Psychotropic Drug Polypharmacy

A recently published study [“National trends in psychotropic medication polypharmacy in office-based psychiatry”, Mojtabai and Olfson, Archives of General Psychiatry 2010 Jan;67(1):26-36] investigated patterns and trends in what is known as psychotropic polypharmacy, meaning the prescribing of two or more psychiatric drugs to be taken at the same time.

The study concludes that, “There has been a recent significant increase in polypharmacy involving antidepressant and antipsychotic medications. While some of these combinations are supported by clinical trials, many are of unproven efficacy. These trends put patients at increased risk of drug-drug interactions with uncertain gains for quality of care and clinical outcomes.”

In other words, drugs are being given to patients in all sorts of combinations without sound science showing they even work well together, much less that these drug cocktails are safe to take. In fact, the researchers point out specific dangers of taking multiple psychiatric drugs.

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

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Eliminate Fraud and Abuse in the Mental Health Care Industry

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Why Cut the Department of Mental Health’s Budget?

The Insane Bloat of the Missouri Department of Mental Health Budget from 1971 to 2009 – now over $1.2 Billion

MO DMH Budgets


Vital Statistics – Order of Magnitude:

1. Every 12 seconds another child takes drugs for the first time. Every 20 seconds a child in the U.S. takes an antidepressant so dangerous that the FDA has issued its strongest “black box” warning, alerting the public that these drugs can cause suicidal thoughts and actions.

2. 20 million children worldwide take psychiatric drugs daily, 9 million of those in the U.S. These drugs potentially cause violent behavior, psychosis, hallucinations, strokes, heart attacks, obesity, life-threatening diabetes and even suicide.

3. Psychiatric drugs do not improve academic performance. The National Institutes of Health reports “there is little improvement in academic achievement or social skills” by children taking stimulant drugs.

4. 628,000 violent crimes occur every year in our schools.

5. $600 billion is generated by the legal and illegal drug trades.

6. 100,000 deaths occur in psychiatric facilities each year.

7. Over 100 million people worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs right now.

8. Psychiatric drugs can cause serious adverse reactions.

9. Every 75 seconds another citizen is incarcerated by psychiatry.

10. Every month psychiatric drugs kill an estimated 3,000 people worldwide.

11. Today, an estimated 70 percent of all psychiatric drugs are prescribed by general physicians.

12. Pharmaceutical companies have expanded their roster of psychiatric drugs from 44 in 1966 to 174 today.

13. The top five psychiatric drugs combined gross more money than the gross national product of each of over half the countries on Earth.

14. Altogether, the psychiatric industry rakes in a third of a trillion dollars a year.

15. Studies show that as many as 20 percent of psychiatrists have sex with patients. One of every 20 of their victims is a minor.

What will it truly take to halt psychiatric fraud and abuse?


[Opinion – Editorial]

* Giving more tax dollars to the Department of Mental Health merely perpetuates the cycle of state tax largesse. Curtailing and cutting the budget will force the Department of Mental Health to reduce their costs, thereby forcing useless and unnecessary state institutions either to improve their services or close shop.

* A budget cut will force the Department of Mental Health to re-evaluate all citizens held in state custody and thus force the Department to recommend release of those who are no longer deemed a threat to the body politic thus saving the state more money. It is an obvious fact that the more patients, residents and clients the Department must care for, the more tax money they can ask for.

* Those citizens who are no longer deemed a threat need to be unconditionally released. This will allow these citizens to return to their families and to make the readjustment back into a tax paying citizen.

* Increasing the Department of Mental Health’s budget covers expensive and debatable psychiatric drugs as necessary medical costs. Many international warnings have been issued on the harmful side effects of various psychiatric drugs, which include suicide, violence, addiction, liver damage, and heart attacks.

* The state is not primarily responsible for a person’s entire life, thus the Department of Mental Health is not responsible for a citizen’s entire life. Some citizens need to be cared for but the primary responsibility lies first with the individual, then his family, then his religious affiliation, then the state government and finally the federal government.

* The Department of Mental Health is also an easy place to cut spending in the long, difficult effort to save our health-care system, as the citizens of this state have long used the Department of Mental health as an emergency health care provider. The unprecedented use of Missouri’s Mental Health psychiatric facilities as emergency health care has hidden a long overlooked problem that the state’s poorer citizens are enduring.

* It may be time to consider the idea of folding the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services; to restructure the Department of Mental Health and allow the new system to provide emergency medical services to this state’s poorer citizens.

* The Department of Mental Health’s motto should be “We care for those who cannot care for themselves”; not “We want to care for all”.

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Psychiatry: An Industry of Death international touring exhibit

STATE-OF-THE-ART TOURING EXHIBIT OPENS TO EXPOSE PSYCHIATRY AS AN “INDUSTRY OF DEATH”

With mounting drug regulatory agency warnings, a new exhibit exposes thousands of child deaths from psychiatric drugs in the U.S.

1 February – 28 February 2010, Jamestown Mall, Florissant, MO

8-9 February 2010, Missouri State Capitol Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO

19-21 February 2010, St. Charles Convention Center (Working Women’s Survival Show), St. Charles, MO

WHO:  Join the psychiatric watchdog group Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis (CCHR) to open a chillingly informative exhibit, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.”  Free to the public, it warns about the more than 100,000 deaths in psychiatric institutions around the world each year and over 15,000 deaths of children taking psychiatric drugs in the United States.

WHAT: The 185-foot, state-of-the-art exhibit, which is being shown internationally in more than 30 countries, features 15 display panels that incorporate audio-visual presentations depicting human rights abuses by psychiatry and carries statements from health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities. It traces the origins of psychiatry, the role psychiatrists have played in the oppression of blacks and minorities, the roots of their eugenics programs and the pivotal part they played in the Holocaust. It also reveals how psychiatric drugs are behind the spate of school shooting sprees and how millions of federal dollars allocated to screen American schoolchildren for “mental disorders” could increase both child deaths and acts of school violence. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that psychiatric drugs prescribed to children could cause aggression, hostility, psychosis, mania, homicide, suicide and death.

WHEN & WHERE:

1 February – 28 February, Jamestown Mall, Florissant, MO (Mon-Sat: 10am-9pm; Sun: Noon-5pm)

8-9 February,  Missouri State Capitol Building Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO (7am-5:30pm)

19-21 February, St. Charles Convention Center – Working Women’s Survival Show (Friday 11am-8pm; Saturday 10am-8pm; Sunday 11am-5pm)

CONTACT: Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis, (314) 727-8307
CCHRSTL@CCHRSTL.ORG, www.CCHRSTL.org

ORGANIZATION: CCHR was founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, and has successfully achieved hundreds of legislative protections against psychiatric abuse.

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Actress Brittany Murphy

According to information leaked to the press, ten different drugs, including various psychiatric drugs, were found in pill bottles next to the bed of actress Brittany Murphy following her death.

• Topamax (anti-seizure)
• Methylprednisolone (anti-inflammatory)
• Fluoxetine (antidepressant, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor)
• Klonopin (anti-anxiety)
• Carbamazepine (bipolar drug)
• Ativan (anti-anxiety)
• Vicoprofen (pain reliever)
• Propranolol (hypertension drug)
• Biaxin (an antibiotic)
• Hydrocodone (pain medication)

According to the Drug Interaction Checker at

http://www.medscape.com/druginfo/druginterchecker

severe interactions (adverse side effects) may occur between Carbamazepine and Biaxin, and between Klonopin and Fluoxetine. Moderate interactions may occur between Vicoprofen and Propranolol; between Carbamazepine and Fluoxetine; and between Fluoxetine and Vicoprofen.

When multiple drugs are administered at the same time, the incidence of adverse drug interactions rises exponentially. Not only do individual psychiatric drugs have the potential for severe side effects such as suicide, but also these various drugs in combination escalate the potential for adverse drug interactions.

What can be done about this?

  • Coroners must test for the presence of psychiatric drugs.
  • State legislatures must establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.
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The Antidepressant Fraud

New research exposes the fraud: depression would be better treated with alternatives to antidepressant drugs, which do not help patients much more than an inactive placebo. [“Antidepressant Drug Effects and Depression Severity”, JAMA. 2010;303(1):47-53]

“They would have done just as well or just about as well with a placebo,” said Robert DeRubeis, one of the study authors and a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

The study’s conclusion states that, “The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo … may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.”

While the study suggests that antidepressants help the symptoms of major depression, one has to ask what that “help” entails. Antidepressant drugs are a chemical straight-jacket, temporarily interfering with normal body processes enough to give an impression of symptomatic relief. Like banging your thumb with a hammer to cure a headache, the pain in the head pales in comparison to the pain in the hand; for a short period, the headache is apparently gone.

Antidepressants can have a “damping down” effect. They suppress the physical feelings associated with “depression” but they are not alleviating the condition or targeting what is causing it. The drugs break into the routine rhythmic flows and activities of the nervous system. The human body, however, is unmatched in its ability to withstand and respond to such disruptions. The various systems fight back, trying to process the chemical, and work diligently to counterbalance its effect on the body. But the body can only take so much. Quickly or slowly, the systems break down. Tissue damage may occur. Nerves stop functioning normally. Organs and hormonal systems go awry. This can be temporary, but it can also be long lasting, even permanent. Like a car run on rocket fuel, you may be able to get it to run a thousand miles an hour, but the tires, the internal parts, were never meant for this. The machine flies apart.

Bizarre things happen: worsening depression, addiction, exhaustion, diminished sexual desire, trembling, nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety, panic, psychosis, heart attack, irritability, violence, aggression, suicide. Side effects are, in fact, the body’s natural response to having a chemical disrupt its normal functioning. Once the drug has worn off, the original problem remains. As a solution or cure to life’s problems, antidepressants do not work.

Why then use an antidepressant which has the potential for virulent side effects, when non-drug alternatives work just as well or better?

The only answer is drug company profits. More than 164 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in 2008, totaling nearly $10 billion in U.S. sales.

For more information, read the booklet “What is the Alternative to Psychiatric Drugs” available for download from www.CCHRSTL.org.

[see also http://video.foxnews.com/v/3961682/do-anti-depressants-really-work/?playlist_id=87249]

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Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

“New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.”
The New York Times, December 12, 2009
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Goals and Purposes of Citizens Commission on Human Rights

It never hurts to re-orient oneself with pro-survival goals and purposes. With so many demands on our personal and group resources (time, money, volunteerism, family, children, health care, political concerns, religious concerns, etc.) it may be helpful to show how CCHR aligns with some of these other demands.

CCHR – Investigating and Exposing Psychiatric Violations of Human Rights

For forty years, CCHR has worked to expose and eradicate psychiatric violations of human rights and restore human rights and dignity to mental health. CCHR’s work will only be complete when psychiatry’s fraudulent practices are eliminated and it is held accountable for its harmful treatments and human rights violations.

Psychiatry and Human Rights

“The very basis of human rights is freedom from false accusation and from brutality and punishment without offense.” – 
  L. Ron Hubbard

Through stigmatizing labels, unscientific diagnoses, easy seizure commitment laws and brutal, depersonalizing “treatments,” thousands around the world suffer under psychiatry’s coercive system every day. It is a system that exemplifies human rights abuse. Modern psychiatry still has no scientific veracity and knows and admits it, but keeps up the charade for the sake of profit.

The Situation

Every 75 seconds someone is involuntarily committed into a mental institution.

More than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions.

Psychiatrists continue to use electroshock and drugs to torture political dissidents, and to brainwash people into committing terrorist acts.

One hundred million people worldwide are on psychiatric drugs. Twenty million children worldwide (9 million in the U.S.) are on psychiatric drugs, which have been acknowledged by international drug regulatory agencies to cause suicide, hostility, violence, mania and drug dependence, strokes and sudden death. Psychiatric drugs or other psychiatric treatment may significantly interfere with an individual’s physical, emotional, educational, mental or spiritual development.

An estimated 70 percent of all psychiatric drugs are now prescribed by general physicians rather than by psychiatrists.

With over $80 billion a year in psychiatric drug money at stake, it is impossible to escape the saturation of psychiatric disease mongering in today’s society.

CCHR Goals and Purposes

  • Investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.
  • Clean up the field of mental health.
  • Demand medical doctors become competent.
  • Recognize psychiatry, psychiatrists, psychology and psychologists who engage in human rights abuses for what they are and abolish them.

Societal Solutions

With the knowledge of psychiatric fraud and abuse comes the responsibility to do something about it and the awareness and expectation of control necessary to accomplish this.

KNOWLEDGE – Having, knowing and applying a technology that works and being able to distinguish this from technologies that do not work (e.g. psychiatry, psychology, bleeding with leeches, restraints, etc.)

RESPONSIBILITY – There are a number of campaigns that align with and handle various societal situations, such as:

Cleaning up the field of mental health

A common sense guide to better living

Assisting and uniting individuals, educators, organizations and governmental bodies to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Helping restore purpose, truth and spiritual values to the lives of others

Making available educational materials so youth and adults can make informed decisions to be drug-free

Vanquishing illiteracy by providing effective education services, training and materials to educators, parents and students to enable individuals to learn how to learn and become self-motivated lifelong learners

The largest private drug rehabilitation organization on the planet, salvaging lives from the scourge of drugs

CONTROL – Organizations that provide field control and coordination among these various societal solutions.

What You Can Do

* Increase your knowledge about these problems and their solutions. Obtain and watch your own free copy of the CCHR documentary DVD Making A Killing–The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging. Show the DVD to family, friends and associates; get them to do the same. Attend and bring others to Briefings about CCHR and psychiatric fraud and abuse.

Inform yourself about CCHR and psychiatric fraud and abuse from these web sites:

* Take some amount of responsibility for contributing your time and money to one or more of the solutions. Donate to CCHR St. Louis. Volunteer for CCHR St. Louis.

* Report adverse drug reactions to the US Food and Drug Administration, encourage others to do so, and let us know when you do.

* Report psychiatric abuse, encourage others to do the same, and let us know when you do.

* Broadcast the CCHR Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights and let us know when you do.

* Bring people to visit CCHR traveling exhibits and volunteer to work at them in your local area.

* Contact your school, church, media, and local, state and federal authorities and representatives to express your opinion and suggest alternatives to fraudulent and abusive psychiatric treatment, and let us know when you do. Some suggestions are:

  • advocate patient rights
  • replace psychiatric institutions with actual mental health homes or asylums
  • establish a refund system for failed psychiatric treatments
  • conduct audits of psychiatric facilities
  • add more fraud investigation units
  • require scientific, physical evidence of claimed “mental disorders”
  • outlaw coercive psychiatric treatments
  • hold agencies accountable for psychiatric harm
  • remove government funding from unworkable psychiatric treatments

Conclusion

Let us know how CCHR goals and purposes align with your own.

Let us know what you think, let us know what you have done, let us know whom you have contacted and what they said, let us know how you would like to help.

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Support CCHR St. Louis this month when you Shop!

Register for a FREE iGive Account and shop online with iGive.com

Your Shopping can automatically donate to CCHR St. Louis – Click Here!

iGive.com

At over 750 brand name stores, a portion of each online purchase is donated to Citizens Commision on Human Rights of St. Louis (CCHR STL)!

You can also give your friends, family and associates a CCHR video documentary. Go here to preview the CCHR DVD’s.

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The Missouri Department of Mental Health Budget

The Insane Bloat of the Missouri Department of Mental Health Budget from 1971 to 2009 – now over $1.2 Billion

MO DMH Budgets


Reports show that:* 10% to 25% of mental health practitioners sexually abuse patients.

* Psychiatry has the worst fraud track record of all medical disciplines.

* The largest health care fraud suit in history [$375 million] involved the smallest sector of healthcare–psychiatry.

* An estimated $20-$40 billion is defrauded in the mental health industry in any
given year.


Recommendations

1.   Establish or increase the number of psychiatric fraud investigation units to recover funds that are embezzled in the mental health system.

2.   Clinical and financial audits of all government-run and private psychiatric facilities that receive government subsidies or insurance payments should be done to ensure accountability; statistics on admissions, treatment and deaths, without breaching patient confidentiality, should be compiled for review.

3.   A list of convicted psychiatrists and mental health workers, especially those convicted and/or disciplined for fraud and sexual abuse should be kept on state, national and international law enforcement and police agencies databases, to prevent criminally convicted and/or deregistered mental health practitioners from gaining employment elsewhere in the mental health field.

4.   No convicted mental health practitioner should be employed by government agencies, especially in correctional/prison facilities or schools.

5.   The DSM and/or lCD (mental disorders section) should be removed from use in all government agencies, departments and other bodies including criminal, educational and justice systems.

6.   Establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.

7.   None of the 374 mental disorders in the DSM/ICD should be eligible for insurance coverage because they have no scientific, physical validation. Governmental, criminal, educational and judicial agencies should not
rely on the DSM or lCD (mental disorders section).

8.   Provide funding and insurance coverage only for proven, workable treatments that verifiably and dramatically improve or cure mental health problems.


We think it is time to call psychiatry and psychology for what they are — failed pseudo sciences with no basis in fact, pseudo sciences that harm their recipients and line the pocketbooks of their practitioners.

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