To begin with, psychiatric drugs do more harm than good and the use of most antidepressants and dementia drugs could be virtually stopped without causing harm, a clinical trials expert has argued in a leading medical journal.
Moreover, the views expressed in the British Medical Journal debate by Peter Gøtzsche, professor and director of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Denmark, are sharply opposed by many mental health experts. But others say the debate about the use of psychiatric drugs is important and acknowledge that there has been an overuse of antipsychotics to calm aggressive dementia patients.
Benefits of psychiatric medications not colossal
Subsequently, Gøtzsche says that more than half a million people over the age of 65 die each year in the Western world as a result of taking psychiatric drugs. “Their benefits would have to be colossal to vindicate this, but they are negligible,” he writes.
Besides, he claims that tests of the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs conducted with funding from pharmaceutical companies were almost all biased because the patients involved usually took other drugs first. They stop their medication and often go through a withdrawal phase before starting the trial drug, which then seems to be of great benefit. They also claim that suicide deaths in clinical trials are underestimated.
Although in trials of the modern antidepressants fluoxetine and venlafaxine, says Gøtzsche, it only takes a few extra days for depression to lift in the placebo group, given the fake pills, as much as in the drug group. They claim that the disease spontaneously recedes over time.
Moreover, results of drug trials for schizophrenia are also disappointing, he says, and results for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are uncertain. “It appears that short-term relief will be restored by long-term harm. Animal studies strongly suggest that these drugs can cause brain damage, which is probably the case with all psychoactive drugs,” he writes.
Medications should be avoided to an extent
In conclusion, “Given their lack of benefit, it can be estimated that we could do away with almost all psychoactive medications without causing impairment by ceasing the use of all antidepressants, ADHD drugs and dementia medications and using only a portion of the antipsychotics and benzodiazepines which we administer now.
