Posts Tagged ‘mental disorders’

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Psychiatry has devolved from personalized therapy to shameless drug dealing

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

NaturalNews.com March 9, 2011
by Jonathan Benson

Back in the day, psychiatrists used to actually consult intimately with their patients and provide some type of personalized, talk-based therapy as part of their practice. The modern-day approach to psychiatry, however, has become more like a series of drug dealing sessions in which psychiatrists will briefly consult with their patients and prescribe them drugs for their problems.

A recent report at Ocala.com explains that over the past several decades, many psychiatrists have abandoned the personalized approach to therapy partly because insurance companies will often not pay for it, and thus it is not worth their time. But another likely reason for the switch to drug vending is that it simply pays better than actually having to deal with patients and try to help them in a non-drug way.

The Ocala.com report mentions a psychiatrist who has been practicing for nearly 40 years. In his early days, he consulted with and treated, at most, 60 patients once- or twice-weekly, which included a 45-minute talk therapy session. Today, he sees roughly 1,200 people every week for quick 15-minute sessions, and sends them on their way with drugs. This approach has become the norm, not the exception. And this particular psychiatrist is even quoted as saying that he has had to train himself out of actually caring about people’s problems, and instead focus on basically getting them out the door and on their way.

“It’s a practice that’s very reminiscent of primary care,” said Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, former president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the president and chief executive of Sheppard Pratt Health System, to Ocala.com. “They check up on people; they pull out the prescription pad; they order tests.”

The entire field of psychiatry has been on a downward spiral for years, though, as the “Disease Mongering Engine” literally invents new diseases every year — which are really just normal, everyday human behaviors that vary based on personality, by the way — and comes up with drug interventions to treat them. It is a highly lucrative drug dealing business that profits at the expense of human health (http://www.naturalnews.com/028280_p…).

To see a psychiatrist in today’s environment is like playing Russian Roulette with your health. If able to evaluate every person on the planet, the average psychiatrist would surely find a problem or two with each one. And within five-to-ten minutes, he or she would be able to prescribe a laundry list of medications to treat those alleged disorders. So in other words, if you value your health, stay far, far away from modern-day psychiatrists.

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DSM: The Book of Woe—Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Wired—December 27, 2010

by Gary Greenberg

Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.

But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.

One influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids failed to disclose money he received from the makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal.

As a practicing psychotherapist myself, I can attest that this is a startling turn. But when Frances tries to explain it, he resists the kinds of reasons that mental health professionals usually give each other, the ones about character traits or personality quirks formed in childhood. He says he doesn’t want to give ammunition to his enemies, who have already shown their willingness to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not an unfounded concern. In its first official response to Frances, the APA diagnosed him with “pride of authorship” and pointed out that his royalty payments would end once the new edition was published—a fact that “should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.”

Frances, who claims he doesn’t care about the royalties (which amount, he says, to just 10 grand a year), also claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they’d go after the right ones—the serious errors in the DSM-IV. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.

The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it. Dissidents complain that the revision process is in disarray and that the preliminary results, made public for the first time in February 2010, are filled with potential clinical and public relations nightmares. Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”

At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.

This is hardly the first time that defining mental illness has led to rancor within the profession. It happened in 1993, when feminists denounced Frances for considering the inclusion of “late luteal phase dysphoric disorder” (formerly known as premenstrual syndrome) as a possible diagnosis for DSM-IV. It happened in 1980, when psychoanalysts objected to the removal of the word neurosis—their bread and butter—from the DSM-III. It happened in 1973, when gay psychiatrists, after years of loud protest, finally forced a reluctant APA to acknowledge that homosexuality was not and never had been an illness. Indeed, it’s been happening since at least 1922, when two prominent psychiatrists warned that a planned change to the nomenclature would be tantamount to declaring that “the whole world is, or has been, insane.”

Some of this disputatiousness is the hazard of any professional specialty. But when psychiatrists say, as they have during each of these fights, that the success or failure of their efforts could sink the whole profession, they aren’t just scoring rhetorical points. The authority of any doctor depends on their ability to name a patient’s suffering. For patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.”

If bad tests are sanctioned in the DSM, insurance companies might use them to cut off coverage for patients deemed not sick enough. It could be a disaster.

Since 1980, when the DSM-III was published, psychiatrists have tried to solve this problem by using what is called descriptive diagnosis: a checklist approach, whereby illnesses are defined wholly by the symptoms patients present. The main virtue of descriptive psychiatry is that it doesn’t rely on unprovable notions about the nature and causes of mental illness, as the Freudian theories behind all those “neuroses” had done. Two doctors who observe a patient carefully and consult the DSM’s criteria lists usually won’t disagree on the diagnosis—something that was embarrassingly common before 1980. But descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles. “No one should be proud that we have a descriptive system,” Frances tells me. “The fact that we do only reveals our limitations.” Instead of curing the profession’s own malady, descriptive psychiatry has just covered it up.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all/1

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The New Child Abuse: The Psychiatric Diagnosing and Drugging of Our Children

Friday, December 17th, 2010

The Huffington Post—Dec 17, 2010

by Peter Breggin

Every society has found its own methods to abuse its most vulnerable members: children; women; the elderly; ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the poor; the mentally distressed or distressing; the physically disabled; those with unconventional lifestyles. All of these have been widely abused and all remain victims of abuse to varying degrees in societies throughout the world.

Just as it is certain that these abuses can never be fully eliminated, it is also certain that these same abuses will expand to the degree that individual citizens justify or ignore them and fail to take a stand.

In the past, the most rampant abuses have been justified on moral, religious, patriotic or ethnic grounds. But increasingly we will see the worst abuses rationalized on scientific and medical grounds. It’s the modern way.

Science and medicine have so successfully rationalized and justified our society’s most devastating and pervasive form of child abuse that it remains almost wholly unacknowledged, though it is known to every sentient adult and to most children. Probably every adult and half-grown child in America knows and can identify at least one child who is the victim of this abuse. Those who teach, coach, minister to or otherwise serve children may know dozens or even hundreds of children who are victims of the new child abuse.

Our society’s particular form of child abuse is the psychiatric diagnosing and drugging of our children.

The diagnoses are becoming almost innumerable including LD, ADHD, OCD, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, and Asperger’s and autistic spectrum disorders. Increasingly children also fall victim to psychological tests that allegedly identify frontal lobe dysfunctions characterized by inattention or flawed executive functions.

Like the diagnoses, the drugs administered to children have mushroomed to involve every class of psychiatric medication, including stimulants, antidepressants, tranquilizers, mood stabilizers and anti psychotic agents. The FDA has increasingly given official approval for giving children especially deadly anti-psychotics such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, Geodon and Seroquel. Meanwhile, anything that can sedate the child’s growing brain from anti-hypertension drugs to anti-seizure drugs are routinely dispensed with callous disregard for their harmful impact.

It’s not uncommon to find children subdued and crushed by multiple psychiatric drugs. Probably 10 to 20 percent of our children will at some time be diagnosed or drugged. This number includes nearly every child in special education classes, foster care or on SSI/SSDI. Any child singled out by child services and educational or psychiatric authorities is likely to fall victim to psychiatric drugs.

The Psychopharmaceutical Complex is the source of these abuses: the pharmaceutical industry, organized psychiatry and medicine, NIMH, insurance companies and various other groups supported by the drug companies. Few parents are abusers; they are misled and intimidated by the “authorities” and often medicate their children against their better judgment.

Two principles are self-evident: First, convincing children that they have “something wrong” in their heads such as genetically crossed wires or biochemical imbalances is the surest way to rob them of self-esteem, personal responsibility, self-mastery and the hope of an unlimited future. Second, convincing children that they have a psychiatric diagnosis or treating them as if they have one and teaching them to rely on psychiatric drugs is a prescription for their becoming lifelong mental patients.

Two other principles require a little more thought or scientific evidence: First, all psychoactive substances from alcohol and marijuana to psychiatric drugs reduce and compromise the function of brain and mind, and none improve it. Whether or not we like the feelings we get from them, all psychoactive substances impact us precisely by producing a partial disability of our highest mental and spiritual life. More concretely most are poisonous to brain cells. I call this “the brain-disabling principle” of psychiatric treatment and have described and documented it in a lengthy medical text book with more than 1,000 scientific references.

Second, all psychiatric drugs have potentially horrendous and even lethal adverse effects from chronic depression and growth stunting caused by stimulants to diabetes, severe obesity, disfiguring neurological disorders and shortened lifespan caused by “antipsychotic” agents. You can confirm and expand on these observations by googling antipsychotic drugs or reading my various books on the subject, especially “Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition.” The names of the diagnoses will change. The chemical structures of the drugs will change. The promotional strategies will change. But, in my opinion, it will always be abusive to psychiatrically diagnose and drug children.

Now comes the challenge. Put yourself into the emotional and spiritual life of a child who has been diagnosed and will soon be drugged. Be empathic, but not in a disheartening way. Be empathic by connecting with love to the child’s inherent desire to love and be loved, to benefit from rational discipline, to play and to have fun, to grow up and to take responsibility, to learn, and to reach to his or her self-determined stars.

Are you able to put yourself in that child’s place? How does it feel to be told you’re not normal, that you have a disorder, that you’re special but not in a good or hopeful way? How does it feel to be different, let alone mentally impaired? And what impact will it have on you when the expectations of your parents and teachers are tailored to your limitations?

Be genuinely empathic. Children will say almost anything to adults to cover up their shame or to appease them. Beyond that, the medication spellbinding effects of psychiatric drugs impair the individual’s ability to perceive or evaluate the emotional and cognitive disruption that the psychoactive substances are causing. Put yourself in the child’s place and know what he or she must feel about being stigmatized and marginalized by psychiatric diagnoses.

Now imagine yourself inside the head of the child being drugged. The drug makes you feel different and you don’t like it, but everyone says you need it. You don’t want to have to take a drug to make you normal. But you’re a kid and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Gradually your brain and mind struggle to adapt to the brain-disabling chemical that’s crossed your blood brain barrier and disrupted your normal biochemical functions. As an aspect of medication spellbinding, you become so accustomed to your more flattened emotions and reduced mental acuity that you hardly notice the difference anymore.

And now consider this: All these children will grow up with brains drenched in toxic substances, literally polluted in the extreme. Think about the known adverse effects and dare to imagine the even more subtle changes in the function of the brains of each child, brains forever chemically altered.

These children will never know what evolution or God really intended them to become before these toxic intrusions.

Do not be misled that the medical and scientific authorities, and the weight of the universities and government, wholly support this rampant abuse of children. From the systematic abuse of women, children and minorities throughout the ages to the institution of slavery and the Holocaust, those in authority have condoned and benefited from these abuses. Authority at the top of society always justifies these widespread abuses, otherwise the abuses would never get started, nor would they persist.

Reject the authorities. Rely on common sense, sound ethics and real science. Allow yourself to become empathic toward these abused children. Then become angry, energized, motivated and engaged. Educate yourself. My books and those of many others will introduce you to a new world of science, education and philosophy about childhood and children. Find your own way to protest and to make a difference. Join us at empathictherapy.com in our efforts to protect our nation’s children from psychiatric abuse and to offer them genuine love, inspiration, service and education.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/the-new-child-abuse-psych_b_788900.html

Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books. His two most recent books are  Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime and Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex. Dr. Breggin’s professional website is www.breggin.com. Dr. Breggin and his wife Ginger have founded a new organization, The Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living (www.empathictherapy.com). It will hold an international conference in Syracuse, New York, April 8-10, 2011.

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Psychiatrist Asks, “Why Are People So Divided When It Comes To Children’s Mental Health?” We’ve Got the Answer…

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

20 million kids are being prescribed dangerous mind-altering drugs

By CCHR

Today’s Huffington Post features an article from psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz, frequently seen in the press leading the cheer for more psychiatric diagnosing and drugging of children.   In today’s article, Koplewicz makes a plea to ‘Stop the Stigma’ which is preventing children from being diagnosed mentally ill.   Pretty catchy slogan isn’t it? “Stop the Stigma.”  It ought to be, it’s a brilliant marketing campaign, brought to you by Big Pharma, via the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), a group that  masquerades as a “patient’s rights group for the mentally ill”  but receives tens of millions in Pharma funding.

But here’s the real rub—What entity is most responsible for stigmatizing millions of children? What group has pathologized childhood behavior and repackaged a list of behaviors into a “disease” called ADHD?  Psychiatry and Pharma.   You can’t be a kid anymore.  If you display child-like behaviors you can be  branded mentally ill for life. And its not just us saying this.  Consider that the former Chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM task force,  psychiatrist Allen Frances, stated “Our country is in the midst of a fifteen year ‘epidemic’ of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). There are six potential causes for the skyrocketing rates of ADD—but only five have been real contributors. The most obvious explanation is by far the least likely – that the prevalence of attention deficit problems in the general population has actually increased in the last 15 years. Human nature is remarkably constant and slow to change, while diagnostic fads come and go with great rapidity. We don’t have more attention deficit than ever before-we just label more attentional problems as mental disorder.”

He  also talked about “stigma,” but sourced the industry creating it—psychiatry: “The ‘epidemic’ of childhood Bipolar Disorder has created a public health dilemma” and that it is  “based on much hype and very little scientific evidence. The label Bipolar Disorder also carries considerable stigma, implying that the child will have a lifelong illness requiring lifetime treatment.”

Exactly.

The title of Dr. Koplewicz’s article is “Why Are People So Divided When It Comes to Children’s Mental Health?” so we’d like to answer that question, as it’s pretty simple —Some of us are for children’s rights and putting their best interests above all else, while others are for Psycho/Pharma and putting their best interests above all else.

That’s the short version.  Here is a bit more detailed answer;

Point 1) Millions of children have been stigmatized with bogus psychiatric “labels” that are based solely on opinion, and not one shred of medical evidence that there’s anything physically wrong with them.  No blood tests, brain scans, X-rays, MRIs or any proof whatsoever they are “mentally ill” and require drugs euphemistically being called “medicine.”    Unlike real medical diseases which are discovered in labs, psychiatric diagnoses are invented by psychiatrists in committee, by  the following “scientific” process;  Cluster a number of behaviors into a nice little package, give it a name and add “disorder” on the tail end of it,  then take a vote.  Majority wins.   That’s about it. And that’s why mental disorders can be here one day and gone the next, because of majority opinion — namely, psychiatry’s.   So while psychiatrists talk about the “amazing progress” they’ve made, and how “close” they’ve come to proving mental disorders are “real medical conditions,” we’d like to point out the obvious—they haven’t.   They couldn’t prove mental disorders were physical/medical conditions 50 years ago, and can’t prove it today despite billions in government funding.    No progress.  Whatsoever.   Zippo.  Nada.    So understandably, Dr. Koplewicz,, as people become more educated about this ludicrous subjective process of disorders made to order, they are concerned about the lack of real science to psychiatric “diagnoses” particularly where their children are concerned.

Point 2) The majority of psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association that “decide” on what will and will not be a mental “disorder” are funded by Pharma.  That’s called a Conflict of Interest.  A serious, egregious conflict of interest.  No “conspiracy” here Dr. Kopelwicz, just some facts about your colleagues and their incentives for developing more mental disorders.

Point 3) Due to these subjective, invented mental disorders,  20 million children are currently taking mind-altering, life-threatening drugs, acknowledged by international drug regulatory agencies to cause future drug dependence, stunted growth, mania, psychosis, violence, aggression, hallucinations, heart attack, stroke, sudden death and suicidal ideation.  All international studies and warnings on psychiatric drugs along with all the reports filed with the U.S. FDA’s Medwatch by doctors, pharmacists and healthcare providers reporting suicidal ideation and death from psychiatric drugs given to toddlers, young children and teenagers can be found here:  http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/

Point 4) While Koplewicz has the audacity to call the “over-drugging” of children “a myth”,  consider that the Government Accountability Office has launched a federal investigation into the massive increase of drugging children in foster care.  “The investigators will attempt to account for estimates in the hundreds of millions of dollars of possible fraud arising from prescriptions for drugs explicitly barred from Medicaid coverage.  The GAO is collecting data from six states to search for patterns of abuse.  According to a number of foster care experts who spoke with Politics Daily, children in foster care, who are typically concurrently enrolled in Medicaid, are three or four more times as likely to be on psychotropic medications than other children on Medicaid. Alarmingly, many of these drugs are medically prohibited for minors and dangerous to the children taking them.”

Point 5) Senate investigations this past year revealed that some of the “leading” psychiatrists touting the wonders of diagnosing and drugging kids, and largely responsible for massive increases in kids unnecessarily placed on dangerous psychiatric drugs, were on Pharma’s payroll, and failed to disclose this.  Psychiatrists such as Joseph Biederman, who was being paid millions of dollars by the Pharmaceutical companies while skewing the results of drug trials to show false benefits for kids, in order the launch a nationwide campaign to get children diagnosed as “bi-polar.”

And he’s not the only one: Here are some of the “leading” psychiatrists exposed by Senate investigations:

Melissa DelBello, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati, was exposed in 2007 by the Senate Finance Committee for concealing $180,000 she received from AstraZeneca in 2003 and 2004.  DelBello’s studies of the antipsychotic Seroquel, made by AstraZeneca, in children helped to fuel the widespread pediatric use of antipsychotic drugs.

In 2008, Joseph Biederman, a leading Harvard child psychiatrist whose work helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs in children, was exposed for withholding earning at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers between 2000 and 2007.

Alan Schatzberg, president-elect of the APA, and Professor and Department of Psychiatry Chair of Stanford University was also investigated in 2008 by the Senate Finance Committee.  Schatzberg was forced to step down as principal investigator in an NIH funded research project into a drug called Mifeprestone, to treat “psychotic depression.” Senate investigators found that Schatzberg failed to report $4.8 million worth of stock in Corcept Therapeutics, a drug company which he co-founded and acted as lead researcher on a drug development project for until he was forced to surrender that role after being exposed.

A Senate investigation found Charles Nemeroff, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Chairman of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine had concealed $2.8 million he earned from drug companies. He was forced to step down as Chairman of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory due to being exposed for his hidden pharmaceutical pay and attempted cover up.

In December 2009, Sen. Charles Grassley filed a complaint about Fernando Mendez-Villamil to federal authorities for his excessive prescribing of antipsychotics to children that were not approved by the FDA.  This cost taxpayers $43 million over six years.  Mendez-Villamil is apparently also currently under investigation by the Medicaid program.  Mid 2009, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration reported that that Mendez Villamil is the top Medicaid prescriber of mental health drugs in the state—for all ages.  It was calculated that he wrote more than 150 prescriptions a day, seven days a week for six years

So to summarize, we don’t have an epidemic of mentally ill children, we have an epidemic of psychiatry stigmatizing children with mental disorders that cannot be medically/scientifically proven to exist.  We have an epidemic of children prescribed dangerous and potentially lethal psychiatric drugs, including infants and toddlers.  And we have the real source of stigmatization—the Psychiatric/Pharmaceutical industry.

To read Koplewicz’s article, click here

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-harold-koplewicz/mental-health-being-openminded_b_791706.html

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The Over-Prescribing of Psychoactive Drugs to Children: A Scourge of Our Times

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

The Huffington Post

September 1, 2010

by Dr. Ronald Ricker and Dr. Venus Nicolino

Today, the administration of psychoactive drugs to children (6-17) is all too common and growing at an alarming rate. These drugs often cause the opposite of the intended effect, often condemning children to a life of misery and ill health. The prescription of these drugs is said to treat “chemical imbalances” which were said to cause ADHD, Depression and Bi-polar disorder. It turns out, however, that what we were calling “disease-causing chemical imbalances,” is simply incorrect . The sad irony is, the inappropriate use of these medications is in fact creating different chemical imbalances, which do cause mental disorders, many of which are both life-long and debilitating.

Furthermore, it is now clear that often we are diagnosing ordinary childhood and adolescent behavior as mental disorders (Wait, children are supposed to be bursting with energy? It’s normal for a teenager to be moody and aloof?). This diagnosing is not only based on this idea of “chemical imbalances,” but also a general and pervasive notion that every non-acceptable behavior is due to a mental illness. And last, but certainly not least, the prescribing of these medications by doctors is based on the disinformation provided them by the FDA, drug manufactures and often fraudulent studies, all in the name of making money, on the backs of our children.

In a recent lecture, respected journalist, writer and Nobel Prize Nominee, Robert Whitaker (PBS, Boston, June 15, 2010) highlighted not only the appallingly unscientific methodology used in the development, prescription and use of psychotropic drugs in school-aged children, but also how hopelessly corrupt and failed the systems that should be regulating the safety of medicines are in this country.

Unfortunately, many drug companies exist for one reason: to make money. As such, the people who run these companies have developed a worldview bereft of any more notion of ethics or morality than British Petroleum. Some drug companies’ success is not based on a drug’s usefulness or the safety of its products, but whether it makes money. The path to more money is simple: find new uses for their old drugs, invent new drugs and find new markets for both new and old drugs. Unfortunately, children are today’s newest market.

The FDA requires a “Successful Drug Trial” to approve new medications. “Trial” is often a misnomer, as the word implies some notion of impartiality and unknown outcome. These “trials” often are more like kangaroo courts. In one “trial,” in this case to prove the usefulness of Prozac, corruption and dishonesty were the rule. Children who responded to placebos were removed from the data, as were negative responders to the actual drug. This meant that the only children who were left in the study group were so-called “positive responders.” And, even then, the researchers and doctors, whose “research” funding was provided by the makers of Prozac, were the very ones to decide which subjects, if any, actually did respond “positively” to the drug. This, of course, is a massive conflict of interest. The doctors, researchers and drug companies all want the same thing — FDA approval and to make more money.

In a 2004 article published in perhaps the most prestigious British medical journal, Lancet, said the trial studies used to provide proof of the usefulness of anti-depressant drugs in children, were “nothing but fraudulent.” Following that assessment, all anti-depressants but Prozac were banned in the UK for use on children. (The fact that Prozac was not banned was based on very dubious, some say dishonest, research as documented above).

The true damage caused by the use of anti-depressant drugs like Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, etc. (AKA of SSRI’s: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) by school-aged children is only found by legitimate, longer studies, like those that continued from 17 months to six years. In one study, 25 percent of children who had been on SSRI’s for three years were re-diagnosed with the much more serious disorder of Bi-polar disease. This number increased to 50 percent after six years of SSRI use. Long-term use of new anti-psychotics may lead to even greater problems than the initial disease. Diabetes, morbid obesity and early death have all been linked to the use of these drugs. And, as written by us in a previous blog both short and long term use of stimulant drugs such as Adderall), have numerous serious side effects.

Read the rest of this article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-ronald-ricker-and-dr-venus-nicolino/the-prescribing-of-psycho_b_665838.html

Note: To view all international drug regulatory warnings and studies on psychiatric drugs including those issued specifically for children,visit CCHR’s psychiatric drug search engine here: http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/drug_warnings.php

Also see this video – Drugging Our Children: Side Effects – http://www.cchrint.org/videos/

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Americas Mental Illness Epidemic

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Rense.com
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
August 25, 2010

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy ­ often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs – to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies aka, BigPharma.

That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and health science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600% increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability. Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients are now motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can cross the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering the brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the patients are taking the drugs long-term..

In Whitaker’s second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma. Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to admit: These drugs, it turns our, are fully capable of disabling ­ often permanently – body, brain and spirit.

More evidence to support Whitaker’s well-documented claims are laid out in two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace Jackson. Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, from the voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly ignored by the clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous consequences of the chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes of psychiatric drugs. Her second and most powerful book: Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any of the five classes of drugs that are commonly used in psychiatric patients (antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, tranquilizers and anti-seizure/”mood-stabilizer” drugs) have shown microscopic, macroscopic, biochemical, clinical and/or radiological evidence of brain shrinkage and other signs of brain damage, which can result in clinically-diagnosable, permanent dementia, premature death and a variety of other related brain disorders that can mimic mental illnesses. Jackson’s first book, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent was an equally sobering book warning about the many hidden dangers of psychiatric drugs.

This sad truth is that the seemingly knee-jerk prescribing (without very much information being given to patients about the long list of serious long-term adverse effects) of potent and often addicting/dependency-inducing psychiatric drugs has become the standard of care in American psychiatry since the introduction of the so-called anti-schizophrenic “miracle” drug Thorazine in the mid-1950s. (Thorazine was the offending drug that all of Jack Nicholson’s fellow patients were coerced into taking at “medication time” in the Academy Award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.) Thorazine and all the other “me-too” early antipsychotic drugs are now universally known to have been an iatrogenic (= doctor or other treatment-caused) disaster because of their serious long-term, initially unsuspected, brain-damaging effects that resulted in a number of incurable neurological disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson’s disease.

Thorazine and all the other knock-off drugs like Prolixin, Mellaril, Navane. etc, are synthetic “tricyclic” chemical compounds similar in molecular structure to the tricyclic “antidepressants” like imipramine and the similarly toxic, obesity-inducing, diabetogenic, “atypical” anti-schizophrenic drugs like Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel.

Thorazine, incidentally, was originally developed in Europe as an industrial dye. That doesn’t sound so good although it may not be so unusual in the closely related fields of psychopharmcology and the chemical industry, especially when one considers that Depakote, a popular drug marketed initially as an anti-epilepsy drug but now is being heavily used as a so-called “mood stabilizer”. Depakote, known to be a hepatotoxin and renal toxin, was originally developed as an industrial solvent capable of dissolving fat – including, presumably, the fatty tissue in human livers and brains.

Some sympathy and understanding needs to be generated for the various victims of BigPharma’s compulsive drive to expand market share and “shareholder value” (share price, dividends and the next quarter’s financial report) by whatever means necessary. Both the prescribers and the swallowers of BigPharma’s drugs have succumbed to BigPharma’s cunning marketing campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by attractive drug company representatives and their “pens, pizzas and post-it note” freebies in the office, and the patients being brain-washed by the inane and unbelievable (if one has intact critical thinking skills) commercials on TV that quickly gloss over the lethal adverse effects in the fine print while urging the watcher to “ask your doctor” about the latest unaffordable wannabe blockbuster drug..

For a quick overview of these issues, I recommend that everybody with an open mind read a long essay written by Whitaker that persuasively identifies the source of America’s epidemic of mental illness disability (a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in Third World nations because costly psych drugs are not prescribed so cavalierly as in the US).

Whitaker and Jackson (among a number of other ground-breaking and whistle-blowing authors who have been essentially black-listed by the mainstream media and mainstream medical journals) have proven to most critically-thinking scientists, alternative practitioners and assorted “psychiatric survivors” that it is the drugs – and not the so-called “disorders” – that are causing our nation’s epidemic of mental illness disability. The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent information about his books can be accessed at www.madinamerica.com A recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at www.wpr.org (at their radio archives link) and a long interview with Dr.Joseph Mercola can be heard at: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/05/08/robert-whitaker-interview.aspx

After reading and studying all these inconvenient truths, mental health practitioners must consider the medicolegal implications for them, especially if the information is ignored or if the information is dismissed out of hand by practitioners who might be tempted to not take the time to study this new information. Those people who are hearing about this for the first time need to pass the word on to others, especially their prescribing healthcare practitioners who should be equally concerned. This is important because the opinion leaders in the highly influential (for good or ill) psychiatric and medical industries have been marketed into submission without hearing the all the facts (which may have been intentionally hidden from them. If that is the case, they cannot be automatically blamed for proceeding in a practice that some day might represent malpractice. It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that is the solemn duty of ethical practitioners who are in positions of authority to fully examine potential malpractice issues and then warn others, especially their patients, of the dangers.

Sadly, it must be admitted that most of the over-worked, double-booked care-givers in medical clinics have not yet heard the news that most if not all of the brain-altering synthetic chemicals known as psychotropic drugs (which are treated as hazardous waste unless they are packaged in a swallowable capsule!) have been marketed as safe and effective – but only for short-term use. The captains of the drug industry know that the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 weeks. They also know ­ indeed they hope – that patients will be taking their drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as the only “treatment” for mental ill health. They know that their brain-altering drugs are also dependency-inducing (aka addicting, causing withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic and increasingly ineffective (a la “Prozac Poop-out”) as time goes by.

The truth is that the people diagnosed as “mentally ill” for life are often simply those unfortunates who find themselves in acute or chronic states of crisis or “overwhelm” due to any number of preventable, curable and treatable (without the use of drugs) bad luck accidents such as poverty, abuse, violence, torture, homelessness, discrimination, underemployment, brain malnutrition, addictions/withdrawal, brain damage from electroshock “therapy” and/or exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in their food, air, water or prescription bottles.

Those labeled as the “mentally ill” are just like us “normals” who have not yet decompensated because of some yet-to-happen, crisis-inducing, overwhelming (however temporary) life situation. And thus we have not yet been given a billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly obligatory – and unaffordable – drug prescription or two signifying we are now chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain off prescription drugs but with a label and in “the system”, it is hard to “just say no to drugs.”

The victims of hopelessness-generating situations like simple bad luck, bad circumstances, bad company, bad choices, bad government, big business, and a competitive society that generates a few winners but mostly losers. America tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus fear-inducing social systems resembling in many ways the infamous police state realities of 20th century European totalitarianism, where people who were different or just dissidents were thought to be abnormal and therefore “disappeared” into insane asylums, jails or concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense. And many of them were and are drugged with disabling psychoactive chemicals against their will.

The truth is that most, if not all, of BigPharma’s psychotropic drugs are lethal at some dosage level (the LD50, the lethal dose that kills 50% of lab animals, is calculated before efficacy testing is done), and therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, brain damage, loss of creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of empathy, loss of energy, loss of strength, fatigue and tiredness, permanent disability and a multitude of metabolic adverse effects that can readily sicken the body, brain and soul by causing insomnia or somnolence, increased depression or anxiety, delusions, psychoses, paranoia, mania, etc. So before filling the prescription, it is advisable to read the product insert labeling under WARNINGS, PRECAUTIONS, ADVERSE EFFECTS, CONTRAINDICATIONS, TOXICOLOGY, OVERDOSAGE and the ever-present BLACK BOX WARNINGS ABOUT SUICIDALITY.

Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a “chemical lobotomy”. That is a useful way to conceptualize this serious issue, because such chemically brain-altered patients are often indistinguishable from those who have suffered a physically traumatic brain injuries or been subjected to ice-pick lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 50s – before the drugs came on the market.

America has a mental ill health epidemic on its hands that is grossly misunderstood because it is worsening, not by the supposed disease progression, but because of the neurotoxic, non-curative drugs that are somehow regarded as first-line “treatment.”
Read the rest of this article here: http://www.rense.com/general91/edi.htm

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The Los Angeles Examiner: Psychiatric Overdiagnosis Means “Normal” Could Become Obsolete

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Examiner.com
By jenny Westberg
July 13, 2010

An intolerance of individual differences, according to some, has led to overdiagnosis.

Are you normal? Are you sure?

A growing number of behaviors and moods are being relabeled as mental disorders, according to two recent articles. Sadness, shyness, personality quirks and the ups and downs of everyday life may qualify almost anyone for a psychiatric diagnosis, effectively pathologizing normality.

Allen Francis, MD writes in the Psychiatric Times that almost everyone meets the criteria for one or another of the conditions listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book psychiatrists use to determine whether you have a mental illness. The fifth edition of the manual (DSM-5), due in 2013, will relax these criteria even further, giving psychiatric labels to even more people.

According to 2010 figures from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), more than 25 percent of the adult population has a diagnosable mental disorder. That’s approximately 60 million people. A prospective study found that, by age 32, half of U.S. adults could be diagnosed with anxiety; 40 percent with depression; and 30 percent with alcohol abuse or dependence.

With criteria proposed for the DSM-5, psychiatrists could diagnose “Nicotine Use Disorder” or “Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder.” If your child has temper tantrums, that’s one of the signs of “Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria.” Bad dreams? It could be a case of “Nightmare Disorder.”

Why is this a problem? Mental illness carries a stigma. A diagnostic label can follow you for the rest of your life. It is shared with your insurance company. Your family and friends might make certain assumptions about you. Your doctor may insist you need psychiatric drugs.

More and more behaviors, however, are being stamped as “mental illnesses.”

Francis writes that individual differences that were once accepted as normal have become medicalized. Our society, he says, has become perfectionistic and intolerant of even short-term distress.

Read entire article:  http://www.examiner.com/x-31400-Portland-Mental-Health-Examiner~y2010m7d13-Psychiatric-overdiagnosis-means-normal-could-become-obsolete

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The Huffington Post—Life is Not a Mental Disorder

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

The Huffington Post
By Ronald Ricker
July 13, 2010

The Bible (or really any religious text) can be made to say and mean anything the author wishes.

The “Bible” of psychiatry, that fabled and hoary text, the DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders written by the American Psychiatric Association), is no different. Conceived as an instrument to identify and help heal disorders of the mind, it has morphed as to both form and function. Too often, psychiatrists wield the DSM-IV-TR like a blunt instrument, desperate in their drive to assign names to supposed “mental conditions” and thus to be able to assign numbers to these “conditions.” Discover a new widely inclusive “condition,” give it a name and number and you have a winner: One more brick in the wall of sicknesses.

DSM-IV-TR is very large book. We have lots of diagnoses, the number rapidly growing. We need lots of page room. Aside from blank pages, Chapter Heading Pages, and long lists of Contributors, etc., DSM-IV-TR is chuck full of diagnoses, with detailed descriptions and code numbers for each diagnosis. This book is 952 pages long. It weighs 4.8 pounds.

There is an odd situation in DSM-IV-TR. Really odd. In its entirety, all 952 pages, there is no “No Disorder” option. Therefore, everyone is seen by DSM-IV-TR as sick, the only question being from which sickness(es) they suffer. The annual physical checkup many of us get, usually, unless there is something wrong, ends with “everything is fine.” This, apparently, doesn’t exist in mental health.

I have always felt that I was a crummy writer, starting from college and thereafter (including medical school, internship, National Institute of Mental Health, Psychiatric Residency). However, in writing this poorly written piece, while trudging through DSM-IV-TR, I found 315.2 – “Disorder of Written Expression.” It was an AH-HA moment. I may be a crummy writer, but it’s because I have a disease. Criteria, according to DSM-IV-TR, for this disease (315.2) are 3:

  • a) Writing skills below those expected given the person’s chronological age, measured intelligence and age appropriate education;
  • b) The disturbance in criterion A significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require the composition of written texts (e.g, writing grammatically correct sentences and organized paragraphs);
  • c) If a sensory deficit is present, the difficulties in writing skills are in excesses of those usually associated with it.

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-ricker/life-is-not-a-mental-diso_b_644606.html

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Ready for Psychiatry’s latest mental illness? Try this: Healthy Eating Disorder

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Natural News
By Mike Adams
June 29, 2010

In its never-ending attempt to fabricate “mental disorders” out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they’ve invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you’re “mentally diseased” and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardian newspaper reports, “Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder” and goes on to claim this “disease” is called orthorexia nervosa — which is basically just Latin for “nervous about correct eating.”

But they can’t just called it “nervous healthy eating disorder” because that doesn’t sound like they know what they’re talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn’t). That’s where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means “bones with holes in them”).

Getting back to this fabricated “orthorexia” disease, the Guardian goes on to report, “Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out.”

Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now makes you a mental health patient? Yep. According to these experts. If you actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients like soy and sugar, there’s something wrong with you.

But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be “normal?” If you eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that’s okay with them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods, apparently.

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/029098_orthorexia_mental_disorder.html

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The Huffington Post— Creating Disease: Big Pharma and Disease Mongering

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

The Huffington Post
by Dr. Larry Dossey
June 18, 2010

You may think there is enough disease in the world already, and that no one would want to add to the diseases that we humans must deal with. But there is a powerful industry in our society that is working overtime to invent illnesses and to convince us we are suffering from them.

This effort is known as “disease mongering,” a term introduced by health-science writer Lynn Payer in her 1992 book Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick. Payer defined disease mongering as “trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill.” This strategy has also been called “the corporate construction of disease” by Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath and David Henry in the British Medical Journal. “There’s a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they’re sick,” they say. “Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers.”

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/big-pharma-health-care-cr_b_613311.html

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