1 in 6 Americans Are Now on Psychiatric Medication

By Dr. Mercola

Recent research shows that American doctors are still over-prescribing many different kinds of drugs,1 especially antibiotics and opioid pain killers, despite repeated calls for prudence.

U.S. health care expenses have also risen, hitting $3.2 trillion annually as of 2015, and rising prescription prices combined with over-prescribing are significant drivers of these rising costs, according to a government report.2,3,4,5

While psychiatric drugs were not included in that report, statistics reveal a very clear trend of over-prescribing here as well. According to recent research, 1 in 6 Americans are now on antidepressants or some other type of psychiatric drug, and most appear to be taking them long-term.6,7,8,9,10

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That’s quite an extraordinary number, and a significant increase, nearly doubled, from 2011 when 1 in 10 American adults reported using a psychiatric drug.11According to lead author Thomas J. Moore, a researcher at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices:12

“To discover that 8 in 10 adults who have taken psychiatric drugs are using them long term raises safety concerns, given that there’s reason to believe some of this continued use is due to dependence and withdrawal symptoms.”

Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, commented on the findings saying it reflects a growing reliance on prescription medications to manage common emotional problems.

Seniors, Women and Caucasians Use the Most Psychiatric Drugs NOW Supplements, Neptu... Buy New $27.95 ($0.47 / Count) (as of 11:55 UTC - Details)

Among the noteworthy statistics revealed in this latest study, which is based on government survey data from more than 37,400 Americans:

  • Nearly 17 percent of American adults used one or more psychiatric drugs in 2013, up from 10 percent in 2011
  • 12 percent of users are taking antidepressants; 8.3 percent are taking anxiety drugs, sedatives and/or sleeping pills; 1.6 percent are taking antipsychotics
  • Caucasians are twice as likely to use psychiatric drugs than African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians (20.8 percent were Caucasian, 9 percent African-American, 8.7 percent Hispanic. Only 5 percent of users are Asian)
  • 25 percent of seniors between the ages of 60 and 85 are taking at least one psychiatric drug. This despite the fact that incidence of diagnosable mental problems tends to be lower in seniors than younger adults overall
  • Nearly twice as many women use psychiatric drugs than men (21 percent and 12 percent respectively)

Psychiatric Drugs Are Over-Prescribed

Other recent research shows that anti-anxiety benzodiazepine drugs accounted for nearly one-third of the 23,000 prescription overdoses in 2013.

According to researchers, part of the problem appears to be that primary care physicians are under-educated on the risks associated with psychiatric drugs. As reported by Scientific American:13

“For antidepressants, there is limited information available about how long an individual should stay on the drug … For certain drugs in the sedative, hypnotic and anxiolytic category, however, people can become dependent, the researchers noted.

To improve the safety of psychiatric drugs, Moore and Mattison suggested increasing the emphasis on prescribing these medications at the lowest effective dose and continually re-assessing the need to keep individuals on the drugs.”

Declining Mental Health Is a Wakeup Call for Psychiatry

While prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are increasing,14 several parameters show that mental health in the U.S. is declining.15

Suicide rates are at a 30-year high, prescription drug abuse and overdose deaths have become a public health emergency, and mental disorders are now the second most common cause of disability, having risen sharply since 1980.16

All of these statistics suggest that far from being helpful, the availability of psychiatric drugs and the ease of getting them are making the situation worse. Nature’s Bounty ... Buy New $5.12 ($2.56 / Fl Oz) (as of 07:10 UTC - Details)

Sure, these drugs may be helpful for a small minority of people with very severe mental health problems, such as schizophrenia, but clearly, the vast majority of people using these drugs do not suffer from severe psychiatric illness.

Most are struggling with sadness, grief, anxiety, “the blues” and depression, which are in many ways part of your body’s communication system, revealing nutritional or sunlight deficiencies and/or spiritual disconnect, for example.

The underlying reasons for these kinds of troubles are manifold, but you can be sure that, whatever the cause, an antidepressant, sedative or antipsychotic will not correct it.

Better Treatment Alternatives Are Sorely Needed

As noted by Dr. Edmund S. Higgins, a psychiatrist who has authored a number of articles and books on psychiatry:17

“The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and big pharma explain the deterioration of mental health nationally by proposing that not enough people are getting treatment. But this suggestion seems a bit self-serving.

Another explanation points to the vague nature of psychiatric diagnoses … [M]ental disorders … seem to expand and contract with the economy. Thus, changes in the prevalence of mental disorders may not necessarily reflect changes in the biology of mental illness.

It is also possible that we are hampered by not having new treatments for patients seeking help. As it turns out, drugs developed in the past 20 years perform like older medications …

[I]t is paramount that we discover new mechanisms to treat mental illness …  [T]here is one unique, promising treatment that is struggling to get approval: psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Preliminary evidence suggests that drugs such as LSD and psilocybin could be used episodically, together with psychotherapy, to enhance the healing process.”

Magic Mushrooms — A Better Answer for Anxiety-Ridden Patients?

Indeed, I recently wrote about research showing a single dose of psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms, helped many cancer patients in two separate studies achieve immediate and long-lasting relief from anxiety and fear of death.

A major part of this remarkable recovery appears to be related to the spiritual intensity of the experience.

Apart from the spiritual reconnection itself, the feeling of love and being “one” with everything also appears to result in alterations in the brain — a mechanism ascribed to neuroplasticity, where your brain actually changes in accordance to experience. Indeed, a majority of the participants ranked it among “the most meaningful” experiences of their lives, which in turn resulted in a feeling that everything has purpose, including their own struggles.

In my view, it is lack of life meaning and lack of connection to something larger than ourselves that pervades the lives of so many these days, and the answer is not to shut down or mask your emotions with a pill. The relief you seek is more likely to be found through careful soul searching and implementation of strategies to boost your emotional resilience, which can include spiritual practices.

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Six years ago, I interviewed journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Whitaker about his books “Mad in America” and “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” both of which address the dramatic rise of mental illness in the U.S., and its treatment. When looking at the research literature, short-term trials show that antidepressants fail to provide any clinically significant benefits for mild to moderate depression when compared to a placebo. Doctor’s Best SA... Buy New $37.87 ($0.63 / Count) (as of 05:40 UTC - Details)

Indeed, if you believe in following the recommendations of science-based medicine, you simply would not take an antidepressant. You might as well take a sugar pill and avoid all the side effects. As noted in a 2014 paper on antidepressants and the placebo effect:18

“Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain … But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect …

Analyzing the data we had found, we were not surprised to find a substantial placebo effect on depression. What surprised us was how small the drug effect was. Seventy-five percent of the improvement in the drug group also occurred when people were give dummy pills with no active ingredient in them.

The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.”

Placebo Effect Accounts for 82 Percent of Drug Response

The author of that 2014 study, Irving Kirsch, is a psychotherapist who has performed a number of analyses on antidepressants. In 2002, his team filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), asking for the trial data provided by drug companies as part of the drug approval process.

The FDA requires drug companies to provide data on all clinical trials they’ve sponsored, including unpublished trials. As it turned out, nearly half of all clinical trials on antidepressants had never been published. When both published and unpublished trials were included, 57 percent showed the drug had no clinical benefit over placebo. What’s more, the placebo response actually accounted for 82 PERCENT of the beneficial response to antidepressants!

These results were reproduced in a 2008 study19 using another, even larger set of FDA trial data. According to Kirsch, “once again, 82 percent of the drug response was duplicated by placebo.” A major benefit of evaluating FDA trial data was that all of the trials used the same primary measure of depression, which made the drug to placebo effects very easy to identify and compare.

The primary measure of depression used in these studies was the Hamilton depression scale, a 17-item scale with a possible score of 0 to 53 points. The higher your score, the more severe your depression. Doctoru2019s Best 5-HT... Buy New $16.50 (as of 03:10 UTC - Details)

Importantly, the mean difference between antidepressants and placebo was less than two points (1.8) on this scale, which is considered clinically insignificant. To illustrate just how insignificant of a difference this is, you can score a 6-point difference simply by changing sleep patterns without any reported change in other depressive symptoms.

Antidepressants Raise Your Risk of Suicide While Offering Little Hope of Remission for Major Depression

Adding insult to injury, many of these drugs have serious side effects, including worsening depression, anxiety and violent ideation that can lead to both murder and suicide. According to Whittaker, long-term studies indicate that of people with major depression, only 15 percent of those treated with an antidepressant go into remission and stay well for a long period of time.

The remaining 85 percent start having continuing relapses and become chronically depressed, and this tendency to sensitize the brain to long-term depression appears to be the same both for the earlier tricyclic antidepressants and the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

This is one reason why antidepressant use among adolescents and young adults need to be strongly discouraged. Children and adolescents are also at high risk of suicide when using antidepressants, even if they were not suicidal before.

Treatments Scientifically Validated as Being the Most Effective Are Typically Ignored

Research suggests that one of the most effective treatments for depression is exercise, a healthy lifestyle strategy that few people are engaging in on a routine basis these days. That in and of itself may be a reason for our declining mental health. Diet and certain nutritional deficiencies — especially vitamin D and omega-3 deficiencies — have also been shown to play very important roles.

One of the reasons why your diet is so important is because it affects your gut microbiome, for better or worse. Many studies have demonstrated that improving the diversity and increasing the number of beneficial bacteria in your gut can have dramatic impact on your mental health, boosting mood and reducing your risk for more serious mental health problems.

Some researchers in this field even refer to probiotics as “psychobiotics,” noting that dietary treatments for mood disorders may be part of the future of psychiatry. In addition to eating real food and avoiding processed foods as much as possible, be sure to eat plenty of fiber — which help nourish important bacteria — and a variety of traditionally fermented foods, which help reseed your gut with beneficial bacteria.

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Considering the fact that antidepressants have the clinical effectiveness of a placebo, is it any wonder that nutritional supplements can “boost” their effectiveness? That’s exactly what a recent study found. The meta-analysis, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, looked at 40 clinical trials in which supplements were added to the drug regimen.20,21,22

The following four supplements were found to improve the impact of the medication — which included serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) and tricyclic antidepressants — compared to medication only:

  • Fish oil
  • Vitamin D
  • Methylfolate (an effective form of folic acid)
  • S-adenosylmethionine (SAMe)

Fish oil produced the most significant improvement. Interestingly, while docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) is typically credited with being the most important omega-3 fat for brain health, here, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) was found to have the most prominent effect. The best way to get these fats is from small fish like sardines and anchovies. If that is not an option then krill oil is a far superior choice to fish oil as it is better absorbed and less oxidized.

In my view, it would have been far more interesting to see how these supplements might have fared without the use of medication, as the supplements could very well have been the true benefit. After all, studies have shown that both omega-3 and vitamin D can help improve mental health all on their own, and if the medication doesn’t add anything of real value, why risk your health and wellbeing by taking it?

Overcoming Depression Without Drugs

Research has revealed there are a number of safe and effective ways to address depression that do not involve drugs. So, if you suffer from an anxiety- or depression-related disorder, please consider addressing the following diet and lifestyle factors before resorting to a psychiatric drug:

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Sources and References