Dying for a cure

As I began to understand the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry is involved in doctor education, I began also to understand why it might have been that my doctors simply didn’t realise the harm their treatments were causing me.

There are drug industry funded symposia where doctors learn of the latest developments in medicine and obtain credits towards their ongoing education. There are the friendly drug reps dropping by the clinic, updating doctors on the latest drugs, dropping off samples to get patients started on treatment.

Some doctors prefer not to see these reps and rely on subscription journals instead. But sadly this doesn’t mean they avoid industry influence. The practice of ghostwriting has crept into these journals whereby professionals are paid to lend their names to articles the drug companies have produced. According to the deputy editor of one widely circulated medical journal, it’s a practice that’s “well known, scandalous and outrageous”.

I was astounded to learn that the very questionnaire designed to aid doctors in making a diagnosis of depression, and which was in use around the time of my own diagnosis, was backed by a drug company with a new antidepressant on the market.

I was further astounded to learn that this questionnaire classified 49 per cent of participants as mentally ill. I have to ask myself, had it not been for the existence of such a diagnostic tool, would I ever have been labelled “ill” in the first place? Had I not been, it is unlikely I would have been medicated, then all that followed might have been avoided.

How in this tangled mental health care system could there not be others suffering as I had suffered? How many others have been diagnosed with an “illness” they might not really have, given medication they might not really need, and possibly have reacted badly to it as I had done?

Throughout my ordeal I had continued to write a journal and had taken on a formal unit of study to advance my writing skills. I had wanted to write my own story focusing on my decline from ambitious, successful career woman, to chronic psychiatric patient, exemplifying in my experience how mental illness does not discriminate. With my newfound knowledge I realised I had a completely different story to tell, and I have told it in my book, Dying for a Cure.

Dying for a Cure is not anti-psychiatric medication. I have been told by many that antidepressants have been a life-saver for them. I did not write this book to sit in judgment of those seeking relief for depression, anxiety or any other form of psychological distress by means of medication.

I wrote this book to give a personal account of my experience, set against a background of evidence that in some people, SSRIs are not the wonder drugs we have been led to believe they are; that in some people, these drugs can induce the very symptoms they are supposed to relieve.

I wrote this book in the hope I may give those who may be unwittingly suffering as I did, the chance to see their experience in mine.