Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply
in the mental "health" system, have actually been made crazy by the use of
or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling,
indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades,
cavalierly handed out like candy -- often in untested and therefore
unapproved combinations of drugs -- to trusting and unaware patients by
equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the
mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical
drug companies, a.k.a. BigPharma.
That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and health
science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled
Mad in America:
Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
noted that there has been a 600 percent increase (since Thorazine was
introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent
disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This uniquely First
World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long
taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric
patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of
society.
Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously
hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the
drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness
disability. Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients
are now motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can
cross the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering
the brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the
patients are taking the drugs long-term. .
In Whitaker's second book
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets,
Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America,
he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He documents the
history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of
psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma.
Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in
the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug
and psychiatric industries are willing to admit: These drugs, it turns our,
are fully capable of disabling -- often permanently -- body, brain and
spirit.
More evidence to support Whitaker's well-documented claims are laid out in
two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace Jackson.
Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, from the
voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly ignored by the
clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous consequences of the
chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes of psychiatric drugs. Her
second and most powerful book:
Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime,
proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any of the five classes of drugs
that are commonly used in psychiatric patients (antidepressants,
antipsychotics, psychostimulants, tranquilizers and
anti-seizure/"mood-stabilizer" drugs) have shown microscopic, macroscopic,
biochemical, clinical and/or radiological evidence of brain shrinkage and
other signs of brain damage, which can result in clinically-diagnosable,
permanent dementia, premature death and a variety of other related brain
disorders that can mimic mental illnesses. Jackson's first book,
Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent was an
equally sobering book warning about the many hidden dangers of psychiatric
drugs.
This sad truth is that the seemingly knee-jerk prescribing (without very
much information being given to patients about the long list of serious
long-term adverse effects) of potent and often addicting/dependency-inducing
psychiatric drugs has become the standard of care in American psychiatry
since the introduction of the so-called anti-schizophrenic "miracle" drug
Thorazine in the mid-1950s. (Thorazine was the offending drug that all of
Jack Nicholson's fellow patients were coerced into taking at "medication
time" in the Academy Award-winning movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.)
Thorazine and all the other "me-too" early antipsychotic drugs are now
universally known to have been an iatrogenic (= doctor or other
treatment-caused) disaster because of their serious long-term, initially
unsuspected, brain-damaging effects that resulted in a number of incurable
neurological disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson's disease.
Thorazine and all the other knock-off drugs like Prolixin, Mellaril, Navane,
etc., are synthetic "tricyclic" chemical compounds similar in molecular
structure to the tricyclic "antidepressants" like imipramine and the
similarly toxic, obesity-inducing, diabetogenic, "atypical"
anti-schizophrenic drugs like Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel.
Thorazine, incidentally, was originally developed in Europe as an
industrial dye. That doesn't sound so good although it may not be so
unusual in the closely related fields of psychopharmcology and the chemical
industry, especially when one considers that Depakote, a popular drug
marketed initially as an anti-epilepsy drug but now is being heavily used as
a so-called "mood stabilizer."
Depakote, known to be a hepatotoxin
and renal toxin, was originally developed as an industrial solvent capable
of dissolving fat -- including, presumably, the fatty tissue in human livers
and brains.
Some sympathy and understanding needs to be generated for the various
victims of BigPharma's compulsive drive to expand market share and
"shareholder value" (share price, dividends and the next quarter's financial
report) by whatever means necessary. Both the prescribers and the swallowers
of BigPharma's drugs have succumbed to BigPharma's cunning marketing
campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by attractive drug company
representatives and their "pens, pizzas and post-it note" freebies in the
office, and the patients being brain-washed by the inane and unbelievable
(if one has intact critical thinking skills)
commercials on TV that
quickly gloss over the lethal adverse effects in the fine print while urging
the watcher to "ask your doctor" about the latest unaffordable
wannabe blockbuster drug. .
For a quick overview of these issues, I recommend that everybody with an
open mind read a long essay written by Whitaker that persuasively identifies
the source of America's epidemic of mental illness disability (a phenomenon
that doesn't exist in Third World nations because costly psych drugs are not
prescribed so cavalierly as in the US).
Whitaker and Jackson (among a number of other ground-breaking and
whistle-blowing authors who have been essentially black-listed by the
mainstream media and mainstream medical journals) have proven to most
critically-thinking scientists, alternative practitioners and assorted
"psychiatric survivors" that it is the drugs -- and not the so-called
"disorders" -- that are causing our nation's epidemic of mental illness
disability. The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent information about his
books can be accessed at
Mad In
America. A recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at
www.wpr.org (at their radio archives link)
and a long interview with Dr.Joseph
Mercola can be heard here.
After reading and studying all these inconvenient truths, mental health
practitioners must consider the medicolegal implications for them,
especially if the information is ignored or if the information is dismissed
out of hand by practitioners who might be tempted to not take the time to
study this new information. Those people who are hearing about this for the
first time need to pass the word on to others, especially their prescribing
healthcare practitioners who should be equally concerned. This is important
because the opinion leaders in the highly influential (for good or ill)
psychiatric and medical industries have been marketed into submission
without hearing the all the facts (which may have been intentionally hidden
from them. If that is the case, they cannot be automatically blamed for.
proceeding in a practice that some day might represent malpractice. It
shouldn't have to be pointed out that is the solemn duty of ethical
practitioners who are in positions of authority to fully examine potential
malpractice issues and then warn others, especially their patients, of the
dangers.
Sadly, it must be admitted that most of the over-worked, double-booked
care-givers in medical clinics have not yet heard the news that most if not
all of the brain-altering synthetic chemicals known as psychotropic drugs
(which are treated as hazardous waste unless they are packaged in a
swallowable capsule!) have been marketed as safe and effective --
but only for short-term use. The captains of the drug industry know
that the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only
been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 weeks.
They also know -- indeed they hope -- that patients will be taking their
drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as
the only "treatment" for mental ill health. They know that their
brain-altering drugs are also dependency-inducing (aka addicting, causing
withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic and increasingly ineffective
(a la "Prozac Poop-out") as time goes by.
The truth is that the people diagnosed as "mentally ill" for life are often
simply those unfortunates who find themselves in acute or chronic states of
crisis or "overwhelm" due to any number of preventable, curable and
treatable (without the use of drugs) bad luck accidents such as poverty,
abuse, violence, torture, homelessness, discrimination, underemployment,
brain malnutrition, addictions/withdrawal, brain damage from electroshock
"therapy" and/or exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in their food, air, water
or prescription bottles.
Those labeled as the "mentally ill" are just like us "normals" who have not
yet decompensated because of some yet-to-happen, crisis-inducing,
overwhelming (however temporary) life situation. And thus we have not yet
been given a billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly obligatory
-- and unaffordable -- drug prescription or two signifying we are now
chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain off
prescription drugs but with a label and in "the system," it is hard to "just
say no to drugs."
The victims of hopelessness-generating situations like simple bad luck, bad
circumstances, bad company, bad choices, bad government, big business, and a
competitive society that generates a few winners but mostly losers. America
tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus fear-inducing social systems
resembling in many ways the infamous police state realities of 20th century
European totalitarianism, where people who were different or just dissidents
were thought to be abnormal and therefore "disappeared" into insane asylums,
jails or concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense.
And many of them were and are drugged with disabling psychoactive chemicals
against their will.
The truth is that most, if not all, of BigPharma's psychotropic drugs are
lethal at some dosage level (the LD50, the lethal dose that kills 50 percent
of lab animals, is calculated before efficacy testing is done), and
therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The chronic use of these
drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, brain damage, loss of
creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of empathy, loss of energy, loss of
strength, fatigue and tiredness, permanent disability and a multitude of
metabolic adverse effects that can readily sicken the body, brain and soul
by causing insomnia or somnolence, increased depression or anxiety,
delusions, psychoses, paranoia, mania, etc. So before filling the
prescription, it is advisable to read the product insert labeling under
"WARNINGS, PRECAUTIONS, ADVERSE EFFECTS, CONTRAINDICATIONS, TOXICOLOGY,
OVERDOSAGE and the ever-present BLACK BOX WARNINGS ABOUT SUICIDALITY."
Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be
regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like
Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a "chemical lobotomy." That is a
useful way to conceptualize this serious issue, because such chemically
brain-altered patients are often indistinguishable from those who have
suffered a physically traumatic brain injuries or been subjected to ice-pick
lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 50s -- before the drugs came
on the market.
America has a mental ill health epidemic on its hands
that is grossly misunderstood because it is worsening, not by the supposed
disease progression, but because of the neurotoxic, non-curative drugs that
are somehow regarded as first-line "treatment."
For more information of these extremely serious topics check out these
websites:
MindFreedom International,
Psychiatric Drug Facts with Dr. Peter
Breggin,
ICSPP~ for Empathic Human
Sciences and Services,
Citizens Commission
on Human Rights (CCHR),
The
International Coalition for Drug Awareness,
Law Project for Psychiatric Rights,
Benzodiazepine Addiction, Withdrawal &
Recovery,
Paxil Withdrawal,
Coalition for the Abolition of
Electroshock,
Dr. Mercola,
Mad in America and follow the
links.
Dr. Kohls is a family physician who, until his retirement in 2008,
practiced holistic mental health care. His patients came to see him asking
for help in getting off the psychotropic drugs that they knew were sickening
and disabling them. He was successful in helping significant majorities of
his patients get off their drugs using a thorough and therefore
time-consuming program that was based on psychoeducational psychotherapy,
brain nutrient therapy, a drastic change away from the malnourishing and
often toxic Standard American Diet (SAD) plus a program of gradual, closely
monitored drug withdrawal. Dr. Kohls warns against the abrupt
discontinuation of any psychiatric drug because of the common, often serious
withdrawal symptoms that can occur with the chronic use of any
dependency-inducing psychoactive drug, whether illicit or legal. Close
consultation with an aware, informed physician who is hopefully familiar
with dealing with drug withdrawal syndromes (starting with the original
prescribing physician), who will read and study the above books and become
aware of the previously unknown dangers of these drugs and the nutritional
needs of the drug-toxified and nutritionally-depleted brain.
Dr. Kohls is a member of MindFreedom International and the International
Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. He is the editor of the
occasional Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.