Posts Tagged ‘Peter Breggin’

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Be Skeptical of Pharmaceutical Company Claims

Monday, April 8th, 2013

Huffington Post
By Peter Breggin
April 7, 2013

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Ben Goldacre’s TEDTalk describes the selective bias in research and publishing which strongly favors articles with positive outcomes. In my field of psychiatry, this bias is only the tip of the iceberg. In many cases, the articles are not even written by the scientists whose names appear on them. They are “ghostwritten” by drug company minions.

In my role as a medical expert in product liability lawsuits against drug companies, judges have empowered me to dig into the otherwise secret interiors of drug company data vaults. The following observations have been generated during my forensic investigations and have been documented in my books and scientific articles.

Published articles about psychiatric drugs frequently fail to reflect the actual results of the study. After the FDA rejected an antidepressant clinical trial for failing to demonstrate effectiveness, the pharmaceutical company authored a paper based on the same study that was manipulated to show a positive outcome. In another example, a major journal editor was complicit with a drug company in publishing an article about a benzodiazepine tranquilizer that emphasized its supposed effectiveness at six weeks. But the study had lasted an additional two weeks, at which time many of the patients had become addicted to the drug and were suffering from greater than before starting the medication.

In the 1980s, a drug company conducted an in-house review showing that its soon-to-be approved antidepressant increased the suicide attempt rate in adults 6-12 times compared to placebo. The report remained secret until I unearthed it several years later in a legal case. When I informed the FDA, the agency showed no interest in it.

When pharmaceutical corporations have received reports of suicide related to their drugs, more than one has changed the identifying description of the report from “suicide” to “no drug effect,” “depression,” or “emotional liability.” This sleight of hand made the reports invisible to the drug company and the FDA when looking for cases of suicide. In one drug company file, I found an internal memorandum from an employee to his bosses expressing shame about this self-serving misreporting. The employee asked rhetorically how he could explain these actions to “a judge, to a reporter or even to my family… ” Nothing changed.

Akathisia (agitation accompanied by a compulsion to move) is a drug effect that can lead to violence, suicide, and psychosis. Some drug companies have successfully avoided receiving reports of akathisia when testing their drugs. They simply remove akathisia from the list of possible adverse effects that are given to their clinical investigators. The researchers end up reporting akathisia as something much less ominous such as “hyperactivity” or “jitteriness.”

Too many patients were dropping out of the clinical trials for an antidepressant due to insomnia and agitation. So a top executive sent out a secret memo illegally allowing patients in the study to be given tranquilizers. When the FDA found out, it nonetheless allowed the company to use the fraudulent studies to gain approval for the drug. Doctors and patients had no idea that the drug was so over-stimulating it could only be approved in combination with dangerous addictive tranquilizers.

There is no simple remedy for drug-company falsification of data and scientific reports. We can exert political pressure to strengthen the FDA; but to strengthen the FDA we must go up against… the FDA itself. Unlike medical experts in product liability suits, the FDA does not examine the company’s data-gathering and culling process. More like a lapdog than a watchdog, it rarely challenges the validity of drug company data. To strengthen the FDA, we must also go up against NIMH, the AMA, the American Psychiatric Association and multiple other interests groups closely tied to the drug companies.

Product liability suits have helped to control and publicize drug company malfeasance, but too often cases are settled and incriminating facts are sealed. In recent years the U.S. Department of Justice has forced drug companies to accept billion-dollar settlements in criminal and civil cases, often based on the false marketing of psychiatric drugs. But drug companies are able to sacrifice a few billions of dollars as a part of conducting “business as usual.”

At present, most drug company records are treated as proprietary secrets. As a public health measure, drug companies should be required to make public all of their internal documentation concerning any drugs that begin the FDA approval process.

In the meanwhile, as individuals we need to be skeptical about pharmaceutical claims for the safety and efficacy of their products. Be aware and be wary, especially in the arena of psychiatric medications, and seek non-drug approaches to healthcare whenever possible.

Warning: Do not abruptly stop psychiatric drugs. Especially after months of treatment, withdrawal can be dangerous, and should be done cautiously with experienced clinical supervision and family or peer support.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/be-skeptical-of_b_3020841.html

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Never again! The real history of psychiatry— by Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

Natural News
By Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, Author
March 20, 2013

There have been recent calls for a national Mental Health Registry, and then additional calls to link such a registry to gun licensing. In the dreadful wake of Newtown, both the left and the right and the current US federal administration are demanding that we tighten mental health statutes to make it easier and even mandatory for health care providers including psychiatrists and psychotherapists to incarcerate people on suspicion of perpetrating violence.

In a recent blog, I evaluated all the ways psychiatry and individual psychiatrists already have too much authority to lock up American citizens. I’ve pointed out how ineffective that power has proven in preventing violence.

Indeed, as many are now learning, psychiatric drugs can cause violence and have contributed to school shootings and other mayhem. Here I want to remind and to warn that psychiatry has been and continues to be the cause of some of the greatest abuses in the Western World. In the aftermath of the school shootings, psychiatry should not be allowed to garner even more power.

Consider as a start the several-hundred year history of the state mental hospital system. Given the power to lock up people at their own discretion, psychiatrists “put away” untold millions of people over several hundred years in the Western World. In its heyday in the 1930s, by turning innumerable state hospital patients into guinea pigs, psychiatry invented and practiced lobotomy, insulin coma shock, and electroshock. Despite overwhelming evidence for its damaging effects, electroshock continues to flourish and to be pushed by advocates, probably afflicting several hundreds of thousand patients each year in the US.

Psychiatry never reformed itself. It became so costly to the states to maintain these facilities and the federal government obliged by providing Social Security Disability Insurance for “mental illness.” This enabled the states to throw out the inmates from their giant facilities to live on the streets or to languish in oppressive nursing homes with meager federal support.

How devoid has psychiatry been of any self-critical restraint? In the early 1970s, when a resurgence of lobotomy threatened another wave of brain mutilation, I stood alone as the first psychiatrist to publically oppose this “treatment.” My successful international campaign against psychosurgery launched my psychiatric reform career (see here also) in earnest. The violent reaction from psychiatry to my reform efforts taught me how dearly psychiatry holds onto its power and even its most barbaric treatments.

A few years later, I became the first psychiatrist to speak out in public against electroshock. Now I’m the first one to have been a medical expert in successful malpractice suits against a psychosurgeon and more recently against a shock doctor. I tell you this not only to share some of what I’ve been doing as a psychiatrist these past 50 years, but also to tell you that psychiatry cannot be trusted to monitor itself. It always seeks to aggrandize itself with power with resultant severe injuries to those it alleges to help.

It has grown unfashionable to talk about Nazi Germany. But the information I am about to convey is still known to only a tiny fraction of our Americans. More than anything else in history, it teaches us to beware increasing psychiatric power.

Without any involvement from Hitler, in the late 1930s German psychiatry implemented the mass extermination of its psychiatric population, calling it merciful “euthanasia” but really rid the German nation of “useless eaters.” At the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi War Criminals held after WWII, several of the highest ranking observers declared that the Holocaust might never have taken place without German psychiatry first demonstrating that mass murder could be carried out in a systematic fashion. The four highest ranking official medical observers at Nuremberg were the two representatives from the German medical association, the American representative from the AMA, and the U. S. Army psychiatrist in charge of ferreting out psychiatric crimes all. All four agreed that that psychiatry’s organized annihilation of Germany’s mental hospital population was the entering edge into the Holocaust. They furthermore agreed that the Holocaust might never have occurred without psychiatry demonstrating the feasibility of systematic, organized mass murder.

I have previously written about the psychiatric holocaust in detail in a paper I delivered at the first conference held in Germany on Medicine in the Third Reich. The article was published in the conference proceedings and then in a respected European medical journal. That article, available on my website, documents all the tragic and dismaying details, including the quotes from observers at the Nuremberg Trials. You can also watch a video of a younger and fiercer me delivering a speech about the German psychiatric mass murders. In addition, I’ve recently talked about the German psychiatry murder program on Mike Bundrant’s March 13, 2013 radio show on naturalnews.com. Also see a recent peer reviewed journal article “A long shadow: Nazi doctors, moral vulnerability and contemporary medical culture.”

In a nutshell, psychiatry developed the first killing centers in Germany, complete with wooden soap in fake showers fed with poisonous gas. Psychiatry also pioneered mass cremation to hide the details. The program was highly organized and ferried the patients to the death centers in what would later become those infamous trains with people crammed like cattle in boxcars. After nearly all the existing hospital inmates were slaughtered, including many children, German psychiatry brought in a steady stream of new patients to be killed. When the formal program ended because of public opposition, state hospitals took up the burden on their own, poisoning and starving patients, and then cremating them.

ack in America, organized psychiatry had been sterilizing tens of thousands of Americans. For a time in California, you couldn’t be discharged from a state hospital unless you were sterilized. In Virginia the retarded were targeted. American advocates of sterilization went to Berlin to help the Nazis plan their sterilization program. These Americans reassured the Germans that they would meet no opposition from America in sterilizing their mentally and physically “unfit” citizens.

While the murder of mental patients was going full swing in Germany, knowledgeable American psychiatrists and neurologists didn’t want to be left out. In 1942, the American Psychiatric Association held a debate about whether to sterilize or to murder low IQ “retarded” children when they reached the age of five. Those were the only two alternatives in the debate: sterilization or death.

After the debate, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association published an editorial in which it chose sides in favor of murder (“Euthanasia” in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1942, volume 99, pp. 141-143). It said psychiatrists would have to muster their psychological skills to keep parents from feeling guilty about agreeing to have their children killed.

From the psychiatric holocaust to lobotomy, electroshock, and the mass drugging of America’s children and elderly, what makes psychiatry so driven to perpetrate harm? There are of course multiple explanations for this. One key is psychiatry’s misguided attempt to treat human beings “scientifically” which ultimately means treating them without empathy, like inanimate objects. When we approach human beings without genuine care and even love, we do not become neutral or objective, we become destructive. This is one reason why my wife Ginger and I founded the Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy. At our upcoming international conference April 26 to 28th 2013, we will examine both the dangers of modern psychiatry and better approaches based on a variety of empathic perspectives.

We must not let the tragedy of Newtown empower psychiatry to gain even more authority and control in our society than it already possesses. The potential consequences are dehumanizing and catastrophic.

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York. With his wife Ginger, he is the founder of the Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education and Living (a nonprofit 501c3). In a few weeks, the Center will hold its Empathic Therapy conference in Syracuse, New York, April 26-28, 2013. The conference combines trenchant criticism of biological psychiatry along with frontier innovations in the field of empathic mental health. Dr. Breggin is the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than 20 books including Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (2013).

Read the rest of the article here:  http://www.naturalnews.com/039560_psychiatry_real_history_school_shootings.html

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CNN’s Sanjay Gupta & Former Secretary of Homeland Security Address Psychiatric Drug/Violence Connection in School Shootings

Monday, January 14th, 2013

NaturalNews
By Peter Breggin
January 14, 2013

(NaturalNews) For the first time ever, and for a brief moment in time, two knowledgeable and highly credentialed public figures have commented on the fact that psychiatric medications cause violence and must be considered suspect in the case of the Newtown shooter. But then, as if it never happened, and as if psychiatric drugs could not possibly be implicated in violence, the issue was dropped by the media.

Fortunately I happened to be watching television on both CNN and Fox Cable News shortly after the Newton tragedy and I have put the TV clips onto YouTube.

The most striking commentary came from Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and famous chief medical correspondent on CNN. On December 18, 2012 at approximately 5:25 p.m. on CNN, he offered the following remarks:

We still don’t know much about the shooter who lived in this home. But there is something else to consider: What medications if any he was on? I’m specifically talking about antidepressants. If you look at the studies of other shootings like this that have happened, medications like this were a common factor. Now I want to be clear I’m not saying that antidepressants can’t be effective. But people seem to agree that there is a vulnerable time. When someone starts these medications and when someone stops could lead to increased impulsivity and decreased judgment, and making someone out of touch. None of this is an excuse and it’s never just one thing. None of these behaviors will fully predict or explain why. But soon again there will be hindsight that might just help prevent another tragedy. It’s worth pointing out over a seven-year period there were 11,000 episodes of violence related to drug side effects. If there was a death involved, often it was the individual of himself or herself, a suicide.

Gupta doesn’t say where he got the figure of 11,000 drug-induced cases of violence. However, that exact unconfirmed estimate has circulated on the Internet in regard to violence reports to the FDA.

There is very convincing evidence of violence induced by psychiatric drugs in a scientific review of all reports of violence and homicidal ideation made to the FDA over a 69 month period. Less extreme behaviors, such as “Aggression, Belligerence and Hostility,” were excluded. Among 454 prescription drugs, 31 drugs had a disproportional rate of reported violence or homicidal threats for a total of 1527 reports. Two-thirds of drugs had no reports of violence. The drugs that most clearly cause violence included varenicline (Chantix, a smoking cessation aid), 11 antidepressant drugs, 3 drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 5 hypnotic/sedatives (sleep aids and tranquilizers). Thus, all but one of the top offenders were psychiatric drugs. Antidepressants as a group were 8.4 times more likely than other prescription drugs to be associated with violence. This study should end the controversy. Psychiatric drugs do cause violence. As the researchers concluded:

Acts of violence toward others are a genuine and serious adverse drug event associated with a relatively small number of drugs.

On Sunday December 16, 2012 on the Fox News Channel, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge was interviewed by Shannon Bream. Ridge was also on the Virginia Tech Review Panel. His roles as Homeland Security boss and Virginia Tech Review Panel member put him into a knowledgeable position. In discussing flawed efforts to intervene in the lives of potentially violent youth, Ridge observed:

Or we put them on severe medications. One of the students in the Columbine shooting was on severe medication and apparently there’s analysis that it probably even contributed to his destructive aggressive behavior.

Combined with Sanjay Gupta’s remarks, these observations by former Secretary of Homeland Defense Tom Ridge should elevate psychiatric drug-induced violence to a new level in public discourse.

Ridge’s characterization of the medication prescribed to Eric Harris as “severe” was incorrect. Harris was prescribed routine antidepressant treatment. As a medical expert in cases surrounding Eric Harris and the Columbine shootings, I obtained the drug company’s official report to the FDA on March 17, 1999 confirming that one of the two shooters (Harris) had a “therapeutic blood level” of the antidepressant Luvox (fluvoxamine) in his system. Luvox is similar to other well-known antidepressants, including Prozac (fluoxetine), Paxil (paroxetine) and Zoloft (sertraline) in its effects.

As a medical expert, I also had access to medical records and can confirm from these unpublished documents that Eric Harris was taking Luvox regularly for one year leading up to the shootings. The dose was increased 200 mg per day on February 9, 2009, two and one-half months prior to the April 20th assaults. He saw his doctor and his prescription was renewed on March 13, 2009. At that time, the medical record described him as suffering from medication-induced tremors, indicating a degree of toxicity.

I first began writing about the risks of violence associated with antidepressants in the early 1990s in Talking Back to Prozac (coauthored by Ginger Breggin). I specifically addressed Eric Harris’ use of Luvox in my book, Reclaiming Our Children: A Healing Solution for a Nation in Crisis (2000). I also about Eric Harris and Luvox-induced violence in a peer-reviewed scientific article titled “Fluvoxamine as a cause of stimulation, mania and aggression with a critical analysis of the FDA-approved label” (2001).

With the exception of the disclosure of Eric Harris’ toxicology report, it has been very difficult to obtain exact information about the psychiatric drug exposure of previous mass murders. For example, James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter was in treatment with psychiatrist Lynne Fenton in the months before he assaulted people in a movie theater. He mailed a box of materials to her shortly before committing the violence. A court hearing recently revealed that four prescription bottles had been removed from his home. Yet to this day information has been withheld about what psychiatric medications he was almost surely taking.

Similarly, there are unconfirmed reports that Newtown mass murderer Adam Lanza was taking psychiatric drugs. According to the Washington Post, he was, “A really rambunctious kid, as one former neighbor in Newtown, Conn., recalled him, adding that he was on medication.” Yet no information has been released concerning his medication use.

Psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, stimulants and tranquilizing sedatives, can cause violence. It is imperative to find out what, if any, psychiatric drugs were being taken by twenty-year old Adam Lanza in the Newtown elementary school massacre.

http://www.naturalnews.com/038674_psychiatric_drugs_mass_murders_Sanjay_Gupta.html

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Russia Today’s Video Exposé “Schools, Guns & Drugs” with Michael Moore, Dr. Peter Breggin & More

Saturday, January 12th, 2013

Video exposé from Russia Today on psychiatric drugs and violence featuring filmmaker Michael Moore, psychiatrist Peter Breggin, US government whistleblower Allen Jones, ex-pharma sales rep Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, investigative journalist Jeanne Lenzer and professor of psychology Irving Kirsch. Includes  documentary film footage and information from CCHR International.

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The Huffington Post—Drug Companies Drive the Psychiatric Drugging of Children

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
The Huffington Post—July 24, 2012
by Dr. Peter Breggin, Reform Psychiatrist

(click image to visit the psychiatric drug database) “The health professions would do far more good stopping the drugging of children than continuing or increasing it. Ethical professionals need to work toward removing children from psychiatric drugs.” – Dr. Peter Breggin

July 24, 2012 – Johnson & Johnson, the company that makes the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, has tentatively agreed to a settlement of $2.2 billion to resolve a federal investigation into the company’s marketing practices. Although details are not fully finalized, this includes “a roughly $400 million criminal fine for the illegal promotion of the antipsychotic Risperdal,” according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s been well documented that Johnson & Johnson confidentially paid psychiatrists such as Harvard’s Joseph Biederman to promote adult drugs such as the powerful antipsychotic drug Risperdal for children. The company has even ghost-written at least one of the Harvard professor’s “scientific” articles.

Another recent DOJ settlement with drug company GlaxoSmithKline resulted in Glaxo’s agreement to pay $3 billion in criminal and civil fines. As I wrote in an earlier Huffington Post blog:

In one of the most egregious examples of fraudulent marketing, “In the case of Paxil, prosecutors claim GlaxoSmithKline employed several tactics aimed at promoting the use of the drug in children, including helping to publish a medical journal article that misreported data from a clinical trial,” [according to the New York Times].

Glaxo manipulated and rewrote this study, which was rejected by the FDA for failing to show efficacy. The Glaxo rewrite made it appear as though the drug was useful for adolescent depression even though the FDA had not approved Paxil for adolescents. The company then got almost two dozen well-known researchers and “experts” to put their names on the article as if they had written it.

GlaxoSmithKline also secretly paid about $500,000 to psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, while he was a professor at Emory University, to promote Paxil

GlaxoSmithKline also secretly paid about $500,000 to psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, while he was a professor at Emory University, to promote Paxil. Glaxo even ghostwrote a psychopharmacology textbook for family doctors, who write many prescriptions for children, which was “coauthored” by Nemeroff and psychiatrist Alan Schatzberg. Nemeroff was sanctioned for failing to report the Glaxo payments he received while at Emory. But he’s landed on his feet running, now chairing the psychiatry department at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami.

None of these drug-company-bought psychiatrists has suffered serious consequences. Biederman remains a star at Harvard and Nemeroff recently received a new $2 million federal grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. These influential psychiatrists are just two out of many doctors who have been investigated for extensive financial relationships with drug companies.

Meanwhile, the DOJ has now enforced a total of $8.9 billion in criminal and civil fines against GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson.

Drug-company marketing has bought rich rewards, as reflected in the increasing numbers of children and youth diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other psychiatric problems. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 12.3 percent of boys and 5.5 percent of girls age 5-17 were diagnosed with the disorder in 2009. With the rates growing especially rapidly in the older children, considerably more than 12.3 percent of older boys are given this diagnosis, which almost inevitably leads to treatment with stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta, Focalin, Dexedrine and Adderall. Given estimates of 2.8 million children taking stimulants for ADHD in 2008, the number is now well over three million and rising.

“Drug-company marketing has bought rich rewards, as reflected in the increasing numbers of children and youth diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other psychiatric problems.” – Dr. Peter Breggin

Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics overrode FDA drug guidelines and advised that children as young as 4 could be diagnosed with ADHD and treated with stimulants. This will surely increase the numbers of younger children psychiatrically diagnosed and medicated with other drugs as well. In our professional experience, children given stimulants may become the targets of additional drugs as their conditions worsen due to the stimulants. Stimulants have been the entering wedge into the widespread psychiatric drugging of America’s children. Once the door was opened, nearly all the other psychiatric drugs came rushing in.

Keep in mind that the more than three million children on psychiatric drugs are for only one class of medication — stimulants for ADHD. Large numbers of other children are being put on highly dangerous adult antipsychotic drugs, antidepressants, and mood stabilizers, often to treat so-called “childhood bipolar disorder.” Psychiatrist Biederman’s work “helped to fuel a controversial 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder … and a rapid rise in the use of antipsychotic medicines in children,” according to the New York Times. Bipolar disorder, like most other psychiatric diagnoses for children, is linked to the greater use of various psychiatric drugs. No surprise that this is so, since as in the case of Joseph Biederman, the “top” researchers in child psychiatry are heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies.

It is our personal and professional opinion that most childhood psychiatric diagnoses have no scientific validity. ADHD, for example, is described and diagnosed by a collection of behaviors – inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity — that can be caused by innumerable factors including too high expectations for a child, confused parenting, family disintegration, racism and poverty, inadequate teaching, poor nutrition, bullying, and head injury. The diagnosis literally shuts down the search for the real causes, undermines effective parenting and teaching approaches, and guarantees that the child will be medicated.

As another example, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) merely describes a child who displays anger. In the words of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, ODD involves “A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least six months.” The top three “symptoms” are “(1) often loses temper, (2) often argues with adults, and (3) often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules.” That’s not a disease in a child, it’s a sign that something has gone haywire in the child’s life and is not being remedied.

My most recent review of the scientific literature in Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal concludes that stimulants, antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs are very harmful to the brain. With increasing millions of children being placed on drugs that can harm normal development of the child’s brain and mind, and substitute for proper teaching and parenting, it’s time to change emphasis. As a society, we need to resist the quick fix that does more harm than good, and to stand up against the massive drugging of children.

The health professions would do far more good stopping the drugging of children than continuing or increasing it. Ethical professionals need to work toward removing children from psychiatric drugs.

The health professions would make a major contribution to the wide-scale health of children not only by curtailing psychiatric drugging, but also by offering the opportunity for parents to withdraw their children from these psychoactive substances.

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, and the cofounder with his wife Ginger Breggin of the Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy. He is the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than twenty books. His latest book is Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families. It is based on a Person-Centered Collaborative Approach to psychiatric treatment with the focus on psychiatric drug withdrawal. It also describes many of the most severe adverse effects of psychiatric drugs that require drug withdrawal.

Ginger Breggin, in addition to cofounding and managing the Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, has coauthored books with her husband, contributes to their mutual research projects, and blogs independently on The Huffington Post.

Disclosure: Peter Breggin, M.D. has been a plaintiffs’ medical expert in product liability suits against the mentioned drug companies including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/psychiatric-drugs_b_1693649.html

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Natural News: Amazing facts about psychiatry revealed by psychiatric reformer, Peter Breggin, MD

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Peter Breggin, MD

Natural News
By Mike Bundrant
March 6, 2012

(NaturalNews) I can’t think of a more fitting first guest for Mental Health Exposed. Our mission is to expose the fraud, abuse and incompetence in the mental health industry, as well as promote natural and effective methods of healing. Peter Breggin, MD and I discuss all of the above in the premier of Mental Health Exposed on Natural News Radio.

Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time consultant with NIMH who is in private practice in Ithaca, New York. Dr. Breggin is the author of more than twenty books including the bestseller Talking Back to Prozac and the medical book Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry. His most recent book is Medication Madness, the Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime. He is also the author of dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles, many in the field of psychopharmacology.

For more than thirty years Dr. Breggin has served as a medical expert in many civil and criminal suits, including product liability suits against the manufacturers of psychiatric drugs. His work provided the scientific basis for the original combined Prozac suits. His efforts as a medical expert and his scientific publications have resulted in the FDA changing numerous official drug labels. He has been involved in landmark cases on behalf of patient rights in regard to antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs and tardive dyskinesia, electroshock, and lobotomy.

Here are some of the show’s highlights:

Psychiatry doesn’t know what to do with the mentally ill. Dr. Breggin tells about his first experience, as a young intern, in which he was warned that he might “harm the patients” by talking to them regularly and treating them with decency. Ultimately, his actions led to the successful release of several neglected, back ward patients.

Psychiatry has always been a public abuse. Dr. Breggin pulls no punches here. It is always interesting to hear an expert tell the truth about his own profession and back it up with experience. Dr. Breggin exposes the APA’s goal to turn entire communities into mental health hospitals, which it has successfully accomplished. He backs up his statements with a concise history of psychiatry traced from the publicly documented minutes of the APA’s board of directors

How psychiatry turned to over-prescribing medicine as a way to maintain control of the mental health field. The APA couldn’t compete with people who actually wanted to help their patients, so it turned to a non-researched, unverified medical model of treating mental illness based on the fabricated notion “biochemical imbalance.” Again, this sordid tale is revealed in Dr. Breggin’s history of psychiatry and the APA.

Most important of all, we discuss how to actually help people

How people with a variety of “mental disorders” can become free within minutes and maintain their mental health with a few month’s treatment, as proven by practices in Finland and examples from Dr. Breggin’s own practice in New York.

We discuss various approaches to mental health and recovery, which include Dr. Breggin’s comments on the most overlooked cause of mental stress, which is basic human trust, or lack thereof.

Finally, the ultimate solution may be to learn to become a people whisperer! I’ll take credit for inspiring Dr. Breggin to use the term for the first time. Admittedly, so much of what we discussed may be idealistic, but someone needs to lead the way to a more humane, empathetic mental health system that is based on trust and genuine human contact, not biochemical imbalance. These kinds of discussions are important.

Tune in to Mental Health Exposed on Natural News Radio on, Wednesday, March 7, 2012 at 3 PM EST and hear for yourself.

http://www.naturalnews.com/035157_Peter_Breggin_psychiatry_mental_health.html

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The Psychiatric Drugging of America’s Foster Children by Psychiatrist Peter Breggin

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

The Huffington Post – December 22, 2011

Remember that many of these children will be waking up on Christmas morning to count out their multiple mind-altering psychiatric drugs that they have been prescribed by psychiatrists and other prescribers hired by the states in which they reside and paid for by tax dollars. These kids don't need psychiatric drugs, they need human "angels" to rescue them from a system that is stacked against their well-being.

The most vulnerable among us are the littlest victims. Young children, torn from their birth families through various, often unspeakable tragedies. These children end up in state supervised foster care and too often are passed from hand to hand, house to house. There were approximately 662,000 children in foster care in the United States in 2010.

Now there is a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report confirming that foster children in five states — Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas — are receiving shocking amounts of psychiatric drugs. In the words of ABC News, they are “being prescribed psychiatric medications at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in these five states alone. And hundreds of foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time despite absolutely no evidence supporting the simultaneous use or safety of this number of psychiatric drugs taken together.” The ABC News report shows one 7-year-old holding a bag filled with 13 psychiatric medications that she had taken.

During the FDA drug-approval process, the maximum dose of a drug is determined by giving that drug by itself without any other psychoactive substances. When two or more psychiatric drugs are given together, each at its maximum dose, toxic levels of exposure can occur. In addition, some of these children are being given higher than the FDA-approved dose of individual drugs.

One young child interviewed by ABC News described the effect of the antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs he was taking: “They made me feel like I had a thousand bricks on my head.” Another child said, “Some of the medications were for ADHD but I’m not ADHD, I’m just naughty.” A teen in foster care on multiple psychiatric drugs told ABC News she felt like a “guinea pig.”

Foster children are provided government insurance in the form of Medicaid that includes “mental health” services such as psychiatric evaluations and prescription drug coverage. Individual states administer Medicaid and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for overseeing the state programs.

In the states surveyed by the GAO, children in Massachusetts fared worst. Thirty-nine percent of the foster care children aged 0-17 on Medicaid were prescribed at least one psychiatric drug. By comparison, 10 percent of non-foster care children in Massachusetts were prescribed at least one psychotropic medication under Medicaid. It’s serious enough when 10 percent of non-foster care children from our poorer communities are receiving psychiatric drugs; it’s even more tragic when 39 percent of our most poor and abandoned children are being inundated with these drugs.

Other states in the GAO study had total numbers of foster care children on Medicaid being prescribed at least one psychiatric drug: Oregon — 19.7 percent; Texas — 32.2 percent; Florida — 22 percent; and Michigan — 21 percent. The statistics reported are eye-opening, and it is worthwhile to see the full GAO report. In Texas, for instance, 9.1 percent of foster care children aged 0-5 years old are on at least one psychiatric drug, and 58.2 percent of foster care children aged 13-17 years old are on at least one psychiatric drug. Massachussetts has 53.4 percent of foster care children aged 13-17 on at least one psychiatric drug, and almost 5 percent of foster children aged 0-5 are on at least one psychiatric drug.

Is this widespread psychiatric drugging medically appropriate or indicated? Absolutely not. First of all, these are young children, even infants, who have already been through extremely traumatic experiences. All of them have been taken from their homes and most of them will not have had a stable replacement home. Beyond that, one can only imagine their horrendous living conditions prior to being removed from their families of origin. These children do not need psychoactive substances — they need the best human, caring services that our society can provide. The drugs may make them temporarily more docile, but by disrupting and suppressing normal brain function and development, they add new stressors to their lives and prevent them from adapting and growing as best as possible.

ABC News reports, “Of all the psychiatric medications, antipsychotics are, by far, the most prescribed, especially for foster children. Foster children are given anti-psychotics at a rate nine times higher than children not in foster care, according to a 2010 16-state analysis by Rutgers University of nearly 300,000 foster children.”

These antipsychotic drugs — including Abilify, Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — can lead to obesity, elevated blood sugar and diabetes, pancreatitis, cardiovascular abnormalities and a disfiguring and sometimes disabling movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia. It’s been suggested they could shorten lifespan by up to 25 years in patients exposed to them for decades. Evidence is accumulating that they can also lead to shrinkage of the brain in those patients exposed to them for years.

Why are these highly-toxic drugs being given to so many children in foster care? The antipsychotic drugs can suppress the highest centers of the brain — the frontal lobes — leading to indifference and apathy, which makes the children more docile and easier to manage. The use of multiple psychiatry drugs (polydrug therapy) produces similar effects. In the extreme, these children become zombie-like.

The newer antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Effexor and Pristiq and have been shown to cause an increase in suicidal behavior in children. In addition, as the FDA-approved label and medication guides for these drugs confirm, they also can cause a general worsening of the individual’s condition, including depression, anxiety, hostility, aggression, impulsivity and mania. Many studies also suggest that a high percentage of children are driven into abnormal mental states by these drugs. When a child develops any one of these adverse reactions they are likely to have additional psychiatric drugs added to their drug cocktail rather than being carefully withdrawn from the offending substances.

As ABC News documented with one mother, parents or foster parents who object to the prescriptions of mind-altering psychiatric drugs for their young children are likely to be threatened with removal of the child from their care. In a separate case in Detroit, a child who was on Medicaid due to physical disability was taken off her mind-altering psychiatric drug by her mother when she displayed adverse effects.

The prescribing clinic called child welfare services and reported the mother. Welfare services removed the child from her mother’s care for a time. Fortunately, this child was later returned by court order to her mother and criminal charges against the mother were dismissed.

But word gets around. Complain about your child being placed on drugs and social services may intervene.

A mother in Millbrook, NY, was charged with medical neglect for not continuing her 4th grade son on a cocktail of psychiatric medications that was making him angry and listless. Off the drugs his energy returned and his mood improved, but public school officials kicked the boy out of school and reported the mother. The mother prevailed and was exonerated of “medical neglect” charges. Her son attended a private school and thrived. He is now a grown man and responsible citizen. His mother explained, “Kids don’t need drugs, they need individualized education and better family life. The priorities are all screwed up.”

In two of the ABC news foster care cases, the clinics that were authorized to deliver services to the children were also promoting themselves as being research facilities for “CNS Conditions” (central nervous system conditions, a misnomer for psychiatric conditions.) As research facilities those clinics have ties with pharmaceutical companies.

And what about the drug companies? Are they doing all they can to prevent the inappropriate use of their products? To the contrary, several of the largest drug companies have paid billions to settle claims they illegally marketed antipsychotics to children and other off-label populations, such as the elderly.

What is being done to these children should be viewed as chemical battery and child abuse. The misguided parents and foster parents are not the perpetrators. The psychopharmaceutical complex is the perpetrator, including the drug companies, the federal government and organized medicine and psychiatry.

The drugging of America’s children raise many issues including parental rights, children’s rights, child safety, off-label prescribing of the drugs and fraud and malpractice on the part of the researchers, psychiatrists and other prescribers. Most tragic is the silence! The stifled voices of victimized children and the self-serving silence of health professionals throughout the country who fail to take a public stand against the escalating drugging of our children.

Drugging traumatized foster children shoves them under society’s rug and is in no way therapeutic for the child. There are humane and effective approaches to helping our most vulnerable children. First, they need to be protected from predatory psychiatrists and other prescribers. Second, they need improved social services that could keep many of them in their homes or provide better assistance, training and supervision to improved foster care homes. When they inevitably become emotionally distressed and at times behaviorally disturbing, they do not need chemical readjustments of their brains — they need better attention from adults in the form of improved home-life or foster care, improved educational opportunities and psychosocial therapies aimed at helping them overcome and move beyond the trauma and stress they have endured and continue to endure as children and youth.

Sure, it’s easier to give them drugs. But has anybody noticed — it doesn’t help them in the long run. Exposure to psychiatric drugs in childhood is dangerous and over time can be damaging, disabling and even deadly.

No agencies and no associations — not NIMH, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the many other mental health associations — are willing to call a halt to the massive tidal wave of mind altering psychiatric drugs being thrown at America’s children. Several states, including Florida, Louisiana and New York have expelled “high prescribing” doctors from Medicaid but this is like nipping off the top of the iceberg. The primary problem remains: Placing children on psychiatric drugs instead of offering genuine help.

Dr. Robert Nelson, M.D., Ph.D. of the FDA Office of Pediatric Therapeutics, squirmed when challenged by Diane Sawyer in the ABC foster child series, but said the FDA had no plans to strengthen their warnings about psychiatric drugs and children.

The GAO, while courageously illuminating the great number of foster children on psychiatric drugs as well as the seriousness of children being exposed to multiple psychiatric drugs, falls far short of calling for the curtailment of the drugging of American children.

Twenty-five years ago, a tiny fraction of children were prescribed psychiatric medications, and that was largely confined to stimulants. In the early 1990s we were blowing the whistle on the increasing attention psychiatry was paying to children. I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in 1989 and spoke frequently through the media about how children being blamed and diagnosed for problems in families, schools and in society. From 1990 to 1995 the increased prescribing of psychotropic drugs for preschoolers had begun.

What is to be done?

It is time for state attorney generals to launch full-scale investigations into the practices of these Medicaid psychiatrists. When appropriate, they should be charged with battery and with fraud, and sued for malpractice. But the psychiatrists are largely responding to the campaigns conducted by the psychopharmaceutical complex.The entire system, from the drug companies and insurance companies to the medical and psychiatric associations, and also the researchers and universities, need to be investigated for participating in this widespread medical abuse of children.

This Christmas, as many of us gather around a Christmas tree watching the children in our families wake up with shining eyes and happy laughter… remember. Remember that there were approximately 662,000 children in foster care in the United States in 2010.

Remember that many of these children will be waking up on Christmas morning to count out their multiple mind-altering psychiatric drugs that they have been prescribed by psychiatrists and other prescribers hired by the states in which they reside and paid for by tax dollars. These kids don’t need psychiatric drugs, they need human “angels” to rescue them from a system that is stacked against their well-being.

Only an outraged citizenry will change this. Write your Congressional representatives and senators. Write your state representatives and senators. Write your state attorney general’s office requesting a full investigation in your state of the crisis with foster children and psychiatric drugs. If you are a parent or a foster parent being pressured to keep your child on psychiatric drugs, call your local paper, referencing the ABC News investigation. If you are a reporter, plan a local series on this issue. If you are a teacher, a social worker or professional in the Medicaid system, consider becoming a whistleblower against the chemical assault of these children. If you are a medical professional learn how to help children safely taper off their psychiatric drugs while assisting their families in obtaining more useful services. Always remember that withdrawal from psychiatric drugs can be hazardous and needs to be done carefully with experienced clinical supervision.

It’s the Christmas season. Let’s not forget the kids who are so drugged their eyes cannot sparkle anymore. Become one of their real-life angels.

Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time consultant with NIMH who is in private practice in Ithaca, New York. Dr. Breggin is the author of more than twenty books including the bestseller Talking Back to Prozac and the medical book Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition. His most recent book is Medication Madness, the Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime. He is also the author of dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles, many in the field of psychopharmacology. On April 13-15, 2012 in Syracuse, New York, the annual conference of Dr. Breggin’s 501c3 nonprofit international organization, The Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, will present a panel of lawyers, experts, survivors and families concerning antidepressant-induced violence and crime. Conference information is available on www.EmpathicTherapy.org.

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Prozac is now a defense for murder, writes Australian Member of Parliament Martin Whitely

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

For the first time in criminal history, a murder was attributed to an anti-depressant drug. (Photo Credit -The Daily Telegraph)

Perth Now – December 21, 2011

FIRST it was ADHD drugs, then organ donation, now WA Labor MP Martin Whitely is hoping to get some action on the fatal risks of antidepressant drugs, such as Prozac, to children.

Anti-depressant manufacturers warn that products such as Prozac should not be given to children, because of the potentially tragic consequences, but they are prescribed every day to Australian kids.

Some anti-depressants, prescribed to help lift people out of a depressive state, actually have the opposite effect and make things worse.

This is what happened, with fatal results, in the case of a 16-year-old boy in Canada who stabbed a friend to death.

For the first time in criminal history, a murder was attributed to an anti-depressant drug.

In the finding, handed down on the 16th of September 2011, a Canadian Judge said a 16-year-old boy, who stabbed his brother’s friend in the stomach, would not have committed the offence had he not been treated with the drug Prozac (a brand of Fluoxetine).

The judge accepted the evidence of psychiatrist, Dr Peter Breggin, who told the court the boy’s symptoms were consistent with a Prozac-Induced Mood Disorder with Manic Features.

In delivering his decision the judge stated, “his basic normalcy now further confirms he no longer poses a risk of violence to anyone and that his mental deterioration and resulting violence would not have taken place without exposure to Prozac”.

The boy, who had no history of violence, had been taking Prozac for three months, during which his parents observed a marked deterioration in his behaviour and mood, which included acts of violence and self-harm where previously no such signs existed.

His alarmed parents returned to his doctor for advice, but instead of taking him off Prozac or reducing his dosage, his doctor increased the dose, obviously believing more of what appeared to be causing these dangerous behaviours, would solve the problem.

Fluoxetine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) and is approved for use in Australia for the treatment of depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

However, it is routinely prescribed ‘off label’ for a range of other conditions including panic and eating disorders.

Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing figures revealed that in the 2008 financial year, 110,848 Australians received Fluoxetine scripts that were subsidised via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Concerns about possible aggression and manic side effects of Prozac were first raised in Australia in the New South Wales parliament in 1995, just five years after the release of the drug in Australia.

Since 2007, the US Food and Drug Administration has labelled SSRI antidepressants including Prozac with the highest possible ‘black box’ warning stating:

“All patients being treated with antidepressants for any indication should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, and unusual changes in behavior, especially during the initial few months of a course of drug therapy, or at times of dose changes, either increases or decreases. The following symptoms, anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania, have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and non-psychiatric.”

The US Black Box warning was followed by similar warnings in Australia. The evidence that led to these warnings came from, ‘pooled analyses of short-term placebo-controlled trials of anti-depressant drugs (SSRIs and others)’ which ‘showed that these drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents [by 100%], and young adults ages 18-24 (by 50 per cent) with major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders.’ The fact that SSRI antidepressants like Prozac are supposed to manage severe depression in young people but increase the risk of suicidality poses obvious questions.

Over a 10 year period, up until 30 June 2011, more than 40 adverse events of self-harm and violence, including suicides, homicides and suicidal or homicidal ideation, for Fluoxetine were reported to the Australian Therapeutic Drugs Administration (examples are listed below).

Hundreds of reports were recorded by the TGA for other antidepressants however, it is impossible to know the true number of actual events, as the voluntary nature of the reporting system means only a fraction of actual incidents gets reported.

Despite the fact that the manufacturers advise that Prozac and other SSRI antidepressants are ‘not recommended for use in children and adolescents under 18 years of age’ they are frequently prescribed ‘off label’ to even very young children.

Data provided by the Commonwealth Department of Health revealed that in the 2007-8 financial year 3,752 Australian children 15-years-old or younger (863 were 10 or younger, 117 were six or younger) were prescribed Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme-funded Fluoxetine.

Furthermore all the expense and risks of adverse side effects may be for little or no benefit. The efficacy of antidepressants are being questioned – with some high profile, mainstream critics, arguing that placebos are just as effective and much safer in treating moderate depression.

One such critic, Marcia Angell, MD, Senior Lecturer on Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, contends; ‘that clinical trials have failed to find antidepressants effective at all in mild to moderate depression; that many psychiatric drugs have devastating adverse effects, especially in children and when used long-term; and that despite the risks and uncertain benefits, use of psychiatric drugs is soaring and the heavy reliance on drugs diverts resources better spent on improving treatment’.

In summary, taxpayers are subsidising the ‘off label’ use by children and adolescents of antidepressants, with questionable efficacy, that double their risk of suicidality. This invites some obvious questions: Is this the best way to spend our taxes? And more importantly, is this the best way to help troubled young people?

* A sample from the Adverse Drug Reactions Committee (ADRAC) adverse event reports for Fluoxetine Hydrochloride:

  • A 54 year old woman attempted suicide. She was also suffering from mania and a confusional state.
  • A 36 year old woman “attempted suicide”.
  • A 36 year old woman was admitted to intensive care in a coma following a suicide attempt.
  • A 51 year old woman “had sudden urge to murder someone”.
  • A 37 year old woman was admitted to a psychiatric hospital suffering from “suicidal ideation, nausea, trembling, feelings of despair, anxiety, paranoia and fear”.
  • A 16 year old boy suffering from agitation and auditory hallucinations heard voices “telling him to kill his mother, father, sister and himself”.
  • A 45 year old man “became obsessively suicidal and cut his throat” 3/7 days after Prozac was stopped.
  • A 17 year old girl “became manic half an hour after commencing antidepressant.”
  • A 40 year old patient “experienced trembling, cramps, heard voices and had suicidal ideation.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age experienced “homicidal and suicidal ideation.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age attempted suicide after experiencing suicidal ideation.
  • A 44 year old patient “experienced akathisia, suicidal ideation and suicide attempt.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age experienced “suicidal violence” and “aggression.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age experienced “suicidal ideation.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age experienced “suicidal ideation and “suicide attempt.”
  • A 50 year old patient experienced “suicidal ideation, suicide attempt and akathisia.”
  • A 37 year old patient attempted suicide.
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age experienced “suicidal ideation and suicide attempt.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age made a suicide attempt and was violent.
  • A 16 year old girl “attempted to hang herself with television cord from curtain rail in hospital bedroom. Nurse said she found her at the last moment.”
  • A 16year old girl “ingested 40 Panadol tablets. Also frequent self-harming.”
  • A 16 year old girl “attempted suicide by ingestion of 80 Panadol, 20 Panadeine, 7 Olanzapine.”
  • A 29 year old patient “developed acute suicidal akathisia” and made a suicide attempt.
  • A 73 year old patient “experienced homicidal ideation and made a suicide attempt.”
  • A 60 year old woman “experienced suicidal ideation, suicide attempt and homicidal ideation – she attempted to kill her parents.”
  • A 69 year old patient “experienced suicidal ideation and was very anxious.”
  • A 16 year old girl attempted to “strangle herself with and IPod cord in the bathroom of the hospital. Agitation. She ran around crying and banging her fists of the walls and windows begging to be let out. … it lasted about 10 minutes before I could settle her.”
  • A patient of unrecorded gender and age “took a fistful of sleeping pills.”
  • A 35 year old patient “murdered his wife whilst on Prozac. He had also experienced suicidal thoughts.”
  • A female patient of unrecorded age “became seriously depressed, complained of headaches, and clenching jaw, was unable to sleep and started to self-harm. She began to have suicidal thoughts, was hyperventilating, agoraphobic, had five suicide attempts, was confused, tearful, phobic, aggressive, experienced akathisia and suspected serotonin syndrome. She experienced weird dreams, was impulsive, light headed, had numbness and tingling limbs and committed suicide by hanging on 11 September 2000 on the second attempt.”
  • A 50 year old woman “became more depressed whilst taking Prozac. She wanted to throw herself off a train or bus, had difficulty sleeping, was pacing and restless, had voice hallucinations, would look in the mirror and see a different person, had murderous thoughts, stiff legs, was hot a lot, felt she was in a delirium, could not concentrate, was angry, had numbness in her hands and pins and needles a lot in her body.”
  • A 19 year old male “had thoughts about killing himself which made him violent, tried to hit someone else, tried to hit a security guard with feelings of killing and tried to do physical damage. Tried to hurt himself and had thoughts of hurting other people. He was walking faster than normal. Experienced aggression, insomnia and was feeling high on Prozac. Also felt anxious and put on more than 20kg.”
  • A male of unreported age “experienced severe depression, cognitive impairment and was acutely suicidal.”
  • A 16 year old girl was “cutting herself, throwing herself against the walls while an inpatient”. She “intentionally overdosed on Fluroxetine” and “developed severe levels of aggression and violence.”
  • A 14 year old boy experienced “suicidal ideation.”
  • A female of unreported age “experienced suicidal ideation”.
  • A 16 year old girl experienced “excessive bleeding, psychosis, high blood pressure, severe diarrhea, sweating, tremors, violent, aggressive and suicidal behavior, serotonin syndrome.”
  • A 14 year old male experienced “severely increased suicidal ideation in two days with high level of intent and plan to jump in front of train. Previously no suicidal ideation and settled spontaneously within four days of ceasing Fluoxetine”.
  • A female patient experienced a “sudden and marked increase in hostility and verbal abuse of others and describes intrusive suicidal ideation. Seems agitated and restless”.
  • A 32 year old woman experienced “audio hallucinations, bright and blurred vision, made everything sound louder, constipation, increased suicidal thoughts and increased anxiety”

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/prozac-is-now-a-defence-for-murder/story-e6frg13u-1226227796937

Note from CCHR International:  CCHR is the only organization to have decrypted the US FDAs Medwatch reports on adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs and compiled them in an easy to search database.    This database is provided here http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/medwatch_psych_drug_adverse_reactions.php

CCHR has also compiled all international drug warnings and studies on psychiatric drugs here http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/drug_warnings.php

 

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Can Prozac Cause Kids to Kill? A Canadian Judge Has Ruled it Can

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Note from CCHR:

(see videos at the bottom of this post from film maker Michael Moore and Fox National News reporter Douglas Kennedy)

It is well documented that psychiatric drugs, particularly antidepressants, can cause a host of violent side effects including mania, psychosis, aggression, violence and in the case of the antidepressant Effexor, homicidal ideation.   As far back as 1991, CCHR helped organize dozens of individuals and experts testifying before the US FDA that people with no prior history of violence (or suicide) became homicidal and suicidal under the influence of antidepressants (see CCHR’s exclusive footage of the 1991 hearings here).  It would take the FDA another 13 years to admit antidepressants could cause suicide and black box warnings were finally issued in 2004.  However, despite all the documented violence-inducing side effects of these drugs, the FDA has never issued black box warnings on antidepressants causing violence or homicide despite the fact that at least 11 recent school shootings were committed by kids documented to be on or in withdrawal from psychiatric drugs (see Fox News special report on school shootings here).   Therefore, the case cited below, where a Canadian judge ruled that a teenage boy murdered his friend due to being on the antidepressant Prozac, and the fact that the case will not be appealed, is a major turning point in exposing the violence inducing effects of antidepressant drugs.  

National Post
By Tom Blackwell
December 7, 2011

JB Reed/Bloomberg News

A Winnipeg judge’s ruling that a teenage boy murdered his friend because of the effects of Prozac will not be appealed, confirming an apparent North American first and reviving debate around the widespread prescription of anti-depressants to young people.

Justice Robert Heinrichs concluded the 15-year-old boy was under the influence of the medication when he thrust a nine-inch kitchen knife into the chest of Seth Ottenbreit, a close friend.

Although the killer pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, the judge cited the drug’s alleged side effects as a reason not to raise the case to adult court, and to mete out a sentence last month of just 10 months – on top of two years already spent in jail.

A spokeswoman for the Manitoba Justice Department said this week prosecutors have decided not to appeal the provincial-court decisions, which were earlier met with outrage from Mr. Ottenbreit’s family and friends.

Both the boy’s lawyer and the psychiatrist who testified on his behalf say it is the first time a criminal-court judge in North America has made such a finding.

Prozac is meant to curb the effects of depression, but Justice Heinrich concluded it set off a steady deterioration in the young murderer’s behaviour.

“He had become irritable, restless, agitated, aggressive and unclear in his thinking,” the judge said. “It was while in that state he overreacted in an impulsive, explosive and violent way. Now that his body and mind are free and clear of any effects of Prozac, he is simply not the same youth in behaviour or character.”

Yet the empirical underpinning of his conclusion, and the pros and cons of young people taking Prozac and other “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)” anti-depressants, seem less clear-cut.

Justice Heinrichs relied largely on the expert testimony of Dr. Peter Breggin, a controversial American physician known for his outspoken opposition to the use of virtually any psychiatric drug. Some other experts say scientific evidence of a link between the latest anti-depressants and homicide is thin.

“I think it got pulled out of a hat, frankly,” said Dr. Umesh Jain, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental health. “You could construct a weak and biologically plausible effect, but you’d have to be pretty convincing in court.”

Studies have established such drugs can increase the risk of young patients having suicidal thoughts. Their tendency to lift inhibition could also release some hostility or violence lurking in a person’s character, said Dr. Jain. Small studies like one he co-authored in 1992 have also suggested that the drugs can trigger short-term mania, especially in bi-polar disorder patients.

There is little or no scientific evidence directly linking the anti-depressants and serious violence or homicide, though, he said.

Still, the official “product monograph” approved by Health Canada for Prozac says the drugs are not recommended for use on adolescents, and warns that agitation, hostility and aggression might ensue. Doctors are allowed to prescribe medications “off label” to patients even when the approval does not expressly permit it.

Specialists in Winnipeg responded to concerns voiced by the accused’s parents by actually increasing the dose, said Greg Brodsky, the teenager’s lawyer.

“On Prozac he was becoming more irrational and aggressive,” Mr. Brodsky said. “That should have been a warning. That warning wasn’t heeded.”

SSRI drugs have a contentious track record. They were hailed originally as a safe alternative to older anti-depressants, then clinical-trial results came to light in 2004 that suggested they increased the risk of children and adolescents having suicidal thoughts.

Other studies have indicated they are effective in patients with major depression, but little better than a placebo for mild to moderate cases.

The Winnipeg murderer had a history of smoking marijuana, had abused prescription drugs and “experimented” with cocaine, but was trying to break free of that background when a family doctor prescribed Prozac for depression in July, 2009.

On Sept. 20, the accused met with Mr. Ottenbreit and another friend at his house, after the two friends had earlier stormed into his home, allegedly damaging the floor. The killer and Mr. Ottenbreit shared a cigarette, before the accused pulled aside a sweater on the floor of his garage, revealing the knife. He picked it up, “got this weird look on his face,” then abruptly stabbed his friend, the other boy told police.

“They were in my house, they dented the floor, I had nothing else to do but to stab him,” he told police later.

Dr. Keith Hildahl, clinical head of Winnipeg’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health program, testified that the Prozac might have played a role, but concluded on balance that his behaviour that summer was largely a result of the tense relationship he had with his parents.

Dr. Breggin, who has testified in a number of U.S. cases where anti-depressants allegedly led to murder or other violence and reviewed the Winnipeg case, pointed the finger of blame at the medication.

“These drugs produce a stimulant or activation continuum,” he said in an interview. “That continuum includes aggression, hostility, loss of impulse control … all of which are a prescription for violence.”

Dr. Breggin’s long-standing criticism of psychiatric drugs and opposition to the view that psychiatric problems have biochemical roots have prompted some supporters to call him the “conscience” of the speciality, and some psychiatrists and patient advocates to condemn him as a harmful influence.

Read article here:  http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/07/prozac-defence-stands-in-manitoba-teens-murder-case/

See Michael Moore discuss the need for an investigation into psychiatric drugs causing violence:

See Fox National News on School Shootings and Psychiatric Drugs:

To read international warnings and studies on psychiatric drugs causing violence – visit CCHRInt’s Psychiatric Drug database and simply type in keywords such as violence, mania, psychosis, aggression in the red search box

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Judge Agrees Prozac Turned Teen into Murderer

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Antidepressant Caused a Stimulant-like Syndrome Leading to Manic-like Behavior, Suicidality and Violence

PR Newswire—October 3, 2011

Judge Robert Heinrich listened to expert psychiatric testimony for the defense by Peter Breggin, MD and issued his opinion regarding the sixteen-year-old who stabbed his friend to death.

The judge stated, “His basic normalcy now further confirms he no longer poses a risk of violence to anyone and that his mental deterioration and resulting violence would not have taken place without exposure to Prozac.” Consistent with Dr. Breggin’s testimony, the judge observed, “He has none of the characteristics of a perpetrator of violence. The prospects for rehabilitation are good.”

This is the first criminal case in North America where a judge has specifically found that an antidepressant was the cause of a murder.

The case involved a high school student with no violence who abruptly stabbed one of his friends to death at home with a single wound to the chest. The boy had been taking Prozac for three months, during which his behavior deteriorated.

Starting approximately 2005 to the present, the FDA required official drug labels to include information about dangers under the section titled WARNINGS-Clinical Worsening and Suicide Risk. The list of adverse effects—”anxiety, agitation, panic attacks,insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania”—is a prescription for violence. Canadian drug regulatory agency,  Health Canada, also warns about these side effects.

Dr. Breggin testified the boy’s symptoms were consistent with a Prozac (fluoxetine) Induced Mood Disorder with Manic Features and he would not have committed the violence if he had not been given the antidepressant. He brought numerous independent scientific studies to court confirming his testimony.

The hearing determined whether or not the now 17 year old should be sentenced as a minor, limiting jail time. The prosecution wanted him tried as an adult. On October 4, 2011 final sentencing will occur. The judge’s decision represents an enormous step forward in recognizing the newer antidepressants can cause violence.

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