The current Covid 19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate the disturbing increase in rates of depression and anxiety in the community. The not-for-profit charity Mind Medicine Australia, which is seeking to establish safe and effective psychedelic-assisted treatments for mental illness in Australia, has produced some alarming statistics on mental illness in this country. The thrust of MMA’s argument is that 50 years of mainstream medication since the banning of psychedelics has completely failed the vast majority of sufferers of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addictions.
As a result of lobbying by MMA, the Therapeutic Goods Administration is seeking submissions from the public on a proposal to amend the scheduling of substances including psychedelics so they can be made available for therapeutic treatment. (The closing date for submissions was 28th September 2020).
What needs to be understood here is that psychedelics were banned in the US in 1970 by the Nixon Administration for political reasons. It was part of Nixon’s strategy to kill off the anti-Vietnam war movement, thus years of research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA was flushed down the toilet. Most other countries followed suit.
I would argue that the failure of the mental health system in general and mainstream medication in particular has manifested itself in the increased suicide rate and the emergence of, among other things, the media psychiatrist. This brings me to the 1991 series “Madness” presented by the remarkable Jonathan Miller who died last November, which explores the history and treatment of mental illness.
In one episode, titled “The Talking Cure”, Miller looks at the history of psychoanalysis. It begins with Miller driving along a huge freeway in the US whilst listening on his car radio to the ‘psychiatrist turned agony uncle’ David Viscott taking calls from the distressed, the lonely, the depressed and anxious. Miller tells us that Viscott was one of the brightest young psychiatrists of his generation, but he decided to reach a much wider audience.
David Viscott
There is something perverse about listening to a distressed pot smoking young mother of 3 who also takes 2 quaaludes a day (a barbiturate) giving an account of her life, with these accounts interspersed with joyful advertising. Miller believes that Sigmund Freud’s patients would have been horrified at the thought of broadcasting their private agonies to a huge anonymous audience.
We need to go back to the beginning. Freud discovered that in order to effectively treat the disordered patients who presented themselves in his consulting rooms, they needed access their unconscious mind by going through a process of autobiographical reconstruction. He recognised the way in which some patients would give a self-deceiving account of their past, which was largely due to a repressive process in the mind preventing access to its unconscious contents, which may contain pain or certain urges that are in conflict with the moral order of the social world. Freud discovered that the repressive process didn’t annihilate those contents. Instead, it was likely that those unconscious urges would surface in a disguised form such as slips of the tongue, or in dreams.
Freud believed that if in the course of a person’s development he/she fails to reconcile certain instinctive urges in the unconscious with the increasingly demanding social world, these unresolved conflicts can arrest a person’s development and manifest themselves as psychological illness.
Jonathan Miller
Only recently has there been a revival in interest in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore and the Imperial College in London leading the charge. Studies have shown how intensive treatments in psychedelics in a controlled environment can give patients access to their biographies and allow the processing of them once and for all. Psychedelics can open up new opportunities to patients and give them an entirely new perspective on life. Just 3 treatments over a 2 week period is usually all that is required. Results are very encouraging.
But in the absence of psychedelic treatments and other alternatives, plus the high cost of mental health care (Viscott charged $1500 for a 2 hour private session) many sufferers may have felt they had no option but to avail themselves of Viscott’s on air ‘services’.
I will certainly be making a submission to the TGA. I’ve suffered depression all my life, there is a history of suicide in my family and I’ve had enough.
Just as an aside. After reaching its peak in the early 1990’s, Viscott’s career and life quickly disintegrated. His method was to gently probe intimate details out of his clients before hitting them with a sledge hammer. It was undifferentiated, tough love shrink radio. But then his ratings declined along with his health. His marriage failed and new projects came to nothing. He died alone in 1996, aged 58.
References;
Los Angeles Times
“Madness” - BBC TV