Psychiatric Drugs Kill the Lives of Those Who Take Them http://www.encognitive.com/node/1185 Drug-Induced Dementia: a perfect crime http://www.amazon.com/Drug-Induced-Dementia-MD-Grace-Jackson/dp/1438972318 Brain Damage Caused by Neuroleptic Psychiatric Drugs http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychotics/neuroleptic-brain-damage Evidence of Neuroleptic Drug-Induced Brain Damage http://www.ahrp.org/risks/biblio0100.php Arch Gen Psychiatry -- Abstract: Long-term Antipsychotic Treatment and Brain Volumes: A Longitudinal Study of First-Episode Schizophrenia, February 2011, Ho et al. 68 (2): 128 http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/2/128 Metanalysis: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341200125X Antipsychotic deflates the brain Drug for schizophrenia causes side effects by shrinking part of the brain. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100606/full/news.2010.281.html Indeed, it looks as if after some 50 years widespread prescribing there is going to be a massive re-evaluation and re-interpretation of these drugs, with a reversal of their evaluation as a great therapeutic breakthrough. It now seems distinctly possible that for half a century the creation of millions of asocial, neuroleptic-dependent but docile Parkinsonian patients has been misinterpreted as a ‘cure’ for schizophrenia. This wholesale re-interpretation represents an unprecedented disaster for the self-image and public reputation – not just of psychiatry – but of the whole medical profession. Perhaps the main useful lesson from the emergence of the 'atypical' neuroleptics is that psychiatrists did not need to make all of their agitated and psychotic patients Parkinsonian in order to suppress their behavior. ‘Atypicals’ are weakly neuroleptic but highly sedative. This implies that sedation is probably sufficient for behavioral control in most instances [3, 17]. In the immediate term, it therefore seems plausible that already-existing, cheap, sedative drugs (such as benzodiazepines or antihistamines) offer realistic hope of being safer, equally effective and subjectively less-unpleasant substitutes for neuroleptics in many (if not all) patients. I would argue that this should happen sooner rather than later. If we apply the test of choosing what treatment we would prefer for ourselves or our relatives with acute agitation or psychosis, knowing what we now know about neuroleptics, I think that many people (perhaps especially psychiatric professionals) would now wish to avoid neuroleptics except as a last resort. Few would be happy to wait a decade or so for the accumulations of a mass of randomized trial data (which may never emerge, since such trials would lack a commercial incentive) before making the choice of less dangerous and unpleasant drugs [17]. But there is no hiding the fact that if neuroleptics were indeed to be replaced by sedatives then this would seem like stepping-back half a century. It would entail an acknowledgement that psychiatry has been living in a chronic delusional state – and this may suggest that the same could apply to other branches of medicine. Since such a wholesale cognitive and organizational reappraisal is unlikely, perhaps the most realistic way that the desired change in practice will be accomplished is not by an explicit ‘return’ to old drugs but by the introduction of a novel (and patentable) class of sedatives which are marketed as having some kind of (more-or-less plausible) new therapeutic role. Why are doctors still prescribing neuroleptics? by Bruce G Charlton http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/neuroleptics.html