Archive for May, 2010
Monday, May 31st, 2010
ArticlesRoad.com
May 29, 2010
The term “ADHD” is simply a label used to categorise a list of psychosocial traits that Psychiatry considers to be improper or abnormal in society. Psychiatry defines these traits as a “mental illness”, and promotes it as a “disease” that requires “treatment”.
It is not a “disease”, despite claims or implications made by certain psychiatric or pharmaceutical organisations. There is NO credible scientific evidence that shows the existence of what constitutes “ADHD” as a biological/neurological disorder, brain abnormality or “chemical imbalance”.
“For a disease to exist there must be a tangible, objective physical abnormality that can be determined by a test such as, but not limited to, blood or urine test, X-Ray, brain scan or biopsy. All reputable doctors would agree: No physical abnormality, no disease. In psychiatry, no test or brain scan exists to prove that a ‘mental disorder’ is a physical disease. Disingenuous comparisons between physical and mental illness and medicine are simply part of psychiatry’s orchestrated but fraudulent public relations and marketing campaign.” Fred Baughman, MD., Neurologist & Pediatric Neurologist.
“Chemical imbalance” it’s a shorthand term really, it’s probably drug industry derived “We don’t have tests because to do it, you’d probably have to take a chunk of brain out of someone – not a good idea.” Dr. Mark Graff, Chair of the Committee of Public Affairs for the American Psychiatric Association. July, 2005.
Such behavioural characteristics that Psychiatry created this unscientific “disease” from are, and always have been, generally considered “normal”. Now, it seems, inattention or “hyperactivity” (Hyperactivity means ‘excessively active’* — what is excessive? On whose authority?? It’s ridiculous!!) is abnormal, a “mental illness”.
Read entire article: http://articlesroad.com/adhd/what-is-the-defination-of-addadhd-according-to-the-dsm_iv.html
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Tags: ADD, ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, behavior problems, brain abnormality, chemical imbalance, child drugging, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, disease, dsm, DSM-IV, fraud, Fred A. Baughman, hyperactivity, mental illness, neurological disorder, neurologist, pharmaceutical companies, psychiatric drugs, psychiatry, psychosocial traits, schoolchildren, scientific evidence, treatment
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Monday, May 31st, 2010
The Epoch Times
By Gao Zitan
May 30, 2010
Although Beijing has always denied charges of psychiatric abuse of dissidents, the National Conference of Ankang Asylums held by the Ministry of Public Security in Wuhan, Hubei Province, on May 26 and 27 has inadvertently admitted these charges.
Ankang Asylums are special psychiatric hospitals administered by the police. According to a document issued by the Ministry of Public Security on January 29, 1988, Ankang hospitals serve two functions: to maintain social order and to provide medical treatment. The document also points out that Ankang hospitals, as a special means of maintaining societal control, are an integral part of the public security services.
As of now, there are 22 Ankang hospitals in China, and the ministry has asked that at least one Ankang asylum be set up in each province, according to a report in state-run China Daily on May 29.
The recently-held National Conference pointed out that Ankang hospitals should play a more important role in social surveillance and control, and that they should work closely with public security bureaus, police stations, and criminal investigation units. It also stressed that Ankang hospitals should not admit anyone who is not mentally ill “without the approval of public security bureaus.”
People from mainland China read it as an indirect admission that Ankang hospitals can detain perfectly sane people as long as it is approved by the police. They comment that, in the past, police have incarcerated mentally healthy petitioners into psychiatric hospitals without a word. Now they send out a warning.
Persecution under cover
Zhang Ningzan, a renowned human rights lawyer told The Epoch Times that persecution, especially of political dissidents and petitioners under the guise of psychiatric treatment, occurs more often nowadays.
News broke on April 25 that a peasant named Xu Lindong from Henan Province was locked up in a mental hospital for six and a half years for supporting his neighbor Zhang Guizhi in a land dispute between Zhang and the township government. He was shackled 48 times and given electric shocks 54 times during his incarceration.
Ding Hongyun, deputy head of the Psychiatric Hospital of Luohe in Henan Province explained that Xu was incarcerated because of his insistence on visiting Beijing to lodge complaints against the local government, thereby disrupting social order, according to a China Youth Daily report.
Yangcheng Evening News reported on April 9 that Peng Baoquan and Deng Fuhua, two residents of Shiyan, a city in Hubei Province, were detained in a mental hospital because they took pictures of a protest.
According to Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, on April 22, 2009, Pan Xiang, a citizen of Baoying County, Jiangsu Province, was kidnapped by local police and detained in a Yangzhou psychiatric hospital for nearly two months. Pan had asked the authorities to provide him with a letter allegedly written by Wen Jiabao in response to an earlier letter sent by Pan. He was forced to take medication, and as a result of an allergic reaction, developed edema in his legs.
Read entire article: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/36505/
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Tags: Ankang Asylums, asylums, Beijing, charges of psychiatric abuse, China, Chinese dissidents, Chinese Health Ministry, edema, electric shock, electroshock, forced drugging, human rights, incarcerated, kidnapped, mental hospital, mentally ill, Pan Xiang, persecution, police, political dissidents, psychaitric drugs, psychiatric abuse, psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric torture, psychiatric treatment, shackled, social control, Xu Lindong, Zhang Ningzan
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Monday, May 31st, 2010
True/Slant
By David DiSalvo
May 29, 2010
I came across the graphic below in Good Magazine online. Each pill represents one million psychiatric drug prescriptions. Of the 10 drugs shown, three are benzodiazepines prescribed for anxiety (Xanax, Ativan and Valium), and by far the most prescribed drug of the group is Xanax with 44 million prescriptions in 2009.
What surprises me about this is that of all the benzos, Xanax is the one most often criticized by the psychiatric community for its addictive potential and severe withdrawal effects.
The half life for Xanax is extremely short (6-20 hours) compared to all of the other drugs in its class, and it’s rapidly absorbed by the brain. On the face of it, this seems like a great combination–you get a quick hit of anxiety relief and the drug leaves your system within a 24-hour period. But in practice what often happens is that because the drug acts so quickly and dissipates quickly, the patient begins taking more of it to maintain the effect. Two pills a day turns into four, which turns into six and on and on.
That’s bad news, but it gets worse. As more of the drug is absorbed by the brain, the brain reacts by decreasing its production of GABA–the naturally occurring chemical that slows down brain activity when your cerebral gaskets start overheating. With so much of the sedative (Xanax) available, the brain’s efficiency process kicks in and turns down the GABA tap.
Read entire article: http://trueslant.com/daviddisalvo/2010/05/29/despite-its-infamous-reputation-xanax-is-still-the-most-prescribed-psychiatric-drug/
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Tags: addictive, anxiety, Ativan, benzodiazepines, benzos, brain activity, pills, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, psychiatry, sedative, side effects, Valium, withdrawal effects, Xanax
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Friday, May 28th, 2010
The West Virginia Record
By Lawrence Smith
May 28, 2010
RIPLEY — The murder-suicide of a Jackson County couple is at the center of a wrongful death, and product liability suit against New York pharmaceutical company.
Forest Laboratories and Forest Pharmaceuticals are named as co-defendants in a lawsuit filed in Jackson Circuit Court on April 30 by Robin J. Hall. In her six-count complaint, Hall, 49, a resident of Staats Mill, alleges Forest failed to alert both her father, and his physician of potentially dangerous side-effects of medication he was taking which resulted in him taking the life of his wife, then his own.
Located in New York, N.Y., Forest Laboratories is the parent company of Forest Pharmaceuticals based in St. Louis, Mo. Forest Pharmaceuticals handles the manufacture, sell and distribution of all Forest products in the United States.
In her suit, Hall says her father, Robert Raines, was prescribed Celexa by his doctor on April 24, 2008. Later that day, Raines purchased Celexa in 20 mg tablets.
Celexa is the brand name for Citalopram, a psychoactive drug in the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. It is used mostly for treatment of depression by altering a person’s serotonin levels.
Forest, Hall alleges, was aware Celexa caused an increased risk of suicidal behavior in people over 65, yet failed to conduct any further testing or investigation. Also, she alleges in its promotional materials, Forest failed to warn not only patients, but also physicians and pharmacists of that risk.
As early as Oct. 15, 2004, Forest was aware of the causality between SSRI drugs like Celexa and suicidal behavior in children. It was then, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered Forest to put a “black box warning” on Celexa for anyone under the age of 24 about the potential risk of suicidal behavior.
Read entire: http://www.wvrecord.com/news/227152-anti-depressant-led-to-elderly-couples-murder-suicide-jackson-suit-claims
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Tags: antidepressants, black box warning, celexa, citalopram, depression, elderly, Forest Laboratories, Jackson County, lawsuit, murder, murder-suicide, pharmaceutical company, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, side effects, SSRIs, Suicide, wrongful death
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Friday, May 28th, 2010
The Huffington Post
By Annie B. Bond
May 28, 2010
My friend Sally used to corral her three teenage children to clean their house every Saturday morning. I was envious of her chutzpa to demand this of her kids, but the part of the story that was always tragic to me was that every Saturday afternoon without fail, Sally’s son Sam was sent to his room for hyperactive, “out of control” behavior.
Looking at the cause and effect of the son’s behavior through my lens of awareness of how neurotoxic many cleaning chemicals are, I could see it would make sense that the son’s central nervous system and brain could be reacting to these chemicals. Symptoms of neurotoxicity include lack of concentration, personality changes, depression, hyperactivity and the mimicking of psychiatric disorders.
Not being particularly “green,” the cleaning products Sally would buy for her kids to use were the standard store-bought fare readily available in supermarkets. Examples of neurotoxins found in such products include VOCs (furniture polish can contain VOCs), neurotoxic disinfectants, petroleum distillates, fragrances (scented products are notoriously neurotoxic,) and waxes (VOCs again in the solvents), to name a few.
Pesticides take front seat in the arsenal of poisons that hurt the central nervous system and brain. After all, they are designed to kill. A new study reported in the June issue of Pediatrics, published online May 17, links organophosphate pesticide metabolites found in urine to a much higher incidence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-b-bond/neurotoxins-and-adhd-conn_b_592796.html
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Tags: ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, behavior problems, central nervous system, cleaning chemicals, depression, drugging children, green, hyperactive, hyperactivity, lack of concentration, mimicking of psychiatric disorders, neurotoxicity, neurotoxins, Pediatrics, personality changes, pesticides
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010
“The proposed DSM5 would be a giant step backwards for psychiatry. American psychiatrists should petition the APA to drop this ill-conceived and badly executed project.”
Psychiatric Times
By Irwin Feinberg, MD
May 27, 2010
A vital consideration we learn in medicine is that continuing life support for a moribund patient past a certain point is harmful to the lives of all concerned. We have reached that point with DSM5. Dr Allen Frances has outlined compelling clinical arguments against many of the new disorders DSM5 proposes and he has shown how their adoption could have far-reaching, unintended, and damaging consequences for the patients we have pledged not to harm, and for society generally.
I write from the vantage point of 50 years of psychobiological research. Most of it is in the field of sleep neuroscience. However, as often happens in science, one thing leads to another and my observations enabled me to propose that the human brain undergoes a profound reorganization during adolescence driven by synaptic pruning and that some cases of schizophrenia might be caused by errors in this process. My association at NIMH with Edward V. Evarts, one of the great neurophysiologists of the last half century, stimulated me to propose that the hallucinations of schizophrenia result from a failure of feed-forward mechanisms that distinguish self-initiated neural activity from that produced by external stimulation, resulting in auditory hallucinations and other first-rank symptoms.
It is difficult and time-consuming to produce reliable new knowledge; it cannot be accomplished by committee fiat, as Drs Kupfer, Schatzberg and Regier seem to be believe. Dr Frances has mentioned the damage to psychiatric research that several new, ill-conceived categories in DSM5 could inflict. He also pointed out that changing nomenclature and diagnostic standards in the absence of compelling scientific justification will severely damage psychiatric research as well as clinical practice. Many of these changes would make it impossible to compare decades of epidemiological results with new findings. Moreover, the sloppy thinking and language in the proposed revision will be apparent to any educated layman. The “field trials” and timetables proposed for new categories are laughable to any statistically trained psychologist. The inevitable public exposure of the gross defects in DSM5 will bring our entire field into disrepute and diminish public support for the research we need.
There have been no research advances that demand new diagnoses and syndromes. Despite many intriguing findings, no psychiatric disease can be diagnosed by a biological or psychological test.
Read entire article: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/1576554?CID=rs
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Tags: Alan Schatzberg, Allen Frances, American Psychiatric Association, APA, Darrel Regier, David Kupfer, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, diagnostic standards, dsm, DSM-5, ill-conceived categories, Irwin Feinberg, mental disorder, mental illness, NIMH, psychiatric disease, psychiatric research, psychiatrists, psychiatry, schizophrenia
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Examiner.com
By Jed Shlackman
May 26, 2010
Andrew Tighman, writing in the Marine Corps Times, recently described the investigation of Fred A. Baughman Jr., M.D. into the deaths of military personnel taking multiple psychotropic medications. Baughman was alerted to a series of soldier deaths upon reading a May 2008 article in the Charleston [WV] Gazette titled “Vets Taking Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Drugs Die in Sleep.” Baughman, a retired neurologist known previously for his criticism of medication treatments of ADHD and other mental health disorders, suspected that the reported cases could be part of a much larger problem. In the cases of four West Virginia veterans who died in their sleep in 2008 Baughman found that the deaths were not due to overdoses. The veterans were apparently normal upon going to bed, yet all died in their sleep after taking a combination of prescribed medications that included Paxil, Seroquel, and Klonopin. Each case involved a sudden cardiac incident and resulting death. This adds to growing concern about serious adverse effects of psychiatric medications commonly prescribed to emotionally disturbed or traumatized soldiers.
Research reported by Ray, et. al in the January 2009 New England Journal of Medicine noted that antipsychotic drugs doubled the risk of sudden cardiac death, while another study disclosed in March 2009 by Whang, et. al. found that antidepressant drugs also increase the rate of sudden cardiac death. A literature review of studies from 2000-2007 titled “Sudden Cardiac Death Secondary to Antidepressant and Antipsychotic Drugs” published in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety; 2008, No. 2, March 2008, pp. 181-191(14), found that “Antipsychotics can increase cardiac risk even at low doses, whereas antidepressants do it generally at high doses or in the setting of drug combinations.” In an Army Times article by Gina Cavallaro in February 2009 it was reported that more than 70 soldiers assigned to the Army’s warrior transition units had died, with at least 50% of the deaths attributed to natural causes that included a high number of cardiac deaths.
In one case investigated by Baughman an Army private was found dead in his barracks at Ft. Carson, Colorado, with sudden cardiac death reported by EMTs on the scene followed later by the death being re-classified as a suicide. Baughman suspects that there is an attempt to cover up the dangers of these psychiatric drugs, as the U.S. military, doctors, and drug manufacturers could be held accountable if it became apparent that these dangerous drug combinations are being used despite published evidence of the hazards.
Read entire article: http://www.examiner.com/x-12517-Miami-Holistic-Health-Examiner~y2010m5d26-Memorial-Day-2010-Psychiatric-drugs-triggering-deaths-of-US-soldiers-treated-for-PTSD
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Tags: ADHD, adverse effects, Andrew Tighman, antidepressants, antipsychotics, army, Army Times, deaths, FDA, Fred Baughman, Klonopin, Marine Corps Times, marine corps., medicated army, military, military suicides, overdose, Paxil, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychiatric drugs, psychosis, PTSD, Seroquel, sudden cardiac death, Suicide, Surgeon General of the Army, Veterans, vets
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
The Village Voice
By Foster Kramer
May 25, 2010
An excellent Newsweek cover story today brings the sad news that antidepressants depressingly don’t work. Which is sad, because – among other reasons – a lot of people use them. What’s even worse, however, is that they work less than placebos.
Sharon Begley writes that last month, The Journal of the American Medical Association published “landmark” work that the pros of taking anti-depressants aren’t that much greater than people on placebos of antidepressants, who think they’re taking drugs to get happy. Essentially, Begley writes, “antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.” Even more, the drug companies were like, “Well, you’re (basically) right, but you are all unique snowflakes, and that’s what keeps us in business!”
They point out that the average is made up of some patients in whom there is a true drug effect of antidepressants and some in whom there is not. As a spokesperson for Lilly (maker of Prozac) said, “Depression is a highly individualized illness,” and “not all patients respond the same way to a particular treatment.”
Read entire article: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/05/newsweek_antide.php
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Tags: antidepressants, antidepressants don't work, depression, Eli Lilly, Journal of the American Medical Association, Newsweek, placebo, prozac, psychiatric drugs
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Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
May 23, 2010
It has been a routine week in my clinical and forensic practice. I evaluated a malpractice case involving a woman on the West Coast whose family doctor from a decade earlier kept prescribing Prozac to her for ten years without ever seeing her again. When she ran into emotional difficulty, she called this doctor who simply raised the dose and added a new drug, still without seeing her for a decade. This woman, a respected professional and parent in her community, then landed in a hospital where her adverse drug reaction was mistaken for a mental illness, more psychiatric drugs were added, and she soon killed herself in a most horrendous fashion.
In this same past week of routine events, one of my own patients came to the office for an emergency session. He had sought my help to come off a cocktail of psychiatric drugs that had been prescribed for him during a personal crisis. We had recently cut back on his tranquilizers and he had become unable to sleep all night. He was feeling anxious and scared. “Am I going crazy, or is it drug withdrawal?” It turned out to be a withdrawal reaction that was easily handled by a slower taper of his medication. A very bright, creative young man, he had a series of traumatic events in his background. He needed counseling and encouragement, not a psychiatric diagnosis and drugs.
Meanwhile, my wife Ginger has been handling the flood of mail we get from our books, websites, and public appearances. People email and call the office identifying themselves as “bipolar” or “clinically depressed.” Or they describe their children in the same terms, as well as “ADHD.” By the time they contact our office, their lives or those of their children have been deeply complicated, compromised and sometimes ruined by psychiatric drugs. They can no longer separate their original emotional problems from their complex array of drug side effects. They devote themselves to adjusting their diagnoses and their drugs instead of addressing their lives. After yet another week like this, Ginger tells me, “You’ve got to write about our Psychiatric Civilization.”
The culture is so imbued with biological psychiatry — which is to say, modern psychiatry — that self-defined patients diagnose themselves, sometimes with the help of a one-minute TV ad. They visit their family doc, give him the diagnosis, “I think I have an anxiety disorder,” and get the appropriate drug. If they arrive a few minutes early, or the doctor is a few minutes late, they’ll get a chance to get educated by a flat screen TV in the waiting room which instructs them about the symptoms of the psychiatric diagnosis de jour as well as its treatment with a propriety drug.
Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/our-psychiatric-civilizat_b_586498.html
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Tags: ADHD, adverse drug reaction, anxiety disorder, anxious, biological psychiatry, bipolar, clinically depressed, creative, Dr. Peter Breggin, drug cocktail, drug withdrawal, emotional difficulty, emotional problems, malpractice, mental illness, Peter Breggin, prozac, psychiatric civilization, psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric drugs, psychiatry, side effects, Suicide, symptoms, tranquilizers, TV ad, withdrawal reaction
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Monday, May 24th, 2010
EarthTimes.org
By Fred A. Baughman, Jr.
May 24, 2010
Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD today announced the results of his research into the “series” of veterans’ deaths acknowledged by the Surgeon General of the Army.
Upon reading the May 24, 2008, Charleston (WV) Gazette article “Vets Taking Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Drugs Die in Sleep,” Baughman began to investigate why these reported deaths were “different.” And, why they were likely, the “tip of an iceberg.”
Andrew White, Eric Layne, Nicholas Endicott and Derek Johnson were four West Virginia veterans who died in their sleep in early 2008. Baughman’s research suggests that they did not commit suicide and did not “overdose” leading to coma as suggested by the military. All were diagnosed with PTSD. All seemed “normal” when they went to bed. And, all were on Seroquel (an antipsychotic) Paxil (an antidepressant) and Klonopin (a benzodiazepine).
They were not comatose and unarousable ? with pulse and respirations or pulse intact, responsive to CPR, surviving transport to a hospital, frequently surviving. These were sudden cardiac deaths.
At the time, Stan White, father of Andrew White knew of eight such cases in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.
In a February 7, 2008 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army’s surgeon general, said there has been “a series, a sequence of deaths” in the new “warrior transition units.”
In April 2005, the FDA warned that Seroquel put elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis at increased risk of death.
On January 15, 2009, Ray et al, reported that antipsychotics double the risk of sudden cardiac death. On March 17, 2009, Whang et al reported that antidepressants, as well, increase the rate of sudden cardiac deaths.
And yet, in an August 14, 2008 analysis of two of the four Charleston-area deaths, the Inspector General for Veterans Affairs concluded (Report No. 08-01377-185): “Although antipsychotic medications have been identified as possible causes of cardiac rhythm disturbances, a 2001 review…found no association with olanzapine (Zyprexa), quetiapine (Seroquel), or risperidone (Risperdal) and Torsades de Pointes (a fatal heart rhythm) or sudden death… we are unaware of any clinical practice guidelines recommending baseline or periodic electrocardiogram monitoring in young, healthy patients on quetiapine (Seroquel).”
However, in a literature review covering the years 2000-2007, entitled Sudden Cardiac Death Secondary to Antidepressant and Antipsychotic Drugs: [Expert Opinion on Drug Safety; 2008, Number 2, March 2008 , pp. 181-194(14)] Sicouri and Antzelevitch conclude: (1) “A number of antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs can increase the risk of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death?” (2) “Antipsychotics can increase cardiac risk even at low doses whereas antidepressants do it generally at high doses or in the setting of drug combinations,” and (3) “These observations call for?an ECG at baseline and after drug administration.”
Read entire article: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/fred-a-baughman-jr-md,1312839.shtml
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Tags: antidepressants, antipsychotics, army, benzodiazepine, deaths, dementia, FDA, Fred Baughman, Inspector General for Veterans Affairs, Klonopin, medicated army, military, military suicides, olanzapine, overdose, Paxil, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, PTSD, quetiapine, Risperdal, Risperidone, Seroquel, sudden cardiac death, Suicide, Surgeon General of the Army, Veterans, vets, Zyprexa
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