Note from CCHR:  This is pure negligence.  A teenager who was under psychiatric “care” was  found dead with two antipsychotic drugs in his system.  The consulting psychiatrist says he is “puzzled” about his death and that they have “no explanation at all.”  Really.   Perhaps the good doctor should brush up on the international drug regulatory warnings for the drugs they are prescribing.    CCHR’s psychiatric drug database contains 24 international drug regulatory warnings on Antipsychotic drugs, and 49 international studies citing side effects including diabetes, obesity, blood clots, heart problems,  cardiac events,  cancer, tumors, death/sudden death. Moreover, if as the psychiatrist claims,  this teenager was found to have two antipsychotics in his system, only one of which was prescribed (so they say) then obviously the psychiatric hospital staff is beyond negligent if in fact a teen already under the influence of mind-altering drugs, was able to get his hands on and ingest another psychiatric drug unbeknown to any of the staff.

by Stephen Exley, November 2, 2010

A teenager with schizophrenia was found dead in a psychiatric hospital with a cocktail of drugs in his bloodstream, an inquest heard.

Patrick Bennett was discovered in his bed by a shocked nurse at Fulbourn Hospital, and a post-mortem revealed he had taken two anti-psychotic drugs – only one of which he had been prescribed – and paracetamol.

But doctors told an inquest in Huntindon they had no idea how the 19-year-old obtained them, and that he was too mentally ill to have planned and carried out a suicide.

Sue Lancaster, a staff nurse at the hospital, spoke of the moment she found the body of Mr Bennett, of Pound Lane, Kimbolton, on the morning of August 12, 2009.

She said: “It was then I saw his face and knew he was dead. His face still haunts me.”

Fellow nurse Margaret Molina said she was “certain” she had given Mr Bennett the correct dosage of 4.5ml of clozapine, an anti-psychotic drug, on the night before his death.

When asked about his behaviour, she added: “He didn’t seem clearly anxious or upset in any way, he just seemed bewildered.”

Dr Emilio Fernandez, a consultant psychiatrist who had assessed Mr Bennett, said he had “severe impairment in many daily activities”.

He told the inquest doctors suspected Mr Bennett had been hiding tablets in his mouth, so he was switched to a liquid form of clozapine.

He said this switch made his behaviour “more warm”, and he was transferred to a different ward days before his death.

Dr Fernandez described Mr Bennett as “one of the most severe cases I have ever seen in my life” who would not have had the “ability to plan or carry out any suicide attempt”.

He added: “We are all very puzzled about this, we have no explanation at all.”

Search international warnings and studies on antipsychotic and other psychiatric drugs here: http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/drug_warnings.php

Search for deaths reported to the US FDA from antipsychotic drugs here http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/medwatch_psych_drug_adverse_reactions.php

Read the rest of the article here:  http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Hospital-staff-puzzled-by-teenagers-fatal-overdose.htm

« Return to news items

News Feed

Related Posts

• FDA Needs to Ban Antipsychotic Drug Use on Kids (0)
• 52% of foster kids are prescribed psych drugs—One of them is fighting back (1)
• Antipsychotics Have Dramatic Consequences in Kids, Study Shows (0)
• Unregulated prescription of antipsychotic drugs in elder care facilities on the rise (0)
• Girl, 2, had twice the amount of anti-psychotic drug in her system as adult dosage (0)

New York Times
by Richard Perez-Pena
August 3, 2010

Patient advocates filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday charging that New Jersey psychiatric hospitals routinely medicate patients against their will without a review by an outside arbiter, a practice that is banned in most other states.

Twenty-nine states require a judge’s ruling for involuntary medication, according to the suit, including New York, Connecticut and other large states, like California, Florida and Texas. Five other states leave the decision to an individual or panel outside the hospital. Some states also provide an advocate to represent a patient in a hearing on forced medication.

But in New Jersey, state rules allow a patient in a state hospital to appeal medication decisions only to people in the hospital. The lawsuit contends that the internal appeal process is routinely ignored and that psychiatric patients in private hospitals lack any opportunity to appeal medication regimens at all.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Trenton by the group Disability Rights New Jersey, seeks a court order requiring the state to provide judicial review of involuntary medication. It notes that a prison inmate has more power to contest treatment decisions than a psychiatric patient.

The drugs forced on patients include powerful medications for conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They help many people with those diseases function better, but can have serious side effects, including diabetes, tremors, seizures, high blood pressure, obesity, sedation, aches and impaired mental function.

“As a patient in a state hospital, it’s your legal right to refuse and go through a process, but you get severely penalized if you try,” said W. Emmett Dwyer, litigation director of Disability Rights New Jersey, a federally financed organization. “They view you as noncompliant with treatment. They give you an injection instead of a pill. And they tell you if you don’t take it, you won’t get out.”

There are about 1,800 patients at any given time in New Jersey’s five state psychiatric hospitals, and 1,000 in private ones.

Michael D. Reisman, a lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis, which is helping bring the lawsuit, said recent records from one state hospital showed that fewer than 20 percent of patients contested their medication.

But the advocates and several former patients said many more objected to their prescriptions but submitted quietly, rather than risk painful injections or a longer hospital stay. Others, they said, are too medicated to object.

“When I said no, they just shot me up instead, so pretty soon I gave up,” said Alice Hsia, 34, who has been in and out of hospitals for schizophrenia. “The times I was sedated, I would sign anything they wanted.”

Mr. Reisman said the question often was not whether some medication was needed, but rather one of dosage or a desire to try a “different drug with fewer side effects.” Some hospital

psychiatrists do not take such concerns seriously, he said, but “a judicial hearing would give the patient more leverage and force the doctors to listen.”

The State Department of Human Services, which runs the hospitals, declined to comment on the suit. But among advocates for the mentally ill, there are wide-ranging opinions on involuntary treatment.

Phil Lubitz, associate director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New Jersey,  said he did not see forced medication as a major issue, noting that it was extremely difficult to get patients committed in New Jersey, and that most who were presented “a danger to themselves or others.”

But Robert Davison, executive director of the Mental health Association of Essex County,  called New Jersey’s policy “beneath contempt.”

Read the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/health/policy/04psych.html

« Return to news items

News Feed

Related Posts

• Shy children now candidates for dangerous psychiatric drugs (0)
• The New Child Abuse: The Psychiatric Diagnosing and Drugging of Our Children (0)
• On Earth Day, with Green Causes in the Forefront, Here is a Video about Green Mental Health (0)
• Psychiatric Drugging of Infants and Toddlers—The U. S. has become the psychiatric drugging capital of the world (1)
• ABC News: The Foster Kids Speak Out (0)

InjuryBoard.com
By David Mittleman
January 29, 2010

Obesity is an epidemic–or at least a major concern for many Americans. We obsess over diet fads, exercise machines, portion control, and The Biggest Loser, all in an effort to get our ballooning waistlines in check. However, according to some researchers, we are looking in all the wrong places for the reason why we’re so fat. Instead of oversized and calorie-laden fast food meals, at least one expert is starting to wonder if the cause of our nation’s weight gain is prescription psychiatric drugs.

Paula J. Caplan, a clinician and research psychologist at Harvard University, suspects that the seemingly non-serious “side effects” of psychiatric medications are to blame for our weight problems. She argues that the sudden weight gain of many Americans occurred during the same time period that psychiatric drugs picked up in popularity–that is, the average weight of an adult has increased by 25 pounds since 1960 while prescriptions of psychiatric drugs to US adults also increased by 73% between 1996 and 2006 alone. What troubles Caplan even more so is that children aren’t left out of the equation. In fact, over the past two decades the number of obese children has tripled while prescriptions of psychiatric drugs to children from 1996-2006 increased by 50%.

Read entire article:  http://lansing.injuryboard.com/fda-and-prescription-drugs/are-psychiatric-medications-causing-your-weight-gain.aspx?googleid=277442

« Return to news items

News Feed

Related Posts

• Psychiatry’s most prescribed drug, Xanax—withdrawal effects severe & going cold turkey “is a guaranteed ticket to hell” (0)
• Can Prozac Cause Kids to Kill? A Canadian Judge Has Ruled it Can (2)
• ONE DRUG TO MAKE YOU HAPPY (1)
• Georgia Advocate Speaks Out Against Psychiatric Medication Use in Nation’s Foster Care System (0)
• Online database lets you research the side effects of common psychiatric drugs (0)

Benedict Carey
The New York Times
November 26, 2009

One was a middle-aged man who refused to get into the shower. The other was a teenager who was afraid to get out.

The man, Leonard, a writer living outside Chicago, found himself completely unable to wash himself or brush his teeth. The teenager, Ross, growing up in a suburb of New York, had become so terrified of germs that he would regularly shower for seven hours. Each received a diagnosis of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., and for years neither felt comfortable enough to leave the house.

But leave they eventually did, traveling in desperation to a hospital in Rhode Island for an experimental brain operation in which four raisin-sized holes were burned deep in their brains.

Today, two years after surgery, Ross is 21 and in college. “It saved my life,” he said. “I really believe that.”

The same cannot be said for Leonard, 67, who had surgery in 1995. “There was no change at all,” he said. “I still don’t leave the house.”

Both men asked that their last names not be used to protect their privacy.

The great promise of neuroscience at the end of the last century was that it would revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric problems. But the first real application of advanced brain science is not novel at all. It is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery, in which doctors operate directly on the brain.

Read entire article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/health/research/27brain.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss

« Return to news items

News Feed

Related Posts

• The Total Failure of Modern Psychiatry (0)
• Antidepressant Nation (0)
• The Los Angeles Examiner: Psychiatric Overdiagnosis Means “Normal” Could Become Obsolete (1)
• Psychiatry’s Flawed Tool: A book full of subjective checklists—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (0)
• Is the American Psychiatric Association in Bed with Big Pharma? Answer: Yes (1)

Geoff Leisik
Deseret News
November 11, 2009

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. has agreed to pay $24 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Utah Attorney General’s Office.

Attorney General Mark Shurtleff sued the company after a nearly four-year investigation revealed that Lilly concealed its knowledge of significant weight gain and obesity associated with the anti-psychotic medication Zyprexa. Investigators also showed that Lilly’s sales representatives illegally promoted the drug for uses not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“We’re not just asking them for money. We want their bad conduct to stop,” Shurtleff said Wednesday while announcing the settlement.

“As part of the settlement agreement, there are corporate integrity responsibilities and remedial provisions that will continue to be monitored by the court to stop (Lilly’s) harmful behavior.”

Zyprexa is approved for the treatment of schizophrenia and certain types of bipolar disorder in adults. But authorities say that in 1999, Lilly’s marketing arm that focuses on doctors who treat the elderly began encouraging physicians to prescribe the drug for dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, agitation, aggression, hostility, depression and generalized sleep disorder without prior FDA approval. Lilly also trained its sales teams to avoid discussions with health-care professionals about the weight gain side effect, investigators said.

Read entire article: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705343716/Firm-to-pay-Utah-24M-in-settlement.html

« Return to news items

News Feed

Related Posts

• Another Psychiatric Drug, Another Potential Criminal Investigation—J&J’s Antipsychotic Risperdal (0)
• Drugging Kids For Profit: Powerful & dangerous antipsychotic drugs being used on kids more and more often (0)
• Eli Lilly’ s confidential settlement with seven states over its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (0)
• FiercePharma: Drugmaker Eli Lilly nears another settlement over its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (0)
• Two High Ranking Senators – Grassley & Kohl – Question Use of Psych Drugs in Nursing Homes (1)

Weight Loss Surgery Channel
July 21, 2009

Clinical depression is a serious disease that affects millions of people in North America. Researchers have concluded that depression in itself does not appear to increase the risk of obesity. But can the drugs used to treat depression be a factor?

Some researchers think so. A recent study out of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute of the University of Calgary and the School of Public Health of the University of Alberta examined data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey, a 10-year-long study of a representative sample of household residents in Canada.

Read entire article:  http://www.weightlosssurgerychannel.com/breaking-wls-news/obesity-linked-to-anti-depressants-study-shows-5344.html/

« Return to news items

News Feed

Related Posts

• Depression? Don’t believe it —Big Pharma has gained an ever greater hold over our mental & emotional lives (0)
• Will we ever wake up to the deadly risks of happy pills? (0)
• SSRIs Render Unfriendly Skies—FOIA documents reveal what FAA failed to consider in allowing pilots on antidepressants to fly (0)
• The Globe and Mail — “Is Depression a Disease? Big Pharma says yes, but others aren’t so sure” (1)
• Toronto Sun—“The girl with every reason to live” Parents blame daughter’s suicide on antidepressant Paxil (2)