I’ve spent a week or so living up to my nom de plume:
It’s just the way I think out loud to clarify what I really think. Here’s the summary. While I’m all for basic biological research in mental illness and the development of pharmacological treatments, I’ve lived out my career feeling that we’ve been under the sway of a sick version. I made up the term psychopharmacological evangelism because that’s how it has felt to me since the 1980s – like that down home camp meeting at my grandma’s house outside of Talapoosa Georgia that the neighbors dragged me to in the 1940s. Evangelists scared me then as they scare me now.
Now the people who were the prophets for the drugs that rolled through our lives starting with Prozac have finally gotten around to agreeing that those drugs weren’t so hot after all and were a bit more toxic than advertised. Their friends, the Pharmaceutical Industry, have given up trying to find any new blockbusters. Now those same prophets are telling us that we need to pick up the quest and move Drug R&D into the National Institute of Mental Health – our basic science agency. Dr. Tom Insel, Director of the NIMH, is in agreement and replacing Drug R&D Laboratories with government funded Translational Neuroscience Centers adopting some variants of the same techniques that the Drug Companies gave up on.
I can only conclude that the current cast of characters [including Dr. Insel] are trying to keep the system they’ve inhabited for their whole careers alive [the DSM-III et al, psychopharmacological evangelism, the Pharma/Academia Symbiosis]. They haven’t heard the bubble burst or caught on that their version of the paradigm is exhausted [psychopharmacological evangelism: alternative frames…]. The path forward is not theirs to have. We clearly need to put the NIMH back in its right place, dispensing its precious funding to creative basic scientists who have good ideas of their own. I’m afraid that Dr. Insel and his academic friends are the new dinosaurs unaware that we’re moving into a new, as yet un-named, epoch, and their present frantic attempts to hold on to the past have numbered days. They’re fighting windmills…
Your posts are anything but boring. It’s exhilarating to hear a psychiatrist questioning psychiatry.