Needed: Critical Thinking About Psychiatric Medications

SUMMARY It is now well recognized that because of pharmaceutical companies concealment of unfavorable clinical trial data from publication, published trial findings are not credible. Drug marketing budgets and practices allow the drug industry to exercise an inordinate influence on the mental health system, one that serves neither consumers nor professionals. This latest systemic crisis calls into question contradictory stances in social work in mental health: professing nonexpertise in psychopharmacology yet usually collaborating with the medication-compliance agenda of biomedical psychiatry. To avoid losing scientific and practical relevance in a mental health system rife with conflicts of interest, social workers should strive to contribute basic knowledge about psychotropic drugs. They might begin to accomplish this by asking fundamental questions about medications and their uses and offering responses that resonate with core values of the profession and with the principles of scientific inquiry untarnished by economic or narrow professional interests. Five such questions are asked in this article: What are psychotropic drugs? Does their clinical use represent progress in mental health healing? How should we understand placebo effects in drug treatments? Are therapeutic effects socially constructed? Are prescribed psychotropic drugs better than illicit psychotropic drugs?