Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

“It is quite ironic that Prozac, which is 94 percent fluoride and given to hyperactive children, requires a prescription from a licensed physician while the same substance can be placed in our drinking water by dealers who have no medical training, no license to dispense medications, and no idea to whom they are administering this corrosive, toxic, and impairing substance.” – The Rise of the Fourth Reich, by Jim Marrs (HarperCollins, 2008, p. 193) [Editorial Comment: this book is highly recommended]

Mothers Act Fuels Multibillion Dollar Industry
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
by Evelyn Pringle

Motherhood has fallen prey to the psycho-pharmaceutical complex. If new legislation known as the Mother’s Act becomes law [H.R.20], the drugging of infants through pregnant and nursing mothers will no doubt increase.

Congress has rightfully refused to pass this bill for eight years. The official title is currently the “Melanie Blocker Stokes Mom’s Opportunity to Access Health, Education, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression Act of 2009.”

The legislation was introduced in the House during the 110th Congress on January 4, 2007, by Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush and later reintroduced into both bodies of the new Congress in January 2009, after the bill died in the Senate last year.

Democratic Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey, home to a large number of drug companies, and Richard Durbin (D-IL) are the main sponsors of the bill in the Senate.

In a March 30, 2009 speech on the House floor, Congressman Rush identified the target of this piece of legislation when he claimed that, “60 to 80 percent of new mothers experience symptoms of postpartum depression while the more serious condition, postpartum psychosis, affects up to 20 percent of women who have recently given birth.”

After the House voted to pass the legislation on that day, the Congressman stated: “H. R. 20 will finally put significant money and attention into research, screening, treatment and education for mothers suffering from this disease.”

However, he only mentions screening and treatment for postpartum depression. The true goal of the promoters of this Act is to transform women of child bearing age into life-long consumers of psychiatric treatment by screening women for a whole list of “mood” and “anxiety” disorders and not simply postpartum depression.

Enough cannot be said about the ability of anyone with a white coat and a medical title to convince vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers that the thoughts and feelings they experience on any given day might be abnormal.

The constant watching and barrage of questions such as are you depressed, are you anxious, are you moody, are you fearful of motherhood, are you sleeping well, are there changes in your eating habits, will predictably have the net effect of convincing many women that normal thoughts and emotions are a sign of mental disorders.

In the March 13, 2008 NewsWithViews article, “Branding Pregnancy as a Mental Illness,” Byron Richards writes:

“The Mothers Act has the net affect of reclassifying the natural process of pregnancy and birth as a mental disorder that requires the use of unproven and extremely dangerous psychotropic medications (which can also easily harm the child). The bill was obviously written by the Big Pharma lobby and its passage into law would be considered laughable except that it is actually happening.”

While mania, psychosis, agitation, hostility, anxiety, confusion, depression and suicidality are often cited as “symptoms” of mental illness, many of the same exact “symptoms” are listed as side effects on the warning labels for antidepressants, antipsychotics and anticonvulsants.

All of these drugs are now being prescribed to treat the “mood” and “anxiety” disorders that women will be screened for if the Act becomes law. In the case of pregnant women, no psychiatric drug has been FDA approved as safe for use.

The newly recruited customers will be stigmatized for life with labels of the most serious forms of mental illness simply because they are unlucky enough to become pregnant in the United States, where serious disorders lead to major profits from the prescribing of multiple classes of psychotropic drugs.

On September 1, 2008, Medical News Today ran a headline for a study that stated: “Americans Show Little Tolerance For Mental Illness Despite Growing Belief In Genetic Cause.” The study by University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Jason Schnittker showed that while more Americans believe that mental illness has genetic causes, the country is no more tolerant of the mentally ill than it was 10 years ago.

The study explored tolerance in terms of: unwillingness to live next door to a mentally ill person, having a group home for the mentally ill in the neighborhood, spending an evening socializing with a mentally ill person, working closely with such a person on the job, making friends with someone with a mental illness or having a mentally ill person marry into the family.

Multi-billion dollar industry

In an article for AlterNet on June 18, 2008, Dr Bruce Levine, author of the book, “Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic,” explains how the psycho-pharmaceutical cartel works. “Mental health treatment in the United States is now a multibillion-dollar industry,” he reports, “and all the rules of industrial complexes apply.”

“Not only does Big Pharma have influential psychiatrists… in their pocket, virtually every mental health institution from which doctors, the press, and the general public receive their mental health information is financially interconnected with Big Pharma.”

“The American Psychiatric Association, psychiatry’s professional organization, is hugely dependent on drug company grants, and this is also true for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other so-called consumer organizations.”

“Harvard and other prestigious university psychiatry departments take millions of dollars from drug companies, and the National Institute of Mental Health funds researchers who are financially connected with drug companies.”

More Democrats than Republicans are supporting the Mother’s Act. The increased campaign funding to Democrats may well explain this turn of events. For the last eight election cycles the pharmaceutical industry has contributed far more to Republicans than Democrats. In the 2006 cycle the percentage was 28% to Democrats and 70% to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks political funding.

But the Democrats were close to matching the Republicans for the 2008 cycle with $5,099,942 to Democrats compared to $5,680,871 to Republicans, which is probably why the Democrats would allow such an obvious drug marketing scheme to be implemented.

“The Mothers Act, while appearing like an Act of benevolence, is a dangerous and unnecessary measure that will result in the further over-prescription of drugs that are already grotesquely over-prescribed,” says Kate Gillespie, one of the lead attorneys handling SSRI birth defect lawsuits and Paxil suicide cases at the Los Angeles based Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman law firm.

“The Act is a slippery slope,” she warns, “toward the forced drugging of women of childbearing years with drugs of questionable efficacy and serious safety issues effecting mothers and their innocent children – drugs that can cause horrific side effects, including, suicidal behavior, violence and devastating birth defects.”

“Of course, mothers who truly cannot cope should be helped,” Ms Gillespie says, “but do we really need legislation requiring mothers to be screened and drugged?”

“Take out politics and Big Pharma and the push for this legislation just doesn’t make sense,” she states.

“For politicians, a much safer issue than pushing drugs for pregnant mothers is promoting the expansion of medical treatment for postpartum depression,” according to Dr Levine.

He says the Mother’s Act “omits relevant truths” about Melanie Blocker-Stokes, the woman the bill is named after, and the following information about her suicide should be made known:

“Blocker-Stokes… did in fact receive extensive psychiatric treatment. She was hospitalized three times in seven weeks, given four combinations of anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety, and antidepressant medications, and underwent electroconvulsive therapy (electroshock). But despite her psychiatric treatment — or because of it — Melanie Blocker-Stokes jumped to her death from the twelfth floor of a Chicago hotel.”

“There is no evidence that antidepressant use by depressed mothers lowers their likelihood of suicide,” Dr Levine says, “and there is a great deal of evidence that antidepressant use can make some people manic, agitated, and violent.”

Money-making promoters behind the Act

Katherine Stone runs an internet website called “Postpartum Progress” and posts a daily blog. She also serves on the board of Postpartum Support International as the public relations outreach chairwoman. Her Bio says she “is a nationally-recognized, award-winning advocate for women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.”

“In 2001,” Katherine reports on her website, that “she suffered postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder after the birth of her first child. The feeling of isolation and shame she suffered inspired her to create Postpartum Progress, which has become the most widely-read blog in the United States on postpartum depression, postpartum OCD, antepartum depression, postpartum PTSD and postpartum psychosis.”

On another page titled, “The Art of Psychiatric Medication,” Katherine tells women to hang in there if a medication does not work because for her diagnosis of OCD, she states:

“I’ve taken many medications, including Effexor, Celexa, Seroquel, Risperdal, Wellbutrin, Luvox, Cymbalta, etc. Throughout all of them, I was on the road to recovery. Some just worked better than others at treating my symptoms.”

She ends the commentary by telling women: “You will find the right medication for you, and you will get better.”

The prescribing of seven drugs, including two antipsychotics and five antidepressants, to treat OCD is a typical example of the profit-driven drugging that women snagged by the Mother’s Act will face, but it’s a far cry from the description Katherine wrote about regarding the comparatively minor treatment she received, when she stated in the June 7, 2004 issue of Newsweek, “in my case, that meant taking an antidepressant and going for weekly therapy sessions.”

Aside from all the serious health risks now known to be associated with these drugs, most women could not afford the 7-drug “cure” that Katherine ingested. According to DrugStore.com in December 2008, from first to last, at a middle dose for a 30-day supply, the drugs would cost: Effexor $197.86, Celexa $279.92, Seroquel $388.38, Risperdal $652.07, Wellbutrin XI $202.08, Luvox CR $135.99, and Cymbalta $366.62. The cost of “etc” is impossible to calculate without knowing how many more drugs she took.

In a March 11, 2009 Postpartum Progress blog, Katherine plugs herself for speaking jobs, along with a study that concluded “the Internet is a viable and feasible tool to screen for PPD.”

“I’ll be adding this study to the speech I give on how women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders use the Internet,” she reports, and then adds:

“If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, let me know!”

On March 10, 2009, Katherine’s headline read: “It’s Petition Signing Time! Get Out Your Virtual Pen & Support Women with PPD”, and reported “that Susan Stone over at Perinatal Pro is alerting everyone to the new petition created by the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance to support the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act. She states that last year’s petition generated more than 24,000 signatures. The petition has been reintroduced this year to try and get this legislation passed once again.”

The blog carried a live link to a page where “you can scroll down, enter your zip code and generate letters of support in a matter of seconds for the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act that will be sent to your local Congresspeople and Senators.”

Katherine further told readers: “I know you’re thinking ‘but I already did that last year.’ Well that was then and this is now. Do it again.”

The 2007 Annual Report for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance shows this Big Pharma front group received between $150,000 and $499,000 from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Wyeth. Abbott Labs, Cyberonics, Eli Lilly, Forest Labs, GlaxoSmithKline, Organon, and Otsuka American Pharmaceuticals each gave between $10,000 and $149,999.

The 2006 Annual Report shows that AstraZeneca gave the group more than $500,000. Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Wyeth gave between $150,000 and $499,000, and Forest Labs, Glaxo, Janssen, Pfizer, and Shire Pharmaceuticals each gave between $10,000 and $149,000. The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance in Baltimore also received $5,000 from Eli Lilly in the first quarter of 2008, according to Lilly’s grant report.

In the section of the 2007 Annual report “at a Glance: How We Met Our Mission,” among the things accomplished by the group, it states:

“Promoted Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research & Care Act at invitation of Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.)

“Promoted MOTHER’s Act at invitation of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)”

After writing letters to Congress through the link established by the industry funded Alliance, those visiting Postpartum Progress will hopefully click on the link to Amazon and buy the book “Perinatal and Postpartum Mood Disorders: Perspectives and Treatment Guide for the Health Care Practitioner” by none other than the Perinatal Pro “expert,” Susan (Dowd) Stone, and Alexis Menkin, at a special price of $43.20, for a savings of $10.80.

Katherine also provides a link to the PerinatalPro website, where women can find treatment for all the “mood” and “anxiety” disorders diagnosed with internet screenings at “Blue Skye Consulting,” where Susan is listed as the Managing Director and Owner.

She also served as president of Postpartum Support International from 2006 – 2008, as vice-president and Conference Chair in 2005 – 2006, and will chair the group’s President’s Advisory Council through 2010. This group brags of being the leading proponent of the Mother’s Act. On March 2, 2009, Susan’s PerinatalPro Blog announced: “The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act moves forward!” and stated:

“Thank you to Congressman Bobby L. Rush, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez and Senator Richard Durbin for your unceasing efforts on behalf of America’s mothers!”

She should have thanked these members of Congress for boosting her career status and yearly income from her treatment center, speaking fees and book sales.

On PerinatalPro, Susan posts a running list of supporters for the Mother’s Act. On March 27, 2009, the list included many drug company funded groups. For instance, the American Psychiatric Association is listed as a supporter. In 2006, the pharmaceutical industry provided close to 30% of the Association’s $62.5 million in financing, according to the July 12, 2008 New York Times.

In the first quarter of 2007, Eli Lilly gave the Association grants worth more than $412,000, according to Lilly’s grant report. The group also received $623,190 from Lilly in the first quarter of 2008.

In her PerinatalPro blogs, Susan has nothing but praise for Katherine’s website and directs visitors back to Postpartum Progress with a live link. On March 16, 2009, Katherine posted a “Quick Survey on Postpartum Anxiety,” and wrote:

“The fabulous Karen Kleiman has asked me to ask you to participate in a short, five-question online survey on anxiety. She says ANYONE can answer it, regardless of the age of their baby(s) and regardless of diagnosis or lack thereof. ANY mother should answer the questions. It’s super quick — I know because I took it myself.”

Kleiman must be fabulous because she has three books for sale on Postpartum Progress with links to purchase them on Amazon. In fact, there are a total of fourteen books for sale on Katherine’s site from which she most likely gets a kick-back with every sale.

Kleiman’s survey is an excellent example of the methods used to con women into suspecting they are mentally ill via the “expert” blogs. The preface states: “The questions on this survey can be answered by a new mother of an infant or an empty-nester with good recall of the early days with her baby. Please answer as honestly as you can.”

The question, capital letters and all, reads: “When you were carrying your baby down a flight of stairs, did you EVER, at ANY time, have ANY thought, image or concern that you could accidentally drop your baby?” The survey further tells women:

If you answered YES to the first question, please describe the type of worry you had: Scary thoughts about dropping the baby, Scary images about dropping the baby, Both thoughts and images, Other.

How much distress did this cause you? A Great deal of distress, Some distress but I quickly got over it, Some distress that seemed to linger, Not much stress

Did this thought or image occur once or did it recur? Only once, It recurred frequently, It recurred persistently, It occurred off and on, Did you ever tell anyone about the fear of dropping the baby? (Please describe why you chose to tell someone or why you chose not to)

As a mother with good recall, the “honest” answer is yes, with two babies born 4 years apart, every single night as I stumbled out of bed half asleep for a nightly feeding, my normal fear instinct kicked in and warned me to be careful not to trip and fall down the stairs or drop the baby.

Women who take the survey are told nothing about what the results mean; but clearly the seed is planted that something is wrong if you “EVER, at ANY time, have ANY thought, image or concern that you could accidentally drop your baby”.

Katherine’s website also provides links to the “Top Women’s PPMD Treatment Programs & Specialists.” The first link on the list takes women to the “Emory Women’s Mental Health Program” that primarily focuses on “the evaluation and treatment of emotional disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period,” according to Emory University’s website. Lilly’s 2008 first quarter grant report shows Emory’s Department of Psychiatry received $25,000.

The “experts” at Emory include some top pharmaceutical industry shills. For example, a link to “Articles” brings up roughly 90 studies and papers that include the co-author Dr Charles Nemeroff. Nemeroff is on an ever-growing list of academic researchers in the field of psychiatry under investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee for not disclosing millions of dollars of income from the makers of psychotropic drugs.

Emory’s investigation found he was paid more than $960,000 by Paxil maker, GlaxoSmithKline, from 2000 through 2006, but listed less than $35,000 on his Emory disclosure forms. All totaled, Nemeroff had earnings of $2.8 million from speaking and consulting arrangements with drug companies between 2000 and 2007, but only disclosed a fraction of that amount, according to the Senate Finance Committee reports.

On July 23, 2008, Medscape Psychiatry & Mental Health posted an article by Nemeroff titled: “Weighing Risk and Benefit for Treatment of Depression in Pregnancy and Post Partum”. On March 17, 2009, the Medscape website stated: “This article is temporarily unavailable.”

Maybe that’s because the “top expert,” Dr Nemeroff, recently stepped down as chairman of Emory’s psychiatry department.

*************
epringle05@yahoo.com

(Article sponsored by the Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman law firm www.baumhedlundlaw.com)

(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Scoop Independent News and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America)

——————————————————————————–

What you can do

Please FAX the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee to express your opposition to H.R. 20. Go to http://uniteforlife.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/stop-the-mothers-act-action-day-all-over-earth-day-for-healthy-births-day/

March 31, 2009

Anchorage: Today, responding to the State of Alaska’s admission in PsychRights v. Alaska that it was incapable of protecting the children and youth in its care from improper and harmful psychiatric drugging, the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights®) told the court it must step in.

PsychRights v. Alaska was filed last Fall to halt the State of Alaska’s practice of administering and paying for psychiatric drugs being given children and youth without safeguards being in place to make sure proper decision making occurs. In trying to get PsychRights v. Alaska “thrown out of court” the State admitted it was incapable of protecting the children and youth in its care as follows:

A reading of the Complaint makes obvious that the true subject of plaintiff’s grievances is not the Department, but prescribers of psychotropic pharmaceuticals, the pharmaceutical companies which produce and market them, and the overall culture of pediatric psychiatry. The implication that the Department possesses meaningful authority and control over these matters-or is in any realistic position to administer the relief requested even if the court were to order it-is a fiction.

“The point is the State has the responsibility to properly care for the children and youth in its care regardless of the ‘culture of pediatric psychiatry,'” according to Mr. Gottstein. Today’s court filing tells the court, “It is shameful the State is abdicating its responsibility when it should be working to correct the problem.”

In the absence of the State being willing to address the problem without court intervention, the lawsuit seeks to solve it by obtaining a court order prohibiting the psychiatric drugging of children and youth by the State unless and until

(i)     evidence-based psychosocial interventions have been exhausted,

(ii)    rationally anticipated benefits of psychotropic drug treatment outweigh the risks,

(iii)  the person or entity authorizing administration of the drug(s) is fully informed of the risks and potential benefits, and

(iv)   close monitoring of, and appropriate means of responding to, treatment emergent effects are in place.

Practically every day brings revelations that pediatric psychopharmacology is the result of illegal drug company actions to improperly influence psychiatrists to prescribe extremely harmful drugs to children and youth, in spite of there being no real evidence of their efficacy. “Rather than meeting its mandate to properly care for and protect these children and youth from harm, the actions of the State are reprehensible,” Mr. Gottstein declared, adding “The State is also trying to hide its complicity by stopping the discovery process.”

The defendants in the lawsuit are the State of Alaska, its Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS), and responsible officials, Sarah Palin, Governor, William Hogan, Commissioner of DHSS, Tammy Sandoval, Director of the Office of Children’s Services (OCS), Steve McComb, Director of the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), Melissa Stone, Director of the Division of Behavioral Health (DBH), Ron Adler, CEO of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute (API), and William Streur, Deputy Commissioner and Director of Medicaid. All of the substantive filings in the lawsuit are available on the Internet at http://psychrights.org/States/Alaska/PsychRightsvAlaska.htm.

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is a public interest law firm devoted to the defense of people facing the horrors of unwarranted forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock. PsychRights is further dedicated to exposing the truth about psychiatric interventions and the courts being misled into ordering people subjected to these brain and body damaging drugs against their will. Extensive information about these dangers, and about the tragic damage caused by electroshock, is available on the PsychRights web site: http://psychrights.org/.

#  #  #

James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq.
President/CEO
Law Project for Psychiatric Rights
406 G Street, Suite 206
Anchorage, Alaska 99501 USA
Phone: (907) 274-7686)  Fax: (907) 274-9493
jim.gottstein@psychrights.org
http://psychrights.org/ 

Legislation requires doctors to get state permission before prescribing psychiatric drugs for kids on Medicaid

April 1, 2009
By EMILY RAMSHAW
The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – The number of poor Texas children on powerful psychiatric drugs could drop dramatically under a bill lawmakers are considering to halt unwarranted prescriptions.

Rep. Sylvester Turner’s bill would prohibit doctors from prescribing anti-psychotic drugs to children younger than 11 who are covered by Medicaid unless they get special permission from the state. …

According to state data, roughly 13 percent of the 2.1 million children on Medicaid received a psychotropic drug in fiscal 2007. Nearly 190,000 of those kids were younger than 11. …

Last year, Florida health officials began requiring state approval for Medicaid recipients younger than 6. Since then, the number of antipsychotic prescriptions written for preschoolers in the state dropped by nearly 75 percent, and 200 doctors stopped prescribing to them all together.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-psychdrugs_01tex.ART0.State.Edition2.4ac00bc.html

and write a Letter to the Editor at

letterstoeditor@dallasnews.com

Rolling Stone

SPECIAL REPORT

Marketing a Phony “Miracle” Drug

By Ben Wallace-Wells

Jan 28, 2009

Zyprexa was created to treat schizophrenia, but it wound up being used on depressed moms and misbehaving kids. How one of the nation’s biggest pharmaceutical companies turned a flawed, dangerous pill into a multi-billion-dollar bonanza — and who paid the price.

In June 1992, not long after the place closed down, a Harvard-trained psychologist named Sergio Pirrotta walked out of Danvers State Hospital for the last time. The psychiatric facility, at this late date, was a baggy old thing, rectangled into a field just north of Boston; whole wings were barely occupied, and vandals had already begun to rip out the mantelpieces and furniture. The hospital had been slowly, incrementally shutting down for a decade, and the patients that remained were the hardest cases, mostly schizophrenics and those with disorders too dense and weird to classify. But now, as Pirrotta took a walk around the campus, even those patients were gone: released into the larger world to fend for themselves or bused to hospitals where the staffs had little psychiatric training.

Pirrotta had come to Danvers in the mid-1970s to rehabilitate children whom the courts had declared insane. Back then the place was overpopulated, the halls packed with madmen who would wander around smoking cigarettes, leering and lunging at the kids. In those days, the drugs used to treat mental illness were crude and ugly things. Thorazine was the best, and it made you into a ghouled and lifeless ogre — your face seized up involuntarily, you kept shuffling around, you were an emotional drone. But gradually the medications got a little bit better, the pharmacology more precise. First there was haloperidol, similar to Thorazine but with less-vivid side effects. Then clozapine, which had at first seemed a wonder drug, before it turned out to trigger a potentially fatal immune deficiency in two cases out of a hundred.

The patients at Danvers, their symptoms softened by the new medications, began to venture forth, almost miraculously, into the world beyond the hospital. Pirrotta took a group that included schizophrenics to a children’s camp in New Hampshire, off-season, where they spent a week cleaning and grooming the grounds. “For most of them, it was the first time they’d been out of an institution in their adult lives,” he recalls. But the state’s budget crunchers had wanted to close places like Danvers for years — pills, after all, were far cheaper than hospitals — and the new drugs made the move clinically defensible. To the staff at Danvers, it seemed as if the state had abandoned its responsibilities to the mentally ill. “It felt like we’d been sold a bill of goods,” Pirrotta says. “It felt like a betrayal.”By 1992, when Danvers closed, something even more vivid and hopeful was looming: A whole new class of drugs, called atypical antipsychotics, were being tested in clinical trials. The atypicals held the promise of a more perfect tranquilizer, one that would calm the storms of schizophrenia while eliminating the side effects that made the older drugs so despised. Psychiatrists reserved their greatest excitement for a molecule being developed by Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical company based in Indianapolis. The new chemical mirrored the powers of clozapine but without its fatal flaw. It was called olanzapine, and the scientists working on it believed it might be the One.Dr. William Wirshing, a UCLA psychiatrist who had a grant from Lilly to conduct clinical trials on olanzapine, was one of those enthused by the early results. He believed the hype was warranted, and Lilly was flying him around the country to brief other psychiatrists on his work and to seed excitement for the coming medication. Then one morning in 1995, as Wirshing was driving to LAX to catch a pre-dawn flight, a story came on the radio about olanzapine. Wirshing listened in astonishment as a top Lilly executive announced the company’s plans for the new drug, which it was preparing to market under the name Zyprexa.

“He says it’s got the potential to be a billion-dollar-a-year drug,” Wirshing recalls. “I almost pulled off the road and crashed into the side rail.” At the time, the entire market for atypical antipsychotics was only $170 million. “How the hell do you make $1 billion?” Wirshing thought. “I mean, who are we gonna give it to? It’s not like we’re making any more schizophrenic brains.”

There is a well-known feature of medical science called the placebo effect, which suggests that, in a clinical trial, patients who are told they are being medicated but are in fact given only a sugar pill will see their symptoms improve, merely out of the misplaced conviction that they are being healed. During the late 1990s, and then with increasing speed during the current decade, Wirshing and other psychiatrists watched as the market for atypical antipsychotics swelled well beyond its marked territory, far exceeding the country’s supply of schizophrenic brains — past $2 billion a year, $5 billion, $10 billion, all the way to $16 billion. What had begun as niche drugs are now the third-largest class of medication in the world, their sales greater than those of the antidepressants. The mechanisms used to leverage this growth were in some ways the most modern and perfect the pharmaceutical industry had developed, but they were also, according to state and federal prosecutors, illegal. Lilly has already agreed to pay $2.6 billion to settle charges that it built the market for Zyprexa first by concealing its side effects, and then by marketing it “off-label,” for diseases for which it had not been approved.

“It was a very clever sort of con,” says Dr. Peter Tyrer, a leading psychiatric researcher at Imperial College in London who wrote in the latest issue of the respected medical journal The Lancet about a new study that debunks the effectiveness of the atypicals. “Almost the whole scientific community was conned into thinking — as a consequence of good marketing — that this was a different and better set of drugs. The evidence, as it’s all added up, has shown this to be untrue.”

Eli Lilly insists that it has not marketed Zyprexa off-label and that it has accurately represented the drug’s side effects. But some medical researchers who have studied the atypical antipsychotics say that, in the final tally, the drugs, which have already been linked to some deaths, may eventually be responsible for tens of thousands of cases of diabetes and other potentially fatal diseases. And despite their early promise for treating schizophrenia, the drugs have not even performed any better than the crude and imprecise earlier medications that preceded them. “We have been paying $16 billion a year instead of $2 billion a year for drugs that seem to be no better and might be worse,” says Douglas Leslie, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina who contributed to an extensive federal study of the drugs. The story of how Zyprexa and other atypicals became a multibillion-dollar market suggests that the medical community — doctors, researchers, the institutions that back them — may be themselves prone to a placebo effect: the willed conviction that a new drug, presented as a breakthrough, must in fact be one, that a product sold as healing must in fact do good.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/25569107/bitter_pill

There have been over 20 pieces of federal pro-mental health legislation already introduced in 2009, with eight of them on mental health screening alone. These screening bills involve pregnant women and new mothers, children 0 to 5 years old and veterans of the military. And if that is not frightening enough, despite the complete lack of scientific evidence to substantiate any of the screening questionnaires used, completing them could result in a further 15 to 30 million Americans being prescribed dangerous psychiatric drugs.

We have an opportunity right now to warn policy makers about the economic and human risk that funding mental health screening brings. We need to educate these policy makers through a strong public awareness campaign—producing a new website specifically on screening with all the facts, and by doing one-on-one visits with them at the federal level during the next few weeks.

Dr. Jeffrey Schaler, Professor of Psychology and lecturer at American University, stated, “The New Freedom Commission Initiative on Mental Health likely poses one of the greatest threats to freedom in our contemporary society, such that we haven’t seen in 60 years. When the government gets involved in screening people for ‘mental illness,’ we run the risk of depriving any numbers of people of freedom.”

Your donation can and does make a real difference. Please watch this video and then Donate today.

Please make a donation today as a commitment against mental health screening—a clear and present danger to human rights, the Constitution and people’s freedoms.

Psychiatry Pushes Hallucinogenic Drugs for Profit
by Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
January 27, 2009
http://www.naturalnews.com/z025433.html

New research published in the journal Pediatrics reveals that the ADHD drugs prescribed to millions of children are causing them to experience frightening hallucinations. Children on these drugs hallucinated that snakes and bugs were crawling all over them, says Reuters, and some kids taking the drugs experience other bizarre psychotic side effects such as thinking they ran into a wall and falling to the ground even when no wall was present.

ADHD drugs, of course, are powerful psychotropic mind-altering chemicals that are often molecularly identical to street drugs. The industry of psychiatry is virtually owned by Big Pharma, which hopes to drug every child, teenager and adult with at least one mind-altering medication.

The drugs reviewed in this study include: Ritalin and Focalin XR (Novartis), Adderall XR and Daytrana patch (Shire), Concerta (Johnson & Johnson), Strattera (Eli Lilly), Metadate CD (Celltech Pharmaceuticals) and Provigil (Cephalon).

Researchers noticed that only children taking these drugs suffered from hallucinations. Those taking placebo had no hallucinations, and the children who stopped taking ADHD drugs saw their hallucinations cease.

Reuters reports that “…FDA researchers urged doctors to discuss the potential side effects with parents and children to help ease their anxiety if such symptoms should occur.” So instead of getting their kids off these drugs, the FDA thinks parents and kids just need to “talk about the hallucinations” to ease their anxiety.

And if that’s not enough, I suppose, there are anti-anxiety drugs they can both take in order to avoid getting too uptight about the fact that their children are on hallucinogenic drugs.

Stop the insanity!
I’m just going to come right out and say the obvious: These children are tripping out on hallucinogenic, mind-altering street drugs. This isn’t “treatment” for some genuine health problem; it’s a legalized mass-drugging campaign that’s permanently harming the brains of children while earning sick profits for Big Pharma.

The psychiatric pill pushers have managed to turn a generation of children into druggies who are now demonstrating the same symptoms as a street junkie burnout. And rather than trying to get kids OFF these drugs, the FDA, Big Pharma and modern psychiatrists are doing everything in their power to put MORE kids on these dangerous, hallucinogenic drugs!

That this continues in America today is outrageous. In a nation that spends billions of dollars on the so-called “War on Drugs” — see the Drug War Clock at http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm — to ignore the mass drugging of its own children with hallucinogenic street drugs re-labeled as “medication” is unconscionable.

If there’s really a War on Drugs, why doesn’t that war target the biggest drug pushers of all? Big Pharma has put more kids on drugs than any street corner crack dealer could ever hope to achieve. In fact, the entire industry of psychiatric medicine is little more than a legalized drug-dealing network that hides behind the jargon of “medicine” and “therapy.”

Mind-numbed parents lead to drugged children
It’s not just the industry that’s to blame on all this, either: Parents who allow their children to be drugged with these hallucinogenic ADHD drugs are just as much a part of the problem. In the same households where parents are adamantly restricting their child’s use of pot or alcohol, they will literally feed that same kid dose after dose of hallucinogenic street drugs on the advice of a psychiatric medicine quack who’s on the take from Big Pharma.

What are they thinking? Say no to drugs, but say yes to hallucinogenic psychotropic drugs if a corrupt psychiatrist tells you your kid needs them?

Somehow, when speed is labeled under Big Pharma’s brand names, it eludes all rational thinking by parents, doctors, pharmacists and drug war zealots. It is one of the largest sectors of the hallucinogenic drug trade in America, and yet it goes completely unnoticed by virtually everyone.

My latest hip-hop song takes a shot at mind-altering medications with some disturbing, uncensored lyrics. Listen to “SSRIs – S.S.R.Lies” here: http://www.naturalnews.com/SSRIs_S_…

The ugly truth about the War on Drugs
The War on Drugs, of course, was never really about ending drug use in the first place. It was about eliminating the competition for Big Pharma, making sure kids get off generic black market drugs and get onto brand-name Big Pharma drugs. To legitimize this mass drugging of children, the industry of modern psychiatry was created, with all its imaginary (hallucinated?) disorders and dysfunctions used to befuddle the public with seemingly intelligent-sounding technical jargon.

It’s all just drug-pushing psychobabble, of course. Disorders like ADHD are purely fictional, having no basis in reality whatsoever, and the brain shrinkage pointed to by psychiatrists who claim ADHD causes stunted growth is actually the result of the amphetamine drugs they put the kids on. It is well documented that drugs like Ritalin cause stunted growth and reduced brain size (http://www.naturalnews.com/021944.html).

The degree of quackery present in the psychiatric industry today is simply staggering. And to think that mainstream doctors defend this quackery is yet more evidence that modern medicine has nothing whatsoever to do with actual science; it’s all based on a Cult of Pharmacology where all drugs are considered good and necessary, regardless of the mountain of evidence showing them to be dangerous and medically useless.

This is where I have to challenge all the so-called “skeptics” out there who attack natural medicine. These skeptics and self-proclaimed quack observers are, in fact, among the greatest quacks of all. Why? Because they aren’t skeptical in the least about psychiatric medicine!

The skeptics are the quacks
Where is the skepticism about this home-grown brand of legalized drug pushing? Where are all the intelligent questions demanding proof that ADHD is a genuine disease and not just something made up to sell more drugs? The skeptics are silent when it comes to psychiatric medicine, and by their silence they reveal themselves to be quacks

Logic, reason and scientific evidence are all thrown out the window on the subject of psychiatric disorders. The most rational-sounding skeptics are instantly transformed into psychobabble-spouting quacks who defend the indefensible — the mass drugging of children with powerful hallucinogenic drugs as “treatment” for some imaginary disease.

Sure, the skeptics will attack meditation, crystals, prayer, intention, chiropractic care and even herbal medicine (all of which can be healing, by the way), but when it comes to the loopy loose logic of psychiatric medicine inventing diseases and drugging up the children with hallucinogenic amphetamines, they swallow the whole thing without blinking an eye!

So much for the credibility of the so-called skeptics and quack busters. It turns out they’re quacks themselves. They’ve simply subscribed to their own form of quackery: Drugs and surgery for all!

The quacks are on crack, and they’re supporting an industry that hands out speed to the children. Meanwhile, the War on Drugs fills the prisons with people who smoked a little weed while completely ignoring the psychiatric pill pushers. Crazy, huh? I’m beginning to think everybody’s on drugs!

Just remember, folks: If you want to sell drugs to kids, just get FDA approval first. It keeps the DEA off your back and will fool parents into thinking your hallucinogenic drugs are “medicine.”

“A prominent Massachusetts anesthesiologist allegedly fabricated 21 medical studies that claimed to show benefits from painkillers like Vioxx and Celebrex, according to the hospital where he worked.

“Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, Mass., said that its former chief of acute pain, Scott S. Reuben, had faked data used in the studies, which were published in several anesthesiology journals between 1996 and 2008. …

“Dr. Reuben’s research work also claimed positive findings for Wyeth’s antidepressant Effexor XR as a pain killer.”

From The Wall Street Journal
March 11, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123672510903888207-lMyQjAxMDI5MzE2MTcxMjE1Wj.html

[Editorial Comments: Another example of medical fraud. While no conclusions can be drawn directly about antidepressants such as Effexor from this information, it certainly raises more doubts about drug safety.

On August 22, 2003 Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the makers of SSRI antidepressant Effexor, issued a warning to U.S. doctors that Effexor could cause hostility, suicidal ideation and self-harm in patients under the age of 18. In September, 2003 Wyeth sent a similar alert to Canadian doctors telling them Effexor had been linked with a possible increase in suicidal thinking in children. In November, 2005 the FDA’s Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program reported “homicidal ideation” as an adverse event of Effexor ER extended release.

41 persons of the 393 in Sweden who committed suicide in 2007 and were reported to the National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden got treatment with Effexor. On April 10, 2001 in Wahluke, Washington, 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage while on a high dose of the antidepressant Effexor. On March 22, 2001 in El Cajon, California, 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants, Effexor and Celexa, when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five.

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, and can cause crime.

It is vital that you and your friends and associates watch the video documentary “Making A Killing – The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging”. Containing more than 175 interviews with lawyers, mental health experts, the families of psychiatric abuse victims and the survivors themselves, this riveting documentary rips the mask off psychotropic drugging and exposes a brutal but well-entrenched money-making machine. The facts are hard to believe, but fatal to ignore. Watch the video online at http://www.cchr.org/#/videos/making-a-killing-introduction.]

Scotland on Sunday reports German Gunman Under Influence of Psychiatric Drugs

Growing Reports of Drug Induced Shootings Highlighted in 10 minute mini documentary

The Winnendon, Germany school shooting, which left 17 dead including the gunman, appears to be the latest in the chain of psychiatric drug-induced school shootings highlighted in a new documentary entitled Psychiatry: Prescription for Violence — created by the mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR).  A March 15 article in Scotland on Sunday, revealed that the shooter, Tim Kretschmer, “had been suffering from depression, even attending a clinic and receiving medication for the condition.”

With 54 dead and 105 wounded from recent school shooters under the influence of psychiatric drugs documented to cause suicidal behavior, mania, psychosis, hallucinations, hostility and “homicidal ideation,” CCHR is calling on Germany’s law enforcement and press to fully investigate the school shooter’s psychiatric drug history. Last November, Pekka-Eric Auvinen joined the growing list of school shooters under the influence of psychiatric drugs documented by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to cause suicidal behavior and homicidal thoughts. In other instances, the shooter’s medical records were never made public, so their psychiatric drug use remains in question. School shootings committed by individuals under the influence of psychiatric drugs include:

• DeKalb, Illinois – February 14, 2008: 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 16 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology reports showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.
• Omaha, Nebraska – December 5, 2007: 19-year-old Robert Hawkins killed eight people and wounded five before committing suicide in an Omaha mall. Hawkins’ friend told CNN that the gunman was on antidepressants, and autopsy results confirmed he was under the influence of the “anti-anxiety” drug Valium.
• Jokela, Finland – November 7, 2007: 18-year-old Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School in southern Finland, then committed suicide.
• Cleveland, Ohio – October 10, 2007: 14-year-old Asa Coon stormed through his school with a gun in each hand, shooting and wounding four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon had been placed on the antidepressant Trazadone.
• Blacksburg, Virginia – April 16, 2007: The psychiatric drug history of Seung-Hui Cho in the Virginia Tech Massacre was never made public. Initial reports stated that “depression medication” was found among Cho’s belongings. But neither his toxicology reports, nor his recent medical history were ever released to find out whether Cho had been in withdrawal from psychiatric medication. (33 were killed and 29 injured, but this was not included in the total of dead and wounded cited above.)
• Red Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota – March 21, 2005: 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise, reportedly under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac, went on a shooting rampage at home and at his school, killing nine people and wounding five before committing suicide.
• Greenbush, New York – February 2004: 16-year-old Jon Romano strolled into his high school in east Greenbush and opened fire with a shotgun. Special education teacher Michael Bennett was hit in the leg. Romano had been taking “medication for depression.”
• El Cajon, California – March 22, 2001: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants, Effexor and Celexa, when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five. Hoffman had also undergone an “anger management” program.
• Williamsport, Pennsylvania – March 7, 2000: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on the antidepressant Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.
• Conyers, Georgia – May 20, 1999: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with a mix of antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded 6 of his classmates.
• Columbine, Colorado – April 20, 1999:  18-year-old Eric Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox when he and his partner Dylan Klebold killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 23 others before taking their own lives in the bloodiest school massacre in history. The coroner confirmed that the antidepressant was in his system through toxicology reports while Dylan Klebold’s autopsy was never made public.  Harris and Klebold underwent “anger management” and “death education” classes.
• Notus, Idaho – April 16, 1999: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school narrowly missing students; he was taking a mix of antidepressants.
• Springfield, Oregon – May 21, 1998: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his own parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Kinkel had been on Prozac.  Kinkel also underwent “anger management” classes.

This message is a public service announcement provided by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR ®). CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Click here to watch the “Prescription for Violence” DVD by CCHR to find out more about the dangerous connection between violence and psychiatric drugs. Or click here to read more about the link between hostility, violence, suicidality and psychiatric drugs. For more information, contact CCHR St. Louis at www.cchrstl.org.

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/article980559.ece

St. Petersburg Times
A Times Editorial
Don’t let drugmaker hide records
Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Beyond arbitrating private disputes, the courts play a key role in protecting the public interest. A federal magistrate in Orlando is deciding whether to open records of the drug company AstraZeneca or allow the maker of the blockbuster drug Seroquel to hide potentially embarrassing information. This should be an easy call. If the documents would inform the public about risks of the drug, alert the public to a faulty FDA review or warn the public about less-than-forthcoming marketing practices of the drugmaker, they should be opened. Even when handling private lawsuits, the courts should be looking after the public interest.

Thousands of personal injury lawsuits have been filed against AstraZeneca by patients who claim the drug led to weight gain and diabetes. Some 6,000 cases have been consolidated in the U.S. District Court in Orlando for pretrial hearings. The drug, which racked up $4.45 billion in sales last year, has been approved by the FDA for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder but has been prescribed for a wide range of problems such as insomnia and depression.

The company sought to keep a raft of internal documents sealed. But just hours before a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Baker, the company and plaintiffs’ lawyers came to an agreement to open about 100 documents. St. Petersburg Times staff writer Kris Hundley reported that among these docments was a discussion by Seroquel marketing managers on “burying” the results of unfavorable clinical trials and a 2006 voice mail message from the company’s “scientific alignment manager” that told sales reps to “neutralize customer objections” when doctors asked about a link between Seroquel, diabetes and weight gain.

This agreement still allows AstraZeneca to keep documents secret that should be disclosed. Fortunately, Judge Baker made clear his role is not just to rubber stamp a deal made between private parties. When an attorney for the drugmaker argued that communications between the FDA and AstraZeneca should be shielded from public view, Baker raised appropriate concerns. He said the public has an interest in learning about the FDA’s administrative process and whether it “is running a slipshod operation.”

Exactly right.

The public also has an interest in knowing the results of unpublished clinical studies that AstraZeneca doesn’t want to release, and in seeing the notes of its sales reps that indicate how the drug was marketed. AstraZeneca is being sued not just by patients who say the drug caused them medical problems but by four states for the off-label marketing of Seroquel.

If the company believes that the lawsuits are baseless, then it should open its records for all to see. If it continues to refuse, then the court should order the documents unsealed. The public has the right to know if a drug company is putting sales before safety — and if the FDA is acting in the public interest.