Question:
"A Beautiful Mind" won the best picture award tonight and as a result will be
focusing more light on the travesty of psych drugs. Despite Ron Howard's bow to
pressure from the psych industry, the real story here is that people diagnosed
with Schizophrenia tend to recover on their own without drugs, whereas most
often those who are treated, never recover at all -- leaving one to inquire,
rhetorically: "Why do the psychs still insist on doling out these drugs in the
first place?"
Answer:
The movie A Beautiful Mind, nominated for eight Academy Awards, has brought
welcome attention to the fact that people can and do recover from schizophrenia,
a severely disabling disorder that affects about one in 100 Americans.
Unfortunately, the film fabricates a critical detail of John Nash's recovery and
in so doing, obscures a question that should concern us all: Do the medications
we use to treat schizophrenia promote long-term recovery -- or hinder it ?
In the movie, Nash -- just before he receives a Nobel Prize -- speaks of taking
''newer medications.'' The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has praised
the film's director, Ron Howard, for showing the ''vital role of medication'' in
Nash's recovery. But as Sylvia Nasar notes in her biography of Nash, on which
the movie is loosely based, this brilliant mathematician stopped taking
anti-psychotic drugs in 1970 and slowly recovered over two decades. Nasar
concluded that Nash's refusal to take drugs ''may have been fortunate'' because
their deleterious effects ''would have made his gentle re-entry into the world
of mathematics a near impossibility.''
His is just one of many such cases. Most Americans are unaware that the World
Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly found that long-term schizophrenia
outcomes are much worse in the USA and other ''developed'' countries than in
poor ones such as India and Nigeria, where relatively few patients are on
anti-psychotic medications. In ''undeveloped'' countries, nearly two-thirds of
schizophrenia patients are doing fairly well five years after initial diagnosis;
about 40% have basically recovered. But in the USA and other developed
countries, most patients become chronically ill. The outcome differences are so
marked that WHO concluded that living in a developed country is a ''strong
predictor'' that a patient never will fully recover.
Myth of medication
There is more. In 1987, psychologist Courtenay Harding reported that a third of
chronic schizophrenia patients released from Vermont State Hospital in the late
1950s completely recovered. Everyone in this ''best-outcomes'' group shared one
common factor: All had weaned themselves from anti-psychotic medications. The
notion that schizophrenics must spend a lifetime on these drugs, she concluded,
is a ''myth.''
In 1994, Harvard Medical School researchers found that outcomes for U.S.
schizophrenia patients had worsened during the past 20 years and were now no
better than they were 100 years earlier, when therapy involved plunking patients
into bathtubs for hours. And in 1998, University of Pennsylvania investigators
reported that standard anti-psychotic medications cause a specific area of the
brain to become abnormally enlarged and that this drug-induced enlargement is
associated with a worsening of symptoms.
Comprehensive care succeeds
All of this has led a few European physicians to explore non-drug alternatives.
In Finland, doctors treat newly diagnosed schizophrenia patients with
comprehensive care: counseling, social-support services and the selective use of
anti-psychotic medications. Some patients do better on low doses of medication,
and some without it. And they report great results: A majority of patients
remain free of psychotic symptoms for extended periods and hold down jobs.
John Nash's recovery from schizophrenia is a moving story. But we are not well
served when the movie fibs about the anti-psychotic drugs' role in his recovery.
If anything, his story should inspire us to reconsider anti-psychotics'
long-term efficacy with an honest, open mind. That would be a first step toward
reforming our care -- and if there is one thing we can conclude from the WHO
studies, it is that reform is vitally needed. Perhaps then we could even hope
that schizophrenia outcomes in this country would improve to the point that they
were equal to those in poor countries such as India and Nigeria.
Robert Whitaker is the author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and
the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.
Have you noticed any one else who was connected to a group that we
could have been spared from?
The true story of Nash is that he recovered after getting *out* of the hands of
psychs. Whilst getting "treatment" he just got worse and worse, after ditching
the psychs he gradually improved until he finally won the Nobel Prize. Yes, the psychs are a bit unnerved about this. They tried to spin it their way
but the lie is coming back to haunt them.
