Citizens Commission on Human Rights St. Louis

THE STAMP: Psychiatric Disorders Fuel $80 Billion Drug
Industry

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October 29, 2009 — First-time, second-generation antipsychotic use in children and adolescents is associated with rapid and significant weight gain as well as varied adverse metabolic changes, new research shows. “These medications are not benign and can have side effects that can have potential long-term complications that are associated with endocrine and cardiovascular illness,” said principal investigator Christoph U. Correll, MD.[http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/711526]

November 13, 2009 — More research appears to confirm recent results of a large, prospective cohort study that the use of atypical antipsychotics (AAPs) increases the risk of significant weight gain and varied metabolic changes in children and adolescents with mental illness and behavioral disturbances. According to Dr. Panagiotopoulos, a growing body of evidence in adults demonstrating that AAPs cause significant weight gain, hyperlipidemia, and insulin resistance has raised concerns among the medical community in general, and the psychiatric community in particular, about whether these drugs may increase the risk of premature cardiovascular disease in children and adolescents. [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/712079]

February 24, 2010 — A significant proportion of children younger than 18 years in at least 1 state Medicaid population received a second-generation antipsychotic for conditions that have no published evidence supporting their use. “Clearly, behavioural problems, including oppositional and conduct disorders and hyperkinetic-hyperactivity symptoms, were frequently seen among the children treated with second-generation antipsychotics,” the investigators write. [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/717544]

October 27, 2010 — GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to pay an eye-popping $750 million and will plead guilty to a criminal charge to settle a U.S. government investigation of manufacturing deficiencies at a former plant in Puerto Rico. The investigation largely concerned the manufacture of defective pills including the Paxil antidepressant at Glaxo’s plant in Cidra, Puerto Rico, between 2001 and 2005. U.S. authorities found that some tablets could split apart or had inappropriate amounts of active ingredient, posing safety risks.  [http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/10/27/gsk-to-pay-750m-to-settle-charges-over-adulterated-drugs/?blog_id=14&post_id=35066]

October 28, 2010 — Anna Nicole Smith’s psychiatrist was convicted of conspiring to fake names on prescriptions. Psychiatrist Dr. Khristine Eroshevich was convicted of conspiring with Howard K. Stern to fraudulently prescribe Vicodin. [http://www.sacbee.com/2010/10/28/3140863/jury-acquits-smiths-doctor-in.html]

Forest Labs Settles Some Psych Drug Suicide Suits

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article on Saturday and Sunday, October 30 and 31, 2010, describing fallout from Forest Pharmaceuticals’ guilty plea to illegally marketing antidepressants to children.

“A month after its Earth City [St. Louis, Missouri] subsidiary pleaded guilty of illegally marketing antidepressants to children and adolescents, Forest Laboratories is now settling a string of wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits from the parents of children who took the drugs Celexa and Lexapro.”

“Fifty-four lawsuits, mostly involving suicides and attempted suicides by teenagers in various parts of the country, accuse the New York-based pharmaceutical company of concealing a negative pediatric study on Celexa, duping physicians about the drug’s clinical trials, and targeting children in aggressive promotions of Celexa and a sister drug, Lexapro.”

“In vivid detail, the complaints allege that children under the influence of Celexa and Lexapro committed acts of suicide and violence.”

Read the full article here http://www.stltoday.com/business/article_c569f2c4-58a7-5432-a939-ff22e90583e5.html and thank the author, Jim Doyle, for his reporting.

CCHR has known and publicized for years that psychiatric drugs can provoke violence and suicide, among many other disastrous side effects. The real problem, however, is that psychiatrists, and now non-psychiatric doctors, are fraudulently diagnosing life’s problems as an “illness,” stigmatizing unwanted behavior or study problems as “disease,” and prescribing harmful and addictive psychoactive drugs as so-called “treatment.”

Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax — unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.

Click here for more information about the harmful effects of Celexa and Lexapro.

Click here for more information about psychiatric fraud.

Click here for more information about the alternatives to psychiatric drugging.

A psychiatrist in Israel was recently arrested for alleged fraud when it was discovered that he fraudulently diagnosed dozens of students with mental illness so that they could receive a stipend from the National Insurance Institute. [http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/psychiatrist-suspected-of-handing-out-fraudulent-diagnoses-to-haredis-1.319781]

Pfizer decided not to proceed with a clinical trial of its antipsychotic drug Geodon for children. The FDA had warned Pfizer that there was widespread overdosing of patients due to inadequate monitoring by Pfizer. Last September, Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal charges for improper marketing of drugs including Geodon. [http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/company-news-story.aspx?storyid=201006231755dowjonesdjonline000603]

Officials in Georgia recently committed to spend millions of dollars to help mentally ill and developmentally disabled people move out of state mental hospitals and receive services in the community. Georgia pays an average of $174,000 per year to house a person in a state-run hospital, compared with $47,000 for in-home services. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had previously exposed that dozens of patients in Georgia’s psychiatric hospitals had died from abuse. [http://www.ajc.com/news/state-justice-department-reach-685948.html]

There are workable alternatives to psychiatry’s mind-, brain- and body-damaging treatments. With psychiatry now calling for mandatory mental illness screening for adults and children everywhere, we urge all who have an interest in preserving the mental health, the physical health and the freedom of their families, communities and nations, to find out for themselves. Something must be done to establish real help for those who need it.

Click here to download and read the full CCHR report Community Ruin — Psychiatry’s Coercive ’Care’ — Report and recommendations on the failure of community mental health and other coercive psychiatric programs.

St. Louis psychiatrist Howard Goldstein pleaded guilty Tuesday, October 12, 2010 and admitted to lying to an FBI agent about making false Medicare billings.

He would spend five minutes or less with a patient, for example, and then bill Medicaid for 20 minutes. Goldstein now must repay $830,329 in fraudulent billings, and his former employers SSM St. Charles Clinic Medical Group and SSM Healthcare owe another $865,812 to reimburse the government for Goldstein’s false charges.

Read the entire article here.

A significant portion of health care appropriations and insurance reimbursements has been lost due to financial fraud within the mental health industry, an international problem estimated to cost more than a hundred billion dollars every year; up to $40 billion of this is due to fraudulent practices in the mental health industry in the U.S. No wonder health insurance costs are increasing.

We think Goldstein should have his medical license revoked; express your own opinion to the Missouri State Board of Registration for the Healing Arts (healingarts@pr.mo.gov) and the Missouri Attorney General (attorney.general@ago.mo.gov).

For more information about psychiatric fraud, click here to download the free CCHR booklet, “Massive Fraud – Psychiatry’s Corrupt Industry – Report and recommendations on the criminal mental health monopoly.“

A federal judge gave final approval October 1, 2010 to an agreement worked out between the State of Illinois and a coalition of legal services organizations, for individuals with mental illnesses to move out of Illinois’ outmoded, segregated nursing home system and receive the services they need in the community.

Approximately 4,300 persons with mental illnesses will be given the choice to move out of large nursing homes known as “Institutions for Mental Diseases” (IMDs) and into community-based settings with the support they need to be successful.

Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, one of five legal organizations representing the plaintiffs, said, “There simply is no rational, medical reason for forcing persons with mental illnesses to receive the treatment they need in a large, institutional setting living with hundreds of other people with mental illnesses. We do not require such living arrangements for other diseases – it is indefensible for those with mental illness.”

The Illinois Governor’s Nursing Home Safety Task Force, after examining the state’s troubled and scandalized nursing home system, recently concluded that “(t)here is … remarkable consensus that many people currently admitted to nursing homes with serious mental illness would be better cared for in specially designed and monitored community residential settings.”

An individualized plan for each person will be developed. One can only hope that these plans will not rely on harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs or other abusive psychiatric treatments.

For more information on the alternatives to abusive psychiatric treatments and harmful psychiatric drugs, download the CCHR report, “What is the Alternative to Psychotropic Drugs” from http://cchrstl.org/alternatives.shtml.

Midazolam

“Midazolam injection is used before medical procedures and surgery to cause drowsiness, relieve anxiety, and prevent any memory of the event. It is also sometimes given as part of the anesthesia during surgery to produce a loss of consciousness. Midazolam injection is also used to cause a state of decreased consciousness in seriously ill people in intensive care units (ICU) who are breathing with the help of a machine. Midazolam injection is in a class of medications called benzodiazepines.”

“If you receive midazolam injection in the ICU over a long period of time, your body may become dependent on it. Your doctor will probably decrease your dose gradually to prevent withdrawal symptoms such as seizures, uncontrollable shaking of a part of the body, hallucinations (seeing things or hearing voices that do not exist), stomach and muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, sweating, fast heartbeat, difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, and depression.”

[Quotes are from MedlinePlus, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a609014.html]

Midazolam (brand name Versed^®) also comes as a syrup to take by mouth when it is prescribed for children before medical procedures, or before anesthesia for surgery or dental surgery, in order to cause drowsiness, relieve anxiety, and prevent any memory of the event. It can also be given to prevent seizures, or for chemical restraint (such as for an agitated psychiatric patient,) and may be administered through the nose with an atomizer to an already unconscious person (such as someone having a seizure.) It may also be given by emergency medical personnel outside of a hospital setting.

In one study, the researchers found that “No patient on the low-dose midazolam infusion in our protocol was able to recall any time during paralysis, a testament to the amnestic qualities of this drug.”

More information about the side effects of this drug, and benzodiazepines in general, can be found in the CCHR booklet, “The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs,” which can be downloaded free from http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

What You Should Take Away From This Information

Children and adults can be given this drug with or without permission, in or out of a hospital, by psychiatrists or non-psychiatric doctors or emergency medical personnel. One of the primary reasons for using this drug is to prevent any memory of the event, which has also led to its abuse as a date-rape drug. Psychiatric drugs are not just for psychiatric patients anymore.

While psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness” and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases” for which they can prescribe harmful and addictive drugs, some of these drugs are now also in standard medical use for non-psychiatric conditions, producing the same horrific side effects, and no one is the wiser. Except you. Let others know. Get the Facts. Fight Back.

Psych Meds in Jails

“A ground-breaking, year-long investigation by Youth Today has uncovered ample evidence that many youths incarcerated in American juvenile facilities are getting potent anti-psychotic drugs intended for bipolar or schizophrenic patients, even when they have not been diagnosed with either disorder.”

“Ken Kramer, a researcher with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida, obtained detailed annual Medicaid expenditures for the five most prescribed atypicals in 30 states. In 2003, Medicaid spending on the atypicals for adolescents in those states was about $238.7 million. Kramer found that by 2007 – the year Abilify became the first to gain approval for adolescent use – spending had more than doubled to $562.4 million.”

“It is clear that in at least some states, atypical anti-psychotics have become a major part of the medical protocol in juvenile facilities, and prescriptions for the drugs are tied to a wide range of diagnosed conditions.”

Read the full article by John Kelly here:
http://youthtoday.org/view_article.cfm?article_id=4344

For more information download this booklet from www.cchrstl.org: Child Drugging — Psychiatry Destroying Lives — Report and recommendations on fraudulent psychiatric diagnosis and the enforced drugging of youth.