Pulitzer Finalist Whitaker to Discuss Iatrogenic Mental Illness and Psych Meds at NADA Conference

Guidepoints March 2011

By Ryan Bemis

At this year's conference in Kansas City on May 20-21, NADA will meet award-winning investigative journalist Robert Whitaker, who emerged in 2010 as a leading critic of the drug-based psychiatric health care paradigm.  Whitaker will present his research and will also serve on a conference panel alongside clinicians discussing the use of NADA methods to assist in tapering off of psychiatric medication.

His most recent book has been referred to as the "Silent Spring" of the psycho-pharmaceutical industry.  Entitled Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, Whitaker makes a compelling case for the need for alternatives to drug based psychiatry.  In January, Whitaker presented his research and debated psychiatrists at one of the top rated psychiatric hospitals in the country, the Massachusetts General Hospital.

His argument: the "evidence base" for the long term use of psychiatric medication, based on studies in major psychiatric journals, is severely lacking.  Whitaker does not advocate that psychiatric medications should never be used or are never helpful. Rather, he calls for a scientifically honest discussion about the long term outcome data on psychiatric medications, and a consideration for alternative approaches.

His research is acclaimed by psychiatrist Elizabeth "Libby" Stuyt, director of a dual diagnosis state hospital program in Colorado, who has ample clinical and research experience, and supervises non-acupuncturist nurses who use the NADA protocol and other modalities to help clients taper off antidepressants, anti-psychotics and benzodiazepines. "I do think medications are utilized far more frequently than is necessary or prudent.  The biggest problem I see is they are used far longer than is recommended."  Stuyt, also a NADA board member, calls Anatomy of an Epidemic a "very sobering read."  (See page 1 of Guidepoints, March 2011 for more on Stuyt's legislative efforts to expand NADA in Colorado)

Former president and co founder of NADA, David Eisen, also has used acupuncture and other psychosocial therapies to help clients taper from psychiatric medication at both the dual diagnosis and HIV program in Portland, Quest Center for Integrative Health, as well as at the largest behavioral health program in Oregon, Central City Concern.  "Whitaker’s book is a must read for anyone who is either currently practicing in the field of behavioral health or thinking about entering it."

Whitaker admits that he once believed that antipsychotic drugs "revolutionized" the treatment of schizophrenia.  "We've all been told that it was a story of great progress," he told a Portland audience in February.  As a medical journalist for the Boston Globe, his exposé on the abuses in psychiatric research was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.  His book, Mad in America, trailed the history of psychiatric treatment since the 1800's.  But Whitaker kept digging further.

Anatomy of an Epidemic begins as an investigation into why the number of disabled adults diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder has tripled in just 20 years.  Though psychiatric medications are prescribed more today than ever for children, he asks: Why are there 35 times more disabled mentally-ill children than there were two decades ago?  Why aren't disability rates decreasing as a result of advances in pharmaceutical treatments?

In the 1980's, Whitaker finds, psychiatrists had determined that psychiatric medications far too often caused rather than fixed "chemical imbalances" in the brain.  Yet the prescribing rates of psychiatric medications exploded.  He shows how this swell in psychotropic prescribing correlated with the poor long term outcomes for depression, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, bipolar and schizophrenia over the past 50 years.

The studies Whitaker dissects can hardly be dismissed as marginalized evidence.  The World Health Organization and the National Institute of Mental Health funded six of the sixteen studies he focuses on.  Many of the pivotal studies revealing poor long-term outcomes were funded by the pharmaceutical inventors themselves, though these studies were not always reported in US newspapers.

"The real question regarding psychiatric medications is this:  When and how should they be used?" he writes in his final chapter, "Blueprints for Reform."

In western Lapland in Finland, he reports, new cases of schizophrenia have almost disappeared, reduced by 90% since the 1980s when an Open Dialogue family network approach treating psychosis was installed into the mental health system.  The model de-emphasizes medication as a first step in treating psychosis, provides in-home counseling sessions for families of clients experiencing psychosis, and discourages a diagnosis of schizophrenia in the first 6 months of treatment.  "Psychosis" itself is not seen as residing inside a disordered individual in this model, but instead is considered to be a relational process that occurs between people in their social networks.

At a recent conference in Portland, "Moving Mental Health Forward: Rethinking Psychiatry," Whitaker said his hope for his book was to encourage a critical look at what is working and what needs to be changed in how mental health care is provided.  Alone, the societal cost of paying for the medications of disabled Americans makes reform imminent, he argues.  At the conference, he presented the Finnish model to policy makers and mental health experts alongside mental health diversity counselor and Lincoln NADA trainee, Will Hall.

A Portland-based writer, therapist and international speaker on alternatives to drug-based psychiatric therapy, Hall is currently working to promote NADA services in peer mental health recovery groups in Alaska and Oregon.  In Massachusetts, Hall co-founded a weekly free NADA clinic as part of Freedom Center, a volunteer peer-run program which has used NADA, yoga, recovery education and community support groups for over six years to help hundreds of clients reduce their reliance on psychiatric medications.  Hall and Freedom Center acupuncturist, Lee Hurter, will present to NADA conference members on their success using NADA methods as well as how to create collaboration between NADA practitioners and the peer mental health movement.

The demand for alternatives to the drug based behavioral health paradigm has long been a force behind the pharmaceutical-free NADA model.  Community activists in the 1970s developed the NADA protocol as an alternative to methadone maintenance. NADA conferences regularly feature presentations from innovative psychiatrists and nurses using NADA methods both as an alternative and adjunct to psychiatric medications within government run psychiatric hospitals throughout Europe, as well as the state mental hospital in Colorado.

Stuyt admits that encouraging clients to safely taper off their medication can be a "hard sell", "primarily I believe because they have been told by their doctors that they must take their medication.  The patients are convinced that they have a ‘chemical imbalance’ that only the medication can fix. Of course there is no research backing this up but it is what they have heard over and over."

To receive a full subscription to Guidepoints: News From NADA, become a NADA member to have full access to Guidepoints archives on our website.

Robert Whitaker's blog and website:  www.madinamerica.com.

Freedom Center is at www.freedom-center.org

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We welcome peer recovery groups to attend the NADA conference in Kansas City May 20-21.  If you are a counselor or peer recovery group facilitator, consider attending the full NADA training, beginning Sunday May 15 and ending Thursday May 19.  This is a great opportunity to learn how to incorporate the five point NADA ear acupuncture protocol into your set of clinical skills.

Early registration ends April 15, 2011.   All Missouri residents receive 20% off the registration fee!