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Mass psychosis in the US—How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

ALJAZEERA – July 12, 2011

by James Ridgeway

Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits - GALLO/GETTY

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry’s development of a new class of medications known as “atypical antipsychotics.” Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs – in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry’s roster of psychotropic drugs – costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren’t just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore

By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. “Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry’s influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can’t give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what’s wrong with you. So it’s often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it’s assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry’s influence put it, “the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence.” For this reason, they argue, it’s particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled “on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence” – and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: “Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry.” Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent “raging epidemic of mental illness” among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should “expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising.” Instead, “the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 – from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.” Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are “simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.” Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, “Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people.”

Cost benefit analysis

What’s especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old – vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: “Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003.” And according to another study, “one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug.”

A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida’s juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, “routinely” doling them out “for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators.” The numbers are staggering: “In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That’s enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day.” Further, the paper discovered that “One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications.”

In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan “five at five”—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were “flipping out” over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. “We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand” and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, “I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What’s more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same–a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.’”

For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including “a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,”the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement.” But Lilly’s sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.

Turning people into zombies

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.

Read the rest of the article here: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html

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Tags: $14 billion in sales, Abilify, antipsychotics, Astra Zeneca, big pharma, bilogical test, bipolar disorder, Marcia Angell, mental disorders, mental illness, New England Journal of Medicine, pharmaceutical industry, psychiatrists, psychiatry, Risperdal, schizophrenia, Seroquel, Zyprexa
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Bad Side-Effects Ahead For Pharma?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Forbes – June 30, 2011

by Martin Fridson

In 2006, The New York Review of Books reported that four-year-old Rebecca Riley died of the effects of two prescription drugs—Clonidine and Depakote.

These medications, along with Seroquel, were prescribed for Rebecca after she was diagnosed, at the age of two, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder. The three drugs are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of ADHD or long-term treatment of bipolar disorder, nor are they approved for children as young as Rebecca.

The New York Review of Books‘ recent two-part article (1) by Marcia Angell on the treatment of mental illness with psychoactive drugs (those that affect the mental state) addresses an issue that may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks. (All statistics and quotations herein are drawn from Dr. Angell’s article.)

It is not illegal for a doctor to prescribe a drug off-label, that is, for a non-FDA-approved use, but a drug marketer cannot lawfully encourage a doctor to do so. The profits in psychoactive drugs, however, make it tempting to flout the law. In the past four years, AstraZeneca (AZN), Pfizer (PFE), Eli Lilly (LLY), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) and Forest Labs (FRX) have all settled federal charges of marketing psychoactive drugs off-label, at a cost running into hundreds of millions.

Seeing that pharmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law, Dr. Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, advocates a prohibition on prescribing psychoactive drugs off-label.

A ban would cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.

This growth is not a function of a few blockbuster drug discoveries. It parallels an extraordinary rise in the portion of the population, particularly children, diagnosed with mental illness. For example, if diagnoses mirror the actual incidence of juvenile polar disorder, that affliction grew forty-fold between 1993 and 2004.

Have mental disorders genuinely proliferated that dramatically? Dr. Angell suggests instead that the surge in certain diagnoses reflects a long-run shift in emphasis from “talk therapy” to medication. This change just so happens to enable psychiatrists to see more patients and earn higher fees. Not incidentally, with drugs now regarded as the preferred mode of treatment, the increase in diagnoses is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.

Also benefiting from the present arrangement are low-income families that receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disabilities. To qualify, applicants (children included) generally must be taking psychoactive drugs. Getting into the program usually also ensures that the family will qualify for Medicaid. The disbursements can be so substantial that MIT economics professor David Autor describes SSI as “the new welfare.”

The parents and two siblings of Rebecca Riley, the four-year-old who died from the effects of off-label drugs, were all on psychoactive drugs and were receiving about $30,000 a year from SSI. Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.

I do not want to portray this issue as an imminent or mortal threat to pharmaceutical stocks. If a ban on off-label prescription of psychoactive drugs were proposed in Congress, the companies’ lobbyists probably could stave it off for a long time. Furthermore, the major pharmaceutical companies have widely diversified product lines, so a setback in the psychoactive category, even though it is a major growth area, would not be a body blow.

Still, this topic is one to keep an eye on for investors who hope to gain an edge by seeing beyond the quarterly EPS data. Psychoactive drugs have been around since the 1950s, but parents can readily observe that their use with children is far more widespread than it was a generation ago. If advocates such as Marcia Angell can make a persuasive case that the change is not fully justified on medical grounds, yet poses significant health hazards, is it unrealistic to expect a public opinion backlash some day?

[1] Marcia Angell, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” The New York Review of Books (June 23, 2011), pp. 20-22 and “The Illusions of Psychiatry” (July 14, 2011), pp. 20-22. The article is a review of three books on the contemporary practice of psychiatry by Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat.

http://blogs.forbes.com/investor/2011/06/30/bad-side-effects-ahead-for-pharma/

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Tags: ADHD, Astra Zeneca, bipolar disorder, blockbuster drugs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, children, Clonodine, death, Depakote, Eli Lilly, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, marketing executives, off-label, Pfizer, pharma, pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical stocks, Rebecca Riley, Seroquel, unapproved
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Selling Depression—Adding New Spin and Urgency to Depression Drug Sales

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

CounterPunch – June 19 Edition

by Martha Rosenberg

The discovery that many people with life problem or occasional bad moods would willingly dose themselves with antidepressants sailed the drug industry through the 2000s. A good chunk of the $4.5 billion a year direct-to-consumer advertising has been devoted to convincing people they don’t have problems with their job, the economy and their family, they have depression. Especially because depression can’t be diagnosed from a blood test.

Unfortunately, three things dried up the depression gravy train for the drug industry. Blockbusters went off patent and generics took off, antidepressants were linked with gory and unpredictable violence, especially in young users and — they didn’t even work, according to medical articles!

That’s when the drug industry began debuting the concept of “treatment resistant depression.” It wasn’t that their drugs didn’t work (or you didn’t have depression in the first place), you had “treatment resistant depression.” Your first expensive and dangerous drug needed to be coupled with more expensive and dangerous drugs because monotherapy, one drug alone, wasn’t doing the trick!

You’ve got to admire the drug industry’s audacity with this upsell strategy. Adding drugs to your treatment resistant depression triples its take, patients don’t know which drug is working so they’ll take all of them and the defective drugs are exonerated! (Because the problem is you.)

Now the drug industry has a new whisper campaign to keep the antidepressant boat afloat. Your depression is “progressive.”

Once upon a time, when depression was neither seasonal, atypical, bipolar or treatment resistant, it was considered to be a self-limiting disease. In fact, just about the only good thing you could say about depression was it wouldn’t last forever.

But now, the drug industry is giving depression the don’t-wait scare treatment like coronary events (statins), asthma attacks (“controller” drugs) and thinning bones (Sally Field). If you don’t hurry and take medication, your depression will get worse!

“Depressive episodes become more easily triggered over time,” floats an article on the physician Web site Medscape (flanked by ads for the antidepressant Pristiq.) “As the number of major depressive episodes increase, the risk for subsequent episodes is predicted more from the number of prior episodes and less from the occurrence of a recent life stress.” The article, unabashedly titled “Neurobiology of Depression: Major Depressive Disorder as a Progressive Illness,” is written by Vladimir Maletic who happens to have served on Eli Lilly’s Speaker’s Bureau, says the disclosure information, and whose co-authors are each employees and/or Lilly shareholders.

On WebMD, a sister site to Medscape, the depression sell is even less subtle. An article called Recognizing the Symptoms of Depression, smothered with five ads for the Eli Lilly antidepressant, Cymbalta, submits, “Most of us know about the emotional symptoms of depression. But you may not know that depression can be associated with many physical symptoms, too.”

Depression may masquerade as headaches, insomnia, fatigue, backache, dizziness, lightheadedness or appetite problems mongers the article. “You might feel queasy or nauseous. You might have diarrhea or become chronically constipated.” And here, you thought it was something you ate!

The danger with these symptoms says the article is that you would fail to diagnose yourself as suffering from a psychiatric problem and buy an over-the-counter drug like a normal person. “Because these symptoms occur with many conditions, many depressed people never get help, because they don’t know that their physical symptoms might be caused by depression. A lot of doctors miss the symptoms, too.”

But when head and backaches aren’t labeled as depression, the drug industry make no money and insurance rates could stop climbing from over-treatment with unnecessary, expensive and dangerous psychoactive drugs!

To prevent such goring of marketshare, the article (whose content was “selected and controlled by WebMD’s editorial staff and is funded by Lilly USA,” an original WebMD financial partner according to the Washington Post) counsels worry about physical symptoms. “Don’t assume they’ll go away on their own.” Symptoms may “need additional treatment” and “some antidepressants, such as Cymbalta and Effexor, may help with chronic pain, too.”

Before direct-to-consumer advertising, the health care system was devoted to preventing over-treatment and assuring patients they were probably okay. Who remembers “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning”? Now patients are assured they probably aren’t okay but probably have a progressive disease. Luckily their disease can be treated with progressive prescriptions from pharma.

http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg06172011.html

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Tags: antidepressants, antipsychotic, bipolar disorder, blockbuster drugs, Cymbalta, depression, direct to consumer advertising, Effoxor, Eli Lilly, Major Depressive Disorder, Marketing, pharma, selling depression, treatment resistant depression, WebMD
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America’s Most Dangerous Pill? Klonopin.

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

No "benzo" has been more lethal to millions of Americans than a popular prescription drug called Klonopin

It’s not Adderall or Oxy. It’s Klonopin. And doctors are doling it out like candy, causing a surge of hellish withdrawals, overdoses and deaths.

Alternet – June 1, 2011

by Christopher Byron

You could argue that the deadliest “drug” in the world is the venom from a jellyfish known as the Sea Wasp, whose sting can kill a human being in four minutes—up to 100 humans at a time. Potassium chloride, which is used to trigger cardiac arrest and death in the 38 states of the U.S. that enforce the death penalty is also pretty deadly . But when it comes to prescription drugs that are not only able to kill you but can drag out the final reckoning for years on end, with worsening misery at every step of the way, it is hard to top the benzodiazepines. And no “benzo” has been more lethal to millions of Americans than a popular prescription drug called Klonopin.

Klonopin is the brand name for the pill known as clonazepam, which was originally brought to market in 1975 as a medication for epileptic seizures. Since then, Klonopin, along with the other drugs in this class, has become a prescription of choice for drug abusers from Hollywood to Wall Street. In the process, these Schedule III and IV substances have also earned the dubious distinction of being second only to opioid painkillers like OxyContin as our nation’s most widely abused class of drug.

Photo Credit: Kristin Burns

Seventies-era rock star Stevie Nicks is the poster girl for the perils of Klonopin addiction. In almost every interview, the former lead singer of Fleetwood Mac makes a point of mentioning the toll her abuse of the drug has taken on her life. This month, while promoting her new solo album, In Your Dreams, she told Fox that she blamed Klonopin for the fact that she never had children. “The only thing I’d change [in my life] is walking into the office of that psychiatrist who prescribed me Klonopin. That ruined my life for eight years,” she said. “God knows, maybe I would have met someone, maybe I would have had a baby.”

Nicks checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1986 to overcome a cocaine addiction. After her release, the psychiatrist in question prescribed a series of benzos—first Valium, then Xanax, and finally Klonopin—supposedly to support her sobriety. “[Klonopin] turned me into a zombie,” she told US Weekly in 2001, according to the website Benzo.org, one of many patient-run sites on the Internet offering information about benzodiazepine addiction, withdrawal and recovery. Nicks has described the drug as a “horrible, dangerous drug,” and said that her eventual 45-day hospital detox and rehab from the drug felt like “somebody opened up a door and pushed me into hell.” Others have described Klonopin’s effects as beginning with an energized sense of euphoria but ending up with horrifying sense of anxiety and paralysis, akin to sticking your tongue into an electric outlet, or suddenly feeling that your brain is on fire.

When benzodiazepines first came to market in the 1950s and 1960s, they were prescribed for a range of neurological disorders such as epilepsy as well as anxiety related disorders such as insomnia. But over time, a loophole in federal drug-control laws known as the “practice of medicine exception” has permitted psychiatrists and other physicians to prescribe the drugs for any perceived disorder or symptom imaginable, from panic attacks to weight control problems. Much in the same way, Valium became infamous as “mother’s little helper,” a sedative used to pacify a generation of bored and frustrated suburban housewives.

Alcoholics and drug addicts are most likely to run into Klonopin during detox, when it is used to prevent seizures and control the symptoms of acute withdrawal. Klonopin takes longer to metabolize and passes through your system more slowly than other benzos, so in theory you don’t need to take it so frequently. But if you like the high it gives you, and keep increasing your dosage, the addictive effects of the drug accumulate quickly and can often be devastating. The drug’s label clearly specifies that it is “recommended” only for short-term use—say, seven to 10 days—but once exposed to the pill’s seductive side-effects, many patients come back for more. And not surprisingly, many doctors are happy to refill prescriptions to meet this consumer demand. In the process, countless numbers of people swap one addiction for another, often worse than the initial addiction they were trying to treat. Although benzodiazepines are rarely reported to be the cause of single-drug overdoses, they show up with great frequency in deaths from so-called combined drug intoxication, or CDI. In recent years there have been thousands of deaths caused by this lethal combination. The drug has also help hasten the death of a wide list of otherwise healthy celebrities. :

In 1996, Actress Margaux Hemingway committed suicide by overdosing on a barbiturate-benzodiazepine cocktail. Weeks later, Hollywood movie producer Don Simpson (Beverly Hills Cop) also died from an unintentional benzo-based overdose. Klonopin was one of 11 different prescription drugs—all written by the same doctor—found in the body of Playboy centerfold model Anna Nicole Smith, who OD’d in 2007. Thereafter, the well-known Los Angeles author, David Foster Wallace, who was suffering from a profound depression when a doctor prescribed him Klonopin, went into his backyard on a September evening and hanged himself with a leather belt he had nailed to an overhead beam on his patio. Klonopin has been striking down more than just troubled celebrities, however. In 2008, reports began to surface of soldiers returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder who were dying in their sleep, the victims of a psych-med cocktail of Klonopin, Paxil (an antidepressant), and Seroquel, an antipsychotic that is routinely prescribed by VA hospitals.

Hospital emergency room visits for benzodiazepine abuse now dwarf those for illegal street drugs by a more than a three-to-one margin. This trend has been increasing for at least the last five years. In 2006, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published data showing that prescription drugs that year were the number two reason for ER admissions to hospitals for drug abuse, slightly behind illicit substances like heroin and cocaine. But a survey released by the agency earlier this year claims that benzos, opioids and other prescriptions meds are now responsible for the majority of drug-related hospital visits.

Scientists can’t say for sure what Klonopin does when ingested, except that it dramatically affects the functioning of the brain. This much we know: If your brain is on fire with electrical signals—like, say, you’re having an epileptic seizure—a dose of clonazepam will help put out the flames. It does so by lowering the electrical activity of the brain, specifically which electrical activities it suppresses is something that no one really seems to know for sure. And therein lies the reason why clonazepam, like nearly the entire class of benzos, causes such unpredictable reactions in people. Put simply, the brain is just too complex a structure for its owners to understand—and when you start monkeying around with the way it functions, it’s anybody’s guess what is going to happen next.

Here’s how the respected neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick, Jr., describes the brain in his book When The Air Hits Your Brain: Parables of Neurosurgery: “The human brain: a trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans.” So, if clonazepam is given to a patient with a history of epileptic seizures, it is likely to bring the symptoms under control. But give the same drug to a person suffering from a completely different problem (an eating or sleeping disorder, for example), and it might actually cause an epileptic seizure.

Clonazepam has wreaked such havoc on people partly because it is so highly addictive; anyone who takes it for more than a few weeks may well develop a dependence on it. As a result, you can be prescribed Klonopin as a short-term treatment for, say, insomnia, and wind up so hooked on it that you’ll begin frantically “doctor shopping” for new prescriptions if the first physician who gave it for you refuses to renew the prescription. As with all benzos, use of Klonopin for more than a month can lead to a dangerous condition known as “benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome,” featuring elevation of a user’s heart rate and blood pressure along with insomnia, nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety, panic, weight loss, muscular spasms or cramps, and seizures.

Along with Klonopin, here are the three other benzos that, by general agreement, have made it into the top ranks of the world’s worst and most widely abused drugs: temazepam, alprazolam, and lorazepam.

Temazepam: Sold in the U.S. under the brand name Restoril, this benzo was developed and approved in the 1960s as a short-term treatment for insomnia. It is basically what is commonly called a “knockout drop.” Taken even in relatively modest dosages, temazepam can produce a powerfully hypnotic effect that numbs users and makes them extremely compliant and susceptible to control. But thanks to the “practice of medicine exception” physicians can prescribe it for anything they want.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union reportedly used temazepam extensively to keep political dissidents in a drugged-out state in government-run psychiatric hospitals. Both the CIA and the KGB are also said to have also used the sleeping pill in prisoner interrogations and in research into mind-control, brainwashing and social engineering.

Temazepam is sometimes referred to as a “date rape” drug, and it figures frequently in drug-related crimes of violence. In the drug world underground, where it is often sold as an alternative to heroin and crack cocaine, it goes by such street names as “tams,” “Vitamin T,” “terminators,” “big T,” “mind eraser” and “Mommy’s Big Helper.” Common side-effects include confusion, clumsiness, chronic drowsiness, impaired learning, memory and motor functions, as well as extreme euphoria, dizziness and amnesia.

Alprazolam: Brand name Xanax, this benzo now accounts for as many as 60% of all hospital admissions for drug addiction, according to some research. What’s more, violent and psychotic responses to Xanax are not limited to humans. In May 2009, a 200-lb chimpanzee being kept as a house pet by a Stamford, Conn., woman went on a rampage after being dosed with Xanax, escaping into the neighborhood and ripping off the face of a friend of its owner.

Lorazepam: Brand name Ativan, this drug has figured in an array of well-publicized homicides and suicides by those using it. Ativan surfaced in the 2000 divorce case between Washington, D.C., socialite Patricia Duff and her husband, Wall Street billionaire Ronald Perelman. In deposition testimony, Perelman acknowledged taking Ativan as an anti-anxiety drug during his separation from Duff and the commencement of divorce proceedings. The period was marked by numerous outbursts by Perelman and at least two physical assaults on Duff. In 2008, news reports revealed that Ativan was being used by the U.S. Customs Service to keep suspected terrorists sedated while deporting them to detention facilities abroad.

You can buy any of these “feel-good” drugs without a doctor’s signature by simply typing the name into any Internet search engine. Instantly, you’ll be presented with dozens of websites, both foreign and domestic, where you can make your purchase, no prescription required. (Most of the websites accept all major credit cards.)

Why has all this happened? In large measure you can thank the 47,000 members of the American psychiatric profession for this dreadful state of affairs. Neither the pharmaceutical industry nor the psychiatric profession would be anywhere near as lucrative as they are today without their mutual support system. Together they have created a marketing juggernaut that over the last 20 years has spawned a seemingly nonstop gusher of profits that is only now beginning to slow—and probably only temporarily.

The scholarly journals of the psychiatric profession were filled with early warnings, beginning almost 50 years ago, from those who could see where the encroaching influence of the drug companies was destined to lead the profession. Now, even the medical journals themselves have been corrupted by the hidden hand of Big Pharma. In 2008, the New York Times reported that a survey of the six top medical journals showed that on average almost 8% of the bylined articles published in their pages were ghostwritten by freelance writers, then published under the names of cooperating doctors and researchers to give the pro-drug messages contained in the articles the appearance of impartiality. The scheme is bankrolled, of course, by the company that makes the drug.

Consider Dr. Joseph Biederman, the world-renowned Harvard University psychiatrist and father of modern psychopharmacology for children, who, it now turns out, has been taking secret “consulting fees” from drug companies for years. Biederman is widely credited with legitimizing the concept of “bipolar disorder” as a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be corrected with psychiatric drugs. But documents uncovered by Senate investigators probing ties between the psychiatric profession and the drug industry, which have resulted in an explosion in medically approved uses for psychiatric drugs for children, show that Biederman received more than $1.6 million in undisclosed payments since 2000 from the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing the drugs he was encouraging parents to give to their children if they appeared to be “bipolar.”

No surveys that I am aware of have ever been conducted regarding the public’s impression of what psychiatrists actually do. But from pop culture media characters such as the fictional female psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi in the HBO series The Sopranos, the general belief seems to be that psychiatrists are learned and humane professionals who counsel their patients through hour-long “talk therapy” sessions in their offices once a week, and more frequently than that if necessary to help them resolve their conflicts.

In fact, many do nothing of the sort. It may be only a patient’s first session with a psychiatrist that lasts any meaningful amount of time. In this initial consultation the psychiatrist relies on the DSM manual as the diagnostic tool to decide precisely what the patient suffers from. Once that is established, the psychiatrist can begin prescribing psych meds as therapy, free of fear about the danger of a medical malpractice suit lurking down the road.

The follow-up sessions (weekly, monthly, etc.) that come after the initial consultations—that is, the sessions that are portrayed on The Sopranos as the occasions when Mafia killer Tony Soprano sits down in Dr. Melfi’s darkened office and pours out his guts about his troubled childhood—usually last as little as 15 minutes. During these so-called “med checks,” a psychiatrist typically charges $100 or more for asking the patient little more than how he or she is responding to the prescribed medication—a question that can usually be answered by a quick glance at the patient’s demeanor.

At the end of such a med-check, the psychiatrist may decide to renew the patient’s current prescription, substitute or add a new one—or even offer the patient a free sample of some new psych-med, courtesy of a sales rep from a pharmaceutical company. At four med-checks per hour, a psychiatrist with enough patients to fill up his workdays can easily make $120,000 annually from his med-check practice alone and still take a month-long summer vacation.

It’s obvious that this system incentivizes doctors financially to keep prescribing drugs in order to keep patients returning for med-checks. But Big Pharma offers a whole host of additional income opportunities. Last year, ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize–winning public-interest investigative website, did an extensive report on the financial compensation drug companies shower on physicians. Well-titled “Dollars for Docs,” this series included a database of more than 17,000 doctors who accepted “speaker fees” and other money from eight drug companies in 2009 and 2010 totaling $320 million.

That accounting is only the tip of the iceberg, however, as most pharmaceutical companies have refused to disclose their physician payments. Not surprisingly, most doctors interviewed by ProPublica denied that their medical decisions and prescribing habits were influenced by drug company payments. The new healthcare reform bill calls for greater transparency, requiring all drug-makers to disclose all fees paid to all doctors by 2014. Until then, you can type your doctor’s name into the database to find out if he or she is on the pharma take, and for how much.

http://www.alternet.org/health/151166/america%27s_most_dangerous_pill?page=entire

Christopher Byron is a prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author. His columns and articles have appeared in a dozens of major publications, including New York Magazine, Fortune, The New York Times and The New York Post. He has also been a regular guest commentator on CNN. Fox, and CNBC. This article is exclusively excerpted from his forthcoming book, Mind Drugs, Inc.: How Big Pharma and Modern Psychiatry Have Corrupted Washington and Destroyed Mental Health in America.

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Tags: anti anxiety drug, Ativan, benzo, benzodiazapines, bipolar disorder, death, homicide, joseph biederman, Klonopin, overdose, psychiatric, psychiatrist, Stevie Nicks, Xanax
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FDA approved Big Pharma drugs without effectiveness data

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Natural News May 4, 2011

by S. L. Baker

Consumers constantly are told how complicated it is to get a new drug on the market. After all, researchers have to jump through all sorts of hoops to assure safety before new therapies are approved for the public, right?

It turns out they may be missing some of those hoops or not jumping through some of the most important ones.

In fact, huge red flags are being raised about how drugs are tested and approved in two new studies, including one just published in the May 4th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

A case in point: it turns out that only about half of the new prescription medications pushed onto the market over the last decade had the proper data together for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – yet the FDA approved them anyhow.

The information in question is known specifically as comparative effectiveness data. And it is – or should be – a very big deal when it comes to deciding whether a drug should be approved and sold to the public

According to the Institute of Medicine, comparative effectiveness data is defined as the “generation and synthesis of evidence that compares the benefits and harms of alternative methods to prevent, diagnose, treat, and monitor a clinical condition or to improve the delivery of care.”

In other words, how does a new drug stack up against other treatments – is it more beneficial, safer, or does it have more potential dangers?

Comparative effectiveness information on drugs is especially important when doctors are making decisions about whether to prescribe a med, and to whom, soon after a drug is approved. That’s because when Big Pharma medications first hit the market, physicians are relying on what drug companies and the FDA tell them about a medication. It takes a while for real life reports to come in as people report reactions, side effects (including deaths related to a drug) to become clearer.

Also, there are usually not data from large head-to-head trials comparing multiple treatments available when a medication first hits the marketplace. “Comparative effectiveness is taking on an increasingly important role in U.S. health care, yet little is known about the availability of comparative efficacy data for drugs at the time of their approval in the United States,” according to background information in the new JAMA study.

It’s not like there’s not money to come up with this information, either. In 2009, Congress allocated $1.1 billion of taxpayers’ money to comparative effectiveness research.

For the JAMA study, researcher Nikolas H. Goldberg and colleagues from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, investigated the proportion of recently approved drugs that had comparative efficacy data available at the time they were authorized by the FDA to be sold in the U.S. They also examined the availability of this information over time and by therapeutic indication by checking out approval packages publicly available through the online database of drug products (dubbed new molecular entities, NMEs, for short) approved by FDA between 2000 and 2010.

The researchers found that only about half of 197 eligible approved NMEs between 2000 and 2010 had comparative efficacy data available at the time they were approved to be marketed.

Meanwhile, another recent study throws needed light on the limited data behind the safety and effectiveness of some Big Pharma drugs.

Research led jointly by Alexander Tsai of Harvard University and Nicholas Rosenlicht of the University of California San Francisco just published in PLoS Medicine zeroed in on the medication aripiprazole, which is prescribed treating bipolar disorder .

How was this powerful drug deemed safe and effective? Amazingly, the research team found the only evidence for the use of this medication came from a single trial. And, as they described in their paper, the scientists found key limitations of the drug study that clearly skewed the findings so they appear to support the use of aripiprazole for bipolar disorder.

Did this stop the FDA from approving the drug? No way. And neither did the fact that this single, poorly designed trial was sponsored by the drug manufacturer who produces aripiprazole.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032279_Big_Pharma_fraud.html#ixzz1LVKgPjfN

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Tags: aripiprazole, big pharma, bipolar disorder, drugs, FDA, FDA drug approval, Marketing, powerful drug, unsafe drugs
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Mad World:”A pill to make you numb, a pill to make you dumb, a pill to make you anybody else”— Marilyn Manson

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

“A pill to make you numb, a pill to make you dumb, a pill to make you anybody else”"

– Marilyn Manson, “Coma White”

OpEd News, April 20, 2011

By Damien Qui

If you’ve ever watched two episodes of House M.D., you know the routine. The doctors are on a mad rush to get a diagnosis, throwing one treatment after another at the symptoms to see if it works. All tests have been inconclusive, all theories have been shot down, and the only thing that can save the day is the last minute epiphany of a brilliant and eccentric doctor. If you take away that last step you get a somewhat less interesting show where the patients always die, but also a much better metaphor for the psychiatric industry.

Let’s put on our diagnostic whiteboard the term “chemical imbalance”. What is the cause? Unknown. What are the physiological signs of a chemical imbalance? Since there is no control model for a chemically balanced brain, there are no physiological signs of an imbalance. What are the symptoms? Now we’re getting somewhere. If you suffer from periods of sadness (depression), happiness or agitation (mania), emotional numbness, confusion, extreme boredom, hyperactivity, inactivity, increased or reduced sex drive, sleeplessness, restlessness, oversleeping, lack of interest, changes in behavior, drug use, lack of stimulation, and/or procrastination, then you have just tested positive. What is the treatment? That’s the easy part. Simply start depositing your paychecks into the accounts of your doctor’s favorite pharmaceutical company and you are on your way to a life-long course of treatment that will make damn sure that you have a chemical tornado in your brain, whether you did in the first place or not.

This is an issue particularly personal to me, though I’m sure it’s not uncommon. I’m sure we’ve all known someone who’s gone on the anti-depressant rollercoaster, and most are still riding it. My mother is one of those people. Her first husband killed himself in front of my young eyes in August of 1983. Though the trauma of that experience never faded from her, she went on with her life. Sometimes it was too much and she would turn to drinking and drugs, or just sink into a depression that could last weeks. Even twenty years later, the occasional feelings of guilt and loss would be unbearable, but she maintained. She worked hard and took care of herself, and held fast to an independent spirit that brightened the air around her. Most of the year this was her, but every year around August she would feel that weight begin to crush her again.

One year, she finally decided to seek help, and what she found would destroy her. Being a typical lower-middle class woman, she couldn’t afford the best. A cheap clinic diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, which allowed her to draw social security and disability benefits that would help her see a doctor. The doctor confirmed the diagnosis and prescribed a drug that made her unable to get out of bed in the morning, but she was encouraged to stay on it until her body had fully adapted to it. When they finally let her switch, we learned our first lesson in withdrawal. Switching from the first drug (whose name I can’t remember) to Prozac was accompanied by violent mood swings and unpredictable behavior. She physically attacked several people unprovoked and couldn’t remember why. Then came Zoloft, Lithium, and a host of others. With them came blackout mania, dissociative fugue, and multiple suicide attempts. She was eventually living under my care and supervision as ordered by a judge, and the intelligent, vibrant, and headstrong woman I had looked up to as a child had long since transformed into a babbling, paranoid, and delusional stranger. The last time I talked to this person, she was living with a pedophile that had me baker-acted (sent to a mental institution) when I found him out and tried to separate them. Can you guess what I found out there? Apparently I’m bipolar as well.

They never tested me, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. There are no tests that can prove the necessity of a psychiatric drug, because the drugs are designed to treat a purely theoretical cause of the disorder for which they are prescribed. No psychiatrist has ever ordered an MRI as part of their diagnostic routine. There is no blood work that can be done, no gene markers that can be identified, and no abnormalities in neurological structure (yet) that can be found to specifically identify bipolar, manic-depressive, or any other psychological disorders. We continue to treat them with drugs that are permanently addictive, mind-altering, and endangering.

They (the psychiatric industry) say that mental illness affects about twenty-five percent of the population, so the odds are that you know someone who is either being baited or already in the trap.The standard for diagnosis is The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (available online at http://allpsych.com/disorders/dsm.html ). Spend some time browsing through this massive compilation of mental illness, and you will start to realize just how sick you apparently are. The category vaguely labeled “mood disorders” consists of across the board psychotropic drug treatment. In describing this category, the manual says “The disorders in this category include those where the primary symptom is a disturbance in mood. In other words: inappropriate, exaggerated, or limited range of feelings. Everybody gets down sometimes, and everybody experiences a sense of excitement and emotional pleasure. To be diagnosed with a mood disorder, your feelings must be to the extreme.” Fair enough, until you look at the most popular diagnosis for young and old, and my personal favorite, bipolar disorder:

Under the DSM-IV definition of Bipolar 1 symptoms:
For a diagnosis of Bipolar I disorder, a person must have at least one manic episode” an intense high where the person feels euphoric, almost indestructible in areas such as personal finances, business dealings, or relationships. They may have an elevated self-esteem, be more talkative than usual, have flight of ideas, a reduced need for sleep, and be easily distracted” Depression is often experienced as the high quickly fades and as the consequences of their activities becomes apparent, the depressive episode can be exacerbated.

Sounds like the bipolar we all know and love. What about bipolar 2? It can only get worse, right?

Under the DSM-IV definition of Bipolar 2 symptoms:

Similar to Bipolar I Disorder, there are periods of highs as described above and often followed by periods of depression. Bipolar II Disorder, however, is different in that the highs are hypo manic, rather than manic. In other words, they have similar symptoms but they are not severe enough to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning and typically do not require hospitalization in order to assure the safety of the person.

Funny, it almost sounds like this person is moody, but that term wasn’t medical enough. Note that we still haven’t heard any physiological symptoms, as are required to identify as a disease and/or determine the target of pharmaceutical treatment, but all that does is open the door to the pharmaceutical companies. If a diagnosis can be based on generic medical opinion and theory, the same goes for the treatment.

Under the DSM-IV definition of Bipolar (1 and 2) treatment:

Medication, such as Lithium, is typically prescribed for this disorder and is the corner stone of treatment.

By the way, just in case your moods don’t swing quite far enough for you to feel like Bipolar 2 is your particular brand of crazy, they’ve got an even more medical sounding term for you.

Under the DSM-IV definition of Cyclothymia symptoms:

Like Bipolar II Disorder, symptoms of cyclothymia include periods of hypomania (see above). Depressive symptoms are also present as the hypomania fades. These symptoms, however, do not meet the criteria for a major depressive episode, in other words, are not as severe as those found in Bipolar Disorder.

Prognosis: Prognosis is good when the proper combination of medication and therapy are received.

The next step down seems to be complete apathy, for which I’m sure there is an excellent prescribed treatment. The problem is that we have trusted psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies to define what is abnormal without ever defining what is normal. It is an impossible standard to define. We as a society only allow it because we don’t want to accept that “normal” does not always equal comfortable. That is why more than six million children in America are medicated in the name of ADHD. Drugging your child so that they are easier to deal with cuts so much of the hassle out of parenting. Besides, it’s much nicer to believe your child is naturally focused and reserved, just a victim of an unfortunate illness, than to accept that hyperactivity and disorganized thought are the natural state of a child (unless we are to redefine the term “childish”).

Sometimes we have to deal with the annoyance, whatever it may be, because it is part of life. A screaming, hyperactive kid is hard to deal with. Sadness can seem impossible to overcome. Emotion, pain, and even life as a whole can be a great burden to bear. It is part of the human experience, and sometimes it sucks. That doesn’t make you abnormal. Sometimes you can’t think straight. Sometimes you can’t make any sense of anything and you don’t know what to do. Sometimes there really may be something wrong. That doesn’t mean that there is a pill to fix it. The best treatment for mental disorder is to find someone to talk to, be it a friend, family member, or a professional therapist. There are good doctors out there who don’t buy their prescription pads in bulk. If your doctor can’t show you the hard evidence of what they are medicating, refuse the medication. Any other field of medicine will easily pass this test. No oncologist would prescribe chemotherapy for troubled breathing, he’ll check your lungs for a tumor. A doctor doesn’t put your leg in a cast because it hurts, he does it to set a broken bone. This is because chemo can kill you, and an unnecessary cast both incurs a wasteful expense and masks the potentially serious cause of the leg pain. Why, then, do we allow psychiatrists alone to prescribe dangerous drugs for ambiguous symptoms with an unknown cause, throwing unprovable medicine at theoretical conditions? I’m not against the medical industry, prescribed medicine, or even psychiatry as a whole.

I just don’t believe in hammering at invisible nails. Then again, I’m a little crazy.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mad-World-by-Damien-Qui-110417-174.html

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Tags: bipolar disorder, depression, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, dsm, pill, psychiatry
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Adderall’s on First, Ritalin’s on Second: The Ongoing Saga of PEDs in Baseball

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Bleacher Report
By Joseph Jones
March 23, 2011

It seems like an eternity since Major League Baseball finally got around to admitting it had a problem of the performance enhancing variety, but in reality it has barely been a half a decade.

Players once thought to be first-ballot Hall of Famers are struggling to garner more than a pittance of support from sports writers and fans alike as the sport carries on the best it can.

Attendance remains high—despite an ongoing quasi-recession—television revenue is streaming in and it appears that many of the measures taken by commissioner Bud Selig and his merry band of nitwits salvaged what little dignity this great sport had left in the wake of all that ugliness.

But alas, as always, looks can be deceiving.

I, for one, was more than a little bit surprised when MLB decided to include a ban on stimulants in its new drug program a few years back.

Now the use of uppers is neither new nor surprising in the baseball world, going back as far as the days of Willie Mays players have been using some form or another to endure the grueling demands of the 162-game season.

While steroids, and their artificial augmentation of baseball’s favorite play, the longball, have received most of the mainstream media coverage, anyone who really knows two shits about baseball recognizes that “greenies” have always been a much more pervasive part of the game.

Countless stories of large Ronald Reagan-esque like jars filled with amphetamines (as opposed to Ronnie’s trademark jellybeans) and pots of coffee labeled “extra-caffeinated” could be found without much effort at all.

A baseball season is a long & grueling one, after all. 162 games, packed into about 180 days, taking players, coaches and fans through a hot and humid summer can wear down even the best of men. So for decades players have turned to “artificial means” to carry them through the dog days of summer.

I told more than one friend that it would be interesting to see who “faded down the stretch” and chuckled at the sudden emergence of energy drinks as sponsors for the big league clubs.

But I never could have imagined the thing that would catch my eye exactly one year later…and every year since.

When the league banned these drugs, an amazing thing happened. The number of players claiming and obtaining “therapeutic use” exemptions for stimulants nearly quadrupled from 28 to 103.

“Therapeutic use” means you can justifiably use the drug because you need it for a medical condition. If you didn’t have the condition, you’d just be a normal pro baseball player, and the attention-focusing benefits of Ritalin would be a form of “enhancement,” i.e., cheating.

Before the ban only 28 players had “therapeutic use exemptions” allowing them to take drugs such as Ritalin or Adderall. Twenty-eight. Then somehow magically that number jumps to over 100 as soon as the ban kicks in?

Color me suspicious but do they really think we are that dumb?

I mean how the hell can ADHD multiply fourfold in a sport in a single year? How can it become three times as prevalent in that sport as in the adult population? Is it contagious? Can Derek Jeter give it to Dustin Pedroia if he coughs on him as he slides into second base? Of course not.

ADHD is a psychological diagnosis. Like post-traumatic stress disorder or bipolar disorder it’s open to interpretation in any given patient. Three doctors may say you don’t have it. A fourth may say you do.

It’s that subjectivity that should have led to the league having a more discerning eye. After all they had literally just caught the foxes trying to rob the hen house when they found over 100 major leagues had tested positive in their last round of anonymous testing.

MLB should have also taken notice of what pretty much EVERYONE else had when these numbers were first published, namely that among adults, the rate of diagnosis is between 1 percent and 3.5 percent. But among pro baseball players, the disease seems epidemic. That means 8 percent of major-league players have ADHD—twice the rate among children and three to eight times the rate among adults.

But, of course, they didn’t.

They argue that once the number spiked up to 103 it “plateaued” and has remained at or about that same level since. This is true, the numbers show there were 105 therapeutic use exemptions in 2010, up from 106 TUEs in 2008/2009 and 103 in 2007, but it still doesn’t address why there was such a sharp rise in the first place.

But then again, do we really expect more from Bud the Dud?

The World Anti-Doping Agency sure as hell doesn’t:

“My reaction is the same as last year and the year before that,” said Dr. Gary Wadler, chairman of the committee that determines the banned substances list for the World Anti-Doping Agency. “It seems to me almost incomprehensible that ADHD is so pervasive in baseball to a degree that it requires medicine.”

A frequent critic of baseball’s drug-testing program, Wadler said “these numbers really cry out for transparency in the TUE process in baseball — a good look-see at the process, not just the numbers.”

This ostrich-like ability of Selig’s, where he is able to shove his head in the sand for unnaturally long periods of time has long infuriated me frankly.

I only wish I could have been a fly-on-the-wall in the offices of Major League Baseball when the recent divorce proceedings of Kansas City Royals catcher Jason Kendall and his estranged wife Chantel have remained frequent fodder for internet gossip sites like TMZ and RadarOnline and even recently made the jump to websites not concerned with the latest atrocious parenting of Jon and Kate Gosselin.

While professional athletes ditching gold digging trophy wives is no novel concept, this one had steamy particulars involving the love triangle of a pro athlete, a smokin’ hot babe and the son of a rock-n-roll legend (Chantel is currently dating Sean Stewart, son of Rod Stewart).

The focus of the tittle-tattle involved Chantel accusing her husband of abusing the drug Adderall, which subsequently led to him both physically and emotionally abusing her.

Aside from accusations that he urinated & defecated on a pile of Chantel’s clothes after finding out she had been cheating on him, she claimed that he received a spurious prescription to take what is now labeled a performance enhancing drug otherwise banned by Major League Baseball.

While Kendall refused to answer the judge’s question about his use of greenies under the argument that (I. shit. you. not) Mark McGwire didn’t have to answer the questions he was asked in court about PEDs, he was very forthcoming about his prescription drug habits and more than willing to toss former teammates Brian Giles and Bobby Crosby under the bus, implicating them as fellow Adderall appreciators in court depositions.

One has to think that Bud was running around Manhattan looking for a schoolyard sandbox the shove his head in the moment he caught wind of these proceedings.

I am sure Selig is a good man. It appears he has a passion for baseball, and genuinely wants to do the right thing to help the sport. But there is a problem—he is gutless.

For years he ignored steroids in baseball while the problem grew out of control. Despite many fans knowing certain players were on steroids, even going back to the 1980s (for an example, a 1988 Fenway Park crowd chanted “Ster-oids” at Jose Canseco), Selig in February of 2005 said, with a straight face:

“I never heard about it. I ran a team and nobody was closer to their players and I never heard any comment from them. It wasn’t until 1998 or ’99 that I heard the discussion…I don’t know if there were allegations in the early 90s. I never heard them.”

I remember reading those comments and thinking either this man is absolutely lying, or he is completely incompetent and oblivious. Maybe it is a little of both, but either way, this man should not be allowed to run major league baseball.

Further, even if taken at face value, if Selig knew about steroids in 1998 or ’99, why did it take him until 2005 to take any action, and only after Congress forced him into it.

Sadly, I fully expect this same sort of blissful ignorance to plague Selig’s handling of this next round of PEDs in baseball.

Just as stories about players juicing were swept under the rug because of increasing television ratings and attendance due to historical records falling every year, this dirty little secret will go on flying under the radar.

Instead of looking out for the interest and integrity of the game, Selig will gladly keep trading it away, piece by piece, for an increased revenue stream.

Read article here: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/643751-adderalls-on-first-ritalins-on-second

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Tags: Adderall, ADHD, amphetamines, bipolar disorder, Major League Baseball, MLB, PEDs, performance enhancing drugs, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychiatric drugs, Ritalin, stimulants, Therapeutic use
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Oh That? Seroquel Marketing Undeterred by This Week’s Deceptive Marketing Settlement

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

OpEdNews March 15, 2011

by Martha Rosenberg

Google the word “depression” and the first search result you’ll get is for the antipsychotic Seroquel XR.

Visit WebMD and the home page hosts similar ads for Seroquel XR, above and adjacent to the lead news story.

Who would know AstraZeneca inked the largest multi-state consumer protection settlement on record relating to deceptive Seroquel marketing just this week? For $68.5 million? Only a year after inking a similar settlement related to burying side effect and safety information for $520 million with the government?

Who would know AstraZeneca has already settled nearly 25,000 personal injury lawsuits pertaining to Seroquel with more to come says ABC news?

First approved in 1997, Seroquel has enjoyed the camel-nose-under-the-tent phenomenon known as indications creep. First approved for schizophrenia, it was later approved for bipolar disorder and psychiatric conditions in children. But it was Seroquel’s 2009 approval as an add-drug for depression that helped it reach its spectacular sales of $5.3 billion in 2010 thanks to the US’ walloping depression “market” of 20 million.

Seroquel’s blood sugar, weight gain and heart side effects are well known. That’s why FDA regulators opposed its use as a first choice, stand-alone treatment for the 10 percent of the US population with depression when safer drugs exist. “I saw no clear advantage demonstrated in efficacy,” said Dr. Wayne Goodman who chaired the FDA panel considering the depression indication. “There were side effects, and I would expect unintended consequences associated with wide-scale use of the drug.”

The drug also can cause increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis, suicidality, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, cataracts, seizures, increases in blood pressure and movement disorders in neonates when their mothers take it.

Seroquel’s fraud trail is also well known with more than six conflict of interest scandals swirling around Seroquel researchers and promoters. Psychiatrist Richard Borison was sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence in 1998 for a pay-to-play Seroquel research scheme which helped establish Seroquel’s original perception as safe.

But how many realize Seroquel’s cost to the individual taxpayer and health insurance consumers at a Red Book price of almost $500 per month per person?

Auditors with the Michigan Corrections Department say the state could save $350,000 a month by switching just half of its Seroquel prescriptions to another pill. (Anyone know a school that could use $350,000 a month?) And North Carolina spends $29.4 million per year on Seroquel prescriptions. Who knows how much else states and taxpayers are paying to control the metabolic side effects that emerge with Seroquel?

Reports are also starting to surface about the effect $6,000-a-year Seroquel prescriptions, many unnecessary and inappropriate, are having on rising insurance premiums themselves for private insurance holders.

In fact, the public is really paying twice for the irrepressible Seroquel marketing. First for drug purchases in state and private plans (and the advertising) and second in side effects from a drug whose safety continues to be in doubt.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Oh-That-Seroquel-Marketin-by-Martha-Rosenberg-110315-836.html

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Tags: $520 million, $68.5 million, antipsychotic, antipsychotic side effects, AstraZeneca, bipolar disorder, dementia related psychosis, depression, FDA, movement disorders, personal injury lawsuits, Seizures, Seroquel, suicidality, WebMD
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Mental health patients complain of ‘zombification’

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Note from CCHR: The article posted below is about involuntary commitment under the U.K.’s use of “community treatment orders” under their Mental Health Act. Since these involuntary commitment orders have gone into effect (2008), the number of people forced into psychiatric wards has 10xed what was expected. Quite simply, if you are diagnosed mentally ill, you can lose all your civil and human rights. Even if you commit no crime, you can be incarcerated in a psychiatric facility against your will. The idea of “danger to self or others” is also a very, very loose description and particularly horrifying in the UK, considering they also have laws against what they term “anti-social behavior.” From the New American:

In July 1998, the U.K.’s Crime and Disorder Act enacted the “Anti-Social Behaviour Orders” (ASBOs) to tackle disagreeable and disruptive acts. ASBOs are court-ordered restrictions on “unsociable conduct.” Breaching an ASBO is a criminal offense.

Eight years into the legislation, some 12,675 ASBOs had been issued. Nearly 2,000 youngsters, aged 10 to 17, were jailed by 2007 for an average of six months each for breaching ASBOs [the rest were all adults]. Even that was not enough. According to Mail Online, May 27, 2007 (“Revealed: Blair’s secret stalker squad”), the government attempted to widen the definition of “mental disorder” so that the right not to be detained in a psychiatric facility based on cultural, political, or religious beliefs would be forfeited.

So, what are some of the offenses that would constitute getting as ASBO? Try spitting in the street, swearing, “noise pollution” being drunk, loitering, intimidation…think we’re kidding? Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Social_Behaviour_Order

The “community treatment orders” under UK’s Mental Health Act are considered “psychiatric ASBOs.” http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/psychiatric-asbos-will-fail-say-mental-health-experts-438809.html So, if you are diagnosed “mentally ill” you can be ordered to act a certain way, take your drugs, be forced to have a curfew, not be allowed to consume alcohol. Now think about that for a minute; Millions of citizens have been diagnosed with one or more mental disorders, be it “bipolar, “depressed” or “ADHD” to name but a few. Once labeled “mentally ill” – game over. You can be court ordered to behave a certain way or face psychiatric incarceration. Plain and simple. This is the Brave New World of Psychiatry. See links and references at the end of this post read this article from the and more links at the end of this post

Excessive use of forced detention and coerced treatment by the NHS means patients have little control over their treatment

The Guardian
By Mark Gould
March 15, 2011

Between 2008-09 and 2009-10 there was a 17.5% increase in the number of people being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Photograph: Alamy

“I became ‘zombified’ for nearly 12 months when I was forced to take mood stabilisers and antipsychotic medication,” says Reka Krieg. The 30-year-old has bipolar disorder, so has periods of manic activity and psychotic episodes, which led to her being forcibly detained and treated in hospital in 2009.

Krieg’s case exemplifies the crisis in NHS psychiatric care, which is resulting in excessive use of coercive detention and treatment of people with mental illness. Latest statistics released in January show a 17.5% rise in the number of people being “sectioned” – under the Mental Health Act (MHA) – from 32,649 in 2008‑09 to 38,369 in 2009-10. This means that nearly 40% of patients in NHS psychiatric units are there under legal duress.

Years of drastic bed cuts mean wards are full of only the most unwell patients – those seen to be a danger to themselves or others. This includes rising numbers coming into hospital via the judicial system. Eight hundred and thirty women detained under the MHA came into hospital via prison or the courts last year, a rise of more than 85%, while the number of men rose by 48%, from 1,982 to 2,935.

The use of community treatment orders (CTOs) has also rocketed. Since they were introduced in 2008, more than 6,200 have been served – 10 times the expected number. Under a CTO, patients are released from detention, but can be forcibly returned to hospital if they fail to take their medication or other treatment. However, patients complain that once given a CTO, it takes them too long to get it removed, obliging them to stick with medication they believe they no longer need.

CTOs are “a complete waste of money,” says Krieg. “I had a history of repeat hospital admission, but I was better when they decided to impose the CTO, which I hated. I felt I had no control over my human rights.” She was finally released from the CTO after two appeals with the help of a specialist lawyer.

And it seems that CTOs have not eased the pressure on psychiatric wards. Last November, the Care Quality Commission, which oversees patients detained under the MHA, found that some hospitals were reporting 125% bed occupancy rates, and nearly a third of the 486 locked NHS wards in England and Wales had occupancy rates of 100% or more, meaning they were forced to send patients home early to accommodate new arrivals.

Mental health charities and senior psychiatrists say the situation is appalling, and they are lobbying for changes to the health and social care bill currently going through parliament, to make it harder to impose compulsory treatment.

Tony Zigmond, the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ lead on mental health law, says the situation is “a disgrace”. He fears some mental health services are becoming so focused on the risk of patients harming themselves or others that they make excessive use of compulsion and coercion.

He describes detention under mental health law as “a lobster pot – easy to get into but hard to get out”. His college and the Mental Health Alliance, an umbrella group of charities, civil liberties organisations and lawyers, are lobbying MPs to amend the health and social care bill to make it harder to impose CTOs. Otherwise, he fears the use of CTOs could spiral out of control. “The top line is that CTOs have increased the number of detentions,” he says. “In effect, they are prisons without walls so the numbers on them could be limitless.”

Paul Farmer, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, says he is “extremely worried” about the rise in CTOs, “especially as 30% of them are being imposed on people who have no history of not co-operating with treatment”. He adds: “CTOs are a looming threat of readmission hanging over the heads of people who are trying to rebuild their lives and independence.”

Lee Milner, 41, has schizoaffective disorder, which results in episodes of elation or depression coupled with hallucinations. A volunteer and campaigner with mental health charity Rethink, Lee has had extensive experience of detention in hospital since 1992 when, following the suicide of his father, he tried to set fire to the family home. He was last sectioned in 2010 and agrees that hospitals are packed with only the most serious cases. “The ward was like being in the dark ages. How the nurses qualified I never know … When I tried to talk to the consultant about spirituality, he just asked if I wanted more medication.”

Zigmond wants a more consensual approach to treatment, and more space set aside in hospitals for patients to use as sanctuaries in times of crisis. “Why not give patients the option of coming off medication and being able to come into hospital if they need to?” he says.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/15/mental-health-patients-forced-detention

Psychiatric diagnostic manual editor reveals emperor has no clothes, “There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bull__.”

Monday, January 24th, 2011

Natural News — January 24, 2011

by Monica G. Young

"There is no definition of a mental disorder. It's bull___. I mean, you just can't define it." —Allen Frances, MD, lead editor for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-IV).

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bull___. I mean, you just can’t define it,” states Allen Frances, MD, lead editor for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). As DSM-IV is the imperial doctrine used by psychiatrists in diagnosing mental disorders, prescribing powerful psychotropics to the masses, and commanding health care dollars, this is quite a confession. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” Frances concedes.

Gary Greenberg who interviewed Frances and wrote an in-depth article for Wired Magazine, describes how Frances’ conscience has been hitting him in the gut. “Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics — and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs,” writes Greenberg.

DSM-IV led to a 40X increase in child bipolar diagnoses and an epidemic of dangerous antipsychotic prescriptions for children, even as young as 3.

Senior editor of DSM-III (the prior version), Robert Spitzer MD, had his own rude awakening. He is the one who spurred Frances to join him in battling against the creators of DSM-5 — the next edition in progress. Spitzer publicly censured the APA for mandating that psychiatrists involved in DSM-5 sign a written promise to never talk about what they were doing, except when necessary for their jobs. “The intent seemed to be not to let anyone know what…was going on,” says Spitzer.

Spitzer and Frances warn that including a proposed “pre-psychotic” disorder could lead to a new diagnosis explosion and drug company marketing onslaught. Frances says an emphasis on early intervention would encourage the “wholesale imperial medicalization of normality,” producing “a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry” while imposing on patients the “high price [of] adverse effects, dollars, and stigma.”

There are many other dissenters in the field. Greenberg says “they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will ‘take psychiatry off a cliff.’”

Greenberg, himself a psychotherapist, points out that scientific certainty eludes psychiatry. He reports, “every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering.”

With 25% more mental disorders than DSM-III, DSM-IV has been a goldmine for drug companies. According to a 2006 study by Tufts University, more than half of the DSM-IV authors had financial links to the pharmaceutical industry.

Lacking medical research, the DSM-5 website is riddled with “deliberating”, “discussing”, and “heavy discussions” to describe how these professed experts attempt to decree new disorders. New proposals for DSM-5 include “Hoarding Disorder”, “Skin Picking Disorder” and worse, new labels for babies: “Temper Dysregulation Disorder” and “Feeding Disorder”. This would open the door to an infant drugging marketing campaign!

Like the tale of the pompous emperor who pretends his clothes are so magnificent they can only be seen by wise people, the psychiatric and drug industries peddle their fabricated labels and drug remedies to the world. And like the little boy who shouts the obvious “the emperor has no clothes”, it’s up to public pressure to stop this.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031088_psychiatric_disorders_mental_health.html#ixzz1ByZ3Qulf

For more information see Psychiatric Disorders: The Facts Behind the Billion Dollar Marketing Campaign, by CCHR International http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-disorders/

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Tags: Allen Frances, antipsychotic drugs, bipolar disorder, diagnoses, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, dsm, DSM-5, pharma, pharmaceutical industry, pre-psychotic disorder, psychiatrists, Robert Spitzer
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