And honestly, they should be used on a short-term basis." It should be understood that they’re not fixing any chemical imbalances. Whitaker acknowledges that psychiatric medications do sometimes work but believes that they must be used in a "selective, cautious manner. These programs provided federal subsidies for nursing home care but no such subsidy for care in state mental hospitals, and so the states, seeking to save money, began sending their chronic patients to nursing homes. What he argues actually cleared the asylums was the beginning of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. This is additionally evidenced by the fact that when Thorazine was introduced in 1955 there were 267 thousand schizophrenia patients in state and county mental hospitals, and eight years later, there were 253 thousand, thus indicating that the advent of neuroleptics barely budged the number of hospitalized patients. In fact, based on the only large scale first episode schizophrenia study of this era, 88% of those who were not treated were discharged within eighteen months compared to 74% of neuroleptic treated. He then notes that the arrival of Thorazine did not improve discharge rates in the 1950s for people newly diagnosed with schizophrenia. His case begins by showing that during the late 1940s and 1950s ~75% of cases admitted for first episode schizophrenia recovered to the community by approximately 3 years (Thorazine was not released until 1955). Whitaker further criticizes the magic bullet theory by attacking the historical notion that the "invention of the antipsychotic Thorazine" emptied the asylums. According to Whitaker's analysis of the primary literature, lower levels of serotonin and higher levels of dopamine "have proved to be true in patients WITH prior exposure to antidepressants or antipsychotics (ie as homeostatic mechanisms) but NOT in patients without prior exposure." It was not until many years later, after the mechanisms of these drugs were determined, that the serotonergic hypothesis of depression and dopaminergic hypothesis of schizophrenia were developed to fall in line with the drug's mechanisms. This also followed the industry's development of "magic bullets" that treat people with, for example, diabetes, which according to Whitaker provided an analogy to sell the idea of these drugs to the public. The psychiatric mechanisms of action of these drugs were not known at the time and these were initially called major tranquilizers (now typical antipsychotics) due to their induction of "euphoric quietude" minor tranquilizers (now benzodiazepines) and psychic energizers (now antidepressants) due to patients "dancing in the wards." These compounds were developed during a period of growth for the pharmaceutical industry bolstered by the 1951 Durham-Humphrey Amendment, giving physicians monopolistic prescribing rights thus aligning the interests of physicians and pharmaceutical companies. These were discovered as side effects during research for antihistamines (specifically promethazine), gram negative antibiotics (specifically mephenesin) and the anti-tuberculosis agents isoniazid and iproniazid respectively. Whitaker begins by reviewing the discovery of antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and antidepressants. Number of Americans who received SSDI and SSI for mental disability in 1987 (blue) when Eli Lilly and Company introduced the antidepressive drug Prozac, compared to 2003 (red).
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