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Jim Marrs, Investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author

Today, the biggest problem we have and one of the things that shocks so many Americans is the rise of teen suicides and  the rise of school shootings. Yet all we hear from the corporate mass  media on the shootings is “Well, we need to take the guns away.”

Let me tell you something: I went to school in Texas. We took guns to school. Nobody shot anybody. So what’s changed? Drugs. Kids on psychiatric drugs.

To read the rest of this blog article, click here.

We thought you might like to know about this. You might like to write your US Senators to encourage more of this kind of legislation. Go to http://thomas.loc.gov to find out more information about bills in Congress.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2009 the US Senate approved an amendment (SA 1475 page:S7416) proposed by Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) to the 2010 defense authorization bill (S. 1390) that would order an independent study by the National Institute of Mental Health on the potential relationship between suicide or suicide attempts and the use of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and other behavior-modifying prescription drugs.

The text of this amendment follows:

SEC. 724. PRESCRIPTION OF ANTIDEPRESSANTS FOR TROOPS SERVING IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN.

(a) Report.–

(1) IN GENERAL.–Not later than June 30, 2010, and annually thereafter until June 30, 2015, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to Congress a report on the prescription of antidepressants and drugs to treat anxiety for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(2) CONTENT.–The report required under paragraph (1) shall include–

(A) the numbers and percentages of troops that have served or are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 1, 2005, who have been prescribed antidepressants or drugs to treat anxiety, including psychotropic drugs such as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs); and

(B) the policies and patient management practices of the Department of Defense with respect to the prescription of such drugs.

(b) National Institute of Mental Health Study.–

(1) STUDY.–The National Institute of Mental Health shall conduct a study on the potential relationship between the increased number of suicides and attempted suicides by members of the Armed Forces and the increased number of antidepressants, drugs to treat anxiety, other psychotropics, and other behavior modifying prescription medications being prescribed, including any combination or interactions of such prescriptions. The Department of Defense shall immediately make available to the National Institute of Mental Health all data necessary to complete the study.

(2) REPORT ON FINDINGS.–Not later than two years after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to Congress a report on the findings of the study conducted pursuant to paragraph (1).

Once-missing Virginia Tech mental health records regarding a student who killed 32 people and himself in a campus rampage were released Wednesday, 8/19/2009.

Read the full news article here.

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Seung Hui Cho was reported to have been prescribed “depression” drugs.

During a 1991 Food and Drug Administration hearing, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a psychiatric watchdog group, was first to raise awareness about the serious risk of suicide and violent behavior linked to antidepressants.

CCHR says that mental health professionals today are continuing to protect their multi-billion dollar drug industry at the expense of victims of violence and their families. While unconscionable, it is predictable, as the same scenario unfolded following the Columbine school shooting, netting the mental health industry untold millions of dollars in government funding and more “rights” to scrutinize schoolchildren—all aimed at preventing another Columbine, all of which have failed.

CCHR says that mental health “experts” have used the Virginia Tech tragedy to push for mandatory mental health screening, psychiatric drug treatment and tougher commitment laws in a frightening Brave New World agenda which, if accepted, will only make matters worse and lead to further senseless massacres.

The idea that psychiatrists can predict or prevent a school shooting by screening students or treating them is a lie, CCHR says. There is no scientific means by which to predict violent behavior and the psychiatric community acknowledges that there is an 84% chance of incorrectly diagnosing a student as suicidal. The idea that the “risk” of school violence can be minimized by drugging individuals, against their will, while committed to an institution, is also false. The truth is that neither the absence of such drugs, nor the failure to take them, is the problem.

CCHR’s policy statement in response to these moves for mandated screening and treatment, warns:

Psychotropic Drugs and Violence

+       Of the 1.5 million children and adolescents in the U.S. currently taking antidepressants, 4% could potentially become manic and violent—potentially 60,000 potential time bombs driven to senseless acts of violence. Mandatory toxicology tests for psychotropic drug intake are needed in all cases of violent crime and suicide. Congressional Hearings are needed into the link between psychiatric drugs and school violence.

+       Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, author of Prozac Backlash, says antidepressants could explain the rash of school shootings and mass-suicides over the last decade. Those taking antidepressants, he said, could “become very distraught….They feel like jumping out of their skin. The irritability and impulsivity can make people suicidal or homicidal.”

+       In September 2006, Dr. David Healy, director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, and colleagues published the findings of their study of the antidepressant, Paxil, in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine stating: “We’ve got good evidence that the drugs can make people violent and you’d have to reason from that that there may be more episodes of violence.”

+       In August 2006, The Archives of General Psychiatry published a study by Mark Olfson, MD, MPH stating that in children and adolescents, “the risk of suicide attempts was nearly two times higher after antidepressant drug treatment compared with no antidepressant drug treatment.” In 2005, Norwegian researchers found that Paxil was seven times more likely to induce suicide in people taking it than those taking placebo.

Screening/Predicting Violent Behavior

It is not possible for psychiatrists to determine with any accuracy violent or criminal behavior and they should not be given any increased powers to vent their lack of science.

+       Terrence Campbell writing in the Michigan Bar Journal, said, “The accuracy with which clinical judgment predicts future events is often little better than random chance” and the rate of “errors in predicting dangerousness” average “about 85%.”

+       The Supreme Court rendered the opinion that “the professional literature uniformly establishes that such predictions [of criminal behavior] are fundamentally of very low reliability…psychiatric testimony on the issue of future criminal behavior only distorts the fact-finding process.”

+       Legal experts say that involuntary commitment is especially problematic when based on a prediction that an individual may become violent or the potential for deterioration in the individual’s mental status without treatment because such assessment is rooted only in speculation.

The Case Against Enforced “Treatment”

+       Self-determined decisions about one’s treatment is an interest long protected by the common law and encompassed within the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Violation of this fails to recognize that forcing treatment counters any potential therapeutic benefits and can cause substantial injury to the individual.

+       On June 30, 2006, the Alaska Supreme Court recognized that psychiatric drugs should not be easily forced on someone, stating: “Psychotropic drugs ‘affect the mind, behavior, intellectual functions, perception, moods, and emotion’ and are known to cause a number of potentially devastating side effects….” Further, “Given the nature and potentially devastating impact of psychotropic medications…we now similarly hold that the right to refuse to take psychotropic drugs is fundamental.”

Click here to download and read CCHR’s publication, Psychiatric Drugs And Anger Management Curricula—A Perspective on School Violence.

by Shane Ellison
Award-winning scientist, Masters degree in organic chemistry
Previously worked for Array BioPharma and Eli Lilly

“I love Big Pharma. After getting a masters degree in drug design, I was fortunate enough to work within their stinky labs and learn the inner workings of corporate drug making (and dealing). My most important lesson: Not all drugs are bad. Some are really bad. Take the so-called antidepressant Prozac as an example.”

To read the rest of this blog article, click here

[http://www.cchrint.org/2009/08/12/the-prozac-calamity/].

All neuropsychiatric theory and practice and the entire modus operandi of dispensing psychiatric drugs to both children and adults rests on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, otherwise known as the DSM.

CCHR’s Making A Killing documentary exposes the DSM as a grab bag of so-called mental disorders, which are literally voted into existence so that criminal psychiatrists may enjoy “multiple billing options” with health insurance companies.

The DSM also comes in handy when psychiatric drug manufacturers find it convenient to market new drug lines. While it is one thing to hear of such matters from CCHR, it is quite another to hear it from abusive psychiatrists themselves. That is the subject of the new video presentation Where the Truth Lies. If someone has only five or six minutes to absorb the whole story, this is the video to watch. Go to http://www.cchr.org/#/videos/where-the-truth-lies to find out exactly where the truth lies.

Decrypted FDA reports reveal 4,260 suicides, 2,452 additional deaths, 195 homicides from 2004-2006 alone

Los Angeles, CA — For the first time the side effects of psychiatric drugs that have been reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by doctors, pharmacists, other health care providers and consumers have been decrypted from the FDA’s MedWatch reporting system and been made available to the public in an easy to search psychiatric drug side effects database and search engine (http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/). The database is provided as a free public service by the mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR).

The report totals reveal that between 2004-2008 the FDA’s MedWatch system received pregnancy-related psychiatric drug adverse reaction reports which included 2,442 babies born with heart disease, 3,372 other birth defects, as well as 1,072 miscarriages, abortions and other deaths.

The database also reveals that, between 2004-2008 there were reports submitted to MedWatch including 4,895 suicides, 3,908 cases of aggression, 309 homicides and 6,945 cases of diabetes from people taking psychiatric drugs. These numbers reflect only a small percentage of the actual side effects occurring in the consumer market, as the FDA has admitted that only 1-10% of side effects are ever reported to the FDA.

The database is searchable by individual reports (for the 2004-2006 period), type of drug, age of patient, the side effect reported (suicide, homicide, heart attack, stroke, mania, etc.), and whether the drug in question carries a black box warning (the agency’s strongest warning–short of banning a drug).

It is searchable by drug name and age group and includes who reported the psychiatric drug reaction (doctor, pharmacist, consumer, etc.). It also includes the top 20 reported adverse reactions to all psychiatric drugs to the FDA and combined summaries of all psychiatric drug reactions for the years 2004-2006 and 2004-2008.

Since the reform of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) in 2007, ads for psychiatric and other drugs must include statements encouraging consumers to report adverse drug reactions to the FDA’s MedWatch system–Adverse Events Reporting System (AERS). However, consumers or doctors attempting to access the AERS online were confounded by a system so complex that it was impossible to use. Although the FDA should have made the information collected readily accessible, it failed in that duty to the public. It took a computer programmer over 1,000 hours to decipher four years’ worth of data to make this information available.

The programmer identified the main psychiatric drugs in the AERS, wading through quarterly reports of seven different reporting systems, including the drug name, demographics, adverse reactions, patient outcomes, reporting source, therapy start and end dates and the indication (diagnosis). The result: A database and search engine that unravels the 94,000 pages of codified psychiatric drug adverse reactions reported each year from 2004-2006 and 2004-2008 to the FDA’s MedWatch system.

Reporting of adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs by doctors, pharmacists, other health care providers and consumers once those drugs are out in the consumer market, is fundamental to drug safety monitoring. Yet these reports have been frequently ignored or dismissed as “anecdotal” by the FDA even when serious side effects number in the thousands. The FDA approves the majority of psychiatric drugs only after Phase 2 (short term) clinical trials. However, once the drugs are out in the consumer market, the FDA is supposed to require longer clinical trials, or post-marketing studies of the drugs, however this rarely happens. Subsequently, dangerous and deadly drugs have been left without black box warnings, or on the market for far too long. The best “signal” event for the FDA to direct its resources in identifying or pulling dangerous drugs is what is happening out in the real world, with consumers and patients, not in a controlled short term clinical trial, funded by the pharmaceutical companies seeking approval for their drugs to go to market.

For years the information contained in the FDA’s MedWatch reporting system has been inaccessible and therefore virtually useless for consumers and doctors. CCHR’s stance has always been that consumers have the right to this information for then — and only then — can consumers have full “informed consent” regarding the risks of psychiatric drugs, and so it has provided this database as a free public service.

The psychiatric drug search engine features a promotional video as well as an instructional video for users on CCHR’s newly launched website so they can get the information from the database they are looking for in the shortest amount of time.

About The Citizens Commission on Human Rights:

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a mental health watchdog co-founded in 1969 by Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus Thomas Szasz and the Church of Scientology. It is a non-profit, non political, non-religious organization that has been responsible for more than 100 reforms that help protect patients rights against abuses in the field of mental health. For more information about CCHR go to http://www.cchrint.org.