Antidepressant info

Some info and wisdom from my Withdrawal and Recovery group.

BENEFITS OF DISCONTINUING SSRIs:

1. Every day you are taking one of these drugs, more damage is
being done to your brain and body. There is no escaping this.
Psychotropic drugs alter brain chemistry and brain structure in ways
nature never would.

2. They are ALL damaging to the heart and those that manipulate
serotonin in particular, are damaging to your entire circulatory
system.

3. All of these drugs, perhaps with the exception of the
benzodiazepines, damage your entire hormonal system. Most people
think of hormones as bweing only estrogen and testosterone. That is
not correct. There are many hormones in the body including
serotonin and insulin. Antidepressants and antipsychotics alter how
your body metabolizes insulin which damages many other body
processes including certain organs.


5. All psychotropic drugs damage your nervous system. Your nervous
system is the centeral network in your body involved in all bodily
processes.


4. Scores of articles, websites, and books detail the dangers of
psychotropic drugs. The basic fact is that your life is shortened
and you will face illnesses, chronic ones, as a result of continuing
these drugs.

********

Very few people escape the ravages of these drugs; however, in many cases, people do not connect what they are experiencing with the drugs they took. Some no longer can lose weight as they used to. This is because the drugs disrupt proper insulin metabolism. How? Serotonin and insulin are intimately connected. When you alter serotonin, you alter insulin.

ADs are harmful to the cardiovascular system. Excess serotonin damages arteries. All SSRIs cause excess serotonin -- at least initially.

SSRIs leave you with fewer serotonin receptors than you had prior to taking the drug. All ADs do this to the receptors of whatever neurotransmitters they affect.

People end up more tired than ever. Eventually, some get fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. They don't associate it with the drugs.

All hormones are adversely affected.
People feel less emotionally. They are less empathic with others.
Psychotropic drugs turn people into carbohydrate addicts.

These are just a few of the things that psychotropic drugs do.

As for how this can be allowed to continue -- the bottom line is, follow the money. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is growing every day. Only the best industrial psychologists and Madison Avenue advertising firms work for the pharmaceutical industry. Also, consider the role the drug industry plays in the stock market. What would happen if they were really called to task and made to stop selling drugs that don't work or cause harm? Most likely, the entire economic underpinning of the US would collapse.

Final note -- it is not just psychotropic drugs that are dangerous and lacking in efficacy being foisted upon the public.

American Journal of Psychiatry:

Roy H. Perlis, Clifford S. Perlis, Yelena Wu, Cindy Hwang, Megan Joseph, and Andrew A. Nierenberg (2005) Industry Sponsorship and Financial Conflict of Interest in the Reporting of Clinical Trials in Psychiatry. Am J Psychiatry, 162: 1957 - 1960.


British Journal of Psychiatry:

Moncrieff, J. (2002) The antidepressant debate. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180(3): 193-194.

Andrews, G. (2001) Placebo response in depression: bane of research, boon to therapy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 178, 192-194.

Even, C., Siobud-Dorocant, E. & Dardennes, R. M. (2000) Critical approach to antidepressant trials. Blindness protection is necessary, feasible and measurable. British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 47-51.


Public Library of Science – Medicine (Working Links):

Lacasse JR, Leo J (2005) Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature. PLoS Med 2(12): e392 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Healy D (2006) The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder. PLoS Med 3(4): e185 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030185

Smith R (2005) Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies. PLoS Med 2(5): e138 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138

Having only ever tried AD's once before many years ago & having such a horrid reaction to them that I decided that no matter how bad things got there was no way I was going back onto them, I felt as though I was a zombie and my whole body shook from the minute I took the first pill, I realised when my body stopped shaking that it was the pill which had caused it, I therefore took the decision to leave them alone, as people kept asking me "are you alright?", my reply was "I am not sure".

I think the best advice a friend ever gave me was to put the pills in the bin and go from there, this might not be to everyones I don't feel we have the right to tell others how to *fix*, their lives we can only lead by example as it were. :lol:

Some really interesting looking reading there, thanks Linda (and Joel).

I genuinely resent the 'pill for every ill' attitude that pervades western society, but equally I am amazed and proud of much of the research and development done, particularly to cure chronic and degenerative illnesses.

I have to take medication every day, for my physical health, and would not be without that support for the world, but would be off it in a flash if I could - I've tried more than once to no success.

I do think that lifestyle and society has a greater impact on health than many people are willing to accept.

Social inclusion is a biggie too - how many of us actually live in a real community? Family and friends all nearby, knowing the shop workers and everyone on your street? Without these networks, we are all far more prone to illness (physical or mental). I'm very happy to see so much time and effort being put into social inclusion work, but sad that we need government money to keep us socially involved.

A bit of a ramble I know, but I don't really have anywhere else to share this kind of thing.

Excerpt from "Psychopharmacology and Human Values" by Peter Breggin

http://www.breggin.com/psychopharmacologyand.pbreggin.2003.pdf

Psychopharmacology and psychiatry now dominate the mental health field. Even humanistic and existential therapists are likely to refer difficult or disturbed clients to physicians, especially psychiatrists, for possible medication. The prevailing professional tendency is to conceptualise the conflict between psychotherapy and drug treatment as a scientific one; but it is at root a conflict between two different views of human nature. We need to renew our faith in the psychiatric drug-free human being in both our personal and professional lives.

Throughout the mental health professions, and medicine in general, there is an increasing reliance on psychiatric drugs for a broadening array of human suffering from conflict between parents and children to anxiety and despair among adults. This professional reliance on drugs takes many forms, including (a) failure to recognise the existence of safer and more effectove psychtherapeutic approaches, (b) distrusting their own professional skills at critical moments in therapy, (c) overestimating the value of medication to relieve suffering, and, in particular, to prevent suicide, and (d) falsely communicating to patients that they cannot succeed in therapy without the addition of a medication.

I have criticised the growing trend to use medicalised diagnoses and treatment with drugs and electroshock and have proposed better human services based on empathy (Breggin, 1991, 1992, 1997a, 1997b, 1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Breggin & Breggin, 1994, 1998; Breggin, Breggin, & Bemack, 2002; Breggin & Cohen, 1999; Breggin & Stern, 1996). My views have drawn on traditions established by psychosocially oriented psychologists and psychiatrists, (e.g. Adler, 1969; Allport, 1955; Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956; Fromm, 1956; Laing, 1967; Laing & Esterson, 1970; Rogers, 1961, 1995; Sullivan, 1953; Szasz, 1987). Many other contemporary voices have also been criticising the fundamental principles of biological psychiatry from scientific, humanistic psychology, and philosophical perspectives (Armstrong, 1993; Caplan, 1995; Cohen & Cohen, 1983; Colbert, 1996; Fisher & Greenberg, 1989, 1997; Jacobs, 1995; Modrow, 1992; Mosher & Burti, 1989; Romme & Escher, 1993; Ross & Pam, 1995).

Faith in "My Biochemical Imbalance"

When people consider starting or stopping psychiatric drugs, they often feel as if they are facing a void or stepping off a cliff. These patients and their doctors believe that they must rely on psychiatric drugs. That is, they don't believe there are safer and potentially more effective alternatives to drugs. If they don't take the drugs, what else can they do? If they stop relying on psychiatric drugs, what will they rely on? What will they do about their suffering without their psychiatric drugs? In today's society, people who seek help from doctors seldom realise that reliance on psychiatric drugs is, at root, based on faith rather than on scientific conclusions. In particular, they don't know how flimsy the data is for supporting the most commonly used psychiatric medications, such as the newer generation of antidepressants called SSRIs, such as fluvoxamine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil/Seroxat), sertraline (Zoloft), and citalopram (Celexa). (See Breggin, 2001a, 2001b; Breggin & Breggin, 1994; Fisher & Greenberg, 1989, 1997.)

In clinical practice, patients commonly present with one or another variation on the following scenario. Ms. Martin was 18 years old when she left an abusive, "dysfunctional" family and attempted to live alone and to work while putting herself through college. Her family actively opposed her efforts, and she eventually began to feel paralysed with anxiety and hopelessness. After returning home, the family doctor told her that she was suffering from "major depression" caused by a "biochemical imbalance." He placed her on an antidepressant that she continued to take for several years. She then suffered a brief "manic" episode that, in retrospect, was probably induced by the antidepressant.

The family doctor referred Ms. Martin to a psychiatrist who reemphasised to her that she had a "biochemical imbalance" caused by genetic and biological dysfunctions. He changed her diagnosis from major depression to bipolar disorder without informing her that the antidepressant probably caused her "mania." He prescribed another antidepressant and added lithium to "stabilise" her "mood swings." For the next 10 years, Ms. Martin's life involved a constant tinkering with antidepressants, often two at a time, and various dosing schedules of lithium and other drugs. She never returned to college and enjoyed only moderate success at work compared to her real abilities.

When Ms. Martin began to realise that she was becoming increasingly apathetic and experiencing memory loss, she sought help to assist her in coming off psychiatric drugs. In the initial discussions, it became apparent that Ms. Martin had been living for many years according to the simplistic faith of biopsychiatry: "I have a genetic and biological disease called bipolar disorder that requires treatment for the rest of my life. The drugs correct by biochemical imbalance."

The biopsychiatric faith had left Ms. Martin dependent on doctors for medication. The drugs had confined her within the physical constraints of drug-induced emotional numbness and apathy and ultimately impaired her cognitive function. She plodded along in drug-induced stagnation without ever experiencing personal fulfillment in her work or social life.

Although Ms. Martin's initial crisis developed during her teenage attempt to leave an abusive home, none of her doctors suggested to her that she might have psychologically based problems and that psychotherapy or counselling might be helpful. The biochemical bias of her doctors actively discouraged her from learning about and overcoming the original sources for her problems.

Over a period of several months, Ms. Martin was able to withdraw from psychiatric drugs. In the process, she developed a philosophy of life that empowered her to take charge of her thoughts and feelings and to take new steps toward the fulfillment of her psychological, social, and creative needs. She convinced her employer to pay for her college credits, and she began a marked escalation in career achievements. She was also more able to express her feelings and to develop more fulfilling personal relationships.

***********

In the humanistic, existential approach, human beings are seen as endowed with unique capacities, yearnings, and aspirations. They seek to overcome and transcend suffering through self-understanding, ethics, community, and enriched lives. In this model, people must take personal responsibility for their lives, including the quality of their mental condition and relationships with others, including children.

The corresponding psychotherapeutic model does not reject the existence of the body or the attempt to address complex mind-body issues. Its emphasis is more focused and even practical: First, the human suffering dealt with by psychiatrists and other mental health professionas is almost always psychological, existential and social in nature, rather than biological; and second, psychotherapeutic rather than biological interventions are safer and more effective for these problems. When patients do turn out to have a real physical problem contributing to their psychological suffering, such as a chronic head injury or thyroid disease, they need specific medical treatments and not psychiatric drugs.

There are many traditional ideas about human nature that are particularly relevant when trying to reject or to withdraw from psychiatric drugs.

-- Pain and suffering have meaning. Emotions are signals, not symptoms; they tell us about our physical and psychological condition. When we blunt our emotions, we blind ourselves to our inner feelings and needs and suppress our human nature.

-- Heroism is required to live a principled life in the face of the inevitable pain and suffering that all human beings endure.

-- There are no short cuts to making life less painful or to achieving peace of mind. Hard work and rational, consistent principles are required to achieve a state of contentment or satisfaction, and such a state always remains fragile.

-- Human beings thrive to the extent that they live by ideals and refuse to compromise them.

In recent centuries, philosophy and psychology have added to concepts of human nature, the self, or the soul. Following are some of these more contemporary humanistic or existential principles:

-- Individuals seek self-actualisation or self-fulfillment through the development and expression of their unique capacities and will suffer if this pursuit is inhibited or thwarted.

-- Empathy -- the capacity to understand and to care about the feelings and viewpoint of others -- is central to an ethical and fulfilling life. Empathy is also the basis of healing.

-- Successful people take personal repsonsibility for choosing the principles by which they conduct their lives.

-- Emotional and psychological suffering can come from many causes -- from early childhood trauma to unhappiness in marriage or work. It can also come from the failure to find a meaningful way of life. Triumph over psychological suffering requires self-understanding, responsibility, and commitment to sound principles of living.

Biopsychiatric Mechanical Model of Human Life

When people choose to become patients of a psychiatrist who prescibes drugs, they are doing a great deal more than merely "seeing the doctor." They are subjecting themselves to a very specific and limited model of thinking about human suffering and failure. The widespread adoption of this mechanistic model is relatively new in the hisotry of humankind. It demands that we think of ourselves as broken machines or flawed mechanical devices. It requires blind faith in doctors and scientists, combined with a materialistic faith in molecular causes and manipulations.

In the biopsychiatric model, we are mechanical devices similar to computers or other machines. Our suffering is caused by genetic and biological factors beyond our control. When we cannot seem to find a solution on our own, we place our fate in the hands of technicians who know how to tinker with our machinery.

In this mechanical model, we have very little personal responsibility for our condition. We are spared the painful search for the personal and psychological causes of our suffering in our lives as children and adults. We are relieved of the necessity of finding more valid and meaningful principles of living. We do not have to face our conflicts with our husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, children, friends, coworkers, or bosses. We do not have to seek more meaningful work and satisfying relationships. Heroism and determination in the face of our suffering becomes irrelevant. We are only responsible for taking our medications as directed. For these reasons, the psychotherapeutic model cannot be successfully blended with the biological model. The biological model undermines the core of the humanistic, existential or psychotherapeutic approach in therapy.

Taking psychiatric drugs is not like taking insulin for diabetes. In psychiatry, the "target organ" is the brain, and the brain is the seat of our thinking, feeling selves. This is very different from taking drugs to modify the functioning of our hearts or livers. Consider, for example, the difference between a heart transplant and a brain transplant. If you were to exchange your old brain for a new one, you would become another person -- the person who donated the brain. You, as a distinct person, would die with the death of your old brain.

But you can exchange your heart for a new one without losing your identity and without becoming the donor. To pursue the parallel, when you take a psychiatric drug, you change yourself as a person; but when you take a cardiac drug, little about you as a person is changed.

Tragically, modern, well-informed people too often put their faith in psychiatry and its drugs. This has become the equivalent of putting one's faith in the pharmaceutical industry. Drug promotion panders to the most superficial values in the culture: the hope of short cuts around the need for personal responsibility and personal growth. In doing so, the drug companies and biological psychiatry do more harm than good. Mental health professionals need to reclaim their professional knowledge and skills. They should srtive to help their clients and patients to reclaim their faith in fundamental values, including personal responsibility, empathy and love, and principled living.

http://thestreetspirit.org/August2005/interview.htm

Psychiatric Drugs: An Assault on the Human Condition
Interview by Terry Messman

Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring
Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.

Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the groundbreaking
book Mad In America, is now pursuing a fascinating line of research
into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the
American public by covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish
and disease caused by the most widely prescribed antidepressants and
antipsychotic medications.

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted
the Food and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted
research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and
conceal the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-
name drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa.

The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the
aggressive tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence
prominent critics by defaming them in the press, and by using their
money and power to have widely respected scientists and eminent
medical researchers fired for daring to point out the hazards and
risks of suicide and premature death caused by these drugs.

Whitaker starts by debunking the effectiveness of these massively
hyped wonder drugs -- antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil,
and the new atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa. His research
shows how they often are barely more effective than placebos in
treating mental disorder and depression, despite the glowing
adulation they have received in the mainstream media.

But he goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric
drugs have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of drug-
induced mental illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians to
stabilize mental disorders in fact are inducing pathological changes
in brain chemistry and triggering suicide, manic and psychotic
episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes, pancreatic failure,
metabolic diseases, and premature death.

Whitaker originally was a highly regarded science reporter for the
Boston Globe. When he began to research a series on psychiatric
issues for the Globe, he was still a believer in the story of
progress that psychiatry has been telling the public for decades.

He said, "I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these
antipsychotic drugs actually had improved things and that they had
totally revolutionized how we treated schizophrenia. People used to
be locked away forever, and now maybe things weren't great, but they
were a lot better. It was a story of progress."

That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out
when he gained new insight from his research into torturous
psychiatric practices such as electroshock, lobotomy, insulin coma,
and neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists told the public that these
techniques "cured" psychosis or balanced the chemistry of the brain.

But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments
was the attempt to suppress "mental illness" by deliberately damaging
the higher functions of the brain. The stunning truth is that, behind
closed doors, the psychiatric establishment itself labeled these
treatments as "brain-damaging therapeutics."

The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced
brain pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and
essentially shutting down many higher brain functions. In fact, when
antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were first introduced,
psychiatrists themselves said that these neuroleptic drugs were
virtually indistinguishable from a "chemical lobotomy."

In recent years, the media have heralded the arrival of so-called
designer drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zyprexa that are supposed to be
superior and have fewer side effects than the old tricyclic
antidepressants and the first antipsychotics. Millions of Americans
have believed this story and have enriched drug companies like Eli
Lilly by spending billions of dollars annually to purchase these new
medications.

Whitaker's research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and
early deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers
have been misled by a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and
bought-and-paid-for drug trials. Eminent medical researchers who have
tried to warn us of the perils of these drugs have been silenced,
intimidated and defamed. In the process, the Food and Drug
Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical
industry, not its watchdog.

Street Spirit interviewed Robert Whitaker about this new "epidemic"
of mental disorders, and how the giant drug companies have profited
from selling drugs that make us sicker.

Street Spirit: Your new line of research indicates that there has
been an enormous rise in the incidence of mental illness in the
United States, despite the seeming advances in a new generation of
psychiatric drugs. Why do you refer to this increase as an epidemic?

Robert Whitaker: Even people like the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey
wrote a book recently in which he said it looks like we're having an
epidemic of mental illness. When the National Institute of Mental
Health publishes its figures on the incidence of mental illness, you
see these rising numbers of mentally ill people. Some recent reports
even say that 20 percent of Americans now are mentally ill.

So what I wanted to do was two-fold. I wanted to look into exactly
how dramatic is this increase in mental illness, and particularly
severe mental illness. Part of this rise in the number of people said
to be mentally ill is just definitional. We draw a big wide boundary
today and we throw all sorts of people into that category of mentally
ill. So children who are not sitting neatly enough in their school
rooms are said to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), and we created a new disorder called social anxiety disorder.

SS: So what used to be called simply shyness or anxiety in relating
to people is now labeled a mental disorder and you supposedly need an
antidepressant like Paxil for social anxiety disorder.
RW: Exactly. And you need a stimulant like Ritalin for ADHD.

SS: This increases psychiatry's clients, but doesn't it also increase
the number of people that giant pharmaceutical companies can sell
their psychiatric drugs to?
RW: Absolutely. So part of what we're seeing is nothing more than the
creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as long
as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of
mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs.
So there's a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in
as broad terms as possible, and to find ordinary, distressing
emotions or behaviors that some people may not like and label them as
mental illness.

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people
who have a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems counterintuitive,
but is it true that you believe much of this increase is caused by
the overuse of some of the new generations of psychiatric drugs?
RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely
disabled mentally ill -- people who aren't working or who are somehow
dysfunctional because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart through
history the percentage of the population who are considered the
disabled mentally ill.

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the
United States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the
start of the modern era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of
every 300 people was disabled by mental illness. Now, let's go to
1987, the end of the first generation of antipsychotic drugs; and
from 1987 forward we get the modern psychiatric drugs. From 1955 to
1987, during this first era of psychiatric drugs -- the antipsychotic
drugs Thorazine and Haldol and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as
Elavil and Anafranil) -- we saw the number of disabled mentally ill
increase four-fold, to the point where roughly one out of every 75
persons are deemed disabled mentally ill.

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill
between 1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by
1987, we had gone through social change, and we were now placing
people in shelters, nursing homes, and some sort of community care,
and gave them either SSI or SSDI payments for mental disability. In
1987, we started getting these supposedly better, second-generation
psychiatric drugs like Prozac and the other selective serotonin re-
uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get
the new, atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine),
Clozaril and Risperdal.

What's happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued
to increase until it's now one in every 50 Americans. Think about
that: One in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness today. And
it's still increasing. The number of mentally disabled people in the
United States has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per
year since 1987. That's an increase every day over the last 17 years
of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness.

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has
introduced these so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and
Zyprexa, why is the incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?
RW: That's exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form
of care where we're using these drugs in an ever more expansive
manner, and supposedly we have better drugs and they're the
cornerstone of our care, so we should see decreasing disability
rates. That's what your expectation would be.

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the
number of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7
million people in the United States. In that time, our spending on
psychiatric drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending
on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500
million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the
question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this
increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of
outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics,
the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like
Ritalin used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom
slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of
time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of
depression better than a placebo over the short term.

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a
worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety
over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on
the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity
of symptoms. And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients
where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the
drug itself.

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are
told will help them recover?
RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A
certain percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have
some form of depression will suffer either a manic or psychotic
attack -- drug-induced. This is well recognized. So now, instead of
just dealing with depression, they're dealing with mania or psychotic
symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced manic episode, what
happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they're
newly diagnosed. They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an
antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that
point, they're moving down the path to chronic disability.

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct
pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their
claim that abnormal brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia
and depression?
RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is
the answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have this
long-term problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They
hypothesize that these drugs work by correcting an imbalance of the
neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine
systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed
that chemical imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they're
like insulin is for diabetes; they're fixing an abnormality. With the
antidepressants, the theory was that people with depression had too
low levels of serotonin; the drugs upped the levels of serotonin in
the brain and therefore they're balancing the brain chemistry.

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into
what was actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out
that antipsychotics blocked dopamine and so they theorized that
people had overactive dopamine systems. Same with the
antidepressants. They found that antidepressants upped the levels of
serotonin; therefore, they theorized that people with depression must
have low levels of serotonin.

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and
wishes psychiatry would come clean on: They've never been able to
find that people with schizophrenia have overactive dopamine systems.
They've never been able to find that people with depression have
underactive serotonin systems. They've never found consistently that
any of these disorders are associated with any chemical imbalance in
the brain. The story that people with mental disorders have known
chemical imbalances -- that's a lie. We don't know that at all. It's
just something that they say to help sell the drugs and help sell the
biological model of mental disorders.

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb
how these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm
is: People diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with
their neurotransmitter systems; and these drugs perturb the normal
function of neurotransmitters.

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely
prescribed drugs distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.
RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the
former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a
paper in 1996 that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain.
He wrote that all these drugs create perturbations in
neurotransmitter functions. And he notes that the brain, in response
to this drug from the outside, alters its normal functions and goes
through a series of compensatory adaptations.

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic
drug is blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of
antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the fact that you're
blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is to
adapt in the opposite way. So, if you're blocking dopamine in the
brain, the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually
increases the number of dopamine receptors. So a person placed on
antipsychotic drugs will end up with an abnormally high number of
dopamine receptors in the brain.

If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep
serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite.
It stops producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it
reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone
who is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally
low level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman
concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient's
brain is functioning in a way that is "qualitatively as well as
quantitatively different from the normal state." So what Stephen
Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done is present a paradigm for
how these drugs affect the brain that shows that they're inducing a
pathological state.

SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's
claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the
brain that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these
new wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?
RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real
paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these
drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing
precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known
abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we're
perturbing that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry Jacobs, a
Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an
SSRI antidepressant. "These drugs," he said, "alter the level of
synaptic transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under
normal environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or
physiologic change produced under these conditions might more
appropriately be considered pathologic rather than reflective of the
normal biological role of serotonin."

SS: One of the SSRI antidepressants that's widely believed to be a
wonder drug is Prozac. Yet your research found that the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) received more adverse reports about Prozac than
any other drug. What sort of ill effects were people reporting?
RW: First of all, with Prozac and the SSRIs that followed, their
level of efficacy was always of a very minor sort. In all the
clinical trials of the antidepressants, roughly 41 percent of the
patients got better in the short term versus 31 percent of the
patients on placebo. Now just one other caveat on that. If you use an
active placebo in these trials -- an active placebo causes a
physiologic change with no benefit, like a dry mouth -- any
difference in outcome between the antidepressant and placebo
virtually disappears.

SS: Weren't the early drug tests of Prozac so unpromising that they
had to manipulate test results to get FDA approval at all?
RW: What happened with Prozac is a fascinating story. Right from the
beginning, they noticed only very marginal efficacy over placebo; and
they noticed that they had some problems with suicide. There were
increased suicidal responses compared to placebo. In other words, the
drugs was agitating people and making people suicidal who hadn't been
suicidal before. They were getting manic responses in people who
hadn't been manic before. They were getting psychotic episodes in
people who hadn't been psychotic before. So you were seeing these
very problematic side effects even at the same time that you were
seeing very modest efficacy, if any, over placebo in ameliorating
depression.

Basically, what Eli Lilly (Prozac's manufacturer) had to do was cover
up the psychosis, cover up the mania; and, in that manner, it was
able to get these drugs approved. One FDA reviewer even warned that
Prozac appeared to be a dangerous drug, but it was approved anyway.
We're seemingly finding all this out only now: "Oh, Prozac can cause
suicidal impulses and all these SSRIs may increase the risk of
suicide." The point is, that wasn't anything new. That data was there
from the very first trial. You had people in Germany saying, "I think
this is a dangerous drug."

SS: Even back in the late 1980s, they already knew?
RW: Before the late 1980s -- in the early '80s, before Prozac gets
approved. Basically what Eli Lilly had to do was cover up that risk
of mania and psychosis, cover up that some people were becoming
suicidal because they were getting this nervous agitation from
Prozac. That's the only way it got approved.

There were various ways they did the cover-up. One was just to simply
remove reports of psychosis from some of the data. They also went
back and recoded some of the trial results. Let's say someone had a
manic episode or a psychotic episode; instead of putting that down,
they would just put down a return of depression, and that sort of
thing. So there was a basic need to hide these risks right from the
beginning, and that's what was done.

So Prozac gets approved in 1987, and it's launched in this amazing PR
campaign. The pill itself is featured on the cover of several
magazines! It's like the Pill of the Year . And it's said to
be so much safer: a wonder drug. We have doctors saying, "Oh, the
real problem with this drug is that we can now create whatever
personality we want. We're just so skilled with these drugs that if
you want to be happy all the time, take your pill!"


That was complete nonsense. The drugs were barely better than placebo
at alleviating depressive symptoms over the short term. You had all
these problems; yet we were touting these drugs, saying, "Oh, the
powers of psychiatry are such that we can give you the mind you want -
- a designer personality!" It was absolutely obscene. Meanwhile,
which drug, after being launched, quickly became the most complained
about drug in America? Prozac!

SS: What were the level of complaints when Prozac hit the market?
RW: In this county, we have Medwatch, a reporting system in which we
report adverse events about psychiatric drugs to the FDA. By the way,
the FDA tries to keep these adverse reports from the public. So,
instead of the FDA making these easily available to the public. so
you can know about the dangers of the drugs, it's very hard to get
these reports.

Within one decade, there were 39,000 adverse reports about Prozac
that were sent to Medwatch. The number of adverse events sent to
Medwatch is thought to represent only one percent of the actual
number of such events. So, if we get 39,000 adverse event reports
about Prozac, the number of people who have actually suffered such
problems is estimated to be 100 times as many, or roughly four
million people. This makes Prozac the most complained about drug in
America, by far. There were more adverse event reports received about
Prozac in its first two years on the market than had been reported on
the leading tricyclic antidepressant in 20 years.

Remember, Prozac is pitched to the American public as this
wonderfully safe drug, and yet what are people complaining about?
Mania, psychotic depression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation,
hostility, hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence,
convulsions, insomnia, nausea, suicidal impulses. It's a wide range
of serious symptoms.

And here's the kicker. It wasn't just Prozac. Once we got the other
SSRIs on the market, like Zoloft and Paxil, by 1994, four SSRI
antidepressants were among the top 20 most complained about drugs on
the FDA's Medwatch list. In other words, every one of these drugs
brought to market started triggering this range of adverse events.
And these were not minor things. When you talk about mania,
hallucinations, psychotic depression, these are serious adverse
events.


Prozac was pitched to the American public as a wonder drug. It was
featured on the covers of magazines as so safe, and as a sign of our
wonderful ability to effect the brain just as we want it. In truth,
the reports were showing it could trigger a lot of dangerous events,
including suicide and psychosis.

The FDA was being warned about this. They were getting a flood of
adverse event reports, and the public was never told about this for
the longest period of time. It took a decade for the FDA to begin to
acknowledge the increased suicides and the violence it can trigger in
some people. It just shows how the FDA betrayed the American people.
This is a classic example. They betrayed their responsibility to act
as a watchdog for the American people. Instead they acted as an
agency that covered up harm and risk with these drugs.

SS: In light of the FDA's failure to warn us about Prozac, what about
their recent negligence on the issue of the risk of suicide in
children given antidepressants like Paxil? Weren't England's mental
health officials far better than their American counterparts in the
FDA in warning about the dangers of suicidal attempts when
antidepressants are given to youth?
RW: Yes. The children's story is unbelievably tragic. It's also a
really sordid story. Let's go back a little to see what happened to
children and antidepressants. Prozac comes to market in 1987. By the
early 1990s, the pharmaceutical companies making these drugs are
saying, "How do we expand the market for antidepressants?" Because
that's what drug companies do -- they want to get to an ever-larger
number of people. They saw they had an untapped market in kids. So
let's start peddling the drugs to kids. And they were successful.
Since 1990, the use of antidepressants in kids went up something like
seven-fold. They began prescribing them willy-nilly.

Now, whenever they did pediatric trials of antidepressants, they
found that the drugs were no more effective on the target symptom of
depression than placebo. This happened again and again in the
pediatric drug trials of antidepressants. So, what that tells you is
there is no real therapeutic rationale for the drugs because in this
population of kids, the drugs don't even curb the target symptoms
over the short term any better than placebo; and yet they were
causing all sorts of adverse events.

For example, in one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with
antidepressants suffered an adverse event of some kind. In one study
by the University of Pittsburgh, 23 percent of children treated with
an SSRI developed mania or manic-like symptoms; an additional 19
percent developed drug-induced hostility. The clinical results were
telling you that you didn't get any benefit on depression; and you
could cause all sorts of real problems in kids -- mania, hostility,
psychosis, and you may even stir suicide. In other words, don't use
these drugs, right? It was absolutely covered up.

SS: How was it covered up?
RW: We had psychiatrists -- some of those obviously getting money
from the drug companies -- saying the kids are under-treated and
they're at risk of suicide and how could we possibly treat kids
without these pills and what a tragedy it would be if we couldn't use
these antidepressants.

Finally, a prominent researcher in England, David Healy, started
doing his own research on the ability of these drugs to stir suicide.
He also managed to get access to some of the trial results and he
blew the whistle. He first blew the whistle in England and he
presented this data to the review authorities there. And they saw
that it looks like these drugs are increasing the risk of suicide and
there are really no signs of benefits on the target symptoms of
depression. So they began to move there to warn doctors not to
prescribe these drugs to youth.

What happens in the United States? Well, it's only after there's a
lot of pressure put on the FDA that they even hold a hearing. The FDA
sort of downplays the risk of these drugs. They're slow to even put
black box warnings on them. Why? Aren't kids lives worth protecting?
If we know that we have a scientifically shown risk that these drugs
increase suicide, shouldn't you at least warn about it? But the FDA
was even digging in its heels about putting that black box warning on
the drugs.

SS: If Prozac is the nation's most complained about drug, if Paxil is
shown to be a suicide risk for youth, how do these antidepressants
continue to have a reputation as near-magic cures for depression? And
why did the FDA failed to warn us about Paxil and Prozac for such a
long time?
RW: There's a couple reasons for that. The FDA's funding changed in
the 1990s. An act was passed in which a lot of the FDA's funding came
from the drug industry: the PDUFA Act, or Prescription Drug User Fee
Act. Basically, when drug companies applied for FDA approval they had
to pay a fee. Those fees became what is funding a large portion of
the FDA's review of drug applications.

So all of a sudden, the funding is coming from the drug industry;
it's no longer coming from the people. As that act comes up for
renewal, basically the drug lobbyists are telling the FDA that their
job is no longer to be critically analyzing drugs, but to approve
drugs quickly. And that was part of Newt Gingrich's thing: Your job
is to get these drugs to market. Start partnering with the drug
industry and facilitating drug development. We lost this idea that
the FDA had a watchdog role.

Also, in a human way, a lot of people who work for the FDA leave
there and end up going to work for the drug companies. The old joke
is that the FDA is sort of like a showcase for a future job in the
drug industry. You go there, you work awhile, then you go off into
the drug industry. Well, if that's the progression that people make,
in essence they're making good old boy network connections, so
they're not going to be so harsh on the drug companies. So, that's
what really happened in the 1990s. The FDA was given new marching
orders. The orders were: "Facilitate getting drugs to market. Don't
be too critical. And, in fact, if you want to keep your funding,
which was coming now from the drug industry, make sure you take these
lessons to heart."

SS: So the giant pharmaceutical companies have a vast amount of power
to cook the results of drug tests and make researchers and even the
FDA itself bow to their will?
RW: The FDA, in essence, was kneecapped in the early 1990s, and we
really saw it with the psychiatric drugs. The FDA became a lapdog for
the pharmaceutical industry, not a watchdog.
It's only now that this has become common knowledge. We have Marcia
Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine,
write a book in which she says that the FDA became a lapdog. It's
basically now well recognized that you had this decline and fall. As
the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, the most
prestigious medical journal we have, Marcia Angell is someone who was
at the very heart of American medicine, and she concluded that the
FDA let down the American people. And she lost her job at the New
England Journal of Medicine for starting to criticize pharmaceutical
companies.

She was the editor of the journal in the late 1990s and there was a
corresponding doctor named Thomas Bodenheimer who decided to write an
article about how you couldn't even trust what was published in the
medical journals anymore because of all the spinning of results.
So they did an investigation about how the pharmaceutical companies
are funding all the research and spinning the trial results, so you
can no longer really trust what you read in scientific journals. They
pointed out that when they tried to get an expert to review the
scientific literature related to antidepressants, they basically
couldn't find someone who hadn't taken money from the drug companies.

Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the
Massachusetts Medical Society which publishes a lot of other
journals, and they get a lot of pharmaceutical advertising. So what
happens after that article appears by Thomas Bodenheimer and an
accompanying editorial by Marcia Angell about the sorry state of
American medicine because of this? They both lose their jobs! She's
gone and so is Thomas Bodenheimer. Think about this. We have the
leading medical journal firing people, letting them go, because they
dared to criticize the dishonest science and the dishonest process
that was poisoning the scientific literature.

So we have the FDA that's acting as lapdogs. You can't trust the
scientific literature. All this shows how the American public was
betrayed and didn't know about all the problems with these drugs and
why it was kept from them. It has to do with money, prestige and old
boy networks.

SS: It also has to do with the silencing of critics. Eli Lilly uses
the media to trumpet Prozac's benefits and gives perks to doctors to
attend conferences to hear about its benefits, and buys off
researchers. But don't they also use their power and money to silence
their critics?
RW: An example is Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who also
works for Harvard University Health Services, and who wrote a book
called Prozac Backlash to warn about the dangers of Prozac. He's
finding that the drugs are being overused and cause severe side
effects. He even raises questions about long-term memory problems
with the drugs and cognitive dysfunction. Well, Eli Lilly then
mounted a public relations campaign to try to discredit him. They
sent out notices to the media questioning his affiliation with
Harvard Medical School, etc. It was all about silencing the critics.

If you sing the tune that the drug companies want, at the very top
levels, you get paid a lot of money to fly around and give
presentations about the wonders of the drugs. And those who come, and
don't ask any embarrassing questions, get the lobster dinners and
maybe they get a little honorarium for attending this educational
meeting. So if you want to be part of this gravy train, you can. You
sing the wonders of the drug, and you don't talk about their nasty
side effects, and you can get a nice payment as one of their guest
speakers, as one of their experts.

But if you're one of the ones saying, "What about the mania, what
about the psychosis?" -- they do silence you. Look at what happened
to David Healy. Healy is even the best example. David Healy has this
sterling reputation in England. He's written several books on the
history of psychopharmacology. He's like the former Secretary of the
Psychopharmacology Association over there. He gets offered a job at
the University of Toronto to head up their psychiatry department. So
while he's waiting to assume that position at the University of
Toronto, he goes to Toronto and delivers a talk on the elevated risk
of suicide with Prozac and some of the other SSRIs. By the time he's
back home, the job offer has been rescinded.

Now does Eli Lilly donate some money to the University of Toronto?
Absolutely. So, to answer your question, yes, Eli Lilly silences
dissenters as well.

SS: What is the story behind the secret settlement between Eli Lilly
and the survivors who sued the company after Joseph Wesbecker shot 20
coworkers after being put on Prozac?
RW: During this trial in which Eli Lilly was being sued, the judge
was going to allow some very damaging evidence showing wrongdoing by
Eli Lilly in a previous instance. The judge said, "Go ahead and
introduce this at the trial." But next thing you know, they don't
introduce this; and in fact, all of a sudden, the plaintiffs no
longer are presenting very damaging evidence to make their case. So
the judge wonders why they are not presenting their best case
anymore. He smells a rat. He suspects Eli Lilly has settled with the
plaintiffs secretly and the deal is that, as part of this settlement,
the plaintiffs will go ahead with a sham trial so that Eli Lilly will
win the trial. Then Eli Lilly can claim, "See our drug doesn't cause
people to become violent."

And, indeed, that's what happened. Eli Lilly felt it was going to
lose this trial. They went to the plaintiffs and said they would give
them a lot of money. They agreed to go ahead and settle the case, but
had the plaintiffs go ahead with the trial. That way Eli Lilly can
publicly claim that they won the trial and Prozac doesn't cause harm.

SS: How did this even come out into the light of day?
RW: We would never have known about this except for two things. One,
believe it or not, the judge, in essence, appealed the decision in
his own court. He said, "I smell a rat." And through that, he found
out that there was this secret settlement and that it was a sham
proceeding that continued on. He said it was one of the worst
violations of the integrity of the legal process that he'd ever seen.
And second, an English journalist named John Cornwell wrote a book
called Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial. He wrote
about this case, and yet in the United States, we got almost no news
about this secret settlement and this whole perversion of the legal
process. It was an English journalist who was exposing this story.

My point here is this: They silence people like Marcia Angell. They
pervert the scientific process. They pervert the legal process. They
pervert the FDA drug review process. It's everywhere! And that's how
we as a society end up believing in these psychiatric drugs. You
asked the question a while back, "Why do we still believe in Prozac?"
One of the reasons is that the story about Prozac is, in effect,
maintained. It's publicly maintained because we do all this silencing
along all these lines.

The other thing to remember is that some people on Prozac do feel
better. That's true. That shows up, just in the same way that some
people on placebos feel better. And those are the stories that get
repeated: "Oh, I took Prozac and I'm feeling better." It's that
select group that does better that becomes the story that is told out
there, and the story that the public hears. So that's why we
continued to believe in the story of these wonder drugs that are very
safe in spite of all this messy stuff that gets covered up.

SS: Let's now move from the antidepressants like Prozac to consider
another new group of supposed wonder drugs -- the new antipsychotic
drugs. You write that long-term use of antipsychotic drugs -- both
the original neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine and Haldol and the
newer atypicals like Zyprexa and Risperdal -- cause pathological
changes in the brain that can lead to a worsening of the symptoms of
mental illness. What changes in brain chemistry result from the
antipsychotics, and how can that lead to the most frightening
prospect you describe -- chronic mental illness that is locked in by
these drugs?
RW: This is a line of research that goes across 40 years. This
problem of chronic illness shows up time and time again in the
research literature. This biological mechanism is somewhat well
understood now. The antipsychotics profoundly block dopamine
receptors. They block 70-90 percent of the dopamine receptors in the
brain. In return, the brain sprouts about 50 percent extra dopamine
receptors. It tries to become extra sensitive.

So in essence you've created an imbalance in the dopamine system in
the brain. It's almost like, on one hand, you've got the accelerator
down -- that's the extra dopamine receptors. And the drug is the
brake trying to block this. But if you release that brake, if you
abruptly go off the drugs, you now do have a dopamine system that's
overactive. You have too many dopamine receptors. And what happens?
People that go abruptly off of the drug, do tend to have severe
relapses.

SS: So people that have been treated with these antipsychotic drugs
have a far greater tendency to relapse, and have new episodes of
mental illness, as opposed to people who have had other kinds of non-
drug therapies?
RW: Absolutely, and that was understood by 1979, that you were
actually increasing the underlying biological vulnerability to the
psychosis. And by the way, we sort of understood that if you muck
with the dopamine system, that you could cause some symptoms of
psychosis with amphetamines. So if you give someone amphetamines
enough, they're at increased risk of psychosis. This is well known.
And what do amphetamines do? They release dopamine. So there is a
biological reason why, if you're mucking up the dopamine system,
you're increasing the risk of psychosis. That's in essence what these
antipsychotic drugs do, they muck up the dopamine system.

Here's just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the
University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed
with schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the
brains of these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the
moment of diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18
months to see how those brains change. Now during this 18 months,
they are being prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the
researchers report? They reported that, over this 18-month period,
the drugs caused an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the
brain that uses dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change
in morphology, a change in the size of an area of the brain, and
that's abnormal. That's number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug
causing an abnormality in the brain.

Now here's the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred,
it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a
worsening of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with
modern technology, a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we
see how an outside agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes
an abnormal enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement
causes a worsening of the very symptoms it's supposed to treat. Now
that's actually, in essence, a story of a disease process -- an
outside agent causes abnormality, causes symptoms...

SS: But in this case, the outside agent that triggers the disease
process is the supposed cure for the disease! The psychiatric drug is
the disease-causing agent.
RW: That's exactly right. It's a stunning, damning finding. It's the
sort of finding you would say, "Oh Christ, we should be doing
something different." Do you know what those researchers got new
grants for, after they reported that?

SS: No, what? You'd guess they got funding to carry out these same
studies on other classes of psychiatric drugs.
RW: They got a grant to develop an implant, a brain implant, that
would deliver drugs like Haldol on a continual basis! A grant to
develop a drug delivery implant so you could implant this in the
brains of people with schizophrenia and then they wouldn't even have
a chance not to take the drugs!

SS: Unbelievable. Designing an implant to provide a constant dose of
a drug that they had just discovered causes pathology in the brain
chemistry.
RW: Right, they had just found that they're causing a worsening of
symptoms! So why would you go on to a design a permanent implant?
Because that's where the money was.
And no one wanted to deal with this horrible finding of an
enlargement of the basal ganglia caused by the drugs, and that is
associated with the worsening of symptoms. No one wanted to deal with
the fact that when you look at people medicated on antipsychotics,
you start to see a shrinking of the frontal lobes. No one wants to
talk about that either. They stopped that research.

SS: What other side effects are caused by prolonged use of these
antipsychotic drugs?
RW: Oh, you get tardive dyskinesia, a permanent brain dysfunction;
and akathisia, which is this incredible nervous agitation. You're
just never comfortable. You want to sit but you can't sit. It's like
you're crawling out of your own skin. And it's associated with
violence, suicide and all sorts of horrible things.

SS: Those kinds of side-effects were notorious with the first
generation of antipsychotic drugs, like Thorazine, Haldol and
Stelazine. But, just as with Prozac, so many people are still touting
the new generation of atypical antipsychotics -- Zyprexa, Clozaril
and Risperdal -- as wonder drugs that control mental illness with far
fewer side effects. Is that true? What have you found?
RW: No, it's just complete nonsense. In fact, I think the newer drugs
will eventually be seen as more dangerous than the old drugs, if
that's possible. As you know, the standard neuroleptics like
Thorazine and Haldol have had quite a litany of harm with the tardive
dyskinesia and all.
So when we got the new atypical drugs, they were touted as so much
safer. But with these new atypicals, you get all sorts of metabolic
dysfunctions.

Let's talk about Zyprexa. It has a different profile. So it may not
cause as much tardive dyskinesia. It may not cause as many
Parkinsonian symptoms. But it causes a whole range of new symptoms.
So, for example, it's more likely to cause diabetes. It's more likely
to cause pancreatic disorders. It's more likely to cause obesity and
appetite-disregulation disorders.

In fact, researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the
introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among
people with schizophrenia has doubled. They have done death rates of
people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that
with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and
it doubles. It doubles! It didn't reduce harm. In fact, in their
seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died.

SS: What were the causes of death?
RW: All sorts of physical illnesses, and that's part of the point.
You're getting respiratory problems, you're getting people dying of
incredibly high cholesterol counts, heart problems, diabetes. With
olanzapine (Zyprexa), one of the problems is that you're really
screwing up the core metabolic system. That's why you get these huge
weight gains, and you get the diabetes. Zyprexa basically disrupts
the machine that we are that processes food and extracts energy from
that food. So this very fundamental thing that we humans do is
disrupted, and at some point you just see all these pancreatic
problems, faulty glucose regulation, diabetes, etc. That's really a
sign that you're mucking with something very fundamental to life.

SS: There's supposedly an alarming increase in mental illness being
diagnosed in children. Millions are diagnosed with depression,
bipolar and psychotic symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Is this explosive new
prevalence of mental illness among children a real increase, or is it
a marketing campaign that enriches the psychiatric drug industry, a
bonanza for the pharmaceutical corporations?
RW: You're touching on something now that is a tragic scandal of
monumental proportions. I talk sometimes to college classes,
psychology classes. You cannot believe the percentage of youth who
have been told they were mentally ill as kids, that something was
wrong with them. It's absolutely phenomenal. It's absolutely cruel to
be telling kids that they have these broken brains and mental
illnesses.

There's two things that are happening here. One, of course, is that
it's complete nonsense. As you remember as a kid, you have too much
energy or you behave sometimes in not altogether appropriate ways,
and you do have these extremes of emotions, especially during your
teenage years. Both children and teenagers can be very emotional. So
one thing that's going on is that they take childhood behaviors and
start defining behaviors they don't like as pathological. They start
defining emotions that are uncomfortable as pathological. So part of
what we're doing is pathologizing childhood with straight-out
definition stuff. We're pathologizing poverty among kids.

For example, if you're a foster kid, and maybe you drew a bad straw
in the lottery of life and are born into a dysfunctional family and
you get put into foster care, do you know what happens today? You
pretty likely are going to get diagnosed with a mental disorder, and
you're going to be placed on a psychiatric drug. In Massachusetts,
it's something like 60 to 70 percent of kids in foster care are now
on psychiatric drugs. These kids aren't mentally ill! They got a raw
deal in life. They ended up in a foster home, which means they were
in a bad family situation, and what does our society do? They
say: "You have a defective brain." It's not that society was bad and
you didn't get a fair deal. No, the kid has a defective brain and has
to be put on this drug. It's absolutely criminal.

Let's talk about bipolar disorder among kids. As one doctor said,
that used to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Now we're seeing
it all over. Bipolar is exploding among kids. Well, partly you could
say that we're just slapping that label on kids more often; but in
fact, there is something real going on. Here's what's happening. You
take kids and put them on an antidepressant -- which we never used to
do -- or you put them on a stimulant like Ritalin. Stimulants can
cause mania; stimulants can cause psychosis.

SS: And antidepressants can also cause mania, as you pointed out.
RW: Exactly, so the kid ends up with a drug-induced manic or
psychotic episode. Once they have that, the doctor at the emergency
room doesn't say, "Oh, he's suffering from a drug-induced episode."
He says he's bipolar.

SS: Then they give him a whole new drug for the mental disorder
caused by the first drug.
RW: Yeah, they give him an antipsychotic drug; and now he's on a
cocktail of drugs, and he's on a path to becoming disabled for life.
That's an example of how we're absolutely making kids sick.

SS: It's like society or their schools are trying to make them
manageable and they end up putting them on a chemical roller coaster
against their will.
RW: Absolutely.

SS: There's an astonishing number of kids being given Ritalin to cure
hyperactivity. But what 10-year-old boy in a confined school setting
isn't hyperactive? You write that the effect of Ritalin on the
dopamine system is very similar to cocaine and amphetamines.
RW: Ritalin is methylphenidate. Now methylphenidate affects the brain
in exactly the same way as cocaine. They both block a molecule that
is involved in the reuptake of dopamine.

SS: So they both increase the dopamine levels in the brain?
RW: Exactly. And they do it with a similar degree of potency. So
methylphenidate is very similar to cocaine. Now, one difference is
whether you're snorting it or if it's in a pill. That partly changes
how quickly it's metabolized. But still, it basically affects the
brain in the same way. Now, methylphenidate was used in research
studies to deliberately stir psychosis in schizophrenics. Because
they knew that you could take a person with a tendency towards
psychosis, give them methylphenidate, and cause psychosis. We also
knew that amphetamines, like methylphenidate, could cause psychosis
in people who had never been psychotic before.

So think about this. We're giving a drug to kids that is known to
have the possibility of stirring psychosis. Now, the odd thing about
methylphenidate and amphetamines is that, in kids, they sort of have
a counterintuitive effect. What does speed do in adults? It makes
them more jittery and hyperactive. For whatever reasons, in kids
amphetamines will actually still their movements; it will actually
keep them in their chairs and make them more focused. So you've got
kids in boring schools. The boys are not paying attention and they're
diagnosed with ADHD and put on a drug that is known to stir
psychosis. The next thing you know, a fair number of them are not
doing well by the time they're 15, 16, 17. Some of those kids talk
about how when you're on these drugs for the long term, you start
feeling like a zombie; you don't feel like yourself.

SS: Hollowed-out, blunted emotions. And this is being done to
millions of kids.
RW: Millions of kids! Think about what we're doing. We're robbing
kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to
experience their full range of emotions, and their right to
experience the world in its full hue of colors. That's what growing
up is, that's what being alive is! And we're robbing kids of their
right to be. It's so criminal. And we're talking about millions of
kids who have been affected this way. There are some colleges where
something like 40 to 50 percent of the kids arrive with a psychiatric
prescription.

SS: It looks like a huge social-control mechanism. Society gives kids
Ritalin and antidepressants to subdue them and make them conform. On
the one hand, it's all about social control and conformity. But it
also has a huge marketing payoff.
RW: You're right, it creates customers for the drugs, and hopefully
lifelong customers. That's what they're told, aren't they? They're
told they are going to be on these drugs for life. And next thing
they know, they're on two or three or four drugs. It's brilliant from
the capitalist point of view. It does serve some social-control
function. But you take a kid, and you turn them into a customer, and
hopefully a lifelong customer. It's brilliant.

We now spend more on antidepressants in this country than the Gross
National Product of mid-sized countries like Jordan. It's just
amazing amounts of money. The amount of money we spend on psychiatric
drugs in this country is more than the Gross National Product of two-
thirds of the world's countries. It's just this incredibly lucrative
paradigm of the mind that you can fix chemical imbalances in the
brain with these drugs. It works so well from a capitalistic point of
view for Eli Lilly. When Prozac came to market, Eli Lilly's value on
Wall Street, its capitalization, was around 2 billion dollars. By the
year 2000, the time when Prozac was its number-one drug, its
capitalization reached 80 billion dollars -- a forty-fold increase.

So that's what you really have to look at if you want to see why drug
companies have pursued this vision with such determination. It brings
billions of dollars in wealth in terms of increased stock prices to
the owners and managers of those companies. It also benefits the
psychiatric establishment that gets behind the drugs; they do well by
this. There's a lot of money flowing in the direction of those that
will embrace this form of care. There's advertisements that enrich
the media. It's all a big gravy train.

Unfortunately, the cost is dishonesty in our scientific literature,
the corruption of the FDA, and the absolute harm done to children in
this country drawn into this system, and an increase of 150,000 newly
disabled people every year in the United States for the last 17
years. That's an incredible record of harm done.

SS: Everyone gets rich -- the drug companies, the psychiatrists, the
researchers, the advertising agencies -- and the clients get drugged
out of their minds and damaged for life.
RW: And you know what's interesting? No one says that the mental
health of the American people is getting better. Instead, everyone
says we have this increasing problem They blame it on the stresses of
modern life or something like that, and they don't want to look at
the fact that we're creating mental illness.

Linda,

I can't exactly say that I felt I lambasted you just made my point of view known. My main issue is my experiences are different than yours and as I said before I have nothing against people sharing their experiences or worries but ultimately it is peoples personal choice whether they take drugs. I have nothing against the promotion of information but I feel it has to be done in an balanced way. I can probably dredge up websites siting the benefits of antidepressants but ultimately I don't promote their use I just say that I feel they help me and if people are on their lowest ebb it might help them.

My experience of drugs is also affected by the fact I have been working in Psychiatric care for 15 years and have met hundreds of people on many differing anti-psychotic and anti-depressive medication. I decided on the basis of how it affected the people I worked with it was a reasonably safe risk.

I am concerned when people have an axe to grind, in the grand scale of things this issue is irrelevant so I won't be continuing this debate

If you want to stay away from, or discontinue, psychotropic drugs, here is the Withdrawal and Recovery link:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Withdrawal_and_Recovery/

If you truly want to be medication-free, and well, and are willing to do what it takes to accomplish this, then you are welcome. You need to be prepared to be honest with yourself, to look at your life and make changes to your thought patterns and also to address fundamental needs that are possibly not being met. You also need to be prepared to change how you eat, to use nutritional supplements, and to do a slow taper off your medication -- 10% or less at a time.


If you're in doubt about any of this, please think hard before you join. You might want to dip into the info on the many links in this topic. You're also welcome to contact me if you have any questions.

It is possible to lead a healthy, drug-free life. There is hope.

Linda.

Hi Jeff,

Yes I read some of your other posts here, and thought it sounded like we were of a similar mind in many ways. I'm American too BTW, though I've been living in England for 12 years. I grew up in Missouri.

When I came to this forum I met some kind-hearted and sympathetic people. There's lots of good advice here about coping with symptoms. But I was severely depressed for months on end, desperate for help, and unfortunately there was no help to be had anywhere. "Coping" with symptoms isn't enough when you're as deep in the pit as I was. Suicide started to seem like the only way out.

I remember thinking exactly the same thing you said just now: "What I feel goes beyond the pain of having a 'down period' in life. This is excruciating, every minute of the day, and I can't take it anymore."

So even the people like Dr. Moncrieff, who talk perfect sense about psychotropic drugs being harmful and not offering much help, didn't light any hope in me. When I wrote to Dr. Moncrieff about this, her only suggestion to me was, "Have you tried exercise?" which I thought was rather patronising.

What gets left out of a lot of this is nutrition. Don't underestimate its power to hurt or harm, Jeff. And if you have taken/are taking psychotropic drugs, this is especially true. If you look into studies that have been done on aboriginal societies, like hunter-gatherers, you will find that diseases like schizophrenia and cancer are rare or non-existant. What you do find is that when these societies switch over to a Western-style diet, that's when they start getting ill. Diabetes was unknown in the Pacific before World War Two. Once these island societies adopted the American diet, cases of type 2 diabetes soared. It is now as high as 50% in some places. I could give many more examples like this.

Nutritional deficiencies can show themselves in myriad ways before they reach the deprivation levels in related diseases like scurvy, pellagra, pernicious anemia, etc. Doctors mostly don't recognise this because they don't look. They are trained to spot and treat symptoms. This is what Western medicine does. By beginning to look at your mind and body holistically, looking at the nutrition you are giving them and how you are taking care of them in general, you are starting to break out of this "treating symptoms" mode of thinking, and reaching out to something deeper and more profound.

If this piques your interest, a good starting point might be Linus Pauling's book "How to Live Longer and Feel Better" (which can be got from Amazon.com.) He was a pioneer of something called orthomolecular medicine, though there are other big names to look into there as well (the Shute brothers, Abram Hoffer). Pauling won a Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C megadosing, which was ironically largely ignored and written off as nonsense. Anyone who follows his advice will find that it does actually work, as long as you take the vitamin in the amounts that he tells you to (which is perfectly safe). I have headed off 4 or 5 colds now in a matter of a day or two each, by megadosing the way he recommends.

You might also like to have a look at this site: http://www.orthomolecular.org/

I'll just add here that I, like many others on the Withdrawal and Recovery list, would not have got out of the hole I was stuck in without altering my diet and starting to take supplements. Now I'm getting better, day by day, and I see my life stretching before me again -- better than I ever thought possible.

I hope this helps Jeff. Let me know if you've got further questions, and happy hunting -- there's enough info on the links here to keep a person busy for days.

Linda.

The following exerpt talks about the reasons why people are prescribed, and take, psychiatric drugs. It's important to keep in mind that there's no awareness here of the potential for nutritional deficiencies, food allergies, etc, to cause mental illness; but there is a lot of wisdom here nonetheless.

Introduction: What Is Your Ultimate Resource?

from Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, by Peter Breggin M.D. & David Cohen Ph.D.

This book is filled with technical and scientific information about psychiatric drugs (especially their dangers) and how to withdraw from them. However, it is also important to understand the underlying psychological, social, and ethical principles that may affect your decision to use or not use psychiatric drugs.

We can learn a great deal about ourselves and how we view life by asking, "Where do we turn when we feel emotionally upset or despairing? Where do we go when life seems unendurable and we have little or no hope left? What are our ultimate resources in life -- the places and persons to whom we turn for help, direction, and inspiration?"

Our Final Resort

All people seem to need faith, but the varieties of faith seem infinite. For many individuals, the ultimate resort or resource is religious or spiritual: God and prayer, or other beliefs and practises, and perhaps a trusted minister, priest, rabbi, or counselor. For others, the ultimate resource may be a loved one -- a husband or wife, a parent, a friend. Still others may believe that they themselves are the ultimate resource. They may turn to creative work, nature, pets, hobbies, sports, or some other seemingly individual or personal persuit. Increasingly, people nowadays also turn to science to find answers about how to live life. Probably for most people, the final resort is a combination of these resources: God, nature, science, other people, and oneself. Ultimately, all human resources are related. Commitment to a loving, zestful, rational, principled life becomes the cornerstone of life and the final resource.

Resort to Drugs

Many people, however, rely on another, more limited resource when they face psychological or social crises. They turn to psychoactive or mind-altering substances. Although they may believe or hope that they are relying on seemingly objective science, in reality they are placing their faith in drug company marketing -- and so are their doctors.

Consider the seemingly different situation with respect to recreational or illicit drugs. For untold millions throughout the world, the last resort is alcohol, tobacco, or substances such as marijuana and cocaine. Many turn to them when they feel on the verge of experiencing painful emotions. In the extreme, they become addicted to these substances and build their lives around them. When they eventually try to give up their addiction, they may discover that they have no other resources left and nowhere else to turn. Their lives have been emptied by their reliance on drugs. They must rebuild from scratch their faith in God or other ethical convictions, their trust in other people, and their reliance on themselves and their love of creative work or nature.

Seeking Relief

If people do feel better when drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, it is because they feel better when their brain is impaired. Psychiatric drugs are no different. The people who take such drugs may feel less of their emotional suffering. They may even reach a state of relative anesthesia. But to the degree that they feel better, it is because they are experiencing intoxication with the drugs.

Most of us can empathise with people who are willing to sacrifice brain function in return for a blunting of emotional suffering, but should therapists or doctors offer this alternative? Should we ourselves turn to this alternative in our own lives? Is the cost too great in terms of brain dysfunction and the failure to deal with the real issues in our lives?

The resort to psychoactive substances, whether legal or illegal, recreational or psychiatric, involves a compulsive narrowing of focus in the search for solutions to life's problems. Almost always the emphasis is on obtaining relief from painful emotions, too often regardless of the potential cost.

What Suffering Tells Us

Emotional suffering is inevitable in life. But it has meaning -- a purpose. Suffering is a signal that life matters. Specifically, it is usually a signal that something in our lives that matters a great deal needs to be addressed. Depression, guilt, anxiety, shame, chronic anger, emotional numbing -- all of these reactions signal that something is amiss and requires special attention. The depth of suffering is a sign of the soul's desire for a better, more creative, more principled life.

For example, when faced with a patient in deep depression, should we immediately focus on relief of the pain? On the contrary, we should respond by saying that the pain is a signal of the intensity of the person's spirit: "The strength and intensity of your suffering indicates the strength and intensity of your spirit. Your discomfort shows how alive you are. Now imagine if you could learn to turn all that self-destructive energy into creative energy and a love of life."

The degree to which we suffer indicates the degree to which we are alive. When we take drugs to ease our suffering, we stifle our psychological and spiritual life. Instead, we need to find a way to untangle that twisted energy and to redirect it more creatively. Sometimes this process of personal and psychological growth can be helped by insightful psychotherapy or other therapeutic and educational techniques -- including those that facilitate our understanding of early childhood sources of the suffering. At other times, the process is helped by our understanding of the problems in our immediate lives, such as an unhappy marriage, a frustrating job, or a difficult financial situation. Sometimes this understanding involves learning new principles of living with which to guide ourselves more effectively, which, in turn, may entail a recommitment or a new commitment to spiritual or philosophical ideas, and especially love for ourselves, for other people, and for life or some other guiding ideal. Sometimes it involves a therapist who cares so much about the client that the client can begin to care about himself or herself.

The New Ultimate Resource

The last ten to twenty years have seen a drastic change in viewpoint regarding the ultimate resource of moral and psychological guidance: Regardless of their religion or philosophy, many educated and informed people have come to believe that psychiatry and psychiatric drugs provide the best last resort for themselves when in psychological distress. Indeed, such drugs are increasingly the first resort. It appears that we have replaced reliance on God, other people, and ourselves with reliance on medical doctors and psychiatric drugs. The ultimate source of guidance and inspiration is no longer life itself with its infinite resources but biopsychiatry with its narrow view of human nature.

This view of ourselves is a most astonishing one. It suggests that most if not all of our psychological, emotional, and spiritual problems are “psychiatric disorders” best treated by specialists who prescribe psychoactive drugs. Our emotional and spiritual problems are not only seen as psychiatric disorders, they are declared to be biological and genetic in origin.

The propaganda for this remarkable perspective is financed by drug companies and spread by the media, by organised psychiatry and individual doctors, by “consumer” lobbies, and even by government agencies such as the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). As a result, many educated Americans take for granted that “science” and “research” have shown that emotional upsets or “behaviour problems” have biological and genetic causes and require psychiatric drugs. Indeed, they believe they are “informed” about scientific research. Few if any people realise that they are being subjected to one of the most successful public relations campaigns in history.

These days, your doctor is likely to suggest medication for relatively mild degrees of emotional upset or distress; even a few weeks of moderate sadness or anxiety are apt to lead to a prescription. If your child has been difficult to deal with for a few weeks at home or in school, that, too, is likely to bring out the prescription pad. The probem may have lasted for only a short period, but the drug treatment may go on for years or even for a lifetime.

Psychiatric diagnosis has become so widespread that it is almost impossible to mention any kind of “feeling” to a medical doctor without being assigned a psychiatric label and prescribed the latest psychiatric drug. And this scenario is not limited to strong emotions or serious distress. Feeling fatigued? take Prozac. Feeling as though you’ve lost your enthusiasm or direction? Take Paxil or Zoloft, especially if Prozac hasn’t worked. Feeling trapped in an abusive relationship? Take Effexor, Luvox, or lithium. Feeling a little nervous? Take Xanax, Klonopin, or Ativan. Having trouble disciplining your child? Give the child Ritalin, or Dexedrine, or Adderall. Having trouble focusing on work that bores you? Try Ritalin for yourself. Having ups and downs of any kind? Take any number of psychiatric drugs.

What Do We Really Know About How Our Brains Work?

Do we know what we are doing to our brains and minds when we take psychiatric drugs? Do we know what we are doing to our children when we give them these substances?

Consider this extraordinary reality. The human brain has more individual cells (neurons) than there are stars in the sky. Billions! And each neuron may have 10,000 or more connections (synapses) to other brain cells, creating a network with trillions of interconnections. In fact, the brain is considered to be the most complex organ in the entire universe. With its billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, it is more complex than the entire physical universe of planets, stars and galaxies.

Scientists have well-developed ideas about how the physical universe works. They possess mathematical formulae for describing the various forces that control the relationships among physical entities from black holes to subatomic particles. All these forces also affect the human brain. However, the living processes of the brain add complexities unknown in the physical universe. Those trillions of interconnections between brain cells, for example, are mediated by hundreds of chemical messengers (neurotransmitters), as well as by hormones, proteins, tiny ions such as sodium and potassium, and other substances. We have limited knowledge about how a few of these chemical messengers work but little or no idea as to how they combine to produce brain function.

The Science Behind Psychiatric Drugs

The public is told that a great deal of science is involved in the prescription of psychiatric drugs, but this is not so – given that we know so little about how the brain works. The knowledge that we do have about the effects of psychiatric drugs on the brain is largely limited to test-tube studies of biochemical reactions utilising ground-up pieces of animal brain. We simply do not understand the overall impact of drugs on the brain.

Nor do we have a clear idea about the relationship between brain function and mental phenomena such as “moods” or “emotions” like depression or anxiety. We don’t even know where to begin looking because we don’t fully understand how the brain functions.

Some theoreticians would urge us to focus on the molecular level by looking for biochemical imbalances. But that’s sheer speculation. Why would a biochemical imbalance be at the root of feeling very depressed any more than it would be at the root of feeling very happy? And if there were biochemical substrates for extreme sadness and extreme happiness, would that fact make them diseases? The idea of individual biochemical imbalances is wholly at odds with the complexity of the brain.

Besides, whose biochemical imbalance are we looking for? That of the child who is out of control or the caregiver who has difficulty disciplining? That of the child who isn’t learning or the teacher who hasn’t figured out how to reach this child? That of the individual who becomes anxious in dealing with people or the adult who abused the individual as a child? That of the person who is deeply depressed over a lost loved one or the doctor who recommends electroshock? That of the person who feels insecure or anxious or the doctor who thinks that the person’s problems require drugs? In short, whose brain isn’t working right?

Are There Biochemical Imbalances?

As one of our colleagues recently said, “Biochemical imbalances are the only diseases spread by word of mouth.” Individually, we must all use our own intuitive understanding of life to determine the likelihood that our problems are caused by some as-yet-undetected brain dysfunction rather than by conflicts in the home, at work, or in society, painful life experiences, confused values, a lack of direction, or other aspects of human life.

Of course, our bodies can affect our emotional outlook. We all find it much easier to maintain a bright and enthusiastic attitude when physically healthy than when physically ill. And anything from lack of sleep to the common cold can affect our moods.

However, doctors commonly give people psychiatric drugs without checking for obvious signs of serious physical disorder, such as hypothyroidism, estrogen deficiency, or head injury from a car accident. Moreover, they seem particularly prone to overlooking the importance of physical symptoms in women. Some women with obvious signs of a hormonal disorder or heart condition are put on antidepressants and antianxiety drugs without first being required by their internists or psychiatrists to undergo a physical evaluation.

It is therefore theoretically possible that some anxious or depressed people may be afflicted with an as-yet-undetected physical dysfunction. But this speculation doesn’t justify the unfounded conclusion that people in emotional distress are beset by specific biochemical imbalances or that such imbalances can be corrected with drugs.

In our own experience, most people with depression and anxiety have obvious reasons for how they feel. These reasons are often apparent in their everyday lives and may be complicated by past experiences in childhood or earlier adult life. But even if some people do turn out to have subtle, undetected biochemical imbalances, there is no reason to give them drugs like Prozac or Xanax that cause biochemical imbalances and disrupt brain function.

Let us again consider the final resort. Is it defined by our values, our family and friends, and ourselves – or by a medical doctor with a prescription pad?

What Do We really Know About Psychiatric Drugs and the Brain?

Almost all psychiatric drug research is done on the normal brains of animals, usually rats. As noted earlier, much of this research involves grinding up brain tissues to investigate the gross effects of a drug on one or more limited biochemical reactions in the brain. More sophisticated research involves micro-instrumentation that injects small amounts of drugs into the living brain and measures the firing of brain cells. Yet even these more refined methods are gross compared to the actual molecular activity in the brain. For example, we have no techniques for measuring the actual levels of neurotransmitters in the synapses between the cells. Thus all the talk about biochemical imbalances is pure guesswork. More important, what’s actually being studied is the disruption of normal processes by the intrusion of foreign substances.

This research in no way bolsters the idea that psychiatric drugs correct imbalances. Rather, it shows that psychiatric drugs create imbalances. In modern psychiatric treatment, we take the single most complicated known creation in the universe – the human brain – and pour drugs into it in the hope of “improving” its function when in reality we are disrupting its function.

The notion that Prozac corrects biochemical imbalances is sheer speculation – propaganda from the biological psychiatric industry. But disruption of biochemical reactions in the brain, causing severe biochemical imbalances and abnormal rates of firing among brain cells, is a proven fact about Prozac that cannot honestly be disputed by anyone who knows the research.

How does the brain react to the intrusion of psychiatric drugs such as Prozac, Ritalin, or Xanax?

The brain reacts as if it is being invaded by toxic substances; it tries to overcome, or compensate for, the harmful drug effects. In the process, the brain literally destroys its own capacity to respond to the drug. It numbs itself to the drug and, in so doing, actually kills some of its own functions. So when a doctor tells us that Prozac is putting our biochemistry into balance, we are being badly misled. In actuality, Prozac is profoundly disrupting the function of the brain.

Prozac, Ritalin, and Xanax, like most psychiatric drugs, overstimulate particular neurotransmitter systems either by increasing the output of a neurotransmitter or by preventing its removal from the synapses between nerve cells. Prozac, for example, overstimulates a chamical messenger called serotonin by blocking its removal from the synapse. The brain reacts by initially shutting down the release of serotonin and then by reducing the number of receptors that can respond to the serotonin.

These self-destructive processes in the brain are relatively easy to research. They were demonstrated in the private laboratories of Eli Lilly – the manufacturer of Prozac – even before the drug was approved for marketing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Long before the marketing of Prozac, the drug was known to routinely cause drastic biochemical imbalances rather than to correct them.

How long does it take the brain to recover from the imbalances caused by Prozac? We don’t have an answer to this critical question. Why not? Because drug companies and the scientific community have never carried out the relatively simple and inexpensive research that would be required. Yet we should suspect that the brain does not always recover from Prozac or similar antidepressants such as Paxil and Zoloft.

We already know that the brain’s recovery from exposure to many psychiatric drugs can be prolonged and that full recovery may never take place. Studies have demonstrated this outcome for stimulant drugs such as the amphetamines, including Dexedrine and Adderall, that are prescribed for children. Although the final verdict concerning Ritalin isn’t in, its similarity to other stimulants is such that we should be concerned about its capacity to cause irreversible changes. We also know that irreversible changes can occur in response to the drugs used to treat schizophrenia, such as Haldol, Prolixin, and Risperdal. These drugs can cause permanent, severe impairments of brain function. Indeed, we should suspect that any psychoactive drug – any drug that affects mental function – tends to produce irreversible changes in some if not most people.

What hope can we have that bathing the brain in a psychiatric drug will actually improve the overall function of this mysterious organ? Almost none. In fact, as already noted, most of what we know about the various neurotransmitters has been gathered by studying how psychiatric drugs disrupt or spoil their functioning.

What if We Treated Our Computers the Way We Treat the Brain?

Imagine what would happen if we treated our much simpler computers in the same way as we treat the brain in psychiatry. Consider the case of a computer that is “crashing” too often. With considerable poetic license, we can compare this mechanical dysfunction to the human tendency to become “overwhelmed” or “overloaded” with depression, anxiety, or obsessions and compulsions, and unable to function easily in everyday life.

Perhaps the computer is crashing for reasons having to do with its hardware. For example, the computer may need more memory or a new hard drive. Alternatively, the problem may be traceable to its software – to one or more of the programs installed on the computer. Then again, the operator of the computer and its programs may be responsible. Or the source of the problem could lie outside of the computer and even outside the office, as in the case of power surges.

When troubleshooting such a problem, computer experts routinely take all of these factors into consideration – the computer, the program, the operator, and the power source. If the cause of the problem isn’t immediately apparent, they may run experimental tests or programs in order to diagnose the problem.

The approach taken by psychiatrists and other medical doctors, by contrast, is both simple-minded and destructive. In contemporary psychiatry, the doctor almost always assumes that the problem lies in the “hardware” of the brain (i.e., “biochemical imbalances”). In the words of one well-known psychiatrist, emotional and behavioural difficulties are caused by a “broken brain.”

Modern psychiatrists seem to consider themselves brain consultants, but they have little knowledge with which to establish that expertise. Unlike computer consultants, psychiatrists have no way of identifying or locating the source of the problem in a patient’s brain. So the patient must take their “expert” assertions on faith.

How would you react if your computer consultant treated your computer the way psychiatrists treat patients and their brains? Suppose your consultant invariably concluded that the problem must lie in the hardware of your machine rather than in the program, the operator, or some external factor such as the power source. Suppose your consultant always began by pouring toxic agents into your computer. Further suppose that your consultant never guaranteed you a good result while continuing to pour toxic agents into your machine without regard for the consequences – and, when pressed for an explanation, made vague references to “crossed wires” or “electrical imbalances” in your computer but never looked inside, conducted any tests, or provided a definitive physical diagnosis.

How long would you put up with such nonsense from your computer consultant? Not very long. If computer consultants behaved like psychiatrists, we would fire them. Yet, tens of millions of people put up with even more slipshod, irrational treatments involving their far more complex and vulnerable brains and minds.

What This Viewpoint Does to Us

What happens when we start viewing a human being as an object? We lose our own capacity for rationality and for love. It is impossible to reduce a person’s emotional suffering to biochemical aberrations without doing something psychologically and morally destructive to that person. We reduce the reality of that individual’s life to a narrowly focused speculation about brain chemistry.

In taking such a distorted view of the person, doctors also do harm to themselves. They suppress their natural tendency to be empathic toward other human beings. Thus, in their efforts to be “objective” and “scientific,” biological psychiatrists and doctors end up doing very destructive things to people, including themselves.

Herbal and “Natural” Remedies

Although this book is about psychiatric medications that are approved by the FDA, many readers may have questions about psychoactive herbal remedies that can be obtained over the counter (OTC). They may wonder if these more “natural” substances can be used instead of psychiatric drugs during the withdrawal process or as a general substitute. In brief, we do not recommend the use of psychoactive herbs for these purposes.

Many people believe that such natural remedies are likely to be safer than prescription drugs. This is the implication conveyed by many books that evaluate herbal medicines, such as PDR for Herbal Medicines (1998) and Alternative Medicine (1994). Both list far fewer adverse effects for typical herbal remedies (such as St. John’s Wort as an antidepressant or ginseng as a stimulant) than are usually described in the literature for psychiatric drugs used for corresponding purposes (such as Prozac or Ritalin).

Nonetheless, anyone who uses psychoactive herbs should do so with caution. Some of these herbs have recognised adverse effects. For example, ginseng, in large doses, can cause dependence with serious adverse effects. The scientific citations typically listed for herbs are mainly non-English language reports not readily accessible to the ordinary reader in the United States. The composition of many of these substances, including St. John’s Wort and ginseng, is very complex, with numerous active agents that have been little studied. Preparations from different manufacturers – or even from the same manufacturer – may not be standardised. And, finally, even though the FDA often fails to live up to its mandate, FDA-approved drugs are usually more thoroughly studied than herbal remedies in regard to adverse effects.

Some people might believe that a long history of use without known ill effects is in itself a good indication of a psychoactive herb’s safety. However, consider two of the most widely used natural psychoactive substances, alcohol and tobacco. Both were once recommended by physicians for medicinal purposes, and both have been heavily promoted by government and corporate interests. Alcohol has been used for many reasons by untold millions of human beings since before recorded history, but only in the last few decades have the harmful effects of chronic excessive alcohol use been generally recognised. Society has also become increasingly aware of the association between acute alcohol use and many forms of violence and accidents. Likewise, tobacco has an ancient history of ritual use in Native American societies and, in more recent centuries, of widespread chronic use in Western society. But the dangerousness of smoking did not gain widespread recognition until a few decades ago.

Any drug that affects the mind and brain should be viewed with caution, especially in the context of daily or persistent use. And any person who decides to use herbal remedies should read as much as possible about them. To use these agents is, to some extent, to step into the unknown. By contrast, all psychiatric drugs have well-documented, serious hazards.

Even if psychoactive substances were harmless, we would question their use for “therapeutic” or “psychiatric” purposes – that is, to overcome psychological and social problems. The use of a psychoactive substance for such purposes is wrong in principle because it represents an attempt to fix the brain instead of the problems that lie within the person’s internal life, relationships, and environment.

It is understandable, of course, that people want relief from emotional suffering, just as they tend to take aspirin, ibuprofen, or other drugs for head, muscle and joint pains. The latter treatments play a valuable role, especially if they are administered over the short term. However, both aspirin and ibuprofin also have many potentially serious adverse effects, ranging from stomach ulcers to stroke.

The use of “emotional pain-killers” is more questionable. If a person gets headaches because of the stress of a conflicted marriage or a frustrating workplace, it would ultimately be self-defeating to rely on pills instead of dealing with the issues involved. Besides, all psychiatric drugs have far more negative effects on brain and mind function than do aspirin or ibuprofin. Psychiatric medications are, first and foremost, psychoactive or psychotropic drugs: They influence the way a person feels, thinks, and acts. Like cocaine and heroin, they change the emotional response capacity of the brain. If used to solve emotional problems, they end up shoving those problems under the rug of drug intoxication while creating additional drug-induced problems.

There is another lesson to be gained from how long it has taken us to recognise the dangers of tobacco and alcohol. Because it has taken centuries to grasp the damaging effects of these natural substances on individuals, families and society, we cannot blithely assume that we can learn about the dangers of psychiatric drugs in a matter of months or years.

Many drugs are effective in bringing about the short-term relief of emotional suffering. Alcohol, for example, affects the same general neurotransmitter system as tranquilisers like Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, and Ativan. It has similar clinical effects, too. Millions of people “take a drink” to relax or calm down, to relieve anxiety or even depression, and to fall asleep more easily. Yet alcohol, much like the tranquilisers, has many negative effects on behaviour, tends to worsen the very problems it is used to treat, and can become addictive.

The question, then, is not “Do drugs affect mental processes?” Many drugs are called “psychoactive” precisely because they have effects on the mind. Rather, the question is, “Should they be prescribed as treatments?”

This book is aimed at helping people understand some of the medical and psychological dangers of relying on psychiatric drugs, but it can only hint at the psychological and social void created by such reliance on mind-altering agents. The book also offers appraoches to coming off psychiatric drugs, but, in this context too, it can only hint at the kinds of resources to which people must turn to live a meaningful and satisfying life. The choice is not between psychiatric drugs and some other “therapy” but between psychiatric drugs and all the resources that life can offer us.

I'm sorry to hear you're feeling so poorly Jeff. I believe you posted on Withdrawal and Recovery, and I responded. Have you read the files that were sent to you, and have you looked into changing your diet and starting supplements? These things will help a lot with how you are feeling right now.

Let me know if I can help :)
Linda.

OK Jeff, that's certainly your choice. If you decide you do want help, you can post this supplement info, plus dietary info, on the site, and Catherine will advise you. There is a specific healing protocol that people follow there in order to do what they do.

Best wishes for a successful taper of your drug and for future healing,
Linda.

Jeff, the culprit is overall diet and nutritional supplements. You pay more attention to these things than most people, but what you are doing is not quite what your body needs -- this is why you are feeling the way you do.

I suggest you try following the healing protocols from Withdrawal and Recovery; and if you are still having problems, do a one-off consultation with Catherine, who will tailor your programme to your individual needs. You will have trouble coming off your med if you are feeling as bad as you are now.

Like I said, it's completely up to you. However, though cutting figs out of what you eat might help a little, it isn't going to make a huge impact on your mood. What's more, when you are sure about what you need to cut out of your diet, it ceases to have a pull on you and over time you don't miss it. I will always love the taste of chocolate, cake, ice cream, all that stuff. But I'm happy not to eat it because I like how I'm feeling without it, and I know what it does to me when I eat it.

I hope this helps Jeff. Change takes courage. Sometimes I think our bodies make us feel so bad to give us a nudge in that direction.

Best,
Linda.

I'm pleased to help anyone I can. I'm glad you've found the info here useful Joannet.

I came off my own antidepressant cold turkey 9 months ago. I was actually given the basic info I needed, but was so keen to be drug-free that I ddn't really pay attention, and ended up in difficulties for a long time. Sounds like you've been there too. In fact Seroxat is notorious for causing withdrawal problems. It must have taken some determination for you to be able to get off it.

Please let me know if I can give you any further assistance; there's a lot in these topics to read. Good supplements are particularly important for someone who has taken psychotropic drugs, even if it was some time in the past.

Best wishes,
Linda.

Between regular exposure to sunlight,a nd consumption of producst with significant amounts of vitamin D, and other thing(s) necessary for making and processing Vit D in the body, I imagine that I am already getting well more Vit D than required, soi I have never tried adding it as a supplement, that I can recall.

Vitamin D deficiencies are really pretty rare in advanced nations, unless the individual has an unusually restrictive diet and is not supplementing.

That isn't to say that extra vit D may not be good. Maybe it works wonders to have extra, I have no idea.

I would like to add a little balance to this thread. I have info regarding antidepressants too and also professional advice received regarding medication in general. The fact is that some people regard medication as a necessary part of their treatment and are helped by it.

I have often been advised by qualified pharmacists... ie. people with a high level of training that within any group of drugs there is a variation in how YOUR body will metabolise that drug compared with the next person. Therefore if one doesn't suit you, eg. is not effective, or level of side effects is not tolerable, then it is well worth asking your health professional, whether consultant or GP, to prescribe an alternative.

THis has had incredible results in my case. A change of medication (an antidepressant) has enabled me to go back to work.... I have been off 12 weeks with SAD cited as cause on Doctors Medical Certificate. I was so lethargic and feeling rough on the first medication, I feel brighter and more alert on the second and well.

My libido is not back to normal, but is greatly improved, to a point where it has actually made me want to resume that area of life too.

Many people regard 'pills' as being the quick fix all. Well it seems to me that the further into any sort of depression you get, the harder it is to get out, so something that will prevent you going too far 'down' may stop things getting bad to the point where it is hard to do anything about it.

Think about how many millions of people use medication of thousands of diffferent types every year. Then think about the relatively small number that have a significant and lasting problem with it. None of us takes medication lightly, I don't suppose. But the fact is that the risks are probably much lower than if you endanger your own life by smoking, drinking to excess or taking part in other risky activities.

I suspect that by saying this I will be criticised by some, but there are some for whom medication is an appropriate treatment and we need ot be allowed to do what is right for us.

Suzie and Purplecrab,

You're welcome to browse this topic and take from it what you will. I'm not going to go to other places on this list and tell both of you that you must not take drugs. That is your decision. And both of you, like many others, feel you are being helped by them.

If you do come here and browse, though, I would urge you to read the information that is actually here. It contradicts much of what you have said about diagnoses, and the efficacy of drugs in treating these conditions. The reason why I put that information here was just that -- to inform people. If you'd like to read what's here and respond specifically to that, then maybe we can be on more level footing here.

I'll take some of the basic points that have been mentioned for the moment then. You both are speaking from the point of view of people who feel they have been helped by these medications. You have been lucky to experience few side effects. You have not been taking the drugs long-term, have not been on and off them (correct me if I'm wrong) many times, or stuggled with your condition worsening despite (or because of) the meds.

You do need to know that it is no exaggeration to say that there are people out there whose lives have been destroyed by these drugs, and by the doctors who were supposed to help them. To say that smoking or drinking are bigger risks to health is both misguided and frankly insulting to these people.

I belong to one list for people in withdrawal from psychotropic drugs. Almost every day, someone new joins. You have not witnessed the desperation of those whose functioning has deteriorated on these drugs, who have developed long-term permanent problems, who have been put on cocktails of medications, who developed a set of symptoms with one med and were subsequently diagnosed with a new disorder and given more meds for that on top of the current ones. People who are suicidal. Who are experiencing Parkinson symptoms, uncontrollable movements of their bodies, who even feel that they are being tortured from within (a condition called tardive akathesia). Please don't tell me that you are taking more risk with drinking or smoking than you are with these drugs. Thank whatever god is up there that these things did not happen to you -- but understand that they do happen to others.

I also find it disturbing to hear anyone say that people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are dangerous and need to be on meds, possibly for life. Read the article here on biological psychiatry. Read various points of reference here, specifically the story about the lady who was diagnosed as bipolar because of a reaction she had to a medication, and spent much of the rest of her life tweaking doses of lithium and feeling like a zombie inside. Read in the nutrition topic about how a doctor has cured schizophrenia with vitamins, and what he says about the inhuman treatment of these people at the hands of doctors dishing out medications and electroconvulsive therapy.

People come to the withdrawal list who are fed up with being drugged and want their lives back. Many of them come with these very diagnoses. They change their diets, supplement, address the original problems they had where necessary, and those diagnoses are history. Any doctor who thinks that long-term drugs are appropriate ought to see what is going on at that list, and the healing that is taking place.

Other people too have claimed that I am scaremongering, that even taking aspirin is dangerous. The fact of the matter is that the truth about how these medications work, and what they do to the body, is not generally known, for a variety of reasons. And also, aspirin does not change levels of neurotransmitters and alter fundamental parts of biochemistry, so that comparison is a meaningless one.

Many people on Outside In have also said that they eat a healthy diet and it hasn't helped with the depression. I would ask you to visit the Nutrition topic, because what a person calls "healthy" may actually not be, for them. I used to think I ate healthily too, and knew what a healthy diet was, but I didn't.

At the end of the day, I wanted this topic to be here to inform people about these drugs, but also to say that there are other ways of addressing depression. Of course it's a person's choice, but that choice needs to be an informed one. You may end up being lucky in that the serotonin boost gives you a mood boost that ameliorates some of the depressive symptoms, and you may have few or no noticeable side effects. It is your choice what to do from there. However it is important to realise that if the original cause of the depression is not addressed, it is likely to still be there when the medication is withdrawn, or to return.

I do think about the millions of people taking thousands of different kinds of medication, and it saddens me deeply. Medications are handed out far too freely in Western countries. Our doctors treat symptoms, not causes. They often don't even think to look for the cause of a problem before they prescribe a drug. Of course medications can be helpful and even life-saving, but they are often just not needed. A case in point is the millions of pounds the NHS spends on statins, which are no more of an effective treatment for high cholesterol or heart disease than is a placebo.

Purplecrab and Suzie, no one is questioning your right to take medications, or your choice, which is a private matter for you. I would just ask you to please read the information here and respond to that, question or challenge it, but look at what it has to say and compare that to what you think you know. There may be some surprises, some food for thought. Or maybe you will decide you disagree, or are not interested. That is OK too, but please at least recognise that psychiatric diagnoses and the DSM-IV doctors use to make them are subjective and not set in stone; also that psychiatric drugs may not do what you think they do for everyone, and that many people have been damaged by them. I wouldn't argue that symptoms associated with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia don't exist. However, by classifying them rigidly as mental illnesses and then telling people that they need drugs for this, disempowers them to continue looking for answers. There are many possible causes for these symptoms and I would firmly refute the ideas of biological psychiatry, that there are mysterious chemical imbalances, or that it's genetic. This is drug industry spin.

I hope this clarifies my position a bit better. Please try some of the links I've posted here, or read some of the articles.

Regards,
Linda.

I'm glad to hear that things are improving for you Suzie, and that you have an understanding doctor. Many doctors really want to help people and I don't believe they are deliberately trying to con us to make money for the drug companies. Their bias is just at such a deep level that they think they are helping us with the drugs. Our doctors are trained to prescribe drugs, that is their job basically, and it seems to be a rare person who breaks away from that thinking and considers other options. I doubt if many doctors would tell someone to just pull themselves together, but on the whole they are much more likely to prescribe a pill than they are to suggest something like counselling. Counselling isn't as available as it needs to be.

I'm also glad to hear that you have not noticed long-term damage from the drugs. It sounds like you're OK with how things are right now. I'd just like to say though, that even given your personal history of depression, I hope no one has suggested that depression might be part and parcel of your life, or that you might have to continue to be on and off drugs. If you're confident that there are no emotional reasons why you should be depressed, then physical issues need to be explored. When I talk about nutritional deficiencies sometimes causing depression, I don't mean those that cause someone to starve or develop severe deficiency diseases. Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize for his research into vitamin C, had a mother who was in and out of psychiatric hispitals all her life, and died young and very ill. No one could ever work out what was wrong with her, until they were able to pinpoint the cause of her death: pernicious anemia, caused by a vitamin B12 deficiency. A symptom of B12 deficiency -- a symptom of most any kind of nutritional deficiency -- can be mental illness. This can occur before other more obvious physical symptoms, and doctors may never see the connection.

Also, some of us need more of a certain kind of vitamin or mineral than others to achieve optimal health; it's called biochemical individuality. It follows that you would be exhibiting symptoms of deficiency even if you were getting the RDA for this vitamin every day (the RDa is the lowest amount of a vitamin needed to prevent a deficiency disease).

I won't go on about this, there's more in Nutrition Info, but I wanted to say that this is an option you can explore Suzie, if you ever want to.

I know what it's like to be debilitated by depression and not know how I'd drag myself through another day. To barely be able to look after my little girl. and know I couldn't work at a job if I tried. When I heard the anti-drug psychiatrists talk, I wanted to ask them what they thought I was supposed to do -- how would something like talking to a therapist help when I was in such a terrible state? How could I just think myself out of it? I felt that I was out of options, I was full of fear, and that's when I started on antidepressants. However, the key there was that it really did feel like the final option. A big reason I've stayed on this forum is because if I can, I want to offer help to people who are in similar situations to the one in which I found myself. The option I finally found, which I wanted all along and which no doctor could ever offer me, was healing through nutrition. You are welcome to look at that topic I've been maintaining on the forum.

Most importantly of all, there is always hope. Mine is that even when I am no longer talking on this forum, the info I've put here will be available for anyone who is searching for answers and also feels they are about out of options.

Regards,
Linda.

Jeff, what you said about taking responsibility for your health is important.

In our culture, doctors have a god-like status. I was certainly raised to go to the doctor when I was ill, and I would not question what the doctor said, I would just take the medicine, and be thankful that I was helped by the expert.

My American family and friends have not changed in this way of thinking. Whatever low I hit with my own depression, their way of trying to help me was to implore me to see the doctor. They simply could not see the situation any other way. To think of a doctor the way you describe, as I also do now, is unimaginable to them.

My own illusions in this respect were shattered with the depression. These people were supposed to help me and all they could do was prescribe one drug after another. My doctor was of the common opinion that if you are depressed you need "more serotonin." I accepted this at first, after researching SAD and supposed serotonin deficiencies that were related. However, I did not understand where this sudden deficiency came from.

I was on Effexor for a while, that didn't help, but the doctors/psychiatrists were sure it would because hey, it hits TWO neurotransmitters, and two is better than one! So . . . were they telling me I had a norepinephrine deficiency as well? No. So why did they think upping that chemical in my system was going to help?

Later, my doctor was enthusing about Cymbalta, again targeting two neurotransmitters, but also it was NEW. This really started to sound fishy to me and I'd had enough by this point. It was clear to me that these meds were not well chosen by my doctor to help me individually, but rather he believed, or had been told (by drug company advertising) that whatever is newer is better.

Instinct led me to learn about nutrition. Nutrition is a small part of a doctor's training and it is not hard to educate yourself beyond what most all of them know, as you say Jeff. However I am also aware that to most people, the idea of healing through nutrition sounds like just another fad or gimmick, why don't you try feng shui or yoga too while you're at it. There's so much more to it than this. I've tried to put what I've learned so far in a topic here. I also try to be a role model to people around me through what I eat, so maybe I can be a good influence on my husband and daughter if no one else.

I'm not here to tell anyone what to do, what choices to make, how to run their lives. If you (whoever may be reading this) choose to come to this topic and read, however, I would ask you to read what is here and try to be open to some of the ideas. Like I've said elsewhere, there's a difference between what helps a person cope with symptoms, and what actually works to get at the roots of those symptoms. This forum is good for the former, not always for the latter, which is why there are so many people here in pain.

Linda.

There seems to be obvious difference's in the medical care that is received in my area and in the US. Counselling and CBT is always a first option at the GP surgery that I go to. We have 3 doctors who are based there, one of which will not prescribe medication unless absolutely nescessary. He too is very much into holistic and nutritional therapy.

As I have said before I have been on my medication for 6 years and had read in Norman Rosenthal's "Winter Blues" that there was a AD that was more effective for SAD than the one I am on. Armed with my book and this information I visited my doctor in September requesting that I try this drug. I was told under no circumstances would I be allowed to have this drug as the UK would not licence it for depression due to the problems that had occured in the US. One of the side effects had been that it was an appertite suppressent. Apparently people who had been prescribed the drug in the US had starved themselves to death.

I was instead offered counsellling and secondary care which I am to start again in February.

I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones. It saddens me to think that there are other people who are desperate for the care they need. I have taken control of my life. In the past like Linda I have gone to the doctors and taken everything he/she says as gospel and not questioned it. This is not the case now. Through literature and sites like this I can make an informed decision and if I don't like what I am being told by the "professional" then I will dispute it.

Jeff, my apologies, it was not my intention to offend anybody with regards to my comments on bipolar etc. I wasn't generalising and i know it is not the case for everybody. I do know several people who would have to spend most of their life in and out of hospital if they didn't take their medication. This medication is supplemented by exercise and nutritional information but without their medication they would have dire problems and have done so in the past. This includes one person burning her house down, another continually self harming (in front of her children), another trying to kill his partner. These aren't isolated incidents for these people. I also realise that there are still areas where there are the unsavoury hospitals that in my opinion (and it is only my opinion) should never have existed.

There are obviously different levels of depression and everyone finds their own way of dealing with it. At the end of the day we are all here to champion the same cause........ ideas for helping to allieviate the problem.

I'm pleased to hear all of this, that the standards of care are better in some places, that CBT is offered, that people can partake of this and be happy.

Again I would just ask that if anyone posts here, would you please do me the courtesy of reading some of the info here. Try some links, read some of the articles, and then discuss/debate if you like. They would challenge some of the generalisations that are being made here about mental illness and drugs and it's hard for me to discuss these things when there is no awareness on the other person's part of why I am saying some of the things I am.

Like I said, I do not question the existence of symptoms of bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. However I have good reason to say that these symptoms are curable. I know people who manage the symptoms without drugs. I also know people who have cured their symptoms completely. They do not "manage," they live. This is what nutrition can do. What we put into our bodies is what our bodies build themselves from. Deficiencies and toxins can go a long way to causing ill health, but putting those right can restore it. Schizophrenic symptoms can be caused by a food allergy. Bipolar symptoms can be caused bu nutritional deficiencies. If someone is so unbalanced that they need to be tranquilised with drugs in order not to harm themselves or others, then what is needed is for them to address this; or if they can't do it themselves, for someone to help them. If this sounds crazy then let me remind you that I see people forgetting their diagnoses and healing themselves every day.

I have a friend who is diagnosed bipolar, who seems half-convinced of what I say. She at least has the self-awareness to look down deep and admit that she is not sure if she wants to be "cured," because "bipolar" has become part of her identity, who she is. She is afraid that if she were no longer bipolar, she would be a different person, maybe lose her artistic abilities. I think she'd find that she would end up with a clarity and zest for life she forgot she had, and her creativity would blossom, but this is something she has to think about for herself. I just think it is disgusting that a doctor can label someone with a mental illness, and that becomes such a part of the person that they can't conceive of themselves any other way. But it does happen all too often.

I think this is all I'd like to add to the discussion here for the moment. Talking about these kinds of things is important to me, but I would rather do it in regards to the information I've posted here.

Linda.

More links


http://www.paxilprogress.org/forums/
A support site for paxil (seroxat) withdrawal. Also contains news and articles, info about protests and litigation, and info about health and supplements

http://www.mindfreedom.org/
MFI is an independent nonprofit coalition defending human rights and promoting humane alternatives in mental health.

http://ssristories.com/
Stories of suicide, murder, abuse, accidents, and other serious adverse effects related to use of SSRIs

http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021118.html
http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021125.html
http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021202.html
http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021209.html
A series of articles written by a therapist. While his own particular approach to counselling for depression may not be everyone's cup of tea, I feel that what he says about psychotropic drugs and the ethics of using them worth pondering.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1687319,00.html?gusrc=rss">http://www.healyprozac.com/
This website explores threats to public safety and academic freedom surrounding the SSRI group of drugs – Prozac, Zoloft (Lustral), Paxil (Seroxat/Aropax). It makes available trial transcripts in 3 major cases involving SSRIs and suicide and homicide. It also makes available correspondence surrounding issues to do with ghost writing, efforts to draw attention to the hazards of these drugs and the dramatic changes taking place in academia as an increasing proportion of clinical research is privatised.

http://www.adbusters.org/metas/psycho/prozacspotlight/lillysuicidestour/index.html
"The Lily Suicides" -- info about SSRIs and suicide, and litigation

http://www.paxilprogress.org/forums/
A support site for paxil (seroxat) withdrawal. Also contains news and articles, info about protests and litigation, and info about health and supplements

http://www.mindfreedom.org/
MFI is an independent nonprofit coalition defending human rights and promoting humane alternatives in mental health.

http://ssristories.com/
Stories of suicide, murder, abuse, accidents, and other serious adverse effects related to use of SSRIs

http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021118.html
http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021125.html
http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021202.html
http://www.primalworks.com/thoughts/thought021209.html
A series of articles written by a therapist. While his own particular approach to counselling for depression may not be everyone's cup of tea, I feel that what he says about psychotropic drugs and the ethics of using them worth pondering.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1687319,00.html?gusrc=rss
Rise in mental illness linked to unhealthy diets, say studies
from The Guardian, January 16 2006
(article can be found in its entirety under Nutrition Info)

Former drug rep has horror stories to tell

By KATHY RUMLESKI, FREE PRESS REPORTER
from The London Free Press


Calling her book and North American tour a child-advocacy campaign, Gwen
Olsen is warning parents of the dangers of some antidepressants and
psychotropic drugs.

After spending 15 years in the pharmaceutical industry, selling some of the
drugs she now says can be deadly, Olsen has blown the whistle on her old
employers and published Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher: God's Call to
Loving Arms.

"I had a moral responsibility to tell people everything I knew," she said in
a phone interview from her home in Texas.

What Olsen knows is horrendous.

Olsen's niece set herself on fire and died after being on an antidepressant.

"She burned herself alive. She said . . . 'I'd rather be dead than feel
crazy like I feel on those drugs.'

The niece was prescribed medication following a car accident. She had
problems when she stopped taking the drug.

"She got addicted and when she tried to withdraw she became depressed,"
Olsen said. Her doctor prescribed her an antidepressant and that sent her
spiralling downward, leading to suicide.

Olsen was also treated for depression in 1992 with Zoloft.

"I became manic psychotic. About 25 per cent of the population will have a
serious adverse reaction. I was educated about these side effects and I had
sold drugs that caused these side effects."

Olsen walked away from her job and her career in 2000 when her bosses asked
her to sell the antidepressant Celexa.

In clinical studies, this medication had increased the risk of suicidal
thinking and behavior in children and adolescents who had depression and
other psychiatric disorders.

Olsen said children are more vulnerable to the side effects of these
medications because of their developing organs.

"They are three times as likely to react to these drugs as an adult is."

Olsen said there is "rampant economic incentive to over-prescribe drugs.

"This is a social control mechanism."

Psychotropic drugs were a big part of Canada's $24.8 billion pharmaceutical
industry in 2005. In the U.S. $3.3 billion was spent on drugs to treat
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Olsen said kids diagnosed with ADHD may be helped with natural treatments.

She suggested parents try getting more Omega-3 essential fatty acids, such
as flax, krill or fish oil, into their children's diet and eliminate refined
carbohydrates and aspartame.

Olsen has another dire warning for parents. Once someone gets started on
these mental-illness drugs, he or she may never get off them.

"It's a lifelong customer for the pharmaceutical industry. They alter the
pathology of brain chemistry so you can't get off them. They're extremely
addictive."

Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature
Jeffrey R. Lacasse, Jonathan Leo*
Jeffrey R. Lacasse is at Florida State University College of Social Work, Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America. Jonathan Leo is at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Bradenton, Florida, United States of America.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that no competing interests exist and that they received no funding for this work.
Published: November 8, 2005
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392
Copyright: © 2005 Lacasse and Leo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abbreviations: DTCA, direct-to-consumer advertising; FDA, Food and Drug Administration; SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
Citation: Lacasse JR, Leo J (2005) Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature. PLoS Med 2(12): e392
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jleo1@...

In the United States, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are advertised directly to consumers . These highly successful direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) campaigns have largely revolved around the claim that SSRIs correct a chemical imbalance caused by a lack of serotonin (see Tables 1 and 2). For instance, sertraline (Zoloft) was the sixth best-selling medication in the US in 2004, with over $3 billion in sales likely due, at least in part, to the widely disseminated advertising campaign starring Zoloft's miserably depressed ovoid creature. Research has demonstrated that class-wide SSRI advertising has expanded the size of the antidepressant market , and SSRIs are now among the best-selling drugs in medical practice .

Table 1. Selected Quotations Regarding Serotonin and Antidepressants

Table 2. Selected Consumer Advertisements from SSRIs from Print, Television, and the World Wide Web
Given the multifactorial nature of depression and anxiety, and the ambiguities inherent in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, some have questioned whether the mass provision of SSRIs is the result of an over-medicalized society. These sentiments were voiced by Lord Warner, United Kingdom Health Minister, at a recent hearing: “…I have some concerns that sometimes we do, as a society, wish to put labels on things which are just part and parcel of the human condition”. He went on to say, “Particularly in the area of depression we did ask the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to look into this particular area and their guideline on depression did advise non-pharmacological treatment for mild depression” . Sentiments such as Lord Warner's, about over-medicalization, are exactly what some pharmaceutical companies have sought to overcome with their advertising campaigns. For example, Pfizer's television advertisement for the antidepressant sertraline (Zoloft) stated that depression is a serious medical condition that may be due to a chemical imbalance, and that “Zoloft works to correct this imbalance” . Other SSRI advertising campaigns have also claimed that depression is linked with an imbalance of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and that SSRIs can correct this imbalance (see Table 2). The pertinent question is: are the claims made in SSRI advertising congruent with the scientific evidence?
The Serotonin Hypothesis
In 1965, Joseph Schildkraut put forth the hypothesis that depression was associated with low levels of norepinephrine , and later researchers theorized that serotonin was the neurotransmitter of interest . In subsequent years, there were numerous attempts to identify reproducible neurochemical alterations in the nervous systems of patients diagnosed with depression. For instance, researchers compared levels of serotonin metabolites in the cerebrospinal fluid of clinically depressed suicidal patients to controls, but the primary literature is mixed and plagued with methodological difficulties such as very small sample sizes and uncontrolled confounding variables. In a recent review of these studies, the chairman of the German Medical Board and colleagues stated, “Reported associations of subgroups of suicidal behavior (e.g. violent suicide attempts) with low CSF–5HIAA concentrations are likely to represent somewhat premature translations of findings from studies that have flaws in methodology” . Attempts were also made to induce depression by depleting serotonin levels, but these experiments reaped no consistent results . Likewise, researchers found that huge increases in brain serotonin, arrived at by administering high-dose L-tryptophan, were ineffective at relieving depression .

(Illustration: Margaret Shear, Public Library of Science)
Contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency. Modern neuroscience has instead shown that the brain is vastly complex and poorly understood . While neuroscience is a rapidly advancing field, to propose that researchers can objectively identify a “chemical imbalance” at the molecular level is not compatible with the extant science. In fact, there is no scientifically established ideal “chemical balance” of serotonin, let alone an identifiable pathological imbalance. To equate the impressive recent achievements of neuroscience with support for the serotonin hypothesis is a mistake.
With direct proof of serotonin deficiency in any mental disorder lacking, the claimed efficacy of SSRIs is often cited as indirect support for the serotonin hypothesis. Yet, this ex juvantibus line of reasoning (i.e., reasoning “backwards” to make assumptions about disease causation based on the response of the disease to a treatment) is logically problematic—the fact that aspirin cures headaches does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain. Serotonin researchers from the US National Institute of Mental Health Laboratory of Clinical Science clearly state, “he demonstrated efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors…cannot be used as primary evidence for serotonergic dysfunction in the pathophysiology of these disorders” .
Reasoning backwards, from SSRI efficacy to presumed serotonin deficiency, is thus highly contested. The validity of this reasoning becomes even more unlikely when one considers recent studies that even call into question the very efficacy of the SSRIs. Irving Kirsch and colleagues, using the Freedom of Information Act, gained access to all clinical trials of antidepressants submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by the pharmaceutical companies for medication approval. When the published and unpublished trials were pooled, the placebo duplicated about 80% of the antidepressant response ; 57% of these pharmaceutical company–funded trials failed to show a statistically significant difference between antidepressant and inert placebo . A recent Cochrane review suggests that these results are inflated as compared to trials that use an active placebo . This modest efficacy and extremely high rate of placebo response are not seen in the treatment of well-studied imbalances such as insulin deficiency, and casts doubt on the serotonin hypothesis.
Also problematic for the serotonin hypothesis is the growing body of research comparing SSRIs to interventions that do not target serotonin specifically. For instance, a Cochrane systematic review found no major difference in efficacy between SSRIs and tricyclic antidepressants . In addition, in randomized controlled trials, buproprion and reboxetine were just as effective as the SSRIs in the treatment of depression, yet neither affects serotonin to any significant degree. St. John's Wort and placebo have outperformed SSRIs in recent randomized controlled trials. Exercise was found to be as effective as the SSRI sertraline in a randomized controlled trial . The research and development activities of pharmaceutical companies also illustrate a diminishing role for serotonergic intervention—Eli Lilly, the company that produced fluoxetine (Prozac), recently released duloxetine, an antidepressant designed to impact norepinephrine as well as serotonin. The evidence presented above thus seems incompatible with a specific serotonergic lesion in depression.
Although SSRIs are considered “antidepressants,” they are FDA-approved treatments for eight separate psychiatric diagnoses, ranging from social anxiety disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder to premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Some consumer advertisements (such as the Zoloft and Paxil Web sites) promote the serotonin hypothesis, not just for depression, but also for some of these other diagnostic categories . Thus, for the serotonin hypothesis to be correct as currently presented, serotonin regulation would need to be the cause (and remedy) of each of these disorders . This is improbable, and no one has yet proposed a cogent theory explaining how a singular putative neurochemical abnormality could result in so many wildly differing behavioral manifestations.
In short, there exists no rigorous corroboration of the serotonin theory, and a significant body of contradictory evidence. Far from being a radical line of thought, doubts about the serotonin hypothesis are well acknowledged by many researchers, including frank statements from prominent psychiatrists, some of whom are even enthusiastic proponents of SSRI medications (see Table 1).
However, in addition to what these authors say about serotonin, it is also important to look at what is not said in the scientific literature. To our knowledge, there is not a single peer-reviewed article that can be accurately cited to directly support claims of serotonin deficiency in any mental disorder, while there are many articles that present counterevidence. Furthermore, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association and contains the definitions of all psychiatric diagnoses, does not list serotonin as a cause of any mental disorder. The American Psychiatric Press Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry addresses serotonin deficiency as an unconfirmed hypothesis, stating, “Additional experience has not confirmed the monoamine depletion hypothesis” .
Consumer Advertisements of Antidepressants
Contrary to what many people believe, the FDA does not require preapproval of advertisements. Instead, the FDA monitors the advertisements once they are in print or on the air . Misleading content is frequently found in various DTCA campaigns ; hence, it is valuable to compare SSRI advertisements to the scientific evidence reviewed above. These SSRI ads are widely promulgated; hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent disseminating these advertisements, and one study found that over 70% of surveyed patients reported exposure to antidepressant DTCA .
The Role of the FDA
In the US, the FDA monitors and regulates DTCA. The FDA requires that advertisements “cannot be false or misleading” and “must present information that is not inconsistent with the product label” . Pharmaceutical companies that disseminate advertising incompatible with these requirements can receive warning letters and can be sanctioned. The Irish equivalent of the FDA, the Irish Medical Board, recently banned GlaxoSmithKline from claiming that paroxetine corrects a chemical imbalance even in their patient information leaflets . Should the FDA take similar action against consumer advertisements of SSRIs?
As just one example, the prescribing information for paroxetine, which is typical of the SSRI-class drugs, states, “The efficacy of paroxetine in the treatment of major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder (PD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is presumed to be linked to potentiation of serotonergic activity in the central nervous system resulting from inhibition of neuronal reuptake of serotonin. Studies at clinically relevant doses in humans have demonstrated that paroxetine blocks the uptake of serotonin into human platelets” .
In other words, the mechanism of action of paroxetine has not been definitively established, and remains unconfirmed and presumptive (the prescribing information states that the efficacy of the drug “is presumed to be linked to potentiation of serotonergic activity” (, our italics added). Although there is evidence that paroxetine inhibits the reuptake of serotonin, the significance of this phenomenon in the amelioration of psychiatric symptoms is unknown, and continually debated . Most importantly, the prescribing information does not mention a serotonin deficiency in those administered paroxetine, nor does it claim that paroxetine corrects an imbalance of serotonin. In contrast, the consumer advertisements for paroxetine present claims that are not found in this FDA-approved product labeling.
In order to determine whether these advertisements actually comply with FDA regulations, it is useful to consult the Code of Federal Regulations under which DTCA is regulated. The regulations state that an advertisement may be cited as false or misleading if it “ontains claims concerning the mechanism or site of drug action that are not generally regarded as established by scientific evidence by experts qualified by scientific training and experience without disclosing that the claims are not established and the limitations of the supporting evidence…” (, our emphasis added]).
Stating that depression may be due to a serotonin deficiency is seemingly allowed, but, as stated in the regulations, only if the limitations of the supporting evidence are provided. In our examination of SSRI advertisements, we did not locate a single advertisement that presented any such information. Instead, the serotonin hypothesis is typically presented as a collective scientific belief, as in the Zoloft advertisement, which states that regarding depression, “Scientists believe that it could be linked with an imbalance of a chemical in the brain called serotonin” . Consumers viewing such advertisements remain uninformed regarding the limitations of the serotonin hypothesis (reviewed above).
According to federal regulations, advertisements are also proscribed from including content that “contains favorable information or opinions about a drug previously regarded as valid but which have been rendered invalid by contrary and more credible recent information” .
This means that a disconnect between the evolving peer-reviewed literature and advertisements is not permitted. Regarding SSRIs, there is a growing body of medical literature casting doubt on the serotonin hypothesis, and this body is not reflected in the consumer advertisements. In particular, many SSRI advertisements continue to claim that the mechanism of action of SSRIs is that of correcting a chemical imbalance, such as a paroxetine advertisement, which states, “With continued treatment, Paxil can help restore the balance of serotonin…” . Yet, as previously mentioned, there is no such thing as a scientifically established correct “balance” of serotonin. The take-home message for consumers viewing SSRI advertisements is probably that SSRIs work by normalizing neurotransmitters that have gone awry. This was a hopeful notion 30 years ago, but is not an accurate reflection of present-day scientific evidence.
The FDA has sent ten warning letters to antidepressant manufacturers since 1997 , but has never cited a pharmaceutical company for the issues covered here. The reasons for their inaction are unclear but seem to result from a deliberate decision at some level of the FDA, rather than an oversight. Since 2002, the first author (JRL) has repeatedly contacted the FDA regarding these issues. The only substantive response was an E-mail received from a regulatory reviewer at the FDA: “Your concern regarding direct-to-consumer advertising raises an interesting issue regarding the validity of reductionistic statements. These statements are used in an attempt to describe the putative mechanisms of neurotransmitter action(s) to the fraction of the public that functions at no higher than a 6th grade reading level” (personal communication, 2002 April 11).
It is curious that these advertisements are rationalized as being appropriate for those with poor reading skills. If the issues surrounding antidepressants are too complex to explain accurately to the general public, one wonders why it is imperative that DTCA of antidepressants be permitted at all. However, contrary to what the FDA seems to be implying, truth and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. Consider the medical textbook, Essential Psychopharmacology, which states, “So far, there is no clear and convincing evidence that monoamine deficiency accounts for depression; that is, there is no ‘real’ monoamine deficit” . Like the pharmaceutical company advertisements, this explanation is very easy to understand, yet it paints a very different picture about the serotonin hypothesis.
Conclusion
The impact of the widespread promotion of the serotonin hypothesis should not be underestimated. Antidepressant advertisements are ubiquitous in American media, and there is emerging evidence that these advertisements have the potential to confound the doctor–patient relationship. A recent study by Kravitz et al. found that pseudopatients (actors who were trained to behave as patients) presenting with symptoms of adjustment disorder (a condition for which antidepressants are not usually prescribed) were frequently prescribed paroxetine (Paxil) by their physicians if they inquired specifically about Paxil ; such enquiries from actual patients could be prompted by DTCA .
What remains unmeasured, though, is how many patients seek help from their doctor because antidepressant advertisements have convinced them that they are suffering from a serotonin deficiency. These advertisements present a seductive concept, and the fact that patients are now presenting with a self-described “chemical imbalance” shows that the DTCA is having its intended effect: the medical marketplace is being shaped in a way that is advantageous to the pharmaceutical companies. Recently, it has been alleged that the FDA is more responsive to the concerns of the pharmaceutical industry than to their mission of protecting US consumers, and that enforcement efforts are being relaxed . Patients who are convinced they are suffering from a neurotransmitter defect are likely to request a prescription for antidepressants, and may be skeptical of physicians who suggest other interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy , evidence-based or not. Like other vulnerable populations, anxious and depressed patients “are probably more susceptible to the controlling influence of advertisements” .
In 1998, at the dawn of consumer advertising of SSRIs, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience Elliot Valenstein summarized the scientific data by concluding, “What physicians and the public are reading about mental illness is by no means a neutral reflection of all the information that is available” . The current state of affairs has only confirmed the veracity of this conclusion. The incongruence between the scientific literature and the claims made in FDA-regulated SSRI advertisements is remarkable, and possibly unparalleled.
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This "log" is maintained by someone who has not got any medical qualifications. It should in my opinion be viewed with great care as it does not make any efforts to show that medication has a good and needed place in our modern society.

My advice is always to talk with your GP about any thoughts you have about the use of medication.

I too have no medical qualifications and have had some poor experiences with medication. However, there comes a point at which a crusade to enlighten and inform passes over a threshold of reason an into the realms of obsession.

Keep an open mind about all things. Be reasonable about your thoughts and expectations and above all else keep your own counsel.

If you read nothing else here, please at least read this. It is this kind of info that blew my mind after years of growing up believing that the doctor always knows best, and that the drugs he/she prescribes can be trusted to help me. It encapsulates pretty much EVERYTHING I have been saying in this topic. I hope this empowers everyone who read it.

from NewsTarget.com
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
by Mike Adams, editor

Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: Same Tactics, Different Chemicals

Have you ever thought about the similarities between pharmaceutical and tobacco companies? They're striking. Both sell products that kill people when used as directed. The statistics are readily available for pharmaceuticals, which kill around 100,000 Americans each year according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Big Tobacco, which makes tobacco products that are partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer in the United States each year. These are the facts from industry. Industry critics (such as myself) would argue that those numbers are actually much higher.
But let's look at other similarities. Aside from marketing products that actually kill people when used as directed, both industries are engaged in the blatant distortion of scientific evidence in order to mislead regulators and the public.

With Big Tobacco we saw the suppression of studies that said nicotine was addictive, or of studies linking the inhalation of tobacco smoke to lung cancer. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see even worse distortions of clinical studies. We see studies that are designed to minimize the appearance of negative risks associated with these drugs, such as heart attacks , stroke, mental disorders, suicide attempts, and violent behavior. Even after studies are completed, the results are highly distorted as well. Drug companies pick and choose which studies they want to publish. They may do twelve different studies on a particular drug, and if six of them say the drug is safe and effective, while the other six studies say the drug is dangerous and useless from a medicinal point of view, they pick the six they want and bury the others. They forward the six they want to the FDA. The FDA looks at those six and says, "This sure is scientific!", and they approve that drug application. I'm not making this up.

In the late 1990's, drug advertising appeared on television. That is, of course, another similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: they both use direct-to-consumer advertising to create demand for their products. For many years, tobacco companies sponsored sporting events; in fact, they still attempt to sponsor many sporting events. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see heavy magazine and television advertising, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent lobbying doctors , buying them gifts, trips (to Hawaii, believe it or not), air tickets, and stays in luxurious resorts. All doctors have to do is show up, sign in, and act like they're attending a continuing medical education course. They then can leave for the entire day, and go on the beach, go fishing, go surfing, and do whatever they want. It's an all-expenses-paid vacation.

Some people say, "No, that's ridiculous. That doesn't happen." I've actually been in Hawaii, talking to doctors who were attending such an event. I saw the entire room of about four hundred MD's, and these people just signed in, then they left to go surfing with me! So I know how the system works, I've seen it firsthand. All the doctors out there who might be listening to this, you know how it works too. A lot of these continuing medical education courses are really just a joke.


Doctors pushed cigarettes for decades
Another interesting similarity between cigarettes and prescription drugs is that doctors have a history of supporting them both very strongly. You might say, "Wait a minute, doctors don't support smoking and cigarettes." Sure they do, if you just go back far enough. In the seventies and eighties, they began to figure out that smoking is bad for you. Before that, however, doctors could actually be found as spokespersons for cigarettes. They said that cigarettes made you healthy.
You can find, in archives of old magazines like Time, that some doctors are even in advertisements stating, "Smoking, it's good for your smile". They also said smoking helps you concentrate, and that it's good for your nervous system. They made many ridiculous claims about cigarettes. We tend to forget about that today, but doctors were paid to be spokespersons for tobacco companies, and this went on for decades.

Today, of course, old school doctors are strongly in support of prescription drugs. But new doctors, the smart doctors, whom I hope you're visiting, are questioning the safety of prescription drugs. They are looking outside of conventional medicine for solutions, in terms of disease prevention and even the simple treatment of symptoms. These new doctors are noticing that people get healthier when they get off of prescription drugs. Alternatively, they use prescription drugs only as a temporary measure in order to give the patient enough time and education so that they can put into effect long term lifestyle changes that, in turn, eliminate the need for the drugs.

Of course, this frustrates the drug companies, since they want people to take these drugs for a lifetime. They claim that it's good for you, but actually, it's only good for their bottom line when you become a daily user of their overpriced product. Good doctors are recognizing that. They recognize statin drugs do have a temporary role in dealing with an acute symptom, which might be extremely elevated cholesterol that represents an immediate risk to the person's health or even life. So they may use a statin drug on a temporary basis, only for a few weeks or a couple of months at most. They meanwhile help patients undergo major, fundamental reforms in their lifestyle consisting of food choice, dietary habits, and physical exercise, avoidance of environmental toxins, lower levels of chronic stress, better sleep, better hormonal balance, and so on.


Marketing to children
Here's another similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: They both love to market to children. For years, tobacco companies have been trying to edge and wiggle their way into the adolescent market, targeting teenagers and children. They used Joe Camel, a cartoon character, to sell cigarettes, because they knew that if they could get adolescents hooked on nicotine, they had a customer for life. It's not rocket science to figure out the marketing tactic there for Big Tobacco.
Pharmaceutical companies don't have the same addictive quality for their drugs. You're not necessarily psychologically or physiologically addicted to drugs in the same way as nicotine. However, by starting a kid early on drugs, they can create a paradigm where that kid grows up thinking that he is a diseased person, and that he is that label. So if they get a kid diagnosed as ADD or ADHD, then that child will associate that label with himself or herself, and will continue on in life with the belief that they have some sort of disease or brain chemical imbalance. And they'll even tell other people, "I'm ADD" or "I'm bipolar," as if that's who they are.

That, of course, is not who they are. That's a completely fictitious label; it's been made up, and it's been placed upon them. But the trick is that by placing these labels upon these children, the drug companies know that when those children grow up, they identify themselves with those diseases, and they readily accept the idea of taking more prescription drugs as long as the doctors put more labels on them. So as they grow up, they'll find more labels, being told, "You have a syndrome X, you need this drug" or "You have high blood pressure and that's a disease, so you need this drug to lower your blood pressure." If you take a child and you get them used to the idea of associating their identity with labels of diseases, then you create a lifelong customer for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma knows this, and their marketing people understand this.


Some people will do anything for a paycheck
Another interesting similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma is that both are staffed by people you might consider to be ordinary, everyday people. They might be your neighbors, people that you wouldn't think would be harmful, and who aren't necessarily evil. They're just regular, everyday people trying to succeed in their jobs. Yet, they are part of a machine that is creating tremendous pain and suffering, along with destruction, disease, and distortion in our society.
It makes you wonder, what kind of people would go work for tobacco companies? Who would do that? What kind of person would go work for a pharmaceutical company? Who are these drug reps? I've met a lot of these drug reps. They're everyday, nice people; people you might have as friends. Maybe you are a drug rep because you just needed a job. But I think it's important to note that there's a great tendency for human beings, when they need jobs, to set aside their ethics. They tend to dissociate themselves from the long term effects of what they are doing.

Historically, we saw this of course in Nazi Germany, where people were members of the Nazi party. They were part of a machine that was creating tremendous evil, pain and suffering, and destruction in many different ways. (I'm not talking just about the Holocaust here.)

They were part of this machine, yet they felt the need to succeed in their particular role in that machine. They dissociated themselves from the pain and suffering the machine was ultimately causing. Perhaps they saw themselves as just a cog in a big wheel. Maybe they felt like they just had no other options. I suspect that some of the same psychology is at work today in people who work for pharmaceutical companies, or people who work for tobacco companies.

But this psychological deception is harder to do today, at least when working for tobacco companies. It's hard to lie to yourself and say, "This is a healthy product." You'd have to be living in some alternate universe, where you've seen none of the science about how dangerous cigarette smoke is to human health. In the pharmaceutical industry, however, there are a lot of people who are lying to themselves, and it's easier to lie to yourself saying, "We are searching for the cure for cancer!" or "We're going to solve osteoporosis and we're going to end suffering!" They think they're part of a machine that's going to end suffering. Thus, they think if they succeed in marketing and creating more money and more profits for their company, then fund more research, they can find all these solutions to disease.

Thus, they fall for something I call "The Big Lie," which is the idea that we can solve health problems by creating ever more technologically advanced or complex synthetic chemicals and compounds that, if introduced into the human body, can suddenly reverse all of these diseases which have been created by years and years of abuse through lifestyle, lack of nutrition, exposure to environmental toxins, and so on.


The Big Lie of the pharmaceutical industry
It's a big lie that you can cure cancer or diabetes by coming up with the right chemical, or that you can even cure depression by altering brain chemistry with the right chemical. This is a big lie. It's as if medical science has gone down the wrong pathway for so long that they can't even see the fact that they're lost. They're lost in the forest, and they can't even see the trees. All they can do is continue to try to come up with more and more chemicals they think are treating these diseases.
They think the only reason they haven't cured cancer yet is because they don't have enough money, that it's just a money problem. "Give us more money and in a couple more years, and we'll have cancer cured." That's been the promise they've held out for decades. The reason they think they can cure these diseases if they just have enough money and enough time is because conventional medicine remains stuck in the paradigm of germ theory. And the germ theory says that every disease is based on an organism or an invading element, whether it is a virus or bacteria, and if you just have the right chemical compound, then you can cure that infectious disease.

Of course, this was quite valid in the day of penicillin, and it's still valid today for basic, simple infections. But the germ theory does not apply to chronic, degenerative diseases such as cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, diabetes, cardiovascular heart disease, Crohn's disease, clinical depression , inflammatory diseases, and so on.


Chemical-based medicine is a Newtonian view of health
That model of germ theory simply does not apply today. It doesn't mean that germ theory is false, but these chronic degenerative diseases exist in a different realm. For example, regarding physics and the laws of motion, Newtonian physics operate on a large scale; it talks about the interaction between the motion of objects and gravity and momentum. That is a very valid realm of physics and science. And it creates predictable observations and outcomes that match the mathematics. But when you go into quantum mechanics, or when you get to the subatomic level, the rules begin to change. You're now dealing with quantum physics. Quantum physics disagrees with Newtonian physics. But it doesn't mean that quantum physics is wrong, or that Newtonian physics is wrong, it's only that it's applied in a different context. The same is true with medicine.
We still have the old germ theory, which I equate to Newtonian physics, trying to be applied to today's epidemic diseases, which shouldn't even be called diseases, because invading microorganisms do not cause them. They are created as a result of many different inputs, or causes that the patient undergoes, or those which the patient chooses to engage in. To call them diseases is really not accurate. Therefore, the idea that you can cure or reverse these fictitious diseases is invalid at its very premise.


Cancer is no infectious disease
The idea that you can reverse cancer by taking a synthetic chemical compound or prescription drug is, at its very core, nonsense. Because there is no such infectious disease as "cancer," there is no microbial invader. In fact, there isn't even a tissue or a physical element that you can point to and look at under a microscope and say, "That is cancer."
Some people mistakenly say, "Well, sure you can. You can take a tumor out of the body, and you can put that under a microscope and call it cancer. However, that's not cancer. That's the side effect of cancer, because cancer is a systemic failure of the immune system. It's a systemic disease. It is actually a condition. It is a lack of the body's ability to self-regulate its own cell growth, to clean up its own blood, tissues, bones, bone marrow, and so on.

This is the nature of cancer; you can't put that under a microscope and look at it. In the germ theory of disease, however, scientists are always trying to look at cancer under a microscope, where they can put it down and say, "This is the microbe, see? There's the virus" or "There's the bacteria" or "There's the parasite." They still try to do that today by saying, "Alzheimer's is based on the nervous system. Put it under a microscope and there you can see plaque. Plaque on the nervous system." They think that's the cause of the disease. It's not, it's just a side effect.


Big Pharma = big-time poverty
Getting back to the main point of this, which is Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, we were talking about why people work for these organizations when these organizations are actually doing such evil, or engaging in the creation of such pain and suffering, and even death. Here in the United States, we're also talking about economic poverty created by both of these companies.
Tobacco companies make people poor, because they hook them on a product that's expensive to buy; and they have to keep buying it, because they're addicted to it. You'll notice that people who smoke tend to be on a lower economic scale. Part of that is the vicious feedback cycle; if you start smoking, you will get poorer. As you get poorer, you will continue to smoke more because life is terrible and you need your nicotine high just to feel okay. Thus, it's a downward spiral into oblivion.

Much the same is true with prescription drugs in terms of the economic scale and the loss of good, clear decision making abilities. One thing I've noticed is that when people begin taking prescription drugs, not only do they immediately suffer a big economic hit (remember that 50 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States today are due to medical bills, including prescription drugs), they also tend to lose the ability to make good decisions.

Many of these drugs, especially statin or antidepressant drugs, for example, affect people's mental acuity. They result in a loss of lucidity, which results in people no longer comprehending the big picture, and no longer making good decisions. When people can't make good decisions, they ultimately decide to allow the doctor to keep prescribing them more prescription drugs. They don't have the mental awareness to say no to the drugs. They keep taking more drugs, and they lose even more awareness. They get even less responsive, and retain less decision-making ability, and this just becomes another downward spiral.

As this is happening; they are being drained of their finances. So day after day dollars are leaving their pockets and being stuffed into the pockets of the corporate CEOs and the shareholders of the pharmaceutical companies. There's this huge transfer. Imagine dollar bills with little wings flying out of the pockets of people all around the country and flying into the corporate CEOs' pockets in the big buildings of the giant pharmaceutical companies of this country. That is happening every single day. I believe it's an exploitation of people for economic gain, for greed, by the pharmaceutical companies.


Profits first, people second
This, of course, is classic behavior that we saw from Big Tobacco. It was all about greed, it was all about marketing products. They didn't care about the resulting effect they were creating in their customers. In fact, the tobacco companies really only wanted to make sure their product didn't kill customers so fast that they lost a paying customer. They most likely didn't mind that it was giving them disease; they just wanted the customer to stay alive long enough to keep buying more product.
To some degree, this mindset is still present in the pharmaceutical industry. You see this incredible insensitivity to the human condition in Big Pharma. You see press releases and memos from inside the pharmaceutical companies saying , "We can't wait for the Alzheimer's wave to come. We can sell a lot of drugs! Look at all those Alzheimer's patients out there!" Obviously I'm paraphrasing, but this is the kind of attitude we see. They look at diseases as opportunities, and that's sick! To look at a disease and how it's sweeping across the nation and affecting millions of people, and have dollar signs ringing up in your eyes and thinking, "Wow! This is great! We can make so much money selling drugs to all these people who are going to have Alzheimer's, or dementia, or osteoporosis." That's what goes on every single day in the back alleys of Big Pharma; or rather, I should say, in the executive office suites of Big Pharma. There are no back alleys; they're doing quite well financially.


Exploiting the public for financial gain
Whether it's Big Tobacco or Big Pharma, the similarities are very obvious at this point. It's all about making money, and selling a product to people. It's about exploiting the public for financial gain, while disregarding the true effects of your company's products on the public health. That, to me, is a crime. It's not just a crime in the legal sense, but in the spiritual sense, a crime against a fellow human being. To exploit their pain and suffering for your financial gain is unethical and immoral. It's bad karma and it should be against the law.
Instead, many of these companies are actually propped up today. Business magazines talk about them as great successes, and their CEOs are named as some of the most successful business people in the country. They sit on various boards, and they're influential people. I ask myself, "What great good have these people accomplished?" Nothing! Where are the cures for any of these diseases?


Where are all the cures?
I haven't seen a single cure for any disease come out of the pharmaceutical industry since insulin came out. And that doesn't even cure diabetes, although it does regulate blood sugar. So where are the cures? Where is this big turnaround in health if everybody's taking so many drugs? If drugs are so good for everybody, shouldn't we be the healthiest population in the world? Where are those statistics? Well, they don't exist!
We're the most diseased population in the world, the most diseased in the history of the world. We have never seen a population this diseased, and we're taking more drugs than anybody. We're spending the most money on healthcare. We're supposed to have the greatest healthcare system in the world, yet we're the sickest!

We're the craziest in this country, too. We have more mental disorders, behavioral disorders, school violence -- we have people shooting their friends and classmates -- we have more people with dementia and Alzheimer's than we've ever seen before. So where are all these medicinal miracles? They're nowhere. The whole thing is a giant distortion and an illusion. Pharmaceuticals offer us nothing. It's just like nicotine and cigarettes. They offer us nothing other than a quick fix; nothing other than something to try to make us feel comfortable in the short term. Meanwhile, they are destroying our health from the inside out. In both cases, they're also destroying us economically.


Class action lawsuits: the downfall of Big Pharma?
The last similarity between these two companies is the class action lawsuits. Of course, Big Tobacco has fended off a lot of lawsuits. There was a Big Tobacco settlement a few years ago where the states got involved, and I think there is just such a lawsuit coming against the pharmaceutical companies.
I think the pharmaceutical companies have dug their own grave. They have over-hyped, over-promoted, over-prescribed, over-pushed, and over-advertised all these prescription drugs. As a result, they now have over 40 percent of the population taking drugs. This means that as the facts start to come out about how these drugs are killing people and causing disease, and sometimes causing the very disorders they claim to treat, there's going to be a huge backlash -- a major class action lawsuit.

Most of the adults in this country will probably be involved. We've got drugs out there that are extremely dangerous, even over-the-counter drugs like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which, by the last study I saw, are killing 16,500 Americans per year just from gastro-intestinal bleeding alone. These are the numbers from one of the drug safety researchers at the FDA. That's just one drug, one over-the-counter drug, killing 16,500 a year. I think there's a big backlash coming, just like there was against Big Tobacco.

Times are changing; people are realizing that pharmaceuticals are not safe, that they need to look beyond drugs. They need to look beyond these magic pill solutions and start taking responsibility for their own health. People are figuring out that if they go to the doctor and believe everything their doctor tells them, they'll most likely end up on one or more prescription drugs that will turn out to be unsafe years down the road, after the damage has been done. Most of these drugs are just giant experiments. And people are just guinea pigs to the drug companies. These drugs are not well tested. They're not in widespread use. All these trials have been carefully selected and constructed, but afterward they are distorted anyway. These are not safe drugs, but the drug companies know they can make enough money to fend off the lawsuits and even settle with patients, so they still come out ahead, even when their drugs literally kill people by the thousands.

But that's the big trend coming -- massive nationwide lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies with the states and the Attorney General getting involved. People like Eliot Spitzer, a fantastic champion of protecting the public and going after corrupt corporations will play a part. We've got states right now suing drug companies for all kinds of billing fraud. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, in which these pharmaceutical companies would just over-bill states.

I saw statistics in which some drug companies were billing states, I believe, $900 for a bottle of electrolyte solution for IVs. This should be about $20, and it's being billed at $900. It was a long list of items being overcharged. The states were shelling out this money to the pharmaceutical companies, being scammed one day after another, just like the American people are being scammed.

I say the pharmaceutical industry is the greatest con ever perpetrated on the American people. It's a huge con, and they've got everybody behind it. They've got the FDA backing it up, they've got the doctors and the medical profession, and even the medical schools and the medical journals behind it. A lot of the mainstream media as well, because the drug companies spend so much money in advertising that they can pick up the phone and talk to the editors of these big magazines and news networks. They have influence because they spend the bucks. It's a huge con and it has far-reaching implications, and its roots are deep and widespread throughout society. It's going to be difficult to get rid of this, but times are changing.


History will not judge Big Pharma kindly
Some day, Big Pharma will be looked at in much the same way that Big Tobacco is looked at today. Today, Big Tobacco is not doing so well here in the United States. What has Big Tobacco done? They have turned to the international market. The American people finally figured out that cigarettes are a dangerous product and started passing laws about not selling cigarettes to minors, restricting the advertising of tobacco companies, and so on. But the tobacco companies figured out that they can exploit other countries. "Let's go sell cigarettes in China."
Guess what, the smoking rate in China is skyrocketing. They're selling a whole lot of cigarettes over there, and killing a lot of Chinese people in the meantime. We're talking about Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, North and South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and all throughout Southeast Asia. We have a huge smoking problem and it's the American cigarette companies that are over there exploiting those populations and literally poisoning and killing those people just to make a buck, because they figured out they couldn't make their money over here in the US anymore. The game was up. They got caught red handed here in the US.

Eventually some of those other countries will figure it out too. Hopefully, we eventually won't have a tobacco industry in this country or anywhere in the world. That would be ideal. Hopefully, people don't need to inhale these deadly products.

When the backlash happens against Big Pharma, we're going to see the same thing. Big Pharma here will finally have to get creative and try to sell their products overseas. They will very likely start exploiting Asia again. There's a whole lot of people over there, they need drugs too. They'll go over there and try to discredit traditional Chinese medicine, and they will try to discredit herbs and acupuncture, just like they've done here in the US. They will create a market where they force people to have only one option for treating diseases or symptoms: prescription drugs.

The same scam worked here in the US. They convinced most people that drugs are the answer, even doctors, who are smart people. Why not try it in Asia as well? I'm sure they will. They're doing it already. They will just accelerate it as they become exposed here in the US, as people learn the truth about the dangers of prescription drugs.


A few legitimate uses of drugs
With all this talk about the pharmaceutical industry, you might say, "Mike, don't you have anything good to say about the pharmaceutical industry?" Yes, sure. It's great to have antibiotics if they're used properly, which they aren't. They're overused today. It's great to have anesthetics. If you need a surgical procedure because you've been in a car crash or you've experienced some kind of physical trauma or injury, you need anesthetics. You need antibiotics during that surgery. You need this technology to help put you back together physically.
Traditional, organized Western medicine has a place. I don't deny that. Even prescription drugs can have a place if used temporarily, only for short term treatment of acute symptoms and acute conditions, and only when paired with education and lifestyle changes that can help that patient eliminate the very causes of the conditions that created that disease in the first place. The pharmaceutical industry does have a place; but frankly, it's only justified role in society is maybe something like one-twentieth of its current size. We don't need 40 percent of the population taking pharmaceuticals at any one time, we only need about 2 percent. The other 38 percent should be on nutritional healing programs. They should be on lifestyle changes, strength training, physical exercise, exposure to natural sunlight, and consumption of fresh water on a more regular basis. They also need healing foods and healing therapies. They don't need drugs.


Where is the shame of doctors?
Doctors will some day look back on this and they will be embarrassed that they supported prescription drugs for so long. They will be embarrassed in the same way as they are today about the truth that they promoted cigarettes. No doctor is proud of being associated with a profession and with an American Medical Association that has actually promoted these things in the past. The American Medical Association has even been convicted twice in the federal courts of conspiracy, for conspiracy to discredit chiropractic medicine.
This is a history that doctors shouldn't be proud of. Perhaps a lot of them don't even know this history, but this is the real history of medical doctors in this country. In the future they will look back to today and say, "We are ashamed that we promoted all of these drugs, that we prescribed them without teaching patients how to be healthy. We are ashamed of our profession, and it's time to make some changes." They indeed should be ashamed, because right now old school medical doctors are doing tremendous harm.

The first rule of medicine: Do no harm. That has been forgotten, because every time a doctor sees a patient, spends three minutes with that patient, writes a prescription, and sends them out the door to go to the pharmacy, that's doing harm. That is irresponsible medicine. In fact, it is not even healing at all. It's not even being a doctor.

The word "doctor" means "teacher", according to the Latin root. Where is the teaching in our doctors today? It's not present, except in the really great doctors. But by and large, the run-of-the-mill general practitioners are not teaching anybody anything. They're writing prescriptions and getting them out of the office.

Some say, "We don't have time to teach people." Then, what are you doing? What are you doing as a doctor? What are you doing in this profession if you don't have time to help people? Didn't you get into medicine because you wanted to help people? Stop wasting your time being a slave of the drug companies. You will be embarrassed about that some day, believe me; instead, go study naturopathy. Go learn nutrition ( see related ebook on nutrition). Go help people in meaningful ways. Don't be part of the machine that is causing pain, suffering, destruction, and death in our society and around the world right now. That machine is set up for one purpose, which is financial profit. Refuse to be part of that machine.


Just say no to prescription drugs
For the rest of us, we can cause the vanishing of both Big Tobacco and Big Pharma by simply not purchasing their products. We can go somewhere else, we can do something different. We can use homeopathic remedies or acupuncture to treat our acute systems. We can use nutritional healing and lifestyle changes to prevent chronic disease so that we don't become a patient in the first place. We won't suffer from Alzheimer's and dementia and these so called "aging diseases," which really have almost nothing to do with aging; but modern medicine loves to describe it that way to try to make you think it's inevitable.
We can make these changes. We don't have to be a customer of organized medicine. We can say "No" to cigarettes; we can say "No" to prescription drugs. We can find alternatives. I encourage you to take responsibility for your own health, to seek out those alternatives and use them. Don't be a victim. Don't be exploited by tobacco companies or pharmaceutical companies just so that you can make their CEOs rich at your expense.

The article doesn't say that all prescription meds are bad. It says that many of them would be unnecessary if appropriate changes are made in the person's life. Not all of them, but most. I know that most people dismiss the idea of nutritional healing as nonsense. I've seen it work for many people firsthand, but that's a whole other topic and I don't want to get into any more arguments.

I actually came here just now to say that I've put a lot into this topic and I'm particularly happy with the previous article as a way to end it for a while. People can find their way here if they are interested; I want to allow this topic to find its way off the first page and let arguments die down. I want to inform, not provoke. It's fine by me if people come here to disagree. I think the info here speaks for itself and some may find it useful. I needed to know these things myself before I took my med.

Best wishes to all for a life full of health, spirituality and vibrance.
Linda.

Debunking biological psychiatry

Dr. Wayne Goodman - FDA announcement:

ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP)
Promoting Openness, Full Disclosure, and Accountability
http:h//www.ahrp.org/cms/

FYI
"Biological psychiatrists have looked very closely for a serotonin imbalance
or dysfunction in patients with depression or obsessive compulsive disorder and,
to date, it has been elusive," says Dr. Wayne Goodman, Chair of the US Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee.

Psychiatry's drug prescribing practices rest on a myth debunked by Jeffrey
Lacasse and Jonathan Leo in their article in PLoS Medicine. Not a single
representative of mainstream psychiatry has come forward to rebut them.
Lacasse and Leo lay out the case against psychiatry's bedrock justification
for prescribing psychotropic drugs. For decades psychiatry's leadership and
chorus of followers have claimed that depression is caused by a "chemical
imbalance" in the brain, and that SSRI antidepressants normalize that "chemical
imbalance."
But such claims have been overturned In the absence of evidence. As Lacasse
and Leo have shown, not a single peer reviewed article validates the theory of a
chemical or biological marker abnormality in persons diagnosed with
depression--or, for that matter with any psychiatric disorder.
Thus, neurologist, Dr. Frederick Baughman argues, in the absence of a
confirmed disease, no medical intervention is justified.
Evidence does exist showing that the drugs have serious adverse effects which,
for some individuals, cause permanent damage.
Furthermore, some of the prescribed drugs are controlled class II
substances--which means they are highly addictive!
We are led to ask: What is the justification for giving psychiatrists a
license to prescribe psychotropic drugs in the absence of evidence that:
1. A pathological abnormality is present;
2. The prescribed intervention (drug) is proven safe;
3. The intervention is proven effective to treat the pathology;
4. The benefit / risk ratio is favorable for those for whom it is prescribed.

See: Jeffrey R. Lacasse, Jonathan Leo. Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect
between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature, PLoS Medicine, Dec
2005 at:

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/jour\
nal.pmed.0020392
See also: http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/67/94/

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
212-595-8974
veracare@...

Jefferson Scientists Show Several Serotonin-Boosting Drugs Cause Changes in Some
Brain Cells
Some cells shriveled, while others took on corkscrew shapes


Researchers from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia have found changes in
brain cells in rats treated with large doses of several anti-depressant or
anti-obesity drugs. In some cases, the cells shriveled or took on abnormal
corkscrew shapes. While the clinical significance of the findings isn’t known,
the scientists say, they may raise new concerns about the prolonged use of such
commonly prescribed drugs as fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft). The
work also highlights the need for similar studies on other classes of drugs that
act on the central nervous system.

The scientists, led by Madhu Kalia, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., professor of
biochemistry, molecular pharmacology, anesthesiology, and neurosurgery at
Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia,
compared the effects of giving high doses for four days of four drugs – Prozac,
Zoloft, sibutramine (Meridia) and dexfenfluramine (Redux) – on rat brain cells.
Each rat received only one drug.

In the study, after the toxic doses of drugs were halted, and the animals’
brains subsequently examined, the researchers saw marked changes in some nerve
terminals, which actively release the brain chemical serotonin.

These drugs, collectively known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors
(SSRIs), increase the level of serotonin, which is vital to brain cell
communication. Low serotonin levels are linked to mood and eating disorders.

Dr. Kalia and her colleagues at Jefferson and at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health in
Morgantown, WVa., report their results March 6 in the journal Brain Research.

The question remains, what do these findings mean. "We don’t know if results
with four days of drug treatment are clinically significant," Dr. Kalia says.
"We don’t know if the cells are dying. That’s the key question. We need to do
more studies to prove cell death. These effects may be transient and reversible.
Or they may be permanent."

Prozac and Zoloft are Food and Drug Administration-approved medications for the
treatment of depression and other central nervous system disorders. Meridia is
marketed for the treatment of obesity. The anti-obesity drug Redux was pulled
from the market in 1997 after reports of heart valve damage.

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), known as the street drug Ecstasy, is an
amphetamine-derivative that is known to be toxic to some brain cells. MDMA and
another drug, 5,7-dihydroxytryptamine (5,7-DHT), were used as controls because
both drugs push serotonin out of the brain cells. The brain cell changes with
SSRIs were similar to those observed with MDMA.

Serotonin is ubiquitous in the central nervous system, making it a frequent
target of potential drugs. Drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft raise serotonin
levels for depression and panic attacks, for example. Another class of SSRIs –
anti-anorectics – includes drugs such as Meridia and its predecessor, Redux.
Such drugs block the circulating serotonin, a neurotransmitter. Once brain cells
use serotonin, it’s recycled in the brain. SSRIs keep serotonin from being
recirculated back to the brain for subsequent use, allowing the chemical to stay
active in the brain.

More than a decade ago, rat studies showed that high doses of Redux could change
the shape of some brain terminals, says Dr. Kalia. Some researchers attributed
the effect to the fact that the drug was also a serotonin releaser. It pumps
extra serotonin out of the brain cell, depleting the brain cell nerve terminal,
rather than just blocking serotonin from entering back into the cell.

"It was a big mystery why these brain terminals looked like corkscrews with high
doses," Dr. Kalia remembers. But, she says, few scientists examined all SSRIs.
"We asked the question, ‘Would other SSRI’s cause the same effects in high
doses’?"

Because patients are using some of these drugs for long periods – and scientists
aren’t sure of what the long-term effects of many of these drugs might be – she
and her co-workers plan to do long-term studies in animals. "We would lower the
doses to about 10 to 30 times the therapeutic dose and give it to the rats for
six months or a year, looking at them at selected periods of time to ask the
questions, ‘Can we see these changes in serotonin cells over the long term, or
does the brain adjust?’" she says.

The scientists would then examine the long-term effects of the drugs and examine
the behavioral and neurological effects of these brain changes. "We need to find
out if these changes are effecting behavioral changes in the rat and in
patients.

"The problems with human studies is we can't do such experiments in controlled
environment," she explains. One difficulty with using such drugs, she says, is
that several of them are given to patients who already have psychological
problems such as depression and mood swings. They may or may not develop
neurological problems following drug treatment. Though that isn’t necessarily
the case with patients taking anti-obesity drugs, she points out, in any case,
"the possibility of overlooking any drug-induced neurological changes must be
considered."

Published: 2-29-2000

SSRI Warning
Public Notice

There is a class of drugs on the market for depression, anxiety, and a host of
other mental health problems known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors,
or SSRIs. You have heard of them: Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Luvox, Celexa...
to name just a few...

If you are currently on one of these drugs, or if someone has mentioned to you
that you should get on one of these drugs (your family physician, your friend,
your relative), this notice is especially for you.

SSRI theory is based on findings that depressed people have lower levels of the
metabolite of the neurotransmitter serotonin. SSRI drugs block the re-uptake of
serotonin in the brain, and thus, the level of serotonin increases in the brain,
bringing about the "proper" neurotransmission necessary to alleviate the
depression. This is a horribly flawed theory.

Some of what the companies manufacturing these SSRI's, and what doctors
prescribing this medication will very likely NOT tell you is this:

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines serotonin as, "a powerful
vasoconstrictor", which is what it was discovered to be in 1948. A
vasoconstrictor is an agent which constricts blood vessels and blood flow.
So while shoring up enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain to
alleviate depression, the person taking one of these drugs is also shoring up
enough of the vasoconstrictor - serotonin, to substantially decrease blood
flow in the brain- a serious and sometimes deadly oversight.

And, as the delicate chemical balances in each of our brains is as unique to
each person as his or her fingerprints, it's no surprise the adverse reactions
reported with these drugs can vary to extremes. Some people have seizures while
either actively taking, or while withdrawing from these drugs. Some people have
had strokes after taking them, due to the vasoconstrictive action of too high a
serotonin level. Some experience a complete personality change.

But another serious casualty of this decrease in blood flow concerns the area
of the brain responsible for self-control. This is why nearly every time you
hear of some random, violent act such as a school or office shooting, the
people going into these homicidal rages have been found to be on an SSRI
over 95% of the time.

Columbine High School? One of those kids was taking Luvox. The Atlanta day
trader who shot up his office? Prozac. Kip Kinkel? Prozac. Michael McDermott
in Boston? Paxil and Prozac. Phil Hartman's wife Brynn had been taking Zoloft
before killing her husband and herself. These are just to name a few.

A jury in Gillette Wyoming determined that Paxil was to blame for a triple
murder/suicide. The plaintiffs were awarded an $8 million dollar
settlement in this case which hit the media during the first week of
June 2001. Unfortunately a money settlement, no matter how large can ever
bring back four precious human lives! In another case in Australia, a supreme
court judge found Zoloft to be the reason a fellow murdered his wife of over
30 years... For every one of those incidents you have heard about, there are
fifty such incidents that didn't make the national news. But wouldn't the FDA
keep something like this off the market?

No. There is simply too much political and financial interest in the profits
from these drugs. Your consumer protection when it comes to this class of drugs
is just not there. People within the FDA who have dared to voice opposition to
these drugs during the approval processes have found themselves without their
jobs.

During trials to determine the safety of Prozac, when subjects were reported to
have become suicidal on the drug, a memo surfaced, ordering the language in the
report changed from "suicidal" to "depressed".

Further, the FDA issues "conflict of interest waivers" to drug company doctors
and researchers during the approval processes for these drugs. For example, in
the case of Paxil, every single one of the "experts" on the panel with the
authority to approve or disapprove Paxil had been granted this "conflict of
interest waiver" by the FDA director.

As a result, Paxil was approved as safe. Safe, for say, a mother of four driving
her kids down the interstate at 75 mph - while the Federal Aviation Administration
will not grant a pilot's license to anyone on Paxil, because the seizures and
sudden involuntary movements it can cause may cause a pilot to crash a plane.

We say SSRI's are NOT safe, and there is account upon account to back it up.
Just who are 'WE', you might be asking yourself... We are a group of people who
have taken these drugs, only to have them upend our lives in a variety of some
of the worst ways imaginable. And we want you to know what they do.

The story of H.

I'm a 22 year old student. My studies had gone very well and university
life was generally successful in every respect. However, I had had a few
problems and felt tired and had a lot of stress. My doctor diagnosed me with
depression after a very brief consultation, and suggested i take Prozac.
Looking back now, i did suffer from depression, but I think my problems
would have resolved with time, and it was nothing compared to what the
SSRI's induced. After being told that Prozac has very few side-effects, I
agreed to try it.
The reaction started very soon after the first dose....within 48 hours I
felt the usual nausea, headache, dizziness. Within a few days, i suddenly
felt extremely anxious and a worsenning of depression....this developed
rapidly into a depression deeper than I had ever experienced before. I felt
extremely confused and for no reason, believed everyone to be against me.
This sudden worsenning of mood was accompanied by strange physical symptoms;
my skin was itching, my mucsles were twitching, i was shaking violently, and
felt a terrible pressure behind my eyes....everything looked brighter and my
thoughts were racing. I was put on another SSRI a few days later after a
emergency doctor had to be called...... I had felt a sudden panic worse
than anything I had ever experienced, i felt strong impulses to do things
that I didn't want to do and the fear was extreme. I was so afraid of myself
and really thought that I'd lose control .The doctors persuaded me that I
should stay on the medication for longer and that the symptoms I was
experiencing were a worsenning of my depression. Over the following three
months the doctors prescribed another two SSRI's.. There were a couple weeks
when I believed the medication to be finally working....I felt really
confident and excited, almost euphoric. I was unable to eat or sleep, I lost
a lot of weight, and then very suddenly my mood changed again and I felt very
strong suicidal impulses.
The terrifying side-effects continued and I eventually decided to stop the
medication. I was unaware of the dangers associated with abrupt withdrawal.
Some of the restlessness eased a few days later, but most of the symptoms
remained. I was unable to study anymore, the anxiety was so great, and I had
no concentration. I couldn't feel normal emotions anymore, nor could i think
clearly. A psychiatrist whom I had been referred to suggested that I go to
hospital for a few weeks.....i was unable to function and desperately wanted
help. In hospital I refused any more anti-depressants, i knew that the
damage had been caused by the drugs, and decided to allow time to heal me.

Seven months have now passed since my last SSRI dose and although I am
getting better, the process is very slow. Although the doctors finally
recognised that I had a bad reaction to the SSRI's, they have all dismissed
the idea that for some people they can cause long-term damage. Because of
the reaction, I had to discontinue university. I'd do anything to be the
person I was before i took SSRI's. All I want is to be able to continue at
college, and fulfill my aspirations.... but I am confident that with time I
will get better and hopefully be a stronger person at the end of it.

The story of C

I am neither a psychiatric survivor, nor a member of the Scientology Church.
I have never been prescribed, nor have I ever taken a psychiatric drug, but
my life has taken a complete 180 degree turn because of them. I carry no
high degrees or honors worthy of applaud or recognition. I am just a mother
who cares about this world and my fellow man. I care deeply about human
rights and free agency.


My ex-husband was prescribed Paxil to alleviate depression. Initially, he
had a positive response to it, but that effect did not last. When my son was
only twelve years old I was told that a “chemical imbalance” was the cause of
his depression. He was prescribed Prozac by a physicians assistant in our
primary care doctor’s office. Our doctor explained that depression runs in
families (like father, like son).


My son told me he didnt want to keep taking this drug because it made him
feel really “weird.” When we discussed this with our doctor, he told us that
sometimes it is hard to find the proper dosage for children, but since my
son was big for his age, he doubled the dosage. One day I found my son no
longer breathing. He had died from a self inflicted gunshot wound to the
head, or at least that’s what his death certificate tells the world.


I eventually came to know of others who had experienced negative results
from using antidepressants, and my ex-husband decided to quit taking Paxil.
We had been married for nearly twenty years, and had faced different
challenges throughout that time, but nothing could have ever prepared us for
the nightmare we lived through as he tried to come off Paxil. He became
violent and suicidal. Our marriage fell apart during that time. It took
almost a year before he was certain that he was free from the horrendous
withdrawal. He has never been violent or suicidal since.


Through my own research I discovered that there is no definitive test that
can determine whether someone has a chemical imbalance. My personal
understanding has been validated by the scientific literature. So,
essentially, we had been lied to by the physician we had once trusted. No
doubt, he had been lied to and trusted pharmaceutical reps he had once
trusted.


The FDA has miserably failed in its own stated mission:

”The FDA is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the
safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological
products, medical devices, our nations food supply, cosmetics, and products
that emit radiation. The FDA is also responsible for advancing the public
health by helping to speed innovations that make medicines and foods more
effective, safer, and more affordable; and helping the public get the
accurate, science-based information they need to use medicines and foods to
improve their health.”


I personally testified before an FDA hearing on the safety of
antidepressants in February 2004. I have read the transcripts from the 1991
and September 2004 hearings. It has now been sixteen years since the first
horror stories were laid bare for the FDA to examine, and during this
expanse of time, the FDA administration has not yet met its own missive, and
thousands have died or have been through similar nightmarish experiences to
my own. I am not writing to request additional restrictions on these drugs
or more strongly worded warnings. I am writing because it is time for those
who head the FDA to step down or be booted out. It is well past time to
change the guard.

The story of S

Hi.. I would like to share some of my story. I am 46, an attorney, mother, grandmother... In 1984 I was put on tricyclic antidepressants while my husband struggled with leukemia. The doctor wanted to take advantage of the side effect of weight gain, as I was not eating properly.

I became aggressive and impulsive, but managed to complete a law degree. I stayed on the antidepressants. While studying for the Bar in 1994, I was switched to SSRIs (Zoloft). Within weeks I developed panic attacks and my diaphragm partially paralyzed. They added benzodiazapine.

In 1996, I attempted suicide. They diagnosed me with bipolar disorder based on the aggression and suicidality. They put me on anticonvulsants. The aggression went away. And my nightmare began..

Over the next ten years, I put on 100 pounds, developed high blood pressure, high blood sugar, an ulcer, heart and lung problems, neuromuscular problems, mild hallucinations. I probably was tried on 15 different medications during this time as they all had unacceptable side effects or didn't work or made my symptoms worse. But they assured me I just needed the right combination. I didn't want to go back to being angry and impulsive, which they attributed to bipolar disorder. So, I continued to try medications.

In 2002, I began stumbling and had several falls between 2002 and 2005, resulting in permanent spinal damage.

In 2004, I was hospitalized for pneumonia and was in the hospital for a month. I was in isolation for 9 days due to heart palpitations, severe sweating, neuromuscular problems. They thought I had tuberculosis. It was later found they had neglected to give me some of the medications and I was having "discontinuation syndrome." I was put on oxygen 24/7 for several months, then "while ambulating" as my paralyzed diaphragm was collapsing one lung. They changed me to a new antidepressant, Effexor.

A few months later I took a near fatal overdose. I was unconscious 4 days before my family convinced the police to check on me. I was lucky I did not suffer brain damage. They switched me to Celexa and added Seroquel, an antipsychotic, to help me sleep.

In 2005 I became so disorganized and suicidal my employer became concerned. I admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital for the first time. I refused to leave til they "fixed me." At that time, they discontinued the anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medications. I went through several days of panic and sleeplessness, but I recovered. Then over a period of several weeks, they decreased the SSRI, believing it was making me more depressed. The plan was to leave me on only an anticonvulsant. I developed severe muscle pain, nausea, vomitting, convulsions, tinnitus, nystagmus, laughing and crying spells, panic, sweating, electric shocks in my arms and head.

I lost my job, as I could not return in that state and they could not accommodate my absence. I was in and out of the ER. My family doctor finally said to go off ALL medication. ALL chemicals as he thought my liver and gallbladder were failing and they might have to remove the gallbladder. He ordered an abdominal scan and referred me to a liver specialist for liver damage. However, when I lost my job, I lost my insurance...

So, I consulted a naturopath. She had me do a liver and gallbladder cleanse.. I threw out all packaged food and switched to organic, fresh everything. This was the first week in March.

I felt deathly ill for three weeks. But slowly, I began to feel better. The suicidal thoughts went away. The muscle pain and contractions went away. My blood sugar and blood pressure returned to normal. My ulcer went away. I lost 76 pounds. I began breathing better and was able to discontinue using a bipap and oxygen at night.

I have been off all medications since March. I still haven't found a full-time job, have had to sell my home, and theoretically should be depressed and suicidal, as that has been my mental state for ten years.. yet I am fine. No depression. Even the anxiety is minimal for someone in my precarious circumstances.

I believe that these medications caused the symptoms that led to the diagnosis of bipolar disorder; and the subsequent prescriptions caused the whole host of illnesses that cost me my job, my home, and so far, it looks like, my career. I have relocated to another state, hoping to find work here, as my education and experience rendered me over-qualified for anything other than attorney work and the flooded market and other factors have prevented me finding work in my area.

I hope that my experience will help others to understand the hazards of the pharmaceutical complex as it stands.

The story of D

About 7 months ago I suffered a panic attack, which I didn't handle too
well. After seeing my md a few times I was put on Cipramil and told I
would feel myself again in about 4-6 weeks. About 2 weeks into the meds
my panic attacks worsened - I had really hot surges rushing through my
whole body. Not to mention horrible nightmares and obsessive thoughts
that I was going to lose it and kill somebody. I'm still traumatised
and plagued by these thoughts and believe me I was NEVER a violent
aggressive person. My pdoc assured me it wasn't the medication but
part of the depression. I kept on taking it. I went back to work
about 4 weeks into the med and started noticing that I didn't feel real
anymore. By the 6th week I was an absolute zombie, emotionless,
physically numb - I couldn't feel the water running on me in the shower
or taste food. I arrived at work one morning and felt like I didn't
know where I was or how I got there. I broke down and haven't been
back at work since (that was about 4 months ago). The psychiatrist
told me it was the depression that was making me feel this way, but
also made me stop the Cipramil cold turkey. That's when another
nightmare began. Severe dizziness, to the point where I felt like I
was going to pass out or lose control, I even slept with the light on
because of the fear. At the time I didn't know it was
withdrawal...thought I was losing my mind. That lasted for over a month,
never really subsided. I then saw a naturopath with no success.
I now know that I was still suffering from withdrawal, but thought it
impossible at the time - 2 months later, so I went to another pdoc and
was given Zoloft, was on that for 6 weeks, have been off it almost 4.
I'm now suffering hellish withdrawal AGAIN. Feel really disconnected
and drugged out most of the time. Have heart palpitations, tightness in
the head, dizziness, tinnitus, flashes of memories and images. I feel
as thought a part of me has died. Find it hard to believe that I was
anything but this person, nothing feels real anymore. These drugs have
taken my identity, destroyed my relationships with friends and
family...made me unable to function like a normal human being. I have
completely lost my grip, hate to go out and be around people. Don't
even feel comfortable with my family. I've been taking vitamins and
St.John's Wort to try and help with detox, but still the nightmare
continues. Sometimes it feels like it will never end.

The Sunday Independent (Ireland)
The drugs don't work, warn top psychiatrists
TOM PRENDEVILLE
A DAMNING indictment by the country's most eminent psychiatrists paints
a picture of patients' lives being needlessly put at risk by a cocktail
of dangerous drugs, and a profession which is in the back pocket of
vested interests in the pharmaceutical industry.

"The psychiatric world has to be cleaned up - it's appalling. There are
over 200,000 people on over-the-counter tranquilliser drugs," says Dr
Michael Corry, a consultant psychiatrist. "In Ireland, there are 25,000
people on Zyprexa and 20,000 people on Seroxat. With Seroxat, there is a
one-in-500 suicide risk. They get totally overwhelmed by a sense of
disinhibition, and they literally feel they can't go on, and they kill
themselves." Coincidentally, a damning Oireachtas report on the adverse
side effects of pharmaceuticals, which was released last week, has come
to more or less the same conclusions.

The report stated that "the influence of the pharmaceutical industry is
unhealthy". It also called into question the relationship between the
pharmaceutical companies and psychiatric doctors, who are financially
rewarded in the form of payments for ghostwriting medical-research
reports, get free travel, research grants and numerous other perks.

The all-party committee report also took a swipe at the widespread
prescribing of psychiatric drugs. "Their use in therapy
represents unwarranted medical intervention in what are often normal
emotional difficulties," said. "The side effects include behavioural
disorders, physical illness, dependence and even suicide."

The report went on to say that some of the drugs "were of doubtful
benefit" and that "where side effects are well known, they seem not to
be appreciated or are ignored by prescribers".

The Oireachtas Committee is now calling for the setting up of a Patient
Safety Agency.

Other senior doctors raise the issue of the use of drugs such as
Clozaril, a widely used schizophrenia drug which can produce a litany of
life-threatening reactions.

"It's a very dangerous drug - and it's not the only one," said Dr Corry,
who runs the Dun Laoghaire-based Institute of Psychosocial Medicine.
"It's an absolute scandal that the Medicines Board has licensed these
drugs - surely they can unlicense them, seeing as we have clear
irrefutable evidence they are dangerous?"

Professor Pat Bracken, consultant psychiatrist and clinical director of
the West Cork Mental Health Service, says that many of the woes
befalling psychiatry can be directly traced to the vast influence which
the pharmaceutical industry now wields over the academic faculties that
teach psychiatry - an influence gained through the doling out of vast
research grants.

"There are growing concerns about the way in which the pharmaceutical
industry has come to dominate psychiatry," he warns. "The profession
should be independent and be seen to be independent. And if it is not,
it is a concern for everyone."

June 3, 2007
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS


A decade ago the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice accused Dr. Faruk
Abuzzahab of a "reckless, if not willful, disregard" for the welfare
of 46 patients, 5 of whom died in his care or shortly afterward. The
board suspended his license for seven months and restricted it for two
years after that.

But Dr. Abuzzahab, a Minneapolis psychiatrist, is still overseeing the
testing of drugs on patients and is being paid by pharmaceutical
companies for the work. At least a dozen have paid him for research or
marketing since he was disciplined.

Medical ethicists have long argued that doctors who give experimental
medicines should be chosen with care. Indeed, the drug industry's own
guidelines for clinical trials state, "Investigators are selected
based on qualifications, training, research or clinical expertise in
relevant fields." Yet Dr. Abuzzahab is far from the only doctor to
have been disciplined or criticized by a medical board but later paid
by drug makers.

An analysis of state records by The New York Times found more than 100
such doctors in Minnesota, at least two with criminal fraud
convictions. While Minnesota is the only state to make its records
publicly available, the problem, experts say, is national.

One of Dr. Abuzzahab's patients was David Olson, whom the psychiatrist
tried repeatedly to recruit for clinical trials. Drug makers paid Dr.
Abuzzahab thousands of dollars for every patient he recruited. In July
1997, when Mr. Olson again refused to be a test subject, Dr. Abuzzahab
discharged him from the hospital even though he was suicidal, records
show. Mr. Olson committed suicide two weeks later.

In its disciplinary action against Dr. Abuzzahab, the state medical
board referred to Mr. Olson as Patient No. 46.

"Dr. Abuzzahab failed to appreciate the risks of taking Patient No. 46
off Clozaril, failed to respond appropriately to the patient's rapid
deterioration and virtually ignored this patient's suicidality," the
board found.

In an interview, Dr. Abuzzahab dismissed the findings as "without
heft" and said drug makers were aware of his record. He said he had
helped study many of the most popular drugs in psychiatry, including
Paxil, Prozac, Risperdal, Seroquel, Zoloft and Zyprexa.

The Times's examination of Minnesota's trove of records on drug
company payments to doctors found that from 1997 to 2005, at least 103
doctors who had been disciplined or criticized by the state medical
board received a total of $1.7 million from drug makers. The median
payment over that period was $1,250; the largest was $479,000.

The sanctions by the board ranged from reprimands to demands for
retraining to suspension of licenses. Of those 103 doctors, 39 had
been penalized for inappropriate prescribing practices, 21 for
substance abuse, 12 for substandard care and 3 for mismanagement of
drug studies. A few cases received national news media coverage, but
drug makers hired the doctors anyway.

The Times included in its analysis any doctor who received drug
company payments within 10 years of being under medical board
sanction. At least 38 doctors received a combined $140,000 while they
were still under sanction. Dr. Abuzzahab received more than $55,000
from 1997 to 2005.

Drug makers refused to comment, said they relied on doctors to report
disciplinary or criminal cases, or said they were considering changing
their hiring systems.

Asked about the Minnesota analysis, the deputy commissioner and chief
medical officer of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Janet
Woodcock, said the federal government needed to overhaul regulations
governing clinical trials and the doctors who oversaw them.

"We recognize that we need to modernize the F.D.A. approach in keeping
people safe in clinical trials," Dr. Woodcock said.

Drug makers are not required to inform the agency when they discover
that investigators are falsifying data, and indeed some have failed to
do so in the past. The F.D.A. plans to require such disclosures, Dr.
Woodcock said. The agency inspects at most 1 percent of all clinical
trials, she said.

Karl Uhlendorf, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, said the trade group would not comment on
The Times's findings.

The records most likely understate the extent of the problem because
they are incomplete. And the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice
disciplines a smaller share of the state's doctors than almost any
other medical board in the country, according to rankings by Public
Citizen, an advocacy group based in Washington.

Dr. David Rothman, president of the Institute on Medicine as a
Profession at Columbia University, said the Times analysis revealed a
national problem. "There's no reason to think Minnesota is unique,"
Dr. Rothman said.

"Clinical trial investigators must be culled from only the finest
physicians in the country," he said, "since they work on the frontiers
of new knowledge. That drug makers are scraping the bottom of the
medical barrel is an outrage."

Payments by drug companies to doctors, whether or not the doctors have
been disciplined, are a matter of much debate. Drug makers and doctors
say the money finances vital research and helps educate doctors about
helpful medicines. But others in the medical profession say the
payments are thinly disguised incentives for doctors to prescribe
more, and more expensive, drugs.

Among the other doctors who were disciplined or criticized by the
board and paid by pharmaceutical companies:

¶Dr. Barry Garfinkel, a child psychiatrist from Minneapolis who was
convicted in federal court in 1993 of fraud involving a study for
Ciba-Geigy. His criminal case made headlines across the state. From
2002 to 2004, Eli Lilly paid him more than $5,500 in honoraria,
according to state records.

Dr. Garfinkel said in an interview that he had wondered why drug
makers would hire him as a speaker considering his statewide
notoriety. He decided that "they're hiring me to influence my
prescribing habits," so he quit giving sponsored talks and taking
money from drug makers, he said.

¶Dr. John Simon, a Minneapolis psychiatrist who for years shared an
office with Dr. Abuzzahab and was told by the state medical board in
1994 to complete a clinical training program after it concluded in a
report that he "frequently makes abrupt and drastic changes in type
and dosage of medication which seem erratic, not well considered and
poorly integrated with nonmedication strategies." He prescribed
addictive drugs to addicts and failed to stop giving medicines to
patients suffering severe drug side effects, the board concluded.

Dr. Simon earned more than $350,000 from five drug makers from 1998 to
2005 for consulting and giving drug marketing talks. Of this, Eli
Lilly paid more than $314,000. Dr. Simon said in an interview that the
board's action was a learning experience, and that drug makers
continued to hire him to speak because "I am respected by my peers."

Asked about Drs. Garfinkel and Simon, Phil Belt, a spokesman for Eli
Lilly, said that both doctors were licensed to practice medicine and
that the company relied on doctors to report disciplinary actions or
criminal convictions against them.

¶Dr. Ronald Hardrict, a psychiatrist from Minneapolis who pleaded
guilty in 2003 to Medicaid fraud. In 2004 and 2005, he collected more
than $63,000 in marketing payments from seven drug makers. In an
interview, Dr. Hardrict said it was "insulting" and "ridiculous" to
suggest that income from drug makers might influence doctors'
prescribing habits.

"I bought the Mercedes because it has air bags, and I use Risperdal
because it works," Dr. Hardrict said, referring to an antipsychotic
medicine for schizophrenia. Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Risperdal,
paid Dr. Hardrict more than $30,000 in 2003 and 2004.

Srikant Ramaswami, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, said the company
removed Dr. Hardrict as a speaker in 2004 when, as a result of his
conviction, his name appeared in a government database.

Asked why other drug makers continue to hire him despite a fraud
conviction, Dr. Hardrict responded with an e-mail message stating
only, "I will pray for you daily."

In cases involving Dr. Abuzzahab over 15 years in the 1980s and '90s,
the medical board found that he repeatedly prescribed narcotics and
other controlled substances to addicts, renewing one patient's
prescriptions six weeks after the patient was jailed and telling
another that his addictive pills should be thought of as "Hamburger
Helper." He prescribed narcotics to pregnant patients, one of whom
prematurely delivered a baby who soon died.

In explaining his abrupt discharge of the suicidal Mr. Olson, Dr.
Abuzzahab told the medical board that "if a patient is determined to
kill himself, he can't be prevented from doing it and hospitalization
postpones the event," records show.

Mr. Olson's sister, Susie Olson, said Dr. Abuzzahab "had no time for
my brother unless David agreed to get into a drug study. He said,
'You're wasting my time and the hospital's.' It was all about money."

Separately, the F.D.A. in 1979 and 1984 concluded that Dr. Abuzzahab
had violated the protocols of every study he led that they audited,
and reported inaccurate data to drug makers. He routinely oversaw four
to eight drug trials simultaneously, often moved patients from one
study to another, sometimes gave experimental medicines to patients at
their first consultation, and once hospitalized a patient for the sole
purpose of enrolling him in a study, the F.D.A. found.

Dr. Abuzzahab, 74, was president of the Minnesota Psychiatric Society
and two decades ago was chairman of its continuing education and
ethics committees. He would not discuss the specifics of his
disciplinary record, saying he did not have the time. But in 1998 he
signed an agreement with the board saying that his conduct
"constitutes a reasonable basis in law and fact to justify the
disciplinary action."

A simple Google search reveals Dr. Abuzzahab's 1998 medical board
disciplinary file, which was reported at the time by a local newspaper
and a TV station. In 1998, The Boston Globe featured Dr. Abuzzahab in
a front-page article questioning the safety of psychiatric drug
experiments. And in 1999, the NBC program "Dateline" did a segment
about a woman who committed suicide while in a drug experiment he
supervised.

In June 2006, the medical board criticized Dr. Abuzzahab, this time
for writing narcotics prescriptions for patients he knew were using
false names, a violation of federal narcotics laws.

Despite all this, drug makers continued to hire him. Dr. Abuzzahab's
résumé lists 11 publications or research presentations since 2000,
when the medical board lifted its restrictions on his license.

Takeda, a Japanese drug maker, confirmed that Dr. Abuzzahab was doing
a study financed by the company on its sleep medicine, Rozerem. Eisai,
another Japanese drug maker, said that although Dr. Abuzzahab had
signed a clinical trial agreement with the company to study its
Alzheimer's drug, Aricept, it told him two days after a reporter asked
for comment on the case that he was not qualified to be an
investigator. And at AstraZeneca, for which Dr. Abuzzahab said he had
performed clinical trials and still gave drug marketing lectures, a
spokesman said the company was "concerned" about Dr. Abuzzahab's
disciplinary record.

"We have our own internal processes for dealing with these matters,
which are under way," said Jim Minnick, an AstraZeneca spokesman.

The Minnesota records often fail to distinguish between drug company
payments to doctors for research and for marketing, so it is sometimes
impossible to determine why doctors were paid. Some doctors, like Dr.
Abuzzahab, clearly performed both research and marketing.

Gene Carbona, who left Merck on good terms in 2001 as a regional sales
manager after 12 years in drug sales, said the only thing the company
considered when hiring doctors to give marketing lectures was "the
volume or potential volume of prescribing that doctor could do."

A Merck spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Carbona, now executive director of sales for The Medical Letter,
which reviews drugs, said that had he known that a doctor had a
disciplinary record for excessive prescribing, "I would have been more
inclined to use them as a speaker."

Active placebos versus antidepressants for depression (Cochrane Review)


Moncrieff J, Wessely S, Hardy R

ABSTRACT

A substantive amendment to this systematic review was last made on 27 July
1998. Cochrane reviews are regularly checked and updated if necessary.
Background: Although there is a consensus that antidepressants are
effective in depression, placebo effects are also thought to be
substantial. Side effects of antidepressants may reveal the identity of
medication to participants or investigators and thus may bias the results
of conventional trials using inert placebos. Using an 'active' placebo
which mimics some of the side effects of antidepressants may help to
counteract this potential bias.Objectives: To investigate the efficacy of
antidepressants when compared with 'active' placebos.Search strategy: The
Cochrane Collaboration Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis review groups's
search strategy was used to search MEDLINE (1966-2000), PsychLIT
(1980-2000) and EMBASE (1974-2000) and this was last done in July 2000.
Reference lists from relevant articles and textbooks were searched and 12
specialist journals were handsearched up to 1996.Selection criteria:
Randomised and quasi randomised controlled trials comparing antidepressants
with active placebos in people with depression.Data collection and
analysis: Since many different outcome measures were used a standard
measure of effect was calculated for each trial. A subgroup analysis of
inpatient and outpatient trials was conducted. Two reviewers independently
assessed whether each trial met inclusion criteria.Main results: Nine
studies involving 751 participants were included. Two of them produced
effect sizes which showed a consistent and statistically significant
difference in favour of the active drug. Combining all studies produced a
pooled estimate of effect of 0.39 standard deviations (confidence interval,
0.24 to 0.54) in favour of the antidepressant measured by improvement in
mood. There was high heterogeneity due to one strongly positive trial.
Sensitivity analysis omitting this trial reduced the pooled effect to 0.17
(0.00 to 0.34). The pooled effect for inpatient and outpatient trials was
highly sensitive to decisions about which combination of data was included
but inpatient trials produced the lowest effects.Reviewers' conclusions:
The more conservative estimates from the present analysis found that
differences between antidepressants and active placebos were small. This
suggests that unblinding effects may inflate the efficacy of
antidepressants in trials using inert placebos. Further research into
unblinding is warranted.
Citation: Moncrieff J, Wessely S, Hardy R. Active placebos versus
antidepressants for depression (Cochrane Review). In: The Cochrane Library,
Issue 1 2003. Oxford: Update Software.
This is an abstract of a regularly updated, systematic review prepared and
maintained by the Cochrane Collaboration. The full text of the review is
available in The Cochrane Library