Posts Tagged ‘Psychiatric Drugs’

If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It!

Monday, June 20th, 2022

[Flaunt: To show oneself off or move in an ostentatious way.]

Social media often emphasizes a need for one to promote oneself, to have a “brand”, to make oneself and one’s abilities known and available.

Saying “flaunt it” is somewhat of a dramatic usage, perhaps even melodramatic, but it serves to emphasize that there are things one can do to make oneself and one’s abilities known and used.

A much less vivid expression, perhaps, would be “If you’ve got it, use it; if you can’t use it, get rid of it.”

Why is this important?

There are group insanities that suppress people from being effective. It can be manifested in a number of ways.

Here are some examples:
1. Exclusion of others — an obvious example is a refusal to employ someone or allow them to belong.
2. A failure to use people — Making practical and effective use of people; if they are well-trained in an area but not allowed to perform in that area. There can also be a disparity between what someone is doing and what they consider is their purpose or interest.
3. The substitution of violence for reason, all too common in this current society.

We’re sure you can think of other examples. One’s optimum survival, and the optimum survival of all the groups to which one belongs, depends on being effective, having a high worthwhile purpose, and demonstrating a mutual confidence between the individual and the group.

Yet there is one group dedicated to suppressing these things.

It should be obvious by now that psychiatry is not an encouraging industry, neither by definition nor by example. Psychiatry is an Industry of Death.

The main resource in consideration here is people, the most critical building blocks of society. Yet psychiatry has no cures, and depends on damaging their patients to continue in business.

Psychiatrists proclaim a worldwide epidemic of mental health problems and urge massive funding increases as the only solution. Yet Community Mental Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.

The end result of psychiatric treatment is not a cured patient, returned to society as a well-adjusted, functioning contributor, but rather a person with the same or worse mental symptoms, told they must remain on debilitating psychiatric drugs for life, because psychiatrists know of no other cure.

Psychiatry defines “self-promotion” as an aberration of presenting oneself to others as accomplished, and that it is boastful and obnoxious. An entire category of psychological research is devoted to so-called “Imposter Syndrome”, making people wonder if they are really competent or not, and heavily suggesting that one may need psychiatric treatment for such. There is a psychiatric lobby for including this fraudulent condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

We’re totally sure that you can promote yourself effectively without bragging or being obnoxious. After all, the whole subjects of Marketing and Public Relations are involved with making things known and well-liked. Just don’t depend on psychiatry to help you with that!

The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options.

As Nation Reels From Mass Violence, CCHR Calls For Mandatory Toxicology Tests

Monday, June 6th, 2022

Mental health watchdog joins others in wanting answers to what drives individuals to commit horrific, senseless acts of violence; toxicology tests should be part of every investigation into such acts.

By CCHR International 

[References are provided in the CCHR INT publication.]

The Mental Health Industry Watchdog

May 30, 2022

As the country reels in the wake of another tragic shooting, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International joins in sending condolences to the families of lost children and teachers. And, like many others, it questions what could have triggered the mindset of the alleged killer, an issue that needs responding to if we are to truly face preventing more tragedies like this and provide grieving families and the nation with answers.

Media quote experts saying that such individuals are “mentally disturbed,” or have “untreated mental illness,” but that doesn’t explain the level of violence we are seeing or what drives a person to pull a trigger. At the very minimum, CCHR says, mandatory toxicology tests should be required in each deadly incident to determine any prescription or illicit drug use, especially as today, most psychotropic drugs can be purchased from rogue online pharmacies, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Students abuse prescription drugs, with some 2.8 million teen students engaging in illicit drug use. Estimates are that up to 20% of college students abuse prescription stimulants alone.

A review of scientific literature published in Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry regarding the “astonishing rate” of mental illness over the past 50 years revealed that it’s not “mental illness” linked to increased acts of violence, but, rather, the psychiatric drugs prescribed to treat it.

“There is no evidence the shooter is mentally ill, just angry and hateful,” said Lori Post, director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at the Northwestern University School of Medicine. “While it is understandable that most people cannot fathom slaughtering small children and want to attribute it to mental health, it is very rare for a mass shooter to have a diagnosed mental health condition.”

One thing is for sure, the country’s mental health system has been an abject failure and investing more in it is not prevention but part of the problem. Listing 20 high profile mass killings since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999, or 19 since 2007, including two mass shootings in May this year, in 85% of the cases (17 of 20) or 89% since 2007, there was a potential history of mental health services or current taking of, or withdrawal from, prescription psychotropic drugs involved. In only several of the cases was a toxicology report mentioned.

The FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System reports that at least 31 out of 484 medications are disproportionately associated with violence, which includes 25 psychotropic drugs. This includes eleven antidepressants, six sedative/hypnotics and three drugs for treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The specific cases of violence included: homicide, physical assaults, physical abuse, homicidal ideation, and cases described as violence-related symptoms.

Experts have consistently raised concerns about this:

“The irritability and impulsivity” from antidepressants, for example, “can make people suicidal or homicidal.” – Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen

“The link between antidepressants and violence, including suicide and homicide, is well established.” – Patrick D. Hahn, affiliate professor of biology at Loyola University Maryland

“Violence and other potentially criminal behavior caused by prescription drugs are medicine’s best kept secret.” – Professor David Healy, leading psychopharmacology expert and professor of psychiatry in Wales 

In a study published in the British Medical Journal, in January 2016, Prof. Peter C. Gøtzsche and other researchers reported: “Perpetrators of school shootings and similar events have often been reported to be users of antidepressants….” Antidepressants, including the use of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs), put at risk the lives of individuals prescribed them. Reviewing numerous studies of five different antidepressants, they found there was a doubling of the risk for both aggressive behavior and suicidality for children and adolescents.

The use of psychotropic drugs in schools is so rife in the U.S. that in 2004, a Prohibition of Mandatory Medication Amendment was necessary when it was discovered that, astoundingly, parents were being threatened with criminal child abuse charges if they refused to put their school-aged child on a psychotropic drug as a requisite for their education, or took them off it.

It is the sudden change in behavior that prompts questions in potential drug-taking. Salvador Romas, responsible for the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas raises questions on why Ramos, experienced sudden behavior changes. Authorities have said Ramos had no known criminal or mental health history. But no toxicology test has been done to determine if he’d acquired or had taken any psychotropic substance—licit or illicit.

Ramos had been a student at Uvalde High School but he dropped out of school and was not on track to graduate this year.  It is unclear what social services he may have undergone given the number of police visits to his home.  He apparently had a history of being “the nicest kid, the shyest kid,” according to a friend, but was bullied for stuttering. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,” a school friend, Mr. Stephen Garcia said. “Over social media, over gaming, over everything.”

His behavior had apparently recently begun to deteriorate, with him admitting to cutting his face with a knife over and over for fun. About a year ago, Ramos posted on social media photos of automatic rifles he would have on his wish list. The teen had hinted on social media that an attack could be coming, one state senator told reporters. “He suggested the kids should watch out,” a lawmaker said.

In the wake of the Sante Fe High School shooting in 2018 that left eight students and two teachers dead, the Texas Senate approved a school safety bill to prevent another such tragedy from happening. It established threat assessment teams to help implement safe ways to identify dangerous students. Every Texas district is required to have a behavioral threat assessment team tasked with preventing horrific acts like the Uvalde shooting at local schools. Of the 1,022 total districts – 80% (818) reported their board of trustees established a team. Of the 818 districts that reported establishing a behavioral threat assessment team, over 90% reported members appointed to their behavioral threat assessment team and were expert in behavior management (793), special education (n = 790), counseling (n = 783), and mental health/substance use (n = 746).

Unfortunately, like mental health services, behavioral threat assessment is not based on science, but mostly conjecture and such an inexact “science” means prediction can be futile. In the sample of 20 cases cited here, it was unclear how many may have been involved in social media well in advance of the act of mass violence. One “Big Brother” program in the U.S. scans billions of social media posts for indications of harm and violence, and relays messages in near-real time to safety and security professionals. It uses a software program that can examine language written on posts. It reaps the company up to $5 million a year in revenue.

Even an article on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Psychiatry Online pointed out that “Computer-generated recommendations may carry a false authority that would override expert human judgment” and “raises false hopes that machines will explain the mysteries of mental health and mental illness.” However, the real point is that psychiatry and psychology’s ability to diagnose any mental disorder is not based on science but on arbitrary whims that AI can only exacerbate this.

The use of AI and acceptance of AI and Applications (Apps) in mental health could contribute to the problem. AI is now marketed as a means to “prevent” or quickly identify the “growing” numbers of people, including children and youths, said to be mentally ill. Add to this, surging digitalization and growing smartphone & internet use increase the use of mental health apps. Peter Foltz, a research professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science stated: “Language is a critical pathway to detecting patient mental states,” says Foltz. “Using mobile devices and AI, we are able to track patients daily and monitor these subtle changes.”

AI identifies and diagnoses from speech patterns of young children and says it can monitor everything from their googling, texting, Facebook use and Twitter. One system asserts it can detect cyber-bullying, self-harm and grief sentiments in students’ emails and in Google/OneDrive. There is no standardized process for evaluating the validity of such research.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” said Ann Cavoukian, the distinguished expert-in-residence leading the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University in Toronto. “I say that as a psychologist. The feeling of constantly being watched or monitored is the last thing you want.”

No amount of money expended on mental health services could have prevented what occurred in Texas. In 2021, Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) received more than $210 million in federal emergency grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for mental health and substance use disorder services. For the 2022 fiscal year, Texas Community Mental Health Grant programs saw increased funding of $2,910,409. For the same budget period, federal funding increased by $41,103,876. The 2022-23 budget has a projected $8.1 billion for mental health services.

Mental health screening and surveys in schools have notoriously been criticized for lack of science and validity. The late Karen Effrem, M.D., a renowned pediatrician and researcher, found that increased screening results in “the increased psychiatric drugging of children and adolescents,” with significant evidence of “harmful, if not fatal side effects, including suicide, violence, psychosis, hallucinations, diabetes, and movement disorders.”

Drug proponents argue that there are many shootings and acts of violence that have not been correlated to psychiatric drugs, but that is exactly the point. It has neither been confirmed nor refuted, as law enforcement is not required to investigate or report on prescribed drugs linked to violence, and media rarely pose the question. This is one reason why compulsory toxicology testing should occur and record of any drugs found added to all databases on acts of mass violence.

Read CCHR’s comprehensive report, Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence and Suicide.

Bigotry – A Sign of the Times?

Monday, May 23rd, 2022

“You can tell a bigot, but you can’t tell him much.”

Bigot: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a religious, racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.

[From French bigot, a religiously intolerant person, hypocrite]

Psychiatrists love to debate whether bigotry is a mental illness.

They might qualify the condition as “pathological bigotry” to emphasize that they really mean a medical disease condition, rather than just plain ignorance. Although they’ve got ignorance covered as well, with a diagnosis of “neurocognitive disorder.”

Of course, they need to make it seem to be a medical condition in order to diagnose it as a psychiatric disorder and prescribe harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs for it.

The latest psychiatric “research” demands more funds to investigate how prejudice supposedly is biologically based in the brain.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) enshrines discrimination as a mental disorder: “Target of (perceived) adverse discrimination or persecution”. But notice that it’s the victim, not the perpetrator, who is labeled with a diagnosis.

To what might we owe the surging prevalence of bigotry and prejudice in modern society? How does an apparently rational person sink to the level of devious writhings of secret hate?

In truth, the hard core bigot is completely terrified of anyone becoming more powerful than them. To such a person, everyone else is an enemy.

When confronted by a bigot, what can you do about this? It is counterproductive to make someone wrong for their attitude. Here is what I do: With a big smile, I tell them exactly what they are doing. For example I might say, “That’s a particularly bigoted attitude.” They’ll usually deny it, because such a person cannot detect this in themselves. End of interaction. You are now forewarned; go cultivate better relationships.

As a way of fighting back, report instances of intolerance, discrimination, bigotry and prejudice by clicking here.

The Truth About Drugs

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

Drugs are essentially poisons. The amount taken determines the effect.

A small amount acts as a stimulant (speeds you up). A greater amount acts as a sedative (slows you down). An even larger amount poisons and can kill.

This is true of any drug. Only the amount needed to achieve the effect differs.

But many drugs have another liability: they directly affect the mind. They can distort the user’s perception of what is happening around him or her. As a result, the person’s actions may be odd, irrational, inappropriate and even destructive.

Drugs block off all sensations, the desirable ones with the unwanted. So, while providing short-term help in the relief of pain, they also wipe out ability and alertness and muddy one’s thinking.

[Drug — Derivation from Middle English drogge, from Old French drogue, perhaps (no one is sure) from Middle Dutch droge, dry.]

Why Do People Take Drugs?

People take drugs because they want to change something about their lives. They think drugs are a solution. But eventually, the drugs become the problem.

Psychiatric Drugs

If you are taking any psychiatric drugs, do not suddenly stop taking them based on what you read here. You could suffer serious withdrawal symptoms.

We use the term “drug” instead of “medicine” because medicines are drugs intended to make the body work better. Psychiatric drugs are intended to blunt sensations, not to cure any trauma.

Drugs can lift a person into a fake kind of cheerfulness, but when the drug wears off, he or she crashes even lower than before. Eventually these drugs will destroy one’s creativity.

Psychiatry’s bogus theory that a brain–based, chemical imbalance causes mental illness was invented to sell drugs. Misled by all the drug marketing efforts, 100 million people worldwide—20 million of them children—are taking psychotropic drugs, convinced they are correcting some physical or chemical imbalance in their body. In reality, they are taking powerful substances so dangerous they can cause hallucinations, psychosis, heart irregularities, diabetes, hostility, aggression, sexual dysfunction and suicide.

While not everyone on psychotropic drugs commits suicide or uncontrolled acts of violence, the effects of the many other side effects can be horrendous.

But what about those who say psychotropic drugs really did make them feel better—that for them, these are “lifesaving medications” whose benefits exceed their risks? Are psychotropics actually safe and effective for them? What else aren’t they told?

Psychotropic drugs may temporarily relieve the pressure that an underlying 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.

The drugs break into, in most cases, the routine rhythmic flows and activities of the nervous system. Human physiology was not designed for the continuous manufacture of euphoric, tranquilizing, or antidepressant sensations. Yet it is forced into this enterprise by psychiatric drugs.

Once the drug has worn off, the original problem remains, and the body is worse off from the nerve damage. As a solution or cure to life’s problems, psychotropic drugs do not work. Sometimes real physical conditions can produce mental symptoms. The correct action on a seriously mentally disturbed person is a full, searching clinical examination by a competent medical (not psychiatric) doctor to discover and treat the true cause of the problem.

Prolonged Grief Disorder is Now Official

Monday, April 18th, 2022

The latest update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-5-TR, 3/18/2022], the billing bible used by psychiatrists, includes a new officially voted-upon condition called “prolonged grief disorder” [PGD].

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) formally released on March 18, 2022 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), with prolonged grief disorder added.

This so-called disorder has these salient points:
1. The bereaved individual has experienced the death of a person close to them at least 12 months ago (for an adult).
2. The bereaved individual continues to be upset about it nearly every day for the last month, and the grief interferes with normal activities.
3. “The duration and severity of the bereavement reaction clearly exceed expected social, cultural, or religious norms for the individual’s culture and context.”

There is a lot more mumbo-jumbo in the official text of the diagnosis. Essentially, it is the opinion of a psychiatrist, since there are no medical tests against which such a diagnosis can be confirmed (and no medical treatment, either.)

Allen Frances, the American psychiatrist best known for chairing the APA task force for DSM-IV, tweeted about DSM-5-TR, “Its only new new diagnosis ‘Prolonged Grief’ is a disaster”.

Psychiatrists who support this ridiculous diagnosis may hope that it explains the difference between “normal grief” and “abnormal grief.”

In point of fact, there is such a thing as an upset of long duration. But it’s not a mental illness; it’s a spiritual trauma.

Really, what is an upset?

An upset is a sudden drop or cutting of one’s Affinity, Reality, Communication or Understanding with someone or something. It’s a lack of Affinity, Reality, Communication or Understanding that is common to all upsets. If one discovers which of these points have been cut, one can bring about a rapid recovery. When such an upset continues over too long a period, they become sad and mournful. This condition is handled by finding the earliest such upset and indicating which of these points were cut.

Psychiatrists want to prescribe an antidepressant for this (or some other harmful and addictive mind-altering drug to suppress the symptoms) instead of actually dealing with the original trauma — primarily because they don’t know how to deal with it, so they default to the quickest way to make a buck off of it.

Such brutal treatment is all too common in psychiatric mental health care.

The APA’s DSM extends the reach of psychiatry deeply into daily life, making as many people as possible eligible for psychiatric diagnoses and thus for psychotropic drugs. More than ten per cent of American adults already take antidepressants, in spite of their horrific side effects such as violence and suicide.

With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior, such as grief, and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to these “disorders,” the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. 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.

The psychiatricizing of normal everyday behavior by including personality quirks and traits is a lucrative business for the APA because by expanding the number of “mental illnesses” even ordinary people can become patients and added to the psychiatric marketing pool.

There are non–psychiatric, non–drug solutions for people experiencing mental difficulty, there are non–harmful alternatives.

Contact your State Legislators and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from State Law.

Psychotropic Drug Use Tied to Dementia

Monday, April 4th, 2022

Older adults taking psychotropic drugs before contracting COVID-19 are at increased risk of dementia in the year following the illness, from a study published 18 March 2022.

Results from this large study of more than 1700 patients who had been hospitalized with COVID showed a greater than twofold increased risk for post-COVID dementia in those taking antipsychotics and mood stabilizers/anticonvulsants.

The study concludes: “In this cohort study of older adults hospitalized with COVID-19 at a large health system in New York, exposure to pre-COVID psychotropic medications was associated with greater 1-year incidence of post-COVID dementia.”

The psychiatric community continues to find that there are great liabilities to the use of psychiatric drugs, yet they continue to prescribe them.

How did psychotropic drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of harmful side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress? And how did the psychiatrists espousing these drugs come to dominate the field of mental treatment? We think you deserve to know the truth.

It’s the story of big money — drugs that fuel a $330 billion psychiatric industry, without a single cure. The cost in human terms is even greater — these drugs now kill an estimated 42,000 people every year. And the death count keeps rising.

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected society within the last 60 years.” [The late Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus]

Watch the CCHR documentary “The Marketing of Madness — Are We All Insane?” and find out what you can do about this.

Marketing of Madness
Marketing of Madness

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.

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.

The Suicide Risk Assessment Fraud

Monday, February 28th, 2022

“A disappointing, and perhaps the most telling, finding was that there has been no improvement in the accuracy of suicide risk assessment over the last 40 years.”

Suicide Risk Assessment doesn’t work. In fact, research suggests it not only doesn’t help, but also it may hurt.

One study looked at the last 40 years of suicide risk assessment research. They found no statistical method to identify patients at a high-risk of suicide in a way that would improve treatment.

Another study of people who had already harmed themselves found that there was no evidence to support the use of risk assessment scales.

Combined with ineffective suicide risk assessment, patients labeled with depression or suicidal ideation often receive prescriptions for dangerous psychotropic drugs laden, and even labeled, with side effects that encourage the exact symptoms they are marketed to treat.

Suicide prevention is a social issue, rather than a medical one. A psychiatrist prescribing an antidepressant is thus not really providing a valid treatment, and the widespread use of suicide risk assessment diverts social and health care practitioners from engaging with patients to find out and handle whatever is really the problem.

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.

Titration Titillation

Monday, January 10th, 2022

Titration is the process of adjusting the dose of a drug for the maximum benefit that can be obtained without any adverse effects. When a drug’s recommended dosage has a narrow therapeutic range, titration is especially important, because the range between the dose at which a drug is effective and the dose at which side effects occur is small. The starting dose is very low, and then increased regularly until the symptoms subside, or the recommended maximum dose is achieved, or side effects occur.

[Titrate ultimately derived from Latin titulus, “inscription, label, title”.]

When changing to a different medication, sometimes one can be stopped and the other then started without overlap. However, with some there needs to be overlap, called cross-titration.

Since some psychiatric drugs may take weeks or months to demonstrate an effect (or an adverse reaction), titration is pretty much just guesswork. There is a general lack of evidence regarding the impact of titration rate on clinical outcomes. There are no specific recommendations on what titration rate is optimal for achieving rapid response while minimizing adverse effects.

The half-life of a drug is the time it takes for the amount of a drug’s active substance in the body to reduce by half. Psychiatric drugs are metabolized in the liver by Cytochrome P450 enzymes in order to be eliminated from the body. A person genetically deficient in these enzymes, or who has an ultrarapid drug metabolism, or who is taking other (legal or illegal) drugs that diminish CYP450 enzyme activity, is at risk of a toxic accumulation of the drug leading to more severe side effects.

Most antipsychotics have an average half-life of 1 day or longer; it can take up to 5 days or more for patients to reach steady-state concentrations with the same daily dose. One would not generally want to titrate the dose until a relatively steady-state concentration was reached.

One recent retrospective study of 149 hospitalized patients on antipsychotics was relatively inconclusive; it was unclear to what extent titration rate either improved symptoms or reduced length of hospital stay. Patients who continued to have their dose increased were less likely to adhere to treatment, due to increasing adverse reactions. Also, delayed adverse effects may occur if dose increases occur sooner than necessary.

Since the 1960s, there has been a large push for patients in psychiatric hospitals to be discharged as quickly as possible. In such an inpatient setting, pressure may be put on prescribers to titrate antipsychotics quickly with the hopes of reducing length of stay and hospitalization costs.

All this goes to show the general lack of predictability in the administration of psychiatric drugs, although it doesn’t even begin to address the fact that these drugs are generally addictive and harmful, and that they are prescribed for fraudulent diagnoses.

One must also keep in mind that the psychiatric industry generally pushes psychotropic drugs without regard to these considerations. This is the direct result of the unscientific psychiatric diagnoses perpetrated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) which fraudulently justifies prescribing these harmful drugs for profit in the first place.

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 because they preclude finding out the real causes of mental trauma and treating those.

At best one might consider psychotropic drugs as “first aid”; they never have and never will cure any mental trauma. While the patient may be lulled into a temporary sense of wellness, whatever condition has caused the symptom is still present and often growing worse. Psychiatrists have deceived millions into thinking that the best answer to life’s many routine problems and challenges lies with the “latest and greatest” psychiatric drug.

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Marketing of Madness
Marketing of Madness