'Antidepressants' - A Crack in the Ice

Those of us who suspect that ‘antidepressant’ medication may not be all it is claimed to be have a very hard time in public debate. A great polar ice-cap of intolerant certainty faces the explorer in these regions. But it has begun to crack. A very significant fissure appeared on Tuesday evening, when BBC Radio 4 ( see below) broadcast a commendable programme on the subject  

 

I have some suspicions as to why the forces of conformity are so powerful . Partly, of course, it stems from the power of the big drug companies, which make eye-watering amounts of money from what is, in effect, the creation of an entirely new illness, and the ‘treatment’ which , oh-so-coincidentally, deals with it - or, at least, is said to deal with it. Such enormous commercial power, wisely and subtly used, can of course influence media coverage and the academy, though public relations, advertising, research grants, endowments  and similar methods.

 

Then there is the influence of doctors themselves, a group of men and women granted a great deal of respect by laypeople, even quite educated laypeople. Yet doctors are themselves not immune to fashion, conventional wisdom or the blandishments of a large promotion budget, and all the treats and perks which can flow to those who prescribe as desired.

 

And finally there are all those people (many of them very influential in society, the media and the academy) who are gratified to be told that their difficulties with life are not their responsibility, but are the outcome of an implacable disease which has nothing to do with them or their way of life, and also that this disease can be cured.  

 

 

I’d be very interested in tracing the origins of the thing which many people started saying towards the end of the last century, as if they had discovered it for themselves and it was an essential part of human knowledge ‘There is a such a thing as clinical depression – and it can be treated’.

 

Well, listeners to an extraordinary and creditable BBC Radio 4 programme - presented on that station on Tuesday night by my old opponent Professor Will Self – may learn something interesting about the origin of that belief. They will also learn a lot of other very interesting things.  

 

It can be heard here

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rr377

 

 

To me, the single best thing about this programme (which has many good things in it)  is that Professor Self wrote and presented it. He is in many ways the opposite of me, a fashionable person whose thoughts are listened to and automatically given generous consideration, by the very people whose minds one must reach if one is to have any influence in our society. I don’t think this should be so, but I still have to recognise that it is so. This is, alas, an argument against me being allowed to present programmes on Radio 4, as I have now implicitly accepted that whatever I say on that station will probably be filtered out by the minds and ears of many of its most valued listeners.

 

It’s awkward, sometimes, following the logic of one’s own arguments. And I’m not sure it would be morally right for anyone else but me to follow the logic of this one. It oughtn’t to be so. And it is possible that, were I allowed to speak directly to the Radio 4 audience on enough occasions, the wild prejudice against the Hated Peter Hitchens might begin to dissipate, and the station would benefit from having another voice, apart from Stephen Fry and Clare Balding, who seem rather to dominate it at the moment.  That’s an argument in favour of letting me present programmes on Radio 4, by the way.

 

But I thought I’d mention it,  when I could easily not have done (and was briefly tempted by the devil of dishonest self-deception which lurks in all of us, to drop this line altogether rather than find myself trapped by my own logic into admitting something unwelcome). It usefully demonstrates the tricky workings of the human mind, and how we are ceaselessly lured towards self-deception and self-censorship 

 

Anyway, in a scrupulously balanced presentation. Professor Self makes it plain that there are significant doubts about ‘antidepressants’, that they are held by intelligent and scientifically informed people; that even the makers of these pills admit that they don’t actually know how they work (if in fact they work at all, which is very much disputed by others).  There is also some very powerful stuff about the connection between SSRI ‘antidepressants’ and the suicidal urge felt by some of those who take them, simply not explicable by the claim that people prescribed such drugs are likely to be suicidal in the first place.

 

Now, once this case is accepted for discussion in BBC circles, it seems to me that the end, though it may yet be very far off, is undoubted.  The science, and the morals, seem to me to be quite overwhelming. The world will come to understand that there is something very wrong going on here.

 

Once again, for those interested, I will provide links to what I regard as the single most powerful statements of the problem, two articles by Dr Marcia Angell, a very distinguished American academic doctor, in the New York Review of Books. These are reviews of important books, and entirely accessible to the intelligent layman. They may be found here:

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?pagination=false#

 

and here:

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/?pagination=false