Let's stop drugging kids

Another teenager has shot and murdered schoolchildren, and those who believe that "mental illness" is the cause of all our social problems have offered the standard explanation and usual solution: This child suffered from a mental illness, and if only someone had seen the symptoms and notified mental-health authorities, he would have received an accurate diagnosis and the proper medication, and the tragedy could have been prevented. If only Red Lake High School student Jeff Weise had been placed on antidepressant medications, psychiatrists say, then this murder/suicide would never have happened. The story is usually followed by calls for more mental-health screening and treatment of our nation's schoolchildren.

In most of the recent cases of school shootings, however, the signs were noticed: The child was reported to mental-health authorities, received a psychiatric diagnosis, was put on medications and was taking them when he pulled the trigger. It was true with Eric Harris of Columbine and Kip Kinkel in Oregon, as well as 10 other youths. This may be the tip of the iceberg, because this information is often kept confidential and out of the papers, even when a murder occurs.

Now news reports indicate Weise, who murdered nine in Red Lake, Minn., before turning the gun on himself, had been suicidal and was committed to a mental hospital. He began taking an antidepressant last summer, and his dosage had been increased a week before the shootings, according to the New York Times.

In 2003 Britain banned antidepressants for use in children and adolescents, and last year Health Canada issued a stern warning about these drugs, noting "clinical trial and post-marketing reports (of) ... severe agitation-type adverse events coupled with self-harm or harm to others."

This year, the Food and Drug Administration has mandated a black-box label on antidepressants warning of the potential for increased suicidal thoughts and behavior with children and adolescents. Yet, as Vera Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, has said: "Journalists continue to be beguiled by speculative scientific hypotheticals which psychiatrists discuss as though they have been proved. Misinformation is transmitted to the public about unproven 'chemical imbalances' in the brain of depressed people - - when, in fact, no evidence exists demonstrating any chemical or structural brain abnormality in people diagnosed with a mental illness."

Indeed, the papers are full of quotes of psychiatrists claiming that depression is a serious medical disease caused by a serotonin imbalance in the brain. But no conclusive scientific evidence exists to support this theory. In "Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health" (Free Press, 1998), neuroscientist Eliot Valenstein says, "Although it is often stated with great confidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency, the actual evidence contradicts these claims. It is not now possible to measure norepinephrine and serotonin in the brains of patients."

Not surprisingly, psychiatrists have never developed any physical test to detect depression or any mental illness, and all diagnosis is done based solely on symptoms. In other words, antidepressants and all other psychiatric medications are not in fact being prescribed to treat bona fide diseases.

Yet, whenever anyone criticizes the drugs, psychiatrists shout about the increased risk of suicide if patients stop taking their antidepressants, despite the fact that no antidepressant has ever been tested on suicidal patients and therefore never approved by the FDA as safe and effective in preventing suicide.

President Bush included an unprecedented call for mandatory mental-health screening of schoolchildren in his recent budget. Violating the rights of parents to just say "no" to psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of their children, this idea originated in the president's New Freedom Commission.

According to a study last year in the Lancet, U.S. psychiatrists, pediatricians and family practitioners wrote 11 million prescriptions for antidepressants for children in 2002. All the signs indicate this method of dealing with our children is not working. It is high time for both parents and schools to find a different method of dealing with troubled children. To paraphrase Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," the fault is not in our children's brains or genes, but in ourselves. It is to our own treatment of children that we must look to find an answer to their problems -- and ours.

Keith Hoeller is editor of the Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry.

30 March 2005
 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/30/EDGN1BVTT31.DTL

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