The Not Broken Project
The Not Broken Project aims to raise awareness around the disadvantage of overmedicalising distress and advocates for better systems in health and society.
Why this project is critical
About 7 million Australians (over a quarter of the population) are taking mind-altering drugs for emotional distress and behavioural challenges (anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD) as well as for ’serious mental illness’ (1-2% of the population). Their experiences are real and deserve proper care.
A ‘chemical imbalance’ hypothesis - the idea that something is wrong or broken in a person’s brain on a biological level that a drug can fix - justifies widespread prescription of these drugs. Scientific evidence does not support this theory.
Validation of symptoms can be a positive experience, but assuming a person may need drugs for life is disempowering, stigmatising, and false. The negative effects of these drugs can be life-altering and withdrawing from them can be very difficult. In Australia no meaningful help exists for deprescribing.
Social, environmental and developmental factors can play a major role in emotional distress and behavioural challenges, but drugs don’t address these.
Current drug-based approaches lead to ineffective government spending, distorted support systems and discourage development of better solutions.
Project goals
Our aim is that most people seeking help for mental distress or behavioural challenges will access support without being left feeling they have a broken brain or lifelong deficit that can only be helped by biomedical intervention.
There will be greater attention to and support for social and interpersonal solutions that help people manage their particular circumstances.
When doctors prescribe drugs to relieve mental distress or behavioural challenges, they will do so understanding that in most cases they are suppressing symptoms, not correcting an underlying chemical imbalance.
The project has three main goals
- Raise awareness of problems that have arisen from seeing emotional distress and behavioral difficulties as malfunctioning biology requiring prescription of psychotropic drugs. We encourage the public, medical professionals and policymakers to think more critically about the use of diagnostic labels and related prescribing.
- Help medical practitioners better serve their patients through a solid understanding of the scientific basis of what psychotropic drugs can and cannot do, their side effects and problems withdrawing from them.
- Change government policies to reduce the personal, social and economic costs of ignoring what patients, as well as science, are saying.
Ultimately, our hope is that a greater share of medical resources will be deployed to support the 1-2% of Australians who suffer serious mental illness and that the spending on less severe cases will be directed towards more appropriate interventions that target the underlying issues rather than trying to suppress symptoms with drugs.