"Poverty is making us sick" - University of Toronto study

Mental and behavioural disorders are conditions strongly associated with low income (and poverty) in Canada.

Mental and behavioural disorders

Mental and behavioural disorders include anxiety disorders, mood disorders, Alzheimer’s or
dementia and schizophrenia. As group they relate closely to income, falling from a high of 146
per thousand in the bottom quintile to 64 in the highest, with most quintiles significantly
different from the adjacent quintiles. There is a highly significant drop in incidence as we go
from the bottom to the second quintile and from the fourth to the top quintile as well, reflecting
greatest incidence among the poorest Canadians with the wealthiest quintile least affected
Anxiety and mood disorders, the two specific conditions for which incidence rates could be
reliably calculated,xvi showed clear relationships with income. In each case there is a significant
drop in incidence with movement from the bottom to the second quintile.
In the case of anxiety the rate in the bottom quintile (81 per thousand) is significantly higher than
the rate in the next quintile (44 per thousand population), and indeed, significantly higher than in
all other quintiles.
Mood disorders are found at a rate of 105 per thousand in the lowest income quintile, a rate over
60 per cent higher than the 64 per thousand rate found in the second quintile. Similarly, the rate
in the second quintile is significantly higher than the rate in the third and fourth quintiles, and the
rate of 39 per thousand in the highest quintile is significantly lower than the rates of 54-55 found
in the third and fourth quintiles.

PDF

UK: Action on an epidemic of pill addiction

Action on Britain's epidemic of pill addiction
Peer to use House of Lords speech to reveal relative's addiction to prescription drug

By Jeremy Laurance, Health editor
Saturday, 31 October 2009

As early as 30 years ago, the addictive properties of tranquillisers such as Valium were known, but critics maintain the Government is still not doing enough to help

The Department of Health has launched a review of the million-plus patients addicted to prescribed drugs in the UK in a tacit admission that attempts to control the problem over the last two decades have failed.

An estimated 1.5 million people are addicted to prescription and over-the-counter drugs including benzodiazepine tranquillisers, sleeping pills such as zoplicone - implicated in the death of Hollywood star Heath Ledger - and painkillers containing codeine.

The review, which began in July, was disclosed in a Westminster hall debate last June but has not been formally announced. It followed a report by the House of Commons all-party group on drugs misuse which called for better training for doctors in the risks of over-prescribing, greater awareness of the scale of addiction and more centres for treatment....

snip

Case study: 'My life has been shattered'

Matthew (not his real name), was prescribed Efexor, an antidepressant, and Clonazepam, a benzodiazepine, to help him sleep following the failure of a business venture in 2001.

He was living abroad but returned to Britain where the prescription was continued. “For seven years I was fine. I didn’t really think about the pills, I took them as vitamins. It was something I did at the end of the day.”

Earlier this year increasing fatigue prompted him to try and withdraw from them. His doctor advised a “cold turkey” approach involving a few days in hospital, after which he would be drug free.

“I went in as a happy confident person and in two days I was a train wreck. I felt I had woken up in a horror film, I couldn’t walk or think and I had lost my memory. It was indescribable torture.”

Nine months on, he is still trying to put his life back together. Married with two children, he has been unable to return to work.

“I am still terrified of going outside, I can’t think straight or concentrate and I have very bad depression. Every single stimulus seems scary and heightened. It is absolutely extraordinary a prescription drug can do this to you. My life has been shattered.”

“There is nowhere for me to go for support except to other sufferers on the internet and one or two people who have set up support groups round the country.”

“I have seen several doctors since and they cannot believe my doctor kept me on these drugs for seven years. I have lodged a formal complaint about him.”

The Independent

UPDATE - JAMA: Antidepressant meta-analysis reveals 22 years of deception; treatment worthless for most
"The full magnitude of severe harm produced by these drugs in otherwise healthy people for whom antidepressants were misprescribed has not yet been fully collated--the human casualties include thousands of drug-induced suicides, mania, drug-exacerbated depression, drug dependence, birth defects..."
Link

It is possible withdraw from medication without doing harm to yourself.
See
The Ashton Manual - Dr. Heather Ashton re Benzos/Tranquillizers

Halting SSRI's - Dr. David Healey - PDF re Antidepressants

Icarus Project Harm reduction guide to coming off psychiatric drugs

Fattened by Pills?

Paula Caplan's article on weight gain due to psychiatric medication is an eye opener. From the Boston Globe

Obituary: Judi Chamberlin

Sad news: After a long illness, Judi Chamberlin, mental health rights activist, has died.
Her blog will remain open for a time; please visit and leave your respects.

Drugs World - Medications Visualized

Medications diagrammed and arranged by family - Antipsychotics, Stimulants, Downers/Depressants, Hallucinogens.
Take a look!

Martin Luther King

Image available from Robert Shetterly's series AMERICANS WHO TELL THE TRUTH

"This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." - MLK
Martin Luther King
January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968 (aged 39)

NYT: The Americanization of Mental Illness

From the essay:
'...we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book “Mad Travelers,” the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.'

Link

Wikipedia has an article about mental health diagnoses in China.