Furious Seasons

November 24, 2008

Judith Warner Tries To Go Moderate, NIMH Head Makes Dumb Joke

Some of you may remember that earlier this year, New York Times columnist Judith Warner accused critics of slamming kids with psych meds of engaging in "narrative," which I suppose means that they were making up stories of overmedicated kids in our culture and flapping their arms about nothing. Now, it appears that Warner, in her most recent piece, is engaging in some narrative of her own, or at any rate trying to back away from her accusation that people such as myself were exaggerating what was afoot in American culture, even when folks like me were presenting actual solid evidence of what was going on such as 50 percent of antipsychotic use in kids in Florida being tied to ADHD diagnoses and all that stuff I totally made up about side effects of these meds in kids.

Warner's shift comes because last week an FDA panel of outside experts slammed the FDA and, by implication, American doctors for overusing atypical antipsychotics in kids and stating that something needed to be done about this situation.

The other day, Warner opined on "tough" kids:

"[T]hinking hard about these kids — instead of merely moralizing about them and their psychotropic drug use — may well lead to a situation in which atypical use can be greatly reduced....
"It won’t solve the problem of the drug companies’ predatory marketing practices, or of thought leaders in psychiatry renting out their minds for the sake of fancy vacations and top-flight meals. But the fact that efforts are being made, in a concerted way, to figure out what lies behind the scary-sounding statistics about drugs like Risperdal argues, I think, for hope. After a period in which drug companies have had way too much power in determining how children with psychiatric issues are treated, the pendulum may be swinging back."

Well, no shit, Judy. Welcome to the show, although calling a small blowback by a few docs hope is a bit of a stretch. Besides, I'm not sure what "hard thinking" needs to be done here. Psych meds are rough on adults, rougher on children, and strip them of their souls in many cases, as they do adults too. (Don't believe me, Judy? Go take some Zyprexa!) Diagnostic criteria is often a joke--one Warner continues by refusing to call BS on pediatric bipolar disorder, or even hint that anyone in psychiatry has--and we've gone from a culture where 20 years ago, say, kids with behavioral problems that required psychiatric intervention were few and now, a generation later, they suddenly are mentally ill, suffering from brain damage if they don't get medicated and there are millions of them.

This isn't just as a result of drug companies marketing away or a few key opinion leaders saying it's so, it's because doctors have bought into this nonsense, almost across the board. And it's because the parents of these kids have accepted their views. So while I appreciate Warner suddenly getting all concerned about the FDA panel's warning and kids with ADHD being slapped with Risperdal, she's so late to the party that the drinks have all been drunk. Interestingly, I gather than Warner has a book coming out next year on children's mental health issues, a book she wrote earlier this year. Something tells me it won't reflect her recent backing away from a feminist-says-it's-cool-to-medicate-little-boys approach to hard thinking. Can't wait to read it.

Not that Warner can get beyond her earlier prejudices in her column the other day:

"This will not satisfy the critics of today’s biological psychiatry for whom no drug use is good drug use, nor the critics of today’s culture of parenting who are sure that all the aggression, irritability and out-of-control behavior that psychiatrists call mental illness is actually nothing more than a state of 'toddlerhood in perpetuity' caused by ineffective parenting practices, as the conservative family psychologist and writer John Rosemond and his coauthor have asserted in his new book, 'The Diseasing of America’s Children.'"

Interesting.

Even more interesting, in her column Warner quotes NIMH director Thomas Insel as saying psychiatry is:

"'[T]he only field where the doctors are more stigmatized than the illness.'"

While I assume Insel was trying to be amusing, I'm not sure I can appreciate his humor. Psych docs make on average $180,000 a year, some of them far, far more than that. Psych docs have tons of power with peoples' lives and often offer them treatments that don't work very well and hurt them. Psych docs often ignore evidence in the field of problems with treatments. Meanwhile, patients are regularly denied employment, romance and the fruits of American life based upon their psychiatric diagnoses. Last time I checked that's not what psychiatrists were experiencing.

It's time for Insel to stop making dumb jokes.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at November 24, 2008 12:05 AM

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Comments

Judith Warner says "thinking hard about these kids" in reference to their antipsychotic use.

Well, we "thought hard" about all the kids taking SSRIs & SNRIs and reported their suicides, murders & mayhem to the FDA in 2004 and got the Black Box warning for them.

And then what happened - the powers-that-be outright lied and said that youth suicides increased with a drop in antidepressant use. Newspapers all over the country reported this lie and had docs believing that SSRIs & SNRIs were o.k. again to give to kids and then, when it was discovered that the original article had the wrong years, only three newspapers corrected the stats. These 3 newspapers were the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Enquirer. The rest of the country's docs were left in the dark.

Here is the article as it appears on www.SSRIstories.com which showed that the American Psychiatric Association actually had the stats which showed that in 2004 antidepressant use among youth had increased by a whopping 8%.

http://www.ssristories.com/show.php?item=2036

It is really frightening that someone as ignorant as Judith Warner can write books and columns about psychotropic drug use in children. I wonder who gave her the power to do this and who is responsible for her books and columns being published. Good question.

Posted by: Rosie at November 24, 2008 07:10 AM

that's not a dumb joke it's a highly offensive one that lacks sensitivity in such a profound way, that once again it simply highlights how clueless psychiatrists are about how stripped we are of our human dignity in their hands.

Posted by: Gianna at November 24, 2008 07:15 AM

Hey, having a mainstream, relatively non-critical of Big Pharma reporter for the New York Times call Risperdal "a tranquilizing whopper of a drug with serious, sometimes deadly side effects" is progress if not perfection.

Ironically, the much vilified and now rehabilitated Hillary Clinton probably had the answer to children who are truly oppositional and whose parents cannot 100% handle them -- "It Takes a Village." Good luck reorganizing our current society to handle that, though, which makes drugs WAY too tempting for all concerned.

Posted by: Larry at November 24, 2008 09:02 AM

I am sorry that this woman is even out there in the universe. Atypical antipsychotic warnings now lag far behind those of the SSRIs, as their makers knock on the door to get official approval to give them to children - though they are already being given to children off label. Many years went by once there was public evidence that other countries have given Zyprexa a black box warning (2002) and there still is NO black box warning or medguides for these or the other atypical antipsychotics. Though there is finally mention that blood glucose should be checked, so less people except seniors are dying, those of us who have tried to have stringent warnings on these drugs, or removal for kids, have failed. It is very discouraging. Pharma's reach is broad, and many are either dead or the worse for it. My impression of what you tell us about Judith Warner is that she is an opportunist in the middle of a life and death situation. No thanks. I don't plan to read her book.

Posted by: sorrowful at November 24, 2008 09:05 AM

Well remember last Thanksgiving I invited Judith Warner to dinner. She didn't show up. :)

Posted by: Stephany at November 24, 2008 12:54 PM

I don't think it was a joke, I think he was serious. I've read too many psychiatric articles whining about how stigmatized they are by who they work with that completely ignore how they contribute to their own patients' stigma daily to think this was a joke. It's the self-soothing delusion a lot of psychiatrists cling to.

Posted by: Alison Hymes at November 24, 2008 09:32 PM

Dear Philip:

You just about said it all in a nutshell; except that psychiatry and the Pharmaceutical Industry as a whole has become a really bad and poor excuse for a joke on those that get harmed by their ways!

When is Congress going to call the CEO of every Pharmaceutical Giant Corporation before it and demand answers? When will legislation be passed and enforced protecting us from these evil doers!

When will ethics, the Common Good, and just plain old being responsible; take precedence over the bottom line? As much bad news that is coming to light; the real darkness and demons are still winning in the trenches of this battle for our sanity. I'm not so sure we haven’t rounded a corner that there is no turning back from.
In which by these World Mega Corporations taking us down this horrible path of greed and inhumanity, in a very real sense pretty much places the final nail in the coffin of our society as both functional and survivable unfortunately.

Yours Truly,
Stan

Posted by: stan at November 25, 2008 10:53 AM

Stan, You sometimes say things in a pretty inflammatory way but I have to agree wholeheartedly with your comment about what's happening to our society and why. It's a tragedy for humanity.

Posted by: Sara at November 25, 2008 11:32 AM

Stan has been a patient, trialed meds, an employee of the mental health system and fired from his job as one for discrimination. I'd be a bit inflammatory myself, and I am!

Posted by: Stephany at November 25, 2008 05:59 PM