Tag Archives: death

Five dementia sufferers die every day from antipsychotic drugs

Five dementia sufferers die each day after being wrongly prescribed “chemical cosh” drugs, the Department of Health has warned. A Government-commissioned report published in 2009 estimated that 180,000 dementia sufferers are being prescribed anti-psychotic drugs but in as many as 150,000 cases they are unnecessarily being taken, often to keep patients quiet in hospital or nursing homes.

Because the “chemical cosh” drugs are feared to worsen other medical conditions and speed up mental decline, it is estimated that they lead to 1,800 needless deaths – five a day – every year. In addition, they are thought to cause 1,620 strokes, half of which are severe.

Bad Side-Effects Ahead For Pharma?

In 2006, The New York Review of Books reported that four-year-old Rebecca Riley died of the effects of two prescription drugs—Clonidine and Depakote.

These medications, along with Seroquel, were prescribed for Rebecca after she was diagnosed, at the age of two, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder. The three drugs are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of ADHD or long-term treatment of bipolar disorder, nor are they approved for children as young as Rebecca.

The New York Review of Books‘ recent two-part article (1) by Marcia Angell on the treatment of mental illness with psychoactive drugs (those that affect the mental state) addresses an issue that may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks. (All statistics and quotations herein are drawn from Dr. Angell’s article.) It is not illegal for a doctor to prescribe a drug off-label, that is, for a non-FDA-approved use, but a drug marketer cannot lawfully encourage a doctor to do so. The profits in psychoactive drugs, however, make it tempting to flout the law. In the past four years, AstraZeneca (AZN), Pfizer (PFE), Eli Lilly (LLY), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) and Forest Labs (FRX) have all settled federal charges of marketing psychoactive drugs off-label, at a cost running into hundreds of millions.

In Australia— 200 Psych Patients Died Suddenly

MORE than 200 psychiatric patients died in ”unexpected, unnatural or violent” circumstances last year, a report by Victoria’s chief psychiatrist reveals. Six patients died by committing suicide in hospital but most of the 237 deaths occurred in the community…Dr Vine’s annual report for 2009-10 shows that 14 per cent of inpatients were secluded, or confined in a room locked from the outside, in what guidelines say should be used only when a patient poses an immediate risk to himself or others.

A total of 1828 patients were secluded and there were 6059 episodes of seclusion, up slightly from the previous year. More than 1100 were for longer than 12 hours. A total of 1750 patients received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), including 83 children, the youngest of whom was 13.

In Australia – Electric shock therapy on the rise for young

More than 1 million people are electroshocked every year, including children, the elderly and pregnant women. This is simply a brutal, invasive and damaging ‘treatment’ where up to 450 volts of electricity are sent through the skull. Psychiatrists admit they don’t know how electroshock ‘works’ and the reason behind this is simple: it doesn’t work. Not unless you consider cognitive impairment, brain seizures, permament memory loss and death ‘workable.’ Now in Australia, the use of electroshock for the young is on the rise. Mentioned in this article are the atrocities that were committed in Chelmsford psychiatric hospital where patients were put into drugged induced coma’s and electroshocked, killing dozens. That lethal and inhumane practice was exposed and then banned due to the efforts of CCHR. No organization has done more to expose the deadly practice of electroshock, or helped enact more international laws restricting or prohibiting its use, than CCHR.

52% of foster kids are prescribed psych drugs—One of them is fighting back

At just 6 years of age, still grieving over the death of the only mother he had ever known, his foster mother, Giovan Bazan would receive the first of many psychiatric ‘diagnoses’ and drugs that would plague him for the next twelve years of his life. Moved from foster home to foster home, orphanages and other modes of state care, Giovan was stigmatized with a plethora of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs until the age of 18, when he could finally make his own medical decisions and quit. Now a child advocate working part time at the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) in Georgia, Giovan is on a mission: To get a full-time job with DFCS and help enact laws to combat the wholesale labeling and drugging of foster children. In the video below, Giovan tells his story and why he decided to fight back against the abuse of kids in foster care.