A few snippets worthy of pondering...

<blockquote>RW: Here's just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed with schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the brains of these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the moment of diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18 months to see how those brains change. Now during this 18 months, they are being prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the researchers report? They reported that, over this 18-month period, the drugs caused an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that uses dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change in morphology, a change in the size of an area of the brain, and that's abnormal. That's number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug causing an abnormality in the brain.

Now here's the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred, it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a worsening of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with modern technology, a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we see how an outside agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes an abnormal enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement causes a worsening of the very symptoms it's supposed to treat. Now that's actually, in essence, a story of a disease process -- an outside agent causes abnormality, causes symptoms...

SS: But in this case, the outside agent that triggers the disease process is the supposed cure for the disease! The psychiatric drug is the disease-causing agent.

Source: Interview: Robert Whitaker

<hr width=100% size=2>

As for the abnormalities that researchers have found with brain scans, Mosher thinks the antischizophrenic medication accounts for much of this. He says, "The Germans, who invented neuropathology, looked at the brains of thousands of schizophrenics before there were any neuroleptics. And they were never able to find anything. They never reported increased ventricular volume, which at postmortem you can measure quite easily. And they also never reported any specific cellular pathology, and they studied many, many, many brains." He adds that "there are a whole lot of people who don't have schizophrenia and also have enlarged ventricles. And there are people who have other psychiatric conditions who have enlarged ventricles, and there are a number of known causes of enlarged ventricles that are not schizophrenia. So, yes, there is a statistical difference, but it is not specific."

"On the other hand," Mosher continues, "there are studies that have shown that people treated with neuroleptics have changes in brain structure that are at least associated with drug treatment, dosage, and duration -- and have been shown to increase over time as drugs are given." He cites one "horrific study" of children between the ages of 10 and 15 in which the researchers measured the volumes of the kids' cortexes. "The cortex is what you think with, the part on the outside," Mosher explains. Over time, "They watched the cortical volume of these young people decline, while the cortical volume of the nonschizophrenic controls was expanding because they were adolescents and still growing." The researcher concluded that their schizophrenia had caused the decrease in the subjects. "And yet every single one was taking neuroleptic drugs," Mosher says.

He concedes that the German neuropathologists working earlier in the last century didn't have access to PET scans, a tool that Mosher categorizes as being a significant advance. "They show you activity, not just structure. They show which parts of the brain are working at a given task. And okay -- there they do find differences between people who've been labeled schizophrenic and normal people." But how, Mosher asks, can anyone tell if those differences cause the psychotic behavior or result from it? He says he's not at all surprised that the frontal lobe metabolism of drug-naïve schizophrenics looks different on PET scans than that of normal people. "Because if you meet such people, you know that they are in an unusual state of consciousness. They may be going 100 miles a minute. They may be totally distractible. You could measure a lot of other things, and they'd all be different at that point in time. But you don't know if that's a cause or an effect of the way they are."

Source: <a href=http://laingsociety.org/colloquia/thercommuns/stillcrazy5.htm>Still Crazy After All These Years</a>

<hr width=100% size=2>

The issue of medication is a complex and controversial one. On the one hand, there are numerous people who identify medication as being helpful to them; on the other, there are numerous others who don't. My position on the matter is that what helps is what helps. Regardless of whether an individual personally finds medication to be beneficial, I firmly believe they are deserving of information such as the above. If the drug you are taking carries a high risk of stroke, diabetes, tardive dyskinesia, etc., that is information you are entitled to know. Without that information you cannot truly give your informed consent.

Just as vital, individuals are entitled to know that many people recover from schizophrenia without the use of medications. That's not to say that all people can but, rather, to counteract the perpetuated myth that medication is essential to recovery. This is simply not true.