Psychiatry Ain't What It Used To Be

There was a time when most of what I knew about psychiatrists came from Woody Allen. In his 1973 movie "Sleeper," his character wakes up in the future and complains, "I haven't seen my analyst in 200 years. He was a strict Freudian, and if I'd been going all this time I'd probably almost be cured by now." But even his treatment sounded better than what Jack Nicholson's character got in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for being rebellious: a lobotomy.

Those films imprinted a couple of lessons about psychiatry. The first was that mental health professionals were useless; the second, that they were dangerous. No surprise that in the 1970s, Thomas Szasz's book, "The Myth of Mental Illness," got a lot of attention.

Szasz had grounds for doubt. In his new book, "Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry," Jeffrey A. Lieberman writes, "Back then, the majority of psychiatric institutions were clouded by ideology and dubious science, mired in a pseudo-medical landscape where devotees of Sigmund Freud clung to every position of power."

Lieberman, a psychiatrist and chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University medical school, is aware of the many wrong turns the profession has taken, which his book recounts. But he contends that it has come a long way and now offers real solutions to real problems.

Recently, he spent an hour on the phone with me -- well, more like 50 minutes. Two themes emerged. The first is that his profession has a lot to apologize for. The second is that judging today's psychiatry by what happened decades ago is like judging modern surgery by the battlefield amputations of the Civil War.

When he was born in 1948, Lieberman attests, "not a single therapeutically effective medicine existed for any mental disorder. There were no antidepressants, no antipsychotics, no anti-anxiety drugs."

In 1927, he recalls, the Nobel Prize for medicine went to Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who found a cure for a virulent form of psychosis. The remedy -- "which sounds barbaric now," he notes -- was to infect the victim with malaria. It was dangerous, but it was welcome, because "the alternative was so abominable."

Likewise for such remedies as stupor-inducing drugs, electro-shock treatments and lobotomies. Psychiatrists didn't resort to these methods because they were sadistic, but because they had no other ways to relieve devastating afflictions.

Today, it's clear that some of those "mythical" mental illnesses have physical origins. Schizophrenics have structural brain abnormalities -- and left untreated, says Lieberman, "their brains get smaller and smaller."

New medicines can alleviate the most common and debilitating conditions, particularly depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Where at one time psychiatry "couldn't do anything for anybody," Lieberman tells me, it now has treatments offering "the difference between a life of disability and suffering and possibly death, or living in a recovered state and, in many instances, fully normally and productively."

About one in 10 Americans now takes antidepressants. Do they help? A 2007 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a 12 percent increase in sales of the most common type was associated with a 5 percent decline in suicides.

But most people with mental illness get inadequate treatment, if any. The rest of us see the results: homelessness, suicide and crime. More than a million of those afflicted are behind bars.

There are two ways to address the problem. The first is to make comprehensive treatment available to those who want it. But it's also crucial, as Lieberman notes, to treat those who can't care for themselves but lack the mental clarity to comprehend their plight.

This second option is controversial because it may involve medicating people against their will. We have no trouble allowing treatment of unconscious, injured people when doctors deem it necessary. But civil libertarians oppose involuntary treatment of people incapacitated by serious mental disorders -- many of whom, Lieberman points out, will end up in emergency rooms or jails if left to their own devices.

Fortunately, there is a growing sense -- reflected in the widespread adoption of state laws making it easier to mandate medication -- that the risks of unchecked mental illness are greater than the risks of treatment.

Psychiatry has made enormous advances from which many sick people never benefit. The tragedy of the past was that the mentally ill were mostly beyond the help of doctors. The tragedy of the present is that they are not beyond help, but many are beyond reach.

>>>This second option is controversial because it may involve medicating people against their will. We have no trouble allowing treatment of unconscious, injured people when doctors deem it necessary. But civil libertarians oppose involuntary treatment of people incapacitated by serious mental disorders — many of whom, Lieberman points out, will end up in emergency rooms or jails if left to their own devices.<<<

So you’re against same-sex marriage? Oppositional defiance, take your meds.

Go to church regularly? Religious mania, take your meds.

Don’t like Obama’s policies? Racism is a reflection of paranoia or depression, take your meds.

Pro-life? Obviously you don’t like women, take your meds.

Full disclosure here. I’ve been battling with anxiety problems my whole life. That anxiety is usually expressed by shortness of breath, which has plagued me since I was 17 years old. I’ve been to a fair number of therapists, doctors, and psychs about it, and in April of this year, I had a debilitating panic attack that was so extreme the troopers were involved (no violence, I was just breaking down in the middle of the street) and I had to take several days off of work.

The clinic immediately gave me Lorazepam, which was as close as I’ve gotten in the past 30 years to psychedelic drugs. Then it was off to Fairbanks, where someone I didn’t know sat down with me for 45 minutes and concluded that I needed Zoloft to deal with a chronic mental issue which I had not been able to handle. I didn’t like the idea but I took the Zoloft.

The next month was literally a fog. Sometimes it would be as if my waking life was a dream. Yes, my shortness of breath vanished, as did dreaming, libido, focus, and imagination. Sadly, there were moments when I would snap at people in an angry manner, something that I had never done. And as the Zoloft took hold, the anxiety was replaced by depression and thoughts of suicide.

So I quit the Zoloft, carefully, since I had read online about bad withdrawal. Then it was over, and my mind returned. The anxiety was still there.

My neighbors, who attend a nondenominational evangelical church, talked with me one day on the street, and I explained my time with anxiety, something that I suspect they knew after being around me for 15 years. So my neighbor and her daughter stood next to me and said a prayer for the peace of God to lift the burden from my heart.

The shortness of breath disappeared. It has not returned.

To describe this as a miracle is not hyperbole. I’ve had this problem for 43 years, and it is gone.

Of course, there’s this scientific guy in part of mind dissecting this miracle. I can still feel the anxiety building up in my chest sometimes. I bite my lip now, something that I have never done before - classic displacement behavior. But the labored breaths are gone.

The two methods face each other - a lifetime of medical practice, and a moment of prayer. The prayer was what was needed all along.

I’m still recovering, but facing God as I do so, and that has made all the difference. Better than Zoloft, too.

Next time you see a kid fall out a tree and break his leg, we can stand over him and pray. No need to set it, or for pain meds. We will simply let the Lord fix it.

Next time I see a kid fall out of a tree and break his leg, I will remind him that he was told not to climb that tree, because he will fall and break his leg.

Then I will tell the kid to drink about 6 shots of Wild Turkey, and when he's feeling no pain, I'll set the break, splint it, and tell his mom she owes me a fifth of whiskey.

No digital record keeping, no medical coding and billing some insurance company so they can, in turn, go and bilk taxpayers of hundreds of billions, and in the end the kid learns to listen to an adult, maybe... or at the least that there are consequences and real suffering when you don't.

Whiskey... is a gift from God.

Can I get an Amen?

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