1994 was a long time ago. That was the year Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa – the year O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife was murdered in California. Tim Berners-Lee had just created the kernel that would become the World Wide Web. Schindler’s List won 7 Oscars that year. Newt Gingrich spearheaded a take-over of the U.S. House of Representatives. Justin Bieber was born and Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed under orders from figure skating rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband before the Lillehammer Olympics. We hadn’t yet heard of Monica Lowensky, but we were all familiar with Lorena Bobbitt. In psychiatry, Tom Insel lost his position at the N.I.M.H. and moved to Yerkes in Atlanta. Charlie Nemeroff published a review article on a brand new antidepressant, Paroxetine, in Pharmacotherapy. Joseph Biederman submitted his first paper on Bipolar Illness in children. TMAP had yet to be conceived. And the APA published the newly revised DSM-IV. It really was a long time ago.
Why all the nostalgia? We didn’t know anything then. The pharmaceutical invasion of academic psychiatry may have already been well under way, but we didn’t know it, at least I didn’t. Prozac was still mostly thought of as a wonder drug. Risperdal was the new kid on the block. We had no idea about the conflicts of interest that would later prove to be so extensive and destructive. So why does the DSM-5 Task Force take pride in claiming that the conflict of interest policies for the DSM-5 Task Force are better that those for the DSM-IV? Back then, we had no idea how important those policies would be. That would be like comparing our National Defense policies in 1958 to those of 1940.
It was 94 when I had my first debilitating “depression” and surrendered to the Bipolar II diagnosis. And 2002 when I had it again, and discovered that it was pernicious anemia. Several months on psychotropic cocktails did not help. Two weeks on high doses of iron restored me completely. It floors me that I was trying one cocktail after another and feeling damned while my body was starving for iron. I even described it as “feeling bloodless” at the time.
I learned well enough not to call my fatigue “depression”. Eventually, because I couldn’t walk, I was diagnosed as having MS.
I really think that psychiatrists— since they are medical doctors— should educate themselves about physical conditions that cause depression-like symptoms (especially what they call “atypical depressions”) and at least attempt to rule those out.
Giving nurses the power to prescribe psychotropics should just be stopped. It’s blatantly cynical and greedy for the mental health field to treat mental illness as something so rampant that nurses have to be given the power to prescribe psycho active drugs that are so “effective” that patients who don’t benefit from them are described as “treatment resistant” and given scores of drugs in another score of combinations. They might as well call us “lab rats”.