Tag Archives: psychiatric drugs

Dangerous doctors slipping through the cracks

It took the discovery of guns and grenades to suspend the license of a psychiatrist who some say should have come under scrutiny years earlier. One night a Crestwood police sergeant doing a routine building check noticed an open door to the office of psychiatrist Joel Carroll. Stepping inside the cluttered office, he discovered roaming cats, a Colt AR-15 assault rifle and other guns, ammunition, military-grade smoke grenades, sex toys, and pornography. “Well, for the lack of better terminology, we considered it a pigsty,” Sgt. Thomas Kaniewski testified about his April 2009 discovery. “It looked in complete disarray. We couldn’t believe that someone could actually conduct business in an office like that because of the conditions it was in.”

Concern over high medication rate among foster kids—Review of kids’ psych drugs urged

Giovan Bazan was 6 when a doctor first gave him medicine to treat his diagnosis of hyperactivity. Bazan admits he was unruly at the time. Perhaps it was because the only parent he had ever known, his foster mother since he was an infant, had just died. No one asked about that. Nor did anyone check years later to see that he was on a double dose of Ritalin when another physician, seeing a boy so mellowed out that he barely reacted, prescribed an antidepressant. “They start you on one thing for a problem, then the side effects mean you need a new medicine,” Bazan said. “As a foster kid, I’d go between all these doctors, caseworkers, therapists, and [it] seemed like every time there was a new drug to try me on.”

When he turned 18, Bazan elected to stop all medications. It turned out he didn’t need any of them.

After surviving war in Iraq, U.S. troops now being killed by Big Pharma

They survived live fire, explosive devices, terror attacks and grueling desert conditions. But upon returning home to seek treatment for the mental anguish that too often accompanies war, U.S. soldiers are now being killed by the pharmaceutical industry in record numbers.

A recent example is found with the late Senior Airman Anthony Mena, who returned home from Baghdad only to be killed by a toxic cocktail of prescription medications in his apartment in the USA. As the New York Times reports, a toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood

Psychiatric News — Antidepressants/Antismoking Drugs Linked to Violent Behavior

A link between several types of psychotropic medications and violent behavior toward others has been documented in a recent study.

The medications most strongly linked to violent behavior were the smoking-cessation aid varenicline and antidepressants, regardless of class.In a study published in the December 15, 2010, PloS One, the researchers used 2004 to 2009 data from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System. They found that during the study period, 780,169 serious adverse events of one kind or another had been reported for 484 drugs, and that of those serious adverse events, 1,937 had been acts of violence. They defined a violent event as any case report containing one or more of the following items: homicide, physical assault, physical abuse, homicidal ideation, or violence-related symptom, but not more ambiguous descriptions such as crime, aggression, belligerence, or hostility.

Concerns Raised About Combat Troops Using Psychotropic Drugs

As U.S. military leaders gathered Wednesday to give their latest update on the rash of Army suicides, new questions are being raised about a U.S. Central Command policy that allows troops to go to Iraq and Afghanistan with up to a six-month supply of psychotropic drugs. Prescription drugs have already been linked to some military suicides, and a top Army official warned last year about the danger of soldiers abusing that medication. Psychiatrists are now coming down hard on the military for continuing to sanction certain psychotropic drugs for combat troops, saying the risk from side effects is too great. “There’s no way on earth that these boys and girls are getting monitored on the field,” said Dr. Peter Breggin, a New York-based psychiatrist who has extensively studied the side effects of psychiatric drugs. “The drugs simply shouldn’t be given to soldiers.”