Blue Dreams Quotes

“if there is no proof that a depressed person has a chemical imbalance, and you choose nevertheless to put that person on a medication that will alter neurotransmitter levels in his or her brain, then in effect you are causing a chemical imbalance rather than curing one. According to Steven Hyman, a neuroscientist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, all psychotropic drugs cause “perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” And this is Whitaker’s main point. We are subjecting millions of brains to drugs that change natural neurotransmission, sometimes radically, disturbing and upsetting the complex interplay inside our heads, clogging neural pathways with excess chemicals, and sometimes causing the entire brain, which is intricately interlinked, to malfunction in ways we do not yet understand. An unmedicated depressed patient does not have a known chemical imbalance in his brain, but once he ingests Prozac, he will. The drug crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets to work, jamming serotonin into the synaptic cleft. Whitaker explains the result this way: “Several weeks later the serotonergic pathway is operating in a decidedly abnormal manner.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Methylene blue was a kind of home run that disappeared from psychiatric use not because it was ineffective or barbaric but because, according to British psychopharmacologist David Healy, “patents had been obtained on newer agents and no drug company would market an old drug even if it worked.” In the case of methylene blue, then, “there were competing therapies or interest groups likely to make more money out of other therapies than they would from methylene blue.” In the 1970s, methylene blue reemerged as a means of treating manic depression, for which it was highly effective, but ultimately corporate profit-seeking interests rather than therapeutic outcomes won the day.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Studies of the placebo effect by Ted Kaptchuk, a Harvard researcher, definitively show that the more care you lavish on a person, the more symptomatic relief that person will get. One of Kaptchuk’s studies of patients with irritable bowel syndrome examined the effects of sham acupuncture. The catch here is that both groups of patients received the sham version of the acupuncture. The difference is that in one group the sham acupuncture was administered by a clinician who was cold and curt, whereas in the other group the sham acupuncture was administered by a clinician who was warm, who took the time to sit with the patient before beginning the “treatment.” The caring clinician was instructed to have a “warm friendly manner,” to sympathize with how difficult the condition must be for the patient and to stare thoughtfully into space for about twenty seconds. The curt clinician, by contrast, was instructed to say as little as possible to the patient during the “procedure.” The results? The patients who received treatment from the caring clinician had a huge decrease in pain and in irritable bowel symptoms in the weeks that followed, while the patients who had been with the curt clinician got far fewer benefits. Placebos require that we be kind, in other words, and they prove that kindness and compassion have potent biological consequences. Medicine, however, may not be at a place where it can”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“A placebo is not just a sugar pill or a bunch of sham sutures. A placebo can be an event as well as a thing. Anytime a person endows something with meaning, whether it’s a relationship or an occurrence, he is held in a warm embrace; he is helped by something that does not exist except as dream or hope or expectation. Much of the power of the placebo comes from the one who is hurting, which means we can start to see the sheer energy in states of sickness—what we are capable of doing when down and supposedly out, how strong we really are, even in our weakest moments, with our brains always ready to find us some faith.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“In the time of Philotimus, a notable Greek physician several centuries BCE, sufferers complaining of a light head were instructed to wear a lead helmet in hopes of a cure. Chrysippus of Cnidus, a contemporary, believed that people with depression should eat more cauliflower while carefully avoiding basil because it could incite someone to insanity.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“I am calling because I’d like to…to…donate my brain,” I said, the last three words spilling together in a rush. The person on the other end did not respond and again I stood there listening to the crackle on the line, looking out my large window at the apple tree, where clusters of reddening fruit studded its beautiful branches. “Donate. My. Brain,” I repeated, articulating each word, suddenly, strangely, emboldened. “Okay,” the disembodied voice said. “You can make the donation online.” And then the voice gave me the Web address and, poof, was gone.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Phelps and Hirst surveyed several hundred people about their September 11 recollections over a period of ten years, observing the subjects’ memories deteriorate even as the subjects exhibited no clue that their deeply felt stories were morphing. All the participants whom Phelps and Hirst surveyed had formed a flashbulb memory of the 9/11 attacks. It turned out that most of the forgetting, which was manifested in errors of either omission or commission, occurred in the first year after the event. The deviations ranged from simple tweaks to wholesale revisions, and even in the case of extreme changes, the subjects were unaware that they were deconstructing and reconstructing what seemed, to them, a very stable story. Researchers believe that the act of repeating a narrative somehow contaminates it, meaning that nowhere in our brains do any permanent, unmarred memories reside, no matter how much it may feel that way.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“In the 1970s, memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus was one of the first to dismember the camcorder–wax stamp notion, proving that eyewitness accounts were wildly unreliable and subject to suggestibility. In one groundbreaking experiment, Loftus showed it was possible to get people to create memories of something that had never happened by proposing to them that they’d gotten lost in a mall; she later listened to her unwitting subjects confidently detail the discombobulating incident that had not, in fact, occurred.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“In 1936, shortly after the first lobotomies were performed in Lisbon, the procedure came to our side of the sea, where it was adapted with all-American vigor, so much so that by the late 1950s, more than twenty thousand patients had had lobotomies and the surgery was being used to “cure” everything from mental retardation to homosexuality to criminal insanity.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Mithoefer completed an FDA- and DEA-approved trial of MDMA for the treatment of severe PTSD, with stunning results. In 2011, with the support of MAPS, he and his team created a double-blind design in which twelve severely traumatized patients were given MDMA and psychotherapy, and eight patients were given an active placebo and psychotherapy. The researchers used the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) as a means of measuring symptom reduction after intervention. In the placebo group, only two out of the eight subjects had a significantly lowered CAPS score post-intervention, whereas in the MDMA group, ten out of the twelve subjects had significantly lowered CAPS scores and were able to maintain those scores at a two-month follow-up. Furthermore, in the MDMA group, ten of the twelve patients were so improved that they no longer met the DSM criteria for PTSD. The second phase of the study allowed seven subjects who had previously taken the placebo (six of whom had failed to respond to the placebo and one of whom had relapsed after the placebo) to now try MDMA. They found a clinical response rate of 100 percent, and the three people who had previously said they weren’t able to perform their jobs on account of their PTSD were now able to work once again.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Danforth and Grob have reason to believe that MDMA could be crucial in breaking down the barriers autistic people face, especially their extreme difficulty in connecting to the “neurotypical” world. There are ample accounts from those with autism who have taken MDMA independently, without medical guidance, stating that the drug makes it possible for them to function—not only while they’re on the drug, but for weeks and sometimes months afterward. In Danforth’s own study of how autistic adults experience the subjective effects of MDMA, she found that 91 percent of respondents reported an increase in feelings of connectedness on MDMA, while 86 percent of them said that communication became easier.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“reveals the extent to which psychiatry is tightly tied to capitalistic corporate interests, how closely allied the field is with the major pharmaceutical houses, where millions, even billions, of dollars are made in mere months. This is why, although lithium had worked so well for so many people, drug developers set about discovering new mood stabilizers that had patent and profit possibilities, whipping up in their high-tech cauldrons scores of new pharmaceuticals to treat bipolar disorder or, better yet, converting already existing medications—drugs, say, for epilepsy—into treatments.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Researchers, for instance, have measured the amount of naturally occurring lithium in tap water in twenty-seven counties in Texas and found a negative association between lithium levels in the water and suicide rates, meaning the higher the level of lithium in the water, the lower the suicide rate. Similar studies have been carried out elsewhere, such as in Japan, where researchers studied the tap water of eighteen municipalities of the Ōita Prefecture and noted that even very low levels of lithium in the water supply may be protective against suicide, and, by extension, against depression as well. Until 1948, the popular soft drink 7Up contained lithium citrate, a little boost contained in a can.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Thorazine’s reputation was done in primarily by its link to tardive dyskinesia, combined with the rampant antipsychiatry movement that started in the 1960s—initiated in part by books like Thomas Szasz’s Myth of Mental Illness and in part by the rise of the civil rights movement and feminism, both of which employed a rhetoric later adapted by the antipsychiatry movement to insist that mental patients were another oppressed minority, “their psyches manipulated by therapists.” Thus the drug once hailed for saving the minds of many madmen and -women the world over is rarely prescribed anymore, so out of fashion has it fallen.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“The new antipsychotics are now a multibillion-dollar industry in this country, and by 2011 they had surpassed statins—cholesterol-lowering agents such as Lipitor and Zocor—as the best-selling category of drugs in the United States, a truly mind-boggling fact when one considers how rare psychosis is in the population.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“been used in India to treat fever, vomiting, snakebite, insomnia, and insanity for thousands of years, reserpine was introduced in the United States at around the same time as Thorazine, but while Thorazine was used clinically, reserpine was used more experimentally.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Whatever its pros and cons, the invention and dissemination of Thorazine is ultimately as significant for what it did not do as for what it did. Yes, the drug reversed states of psychosis so severe they had trapped patients for years. Yes, by doing so, the drug helped to birth the deinstitutionalization movement and the corresponding rise of the community mental health center. And the drug finally put a dent in the deeply held American affinity for psychoanalysis, as even the clinicians most dedicated to “the talking cure” had to concede that this capsule could clear the mind more effectively and efficiently than could any leather couch and conversation. But the drug did not, at least initially, spur anyone to ask how or why it was working. No one had the slightest idea. It was simply enough for everyone that it was working. Clearly the capsule suggested that mental illness, at least in some respects, was a brain-based phenomenon, but beyond that, few had a clue.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Laborit substituted the new antihistamine, Thorazine, for promethazine. He also went so far as to recommend that Thorazine be included in soldiers’ battlefield kits, as a kind of first aid that could be self-administered in case of injury, to help manage stress responses and the flood of histamines into the body. Adhering to this recommendation, the U.S. military did include Thorazine in the medical kits of its soldiers during the Korean War. So marked was the apathy caused by Thorazine that the soldiers who took it lay languidly on the battlefield, indifferent to their wounds and unworried about their situation, in some cases forgoing opportunities for rescue, to the point where some may have died as a consequence. Thorazine as a battlefield staple was quickly discontinued.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Accordingly, in the spring of 1951, Rhône-Poulenc distributed eighteen ampules of their novel compound for clinical testing, which meant something very different in those days from what it does in ours. Doctors “tested” a new drug in one of two ways: either by taking it first themselves and recording in a notebook their own responses, or by handing it to a small sample of patients and observing the effects.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“In the early twentieth century, for instance, opiates were widely used for all sorts of ills, even sold in syrup to calm colicky babies. Lithium baths prospered—vats of cool bubbling water said to soothe the troubled soul. Extract of conium, either on its own or coupled with iron, quinine, or Fowler’s solution, was used to treat depression, as was the plant extract nux vomica. Hyoscyamus, from the passionflower, was used to diminish sleeplessness or extreme excitement. There were tinctures of veratrine and belladonna and stimulants such as ammonia, lytta, and all kinds of aromatics in small amber jars you held just below the nostrils, sniffing in comforting drafts of lavender, rosemary, or cinnamon. So prevalent were and are attempts at biological cures, and so available for such a great span of time, that nonphysical therapies, such as psychoanalysis and other “talking cures,” are in fact the real oddity, a brief blip in what has otherwise been a mostly somatic approach to the treatment of human suffering in all its manifestations.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“In 1955, at their peak, American mental hospitals held 560,000 patients nationwide, double the number at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1988, three decades later, that figure had fallen to 120,000.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds