Dr. Joshua Gordon
Director, National Institute of Mental Health
25 Oct. 2017
Dear Dr. Gordon,
I was encouraged by something you said in an interview with the Washington Post recently:
“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.”
Many people have decried the use of antidepressants, for example, as studies show them being only slightly more efficacious than placebos, increasing the incidence of “suicidality,” significantly increasing the risk of death, and when taken by pregnant women, increasing the incidence of mental illness in their children. And while most of these studies were fairly recent, pharmaceutical companies have for some time not been reporting negative effects of their products.
Research does show that simple measures such as cutting sugar from the diet, and engaging in exercise do help reduce depression, have few side effects and cost patients or the treasury little to nothing.
I hope you will have the interest and ability help transition the psychiatric profession back to talk therapy, and off the money train of harmful, ineffective and expensive pharmaceuticals. Your own agency found that simple postcards and phone calls reduced the risk of suicide in patients as effectively as other more harmful treatments.
Also it seems that as pharmaceuticals become less popular, psychiatry is reverting to “electroceuticals” psychedelics and electroconvulsive therapy. I say reverting, because in the 1960s the MKULTRA project investigated these same methods as mind control techniques. Electroceuticals, for example, as developed by Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado for MKULTRA were then called “Stimoceivers” and “Chemitrodes.” Please look elsewhere for remedies.
Thanks, and good luck on your new post.
Best,
Wayne Edward Hanson
wehanson@aol.com
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