In “My Adventures With the Trip Doctors” (May 15 New York Times Magazine,) author Michael Pollan drops a bomb – a simple idea that has been denied by the psychiatric, pharmaceutical and mental health communities for years: mainly that psychiatry and psychopharmaceuticals don’t work, and in fact can create and exacerbate insanity, dependence and suicide.
Pollan, while basically extolling the miracles of psychedelic drugs for everything from religious transformation to the healing of mental illness says this in passing:
“Such a new approach couldn’t come at a better time for a field that is ‘broken,’ as Tom Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health until 2015, told me bluntly. Rates of depression (now the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the W.H.O.) and suicide are climbing; addictive behavior is rampant. Little has changed, meanwhile, in psychopharmacology since the introduction of SSRI antidepressants in the late 1980s. This may explain why prominent figures in the psychiatric establishment are voicing support for psychedelic research.”
This echoes a statement by Joshua Gordon, the current head of the NIMH who took office last July. In an interview with the Washington Post, Gordon said “All these off-label uses of any of our psychiatric medications result from desperation on the part of both patients and physicians who don’t know what else to do for their patients . . . The evidence for any of them is nonexistent or minimal. But we don’t have good alternatives. We don’t have evidence-based treatments that really do the job. So that means that people turn to whatever can help them in a symptomatic way . . . It’s a problem that’s borne out of the fact that our treatments just don’t work, or don’t work well, for a substantial fraction of our patients.”
Recent studies indicate that about one in six Americans take psychiatric drugs, and today mental health is a $200 billion industry. With top officials at the NIMH admitting failure, it’s time to reevaluate our commitment to these drugs and those that prescribe them, and to carefully scrutinize measures to legalize psychedelics as “the next great thing.” Psychiatry is desperate for answers and psychedelics could be just the next in a long line of desperate measures that will create the next round of havoc.
