Salon Magazine- November 15, 2011 by Alice Karekezi

The diagnosis is now being applied to everything from muggings to childbirth. An expert explains why it’s bad news

We’re not saying that people don’t have difficult emotional experiences and aren’t suffering. What we’re saying is this is not necessarily a disorder that people are experiencing, and if people think like that, it can be very disempowering to them. ( Photo Credit: David Royal Hanson via Shutterstock)

In the past 30 years, post-traumatic stress disorder has gone from exotic rarity to omnipresent. Once chiefly applied to wartime veterans returning from combat, it is now a much more common diagnosis, still linked to traumatic events but now including those occurring outside the battle zone: the death of a loved one on a hospital bed, a car crash on the highway, an assault in the neighborhood park. Many would argue that this is a good thing: greater recognition of psychologically distressing events will lead to more people seeking treatment and a decrease in the preponderance of PTSD – a win-win.

Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.

Joseph spoke to Salon over the phone to discuss our misunderstanding of the disorders, the meaning and usefulness of suffering, and if some cultures are more prone to PTSD than others.

How would you define a traumatic event? Is it subjective or are there some basic requirements that must be met?

I see trauma as a psychological rupturing. It’s when something happens to us that ruptures our psychological skin. Or, something which shatters our assumptions about ourselves in the world. That’s what I think of as traumatic, and in a way that can be many things. So, that can include a wider range of experience, and I can understand trauma in that broader way. There are lots of different experiences, such as being in a road traffic collision, or experiencing an illness – those sorts of things can be traumatic to people. It can be experienced as psychologically traumatic. But whether it’s necessary to create a psychiatric diagnostic category to capture those experiences is perhaps not necessary.

Do you believe that PTSD is over-diagnosed?

Well, that’s a really, really tricky question to answer because in a way it’s diagnosed pretty much exactly as it’s described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). So whether the definition of PTSD is too broad is a different question, if you see what I mean. When PTSD was first introduced in 1980, it was defined much more tightly. The gatekeeper criterion to the diagnosis was: Have you experienced a traumatic event? In 1980, it was defined in such a way that only people who had experienced an event that was really outside the range of usual human experience, [like] Vietnam or the Holocaust, had experienced the sorts of experiences that were thought to elicit PTSD. So if you experienced something like a car accident or a traumatic birth, then you couldn’t get a diagnosis of PTSD, because, by definition, you hadn’t experienced a traumatic event.

In 1994, the definition changed in such a way as to include other, broader experiences. Equally persistent was the person’s subjective experiences of what they thought was traumatic. When that happened, people who had experienced car accidents, traumatic births, what we would have otherwise thought of as more ordinary life events, insofar as they are not statistically unusual, could then be diagnosed as a having PTSD. So now we are in a position where lots of people are able to receive the diagnosis of PTSD. So it’s not that it’s being over-diagnosed in that sense. The difficulty or problem, if there is one, is whether, generally speaking – PTSD would be part of this – the DSM over-medicalizes human experience. Things which are relatively common, relatively normal, are turned into psychiatric disorders.

Can you describe some of the typical symptoms of PTSD?

When people experience trauma, when their assumptions about themselves and the world come crashing down, there’s often a period of avoidance. People just try to block out what happened. Switch off. Turn their attention to other things. That’s quite understandable. Then, over time, that gives rise to memories and emotions that come flooding in as the person sort of begins to try to make sense of what happened, and that can become so powerful and distressing that they have to push that away again and go back into a period of avoidance. So sometimes people go through that, periods of avoidance and intrusion. That seems to me as a healthy and adaptive way of working through something painful, emotionally painful, that has happened to us. So those are the experiences. PTSD is when those experiences become so overwhelming that the person can’t function anymore – at work, or school, or in their social life. It takes over so much. But otherwise the symptoms of PTSD are fairly normal, natural ways of dealing with adaptation.

It’s important to see those experiences as quite normal and natural. They are not symptoms of a disorder by themselves. They’re just the way that people deal with an upsetting event in order to be able to make sense of things and to move on. It’s only when they become so overwhelmingly intense that they might be considered a disorder. I think that’s where we get into the problem with what PTSD is: when people are going through that normal experience, but they see it as having a disorder rather than a normal process of adaptation.

That will diminish over time?

Exactly.

Is the emotional pain overblown in such cases?

The suffering is very real. We’re not saying that people don’t have difficult emotional experiences and aren’t suffering. What we’re saying is this is not necessarily a disorder that people are experiencing, and if people think like that, it can be very disempowering to them.

What is the detrimental effect of over-medicalizing these more common human experiences of grief and pain?

When we think of ourselves as suffering from a disorder in a medical sense, well we go to the doctor and we expect the doctor to prescribe whatever the medical treatment is. We’re not in the driver’s seat. We go along – we tell them [our] symptoms, they listen to us, they diagnose what the problem is, and then they work out what the appropriate treatment is. That’s the mind-set when we’re working within a medical framework and we think of ourselves as suffering from a disorder. We sit down in front of the therapist and we expect the therapist to be like a doctor – to be looking out for what the symptoms are so that they can make the correct diagnosis and prescribe us the right treatment. The language of PTSD invokes those ideas, and I think it’s those ideas that can be quite unhelpful at times. For what we’re talking about here, if it’s a normal, natural process, what’s really important is for the person to be in the driver’s seat for themselves – to make their own choices, their own decisions, because we’re dealing not with a disorder, but a battle within the person to find new meanings and new ways of understanding the world. That’s what they have to do. Nobody else can do that for them.

What is “post-traumatic growth”?

Post-traumatic growth is when people come out of trauma having learned new things about themselves and about the world and about their relationship with the world. People develop new philosophies of life. They develop new priorities in life. People learn an awful lot about themselves: their strengths; what they’re good at; having new respect for themselves. They sort of see their lives as divided into two halves: before the event happened and after the event happened. There is a clear demarcation. And they recognize that something happened to them that sliced their world in half in that way, and things for them are now completely different. How they lead their lives has been transformed – their priorities about life, their relationships.

I think one of the things that captures that the most [starts with] the idea that, sometimes, people lead their lives in a way that is dictated by external forces of status and wealth, which are very much big drivers in our capitalist society. We often, in our everyday lives, forget about the small things that are quite important – our relationships: remembering to nurture them, to look after the people around us, to be giving, to be compassionate. When traumatic events happen, people are often shaken back to reality, and remember what really matters to them. Often it is those other things – remembering somebody’s birthday; nurturing our friendships; looking after our parents, the people around us; really embracing our relationships; and letting go of a more materialistic outlook. People often describe it as getting back to who they really are, or feeling more true to themselves, or being more genuine or more authentic. Somehow the idea of the false self that people create around them is shattered, like Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall. The essence of who they are emerges.

Yes, becoming truer to oneself captures the idea very well. Realizing that life is short and sometimes there isn’t as much time left as we thought to put up facades.

This kind of makes trauma sound like a blessing (you even mention people describing it as a “gift”). Is finding meaning the same thing as condoning the traumatic event? And doesn’t this talk of growth all sound very “kumbaya-ish” and unrealistic?

One of the reasons, sometimes, that post-traumatic growth can be seen unfavorably is that it seems like saying that trauma can lead to greater happiness; that for people who have been through trauma, it’s a good for them – they’re happier. That’s just so not the message. It’s not saying that trauma leads to happiness, in terms of smiling and feeling good and laughing and joy – not that type of happiness. What we’re talking about is how trauma can lead to a deeper, more existentially meaningful and fulfilling life, and that in turn may lead to greater happiness further down the road. But, post-traumatic growth is not about happiness in the sort of yellow, smiley face sense.

In essence, post-traumatic growth is a very simple idea, but it has been overshadowed by this mass of psychiatric literature over the past 30 or 40 years about the overwhelming destructive side of trauma, and about how these lead to medical problems. It’s a very simple idea, but [post-traumatic growth] sits, on the one hand, very uncomfortably within mainstream culture of the world of psychology and psychiatry, and on the other hand it seems to sit very comfortably with some other parts of Western culture, such as positive thinking, but it also clashes with some of that literature which is quite superficial, and not grounded in scientific research, and makes unsupported claims.

So, no, post-traumatic growth] doesn’t mean that [people] value or cherish the bad thing that has happened to them. They just accept that it has happened to them. People will often say they wish it hadn’t happened, or they wish they could go back, but there is a realism that they know they can’t. So it’s accepting that they can’t go back; they can’t change things. The only way forward is to go forward. It’s when people can’t accept that something has happened, and they [try] to go back to how they were before, is when they struggle. Acceptance is just being realistic – not seeing it as a good thing.

And someone not experiencing growth — or experiencing PTSD — is that person always trying to go back?

I think that often that’s what gets people stuck – trying to go back, trying to rebuild their lives exactly as it was before. That can lead people to get very stuck because it just isn’t possible when traumatic events happen and we’re presented with new information about the world, or with losses. It just isn’t possible to go back and make things as they were. We have to somehow accept what has happened to us and move on.

Is post-traumatic growth something completely in opposition to PTSD or post-traumatic stress? Either you have one or the other?

They can sit together. The way I see it, post-traumatic growth mostly arises out of post-traumatic stress. So it’s how people deal with the post-traumatic stress; how they manage to deal with the intrusive thoughts that are plaguing them; and the new sense they make of their experiences. So it’s through the post-traumatic stress, through the struggle of post-traumatic stress that post-traumatic growth arises. So often there’s a period of time in which people will begin to talk about post-traumatic growth but they will still be suffering from post-traumatic stress. They’re not in opposition. In a way, they are opposite sides of a coin.

You make a claim that true happiness is something that in and of itself cannot be pursued, and one is doomed to fail if one tries. How is that?

Well, that’s an idea that some philosophers have put forward. Some of the research seems to suggest that what’s really important to finding happiness is meaning and purpose in life. If we think our road to happiness is through seeking hedonistic pleasures night after night, then that’s not likely to lead to a deep, fulfilling level of happiness. But, if we find ways of finding meaning and purpose, wherever that might be, then we’re not setting out directly aiming for happiness but that’s what we’re going to get. We’re going to find a more fulfilling life. Happiness is a byproduct, but in a sense it’s more guaranteed.

When we think of psychological therapies, and the helping professions in general, they often have been about helping people feel better. [For] people with various problems of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress, therapy is about getting the person to have a more positive emotional state. That’s been, really, what the therapy world has been about for 50 years, and yet that’s only half the picture. The other half is about the meaning we put on things, our purpose in life, our sense of ourselves, our sense of autonomy, our relationships. Psychology can also be about those things. I’m not saying that therapists have ignored them altogether; for sure, they haven’t, but those more existential ideas have been overshadowed by trying to feel good. This is the idea between what psychologists call subjective well-being, which is about feeling good, and psychological well-being, which is what you could call “meaning-good,” and it’s just about getting the balance between those two things right.

Are there some cultures that are more prone to post-traumatic growth?

That’s a really good question. I don’t think the research has really documented that yet as to whether it may be more common. What the research has shown, however, is that post-traumatic growth is something observed in pretty much all cultures that have been investigated, though differently defined in slight ways. “Post-traumatic growth” sounds like a very Western idea, but [it’s one that] gets back into history and into all sorts of cultures. It’s an idea that’s very resonant with Buddhist and some Chinese philosophy ideas, as well as ideas in Western religion.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/how_ptsd_took_over_america/singleton/

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Market Watch
November 7, 2011

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD & Stan White (Father of Deceased Veteran, Andrew White) disclose the following:

EL CAJON, Calif., Nov. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — As a neurologist who has discovered and described medical diseases, I (Fred A. Baughman) read the May 24, 2008, Charleston (WV) Gazette article “Vets taking Post Traumatic Stress Disorder drugs die in sleep,” and opened and financed my own investigation into these unexplained deaths.

Andrew White, Eric Layne, Nicholas Endicott and Derek Johnson, all in their twenties, were four West Virginia veterans who died in their sleep in early 2008. There were no signs of suicide or of a multi-drug “overdose” leading to coma, as claimed by the Inspector General of the VA. All had been diagnosed “PTSD”–a psychological diagnosis, not a disease (physical abnormality) of the brain. All were on the same prescribed drug cocktail, Seroquel (antipsychotic), Paxil (antidepressant) and Klonopin (benzodiazepine) and all appeared “normal” when they went to sleep.

On February 7, 2008, Surgeon General Eric B. Schoomaker, had announced there had been “a series, a sequence of deaths” in the military suggesting this was “often a consequence of the use of multiple prescription and nonprescription medicines and alcohol.”

However, the deaths of the ‘Charleston Four’ were probable sudden cardiac deaths (SCD), a sudden, pulseless condition leading to brain death in 4-5 minutes, a survival rate or 3-4%, and not allowing time for transfer to a hospital. Conversely, drug-overdose coma is protracted, allowing time for discovery, diagnosis, transport, treatment, and frequently–survival.

Antipsychotics and antidepressants alone or in combination, are known to cause SCD. Sicouri and Antzelevitch (2008) concluded: (1) “A number of antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs can increase the risk of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death,” (2)”Antipsychotics can increase cardiac risk even at low doses whereas antidepressants do it generally at high doses or in the setting of drug combinations.”

On April 13, 2009, Baughman wrote the Office of the Surgeon General (OTSGWebPublisher@amedd.army.mil): “On February 7, 2008 the Surgeon General said there had been ‘a series, a sequence of deaths.’ Has the study of these deaths been published?”

On April 17, 2009 the Office of the Surgeon General responded, “The assessment is still pending and has not been released yet.” More than a year later and still no explanation, nor further acknowledgement that these deaths even took place.

In a press release, (PRNewswire, May 19, 2009) Baughman wrote: “I call upon the military for an immediate embargo of all antipsychotics and antidepressants until there has been a complete, wholly public, clarification of the extent and causes of this epidemic of probable sudden cardiac deaths.”

Googling “dead in bed,” “dead in barracks,” by April 16, 2009, veteran’s wife, Diane Vande Burgt, had Googled 74 probable sudden cardiac deaths. By May 2010: 128, and, by November 2, 2011: 247. Two-hundred-forty-seven!

In April 2010 I was in anonymous receipt of an Army National Guard Serious Incident Report for the 5 months 10/03/09 to 3/7/10. In it were 93 “incidents” including 4 “heart attacks,” 6 “cardiac arrests” and 3 “found dead”; 13 of 93 (14%) probable SCDs.

Pfc. Ryan Alderman, was on a cocktail of psych drugs when found unresponsive, dying in his barracks at Ft. Carson, Colo. Sudden cardiac death was confirmed by an ECG done at the scene. Inexplicably, military officials de-classified his death and reversed the cause, calling it instead, a “suicide.”

Again I challenge the military to produce the evidence.

In June 2011, a DoD Health Advisory Group backed a highly questionable policy of “polypharmacy” asserting: “…multiple psychotropic meds may be appropriate in select individuals.” The fact of the matter is that psychotropic drug polypharmacy is never safe, scientific, or medically justifiable. What it is a means of (1) maximizing profit, and (2) making it difficult to impossible to blame adverse effects on any one drug.

From 2001 to the present, US Central Command has given deploying troops 180 day supplies of prescription psychotropic drugs–Seroquel included. In a May 2010 report of its Pain Management Task Force, the Army endorsed Seroquel in 25- or 50-milligram doses as a ‘sleep aid.’

Over the past decade, $717 million was spent for Risperdal and $846 million for Seroquel, for a mind-blowing total of $1.5 billion when neither Risperdal nor Seroquel have been proven safe or effective for PTSD or sleep disorders.

Ironically, yet not surprisingly, pay-to-play in Washington becomes more egregious every day. Heather Bresch, daughter of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, (D-WV) was recently named CEO of WV drug-maker Mylan Inc., that recently contracted with the DoD for over 20 million doses of Seroquel.

Defense Department Health Advisory Group chair, Charles Fogelman, warned: “DoD currently lacks a unified pharmacy database that reflects medication use across pre-deployment, deployment and post-deployment settings.” In essence, through a premeditated lack of record keeping, mandated by law at any other pharmacy or medical office to track potential fatal reactions to mixing prescription drugs, the military is willfully preempting all investigations into the injuries and deaths due to psychiatric drugs.

I call on the DoD, VA, House and Senate Armed Services and House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees to tell concerned Americans and the families of fallen heroes what psychiatric drugs each of the deceased, both combat and non-combat, soldiers and veterans were on?

It is time for the military and government to come clean.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hundreds-of-soldiers-vets-dying-from-antipsychotic-seroquel-2011-11-07

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NaturalNews.com – June 3, 2011

by Neev M. Arnell

Prior to the Iraq war, American soldiers in combat zones did not take psychiatric drugs - by 2007, more than 20,000 troops were taking antidepressants & sleeping pills

“If mentally incapacitated troops are being drugged with dangerous, mind-altering drugs and deployed to battle against their will, how can we say that we have a volunteer army?” asked Alliance for Human Research Protection, the national network dedicated to advancing responsible and ethical medical research practices.

This is just one of the many criticisms being levied against the U.S. military in light of its liberal use of prescription medication, which is now being linked to rising suicide rates among soldiers.

A study released by the Army in June 2009 indicated that nearly as many American troops at home and abroad committed suicide in the first six months of 2006 as the number who had been killed in combat in Afghanistan during the same time period (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/…).

An average of 18 American veterans commit suicide every day (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMo…). Now, the increasingly high number of deaths among both veterans and active duty soldiers–including suicides, accidental overdose, and lethal drug interactions–have now been linked to the exponential increase in the prescribing of drugs for post traumatic stress disorder, depression and other psychological illnesses.(http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/vie…)

Prior to the  Iraq war, American soldiers in combat zones did not take psychiatric medications, according to PBS Frontline documentary The Wounded Platoon, which aired in May 2010. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front…) But by the time of the 2007 surge more than 20,000 of our deployed troops were taking antidepressants and sleeping pills.

These drugs allowed soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder to remain in combat when they otherwise could not.

“What I use medications for is to treat very specific side effects,” said Army psychiatrist Col. George Brandt. “I don’t want somebody in a helpless mode in a combat environment. I want to make sure I don’t have someone with suicidal thoughts where everyone is armed.”

Well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury or some combination of those, according to The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/u…). Following the lead of civilian medicine, the military has relied heavily on medications to treat those problems, resulting in more widespread use of drugs in the military than in any previous war.

The aforementioned Army report on suicide recognized that one-third of the troops were taking at least one prescription medication and stated that prescription drug use was on the rise. The report also noted that one-third of the 162 active-duty soldiers who committed suicide in 2009 were taking medication.

Frontline’s The Wounded Platoon looked at the problem of PTSD, depression and prescription medication in the military from the perspective of one platoon from Fort Carson, CO. 18 soldiers from Fort Carson have been charged with or convicted of murder, manslaughter or attempted murder committed in the United States, since the beginning of the “War on Terror,” and 36 have committed suicide.

Jose Barco, who was once known as the hero who saved his fellow soldiers during a suicide-bombing, is now serving a 52-year prison sentence for attempted murder. Barco suffered traumatic brain injury as a result of his heroics and was also diagnosed with PTSD for which he was prescribed nine different medications.

“We have someone who’s been emotionally traumatized, and they’ve got PTSD,” said retired military psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis. “They’re anxious, and they’re depressed, and they’ve got TBI, which means that they’ve got problems in decision making. They can’t think as clearly. They are really vulnerable to just overreacting.”

The rate of PTSD diagnosis at Fort Carson rose 4,000 percent between 2002 and 2010, and the increase in medications being prescribed for both veterans and those in combat rose to meet the demand.

Kenny Eastridge, another platoon member that Frontline spoke with who is in jail for murder and other crimes, was prescribed a cocktail of medications while in combat.

“I was having a total mental breakdown. Every day we were getting in battles and never having a break. It seemed like, it was just crazy,” he said. “They put me on all kinds of meds, and I was still going out on missions. They had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff.”

Eastridge was sent to a remote combat outpost for weeks at a time with no medical supervision or mental health provision, despite the recommendation that patients on this medication should be monitored. Frontline footage showed Eastridge’s unstable behavior, which included wandering into Iraqi homes, lying in the people’s beds, and trying to hug local people.

As more soldiers return home to Fort Carson, concern abounds.”We’re all wondering what’s going to happen,” says Colorado Springs psychotherapist Robert Alvarez. “It’s a scary thought, you know, what’s going to happen in this community. Are we going to have more murders? Are we going to have more suicides, or are we going to have more crime? I think the answer to that is probably yes.”

http://www.naturalnews.com/z032598_veterans_suicide.html

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Natural News, February 17, 2011

by Mike Adams, Editor, NaturalNews.com

They survived live fire, explosive devices, terror attacks and grueling desert conditions. But upon returning home to seek treatment for the mental anguish that too often accompanies war, U.S. soldiers are now being killed by the pharmaceutical industry in record numbers.

A recent example is found with the late Senior Airman Anthony Mena, who returned home from Baghdad only to be killed by a toxic cocktail of prescription medications in his apartment in the USA. As the New York Times reports, a toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/u…).

Those drugs included painkillers, sleeping pills, antidepressants and a sedative. The medical examiner concluded that Anthony Mena died of multiple pharmaceutical toxicity. He was only 23 years old.

Big Pharma killing more soldiers than enemy combatants?

Anthony Mena is just one of a fast-rising number of U.S. soldiers who are being drugged to death by psychiatrists and physicians who dish out painkillers and psychotropic drugs with virtually no regard to their chemical interactions.

Those interactions are never tested in clinical trials (yes, never!). The position of the FDA and Big Pharma seems to be that the more drugs a person takes, the better they’ll get, and doctors are trained in med schools to keep prescribing pills with virtually no concern about the extreme toxicity of various pharmaceutical combinations. Their motto is, “For every ill, there’s another pill.”

Now the body count is rising. Today, one-third of the U.S. Army is on at least one prescription medication, and many of those are psychiatric meds used to treat PTSD.

Think about that astounding statistic for a moment: One-third of the U.S. Army is on synthetic chemicals! Some of those chemicals, by the way, have been linked to suicides and violent behavior, especially in young males. What kind of formula for warfare is that, anyway? Take a young male, put a rifle in his hands and a psychiatric medication in his head, then let him loose on the front lines and see what happens?

An Army report says that 101 soldiers have died from toxic pharmaceutical combinations in 2006 – 2009, but that report almost certainly vastly underestimates the true numbers. Most deaths are traditionally written off as organ failure of one kind or another. Very few pharmaceutically-induced deaths are ever accurately tracked back to the drugs involved… unless you’re Michael Jackson, of course.

It makes you wonder: Are more soldiers being killed by Big Pharma than by enemy combatants?

It’s not out of the question. The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed just over 3,000 Americans. Yet, according to well-researched estimates based on published scientific studies, FDA-approved prescription drugs currently kill anywhere from 98,000 – 250,000 Americans a year (http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html). Remember, that’s every year!

Big Pharma’s link to Nazi concentration camps

Over the last decade, then, FDA-approved prescription drugs have likely killed at least one million Americans and probably many more. That’s approaching the level of a chemical holocaust. The last time so many people were killed with chemicals was in the Nazi era of World War II, when Nazi war criminals gassed Jews to death by the millions.

It’s no coincidence, by the way, that the very same chemical companies that worked for the Nazi war machine are now some of the world’s top pharmaceutical manufacturers. That’s not an internet myth, by the way: It’s an historical fact. Just Google the history of  Bayer and Nazi Germany if you want to learn more: http://www.google.com/search?q=baye…

Or check out the role of IG Farben /Bayer in Auschwitz and other German concentration camps, where this pharmaceutical company relied on slave labor to churn out chemical weapons and experimental drugs used in human medical experiments: http://archive.corporatewatch.org/p…

(You won’t read that in the New York Times, most likely…)

Fast forward to the present. Now the pharmaceutical industry is killing our young soldiers in record numbers. Much of it is due to the insanity that’s inbred throughout the psychiatric industry, which has a long and disturbing history of torturing and maiming patients in the name of “medicine.”

I strongly urge you to learn about the true history of psychiatry through the Citizens Commission on Human Rights: http://www.cchr.org/quick-facts/the…

I have walked through their museum in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen what psychiatric medicine has done to destroy the lives of countless children, adults and even soldiers. What’s happening today with psychiatric medicine is, by any honest assessment, a crime against humanity that makes the casualties of war in Iraq seem tiny by comparison.

And now, even the mainstream media is beginning to see this truth. It’s hard to deny it when young, healthy soldiers start dropping dead from following doctors’ orders and taking FDA-approved medications. These are not overdoses, folks. These are soldiers following orders and “taking their medicine” as directed.

And they’re dying from it.

The New York Times article on this issue is a great read. It’s an example of stunningly good journalism from the mainstream media, and I recommend you read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/u…

The NYT, of course, probably won’t go into the history of Bayer and the Nazi war crimes connection, but you can only expect the mainstream media to go so far on these stories. For the whole truth on issues like this, you have to turn to internet sites like NaturalNews which simply aren’t driven by pharmaceutical advertising money. That’s where you’ll find out the rest of the story that the MSM isn’t likely to ever report.

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NextGov
By Bob Brewin
January 18, 2011

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Salem-news.com

September 21, 2010

by Dr. Phillip Leveque

Afghanistan by Tim King Salem-News.com

(MOLALLA, Ore.) – I’m sure some people will take umbrage at my title. Keep on reading. First of all there are about 30 of them – why? It’s easy, most don’t work. In fact placebos (fake sugar pills) frequently work better.

Another point, their adverse side effects are horrible. Some even cause worse depression and even suicide. The main side effects are nausea, insomnia, anxiety, restlessness, decreased sex drive, dizziness, weight gain or loss, tremors, sweating, sleepiness, fatigue, dry mouth, diarrhea, constipation, headache, et cetera. Who needs that stuff?!? They also screw up ones head and balance with falls and fractures. If one stops taking them, the withdrawal symptoms sound worse than heroin. In addition to all this, some are addicting and it is very difficult to stop taking them.

This kind of drug or drugs has an extremely interesting origin. Around 1950 the first drug in this class was actually an anti-tuberculosis drug Isoniazid. For some reason it also acted as a brain stimulant, much like amphetamine. When this side effect was published by the T.B. doctors, other doctors decided to try it on depression patients. Prior to this certain Morphine-like cousin drugs and amphetamines were used for depression. They had severe addiction liability.

Isoniazid, the T.B. drug, was used on an experimental basis and the patients brain function improved dramatically. The psychiatrists who read about this tried Isoniazid on their depression patients and they coined the word ANTI-DEPRESSANT.

From then on starting about 1957 the Tricyclic drugs were born. They were relatives of anti-histamine drugs and they did combat depression. I think the first well known one was Elavil which is still in use. This type of drug drifted around quietly for several years searching for a disease all of the sudden it erupted – CLINICAL DEPRESSION. The first REAL drug Fluoxetine or PROZAC came out in 1988 by Ely Lilly & Co. It was heavily advertised and we soon had a epidemic of clinical depression spread all over the world.

I’m not going into a recital of the various kinds of anti-depressants. I think there is enough to indicate that at least 500,000,000 prescriptions are written per year and for the 14 or so leaders, each is worth up to several billion dollars to the drug companies.

As I said in the beginning placebos, or fake pills, work about as well as these chemicals and exercise or just plain talking to a psychologist may work as well. The drug companies advertise heavily in the millions of dollars to sell these drugs to doctors and patients. It is worth it. The anti-depressants bring in billions of dollars.

A side comment is that the drug companies have sold the idea to the Veterans Administration and they prescribe these drugs by the ton to PTSD Veterans. The evidence is that they don’t help much and cause a lot of harm.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/september212010/ptsd-depressants-pl.php

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Associated Press reports:

Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-psychotic called Seroquel.

Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to make Seroquel one of the Veteran Affairs Department’s top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation.

Several soldiers and veterans have died while taking the pills, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being up front about the drug’s risks. They want Congress to investigate.

In White’s case, the nightmares persisted. So doctors recommended progressively larger doses of Seroquel. At one point, the 23-year-old Marine corporal was prescribed more than 1,600 milligrams per day — more than double the maximum dose recommended for schizophrenia patients.

A short time later, White died in his sleep.

“He was told if he had trouble sleeping he could take another (Seroquel) pill,” said his father, Stan White, a retired high school principal.

Activist, Vince Boehm, communicated with the Whites and told Beyond Meds:

Stan and Shirley White lost two sons to war. Robert White, a staff sergeant, was killed in Afghanistan in 2005, when his Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. But the death of Robert’s younger brother Andrew, who survived Iraq only to succumb to a different battle, is in some ways “harder to accept” says his father.

Struggling with PTSD compounded by grief over the death of his brother, Andrew sought help from VA doctors. Their first line of defense was to prescribe him 20 mg of Paxil, 4 mg of Klonopin and 50 mg of Seroquel. These medications helped at first, but later proved ineffective. Instead of changing the course of treatment, the doctors responded by continually increasing his dosage until the Seroquel alone reached a whopping 1600 mg per day. Within weeks of Andrew’s death, three more young West Virginia veterans died while being treated for PTSD with the same drugs, prompting Stan and Shirley White to begin a mission to find out what the deaths have in common.

Earlier this year, Martha Rosenberg reported on the same deadly cocktail being used to treat PTSD:

Sgt. Eric Layne’s death was not pretty.

A few months after starting a drug regimen combining the antidepressant Paxil, the mood stabilizer Klonopin and a controversial anti-psychotic drug manufactured by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, Seroquel, the Iraq war veteran was “suffering from incontinence, severe depression [and] continuous headaches,” according to his widow, Janette Layne.

Soon he had tremors. ” … [H]is breathing was labored [and] he had developed sleep apnea,” Layne said.

Janette Layne, who served in the National Guard during Operation Iraqi Freedom along with her husband, told the story of his decline last year, at official FDA hearings on new approvals for Seroquel. On the last day of his life, she testified, Eric stayed in the bathroom nearly all night battling acute urinary retention (an inability to urinate). He died while his family slept.

Sgt. Layne had just returned from a seven-week inpatient program at the VA Medical Center in Cincinnati where he was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A video shot during that time, played by his wife at the FDA hearings, shows a dangerously sedated figure barely able to talk.

Sgt. Layne was not the first veteran to die after being prescribed medical cocktails including Seroquel for PTSD.

Read the rest of this article here: http://warincontext.org/2010/08/31/treatment-for-ptsd-may-be-killing-veterans/

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Pharmalot
By Ed Silverman
August 31, 2010

The widely used Seroquel antipsychotic was never approved to treat post-traumatic stress disorder or the insomnia sometimes related to the afflication, but that hasn’t stopped the drug from being prescribed for that purpose by the US Department of Veteran Affairs and, in the process, becoming one of the VA’s biggest expenditures.

Since 2001, VA spending on Seroquel jumped more than 770 percent, while the number of patients covered by the VA increased just 34 percent, the Associated Press writes. Seroquel is now the VA’s second-biggest prescription drug expenditure since 2007, behind the Plavix bloodthinner. The agency spent $125.4 million last fiscal year on Seroquel, up from $14.4 million in 2001, and the growth in spending outpaces the growth in personnel who have gone through the military during that time.

Meanwile, thousands of soldiers have taken the med, and several soldiers and veterans have died, raising concerns among some military families the government is not being forthcoming about the risks, the AP writes, noting that they want Congress to investigate. The trend, by the way, is not confined to Seroquel. An investigation earlier this year found that at least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug (background).

According to the VA, Seroquel is only prescribed as a third or fourth option for patients with difficult-to-treat insomnia stemming from PTSD, the AP writes. And the US Defense Department’s deputy director for force health protection, Michael Kilpatrick, tells the news service that the government has not seen any increase in dangerous side effects from Seroquel and other drugs.

Read entire article:  http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/08/the-military-post-traumatic-stress-and-seroquel/

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Note from CCHR:  Our psychiatric drug database lists FDA advisory warnings on Seroquel causing sudden death, death, suicide, suicidal ideation, heart problems, as well as a Journal of Toxicology report dating back to 2001, warning of antipsychotic drugs causing stroke, cerebrovascular events (such as loss of brain function) seizures, toxicity, confusion and coma. Simply keyword search Seroquel here (or for a broader search, newer antipsychotics)  http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/drug_warnings.php

By MATTHEW PERRONE (AP) – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON — Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-psychotic called Seroquel.

Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to make Seroquel one of the Veteran Affairs Department’s top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation.

Several soldiers and veterans have died while taking the pills, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being up front about the drug’s risks. They want Congress to investigate.

In White’s case, the nightmares persisted. So doctors recommended progressively larger doses of Seroquel. At one point, the 23-year-old Marine corporal was prescribed more than 1,600 milligrams per day — more than double the maximum dose recommended for schizophrenia patients.

A short time later, White died in his sleep.

“He was told if he had trouble sleeping he could take another (Seroquel) pill,” said his father, Stan White, a retired high school principal.

An investigation by the Veterans Affairs Department concluded that White died from a rare drug interaction. He was also taking an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety pill, as well as a painkiller for which he did not have a prescription. Inspectors concluded he received the “standard of care” for his condition.

It’s unclear how many soldiers have died while taking Seroquel, or if the drug definitely contributed to the deaths. White has confirmed at least a half-dozen deaths among soldiers on Seroquel, and he believes there may be many others.

Spending for Seroquel by the government’s military medical systems has increased more than sevenfold since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. That by far outpaces the growth in personnel who have gone through the system in that time.

Seroquel is approved to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, but it has not been endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for insomnia. However, psychiatrists are permitted to prescribe approved drugs for other uses in a common practice known as “off-label” prescribing.

But the drug’s potential side effects, including diabetes, weight gain and uncontrollable muscle spasms, have resulted in thousands of lawsuits. While on Seroquel, White gained 40 pounds and experienced slurred speech, disorientation and tremors — all known side effects.

Last year, researchers at Vanderbilt University published a study suggesting a new risk: sudden heart failure.

The study in the January 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine found that there were three cardiac deaths per year for every 1,000 patients taking anti-psychotic drugs like Seroquel. Seroquel’s unique sedative effect sets it apart from others in its class as the top choice for treating insomnia and anxiety.

AstraZeneca PLC, maker of the drug, said it is reviewing the study. The FDA is conducting its own review, citing the limited scope of the Vanderbilt study.

According to the Veterans Affairs Department, Seroquel is only prescribed as a third or fourth option for patients with difficult-to-treat insomnia stemming from PTSD.

Marine Cpl. Chad Oligschlaeger, 21, was being treated for PTSD when he died in his sleep at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in May 2008. Oligschlaeger was taking six types of medication, including Seroquel, to deal with anxiety and nightmares that followed two tours of duty in Iraq.

The military medical examiner attributed the death to “multiple drug toxicity,” indicating that Oligschlaeger, too, died from a drug interaction. Because of the complex reactions between various drugs, medical examiners do not attribute such deaths to any one medication.

After consulting with physicians, parents Eric and Julie Oligschlaeger now believe their son died of sudden cardiac arrest caused by Seroquel.

“Right now, I’m so angry, and I believe someone needs to be held accountable,” said Julie Oligschlaeger, of Austin, Texas. “The protocol absolutely has to change.”

The Defense Department’s deputy director for force health protection, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, said the government has not seen any increase in dangerous side effects from Seroquel and other drugs.

Physicians interviewed by the AP said they began prescribing Seroquel because it was the only drug that offered relief from the nightmares and anxiety of PTSD.

“By accident, some people were giving them Seroquel for anxiety or depression, and the veterans said, ‘This is the first time I have slept six or seven hours straight all night. Please give me more of that.’ And the word spread,” said Dr. Henry Nasrallah of the University of Cincinnati, who has treated PTSD patients for more than 25 years.

Most of the soldiers and veterans seeking treatment for PTSD do so at hospitals run by the VA or the Defense Department.

The VA’s spending on Seroquel has increased more than 770 percent since 2001. In that same time frame, the number of patients covered by the VA increased just 34 percent.

Seroquel has been the VA’s second-biggest prescription drug expenditure since 2007, behind the blood-thinner Plavix. The agency spent $125.4 million last fiscal year on Seroquel, up from $14.4 million in 2001.

Spending on Seroquel by the Department of Defense, has increased nearly 700 percent since 2001, to $8.6 million last year, according to purchase records.

Read the rest of this article here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iPPHBQ6w28w4kTXzANGm6kCzPN1gD9HTRUQ80

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Examiner.com
By Jed Shlackman
May 26, 2010

Andrew Tighman, writing in the Marine Corps Times, recently described the investigation of Fred A. Baughman Jr., M.D. into the deaths of military personnel taking multiple psychotropic medications. Baughman was alerted to a series of soldier deaths upon reading a May 2008 article in the Charleston [WV] Gazette titled “Vets Taking Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Drugs Die in Sleep.” Baughman, a retired neurologist known previously for his criticism of medication treatments of ADHD and other mental health disorders, suspected that the reported cases could be part of a much larger problem. In the cases of four West Virginia veterans who died in their sleep in 2008 Baughman found that the deaths were not due to overdoses. The veterans were apparently normal upon going to bed, yet all died in their sleep after taking a combination of prescribed medications that included Paxil, Seroquel, and Klonopin. Each case involved a sudden cardiac incident and resulting death.  This adds to growing concern about serious adverse effects of psychiatric medications commonly prescribed to emotionally disturbed or traumatized soldiers.

Research reported by Ray, et. al in the January 2009 New England Journal of Medicine noted that antipsychotic drugs doubled the risk of sudden cardiac death, while another study disclosed in March 2009 by Whang, et. al. found that antidepressant drugs also increase the rate of sudden cardiac death. A literature review of studies from 2000-2007 titled “Sudden Cardiac Death Secondary to Antidepressant and Antipsychotic Drugs” published in Expert Opinion on Drug Safety; 2008, No. 2, March 2008, pp. 181-191(14), found that “Antipsychotics can increase cardiac risk even at low doses, whereas antidepressants do it generally at high doses or in the setting of drug combinations.” In an Army Times article by Gina Cavallaro in February 2009 it was reported that more than 70 soldiers assigned to the Army’s warrior transition units had died, with at least 50% of the deaths attributed to natural causes that included a high number of cardiac deaths.

In one case investigated by Baughman an Army private was found dead in his barracks at Ft. Carson, Colorado, with sudden cardiac death reported by EMTs on the scene followed later by the death being re-classified as a suicide. Baughman suspects that there is an attempt to cover up the dangers of these psychiatric drugs, as the U.S. military, doctors, and drug manufacturers could be held accountable if it became apparent that these dangerous drug combinations are being used despite published evidence of the hazards.

Read entire article:  http://www.examiner.com/x-12517-Miami-Holistic-Health-Examiner~y2010m5d26-Memorial-Day-2010-Psychiatric-drugs-triggering-deaths-of-US-soldiers-treated-for-PTSD

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