When the Truth Is Too Inconvenient

     Peter Gotzsche, renowned watchdog of medical and psychiatric corruption, posted on Substack this week about a rogue editorial comment by a Daily Mail editor which was inserted into a recent article by Katinka Blackford Newman. British documentary filmmaker Newman had come close to killing her two children after the psychiatric drugs she was taking turned her psychotic.

     Newman had written her piece in response to the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial to highlight that it was Clancy’s horrific number of prescriptions (thirteen) of psychotropic medication which precipitated her killing her children and not necessarily post partum “psychosis” itself. Newman chronicles the sequence of antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and sleeping medication Clancy was prescribed that led up to her children’s murder.

     She writes that Clancy’s lawyer asked the judge to “let the jury consider ‘involuntary intoxication,’ arguing that the prescribed medication and the effects of stopping it could have contributed to her state of mind. The judge turned down his request.” An inconvenient truth to him, apparently.

     Newman then goes on to tell her own story, so similar to Clancy’s. She too had suffered “a severe adverse drug reaction: I had beliefs and impulses utterly alien to me, including the conviction that I had killed my children, then aged 11 and 12.” Newman and her children survived, however. “When the drugs wore off,” she wrote, “those beliefs disappeared – and have never returned.”

     She adds a corroborating quote from psychiatrist David Healy. “These drugs can produce states in which people with no history of mental illness do things that are completely out of character.” She then adds a statement that Peter Gotzsche himself had once made to her. “One of the best guarded secrets in psychiatry is that antidepressants increase the risk of violence, including suicide and homicide.”

     There’s no doubt in her article of her indictment of psychiatric drugs and the horrific harm they can cause. She gives herself, Lindsay Clancy, and others as pertinent examples.

     However, just before Gotzsche’s quote, this paragraph appears:  

     “We must be clear on this: psychiatric drugs can be lifesaving for some patients. But it’s also important to recognise that for a minority (approximately one in 100), they can be dangerous.”

     Gotzsche read that paragraph and, quite startled, asked Newman about it. She said she would never have written that. Some editor at the Daily Mail had added it.

     We could suspect that the editor had been given a free long weekend in Brighton by some Big Pharma rep, but that would be a bit too conspiratorial a theory. It’s more likely that Newman’s assertions in the article jarred too thoroughly with some unexamined idea in his own mind…probably some psychiatric marketing ploy he’d read so many times he believed it.

     Newman’s truth became too inconvenient an idea to fit into that editor’s worldview. Unfortunately, by adding in that paragraph he or she – like too many other journalists – inadvertently perpetuated and reinforced that faulty myth to the broader public. Truth becomes inconvenient when measured against a fixed idea.

     And that fixed idea becomes an inconvenient barrier for too many others for them to be able to view what the truth actually is.

     ”We must be clear on this: psychiatric drugs can be lifesaving for some patients.”