Comments on: Writer For Rookie Paints Too Pretty a Picture of Her Treatment For Bipolar Disorder

By: Jim Purdy

Jim Purdy — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:08:32 +0000

I think medical students must be taught nonsense like this:

Bipolar disorder is caused by a lithium deficiency.
Diabetes is caused by a metformin deficiency.
High LDL is caused by a statin deficiency.
Obesity is caused by a xenical deficiency.
Pain is caused by an oxycodone deficiency.
Upset stomach is caused by a proton pump inhibitor deficiency.

Geez. How has modern “medical science” (Now there’s an oxymoron!) gotten so loony?

Seth: I think they are taught that depression, etc., are “biochemical” disorders. Which means nothing but supports the use of drugs. A Berkeley psychology major who worked in a job where she encountered lots of people with mental disorders found they were quite different than she had been taught. Diagnosis was less clear, for one thing.

By: Alex Chernavsky

Alex Chernavsky — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:05:33 +0000

Sady Doyle should read Robert Whitaker's book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, particularly Chapter 9 ("The Bipolar Boom"). Here's a paragraph that I was able to extract from the preview on Amazon (I removed the superscripts that reference footnotes):

The remarkable decline in the functional outcomes of bipolar patients is easy to document. In the pre-lithium era, 85 percent of mania patients would return to work or to their “pre-morbid” social role (as a housewife, for example). As Winokur wrote in 1969, most patients had “no difﬁculty resuming their usual occupations.” But then bipolar patients began cycling through emergency rooms more frequently, employment rates began to decline, and soon investigators were reporting that fewer than half of all bipolar patients were employed or otherwise “functionally recovered.” In 1995, Michael Gitlin at UCLA reported that only 28 percent of his bipolar patients had a “good occupational outcome” at the end of ﬁve years. Three years later, psychiatrists at the University of Cincinnati announced that only 24 percent of their bipolar patients were “functionally recovered” at the end of one year. David Kupfer at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, in a study of 2,839 bipolar patients, discovered that even though 60 percent had attended college and 30 percent had graduated, two-thirds were unemployed. “In summary,” wrote Ross Baldessarini in a 2007 review article, “functional status is far more impaired in type I bipolar patients than previously believed, [and] remarkably, there is some evidence that functional outcome in type II bipolar patients may be even worse than in type I.”

By: Jill

Jill — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:14:13 +0000

How long has she (Sady) been on a regimen that works? Perhaps she is in a sort of “honeymoon” period, during which the relief is so great that to her, right now, that’s all that matters. As a journalist, she owes her audience something a bit less short-sighted, but it’s not necessarily “the opposite of truth telling.”

Seth: Yes, an update after a year would be a good idea.