"Clean up mental health medicating"

When atypical anti-psychotic medications arrived, a new era was heralded, one of abundant recovery and restitution for Patients and an end to continuing ill-health! Expectations sky-rocketed, and continuing care services went into a down-ward spiral from which they have never recovered.

But as the days turned into years, the glossy veneer of the atypicals was starting to wear thin, as certain marked adverse effects started to emerge. All we of asthenic build and a prognosis of chronic and enduring schizophrenia were rather grossly changing shape! All the people known to me with similar conditions who had made a switch to these newer medications were presenting in a similar way.

Not what the doctor ordered. Yet this medicating, with the new Mental Health Act, had now become Compulsory, with penalties for non-compliance of compulsory treatment orders placing us patients under considerable duresse. Our medications had become a rather bizarre Russian Roulette, where we were damned if we complied and damned if we did not. NICE still endorses these medications as treatments of choice. But I do not know of one of the atypicals which does not harbour these insidious effects to a measurable extent. Maybe the reader can help us here.

So what we have is a burgeoning burden of physical ill-health with a trail leading back directly to these medications - a prescription with noxious consequences.

I plead with the powers that be to bring an end to this intolerable impasse by petitioning pharmaceutical companies to step up their search for more appropriate targeted treatments, but I fear my pleas are falling upon deaf ears, as drug company after drug company turn their attentions away from the plight of patients with psychosis towards more lucrative pursuits. Well where now? I may not be here to find out, so I leave that to you and perplexed others, who might read this.