Do Psychiatric Drugs Work? The Effectiveness of Using Medication To Treat Mental Illness

“When they give a drug, they have no idea what it does to this processor. And the neocortical column is the elementary processor for human beings to have coherent perception, attention, and memory. This is shocking. I mean, we are living in such a primitive time of medicine, you cannot imagine.”  -Neuroscientist Henry Markram (2009, p. 63)

For around a century now, people have been living with the miracles of modern medicine. We have vaccines that keep illness away, technologies that can peer inside one’s muscle and bones, and drugs like penicillin and antibiotics that have made dying from infection a rare event. These breakthroughs have revolutionized medicine. Such success, however, has also given the public an overly rosy view of medication and deeply flawed ideas about how simple it is to solve problems with a pill.

Why you should be skeptical of mood enhancing drugs

Not all drugs are created equally, and solving some problems with medication is easier than others. The body is a complex system complete with its own checks and balances, and tinkering with this physiology often isn’t as straightforward as dumping a chemical into your body and watching the problem go away. Nowhere is this principle more true than when it comes to psychiatric medications and mood-modifying drugs, which attempt to modify how the brain works in order to alter someone’s behavior.

Psychological drugs and the complexity of the brain

The brain is the most complex organ in the body, and by leaps and bounds the least understood. This makes tinkering with it problematic, and some key players in the pharmaceutical industry are even starting to acknowledge this. Science writer Jonathan Lehrer notes that “Most recently, two leading drug firms, Astra-Zeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, announced that they were scaling back research into the brain. The organ is simply too complicated, too full of networks we don’t understand.” (Lehrer, 2012, p. 109) Many industry drugs prove to be a bust, even alter years of painstaking research by scientists, because simple cause and effect correlations (such as those that state positive moods and serotonin go hand in hand) often break down and disappear or even turn negative in complex systems.

An example of how brain complexity makes it difficult for drugs to work as intended

A chemical known as corticotropin-releasing hormone, or CRH, has been shown by past research to play a role in anxiety and depression. So for more than a decade, drug companies have been trying to work

Science journalist Stephani Sutherland states that “the finding reaffirms scientists’ growing understanding that mood disorders do not result from a simple chemical imbalance–too much or too little of one neurotransmitter–but rather from subtle changes in many systems of the brain.” (Sutherland, 2012) Jan M. Deussing, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry and lead author of the study, adds that “the network is much more complex than we thought before.”

For example, oxytocin is well established as the “love” chemical and plays an important role in affection and bonding. Yet in a recent study, giving patients additional oxytocin worked to increase whatever inherent moods the patient was feeling at the time. If they were feeling calm and content, it boosted these feelings. But if they were primed for negative feelings beforehand, it also boosted negative emotional states such as prejudice or resentment, actually enhancing bigotry. (Weaver, 2011) Such findings illustrate the problems in trying to draw straight-line conclusions when it comes to artificial mood enhancement. If a similar finding were to be discovered when it comes to serotonin, it might explain why some people become more depressed or suicidal when they first start the drug.

Habituation to psychological drugs

In other cases, some medications that are intended to correct chemical imbalances may actually create them. (Fitzpatrick, 5-30-2010) Whenever you artificially alter the body’s chemistry the body begins to adjust to these changes, a process referred to in medical terms as habituation. So for example, when a person continues to use cocaine, their brain will respond to this excess dopamine by getting rid of dopamine receptor cells and creating less dopamine of its own. If such use continues over years, these changes could start to become permanent, forever altering a person’s ability to feel pleasure through normal experiences, which is why chronic drug use can so seriously damage a person’s mental and emotional capacity.

The same thing is possible when it comes to psychological medication, which is especially worrisome considering the fact that these drugs work on the assumption that there’s a chemical imbalance to be corrected, despite the fact that there is no compelling evidence that anxious or depressed people have any more or less of these chemicals than healthy people do. So you’re essentially throwing more of these mood chemicals into the mix and hoping for the best. Over the long-term this could create chemical imbalances that didn’t exist before, even permanently damaging the person’s ability to feel pleasure in life on their own.

Psychiatric drugs: The Snuffaluffaloffagus of medicine

“I think I did feel brighter on Lexapro, but looking back, I’m not certain whether it was the drug itself or if I was simply feeling proactive–good that I was caretaking myself.”  – Holly Millea (2016, p. 154)

The placebo effect is powerful. The archives of medicine are filled with cases where a patient’s belief in a cure did far more for them than our most advanced medical science. As a result, many of the people taking psychiatric drugs will appear to get better. They may actually feel better. This improvement is then falsely attributed to the drug they are taking, which is why the myths surrounding psychiatric medication are so hard to kill.

But any improvements they perceive are unlikely to be related to the chemical alterations created by the pill, but is rather a fanciful placebo effect. Our collective body of research suggests these chemicals offer no benefit beyond this placebo effect.

The overall effectiveness & overuse of psychiatric drugs

Despite drastic increases in the number of psychological medications available and their overall use, rates of mental illness have vastly increased since their introduction in 1954, which is a pretty good indicator of just how ineffective these drugs really are. Yet such sobering evidence hasn’t stopped practitioners from widely prescribing them. Dr. C. Normal Shealy notes that “At least 30 double-blind studies have demonstrated Valium is no more effective than a placebo in treating anxiety, and yet valium is the most commonly prescribed drug for that problem.” (Myss & Shealy, 1993, p. 339)

One young woman was labeled with a number of different disorders, and was eventually “prescribed 26 different medications, but nothing helped.” (Maloney, 2016) Sadly, this woman’s experience is not that uncommon. It never ceases to amaze me that it took 26 tries for her to figure out that medication wasn’t treating her illness. You’d think the ineffectiveness of these medicines would become apparent after the third or fourth drug.