I'm Back

Hi! I know I've been off for a while, sorry. I have been working at getting a new job and all sorts of life stuff has been coming up. I'm back now though, so you should be getting semi-consistent posts from now on. :)

Just as a little tidbit, here's an interesting link: Military Suicide Rising. While some may say that the rate of military suicide is rising due to PTSD, I'd say there is more behind that. Obviously, I'm not a doctor, but here's my idea:

War is an awful thing. It certainly is extremely upsetting. So we are giving our military men and women - the people who are willing to give up their lives for us, we give them SSRIs and other drugs that deal in Serotonin reuptake. The majority of these drugs has suicide as a side effect.

While my opinions are anti-war, a part of my family has been heavily involved in the military since World War II. I respect and admire them and their bravery. It is extremely upsetting to me that we are allowing people who are willing to die for us and our country drugs that could make them kill themselves.

What do you think?

Army Hero Used for Drug Expirement

Army Suicide Rate Increases

This article points out that an enormous amount of soldiers (a confirmed 108) have committed suicide in 2007. Ten times as many have attempted or thought about suicide. This has ranked suicide as the fourth leading cause of death in the army, exceeded only by hostile fire, accidents and illness.

Somehow, the additional 180 hired psychiatrists and psychologists along with added mental health screening has not handled the problem. It's only getting worse. It makes me wonder if the amount of army suicides are going up in relation to the amount of soldiers on psychiatric drugs. If soldiers are on SSRIs or other drugs that include suicide as a side effect, the psychiatrists hired could be part of the problem - not the solution.

I'd love my readers to keep their eyes and ears open for more data about this truly tragic epidemic that is happening in our military.

Shooting - Prozac Induced?

Decide for yourself, check out this article with the following in mind - Prozac is an SSRI with side effects of suicidal thoughts and violent behavior. SSRI withdrawl symptoms include the above two side effects as well.

Why do we have people on such destructive drugs? Aren't mental health experts supposed to be protecting society against those who would be dangerous to themselves and others - not causing depressed people to become dangerous to themselves or others via drugs?

What do you think?

Speaking up about Seroxat

Pharmalot has a fascinating post regarding a blogger who spoke up about Seroxat (also known as Paxil to us Yankees) and the company that makes Seroxat/Paxil (GlaxoSmithKline) and the company's head of psychiatry. Glaxo only paid attention to him once it seemed he might be defaming the head of psychiatry. The blogger did compare the head of psychiatry to Hitler (perhaps not the wisest move in the world) and accused him of covering up the issues that Paxil has had - like the side effects of suicidality, death, etc. The lawyers for GlaxoSmithKline sent the blogger this letter, and he did take down the video and the defaming statements. However, the video that caused all this controversy has spread around the Internet and can be viewed here:

Great Links about Psychiatry Part V

Here are another set of links about psychiatry:

PsychData reports That People with Dementia are Being Drugged Rather Than Helped

The Alliance for Human Research Protection reports on The Congressional Hearing for the Drugging of Children by Psychiatrists

A Clinical Psychiatry and Psychology reports on Who is Bankrolling the Medical Journals that Doctors Trust

Prozac Causes Depression posts about Anti-Depressants Killing Again

PsychWatch posts about What Sort of People Love Psychiatry

PsychData posts on What the Government is Doing about Psychiatrists Drugging Children

Schoolboy Suffers from Suicidal Side Effect of Ritalin

This article reports the tragic death of 15 year old Anthony Cole, who hung himself after being on Ritalin for 6 years. From the report, it seems like it was a premeditated suicide - days before his suicide he had asked about how to write a will and about life insurance, an hour before he was found dead he had cuddled his parents and told them that he loved them.

My heart goes out to his parents, his brother and sisters, his friends and extended family. I don't understand why parents are still allowing their children to take these drugs, I can only guess that it's because the side effects are not being taken seriously. They are very real and very serious.

If you know someone on Ritalin, please make sure they know the side effects and have fully evaluated their decision to take it.

FDA Approves Abilify for Kids

*Warning – Excessive Sarcasm*

Great, just what we need - another psychiatric drug. This one's even approve for kids. The FDA recently approved Abilify for "Pediatric Bipolar Illness".
The facts are these: The symptoms for "Pediatric Bipolar Illness" sound like the growing pains most children go through. Here are the symptoms, and you can decide:

- An expansive or irritable mood (so if the kid is overly happy or overly irritable, they are mentally ill)

- Extreme sadness or lack of interest in play (if the other kids hate him or her - or vice versa)

- Rapidly changing moods lasting a few hours to a few days (ever seen a kid go from 0-60 in 1.3 seconds when they are hungry or tired? Could it be that it's a deficiency in food or sleep?)

- Explosive, lengthy, and often destructive rages (No tantrums allowed!)

- Separation anxiety (You can't love your parents and be worried that the people who have been around you constantly for the past five or so years are now leaving you with strangers)

- Defiance of authority (You must all be mindless drones)

- Hyperactivity, agitation, and distractibility (If you don't understand what your teacher is saying, so you get bored or distracted, you must have a mental illness)

- Sleeping little or, alternatively, sleeping too much (Who judges what "sleeping too much or too little" is in a child?)

- Bed wetting and night terrors (You know when you watched Terminator the other night? You now have a mental disorder. Enjoy.)

- Strong and frequent cravings, often for carbohydrates and sweets (Have a sweet tooth?! You MUST be crazy)

- Excessive involvement in multiple projects and activities (Can you multi-task? Can't have that. You might grow up to be capable of thinking for yourself)

- Impaired judgment, impulsively, racing thoughts, and pressure to keep talking
dare-devil behaviors (You react to peer pressure? You want to find out how high you can climb up that tree? Nutcase)

- Inappropriate or precocious sexual behavior (Your parents were too embarrassed to explain what your body is or does, so you are trying to figure it out? or You react to peer pressure? Off to the nuthouse with you! or better yet, let's give you a drug to make it all better)

- Delusions and hallucinations (hmmm... can't do much commenting on that one)

- Grandiose belief in own abilities that defy the laws of logic (ability to fly, for example) ( I guess R. Kelly is mentally ill then) - Note, the first comment in parentheses is not mine, it is actually on the list of symptoms. My comment is the R. Kelly one.

Okay, I know that this post is far more sarcastic than what I've posted before, but it makes me so mad I could spit that the FDA would approve a drug to "cure" kids of some specious disease. Look at the side-effects this drug has:

- Extrapyramidal Disorder (common extrapyramidal disorders are diseases like Parkinsons and they often cause strokes). Five percent of people who take Abilify got extrapyramidal disorder.
- Thoughts of hurting yourself
- Restlessness
- Headache or Anxiety
- Seizures
- Urinating less than usual or not at all
- Jaundice
- Insomnia
- Jerky muscle movements you cannot control
- Nausea
- Drowsiness, Dizziness or Weakness
- Choking or trouble swallowing
- Feeling faint

The list goes on. Look over these side-effects and look what the drug is supposed to cure. Do they look similar to you? Would you put your child on a drug like this?
Also, does anyone know if any studies done or any proofs presented with regard their being a connection between childhood "mental illness" (which, as I said above, sound a lot like growing pains to me) and adult "mental illness"?

Great Links About Psychiatry

Here are some great links to start March out with:

Psychdata reports on the Mothers Act

The Alliance for Human Research Project reports on the Zyprexa saga

The Alliance for Human Research Project reports on Ablify

Attention Deficit Disorder reports on how to use vitamins to curb ADHD and ADD symptoms

Grahame reports that Prozac doesn't work

Psychwatch reports that 80% of suicides in Sweden are committed by people on anti-depressants

MSNBC reports on using psychiatry as punishment in Russia

DBunker reports on drug companies hiding the negative results of clinical trials (please note that DBunker's blog contains uninhibited terms and strong language.)

Scientology Against Drugs asks, is Bipolar Disorder real?

These are all very interesting articles. Check 'em out!

When it Comes to Depression - Does Anyone Really Know What They Are Talking About?

I started reading up on the condition that psychiatrists call depression and it was frankly, depressing.

I started my hunt by looking at my trusty Encarta dictionary, which said:
Depression - psychiatric disorder: a psychiatric disorder showing symptoms such as persistent feelings of hopelessness, dejection, poor concentration, lack of energy, inability to sleep, and, sometimes, suicidal tendencies.

Okay, that sounds pretty severe, right?

So, I started delving more into it and looked up depression on the Internet. It seems that some of the symptoms of depression are:

Sleeping too much, sleeping too little or a change in sleeping patterns; feeling irritable, sad or tense; loss of energy; decreased interest in things; restlessness or feeling slowed down; feeling worthless, hopeless or guilty; weight loss or weight gain...
Wow..it really sounds as if they are covering every possible ground here. "Hey, you lose some weight, you might be depressed! Oh, wait, you gained weight? Well, you could be depressed!"
I mean, half of the symptoms above could be explained by lack of sleep alone (haven't you ever felt irritable, exhausted, restless and uninterested when you don't have enough sleep?).

It seemed that trying to find symptoms that made depression easy to figure out was impossible, so I searched more into depression and conversely, into happiness, and this is what I found:

a) There is no consistent definition of depression out there. It's more like, if you're not happy, your depressed, and only your doctor can delineate when that happens.

b) Even a few weeks of sadness can be considered depression! What's with that craziness? If your mom died, are you supposed to be "okay" with it in a couple of weeks? I don't know how long it would take me to bounce back - but it certainly wouldn't be weeks.

c) Reading up on depression and how to "get happy" is actually depressing. If a person is just moderately happy and wants to attain higher states of happiness, and they read up on it, it seems as if everyone on planet earth falls short of the standards of happiness now required.

d) For some reason or another you are supposed to "live with depression". That's more depressing than being diagnosed with depression. No one should have to "live with" anything in their life.

I think I can officially say that there seems to be no finite information on depression available. This makes me wonder, if doctors and psychiatrists don’t understand this condition, how could they possible come up with a plausible cure for it?

FDA Looks as Clinical Trials

This International Herald Tribune article states that now the FDA is requiring many drugs be looked into to see if they have suicidality as a side-effect. This is really good news! If the FDA becomes more aware of what each drug on the market does, they have to publish that information for us non-government people.

Which Drugs Have Black Box Warnings?

If you are researching psychiatric medication for any reason, it's important to know which drugs have black box warnings, or warnings of increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior. The FDA has published these. This link also has links to any revisions in product labeling as well as current news on these drugs. It's important to research the side effects and studies on any psychiatric drug as it has been found in a recent study that the studies drug companies and medical journals publish have been exaggerated to make antidepressants seem more effective then they really are. Many doctors depend on medical journals and drug companies to give them up-to-the-minute information. They don't always check out what the FDA has to say about the drug. So, take some time to do an in-depth research of the subject before making any life-changing decisions regarding these drugs.

FoxNews Speaks Up Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children

FoxNews has a show called Hannity's America that aired about two weeks ago about teens and anti-depressants. Check it out.

Psychiatric drugging behind school shootings

29 people have been killed and 62 wounded by school shooters taking violence and suicide inducing psychiatric drugs. These notorious school-yard crimes include, among others, the 2005 Red Lake Indian Reservation shooting by Jeff Weise on Prozac, the 1999 Columbine shooting by Eric Harris on Luvox, and a 1998 shooting in Springfield, Oregon by Kip Kinkel on Prozac.

Including this morning's murder in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, three shootings have occurred within the last week. One of these three shootings occurred at a school in Bailey, Colorado, less than an hour's drive from Columbine. Rocky Mountain News reports that outside Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, antidepressants were recovered from shooter Duane Morrison's jeep, after he took several girls hostage and killed one of the school girls before taking his own life.

The U.S. FDA warns that antidepressants can cause suicidal ideation, mania and psychosis. The manufacturers of one antidepressant, Effexor, now warn the drug can cause homicidal ideation. This month, a study came out in the Public Library of Science-Medicine journal, conducted by David Healy, director of Cardiff's University's North Wales department of psychological medicine, which found that the antidepressant Paxil raises the risk of violence. Though the study focuses specifically on Paxil, Healy reasoned that other antidepressant drugs like Prozac, Celexa and Zoloft, most likely pose the same risk of violence.

"We've got good evidence that the drugs can make people violent and you'd have to reason from that that there may be more episodes of violence," Healy said.

This morning another community was torn by the irrational murder of multiple school children. Violence and suicide inducing psychiatric drugs are taking a huge toll on our children and our community. School shootings are plaguing the nation. With three in the last week alone, investigators must look into the causes for this psychotic, suicidal behavior, and they should start at the most obvious place.

Was Charles Carl Roberts IV, who murdered Amish schoolgirls before shooting himself, on these behavior-altering drugs, like so many of the school shooters? Go to www.cchr.org to learn more about the connection between violence and antidepressants, or read the Report on Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs, published by the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, a psychiatric watchdog group.

An article I ran across

The following article - titled "INHUMAN BEINGS - The Chemicalized Personality" is by Tom Solari, a writer and producer:
A mother murders her five children. High school students massacre their classmates. An Iraq vet stabs his wife 71 times. How can this happen?
A common thread in these occurrences is the fact that the killers have been taking psychiatric medications. But that is too simple. So we hear about “post-partum depression” and “combat stress.” In the case of the teens, it's “the breakdown of the family" or it’s the music, the movies, the video games.
The real answer is the dehumanizing effect of drugs.
A human being has more than one aspect. There is a definite electro-chemical component. The body physically functions via electro-chemical processes. Then there is that aspect which perceives and reasons and creates. This is not electro-chemical. When people communicate with each other, it is not chemical molecules that are exchanging ideas. This is the spiritual aspect; the conscious, aware individual.
There is also a mental component—a mind—which is an interactive link between the reasoning factor and the physical. A healthy mind (motivated by the spirit) is analytical. A less healthy mind is less analytical and more and more reactive. It operates on a stimulus/response basis, motivated by random factors. A troubled, unhealthy mind doesn't reason. It doesn't perceive well. It reacts to stimuli.
For a long time now, the mental health establishment has been telling us that we are chemical in nature. They would have us believe that they can solve our problems with mood-altering drugs—a little dash of this and a little dash of that. That approach may work at the purely physical level, as in taking antibiotics to handle infection, but it is not the physical component that gives us our rationality, our humanity. It is not the molecules in the brain that are thinking and perceiving, loving and caring, creating great music and poetry. No, the physical component is comprised of cells and electrical impulses, which are as reasoning and creative as an avocado or the electric current that powers your toaster.
When a person is troubled, he is already sliding in the direction of the reactive, unthinking, physical impulse side of his nature. To then give him chemical, mood-altering drugs, pushes him further in that direction. While the sedative effect may appear to calm him down, he is becoming, more and more chemicalized.
So is it any wonder that these killers seem less than human? They ARE less than human. Though they can appear bright and calculating at times, real judgment is gone. They are completely reactive; alienated. Their minds bubble and boil like the mass of chemicals they have become. The analytical capacity is gone. The spirit is gone. Their humanity is gone. They respond randomly and literally to stimuli (enter music, movies and video games). Then, in the extreme, they lash out with violence at the imagined demons and enemies in their own unreal world. They have been mentally short-circuited by the drugs that are supposed to be helping them. It is the ultimate betrayal.
And when their bizarre, chemically induced, nightmare world collides with the world of OUR reality—which consists of living people, loving families, children, teachers, learning, accomplishment—a slaughter ensues and we are left to wonder "WHY?" "WHAT HAPPENED?"
The answer: psychiatry happened. And why would anyone perpetrate such a crime as to drug children and adults, driving them insane, all in the name of help? It's too horribly simple. It’s a multi-billion dollar business. They do it for money.
The good news is that when society wakes up to these facts, we will cease to allow these evils to occur. It's time.

Tom Solari
Copyright(c)2006 Tom SolariAll Rights ReservedTom Solari is a writer and video producer, living and working in Los Angeles. He is concerned about a culture that promotes chemical dependency as a solution to problems, when logic and the evidence shows that this approach deepens the problem by numbing the brain, muddling the mind and undermining the human spirit

Psychiatrists causing school violence

Did you know that eight out of 13 U.S. school shootings were committed by teens taking prescribed psychotropic drugs known to cause violent and suicidal behavior? It's a disgusting, but true fact. Find out more.

Psychiatrists still use ECT

Did you know that psychiatrists still use Electric Convulsive Shock Therapy - also known as ECT? This is where a psychiatrist puts an enormous amount of electrical current through the brain of a human being, thereby "curing" the patient. First of all, hasn't your mother ever told you not to stick your finger in an electrical socket? How would it make sense that this would differ for the insane, or even for the depressed?
Second of all, this treatment actually causes irreversable damage to the brain, memory loss, and sometimes death - either by suicide or by shock. The general result of such a treatment is that the patient is made into a vegatable, while psychiatrists rake in an estimated $3 billion annually in the United States alone.

The brilliant writer and Nobel Prize winner, Mr. Ernest Hemmingway, was given electric shock treatment. He told his friend, “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient....” and indeed we did, Mr. Hemmingway committed suicide shortly afterward in 1961.

For more information on this terrible and deadly "treatment", check out this link.

Anti-Depressants and Suicide

I have been researching the link between anti-depressants and suicide lately and found that the FDA warns against anti-depressants. It is said in the FDA website that anti-depressants can make those taking them experience an increase of depression and suicidal thinking or behavior, which is odd since that's what anti-depressants are supposed to cure. The specific list of drugs lists several anti-depressants such as Fluvoxamine, Paxil and Prozac, all of which are relatively commonplace. This list is the list of drugs supposedly just for adults. However, if you look at the label it warns against pediatric use. Also, if you check out further links in the FDA website, there is another list just for kids. This one has even more drugs, some of which as Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil, Aventyl, and many more. All of these drugs require a "black box" label, which labels them as having the possibility of making you or your kid have thoughts about suicide or want to commit suicide.

Also, as a note, these drugs are addictive. There are studies that have shown those who try to get off of them become ill, have panic attacks, feel suicidal and experience many other withdrawal symptoms.

If you would like to know more about anti-depressants and suicide, go to www.cchr.com, or if you live in LA, visit the Psychiatry, an Industry of Death Museum.

Dangers of anti-depressants

I found the below movie very interesting. It's about the dangers of getting off of the addictive anti-depressants that psychiatrists prescribe to their patients:

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or "SSRIs"

There is a kind of drug called "SSRIs" - which stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. These are drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft that are supposed to regulate the amount of a neurological chemical made naturally in the body called "Seritonin". Basically the seritonin is there as a neurotransmitter. It allows a message to get to one nerve to the other. When the receiving nerve gets the message, it's called "reuptake". So, these drugs stop "reuptake" from occurring, thereby making more seritonin available in the brain and also cutting off the communication abilities of the brain.
I read somewhere that in experiments with rats, these "SSRIs" made the rats get insanely violent and that too much seritonin will do that to any animal, no matter how tame it is. I will post where I got this from once I figure out what book it was.
Some of the side effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors are agitation, nervousness, sexual problems, nausea, fever, kidney problems, heart problems, liver failure and suicide.

Here's a Fox News investigation into SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs: