Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

The February 27, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried an article called “Why psychiatry needs therapy,” by Edward Shorter, professor of history at the University of Toronto. Dr. Shorter is a social historian of medicine, specializing in the history of psychiatry.

Shorter says, “Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.”

Making fun of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, is a pastime we understand, and Shorter makes short work of the DSM, calling it horse-trading in symptoms, “defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses.”

Although, to be sure, the DSM is no laughing matter, as it aims to eventually diagnose everyone with some form of mental illness for which harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs can be prescribed.

Here are some actual diagnoses of “mental disorders” in the DSM-IV (DSM fourth edition):

Click here to watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft1RDGVq2LA

Mood disorders such as depression have been a known adverse side effect of drug use since at least the 1950’s.

A drug-induced mood disorder is the onset of symptoms of mental distress while a person is taking or withdrawing from these drugs.

Despite the plethora of reported cases, there are few controlled studies of this phenomenon. Many different drugs have been implicated in the onset of drug-induced mental symptoms. Many different hypotheses have been put forward regarding the etiology of these reactions, but since the actual action of many of these drugs is unknown, these are mostly just guesses.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) even has multiple categories for this “mental illness,” for example:

291.8 Alcohol-Induced Mood Disorder
292.84 Substance-Induced Mood Disorder, and so on.

The many possible symptoms of mental stress caused by drug use or withdrawal make it easy to receive an unfounded or fraudulent diagnosis; i.e. a diagnosis of some psychiatric disorder rather than an adverse drug reaction. Naturally, diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder is treated with a psychiatric drug, adding to the drug-induced stress.

Common symptoms arising from the adverse effects of drugs include depression, fatigue, insomnia or other sleep problems, irritability, gastro-intestinal problems, mania, inattention, lack of motor control, suicidal thoughts, hallucinations. Elderly patients may be more likely to take drugs and therefore may have a greater exposure to the risks of adverse drug reactions.

How can one tell if mental symptoms are drug-related? Quick resolution of symptoms after stopping the drug is a good clue, although one must also watch for withdrawal effects. No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent non-psychiatric medical doctor. In any case, a thorough, searching medical examination by a non-psychiatric medical doctor is encouraged to find and treat any real medical conditions that are contributing to the problems.

For more information about the side effects of common psychiatric drugs, go to http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

Pregnant women who use antidepressants have an overall 68% increased risk of miscarriage compared with those who do not take them.

Dr. Anick Bérard, a professor at the University of Montreal, and her team conducted a study that was published May 31 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, saying that antidepressants, particularly paroxetine and venlafaxine, were associated with increased risk of miscarriage, and a combination of different antidepressants doubled the risk of miscarriage.

Up to 3.7% of pregnant women receive antidepressants during the first trimester. Antidepressants have also been associated with birth defects.

The generic paroxetine is an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) found in various brands such as Aropax, Deroxat, Paroxat, Paxil, Pexeva, Seropram, and Seroxat.

The generic venlafaxine is an SNRI (Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitor) found in various brands such as Dobupal, Efectin, Effexor, and Pristiq.

These drugs also carry an increased risk of suicide. Warnings against using these drugs during pregnancy have been periodically issued since at least 2005.

Psychiatric drug use during pregnancy has another potential consequence: antidepressants may have a deleterious effect on a developing baby’s brain. In one study, children exposed to antidepressants in the womb are more likely to appear sad or withdrawn at age 3 than those whose moms did not take these drugs. [“Prenatal Effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants …”; Oberlander, Papsdorf, Brain, Misri, Ross, and Grunau; Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 2010;164(5):444-451]

Click here for more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs.

The true resolution of many mental difficulties begins, not with a checklist of symptoms, but with ensuring that a competent, non-psychiatric physician completes a thorough physical examination.

Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases.” 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.

Read the rest of this article here.

Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

A comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States.

Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, has a new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which looks at the history of mental illness in America, with disturbing results.

Why has the number of adults and children disabled by mental illness skyrocketed over the past fifty years? There are now more than four million people in the United States who receive a government disability check because of a “mental illness,” and the number continues to soar.

Every day, 850 adults and 250 children with symptoms of mental distress are added to the government disability rolls. What is going on? Are they really being helped by psychiatric drugs, or are these drugs really a colossal hoax?

Check it out!

Watch this new two-minute CCHR video —

How GlaxoSmithKline had to pay out over 1.1 Billion Dollars in litigation over the antidepressant Paxil (so far…)

Featuring attorney Karen Barth Menzies, who has been at the forefront
of the SSRI antidepressant litigation for more than a decade against
defendants such as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Pfizer and Eli Lilly, in cases
involving antidepressant–induced suicide, withdrawal and birth defects.

Click here to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpex0n0DXuc

Attorney Karen Barth Menzies

Medication Madness
The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Murder
by Peter Breggin, M.D.
St. Martin’s Press 2008

Watch a 10-minute video interview of Dr. Breggin discussing his book here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ8zBCSAxZE

The program “Your Turn with Kathy Fountain” aired on Tampa FOX 13 TV on Friday, December 26, 2008.

Medicalization is the process by which non–medical problems, such as normal life events, become defined and treated as medical problems, usually as illnesses or disorders.

For some time there has been growing concern that the medicalization of behavior is a principal driver of increased health care costs in the mental health care industry. The medicalization of unhappiness, for example, is a driver for the prescription of harmful antidepressant drugs.

Peter Conrad, a sociologist at Brandeis University, and his team have published a recent paper in which they estimate the costs of medicalization [“Estimating the costs of medicalization” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 70, Issue 12, June 2010, Pages 1943-1947].

The paper estimates direct costs associated with twelve medicalized conditions (including ADHD, sadness, anxiety and behavioral disorders) in the U.S. at approximately $77 billion in 2005, which was 3.9% of the total domestic expenditures on health care. This amounts to about $256 per person for the current U.S. population of roughly 300 million.

Conrad is quoted as saying, “We spend more on these medicalized conditions than on cancer, heart disease, or public health.” [Science Daily]

Certainly one of the primary culprits of mental health medicalization is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which is currently being revised to include even more medicalized behavioral disorders, for which more harmful drugs can be prescribed.

In a research paper recently published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the authors pose the possibility that ADHD is linked to pesticide poisoning [“Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides,” Bouchard, Bellinger, Wright, and Weisskopf, Pediatrics, 2010 May 17].

Organophosphates were originally developed for chemical warfare, and they are known to be toxic to the nervous system. There are about 40 such pesticides registered with the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S.

Exposure to organophosphate pesticides has been associated with adverse effects on neurodevelopment, such as behavioral problems and lowered cognitive functions. In this study, children with higher urinary levels of metabolites of these toxins were twice as likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD than children with undetectable levels of exposure to these toxins.

In other words, there is reason to suspect that organophosphate pesticide exposure, at the low levels common among U.S. children, may contribute to the prevalence of symptoms that psychiatrists like to label as ADHD.

While no causal link is established, the findings warrant caution and further research. A major source of exposure is thought to be pesticide traces on fruits and vegetables, which should therefore be washed well before use.

Click here for more information about psychiatry fraudulently labeling  children with ADHD.