Dying for a Cure

I've just finished reading two books written by psychiatric survivors detailing their experiences: Dying for a Cure by Rebekah Beddoe, and What Difference Does it Make?, by Wendy Funk. Funk's memoir will be familiar to many in the North American survivor movement, while Beddoe's is a more recent Australian release.

I was actually surprised that a book like Dying for a Cure could be published by a large mainstream publishing house in Australia, given its scathing indictment of psychotropic drugs and those who manufacture and prescribe them, as well as the scaremongering and oversimplification that characterises many depression awareness campaigns. It comes with a foreword written by Dr Jon Jureidni, Head of Psychological Medicine at the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital, which I guess lends it some institutional credibility, and was prefigured by an article in Time by Daniel Williams, which questioned the safety of SSRI anti-depressants, citing Rebekah's case as an example.

A first-time mother, an exhausted Rebekah took her new-born daughter Jemima to her GP, seeking help with getting her to settle. For her trouble, Rebekah was diagnosed with post-natal depression, handed a trial pack of Zoloft and referred to the mother and baby unit of a nearby hospital, where she encountered psychiatrist 'Max Braydle', a deceptively blokey type with some serious boundary management issues. And thus begun her emotional disintegration, beginning with self-harm just days after commencing Zoloft, followed by repeated hospitalisations, shock treatments and suicide attempts and the prescription of cocktails of drugs that variously included Prozac, Luvox, Valium, Xanax, Serzone, lithium and Zyprexa. Presumably as a result of the latter, Rebekah developed Type I diabetes.

Most distressingly for Rebekah, she developed severe drug-induced restlessness, or akathisia, which was interpreted by all as evidence of her sickness, and led her to behave in increasingly outlandish ways - neglecting Jemima, drinking, scoring heroin, making frequent and extreme changes to her appearance, being physically violent and breaking household objects. This inevitably led to the diagnosis of Bipolar I disorder, which conveniently 'explained' and encapsulated all of her drug-induced symptoms. It wasn't until a chance conversation with a pharmacist that Rebekah learned that the physical symptoms and drop in her mood that followed a couple of missed doses of Luvox were withdrawal symptoms, not the resurgence of some underlying condition, that she began to research the rationale (or lack thereof) behind her treatment, wean herself off the drugs, and regain her former level of cognitive and emotional functioning. But of course, this knowledge came at the cost of three years of madness, strained family relationships, destroyed friendships and the loss of a promising career in IT, not to mention essentially being 'out of it' for the first three years of her daughter's life.

Rebekah's story echoes my own personal experience, to the extent that I can formulate the following hypothesis:

Prescribing a combination of several SSRI anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and benzodiazepines, with their respective capacities to energise, flatten and disinhibit, can easily induce a state that mimics the symptoms of bipolar disorder, in particular mixed episodes and rapid cycling.

I'm not yet sure how this could be experimentally verified, but it's a possibility I hope both professionals, patients and their families will begin to consider, as more stories like Rebekah's emerge from the steel-reinforced glasswork.