Posted on 06/11/2009 1:15:09 PM PDT by Scythian
(NaturalNews) Today an FDA advisory panel approved the prescribing of powerful mind-altering chemicals for children. Seroquel, Zyprexa and Goedon have now been approved by the advisory panel to be prescribed to children as young as 10 years old to treat a fictitious disease invented by psychiatrists and given the name "bipolar disorder." (There is no such thing as a bipolar disorder disease. It is merely a name assigned to children demonstrating the predictable side effects of correctable dietary imbalances.)
(Excerpt) Read more at naturalnews.com ...
I agree it’s real and I agree that some children and teenagers need this.
Our best friends adopted a baby girl who's mother drank and probably did drugs. The girl, now seven, is developmentally delayed, has hearing loss (untreated ear infections as an infant), poor eyesight and a slew of emotional problems. If they didn't use Seroquel at night she'd be literally screaming and bouncing off the walls.
These kids are real. RAD kids are real. It's very hard for people to imagine children could behave this way even with good parents, but they do.
>>Yea but what your are describing could be a lot of things, not just manic-depressive. It could be: drug use, sexual abuse, too much caffeine, as well as a bunch of other things, but this does not warrant drugging them up on antipsychotics at the drop of a hat.<<
Sounds good, and any Psych worth his/her weight will have a long first appointment and determine that.
However, to state that BiPolar disorder is imaginary is just plane bunk.
And if you’ve ever seen someone swing Manic, it’s a sight to behold. Scary, really scary.
In most cases, other approaches have been tried first, but often they just don’t work. It’s well-established that there is strong heritable factor, based on studies of twins and siblings raised apart, and other similar study approaches. There’s a genetic factor, and even if there are also environmental factors (such as chemicals in the diet) that trigger the expression of the genetic problem, that doesn’t mean that changing the environmental factor after the fact will cause the disease to go away or get better.
It’s the same with schizophrenia (I have a schizophrenic half-sister). There’s definitely a genetic component, but strong evidence for a variety of environmental factors too, including prenatal ones. Example: There’s a significant statistical skew in the birth month of schizophrenics in teh Western world (as far as I know, that’s where the bulk of reliable data is from). No one has figured out why, but one theory is that certain common viral infections — maybe even the common cold — are more more prevalent at certain times of year, and that a fetus exposed to one of these infections at a certain point in development will have the genetic factors for schizophrenia triggered. There are people who try to avoid drugs in treating schizophrenia, and the results are ugly — the disease usually progresses faster and further when not treated with drugs, and some unmedicated schizophrenics are prone to sudden bursts of violence, that can result in innocent people get killed or maimed (often by schizophrenics who hadn’t shown violent tendencies before).
What’s so bad about drugs? They should be used when evidence suggests they’ll be helpful. Untreated mental illness is hardly free of ugly side effects, including murder and suicide. Just because drugs don’t always succeed in preventing these things, doesn’t mean they’re dangerous or useless.
It’s not just a name change. Bipolar Disorder I and Bipolar Disorder II are both types of manic-depressive disorder (and there are more types as well). In popular usage, the terms are often thrown around carelessly and misapplied, but that doesn’t mean psychiatrists “invented” the disorder.
My own mom is a perfect case. We could probably sue and perhaps we should just to hold the psychiatric profession accountable for the damage they do. None of us have the stomach to do it but it would probably be best if we did. The drugs robbed my mom of 30 years of her life and thousands and thousands of dollars.
Several months ago we started to wean her off the drugs and everyone who sees her now is shocked that this is the same miserable person they've seen for years.
I also know of a young man who was given every psychotropic drug they could find. He is now in prison and probably about 5 ft tall. These drugs stunt growth and if this youngster didn't have problems before they started on him, he certainly did afterward.
Almost all of these mass killers are on drugs.
Why do they warn about suicide being a side effect of these drugs? Why give them if they're going to cause suicide? It's irresponsible.
There’s really no evidence that they *cause* suicide. There’s evidence that people with mental illnesses are prone to committing suicide, regardless of whether they’re taking psychoactive drugs or not, and nowadays a lot of them are taking drugs, so there’s a superficial correlation. No causative relationship has ever been found, and in fact there’s a great deal of evidence that use of antidepressants is correlated with a reduced suicide rate. http://www.healthywomen.org/resources/womenshealthinthenews/dbhealthnews/studybenefitsofantidepressantsoutweighrisks http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-08/econ-ais082708.php There was also a huge jump in youth suicides during the first year after the FDA mandated the “black box warning” on SSRIs, triggering a sharp drop in prescriptions.
And an awful lot of the suicides and murders committed by people who have been taking psychoactive drugs occur shortly after they have *stopped* taking them (in most cases, against medical advice). They were acting suicidal or homicidal before they were put on the drugs, which is *why* they were put on the drugs, their behavior improved while they were on the drugs, and then when they stopped the drugs, their behavior reverted to suicidal or homicidal. Obviously when dealing with mentally ill people and synthetic pharmaceuticals, there are always going to be cases where the two don’t mix well. But that doesn’t mean the drugs should be taken off the market, any more than the well-documented phenomenon of people with severe peanut allergies means peanuts should be taken off the market.
Drugs are not expected to “cure” mental illness, any more than insulin is expected to cure diabetes. At best, drugs improve or even temporarily eliminate the symptoms. People who are expecting pills to magically cure something as complex and serious as mental illness are inevitably going to be disappointed.
In some cases, especially with adolescents and young adults who are still dependent on their families, I’m afraid many parents put too much faith in the pills, figuring that now that Johnny’s “on medication” we can stop worrying about him and go back to being totally self-absorbed (which in many cases, was probably the original cause of Johnny’s mental instability). Kids who have been attending an ordinary public school and become mentally unstable, are given pills and sent right back to the school, because often parents, school officials, and doctors are operating on the theory that the one and only objective is for the kid to be “normal”, and do what all the other kids do. The kid may in fact need medication, but may need to be in a totally different daily environment just as badly. Sometimes the resistance to the need for such a change is ideological, and sometimes it’s more just a matter of practical necessity, but it’s harmful either way — and it has nothing to do with the drugs.
My schizophrenic half sister has never been on medication, and is a complete disaster. Lives in a makeshift tent, in and out of jail constantly on various disorderly conduct type charges, all her teeth rotted out a long time ago, rarely if ever bathes, hair is all matted — and the law says she can’t be medicated without her consent, and she won’t consent because she insists there’s nothing wrong with her. Seeing her like this causes extreme emotional distress for my elderly father and my half brother.
On the other hand, I rent a room to a young lady who is slowly making her way through college while suffering from severe depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. She grew up in the care of an unmedicated schizophrenic mother, so almost certainly has both genetic and environmental causes for her mental illness. She’s on a cocktail of drugs and they DO work. They’re not perfect, and occasionally need adjusting, but they keep her functional, which she really wasn’t before she started on medication. Her mother (after committing some crimes) was finally forced to go on medication, and is now doing okay, living on her own and behaving reasonably normally, though if you talk to her at length you can tell there’s still some disordered thinking going on.
Be careful about swallowing the anti-drug line too readily. Obviously when you have a close relative who’s had a bad experience with them, it’s harder to do that, but the extreme anti-psychoactive drug ideology is being pushed primarily by Scientology and its many front groups, and also by lawyers who are eager to after deep-pocketed drug companies in tear-jerker courtroom dramas featuring the parents and siblings of someone who committed suicide. The murders and suicides make headlines, but the much larger number of people who take these drugs and simply lead ordinary productive lives that they were unable to lead without drugs, don’t make any headlines. This leaves a popular impression that the drugs must somehow be causing the headline-grabbing problems, but there is simply no empirical data to back that up.
That whole class of drugs (psychotropics) scares the crap out of me. I’m so sorry to hear about your mom. 30 years is unimaginable. Thankfully our experiences weren’t as long, but they are still somewhat ongoing, a year after weaning.
Long story as short as possible - five years ago husband has extremely hard time dealing with unexpected death of his mom, develops anxiety issues, made worse by new highly stressful sales job, a year later is put on antidepressants and blood pressure meds. Anxiety gets worse, has panic attacks, agitation, insomnia, akathisia, racing thoughts, goes “real dark” sometimes, extrapolates fear to extremes, exhibits some paranoia. Concerned, we go to the dr (our GP) together, where he is diagnosed “soft” bipolar and put on a different antidepressant (switched from SSRI to SNRI).
3 weeks later after the third and final dose increase, he has what can only be called a psychotic episode. Alarmed, we return to the same dr, who becomes alarmed himself, pulls him back to a lower dose of the SNRI, adds a mood stabilizer and sends him off to a psych. Psych confirms the diagnosis, switches him to two different antidepressants and changes the mood stabilizer to an antipsychotic.
When asked about psychotherapy, the psych says “let’s get your meds regulated first.” Red flag #1. Thus begins 3 months of drug horror, during which drug after drug was switched, while the two antidepressants remained constant. He became a shadow of himself, had more side effects than I can list here - horrible ones, both physical and mental - I said more than once that the anticrazy drugs actually made him crazy, and never lost the anxiety, agitation etc, but he did lose his job. Each day was a herculean effort to just get through.
Meanwhile I’m reading all about these drugs and their side effects and lo and behold, I find out that antidepressants can WORSEN anxiety and can CAUSE agitation, insomnia, akathisia, racing thoughts, paranoia, even mania in people who had never before evidenced any signs of such. I learned about something called “substance induced mood disorder” and I started to wonder if the ADs were largely causing the problem in the first place.
During this five year period culminating in that three months of hell, he was on - in the following subsequent and/or simultaneous order - zoloft, then wellbutrin, then effexor + risperdal, switched then to cymbalta + wellbutrin which remained constant while he tried seroquel, depakote, lamictal, back to seroquel, also with some xanax thrown in here and there. Then lithium was suggested, at which we both balked.
So off we go to the psych together, armed with peer literature, FDA warnings, drug inserts and other assorted articles in support of our findings that ADs can cause all he had been experiencing before the BP diagnosis, and we were arrogantly told that we were in denial about the diagnosis, that he was the doctor and as his wife I was interfering with his treatment of my husband, that there was no way that ADs could cause all we were claiming (despite the evidence we had accumulated), in fact, he had been on the consulting board during cymbalta’s development. That last was of course a HUGE red flag.
It was an incredible hour, after which we dismissed him utterly and decided to wean slowly and see what would happen. Thus began another three months of hell, during which I quickly became glad he was unemployed and could rest as much as possible - cymbalta is horrible to wean from, to say the least. Withdrawal symptom list is too long to really get into, but let’s just say this - there’s a list of 50 different ones in a book I have, and he hit about 45 at one time or another.
Anyway, then for several more months after that, he had intermittent withdrawal symptoms that largely went away at the beginning of this year, but he is STILL dealing with some stuff. Oh, and I forgot - the initial BP diagnosis was thrown out by a second opinion, a psych who said that absolutely, antidepressants can cause all those things, but even HE wants to put him on remeron for his anxiety. And yes, he did have initial anxiety issues resulting from his mom’s death. But he never should have had to go through all that he did.
I know that many people say some of these drugs save lives, and that’s great, but wow, are they overprescribed. Thanks in large part to the sunshine and lollipops put out there by the pharmaceutical companies, doctors are way too fast and loose with these drugs - they are the number one prescribed class in America today and it is estimated that 1 in 10 of us take some sort of psychotropic or another. Truly frightening.
Meanwhile, you wouldn’t believe the huge amount of anecdotal discussion out there among people who have suffered on these drugs. It’s quite the education. And thank God for the internet, or my husband would likely still be on them. Oh, one more thing, all the stuff that the psych said couldn’t possibly be caused by antidepressants? Gone.
Frankly, I need to see ONE successful case of drugs curing a mental illness. It has probably happened, I’m just not familiar with it but I know of plenty that have ended in disaster.
psychotropic drugs do not cure MI. They control the symptoms. For example, someone with unbearable negative voices will have the voices diminish on certain drugs.
G-d help us. More SSRIs for children.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
That is how the system works, "EXPERT WITNESSES" is what the courts use. Those experts are not any more expert than you or I. There are schools out there that teach anyone to become an EXPERT WITNESS, and the jurors don't know the difference.
Prednisone is NOT a psych med.
And you are not a child
Apples and Oranges.
The transformation is dramatic. I have six siblings and even the doubters are no longer doubters. Some believe doctors know what they're doing but I had the power to ask for the withdrawal and when I suggested it to the nursing home personnel, they were more than in agreement. They contacted her MD who has cooperated beautifully and there is not one member of our family who can deny that our mom is in better shape now and happier than we've seen her in years. It's unbelievable. She is a truly happy person and we're happy, too.
Some of us wanted her put on fish oil, Vit C, Vit E, and a multi vitamin. She was put on them and the TIAs stopped.
Due to the extreme expense of all her drugs and she seemed to be failing, some siblings thought we could eliminate the supplements as there was no proof they did her any good anyway.
Lo and behold, the TIAs started again. Some of us siblings decided we would pay for the supplements ourselves so she was put back on them. She has not had a TIA since and since then the withdrawal of the drugs has been done and we have a whole new mom.
Thanks for posting the article. Interesting thread also.
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