Rob: While you're looking, we've reported in opednews.com with multiple articles that pharmaceutical companies are working to put into school systems testing for children to assess and diagnose mental illness in children with the goal of coming up with a diagnosis for every single child; and as we're moving toward the new DSM-IV, the Diagnostic Manual for psychiatry, which is basically put together by a bunch of psychologists in some hotel rooms, we're going to see a collection of new diagnoses that will make it easier to diagnose more people as mentally ill or emotionally ill with medical diagnoses. And these are very often just collections of descriptions and behaviors....
RW: Right.
Rob: ...just like Biederman took oppositional defiant disorder and decided well he's going to re-label it, reframe it as childhood bipolar disorder...that's the way you described it.
RW: Right, and listen I have the numbers here about what we're talking about. And these are numbers even, you know, it takes some time for the numbers to catch up, but it seems like right now there's about 3.5 million children and adolescents -- and this is a conservative estimate -- being prescribed stimulants, okay, so that's the number of stimulants...3.5 million children. And even if it's only 10 percent, we're talking about creating 350,000 bipolar youth, and if it's 25 percent we're talking about 6 or 700,00 bipolar youth; now in terms of SSRIs for depression we now have at least 2 million children and adolescents on those drugs -- so if that's, you know, turning somewhere between 25 percent...if that's turning 25 percent into bipolar youth we're talking about another half million bipolar youth. So we're talking like a million kids turned to bipolar, so to speak, and put into this seriously mentally ill camp by being exposed to stimulants and antidepressants. So that gives you a sense of the magnitude of this thing. And this is a "disorder we didn't use to see in children." So it gives you the sense of this extraordinarily iatrogenic, meaning drug caused, pathway that is opened up in our society.
Rob: Now, you know, you take a 9/11...you think of what happened there and you think that less than 3,000 people were killed and then you take a million children into chronically, mentally ill and these are disabled mostly, right? These are children who become adults who stay bipolar and are...what percentage of them are able to work would you say?
RW: Well this, again, this is again part of this extraordinary tragedy going on. If you look at what happens once these kids enter into this bipolar diagnosis now -- and remember kids...just we didn't have bipolar kids, you know, before this whole medicating -- it's not just that they become bipolar in the same way that adults get diagnosed with bipolar, they become severely bipolar, meaning they become rapid cyclers, they become...they exhibit, as the juvenile bipolar experts said, a severe form of bipolar illness; and they can expect to become, sort of, chronically severely ill as adults, so that's the pathway that the very experts saying this is a disease that needs to be treated....are saying well, what's the fate that awaits. It's not that the cocktails are expected to allow them to go on to this good full-functioning life; instead these people are going to become chronically ill with rapid cycling, cognitive problems are going to set in, physical problems are going to set in; and you can be assured that these kids on these cocktails -- I've included antipsychotics -- they're going to die early. So what is the future being paved for these kids? It is disability, it is being burdened by, you know, severe psychiatric symptoms, being burdened by physical problems, metabolic disorders, obesity, diabetes, it is being...cognitive decline, where you'll see that on kids on antipsychotics...there's some...basically a cognitive decline begins to set in after 3 to 5 years, you see some shrinkage of the frontal lobes related with antipsychotics -- I mean, when you really put this whole story together, what you see...and the 9/11 comparison with the 3,000 is actually pretty...in its own way, does provide some valuable context -- we have created a think where we take behaviors like, let's say oppositional defiant behavior which means just behaving a way parents don't like, and putting that kid on a path that leads to shortened life, muted life, lots of psychiatric symptoms, cognitive decline -- you're really talking about taking that kid's life away.
And how big is this now? I'll give you some data. The US government accountability office, okay -- and that's this office that looks at, you know, broad themes in our society -- reported in 2008 that 1 in every 15 young adults hitting age 18 is...oh no, excuse me, I'm sorry about that....1 in every 15 young adults 18 to 26 years old is now "seriously mentally ill"...1 in every 15; and this population now is expected to be, sort of, seriously mentally ill for life -- so that gives you a sense of the extraordinary, you know, wrong being done and how we're not allowing so many kids to grow up and make their way in life. 1 in every 15 is getting caught in this web -- that is an astonishing number and...
Rob: I want to reiterate what we did in our last interview, that you have no connection with Scientology because Scientology criticizes the use of psychiatric medications...
RW: No, not this...
Rob: You have...
RW: Can I...
Rob: ...repudiated any connection with that. You never did and never had any connection at all, right?
RW: No, no, none, none, none, none, none, none -- listen I'm a guy that is mainstream science writer, okay? And I'm like...you can't find a guy in the American planet less likely to have any interest in Scientology than I. My background is reporting for newspapers. My background...I was Director of Publications at Harvard Medical School. I'm a guy that I was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year. I'm a guy who believes in mainstream science, okay. I'm a believer in evidence-based medicine. Anatomy of an Epidemic is a book that looks at what their -- by their I mean mainstream biological psychiatry -- their science says; it's a book that looks at what research done by the National Institute of Mental Health...what does that research show. I began this whole story as a believer in the common wisdom. In 1998 I co-wrote a series for the Boston Globe that talked about abuses of psychiatric patients in research settings and one of the contexts, one of the elements of that series was how awful it would be to ever take anybody off psychiatric medications or antipsychotic...you know, take people with schizophrenia off antipsychotic medications because these drugs were like insulin for diabetes...that's because I believed that common wisdom. And finally, just so you know in this book, I actually write about how Scientology has actually been used by the pharmaceutical companies as a conventional way to avoid societal attention on the real research. Because Scientology emerged as this extraordinary critic, this sort of very...what's a word for it...sort of, extreme critic of medications and psychiatry. And the problem was, of course, that Scientology has some of its own crazy stuff that this allows mainstream psychiatrists in the pharmaceutical companies to delegitimize the criticism. They said -- Aha, look this coming from Scientologists; and then they were able to use that to taint...to try to taint people like myself that come from this just as a mainstream believer in science -- what happens is the presence of Scientology in this whole debate it allowed the pharmaceutical companies to go -- Aha, a critic must be a Scientologist....it delegitimized this whole thing.
But bottom...but I want to get back to your question and I'm glad you asked it. I have never been to a Scientology meeting, I have no interest in that thing, and it's just absolutely foreign to any way of thinking that I have, and my background is as a mainstream science writer...and that's how I come at this -- a guy who's been writing for newspapers, magazines and books for more than 20 years.
Rob: Okay.
RW: I hope that was clear (laughs).
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