How Pharmaceutical Companies Medicate Normal

Medicating Normal

ENDEVR (2024)

Film Review

This films documents the growing problem with psychiatrists dispensing psychotropic medications without informing patients about severe withdrawal effects if they try to stop them.

Among the patients interviewed are

• A career naval officer with two MIT masters degrees who was forced to retire on medical disability owing to his inability to taper and discontinue his lorazepam. Describing himself as an anxious, driven high achiever with relationship problems, he was given Zoloft and lorazepam. Despite initial relief, after eight months, he was much worse with low mood, sexual dysfunction and weird cogniitve effects. However every time he tried to discontinue the medication he was unable to get out of bed.
• The parents of a 13-year-old distressed over moving to a new school. After she failed to improve Zoloft, her psychiatrist changed her to Prozac and she began having visual and auditory hallucinations telling her to hurt herself. This necessitated seven psychiatric hospitalization and being started on antipsychotic and side effect pills.
• A waitress unable to sleep owing to night shift work was given 2 mg lorazepam twice a day and ended up taking it for six years because she couldn’t function if she tried to stop it.
• A female sergeant was medevaced from Iraq after developing nosebleeds, fainting spells and 40 pound weight loss from severe PTSD. Forced to take medical retirement, she went to the VA where she was given multiple cocktails. At one point she was on 16 medications and owing to severe withdrawals it took her 10 years to get.

An Army psychologist is also interviewed at length. It’s her view that PTSD is grief that has been medicalized. She explains that most medications work really well short term. Nevertheless unless severe mental illness is present, there are few justifications for taking psychotropic medication longterm.

In a vignette near the end journalist Robert Whitaker describes how pharmaceutical companies rig psychotropic studies through cozy financial relationships with the psychiatrists who perform them and the medical journals that publish them. According to Whitaker, Big Pharma never funds long term studies. Despite clear short term relief from anxiety-related symptom, symptom nearly always worsen with long term use.

Xanax is a good example. In the very first Xanax trial, patients were better at 4 weeks but worse than placebo patients at 8 weeks. The way the company dealt with this was to only publish results up to 4 weeks.

Likewise Germany refused to approve Prozac owing to patient deterioration after two months. In the US they only published the first month of data to win FDA approval.

Deaths in drug trials are never published. Drug companies prefer to pay fines and law suit settlements because it’s cheaper than being honest – which could hurt profits.