Posts Tagged ‘CCHRInt’

The FAA better rethink allowing pilots to take antidepressants; New report says pilot in 2008 plane crash was on Zoloft

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Comment from CCHR Int:
A few months ago, the FAA changed its rules and now allows pilots to fly planes under the influence of antidepressants (drugs documented to cause mania, psychosis, worsening depression, hallucinations, suicidal and even homicidal ideation—see this link for international studies and warnings http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/ ). Now a new report has just been released on the 2008 Mount Airy plane crash, and toxicology tests reveal the pilot had the antidepressant Zoloft in his system. Now pay attention to this particular line of the report, “Officials say the pilot ‘displayed non-professional behavior’ and that a cockpit voice recording showed that he began singing, [yes singing] “Save my life, I’m going down for the last time.”

And this, “The NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] says the pilot failed to maintain control of the plane during instrument flying and deliberately went below the minimum descent altitude.” Deliberately. Now look again at the documented side effects of these drugs cited above or see for yourself in the link to the psychiatric drug database. The FAA needs to reverse its ruling.

News 14 Carolina
June 30, 2010

The National Transportation Safety Board issued a report on the probably cause of a 2008 plane crash in Mount Airy that killed everyone on board. The plane stalled and crashed while circling after an aborted landing.

The NTSB says the pilot failed to maintain control of the plane during instrument flying conditions and deliberately went below the minimum descent altitude.

Officials say the pilot “displayed non-professional behavior” and that a cockpit voice recording showed that he began singing, “Save my life, I’m going down for the last time” after being cleared for approach.

Toxicology tests revealed that the pilot had the drug Zoloft in his system, and medical records revealed he had been treated for anxiety and depression. The report also said it’s not clear whether the medical conditions could account for the behavior or whether they contributed to the accident.

Read entire article:  http://charlotte.news14.com/content/local_news/triad/627644/ntsb-releases-report-on-2008-mount-airy-plane-crash

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CCHR Increases Investigations into Psycho/Pharma Conflicts in Australia in Wake of Psychiatrists Calling for Millions in Federal Funds to Drug More Kids

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Jan Eastgate, President CCHR International, arrived in Australia this week from CCHR’s international headquarters in Los Angeles following calls by psychiatrist Patrick McGorry for the federal government to hand over $200 million to fund programs that could lead to hundreds of thousands more children and youths being drugged. She said Australian psychiatrists are pushing a biological drug model in her home country that drug regulatory agencies have warned could place children at risk of suicide, heart irregularities, hallucinations, psychosis and death. Read more from CCHR Int on Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry and what he promotes.

Eastgate, an Australian, spent 10 years helping investigate the lethal psychiatric drug practice known as deep sleep treatment, which resulted in the NSW government banning the practice after 48 deaths. She says Australia hasn’t learned from the $15 million inquiry into this psychiatric practice 20 years ago. Today, psychiatrists, backed by the pharmaceutical industry, advise governments that clearly want to see better healthcare for Australians without breaking the bank. However, Eastgate said governments are being misled as Big Pharma and psychiatrists with vested interests puts profit before patient care. Eastgate’s investigations in the U.S. and globally during the past 16 years have found that government goodwill can be unwittingly compromised by psychiatric-pharmaceutical interests. She is investigating this further and expects a series of exposes to be featured on CCHR’s National site during the next few weeks. A report will also be provided the government on CCHR’s findings.

CCHR’s accomplishments in worldwide mental health reform are well documented, and the organization has helped to enact more than 150 laws protecting individuals from abusive or coercive psychiatric practices.  In the United States, CCHR was instrumental in the passage of the Prohibition of Mandatory Medication Act, which prohibits school personnel from forcing children onto psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their education. The Act was a positive response to the harmful influence the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry had had on education and Eastgate says there is every indication the same influence is happening in Australia.

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Pharma Backed Australian of the Year Psychiatrist Wants Millions in Government Funding for Brave New World of “Pre-Drugging” Kids

Monday, March 15th, 2010

By CCHR Int
March 15, 2010

Who is Patrick McGorry and what does he promote?  He’s a psychiatrist just named Australian of the Year for his work in “youth mental health reform.”  What does that reform consist of?  What he calls a “new form of climate change.” It sure is.

[See TIME Magazine Article "Drugs Before Diagnosis?"]

He not only promotes youths being put on antipsychotics and antidepressants, cited by international drug regulatory agencies as causing hallucinations, hostility, personality change, life-threatening diabetes, strokes, suicide and death, McGorry goes a giant step further—drug them before they’ve even developed a “psychiatric” disorder.

The Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AHRPP) likens such concepts to “performing mastectomies on women who are at risk of—but do not have—breast cancer.”[i]

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed “serious concerns” about child drugging and Senate investigations in the United States have found high profile psychiatrists who were pharmaceutically funded and using fraudulent research being among the heaviest promoters of psychiatric drug use on children. While the rest of the world is experiencing serious alarm at the rampant use of deadly psychiatric drugs on children, McGorry pushes full steam ahead to increase the amount of children being needlessly subjected to psychiatry’s most powerful drugs—antidepressants and antipsychotics.

His theory and practices are so controversial that even his colleagues in the United States have backed away from it.  And a parallel study done in the United States based on the same theory that McGorry uses was considered an abject failure—even by the investigators themselves.  Other psychiatrists have criticized McGorry’s pre-drugging practice as unethical and harmful to adolescents.  More on that later.

This is especially so as the “symptoms” McGorry and cohorts invented to “pre-label” youths as potential candidates for psychosis and “schizophrenia” (to start with) are, according to one U.S. psychiatrist, “remarkably common…adolescence is a period of life that is normally marked by tumultuous changes in personality.”

And what was the first thing he did to capitalize on his winning his “Australian of the Year” award?  He demanded the Australian government hand over another $200 million to fund more of his centers where he can drug more children.  Worse, the government is entertaining the idea.

Yet, for who ever nominated him—apparently an “anonymous supporter”—due diligence wasn’t done on what McGorry advocates.

A cursory look at his research shows that while behavioral symptoms are evaluated and, on a hunch, drugged to see if they “prevent” the onset of a “mental” disorder, there’s no mention of the teens being given full and searching physical exams to first rule out undiagnosed and untreated medical conditions that may be causing it.  Yet dozens of physical conditions can manifest as behavioral problems.

  • Australia, like the U.S., has recently seen major media and legislative exposure of the conflicts of interest between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry.  McGorry has received unrestricted research grant support from Eli Lilly, Janssen-Cilag, Bristol Myer Squibb, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Novartis.

  • He is also a paid consultant for, and has received speaker’s fees from all or most of these companies.[ii] His recent report on “early intervention” for young people acknowledges AstraZeneca, Janssen, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer.[iii] [Since 2001, the U.S. Federal and state governments have recovered more than $4 billion from many of these companies that settled criminal or civil charges of fraud and misleading advertising filed against them.]

  • Even Big Pharma is bowing out of psychiatric drug research. In February, the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline said it was dumping antidepressant research because it is too hard to prove that antidepressants work because “patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys” and not by any blood or biological test used to confirm medical diseases. AstraZeneca followed with the head of development, Anders Ekblom, announcing it would no longer research and develop drugs for depression, bipolar, anxiety and schizophrenia, saying the decision reflects the unpredictable and risky nature of clinical trials to assess medicine working on the brain. [emphasis added]
  • Yet, despite the unpredictability and risk of these drugs, McGorry wants to go full steam ahead, increasing the funding to increase the number of children being placed on them.

A Closer Look at McGorry’s Brave New World

  • In 1996, Patrick McGorry and fellow pharmaceutical company-funded researcher Alison Yung set up a clinic in Australia to monitor young people considered at a “high risk” for developing psychosis.  They invented a subjective method for assessing symptoms that, while not based on science—claimed to predict early onset of psychosis or schizophrenia called prodromal (early symptoms), and drugged the teens and young adults.  In other words, gave them toxic chemicals for a mental disorder they did not have.[iv]
  • The theory wasn’t McGorry’s alone, but he decided to test it in a world-first trial that had psychiatry’s skeptics and even psychiatrists themselves aghast.  The Australian program inspired the development of similar programs worldwide.[v]
  • A follow up study was conducted in 2002, funded with an unrestricted grant from Janssen-Cilag pharmaceuticals, and supported by psychiatric-pharmaceutical front groups NARSAD and Stanley Foundation, as well as several Australian agencies.  McGorry and colleagues said that risperidone (Risperdal)—made by Janssen—reduced the risk of “transition to psychosis” in young people.[vi]
  • Risperdal has been linked to diabetes and, more specifically, Type 2 diabetes. Other serious side effects include Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome (NMS), a potentially fatal syndrome involving muscle rigidity, and irregular blood pressure and pulse.[vii]
  • McGorry’s friend and colleague, Yale University professor of Psychiatry, Dr. Thomas McGlashan, conducted a parallel study (1997-2003), the results of which were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.   Eli Lilly funded the experiment.  Sixty adolescents, who did not meet any criteria for a diagnosis of mental illness, were prescribed Lilly’s antipsychotic Zyprexa (olanzapine).[viii]
  • The experiment failed to demonstrate any significant benefit of Zyprexa, and 54.8% of adolescents prescribed the drug compared to 34.5% on placebo refused to complete the study (the 20% difference indicating substantial intolerable safety problems with the drug).[ix]
  • Even McGlashan later admitted to The New York Times in May 2006 that, “the drugs were more likely to induce weight gain than to produce a significant, measurable benefit….” Those on medication gained an average of about 20 pounds. The entire process changed Dr. McGlashan’s thinking.[x]
  • In fact he distanced himself from McGorry in a TIME Magazine article the same year on McGorry titled, “Drug Before Disorder?”  “There may be gold in the early-intervention hills,” McGlashan conceded, “but the data are not plentiful enough and the findings not replicated enough for us to recommend anything more than further research at this point.”[xi]
  • Undeterred, and buoyed by an Australian government $A54 million funding of a National Youth Mental Health Foundation, McGorry plowed on to expand his unproven and potentially risky methods to the early diagnosis and treatment for “a range of mental health problems in young people: substance abuse, personality disorders, bipolar—the whole lot, really.”[xii]
  • Richard Warner, MB, DPM, director of Colorado Recovery in Boulder, Colorado, and professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, completely debunks McGorry’s theory, writing: “Medicating at the earliest appearance of symptoms, without thought for the natural history of the condition, may lock the person experiencing a brief psychosis into a long-term career as a psychiatric patient.”[xiii]
  • Further refuting McGorry’s theory, Honorary Professor Anthony Pelosi from the Department of Psychiatry, Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, wrote, “So far, evidence from randomized trials does not support the use of psychological therapies or drugs as preventive interventions.”[xiv]

No Science to “Pre-Disorder” Screening

  • Dr. Warner counters any idea that science drives McGorry’s pre-disorder assessment: “As for the claim that we can prevent psychosis by intervening before the illness has become fully evident, this effort requires effective screening to detect those at risk.”  Something that McGorry clearly doesn’t have.
  • “Patrick McGorry and colleagues at the PACE clinic in Melbourne…report that their screening instrument is capable of 80 per cent accuracy in their clinic.  But the instrument is not that accurate in routine use.  In the PACE sample, 35 per cent developed psychosis within one year.  Probability theory tells us that if the same instrument were used to screen a general population sample…it would be correct only seven per cent of the time.”
  • “In fact, in another Australian clinic, the PACE instrument only achieved nine per cent accuracy. False-positive rates of the order of 70 to 90 per cent are clearly unrealistic for intervening with medication or other forms of treatment.”

Harmful Drug Outcomes

  • Further, the antipsychotic drug interventions McGorry suggests as one intervention approach are dangerous. “Given the expected number of false positives, the potential for harm is significant,” Dr. Warner stated.[xv]

  • Dr. Pelosi concurs: “[M]ost patients who enter these specialist programs will unnecessarily receive potentially dangerous treatments.  Data are emerging from the clinics of early intervention enthusiasts that illustrate nicely what they have been warned about for years.  When psychiatrists referred selected patients to a schizophrenia prodrome clinic, about half went on to develop a psychosis.  After teachers, college counselors, and families were encouraged to refer young people with possibly prodromal symptoms directly to the same clinic for the same care plans…almost 90% were receiving unnecessary ‘preventive’ interventions.”[xvi]
  • Dr. Jerald J. Block, a U.S. psychiatrist, writing in Bioethics Forum, says that “preventive pharmacology” (what McGorry is practicing) is “ethically questionable territory” because the treatments given “frequently have side effects and complications” and you are potentially harming people.  Further, 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.”[xvii]
  • He says, “[I]t is unclear how the quality of one’s life will be affected during and after one year of getting daily neuroleptic,” especially for a condition you haven’t even developed. “Forming and solidifying new relationships occupies much of the time in adolescence and young adulthood.  As neuroleptics affect cognition and emotionality, we might expect [an antipsychotic] to influence one’s ability to build relationships, for better or worse.”[xviii]
  • Moreover, Dr. Warner points out, if left untreated, the person exhibiting so-called “prodromal” symptoms is likely to recover without drug treatment. “The Soteria projects in California and Berne, Switzerland, and a multi-center study in Finland demonstrated that medication is not essential for good outcome.”[xix]

Despite the Failure, Keep Lobbying for the $

  • Dr. Pelosi points out that when the leaders of the early intervention movement are pinned down, while they accept the criticisms against them, “this has not stopped their skilful lobbying of politicians, journalists, patients, and carers with upbeat messages about the prevention and attenuation of schizophrenia.”
  • Which is precisely what McGorry is doing now—using his award and unquestionably unscientific theories to advocate for more funds.[xx]

Australia’s Joseph Biederman?

  • McGorry has been equated with America’s Dr. Joseph Biederman, the psychiatrist who came under U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation for failing to disclose more than $1.6 million he’d earned in consulting fees from drug makers while conducting research for universities.  Biederman was on the Advisory Board of Eli Lilly, which manufactures antipsychotics and antidepressants. The New York Times said that Biederman helped to fuel a 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric “bipolar disorder” and corresponding increase in children taking antipsychotics.
  • How much McGorry may have impacted on pediatric and youth prescriptions of antipsychotics and antidepressants in Australia is unknown, but certainly warrants a closer look. As do the outcomes of his studies and what, if any, influence the drug companies that funded him may have had.
  • Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has received reports of 26,506 adverse reactions linked to antipsychotics, including 477 deaths.  That’s since they were introduced over many years.  By January 2009 there were 36,804 adverse reactions reported to the TGA linked to antidepressants, including 217 deaths, of which 4 were from the 10 to 19 age group.
  • But add to that the Food and Drug Administration’s adverse drug reaction reports (ADRs) during a five-year period alone (2004-2008) and the magnitude of where the potential risk of this “Drugs before Disorder” practice is heading.  For antipsychotics, there were 91 deaths for those under 18.  For antidepressants, there were 321 deaths, of which 251 were suicides. As these reports represent between one and ten percent of the ADRs, that figure could be as high as 3,210 deaths, and for antipsychotics, nearly 1,000.

Australia’s health care system ranks well internationally, and preventative measures may seem the way to enhancing it; however, the last thing the country needs, then, is a psychiatrist banner heading the idea that children and youths should be gotten to early and drugged on the precept that they might become mentally ill.  Rather, they need proper medical—not psychiatric—care and educational solutions.  The last thing they need is $200 million of taxpayers’ dollars funding what could be a lifetime sentence to taking mind-altering drugs.

Someone needs to care for Australia’s children and youth, but it’s definitely not Patrick McGorry.

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

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

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

[iv] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632176/

[v] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632176/

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

[vii] http://www.coreynahman.com/atypical-antipsychotic-lawsuits.html

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

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

[x] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/health/psychology/23prof.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

[xi] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1205408,00.html#ixzz0i0DykBNV

[xii] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1205408,00.html#ixzz0i0NMJQyd

[xiii] http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2007-08/futureorfad_crcuwinter0708.html

[xiv] 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

[xv] http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2007-08/futureorfad_crcuwinter0708.html

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

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

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

[xix] http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2007-08/futureorfad_crcuwinter0708.html

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

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How Vested Interests Created the Perfect Marketing/Lobbying Machine: Mental Health “Advocacy” Groups—Funded by Pharma

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

by CCHR International

An ongoing U.S. Senate investigation headed by Senator Charles Grassley has  sought disclosure of pharmaceutical funding paid to researchers, physicians,  medical schools and medical journals.  Some of the nation’s most prominent psychiatrists have now been exposed for extensive conflicts of interest amounting to millions in undisclosed pharmaceutical funding, including Dr. Charles Nemeroff, Dr. Joseph Biederman, Dr. Melissa DelBello, Dr. Timothy Wilens, Dr. Thomas Spencer, Dr. Alan Schatzberg, Dr. Martin Keller, Dr. A. John Rush, Dr. Karen Wagner, Dr. Jeffrey Bostic and Dr. Frederick Goodwin — many of which serve as advisory board members to mental illness “advocacy groups” which are now also the subject of the Senate investigation for their undisclosed pharmaceutical funding.

The majority of the public may or may not be familiar with these so-called mental health advocacy organizations, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) or the myriad of bipolar, depression or ADHD “support groups” that are inundating the internet.

But they need to be.

These are groups operating under the guise of advocates for the “mentally ill,” which in reality are heavily funded pharmaceutical front groups – lobbying and working on state and federal laws which effect the entire nation — from our elderly in nursing homes to our military, pregnant women, nursing mothers and school children. Presenting themselves as patient advocacy groups is highly disingenuous not only to their membership, many of which may have a sincere desire to help a loved one or a family member with mental problems, but to legislators, the press and the American public — for they have consistently lobbied for legislation that benefits the mental health and pharmaceutical industries which fund them, and not patients they claim to represent.

Certainly any organization claiming to be for the rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill would have as their primary goal, full informed consent in the field of mental health – including full and complete disclosure of all drug risks, the right to refuse treatment, the right to know that psychiatric diagnoses are not medical conditions (evident by the fact there is not one confirmatory medical/scientific test). Above all such groups would provide patients with an abundance of information on non-harmful, non- drug, medical solutions and options considering the dangerous and well documented risks of psychiatric drugs by international drug regulatory agencies.

These groups do not.

A patients rights group for the mentally ill would never endorse something as absurd and obviously dangerous as giving electroshock to pregnant women, nor condone schools being able to require children to take a psychiatric drug as a condition of attending school. Furthermore, they would never be opposed to the FDA actually doing its job and finally issuing long overdue warnings that antidepressants can cause children to commit suicide, or issue warnings that ADHD drugs have serious and even deadly side effects. Yet these are just some of the actions condoned and promoted by these so-called patients rights groups.

As another example take the federally proposed bill, The Mothers Act; a previous version of this bill called on using a method of “screening” pregnant women and new mothers called EPDS, a screening method documented to triple the number of women diagnosed with Postpartum depression, according to a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology. The Scandinavian Journal of Public Health stated that EPDS screening was unethical and should not be used. None of the so called advocacy groups for the mentally ill had any objections to this bill whatsoever, or endorsing such an unethical screening tool. They supported it. The bill would have passed with no objections from them whatsoever, if not for the dedication of real advocacy groups with no vested interests (ties to Pharma) opposing language in this bill that would have led to women being falsely diagnosed and put on dangerous psychiatric drugs to “treat” them, unnecessarily placing new mothers and their infants at great risk.

To put it simply, these groups are not what they appear to be. Yet their influence over legislation, lobbying, drug regulation (or lack thereof), and public relations campaigns is substantial and effects the entire nation. For they claim to be the voice of the “mentally ill.” But are they? Or are they the result of a brilliant marketing/lobbying campaign designed to benefit the industry that funds them—the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry.

To find out how it all started click here: http://www.cchrint.org/psycho-pharmaceutical-front-groups/

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Drugged to Death; Our Kids and Our Troops

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

By Jim Marrs
Investigative Journalist
New York Times bestselling author
August 19, 2009

Today, one of the biggest problems we have, and one of the things that shocks so many Americans, is the rise of teen suicides and the rise of school shootings. Yet all we hear from the corporate mass media on the shootings is “Well, we need to take the guns away.” Let me tell you something, I went to school in Texas. We took guns to school. Nobody shot anybody. So what’s changed? Drugs. Kids on psychiatric drugs. Nearly every school shooter in this country can be shown to have been involved with psychotropic drugs—either taking them at the time of the shootings, or what can be even worse, coming off of them. And teen suicides? Read the FDA black box warnings, these drugs can cause suicidal ideation. So logically, if kids are being drugged up with antidepressants, and if in fact teen suicides are rising, then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that we better stop drugging our kids to death.

Psychiatric drugs cause major changes in brain chemistry and in behavior. International drug regulators warn that the drugs we are doling out to kids can cause mania, psychosis, depersonalization, suicidal and even homicidal ideation. If we take a look at the school shooters that were under the influence of these drugs, you have to wonder why there hasn’t been a federal investigation into the correlation between drugs documented to cause violence and suicide and kids taking them who then became violent and suicidal. If even a handful of these school shooters were found to be taking PCP or smoking crack we would have headline news announcing a causal relationship between illicit drug use and acts of violence. But because these kids are taking legal drugs, prescribed by a psychiatrist for an alleged mental disorder, something we use to refer to as “childhood,” the powers that be don’t think it merits an investigation. Well we are all aware of how much Pharma spends on lobbying efforts. Regarding corporate media I would venture a guess that the reason they haven’t taken on the issue is simple: Big Pharma is now one of, if not the largest, advertisers in the United States, with $5 billion a year spent on direct to consumer advertising.

The rise of drug-induced acts of violence and suicide isn’t limited to our schools. In January 2009 it was reported that more of our military died of suicide than of combat deaths. Why is that? Could it be because our military are getting pumped full of psychiatric drugs? What Time Magazine referred to as “America’s Medicated Army?” Well if we are “medicating” our troops with antidepressants and antipsychotics, drugs documented to cause suicidal reactions, let’s put 2 and 2 together and state the obvious—these drugs are minimally a contributing factor.

Many people don’t realize that psychiatry’s love affair with the military dates back more than 90 years; During World War I the biggest problem the German military had was desertions—people leaving the front lines of the War. So the Germans turned to psychiatrists who came up with a solution: Electroshock. Psychiatrists theorized that if the shock soldiers experienced due to the brutalities of war made them desert the front lines, then another kind of shock—electroshock—could get them to be good little soldiers and willingly return to combat. Maybe because electroshock wiped out their memory, or maybe because soldiers chose to face the front lines rather than have another 450 volts of current tear through their brain, it worked. Psychiatry had come up with a winning strategy for the military to deal with reluctant soldiers and since that time the love affair between the two entities has never waned.

Today there are mobile psychiatric units that travel with the troops to ensure they’re drugged up as needed. And though they are not yet employing electroshock, as more Americans are made aware that these psychotropic drugs are killing our troops, don’t be surprised if sometime soon you pick up a newspaper and find psychiatrists promoting a new cure for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; Electroshock.

Jim Marrs is an award-winning journalist and author. After graduating from the University of North Texas with a degree in journalism, Marrs worked for and owned several Texas newspapers before becoming an independent journalist/author. Marrs is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, the basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK, and Rule by Secrecy.

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