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Mass psychosis in the US
Al Jazeera ^ | July 12th 2011 | James Ridgeway

Posted on 07/13/2011 10:35:51 AM PDT by Cardhu

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore

By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."

Cost benefit analysis

What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."

A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."

In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"

For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.

Turning people into zombies

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.

A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.

Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."

Bottom line:Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population


TOPICS: Extended News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: aljazeera; antipsychotics; psychiatrists; psychoticislam
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To: dagogo redux; beaversmom; To-Whose-Benefit?

my ex-wife got my son diagnosed as “ADD” after ONE visit to a well-respected and credentialed Doctor.
medication was IMMEDIATELY prescribed, and taken.

i didn’t know about it. i only learned of of it, BECAUSE i noticed abnormal behavior, caused by the drugs !

he’s a good boy. not a discipline problem. (and i’ve never had to spank him, not once!)
they said he had problems with staying focused.
i said “watch him play video games for hours, learning goals, advancing, etc.”. sure i’d prefer he was reading.
but he has NO problem with “focus”, if a subject is made interesting.
(i taught him negative numbers, and stuff from physics, years before he learned them in school. i know how to teach him.)

...then, they said he has trouble remember things.
(apparently another boiler plate “symptom” to drug boys for ADD or ADHD, along with inability to keep their energy seated for many boring hours with boring teachers...)

so i had him begin reciting the ENTIRE history of the 7 tribes of Bionicles, with the complete history of their world and culture. ...then, started him naming Pokemon, with ALL their evolution stages...
after about TWO HUNDRED, they finally got the message...
and my son remains drug free.


21 posted on 07/13/2011 12:16:18 PM PDT by Elendur (the hope and change i need: Sarah / Colonel West in 2012)
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To: Elendur

Good for you!


22 posted on 07/13/2011 12:19:16 PM PDT by beaversmom
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To: Elendur

“my son remains drug free.”

Good On You! Keep him that way. It’s not just the antipsychotics either.

http://www.ssristories.com/

There’s over 4600 independent news reports of violence involving SSRI antidepressants there.

“65 School Shootings/Incidents Involving SSRIs

Most of the stories on this site describe events that occurred after the year 2000. The increase in online news material and the efficiency of search engines has greatly increased the ability to track stories. Even these 4,600+ documented stories only represent the tip of an iceberg since most stories do not make it into the media. There are 112 cases of bizarre behavior, 65 school shootings/incidents, 68 road rage tragedies, 18 air rage incidents, 101 arson cases, 70 postpartum depression cases, over 1,000 murders (homicides) or murder attempts, over 300 murder-suicides (30% committed by women) and other acts of violence including workplace violence on this site. There are also over 100 Journal Articles and FDA reports listed in the Index. They are at the top of the Index immediately below the 65 school shootings/incidents and the 25 “won” cases.
An Absence of Controlled Scientific Evidence

In the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2009, there is a journal article by Joel M. Kauffman, Ph.D., which is titled: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) Drugs: More Risk Than Benefits?” In reference to SSRIStories.com, Dr. Kaufmann made the following statement: “Since no clinical trial involving multiple homicides is ever likely to be run, no firmer evidence is likely to be found. Healy noted that much of the evidence for suicide and murder came from the efforts of journalists and lawyers”.

To read the full article go to the Links page on this site (click the button at the bottom of this page).”

When the smoke finally clears on this drugging scam, it will be recognized in hindsight as the worst, Doctor CAUSED public health Disaster in American history.


23 posted on 07/13/2011 12:28:22 PM PDT by To-Whose-Benefit? (It is Error alone which needs the support of Government. The Truth can stand by itself.)
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To: IWONDR

“i’m guessing that the large increase in children being classified as disabled relates to the subsequent eligibility for SSI payments ?”

You’re spot on right. Medicare payments are also tied to SSI eligibility for people 64 and under. One of the requirements for eligibilty is that the patient be expected to die. So the psych drug industry simply decides that people are potential suicides, because if they Don’t write them up that way, they are committing

1: Federal Healthcare Fraud by billing medicare
2: Federal Tax Fraud

These drug peddlers are a huge part of Why Social Security is going down in flames. But they’re Far more detestable than being simple financial frauds, FAR more detestable:

http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/1index.html


24 posted on 07/13/2011 12:47:09 PM PDT by To-Whose-Benefit? (It is Error alone which needs the support of Government. The Truth can stand by itself.)
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To: To-Whose-Benefit?

Those are only two of the several federal crimes they commit.


25 posted on 07/13/2011 12:58:58 PM PDT by darkangel82 (I don't have a superiority complex, I'm just better than you.)
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To: To-Whose-Benefit?; Signalman

Also when I saw the title I thought it was talking about Congress.


26 posted on 07/13/2011 1:11:13 PM PDT by darkangel82 (I don't have a superiority complex, I'm just better than you.)
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To: beaversmom

My youngest son was not learning to read in school by the second grade. We became worried because he seemed to be less reading ready than when he was at the beginning of first grade. I started observing him in class by volunteering for everything I could. I observed a school experience of constant noise and a three ring circus all day long.

At the same time the “experts” at the school decided he needed ritlan and told me to get him on that drug right away. That is when we pulled him out for homeschool and he was healed to be a happy and intellegent human boy in life rather than a mentally and spiritually abused animal in a zoo.


27 posted on 07/13/2011 1:25:50 PM PDT by SaraJohnson
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To: dangus

“You’re believing the crap churned out by Al Jazeera? The article conflates anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic, ADD, and anti-depressants into the inaccurate catch-all, “anti-psychotic” and then claims we’re all on anti-psychotics.”

Agreed. Being depressed is not being psychotic. Strapping on a suicide bomb, now that’s being psychotic. Maybe they ought to be taking this stuff.


28 posted on 07/13/2011 2:58:50 PM PDT by beef (Who Killed Kennewick Man?)
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To: SaraJohnson

Wow, you didn’t have to put him on 4 drugs! One drug after the other to combat the symptoms of the previous prescription. So glad your son had you for a mom.


29 posted on 07/13/2011 3:35:38 PM PDT by beaversmom
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To: beaversmom

It is rare when your children fully realize when you make a major sacrifice for them and pull them out of harm’s way when that course of events is the way of the world. Everybody was doing one thing and we whipped him out and were named strange by his teachers and many of his friends’ parents. Some of them would no longer permit their children to play with him since we left the herd and all.

In this case, my son actually knows what happened and what his dad and I did for him for many reasons but one is that he had friends in college (he just graduated!) who were put on the drugs and now suffer greatly as drug addicts who have lost themselves.

He thanks us often and he actually listens to us. It is difficult for parents to know when to conform and when to become “strange.”


30 posted on 07/13/2011 3:55:47 PM PDT by SaraJohnson
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To: SaraJohnson
Well I really congratulate you for going against the system like that. It's not easy. My tendency is to conform and not be thought of as strange too. I've really had to fight against that part of my personality. I hate personal conflict, but sometimes you have to ignore that knot in the stomach and do what you know to be right.

I have a former neighbor that put her daughter on medication when her daughter was in school in the 80's/90's. She regrets it now. Her daughter has really struggled with drug abuse problems.

31 posted on 07/13/2011 5:12:43 PM PDT by beaversmom
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To: beaversmom

Well I really congratulate you...


Well, to be perfectly honest, Jesus did it. LOL! I didn’t what the heck I was doing so I asked Him to show me what to do!


32 posted on 07/13/2011 5:34:43 PM PDT by SaraJohnson
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To: Cardhu
My career began during the age of Thorazine and Haldol. I can tell you the newer drugs are far superior. They didn't call it "the thorazine shuffle" for nothing. Nobody ever talks about a "Risperdol" shuffle.

And, you seldom need companion drugs to control extrapyramidal symptoms any more either.

It may well be the case that so-called "anti-psychotics" are prescribed promiscuously by certain psychiatrists, but even if, they are less harmlful than their predeccessors.

33 posted on 07/13/2011 6:24:55 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard
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To: hinckley buzzard

I don’t suppose you bothered to download & read the documents I linked to, did you?

“And, you seldom need companion drugs to control extrapyramidal symptoms any more either.”

Your statement is factually inaccurate. Anti-Parkinson drugs are indeed needed with today’s atypical antipsychotics. Please get on board with the current Facts, before rushing to defend drugs which are No better, and in many instances Worse than the 1st generation drugs.

http://psychroaches.blogspot.com/search/label/Akathisia

The current Courtroom slugfest over J&J’s Risperdal lies in J&J’s falsely marketing, and over marketing, Risperdal as safer and more effective than Thorazine, Haldol, Stelazine and all the Other 1st generation antipsychotics.

And please spell the name of J&J’s wretched Brain Eating drug correctly next time.

NONE of those drugs, OR Psychiatric/Psychological THEORIES - Not Science, but THEORIES - are worth the powder to blow them to the Nether Regions, and the US VA admits it. Where are you going to find a larger patient population/sample size than the US VA?

“No Positive Outcome”, no matter How the drugs are mixed and matched.

http://psychroaches.blogspot.com/2010/12/dear-us-department-of-veterans-affairs.html

“I can tell you the newer drugs are far superior.”

You can Tell other people anything you want to tell them, but that alone doesn’t make it the truth.


34 posted on 07/15/2011 11:38:46 AM PDT by To-Whose-Benefit? (It is Error alone which needs the support of Government. The Truth can stand by itself.)
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