Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

Clozapine is an FDA-approved atypical antipsychotic drug for treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Clozapine is not the first-line drug of choice due to its range of adverse effects, making compliance an issue for many patients. (Meaning patients will stop taking it because of the bad side effects.) So it is really a drug of last resort.

Psychiatrists rely on dangerous drugs like clozapine but cannot make up their minds if these drugs are safe when they clearly are not. Psychiatrists experiment on our most vulnerable people using a “drug of last resort” when they have likely misdiagnosed a real physical cause of the person’s distress which has a real medical treatment.

Clozapine was first synthesized in 1956. Initial FDA approval was in 1989. Shortly after its introduction, clozapine was linked to a serious life-threatening side effect, and it was withdrawn from the market temporarily in the same year. It was re-approved with strict monitoring requirements later in 1989. While clozapine is not considered addictive, abruptly stopping clozapine can lead to withdrawal symptoms; which may be why psychiatrists often use the euphemism “discontinuation symptoms” instead of “withdrawal symptoms” in order to avoid saying a drug may be addictive.

The clozapine controversy is not over; the FDA is hosting an in-person advisory committee meeting on November 19, 2024, to discuss reevaluation of the Clozapine Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, which is the protocol for mitigating clozapine’s serious adverse side effects.

Clozapine is primarily metabolized in the liver involving the cytochrome P450 enzyme system in order to be eliminated from the body. Abnormal CYP450 metabolism, either ultrarapid and/or diminished, can lead to the drug or its metabolites reaching a toxic level in hours or days, correlating with the onset of intense dysphoria [unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life] and akathisia [an inability to remain still]. A person genetically deficient in these enzymes, or who has an ultrarapid drug metabolism, or who is taking other (legal or illegal) drugs that diminish CYP450 enzyme activity, is at risk of a toxic accumulation of the drug leading to more severe side effects.

Clozapine is a dopamine and serotonin receptor antagonist, which means it blocks certain receptors in the brain for dopamine and serotonin. By interfering with these neurotransmitters in the brain the psychiatric theory supposes this is beneficial; however, the body must maintain strict balances of these chemicals because a surplus or deficiency of either can have disastrous side effects. So forcing the body into a different balance is like playing Russian Roulette with one’s brain.

This theory is called “The dopaminergic hypothesis of schizophrenia.” Unfortunately, it is not based on any true understanding of what schizophrenia actually is.

The condition was first called “dementia praecox” by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the late 1800’s, and labeled “schizophrenia” by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908.

Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, says the patients that Kraepelin diagnosed with dementia praecox were actually suffering from a virus, encephalitis lethargica (brain inflammation causing lethargy) which was unknown to doctors at the time.

Psychiatry never revisited Kraepelin’s material to see that schizophrenia was simply an undiagnosed and untreated physical problem. “Schizophrenia was a concept too vital to the profession’s claim of medical legitimacy. The physical symptoms of the disease were quietly dropped. What remained, as the foremost distinguishing features, were the mental symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre thoughts,” says Whitaker. Psychiatrists remain committed to calling “schizophrenia” a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality.

Today, psychiatry clings tenaciously to antipsychotics as the treatment for “schizophrenia,” despite their proven risks and studies which show that when patients stop taking these drugs, they improve.

The late Professor Thomas Szasz stated that “schizophrenia is defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behavior of which the speaker disapproves.”

These are normal people with medical, disciplinary, educational, or spiritual problems that can and must be resolved without recourse to drugs. Deceiving and drugging is not the practice of medicine. It is criminal.

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a person exhibiting signs of what a psychiatrist calls Schizophrenia can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Any person labeled with so-called Schizophrenia needs to receive a thorough physical examination by a competent medical -not psychiatric- doctor to first determine what underlying physical condition is causing the manifestation.

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, anxiety or panic. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well–being. Psychiatric drugs and psychiatric treatments are not workable.