True story: Last night, while I was flipping through YouTube channels, one of the videos in my “recommended” list was a throwback to the famous (or now infamous) interview in 2005 between Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise. (I am subscribed to several channels involving science, history, and philosophy, which probably explains the cross-match with that interview. Definitely not because of a bromance with Tom Cruise.)
The somewhat heated debate between Lauer and Cruise started from a comment about Brook Shields’ battle with bipolar disorder — namely, that the medication she had been taking had provided a dramatically positive impact on her managing the disorder. Cruise argued that psychiatry is pseudoscience, chemical imbalances are fiction, and drug treatments are just masking the problem (which is a common trope among many pharmacology skeptics).
Yes, if you watch an ad for Abilify or other anti-psychotic medications, the impression is that your life can become reasonably “normal” again: you can play with your kids in the backyard, continue you work at your job, travel around the world, you name it. Rainbows, puppy dogs, and kitty cats.
That, of course, just fuels the combative conspiracy theories that “big pharma is an ultra-greedy empire that just wants to keep everyone sick”. However, as we have clearly learned in this course and in our research, chemical balances are in fact real. Further, drug therapies for brain / neurological disorders have been a boon for many people suffering from schizophrenia, severe depression, bipolar disorder, etc.
That’s not to say there aren’t proverbial bad apples in every profession. And considering it has only been within the past couple of hundred years — compared to the few hundred thousand+ years that humans have existed — that we have been able to delve much more scientifically into brain disorders, it appears to be quite the balancing act between scientific research and proven cases studies on one end, and some doctors over-prescribing medications on the other end. I imagine we will cover this in more detail in Week 6.
In the meantime, we all know that drugs have a risk-to-benefit ratio. If a drug benefit demonstrably outweighs the risk, then medical professionals have yet another viable option in their knowledge base. What’s most important is to separate fact from fiction. Sweeping claims that anti-psychotic drugs are a medical lie can be just as pernicious as the unethical medical practices. This is why we are right here, right now — to get down to the facts and keep progressing with treatment options, including effective drug therapies.
Haddad, P., Correll, C. (2018). The acute efficacy of antipsychotics in schizophrenia: a review of recent meta-analyses. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6180374/
Henriques, G. (2012). Is Psychiatry the Science of Lies?. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201212/is-psychiatry-the-science-liesCarlson, N. R. (2013). Physiology of Behavior (11th ed.). Retrieved from https://phoenix.vitalsource.com