Archive for July, 2011

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Australia: New laws to ban electric shocks on children

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

Note from CCHR: The fact that there is a proposed ban on electroshocking children is good news.  The fact that children are being electroshocked is abhorrent.   The truth is, that more than 1 million people are electroshocked every year, including  the elderly, pregnant women and children.   Even toddlers.     The practice needs to be banned across the boards.  Period.  Read this for the actual facts about ECT by  psychologist John Breeding, “Think They Don’t Electroshock People Anymore? Think Again, Even Toddlers and Pregnant Women are Being Shocked” http://qr.net/eplm

 

The Age, Australia – July 30, 2011

by Jill Stark

 

Electric shock therapy machines. Photo: Brendan Read

ELECTRIC shock therapy on young children will be banned and psychiatrists could be jailed for carrying out the controversial treatment on teenagers and adults without strict legal checks, under proposed legislation.

Under a review of Victoria’s Mental Health Act, new legislation has been drafted that would outlaw electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ECT, for children aged 12 and under.

Doctors would still be able to use it on 13 to 17-year-olds without their parents’ consent if they can convince a mental health tribunal that all other treatment options have been exhausted.

The same rules will apply to adults, with the final decision on whether to use shock therapy taken out of psychiatrists’ hands and given to the tribunal. Doctors who breach the laws will face up to a year in jail.

The treatment, immortalised in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, induces seizures by delivering an electrical current to the brain.

Proponents say the movie unfairly stigmatised the procedure, and the use of anaesthetic and advances in technology have made it safer. But its use on children, whose brains are still developing, remains contentious.

ECT is usually used to treat patients with severe depression or extreme mania whose conditions have not improved with other treatments. While it is still unclear how the treatment works, it is thought the shock-induced seizures affect chemicals in the brain that influence mood.

In submissions to the mental health review, legal groups including Youthlaw and the Law Institute of Victoria, along with Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary, the Mental Health Council of Australia and the national depression group beyondblue, have welcomed the changes, saying they provide greater protection for vulnerable patients. Others want the legislation to go further, with a complete ban for anyone under 18.

However, psychiatrists say the new laws are too punitive and could lead to increased suicides as severely depressed people are denied ”life-saving” treatment.

Last year The Sunday Age revealed there had been a 10 per cent rise in the number of patients receiving shock therapy since the previous year.

Almost 20,000 sessions were carried out on 1791 patients in Victorian hospitals in the 2009-10 financial year, including 46 sessions on seven children under 17 and a further 163 on an undisclosed number of 18 to 19-year-olds.

In submissions, the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and the Victorian branch of the Australian Nursing Federation called for the draft bill to be amended to allow shock therapy on children.

Doctors from the University of Melbourne department of psychiatry mounted the most strident objections to the changes, arguing they imply doctors are ”evil and want to harm their patients”.

One of the doctors, David Castle, who is also chair of psychiatry at St Vincent’s Hospital, told The Sunday Age that while shock therapy on children was extremely rare, it was a valuable treatment option.

”Anything that categorically bans it could be enormously damaging because some youngsters do get very severe depression and ECT is an extremely effective and very safe treatment. The new law means it’s going to be very difficult to give it to a patient, especially in an emergency when people are in a totally dire situation where they’re not eating or drinking or intensely suicidal,” he said.

Under the draft laws, doctors would be limited to a maximum of 12 sessions of electric shock therapy per patient and would have to seek permission from a mental health tribunal.

Youthlaw’s submission expressed concern about the effects of shock therapy on the developing brain and called for a ban on the treatment for patients up to the age of 25.

A spokeswoman for Mental Health Minister Mary Wooldridge said the reforms were complex and the state government was reviewing feedback.

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Harvard Expert Ties Mental Illness “Epidemic” to Big Pharma’s Agenda

Friday, July 29th, 2011

Minyanville
By Minyanville Staff
July 28, 2011

When the DSM-II was published in 1980, it became “the bible of psychiatry,” writes Angell, who adds, “but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions.”

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — better known as the DSM — has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there’s the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That’s a label almost everyone can lay claim to.

These codes are used by doctors, psychologists, and regulators to maintain a mutual language; it’s a handy shorthand system for bureaucratic purposes. But over the past few decades, the staggering, ever-expanding influence of the ever-expanding DSM, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, has also played a lead role in building wealth and off-label product uses for the major drug manufacturers. In an insightful essay in this week’s New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, explains how.

The medical director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Melvin Sabshin, declared in 1977 that “a vigorous effort to remedicalize psychiatry should be strongly supported."

Angell’s essay is based on a review of three current books examining the psychiatric industry: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker, and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry–A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat. She also cites the DSM-IV, the most recent edition of the manual, while her review traces big pharma’s role in our current mental disorder epidemic to the DSM-III, published in 1980.

To begin, Angell describes the psychiatric profession’s backlash against a developing perception in the 1960s and 1970s that the practice was a “soft” almost pseudo science:

In the late 1970s, the psychiatric profession struck back–hard. As Robert Whitaker tells it in Anatomy of an Epidemic, the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Melvin Sabshin, declared in 1977 that “a vigorous effort to remedicalize psychiatry should be strongly supported,” and he launched an all-out media and public relations campaign to do exactly that. Psychiatry had a powerful weapon that its competitors lacked. Since psychiatrists must qualify as MDs, they have the legal authority to write prescriptions. By fully embracing the biological model of mental illness and the use of psychoactive drugs to treat it, psychiatry was able to relegate other mental health care providers to ancillary positions and also to identify itself as a scientific discipline along with the rest of the medical profession. Most important, by emphasizing drug treatment, psychiatry became the darling of the pharmaceutical industry, which soon made its gratitude tangible.

Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

These efforts to enhance the status of psychiatry were undertaken deliberately. The APA was then working on the third edition of the DSM, which provides diagnostic criteria for all mental disorders. The president of the APA had appointed Robert Spitzer, a much-admired professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, to head the task force overseeing the project. The first two editions, published in 1952 and 1968, reflected the Freudian view of mental illness and were little known outside the profession. Spitzer set out to make the DSM-III something quite different. He promised that it would be “a defense of the medical model as applied to psychiatric problems,” and the president of the APA in 1977, Jack Weinberg, said it would “clarify to anyone who may be in doubt that we regard psychiatry as a specialty of medicine.”

When the DSM-II was published in 1980, it became “the bible of psychiatry,” writes Angell, who adds, “but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions.”

Despite its lack of citations, that DSM named 265 disorders doctors were meant to identify by matching (or mostly matching) a list of symptoms in the book with symptoms described by a patient. The drug companies were quick to see this radical shift in psychiatry as an opportunity. From the 1980s until now, as Angell demonstrates, the drug makers have supported the move away from talk therapy to the drug therapy, which also benefits practitioners, since doling out drugs and tweaking prescriptions earns a psychiatrist more money for less time spent with a patient.

Here Angell explains how companies influence the DSM itself. The bold typeface is ours.

Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

The drug industry, of course, supports other specialists and professional societies, too, but Carlat asks, “Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Unlike the conditions treated in most other branches of medicine, there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness—no lab data or MRI findings—and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that.

Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to NAMI

In addition to the money spent on the psychiatric profession directly, drug companies heavily support many related patient advocacy groups and educational organizations. Whitaker writes that in the first quarter of 2009 alone, “Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] and its local chapters, $465,000 to the National Mental Health Association, $130,000 to CHADD (an ADHD [attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder] patient-advocacy group), and $69,250 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.”

And that’s just one company in three months; one can imagine what the yearly total would be from all companies that make psychoactive drugs. These groups ostensibly exist to raise public awareness of psychiatric disorders, but they also have the effect of promoting the use of psychoactive drugs and influencing insurers to cover them. Whitaker summarizes the growth of industry influence after the publication of the DSM-III as follows:

“In short, a powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980’s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases. Pharmaceutical companies provided the financial muscle. The APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the enterprise. The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] put the government’s stamp of approval on the story. NAMI provided a moral authority.”

And now here we are in 2011, with almost everyone we know taking two or three different mood disorder drugs. (This trend is not limited to mental disorder, mind you. See Disease Branding.)

Work started on the DSM-V in 1999, which is due out in 2013. It will contain many new disorders, such as “binge eating” and “restless leg disorder.” It will also expand existing categories by tacking on words like “spectrum” to the end of a known disorder, Angell reports. “It looks as though it will be harder and harder to be normal,” she writes.

But the curtain gets pulled back further still.

In her review of Daniel Carlat’s book, Angell calls attention to the “disillusioned insider’s” frank admission that when he prescribes a drug, his decision process is largely guesswork. Carlat’s view is that although any psychiatrist will acknowledge that he or she has had great success with mental disorder drugs for say, depression or anxiety, no doctor can say with certainty whether the drugs are working or if a placebo effect has taken effect.

[Carlat's] work consists of asking patients a series of questions about their symptoms to see whether they match up with any of the disorders in the DSM. This matching exercise, he writes, provides “the illusion that we understand our patients when all we are doing is assigning them labels.” Often patients meet criteria for more than one diagnosis, because there is overlap in symptoms. For example, difficulty concentrating is a criterion for more than one disorder. One of Carlat’s patients ended up with seven separate diagnoses. “We target discrete symptoms with treatments, and other drugs are piled on top to treat side effects.” A typical patient, he says, might be taking Celexa for depression, Ativan for anxiety, Ambien for insomnia, Provigil for fatigue (a side effect of Celexa), and Viagra for impotence (another side effect of Celexa).

As for the medications themselves, Carlat writes that “there are only a handful of umbrella categories of psychotropic drugs,” within which the drugs are not very different from one another. He doesn’t believe there is much basis for choosing among them. “To a remarkable degree, our choice of medications is subjective, even random. Perhaps your psychiatrist is in a Lexapro mood this morning, because he was just visited by an attractive Lexapro drug rep.”

Messy. And, of course, the whole system is now being exported to China and other countries where the middle class is growing and the mental health industry is still in a developing stage.

Angell’s latest book is The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

Read the rest of her essay, which examines the controversial use of brain chemistry drugs to treat children, here.

http://www.minyanville.com/dailyfeed/2011/07/25/harvard-expert-links-our-mental/

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Drug firms paid ‘independent’ experts

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

Practice led to AG-whistleblower lawsuit

KXAN.com
By Nanci Wilson
July 27, 2011

Watch video: Allen Jones, former investigator, Office of the Inspector General, Pennsylvania

AUSTIN (KXAN) – When Cliff Gay was told to switch medications to treat his bipolar disorder, he never dreamed a significant gain in weight and then to twice-daily injections of insulin would follow.

In 1999, Gay’s doctor recommended he begin taking Zyprexa, which then was a new antipsychotic medication. At the time, Gay says it seemed like a good idea.

“The side effects were going to be less,” he said.

Gay says he immediately noticed a profound change — not so much in his symptoms, but in his appetite. Within a few months, he put on about 60 pounds, and that was followed by diabetes.

Records maintained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration show that such stories are not uncommon among patients across Texas who, who beginning in the middle to late 1990s, were switched to medications called “atypical antipsychotics.”

Many who have been put on the new class of drug reported similar gains in weight over time.

Doctors working in state hospitals and community mental health centers began switching patients to the atypical antipsychotics because they were deemed the best treatment by an expert panel convened by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

But a detailed examination of public records documents on file in a whistleblower lawsuit that has been joined by the Texas Attorney General’s Office allege that the experts hired to evaluate the drugs and make recommendations for their usage were also accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the companies developing and marketing the medications.

It started in the middle 1990s when MHMR contracted with University of Texas and some of its professors to evaluate the medications and develop a set of treatment guidelines.

The program was named the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP. The result was step-by-step guidelines for treating major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

TMAP was supposed to be based on the latest science, evaluated by an independent group of experts in the field.

But a 2004 lawsuit filed by whistleblower Allen Jones and the Texas Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Division against Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson, suggests that the project was actually a vehicle for boosting sales of expensive new drugs that government funded studies found were not more effective, but cost far more than conventional medications.

According to records compiled from company documents, Janssen was making substantial payments over several years to the decision makers, many of whom were University of Texas professors.

While the professors were under contract with the state of Texas to provide their expert opinions on medications, records show many were also being paid by the companies whose drugs were being evaluated.

The suit alleges that Janssen improperly influenced the development of TMAP and compromised the objectivity of the decision makers by paying consulting fees, funding research and providing extravagant meals and lavish travel.

Such relationships were not always disclosed in TMAP manuals distributed to state hospitals and community mental health centers.

The depth of the financial relationship between the drug companies and the Texas Department of Mental Health weren’t always disclosed, either.

Extent of funding not fully disclosed

Steven Shon, who then was medical director for Texas MHMR, publicly reported in media interviews pharmaceutical company funding for TMAP was only $285,000.

However, documents obtained through the Texas Public Information Act show far more funding from the companies whose drugs were recommended as a first-line treatment in the TMAP guidelines.

Donations to the Texas Department of Mental Health/Mental Retardation from pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Forest, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Janssen and Forest and Wyeth-Ayerst totaled more than $1.2 million.

An additional $2.8 million was donated by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, which stock portfolio benefits from sales of Janssen’s medication.

Shon claimed he never personally received any money from the drug companies. A claim that was disputed in financial records turned to the court over by Janssen.

According to court records, Janssen paid Shon nearly $30,600 in honoraria and travel expenses. An additional $17,000 was directed to Association of Korean Americans at Shon’s direction.

In June, 2002, Janssen hosted a meeting and paid the travel expenses for seven TMAP decision makers. The meeting was held at the lavish Mansion on Turtle Creek Resort in Dallas with the purpose of advising Janssen on its newest antipsychotic.

Attendees included Steve Shon MD, Madhukar Trivedi MD, Tricia Suppes MD, John Rush MD, Larry Ereshefsky MD, Lynn Crismon, John Chiles MD and Alexander Miller MD.

Trivedi, Suppes, Rush and Ereshefsky were employees of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Crismon was a professor

at the University of Texas School of Pharmacy in Austin.

Chiles and Miller were professors at University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

According to an expert report filed in the Janssen lawsuit, the meeting cost the company $114,000. The report says that the investment paid off. Shortly after, emails between some of the TMAP decision makers and Janssen discuss where the company wanted to place its newest antipsychotic on the guidelines.

The expert report, notes that other similar meetings were held at resorts in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Ritz Carlton in Amelia Island, Fla. In most cases, participants were paid an honorarium.

Court records show Janssen paid Crismon, now the dean of the UT College of Pharmacy, more than $61,200 for various consulting fees and speaking engagements, including some that took place in state hospitals and community MHMR clinics.

Janssen reported paying Alexander Miller, professor at UT Health Science Center in San Antonio, $82,485.42. John Chiles, a UT professor at the time, was paid $151,254.73. Crismon, Miller and Chiles served on the TMAP panel at the time they received the payments.

Huge boosts in sales

The pharmaceutical companies funded trips for certain members of the TMAP team for travel to other states to expand TMAP to other states. More than a dozen states adopted the guidelines.

It meant huge sales for the drug companies because TMAP not only recommended their drugs for disorders in which the FDA had granted approval.

But for some illnesses that were not approved. Doctors are allowed to prescribe a drug with FDA approval for any reason, but manufacturers are only allowed to promote drugs for disorders that have been approved by the FDA.

While TMAP was touted as evidence-based or based on science and actual experience, the medications chosen to be included in the guidelines raised questions to exactly what evidence was considered by decision makers.

For example, several of the participants were involved in one of the largest independently funded studies to determine which medications provide the best treatment for schizophrenia.

The Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness Study, known as CATIE compared several of the new antipsychotics, risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa), quetiapine (Seroquel) and ziprasidone (Geodon) with an older, cheaper drug, perphenaxine (Trilafon).

The results, announced in 2005, found the new drugs, which cost roughly 10 times as much, had no substantial advantage over the older medication.

Despite the scientific findings, the TMAP team continued to recommend the more expensive drugs as a first-line treatment.

In 2008, the TMAP guideline for major depression was revised. The first non-medication treatment was added. The Vagal Nerve Stimulator, or VNS, manufactured by Cyberonics, is a medical device that is surgically implanted and sends electrical impulses to the brain.

The studies provided to the FDA during the approval process were conducted by several of the members of the TMAP team, including John Rush of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Reviewers with the FDA found the evidence submitted to the FDA to be lacking.

They recommended against approval. However, their decision was overruled and the device was approved.

Alarm bells sounded

The reviewers sounded an alarm, and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation into the approval process. Its findings raised questions about how the device could be approved by the FDA absent the scientific data showing the product was safe and effective.

In a speech on the floor of the Senate about the investigative report, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley said the conclusions of the person overruling the decision raise serious questions.

He read from the override memo, “I think it needs to be stated clearly and unambiguously that [certain VNS data]failed to reach, or even come close to reaching, statistical significance with respect from its primary endpoint. I think that one has to conclude that, based on [that] data, either the device has no effect, or, if it does have an effect, that in order to measure that effect a longer period of follow-up is required.”

The FDA approved the VNS with the condition that the company would conduct further studies and report the results to the FDA.

The Centers for Medicare/Medicaid refused to pay the estimated $25,000 bill for VNS treatment for depression. Most insurance companies wouldn’t pay, either.

But that didn’t deter the TMAP team from including the VNS on the revised guideline for treating depression. Such decisions were made behind closed doors and records revealing which members approved the inclusion are not available.

Rush’s relationship with Cyberonics was not fully disclosed to the University of Texas in his annual Statement of Financial Interest filing. His filing dated Aug. 7, 2006, lists his role as a member Cyberonics Speakers Bureau with an annual income equal or

less than $10,000.

But in records submitted to the office of U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, by Cyberonics, Rush was paid $100,000 in 2006 by the maker of the VNS. Cyberonics also reported paying Rush more than $75,000 in 2003 and 2004, and $62,000 in 2005.

Of the 10 decision makers who worked on the revision to the TMAP guideline for depression, six reported they owned stock or had a financial relationship with Cyberonics, including the project director, Crismon. Such disclosures were made to their employers or though industry publications.

The UT School of Pharmacy reported Cyberonics was the source of funding for a $54,938 research project in which Crismon was the principal investigator.

In a news release by Cyberonics, the company said the purpose of funding the research was to use the data to convince Medicaid and insurance companies to pay for VNS.

“By demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of VNS Therapy for treatment resistant depression (TRD) through this standardized, extensive and thorough analytical approach,” the release said, “it is our expectation that many more payers will come to recognize and understand the unique safety, effectiveness and cost effectiveness of VNS Therapy and grant psychiatrists and Americans with TRD access to VNS Therapy through national and regional coverage policies.”

Several TMAP panel members wrote letters urging the Centers for Medicaid to reconsider and pay for VNS treatment for depression.

Cyberonics cited it’s inclusion in the revised TMAP guideline for depression as reason for the government to pay.

It didn’t work.

CMS ruled the evidence did not show the treatment was effective for treating depression. A year after the ruling, the revised TMAP guideline was published recommending VNS, although many patients in the states hospitals and community centers would have had to pay out-of-pocket for the treatment.

Travel and out-of-state lobbying

Some of the TMAP team members were instrumental in expanding its usage across the nation. Largely funded by the drug companies, UT professors and state employees traveled to other states to lobby state legislatures and conduct training sessions.

But not all doctors in Texas centers and state hospitals were on board with the program. Emails between the TMAP team blamed a reluctance to change.

Texas MHMR paid two University of Texas at Dallas professors $100,000 to design a change management program.

Doctors were still reluctant, so the state made complying with the TMAP program a condition of its contract with community centers. The centers were required to show they were in compliance or would lose a percentage of their medication funding.

TMAP was at one time heralded. It was included in recommendation by the White House New Freedom Commission Report.

Psychiatrist Daniel Fisher, who was appointed to the commission said, members were encouraged to include TMAP in the recommendations, but never told of the pharmaceutical company involvement or that members of the consensus panel that developed the guidelines received money from the drug companies.

Fisher said he was stunned to learn the depth of involvement of the drug companies.

“This is the story of the century,” he said.

The pharmaceutical involvement came as a surprise to Cliff Gay. He was asked to participate in TMAP activities early on in the development. His role was as a patient and family advocate.

“I am totally blown away by the amount of money that was put into this thing,” said Gay. “I didn’t find out about the extent of the payments until I went to work for NAMI Texas.”

According to expert reports filed in the lawsuit against Janssen, NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Texas, played a big role in helping TMAP and the pharmaceutical companies.

The expert report quotes from internal Janssen memos and depositions, efforts to utilize advocacy groups to their advantage, particularly NAMI Texas executive director Joe Lovelace.

The expert report filed in court reads “Lovelace received funding from J&J not only for the organization but personally, noting in his deposition that he deposited the monies in his wife’s law firm account because “she needed the money…there was a loss there.”

One of Janssen’s employees explained that “Lovelace desired to partner with Janssen as a consultant.”

Lovelace became a frequent speaker for J&J between 2000 and 2003. The report details the value of Lovelace when company officials asked if he would have NAMI members “come up to testify and relate their personal stories”, he responded by noting the when he had a chairman of a legislative insurance committee from Amarillo, he “made sure that a person in his church sat down in front of him.”

Lovelace no longer works for NAMI Texas. He is now the Associate Director of Behavioral Health for Texas Council of Community Centers.

TMAP’s rapid expansion began to crumble in 2004, when the first whistleblower lawsuit was filed against one of the drug companies involved. The State of Texas

Attorney General’s office joined in the lawsuit and filed suits against the other companies. Attorney Generals in other states filed suits, too.

Big-dollar settlements

To date, all but one of the suits has settled.

Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $15.7 million to Texas under a national settlement for allegations relating to its anti-depression drug, Serzone.

According to the press release issued by the Attorney General, the investigation also revealed BMS unlawfully marketing and promoting, Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic drug. It’s marketing partner, Otsuka paid $220,OOO to settle that claim.

Eli Lilly paid more than $30 million to Texas in a state and federal lawsuit over the marketing of its drug Zyprexa. In total, Eli Lilly paid $1.6 billion in criminal fines and reimbursing the government for charges to Medicaid.

The Texas Attorney General and 42 other states reached a $33 million agreement with Pfizer to settle claims of its marketing of Geoden to health care providers.

In a separate action, Pfizer also settled another case involving Geoden and another medication by paying $55 million to Texas as part of a $1 billion multi-state agreement.

Texas and 38 states reach a $68.5 million settlement with AstraZeneca stemming from a federal suit charging the company with unlawfully marketing Seroquel.

Texas share of the settlement was $3.8 million.

Janssen settled multiple Medicaid fraud and deceptive drug marketing cases related to its drug, Topamax, by agreeing to pay $50.7 million to several states.

Texas share is $2.86 million.

The Texas case against Janssen is pending and scheduled to go to trial in November.

Shon was fired as medical director for the state of Texas on Oct. 9, 2006. However, he was allowed to stay on the payroll in an unpaid capacity until he qualified to retire with full benefits.

He is now living in Las Vegas.

Crismon was promoted from professor to Dean of the UT School of Pharmacy. His work on TMAP was cited in the press release announcing his promotion. He continues to consult on guidelines for mental health treatment through a contract with the Reach Institute.

Rush left the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and is now working for Duke University in Singapore.

The other TMAP professors are still employed at various University of Texas System campuses.

Crismon declined to grant an interview for the report. KXAN’s request for an interview with Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa was denied, but UT System Vice Chancellor Barry Burgdorf said outside employment arrangements decisions are made by the individual campuses within the system.

“Supervisors are charged with evaluating requests to approve outside employment by assessing whether the potential outside employment constitutes a conflict of commitment — whether the time required to fulfill the outside employment would interfere with UT job duties — or a conflict of interest,” said Burgdorf, also the system’s general counsel.

“With regard to conflicts of interest in some cases the employee requesting approval of outside employment is required to enter into a conflict of interest management plan designed to prevent potential conflicts from maturing to an actual conflict,” he added. “Many times approved outside employment is synergistic with UT employment such as when a faculty member works for a start -up company spun out from UT using technology invented by the faculty member.”

In 2010, The Texas Department of State Health Services approved recommendations by a committee tasked to review the TMAP to stop using the guidelines.

Cliff Gay said he feels betrayed. He is among those who they were supposed to be helping.

“I don’t think any of them could look me in the eye and tell me they were doing it for me,” said Gay. “They did it for the money. It’s all about the money.”

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/investigations/drug-firms-paid-independent-experts

 

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Psychiatric disease labeling of children exposed as scam by non-profit group

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

NaturalNews – July 26, 2011

by Bella Muse

Child drugging has been a huge profitable market for Big Pharma, earning them $4.8 billion dollars a year. They have done everything in their power to convince the press, legislators and especially parents why children need to be put on drugs.

They claim that ADD/ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, etc., are medical conditions, and consider them on par with cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. But in reality there is no actual evidence that proves that psychiatric disorders are indeed medical conditions. They simply diagnose a child by using a behavioral checklist.

There are 20 million children in the United States who have been diagnosed with some kind of psychiatric disorder and drugged for it. It’s practically an epidemic. Innocent children are being turned into patients for simply acting like kids.

Not to mention that all those who are licensed by the government who can “legally” prescribe drugs are paid huge amounts of money by the pharmaceutical industry to write prescriptions of their drugs. But has anyone considered the side effects that these drugs have on children?

In 2001, Matthew Smith, 14, was skateboarding with his cousins when he collapsed and started turning blue. By the time the paramedics arrived Matthew couldn’t be revived and suffered a heart attack.

According to Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, the cause was Ritalin. Matthew Smith was only six years old when his parents followed the school social worker’s advice and placed him on Ritalin. She claimed Matthew had “ants in his pants” and wouldn’t sit still. After the autopsy, Matthew’s heart showed the same signs of vessel damage that are caused by amphetamines and cocaine.

Ritalin is a methylphenidate, and classified as a Schedule II drug. The DEA reserves it as one of the most dangerous and addictive drugs allowed to be legally prescribed. Some of the serious known side effects are heart palpitations, heart attacks, and cardiac arrhythmia. Why in the world would they prescribe this to children?

What is being done to these kids is truly child abuse. If children are not running around, being loud and constantly playing, then I’d be concerned. Forcing them to sit still and act like adults is unrealistic and cruel.

There’s so much that we can learn from our children if we stop and observe them. They are always in the moment. All they require is patience, understanding, and love. Not drugs.

Online resources:

The Fraudulent Nature of Psychiatric Labels Exposed by Human Rights Group

www.cchrint.org/2011/04/25/the-frau…

www.feingold.org/Research/ritalin.html

www.myhealthtoday.com

www.ritalindeath.com

www.chaada.com

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America conned: Psycho pharma drug pushing empire under fire

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

NaturalNews – July 26, 2011

by Monica G. Young

"psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed."

Is America truly stricken with widespread mental illness? Do tens of millions need mind-altering drugs? A recent flurry of media articles lead readers to a realization that Big Pharma and the “mental health” industry have deceived Americans on a grand scale.

The “New York Review of Books” two-part article by Dr. Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, summarizes it extremely well. She analyzes three books by authors Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. Each deconstructs the apparent mental illness epidemic and theory that mental disorders stem from brain chemical  imbalances which can be corrected by drugs.

Dr. Angell’s review has sparked a host of other journalists to applaud her and fuel the fire. An article in Forbes even concludes, “psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed.”

As an overview:

Ten percent of Americans over age six take antidepressants. Antipsychotic drugs, once reserved for schizophrenics, have become the top-selling class of drugs in the US, with over $14 billion in sales in 2009. ADHD, bipolar and autism diagnoses have exploded in the past two decades with at least 5 million US kids now on psychiatric drugs.  Ten percent of boys take drugs for ADHD. Half a million kids take antipsychotics, including preschoolers.

The chemical imbalance theory rose to fame when Prozac hit the market in 1987, accompanied by massive hype that it corrected a chemical deficiency in the brain. In the years that followed, the number of people prescribed drugs for mental illness skyrocketed. Today, “treatment” for mental disorders is synonymous with psychoactive (mind-altering) drugs.

Tracing the origin of this theory shows it wasn’t that chemical imbalances were discovered in the mentally ill and then drugs were devised to correct the imbalance. Instead, drugs created for other purposes were incidentally found to also affect brain chemicals and blunt mental symptoms. Drug companies, hungry for new markets, and   psychiatry, eager to build stature in the medical arena, leapt on this. They conducted a vast campaign to popularize chemical imbalances as the cause of mental disturbance and push drugs as the answer.

As Dr. Angell writes, “instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.” “Or similarly,” she says, “one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin.”

Many scientific studies disprove the chemical imbalance theory. After fifteen years of research, Irving Kirsch – psychologist and author of “The Emperor’s New Drugs” – concludes, “It now seems beyond question that the traditional account of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is simply wrong.” Research studies show psychoactive medications actually disrupt brain chemistry and causes the brain to function abnormally. This year prominent neuroscientist, Dr. Nancy Andreason, announced proof that antipsychotics shrink the brain.

Studies also demonstrate that long-term recovery rates are higher for nonmedicated patients. For instance, the World Health Organization conducted an investigation in fifteen cities around the world and out of 740 depressed individuals studied, those that weren’t on psychiatric drugs had the best long term outcomes.

In the pre-medication era, it was known that with time, people usually recovered from depression. If kids had tantrums, were unruly or shy, they were apt to outgrow it. Today, individuals branded with disorders are likely to receive long-lasting diagnoses, endless prescriptions and the poorer ones tend to remain on disability for life.

Big Pharma manipulation

Dr. Marcia Angell says the author of each of the three books agrees on “the disturbing extent to which the companies that sell psychoactive drugs – through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery – have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated.”

According to IMS Health, an information and consulting company, pharmaceutical companies spent $6.1 billion in 2010 in marketing to US doctors. Another $4 billion was spent on direct-to-patient advertising.

Drug trials, used to bring a drug to market, are funded by drug companies, heavily biased and misleading. Companies may sponsor as many trials as they like until they have just two positive ones to submit to the FDA. Great care is taken to hide negative trials. The highly positive results of placebo trials are downplayed: a high percentage of patients recover on a fake drug (like a sugar pill) – proving that the more a person believes he will benefit from a treatment, the more likely he will experience a benefit.

In regards the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – the psychiatric bible of mental disorders, used in prescribing drugs – Dr. Angell points out “in all of its editions, it has simply reflected the opinions of its writers.” The majority of the psychiatrists involved in creating the current edition had financial ties to drug companies.

Author Daniel Carlat points out that “psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies.”

Crime against humanity

And where has the “mental health” industry and “drug therapy” brought our nation?

As Americans line up at their local pharmacy, documented side effects are legion: weight gain, deadened emotions, diabetes, heart problems, liver damage, stunted growth in kids, shortened life spans and on and on. Those prescribed one psychoactive drug are commonly prescribed another to address side-effects, with many on daily cocktails of meds.

An estimated 2.2 million Americans are hospitalized each year for adverse drug reactions. Over 100,000 die from them.

Instead of decreasing, the number of adults on disability pay for mental illness has soared 250% since 1987 and for kids it’s a 35X increase.

The greatest  crime to humanity is the mass drugging of children. Yet it’s perpetrated within schools, doctors offices, foster homes and juvenile facilities daily.

There is good news. In the past few years, drug companies have faced a rise of multi-billion dollar class action suits. The key popularizer of childhood bipolar and antipsychotics for kids, Dr. Joseph Biederman, was publicly sanctioned by Harvard Medical School for failing to report $1.6 million he pocketed from drug companies. Some drugmakers are steering away from pursuing new psychoactive drugs.

Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

This chemical-imbalance/drug therapy lie has been told big enough and repeated enough, that much of America believes it. Isn’t it time we all put a stop to it?

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Battling over happy pills

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

The Boston Globe – July 26, 2011

by Alex Beam

A scholarly tug of war over treating mental disorders boils down to one question: Do antidepressants work?

In this corner: Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and frequent critic of the pharmaceutical industry. In the opposite corner: Dr. Peter Kramer, Brown University psychiatry professor and author of the mega-selling “Listening to Prozac,’’ a book that helped convince thousands of Americans to live better, chemically.

At issue: a two-part article by Angell, published in The New York Review of Books, that assails psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical helpmeets, mainly antidepressants, on several fronts.

Item: Angell, quoting, among others, Tufts University psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Carlat, attacks the widely held belief that depression and other mental disorders result from chemical imbalances in the brain.

Item: Citing the research of British psychologist Irving Kirsch, Angell writes that some of the most widely used antidepressants, including Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, and Effexor, performed only marginally better than placebos in Food and Drug Administration tests, a “clinically meaningless’’ result.

Item: Angell uses a book by journalist Robert Whitaker to suggest that newly minted antipsychotic drugs may be causing “an epidemic of brain dysfunction.’’

A few days after Angell’s essay appeared, Kramer published a lengthy essay, “In Defense of Antidepressants’’ in The New York Times. His key point: “Antidepressants work – ordinarily well, on a par with other medications doctors prescribe.’’ Kramer attacked Kirsch’s analysis of FDA drug trials, allowing that they can be “quick’’ and “sloppy,’’ and adding that the kinds of people who present themselves for drug research studies “are likely to be an odd bunch.’’

More convincingly, Kramer cited drug companies’ “maintenance studies,’’ in which patients successfully taking antidepressants switched to dummy pills. “If the drugs are acting as placebos,’’ Kramer wrote, “switching should do nothing.’’ But the drugs significantly reduced the odds of relapse. “These results, rarely referenced in the antidepressant-as-placebo literature, hardly suggest that the usefulness of the drugs is all in patients’ heads,’’ Kramer concluded.

What prompted Kramer to defend antidepressants? “I had never really come out and said that antidepressants work in ordinary ways for ordinary diseases,’’ he said. “Doctors work with these tools all the time. It’s true that these medications are imperfect, and we would all like them to be better, but we’ve all seen them work. You would have to start from a really suspicious stance to think that the whole enterprise is corrupt.’’

In an interview, Angell replied: “In his article, Kramer says it’s well established that antidepressants work for chronic and recurrent mild depression, but where is the evidence for that? That screams out for a reference. Should we believe it just because he says that?

“You can’t base judgments on anecdotes from clinical experience, because that can be very misleading,’’ Angell said. “I have faith in the evidence – in rigorous, randomized, double blind controlled clinical trials, and that’s the only way we can get at the facts. Medical history is filled with storytelling, and it is often wrong.’’

Whose side am I on? I’m biased. If there were a religion that combined the non-loony elements of Christian Science, Scientology, and Episcopalianism – a tall order, I know – I would sign right up. Psychoactive drugs frighten me. I embrace my dysphoria, although I am sensitive enough to realize that this isn’t a life strategy that works for everyone.

Also, I read Angell’s brilliant, anti-lawyer, anti-journalist book-diatribe, “Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case,’’ and loved it. I read Kramer’s “Listening to Prozac’’ and had trouble finding the handle.

So I appealed to Dr. Steven Hyman, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, now a visiting scholar at the Broad Institute, for a second opinion. Angell cites some of Hyman’s work – incorrectly, he says – in her NYRB article, so I figured he would have read both her essay, and Kramer’s.

He had. Hyman didn’t have much to say about Kramer’s Times essay, other than to remark that it seemed a little hurried. He had read Angell’s article closely, and was quite familiar with Kirsch’s “Prozac as placebo’’ theories, and with Angell’s low opinion of pharmaceutical companies. “I agree with her that the marketing practices of the big pharmaceutical companies have been awful,’’ Hyman said. “But it’s a leap to say that mental illness is a pharmaceutical company invention.’’ http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2011/07/26/do_antidepressants_work/

Note from CCHR to Dr. Steven Hyman:  You’re actually correct in stating “it’s a leap to say that mental illness” [as it has been falsely pawned off on the public as a biological/medical condition] is a “pharmaceutical company invention.”  You’re right. It’s not.   Drug companies can’t vote mental disorders into existence, categorize behaviors or emotions as “disease” and then without a shred of medical/scientific evidence to support them as such – repackage these behaviors as “illness” and pawn them off on as unsuspecting public as disease.  Only psychiatry can do that.  Pharma simply funds psychiatry’s mass marketing campaigns.   For more information click here: http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-disorders/

 

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Interview with “Psychiatryland” Author, Phillip Sinaikin, MD

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Scoop News – July 25, 20011

By Martha Rosenberg

"Psychiatry mimics science but is not a real science. The symptoms it treats are subjective and have not been demonstrated and cannot be demonstrated at the cellular level."

Phillip Sinaikin, MD, is a Florida psychiatrist who has been in practice for 25 years. His new book focuses on excesses and industry influence in the field of psychiatry.

Rosenberg: Your new book, Psychiatryland, traces how deception, conflicts of interest, medical enabling and direct-to-consumer advertising have resulted in millions being on psychiatric drugs they don’t need. One patient you describe has legitimate mourning and grief work to do after his wife leaves him for his own cousin. But his grief is pathologized into “bipolar disorder” by the system, including his own mother.

 Sinaikin: By the time I saw this patient, he was on Wellbutrin and another antidepressant, the mood stabilizers Eskaltih and Keppra, the antipyschotic Abilify, the tranquilizer Klonopin and Adderall for ADD. Calling grief a psychiatric disorder deflates and dishonors the spiritual dimension of loss and grief and the sadness which is a marker of the lost love. By the time this patient came under my care (three years after the loss of his wife) his “case” had become such a jumbled, incomprehensible and irrational mess of overdiagnosis and overmedication that the only word I can use to describe it is CRIMINAL.

Rosenberg: Can you explain the popularity of such drug cocktails? The drugs haven’t been tested together so the patient is a guinea pig. And their total cost can exceed $1000 per month, often shuttled onto taxpayers because the people are considered disabled under federal entitlement programs.

Sinaikin: Psychiatry mimics science but is not a real science. The symptoms it treats are subjective and have not been demonstrated and cannot be demonstrated at the cellular level. That gives psychiatrists free reign to just experiment and symptom chase, often insanely chasing the side effects and negative interactions of the current drug regimen with more and more drugs. Polypharmacy is also a way psychiatrists can distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive market. No one believes you need a specialist for one drug — any primary care physician can give you Zoloft — but for multi-drug therapy you do. If you don’t write a prescription as a psychiatrist, you won’t work these days. It is like being a pacifist and having no choice but working in a bullet factory.

Rosenberg: A lot of this trial-and error polypharmacy is buttressed by the concept of “treatment resistance” and “Prozac poop-out.”

Sinaikin: I write in the book that an antidepressant not working anymore is no different than getting used to anything that used to thrill us. We buy our dream house with two bedrooms and a garage and after a while it doesn’t make us happy anymore and we are eyeing the house with three bedrooms and a pool. Another example, of course, is falling in and out of love.

Rosenberg: You document in Psychiatryland the creation of new diseases to sell drugs including adults now diagnosed with childhood disorders like ADD and children with adult disorders like bipolar and depression.

Sinaikin: One scientific article I read about the new childhood disorders sounds like a satire. Two well-respected “thought leaders” in psychiatry were debating the underlying pathology of a three-year-old girl who ran out in traffic. The first doctor believed her dangerous behavior was indicative of an Oppositional-Defiant disorder. The other doctor argued her impulsive act represented grandiose delusions where this girl believed she was special and cars could not harm her. She was, therefore, bipolar.

Rosenberg: Another shocker in your book is how everyday drug and alcohol addicts were recast as having psychiatric conditions for money.

Sinaikin: The insurance companies told the rehabs they would no longer pay for inpatient rehab for heroin, cocaine or alcohol unless there was also another Axis 1 psychiatric disorder like bipolar disorder or major depression. I was working in a drug treatment facility when the change happened. Since addicts typically complain of anxiety and depression, a completely understandable emotional response to their toxic lifestyles, it was “no problem” to add a new label and throw a few psychiatric drugs at their now relabeled “dual diagnosis.” Of course the central tenet of recovery, taking personal responsibility, was buried by the new victim narrative of self-medicating a previously undiagnosed mental illness.

Rosenberg: Treating addiction with psychiatric drugs before or instead of seeking a higher power is antithetical to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sinaikin: As I say throughout my book, human beings are indescribably complex. There are times when the dual-diagnosis concept is necessary and helpful but clearly not applicable to 100% of the cases of addiction as it is now applied. I believe that the 12 Step model is an ideal model of recovery. Patients can have the help whenever they are truly ready, not just when someone decides to foist it on them. Most importantly, the addicts helping other addicts are doing it to facilitate their own recovery and not for ulterior motives such as money. Amazingly, in a world gone profit crazy 12 Step recovery programs are still free. I conceptualize the 12 Steps as a distillation of the spiritual principles world’s great religions but no one is forced to believe in anything including God.

Rosenberg: Given conflicts of interest at the American Psychiatric Association, which drives psychiatric diagnoses, in the FDA drug approval process itself and the legions of doctors willing to huckster for pharma as thought leaders or Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), do you see any hope of rescuing people from Psychiatryland?

Sinaikin: The system is unbelievably bad and even worse than it looks. But, I think a goal that could be achieved would be a repeal of direct-to-consumer advertising. Patients now come into my office asking me if they have ADD or bipolar disorder or if they can have Cymbalta. When I began practicing psychiatry, long before direct-to-consumer advertising, this would never have happened.

Psychiatryland

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The mass overmedication of foster children with psychiatric drugs

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Prison Planet – July 25, 2011

by Sally Oaken – Natural News

For a long list of reasons, the day-to-day life of a child in foster care can be challenging. Foster parents are often stretched thin and overburdened, foster children often wrestle with emotional issues that can go misdiagnosed, unrecognized or misunderstood, and qualified medical care for this vulnerable population is constantly in short supply.

These challenges are now being compounded by an additional concern: the over-administration of psychotropic drugs. Psychotropic medications are intended to combat or ease the symptoms of behavioral and mental health problems, but among children in foster care, these drugs are being prescribed at excessive levels and often for inappropriate reasons.

According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute, about 4 percent of the general youth population has received prescriptions for these drugs during the past decade. By comparison, the numbers for children in foster care fall between 13 and 52 percent. This study corroborates the findings of similar studies conducted in Texas and Georgia during the same time period.

There are several debatable factors that can explain the disparity in prescription rates between children in foster care and the general youth population. While foster children may appear to suffer from a higher rate of behavioral and mental health concerns, many of these behavioral issues arise as a natural response to trauma and domestic stress, and are being improperly diagnosed as mental health disorders.

Due to the time and financial constraints placed on care-givers and a lack of access to qualified medical professionals, it seems likely that many of these inappropriate prescriptions are written for the sake of convenience.

The reasons behind the trend may be simple, but the consequences of inappropriate prescription drug use can be tragic. Researchers cite many cases of children in the foster care system who are grossly overmedicated, irresponsibly medicated, or feel imprisoned rather than cared for while being regularly dosed with an indiscriminate cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Read the rest of the article here: http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-mass-overmedication-of-foster-children-with-psychiatric-drugs.html

CLICK IMAGE TO WATCH:  The Psychiatric Drugging of Foster Kids

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Mainstream psychiatry is failing – but there is another way

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Speak Out About Psychiatry wants to change the way mentally ill people are treated in the UK

The Guardian – July 25, 2011

I am sick of seeing friends who are seriously mentally distressed neglected and damaged by mainstream psychiatry. I am fed up hearing about people being detained, locked up and forced to take damaging medication before anyone has found out why they are distressed. I am angry about children being forced to take addictive psychoactive drugs by health professionals because no one could be bothered to work out why they are playing up. I met some others who wanted to change things and together we formed an organisation called Speak Out Against Psychiatry.

Speak Out Against Psychiatry is a group of service users, carers and advocates with direct experience of the psychiatric industry. We know that people who are mentally distressed need compassionate understanding and intense social support. We know that there have been many successful units around the world that have helped people resolve their problems with little or no medication. They have been relatively cheap and successful yet they are not being taken up in the UK. Why not?

Take Western Lapland, in Finland. There, the mental healthsystem is based on a method called Open Dialogue: lots of long conversations with family and friends. It has the best outcomes for first episode psychosis in the developed world. About 80% of participants are back at work or training within two years. Very little medication is used. These results should be the envy of the medical professional yet it is mainly ignored. Similarly, the Family Care Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden, allows seriously disturbed people to live with rural families for a year or more. They get therapy and the family can regularly talk over how things are going. It gets people off medication, a frightening contrast with the standard treatment from the NHS.

Here, psychiatrists’ main activity is diagnosis, yet many people do not find this helpful. They find talking about their lives and their symptoms helpful. Yet talking about hearing voices or the unusual ideas expressed by people experiencing psychosis is discouraged by mainstream psychiatry.

Most people who are extremely distressed have experienced immense personal trauma. Two-thirds of people diagnosed with schizophrenia had experienced physical or sexual abuse. Most psychiatrists ignore the evidence and prefer to talk about unproven brain disorders and imbalances in neurotransmitters. So the causes of mental distress are not fed back into wider social policy.

Then there are the drugs. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has no scientific basis and concerns about the drug Ritalin, used to ‘treat’ it are well documented. There are other ways of helping children who are in conflict with their parents and teachers that do not use potentially addictive medication. Equally, the prescribing of major tranquillisers such as Haloperidol to elderly people in hospital and nursing homes can be dangerous yet is becoming standard practice instead of developing staff skills in dealing with people experiencing dementia. Meanwhile, anti-depressants may be no more effective than a placebo. The serotonin hypothesis of depressionis rubbish. It is a marketing ploy by drug companies. Anti-depressants are potentially addictive and sometimes dangerous, yet one in three women take them some time in their lives. On top of this, electroconvulsive therapy is still used yet there has been ample research showing its dangers and it is just about useless.

Speak Out Against Psychiatry is inviting people to come along at 4pm on Wednesday 27 July, outside the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Belgrave Square, London, to tell us about their experiences of the damaging treatment they have received. We want to hear your stories and we want the Royal College to hear them too.

After the Speak Out we are going to Hyde Park for a picnic and to discuss our next move. I repeat, all the evidence shows that mainstream psychiatry and psychiatric medication is a waste of public money. There are better ways of helping people who are mentally distressed and we need to start using them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/mental-health

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Five dementia sufferers die every day from antipsychotic drugs

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

The Telegraph – July 22, 2011

By Martni Beckford, Health Correspondent

Five dementia sufferers die each day after being wrongly prescribed “chemical cosh” drugs, the Department of Health has warned.

Click image to read: The Psychiatric Abuse of Our Elderly

Many more hospital patients and care home residents suffer strokes triggered by the antipsychotic medications they are given to keep them sedated.

New GP-led bodies that will purchase services under the reformed NHS are being told to review the prescriptions of all 180,000 dementia sufferers currently prescribed the drugs, and to do all they can to give them alternative treatment.

A Dementia Commissioning Pack published on Thursday by the Department of Health states: “Thousands of people across England who are living with dementia are taking antipsychotic medication that they do not need and that could possibly harm them.

“Evidence tells us that although there are clinical situations where a time-limited prescription of antipsychotic drugs may be appropriate, antipsychotic drugs are often overprescribed and continued when alternative therapies are more beneficial.

“There is an unambiguous case for a substantial reduction in their use alongside the wider adoption of alternative interventions which we know can help to maximise the quality of life for people with dementia and their carers.”

More than 600,000 people in England already have degenerative brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s but the figure is expected to rise to above 1million within a few decades as the population ages.

A Government-commissioned report published in 2009 estimated that 180,000 dementia sufferers are being prescribed anti-psychotic drugs but in as many as 150,000 cases they are unnecessarily being taken, often to keep patients quiet in hospital or nursing homes.

Because the “chemical cosh” drugs are feared to worsen other medical conditions and speed up mental decline, it is estimated that they lead to 1,800 needless deaths – five a day – every year. In addition, they are thought to cause 1,620 strokes, half of which are severe.

The new commissioning pack tells doctors to review all the prescriptions for anti-psychotics by next April; to ensure that they tell hospitals and care homes they work with to look for “therapeutic alternatives”; to publish data on their progress; and to use schemes that pay more to hospitals and other providers if they meet targets.

Sir Ian Carruthers, dementia champion for the NHS, said: “Dementia is one of the greatest challenges society faces today, and it is essential that we get commissioning right so that people can live well in their community, and access more support when they need it.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8652593/Five-dementia-sufferers-die-every-day-from-chemical-cosh-drugs.html

For more information, read The Psychiatric Abuse of Our Elderly - http://www.cchrint.org/protectelderly/

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