NIMH FOIA Data Reveals that FDA Should Stop False Chemical Brain Imbalance Advertising

NIMH FOIA Data Reveals that FDA Should Stop False Chemical Brain Imbalance Advertising

NEW JERSEY –With the age of retirement upon me, and the new freedom I have to fulfill a dream of a freelance investigative reporter, I find I am very much interested in the advancements and new developments concerning the human body. One thing in particular I found while researching on my computer from my New Jersey home, was a statement in the July 11th edition of “Psychiatric Times” [the official publication of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)]by APA Director Ronald Pies, about how the chemical imbalance of the brain theory of mental illness is “…urban legend – never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” The statement dumbfounded me as every advertisement on psychiatric drugs I have ever seen promotes that their drugs work by correcting a chemical imbalance and because the FDA is required to stop fraudulent advertising of drugs.

With that thought in mind, I decided to do a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the highest authority I knew, the United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for any evidence they had on file showing :
“1. That a chemical imbalance of the brain causes mental illness;
2. What a proper balance of brain chemicals and/or neurotransmitter levels would be; and
3. What neurotransmitter levels such as in serotonin or dopamine would cause a person to have different biological mental illnesses such as depression, bi-polar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia.”

I thought that they would send me a quick answer to what must be a very common question but instead of answering it, SAMHSA referred my FOIA request to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

I found it exciting and unusual that this major societal answer to such an important question about life, from the world’s two highest mental health authorities, would soon be delivered to a retired grandmother in New Jersey . It is this promotion of chemical imbalance and neurotransmitter-correcting drugs that is why people take them, why the drugs are supposed to work at all and why people, including children, the elderly in nursing homes, mentally disturbed persons, prisoners and many other individuals are ordered by judges and other authorities that they must take them. The advertising is so prevalent that the chemical imbalance theory has become pop culture. But, is it true?

NIMH’s FOIA department sent my questions to the NIMH public relations people who sent me an answer, sort of. Their December 16, 2014 answer gave me a link to PubMed which basically contains most all medical studies on all subjects from all time periods, along with links to various blogs on the subject by NIMH Director Tom Insel. There was no direct answer except for direction on where to research.

I decided that the PubMed link would be too far-reaching to be considered an answer to my questions so I started researching the data by Director Insel as the official NIMH/SAMHSA answers on the subject. There was a lot of information, mostly written in medical terminology and on related subjects such as the psychiatric diagnostic manual, the ineffectiveness of psychiatric drugs and how “they do not work on most people.”

You can follow this line of research that I was given with research to the NIMH website, Dr. Thomas Insel’s blogs on antidepressants and schizophrenia treatment, his article and this web page, www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/index.shtml by Insel and his blogpost. The only reason that I am giving you all these different data sources in such a disjointed manner is that it is how I received them from NIMH instead of simply getting an official answer.

As I went through all this data, I realized that NIMH’s stance was that their research from improved neuroimaging equipment showed that different types of behavior, like anxiety or depression, seemed to come from different sections of the brain, as opposed to the current neurotransmitter theories and that with more answers, maybe 20-30 years in the future, we may find the sources of mental illness so that cures can be created.

On January 16th, 2015, after doing this research of the links that NIMH sent me, I asked NIMH to confirm, in layman terms, my new understanding of NIMH’s view on the cause of mental illness which was:

“Mental health scientists previously believed that the mental illnesses of depression and schizophrenia were caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain that was caused by an overall lack of serotonin or increase in dopamine. Great advances in neuroimaging that has now allowed us to see much more deeply into the brain shows that these and other mental illnesses are connected to deeper disorders within the neural systems of various parts of the brain and not by an altered amount of neurotransmitters which makes us closer to fully understanding the diseases and to finding mental illness cures.”

Instead of getting a simple confirmation or slight alteration in message with a little public relations spin from NIMH as I expected, I was referred to two more links January 27th to further research which were http://chronicle.com/article/A-Revolution-in-Mental-Health/141379 and a video www.nimh.nih.gov/news/media/2013/introduction-to-rdoc.shtml#transcript_section

Since I realized that NIMH’s public relations department was seemingly fearful of even telling a New Jersey grandmother that the mental health emperor has no clothes regarding real science behind the reason for mental illness or how drugs work, I decided to research further into these two links and they were very revealing. If you check yourself, you will find that NIMH sees many possibilities for the different mental disorders and that they certainly do not come from neurotransmitter levels such as too much dopamine or too little serotonin as we constantly and fraudulently see advertised.

So, Food and Drug Administration, please do your job by banning these fraudulent and misleading psychiatric drug ads that have a large percentage of our population hooked on drugs. When researching several psychiatric drug ads, they all generally stated that although they don’t know exactly how their drugs work, experts believe that they are correcting a chemical imbalance of the brain and neurotransmitter levels that cause mental illness. That is obviously misleading as our highest official mental health authority, National Institute of Mental Health, is giving other reasons for mental illness and also states that these mental health drugs do not help most people and never cure anyone. US citizens are counting on the FDA to be truthful with those of us, who have put their trust in them for so long, to protect us from fraudulent marketing and unworkable drugs. The FDA certainly should not be complicit in covering up the truth.

If any government official or media representative would like the exact email exchange of documents with SAMHSA and NIMH, feel free to email me at bevmacphee@gmail.com.