Posts Tagged ‘SSRIs’

Birth Defects Claims from Users of Paxil on the Rise

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Lawyers and Settlements
March 19, 2010

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the pharmaceutical giant responsible for medications like Advair, Geritol and Zantac, has seen an increased number of lawsuits related to SSRI birth defects stemming from its popular antidepressant, Paxil.

Paxil, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), has resulted in three separate kinds of lawsuits since its introduction to the market in 1992: cases citing the medication’s addictive nature, those citing the suicidal tendencies it can provoke and those that cite the frequency of birth defects in expectant mothers taking the medication.

SSRI medications have been linked to serious lung and heart defects in newborns, including persistent pulmonary hypertension, a disorder of the respiratory system that severely restricts the arteries causing the blood pressure in the pulmonary artery of the heart to rise to dangerous levels.

Read entire article:  http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/13802/ssri-birth-defects-side-effects-pphn-2.html

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In addition to causing birth defects & preterm labor—new study says antidepressants cause breastfeeding problems

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

AttorneyAtLaw.com
January 27, 2010

Taking Prozac, Paxil, or other antidepressants from the class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can cause delays in lactation in new mothers and difficulty in breast-feeding newborns, a new study says.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati found SSRIs can result in delayed secretory activation after giving birth. SSRIs regulate the hormone serotonin in the body to stave off depression, but the hormone also is crucial to the breasts’ ability to deliver milk when it is needed, the study’s authors said.

A delay in breast milk production caused by taking SSRIs can “impact serotonin regulation in the breast, placing new mothers at greater risk of a delay in the establishment of a full milk supply,” the study found.

The study’s findings are troubling because millions of people take Prozac, Paxil, and other brands of SSRIs to treat a variety of depression-related disorders. Paxil and other SSRI drugs have been linked before to other serious health complications, including heart-related birth defects and pre-term labor.

Read entire article:  http://www.attorneyatlaw.com/2010/01/prozac-and-paxil-can-cause-breast-feeding-problems-new-study-says/

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Natural News – “The U.S. is a nation seemingly hooked on mind-altering drugs”

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

S.L. Baker
NaturalNews.com
January 13, 2010

As NaturalNews has previously reported, the U.S. is a nation seemingly hooked on mind-altering drugs.  A study released last fall in the Archives of General Psychiatry documented a dramatic increase in the use of antidepressant drugs like Prozac since l996. In fact, these medications are now the most widely prescribed drugs in the U.S.

Think Americans are maxed out on the number of psychiatric meds that huge numbers of them are taking? Think again. A new report says U.S. adults are increasingly being prescribed combinations of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medications — and they could be experiencing serious side effects as a result.

The study, published in the January edition of Archives of General Psychiatry, investigated patterns and trends in what is known as psychotropic polypharmacy, meaning the prescribing of two or more psychiatric drugs. Ramin Mojtabai, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Mark Olfson, M.D., M.P.H., of Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, examined data gathered from a national sample of office-based psychiatry practices. In all, the researchers looked at the medications prescribed between 1996 and 2006 during more than 13,000 office visits to psychiatrists by adults.

Read entire article: http://www.naturalnews.com/027932_polypharmacy_psychiatric_drugs.html

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Daily Mail – “Internal bleeding. Strokes. Birth defects. The long term effects of antidepressants are terrifying”

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Jane Feinmann
The Daily Mail
January 12, 2010

Just a few years ago, Yasmin Miller would have been horrified by the suggestion she might take antidepressants for the rest of her life. But today, the 37-year-old can barely imagine a future without this daily chemical boost.

Yasmin’s ‘perfect’ life as a corporate tax adviser was shattered when, in 2003, she developed severe depression. Although incapacitated by the illness, she needed convincing that a pill could make a difference.

‘I was gobsmacked when my GP suggested antidepressants, because I thought they were addictive,’ she recalls. ‘But now I’ve changed my mind: depression is just like epilepsy or diabetes or any other illness where you need to take a daily pill for life in order to stay healthy.’

Just 20 years after the launch of the ‘sunshine drug’ Prozac, Yasmin is one of hundreds of thousands of young women who can’t imagine life without antidepressants.

But some experts are warning of disturbing parallels with the ‘mother’s little helper’ scandal of the Seventies and Eighties, when thousands of women became addicted to widely prescribed tranquillisers, including Valium.

Read entire article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1242502/Hooked-happy-pills-Internal-bleeding-Strokes-Birth-defects-The-long-term-effects-antidepressants-terrifying.html

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Psychology Today “Five Reasons not to take SSRIs: Now that SSRIs don’t work for depression, don’t take them!”

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Lennard Davis
Psychology Today
January 7, 2010

For the past five years, and in my recent book OBSESSION: A HISTORY, I have been questioning the effectiveness of Prozac-like drugs known as SSRIs. I’ve pointed out that when the drugs first came out in the early 1990′s there was a wildly enthusiastic uptake in the prescribing of such drugs. Doctors were jubilantly claiming that the drugs were 80-90 per cent effective in treating depression and related conditions like OCD. In the last few years those success rates have been going down, with the NY Times pointing out that the initial numbers had been inflated by drug companies suppressing the studies that were less encouraging. But few if any doctors or patients were willing to hear anything disparaging said about these “wonder” drugs.

Now the tune has changed.

Reason One: A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that SSRI’s like Paxil and Prozac are no more effective in treating depression than a placebo pill. That means they are 33 per cent effective, which is the percent of patients who will respond well to a sugar pill. The article goes on to say that although SSRI’s are effective to some degree in treating severe depression they don’t have any effect on the routine type of depressions they are most often used to treat. The take-home message is–don’t take SSRI’s if you have normal, mild, or routine depression. It’s a waste of money, and the drugs have serious side-effects including loss of sexual drive.

Reason Two: A January 4 article in MedPage Today cites a study done at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins.  The study says that doctors routinely prescribe not one but two or three SSRI’s and other psychopharmological drugs in combination with few if any serious studies to back up the multiple usage.

Read entire article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/obsessively-yours/201001/five-reasons-not-take-ssris

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50 to 79 Year-old Women on Antidepressants Are 45% More Likely to Have a Stroke and Are at 32% Higher Risk of Death

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Deirdre Branley
Eurekalert.org
December 14, 2009

Postmenopausal women who take antidepressants face a small but statistically significant increased risk for stroke and death compared with those who do not take the drugs. The new findings are from the federally-funded, multi-institution, Women’s Health Initiative Study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, and the results are published in the December 14 online edition of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Senior author Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Ph.D., is a principal investigator in the Women’s Health Initiative and is division head of epidemiology and professor of epidemiology & population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. In addition to Einstein, other institutions involved in the study were Massachusetts General Hospital, where the lead author of the paper, Jordan W. Smoller, M.D., Sc.D., is based. He is also associate professor of psychiatry in the Harvard Medical School. Also contributing to the study are researchers from the University of California San Diego, the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii, the University of Iowa, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Emory University School of Medicine.

The study examined data from 136,293 study participants, aged 50 to 79, who were not taking antidepressants when they enrolled in the study, and who were followed for an average of six years. Data from 5,496 women who were taking antidepressants at their first follow-up visit were compared with data from 130,797 not taking antidepressants at follow-up. The researchers compared the two groups with respect to the incidence of fatal or nonfatal stroke, fatal or nonfatal heart attack and death due to all causes.

The researchers found no difference in coronary heart disease (defined as fatal and non-fatal heart attacks). However, they did observe a significant difference in stroke rates: antidepressant users were 45 percent more likely to experience strokes than women who weren’t taking antidepressants.

The study also found that when overall death rates (all-cause mortality) were compared between the two groups, those on antidepressants had a 32 percent higher risk of death from all causes compared with non-users.

Read entire article: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/aeco-ami121009.php

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Green Mental Health Care – Reclaiming Lives From Psychiatric Drugs

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

by Genita Petralli, Nutritional Biochemist
November 24, 2009

Genita_Petralli_blog_295x193The so-called “War On Drugs” has a new battleground – your doctor’s office, where the unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries presents a pseudo medical model that inflicts addictive, chemical abuse on innocent victims while lying to the public with “sales science” and calling it medicine. Their drugs are nothing more than variations of the very same illegal drugs the government has spent billions of dollars fighting—not because they care about you, only to preserve pharmaceutical sales. Make no mistake; a drug is a drug—pushed or prescribed. They are all toxic, and psychotropic pharmaceuticals are far more toxic to brain tissue and the liver; diminishing quality of life, causing multiple addictions and ultimately resulting in disease and death—never health and wellness!

My life is dedicated to reclaiming lives from psychiatric drugs and exposing psychiatry for what it is; a gang of white collar drug pushers robbing our society of every resource that supports it right down to our future; the children.

As a scientist and licensed practitioner I want to educate all those interested in what is causing the epidemic mental health crisis of today, how to avoid it, how to get off of psychiatric drugs if you are on them now, and why toxic drugs should never be sold as medicine.

My work is toward a medical model for all mental health issues to be based on patient outcomes and not profit. This is accomplished with Orthomolecular Neurochemical Rehabilitation (ONR).

green mental health careI wrote Green Mental Health Care – How to Get Off & Stay Off Psychiatric Drugs because the psychiatric patient with Prozac in his/her medicine cabinet is in even more danger than the crack head smoking crack. This is because the crack head knows they have to stop smoking crack to get well—the psychiatric patient thinks they are taking medicine and that their condition is the best they can hope for—when neither is true. They don’t recognize the fundamental truth that drugs injure the body and mind – prescribed or pushed.

To sit on the sidelines and do nothing while I watch people suffer from the effects of psychiatric drugs is not an option. I know what these drugs do to cells, tissues, critical organs and brain function and I can’t just turn my head because everywhere I turn I see more pain and suffering while Big Pharma continues to make bank and control society. They are literally using our money against us, forcing out all evidence-based holistic options that should be sponsored by public medicine like pharmaceutical drugs are. They are using our taxes and out of pocket cash spent on their drugs to buy lobbyists in Washington to get pro-Pharma laws passed and forced medical practices pushed through such as the Mother’s Act, the language of which is now in the health care reform bill. Come on, the notion of giving an antidepressant to a pregnant woman? These drugs are extremely harmful to grown adults; can you imagine what they do to the development of a fetus that doesn’t have the functional maturity to even try to protect itself from them? They will stunt every process of development in that child and already have been shown in numerous studies to cause birth defects.

Psychiatric drug use is particularly destroying the youth in our society. The vast majority of the mass school shootings are done by young adults on psych meds (see www.ssristories.com). People will say, “Well, that’s why they were on meds, there was something wrong with them” or “They weren’t taking their meds, therefore they went crazy.” Don’t believe this for a second, kids have been going through all the challenges and discomforts of adolescent bullying, ostracism etc.… since the beginning of time and it wasn’t until our toxic health care system started drugging them that they started taking guns to school and initiating mass murders.

Psychiatric drugs are responsible for increased car accidents, domestic violence, emergency room visits, hospital admissions, diabetes, cancer, aneurysms, tardive dyskinesia, suicide, violence, they are more abused by school children today than their illegal counterparts. As the damage these drugs do to the health of our global citizens takes its toll, they turn once productive people into parasites of society as we pay through our taxes for their subsidized housing, health care costs, and SSI/Disability payments monthly. Is it their fault? No- after all, they were told to take their medicine to get better—the only fault is that they believed their doctor whose practice is dictated by the “standards of care” created by a corrupt Big Pharma. We are all suffering the deluge of destroyed lives by these drugs and humanity as a whole is becoming crippled by them. I want to help stop the pain and suffering these drugs cause and teach what is causing their symptoms, how to find out what is the root cause, and how to cure it and live this one precious life we all share in the full spectrum capacity they were born capable of living it. I want to see humanity flourish and witness the beauty we are capable of creating on this planet. I want the planet to be inhabitable by my grandchildren and I don’t want them forced onto drugs for being children.

Government agencies are now forcing children to take drugs if a psychiatrist labels them with a “mental illness.” And they are calling those who speak against the government’s toxic health care initiatives “terrorists” and “crazy,” incarcerating and drugging them. The day I always feared has now seen its dawn; we are losing our right to refuse “medical care,” even with the volumes of evidence piled up that proves it is harmful, toxic and does not deliver its recipients to health. The people are too fog-brained by and addicted to their pushed and prescribed drugs in their food, environment and medicine to see what is happening and reclaim their lives and the potential of humanity that “God” is capable of. People are literally chemically lobotomized today and it is a pandemic.

You are no longer a freethinker if you are addicted to a drug, be it pushed or prescribed, and people are becoming more and more compliant as legal drugs become more and more prolific in our society. Only someone addicted, misinformed and symptomatic would find it plausible to believe that a toxic drug is a medicine and that that “medicine” has any chance of producing health and wellness. Big Pharma has done a very good job at creating masses of people who are addicted, misinformed and symptomatic in a very short period of time. The drug companies now have undue influence over our medicine, standards of care, our government and the FDA. They have become so powerful that they run our government to the point of using our own police to enforce laws that are unconstitutional that require parents to drug their children if their child is diagnosed with a mental disorder. Parents have had their children taken away for refusing to give them psychiatric medications! Yes, our own police officers have removed children from homes because their parents wouldn’t give them legal cocaine (Ritalin)!

This book is my contribution toward helping them get well and bring them from the dark corners they have quietly suffered in, into the light of health and wellness, hope, and the empowering feeling of being embraced by the love and compassion that those of us have for those harvested by the pushers of toxic “medicine.” With each person I detoxify and help to natural mental health, I am building an army of healthy environmentalists. By making the decisions you need to make to get well—starting with the needs of an individual cell to get well, you will by default become an environmentalist helping the planet detoxify and survive as well. When we discontinue the demand for the products that are making people crazy, we take their power and ability to buy Washington, the FDA, the NIH and their front people, psychiatrists (grants, ghost writing payoffs, schools, etc.) away. Our medicine and laws will become patient outcome driven as opposed to profit driven and those toxic chemicals that are causing disease, death and loss of quality of life will no longer be pushed upon us and offered at every turn of our head.

Believe it or not, we live in an era of “harvesting” and people are being harvested by psychiatry for future income. The pharmaceutical companies that are making the laws that force their drugs into people now pave the way for psychiatry’s methods. Psychiatrists are being sent to grade and intermediate schools to evaluate our children, they are the first “doctors” people being incarcerated see, elderly people in senior homes are being drugged to death. If you lose a loved one and are sad you get drugged, if you get in a car accident you are drugged, if you have anxiety about finals in college you get drugged, if you are going through a divorce you get drugged, if you’re not good at math you get drugged, if you speak against the government you are crazy and drugged. Psychiatric medication prescriptions skyrocket for those 65 and older, psych drugs are being pushed on television, in newspapers, magazines and through schools. The unholy alliance between Big Pharma and psychiatry is causing more deaths yearly than any illness if you consider not only the suicides and murders, but the diseases they are associated with.

Big Pharma and psychiatry are literally sucking the life out of humanity and destroying the ability to achieve the quality of life people hope to reclaim when they go to their doctor. For anyone interested in a free copy of the pamphlet version of my book, Green Mental Health Care – How to Get Off Psychiatric Drugs & Stay Off – A Comprehensive Guide to Staying Sane in a Toxic World, send an email to FindPeace@ShangriLaBioSpa.com.

Genita Petralli H.H.P., N.C., M.H., Nutritional Biochemist ~ Orthomolecular Neurochemical Rehabilitation, Psychiatric Drug Detox & Neuroendocrine BioRepair

For more information on non-drug alternatives for mental health or for more information on safely coming off of psychiatric drugs visit our alternatives page.

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“Was Fort Hood Killer On Psychotropic Drugs?” – Media fails to ask if Hasan was on SSRI’s

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Paul Joseph Watson
Alex Jones’ Prison Planet.com
November 6, 2009

Despite the fact that Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik Hasan was a psychiatrist, the media has failed to even raise the question of whether he was taking psychotropic drugs before he gunned down over a dozen of his colleagues during yesterday’s tragic rampage, a hefty indictment of how the establishment rushes to blame politics, religion, gun rights, or any other factor for mass shootings in order to hide the direct link between such massacres and the use of anti-depressant drugs.

It has been confirmed that Hasan was an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood. Psychiatrists have a history of “self-medication” because of the easy access they have to psychotropic drugs.

In almost every major mass shooting over the past two decades, since anti-depressant drugs became popular, the killer has been on SSRI’s – serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

The establishment media, allied closely as it is with the pharmaceutical industry, uniformly fails to stress this common factor, preferring instead to blame shootings on gun rights or, as in the case of Hasan, political motives.

Read entire article: http://www.prisonplanet.com/was-fort-hood-killer-on-psychotropic-drugs.html

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New study confirms the obvious: Babies of women taking antidepressants while pregnant have more health problems

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Amy Norton
ABC News
November 3, 2009

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Babies whose mothers used antidepressants during pregnancy visit the doctor more often and have higher risks of certain health problems than other children their age, a new study suggests.

The study looked at the medical records of nearly 39,000 Norwegian children through the first year of life. It found that rates of congenital heart defects and physical therapy — a potential sign of movement-related problems — were elevated among babies whose mothers used antidepressants throughout pregnancy.

These children also tended to have more doctor visits and higher rates of certain other health problems, like respiratory and digestive symptoms. However, those rates were also elevated among children whose mothers had stopped using antidepressants before pregnancy.

Read entire article: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=8986268

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Pregnant women on antidepressants double risk of premature deliveries: infants more likely to need intensive care

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Julie Steenhuysen
ABC News
October 5, 2009

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Danish women who took antidepressants during pregnancy had twice the risk of pre-term delivery as other women, and their babies were more likely to be admitted to an intensive care unit than those of women who did not take the drugs, researchers reported on Monday.

They said antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, which affect a message-carrying brain chemical called serotonin, may raise the risk of pre-term delivery and affect a baby’s health at birth.

Some prior studies have found that drugs in this class can cross the placenta and appear in the umbilical cord blood of babies whose mothers have taken them.

“The study justifies increased awareness to the possible effects of intrauterine exposure to antidepressants,” Dr. Najaaraq Lund of the Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Read entire article: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=8757454

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