Psychoactive Drugs and the Military’s Suicide Crisis

The answer might be simpler than you would ever think…

In 1931, Audous Huxley wrote his novel Brave New World warning of the loss of individuality and freedom by state control of technology and science, and human reproduction He described the widespread use of soma, a medication meant to salve the pain and sorrow of this human and social transformation while keeping the multitude “happy” and without revolt against the state.

The widespread use of “soma” or as we say today, psychopharmacological treatment, is again in the news as recent media coverage of the military reveals that soldiers are attempting suicide in record numbers.[1] As a response to greater numbers of our service members killing themselves than losing their lives in harm’s way, the Department of Defense is employing, no doubt at the suggestion of experts, the use of psychoactive drugs.  Yet a troubling history of psychopharmacology is detailed in the New York Review of Books, dated June 23, 2011, and July 14, 2011, where lengthy articles examine the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) “bible” for defining mental illness) and three books written by psychiatrists and experts describing the explosion of drug therapy for mental illness driven by pharmaceutical companies and those charged with compiling the DSM.

One cannot read these two well-documented articles[2] without recognizing the manipulation of medical treatment by pharmaceutical companies.  What else can be deduced when 1/5 of the funding for the APA comes from drug companies, which also publish much of the clinical research on drugs, and largely determine the content of the DSM? How close is the association of Big Pharma to the APA’s operation? Of the 170 contributors to the current DSM, 95 had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

How does this work on a doctor-patient basis?  Like most psychiatrists, Daniel Carlat treats his patients only with drugs, not talk therapy.  Dr. Carlat is quite candid about the drugs’ operational advantages and profitability to him.  Carlat is paid, with no collection issues, per patient by insurance companies and he can see three times the number of patients using drug therapy instead of talking therapy.  He conducts a routine interview asking patients a series of predetermined questions about their symptoms matching them with the disorders in the DSM.  His typical patient, he reports, might be taking Celexa for depression, Ativan for anxiety, Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue (a side effect of Celexa) and Viagra for impotence (another side effect of Calexa).

The authors of the next edition of the DSM wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that “in primary care settings, approximately 30 percent to 50 percent of patients have prominent mental health symptoms or identifiable mental disorders, which have significant adverse consequences if left untreated.”  By broadening the categories of “mental illness,” almost anyone can obtain psychoactive drugs.  For example, the treatment of “juvenile bipolar disorder” jumped forty-fold from 1993 to 2004.  Today ten percent of ten-year-old boys take daily stimulants for ADHD, and 500,000 children take antipsychotic drugs.

Why, you might ask, the explosion? There is a new trend involving “mental disability” in low-income families that apply for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments.  MIT economics professor David Autor calls this the “new welfare” as he cites growing numbers of for-profit firms specializing in aiding poor families in securing government SSI benefits; but to qualify, the applicants, including children, must be taking psychoactive drugs.  Profits and incentives abound for the families in extra government income, for those for-profit groups assisting families to get increased government benefits and the drug companies too that are helping to sate the segment of the population most likely to revolt (less to lose) in a country where government controls more and more of their daily lives.  Soma is all around!

A Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic drugs.  Some have gone too far and corruption is afoot.  Over the past four years, five drug companies have been fined for illegally marketing psychoactive drugs for reasons not approved by the FDA. However, these fines are marked up no doubt as the cost of doing business and despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, they have come out well ahead.

As in the Brave New World Huxley portrayed, overuse of drugs and manipulation by pharmaceutical companies is blatant and irrefutable.  Today irritable two-year-olds, inattentive fifth grade boys, and anxious middle school girls are all candidates for psychotropic drugs.  Government benefits for disability are far more generous than welfare, and the diagnoses are multiplying.  There is a 35-fold increase of children on “disability” in the two decades from 1986 to 2007, causing the New York Review of Books to label the problem an “epidemic.”

There is more to come as the president of the APA last year wrote that the new DSM, scheduled to come out in 2013 will justify further the use of drugs.  She wrote, “It became necessary in the 1970’s to facilitate diagnostic agreements among clinicians, scientists, and regulatory authorities given the need to match patients with newly emerging pharmacologic treatments.”

What does all this mean for the military, where drugs with warning labels for increased risk of suicide are given to young people, an at risk population, in six-month supplies?  There has been an eight-fold increase of soldiers on antidepressants since 2005, and the suicide prevention programs promoted by the Department of Defense continue to be focused on drug therapy.  It is clear from the 18% increase in suicides this year that the military needs to consider a new direction for supporting our troops, who do in fact have a soul that needs ministry dispensed by caring, talking chaplains and leaders, and not another pill.

Or maybe the direction needed isn’t a new path at all?  General George C. Marshall, one of America’s foremost soldiers of the WWII era, wrote of the soldier’s soul:

…I look upon the spiritual life of the soldier as even more important than his physical equipment…the soldier’s heart, the soldier’s spirit, the soldier’s soul are everything.  Unless the soldier’s soul sustains him, he cannot be relied upon and will fail himself and his commander and his country in the end.  It’s morale, and I mean morale, which wins the victory in the ultimate, and that type of morale can only come out of the religious fervor in his soul.  I count heavily on that type of man and that kind of Army.[3] 

“The Studies in Social Psychology in World War II Series,” produced by the Social Science Research Council, was one of the largest social science research projects in history.  Volume II, The American Soldier, Combat and Its Aftermath, Princeton University Press, (1949), reported data on the importance of prayer to officers and enlisted infantrymen.  Prayer was selected most frequently as the soldier’s source of combat motivation.

Why did John Adams write the second principle for the military in 1775 that soldiers attend divine services twice a day?  Why did General George Patton encourage every soldier in the third army to “pray as well as to fight?”

Our current military leaders have forgotten the strong moral support recorded in history from the War for Independence to the present.  First Principles Press has take the initiative to tell this present generation about the military’s first principles, where the call to arms included the moral support  and the brand of valor seeded long ago in the US military’s first principles of virtue and prayer.  “Endowed By Their Creator”: A Collection of Historic American Military Prayers 1774-Present is a collection of hundreds of years of evidence for the benefit of leader-led military prayer from the War for Independence to the present conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We ask every church in America to distribute Endowed By Their Creator to servicemen and women and their families and friends.  Together, we must tell this generation to “be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.  Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (II Timothy 2:1-4).