Anne Guy - How Therapists Can Help With Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Anne Guy is a member of the council for evidence-based psychiatry (CEP) and works with the secretariat for the All-party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. She's the lead editor and author of "Guidance for psychological therapists: enabling conversations with clients taking or withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs." (an abridged version can be found here). This guide is endorsed by the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, the UK Council for Psychotherapy, the National Counseling Society, and the British Psychological Society. Dr. Guy is also a practicing psychotherapist that does not rely on a model of diagnosis to help her clients.
Beginning as a claims manager for an insurance company, she got an up-close view of how the healthcare system worked and saw the biggest problems clearly. This "systems view" followed her into her work as a psychotherapist, where she attempts to navigate systemic failures that have resulted in the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs.
In this interview, we will discuss withdrawal from psychiatric medications, problems with psychiatry's over-reliance on the biomedical model, the difference between "addiction" and "dependence," and counseling beyond diagnosis. She notes that while withdrawal can be difficult, not everyone will experience it as severely as described—for example, research shows that 50% of people coming off antidepressants are likely to experience some kind of withdrawal reactions, with half of those describing them as 'severe.' Most reactions last weeks or months with a small group of people experiencing them for years.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:14.1 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Richard Sears, here today with Dr. Anne Guy. |
| 0:20.5 | Dr. Guy is a member of the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry and works with the Secretariat for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependents. |
| 0:29.1 | She's the lead editor and author of Guidance for Psychological Therapists, Enabling Conversations with Clients Taking or With withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs. |
| 0:39.1 | This guide is endorsed by the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, |
| 0:43.1 | the UK Council for Psychotherapy, the National Counseling Society, and the British Psychological |
| 0:49.2 | Society. Dr. Guy is also a practicing psychotherapist that does not rely on a model of diagnosis to help her clients. |
| 0:56.0 | Today we'll be discussing withdrawal from psychiatric medications, problems with psychiatry's over reliance on the biomedical model, and counseling beyond diagnosis. |
| 1:07.0 | Hello, Dr. Guy, and welcome and thank you for talking with us today. |
| 1:10.0 | Thank you, Richard. It's a pleasure and thank you for talking with us today. |
| 1:12.5 | Thank you, Richard. It's a pleasure to be here. |
| 1:15.9 | So we're just going to jump right into the questions here. |
| 1:21.8 | Can you tell us a bit about what brought you to your work and kind of what gave you a critical perspective of the biomedical model in psychiatry? |
| 1:25.0 | Yes, and it's a bit of a complicated history, just that I didn't start out as a |
| 1:30.8 | psychotherapist. |
| 1:31.6 | My first career was actually in health insurance in the UK. |
| 1:36.4 | So I worked for 20 years in health insurance. |
| 1:38.7 | And I learned a thoroughly medical model way of looking at the world through, you know, |
| 1:46.5 | obviously health insurance are there primarily to cover physical illnesses and disease. |
| 1:53.0 | But of course, they do cover emotional distress. |
| 1:55.8 | And they simply transfer their model of physical disease onto that of the mental world. And I just accepted |
| 2:04.4 | that I didn't really understand any differently. But I retrained as a psychotherapist about 15 years |
... |
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