<< Teach The University! | Front Page | Look Back in Anger: The Death of Literary Studies >>
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Progress in Psychology and Psychiatry
The Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner, at the NYTimes, has staged a roundtable on progress in these areas, with comments by David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz. He asked: “How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made in the last century? Do we know enough about the human psyche to prescribe the medication that we do?”
Comments
We don’t even know enough about the human body to prescribe the medications that we do. After all, clinical trials test one, maybe two, at the outset three medications at a time—yet some of the newest and most powerful psych drugs are added onto patient regimens of a dozen or more medications.
Minimally, as Public Citizen states on its http://www.worstpills.org Website, wait until a medication has been out seven years before considering taking it. Consulting a powerful drug-drug and drug-gene database (like http://www.genemedrx.com/) is an essential starting point for identifying and understanding interactions (enzyme, gene, etc.) yet, how few physicians and psychiatrists even read the entire FDA prescribing information flyers!
It was rather disturbing to have the testimony of the mother of a bi-polar suicide as a part of the forum (a library assistant, not a medical professional, there, ostensibly only because she had such an experience), proclaiming that the absence, not the presence of her son’s medication contributed to his death—thus exonerating the drug and the pharmaceutical industry. As if her son’s choice to _stop_ taking the drug might not have been related to a perceived disturbing side-effect. This in the face of the newly-imposed FDA “black box” warnings of the dangers of suicide, especially in the young, from a number of widely-prescribed psychopharmaceuticals.
No. We do not know enough about the human body to prescribe the drugs we do and, further, we have an FDA whose leadership and funding are so interwoven with the pharmaceutical industry as to be virtually indistinguishable at times—ergo, clearly we do not know enough about the psyche in interaction with these physical and political realities to be prescribing these powerful, often mysteriously interacting, and increasingly deadly drugs.