Hypocrisy of Psychology

[Sage]

I'm fascinated with psych drugs and illegal drug/alcohol abuse-- specifically the commonalities between the two. I have researched both well through websites, televison, print articles and a stint in outpatient care for depression/anxiety (I don't use illegal drugs).

The one thing that I find interesting are the similiar properties/actions between psych and illegal drugs. In many cases, they target the same brain chemicals but obviously the prescribed dosages of psych meds are much, much lower and probably don't use chemicals like fertilizer or ammonia.

There are a myriad of things that I could discuss, but the one thing that stands out is the fact that dr.'s are quick to say that drugs like meth, for example, completely change brain chemistry (target: dopamine) and it may take 6 months to 2 years for a brain to recover from rebound depression once a user stops. How come they won't admit the same is true if someone uses Wellbutrin (target: dopamine) and stops and gets depression again? Dr.'s also say that "oh that person has anxiety/depression b/c they quit meth or heroin". How many times have you heard a doctor say, "oh that person has depression b/c they quit Paxil or Wellbutrin?! What's the difference? My point is that the brain takes time to regenerate and heal from the absense of any drugs IMO.

Some interesting statistics just came out (for U.S.):
40 million people in take psych meds
20 million people are addicted to alcohol
15 million people are addicted to illegal drugs
That's 75MM out of a total 275MM population (almost 30% of the nation) that seek some sort of chemical substance to numb pain, relieve stress, anxiety, depression, etc. This doesn't count food addicts who may use food to self medicate.
This is very sad state of the union to me.

[sherijo]

sage there is a thread in the misc section about wellbutrin being touted as the new cure all for people coming off of meth! i think the thread is something like.. i wondered when they would do this.. or something like that.. they are all hypocrites and it IS all about the money.. it isn't about our health.. it is about their financial health and nothing else!

sheri

[velveteengreen]

Psych Drugs are different from illegal drugs in a number of different ways. First, the reason that illegal drugs become such a problem is their pleasure producing capabilities. People quickly abuse them because they fit into already existing neurotransmitter spots. For example, amphetamine is very similar to adrenalin, so when you take it you're tricking your brain into creating an adrenalin rush; your brain is capable of understanding the drug, if that's a good analogy. However, people take it in doses higher than the body's amount of adrenalin and that's where problems arise in brain chemistry. Same with psilocybin; you're looking at a molecule that is one phospho-oxygen different than serotonin, they're fundamentally the same molecule.

But when you arrive at Psych meds, these work by turning off areas of the brain. THere are no endogenous receptors for Benzos, which is why they create life-threatening withdrawal like Barbituates. The wholly synthetic drugs like SSRI's are interfering with the WAY in which the body's nervous system works, not tricking it into thinking that it created a lot of adrenalin, for example. That's why Psych meds are actually WORSE, in my opinion, than the so called illegal drugs. For example, Heroin withdrawal is not life-threatening, neither is amphetamine or cocaine withdrawal. Just very unpleasant. Lifethreatening withdrawal is only seen with Alcohol (and my Psychiatrist told me once that SSRI's work like alcohol), Barbituates and Benzodiazepines, the last two being psychiatric.

In my opinion, illegal drugs are illegal because they are so pleasurable, and then people overuse them and get addicted. But addiction to psychiatric meds is MUCH worse, because of the massive nervous system damage and the fact that they were designed to turn off your ability to think (which is why they "cure" you-you can't think about your mental illness in the same terms as you could off the drugs), they're not just fooling you into thinking that you're having a pleasurable experience. Does that make sense?

Most illegal drugs are illegal because they can be grown naturally...
Poppies for heroin , cocaine, magic mushrooms , marijuana ( take your pick)

The pharmaceutical companies have a had a huge influence on Drug laws ..
Because they have a huge influence on governments...

In Ireland st johns Wort was banned as an over the counter medicine....Its now available as a prescription only herb....and under 'control' .
Why ?...because the Pharma lobbyists knew it was too effective and taking custom away from their synthetic poisons....

[Charlie]

I don't think SSRI's are that much different than many illegal drugs. Illegal drugs that target serotonin achieve the result very quickly while the SSRI's get there more slowly (sneak attack). LSD,PCP and Ecstacy can all induce psychosis as can ANY SSRI but the end result is the same.

[velveteengreen]

Well, they're all psychotropic drugs. Drugs like Cocaine, Heroin, and LSD work in VERY different ways, just because they're illegal doesn't mean they have similar mechanisms. SSRI's are just as different from Cocaine as Cocaine is from Heroin.

I assume that the end result you're talking about is psychosis, but different drugs create different types of psychosis, and toxic psychosis usually resolves itself by the time the drug leaves the system. Problems come in when doctor's convince people that they've damaged themselves in irreparable ways, telling them that somehow LSD damaged brain cells (when it doesn't nothing of the sort). The Natural Mind goes into this in depth, talking about how different drugs affect the nervous system in different ways. It also discusses issues of brain damage and psychosis. The Author, Dr. Andrew Weil got his degree from Harvard, and is highly respected in the medical industry. And he reserves his largest indictment for psychiatric drugs. This book is DEFINITELY one of my favorites and is most enlightening.

[velveteengreen]

I forgot to add that PCP is a dissociative anesthetic that is well-known for causing psychosis, and there is no other drug like it. It doesn't target serotonin either, I don't think. Let me check on that. Ecstasy is the only illegal drug that is similar to antidepressants, and in my opinion causes similar brain damage. It works however by emptying the body's stores of serotonin in the the synaptic cleft, whereas SSRI's block the reuptake of serotonin back into the presynaptic vesicle. LSD is a hallucinogen that temporarily replaces serotonin, and the body clears it out within hours. You don't see brain damage with psychedelics for this very reason, because they fit into the already existing serotonin key holes. I can't reiterate the importance of researching illegal drugs because so much misinformation circulates. www.erowid.org is a good choice, or some of the other books that I"ve mentioned.

[Healing]

I really appreciate this thread. I think you guys are doing your part to expose how harmful psych meds are. They have been grossly under-researched, are inadequately understood, and are as harmful or far more harmful than street drugs.

[velveteengreen]

Thanks for the encouragement, Healing! I hate how just because a drug is legal (aka psychiatric drugs) people think that it's safe. People really are misinformed, and A LOT more research needs to be done on these drugs. But then again, who is gonna fund a reseach project that challenges the safety of a Multi-Billion Dollar industry? I think that society and the government support drugs like AD's that make people "productive members of society" aka wage-slave robots and able to function, even if the cost of that is high. Just my opinion

[Healing]

I totally agree that there are political and economic forces at work that want a labor pool that is compliant, productive, and willing to consume whatever makes for the biggest profit margin.

I really *chose* to take Paxil, went to the psychiatrist *wanting* a prescription, and it is definitely true that part of the reason I wanted it was that I was succumbing to the enormous social pressure to *be* a certain way -- highly productive, smoothly functioning, well-appearing, high achieving, like everyone else, being the way one is *supposed* to be. I have always had Marxist leanings, yet I, too, got sucked in.

[Pat Shields]

Originally Posted by velveteengreen

I forgot to add that PCP is a dissociative anesthetic that is well-known for causing psychosis

I don't know the name of the anesthetic, but when I had bladder surgery back in 1982, I came away with some long-lasting but minor psychosis. I was in the Navy and having a lot of trouble at the time, and something in my mind told me that hey, maybe during surgery they had implanted a chip in my ear or in my brain that could monitor what I was doing or where I was doing it or influence me somehow. Looking back on that I see how SILLY that was, but at the time I considered it a legitimate possibility. Fortunately for me the docs I see don't think that isolated incidence was crazy because they acknowledge that some anesthetics cause psychosis in some individuals. I was fully functional the whole time, by the way.

[velveteengreen]

PCP hasn't been used on humans since the late 50's because of the horrible reactions to it. You might have had ketamine, a psychedelic anaesthetic that John Lilly was a huge fan of. Yes, Lilly as in Lilly Pharmaceuticals and Prozac, he was a HUGE recreational user. But I can't say for sure, since to my knowledge ketamine was only used today in veterinary medicine, but you had it in the 1980's, so its quite likely. Check this out tell me if this helps

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine.shtml

[genevieve]

the difference between legal and illegal drugs is not science it is CULTURE. This is why it makes me laugh when I hear people say "it is not a drug, it is a medication". What makes a drug legal is that it serves a purpose in a society and the autority in place can control it. SSRIs make people productive and we are in a capitalist society : it makes sense why there is so much prescriptions.

[velveteengreen]

Genevieve, I couldn't say it any better myself!!!

[altostrata]

Originally Posted by Sage

one thing that stands out is the fact that dr.'s are quick to say that drugs like meth, for example, completely change brain chemistry (target: dopamine) and it may take 6 months to 2 years for a brain to recover from rebound depression once a user stops. How come they won't admit the same is true if someone uses Wellbutrin (target: dopamine) and stops and gets depression again?

Wellbutrin (bupropion or 3-chloro-N-tert-butyl-β-keto-amphetamine) is methamphetamine's chemical cousin. A lot of the so-called therapeutic pharmaceuticals were developed from anesthetics, poisons, and psychoactive substances. It's no accident that research into psychoactive medications took off in the 1960s and bore fruit in the '70s and '80s. A lot of researchers took recreational drugs and wanted to study things that make you high.

Sage does point out an essential fallacy: That legal psychoactive drugs are harmless and have no lasting effect while illegal psychoactive substances fry your brain. Remember that frying pan commercial (which always made me laugh), well, THIS is your brain on Paxil!!!

Oh, yeah, and other phenethylamine cousins to bupropion and amphetamine: MDMA aka Ecstacy (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methyl-amphetamine), my personal favorite mescaline, and Venlafaxine aka Effexor (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venlafa...tion_syndrome). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenethylamines.

[velveteengreen]

Originally Posted by altostrata

Sage does point out an essential fallacy: That legal psychoactive drugs are harmless and have no lasting effect while illegal psychoactive substances fry your brain. Remember that frying pan commercial (which always made me laugh), well, THIS is your brain on Paxil!!!

So true! This was the point I was trying to get across in earlier threads... just because a drug is illegal doesn't necessarily mean its brain damaging and just becaes a drug is legal doesn't mean its safe. You have to look at what the drugs actual mechanisms are, and how they affect neurotransmitters and the nervous system etc... on your own. The "authorities" are grossly underinformed. In my opinion, they should be raiding GSK for manufacturing a deadly chemical instead of cancer patients in California who smoke pot to relieve the symptoms of chemotherapy.

Originally Posted by altostrata

Wellbutrin (bupropion or 3-chloro-N-tert-butyl-β-keto-amphetamine) is methamphetamine's chemical cousin.

Wellbutrin is actually a scarier drug then Methamphetamine if you look at its chemical structure!

http://www.erowid.org/cgi-bin/chem_c...etamine_2d.jpg

You can see that they have the same chemical backbone, but Wellbutrin has been heavily modified, which means that Methamphetamine fits into the receptors easier because it is closer to the structure of [nor]epinephrine (or [nor]adrenalin, same thing). I wouldn't be suprised if 20 years from now researchers discovered that these drugs cause nervous damage WORSE than the so called "street drugs"

[scotty]

Originally Posted by velveteengreen

In my opinion, they should be raiding GSK for manufacturing a deadly chemical instead of cancer patients in California who smoke pot to relieve the symptoms of chemotherapy.

I'm with you on this one!

[altostrata]

Originally Posted by velveteengreen

Wellbutrin is actually a scarier drug then Methamphetamine if you look at its chemical structure!

http://www.erowid.org/cgi-bin/chem_c...etamine_2d.jpg

You can see that they have the same chemical backbone, but Wellbutrin has been heavily modified, which means that Methamphetamine fits into the receptors easier because it is closer to the structure of [nor]epinephrine (or [nor]adrenalin, same thing). I wouldn't be suprised if 20 years from now researchers discovered that these drugs cause nervous damage WORSE than the so called "street drugs"

I agree, the drug developers like to think of these engineered drugs as "targeted" but in reality they can't predict the collateral damage, which we know is all over the endrocrine system. (Actually, Wellbutrin is somewhat less targeted than SSRIs but, hey, I'd much rather be taking mescaline.)

[velveteengreen]

What I want to know is how pharmaceutical companies manage to get around the Analogue (Designer Drug) Law of 1986!?! It makes drugs that are similar to already banned drugs illegal. But then again, Methamphetamine is approved for medical use (schedule 2). The whole drug system is corrupt and controlled by powerful lobbyists-I guess I just answered my own question.

In my opinion they should schedule drugs according to actual and proven danger, and place antidepressants in Schedule 1!

[Healing]

Originally Posted by altostrata

collateral damage

Ooh, excellent turn of phrase....

[Healing]

Originally Posted by velveteengreen

What I want to know is how pharmaceutical companies manage to get around the Analogue (Designer Drug) Law of 1986!?! It makes drugs that are similar to already banned drugs illegal. But then again, Methamphetamine is approved for medical use (schedule 2). The whole drug system is corrupt and controlled by powerful lobbyists-I guess I just answered my own question.

In my opinion they should schedule drugs according to actual and proven danger, and place antidepressants in Schedule 1!

This is an interesting point. There's a thing on Rob Robinson's website about how Paxil contains a compound (piperazine?) that is actually a controlled substance found in many opiates (I think that was it) that's on the WHO list of controlled substances. I'll go see if I can find it and I'll post the link.

[sherijo]

Originally Posted by Healing

This is an interesting point. There's a thing on Rob Robinson's website about how Paxil contains a compound (piperazine?) that is actually a controlled substance found in many opiates (I think that was it) that's on the WHO list of controlled substances. I'll go see if I can find it and I'll post the link.

this is a really interesting thread! you guys are such great researchers!
sheri

[Healing]

http://www.paxilprotest.com/page22.html

PIPERADINE.....(I think piperazine is my cat's de-wormer....)

[sherijo]

holy cow! i guess i am officially an addict! what the hell? why is this overlooked? how do doctors not know this?
flabbergasted, once again!
sheri

[altostrata]

Originally Posted by Healing

PIPERADINE.....(I think piperazine is my cat's de-wormer....)

Slightly off-topic: trazodone's active metabolite mCPP and buspirone's (Buspar's) active metabolite is 1-PP. They are both piperazines, same family as de-wormers, and if they build up in the bloodstream they are both anxiety-inducers. And these are our legal THERAPEUTIC drugs.

(How do I know? Because I had the "paradoxical" adverse reaction to both trazodone and buspirone -- in reality, cyp2D6 drug conflicts that should have been predicted by my doctors. But I digress.)