Ritalin remains one of the primary drugs prescribed for children with supposed behavioral problems. Rather than be encouraged to modify diet and increase exercise, children are being given drugs by their doctors instead. Research from the National Institute of Mental Health has revealed that popular Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) drugs like Ritalin are responsible for causing sudden death in many children.
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.
Irish health inspectors have uncovered evidence of bad management and untrained medical staff administering electric shock therapy to patients in psychiatric wards around the country. Many of Ireland’s psychiatric wards may be closed as they are “unfit for human habitation.”
Clearly the drug industry needs New Year’s Resolutions–and to honor them better than the Corporate Integrity Agreements with the government it keeps breaking. How about: “We will stop upgrading anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder to ‘treatment resistant depression’ to sell drugs. We will admit that studies are beginning to show that the reason depression is sometimes treatment resistant is because it wasn’t depression to begin with but consumer advertising.”
In Illinois, advocates are calling for restrictions on Medicaid’s reimbursement for antipsychotic drugs and for enforcement of rules requiring informed patient consent, among other measures.