Prescription for Violence documentary exposes oversight failures that enabled decades of addiction and neurological injury from psychiatric drugs. Its new documentary explores how industry influence and diagnostic labels conceal widespread harm and rising public health risks.
By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
December 19, 2025
CCHR’s latest documentary, Prescription for Violence, raises the alarm over the widespread, little-known fact that many psychiatric drugs are addictive, disfiguring, and capable of producing catastrophic neurological damage. This is harm that the group says now warrants a federal investigation into how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed such risks to proliferate for decades.
Among the most disturbing adverse reactions is akathisia, a tormenting condition that can drive even the most stable individual into extreme agitation, self-destructive impulses, or sudden violence. CCHR’s new documentary, Prescription for Violence, exposes how pervasively this reaction has been ignored or minimized.
Psychiatrist Samuel Lee describes akathisia as “restlessness, not being comfortable in your body.”
Victims in the film put it more bluntly: “I just can’t believe that a drug a psychiatrist gives you does this to you and you have no control over it.” Another stated, “Akathisia is internal torment, it’s physical and emotional torment, you can’t get away from it, it’s 24/7. It’s like hell.” And another: “Akathisia, it won’t kill you, it will make you want to kill yourself. It’s the feeling of ants, or fire, or electricity coursing head to toe, all over, right underneath the skin, right underneath the skin… The pain is so bad you can’t see anything else… Death is the welcome thought,” as it would be “the only relief.”
Los Angeles trial attorney Brent Wisner comments, “If you read some of these case studies about people who are under these drugs, it’s a torture that I would wish on nobody.”
CCHR International President Jan Eastgate says the system enabling this is indefensible: “Psychiatric drug damage is excused because the person is labeled ‘mentally disordered.’ It’s blaming the victim for the poison they were given.”
She continued: “The FDA has allowed drug makers and psychiatrists to argue—with no scientific support—that people ‘need’ drugs that can drive them to suicide, violence, and irreversible neurological injury. It is one of the great medical hoaxes of our time.”
Regulatory Capture and Massive Profit Motives
Pharmaceutical companies spent more than $350 million lobbying Congress and federal regulators—including the FDA—in 2022 alone, according to OpenSecrets. Former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Marcia Angell has warned, “When the FDA is dependent on industry fees, it creates a dangerous incentive to prioritize profit over public safety.”[1]
The money at stake is enormous. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data show U.S. prescription drug expenditures totaled $370 billion in 2019, with 41% spent through federal Health and Human Services (HHS) programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.[2] With no meaningful effort to curb harmful psychiatric prescribing, drug companies increasingly view populations dependent on or harmed by psychiatric drugs as an expanding revenue base.
Withdrawal: A Crisis Hidden Behind Word-Play
Long-term antidepressant use can cause physical dependence and debilitating withdrawal, all facts that manufacturers moved to conceal. At a 1996 closed-door meeting funded by drug makers, SSRI withdrawal was deliberately renamed “antidepressant discontinuation syndrome” to avoid the public associating these reactions with addiction.[3]
In CCHR’s documentary, psychologist Gretchen Watson states: “These drugs are powerful and our brains and entire bodies adapt to them. And often people experience very serious psychiatric symptoms when they’re withdrawing.” These include dizziness, insomnia, impaired concentration, fatigue, headache, tremor, nightmares, depressed mood, irritability, anxiety, and panic attacks.[4]
Dr. Mark Horowitz, a Clinical Research Fellow in Psychiatry in England, notes: “It’s not the time taken for the drug to leave the system that determines the length of the effect. It’s the time taken for the system to readapt to the drug not being there that explains how long withdrawal symptoms can last for.”[5]
A Lancet Psychiatry review found withdrawal in 15% of patients, while other analyses estimate 56%.[6]
Psychiatrist Samuel Lee concludes: “Just the fact that the body’s withdrawing from the SSRIs, if too abruptly taken away, proves that actually there is a physiologic and mental addiction to the SSRIs.”
Mental health defense attorney Kendra Parris adds that calling it “discontinuation syndrome” is “sophistry—it’s word-play.” It is withdrawal by another name.
When patients worsen on psychiatric drugs, psychiatrists often declare them “treatment-resistant.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring explains that this frequently masks iatrogenic injury, harm directly caused by psychiatric drugs themselves. Psychotropics can create the very symptoms later mislabeled as “persistent illness.” These are drug-induced conditions, not underlying disorders. He adds, Those harmed by withdrawal syndromes—also called protracted withdrawal—sustain neurological injury that does not resolve even when the drug is reinstated. This is a defining feature of brain damage: reinstating the substance does not reverse the harm.[7]
Tardive dyskinesia (TD), which is disfiguring involuntary movements of the face, limbs, and torso, occurs in 20%–50% of antipsychotic users and can also be triggered by antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and stimulants.[8] Instead of addressing the cause, psychiatry relabeled TD as a “neurological disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), transforming drug-induced injury into a billable diagnosis it into a billable diagnosis.[9]
In 2020, nearly 77 million Americans were on psychiatric drugs; over 11.1 million were on antipsychotics, including 829,372 children aged 0–17. That means 2.2–5.6 million Americans may already be permanently affected by TD from antipsychotics alone.[10]
A second revenue stream has emerged: TD “treatment” drugs, many producing side effects nearly identical to the original injury, including restlessness, drooling, irregular heartbeat, and trembling and shaking of the fingers or hands. Some were approved despite the admission that “the mechanism of action is unclear.” The TD-drug market exceeded $14 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $23 billion by 2033.[11]
Another antipsychotic-induced condition, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, is estimated to have killed 100,000 Americans, yet psychiatry again redefined it as a “disorder,” masking a drug-induced toxic reaction.[12]
Eastgate states: “This is a closed loop of harm and profit. First, the drugs cause neurological damage; then new drugs are sold to ‘treat’ the damage—and both are marketed as medical progress.” Further, “There is zero accountability for this abuse, especially for those forced to take psychotropic drugs under involuntary commitment and community treatment laws. They cannot refuse the drugs, and they cannot prevent the known damage the drugs will cause.”
Dr. Witt-Doerring underscores the magnitude of this failure: “Taking psychiatric medications long-term is like playing Russian roulette… The truth is, these medications can substantially worsen your life over time.”[13]
Eastgate concludes: “Prescribing drugs known to cause neurological injury and excusing the harm because the person is ‘mentally disordered,’ is like handing someone a seatbelt made of barbed wire and insisting it’s for their protection. The injury isn’t accidental. It’s built in.”
CCHR says the DSM, the FDA’s permissive drug approvals, and aggressive psychiatric-pharmaceutical marketing have created a system where drug-induced harm is relabeled as illness, monetized, and buried under diagnostic expansion. CCHR calls for a full federal investigation and urges the public to watch Prescription for Violence: Psychiatry’s Deadly Side Effects for additional information.
[1] “How Big Pharma Controls the FDA: Lobbying and Fast-Tracked Approvals,” The White Rabbit Report, 21 Sept. 2024, https://thewhiterabbitreport.substack.com/p/how-big-pharma-controls-the-fda-lobbying
[2] “Drug Spending,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, 16 Dec. 2024, https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/featured/drug-spending/
[3] https://www.cchrint.org/cchrs-exposure-of-antidepressant-risks-false-marketing-of-the-chemical-imbalance-theory/; Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., Prozac Backlash, (Simon & Schuster, NY, 2000), p. 76
[4] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/06/07/high-antidepressant-use-calls-for-a-de-prescribing-de-escalation-policy
[5] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/06/07/high-antidepressant-use-calls-for-a-de-prescribing-de-escalation-policy/; https://europeantimes.news/2024/05/users-of-antidepressants-may-suffer-due-to-doctors-not-knowing-new-research-and-guidelines/
[6] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/06/07/high-antidepressant-use-calls-for-a-de-prescribing-de-escalation-policy/; Jonathan Henssler, M.D., et al., “Incidence of antidepressant discontinuation symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” Lancet Psychiatry, 5 June 2024, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(24)00133-0/fulltext
[7] Dr Josef Witt-Doerring, “The Ethics of Long-Term Psychiatric Drug Use and Why We Need a Better Way,” MAD, 27 Feb 2025, https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/02/ethics-psychiatric-drug-use/
[8] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/10/11/consumers-beware-of-antipsychotics-long-term-debilitating-effects/; Elyse M. Cornett, PhD, “Medication-Induced Tardive Dyskinesia: A Review and Update,” The Ochsner Journal, Summer 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472076/
[9] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/10/11/consumers-beware-of-antipsychotics-long-term-debilitating-effects/; Elyse M. Cornett, PhD, “Medication-Induced Tardive Dyskinesia: A Review and Update,” The Ochsner Journal, Summer 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472076/
[10] https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/people-taking-psychiatric-drugs/
[11] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tardive-dyskinesia-td-treatment-drugs-4oogc
[12] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/10/11/consumers-beware-of-antipsychotics-long-term-debilitating-effects/; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3726098/
[13] Dr Josef Witt-Doerring, “The Ethics of Long-Term Psychiatric Drug Use and Why We Need a Better Way,” MAD, 27 Feb 2025, https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/02/ethics-psychiatric-drug-use/
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