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Will antidepressant medications ever require informed consent?
That question is at the heart of the new documentary, "Medicating Normal."

- The directors of the new documentary, "Medicating Normal," want psychiatrists to require informed consent when writing prescriptions.
- Long-term effects of antidepressant usage do not have to be documented for FDA approval.
- Big Think talks to producer/director Wendy Ratcliffe and film subject, Angela Peacock.
While humoral theory was finally abandoned with the acceptance of germ theory, Hippocrates offered many important insights into the nature of disease. The humors pointed to bodily causes of disease at a time when many thought divine forces were at play. ("Men think [epilepsy] divine merely because they do not understand it," wrote one Hippocratic student.) Though disease specificity of blood and phlegm took time to understand, important ramifications for the future of medicine were being considered nearly 2,500 years ago.
The most interesting humor was black bile. Black liquid secreted by the spleen, the temperamental correlation resonates: melancholy. Hippocratic students recognized depression as an imbalance and sought methods to cure it. Over the centuries, various tinctures and herbs addressed melancholy. Doctors agreed targeted medicine helped the patient overcome the imbalance leading to depression; they also believed depression was a natural state that everyone experiences from time to time.
Our views on depression changed when twentieth-century pharmacology entered the picture. Doctors had terrible ideas, such as electroshock therapy and lobotomies, but one of the worst might be the chemical imbalance theory of the brain. As former psychiatrist Dean Schuyler wrote in his 1974 book, most depressive episodes "will run their course and terminate with virtually complete recovery without specific intervention."
That's not how the growing pharmaceutical industry treated it. The pathologizing of depression meant that doctors—in this case, psychiatrists—could diagnose and treat what had long been considered a natural part of life. As often happens in drug development, a substance is discovered and only then is a disease needed for it to treat. Mental health seems particularly useful in this process.
Depression wasn't the only mental health condition to be pathologized. Anxiety is a big one. Lack of focus is another. Any minor deviation from a perceived norm has, over the course of the 20th century, become subjected to diagnosis and, thanks to the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry, pharmacological treatments with little to no informed consent.
Take Angela Peacock, an Iraq War veteran that was medically retired due to PTSD. Upon her return in 2004, she was put on one drug after another. By 2006, that meant 18 different drugs. "That took away my ability to even know there's anything wrong with that," she recently told me prior to an online screening of "Medicating Normal" a new documentary that challenges the market for increasingly over-prescribed and under-studied prescription drugs.
EarthRise Podcast 93: Medicating Normal (with Angela Peacock & Wendy Ratcliffe)
During our talk, Peacock is seated next to director and producer, Wendy Ratcliffe. Co-director Lynn Cunningham was initially inspired to pursue this topic when a family member's health deteriorated after 15 years of psychiatric medication. A Harvard graduate and star athlete, this family member is now on disability and exhibits poor mental health.
This brings up a question modern psychiatry rarely confronts: Why are prescription drug rates and rates of anxiety and depression increasing? If the former worked, shouldn't the latter be in decline?
That's not what's happened. Ratcliffe decided to produce "Medicating Normal" after reading Robert Whitaker's 2010 book, "Anatomy of an Epidemic." (Whitaker is featured in the film and was recently featured in my column.) For over three years, the crew followed five people (including Peacock) around as they dealt with the terrifying health consequences of medication dependence.
"These medicines are causing an epidemic of disability," Ratcliffe says. When I ask what she learned about the pharmaceutical industry while making the film, her eyes light up. She shakes her head in disbelief.
"I'm totally shocked by the FDA process: medications that are designed to be taken for many years or even a lifetime, to get them approved they only have to be shown to work better than a placebo over three to six weeks. There is no obligation to test these drugs for long-term side effects. I was shocked to discover that pharmaceutical companies pay for most of the research on their own drugs. They design the research to get the result that they want. When they don't like the result of the trial, they throw it out."
Whitaker told me about the original trial for the benzodiazepine, Xanax. At four weeks, it outperformed the placebo. At eight weeks, however, there was no discernible difference between the placebo and Xanax. By 14 weeks, the placebo outperformed Xanax. To get around this inconvenient data, Upjohn only reported the four-week data. The FDA approved the drug.
That was in 1980. In 2017, 25 million Xanax prescriptions were written.
Pharmaceutical companies understand how to get FDA approval. Like oil companies, they're clueless when tragedy strikes. They don't know how to deal with the long-term side effects of their drugs, so they ignore them. Ratcliffe says the doctors she talked with weren't trained in tapering protocols or educated about the negative impact of the drugs they prescribe. The reflexive response is another drug, not an honest investigation of the drugs themselves.
Wendy Ratcliffe and Lynn Cunningham at the premiere of Medicating Normal at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Credit: Wendy Ratcliffe
This is the process that led to Peacock being prescribed 18 drugs at once. The side effects, she confirms, are not minor.
"From a patient standpoint, I thought dizziness meant I had to get up slowly. The dizziness I experienced coming off of antidepressants and benzodiazepines was like, I can't walk. It was like walking on the Grand Canyon in high heels on a tight wire."
Though the final benzodiazepine nearly killed her, Peacock finally abandoned all drugs in 2016. Today, she feels old parts of herself coming back, but she's not yet whole. She's not sure she'll ever be. Currently living in her RV, she travels around the country educating former vets and promoting the documentary. Unlike her time on prescription drugs, she now has a mission.
"The way we bring people home from war and then put them on drugs is not right," she says. She is doing her best to change that fact.
Both women agree on an important point: psychiatry needs informed consent. The problem, Ratcliffe says, is that "psychiatry lobbying groups feel that informed consent impedes their ability to prescribe." She compares the industry to the NRA: any criticism is treated as a potential keystone that, if removed, will take out the entire system. In reality, all patients are asking for is honesty about how these drugs interact in their bodies.
We don't know the long-term effects because pharmaceutical companies don't have to study them. If the industry isn't required to disclose these effects, and psychiatrists remain ignorant of the real damage being done to some of their patients, informed consent remains an intangible dream with no pathway to reality.
As Whitaker writes in "Anatomy of an Epidemic," antidepressants don't treat chemical imbalances—they create them. Over 2,500 years ago, doctors recognized melancholy as a natural part of life—one that, as Schuyler and others realized, goes away with time. Yet for a growing number of Americans, depression will never fade because they weren't informed about the potential consequences of the prescription they were handed. They never know what they're being told to swallow.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter, Facebook and Substack. His next book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
How New York's largest hospital system is predicting COVID-19 spikes
Northwell Health is using insights from website traffic to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks in the future.
- The machine-learning algorithm works by analyzing the online behavior of visitors to the Northwell Health website and comparing that data to future COVID-19 hospitalizations.
- The tool, which uses anonymized data, has so far predicted hospitalizations with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.
- Machine-learning tools are helping health-care professionals worldwide better constrain and treat COVID-19.
The value of forecasting
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Credit: Northwell Health
<p>One unique benefit of forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations is that it allows health systems to better prepare, manage and allocate resources. For example, if the tool forecasted a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in two weeks, Northwell Health could begin:</p><ul><li>Making space for an influx of patients</li><li>Moving personal protective equipment to where it's most needed</li><li>Strategically allocating staff during the predicted surge</li><li>Increasing the number of tests offered to asymptomatic patients</li></ul><p>The health-care field is increasingly using machine learning. It's already helping doctors develop <a href="https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2020/06/09/dc19-1870" target="_blank">personalized care plans for diabetes patients</a>, improving cancer screening techniques, and enabling mental health professionals to better predict which patients are at <a href="https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ehr-data-fuels-accurate-predictive-analytics-for-suicide-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevated risk of suicide</a>, to name a few applications.</p><p>Health systems around the world have already begun exploring how <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315944/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">machine learning can help battle the pandemic</a>, including better COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, contact tracing, and drug and vaccine development.</p><p>Cruzen said these kinds of tools represent a shift in how health systems can tackle a wide variety of problems.</p><p>"Health care has always used the past to predict the future, but not in this mathematical way," Cruzen said. "I think [Northwell Health's new predictive tool] really is a great first example of how we should be attacking a lot of things as we go forward."</p>Making machine-learning tools openly accessible
<p>Northwell Health has made its predictive tool <a href="https://github.com/northwell-health/covid-web-data-predictor" target="_blank">available for free</a> to any health system that wishes to utilize it.</p><p>"COVID is everybody's problem, and I think developing tools that can be used to help others is sort of why people go into health care," Dr. Cruzen said. "It was really consistent with our mission."</p><p>Open collaboration is something the world's governments and health systems should be striving for during the pandemic, said Michael Dowling, Northwell Health's president and CEO.</p><p>"Whenever you develop anything and somebody else gets it, they improve it and they continue to make it better," Dowling said. "As a country, we lack data. I believe very, very strongly that we should have been and should be now working with other countries, including China, including the European Union, including England and others to figure out how to develop a health surveillance system so you can anticipate way in advance when these things are going to occur."</p><p>In all, Northwell Health has treated more than 112,000 COVID patients. During the pandemic, Dowling said he's seen an outpouring of goodwill, collaboration, and sacrifice from the community and the tens of thousands of staff who work across Northwell.</p><p>"COVID has changed our perspective on everything—and not just those of us in health care, because it has disrupted everybody's life," Dowling said. "It has demonstrated the value of community, how we help one another."</p>3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
- The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
- It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
- Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"</p><p>Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632" target="_blank">8.2 feet long</a>.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a <em>Triceratops prorsus, </em>one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.</p>Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p>The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the T<em>yrannosaurus rex</em>. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">headlines</a> after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.</p><p>Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a>.</p>Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
Triceratops illustration
Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
World's oldest work of art found in a hidden Indonesian valley
Archaeologists discover a cave painting of a wild pig that is now the world's oldest dated work of representational art.
Pig painting at Leang Tedongnge in Indonesia, made at 45,500 years ago.
- Archaeologists find a cave painting of a wild pig that is at least 45,500 years old.
- The painting is the earliest known work of representational art.
- The discovery was made in a remote valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Oldest Cave Art Found in Sulawesi
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a9734e306f0914bfdcbe79a1e317a7f0"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-wAYtBxn7E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
The incredible physics behind quantum computing
Can computers do calculations in multiple universes? Scientists are working on it. Step into the world of quantum computing.
