Harrisburg psychiatrist Stefan Kruszewski offers no pain relief for pharmaceutical companies. He testifies against them when they make false claims about their drugs, and he’s good at it. The AstraZeneca drug Seroquel is for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but the company marketed it to seniors and kids for other things and wooed doctors into over-prescribing it.
As Dr. Allen Frances read through the list of proposed changes to psychiatry’s bible of mental sickness, alarms started ringing in his own mind. “I was surprised,” the renowned U.S. psychiatrist says, “that the proposals managed to be much worse than my most pessimistic expectations.”
Since 1950, man has landed on the moon, made computers commonplace and harnessed nuclear power. We’re obviously using our minds to the fullest. Yet the number of ways we can go officially crazy has nearly tripled. The hugely influential reference book used by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals the world over to diagnose mental illness — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — currently lists 357 types of psychiatric afflictions, up from 128 when the first volume was published in 1952.
Here’s some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don’t work. What’s even more depressing is that the pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work. As a physician, this is frightening to me.
Psychiatry’s solution to life’s problems is stigmatizing psychiatric labels and the administration of toxic drugs which international drug regulatory agencies have warned can cause mania, worsening depression, anxiety, delusions, seizures, liver failure, suicide, mania, heart attack, stroke, fatal blood clots, sudden death, diabetes and much more.