CCHR International » Blog

Psychiatric Meds 101: A Surprising Discovery

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:47:29 +0000

By Shane “The People’s Chemist” Ellison
Author, Over-The-Counter Natural Cures

I may be a perfect candidate for psychiatry.

I ask questions with period marks to shorten conversations. I avoid eye contact with strangers in fear (maybe it’s anxiety) that I might learn too much about them. I secretly think that Metallica would be making better music if they went back to bludgeoning themselves with party drugs and alcohol, instead of “therapy.” I’m trying to master the Law of Un-attraction to shield myself from a “real job,” small homes and junky cars. And, I’m constantly giving my children advice, only to give it to myself.

Psychiatry, can your drugs help me?

Perhaps these questions are what motivated me to pursue a career as a drug design chemist, winning multiple awards for my work. Nothing gets me more excited than drugs and how they affect the body (except my wife’s abs). I’ve studied their molecular anatomy, risked life and limb to mix and match explosive chemicals in a round bottom flask, and even sold my soul to Big Pharma in exchange for a lab bench and chemical hood.

During this time, I’ve made some surprising discoveries about psychiatric meds, which include antidepressants, antipsychotics, stimulants, and anti-anxiety drugs. Understanding what I’ve learned will protect you from the flood of side effects that are now being discovered at breakneck speeds, courtesy of the myriad of patients being prescribed psychiatric drugs in the name of mental health.

Your Own Personal Hell

Antidepressants strive to increase the levels of a “coping” molecule known as serotonin in the brain. It supposedly helps us find happiness when it’s covered in an avalanche of nastiness. But, it’s never been proven. Still, the drugs attempt to boost serotonin by “selectively” stopping the “reuptake” among brain cells. This is where the whole SSRI acronym came from—“selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.” It’s a slick name, but a stupid idea. Nothing is selective in the body.

While trying to block the reuptake of serotonin, antidepressants can also prevent its release and that of another brain compound known as dopamine. The areas of the brain responsible for release and reuptake of these neurotransmitters are so damn similar (after all, they work on the same molecule) that an antidepressant drug isn’t smart enough to understand which one it is supposed to work on. So it does what any dumb drug would do, it blocks both. That’s why users usually carry a glassy stare in their eye. Fully under the psychiatric spell, they’ve tuned out.

Deep sadness, fear, anger and aggression can set in over time. By removing serotonin and dopamine from the brain, long-term antidepressant users can’t find or feel happiness. Instead, they may become buried in the avalanche of nastiness. And if you can’t find or feel happiness in life, what’s the point? What’s going to stop you from snapping your own neck or spraying bullets on your classmates? Not much when you live in your own personal antidepressant hell.

Think this is all opinion?

According to the FDA, antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts and behavior, worsening depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, aggression, psychotic episodes and violence. Some even cause homicidal ideation according to the manufacturers. Many long-term antidepressant users will tell you they no longer feel normal emotions—they’re numb, like zombies.

But the side effects of these drugs aren’t limited to hijacking your feelings and emotional state, causing violent and psychotic states. Physical side effects occur too and include abnormal bleeding, birth defects, heart attack, seizures and sudden death. Over one hundred and seventy drug regulatory warnings and studies have been issued on antidepressants, to sound the alarm on these side effects.

For Elephant Use Only

Psychiatrists prescribe antipsychotic meds such as Zyprexa and Seroquel, for anything from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, psychotic depression, autism or anything else they can think of, even “pervasive developmental disorder,” which is perfect for boosting sales because it targets children who suffer from irritability, aggression, and agitation. It’s a shame ‘cause these drugs are good for nothing but sedating irate elephants, not curing psychiatric disease.

According to a study published in Psychological Medicine, antipsychotic drugs cause brains to shrink – they lessen brain matter and volume. Originally designed for those deemed “schizophrenic,” the drug companies came up with a brilliant marketing campaign to sell these drugs to a much wider market—unsatisfied antidepressant users. You’ve probably seen the ads—if your “depression medication” isn’t working, then don’t blame the drug; you may just have bipolar disorder!

Once swallowed, antipsychotics sail through the blood stream where they’re carried to the brain. Like a giant oil spill, antipsychotics cover the brain in a medicinal slick, where brain wave transmission is blocked. Users become devoid of normal brain activity. Motivation, drive and feelings of reward are shunted. If psychiatry considers this a “treatment,” they’re the crazy ones.

If you’ve ever seen someone who has suffered from the “spill” courtesy of following doctors orders, you can’t mistake one of the most common side effects, it’s called Akathisia. Involuntary movements, tics, jerks in the face and the entire body can become permanent side effects for antipsychotic users.

Antipsychotics also cause obesity, diabetes, stroke, cardiac events, respiratory problems, delusional thinking and psychosis. Drug regulators from the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa warn that they can also lead to death. I wouldn’t be surprised if psychiatrists considered this a cure…

Use This to Jump The Grand Canyon

If you’re going to attempt to jump your scooter over the Grand Canyon, or ride your snowboard off Kilimanjaro, stimulants are great. They flood the brain with dopamine and trigger an inhuman surge of adrenaline, responsible for making you believe life is grand, despite eminent death. Outside of that, you’re either a speed freak, a college student trying to learn an entire semester of Biology 101 in 4 hours, or a fifth grader “following doctor’s orders.”

Top stimulants being prescribed today are nothing more than a mix of amphetamines packaged into trade names like Adderall, Dexedrine and Ritalin. Street thugs sell it as meth, poor man’s cocaine, crystal, ice, glass and speed. It’s no wonder kids are now abusing Ritalin, Adderall and these drugs more than street drugs, they’re cheaper to get and they’re “legal,” hence the term kiddie cocaine.

Even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) categorizes Ritalin in the Schedule ll category, meaning a high potential for abuse—just like cocaine and morphine. All of them have the same effects regardless of how they’re named: Central nervous system overload leading to heart attack and/or heart failure. And kids are dropping faster than Meth Heads at Raves…

I’m not exaggerating.

Eleven international drug regulatory agencies and our own FDA has issued warnings that stimulants like Ritalin cause addiction, depression, insomnia, drug dependence, mania, psychosis, heart problems, stroke and sudden death.

Bash Your Head in with Anti-Anxiety Drugs

If you’re not man enough for a drug that could sedate an elephant like antipsychotics, then psychiatrists will prescribe anti-anxiety meds, particularly benzodiazepines. Choosing between the two is akin to deciding whether or not you should be hit in the head with an aluminum bat or a wooden one; anti-anxiety meds being the latter.

Discovered in the stinky chemistry labs of Hoffman La Roche in 1955, anti-anxiety meds aim to trigger sleep receptors in the brain, just slightly. So, rather than being riddled with anxiety, you are put to sleep, halfway. It’s “treatment,” and psychiatrists have been “practicing it for decades.” But, it has yet to work, because drugging your problems away is more dangerous than anxiety. The use of anti-anxiety meds is coupled with a host of nasty side effects such as seizures, aggression and violence once the drug wears off. Hallucinations, delusional thinking, confusion, abnormal behavior, hostility, agitation, irritability, depression and suicidal thinking are all possible outcomes according to Big Pharma’s heavily guarded research papers.

Getting off the drugs could be harder than abandoning a heroin addiction. Some have described withdrawal from “benzos” being akin to pulling hundreds of fish hooks out of their skin, without anesthesia. If you doubt their addictive nature, go to Google search and type in a few of the leading anti-anxiety drugs like Klonopin or Xanax and here is what you’ll find:

“Klonopin withdrawal” 1,860,000 results

“Xanax withdrawal” 1,980,000 results

Exposing Psychiatry: How to Get The Truth

In total, the side effects of psychiatric meds spread far and wide. And most are hidden from patients and doctors alike. Fortunately, Citizens Commission on Human Rights has solved this problem with a state-of-the-art database that allows people to search through the adverse reaction reports sent to the FDA on psychiatric drugs. It also provides international drug regulatory agency warnings and studies published on the side effects of the drugs.

So, can psychiatry help me? No. And that’s surprising because psychiatric meds are some of the biggest selling drugs, poised to seal the hopes and dreams of millions. Regardless of what mental state I might be in (or anyone else for that matter), there is not a single drug that cures, treats or solves the perceived problems of mental health.

While people can suffer miserably from emotional or mental duress that can hinder their lifestyle, the pseudo-science of psychiatry has yet to solve any of these problems, and in fact only contributes to poor health as seen by the wide array of side effects. Marketing campaigns and ghostwritten medical journals are designed to obscure these facts. But the psychiatric drug side effect database courtesy of CCHR ensures that all patients have access to the truth, to the documented facts, which could save their life or that of a loved one.

About the Author

Shane Ellison holds a masters degree in organic chemistry and is the author of Over-The-Counter Natural Cures. An award winning chemist, he has been quoted by USA Today, Shape, Woman’s World, as well as Women’s Health and appeared on Fox and NBC as a natural medicine advocate. Sample his book free at www.thepeopleschemist.com

To use this slideshow on your own website, you can use one of these two embed codes:

Error: Embedded data could not be displayed.

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug: Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

cchrint — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:00:46 +0000

By CCHR International
June 23, 2010

A new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and headed by psychiatrist John H. Gilmore, professor of psychiatry and Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, claims to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk” in infants just a few weeks old. We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study; there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or brain abnormality to start with. There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one. So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads)—it means nothing.

For decades, psychiatrists and Pharma have spouted lines to the press and public amounting to, “researchers now believe” they have medical evidence of schizophrenia as a physical/biological abnormality, or “new evidence suggests” evidence of schizophrenia as a real disease. But despite millions of dollars in research funds and countless tales of “belief” —no evidence to support the theory. One of the most common tricks employed by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry to mislead the public, legislators and the press, is to take X-rays or brain images of people who have been long-term users of antipsychotic drugs (known to cause brain atrophy/shrinkage) and then claim people with schizophrenia have smaller brains. They’ve spouted similar studies on kids with ADHD having smaller brains, but the bottom line to that study was that the kids with smaller brains, were…smaller kids. These are just a few of the many PR spins employed by Psycho/Pharma to try and maintain the “belief” in psychiatry, in their credibility as a science. As evidenced by the recent statement of psychiatrist Allen Frances, former DSM- IV Task Force Chairman, this belief is falling apart even within their own ranks, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” —Allen Frances (And Frances isn’t the only psychiatrist exposing the fraud of the biological brain disease model; click here for more.)

The logical question the press should be asking is what are the American Journal of Psychiatry and “the Director of UNC Schizophrenic Research” really after? What is their goal?

As we have exposed in the article “Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global” there is a concerted push being headed by Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry and other pharmaceutically funded psychiatrists for the global implementation of a new mental health paradigm; preventative mental health, i.e., pre-diagnosing (diagnosing children before they develop a “mental disorder”) and pre-drugging children ( before they show “signs” of the mental disorder). There is an obvious push for the same pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging agenda with this latest study, which claims ”major cases of schizophrenia are usually not diagnosed until a person begins witnessing its related symptoms like delusions and hallucinations as a teenager or adult . However, by that time, the disease [notice the term disease despite no medical evidence of disease] crosses the stage of preliminary treatment and is difficult to treat.” In other words, if we wait to administer drugs to them it may be too late. That along with Gilmore’s statement, “It allows us to start thinking about how we can identify kids at risk for schizophrenia very early and whether there are things that we can do very early on to lessen the risk.” This is the pre-diagnosing, pre-drugging agenda being pushed and the new “preventative” model of mental health that is more akin to a Brave New World than anything previously witnessed. And this latest “study” tells us infants are also on the agenda.

And finally, to psychiatrist and lead study author John H. Gilmore, we think you should take a lesson from the former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Chief of the Center for Studies in Schizophrenia, the late Loren R. Mosher, M.D. who stated in his letter of resignation to the American Psychiatric Association, “The fact that there is no evidence confirming the brain disease attribution is, at this point, irrelevant. What we are dealing with here is fashion, politics and money. This level of intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support my membership…After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this is my belief I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association. Luckily, the organization’s true identify requires no change in the acronym…”

To read more from Loren Mosher, including his two-year outcome study treating patients diagnosed “schizophrenic” without the use of drugs, his vehement stance against the biological psychiatric model of “disease” and more, click here.

To read the latest bogus psychiatric study, click here.

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global

cchrint — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:15:59 +0000

“Australia is a place that can actually change the world in mental health, provided we get the right government support to do so.” — Patrick McGorry

By CCHR International
June 16, 2010

A Public Service Announcement on Australian TV features Australian of the Year, psychiatrist Patrick McGorry, claiming that nearly half the population will experience mental ill-health during their lifetime. Considering that after World War II, psychiatrists claimed that one in 20 people had a mental disorder, and now it’s every second one of us, that’s a damning 1000 percent failure rate for psychiatrists in reducing “mental illness.” Let’s get real; the reason psychiatrists claim more people are mentally ill is because they can keep inventing new ways to label them mentally ill—but the press and governments are starting to catch on, evidenced by all the controversy surrounding psychiatry’s upcoming edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—better known as psychiatry’s billing bible. Yet of all the proposed “mental disorders” ranging from overeating to kids throwing tantrums, no proposed model of mental disorder is more insidious and dangerous than that of Patrick McGorry, who promotes diagnosing people before they develop a so-called mental disorder—drugging them before they become “mentally ill.” Yet the Australian government has bought into it hook, line and sinker—despite the fact McGorry’s plan is so outrageous, even his peers, such as psychiatrist Allen Frances, former Chair of the DSM task force, have called it ”the most ill-conceived and potentially harmful.”

Make no mistake, the pre-drugging agenda is Patrick McGorry’s baby—his dream for a new paradigm in mental health, one that has the power to diagnose and drug people before they become mentally ill—welcome to the Brave New World of Patrick McGorry. And he isn’t stopping with Australia; his plan is to go global. As he recently stated, “Australia is a place that can actually change the world in mental health, provided we get the right government support to do so.”[1]

The fact that McGorry’s agenda is so controversial—it even has other psychiatrists protesting it—has not deterred the Australian government from funding this “ill-conceived” plan. A recent letter to Citizens Commission on Human Rights states, “The Australian Government is providing $25.5 million over four years from 2010-2011 to expand Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) model,” developed by McGorry who founded EPPIC and the Orygen Youth Health in Victoria, Australia.

The Australian Government has already been criticized for massive expenditure on psychotropic drugs increasing more than 660 percent during the last decade—with a whopping 3,100 percent increase on antipsychotic drugs (with at least 15 Australian deaths in the under 19 year olds as a tragic consequence of this). This can only get worse when under McGorry’s plan, with an enormous client base that can be prescribed drugs despite the fact they are not yet “mentally ill.” It’s called prodrome (prodromos meaning the forerunner of an event)—referring to “a period of prepsychotic disturbance” that may or may not develop into psychosis or “schizophrenia”[2]—in other words, the crystal ball theory.

Australia Meets the US in Pre-Drug Scam

McGorry’s plan for Australia to “lead the change” in world mental health is happening—to the detriment of those who may be forced to undergo drug treatment based on a psychiatrist’s hunch that they might, one day, become ill. In the U.S., on May 13, 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services convened a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) discussed “emerging evidence around psychopharmacological interventions for first episode schizophrenia” citing the research efforts of McGorry and others.[3]

The push for pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging has even those within the psychiatric profession calling foul; Dr. Richard Warner, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, counters the idea that science drives McGorry’s pre-disorder assessment, stating, “Given the expected number of false positives, the potential for harm is significant.”[4]

However, as Anthony Pelosi, honorary professor, Department of Psychiatry, Hairmyres Hospital, wrote in a counter to McGorry in the British Medical Journal last year, “this has not stopped their skillful lobbying of politicians, journalists, patients, and carers with upbeat messages about the prevention.”

“Skillful lobbying” is right.

In 2006 McGorry and other researchers, including psychiatrist Michael Berk, Karen Hallam, Craig McNeil, Linda Kaler and psychologist Melissa Hasty reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, “Evidence increasingly indicates that earlier identification may allow for appropriate pharmacological and psychosocial treatments….”[5]

Could they have a Pharma incentive behind this agenda? Berk is financially linked to AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen-Cilag, Lundbeck, Organon, Novartis, Mayne Pharma, Servier, Sanofi-Synthelabo, Solvay, and Wyeth and Pfizer.[6] Hallam disclosed received speaker fees from Janssen-Cilag; McNeil received consultancy fees, speaker fees and travel assistance from Eli Lilly, Janssen-Cilag and Sanofi-Aventis; and Hasty and Linda received financial assistance to attend conferences from or Janssen-Cilag, maker of the antipsychotic Risperdal (resperidone).[7]

McGorry has received grant support from Eli Lilly, Janssen-Cilag, Bristol Myers Squibb,Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, and Novartis.[8] He is a paid consultantfor, and has received speaker’s fees from all or most of these companies.[9] Studies published in the British Medical Journal in 2005 and 2008 declared McGorry’s “early interventionstudies have received partial support in the form of investigator-initiatedunrestricted research grants from Janssen-Cilag.”[10]

The U.S. has already begun adopting the “early intervention” fad, which looks more like a trade in children’s lives and a business opportunity for increased pharmaceutical sales. In March 2010, the Department of Health & Human Services Substance Abuse & Mental Health Service Administration Center for Mental Health Services announced $16.5 million in funding for “Mental Health Transformation Grants,” including the “Early Detection and Intervention for the Prevention of Psychosis Program (EDIPPP).”[11]

EDIPP is the American sister of McGorry’s EPPIC. It was originally bankrolled by a $14.4 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. According to investigative journalist Evelyn Pringle, “The founder of RWJF, Robert Wood Johnson, was chairman of Johnson & Johnson for over 30 years, from 1932 to 1963, as a member of the drug maker’s founding family. Throughout the years, the majority of the Foundation’s money has come from investments in J&J stock.”

In an article in Behavioral Healthcare, in 2008, the Mid-Valley Behavioral Care Network (MVBCN), an intergovernmental Medicaid government insurance-managed healthcare organization situated in Oregon, was recommended to study EPPIC used at Orygen and EDIPPP.

Based on EDIPP and EPPIC, the MVBCN developed the Early Assessment and Support Team (EAST) in 2001. In 2003, the Oregon state legislature allocated $4.3 million to disseminate early psychosis intervention statewide. By March the following year, new programs had begun in 12 counties.[12]

EDIPPP also replicates the “Portland Identification and Early Referral,” or “PIER,” a treatment research program at the Main Medical Center, in Portland, Maine.[13] People typically are referred to PIER by high school guidance counselors, pediatricians, or other clinicians who attended presentations about PIER’s work, says Pringle. “Virtually every person entering the PIER program is prescribed antipsychotics, such as Risperdal or Invega, marketed by Johnson & Johnson,” she added.

Both PIER and EDIPPP are promoted in McGorry’s 2002 book, Implementing Early Intervention in Psychosis: A Guide to Establishing Early Psychosis Services.”[14] The book’s foreword is written by Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, Professor of Psychiatry, Chairman Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.[15] Lieberman has taken consulting fees and research grant support from AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Upjohn Pharmacia, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Hoechst AG, & AstraZeneca. He’s on the Speakers Bureaus for Astra Zeneca, Janssen, Eli Lilly and Pfizer.[16]

Lieberman is also the Vice President (North America) of the McGorry instigated group International Early Psychosis Association (IEPA), which was officially incorporated in Victoria in 1998.[17] McGorry is currently Treasurer of the Association.[18] Lieberman is a member of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical company front groups, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD).

Between 1999 and 2003 IEPA received unrestricted education grants from Janssen-Cilag and AstraZeneca.[19] EIPA’s conferences are supported by Janssen-Cilag, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.[20]

The IEPA lists the “who’s who” of Pre-Psychosis Risk Syndrome (the official label given pre-psychotic symptoms) and many of its board or members disclose manufacturers of antipsychotics as companies they’ve received financing from.

On July 29-30, the First international Youth Mental Health Conference is being held in Melbourne, with keynote speakers, including McGorry. The conference is described by one advocate as an “important and innovative event, attracting the best in the business/industry to discuss the emerging issues of youth mental health.”[21]

It couldn’t have been more adequately stated: business and industry. Herein you see McGorry’s pitch again that Australia is a global leader in this latest psychiatric fad. His invitation online states, “This is an important event for Australia and the mental health field. We expect this to be the first of many similar conferences, bringing together innovators, practitioners, researchers, young people and families to showcase the best of youth mental health innovation from around the globe.”[22] [Emphasis added]

There’s no doubt that this conference, like his Australian award, will be used to demand more funding to increase the business stakes and drive more income into psychiatry’s pre-drugging efforts. Despite the government already allocating $103 million to McGorry, including the $25 million to further research EPPIC, he continues to call for another $800 million in funding for programs for youth mental health over the next four years.[23]

McGorry recently stated, “You have to be able to give something of yourself to people, if you are going to help them.”[24] McGorry’s brand of “helping” entails stigmatizing children with psychiatric labels that have no basis in science or medicine and then drugging them. That does not qualify as “help.” It’s betrayal. If this agenda to pre-diagnose, and pre-drug is allowed to take hold, we will truly have entered a Brave New World; Patrick McGorry’s.

[1] http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/museum/mwmuseum/index.php/McGorry,_Patrick

[2] http://www.mentalhealth.com/mag1/scz/sb-prod.html

[3] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “ASPE Technical Expert Panel on Earlier Intervention for Serious Mental Illness: Summary of Major Themes,” The Lewin Group, 13 May, 2009.

[4] Richard Warner, MB, DPM, is director of Colorado Recovery in Boulder, Colorado, and professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, “Early intervention in psychosis: Future or fad?” Centre for Addiction and Mental Health website, http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2007-08/futureorfad_crcuwinter0708.html.

[5] http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/187_07_011007/ber10341_fm.pdf

[6] http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/187_07_011007/ber10341_fm.pdf

[7] http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/187_07_011007/ber10341_fm.pdf

[8] http://www.mhanet.ca/documents/2008/Research-Colloquium/0920%20-%20Keynote%20MCGORRY.pdf

[9] http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a695

[10] http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/187/48/s108; http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a695

[11] http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tracking-the-American-Epid-by-Evelyn-Pringle-100602-668.html

[12] http://www.behavioral.net/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=9B6FFC446FF7486981EA3C0C3CCE4943&nm=Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=64D490AC6A7D4FE1AEB453627F1A4A32&id=BFCD36BFD75E447CA63F662A633F41FB&tier=4

[13] http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tracking-the-American-Epid-by-Evelyn-Pringle-100602-668.html

[14] http://books.google.com.au/books?id=lyLfMPsnvJ0C&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=Portland+Identification+and+Early+Referral+McGorry&source=bl&ots=lEp9tdT8ZV&sig=_zlnHeFk8oqxTHSjbvLf0XQmlY4&hl=en&ei=lP0RTKThLMWPcMnSzNAH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[15] http://69.5.18.33/ahrp/cms/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=345

[16] http://69.5.18.33/ahrp/cms/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=345

[17] http://www.iepa.org.au/ContentPage.aspx?pageID=10

[18] http://www.headspace.org.au/about/headspace-board/

[19] http://www.iepa.org.au/ContentPage.aspx?pageID=59

[20] http://www.iepa.org.au/ContentPage.aspx?pageID=59

[21] http://www.iymhconference.com.au/why-attend/

[22] http://www.iymhconference.com.au/

[23] Mental Health Update, GetUp! Action for Australia, 21 Apr. 2010, http://www.getup.org.au/blogs/view.php?id=1936&dc=1086,21560,1

[24] http://sydney.edu.au/medicine/museum/mwmuseum/index.php/McGorry,_Patrick

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

DSM Panel Members Still Getting Pharma Funds

cchrint — Sat, 22 May 2010 01:19:44 +0000

Despite promises to cut back on Pharma funds, 56% of DSM V panel members have reported industry ties— Zero improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

By CCHR International
May 21, 2010

Due to Senate investigations into the American Psychiatric Association, psychiatrists have promised to cut back on their conflicts of interest (pharma funds), but of the current DSM task force members, those who will be deciding on the holy grail of psychiatric disorders (DSM) and what constitutes a “mental illness” are still heavily funded by Pharma. In fact, there is no improvement over cutting down the number of panel members who are getting paid by industry over the last DSM revision in 1994. It was 56% then and its 56% now. So much for psychiatry’s promises…

Former APA president Nada Stotland stated: “We are in the midst of a revolution caused by public and legislative concern about the influence of the for-profit sector….” [Emphasis added] Part of that public pressure for the APA to disclose its conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies was driven by Lisa Cosgrove Ph.D. et al’s study of DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR committee members, which found that of the 170 members, 56% had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma’s psychotropic drug profits have soared commensurately with the increased numbers of disorders voted into the DSM.

Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties—no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

Writing in Psychiatric Times (March 6, 2010), Cosgrove and Harold J. Bursztajn, MD, stated: “Although the APA recently announced that it would phase out the visibly industry-supported educational programs, the organization has remained curiously silent about acknowledging and monitoring industry funding of the 2 philanthropic arms of the APA—the American Psychiatric Foundation (APF) and the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education (APIRE).”

APF’s 15-member board of directors includes 4 high-level executives from pharmaceutical companies that either manufacture drugs recommended by APA (i.e.; in APA’s Clinical Practice Guidelines [CPG]) or have products in development targeted for mental disorders.

Other board members include 2 more with industry ties and a senior vice president at one of the largest public relations agencies in the world, whose clients include 6 drug companies.

APF’s corporate advisory council comprises pharmaceutical companies that contribute significant funding to APF and manufacture drugs recommended in the APA’s CPG; 6 of the companies give $40,000 “and above” per year.

APIRE, like APF, does not require disclosure of financial conflicts of interests, yet 9 of 16 of its board members have industry ties.

At least a quarter of the presenters at this year’s APA congress have significant pharmaceutical company ties.

The APA should sever all ties to pharmaceutical company interests. The US Senate Finance Committee has investigated at least a dozen APA psychiatrists over their undisclosed financial ties to drug companies, including:

Investigated - Alan Schatzberg, APA President: Owned $6 million equity in and as co-founder of drug developer Corcept Therapeutics while principle investigator in an NIH-funded, Stanford-based study of Corcept’s drug mifepristone. Schatzberg initiated the patent application on mifepristone to “treat psychotic depression” in 1997. In 2008, after months of Congressional scrutiny, Schatzberg stepped down from his position as principal investigator in the study.

Investigated – Joseph Biederman: Chief of the Program in Pediatric Psychopharmacology, Massachusetts General Hospital, he earned $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers between 2000 and 2007, most of which was not disclosed to Harvard University officials. In March 2009, court documents showed Biederman promised Johnson & Johnson in advance that his studies of their antipsychotic Risperidone would prove effective when used on preschool age children.

Investigated - Melissa DelBello: Research psychiatrist, University of Cincinnati failed to disclose all her Pharma earnings. In 2002, she was the lead author of a study that reported patients benefited from Seroquel by AstraZeneca, which paid her $180,000. She disclosed receiving $100,000 from the company between 2005 and 2007, but federal investigators discovered it was more than double that—$238,000.

Investigated - Frederick Goodwin: Former NIMH director, Goodwin earned at least $1.3 million between 2000 and 2007 for marketing lectures to physicians on behalf of drug makers, which he did not reveal to the producers of “The Infinite Mind” that he hosted on the National Public Radio during its 10-year run. NPR removed the program.

Investigated - Charles Nemeroff: Perhaps the most egregious case exposed was that of Dr. Nemeroff, chair of Emory University’s department of psychiatry and, along with Schatzberg, coeditor of the influential Textbook of Psychopharmacology. He received more than $960,000 from GSK, but reported to Emory $35,000. He earned a further $2.8 million from various drug makers but failed to report at least $1.2 million. Nemeroff resigned his position at Emory in 2008.

Investigated - Martin Keller: Professor of Psychiatry at Brown University. His (and others’) Study 329 (ghostwritten by a GSK rep.) on Paxil use in children allegedly misrepresented data and suppressed information linking Paxil to suicidal tendencies. Keller didn’t disclose the full extent of his financial ties with companies to medical journals that published his research. In another matter, following a criminal investigation, Brown University returned $300,170 to the state of Massachusetts for research Keller’s department never performed. Keller stepped down as chair of psychiatry at Brown.

Investigated - Augustus John Rush: Former Vice-Chairman of the Dept. of Clinical Sciences at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He reported only $3,000 of the nearly $18,000 that Eli Lilly paid him in 2001. Between 2000 and 2007, he failed to report another $12,000 from various drug companies.

Investigated - Karen Wagner: Professor, University of Texas Medical Branch failed to disclose more than $160,000 in payments from GSK, reporting only $18,000. Wagner worked on NIH-funded studies on the use of Paxil to treat teen depression and was a co-researcher on Study 329 (see Keller), for which she was paid more than $18,000. In 2002, Eli Lily paid her over $11,000, which was not disclosed.

Investigated – Thomas Spencer: Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, reportedly failed to disclose at least $1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007.

Investigated - Timothy Wilens: Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School allegedly failed to report he had earned at least $1.6 million from drug makers.

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Meet the Psychiatrist Pushing For A Brave New World of Pre-Drugging Kids—Patrick McGorry

cchrint — Fri, 21 May 2010 23:26:59 +0000

By CCHR International
May 21, 2010

One of the most controversial proposed disorders for the upcoming revision of psychiatry’s billing bible of mental disorders, (the DSM-5) is Psychosis Risk Syndrome (PRS) a “mental disorder” that, if voted into DSM, would confirm the allegations that psychiatry is manufacturing a Brave New World for itself—heavily backed by Big Pharma—of drugging children before they develop a “mental illness.” Already criticized for the millions of children being needlessly drugged and the lack of scientific criteria to substantiate any mental diagnosis as a legitimate medical condition, some psychiatrists now want the power to pull out their crystal ball and predict the onset of a psychosis and drug it before it has even occurred. And perhaps the strongest proponent is Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry.

Even psychiatrist Allen Frances, former chairman of the previous DSM task force expressed alarm over the proposed diagnosis and its repercussions should it be legitimized, stating, PRS “stands out as the most ill-conceived and potentially harmful.” The Syndrome fails badly on all 3 counts, he says:

“1. It would misidentify many teenagers who are not really at risk for psychosis;

2. The treatment they would most often receive (atypical antipsychotic medication) has no proven efficacy; but,

3. It does have definite dangerous complications.”

Frances adds: “Drug company marketing would influence parents and clinicians to be especially alert to any strangeness in teenagers.” False positives could be as high as 70-90 percent.[i] This can only lead to greater numbers of children and adolescents being harmfully drugged—already one of the major criticisms against psychiatry and a point of contention among many psychiatrists today.

Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry, speaking at the APA convention in New Orleans, as a cheerleader for “early intervention” (i.e. pre-drugging) is undeterred. Despite the unpredictability and risk of the drugs prescribed to treat PRS, McGorry wants to go full steam ahead, increasing the number of children being placed on extremely dangerous and even lethal drugs. It should come as no surprise that McGorry is a paid consultantfor, and has received speaker’s fees from AstraZenecca, Janssen-Cilag, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer.[ii]

The theory of PRS wasn’t McGorry’s. He credits Dr. Ewen Cameron, the Canadian psychiatrist who became infamous in the 1980s after it was revealed he had performed cruel and brain-damaging experiments on his patients in the 1950s and 1960s with funding from the CIA.[iii] However, McGorry tested it in a world-first trial. Another study he conducted in 2002 was funded with an unrestricted grant from Janssen-Cilag and supported by pharmaceutical company-funded groups NARSAD and the Stanley Foundation, as well as several Australian agencies. McGorry and colleagues predictably found that risperidone (Risperdal)—made by Janssen—reduced the risk of “transition to psychosis” in young people.[iv] Risperdal has been linked to Type 2 diabetes.

In Australia, McGorry’s Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Center’s (EPPIC) preventive treatment center for young people, PACE, receives drug company funding from Janssen-Cilag. Much of the policy development embodied in the Australian Clinical Guidelines has come out of EPPIC research programs. As Richard Gosden, Ph.D., a highly respected Australian author and academic stated: “This may have paid off handsomely for the company…. It may not be coincidental that a half page of the Clinical Guidelines is dedicated to dosage recommendations for using risperidone in first-episode psychosis. The Clinical Guidelines do not extend these dosage recommendations to include other schizophrenia drugs and the recommendations for risperidone give the appearance of an official endorsement of the drug.”^[v]

McGorry’s theory has psychiatry’s skeptics and even psychiatrists aghast:

One respected American research group equated the practice of pre-drugging children to “performing mastectomies on women who are at risk of—but do not have—breast cancer.” [vi]

Honorary Professor Anthony Pelosi from the Department of Psychiatry, Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, stated, “So far,evidence from randomized trials does not support the use ofpsychological therapies or drugs as preventive interventions.”[vii] Further, “After teachers, college counselors, and familieswere encouraged to refer young people with possibly prodromal [early] symptoms directly to the same clinic for the same care plans…almost 90% were receiving unnecessary ‘preventive’ interventions.”^[viii]

Fellow Australian psychiatrist Niall McLaren says the diagnostic criteria for PRS “has no scientific validity whatsoever…it can never be reliable and…will have huge unforeseen consequences.” Essentially, it means “putting large numbers of teenagers and young adults under the long-term supervision and control of psychiatrists” and that “supervision” includes the “aggressive, indefinite prescription of antipsychotic drugs.” It is the “clearest example I know of pseudoscience. Not since [lobotomies] has psychiatry stumbled so far from the principle of Primum, non nocere. First, do no harm.”^[ix]

Dr. Richard Warner, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, counters the idea that science drives McGorry’s pre-disorder assessment, stating that the screening instrument he uses “is not that accurate in routine use.” Further, “McGorry speculates that a variety of interventions may be effective in preventing schizophrenia in high-risk cases…. Given the expected number of false positives, the potential for harm is significant,” stated Dr. Warner. [x]

Dr. Jerald Block, a US psychiatrist writing in Bioethics Forum, reported that “preventive pharmacology” (which McGorry, et al. practice) is “ethically questionable territory” because the treatments given “frequently have side effects and complications” and “you are potentially harming people.” The symptoms used to identify them as at risk of schizophrenia are “also remarkably common…adolescence is a period of life that is normally marked by tumultuous changes in personality.”^[xi]

Melissa Raven, psychiatric epidemiologist and policy analyst, adjunct lecturer in Public Health at Flinders University, South Australia, and David Webb, board member of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry and working with the research/policy office with the Australia Federation of Disability Organizations, were published last month, writing: “McGorry’s campaign is part of a wider push to promote the medicalization of mental health (for which psychosocial wellbeing is a better term).” “Further doubts must be raised about McGorry’s agenda when you see the substantial funding his organization (Orygen Youth Health) receives from the pharmaceutical industry and also from the US Stanley Foundation, which is notorious for its particularly aggressive approach to the detention and mandatory treatment of people labeled with psychiatric disorders.” He has “personally received funding from many manufacturers of antipsychotics, frequently reports no conflicts of interest, particularly in his many recent Medical Journal of Australia articles, including a supplement on early intervention that repeatedly advocates the use of antipsychotics.”^[xii]

Psychosis Risk Syndrome is nothing more than psychiatrists with conflicts of interest drumming up more business at the risk of teenage lives, while increasing the profits for the pharmaceutical industry they serve.

[i] Allen Frances, M.D., “DSM5 ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’–Far Too Risky,” Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201003/dsm5-psychosis-risk-syndrome-far-too-risky.

[ii] http://www.mhanet.ca/documents/2008/Research-Colloquium/0920%20-%20Keynote%20MCGORRY.pdf; http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a695.

[iii] Richard Gosden, Ph.D., “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, Vol 1, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 165-177, http://sites.google.com/site/richardgosden/ehss.

[iv] Arch Gen Psychiatry, Vol 59, Oct. 2002, http://www.meb.uni-bonn.de/psychiatrie/zebb/literatur/mcgorry.pdf.

[v] Richard Gosden, Ph.D., “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, Vol 1, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 165-177, http://sites.google.com/site/richardgosden/ehss.

[vi] http://www.ministryoflies.com/pdf-articles/Yale-Lilly.pdf.

[vii] Anthony Pelosi, “Head to Head, Is early intervention in the major psychiatric disorders justified? No,” BMJ 2008;337:a710, http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a710.

[viii] http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a710.

[ix] Niall McLaren, M.D., “Psychosis Risk Syndrome (PRS),” 14 May 2010 (soon to be published).

[x] Richard Warner, MB, DPM, is director of Colorado Recovery in Boulder, Colorado, and professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, “Early intervention in psychosis: Future or fad?” Centre for Addiction and Mental Health website, http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2007-08/futureorfad_crcuwinter0708.html.

[xi] http://www.ahrp.org/cms/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=386; http://ww.bioethicsforum.org/ethics-of-preventive-psychopharmacologic-treatments.asp.

[xii] David Webb, Melissa Raven, “McGorry’s ‘early intervention’ in mental health: a prescription for disaster,” Online Opinion, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10267.

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Our U.S. Military: Betrayed and Drugged

cchrint — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:35:01 +0000

“Psychiatrists under contract with the Veteran Affairs—in my opinion—are legal drug dealers who almost took my life.”
- Former Marine Scout Sniper

By Shane Ellison
Award-winning scientist, Masters Degree in Organic Chemistry

Chad was a Marine Scout Sniper who served two tours in Iraq. Upon being honorably discharged as a Sgt. in 2007, he summoned the courage to ask for help in dealing with the images and emotions that gnawed on him from being dropped into combat. Like so many of his peers, the help he was given was “meds.” Although Chad was used to putting his life at risk, he never expected that his life would be more directly threatened by the “treatment” he was offered—psychiatric drugs.

After a single day of “following doctor’s orders,” Chad felt things were starting to look up. He seemed to be more cognizant, and the weight of daily struggles was lifted. But, as he describes it, things “quickly flip-flopped.”

“As time passed, I began changing into someone I wasn’t. Once a focused, motivated sniper, my reaction time became stagnant. My thought process became dry and lethargic, while my independence drifted. I became unable to make decisions on my own and reluctantly found myself relying on others in ways I had never done before. I had become a sort of medicated drone. All emotion turned into apathy and I found myself lackadaisical and eventually felt meaningless. That’s where it got really bad for me, and it’s hard to talk about now…. It was as if my brain chemistry went whack.”

This bleak scenario is becoming all too common for today’s military. The psychiatric death threat is becoming riskier than combat. In 2010, Time magazine reported that, “During the month of January, more soldiers committed suicide than were killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.” Mystified by the death toll among troops, Army Chief of Staff George Casey said that, “The fact of the matter is, we just don’t know why suicides have increased.”

A group of U.S. Senators have finally raised concern that the use of antidepressants and other prescription drugs are on the rise in the military, particularly among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. FDA has warned these drugs can cause worsening depression, mania, psychosis, suicidal and homicidal ideation. Senator Jim Webb, D-Va., who led the recent Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing in Washington, said the apparent increase in prescription drugs is “on its face, pretty astounding and troubling.” In fact, Department of Defense statistics show that from 2005 to 2008, there was a 400 percent increase in the prescription of antidepressants and other drugs used to treat anxiety. And a 2007 Army report showed that about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan were taking antidepressants or sleeping pills.

The suicide trend is not inexplicable, and must be highlighted if troops like Chad are to be saved from the psychiatric death threat. Like the loss of power to a car that results from a broken fuse, mental circuitry is shut off with each and every dose of psychiatric medication. The latest cloning techniques and laboratory methods show this to be the result of “neurotransmitter hijacking,” which scrambles brain circuitry, leaving users like Chad feeling “dry and lethargic,” in times of deep emotional turmoil.

Once neurotransmitter hijacking takes place, users become fully under the spell of psychiatry. The brain can become so scrambled that all normal reality and reason are overwritten by a new confusing and violent agenda. A new personality arises—one with homicidal and suicidal tendencies. Commenting on the biochemical fiasco, CNN publicized that, “Antidepressant drugs actually create a perilous brain imbalance.” Chad barely escaped.

“Rebounding on and off the drugs, I reached the darkest point in my life, strangely enough at home. I packed up my ghillie suit—the same thing I used to camouflage myself as a sniper in enemy territory—and hiked into the wilderness late at night, where no one would find me. I held my .45 cal pistol while attempting the unspeakable…many things raced through my mind, and at the forefront were feelings of worthlessness and my inability to relate to anyone, even myself. As a combat decorated Marine, it’s not something I’m proud of. But it’s a reality that seems to be more common among my peers, and it’s scary as hell.… To this day, I’m not sure what stopped me, probably an act of God. I walked backed vowing to reclaim my life – with everything I had. And, since my mental health declined so drastically since getting on the meds, I felt that getting off them was the first place to start.”

No doubt, combat leads to emotional stress beyond what the rest of us can concede. Listening to the combat experience of Chad paints painful images in my own mind. It’s no wonder indelible scars are left on the minds of our troops. And rather than help them cope, they are literally being drugged to death in a large-scale experiment that goes ignored. Former military psychiatrist, Dr. Grace Jackson, substantiated this stating that, “It’s really a large-scale experiment. We are experimenting with changing people’s cognition and behavior.”

Once off the drugs, Chad’s escape came from getting back to basics—really basic. He starts each day with rigorous exercise and ends it with a deep sleep, induced by L-tryptophan and valerian. His diet is fortified with whey isolate twice per day with meals that consist of unprocessed foods. Sugar and alcohol have been reduced to an absolute minimum. Sauna treatments are regular, and real therapy comes from writing and talking to others who share his experience, as well as giving back in the form of support. He knows his story is only “one of thousands” and that other veterans need help.

Today, Chad has earned his bachelor’s degree—with honors—in a record 2.5 years. At the same time, he founded a Veterans center, which serves as a hub at his Alma Mater to offer support in all matters that relate to being a vet. And when he can, he helps others heed his warning about the military death threat: “Psychiatrists under contract with the Veteran Affairs—in my opinion—are legal drug dealers who almost took my life.”

Shane Ellison is the bestselling author of Over-The-Counter Natural Cures and holds a masters degree in drug design (organic chemistry). He is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his studies in biochemistry and physiology.

For international drug regulatory warnings about psychiatric drugs causing violence and suicide go to:

http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/

For more by Shane Ellison, go to:

http://www.cchrint.org/videos/experts/shane-ellison/

For more information on the current U.S. Senate investigation into this topic see related posts below.

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

50 Years Ago Thomas Szasz Rocked The World of Psychiatry: The Difference Between A Disease and a Disorder

cchrint — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:31:08 +0000

By Dr. Jeffrey Schaler
Assistant Professor of Justice, Law & Society
March, 2010

It is fifty years now since Thomas Szasz rocked the world of psychiatry by writing The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. His work continues to have a profound impact on how we think about disease, behavior, liberty, justice, responsibility, and most important of all, what it means to be human. Szasz has shown us how the idea of mental illness is used by the state to deprive innocent people of freedom, and guilty persons of justice. Without the state involved, the medicalization of behavior means nothing.

He has shown us how the idea of mental illness functions as legal fiction within our legal system. In this sense, the idea of mental illness has been used much as the idea that African American slaves were considered three-fifths of a person. Persons labeled as mentally ill are now considered three-fifths of a person. It is as if there was a postscript at the bottom of the Bill of Rights that reads: “PS: For mentally healthy people only.”

The courts will not allow the idea of mental illness to be disproved, in much the same way that the idea that slaves could be three-fifths person was not allowed to be disproved. Today, mental illness as legal fiction maintains the institution of psychiatric slavery.

Mental illness diagnoses have more to do with politics and science fiction, than medicine and science. Take for example the idea that people with a homosexual orientation are mentally ill. The category was excluded from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – our contemporary “Malleus Maleficorum,” or “Hammer of Witches” – the same way it was included, for political reasons, not scientific reasons. No one discovered that homosexuality was a disease, and no one discovered that it isn’t a disease. They pronounced it as such, in each case, because of political pressure.

About two years after The Myth of Mental Illness was first published, Szasz published another book that has had an equally profound impact on freedom and responsibility. In Law, Liberty and Psychiatry he predicted the following:

“Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.”

Thomas Szasz wrote that in 1963.

We live in a Therapeutic State today. Moral management now masquerades as medicine. The state dictates a “duty to be healthy.”

Seventy years ago another state, Nazi Germany, dictated a “duty to be healthy.” Back then, murder masqueraded as medicine. I think you all know what I’m referring to. We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Today, good health practices have become a social responsibility. Bad health practices are viewed as socially irresponsible behavior. When health and illness are applied to the mind and behavior, this means that people must think and speak and act the right way. Otherwise, they may end up in a prison called a mental hospital.

I am one of the few college professors in the United States, if not in the world, who teaches Szasz’s ideas on a regular basis in college. And in every course, my students have always said at least two things to me: This stuff by Szasz is changing my life. And why hasn’t anyone ever taught his work in class before?

Because professors are punished for teaching Szasz; they can lose their jobs if they do so. I know. I have the scars to prove it. If you read my book, Szasz Under Fire, you will see how the same thing almost happened to Thomas Szasz. He came a hair away from being fired for teaching Thomas Szasz!

The Myth of Mental Illness and the subsequent Law, Liberty and Psychiatry are not so unsophisticated as to deny the existence of behaviors that people find disturbing. Quite to the contrary, Szasz’s writings clarify the difference between behavior and disease, description and explanations for behavior, and the consequences of labeling behavior as a disease within the arenas of law, medicine, social and public policy.

Szasz has simply pointed out what pathologists have always known: A disease refers to cellular pathology. Period. A behavior cannot be a disease. And he has also fought endlessly for the rights of persons labeled mentally ill. He will be ninety years old on April 15. He is still writing one book after another. He writes books faster than I can read them!

He has also shown us how behavior is strategic, the expression of what philosophers call moral agency. Today’s neuroscientists, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have attempted to reduce man to the category of things. They deny the existence of moral agency. Let me give you one simple example of how this is so.

Conventional wisdom, particularly as it appears in the media, leads people to believe that brains cause behavior, as if the brain could act. Psychiatrists and the neuroscientists they aspire emulate, regard man as a machine, an incredibly complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless. Everything that is human is ultimately reducible to electrical and chemical interactions.

This is especially so when it comes to socially unacceptable, abnormal, disturbing and criminal behavior. Bad brains are said to cause bad behavior. Bad brains, in this, sense refers to problems in the structure and function of the brain.

Now if bad brains cause bad behavior, it only follows that good brains must cause good behavior. In other words, brains that work correctly, brains that are structurally and functionally healthy, cause good and admirable behaviors.

While psychiatrists try to excuse bad behaviors by ultimately blaming bad brains, they inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) are removing personal responsibility for the good things that people do. When someone commits a heroic deed, for example, shows courage, compassion, and care for others at great personal expense and with great risk of danger, the person is then not choosing to do what is clearly important to do.

The brain, according to this way of thinking, is causing the person to do this good thing, in the same way that a bad brain causes someone to prey on others. There is no need to praise someone for his altruism, heroism, and courage, his brain made him do it.

Some psychiatrists have equated human behavior with seizure activity: An alcoholic reaching for that drink too many is having an epileptic seizure. So is the mother sacrificing her own life for the life of her child.

What is left of the person, if this is so? What is left of the person if brains cause bad and good behavior? What is that represented by the pronoun “I?” What happens to moral agency?

Nothing. From this way of thinking, human beings are reduced to the category of things. Things do not choose, they are caused. Things do not feel. Things are not alive. Things have no conscience, no values, no morality, no ethics. And most important, things do not care, for self or others.

This is the legacy of psychiatry and neuroscience today, when it comes to entertaining biological explanations for behavior. Mind is equated with brain, behavior with disease, good with bad, morality with medicine, and ethics with mechanics. In other words, there is no soul. That which we consider uniquely human is destroyed by psychiatry and neuroscience.

How does this fit into law? Through a simple equation. Liberty and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. If we increase one, we increase the other. If we decrease one, we decrease the other. The more free man is, the more responsible he must be. The more responsible man is, the more he is captain of his own ship.

What institutional psychiatry as an extension of the state would have us believe is this: The more we decrease responsibility, the more we increase freedom. In other words, the more you allow us to be in charge of your life, the more you abdicate responsibility, the more you embrace the paternalism we say is good for you, the more you will be free. For obedience to authority is the greatest political virtue.

What then must we do? Szasz has done his job, what is ours? I believe our job is this: We get psychiatry out of the courthouse. We do not need to destroy psychiatry. It will destroy itself if we sever its invisible umbilical cord to the mother-state. Once psychiatry is available to people by choice only, it will die a natural death. Very few people will seek out psychiatrists if they cannot hire and fire them at will.

Psychiatrists know this. That is why they are so afraid of Thomas Szasz.

And that is why they are so afraid of those who understand what I am saying here. As I tell my students every semester, “don’t believe a word I say. Just think about it and come to your own conclusion.” That kind of independence and autonomy scares institutional psychiatrists and those who run the therapeutic state.

It should.

Jeffrey A. Schaler is an assistant professor of justice, law, and society at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. Professor Schaler’s work is focused on the “therapeutic state”—the union of medicine and state. He completed his doctoral and master’s degrees in human development at the University of Maryland College Park, where the major emphasis of his research was addiction and social policy. Dr. Schaler is particularly interested in how research in the behavioral sciences is interpreted and applied in public, social, and legal policy arenas. He writes and speaks extensively on the relationship between liberty and responsibility.

Dr. Thomas Szasz is a Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, State University of New York. He is a well known critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry and has authored more than 30 books on the subject including the Manufacture of Madness, The Myth of Mental Illness and The Therapeutic State. He is the co-founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) and has said of the organization, “We should all honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never been done in human history before.”

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Think They Don’t Electroshock People Anymore? Think Again–Even toddlers and pregnant women are being shocked

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:27:59 +0000

By Dr. John Breeding, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses

Ask the average person about the use of electroshock treatment in today’s society and 9 out of 10 will respond, “They still shock people?”

They do. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 Americans are electroshocked each year; half are 60 and older, and two-thirds are women. In Australia, it was recently revealed that psychiatrists had electroshocked 55 toddlers age four and younger. In the UK, three year olds have been brutalized with it. And one of the country’s leading mental health “patients’ rights” groups—the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI)—recently endorsed the use of electroshock on pregnant women. One would wonder why a patients’ rights group would endorse such an obviously harmful procedure if not for the fact that the group has recently been exposed as a major front for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry.

The FDA reports pregnant women miscarrying following ECT, while studies show that in addition to the risk of death, the fetus can suffer malnutrition, dehydration and violent injury. Electroshocking children, pregnant women and the unborn is tantamount to torture and should not only be banned but those administering it prosecuted.

Given the factual truths of sending up to 360 volts of electricity searing through the brain – the obvious question is why the “treatment” has not gone by the wayside like its psychiatric sister treatments during the 1940s and 1950s, insulin coma shock and lobotomy.

Electroshock was indeed challenged, and its low point pretty much coincided with the release in 1975 of the Academy Award-winning film version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the feisty Randle Patrick McMurphy. The horrible scene of his undergoing “unmodified” shock treatment, i.e., without anesthetic and muscle-paralyzing drugs, along with his reduction to a vegetative state was seared in the public’s mind. This, together with public exposure of the shameful state of psychiatric institutions, certainly gave electroshock treatment a bad name—so much so that the treatment was renamed Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). The bad publicity caused its use in public institutions to fall sharply, and its overall use was also considerably diminished. It would be naïve, however, to think that this curtailment was strictly due to increased public awareness about the brutalities of the procedure. The advent of neuroleptics (nerve-seizing drugs) was perhaps the major factor in this development. The indiscriminate use of these drugs replaced the indiscriminate use of ECT as the primary means of subduing and pacifying inmates who resisted incarceration and wouldn’t cooperate.

In the last two decades, however, electroshock has made a comeback.

Most electroshock is insurance-covered. ECT specialists on average have incomes twice that of other psychiatrists. The cost for inpatient ECT ranges from $50,000 to $75,000 per series (usually 8 to 12 individual sessions). Electroshock is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry—yet its damaging effects are well known to those who endorse it.

Max Fink, a professor of psychiatry and the “Grandfather of American ECT” believed the “therapeutic” effect from ECT is produced by brain dysfunction and damage. “Effects on memory, common in ECT, come in two flavors,” wrote Fink in Psychiatric Times in 2006. “Delirium is common with each seizure and is well documented by immediate measurable changes in brain chemistry and physiology” and “the second complaint is of a persistent loss of personal memories…They do not recall the names of their children, family holidays, or personal events….Their complaints cast a public shadow on ECT practice.”

The Procedure

Electroshock is a psychiatric procedure that involves the production of a grand mal convulsion, similar to an epileptic seizure, by passing from 70 to upwards of 600 volts of electric current through the brain for one-half second to four seconds. Before application, ECT subjects are typically given anesthetic, tranquilizing and muscle-paralyzing drugs to reduce fear, pain, and the risk (from violent muscle spasms) of fractured bones (particularly of the spine, a common occurrence in the early history of ECT before the introduction, in the mid-1950s, of the muscle-paralyzing drug succinylcholine [Anectine]). The ECT-induced convulsion usually lasts from thirty to sixty seconds and may immediately produce disorienting, painful, and even life-threatening complications, such as apnea (temporary suspension of breathing) and cardiac arrest. The convulsion is followed by a period of unconsciousness of several minutes’ duration. Electroshock is usually administered in hospitals because they are equipped to handle emergency situations that often develop during or soon after an ECT session.

Brain Damage

The brain naturally operates in millivolts of electricity, and ECT administers on average between 150 and 400 volts of electricity to the brain, a force sufficient to induce a grand mal seizure, rupture the protective blood-brain barrier and incite glutamate toxicity (glutamate is a powerful neurotransmitter released by nerve cells in the brain and is responsible for sending signals between nerve cells. In glutamate toxicity there is too much glutamate that leads to over-excitation of the receiving nerve cell, which can cause cell damage and/or death). It is prima-facie, common sense obvious fact that ECT causes brain damage. After all, the rest of medicine, as well as the building trades, do their best to prevent people from being hurt or killed by electrical shock. People with epilepsy are given anticonvulsant drugs to prevent seizures because they are known to damage the brain. The Electroshock Quotationary, a collection of quotations, excerpts, and essays about the history and nature of electroshock, by shock survivor Leonard Roy Frank, includes the testimony of Peter Sterling, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscience professor, describing the nature of ECT-caused brain damage, dated May 31, 2001, to the New York Assembly Standing Committee on Mental Health at a public hearing on ECT.

Sterling affirms the obvious: that massive amounts of electricity directly into the brain cause profound damage.

Lack of Efficacy

Not only does electroshock directly violate the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, the practice has never been proven effective. There are no lasting beneficial effects of electroshock; sham-electroshock (anesthesia but no electroshock) has the same short-term outcomes as electroshock (Ross, 2006). Even leading shock researcher and advocate Harold Sackeim now provides a proof. In an article from 2001, he and his colleagues conclude, “Our study indicates that without active treatment, virtually all remitted patients relapse within 6 months of stopping ECT.” (Italics mine)

The FDA

The battle against electroshock has been ongoing since its advent. The two recent chronicles by electroshock survivor activist leaders, Leonard Roy Frank (The Electroshock Quotationary) and Linda Andre (Doctors of Deception), tell the story best. Just now, the fight has centered on the FDA review of the “efficacy and safety” of ECT machines.

Many activists, including myself, have submitted testimony urging the FDA NOT to reclassify these devices from Class III (high risk) to Class II (low risk). I have worked with scores of electroshock survivors, and I can tell you the damage is consistent and terrible. I can also tell you as a psychologist that there are methods so much gentler, safer and more effective to help people with depression.

A Repackaged Product

The reason for electroshock’s endurance and resurgence is best described by Linda Andre, shock survivor and leader of the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry, in her masterful new work, Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Shock Treatment—it is simply the triumph of public relations over science. A concerted PR campaign has allowed electroshock to continue despite clear scientific evidence of its dismal and tragic record on safety and efficacy.

The industry repackaged the product to keep it selling. They touted a “newer and safer ECT,” bragging about improved equipment and the introduction of anesthesia and muscle paralysants, which actually came on the market in the 1950s. While the muscle paralysants greatly reduced the risk of broken bones from unrestrained convulsions, there was no lessening of permanent damage to the brain caused by the electroshocks. The drugs made the procedure appear much more benign because they suppressed the body’s natural, violent reaction to a grand mal convulsion. However, as Doug Cameron (1994) and other researchers have shown, the new machines, because they are more powerful than ever are capable of releasing greater amounts of electricity into the brain thus causing more damage than the older devices.

With the newer technique modifications there is also an added risk. The drugs used to prevent bone complications raise the seizure threshold so that more electrical current is required to induce the convulsion, which in turn increases brain damage. Moreover, whereas ECT specialists formerly tried to induce seizures with minimal current, they commonly use suprathreshold amounts in the belief that they are more effective. Again, the more current, the more brain damage. Proponents, and the public, have missed the point that the supposed “effectiveness” of ECT is in direct ratio to the amount of brain damage it causes.

In addition to the propaganda effect and the financial incentives, there is a less well-considered reason for ECT’s popularity among psychiatrists. Although electroshock is often described as psychiatry’s “treatment of last resort,” it is actually psychiatry’s “treatment of next resort.” Next resort after psychiatric drugs, which are the main “treatment”—a treatment whose lack of effectiveness and lack of safety are well documented. Like ECT, these drugs can damage and disable the brain. Like ECT, they can cause a fully justified resentment that goes with the experience of having been betrayed by one’s supposed helpers.

Activist and electroshock survivor Leonard Roy Frank’s recent letter to the FDA in regards to their review of ECT devices is one of the best. I end this blog article with his conclusion:

As a destroyer of memories and thoughts, electroshock is a direct, violent assault on these hallmarks of American liberty: freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from assault, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Tens of thousands of people every year in the United States are deceived or coerced into undergoing electroshock. The FDA should do everything in its power to discourage the use of electroshock by:

keeping ECT’s Class III, high-risk rating;

insisting that electroshock psychiatrists, manufacturers of ECT devices, and executives and administrators in hospitals where ECT is administered, substantiate with scientific proof their claims that the procedure is “safe and effective”;

and calling upon the Congress and the Department of Justice to investigate the fraudulent and coercive use of this cruel and inhuman procedure.

Despite the evidence of grievous harm and failure to help, electroshock’s proponents rave on; as an example, an electroshock psychiatrist told Washington Post reporter Sandra Boodman in 1996, that, “ECT is one of God’s gifts to mankind. There is nothing like it, nothing equal to it in efficacy or safety in all of psychiatry.”

Given that ECT causes brain damage, memory loss, and other serious cognitive impairment, electroshock serves to cover up and impede any potential malpractice or personal injury litigation. It generally takes years for a shock survivor to recover enough to figure out what has happened to them, and most states have a statute of limitations (usually one or two years) on medical malpractice and personal injury suits. As a result, electroshock survivors are effectively prevented from pursuing litigation against those who harmed them, making electroshock psychiatrists almost malpractice-proof.

John Breeding, Ph.D. has been a counseling psychologist in Austin, Texas for 25 years.
He is an outspoken critic of electroshock treatment and has testified against its use before legislative bodies on numerous occasions. Dr. Breeding is also the director of Texans For Safe Education, a citizens group dedicated to challenging the ever-increasing role of psychiatric drugs in schools. He is the author of numerous articles and four books including: The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses and True Nature and Great Misunderstandings.

For more information on the damage caused by ECT, visit www.endofshock.com

References

Ayd Jr., F.T. (November-December 1963). “Guest editorial: Ugo Cerletti, M.D. (1877-1963),” Psychosomatics, Vol. 4, pp. A-6 – A-7.

Boodman, S.G. (September 24, 1996). “Shock therapy: It’s back,” Washington Post (Health Section), pp. 14-20.

Frank, Leonard Roy, The Electroshock Quotationary, June 2006, www.endofshock.com/102C_ECT.PDF.

Andre, Linda, Doctors of Deception, www.doctorsofdeception.com.

Kalinowsky, L.B. (1988). Quoted in R. Abrams, “Interview with Lothar Kalinowsky, M.D.,” Convulsive Therapy, Vol. 4.

Ross, C.A. (Spring 2006). “The sham ECT literature: Implications for consent to ECT,” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 8.

Sackeim, H.A. et al. (March 14, 2001). “Continuation pharmacotherapy in the prevention of relapse following electroconvulsive therapy,” Journal of the American Medical Association.

Sackeim, H.A. (2001). “Memory loss: From polarization to reconciliation,” Journal of ECT, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 229. Sackeim, H.A., Prudic, J. et al. (January 2007). “The cognitive effects of electroconvulsive therapy in community settings,” Neuropsychopharmacology, Vol. 32, pp. 244-254.

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Green Mental Health Care – Reclaiming Lives From Psychiatric Drugs

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:49:53 +0000

by Genita Petralli, Nutritional Biochemist
November 24, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

Pharma’s Drug Ads: From Million Dollar TV Ads to $1.7 Billion Internet Marketing Campaign

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:00:48 +0000

November 16, 2009

On November 13th, 2009, Pharmaceutical companies flocked to a two-day FDA hearing into online drug advertising, which could influence their use of social media on the net. ¹ Already, the explosive growth in online advertising has intensified public concerns: the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $1 billion on Internet ads last year and is projected to spend $1.7 billion on such marketing efforts in 2012, according to the Direct Marketing Association.²

Both Eli Lilly and Merck have received warning letters this year from the FDA accusing them of misleading online advertisements.³ But while the FDA scrambles to monitor online ads, who monitors the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry’s use of front groups to indirectly market their products?

A Washington Post article of June 16, 2009 reported that an increasing number of pharmaceutical firms are turning to social media tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace, to market their products. It cites how a community site sponsored by drugmaker McNeil called “ADHD Allies”—aimed at adults with ADHD—was established and offered an online podcast on financial advice and an “ADHD self-assessment tool.”⁴

British psychiatrist Joanne Moncrieff explains how this ultimately increases drug sales because only a biomedical approach is promoted: “Drug companies…provide funds for pro drug patient and carer groups and address advertising or disease promotion campaigns to the general public…This influence has helped to create and reinforce a narrow biological approach to the explanation and treatment of mental disorders and has led to the exclusion of alternative” treatments.⁵

Such websites do not mention company’s product but rather market the “disease.” In advertising, it can be accomplished through a strategy known as “condition branding,” where “mental illness” can be pitched just like cars, beer or laundry detergent. Witness the brand name “bipolar” and “social anxiety disorder” that drug companies marketed at a fever pitch.

John Read, PhD, Psychology Department, University of Auckland did an analysis of 54 random “advocacy” groups for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through the Internet. The results, published in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation this year, found 42% of the websites received drug company funding. The researchers found:

“Patients tend to trust these organizations to act in an unbiased manner” but as earlier researchers argued in some cases “patient organizations have become a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry in influencing regulatory authorities.”
“Drug company influence within the area of mental health is prevalent and now extends to the Internet. This influence is not always transparent. This study suggests that drug company sponsorship of websites leads to a greater emphasis on pharmacology in the treatment of PTSD,” Dr. Read’s report concludes.⁶

ADHD Allies/ADHD Moms

In June 2008 Concerta was given an expanded indication by FDA and is now indicated for patients aged 6 to 65.⁷ In July 2008, McNeill Pediatrics—a subsidiary of Ortho-McNeill Pharmaceuticals—launched what they called an “unbranded group” called “ADHD Moms.” ADHD Moms markets the trademarked name “Mom-bassadors” to get mothers into the Facebook page. ⁸

McNeill spuriously claims “the group is not product-specific, nor are there any advertisements for the company’s ADHD drug Concerta (methylphenidate).” Well not directly, but providing material for the site is a Dr. Quinn, a paid consultant and speaker for McNeil Pediatrics. ⁹ April White, who also provides content is a paid spokesperson for McNeil Pediatrics.¹⁰
On April 22 2009, McNeill launched a second ADHD-focused Facebook page called “ADHD Allies,” this time targeting adults. The “Allies” are board members of another front group Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA), funded by McNeill.¹¹
The pharmaceutical company has trademarked “ADHD Allies” and “ADHD Moms.” ADHD Allies was responsible for a “2008 Harris Interactive survey of 1,000 adults with ADHD.” Not surprisingly, the survey found the condition significantly affects them. ¹²

Log onto The Bipolar Journey: Living With Bipolar Depression website and while it does show AstraZeneca on the home page, there’s no mention of its blockbuster antipsychotic drug Seroquel, approved by the FDA in 2006 for “bipolar.” The site looks like a patient information site providing facts about the “disease” and misleadingly saying that it may be caused by a chemical imbalance—for which there is no evidence.

It refers people to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) that has received $23 million recently from at least 18 drug companies. The site shows that of 17 cites for the exhibit’s showing in 2009, 12 are conferences or events put on by NAMI.

It also links to The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, a group that received close to $1 million in pharmaceutical company funding in 2007.

According to an August 27 2009 press announcement, AstraZeneca launched its interactive exhibit, endorsed by New York psychiatrist Janet Taylor. The press release does not mention that Dr. Taylor has financial ties to the company.¹³

In 2005, global sales for Seroquel reached $2.8 billion. October 20, 2006, company announced Seroquel was FDA approved for bipolar.¹⁴ Within a year, sales reached $3 billion and then soared again in 2008 to $4.66 billion.¹⁵

By funding social media front groups that talk only about the “disorder,” drug companies can overcome fears of running afoul of FDA regulations that govern drug advertising and “are embracing social networks to help brand and position their companies in a positive light with consumers and practitioners.” The top 10 drug companies using social media are: Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca US, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Roche, and Merck.¹⁶

This post was written by CCHR International.
Coming next from CCHR Int: Psycho Pharma Front Groups

1 “FDA Addresses Drug Ads in Online Social Media,” Red Orbit, 13 Nov. 2009.

2 http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091111-713848.html

3 “FDA Addresses Drug Ads in Online Social Media,” Red Orbit, 13 Nov. 2009.

4 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061203230.html

5 Joanne Moncrief, in a “Study of the Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry on Academic and Practical Psychiatry,” http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/pharmaceuticalindustry.htm

6 http://www.isst-d.org/jtd/mansell_&_read_ptsd_drug_cos_&_internet%20.pdf; Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 10:9–23, 2009

7 http://www.mmm-online.com/McNeil-launches-adult-ADHD-Facebook-page/article/131647/

8 http://www.facebook.com/ADHDMoms#/ADHDMoms?v=app_17037175766

9 http://pharmexec.findpharma.com/pharmexec/News+Analysis/Ortho-McNeil-Talks-ADHD-On-Facebook/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/529878?contextCategoryId=39722

10 http://www.facebook.com/ADHDMoms?v=app_10467688569#/ADHDMoms?v=app_17037175766

11 http://www.facebook.com/ADHDAllies#/ADHDAllies?v=app_7146470109

12 “Adults ‘Facing’ ADHD: ADHD Allies™ Offers Unique Online Community for Adults with ADHD on New Facebook® Page,” http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/concerta/36533/

13 http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/astrazeneca/38693/

14 http://www.lifesciencesworld.com/news/view/12152

15 “Seroquel Sales Up, Zyprexa Sales Stagnat, Cymbalta Sales Way Up in 2008,” http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2009/01/seroquel_sales_up_zyprexa_sales_stagnant_cymbalta_sales_way_up_in_2008.html

16 http://inventorspot.com/articles/top_ten_drug_companies_social_media_31760

RETURN TO BLOGS PAGE

Blog Feed

CCHR International » Blog

Psychiatric Meds 101: A Surprising Discovery

Your Own Personal Hell

For Elephant Use Only

Use This to Jump The Grand Canyon

Bash Your Head in with Anti-Anxiety Drugs

Exposing Psychiatry: How to Get The Truth

About the Author

Related Posts

Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug: Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

Related Posts

Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global

Related Posts

DSM Panel Members Still Getting Pharma Funds

Despite promises to cut back on Pharma funds, 56% of DSM V panel members have reported industry ties— Zero improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

Related Posts

Meet the Psychiatrist Pushing For A Brave New World of Pre-Drugging Kids—Patrick McGorry

Related Posts

Our U.S. Military: Betrayed and Drugged

“Psychiatrists under contract with the Veteran Affairs—in my opinion—are legal drug dealers who almost took my life.”
- Former Marine Scout Sniper

Related Posts

50 Years Ago Thomas Szasz Rocked The World of Psychiatry: The Difference Between A Disease and a Disorder

Related Posts

Think They Don’t Electroshock People Anymore? Think Again–Even toddlers and pregnant women are being shocked

Related Posts

Green Mental Health Care – Reclaiming Lives From Psychiatric Drugs

Related Posts

Pharma’s Drug Ads: From Million Dollar TV Ads to $1.7 Billion Internet Marketing Campaign

Related Posts

CCHR International » Blog

Psychiatric Meds 101: A Surprising Discovery

Your Own Personal Hell

For Elephant Use Only

Use This to Jump The Grand Canyon

Bash Your Head in with Anti-Anxiety Drugs

Exposing Psychiatry: How to Get The Truth

About the Author

Related Posts

Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug: Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

Related Posts

Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global

Related Posts

DSM Panel Members Still Getting Pharma Funds

Despite promises to cut back on Pharma funds, 56% of DSM V panel members have reported industry ties— Zero improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

Related Posts

Meet the Psychiatrist Pushing For A Brave New World of Pre-Drugging Kids—Patrick McGorry

Related Posts

Our U.S. Military: Betrayed and Drugged

“Psychiatrists under contract with the Veteran Affairs—in my opinion—are legal drug dealers who almost took my life.” - Former Marine Scout Sniper

Related Posts

50 Years Ago Thomas Szasz Rocked The World of Psychiatry: The Difference Between A Disease and a Disorder

Related Posts

Think They Don’t Electroshock People Anymore? Think Again–Even toddlers and pregnant women are being shocked

Related Posts

Green Mental Health Care – Reclaiming Lives From Psychiatric Drugs

Related Posts

Pharma’s Drug Ads: From Million Dollar TV Ads to $1.7 Billion Internet Marketing Campaign

Related Posts

“Psychiatrists under contract with the Veteran Affairs—in my opinion—are legal drug dealers who almost took my life.”
- Former Marine Scout Sniper