This is an excellent article to give to anyone you want to educate.
Bestselling psychiatric drugs now linked to chronic disease and medical malpractice
http://vitalitymagazine.com/article/toxic-psychiatry/
by Helke Ferrie
Nov 2012
“The battle against polypharmacy, or the use of a large number of drugs (the action of which we know little, yet we put them into the bodies ... the action of which we know less), has not been fought to the finish…. Do not use rashly every new product of which the peripatetic siren sings. Consider what surprising reactions may occur in the laboratory from the careless mixing of unknown substances. Be as considerate of your patient and yourself as you are of the test-tube.” Sir William Osler (1849-1919)
About 20% of the North American population is now on psychiatric drugs for either depression, ADHD, anxiety, schizophrenia, phobias, impulse-control disorder, or bi-polar disorder. North Americans consume multiple uppers and downers and mysterious “mood stabilizers,” to the tune of $25 billion annually. These are prescribed by doctors who are either deceived by the manufacturers of those drugs or who are complicit in Big Pharma’s business model. Most prescribers know very little about pharmacology and almost none have any training in toxicology. Big Pharma tosses 87% of their annual $58 billion marketing budget at doctors, starting in medical school where 94% of psychiatrists-in-training have accepted gifts from Big Pharma by their third year.
Big Pharma’s top sellers are psychiatric drugs used to treat conditions codified in the current edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Marcia Angell, professor of public policy at Harvard and former interim editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, observes: “This Bible of psychiatry, like the real Bible, is dependent a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions.” The diagnoses described in the DSM-IV are arrived at in secret, behind closed doors, by vote only, and are not backed up by any references to objective scientific findings – testable and verifiable material.
As psychiatric drug sales keep rising, and psychiatrists tell us that 46% of the American population now fit at least one of the criteria in the DSM-IV, Angell asked: “What is going on here? What about the drugs? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?” She then examined the pervasive intellectual morass and corporate-controlled scientific fraud on which modern psychiatry is based. It was best illustrated with the help of a graph published in Nature recently, showing the sky-rocketing increases in fines that pharmaceutical companies have paid since 2006 for the harm their blockbuster drugs have caused. Fines are now in the billions of dollars.
The drugs prescribed by psychiatrists are backed by manufacturer-sponsored clinical trials, a business worth $30 billion annually; the industry keeps all the resulting data secret, protected by current patent law from the critical intellects of independent reviewers. Most are scientific trials in appearance, but in reality they are controlled by marketing departments; as such “the blind lead the blind – giving a whole new meaning to the idea of a double-blind study,” observes Dr. David Healy, a UK professor of psychiatry and pharmacology and outspoken critic of psychiatry. According to him, “Evidence-based medicine has become evidence-biased medicine” so that “we are quite literally taking pills to save the lives of companies who have greater interest in the vitality of the diseases they market drugs for than in our well-being.”
And what about the doctors involved? Marketing departments armed with off-prints of those company-controlled studies work aggressively to influence the doctors’ prescribing habits; most doctors believe what they are told and prescribe as they are told. Healy states: “The idea that most doctors have been body-snatched and replaced by someone working for a faceless marketing department seems at first inconceivable to most people, the germ perhaps of an amusing idea for a television series.”
“Medicine as we know it is at death’s door,” writes Healy in his latest book Pharmageddon. In it, he shows how the pharmaceutical industry has hijacked clinical medical practice, research, and the governmental regulatory systems to serve their business objectives, thereby doing far more harm than good for patients. The most tragic victims of all are children who are prescribed toxic psychiatric drugs now known to cause brain damage and the risk of sudden death. For children, especially those in foster care, the concept of informed consent is now meaningless.
On October 4 of this year, at the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association, Healy told his colleagues “you are committing professional suicide,” comparing their relationship to industry with the Vatican’s attempts to suppress child sex abuse scandals instead of dealing with the problem. He told his fellow psychiatrists, backed by the most compelling international research he had published in a series of books, “you’ve been fooled by industry. The key conflict is whether people are hiding the data from you.” One example involved Zyprexa “which has the highest suicide rate in clinical trial history” – information which had been hidden from regulators and prescribers. Indeed, as reported by AdverseEvents Inc. (http://www.adverseevents.com) in March of this year, the worst adverse events are brain-related side effects caused by the best-selling psychiatric drugs.
THE DRUG PARTY IS OVER
There are four classes of drugs used in psychiatry:
1) antidepressants (e.g. Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Celexa);
2) anti-anxiety meds (e.g. Lorazopam/Ativan, Valium);
3) antipsychotics (e.g. Chlorpromazine, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Haldol, Risperdal, Abilify);
4) stimulants (e.g. Ritalin, Concerta).
The proof is now in, provided by critical-thinking researchers supported by brain-imaging technology, that drugs, especially those used to treat schizophrenia and stimulants used for ADHD, actually shrink the brain. Who would have thought that MRIs would give concrete reality to the term “s hrink”!
In 1989, Nancy Andreasen, professor of psychiatry and then editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry, found – through a longitudinal study combined with brain scans – that anti-psychotic drugs shrank the frontal lobes of schizophrenics and thus made recovery impossible. In 2008 she observed, “The more drugs you have been given, the more brain tissue you lose.... The pre-frontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by the drug. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.”
Children, if taken off Ritalin, do have a chance to recover the use of their brains, as psychiatrist Peter Breggin has shown with his withdrawal protocols. Breggin, often referred to as “the conscience of psychiatry,” is credited with stopping the return of frontal lobotomy surgery, and other forms of psychosurgery, and acted as expert witness for more than a hundred legal actions against manufacturers of antidepressants. He explains that Ritalin causes children to become abnormal: “the crushing of spontaneous behaviour and the enforcement of compulsive, over-focused behaviour is actually [not] an improvement. It’s a form of brain dysfunction, and long-term it causes permanent abnormalities in the brain and suppresses growth. That is a dreadful thing to do to children.”
While serious behaviour problems can be very real and disrupting, most can be attributed to intolerances to specific foods, and/or artificial food additives, or sensitivities/allergies to pervasive chemicals in the environment.
In 1965, Joseph Schildkraut suggested that depression might be caused by a lack of the neurotransmitters serotonin and epinephrine; this is the “catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorder” – today’s “chemical imbalance” myth. Then, in 1969, followed the “dopamine hypothesis.” By the mid-1970s it was clear there was not a shred of evidence to support either theory, and psychiatry abandoned it.
Yet Healy describes how – by the late 1980s – the marketing departments of SmithKline Beecham (as it was then), Eli Lilly, and Pfizer revived this theory to sell Paxil, Zoloft, and Prozac:
“In fact, mindless patter about restoring chemical imbalances did a great deal to make SSRIs most profitable… from 1990 onward.” Referring to the flood of company-sponsored and controlled trials designed to help support such myths, Healy wonders if such “spin” can ever be “overcome” by real data, because “myths always have the last word.”
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