Is Tom Cruise right?: are psych meds wrong?

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Psych Meds a Problem?

Tom says psych meds stink. OK, Tom lost it on Today with Matt, but has he perhaps actually identified a real problem with the use of psych meds?

In the video here with Tom Cruise and Matt Lauer Tom is busting on my buddy Matt, psychiatry, docs, and the pharmaceutical crowd with an old polemic. In our offices we see this same downstream medical challenges everyday. Even some members of the medical community have little appreciation for the complexity and usefulness of psych meds. They just don't get psych diagnosis. Why?

Beyond Beliefs and Labels

Simple: Many still think psychiatry is a belief system, a faith, and med management is a faith based, almost Satanic, cult thing. Following that line of reason, health is a spiritual thing and being depressed or having ADD is a bad will thing. If you have a problem you are possessed, your impulsivity is diabolical.

Sounds a bit like the Salem witch trials wherein the “witches” were killed because they acted strange, – now traced to ergotism, mold growing on stored rye. In 857 AD they called ergotism “Holy Fire” and that perspective on psych problems sounds familiar to me. The biology, the science, evolved and even in 1039 they knew it was a medical problem. They came to call it St. Anthony's Fire. To wrap the mold thing, it wasn't until 1670 that Dr Thuillier announced it wasn't an infection but [my words] a neurotoxin problem.

Here is what a neurotoxic brain looks like [not on ergot, but you'll get this SPECT picture below]:

Metabolic/Toxic Brain

Just take a look at all the dents and bumps: – easy to see when it looks like someone hit this person's brain repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer. If they could have looked at brains in 857 they wouldn't have blamed the devil. The science from brains to molecular and cellular physiology is changing psychiatry even today. More on neurotoxins and brains later, stay tuned.

Neurotoxins and ADHD symptoms are often significantly entwined.

Even as a kid studying psychoanalysis in Philadelphia, I was fascinated by a paper about Robert Waelder that addressed theories of psychoanalysis and the distance [levels of abstraction] from actual, real clinical observations: what the patients actually said, the real history, and real medical issues. Until very recently abstractions formed the foundation of our best psychiatric tools.

Now back to Tom: Yes, he was disrespectful not only with Matt, but his own friends. But let's face it without new information, without a public dialog about science, we all fight over that recovery path.

And yes, Tom is right on an important element: People are having problems with meds and we need alternatives. Faith, spiritual practice, is an essential part of any recovery process. And we do need to know more about the meds.

Now it's time to move on, beyond beliefs into facts. Psychiatry is loaded with useful scientific information: science works, if you work it.
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