A group of U.S. senators has raised concern that the use of antidepressants and other prescription drugs for treatment of mental disorders is on the rise in the military, particularly among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Two essays published in separate periodicals this week raise troubling questions about the extent to which psychiatrists may be unduly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, and how this relationship may effect public trust in psychiatry. The upshot? The concern about corruption, or at least the appearance of corruption is palpable. Sigmund Freud (see photo) would not be pleased. Interestingly, one of the authors is Tom Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
Young people are being overmedicated and undermined. It is time that we recognize that the deluge of amphetamines and psychotropic drugs being consumed by teenagers may be more of a problem than a solution.
Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland called Wednesday for a government-funded investigation into possible links between the growing use of anti-depressants by members of the military and high rates of suicide among men and women in uniform.
Sgt. Eric Layne’s death was not pretty. A few months after being prescribed a drug cocktail with the antidepressant Paxil, the mood stabilizer Klonopin and AstraZeneca’s controversial antipsychotic drug Seroquel, the Iraq war veteran was “suffering from incontinence, severe depression [and] continuous headaches,” according to his widow, Janette Layne, at FDA hearings for new Seroquel approvals last year.
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