Drugmakers encouraged doctors to prescribe these drugs for children before the FDA sanctioned their use for youngsters. This was particularly troubling, given that the drugs can cause diabetes and weight gain, side effects that prompted thousands of lawsuits claiming that drugmakers tried to hide evidence of these problems.
The 12-year-old web site lists 3,500 crime related news reports linked to the use of SSRI antidepressants with celebrities like Wynona Ryder, Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy, Anna Nicole Smith, Heather Locklear, Glen Campbell, Carrie Fisher, Sharon Osbourne, Phil Hartman, Princess Di’s driver, Patrick Swayze’s Sister, O.J. Simpson and the Crown Prince of Nepal generously sprinkled in.
Many states have sued over the cost of atypical antipsychotic drugs, especially the cost of treating the diabetes and metabolic disorders they cause, which has decimated Medicaid budgets. Yet now the FDA gives pharma the Christmas present of approving Seroquel and Zyprexa for children and hence, Medicaid reimbursement even as its own Division of Pharmacovigilance (DPV) reported a “a direct association between adverse metabolic effects of treatment with atypical antipsychotics” and children!
“No matter how DSM V will be written, it will be flawed. There is no psychiatric diagnosis which has an objective measure. At the moment, all diagnoses are clinical diagnoses, meaning they are subjective. This is a field of humility. There is a lot that we do not know. I think there should be an introduction to DSM V which clearly states that this book is a product of work groups…” – Shirah Vollmer, MD
Genita Petralli, president of nonprofit Green Body and Mind, director of Patient Services at Alternative to Meds Clinic, and an author of several books, says it’s her mission to “educate all those interested in what is causing the epidemic mental health crisis of today, how to avoid it, how to get off psychiatric drugs if you are on them now, and why toxic drugs should not ever be called medicine.” To that end, Petralli launched the area’s first Green Mental Health Care Day, a day where speakers and healers came together to address the problems of psychiatric drugs and offer several alternative solutions.