Posts Tagged ‘Anti-anxiety’

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Tranquility or Agitation? There’s a drug for that!

Monday, April 25th, 2022

Agitation, as with many English words, has multiple definitions. Here are a few:
1. moving back and forth with an irregular, rapid, or violent action
2. a feeling of being restless
3. a state of excessive tension and irritability
4. a state of anxiety, emotional disturbance, worry, upset, or nervous excitement
[From Latin agitare, put into motion]

Agitation is a side effect of various psychotropic drugs, such as psychostimulants given to children for so-called ADHD; newer antidepressants such as SSRIs; antipsychotics often called major tranquilizers; anti-anxiety drugs often called minor tranquilizers.

So, pretty much all psychiatric drugs, often prescribed to reduce agitation, have a side effect of agitation. Counter-productive, wouldn’t you say?

The psychiatric billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), specifies some diagnoses related to agitation:

 — Restless legs syndrome
 — 54 individual diagnoses using the word “anxiety”
 — High expressed emotion level within family
 — Adjustment disorder, With mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct

Pretty much anybody, then, can be diagnosed with some form of agitation or anxiety and prescribed one or more psychiatric drugs which have the potential to exacerbate the agitation.

The Latest Agitation Drug

On April 6, 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved BioXcel Therapeutics dexmedetomidine (Igalmi™) sublingual film for the acute treatment of agitation associated with schizophrenia or bipolar I or II disorder in adults.

Dexmedetomidine is a sedative whose safety and effectiveness cannot be established beyond 24 hours from the first dose, usually used to anesthetize a patient or animal before surgery. It inhibits the release of norepinephrine in the brain, stopping propagation of pain signals. They don’t really know how it “works” for agitation, other than the obvious fact that it knocks you out. It’s mostly eliminated from the body within hours. It’s metabolized in the liver by Cytochrome P450 (CYP450) enzymes, so the side effects can be exacerbated by abnormal CYP450 metabolism which can lead to a toxic level causing acute agitation.

The most common side effects (incidence ?5% and at least twice the rate of placebo) were sleepiness, burning or prickling sensations, oral numbness, dizziness, dry mouth, and low blood pressure.

Since it is self-administered by placing the film under the tongue, it’s used by an individual to knock themselves out when they are having an anxiety attack.

Psychiatrists promoting this “treatment” are ecstatic about it, since the patients can knock themselves out whenever they feel the need.

If you feel the need, please contact your local, state and federal representatives and let them know what you think about this.

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Teens are Overdosing on Prescribed Psychiatric Drugs at an Alarming Rate

Monday, March 21st, 2022

A growing number of teens and young adults are overdosing on mental health drugs, according to a study published March 2, 2022 in the journal Pediatrics.

Many of the overdoses are due to abuse of prescribed psychiatric drugs such as benzodiazepines and psychostimulants.

Benzos, or BZDs, include anti-anxiety drugs such as Xanax; psychostimulants include drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall, and Concerta.

Between 2016 and 2018, results show 29 percent of the youths who overdosed on BZDs received a written prescription within one month of their overdose. One in four youths overdosing on mental health stimulants received a doctor’s prescription a month before the incident. The study found that young adults who intentionally overdosed on BZDs and stimulants were more likely to have a recent prescription than those who suffered an accidental overdose.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4,777 U.S. youths died of a drug overdose in 2019. BZD use accounted to 727 of these overdoses and 902 involved psychostimulants.

We hear renewed cries from the psychiatric industry for more funds and more screenings. Unfortunately, psychiatric screenings for potential suicide or self-harm are a total fraud.

Risk assessments, screenings, school mental health programs and more funding are often presented as solutions to suicide, and since the onset of the Covid pandemic calls for more screenings and funding are louder than ever. Yet these so-called solutions are actually contributing to the problem by masking truly effective solutions and proliferating the use of psychotropic drugs whose side effects include suicide and violence.

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatry is not workable.

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Is Overthinking a Mental Illness?

Monday, March 7th, 2022

Overthinking is the habit of thinking too much or too long about something, or making something more complicated than it actually is. Overthinking is also known as “analysis paralysis” because by thinking too much one is getting stuck and stopped from taking action.

Overthinking is a favorite topic for psychiatric and psychological review, as a symptom of a possible mental health issue like so-called depression or anxiety, with recommended treatments of psychotropic anti-anxiety or antidepressant drugs, or other harmful psychiatric interventions.

Sometimes the word “rumination” is used as a scholarly euphemism for overthinking. It means “obsessive or abnormal reflection upon an idea or deliberation over a choice.”

Overthinking may also be a symptom of justified thought, which is one’s futile attempt to analytically explain an irrational reaction to something.

Another word for this is a “via,” as in “They took a via instead of a direct approach.” That’s a Latin word meaning “way.” In this sense it means a roundabout way, instead of just a straight A to B. A via is a relay point in a communication line, and represents some interference between a cause and an effect. A totally rational activity strings a straight line between cause and effect; the reasons one cannot are vias. Enough vias between cause and effect make a stop. Almost all anxieties in human relations come about through an imbalance of cause and effect.

Well, how does one determine if one’s route is A to B, or if it is A to C to X to B? In other words, to B or not to B?

That is indeed the question!

We’d like to emphasize that overthinking is not a mental illness. However, psychiatrists have many ways to call this phenomenon a mental disorder, so that they can make a buck, and a patient for life, off of an unsuspecting and vulnerable person.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is used to diagnose a number of related symptoms that could be presented by one’s overthinking:

  • Intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
  • Unspecified intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
  • Unspecified mental disorder
  • Unspecified neurocognitive disorder
  • Unspecified communication disorder
  • Generalized anxiety disorder
  • Other specified anxiety disorder
  • Unspecified anxiety disorder

Basically, if you think at all, you can be diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs.

Back to the question. How does one effectively deal with this?

It can’t hurt to address it as a manifestation of anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion, and is really a conflict, or the restimulation of a conflict, or something containing indecision or uncertainty — in other words as above, obsessive deliberation over a choice. It is exemplified by a conflict between something supporting survival and something opposing survival. It is rooted in an inability to assign the correct cause to something, which itself is rooted in an inability to observe. The cure is not a drug, but in observing the correct cause.

Opposing ideologies, violent revolutions and a frail social economic structure have subjected more than one-third of the world’s population to oppression, poverty and brutal human rights violations. Terrorism and a global economic crisis rips at the very fabric of society, propagating a mindset governed by hysteria, fear and anxiety. It’s no small wonder why some are gripped by anxiety and its attendant overthinking.

The Bottom Line

Anything one can do to improve one’s condition in life, enhance one’s ability to get along well in life, to make good judgments and decisions, to reduce anxiety, and to relieve stress in the environment and in society, can likely help. But however one addresses the condition, the wrong way to deal with it is with psychiatry.

Overthinking is not a mental illness.

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Chantix is in Trouble Again

Wednesday, September 29th, 2021

We’ve been regularly warning about the dangers of Chantix since 2009, and now it’s causing trouble again.

The FDA warned in 2009 that Chantix (generic Varenicline), a psychiatric drug made by Pfizer, can have serious side effects, namely suicide.

Chantix is a benzodiazepine-based anti-anxiety drug promoted for smoking cessation. Benzodiazepines are prescribed to treat anxiety, insomnia or panic attacks, typically for a few weeks to six months; an estimated 50% of patients take them for two months or longer. These drugs have significant risks, because they are highly addictive and can have severe side effects, including heart problems, violence and suicide.

However, in 2016 the FDA removed the Black Box warning, after heavy lobbying from Pfizer claiming that additional data showed that the benefits of Chantix outweighed its adverse side effects (oh, and since its sales had significantly dropped.)

But the adverse side effects did not go away; only the Black Box warning went away.

Chantix Recall

Now (9/17/2021), Pfizer has issued a voluntary recall for all lots of Chantix 0.5mg and 1mg tablets due to the presence of unacceptable N-nitroso-varenicline levels, a suspected cancer-causing agent.

If you smoke, you are susceptible to cancer. If you take anti-smoking drugs, you are susceptible to cancer. But what’s the real danger here?

Chantix was developed to specifically affect nicotinic receptors in the brain, under the unproven theory that this would reduce nicotine craving and block the rewarding effects of smoking. As we’ve warned before, messing with neurotransmitters in the brain is playing Russian Roulette with your mind.

The psychiatric industry considers that smoking cessation therapies are their territory, however this drug masks the real cause of problems in life and debilitates the individual, thus denying one the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future.

Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems, apparently such as smoking, as a “mental illness”, and stigmatize this unwanted behavior as a “disease.” 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.

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People’s Resilience in Times of Disasters

Monday, June 29th, 2020

We must be witnessing a societal aberration something like “effective communication must be in person,” since so many people seem to experience anxiety from the social isolation imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.

The psychiatric industry is heavily pushing the fraudulent idea that loneliness is a mental illness, in order to sell more drugs.

Loneliness is quite simply a lack of communication, not a lack of personal contact; and it is not a mental illness, as the psychiatric industry would have you believe. But we see daily reports all over the media from psychiatrists and psychiatric facilities claiming that loneliness and anxiety are mental illnesses needing anti-anxiety drugs. Such anxiety can be cured by more communication, which is basically free; drugs can only suppress anxiety, not cure it, but they provide massive profit for the mental health industry.

Reliable reports are showing that psychotropic drug prescriptions have significantly increased since the start of the pandemic lockdowns. Prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs rose 34.1% in February and March; and there were 86% more prescriptions for other psychiatric drugs, primarily  antidepressants. Evidently many people are being fooled by the psychiatric propaganda machine.

A tolerance to these highly addictive drugs can build up, leading to people taking higher dosages, and subsequent severe withdrawal effects when stopped. These drugs are not benign, they have serious adverse side effects.

The history of the mental health industry shows them using epidemics, Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, and much more, to push for increased mental health treatment with commensurate increases in funding, but showing no effective results. Psychiatry and psychiatric drugs thrive under such conditions.

Psychotropic drugs Prozac and Luvox, known to cause violence and suicide, are now being tested to treat Covid-19. Two antipsychotics, Haldol and Thorazine are also being tested. Thorazine, known as a “chemical lobotomy,” has killed 100,000 Americans due to its toxic side effects. This practice of using existing drugs is called “repurposing,” using them for new indications and expanding their reach into new patient populations.

On May 8, the next stage of a clinical trial using LSD to treat adult “ADHD” was also announced. Repurposing psychotropic drugs during a global epidemic puts the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry back on track for greater profits.

There are already “mental health” apps for your smartphone using artificial intelligence algorithms to predict suicide risk. We can see in your future compulsory psychiatric treatment if these trends persist.

Resilience

One definition of resilience is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties,” from the Latin word resiliens “rebounding”. In the most basic sense, resiliency has been defined as the ability to adapt and cope successfully despite threatening or challenging situations. Thus, competency in relevant areas is a strong supporter of resiliency.

CCHR’s research has found that people’s resilience in times of disasters such as pandemics, wars and terrorism, has often been the people’s best treatment, and that the sources of predictions about so-called “mental health epidemics” often have conflicts of interest with manufacturers of psychotropic drugs.

Psychiatry’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is ultimately an instrument for weakening human resilience, making people prey to entrepreneurs of human misery. Existing evidence indicates that prior psychiatric treatment is associated with increased (rather than decreased) rates of future suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

CCHR is fully aware of the country’s challenging times (with its own staff part of the stay-at-home restrictions) and how, generally at a societal level, this can impact mental and physical health. But psychiatric and other mental disorder groups making claims that high percentages of people will be anxious, depressed or have PTSD (based largely on surveys of a small number of people, and often with a Public Relations firm spin) is totally self-serving to rake in future profits with no cures.

Find out what the real crisis in mental health care is today. It isn’t the pandemic — it’s the lack of science and results within the mental health industry!

Anatomy of an Epidemic

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Covid-19 Get A Grip On It

Monday, March 30th, 2020
Looking at the News the past several weeks, it seems like every single mental health facility, psychologist and psychiatrist in the country is advertising their services for people with anxiety about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Overall, the number of Americans on drugs used to treat mental trauma has substantially increased since 2001; more than one?in?five adults was on at least one of these drugs in 2010, up 22 percent from ten years earlier. We can only suppose that has continued to increase into present time; the latest data from 2017 shows over 32 million Americans taking anti-anxiety drugs.

Anti-Anxiety Drugs

Anti-anxiety drugs can cause hallucinations, delusional thinking, confusions, aggression, violence, hostility, agitation, irritability, depression and suicidal thinking. They are also some of the most difficult drugs to withdraw from.

There have been 39 warnings from 8 countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States) and the European Union warning that anti-anxiety drugs cause harmful side effects. There are 79 studies from 19 countries (Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom and United States) showing that anti-anxiety drugs cause harmful side effects.

Many people who have taken psychiatric drugs have found out the withdrawal effects of the drugs can persist for months, even years after they stop taking them. No one should attempt withdrawal from psychiatric drugs without a doctor’s supervision due to the potential for serious withdrawal symptoms.

Recommendations

CCHR recommends a full, searching medical examination by a non-psychiatric health care professional, with appropriate clinical tests, to determine if there are undetected and untreated medical conditions that could be causing or contributing to mental distress.

It has been known for a long time that certain kinds of infections are known to cause mental symptoms, but they are rarely considered during psychiatric examinations and diagnosis. Be very wary of any psychiatrist or psychologist who claims you have a mental illness when you are suffering from some infectious disease.

This information is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease; mental symptoms can be caused by many different conditions, so see a qualified health care practitioner (not a psychiatrist) who can perform legitimate clinical tests.

Be prudent, lawful, observant, helpful — basically just be the good people you know you should be anyway!

Download and read “The Role of Infections in Mental Illness” by Frank Strick here.
Stressed Out

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Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry

Monday, October 7th, 2019

In 1976 Dr. Thomas Szasz, the co-founder of CCHR, published an article in The British Journal of Psychiatry called “Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry,” in which Szasz argues that there is no such disease as schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia — the most common and most disabling of the so-called mental illnesses — has become the poster disease for psychiatry, the psychiatric symbol of why we need psychiatrists.

However, Szasz recognized that there are no clinical tests for such a “disease,” and that labeling the symptoms was rather psychiatry’s attempt to control deviant behavior rather than to cure disease.

Szasz stated that “schizophrenia is defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behavior of which the speaker disapproves.”

Psychiatrists today remain committed to labeling “schizophrenia” a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality.

The unfortunate aspect of this is that psychiatry clings tenaciously to antipsychotics as the treatment for “schizophrenia,” despite their proven risks and studies which show that when patients stop taking these drugs, they improve.

Psychiatry is Enamored of Symbols

This deserves a more complete examination of the subject of “symbols.” We name, or label, objects and ideas, which in itself is not a bad thing, as long as we realize that the symbol is not the thing itself.

A symbol is something which has mass, meaning and mobility. An example is a body. We label a body with a name which we then use to mean the person; the body moves, carrying its mass and meaning around for others to see and experience.

On top of that, we label it “schizophrenic”, so we have a symbol of a symbol. Now we don’t have to directly confront the painful symptoms; we just label it “a schizophrenic.” We no longer have to cure it, since now we “know” what it is.

Psychiatry insists that one have a label, which is one way to trap and keep a person located. Using and being slaves to symbols is basically a substitute for just knowing. We no longer have to really know what it is, because we “know” it is “a schizophrenic.” So psychiatry has operated on this basis for over a hundred years, never really finding out what schizophrenia is so it can be cured. People just have to live with it, and take psychiatric drugs which are highly profitable and which suppress the symptoms but do not actually fix it.

Psychiatry Uses Other Symbols As Well

The psychiatric or psychological analysis of symbols in dreams has been a fruitless red herring for many centuries. It can certainly be interesting and fun to imagine all the ways dreams could be interpreted; but really, it doesn’t actually lead to cures. Dreams are mostly puns on words and situations.  Thiamine (vitamin B1) has been used successfully at doses of 250 mg/day to treat patients having nightmares. B1 at roughly $20 per bottle beats any anti-anxiety or anti-psychotic drug currently being prescribed for bad dreams, since one of the possible side effects of these drugs is (wait for it…) nightmares!

Now think of the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, originally developed in 1921 by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach as a tool for the diagnosis and labeling of schizophrenia. Over the years several different scoring systems were used, including pure subjective judgment; one present day scoring system wasn’t developed until the 1960s, and another scoring system was published in 2011. There are naturally many critics of these systems, including some court cases calling the results bogus.

Given the fraudulent nature of psychiatric “diagnosis” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), we are calling the Rorschach symbol test a total hoax.

And Speaking of the DSM and the ICD

Of course, the names of so-called mental disorders in the DSM and ICD are the ultimate in misleading symbols. They appear to designate actual mental states, but upon close inspection they are empty of scientific meaning.

With these tomes, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of normal human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” based solely on opinion.

Though the DSM weighs less than five pounds, its influence pervades all aspects of modern American society: our governments, our courts, our military, our media and our schools.

Using it, psychiatrists can enforce psychiatric drugging, seize your children and even take away your most precious personal freedoms. It is the engine that drives a $330 billion psychiatric industry.

Missouri law explicitly names the DSM as the official reference for mental illnesses. Contact your State Senator and Representative and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from State Law. We should not support symbolism that hits you over the head; a symbol should not be a cymbal.

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Premedication Sedation for Surgical Procedures

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

Premedication is the administration of drugs before anesthesia and surgery, usually intended to reduce anxiety and increase amnesia.

They are sometimes used with anesthesia to calm a patient down just prior to surgery or during their recovery. Promoting amnesia is said to reduce the risk of awareness during surgery; however, some people would rather not have their awareness truncated in this fashion.

They may be automatically administered without a patient’s knowledge, so be sure to ask, and indicate you don’t need them if you don’t want them.

Examples of drugs used for this sedation may be:

  • benzodiazepines such as Ativan (lorazepam), Valium (diazepam), Versed (midazolam)
  • barbiturates such as Amytal
  • other anxiolytics (anti-anxiety drugs) such as alpha-2 adrenergic agonists (clonidine, dexmedetomidine)
  • ketamine
  • anticholinergics

Readers will know that benzodiazepines are highly addictive psychiatric drugs with severe withdrawal effects and possible adverse reactions such as suicide and violence.

Barbiturates are highly dangerous psychiatric drugs because of the small difference between a normal dose and an overdose.

Alpha-2 adrenergic agonists have been used for decades to treat so-called  ADHD, so you know these are bad news.

Ketamine is an anesthetic now being promoted as a “miracle” treatment for depression, instead of its off-label use as a “date-rape” drug.

Anticholinergics may raise your risk of dementia, according to new research. An anticholinergic agent is a substance that blocks the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the nervous system. Examples of strong anticholinergic drugs are antipsychotics and antidepressants.

While medicine has advanced on a scientific path to major discoveries and cures, psychiatry and psychiatric drugs have never evolved scientifically, are no closer to understanding or curing mental problems, and are mis-used as “medicine” as a “standard of care” which only makes matters worse.

While medicine has nurtured an enviable record of achievements and general popular acceptance, the public still links psychiatry to snake pits, straitjackets, and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Psychiatry continues to foster that valid impression with its development of such brutal treatments as ECT, psychosurgery, the chemical straitjacket caused by antipsychotic drugs, and its long record of treatment failures, including the use of psychiatric drugs as premedication by real doctors who have been subverted by psychiatric promises that cannot be realized.

Click here to download and read the full CCHR report “Psychiatric Hoax — The Subversion of Medicine — Report and recommendations on psychiatry’s destructive impact on health care.”

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Chanting the Chantix Mantra

Monday, May 6th, 2019

Recently there has been a gross increase in the TV ad campaign for Chantix, promoting this deadly drug for smoking cessation.

We’ve written about Chantix before, but we thought a repeat was in order due to this massive ad campaign.

In 2008 the Federal Aviation Administration banned Chantix for pilots and air traffic controllers, and reissued that decision in 2013.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) slapped a “Black Box” warning on Chantix (varenicline tartrate, made by Pfizer) in 2009 after receiving thousands of reports linking the drug to mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts, hostility and agitation.

In 2015, the FDA expanded the warning to note that the drug had also been linked to reduced alcohol tolerance leading to seizures.

However, in 2016 the FDA removed the Black Box warning, after heavy lobbying from Pfizer claiming that additional data showed that the benefits of Chantix outweighed its adverse side effects (oh, and since its sales had significantly dropped.)

But the adverse side effects did not go away; only the Black Box warning went away. One study found that Chantix had more cases of suicidal thoughts, self-harm, and homicidal thoughts than any other drug, by a more than three-fold margin. Pfizer’s prescribing information still warns about new or worsening mental health problems such as changes in behavior or thinking, aggression, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, or suicidal thoughts or actions while taking or after stopping Chantix.

We suspect that the recent spate of TV ads is related to the removal of the Black Box warning and the prior drop in sales. Also, the price of Chantix more than doubled between 2013 and 2018. In 2013, Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle a majority of the 2,700 state and federal lawsuits that had been filed over adverse side effects. Now the company is trying to grow the market with clinical studies for smokers age 12 to 19.

What is Chantix?

Chantix is a psychiatric drug — a benzodiazepine-based anti-anxiety drug, also called a minor tranquilizer or sedative hypnotic. Daily use of therapeutic doses of benzodiazepines are associated with physical dependence, and addiction can occur after 14 days of regular use. Typical consequences of withdrawal are anxiety, depression, sweating, cramps, nausea, psychotic reactions and seizures. There is also a “rebound effect” where the individual experiences even worse symptoms than they started with as a result of chemical dependency.

The exact mechanism of action of benzodiazepines is not known, but they affect neurotransmitters in the brain and suppress the activity of nerves, under the unproven theory that excessive activity of nerves may be the cause of anxiety. Chantix was developed to specifically affect nicotinic receptors in the brain, under the theory that this would reduce nicotine craving and block the rewarding effects of smoking. Messing with neurotransmitters in the brain is playing Russian Roulette with your mind.

Benzodiazepines are metabolized by cytochrome P450 enzymes, so a genetic lack of these enzymes can cause a buildup of harmful toxins and increase the severity of adverse side effects.

Psychiatric “best practices” consider that smoking is an addiction and recommend that psychiatrists assess tobacco use at every patient visit, since tobacco addiction is covered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) as a “mental illness” under eight separate items, and disorders related to inhalant use have 33 entries. Smoking is not a mental illness and addiction cannot be fixed with psychiatric drugs.

The psychiatric industry considers that smoking cessation therapies are their territory, however this drug masks the real cause of problems in life and debilitates the individual, thus denying one the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future. Treating substance abuse with drugs is a major policy blunder; contact your state and federal representatives and let them know you disapprove of this trend.

Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior like smoking as a “disease.” 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.

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The Psychiatric Scientific Double Standard

Saturday, March 30th, 2019

When it comes to psychiatric scientific research, there is a double standard that favors what makes money and disavows what does not make money. When we say “double standard” we mean some rule or principle which is unfairly applied in different ways to different groups or situations, or that favors one group or situation over another. The actual principle in question here is called “evidence-based science.”

Many scientists, particularly those in the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry, mouth that they favor “evidence-based science” when in fact they favor what can make the most money regardless of the evidence.

A recent Scientific American editorial (“The WHO Takes a Reckless Step“, April, 2019) denigrates Traditional Chinese Medicine because it is purportedly not “evidence-based.”

Yet Scientific American promotes psychiatry and psychiatric drugs, when it knows that every psychiatric drug on the market has somewhere in its fine print a statement to the effect that “we don’t know how it works,” while the FDA approves these drugs based on so-called “evidence.”

Here are some representative quotes:

  • The fine print for Rexulti (brexpiprazole, an antipsychotic) says, “the exact way REXULTI works is unknown”.
  • The fine print for Latuda (lurasidone, an antipsychotic) says, “It’s not known exactly how LATUDA works, and the precise way antipsychotics work is also unknown”.
  • The fine print for Xanax (alprazolam, a benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug) says, “Their exact mechanism of action is unknown”.

So much for evidence-based practice! The actual evidence is, they don’t have a clue how these drugs are supposed to work — it’s all conjecture!

As we continue to examine the actual evidence, we come up against the adverse reactions, or side effects, of these drugs. This is hard evidence, not conjecture.

What is a Side Effect?

Side effects (also called “adverse reactions”) are the body’s natural response to having a chemical disrupt its normal functioning.

One could also say that there are no drug side effects, these adverse reactions are actually the drug’s real effects; some of these effects just happen to be unwanted.

The FDA takes the adverse side effect of suicide seriously by placing a Black Box Warning on certain psychiatric drugs. For example, the FDA says that “Antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children and adolescents with MDD [Major Depressive Disorder] and other psychiatric disorders.”

What about those who say psychotropic drugs really did make them feel better? Psychotropic drugs may relieve the pressure that an underlying physical problem could be causing but they do not treat, correct or cure any physical disease or condition. This relief may have the person thinking he is better but the relief is not evidence that a psychiatric disorder exists. Ask an illicit drug user whether he feels better when snorting cocaine or smoking dope and he’ll believe that he is, even while the drugs are actually damaging him. Some drugs that are prescribed to treat depression 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.

Once the drug has worn off, the original problem remains. As a solution or cure to life’s problems, psychotropic drugs do not work.

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

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