Psych Drugs: The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction [Archive]

Hervé

3rd April 2013, 13:35

The role of "antidepressants" (i.e. "stimulants") in the psychotronic war as delineated by Dr. Robert Duncan in his PDF book "The Matrix Deciphered" (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?56002-Must-Read-The-Matrix-Deciphered-by-Dr-Robert-Duncan):

Ghost Busting - Baiting the Weapons Testers
It is merely speculation as to why the traitorous CIA/DoD weapons testers choose most of the people that they do. Everyone asks, "Why me? I'm nobody." That may be exactly one of the criteria. One rough breakdown of the people targeted by the weapon is: 70% random selection, 5% government whistle blowers, 5% outspoken liberal activists, 10% DoD scientists who worked on secret technologies, 10% lifestyle choices, < 1% appear to be real targets like Saddam Hussein. So one method that one undercover American hero might use to bait the shadow government is by taking a combination of L-dopa and serotonin reuptake inhibitors which would increase neurotransmitter secretion or their reuptake and thereby would make them more "psychic" temporarily. Since it appears like they try to find brains that are responsive to a low power level, this might be a method to bait them. L-dopa, a synthetic dopamine neurotransmitter analogue, would increase synaptic activity and thereby amplify any reception of small radio/microwave/magnetic/electric informationally, coherent signals. The excess neurotransmitter in the synaptic junctions helps amplify any precise external modulation of neurotransmitter release. At high frequency pulsed modulated with extremely low frequencies representing neuronal connections one will find several energy and information transfer mechanisms. Sony has patents using ultrasonic energy transfer into brain tissue for future virtual reality video gaming. That's a different method but effective. The undercover hero would be a very appealing subject for the weapons testers due to the ability to discredit him/her thinking that they were natural psychotics and view them as someone who has gone beyond the allowable threshold of sensitivity. Perhaps there is a TEMPEST threshold for human brains. I can only speculate as to why there appears to be a threshold. Perhaps psychic spies use it and everyone who goes beyond it, the US views as a potential threat. It may be that that person begins to pick up on EEG heterodyning signals meant for other people and would be considered a threat. That is only speculation though as to the motives behind it. There may in fact be no threshold that is searched for and simply directed focused energy can compensate for different natural energy amplification levels.

ADD and Ritalin
I am only speculating here about the increased need for Ritalin due to ADD in children. I do not have any proof of this yet. But the training of the psychic army (or mind controllers) has stepped up its intensity about every 4 years, probably in accordance with budget increases. No one is except from being selected, including children and the elderly. One of the bad side effects of being in a hive mind and remote neurally linked is attention deficit disorder, ADD. The number of children put on Ritalin has escalated in correlation with the growing army. There is evidence that stimulants like Ritalin change the amplification of external stimuli in the brain and alter the brains neurochemistry sufficiently to break an EEG cloning lock. The new brainwaves would need to be remapped to create a more effective lock on. Usually the mapping process just occurs at the beginning of a project and is not revisited later. EEG cloning is most effective on subjects that are sensory deprived. Stimulants, like caffeine, act to increase the amplification of sensory stimuli and thereby diminish the influence of the electromagnetic signals relative to internal and sensory brain signals. Another speculation I have with regards to stimulants increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of EEG heterodyning weapons, is the Air Force has been experimenting with stimulants on their fighter pilots. There have been a couple of reported cases where a fighter pilot was given an amphetamine drink before combat. They accidentally fired on allies. Could this have been a test to see if errors of judgment through EEG heterodyning could be defeated through stimulants?

The Psychology of “Crazy”
It is interesting to poll people as to what they believe “crazy” means. The average person’s intuitive understanding of the word usually means to do or say something very unusual or bazaar. Geniuses and eccentrics have throughout history been called crazy. My father is a very conservative man, and he calls about a third of everyone he meets crazy. People who visit San Francisco from a conservative culture, thinks the whole city is crazy. The trend that I have found is that less worldly experiences one has, the more often one judges behavior that is not native to their own culture as some form of mental illness. This is clearly an error to believe that something that has not been thought, heard, or seen before is some kind of pathology of the mind. When one has many errors of thinking, it could be classified as mental illness, unless the errors of thinking are being induced electromagnetically through TAMI. Stop the signal and the brain will regain its normal processing. But this is an important psychological observation, that these discrediting tactics are regularly and historically used by the CIA and Psychlops. Create a scenario that is so improbable like government goon squads or being abducted and tortured, and the majority of people will think the person reporting it is crazy, simply because it is so unusual. Imagine if you were one of Jeffrey Dahlmer’s victims, and you escaped and you told a story about a man who eats dead people, keeps them in his fridge, and drills holes in their heads to try and create a sex zombie to the police. We know this happened, but the police would most likely have locked you up in the psyche ward for showing delusional symptoms. In fact, the police returned a boy who was bleeding from his head, naked, confused, and didn’t speak English very well, back to Jeffrey Dahlmer and within ten minutes after the police returned the kid, he killed and ate him. Jeffrey Dahlmer used the same tactics as the CIA successfully. Of two possible scenarios which was more believable? Jeffery told the police that he and the boy were fighting, homosexual lovers.

So this is how the game is played. Get some famous psychologists on your payroll. Have them create new mental illness like “Thought Sonorization”. And you can label anyone as mentally ill who speaks about the “voice of god” weapons, microwave hearing effect, mind reading radar, or ultrasonic heterodyning technologies that you wish to keep out of the population’s awareness. As time progresses over the decades, the new mental illness will gain more credibility due to its age and number of people reporting it.

I tracked back several “mental illnesses” to the same time frame as TAMI came on line and to known mind control monster psychologists on the CIA payroll like Cameron. This has allowed the human effects weapons testing industry on the population to expand and go unrecognized. One percent of the population has schizophrenia. According to some psychological studies, over 20% of the population has some form of mental illness. Perhaps the categories are getting too broad. See the appendix for my facetious comments on many popular illnesses. What percentage of those classified as mentally ill are genetic and environmentally caused, and what percent is government menticide? The two groups overlap significantly. Through my protected sources, I was told that government weapons testers look for brain waves that show three traits that they want. One is an amplification factor of neurons often found in dopamine excessive brains. This group has traditionally been known to exhibit psychosis. The other is brain entrainment inducibility indicative of a high susceptibility to hypnosis. The third is the uniqueness of the brain waves to add to the database which increases the effectiveness of TAMI for other people. Other factors for target selection include the ease of discrediting and isolating the victim. Of course being a disobedient politician or a government whistle blower will increase your chances of being thrust into the virtual hell and beginning your journey into madness. There is no other word for this program other than diabolical.

Can you feel the pride of being American coursing through your veins?

Psychopathy and sociopathy for human weapons effects experimentation is not uniquely found in serial killers and government agencies. But it is the worst and truest form of mental illness.

... then one wonders why all these "Zombies" movies and FEMA drills have anything to do with reality...

Hervé

3rd April 2013, 13:54

From http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?_r=1& (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?_r=1): The cultivating of the new army of zombies:

A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/04/01/science/video-tc-130401-adhd/video-tc-130401-adhd-articleLarge.jpg

By Channon Hodge, Ben Werschkul, Alyssa Kim and Erica Berenstein
A.D.H.D. Diagnoses Worry Doctors: The Times’s Alan Schwarz on doctors’ growing concern about the skyrocketing use of A.D.H.D. medications in children.

By ALAN SCHWARZ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/alan_schwarz/index.html) and SARAH COHEN
Published: March 31, 2013 1162 Comments (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?_r=1&#commentsContainer)

Nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These rates reflect a marked rise over the last decade and could fuel growing concern among many doctors that the A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its medication are overused in American children.

The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 41 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. (http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/overview.html?8qa) but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis.

“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” said Dr. William Graf (http://medicine.yale.edu/pediatrics/neurology/people/william_graf.profile), a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”

And even more teenagers are likely to be prescribed medication in the near future because the American Psychiatric Association (http://www.psych.org/)plans to change the definition of A.D.H.D. to allow more people to receive the diagnosis and treatment. A.D.H.D. is described by most experts as resulting from abnormal chemical levels in the brain that impair a person’s impulse control and attention skills.

While some doctors and patient advocates have welcomed rising diagnosis rates as evidence that the disorder is being better recognized and accepted, others said the new rates suggest that millions of children may be taking medication merely to calm behavior or to do better in school. Pills that are shared with or sold to classmates — diversion long tolerated in college settings and gaining traction in high-achieving high schools — are particularly dangerous, doctors say, because of their health risks when abused.

The findings were part of a broader C.D.C. study (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/slaits/nsch.htm) of children’s health issues, taken from February 2011 to June 2012. The agency interviewed more than 76,000 parents nationwide by both cellphone and landline and is currently compiling its reports. The New York Times obtained the raw data from the agency and compiled the results.
A.D.H.D. has historically been estimated to affect 3 to 7 percent of children. The disorder has no definitive test and is determined only by speaking extensively with patients, parents and teachers, and ruling out other possible causes — a subjective process that is often skipped under time constraints and pressure from parents. It is considered a chronic condition that is often carried into adulthood.

The C.D.C. director, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, likened the rising rates of stimulant prescriptions among children to the overuse of pain medications and antibiotics in adults.

“We need to ensure balance,” Dr. Frieden said. “The right medications for A.D.H.D., given to the right people, can make a huge difference. Unfortunately, misuse appears to be growing at an alarming rate.”

Experts cited several factors in the rising rates. Some doctors are hastily viewing any complaints of inattention as full-blown A.D.H.D., they said, while pharmaceutical advertising emphasizes how medication can substantially improve a child’s life. Moreover, they said, some parents are pressuring doctors to help with their children’s troublesome behavior and slipping grades.

“There’s a tremendous push where if the kid’s behavior is thought to be quote-unquote abnormal — if they’re not sitting quietly at their desk — that’s pathological, instead of just childhood,” said Dr. Jerome Groopman (http://jeromegroopman.com/), a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the author of “How Doctors Think.”

Fifteen percent of school-age boys have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, the data showed; the rate for girls was 7 percent. Diagnoses among those of high-school age — 14 to 17 — were particularly high, 10 percent for girls and 19 percent for boys. About one in 10 high-school boys currently takes A.D.H.D. medication, the data showed.

Rates by state are less precise but vary widely. Southern states, like Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee, showed about 23 percent of school-age boys receiving an A.D.H.D. diagnosis. The rates in Colorado and Nevada were less than 10 percent.

The medications — primarily Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta and Vyvanse — often afford those with severe A.D.H.D. the concentration and impulse control to lead relatively normal lives. Because the pills can vastly improve focus and drive among those with perhaps only traces of the disorder, an A.D.H.D. diagnosis has become a popular shortcut to better grades, some experts said, with many students unaware of or disregarding the medication’s health risks.

“There’s no way that one in five high-school boys has A.D.H.D.,” said James Swanson (http://bayonet.fiu.edu/library/www3/psychiatry.php?ss=psyf_swanson), a professor of psychiatry at Florida International University and one of the primary A.D.H.D. researchers in the last 20 years. “If we start treating children who do not have the disorder with stimulants, a certain percentage are going to have problems that are predictable — some of them are going to end up with abuse and dependence. And with all those pills around, how much of that actually goes to friends? Some studies have said it’s about 30 percent.”

An A.D.H.D. diagnosis often results in a family’s paying for a child’s repeated visits to doctors for assessments or prescription renewals. Taxpayers assume this cost for children covered by Medicaid, who, according to the C.D.C. data, have among the highest rates of A.D.H.D. diagnoses: 14 percent for school-age children, about one-third higher than the rest of the population.

Several doctors mentioned that advertising from the pharmaceutical industry that played off parents’ fears — showing children struggling in school or left without friends — encouraged parents and doctors to call even minor symptoms A.D.H.D. and try stimulant treatment. For example, a pamphlet for Vyvanse from its manufacturer, Shire, shows a parent looking at her son and saying, “I want to do all I can to help him succeed.”

Sales of stimulants to treat A.D.H.D. have more than doubled to $9 billion in 2012 from $4 billion in 2007, according to the health care information company IMS Health (http://www.imshealth.com/portal/site/ims).
Criteria for the proper diagnosis of A.D.H.D., to be released next month in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, have been changed specifically to allow more adolescents and adults to qualify for a diagnosis, according to several people involved in the discussions.

The final wording has not been released, but most proposed changes would lead to higher rates of diagnosis: the requirement that symptoms appeared before age 12 rather than 7; illustrations, like repeatedly losing one’s cellphone or losing focus during paperwork, that emphasize that A.D.H.D. is not just a young child’s disorder; and the requirement that symptoms merely “impact” daily activities, rather than cause “impairment.”

An analysis of the proposed changes published in January by the Journal of Learning Disabilities concluded: “These wording changes newly diagnose individuals who display symptoms of A.D.H.D. but continue to function acceptably in their daily lives."Given that severe A.D.H.D. that goes untreated has been shown to increase a child’s risk for academic failure and substance abuse, doctors have historically focused on raising awareness of the disorder and reducing fears surrounding stimulant medication.

A leading voice has been Dr. Ned Hallowell (http://www.drhallowell.com/), a child psychiatrist and author of best-selling books on the disorder. But in a recent interview, Dr. Hallowell said that the new C.D.C. data, combined with recent news reports of young people abusing stimulants, left him assessing his role.

Whereas Dr. Hallowell for years would reassure skeptical parents by telling them that Adderall and other stimulants were “safer than aspirin (http://www.drhallowell.com/blog/dr-hallowells-response-to-ny-times-piece-ritalin-gone-wrong/),” he said last week, “I regret the analogy” and he “won’t be saying that again.” And while he still thinks that many children with A.D.H.D. continue to go unrecognized and untreated, he said the high rates demonstrate how the diagnosis is being handed out too freely.

“I think now’s the time to call attention to the dangers that can be associated with making the diagnosis in a slipshod fashion,” he said. “That we have kids out there getting these drugs to use them as mental steroids — that’s dangerous, and I hate to think I have a hand in creating that problem.”

Allison Kopicki contributed reporting.

Multimedia

http://graphics8.nytimes.com//images/2013/03/31/us/0331-web-STIMULANT190thumb.jpgGraphic (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/31/us/adhd-in-children.html?ref=health)
Rates of A.D.H.D. Diagnosis in Children (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/31/us/adhd-in-children.html?ref=health)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of the headline with this article referred incorrectly to the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnosis in boys in the United States. Nearly one in five high school age boys have been diagnosed, not boys of all ages.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 2, 2013

A headline on Monday about the marked rise in diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, described incorrectly the disorder that saw the increase. It is A.D.H.D. — not hyperactivity, which is present in only a portion of A.D.H.D. cases. The article also misidentified the organization that plans to change the definition of A.D.H.D. to allow more people to receive the diagnosis and treatment. It is the American Psychiatric Association, not the American Psychological Association.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 3, 2013

An article on Monday about the marked rise in diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder misstated the increase in the past decade of children ages 4 through 17 diagnosed with A.D.H.D. at some point in their lives. It is 41 percent, not 53 percent.

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

Read All Comments (1162) » (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?_r=1&#comments)

northstar

3rd April 2013, 15:33

Many good people who live with serious mental illnesses like bipolar, schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia are able to get into recovery and live stable lives thanks to anti-psychotic medication. I have a family member who lives with schizophrenia and I can assure you that anti-psychotic meds are making a big positive difference in her life.

I do think that there are probably millions of people who live with a variety of mild or moderate mental illnesses (for example mild depression, mild anxiety, etc) who are very likely over-medicated. I am actually against over-medication and unnecessary medication for people who are otherwise quite functional. There are many extremely effective non-drug interventions for mild mental illnesses like mild depression and mild anxiety and those wholistic approached should definitely be used before resorting to drugs. For example, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is just one non-drug therapy that is extremely effective at treating mild and moderate depression.

However, knowing first hand how my relative and her family suffered when she was ill (in full psychosis) and not medicated, and seeing her vast improvement now, I am troubled whenever I read sweeping attacks on psychiatric drugs.

Some of the sickest of the sick people in society really need those drugs to function. and anti-psychotics can mean the difference between life and death for people who live with serious mental illnesses like bipolar, schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia.

Hervé

3rd April 2013, 15:45

northstar

3rd April 2013, 16:03

That's the Big Pharma "solution" to, and misdirection from the actual cause/source of the "problem", i.e. I am referring to what can be found on this thread: Dreamtime Healing - Using Holographic Kinetics (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?38458-Dreamtime-Healing-Using-Holographic-Kinetics)

Thank you Amzer Zo.

As I said in my post I am actually against over-medication and I fully support wholistic approaches and alternative approaches to dealing with mild and moderate mental illnesses. That is a point of agreement between us.

But I also said something important that bears repeating.

There is an important and vital distinction between those who live with a variety of moderate mental illnesses (such as mild depression and ADHD, etc.) and those who live with serious mental illnesses like bipolar, schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia.

Serious mental illness is extremely disabling. Many people who live with serious mental illness have experienced losing their homes, their friends, their jobs, their schooling. Many people who live with serious mental illness find themselves in jail for crimes they commit when they are not in their right minds (when they are experiencing psychosis).

People who live with mild mental illnesses can for the most part function. They can keep a roof over their heads, they can keep relationships going, they can usually keep their jobs. Many people in the psychiatric survivor movement are in this category. Many are vocally against psychiatric meds because they themselves are not sick enough to need them. Therefore, it is easy to silence, stigmatize and marginalize the 1% of the population, the sickest of the sick, who really do need them.

I speak as one who lives in the trenches with serious mental illness. I personally know (in real life, not just online) dozens of people who live with schizophrenia and all of those I know who are currently persuing a psycho-social recovery model and getting on with their lives in a positive way are also taking anti-psychotic medications.

Hervé

3rd April 2013, 17:22

northstar

3rd April 2013, 18:05

Hi northstar,

I am not disagreeing with you.

All I am saying is that such medications are a palliative and misdirection from uncovering the real root of such states and therefore preventing the discovery and/or applications of less lucrative cures; while creating an army of zombies out of a generation rendered psychotronic-sensitive.

Amzer Zo, I suspect that you may not have read a broad spectrum of literature on this issue.

And regarding your blanket characterization of my bright and beloved family member who lives with schizophrenia as a "zombie", shame on you. It is actually stigmatizing language like that which keeps people who live with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar silent and marginalized.

It is language like that which heaps stigma and shame on their families, in addition to the heavy burden of daily issues which they also deal with.

Of the many, many bright, brave and beautiful souls I know personally, (in real life) who live with schizophrenia, I cannot honestly say I would characterize any one of them as a "zombie". Rather, they are individuals struggling with an extremely serious illness, as well as struggling with a heavy burden of stigmatization and social prejudice.

Hervé

3rd April 2013, 18:35

Hi northstar,

It seems to me you misunderstood what I wrote, the "zombie" comes from the generation that's being prepared and which is made susceptible to psychotronic mind control and behaviour control via said psychotronic remote controlling.

You would have to read that PDF "The Matrix Deciphered" (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?56002-Must-Read-The-Matrix-Deciphered-by-Dr-Robert-Duncan) to understand my simplified statement.

No offense was intended and apologies if that occurred.

Michelle Marie

3rd April 2013, 19:47

AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL - I quit. Too much military and pharmaceutical corruption!!

I was not okay with what was happening at the high school I taught at, so I quit. My bus. technology position was eliminated and they put me down the street before that. (GED prep - housed with childcare and family program)

NOW (I went back as a substitute) they have a CLINIC ON CAMPUS. One student actually said to me as he was showing me the note to go to the clinic: "Ms. A, I'm going to tell them that don't want to be on Prozac." I was calm with him, but my heart hit the ceiling.

I had already been put off when they gave us a teaching instrument promoting flu shots. Clearly opinions were presented as facts. I did not participate. Soon after is when I tendered my resignation from my full-time job.

I went to the clinic as an innocent observer, past teacher wondering about it all. I got the tour. Then I asked the most important question on my heart: "Do you get a permission slip for each visit or just one at the beginning of the year?"

ANSWER: Just one at the beginning of the year.

WHAT? Parents are not even necessarily aware when their children are prescribed psycho-tropic drugs or other medications? The year before they couldn't even get an aspirin without permission.

WAKE UP THE PARENTS!!

Don't even start me about what I observed in the mental conditioning of the students in terms of the military presence.

MANDATORY EDUCATION SHOULD BE ILLEGAL when these immoral and unethical, inhumane practices are present.

I intend to raise awareness around what is happening through my own personal experience and evidence. (No theory here, name callers from the conditioned mindset.)

Get our children out of the American high schools. Home school. Have them learn skills from the internet or vocational schools. Get skills, use talents, find your inner genius and use it! That's what I tell them.

I'm creating alternative educational programs that are inspiring. I just moved and need to gather resources, then I'll move forward.

Thanks so much for this thread!

Love,
Michelle Marie

Hervé

11th April 2013, 06:15

Thanks to Dennis for discovering this gem:

rAxXyMAmBMs

... where the impromptu speaker uncovers how "PTSD" has become a lucrative business, amongst other things.

Hervé

12th April 2013, 06:03

Breeding mental illness in the US
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201347115119833454.html

"Rampant over-prescribing of drugs contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them."

Last Modified: 10 Apr 2013 09:49
http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/89/89/mritems/Images/2012/10/17/20121017145330240734_9.jpg
Belen Fernandez (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/profile/belen-fernandez.html)

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2013/4/7//201347123216538734_20.jpg

"Standard psychiatric diagnoses… do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world" and can counter-productively result in "further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion" for their recipients [Reuters]

In a recent article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20986796) on the BBC News website, Professor Peter Kinderman - head of the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool - warns that the forthcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx) "will lower many diagnostic thresholds and increase the number of people in the general population seen as having a mental illness".

According to Kinderman, the manual - scheduled for publication in May 2013 - constitutes a dangerous effort to pathologise emotions and other symptoms of human existence and will exacerbate the rampant over-prescribing of drugs that already occurs "despite significant side-effects and poor evidence of their effectiveness".

The practice of attributing emotional distress and other phenomena to alleged cerebral/biological abnormalities rather than to social and psychological causes, writes Kinderman, is particularly problematic: "Standard psychiatric diagnoses… do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world" and can counter-productively result in "further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion" for their recipients.

Regarding the impending updates to the psychiatric manual, Kinderman notes that "[t]he new diagnosis of 'disruptive mood dysregulation disorder' will turn childhood temper tantrums into symptoms of a mental illness", while relaxed criteria for "generalised anxiety disorder" will turn "the worries of everyday life into targets for medical treatment". Normal grief will undergo conversion into "major depressive disorder". Additional cutting-edge maladies will include "internet addiction" and "sex addiction".

No guidelines are apparently provided as to how to go about diagnosing societies that obsessively pathologise routine aspects of individual life.

Societal diagnostics
Incidentally, the tendency toward over-diagnosis and over-prescription that dominates the mental health care scene in the US contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them.

For example, it is not difficult to see how anxiety that otherwise would not be present can be generated by inculcating persons with the fear that something is always wrong with them and that it requires purchase of a substance, service, or gadget to fix - a process aided by ubiquitous advertising for antidepressants.

The profitable endurance of the depression industry in particular is presumably ensured by the very nature of contemporary society - not least by the isolation of the individual who has been conditioned to believe that self-made success and material gains trump inter-human bonds in importance.

To be sure, neoliberal policies dependent on the obstruction of communal solidarity facilitate a mass alienation from human reality and deprive individuals of psychological support networks enjoyed in certain other cultures.

It could be argued that alienation in the US begins at birth, an event too often characterised by scheduled Caesarean sections, the immediate removal of newborns from the vicinity of their mothers in defiance of natural bonding needs, and hospital distribution of infant formula (http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=5383) encouraging mothers to simplify their lives by administering expensive and potentially toxic material (http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/07/infant-formula-similac-enfamil-melamine-bpa) to their offspring rather than the free nutrition that is generally located in their own breasts.

And it is pretty much downhill from there.

Sequestration will damage US social safety net
The "socialisation" process of children increasingly involves fundamentally anti-socialising activities such as video games and other technological distractions, the all-pervasiveness of which renders the proliferation of attention deficit disorder somewhat less than surprising. Of course, this does not stop ADD from being treated by and large as an individual mental defect rather than a societally induced condition.

Energetic children are reformed into automatons via the fanatical prescription of pharmaceuticals with side effects ranging from depression to sudden death (http://leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/data/674/Lombardo.html), while a cultural insistence on individual triumph and competition over collaboration likely contributes to such manifestations of emotional insecurity as the institutionalised practice of bullying at US schools.

Luckily for drug companies and other entities that profit from mental disturbance, the New York Times reported (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/effects-of-bullying-last-into-adulthood-study-finds/) in February with regard to victims of bullying and bullies themselves that "researchers have found that [an] elevated risk of psychiatric trouble extends into adulthood, sometimes even a decade after the intimidation has ended".

Disconnecting from the human condition
My own personal experience with mental health issues in the US includes a prolonged panic attack I suffered in high school in the late 90s. Convinced for a period of six months that I was on the verge of spontaneous death, I would hyperventilate, unceasingly check my pulse, and hide in bathroom stalls.

After later living abroad for many years in locations less estranged from reality, I concluded that the attacks had been hypochondriac fallout of extreme anxiety over the possibility of stigmatisation by society for exhibiting any indication of physical or psychological weakness - such as anxiety itself.

Of course, the structure and habits of other societies and cultures can also have adverse effects on the human nervous system; however, the position of the US as global superpower means that its acute unhinging from humanity contains worldwide ramifications.

For example, the mass production of isolated persons lacking empathy naturally facilitates the frequent military devastation of populations abroad - a hobby that has been deemed more lucrative than, say, providing health care to US children (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102074.html).

The agricultural imperialism of US-based corporations like Monsanto (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/04/2013428059717911.html), patron saint of the genetic modification of food, has also proved an effective means of global population control, facilitating the suicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers in India (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212575935285501.html).

Obviously, a nutritional reliance on modified and artificial ingredients and other materials that do not technically qualify as food does not bode well for biological - and therefore also psychological - processes.

The quest for profit at the expense of the functioning of the body is further evidence of the US disconnect from the human condition, which is reinforced by schizophrenic electronic multi-tasking and the general reduction of interpersonal relations to a barrage of mobile phone beeps and Facebook notifications.

In my interview (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012928329663179.html) last year with renowned Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra (http://www.pankajmishra.com/), he commented on the contemporary deterioration of the human essence:
"Our capacity for uncritical love has been expended recklessly in recent years on the free market… This was the false god we were instructed to worship during the era of globalisation and most of us duly obliged, even the least resourceful and economically underprivileged peoples, dazzled by our new goods and gadgets, the routinely updated models of mobile phones… [Now] we can see more clearly how a tiny minority has enriched itself, leaving many others feeling cheated, and exposed to deprivation and suffering."
Professor Kinderman notes in his BBC News article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20986796) on mental illness that therapy constitutes a "humane and effective alternative… to traditional psychiatric diagnoses".

Any truly effective therapeutic approach, however, would require a thorough examination of the inhumane context in which minds function - and, presumably, a comprehensive systemic rewiring.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1024-the-imperial-messenger), released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine (http://jacobinmag.com/)editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog (http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/author/belen-fernandez/), The Baffler (http://thebaffler.com/current), Al Akhbar English (http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/753) and many other publications.
Follow her on Twitter: @MariaBelen_Fdez (https://twitter.com/MariaBelen_Fdez)

778 neighbour of some guy

12th April 2013, 19:39

On topic:
Apologies was not able to upload this to Avalon but I recommend the viewing of:

Just press the Youtube icon above the 'quick reply' box.
copy the URL to the youtube and paste it in between the 2 youtube words in the 'quick reply' box.

IgCpa1RlSdQ

nsklIiAI5SE

UDlH9sV0lHU

voila :)

welcome to Project Avalon!

Great compilation, thanx

Michelle Marie

13th April 2013, 07:19

Michelle Marie

13th April 2013, 07:26

I DO NOT trust the CDC as a reliable source of unbiased information, rather than a pseudo expert organization that pushes agendas.

I know. I've had personal experience as a teacher when my Heart/Truth Sensor went into ALARM mode when we were presented with a teaching instrument that was orchestrated to be delivered to all students at once, presented opinions as facts, and clearly represented an "agenda" and not in the best interests of the students whose minds were being purposely inculcated. NO! to the CDC and its negative effects on our children.

Our new discernment is the ability to perceive impure motives directly. This light of awareness allows us to avoid the pitfalls and traps that are being laid.

The power of TRUTH is setting us free.

Love to all,
Michelle Marie

PS. Sorry about the duplication. I had a message that the first reply was rejected because it had too many characters. Then after I posted the second one, the first one had appeared. I just took the links back out of this one.

The Truth Is In There

13th April 2013, 09:05

the whole psych drug problem will solve itself after the severe earch changes have begun and no more drugs are available to the general populace. it's a safe bet to say that lots of people who depend on "happy pills" and other psych drugs will either go into total mental breakdown mode (zombification) or simply kill themselves because their bodies don't function anymore without these drugs. either way, the problem will be its own solution. survival of the fittest will become the motto of the day again. souls will no longer be jailed in defective physical vehicles and be forced to suffer.

Hervé

13th April 2013, 11:26

I DO NOT trust the CDC as a reliable source of unbiased information, rather than a pseudo expert organization that pushes agendas.

[...]

That's exactly what's alarming because it is the one onto which the "establishment" bases actions on drugging children...

Hervé

27th April 2013, 17:13

From http://www.sott.net/article/261353-Psychiatric-profession-has-lost-its-mind:

Psychiatric profession has lost its mind (http://www.cchrint.org/2013/04/18/psychiatryhaslostitsmind/)

Pete Papaherakles, American Free Press, Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:43 CDT

Nearly every expression of normal emotion can now be classified as a syndrome in need of medication

http://www.sott.net/image/image/s6/138723/medium/psychiatrydrugs_300x281.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/image/s6/138723/full/psychiatrydrugs_300x281.jpg)

The entire industry of psychiatry has become such a laughing stock that even many supporters of the industry are turning their backs in disgust.

In May 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is scheduled to release its fifth Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) superseding the DSM-IV published in 1994 and revised in 2000. The new "psychiatry bible" has been criticized by many as a testament to the insanity of the industry itself. Virtually every emotion experienced by a human being - sadness, grief, anxiety, frustration, impatience, excitement - is now being classified as a "mental disorder" demanding chemical treatment with - you guessed it - pharmaceutical drugs.

Ironically, one of its harshest critics is Allen (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all)Frances (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all) M.D., professor emeritus from the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University who was chair of the DSM-IV Task Force.

"DSM-5 opens up the possibility that millions and millions of people currently considered normal will be diagnosed as having a mental disorder and will receive medication and stigma that they don't need," said Frances (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/775526). "This is the saddest moment in my 45-year career of studying, practicing, and teaching psychiatry. [The] approval makes it likely that DSM-5 will start a . . . dozen or more new fads which will be detrimental to the misdiagnosed individuals and costly to our society."

The DSM is now larger than ever, and it includes Orwellian disorders such as "obedience defiance disorder" (ODD), defined as refusing to follow authority. Rapists who feel sexual arousal during their raping activities are given the excuse that they have "paraphilic coercive disorder" (PCD) and therefore are not responsible for their actions. You can also get diagnosed with "hoarding disorder" if you happen to stockpile food, water and ammunition, among other things. Being prepared for possible natural disasters now makes you a mental patient in the eyes of modern psychiatry.

The entire industry of psychiatry has become such a laughing stock that even many supporters of the industry are turning their backs in disgust. To many scientists today, psychiatry is no more "scientific" than astrology or palm reading, yet its practitioners call themselves "doctors" of psychiatry in order to sound credible.

The authenticity of already established "disorders" such as attention deficit hyper-active disorder (ADHD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) have been called into question.

Frances admits that even the 1994 DSM-IV was a huge mistake that has resulted in the mass over-diagnosis of people who are actually normal.

The major victor in this is the pharmaceutical industry, which is having a field day with sales of billions of dollars of psychotropic drugs such as Prozac, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil and others.

Since the introduction of Prozac in 1987 there has been an explosion in the number of people using psychiatric drugs. One in five Americans, or 65M people, is now taking at least one psychiatric drug such as anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and anti-anxiety medications, according to an analysis (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203503204577040431792673066.html) of pharmacy claims data released on November 2011. In 2010, Americans spent $16.1B on anti-psychotics to treat depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, $11.6B on anti-depressants and $7.2B on treatment for ADHD, according to IMS Health, which tracks prescription drug sales. The report showed that, between 2010 and 2011, the use of psychiatric drugs had increased a staggering 21%.

The adverse effects from these drugs are devastating. Over 200K people a year in the United States enter a hospital with anti-depressant-associated mania or (http://ssristories.com/index.php?p=school)psychosis (http://ssristories.com/index.php?p=school). There have been 66 school shootings and over 1,300 murders and suicides (http://ssristories.com/index.php?p=murders) by psych-drug users since 2000. The Columbine, Virginia Tech, Red Lake Reservation and Northern Illinois University shootings were all committed by individuals on psych drugs, as were many other mass shootings. At least 5K other news stories, including school shootings, link psychiatric drugs to violent crime, according to the website "SSRI Stories (http://ssristories.com)," which tracks these cases.

Hervé

27th April 2013, 17:19

From http://www.sott.net/article/261352-Pharma-funding-shrinks-for-sale-the-creation-of-pre-school-age-bipolar-epidemic:

Pharma funding & shrinks for sale - the creation of pre-school age bipolar epidemic (http://www.cchrint.org/2013/03/25/pharma-funding-and-shrinks-for-sale-the-creation-of-pre-school-age-bipolar-epidemic/)
Kelly Patricia O'Meara, Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:34 CDT

http://www.sott.net/image/image/s6/138721/medium/joseph_biederman_300_377.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/image/s6/138721/full/joseph_biederman_300_377.jpg)
Psychiatrist Joseph Biederman is credited with the explosion of young children diagnosed with “bipolar” disorder and prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs. He was paid 1.6 million from the pharmaceutical companies for his “research.”

It is difficult to absorb the recent data released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AHRQ, on the skyrocketing numbers of children diagnosed with "bipolar disorder" and not come to the conclusion that this startling information represents the never-ending harm initiated by the idiotic psychiatric theories of Harvard child psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman.

In order to fully grasp just how outrageous the data are, one first must remember that the now disgraced and marginalized Biederman is credited with being the ring leader for diagnosing the alleged bipolar disorder in very young children.

To add insult to injury, not only was Biederman the chief advocate of the now controversial diagnosis, but he is also credited with prescribing the most powerful antipsychotic drugs (http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/) as treatment.

It was only due to a Congressional inquiry by Senator Charles E. Grassley that the apparent motive behind Biederman's childhood bipolar diagnosis was uncovered...money. (http://www.cchrint.org/cchr-issues/the-corrupt-alliance-of-the-psychiatric-pharmaceutical-industry/)

$1.6 million dollars was Biederman's take from the pharmaceutical companies for his "research." Most revealing, however, were court documents released in March of 2009, which disclose that Biederman reportedly had promised drug maker Johnson & Johnson in advance that his studies on the antipsychotic drug Risperdone (Risperdal (http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/risperdalsideeffects/)) would prove the drug to be effective when used on preschool age children.

Biederman could never be accused of discrimination. The Harvard psychiatrist, who literally placed himself just one rung below God, was so drug money-friendly that his list of paymasters reads like a who's who of pharmaceutical giants, including Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer and Shire to name a few.

Remarkably, Biederman was not held responsible for the epidemic of preschool children being diagnosed with the alleged bipolar disorder. Rather, the psychiatrist received a slap on the wrist for failing to report all but $200,000 of his pharmaceutical booty to University officials.

And while Biederman remains at his Harvard ivy tower, the devastating scope of his pharmaceutical-bought psychiatric theories on childhood bipolar disorder finally are coming to light.

The AHRQ data reveal the breakdown of the number of children diagnosed as bipolar has skyrocketed. The data below represents hospitalization rates for children diagnosed as bipolar between 1997-2010.

* 5-9 year olds increased 696%.
* 10-14 year olds increased 475%.
* 15-17 year olds increased 345%.
* Hospital stays for bipolar disorder for all children aged 1-17 increased 434%.

While the increased numbers alone are mind-boggling, there are several issues to look at when considering this information. The least of which is that there is no discussion about what psychiatric drugs had been prescribed to these children as "treatment" prior to the hospitalization.

Given Biederman's pharmaceutical-driven influence on the diagnosing of the alleged bipolar disorder in children, and his recommended treatment, one can assume that antipsychotic drugs (http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/) were involved in many, if not most, of the hospitalizations.

That antipsychotic drugs (http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/) may adversely affect children isn't in question. The reported adverse side effects include excessive weight gain, head pain, dizziness, drowsiness, abnormally low blood pressure, trouble breathing, suicidal ideation, depression, disease of the muscle of the heart with enlargement, kidney failure and diabetes, to name a few of the three pages listed.

Perhaps it is because of psychiatrists, like Biederman, who literally get away with pharmaceutical bought-and-paid-for psychiatric diagnosing (http://www.cchrint.org/cchr-issues/the-corrupt-alliance-of-the-psychiatric-pharmaceutical-industry/), that others in the profession are embolden to join the Biederman million-dollar push-a-drug club.

For example, last week a study by Lisa Cosgrove, a University of Massachusetts researcher, reported that "All of the panel members that produced the American Psychiatric Association (APA)'s Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients with Major Depressive Disorder [a precursor to bipolar] had numerous financial ties to drug companies that manufacture antidepressants."

So it continues. One can only guess what the hospitalization data will reveal ten years from now for the astronomical increases in the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. If Biederman's "research" and pharmaceutical pay-off is any indication of what's to come, it doesn't take much imagination.

Biederman is the poster boy for no personal accountability. Despite his obvious lapse in ethical behavior, not only was he not run out of the profession but he got to keep every penny of his $1.6 million in pharmaceutical largesse.

Unfortunately, based on the data, it seems the recipients of Biederman's pharmaceutical-bought psychiatric theories - the children - didn't make out so well.

And despite the harm caused by such a flagrant abuse of position, Cosgrove's research reveals that nothing has changed... it's psychiatric diagnosing as usual. For the right price, there appears to be no shortage of psychiatric diagnosis wannabes eager to pick up where Biederman left off.

Comment: For more information, check out SOTT Talk Radio: Good Science, Bad Science - Psychology and Psychiatry (http://www.sott.net/article/260797-SOTT-Talk-Radio-Good-Science-Bad-Science-Psychology-and-Psychiatry)

witchy1

27th April 2013, 23:05

"There's a tremendous push where if the kid's behavior is thought to be quote-unquote abnormal -- if they're not sitting quietly at their desk -- that's pathological, instead of just childhood." -- Dr. Jerome Groopman (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&), professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School
According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control, a staggering 6.4 million American children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), whose key symptoms are inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity -- characteristics that most would consider typically childish behavior. High school boys, an age group particularly prone to childish antics and drifting attention spans, are particularly prone to being labeled as ADHD, with one out of every five high school boys diagnosed with the disorder.

Presently, we're at an all-time high of eleven percent of all school-aged children in America who have been classified as mentally ill. Why? Because they "suffer" from several of the following symptoms: they are distracted, fidget, lose things, daydream, talk nonstop, touch everything in sight, have trouble sitting still during dinner, are constantly in motion, are impatient, interrupt conversations, show their emotions without restraint, act without regard for consequences, and have difficulty waiting their turn.

The list reads like a description of me as a child. In fact, it sounds like just about every child I've ever known, none of whom are mentally ill. Unfortunately, society today is far less tolerant of childish behavior -- hence, the growing popularity of the ADHD label, which has become the "go-to diagnosis" for children that don't fit the psycho-therapeutic public school mold of quiet, docile and conformist.

Mind you, there is no clinical test for ADHD. Rather, this so-called mental illness falls into the "I'll know it if I see it" category, where doctors are left to make highly subjective determinations based on their own observation, as well as interviews and questionnaires with a child's teachers and parents. Particular emphasis is reportedly given to what school officials have to say about the child's behavior.

Yet while being branded mentally ill at a young age can lead to all manner of complications later in life, the larger problem is the routine drugging that goes hand in hand with these diagnoses. Of those currently diagnosed with ADHD, a 16 percent increase since 2007, and a 41 percent increase over the past decade, two-thirds are being treated with mind-altering, psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall.

Diagnoses of ADHD have been increasing at an alarming rate of 5.5 percent each year. Yet those numbers are bound to skyrocket once the American Psychiatric Association releases its more expansive definition of ADHD. Combined with the public schools' growing intolerance (a.k.a., zero tolerance) for childish behavior, the psychiatric community's pathologizing of childhood, and the Obama administration's new mental health initiative aimed at identifying and treating mental illness in young people, the outlook is decidedly grim for any young person in this country who dares to act like a child.

As part of his administration's sweeping response to the Newtown school shootings, President Obama is calling on Congress to fund a number of programs aimed at detecting and responding to mental illness among young people. A multipronged effort, Obama's proposal includes $50 million to train 5,000 mental health professionals to work with young people in communities and schools; $55 million for Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), which would empower school districts, teachers and other adults to detect and respond to mental illness in 750,000 young people; and $25 million for state efforts to identify and treat adolescents and young adults.

One of the key components of Obama's plan, mental health first-aid training for adults and students, is starting to gain traction across the country. Incredibly, after taking a mere 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities, for instance, a participant can be certified "to identify, understand and respond to the signs of mental illness, substance use and eating disorders."

While commendable in its stated goals, there's a whiff of something not quite right about a program whose supporting data claims that "26.2 percent of people in the U.S. -- roughly one in four -- have a mental health disorder in any given year." This is especially so at a time when government agencies seem to be increasingly inclined to view outspoken critics of government policies as mentally ill and in need of psychiatric help and possible civil commitment. But I digress. That's a whole other topic.

Getting back to young people, Dr. Thomas Friedan, director of the CDC, has characterized the nation's current fixation on ADHD as an over diagnosis and a "misuse [of ADHD medications that] appears to be growing at an alarming rate."

Indeed, not that long ago, the very qualities we now identify as a mental illness and target for drugging were hallmarks of the creative soul. Many of the artists, musicians, poets, politicians and revolutionaries whom we have come to revere in our society were unable to sit still, pay attention, concentrate on their work, and stay within the confines which had been set out for them in the classroom.

Visionaries as varied as Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Feynman, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill might have all been labeled ADHD had they been students in the public schools today. Legendary filmmaker Woody Allen claims to have "paid attention to everything but the teachers" while in school. Despite being put in an accelerated learning program due to his high IQ, he felt constrained, so he often played hooky and failed to complete his assignments. Of his school days, Gandhi said, "They were the most miserable of his life" and "that he had no aptitude for lessons and rarely appreciated his teachers." In fact, Gandhi opined that it "might have been better if he had never been to school."

One can only imagine what the world would have been like had these visionaries of Western civilization instead been diagnosed with ADHD and drugged accordingly. Writing for the New York Times, Bronwen Hruska documents what it was like as a parent being pressured by school officials to medicate her child who, at age 8, seemed to have "normal 8-year-old boy energy."

Will was in third grade, and his school wanted him to settle down in order to focus on math worksheets and geography lessons and social studies. The children were expected to line up quietly and "transition" between classes without goofing around... And so it began. Like the teachers, we didn't want Will to "fall through the cracks." But what I've found is that once you start looking for a problem, someone's going to find one, and attention deficit has become the go-to diagnosis... A few weeks later we heard back. Will had been given a diagnosis of inattentive-type A.D.H.D....The doctor prescribed methylphenidate, a generic form of Ritalin. It was not to be taken at home, or on weekends, or vacations. He didn't need to be medicated for regular life. It struck us as strange, wrong, to dose our son for school. All the literature insisted that Ritalin and drugs like it had been proved "safe." Later, I learned that the formidable list of possible side effects included difficulty sleeping, dizziness, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, headache, numbness, irregular heartbeat, difficulty breathing, fever, hives, seizures, agitation, motor or verbal tics and depression. It can slow a child's growth or weight gain. Most disturbing, it can cause sudden death, especially in children with heart defects or serious heart problems.

As Hruska relates in painful detail, each time the overall effects of the drugs seemed to stop working, their doctor increased the dosage. Finally, towards the middle of fifth grade, Hruska's son refused to take anymore pills. From then on, things began to change for the better. Will is now a sophomore in high school, 6 feet 3 inches tall, and is on the honor roll.

The drugs prescribed for Ritalin and Adderall and their generic counterparts are keystones in a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry that profits richly from America's growing ADHD fixation. For example, between 2007 and 2012 alone, sales for ADHD drugs went from $4 billion to $9 billion.

If America could free itself of the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on our medical community, our government and our schools, we may find that our so-called "problems" aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. As Hruska concludes:

For [Will], it was a matter of growing up, settling down and learning how to get organized. Kids learn to speak, lose baby teeth and hit puberty at a variety of ages. We might remind ourselves that the ability to settle into being a focused student is simply a developmental milestone; there's no magical age at which this happens.

Which brings me to the idea of "normal." The Merriam-Webster definition, which reads in part "of, relating to, or characterized by average intelligence or development," includes a newly dirty word in educational circles. If normal means "average," then schools want no part of it. Exceptional and extraordinary, which are actually antonyms of normal, are what many schools expect from a typical student.

If "accelerated" has become the new normal, there's no choice but to diagnose the kids developing at a normal rate with a disorder. Instead of leveling the playing field for kids who really do suffer from a deficit, we're ratcheting up the level of competition with performance-enhancing drugs. We're juicing our kids for school.

We're also ensuring that down the road, when faced with other challenges that high school, college and adult life are sure to bring, our children will use the coping skills we've taught them. They'll reach for a pill.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/the-psychotherapeutic-sch_b_3037194.html (http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fjohn-w-whitehead%2Fthe-psychotherapeutic-sch_b_3037194.html&h=iAQHVFzWD&s=1)See More
https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/p480x480/603902_592770724068242_1246858560_n.jpg
(https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=592770724068242&set=a.560821643929817.128725.546816438663671&type=1&relevant_count=1)

Hervé

28th April 2013, 00:10

Mass nervous breakdown: Millions of Americans on the brink as stress pandemic ravages society (http://www.sott.net/article/261360-Mass-nervous-breakdown-Millions-of-Americans-on-the-brink-as-stress-pandemic-ravages-society#)

Gabriela Segura, MD., Sott.net, Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:57 CDT

http://www.sott.net/image/image/s6/138335/medium/nervous_breakdown.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/image/s6/138335/full/nervous_breakdown.jpg)

The U.S. population makes up 5% of the world population, yet are prescribed 2/3rds of all psychiatric drugs used worldwide. If this is not a sign of looming mental health collapse, we don't know what is!

As a doctor, I can tell you that stress has reached pandemic levels, though many still hold back from admitting it to themselves or their peers. Our normalcy bias (http://beforeitsnews.com/education/2013/01/america-has-fallen-victim-to-the-normalcy-bias-do-you-suffer-from-normalcy-bias-video-2442598.html) prevents us from taking notice that tens of millions of people in Western countries are dropping like flies from illness, depression and self-destruction. I came across this article (http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/americans-snapping-by-the-millions/) by David Kupelain on Americans' health and agreed with some of the observations made about the dire state of affairs:

Suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death (http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300960) for Americans. Even more disturbing, in "the world's greatest military", more U.S. soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat (http://www.stripes.com/news/more-soldier-suicides-than-combat-deaths-in-2012-1.201440).

Fully one-third of U.S. employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578340332290414820.html) and more than half of all "millennials" (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress (http://diverseeducation.com/article/51755/#) that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.

Shocking new research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that one in five (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?_r=0) high-school-aged children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ADHD, and likewise a large new study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens - children aged six to 12 - have been medically diagnosed (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/in_city_preteens_have_mental_woes_z3NTWFgdVioO0n804SZhWK) with either ADHD, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder.

New research (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9932987/Stress-makes-you-susceptible-to-illness.html) concludes that stress renders people susceptible to serious illness, and a growing number of studies now confirm (http://www.jci.org/articles/view/67887?key=741bcde7c39c877f58de) that chronic stress plays a major role in the progression of cancer, the nation's second-biggest killer. The biggest killer of all, heart disease, which causes one in four deaths (http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm) in the U.S., is also known to have a huge stress component (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2250106/Stress-bad-heart-smoking-cigarettes-day.html).

Incredibly, 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older are currently taking SSRI antidepressants - those highly controversial, mood-altering psychiatric drugs with the FDA's "suicidality" warning label and alarming correlation with school shooters. (http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/) Women are especially prone to depression, with a stunning 23 percent of all American women in their 40s and 50s - almost one in four - now taking antidepressants, according to a major study by the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.htm).

Add to that the tens of millions of users of all other types of psychiatric drugs, including (just to pick one) the 6.4 million American children (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?_r=0) between 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar psycho-stimulants. Throw in the 28 percent of American adults with a drinking problem (http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/alcoholism/risk-factors.html), that's more than 60 million, plus the 22 million using illegal drugs (http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/08/study-22-million-americans-use-illegal-drugs-3/) like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens and inhalants, and pretty soon a picture emerges of a nation of drug-takers, with hundreds of millions dependent on one toxic substance or another - legal or illegal - to "help" them deal with the stresses and problems of life.

Likewise, the CDC has reported (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.htm) that antidepressant use in the U.S. has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans aged 18-44. The U.S. population makes up 5% of the world population, yet are prescribed two-thirds of all psychiatric drugs used worldwide. If this is not a sign of looming mental health collapse, I don't know what is!

With so many people on meds, I think we can basically say that the U.S. is a 'zombie nation'. People are so out of touch with themselves and with reality that they think they have to use anti-depressants in order to 'go back to normal', not realizing that the reason why reality is ****ty is because it is sending them a strong signal to sit up and take notice. Instead, taking mind-numbing drugs makes them even more ignorant of what is going on around them - the false-flag attacks (http://www.sott.net/article/260940-Strategy-of-Tension-Boston-Marathon-bombing), the fireballs (http://www.sott.net/article/261184-Big-fireball-over-Argentina-caught-on-camera-21st-of-April) raining down from the sky and Earth changes (http://www.sott.net/article/260490-Extreme-weather-events-and-Earth-Changes-in-March-2013).

The pandemic is by no means confined to the U.S. One major study (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/04/us-europe-mental-illness-idUSTRE7832JJ20110904) mentioned by Kupelain concluded almost 40 percent of Europeans are plagued by mental illness.

Consider this:

A cross-border report on suicide (http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0123/364033-suicide-rate-report/) shows the rate among young people on the island of Ireland is one of the highest in Europe.

The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling "suicide by economic crisis (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/europe/increasingly-in-europe-suicides-by-economic-crisis.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)."

Bulgaria's suicide rate (http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=149144)is among the highest in Europe. Psychologists named poverty and stress as the main reasons behind the suicide wave that shocked the Balkan country recently.

According to official figures (http://indrus.in/society/2013/03/16/russias_child_teenage_suicide_rates_highest_in_europe_22979.html), Russia sees 19-20 suicides per 100,000 teenagers a year, which is three times the world average.

Switzerland holds the European record (http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/switzerland_for_the_record/european_records/Switzerland_s_troubling_record_of_suicide.html?cid=8301804) for rate of gun suicide.

France has one of the highest suicide rates (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37860750-a47a-11de-92d4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2RC11PTMs) in western Europe, ranking second behind Finland and more than double the UK or Greece. Workplace suicides have sparked a French outcry over France's elite system where the graduates of an exclusive group of schools are promoted straight into top jobs, denying any possibility of advancement to graduates of lesser schools.

Japan has consistently maintained the world's suicide record (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/04/japan-suicide-rate-still-_n_831430.html) for years. The number of students (http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Asia/Story/A1Story20120310-332649.html) who committed suicide in 2011 hit a record figure of 10.9 per cent from the previous year and the total number of suicides across the nation has exceeded 30,000 for 14 consecutive years up to 2011.

Every 12 hours, one farmer commits suicide in India (http://www.indiatribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5389:every-12-hours-one-farmer-commits-suicide-in-india&catid=106:magazine).

Kupelain asks:

What on earth is going on? Why isn't medical science - and for that matter all of our incredible scientific and technological innovations in every area of life - reducing our stress and lightening our load? Why doesn't the almost-magical availability of the world's accumulated knowledge, thanks to the Internet, make us more enlightened and happy? Why is it that, instead, more and more of us are so stressed out as to be on a collision course with illness, misery, tragedy and death?

Most important, what can we do to reverse course? Indeed, why hasn't our wonderful advanced technological civilization saved us from ourselves? Maybe it is turning out to not be so wonderful after all...

There is in fact a proven, effective way of dealing with stress from coping with the increasing global madness, something I'll get on to later.

First, let's have a closer look at some of the causes of this stress pandemic...

Full article: http://www.sott.net/article/261360-Mass-nervous-breakdown-Millions-of-Americans-on-the-brink-as-stress-pandemic-ravages-society

Michelle Marie

28th April 2013, 16:49

This is the reason I am an EX-teacher in the public schools.

I was teaching at a high school where they began pushing flu shots. They installed a clinic ON CAMPUS! where they prescribe these psychotropic drugs.

I mentioned this in an earlier post. After I had quit, I went back to substitute. One student came up to me with a pass to the clinic and said to me:
Ms. E, I'm going to tell them I don't want to be on Prozac.

AT SCHOOL....mandatory public school. THIS IS NOT OK.

I don't believe in ADHD or labels, or the prescriptions to "cure/dumb down" them.

Everyone has GENIUS potential. Everyone has talents and gifts.
I used to tell all my kids that they are a genius.
I know psychology/consciousness. They just have to: KNOW themselves, BE themselves (live the authentic truth of their Being), be TRUE TO THEMSELVES (follow your heart), and BELIEVE in themselves.

I've created "Follow Your Heart" education. I just stepped away completely from the old paradigm and am working diligently to launch my non-profit Visionary Solutions to implement this in the world. THE SOLUTION.

I'm calling in assistance from every dimension/realm to launch this into the world. I'll receive help in many forms because this is the time for this change to occur.
I'm really passionate about making this change for education/the conditioning of consciousness.

Together, we are raising awareness.

This is the TRUTH that will set us free.

Lots of love,
Michelle Marie

Hervé

7th May 2013, 18:20

The lying liars who lie about psychiatry (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/the-lying-liars-who-lie-about-psychiatry/)

The lying liars who lie about psychiatry
by Jon Rappoport, May 7, 2013
www.nomorefakenews.com (http://www.nomorefakenews.com/)

These days, we are witnessing an acceleration in the use of psychiatry to target Americans, to label them as dangerous, to take away guns they own (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/breaking-new-york-creates-psychiatric-police-state/), to blame gun violence in the US on mentally ill people. (see also this story (http://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/ny-psychiatrists-served-with-subpoenas-for-patient-records-in-ny-gun-confiscation/) by Dan Roberts).

It’s a winning strategy, because most Americans don’t have a clue about the way psychiatry actually works or its pose of being a science.

The public hears techno-speak and nods and surrenders.

If psychiatrists are experts on the human mind, mice can navigate the Arctic in canoes. But psychiatrists are educated to be able to talk a good game.

And politicians are more than happy to mouth vagaries, and consign the problems of society to “mental-health professionals.”

It turns out that the phrase “mental health” was invented by psyops specialists, who needed to create an analogy to physical well-being.

The needed to, because the mind was (and is) a mystery to psychiatrists.

An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:

“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bull****. I mean, you just can’t define it.”

BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:

“Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic…you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn’t know what was going on, they wrote ‘Dragons live here’…we have a dragon’s world here. But you wouldn’t want to be without the map.”

Translation: Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we’re inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests—it’s a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they’ll believe it because psychiatrists place a name on their problems…

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.

If I were an editor at one of the big national newspapers, and one of my reporters walked in and told me, “The most powerful psychiatrist in America just said the DSM is sheer b.s. but it’s still important,” I think I’d make room on the front page.

If the reporter then added, “This shrink was in charge of creating the DSM-IV,” I’d clear more room above the fold.

If the reporter went on to explain that the whole profession of psychiatry would collapse overnight if the DSM was discredited, I’d call for a special section of the paper to be printed.

I’d tell the reporter to get ready to pound on this story day after day for months. I’d tell him to track down all the implications of Dr. Frances’ statements.

I’d open a bottle of champagne to toast the soon-to-be-soaring sales of my newspaper.

And then, of course, the next day I’d be fired.

Because there are powerful multi-billion-dollar interests at stake, and those people don’t like their deepest secrets exposed in the press.

And as I walked out of my job, I’d see a bevy of blank-eyed pharmaceutical executives marching into the office of the paper’s publisher, ready to read the riot act to him.

Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM-IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definition of Bipolar was expanded to include more people.

Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;

life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;

brain damage.

Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:

intercranial pressure leading to blindness;

peripheral circulatory collapse;

stupor and coma.

Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:

serious impairment of cognitive function;
fainting;

restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).

Dr. Frances’ label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of toxic Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.

So what about Ritalin?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

Paranoid delusions
Paranoid psychosis
Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
Activation of psychotic symptoms
Toxic psychosis
Visual hallucinations
Auditory hallucinations
Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
Effects pathological thought processes
Extreme withdrawal
Terrified affect
Started screaming
Aggressiveness
Insomnia
Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
Psychic dependence
High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
Decreased REM sleep
When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
Convulsions
Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

A recent survey revealed that a high percentage of children diagnosed with bipolar had first received a diagnosis of ADHD. This is informative, because Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”

Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium.

In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.

Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.

And Dr. Frances is somehow let off the hook. He’s admitted in print that the whole basis of his profession is throwing darts at labels on a wall, and implies the “effort” is rather heroic—when, in fact, the effort leads to more and more poisonous drugs being dispensed to adults and children, to say nothing of the effect of being diagnosed with “a mental disorder.”

I’m not talking about “the mental-disease stigma,” the removal of which is one of Hillary Clinton’s missions in life. No, I’m talking about MOVING A HUMAN INTO THE SYSTEM, the medical apparatus, where the essence of the game is trapping that person to harvest his money, his time, his energy, and of course his health—as one new diagnosis follows on another, and one new toxic treatment after another is undertaken, from cradle to grave.

The result is a severely debilitated human being (if he survives), whose major claim to fame is his list of diseases and disorders.

Thank you, Dr. Frances.

Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent psychiatrist, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [Emphasis added]

Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows the whistle on his own profession.

So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.

These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.

If I said the moon was made of green cheese, even if I were a Harvard professor, sooner or later someone would ask me to produce a sample of moon rock to be tested for “cheese qualities.” I might begin to feel nervous, I might want to tap dance around the issue, but I would have to submit the rock to a lab.

Dr. Barkley employs a version of logical analysis in his statement to the PBS Frontline interviewer. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. But if a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is absurd, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”

That logic is no logic at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.

Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.

As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological fact, a gateway into the drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.

So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.

So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.

Under the cover story, it was all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.

And now, in the wake of the Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings, it matters even less who or how many people are labeled with mental disorders. The more the better, as far as government is concerned (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/after-sandy-hook-how-psychiatrists-will-become-policemen/).

Just as in the old USSR, psychiatry becomes an instrument of oppression, a way to discredit any person the State wants to silence and destroy.

“…in the disputes between the East and West concerning the Russian opponents of the Soviet regime… [m]any dissidents went to lunatic asylums and were treated as mentally sick. Western doctors and the press accused Soviet doctors of being blind instruments of the regime and of having broken the solemn oath of their calling. The Russian doctors thought the West had gone mad in reproaching their behavior. For them, anyone who opposed such an efficient police power must be mentally disturbed. In their view, only those who had what Seneca called Libido morienti (the death wish) would dare to provoke the State. The Russian doctors were convinced that they were undertaking a humanitarian mission by placing the opponents of the regime in asylums and thereby reducing their aggression–the only hope for their survival. To reduce the outstanding to mediocrity was always a medical and human duty in a state where mediocrity had the better chance of survival.” — “Man: The Fallen Ape” by Branko Bokun (http://www.certopower.com/books/man_the_fallen_ape/part1/chapter1.html)

Jon Rappoport

ThePythonicCow

9th May 2013, 01:22

Hervé

10th May 2013, 19:40

From: http://www.henrymakow.com/

Half of US Foster Care Children are Drugged
May 10, 2013

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/cira.jpg
Ciara Jackson

"The first medication I took was Haldol. I had never been Bipolar in my life and had someone taken the time to listen to me, and answer my questions adequately, I would have been fine. Little did I know my diagnoses would do all the speaking for me. My voice was left unheard."

There are more than 400,000 children (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/resource/foster-care-faq8) in foster care in the US. More than half [51%] are medicated. Ciara Jackson was one.

"A Voice Silenced"
By Ciara Jackson
(henrymakow.com)

Child Protective Services in the US is a Federal Agency. Each state has a branch of their own. In Colorado, its called Department of Human Services and pretends to help children, but almost every department has become corrupt.

Being a child in DHS, I became a ward of the state, once my mother had her rights relinquished. My family didn't fight to get me out. My grandma did.

When she saw what the system was doing to me, she began to give me money to run away to her house. She rather me run away to her house, then be out somewhere and have no clue where I was. When I got to her house, she would tell my case manager from the Department of Human Services that I was with her. I was not a fugitive. Give me a few days and then come and get me. My case manager did what she could.

It got so bad where I was. I was in places where they would drug the children. More than half of the children are medicated to control the child. I was personally diagnosed Bipolar/ not otherwise specified. At the time I was diagnosed, I had been abandoned by my parents not once but three times, I was going through puberty and no one wanted me. It's natural for a normal child to act out when becoming a teenager. It happens all the time. Now imagine that plus being giving up by your family. You can understand why I acted out.

The Department of Human Services put me in a Detention Facility because a foster home said I had ran away. Not that I actually ran away, but that was their way of getting me out of their house because the mother and I didn't get along.

Truth is, I never ran away. I had just moved to Colorado that summer and lived in literally one area. This was my first experience of being a runaway and was sent to spend a week in The Filmore Detention Facility. From there I was sent to a "treatment facility." A treatment facility is designed to rehabilitate children.

This is where they stick from 20 to 500 or more children of all different backgrounds. In some places, I lived with children who were labeled as sex offenders; children who have been molested by their parents; children who were already having sex with random men on the streets; children who were in gangs, the list goes on and on. These were things I had never experienced in my life. I was still into playing in the park and riding bikes. The majority of these children grew up fast, way too fast.

In the places, they have staff members who are put into certain roles in authority. I have seen staff members who would sleep with the girls; staff members who would become emotionally or mentally abusive towards the children. I would see staff who are now homeless or on drugs. I would see staff who would abuse their power. I would see staff who are genuinely good people.

The treatment facility is often tied to a psychiatrist. These so-called psychiatrists are there to dope the children. By doing this, they need to come up with a diagnoses for the child, but a lot of the time, the false-diagnose the child and put them on drugs. I was a child they could not control. I asked way too many questions and when things did not make sense, I questioned them more. There were times when I would ask to sit in my court proceedings and because I was only 13, the social workers would tell me I am not old enough. I would ask to see my files but according to the social workers I was too young.

I was a child beyond my time. Too young to ask questions but old enough to have them. I figured my questions should be answered because they pertained to me.

The more I got told no, and the more these so-called professionals refused to answer my questions, I began to act out. I was taken away from my family, held in a lock down facility like a prisoner. No more going to take a walk to the store, or playing in the creek. No more staying up all night with my cousins, no more being a normal teenager and no one would explain why. In 2003, Denver Health diagnosed me with being Bipolar (Not otherwise Specified).

MEDICATED JOURNEY
The first medication I took was Haldol. I had never been Bipolar in my life and had someone taken the time to listen to me, and answer my questions adequately, I would have been fine. Little did I know my diagnoses would do all the speaking for me. My voice was left unheard.

Years passed with me on all types of medications. I gained weight, lost weight. When people saw me they would say, that with my medication I was doing so well. When really I felt isolated, ignored, and grew angrier with the system as time went by.

I always believed that there is a way to help children cope with their problems without the use of medication, if they can at least think and do things for themselves. Injecting their bodies with chemicals is not the way to teach someone how to become self-sufficient, because when the drugs run out, then what?

The entire time I was in the system, I battled and refused to take medication after I realized the symptoms I was having. I was always drooling, I was so slow mentally and physically. I had went from wearing a size 5 in juniors to a size 18. The more I refused the drug, the more defiant social services labeled me and the angrier I became.

I finally gotten to an age where I could emancipate. I continued to refuse the medication. This is a time when my diagnoses changed. I was no longer Bipolar; I had "a mood disorder." If you had been in my surroundings and seen the things that I witnessed, your moods would change rapidly too.

From the time I was 13 until 17, I had no choice but to be surrounded by inconsistency and instability.

When I emancipated, my last caseworker told me to sue the County of Denver because they false diagnosed me with being Bipolar all those years. To me, being emancipated was enough. I would never have to deal with those people again. I stopped taking the medication, and am now a college student, a civilized adult with friends and family who genuinely love me.

I still have stretch marks on my arms from being given medication, and the battle wounds of all the things I went through in the Department of Human Services, but I was determined to prove to them that their diagnoses of me was wrong, and I have.
-----

Related:
"
Psychotropic drugs,SSRIs, a frequently prescribed class of medications, generates close to 200 million prescriptions in the United States that approaches a cost of 20 billion dollars a year." - Dan Abshear - former drug rep (http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Mean-And-Unclean-TeenS-by-Dan-Abshear-090725-27.html)

- See more at: http://www.henrymakow.com/#sthash.g64wZoEv.dpuf

Hervé

3rd June 2013, 18:51

Meet the Doctor Big Pharma Can't Shut Up (http://www.alternet.org/meet-doctor-big-pharma-cant-shut?paging=off)
AlterNet (http://www.alternet.org) / By Tamara Straus (http://www.alternet.org/authors/tamara-straus)

The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs. One psychiatrist is fighting back.

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/screen_shot_2013-05-30_at_12.16.27_pm.png
May 30, 2013 |

For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.

Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect—both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being “eclipsed” by drug companies.

“It’s been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs,” said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.

Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org (https://www.rxisk.org/Default.aspx) with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.

Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of “biological psychiatry,” and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.

For years, it was fairly easy for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industries to label Healy, Kirsch and Breggin as alarmists. But two summers ago, one of the most prominent members of U.S. medical establishment, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, published an article damning the over-prescription of psychoactive drugs. In two essays in the June 23, 2011 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?pagination=false) and July 14, 2011 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/?pagination=false) New York Review of Books, Angell backed arguments by the university clinician Kirsh, the mental heath journalist Robert Whitaker, and Boston psychiatrist Daniel Carlat that there is something extremely suspicious about the following trends: the number of people treated for depression has tripled since the launch of Prozac in 1987; 10 percent of Americans over age six are taking antidepressants; and 30 antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel are replacing cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the U.S., largely because they are being prescribed to children.

Angell’s articles should have been a bomb on the medical establishment. She wrote:
“The industry-sponsored studies usually cited to support psychoactive drugs—and they are the ones that are selectively published—tend to be short-term, designed to favor the drug, and show benefits so small that they are unlikely to outweigh the long-term harms. … Both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry profession have strong financial interests in convincing the public that drug treatment is safe and the most effective treatment for mental illnesses, and they also have an interest in expanding the definitions of mental illness.”
But like Healy, Angell’s warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Recent data indicates that U.S. prescription drug use is growing. The September 2012 Consumer Reports National Research Center report (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/9/prweb9892917.htm) found that among the 46 percent of American adults taking prescription drugs, a fourth of those ages 18 to 39 regularly take two prescription drugs, indicating that multiple drug use is no longer confined to older Americans. Congressional testimony in 2012 by the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians revealed (http://www.asipp.org/documents/ASIPPFactSheet101111.pdf) that Americans consume 80 percent of opiate painkillers produced in the world. And a January 2011 report (http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2011/january/antipsychotics.html) from Stanford University Medical School warned that antispychotics are now regularly being prescribed to treat conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia.

According to a Feb. 7, 2013 report (http://www.drugs.com/news/releases-q4-sales-top-100-u-s-abilify-overtakes-nexium-top-sales-43016.html) from Drugs.com, the No. 1 best-selling U.S. drug (in dollar volume) is an atypical antipsychotic for schizophrenia treatment called Abilify. Sales for the last quarter of 2012 soared to $1.5 billion, because Abilify is widely prescribed off-label—i.e., not for schizophrenia in adults, but, for example, for irritability in children. Although Bristol-Myers Squibb, the maker of Abilify, was fined $515 million in September 2007 for recommending off-label uses of Abilify, doctors are still doling out the drug. Why?

“The reason for the increase in prescription drug use is that the entire Western medical complex is run by pharmaceutical companies,” said a Stanford University professor of medicine who preferred to remain anonymous (and who was not involved in the 2011 report on antipsychotics). “The medical training you get in Western medical schools is largely about learning which drugs to treat which diseases.” She added: “You would think that recent studies, such as the one that said antidepressants are no more helpful than a placebo (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045), would have an effect. But they haven’t.”

Other university psychiatrists and medical doctors I contacted for this article either wouldn’t talk on the record or didn’t want to be interviewed, confirming an atmosphere Healy describes as “McCarthyist.” “There is a climate of fear,” he said during our interview. “You find that they are very nervous about saying anything about drug treatments or adverse effects of drugs at all. Doctors keep patients on lots of drugs, even if they are uncomfortable with it. And if you ask them why they’re doing so, the answer you’ll get is: ‘Well, this is the standard of care, and if I don’t take care of it this way, I’m going to be in awful trouble.’”

This standard of care is why Rxisk is directed at patients, not doctors, whose financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are well documented (http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/). Rxisk allows users to enter into its search engine the name of a prescription drug and to see the side effects that have been reported to the FDA’s MedWatch website since 2004 as well as from Rxisk’s international data base, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries, totaling 4.5 million adverse drug event reports. The site has information “zones for sex, violence, hair, skin, and withdrawal, designed to increase awareness of seldom-publicized drug effects. Rxisk.org also allows users to add their own reports of adverse drug reactions, creating their own “Rxisk report” to share with their doctor or pharmacist. Since November 2012, the website has collected 1,500 reports.

One could argue that Rxisk is doing the same thing as MedWatch, the FDA’s online gateway for “reporting serious problems with human medical products.” But Kalman Applbaum, a Rxisk founder and professor of medical anthropology and global studies at the University of Wisconsin, argues that MedWatch isn’t for patients—especially those “trying to sort out whether it’s the drug or the illness that’s causing the suffering.”

“We felt there were a number of things that were lacking on most or all of the FDA sites that collect information about drug side-effects,” said Applbaum. “First, there’s a reliance on doctor reporting, and doctors report very little, very infrequently—and this is true all over the world for a variety of reasons. And what they report is extremely slim. Very common is a single word to describe a side effect, such as hypertension, ataxia, etc.” Meanwhile, said Applbaum, research (http://www.haiweb.org/14012010/14Jan2010ReportDirectPatientReportingofADRsFINAL.pdf) shows that patients are much more motivated to report than doctors. And more importantly, “their reported data is very high quality data, because they spend a lot of time,” said Applbaum.

Since the November 2012 launch, Rxisk has received only 10,000 visitors per month. But Healy, Applbaum and the other founders (http://wp.rxisk.org/about/#medicalteam), like Nancy Olivieri, a senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital and University of Toronto Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and Public Health Sciences, are not particularly concerned and plan to ramp up and market their efforts slowly. “We’re doing something that’s new and it’s probably going to take awhile for people to cotton on to what’s new about it,” said Healy.

**

David Healy does not consider himself a radical. He prescribes antidepressants and other prescription drugs to his patients. He runs a national university school of psychological medicine. “I’m fairly conservative. I’m a very mainstream doctor, really,” he said. But as New York Times reporter Benedict Carey pointed out in a 2005 story (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/15prof.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0), the Irishman living on an island off the coast of Wales “has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as a scholar and pariah.”
Healy’s status as an outcast arises from his grave concern that blockbuster drugs like Prozac and other antidepressants can lead to suicide, murder and unforeseen mental health problems. In the 1990s, he began to publish academic journal papers (http://davidhealy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/1999-Langmaak-Healy-Antidepressant-Suicide.pdf) providing evidence that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide. Although many colleagues denied the link, by 2004 American and British drug regulators issued strong warnings supporting Healy’s and other’s claims.

This was vindication for Healy. But it did not prevent him from losing in 2001 a job offer to direct the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry. There is an entire website (http://www.pharmapolitics.com/) devoted to Healy’s travail, what’s known as the “Toronto Affair.” The assembled documents—a lecture by Healy, email exchanges, and Healy’s legal claim against the university (which he won out of court)—form a parable on the limits of academic freedom. They also show how radical Healy’s beliefs are when set against the standards of privately supported research universities.

In a brief, sweeping and somewhat rambling history of psychopharmacology, Healy hit a lot of fly balls. He said that drugs “have played or threaten to play a part in a changing of the social order.” He intimated that psychiatric drugs, unlike illegal drugs, are a form of institutional control. In the Nov. 30, 2000 lecture (http://www.pharmapolitics.com/feb2healy.html), titled “Psychopharmacology and the Government of the Self,” he also made the following statements:

“…The era of Depression that we have lived through in the 1990s in the West has arguably been a politically and economically constructed era that bears little relationship to any clinical facts. An era that has changed popular culture by replacing a psychobabble of Freudian terms with a new biobabble about low serotonin levels and the like.”
“…Both psychiatry and anti-psychiatry were swept away and replaced by a new corporate psychiatry. [John Kenneth] Galbraith has argued we no longer have free markets; corporations work out what they have to sell and then prepare the market so that we will want those products. It works for cars, oil, and everything else, why would it not work for psychiatry? Prescription-only status makes the psychiatric market easier than almost any other market—a comparatively few hearts and minds need to be won.”
“…The best-selling drugs in modern medicine do something similar—they don’t treat disease. They manage risks. This is clearly true of the anti-hypertensives, the lipid-lowering agents and other drugs. It is true also of antidepressants, which have been sold on the back of efforts to reduce risks of suicide. We are in an era, which is popularly portrayed as an “Evidence Based Medicine” era. What can go wrong if we have clinical trial evidence to demonstrate what works and what doesn’t work, if we but adhere to this evidence. What more can we do than that?”

What’s amazing about Healy’s lecture is that he thought he could deliver it and still work at a university psychiatry department. According to the UK Guardian, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health has received more than $1.5 million in recent years from Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Prozac. On the other hand, nothing that Healy said in Toronto, he hadn’t said before.

In the most comprehensive news article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/may/21/internationaleducationnews.mentalhealth) on the Toronto Affair, the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley reported that Lilly and Healy had previously “crossed swords” in the U.S. courts: “Dr. Healy has been an expert witness against [Lilly], backing the claims of families who say the drugs have caused people to kill and commit suicide. In June 2001, just six months after his Toronto job was rescinded, a US jury agreed with him that Paxil (Seroxat in the UK), an SSRI manufactured by the British giant GlaxoSmithKline, caused Donald Schell to kill his wife, daughter, granddaughter and himself and awarded the remaining family members £4.2m compensation.”

More recently, Healy has tried to draw attention to the connection between the increasing use of antidepressants and antispychotics and the increasing number of school shootings. On a Jan. 30, 2013 blog (http://wp.rxisk.org/rxisk-asks-are-prescription-drugs-to-blame-for-school-shootings/) and video on Rxisk.org, he claimed that 90 percent of school shooters in North America and Europe were on or withdrawing from meds at the time of the incident. In our interview he pointed to a list (http://ssristories.com/index.php?sort=date&p=school) on SSIRStories.com, a patient anecdote website that is being integrated into Rxisk, that documents which perpetrators were on which drugs for violent acts in schools between 1988 and 2011.

The only semi-mainstream figure to have paid attention to this claim is filmmaker Michael Moore, who created a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpinCRaAQOk) on the subject in 2012, calling for an investigation. Unsurprisingly, there has been no move to look at the correlation, since one could argue that the school shooters are psychologically disturbed and should be on more meds. Indeed, across the country, there is a drive to keep a lookout for students with possible mental health problems and to report those who seem odd.

“The problem is,” says Healy, “that it’s really going to lead to a greater use of pills. The key thing is to make sure that people who get put on them are really going to be helped by them. Once you identify the problem, the pill will be the answer, because it’s the answer for the person who has identified the problem. It may not be the answer for the person who is having to take the pill.”

One of Healy’s main problems these days is that few people listen to him. “I published a list (http://davidhealy.org/left-hanging-suicide-in-bridgend/) of 98 drugs that can cause you to commit suicide or homicide. I was waiting for the world to come to an end, but nothing happened.” He continued, “If I make a claim and I don’t have scientific proof to back it up, pharmaceuticals are going to sue me.” There have been no lawsuits, which makes Healy think that silence is part of pharmaceutical companies’ tactics. “They’ve learned that the worst thing they can do is argue. If they jump up and down and say, ‘Listen to the foolish things Healy is saying,’ that would be a good way to hear about Healy. So they’re very good at not responding, maintaining their cool.”

All of this sounds rather paranoid, but then again none of the dozen university psychiatrists or drug company scientists I reached out to wanted to talk about Healy or his claims. Neither Eli Lilly nor GlaxoSmithKline could "find time” to respond to my inquiries about Healy and Rxisk. I was permitted, however, to send questions by email to MedWatch, the website that culls adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals run by the FDA. Dr. Lisa Kubaska of the FDA’s press arm, CDER Trade Press, wrote, “Rxisk.org’s efforts to increase awareness of drug/medication associated risk, harm and best practices, along with their message about the value of voluntary reporting may also serve to advance this patient safety goal in parallel with FDA’s work.” But when I emailed her back, to ask how the FDA works with a pharmaceutical company if it gets multiple reports from patients or doctors about an adverse effect to a drug, I received no answer.

***

Among David Healy’s many concerns about the state of modern medicine is the marginalization of doctors. Doctors, he’s said, are like cogs in a machine, spending a minimum of time with patients, doling out drugs pushed by pharmaceutical companies, and wrangling with insurance companies over costs. He argues that one rectification to the sad state of his profession is to abandon “evidence-based medicine” for “data-based medicine.” The difference between the two goes to the root of why Healy founded Rxisk.org.

Evidence-based medicine categorizes different types of clinical evidence—such as randomized, triple-blind, and placebo-based control trials—and rates or grades them. Because evidence-based medicine relies on scientific methods that can have wide acceptance among medical practitioners, it has become the standard approach to health services and public health—and is one of the ways nations can arrive at universal healthcare systems.

But Healy and his colleagues at Rxisk argue that evidence-based medicine is flawed because important information ends up being systematically buried or corrupted. In his 2012 book Pharmageddon, Healy argues (and provides evidence) that close to 30 percent of the clinical drug trials that have been undertaken remain unreported; and of the 50 percent that have been reported, almost all are ghostwritten by scientists for pharmaceutical companies.

Perhaps more frighteningly, Healy reports that roughly 25 percent of published clinical drug trials are statistically altered, to provide evidence that a drug works well and is safe. And in 100 percent of the cases, the data from the trials remain inaccessible to scrutiny. Yet, he writes, 80 percent of the reports on adverse consequences of drug treatment, dismissed as anecdotes, have turned out to be correct. “Given these facts,” Healy writes, “it is not reasonable to suggest that the observations of doctors and patients are less reliable than clinical trial evidence.”

Healy’s push (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3YB59EKMKw) to abandon evidence-based medicine is not at attempt to get rid of randomized, triple-blind and placebo-based control trials, but to show the degree to which these trials are controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. So Rxisk’s preference for “data-based medicine” is simply a euphemism. It’s a push to expand evidence-based medicine to include full clinical trial transparency and to put anecdotes, specifically from patients, into the wider scientific analysis of drug efficacy.

It seems reasonable. But can it be done?

***

Tanya Jensen is a fairly typical middle-aged woman. She is 37 years old, has two little kids, and occasional bouts of mild depression. (To protect her identity, her name has been changed.) When her husband lost his job in 2008 and had trouble finding work, Tanya took on a full-time job with a long commute and a part-time job. Within a few months, she felt frazzled. She began to notice that some of her mom friends, who had their own reasons for feeling frazzled, were taking antidepressants, especially Celexa. So at a checkup with her general practitioner, she inquired whether she could try the drug. Her physician agreed and wrote her a prescription for the generic version of Celexa, citalopram, at 10 mg a day, the lowest dosage, asking Jensen to check in if anything went wrong.

Jensen liked the drug. It made her feel less anxious. But a year later, the Jensens’ situation improved and Tanya decided it was time to wean herself from the pills. Jensen said she worried “about being on the drug for the rest of her life, when it was unclear how it could affect her brain or behavior long-term.” As recommended by her physician, Jensen cut the dosage to 5 mg a day for 10 days and then to 5 mg a day every other day for the next 10 days. But at the end of the 20-day period, she had withdrawal symptoms: night sweats, emotional volatility, anger, aggression, suicidal impulses. Her husband begged her to go back on citalopram and she did.

A year passed, and Jensen decided she was ready to go off citalopram again. She proceeded with the same reduced dosage regimen and by the end of the 20-day period was, she said, “as close to manic as I hope I’ll ever come: full of rage, prone to tantrums, sweating buckets at night, and feeling suicidal, especially while driving.” Again her husband begged her to go back on citalopram and she did so.

That’s when Jensen started doing Internet research on citalopram and found Rxisk.org. There, she said, she found the best available information on citalopram and other people’s withdrawal symptoms, including a long list of adverse side-effects and the percentage of people who had reported them. When Jensen filled out a Rxisk Report, she received a 9+ score, indicating that she had become drug dependent. “This was alarming, but not really surprising,” she said.

Per RxISK’s recommendation, Jensen made an appointment with her doctor to discuss her problem. Jensen had switched health insurance providers, so she had a new general practitioner, a female MD with a degree from the University of Bombay, whom she chose, “hoping that she would be a less typical American doctor.” But Jensen was disappointed. The doctor said, “But you feel less anxious, and your dose is so low. When I fill out a prescription for 10 mg of citalopram, the computer prompts me to up the dose. It actually recommends I prescribe 20 mg, not 10 mg.” Jensen asked if she had other recourse, but her doctor waved off her concern. Before leaving the examination room, she handed Jensen a six-month prescription of citalopram. Jensen did get her doctor’s permission to review her Rxisk Report. But Jensen said that since emailing the report on May 10, 2013, she has heard nothing from her doctor.

“What upsets me most,” Jensen said, “is that my original doctor never told me about citalopram’s very well-documented withdrawal problems. This was just never part of the discussion, either because she didn’t have the time or didn’t know that stopping citalopram can be very tricky for some people. And what’s scary is that when I tried to communicate my problem with the second doctor, I was patted on the head like a child and handed 900 more pills.”

Healy is aware that changing doctor’s views on pharmaceuticals is a David and Goliath battle. That’s why he and his colleagues have another potential audience for Rxisk data: investors and insurance companies. “The shrewd investor in pharma companies wants to know what the adverse effects of a drug are,” said Healy. Rxisk is therefore positioning itself to provide data from the trials the companies are most keen to hide. In addition, Rxisk hopes to find clients in HMOs and insurance companies, which are looking for ways to cut drug costs.

“Many of drugs advertised are rigged to look better than previous generations of drugs and are costed sometimes 10, 20, 30, or 40 times higher than the generic drug,” Rxisk co-founder Applbaum said. “A bit of research through the data will show that the claims of improvement are false.”

Applbaum and Healy also point out that the cost of adverse side-effects to prescription drugs in the U.S. is huge—estimated to be $100 million in hospital costs alone. The same 1998 University of Toronto study (http://www.cancure.org/medical_errors.htm) they cite found that pharmaceuticals are the country’s fourth leading cause of death. Healy and Applbaum point to other galling statistics: the U.S. spends twice as much (http://www.google.com/imgres?client=firefox-a&hs=9va&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1063&bih=592&tbm=isch&tbnid=YtG8u9wjFfkWsM:&imgrefurl=http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html&docid=e_LXInQYnEZFjM&imgurl=http://newshour.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/2012/10/02/US_spends_much_more_on_health_than_what_might_be_expected_1_slideshow.jpg&w=718&h=529&ei=lYqfUa2wD5SE8ATlroHoCQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:18,s:0,i:137) on healthcare as anyone else in the world, consuming a total of 45 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization ranks the country 37th (http://thepatientfactor.com/canadian-health-care-information/world-health-organizations-ranking-of-the-worlds-health-systems/) in the quality of our care.

“So it’s killing the economy overall, and the recognition is seeping in that we’re doing something wrong,” said Applbaum. “We believe that our little piece of it—the over-prescription of drugs, the polypharmacy, the prescribing of drugs when none are needed—can help healthcare costs come down.”

Both Applbaum and Healy believe the FDA won’t or can’t be a force for change. Since the Drug Efficacy Amendments were passed in 1962, requiring drug manufacturers to prove to FDA the effectiveness of their products before marketing them, Healy says drug makers must show, first, that a drug works, and second, that it is safe. “The result has been that the effectiveness profile has taken over and safety has been lost sight of,” said Healy. “At Rxisk, we’re trying to restore safety to its due place.”

Hervé

19th December 2013, 17:42

NEJM editor: “No longer possible to believe much of clinical research published” (http://ethicalnag.org/2009/11/09/nejm-editor/)

Posted on November 9, 2009 (http://ethicalnag.org/2009/11/09/nejm-editor/) by Carolyn Thomas (http://ethicalnag.org/author/czthomas/)

http://carolynthomas.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/nejm-poster.jpg?w=209&h=300
Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. But more to the point, she’s also the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably one of the most respected medical journals on earth. But after reading her article in the New York Review of Books called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, one wonders if any medical journal on earth is worth anybody’s respect anymore.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Dr. Angell cites the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. She explains:

“Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose, and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.”

Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”

In June 2009, an American senate investigation revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in “consulting” and “speaking” fees between 2000 and 2007.

“Two of Biederman’s colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital’s physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: “We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them.”

Biederman’s failure to disclose his Big Pharma payments to his employers ar Harvard (as is required for all Harvard employees) has been under investigation* for the past two years by Harvard Medical School, in as journalist Alison Bass describes this: “what must be the longest investigation in that school’s history”).

Dr. Angell’s article contains bombshell after bombshell, all gleaned during her tenure as NEJM editor. For example, on the subject of doctors who are bought and paid for by Big Pharma, she writes:

“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top 9 U.S.-based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America alone.By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.”

Revelations like this from medical profession insiders cast serious doubt on more than what’s printed on the pages of these medical journals.

Your physician reads these journals, treatment decisions are changed, care is affected, drugs are prescribed – all based on Big Pharma-funded medical ghostwriter-prepared journal articles from physicians who fraudulently claim to be the study authors. Then you walk out of your doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that may or may not kill you, based on treatment protocols written by doctors like Biederman who are on the take from Big Pharma.

A very recent example of the sad reality over at the once-prestigious New England Journal of Medicine is their decision to publish a drug company-funded review article. This review attempts to discredit emerging research suggesting that many years of using Merck’s Fosamax or Procter & Gamble’s Actonel (both osteoporosis drugs in a class called bisphosphonates) could actually result in more leg bone fractures.

Not surprisingly, drug manufacturers of bisphosphonates are fighting back ferociously against this emerging (independent) research. A Merck-funded review paper (http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMoa1001086) published in the NEJM on March 24, 2010 concludes:

“The occurrence of fracture of the subtrochantericor diaphyseal femur was very rare, even among women who had been treated with bisphosphonates for as long as 10 years.”

Sounds promising for Big Pharma. But if you look very, very closely, the article’s fine print confesses:

“The study was underpowered for definitive conclusions.”

You might justifiably ask yourself why a medical journal would stoop to publishing a meaningless scientific paper that the paper’s own authors admit lacks any conclusion. Even more troubling than a journal article that was itself bought and paid for by Merck, is the conflict of interest disclosure list at the bottom of this NEJM article. It reads like a Who’s Who of Big Pharma.

Of the 12 study authors listed in the NEJM article, at least three are full-time employees of Merck or Novartis. Each one of the other nine admit owning equity interests in or receiving cash, travel expenses, or “consulting and lecture fees” from companies including Merck, Novartis, Amgen, Roche Nycomed, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Medtronics, Nastech, Nestle, Fonterra Brands, OnoPharma, Osteologix, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Sanofi-Aventis, Tethys, Unilever,Unipath, Inverness Medical, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, OSIProsidion, or Takeda.

Why is the New England Journal of Medicine or any other credible medical journal accepting for publication articles submitted by paid employees of pharmaceutical companies?

As a cardiac patient, I’m gobsmacked by what appears to be this systemic corruption of not only medical journals who continue to publish what they clearly know is tainted research linked to drug marketing, but of the very doctors whom patients trust to look out for us.

Since my heart attack in 2008, I take a fistful of cardiac meds every day, and I have no clue which of them were prescribed for me based on flawed research or tainted medical journal articles funded by the very companies that make my drugs.

And worse, neither do my doctors.

Happily, there are other decent physicians out there who, like Dr. Angell, are just as outraged as she is. Her targets are not just guilty of unethical conflict of interest – they are criminals who should be charged with endangering our health while padding their wallets.
.
Read Dr. Angell’s article (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22237) from the New York Review of Books, called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption.

* NEWS UPDATE: “Massachusetts General Hospital Discloses Sanctions against Three Psychiatrists for Violating Ethics Guidelines”, July 1, 2011: The Boston Business Journal said today that three psychiatrists have been sanctioned for failing to adequately report seven-figure payments they received from drug companies.

Drs. Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens disclosed the disciplinary actions against them in a note to colleagues. According to a copy of the note made public upon request by the hospital, the three doctors:

• must refrain from “all industry-sponsored outside activities” for one year
• for two years after the ban ends, must obtain permission from Mass. General and Harvard Medical School before engaging in any industry-sponsored, paid outside activities and then must report back afterward
• must undergo certain training
• face delays before being considered for “promotion or advancement.”

The three doctors have been under the political microscope since June 2008 when Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, began investigating conflicts of interest involving clinicians. Biederman and Wilens have since admitted to accepting $1.6 million from drug companies whose drugs they were promoting; Spencer took $1 million.

Senator Grassley said, according to an online version of the Congressional record:

“These three Harvard doctors are some of the top psychiatrists in the country, and their research is some of the most important in the field. They have also taken millions of dollars from the drug companies.”

See also:

Does The Medical Profession Need To Wean Itself From The Pervasive Dependence on Big Pharma Money? (http://ethicalnag.org/2010/04/07/medical-profession-pervasive-dependence/)
Warning: Clinical Trials Funded by Drug Companies May Appear More Truthful Than They Actually Are (http://ethicalnag.org/2009/11/13/gapabentin-trials/)
Bioethical Journal: “How Drug Marketing Corrupts Every Part of the Scientific and Medical Network” (http://ethicalnag.org/2010/03/18/corrupt-drug-mktg/)
How the “Shrink’s Bible” Can Make you Sick (http://ethicalnag.org/2011/07/02/dsm-5-shrinks-bible/)
Harvard Cozies Up with Big Pharma (http://ethicalnag.org/2010/05/01/harvard-conflict-of-interest-big-pharma/)
Harvard’s Ethical Ultimatum to Doc: Give Up Big Pharma Moonlighting Jobs, or Lose Harvard Teaching Post (http://ethicalnag.org/2010/02/18/dubuske-quits-harvard/)
Is Your Doctor a “Thought Leader”? (http://ethicalnag.org/2010/10/31/is-your-doctor-a-thought-leader/)
Bad Doctors Earning Good Money from Big Pharma (http://ethicalnag.org/2010/11/16/bad-doctors-big-pharma/)
Doctor’s Kiss & Tell Tale: My One-Year Career As a Drug Rep (http://ethicalnag.org/2009/11/19/wyeth-drug-rep-carlat/)

Hervé

4th March 2014, 15:32

Exposed: the Nazi roots of the European Union (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/exposed-the-nazi-roots-of-the-european-union/)

Mar3 (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/exposed-the-nazi-roots-of-the-european-union/) by Jon Rappoport (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/) March 3, 2014
www.nomorefakenews.com (http://www.nomorefakenews.com/)

Once upon a time, there was an industrial combine in Nazi Germany called IG Farben. It was the largest chemical/pharmaceutical octopus in the world. It owned companies, and it had favorable business agreements with companies from England to Central America to Japan.

As I mentioned in a recent article (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/nixon-rockefeller-ig-farben-and-global-control/), the author of The Devil’s Chemists, Josiah DuBois, traveled to Guatemala in the early days of World War 2, and returned with the comment that, as far as he could tell, Guatemala was “a wholly owned subsidiary of Farben.”

The pharmaceutical empire was and is one of the major forces behind the European Union (EU). It is no accident that these drug corporations wield such power. They aren’t only involved in controlling the medical cartel; they are political planners.

This is how and why Big Pharma fits so closely with what is loosely referred to as the New World Order. The aim of enrolling every human in a cradle-to-grave system of disease diagnosis and toxic drug treatment has a larger purpose: to debilitate, to weaken populations.

This is a political goal. It facilitates control.

IG Farben’s component companies, at the outbreak of World War 2, were Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. They were chemical and drug companies. Farben put Hitler over the top in Germany, and the war was designed to lead to a united Europe that would be dominated by the Farben nexus.

The loss of the war didn’t derail that plan. It was shifted into an economic blueprint, which became, eventually, the European Union.

The European Commission’s first president was Walter Hallstein, the Nazi lawyer who, during the war, had been in charge of post-war legal planning for the new Europe.

As the Rath Foundation reports: In 1939, on the brink of the war, Hallstein had stated, “The creation of the New Law [of the Nazis] is ONLY the task of the law-makers!”

In 1957, with his reputation sanitized, Hallstein spoke the words in this manner: “The European Commission has full and unlimited power for all decisions related to the architecture of this European community.”

Post-war, IG Farben was broken up into separate companies, but those companies were following a common agenda. If, for example, you want to know why the endless debate over labeling GMO food rivals the real issue—banning GMO crops altogether—you can look to these Farben allies: Bayer, BASF, and Sanofi, among others.

They are among the leaders in GMO research and production. BASF cooperates with Monsanto on research projects. Sanofi is a leader in GM vaccine research.

The original IG Farben had a dream. Its executives and scientists believed they could eventually produce, synthetically, any compound in a laboratory. They could dominate world industry in this fashion.

The dream never died. Today, they see gene-manipulation as the route to that goal.

I refer you to the explosive book, The Nazi Roots of the Brussels EU, by Paul Anthony Taylor, Aleksandra Niedzwiecki, Dr. Matthias Rath, and August Kowalczyk. You can read it at relay-of-life.com. It is a dagger in the heart of the EU.

At the Rath Foundation, you can also read Joseph Borkin’s classic, “The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben.”

In 1992, I was deeply engaged in researching the specific devastating effects of medical drugs. Eventually, I concluded that, at the highest levels of power, these drugs weren’t destructive by accident. They were intended to cause harm. This was covert chemical warfare against the population of the planet. The Rockefeller-Standard Oil-Farben connection was a primary piece of the puzzle.

It was, of course, Rockefeller (and Carnegie) power that forced the birth of pharmaceutical medicine in America, with the publication of the 1910 Flexner Report. The Report was used to excoriate and marginalize Chiropractic, Homeopathy, Naturopathy, and other forms of traditional natural practice, in favor of what would become the modern juggernaut of drug-based treatment.

In an article about the FDA, “Medical Murder in the Matrix,” I point out the fact that this federal agency has permitted at least 100,000 deaths of Americans, per year, from the direct effects of drugs it, the FDA, has certified as safe.

The FDA knows these death figures. “Unintended” and “accidental” can no longer be applied to this ongoing holocaust.

The same can be held true for the pharmaceutical industry itself.

People are exceedingly reluctant to come to this obvious conclusion. They prefer to hem and haw and invent excuses or deny the facts.

To understand the dimensions and history of the ongoing chemical warfare against the population, in the form of medical drugs (and of course pesticides), one must factor in the original octopus, IG Farben.

World War 2 never ended. It simply shifted its strategies.

And just as one can trace extensive collaboration between major American corporations and the Nazi war machine, during the military phase of the war, today you see American corporations wreaking destructive havoc on the American people, as Dow, DuPont, Monsanto and others “work their magic for a better life.”

In any fascist system, the bulk of the people working inside the system, including scientists, refuse to believe the evidence of what is happening before their own eyes. They insist they are doing good. They believe they are on the right side. They see greater top-down control as necessary and correct. They adduce reasonable explanations for inflicted harm and death.

This is how and why conspiracies can exist. Only a few people, at the very top, need to know the true motives.

Everyone else tells themselves fairy tales. This deep-seated obsession is an integral part of mind control, and ultimately it is self-inflicted.

The self-created victim calculates: “I would rather stay in my dream than wake up to a nightmare.”

Yes, but acknowledging the nightmare is a step on the road to liberation.

In centuries past, empires conquered foreign lands and made colonies out of them. When that era ended, a less overt style of military and economic conquest was initiated. But there is something most people don’t realize.

When richer nations now go into poorer nations, the so-called incidental goal of bringing “life-saving” medical care with them is a front and a pose.

One of the chief goals of the conquerors is, in fact, pharmaceutical. Changing the habits of populations, so they come to rely on these drugs is high on the to-do list. It rings up profit, of course, for the pharmaceutical empire, and it also poisons the poor into even greater desolation than they are already experiencing. They become even easier to control.

On top of that, the actual untreated causes of the routine desolation—starvation, generation-to-generation malnutrition, contaminated water supplies, lack of general sanitation, overcrowding, and previously stolen agricultural land—are shoved on the back burner of the global media.

Suddenly, we learn that various germ-caused diseases are the real scourges of these countries, and help is coming (slowly), in the form of drugs that kill the germs, along with the medical heroes who will deliver these drugs.

This is a cover story. It’s a preposterous lie. In the conditions of desolation mentioned above, it doesn’t matter what germs are present, and trying to attack them is futile and absurd.

The general desolation weakens and destroys immune systems. At that point, what would normally be completely harmless germs, any germs, can sweep through an area and cause death and severe illness, because the routine processes of the immune system, which would immediately neutralize the germs, are disabled.

The “medical intervention” is meant to defer, for yet another day, the remedying of the actual problems that keep causing disease—and the medical drugs create new and lethal toxicity, leading to more deaths.

This is the standard op of the modern pharmaceutical empire. To know it is proceeding apace, all you have to do is see foreign doctors getting off planes in Third World countries, or read about some drug giant that is undertaking a humanitarian program of supplying medicines and vaccines to “people in desperate need of them.”

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

9th March 2014, 12:17

RIP, psychiatry: the “chemical-imbalance” theory is dead (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/rip-psychiatry-the-chemical-imbalance-theory-is-dead/)

Mar7 (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/rip-psychiatry-the-chemical-imbalance-theory-is-dead/) 2014, by Jon Rappoport (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/)
www.nomorefakenews.com (http://www.nomorefakenews.com/)

This one is big.

Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid the theory to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:

“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend — never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”

Boom.

Dead.

The point is, for decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “we’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain.”

The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.

In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to cover his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:

“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it…the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”

Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.

And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…

…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients…

…since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct an imbalance?

Here’s what’s happening. The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed. They’re taking heavy flack on many fronts.

The chemical imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders. All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence. Suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.

Psychiatry is a pseudo-pseudo science.

So the shrinks have to move into another model, another con, another fraud. And they’re looking for one.

For example, genes plus “psycho-social factors.” A mish-mash of more unproven science.

“New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise…” Professional gibberish.

Meanwhile, the business model demands drugs for sale.

So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.

Big Pharma isn’t going to back off. Trillions of dollars are at stake.

And in the wake of Aurora, Colorado, and Sandy Hook, and the Naval Yard, the hype is expanding: “we must have new community mental-health centers all over America.”

More fake diagnosis of mental disorders, more devastating drug prescriptions.

As Dr. Peter Breggin explains in his classic, Toxic Psychiatry (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312113668/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwnomorefake-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0312113668), half a century ago the psychiatric profession and the drug companies began to shape a deal.

Psychiatry was dying out. Patients didn’t want to talk about their problems to MD shrinks.

So the deal was this: psychiatry would go along with and promote chemical-imbalance propaganda. In turn, the drug companies would turn out the pharmaceuticals, and they would bankroll psychiatry, sponsoring conferences, taking out massive numbers of ads in journals, offering grants to universities.

The deal paid off.

Psychiatry experienced a resurgence. “Talk therapy is useless. Mental problems are all about the brain, and the brain must be drugged.”

But now, the charade is exposed.

You can be sure major Pharma players are meeting behind closed doors with leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The mafia is making a house call.

They are reminding the APA that they have a deal. No cancellation allowed.

“You guys promoted the chemical-imbalance theory. That was the arrangement. So keep promoting it. We don’t care how many lies you have to tell. Don’t try to develop a conscience all of a sudden. This is business.”

The mafia doesn’t like it when people try to interrupt business.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

16th April 2014, 02:29

The Drug That Can Make You Kill (http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/drug-can-make-you-kill)

AlterNet (http://alternet.org) / By Martha Rosenberg (http://www.alternet.org/authors/martha-rosenberg)

A common malaria drug has been linked to murders and suicides.

http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/screen_shot_2014-03-26_at_1.06.32_pm.png

March 26, 2014 |

Lariam (mefloquine) is one of the most widely used malaria drugs in America. Yet it has been linked to grisly crimes, like Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' 2012 murder of 16 Afghan (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/jul/15/soldier-malaria-lariam-robert-bales-massacre/) civilians, the murders of four wives of Fort Bragg soldiers in 2002 (http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_lariam_062504,00.html) and other extreme violence.

While the FDA beefed up warnings for Lariam last summer, especially about the drug's neurotoxic effects, and users are now given a medication guide and wallet card (http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/UCM362232.pdf), Lariam and its generic versions are still the third most prescribed malaria medication (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/business/fda-strengthens-warnings-on-lariam-anti-malaria-drug.html). Last year there were 119,000 prescriptions between January and June. Though Lariam is banned among Air Force pilots, until 2011, Lariam was on the increase (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2011-11-19/military-malaria-drug/51311040/1) in the Navy and Marine Corps.

The negative neurotoxic side effects of Lariam can last for "weeks, months, and even years," after someone stops using it, warns the VA. Medical and military authorities say the drug "should not be given to anyone with symptoms of a brain injury, depression or anxiety disorder," reported Army Times (http://www.armytimes.com/article/20090324/NEWS/903240308/Army-scales-back-use-anti-malaria-drug)—which is, of course, the demographic that encompasses "many troops who have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan." In addition to Lariam's wide use in the military, the civilian population taking malaria drugs includes Peace Corps and aid workers, business travelers, news media, students, NGO workers, industrial contractors, missionaries and families visiting relatives, often bringing children.

What makes Lariam so deadly? It has the same features that made the street drug PCP/angel dust such an urban legend in the 1970s and 1980s. It can produce extreme panic, paranoia and rage in the user along with out-of-body " dissociative" and dream-like sensations so that a person performing a criminal act often believes someone else is doing it. An example of such dissociative effects was seen in Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' rampage; according to prosecutors at his trial, Bales slipped away from his remote Afghanistan post, Camp Belambay, in a T-shirt, cape (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/agent-reaction-afghan-massacre-was-severe) and night-vision goggles and no body armor to attack his first victims. He then returned to the base and "woke a fellow soldier, reported what he'd done, and said he was headed out to kill more."

In addition to Bales' 2012 attacks and the 2002 Fort Bragg attacks, Lariam was linked in news reports to extreme side effects in an army staff sergeant (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6947472/ns/health-mental_health/t/hallucinations-linked-drug-given-troops/#.UzB_zBwZo3V) in Iraq in 2005 and to the suicide of an Army Reservist (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/11/AR2008101101516.html) in 2008.

Former Army psychiatrist Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, former U.S. Army Major and Preventive Medicine Officer Remington Nevin and Jerald Block with the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center agree in a recent paper (http://www.jaapl.org/content/41/2/224.full) that Lariam may be behind "seemingly spectacular and impulsive suicides." It can produce "derealization and depersonalization, compulsions toward dangerous objects, and morbid curiosity about death," they write, describing frequent hallucinations "involving religious or morbid themes" and "a sense of the presence of a nearby nondescript figure." The researchers refer to two reports of people jumping out of windows on Lariam under the false belief that their rooms were on fire.

Lariam is one of five malaria drugs listed by the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/travelers/drugs.html) for people who will be exposed to malaria. Other drugs include Malarone, a combination of the drugs atovaquone and Proguanil, Aralen (chloroquine,) primaquine and the antibiotic doxycycline marketed as Vibramycin. None of the drugs are ideal—Malarone can have renal effects and Aralen can have liver, blood and skin effects. Some do not work right away or are ineffective against resistant malaria strains. But the main reason for Lariam's historic popularity is that it is taken weekly, unlike all the other drugs (except chloroquine) which are taken daily. Some travelers also report that Lariam is cheaper than other malaria drugs (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/army-mefloquine-green-beret-anti-malarial-drug_n_3953584.html) and say they only experience symptoms like memory loss and vivid nightmares. Still, since awareness of Lariam's dangers, many users are now required to read and sign an informed consent form.

Early Example of Public Funding of Pharma Profits
Lariam was an early example of "technology-transfer" between publicly funded (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1847738/) and academic research and Big Pharma, driven by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The Bayh-Dole Act dangled the riches of “industry” before medical institutions just as the former were floundering and the latter was booming, observes (http://bostonreview.net/angell-big-pharma-bad-medicine) Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. (http://bostonreview.net/angell-big-pharma-bad-medicine) Turning universities into think tanks for Big Pharma has been so profitable, Northwestern University (http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/01/27/son-of-neurontin-meets-the-fibromyalgia-epidemic/) made $700 million when it sold Lyrica, discovered by one of its chemists, to Pfizer enabling it to build a new research building.

Lariam was developed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in the 1960s and '70s after a drug-resistant strain of malaria did not respond to medications and sickened troops during the Vietnam War. Though Lariam was developed with our tax dollars, all phase I and phase II clinical trial data were given to Hoffman LaRoche and Smith Kline free of charge (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1847738/) in what was the first private public partnership between the U.S. Department of Defense and Big Pharma . You're welcome! It was approved by the FDA in 1989.

Roche, which retained the patent, did well with the government largesse. In 2009, it spent $46.8 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/business/worldbusiness/13drugs.html?_r=0) billion to buy Genentech (for comparison the entire yearly budget (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/what-does-60-billion-buy/) of the National Institutes of Health is $60 billion a year) and its cancer drug, Avastin, makes up to $100,000 per patient (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/health/06avastin.html?pagewanted=all) per year, despite reports of its limited effectiveness for some cancers for which it is used.

Nor was the testing of Lariam kosher. It was first tested on prisoners (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1847738/) and soldiers (http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-874.html) who are not necessarily able or willing to refuse participation in clinical trials and it was also widely given to Guantanamo detainees (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22882560). Phase III trials, supposed to be conducted on larger patient groups of up to 3,000 people, were not conducted at all, wrote the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1847738/) in 2007 and "there was no serious attempt prior to licensing to explore the potential drug-drug interactions." In fact, all users "have been involved in a natural experiment to determine the true safety margin," says the journal, because "Consumers have been unwitting recruits to this longitudinal study, rather than informed partners." No wonder Lariam causes adverse effects in as many as 67 percent (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/opinion/crazy-pills.html?_r=0) of users.

As seen with other drugs that have neuropsychiatric effects, like the antidepressant Cymbalta (http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/02/18/it-s-the-cymbalta-stupid/) and seizure drug Neurontin, (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-rosenberg/pfizer-neurontin-suicide_b_875603.html) the military, government and Big Pharma blamed the effects on the patients not the drugs. When the wives of four Fort Bragg soldiers were murdered during the summer of 2002—one was stabbed 50 times and set on fire—military investigators blamed "existing marital problems and the stress of separation while soldiers are away on duty," instead of Lariam. Right. Three of the four soldiers also took their own lives.

The military, government and Big Pharma similarly blame the current suicide epidemic among military personnel on factors others than the ubiquitous psychiatric drugs in use—even though 30 percent of the victims never deployed and 60 percent never saw combat. A recent five-year study by Pharma-funded academic, government and military researchers about military suicides does not even consider (http://www.reportingonhealth.org/2014/03/12/drug-company-consultants-explain-military-suicides-kind) the drugs given to an estimated fourth of soldiers—almost all of which carry warnings about suicide.

It is also worth noting that the alarming side-effects linked to Lariam which patients, doctors and public health officials reported for at least a decade, were not acknowledged until profits ran out and Lariam became a generic, as has happened with other risky drugs (http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/7-drugs-whose-dangerous-risks-emerged-only-after-big-pharma-made-its-money?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark). When sentiment turned against Lariam in 2008, its manufacturer, Hoffmann–La Roche (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefloquine) ceased marketing it in the US and now the words "Lariam" and "malaria" draw no search results on its US website. Who, us?

One group that has tried to raise awareness of the dangers of Lariam is Mefloquine (Lariam) Action, (http://www.lariaminfo.org/category/homepage/) created in 1996 when founder, Susan Rose, noticed Peace Corps workers given Lariam were falling ill. Rose soon enlarged the scope of Mefloquine (Lariam) Action to include travelers and military personnel.

"This black box [the strongest FDA warning on drug packaging] officially establishes that mefloquine can cause permanent, brain damage and more. It validates what we have been saying since the beginning," Jeanne Lese, director of Mefloquine (Lariam) Action told me. The problem is far from solved by the black box, says Lese. "The drug continues to be given out at travel clinics all over the U.S. and elsewhere every single day. What's more, it is often prescribed with no hint to the patient about the black box, and no screening for contraindications such as history of previous depression or other neuropsych problems."

Lariam's Checkered Past
The case of the four Fort Bragg soldiers charged with killing their wives during the summer of 2002 is not the only time Lariam has been in the news. There was also the case of Staff Sergeant Andrew Pogany who volunteered to serve in Iraq in 2003 and experienced such panic and PTSD symptoms in the war theater (http://www.randomhouse.com/book/230995/born-with-a-junk-food-deficiency-by-martha-rosenberg), he was sent back to Fort Carson and charged with “cowardly conduct as a result of fear.” Pogany and his attorney were able to prove that his reaction probably stemmed from Lariam and he received an honorable discharge. But Pogany, understandably, became a vehement advocate for the rights of soldiers with PTSD, especially those who have been given psychoactive drugs that make them worse.

The wife of a 17-year marine veteran I interviewed in 2011 (http://www.randomhouse.com/book/230995/born-with-a-junk-food-deficiency-by-martha-rosenberg) reported a similar story. After being deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan, her husband developed extreme PTSD. "He went from being loving on the phone, to saying he never wanted to see me and our daughter again," the wife said. "He said not to even bother coming to the airport to meet him, because he would walk right past us." When the couple did reunite, the husband was frail and thin, and "the whites of his eyes were brown," says the wife. The formerly competent drill instructor became increasingly and inexplicably unpredictable, suicidal and violent and was incarcerated in the brig at Camp Lejeune for assault in 2011. I asked the wife to ask him during her visits if he had been given Lariam and she said he said yes.

In the nonﬁction book, Murder in Baker Company (http://www.amazon.com/Murder-Baker-Company-American-Soldiers/dp/1556529473): How Four American Soldiers Killed One of Their Own, Lariam is also raised as a possible factor in the brutal death of Army Specialist Richard Davis. When asked about Lariam in the crime in an interview (http://everythingnonfiction.com/interview-with-cilla-mccain-author-of-murder-in-baker-company/), the author Cilla McCain said, "Although it was never mentioned in court, I think if this same case were to happen today, it would definitely be considered as a defense. These soldiers were overdosing on Lariam in massive amounts because there wasn’t proper oversight. In reality, proper oversight is impossible in a war zone but steps could have been taken to make sure that overdosing didn’t occur. Even without over-dosage the Lariam issue is a volatile one at best and I’m positive we will be hearing more about the damage it has caused for years to come. Some scientists are linking Lariam directly to the historical rise of suicides in the United States."

As a dark cloud grows over Lariam, there is both good and bad news. The good news is in 2013, the Surgeon General's Office (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/army-mefloquine-green-beret-anti-malarial-drug_n_3953584.html) of the Army Special Operations Command told commanders and medical workers that soldiers thought to be suffering from PTSD or other psychological problems or even faking mental impairment may actually be Lariam victims. The bad news is a new malaria drug developed at Reed during the same time period as Lariam called tafenoquine is now fast-tracking toward FDA approval. Jeanne Lese and Remington Nevin worry that the new drug has not been adequately tested for the same types of neurotoxic effects (http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/23/1_MeetingAbstracts/529.3) seen with Lariam and that it will become Lariam 2.0.

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter and the author of "Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1616145935/counterpunchmaga) (Random House)."

Hervé

18th April 2014, 13:29

100,000-Person Study Shows That Your Psych Meds Can Kill You (http://blogs.psychcentral.com/science-addiction/2014/04/100000-person-study-shows-that-your-psych-meds-can-kill-you/)

By Richard Taite (http://blogs.psychcentral.com/science-addiction/author/rtaite/)

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3128/2447542822_6ecf0a5d92.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/10175246@N08/2447542822/)

Sleep aids are a more than $2 billion (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Sleep-aids-a-booming-business-2540076.php) per year industry. Forecasts (http://www.prweb.com/releases/anxiety_disorders/depression_stress/prweb8285957.htm) predict that global prescriptions for anti-anxiety medicines will reach $5.9 billion per year by 2017. But are these drugs safe? Studies (http://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/abstract/S0166-2236%2811%2900005-1?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0166223611000051%3Fshowall%3Dt rue?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0166223611000051%3Fshowall%3 Dtrue) show how easy it is to get hooked and a new study (http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g1996) just published in the British Medical Journal shows that anti-anxiety and sleep drugs can kill you.

Using data from the prescription records of primary care doctors, the study compared 34,727 patients prescribed anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) or hypnotic (sleep) drugs to 69,418 people not prescribed these drugs. Over 90 percent of the prescribed drugs were benzodiazepines or Z-drugs, which you might know by brand names like Xanax, Valium, Lunesta, Ambien and many more.

The study found that over the average 7.6-year follow-up period, for every 100 people followed there were about 4 more deaths in the prescription drug group than in the control group.

As you can imagine, the big challenge in this study was pulling out the influence of all the other things that might matter. For example, was the prescription drug group more likely to have other challenges that increased their chance of death?

Researchers did their best, controlling for factors like “sex, age at study entry, sleep disorders, anxiety disorders, other psychiatric disorders, medical morbidity, and prescriptions for non-study drugs.” They also controlled for socioeconomic status, alcohol and smoking.

The results remained: The 4-per-100 death increase doubled the chance of death in the prescription drug group compared to controls. And the more prescription drugs a person took during the study, the greater their chance of death increased – the more drugs, the more morbidity.

The thing is, this study is just one in a long line of research showing the dangers of psychotropic medicines prescribed for anxiety, sleep, depression and a host of other mental health challenges. For example, even though you’re told not to drive, people prescribed these medicines have more than six times the risk (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/1047279794001127) of hospitalization due to traffic accident in the two weeks after the prescription is first filled. And, “Even at modest doses…treatment with benzodiazepines appears to increase the risk of hip fracture,” writes an article (http://journals.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=174819) in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The list of unintended risks of psychotropic medications goes on to include seizure, birth defects, heart rate variability, suicide, and even cancer (http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/7/8/697.short).

Not to mention addiction. Absolutely every day at my center, we treat addictions to prescription anti-anxiety and sleep medications. In addition to the health consequences of these drugs, if left untreated, dependence has the potential to rob people of relationships, careers and their sense of self. Addiction is a heartbreaking consequence of these drugs and is largely overlooked by the medical model that is designed to treat symptoms instead of diseases – have a fever? Take a Tylenol.

Have trouble sleeping? Take an Ambien.

The fact is that at best psychotropic medications mask the symptoms of an underlying illness. Then when a person stops taking these dangerous drugs to steer clear of the health or mental health consequences, the symptoms often return.

Instead, this most recent article in the British Medical Journal and the hundreds of others add weight to a scale that is already tipped far in favor of a better way:

psychotherapeutic techniques that heal the root causes of anxiety or sleep issues and not drugs that mask their symptoms are the best way to treat addiction and mental health challenges. In the great an ongoing debate of prescriptions versus holistic therapies, this study adds yet more support to the essential truth of drug-free treatment.

–
Richard Taite is founder and CEO of Cliffside Malibu (http://www.cliffsidemalibu.com/), offering evidence-based, individualized addiction treatment based on the Stages of Change model. He is also coauthor with Constance Scharff (http://www.constancescharff.com/) of the book Ending Addiction for Good (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1604948582).

raregem

18th April 2014, 14:40

I was prescribed Amitriptyline for depression during my trials before the disability judges.
I took it two nights in a row then put the rest in the trash. (I usually do not ask for or get pain meds etc... Pharmaceuticals are scary for me in general. )
My experience was so scary and thoughts I had were horrid. Beyond horrid. I had never had these kind of thoughts or images before. I do not watch horror movies and the like. I kept my psyche away from the subtle influence. It was so frightful that I could not see screwing up my mind until the pills "stabilized". HAR. Stabilized my foot.
Needless to say the doctor was just cruel anyway. He was willing to give me mind altering (real mind altering) drugs but not a pain relief pill in the 3 years I saw him. I asked a lot of his patients their stories on the small town bus during our rides. So many disheartening stories re: this doc. Small town- one doc choice -when poor. Poor when cannot work. lol and on and on we go

Hervé

18th April 2014, 23:23

SSRI Stories (http://www.ssristories.org)

Antidepressant Nightmares

Our Stories
SSRI Stories is a collection of over 5,000 stories that have appeared in the media (newspapers, TV, scientific journals) in which prescription drugs were mentioned and in which the drugs may be linked to a variety of adverse outcomes including violence.

This updated site includes the stories from the previous site and new ones from 2011 to date. We have used a new “category” classification system on the new stories.

We are working back through previous SSRI Stories to bring them into the new classification system. In the meantime use the search box in the upper right column to search through both the old and the new stories.

Also, all of the stories from the original site are available under the Archives tab (http://ssristories.org/archives/). These are presented in the traditional site format. Once we have finished the posting of new stories and applying the expanded classification we will make all of this available in this traditional format.

SSRI Stories focuses on the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), of which Prozac (fluoxetine) was the first. For more see About SSRIs (http://ssristories.org/ssris).

Popular Categories

Antidepressant Defence (http://ssristories.org/category/lawsuits/not-criminally-responsible-due-to-antidepressant-effects/)
Celebrity Cases (http://ssristories.org/category/celebrity/)
Postpartum (http://www.ssristories.org/category/altered-mental-state/postpartum-reaction/)
School & Mass Shootings (http://ssristories.org/category/violence/school-or-other-mass-shooting/)
Soldiers (http://ssristories.org/category/occupation/military/)
Women Teacher Molestations (http://ssristories.org/category/occupation/teacher/)
Workplace Violence (http://ssristories.org/category/violence/workplace-violence/)

Warning
Adverse reactions are most likely to occur when starting or discontinuing the drug, increasing or lowering the dose or when switching from one SSRI to another. Adverse reactions are often diagnosed as bipolar disorder when the symptoms may be entirely iatrogenic (treatment induced). Withdrawal, especially abrupt withdrawal, from any of these medications can cause severe neuropsychiatric and physical symptoms. It is important to withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs, often over a period of a year or more, under the supervision of a qualified and experienced specialist. Withdrawal is sometimes more severe than the original symptoms or problems.
The following RxISK.org research papers and guides deal with dependence and withdrawal and may be helpful:

Dependence and Withdrawal
Guide to Stopping Antidepressants (http://wp.rxisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/RxISK-Guide-to-Stopping-Antidepressants.pdf)
Medicine Induced Stress Syndromes

Click here (http://wp.rxisk.org/research-papers/) to view these and other RxISK.org research papers.

http://ssristories.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Your-and-Your-Meds.jpg (http://RxISK.org)
(click on picture to search for a specific drug or record your own side effect story)

Hervé

24th April 2014, 12:25

Drugs: Psychiatry's modus operandi - The hidden enemy documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx_IhgFTUVk&index=4&list=PLfEz8k3ShuY6Q2aCH5-hzMFiHzxMx-gVM)
CCHR Documentaries (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx_IhgFTUVk&index=4&list=PLfEz8k3ShuY6Q2aCH5-hzMFiHzxMx-gVM)
Mon, 07 Apr 2014 05:50 CDT

Gx_IhgFTUVk

Published on Apr 7, 2014
It used to be that no one could take psychiatric drugs while in the military. All that has changed in recent years. Today, psychiatric drugging has gone rampant. From 2005 to 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration increased their prescriptions of psychiatric drugs by nearly seven times. That's over thirty times faster than the civilian rate, even though the American military has been steadily reducing troop levels since 2008.

Officially, one in six American service members is on at least one psychiatric drug. That's probably a very low estimate. Psychiatric drugs are handed out not just by psychiatrists, but also by physician's assistants, nurses, medics--they're even passed around from soldier to soldier. And the U.S. government acknowledges they have no way of knowing how many drugs are handed out on the front lines. This rampant drug dispensing has turned very dangerous, especially when so many "qualify" for psychiatry's biggest diagnosis/drugging combo of all.

TheVoyager

24th April 2014, 14:27

Hi Daughter of Time,
As you mentioned - simple homeopathic remedy could not help you in this, but Holographic Kinetics may very well do help you with the insomnia because it has the understanding and knowledge what is involved in it and how to deal with it. You could probably solve your problem in just one session with a good HK practitioner.

As someone who suffers from insomnia, I have had to rely on small amounts of medicine at bedtime. A holistically oriented M.D. as well as a naturopath advised me to take natural supplements like GABA, 5HTP, melatonin and the tiniest little piece of clonazepam. This combination actually works and I am told, is not that harmful. My doctor is one of those rare M.D.s who does not like to prescribe drugs unless absolutely necessary and he feels that as long as one of the "pam" drugs is kept at a minimum, then it is safer than not sleeping. The naturopath agrees with this conclusion.

A couple of years ago, I ran out of the prescription and my doctor was on vacation. I went to a walk-in clinic where I was attended by a very young doctor. She refused to prescribe the pam because she said it's very bad for you. She informed me that the answer to sleep, and most afflictions which are not related to any disease, as in my case, is one of the many different kinds of anti-depressants! So she prescribed some "tradozone" for me, which I refused. She became rather miffed and shoved the prescription in my hands and ordered me to take one every night and my insomnia would go away. I did not fill out the prescription! I find it quite impossible to believe that an anti-depressant every night is less harmful than a sliver of clonazepam.

Because she was so young, I conclude that medical school is teaching their future doctors that anti-depressants are the panacea we've been looking for and they probably want the whole planet to be on one kind or another.

I know some people whose young children are on psychiatric drugs and unless they take such medications, they will not be allowed to attend school because they are too belligerent. One such person took her belligerent child to a naturopath who immediately knew the child had worms. A remedy for worms was given to the child who became perfectly calm after two weeks.

Unfortunately, my case is far more complex than a simple homeopathic remedy because I've tried them all and they haven't worked. But I do look forward to the day when I will be able to remove the "pam" completely from my bedtime routine.

sigma6

26th April 2014, 23:55

The "math" on this is so simple... If Big Pharma pharmaceutical chemicals were as sophisticated as the Commercial images of white lab coats would suggest, then why are there a dozen side effects, (some lethal!) to all these drugs? Obviously these drugs are pathetic attempts at trying to effect a change in a complex system (the human body) that they DON'T completely understand... All the talk and explanation is just that, a bunch of talk.

Rogain is a perfect example, originally a heart drug, that turned out to be ineffective as a heart drug, was simply put in a different package and sold as a hair replacement therapy.

Prozac is the highest profit making drug of all time. A so called "anti-depressant" Which if there were any REAL Doctors, would tell you to take a single drag on cannabis or hash, (btw - Can you imagine, the threat this legalization movement is creating for Crime Syndicate funded Big Pharma? HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!)
Anyhow... Prozac is considered, by definition to be the most successful drug of all time, (i.e. a measure of it's distribution and profit) It's main ingredient is fluoride. And it is highly addictive. The withdrawal symptoms being violent aggression and suicidal tendencies. Dead simple what is going on here...

There is a famous chemist who is on the record, that most of these chemicals are toxic, overly concentrated poisons, derivatives of already existing natural substances that occur in nature. By concentrating out only or 2 elements from it's natural source which may have thousands of other "factors" 1) You lose the overall balance of the natural source, and create a toxic and dangerous poison. and 2) The isolated chemical may be artificially manufactured from a different source once some of it's properties are better understood.

So now you have an artificially created (if that turns out to be cheaper, although that step itself might even introduce more side effects) and toxic poison that can now be "patented" and dumped into the "National Drug Distribution Network" of "Doctors" to make BILLIONS of dollars PROFIT selling a "pill" that cost a penny to manufacture for $1, or today even $5 or $10 (since an ever greater need to make profits is required to cover their huge lawsuits and political campaigns to Congressional Agents, themselves tools of the same Banking Cartels (read Crime Syndicates, who are controlling and funding the Big Pharma in the first place) ...

It is always about elite powerful individuals who have hijacked the monetary system and leveraged it for their own personal gain, and always at the cost of other human suffering and even loss of life. (soft kill as Alex Jones call it, I think)

Tesla_WTC_Solution

27th April 2014, 02:04

Thanks again for this thread, it's a winner.
This issue comes up again and again, because they are still dying...
it's very sad.

"...for every one of us who makes it, there will be 10 who do not. for every survivor there were will 10 or more who are not surviving..."

Letter to the Union Bulletin

Hervé

5th May 2014, 01:22

Bombshell: 1 in 13 U.S. children take psychiatric drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/044978_psychiatric_drugs_children_overmedication.html#)

Sunday, May 04, 2014 by: L.J. Devon, Staff Writer
Tags: psychiatric drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/psychiatric_drugs.html), children (http://www.naturalnews.com/children.html), overmedication (http://www.naturalnews.com/overmedication.html)

(NaturalNews) An increasing number of children in America are being labeled, diagnosed and branded. Unique personalities are being scolded and molded by drugs to adapt childhood behavior into societal norms. Children have become like sculptures, motionless, lifeless, as psychiatric drugs chisel away at their natural state of well-being.

Living under a controlled paradigm designed by Drug Companies

The emotional and behavioral differences among children are yoked into compliance, to conformity. A child's struggles aren't listened to, aren't understood. Their differences, behavior and problems are stamped into their mind as if they are a mental illness. Psychiatric drugs are driven down the throats of young people, as pharmaceutical companies expand their controlling influence.

A shocking new study facilitated by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reveals that 1 in 13, or 7.5 percent of US children, are now on some type of psychiatric drug. Taking a step back, it's as if the lives of people today are controlled by a paradigm designed by drug companies. The potential of free thought is a mere speck of what it could be.

The minds of a generation have been collectively hijacked in the 21st century; an alarming number of parents and medical professionals have become disillusioned in a new age of chemical quick fixes. Mind-altering drugs are pushed onto children with little regard for their natural ability to overcome challenges. The root issues are never dealt with when a drug (http://www.naturalnews.com/drug.html) is issued as the one-size-fits-all band-aid.

A generation ago, all these mental illnesses and ADHD labels were nonexistent. Children's minds were left unaltered. They were never so psychotically evaluated, labeled and nitpicked like they are today. They were not subjects of a multinational psychiatric drugging machine, which now possesses 1/13 of today's American culture.

Boys drugged more than girls, belittled in an emasculated culture

The childhood drug study, based on 6- to 17-year-olds, shows another alarming trend; boys are more likely to be prescribed psychiatric drugs than girls. 9.7 percent of boys are drugged compared to 5.2 percent of girls. It's apparent that these drugs are a way to emasculate boys, as strength is belittled and minds are altered to submit.

The increasing psychiatric diagnoses on children (http://www.naturalnews.com/children.html) show that medical professionals have generally strayed away from treating people as human beings and have instead become like drug peddlers and distributors. They've become mindless themselves, submitting to new labels and diagnoses formulated and made into doctrine through the psychiatrists' Bible, the DSM. While the American Psychiatric Association believes that medical professionals are doing a better job today at pinning down psychiatric problems in children earlier and responding to them sooner, this is no excuse to drug children out of their wits, out of their problems, personalities, abnormalities, masculinity and/or behavioral differences.

Psychiatric drugs condemn personality differences and throw away discipline

These psychiatric drugs do not teach children how to cope with challenges in life. These drugs replace discipline and perseverance with chemical alterations that harbor physical, emotional, mental and spiritual side effects.

If a psychiatric drug is credited for helping change a child's behavior or depressive state, then the child (http://www.naturalnews.com/child.html) is inherently taught to be mentally and spiritually dependent on a substance to cope with life's tough realities. This drug-care illusion could ultimately be cast onto every human being, since behavioral differences, life challenges and brain chemical imbalances are all possible at some point in every person's life.

Leaning on drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/drugs.html) to deal with life does not allow time for the chemically imbalanced brain to heal naturally. The brain can become dependent on the chemical alteration while fighting side effects and withdrawals. Important bodily functions like metabolism and sleep can also be adversely affected as well as elicit unnatural changes in communication, violent behavior and lack of empathy for mankind.

Children enrolled in Medicaid drugged more readily

The study also showed that kids enrolled on Medicaid are more likely to be branded and drugged with psychiatrics. Medicaid boasts 9.9 percent of children taking drugs for behavioral problems, as opposed to 6.7 percent of children covered under private insurance.

In the CDC report, the researchers wrote, "Over the past two decades, the use of medication to treat mental health problems has increased substantially among all school-aged children and in most subgroups of children."

Why have medical professionals and parents settled for a method of labeling and drugging so disempowering and so defeated?

It's definitely time to take a closer look at the overmedication (http://www.naturalnews.com/overmedication.html) epidemic going on right now in American culture. It's time to question the labels, the diagnoses and the blind servitude of psychiatric medicine.

Sources for this article include

http://www.foxnews.com (http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/04/25/1-in-13-children-taking-psychiatric-medication-in-us/)

http://www.upi.com (http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2014/04/25/75-percent-of-schoolchildren-take-prescription-psych-meds/9691398436127/?spt=su)

http://science.naturalnews.com (http://science.naturalnews.com/psychiatry.html)

Hervé

5th May 2014, 01:35

Drugged Up (http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/drugged-up-auid-364)

Psychiatry is over-reliant on chemical cures. It’s time to look at the facts, not the fallacies.

Bob Johnson | Psychiatrist, critic of electroconvulsive therapy. Consultant to James Nayler Foundation

http://iainews.iai.tv/assets/Uploads/_resampled/SetWidth592-drugs-4.jpg

If ever there were a case for an outside body to let the light in, then it’s here, today, in psychiatry. If today’s psychiatry is working, why are claims for mental disability going up? Why is there accumulating evidence that sufferers do better OFF the medication than on? Why is not more attention paid to the solid Swedish epidemiological evidence that ‘anti-psychotic’ drugs increase the risk of dementia (http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/issue.aspx?journalid=71&issueid=927427) up to 20-fold? All that known drug-induced brain damage has to show up somewhere.Why is increased suicide listed in the side-effects of the ‘anti-depressants’? And worst of all, why are so many drugs being given compulsorily, overriding the patient’s sensibly withheld consent – the iniquitous Community Treatment Orders (http://www.mentalhealthlaw.co.uk/Community_Treatment_Order) (CTOs)? Even this has been shown not to work (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/issue/vol381no9869/PIIS0140-6736%2813%29X6014-3).

The answer is that it is the psychiatrists who are addicted to hard medications. It’s a case of “I’ve made up my mind, don’t confuse me with facts”. The facts are overwhelming. On 30th April 2014, I attended the launch in the House of Lords of the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry – why is such an organisation so urgently needed? Because, in Dr Joanna MonCrieff’s words, in her book aptly titled The Myth Of The Chemical Cure:
The persistence of the dopamine hypothesis and its recent resurgence in popularity are testimony therefore not to the state of the evidence but more to the need of the psychiatric profession to have medical models of the disorders it is confronted by, particularly ones that provide a medical justification for its treatment.
Clinical psychologist Richard Bentall knows there’s a clear link between childhood trauma and psychoses. In my work I focus on convincing the individual that this trauma is now over, and they blossom. And we are talking about the most severe forms, the 3% of severe psychoses, severe depressions, severe bi-polar. In every case, if you look for it, you find severe trauma. Contrary to DSM III, IV and V (the standard classification system used by mental health professionals in the US) severe psychiatric disorders are all reactive – they result from overwhelming trauma in susceptible individuals.

Let me give you a taste. I have a 38 year old whose thought disorder was crippling. She couldn’t finish a sentence straight. Then, out of the blue, she says “mum is alive” – we both knew that mum had died 30 years before. She simply couldn’t say “mum is dead”, even though she knew it was true. Her face contorted, her thinking went down the tubes. The fact that she could say the first proved that all her neurology was intact, but her emotions were not. Gently persuading her that the second was true, and that she would be all right, has evaporated her psychotic symptoms.

Andy is 45. He writes “mum is dead, but I don’t know this yet”. This is bonkers, and Andy knows it. Gently I’m persuading him, with support, that he too can survive without parents – something that was impossible aged two. This has nothing to do with dopamine, and all to do with a human reaction to overwhelming trauma. How long before my psychiatric colleagues wake up? And how much more damage, especially to human rights, must we endure before they do?

Dr Bob Johnson is currently working on a book about “Antropy”, a kind of anti-entropy present only in living beings and essential to the biosphere.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's the crux of the matter: it seems like there's a vested interest in obfuscating the major, widespread cause of traumatic events... the SRA kind of things (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?67941-Damage-Control).

Tesla_WTC_Solution

5th May 2014, 02:05

really did not enjoy the nightmarish dance with pharma :(

nothing seemed to help anyway! then i find out, oh gee, there really isn't much in the way of a pill for ASD

Hervé

5th May 2014, 15:08

Oklahoma parents say son needed help - sheriff's deputies gunned him down instead (http://newsok.com/oklahoma-parents-say-son-needed-help-instead-custer-county-sheriffs-deputies-shot-him/article/3929841)

Jennifer Palmer
NewsOK (http://newsok.com/oklahoma-parents-say-son-needed-help-instead-custer-county-sheriffs-deputies-shot-him/article/3929841)
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 10:00 CST

http://www.sott.net/image/image/s9/184179/medium/w300_c_d54215b1cfc3c9f8161866d.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/image/s9/184179/full/w300_c_d54215b1cfc3c9f8161866d.jpg)
© Photo provided

Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, 18, was shot and killed by Custer County sheriff's deputies on Dec. 21. The district attorney's office hasn't yet ruled whether the shooting was justified.

[...]

'An emotional episode'

Melissa Goodblanket said her son, whose name translated into English means Red Bird, was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder in the ninth grade and continued to struggle with his mental health. But he graduated high school, was planning to attend the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College and had a girlfriend.

[...]

Full article: http://www.sott.net/article/278492-Oklahoma-parents-say-son-needed-help-sheriffs-deputies-gunned-him-down-instead

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What kind of people make that kind of sh*t up:

oppositional defiant disorder?

My guess is that, that poor kid was on psych drugs for too long...

Hervé

15th May 2014, 02:07

Alert: imperial psychiatric empire is invading the mind (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/alert-imperial-psychiatric-empire-is-invading-the-mind/)

May14 (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/alert-imperial-psychiatric-empire-is-invading-the-mind/), by Jon Rappoport (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/)

www.nomorefakenews.com (http://www.nomorefakenews.com/)

A federal bill, HR 3717, is being refined in the hope of gaining big support from both sides of the political aisle.

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) is the key point man for the American Psychiatric Association.

This bill is playing off of Aurora, Sandy Hook, Boston, and other recent “mass events.”

The propaganda hook is: catch mental illness early, prevent tragedy.

The strategy is: expand mental health services into every cranny and nook of the society, starting with children.

Translation: diagnose mental disorders and drug patients with toxic compounds.

As I’ve demonstrated in many past articles, none of the 300 officially certified mental disorders has any defining diagnostic test. No blood test, no urine test, no brain scan, no genetic assay.

The names and descriptions of all the disorders are outright frauds, packaged to sell harmful drugs.

But that doesn’t stop the juggernaut.

HR 3717 is designed to do the following, as described in a recent article in Psychiatric News, “Comprehensive Mental Health Bill Introduced in House”:

“Among the bill’s provisions is the creation of a new assistant secretary position in the Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate activities within the agency on prevention and treatment of mental health and substance abuse.”

That means far greater clout for the feds in foisting psychiatric treatment on the public.

“…increase funding for crisis-intervention team training for police officers and firefighters…”
This adds a psychiatric component in instances of “crises,” wherein suspects, witnesses and even government workers will receive “mental health” evals and counseling (and drug prescriptions). It’ll be SOP for anyone within shouting distance of a police raid, for example, to experience a brush with the psychiatric system, whenever possible.

“…permit disclosure of information about individuals with mental illness to caregivers or immediate family members under certain circumstances.”
There goes privacy and confidentiality…one leak and cross-reference after another.

“…$40 million a year for the National Institute of Mental Health to fund the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative…or other ‘research on the determinants of self- and other-directed violence in mental illness, including studies directed at reducing the risk of self-harm, suicide, and interpersonal violence.’”
More $$ to study how to control the brain. More fraudulent research aimed at blaming “chemical imbalances” as the cause of crime, which again results in more mental-disorder diagnoses and drugging. Keep in mind that increasing numbers of people are being driven over the edge into committing violence, because psychiatric drugs, such as the SSRI antidepressants, are scrambling their neurotransmitters. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“…adopt a ‘need-for-treatment’ standard for assisted outpatient treatment (AOT)," he [Rep. Murphy] said, adding that the current legal standard requiring ‘dangerousness to self or others’ to permit involuntary evaluation and treatment was a bar set too high.

This means the government can order more people to receive psychiatric care and forced drugging, erasing the previous restriction.

Jeffrey Lieberman, president of the American Psychiatric Association: “We need a public-health initiative for mental health care that moves out of clinical settings into the community, whether it’s in primary care, education, the workplace, or faith-based organizations.”

Meaning: tons of new propaganda about the need for psychiatric treatment; the building of community psychiatric centers all across the country; pressure to submit to treatment applied in ordinary doctors’ offices, in schools, in private companies, in churches.

This is a diabolical legislative package.

If it’s fully implemented, you’ll witness a sea-change in society, in the coming decade. Diagnoses of mental disorders and consequent drugging, already widely in effect, will become as common and ordinary as people eating at fast food restaurants.

And the population will eventually forget things were ever different.

“Hey, can I borrow your Valproate? My son took my bottle because he ran out.”

Look for schools to set up monitoring systems, so they can be sure students are taking their psychiatric meds at the proper times during the day.

On their wireless devices, all children will have ID packages that allow them to check into any pharmacy and pick up a prescription refill.

And esoteric concepts like “consciousness?” They’ll fade from view, because “states of mind” will be defined by mental-disorder labels.

This is about more than Pharma profits. It’s also about putting a ceiling on how human beings view themselves.

As exemplified by this bill before Congress, the federal government has set itself up as a legal partner and enforcer of a monopoly of the mind.

Understand that. There are a million ways to explore and understand the inner life of a person. Psychiatry is just one of those. It’s a pseudoscience and a con and a hustle.

But it has the unflinching support of all three branches of government.

Which is why the freedom to refuse treatment must be protected, against any and all attacks.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

21st May 2014, 01:02

One in three in France on psychotropic medication – study (http://rt.com/news/160280-france-use-psychotropic-medication/)

Published time: May 20, 2014 20:55
Get short URL (http://rt.com/news/160280-france-use-psychotropic-medication/)

http://cdn.rt.com/files/news/27/21/80/00/france-use-psychotropic-medication.si.jpg

AFP Photo / Joseph Eid

A study by France’s National Drug Safety Agency (ANSM) found that one third of French people were taking and at times misusing antidepressants, mood stabilizers and other psychotropic drugs, prompting fresh warnings by health experts.

The report by ANSM, carried by Le Parisien Tuesday, found that 32 percent of French citizens were using psychotropic medication, such as antipsychotics, antidepressants, ADHD drugs, anti-anxiety medications and mood stabilizers.

Many of the psychoactive drugs prescribed in France have severe side effects. For example many anti-depressants cause high blood pressure, an increased risk of developing diabetes and suicidal thoughts.

Professor Bernard Begaud told Le Parisien that it was “incomprehensible” that nothing is being done to reduce the rate at which these drugs are used in France.

“It is a matter of urgency because there is a real public health problem,” he said.

The way the drugs are taken by patients is also a cause for concern, with many patients combining them with other medications.

A study by Cetipharm, which was also quoted in Le Parisien, found that 230,000 people in France were mixing psychotropic drugs with other non-compatible medication and endangering their health in the process.

“It is in France that psychotropic drugs are the most heavily consumed, but also the most misused. The public, too, must be informed that no, these drugs are not trivial,” AFP quoted Begaud as saying.

France apparently suffers from high rates of depression, although Professor Begaud said that inadequate doctor training and overzealous prescribing of the drugs by doctors was also to blame.

A survey carried out by Ipsos on behalf of the French Hospital Federation, which was also released this week, found that 84 percent of patents think doctors hand out unnecessary medication.

The problem of overdependence on prescription medication is not only a French problem. A study published last year found that the use of antidepressants across Europe had increased by 20 percent between 1995 and 2009. Sweden had the highest increase of 59 percent, while France saw a more modest rise of 5 percent.

The relatively low increase in France is due to the fact that the nation was already addicted to prescription drugs.

A book published in 2012 by Guy Hugnet found that up to 15 million people in France were using psychotropic drugs.

Hugnet writes that the French have a blind faith in pills and will visit several doctors to make sure they have enough.

“Often, these people are taking a mixture of medication. People don’t talk about it as in France medicine is a religion that cannot be questioned,” Hugnet told the Telegraph.

**************************************************************

Maybe the WHO ought to declare a world wide pandemic caused by these pesky secretions from Fat Pharma... where the only people needing vaccinations are its CEOs, bankers and running dogs...

Pam

21st May 2014, 13:31

I thought I would throw in a personal story to bring some of this excellent info home. My nephew was a very calm baby. At the age of 2 or 3 I began to see that he was exceptionally bright and articulate. My only concern for him at that time was that he might be so intelligent that he would be considered a smart nerd by his peers.

My sister in law, who is also extremely intelligent and is a doctor began to describe incidents where my nephew was becoming defiant to her at home. No family members ever saw these incidents that I know of. By the age of 6 he was seeing a psychiatrist and began the long journey to hell. He was diagnosed as being bipolar. No one had ever seen a manic episode with this kid and it would be impossible to tell if he was depressed because they had him on so many medications that he could hardly wake up in the morning. He became grossly obese and began telling ridiculous, outrageous lies. He got an exemption from arriving at school on time because of his inability to wake up from the drugs in the morning. Although at one time a delightful, brilliant child he was now a blob of existence that barely graduated from high school. And the drugs just kept coming.

Flash forward -My nephew is now 21, he has never held a job, he takes any illegal drugs he can get his hands on , he lives in his car and steals from his parents whenever he can. Recently, he was taken to another psychiatrist and was told that he is NOT bipolar. OOOOOPS , you mean he was taking all this crap for 15 years for a misdiagnoses?

As far as I can tell this kids' life was turned into a living hell because he had a power struggle going with his strong willed mother who deeply believed in medication. What a tragedy. I wonder how many millions of other kids have a similar story?

Hervé

21st May 2014, 13:48

Hi peterpam,

Thank you for putting a face on so many of these sad stories...

Hervé

23rd May 2014, 00:05

SOTT EXCLUSIVE: 10,000 2-3 year olds are on psychotropic drugs for 'ADHD' (http://www.sott.net/article/279528-SOTT-EXCLUSIVE-10000-2-3-year-olds-are-on-psychotropic-drugs-for-ADHD#)

Shane LaChance
Sott.net (http://www.sott.net/article/279528-SOTT-EXCLUSIVE-10000-2-3-year-olds-are-on-psychotropic-drugs-for-ADHD#)
Thu, 22 May 2014 12:17 CDT

http://www.sott.net/image/image/s9/186837/large/JP_TODDLERS_master675.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/image/s9/186837/full/JP_TODDLERS_master675.jpg)
© Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Dr. Susanna Visser presented a CDC report Friday to the Georgia Mental Health Forum in Atlanta on the drugging of young children for ADHD.

The CDC has shocked parents and many of the countries child welfare experts with it's release of a disturbing report showing the high number of very young children being prescribed mind-altering drugs. The report states that some 10,000 toddlers across the US are being diagnosed and medicated with psychotropic drugs like Ritalin and Adderall.

"It's absolutely shocking, and it shouldn't be happening," said Anita Zervigon-Hakes, a mental health consultant for children from the Carter Center. "People are just feeling around in the dark. We obviously don't have our act together for little children."

In interviews with the New York Times and NBC, Dr. Lawrence H. Diller, a behavioral pediatrician in California, thought the news was outrageous:
"People prescribing to 2-year-olds are just winging it. It is outside the standard of care, and they should be subject to malpractice if something goes wrong with a kid."

"We're giving Adderall to 2-year-olds? I mean, that's nuts," said Diller. "There's no evidence that it works. There's no evidence that it's safe. These are desperate measures." According to Diller the U.S. uses 70 percent of the world's Adderall and Ritalin even though we only make up 4 percent of the world's population.

Readers may be surprised to know that there is no consensus about what 'ADHD' (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) actually is, but that hasn't stopped thousands of physicians from doping our children based on highly questionable criteria. This 'disease' with mythological undertones is now the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder in children. Statistics from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) indicate that 6.5 million U.S. children are labeled with ADHD.

"Families of toddlers with behavioral problems are coming to the doctor's office for help, and the help they're getting too often is a prescription for a Class II controlled substance, which has not been established as safe for that young of a child," said Dr. Susanna N.Visser, the lead researcher of the CDC study. "It puts these children and their developing minds at risk, and their health is at risk."

The CDC's study also found that toddlers covered by medicaid were far more likely to be drugged than those who had private insurance. Dr. Visser could not offer an explanation for why the poor are being targeted.

The New York Times has previously reported on a Rutgers and Columbia study (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/health/12medicaid.html?pagewanted=all) from 2009, which found that children who were covered by Medicaid were four times more likely to be prescribed powerful drugs than those who had private insurance. Those children were also prescribed medications for less severe conditions.

An investigation (http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/family/articles/2010/12/12/with_ssi_program_a_legacy_of_unintended_side_effects/) by the Boston Globe found that congress' Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program was being used to serve those with common 'behavioral disorders' like ADHD. It provides a financial incentive for poor families to accept powerful medications for their children.

"To get the check,'' Geneva Fielding, mother of three boys, has unfortunately concluded, "you've got to medicate the child.''

Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University and former chairman of the DSM-IV wrote (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/adhd-toddler-diagnosis_b_5343766.html), "Treating babies with stimulants is based on no research, is reckless and takes no account of the possible harmful, long-term effects of bathing baby brains with powerful neurotransmitter drugs."

There's been very little scientific study on the use of stimulant medications in very young children and none for those younger than three years old. One study (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2006/preschoolers-with-adhd-improve-with-low-doses-of-medication.shtml) from 2006 found that methylphenidate reduced 'ADHD-like' symptoms in preschoolers. Most researchers on that study had significant ties to pharmaceutical companies that make ADHD medications.

Dr. Bruce Perry, a senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, says ADHD is not a "real disease. It is best thought of as a description. If you look at how you end up with that label, it is remarkable because any one of us at any given time would fit at least a couple of those criteria," said Perry.

Neurologist Richard Saul seems to agree. In fact, he doesn't think there are any American children suffering from ADHD because he doesn't think it exists. In his book, ADHD Does Not Exist: The Truth About Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, Saul sees ADHD as a collections of symptoms, not as a disease.

Parents are bewildered and angered by these findings too.

"I don't get how you diagnose somebody. I mean, if they're hyper or all over the place then you probably have a 2-year-old," said Craig Lewis, a dad. Indeed, it's as if, in this psychopathic reality, just being a child is a 'disease'. Heck, as far as Big Pharma is concerned, being a human being with any kind of agency whatsoever is a disease. And now even toddlers are being abused by doctors who are supposed to be helping. Of course, when you consider the sugar and chemical-loaded 'Western diet', it's not surprising that young children are often hyperactive and cranky, but the solution is to change their diets, not load them up with chemical suppressants to cover up the toxic stimulants they are ingesting every day.

Putting toddlers on drugs for ADHD is not only shameful, it's criminal. Adderall is a Schedule II drug, the same classification as cocaine and morphine. Their brains are in the critical stages of development and permanent damage results from long-term use of such drugs.

Stress is mounting in our increasingly dystopian society, and vulnerable children may feel the effects most acutely. It's up to us, as adults, to learn how to cope by informing ourselves and passing on that knowledge to our children. While the truth is not something that is taught in schools (an informed population is a threat to psychopaths in power), by learning and applying the necessary knowledge and skills in our own lives, and sharing them with others, we can protect ourselves and our children against the worst effects of our 'modern' society. Children need to go through the process of learning how to cope on their own, understanding boundaries and how to control impulses during the formative years of their brain development. By forcing them to take drugs in a futile and harmful effort to avoid this responsibility, we rob them of the necessity of learning how to cope and destroy their ability to build the emotional bonds that come as a result.

There are effective means of managing stress and the symptoms that are lumped together and called ADHD. A ketogenic diet that is free from grain, low in carbs and high in saturated fat provides protective measures to help body and brain withstand stress. See Dr. Gabriela Segura's article The Ketogenic Diet - An Overview (http://www.health-matrix.net/2013/08/09/the-ketogenic-diet-an-overview/#more-797) for more information.

Learning how to turn on the body's natural relaxation systems and turn down it's stress responses can also provide immediate and long-term relief. The breathing exercises taught in Laura Knight-Jadczyk's stress control and rejuvenation program, Éiriú Eolas (http://eiriu-eolas.org/), can get you there.

Tesla_WTC_Solution

23rd May 2014, 08:45

My boy is currently on Guanfacine.
Anyone w/ experience of this drug, please PM me.
He has been on it for a while, but his dosage was recently increased a bit.

i'm frustrated w/ system because mmj is legal here but not necessarily "FDA" approved for kids.

it needs to be acknowledged as an autism treatment.
so our kids can get off the pills and get on something more independent of the system.

if society crashed tomorrow the pill people would be sad and the weed people would shrug.

Tesla_WTC_Solution

24th May 2014, 04:42

Update (and thanks AZ):

my son is doing well this week.
he seems to be handling the new dosage just fine.
was more focused and talkative today than i remember ever.

i hope he doesn't get heart damage from the Rx but he is a strong one.

/pray

Hervé

11th June 2014, 15:15

Drug cartels? Amateurs! Here’s the real thing.

Jun9 (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/drug-cartels-amateurs-heres-the-real-thing/), 2014, by Jon Rappoport (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/)
www.nomorefakenews.com (http://www.nomorefakenews.com/)

Mexican cartels? Colombian cartels? Afghan poppy lords? Middlemen? Street dealers? Are you kidding? They’re small fry. Check out the pros.

Medical News Today, June 22, 2013, “Most Americans on Prescriptions.” (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/262352.php) “7 out of every 10 Americans are on prescription drugs, and more than half of the country are on at least two, according to an analysis conducted by Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center researchers.”

That’s 210 million men, women, and children (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/psst-kid-want-drugs-im-a-psychiatrist/)—hooked. Something the Sinaloa Cartel can only dream of.

Most commonly ingested medical drugs? In order: antibiotics, antidepressants, and opioids. Those last two indicate Americans are trying to change their state of mind and kill pain via the Man in the White Coat; the street dealer is way, way behind.

Here’s an interesting quote from the Medical News piece: “…nearly one quarter of women between 50 and 64 take antidepressants…”

The street drug cartels, of course, are working at a disadvantage. The White Coat dealers are backed up by government, insurance companies, medical boards, medical journals, Wall Street, banks, pharmaceutical companies, media, medical schools, hospitals, and big foundations. That’s the competition. What are the street drug cartels going to do? Put out a hit on all these people? Hell, I’m sure some of the Mexican and Colombian drug chiefs have their own doctors and are taking Zoloft and Paxil themselves.

Previously, in another piece, Medical News Today reported (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/shocker-how-many-drug-prescriptions-are-written-in-the-us-every-year/) that, in 2011, there was a modest uptick in the number of prescriptions written in the US.

The increase brought the total to: 4.02 billion.

Yes, in 2011, doctors wrote 4.02 billion prescriptions for drugs in America.

That’s an average of roughly 13 prescriptions for each man, woman, and child.

That’s about one new prescription every month for every American.

The Medical News Today article concluded, “…the industry should be heartened by the growth of the number of prescriptions and spending.” Yes, I’m sure the drug industry was popping champagne corks.

We’re talking about prescriptions here. We’re not talking about the number of pills Americans took. We’re also not counting over-the-counter drugs.

Pharmacopoeia, a 2011 exhibition at the British Museum, estimated that “the average number of pills a person takes in his or her own lifetime in the UK is 14,000.” That’s as a result of prescriptions. Including over-the-counter drugs, the 14,000 number would swell to 40,000 pills taken in a lifetime.

What are the effects of all these drugs?

We are looking at a supreme Trojan Horse that is rotting out America and other industrialized countries from the inside. Wars, no wars, economic deprivation, economic prosperity, the drugs continue to do their work, debilitating and ruining and terminating lives.

Many sources can be cited to confirm this assessment.

On January 8th, 2001, the LA Times published an article by Linda Marsa: “When Good Drugs Do Harm.” (http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/08/health/he-9609) Marsa quoted researcher Dr. David Bates, who indicated that, in the US, there are 36 million serious adverse reactions to medical drugs per year.

On July 26, 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the most stunning mainstream estimate of medical-drug damage in history: “Is US health really the best in the world?” The author was Dr. Barbara Starfield, a respected public-health researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Starfield concluded that medical drugs were killing Americans at the rate of 106,000 per year. That’s over a million deaths per decade. (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/the-starfield-revelations/)

(By contrast, The Wall St. Journal reports 3,094 deaths from heroin overdose in 2010.)

Starfield gives us a conservative sketch of the Trojan Horse that has been placed in the center of the industrialized world.

The destruction of societies by medical drugs goes far beyond what some people call “over-prescribing.” This isn’t just a tilt in the wrong direction. It isn’t simply errors of judgment compounded by the number of doctors dispensing medicines.

Those are all polite terms suggesting the situation can be corrected through a show of good will and better judgment. That will never happen.

Countries of the world are literally being assaulted by pharmaceutical companies and their foot-soldier doctors. It’s chemical warfare.

To even begin to see light at the end of the tunnel, hundreds of millions of people must add themselves to the rolls of those who already are pursuing better health through natural means.

Not even the worst dictators and mass murderers in history dreamed of a day when the citizenry would line up and demand to ingest more and more life-destroying chemicals.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

22nd June 2014, 22:18

Inside the FDA Mafia (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/inside-the-fda-mafia/)

Jun22 (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/inside-the-fda-mafia/) , 2014 by theodorewesson (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/theodorewesson/)
by Jon Rappoport
www.nomorefakenews.com (http://www.nomorefakenews.com/)

I post this piece now and then to show how personal things can get inside a terminally corrupt government agency.

It’s not all about remote decisions made from a great height.

These decisions can come about through the rank intimidation the Mafia exercises with a member who wants to leave the mob and go straight.

As in: “We know where your wife and kids are.”

This article is based on a Truthout interview of a man who did drug reviews for the FDA. (http://truth-out.org/news/item/10524-former-fda-reviewer-speaks-out-about-intimidation-retaliation-and-marginalizing-of-safety) He examined applications to approve new medical drugs for public consumption.

Pharmaceutical companies must have their new drugs certified as safe and effective before they can enter the market, before doctors can prescribe them. The FDA does this certification. Thumbs up or thumbs down. The drug is okay or it isn’t.

Here’s the story:

In a stunning interview with Truthout’s Martha Rosenberg, former FDA drug reviewer, Ronald Kavanagh, exposes the FDA as a relentless criminal mafia protecting its client, Big Pharma, with a host of mob strategies.

Kavanagh: “…widespread racketeering, including witness tampering and witness retaliation.”

“I was threatened with prison.”

“One [FDA] manager threatened my children…I was afraid that I could be killed for talking to Congress and criminal investigators.”

Kavanagh reviewed new drug applications made to the FDA by pharmaceutical companies. He was one of the holdouts at the Agency who insisted that the drugs had to be safe and effective before being released to the public.

But honest appraisal wasn’t part of the FDA culture, and Kavanagh swam against the tide, until he realized his life and the life of his children were on the line.

What was his secret task at the FDA? “Drug reviewers were clearly told not to question drug companies and that our job was to approve drugs.” In other words, rubber stamp them. Say the drugs were safe and effective when they were not.

Kavanagh’s revelations are astonishing. He recalls a meeting where a drug-company representative flat-out stated that his company had paid the FDA for a new-drug approval. Paid for it. As in bribe.

He remarks that the drug pyridostigmine, given to US troops to prevent the later effects of nerve gas, “actually increased the lethality” of certain nerve agents.

Kavanagh recalls being given records of safety data on a drug—and then his bosses told him which sections not to read. Obviously, they knew the drug was dangerous and they knew exactly where, in the reports, that fact would be revealed.

We are not dealing with isolated incidents of cheating and lying. We are not dealing with a few isolated bought-off FDA employees. The situation at the FDA isn’t correctable with a few firings. This is an ongoing criminal enterprise, and any government official, serving in any capacity, who has become aware of it and has not taken action, is an accessory to mass poisoning of the population.

Fourteen years ago, the cat was let out of the bag. Dr. Barbara Starfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, on July 26, 2000, in a review titled, “Is US health really the best in the world,” exposed the fact that FDA-approved medical drugs kill 106,000 Americans per year.

In interviewing her (http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/an-exclusive-interview-with-dr-barbara-starfield-medically-caused-death-in-america/), I discovered that she had never been approached by any federal agency to help remedy this tragedy. Nor had the federal government taken any steps on its own to stop the dying.

Ronald Kavanagh’s story, exposed in Truthout, never jumped the rails and made it into the mainstream press as the explosive revelation it was.

Too hot to handle. Too many bodies buried. Too many media outlets bought off by pharmaceutical advertising money. Too close to bought-off government officials. Too likely to shake the pillars of the medical cartel. Too real.

It was the kind of story that could actually wake people up from their mind-controlled slumber.

It still is.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

30th August 2014, 14:43

New Study Throws Into Question Long-Held Belief About Depression (http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113222963/depression-may-not-be-due-to-lack-of-serotonin-082914/)

August 29, 2014

http://www.redorbit.com/media/uploads/2014/08/depression-617x416.jpg
Image Credit: Thinkstock.com (http://www.thinkstockphotos.com/)

Michael Bernstein, American Chemical Society (http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2014/acs-presspac-august-27-2014/new-study-throws-into-question-long-held-belief-about-depression.html)
New evidence puts into doubt the long-standing belief that a deficiency in serotonin (http://www.redorbit.com/topics/serotonin/) — a chemical messenger in the brain — plays a central role in depression (http://www.redorbit.com/topics/depression/). In the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cn500096g), scientists report that mice lacking the ability to make serotonin in their brains (and thus should have been “depressed” by conventional wisdom) did not show depression-like symptoms.

Donald Kuhn and colleagues at the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center and Wayne State University School of Medicine note that depression poses a major public health problem. More than 350 million people suffer from it, according to the World Health Organization, and it is the leading cause of disability across the globe. In the late 1980s, the now well-known antidepressant Prozac (http://www.redorbit.com/topics/prozac/) was introduced. The drug works mainly by increasing the amounts of one substance in the brain — serotonin. So scientists came to believe that boosting levels of the signaling molecule was the key to solving depression. Based on this idea, many other drugs to treat the condition entered the picture. But now researchers know that 60 to 70 percent of these patients continue to feel depressed, even while taking the drugs. Kuhn’s team set out to study what role, if any, serotonin played in the condition.

To do this, they developed “knockout (http://www.redorbit.com/education/reference_library/science_1/genetically_modified_organisms/1112964538/knockout-mouse/)” mice that lacked the ability to produce serotonin in their brains. The scientists ran a battery of behavioral tests.

Interestingly, the mice were compulsive and extremely aggressive, but didn’t show signs of depression-like symptoms. Another surprising finding is that when put under stress, the knockout mice behaved in the same way most of the normal mice did.

Also, a subset of the knockout mice responded therapeutically to antidepressant medications in a similar manner to the normal mice. These findings further suggest that serotonin is not a major player in the condition, and different factors must be involved. These results could dramatically alter how the search for new antidepressants (http://www.redorbit.com/topics/antidepressant/) moves forward in the future, the researchers conclude.

The authors acknowledge funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Wayne State University.

Source: Michael Bernstein, American Chemical Society

Hervé

4th September 2014, 13:46

30 Million Americans On Antidepressants And 21 Other Facts About America's Endless Pharmaceutical Nightmare (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-03/30-million-americans-antidepressants-and-21-other-facts-about-americas-endless-pharm)

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/pictures/picture-5.jpg (http://www.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden)
Submitted by Tyler Durden (http://www.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden) on 09/03/2014 22:35 -0400

Submitted by Michael Snyder of End of The American Dream blog (http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/30-million-americans-on-antidepressants-and-21-other-facts-about-americas-endless-pharmaceutical-nightmare?utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=30-million-americans-on-antidepressants-and-21-other-facts-about-americas-endless-pharmaceutical-nightmare),

Has there ever been a nation more hooked on drugs than the United States? And I am not just talking about illegal drugs – the truth is that the number of Americans addicted to legal drugs is far greater than the number of Americans addicted to illegal drugs. As you will read about below, more than 30 million Americans are currently on antidepressants and doctors in the U.S. wrote more than 250 million prescriptions for painkillers last year. Sadly, most people got hooked on these drugs very innocently. They trusted that their doctors would never prescribe something for them that would be harmful, and they trusted that the federal government would never approve any drugs that were not safe. And once the drug companies get you hooked, they often have you for life.

You see, the reality of the matter is that some of these “legal drugs” are actually some of the most addictive substances on the entire planet. And when they start raising the prices on those drugs, there isn’t much that the addicts can do about it. It is a brutally efficient business model, and the pharmaceutical industry guards their territory fiercely. Very powerful people will often do some really crazy things when there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. The following are 22 facts about America’s endless pharmaceutical nightmare that everyone should know…
#1 According to the New York Times, more than 30 million Americans (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/a-glut-of-antidepressants/) are currently taking antidepressants.

#2 The rate of antidepressant use among middle aged women is far higher than for the population as a whole. At this point, one out of every four women in their 40s and 50s (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/a-glut-of-antidepressants/) is taking an antidepressant medication.

#3 Americans account for about five percent of the global population, but we buy more than 50 percent (http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520441/a-tale-of-two-drugs/) of the pharmaceutical drugs.

#4 Americans also consume a whopping 80 percent (http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/29/health/gupta-unintended-consequences/) of all prescription painkillers.

#5 It is hard to believe, but doctors in the United States write 259 million prescriptions (http://www.naturalnews.com/045873_painkiller_prescriptions_overdose_deaths_opioids.html) for painkillers each year. Prescription painkillers are some of the most addictive legal drugs, and our doctors are serving as enablers for millions up0n millions of Americans that find themselves hooked on drugs that they cannot kick.

#6 Overall, pharmaceutical drug use in America is at an all-time high. According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent (http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2013-rst/7543.html) of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.

#7 According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db42.htm) Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month.

#8 In 2010, the average teen in the United States was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/03/maybe-we-should-blame-teenagers-for-our-health-spending-problems/). Those are the kinds of drugs which treat conditions such as ADHD and depression.

#9 A very disturbing Government Accountability Office report found that approximately one-third (http://abcnews.go.com/US/study-shows-foster-children-high-rates-prescription-psychiatric/story?id=15058380#.Ttf6hlZmlH3) of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug.

#10 An astounding 95 percent (http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/how-the-staggering-cost-of-inventing-new-drugs-is-shaping-the-future-of-medicine/) of the “experimental medicines” that the pharmaceutical industry produces are found not to be safe and are never approved. Of the remaining 5 percent that are approved, we often do not find out that they are deadly to us until decades later.

#11 One study discovered that mothers that took antidepressants during pregnancy were four times more likely (http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/07/04/antidepressant.pregnancy.autism.risk/index.html) to have a baby that developed an autism spectrum disorder.

#12 It has been estimated that prescription drugs kill approximately 200,000 people (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101) in the United States every single year.

#13 An American dies from an unintentional prescription drug overdose every 19 minutes (http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/29/health/gupta-unintended-consequences/). According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta (http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/29/health/gupta-unintended-consequences/), accidental prescription drug overdose is “the leading cause of acute preventable death for Americans”.

#14 In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined (http://www.naturalnews.com/037299_prescription_painkillers_heroin_fatalities.html).

#15 According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-galland-md/why-medication-can-be-dan_b_643690.html) are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.

#16 The number of prescription drug overdose deaths in the United States is five times higher (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-corr/reversing-the-prescriptio_b_5648046.html) than it was back in 1980.

#17 A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent (http://www.mayoclinic.com/print/prescription-drug-abuse/DS01079/METHOD=print&DSECTION=all) of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs.

#18 More than 26 million women over the age of 25 say that they are “using prescription medications for unintended uses (http://blogs.psychcentral.com/addiction-recovery/2014/08/three-unlikely-groups-hit-hard-by-the-prescription-drug-epidemic/)“.

#19 If all of these antidepressants are helping, then why are more Americans killing themselves? The suicide rate for Americans between the ages of 35 and 64 increased by nearly 30 percent (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/health/suicide-rate-rises-sharply-in-us.html?_r=1&) between 1999 and 2010. The number of Americans that die by suicide is now greater than the number of Americans that die as a result of car accidents every year.

#20 Antidepressant use has been linked to mass shootings in America over and over and over again (http://naturalsociety.com/xanax-elliot-roger-linked-mass-shootings/), and yet the mainstream media is eerily quiet about this. Is it because they don’t want to threaten one of their greatest sources of advertising revenue?

#21 The amount of money that the pharmaceutical industry is raking in is astronomical. It has been reported that Americans spent more than 280 billion dollars (http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/8/) on prescription drugs during 2013.
If many of these drugs were not so addictive, the pharmaceutical companies would make a lot less money. And pharmaceutical drug addicts often don’t fit the profile of what we think a “drug addict” would look like. For example, CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/23/us/prescription-drug-heroin-abuse-epidemic/) shared the story of a 55-year-old grandmother named Cynthia Scudo that become addicted to prescription painkillers…
For Scudo, her addiction began — as they all do — innocently enough.

She sought relief from hip pain, possibly caused by scarring from cesarean sections she had delivering several of her children.

Her then-husband recommended a physician.

“There was no physical therapy offered,” she said of the doctor’s visit. “The first reaction was, let’s give you some drugs.”

He put her on OxyContin.

By the second week, she was physically addicted.

She was popping so much of the painkiller and other drugs such as anti-anxiety Valium that they equated to a dosage for three men.
There is lots and lots of money to be made from addiction. In fact, if the U.S. health care system was a totally separate nation it would actually be the 6th largest economy (http://www.businessinsider.com/depressing-facts-about-healthcare-system-2011-6#if-our-health-care-system-were-its-own-country-it-would-be-the-sixth-largest-economy-in-the-world-29) on the entire globe. We are talking about piles of money larger than most people would ever dare to imagine.

And with so much money floating around, it is quite easy for the pharmaceutical industry to buy the cooperation of our politicians and of the media.

Some time when you are watching television in the evening, consciously take note of how often a pharmaceutical commercial comes on.

It has gotten to the point where we are literally being inundated with these ads.

They are already making hundreds of billions of dollars, and they think that there is room for even more growth.

Will they ever be satisfied?

http://www.sott.net/image/s10/204353/full/transparency.jpg

Hervé

13th October 2014, 12:34

ADHD Not a Real Disease, Says Leading Neuroscientist (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/04/02/adhd-real-disease-says-leading-neuroscientist/)

http://www.wakingtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Flickr-adderall-Patrick-Mallahan-III-300x225.jpg (http://www.wakingtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Flickr-adderall-Patrick-Mallahan-III.jpg)

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer Waking Times (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/04/02/adhd-real-disease-says-leading-neuroscientist/)

One of the world’s leading pediatric neuroscientists, Dr. Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D, recently stated publicly that Attention Deficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder (ADHD) is not ‘a real disease,’ and warned of the dangers of giving psycho-stimulant medications to children.

Speaking to the Observer (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/30/children-hyperactivity-not-real-disease-neuroscientist-adhd?CMP=fb_gu), Dr. Perry noted that the disorder known as ADHD (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/03/07/diagnoses-fictitional-illness-add-adhd-jump-dramatically/) should be considered a description of a wide range of symptoms that many children and adults exhibit, most of which are factors that everyone of us displays at some point during our lives.
“It is best thought of as a description. If you look at how you end up with that label, it is remarkable because any one of us at any given time would fit at least a couple of those criteria,” he said.
Dr. Perry is a senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy (http://childtrauma.org/) in Houston, Texas, a highly respected member of the pediatric community, and author of several books on child psychology including, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465056539/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0465056539&linkCode=as2&tag=wakitime09-20), and, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061656798/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0061656798&linkCode=as2&tag=wakitime09-20).

His comments are quite refreshing at a time when diagnoses for ADHD in the UK and the US are sky-rocketing (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/03/07/diagnoses-fictitional-illness-add-adhd-jump-dramatically/) and prescriptions of stimulant medications to children are also rising rapidly, with many parents and concerned activists growing suspicious of the pharmaceutical industry’s motivations in promoting drugs to children. Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse and other mind-altering stimulant medications (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/03/07/run-for-your-life-my-flight-from-the-modern-medical-establishment/) are increasingly prescribed to children between the ages of 4 and 17.

Dr. Perry noted that the use of medications like these may be dangerous to the overall physical and mental development of the child, remarking on studies where these medications were given to animals and were proven detrimental to health.
“If you give psychostimulants to animals when they are young, their rewards systems change. They require much more stimulation to get the same level of pleasure.

“So on a very concrete level they need to eat more food to get the same sensation of satiation. They need to do more high-risk things to get that little buzz from doing something. It is not a benign phenomenon.

“Taking a medication influences systems in ways we don’t always understand. I tend to be pretty cautious about this stuff, particularly when the research shows you that other interventions are equally effective and over time more effective and have none of the adverse effects. For me it’s a no-brainer.”
Given that the problem of ADHD (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/11/25/28-increase-us-children-taking-medication-adhd-cdc-study/) is complex and the term is more of a blanket term used to describe a wide range of behavioral symptoms, it is important to consider what the root causes of many of the symptoms may be before pharmaceutical intervention (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/01/02/mental-handcuffs-kids-view-adhd-medications/) should be considered. Citing potential remedies (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/10/29/acupuncture-used-in-treating-adhd/), Dr. Perry suggested an approach that focuses attention on the parents and the child’s environment, while also recommending natural remedies like Yoga, and improved diet.
“There are number of non-pharmacological therapies which have been pretty effective. A lot of them involve helping the adults that are around children,” he said.

“Part of what happens is if you have an anxious, overwhelmed parent, that is contagious. When a child is struggling, the adults around them are easily disregulated too. This negative feedback process between the frustrated teacher or parent and dis-regulated child can escalate out of control.

“You can teach the adults how to regulate themselves, how to have realistic expectations of the children, how to give them opportunities that are achievable and have success and coach them through the process of helping children who are struggling.

“There are a lot of therapeutic approaches. Some would use somato-sensory therapies like yoga, some use motor activity like drumming.

“All have some efficacy. If you can put together a package of those things: keep the adults more mannered, give the children achievable goals, give them opportunities to regulate themselves, then you are going to minimise a huge percentage of the problems I have seen with children who have the problem labelled as ADHD.”
Many people may disagree with the assertion that ADD/ADHD (http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/01/02/mental-handcuffs-kids-view-adhd-medications/) should not be considered a disease, however, the fact remains that the myriad symptoms that are associated with these increasingly common ‘disorders’ can often be addressed and relieved without creating an addiction and dependency on pharmaceutical medications, which disrupt the mind and body in ways that are not fully understood or even researched.

Ahnung-quay

13th October 2014, 13:20

I had what I would term a moderate depression after the death of my father. I took 5 HTP for a couple of months. It is a natural supplement that stimulates serotonin uptake. There is no phase in or phase out period for it. It helped me get over an emotional hump. I stopped taking it when I started to feel like getting up in the morning.

My daughter was diagnosed with ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) when she was a teen. The school and doctors wanted her to go on an antidepressant which she did for awhile. She stopped taking it because she told me it made her feel like she wasn't herself. She self-treated with marijuana instead.

My daughter is now 29. She doesn't drink alcohol and she only smokes marijuana occasionally. She has a beautiful, healthy daughter.

I have been trying to help raise my granddaughter with emotional competence. This involves helping her identify her feelings when she's upset and providing her with strategies to calm herself down. Also, provides her with a sense of self-esteem. When she stays with me, my granddaughter has no behavior problems whatsoever. We have an understanding.

I told my daughter that if the school system ever tries to label her, I will make sure that she is home schooled.

Ahnung-quay

13th October 2014, 13:46

http://elitedaily.com/envision/artist-creates-self-portraits-on-different-drugs-and-the-results-are-insane-photos/

This man took both big pharma meds and street drugs for a few weeks each. His self-portraits are amazing.

boutreality

14th October 2014, 00:51

PLEASE PLEASE- Anyone affected by mental disorders: Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride has developed the GAPS diet to combat and correct conditions caused by what she terms Gut And Psychology Syndrome. A basic synopsis: toxins from refined foods; drugs; and depending on the amount of healthy flora one is born with, saturate the blood to the point of breaking the blood-brain barrier. (Without enough healthy gut flora this happens sooner. The badies in diet/recreation deplete same.) Also, for more evidence to the Gut- mental health connection, read "The Second Brain" by Dr. Michael Gershon from page 2 of the Preface- "95% of the body's Serotonin is produced in the Gut." NINETY FIVE PERCENT. In light of the world's mental health epidemic, it is impossible to overstate the importance of this line of thinking. Dr McBride thinks a vegan diet is insane- so I developed a Vegan equivalence to her recommendations that worked for me and it worked. It's the only thing that fit with my life's mission/"spiritual path."

We can prognosticate over how this Allopathic approach was first developed by Nazis and is enforced by Pharmaceutical Companies effectively writing the textbooks circuitously by only funding Studies which bare their pre-ordered results until we are blue in the face and the systemic degradations of one bodily system followed by another, each we "treat" with their so-called medicines, or we can do something about it.

The path to health is everyone's to take on their own and for themselves. And suck it up- it's not the easiest way, as it provides no chemical reaction to shut down neurological pathways housing damaging symptoms, but it is the only one that works in a way that does not permanently change who you are.

Hervé

14th October 2014, 10:54

PLEASE PLEASE- Anyone affected by mental disorders: Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride has developed the GAPS diet to combat and correct conditions caused by what she terms Gut And Psychology Syndrome....

[...]

You might want to contribute to this thread on that particular subject: The gut of most disease... NOT what you think! (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?43548-The-gut-of-most-disease...-NOT-what-you-think-) :)

Hervé

1st December 2014, 17:50

Are all psychiatric drugs too unsafe to take? (http://www.naturalnews.com/047784_psychiatric_drugs_mental_health_withdrawals.html)

Wednesday, November 26, 2014
by: Peter Breggin

http://www.naturalnews.com/gallery/640/Medical/Addiction-Addict-Druggie-Pill-Desperate.jpg

(NaturalNews) Psychiatric drugs are more dangerous than you have ever imagined. If you haven't been prescribed one yet, you are among the lucky few. If you or a loved one are taking psychiatric drugs, there is hope; but you need to understand the dangers and how to minimize the risk.

The following overview focuses on longer-term psychiatric drug hazards, although most of them can begin to develop within weeks. They are scientifically documented in my recent book Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (http://www.amazon.com/Psychiatric-Drug-Withdrawal-Prescribers-Therapists/dp/0826108431/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416851062&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Psychiatraic+Drug+Withdrawal) and my medical text Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition (http://breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=45).

Newer or atypical antipsychotic drugs: Risperdal, Invega, Zyprexa, Abilify, Geodon, Seroquel, Latuda, Fanapt and Saphris
Antipsychotic drugs, including both older and newer ones, cause shrinkage (atrophy) of the brain in many human brain scan studies and in animal autopsy studies. The newer atypicals especially cause a well-documented metabolic syndrome including elevated blood sugar, diabetes, increased cholesterol, obesity and hypertension. They also produce dangerous cardiac arrhythmias and unexplained sudden death, and they significantly reduce longevity. In addition, they cause all the problems of the older drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/drugs.html), such as Thorazine and Haldol, including tardive dyskinesia, a largely permanent and sometimes disabling and painful movement disorder caused by brain damage and biochemical disruptions.

Risperdal in particular but others as well cause potentially permanent breast enlargement in young boys and girls. The overall risk of harmful long-term effects from antipsychotic drugs exceeds the capacity of this review. Withdrawal from antipsychotic drugs can cause overwhelming emotional and neurological suffering, as well as psychosis in both children and adults, making complete cessation at times very difficult or impossible.

Despite their enormous risks, the newer antipsychotic drugs are now frequently used off-label to treat anything from anxiety and depression to insomnia and behavior problems in children. Two older antipsychotic drugs, Reglan and Compazine, are used for gastrointestinal problems, and despite small or short-term dosing, they too can cause problems, including tardive dyskinesia.

Antipsychotic drugs masquerading as sleep aids: Seroquel, Abilify, Zyprexa and others
Nowadays, many patients are given medications for insomnia without being told that they are in fact receiving very dangerous antipsychotic drugs. This can happen with any antipsychotic but most frequently occurs with Seroquel, Abilify and Zyprexa. The patient is unwittingly exposed to all the hazards of antipsychotic drugs.

Antipsychotic drugs masquerading as antidepressant and bipolar drugs: Seroquel, Abilify, Zyprexa and others
The FDA has approved some antipsychotic drugs as augmentation for treating depression along with antidepressants. As a result, patients are often misinformed that they are getting an "antidepressant" when they are in fact getting one of the newer antipsychotic drugs, with all of their potentially disastrous adverse effects. Patients are similarly misled by being told that they are getting a "bipolar" drug (http://www.naturalnews.com/drug.html) when it is an antipsychotic drug.

Antidepressants: SSRIs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro and Viibyrd, as well as Effexor, Pristiq, Wellbutrin, Cymbalta and Vivalan
The SSRIs are probably the most fully studied antidepressants, but the following observations apply to most or all antidepressants. These drugs produce long-term apathy and loss of quality of life. Many studies of SSRIs show severe brain abnormalities, such as shrinkage (atrophy) with brain cell death in humans and the growth of new abnormal brain cells in animal and laboratory studies. They frequently produce an apathy syndrome -- a generalized loss of motivation or interest in many or all aspects of life. The SSRIs frequently cause irreversible dysfunction and loss of interest in sexuality, relationship and love. Withdrawal from all antidepressants can cause a wide variety of distressing and dangerous emotional reactions from depression to mania and from suicide to violence. After withdrawal from antidepressants, individuals often experience persistent and distressing mental and neurological impairments. Some people find antidepressant withdrawal to be so distressing that they cannot fully stop taking the drugs.

Benzodiazepine (benzos) anti-anxiety drugs and sleep aids: Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, Valium, Librium, Tranxene and Serax; Dalmane, Doral, Halcion, ProSom and Restoril used as sleep aids
Benzos deteriorate memory and other mental capacities. Human studies demonstrate that they frequently lead to atrophy and dementia after longer-term exposure. After withdrawal, individuals exposed to these drugs also experience multiple persisting problems including memory and cognitive dysfunction, emotional instability, anxiety, insomnia, and muscular and neurological discomforts. Mostly because of severely worsened anxiety and insomnia, many cannot stop taking them and become permanently dependent. This frequently happens after only six weeks of exposure. Any benzo can be prescribed as a sleep aid, but Dalmane, Doral, Halcion, ProSom and Restoril are marketed for that purpose.

Non-benzo sleep aids: Ambien, Intermezzo, Lunesta and Sonata
These drugs pose similar problems to the benzos, including memory and other mental problems, dependence and painful withdrawal. They can cause many abnormal mental states and behaviors, including dangerous sleepwalking. Insufficient data is available concerning brain shrinkage and dementia, but these are likely outcomes considering their similarity to benzos. Recent studies show that these drugs increase death rate, taking away years of life, even when used intermittently for sleep.

Stimulants for ADHD: Adderall, Dexedrine and Vyvanse are amphetamines, and Ritalin, Focalin, and Concerta are methylphenidate
All of these drugs pose similar if not identical long-term dangers to children and adults. In humans, many brain scan studies show that they cause brain tissue shrinkage (atrophy). Animal studies show persisting biochemical changes in the brain. These drugs can lead directly to addiction or increase the risk of abusing cocaine and other stimulants later on in adulthood. They disrupt growth hormone cycles and can cause permanent loss of height in children. Recent studies confirm that children who take these drugs often become lifelong users of multiple psychiatric drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/psychiatric_drugs.html), resulting in shortened lifespan, increased psychiatric hospitalization and criminal incarceration, increased drug addiction, increased suicide and a general decline in quality of life. Withdrawal from stimulants can cause "crashing" with worsened behavior, depression and suicide. Strattera is a newer drug used to treat ADHD. Unlike the other stimulants, it is not an addictive amphetamine, but it too can be dangerously overstimulating. Strattera is more similar to antidepressants in its longer-term risks.

Mood stabilizers: Lithium, Lamictal, Equetro and Depakote
Lithium is the oldest and hence most thoroughly studied. It causes permanent memory and mental dysfunction, including depression, and an overall decline in neurological function and quality of life. It can result in severe neurological dilapidation with dementia, a disastrous adverse drug effect called "syndrome of irreversible lithium-effectuated neurotoxicity" or SILENT. Long-term lithium exposure also causes severe skin disorders, kidney failure and hypothyroidism. Withdrawal from lithium can cause manic-like episodes and psychosis. There is evidence that Depakote can cause abnormal cell growth in the brain. Lamictal has many hazards including life-threatening diseases involving the skin and other organs. Equetro cases life-threatening skin disorders and suppresses white cell production with the risk of death from infections. Withdrawal from Depakote, Lamictal and Equetro can cause seizures and emotional distress.

Summarizing the tragic truth
It is time to face the enormous tragedy of exposing children and adults to any psychiatric drug (http://www.naturalnews.com/psychiatric_drug.html) for months and years. My new video introduces and highlights these risks and my book Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal describes them in detail and documents them with scientific research.

All classes of psychiatric drugs can cause brain damage and lasting mental dysfunction when used for months or years. Although research data is lacking for a few individual drugs in each class, until proven otherwise it is prudent and safest to assume that the risks of brain damage and permanent mental dysfunction apply to every single psychiatric drug. Furthermore, all classes of psychiatric drugs cause serious and dangerous withdrawal reactions, and again it is prudent and safest to assume that any psychiatric drug can cause withdrawal problems.

Widespread misinformation
Difficulty in stopping psychiatric drugs can lead misinformed or unscrupulous health professionals to tell patients that they need to take their drugs for the rest of their lives when they really need to taper and withdraw from them in a careful manner. As described in Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, tapering outside of a hospital often requires psychological and social help, including therapy and emotional support and monitoring by friends or family.

Meanwhile, there is no substantial or convincing evidence that any psychiatric drug is useful longer-term. Psychiatric drug treatment for months or years lacks scientific basis. Therefore, the risk-benefit ratio is enormously lopsided toward the risk.

Science-based conclusions
Whenever possible, psychiatric drugs should be tapered and withdrawn either as an inpatient or as an outpatient with careful clinical supervision and a support network as described in Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal. Keep in mind that it is not only dangerous to take psychiatric drugs -- it can be dangerous to withdraw from them. The safest solution is to avoid starting psychiatric drugs! It is time for a return to psychological, social and educational approaches to emotional suffering and impairment.

Psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin's scientific and educational work has provided the foundation for modern criticism of psychiatric drugs and electroconvulsive therapy. He leads the way in promoting more caring, empathic and effective therapies. His newest book is Guilt, Shame and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions (http://breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=315&Itemid=136). His website is Breggin.com (http://www.breggin.com).

About the author:
Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York. Dr. Breggin criticizes contemporary psychiatric reliance on diagnoses and drugs, and promotes empathic therapeutic relationships. He has been called "the Conscience of Psychiatry." See his website at www.Breggin.com (http://www.Breggin.com)

Gatita

2nd December 2014, 15:14

When I was working on a behavioral unit, one of the primary things we had to observe and document, was extra pyramidal side effects of psychotropic medications. These medications are appropriate and helpful for many people, but they're often over prescribed as a matter of convenience. Your patient screams all night? How about some depakote? In truth, the patient would benefit from better staffing and a care plan that includes daytime activities. If you keep them awake during the day, they're more likely to sleep at night. Or we can over prescribe narcotics and slowly euthanize someone who's considered a problem. I'm speaking from experience. Think twice before putting a loved one in long term care.

Cat

Hervé

7th January 2015, 16:05

http://www.clixtrac.com/banner/188131.jpg (http://www.clixtrac.com/banner/click.php?banner=188131)Psychiatric drugs: Time bombs in the medicine cabinet (http://americanfreepress.net/?p=21865) Peter R. Breggin, MD

American Free Press Newspaper (http://americanfreepress.net/?p=21865)
Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:47 CET

http://www.sott.net/image/s9/184112/medium/SetWidth592_drugs_4.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/s9/184112/full/SetWidth592_drugs_4.jpg)
© unknown, Prescriptions for anti-psychotic drugs handed out like candy.

Psychiatric drugs are more dangerous than you have ever imagined. If you haven't been prescribed one yet, you are among the lucky few. If you or a loved one are taking psychiatric drugs, there is hope, but you need to understand the dangers and how to minimize the risk.

Anti-psychotic drugs, including both older and newer ones, have been shown in many human brain scan studies and in animal autopsy studies to cause shrinkage (atrophy) of the brain. The newer "atypicals" especially cause a well-documented metabolic syndrome including elevated blood sugar, diabetes, increased cholesterol, obesity and hypertension. They also produce dangerous cardiac arrhythmias and unexplained sudden death, and they significantly reduce longevity. In addition, they cause all the problems of the older drugs, such as Thorazine and Haldol, including tardive dyskinesia, a largely permanent and sometimes disabling, painful movement disorder caused by brain damage and biochemical disruptions.

Despite their enormous risks, the newer anti-psychotic drugs are now frequently used off label to treat conditions from anxiety and depression to insomnia and behavior problems in children. Two older anti-psychotic drugs, Reglan and Compazine, are used for gastrointestinal problems, and despite low or short-term dosing, they too can cause problems, including tardive dyskinesia.

Nowadays, many patients are given medications for insomnia without being told that they are in fact receiving very dangerous anti-psychotic drugs. This can happen with any antipsychotic but most frequently occurs with Seroquel, Abilify and Zyprexa. The patient is unwittingly exposed to all the hazards of antipsychotic drugs.

Benzodiazepines (benzos), commonly prescribed as anti-anxiety drugs and sleep aids, deteriorate memory and other mental capacities. Human studies demonstrate that they frequently lead to atrophy and dementia after longer-term exposure. After withdrawal, individuals exposed to these drugs also experience multiple persisting problems including memory and cognitive dysfunction, emotional instability, anxiety, insomnia and muscular and neurological discomforts.

Mostly because of severely worsened anxiety and insomnia,many cannot stop taking them and become permanently dependent. This frequently happens after only six weeks of exposure. Any benzo can be prescribed as a sleep aid, but Dalmane, Doral, Halcion, ProSom and Restoril are marketed for that purpose.

"Non-benzo" sleep aids, such as Ambien, Intermezzo, Lunesta and Sonata, pose similar problems to the benzos, including memory and other mental problems, dependence and painful withdrawal. They can cause many abnormal mental states and behaviors, including dangerous sleepwalking.

Insufficient data is available concerning whether they lead to brain shrinkage and dementia, but these are likely outcomes considering their similarity to benzos. Recent studies show that these drugs increase death rate, taking away years of life, even when used intermittently for sleep.

It is time to face the enormous tragedy of exposing children and adults to any psychiatric drug for lengthy periods.

All classes of psychiatric drugs can cause brain damage and lasting mental dysfunction when used for months or years. Although research data is lacking for a few individual drugs in each class, until proven otherwise it is prudent and safest to assume that the risks of brain damage and permanent mental dysfunction apply to every single psychiatric drug. Furthermore, all classes of psychiatric drugs cause serious and dangerous withdrawal reactions, and again, it is prudent and safest to assume that any psychiatric drug can cause withdrawal problems.

Meanwhile, there is no substantial or convincing evidence that any psychiatric drug is useful longer-term. Psychiatric drug treatment for months or years lacks scientific basis. Therefore, the risk-benefit ratio is enormously lopsided toward the risk.

The safest solution is to avoid starting psychiatric drugs. It is time for a return to psychological, social and educational approaches to emotional suffering and impairment.

Peter R. Breggin (http://www.breggin.com), M.D., a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York, has been called "The Conscience of Psychiatry" for his many decades of successful efforts to reform the mental health field. His scientific and educational work has provided the foundation for modern criticism of psychiatric drugs and ECT, and leads the way in promoting more caring and effective therapies. He has authored dozens of scientific articles and more than 20 books.

luKsQaj0hzs

Hervé

7th January 2015, 16:27

Depression: It's not your Serotonin (http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/depression-it-s-not-your-serotonin)

Dr. Kelly Brogan, M.D.
Greenmedinfo.com (http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/depression-it-s-not-your-serotonin)
Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:34 CET

http://www.sott.net/image/s11/221469/large/serotonin_deficiency.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/s11/221469/full/serotonin_deficiency.jpg)

Millions believe depression is caused by 'serotonin deficiency,' but where is the science in support of this theory?

"Depression is a serious medical condition that may be due to a chemical imbalance, and Zoloft works to correct this imbalance." Herein lies the serotonin myth.
As one of only two countries in the world that permits direct to consumer advertising, you have undoubtedly been subjected to promotion of the "cause of depression." A cause that is not your fault, but rather; a matter of too few little bubbles passing between the hubs in your brain! Don't add that to your list of worries, though, because there is a convenient solution awaiting you at your doctor's office...

What if I told you that, in 6 decades of research, the serotonin (or norepinephrine, or dopamine) theory of depression and anxiety has not achieved scientific credibility?

You'd want some supporting arguments for this shocking claim.

So, here you go:

The Science of Psychiatry is Myth
Rather than some embarrassingly reductionist, one-deficiency-one-illness-one-pill model of mental illness, contemporary exploration of human behavior has demonstrated that we may know less than we ever thought we did. And that what we do know about root causes of mental illness seems to have more to do with the concept of evolutionary mismatch (http://kellybroganmd.com/video/ancestral-health-symposium-presentation-2014/) than with genes and chemical deficiencies.

In fact, a meta-analysis (http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=184107) of over 14,000 patients and Dr. Insel, head of the NIMH, had this to say:

"Despite high expectations, neither genomics nor imaging has yet impacted the diagnosis or treatment of the 45 million Americans with serious or moderate mental illness each year." To understand what imbalance is, we must know what balance looks like, and neuroscience, to date, has not characterized the optimal brain state, nor how to even assess for it.

A New England Journal of Medicine review (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15738959) on Major Depression, stated:

" ... numerous studies of norepinephrine and serotonin metabolites in plasma, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid as well as postmortem studies of the brains of patients with depression, have yet to identify the purported deficiency reliably."The data has poked holes in the theory and even the field of psychiatry itself is putting down its sword. One of my favorite essays by Lacasse and Leo (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252Fjournal.pmed.0020392) has compiled sentiments from influential thinkers in the field - mind you, these are conventional clinicians and researchers in mainstream practice - who have broken rank, casting doubt on the entirety of what psychiatry has to offer around antidepressants:

http://www.sott.net/image/s11/221470/large/screen1.jpg (http://www.sott.net/image/s11/221470/full/screen1.jpg)

Humble Origins of a Powerful Meme
In the 1950s, reserpine, initially introduced to the US market as an anti-seizure medication, was noted to deplete brain serotonin stores in subjects, with resultant lethargy and sedation. These observations colluded with the clinical note that an anti-tuberculosis medication, iproniazid, invoked mood changes after five months of treatment in 70% of a 17 patient cohort. Finally, Dr. Joseph Schildkraut threw fairy dust on these mumbles and grumbles in 1965 with his hypothetical manifesto entitled The Catecholamine Hypothesis of Affective Disorders stating:

"At best, drug-induced affective disturbances can only be considered models of the natural disorders, while it remains to be demonstrated that the behavioral changes produced by these drugs have any relation to naturally occurring biochemical abnormalities which might be associated with the illness." Contextualized by the ripeness of a field struggling to establish biomedical legitimacy (beyond the therapeutic lobotomy!), psychiatry was ready for a rebranding, and the pharmaceutical industry was all too happy to partner in the effort.

Of course, the risk inherent in "working backwards" in this way (noting effects and presuming mechanisms) is that we tell ourselves that we have learned something about the body, when in fact, all we have learned is that patented synthesized chemicals have effects on our behavior. This is referred to as the drug-based model by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff (http://joannamoncrieff.com/2014/05/01/the-chemical-imbalance-theory-of-depression-still-promoted-but-still-unfounded/). In this model, we acknowledge that antidepressants have effects, but that these effects in no way are curative or reparative.

The most applicable analogy is that of the woman with social phobia who finds that drinking two cocktails eases her symptoms. One could imagine how, in a 6 week randomized trial, this "treatment" could be found efficacious and recommended for daily use and even prevention of symptoms. How her withdrawal symptoms after 10 years of daily compliance could lead those around her to believe that she "needed" the alcohol to correct an imbalance. This analogy is all too close to the truth.

Running With Broken Legs
Psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Carlat has said:

"And where there is a scientific vacuum, drug companies are happy to insert a marketing message and call it science. As a result, psychiatry has become a proving ground for outrageous manipulations of science in the service of profit." So, what happens when we let drug companies tell doctors what science is? We have an industry and a profession working together to maintain a house of cards theory in the face of contradictory evidence.

We have a global situation (http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/2/1/9#sec3) in which increases in prescribing are resulting in increases in severity of illness (including numbers and length of episodes) relative to those who have never been treated with medication.

To truly appreciate the breadth of evidence that states antidepressants are ineffective and unsafe, we have to get behind the walls that the pharmaceutical companies erect. We have to unearth unpublished data, data that they were hoping to keep in the dusty catacombs.

A now famous 2008 study (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa065779) in the New England Journal of Medicine by Turner et al sought to expose the extent of this data manipulation. They demonstrated that, from 1987 to 2004, 12 antidepressants were approved based on 74 studies. Thirty-eight were positive, and 37 of these were published. Thirty-six were negative (showing no benefit), and 3 of these were published as such while 11 were published with a positive spin (always read the data not the author's conclusion!), and 22 were unpublished.

In 1998 tour de force, Dr. Irving Kirsch, an expert on the placebo effect, published a meta (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1999-11094-001)-analysis (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1999-11094-001)of 3,000 patients who were treated with antidepressants, psychotherapy, placebo, or no treatment and found that only 27% of the therapeutic response was attributable to the drug's action.

This was followed up by a 2008 review (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045), which invoked the Freedom of Information Act to obtain access to unpublished studies, finding that, when these were included, antidepressants outperformed placebo in only 20 of 46 trials (less than half!), and that the overall difference between drugs and placebos was 1.7 points on the 52 point Hamilton Scale. This small increment is clinically insignificant, and likely accounted for by medication side effects strategically employed (sedation or activation).

When active placebos were used, the Cochrane (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14974002) database found that differences between drugs and placebos disappeared, given credence to the assertion that inert placebos inflate perceived drug effects.

The finding of tremendous placebo effect in the treatment groups was also echoed in two different meta-analyses by Khan (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10768687) et al who found a 10% difference between placebo and antidepressant efficacy, and comparable suicide rates. The most recent trial (http://kellybroganmd.com/snippet/power-belief-new-placebo-data/) examining the role of "expectancy" or belief in antidepressant effect, found that patients lost their perceived benefit if they believed that they might be getting a sugar pill even if they were continued on their formerly effective treatment dose of Prozac.

The largest, non-industry funded study (http://www.edc.gsph.pitt.edu/stard/), costing the public $35 million dollars, followed 4000 patients treated with Celexa (not blinded, so they knew what they were getting), and found that half of them improved at 8 weeks. Those that didn't were switched to Wellbutrin, Effexor, or Zoloft OR "augmented" with Buspar or Wellbutrin.

Guess what? It didn't matter what was done, because they remitted at the same unimpressive rate of 18-30% regardless with only 3% of patients in remission at 12 months.

How could it be that medications like Wellbutrin, which purportedly primarily disrupt dopamine signaling, and medications like Stablon which theoretically enhances the reuptake of serotonin, both work to resolve this underlying imbalance? Why would thyroid, benzodiazepines, beta blockers, and opiates also "work"? And what does depression have in common with panic disorder, phobias, OCD, eating disorders, and social anxiety that all of these diagnoses would warrant the same exact chemical fix?

Alternative options
As a holistic clinician, one of my bigger pet peeves is the use of amino acids and other nutraceuticals with "serotonin-boosting" claims. These integrative practitioners have taken a page from the allopathic playbook and are seeking to copy-cat what they perceive antidepressants to be doing.

The foundational "data" for the modern serotonin theory of mood utilizes tryptophan depletion methods which involve feeding volunteers amino acid mixtures without tryptophan and are rife with complicated interpretations.

Simply put, there has never been a study that demonstrates that this intervention causes mood changes in any patients who have not been treated with antidepressants.

In an important paper entitled Mechanism of acute tryptophan depletion: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21339754) Is it only serotonin? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21339754), van Donkelaar et al caution clinicians and researchers about the interpretation of tryptophan research. They clarify that there are many potential effects of this methodology, stating:

"In general, several findings support the fact that depression may not be caused solely by an abnormality of 5-HT function, but more likely by a dysfunction of other systems or brain regions modulated by 5-HT or interacting with its dietary precursor. Similarly, the ATD method does not seem to challenge the 5-HT system per se, but rather triggers 5HT-mediated adverse events." So if we cannot confirm the role of serotonin in mood and we have good reason to believe that antidepressant effect is largely based on belief, then why are we trying to "boost serotonin"?

Causing imbalances
All you have to do is spend a few minutes on survivingantidepressants.org (http://survivingantidepressants.org/) or beyondmeds.com (http://beyondmeds.com/) to appreciate that we have created a monster. Millions of men, women, and children the world over are suffering, without clinical guidance (because this is NOT a part of medical training) to discontinue psychiatric meds. I have been humbled, as a clinician who seeks to help these patients, by what these medications are capable of. Psychotropic withdrawal can make alcohol and heroin detox look like a breeze.

An important analysis (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8561194) by the former director of the NIMH makes claims that antidepressants "create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions" causing the body to compensate through a series of adaptations which occur after "chronic administration" leading to brains that function, after a few weeks, in a way that is "qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state."

Changes in beta-adrenergic receptor density, serotonin autoreceptor sensitivity, and serotonin turnover all struggle to compensate for the assault of the medication.

Andrews (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21779273), et al., calls this "oppositional tolerance," and demonstrate through a careful meta-analysis of 46 studies demonstrating that patient's risk of relapse is directly proportionate to how "perturbing" the medication is, and is always higher than placebo (44.6% vs 24.7%). They challenge the notion that findings of decreased relapse on continued medication represent anything other than drug-induced response to discontinuation of a substance to which the body has developed tolerance. They go a step further to add:

"For instance, in naturalistic studies, unmedicated patients have much shorter episodes, and better long-term prospects, than medicated patients. Several of these studies have found that the average duration of an untreated episode of major depression is 12 - 13 weeks." Harvard (http://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Discontinuing%2520antidepressant%2520treatment%2520in%2520major%2520depression.PDF) researchers (http://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Discontinuing%2520antidepressant%2520treatment%2520in%2520major%2520depression.PDF) also concluded that at least fifty percent of drug-withdrawn patients relapsed within 14 months. In fact:

"Long-term antidepressant use may be depressogenic . . . it is possible that antidepressant agents modify the hardwiring of neuronal synapses (which) not only render antidepressants ineffective but also induce a resident, refractory depressive state." So, when your doctor says, "You see, look how sick you are, you shouldn't have stopped that medication," you should know that the data suggests that your symptoms are withdrawal, not relapse.

Longitudinal studies (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1313290/) demonstrate poor functional outcomes for those treated with 60% of patients still meeting diagnostic criteria at one year (despite transient improvement within the first 3 months). When baseline severity is controlled for, two prospective studies support a worse outcome in those prescribed medication:

One (http://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Outcome%2520of%2520anxiety%2520and%2520depressive%2520disorders%2520in%2520primary%2520care.PDF) in which the never-medicated group experienced a 62% improvement by six months, whereas the drug-treated patients experienced only a 33% reduction in symptoms, and another (http://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The%2520effects%2520of%2520detection%2520and%2520treatment%2520on%2520the%2520outcome%2520of%2520maj or%2520depressoin%2520in%2520primary%2520care.PDF) WHO study of depressed patients in 15 cities which found that, at the end of one year, those who weren't exposed to psychotropic medications enjoyed much better "general health"; that their depressive symptoms were much milder"; and that they were less likely to still be "mentally ill." I'm not done yet. In a retrospective 10-year study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10771465) in the Netherlands, 76% of those with unmedicated depression recovered without relapse relative to 50% of those treated.

Unlike the mess of contradictory studies around short-term effects, there are no comparable studies that show a better outcome in those prescribed antidepressants long term.

First Do No Harm
So, we have a half-baked theory in a vacuum of science that that pharmaceutical industry raced to fill. We have the illusion of short-term efficacy and assumptions about long-term safety. But are these medications actually killing people?

The answer is yes.
Unequivocally, antidepressants cause suicidal and homicidal behavior. The Russian Roulette of patients vulnerable to these "side effects" is only beginning to be elucidated (http://www.dovepress.com/antidepressant-induced-akathisia-related-homicides-associated-with-dim-peer-reviewed-article-PGPM) and may have something to do with genetic variants around metabolism of these chemicals. Dr. David Healy has worked tirelessly (http://davidhealy.org/articles/#journalpublications) to expose the data that implicates antidepressants in suicidality and violence, maintaining a database for reporting, writing, and lecturing (http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/02/prescription-only-homicide-and-violence/) about cases of medication-induced death that could make your soul wince.

What about our most vulnerable?
I have countless patients in my practice who report new onset of suicidal ideation within weeks of starting an antidepressant. In a population where there are only 2 randomized trials, I have grave concerns about postpartum women who are treated with antidepressants before more benign and effective interventions (http://kellybroganmd.com/article/causes-postpartum-depression/) such as dietary modification and thyroid treatment. Hold your heart as you read through these (http://www.ssristories.org/category/altered-mental-state/postpartum-reaction/) reports (http://www.ssristories.org/category/altered-mental-state/postpartum-reaction/) of women who took their own and their childrens' lives while treated with medications.

Then there is the use of these medications in children as young as 2 years old. How did we ever get the idea that this was a safe and effective treatment for this demographic? Look no further than data like Study 329 (http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/legacy/2012/07/02/us-complaint.pdf), which cost Glaxo Smith Klein 3 billion dollars for their efforts to promote antidepressants to children. These efforts required ghost-written and manipulated data that suppressed a signal of suicidality, falsely represented Paxil as outperforming placebo, and contributes to an irrepressible mountain (http://fearlessparent.org/school-violence-psych-meds-and-our-children/) of (http://fearlessparent.org/school-violence-psych-meds-and-our-children/) harm (http://fearlessparent.org/school-violence-psych-meds-and-our-children/) done to our children by the field of psychiatry.

RIP Monoamine Theory
As Moncrieff and Cohen (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252Fjournal.pmed.0030240)so succinctly state:

"Our analysis indicates that there are no specific antidepressant drugs, that most of the short-term effects of antidepressants are shared by many other drugs, and that long-term drug treatment with antidepressants or any other drugs has not been shown to lead to long-term elevation of mood. We suggest that the term "antidepressant" should be abandoned." So, where do we turn?
The field of psychoneuroimmunology (http://kellybroganmd.com/article/new-psychiatry-psychoneuroimmunology/) dominates the research as an iconic example of how medicine must surpass its own simplistic boundaries if we are going to begin to chip away at the some 50% of Americans who will struggle with mood symptoms, 11% of whom will be medicated for it.

There are times in our evolution as a cultural species when we need to unlearn what we think we know. We have to move out of the comfort of certainty and into the freeing light of uncertainty. It is from this space of acknowledged unknowing that we can truly grow. From my vantage point, this growth will encompass a sense of wonder - both a curiosity about what symptoms of mental illness may be telling us about our physiology and spirit, as well as a sense of humbled awe at all that we do not yet have the tools to appreciate. For this reason, honoring our co-evolution with the natural world, and sending the body a signal of safety (http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-11688/want-to-stop-your-antidepressant-heres-how.html) through movement, diet, meditation, and environmental detoxification represents our most primal and most powerful tool for healing.

Dr. Brogan is allopathically and holistically trained in the care of women at all stages of the reproductive cycle experiencing mood and anxiety symptoms, including premenstrual dysphoria (PMDD), pregnancy and postpartum symptomatology, as well as menopause-related illness.

Learn more by taking Dr. Kelly Brogan's E-Course Beyond Medication (http://store.greenmedinfo.com/product/beyond-medication-mental-health-holistic-healing-ecourse), or receive it free by becoming a member (http://www.greenmedinfo.com/page/greenmedinfo-memberships) of Greenmedinfo.com today.

SOTT Comment: (http://www.sott.net/article/290915-Depression-Its-not-your-Serotonin) Read more about the drugging of America's youth and some additional mind-altering facts (http://www.sott.net/article/274073-The-drugging-of-America-summarized-in-19-mind-altering-facts) about legal drug addiction in the U.S:

The Psychiatric Drugging of Infants and Toddlers: An American Phenomenon (http://)
Number of 0-5 year olds on psychotropic drugs skyrockets 42% since 2009 (http://www.sott.net/article/266960-Number-of-0-5-year-olds-on-psychotropic-drugs-skyrockets-42-since-2009)
Turning classrooms into labs: ADHD diagnosis and the druggingof kids (http://www.sott.net/article/269532-Turning-classrooms-into-labs-ADHD-diagnosis-and-the-drugging-of-kids)
Big Pharma and Wall Street Profit from the Drugging of Children and Elderly (http://www.sott.net/article/245646-BigPharma-and-Wall-Street-Profit-from-the-Drugging-of-Children-and-Elderly)
Mainstream Media and Medical Journals Pushing ADHD Drugs for Six-year-olds (http://www.naturalnews.com/036340_ADHD_drugs_children_mainstream_media.html)

Also watch the Documentary Generation RX (http://www.generationrxfilm.com/trailer.htm) for more disturbing facts about the side effects that SSRI's have on children, adolescents and young adults:

In the 1990s, Director/ Producer Kevin P. Miller began producing documentaries about the great social issues of our time. Miller investigates collusion between pharmaceutical manufacturers and their regulatory watchdogs at the FDA, and also questions whether we have forced millions of children onto pharmaceutical drugs for commercial rather than scientific reasons.Additional information about the placebo effect:

Placebos, nocebos, and the symptoms of healing (http://www.sott.net/article/254631-Placebos-nocebos-and-the-symptoms-of-healing)

The placebo effect is one of the most misunderstood, misrepresented, misused and maligned effects of health and medical products.

Placebo is an interesting word, the definition of which helps to create a false image of the placebo effect. Placebo, according to Webster, is "a usually pharmacologically inert preparation prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on a disorder". Written as if placebos do not provide physical relief. But they do.

Many doctors prescribe 'placebos' because they recognize that mental relief is an important aspect of physical relief. Even if they don't understand the details. These doctors are not 'deceiving', they are acting in the best interests of the patient. They often prescribe 'patent medicines' that, in theory, will have no effect on the condition, rather than an alternative medicine - because paying more, and going to a pharmacy, increases the placebo effect.

Study shows placebos work, even when patients know they're phony (http://www.sott.net/article/220239-Study-shows-placebos-work-even-when-patients-know-they-re-phony)
Placebo Works as Well as Antidepressant Drugs (http://www.sott.net/article/208942-Placebo-Works-as-Well-as-Antidepressant-Drugs)
Almost half of U.S. doctors use placebos (http://www.sott.net/article/168018-Almost-half-of-US-doctors-use-placebos)
P (http://)lacebo effect: Faith-based healing (http://www.sott.net/article/150795-Placebo-effect-Faith-based-healing)

Hervé

9th January 2015, 20:02

CIA mind-control program: did it really end?
(https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/cia-mind-control-program-did-it-really-end/)
Jan9 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/cia-mind-control-program-did-it-really-end/), 2014 by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/)
http://www.nomorefakenews.com

Follow me on a few twists and turns down the rabbit hole.

Start with this untitled June 27, 1994, document, stored at the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.

It was written by a CIA advisory committee, and forwarded to the Presidential Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which was preparing public hearings in 1994.

Here is a key quote:

“In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA engaged in an extensive program of human experimentation [MKULTRA], using drugs, psychological, and other means, in search of techniques to control human behavior for counterintelligence and covert action purposes… Most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by the order of then DCI Richard Helms…Helms testified that he agreed to destroy the records because ‘there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and that these would be sensitive in this kind of a thing but that since the [mind-control] program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will.’” Helms was not only admitting he destroyed the records, he was stating that the MKULTRA program deployed, through contracts, “outsiders” to carry out mind control experiments. He was determined to protect the outsiders, to keep their identity and work secret. He was also dedicated to preventing these people from exposing the nature of their mind-control work.

Subsequently, some of these “outsiders” have been revealed. But no one really knows how deep, far, and wide the CIA penetrated into academic and research communities to enable MKULTRA.

Helms also stated that MKULTRA was ended. There is no reason to believe this. Therefore, his justification for destroying huge numbers of documents was absurd.

For example: Back in the early 1990s, I interviewed John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book that exposed the existence of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.

John Marks related the following facts to me. He had filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the CIA for documents relating to their mind-control program. He got nothing back.

Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent him 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”

I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.

But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.

Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

Marks continued to press the CIA for more MKULTRA information. He explained to me what then happened. A CIA official told him the following: in 1962, after ten years of mind-control experiments, the whole program—which supposedly was shut down—had actually been shifted over to another internal CIA department, the Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The ORD had a hundred boxes of information on their MKULTRA work, and there was no way under the sun, Marks was told, that he was ever going to get his hands on any of that. It was over. It didn’t matter how many FOIA requests Marks filed. He was done. The door was shut. Goodbye.

The CIA went darker than it ever had before. No leaks of any kind would be permitted.

In case there is any doubt about it, the idea of relying on the CIA to admit what it has done in the mind-control area, what it is doing, and what it will do should be put to bed by John Mark’s statements. The CIA always has been, and will continue to be, a rogue agency beyond the reach of the law.

So…can we go back in time and find evidence that the CIA embraced goals that would take their mind-control research right up through the present day?

Yes.

Goal: develop drugs to transform individuals…and even, by implication, society.

Drug research going far beyond the usual brief descriptions of MKULTRA.

The intention is there, in the record.

A CIA document was included in the transcript of the 1977 US Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control program.

The document is found in Appendix C, starting on page 166. It’s simply labeled “Draft,” dated 5 May 1955.

It begins: “A portion of the Research and Development Program of [CIA’s] TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:”

What followed was a list of hoped-for drugs and their uses.

The range of CIA intentions was stunning.

Some of my comments gleaned from studying that drug list:

The CIA wanted to find substances which would “promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness.” Serious consideration should be given to the idea that psychiatric medications, food additives, herbicides, and industrial chemicals (like fluorides) would eventually satisfy that requirement.

The CIA wanted to find chemicals that “would produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way.” This suggests many possibilities—among them the use of drugs to fabricate diseases and thereby give the false impression of germ-caused epidemics.

The CIA wanted to find drugs that would “produce amnesia.” Ideal for discrediting whistleblowers, dissidents, certain political candidates, and other investigators. (Scopolamine, for example.)

The CIA wanted to discover drugs which would produce “paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.” A way to make people decline in health as if from diseases.

The CIA wanted to develop drugs that would “alter personality structure” and thus induce a person’s dependence on another person. How about dependence in general? For instance, dependence on institutions, governments?

The CIA wanted to discover chemicals that would “lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men.” Sounds like a general description of the devolution of society.

As you read the list yourself, you’ll see more implications/possibilities.

Here, from 1955, are the types of drugs the MKULTRA men at the CIA were looking for. These are direct quotes from the document:

Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.

Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.

Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.

Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing”.

Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.

Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.

Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.

Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.

Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.

A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.

Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.

Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.

A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.

That’s the list.

At the end of this 1955 CIA document, the author [unnamed] makes this remark: “In practice, it has been possible to use outside cleared contractors for the preliminary phases of this [research] work…” That’s further evidence that the CIA mind control program, going forward, would rely on and use a large number of non-CIA researchers—evidence of which, as noted above, was destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms in 1973.

If you examine the full range of psychiatric drugs developed since 1955, you’ll see that a number of them fit the CIA’s agenda.

Speed-type chemicals, which addle the brain over the long term, to treat so-called ADHD.

Anti-psychotic drugs, to render patients more and more dependent on others (and government) as they sink into profound disability and incur motor brain damage. Dr. Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychiatry, places the number of Americans whose brains have been damaged by these anti-psychotic drugs at 300,000, at minimum.

The SSRI antidepressants, like Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft, which produce extreme and debilitating highs and lows—and also push people over the edge into committing violence.

Tranquilizers, which debilitate the thinking process for millions of users.

These drugs drag the whole society down into lower and lower levels of consciousness and action.

If that’s the goal of a very powerful and clandestine government agency…it’s succeeding.

And now, using the pretext of lone-shooter mass violence (Aurora, Sandy Hook, etc.), the US government, out in the open, is funding massive research to “map the brain,” in order to…what?

Control the brain. “Return it to a state of normalcy.”

Meaning: create a society in which obedience to authority is the prime human value.

Every day, the neuro-psychiatric establishment is making the CIA’s 1955 dream come true.

MKULTRA mind control dead and buried? Not a chance.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

13th January 2015, 16:03

At the root of why psych drugs became the choice WMD:

US musicians drafted into the CIA’s MKULTRA (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/us-musicians-drafted-into-the-cias-mkultra/)

Jan12 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/us-musicians-drafted-into-the-cias-mkultra/), 2015 by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/)
NoMoreFakeNews.com (http://nomorefakenews.com/)

The CIA mind-control program is medically based. It employs doctors and psychiatrists and researchers. This isn’t just some small group of fringe whackos who have an idea about altering human behavior.

CIA contractors in the private sector resonate with the goals of the program, because they are already trying, in their own way, to change human reaction and thought.

They don’t need a nudge. MKULTRA isn’t foreign territory for them.

In fact, the entire field of psychiatry is about mind control: the diagnosis of arbitrarily labeled mental disorders; the application of toxic drugs to alter brain response, modulate neurotransmitters, and affect hormonal outputs; and the propagandizing of the population to accept the notion that everyone will experience a mental disorder in his/her lifetime.

Biological/chemical psychiatry is, in its current form, a stunning version of MKULTRA right out in the open, with the blessing and backing of national governments, court systems, prisons, mainstream media, and academia.

Here is a bit of US history that illustrates the reach of the CIA’s infamous mind-control program, MKULTRA.

Some would say the 1940s and 50s were the most vibrant and innovative period in the history of jazz.

During those years, it was common knowledge that musicians who were busted for drug use were shipped, or volunteered to go, to Lexington, Kentucky. Lex was the first Narcotics Farm and US Health Dept. drug treatment hospital in the US.

According to diverse sources, here’s a partial list of the reported “hundreds” of jazz musicians who went to Lex: Red Rodney, Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Elvin Jones, Zoot Sims, Lee Morgan, Tadd Dameron, Stan Levey, Jackie McLean.

It’s also reported that Ray Charles was there, and William Burroughs, Peter Lorre, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

It was supposed to be a rehab center. A place for drying out.

But it was something else too. Lex was used by the CIA as one of its MKULTRA centers for experimentation on inmates.

The doctor in charge of this mind control program was Harris Isbell. Ironically, Isbell was, at the same time, a member of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs.

Isbell gave LSD and other psychedelics to inmates at Lex.

At Sandoz labs in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, also synthesized psilocybin from magic mushrooms. The CIA got some of this new synthetic from Hofmann and gave it to Isbell so he could try it out on inmates at Lex.

MKULTRA was a CIA program whose goal was to control minds…in part through the use of drugs.

Isbell worked at Lex from the 1940s through 1963. It is reported that in one experiment, Isbell gave LSD to 7 inmates for 77 consecutive days. At 4 times the normal dosage. That is a chemical hammer of incredible proportions.

To induce inmates to join this drug experiment, they were offered the drug of their choice, which in many cases was heroin. So at a facility dedicated to drying out and rehabbing addicts, addicts were subjected to MKULTRA experiments and THEN a re-establishment of their former habit.

Apparently as many as 800 different drugs were sent to Isbell by the CIA or CIA allies to use on patients at Lex. Two of the allies? The US Navy and the US National Institute of Mental Health—further proof that MKULTRA extended beyond the CIA.

In another MKULTRA experiment at Lex, nine men were strapped down on tables. They were injected with psilocybin. Lights were beamed at their eyes–a typical mind control component.

During Isbell’s tenure, no one knows how many separate experiments he ran on the inmates. No one knows what other mind-control programming he attempted to insert along with the drugs.

As I say, Lex was the main stop for drying out for NY jazz musicians. How many of them were taken into these MKULTRA programs?

As Martin Lee explains in his book, Acid Dreams, “It became an open secret…that if the [heroin] supply got tight [on the street], you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell’s whacky drug experiments. (Small wonder Lexington had a return rate of 90%.)”

A June 15, 1999, Counterpunch article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp— US Official Poisoner Dies,” contains these quotes on Dr. Isbell:

“Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell’s center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell’s patients.

“Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell’s research notes indicates that he gave the men ‘quadruple’ the ‘normal’ dosages. The doctor marveled at the men’s apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that ‘this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type.’

“In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.”
If you think these experiments were so extreme they bear no resemblance to modern psychiatry, think again. Thorazine, the first so-called anti-psychotic drug, was researched on the basis of its ability to make humans profoundly quiescent and passive. Electroshock and lobotomy are straight-out torture techniques that also destroy parts of the brain. SSRI antidepressants increase violent behavior, including homicide. Among its many documented effects, Ritalin can induce hallucinations and paranoia.

Well, all these effects are part and parcel of the original (and ongoing) MKULTRA.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

22nd January 2015, 14:47

Manufacturing the Deadhead: A product of social engineering… (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/)

By Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin

May 13, 2013; Version 3.7, May 17, 2013

In 2012 Jan Irvin made an important discovery. In the course of re-publishing The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro,[1] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn1) Irvin had been researching the letters of one of Allegro’s most prominent critics, Gordon Wasson, at various university archives (including Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford) when he came across primary documents--letters actually written by Wasson--showing that he had worked with the CIA.[2] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn2)

Though Gordon Wasson was both chairman for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Vice President of Public Relations for J.P. Morgan Bank, he is most famous as the individual who “discovered”, or more accurately popularized, magic mushrooms. An article in Life magazine described fantastic visions and experiences Wasson claimed to have had while under their influence (see Life, May 13, 1957 – Seeking the Magic Mushroom). Wasson’s claims were the first description of the effects of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms presented to the general public.

Irvin saw troubling implications in his discovery. He was aware, of course, of the CIA’s infamous Project MK-ULTRA, in which the organization had given LSD to unsuspecting U.S. citizens. He also knew of the many conspiracy theories claiming that the government has been somehow involved with the creation of the “drug culture.” He was also aware of Dave McGowan's research on the drug and music movement that had come out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960‘s, which showed that many of the “rock idols” who created it were the children of members of military intelligence.[3] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn3)

So the fact that a member of the CIA had also been involved with the discovery of Psilocybe mushrooms fit into a large collection of troubling linkages between the American government and the drug culture that emerged during the 1960’s. Irvin decided to do further research into the government's involvement with the “psychedelic movement”. An obvious question he hoped to answer was: Had Wasson been somehow involved with MK-ULTRA?

During this research, Irvin came in contact with another scholar, Joe Atwill, author of Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. Atwill’s research into the origins of Christianity had led him to conclude that Rome had invented the religion. Further, he believed that the Caesars had deliberately brought about the Dark Ages. They had used Christianity as a mind control device to give slavery a religious context intended to make it difficult for serfs to rebel. Like Irvin, Atwill had become suspicious of the U.S. government’s many connections to the psychedelic movement, which reminded him of the Caesars’ intellectual debasing of their population to help bring on the Dark Ages.

When comparing the results of their research, Irvin and Atwill developed a theory about the origin of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s: The “counterculture” had been developed by elements within the U.S. government and banking establishment as part of a larger plan to bring about a new Dark Age; or, as it was marketed to potential victims, an ‘archaic revival.’[4] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn4)

In 1992 Terence McKenna published in his book Archaic Revival:
These things are all part of the New Age, but I have abandon that term in favor of what I call the Archaic Revival—which places it all in a better historical perspective. When a culture loses its bearing, the traditional response is to go back in history to find the previous “anchoring model.” An example of this would be the breakup the medieval world at the time of the Renaissance. They had lost their compass, so they went back to Greek and Roman models and created classicism—Roman law, Greek aesthetics, and so on.[5] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn5) [emphasis added] ~ Terence McKenna
In another chapter regarding his timewave theory, he states:
Within the timewave a variety of “resonance points” are recognized. Resonance points can be thought of as areas of the wave that are graphically the same as the wave at some other point within the wave, yet differ from it through having different quantified values. For example, if we chose an end date or zero date of December 21, 2012 A.D., then we find that the time we are living through is in resonance with the late Roman times and the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe.

Implicit in this theory of time is the notion that duration is like a tone in that one must assign a moment at which the damped oscillation is finally quenched and ceases. I chose the date December 21, 2012 A.D., as this point because with that assumption the wave seemed to be in the “best fit” configuration with regard to the recorded facts of the ebb and flow of historical advance into connectedness. Later I learned to my amazement that this same date, December 21, 2012, was the date assigned as the end of their calendrical cycle by the classic Maya, surely one of the world’s most time-obsessed cultures. [6] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn6) ~ Terence McKenna
Notice that the date McKenna chose – 12-21-2012 – was earlier falsely claimed to be the date of the Apocalypse foreseen in the Mayan calendar by professor and CIA agent Michael Coe in his 1966 book The Maya[7] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn7), although it was changed by McKenna in 1993 from Coe’s 2011 date to December 21, 2012.[8] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn8) Moreover, McKenna sees this date as resonating with the beginning of the Dark Ages. If, as the authors believe, the psychedelic movement was part of a general plan to usher in a new Dark Age, this suggests that McKenna’s promotion of a drug-fueled “archaic revival” was also a part of the plan.
I guess am a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild dark age. I don’t think it will be anything like the dark ages that lasted a thousand years […][9] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn9)
~ Terence McKenna
Most today assume that the CIA and the other intelligence-gathering organizations of the U.S. government are controlled by the democratic process. They therefore believe that MK-ULTRA’s role in creating the psychedelic movement was accidental “blowback.” Very few have even considered the possibility that the entire “counterculture” was social engineering planned to debase America’s culture – as the name implies. The authors believe, however, that there is compelling evidence that indicates that the psychedelic movement was deliberately created. The purpose of this plan was to establish a neo-feudalism by the debasing of the intellectual abilities of young people to make them as easy to control as the serfs of the Dark Ages. One accurate term used for the individuals who were victims of this debasing was "Deadhead," which is an equivocation for a "dead mind" or "a drugged, thoughtless person."

Aldous Huxley predicted that drugs would one day become a humane alternative to “flogging” for rulers wishing to control “recalcitrant subjects.” He wrote in a letter to his former student George Orwell in 1949:
But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. [emphasis added] [10] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn10)
~ Aldous Huxley
Decades later, one of the CIA’s own MK-ULTRA researchers, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, while citing Huxley had this to say on the matter:
The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations.

But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.

To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome--and less expensive--if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent. […] The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[11] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn11)
~ Louis Jolyon West
The idea of drugs for control seems to be an ancient one. Italian professor Piero Camporesi, writing on Medieval Italy in his book Bread of Dreams, says:
Adulterated breads had been put into circulation by the untori of Public Health: criminal attacks orchestrated by the ‘provisionary judges’ who were supposed to oversee the well-balanced provisioning of the public-square.

On the 21st, a Sunday, with Monday approaching, Master … [blank in the manuscript] Forni, Judge of provisions in the square of Modena, was arrested, along with the bakers, for having had forty sacks of bay leaf ground to be put into the wheat flour to make bread for the square, where it caused the poverty to those who brought it to worsen, so that for two days there were many people sick enough to go crazy, and during this time they could not work or help their families.[12] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn12)
Camporesi later continues:
It would be wrong to suppose that one must wait for the arrival of eighteenth-century capitalism, or even of imperialism, in order to see the birth of the problem of the mass spreading of opium derivatives (first of morphine and then, today, of heroin) used to dampen the frenzy of the masses and lead them back – by means of dreams – to the ‘reason’ desired by the groups in power. The opium war against China, the Black Panthers ‘broken’ by drugs, and the ‘ebbing’ of the American and European student movements (supposing that hallucinogenic drugs were involved in the latter, as some believe), are the most commonly used examples – we don’t know with what relevance – to demonstrate how ‘advanced’ capitalism and imperialism have utilized mechanisms which induced collective dreaming and weakened the desire for renewal by means of visionary ‘trips’, in order to impose their will.

The pre-industrial age, too, even if in a more imprecise, rough and ‘natural’ manner, was aware of political strategies allied to medical culture, whether to lessen the pangs of hunger or to limit the turmoil in the streets. Certainly we could laugh at interventions which are so mild as to appear almost surreal, amateurish or improvised; but we must not forget that both in theory and in practice the ‘treatment of the poor man’, cared for with sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs, corresponded to a thought-out medico-political design.[13] (http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/#_edn13)
~ Piero Camporesi
A key element in the creation of America’s drug counterculture was “The Grateful Dead,” a rock band that passed out LSD to people attending its concerts in the 1960’s. At their concerts listeners were encouraged to take LSD and to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” An expression that instructed the LSD takers to abandon the modern world and join what McKenna coined the “archaic revival.”

There is a recording of Dr. Timothy Leary actually describing the retrograde culture that those who dropped out would participate in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKi4zoJPfFs. In this talk, Leary, Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Allen Cohen describe how those that “tune in, turn on, drop out” would abandon modern culture and return to the status of a peasant.

[...]

Full article: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-product-of-social-engineering-by-joe-atwill-and-jan-irvin/

naste.de.lumina

22nd January 2015, 16:29

Psychiatrists now say non-conformity is a mental illness: only the sheeple are 'sane' (http://www.naturalnews.com/044862_psychiatrists_mental_illness_oppositional_defiant_disorder.html)

The so-called "condition" for why a person might choose to resist conformity has been labeled by the psychiatric profession as "oppositional defiant disorder," or ODD. The new DSM defines this made-up disease as an "ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior," and also lumps it in alongside attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, another made-up condition whose creator, Dr. Leon Eisenberg, admitted it to be phony on his death bed.

Are conditioned (brainwashed) people to accept that their 'think for itself' is a 'BUG' undesirable plant (DNA) or an infectious disease.

I am definitely a bug for this 'New Normal World'.

I am the fly that landed on his 'soup'.

Hervé

10th February 2015, 14:20

Here is how the manufacturing of a life-long pill consumer works:

Pill Pushers- A Personal Story (http://henrymakow.com/2015/02/pill-pushers.html)

February 10, 2015

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/pill.jpg

The medical profession is an extension of the pharmaceutical industry. Instead of curing us, many doctors are making us sick, preying on us for profit like drug traffickers.

by David Scott Douthit
(henrymakow.com)

This is the story of Matthew. He is my step grandson, who has been raised entirely by my wife since shortly after birth. I have know Matthew since he was eight-years-old. Although Matthew is a good kid, at that time he was struggling with what was called Autism, a label for a wide spectrum of abnormalities surfacing in early childhood.

Matthew's issues started shortly after he was given a vaccination for Measles, Mumps, Rubella. This is often the case for children with Autism. The doctors claim it is just coincidence. The critics claim it is the ethyl-mercury contained in the serum as a preservative that actually causes Autism.

Of course the doctors have an answer for the critics. That answer is to unleash a horde of government-paid spokesmen to dispel such pesky old wives tales. The Doctors also have a solution for autism. That solution is to unleash a horde of potent psychoactive chemicals to mask, stiffle, and cripple the dread disease, which just happens to reside within human beings.

Those chemicals include but are not limited to, Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Zoloft. Zyprexa was the subject of a Rolling Stone Magazine article (http://www.narpa.org/bitter%20pill.htm)clearly explaining how drugs are often marketed for conditions they were not developed for. This makes billions in profits for the stockholders, who risk their very fortunes to help humanity. You see, it is those overwhelming profits that help develop new drugs to help humanity. And so this cycle goes.

Meanwhile back on the block, kids like Matthew have to wade through a chemical maze designed to generate an entirely new perception of life.

POSTURING

That is where Matthew was when I came into the picture. The Doctors were working fervently to solve Matthews problems with a pill. And Matthew exhibited all sorts of problems too. He would have mini-seizures called "posturing".

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/GEDC3286.JPG
(Matthew and his mother Rebecca)

Isn't it lovely how the Doctors always seem to hatch a clever euphemism to cover an ugly truth. Posturing consists of holding both hands out in front of the body, palms up as if being inspected. Matthew would then roll both beautiful brown eyes completely into the back of his head exposing just the whites of his eyes.

This would occur all throughout the day. Matthew seemed to be completely unaware of what occurred. It all seemed so strange to me, but my future wife assured me the doctors had told her this was perfectly normal. Of course it didn't have anything to do with those potent psychoactive chemicals...

It was those wonder-working chemicals that caught my interest. I accepted the Doctors' explanations for Zyprexa, Seroquel and Zoloft because I simply did not know enough. Ignorance is bliss. But when the Doctors added Adderall to Mathew's regime, they were pushing the very limits of credibility.

Adderall is an amphetamine class drug such as Ritalin. When Matthew was on Adderall, he exhibited behaviors very similar to crack heads. His eyes would roll in their sockets in a different way. His behavior at school had reached the point they were going to expel him. I convinced my wife, the Doctors were barbarians who had sold their souls for a free trip to Hawaii perk. I convinced her to take Matthew off all the drugs, to at least let his poor system clear.

Within two weeks, 80-90% of what the Doctors were calling Autism totally disappeared never to be seen again, including "posturing".

Matthew's behavior corrected itself. A new Matthew emerged from the ruins of the old, like say a Phoenix or something. The transformation was complete. The new un-drugged Matthew no longer shoveled Potato chips into his mouth, and he consequently lost a bunch of excess weight. He developed a vibrant sense of humor. He was a human being again.

The special school Matthew had been attending had a policy that required all parents to drug their children. Working in conjunction with the school, the doctors found fertile ground to traffic drugs. It all seems so "drug-dealer-like" to me, but what do I know I am just a parent?

In any event, Matthew was not welcome at the special school anymore, so for the very first time he ventured into the public school system. It was a daunting task, but something he lived up to. Isn't it weird how people excel when challenges are placed in front of them, and they are free to use their minds?

Many years later Matthew graduated from that public school system without incident, and with many new friends. He regularly works out with weights. He has many hobbies and interests, including girls which is far beyond the scope of this article.

Matthew is almost 20-years-old now and is looking forward to facing life's challenges, undrugged, unfettered, and flags flying in the wind.
--------

Also by David Scott Douthit-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

See the logic? ...

:wof: !

That might give one an idea about why the insistence for getting everyone to get that MMR vaccine? As well as the current "Measles" propaganda.

Hervé

16th April 2015, 17:48

1,000 British soldiers given psychiatric help after consuming ‘zombie drug’ – new figures (http://rt.com/uk/250169-lariam-mod-mental-illness/)

Published time: April 16, 2015 12:52
Edited time: April 16, 2015 14:16
Get short URL (http://rt.com/uk/250169-lariam-mod-mental-illness/)

http://cdn.rt.com/files/news/3d/13/90/00/lariam-mod-mental-illness.si.jpg
Reuters / Nigel Roddis

The British military is accused of failing to protect its soldier’s mental health. Figures show nearly 1,000 have sought psychiatric treatment after being given the MoD’s budget price anti-malarial drug Lariam.

A Freedom of Information (FoI) request revealed the figure is much higher than previously thought, with 994 service personnel being admitted to mental health clinics or psychiatric hospitals since 2008.

The figures only go back to 2007, so the true number may be much higher, as Lariam, also known as mefloquine, has been in use for much longer.

The MoD has consistently defended the drug, which is one of several it issues to troops, amid concerns that Lariam is contributing to an Armed Forces mental health epidemic. This is despite growing pressure from senior military figures, campaigners and relatives of those affected.

The drug, banned by US Special Forces two years ago, and which the UK military avoids giving to pilots or divers, is still issued to UK troops.

Its use continues despite evidence linking the anti-malarial to the 2012 Panjwai Massacre, in which a US soldier slaughtered 17 Afghan civilians after taking the drug.

Sergeant Robert Bales has since been sentenced to life imprisonment.

In an internal report, Roche, the drug’s manufacturer, described the killings as an “adverse event.”

Roche themselves have conceded that the side effects can include “hallucinations, psychosis, suicide, suicidal thoughts and self-endangering behavior” and may induce “serious neuropsychiatric disorders.”

The figures come as it was revealed a retired British general, who took the drug during service, is currently in a secure psychiatric unit.

Major General Alastair Duncan commanded British troops in Bosnia. His wife, Ellen, told the Independent:

“Like others, I believe that this is a scandal. If 1,000 troops have reported the effects then you can be sure there are others who have not. I know personally of several, and anecdotally of many more.

“The long-term effects of this will be more and more in evidence over the coming years. She said the MoD was “staggeringly unprepared to deal with the fallout.”

In 2012, Dr Remington Nevin, a US Army epidemiologist whose research found the drug could be toxic to the brain, told the Daily Mail:

“Mefloquine is a zombie drug. It's dangerous, and it should have been killed off years ago.” He said Lariam was “probably the worst-suited drug for the military,” adding that its side effects closely matched the symptoms of combat stress.

Considering why the drug remains in use, one former general speculated that it was a matter of economics over welfare.

Former marine Major General Julian Thompson led 3 Commando Brigade during the Falklands War. He told the Independent:

“I can only come to the conclusion that the MoD has a large supply of Lariam, and some ‘chairborne’ jobsworth in the MoD has decreed that as a cost-saving measure, the stocks are to be consumed before an alternative is purchased.” Lariam is significantly cheaper than comparable anti-malarials, such as Doxycycline and Malarone.

An MoD spokesperson said:

“All our medical advice is based on the current guidelines set out by Public Health England.

“Based on this expert advice, the MoD continues to prescribe mefloquine (Lariam) as part of the range of malaria prevention treatments recommended, which help us to protect our personnel from this disease.” The Labour Party responded to the revelations by promising to fully address the impacts and use of Lariam if the party comes to power in the May general election.

Shadow Defense Secretary Vernon Coaker told Channel 4: “Given the growing evidence of the potential damage caused by this drug we are committed to immediately reviewing its use should we form the next government.”

Read more
Army reviews notorious drug after Afghan massacre (http://rt.com/usa/army-drug-mefloquine-bales-500/)

6 veterans per day seeking post-traumatic stress help – military charity (http://rt.com/uk/245525-veterans-ptsd-referrals-increase/)

danegeroussacredgeometry

18th April 2015, 00:37

Fascinating! I am planning a LONG trip to South America and recently had a discussion with a friend about vaccines and whether we should get them before we go. I have been reading a lot of alternative news pointing to them being dangerous. I am going to have to read more into psychedelics and how they may be used for mind control. I have never thought of drugs like mushrooms and DMT to be dangerous bc no one has ever shown me the alternative side outside of doctors (whom I don't trust). Thank you for spending such a great deal of time putting all this information together for us Herve. While my experiences with drugs is not vast I cannot help but agree that there were certain times on hallucinogens when my thoughts had a mind of their own and I found myself a spectator in regards to what was happening.
Can't help to think that what destroys man's will, destroys man.

I hope you have a wonderful day!

Hervé

18th April 2015, 01:03

[...]

Can't help to think that what destroys man's will, destroys man.

[...]

Cannot hit it more squarely:

Something to take into consideration with regards to hypnosis:

Here are the words from a very old oral tradition echoed to the ears of an apprentice to the Gypsy tradition (Pierre Derlon, Voyage au delà du Mental):

“Never in my life have I ever used hypnosis as my masters constantly repeated to me that what destroys Man’s will, destroys Man. Hypnosis destroys consciousness of motion and therefore massacres personality. For hypnosis is to a man’s mind what drug is to his body: a poison which, by killing his will, enslaves his soul into only perceiving lies.

“The difference between drugs and mental disciplines is that drugs kill; whereas, whichever ascetic discipline chosen, it strengthens/empowers. Man is prisoner of drugs, he is the master of the disciplines he subjects his body to in order to free his spirit from the gangue he is prisoner of.

"Man is ignorant of the fact that he is both a machine as well as its mechanics. He distances himself from nature and resorts to artifice. Artifice slowly kills him."

danegeroussacredgeometry

18th April 2015, 09:07

[...]

[...]

Cannot hit it more squarely:

Something to take into consideration with regards to hypnosis:

Here are the words from a very old oral tradition echoed to the ears of an apprentice to the Gypsy tradition (Pierre Derlon, Voyage au delà du Mental):

“Never in my life have I ever used hypnosis as my masters constantly repeated to me that what destroys Man’s will, destroys Man. Hypnosis destroys consciousness of motion and therefore massacres personality. For hypnosis is to a man’s mind what drug is to his body: a poison which, by killing his will, enslaves his soul into only perceiving lies.

“The difference between drugs and mental disciplines is that drugs kill; whereas, whichever ascetic discipline chosen, it strengthens/empowers. Man is prisoner of drugs, he is the master of the disciplines he subjects his body to in order to free his spirit from the gangue he is prisoner of.

"Man is ignorant of the fact that he is both a machine as well as its mechanics. He distances himself from nature and resorts to artifice. Artifice slowly kills him."

Wow... reading that left me speechless. Sat at my computer for a good while before I knew how to respond. I appreciate you sharing that oral tradition. I have done hypnosis before and past lives came up. I realized that MANY lies were told to me during this session and it took me quite some time to sort it out. It's strange because I refuse to go to one again after a session was done on me where I had this... feeling I guess... or more an inclination from myself metaphorically whispering in my ear telling me not to say anything to the hypnotist about what I was hearing... I don't know why, but I listened. I had many past life memories come up naturally beforehand and I went to this person in hopes of bringing forth the small details. This voice of reason told me that what I was seeing were false light images (which I assumed meant that it wasn't real and for some reason I was trying to be tricked). I realized later on (after much meditation on the subject) that I WAS being tricked and something very powerful was doing all it could to appeal to my ego. This being has been after me my whole life. It still gives me the chills talking about that story... I came out of the session more confused than when I walked in. I have told everyone I know not to do hypnosis because of this experience and have had to find other ways to bring almost all of my past lives true information forward.

Hervé

21st April 2015, 14:05

Mental Health Agencies Prey on the Vulnerable (http://henrymakow.com/2015/04/Mental-Health-Agencies-Prey-on-the-Vulnerable%20%20.html)

by Dale Evans (henrymakow.com)
April 21, 2015

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/mentalhealth.jpg

Similar to the military industrial complex, Dale Evans says there is a social services complex that has a voracious need for clients to defend their budgets. They need to "help" us whether we need help or not.

The Ontario sex education curriculum will give "community stakeholders" access to children's records for purposes of "co-parenting". Who are these community stakeholders?

Let's say: "All roads lead to Rome". Rome is the psychiatric ward. In the report of the Select Committee on Mental Health (http://www.ontla.on.ca/committee-proceedings/committee-reports/files_pdf/SCMHA-InterimReport-March2010.pdf), the stakeholders are listed in the back pages - all 200 of them. Seventy five are designated psychiatric facilities in Ontario. Just one of those gets $1,223,119,376 a year. The Hamilton health Service Corporation administers seven mental facilities.

In addition, there are children's mental health facilities, gambling and alcohol addiction centres, community network services, public health services, psychological testing services, ADHD clinics, intellectual disability centres, resource centres, government ministries, suicide prevention centres, secure child lockups, Children's Aid, on and on. There is BIG MONEY in disability.

Many of these agencies are private corporations funded by levels of government according to quotas. The salaries of the employees can be staggering - many over $100,000, $200,000 with benefits and retirement packages.

If your child ever says - "I want to end it all" or "I had a dream I killed myself", the child will be involuntarily committed. No community worker will risk having a suicide on their hands. Parents lose their children at that point. It would be medical neglect to oppose psychiatric treatment which includes dangerous drugs, shock and brain tampering.

CONSEQUENCES
What will be the unintended consequences of this? I have put this in the context of my own experience.

As a doctor's wife in Toronto, I have been called upon to handle many tragic situations. Two years ago, an elderly lady came to our clinic. She was very frail in body but robust in spirit and hopping mad. A "community care worker" told her to go to the hospital for a check up. When she arrived at the hospital, she was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward for a month. She had not even brought her toothbrush.

Because she had no family, she was grist for the mill. In order to certify her and remove her rights, psychiatrists prodded her to admit that she'd like to be dead. However cognitive tests failed to yield any evidence that she was incompetent. Rather, she had a fighting spirit to live. They had to release her.

While she was in the hospital, her Power of Attorney, a supposed trusted church minister took over her affairs. This adviser sold her house for $850,000, threw all her possessions in a dumpster and gave away her dog. The money was supposedly used to buy a house for unwed mothers.

The elderly lady asked for our help. Over the next months, I worked with the Member of Provincial Parliament, the Guardian's Office, a centre for Elderly Rights and the hospital president's office. I got all her medical files and found that due to the fact she had NOT been certified incompetent, the Guardian's Office simply had her write a letter changing her Power of Attorney.

The simple action of writing a letter transfering responsibilities from this minister to a reliable friend solved the problem. She got her money back and moved into a Retirement Home of her choice.

MONEY GUZZLING AGENCIES
The public naively believes that a benevolent government runs these "community partners". Many are private corporations funded by up to three levels of government. Their funding is based on quotas. In other words, they need clients. They can be a vicious and litigious lot that collect information on people to threaten and silence them.

In my experience, intake workers often misrepresent people's situations on assessment forms to make them dependents of the "community partner." Don't be fooled by the misuse of the word "community". They are profit-driven entities with tremendous power to make you their "partner". These are usually elaborate marketing schemes for psychiatric drugs.

A good example of this is the "Motherisk" program at Sick Children's Hospital run by Gideon Koren. Motherisk is partially funded by the drug company Duchesnay and has been involved in experiments on pregnant women with the drug "Diclectin". The Toronto Star only recently revealed this to the public ("Motherisk problems shrouded in mystery", Toronto Star, April 15, 2015). (http://www.pressreader.com/canada/toronto-star/20150418/281651073640597/TextView)

This program also administered a "hair test" that is mired in controversy. Christine Rupert had her two toddlers taken into foster care in 2009 because of findings that she was a cocaine user. She is adamant that she had not touched the drug since 2006. (http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/12/08/hair_drug_tests_a_mothers_anguish_over_losing_her_girls.html)

Adequate legal actions such as Exemption Forms and constant vigilance must be practised by the public. We should remain skeptical of any "community partners" marching in with their Jackboots to "help" us or our children.
------
- See more at: http://henrymakow.com/2015/04/Mental-Health-Agencies-Prey-on-the-Vulnerable%20%20.html#sthash.H1v7CgNc.dpuf

Hervé

14th May 2015, 12:05

Psychiatric drugs kill 500k+ Western adults annually, few positive benefits – leading scientist (http://rt.com/uk/258133-antidepressants-unnecessary-for-many/)

Published time: May 13, 2015 13:46
Edited time: May 14, 2015 06:22

http://img.rt.com/files/news/3f/05/50/00/1_1.si.jpg
Reuters / Siphiwe Sibeko

Psychiatric drugs lead to the deaths of over 500,000 people aged 65 and over annually in the West, a Danish scientist says. He warns the benefits of these drugs are “minimal,” and have been vastly overstated.

Research director at Denmark’s Nordic Cochrane Centre, Professor Peter Gøtzsche, says the use of most antidepressants and dementia drugs could be halted without inflicting harm on patients. The Danish scientist’s views were published in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday.

His scathing analysis will likely prove controversial among traditional medics. However, concern is mounting among doctors and scientists worldwide that psychiatric medication is doing more harm than good. In particular, they say antipsychotic drugs have been overprescribed to many dementia patients in a bid to calm agitated behavior.

Gøtzsche warns psychiatric drugs kill patients year in year out, and hold few positive benefits. He says in excess of half a million citizens across the Western world aged 65 and over die annually as a result of taking these drugs.

“Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal,” he writes.

“Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm.” Gøtzsche, who is also a clinical trials expert, says drug trials funded by big pharmaceutical companies tend to produce biased results because many patients took other medication prior to the tests.

He says patients cease taking the old drugs and then experience a phase of withdrawal prior to taking the trial pharmaceuticals, which appear highly beneficial at first.

The Danish professor also warns fatalities from suicides in clinical trials are significantly under-reported.

In the case of antidepressants venlafaxine and fluoxetine, Gøtzsche casts doubt over their efficacy. He said depression lifts in placebo groups given fake tablets almost as promptly as groups who partake in official clinical tests.

He also stressed the results of trials of drugs used to treat schizophrenia are disconcerting, while those for ADHD are ambiguous.

Commenting on the negative side effects of such pharmaceutical drugs, Gøtzsche argued the “short-term relief” appears to be replaced by “long term harm.”

“Animal studies strongly suggest that these drugs can produce brain damage, which is probably the case for all psychotropic drugs,” he said.

“Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm – by dropping all antidepressants, ADHD drugs and dementia drugs … and using only a fraction of the antipsychotics and benzodiazepines we currently use.”

“This would lead to healthier and more long-lived populations.” Gøtzsche says psychotropic drugs are “immensely harmful” if used for prolonged periods.

“They should almost exclusively be used in acute situations and always with a firm plan for tapering off, which can be difficult for many patients,” he adds.

Gøtzsche’s views are sharply contradicted by many experts in the field of mental health. But others, including a diverse group of medical experts and institutions affiliated with the Nordic Cochrane Centre, argue otherwise. The Nordic Cochrane Centre is an independent research hub dedicated to scrutinizing and monitoring the effects of health care.

The debate on psychiatric drugs has gathered momentum in recent times. In the discussion, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Gøtzsche’s arguments are contradicted by Professor of Mood Disorders Allan Young and John Crace. Crace, himself a psychiatric patient, writes for the Guardian.

Crace and Young say a broad body of research indicates the drugs are effective and that they are just as helpful as drugs for other ailments. They also argue mental health conditions are the fifth most significant contributor to disabilities worldwide.

While Gøtzsche stresses clinical trials bankrolled by pharma giants churn out skewered results, Young and Crace say the efficacy and safety of psychiatric medication continues to be monitored after research trials come to a close.

However, both Young and Crace acknowledge concern over the side effects and effectiveness of psychiatric medication.

“For some critics, the onus often seems to be on the drug needing to prove innocence from causing harm rather than a balanced approach to evaluating the available evidence,” they write.

“Whether concerns are genuine or an expression of prejudice is not clear, but over time many concerns have been found to be overinflated.”

The BMJ discussion is a preamble to the Maudsley debate at Kings College London on Wednesday. The debate takes place three times a year at the university’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN).

Wednesday’s debate focuses on the impacts of psychiatric medications, and poses the question of whether they prove more destructive for patients than beneficial.

Read more:
Emotional toxicity of austerity eroding mental health, say 400 experts (http://rt.com/uk/250501-austerity-toxic-mental-health/)

‘More than a tragedy’: Research efforts to cure dementia falter, UK centers renew push (http://rt.com/uk/233415-dementia-research-drug-firms/)

US spends most on this drug… and no one knows how it works (http://rt.com/usa/204563-abilify-top-grossing-medication/)

Hervé

2nd June 2015, 12:36

Now here is a different tack taken on that subject:

Drugs Help Explain Modern World (http://henrymakow.com/2015/06/drugs-help-explain-modern-worl.html)

by our Kuala Lumpur Correspondent, June 1, 2015

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/raving.jpeg
Hitler was off his head on "Pervitan" - Meth.

So many behaviors you find strange become obvious when you understand drugs.
Hollywood sets are "sexually charged" (http://henrymakow.com/possessed_humans_and_aliens_co.html) because they are all off their heads on Meth and cocaine.

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/wizard.jpeg
In the old days - Julie Garland, Wizard Of Oz - they were all off their heads on benzedrine.

You could do a documentary on drug use by politicians, actors, armed forces etc...

Soooooooooooo many behaviors you find strange become obvious when you understand drugs.

When I went to night clubs, I could never understand people up all night and standing in the UTTER freezing cold in a tiny top and mini skirt seemingly unaffected by the weather. It was close time in 30 minutes but they kept lining up. Then I tried Meth for the first time in 1997 and then I understood.

Then Hitler raving on the podium and sweating like a pig onstage became clear. He was off his head on "Pervitan" - Meth. First synthesized by the Germans in 1932 and injected IV into Hitlers veins by Dr Morrel - a syphilis doctor and most likely jewish. For a man who hated Jews so much Hitler sure spent a lot of time surrounded by them, including his Jewish vegetarian cook. It will take another 50 years to unravel WW2.

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/mussolini.jpeg
Then watch Mussolini on the balconies raving - Meth! Completely off his chops and SOOOOOO obvious but I never saw a doco on it all till 2003.

Then all the crazy stuff Americans and Israeli's are doing. Thats METH! The Waffen SS lived on it. The British, Americans and Russians used Benzidrene.

Its worth several documentaries. This is why the German Army committed so many war crimes - they were off their heads on drugs most of the time. Three days of no sleep - revved up on Meth. This is where killing women and children becomes easy. Just ask the IDF who have one of the most massive drug problems of all the armed forces. They absolutely live on it.

AS FOR PAUL MCCARTNEY
I know a guy who was a stage actor. He ran a shop in London during the infamous swinging 60's. It was one of the first health food shops around. ALL, and I mean ALL of the who's who of the time came to that shop including The Beatles.

http://henrymakow.com/upload_images/PAUL.jpeg

Jack told me that he too believed Paul McCartney was not the same man who started out. He said when they came to his large flat to hang out, Ringo would sit in the kitchen and not even speak to Paul. At the time he thought it very strange. When he first read of the theories about McCartney it made sense to him. He said Paul looked different. Many commented on this at the time.

Check out "Jack Potter" and "Wildcard" on you tube. Jack told me of all the perversions that go on and was one of the reasons he left the industry.
---

Carmody

2nd June 2015, 13:38

Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.

Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.

Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.

Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing”.

Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.

Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.

Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.

Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.

Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.

A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.

Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.

Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.

A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.

I. G. Farben, in it's multitudinous disguises.

Monsanto, chemical companies, big pharma.

The fascist manipulation machine, brought back from Germany...at the end of WWII... as the spoils of war, by the bankers of the USA and the world (who financed it).

Who are, in turn, just a cover story for something far uglier.

'Rise of the fourth Reich, as written by Jim Marrs, and fleshed out, in detail, in the works by Joseph Farrell.

They went too fast, in WWII. They almost pulled it off, but they went a hair too fast, and it came into notice by some.

The set up is very specific, detailed and slowed, this time around. They are trying to leave nothing to chance.

Hervé

16th October 2015, 00:12

American Psycho: Has the United States lost its collective mind? (https://www.rt.com/op-edge/318768-american-psycho-zombies-drugs/)

Published time: 15 Oct, 2015 14:26

https://cdn.rt.com/files/2015.10/original/561fb52dc4618844688b45be.jpg
© Lucas Jackson / Reuters

From Ferguson, Missouri to the deserts of Afghanistan the specter of US aggression is fueling the flames of civil strife and military conflict around an increasingly volatile planet. Much of the problem may be connected to the breakdown of the American psyche.

Before attempting to shed some light on America’s mental condition, let’s open with a pop quiz question: What is the top-selling prescription drug in the US? Nope, it’s not Viagra, not Prozac, forget the Percocet. If you don't know, take a peek in the medicine cabinet because there’s a high chance it’s lurking in there, right behind that purple people eater. Yes, you got it. The top-selling drug in the Land of the Free and Disturbed is an antipsychotic, happily named Abilify.

Once again: The top-selling drug in America is an antipsychotic. Now some might say that’s mental.

“To be a top seller, a drug has to be expensive and also widely used,” Steven Reidbord M.D. wrote (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sacramento-street-psychiatry/201503/americas-top-selling-drug) in Psychology Today. “Abilify is both. It’s the 14th most prescribed brand-name medication, and it retails for about $30 a pill. Annual sales are over $7 billion, nearly a billion more than the next runner-up.”

Let those numbers seep into your brain for a moment: $7.2 billion dollars. $30 per pill. Although that might make for some laugh-out-loud late-night comedy, these numbers are no laughing matter.

This on top of the latest statistic that shows prescription drug spending in the US exploded (http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot/2015/04/14/why-did-prescription-drug-spending-hit-374b-in-the-us-last-year-read-this/) in 2014 to nearly $374 billion, a whopping 13.1 percent increase in growth, according to a new report from IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Aside from the fact that Americans are buying antipsychotic medication by the truckload, there’s another disturbing thing about Abilify: Nobody, not even the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has any idea what makes it effective. According to the USPI label (http://www.otsuka-us.com/Documents/Abilify.PI.pdf) that accompanies each bottle:

“The mechanism of action of aripiprazole... is unknown. However, the efficacy of aripiprazole could be mediated through a combination of partial agonist activity at D2 and 5-HT1A receptors and… etc, etc.”In other words, millions of Americans are ingesting an antipsychotic drug that not even the scientific community can say exactly what makes it work. Is that not in itself the very definition of insanity?

So where is the uproar, the protest, the media hype over this battle for the great American brain? Behind the wall of silence, there have been a few courageous experts who have broken rank with their colleagues - not to mention the omnipotent pharmaceutical industry - to blow the whistle on the abuse of psychiatric drugs in America.

Professional backlash
Joanna Moncrieff, an academic (http://www.palgrave.com/authors/author-detail/Joanna-Moncrieff/18631/) and practicing psychiatrist, is a long-standing critic of psychiatric drug treatment. Her 2009 book, The Myth of the Chemical Cure, was short-listed for the 'Mind Book of the Year.' In it, Moncrieff “exposes the traditional view that psychiatric drugs correct chemical imbalances as a dangerous fraud.”

According to Moncrieff’s landmark study (http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-myth-of-the-chemical-cure-joanna-moncrieff/?sf1=barcode&st1=9780230589445), psychiatric drugs 'work' by “creating abnormal brain states, which are often unpleasant and impair normal intellectual and emotional functions along with other harmful consequences.”

As Jay Michaelson noted (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/09/mother-s-little-anti-psychotic-is-worth-6-9-billion-a-year.html) in The Daily Beast, administering such a powerful drug like Abilify “makes sense for their primary use: anti-psychotics like aripiprazole are administered to seriously ill people like schizophrenics. Abilify is a close cousin of Thorazine. Yet, now it’s the most profitable drug in America.”

[...]

Full article: https://www.rt.com/op-edge/318768-american-psycho-zombies-drugs/

Hervé

20th January 2016, 17:16

Does Prescribing Anti-psychotic Drugs to Infants, Toddlers and Young Children Meet the Definition of Reckless Endangerment? (http://www.globalresearch.ca/does-prescribing-anti-psychotic-drugs-to-infants-toddlers-and-young-children-meet-the-definition-of-reckless-endangerment/5502506)

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls (http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls) Global Research, January 20, 2016

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/pills.jpg

(This article was inspired by the following website: http://www.cchrint.org/issues/prescribing-psychiatric-drugs-recklessendangerment/)

When physicians (or medical paraprofessionals) prescribe psychiatric drugs to children without the parent or legal guardian’s fully informed consent, the prescribers could reasonably be charged with reckless endangerment and/or child endangerment because such drugs commonly cause a multitude of well-known adverse effects, including the following short list: worsening depression, worsening anxiety, sleep disturbances, suicidality, homicidality, mania, psychoses, heart problems, growth disturbances, malnutrition, cognitive disabilities, dementia, microbiome disorders, stroke, diabetes, serious withdrawal effects, death, sudden death, etc. We physicians (not only psychiatrists) normally only spend a small amount of our scarce time warning about a few of the dozens of potential adverse effects when we recommend drug treatment – and apparently most American courts uphold this questionable action when the rare malpractice case manages to be heard in the legal system.

And yet, Child Protective Services has the legal right to charge parents with medical neglect for refusing to give their child a known neurotoxic or psychotoxic drug that wasn’t adequately tested either in the animal lab or in long-term clinical trials prior to being given marketing approval by the FDA.

This makes no sense to parents and can’t be explained by their lawyers, especially if the parents know more than their medical caregivers about the multitude of potentially serious dangers that such drugs could pose for their child. It is worth noting that psychiatrists admit that there is no scientific test in existence that proves that children deserve a permanent mental illness label (and getting brain-altering drugs for the rest of their lives).

Indeed, making a psychiatric diagnosis in this big business era of high volume/high turnover patient care is based largely on an unscientific, sometimes absurd checklist of patient behaviors, emotions or thoughts, often hurriedly obtained after a relatively short office visit. Checklists of signs or symptoms of a newly thought-up “mental illness” periodically are composed at the annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association where the newly invented “disorder” is voted on (by a show of hands) by groups of volunteer psychiatrists, most of whom have financial and/or professional conflicts of interest. If a sufficient majority of convention attendees agree, the new diagnosis is then placed in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which contains hundreds of other unscientific check-lists of “mental disorders”.

Ignoring the Warnings of Drug Regulatory Agencies
Psychiatrists have long admitted that none of their drugs ever cure anything or anyone. They also admit that there are no medical, laboratory, radiological or biopsy tests to confirm that any given psychiatric diagnosis is an actual medical condition.

There are, however, thousands of lab, radiology and biopsy tests that confirm the existence of the long-term neurotoxic effects of the multitude of synthetic psychoactive drugs that continue to be given out in combinations that have never been adequately tested for efficacy or safety – even in the animal labs.

Therefore what the courts have erroneously criminalized as parental neglect must be re-assessed by the legal system. The parent that refuses potentially hazardous psychiatric drugs for their child because they happen to know more about the drug’s dangers than their prescriber, should be supported rather than punished by the courts. And lawyers and judges interested in understanding the nature of the best neuroscience need to be increasingly mistrustful of psychiatrist “experts” who frequently have serious conflicts of interest when it comes to maintaining the prestige and/or economics of the big business of pharmaceuticals, medicine and psychiatry.

There have been more than 200 international drug regulatory agency warnings about the fact that psychiatric drugs can cause dangerous and potentially life-threatening effects (check them out at: http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/). When I was in medical practice, I was totally unaware of the existence of these warnings, so I suspect that most over-worked physicians and psychiatrists today are equally unaware. Undoubtedly, lawyers and judges are in the same boat.

The basic science-based warnings about the dangers of prescription drugs are easily available for anybody concerned with the health and welfare of our children’s brains and bodies, and parents are always more concerned and in many cases, more aware, than their doctors. Concerned parents should be cautious about allowing their vulnerable children to be given potentially toxic substances, especially when the drugs are being prescribed “off label” (ie, for indications that are not approved by the FDA).

The Legal Definition of Reckless Child Endangerment
“Reckless Endangerment” is a crime consisting of an act that created a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person, even if the accused person did not intend to harm the victim. However, the person must have acted in a way that showed a disregard for the foreseeable consequences of the actions.The charge may occur in various contexts, such as domestic cases, car accidents, construction site accidents, testing sites, domestic/child abuse situations, and hospital abuse. The penalties vary from state to state.

“Child Endangerment” refers to an act or omission thatplaces a child at risk of psychological, emotional or physical abuse. Child abuse based on the offense of child endangerment is normally a misdemeanor, but endangerment that results in mentalillness or serious physical illness or injury is a felony. The child who is subjected to child endangerment is called an abused child or a neglected child.

This means that an action or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker (or healthcare giver) that results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, exploitation or an act or failure to act that presents an imminent risk of serious harm could result in legal action.

(As an aside, it must also be mentioned that there is a significant potential for serious neurological harm and/or vaccine-induced autoimmunity disorders (including the ME/CFS and “ASIA” syndromes) that can follow vaccinations that contain aluminum adjuvants and/or mercury. (http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/05/13/5294_aluminum_toxicity_and_vaccines_recent_basic (http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/05/13/5294_aluminum_toxicity_and_vaccines_recent_basic))

Infants and small children are most at risk because they commonly get multiple doses of vaccines at a single well baby visit (at 2, 4 and 6 months of age when their immune systems and blood brain barriers are at their most immature and their body weight is at its smallest). Thus our smallest pediatric patients are much more at risk of developing, sometimes in a delayed fashion, autoimmune and neurotoxic disorders mentioned in the paragraph above. Astonishingly, deaths or damage because of vaccine injuries cannot be litigated in the United States because of the 1986 Reagan-era law that absolves multinational vaccine corporations of liability!)

Antipsychotic Drugs and Reckless Child Endangerment
The sobering data below has been gleaned from www.cchrint.org (http://www.cchrint.org/) and https://www.cms.gov/medicare-medicaid-coordination/fraud-prevention/medicaid-integrity-education/pharmacy-education-materials/downloads/atyp-antipsych-pediatric-factsheet.pdf

1) The Medicaid Integrity Group (MIG) has identified issues with the utilization of the atypical antipsychotic drug therapy class. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves product labeling for prescription drugs. The MIG has found that some providers have prescribed atypical antipsychotics outside of FDA-approved product labeling for indication, age, dosage, or duration of therapy.

2) Despite their widespread use, atypical antipsychotics are not FDA approved for children younger than five years old and the use for the under-18 group has been controversial, with no long-term studies concerning brain shrinkage, brain damage or drug dependency. By and large, the studies that the FDA has approved for using antipsychotic drugs in those young children (whose brains were not hard-wired yet!) were poorly designed, of low power and showing only modest improvement in a very few select outcomes.

3) More than three-fourths of youths receiving Medicaid are taking psychiatric medications for an indication that is not FDA approved. Atypical antipsychotics are being used off-label to treat the so-called attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and aggressive behavior, indications for which the FDA has not granted approval.

4) According to a 2011 Medicaid survey, children taking antipsychotic medications almost always receive one of the newer, more expensive, “atypical” antipsychotic drugs. In the majority of patients the use is for an off-label indication.

5) The list of so-called atypical antipsychotics include Abilify, Clozaril, Geodon, Invega, Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, and Fanapt. They are promoted as being “safer” than the “first generation” anti-psychotic drugs like Thorazine or Haldol but they are actually only safer in that it is harder to commit suicide with them. In many respects, they are actually more dangerous, especially with long term use.

6) The use of antipsychotic drugs for very young American children with behavior problems approximately doubled between 1999 and 2007.

How Many American Pre-Schoolers are on Off Label Antipsychotics?
SOURCE: IMS, Vector One: National (VONA) and Total Patient Tracker (TPT) Database, Year 2013, Extracted April 2014.

http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/people-taking-antipsychotics/

In 2013 American psychiatrists and primary care physicians treated, off label, over 27,000 children below the age of 5 with antipsychotic drugs, drugs that are well known to be capable of causing permanent neurotoxic effects like brain atrophy (shrinkage), cognitive decline, sexual dysfunction, over-sedation and even Parkinson’s disease in children (among many other generalized toxic effects such as constipation, diabetes, obesity, sudden death and gynecomastia). It can be safely assumed that full information about all these known dangers of these brain-altering drugs is only rarely given to the parents by the prescribing physician prior to their child’s starting the drug. (For more on antipsychotic drug adverse effects, click on http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/ (http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/antipsychoticsideeffects/)

Below is the 2013 breakdown of antipsychotic drug use in America, separated out according to age group. It is important to be aware that normal (non-psychotic) voice-hearing, psychostimulant drug-induced psychosis, antipsychotic drug withdrawal psychosis and PTSD with flashbacks can be easily mis-diagnosed and therefore mis-treated (with antipsychotics) as “schizophrenia”. It is equally important to be aware that psychostimulant drug-induced mania, anti-depressant drug-induced mania, and antipsychotic drug withdrawal psychosis can also be mis-diagnosed as so-called “bipolar disorder” and thus mis-treated with antipsychotic drugs.

It is also important to note that antipsychotic drug withdrawal symptoms includenausea and vomiting, diarrhea. rhinorrhea (runny nose), diaphoresis (heavy sweating), myalgias (muscle pains), paresthesias (odd sensations such as burning, tingling, numbness), anxiety, hypersexuality, agitation, mania, insomnia, increased tremor, and voice-hearing.)

Recognizing these realities should give us all pause, especially since over 4,000 American toddlers were assaulted with these drugs in one year.

Age ... Number of Patients (2013)
0-1 Years ............ 654
2-3 Years ......... 3,760
4-5 Years ........24,363
6-12 Years .... 359,882
13-17 Years .. 490,272
18-24 Years .. 599,816
25-44 Years 1,987,933
45-64 Years 2,406,526

65 Year +.... 1,169,044

Grand Total: 6,845,303

Warnings From International Regulatory Agencies
There have been 72 warnings from eight countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa) about the harmful effects of antipsychotic drugs. These include the following:

17 warnings on antipsychotics causing heart problems
15 warnings on antipsychotics causing death/sudden death
9 warnings on antipsychotics causing weight gain
8 warnings on antipsychotics causing involuntary movements or movement disorders
7 warnings on antipsychotics causing strokes
7 warnings on antipsychotics causing withdrawal symptoms
6 warnings on antipsychotics causing convulsions, seizures or tremors
5 warnings on antipsychotics causing diabetes
5 warnings on antipsychotics causing birth defects
4 warnings on antipsychotics causing agitation
1 warning on antipsychotics causing mania and psychosis
1 warning on antipsychotics causing sexual dysfunction

Ignored Antipsychotic Drug Studies
There are 97 studies from seventeen countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, Turkey, Italy, Israel, Ireland, Denmark, New Zealand, China, France, Japan, Sweden, Taiwan) showing that antipsychotic drugs can cause harmful side effects. These include the following:

18 studies on antipsychotics causing diabetes or other metabolic problems
16 studies on antipsychotics causing weight gain/obesity
15 studies on antipsychotics causing death or increased mortality
9 studies on antipsychotics causing heart problems
4 studies on antipsychotics causing strokes
3 studies on antipsychotics causing Parkinson’s Disease
3 studies on antipsychotics having lack of efficacy
3 studies on antipsychotics causing cognitive decline or impairment
2 studies on antipsychotics causing brain shrinkage
2 studies on antipsychotics causing seizures or convulsions
2 studies on antipsychotics causing lowered bone mineral density
1 study on antipsychotics causing violence and homicidal ideation
1 study on antipsychotics causing psychosis and delusional thinking
1 study on antipsychotics causing tumors
1 study on antipsychotics causing birth defects
1 study on antipsychotics causing coma
1 study on antipsychotics causing sexual dysfunction

So the question must be asked again: Does prescribing off-label anti-psychotic drugs to vulnerable immunologically-immature infants, toddlers and young children meet the definition of reckless endangerment?

In a similar vein, one must ask if prescribing (to infants, toddlers and young children) off-label psychostimulants (such as the highly addictive drug Ritalin which is known to cause brain atrophy in some cases) or off-label antidepressants such as Paxil (which is known to cause permanent sexual dysfunction in some cases) also meets the definition of reckless endangerment.

And how about this question? Does injecting an untested (for long-term safety) mixture of mercury or aluminum-containing vaccines into the bodies of pregnant women, infants, toddlers and young children also meet the definition of reckless endangerment? (http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/04/30/5226_aluminum_and_the_neurotoxicity_of_vaccines)

And we should also wonder about the injustice of prosecuting parents who are aware of the possible permanent dangers of psychiatric drugs and multiple simultaneous injections of vaccines and therefore logically refuse to allow their children to be potentially poisoned by them?

I suppose that the answers are blowing in the wind, but one can be certain that they will not be honestly addressed by the multitude of Big Pharma, Big Vaccine and Big Medicine industry-sponsored front group websites like WebMD, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Anxiety Disorders Association of America, Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA), Children and Adults with ADD (CHADD), Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, Screening for Mental Health, Inc, Signs of Suicide (SOS), Suicide Prevention Action Network USA (SPAN), TeenScreen, National Center for Mental Health Checkups, Mental Health America, the JED Foundation, etc, etc.

The (pseudo-) patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) with hidden conflicts of interest and paid-for hidden corporate agendas are almost as uncountable as the number of industry-funded lobby groups and Super PACs in Washington, DC. It should horrify us all to realize how effective they all are in emptying out our pocketbooks and bamboozling us all – a sad commentary on how brain-washable we American consumers are as we sucker for TV commercials, Big Pharma’s drug salespersons and their unaffordable prescription drugs, junk food and political promises.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, psychiatric drugging, over-vaccination regimens, Big Pharma and other movements that threaten the environment or America’s health, democracy, civility and longevity. Many of his columns are archived at http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn

Hervé

4th February 2016, 19:16

SSRIs and Antidepressants Increase Mental Health Issues Confirmed (http://www.activistpost.com/2016/02/ssris-and-antidepressants-increase-mental-health-issues-confirmed.html)

By (http://www.activistpost.com/tag/catherine-frompovich)Catherine J. Frompovich (http://www.activistpost.com/product/1439255369/US/permacultucom-20/?cart=y) February 3, 2016

http://www.activistpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/antidepressants-1024x512.jpg (http://www.activistpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/antidepressants.jpg)

Something of pharmaceutical concern that the holistic/alternative medical community and the alternative press have been alleging for numerous years now, finally is being confirmed by a British Medical Journal paper published January 27, 2016.

Professor Peter C Gotzsche, MD, and several students published “Suicidality and aggression during antidepressant treatment: systematic review and meta-analyses based on clinical study reports” (http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i65) after reviewing and including 76 trials with 64,381 pages of clinical study reports for 18,526 patients—certainly not a small sampling!

What the researchers concluded from their extensive retrospective study of pharmaceutical trials dealing with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) was that for children and adolescents, the risks for suicidality and aggression doubled. What are some of the pharmaceuticals involved? Antidepressants Prozac® and its knock off-type drugs: Celexa®, Lexapro®, Luvox®, Paxil®, and Zoloft®, plus Effexor®, Remeron®, Serzone®, and Wellbutrin®.

What the BMJ paper’s authors concluded brings to mind that in many of the mass shootings and horrible events that have occurred in the USA in recent years, several of the perpetrators were known to have been taking, had been taking, or getting off mood altering prescription drugs.

Still, the BMJ paper states that

It is widely believed that the risk of suicide is not increased in adults, and support for this was provided by a Food and Drug Administration meta-analysis of about 100 000 patients. However, that statistical analysis comes from FDA records. Personally, I have to question its authenticity since we know how much “the FDA is in bed with Big Pharma” to hawk Pharma’s products.

Getting back to children on SSRIs committing crimes, here is some information that seems to corroborate such “coincidences”:

Another Mass Shooting? Another Psychiatric Drug? Federal Investigation Long Overdue
http://www.cchrint.org/2012/07/20/the-aurora-colorado-tragedy-another-senseless-shooting-another-psychotropic-drug/

Every mass shooting over the last 20 years has one thing in common…and it’s not guns
http://www.naturalnews.com/039752_mass_shootings_psychiatric_drugs_antidepressants.html

Study: Psychiatric Drugs Linked to Violent Crime
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/21797-study-psychiatric-drugs-linked-to-violent-crime

Young people on antidepressant drugs more likely to commit violent crime
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11866077/Antidepressants-raise-risk-of-committing-violent-crime.html

Psych Meds Linked to 90% of School Shootings
http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/psych-meds-linked-to-90-of-school-shootings/

The Proven Dangers of Antidepressants
http://breggin.com/index.php%3Foption=com_content&task=view&id=196
Dr Peter R Breggin, MD, has this to say about the problem:

As a psychiatrist and as a medical expert, I have examined dozens of cases of individuals who have committed suicide or violent crimes while under the influence of the newer antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa. In June in South Carolina, Christopher Pittman will go on trial for shooting his grandparents to death while they slept. Chris was twelve when his family doctor started him on Zoloft.

Three weeks later the doctor doubled his dose and one week later Chris committed the violent acts. In other cases, a fourteen-year-old girl on Prozac fired a pistol pointblank at a friend but the gun failed to go off, and a teenage boy on Zoloft beat to death an elderly woman who complained to him about his loud music. A greater number of cases involve adults who lost control of themselves while taking antidepressants. In at least two cases judges have found individuals not guilty on the basis of involuntary intoxication with psychiatric drugs and other cases have resulted in reduced charges, lesser convictions, or shortened sentences. [1] Some of the findings cited in the BMJ paper include reports and statistics on:

Aggressive behavior

Akathisia, which is a state of agitation, distress and restlessness that can be a side effect of antipsychotic and antidepressant prescription drugs

Suicidality, the likelihood of someone committing suicide

Suicidal ideation, suicidal thoughts or preoccupation with thoughts about suicide

Suicides and suicide attempts

In the Conclusion section of the BMJ report we find some disturbing admissions, I think:

We believe our study shows that, despite using clinical study reports, the true risk for serious harms is still uncertain. The low incidence of these rare events and the poor design and reporting of the trials makes it difficult to get accurate effect estimates. GlaxoSmithKline issued a letter to doctors advising them of the increased harm to young adults and for adults of all ages with depression, the frequency of suicidal behavior was higher in patients taking paroxetine [Aropax®, Brisdelle®, Deroxat®, Paraxyl®, Paroxat®, Paxetin®, Paxtine®, Paxil®, Pexeva® Sereupin® and Seroxat® (2)] when compared with placebo.

Therefore we [the BMJ paper authors] suggest minimal use of antidepressants in children, adolescents, and young adults, as the serious harms seem to be greater, and as their effect seems to be below what is clinically relevant. The question that I present is, “How many physicians will take seriously this new BMJ paper, since many, if not most, don’t bother to read the journals?” for if they did, they’d realize the dangers of vaccine ingredients. It seems medical doctors would rather believe the pharmaceutical hucksters (reps) who plop down samples on their desk and exhort them to prescribe, prescribe, and prescribe.

Parents must become over-vigilant to what medical doctors are prescribing for their children, especially those whose behavioral problems may stem from, or be an adverse reaction to, toxic ingredients in vaccines.

The authors of the BMJ paper suggest alternative treatments such as exercise and psychotherapy. My suggestion would be to find a holistically-inclined medical doctor who will treat your children or you with non-toxic SSRIs before having to resort to them, since there are many vitamin and mineral deficiencies that occur in the human body that exacerbate mental health issues. Most of the chemicals found in food and water only intensify those problems for individuals with fragile mental health leanings, I offer. Fast food, junk food diets, sodas and snacks replete with GMOs in everything, certainly do not contribute to a healthful wellbeing or sound mental health.

References:
[1] http://breggin.com/index.php%3Foption=com_content&task=view&id=196

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paroxetine

Mike

4th February 2016, 22:20

wow. just wow.

i don't know how ive missed this thread.

one of the most important on avalon, easily.

great work here Herve!

Hervé

13th February 2016, 01:55

Bombshell Study Exposes Frightening Facts About Anti-Depressant Drugs & Pharmaceutical Companies (http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/02/12/bombshell-study-published-outlining-some-very-frightening-facts-about-anti-depressant-drugs-pharmaceutical-companies/)

by Arjun Walia (http://www.collective-evolution.com/author/arjun/) February 12, 2016

http://cdn3.collective-evolution.com/assets/uploads/2016/02/depression-728x400.jpg

The title of this article might give you the impression that my aim is to frighten you. I assure you it is not. The realities of the pharmaceutical industry are admittedly difficult to swallow, but this is important information given the fact that so many people are taking anti-depressant drugs. While these details may be disturbing, especially if you or someone you know takes anti-depressant drugs, it is important to move past the fear of information and really look at what has happened with the modern day medical industry and the pharmaceutical stranglehold that plagues it today.

“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – (source (http://www.commercialalert.org/relmanangell.pdf))(source (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1126053/#ref15))Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal The most recent example of this kind of corruption comes from a study that was published last week in the British Medical Journal by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen. The study showed that pharmaceutical companies were not disclosing all information regarding the results of their drug trials. Researchers looked at documents from 70 different double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) and found that the full extent of serious harm in clinical study reports went unreported. These are the reports sent to major health authorities like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Tamang Sharma, a PhD student at Cochrane and lead author of the study, said:

We found that a lot of the appendices were often only available upon request to the authorities, and the authorities had never requested them. I’m actually kind of scared about how bad the actual situation would be if we had the complete data. (source (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-harm-of-antidepressants/)) Joanna Moncrieff, a psychiatrist and researcher at University College London, elaborates:

[This study] confirms that the full degree of harm of antidepressants is not reported. They are not reported in the published literature, we know that – and it appears that they are not properly reported in clinical study reports that go to the regulators and form the basis of decisions about licensing. (source (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-harm-of-antidepressants/)) Peter Gotzsche, a clinician researcher at Cochrane and the co-author of the study, actually tried to gain access to clinical trial reports almost a decade ago for anti-obesity pills. Unfortunately, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) denied them the reports:

They talked about commercial confidentiality although there was absolutely nothing in these reports that was commercially confidential. We explained that all this secrecy actually cost human lives, but they weren’t interested in that at all. (source (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-harm-of-antidepressants/)) It took years of requests and complaints for this to happen and, while Gotzsche is pleased they were able to achieve this breakthrough, he reminds us that similar progress has yet to be made in the United States. He went on to state that researchers need better access to data from clinical trials to conduct assessments unimpeded by industry influence:

It’s deeply unethical when patients volunteer to benefit science and then we let drug companies decide that we cannot get access to the raw data. The testing of drugs should be a public enterprise. (source (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-harm-of-antidepressants/)) Moncrieff (quoted above) then goes on to express further concerns:

We really don’t have good enough evidence that antidepressants are effective and we have increasing evidence that they can be harmful. So we need to go into reverse and stop this increasing trend of prescribing [them]. (source (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-harm-of-antidepressants/))
This Is Not The First Time
This is not the first time that pharmaceutical companies have been caught manipulating science in order to get antidepressants onto the shelves. It was only a couple of months ago that an independent review found that the commonly prescribed antidepressant drug Paxil (paroxetine) is not safe for teenagers, even though a large amount of literature had already suggested this previously. The 2001 drug trial that took place, funded by GlaxoSmithKline (also maker of the Gardasil Vaccine (http://www.collective-evolution.com/?s=Gardasil)), found that these drugs were completely safe, and used that ‘science’ to market Paxil as safe for teenagers.

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine and co-author of the study, is also the author of the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124). In the report, he states that “most current published research findings are false.” And this was more than 10 years ago — the situation has undeniably worsened in the interim.

This echoes the words of Dr. Richard Horton, the current Editor-In-Chief of one of the most reputable reviewed medical journals in the world:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. (source (http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf)) The Editor in Chief of the New England Medical journal, which is also considered to be one of the best in the world, has made similar assertions:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. (source (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964337/)) A couple of years ago, Lucia Tomljenovic, a PhD in biochemistry and a senior postdoctoral fellow in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, uncovered documents that reveal vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and health authorities have known about multiple dangers associated with vaccines but chose to withhold them from the public. The documents were obtained from the UK Department of Health (DH) and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI), who advise the Secretaries of State for Health in the UK about diseases preventable through immunizations. The JCVI made “continuous efforts to withhold critical data on severe adverse reactions and contraindications to vaccinations to both parents and health practitioners in order to reach overall vaccination rates.” She goes on to explain that,

The transcripts of the JCBI meetings also show that some of the Committee members had extensive ties to pharmaceutical companies and that the JCVI frequently co-operated with vaccine manufactures on the strategies aimed at boosting vaccine uptake. Some of the meetings at which such controversial items were discussed were not intended to be publicly available, as the transcripts were only released later, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). These particular meetings are denoted in the transcripts as “commercial in confidence,” and reveal a clear and disturbing lack of transparency, as some of the information was removed from the text (i.e., the names of the participants) prior to transcript release under the FOI section at the JCVI website. (source (http://nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BSEM-2011.pdf)) Below is a clip taken from the One More Girl documentary, a film which looks at the Gardasil (http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/01/25/mercks-former-doctor-predicts-gardasil-to-become-the-greatest-medical-scandal-of-all-time/) vaccine, a medicine designed to prevent Human Papillomavirus. In it, Dr. Peter Rost, MD, a former vice president of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world (Pfizer), shares the truth about the ties between the medical and pharmaceutical industry.

Rost is a former vice president of Pfizer, and a whistleblower of the entire pharmaceutical industry in general. He is the author of The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman. (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Whistleblower-Confessions-Healthcare-Hitman/dp/193336839X) Considering his work experience, it would be an understatement to say that he is an insider expert on big pharma marketing.

TrCizlAOBAo
It’s time to re-think current medical research and look at the bigger picture.

Related CE Article:
10 ways you can increase dopamine levels in your brain without the use of drugs. (http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/01/20/10-ways-to-increase-dopamine-levels-in-the-brain/)

norman

13th August 2016, 21:40

A big BUMP for this thread................

Dr. Kelly Brogan

uxyosTrza4A

This woman is bright and has a lot to say.

Hervé

13th September 2016, 17:13

Renowned Harvard psychologist calls ADHD a fraud that only benefits the pharmaceutical industry (http://wakeup-world.com/2016/09/09/renowned-harvard-psychologist-says-adhd-is-largely-a-fraud/)

By Carolanne Wright (http://wakeup-world.com/category/contributing-writers/carolanne-wright/)
Contributing writer for Wake Up World (http://wakeup-world.com/2016/09/09/renowned-harvard-psychologist-says-adhd-is-largely-a-fraud/)
Fri, 09 Sep 2016 16:15 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s17/344328/large/Renowned_Harvard_Psychologist_.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s17/344328/full/Renowned_Harvard_Psychologist_.jpg)

Viewed by academics as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Jerome Kagan ranked above Carl Jung (http://www.cgjungpage.org) (the founder of analytical psychology) and Ivan Pavlov (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html) (who discovered the Pavlovian reflex) in a 2002 American Psychological Association ranking of the eminent psychologists (http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/eminent.aspx). He is well-known for his pioneering work in developmental psychology at Harvard University, where he has spent decades documenting how babies and small children grow, and is an exceptional and highly-regarded researcher.

So it may be surprising to learn that he believes the diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is an invention — and only benefits the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists.

Mislabeling Mental Illness
“That is the history of humanity: Those in authority believe they’re doing the right thing, and they harm those who have no power”, says Jerome Kagan.

In an interview with Spiegel, Kagan addressed the skyrocketing rates of ADHD in America, which he attributes to “fuzzy diagnostic practices.” He illustrated his point with the following example:

Say fifty years ago you have a 7-year-old who is bored in school and exhibits disruptive behavior. Back then, he would be labeled as lazy. But today, that same child is said to suffer from ADHD. That’s why we’ve seen such a dramatic increase in the disorder.
Every child who is having problems in school is sent to see a pediatrician, who then claims it’s ADHD and prescribes Ritalin. “In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis,” he said.

“We could get philosophical and ask ourselves: “What does mental illness mean?” If you do interviews with children and adolescents aged 12 to 19, then 40 percent can be categorized as anxious or depressed. But if you take a closer look and ask how many of them are seriously impaired by this, the number shrinks to 8 percent. Describing every child who is depressed or anxious as being mentally ill is ridiculous. Adolescents are anxious, that’s normal. They don’t know what college to go to. Their boyfriend or girlfriend just stood them up. Being sad or anxious is just as much a part of life as anger or sexual frustration,” Kagan told Spiegel. What are the implications for the millions of American children who are inaccurately diagnosed as mentally ill? Kagan believes it’s devastating because they think there is something fundamentally wrong with them. He’s not the only psychologist to raise the alarm about this trend, but Kagan and others feel they’re up against “an enormously powerful alliance: pharmaceutical companies that are making billions, and a profession that is self-interested.”

Kagan himself suffered from inner restlessness and stuttering as a child, but his mother told him: “There’s nothing wrong with you. Your mind is working faster than your tongue.” He thought at the time: “Gee, that’s great, I’m only stuttering because I’m so smart.” If he had been born in the present era, he most likely would have been classified as mentally ill.

ADHD isn’t the only mental illness epidemic among children that worries Kagan, depression is another. In 1987, about one in 400 American teenagers was using an antidepressant. By 2002, the numbers leaped to one in 40. He feels it’s another overused diagnosis, simply because the pills are available. Instead of immediately resorting to pharmaceutical drugs, he thinks doctors should take more time with the child to find out why they aren’t as cheerful, for instance. At the very least, a few tests should be carried out — and an EEG for certain, especially since studies have shown that people who have heightened activity in the right frontal lobe respond poorly to antidepressants.

Kagan remembers going into a textbook-type depression after a major research project he was involved with failed. He had insomnia and met all the other clinical criteria for depression. But since he knew what the cause was, he didn’t seek professional help. After six months, the depression was gone. Under normal circumstances, he would have been diagnosed as mentally ill by a psychiatrist and put on medication.

But here lies an important distinction: when a life event overwhelms us, it’s common to fall into a depression for a while. But there are those who have a genetic vulnerability and experience chronic depression; they are mentally ill. It’s crucial to look not only at the symptoms, but the causes. This is where psychiatry drops the ball, as it’s the only medical profession that establishes illness on symptoms alone. Such a blind spot opens the door for new maladies — like bipolar disorder, which we never used to see in children. As it stands today, nearly a million Americans under the age of 19 are diagnosed with it.

“A group of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital just started calling kids who had temper tantrums bipolar. They shouldn’t have done that. But the drug companies loved it because drugs against bipolar disorders are expensive. That’s how the trend was started. It’s a little like in the 15th century, when people started thinking someone could be possessed by the devil or hexed by a witch,” said Kagan. When asked if there are alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs for behavioral abnormalities, Kagan said we could look at tutoring, as an example, for kids diagnosed with ADHD. After all, it’s never the ones who are doing well in school that are diagnosed, it’s always the children who are struggling.

Related reading:

The Fictions Surrounding ADHD and the “Chemical Imbalance” Theory of Mental Illness (http://wakeup-world.com/2015/09/06/the-fiction-of-adhd-and-the-chemical-imbalance-theory-of-mental-illness/)
Instead of Pharmaceutical Drugs, These Physicians are Prescribing Time in Nature and Fruit, Vegetables For Patients (http://wakeup-world.com/2016/09/03/instead-pharmaceutical-drugs-physicians-prescribing-patients-time-nature-fruit-vegetables/)
The Biggest Cause of Anxiety and Depression is Traumatic Life Events (http://wakeup-world.com/2016/09/05/the-biggest-cause-of-anxiety-and-depression-is-traumatic-life-events/)

Article sources:

www.spiegel.de/international/world/child-psychologist-jerome-kagan-on-overprescibing-drugs-to-children-a-847500.html (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/child-psychologist-jerome-kagan-on-overprescibing-drugs-to-children-a-847500.html)

Hervé

24th September 2016, 22:13

German Psychologists Declare “the Drugs Don’t Work” (http://www.madinamerica.com/2016/09/german-psychologists-declare-the-drugs-dont-work/)

Experts question the “emperor’s new treatments for mental illnesses”

By --Justin Karter (http://www.madinamerica.com/author/jkarter/) , News Editor In The News (http://www.madinamerica.com/news-archives/in-the-news/) September 23, 2016

Jürgen Margraf and Silvia Schneider, both well-known psychologists at the University of Bochum in Germany, claim that psychotropic drugs are no solution to mental health issues in an editorial for the latest issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. They argue that the effects of psychiatric drugs for depression, anxiety, and ‘ADHD’ are short-lived and may have negative long-term consequences.

“There are now plenty of data and evidence that, in the long term, the drugs do not work,” the authors write in their commentary, “From neuroleptics to neuroscience and from Pavlov to psychotherapy: more than just the ‘emperor’s new treatments’ for mental illnesses?”

Margraf and Schneider begin by pointing out that the number of people in the industrialized world who are disabled because of mental health issues has been rapidly rising over the past fifty years. At the same time, they note, the common perception is that new antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs and other new treatments have greatly improved mental health treatment.

https://www.sott.net/image/s17/346670/large/pjimage_1024x576.jpg
Silvia Schneider and Jürgen Margraf, Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany

If this “epidemic” of mental health issues causing disability is not due to an increase in overall incidence, they ask, “how can this apparent contradiction be explained?”

“Could it be,” they continue, “that therapeutic progress is much less than we think or are being told? Could it be that the course of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or ADHD has been altered for the worse? Could it be that we cannot make therapeutic progress because the concept of mental illness and its treatment is deeply flawed? There are strong reasons to assume that all three suspicions are in fact true.”

The researchers identify three conceptual mistakes that are preventing more successful treatments for mental health issues from being developed.

The “ill-advised biological notion of mental illnesses” and the “myth of the chemical imbalance”
The “reification of diagnostic constructs (‘depression’) as distinct illness categories” rather than as a dimension of human behavior occurring on a spectrum.
The emphasis on “bottom-up” causal pathways, like genetics, rather than “top down” social and psychological influences.

“After decades of proclaimed therapeutic breakthroughs and promises of imminent better treatments based on the translation of basic science into clinical practice, neither neurobiology nor neuroscience has led to measurably better long-term outcomes (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.15252/embr.201540076/pdf) for any of the major mental disorders,” they write. “Although psychotropic drugs are by far the most often used treatment modality in industrialized countries, there is no compelling evidence for the long-term stability of their small to moderate short-term results.”

Margraf and Schneider suggest that psychologists work together to bring a renewed focus to all three levels of analysis, biological, psychological, and sociological, while pushing back against the “marketing power of Big Pharma.”

“A realistic assessment of our current treatment options and the close cooperation of clinicians and neuroscientists would help us to overcome the current stagnation and put us back on the track forward,” they conclude.

****
Margraf, J., & Schneider, S. (2016). From neuroleptics to neuroscience and from Pavlov to psychotherapy: more than just the “emperor's new treatments” for mental illnesses?. EMBO Molecular Medicine, e201606650. (Full Text) (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.15252/emmm.201606650/pdf)

Hervé

7th October 2016, 13:06

Jury awards $11.9 million in Paxil suicide malpractice case (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/10/prweb13743675.htm)

PR Web (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/10/prweb13743675.htm) Thu, 06 Oct 2016 23:00 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s17/349311/large/paxil.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s17/349311/full/paxil.jpg)

A jury has awarded $11.9 million in a suicide case involving the antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine). The patient killed himself in jail after a psychiatrist restarted him on the SSRI antidepressant.

The $11.9 million award (http://www.prweb.net/Redirect.aspx?id=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5mb3huZXdzLmNvbS91cy8yMDE2LzA5LzIwL2ZhbWlseS1wZW5uc3lsdmFuaWEtamFpbC1 zdWljaWRlLXZpY3RpbS1hd2FyZGVkLTExbS5odG1s) was one of the largest jury awards of its kind in an antidepressant-related suicide case which concluded September 15, 2016.

The defendant was PrimeCare and several of its practitioners and staff who provided services at the jail. The jury determined that the company and most of the defendants acted with deliberate indifference to the patient's medical needs.

Psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin MD (http://www.prweb.net/Redirect.aspx?id=aHR0cDovL2JyZWdnaW4uY29tLw==) testified, according to court documents, about the negligence and callous indifference of the psychiatrist and the psychologist who treated the 46 year old patient, Mr. Mumun Barbaros. In addition, Dr. Breggin testified about causation in respect to the actions of the psychologist and psychiatrist, as well as the nursing staff and administration.

According to court documents Dr. Breggin testified that restarting the patient on his regular dose of the SSRI antidepressant Paxil 30 mg, despite a hiatus of least four days without the medication, was a direct cause of the suicide later on the same day. He explained further that the patient had difficulty several years earlier when starting the medication, even though the initial dose was only 10 mg. Restarting him on Paxil 30 mg, when most of the drug was out of his system caused akathisia (agitation with hyperactivity) and suicide. He also found that the doctor and the psychologist were negligent in several other ways, including their failure to evaluate the patient and to order careful monitoring.

Paxil (paroxetine) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant (http://www.prweb.net/Redirect.aspx?id=aHR0cDovL2JyZWdnaW4uY29tL3Zpb2xlbmNlLWFuZC1zdWljaWRlLWNhdXNlZC1ieS1hbnRpZGVwcmVzc2F udHMtcmVwb3J0LXRvLXRoZS1mZGEv). All antidepressants can cause suicidal and homicidal behavior, especially those that routinely cause stimulation or activation, including akathisia, agitation, insomnia, disinhibition, emotional lability, hypomania, and mania, and a general worsening of the patient's condition. Of all the antidepressants, Paxil was the only one to show a statistically significant association with suicide in depressed adults in the short and deeply flawed clinical trials used for FDA approval of the drug. Dr. Breggin has written about the subject of medication-induced suicide in his book, "Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime," as well as in other books and numerous scientific articles.

Dr. Breggin bolstered his testimony with numerous scientific citations according to the trial documents. The judge qualified Dr. Breggin as an expert in psychiatry, psychopharmacology and the specific drug Paxil. In the trial, other experts testified concerning the nursing care and administrative policies of the healthcare provider, as well as the violent method of Mr. Barbaros' death by gagging himself.

Dr. Breggin commented, "This case illustrates the growing understanding within the judicial system and the public arena that psychiatric drugs can cause people to act in harmful ways that are contrary to their character and normal behavior. The verdict confirms the significant body of scientific evidence indicating that psychiatric drugs can cause violence and suicide." Dr. Breggin also warned, "It is especially dangerous when starting, changing the doses or stopping psychiatric medication, and that medication withdrawal should be done carefully with experienced clinical supervision."

The jury award included $2.8 million for negligence, $1.06 million for federal deliberate indifference and $8 million for punitive damages.

Related:

The drugs may be the problem: Inconvenient truths about big pharma and the psychiatric industry (https://www.sott.net/article/330132-The-drugs-may-be-the-problem-Inconvenient-truths-about-big-pharma-and-the-psychiatric-industry)
The pseudoscience of modern psychiatry - manufacturing madness (https://www.sott.net/article/276771-The-pseudoscience-of-modern-psychiatry-manufacturing-madness)
Paxil Babies: The Dangers of Antidepressants (https://www.sott.net/article/158773-Paxil-Babies-The-Dangers-of-Antidepressants)
A single dose of SSRI antidepressant can alter brain architecture in hours (https://www.sott.net/article/286110-A-single-dose-of-SSRI-antidepressant-can-alter-brain-architecture-in-hours)
Field of Dreams: The SSRi Scandal (https://www.sott.net/article/191541-Field-of-Dreams-The-SSRi-Scandal)
Big Pharma is not letting on how risky commonly prescribed drugs may be (https://www.sott.net/article/310731-Big-Pharma-is-not-letting-on-how-risky-commonly-prescribed-drugs-may-be)
SSRI antidepressants: Putting patients at clear risk of suicide (https://www.sott.net/article/324107-SSRI-antidepressants-Putting-patients-at-clear-risk-of-suicide)
SSRI Antidepressants Do More Harm than Good, Researchers Conclude (https://www.sott.net/article/245418-SSRI-Antidepressants-Do-More-Harm-than-Good-Researchers-Conclude)

Hervé

8th January 2017, 17:55

ISIS is not the biggest killer of US troops in the Middle East - it's suicide! (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/sucide-number-one-killer-troops-middle-east/)

Matt Agorist The Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/sucide-number-one-killer-troops-middle-east/)
Tue, 31 Jan 2017 17:35 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s18/369109/large/soldier_suicide.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s18/369109/full/soldier_suicide.jpg)

Confirming once again that war, to those who are sent to fight them, is absolute hell, newly released Pentagon statistics show that suicide — not combat — is the leading killer of US troops deployed to the Middle East.

According to a report in USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/29/suicide-kills-more-us-troops-than-isil-middle-east/95961038/) this week, of the 31 troops who have died as of Dec. 27 in Operation Inherent Resolve, 11 have taken their own lives. Eight died in combat, seven in accidents and four succumbed to illness or injury.

These new numbers confirm a trend that's been in place since the beginning of the prolonged occupation of the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the DoD released a similar report from 2014 that revealed some startling numbers. In all of 2014, a total of 55 US troops, in both hostile and non-hostile situations, lost their lives in foreign occupations (http://icasualties.org/oef/Fatalities.aspx). The number of soldiers who killed themselves was nearly 5 times that amount.

According to the DoD report, (http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/651182/dod-releases-2014-annual-report-on-suicide) in 2014, there were 269 deaths by suicide among active component service members (compared to 259 deaths by suicide in 2013).

As bureaucratic fatcats sit back from their lush taxpayer-funded offices in giant marble buildings debating on whether or not to send more troops to the Middle East, this crisis is being ignored. Partly due to the fact that they can't seem to figure out why troops are killing themselves, the military 'experts' are unable to reverse it.

"I don't think there's one single cause for it," said (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/29/suicide-kills-more-us-troops-than-isil-middle-east/95961038/)Rajeev Ramchand, a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corp. who has studied military suicide. "There are a multitude of factors. They are also picking up on a trend toward more suicide in the U.S. population as a whole. Maybe there's a universal stress on everyone in the military that affects them in profound ways."

However, many experts have come forward and noted that the increased prevalence in the prescription of antidepressants to active duty troops could play a large role. In 2010, Peter Breggin MD testified (https://youtu.be/SBJfZtB_3cc) before the Veterans' Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives:
"The newer antidepressants frequently cause suicide, violence, and manic-like symptoms of activation or overstimulation, presenting serious hazards to active-duty soldiers who carry weapons under stressful conditions. Antidepressants should not be prescribed to soldiers during or after deployment," said Breggin.

"In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Committee, I have pointed to a probable causal relationship between increasing rates of antidepressant prescription and increasing rates of suicide in the military," he explained in his 2010 publication (http://jeffreydachmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Antidepressant-induced-suicide-Risks-for-military-personnel-Peter-Breggin-2010.pdf)on SSRI Suicide in the Military (Antidepressant-induced suicide). Couple the dehumanizing nature of treating human beings as fodder for wars of aggression with the known side effects of antidepressants, and you have a recipe for disaster.

In war, human lives become units to be traded as a commodity to aid in the expansion of the state. When they are no longer deemed useful, these human lives are then tossed out like yesterday's garbage.

Treating human beings in such a brutal and inhumane manner is not without consequence.

Not only are active duty soldiers tragically ending their own lives at an increasing rate, but once they finish their service, these numbers skyrocket.

In a 2012 report put out by the Veterans Administration, (http://www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012-final.pdf) it was estimated that up to 22 veterans a day kill themselves. That is 8,000 lives a year — almost one per hour.

If we look at attempted suicides, that number skyrockets to 19,000 attempts, of which 8,000 result in ending their own lives.

War is the plight of mankind that is perpetually waged by cowards too afraid to send themselves or their own children into harm's way, but who do not hesitate to send the poor or 'patriotic.'

When the state is done with its pawns of empire, it disposes of them like spent military gear. They then become unable to get the proper care they need for illness and injury related to their service. If they try to self-medicate to cope with the subsequent PTSD from being forced to brutally occupy a foreign country, these veterans have their children taken, face life in prison, or worse.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates (http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releases_media_advisories/2014/HUDNo_14-103) that nearly 50,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Another 140,000 are currently in jail, many of them for victimless crimes like drug possession.

As if the numbers aren't bad enough, veterans are often the target of unjust attention from law enforcement. On multiple occasions, the Department of Homeland Security (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/16/napolitano.apology/)has referred to veterans as potential terrorists and noted that they pose a threat to national security.

The Free Thought Project has reported on case after case of veterans returning home only to be beaten and locked up for speaking out (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/happy-veterans-day-veteran-violently-arrested-sentenced-playing-banjo-wrong-place/), or killed by police during a PTSD-triggered episode. (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/reached-waistband-claim-now-cop-kills-mentally-ill-unarmed-naked-man/)

Merely 'supporting the troops' is proving to be the worst possible thing for them.

If you really want to "support the troops" you'll stop supporting wars of aggression in distant lands in which Americans are forced to kill people who pose no threat to the US.

If you really "support the troops" you'll stop blindly standing up for your government whose proven track record shows that they do everything but support the troops.

If you really support the troops, you'll educate yourself on who is behind these wars, why they are waged, and how US foreign policy actually creates enemies. (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/foreign-policy-created-million-osama-bin-ladens-9-11/) ISIS would not exist (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/watch-news-anchor-destroys-msm-fake-news-charge-after-reporting-truth-about-syria/) had the US not remained hell bent on overthrowing the Assad regime for the benefit of special interests in DC.

Pledging blind obedience and unquestioning support for wars that one's government illegally wages at the expense of our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers, is the antithesis of what a free person should do — and anything but "supporting the troops."

So what is the solution? How can the US rein in this epidemic of suicide among active duty troops and vets?

The answer to this question, while it may seem complex, is actually quite simple — Stop creating them.

As a former 'troop' I know how hard it can be to handle the woes faced by life in the military. If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal, please feel free to reach out to the Free Thought Project who is staffed by a number of veterans who understand your pain and who would be glad to help. Feel free to message us on our Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/thefreethoughtprojectcom/?ref=br_tf), or through email here. (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/contact/)

About the author

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter (https://twitter.com/MattAgorist) and now on Steemit (https://steemit.com/@savy4)

SOTT Comment: (https://www.sott.net/article/339001-ISIS-is-not-the-biggest-killer-of-US-troops-in-the-Middle-East-its-suicide)
A Fog of Drugs and War (https://www.sott.net/article/243853-A-Fog-of-Drugs-and-War)
After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed to The Times by the U.S.Army surgeon general. Nearly 8% of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6% is on antidepressants - an eightfold increase since 2005.

Beyond PTSD: Soldiers Have Injured Souls (https://www.sott.net/article/234455-Beyond-PTSD-Soldiers-Have-Injured-Souls)
Fox News Reports: 'U.S. Troops Reportedly Taking More Medication Than Ever' (https://www.sott.net/article/230711-Fox-News-Reports-U-S-Troops-Reportedly-Taking-More-Medication-Than-Ever-)
Are US Soldiers Being Prescribed Drugs That May Make Them Kill Themselves? (https://www.sott.net/article/217464-Are-US-Soldiers-Being-Prescribed-Drugs-That-May-Make-Them-Kill-Themselves-)

Omni

8th January 2017, 18:09

Psychiatry and Psychology were partially designed in their modern form with the directed energy weapon network in mind. In other words they weaponized psychiatry and psychology to misdiagnose electronic harassment targets as mentally ill.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyGNNVkUUAAYj3I.jpg

Hervé

8th February 2017, 12:02

The number-one mind-control program at US colleges (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/the-number-one-mind-control-program-at-us-colleges/)

by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/) Feb 7 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/the-number-one-mind-control-program-at-us-colleges/), 2017

If you’re a college student or have a child at college, read this

The unspoken secret in plain sight

Here is a staggering statistic from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI (http://www.nami.org/)): “More than 25 percent of college students have been diagnosed or treated by a professional for a mental health condition within the past year.”

Let that sink in. 25 percent.

Colleges are basically clinics. Psychiatric centers.

Colleges have been taken over. A soft coup has occurred, out of view.

You want to know where all this victim-oriented “I’m triggered” and “I need a safe space” comes from? You just found it.

It’s a short step from being diagnosed with a mental disorder to adopting the role of being super-sensitive to “triggers.” You could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. “If I have a mental disorder, then I’m a victim, and then what people say and do around me is going disturb me…and I’ll prove it.”

The dangerous and destabilizing effects of psychiatric drugs confirm this attitude. The drugs DO, in fact, produce an exaggerated and distorted sensitivity to a person’s environment.

You want to know where a certain amount of violent aggressive behavior on campuses comes from? You just found it. The psychiatric drugs. In particular, antidepressants and speed-type medications for ADHD.

You want to know why so many college students can’t focus on their studies? You just found one reason. The brain effects of the drugs.

The usual variety of student problems are translated into pseudoscientific categories of “mental disorders”—and toxic drugging ensues.

A college student says to himself, “I’m having trouble with my courses. I don’t understand what my professors want. My reading level isn’t good enough. I don’t like the professors who have a political bias. I’m confused. I miss my friends back home. I feel like a stranger on campus. I’d like to date, but I don’t know where to start. There are groups on campus. Should I join one? Well, maybe I need help. I should go to the counseling center and talk to a psychologist. That’s what they’re there for. Maybe I have a problem I don’t know about…”

And so it begins.

The student is looking for an explanation of his problems. But this search will morph into: having a socially acceptable excuse for not doing well. Understand the distinction.

After a bit of counseling, the student is referred to a psychiatrist, who makes a diagnosis of depression, and prescribes a drug. Now the student says, “That’s a relief. Now I know why I have a problem. I have a mental disorder. I never knew that. I’m operating at a disadvantage. I’m a victim of a brain abnormality. Okay. That means I really shouldn’t be expected to succeed. Situations affect my mood. What people say affects my mood.”

And pretty soon, the whole idea of being triggered and needing a safe space makes sense to the student. He’s heading down a slippery slope, but he doesn’t grasp what’s actually going on. On top of that, the drug he’s taking is disrupting his thoughts and his brain activity. But of course, the psychiatrist tells him no, it’s not the drug, it’s the condition, the clinical depression, which is worsening and making it harder to think clearly. He needs a different drug. The student is now firmly in the system. He’s a patient. He’s expected to have trouble coping. And on and on it goes.

***********************

Buckle up. Here is the background. Here is what psychiatry is all about—

Wherever you see organized psychiatry operating, you see it trying to expand its domain and its dominance. The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm? Are you kidding?

The first question to ask is: do these mental disorders have any scientific basis? There are now roughly 300 of them. They multiply like fruit flies.

An open secret has been bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

In a PBS Frontline episode, Does ADHD Exist?, Dr. Russell Barkley, an eminent professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, unintentionally spelled out the fraud.

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY: That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid… There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [Emphasis added]

Oh, indeed, that does make them invalid. Utterly and completely. All 297 mental disorders. They’re all hoaxes. Because there are no defining tests of any kind to back up the diagnosis.

You can sway and tap dance and bloviate all you like and you won’t escape the noose around your neck. We are looking at a science that isn’t a science. That’s called fraud. Rank fraud.

There’s more. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”

Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bull****. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.

That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”

Frances might have been obliquely referring to the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

If this is medical science, a duck is a rocket ship.

To repeat, Dr. Frances’ work on the DSM IV allowed for MORE toxic drugs to be prescribed, because the definitions of Bipolar and ADHD were expanded to include more people.

Adverse effects of Valproate (given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
* acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;
* life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;
* brain damage.
Adverse effects of Lithium (also given for a Bipolar diagnosis) include:
* intercranial pressure leading to blindness;
* peripheral circulatory collapse;
* stupor and coma.
Adverse effects of Risperdal (given for “Bipolar” and “irritability stemming from autism”) include:
* serious impairment of cognitive function;
* fainting;
* restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).
Dr. Frances self-admitted label-juggling act also permitted the definition of ADHD to expand, thereby opening the door for greater and greater use of Ritalin (and other similar compounds) as the treatment of choice.

So…what about Ritalin?

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published an important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse effects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
* Paranoid delusions
* Paranoid psychosis
* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
* Activation of psychotic symptoms
* Toxic psychosis
* Visual hallucinations
* Auditory hallucinations
* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
* Effects pathological thought processes
* Extreme withdrawal
* Terrified affect
* Started screaming
* Aggressiveness
* Insomnia
* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
* Psychic dependence
* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
* Decreased REM sleep
* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
* Convulsions
* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to people diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land.

Where are the mainstream reporters and editors and newspapers and TV anchors who should be breaking this story and mercilessly hammering on it week after week? They are in harness.

Thank you, Dr. Frances.

***********************

Let’s take a little trip back in time and review how one psychiatric drug, Prozac, escaped a bitter fate, by hook and by crook. It’s an instructive case.

Prozac, in fact, endured a rocky road in the press for a while. Stories on it rarely appear now. The major media have backed off. But on February 7th, 1991, Amy Marcus’ Wall Street Journal article on the drug carried the headline, “Murder Trials Introduce Prozac Defense.”

She wrote, “A spate of murder trials in which defendants claim they became violent when they took the antidepressant Prozac are imposing new problems for the drug’s maker, Eli Lilly and Co.”

Also on February 7, 1991, the New York Times ran a Prozac piece headlined, “Suicidal Behavior Tied Again to Drug: Does Antidepressant Prompt Violence?”

In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin mentions that the Donahue show (Feb. 28, 1991) “put together a group of individuals who had become compulsively self-destructive and murderous after taking Prozac and the clamorous telephone and audience response confirmed the problem.”

A shocking review-study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1996, v.184, no.2), written by Rhoda L. Fisher and Seymour Fisher, called “Antidepressants for Children,” concludes:
“Despite unanimous literature of double-blind studies indicating that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos in treating depression in children and adolescents, such medications continue to be in wide use.”
An instructive article, “Protecting Prozac,” by Michael Grinfeld, in the December 1998 California Lawyer, opens several doors. Grinfeld notes that “in the past year nearly a dozen cases involving Prozac have disappeared from the court record.” He was talking about law suits against the manufacturer, Eli Lilly, and he was saying that those cases had apparently been settled, without trial, in such a quiet and final way, with such strict confidentiality, that it is almost as if they never happened.

Grinfeld details a set of maneuvers involving attorney Paul Smith, who in the early 1990s became the lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the famous Fentress lawsuit against Eli Lilly.

The plaintiffs made the accusation that Prozac had induced a man to commit murder. This was the first action involving Prozac to reach a trial and jury, so it would establish a major precedent for a large number of other pending suits against the manufacturer.

The case: On September 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a former employee of Standard Gravure, in Louisville, Kentucky, walked into the workplace, with an AK-47 and a SIG Sauer pistol, killed eight people, wounded 12 others, and committed suicide. Family members of the victims subsequently sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, on the grounds that Wesbecker had been pushed over the edge into violence by the drug.

The trial: After what many people thought was a very weak attack on Lilly by plaintiffs’ lawyer Smith, the jury came back in five hours with an easy verdict favoring Lilly and Prozac.

Grinfeld writes, “Lilly’s defense attorneys predicted the verdict would be the death knell for [anti-]Prozac litigation.”

But that wasn’t the end of the Fentress case. “Rumors began to circulate that [the plaintiffs’ attorney] Smith had made several [prior] oral agreements with Lilly concerning the evidence that would be presented , the structure of a post-verdict settlement, and the potential resolution of Smith’s other [anti-Prozac] cases.”

In other words, the rumors declared: This plaintiff’s lawyer, Smith, made a deal with Lilly to present a weak attack, to omit evidence damaging to Prozac, so that the jury would find Lilly innocent of all charges. In return, the case would be settled secretly, with Lilly paying out big monies to Smith’s client. In this way, Lilly would avoid the exposure of a public settlement, and through the innocent verdict, would discourage other potential plaintiffs from suing it over Prozac.

The rumors congealed. The judge in the Fentress case, John Potter, asked lawyers on both sides if “money had changed hands.” He wanted to know if the fix was in. The lawyers said no money had been paid, “without acknowledging that an agreement was in place.”

Judge Potter didn’t stop there. In April 1995, Grinfeld notes, “In court papers, Potter wrote that he was surprised that the plaintiffs’ attorneys [Smith] hadn’t introduced evidence that Lilly had been charged criminally for failing to report deaths from another of its drugs to the Food and Drug Administration. Smith had fought hard [during the Fentress trial] to convince Potter to admit that evidence, and then unaccountably withheld it.”

In Judge Potter’s motion, he alleged that “Lilly sought to buy not just the verdict, but the court’s judgment as well.”

In 1996, the Kentucky Supreme Court issued an opinion: “…there was a serious lack of candor with the trial court [during Fentress] and there may have been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial process or perhaps even fraud.”

After the Supreme Court remanded the Fentress case back to the state attorney general’s office, the whole matter dribbled away, and then resurfaced in a different form, in another venue. At the time of the California Lawyer article, a new action against attorney Smith was unresolved. Eventually, Eli Lilly escaped punishment.

Based on the rigged Fentress case, Eli Lilly silenced many lawsuits based on Prozac inducing murder and suicide.

Quite a story.

And it all really starts with the institution of psychiatry inventing a whole branch of science that doesn’t exist, thereby defining 300 mental disorders that don’t exist.

***********************

Here are data about psychiatric drugs and violence from several studies:
[I]February 1990 American Journal of Psychiatry (Teicher et al, v.147:207-210) reports on “six depressed patients, previously free of recent suicidal ideation, who developed `intense, violent suicidal preoccupations after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment.’ The suicidal preoccupations lasted from three days to three months after termination of the treatment. The report estimates that 3.5 percent of Prozac users were at risk. While denying the validity of the study, Dista Products, a division of Eli Lilly, put out a brochure for doctors dated August 31, 1990, stating that it was adding `suicidal ideation’ to the adverse events section of its Prozac product information.”
An earlier study, from the September 1989 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, by Joseph Lipiniski, Jr., indicates that in five examined cases people on Prozac developed what is called akathesia. Symptoms include intense anxiety, inability to sleep, the “jerking of extremities,” and “bicycling in bed or just turning around and around.” Dr. Peter Breggin comments that akathesia “may also contribute to the drug’s tendency to cause self-destructive or violent tendencies … Akathesia can become the equivalent of biochemical torture and could possibly tip someone over the edge into self-destructive or violent behavior … The June 1990 Health Newsletter, produced by the Public Citizen Research Group, reports, ‘Akathesia, or symptoms of restlessness, constant pacing, and purposeless movements of the feet and legs, may occur in 10-25 percent of patients on Prozac.’”

The well-known publication, California Lawyer, in a December 1998 article called “Protecting Prozac,” details some of the suspect maneuvers of Eli Lilly in its handling of suits against Prozac. California Lawyer also mentions other highly qualified critics of the drug: “David Healy, MD, an internationally renowned psychopharmacologist, has stated in sworn deposition that `contrary to Lilly’s view, there is a plausible cause-and-effect relationship between Prozac’ and suicidal-homicidal events. An epidemiological study published in 1995 by the British Medical Journal also links Prozac to increased suicide risk.”

When pressed, proponents of these SSRI antidepressant drugs (Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, etc.) sometimes say, “Well, the benefits for the general population far outweigh the risk.” But the issue of benefits will not go away on that basis. A shocking review-study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1996, v.184, no.2), written by Rhoda L. Fisher and Seymour Fisher, called “Antidepressants for Children,” concludes: “Despite unanimous literature of double-blind studies indicating that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos in treating depression in children and adolescents, such medications continue to be in wide use.”

In wide use. This despite such contrary information and the negative, dangerous effects of these drugs.

There are other studies: “Emergence of self-destructive phenomena in children and adolescents during fluoxetine treatment,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1991, vol.30), written by RA King, RA Riddle, et al. It reports self-destructive phenomena in 14% (6/42) of children and adolescents (10-17 years old) who had treatment with fluoxetine (Prozac) for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

July, 1991. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Hisako Koizumi, MD, describes a thirteen-year-old boy who was on Prozac: “full of energy,” “hyperactive,” “clown-like.” All this devolved into sudden violent actions which were “totally unlike him.”

September, 1991. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Author Laurence Jerome reports the case of a ten-year old who moves with his family to a new location. Becoming depressed, the boy is put on Prozac by a doctor. The boy is then “hyperactive, agitated … irritable.” He makes a “somewhat grandiose assessment of his own abilities.” Then he calls a stranger on the phone and says he is going to kill him. The Prozac is stopped, and the symptoms disappear.

Here’s a coda:

This one is big.

The so-called “chemical-imbalance theory of mental disorders” is dead. The notion that an underlying chemical imbalance in the brain causes mental disorders: dead.

Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid the theory to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:
“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend — never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”
Boom.

However…urban legend? No. For decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “we’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain.”

The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.

In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to protect his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:
[I]“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it…the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”
Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.

And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…

…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients…

…since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct a chemical imbalance?

Here’s what’s happening. The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed. They’re taking heavy flack on many fronts.

The chemical-imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders. All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence. Suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.

So the shrinks need to move into another model, another con, another fraud. And they’re looking for one.

For example, genes plus “psycho-social factors.” A mish-mash of more unproven science.

“New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise…” Professional gibberish.

It’s all gibberish, all the way down.

Meanwhile, the business model still demands drugs for sale.

So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.

Big Pharma isn’t going to back off. Trillions of dollars are at stake.

And in the wake of Colorado, Sandy Hook, the Naval Yard, and other mass shootings, the hype is expanding: “We must have new community mental-health centers all over America.”

More fake diagnosis of mental disorders, more devastating drugs.

You want to fight for a right? Fight for the right to refuse toxic medication. Fight for the right of every parent to refuse toxic medication for his/her child.

***********************

Here is a story Dr. Breggin tells in his classic book, Toxic Psychiatry. It says it all:
“Roberta was a college student, getting good grades, mostly A’s, when she first became depressed and sought psychiatric help at the recommendation of her university health service. She was eighteen at the time, bright and well motivated, and a very good candidate for psychotherapy. She was going through a sophomore-year identity crisis about dating men, succeeding in school, and planning a future. She could have thrived with a sensitive therapist who had an awareness of women’s issues.

“Instead of moral support and insight, her doctor gave her Haldol. Over the next four years, six different physicians watched her deteriorate neurologically without warning her or her family about tardive dyskinesia [motor brain damage] and without making the [tardive dyskinesia] diagnosis, even when she was overtly twitching in her arms and legs. Instead they switched her from one neuroleptic [anti-psychotic drug] to another, including Navane, Stelazine, and Thorazine. Eventually a rehabilitation therapist became concerned enough to send her to a general physician, who made the diagnosis [of medical drug damage]. By then she was permanently physically disabled, with a loss of 30 percent of her IQ.

“…my medical evaluation described her condition: Roberta is a grossly disfigured and severely disabled human being who can no longer control her body. She suffers from extreme writhing movements and spasms involving the face, head, neck, shoulders, limbs, extremities, torso, and back—nearly the entire body. She had difficulty standing, sitting, or lying down, and the difficulties worsen as she attempts to carry out voluntary actions. At one point she could not prevent her head from banging against nearby furniture. She could hold a cup to her lip only with great difficulty. Even her respiratory movements are seriously afflicted so that her speech comes out in grunts and gasps amid spasms of her respiratory muscles…Roberta may improve somewhat after several months off the neuroleptic drugs, but she will never again have anything remotely resembling a normal life.”
WARNING [from Dr. Breggin, published on his site, breggin.com (http://www.breggin.com)]: “Most psychiatric drugs can cause withdrawal reactions, sometimes including life-threatening emotional and physical withdrawal problems. In short, it is not only dangerous to start taking psychiatric drugs, it can also be dangerous to stop them.”

“Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done carefully under experienced clinical supervision. Methods for safely withdrawing from psychiatric drugs are discussed in Dr. Breggin’s book, Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families.”

I’ll offer another illustration. This one is from The Daily Mail (Feb, 7, 2008). A young woman of 25, Eleanor Longden, tells her story to reporter Claire Campbell:
“Through a drugged haze I heard the doctor’s words as he gazed down at me, lying in bed on a locked psychiatric ward, far away from my family and friends, and feeling more lost, lonely and terrified than I had ever done in my life.”

“I felt ashamed, too, as though it was my fault that I’d been diagnosed as mentally ill.”

“Getting out of bed, I stumbled to the bathroom, walking awkwardly and, to my immense embarrassment, drooling from the mouth as a result of the side-effects of the medication I had been given. I felt dazed, my thoughts confused, unable even to remember exactly how long I had been in hospital.”

“I looked at myself in the mirror and got a shock. I was scarcely able to recognise the person I saw there from the shy, 17-year-old who had left home for the first time only a few weeks before, full of excitement about her first term at university.”

“I wondered: ‘Why am I here?’ I still didn’t really understand. It was true that those first few weeks at college had been stressful for me. Like many of my fellow freshers, I had felt homesick and uncertain of myself. At school I had been diligent and conscientious.”

“Arriving at college, I felt torn between continuing to work hard or re-inventing myself as a ‘cooler’, more popular, party girl. All around me I saw other students pretending to be someone they weren’t, and the pressure of sustaining this seemed enormous.”

“But I had managed slowly to make friends, and find my way around the campus, as well as start speaking up for myself in tutorials.”

“Then one morning, out of the blue, I heard a quiet voice in my head, commenting: ‘Now she’s going to the library.’

“After that I occasionally heard the voice again. It never said anything dramatic, and I didn’t find it threatening at all.”

“I remembered having listened to a radio programme which described this experience as one that sometimes occurred to lone yachtsmen, or prisoners in solitary confinement, and put it down to loneliness.”

“Sometimes the voice was also a useful indicator to me of how I was really feeling – such as the day it sounded angry following a tutorial in which another student had unfairly criticised me.”

“After I returned to class the next day and put my point of view across more forcefully, the voice in my head once more resumed its usual calm tone. This reassured me that far from being some sinister psychiatric symptom, the phenomenon was probably no more than my own externalised thoughts.”

“But then I made the fatal mistake of confiding in a friend. I will never forget the horror in her expression as she backed away, repeating: ‘You’re hearing what?’ when I mentioned the voice.”

“She looked really scared, and told me I needed to see the college doctor as soon as possible.”

“Her reaction frightened me. I made an appointment immediately.”

“The doctor’s face became very serious at the mention of the voice, and he insisted on referring me to what he called a hospital ‘specialist’, but who turned out to be a consultant psychiatrist.”

“What I wanted and needed was to talk to someone about my feelings of anxiety and low self-esteem since I had arrived at college. But the psychiatrist kept emphasising the significance of the voice – as though we were discussing a mathematical formula in which having this experience automatically meant I must be insane.”

“Even when I talked about my work for the student television station, I could tell from her face that she thought this was fantasy.”

“I felt I walked into that room as a normal, if slightly stressed and vulnerable young girl, but left it labelled with a diagnosis of a paranoid schizophrenic, my interest in broadcasting dismissed as ‘delusional’.”

“Even at that first meeting, the consultant was already discussing with me the possibility of in-patient treatment at a psychiatric hospital.”

“She also put me straight onto a course of Risperidone [aka Risperdal], a strong antipsychotic drug whose side-effects include weight gain, involuntary tremors and difficulty in walking.”

“From that moment on, I felt cut off, alienated not only from my university friends and teachers, but from my family and upbringing. Suddenly I was no longer a middle-class, educated young woman with a bright future ahead of me, but a potentially dangerous mental patient.”

“Feeling the stigma of this, I did not tell anyone that I had been referred for weekly sessions with a psychiatric nurse, as well as further monthly appointments to see the consultant.”

“During these meetings I tried again to talk about my search for identity since leaving home. But these very ordinary feelings of adolescent insecurity were immediately interpreted as symptoms of a diseased mind. Although I didn’t believe I was mad, I trusted – as most people would – the medical view of the psychiatrist over my own instincts.”

“At my second meeting with the consultant two months later, she suggested I admit myself to hospital ‘only for three days’ to undergo tests.”

“Not wanting to worry my parents, I confided in my personal tutor, who assured me that details of the nature of my illness would be kept private.”

“I was shocked when I arrived at the psychiatric hospital, which had once been a Victorian asylum. It was very old-fashioned, with bars on the windows, double-locked doors and, to my horror, mixed wards. I was by far the youngest female patient there and I felt very vulnerable.”

“I knew straightaway this was not somewhere I would get well. Four hours after I was admitted, I tried to leave, but was coaxed into remaining by a nurse on the ward who told me: ‘Everyone feels like this at first’.”

“Over the course of the next few days, I underwent a routine brain scan, which found no evidence of abnormality, but had no therapy of any kind. I was simply given medication and left alone.”

“At the end of four days, I felt I’d had more than enough of the hospital and asked to be discharged—only to find myself under the threat of being forcibly restrained if I tried to leave.”

“I was absolutely terrified, and contacted my parents at the end of that first week to let them know where I was and ask them to come to see me.”

“But by the time my mother arrived, the effects of the drugs had started to kick in, making me confused and sleepy. I felt unable to explain properly to her why I was there or what was wrong.”

“In the meantime, the one calm voice in my head had been joined by another more strident and critical voice. Over the course of the next few weeks, the number of voices, some now male as well as female, and far more frightening, gradually increased until finally there were 12.”

“Of these, by far the most dominant—and demonic—was the threatening tone of a man. At first, it was only his voice I heard. But one night during my second month in hospital, I awoke to a hallucination of him standing by my bed, hugely tall and swathed in black, a hook where his hand should have been—like a character from a horror film.”

“I thought this was the result of the drugs I had been taking and of my distress at being confined in hospital. But the consultant convinced me this was a further symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. I stared at my reflection in the mirror, wondering if it might be true that I was mad.”

“I felt as if I was trapped in a nightmare. Having needed nothing more than reassurance about my normal feelings of insecurity after having left home, I was now labelled as a schizophrenic, drugged and confined to a locked ward.”

“Yet inside I still felt sane. I knew I had to get out of hospital before I started to see myself as a mental patient. Each time a nurse asked me if I thought there was anything wrong with me, I had answered ‘No’. This was clearly not what they wanted to hear.”

“Now I decided to try answering ‘Yes’ and see what happened. As soon as I began acquiescing to treatment, taking all my medication and agreeing to do what I was told, I was finally allowed to return to college.”

“After three months in hospital, I went back to university—a very different and far more disturbed student than when I had left. As a result of the side-effects of my drug treatment, my weight had ballooned from 9st to 15st.”

“I also suffered from constant trembling and a stumbling walk.” [drug-effects]

“I still don’t know how the other students found out where I’d been, but they obviously had. Within a week of my return, my door in the halls of residence had been defaced with graffiti and I had been spat at on my way to a lecture.”

“Worst of all was the tutorial where, after I’d had an essay criticised by a tutor, another student leant across to me and whispered: ‘That’s finished you off, psycho!’”

“I ran back to my room in tears, staying there for the next few days and feeling I wanted to hide from the world.”

“In the meantime, the dominant demonic voice became even more horrific, telling me the only way I would ever get better was if I agreed to follow his instructions.”

“These included not only self-harming but also cutting off my hair. He threatened terrible punishments, such as burning my room down, if I refused.”

“Desperate for some peace, I started to obey his bizarre instructions. Word now got round the university that I was behaving oddly, talking to imaginary people and cutting my arms.”

“Walking through the student bar one night, a group of students mockingly suggested I stub a cigarette out on my forearm. When I did it, they cheered.”

“I felt defeated and demoralised, no longer caring whether I lived or died.”

“At my next appointment with the consultant, I said I thought my medication was making the voices worse, and asked if I could stop taking it. But she insisted I had to continue.”

“When I admitted that I felt suicidal as a result of the way I was being bullied at college, she sent me back to hospital for a further seven week[s].”

“For the next four months I struggled on at university, as well as having another two brief psychiatric admissions. By the time the summer vacation arrived, I knew I could not carry on battling both against the voices and the cruelty of the students.”

“I returned home to my parents, my self-confidence totally destroyed.”

“My parents were wonderful—really supportive—but confused, because there was no history of mental illness in my family.”

“Over the course of the next few months, I was referred to the local psychiatric services in Bradford. My first appointment was with a male psychiatrist called Pat Bracken, who I later found out had worked with men and women tortured and raped in Uganda, and with child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Liberia.”

“He asked me why I had come to see him and I replied obediently: ‘I am 18 and I am a paranoid schizophrenic’.”

“Later on in my treatment, Pat told me he thought my answer was the saddest statement he had ever heard from a young girl—but at the time all he said was: ‘Tell me what you think would help you’.”

“I asked him to reduce my medication. To my amazement, he agreed immediately.”

“We talked about the voices and he suggested I stop seeing them as a symptom of mental illness and start looking on them as a way of finding out about myself. This encouraged me to tell him about my first experience of the female voice.”

“Up until now everyone had treated me as if I was completely passive, but Pat showed me a way of helping myself to get better.”

“Over the course of the next seven months I saw Pat for regular weekly sessions, gradually reducing my medication until I stopped the drugs completely.”

“During this time, I discovered that if I engaged with the voices, they became less frequent. I also learnt to challenge the more threatening voice, refusing to do what it told me and telling myself it was no more than a symbol of my own externalised anger.”

“One by one the voices gradually disappeared, until I was only occasionally hearing one.”

“Three years on, I am healthy, happy and perfectly stable. Schizophrenia is a frightening and misleading label which stigmatises people. While the doctors insist I was schizophrenic, I don’t know if the label really applied to me.”

“I think, like many young people leaving home for the very first time, I was stressed and unhappy. Going to university, and the lack of support there, tipped me over the edge. All I ever did was hear voices.”

“Now I have learned how to deal with them.”

“I am now studying for a doctorate in clinical psychology, as well as working on a medical team that helps teenagers suffering from the sudden onset of psychosis.”

“I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found a psychiatrist who understood how to treat me.”

“If I do hear a voice now, I am no longer frightened because I understand why it’s happening. My mother’s signal for knowing she’s stressed is an attack of migraine. Mine is the voices.”

***********************

—Children, adolescents, and adults have problems. Those problems arise from many different sources, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Severe nutritional deficits, toxic environmental chemicals, drugs, abuse at home, parents not present, poverty, bullying, hostile crime-ridden neighborhoods, peer pressure, grossly inadequate education, etc.

THE TRANSLATION OF THESE PROBLEMS INTO SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS IS SCIENTIFIC FAKERY AND FRAUD. AND THE EFFCTS OF THE DRUGS GIVEN TO TREAT THESE “CONDITIONS” ARE TOXIC AND DAMAGING.

THE MERE DIAGNOSIS OF A MENTAL DISORDER SETS THE STAGE FOR A PERSON TO VIEW HIMSELF AS A VICTIM. HE CAN OPT FOR BIZARRE ALTERNATIVES, SUCH AS “BEING TRIGGERED” AND “NEEDING SAFE SPACES.”

In a very real sense, the entire profession of psychiatry is a mind-control operation.

It has invaded college campuses. It has spread across all sectors of the country and the world.

It is eating societies and cultures from the inside.

Jon Rappoport

gord

9th February 2017, 16:08

No one ever was or ever will be born with a pharmaceutical deficiency.

Hervé

20th February 2017, 23:31

Fourteen Lies That Our Psychiatry Professors in Medical School Taught Us Med Students
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/fourteen-lies-that-our-psychiatry-professors-in-medical-school-taught-us-med-students/5575023)
By Dr. Gary G. Kohls (http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls)
Global Research, February 18, 2017

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/110803_grossanatomy_0098_blog1-400x270.jpg

For a detailed and unabridged version of the 14 lies with supporting scientific and medical analysis, scroll down to the foot of this article.

Lie # 1:

“The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) tests all new psychiatric drugs”

Lie # 2:
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is effective long-term”

Lie # 3:
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term” .

Lie # 4:
“Mental ‘illnesses’ are caused by ‘brain chemistry imbalances’”
In actuality, brain chemical/neurotransmitter imbalances have never been proven to exist (except for cases of neurotransmitter depletions that can be caused by psych drugs) despite repeated examinations of lab animal or autopsied human brains and brain slices by neuroscientists. Knowing that there are over 100 known neurotransmitter systems in the human brain, proposing a theoretical chemical ”imbalance” is laughable and flies in the face of science. Not only that, but even if a theoretical imbalance between any two of the 100 potential systems did exist a drug could never be expected to re-balance it!

Such simplistic theories have been perpetrated by Big Pharma upon a gullible public and a gullible psychiatric industry…

Lie # 5:
“Antidepressant drugs work like insulin for diabetics”

Lie # 6:
“SSRI ‘discontinuation syndromes’ are different than ‘withdrawal syndromes’”
The so-called “antidepressant” drugs of the SSRI class are indeed dependency-inducing/addictive, and the neurological and psychological symptoms that occur when these drugs are stopped or tapered down are not “relapses” into a previous ”mental disorder” but are actually new drug withdrawal symptoms that are different from those that prompted the original diagnosis….

Lie # 7:
“Ritalin is safe for children (or adults)”
In actuality, methylphenidate (= Ritalin, Concerta, Daytrana, Metadate and Methylin; aka “kiddie cocaine”) is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor drug and, it works exactly like cocaine on dopamine synapses, except that orally-dosed methylphenidate reaches the brain more slowly than snortable or smoked cocaine does. Therefore the oral form has far less of an orgasmic “high” than cocaine. Cocaine addicts actually prefer Ritalin if they can get it in a relatively pure powder form. When snorted, both the synthetic Ritalin has the same onset of action as the natural cocaine, but it has a longer lasting “high” and is thus actually preferred among addicted individuals. The molecular structures of Ritalin and cocaine both have amphetamine base structures with ring-shaped side chains which, when examined side by side, are remarkably similar. The dopamine synaptic organelles in the brain (and heart, blood vessels, lungs and guts) are unlikely to sense any difference between the two drugs….

Lie # 8:
“Psychoactive drugs are totally safe for humans”
Actually all five classes of psychotropic drugs have been found to be neurotoxic (ie, known to destroy or otherwise alter the physiology, chemistry, anatomy and viability of the vital energy-producing mitochondria that is in every brain cell). They are therefore all capable of contributing to dementia when used long-term.

Any synthetic chemical that is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier from the capillary circulation into the brain can alter the brain. Synthetic drugs are NOT capable of healing brain dysfunction or reversing brain damage. Rather than curing anything, psychiatric drugs are only capable of temporarily masking symptoms while the abnormal emotional, neurological or mal-nutritional processes that mimic “mental illnesses” continue unabated….

Lie # 9:
“Mental ‘illnesses’ have no known cause
The root causes of my patient’s understandable emotional distress were typically multiple, but the vast majority of them had experienced acute and chronic sexual, physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual traumas as root causes – often accompanied by hopelessness, sleep deprivation, serious emotional/physical neglect and brain nutrient deficiencies as well….

Lie # 10:
“Psychotropic drugs have nothing to do with the huge increase in disabled and unemployable American psychiatric patients”
Many commonly-prescribed drugs are fully capable of causing brain-damage and dementia long-term, especially the anti-psychotics (aka, “major tranquilizers”) like Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Clozapine, Abilify, Clozapine, Fanapt, Geodon, Invega, Risperdal, Saphris, Seroquel and Zyprexa, all of which can cause brain shrinkage….

Lie # 11:
“So-called bipolar disorder can mysteriously ‘emerge’ in patients who have been taking stimulating antidepressants like the SSRIs”
In actuality, crazy-making behaviors like mania, agitation and aggression are commonly caused by the SSRIs (Prozac [fluoxetine], Paxil [paroxetine], Zoloft [sertraline], Celexa [citalopram] and Lexapro [escitalopram).

An important point to make is that SSRI-induced mania, agitation, akathisia and aggression is NOT bipolar disorder, and SSRI-induced psychosis is NOT schizophrenia! (Google ssristories.net to read over 5000 documented stories about SSRI drug-induced aberrant behaviors, including 48 school shootings/incidents, 52 road rage tragedies, 12 air rage incidents, 44 postpartum depression cases, over 600 murders (homicides), over 180 murder-suicides and other acts of violence including workplace violence. These cases only represent a tiny fraction of the possible cases, since medication use is rarely reported in the media.)….

Lie # 12:
“Antidepressant drugs can prevent suicides”
In actuality, there is no psychiatric drug that is FDA-approved for the prevention of suicidality because these drugs, especially the so-called antidepressants, actually INCREASE the incidence of suicidal thinking, suicide attempts and completed suicides….

Lie # 13:
“America’s school shooters and other mass shooters are ‘untreated’ schizophrenics who should have been taking psych drugs”

Lie # 14:
“If your patient hears voices it means he’s a schizophrenic”
The very sobering information revealed above should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of Big Pharma propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated as mentally ill) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures - heading toward oblivion?”

In my mental health care practice, I personally treated hundreds of patients who had been given a series of confusing and contradictory mental illness labels, many of which had been one of the new “diseases of the month” for which there was a new psych “drug of the month” that was being heavily marketed on TV or by the drug company sales staffs.

Many of my patients had simply been victims of unpredictable and un-forseeable drug-drug interactions (far too often drug-drug-drug-drug interactions) or simply adverse reactions to psych drugs which had been erroneously diagnosed as a new mental illness. Extrapolating from my 1200 patient experience (in my little isolated section of the world) to what surely must be happening all over America boggles my mind. There has been a massive iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) epidemic going on right under our noses that has affected tens of millions of suffering victims who could have been cured if not for the drugs.

The time to act on this knowledge is long overdue.

Note that the article above is abbreviated, below is the Detailed and unabridged version:

------------------------------------

Complete, unabbreviated version:

Lie # 1:

“The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) tests all new psychiatric drugs”

False. Actually the FDA only reviews studies that were designed, administered, secretly performed and paid for by the multinational profit-driven drug companies. The studies are frequently farmed out by the pharmaceutical companies to be done by well-paid research firms, in whose interest it is to find positive results for their corporate employers. Unsurprisingly, such research policies virtually guarantee fraudulent results.

Lie # 2:

“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is effective long-term”

False. Actually, FDA approval doesn’t even mean that psychiatric drugs have been proven to be safe - either short-term or long-term! The notion that FDA approval means that a psych drug has been proven to be effective is also a false one, for most such drugs are never tested - prior to marketing - for longer than a few months (and most psych patients take their drugs for years). The pharmaceutical industry pays many psychiatric “researchers” - often academic psychiatrists (with east access to compliant, chronic, already drugged-up patients) who have financial or professional conflicts of interest - some of them even sitting on FDA advisory committees who attempt to “fast track” psych drugs through the approval process. For each new drug application, the FDA only receives 1 or 2 of the “best” studies (out of many) that purport to show short-term effectiveness. The negative studies are shelved and not revealed to the FDA. In the case of the SSRI drugs, animal lab studies typically lasted only hours, days or weeks and the human clinical studies only lasted, on average, 4- 6 weeks, far too short to draw any valid conclusions about long-term effectiveness or safety!

Hence the FDA, prescribing physicians and patient-victims should not have been “surprised” by the resulting epidemic of SSRI drug-induced adverse reactions that are silently plaguing the nation. Indeed, many SSRI trials have shown that those drugs are barely more effective than placebo (albeit statistically significant!) with unaffordable economic costs and serious health risks, some of which are life-threatening and known to be capable of causing brain damage.

Lie # 3:

“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term”

False. Actually, the SSRIs and the “anti-psychotic” drugs are usually tested in human trials for only a couple of months before being granted marketing approval by the FDA. And the drug companies are only required to report 1 or 2 studies (even if many other studies on the same drug showed negative, even disastrous, results). Drug companies obviously prefer that the black box and fine print warnings associated with their drugs are ignored by both consumers and prescribers. One only has to note how small the print is on the commercials.

In our fast-paced shop-until-you-drop consumer society, we super-busy prescribing physicians and physician assistants have never been fully aware of the multitude of dangerous, potentially fatal adverse psych drug effects that include addiction, mania, psychosis, suicidality, worsening depression, worsening anxiety, insomnia, akathisia, brain damage, dementia, homicidality, violence, etc, etc.

But when was the last time anybody heard the FDA or Big Pharma apologize for the damage they did in the past? And when was the last time there were significant punishments (other than writs slaps and “chump change” multimillion dollar fines) or prison time for the CEOs of the guilty multibillion dollar drug companies?

Lie # 4:

“Mental ‘illnesses’ are caused by ‘brain chemistry imbalances’”

False. In actuality, brain chemical/neurotransmitter imbalances have never been proven to exist (except for cases of neurotransmitter depletions caused by psych drugs) despite vigorous examinations of lab animal or autopsied human brains and brain slices by neuroscientist s who were employed by well-funded drug companies. Knowing that there are over 100 known neurotransmitter systems in the human brain, proposing a theoretical chemical ”imbalance” is laughable and flies in the face of science. Not only that, but if there was an imbalance between any two of the 100 potential systems (impossible to prove), a drug - that has never been tested on more than a handful of them - could never be expected to re-balance it!

Such simplistic theories have been perpetrated by Big Pharma upon a gullible public and a gullible psychiatric industry because corporations that want to sell the public on their unnecessary products know that they have to resort to 20 second sound bite-type propaganda to convince patients and prescribing practitioners why they should be taking or prescribing synthetic, brain-altering drugs that haven’t been adequately tested.

Lie # 5:

“Antidepressant drugs work like insulin for diabetics”

False. This laughingly simplistic – and very anti-scientific - explanation for the use of dangerous and addictive synthetic drugs is patently absurd and physicians and patients who believe it should be ashamed of themselves for falling for it. There is such a thing as an insulin deficiency (but only in type 1 diabetes) but there is no such thing as a Prozac deficiency. SSRIs (so-called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors – an intentional mis-representation because those drugs are NOT selective!) do not raise total brain serotonin. Rather, SSRIs actually deplete serotonin long-term while only “goosing” serotonin release at the synapse level while at the same time interfere with the storage, reuse and re-cycling of serotonin (by its “serotonin reuptake inhibition” function).

(Parenthetically, the distorted “illogic” of the insulin/diabetes comparison above could legitimately be made in the case of the amino acid brain nutrient tryptophan, which is the precursor molecule of the important natural neurotransmitter serotonin. If a serotonin deficiency or “imbalance” could be proven, the only logical treatment approach would be to supplement the diet with the serotonin precursor tryptophan rather than inflict upon the brain a brain-altering synthetic chemical that actually depletes serotonin long-term!

Lie # 6:

“SSRI ‘discontinuation syndromes’ are different than ‘withdrawal syndromes’”

False. The SSRI “antidepressant” drugs are indeed dependency-inducing/addictive and the neurological and psychological symptoms that occur when these drugs are stopped or tapered down are not “relapses” into a previous ”mental disorder” - as has been commonly asserted - but are actually new drug withdrawal symptoms that are different from those that prompted the original diagnosis

The term “discontinuation syndrome” is part of a cunningly-designed conspiracy that was plotted in secret by members of the psychopharmaceutical industry in order to deceive physicians into thinking that these drugs are not addictive. The deception has been shamelessly promoted to distract attention from the proven fact that most psych drugs are dependency-inducing and are therefore likely to cause “discontinuation/withdrawal symptoms” when they are stopped. The drug industry knows that most people do not want to swallow dependency-inducing drugs that are likely to cause painful, even lethal withdrawal symptoms when they cut down the dose of the drug.

Lie # 7:

“Ritalin is safe for children (or adults)”

False. In actuality, methylphenidate (= Ritalin, Concerta, Daytrana, Metadate and Methylin; aka “kiddie cocaine”), a dopamine reuptake inhibitor drug, works exactly like cocaine on dopamine synapses, except that orally-dosed methylphenidate reaches the brain more slowly than snortable or smoked cocaine does. Therefore the oral form has less of an orgasmic “high” than cocaine. Cocaine addicts actually prefer Ritalin if they can get it in a relatively pure powder form. When snorted, the synthetic Ritalin (as opposed to the naturally-occurring, and therefore more easily metabolically-degraded cocaine) has the same onset of action but, predictably, has a longer lasting “high” and is thus preferred among addicted individuals. The molecular structures of Ritalin and cocaine both have amphetamine base structures with ring-shaped side chains which, when examined side by side, are remarkably similar. The dopamine synaptic organelles in the brain (and heart, blood vessels, lungs and guts) are unlikely to sense any difference between the two drugs.

Lie # 8:

“Psychoactive drugs are totally safe for humans”

False. See Myth # 3 above. Actually all five classes of psychotropic drugs have, with long-term use, been found to be neurotoxic (ie, known to destroy or otherwise alter the physiology, chemistry, anatomy and viability of vital energy-producing mitochondria in every brain cell and nerve). They are therefore all capable of contributing to dementia when used long-term.

Any synthetic chemical that is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier into the brain can alter and disable the brain. Synthetic chemical drugs are NOT capable of healing brain dysfunction, curing malnutrition or reversing brain damage. Rather than curing anything, psychiatric drugs are only capable of masking symptoms while the abnormal emotional, neurological or malnutritional processes that mimic “mental illnesses” continue unabated.

Lie # 9:

“Mental ‘illnesses’ have no known cause”

False. The root causes of my patient’s understandable emotional distress were typically multiple, but the vast majority of my patients had experienced easily identifiable chronic sexual, physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual traumas as root causes – often accompanied by hopelessness, sleep deprivation, serious emotional or physical neglect and brain nutrient deficiencies as well…

My practice consisted mostly of patients who knew for certain that they were being sickened by months or years of swallowing one or more brain-altering, addictive prescription drugs that they couldn’t get off of by themselves. I discovered that many of them could have been cured early on in their lives if they only had access – and could afford - compassionate psychoeducational psychotherapy, proper brain nutrition and help with addressing issues of deprivation, parental neglect/abuse, poverty and other destructive psychosocial situations. I came to the sobering realization that many of my patients could have been cured years earlier if it hadn’t been for the disabling effects of psychiatric drug regimens, isolation, loneliness, punitive incarcerations, solitary confinement, discrimination, malnutrition, and/or electroshock. The neurotoxic and brain-disabling drugs, vaccines and frankenfoods that most of my patients had been given early on had started them on the road to chronicity and disability.

Lie # 10:

“Psychotropic drugs have nothing to do with the huge increase in disabled and unemployable American psychiatric patients”

False. Many commonly-prescribed drugs are fully capable of causing brain-damage long-term, especially the anti-psychotics (aka, “major tranquilizers”) like Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Clozapine, Abilify, Clozapine, Fanapt, Geodon, Invega, Risperdal, Saphris, Seroquel and Zyprexa, all of which can cause brain shrinkage…

Of course, highly addictive “minor” tranquilizers like the benzodiazepines (Valium, Ativan, Klonopin, Librium, Tranxene, Xanax) can cause the same withdrawal syndromes. They are all dangerous and very difficult to withdraw from (withdrawal results in difficult-to-treat rebound insomnia, panic attacks, and seriously increased anxiety), and, when used long-term, they can all cause memory loss/dementia, the loss of IQ points and the high likelihood of being mis-diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease (of unknown etiology).

Lie # 11:

“So-called bipolar disorder can mysteriously ‘emerge’ in patients who have been taking stimulating antidepressants like the SSRIs”

False. In actuality, crazy-making behaviors like mania, agitation and aggression are commonly caused by the SSRIs (Prozac [fluoxetine], Paxil [paroxetine], Zoloft [sertraline], Celexa [citalopram] and Lexapro [escitalopram). That list of adverse drug effects includes a syndrome called akathisia, a severe, sometimes suicide-inducing internal restlessness - like having restless legs syndrome over one’s entire body and brain. Akathisia was once understood to only occur as a long-term adverse effect of antipsychotic drugs (See Myth # 10). So it was a shock to many psychiatrists (after Prozac came to market in 1987) to have to admit that SSRIs could also cause that deadly problem. It has long been my considered opinion that SSRIs should more accurately be called “agitation-inducing” drugs rather than “anti-depressant” drugs.

The important point to make is that SSRI-induced mania, agitation, akathisia and aggression is NOT bipolar disorder, and SSRI-induced psychosis is NOT schizophrenia! (Go to www.ssristories.net (http://www.ssristories.net), to read over 5000 documented stories about SSRI-induced aberrant behaviors, including 48 school shootings/incidents, 52 road rage tragedies, 12 air rage incidents, 44 postpartum depression cases, over 600 murders (homicides), over 180 murder-suicides and other acts of violence including workplace violence. These cases only represent a tiny fraction of the possible cases, since medication use is rarely reported in the media.)

Lie # 12:

“Antidepressant drugs can prevent suicides”

False. In actuality, there is no psychiatric drug that is FDA-approved for the prevention of suicidality because these drugs, especially the so-called antidepressants, actually INCREASE the incidence of suicidal thinking, suicide attempts and completed suicides. Drug companies have spent billions of dollars futilely trying to prove the effectiveness of various psychiatric drugs in suicide prevention. Even the most corrupted drug company trials have failed! The fact remains that all the so-called “antidepressants” actually increase the incidence of suicidality.

The FDA has required black box warning labels about drug-induced suicidality on all SSRI marketing materials, but that was only accomplished after over-coming vigorous opposition from the drug-makers and marketers of the offending drugs, who feared that such truth-telling would hurt their profits (it hasn’t). What can and does avert suicidality, of course, are not drugs, but rather interventions by caring, compassionate and thorough teams of care-givers that include family, faith communities and friends as well as psychologists, counselors, social workers, relatives (especially wise grandmas!), and, obviously, the limited involvement of drug prescribers.

Lie # 13:

“America’s school shooters and other mass shooters are ‘untreated’ schizophrenics who should have been taking psych drugs”

False. In actuality, 90% or more of the infamous homicidal - and usually suicidal - school shooters have already been under the “care” of psychiatrists (or other psych drug prescribers) and therefore have typically been taking (or withdrawing from) one or more psychiatric drugs. SSRIs (such as Prozac) and psychostimulants (such as Ritalin) have been the most common classes of drugs involved. Antipsychotics are too sedating, although an angry teen who is withdrawing from antipsychotics could easily become a school shooter if given access to lethal weapons.

The 10% of school shooters whose drug history is not known, have typically had their medical files sealed by the authorities - probably to protect authorities such as the drug companies and/or the medical professionals who supplied the drugs. The powerful drug industry and psychiatry lobby, with the willing help of the media that profits from their advertising revenues, repeatedly show us the photos of the shooters that look like zombies. They have successfully gotten the viewing public to buy the notion that these adolescent, white male school shooters were mentally ill rather than under the influence of their crazy-making, brain-altering drugs - or going through withdrawal.

Contrary to the claims of a recent 60 Minutes program segment about “untreated schizophrenics” being responsible for half of the mass shootings in America, the four mentioned in the segment were, in fact, almost certainly already being “treated” with psych drugs – prior to the massacres - by psychiatrists who obviously are being protected from public identification and/or interrogation by the authorities as accomplices (or at least witnesses) to the crimes.

Because of this secrecy, the public is being kept in the dark about exactly what crazy-making, homicidality-inducing psychotropic drugs could have been involved. The names of the drugs and the multinational corporations that have falsely marketed them as safe are also being actively protected from scrutiny, and thus the chance of prevention of future drug-related shootings or suicides is being squandered. Such decisions by America’s ruling elites represent public health policy at its worst and is a disservice to past and future shooting victims and their loved ones.

The four most notorious mass shooters that were highlighted in the aforementioned 60 Minutes segment included the Virginia Tech shooter, the Tucson shooter, the Aurora shooter and the Sandy Hook shooter whose wild-eyed (actually “drugged-up”) photos had been carefully chosen for their dramatic “zombie-look” effect, so that most frightened, paranoid Americans are convinced that it was a crazy “schizophrenic”, rather than a victim of psychoactive, brain-altering, crazy-making drugs that may have made them do the evil deeds.

Parenthetically, it needs to be emphasized that many media outlets profit handsomely from the drug and medical industries. Therefore those outlets have an incentive to protect the names of the drugs, the names of the drug companies, the names of the prescribing MDs and the names of the clinics and hospitals that could, in a truly just and democratic world, otherwise be linked to the crimes. Certainly if a methamphetamine-intoxicated person shot someone, the person who supplied the intoxicating drug would be considered an accomplice to the crime, just like the bartender who supplied the liquor to someone who later killed someone in a car accident could be held accountable. A double standard obviously exists when it comes to powerful, respected and highly profitable corporations.

A thorough study of the scores of American school shooters, starting with the University of Texas tower shooter in 1966 and (temporarily) stopping at Sandy Hook, reveals that the overwhelming majority of them (if not all of them) were taking brain-altering, mesmerizing, impulse-destroying, “don’t give a damn” drugs that had been prescribed to them by well-meaning but too-busy psychiatrists, family physicians or physician assistants who somehow were unaware of or were misinformed about the homicidal and suicidal risks to their equally unsuspecting patients (and therefore they had failed to warn the patient and/or the patient’s loved ones about the potentially dire consequences).

Most practitioners who wrote the prescriptions for the mass shooters or for a patient who later suicided while under the influence of the drug, will probably defend themselves against the charge of being an accomplice to mass murder or suicide by saying that they were ignorant about the dangers of these cavalierly prescribed psych drugs because they had been deceived by the drug companies that had convinced them of their benign nature.

Lie # 14:

“If your patient hears voices it means he’s a schizophrenic”

False. Auditory hallucinations are known to occur in up to 10% of normal people; and up to 75% of normal people have had the experience of someone that isn’t there calling their name. (http://www.hearing-voices.org/voices-visions/). It doesn’t mean you are crazy.

Nighttime dreams, nightmares and flashbacks probably have similar origins to daytime visual, auditory and olfactory hallucinations, but many psychiatrists don’t necessarily think that they represent mental illnesses. Indeed, hallucinations are listed in the pharmaceutical literature as potential side effects or withdrawal symptoms of many drugs, especially psychiatric drugs. These syndromes are called substance-induced psychotic disorders which are, by definition, neither mental illnesses nor schizophrenia. Rather, substance-induced or withdrawal-induced psychotic disorders are temporary and directly caused by the intoxicating effects of malnutrition or brain-altering drugs such as alcohol, medications, hallucinogenic drugs and other toxins.

Psychotic symptoms, including hallucinations and delusions, can be caused by substances such as alcohol, marijuana, hallucinogens, sedatives, hypnotics, and anxiolytics, inhalants, opioids, PCP, and the many of the amphetamine-like drugs (like Phen-Fen, [fenfluramine]), cocaine, methamphetamine, Ecstasy, and, of course, agitation-inducing, psycho-stimulating drugs like the SSRIs).

Psychotic symptoms can also result from sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and the withdrawal from certain drugs like alcohol, sedatives, hypnotics, anxiolytics and especially the many dopamine-suppressing, dependency-inducing, sedating, and zombifying anti-psychotic drugs.

Examples of other medications that may induce hallucinations and delusions include anesthetics, analgesics, anticholinergic agents, anticonvulsants, antihistamines, antihypertensive and cardiovascular medications, some antimicrobial medications, anti-parkinsonian drugs, some chemotherapeutic agents, corticosteroids, some gastrointestinal medications, muscle relaxants, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications, and Antabuse.

The very sobering information revealed above should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of psych drug propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated as mentally ill) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures – heading toward oblivion?”

Bibliography
(Authors and books that were used as background for the assertions in the above article)

Toxic Psychiatry; Your Drug May Be Your Problem; Talking Back to Prozac; Medication Madness: by Peter Breggin;

Prozac Backlash; and The Antidepressant Solution: A Step-by-Step Guide to Safely Overcoming Antidepressant Withdrawal, Dependence, and “Addiction”: by Joseph Glenmullen;

Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill; and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America: by Robert Whitaker;

Soteria: Through Madness To Deliverance: by Loren Mosher and Voyce Hendrix;Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare: by Peter Goetzsche;

Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent; and Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime: by Grace Jackson;

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It: by Marcia Angell;

Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression; and The Antidepressant Era: by David Healy;

Blaming the Brain: The TRUTH About Drugs and Mental Health; by Elliot Valenstein;
Selling Sickness; How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients: by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels;

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs: by Melody Petersen;

Excitotoxins: by Russell Blaylock;

The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying our Brains and Harming our Children: Carol Simontacchi.

Dr Gary Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. In the decade prior to his retirement, he practiced what could best be described as “holistic (non-drug) and preventive mental health care”. Since his retirement, he has written a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly magazine.

His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American imperialism, friendly fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, and the dangers of Big Pharma, psychiatric drugging, the over-vaccinating of children and other movements that threaten American democracy, civility, health and longevity and the future of the planet.

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Dr. Gary G. Kohls (http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls), Global Research, 2017

=========================================

Jim Stone (http://82.221.129.208/baasepagez1.html)'s Experience about Lie #1: "The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) tests all new psychiatric drugs"
... That really is a lie. The FDA does not test SSRI antidepressants and never did. When it comes to SSRI's the FDA simply takes the manufacturer's word for it and conducts no tests of their own. 8 years ago I successfully hacked into GlaxoSmithKline's web site via defective site mapping, so that's their fault if I "accidentally" got in somewhere. One of the things I got ahold of was their testing for Paxil. They actually did test the drug for an 8 week period on 3 groups of college kids that were paid guinea pigs.

With group 1, they told the kids to take it and do nothing, relax. Six months later, and a year later, they were asked to state any adverse side effects. Several people complained that they never got over taking the drugs, but were still able to function in life.

Group 2 was asked to do moderate exercise and did this with a coach. At the same time interval afterwards they were asked about any adverse reactions. There were many, many of the kids said it changed their life and that they never feel "good again", lacked energy, and had many other side effects.

Group 3 was asked to do intensive exercise daily, and did this with a coach who ensured the exercise was intense. At the same time intervals later, they were asked about adverse reactions. The majority of this group reported that their lives changed entirely and that they had many many problems they believe were caused by the drug testing.

Glaxo then went on to recommend people be as active as possible while taking Paxil, and to stay on it for no less than 9 months. It was apparent from this that their only goal was to destroy whoever took the drugs. Included in these documents were cross comparisons with Prozac (a competing product) and how well that drug wiped people out.

The documents also clearly stated that the FDA simply took their word for it that the drug was safe, and did absolutely no further testing. Additionally, the FDA had access to the same classified documents I got my hands on, and they approved it anyway, which means the FDA is also a malicious entity.

It has been a few years since I have gone over these documents, but they are backed up on numerous flash drives in 2 different states and here with me also. If Glaxo does not like me saying this, I'll just publish their own documents (and (I have before, it would not be the first time). They know damn well they were destroying people and it was apparent that it was fully intentional, and a desired outcome.

Hervé

24th February 2017, 22:10

The Deep State psychopaths want to keep America drugged (http://moderndiplomacy.eu/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2280:the-deep-state-oligarchs-plutocrats-want-to-keep-america-drugged&Itemid=138)

Rahul D. Manchanda, Esq. Modern Diplomacy (http://moderndiplomacy.eu/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2280:the-deep-state-oligarchs-plutocrats-want-to-keep-america-drugged&Itemid=138)
Thu, 23 Feb 2017 20:41 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s19/380106/large/drugs.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s19/380106/full/drugs.jpg)
© Drugs.com

As was predicted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Elite have a vested interest in keeping their subjugated populace drugged to the maximum extent possible so that they do not ever wake from their stupor in order to challenge their soft (and sometimes overt) tyranny over them.

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley, and published in 1932. Set in London in the year AD 2540 (632 A.F.—"After Ford"—in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that combine profoundly to change society.

The "World State" was built upon the principles of Henry Ford's assembly line: mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. While the World State lacks any supernatural-based religions, Ford himself is revered as the creator of their society but not as a deity, and characters celebrate Ford Day and swear oaths by his name (e.g., "By Ford!"). In this sense, some fragments of traditional religion are present, such as Christian crosses, which had their tops cut off to be changed to a "T".

From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called "hypnopædia" in the book) to believe their own class is superior, but that the other classes perform needed functions. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and hallucinogenic drug called "soma."

This is why the Oligarchy/Plutocracy supports a vibrant pharmaceutical industry, consisting predominantly of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and anti-human emotion drugs.

https://www.sott.net/image/s19/380107/large/cddaf28058f6c209c8821803726d96.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s19/380107/full/cddaf28058f6c209c8821803726d96.jpg)
© Modern Diplomacy

As was explained in ZeroHedge's article by Michael Snyder in "The Drugging Of America Summarized In 19 Mind-Altering Facts," the author makes the points that:
"The American people are the most drugged people in the history of the planet...Illegal drugs get most of the headlines, but the truth is that the number of Americans that are addicted to legal drugs is far greater than the number of Americans that are addicted to illegal drugs...close to 70 percent of all Americans are currently on at least one prescription drug...In addition, there are 60 million Americans that 'abuse alcohol' and 22 million Americans that use illegal drugs...What that means is that almost everyone that you meet is going to be on something.

That sounds absolutely crazy but it is true...We are literally being drugged out of our minds...there are 70 million Americans that are taking 'mind-altering drugs' right now...If it seems like most people cannot think clearly these days, it is because they can't...We love our legal drugs and it is getting worse with each passing year...And considering the fact that big corporations are making tens of billions of dollars peddling their drugs to the rest of us, don't expect things to change any time soon..." The pharmaceutical industry funds with billions of dollars medical doctor and scientific whores who have categorically declared that the vast majority of Americans are bona fide, "mentally ill," and thus require immediate, consistent, and long-term medication.

As was recited in the article "Psychiatrists: the drug pushers" published by The Guardian, "They say failed doctors become psychiatrists, and that failed psychiatrists specialize in drugs." The article asks the seminal question: "Is the current epidemic of depression and hyperactivity the result of disease-mongering by the psychiatric profession and big pharma? Does psychiatry have any credibility left at all?"

Unfortunately the long-term effects on the population are that the best and brightest, the ones who can easily gauge and determine just what exactly is wrong with the way the planet is being run, are often times the most depressed, and therefore deemed to be "mentally ill."

The Psychiatric Times issued an obviously well-hidden article by the Oligarchs/Plutocrats entitled "The Association Between Major Mental Disorders and Geniuses" wherein it was shown that:
"There exists an association between creativity and major mental disorders known since antiquity. The ancient Greeks considered both as "having been touched by the gods." Aristoteles, in his perspicacity, stated, "There is no genius without having a touch of madness." This phenomenon has been verified repeatedly in studies in the past. Does one phenomenon cause the other or do both share a common underlying factor or mechanism? How are geniuses able to accomplish "creative fits"?

Although the proposed origin and mechanism of the brain function of creative geniuses is novel, empirical evidence is available to support this theory. Empirical evidence demonstrates that creativity and major mental disorders share a common pool made up of individuals with an extreme temperamental variant who, if endowed with other qualities (eg, high intelligence, tenacity, curiosity, energy) and live in a nurturing and complementary zeitgeist, can be creative geniuses. On the other hand, persons with a similar temperament but who do not have the additional qualities form a common pool of individuals who are at increased risk for a major mental disorder." The early-on "diagnosis" and forced drug administration immediately silences and stifles creativity and problem-solving abilities, not to mention the motivation to undo the wrongs of the world, and renders the world's people leaderless.

The Oligarch/Plutocrat's favorite and most highly funded publications, such as the Huffington Post, eschew mercilessly and repeatedly that "Early Detection for Mental Illness Is a Must," while preaching on and on about today's young geniuses needing to be clipped right from the beginning, before they do any real or meaningful damage to the existing status quo, which is often pretty evil.

These articles go on ad nauseamabout how it is absolutely essential to "take out" these geniuses of society, as early as possible, for the ultimate benefit of the ruling class.

And this is exactly what the Oligarchs/Plutocrats want.

Omni

25th February 2017, 00:53

On the Need for New Criteria of Diagnosis of Psychosis in the Light of Mind Invasive Technology
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, 2003
http://www.electronictelepathy.net/2017/01/on-need-for-new-criteria-of-diagnosis-of-psychosis-in-light-of-mind-invasive-technology.html

We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use.

Hervé

13th June 2017, 14:45

'Chemical straightjackets': Missouri sued for overmedicating foster kids on psychotropic drugs (https://www.rt.com/usa/392012-missouri-medication-foster-children-lawsuit/)

RT (https://www.rt.com/usa/392012-missouri-medication-foster-children-lawsuit/)
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 12:29 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s20/401306/large/593f07d3c46188f3038b462b.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s20/401306/full/593f07d3c46188f3038b462b.jpg)
© Mark Peter Drolet / Global Look Press

Administrators in Missouri's foster care system failed to monitor and oversee the use of psychotropic drugs on foster children, according to a lawsuit filed by two children's watchdog groups.

The complaint (https://youthlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/MB-v-Tidball-complaint.pdf) argues the drugs were used often to sedate children to control behavior and left them exposed to risk of side effects, from diabetes to seizures.

The lawsuit, filed Monday (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-missouri-lawsuit-foster-idUSKBN1931UL) by the Children's Rights and the National Center for Youth Law in US district court, argues that 13,000 children moved into foster care over neglect and abuse suffered under the state of Missouri's own neglect of its medication program.

The complaint argues that while the drugs can be helpful when part of a therapy, poor oversight meant that some children with behavioral issues linked to the trauma of their abuse or neglect were being given drugs as "chemical straightjackets" to control behavior, and the state violated the children's right to be free from harm while in state custody.

It seeks a court order for authorities to ensure drugs are safely administered, that medical records are maintained and prescriptions reviewed, and that the children's informed consent is obtained and documented.

Lawyers said it was the first statewide federal lawsuit to take sole aim at the issue.

"Giving a pill to sedate the child or older person is a quicker and easier response than training caregivers and staff (to provide) non-pharmacological, safer and in many instances more effective treatment," said Bill Grimm, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.

Some 30 percent of children in the state's care are prescribed psychotropic medications, including antipsychotics such as Abilify and Risperdal, as well as anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, the lawsuit said. That is almost twice the national rate, it said. Side effects of such drugs can include sleepiness, nervous tics and suicidal thoughts.

Among the plaintiffs is a 14-year-old identified only as "MB," who was given psychotropic drugs as early as three years old. During one period, the lawsuit claims, MB was placed on more than six psychotropic drugs at once, among them lithium and two atypical antipsychotics. When the child was placed in foster care with Ericka Eggemeyer, "no one discussed MB's medications."

"Ms. Eggemeyer was handed a brown grocery bag full of MB's medication by one of the residential staff members. There was no discussion of MB's history with these drugs, the proper method for administering them, or possible adverse effects." She was provided with no medical history or given an opportunity to ask questions, and had to rely on the child's own instructions of what to take.

The child described having "knives in my eyes," and of being scared to go to sleep. The foster care parent said he would "twitch" and "tweak" and having a "tic" and observed his "eyeballs roll back in his head."

After MB threatened Eggemeyer's life, he was hospitalized, then moved through four different residential placements with drugs changes, does and number of medications increasing.

"By January 2017, MB was taking a total of seven psychotropic medications... In April 2017, Eggemeyer visited MB and observed him to be an entirely changed child. Once a child who was hyperactive, energetic and had great difficulty sleeping, MB was now lethargic, slurring his speech, and falling asleep in broad daylight," according to the complaint.

The lawsuit seeks to force Missouri to enact stricter measures to guard against the overmedication of children in state custody, and as a result to pressure other states to also change their practices.

Some states, including California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas, have taken steps such as requiring court authorization for psychotropic prescriptions.

Rvv5vEzw9nI

Hervé

11th July 2017, 16:32

A reminder:

CIA mind control morphed into psychiatry? (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/cia-mind-control-morphed-into-psychiatry/)

by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/) Jul 11 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/cia-mind-control-morphed-into-psychiatry/), 2017

Here is a new introduction to a piece I wrote several years ago. Then I’ll reprint the piece.

The famous CIA mind-control program, MKULTRA, always used psychiatrists; often these professionals headed up projects; they carried out the bulk of the research. But what I’m talking about here is the “evolution” of MKULTRA into mainstream psychiatry that affects the lives of millions of people every day.

I’ve demonstrated, on a number of occasions, that not one of the 300 so-called official mental disorders has a lab test to back up the diagnosis. No defining lab test. No blood test, no saliva test, no brain scan, no genetic assay. All 300 “disorders” are described and defined by committees of psychiatrists—and their non-scientific decisions are published in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Unfortunately, the treatments for every one of these arbitrary diagnoses are toxic drugs; drugs that addle the brain; drugs that reduce people to a state of abject dependence; drugs that make people think they’re insane; drugs that cause violent behavior; drugs that create life-threatening problems when patients try to withdraw from them quickly; drugs whose effects mimic the very descriptions of mental illness.

In other words, modern psychiatry, backed by drug makers, has an ideal formula for disabling populations.

So it’s more than interesting that the CIA has pursued a mind control program (MKULTRA) to achieve, in certain respects, the same objectives.

—end of introduction—now here is my piece on a forgotten CIA document:

Drugs to transform individuals…and even, by implication, society.

Drug research going far beyond the usual brief descriptions of MKULTRA.

The intention is there, in the record:

A CIA document was included in the transcript of the 1977 US Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control program.

The document is found in Appendix C, starting on page 166. It’s simply labeled “Draft,” dated 5 May 1955.

It states:
“A portion of the Research and Development Program of [CIA’s] TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:”
What followed was a list of hoped-for drugs and their uses.

First, a bit of background: MKULTRA did not end in 1962, as advertised. It was shifted over to the Agency’s Office of Research and Development.

John Marks is the author of the groundbreaking 1979 book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which helped expose MKULTRA. Marks told me a CIA representative informed him that the continuation of MKULTRA, after 1962, was carried out with a greater degree of secrecy, and he, Marks, would never see a scrap of paper about it.

I’m printing, below, the list of the 1955 intentions of the CIA regarding their own drug research. The range of those intentions is stunning.

Some of my comments gleaned from studying the list:
The CIA wanted to find substances which would “promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness.” Serious consideration should be given to the idea that psychiatric medications would eventually satisfy that requirement.

The CIA wanted to find chemicals that “would produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way.” This suggests many possibilities—among them the use of drugs to fabricate diseases and thereby give the false impression of germ-caused epidemics.

The CIA wanted to find drugs that would “produce amnesia.” Ideal for discrediting whistleblowers, dissidents, certain political candidates, and other investigators. (Scopolamine is such a drug.)

The CIA wanted to discover drugs which would produce “paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.” A way to make people decline in health as if from diseases.

The CIA wanted to develop drugs that would “alter personality structure” and thus induce a person’s dependence on another person. How about dependence in general? For instance, dependence on institutions, governments?

The CIA wanted to discover chemicals that would “lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men.” Sounds like a general description of the devolution of society.
As you read the list yourself, you’ll see more implications/possibilities.

Here, from 1955, are the types of drugs the MKULTRA men at the CIA were looking for. The following statements are direct CIA quotes:
A portion of the Research and Development Program of TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:
1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.

2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

3. Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.

6. Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.

7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing”.

8. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.

9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.

10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.

11. Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.

12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.

13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.

14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.

15. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

16. A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.

17. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.
—end of quoted section from the 1955 CIA document—

At the end of this 1955 CIA document, the author [unnamed] makes these remarks:
“In practice, it has been possible to use outside cleared contractors for the preliminary phases of this [research] work. However, that part which involves human testing at effective dose levels presents security problems which cannot be handled by the ordinary contactors.”

“The proposed [human testing] facility [deletion] offers a unique opportunity for the secure handling of such clinical testing in addition to the many advantages outlined in the project proposal. The security problems mentioned above are eliminated by the fact that the responsibility for the testing will rest completely upon the physician and the hospital. [one line deleted] will allow [CIA] TSS/CD personnel to supervise the work very closely to make sure that all tests are conducted according to the recognized practices and embody adequate safeguards.”
In other words, this was to be ultra-secret. No outside contractors at universities for the core of the experiments, which by the way could be carried forward for decades.

A secret in-house facility.

Over the years, more facilities could be created.

If you examine the full range of psychiatric drugs developed since 1955, you’ll see that a number of them fit the CIA’s agenda:
Speed-type chemicals to addle the brain over the long term, to treat so-called ADHD.

Anti-psychotic drugs [Haldol, Risperdal, etc.], AKA “major tranquilizers,” to render patients more and more dependent on others (and government) as they sink into profound disability and incur motor brain damage.

And of course, the SSRI antidepressants, like Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft, which produce extreme and debilitating highs and lows—and also push people over the edge into committing violence.
These drugs drag the whole society down into lower and lower levels of consciousness and action.

If that’s the goal of a very powerful and clandestine government agency…it’s succeeding. In mainstream psychiatry.

Jon Rappoport

Omni

11th July 2017, 22:34

I just published a Psychiatric Warfare quote list with my newest domain project:
Psychiatric Warfare Quotes - OccultQuotes.com (http://www.occultquotes.com/2017/07/psychiatric-warfare-quotes.html)

“They don’t have any idea what they’re doing, or they do and they’re doing it very well. If they are trying to kill our military, if they’re trying to kill off any voice or anybody that doesn’t fall in line, you know: they want a bunch of zombies that they can easily control, then it’s working.[2]” ~Mikal Vega, Former Navy SEAL

“No wonder men are killing themselves, women are killing themselves. Because these pills have everybody depleted. I felt like my soul was gone, like I was just a body with nothing in it.[2]” ~Mikal Vega, Former Navy SEAL

"While all these traditional tactics have proven fruitful through out time without waning effectiveness, the agencies involved in extreme cover-ups prefer another tactic that seems to have withstood the test of time too. That is labeling someone “paranoid schizophrenic” or mentally ill. Once that label has been attached to someone, almost all testimony will be disbelieved. The military has employed this tactic since the 60’s to get rebellious soldiers and others locked up in mental hospitals. But since the weapons testing of neurological disruptor technology has begun on the general population beginning in the early 60’s and then stepped up to full throttle in 1976, the scope of what is considered mentally ill had to be reprogrammed into a broader definition for the general population." ~Department of Defense Whistleblower: From the Out of Print Book - The Matrix Deciphered

“With the brain chemicals, you can force them to go into overload, and you can make a person do what they wouldn’t ordinarily do.[7]” ~Ex-Black Project Scientist Dr. Barrie Trower

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it." ~John Lennon

And also found this amazing video by CCHR that is one of the best videos I have ever seen on Youtube:
hoJBvH2xZ18

Also this Former Navy Seal has a good message IMO:
WVCUIxgOEno

Hervé

27th July 2017, 13:55

New study confirms big pharma & federal govt root cause of opioid epidemic (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/harvard-study-pharma-opioid-epidemic/)

Justin Gardner Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/harvard-study-pharma-opioid-epidemic/)
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 12:38 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s20/409758/large/big_pharma_opioid_696x366.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s20/409758/full/big_pharma_opioid_696x366.jpg)

A new study published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review painstakingly describes how Big Pharma deception and federal government patenting have brought about the current U.S. opioid epidemic. As lawsuits pile up against pharma companies, this study confirms that for 20 years, the American public has served as the victim in a gargantuan scheme of money and power.

The study, titled The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market (http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SarpatwariSinhaKesselheim.pdf), gets right to the point in the introduction.

"In this article, we argue that non-rigorous patenting standards and ineffectual policing of both fraudulent marketing and anticompetitive actions played an important role in launching and prolonging the opioid epidemic. We further show that these regulatory issues are not unique to prescription opioids but rather are reflective of the wider pharmaceutical market." Researchers follow with a primer on the rise of opioid prescriptions and how pain became "the fifth vital sign." By the 1990s, doctors realized that chronic pain was often ignored, and pain management became a hot topic. Physicians were urged to make greater use of opioids, with experts in the field downplaying the potential for misuse and addiction - a view largely based on experience with morphine.

But this was before OxyContin came along.

Purdue Pharma, recognizing that this newfound view of the medical establishment could be exploited, worked to develop an improved synthetic opioid. Their golden ticket was found with the extended-release oxycodone pill known as OxyContin, patented and approved by the FDA in 1995.

However, Purdue's exclusive patent was based on corporate fraud and government ignorance.

"Purdue was able to patent extended-release oxycodone in the United States despite the fact that its constituent elements-the active ingredient oxycodone and the controlled-release system Contin-had been developed decades earlier...Oxycodone was used in clinical practice in Germany as early as 1917, and was first introduced in the United States in 1939." Purdue's angle was to develop a controlled-release version of oxycodone, banking on its success with the patented MS Contin for morphine. Here's where the feds stepped in to help.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) initially rejected Purdue's patent request for extended-release oxycodone, citing the combination as "obvious." But Purdue responded with a statistical falsehood - which the company knew was false - and the patent office made an about-face, granting the 20 year patent for OxyContin.

Since then, the cozy relationship between Big Pharma and government has grown, with the pharma industry spending almost a billion dollars in ten years (https://apnews.com/4d69f4b41cbc475ca42f424524003d21/drugmakers-fought-state-opioid-limits-amid-crisis) on lobbying federal and state governments and campaign contributions.

As the Harvard study notes, "low patenting standards" and "a history of tepid enforcement" provided incentive for Purdue to embark on a massive, fraudulent marketing campaign. With the guarantee of no competition provided by government, Purdue spent obscene amounts of money getting American hooked on their newly-patented product.

"Between 1996 and 2000, the company more than doubled its U.S. marketing team...In 2001, Purdue paid forty million dollars in bonuses tied to extended-release oxycodone...Purdue also invested heavily in analytics, developing a database to identify high-volume prescribers and pharmacies to help focus their marketing resources...Patients were offered starter coupons for a free initial supply of extended-release oxycodone, 34,000 of which were redeemed by 2001...Finally, Purdue hosted forty all-expenses-paid pain management and speaker training conferences at lavish resorts. Over five thousand clinicians attended, receiving toys, fishing hats, and compact discs while listening to sales representatives tout the alleged benefits of extended-release oxycodone...Purdue elevated the stakes, spending an estimated six to twelve times more promoting extended-release oxycodone than its competitor Janssen spent marketing a rival opioid...

Purdue's efforts paid off. Between 1996 and 2001, extended-release oxycodone generated $2.8 billion in sales. From 2008 to 2014, annual sales exceeded $2 billion." It gets even worse.

As the patent expiration for OxyContin approached, Purdue developed an "abuse-deterrent formulation" of the drug, for which FDA granted a patent in 2010. Not satisfied with a simple new patent, Purdue filed a "citizen petition asking the FDA to refuse to accept generic versions of the original extended-release oxycodone formulation on safety grounds." Incredibly, FDA also granted this to Purdue, "effectively preventing the marketing of low-cost, therapeutically equivalent products that might undercut Purdue's incentive to continue to widely promote its new abuse-deterrent formulation."

By the way, the "abuse-deterrent" OxyContin doesn't really deter addicts (http://www.healthline.com/health-news/abuse-deterrent-painkillers-unlikely-to-deter-addicts-012915), and it has fueled the explosive heroin epidemic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/10/how-an-abuse-deterrent-drug-created-the-heroin-epidemic/?utm_term=.1193d76d1e92) as addicts seek out cheaper, black market alternatives. But Purdue is content making its billions off the patented drug.

While thousands of Americans die under a campaign of deception and greed, official Washington pretends to care with the occasional fine levied against pharma companies, including for false marketing by Purdue.

But no one ever goes to jail; no one in top management is ever held to account. The persons in "personhood" conveniently disappear when corporations get in trouble. And the fines? Mere pocket change compared to the revenues already made from the drugs involved.
"Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business."
The Harvard study provides much more insight into the fraudulent marketing practices of Big Pharma, the patent schemes enabled by federal government, how generic drugs are routinely stifled, and possible ways to address the injustice.

Some of the more sinister effects of the system include "hard switches" which force patients to go from one costly patented drug to another instead of generics. The use of "citizen petitions" (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/pharma-citizen-petitions-drug-prices/518544/) by pharma corporations to slow generic drugs and keep prices high is a particularly insidious scheme.

The study notes that today, "Over four million Americans misuse opioids each month" at a societal cost of $80 billion annually. 300 million prescriptions were written in 2015 in the U.S., which has a population of 323 million. This is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the world's opioids are consumed in the U.S. (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/27/americans-consume-almost-all-of-the-global-opioid-supply.html), which has 5 percent of the world's population.

The misuse of opioids is a not a simple issue, and personal choice is of course involved. But the above numbers point to something much bigger going on.

As the Harvard study confirms, Big Pharma has exploited the enormous addiction potential of opioids to prey upon the American populace for decades - made possible by a federal government with blatant disregard for the well-being of citizens.

ThePythonicCow

27th July 2017, 20:00

Opium/heroin/... is one of the long standing ways that the elite bastards suppress humanity. The British Empire and its crowned, and uncrowned, colonies have been at this for centuries.

See further:

The Opium Wars: The Bloody Conflicts That Destroyed Imperial China (http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-opium-wars-the-bloody-conflicts-destroyed-imperial-china-17212)
George H.W. Bush: Biggest. Drug Lord. Ever. (http://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2017/05/16/george-h-w-bush-biggest-drug-lord-ever)
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, by Gary Webb (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Alliance-Contras-Cocaine-Explosion/dp/1888363932)
Jim Stone's new rant on the drug mafia destroying Japan: "Working in Tokyo for the Israeli Mafia" (http://82.221.129.208/baaaasepaagea3.html)
Vietnam, the CIA's Illegal Drug Trafficking, and JFK's Assassination (http://johnfitzgeraldkennedy.net/VietnamCIADrugs.htm)
Afghanistan's Billion Dollar Drug War (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2015/05/afghanistan-billion-dollar-drug-war-150505073109849.html)

Hervé

28th July 2017, 01:42

[...]
The study notes that today, "Over four million Americans misuse opioids each month" at a societal cost of $80 billion annually. 300 million prescriptions were written in 2015 in the U.S., which has a population of 323 million. This is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the world's opioids are consumed in the U.S. (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/27/americans-consume-almost-all-of-the-global-opioid-supply.html), which has 5 percent of the world's population.
[...]
See this article, for comparison: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?57933-Now-that-s-encouraging...&p=1169253&viewfull=1#post1169253

... and one may realize that the "opioids crisis" is intended at most all levels.

Pam

28th July 2017, 20:40

New study confirms big pharma & federal govt root cause of opioid epidemic (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/harvard-study-pharma-opioid-epidemic/)

Justin Gardner Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/harvard-study-pharma-opioid-epidemic/)

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 12:38 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s20/409758/large/big_pharma_opioid_696x366.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s20/409758/full/big_pharma_opioid_696x366.jpg)

A new study published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review painstakingly describes how Big Pharma deception and federal government patenting have brought about the current U.S. opioid epidemic. As lawsuits pile up against pharma companies, this study confirms that for 20 years, the American public has served as the victim in a gargantuan scheme of money and power.

The study, titled The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market (http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SarpatwariSinhaKesselheim.pdf), gets right to the point in the introduction.

"In this article, we argue that non-rigorous patenting standards and ineffectual policing of both fraudulent marketing and anticompetitive actions played an important role in launching and prolonging the opioid epidemic. We further show that these regulatory issues are not unique to prescription opioids but rather are reflective of the wider pharmaceutical market." Researchers follow with a primer on the rise of opioid prescriptions and how pain became "the fifth vital sign." By the 1990s, doctors realized that chronic pain was often ignored, and pain management became a hot topic. Physicians were urged to make greater use of opioids, with experts in the field downplaying the potential for misuse and addiction - a view largely based on experience with morphine.

But this was before OxyContin came along.

Purdue Pharma, recognizing that this newfound view of the medical establishment could be exploited, worked to develop an improved synthetic opioid. Their golden ticket was found with the extended-release oxycodone pill known as OxyContin, patented and approved by the FDA in 1995.

However, Purdue's exclusive patent was based on corporate fraud and government ignorance.

"Purdue was able to patent extended-release oxycodone in the United States despite the fact that its constituent elements-the active ingredient oxycodone and the controlled-release system Contin-had been developed decades earlier...Oxycodone was used in clinical practice in Germany as early as 1917, and was first introduced in the United States in 1939." Purdue's angle was to develop a controlled-release version of oxycodone, banking on its success with the patented MS Contin for morphine. Here's where the feds stepped in to help.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) initially rejected Purdue's patent request for extended-release oxycodone, citing the combination as "obvious." But Purdue responded with a statistical falsehood - which the company knew was false - and the patent office made an about-face, granting the 20 year patent for OxyContin.

Since then, the cozy relationship between Big Pharma and government has grown, with the pharma industry spending almost a billion dollars in ten years (https://apnews.com/4d69f4b41cbc475ca42f424524003d21/drugmakers-fought-state-opioid-limits-amid-crisis) on lobbying federal and state governments and campaign contributions.

As the Harvard study notes, "low patenting standards" and "a history of tepid enforcement" provided incentive for Purdue to embark on a massive, fraudulent marketing campaign. With the guarantee of no competition provided by government, Purdue spent obscene amounts of money getting American hooked on their newly-patented product.

"Between 1996 and 2000, the company more than doubled its U.S. marketing team...In 2001, Purdue paid forty million dollars in bonuses tied to extended-release oxycodone...Purdue also invested heavily in analytics, developing a database to identify high-volume prescribers and pharmacies to help focus their marketing resources...Patients were offered starter coupons for a free initial supply of extended-release oxycodone, 34,000 of which were redeemed by 2001...Finally, Purdue hosted forty all-expenses-paid pain management and speaker training conferences at lavish resorts. Over five thousand clinicians attended, receiving toys, fishing hats, and compact discs while listening to sales representatives tout the alleged benefits of extended-release oxycodone...Purdue elevated the stakes, spending an estimated six to twelve times more promoting extended-release oxycodone than its competitor Janssen spent marketing a rival opioid...

Purdue's efforts paid off. Between 1996 and 2001, extended-release oxycodone generated $2.8 billion in sales. From 2008 to 2014, annual sales exceeded $2 billion." It gets even worse.

As the patent expiration for OxyContin approached, Purdue developed an "abuse-deterrent formulation" of the drug, for which FDA granted a patent in 2010. Not satisfied with a simple new patent, Purdue filed a "citizen petition asking the FDA to refuse to accept generic versions of the original extended-release oxycodone formulation on safety grounds." Incredibly, FDA also granted this to Purdue, "effectively preventing the marketing of low-cost, therapeutically equivalent products that might undercut Purdue's incentive to continue to widely promote its new abuse-deterrent formulation."

By the way, the "abuse-deterrent" OxyContin doesn't really deter addicts (http://www.healthline.com/health-news/abuse-deterrent-painkillers-unlikely-to-deter-addicts-012915), and it has fueled the explosive heroin epidemic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/10/how-an-abuse-deterrent-drug-created-the-heroin-epidemic/?utm_term=.1193d76d1e92) as addicts seek out cheaper, black market alternatives. But Purdue is content making its billions off the patented drug.

While thousands of Americans die under a campaign of deception and greed, official Washington pretends to care with the occasional fine levied against pharma companies, including for false marketing by Purdue.

But no one ever goes to jail; no one in top management is ever held to account. The persons in "personhood" conveniently disappear when corporations get in trouble. And the fines? Mere pocket change compared to the revenues already made from the drugs involved.
"Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business."
The Harvard study provides much more insight into the fraudulent marketing practices of Big Pharma, the patent schemes enabled by federal government, how generic drugs are routinely stifled, and possible ways to address the injustice.

Some of the more sinister effects of the system include "hard switches" which force patients to go from one costly patented drug to another instead of generics. The use of "citizen petitions" (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/pharma-citizen-petitions-drug-prices/518544/) by pharma corporations to slow generic drugs and keep prices high is a particularly insidious scheme.

The study notes that today, "Over four million Americans misuse opioids each month" at a societal cost of $80 billion annually. 300 million prescriptions were written in 2015 in the U.S., which has a population of 323 million. This is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the world's opioids are consumed in the U.S. (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/27/americans-consume-almost-all-of-the-global-opioid-supply.html), which has 5 percent of the world's population.

The misuse of opioids is a not a simple issue, and personal choice is of course involved. But the above numbers point to something much bigger going on.

As the Harvard study confirms, Big Pharma has exploited the enormous addiction potential of opioids to prey upon the American populace for decades - made possible by a federal government with blatant disregard for the well-being of citizens.

Another aspect to this Oxycontin debacle: Where in the hell is all of this Purdue Pharma Oxycontin coming from? This isn't a drug that is cooked up in someones kitchen. I have read articles suggesting that the bulk comes from people selling a part of their prescription, or a few doctors may be over prescribing. What a crock of bull. Purdue is somehow playing a role in the abundance of this drug that is devastating the US and probably untold other countries. It's not enough to rake in the profits from legit sales, the greed is never ending.

I think the government looks the other way because at the end of the day the TPTB want a distracted, stupified and addicted population. I am researching this and would love nothing more than to expose this organized crime organization. Shame on the government for looking the other way while the citizens it is supposed to serve are being destroyed by this very powerful drug.

onawah

29th July 2017, 22:26

Magnesium found in new study to control depression easily without drugs
https://foodrevolution.org/blog/natural-depression-treatment-magnesium/

This Is An Astonishingly Easy, Affordable, and Effective Way to Treat Depression Naturally
July 28, 2017
Magnesium is a proven, natural depression treatment without drugs

Around the world, 350 million people report suffering from depression. And by the year 2020, depression may be the second leading cause of healthy years of life lost (behind only to heart disease). But a new study gives hope to sufferers of this devastating condition.

The mainstream medical approach is to treat depression with antidepressant drugs. But this option is expensive, can take weeks to have an effect, and all-too-often fails to provide any net benefit to patient quality of life. Many medications for depression also bring with them a range of undesirable side effects, such as weight gain, insomnia, and reductions in positive feelings.

Non-medical approaches to depression treatment, including cognitive behavioral therapy and somatic therapy, can also be effective — but these treatments require motivated participants and skilled professionals, and results can be unpredictable.

So with the need for better treatment options, the interest in the role of nutrition in treating depression has grown. Now, new clinical research published in PLoS One offers a surprising and remarkable finding:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180067
Magnesium supplementation was found to be a safe, fast, inexpensive, and effective treatment for mild-to-moderate depression in adults, with positive effects observed within 2 weeks and less risk for side effects than drug treatment options.

Why magnesium is critical for health
Magnesium is a cofactor in more than 300 reactions in the body. It’s needed for DNA replication and repair, controlling inflammation, detoxification, vitamin D synthesis, and more.

Magnesium is linked to prevention of diabetes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, kidney stones, cancer, insomnia, menstrual cramping, blood clotting, and to the control of free radical damage.

Most people in the world today, however, are getting less than the recommended amount. A 2009 report from the World Health Organization stated that 75% of Americans consumed less magnesium than they need.

So what about magnesium and depression?
Magnesium has been found to have an association with lower inflammation, and many researchers have theorized that it might have a role in treating depression. But few clinical trials have studied the effects of magnesium supplementation on depression… until now.

The purpose of the randomized controlled trial published in PLoS One in June 2017 was to test the association between magnesium intake and depression in the adult U.S. population.

The study involved 126 participants — with a mean age of 52 — in outpatient primary care clinics, who consumed 258 mg of magnesium chloride per day for six weeks. The result? Eighty-nine percent of those taking the magnesium supplement showed clinically significant improvement in measures of depression and anxiety symptoms.

Study participants did not have any problems taking magnesium, close monitoring for toxicity was not needed, and the results were consistent regardless of sex, age, whether people were also taking antidepressants or other factors.

Emily Tarleton, the study’s lead author, commented:

“The results are very encouraging, given the great need for additional treatment options for depression, and our finding (is) that magnesium supplementation provides a safe, fast and inexpensive approach to controlling depressive symptoms.“

This isn’t the only study to find benefits from magnesium supplementation for depression and anxiety. Case studies of oral magnesium supplementation have reported improvements in anxiety and sleep within 1 week.

How much to take?
The type of magnesium supplements used in the PLoS One study was MgCL2 tablets from Alta Health Products – chosen for high bioavailability and tolerability. Participants were instructed to take four 500 mg tablets of magnesium chloride daily for a total of 248 mg of elemental magnesium per day.

An adequate dose of over-the-counter magnesium is easily accessible without a prescription, and costs around $14 per month.

In general, oral magnesium supplements are considered safe in adults with normal kidney function who are not taking medications that interact with the supplement. Supplementation is associated with few side effects, although it may be at times lead to hypermagnesemia and diarrhea.

The Institute of Medicine suggests that the upper tolerable limit for adults is 350 mg of elemental magnesium per day.

Because people over 50 can have impaired digestion, using magnesium transdermally (as an oil, gel, or in a bath) is a way to bring the magnesium directly into the cells and bloodstream. This method is recommended by many doctors and health professionals as a way to support optimal magnesium intake.

Foods rich in magnesium
Many studies have focused on magnesium supplementation because that’s easiest to measure. But magnesium is also abundant in food. Which foods, specifically?

Leafy green vegetables, such as spinach, kale, collard greens, bok choy, and Swiss Chard
Nuts and seeds, such as pumpkin seeds, cashews, almonds, and sunflower seeds
Beans, such as soybeans, black beans, and navy beans
Avocados
Cacao (pure dark chocolate)
Throughout human history, humans have derived abundant magnesium from their food. But today, crops contain fewer vital nutrients, including magnesium. And as the modern diet has drifted away from the health-boosting high magnesium foods and come to be filled with more empty calories, deficiency has come to abound. For this reason, some people may are now finding value in magnesium supplementation.

Plant-powered diets for depression
Magnesium is one of a whole symphony of nutrients that are found in plant foods and that can be useful in prevention or treatment of depression. In fact, moving towards a plant-based diet can have tremendous mood enhancing benefits.

According to a video review of scientific research from Michael Greger M.D., eliminating chicken, fish, and eggs may improve symptoms of mood disturbance, depression, anxiety, and stress within two weeks. And a comprehensive controlled trial of diet and mood found that a plant-based nutrition program could improve depression, anxiety, and productivity in a workplace setting.

In closing
If you or someone you care about has depression, consuming more magnesium-rich foods throughout the day, as well as supplementing with magnesium as an alternative or an adjunct to antidepressants, may be a safe, effective, and affordable way to treat depression naturally. Of course, as in all things, use your own best judgment and consult with your doctor or health professional on medical matters.

Hervé

13th August 2017, 15:38

From prescription to addiction: Investigation shows Big Pharma bribed 68,000 doctors to push deadly opioids (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/big-pharma-bribing-doctors-push-opioids/)

Claire Bernish Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/big-pharma-bribing-doctors-push-opioids/)
Sat, 12 Aug 2017 12:58 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s20/413114/large/Opioids_1.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s20/413114/full/Opioids_1.jpg)
© Real Leaders

More than 68,000 doctors received payments in excess of $46 million - in the span of just 29 months - from Goliath pharmaceutical corporations pushing opioid painkillers, researchers in a groundbreaking investigation of Big Pharma's and the epidemic of legal and illicit opiates plaguing the United States.

Money to push opioids found one doctor in 12, and the rampant destruction wrought upon countless American families forced to cope with loved ones dependent on prescription painkillers, or on heroin sought when those ran out, proves circumstantially the dollars did their job.

"The next step is to understand these links between payments, prescribing practices, and overdose deaths," Scott Hadland, a pediatrician and author of the study, published (http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.303982) in the American Journal of Public Health, told (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/09/study-doctors-received-more-than-46-million-from-drug-companies-marketing-opioids/?utm_term=.b43a435892c4) the Washington Post.

Averaged out, more than 1,000 people suffered fatal drug overdoses per week in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, and steep spike occurred during the first six months of the following year - which the National Centers for Health Statistics attributes largely to a sharp rise opioid deaths - in particular, heroin and the potent synthetic painkiller, fentanyl.

Despite heroin driving that abrupt increase, Hadland points out that, for many,
"It's very common that the first opioid they're ever exposed to is from a prescription." Indisputably, the opioid crisis presents a quagmire of issues, each seeming to perpetuate others; and while its complexities seem monumental, the twin agitators of pharmaceutical money to physicians to push dangerous painkillers and the multifarious war on drugs - especially federal prohibition of cannabis, which helps alleviate dependency - present the simplest avenues to explore solutions.

To wit, Boston Medical Center researchers found the largest sums were given to doctors to push fentanyl - a painkiller anywhere from 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine (http://www.narconon.org/drug-information/fentanyl.html), used for the extreme pain of cancer, end of life, and more. Illicit fentanyl manufactured overseas is cut into heroin - and can overwhelm the user's system with a lethal cocktail of opioids and synthetics.

Drug developers engineered tamper-proof fentanyl pills in response to the epidemic, but the study found pharmaceutical companies, on the whole, were not aggressively marketing those safer versions to doctors.

According to the investigation, the top 1 percent of physicians, around 700, received 82.5 percent of total sum of payments for opioids. Speaking fees constituted approximately two-thirds of the total dollars Big Pharma bestowed to physicians, but pharmaceutical reps wined and dined doctors more than any other courting activity, constituting just under 94 percent of total payouts.

Incidentally, the analysis of public data from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revealed, Big Pharma opioid money inundated every corner of the U.S.; but, Indiana, Ohio, and New Jersey - the three states bearing the harrowing brunt of the nationwide opioid scourge - recorded the largest number of payments to doctors.

That this study is believed the first of its kind - coupled with its focus on pharmaceutical opioid cash - speaks to the influence those millions upon millions each year tragically out scream the mourning throngs of families whose loved ones originally sought only to alleviate untenable pain.

Corporate media and pharmaceutical marketers have muddied potential solutions in proposals to solve the nation's pill problem with yet more pills - or their equivalent (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/taxpayers-funding-anti-opioid-vaccines-while-govt-denies-cannabis-solution-to-opioid-crisis/) - legalization (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/opioid-use-plummets-legal-cannabis/) of cannabis (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cannabis-medical-destroys-opioid-government/), found to treat opiate addiction, would do more to extricate opioid addicts from their potentially fatal substance dependency than nearly any other option.

Study authors conclude, "These findings should prompt an examination of industry influences on opioid prescribing" - a study the mounting scores of dead attest should have been undertaken years ago.

About the author

Claire Bernish began writing as an independent, investigative journalist in 2015, with works published and republished around the world. Not one to hold back, Claire's particular areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, analysis of international affairs, and everything pertaining to transparency and thwarting censorship. To keep up with the latest uncensored news, follow her on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/claire.s.bernish) or Twitter: @Subversive_Pen (https://twitter.com/Subversive_Pen).

SOTT Comment (https://www.sott.net/article/359133-From-prescription-to-addiction-Investigation-shows-Big-Pharma-bribed-68000-doctors-to-push-deadly-opioids): Trump declares opioid crisis a 'national emergency' (https://www.sott.net/article/358937-Trump-declares-opioid-crisis-a-national-emergency)
"The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I'm saying officially right now it is an emergency. It's a national emergency," President Trump told reporters before a security briefing on Thursday at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

"We're going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis."

Trump told reporters the drug crisis afflicting the US is a "serious problem the likes of which we have never had" and said he's drawing up documents "to so attest." The question now is will Trump and his 'documents' go after Big Pharma and their role in the opioid epidemic?

New study confirms big pharma & federal govt root cause of opioid epidemic (https://www.sott.net/article/357518-New-study-confirms-big-pharma-federal-govt-root-cause-of-opioid-epidemic)
Unsealed documents reveal Big Pharma worked with pain clinics and caused the opioid epidemic (https://www.sott.net/article/320070-Unsealed-documents-reveal-Big-Pharma-worked-with-pain-clinics-and-caused-the-opioid-epidemic)
Ushering in a heroin nightmare: Big Pharma exposed for knowingly causing opioid epidemic (https://www.sott.net/article/317776-Ushering-in-a-heroin-nightmare-Big-Pharma-exposed-for-knowingly-causing-opioid-epidemic)

Hervé

16th October 2017, 15:52

Former DEA official's '60 Minutes' bombshell: Congress worked with Big Pharma to hook America on opioids (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ex-dea-agent-exposes-opioid-congress/)

Jack Burns Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ex-dea-agent-exposes-opioid-congress/)
Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s21/425513/large/dea_696x366.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s21/425513/full/dea_696x366.jpg)

The former head of the DEA's Office of Diversion Control has come forward with bombshell information on why thousands of Americans are dying from opioids.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/) interviewed several former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) employees who came forward to blow the whistle, accusing several Fortune 500 drug distributor companies for the epidemic opiate overdoses.

For many years, Joe Rannazzisi was the head of the DEA's Office of Diversion Control the division responsible for investigating the pharmaceutical industry consisting of pharmaceutical companies, distributors, pharmacies, as well as doctors and clinics which prescribe the highly-addictive opiates.

After years of investigations, his team finally believed they'd pinpointed the source of the abuse in the supply chain; the distributors. The DEA uncovered unscrupulous shipping of opiates to pharmacies in towns with small populations.

He had harsh criticisms for the opiate drug industry. He told correspondent Bill Whitaker:
This is an industry that's out of control. What they wanna do, is do what they wanna do, and not worry about what the law is. And if they don't follow the law in the drug supply, people die. That's just it. People die. This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors' offices that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs. Rannazzisi identified the big three he says are the major players who have been targeted by the DEA and who quickly learned how to push back, effectively winning their fight against the DEA's oversight. He named Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen and claimed they control 90 percent of the opiate distribution in the U.S.

The former DEA agent called it "a fact" that these companies are killing people by continuing to distribute dangerous opiates to crooked pharmacies which simply sell the goods to bad actors. Rannazzisi equated the distribution of the opiates to a band of drug dealers who were worse than street dealers:
These weren't kids slinging crack on the Corner. These were professionals who were doing it. They were just drug dealers in lab coats. Under the Controlled Substances Act, the distributors are supposed to report and stop shipments of suspicious orders (large shipments of opioids to people who have no legitimate need for those quantities of drugs).

Even after the distributors were fined millions of dollars by the DEA, little was done to curb the problem. The pharmaceutical distributors pushed back by recruiting lawyers from within the DEA to come and work with their companies. In essence, the drug companies recruited the very same lawyers who were writing policy for the DEA and who knew their loopholes and how to get the DEA off of their backs.

Linden Barber, who used to work for the DEA, jumped ship and went to work for the Quarles and Brady's Health Law Group, helping clients navigate through compliance issues with the DEA.

Barber drafted the Marino Bill and lobbied Congress to introduce the bill with Tom Marino (R-PA). The bill became law, after passing without objection in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law in 2016 by President Barack H. Obama. It is known as the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, a law which Rannazzisi claimed took away the DEA's ability to reign in the unethical and illegal distribution of opiates to pharmacies which should not be receiving millions of pills of opiates only having a few residents to serve.

According to the Washington Post: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/dea-drug-industry-congress/?utm_term=.1fc98859125c)
The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies. Marino then turned his attention to Rannazzisi. He asked the DEA to open an investigation into the head of the office of diversion claiming he was attempting to intimidate Congress. Rannazzisi was ultimately stripped of his supervisory leadership and he eventually resigned.

Now, according to the former DEA agent, no one up the supply chain can be held accountable for increased diversion of dangerous and addictive narcotics. Rannazzisi said now no one in a drug company can be held liable for negligence in protecting the controlled substances.

Marino, the Congressman who made it all possible, has now been nominated to be President Donald Trump's drug czar. In other words, the lawmaker who helped get the DEA off the backs of the drug distributors is now supposedly going to be responsible for safeguarding the nation's supply of controlled substances and making sure the drugs are not abused. For those families who have lost a loved one to an opiate overdose, having Marino as the drug czar may not be very comforting. After all, he was lobbied by the very industry which manufactures and distributes the very drugs which killed their loved ones.

In the end, Rannazzisi told Bill Whitaker:
The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before As TFTP has reported, more Americans died in opiate and related heroin overdoes in 2016 than in the entire Vietnam War. It is an epidemic. And in the last decade, 200,000 Americans have died from prescription opioid overdoses. It is killing more Americans than guns or automobile accidents, and no one is doing anything about it. According to Rannazzisi, the DEA's hands are now tied to plug the holes in the supply chain. The WAPO concluded, "Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight."

Related:

Washington city sues Purdue Pharma, Makers of OxyContin, for flooding their town with opioids (https://www.sott.net/article/345317-Washington-city-sues-Purdue-Pharma-Makers-of-OxyContin-for-flooding-their-town-with-opioids)
Fighting the drug pushers: West Virginia suing major drug distributors for flooding the state with opioids (https://www.sott.net/article/344825-Fighting-the-drug-pushers-West-Virginia-suing-major-drug-distributors-for-flooding-the-state-with-opioids)
Another Drug War failure: Thanks to DEA protecting Big Pharma more babies born addicted to opioids than ever (https://www.sott.net/article/331096-Another-Drug-War-failure-Thanks-to-DEA-protecting-Big-Pharma-more-babies-born-addicted-to-opioids-than-ever)
From prescription to addiction: Investigation shows Big Pharma bribed 68,000 doctors to push deadly opioids (https://www.sott.net/article/359133-From-prescription-to-addiction-Investigation-shows-Big-Pharma-bribed-68000-doctors-to-push-deadly-opioids)
Oklahoma doctor charged with murder for over-prescribing opioids after five patients die of multi-drug toxicity (https://www.sott.net/article/354560-Oklahoma-doctor-charged-with-murder-for-over-prescribing-opioids-after-five-patients-die-of-multi-drug-toxicity)
According to the Feds: DEA agents sold opioids, stole cash, falsely ID'd drug suspects (https://www.sott.net/article/363770-According-to-the-Feds-DEA-agents-sold-opioids-stole-cash-falsely-ID-d-drug-suspects)

Hervé

18th October 2017, 14:07

No More Fake News Exclusive: insider reveals how the opioid crime network operates! (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/no-more-fake-news-exclusive-insider-reveals-how-the-opioid-crime-network-operates/)

by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/) Oct 17 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/no-more-fake-news-exclusive-insider-reveals-how-the-opioid-crime-network-operates/), 2017

Opioid drugs: morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, naloxone, Percocet, etc.

PBS Frontline (2/23/2016) (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-bad-is-the-opioid-epidemic/):
“The opioid epidemic has been called the worst drug crisis in American history…with overdoses from heroin and other opioids now killing more than 27,000 people a year…” (Note: prescription opioids are now a very significant gateway-drug leading addicts into heroin.)
CBS News (8/1/2017) (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-than-one-third-americans-prescribed-opioids-in-2015/):
“Nearly 92 million U.S. adults, or about 38 percent of the population, took a legitimately prescribed opioid like OxyContin or Percocet in 2015, according to results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.”
On the condition of anonymity, an insider with intimate knowledge of the opioid crime network spoke with me. He is not a participant or a criminal. He has spent years exposing the network.

My initial question to him was prompted by the current Washington Post series on collusion between members of Congress and the drug industry. The collusion has produced a new law that makes it much harder for the US DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) to shut down major opioid traffickers. (That law is the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/483), signed by President Obama on 4/9/16.)

My question was: how could a corrupt little pharmacy or medical clinic in a small town, in the middle of nowhere, sell, as reported, a MILLION opioid pills a year?

Here is the answer my source confirmed: a criminal doctor or doctors are writing 75-100 opioid prescriptions a day like clockwork; “patients” are flooding in from all over the country (many of them flying in once a month); they are sold the opioid prescriptions, and either fill them right there in the clinic, or take them to a friendly pharmacy.

These patients are actually dealers. They return home and sell the pills to addicts.

Where do the small clinics and pharmacies obtain the huge number of opioid pills? From distributors. These are legitimate companies. They may distribute all sorts of medicines. It’s their business. They know they are committing egregious crimes.

Where do these big distributors obtain their opioid pills? From pharmaceutical companies who manufacture them.

The manufacturers and the distributors have an ongoing relationship. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know the bulk of the product is going into “street sales.”

The distributors and the manufacturers are drug traffickers.

There is no doubt about this. No one is “making a mistake.” No one is in the dark. No one is being fooled.

When the DEA tries to clamp down on opioid manufacturers, this is not a sudden action, as some manufacturers try to claim. The DEA has already made several prior visits and has tried to convince the manufacturers to stop what they’re doing—to no avail.

I suggested to my source that the opioid distributors and their suppliers, the manufacturers, have a “nudge and a wink” relationship. He quickly told me it was far more than that. He left no doubt in my mind that these relationships are undertaken and maintained with full knowledge about the trafficking enterprise these partners are engaged in.

He pointed out that the 2016 law referenced above, passed by Congress—with most of the members completely unware of what they were voting for—radically changed the conditions under which the DEA could immediately freeze huge and obviously criminal shipments of opioids. It’s not a slam-dunk anymore. Far from it.

Before imposing a freeze, instead of simply showing that the (criminal) shipment poses an IMMINENT threat of death or grave harm to users, the Agency now has to demonstrate there is an IMMEDIATE threat.

This word game means the DEA must establish that people could die, not next week or next month (imminent), but “right now” (immediate). If this seems logically absurd and intentionally perverse, it is. Obviously, “immediate” is designed to give rise to back and forth debate, legalistic challenges, long postponements—and ultimately a straitjacket preventing decisive actions against opioid distributors and manufacturers.

The Washington Post (link to 10/15/2017 article below) reached out to Obama, who signed the 2016 law, and his then Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, the highest law-enforcement officer in the nation. The DEA is organized under the Attorney General and the Dept. of Justice.

Both Obama and Lynch “declined” to discuss the law. Naturally.

Who played a central role in crafting the law and pushing it through Congress?

The Post (10/15/2017) (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/dea-drug-industry-congress/):
“Deeply involved in the effort to help the [drug] industry was the DEA’s former associate chief counsel, D. Linden Barber. While at the DEA, he helped design and carry out the early stages of the agency’s tough enforcement campaign, which targeted drug companies that were failing to report suspicious orders of narcotics.”
What?

Barber worked against the drug industry while employed by the DEA, and then he left the Agency and turned around and attacked it.

Continuing, The Post (10/15/2017):
“When Barber went to work for the drug industry [he now works for Cardinal Health], in 2011, he brought an intimate knowledge of the DEA’s strategy and how it could be attacked to protect the [drug] companies. He was one of dozens of DEA officials recruited by the drug industry during the past decade.”

“Barber played a key role in crafting an early version of the legislation [the 2016 law] that would eventually curtail the DEA’s power, according to an internal email written by a Justice Department official to a colleague. ‘He [Barber] wrote the…bill,” the official wrote in 2014.”
The opioid crime network extends to Congress, former (if not present) DEA employees, medical-drug distribution companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

It then includes medical clinics and pharmacies and prescription-writing doctors.

The murderous network is addicting, maiming, and killing Americans in huge numbers.

Jon Rappoport

Bluegreen

21st November 2017, 03:50

"The Family That Built an Empire of Pain"

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
- from The New Yorker (10-30-17)

http://ki.mit.edu/files/ki/ff/93/portrait/sackler2016.jpg
Richard Sackler

The Koch Institute: Board of Advisors
Rockefeller University: Adjunct Professor
AMA Foundation: Former Director
Purdue Pharma: Former President

The Sackler Family
Richard Sackler doesn't talk to the press. He doesn't like having his picture taken. The eight family members who serve on the Board at Purdue Pharma are glad to discuss their philanthropy; they refuse to discuss Oxycontin. Author and researcher Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker goes into some depth; he traces the timeline, naming names, dates, places. From the article:

"I don't know how many rooms in different parts of the world I've given talks in that were named after the Sacklers. Their name has been pushed forward as the epitome of good works and of the fruits of the capitalist system. But, when it comes down to it, they've earned this fortune at the expense of millions of people who are addicted. It's shocking how they have gotten away with it."

- Allen Frances (former chair at Duke University School of Medicine)

New study confirms big pharma & federal govt root cause of opioid epidemic (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/harvard-study-pharma-opioid-epidemic/)

Justin Gardner Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/harvard-study-pharma-opioid-epidemic/)

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 12:38 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s20/409758/large/big_pharma_opioid_696x366.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s20/409758/full/big_pharma_opioid_696x366.jpg)

A new study published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review painstakingly describes how Big Pharma deception and federal government patenting have brought about the current U.S. opioid epidemic. As lawsuits pile up against pharma companies, this study confirms that for 20 years, the American public has served as the victim in a gargantuan scheme of money and power.

The study, titled The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market (http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SarpatwariSinhaKesselheim.pdf), gets right to the point in the introduction.

"In this article, we argue that non-rigorous patenting standards and ineffectual policing of both fraudulent marketing and anticompetitive actions played an important role in launching and prolonging the opioid epidemic. We further show that these regulatory issues are not unique to prescription opioids but rather are reflective of the wider pharmaceutical market." Researchers follow with a primer on the rise of opioid prescriptions and how pain became "the fifth vital sign." By the 1990s, doctors realized that chronic pain was often ignored, and pain management became a hot topic. Physicians were urged to make greater use of opioids, with experts in the field downplaying the potential for misuse and addiction - a view largely based on experience with morphine.

But this was before OxyContin came along.

Purdue Pharma, recognizing that this newfound view of the medical establishment could be exploited, worked to develop an improved synthetic opioid. Their golden ticket was found with the extended-release oxycodone pill known as OxyContin, patented and approved by the FDA in 1995.

However, Purdue's exclusive patent was based on corporate fraud and government ignorance.

"Purdue was able to patent extended-release oxycodone in the United States despite the fact that its constituent elements-the active ingredient oxycodone and the controlled-release system Contin-had been developed decades earlier...Oxycodone was used in clinical practice in Germany as early as 1917, and was first introduced in the United States in 1939." Purdue's angle was to develop a controlled-release version of oxycodone, banking on its success with the patented MS Contin for morphine. Here's where the feds stepped in to help.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) initially rejected Purdue's patent request for extended-release oxycodone, citing the combination as "obvious." But Purdue responded with a statistical falsehood - which the company knew was false - and the patent office made an about-face, granting the 20 year patent for OxyContin.

Since then, the cozy relationship between Big Pharma and government has grown, with the pharma industry spending almost a billion dollars in ten years (https://apnews.com/4d69f4b41cbc475ca42f424524003d21/drugmakers-fought-state-opioid-limits-amid-crisis) on lobbying federal and state governments and campaign contributions.

As the Harvard study notes, "low patenting standards" and "a history of tepid enforcement" provided incentive for Purdue to embark on a massive, fraudulent marketing campaign. With the guarantee of no competition provided by government, Purdue spent obscene amounts of money getting American hooked on their newly-patented product.

"Between 1996 and 2000, the company more than doubled its U.S. marketing team...In 2001, Purdue paid forty million dollars in bonuses tied to extended-release oxycodone...Purdue also invested heavily in analytics, developing a database to identify high-volume prescribers and pharmacies to help focus their marketing resources...Patients were offered starter coupons for a free initial supply of extended-release oxycodone, 34,000 of which were redeemed by 2001...Finally, Purdue hosted forty all-expenses-paid pain management and speaker training conferences at lavish resorts. Over five thousand clinicians attended, receiving toys, fishing hats, and compact discs while listening to sales representatives tout the alleged benefits of extended-release oxycodone...Purdue elevated the stakes, spending an estimated six to twelve times more promoting extended-release oxycodone than its competitor Janssen spent marketing a rival opioid...

Purdue's efforts paid off. Between 1996 and 2001, extended-release oxycodone generated $2.8 billion in sales. From 2008 to 2014, annual sales exceeded $2 billion." It gets even worse.

As the patent expiration for OxyContin approached, Purdue developed an "abuse-deterrent formulation" of the drug, for which FDA granted a patent in 2010. Not satisfied with a simple new patent, Purdue filed a "citizen petition asking the FDA to refuse to accept generic versions of the original extended-release oxycodone formulation on safety grounds." Incredibly, FDA also granted this to Purdue, "effectively preventing the marketing of low-cost, therapeutically equivalent products that might undercut Purdue's incentive to continue to widely promote its new abuse-deterrent formulation."

By the way, the "abuse-deterrent" OxyContin doesn't really deter addicts (http://www.healthline.com/health-news/abuse-deterrent-painkillers-unlikely-to-deter-addicts-012915), and it has fueled the explosive heroin epidemic (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/10/how-an-abuse-deterrent-drug-created-the-heroin-epidemic/?utm_term=.1193d76d1e92) as addicts seek out cheaper, black market alternatives. But Purdue is content making its billions off the patented drug.

While thousands of Americans die under a campaign of deception and greed, official Washington pretends to care with the occasional fine levied against pharma companies, including for false marketing by Purdue.

But no one ever goes to jail; no one in top management is ever held to account. The persons in "personhood" conveniently disappear when corporations get in trouble. And the fines? Mere pocket change compared to the revenues already made from the drugs involved.
"Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business."
The Harvard study provides much more insight into the fraudulent marketing practices of Big Pharma, the patent schemes enabled by federal government, how generic drugs are routinely stifled, and possible ways to address the injustice.

Some of the more sinister effects of the system include "hard switches" which force patients to go from one costly patented drug to another instead of generics. The use of "citizen petitions" (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/pharma-citizen-petitions-drug-prices/518544/) by pharma corporations to slow generic drugs and keep prices high is a particularly insidious scheme.

The study notes that today, "Over four million Americans misuse opioids each month" at a societal cost of $80 billion annually. 300 million prescriptions were written in 2015 in the U.S., which has a population of 323 million. This is reflected in the fact that 80 percent of the world's opioids are consumed in the U.S. (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/27/americans-consume-almost-all-of-the-global-opioid-supply.html), which has 5 percent of the world's population.

The misuse of opioids is a not a simple issue, and personal choice is of course involved. But the above numbers point to something much bigger going on.

As the Harvard study confirms, Big Pharma has exploited the enormous addiction potential of opioids to prey upon the American populace for decades - made possible by a federal government with blatant disregard for the well-being of citizens.

Another aspect to this Oxycontin debacle: Where in the hell is all of this Purdue Pharma Oxycontin coming from? This isn't a drug that is cooked up in someones kitchen. I have read articles suggesting that the bulk comes from people selling a part of their prescription, or a few doctors may be over prescribing. What a crock of bull. Purdue is somehow playing a role in the abundance of this drug that is devastating the US and probably untold other countries. It's not enough to rake in the profits from legit sales, the greed is never ending.

I think the government looks the other way because at the end of the day the TPTB want a distracted, stupified and addicted population. I am researching this and would love nothing more than to expose this organized crime organization. Shame on the government for looking the other way while the citizens it is supposed to serve are being destroyed by this very powerful drug.

Hervé

22nd November 2017, 01:49

Revisiting the way-back machine:

The CIA documented long-range planning for a drugged and debilitated society: OPIOIDS ARE A PERFECT FIT (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/the-cia-documented-long-range-planning-for-a-drugged-and-debilitated-society-opioids-are-a-perfect-fit/)

by Jon Rappoport November 21, 2017

Note: I’m reprinting a piece I wrote about a year ago. In it, you’ll see a CIA mind-control document that calls for drugs fulfilling certain specific requirements.

OPIOIDS SATISFY A NUMBER OF THESE REQUIREMENTS PERFECTLY.
“Long ago, I interviewed John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the book that exposed the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program. He told me that in 1962, when MKULTRA supposedly ended, the CIA actually transferred the program to its Office of Research and Development, where it went completely dark. A CIA representative told Marks there were a hundred boxes of material on the ‘new’ MKULTRA, and he, Marks, would never see any of it, no matter how many FOIA requests he made.”
(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

“Plans for guiding the world can be formed and launched a long, long time before we see the results. Don’t assume cause and effect are merely and only short-term. That’s an unwarranted idea.”
(The Underground)
Drugs to transform individuals…and even, by implication, society.

Drug research going far beyond the usual brief descriptions of MKULTRA.

The intention is there, in the record.

A CIA document was included in the transcript of the 1977 US Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control program.

The document is found in Appendix C, starting on page 166. It’s simply labeled “Draft,” dated 5 May 1955.

It begins:
“A portion of the Research and Development Program of [CIA’s] TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:”
What followed was a list of hoped-for drugs and their uses.

I’m printing, below, the list of the 1955 intentions of the CIA regarding their own drug research. The range of those intentions is stunning. All statements are direct quotes from the “Draft” document.

Some of my comments gleaned from studying the list:

The CIA wanted to find substances which would “promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness.” Serious consideration should be given to the idea that psychiatric medications, food additives, pesticides, and industrial chemicals (like fluorides) would eventually satisfy that requirement. [OPIOIDS WORK FOR PART OF THIS AGENDA]

The CIA wanted to find chemicals that “would produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way.” This suggests many possibilities—among them the use of drugs to fabricate diseases and thereby give the false impression of germ-caused epidemics.

The CIA wanted to find drugs that would “produce amnesia.” Ideal for discrediting whistleblowers, dissidents, certain political candidates, and other investigators. (Scopolamine, for example.) [OPIOIDS CAN DO THIS]

The CIA wanted to discover drugs which would produce “paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.” A way to make people decline in health as if from diseases.

The CIA wanted to develop drugs that would “alter personality structure” and thus induce a person’s dependence on another person. How about dependence in general? For instance, dependence on institutions, governments? [OPIOIDS ARE A PERFECT FIT]

The CIA wanted to discover chemicals that would “lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men.” Sounds like a general description of the devolution of society. [OPIOIDS ARE A PERFECT FIT]

As you read the list yourself, you’ll see more implications/possibilities.

Here, from 1955, quoted verbatim from the Agency document, are the types of drugs the MKULTRA men at the CIA were looking for:
* Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public. [OPIOIDS PROMOTE ILLOGICAL THINKING]

* Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

* Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

* Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

* Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.

* Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness. [OPIOIDS ARE PERFECT FOR THIS PURPOSE]

* Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called “brain-washing”.

* Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use. [OPIOIDS ARE USEFUL FOR CREATING AMNESIA]

* Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use. [OPIOIDS PRODUCE CONFUSION]

* Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.

* Substances which will produce “pure” euphoria with no subsequent let-down.

* Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced. [OPIOIDS ARE PERFECT]

* A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning. [OPIOIDS POSSIBLY USEFUL]

* Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts. [OPIOIDS PERFECT BUT RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN]

* Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

* A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis. [HIGH DOSE OPIOIDS]

* A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever. [OPIOIDS OUT IN THE OPEN, IN HIGH DOSE]
That’s the list.

If you examine the full range of psychiatric drugs developed since 1955 [plus opioids], you’ll see that a number of them fit the CIA’s agenda. Speed-type chemicals, which addle the brain over the long term, to treat so-called ADHD. Anti-psychotic drugs, to render patients more and more dependent on others (and government) as they sink into profound disability and incur motor brain damage. And of course, the SSRI antidepressants, like Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft, which produce extreme and debilitating highs and lows—and also push people over the edge into committing violence.

These drugs drag the whole society down into lower and lower levels of consciousness and action.

If that’s the goal of a very powerful and clandestine government agency…it’s succeeding.

Jon Rappoport

Related:
Opioids are mind-control drugs; MKULTRA is alive and well (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?25102-For-an-idea-on-the-big-picture&p=1192176&viewfull=1#post1192176)

Hervé

26th November 2017, 15:09

ADHD is a fraud says renowned Harvard psychologist, up against 'powerful alliance of pharmaceutical companies and self interested professionals' (https://wakeup-world.com/2016/09/09/renowned-harvard-psychologist-says-adhd-is-largely-a-fraud/)

Carolanne Wright Wake Up World (https://wakeup-world.com/2016/09/09/renowned-harvard-psychologist-says-adhd-is-largely-a-fraud/)
Sun, 26 Nov 2017 09:52 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s21/434618/large/download.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s21/434618/full/download.jpg)
© iheartintelligence.com

Viewed by academics as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Jerome Kagan ranked above Carl Jung (http://www.cgjungpage.org) (the founder of analytical psychology) and Ivan Pavlov (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-bio.html) (who discovered the Pavlovian reflex) in a 2002 American Psychological Association ranking of the eminent psychologists (http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug02/eminent.aspx). He is well-known for his pioneering work in developmental psychology at Harvard University, where he has spent decades documenting how babies and small children grow, and is an exceptional and highly-regarded researcher.

So it may be surprising to learn that he believes the diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is an invention - and only benefits the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists.

Mislabeling Mental Illness
"That is the history of humanity: Those in authority believe they're doing the right thing, and they harm those who have no power", says Jerome Kagan.
In an interview with Spiegel, Kagan addressed the skyrocketing rates of ADHD in America, which he attributes to "fuzzy diagnostic practices." He illustrated his point with the following example:
Say fifty years ago you have a 7-year-old who is bored in school and exhibits disruptive behavior. Back then, he would be labeled as lazy. But today, that same child is said to suffer from ADHD. That's why we've seen such a dramatic increase in the disorder.
Every child who is having problems in school is sent to see a pediatrician, who then claims it's ADHD and prescribes Ritalin. "In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don't have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they'll make the corresponding diagnosis," he said.
"We could get philosophical and ask ourselves: "What does mental illness mean?" If you do interviews with children and adolescents aged 12 to 19, then 40 percent can be categorized as anxious or depressed. But if you take a closer look and ask how many of them are seriously impaired by this, the number shrinks to 8 percent. Describing every child who is depressed or anxious as being mentally ill is ridiculous. Adolescents are anxious, that's normal. They don't know what college to go to. Their boyfriend or girlfriend just stood them up. Being sad or anxious is just as much a part of life as anger or sexual frustration," Kagan told Spiegel. What are the implications for the millions of American children who are inaccurately diagnosed as mentally ill? Kagan believes it's devastating because they think there is something fundamentally wrong with them. He's not the only psychologist to raise the alarm about this trend, but Kagan and others feel they're up against "an enormously powerful alliance: pharmaceutical companies that are making billions, and a profession that is self-interested."

Kagan himself suffered from inner restlessness and stuttering as a child, but his mother told him: "There's nothing wrong with you. Your mind is working faster than your tongue." He thought at the time: "Gee, that's great, I'm only stuttering because I'm so smart." If he had been born in the present era, he most likely would have been classified as mentally ill.

ADHD isn't the only mental illness epidemic among children that worries Kagan, depression is another. In 1987, about one in 400 American teenagers was using an antidepressant. By 2002, the numbers leaped to one in 40. He feels it's another overused diagnosis, simply because the pills are available. Instead of immediately resorting to pharmaceutical drugs, he thinks doctors should take more time with the child to find out why they aren't as cheerful, for instance. At the very least, a few tests should be carried out - and an EEG for certain, especially since studies have shown that people who have heightened activity in the right frontal lobe respond poorly to antidepressants.

Kagan remembers going into a textbook-type depression after a major research project he was involved with failed. He had insomnia and met all the other clinical criteria for depression. But since he knew what the cause was, he didn't seek professional help. After six months, the depression was gone. Under normal circumstances, he would have been diagnosed as mentally ill by a psychiatrist and put on medication.

But here lies an important distinction: when a life event overwhelms us, it's common to fall into a depression for a while. But there are those who have a genetic vulnerability and experience chronic depression; they are mentally ill. It's crucial to look not only at the symptoms, but the causes. This is where psychiatry drops the ball, as it's the only medical profession that establishes illness on symptoms alone. Such a blind spot opens the door for new maladies - like bipolar disorder, which we never used to see in children. As it stands today, nearly a million Americans under the age of 19 are diagnosed with it.
"A group of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital just started calling kids who had temper tantrums bipolar. They shouldn't have done that. But the drug companies loved it because drugs against bipolar disorders are expensive. That's how the trend was started. It's a little like in the 15th century, when people started thinking someone could be possessed by the devil or hexed by a witch," said Kagan. When asked if there are alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs for behavioral abnormalities, Kagan said we could look at tutoring, as an example, for kids diagnosed with ADHD. After all, it's never the ones who are doing well in school that are diagnosed, it's always the children who are struggling.

Related:
ADHD: Fake disease treated with real drugs (https://www.sott.net/article/327363-ADHD-Fake-disease-treated-with-real-drugs)

Magnesium decreases hyperactivity in ADHD children (https://www.sott.net/article/334591-Magnesium-decreases-hyperactivity-in-ADHD-children)

Does ADHD really exist!? Why don't French kids have it? (https://www.sott.net/article/305833-Does-ADHD-really-exist-Why-dont-French-kids-have-it)

The Untold History of Modern U.S. Education (https://www.sott.net/article/272824-The-Untold-History-of-Modern-US-Education)

Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech (https://www.sott.net/article/212383-Valedictorian-Speaks-Out-Against-Schooling-in-Graduation-Speech)

The Truth Perspective - Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration (https://www.sott.net/article/298504-The-Truth-Perspective-Dabrowskis-theory-of-positive-disintegration)

ADHD: The fictitious disease (https://www.sott.net/article/369036-ADHD-The-fictitious-disease)

ADHD: Fake disease treated with real drugs (https://www.sott.net/article/327363-ADHD-Fake-disease-treated-with-real-drugs)

Psychiatrist admitted on his death bed that ADHD was a fictitious disease (https://www.sott.net/article/263558-Psychiatrist-admitted-on-his-death-bed-that-ADHD-was-a-fictitious-disease)

Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration: The awakening of self-awareness (http://www.lisarivero.com/2015/11/14/self-awareness/)

Related Threads:

New Harvard research -- fluoride and ADHD, mental disorders (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?70223-New-Harvard-research-fluoride-and-ADHD-mental-disorders&highlight=adhd)
Harvard Research Finds Link Between Fluoridated Water, ADHD & Mental Disorders (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?69144-Harvard-Research-Finds-Link-Between-Fluoridated-Water-ADHD-Mental-Disorders&highlight=adhd)
MSM finally come 'Clean' on TOXIC Chemicals (incl: Fluoride) & there links to Autism, ADHD..! (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?68520-MSM-finally-come-Clean-on-TOXIC-Chemicals--incl-Fluoride--there-links-to-Autism-ADHD..-&highlight=adhd)
ADHD does not exist (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?67148-ADHD-does-not-exist&highlight=adhd)
Inventor of adhd's deathbed confession: "adhd is a fictitious disease" (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?66289-Inventor-of-adhd-s-deathbed-confession-adhd-is-a-fictitious-disease&highlight=adhd)
ADHD a Made-Up Disease (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?59419-ADHD-a-Made-Up-Disease&highlight=adhd)

Omni

27th November 2017, 16:58

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPl6sWOVoAA_2eZ.jpg

Hervé

31st January 2018, 12:09

When deranged psychiatrists became social justice warriors (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/when-deranged-psychiatrists-became-social-justice-warriors/)

by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/) Jan 30 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/when-deranged-psychiatrists-became-social-justice-warriors/), 2018

I wrote and posted this article on October 11, 2012. What I revealed then is still happening now. I offer the article as an illustration of how far “social justice” can go in actually punishing people classified as victims—not helping them as advertised.

Buckle up:

It’s the latest thing. Psychiatrists are now giving children in poor neighborhoods Adderall, a dangerous medical stimulant, by making false diagnoses of ADHD, or no diagnoses at all.

Their aim? “Promote social justice,” to improve academic performance in school.

The rationale is, the drugged kids will now be able to compete with children from wealthier families who attend better schools.

Leading the way is Dr. Michael Anderson, a pediatrician in the Atlanta area. Incredibly, Anderson told the New York Times his diagnoses of ADHD are “made up,” “an excuse” to hand out the drugs.

“We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid,” Anderson said.

It would be hard to find a clearer mission statement from a psychiatrist: mind control.

A researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, goes even further with this chilling comment: “We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal [to “level the playing field” in low-income neighborhoods], which is psychotropic medicine.”

So pressure is being brought to bear on psychiatrists to carry out and sustain a heinous behavior modification program, using drugs, against children in inner cities.

It’s important to realize that all psychotropic stimulants, like Adderall and Ritalin, can cause aggressive behavior, violent behavior.

What we’re seeing here is a direct parallel to the old CIA program, exposed by the late journalist, Gary Webb, who detailed the importing of crack cocaine (another kind of stimulant) into South Central Los Angeles.

It is widely acknowledged, and admitted in the Times article, that the effects of ADHD drugs on children’s still-developing brains are unknown. Therefore, the risks of the drugs are great. At least one leading psychiatrist, Peter Breggin, believes there is significant evidence that these stimulants can cause atrophy of the brain.

Deploying the ADHD drugs creates symptoms which may then be treated with compounds like Risperdal, a powerful anti-psychotic, which can cause motor brain damage.

All this, in service of “social justice” for the poor.

And what about the claim that ADHD drugs can enhance school performance?

The following pronouncement makes a number of things clear: The 1994 Textbook of Psychiatry, published by the American Psychiatric Press, contains this review (Popper and Steingard): “Stimulants [given for ADHD] do not produce lasting improvements in aggressivity, conduct disorder, criminality, education achievement, job functioning, marital relationships, or long-term adjustment.”

So the whole basis for this “social justice” program in low-income communities—that the ADHD drugs will improve school performance of kids and “level the playing field,” so they can compete academically with children from wealthier families—this whole program is based on a lie to begin with.

Meddling with the brains of children via these chemicals constitutes criminal assault, and it’s time it was recognized for what it is.

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841]. Adderall and other ADHD medications are all in the same basic class; they are stimulants, amphetamine-type substances.

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
* Paranoid delusions
* Paranoid psychosis
* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
* Activation of psychotic symptoms
* Toxic psychosis
* Visual hallucinations
* Auditory hallucinations
* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
* Effects pathological thought processes
* Extreme withdrawal
* Terrified affect
* Started screaming
* Aggressiveness
* Insomnia
* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
* Psychic dependence
* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
* Decreased REM sleep
* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
* Convulsions
* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
In what sense are the ADHD drugs “social justice?” The reality is, they are chemical warfare. Licensed predators are preying on the poor.

The US government, through a labyrinth of rules and licensing requirements, has established psychiatry as a virtual monopoly in the arena of “mental health.” To say this act is unconstitutional would be a vast understatement.

Close to 50 years ago, psychiatry was dying out as a profession. Fewer and fewer people wanted to see a psychiatrist for help, for talk therapy. All sorts of new therapies were popping up. The competition was leaving medical psychiatry in the dust.

As Dr. Peter Breggin describes it in his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, a deal was struck. Drug companies would bankroll psychiatry and rescue it. These companies would pour money into professional conferences, journals, research. In return, they wanted “science” that would promote mental disease as a biological/chemical fact, a gateway into scores of new drugs. Everyone would win—except the patient.

So the studies were rolled out, and the list of mental disorders expanded by leaps and bounds. The FDA was in on the deal as well, as evidenced by their drug “safety” approvals, in the face of the obvious damage these drugs were doing.

So this is how we arrived at where we are. This was the plan, and it worked.

And now, as a “humanitarian gesture,” psychiatrists are handing out ADHD drugs in poor neighborhoods, to children, without the slightest concern, in order to bring social justice to the downtrodden.

Finally, like all other so-called mental disorders, ADHD is diagnosed on the basis of behavior alone. That’s how it was, yes, invented in the first place. There are no defining diagnostic physical tests—no blood, urine, saliva tests, no brain scans, no genetic assays.

Let that sink in.

The whole business is a charade, with toxic consequences.

If that’s social justice, it only exists in the demented minds of psychiatrists.

Jon Rappoport

Pam

31st January 2018, 16:23

Hervé

12th March 2018, 19:02

Pharma cartel has paid $Millions in secret settlements to coverup links between antidepressants and mass shootings, suicides (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/big-pharma-has-spent-millions-covering-up-suicides-and-mass-murder-caused-by-antidepressants/)

Rachel Blevins The Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/big-pharma-has-spent-millions-covering-up-suicides-and-mass-murder-caused-by-antidepressants/)
Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC

Major pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars covering up lawsuits over suicides and mass murders caused by popular antidepressants.

https://www.sott.net/image/s22/456061/large/pharma_sued_1392x731.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s22/456061/full/pharma_sued_1392x731.jpg)

Every time there are reports of a mass shooting, there are a number of people who automatically question whether the suspect had mental health issues or was taking prescription medications such as antidepressants.

While history has shown that the most notorious mass shooters in this century were taking antidepressants or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) before they carried out the deadly rampages, there are a number of killings that have been linked directly to the dangerous drugs. In fact, the pharmaceutical companies behind the most popular SSRI's have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in damages:

Eli Lilly Paid Secret Settlements to Survivors After Man on Prozac Went on Shooting Rampage in 1989

Joseph T. Wesbecker, 47, carried out a mass shooting in which he shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Kentucky, in September 1989. Eight of the victims were fatally wounded, and Wesbecker ended the rampage by shooting and killing himself.

Just one month earlier, Wesbecker had started taking the antidepressant Prozac, which included (https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/16/us/health-eli-lilly-facing-million-dollar-suits-on-its-antidepressant-drug-prozac.html?pagewanted=all) side effects such as "obsession with suicide and dangerously violent behavior," according to an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

When the survivors of the shooting filed a lawsuit against Eli Lilly arguing (http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/01/03/prozac.documents/index.html) that it had known about the propensity of Prozac to cause violent outbursts and suicidal tendencies, the company convinced the victims to agree to secret settlements outside of court.

GlaxoSmithKline Paid $6.4 Million to the Family of a Man Who Murdered Three Family Members Hours After Taking Paxil in 1998

Donald Schell, 60, was prescribed the antidepressant Paxil to treat depression in Wyoming in February 1998. Within hours of taking the first dosage, he burst into a fit of rage and fatally shot (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/09/medicalscience.healthandwellbeing) his wife, Rita; their daughter, Deborah Tobin; and their 9-month-old granddaughter, Alyssa.

Schell then shot and killed himself. His remaining family members filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company behind Paxil, and they were awarded (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/08/us/jury-awards-6.4-million-in-killings-tied-to-drug.html) $6.4 million based on "the company's failure to sufficiently warn doctors and patients that the effects of the drug could include agitation and violence."

GlaxoSmithKline Also Paid $3 Million to the Widow of a Man Who Committed Suicide After Taking Paxil in 2010

Stewart Dolin, 57, was working as a corporate attorney in Illinois when he was prescribed the generic version of the antidepressant Paxil for depression and anxiety. While taking the drug, he committed suicide by jumping in front of a Chicago Transit Authority train.

His widow, Wendy Dolin, filed a lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline, arguing (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/well/mind/paxil-antidepressants-suicide.html) that the company failed to warn her husband's doctor that the drug he was being prescribed would increase his risk of suicidal behavior, which led to his death.

"This for me has not just been about the money. This has always been about awareness to a health issue, and the public has to be aware of this," Wendy Dolin told (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-paxil-suicide-lawsuit-verdict-met-20170420-story.html) the Chicago Tribune after she was awarded $3 million in compensation.

While the cases mentioned above are notable because they received significant media attention, there is still an overwhelming number of lawsuits that stemmed from cases in which pharmaceutical companies paid millions of dollars for failing to warn doctors that the antidepressants they were prescribing could drive patients to kill themselves and others.

According to reports (http://injurylawyer-news.com/antidepressants/antidepressant-lawsuits/), the first lawsuit involving a Paxil suicide case went to trial in 2001, and since then, GlaxoSmithKline has paid more than $390 million in settlements or verdicts for Paxil-related cases. If that is the price they are willing to pay, then the profit they are making off of the controversial drug must be incredible.
Rachel Blevins is an independent journalist from Texas, who aspires to break the false left/right paradigm in media and politics by pursuing truth and questioning existing narratives. Follow Rachel on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/rachelblevinsofficial), Twitter (https://twitter.com/rachblevins), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/rachelblevins), Steemit (https://steemit.com/@rachelblevins/) and Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/rachelblevins/).

Related:
Big Pharma and organized crime - They are more similar than you may think (https://www.sott.net/article/299423-Big-Pharma-and-organized-crime-They-are-more-similar-than-you-may-think)

Dangerous drugs that Big Pharma withdrew & hopes you've forgotten about (https://www.sott.net/article/320987-Dangerous-drugs-that-Big-Pharma-withdrew-hopes-you-ve-forgotten-about)

Scandal rocks Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline - firm faces bribery & wrongful death charges (https://www.sott.net/article/315175-Scandal-rocks-Big-Pharma-giant-GlaxoSmithKline-firm-faces-bribery-wrongful-death-charges)

Slap on the wrist: GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn for laundering drugs they know won't cure you through doctors bought and sold for (https://www.sott.net/article/247483-Slap-on-the-wrist-GlaxoSmithKline-fined-3bn-for-laundering-drugs-they-know-wont-cure-you-through-doctors-bought-and-sold-for)

Pulling back the curtain on the organized crime ring that is the pharmaceutical drug cartel (https://www.sott.net/article/267795-Pulling-back-the-curtain-on-the-organized-crime-ring-that-is-the-pharmaceutical-drug-cartel)

onawah

20th March 2018, 18:34

How about life in prison for doctors who prescribe psychiatric drugs to toddlers? (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/how-about-life-in-prison-for-doctors-who-prescribe-psychiatric-drugs-to-toddlers/)

by Jon Rappoport
March 20, 2018

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/how-about-life-in-prison-for-doctors-who-prescribe-psychiatric-drugs-to-toddlers/

Over the past 25 years, I’ve documented and exposed the horrendous effects of psychiatric drugs.

To take this a giant step further, what doctor, in his right mind, would DIAGNOSE a baby, a toddler, a very young child with a mental disorder and then PRESCRIBE one of these drugs?

“Your six-month-old baby has clinical depression.” What lunatic would say such a thing?

In case you’re a new reader, I’ve firmly established that NO so-called mental disorder is diagnosed on the basis of a defining laboratory test. Not a blood test, not a urine test, not a brain scan, not a genetic assay.

And yet, here are MDs saying—on the basis of psychiatric committee decisions that arbitrarily define these disorders—that babies have specific mental illnesses.

On February 19, 2015, the Wall St. Journal reported (https://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/02/19/why-are-so-many-toddlers-taking-psychiatric-drugs/):
“Psychiatric drugs are now being given to infants and toddlers in unprecedented numbers.”

“An analysis of 2013 IMS Data, found that over 274,000 infants (0-1 year olds) and some 370,000 toddlers (1-3 years age) in the U.S. were on antianxiety (e.g. Xanax) and antidepressant (e.g. Prozac) drugs. This report also found over 1,400 infants were on ADHD drugs.”

“A 2014 Georgia Medicaid analyses…when extrapolated nationwide by the New York Times found that over 10,000 toddlers were put on ADHD treatments [amphetamine-type drugs].”

“Prescriptions of powerful antipsychotics such as Risperdal for infants and very young children have also sharply risen. Office visits for childhood bipolar disorder have risen 40-fold over the past decade in the U.S.”
The doctors who prescribe these dangerous and highly harmful drugs are worse than street dealers. What street dealer would try to sell a drug to a parent for her one-year-old child?

If the Department of Justice won’t take action, professional medical societies, such as the American Medical Association, should publish the names of doctors who prescribe psychiatric drugs to toddlers, and state medical boards should strip these doctors of their licenses to practice. But this is a fantasy, because every major medical group is a partner of the pharmaceutical industry.

It falls, then, to parents to keep their babies miles away from brain-killing MDs who prescribe the drugs.

Here is a tiny sample of available open-source literature. You can multiply the reported drug-effects many times, when babies are the patients—and in many cases, the specific damage to adult patients, when applied to babies, is impossible to predict, except that it will be far-reaching and chaotic.

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse effects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms. (Scarnati’s findings would apply to all ADHD drugs, which are amphetamine-like.)

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
* Paranoid delusions
* Paranoid psychosis
* Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
* Activation of psychotic symptoms
* Toxic psychosis
* Visual hallucinations
* Auditory hallucinations
* Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
* Effects pathological thought processes
* Extreme withdrawal
* Terrified affect
* Started screaming
* Aggressiveness
* Insomnia
* Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
* Psychic dependence
* High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
* Decreased REM sleep
* When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
* Convulsions
* Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.
In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs. Risperdal (mentioned above as a drug given to toddlers diagnosed with Bipolar) is one of those major tranquilizers. (Source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

February 1990 American Journal of Psychiatry (Teicher et al, v.147:207-210) reports on “six depressed patients, previously free of recent suicidal ideation, who developed `intense, violent suicidal preoccupations after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment.’ The suicidal preoccupations lasted from three days to three months after termination of the treatment. The report estimates that 3.5 percent of Prozac users were at risk.”

An earlier study, from the September 1989 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, by Joseph Lipiniski, Jr., indicates that in five examined cases people on Prozac developed what is called akathisia. Symptoms include intense anxiety, inability to sleep, the “jerking of extremities,” and “bicycling in bed or just turning around and around.” Psychiatrist Peter Breggin comments that akathisia “may also contribute to the drug’s tendency to cause self-destructive or violent tendencies … Akathisia can become the equivalent of biochemical torture…”

The June 1990 Health Newsletter, produced by the Public Citizen Research Group, reports, “Akathisia, or symptoms of restlessness, constant pacing, and purposeless movements of the feet and legs, may occur in 10-25 percent of patients on Prozac.”

“Emergence of self-destructive phenomena in children and adolescents during fluoxetine treatment,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1991, vol.30), written by RA King, RA Riddle, et al, reports self-destructive phenomena in 14% (6/42) of children and adolescents (10-17 years old) who had treatment with fluoxetine (Prozac) for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

July, 1991. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Hisako Koizumi, MD, describes a thirteen-year-old boy who was on Prozac: “full of energy,” “hyperactive,” “clown-like.” All this devolved into sudden violent actions which were “totally unlike him.”

For an overview of the effects of psychiatric drugs, consult the following authors: Peter Breggin, Robert Whitaker, Fred Baughman, David Healy, Peter Gotzsche.

Wake up, parents. Your children are under grave threat from psychiatrists.

Jon Rappoport

The Freedom Train

21st March 2018, 02:08

Thank for your starting this thread. My grandfather was a psychiatrist, and I became adamantly against it once he started drugging me in high school and I became suicidal and like a zombie. I went off cold turkey as soon as I got away from the family in college, despite their admonition and never looked back.

Years later, and my mother is psychotic after years of taking medications. For years, her medication was overseen by my grandfather. It started with severe depression when I was born, and became progressively worse, until she was totally delusional - full blown paranoid schizophrenic. Medication has not helped her. She has gotten progressively worse over the y are. She is at a point now where she cannot hold down a job because she thinks everyone is out to get her, and she cannot be alone. It has totally destroyed our family.

onawah

30th March 2018, 20:02

How the CIA hid their MKULTRA mind control program
Mar 30 2018
by Jon Rappoport
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/how-the-cia-hid-their-mkultra-mind-control-program/

Back in the early 1990s, I interviewed John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book (1979) that helped expose the existence and range of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.

Marks related the following facts to me. He had originally filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests for documents connected to the CIA’s mind-control program. He got nothing back.

Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”

I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.

But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.

Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

He told me that three important books had been written about MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton.

After publishing his book, Marks continued to press the CIA for more MKULTRA information. He explained to me what then happened. A CIA official told him the following: in 1962, after ten years of mind-control experiments, the whole program had been shifted over to another internal CIA department, the Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The ORD had a hundred boxes of information on their MKULTRA work, and there was no way under the sun, Marks was told, he was ever going to get his hands on any of that. It was over. It didn’t matter how many FOIA requests Marks filed. He was done. The door was shut. Goodbye.

The CIA went darker than it ever had before. No leaks of any kind would be permitted.

In case there is any doubt about it, the idea of relying on the CIA to admit what it has done in the mind-control area, what it is doing, and what it will do should be put to bed by John Mark’s statements. The CIA always has been, and will continue to be, a rogue agency.

To give you an idea of how far the CIA, the US military, and its allied academics will go in MKULTRA “research,” here is what I wrote in 1995 about several human experiments. My information was based on the three key books I mentioned above, as well as Martin Lee’s classic, Acid Dreams:

“Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as 1955, working for the Army, gave patients LSD while he had electrodes implanted deep inside their brains.”

“In the mid-1950’s, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would become Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then a laborer in the field for the CIA, gave a ‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenic’ patient mescaline. The patient had a heaven-and-hell journey on the compound. But Hoch followed this up with a transorbital leucotomy [aka lobotomy]… Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a local anesthetic, and then proceeded to remove pieces of his cerebral cortex, asking at various moments whether the patient’s perceptions were changing.”

People need to understand how the history of mind control and psychiatry are interwoven, and how the madmen and murderers within these “professions” are content to use torture “in the name of science.”

From a naturalnews.com article by the heroic whistleblower, psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin (“Never again! The real history of psychiatry”), we get insight into one aspect of that history.

Breggin: “[Before World War 2, in America], organized psychiatry had been sterilizing tens of thousands of Americans. For a time in California, you couldn’t be discharged from a state hospital unless you were sterilized. In Virginia the retarded were targeted. American advocates of sterilization went to Berlin to help the Nazis plan their sterilization program. These Americans reassured the Germans that they would meet no opposition from America in sterilizing their mentally and physically ‘unfit’ citizens.”

“While the murder of mental patients was going full swing in Germany, knowledgeable American psychiatrists and neurologists didn’t want to be left out. In 1942, the American Psychiatric Association held a debate about whether to sterilize or to murder low IQ ‘retarded’ children when they reached the age of five. Those were the only two alternatives in the debate: sterilization or death.”

“After the debate, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association published an editorial in which it chose sides in favor of murder (“Euthanasia” in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1942, volume 99, pp. 141-143). It said psychiatrists would have to muster their psychological skills to keep parents from feeling guilty about agreeing to have their children killed.”

The psychiatrists who later went to work for the CIA, in the MKULTRA program, were devoid of conscience. Any experiment was a good experiment. Human beings were “useful subjects.”

Here is an MKULTRA sub-project you may not have heard of. I wrote about it several years ago—

Some would say the 1940s and 50s were the most vibrant and innovative period in the history of American jazz.

During those years, it was common knowledge that musicians who were busted for drug use were shipped, or volunteered to go, to Lexington, Kentucky. Lex was the first Narcotics Farm and US Health Dept. drug treatment hospital in the US.

According to diverse sources, here’s a partial list of the reported “hundreds” of jazz musicians who went to Lex: Red Rodney, Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Elvin Jones, Zoot Sims, Lee Morgan, Tadd Dameron, Stan Levey, Jackie McLean.

It’s also reported that Ray Charles was there, and William Burroughs, Peter Lorre, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

It was supposed to be a rehab center. A place for drying out.

But it was something else too. Lex was used by the CIA as one of its MKULTRA centers for experimentation on inmates.

The doctor in charge of this mind control program was Harris Isbell. Isbell was, at the same time, a member of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs.

Isbell gave LSD and other psychedelics to inmates at Lex.

At Sandoz labs in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, also synthesized psilocybin from magic mushrooms. The CIA got some of this new synthetic from Hofmann and gave it to Isbell so he could try it out on inmates at Lex.

Isbell worked at Lex from the 1940s through 1963. It is reported that in one experiment, Isbell gave LSD to 7 inmates for 77 consecutive days. At 4 times the normal dosage. That is a chemical hammer of incredible proportions.

To induce inmates to join these MKULTRA drug experiments, they were offered the drug of their choice, which in many cases was heroin. So at a facility dedicated to drying out and rehabbing addicts, the addicts were subjected to MKULTRA experiments and THEN a re-establishment of their former habit.

Apparently, as many as 800 different drugs were sent to Isbell by the CIA or CIA allies to use on patients at Lex. Two of the allies? The US Navy and the US National Institute of Mental Health—proof that MKULTRA extended beyond the CIA.

In another MKULTRA experiment at Lex, nine men were strapped down on tables. They were injected with psilocybin. Bright lights were beamed at their eyes—a typical mind control component.

During Isbell’s tenure, no one knows how many separate experiments he ran on the inmates.

As I say, Lex was the main stop for drying out for NY jazz musicians. How many of them were taken into these MKULTRA programs?

As Martin Lee explains in his book, Acid Dreams, “It became an open secret…that if the [heroin] supply got tight [on the street], you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell’s whacky drug experiments. (Small wonder Lexington had a return rate of 90%.)”

A June 15, 1999, Counterpunch article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp— US Official Poisoner Dies,” contains these quotes on Dr. Isbell:

“Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell’s center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell’s patients.”

“Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell’s research notes indicates that he gave the men ‘quadruple’ the ‘normal’ dosages. The doctor marveled at the men’s apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that ‘this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type’.”

“In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.”

If you think these experiments were so extreme they bear no resemblance to modern psychiatry, think again. Thorazine, the first so-called anti-psychotic drug, was researched on the basis of its ability to make humans profoundly quiescent and passive. Electroshock and lobotomy are straight-out torture techniques that also destroy parts of the brain. SSRI antidepressants increase violent behavior, including homicide. Among its many documented effects, Ritalin can induce hallucinations and paranoia.

Well, all these effects are part and parcel of the original (and ongoing) MKULTRA.

But now the whole population, via psychiatry, is included in the experiment.

Which is one reason why the right to refuse medication must be protected and expanded.

Hervé

15th June 2018, 02:08

Many ordinary meds cause depression; public trust in Pharma hits new low (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/many-ordinary-meds-cause-depression-public-trust-in-pharma-hits-new-low/)

by Jon Rappoport Jun 14 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/many-ordinary-meds-cause-depression-public-trust-in-pharma-hits-new-low/), 2018

—For years, I’ve been writing about the medical system’s self-feeding mechanism:
Give a patient a drug to treat his symptoms; the drug causes new symptoms, which are diagnosed as a new illness; and then new drugs are given, and those drugs cause still more symptoms, which in turn are diagnosed as a new condition…on and on it goes. Drugged patients suffer tragically and needlessly, and cash piles up in Big Pharma’s coffers.
At one time, this circle of devastation might have been called an accident.

But now, all the experts know the truth.

Therefore, this is rightly labeled a MARKETING STRATEGY, and, at the highest levels, a covert op to disable the population.

Here is a new revelation:
Suppose your doctor told you this: “I’m prescribing an antidepressant because the other drugs you’ve been taking have a side effect—they cause depression.”
You might say, “Wow, where is my compensation for suffering depression?”

The answer, of course, is: Nowhere.

Yahoo News (6/12) has the story:
“One third of Americans are taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs, such as birth control pills, antacids and common heart medications, that may raise the risk of depression, researchers warned on Tuesday.”

“Since the drugs are so common, people may be unaware of their potential depressive effects, said the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).”

“’Many may be surprised to learn that their medications, despite having nothing to do with mood or anxiety or any other condition normally associated with depression, can increase their risk of experiencing depressive symptoms, and may lead to a depression diagnosis,’ said lead author Dima Qato, assistant professor of pharmacy systems, outcomes and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”
Here is the kicker:
“The report was released one week after US health authorities said suicides have risen 30 percent in the past two decades, with about half of suicides among people who were not known to suffer from mental illness.”

“Anti-depressants are the only drug class that carries an explicit warning — called a black box warning — of suicide risk.”

“For other common medications — like blood pressure lowering pills, antacids known as proton pump inhibitors, painkillers and hormonal contraceptives — the warnings are harder to find or simply don’t exist in the packaging.”
And who knew this?
“Researchers found that more than 200 commonly used prescription drugs have depression or suicidal symptoms listed as potential side effects.”
In the Yahoo article’s comments section, one person writes:
“That explains why so many heart patients get diagnosed with clinical depression and PTSD. I went from 0 pills a day to over 20 a day after a heart attack. Several months later after becoming clinically depressed I was [p]ut on antidepressants.”
Quite possibly, the depression wasn’t simply the reaction to having a heart attack.

The drugs used to treat the attack were at fault.

Hundreds of meds causing depression have produced a $$ bonanza for the psychiatric drug business: THOSE drugs OVER THERE cause depression; THESE drugs HERE treat it.

Of course, the SSRI antidepressants (e.g., Paxil, Zoloft) contain warnings about suicidal effects—because they, too, cause depression. And my readers know I’ve been presenting evidence for years about the ability of antidepressants to cause people to commit violence, including murder.

This is quite a “situation.” Hundreds of ordinary meds bring on depression. Doctors then prescribe antidepressants, which can deepen depression and push people into suicide and homicide.

Taking this further, the official solution to mass shootings is “earlier intervention with people at risk,” which means more psychiatric clinics, more diagnoses of mental disorders, and more drugging with compounds which induce violent actions.

Here is a new report indicating the public may be waking up to “the brutal pharma game”. From fiercepharma.com (June 13):
"[Public] Trust has hit a new low for pharma in Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey. The 13-point drop from 51% to 38% in the U.S. was the category’s biggest plummet in the five years the public relations and marketing firm has been tracking [public] sentiment…Pharma’s score of 38 puts it firmly in distrusted territory…”
None of this press coverage digs deeper into the tragedy. As I’ve been reporting for several years now, the landmark mainstream report on the effects of pharmaceuticals was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 26, 2000.

Written by Dr. Barbara Starfield, a revered researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the report—“Is US Health Really the Best in the World?”—concluded that, annually, these drugs kill 106,000 Americans. Extrapolating that number out to a decade, the drugs kill a MILLION people.

In 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield. She adamantly stated that the US government had never consulted her about fixing the horror; nor had they launched any program to reverse the catastrophic trend.

When I label this overall operation chemical warfare against the population, I’m not exaggerating.

For obvious reasons, the mainstream press refuses to reveal the truth. It’s not only Big Pharma’s advertising revenues that are on the line, it’s the chaos that would be caused by cracking a foundational pillar of modern society.

Reality itself would undergo a vast disruption, as branches of the secular religion called modern medicine collapsed in full view of the public.

Jon Rappoport

Hervé

30th August 2018, 16:56

How many people are on psychiatric drugs? (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/how-many-people-are-on-psychiatric-drugs/)

by Jon Rappoport (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/author/jonrappoport/) Aug 30 (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/how-many-people-are-on-psychiatric-drugs/), 2018
“Antidepressants are neurotoxic, that is, they harm the brain and disrupt its functions. As a result, they cause innumerable kinds of abnormal thinking and behaviors, including mania, suicide and violence. In the process, they cause detectable damage to the brain of the child or adult, and also to the fetus of pregnant mothers who take the drug.”
(Peter Breggin, MD and psychiatrist, author of Toxic Psychiatry, St. Martin’s Press)

-------------------------------------------

“I keep telling people all over the world that there are no reliable lab tests for diagnosing ANY so-called mental disorder. I explain this in great detail. Of course, for many people, this is too much to handle. They run away. What is my strategy for dealing with this? I keep finding new ways to tell them the truth. I don’t stop. That’s what an actual reporter does.”
(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
I came across a Forbes article (5/27/15) by Judy Stone, [U]“Why the U of Minnesota Research Scandal threatens us all.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2015/05/27/why-the-umn-research-scandal-threatens-us-all/#592382d82e74) In the piece, Stone mentions some boggling reports about Americans diagnosed with so-called mental disorders taking psychiatric drugs:
“The use of drugs for mental health conditions in the U.S. is staggering, according to a 2011 mental health report by Medco Health Solutions:”

“—more than one in 5 adults was on at least one psychiatric med in 2010, up 22% from 2000”

“—more than 25% of adult women were on mental health meds in 2010 vs. 15% of men; 21% of women were on antidepressants”

“—11% of women aged 45-65 were on anti-anxiety meds”

“—4% of adults were on medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There are an estimated 5.4 million children carrying a diagnosis of ADHD”

“—The figures for use of these anti-depressants in children are even more appalling, being 2-3%. (This is especially scary since the drugs themselves can increase the risk of suicide).”
These numbers show there is a plague afoot in America—a plague of diagnosing and prescribing drugs.

Over the past 35 years, I’ve spent a great of time reporting on the complete falsity of psychiatric diagnoses, as well as the extreme toxicity of the drugs. We’re talking about nothing short of chemical warfare against the population. The nation is being eaten out from the inside—and all under the guise of proper psychiatric treatment.

I’ve spoken off the record with psychiatrists who readily admit that the whole basis on which mental disorders are labeled and described and diagnosed is a rank fraud; and they’ve also told me that this is an open secret inside the psychiatric profession.

I’ve published quotes from well-known psychiatrists admitting there are NO diagnostic lab tests for ANY of the 300 officially certified and labeled mental disorders.

To grasp the sheer insanity of this, imagine sitting in a doctor’s office chatting for a few minutes, when suddenly the doctor says,
“You have cancer.”

“What?!” you say, bolting out of your chair.

“Yes,” the doctor says, “no doubt it’s cancer.”

"What about tests??”

“Not necessary. I can tell it’s cancer from your answers to my questions. Anyway, there are no tests…”
Of course, manufacturers of the psychiatric drugs are having a field day. Researchers keep claiming they’ve “discovered” new mental disorders, and the manufacturers keep putting together new drugs to fit these research “breakthroughs.”

Psychiatry has monopolistic protections from the federal government. Without them, in a truly free and competitive market, the profession wouldn’t last another 20 years.

But that’s socialism for you (https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/08/29/socialism-equals-triumph-for-corporate-criminals-2/).

The government, colluding with corporations and professional organizations, gives credence and primacy to a whole industry that is based on fabrication and does grave harm through its products (the drugs, in this case).
“Dear Citizen, We, the government, care about you and love you. We keep psychiatry alive for you, so you can benefit from the most absurd and unfounded diagnoses possible, and the enormously toxic drugs that follow. Trust us…”
Who could resist such a good deal?

Jon Rappoport

Flash

30th August 2018, 17:39

Rappoport is right about psychiatric diagnosis, there is no definite test that exist.

However, we know that a large amount of dopamine in the brain provokes schizophrenic reactions (hallucinations) which once implementing seem to change the brain wiring and lasting effect may occur.

And we also know that a low level of serotonine provokes depression symptoms and once again, the brain is rewired in consequence. The problem is that the result are worked on with chemicals, and the cause is never studied.

(I personally think that some of the schizophrenic and depression symptoms are at times due to spiritual crisis and a normal evolution towards higher states, but not always).

However, we also are having new tools to diagnose, at least for psychopaths and sociopaths, and those are brain scans, compared with a large sample of people who do not have psychopathic/sociopathic characteristics. We can then start deciphering who is and who is not psychopath/sociopath.

There is also genetic markers that have been discovered for psychopathy. Here we are starting to talk "REAL" diagnosis, based on hard core evidences.

But yet, we are not talking real treatments and cure, those are still in the woo woo field.

When I was a student years ago, the teachers would say that psychology needed an Einstein of psychology, like it happened in the physic field. i think the Einstein is still needed, and he may come from the biology / neurology field instead of psychology and psychiatry.

Omni

30th August 2018, 18:16

deleted---

onawah

15th December 2018, 18:42

The Real Causes Of Depression Have Been Discovered, And They’re Not What You Think
Jan 28, 2018
Johann Hari
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-hari-depression-causes_us_5a6a144de4b0ddb658c46a21
"Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it any more, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain.
I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs would give me a brief boost whenever I jacked up my dose, but then, soon after, the pain would always start to bleed back through. In the end, I was taking the maximum dose for more than a decade. I thought there was something wrong with me because I was taking these drugs but still feeling deep pain.
In the end, my need for answers was so great that I spent three years using my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to research what really causes depression and anxiety, and how to really solve them. I was startled by many things I learned. The first was that my reaction to the drugs wasn’t freakish ― it was quite normal.

Many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong.
Depression is often measured by scientists using something called the Hamilton Scale. It runs from 0 (where you are dancing in ecstasy) to 59 (where you are suicidal). Improving your sleep patterns gives you a movement on the Hamilton Scale of around 6 points. Chemical antidepressants give you an improvement, on average, of 1.8 points, according to research by professor Irving Kirsch of Harvard University. It’s a real effect – but it’s modest. Of course, the fact it’s an average means some people get a bigger boost. But for huge numbers of people, like me, it’s not enough to lift us out of depression – so I began to see we need to expand the menu of options for depressed and anxious people. I needed to know how.

But more than that – I was startled to discover that many leading scientists believe the whole idea that depression is caused by a “chemically imbalanced” brain is wrong. I learned that there are in fact nine major causes of depression and anxiety that are unfolding all around us. Two are biological, and seven are out in here in the world, rather than sealed away inside our skulls in the way my doctor told me. The causes are all quite different, and they play out to different degrees in the lives of depressed and anxious people. I was even more startled to discover this isn’t some fringe position – the World Health Organization has been warning for years that we need to start dealing with the deeper causes of depression in this way.

I want to write here about the hardest of those causes for me, personally, to investigate. The nine causes are all different – but this is one that I left, lingering, trying not to look at, for most of my three years of research. I was finally taught about it in San Diego, California, when I met a remarkable scientist named Dr. Vincent Felitti. I have to tell you right at the start though – I found it really painful to investigate this cause. It forced me to reckon with something I had been running from for most of my life. One of the reasons I clung to the theory that my depression was just the result of something going wrong with my brain was, I see now, so I would not have to think about this.

The story of Dr. Felitti’s breakthrough stretches back to the mid-1980s, when it happened almost by accident. At first, it’ll sound like this isn’t a story about depression. But it’s worth following his journey – because it can teach us a lot.
When the patients first came into Felitti’s office, some of them found it hard to fit through the door. They were in the most severe stages of obesity, and they were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance. Felitti had been commissioned by the medical provider Kaiser Permanente to figure out how to genuinely solve the company’s exploding obesity costs. Start from scratch, they said. Try anything.

One day, Felitti had a maddening simple idea. He asked: What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies – with monitored nutrition supplements – until they were down to a normal weight? What would happen? Cautiously, they tried it, with a lot of medical supervision – and, startlingly, it worked. The patients were shedding weight, and returning to healthy bodies.
Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable.
But then something strange happened. In the program, there were some stars ― people who shed incredible amounts of weight, and the medical team ― and all their friends ― expected these people to react with joy, but the people who did best were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.

Felitti was baffled ― until he talked with one 28-year-old woman. In 51 weeks, Felitti had taken her down from 408 pounds to 132 pounds. Then ― quite suddenly, for no reason anyone could see ― she put on 37 pounds in the space of a few weeks. Before long, she was back above 400 pounds. So Felitti asked her gently what had changed when she started to lose weight. It seemed mysterious to both of them. They talked for a long time. There was, she said eventually, one thing. When she was obese, men never hit on her ― but when she got down to a healthy weight, for the first time in a long time, she was propositioned by a man. She fled, and right away began to eat compulsively, and she couldn’t stop.

This was when Felitti thought to ask a question he hadn’t asked before. When did you start to put on weight? She thought about the question. When she was 11 years old, she said. So he asked: Was there anything else that happened in your life when you were 11? Well, she replied ― that was when my grandfather began to rape me.
As Felitti spoke to the 183 people in the program, he found 55 percent had been sexually abused. One woman said she put on weight after she was raped because “overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.” It turned out many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them. Felitti suddenly realized: “What we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.”

This insight led Felitti to launch a massive program of research, funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He wanted to discover how all kinds of childhood trauma affect us as adults. He administered a simple questionnaire to 17,000 ordinary patients in San Diego, who were were coming just for general health care – anything from a headache to a broken leg. It asked if any of 10 bad things had happened to you as a kid, like being neglected, or emotionally abused. Then it asked if you had any of 10 psychological problems, like obesity or depression or addiction. He wanted to see what the matchup was.
Once the numbers were added up, they seemed unbelievable. Childhood trauma caused the risk of adult depression to explode. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult, and more than 4,000 percent more likely to be an injecting drug user.
After I had one of my long, probing conversations with Dr. Felitti about this, I walked to the beach in San Diego shaking, and spat into the ocean. He was forcing me to think about a dimension of my depression I did not want to confront. When I was a kid, my mother was ill and my dad was in another country, and in this chaos, I experienced some extreme acts of violence from an adult: I was strangled with an electrical cord, among other acts. I had tried to seal these memories away, to shutter them in my mind. I had refused to contemplate that they were playing out in my adult life.Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hard-core addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a theory – though I want to stress that this next part is going beyond the scientific evidence discovered by Felitti and the CDC, and I can’t say for sure that it’s true.

If it’s your fault, it’s — at some strange level — under your control.
When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So, you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless ― that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power ― at least in your own mind. If it’s your fault, then there’s something you can do that might make it different. You aren’t a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You’re the person controlling the machine. You have your hands on the dangerous levers. In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s ― at some strange level ― under your control.

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either. This is no way to live. But it’s a misfiring of the thing that made it possible for you to survive at an earlier point in your life.
But it was what Dr. Felitti discovered next that most helped me. When ordinary patients, responding to his questionnaire, noted that they had experienced childhood trauma, he got their doctors to do something when the patients next came in for care. He got them to say something like, “I see you went through this bad experience as a child. I am sorry this happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?”

Felitti wanted to see if being able to discuss this trauma with a trusted authority figure, and being told it was not your fault, would help to release people’s shame. What happened next was startling. Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent. One elderly woman ― who had described being raped as a child ― wrote a letter later, saying: “Thank you for asking ... I feared I would die, and no one would ever know what had happened.”
The act of releasing your shame is – in itself – healing. So I went back to people I trusted, and I began to talk about what had happened to me when I was younger. Far from shaming me, far from thinking it showed I was broken, they showed love, and helped me to grieve for what I had gone through.

If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. As I listened back over the tapes of my long conversations with Felitti, it struck me that if he had just told people what my doctor told me – that their brains were broken, this was why they were so distressed, and the only solution was to be drugged – they may never have been able to understand the deeper causes of their problem, and they would never have been released from them.

The more I investigated depression and anxiety, the more I found that, far from being caused by a spontaneously malfunctioning brain, depression and anxiety are mostly being caused by events in our lives. If you find your work meaningless and you feel you have no control over it, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you are lonely and feel that you can’t rely on the people around you to support you, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think life is all about buying things and climbing up the ladder, you are far more likely to become depressed. If you think your future will be insecure, you are far more likely to become depressed. I started to find a whole blast of scientific evidence that depression and anxiety are not caused in our skulls, but by the way many of us are being made to live. There are real biological factors, like your genes, that can make you significantly more sensitive to these causes, but they are not the primary drivers.
And that led me to the scientific evidence that we have to try to solve our depression and anxiety crises in a very different way (alongside chemical anti-depressants, which should of course remain on the table).

To do that, we need to stop seeing depression and anxiety as an irrational pathology, or a weird misfiring of brain chemicals. They are terribly painful – but they make sense. Your pain is not an irrational spasm. It is a response to what is happening to you. To deal with depression, you need to deal with its underlying causes. On my long journey, I learned about seven different kinds of anti-depressants – ones that are about stripping out the causes, rather than blunting the symptoms. Releasing your shame is only the start.
One day, one of Dr. Felitti’s colleagues, Dr. Robert Anda, told me something I have been thinking about ever since.
When people are behaving in apparently self-destructive ways, “it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”

Johann Hari is the author most recently of Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.
Previously on HuffPost: “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, And It Is Not What You Think”

Hervé

2nd October 2019, 17:19

Big pharma's push to oversell ADHD meds to make you feel better about being ill (https://www.rt.com/news/469968-adhd-drugs-big-pharma/)

RT (https://www.rt.com/news/469968-adhd-drugs-big-pharma/)
Wed, 02 Oct 2019 16:11 UTC

https://www.sott.net/image/s26/528759/large/generic_drugs.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s26/528759/full/generic_drugs.jpg)

Conditions like ADHD give big pharma many opportunities to sell products that don't heal people but make them feel less stressed about being ill, the author of a book about his own experience with the disorder told RT.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a disorder usually diagnosed in children and in some cases persists into adulthood. Sufferers generally have problems with attention span and impulse control, which affect their performance at school and may lead to being ostracized.

Large pharmaceutical companies producing drugs used in ADHD treatment have been pushing for a more thorough search for potential sufferers - which some argue (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/books/review/adhd-nation-alan-schwarz.html) is nothing but a sham to expand the market for their products. RT's Jesse Ventura spoke to Timothy Denevi, the author of a book about his personal experience of living with ADHD, who said people should remember that big pharma is not their friend.
"I think we can agree that large pharmaceutical companies are not moral entities. They don't have our best interests at heart," he said.

"The same way a cigarette company or an alcohol company will make argument about their product in regards why you should consume it, I would say big pharma is doing the same thing."

They are not here to help people but to make a profit. Conditions like ADHD have no definite indicators - like having a virus in your blood or a deteriorated liver - so diagnosis is subject to interpretation. The effects of psychoactive drugs are often subjective as well, and may include trade-offs that are hard to measure. This opens the door for subtly biased research funded by big pharma, over-prescription, and dishonest marketing practices.

"What is advertising but saying: you are overweight, but I don't want you to realize you are overweight; I just want you to buy this product so you would feel better about being overweight?" Denevi said.

Watch Jesse Ventura's show for the entire interview.

(prof. Timothy Denevi at 11:53 mark)
9p4NC62mx6M

Related:

Does ADHD really exist!? Why don't French kids have it? (https://www.sott.net/article/305833-Does-ADHD-really-exist-Why-dont-French-kids-have-it)

ADHD does not exist! (https://www.sott.net/article/271562-ADHD-does-not-exist)

Study: Cutting Out Suspect Foods Could Help Calm ADHD Children (https://www.sott.net/article/223226-Study-Cutting-Out-Suspect-Foods-Could-Help-Calm-ADHD-Children)

Nutrition plays a role in ADHD: Studies suggest that diet can have powerful effects on behavior (https://www.sott.net/article/312409-Nutrition-plays-a-role-in-ADHD-Studies-suggest-that-diet-can-have-powerful-effects-on-behavior)

Big Pharma price gouging: Drugs in the U.S. cost 10 times more than in other countries (https://www.sott.net/article/305695-Big-Pharma-price-gouging-Drugs-in-the-US-cost-10-times-more-than-in-other-countries)

More ridiculous 'Diseases' big pharma is trying to make you believe you suffer from (https://www.sott.net/article/290456-More-ridiculous-Diseases-big-pharma-is-trying-to-make-you-believe-you-suffer-from)

Corporate crimes and fines by Big Pharma: How they get away with it (https://www.sott.net/article/292381-Corporate-crimes-and-fines-by-Big-Pharma-How-they-get-away-with-it)

Nine shared traits between Big Pharma and the Mafia (https://www.sott.net/article/299622-Nine-shared-traits-between-Big-Pharma-and-the-Mafia)

===========================================

Of course, the influence of vaccines was left out or very well wrapped up under the "biological" possibility.

RogueEllis

2nd October 2019, 22:33

I find myself agreeing with your post but I swear I'd be dead without my psych meds.

Hervé

11th October 2019, 13:04

The secret behind fake bipolar disease in children (https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2019/10/10/secret-behind-fake-bipolar-disease-in-children/)

by Jon Rappoport (https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/author/jonrappoport/) Oct 10 (https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2019/10/10/secret-behind-fake-bipolar-disease-in-children/), 2019

ABC News, 5/11/12: “…Columbia University researchers found a 40-fold rise in office visits among youth diagnosed with bipolar disorder between 1994-95 and 2002-3.”
In 1995, a new wind began blowing across the psychiatric landscape. The public wasn’t aware of it. But among professionals, it was big, very big:
Children, including the very young, could, for the first time, legitimately be diagnosed with bipolar disease (aka manic depression).
The impetus for this “revelation” was a 1995 report, “Is Your Child Bipolar?” written by two doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital, Janet Wozniak and Joseph Biederman.

Biederman would go on to become the target of internal investigations at Harvard and Mass General—did the pharmaceutical money he took influence his judgment in deciding bipolar was a real disorder among children? The charges against him were ultimately reduced to a few light slaps on the wrist; he retained his prestigious position.

But back in 1995, he and Wozniak, as the NY Times Magazine recounts (9/12/08, “The Bipolar Puzzle” (https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14bipolar-t.html)), arrived at an earthshaking conclusion about children coming through their hospital clinic: a number of them fit the description of “bipolar irritable manic.”

It was a huge wow for the psychiatric profession. No one had seriously insisted, with “convincing evidence,” that very young kids could develop bipolar.

But now, psychiatrists were going to pick up that ball and run with it. Drug companies were going to develop and promote drugs (very serious and toxic drugs, like Johnson & Johnson’s Risperdal (https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/jury-hits-j-j-8b-risperdal-verdict-but-will-it-stand-up-appeals)) to treat childhood bipolar.

However, what the Times Magazine story mentions—but no one pays attention to—is this: Every one of these original manic “bipolar children” coming through Mass General, minus only one child, HAD ALREADY BEEN DIAGNOSED with ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Boom.

What Biederman and Wozniak—and the rest of the psychiatric profession—failed to realize, or didn’t want to see, was: drugs given to treat ADHD (e.g., Ritalin, Adderall) are versions of speed; and speed causes, among other reactions, very irritable hyper emotions, which are indistinguishable from “manic.”

In other words, the obvious takeaway, which no one took away, was that the “manic” symptoms of these kids were reactions to the prior speed drugs prescribed for ADHD.

There was no bipolar.

In fact, and you can find this repeated in many press reports, there are no lab tests for diagnosing bipolar. No blood tests, no brain scans. It’s all done by consulting menus of “indicative” behaviors assembled by committees of psychiatrists. See, for example, the National Institute of Mental Health, “Bipolar Disorder in Children and Teens”:
“There are no blood tests or brain scans that can diagnose bipolar disorder. Instead, the doctor will ask questions about your child’s mood and sleeping patterns. The doctor will also ask about your child’s energy and behavior…”
You can give young kids ADHD drugs like Ritalin or Adderall and watch, in many cases, all the symptoms of so-called bipolar come to life before your eyes. In the old days, people used to call this a speed crash.

At first, speed can give a person a sense of clean fresh energy and clarity. Then after taking it for a few days or a week or a few weeks or a month (user reactions vary widely), the person begins to come apart. He’s sitting in a corner, in a puddle of sadness, then he’s very high energy (“manic”) and yelling and throwing things and cursing at people.

He’s crashing.

This isn’t a sophisticated situation. This is basic brain disruption.

Here’s another drug sequence with the same outcome: ADHD diagnosed, Adderall prescribed; child goes into a big funk and this is diagnosed as depression; doctor prescribes Zoloft, which causes a few high-flying “manic episodes.” New diagnosis: bipolar.

Or a young toddler is fed formula that is largely synthetic, and chemicals cause a severe series of reactions, which are labeled “bipolar.”

Or a child is given a series of vaccine shots containing aluminum (a known neurotoxin), formaldehyde, and other injurious chemicals, and as a result develops severe symptoms labeled “bipolar.”

The drugs prescribed for bipolar are quite heavy and dangerous: Valproate, Lithium, Risperdal.

Adverse effects of Valproate include:
* acute, life-threatening, and even fatal liver toxicity;

* life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas;

* brain damage.
Adverse effects of Lithium include:
* intercranial pressure leading to blindness;

* peripheral circulatory collapse;

* stupor and coma.
Adverse effects of Risperdal include:
* serious impairment of cognitive function;

* fainting;

* restless muscles in neck or face, tremors (may be indicative of motor brain damage).
In January, 2002, psychiatrist and author Peter Breggin told CBS News:
“Psychiatry is out of control when it comes to drugging children…The drug [Risperdal] has an effect. The effect is basically a chemical lobotomy . . .”
And all this bipolar fakery started in 1995 when kids on psychiatric speed showed up at Mass General Hospital…

And here’s the key paragraph from the New York Times Magazine article, “The Bipolar Puzzle,” 9/12/08, about that decisive moment in time at Mass General:
“…In an influential 1995 paper that began the paradigm shift toward bipolar disorder within child psychiatry, Janet Wozniak — the director of the pediatric bipolar-disorder program at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of ‘Is Your Child Bipolar?’ — working with the chief of pediatric psychopharmacology, Joseph Biederman, revealed that 16 percent of the children who came to the clinic met the D.S.M. criteria for mania [manic symptoms]. This was shocking news; it was widely believed until then that mania in children was extremely rare. Wozniak reported that the children’s mania most often took the form of an irritable mood rather than an elevated one, and that the mood was often chronic: the norm, rather than the exception. All but one of the manic children in the study also suffered from A.D.H.D.”
It almost seems as if the author dropped in that last sentence as a clue to the whole scam.

Jon Rappoport

onawah

26th December 2019, 19:02

Depression... or inflammation?
Can Lowering Inflammation Help Major Depression?
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
December 26, 2019
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/12/26/lowering-inflammation-may-help-depression.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20191226Z1&et_cid=DM417943&et_rid=777426939

"Many people believe depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is a theory that has been widely promoted by drug companies and psychiatrists, to the point it is now accepted as fact.

However, this is just a theory and, worse, it's a theory that has been largely discredited. The idea spread quickly after it was proposed in the 1960s when it appeared antidepressant drugs altered brain chemicals. In the 1980s, Prozac (fluoxetine) was released by Eli Lilly and heavily promoted to balance brain chemicals and affect depression.

Prozac had fewer side effects than some of the earlier antidepressants and soon became the poster child for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class of antidepressants. However, while heavily prescribed, data repeatedly showed SSRIs worked no better than placebos for those experiencing mild to moderate depression.

Although antidepressants don't effectively treat depression, they do double the risk of harm from suicide and violence in healthy adults and increase aggression in children and adolescents.

"Researchers also suggest major depression could be vastly overdiagnosed and overtreated with antidepressants. The majority who are prescribed these drugs end up staying on them long-term, which may compromise their health.

More Studies Link Depression to Inflammation
Researchers have found yet another link between inflammation and depression. In one study1 published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, researchers systematically reviewed the safety and effectiveness of anti-inflammatory agents in people suffering with major depression."

Much more in the article, also copied and pasted here: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?107978-Joints-inflammation-and-all-that-stuff&p=1328856#post1328856

Gwin Ru

18th June 2020, 12:32

20 Million Schoolchildren Have Been Prescribed Psychiatric Drugs Known to Cause Suicidal Thoughts (http://www.renegadetribune.com/20-million-schoolchildren-have-been-prescribed-psychiatric-drugs-known-to-cause-suicidal-thoughts/)

By Christina England (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/gmi-blogs/christina.england.btinternet.com)
June 17, 2020 (http://www.renegadetribune.com/20-million-schoolchildren-have-been-prescribed-psychiatric-drugs-known-to-cause-suicidal-thoughts/)

http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/boy-1636731_1920-800x445.jpg

A news article (https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-number-of-americans-on-antidepressants-has-skyrocketed/) published in 2017 reported that, according to the latest data, a staggering 12.7 percent of all US citizens over the age of 12 were taking antidepressants (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/toxic-ingredient/antidepressants). Thrive Global, who reported these figures, stated that:
"For many, antidepressants have been a long-term course of medication: 68 percent of people in the most recent survey said they’d been taking them for two or more years, and 25 percent had been taking them for more than a decade.”
In reality, more children are being prescribed these drugs than the public are aware of. This fact was highlighted by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (https://www.cchr.org/videos/psychiatry-an-industry-of-death/introduction.html) (CCHR) in their film, Psychiatry: an Industry of Death (https://www.cchr.org/videos/psychiatry-an-industry-of-death/introduction.html). They stated that currently around 20 million school children are being prescribed stimulants and psychotropic drugs.

https://www.cchr.org/videos/psychiatry-an-industry-of-death/introduction.html

This information is extremely worrying, especially when you consider that professionals worldwide have been linking the use of antidepressants to suicide, suicidal thoughts, and attempted suicide (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/disease/suicidal-behavior), for many years.

Studies Prove that Antidepressants Can Lead Patients to Die by Suicide
In 2016, in her article titled 7 Facts About Depression That Will Blow You Away (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/7-facts-about-depression-will-blow-you-away), holistic women’s health psychiatrist, Kelly Brogan, M.D., stated that:
"Despite what you’ve been led to believe, antidepressants have repeatedly been shown in long-term scientific studies to worsen the course of mental illness (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/disease/psychiatric-disorders)—to say nothing of the risks of liver damage, bleeding, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, and reduced cognitive function they entail. The dirtiest little secret of all is the fact that antidepressants are among the most difficult drugs to taper from, more so than alcohol and opiates. While you might call it “going through withdrawal,” we medical professionals have been instructed to call it “discontinuation syndrome,” which can be characterized by fiercely debilitating physical and psychological reactions. Moreover, antidepressants have a well-established history of causing violent side effects, including suicide and homicide. In fact, five of the top 10 most violence-inducing drugs have been found to be antidepressants.” (Emphasis added)
Worryingly, Brogan highlighted the fact that the majority of prescriptions being written for antidepressants were actually being written by general practitioners and not psychiatrists, as one would expect. She wrote that:
"Seven percent of all visits to a primary care doctor end with an antidepressant and almost three-quarters of the prescriptions are written without a specific diagnosis (https://kellybroganmd.com/antidepressants-no-diagnosis-needed/%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank). What’s more, when the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health did its own examination into the prevalence of mental disorders, it found that most people who take antidepressants never meet the medical criteria for a bona fide diagnosis of major depression, and many who are given antidepressants for things like OCD (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/disease/obsessive-compulsive-disorder), panic disorder, social phobia, and anxiety also don’t qualify as actually having these conditions.” (Emphasis added)
In fact, according to Brogan, many individuals suffering with a physical condition can also display symptoms similar to those suffered by those patients with psychiatric disorders. If this is correct, then young children may be diagnosed with mental illness when they are not mentally ill but physically sick.

She stated that:
"Many different physical conditions create psychiatric symptoms but aren’t themselves “psychiatric.” Two prime examples: dysfunctioning thyroid and blood sugar chaos. We think (because our doctors think) that we need to “cure” the brain, but in reality we need to look at the whole body’s ecosystem: intestinal health, hormonal interactions, the immune system and autoimmune disorders (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/disease/autoimmune-diseases), blood sugar balance, and toxicant exposure.” (Emphasis added)
Brogan concluded that:
"Depression is a message and an opportunity
It’s a sign for us to stop and figure out what’s causing our imbalance rather than just masking, suppressing, or rerouting the symptoms. It’s a chance to choose a new story, to engage in radical transformation, to say yes to a different life experience.”
If she is correct, then her paper is extremely worrying, as, according to research, children as young as one-year-old are being prescribed antidepressants.

One-Year-Old Prescribed Antidepressants
In 2016, it was reported that the Scottish National Health Service (NHS) had been prescribing antidepressants to children for many years.

In a report written by Harry Cockburn (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/one-year-old-baby-prescribed-antidepressants-nhs-scotland-tayside-dundee-a7204566.html%22%20%5Cl%20%22r3z-addoor), published by the Independent in 2016, Cockburn stated that between January and May, the Tayside and Dundee National Health Service (NHS), prescribed antidepressants to approximately 450 children under the age of 18.

Furthermore, he continued with the extremely worrying statement that:
"In 2014, the trust prescribed antidepressants to a one-year-old boy, according to figures obtained by the Dundee Evening Telegraph (https://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/fp/kids-young-one-given-antidepressants/%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank).” (Emphasis added)
Cockburn also stated that:
"A spokesperson for NHS Tayside told the Evening Telegraph the drugs could be used to treat a number of different conditions beyond their most common use as a treatment for clinical depression (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/disease/depression).”
This being said, should antidepressants be given to children under the age of 18 at all? Cockburn continued his article by revealing that:
"In January this year, the largest ever review of clinical study reports compiled by drug companies found teenagers were twice as likely to commit suicide (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/children-given-antidepressants-are-twice-as-likely-to-become-suicidal-claims-new-study-a6838291.html%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank) if they were taking antidepressants.”
Concerned by what we had discovered, we decided to ask leading child psychiatrist Dr. Sami Timimi (https://iipdw.com/sami-timimi-uk/) what he believed was happening to our children.

Dr. Timimi is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Director of Medical Education in the National Health Service in Lincolnshire, Training Programme Director for East Midlands Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and a Visiting Professor of Child Psychiatry and Mental Health Improvement at the University of Lincoln, UK.

In an exclusive interview, we asked Dr. Timimi whether or not he believed that young children should be prescribed antidepressants.

He replied:
"I believe that they should not. Doctors prescribe them because they can and we deal with difficult situations, but this leads to massive overprescribing and creation of long-term patients on medications that, according to the research, have little to no advantage over a sugar pill (placebo (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/therapeutic-action/placebo-effect)) but come with a range of side effects and withdrawal problems.”
Given his reply, we asked him whether or not there was a known link between antidepressants and suicide?

He told us that:
"You are about twice as likely to experience suicidal impulses and behaviours if you are prescribed an ‘antidepressants’ compared to placebo in under 18s.”
We asked him if, over the years, he had noticed a rise in the number of children being labelled as mentally ill.

He replied:
"Yes, and it has accelerated in the last ten years or so (possibly in connection with post financial crash austerity putting greater pressures on families and schools and therefore young people).”
We asked him if he believed that too many children were being labelled as mentally ill.
He replied:
"I reject the notion that what they have is a mental illness/disorder, as most of what we call this is simply understandable reactions to life events and family circumstances. No one has demonstrated that any neurological or genetic abnormalities are connected with any of the so-called diagnoses we make. I think this is an unhelpful way of thinking about distress or behavioural difference, as it assumes something is wrong with the internal working of the child, and often, by accident, leads to creating more long-term patients. To make progress in how we help those who experience mental distress/behavioural difference as youngsters, we must first dispense with unscientific notions such as psychiatric diagnosis/disorders.”
Finally, we asked him what he believed were the alternatives to prescription drugs.
He replied that:
"Everything else you can think of, from the variety of therapies (family, group, systemic, individual) to lifestyle (diet, exercise (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/therapeutic-action/exercise) etc.), to focus on routines and social functioning, to everyday stuff like hobbies and spending more time with friends, etc.”
Given the fact that, according to Dr. Timimi and many others, there are many alternative therapies that professionals could be offering their patients before prescribing them antidepressants. We need to ask ourselves why so many young children are being prescribed these drugs in the first place, especially since research indicates that they can cause some children to have suicidal thoughts.

Latest Research Once Again Links Antidepressants to Suicide
In 2018, S.Stübner et al (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29939264), conducted a study carefully analysing paperwork collected from 81 psychiatric hospitals during the period from 1993 – 2014. The team documented all single cases of suicidal ideations or behavior that had been judged as adverse drug reactions to antidepressant drugs.

They stated that:
"Among 219,635 adult hospitalized patients taking antidepressant drugs under surveillance, 83 cases of suicidal adverse drug reactions occurred (0.04%): 44 cases of suicidal ideation, 34 attempted suicides, and 5 committed suicides were documented. Restlessness was present in 42 patients, ego-dystonic intrusive suicidal thoughts or urges in 39 patients, impulsiveness in 22 patients, and psychosis in 7 patients. Almost all adverse drug reactions occurred shortly after beginning antidepressant drug medication or increasing the dosage. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors caused a higher incidence of suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior as adverse drug reactions than noradrenergic and specific serotonergic antidepressants or tricyclic antidepressants, as did monotherapy consisting of one antidepressant drug, compared to combination treatments.”
Although their statistics could be seen by many to be somewhat limited, the team concluded that “their findings supported the view that antidepressant drugs can, in rare cases trigger suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviour.”

The team stated that:
"… Special clinical features (restlessness, ego-dystonic thoughts or urges, impulsiveness) may be considered as possible warning signs. A combination therapy might be preferable to antidepressant drug monotherapy when beginning treatment.”
We believe that these statistics are extremely worrying, especially when you consider the fact that children as young one are being prescribed antidepressants.

However, according to evidence that we have uncovered, these links appear to have been known for many years, because, according to a special report published in 2006 by medical expert Dr. Peter R. Breggin, the FDA now require the manufacturers of antidepressants to highlight the potential risk of increased suicidality in children on their labels. He stated that:
"As of 2005, the FDA now require the drug manufacturers to place elaborate warnings on their labels concerning the potential of these drugs to cause stimulating effects, including agitation, anxiety (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/disease/anxiety-disorders), irritability, emotional lability, aggression, hostility, and mania. The labels must also include a warning about increased suicidality in children.”
Furthermore, in his report, which highlights the lengths that drug companies can go to conceal crucial evidence from the public, Breggin explained in detail how, after being asked to give evidence in a trial concerning the widely used antidepressant Paxil, he was “empowered by the court to examine hundreds of cartons of drug company files contained in GlaxoSmith Klines’s sealed record room.” He wrote:
"These files included Food and Drug Administration (FDA) correspondence and all of the company’s worldwide clinical trials and adverse drug reports for Paxil.

"On July 21, 2001, my report in the form of an affidavit was sent to the judicial arbitrator in the case. It addressed GSK’s practices in the development and marketing of Paxil, and in particular its alleged withholding or manipulation of information about the drug’s dangerousness. Based on GSK’s proprietary files that have to this day never been made public, my report examined many factors, including (a) how quickly after the first dose can Paxil cause severe adverse reactions; (b) the actual rates of akathisia; (c) the actual risk of overstimulation causing agitation, irritability, and manic-like symptoms; (d) the actual rates of suicidality in adults; and (e) promotional claims made for the drug.”
He stated that:
"The case against GSK was eventually “resolved” to the satisfaction of GSK and the Lacuzong family. GSK denied and continues to deny all of the allegations of negligence in developing and marketing Paxil. My impression is that a substantial amount of money was involved in the resolution of the case, although the amount was not disclosed. GSK at that time refused to unseal its records or to allow me to make public my findings, regardless of their significance for the FDA, medical profession, and public health.” (Emphasis added)
He concluded his report by adding several sections of his full report, which he has stated, can be found on his website. He stated that the sections that he had added to this report focused largely on Paxil-induced suicidality in adults.

Having read this report and his evidence, plus the evidence that we have highlighted in this article, leads us to conclude that too many young children are being prescribed dangerous, mind-altering drugs before their problems have been fully investigated.

For further research please read:

Psychiatric Drug Facts by Peter R. Breggin M.D. https://breggin.com/

CCHR: Exposing the Dangers of Antidepressants and Other Psychotropic Drugs—Despite FDA/Psychiatric- Pharmaceutical Cover-Ups

Vested Interests Inventing “Chemical Imbalance” Theory to Sell Drugs https://files.ondemandhosting.info/data/www.cchr.org/files/Exposing_the_Dangers_of_Antidepressants_Despite_Cover-Ups.pdf

Seroxat Secrets https://seroxatsecrets.wordpress.com/

Christina was born and educated in London, U.K. After taking an A Level in Psychology and a BTEC in Learning Support, Ms. England spent many years researching vaccines and adverse reactions. She gained a Higher National Diploma in Journalism and Media Studies and in 2016 she gained a BA Hons degree in Literature & Humanities. She currently writes for VacTruth, Health Impact News, GreenMedInfo, The Liberty Beacon, Vaccine Impact and Medical Kidnap on immunisation safety and efficacy. She has co-authored the book, Shaken Baby Syndrome or Vaccine Induced Encephalitis – Are Parents Being Falsely Accused? with Dr. Harold Buttram and Vaccination Policy and the UK Government: The Untold Truth with Lucija Tomljenovic PhD, which are sold on Amazon. Websites: Profitable Harm (https://www.profitableharm.com/), Carers Against Medical Injustice (https://parentsandcarersagainstinjustice.weebly.com/)

© 2018 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here //www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter). Original article (https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/20-million-schoolchildren-have-been-prescribed-psychiatric-drugs-known-cause-suic).

onawah

13th September 2020, 06:52

Psychiatrist Shares Why No Medication Is Best for Depression
Dr. Peter Breggin "Known as 'the conscience of psychiatry,' he says 'there is no promising medical treatment and probably there never can be,' as depression is primarily rooted in this. Sadly, millions are increasing their risk of suicide, diabetes and heart attack - without even knowing."

The Little-Known Sordid History of Psychiatry
by Dr. Joseph Mercola
September 13, 2020

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/09/13/peter-breggin-toxic-psychiatry.aspx?cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20200913Z1&mid=DM654172&rid=963502808

MOaLR-gxNL8

"STORY AT-A-GLANCE
Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist, is frequently referred to as “the conscience of psychiatry” because he's been able to successfully reform the psychiatric profession, abolishing lobotomies and other experimental psychosurgeries
Breggin refers to lobotomies as a rape of the soul, the permanent mutilation of an individual’s selfhood, as damage to one area of the brain will harm the integration of the whole brain
Breggin also had a hand in getting the word out about the dangers of Prozac
Psychiatric drugs only stifle the brain function of patients. While they might ease some of the suffering, that relief comes at the expense of brain damage
One psychiatric treatment Breggin has not been able to eliminate is electroshock treatment, which is actually starting to be used more and more. Transcranial direct current stimulation and Neuralink, a transcranial implant designed by the Elon Musk Company, pose severe risks to your brain health and function
Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist, has written more than a dozen bestselling books on psychiatry and the drug industry. He's frequently referred to as “the conscience of psychiatry” because he's been able to successfully reform the psychiatric profession, abolishing one of the most harmful practices, namely lobotomies and other experimental psychosurgeries.

He was the first to take a public stand against lobotomies as a young man, and was able to change the field as a result. He’s featured in Aaron and Melissa Dykes’ excellent documentary, “The Minds of Men.”1

Now 83 years old, Breggin has seen a lot, and in this interview, he shares his own evolution and experiences as a psychiatrist. His interest in psychiatry began at the age of 18, when he became a volunteer at a local state mental hospital.

“It was a nightmare,” he says. “It was like my uncle Dutch's descriptions of liberating a Nazi concentration camp. The place stank. People were sitting in these bare, barren concrete corridors.

They had a TV set that wasn't working … and bolted down tables and chairs so the people couldn't throw them at each other. No attention being given to them at all. Often just sitting there; some hallucinating, and somebody told me that the girl in the corner coiled up in a ball on the floor by a radiator had been a Radcliffe student ...

The doctors were callous, the aids were callous, there was just no love in the place at all. I could tell, even though I didn't really have much experience growing up with love, I could feel that what was missing was love, care, nurturing. It was so clear.”

Toxic Psychiatry
Breggin eventually became the leader of that volunteer program. He and 200 other students painted the walls and took patients for walks. He asked the superintendent to assign one patient per volunteer aid, to build real relationships. The superintendent balked at the idea, but eventually gave in. Breggin tells this story in his book, “Toxic Psychiatry.”2

“We ended up getting almost every patient out of that hospital,” he says. “We got them placed in different places that were much better. We got some back with their families. It was so clear to me that this was the way to go …

I watched electroshock and insulin coma shock where people would come in and they'd give them overdoses of insulin to send them into coma. They'd be frothing at the mouth, unconscious, having seizures and getting ready to die, literally. Then they would give them orange juice or sugar water and they would become alert again.

It was so clear to me what was going on. People would come in full of energy — angry, depressed, anxious and often resistant … They'd get this injection of insulin to knock them out, killing them, basically, but when they came awake they were like puppies. They were grateful, they said ‘Thank you, I feel like you saved me.’ They'd be docile … There's no fooling about what this was. I knew exactly what it was.

I knew what shock treatment was … I've been fighting this, but we're still doing it … It's when they put electrodes on the forehead of the brain … You get a shock of a voltage … 10 times what you need to give convulsions … and it makes docility. It makes people out of touch with themselves. It makes people unable to complain … [Elevated mood] is the artificial euphoria [caused by] brain damage. This is very brain damaging.”

All of this is what motivated Breggin to go into psychiatry, in order to help reform the profession from the inside. Interestingly, as early as 1963, Jerry Klerman, who later became the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the federal government and a professor at Harvard, told Breggin there was no future in helping people strengthen their mental resilience.

The future, Klerman told him, was in drugs, and using computers to decide which drugs to use. After his first year at Harvard medical school, Breggin left and went back to the Upstate Medical Center (University) in New York, where he had already done internship.

“Then I went on to the National Institute of Mental Health … for two years. There I saw clearly what was happening. Psychiatry was leaving the psychosocial model behind.

My volunteer program had already been described by the last big Federal Commission on Mental Health. It's mentioned two or three times and described as one of the solutions to the vast mental hospital problems … Nothing about drugs, drugging and shocking people in it.

It was much more real, much more about what was really going on with human beings and human sufferings, spiritual, psychological. I could just see this writing on the wall and I was not sure what to do. I was invited to stay at the National Institute of Mental Health.

I accepted briefly, in the child division. I was very interested in helping children. Then I thought, I can't do this. I gave them warning without even having a job that I was leaving. I didn't know what else to do, so I went into private practice.”

Breggin Spearheaded Drug-Free Psychiatry
Breggin focused on helping people without medication. “I learned very quickly that the most disturbed people would calm down and relate when somebody cared about them, wasn't afraid of them, was interested in them and made no pretense of being superior to them,” he says. Drugs, he explains, were simply stifling the patients. While they might ease some of the suffering, that relief came at the expense of brain damage.

Breggin goes on to tell the story of how he prevented the return of lobotomies and psychosurgeries — strategies in which the brain is purposely damaged through electric shocks, radium chip implants or puncturing the prefrontal area of the brain with an ice pick inserted next to the eyeball, for example.

Breggin refers to lobotomies as a rape of the soul, the permanent mutilation of an individual’s selfhood, as damage to one area of the brain will harm the integration of the whole brain. As noted by Breggin, you cannot “plop out aggression” like a pit out of an olive. The brain doesn’t work like that. It’s an integrated organ and mental processes arise from integrated processes involving many different areas of the brain.

So many people now know that drugs are dangerous and shock treatment is horrible. But, the power of psychiatry grows and the drug companies grow … and more and more people are being recruited by all the ads and all the fake science.
He decided somebody had to stop the madness. And, while he received no support from any other well-known psychiatrist or professor, and came under vehement attack by the establishment, including threats of physical violence against himself and his family that at times necessitated the use of bodyguards.

Breggin eventually succeeded. It’s a fascinating story, so I highly recommend listening to the whole interview. When asked why he took on this formidable fight, he says:

“When I saw what was being done to people, I said ‘Somebody has to do this. I have no choice about this.’ I had no idea what I was up against. I had no idea that everywhere there would be enemies; that I'd be threatened with violence.

When I was invited to speak by Harvard Medical students, that people would rip down all the signs about the meeting; that there'd be blowback on the students and stuff like that. I had no idea what I was walking into.”

The Lawsuit That Ended Lobotomies
The end of lobotomies was brought about by a lawsuit filed by a young lawyer named Gabe Kaimowitz on behalf of a chronically hospitalized patient who had been promised release from the mental hospital if he underwent experimental psychosurgery. Breggin tells the story:

“[Kaimowitz] found out they were going to do a psychosurgery experimentation in the state hospital with a local university, Wayne's State. It was all set up to go. He intervened. In fact, the case is called by his name, which is unusual … Kaimowitz v. The Department of Mental Health Wayne State University.

A three-judge panel met about the case. This [patient] had been interviewed by the Commissioner of Mental Health. He had been chronically hospitalized and then allegedly had sexually assaulted a nurse or something, but there was no record of it and certainly no adjudication about it; no meetings about it. He was a lifetime patient.

The Commissioner told him he could get out if he underwent the psychosurgery. Well, the judges looked over his case and decided that, first, he was going to be discharged because he was being held illegally. They discharged John Doe. Then the state said, ‘Well, the case is over.’ They said ‘No. You guys have set up this whole thing. We're going to look at it.’

Well, I was the go-to person as … [Kaimowitz] brought me in. I couldn't testify the first day because they were filibustering me. They wanted to force me to stay overnight so that … they'd have the whole weekend to review the case with the surgeons. Follow me?

Of course, they're forcing me into testifying in the afternoon, filibustering in the morning. Gabe said, ‘This is really too bad because now they're going to have the whole weekend to talk about your testimony with the surgeons.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. We'll filibuster back. I'll testify on something else for the afternoon.’ He said, ‘How are you going to do that?’

I said, ‘Well, I'll talk about the history of psychiatry. I'm going to tie it into the extermination camps, which were very much modeled on state mental hospitals. Show the comparison and hopefully the judges will invoke the Nuremberg Code, which says that, of course, that man couldn't volunteer in a state mental hospital because he's in a total institution, just like the Nuremberg Code was applied to.

He said, ‘OK.’ I gave him a few questions and we went that afternoon and did that. Then on the following Monday, I started to talk about psychosurgery. They were so unprepared that all they could do was go through this 100-page paper that I had written …

We won the trial and it stopped, on the spot, all psychosurgery in the state hospitals in the federal programs. NIH stopped; VA stopped and all the state hospitals stopped. This was 1972-1973.”

It’s important to realize just how important this was, to put a stop to the return of lobotomies and experimental psychosurgeries. It was widely accepted as a practical solution for all sorts of problems, including race riots and behavioral problems among young children.

The beginning of the end of psychosurgery was the early 1970s. At that time, Breggin, who for most of his career struggled to get support, got the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, who could see the social consequences of psychosurgery being used on black children, as well as certain conservative Senators who thought it was immoral.

“I was the first person to criticize lobotomies in public, let alone the first psychiatrist. It was crazy. I still don't understand human beings. I work hard about it, but I keep falling short. I couldn't believe that I was so alone doing this,” he says.

The Dangers of Speaking Out Against Prozac
Breggin also had a hand in getting the word out about the dangers of Prozac. In his 1991 book, “Toxic Psychiatry,” he briefly mentioned Prozac is likely to do a lot of harm, and that there were already reports of the drug causing violent aggression.

He was later asked to be the sole scientific expert to put together the science for several dozen lawsuits against Eli Lilly, in which patients or their families claimed the drug had caused violent episodes, suicide, homicide, mania or psychosis. The drama and intrigue surrounding this trial rivals any good spy novel, so for more details, listen to the interview.

As just one example, at the time of his deposition against Eli Lilly, he, his wife and daughter all developed severe illness. By chance, a plumber they’d called in to fix a problem in the basement discovered the stovepipe for the gas heater had been disconnected and was laying out of sight, as if purposely hidden, pumping gas into the house.

Before that, the family had received death threats, and Breggin had called the FBI. Agents claiming to be FBI had visited his family, but something obviously wasn’t right.

“When I called the FBI back, they said they had no record of coming to see me,” Breggin says. “It got very weird … We were in this strange world. People would get angry at me in the audiences. By the way, that never happens, anymore … I want people to know, the environment has changed completely.

So many people now know that drugs are dangerous and shock treatment is horrible. But, the power of psychiatry grows and the drug companies grow … and more and more people are being recruited by all the ads and all the fake science. It is all fake science. You can look at any of my books. If you want it quicker, look up my YouTube channel.”

In broad strokes, the Eli Lilly trial turned out to be fixed in Eli Lilly’s favor and Breggin was set up to fail in his investigation. The plaintiffs lost the case and Eli Lilly was cleared of charges. Eventually, however, evidence emerged showing Eli Lilly lawyers had bribed some of the plaintiffs and arranged for a secret settlement provided they lost the case.

A Supreme Court judge in Kentucky declared the trial a fraud and changed the verdict to “a secret settlement with prejudice.” When the judge decided to disclose the amount of the secret settlement, he was removed and replaced with another judge who decided the settlement amount was not to be disclosed as it might hurt Eli Lilly. The full details of this remarkable case can be found in Breggin’s book, “Medication Madness.”3

Electroshock Treatment — A Real-World Conspiracy
One psychiatric treatment Breggin has not been able to eliminate is electroshock treatment (ECT), which is actually starting to be used more and more. Breggin says:

“I've worked on denting shock treatment. Then finally, a class action suit was brought against the manufacturers. They lost against the first manufacturer. There are only two [manufacturers] in North America, and I wasn't involved. Then they called me in. Of course, they expected, again, to just get it thrown out of court.

I did a scientific brief for the judge on brain damage from ECT. The judge decided that there was sufficient evidence for brain damage to make it a jury question. This was huge. The judge focused on the single most important thing he could.

The drug company, within days, settled and put out a statement to the FDA that ECT can cause brain damage and severe memory loss. All that's up on my website, and I've written blogs about it … to show you the nature of what is definitely a conspiracy of people working together toward the same aim and being evil about it.

Within days, the FDA approved ECT for the first time for treatment-resistant depression, which means nothing. It’s used more and more. It's not less. I don't think we slowed it down with this, but we made a big gain. We now have a record of a drug company admitting to the FDA it causes brain damage and so on.

Then the FDA with all its power comes right back and then approves ECT for the first time. They had never approved it. They tried to and there was so much opposition they didn't do it. Then when the drug companies got hurt, it was within days that they approved it. Wow.”

On Neuralink and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation
Breggin also discusses the hazards of transcranial direct current stimulation and Neuralink, a transcranial implant designed by the Elon Musk Company. Elon is probably doing this because he’s concerned about the integration of artificial intelligence, which is coming.

He fears the human race could become subservient to artificial intelligence. He thinks one of the preservation strategies is to allow us to sort of keep pace with these advances. Breggin comments:

“This is the new cutting edge that I'm trying to get across to people. I have a new show. If you go to my YouTube channel and look at [my interview with] the Dykes … I did a show about this saying that this is worse than the psychiatry we have now. I'm focusing on all the electronics.

The FDA has approved electrodes on the heads of children to leave them on all night long to give them low voltage stimulation, which is going to go through the skin, back up the nerves, all the way to the frontal lobes in an entirely disruptive hammer-like, crushing way. It's going to blunt the kids. It's horrible. They studied it for four weeks and approved it, if you can imagine that.

It's low voltage, but we know it disrupts brain waves. It's bizarre that they approved this. I started to take this on and then, or actually through Aaron and Melissa, I found out about what was being done by Elon Musk. What's interesting to me is that while Musk is so brilliant, he's stupid about the brain. That's probably because the neurosurgeons and psychiatrists he consults are stupid about the brain.

I mean they're just stupid. He wants to put in multiple threadlike electrodes into the brain, into webs of neurons, and put in low voltage stimulation. This is insane. The brain can't tolerate this. He hopes to [be able to] communicate but there's not going to be any communication.

The brain isn't going to talk to these electrodes. That's not how the brain works. The brain talks to itself. It's not going to talk to Elon Musk [or anyone else] and he's going to disrupt the brain talking to itself. It's a terrible thing to do.

I wish somebody who knows Elon Musk would say, ‘You ought to talk to Peter Breggin. He says your consultants are stupid.’ He's already planning to try to get FDA approval for some neurological disorders and that'll be the beginning of the onslaught.

Here's the really deadly part — a part to really think about and close with — and that is that the defense department, DARPA, is funding Musk.

The Dykes found out that the machine is going to be used to sew in these electrodes … through the funding of DARPA and work through UCLA, which has always been murderers of the brain. We shut down programs at UCLA going way back. We shut down a lot of different kinds of programs in my anti-psychosurgery campaign.” "

Gwin Ru

24th March 2022, 16:31

...

... here we go...

Updated Psychiatric Manual Makes Grief, Racism, and Childhood “Mental Disorders” to be Treated with Drugs (https://healthimpactnews.com/2022/updated-psychiatric-manual-makes-grief-racism-and-childhood-mental-disorders-to-be-treated-with-drugs/)

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
March 23, 2022

https://healthimpactnews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/childhood-is-not-a-mental-disorder-1k.jpg

Americans love their drugs.

We are some of the most medicated people on the face of the planet, which means that this will not be a popular article, because I will expose people’s idols, showing how evil Big Pharma is, and how they maintain control over the U.S. population through people’s addiction to these prescription drugs.

[...]

Full article (with videos): https://healthimpactnews.com/2022/updated-psychiatric-manual-makes-grief-racism-and-childhood-mental-disorders-to-be-treated-with-drugs/

onawah

25th June 2023, 15:25

How Big Pharma Makes Healthy People Sick | ENDEVR Documentary
ENDEVR
735K subscribers
3,313 views Jun 25, 2023

"Medicating Normal: How Big Pharma Makes Healthy People Sick | ENDEVR Documentary

Opioid Tragedy - Inside the Fentanyl Crisis:

• Opioid Tragedy: I...

Millions of people worldwide are physically dependent on commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs. While these drugs can provide effective short-term relief, pharmaceutical companies have hidden -from both doctors and patients - their dangerous side effects, addictive nature, and long-term harm.

Combining cinema verité and investigative journalism, Medicating Normal follows the stories of those whose lives have been torn apart by the very medications they believed would help them. Expert testimony and undercover footage reveal a systemically corrupt industry. Medicating Normal is the untold story of the disastrous consequences that can occur when profit-driven medicine intersects with human beings in distress."

78soEdii12U

onawah

9th October 2024, 23:53

"[/B]Deadly Drugs: What Happens When Antidepressants Trigger Killer Instincts? [/B]
by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.
October 9, 2024
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/mad-in-america-antidepressants-trigger-killer-instincts-david-healy/?utm_source=luminate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=defender&utm_id=20241009

fIw3Vnkgng0

"In his “Mad in America” webinar, Dr. David Healy presented a series of tragic cases involving people who were living stable lives until they were prescribed antidepressants that led them to become aggressive and in some cases homicidal.
The issue of antidepressant-induced homicide brings into focus the broader problems with prescription drugs, psychiatrist Dr. David Healy said during an Oct. 5 webinar.
Those problems include the failure of medical professionals to recognize serious side effects of drugs, and the justice system’s tendency to protect pharmaceutical companies — not people.

Healy, one of the United Kingdom’s foremost experts on serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) has studied antidepressants for 40 years as a researcher, clinician and consultant for Big Pharma.
In the webinar, he presented cases involving people who were living stable and healthy lives — until they were prescribed antidepressants, after which they became aggressive, delusional and homicidal.
Those impulses subsided once the people stopped taking the drugs. However, in many of the cases Healy highlighted, by the time they stopped taking the drugs, they had already committed homicide.

One well-documented case involved 12-year-old Christopher Pittman. Pittman began exhibiting aggressive behavior — fighting with other children and acting extremely agitated in church — almost immediately after taking Zoloft.
Less than one month after starting the drug, he said he heard a voice tell him to kill his grandparents, with whom he lived. That night, he shot them and burned down their house.
In 2005, Pittman was sentenced to 30 years in prison, after a jury declined to find that Zoloft had caused his homicidal behavior. However, U.S. Circuit Judge Daniel Pieper gave him the most lenient sentence possible.

Healy quoted Pieper’s statement during sentencing:
“It seems to turn the whole medical system on its side if you can’t rely on the medication your doctor prescribes. It potentially forces you into a situation of lifetime commitment if that drug induces an effect of which you are unaware when you go on it. There’s something disconcerting about that … probably of a legal nature, that’s troubling me.”

That same year, just before the verdict, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began requiring SSRIs like Zoloft to carry suicide warnings, The New York Times reported. In Canada, SSRIs also carry an additional warning: a potential increase in hostility, aggression and “harm to others.”
Zoloft’s manufacturer, Pfizer, maintained the drug was safe. However, according to the Times, Pfizer also reported immediately following the verdict that 14 other criminal cases blamed Zoloft for people’s actions.
Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac, confirmed the drug had been blamed in over 75 criminal cases. The drugmaker said it was unaware of any cases in which the defense had succeeded.

That’s precisely the problem, according to Healy. Today, nearly 20 years after Pittman’s case, no jury has acquitted a person who claimed antidepressants caused them to commit a murder.
However, there were a few cases in which courts recognized the link between antidepressants and homicide, Healy said.
In one case, a man killed his wife, children and himself 48 hours after being put on GSK’s SSRI, Paxil. One of the daughter’s husbands sued GSK in Wyoming and won financial damages.

In Australia, the case of a man who killed his wife after he was prescribed Zoloft was heard by a judge — not a jury. The judge dismissed the charges, ruling that Zoloft had caused the man’s behavior.
Healy said that when these defenses — blaming antidepressants for violent behavior — first emerged, Pfizer and GSK developed a strategy to combat them. The Zoloft prosecutor’s manual, which Healy said was later refined and revised, was a playbook for prosecutors to rebut the “Zoloft defense.”

The manual’s rebuttal hinges on the claims that violence is common in the U.S. and that the FDA has found the drug to be safe. It also advises lawyers to emphasize the lack of statistically significant evidence from double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials causally linking Zoloft to aggressive behavior or to akathisia, which are strong subjective feelings of distress or discomfort that could also induce violent behavior.

Pharma knew the dangers but manipulated the data
During the “Mad in America” webinar, Healy outlined a long history of the link between drugs and “automatism” — when drugs produce involuntary actions in people taking them. Those involuntary actions can range from pacing to sleepwalking to homicide.
Swedish neuropharmacologist and Nobel Prize winner Arvid Carlsson, M.D., Ph.D., created the first SSRI, Zelmid, which went on the market in 1982. Carlsson recognized from the outset that the drugs would have positive effects for some people and negative effects for others, Healy said.

When Pfizer started marketing Zoloft in 1992, Carlsson — knowing that SSRIs affect people differently — advised the company to carefully monitor how different people responded to the drug. But that approach ran counter to Pfizer’s ambitious plans to have the drug prescribed widely, replacing addictive drugs like valium, Healy said.
According to Healy, at the time, Pfizer already knew that Zoloft had caused suicidal and homicidal impulses, even in healthy trial volunteers.

The challenge of identifying these serious adverse effects is compounded by the fact that “doctors today have great trouble” monitoring how a drug actually affects each patient, as opposed to how the doctor believes the drug should work.
“They are people of the book increasingly and not able to see and hear what’s happening when you’re on these drugs,” he said.
Healy believes most people mistakenly think SSRIs act on the brain, but that most of their effects occur in the body.

The drugs are meant to produce a “serenic effect,” or anti-aggressive effect, which they often do. The problem is that in some people, they have the opposite effect.
SSRIs reduce sensory input from the body to the brain, which can cause feelings of physical and emotional numbness, Healy said. That’s also why SSRIs are often associated with loss of libido and sexual dysfunction.

The drugs work less by treating an illness and more by changing personality, he said. The emotional muting and feelings of aggression and akathisia are what can make the drugs induce suicide or homicide.
Healy walked through a range of examples, including cases documented in the scientific literature and cases he has seen in his own clinical practice of people who experienced dramatic and violent personality changes — changes that disappeared once they stopped taking the drugs.

He also said that companies like Pfizer and GSK — with the FDA’s full knowledge — manipulated and buried much of the data indicating drugs like Zoloft were either ineffective for the conditions they were supposed to treat or induced aggressive behaviors toward self or others.
The drugmakers’ altered studies were then published in journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, Healy alleged.
Healy said he believes most people have great faith in these institutions. This makes it difficult for them to accept that the FDA could license a drug that could cause a person to commit murder, or that top journals could publish trial results manufactured by Big Pharma.

“The greatest concentration of ‘fake news’ on this earth centers on the drugs your doctor gives you. Not just the SSRIs, but all of them,” he said.
Healy called for a return to a clinical practice of medicine where doctors and patients engage in dialogue, and together analyze how a drug affects each patient. He also called for a legal system that recognizes when drugs have caused serious problems."

Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's from the University of Texas at Austin.

onawah

24th January 2025, 23:54

The Dark Side of Antidepressants
Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor
January 24, 2025
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2025/01/24/ssri-dark-side-antidepressants.aspx?ui=8d3c7e22a03f5300d2e3338a0f080d2da3add85bca35e09236649153e4675f72&sd=20110604&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20250124&foDate=true&mid=DM1693053&rid=212252708

https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2025/January/PDF/ssri-dark-side-antidepressants-pdf.pdf

(Hyperlinks in the article not embedded here)

"Story at-a-glance
SSRI antidepressants are among the most harmful medications on the market, impacting society due to their widespread (and frequently unjustifiable) use
Common side effects of SSRIs (and SNRIs) include sexual dysfunction (which is often permanent), emotional numbness, severe agitation, violent psychosis, cognitive decline, and birth defects
The most concerning SSRI side effect is their tendency to cause grisly suicides and homicidal violence which includes mass shootings
Psychiatry's denial of SSRI-related issues often leads to misinterpretation of side effects as signs of pre-existing mental illness, resulting in more medication and catastrophic consequences
SSRIs, like other stimulant drugs (e.g., cocaine), can create aggressive behaviors and are highly addictive so many SSRI enter severe withdrawals once they stop them. Unfortunately, few resources exist for patients struggling to quit SSRIs

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs and SNRIs) have long been marketed as the magical solution to depression and anxiety, promising relief in a convenient little pill. But behind the glossy pharmaceutical ads and doctor endorsements lies a far more troubling reality. These drugs don’t just alter your brain chemistry — they can hijack your emotions, disrupt your life, and lead to consequences far worse than the conditions they claim to treat.

In fact, there’s a dirty secret of the SSRI antidepressants — they cause psychotic violence which typically results in suicide and sometimes in horrific homicide (e.g., mass shootings). Remarkably, this side effect was discovered throughout their clinical trials, covered up by the drug companies, and then covered up by the FDA after the agency received a deluge of complaints1 (39,000 in the first nine years2) once the first SSRI, Prozac, hit the market.

Initially, the media would report on the prescriptions (SSRIs) mass shooters took. However, a gag order went out, it became impossible to know what medications shooters were on, and the topic became taboo to discuss. Fortunately, that recently changed (e.g., after an article I wrote compiling the evidence they cause mass shootings went viral, Tucker Carlson did a 2022 segment on it and prominent conservatives gradually began speaking openly about SSRI mass shootings3).

https://x.com/i/status/1876545283984937202

Midwestern Doctor
@MidwesternDoc
In July 2022
@TuckerCarlson
broke a major taboo by discussing the link between antidepressants and mass shootings—a problem that did not exist until SSRIs entered the market.
Despite being written off as a "conspiracy theory" industry studies consistently showed that SSRIs cause aggression, bipolar disorder, and a loss of one's grip on reality—much of which was only learned after lawsuits from SSRI victims forced the industry to reveal that unpublished data.
In many cases, this leads to psychotic violence which is typically suicidal in nature, but sometimes also homicidal (e.g., a sweet elderly man stabbing his wife 200 times).
Once the school shooting epidemic began, activists quickly noticed the shooters were on SSRIs. To "solve" this, the entire media suddenly stopped reporting what medications the shooter was on, it became taboo to ever suggest any link existed between the two, and every school shooting became a polarized discussion over banning guns.
So, on May 26 2022, (two days after the tragic Uvalde shooting), I published an article (listed below) which compiled the shocking and extensive evidence linking SSRIs to mass shootings in susceptible individuals and showed that those incidents followed a clear and consistent pattern.
It struck a chord (as many could see our "approach" to mass shootings was doing nothing to stop them), quickly went viral, and a few days later on July 5, Tucker, at great risk, aired his groundbreaking segment and permanently changed the media landscape.
Since then, many other prominent figures (e.g.,
@mtgreenee
,
@MattWalshBlog
and
@RobertKennedyJr
) have begun broaching this subject as well and significant doubts have begun emerging around SSRIs.
Likewise, while the data on a shooter's psychiatric medications are rarely made available to us, a CDC official privately shared with one of us that the CDC has continued to secretly track the link between mass shootings and found it's consistently there but has declined to share it due to the political ramifications of that decision.
In this thread, I will provide the evidence SSRIs cause psychotic violence, show how the FDA covered it up in an identical manner to the dangers of other problematic pharmaceuticals (e.g., the COVID vaccines) and highlight how the risks of the SSRIs greatly exceed their "benefits."

Note: I recently learned through a CDC official that the CDC has been silently tracking what mass shooters are on and found the SSRI link continues but has not disclosed it due to political earthquakes this admission would cause.

CREPVbPB7aU

The Toxicology Bell Curve
In toxicology, you will typically see severe and extreme reactions occur much less frequently than moderate reactions:

https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/public/2025/January/toxicology-bell-curve.jpg

Because of this, when a very concerning and unmistakable adverse reaction occurs (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccines causing sudden deaths in young healthy athletes), that suggests you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg and far less severe injuries are also occurring much more frequently.

For example, one estimate4 found that of those vaccinated for COVID, 18% were injured, 0.93% were disabled, and 0.05% to 0.1% died, while another survey5 found 41% of those vaccinated were injured, with 7% being severely injured.

In the case of the SSRIs, the psychotic violence they can create, sadly, is also just the tip of a very large iceberg, and there are many less severe ways they warp your mind, body, and emotions.

The Hidden Side Effects of SSRIs
Many datasets show the harm SSRIs cause greatly outweighs any benefits. For example, in a survey of 1,829 patients6 on antidepressants in New Zealand:

62% reported sexual difficulties

60% felt emotionally numb

52% felt not like themselves

39% cared less about others

47% had experienced agitation

39% had experienced suicidal ideation

In that survey, other less common reported side effects (in order of decreasing frequency) included: insomnia, nightmares, "fuzzy"/"zombie," jaw grinding, sweating, blurred vision, constipation, disturbed/restless sleep, anxiety, heart palpitations, difficulty thinking, fatigue/exhaustion, strange/vivid dreams, stiff muscles/joints, "brain zaps," mania, excessive yawning, panic attacks, memory loss, decreased motivation, night sweats, and decreased appetite.

This list matches what I’ve seen in many other datasets7 (although others like feeling agitated, shaky, or anxious, indigestion, stomach aches, and diarrhea are also commonly reported).

Note: Another major issue with SSRIs (which is unlikely to be detected on a symptom-based survey) is that SSRIs frequently cause bipolar disorder.
Psychotic Violence — A Suppressed Truth
When Prozac was first brought to market in the mid-1980s, the pharmaceutical industry had not yet convinced the world that everyone was depressed and needed an antidepressant. So, instead (given that SSRIs work in a similar manner to a stimulant like Cocaine8) Prozac was initially marketed as a "mood-lifter."

Likewise, in 1985 when the FDA’s safety reviewer scrutinized Eli Lily’s Prozac application, they realized Lily had "failed" to report psychotic episodes of people on the drug and that Prozac’s adverse effects resembled that of a stimulant drug.

In turn, the warnings on the labels for SSRIs,9 such as anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, and mania, match the effects commonly observed with stimulant street drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine.

Note: A large survey of found 44% stopped a psych med because of side effects, a quarter of which were due to SSRI agitation.10

In light of this, and SSRI violence commonly being blamed on a "pre-existing mental illness" I thus compiled numerous studies (including ones industry tried to bury) showing the drugs themselves cause violence. For example:

•A Cochrane review11 assessed 150 studies where healthy volunteers were given SSRIs and found approximately one-third of them deliberately omitted discussing SSRI side effects, and about half of the studies were never made publicly available (presumably to hide their concerning data).

Ultimately, 14 of the 150 studies were eligible for meta-analysis (since enough information existed in them for the researchers to know what actually happened), and in these 14 studies, SSRIs were found to double the risk of suicide.

•In 2000, David Healy published a study12 he had carried out with 20 healthy volunteers — all with no history of depression or other mental illness — and to his big surprise two (10%) of them became suicidal when they received Zoloft. One of them was on her way out the door to kill herself in front of a train or a car when a phone call saved her.

Both volunteers remained disturbed several months later and seriously questioned the stability of their personalities.

•Eli Lilly showed in 197813 that cats who had been friendly for years began to growl and hiss on Prozac and became distinctly unfriendly. Once Prozac was stopped, the cats returned to their usual friendly behavior in a week or two.

Note: The FDA hypothesized that SSRIs could reduce violence in some but cause an increase in violence in others.14 Likewise a review of 84 animal studies showed that reduced aggression upon treatment with SSRI was most commonly observed, but sometimes the animals instead became more aggressive.15

Sexual Dysfunction
One of the side effects that I feel best illustrates the poor risk-reward ratio of SSRIs is sexual dysfunction — as not being able to have sex is quite likely to make someone depressed (and in some cases suicidal16) — hence often completely invalidating the justification for taking an SSRI to "feel happy again."

For example, a Spanish study17,18 of five of 1,022 patients on the most commonly prescribed SSRIs found:

The drugs caused sexual disturbances in 59% of them and 40% considered that dysfunction unacceptable
57% experienced decreased libido
57% experienced delayed orgasm or ejaculation
46% experienced no orgasm or ejaculation
31% experienced erectile dysfunction or decreased vaginal lubrication
Note: Similar results have been obtained in other studies,19 and I’ve met many men and women who continued to experience sexual dysfunction long after they stopped the SSRI (as this dysfunction is often permanent).

What I find the most amazing about SSRI sexual dysfunction is that while psychiatrists tend to downplay or ignore it, they simultaneously market SSRIs to treat premature ejaculation — which is yet another example of the drug industry trying to have its cake and eat it (especially given that many of the SSRI manufacturers also sell drugs for erectile dysfunction).

Note: One reason this side effect is under recognized is that embarrassed patients often won’t report it unless they are specifically asked about it (e.g., in the Spanish study, while 59% of SSRI users reported sexual dysfunction, only 20% did so without prompting20 — something unlikely to be done in a drug trial aimed at getting a medication to market).

Emotional Blunting — Losing the Essence of Life
Once the SSRIs hit the market, I immediately noticed that SSRIs sometimes dramatically altered the personality of those who took them. For example, they often destroyed the drive people had to make something of their life — and in some cases, I sadly watched that derailment continue for decades.

Likewise, I began to hear stories of people describing how their experience of life was deadened, often in a manner not too different from how the drugs "numb" your sexuality. Some of the common stories included:

•Not having emotional responses to things you should have responses to — For example, I saw numerous cases of people being in unhealthy jobs or relationships, seeing a doctor for help with their depression, quickly being put on Prozac, and then wasting a decade of their life because Prozac (or another SSRI) removed their drive to leave that toxic situation. Likewise, I heard many people state that Prozac took away the joy they felt in life.

•Losing the depth and richness of life — This comment for instance, does an excellent job of illustrating that:

https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/public/2025/January/dwb-midwestern-doctor-comment.png

Note: In psychiatry, this emotional anesthesia (not finding things as enjoyable as one used to) is known as "emotional blunting." Depending on the study (e.g., those mentioned above) between 40% to 60% of those who take SSRIs experience this side effect, and it’s sometimes rationalized as a necessary trade-off for removing the emotional pain associated with depression.

One of the greatest problems with our society is the belief that the media has marketed to us that we should never have to feel negative emotions. In reality, they are a critical component of the human experience and are frequently necessary for our growth and identifying the correct direction for our lives. Unfortunately, to market depression (and SSRIs) it was necessary to pathologize normal facets of life and turn them into permanent illnesses requiring indefinite treatment.

Birth Defects — A Hidden Consequence
Once a drug gets approved, pharmaceutical companies will always try to expand their market for it (e.g., this is why after adults stopped wanting the initial COVID-19 vaccine, they pivoted to pushing it on children — even though children have an almost 0% chance of dying from COVID-19).

With SSRIs, the industry has likewise worked to push them on vulnerable groups (e.g., foster children, "struggling" students, prisoners or parolees, pregnant mothers, and the elderly), and each group has suffered significant consequences from these practices — particularly since many are not allowed to decline the drugs. This excellent skit by Peter Gøtzsche illustrates the absurdity of pushing them on pregnant women:
https://x.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1876545296672690358/

A Midwestern Doctor
@MidwesternDoc
Because the SSRI's have been shielded from scrutiny, they are frequently pushed on patients (sometimes against their consent) when the drugs risks greatly outweigh their benefits. This skit for example highlights the unconscionable SSRI advice pregnant women frequently receive:
1:35 / 3:38
2:23 AM · Jan 7, 2025
·
2,119
Views

A Midwestern Doctor
@MidwesternDoc
·
Jan 7
To sell SSRIs, industry relabeled a variety of normal experiences as "unacceptable depression" and (despite evidence showing the opposite) made up the mythology depression was due to a "chemical imbalance" while the actual cures for depression were buried
From midwesterndoctor.com
A Midwestern Doctor
@MidwesternDoc
·
Jan 7
Lastly, changing an SSRI dose will cause awful withdrawals (that sometimes lead to psychotic violence), but doctors misinterpret this to mean the SSRI was helping and must continue.
Here I explain how to safely taper them off. Never suddenly stop an SSRI.

Pushing SSRIs on pregnant women is rationalized by the fact women frequently get depressed during or after their pregnancies (which is often due to excessive copper levels — something quite easy to treat naturally). Unfortunately, there are a variety of reasons why SSRIs are not safe during pregnancy. These include:

•SSRIs increase the risk of premature births,21 with the greatest risk (a doubling) occurring if an SSRI is taken during the third trimester.

•SSRIs significantly increase the risk of septal defects22 (which often require heart surgery to repair). One study of 500,000 infants in Denmark found mothers taking a single SSRI while pregnant caused the likelihood of a septal defect in their child to go from 0.5% to 0.9% and taking two or more increased it to 2.1%. Additionally, while on average taking an SSRI doubled the risk of a birth defect, the increased risk ranged from 34% to 225%, depending on the SSRI.

•SSRIs significantly increase the risk of persistent pulmonary hypertension in a newborn baby. One study of 1,173 babies found SSRIs increased the risk of it by 6.1 times,23 while another found the risk increased by 4.29 times,24 while another found it increased by 2.5 times.25

Given that this condition affects 1 to 2 out of 1,000 births and is often fatal, this "small" risk adds up quite quickly (but nonetheless this was not enough for the FDA to reconsider its advocacy of these drugs for pregnant women26).

Note: Other newborn complications linked to SSRIs include irritability, tremor, hypertonia, and difficulty sleeping or breastfeeding.

Sadly, after birth SSRIs continue to affect the development of a child. For example, the package insert for Prozac states that after only 19 weeks of treatment, children lost 1.1 cm (0.43 inches) and 1.1 kg in weight (2.43 lbs.) compared to children treated with placebo.27

The Role of Marketing in SSRI Popularity
Much in the same way, the pharmaceutical industry spends exorbitant amounts of money dishonestly marketing drugs, it will frequently concoct elaborate ways to make a useless (or worse) drug appear to be worth selling to all of America (in my opinion best encapsulated by the idiom "Putting Lipstick on a Pig"28).

Since "depression" is so subjective, it is even easier to game this research. As a result, when the "successful" studies of antidepressants are carefully examined, like many other pharmaceuticals (e.g., the COVID and HPV vaccines), the benefits are relatively inconsequential while the far greater risks are concealed with elaborate reclassifications.

Note: Antidepressants do work for a metabolic subset of patients (whose metabolic dysfunction can also be treated naturally). Unfortunately, physicians are never trained to screen for those patients, as that screening would eliminate the majority of potential SSRI customers.

Fortunately, there are a few metrics you cannot cover up. One of the most well-known ones is overall mortality (how many people in total on vs. off the drug died) since you can’t reclassify death. Another is how many patients voluntarily chose to stop taking a medication:

•A review of 29 published and 11 unpublished clinical trials containing 3,704 patients who received Paxil and 2,687 who received a placebo, found an equal proportion of patients in both groups left their study early (suggesting Paxil’s benefits did not outweigh its side effect), and that compared to placebo, 77% more stopped the drug because of side effects and 155% more stopped because they experienced suicidal tendencies.29

•A study of 7,525 patients, found that 56% of them chose to stop taking an SSRI within 4 months of being prescribed it.30

•An international survey of 3,516 people from 14 patient advocacy groups found that 44% had permanently stopped taking a psychiatric drug due to its side effects.31

•A survey of 500 patients found 81.5% were unsure if their antidepressants were necessary.32

Put differently, if most patients feel worse on a medication they are taking to "feel good" than they do without it, that means the trials proclaiming the medications made patients feel better were fraudulent.

In turn, thousands of remarkably similar stories can be found online.33 Patients experience a range of previously unimaginable side effects that shake the very foundation of their world, assume something must be wrong with them (hence going through a period of disbelief), find no support or understanding within the medical field — and then eventually realize they’d been trusting their doctors to have a certain amount of knowledge they don’t actually have.

"And you know, this is heartbreaking. I went through this, and I felt that the world had fallen out from underneath me. There wasn’t any medical safety net. So the sociological phenomenon exists, and has not yet filtered into medicine. Medicine has its own ways of gathering information, and in psychiatry, for some reason, they keep asking each other what the truth is instead of asking their patients. The patient voice is not very well recognized in psychiatry at all."34

Note: This SSRI experience mirrors many other pharmaceutical injuries (e.g., I’ve heard almost identical stories from countless individuals injured by the COVID-19 vaccines).

Most importantly, many patients report that their prescribers do not warn them about many of the SSRI side effects. In short, many people I know have not only needlessly been severely impacted by these drugs but also gaslighted35 by the doctors they sought care from.

Conclusion
Over the years, I have asked countless holistic doctors what they consider to be the five most dangerous, widely prescribed drugs in the marketplace, and without exception, SSRIs always make that list. In this article, I have attempted to illustrate some of the most frequent harms of these drugs, but sadly it only touches on the surface.

For example, because of how they are dosed, SSRIs are incredibly addictive, and once they’re partially decreased, a variety of severe symptoms can onset (e.g., dose changes commonly proceeds SSRI suicides and homicides,36 which is why you should never abruptly stop taking them).

Tragically, doctors are not trained to recognize these withdrawals (doctors typically instead interpret them as a pre-existing illness no longer being counteracted by the SSRI and continue to push the drugs), and very few know how to safely taper patients off SSRIs.

Fortunately, with the MAHA movement, this is beginning to change. For example, consider what RFK Jr. stated37 when he shared this article:

https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/public/2025/January/rfk-jr-ssri-post.jpg

As such, for the first time in my life, I am sincerely hopeful this nearly 40 year tragedy at last will end.38 As such, it is now imperative each of us do all we can to expose the Forgotten Sides of Medicine so we can create public pressure to end these pharmaceutical atrocities and bring back the incredible natural therapies that were removed from the market to protect these grotesque pharmaceutical monopolies.

Author's note: This is an abridged version of a longer article which discusses the above points in much more detail and discusses how to safely withdraw from SSRIs. That article and its additional references can be read here. Additionally, a companion article about the depression industry and effective natural therapies for depression can be read here.

A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD's exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD's work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack."

- Sources and References
1, 38 The Forgotten Side of Medicine, December 10, 2023
2 Amazon, Anatomy of an Epidemic
3, 8, 36 The Forgotten Side of Medicine, November 3, 2023
4 Phinance Technologies, Humanity Projects, March 2023
5 Rasmussen Reports, December 7, 2022
6 Psychiatry Res. 2014 Apr 30;216(1):67-73
7, 19, 33 The Forgotten Side of Medicine, November 26, 2023
9 Amazon, Medication Madness
10, 31 Med Care. 2000 Sep;38(9):926-36
11 Cochrane Review, Vienna, 2015
12 New York University Press, Let Them Eat Prozac, 2004 (Archived)
13 Neuropharmacology. 1978 Jun;17(6):383-9
14 BMJ. 2009 Aug 11:339:b2880
15 Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2009 Aug;205(3):349-68
16 Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial, 2015 (Archived)
17, 20 J Clin Psychiatry. 2001:62 Suppl 3:10-21
18 JClin Psychiatry, 2001:62 (Suppl 3) [Archived]
21 PLoS One. 2014 Mar 26;9(3):e92778
22 BMJ. 2009 Sep 23;339:b3569
23 N Engl J Med. 2006 Feb 9;354(6):579-87
24 Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2017 Jan 18;83(5):1126–1133
25 BMJ 2012;344:d8012
26, 27 FDA, February 13, 2018
28 Wikipedia, Lipstick on a pig
29 CMAJ. 2008 Jan 29;178(3):296-305
30 Eur Psychiatry. 2010 May;25(4):206-13
32 Psychol Med. 2005 Aug;35(8):1205-13
34 Mad in America, November 1, 2020
35 The Forgotten Side of Medicine, February 9, 2023
37 X, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, January 3, 2024

onawah

1st June 2025, 03:53

Antidepressant Use Associated with Higher Risk of Sudden Cardiac Death
Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
May 31, 2025
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2025/05/31/antidepressant-use-risk-of-sudden-cardiac-death.aspx?ui=8d3c7e22a03f5300d2e3338a0f080d2da3add85bca35e09236649153e4675f72&sd=20110604&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20250531&foDate=true&mid=DM1754271&rid=305413888

https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2025/May/PDF/antidepressant-use-risk-of-sudden-cardiac-death-pdf.pdf

uysZravC5vQ

"Story at-a-glance
Long-term antidepressant use significantly increases the risk of sudden cardiac death, with risk doubling after six or more years of use according to Danish research
Younger adults face an even higher risk, with those aged 30 to 39 showing five times greater likelihood of sudden cardiac death after six years on antidepressants
Antidepressants disrupt heart rhythm by affecting ion channels, triggering fatal irregular heartbeat
Research shows antidepressants only benefit about 15% of patients beyond placebo effect, primarily those with severe depression rather than general low mood
Effective alternatives for managing depression include exercise, sunlight exposure, gut health optimization and techniques for nervous system regulation

More people are taking antidepressants than ever before — often for years, sometimes for life. If you're one of them, you've likely been told they're safe, effective and essential for your mental health. But there's a growing body of evidence suggesting long-term use increases your risk of something far more dangerous than the symptoms you're trying to manage — sudden cardiac death.

Sudden cardiac death is a fast and fatal collapse that often happens with no warning signs. While it's more common in older adults, it's not limited to them. In younger adults, sudden cardiac death is usually tied to electrical malfunctions or a thickened heart muscle. In older adults, it's most often the result of narrowed arteries. Either way, the outcome is the same: a person collapses and dies within minutes, often with no time for intervention.

However, the risk profile is shifting, and some of that shift appears to be tied to medications millions rely on every day. If you're taking antidepressants, this information could save your life. Because once you understand the risks that come with long-term antidepressant use, you can start taking steps to protect your heart and improve your mental health at the same time.

dsxSKhOjTP4

Longer Antidepressant Use Sharply Increases Your Risk of Dying from a Heart Event
New research presented at the 2025 European Heart Rhythm Association annual meeting examined how antidepressant medications are linked to fatal heart events.1 For the study, researchers reviewed the death records of every adult aged 18 to 90 living in Denmark in 2010.

Out of 45,701 total deaths recorded, 6,002 were confirmed as sudden cardiac deaths. The researchers wanted to know: were people taking antidepressants more likely to die this way? The short answer is yes — and the longer they took the drugs, the higher their risk climbed.

•Researchers specifically looked at antidepressant exposure over time — People were considered "exposed" to antidepressants if they had filled at least two prescriptions within one year, at any point during the 12 years leading up to the study. That exposure was then divided into two categories: short-term (one to five years) and long-term (six or more years).

•Risk increased the longer people stayed on antidepressants — Compared to people who had never used these drugs, those on antidepressants for one to five years had a 56% higher risk of sudden cardiac death.

But the danger didn't plateau. It escalated. Individuals who had been on antidepressants for six or more years had more than double the risk of sudden cardiac death — specifically, a 2.2 times greater likelihood of dying suddenly from heart-related causes.

Younger Adults Face Even Steeper Risk Than Older Users
This wasn't just a problem for older adults. Among those aged 30 to 39, people who used antidepressants for one to five years were three times more likely to die from sudden cardiac death. If they had been using antidepressants for six or more years, their risk jumped to five times higher than unexposed peers. In people aged 50 to 59, the risk doubled after one to five years of use, and quadrupled after six or more years.

•Risk levels were lower but still elevated in people over 70 — In those aged 70 to 79, taking antidepressants for one to five years was associated with an 83% increase in sudden cardiac death risk. With six or more years of use, the risk rose to 2.2 times higher than in people not using antidepressants.

Interestingly, for the youngest group (18 to 29) and the oldest group (80 and up), the data didn't show a statistically significant increase, though the sample size may have been too small to detect it.

•The study showed a clear dose-response relationship with time — The longer you stay on antidepressants, the more likely you are to die suddenly from a heart-related cause. For instance, in people aged 40 to 49, those with six or more years of use had a 70% higher risk compared to those with one to five years. The pattern continued:

◦50 to 59 years old — 100% increased risk

◦60 to 69 years old — 40% higher risk

◦70 to 79 years old — 20% higher risk

•Biological and behavioral factors are driving this connection — Study co-author Dr. Jasmin Mujkanovic from Copenhagen University Hospital explained that there are multiple possible reasons for the higher risk. One factor is direct drug effects. Some antidepressants alter how electrical signals travel through your heart, which could trigger fatal rhythm disturbances.

Another possibility is that antidepressant use is a marker of more severe psychiatric illness, which itself is known to increase cardiovascular risks. Depression is also linked to delayed medical care, unhealthy behaviors and poor heart health.

•Heart rhythm disruption is a likely mechanism of action — Many antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), affect ion channels in the heart.

These ion channels control how electrical impulses flow, which tells your heart when to beat. When these signals are disturbed, your heart slips into an abnormal rhythm known as arrhythmia. Some arrhythmias lead to sudden death if not corrected within minutes.

Antidepressants Don't Work for Most People

Antidepressants are still handed out as a first-line treatment for everything from sadness to burnout, despite growing evidence that they rarely address the actual cause of these problems.

If you're someone who's been prescribed one, odds are you weren't diagnosed with a severe mental illness like schizophrenia or psychosis. Instead, you're likely dealing with grief, anxiety or general low mood — common human experiences that often signal deeper physical or emotional imbalances.

•Symptoms like sadness or anxiety are your body's way of signaling that something needs attention — Feeling emotionally low isn't always a disorder. It's often a sign your system is under stress. You could be low in important nutrients or getting too little sunlight or too much blue light.

You could also be disconnected from your purpose, your relationships or your body. In any of these cases, masking the symptoms with medication ignores the deeper message — and leaves the root problem untouched.

•Two-thirds of people taking antidepressants don't get any real benefit — Even though antidepressants are routinely offered as the go-to solution for depression, the success rate is low. About 66% of people prescribed these medications do not experience meaningful symptom relief.2 And for many, the side effects — like increased risk of Type 2 diabetes,3 dementia4 and even suicide — are worse than the symptoms they started with.

•A 2022 review showed antidepressants only work for a tiny group of people — Researchers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted the largest-ever review of antidepressant studies.5

They analyzed data from 232 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials submitted to the FDA between 1979 and 2016, including unpublished trials that drug companies never released. In total, the data covered 73,388 patients with diagnosed depression.

•Only 15% of patients benefited beyond the placebo effect — The analysis found that antidepressants outperformed placebo in just 15% of patients. That benefit was almost entirely limited to people with the most severe forms of depression. For everyone else, the improvement they felt was likely due to belief and expectation, not the drug itself.

How to Begin Tapering Off Antidepressants Safely
If you're on an antidepressant and you're ready to stop, don't do it alone. Your first step is to get your prescribing doctor on board. But if they're dismissive or untrained in tapering protocols, look for someone who takes a more biologically informed approach.

The American College for Advancement in Medicine (www.acam.org) has a referral list of physicians who combine conventional training with nutritional and metabolic insight. A holistic psychiatrist can guide you through the process and offer alternatives that support your brain, not just medicate it.

•Use trusted resources to educate yourself and plan a slow taper — You need a clear strategy. That's where books like "Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families" by Dr. Peter Breggin and "The Antidepressant Solution: A Step-by-Step Guide to Overcoming Antidepressant Withdrawal, Dependence, and Addiction" by Dr. Joseph Glenmullen come in.

These guides walk you through the process, explain what to expect and offer real-life strategies to manage symptoms. The goal is to support your nervous system during the transition so you don't rebound or crash. Once you've got the right support in place, taper gradually. Your doctor should know the safest dosing schedule based on your medication.

•Help loved ones build momentum when they can't do it alone — If you have a friend or family member struggling with depression, the best thing you can do is show up — literally. Invite them outside. Offer to cook. Take a walk together. Depression makes basic decisions feel overwhelming. But the presence of another person, especially someone gently nudging them toward light, movement and connection, is often enough to change the trajectory of their day.

•In a true crisis, act fast and get help immediately — If you're in a place where you're not just sad but desperate — or thinking about ending your life — this isn't the moment to map out a supplement plan or search for a new doctor. You need to get to safety first. Call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or head straight to your nearest emergency room. Stabilize now. The healing comes after.

Strategies for Depression That Actually Work
If you're on antidepressants now, you don't have to stay there forever. If you're looking for safe, effective ways to support your mental health, without adding to your heart risk, there are many science-backed strategies worth trying. These methods support your mood at the root level by stabilizing nervous system function, reducing inflammation, nourishing your brain and restoring biological balance. Here's how to take action:

1.Move your body in ways that support your brain:

•Exercise does more than burn calories; it builds mental resilience — Aerobic movement, even at moderate levels like walking, helps your brain produce calming neurotransmitters like GABA while also increasing dopamine, and norepinephrine, all of which are linked to improved mood and emotional stability.

•You don't need to go hard to see results — Research has shown that even gentle practices like yoga are effective. One study found that 90-minute yoga sessions three times a week cut major depression symptoms in half.6

2.Adjust your diet to reduce inflammation and stabilize mood:

•Inflammation makes everything worse, including your mental health — Begin by identifying and removing personal food triggers. If you're sensitive to gluten or lectins, removing them from your diet may make a significant difference. A whole food diet that limits linoleic acid (LA) in vegetable oils to 5 grams a day or less also supports your mitochondria for long-term energy and resilience.

•Refined sugar directly impacts your mood — In one study, men consuming over 67 grams of sugar per day were 23% more likely to develop anxiety or depression than those consuming under 40 grams.7 While natural fructose in whole fruit is not a problem, processed fructose, like high-fructose corn syrup, should be avoided.

Nutrients to prioritize:

•B vitamins, especially folate (B9) and B12, which play a direct role in brain chemistry.

•Magnesium, which has been found to improve symptoms in people with depression.8 I favor magnesium glycinate and magnesium malate, as they're well-absorbed and easy on the digestive system.

3.Get real sunlight, not just vitamin D pills:

•Low vitamin D levels are strongly tied to depression9 — Sensible sun exposure is your best source of vitamin D and also boosts melatonin production in your mitochondria and enhances circadian rhythms.

Be aware that if you've been eating vegetable oils, your skin is full of fragile fats that oxidize in the sun, raising your sunburn risk. So, it's best to avoid direct sunlight during peak hours (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) until you've cut back on LA for at least six months.

•Supplement only if needed — Use a vitamin D blood test to confirm your levels are in the optimal range of 60 to 80 ng/mL. If you can't get enough vitamin D from sun exposure alone, then consider a vitamin D3 supplement.

4.Use tools that regulate your nervous system without side effects:

•Light therapy has been shown to be more effective than Prozac in treating moderate to severe depression.10 Spending time in natural daylight is free and often more powerful than artificial lightboxes.

•Gut health is directly tied to mood. Optimizing your gut microbiome supports the production of calming brain chemicals like GABA. Simple dietary changes support gut health, including proper carbohydrate intake (250 grams daily), increasing fiber gradually if your gut is healthy and avoiding processed foods and vegetable oils.

•EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) is a practical self-help tool. It combines tapping on acupressure points with verbal affirmations and has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression symptoms. You can learn this at home without needing a specialist.

5.Clean up your environment and reset your nervous system:

•Minimize EMF exposure — Wireless devices like phones, tablets and Wi-Fi routers increase free radical production and neurotransmitter imbalances by overstimulating calcium channels in your brain. Simple fixes like turning off Wi-Fi at night, using airplane mode on your phone and keeping devices out of your bedroom go a long way.

•Improve sleep quality — Poor sleep raises cortisol and damages mental health. If you're struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep, use these 50 tips for a better night's rest.

•Train your mind with visualization and cognitive behavioral tools — Guided imagery and cognitive behavioral therapy have all shown benefits in shifting thought patterns that contribute to low mood.

•Don't ignore low cholesterol — Brain serotonin receptors are made of cholesterol. If your levels are too low, it could be impairing your ability to regulate mood and suppress aggression. Low cholesterol is linked to increased suicide risk for this reason.

These strategies are not add-ons — they're replacements. Every one of these tools moves your body toward better function and away from the kind of imbalance that puts stress on your heart and brain. If antidepressants have failed you, or you're ready to build a healthier life from the ground up, this is where you start.

FAQs About Antidepressants and Sudden Cardiac Death
Q: Does taking antidepressants really increase the risk of sudden cardiac death?

A: Yes. A large study presented at the 2025 European Heart Rhythm Association meeting found that long-term antidepressant use is strongly associated with a higher risk of sudden cardiac death. The risk increased by 56% for those who had taken antidepressants for one to five years, and more than doubled for those with six or more years of use. The longer the use, the greater the risk — especially in adults under 60.

Q: Who is most at risk for heart complications from antidepressants?

A: Adults between the ages of 30 and 59 face the greatest increase in risk. For example, people aged 30 to 39 who used antidepressants for six or more years had a fivefold increase in sudden cardiac death risk compared to those who never used them. While risk is elevated across most age groups, it's especially high in midlife.

Q: Do antidepressants actually work for depression?

A: In most cases, no. According to the largest-ever review of antidepressant clinical trials — covering 232 studies and over 73,000 patients — only 15% of users experienced a benefit beyond placebo. The drugs showed noticeable effects almost exclusively in people with the most severe depression. For the majority, the perceived improvement comes from the placebo effect, not the drug itself.

Q: How can I safely taper off antidepressants if I've been on them for a long time?

A: Start by working with a prescriber trained in tapering protocols, ideally a holistic or integrative practitioner. Lower your dose gradually to reduce withdrawal symptoms. Nutritional support, such as B vitamins and magnesium, helps stabilize your nervous system during this process.

Q: What are safer, natural alternatives for managing depression?

A: Effective strategies include daily movement, circadian rhythm alignment through morning sunlight, dietary changes to reduce inflammation and tools like light therapy, EFT (tapping) and guided visualization. Supporting gut health, reducing EMF exposure, improving sleep quality and checking for low cholesterol or nutrient deficiencies are also key steps in addressing depression without adding cardiovascular risk."

- Sources and References
1 European Society of Cardiology March 30, 2025
2 Translational Psychiatry June 3, 2022, Introduction
3 Diabetol Metab Syndr. 2023 Aug 31;15:179
4 BMC Medicine February 25, 2025
5 BMJ 2022; 378: e067606
6 Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine March 1, 2017; 23(3)
7 Scientific Reports July 27, 2017; 7, Article Number: 6287
8 Frontiers in Psychiatry December 21, 2023
9 Pharmacol Res. 2023 Jan:187:106605. doi: 10.1016/j.phrs.2022.106605. Epub 2022 Dec 9
10 JAMA Psychiatry November 18, 2015. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2015.2235