Doctor: Dangers of Psychiatric Drugs

[TruthBrigade]

Doctor: Dangers of Psychiatric Drugs

    Russell Blaylock
    Friday, April 20, 2007
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/4/19/194210.shtml?s=lh

The death of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech contains a number of lessons, many of which should have been learned from previous incidences, such as the Columbine high school shootings. Having treated a number of gunshot wounds in my neurosurgical practice over 25 years, I can appreciate the personal horror it entails, for the victims who survive and by the parents of those who were injured and died.

There are a number of common factors surfacing from this latest tragedy. A student who was bullied in earlier years, early signs of serious psychiatric illness, escalating bizarre behavior, police involvement, court ordered psychiatric treatment, use of antidepressants and officials who failed to protect the public.

As far back as 2005, Special Justice Paul M. Barnett indicated in his ordered psychiatric evaluation that Chu represented an "Imminent danger to himself as a result of a psychiatric disorder." Yet, the evaluating psychiatrist did not consider him to be a danger to others.

Of special concern is whether he was on SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor) psychotropic medications, such as the fluorinated SSRI antidepressants (Paxil, Prozac). You may recall that these same antidepressants appeared in most of the other cases of school shootings. There is growing evidence that the SSRI medications, as well as other fluorinated medications, are resulting in increased acts of violence , either suicide, homicide or both.

The first link to SSRI medications came in 1989 when Joseph Wesbecker shot and killed eight people and wounded 12 others before killing himself. The ensuing lawsuit charged that Wesbecker, had just started on an SSRI anti-depressant and that the maker, Eli Lilly, knew that violent behavior was a complication of their medication. Today, both the FDA and the Canadian regulatory agencies recognize that the SSRI medications can induce some people to harm themselves or others. GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Paxil (paraoxetine), admits "hostile episodes" as a complication.

Story Continues Below

  In fact, in their own clinical trials they found homicides, homicidal acts, homicidal ideation and aggressive behavior to be a side effect of the medication. In addition, it was found that children with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) taking the medication experienced hostility episodes 17-times more often than depressed patients. Of particular concern was the finding that 1.1% of healthy, psychiatrically normal people who took an SSRI anti-depressant experienced one or more hostile episodes, while none taking the placebo had such an event.

A number of studies have shown that the most common reason people stop the drug is aggression, agitation and akathisia. Of particular concern is the latter of these-akathisia. The pharmaceutical companies refer to this by using a code word "hyperkinesis", which sounds less ominous to prescribing physicians.

Akathisia is a psychiatric term that means a feeling of tenseness, restlessness and feeling very uncomfortable-like wanting to jump out of your skin. It is also associated with a loss of emotional control, emotional blunting and even psychotic reactions. It has been linked in a number of studies to homicides and suicides. Emotional blunting was described in Chu's psychiatric evaluation and those who witnessed his attack described him as detached and without emotion.

It has been estimated that such side effects with these anti-depressant medications, as well as other fluorinated medications, is grossly underreported to the regulatory agencies. One study estimated only 1 to 10% of cases are ever reported. In 2002 a story aired on the BBC concerning Paxil (paraoxetine). They were inundated with thousands of e-mails from patients on the medication describing "emotional storms", thoughts of violent acts and self-harm, when no such events occurred prior to the medication.

In one publication, the emotional blunting experienced with these medications was described as a "chemical lobotomy". It has also been estimated that 8% of admissions to psychiatric facilities for psychosis and manic behavior is secondary to taking these drugs.

I recently reviewed a number of fluorinated antibiotics and found symptoms of hostility, suicidal thoughts and akathisia to be frequently reported. Despite the growing number of such reports and an expanding number of confirmatory scientific studies linking violent acts to these medications, few in the media seem to be paying attention.

In 2002 a number of murder/suicides occurred on the military base at Fort Bragg, which were linked to the fluorinated antimalarial drug Lariam. The Canadian military experienced a similar rash of murders/suicides and uncontrollable aggression among its soldiers taking the drug as well.

According to the Physician's Desk Reference, used by doctors to prescribe medications, the commonly used fluorinated antibiotics Floxin, Levaquin and Cipro can cause nightmares, psychotic reactions, paranoia, agitation, manic reactions, aggression and hostility, hallucinations and even depersonalization, all symptoms associated with acts of homicide and suicide.

New studies have shown that the fluoride from these medications linger in the brain for long periods and can affect not only memory, learning and thinking, but also trigger violent behavior in a small segment of the population.

The difference with other fluorinated medications is that these anti-depressants are taken for years not weeks, as with an antibiotic. Indeed, recent studies have shown that the fluorinated antidepressant medications remain in the brain for prolonged periods after discontinuing the medication, more so with fluoxetine (Prozac) than Paxil.

In 1990 over 220 fluorinated pharmaceutical drugs were on the market. Now some 1,500 are under development. With millions of people taking this class of fluorinated drugs, as well as other fluorinated medications, similar events as to that at Virginia Tech are bound to occur. I send my prayers for all those who were killed and injured and especially to their families in this time of suffering and grief.

Russell Blaylock, M.D., is a neurosurgeon and nutritionist. He writes the Blaylock Wellness Report, a monthly health newsletter.

[TruthBrigade]

Psychiatric Drugs: Types, Side-Effects, Dangers and Permanent Damage

http://www.sntp.net/drugs/drugs.htm

There are no "safe" psychiatric drugs. Each has numerous harmful short term and largely unknown long term effects. Each psychiatric drug which was orginally heralded as the new "safe" wonder drug, was found to have severe harmful side effects, including addiction, and withdrawal symptoms, among others. Psychiatric drugs obtain their result by causing brain dysfunction.

Thorazine, a strong tranquilizer, creates a very similar effect to a lobotomy (brain surgery) by disrupting frontal lobe nerve activity. Psychiatrists grossly neglect to point out the potential harm of psychiatric drugs to their patients, such as tardive dyskinesia, tardive dementia, general dulling of awareness, emotional numbing, and cognitive dysfunction. Side effects can occur in as high as 50% or more of patients, depending on the drug and dosages, and often the effects are permanent with no known cure. The following modern psychotropic drugs are all dangerous and should not be used by anybody under an circumstances (follow links for detailed information):

    Psychiatric Drugs: Cure or Quackery? - by Lawrence Stevens, J.D.

    1) Neuroleptics (anti-psychotic agents, major tranquilizers) - Such as Haldol, Prolixin, Thorazine, Mellaril, Stelazine, Vesprin, Clozaril, Navane, Trilafon, Tindal, Taractan, and Compazine.

    2) Tricyclic Antidepressants such as Tofranil, Elavil, Adapin, Surmontil, Norpramin, Pamelor, Aventyl, Vivactil, and Anafranil.

    3) Atypical Antidepressants such as Asendin, Ludiomil, Desyrel, and Wellbutrin.

    4) Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (very dangerous antidepessant agents) such as Marplan, Nardil, Parnate, Eldepryl, and Eutonyl.

    5) Lithium

    6) Prozac

    7) Xanax

    7) Minor Tranquilizers - such as Xanax, Valium, Librium, BuSpar, Ativan, Halcion, Tranxene, Paxipam, Centrax, Klonopin, Dalmane, Serax, Ativan, Restoril, Miltown, Equanil, Atarax and Vistaril.

    ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) & ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) drugs (psychostimulants - "speed") - Such as Ritalin (highly addictive), Dexedrine, and Cylert.


Psychiatric Drugs: Neuroleptics

The Effects of Haldol, Prolixin, Thorazine, Mellaril, and Other "Antipsychotic" Drugs

http://www.sntp.net/drugs/tranquilizers.htm#disabling

(This is taken from Chapter 3 of Peter Breggin's book, Toxic Psychiatry.)

    "People's voices came through filtered, strange. They could not penetrate my Thorazine fog; and I could not escape my drug prison." - Janet Gotkin, testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on the Abuse and Misuse of Controlled Drugs in Institutions (1977)

    My concern is that people are having their minds blunted in a way that probably does diminish their capacity to appreciate life. - Jerry Avorn, M.D., Boston Globe, November 25, 1988

    "It's very hard to describe the effects of this drug and others like it. That's why we use strange words like "zombie". But in my case the experience became sheer torture." - Wade Hudson, testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on the Abuse and Misuse of Controlled Drugs in Institutions (1977)

    "Frequent Effects: sedation, drowsiness, lethargy, difficult thinking, poor concentration, nightmares, emotional dullness, depression, despair . . ." - Dr. Calagari's Psychiatric Drugs (1987)

Alexandria sat in my office filled with fright-as much fright as she could feel through the dose of the psychiatric medication. The teenager's face was flat in expression, her body sagged, she moved as if mired down. She looked profoundly depressed. And yet she wasn't feeling at all depressed; she was terrified. She looked depressed because she was suffering from what we psychiatrists call "psychomotor retardation"-the enforced paralysis of mind and body that routinely results from treatment with neuroleptics, the drugs most frequently given to patients labeled schizophrenic.

A few weeks earlier, Alexandria had begun to see and hear things that weren't there and to mutter incoherently about God and death. The parents of this sensitive, poetic teenager at first thought she was going through a phase, maybe even playing a role from one of her beloved novels. That was until she stopped coming out of her room. When they tried to coax her out, she screamed hateful things at them about how they came from the devil and wanted to hurt her. Alexandria's parents saw an ad on TV promoting a local private psychiatric hospital for "the caring treatment" of adolescents, and they found hope in it. She was "acting crazy" some of the time, they later told me, but she was still herself when they left her in the hospital the first day. She was full of vitality and completely alert. When they said good-bye, she hugged them and cried. Her mother cried, too.

When they visited again the next day, they hardly recognized their daughter as she trudged toward them with shuffling steps and bent shoulders. She had been injected with Haldol. Alexandria's parents took her out of the hospital and brought her directly to me.

Now I talked alone with Alexandria while her parents sat nervously in the waiting room. Out of the corners of her eyes, she looked inquisitively around my office. She touched a gleaming crystal and patted a model of a fawn. It was as if she couldn't believe she was in such a bright and cheery room filled with wonderful distractions. I saw her eyes shift toward a small carved duck that was nearer to me, and I handed it to her.

She said, "Exactly."

I wondered what lay behind that cryptic and seemingly inappropriate remark, but I said nothing. She seemed to be relaxing.

She fondled the duck for awhile. "It's so colorful," she said.

"It's one of my favorites, too. I love birds. Do you like the Audubon prints?"

She turned slowly in her chair to see them. "No," she said. "He shot birds."

"Yes, I understand that," I agreed. "I don't like that either."

After a pause, she said, "What's happening to me?"

"What do you mean?"

"My mind. I can't think. I can't feel."

"Tell me some more."

"Like those poor ducks ... the ones in the photographs. The awful black-and-white photographs."

I had no photos of ducks in my office, only the model she was holding, and it took me a moment to realize what she was talking about. Newspaper photos came to mind.

"The ducks in the oil spills?"

"You noticed those pictures, too?" She perked up. "I feel like that, like a duck, my feathers all matted down and stuck together."

I gestured to indicate her arms, which lay heavily on the chair, stiffened by the drug effect.

"Not just my arms . . . my mental wings," she explained to me. "My mental wings and feathers . . . matted down and stuck together."

"It's the medication," I said. "It does that to everybody in the doses you've been given."

"The medicine?" A small smile flickered across her face. "It's not me?"
"No," I said, "It's not you."

"Oh, God," she said, "I thought I had finally lost my mind."

"No, it's nothing like that," I reassured her. "It will wear off."

Alexandria had been on the medication for such a short time, only a few days, that it was safe to stop it abruptly. I promised never to force her to take any medication.

After talking with Alexandria long enough for her to gain some confidence in me, she agreed to inviting in her parents. Then I explained to her mother and father how I would approach their crisis as a family problem. I would help them to relate better to this sensitive, spiritual young woman who was going through such a difficult time, and help all of them to better understand, support, and love one another. Sometimes it would be painful, I said, especially when Alexandria expressed the feelings of hurt and pain that caused her to speak so hatefully to them. But it would open up the opportunity for growth and ultimately for better relations in the family. I added that I liked Alexandria and that in our few minutes together I already sensed that she and I shared many feelings, values, and attitudes. I hoped to help her come through her part of the family crisis with a new and better understanding of herself and a great ability to express her anger in more productive ways and to live effectively in the world.

Once Alexandria found someone she could communicate with, she felt less frantic and more hopeful. The need to flee from reality was no longer so pressing. Through our work together, her parents learned to be more patient with her and to look more honestly at the negative impact of their own attitudes, especially their overinvolvement with her in a negative, critical fashion and their difficulty in expressing unconditional love.

Alexandria would have long-term personal and family difficulties to handle; but she was through the worst of her crisis in a matter of weeks. Indeed, her most difficult problem was recovering from the medication. It took more than a month before she felt in touch with her finely tuned feelings and before she could think with her usual clarity.
It was relatively easy to help Alexandria with her acute "schizophrenic" crisis because it was her first experience with such overwhelming helplessness and fear and she was highly motivated. She understood her urgent need for finding a meaningful way of life and had the courage to pursue her ideals. Of equally great importance to this young person, her parents also were motivated to make changes in her best interest. They were willing to look at their own contribution to Alexandria's crisis and to learn new ways to understand and to love her.

It also was relatively easy to help Alexandria because she had not been driven into hiding by years of psychiatric treatment. The longer a person has been subjected to the humiliation of being diagnosed and misunderstood by professionals, and the longer a person has been subjected to psychiatric drugs-the harder it is to make progress.

Neuroleptic Drugs

The agents inflicted upon Alexandria are known by a variety of designations, including major tranquilizers, antipsychotics, and neuroleptics. These words are synonyms. The original ones, including Thorazine and Mellaril, are called phenothiazines, and sometimes that term is used too loosely to designate the entire group. In psychiatry, the term neuroleptic is now preferred. Neuroleptic was coined by jean Delay and Pierre Deniker, who first used the drug in psychiatry, and means "attaching to the neuron." Delay and Deniker intended the term to underscore the toxic impact of the drug on nerve cells (see chapter 4).

List of Neuroleptics

The public identifies most psychiatric drugs by their trade names-the proprietary trademarks under which the companies own and market them. With generic names in parentheses, a list of trade names of neuroleptics in use today includes Haldol (haloperidol), Thorazine (chlorpromazine), Stelazine (trifluoperazine), Vesprin (trifluopromazine), Mellaril (thiorldazine), Prolixin or Permitil (fluphenazine), Navane (thiothixene), Trilafon (perphenazine), Tindal (acetophenazine), Taractan (chlorprothixene), Loxitane or Daxolin (loxapine), Moban or Lidone (molindone), Serenfil (mesoridazine), Orap (pimozide), Quide (piperacetazine), Repoise (butaperazine), Compazine (prochlorperazine), Dartal (thiopropazate), and Clozaril (clozapine).(1)

The antidepressant Asendin (amoxapine) turns into a neuroleptic when it is metabolized in the body and should be considered a neuroleptic. Etrafon or Triavil is a combination of a neuroleptic (perphenazine) and an antidepressant (amitriptyline), and it combines the impact and the risks of both.

The neuroleptics are the most frequently prescribed drugs in mental hospitals, and they are widely used as well in board-and-care homes, nursing homes, institutions for people with mental retardation, children's facilities, and prisons. They also are given to millions of patients in public clinics and to hundreds of thousands in private psychiatric offices. Too often they are prescribed for anxiety, sleep problems, and other difficulties in a manner that runs contrary to the usual recommendations. And too often they are administered to children with behavior problems, even children who are living at home and going to school.

The Numbers of Patients Treated

No one knows the total numbers of neuroleptic drugs taken by patients each year, but estimates are possible. While the overall number of beds in state hospitals is down, annual admissions are up from the 1950s, and most of the several hundred thousand patients admitted each year are diagnosed as schizophrenic. Nearly all of these are prescribed neuroleptics. Hundreds of thousands more are getting them through outpatient clinics. Well over a million people a year are treated with neuroleptics on the wards and in the clinics of state mental health systems.

Additional millions more are receiving neuroleptics or antipsychotics through sources outside the state mental hospital system and long-term clinics. Of the estimated two million patients in nursing homes, many of them are on neuroleptics. Add to these patients the tens of thousands being treated with these drugs in private psychiatric hospitals, and in the psychiatric and medical wards of general hospitals, plus the tens of thousands in institutions for people with retardation, the untold thousands in board-and-care homes, still more in prisons, and hundreds of thousands in private practice-and the total swells to many millions. Even homeless people in shelters are sometimes forced to take them.

The National Prescription Audit provided by the FDA reported twentyone million prescriptions for neuroleptics in 1984. These figures are drawn from retail pharmacies and therefore do not include patients in institutions or patients dispensed medications directly from clinics. Of course, many patients obtain more than one prescription a year, but the figures suiz2est that at least several million individuals are obtaining neuroleptics rrom retail pharmacies each year.

That huge numbers of people are treated with neuroleptics is confirmed by the figures occasionally released by the pharmaceutical companies. The first neuroleptic was chlorpromazine, whose trade name is Thorazine. In a 1964 publication entitled Ten Years'Experience with Thorazine, the manufacturer, Smith Kline and French, estimated that fifty million patients had been prescribed chlorpromazine in the first decade of use (1954 to 1964). The figure probably was worldwide. In recent years, haloperidol, sold by McNeil Pharmaceutical under the trade name Haldol, has become the most prescribed neuroleptic. In a letter to attorney Roy A. Cohen dated August 13, 1987, McNeil's director of medical services, Anthony C. Santopolo, provided a glimpse at Haldol's escalating use. The figures for patients first treated with Haldol grew from 600,000 in 1976 to 1,200,000 in 1981.(2)

Overall, the estimate I made in my 1983 medical book, Psychiatric Drugs, of five to ten million persons per year in America being treated with neuroleptics probably remains valid today. The sheer size of these numbers should motivate us to learn everything we can about the impact of these agents on the brain and the mind.

The Clinical Impact of the Neuroleptics

Textbooks of psychiatry and review articles claim that the neuroleptics have a specific antipsychotic effect, especially on the so-called positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations and delusions, marked incoherence, and repeatedly bizarre or disorganized behavior.

Meanwhile, very little is written in professional sources about the apathy, disinterest, and other lobotomylike effects of the drugs. Review articles tend to give no hint that the medications are actually stupefying the patients and that life on a typical mental hospital ward is listless at best. And so we must turn to the earliest research reports on the drugs. The pioneers, eager to show the potency of their new discovery, were far more candid and graphic in describing the effects to doctors as yet unfamiliar with them.

The Nature of Lobotomy - To grasp what the pioneers said about the neuroleptic effect, it's important first to understand the lobotomy effect to which it is compared. This link contains the history and description of the surgical lobotomy.

The Birth of Chemical Lobotomy - Reports from the Drug Pioneers & How Neuroleptics Produce Lobotomy - In 1952, the first shot in the "revolution in psychiatry" was fired in Paris by the two pioneers Delay and Deniker. They published their findings on chlorpromazine (Thorazine) in French in Congres des Medecins Alienistes et Neurologistes de France. Read the straightforward description of the apathy and lack of initiative typical of lobotomy.

The neuroleptics also are used in tranquilizer darts for subduing wild animals and in injections to permit the handling of domestic animals who become vicious. The veterinary use of neuroleptics so undermines the antipsychotic theory that young psychiatrists are not taught about it.(3)

The Fundamental Principle of Psychiatric Treatment

The brain-disabling principle applies to all of the most potent psychiatric treatments-neuroleptics, antidepressants, lithium, electroshock, and psychosurgery. The principle states that all of the major psychiatric treatments exert their primary or intended effect by disabling normal brain function. Neuroleptic lobotomy, for example, is not a side effect, but the sought-after clinical effect. It reflects impairment of normal brain function.

Conversely, none of the major psychiatric interventions correct or improve existing brain dysfunction, such as any presumed biochemical imbalance. If the patient happens to suffer from brain dysfunction, then the psychiatric drug, electroshock, or psychosurgery will worsen or compound it.

If relatively, low doses produce no apparent brain dysfunction, the medication may be having no effect or producing a placebo effect. Or, as frequently happens, the patient is unaware of the impact even though it may be significant. Anyone familiar with the behavior of people drinking alcohol knows how easily a slightly intoxicated person may deny being impaired or even claim to be improved. Most people coming off cigarettes become abruptly aware of missing the sedative and tranquilizing effects that previously were taken for granted.

Iatrogenic (Treatment-Caused) Helplessness

Brain dysfunction, such as a chemical or surgical lobotomy syndrome, renders people much less able to appreciate or evaluate their mental condition. Surgically lobotomized people often deny both their brain damage and their personal problems. They will loudly declare, "I'm fine, never been better," when they can no longer think straight. Sometimes they deny that they have been operated on, despite the dime-size burr holes in their skulls palpable beneath their scalp. Superficially, the denial looks so sincere that prolobotomists cite it to justify the harmlessness of the treatment.

Even without the production of brain dysfunction, the giving of drugs or other physical interventions tends to reinforce the doctor's role as an authority and the patient's role as a helpless sick person. The patient learns that he or she has a "disease," that the doctor has a "treatment," and that the patient must "listen to the doctor" in order to "get well again." The patient's learned helplessness and submissiveness is then vastly amplified by the brain damage. The patient becomes more dutiful to the doctor and to the demoralizing principles of biopsychiatry. Denial can become a way of life, fixed in place by brain damage.

Suggestion and authoritarianism are common enough in the practice of medicine but only in psychiatry does the physician actually damage the individual's brain in order to facilitate control over him or her. I have designated this unique combination of authoritarian suggestion and brain damage by the term iatrogenic helplessness. Iatrogenic helplessness is key to understanding how the ma'or psychiatric treatments work .

There is little or no reason to anticipate a physical treatment in psychiatry that will control severely disturbed or upset people without doing equally severe harm to them. If psychosurgery, electroshock, or the more potent psychiatric drugs were refined to the point of harmlessness, they would approach uselessness. In biopsychiatry, unfortunately, it's the damage that does the trick.

Clarifying a Confusing Point

Whether or not some psychiatric patients have brain diseases is irrelevant to the brain-disabling principle of psychiatric treatment. Even if someday a subtle defect is found in the brains of some mental patients, it will not change the damaging impact of the current treatments in use. Nor will it change the fact that the current treatments worsen brain function rather than improving it. If, for example, a patient's emotional upset is caused by a hormonal problem, by a viral inflammation, or by ingestion of a hallucinogenic drug, the impact of the neuroleptics is still that of a lobotomy. The person now has his or her original brain damage and dysfunction plus a chemical lobotomy.

Claims for Curing Specific Schizophrenic Symptoms

But what about claims that the treatments reduce psychiatric symptoms, such as so-called hallucinations and delusions? Gerald Klerman was the major figure in transforming the image of the neuroleptics from nonspecific flattening agent to antipsychotic medication. Klerman was an avid advocate of biopsychiatry from early in his career and went on to become director of NIMH. Klerman's research findings were published in various places, including Alberto DiMascio and Richard Shader's 1970 compendium The Clinical Handbook of Psychopharmacology.
Klerman found that the four most improved "symptoms," in descending order, were combativeness, hyperactivity, tension, and hostility. In short, the drugs subdue and control people. Hallucinations and delusions the cardinal symptoms of schizophrenia - ran a poor fifth and sixth.(4)

Since drugged patients become much less communicative, sometimes nearly mute, it's not surprising that they say less about their hallucinations and delusions. Had the investigators paid attention, they would have noticed that the patients also said less about their religious and political convictions as well as about their favorite hobby or sport. There's no wild cheering for the home team on the typical psychiatric ward. Furthermore, the drugs cause so much discomfort (see chapter 4) that patients often stop saying what they believe to avoid getting larger doses and to bring a more speedy end to the treatment. As many ex-patients have told me, "I learned right away I'd better shut up or I'd get more of that stuff." What's astonishing is that despite investigator bias and the global inhibition produced by the drugs, communications labeled hallucinations and delusions continued to be recorded.

Klerman vociferously claimed that his research confirmed an antipsychotic effect, and few, if any, people bothered to check his data.

They Who Are Different from Us

After I described the lobotomizing effect of the neuroleptics during a 1989 debate with an internationally known psychiatrist, the opposing doctor admitted that he himself had taken "one small dose of neuroleptic" and then experienced an overwhelming and unbearable sense of "depression" and "disinterest." But he went on to say that his patients, because of their "abnormal brains," underwent no such lobotomy effect. Unlike normal people, the patients supposedly felt better because the drug "harmonized" their biochemical abnormalities. This was not the first time I'd heard this argument made by a psychiatrist.

The outrage expressed by ex-patients in the audience contradicted his assertions about the harmlessness of the medications. So does the clinical literature cited in this and the next chapter.

What does it say about professionals when they argue that their patients are so different from themselves? Biopsychiatry lives by the principle that its patients are so different from other humans that almost anything can be done to them, including surgical, electrical, and chemical lobotomy. By contrast, the ethical helping person assumes that those seeking help possess the same human sensitivities as anyone else, including the therapist.

Drugs and Adjustment

Life in a mental hospital is so inhibited, constrained, and suppressed that patients might seem better adjusted when heavily drugged. As already noted in chapter 2, D. L. Rosenhan describes in the January 19, 1973, Science that even the most highly regarded mental hospitals are humiliating and oppressive places, even for normal volunteers masquerading as patients. Typical state hospitals, where many drug studies are conducted, are intimidating and frightfully violent. In Erving Goffman's phrase, these "total institutions" also stigmatize and demean their inmates. His analysis in Asylums (1961) helps us understand why a drugged patient would seem better adjusted than a drug-free person in such a setting; the chemically lobotomized patient fits better into the social role of mental patient, with its obedience to authority, conformity, lack of dignity, acceptance of mundane routines, and restricted opportunities for self-expression. Similarly, books and stories by former patients in all kinds of psychiatric facilities almost always describe them as wholly suppressive and demoralizing.(5) To say that patients behave better in a mental hospital when they are drugged is more a commentary on the requirements of being an inmate than on the allegedly beneficial qualities of drugs.

Unfortunately, the patient may face an equally suppressive life situation after discharge from the hospital. Board-and-care homes and nursing homes are at least as boring and stifling as psychiatric hospitals. Often they offer nothing but a bed, a TV, and perhaps a local park bench. Again, it is no surprise that patients might seem to adjust better to them when drugged. Indeed, most drug-free people would want to take flight rather than to waste away in a facility that offers nothing in the way of rehabilitation, recreation, or social life.

Nor is life necessarily less stultifying when the patient returns home to his or her family. As we saw in chapter 2, the families of children labeled schizophrenic are, at their best, unable to relate to their overwhelmed offspring. At their worst they are outright abusive. Typically the parents are overinvolved and unrelentingly critical of their son or daughter. Again, it's no surprise that drugged offspring might seem better adjusted to life in these families, while drug-free ones might continue to be resentful, rebellious, and difficult to control.

Drug experts and psychiatric textbooks that tout neuroleptics almost never concern themselves with the living conditions to which they are asking or forcing the drugged patient to adjust.

Research Studies on Efficacy

Even considering the built-in biases favoring drugs in typical research studies, the data do not unequivocally support the use of neuroleptics.

In comparing hospitalization with and without drugs, the data are not even consistent. For example, a team led by Maurice Rappaport reported in 1978 in Intemational Pharmacopsychiatry that patients treated with placebo in the hospital and no medications on follow-up "showed greater clinical improvement and less pathology at follow-up, fewer rehospitalizations and less overall functional disturbance in the community than the other groups of patients studied." Of the group that never received medication, only 8 percent were rehospitalized. Of the group that received medication at some time during or after hospitalization, 47 to 73 percent were rehospitalized. The worst performance was for those patients who were drugged both during and after. They suffered a 73-percent return rate.

Gordon Paul and his colleagues investigate long-term maintenance drug therapy for "hard core, chronically hospitalized patient groups" in the July 1972 Archives of General Psychiatry. These patients also were exposed to an active psychosocial rehabilitation program on the wards. One group was abruptly changed from medication to placebo without the staff knowing that a research project was going on. It was found that in the early stages of treatment, medication interfered with participation in the rehabilitation program, and that later on it had no effect, beneficial or otherwise. The authors conclude that the "widespread practice" of giving neuroleptics to chronic hospital patients should be discontinued, because the medications are unhelpful, expensive, dangerous, and interfere with rehabilitation.

Some researchers present a rosier picture for drug intervention. In the Northwick Park study published by T. J. Crow and his team in the British foumal of Psychiatry in 1986, 30 to 50 percent of the patients relapsed with drug therapy and 70 percent relapsed without it. Even if we accept these findings, however, they do not seem so astonishing in the light of the "natural history" of what is called schizophrenia (see chapter 2). As noted earlier, regardless of the treatment regime, one-half or more of patients diagnosed as schizophrenic eventually will make a social and economic adjustment outside the hospital, and that about one-third do well. The results of positive drug studies will seem still less impressive when we examine the high rate of drug-induced permanent brain damage, which can exceed 50 percent among long-term patients (see chapter 4).(6)

Casting Further Doubt

A review published in the October 1989 American Journal of Psychiatry raises serious questions about the validity of the most accepted use of neuroleptics-the control of acute psychotic episodes. From McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Paul Keck and his associates, including Ross Baldessarini, could find only five studies on the use of neuroleptics in acute schizophrenia that used scientific controls, cornparing placebo or sedatives to the neuroleptics. These five studies found that "the same overall degree of improvement was observed during treatment with all the agents tested." Specifically, Valium (a minor tranquilizer and sedative) and opium "demonstrated efficacy similar to that of neuroleptic during the first day and through 4 weeks of treatment." In other words, sedatives and narcotics performed as well as the so-called antipsychofic drugs in the acute treatment of schizophrenia. The authors suggest, "Perhaps the early effects of antipsychotic drugs are nonspecific and are largely the same as those of sedative agents."

More demoralizing to advocates of neuroleptics, Keck and his coauthors also found that in some studies, a placebo performed as well as the neuroleptics. They conclude that the apparent efficacy of neuroleptics in treating acute patients may in fact be due to other factors, such as a  respite from conflicted home life.

The authors also remark that drug efficacy in the long-term treatment of chronic patients is equally unconfirmed. Significantly, Keck and his colleagues constitute a very respected research team from one of the most esteemed institutions in psychiatry, and they are well-known advocates of psychiatric medication.

Returning People to Productive Lives with the Drugs

One entrenched myth is that the antipsychotics helped to empty the state mental hospitals, thereby returning many people to more useful, better lives. The American Psychiatric Press's Textbook of Psychiatry (1988), for example, declares unequivocally: "The rapid decline in the number of patients in psychiatric hospitals has been among the most persuasive examples of how pharmacologic therapies in psychiatry have a beneficial impact not only on the individual patient, but on society as well" (p. 770). The overall process was given the misnomer "deinstitutionalization."

In reality, the drugs did not cause the emptying of the state hospitals, which did not begin in earnest until 1963, more than eight years after the introduction of the neuroleptics in America. At that point, the hospital population had been relatively static for many years-558,000 inmates in the peak year of 1955 and 504,000 in 1963-and admissions actually had skyrocketed. After 1963 a rapid decline in inmate population began throughout the country. In that year, "mental illness" became covered for the first time under federal disability programs, culminating in Social Security Disability (SSI). Now the patients could be sent to old-age homes and board-and-care facilities, to be paid for by their meager disability checks. The states had successfully shifted the financial burden from themselves to the federal program.

"Deinstitutionalization" is itself a misleading term, because very few of the discharged patients became independent. Most were transferred into other supervised facilities, usually with even less to offer than the state mental hospitals, which at least had expansive grounds and a few organized activities. Some of the inmates were cast out on the streets as homeless people. At the same time, the infamous "revolving door policy" began, with frequent short readmissions to drug the patients again before sending them back to their dismal, lonely surroundings.

The primary function of drugs in this process is to make it easier to ship robotic patients from one place to another. That the drugs did not cause deinstitutionalization is confirmed by the Swedish experience, where the process is only now beginning in that country, twenty-five years after the introduction of the drugs. Emptying American hospitals was a matter of social policy-moving patients out and taking fewer in -not a medical miracle.

Into Nursing Homes

The aged made up the largest portion of the old state mental hospital population, and they were the first to be thrown out during deinstitutionalization. A 1989 study by Jerry Avorn and his colleagues from Harvard, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, surveyed fiftyfive rest homes in Massachusetts. They found that 39 percent of the inmates were receiving neuroleptics and that 18 percent were receiving two or more. Several other studies confirm the drugging of the elderly in understaffed, oppressive nursing homes throughout the country.
Private board-and-care homes are no better. Psychiatrist Theodore van Putten and his colleague J. E. Sparr wrote "The Board and Care Home: Does it Deserve a Bad Press?" in the July 1979 Hospital and Community Psychiatry. They describe patients lobotomized by the drugs, suffering from blunted feeling, passivity, and lack of initiative, interest, and spontaneity. Most lived "in virtual solitude."

Onto the Streets as Homeless People

A number of other former inmates have ended up as street people, but not nearly so many as are institutionalized in other settings, such as nursing homes, board-and-care homes, and jails. Furthermore, homelessness as a problem is directly attributable to economic changes. There has been a drastic decline in low-income housing, coupled with an increase in numbers among the very poor. Deinstitutionalization in Denmark, by contrast, has not produced rampant homelessness, because the government provides sufficiently large disability payments and enough affordable housing to keep ex-inmates off the streets.

That many American homeless do have severe psychological problems merely confirms that our more helpless citizens suffer the most acutely and quickly from economic pressures, such as low wages and high rents. Homelessness itself is undoubtedly not good for one's mental stability.

We should reject psychiatry's call to subject ever-increasing numbers of the homeless to enforced medication with neuroleptics. When it diagnoses, drugs, and incarcerates the homeless poor, psychiatry covers up the political issue-society's unwillingness to provide jobs, housing, or an adequate safety net. People victimized by socioeconomic conditions are turned over to psychiatry for further abuse. All of us then rest more easily-except for the victims.

In January 1980, the editor of Clinical Psychiatry News, psychiatrist William Rubin, wrote poignantly about the fate of deinstitutionalized patients:

Patients aren't warehoused in snakepits any longer. They sit instead in wretched welfare hotels and Bowery flophouses. The shopping-bag ladies and other casualties wander the streets, prey for all the vultures, until they are harmed or in some other way attract the attention of law-enforcement authorities. Then they are sent back to the state hospitals; cleaned up; pushed through the revolving door back into the community.

As most observers now agree, so-called deinstitutionalization was not a blessing to the former inmates; it was a callous abandonment. It is simply false to claim that deinstitutionalization returned thousands of inmates to productive lives in the commun ity.

Psychosocial Approaches Instead of Drugs

In their book Community Mental Health (1989), Loren Mosher and Lorenzo Burti describe Soteria House in California, a nondrug psychosocial treatment home that was compared to a control group of patients going through the regular psychiatric system. Using small, homelike quarters with nonprofessional therapists, Soteria outperformed the traditional mental hospital system and neuroleptic drugs. In a chapter in his 1989 book The Limits of Biological Treatments for Psychological Distress, Bertram Karon reviews a variety of studies showing the superiority of psychotherapy over neuroleptics in the treatment of schizophrenic patients. Karon's own psychotherapy project showed that patients did best in the long run when they received no medication or used it only during the times of worst distress. In chapter I we saw how effective untrained volunteers can be in helping people gain release from custodial institutions.

Loren Mosher's Soteria House project, Karon's psychotherapy research, the Harvard-Raqcliffe Mental Hospital Volunteer Program, and other psychosocial approaches will be described in more detail in chapter 16.

Summary

In summary, the neuroleptic drugs are chemical lobotomizing agents with no specific therapeutic effect on any symptoms or problems. Their main impact is to blunt and subdue the individual. In the next chapter we'll see that they also physically paralyze the body, rendering the individual less able to react or to move. Thus they produce a chemical lobotomy and a chemical straitjacket. Indeed, there is relatively little evidence that they are helpful to the patients themselves, while there is considerable evidence that psychosocial interventions are much better. The drugs are also the cause of a plague of brain damage that afflicts up to half or more of long-term patients. We turn now to that drug-induced epidemic.

Footnotes:

1. Clozaril (clozapine), the center of considerable controversy, will be discussed in chapter 4. Although physicians sometimes fail to realize it, many other nonpsychiatric drugs are also neuroleptics. The list includes some antihistamines, such as Tacaryl and Temaril; some antinausea drugs, such as Compazine and Torecan; and some drugs used in conjunction with anesthesia, including Inapsine, Largon, and Phenergan, which is also used as an antinausea and anti-mofion sickness agent. Serpasil (reserpine), a rauwolfia derivative, has neuroleptic qualities and is used as an antihypertensive and rarely as an antipsychotic. Serpasil is one of many trade names; others include Harmony], Raudixin, and Sandril. In nonpsychiatric usage, the doses are usually sufficiently small to avoid producing a neuroleptic toxic effect on the brain and mind, but caution should be exercised, especially in regard to Compazine, which can cause severe neurological reactions in relatively low doses.

2. The rate was increasing by 100,000 to 200,000 per year and is probably much higher now. The figures were based on submissions to the FDA and therefore probably were limited to the United States.

3. Veterinary literature and practice has established that these drugs must be limited to short term use only. They're too dangerous for animal consumption, except in emergencies and terminal states. Yet they are less dangerous to animals, in whom it often is more difficult to produce the permanent drug-induced neurological disorders seen in humans (see chapter 4). Recently, our frisky Shetland sheepdog was given a very small dose of neuroleptic to prevent car sickness. My daughter Alysha soon noticed that he became more obedient and "stopped barking at everything."

4. While combativeness and hyperactivity were markedly reduced in 49 percent and 3 8 percent of patients, respectively, hallucinations and delusions were markedly reduced in only 30.5 percent and 21 percent. Other problems typically associated with mental illness were unimproved by the drugs, including judgment, insight, and emotional tone, or affect.

5. For example, see the compendium of stories and poems in Bonnie Burstow and Don Weitz, eds., Shrink Resistant: The Struggle Against Psychiatry in Canada (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1988); or the following autobiographical accounts: Janet and Paul Gotkin, Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears: A Personal Triumph Over Psychiatry (New York: Quadrangle, 1975); Judi Chamberlin, On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Altematives to the Mental Health System (New York: Hawthom, 1978); and Kate Millett, The Loony-Bin Trip (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

6. As the American Psychiatric Press's Textbook of Psychiatry (1988, p. 387) recognizes, many long-term patients tend to develop increasingly negative symptoms, such as withdrawal and apathy. We will find convincing evidence that the drugs actually produce the negative symptoms that then bccome confused with chronic schizophrenia.

Peter Breggin's Home Site - Peter R. Breggin, M.D. founded The International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP) as a nonprofit research and educational network concerned with the impact of mental health theory and practices upon individual well-being, personal freedom, and family and community values. For 25 years ICSPP has been informing the professions, media and the public about the potential dangers of drugs, electroshock, psychosurgery, and the biological theories of psychiatry.

[TruthBrigade]

Psychiatric Drug Adverse Reactions (Side Effects) and Medication Spellbinding 

http://www.breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=187
    
Dr. Peter Breggin’s new concept of medication spellbinding provides insights into why so many people take psychiatric drugs when the drugs are doing more harm than good.  Psychiatric drugs, and all other drugs that affect the mind, spellbind the individual by masking their adverse mental effects from the individual taking the drugs.  If the person experiences a mental side effect, such as anger or sadness, he or she is likely to attribute it to something other than drug, perhaps blaming it on a loved one or on their own “mental illness.”  Often people taking psychiatric drugs claim to feel better than ever when in reality their mental life and behavior is impaired.  In the extreme, medication spellbinding leads otherwise well-functioning and ethical individuals to commit criminal acts, violence or suicide. 

The concept of medication spellbinding is a unifying theme in Dr. Breggin’s newest book, Medication Madness (2008), which describes dozens of cases of otherwise self-controlled people who became spellbound by psychiatric drugs, leading them to perpetrate bizarre acts, including mayhem, murder and suicide.   Dr. Breggin’s other recent book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008), presents the science beyond the concept of medication spellbinding in great depth.

The majority of Dr. Breggin's books focus on harmful medication effects on the brain, mind and behavior. Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008) is the most up-to-date and thorough presentation of his overall views on the dangers associated with psychiatric medication.  It describes how the supposed therapeutic effects of psychiatric drugs are in fact the result of drug-induced mental disabilities. The following very abbreviated summary should not substitute for the more thorough explanations in Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008):

•    Antidepressants cause emotional anesthesia and numbing or sometimes euphoria, providing a fleeting, artificial relief from emotional suffering.
•    Neuroleptic or antipsychotic drugs disrupt frontal lobe function, causing a chemical lobotomy with apathy and indifference, making emotionally distressed people more submissive and less able to feel.
•    Mood stabilizers slow down overall brain function, dampening emotions and vitality.
•    Benzodiazepines suppress overall brain function, sedating the individual, with temporary relief of tension or anxiety at the cost of reduced mental function.
•    Stimulants blunt spontaneity and enforce obsessive behaviors in children, making them less energetic, less social, less creative and more obedient.

The individual taking the drugs or the doctor, family and classroom teacher can mistakenly interpret these effects as an improvement when they reflect dysfunction of the brain and mind.  As an egregious example, millions of school children are prescribed these drugs because schools find them easer to deal with when their spontaneity is impaired and when they become more compulsively obedient.

In the long run, all psychiatric drugs tend to disrupt the normal processes of feeling and thinking, rendering the individual less able to deal effectively with personal problems and with life’s challenges.  They worsen the individual’s overall mental condition and produce potentially irreversible harm to the brain.

Most recent books by Dr. Breggin:
Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex (2008)

Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (2008)

[TruthBrigade]

Violence and suicide caused by antidepressants
   
http://www.breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=66

On March 22, 2004 the FDA issued an extraordinary Public Health Advisory that cautioned about the risks associated with the new generation of  antidepressants (Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox, Celexa, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Serzone, and Remeron). The warning followed a public hearing at which dozens of family members of victims testified about suicide and violence committed by individuals taking these medications.
 
While stopping short of concluding the antidepressants definitely caused suicide, the FDA warned that they might do so in a small percentage of children and adults. In the debate over drug-induced suicide, little attention has been given to the FDA's additional warning that  certain behaviors are "known to be associated with these drugs," including "anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia (severe restlessness), hypomania, mania."
 
From agitation and hostility to impulsivity and mania, the FDA's litany of antidepressant-induced behaviors is identical to those induced by PCP, methamphetamine, and cocaine, drugs known to cause aggression and violence. These older stimulants and most of the newer antidepressants cause similar effects as a result of their influencing brain levels of the same neurotransmitter, serotonin.
 
A new FDA warning issued on January 31, 2008 declared that yet another group of chemical agents used to treat mood disorders carried the risk of "symptoms such as anxiety, agitation, hostility, mania and hypomania" which "may be precursors to emerging suicidality."  This time the culprits are antiepileptic drugs – medications used to control seizures. Because they cause sedation, these drugs are commonly used in psychiatry as "mood stabilizers." As a result of an orchestrated psychiatric campaign to diagnose children with "bipolar disorder," increasing numbers of children are being given these drugs.
 
This group of anti-seizure medications includes carbamazapine (brand names Tegretol, Equetro), gabapentin (Neurontin), lamotrigine (Lamictal), topiramate (Topamax), and valproate (Depakote). All of these drugs are being prescribed for varying psychiatric purposes, including the treatment of anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.
 
Articles on the relation between antidepressants and violence
 

    * Antidepressant-induced suicidality and violence: more about deception than science (PDF)
    * Antidepressant Madness Strikes Baseball Pitcher Jeff Reardon (PDF)
    * Observations on SSRI-Induced Behavioral and Mental Abnormalities in Children and Adults (PDF)
    * Proven dangers of antidepressants (PDF)
    * Recent Regulatory Changes in Antidepressant Labels: Implicatons of Activation (PDF)
    * Recent US, Canadian, and British regulatory agency actions concerning antidepressant-induced harm (PDF)
    * Suicidality, violence and mania caused by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (PDF)
    * Violence and suicide caused by antidepressants: 2004 report to the FDA (PDF)
    * Dr. Breggin's blog entry on the Huffington Post concerning the 2008 FDA warning
    * The Big Suicide Loophole .

[TruthBrigade]

Drug Company & the FDA Finally Admit Paxil Causes Increased Suicide Risk

http://www.psychiatry.info/deaths-caused-by-psychiatry/drug-company-the-fda-finally-admit-paxil-causes-increased-suicide-risk/

After years of repeated warnings by groups like the Citizens Commission On Human Rights – the United States FDA & the drug company Glaxo Smith Kline (the maker of Paxil) have admitted that patients taking Paxil have a dramatic increase in suicidal thoughts and attempted suicide. This being such a horrible side effect you would think they should have told you this earlier when they first found out about it.

In fact, its an increase of over 600%!!! Would you like to take a drug that makes you six times more likely to kills yourself? How about it you are depressed and seeking help for suicidal thoughts already? Yet that’s exactly what Paxil is prescribed for!

In an article by the LA times it is mentioned that several antidepressants like Paxil were already required to carry a “black boxâ€? warning about the increase of suicidal thoughts in children taking these drugs, but these recent findings now indicate that adults are also at risk. In the article a representative for the maker of the antidepressant Paxil said: “At some point, the FDA is going to say what their analysis shows across the category “ Are they finally admitting that antidepressants all have this horrific side effect? We’ve been warning about this for a long time and I’m happy they are finally being forced to admit the truth.

It seems that Glaxo Smith Kline has been aware of this problem since before the drug even had FDA approval. This article by the Sierra Times reviews the fact on how the drug makers have been secretly settling out of court with anyone who complains of these types of strong side effects and death. The terms of these settlements make the victims to remain silent and not disclose what happened. Thus preventing the public and the FDA from finding out about all the people who kill themselves taking these types of drugs.

In the article it mentions: “Glaxo currently faces thousands of lawsuits over Paxil side effects related to addiction, dependence, and a severe withdrawal syndrome.

SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) like Paxil, are not addictive in the sense that “an individual would mortgage their livelihoods and all they hold dear for further supplies of the drug,� according to Dr David Healy MD, FRCPsych, North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine

SSRIs can hook patients in the sense of making you “physically dependent,� he explains. “

I did a little research and found the actual report on the FDA website. You can click here to find the report on Paxil’s risk of suicide as a side effect. In the report it says Results of this analysis showed a higher frequency of suicidal behavior in young adults “. On the FDA’s page is a link to a Glaxo Smith Kline document. Which you can find here: Glaxo’s letter to doctors about Paxils suicide side effect.

I encourage anyone who has ever experience any side effect like this to report it to the FDA:

FDA’s MedWatch Adverse EventReporting program online (at www.fda.gov/MedWatch/report.htm), by phone (1-800-FDA-1088),

or by returning the postage-paid FDA form 3500 (which may be downloaded from
www.fda.gov/MedWatch/getforms.htm) by mail to

MedWatch
5600 Fishers Lane,
Rockville, MD 20852-9787

or fax (1-800-FDA-0178).

[TruthBrigade]

Science Proves Antidepressants Addictive. Withdrawal Unbearable For Some.

http://www.psychiatry.info/victims-of-psychiatry-speak-out/science-proves-antidepressants-addictive-withdrawal-unbearable-for-some/

As psychiatry and the giant pharmaceutical companies fight to create a PR spin that antidepressants are harmless non-addictive drugs – the truth is beginning to come out showing the dangers of these drugs. Along with horrific side effects these drugs produce while you take them, they are now proving for some people to be nearly impossible to stop taking. As this article by the Associated Press proves many patients experience terrible antidepressant withdrawal so severe that some appear to be hooked on antidepressants for life.

The Associated Press article provides an example of one of the victims side effects and withdrawal symptoms. In the article they state:

“When Gina O’Brien decided she no longer needed drugs to quell her anxiety and panic attacks, she followed doctor’s orders by slowly tapering her dose of the antidepressant Paxil. The gradual withdrawal was supposed to prevent unpleasant symptoms that can result from stopping antidepressants cold turkey. But it didn’t work

“I felt so sick that I couldn’t get off my couch,” O’Brien said. “I couldn’t stop crying.”
Overwhelmed by nausea and uncontrollable crying, she felt she had no choice but to start taking the pills again. More than a year later the Michigan woman still takes Paxil, and expects to be on it for the rest of her life.�

Taking Antidepressants is not an option for many patients because it means putting up with side-effects such as weight gain, sexual dysfunction, suicidal thoughts and even psychosis. For women who want to have children it’s a risky choice; scientists have provided proof of withdrawal in newborns whose mothers were taking antidepressants, and some of these drugs (like Paxil) have been linked to birth defects.

In Europe it is officially recognized that these drugs have addictive qualities and withdrawing from them can give side effects and withdrawal symptoms. In December 2004 Britain’s drug regulatory agency issued a report that warned that all antidepressants “may be associated with withdrawal” and noted that Paxil and Effexor “seem to be associated with a greater frequency of withdrawal reactions.”

In addition, the American Academy Of Family Physicians report of a recent study that showed 20% of all patients who try to quit their antidepressants experience withdrawal. Or as they call it “Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome�. 20% seems to be a very conservative number considering that others are reporting withdrawal figures from antidepressants to be as high as 78%.

In this news story on antidepressant withdrawal by NBC news in Grand Rapids, MI it is stated that:

“A number of patients have reported extreme reactions to discontinuing the drugs. Two of the best-selling antidepressants have led to so many complaints that some doctors avoid prescribing them altogether.�

Personally, that seems like the smartest choice for doctors to make – Just stop prescribing these drugs altogether.

The smartest choice for patients would similarly be to never start taking these drugs in the first place. After all: Psychiatry has publicly stated that they don’t really know what these drugs are doing to your brain. Studies show side effects from these drugs can be life threatening like suicide and psychosis. Then when you decide you can’t handle all the side effects you find you’re addicted and can’t stop taking them.

That’s just my common sense view of these drugs. After all, didn’t they teach us in school to: “Just Say Noâ€?.

[TruthBrigade]

Prozac Suicide Dangers Hidden - Charges Harvard

http://www.psychiatry.info/deaths-caused-by-psychiatry/prozac-suicide-dangers-hidden-charges-harvard-psychiatrist/

I was recently revisiting the story about how the manufacturer of the drug Prozac, Eli Lilly, seemed to magically “misplace” important information showing the strong link between taking antidepressants and suicide. Apparently there were many drug trials that showed this long before the drug was ever approved and sold to the public.

In looking this over it really struck me that magnitude of this act. I did some quick math and it seems that hundreds of thousands of patients are probably dead today because of these suicidal side effects that were buried and hidden from the public. Millions more have likely suffered from thoughts of suicide or unsuccessful acts of suicide. Most of them probably will never know this was cause by the drugs they were taking.

I have a feeling that had this information been readily available to the FDA drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft would have never been approved in the first place.

A great place to see some of this information is in a news article that was published in USA Today. In the article the claim was made that “Eli Lilly & Co. officials lied 15 years ago in denying there was any evidence theanti-depressant Prozac could cause suicidal behavior”

Then in a press release I found online it gave a much more starling view:

Eli Lilly treated the American public “like guinea pigs” says Harvard psychiatrist Martin Teicher. He goes on to explain how Eli Lilly was engaged in widespread scientific fraud in the cherry picking of individuals for drug trial results. Basically, if anyone in the drug trial began to show suicidal behavior, they were “excused” from the trial and removed from the outcome data.

None of this is any surprise to readers of this website, of course. I went public with accusations about the suicide risk of of antidepressant drugs in 1999. At that time it was widely ridiculed and called a “conspiracy theory.” Now, once again, it is emerging as scientific fact. There are so many murder/suicides linked to Prozac and other SSRI drugs that the public would be absolutely shocked to learn the true details of how many people have been killed by these drugs. Remember Phil Hartman, the comedian? He was killed by his wife who was also on these drugs. And let’s not forget the Colombine massacre, in which both teenage boys who blew away their classmates were on antidepressants.

What amazes me the most about all this is how drug companies manage to cover up these facts and suppress negative evidence for so long. After all, these missing Prozac documents are from a trial in 1994! That’s a good ten years of suppression during which billions of dollars worth of these drugs have been peddled to patients by drug-pushing doctors.

Of course, Eli Lilly denies everything. All their drugs are perfectly safe, they have nothing to hide, and their only mission is to serve the good of mankind… to hear it from them, anyway.

I wonder how the parents of the Colombine children feel about all this?