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

Psychiatrist hid records in Virginia Tech shooting

The missing mental health records of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho just turned up ... in the home of the psychiatrist who was treating him.

In 2007, Dr. Robert C. Miller claimed that he didn't know where these records were but they were recently found in his home, during a document discovery phase of a pending trial.

Parents of some of the victims of the shooting are smelling a cover-up.

To see the full details of this and more revelations in the case read: Virginia Tech Shooter's Psych Doctor Hid Mental Health Records for Seung-Hui Cho

If you are reading this then you are mentally ill

Well according to psychiatrists you are.

Believe it or not, psychiatrists are planning to add a new disease to the next edition of their "Bible", the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM V) and that disease is ... "Internet addiction".

What this means is that you are sick and need psychiatric drugs. So get out your wallet or your medical insurance and prepare to cough up dough so they can medicate you for the rest of your life.

Here is the full story: If you're reading this you're "sick, sick, sick"

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

Difference between mental and physical disease

Here is a very informative and entertaining video:

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

ADHD drugs found to be ineffective in long-term study

A study of children on ADHD medication has found that over a period of eight years the drugs made no difference at all to the children in terms of behavior but that the drugs caused stunted growth. The other serious side-effects of these drugs were not mentioned.

Here is the complete article: Study admits that drugs may have long-term risk.

Mental Health Screening

Watch this short video if you care about the future of your children: Mental Health Screening

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?

Another Psychiatrist caught lying about drug industry money

There have been a lot of revelations in recent months about the undisclosed financial ties between leading psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. The bright light of truth is being shone by Senator Charles Grassley as he continues his investigation into this sordid area of medicine.

So it's not surprising that another leading psychiatrist has been caught: Psych Doctor Nemeroff Barred from Emory University Chairmanship after Revelation of Secret Financial Ties to Big Pharma.

A Psychiatrist telling it like it is

The media (because they prefer "controversy" to facts) and those opposed to Scientology often attempt to characterize Scientologists as being totally against psychiatry. This is not accurate. We are against psychiatric abuses. For example, if every psychiatrist in the world were like Peter Breggin, I don't think we'd have much disagreement with the field of psychiatry.

Latest Freedom Magazine

The latest edition of Freedom Magazine is now available for online reading: Psychiatric Screening: Destroying Lives for Profit.

The magazine contains great articles, I especially recommend the "A License To Print Money" article by Alexander Cockburn, an eye-opening expose of the ties between Big Pharma and the Media.