Tag Archives: antipsychotic

America conned: Psycho pharma drug pushing empire under fire

Is America truly stricken with widespread mental illness? Do tens of millions need mind-altering drugs? A recent flurry of media articles lead readers to a realization that Big Pharma and the “mental health” industry have deceived Americans on a grand scale.

The “New York Review of Books” two-part article by Dr. Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, summarizes it extremely well. She analyzes three books by authors Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. Each deconstructs the apparent mental illness epidemic and theory that mental disorders stem from brain chemical imbalances which can be corrected by drugs.

Dr. Angell’s review has sparked a host of other journalists to applaud her and fuel the fire. An article in Forbes even concludes, “psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed.”

Battling over happy pills

In this corner: Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and frequent critic of the pharmaceutical industry. In the opposite corner: Dr. Peter Kramer, Brown University psychiatry professor and author of the mega-selling “Listening to Prozac,’’ a book that helped convince thousands of Americans to live better, chemically.

At issue: a two-part article by Angell, published in The New York Review of Books, that assails psychiatrists and their pharmaceutical helpmeets, mainly antidepressants, on several fronts.

Item: Angell, quoting, among others, Tufts University psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Carlat, attacks the widely held belief that depression and other mental disorders result from chemical imbalances in the brain. Item: Citing the research of British psychologist Irving Kirsch, Angell writes that some of the most widely used antidepressants, including Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, and Effexor, performed only marginally better than placeItem: Angell uses a book by journalist Robert Whitaker to suggest that newly minted antipsychotic drugs may be causing “an epidemic of brain dysfunction.’’

Interview with “Psychiatryland” Author, Phillip Sinaikin, MD

Psychiatry mimics science but is not a real science. The symptoms it treats are subjective and have not been demonstrated and cannot be demonstrated at the cellular level. That gives psychiatrists free reign to just experiment and symptom chase, often insanely chasing the side effects and negative interactions of the current drug regimen with more and more drugs. Polypharmacy is also a way psychiatrists can distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive market. No one believes you need a specialist for one drug — any primary care physician can give you Zoloft — but for multi-drug therapy you do. If you don’t write a prescription as a psychiatrist, you won’t work these days. It is like being a pacifist and having no choice but working in a bullet factory.

Heart Warning Added to Label on Popular Antipsychotic Drug Seroquel

Today the New York Times has reported, “AstraZeneca is adding a new heart warning to the labels of Seroquel, its blockbuster antipsychotic drug, at the request of the Food and Drug Administration, company and agency officials said on Monday.” And that “Seroquel is one of the top-selling drugs in the world, at $5.3 billion last year, including $3.7 billion in the United States. Introduced in 1997, it has been approved for schizophrenia, bipolar disorrder and severe depression. Seroquel has caused legal problems for AstraZeneca, including a $520 million payment in 2009 to settle government charges of illegal marketing. Thousands of lawsuits are pending over side effects like diabetes.”

While this is seemingly good news, look a little deeper in today’s article from Paul Thacker, an investigator for Project on Government Oversight…

Big lies from Big Insurance drown out the proper cure

Reviews published in the two most recent issues of the New York Review of Books (NYRB), taking the psychiatric profession to task for the shameful influence of the pharmaceutical industry, demonstrate the potentially destructive impulse of the profit motive.

Psychiatry has almost dropped its original reliance on therapy in favor of pills, despite evidence that therapy or, surprisingly, exercise are usually just as effective for depression as the new prescription drugs. There is more money in prescribing pills. Diagnosis of mental illness has expanded dramatically so that, as the review author ironically reports, “It looks though it will be harder and harder to be normal.”