The Lecture, The Trip, And So On

I am officially back in Seattle and, after some monster jet lag, my clock is largely reset to West Coast time and the 50-degrees colder weather. The trip was great in many ways, but Florida is so flat that I found it disorienting. I mostly spent my time focusing on the lecture at the New College of Florida, which I'll get to in a second, but I did manage to get about six hours to drive around in a rental car and check things out. That was the one cloudy day of the trip, so I didn't bother with the beach and instead drove by some of the Church of Scientology's buildings in Clearwater and gave them the finger. I also gave the finger to the Yankees spring training complex in Tampa, which I drove by unplanned. My last night was in Tampa and I stayed at a very cheap motel next to a bail bond office. Nice.

People in Florida are damn friendly to strangers, however. Seattle could sure use a dose of that in its civic makeup.

I doubt that the lecture itself would surprise any readers of this site. I spent a lot of time at the beginning letting people know my biases, experience, and that I wasn't there to denounce psychiatry or people taking meds. I'd been alerted in advance that there was some concern on campus that I was there to scare people off their meds--clearly a Lilly PR person in training is at NCF!--so I made damn sure that people knew I was there to tell them to be damn careful about how they use meds and to be skeptical about the "evidence" propounded by our mental health industry, but that I wasn't there to scare or shock anyone. Then I pointed out to them that I was in good company in criticizing the academic-industrial complex that's sprung up in this country and broke out the rent lawsuit filed by the State of Arkansas against Janssen/J&J. Seventy-five students showed up (NCF is about a 750-student campus and this was apparently one of the best attended guest lectures in a long time), and abut 50 or so stayed for the Q&A session after the 90-minute lecture.

I spent time walking people through how the serotonin hypothesis of depression is wildly overstated, largely a marketing tool of pharma companies and doctors, and out of touch with the science base. I told the students about how poorly anti-depressants work particularly in the long-term, walked them through the evidence from STAR-D and STEP-BD, and talked about how desperate academics have been to protect the public image of anti-depressants in light of evidence of anti-depressant induced suicidality that it led to a bogus paper making bogus claims in the American Journal of Psychiatry (I refer to the infamous Gibbons, et al. paper from September). I talked to them about the rise of anti-psychotics in our culture and walked them through evidence that the long-term use of these drugs is flat out dangerous and medically hardly justifiable. I went so far as to say that I had a hard time making an ethical case for the long-term use of anti-psychotics in treating schizophrenia (I can barely make the case from a medical stance). Then I talked about kids and the bipolar child paradigm. I concluded by saying we need a renaissance in researching and treating mental illness in American culture, and that we are creating real problems for ourself as a culture in how we do long-term treatment of mental illnesses.

That took about 90 minutes and very few people left (to my astonishment), and then we went right into the Q&A. I wasn't taking notes, but I remember a few of the issues I was asked about along with the very real human stories I heard. One young woman told me about a family member who's been hooked on Prozac for 20 years and cannot get off the drug. I heard from someone who'd been diagnosed with ADHD in Third Grade, got psychotic on the drugs and later successfully challenged the doctor's diagnosis as 10-year-old. The questions were quite intelligent and the stories I heard were troubling. We've clearly created a medicated generation in this country (actually more like two or three generations, depending on how one wishes to count the Baby Boomers), one that is clearly frustrated with the outcomes they get from treatment and the labels they are forced to wear.

The Q&A took 90 minutes also, and at the end I was falling over tired. Afterwards, one guy took me aside and told me I need to be a bit more radical politically in my critique of the mental health paradigm. I told him that I partially agree with him, but that I don't necessarily see the problems we face in strictly political-cultural terms. It's part of the game, but not the entire problem.

In addition to being impressed with the intelligence of the students at NCF, I was truly amazed that the student body gets good mental health care on campus from professionals who aren't pushing meds at every problem (unlike a lot of other colleges) and aren't tossing lifetime diagnoses/labels at young adults. One person I met told me that they were taking meds that would usually come with a bipolar disorder diagnosis, but that their caregiver refused to use the label and considers it unhelpful.

So, anyhow, that's what went on.