Posts Tagged ‘depression’

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Brain Virus Kills Woman After Docs Misdiagnosed Condition as Depression

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

Fox News
May 10, 2011

Jane Harrop

Jane Harrop

A British woman died from a rare brain virus after being told by doctors that she was simply depressed because she had not had a baby, a coroner’s investigation heard.

Jane Harrop, 30, went to the hospital in February last year with severe head and neck pains after collapsing suddenly but was told she had a migraine, the Birmingham Mail reported Tuesday.

In the months leading up to her collapse, Harrop complained of violent headaches nine times to doctors, who gave her antidepressants and did not refer her for tests, Birmingham Coroner’s Court heard.

“The [doctor] thought she was depressed because she was trying for a baby and hadn’t had one. Jane was a happy-go-lucky character — I didn’t think she was depressed. She said her brain felt like it was being crushed,” according to Harrop’s mother, Linda Cook.

Harrop, who cared for multiple sclerosis patients in their homes, died eight days after she was taken to Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, where a brain scan was delayed for five days because she felt claustrophobic and staff had no way of sedating her.

She was not transferred to a specialized brain unit at a nearby hospital because of a lack of beds, the court was told.

Pathologist Dr. Martin Carey said Harrop’s death was caused by inflammation of the brain and spine by a virus that took hold over a period of at least two months. Headaches are the first sign of sub-acute meningo-myeloencephalitis, Carey added.

Another patient on the ward, Jean Paul, said nurses ignored Harrop’s screams of pain during her final night alive.

“She was screaming in pain and shouting for help, but no one came to her,” said Paul. “I was disgusted at the way the poor woman was left.”

The inquest continues.

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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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How Big Pharma’s Deceptive Advertising Helps Addict Patients, Screw Over Doctors and Jack Up Insurance Rates

Monday, April 18th, 2011

AlterNet – April 18, 2011

by Martha Rosenberg

All you knew about prescription drugs were creepy ads in a JAMA at the doctor’s office with a lot of fine print. Even if you knew the name of a drug, you’d never ask your doctor for it because that would be self-diagnosing and cheeky for a patient.

Flash forward to the late 1990s when direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising, drug Web sites and online drug sales came on board, and self-diagnosing and demanding pills has become medicine-as-usual for the doctor/patient encounter.

The DTC/Web perfect storm didn’t just sell drugs like Claritin, Prozac and the Purple Pill, it sold the diseases to go with them like seasonal allergies, GERD and depression. It sold risk of diseases like heart events for which you’d take a statin like Lipitor, osteoporosis for which you’d take a bone drug like Boniva and asthma attacks for which you’d use a second asthma drug like Advair. Of course, by the very definition of prevention, you didn’t know if the drugs were working but you weren’t paying out of pocket anyway so what the hay…

Thanks to DTC advertising, people started taking seizure drugs like Topamax and Lyrica for everyday pain or headaches and antipsychotics– hello? — for everyday blues or mood problems. They started taking monoclonal antibodies made from genetically engineered hamster cells like Humira that invite cancer, superinfections and TB when they didn’t have to. And FDA mandated risk disclosures — brain bleeds, sudden death, difficulty breathing, stomach bleeding, liver failure, kidney failure, muscle breakdown, fainting, hallucinations — perversely increased drug sales either because people like the identity in having a disease, chemically experimenting on themselves and/or taking a dare or because ad frequency itself sells regardless of the message.

Soon anxiety graduated to depression which graduated to bipolar disorder. Children got schizophrenia and depression like adults and adults got ADHD like kids. And it didn’t stop there. If the depression you or your kid had didn’t go away — maybe because it wasn’t depression in the first place but a thing called “life” — you needed to add a drug like Abilify or Seroquel on to the original drug(s) because your depression was “treatment resistant.”

Of course if people were paying for the drugs out of their pocket and you told them to add a drug that costs almost $500 a month because the first one isn’t working, they would say the only thing “treatment resistant” is your sales pitch — go find another sucker. But if third party payers get stuck with the bill, no one seems to mind pharma’s double-(and triple)-its-money plan — or even notice it.

In fact psychiatric drug cocktails of eight, ten and twelve drugs are now common medical practice for “treatment resistant” depression and PTSD (often paid by government entitlement health plans) even though the drugs have never been tested when taken together. Unless you count the patients taking them now!

Pharma also adds an urgency pitch to the sell in case you think you can wait to take you or your child’s treatment resistant drug cocktail until symptoms worsen. Depression is now a “progressive” disease say pharma-paid doctors after being known for decades as a self-limiting disease. (The one good thing you could say about depression; it would go away.)

And don’t think kids will outgrow mood problems either, says pharma. That erratic behavior is no doubt early mental illness that will become Worse if you’d don’t treat it in the bud. Even mothers of one-year-olds with the sniffles are told serious asthma is just around the corner if they don’t treat their toddler now.

Pharma is also having a field day with sleep because everyone is in the demographic. In fact comedian Chris Rock riffs about hearing a DTC ad that asks, “Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning?” and recognizing himself. “Yeah, I got THAT,” he says.”

Not falling asleep soon enough of course is the disease of insomnia which can have “strains” like “middle-of-the-night” and “terminal” insomnia. But it also sets you up for — what’s the pharma euphemism — wakefulness problems the next day. And once you’re using a wakefulness aid like Adderall or Nuvigil, what do you bet you’ll have sleep problems?

Because of pharma-paid doctors, PR firms and industry subsidized medical journals and Web sites like WebMD, pharma is able to create new diseases (osteopenia, the “risk” of osteoporosis), perimenopause and Low T), “humanize” others by giving them nicknames (ED, RA, RLS, Hep C) and elevate others to public health problems like HPV/venereal warts. (It doesn’t hurt that Julie Gerberding, MD, former CDC head resurfaced as head of Merck vaccines after she left the government.)

But a more insidious sell are pharma subsidized “patient groups” that lobby FDA and state agencies about expensive drugs, often psychiatric. While these “patients” — often flown by pharma to testify at FDA hearings — pretend they can’t get needed drugs like terminal cancer patients, the issue is seldom availability but money: either they want a new use covered by insurers or don’t want an older, cheaper drug substituted.

The same patients appear on Web site testimonials and phony grassroots PSAs (public service messages) about the epidemic of depression or childhood mental illness. How can you tell they’re not real patients but pharma plants? The Web sites and PSAs look exactly like direct-to-consumer ads.

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New antidepressant warning – Prozac and other drugs raise risk of heart attack and stroke

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

The effect of antidepressants on arteries was separate and independent from any diagnoses of 'depression'

Note from CCHR: One of the most common tricks of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry is whenever a valid study shows psychiatric drugs as the cause of medical damage to patients,  such as heart attack, stroke, sudden death, diabetes etc, they will quickly spit out press releases  saying their studies show ‘depression’ or ‘bipolar’ or some ‘psychiatric disorder’ is the actual cause.   You’ll start seeing  headlines such as Depressed patients more likely to have heart attacks or Patients with Bipolar at risk for stroke,  or Patients with Schizophrenia Prone to Develop Diabetes….  Now that’s a nifty little trick that psycho/pharma does,  but the fact is  those studies are bogus.   And here’s how you can tell;  Psychiatrists have never proven that people diagnosed “schizophrenic” or “bipolar” or “depressed”   were more prone to develop any medical or life threatening condition – that weren’t already on drugs, or who had been on drugs. Period.   They  just omit that one key fact from all their propaganda studies.  What we found significant about this latest study is that the authors actually address this very point in preemptively stating their findings were separate and independent from any diagnoses of ‘depression.’  — CCHR


NaturalNews – April 6, 2011

by Sherry Baker, Health Sciences Editor

Millions of Americans take antidepressant drugs — most are Prozac and related antidepressant medications in the class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). A gigantic money maker for the drug giants, the SSRIs bring in billions to Big Pharma a year. They are promoted and prescribed as safe treatments for depression, anxiety and even premenstrual tension — despite a long list of possible side effects ranging from sexual dysfunction and headaches to dizziness and suicide.

Now you can add another reason to think twice before agreeing to take antidepressants.  At the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans, Emory University School of Medicine scientists have just announced they’ve discovered that the drugs are linked to thicker arteries.  The significance? The findings  strongly suggest Prozac and similar meds could raise the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Depression is sometimes listed as a risk for heart disease. But that was not the explanation for the Emory findings, according to Amit Shah, MD, a cardiology fellow at Emory University School of Medicine. Instead, Dr. Shah said in a press statement, the data indicates the effect of antidepressant use on arteries that was revealed by the study is separate and independent from depression.

Dr. Shah worked with Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Emory`s Rollins School of Public Health, on the groundbreaking study which involved 513 middle-aged male twins who both served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Twins are genetically the same but may be different when it comes to other risk factors such as diet, smoking and exercise, so studying them is a good way to factor out the effects of genetics.

The Emory  research team measured the thickness of the lining of the main arteries in the neck (carotid intima-media thickness, or IMT) by ultrasound. The results showed that among the 59 pairs of twins where only one brother took antidepressants, the one taking the medication had a significantly higher carotid IMT — even when heart disease risk factors such as smoking were taken into account. In fact, the thicker arteries were found in antidepressant users whether or not they had ever had a stroke or heart attack in the past.

In the new study, the scientists documented higher carotid IMT in research subjects who used SSRIs (60 percent of those who took antidepressants) as well as those who used other kinds of antidepressants. Curiously, higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with thicker arteries only in those taking antidepressants — so the Big Pharma meds themselves seem to be the key to this disturbing change in the cardiovascular system.

“One of the strongest and best-studied factors that thickens someone`s arteries is age, and that happens at around 10 microns per year,” Dr. Shah stated. “In our study, users of antidepressants see an average 40 micron increase in IMT, so their carotid arteries are in effect four years older.”

How could antidepressants have an effect on blood vessels? The Emory scientists think it may result from changes in serotonin. The SSRIs are the most commonly prescribed antidepressants and they are known to increase the level of serotonin in the brain. Other kinds of antidepressant drugs also impact serotonin levels. And, although serotonin is a chemical that helps some brain cells communicate, what is often ignored in the hyping of SSRIs is that serotonin functions outside the brain, too.

Actually, most of the body`s serotonin is found outside the brain, especially in the intestines, Dr. Shah stated in a media release. What`s more, serotonin is stored by platelets, the cells that promote blood clotting; the chemical is released when platelets bind to a clot. The chemical can, in fact, act in a variety of ways and either constrict or relax blood vessels, depending on whether the vessels are damaged or not.

“I think we have to keep an open mind about the effects of antidepressants on neurochemicals like serotonin in places outside the brain, such as the vasculature. The body often compensates over time for drugs` immediate effects,” Dr. Shah said.

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Pediatrics Journal Gets it Wrong About “Facebook Depression”

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

PsychCentral
By John M Grohol PsyD
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

You know it’s not good when one of the most prestigious pediatric journals, Pediatrics, can’t differentiate between correlation and causation.

And yet this is exactly what the authors of a “clinical report” did in reporting on the impact of social media on children and teens. Especially in their discussion of “Facebook depression,” a term that the authors simply made up to describe the phenomenon observed when depressed people use social media.

Shoddy research? You bet. That’s why Pediatrics calls it a “clinical report” — because it’s at the level of a bad blog post written by people with a clear agenda. In this case, the report was written by Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson and the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media (2011).

What makes this bad a report? Let’s just look at the issue of “Facebook depression,” their made-up term for a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.

The authors of the Pediatrics report use six citations to support their claim that social media sites like Facebook actually cause depression in children and teens. Four of the six citations are third-party news reports on research in this area. In other words, the authors couldn’t even bother with reading the actual research to see if the research actually said what the news outlet reported it said.

I expect to see this sort of lack of quality and laziness on blogs. Hey, a lot of time we’re busy and we just want to make a point — that I can understand.

When you go to the trouble not only of writing a report but also publishing it in a peer-reviewed journal, you’d think you’d go to the trouble of reading the research — not other people’s reporting on research.

Here’s what the researchers in Pediatrics had to say about “Facebook depression:”

Researchers have proposed a new phenomenon called “Facebook depression,” defined as depression that develops when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic symptoms of depression.

Acceptance by and contact with peers is an important element of adolescent life. The intensity of the online world is thought to be a factor that may trigger depression in some adolescents. As with offline depression, preadolescents and adolescents who suffer from Facebook depression are at risk for social isolation and sometimes turn to risky Internet sites and blogs for “help” that may promote substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, or aggressive or self-destructive behaviors.

Time and time again researchers are finding much more nuanced relationships between social networking sites and depression. In the Selfhout et al. (2009) study they cite, for instance, the researchers only found the correlation between the two factors in people with low quality friendships. Teens with what the researchers characterized as high quality friendships showed no increase in depression with increased social networking time.

The Pediatrics authors also do what a lot of researchers do when promoting a specific bias or point of view — they simply ignore research that disagrees with their bias. Worse, they cite the supposed depression-social networking link as though it were a forgone conclusion — that researchers are all in agreement that this actually exists, and exists in a causative manner.

There are a multitude of studies that disagree with their point of view, however. One longitudinal study (Kraut et al., 1998) found that, over a period of 8–12 months, both loneliness and depression increased with time spent online among adolescent and adult first-time Internet users. In a one-year follow-up study (Kraut et al., 2002), however, the observed negative effects of Internet use had disappeared. In other words, this may not be a robust relationship (if it even exists) and may simply be something related to greater familiarity with the Internet.

Other research has shown that college students’ — who are often older teens — Internet use was directly and indirectly related to less depression (Morgan & Cotten, 2003; LaRose, Eastin, & Gregg, 2001).

Furthermore, studies have revealed that Internet use can lead to online relationship formation, and thereby to more social support ([Nie and Erbring, 2000], [Wellman et al., 2001] and [Wolak et al., 2003]) — which may subsequently lead to less internalizing problems.

In another study cited by the Pediatrics authors, simply reading the news report should’ve raised a red flag for them. Because the news report on the study quoted the study’s author who specifically noted her study could not determine causation:

According to Morrison, pornography, online gaming and social networking site users had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than other users. “Our research indicates that excessive Internet use is associated with depression, but what we don’t know is which comes first – are depressed people drawn to the Internet or does the Internet cause depression? What is clear is that for a small subset of people, excessive use of the Internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies,” she added.

The other citations in the Pediatrics report are equally problematic (and one citation has nothing to do with social networking and depression [Davila, 2009]). None mention the phrase “Facebook depression” (as far as I could determine), and none could demonstrate a causative relationship between use of Facebook making a teenager or child feel more depressed. Zero.

I’m certain depressed people use Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites. I’m certain people who are already feeling down or depressed might go online to talk to their friends, and try and be cheered up. This in no way suggests that by using more and more of Facebook, a person is going to get more depressed. That’s just a silly conclusion to draw from the data to date, and we’ve previously discussed how use of the Internet has not been shown to cause depression, only that there’s an association between the two.

If this is the level of “research” done to come to these conclusions about “Facebook depression,” the entire report is suspect and should be questioned. This is not an objective clinical report; this is a piece of propaganda spouting a particular agenda and bias.

The problem now is that news outlets everywhere are picking up on “Facebook depression” and suggesting not only that it exists, but that researchers have found the online world somehow “triggers” depression in teens. Pediatrics and the American Academy of Pediatrics should be ashamed of this shoddy clinical report, and retract the entire section about “Facebook depression.”

Read article here:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/03/28/pediatrics-gets-it-wrong-about-facebook-depression/

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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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False peace of mind – Antidepressant Placebos

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

Antidepressant placebos remain a steady presence in clinical experiments, but not in public knowledge

The McGill Daily
Debbie Wang
March 10, 2011

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

It’s the classic situation: with an imminent exam and a carefully planned cramming schedule, you awake one morning with the all too familiar symptoms of a common cold. Feeling sorry for yourself between sniffles and coughs, you self-medicate with the usual blend of OJ, vitamins and copious amounts of water, fervently hoping for a rapid recovery.

Most of us who catch a cold end up taking desperate measures to fix the situation, regardless of whether such measures are founded on scientific truth. Increased vitamin C intake? Not only is there zero proof that it prevents colds, there’s also none that it expedites recovery, according to a paper in Evidence-Based Child Health. Herbal remedies like echinacea? Hot liquids? Beyond the latter’s ability to provide temporary relief, neither will provide much help.

Indeed, the most powerful panacea of them all is our own gullible mind. Once convinced of the effectiveness of a cold cure through a lifetime of anecdotal accounts and lore, many of us will start feeling better after a day of downing orange juice even though it serves as much of a medical purpose as twiddling your thumbs. And while juice manufacturers don’t proclaim cold-fighting abilities on every carton, another highly lucrative industry relying heavily on the placebo effect does assert a claim: that antidepressants cure depression.

Beginning in 1998, a series of studies have repeatedly questioned the difference in efficacies between antidepressant drugs and placebos. Pioneering analysis work done by University of Connecticut researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein confirmed the effectiveness of antidepressants – but also their inert counterparts. In 38 studies conducted with over 3,000 depressed patients, placebos improved symptoms 75 per cent as much as legitimate medications.

“We wondered, what’s going on?” said Kirsch in a 2010 interview with Newsweek. The medical community, skeptical of his analysis, asked him to instigate a more comprehensive study with the results of all clinical trials conducted by antidepressant manufacturers, including those unpublished – 47 studies in total.

Over half of the studies showed no significant difference in the depression-alleviating effects of a medicated versus non-medicated pill. With this more thorough analysis, which now included strategically unpublished studies from pharmaceutical companies, placebos were shown to improve symptoms 82 per cent as much as the real pill.

Now also consider that any apparent advantage of the genuine medication might be more the mind’s handiwork than chemical effect. Patients in double blind clinical trials, where neither experimenter nor patient know if a placebo or real drug has been taken, may easily determine which is the placebo. The obvious side effects of the genuine pill, such as headaches or nausea, may alert the patient to which study group they’ve been placed in, and the knowledge that their pill is medicated may be enough to alleviate their depression.

Are antidepressant drugs really “a triumph of marketing over science,” as researchers have claimed? Kirsch and other experts are convinced that antidepressants do not chemically cure depression. A British agency charged with determining which treatments are effective enough for government funding has stopped endorsing antidepressants as the default treatment for anything but the most severe forms of depression. And drug manufacturers themselves don’t deny Kirch’s data. A spokesperson for Pfizer, producer of  Zoloft, has alluded to the existence of a “wealth of scientific evidence documenting [antidepressants’] effects,” yet the fact that treatment “commonly fail[s] to separate from placebo” is “well known by the FDA, academia, and industry.”

However, if experts and antidepressant manufacturers are aware of this, the general public certainly isn’t. Which is precisely why antidepressants work. Without the knowledge that even manufacturers of medications aren’t completely convinced of their product’s superiority, antidepressants will continue to be effective. This not a recommendation for current users to halt taking the pills; abrupt withdrawal is extremely dangerous, and there is still a range of perspectives on the topic of antidepressants versus sugar pills.

But you have it. Millions of people every year feel better, simply because they believe they’ll feel better. We’ve recovered from colds, headaches, pain, and depression, courtesy of the placebo effect. After all, there’s something to be said for feeling better.

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2011/03/false-peace-of-mind/

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Dealing With Depression Naturally

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

FOX News, March 8, 2011
by Chris Kilham

If your life is making you unhappy, then making positive changes may be the very best prescription of all

According to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, approximately 10 percent of Americans are taking antidepressant medications.

This means that over 31 million Americans are gobbling Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Elavil, Norpramin, Luvox, Paxil, Wellbutrin and other antidepressant psychiatric drugs like M & M’s. This drug use accounts for billions of dollars in pharmaceutical sales annually (9.6 U.S. billion in 2008).

Yet according to a landmark study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, antidepressant medications work – as well as placebos and not more. In other words, people in depression studies who are given sugar pills instead of antidepressant drugs do as well as the group who gets the drugs.

Before you ask yourself whether you should simply take a Tic Tac instead of a Paxil, there is more disheartening news about these drugs. Many Americans are taking antidepressant medications instead of changing their own behavior or life circumstances. According to Maryland medical doctor Ronald Dworkin, “Doctors are now medicating unhappiness. Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives.” If you are beating your nose with a hammer, do you stop hitting yourself, or do you continue, and take a pain pill?

Digging more deeply into the mystery of antidepressants, George Washington University health analyst Thomas Moore examined unpublished studies conducted by drug companies  with various antidepressants. Approximately 40 percent of the studies conducted on this class of drugs have never been published — because in those 40 percent of studies, antidepressants do not demonstrate effectiveness. In other words, in the unpublished studies, they didn’t work. In even further research, Irving Kirsch of the University of Connecticut looked at results from varying doses of antidepressants. The difference in effectiveness between small doses and large doses was virtually non-existent.

It gets even gloomier. A U.S. government study released in 2006 showed that fewer than 50 percent of people become symptom-free on antidepressants, even after trying two different medications. Many who do respond to medication slip back into major depression within a short while, despite sticking with drug treatment. And then there are the “side effects,” which are really effects pure and simple. The most common effects of antidepressant drugs include nausea, insomnia, anxiety, restlessness, loss of sex drive, dizziness, weight gain, tremors, sweating, sleepiness, fatigue, dry mouth,  diarrhea, constipation and headaches. People over 65 are at extra risk of falls, fractures and bone loss, newborns of mothers on SSRI antidepressants can go through drug withdrawal, and among teens, the use of antidepressants can increase suicidal tendencies. Any sober assessment of these effects points to the fact that there is something terribly wrong with this entire class of drugs. Remember what Hippocrates said “First of all, do no harm.”

Many intangibles add up to either a happy life or a sad one. Do you spend enough time with your family? Your friends? Do you relax? Do you do things you love? Do you enjoy your work? If you answer no to these questions, you probably have good cause to feel depressed. But popping a pill won’t help if you are not living in a fulfilled way.

What about natural approaches to depression? A number of doctors believe that nutritional deficiencies play a key role in many cases of depression. After all, brain chemistry depends on nutrient intake for proper balance. Really, it’s no surprise that a junk food-eating culture would be increasingly mentally out of sorts. No brain food means poor brain function. This is where omega 3 fatty acids come in, notably DHA, which is essential for proper brain function. These essential fats greatly enhance brain health and mood. The best way to get them is to eat fresh seafood, especially wild salmon. But omega 3 fatty acid supplements from fish oil are also available.

According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, anxiety and depression often go hand in hand. Many people find that they can relieve or reduce anxiety by meditating. There are many ways to meditate. By setting aside time every day, you can calm your body and mind, change your brainwaves, and alter your mood for the better.

Regular exercise is also associated with improved mood. Exercise enhances circulation, modifies brain chemistry for the better, enhances overall energy, improves vitality and contributes greatly to well being. You don’t need to go to a gym, either. Just get outside and walk. Do so briskly for at least half an hour each day, and notice how much better you feel.

On the herbal side, Rhodiola rosea is the big antidepressant. Many forward-thinking psychiatrists have turned to Rhodiola as a first line of treatment, instead of pharmaceuticals. Psychiatrists Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg in New York are ardent advocates of Rhodiola for depression and mood enhancement, and have written profusely about it. Dr Hyla Cass of UCLA also is an advocate. Meanwhile, dozens of studies demonstrate significant improvement in all parameters of mental function with Rhodiola rosea. My favorite brands? Rhodiola Energy by Enzymatic Therapy, and Rapid Rhodiola by EuroPharma.

If your life is making you unhappy, then making positive changes may be the very best prescription of all. Many people are so buried by work and stress that they forget to take time to live, to enjoy themselves and to savor life itself. I remember once meeting a psychiatrist at one of my talks. He was retired, and I was deeply impressed by what he shared.

“I practiced psychiatry for twenty-eight years,” he said. “And I never once gave anybody a prescription.” I asked him what he did for his patients instead.

“I talked with them,” he replied. As Rabbi Earl Grollman, author of several books on grief says, “the mentionable is manageable.” Maybe talking is a good place to start.

Chris Kilham is a medicine hunter who researches natural remedies all over the world, from the Amazon to Siberia. He teaches ethnobotany at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is Explorer In Residence. Chris advises herbal, cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies and is a regular guest on radio and TV programs worldwide. His field research is largely sponsored by Naturex of Avignon, France. Read more at www.MedicineHunter.com

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Want to beat depression? Do what I did – just get a grip!

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

The Mail Online – January 18 2011

By Angela Patmore

When I was in my early 20s, I suffered from suicidal despair. I cried for days, sobbed in the street, lost all my self-respect.

Turn a frown upside down: Many people can overcome depression without drugs with the right attitude

I won a prestigious scholarship to America to study ­literature for two years in ­Williamsburg, Virginia, and I became so ­desperately lonely that I took an overdose of sleeping pills. I was found outside my apartment by my flatmate and rushed to hospital, where they pumped out my stomach.

I’d always been a depressive, morbid ­character and suffered from panic attacks. I’d had a very difficult childhood, with a violent father who was addicted to powerful tranquillisers and attacked my mother and me.

Somewhere inside, I knew there was more to life than this. I tried softly-softly therapies such as psychiatry, ‘stress’ management and counselling. They promised to protect me from problems, but all they did was make me feel more helpless.

I could not bear to take antidepressants or tranquillisers because I had seen my father’s character changed by his addiction to them.

But I wasn’t getting better. During one panic attack, I ended up shutting myself in a phone box to ring for help, but I was shaking so badly I couldn’t dial the numbers.

For most of a decade I floundered, working through research, training and academic degrees in search of a magic mindset to make me happy and self-reliant. (I eventually ended up at the University of East Anglia as a research fellow investigating stress.)

Then I turned my research in a different direction, looking instead at what made ­people succeed in difficult or distressing ­circumstances. I studied sports psychology. I looked at the ancient character training used by the Roman army.

The secret, I learnt, was to develop resilience in the face of adversity; to face the problem and be deeply changed by that experience. I came to realise our modern approach to depression and despair often makes the problem worse.

We live in an unusually protective, safety-conscious society that thinks the way to help the weak and vulnerable is to nurse them like infants and prevent them from feeling bad. But look at the number of adults who are suffering from depression and anxiety today and ask yourself: softly-softly — is it helping or harming?

Today, one in three GP patient appointments involves a patient reporting depression. More than six million people in Britain regularly take antidepressants.

A study published just last week found two-thirds of women in England and Wales have suffered mental health problems such as ­anxiety and depression.

‘Being labelled as depressed is not a cure.

It might actually demoralise you and prolong

the whole bitter episode’

Depression is a pandemic, so it must have an underlying cause. I suggest it’s this: we have come to see negative emotions as an inconvenience or an illness. And our modern therapy culture is far too ready to give people labels for their distress — labels that make them feel mentally abnormal and unable to help themselves out of their troubles.

Many people believe they suffer from ‘depression’ or ‘clinical depression’ simply because they are grieving over one of life’s maulings, don’t know what to do to feel better and think it might help if they had a label for their bad feelings.

The label acts like a baby’s dummy or the security blanket of Charlie Brown’s best friend Linus in the Peanuts cartoon — he sucks his thumb and holds it to his ear in times of trouble, though it doesn’t actually serve any useful purpose.

This label is not a cure. It might actually demoralise you and prolong the whole bitter episode.

Once patients are officially labelled ‘depressed’, it tends to sap what little energy they have left to get off their bottoms and set about changing their outlook on life.

Poet John Keats described depression as the ‘drowsy numbness that pains the sense’. It is not only disastrous to life, but dangerous to health. It shouldn’t be mollified with tea and sympathy, but faced down and defeated.

I had such an experience when I was young. I was starting out as a writer, living with my parents, and suffering from panic attacks that were becoming more and more distressing. My habit had been to try to escape the symptoms by surrounding myself with friends and keeping busy. But nights were terrifying spirals and I feared for my sanity.

One evening I decided I couldn’t outrun this any more: I was too exhausted. I’d turn and face the monster. So I went to my room, lay down, folded my arms and waited for the worst.

But suddenly, instead of terror, I felt absolute peace. I went downstairs and looked at my violent, drug-addicted father watching a film on television — On The Waterfront. I was overwhelmed with love and pity for my father, admiration for the film, gratitude for our tiny council house, the lamp on the television, the world I lived in. Everything suddenly made sense. I never suffered from panic attacks again.

Another term commonly applied to depressed people is that they are ‘traumatised’ by some terrible experience. We hear it all the time — schoolchildren have seen an accident in the playground and are therefore ‘traumatised’.

Viewers can apparently even be ‘traumatised’ by watching a particularly challenging episode of EastEnders. But well-conducted studies show that this label, too, can cause far more harm than good. For example, post-traumatic stress counselling can make people feel much worse after they have encountered something shocking.

It can convince them that their reactions are abnormal and a sign of mental illness, causing further anxiety, helplessness and disease.

In fact, negative emotions that go by the name of ‘stress’ can be ­bountifully positive.

A number of Nobel Prize-winning scientists have been studying what are technically known as ‘complex systems’. Examples of complex ­systems include piles of sand, pans of simmering water, the money ­markets and insect swarms.

At the highest point of tension and on the very edge of chaos, they ‘change gear’ and spontaneously produce order.

For example, when a pan of water is put on to boil, all the water molecules behave more and more randomly and ­chaotically until suddenly they all organise themselves into a hexagonal pattern of heat convection and then simmer. From the very edge of chaos emerges order.

‘Nothing to do with me,’ you might think. Except that one of the ­complex systems under study is the human brain, and whether it responds to tension in the same way. Undergoing tension and resolution might be crucial to its vital work.

The nervousness that our stress-managed age has come to fear and avoid might actually be part of a complex process designed to upgrade our abilities, and beat depression and despair.

‘If we are numbed or coddled, we are denied these life-changing breakthroughs’

When we face a threat or challenge, the body goes into the ­complex ‘fight-or-flight response’.

Stress management people are fond of telling us that this is a ‘very primitive’ threat mechanism — one that is suitable for fighting sabre-tooth tigers, but inappropriate for our modern lives.

The mechanism is, in fact, highly sophisticated. Scientists have revealed that it triggers a chain of hormonal and neurological ­reactions which mean that the brain, at the very height of a crisis that threatens to disintegrate us, can suddenly convulse its powers and produce a life-changing revelation.

This miraculous process, which in part is literally a carefully controlled ‘rush of blood’, is what rescued me when I was young and suffering from crippling anxiety.

The brain changes gear when we face threats and challenges. It has to. It is designed to help us survive and learn, to produce brilliant ideas when we’re in the middle of bad experiences. If we are numbed or coddled, we are denied these life-changing breakthroughs — the sudden moments of calm, clarity and visionary joy that occur at the very climax of a personal crisis.

So if you have been ‘diagnosed’, don’t just sit there and succumb. Your brain has untapped powers of recovery just lying there, waiting to help you survive and grow, waiting for you to say: ‘Blast all this. I’m going to get better.’


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Federal disability program induces child drugging in low-income families

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

NaturalNews Jan 5, 2010
by Monica C. Young

In 1990 only 8 percent of children received SSI funds for behavioral issues; by 2009, that percentage had soared to 53 percent. Shockingly, children under 5 form the fastest-growing segment of this steep trend.

(NaturalNews) A $10 billion federal disability program gives low-income parents a strong financial incentive to have their children diagnosed with behavioral disorders and prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs. This is the core finding of a recent Boston Globe in-depth investigation.

Congress created Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in 1974 to aid the aged, blind and severely physically disabled, such as children with cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. Yet per the Globe, half of today’s SSI recipients are children diagnosed with mental disorders such as ADHD and bipolar. But to qualify, those children really need to be on prescription drugs. Per the SSI associate commissioner’s own words, “medication helps confirm a diagnosis.”

In 1990 only 8 percent of children received SSI funds for behavioral issues; by 2009, that percentage had soared to 53 percent. Shockingly, children under 5 form the fastest-growing segment of this steep trend.

The article’s author, Patricia Wen, reports this has, “created, for many needy parents, a financial motive to seek prescriptions for powerful drugs for their children. And once a family gets on SSI, it can be very hard to let go.” A child diagnosed with ADHD and forced onto a daily med regimen yields $700 a month, which can be more than half the family’s income.

It is not surprising then that children of poor families are diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric drugs at a higher rate than in higher-income families. This system encourages needy parents to obtain psychiatric labels for their kids and keep them medicated. It also discourages healthy alternatives and deters improvement. If a clinician finds the child no longer meets prescription requirements for depression, hyperactivity, study difficulties or such, that assurance of a monthly check is gone.

One unemployed single mother, seeing other medicated boys in the community become “zombie-like”, had resisted advice to medicate her three sons for oppositional defiant disorder and other alleged problems. Her applications for SSI were rejected. Strapped financially and after strong urgings from school officials, she finally conceded to a drug for her 10-year-old for his impulsiveness. Within weeks her SSI application was approved. “To get the check,” she confided to the Globe, “you’ve got to medicate the child.”

Still, she hopes to get her son off the drugs as soon as possible and keeps on hand as a favorite article: “What if Einstein had been on Ritalin?”

The Boston Globe’s report (see Sources below) is well worth reading in full.

Another point to note however is the parallel to drug company revenue. While SSI payouts for behavioral issues rocketed since the ’90s, so have drug profits. Pharmaceutical sales shot up from $40 billion in 1990 to $234 billion in 2008. The drug industry’s vast front network of mental health advocates lobby at every opportunity for government backing of their child medicating campaign.

Common vagaries of growing up — the frustrations, defiances, mood swings, spontaneity — have been redefined into psychiatric “disorders”. With some 15 million kids reportedly having “learning disabilities”, this points to a failure with the schools, not the students.

The truly “mentally disordered” it seems are drug makers and cohorts who push parents to believe this myth and comply with drugging their children.

The tragic victims are the kids. This adult (not youth) lunacy endangers children’s health and can crush their self-esteem and derail their future. Not only are they led onto a life of drug dependency and serious side effects, they are also convinced there is something innately wrong with them — a lie.

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