“Elderly individuals with diabetes who are prescribed antipsychotic medication for the first time are at increased risk for hyperglycemia…A study published in the July 27 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine shows the risk for a serious hyperglycemic episode among some older patients with diabetes who recently started an antipsychotic was 50% higher than for their counterparts who had not taken this class of drug for at least 6 months.”
[Note: Hyperglycemia is an unusually high concentration of sugar in the blood. Chronic hyperglycemia at levels more than slightly above normal can produce a very wide variety of serious complications over a period of years, including kidney damage, neurological damage, cardiovascular damage, loss of vision, etc. Acute hyperglycemia involving glucose levels that are extremely high is a medical emergency.]
This MedScape article (http://cme.medscape.com/viewarticle/707068)Â goes on to quote a psychiatrist, Dr. John W. Newcomer, MD, from the Center for Clinical Studies at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who said, “Antipsychotic medications can contribute to risk for diabetes and can contribute to risk for destabilization of existing diabetes; there’s no doubt about that…Clinicians are so desperate that they routinely reach for them [antipsychotic drugs], and actually they might not work as often or as well as people think.”
Diabetes and hyperglycemia are only two of a much longer list of possible side effects from antipsychotic drugs. For more information about this, download and read the CCHR report, The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs.
The body is an extremely complex biochemical machine, with chemical reactions and flows that occur in harmony and rhythmically one with another. They happen in specific sequences, in certain quantities, and at exact rates of speed. When a foreign substance such as a psychotropic drug is introduced into the body these flows and inner workings are disrupted. The drugs may speed up, slow down, dam up, overwhelm or deny critical metabolic substances.
This is why psychiatric drugs produce side effects. This is, in fact, why they produce any effect at all. They do not heal anything. The human body, however, is unmatched in its ability to withstand and respond to such disruptions. The various systems fight back, trying to process the foreign chemical, and work diligently to counterbalance its effects on the body.
But the body can only take so much. Quickly or slowly, the systems break down. Like a car run on rocket fuel, you may be able to get it to run a thousand miles an hour, but the tires, the engine and the internal parts were never meant for this; the machine flies apart.
If you are worried about something—a problem in life such as relationships with your friends, parents or teachers, or how your child’s school grades are going—taking any drug, illegal or psychiatric, isn’t going to solve the problem. If a drug is used to feel better when you are depressed, sad or anxious, the relief is only for a short while. If the problem is not fixed or helped you will often feel worse than before. As a drug wears off, whatever pain, discomfort or upset that was there before taking the drug can become stronger. It can make you want to keep taking the drug.