Congressional Hearings Held On Antidepressant-Induced Suicide In The Military

On February 24, 2010 the Veterans’ Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives chaired by Bob Filner (D-CA) held hearings on “Exploring the Relationship Between Medication and Veteran Suicide.” Military suicides have risen rapidly in recent years at the same time that the prescription of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs has escalated. The hearing focused on the dangers of the newer antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro, Cymbalta, and Effexor.

The New Yorker — “Head Case: Can psychiatry be a science?”

There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent. Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression.

The Australian: Psychiatry’s alarming medicalization of human behavior for their “bible of mental disorders” the DSM

MEDICAL advances can take your breath away. Over the past decade, medical experts have started decoding the human genome to provide genetically-personalised medicine. The experts behind these advances are geniuses. Perhaps in the same vein, the psychiatric profession imagines that their new bible of mental disorders — more than 10 years in the making — will be hailed as milestone of medical achievement. If so, they’d be wrong.