‘Just in Case’ Mental Health Treatment…

My dear colleague, David Webb, has asked me to promote this opinion piece (see link, below) that he has co-written with Melissa Raven. Amongst other important considerations, it urges readers to think about the many, serious implications that flow from bio-psychiatry’s (Team Bio) bent to get the kiddies hooked up on atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants. That is, potent drugs designed for adults (or horses or dogs) for other purposes altogether (not dissimilar to ordering a lobster and getting a cookbook about mussels). Anyway, this ‘just in case’ sort of mental health treatment is seductively packaged, and presented to governments, and their bureaucratic machines as ‘must do’ measures to prevent mass murders and suicides.

If such nonsense had been allowed when I was a kiddy some 40 years ago, then Team Bio would have determined that as the son of a treatment-resistant paranoid schizophrenic, I would have been doomed to suffer florid psychosis, kill, maim, and shabby self-care. The only humane solution to my pending plight would have been massive doses of Largactil. That would have left me in the present even fatter, even balder than I am now, lethargic and impotent, with skin so photosensitive that I could not bear the sun, and tardive dyskinesia so pronounced that I would struggle to eat the food that I could not even afford to buy on my meager government benefit.

The trouble is, my late father never actually suffered with paranoid schizophrenia. Like many veterans who returned from the horrors of active service on WWII battlefields, he suffered with repeatedly misdiagnosed, post-traumatic stress disorder. That ’mistake’ was finally acknowledged by Veteran’s Affairs in 1984 but never rectified, since mega-doses of Largactil remained their sole course of treatment for him until his death in 1992. The claims thus by Team Bio that they need to get in early, really, really early ‘or else’ are fatuous, and dangerous. If they were being honest, they would admit that they simply have no idea which kiddy will go mad, and rampage, and which kiddy will not…

McGorry’s ‘Early Intervention’ in Mental Health…A Prescription for Disaster 2010