A Drug for a Drug, An Eye for a High

Holey smokes Batman, they've done it again. Those wonderful folks who brought you LSD are now promoting psilocybin. This drug, which has been around for years, is made from mushrooms and, like LSD, is a known hallucinogen.

I want to stress that point: The drug causes hallucinations. According to the Oxford American dictionary a hallucination is defined as "an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present." Get it? It's not real. Keep that in mind when you read the following.

A study—"funded in part by the federal government" (your tax dollars at work)—discovered that psilocybin could create "meaningful or spiritually significant experiences" in the user.

But it's a hallucinogen! It's not a real experience. It's randomly generated and created by the drug and whether you have a spiritual experience or a terrible feeling of fear (the other side of the study), it's being created for you.

The researchers even suggested that the drug might be used to help addicts "kick their habit." Hello?

Leave it to the psychs to use an artificial means to reach a spiritual end.

And as for using a drug to get someone off drugs, isn't that ironic?

—Comment based on data from, "Study: Mushrooms Can Have Lasting Spiritual Effects," by Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press, July 11, 2006

These "Trends" are Just Plain Scary

"Objective: To examine national trends and patterns in antipsychotic treatment of youth seen by physicians in office-based medical practice.
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"Results: In the United States, the estimated number of office-based visits by youth that included antipsychotic treatment increased from approximately 201,000 in 1993 to 1,224,000 in 2002. …"

—From an abstract of the article, "National Trends in the Outpatient Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Antipsychotic Drugs," by Mark Olfson, MD, MPH; Carlos Blanco, MD, PhD; Linxu Liu, PhD; Carmen Moreno, MD; Gonzalo Laje, MD, Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 63 No. 6, June 2006

Double Dosing Our Kids

U.S. children diagnosed with behavior and psychiatric problems increasingly receive more than one medication despite very little proof that many of the drugs are safe or effective for kids, suggests a research review out Monday.

"We don't know how these drugs may interact with each other, and we don't even have safety studies in children for many of the drugs on their own," says child psychiatrist Joseph Penn of Brown University Medical School and Bradley Hospital in Providence.
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One drug often causes side effects; since more medications than ever are available, kids get another drug to deal with these side effects. For example, stimulants may cause insomnia, which leads to prescribing sleeping pills.
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"Doctors are doing this polypharmacy stuff all the time with kids," says Penn, "but when you look for the research, there is none."

— By Marilyn Elias, "More kids get multiple psychiatric drugs," August 3, 2005, USA TODAY

Checklists of Behaviors

"Because there are no biological tests, markers or known causes for most mental illnesses, who is counted as ill depends almost entirely on frequently changing checklists of behaviors that the DSM considers as symptoms of mental disorder.
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"The vast broadening of the definition of mental disorders has its skeptics, myself included, who are suspicious of the motivations of the APA and the drug companies that may view the expanding sweep of mental disorders like a lumber company lusting after a redwood forest. But unlike the environment, with its leagues of watchdogs, the medicalization of human foibles has few challengers. That's too bad: The misdiagnosis of mental illness often leaves a lasting trail in medical records open to schools, employers, insurance companies and courts."

—By Stuart A. Kirk (professor of social welfare at UCLA and coauthor of The Selling of DSM and Making Us Crazy), August 14, 2005, "Are we all going mad, or are the experts crazy?" The Los Angeles Times

Psychiatry: Creating Disorder

Psychiatry is on a never-ending quest to find new symptoms and new labels for those symptoms to ensure that, like it or not, one way or another, they'll determine that we're all "disordered."

—Naomi Fox, July 3, 2006

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"...'Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired - are you kidding me?' said Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

"...Dr. McHugh said, 'the problem is that the diagnostic manual* we are using in psychiatry is like a field guide and it just keeps expanding and expanding.'

"'Pretty soon,' he said, 'we'll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I'll be mentally ill.'"

—"Most Will Be Mentally Ill at Some Point, Study Says," by Benedict Carey, June 7, 2005, nytimes.com, The New York Times

*a reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)