The "Science" behind Psychiatric Drugs

I just came across this fascinating article about The Psychiatric Drug Crisis in the pharmaceutical industry.

The article covers not only that crisis, but also the history behind many psychiatric drugs and the complete lack of science behind them.

For example, the use of the drug lithium for people who experienced mania came about because it sedated guinea pigs that had been injected with the urine of manic patients. Honest, I kid you not. If you don't believe me, read the article (see the link above).

Here is a quote from the article:

By 1960, the major classes of psychiatric drugs—among them, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs, known as anxiolytics—had been discovered and were on their way to becoming a seventy-billion-dollar market. Having been discovered by accident, however, they lacked one important element: a theory that accounted for why they worked (or, in many cases, did not). That didn’t stop drug makers and doctors from claiming that they knew.

The article also exposes the truth about the myth of the "chemical imbalance," which even its long time proponents no longer espouse.

It's nice to have someone in the actual industry completely validate everything you've been saying for the past twenty plus years.

Criminal conduct by Eli Lilly costs them 1.42 Billion

Here is a report on the criminal conduct of Eli Lilly and how much it is costing them. But why aren't we seeing the people who did it prosecuted and thrown in jail? Well, let's hope someone in authority decides soon that it's time to put these criminals behind bars.

Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights

These are important rights. Watch the video and realize that everyone, no matter their mental state, needs these rights.

Psychiatic Drug Side Effect Search Engine

If you shop on Amazon or many other online sites you will be able to read reviews of a product before you purchase. These reviews are usually written by other consumers like yourself who have bought and used the product. Their comments give you information you can use to make an informed decision.

So where do you go to get the same type of reviews for prescription drugs?

The commercials or magazine ads were written by the drug company. They are selling the drug so they will paint the rosiest possible picture. Articles about the drugs on news sites are suspect because of the huge clout drug companies have due to their enormous advertising budgets. (You aren't going to say nasty things about one of your biggest advertisers.)

You could go to the FDA website and hunt around for data but that's not necessarily easy to do.

Until now it's been tough for consumers to get the facts on prescription drugs, but not anymore. Now you can check out the facts about psychiatric drugs by going to the Psychiatric Drug Side Effect Search Engine, an easy-to-use website that will tell you the other side of the story.

When you go to the site check out the two videos linked to in the top left corner of the page. They tell you what the search engine is and how to use it.

Don't be fooled by the marketing, the glossy ads and the drug company funded research. Get the facts.

Answer to Jim regarding Psychiatry and Scientology

Jim Gatos said:

Grahame,

I saw this article;

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32271786/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/

thought I'd bring it here.

I'm curious, what's the "connection" with Scientology and Psychiatry?"

Thanks
Jim

Hey Jim,

The only "connection" is that we in Scientology are opposed to the abuses in Psychiatry.

The article you link to is typical of these abuses. Psychiatry and its main sponsor, the Pharmaceutical Industry, need to expand their profit base so Big Pharma finds some willing psychiatrists, hands them a study they can put their names to and the results are published.

The questions to ask before falling for the marketing propaganda in an article such as this are:

1. What are the financial ties between the researchers and the pharmaceutical industry?
2. What actual physical tests were carried out to determine that these 3 year old kids have "depression"?
3. If no physical tests were carried out then how can anyone possibly assert that these kids have "depression"?
4. Do physical tests actually exist to show that someone has "depression"?
5. If not then how come so much money is being made from the widespread prescription of drugs that address a "disease" that cannot be proven to exist.
6. What treatment is recommended for toddler depression? What are the side-effects?
7. What are the long-term effects of giving psychiatric drugs to toddlers?

(The most common side-effect of psychiatric drugs in toddlers, according to the FDA's adverse reactions database, is death.)

By-the-way, I don't say that the set of symptoms that have been labeled as "depression" don't exist. What I say is that they are a set of symptoms for which the underlying condition has not been accurately diagnosed.

Many real, treatable diseases can cause the symptoms that are labeled "depression". Here is an example from the CDC web site: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Symptoms.

References:
The Corrupt Alliance of the Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Industry
Psychiatric Drug Side Effects Search Engine
Video: Where the Truth Lies
Video: What Consumer, doctors and pharmacists say about Psychiatric Drugs
Video: How to use the Psychiatric Drug Side Effects Search Engine

Testing The Mother's Act

Here is an excellent article on a dangerous piece of legislation called the Mother's Act.

Stress Testing the MOTHERS Act

Film Review: Generation RX

Here is a review of the documentary "Generation RX":



You can read my review of this film here: Generation Rx - A must-see for all parents

What's wrong with Clinical Trials?

Almost every day a new drug is labeled "safe and effective" by the FDA and released onto the market. Because it is "safe and effective" doctors start to prescribe it and people start to take it, but how "safe and effective" is it really? All to often, after months or years of use a "safe and effective" drug is found to be "deadly and ineffective". Examples abound, like thalidomide (the wonder drug that was found to cause horrific birth defects), Vioxx (which caused severe and sometimes fatal heart problems) and Zyprexa (which caused diabetes in tens of thousands of people).

What enabled the drug to be labeled "safe and effective" were the results from the procedure know as a "Clinical Trial". So it would seem like a good idea to understand exactly what a clinical trial is and what the results from it actually mean. Here is an eye-opening video that will explain it to you.

A Psychologist speaks about Psychiatry

Here is Dr. John Breeding Ph.D., a psychologist, talking about the uses psychiatry is put to in our society. This is quite eye-opening and he mentions a couple of bills currently before Congress that you should contact your representatives about.

Generation Rx - A must-see for all parents

We know the depths to which corporate executives will descend in order to make a profit. For example, we saw Big Tobacco CEOs stand up before Congress and swear that cigarettes did not cause cancer. Later it was revealed that they knew their cigarettes caused cancer and they lied to protect their profits.

The same story has been going on for a couple of decades now in the pharmaceutical field. The most noticeable difference being that the ones standing up and blatantly lying about the dangerousness of certain billion dollar earning drugs are not Big Pharma CEOs but doctors and other "authorities" who are paid huge sums by Big Pharma.

The rampant corruption in the medical field and the toll it is taking in terms of human lives, and especially children's lives, is exposed in the new documentary Generation Rx, produced and directed by acclaimed documentary maker Kevin P. Miller. The film is a riveting must-see for every person who has any contact with the medical field.

If you are a parent you should see this movie if you don't want to make the mistakes that the parents featured in the movie made. "If I'd known there was a 4 in 100 chance of my daughter committing suicide while on these drugs," says one mother, "you can be sure I wouldn't have let her take them." Her daughter, who took the drugs because she was nervous about a school test, committed suicide just 24 hours after starting on a prescribed anti-depressant. Too late the parents started researching to find out what had happened and they discovered that the truth about the danger of these drugs is out there and easy to find.

The movie is filled with facts about the profits the drug companies make and the human suffering caused by these "safe and effective" drugs. Numerous experts are interviewed and all tell the same story: marketing replacing science, profit usurping help.

One interview that especially caught my attention was with award winning author Robert Whitaker. Whitaker admitted that initially he was a proponent of the "wonder drugs" but that when he looked into the science behind the drug company claims he found that it wasn't there. The drugs were backed by marketing, not science.

If you live on planet Earth, then you need to see this documentary. It can be purchased here: Generation Rx DVD.

In China they execute people for this

Let me begin by saying that I'm against the death penalty. I am for appropriate justice such as a sentence that gives the offender a chance to make up for the damage his criminal acts caused.

So, in China when people, in order to make a profit, carry out acts that kill or cause harm they are given pretty stiff sentences: Two condemned to death for role in China milk crisis and in 2007, Ex-Food and Drug Chief Sentenced to Death.

So what would have happened to the executives of Eli Lilly who pushed the killer drug Zyprexa on thousands of unsuspecting people. Here are a few quotes from an excellent article in Rolling Stone: Marketing a Phony "Miracle" Drug (Subtitle: Created to treat schizophrenia, Zyprexa wound up being used on misbehaving kids. How the pharmaceutical industry turned a flawed and dangerous drug into a $16 billion bonanza)

The mechanisms used to leverage this growth [of the antipsychotic drugs to $16 billion in sales a year] were in some ways the most modern and perfect the pharmaceutical industry had developed, but they were also, according to state and federal prosecutors, illegal. [Ely] Lilly has already agreed to pay $2.6 billion to settle charges that it built the market for Zyprexa first by concealing its side effects, and then by marketing it "off-label," for diseases for which it had not been approved.

... medical researchers who have studied the atypical antipsychotics say that, in the final tally, the drugs, which have already been linked to some deaths, may eventually be responsible for tens of thousands of cases of diabetes and other potentially fatal diseases.

I added the highlighting of what I consider the key phrases above. If that happened in China what do you suppose would be the sentence for the Eli Lilly executives? And what do they get in the USA? The company has to pay out $2.6 billion in fines. That sounds like a lot, but consider that antipsychotics make $16 billion a year. What is $2.6 billion compared to that?

So how was the entire medical community persuaded that these drugs were so wonderful that they should even be given to young children?

[Regarding atypical antipsychotic medication] "Almost the whole scientific community was conned into thinking — as a consequence of good marketing — that this was a different and better set of drugs. The evidence, as it's all added up, has shown this to be untrue."

... despite their early promise for treating schizophrenia, the drugs have not even performed any better than the crude and imprecise earlier medications that preceded them. "We have been paying $16 billion a year instead of $2 billion a year for drugs that seem to be no better and might be worse," says Douglas Leslie, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina who contributed to an extensive federal study of the drugs.

The story of how Zyprexa and other atypicals became a multibillion-dollar market suggests that the medical community — doctors, researchers, the institutions that back them — may be themselves prone to a placebo effect: the willed conviction that a new drug, presented as a breakthrough, must in fact be one, that a product sold as healing must in fact do good.

Read the article. It's a real eye-opener. Marketing a Phony "Miracle" Drug

Antipsychotics are killing people

More evidence has emerged of the dangers of the psychiatric drugs known as antipsychotics. Antipsychotic Drugs Shorten Lifespan of Alzheimer's Patients.

Most telling of all is this from the results of the study:

After three years, less than a third of people on antipsychotics were alive compared to nearly two-thirds that were given the placebo.

Perhaps the drugs work by killing the patient, thus "curing" them?

Drug Companies are at it again

GlaxoSmithKline has been caught exploiting people in third world countries. Their unethical behavior has resulted in the death of twelve babies. Read the article here: Poor Families Pressed Into Vaccine Trials by Drug Companies; 12 Babies Die

How to make a million

How do you make a million dollars? It seems that in the psychiatric industry it is quite simple. You make a deal with a drug company or two, you promote their drugs, open up new markets such as children, make very, very sure you don't tell anyone of your blatant conflict of interest then bank the dough.

It has been working for years for many psychiatrists but recently they've been found out.

Here is the latest from the NY Times: Expert or Shill

Here are some other articles on the same subject:

• Pharmaceutical Industry Hustlers
• Feeding on children
• The Truth about Psychotropic Drugs
• Who owns the Psychiatric Industry?
• Generation RX

Please encourage your representatives in Congress to increase the investigations and to bring about legislation to stop these abuses.

Film Review: GenerationRx

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I will be seeing it soon at which time I'll give you my own review.

In the meantime here is a review from NaturalNews.com: Film Review: GenerationRx Documents Chemical Abuse of Children by Pharmaceutical Industry, Modern Psychiatry

Scientology is Solutions: Drug Addiction

For someone who has never suffered the physical and mental anguish of drug addiction, it is easy to say "get over it" or think that drug addicts are weak willed, but anyone who has been in the horrible situation of being addicted to drugs and who has attempted to get free of their death grip knows how hard it truly is.

It's easy to get addicted. There are plenty of ill-intentioned people out there who are only too willing to supply the initial hit that will create a paying customer for life. And whether the drug is illegal or given by prescription makes little difference to the addict for the results are the same, the only difference being who the money goes to: a pusher on the street or a pusher in a plush corporate office.

So what can be done about this world-wide epidemic?

First is to educate children, teens and even adults so they understand the truth about drugs: The Foundation for a Drug Free World is an organization sponsored by the International Association of Scientologists. It's website just got a major overhaul: Foundation for a Drug Free World. They provide a ton of educational materials including booklets on each of the common drugs people get addicted to, and a set of award-winning Public Service Announcements which quickly communicate the truth about drugs.

Next is to encourage kids to take responsibility for themselves and others where drugs are concerned. The "Drug Free Marshals" (Drug Free Ambassadors outside North America) campaign encourages kids to sign a "Drug Free" pledge and to be active, helping their friends stay off drugs.

Next is to help those who are addicted to free themselves. L. Ron Hubbard developed secular (non-religious) methods to help people get off drugs. The largest drug rehab network in the world, Narconon, uses these methods to get people off drugs and gives them the tools they need to avoid being caught in the trap of drugs again. Narconon has the highest success rate of any drug rehab program (Narconon Program Results).

Finally there is warning people of the dangers of drugs prescribed by doctors who have not been honestly informed by drug companies of their horrendous side-effects: Making A Killing (Documentary).

Scientologists are involved in all the above programs. We want to see people live better lives by being free of harmful drugs.

Pharmaceutical Industry Hustlers

Here is a powerful expose that starts:

After twenty long years, it appears that the epidemic in mental disorders in America might be coming to an end. It won't happen because of any great medical breakthrough but rather because the perpetrators of the greatest healthcare fraud in history are finally being exposed.

Read it and make up your own mind: Pharmaceutical Industry Hustlers – Part I

Feeding on children

Psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman has been in the news quite a bit recently. First we learned that while championing the use of powerful anti-psychotic drugs on toddlers, he was accepting over a million dollars from drug companies without disclosing it (Harvard Researchers Face Heat Over Drug Company Payments).

Now we learn:

Newly disclosed court documents portray Dr. Joseph Biederman, a leading Harvard child psychiatrist, as courting drug company money by promising that his work at Massachusetts General Hospital would help promote the use of antipsychotic drugs for youngsters diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

We also learn:

In one 1999 e-mail, a Janssen employee seeking to make sure Biederman receives $3,000 that the company owes him writes frantically to his superiors: "Dr. Biederman is not someone to jerk around. He is a very powerful national figure in child psych and has a very short fuse."

Does that sound like a man dedicated to the furtherance of science or a money-motivated ghoul feeding off a sector of society that is least able to defend itself against such abuses?

Read the article and make up your own mind: Papers reveal push on drug firm funds.

Other related articles:
Congressional investigation of Harvard psychiatrist

Generation RX

It seems that Scientologists are not the only people who recognize the dangers of psychiatric drugging of children. A new movie, GenerationRX, by critically acclaimed director Kevin Miller, examines the "mass abandonment of medical ethics, and the routine betrayal of an entire generation" and investigates "collusion between drug companies and their regulatory watchdogs at the FDA and focuses on the powerful stories of real families who followed the advice of their doctors - and faced devastating consequences for doing so."

Here is the trailer:

Psychiatrist Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties

A psychiatrist who is the host of a popular radio show on health, and who promotes drugs as the preferred treatment, has been exposed as receiving at least $1.3 million in the last few years from drug companies without disclosing it to his producer or his listeners.

Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin has been exposed by Senator Charles E. Grassley as part of Grassley's ongoing investigation into conflict of interest amongst the nation’s leading researchers and doctors. He is comparing their conflict-of-interest disclosures with records of actual payments from drug companies. And he is finding that the records often conflict, sometimes starkly.

The full story of this psychiatrist and his selling of his professional soul to drug companies is given here: Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties