Posts Tagged ‘medicated’

12-Year-Old Boy Testifies Before Congress On Being Forcibly Drugged in Foster Care

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

By Daily Mail Reporter
December 2, 2011

A 12-year-old boy has bravely told how he was medicated into a near-stupor as he was passed between foster care homes.

The seventh grader, known only as Ke’onte, told Congress that being given the mind-altering drugs was ‘the worst thing anyone could do to foster kids’.

He revealed that he could barely eat while on the medication and was so exhausted ‘it felt like I would collapse wherever I was in the house’.

Ke'onte, 12, tells Congress that he was wrongly diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD and given four different medications that left him in a 'stupor'

‘I think putting me on all these stupid meds was the stupidest thing I’ve ever experienced in foster care,’ he said.

Ke’onte’s plight came to light as a Government Accountability Office report was released that found the federal government had not done enough to oversee the treatment of foster children with powerful drugs.

The study found cared-for children were up to 13 times more likely to be prescribed anti-psychotics and anti-depressants than other children.

Ke’onte, who was adopted in 2009, said he had tantrums as a foster child and was inaccurately diagnosed as bipolar and having ADHD.

‘I’ve been in the mental hospital three times during foster care, and every time I had to get on more meds or new meds to add to the ones I was already taking,’ he said.

Medicated: The Government study found children in foster care were 13 times more likely to be on anti-pyschotics and anti-depressants than other children

He was on four different types of medication during his four years in six foster care and the drugs made him feel irritable, gave him stomach aches and affected his appetite, reports ABC.

‘I remember having a bowl of spaghetti and had three bites and then I was done,’ he said.

He has since been taken off the medication and given therapy, and is thriving.

He plays clarinet in the school band, competes in cross-country and has had roles in the school play.

He said: ‘In therapy, you talk about the deepest thing and it hurts, but you can deal with it better the next time.

‘I’m not only more focused in school… I’m not going to the office anymore for bad behavior and I’m happy.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2069119/Keonte-12-tells-Congress-drugged-4-years-foster-care.html

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US Troops Heavily Medicated on Prescription Drugs, Report Warns

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

MyFoxDetroit.com
June 22, 2011

Men and women in the US military are more medicated than ever — and their doctors do not even know who takes what, The Daily reported Wednesday.

The Department of Defense does not keep track of medical prescriptions doled out to service members in combat, despite ongoing pleas from federal officials to do just that.

Last week, a report on the military’s 2012 budget from the House Appropriations Committee remarked that the prescription of pain management drugs is handled inconsistently, especially in battle.

The report also handed down an ultimatum: within two months of the budget’s approval, the committee wants concrete information on “the required steps and potential obstacles toward electronic transmission of prescription drug data.”

A 2010 US Army study found that 14 percent of soldiers had been prescribed an opiate painkiller, with 95 percent of those prescriptions for oxycodone, a notoriously-addictive pharmaceutical best known by the brand name OxyContin.

And since 2001, military spending on prescription medication has skyrocketed. Orders for antipsychotics like Seroquel are up 200 percent, and demand for anti-anxiety drugs like Valium has increased by 170 percent, according to Defense Logistics Agency records.

Many of the antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs and anti-anxiety drugs prescribed are highly addictive. Potential side effects include dulled reaction times, irritability and a heightened risk of suicide.

“The medications they use shouldn’t be so heavily prescribed in combat,” said Dr. Judith Broder, a psychiatrist and founder of the Soldiers Project, a nonprofit counseling service.

“But they can’t afford to send anyone home. They need the bodies — health and welfare are secondary,” she said.

Read article here:  http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpps/news/us-troops-heavily-medicated-on-prescription-drugs,-report-warns-dpgonc-20110622-to—_13806740

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The Small Group of Thoughtful, Committed Citizens Has Been Drugged

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

OpEdNews
By David Swanson
May 23, 2011

Movements for justice have historically been driven by a small percentage of any population. One percent of Americans nonviolently occupying Washington, D.C., could make Cairo and Madison and Madrid look like warm-up acts. It is certainly true that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens is the only thing that ever has changed the world for the better.

So, what happens if a society picks out a significant slice of its population, one including many thoughtful and committed citizens, and drugs them?

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) held a first-time, one-day, little publicized event last September that allowed people to turn in their extra prescription drugs. The DEA reports collecting 242,000 pounds or 121 tons. A second such day was held in April with 376,593 pounds or 188 tons of pills collected. This is the stuff nobody wants and is willing to hand in to the government. This is not the amount that’s out in circulation. That amount is no doubt in proportion to the roaring flood of television ads for the stuff. “More Americans currently abuse prescription drugs,” says the DEA, “than the number of those using cocaine, hallucinogens, and heroin combined. . . . [I]ndividuals that abuse prescription drugs often obtained them from family and friends, including from the home medicine cabinet.” And that’s just the users said to be abusing.

Ted Rall suggested drugging to me as a possible explanation for the big mystery staring us in the face, namely why Americans sit back and take so much more than other people from their government. The Patriot Act is being put on steroids with hardly a peep of protest. The “Defense Authorization Act” now before Congress would give presidents virtually limitless power to single-handedly make wars or imprison people. This is the biggest formal transfer of power in the U.S. government since the drafting of its Constitution. This undoes the American War for Independence. But perhaps we’d still be 13 colonies if Prozac and Zoloft had come along sooner.

“Like many people,” says Rall, “I have often wondered why so many Americans seem so emotionally flat and politically apathetic in response to a political and economic landscape that cries out for protest, or at least complaint. Could it be that our society’s most angry — justifiably angry — are being medicated into quiescence?” It does seem possible. I don’t mean to discount the fact that the United States imprisons record numbers of people. I’m willing to share some blame with our education system, our so-called news media, our religiosity, the two-party trap, and several other likely factors. But drugs looks like the big one that is nonetheless hardest to see. People don’t usually tell you they’re drugged, but chances are at least one in 10 people you meet is.

Two years ago, a study found that “the number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled to 10.1 percent of the population in 2005 compared with 1996, increasing across income and age groups.” One year earlier, another study had found that close to 10 percent of men and women in America were taking drugs to combat depression, and that 11 percent of women were taking antidepressants.”

Author and clinical psychologist Bruce Levine tells me this may be even worse than it sounds. “If you are around certain populations,” Levine says, “that 10 percent stat seems very low, especially among healthcare professionals and college students.” College students? I can remember them getting pretty thoughtful and committed in times past. “And that 10 percent,” Levine adds, “only includes the ‘official antidepressants’ such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Effexor, etc. This stat doesn’t include people using ADHD drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall, etc. to stimulate themselves.”

Adderall, Levine explained, is an amphetamine that affects the same neurotransmitters as cocaine (dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine), “and if one takes the antidepressant Effexor (affects serotonin and norepinephrine) at the same time one is taking the antidepressant Wellbutrin (affects dopamine), one can sense the hypocrisy in labeling certain psychotropics (drugs that affects neurotransmitters) as ‘antidepressants’ and other psychotropics as ‘ADHD psychostimulants.’ Lots of people — especially young people — are popping ‘Addies’ (street name for Adderall) to ‘motivate’ them to get them through their lives, especially during exam time.”

Levine said he’s counseling a young man who is supplementing his income by selling ADHD psychostimulant drugs to his fellow college students. He gets the best price around final exam time. “He told me, ‘Bruce, you’ve got to do better improving the self-esteem of these young kids who you are counseling.’ Why, I ask him, why do you care? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘these little brats who are getting their freebie prescription Addies feel so crappie about themselves that they are giving away their Addies to their older brothers for free just so they will hang out with them, and all those freebie Addies on the market are driving price down for me.”

Levine stresses that Adderall, like nicotine or caffeine or cocaine, provides a buzz that antidepressants do not. In fact, he points out, the so-called antidepressant drugs make people twice as likely to commit suicide. Levine concedes that some people swear antidepressants have saved their lives, but points out that people will say that about a placebo as well. The evidence, Levine says, shows antidepressants working no better than a placebo at lifting people out of depression.

Antidepressants may bear as Orwellian a name as the Patriot Act, but Levine finds the latter easier to talk about with people. “I get less grief,” Levine tells me, “when I talk about something like anarchism and Emma Goldman than when I talk about antidepressants’ effectiveness and [author] Irving Kirsch, as abstract political ideologies are far less threatening than people’s very own drugs.” Political movements may in fact be less threatening to those in power, because of people’s drugs.

Read article here:  http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Small-Group-of-Thought-by-David-Swanson-110523-181.html

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“Drugged Warriors: Sharp Rise in U.S. Military Psychiatric Drug Use and Suicides” by Psychologist Bruce Levine

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Sharp Rise in U. S. Military Psychiatric Drug Use and Suicides

CounterPunch
By Bruce E. Levine
April 2, 2010

One in six service members is now taking at least one psychiatric drug, according to the Navy Times, with many soldiers taking “drug cocktail” combinations. Soldiers and military healthcare providers told the Military Times that psychiatric drugs are “being prescribed, consumed, shared and traded in combat zones.”

The Navy Times reporters Andrew Tilghman and Brendan McGarry also noted that there has been a large increase in military suicides. From 2001 to 2009, the Army’s official suicide rate increased from 9 per 100,000 soldiers to 23 per 100,000. During that same period, the Marine Corps suicide rate increased from 16.7 per 100,000 soldiers to 24 per 100,000.

A Military Times investigation of records obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency revealed that the DLA spent $1.1 billion on psychiatric and pain medications from 2001 to 2009, and that there was a 76 percent increase in psychiatric drugs. DLA records show:

• Antipsychotic drugs spiked most dramatically — orders jumping by more than 200 percent.

• Orders for anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills such as Valium and Ambien increased 170 percent.

• Orders for antiepileptic drugs (also known as anticonvulsants) such as Depakote, routinely used as psychiatric medications, increased 70 percent.

• Antidepressants showed a 40 percent increase.

Investigators found that antipsychotic and antiepileptic drugs, approved for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, are now commonly used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms such as nightmares, nervousness, and anger outbursts. The use of antipsychotic drugs for non-psychotic conditions such as PTSD is called “off-label” prescribing. The general public is also subject to off-label prescribing, which is considered legal.

Read entire article:  http://www.counterpunch.org/levine04022010.html

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Our U.S. Military: Betrayed and Drugged

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more by Shane Ellison, go to:

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

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

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