Madam, - While largely agreeing with John Waters's column on depression (August 20th), I feel he missed the principal problem with the mechanistic, medical approach to depression. That is that the medical approach is not just wrong, or immoral, it is counter-productive, damaging and dangerous. Drug-based therapy, which is appallingly over-used, not to say misused, in modern psychiatry, is misdirected and damaging.
The underlying theory, if we can grace it with that term, of drug-based psychiatric treatment is that depression is an illness, a property of the body, and therefore, like all illnesses, curable by medication or surgery.
But in most cases, depressed people are perfectly healthy, they have just had a negative experience. The fundamental point is that negative experiences cannot be counteract ed by drugs and the attempt to do so is very destructive. They are best addressed by means of positive experiences. The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children, in its report on the adverse side-effects of pharmaceuticals, published earlier this year and to which I contributed, concluded that "while pharmaceuticals have undoubtedly brought benefits, there is excessive reliance on them to the neglect of other forms of therapy and this contributes to the high rates of adverse reactions".
Under "adverse reactions", one can understand the long-term disorder wrought in the lives of innocent people by the inappropriate, excessive and excessively prolonged administration of psychiatric drugs.
This malpractice on the part of some psychiatrists is referred to in the USA as a "psychiatric holocaust". It is no different here in Ireland.
A code of practice is desperately needed to regulate the application of psychiatric drugs, with the objective of minimising the damage done by them. - Yours, etc,
NORMAN STEWART, Seapark, Malahide Co Dublin.
Madam, - The inquest report of a man who took his life eight days after starting a course of medication for depression (August 14th) is a cause for concern, and is not the first such report. For example, The Irish Times of October 19th 2006 gave details of an inquest on a man who hanged himself five days after he began to take antidepressant medication. In both cases the antidepressant was Lexapro, and grieving relatives of the men expressed serious misgivings about its effects.
How many more such instances have gone unrecorded in the media or elsewhere? Is information arising from individual inquests centrally collated, in Ireland or indeed in Europe? It is important that the number of cases where such medication is linked to suicide should be recorded, even though it may not be possible to establish a causal relationship. The Irish Medicines Board has responsibility for receiving information on adverse drug reactions (ADRs) but, as reporting is open only to medical personnel and is entirely voluntary, there is no way of knowing how accurate its statistics are.
I believe that there should be mandatory reporting of all ADRs, and a particular focus on instances of suicide, attempted suicide and suicidal ideation associated with medication prescribed for depression. - Yours, etc,
BRYAN Mac MAHON, Stillorgan Wood, Co Dublin.