Jaclyn Glenn on Anti-Depressants: ZERO SKEPTICISM.
08 July 2018 [link youtube]
There was a time when Jaclyn Glenn was a self-identified leader in the "Skeptic" movement: many people need to seriously reconsider their assumptions about medical treatment for depression, but it's no less important that we re-examine our assumptions about the meaning of Skepticism.
Source 1: "De-mystifying psychiatric drugs, a presentation by Joanna Moncrieff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfiubXSzzz8
Source 2: "Why I Stopped Taking My Antidepressants" by JaclynGlenn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxLOXVKmPIA
Youtube Automatic Transcription
um so first of all address the anti
depressants thing there's nothing wrong with it be careful though because sometimes they can make you a little bit nauseous so actually talk to your doctor the first thing I did was I went to my primary care physician she prescribed lexapro people have mixed feelings about taking medication about taking antidepressants I tried them like many years ago and had a good experience so I was open to trying this again thinking that it would be another good experience now drugs have been used for mental health problems for a long time prescription drugs have been very popular for at least the whole of the 20th century but up until the nineteen fifties in 1960s drugs that were used in this way were not seen as rectifying a chemical imbalance even the drugs that were prescribed for mental health problems were generally seen as buffers or Downers sedatives or stimulants antidepressants are really very little different from placebos if you look at if you look at all the literature if you get hold of the unpublished studies the difference is minimal it's tiny it's probably to my mind accounted for by the fact that as I was saying if you're doing a placebo controlled study with a mind also that against a mind-altering substance you're not that's not really a fair comparison it's not blinded people are going to know what they're taking that fits with a fact that actually the use of antidepressants haven't really altered the outcome of depression which is still pretty poor if you look at people who are receiving treatment for depression so it for example the large star D study done in the United States only three percent of the people in that study who were all treated with at least one and many of them with numerous antidepressants actually recovered and remained well over the year follow-up period and lots of studies have shown that people who with depression who take antidepressants don't do any better in fact usually do rather worse than people with depression who don't take them I did not have a good experience it worked at first it worked for the first maybe three or four months I noticed I didn't have any panic attacks during that time which was amazing because it was kind of oh man it was it was getting really bad there for me for awhile and month five I noticed that the the effect of the drug was kind of wearing off I started getting panic attacks again when the amphetamines came in and in the 1940s they were advertised as pet pills they would make you smarter and sassier when the barbiturates came in they were advertised as sedatives as Downers as things that would send you to sleep and this was because until about the mid 20th century no one thought there was much that could really be done for mental health problems but that all changed from the 1940s with the introduction of these heroic procedures into psychiatry which some of some of you may have heard of you all have heard or crook as one of them of course with ECT another one which came in in the 1940s was in stood in a coma therapy and of course there was lobotomy and and other techniques and some of these procedures particularly insulin coma therapy and ECT came to be thought of as acting in a specific way on the underlying disease in a way that no previous widely accepted treatment had done before of course most of these procedures particularly insulin coma therapy were since found to be completely useless as well as being very dangerous it had a death rate of about 10% so by the time modern drugs arrived in the early 1950s the point is that psychiatry already believed it had some specific treatments and treatments that were actually treating the disease in some way when the drugs when modern drugs first came in the first one that was introduced was the first drug we still use that was called was chlorpromazine Marg a pill Thorazine I'm sure you would have heard of it they were very popular and there you spread rapidly throughout the old mental hospitals in Europe and America helped in America by a massive pharmaceutical company aided promotion campaign which included the chief executive of the company going on national primetime television to announce this great medical breakthrough but despite the fact that they weren't very popular they were not at first seen as acting in a specific or targeted way in a way that they are now being promoted as acting so the first two psychiatrists who use Crowe promazine were called delay and denickers on delay PA tenneco who were both working in Paris and they believe that chlorpromazine and other early antipsychotics were essentially special sorts of sedative different from the sedatives they'd had before but but sedatives things that worked on the new nervous system to suppress or dampen it in some way lots of adverts advertised these drugs for all sorts of conditions so they were advertised for anxiety they were advertised for behavior problems in children they were widely promoted at this time for the agitation and aggression in elderly people what they've been used for and criticised for being useful recently of course by 1970 this is an advert for nineteen set for mineral in 1970 that's all changed and it's now being advertised as targeting specific symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia and you get the same sort of story with antidepressants the first drugs that were called antidepressants were essentially stimulant type drugs drugs that we use to treat TB that had stimulant effects and were known to send people psychotic incidentally so quite similar to amphetamines and first of all they were described as stimulants but gradually they started to be distinguished from stimulants and to be called antidepressants and to be claimed to be doing something specific in the condition of depressions and I noticed that things that normally would excite me and make me happy weren't really doing that as much it was I just felt kind of like I was becoming numb to the world I went back to my doctor and I told her how the drug was affecting me and how I was I didn't like the way it made me feel how it wasn't even really effective anymore and how it was making me gain weight the solution to me saying I don't like the way this drug is affecting me was to double the dose she was like okay well right now you're only on 10 milligrams we're gonna just go ahead and up back to 20 be the way that drugs used to be understood as working in the way that I'm suggesting they should be understood as working the drugs that we currently have at any rate is what I call this drug centered model and this is the idea that far from normalizing the body or the brain the drugs that we use actually create an abnormal or an altered state they are mind and body altering substances that of course is what a drug is for the but psychiatric drugs are mind-altering that's the really important property that they have they are an example of a psychoactive substance psychoactive substances of course also include recreational drugs like alcohol nicotine the important point is that this change did not happen because a whole load of studies were done which proved that what drugs were really doing was reversing underlying diseases or abnormalities or in chemical imbalances there wasn't any that there was no scientific research set up then and there's almost no scientific research now to demonstrate that the disease centered model is the correct way of thinking I think this change occurred because people wanted it to to occur because psychiatrist wanted it to occur because they desperately wanted to have to be able to offer real medical treatments that made a real difference to a - to what they were suggesting was an underlying disease process it also happened because it was politically expedient the idea that there were drug treatments that could cure people was was very helpful to politicians who wanted to empty out and close down the old asylums and to to pretend is that issues that were raised by mental disturbance mental disorders had been solved I had just sat there and explained how uncomfortable it was making me and all these negative side effects and the you know solution was take more of it take more of that thing that is making you feel like [ __ ] so I went to a new doctor that agreed that taking it was maybe not the best option for me she gave me a very low dose and a very small amount of xanax klonopin is another barbiturate that people can get prescribed for panic attacks and things like that but it's a longer-lasting drug and you kind of just take it every day and I told her I don't really want to be reliant on a medication I don't want to take something every day xanax I know is dangerous because it can be very addictive to people I'm not the kind of person that has an addictive personality so I'm not worried about it I've had the prescription now for like a month and I've taken three so what what might constitute it I just want to think think about evidence for a couple of minutes although I'm not going to go into it in great detail there's lots of stuff in my book and things on the web that I've written as well if you want more references the first point to make is that the vast majority of evidence that is held up to support the idea that psychiatric drugs work does not distinguish how they work because that evidence is placebo controlled trials if you compare a mind-altering substance with a placebo obviously people are going to feel and behave and act and think differently so the fact that there are some changes in a mania rating scale or depression rating scale or a psychosis rating scale or anything else doesn't indicate that that drug has had any fundamental effect on an underlying process I think a really important thing is to realize that drugs can't do anything and everything so this is just a random list of some effects that that that psychoactive mind-altering drugs produce some of them produce euphoria make people get in high that's not the same thing as making people happy so I think I think it's really important to not to just equate the effects of drugs with all with other experiences just think a bit about what the familiar drugs that are used in psychiatry aren't doing and I'm sure you can probably tell me more about this but I can tell you what's interesting is that these early psychiatrists described what antipsychotic were the early antipsychotics my chlorpromazine were doing to people in a lot of detail and what's interesting about that is that that the interest that they had been how these drugs affected and altered and changed people has been lost you won't find an account of how Cyprus that changes people in this sort of way in the modern literature at all except what I've managed to publish but they were there they were pretty honest about it okay quarantine makes people in different delays their responses decreases initiative and preoccupation without quite just sending two people to sleep like the barbiturates did that's what they they noticed but I know that there's more there's more to it than that there's more in my life that I need to you know this is like a band-aid this helps prevent a serious panic attack once it started but I want to get to the point in my life where I don't feel those feelings to begin with and I think the only way to do that is behavioral therapy my doctor did mention that there are other types of antidepressants that I might consider in the future that don't cause weight gain I think wellbutrin is one luvox is one you know so there's there are other options Danika went even further than this and he suggested that what the drugs were doing was replacing the psychosis or schizophrenia with a neurological syndrome a neurological disease which was pretty similar to Parkinson's disease if you push the dose up you've got all the sort of Frank symptoms of Parkinson's very very stiff and very slowed up but lower doses you just got primarily the mental symptoms the mental slowing and the emotional flattening and he said this you know this is how they work this is this is what we're what we're intending to do we're trying to make people a bit Parkinson like and that fits with what people say about the drug in people's people's experiences of certainly of the older antipsychotics people describe them as making them feel stagnant and heavy and slow and emotionally dampened or emotionally empty some of the newer drugs are a little bit different so I think olanzapine and clozapine are a little bit different they still have this effect of inducing lethargy and emotional indifference but this seems to be associated less with sort of physical rigidity and restriction and more with metabolic effect so people get this real compulsion to to eat and of course this was you know this information was was suppressed for a long time but I think this crave sums it up nicely I've never been able to eat as much as I did when I was on zyprexa I gained 40 pounds in no time and my mind was in a constant fog of lethargy and indifference I didn't care about anything I just wanted to sit around and eat lots of adverse effects of antipsychotics that I'm sure you're probably aware of just a couple of things I want to say that I think don't come out strongly in the literature tardive dyskinesia it's a neurological condition it consisted of abnormal involuntary movements that's what's highlighted but actually there's quite a lot of evidence that there's some mental impairment associated with it as well there's been more evidence recently about reduced brain volume I was talking to someone before I started about Peter Bregenz work I read Peter Breggin stocks excitatory when it came out in the early 90s and I thought this is really interesting but he's going too far it just can't be true that the drugs cause you know cause brain shrinkage and these large ventricles he's just totally over the top recent evidence shows that he was almost certainly right the there's there was a big trial in America that showed that had a paradigm and olanzapine caused visible shrinkage of the brain within weeks there was a study on macaque monkeys that showed that both of those drugs caused the monkeys to have smaller brains and there's been a long-term follow-up recently that that shows the same thing the more antipsychotics you're on the more brain the more the brain diminishes in volume over time wellbutrin as one luvox as one you know so there's there are other options and we'll see how I fare with therapy and just doing what I'm doing and exercise and you know keep doing my thing and if I need to go on that at some point I will update you and let you know if I have negative side effects or my experience with that what are more antidepressants in terms of sort of psychoactive and physical effects that they have tricyclic antidepressants are very similar drugs to chlorpromazine so they're very sedative and not very nice to take and of course slowing up with mental processes and some of them have some of these neurological effects at higher doses newer antidepressants have much weaker psychoactive effects so they don't actually make everyone feel that different but they do have some psychoactive effects and these are some of them they seem to have this odd capacity that drugs like the SSRIs and venlafaxine which I looked at recently of making people feel both a little bit lethargic and some people also feeling a bit sort of tense and hyper and irritable as well and they also seem to definitely have this capacity to make people feel emotionally a bit numbed or distant as far as treating depression is concerned there's really no evidence that any drug has any has the ability to reverse depression or to make people's mood any better there are lots of drugs that can make you high temporarily but that's not the same thing but there are drugs with psychoactive effects that can suppress emotions generally but that's not the same thing but essentially what I'm saying is what most people are being told these days or for a long time have been told about antidepressants is that you should take them because they will help normalize your serotonin levels that is just not true there's just no evidence to support that at all
depressants thing there's nothing wrong with it be careful though because sometimes they can make you a little bit nauseous so actually talk to your doctor the first thing I did was I went to my primary care physician she prescribed lexapro people have mixed feelings about taking medication about taking antidepressants I tried them like many years ago and had a good experience so I was open to trying this again thinking that it would be another good experience now drugs have been used for mental health problems for a long time prescription drugs have been very popular for at least the whole of the 20th century but up until the nineteen fifties in 1960s drugs that were used in this way were not seen as rectifying a chemical imbalance even the drugs that were prescribed for mental health problems were generally seen as buffers or Downers sedatives or stimulants antidepressants are really very little different from placebos if you look at if you look at all the literature if you get hold of the unpublished studies the difference is minimal it's tiny it's probably to my mind accounted for by the fact that as I was saying if you're doing a placebo controlled study with a mind also that against a mind-altering substance you're not that's not really a fair comparison it's not blinded people are going to know what they're taking that fits with a fact that actually the use of antidepressants haven't really altered the outcome of depression which is still pretty poor if you look at people who are receiving treatment for depression so it for example the large star D study done in the United States only three percent of the people in that study who were all treated with at least one and many of them with numerous antidepressants actually recovered and remained well over the year follow-up period and lots of studies have shown that people who with depression who take antidepressants don't do any better in fact usually do rather worse than people with depression who don't take them I did not have a good experience it worked at first it worked for the first maybe three or four months I noticed I didn't have any panic attacks during that time which was amazing because it was kind of oh man it was it was getting really bad there for me for awhile and month five I noticed that the the effect of the drug was kind of wearing off I started getting panic attacks again when the amphetamines came in and in the 1940s they were advertised as pet pills they would make you smarter and sassier when the barbiturates came in they were advertised as sedatives as Downers as things that would send you to sleep and this was because until about the mid 20th century no one thought there was much that could really be done for mental health problems but that all changed from the 1940s with the introduction of these heroic procedures into psychiatry which some of some of you may have heard of you all have heard or crook as one of them of course with ECT another one which came in in the 1940s was in stood in a coma therapy and of course there was lobotomy and and other techniques and some of these procedures particularly insulin coma therapy and ECT came to be thought of as acting in a specific way on the underlying disease in a way that no previous widely accepted treatment had done before of course most of these procedures particularly insulin coma therapy were since found to be completely useless as well as being very dangerous it had a death rate of about 10% so by the time modern drugs arrived in the early 1950s the point is that psychiatry already believed it had some specific treatments and treatments that were actually treating the disease in some way when the drugs when modern drugs first came in the first one that was introduced was the first drug we still use that was called was chlorpromazine Marg a pill Thorazine I'm sure you would have heard of it they were very popular and there you spread rapidly throughout the old mental hospitals in Europe and America helped in America by a massive pharmaceutical company aided promotion campaign which included the chief executive of the company going on national primetime television to announce this great medical breakthrough but despite the fact that they weren't very popular they were not at first seen as acting in a specific or targeted way in a way that they are now being promoted as acting so the first two psychiatrists who use Crowe promazine were called delay and denickers on delay PA tenneco who were both working in Paris and they believe that chlorpromazine and other early antipsychotics were essentially special sorts of sedative different from the sedatives they'd had before but but sedatives things that worked on the new nervous system to suppress or dampen it in some way lots of adverts advertised these drugs for all sorts of conditions so they were advertised for anxiety they were advertised for behavior problems in children they were widely promoted at this time for the agitation and aggression in elderly people what they've been used for and criticised for being useful recently of course by 1970 this is an advert for nineteen set for mineral in 1970 that's all changed and it's now being advertised as targeting specific symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia and you get the same sort of story with antidepressants the first drugs that were called antidepressants were essentially stimulant type drugs drugs that we use to treat TB that had stimulant effects and were known to send people psychotic incidentally so quite similar to amphetamines and first of all they were described as stimulants but gradually they started to be distinguished from stimulants and to be called antidepressants and to be claimed to be doing something specific in the condition of depressions and I noticed that things that normally would excite me and make me happy weren't really doing that as much it was I just felt kind of like I was becoming numb to the world I went back to my doctor and I told her how the drug was affecting me and how I was I didn't like the way it made me feel how it wasn't even really effective anymore and how it was making me gain weight the solution to me saying I don't like the way this drug is affecting me was to double the dose she was like okay well right now you're only on 10 milligrams we're gonna just go ahead and up back to 20 be the way that drugs used to be understood as working in the way that I'm suggesting they should be understood as working the drugs that we currently have at any rate is what I call this drug centered model and this is the idea that far from normalizing the body or the brain the drugs that we use actually create an abnormal or an altered state they are mind and body altering substances that of course is what a drug is for the but psychiatric drugs are mind-altering that's the really important property that they have they are an example of a psychoactive substance psychoactive substances of course also include recreational drugs like alcohol nicotine the important point is that this change did not happen because a whole load of studies were done which proved that what drugs were really doing was reversing underlying diseases or abnormalities or in chemical imbalances there wasn't any that there was no scientific research set up then and there's almost no scientific research now to demonstrate that the disease centered model is the correct way of thinking I think this change occurred because people wanted it to to occur because psychiatrist wanted it to occur because they desperately wanted to have to be able to offer real medical treatments that made a real difference to a - to what they were suggesting was an underlying disease process it also happened because it was politically expedient the idea that there were drug treatments that could cure people was was very helpful to politicians who wanted to empty out and close down the old asylums and to to pretend is that issues that were raised by mental disturbance mental disorders had been solved I had just sat there and explained how uncomfortable it was making me and all these negative side effects and the you know solution was take more of it take more of that thing that is making you feel like [ __ ] so I went to a new doctor that agreed that taking it was maybe not the best option for me she gave me a very low dose and a very small amount of xanax klonopin is another barbiturate that people can get prescribed for panic attacks and things like that but it's a longer-lasting drug and you kind of just take it every day and I told her I don't really want to be reliant on a medication I don't want to take something every day xanax I know is dangerous because it can be very addictive to people I'm not the kind of person that has an addictive personality so I'm not worried about it I've had the prescription now for like a month and I've taken three so what what might constitute it I just want to think think about evidence for a couple of minutes although I'm not going to go into it in great detail there's lots of stuff in my book and things on the web that I've written as well if you want more references the first point to make is that the vast majority of evidence that is held up to support the idea that psychiatric drugs work does not distinguish how they work because that evidence is placebo controlled trials if you compare a mind-altering substance with a placebo obviously people are going to feel and behave and act and think differently so the fact that there are some changes in a mania rating scale or depression rating scale or a psychosis rating scale or anything else doesn't indicate that that drug has had any fundamental effect on an underlying process I think a really important thing is to realize that drugs can't do anything and everything so this is just a random list of some effects that that that psychoactive mind-altering drugs produce some of them produce euphoria make people get in high that's not the same thing as making people happy so I think I think it's really important to not to just equate the effects of drugs with all with other experiences just think a bit about what the familiar drugs that are used in psychiatry aren't doing and I'm sure you can probably tell me more about this but I can tell you what's interesting is that these early psychiatrists described what antipsychotic were the early antipsychotics my chlorpromazine were doing to people in a lot of detail and what's interesting about that is that that the interest that they had been how these drugs affected and altered and changed people has been lost you won't find an account of how Cyprus that changes people in this sort of way in the modern literature at all except what I've managed to publish but they were there they were pretty honest about it okay quarantine makes people in different delays their responses decreases initiative and preoccupation without quite just sending two people to sleep like the barbiturates did that's what they they noticed but I know that there's more there's more to it than that there's more in my life that I need to you know this is like a band-aid this helps prevent a serious panic attack once it started but I want to get to the point in my life where I don't feel those feelings to begin with and I think the only way to do that is behavioral therapy my doctor did mention that there are other types of antidepressants that I might consider in the future that don't cause weight gain I think wellbutrin is one luvox is one you know so there's there are other options Danika went even further than this and he suggested that what the drugs were doing was replacing the psychosis or schizophrenia with a neurological syndrome a neurological disease which was pretty similar to Parkinson's disease if you push the dose up you've got all the sort of Frank symptoms of Parkinson's very very stiff and very slowed up but lower doses you just got primarily the mental symptoms the mental slowing and the emotional flattening and he said this you know this is how they work this is this is what we're what we're intending to do we're trying to make people a bit Parkinson like and that fits with what people say about the drug in people's people's experiences of certainly of the older antipsychotics people describe them as making them feel stagnant and heavy and slow and emotionally dampened or emotionally empty some of the newer drugs are a little bit different so I think olanzapine and clozapine are a little bit different they still have this effect of inducing lethargy and emotional indifference but this seems to be associated less with sort of physical rigidity and restriction and more with metabolic effect so people get this real compulsion to to eat and of course this was you know this information was was suppressed for a long time but I think this crave sums it up nicely I've never been able to eat as much as I did when I was on zyprexa I gained 40 pounds in no time and my mind was in a constant fog of lethargy and indifference I didn't care about anything I just wanted to sit around and eat lots of adverse effects of antipsychotics that I'm sure you're probably aware of just a couple of things I want to say that I think don't come out strongly in the literature tardive dyskinesia it's a neurological condition it consisted of abnormal involuntary movements that's what's highlighted but actually there's quite a lot of evidence that there's some mental impairment associated with it as well there's been more evidence recently about reduced brain volume I was talking to someone before I started about Peter Bregenz work I read Peter Breggin stocks excitatory when it came out in the early 90s and I thought this is really interesting but he's going too far it just can't be true that the drugs cause you know cause brain shrinkage and these large ventricles he's just totally over the top recent evidence shows that he was almost certainly right the there's there was a big trial in America that showed that had a paradigm and olanzapine caused visible shrinkage of the brain within weeks there was a study on macaque monkeys that showed that both of those drugs caused the monkeys to have smaller brains and there's been a long-term follow-up recently that that shows the same thing the more antipsychotics you're on the more brain the more the brain diminishes in volume over time wellbutrin as one luvox as one you know so there's there are other options and we'll see how I fare with therapy and just doing what I'm doing and exercise and you know keep doing my thing and if I need to go on that at some point I will update you and let you know if I have negative side effects or my experience with that what are more antidepressants in terms of sort of psychoactive and physical effects that they have tricyclic antidepressants are very similar drugs to chlorpromazine so they're very sedative and not very nice to take and of course slowing up with mental processes and some of them have some of these neurological effects at higher doses newer antidepressants have much weaker psychoactive effects so they don't actually make everyone feel that different but they do have some psychoactive effects and these are some of them they seem to have this odd capacity that drugs like the SSRIs and venlafaxine which I looked at recently of making people feel both a little bit lethargic and some people also feeling a bit sort of tense and hyper and irritable as well and they also seem to definitely have this capacity to make people feel emotionally a bit numbed or distant as far as treating depression is concerned there's really no evidence that any drug has any has the ability to reverse depression or to make people's mood any better there are lots of drugs that can make you high temporarily but that's not the same thing but there are drugs with psychoactive effects that can suppress emotions generally but that's not the same thing but essentially what I'm saying is what most people are being told these days or for a long time have been told about antidepressants is that you should take them because they will help normalize your serotonin levels that is just not true there's just no evidence to support that at all