The medical profession are researching alternatives to clozapine

http://jop.sagepub.com/content/21/6/657.abstract
Review: Combination therapy with non-clozapine atypical antipsychotic medication: a review of current evidence
Jenifer Chan et al.
2007


There's a DARE record as well though it seems they've been less critical of this paper than others. I can only read the abstract of the paper.


<sarcasm>
I'm so glad to see this is a research priority. It's great to see the NHS are pushing forward these sorts of papers. It's even bettter to see the amount of funding, the high quality researchers involved and the huge number of psychiatrists and experienced research professionals involved in the effort for medicine to stop killing people with antipsychotics. It makes me thing that doctors really care about their patients and the NHS really focuses on important research, rather than a million and one trials of treatments for smoking cessation which are left for years before reviewers get round to adding to the DARE database.


The NHS clearly has the deaths it causes through the use of clozapine and other antipsychotics high on the agenda.
</sarcasm>


Now that I've disengaged from using the lowest form of wit let me remember my project management training. A lot of modern project management theory came from NASA because they had the unenviable task of getting to the moon. The Apollo programme is was one of the most ambitious of mankind's endeavours (and it was mankind because women would have been smart enough to know that it was just men compensating for the size of their phalluses and they wouldn't have bothered).


I got some of my training around the time of my first major breakdown so my memory of it isn't fantastic. There are variables. Time. Quality. Resources. If you want something done well then you need lots of resources or lots of time. If you have little resources then it'll take a long time or it'll be crap quality. You get the picture.


Every day that someone doesn't do something about the clozapine deaths is another person killed by psychiatry's solution to treatment resistant schizophrenia. Clearly that's not a priority. The authors of this paper published in 2007 may be the best researchers in the world however it seems the psychopharmacy isn't their specialist area. The main author works at an eating disorders clinic. Her other papers are not on psychiatric medication.


I do not point this out to slate their research. I point this out to slate the medical profession and the NHS's attitude to the development of an alternative to clozapine even if it's still pharmcotherapy.


This paper was in the latest NHS Evidence email that came out today though it was published 3 years ago. Even the NHS Evidence team can't be arsed with clozapine research. It gets stuck at the bottom of the pile. Smokers like me who knowingly self-inflict a reduced life expectancy (and who pay for their treatment on the NHS through all the tax revenue) are more important than the lives of those people that psychiatrists knowingly reduce their life expectancy. There's regular evidence about smoking cessation treatments in the NHS evidence email.


In project management if time is of the essence and quality is important then what's needed is resources. This isn't just money. It's organisations such as the Royal College of Psychiatry getting their heads out of their arses and making research into alternatives to clozapine a priority. It's getting research psychiatry on the case rather than a couple of inexperienced researchers.


At least that's what I understand from my project management training. Back in the day some totally irrationally and potentially mentally ill President of America said that they'd put a man on the moon, gave NASA an unlimited budget and told them to get on with it. To John F Kennedy it was important to reach the moon.


Around that time was the real boom period of psychopharmacy. Psychiatry moved away from psychoanalytic methods of care which required time and patience. Instead they found the convenience of pills like an 18 year old clubber at their first rave. This convenience factor, the biomedical model of schizophrenia and psychiatrist attitudes to anything that isn't of their establishment means they'd rather keep on researching new ways to use clozapine rather than ways to stop using clozapine.


How many dead schizophrenics does it take? Wasn't the Thalidomide disaster enough?

Image via Wikipedia

Going back way back into prehistoric psychiatry there were great men like Pinel who removed the shackles from the men in the Bicêtre Insane Asylum. 200 years on he would piss in the face of psychiatry for it's continued use of the new chemical shackles.