Archive for November, 2009

Psychosurgery as Psychiatric “Disease” Propaganda

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Fred A. Baughman, Jr.
Board Certified Neurologist,
Fellow, American Academy of Neurology
November 30, 2009

As suggested in the New York Times November 27th article, “Brain Power–Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk”, being unable to brush ones teeth and the act of showering for seven hours at a time are not medical or surgical diseases.  Even psychiatrists, having gone to medical school, know that a disease is an abnormality–gross (a lump), microscopic (cancer cells), or chemical (elevated blood sugar in diabetes).  But in the wonderland of psychiatric diagnosis, they would have us believe that each of their labels is a physical abnormality/disease /disorder, when, instead, each is a lie—devoid of science and truth.

Carey cites Ross, 21 years of age, who swears “It (psychosurgery) saved my life…I really believe that.”  Whether or not a patient believes he has a disease, and whether or not they believe a treatment’ has helped is subjective, proving nothing.  Carey persists: “ the first real application of advanced brain science …is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery…”  Because there are no diseases in psychiatry, psychosurgery is performed upon brains with no defined abnormalities—normal brains—powerful imagery to perpetuate the ‘disease’ lie—psychosurgery as ‘disease’ propaganda!.  In 1948 the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology made psychiatry and neurology separate specialties–neurology to deal with the diagnosis and treatment of physical/organic diseases of the nervous system, psychiatry with all problems emotional and behavioral, none of them diseases.

Nor does an article such as this, represented to be news, science and the truth, appearing on the front page of the New York Times, confirm or validate psychiatric diagnoses as brain or body abnormalities/disorders/diseases.

On Nov 10, 2008, Supriya Sharma, MD, MPH, FRCPC, Director General of Health Canada wrote   “For mental/psychiatric disorders in general, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and ADHD, there are no confirmatory gross, microscopic or chemical abnormalities that have been validated for objective physical diagnosis.  On March 12, 2009  Donald Dobbs of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, US Food & Drug Administration, wrote: “I consulted with the FDA new drug review division responsible for approving psychiatric drug products and they concurred with the response you enclosed from Health Canada.”

In psychiatry today, there is no regard for the brain, our #1 organ of learning, adaptation, and mental health, or for the truth that more persons recover from psychiatric ills to return to their homes and jobs absent drugs, shock, and psychosurgery than with any combination of such ongoing “treatments.”

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Pregnant women should stop medications which cause birth defects: “Psychiatric drugs can & should be avoided”

Monday, November 30th, 2009

The Daily Inquirer
November 29, 2009

Canadian researchers are saying that women who are planning to become pregnant should take an inventory of the medications they take.

The researchers have found that many pregnant women still take medications which can cause birth defects.

Dr. Anick Berard, at the University of Montreal in Quebec, said drugs that control epilepsy are essential during pregnancy, albeit known to have fetal risk.

However, medications such as those which treat severe acne, anxiety and psychiatric drugs, antibiotics, and many drugs prescribed for heart disease and medical conditions “can and should be avoided,” according to Berard.

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Psychiatric Patients Tied to Their Beds for Days in Greek Hospitals “just like a dog you tie up”

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews.com
November 28, 2009

Standards of care at Greek mental hospitals are still so atrocious that the European Union has threatened to cut funding for social projects if the country does not clean up its act.

“The system is in a state of reform, but I have to say that if patients are attached to their beds for hours or days, that’s totally unacceptable,” said Vladimir Spidla, the European Commissioner for Social Affairs. “For me it’s sad that this exists in the European Union.”

In 1989, a worldwide scandal erupted when photos were released of naked psychiatric patients restrained by chains in a hospital on the Greek island of Leros. Earning the name “island of the damned,” the hospital was condemned as the worst mental health facility in Europe. Since then, however, reform has come slowly.

A BBC reporter observed widespread physical restraint of mental patients at Dromokraitio Psychiatric Hospital, one of the two main psychiatric hospitals in the capital city of Athens. One woman was seen tied to her bed by a belt around her leg. When the reporter asked if the woman might remain restrained for years, a staff psychologist answered, “Yes, definitely.”

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/027604_psychiatric_patients_medical_malpractice.html

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Depression as a mass marketing campaign: Drug companies profit as antidepressant prescriptions increase

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Keith McLaughlin
The Argosy.ca
November 26, 2009

Since the emergence of antidepressant drugs in the early 1980s, more and more cases of depression are being reported. According to Dr. Brad Hagen, a clinical psychologist and faculty member at the University of Lethbridge, the reason for the skyrocketing rates of depression are a matter of heated debate.
“Depending on how you look at it, depression either started becoming more common or recognized, or it became marketed,” says Hagen.
In the 1950s, reported cases of depression were practically unheard of, but now the World Health Organization warns it could become the second leading cause of disability in the world by 2020.
Most persons with depression are treated by antidepressants, even though counseling – which can be significantly more expensive and time-consuming – has demonstrated equal effectiveness in offsetting feelings of depression. In the U.S, 87 per cent of physician visits for depression result in antidepressants being prescribed.
In 2007, sales of antidepressants topped $11.9 billion in the U.S.
Some in the medical community wonder if the spike in diagnosed depression cases over the last twenty years is exaggerated.
“Some question whether it’s an overinflated number because essentially there’s people that benefit from so many people being diagnosed,” says Hagen.

Read entire article: http://www.argosy.ca/view.php?aid=41974

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Depressed? Have anxiety? Psychiatry has a solution; the new ‘improved’ lobotomy. Just burn some holes in that brain.

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Benedict Carey
The New York Times
November 26, 2009

One was a middle-aged man who refused to get into the shower. The other was a teenager who was afraid to get out.

The man, Leonard, a writer living outside Chicago, found himself completely unable to wash himself or brush his teeth. The teenager, Ross, growing up in a suburb of New York, had become so terrified of germs that he would regularly shower for seven hours. Each received a diagnosis of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., and for years neither felt comfortable enough to leave the house.

But leave they eventually did, traveling in desperation to a hospital in Rhode Island for an experimental brain operation in which four raisin-sized holes were burned deep in their brains.

Today, two years after surgery, Ross is 21 and in college. “It saved my life,” he said. “I really believe that.”

The same cannot be said for Leonard, 67, who had surgery in 1995. “There was no change at all,” he said. “I still don’t leave the house.”

Both men asked that their last names not be used to protect their privacy.

The great promise of neuroscience at the end of the last century was that it would revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric problems. But the first real application of advanced brain science is not novel at all. It is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery, in which doctors operate directly on the brain.

Read entire article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/health/research/27brain.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss

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Believe it or not, NAMI says ‘safest way to treat severe depression in a pregnant woman is probably electroconvulsive (ECT) therapy’

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Believe it or not, The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI),a “patient’s rights group” for the mentally ill, is promoting Electroshock (ECT) for pregnant women as safe and effective. NAMI has recently been exposed for their extensive Pharma funding (3/4 of their donations; $23 million came from Pharma ) which may help explain their long standing promotion and fierce endorsement of psychiatric drugs which they are now attempting to downplay after being the subject of a Senate investigation. Not surprising then is the fact that NAMI also lists Cyberonics, an ECT machine manufacturer as one of NAMI’s Corporate Sponsor in 2008.

From NAMI’s website “The safest way to treat severe depression in a pregnant woman is probably electroconvulsive (ECT) therapy. Patients and families are sometimes frightened by the idea of “shock treatment,” but in fact ECT is safer than antidepressant medication for a depressed pregnant woman. It can be used during any state of pregnancy, but is less risky after the first trimester. The most common side effect of ECT is short term memory loss. Less frequent side effects usually respond to simple treatment. These may include: headaches, mild muscle soreness, nausea, adverse reactions to anesthetic or muscle relaxants, and heartbeat irregularities.

Read entire article: http://www.nami.org/Content/ContentGroups/Helpline1/Pregnancy_Pointers_for_Women_with_Psychiatric_History.htm

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Green Mental Health Care – Reclaiming Lives From Psychiatric Drugs

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

by Genita Petralli, Nutritional Biochemist
November 24, 2009

Genita_Petralli_blog_295x193The so-called “War On Drugs” has a new battleground – your doctor’s office, where the unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries presents a pseudo medical model that inflicts addictive, chemical abuse on innocent victims while lying to the public with “sales science” and calling it medicine. Their drugs are nothing more than variations of the very same illegal drugs the government has spent billions of dollars fighting—not because they care about you, only to preserve pharmaceutical sales. Make no mistake; a drug is a drug—pushed or prescribed. They are all toxic, and psychotropic pharmaceuticals are far more toxic to brain tissue and the liver; diminishing quality of life, causing multiple addictions and ultimately resulting in disease and death—never health and wellness!

My life is dedicated to reclaiming lives from psychiatric drugs and exposing psychiatry for what it is; a gang of white collar drug pushers robbing our society of every resource that supports it right down to our future; the children.

As a scientist and licensed practitioner I want to educate all those interested in what is causing the epidemic mental health crisis of today, how to avoid it, how to get off of psychiatric drugs if you are on them now, and why toxic drugs should never be sold as medicine.

My work is toward a medical model for all mental health issues to be based on patient outcomes and not profit. This is accomplished with Orthomolecular Neurochemical Rehabilitation (ONR).

green mental health careI wrote Green Mental Health Care – How to Get Off & Stay Off Psychiatric Drugs because the psychiatric patient with Prozac in his/her medicine cabinet is in even more danger than the crack head smoking crack. This is because the crack head knows they have to stop smoking crack to get well—the psychiatric patient thinks they are taking medicine and that their condition is the best they can hope for—when neither is true. They don’t recognize the fundamental truth that drugs injure the body and mind – prescribed or pushed.

To sit on the sidelines and do nothing while I watch people suffer from the effects of psychiatric drugs is not an option. I know what these drugs do to cells, tissues, critical organs and brain function and I can’t just turn my head because everywhere I turn I see more pain and suffering while Big Pharma continues to make bank and control society. They are literally using our money against us, forcing out all evidence-based holistic options that should be sponsored by public medicine like pharmaceutical drugs are. They are using our taxes and out of pocket cash spent on their drugs to buy lobbyists in Washington to get pro-Pharma laws passed and forced medical practices pushed through such as the Mother’s Act, the language of which is now in the health care reform bill. Come on, the notion of giving an antidepressant to a pregnant woman? These drugs are extremely harmful to grown adults; can you imagine what they do to the development of a fetus that doesn’t have the functional maturity to even try to protect itself from them? They will stunt every process of development in that child and already have been shown in numerous studies to cause birth defects.

Psychiatric drug use is particularly destroying the youth in our society. The vast majority of the mass school shootings are done by young adults on psych meds (see www.ssristories.com). People will say, “Well, that’s why they were on meds, there was something wrong with them” or “They weren’t taking their meds, therefore they went crazy.” Don’t believe this for a second, kids have been going through all the challenges and discomforts of adolescent bullying, ostracism etc.… since the beginning of time and it wasn’t until our toxic health care system started drugging them that they started taking guns to school and initiating mass murders.

Psychiatric drugs are responsible for increased car accidents, domestic violence, emergency room visits, hospital admissions, diabetes, cancer, aneurysms, tardive dyskinesia, suicide, violence, they are more abused by school children today than their illegal counterparts. As the damage these drugs do to the health of our global citizens takes its toll, they turn once productive people into parasites of society as we pay through our taxes for their subsidized housing, health care costs, and SSI/Disability payments monthly. Is it their fault? No- after all, they were told to take their medicine to get better—the only fault is that they believed their doctor whose practice is dictated by the “standards of care” created by a corrupt Big Pharma. We are all suffering the deluge of destroyed lives by these drugs and humanity as a whole is becoming crippled by them. I want to help stop the pain and suffering these drugs cause and teach what is causing their symptoms, how to find out what is the root cause, and how to cure it and live this one precious life we all share in the full spectrum capacity they were born capable of living it. I want to see humanity flourish and witness the beauty we are capable of creating on this planet. I want the planet to be inhabitable by my grandchildren and I don’t want them forced onto drugs for being children.

Government agencies are now forcing children to take drugs if a psychiatrist labels them with a “mental illness.” And they are calling those who speak against the government’s toxic health care initiatives “terrorists” and “crazy,” incarcerating and drugging them. The day I always feared has now seen its dawn; we are losing our right to refuse “medical care,” even with the volumes of evidence piled up that proves it is harmful, toxic and does not deliver its recipients to health. The people are too fog-brained by and addicted to their pushed and prescribed drugs in their food, environment and medicine to see what is happening and reclaim their lives and the potential of humanity that “God” is capable of. People are literally chemically lobotomized today and it is a pandemic.

You are no longer a freethinker if you are addicted to a drug, be it pushed or prescribed, and people are becoming more and more compliant as legal drugs become more and more prolific in our society. Only someone addicted, misinformed and symptomatic would find it plausible to believe that a toxic drug is a medicine and that that “medicine” has any chance of producing health and wellness. Big Pharma has done a very good job at creating masses of people who are addicted, misinformed and symptomatic in a very short period of time. The drug companies now have undue influence over our medicine, standards of care, our government and the FDA. They have become so powerful that they run our government to the point of using our own police to enforce laws that are unconstitutional that require parents to drug their children if their child is diagnosed with a mental disorder. Parents have had their children taken away for refusing to give them psychiatric medications! Yes, our own police officers have removed children from homes because their parents wouldn’t give them legal cocaine (Ritalin)!

This book is my contribution toward helping them get well and bring them from the dark corners they have quietly suffered in, into the light of health and wellness, hope, and the empowering feeling of being embraced by the love and compassion that those of us have for those harvested by the pushers of toxic “medicine.” With each person I detoxify and help to natural mental health, I am building an army of healthy environmentalists. By making the decisions you need to make to get well—starting with the needs of an individual cell to get well, you will by default become an environmentalist helping the planet detoxify and survive as well. When we discontinue the demand for the products that are making people crazy, we take their power and ability to buy Washington, the FDA, the NIH and their front people, psychiatrists (grants, ghost writing payoffs, schools, etc.) away. Our medicine and laws will become patient outcome driven as opposed to profit driven and those toxic chemicals that are causing disease, death and loss of quality of life will no longer be pushed upon us and offered at every turn of our head.

Believe it or not, we live in an era of “harvesting” and people are being harvested by psychiatry for future income. The pharmaceutical companies that are making the laws that force their drugs into people now pave the way for psychiatry’s methods. Psychiatrists are being sent to grade and intermediate schools to evaluate our children, they are the first “doctors” people being incarcerated see, elderly people in senior homes are being drugged to death. If you lose a loved one and are sad you get drugged, if you get in a car accident you are drugged, if you have anxiety about finals in college you get drugged, if you are going through a divorce you get drugged, if you’re not good at math you get drugged, if you speak against the government you are crazy and drugged. Psychiatric medication prescriptions skyrocket for those 65 and older, psych drugs are being pushed on television, in newspapers, magazines and through schools. The unholy alliance between Big Pharma and psychiatry is causing more deaths yearly than any illness if you consider not only the suicides and murders, but the diseases they are associated with.

Big Pharma and psychiatry are literally sucking the life out of humanity and destroying the ability to achieve the quality of life people hope to reclaim when they go to their doctor. For anyone interested in a free copy of the pamphlet version of my book, Green Mental Health Care – How to Get Off Psychiatric Drugs & Stay Off – A Comprehensive Guide to Staying Sane in a Toxic World, send an email to FindPeace@ShangriLaBioSpa.com.

Genita Petralli H.H.P., N.C., M.H., Nutritional Biochemist ~ Orthomolecular Neurochemical Rehabilitation, Psychiatric Drug Detox & Neuroendocrine BioRepair

For more information on non-drug alternatives for mental health or for more information on safely coming off of psychiatric drugs visit our alternatives page.

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Australia: ADHD guidelines pulled after scandal on U.S. child psychiatrist Biederman’s tainted/pharma funded research

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Kate Sikora
The Daily Telegraph
November 23, 2009

CONTROVERSIAL guidelines on ADHD have been pulled by the Federal Government following claims drug company payments to a doctor have tainted the work.

The Government has been forced to stop the release of the draft guidelines and may have to rewrite them following the embarrassing scandal.

A cloud has been cast over the draft’s validity after one of the psychiatrists, whose research into anti-psychotic drugs helped form the guidelines, was accused of failing to reveal payments from drug companies.

US-based child psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman is under investigation in America by authorities who have uncovered $1.6 million in payments.

The US Congress investigation has found Dr. Biederman failed to declare where all the money came from and has possibly breached federal and Harvard University research laws.

Australian authorities have been forced to admit the embarrassing discovery that has now put the guidelines – which recommend medication such as Ritalin as the best form of treatment for ADHD and are designed to help parents and doctors – in jeopardy.

Read entire article: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26386776-421,00.html

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Renowned researcher says public is mislead about antidepressants: they simply put people into drug induced states

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews.com
November 23, 2009

Contrary to the impression promoted by the psychiatric and drug industries, psychiatric drugs do not work by correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain, Joanna Moncrieff of University College London wrote recently in an opinion piece for the BBC. Instead, such drugs merely put people into “drug-induced states” that make it harder for them to experience the symptoms of their illness.

“Magazines, newspapers, patients’ organizations and Internet sites have all publicized the idea that conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be treated by drugs that help to rectify an underlying brain problem … just like a diabetic needs to take insulin,” Moncrieff writes. “The trouble is, there is little justification for this view.”

Moncrieff notes that prior to the 1950s, mental health workers largely saw antidepressants as psychoactive drugs, primarily sedatives, that eased the symptoms of depression without addressing the underlying cause – much as over-the-counter cold drugs may stop a runny nose without affecting the cold virus. This view was eventually replaced by the idea that depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and other mental health conditions result from chemical imbalances in the brain, imbalances that can be corrected by the right “magic bullet.”

Read entire article: http://www.naturalnews.com/027555_antidepressants_chemical_imbalances.html

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Psychiatrists want ‘binge eating’ as official mental disorder-millions of overweight Americans could be profitable target

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times
November 23, 2009

Rina Silverman’s refrigerator is almost always empty. She keeps it that way to avert episodes of frantic food consumption, often at night after a full meal, in which she tastes nothing and feels nothing but can polish off a party-sized bag of chips or a container of ice cream, maybe a whole box of cereal. The food she’s eating at these moments hardly matters.

In short order, the nothing that Silverman feels and tastes will give way to nauseating fullness, and a bitter backwash of guilt, shame and self-reproach.

The fullness, in time, passes. But the corrosive shame and self-reproach are always there.

Silverman, a 43-year-old executive assistant from Sherman Oaks, is one of the 145 million Americans who are overweight or obese. But the frenzies of consumption put her in a far smaller category of Americans, not all of whom are even overweight.

Silverman is a binge eater, one who is slowly inching her way toward recovery. She and as many as 1 in 30 Americans — roughly 7.3 million adults — are at the center of a psychiatric debate over whether and how to recognize binge eating as a mental disorder.

Read entire article: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-binge23-2009nov23,0,2869829.story

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