Gwen Olsen is a former pharmaceutical sales representative. She shares how common the creation of conditions is, especially with antidepressants and antipsychotic medications. She also talks about the addictive nature of these medications and how many of them are meant to be given throughout the lifetime of the patient.
Scott: Are there safer therapies that you have maybe seen or are these, those kind of drugs that you sold and are talking about largely unneeded? Gwen Olsen: You know, there are crisis situations where someone may need one of these psychiatric drugs. Like I said before, I'm not anti-drug.
However, when you're talking about chronic use of any psychiatric drug, you are heading down a road of problematic side effects. There's just no way around it. And addiction. If you take a benzodiazepine or an anxiolytic, which are the anti-anxiety drugs like Klonopin, Xanax, valium, um, there's a large number of benzo's now that are out there. If you take those drugs for two weeks, you will be dependent, if you take them longer, you will be an addict. There are no exceptions to that!
And people do not understand that when they give you these drugs and prescribe them to you, they tell you 'you're going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life'. And the reason they tell you that is because nobody knows how to get you off of them safely and comfortably.
Because when you try to get off of them, most everyone has symptoms that mimic the exact same symptoms they were given the drugs for but they're more severe. So what you're told is 'oh, well what we thought' for example if you have an adverse reaction to antidepressants and become manic psychotic 'well, what we thought that you had was a depressive disorder, but now we realize this is part of a bipolar depressive spectrum because you've had this, you know event and therefore we're going to add another drug to your regimen and you're going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life'. And people accept that and walk away feeling that they're defective, that there's something wrong with them.
The fact of the matter is that many times it's their poor dietary habits, it's their lifestyles, it's their psychological issues from childhood or from their marriage. It's a number of other things and they haven't even investigated what the real root cause of the problem is. So what they do is start masking the symptoms with drugs, and you get more symptoms, more drugs and pretty soon you are what they tell you you were! Did you get that?! They create the disease to treat! And it's not just in the psychiatric field, but it's the easiest place to do it. Because there are no tests required to diagnose a person with a psychiatric illness. There's no blood test, there's no urine test, there's no PET scan. You might have a little questionnaire that you can fill out that's very subjective, you have a third party that's observing you for 'maladaptive behaviors', but they don't have any disease evidence.
That's what makes it so lucrative. Because you're a potential customer, I'm a potential customer. Anyone that has a death in the family, has a divorce, has a bad day, has a bad job, whatever! They are a candidate for drugs!
Scott: Are there safer therapies that you have maybe seen or are these, those kind of drugs that you sold and are talking about largely unneeded? Gwen Olsen: You know, there are crisis situations where someone may need one of these psychiatric drugs. Like I said before, I'm not anti-drug.
However, when you're talking about chronic use of any psychiatric drug, you are heading down a road of problematic side effects. There's just no way around it. And addiction. If you take a benzodiazepine or an anxiolytic, which are the anti-anxiety drugs like Klonopin, Xanax, valium, um, there's a large number of benzo's now that are out there. If you take those drugs for two weeks, you will be dependent, if you take them longer, you will be an addict. There are no exceptions to that!
And people do not understand that when they give you these drugs and prescribe them to you, they tell you 'you're going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life'. And the reason they tell you that is because nobody knows how to get you off of them safely and comfortably.
Because when you try to get off of them, most everyone has symptoms that mimic the exact same symptoms they were given the drugs for but they're more severe. So what you're told is 'oh, well what we thought' for example if you have an adverse reaction to antidepressants and become manic psychotic 'well, what we thought that you had was a depressive disorder, but now we realize this is part of a bipolar depressive spectrum because you've had this, you know event and therefore we're going to add another drug to your regimen and you're going to be on these drugs for the rest of your life'. And people accept that and walk away feeling that they're defective, that there's something wrong with them.
The fact of the matter is that many times it's their poor dietary habits, it's their lifestyles, it's their psychological issues from childhood or from their marriage. It's a number of other things and they haven't even investigated what the real root cause of the problem is. So what they do is start masking the symptoms with drugs, and you get more symptoms, more drugs and pretty soon you are what they tell you you were! Did you get that?! They create the disease to treat! And it's not just in the psychiatric field, but it's the easiest place to do it. Because there are no tests required to diagnose a person with a psychiatric illness. There's no blood test, there's no urine test, there's no PET scan. You might have a little questionnaire that you can fill out that's very subjective, you have a third party that's observing you for 'maladaptive behaviors', but they don't have any disease evidence.
That's what makes it so lucrative. Because you're a potential customer, I'm a potential customer. Anyone that has a death in the family, has a divorce, has a bad day, has a bad job, whatever! They are a candidate for drugs!