Antipsychotics Hasten Death Considerably…

And now for something we already knew…

For many years, I was a member of the Guardianship Tribunal of NSW, a statutory authority that oversees a substitute decision-making regime for people who are living with disability. One of the most frequently presented and yet highly contentious issues associated with that decision-making process were the extraordinarily high number of elderly people in nursing homes who where juiced up on anti-psychotics, atypically prescribed as they were, as a matter of course. Hence, clinical decision making seemed to have been jettisoned out the window in most individual cases in order to shut up or shut down those elderly people who were, well, ‘bothersome’ to staff, visitors and others. So widespread was this practice and so enmeshed were its various players that to mention, as I sometimes did, factual evidence of the type that is described in this article, was usually met with anxious disbelief. I mean, how could we be participating in death-hastening when we were charged to uphold and defend the best interests of those elderly people who came before us?

Whether it be curbing unpleasant behaviours in elderly nursing home residents or damping down psychotic symptoms in people who are otherwise mentally unwell, it is an irrefutable fact that anti-psychotics carry the risk of causing serious physical health problems and even early death. Any ‘best interests’ argument, thus, needs to be mounted along the lines of quality of life versus quantity of life, although I should wonder if being wiped out by anti-psychotics then wiped off the face of the earth several, if not more years ahead of what one could reasonably expect is ‘best’ anything. The shocker amongst all shockers here, unfortunately, is that the spin merchants within big pharma and those clinicians, academics and others who hang out of their dirty arse, have invented an entirely convenient excuse, ‘metabolic syndrome,’ in which death-hastening is encapsulated within the subject person’s mental illness so as to be characterised as an effect of that person’s mental illness and not, as it really is, an effect of the anti-psychotic medication prescribed to that person.

I guess, those in the position to enforce treatment that kills can also construct the convenient truth to sustain that dodgy practice…