Have a great 2018

I just wish all of those who are trying to raise awareness and those who have been injured by these drugs a great 2018.

10th anniversary of Cymbalta's victim Traci Johnson: drug induced suicidal ideation

Since 2008 I remember Traci Johnson tragic death in Eli-Lilly facilities during Cymbalta clinical trials. I started posting at my blog Justana and now I publish there and here. This beautiful and great woman hanged herself as a side effect of the drug Cymbalta. Her story is known by all of those who are trying hard to raise awareness about the side effects of psychiatric drugs whether they are patients or doctors like Peter Breggin, David Healy and so many others. When I first saw her picture I was amazed because I thought she resembles me. I asked my dad and he agreed. Maybe this resemblance affected my choice among so many other hideous stories of young people and children losing their lives because of antidepressants SSRIs. I found the left picture yesterday when I was searching to make this post and the picture at the right by Jacqueline Larma/AP showing - "Pallbearers carry the coffin of Traci Johnson out of the Philadelphia church where she was active in everything from teaching Sunday school to singing in the choir. Johnson, 19, committed suicide Saturday in an Indianapolis clinic."
 







R.I.P. little angel.
I am representing all colors in this candle because you are shinning so much that you light is being seen from far.

Coming off of Klonopin, Xanax or Ativan

Melanie Safka's Look what they've done to my brain, ma

I posted this song on May, 2009. Nothing changed and more people are being prescribed drugs that
alter body, mind and soul. They don't spare the children.
In Brazil there is not a single book, article or paragraph in Portuguese that approaches a single side effect.
I contact people that I know are aware but they don't wanna talk about it.

Look what they've done to my song, ma
Look what they've done to my song
Well it's the only thing that I could do half right
And it's turning out all wrong, ma
Look what they've done to my song.

Look what they've done to my brain, ma
Look what they've done to my brain
Well they picked it like a chicken bone
And I think I'm half insane, ma
Look what they've done to my song.

I wish I could find a good book to live in
Wish I could find a good book
Will if I cold find a real good book
I'd never have to come out and look
Look what they've done to my song.

It'll be all right ma, maybe it'll be okay
Well if the people are buying tears I'll be rich someday, ma
Look what they've done to my song.

Ils ont change ma chanson ma
Ils ont change ma chanson
C'est la seule chose que je peux faire
Et ce n'est pas bon ma
Ils ont change ma chanson.

Look what they've done to my song, ma
Look what they've done to my song
Well they tied it up in a plastic bag and they turned it upside down
Look what they've done to my song, ma.

Look what they've done to my song, ma
Look what they've done to my song
It's the only thing I could do all right and they turned it upside down
Look what they've done to my song, ma.

Peter Breggin: "The drugs are changing your brain"

 Trailblazing psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, MD in his first of the series: Simple Truths About Psychiatry: Do You Have A Biochemical Imbalance? Dr. Breggin debunks the myth of biochemical imbalance and examines what is known about "mental illness." Further information may be found on Dr. Breggin's website and in his many books, including his latest: "Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families."

Me? A Psychoanalyst?

I'm enrolling on a formation of psychoanalyst course.
In Brazil psychoanalysis is practiced by numerous great professionals and, of course, some not that great and even unethical.

I did psychoanalysis myself  but sitting on the chair instead of the sofa is not an easy choice.
I thought a lot and, funny, suffered a lot to have the guts to come up with the conclusion that this is something I have to do.

I still cannot explain clearly. It is as if psychoanalysis has chosen me and not the opposite. I have been preparing myself to do it without noticing. I don't believe that people go to be a therapist in a very happy mood: "Yippee! Yippee! I'm going to be a therapist!"
I have an idea of what is to come and... OMY! it is not easy. The responsibility, the numerous problems people have...

I want to thank all of you who received me so well and treated me so kindly. I feel part of a group here and it empowered me to take this decision.

I just hope I can do something to help people.

.

US mental institutions are prisons: Alison Hymes case

We are told over and over again that US is democratic or even that it is the most democratic country. The facts reveals the opposite. We have as recently the cases of Brad Manning and Edward Snowden as examples of a regime that is far from being democratic.
Other cases that are not very known involve tasering people till death like what happened to 18 years-old artist Israel Hernandez tasered in the heart till death by Miami police.

If "normal" citizens are being treated this way those who are in mental institutions don't count. Once someone is labelled a mental illness they are not considered human anymore. This is a fact.

I wrote about Alison Hymes at this post. Nothing is being done and she continues to suffer the most heinous treatment in the Western State Hospital, Virginia.
Alison has already had her condition worsened due to the treatment the Virginia's hospital is giving her in a very deep degree. They keep on treating her like an animal.
Being tortured by physicians in a hospital; receiving a treatment that is causing more harm...*
This is surreal but we are living in the most dark of all humankind ages. History will tell the story.
Alison Hymes? Until when?

*Iatrogenesis is the leading cause of death in US.

(first published at Hella Heaven.)

Update:
I wrote to Virginia's governor Bob McDowell this message:

Dear Mr. McDowell,

I'm a Brazilian citizens and as a mental health advocate I would like to call to your attention what is happening to Alison Hymes at the From Western State Hospital.
This is the the report of one of her friends that is at Mindfreedom:

"Resident and longtime MindFreedom member Alison Hymes, on Wednesday, 7/3/13, had a re-commitment hearing. This hearing marked the 6 month, 1/2 year point, in her imprisonment at Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia.

The result of this hearing is that she was given another 45 days in the hospital after which she will be given another hearing. The result could have been worse as potentially she could have had to wait another 6 months for a hearing.

The bad news, according to Alison, is that the staff at the hospital are not talking about releasing her. She wishes to return to her condominium, her community, and the life she was living before imprisonment at Western State Hospital.

Talking to her over the phone it is not always easy to understand what she is saying. Her words are slurred and garbled. She claims that this is so because the hospital staff won't return  her dentures to her. Dentures they took from her.

In a previous alert we claimed she was taking lamictal rather than a neuroleptic. Following a previous hearing with her treatment team this is no longer true. Apparently her doctor thought it necessary to put her back on the drug prolixin. She is receiving shots of prolixin, a long acting injectable, every two weeks. She is also still receiving a daily dose of anti-convulsion drug lamictal.

She had gained much weight since being put on seroquel, the atypical neuroleptic she was receiving during her last hospitalization, and she is very sensitive, as you can well imagine anybody would be, about this issue. She doesn't like the effects of the prolixin, she understands it is a harmful substance, with a potential for doing her a great deal of damage, and she wishes to be taken off it.

Alison was the recipient of a kidney following lithium poisoning after a previous incident of psychiatric malpractice. Her friends and allies worry that keeping her at Western State Hospital
for any length of time will only further endanger her health. She says the medical staff at Western say she needs an operation, on an ulcer, but that the hospital is slow to get around to operating.

Asked what she would tell other members of MindFreedom she said, "I need to get out as soon as possible. I need to get out.""

The treatment Alison Hymes is receiving is criminal.
I hope Alison can count on your mercy to stop being tortured this way.

Sincerely yours,
Ana Luiza Lima

Let's hope for the better.

Remembering David Rosenham experiment: Being Sane in Insane Places

If done again  the same result would be achieved.

On Being Sane In Insane Places

David L. Rosenhan*

How do we know precisely what constitutes “normality” or mental illness?  Conventional wisdom suggests that specially trained professionals have the ability to make reasonably accurate diagnoses.  In this research, however, David Rosenhan provides evidence to challenge this assumption.  What is -- or is not -- “normal” may have much to do with the labels that are applied to people in particular settings.

             If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?

            The question is neither capricious nor itself insane.  However much we may be personally convinced that we can tell the normal from the abnormal, the evidence is simply not compelling.  It is commonplace, for example, to read about murder trials wherein eminent psychiatrists for the defense are contradicted by equally eminent psychiatrists for the prosecution on the matter of the defendant’s sanity.  More generally, there are a great deal of conflicting data on the reliability, utility, and meaning of such terms as “sanity,” “insanity,” “mental illness,” and “schizophrenia.”  Finally, as early as 1934, {Ruth} Benedict suggested that normality and abnormality are not universal.[1]  What is viewed as normal in one culture may be seen as quite aberrant in another.  Thus, notions of normality and abnormality may not be quite as accurate as people believe they are.

            To raise questions regarding normality and abnormality is in no way to question the fact that some behaviors are deviant or odd.  Murder is deviant.  So, too, are hallucinations.  Nor does raising such questions deny the existence of the personal anguish that is often associated with “mental illness.”  Anxiety and depression exist.  Psychological suffering exists.  But normality and abnormality, sanity and insanity, and the diagnoses that flow from them may be less substantive than many believe them to be.

            At its heart, the question of whether the sane can be distinguished from the insane (and whether degrees of insanity can be distinguished from each other) is a simple matter:  Do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them?  From Bleuler, through Kretchmer, through the formulators of the recently revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the belief has been strong that patients present symptoms, that those symptoms can be categorized, and, implicitly, that the sane are distinguishable from the insane.  More recently, however, this belief has been questioned.  Based in part on theoretical and anthropological considerations, but also on philosophical, legal, and therapeutic ones, the view has grown that psychological categorization of mental illness is useless at best and downright harmful, misleading, and pejorative at worst.  Psychiatric diagnoses, in this view, are in the minds of observers and are not valid summaries of characteristics displayed by the observed.

            Gains can be made in deciding which of these is more nearly accurate by getting normal people (that is, people who do not have, and have never suffered, symptoms of serious psychiatric disorders) admitted to psychiatric hospitals and then determining whether they were discovered to be sane and, if so, how.  If the sanity of such pseudopatients were always detected, there would be prima facie evidence that a sane individual can be distinguished from the insane context in which he is found.  Normality (and presumably abnormality) is distinct enough that it can be recognized wherever it occurs, for it is carried within the person.  If, on the other hand, the sanity of the pseudopatients were never discovered, serious difficulties would arise for those who support traditional modes of psychiatric diagnosis.  Given that the hospital staff was not incompetent, that the pseudopatient had been behaving as sanely as he had been out of the hospital, and that it had never been previously suggested that he belonged in a psychiatric hospital, such an unlikely outcome would support the view that psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient but much about the environment in which an observer finds him.

            This article describes such an experiment.  Eight sane people gained secret admission to 12 different hospitals.  Their diagnostic experiences constitute the data of the first part of this article; the remainder is devoted to a description of their experiences in psychiatric institutions.  Too few psychiatrists and psychologists, even those who have worked in such hospitals, know what the experience is like.  They rarely talk about it with former patients, perhaps because they distrust information coming from the previously insane.  Those who have worked in psychiatric hospitals are likely to have adapted so thoroughly to the settings that they are insensitive to the impact of that experience.  And while there have been occasional reports of researchers who submitted themselves to psychiatric hospitalization, these researchers have commonly remained in the hospitals for short periods of time, often with the knowledge of the hospital staff.  It is difficult to know the extent to which they were treated like patients or like research colleagues.  Nevertheless, their reports about the inside of the psychiatric hospital have been valuable.  This article extends those efforts.

 (keep reading)

Zyprexa deaths in clinical trials and after the drug on the market

I wonder how many deaths Eli-Lilly has had in it's facilities during clinical trials.
These are the deaths reported at the Zyprexa leaflet under "side effects":

"Collective data gathered from 17 placebo-controlled clinical studies (n=5106) involving the use of atypical antipsychotic agents, including olanzapine, for the treatment of behavioral disorders in the elderly patient with dementia showed a risk of death 1.6 to 1.7 times greater in the drug treated patient than in the placebo treated patient. The average length of duration for the trials was 10 weeks with the cause of death in the majority of cases, though not all, reported as either cardiovascular (e.g., heart failure, sudden death) or infectious (e.g., pneumonia) in nature. Similar results (i.e., increased risk of mortality with atypical antipsychotics) were reported in another meta-analysis involving elderly dementia patients that consisted of 15 randomized, placebo-controlled trials (n=3353) of 10 to 12 weeks in duration. Olanzapine is not approved by the FDA for use in the treatment of behavioral disorders in elderly patients with dementia.

Cerebrovascular adverse events (e.g., stroke, transient ischemic attack) which included fatalities have been reported in trials of olanzapine on elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis. There was a significantly higher incidence of cerebrovascular adverse events in patients treated with olanzapine when compared to patients treated with placebo. However, the association between the use of atypical antipsychotics (i.e., risperidone, olanzapine) and the risk of cerebrovascular events appears to be somewhat controversial. The results of a case-control study found no increased risk of cerebrovascular events in elderly patients treated with atypical antipsychotics."

After approving the drug FDA is investigating two deaths:

FDA Probes Deaths Linked to Long-Acting Zyprexa
By John Gever, Deputy Managing Editor, MedPage Today
Published: June 18, 2013

SILVER SPRING, Md. -- Two patients died 3-4 days after injections with the long-acting antipsychotic drug olanzapine pamoate (Zyprexa Relprevv), prompting an FDA investigation.

The agency has not determined whether the drug caused the fatalities. "At this time, FDA is continuing to evaluate these deaths and will provide an update when more information is available," it said in a statement Tuesday.

Both patients received intramuscular injections of the drug at appropriate doses, the FDA said, but tests showed "very high olanzapine blood levels after death."

High doses are known to induce delirium, cardiopulmonary arrest, cardiac arrhythmias, and impaired consciousness ranging from sedation to coma.

The long-acting form of olanzapine was approved with a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy that requires patients to remain in the clinic for a 3-hour monitoring period and to be escorted home afterward. The requirement was imposed after some patients in clinical trials became delirious or lost consciousness shortly after receiving injections.

These events, dubbed post-injection delirium-sedation syndrome (PDSS), were traced to an unexpectedly rapid release of olanzapine into circulation leading to very high blood levels of the drug.

However, all those cases occurred within hours of injection, not days, and no deaths were attributed to the syndrome, the FDA said.

Olanzapine pamoate is approved for injection every 2-4 weeks for treating patients with schizophrenia. It is one of several long-acting formulations of "atypical" antipsychotic drugs currently available. PDSS has not been seen with those other products.

From: MepageToday.

Raising awareness without others is almost impossible - second part

Mark and D Bunker left two good comments about the post below. I noticed that it is not clear that I'm talking about my experience when I speak to Brazilians.
Take a look at my answer below.
I thank you all for receiving me in such a warmth way. It would be impossible without being part of a group fighting the same war and being there when I needed backup.
I just regret some disagreements that were only justified by our tiredness and frustration of always having in the back of our minds: "is it worthy? will this project lead anywhere?".
We just have to forget about quick changes. 
What is important is raising awareness and the more people in the army the better.
A lie repeated becomes truth but the truth repeated will be echoed to the right person and prevent another life being destroyed.
Love to all of you..

 Mark p.s.2 said...

"they ask the same questions" they are hypnotized by the machine of consumerism and magical pills.

"people trust their doctors" people are supposed to trust their doctors, the problem is the fake scientific evidence saying psychiatric drugs work.

"I almost have to beg to people to listen" people who do not want to listen , will not believe what you say. Only speak to those who ask to hear your opinion.

May 3, 2013 at 4:36 AM

 

 D Bunker said...

"It is useless because a doctor will "prove" me wrong."

Then where are all those Doctors, Right Here, who are 'Proving' you wrong?

They're not here, the same way they're not at my page, because they Can't prove you wrong.

In fact. the Only thing they can Prove, is that they are Frauds, Con Artists, and Blow Hards.

For the moment, let's put the Worthless, Brain Eating Drugs aside.

Even the people who've Been poisoned by these Lawless Quacks, in the main, complain that we should substitute Psycho-Social counseling 1st and foremost. Whatever we do, Stop Attacking the Psycho-Bulls**t sessions.

If Any of that crap worked, Why are people supposed to need repeat Psyco-BS sessions for Life?

If it was Worth anything, at All, it would Work Permanently in 6 months tops.

But as you and I both know, it doesn't work and it Can't work, . . . BECAUSE, . . . it's Not actually medical, it's the Idiot, Political Scientism of Atheists, Nazis, and Communists.

Here, Share This with your readers. Both of these Psychiatric Super Geniuses are on the internet picking at nits.

http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2012/12/18/speaking-of-infringement/

They are Both Americans, and they don't even know the US Constitution from the Declaration of Independence.

Then, rather than discuss their PREJUDICES based on WRONG ASSUMPTIONS, the owner shuts off the comments.

And these 2 Psychiatrists are supposed to be the Good Ones.

There is simply No Hope for this field. None.

May 4, 2013 at 7:50 AM

 

 Ana said...

Mark and D Bunker,

I agree with all you both said.
It is only when I speak to Brazilians that I have these problems.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing at the internet similar to what we find in English.

I could make this blog because of all of you. There is a group of people who are writing books - none has been translated to Portuguese -, blogging, manifesting and keep raising awareness even if things don't change.

If I started a blog in Portuguese I would have nobody but the labs commenting saying that I'm crazy and "these drugs are helping millions of people, blah blah blah...".

I only discovered the truth by researching in English.

U should have made it clear at the post that this is about nations that don't have English as language.

It is the same in French. There is not a group of French people that are united doing what is done in English.

Sometimes I think that I'm the only person bellow the Equator that is in contact with these great people who have integrity and dignity.

This is strange. I'll search more because it simply can't be.

I have a virtual friend who has a blog where he writes about the barbaric way he was treated in a mental institution.

He is alone.

May 23, 2013 at 3:31 AM

 

Raising awareness without others is almost impossible

'A pill for every ill" leads to other pills to cope with side effects;

I don't know if it is only me but I have already explained the problems of psychiatric drugs to some people and when I met them again they ask the same questions and I have the feeling that all I said was not heard.

Maybe I speak too much and might be changing topics before making a point clear. I usually have the feeling I would have to spend one week talking to someone to explain what is happening to medicine.

The problem is that people trust their doctors. I once did and who knows I would ask myself if this lunatic who is claiming that the drug I'm taking can make me suicidal is right?

As there is nothing written in Portuguese, not a single physician speaks out, and the pharmaceutical industry is omnipresent there are no sources I can give to people.

I almost have to beg to people to listen because what I have to convey might save their lives of the life of a family member.

It is useless because a doctor will "prove" me wrong.

Bloggers who have stopped must be counted!

I've noticed that many good bloggers have stop blogging and I think we should do something.

There are some great blogs full of invaluable information that are not on Google anymore because they are not updated for more than 3 months.

I don't know what to do but we should think about something because every blog that raises awareness on the harms of psychiatric drugs is part of a strong group of people. We are in this together.

Information can save lives, Recently I took a drug for back pain that had "cariprodosol" and I felt numerous side effects. I searched, in English, - in Portuguese there is nothing - and found out that this drug has been banned first in Norway and finally from EU, The patent has already expired and we know that this is the reason they took it from the market and produced detailed information about numerous side effects.

I stop taking the pill.
I don't know what to do and I'm just raising the issue. I remember finding Rob Robinson's blog and reading what he had gone through. It helped me a lot.

Dr. David Healy: 60 million suicides per year in England and Wales

Dr. David Healy published this post at his blog and I felt like sharing.
I admire his work and I follow his blog. He is at my list of psychiatrists who are bright because they understand human condition and are not blind to other fields especially those who are from the humanities.
Most psychiatrist are illiterate. Yep! Being literate does not mean someone can read. It also means that one has the ability to read a novel and critically and analytically.

Usually those who are not insensible for other fields use literature or philosophy at their discourse from time to time.

If a doctor only pays attention on the symptom's check list and have a poor understandment of other fields they will not be a good professional for it takes other knowledge to get close to a comprehension of what patient's are reporting.

Without other fields it is impossible to see what the patient is not reporting.


Left Hanging: Suicide in Bridgend
March 12, 2013
The Figures

In the England and Wales there are roughly 5000 suicides in roughly 60 million people per year. This would until recently have led to around 2000 hangings per year, 34 hangings per million people per year, 3.5 per 100,000 people per year.
Bridgend in South Wales has a population of 40,000. The greater

Bridgend area has a population of 130,000. There should be 18 hangings per 100,000 people over a 5 year period, 24 per 130,000 per year.

In recent years however in both the US and UK there has been a rise in the number of hangings so that this mode of death now accounts for 50% of cases. If this applies in the Bridgend area, we might expect 28 hangings per 130,000 over a 5 year period, roughly 6 per year.

There were in fact 79 hangings in Bridgend between January 2007 and February 2012. The hangings continue unabated, so the true figure may be in the 90s. This means there have been 16 per year – an excess of 10 or more hangings per year.

Vanishing 

Suicides There have likely been a lot more self-destructions than this in Bridgend. Coroners have considerable discretion and recently a great deal of encouragement to use narrative, open or death by misadventure verdicts rather than to record a verdict of suicide. To record a suicide verdict they should be satisfied that the person intended to kill themselves. One of the primary indicators of intent is a suicide note. In the Bridgend cases, there have been few suicide notes. This has made it easy for coroners to manage perceptions of what might be going on.

Having a narrative or open verdict can be extremely important for families. I have written reports in over 20 inquests arguing that it would be appropriate to return a narrative rather than a suicide verdict, in the case of people whose suicide has been triggered by an antidepressant.

But this use of narrative verdicts has produced a situation where suicide figures are close to worthless. The British suicide rate is comprised of cases recorded as suicides along with a proportion of narrative, open or other verdicts, with the proportion chosen down to bureaucratic whim. We do not have a self-destruction rate and absolutely no idea as to how many verdicts, either suicide or narrative, are linked to antidepressant or other drug intake.

A website antidepaware was recently set up to track deaths by suicide or misadventure or related that are related to antidepressants. It has logged over 1600 UK suicides involving antidepressants of which 43% were recorded as suicides by the coroner, 26% as narrative verdicts, 19% as open verdicts, 5% as death by misadventure and 7% as accidental.

Hanging & Kneeling

While the suicide rate has become ambiguous, it is not possible to conceal the number of hangings.

Bridgend has had an unusual number of hangings. An apparently odd feature is that these hangings have involved a lot of kneeling. The fact that many victims have been found hanging but with their feet on the ground or close to kneeling has given rise to speculation about internet or other cults, and about serial killing rather than self-destruction.

I had been exposed to relatively few SSRI suicide cases when Linda Hurcombe came to me telling me of her daughter Caitlin, who after 6 weeks on Prozac hung herself using her horses’ lanyard (see Let Them Eat Prozac).
Soon after that with colleagues I ran a healthy volunteer study designed to test how antidepressants work. In this study, two completely normal women while taking the SSRI sertraline (Zoloft) became suicidal. One of these two had vivid imagery of hanging herself.

Around this time too I got involved in the Miller case. Matt Miller was a 13 year old boy who had just changed schools and was feeling nervous. His parents prompted by the teacher brought him to a doctor who put him on Zoloft. Seven days later he hung himself in the bathroom between his parent’s bedroom and his bedroom.

Pfizer, the makers of Zoloft argued that this was not suicide but auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong. As evidence, they pointed to the fact he was not suspended several feet above the floor but had his feet on the ground, almost kneeling. They went so far as to scour the carpet in the bathroom to collect potential evidence for seminal stains.

It was Yvonne Woodley’s case in 2010 that explained the hanging issue to me – something that anyone with an interest in the area could in fact have found from Wikipedia.

Yvonne Woodley was a 42 year old woman who was having marital difficulties. She presented to her doctor with sleep problems. The doctor viewed her as being under stress, and as posing absolutely no suicide risk. She gave Yvonne citalopram. A week later the doctor noted that Yvonne was more agitated and there were fleeting thoughts of suicide – so she doubled the dose of citalopram. After a suicide attempt, she doubled it further and a short while afterwards Yvonne hung herself.

She hung herself in the attic of her house. Given the kind of person she was, the rest of her family found it unbelievable that she would have hung herself in the house with her two daughters downstairs but a common feature of SSRI suicides is the apparent lack of concern for the effect on others.

The fact that Yvonne was close to kneeling enabled the coroner to return a narrative rather than a suicide verdict. The pathologist explained that when people are weighing up the possibility of hanging themselves, wondering about it, they might put a rope in place and test themselves against it. If they do this, it is in fact very easy by putting pressure on the carotid sinuses that are in the side of the neck to slip out of consciousness and falling forward to end up asphyxiated. If you have begun with your feet on the ground you can end up kneeling or close to kneeling.

The First Cases in Bridgend

Dale Crole, 18 Found hanged, 5 January 2007 David Dilling, 19 Found hanged in his home, February 2007 Thomas Davies, 20 Found hanged from a tree, 25 February 2007 Allyn Price, 21 Found hanged in his bedroom, April 2007 James Knight, 26 Found hanged at his home, 17 May 2007 Leigh Jenkins, 22 Found hanged, June 2007 Zachery Barnes, 17 Found hanged from a washing line, August 2007 Jason Williams, 21 Found hanged at home, 23 August 2007 Andrew O’Neill, 19 Found hanged at home, September 2007 Luke Goodridge, 20 Found hanged, November 2007 Liam Clarke, 20 Found hanged, 27 December 2007 Gareth Morgan, 27 Found hanged, 5 January Natasha Randall, 17 Found hanged, 17 January Angie Fuller, 18 Found hanged, 4 February Kelly Stephenson, 20 Found hanged on 14 February while on holiday Nathaniel Pritchard, 15 Kelly’s cousin, found hanged, died 15 February  (keep reading)

February, 7 Cymbalta's victim Traci Johnson death anniversary

She would be twenty eight years old if she had not volunteered to join Cymbalta's Eli-Lilly urinary incontinence clinical trial in early January, 2004 in a clinic at Indiana University Medical Center.
In February, 7 her body was found. She hung herself with a scarf from a shower rod at Eli-Lily's facilities.

She was a healthy woman who just joined the trial to make a little money. Her picture is at the top left.

R.I.P. Traci

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas. I love you all.

Not posting but always here

I always post once a month but I didn't post on November. But I'm here and will always be.
I'm just dealing with some issues.
Be at peace.

Frustration: Nothing changed

When I started this blog I had a little hope that with all the data brought up by bloggers, lawyers, psychiatrists, journalists and patients something was going to happen.

They are still drugging people and, appalling, children.
I'm very sad.

Children's mood swing

The only acceptable diagnose to children.
Have a great Sunday!

"All We Have to Fear" another book about Psychiatry's criminal practice

There are already so many books exposing the absurd way that psychiatry is being done that it's amazing that some people have not a clue about it all.
Maybe people don't have the habit of going to bookstores or if they do they go straight to the best-sellers shelves.

The LA Review of Books has published this article about "All we Have to Fear: Psychiatry's Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders" by Allan V. Horwitz  PhD and Jerome Wakefield PhD:


Psychiatry’s legitimacy crisis
By Andrew Scull, LA Review of Books~

"ABOUT 40 YEARS AGO, American psychiatry faced an escalating crisis of legitimacy. All sorts of evidence suggested that, when confronted with a particular patient, psychiatrists could not reliably agree as to what, if anything, was wrong. To be sure, the diagnostic process in all areas of medicine is far more murky and prone to error than we like to think, but in psychiatry the situation was — and indeed still is — a great deal more fraught, and the murkiness more visible. It didn’t help that psychiatry’s most prominent members purported to treat illness with talk therapy and stressed the central importance of early childhood sexuality for adult psychopathology. In this already less-than-tidy context, the basic uncertainty regarding how to diagnose what was wrong with a patient was potentially explosively destabilizing.

The modern psychopharmacological revolution began in 1954 with the introduction of Thorazine, hailed as the first “anti-psychotic.” It was followed in short order by so-called “minor tranquilizers:” Miltown, and then drugs like Valium and Librium. The Rolling Stones famously sang of “mother’s little helper,” which enabled the bored housewife to get through to her “busy dying day.” Mother’s helper had a huge potential market. Drug companies, however, were faced with a problem. As each company sought its own magic potion, it encountered a roadblock of sorts: its psychiatric consultants were unable to deliver homogeneous populations of test subjects suffering from the same diagnosed illness in the same way. Without breaking the amorphous catchall of “mental disturbance” into defensible sub-sets, the drug companies could not develop the data they needed to acquire licenses to market the new drugs.

In a Cold War context, much was being made about the way the Soviets were stretching the boundaries of mental illness to label dissidents as mad in order to incarcerate and forcibly medicate them. But Western critics also began to look askance at their own shrinks and to allege that the psychiatric emperor had no clothes. A renegade psychiatrist called Thomas Szasz published a best-selling broadside called The Myth of Mental Illness, suggesting that psychiatrists were pernicious agents of social control who locked up inconvenient people on behalf of a society anxious to be rid of them, invoking an illness label that had the same ontological status as the label “witch” employed some centuries before. Illness, he truculently insisted, was a purely biological thing, a demonstrable part of the natural world. Mental illness was a misplaced metaphor, a socially constructed way of permitting an ever-wider selection of behaviors to be forcibly controlled under the guise of helping people.

The problem was exacerbated when some psychiatrists sought to examine the diagnostic process. Their findings dramatically reinforced the growing suspicion that their profession’s claims to expertise were spurious. Prominent figures like Aaron Beck, Robert Spitzer, MG. Sandifer and Benjamin Pasamanick published systematic data that dramatized just how tenuous agreement was among psychiatrists, even the most prominent ones, regarding the nature of psychiatric pathology; consensus barely exceeded 50 percent whether the subjects were patients in state hospitals or out-patient settings. And in 1972, a systematic study of diagnostic practices in Britain and the United States found massive differences: New York psychiatrists diagnosed nearly 62 percent of their patients as schizophrenic, while in London only 34 percent received this diagnosis. And, while less than five percent of the New York patients were diagnosed with depressive psychoses, the comparable figure in London was 24 percent. Further examination of the patients suggested that these differences were byproducts of the preferences and prejudices of each group of psychiatrists, and yet they resulted in consequential differences in treatment.

Nor was this chaotic situation hidden from a larger public. In the legal profession, the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to the emergence of public interest law. A number of these attorneys broadened their focus from race to include other stigmatized and disadvantaged populations. By the early seventies, this led to the creation of a mental health bar, two of whose prominent practitioners seized on the results reported in these studies. They intimated that psychiatrists should no longer be credited with the status of “expert witnesses,” since their judgments amounted to “flipping coins in the courtroom,” as they put it. Shortly thereafter, a cleverly designed study by a Stanford social psychologist, David Rosenhan, appearing in the august pages of Science, poured gasoline on the flames. Rosenhan had eight pseudo-patients (including himself) show up at a dozen psychiatric hospitals complaining they were hearing voices and uttering the words “empty,” “hollow,” or “thud.” The so-called patients otherwise presented their normal selves. Seven received the diagnosis of schizophrenia, the eighth was labeled manic-depressive, and all were hospitalized for terms as long as 52 days. The article garnered massive media coverage, made Rosenhan a star and made of psychiatry a hapless buffoon.

To address the embarrassment, one of the profession’s internal critics, Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, persuaded the American Psychiatric Association to authorize the development of a new diagnostic manual. The document he and his Task Force produced, approved and published in slightly modified form in 1980 as the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM III for short) launched a revolution in American psychiatry whose effects are still felt today. Versions III R (revised), IV, and IV TR (text revision) and DSM 5 (to be released in 2013) have been produced with numbing regularity. The advent of DSM III and its descendants constitute the backdrop to the argument presented in the new book by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Natural Anxieties into Mental Disorders.        

Horwitz and Wakefield want to argue for the harmful impact of what is often called the neo-Kraepelinian revolution in psychiatry. Emil Kraepelin was the fin-de-siècle German psychiatrist who launched the fashion for descriptive psychopathology and first made the distinction between dementia praecox and manic-depressive illness. Horwitz and Wakefield suggest that the efforts of Kraepelin’s late-twentieth century successors to make psychiatric diagnoses more rigorous and predictable have instead enabled psychiatric pathology to get out of hand. They identify two problems: the psychiatric profession’s obsession with simplistic, symptom-based diagnoses, and the looseness of its criteria for defining mental states as pathology. All sorts of anxieties that are in reality part of the normal range of human emotion and experience have been transformed by professional sleight of hand into diseases. The upshot, they contend, is that whereas thirty years ago less than five percent of Americans were thought to suffer from an anxiety disorder, nowadays some widely cited epidemiological studies have decreed that as many as 50 percent of us do so.

Horwitz and Wakefield are scarcely the first scholars to suggest that rising rates of mental illness are a reflection of the widening and loosening of diagnostic schema. Three decades ago, the British psychiatrist Edward Hare and I engaged in a vigorous debate on this issue in the pages of the British Journal of Psychiatry. He argued that the growing number of lunatics in Victorian museums of madness were victims of a new viral disease, schizophrenia, and I countered that it was more probable that other factors were at work — namely, the amorphousness of nineteenth century definitions of madness, the decreasing willingness and ability of families to cope with difficult or impossible relations, and the eagerness of psychiatrists to enlarge their sphere of operations. Of more contemporary relevance, a range of commentators have noticed the explosive growth of depression as a diagnosis, to the point where it is now frequently termed ‘the common cold’ of psychiatry; the equally dramatic expansion in the number of children being diagnosed with ADHD; the appearance out of nowhere of juvenile bipolar disorder, which apparently became forty times as common between 1994 and 2004; the epidemic of autism, a formerly rare condition afflicting less than one in five hundred children in 1990, which has now mushroomed into a disease found in one in every ninety children. More than a few scholars have been tempted to attribute these seismic shifts not to any real alteration in the numbers of sufferers from these disorders, but to disease-mongering by the psychiatric profession and by Big Pharma, the multi-national pharmaceutical industry that obtains a huge fraction of its profits from the sale of drugs aimed at mental disorders of all sorts.

Among the most zealous critics of the expanding psychiatric empire have been two unlikely souls: Robert Spitzer, the principal architect of DSM III, and Allen Frances, who played a similarly large role in the construction of DSM IV. As the latest edition of that tome, the largest thus far and the most delayed, struggles to be born, those assembling it have been assaulted by Spitzer and Frances for creating a version built on hasty and unscientific foundations; they claim it pathologizes everyday features of normal human existence, and that, like its predecessors, it will create new epidemics of spurious psychiatric illness. Allen Frances, in particular, has taken to uttering frequent mea culpas, taking the blame for loosening the criteria for diagnosing autism in DSM IV, and thus, so he claims, sowing fear and mislabeling thousands and thousands of children.

Before focusing on Horwitz and Wakefield’s contribution to this debate, it is worth acknowledging that Spitzer and Frances’s claims have proven to be highly controversial. Not unexpectedly, given the huge revenue the American Psychiatric Association rakes in from each edition of its manual, and the centrality of that book’s place to psychiatry’s claims to be a science, the oligarchs who run its operations have been swift to condemn the renegades. The oligarchs have launched a series of ad hominem attacks on the renegades’ motives and on the nature of their criticisms. Interestingly, equally fierce if not fiercer reactions have been manifested from an entirely different source: the relatives of those who have been diagnosed with ailments whose boundaries Spitzer and Frances want to shrink. Particularly vocal in online discussions have been the parents of children diagnosed with autism, for whom the loss of the label will mean being deprived of social services and support that is conditional on retaining that status. At times, the vituperation that has rained down on Frances’s head has been extraordinary — and indeed it’s hard not to form a mental image of families all across the country sticking pins into a Frances voodoo doll. Whatever other lessons are derived from this state of affairs, one point should be obvious: It is not just professional imperialism on the part of psychiatrists, nor the greedy machinations of Big Pharma, that explains the burgeoning problem of mental disorder in early twenty-first century America. And a burgeoning problem it is. To cite just one statistic[EM1] , one in every 76 Americans in 2007 qualified for welfare payments based on mental disability. As we examine Horwitz and Wakefield’s work on anxiety disorders, it is therefore important to bear in mind that theirs is just one piece of a larger puzzle. Indeed, the same authors have already examined another example of this phenomenon, the medicalization of sadness, and its transformation into pathology.

Horwitz and Wakefield rightly place the DSM in its various post-1980 incarnations at the center of their explanation of how we are to account for the massive growth in the numbers of people diagnosed with pathological anxiety. DSM III “solved” the legitimacy crisis that psychiatry faced in the late 1970s. As long as one employed its methods and categories, high levels of agreement among psychiatrists confronting the same case were all but assured. In that sense, psychiatric diagnosis became, as statisticians would put it, more reliable. How was that feat accomplished? By rendering the diagnostic process mechanical, employing a tick-the-boxes approach to deciding whether or not someone had a mental disorder, and if so, what disorder it was. Display any six out of ten symptoms, and voilà, a schizophrenic. Tick another set of boxes and you had General Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and so forth. A given patient might potentially have several “illnesses” at once, a problem alleviated by setting up a hierarchy of psychiatric diseases and awarding patients the most serious of them, or by creating a category called “co-morbidity” and thereby accepting the presence of multiple illnesses. The overlap in symptomatology between two schizophrenics with the “same” disease might be as few as two out of ten symptoms.

Why is psychiatry forced to rely on a grab bag of symptoms to make its diagnoses? Because, fundamentally, it has nothing else to offer. The cause of the overwhelming majority of psychiatric disorders remains as obscure as ever. Periodic weightless claims, endorsed by credulous science journalists, that schizophrenia is triggered by a newly discovered gene or by a dopamine deficiency in the brain, or that people suffering from depression have a shortage of serotonin, which can be reversed by taking a Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) such as Prozac to immerse their synapses in a serotonin bath, are so much biobabble ­­­— scientific nonsense that has proved good marketing copy for Big Pharma but is otherwise worthless.

This reliance on symptoms, and on the simplistic approach of counting symptoms to make a diagnosis, creates a bogus confidence in psychiatric science. Such categories have an element of the arbitrary about them. When Robert Spitzer and his associates created DSM III, they liked to call themselves DOPs (data-oriented persons). In fact, DSM’s categories were assembled through political horse-trading and internal votes and compromise. The document they produced paid little heed to the question of validity, or to whether the new system of categorizing mental disorders corresponded to real diseases out there. And subsequent revisions have hewed to the same approach. With the single exception of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which, as its name implies, is a diagnosis having its origins in trauma of an extreme sort, the various categories in the DSM, including the anxiety disorders that preoccupy Horwitz and Wakefield, are purely symptom-based. (The construction of the PTSD diagnosis, incidentally, as the authors show, was every bit as political as the creation of the other DSM categories.) Because so much depends on the wording that describes the symptoms to be looked for and on how many symptoms one needs to display to warrant a particular diagnosis (why do six symptoms make a schizophrenic, not five, or seven?), small shifts in terminology can have huge real-world effects. The problem is magnified in studies of the epidemiology of psychiatric disorders. As Horwitz and Wakefield point out, to make studies of this sort cheaper and allow those producing them to employ laypeople to administer the necessary instruments, the diagnostic process is simplified even further in these settings. They write that psychiatric epidemiologists make “no attempt to establish the context in which worries arise, endure, and disappear so as to separate contextually appropriate anxiety from disordered anxiety conditions [and thus they] can uncover as much seeming psycho-pathology as they desire.”

By contrast, at least initially, psychiatrists were expected to exercise some independent clinical judgment when reaching their professional judgments. Being anxious and fearful is, under some circumstances, a natural and healthy human response to the world. How are we to distinguish between healthy or normal fears — perhaps even fears that are exaggerated but had their origins in an earlier period of our evolutionary history — and pathological forms of anxiety? Allow too much room for clinical judgment and the goal of standardizing psychiatric diagnosis goes away. Eliminate it and the anxieties that people naturally feel when they’ve survived a bad marriage, recovered from a serious disease, or lived through a war or a disaster like Katrina, are all-too-readily relabeled as illness. DSM attempted to cope with this problem by insisting that the anxiety had to be “excessive” and “prolonged,” six months in duration or longer, and to be perceived as “abnormal” or disabling by those subject to these emotions. These are inadequate and fallible correctives, but they did something to make it less likely that normal people would be called “mentally ill.” As the manual went through successive editions, however, and as its categories were simplified to make the job of epidemiologists easier and cheaper, the effect, as Horwitz and Wakefield argue, was steadily to enlarge the numbers of ordinary people drawn into the ranks of the mentally unstable, often to a spectacular degree. And because of the seemingly scientific basis of the labels, the consistency with which cases were diagnosed, and the translation of human judgment by means of this verbal alchemy into statistics, the multiplication of the anxious and nervous (as with other psychiatric categories) has proceeded in relentless fashion.

Through detailed analyses of the underlying terminological changes and their effects, Horwitz and Wakefield show how “social phobia” multiplied six-fold in the course of a decade. They document a similar pattern with PTSD, with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), and a whole variety of other anxiety disorders. Less satisfactorily, they make some attempt to link these developments to issues of professional imperialism, the financial interests of Big Pharma, and even the demands of patients and more especially of patients’ families, for whom a particular diagnosis may be the sine qua non of obtaining access to insurance payments and other forms of social support. Two other critics of the DSM, Kutchins and Kirk, have suggested that the looseness of its categories means that “the prevalence rates in the United States will rise and fall as erratically as the stock market.” To this comment, Horwitz and Wakefield add a rueful and all-too-accurate coda: “Kutchins and Kirk are only half correct. Prevalence rates in recent epidemiological studies go in only one direction: upward.”

All We Have to Fear is nonetheless a curate’s egg of a book. There are good bits and bad bits. Horwitz and Wakefield manage to make a strong case for the prosecution: Psychiatry has indeed lost its way and seems increasingly unable to resist pathologizing ordinary life. But before the reader gets to that case, he or she will have to plow through the seemingly endless and tedious pages of evolutionary psychology that make up the key sections of the book’s first three chapters. Here one finds claims about genetic endowments that were built into human beings at the time of cave-men and hunter-gathers, and persist as part of our mental constitution. These inheritances from the past are invoked to explain our contemporary fears and anxieties, even ones of quite specific sorts. The alleged features of normal human nature and the supposed hold our genes have over our behavior are as speculative as most neuro-maniacal accounts of modern man. More importantly, they are unnecessary, and get in the way of an argument that depends on no more than the self-evident proposition that all of us experience fears and anxieties, which are intensified in certain social situations and by large-scale trauma, but which cannot be termed “mental illnesses.”

Even setting that objection aside, the remainder of the book is heavy-going. Much of the discussion is wandering and repetitive. The same arguments are mobilized again and again, moving across only slightly varied terrain. What could have been a long article thus becomes a book of sorts — one that many readers will have trouble finishing. This is too bad, because contemporary psychiatry is on the brink of one of those periodic crises of legitimacy that have been so notable a feature of the profession’s history over the past couple of centuries; the story Horwitz and Wakefield recount helps us to understand one of the reasons why renewed turmoil threatens to engulf the psychiatric enterprise."

Be at peace

May we all have peace in our heart.

FDA to approve buying Rx drugs without prescription

"The FDA says over-the-counter distribution would let patients get drugs for many common conditions without the time and expense of visiting a doctor, but medical providers call the change medically unsound and note that it also may mean that insurance no longer will pay for the drugs.

“The problem is medicine is just not that simple,” said Dr. Matthew Mintz, an internist at George Washington University Hospital. “You can’t just follow rules and weigh all the pros and cons. It needs to be individualized.”

Under the changes that the agency is considering, patients could diagnose their ailments by answering questions online or at a pharmacy kiosk in order to buy current prescription-only drugs for conditions such as high cholesterol, certain infections, migraine headaches, asthma or allergies."
Whole article The Washington Times.

Of course that physicians will hate the idea of not receiving money for numerous consults they receive just to give the prescription.

Nothing was said about psychiatric drugs and they will never accept that one or two days without taking one of these drugs can cause severe withdrawal symptoms since they claim that there is not such a thing as withdrawal symptom. "It is all in your head." "It is psychological."

Drugs like Seroquel that is used by criminals to rape but causes withdrawal symptoms for those who have been prescribed will be a good excuse not to sell them OTC event though they are on the criminals's possession now that the prescription is required.

It would be a relief not to have to pay to have a prescriptions. After all these drugs are highly expensive.