DOING MORE HARM THAN GOOD – Why Current Medicines Are Not Working For The Majority Of Patients

Join this free, 60-minute online webinar to gain access to insights and learn about ground breaking treatments to chronic mental health conditions.

Clinical trials assess the efficacy of psychiatric drugs over the short term. But what about their long-term effects? A comprehensive review of the scientific literature reveals that that psychiatric drugs, on the whole, increase the likelihood that a person will remain symptomatic and functionally impaired.

In this webinar Robert Whitaker (USA) will explain why current pharmacotherapy treatments for chronic mental illness fail over the longterm and the need for innovation to introduce new treatments to combat mental illness.

Learning points:

• How can the long-term effects of psychiatric drugs be assessed? What is the evidence that can be reviewed?

• A historical review of research on antipsychotics and antidepressants reveals that as early as the 1970s, researchers had begun to worry that these drugs might increase the “chronicity” of psychotic disorders and depression.

• Why would psychiatric drugs have this negative long-term effect? Researchers have hypothesized that it is because the drugs, over the long-term, induce abnormalities in brain function that is the “opposite” of what the drugs do over the short-term.

WEBINAR SESSION

Date: Wednesday 14 October 2020
Time: 7:25pm for 7:30pm start – 8:45pm (incl Q&A) (AEST)
The presentation WILL BEGIN AT 7:30pm.
Location: Online. A link will be emailed to you with the viewing details once you have registered.

Following the presentation there will be a Q & A panel with Tania de Jong AM, Robert Whitaker (USA) and Peter Hunt AM. This will be an opportunity to engage in a discussion about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies for mental illness broadly, and what Mind Medicine Australia and other local organisations are doing here in Australia.

More about medicinal psychedelic treatments:

Psychedelic-assisted treatments offer enormous potential in providing a meaningful alternative to current treatments for mental illness. PTSD is a debilitating condition that affects tens of millions of people worldwide, with many more trauma victims diagnosed with comorbid conditions such as depression, anxiety and eating disorders. In recent clinical trials, MDMA has been shown to produce reliable clinical improvements, restoring patient safety and self-agency even for individuals who have suffered with PTSD for many years, and for whom many treatments have failed.

The wave of clinical psychedelic research and regulatory support is rapidly building, with experts forecasting the availability of psychedelic-assisted treatments in the US and EU within the next 2 to 5 years, subject to positive clinical outcomes in large trials that are currently underway.