I took an atypical antipsychotic drug similar to Zyprexa when I had encephalitis. I was suffering from delirium because I was physically ill. I had never been committed or sent to a mental hospital prior to this. The drug almost killed me.

My heart was racing, my head pounded to the point that I felt as if it would explode, my ears were ringing because my blood pressure was so high…I nearly died. My weakened physical condition may have contributed to the effects of the drug or maybe everyone who takes it has this reaction the first time. I can certainly understand why so many refuse to “accept treatment” if their experience is anything like mine.

I knew I was sick but I didn’t know I had encephalitis. I reported my severe adverse reaction to a primary care physician along with my cognitive difficulties. Instead of offering concern for my health, he was outraged that I suggested that the antipsychotic drug could have contributed to my condition. He then made my minimal and extremely limited mental health history public without my knowledge or consent, embellishing the story by claiming I was involuntarily committed. There’s an implied malice to his actions. The local police immediately put me at the top of their list of suspects in every situation from a small fire to terrorism and stalking with no evidence to support my involvement in any crime. Hysteria insued in the small community were I lived.

Unlike you, most doctors hold pharmaceutical companies in high regard and anyone with even a one time misdiagnosis of mental illness in contempt. Pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly who manufacture drugs for the mentally ill have a built in defense for any claims of adverse or deadly reactions to their drugs: the person is mentally ill.

If the drug injures a mentally ill person, the patients are just imagining it. Any person labeled menatlly ill, whether the diagnosis has any clinical justification or not, has no credibility in this society. It took psychiatrists 30 years to acknowledge that antipsychotics caused Tardive Dyskinesia and Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome. The objective evidence of these conditions was right in front of them for years, yet they denied it. Why? Because the people complaining about the effects of the drugs were mentally ill. No credibility.

Likewise, those labeled mentally ill have no worth as human beings. If they die as a result of taking a drug, it doesn’t matter because they were less than fully human to begin with. They are damaged people with defective brains so their lives weren’t worth living anyway. How else can one explain the fact that antipsychotics have killed many times more people than Vioxx did in the same period according to the FDA, yet not one antipsychotic has been pulled off the market by the FDA as Vioxx has.

Even animals have more protection from harmful drugs than the mentally ill do. The same antipsychotics used to sedate and disable animals in a veterinarian’s office are used on the mentally ill. Guidelines that limit their use in animals to protect them from injury are followed but not so with the mentally ill. I met a formerly gifted college student who after being dosed with antipsychotics is so brain damaged that he can no longer communicate effectively with others or function independently. His grieving mother can’t find a lawyer to represent him because what jury would financially punish a noble doctor for destroying the life of a worthless mentally ill person? Animals have more worth in our society than mental patients.

If you had revealed secret documents that proved that a drug for women with breast cancer or children with asthma or any other group of patients were dangerous, you would have been recognized as the hero you are for coming forward and breaking the silence. Instead you protected a group that is dehumanized, feared, hated, mocked and held in contempt in our society, the mentally ill. Thank God for doctors like you.

You’re right. It isn’t the lack of knowledge that allows these tragedies to continue. Employees at Eli Lilly knew for years how dangerous Zyprexa was and is. Not one of them came forward. It is the lack of moral courage to speak up and break the silence that creates and allows these atrocities.

Only when compassion and decency overcome cowardice and greed will this type of needless suffering and death end.
Sincerely,

Mary Ellen Gottlieb