The Neuroleptic Drugs

I'm someone who really hates the use of the term antipsychotic. The neuroleptic drugs, drugs like Abilify, Seroquel, Risperdal, Invega, Geodon, and Haldol don't have a specific antipsychotic effect. These drugs instead produce generalized brain dysfunction not unlike an ice pick driven through your eye socket. These drugs are anti-anything they get prescribed for and anti-anybody they get prescribed to. In Peter Breggin's book Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry he points to research illustrative of the brain disabling effects of the drugs. This is an excerpt from his book:

Peter Liddle and his colleagues (2000) used positron emission tomography (PET) to study the effects of risperdone on the rate of metabolism on the ventral striatum, thalamus, and frontal cortex. Their subjects were eight neuroleptic-naive patients diagnosed with their first episodes of schizophrenia.

First and foremost, Liddle et al. (2000) found that "a single dose of risperdone produced decreases in metabolism in ventral striatum, thalamus and frontal cortex." The authors identified this region as the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical feedback loop. This encompasses much of the emotion-regulating centers in the limbic system and higher mental centers in the frontal lobes. Dopaminergic neurotransmission plays a significant role in this system and is profoundly blocked by risperdone. Clearly this confirms that risperdone, like all neuroleptics, causes a chemical lobotomy, with inevitable production of relative degrees of apathy and indifference.

If psychiatry came up with a label and a symptom checklist that included things like a preoccupation with sports, unusual excitement over the minutia of a sporting event, and intrusive thoughts about sports they could make being a sports announcer a psychiatric illness. They could then use the neuroleptic drugs to reduce the symptoms of that newly defined psychiatric illness. Van Putten and Marder's description of akinesia in Behavioral Toxicity of Antipsychotic Drugs could have referred to sports announcers. It could read like this:

In the treatment of sports announcers with neuroleptics, akinesia, in our experience, produces a type of improvement. The patient talks less about sports, but he talks less of everything; he is less bothered by a lay-up or a touchdown, but he is less bothered by everything else as well; he less invested in sports, but he is less invested in all else as well. Many patients with akinesia experience a peculiar absence of emotions, appear emotionally dead, and often state that everything is all right. This type of improvement, which occurs particularly with higher doses, is one we should not be proud of.

Most people don't know that the brain disabling effects of these drugs are the primary effects of these drugs, it's not a side effect. It's interesting to look at peoples subjective experience of taking the drugs, it gives you some idea just how the drugs might be working.

The neuroleptic drugs are now being used to treat depression. They've just begun marketing a neuroleptic drug named Seroquel direct to consumers. The television ads for another neuroleptic drug called Abilify have been running for a while now. If these drugs perform any better than a sugar pill it makes you wonder how they work to treat the thoughts and feelings that may make one depressed.