How Robert Whitaker Found Out that the Chemical Imbalance Hypothesis Is a Lie
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I used freedom of information requests to get what the FDA said about these new drugs when the companies were making an application for, say, the new atypicals.
And what you saw there with that freedom of information request was that the actual study data was very mixed.
The efficacy was pretty marginal.
And there were a lot of adverse events that the FDA investigators were saying you're going to see.
But that wasn't part of the message given to the public.
So I then went to the Boston Globe, who I'd written for before, and said, I'll do a series of abuses of psychiatric patients in research settings, because there were also some NIMH trials that were quite abusive towards the patients, and we can talk about that.
Now, one of the keys here, as you asked me this question, is at this time, I still believed in the chemical imbalance story.
So much so that one of the things in the Boston Globe series that we wrote looked at studies in schizophrenia patients in which they took people who were doing fairly well on antipsychotics and then they conducted what are known as relapse studies.
They took half the people who were maintained on the drug, half the people who were taken off the drug with great regularity.
Those who were taken off the drug relapsed at a higher rate.
And so we said, and when I called people up, they said, oh, yeah, antipsychotics fix a dopamine imbalance on the brain like insulin from diabetes.
So we said, well, why would you fund studies that took a drug away from people that supposedly fixed in pathology to see how quickly they became sick again?
You would never withdraw insulin from a diabetic to see how fast they became sick again.
So I tell this story to explain that I was a believer in the chemical imbalance story.
I was a believer in, therefore, that model of progress, that we now had drugs that fixed known chemical imbalances.
What happened, though, was this.
So that narrative that I was a believer in is a narrative of progress, right?
Of modern, amazing progress.
And by the way, in my opinion, if they had actually discovered the molecule that caused madness and could fix it, or the molecule that caused depression and could fix it, I would say that's the greatest medical discovery in history, given how complex the human brain is, right?
But what happened was, as that series was being published, I came upon two studies that belied that narrative of progress.
One was a study by Harvard researchers, published in 1994, which looked at longer-term outcomes for schizophrenia patients.
And they said they had declined since the 1970s, not improved, and were now no better than they had been in the first third of the 20th century.
Now, we look back at the first third of the 20th century as these dark ages, right?
So how can it be that with these modern drugs that fix chemical imbalances, are we no better than when they put people in showers and did all sorts of sort of harsh somatic treatments?
Okay, that was number one.
The second was I then stumbled upon studies done by the World Health Organization, cross-cultural studies, that compared outcomes in three developing countries, India, Colombia, and Nigeria, to longer-term outcomes in the U.S. and five other developed countries.
Now, everybody was diagnosed with schizophrenia by Western doctors and studies.
And what they found after the first study was that the outcomes in the developing countries were much, much better than in the developed countries.
So much so that they concluded that living in a developed country is a strong predictor that you won't have a good outcome if you're diagnosed with schizophrenia.
And I'm saying, what?
We're so proud of our medicine.
Why would you do better if you're in India or Nigeria than in the U.S. with all our modern medicine?
It was a conundrum, basically, a question I wanted to investigate further.
So the very first thing I did is I started calling up people, including some of the people who I had called up for the Boston Globe series, who had told me that the drugs fixed the chemical imbalance in the brain.
I said, can you just show me where you found that, say, too much dopamine is the cause of schizophrenia?
Or can you show me where you actually found that too little serotonin is the cause of depression?
And I swear to God, here's what they said.
Oh, we didn't actually find that.
That's a metaphor.
for explaining why they should take the drugs like insulin for diabetes.
And I said, well, I understand that like insulin for diabetes is a metaphor, but surely you actually found these chemical imbalances.
And I just want to read the research where you did.
And first person says, no, we didn't really find it.
The second person, no, we didn't really find it.
And then I went to the makers of Risperdol, which is a second generation atypical.
And Risperol was being marketed as fixing not only a dopamine imbalance in the brain, but as a serotonin imbalance in the brain.
And I actually managed at that time to get to the actual researchers.
And you know what they said?
Yeah, that's just such nonsense.
You know, we're just, it's just, I'm sort of embarrassed that we say this.
So for your listeners, it's important.
I was a believer in the narrative.
I was a reporter who called up scientists and quoted what they said, called up the leading figures in any particular field of medicine.