Thread by @LauraDelano

A quick 🧵 on 3 basic facts about psychiatric drugs that you've likely not been told-- facts I wish my parents and I had learned prior to starting a 14-year old me on a long-term regimen that would eventually grow to include #SSRIs, benzos, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotics.

https://twitter.com/APApsychiatric/status/1961116732984078347

There are currently ~65 mill Americans taking psych drugs (according to 2022 @CDCgov numbers)-- many of them for years. Since our trusted psychiatric guild authorities like the APA don't seem to be sharing these basic facts, it's up to us to inform ourselves.

Let's dive in 👇

1. The safety and effectiveness of psychiatric polypharmacy-- in other words, of taking a prescribed regimen of multiple psychiatric drugs like #SSRIs, mood stabilizers, and benzodiazepines at the same time-- has never been adequately determined.

2. The average length of a psychiatric drug efficacy trial is typically 6-8 weeks. In other words, there is essentially no evidence base for safe or effective long-term psychiatric drug use, despite the huge numbers of people who are prescribed them for months or years.

3. Psychiatric drug research outcomes are generally based on vague, unscientific, subjective rating scales (i.e. "On a scale of 1 to 10..."). Some of these rating scales are even copyrighted by drug companies, who then share these tools w/ the public for free. How generous!

To be clear: this isn't to say that psychiatric drugs can never feel helpful to people (especially when used in the short term)-- they most certainly can...

... The point I'm making is that if you (or someone you care about) has been on one or more psychiatric drug for longer than a few weeks, as I once was, you are essentially an unwitting guinea pig in a vast, unmonitored, unscientific experiment.

Has this vast, unmonitored, unscientific social experiment of addressing mental and emotional pain with long-term psychiatric drug use actually helped lessen suffering on the whole in America?

With rates of suicidal despair and anxiety higher than ever before, at the same as more people than ever before are being psychiatrically medicated, I think the numbers speak for themselves.

These 3 facts about psych drugs might be shocking to you; they certainly were to me when I first learned them years ago, newly in the wake of coming off a polypharmacy regimen I'd taken through my most formative years, only to see my life fall progressively more apart.

Until such time as we can trust psychiatric authorities to provide us with straightforward facts about their diagnoses and treatments, we must take it upon ourselves to dig into the evidence base. My new book, Unshrunk, shows how I did this for myself (link in bio).