Scientific Psychiatry & Big Pharma

William Bramley Excerpts from The Gods of Eden, p.354-363

 

One of the earliest centres of ‘scientific psychiatry’ was Leipzig, Germany. There a man named Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established the world’s first psychological laboratory in 1879. Until that time, universities usually placed the study of psychology in their philosophy departments because of a lingering belief that there exists a spiritual side to man. It was Wundt’s contention, however, that psychology belonged in a biological laboratory. To Wundt, human beings were only biological organisms to which there were no spiritual realities attached. He therefore considered his approach ‘scientific’ rather than philosophical.

Wundt’s theory about the mind was that human thought is caused by external stimulation bringing about bodily identification with other stimuli which the body had received and recorded in the past. When this identification occurs, the body, or brain, mechanically creates an act of ‘will’ which responds to the new stimulus. There is no such thing as self-created thought or free will. To Wundt and his followers, man was but a sophisticated robot-type organism.

Wundt’s ideas were based upon experiments conducted in his laboratories and elsewhere. Some of those experiments revealed that one could produce the physiological manifestations of different emotions by applying electronic stimulation to different parts of the brain. Experimenters erroneously concluded that the brain must therefore be the source of personality because it triggers the physical manifestations of emotion and thought. The fallacy in this is applying external stimulation. In other words, the brain centres are not self-triggering except in a very limited sense. The experiments proved that it takes something else, something external, to trigger those brain centres. What, then, triggers those centres when the experimenter is no longer applying his electrodes? There must be another external source – a missing element. That missing element appears to be the spiritual entity which produces its own energy output. Although Wundt and others used the experiments to ‘prove’ a pure biological basis to human thought, the results were, in fact, subtly pointing in the opposite direction.

Erroneous or not, the stimulus-response model of behaviour developed at Leipzig quickly became the ‘new wave’ in psychiatry and received considerable support from the influential figure in scientific psychiatry for 40 years. The Leipzig labs attracted many students from around the world, many of whom later became prominent names in psychiatry...

By redefining the nature of thought and behaviour, scientific psychiatry also redefined the nature of mental abnormality and its cure. Methods to bypass human free will and intellect (behaviour modification) were explored and developed. Because human beings were viewed as strictly biological-chemical-electrical organisms, all mental illnesses were said to be the result of physiological processes somehow going ‘out of kilter.’ Experimenters theorised that mental illness could be cured by strictly physiological means, such as with drugs, shock treatment or brain surgery. It was believed that such treatments could remedy the chemical or electrical ‘imbalances’ and thereby cure the mental illness itself.

Out of these theories arose a multibillion dollar drug industry which pours out huge quantities of mood-altering drugs every year. These drugs are designed to relieve every mental ill from ‘can’t get to sleep at night’ to violent psychosis. In addition, many psychiatrists use special machines to send electrical shocks through a person’s brain. Some may even resort to brain surgery. Now that we have had almost half a century to observe these cures in action, we can ask: have they benefited mankind? Is the world a saner place today than it was 50 years ago? To answer these questions, we might do well to analyse the cure most often prescribed by psychiatrists:  psychotropic (mind-affecting’) drugs.

Psychotropic drugs are a mammoth industry. They comprise a large portion of the total prescription drug trade which in 1978 amounted to an estimated $16.7 billion wholesale value in global sales by U.S. manufacturers alone. This figure does not even include sales by Swiss and other European manufacturers...

This epidemic drug use is not an accident. Powerful psychotropic medications are energetically promoted to the medical community in glossy Madison Avenue advertisements in such publications as the American Journal of Psychiatry an through workshops and seminars sponsored by the drug companies.

Justified criticism has been levelled against drug-oriented psychiatry because of the number of patients who actually deteriorate as a result of their psychiatric treatment. For example, a surprisingly large number of people who commit apparently senseless acts of violence, such as shooting sprees and other grisly headline-grabbing acts, are people who were previously treated with psychotropic drugs. John Hinckley, Jr., for example, was under the influence of Valium when he attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Such coincidences are usually explained as an indication that those people were already mentally deranged before the violent episodes and, at worst, the drugs were simply not able to help them. On the other hand, critics point out that such individuals were often not violent before their treatment, but became violent only afterwards. Did psychiatric treatments actually worsen their mental states to the point of their going completely psychotic?

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 Example

Thorazine, which is promoted as a medication for handling psychotic adults and children, belongs to a class of drug which has been known to cause the following:

...psychotic symptoms, catatonic-like states, cerebral edema [excess brain fluid], convulsive seizures, abnormality of the cerebrospinal fluid proteins...NOTE: Sudden death in patients taking phenothiazines [the drug classification to which Thorazine belongs] (apparently due to cardiac arrest or asphyxia due to failure of cough reflex) has been reported but no causal relationship has been established.

The last sentence in the above quote is a remarkable bit of doublespeak. It states that giving someone this class of drug has coincided with their suddenly dying, but the manufacturer denies that there is any evidence that the drugs were responsible for the deaths! No doubt it was just an extraordinary coincidence that some people have had cardiac arrests or cough reflect failures at the time of taking the drug. Fate must indeed work in mysterious ways...

The implications of this are significant. These drugs [also Surmontil, Haldol, Stelazine and Norpramin] have been known to sometimes seriously worsen a person’s mental state or cause mental problems far more severe than those the patient began with!

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It  is argued that the number of people who are helped by the drugs far exceed those who are worsened. Advocates cite statistics showing that drugs enable many patients to leave psychiatric institutions sooner and return to the community. Psychotropic drugs seem to enable some people to keep their psychological symptoms under control enough for them to lead useful lives in society. The question is: at what cost are these apparent benefits being obtained?

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Psychiatry boasts a low ‘cure’ rate, but a high ‘maintenance’ rate. As long as factories churn out pills, drug ‘maintenance’ can continue.

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“If psychotropics are slamming thousands of people every year into a deeper psychological morass because of dangerous side effects, we can see that drug-oriented psychiatry risks pushing a society to ruin; yet psychotropics constitute the main form of therapy in most psychiatric institutions today.

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The epidemic use of psychotropic drugs creates yet another significant problem. Drug abuse is considered one of today’s major social ills. Drug abuse is considered one of today’s major social ills. Law enforcement agencies spend an enormous amount of time and money to combat it. The fight against drug abuse is based on the philosophy that people should not take illegal drugs to alter their moods or mental states. Modern psychiatry defeats this campaign. Drug-oriented psychiatry tells us: Feeling depressed? Take a drug. Feeling too happy (manic)? Take a drug. Feeling unable to cope? Take a drug. Feeling too able to cope (megalomaniacal)? Take a drug. Feeling confused and uncertain? Take a drug. Feeling too certain (delusional)? Take a drug. Can’t sleep? Take a drug. Too sleepy? Take a drug. Seeing things that aren’t there (hallucinations)? Take a drug. Not seeing things that are there? Take a drug. Maintenance-oriented psychiatry promotes the very attitude upon which the illegal drug trade flourishes: want to feel better mentally and emotionally? Take a drug. The great irony is that some of the very same ‘conservative law and order’ judges and lawmakers who demand stiffer penalties against illegal drug pushers are among those who are quickest to set up the legal machinery for committing people involuntarily to mental institutions where drugs as powerful as anything on the illegal market are routinely and openly used...

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Have philosophies of strict materialism brought about a flourishing psychiatric profession which is bringing about greater sanity to patients, practitioners and the world as a whole? Sadly, the answer seems to be no. Psychiatry started on the right track when it discovered that the mind could be cured of its inorganic ills by confronting past hidden traumas, but it failed to develop that discovery beyond the crude and haphazard techniques used today in psychotherapy. Psychiatry was derailed when it began to mask mental problems for bypassing individual free will in favour of stimulus-response manipulation (behaviour modification). It is perhaps time to move away from the strict materialist perspective, to get off the drugs and to begin restoring a sense of respect for the free will and intellect of human beings. We may then be able to truly start back on the road to genuine mental, social and spiritual recovery for the human race.

HarperCollins, New York, U.S., 1989.