Happy Daze – Antidepressant Drugs Keeping you in”Drug-Induced State’

November 23, 2009

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Contrary to the impression promoted by the psychiatric and drug industries, psychiatric drugs do not work by correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain, Joanna Moncrieff of University College London wrote recently in an opinion piece for the BBC. Instead, such drugs merely put people into “drug-induced states” that make it harder for them to experience the symptoms of their illness.

“Magazines, newspapers, patients’ organizations and Internet sites have all publicized the idea that conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be treated by drugs that help to rectify an underlying brain problem … just like a diabetic needs to take insulin,” Moncrieff writes. “The trouble is, there is little justification for this view.”

Moncrieff notes that prior to the 1950s, mental health workers largely saw antidepressants as psychoactive drugs, primarily sedatives, that eased the symptoms of depression without addressing the underlying cause – much as over-the-counter cold drugs may stop a runny nose without affecting the cold virus. This view was eventually replaced by the idea that depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and other mental health conditions result from chemical imbalances in the brain, imbalances that can be corrected by the right “magic bullet.”

“However, this transformation was not based on any compelling evidence,” she says.

Moncrieff holds to the older view, that “drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis. They affect everyone, regardless of whether they have a mental disorder or not.”

Antipsychotics, she notes, mute people’s emotions and thoughts, which can reduce the effects of psychosis as a side effect. Anti-anxiety drugs are central-nervous system depressants, like alcohol.

“If you told people that we have no idea what is going on in their brain, but that they could take a drug that would make them feel different and might help to suppress their thoughts and feelings, then many people might choose to avoid taking drugs if they could,” she writes. “People need to make up their own minds.”

Click here for the full report

Court Doccuments Reveal Psych Drugs Misused on Children

October 28, 2009

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

Internal documents acquired as part of a series of lawsuits show that pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca planned as early as 2001 to market its antipsychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved by the FDA.

Under U.S. law, drug makers are prohibited for marketing their drug for any use not approved by the FDA. Doctors are still permitted to prescribe drugs, however, for any use they wish.

Seroquel (generic name quetiapine) was approved for the treatment of psychotic disorders in adults in 1997. In 2001, the FDA extended this approval to cover schizophrenia. In 2004, it was approved for use of bipolar mania, and in 2006 it was approved for bipolar disorder.

Yet AstraZeneca is now the defendant in thousands of lawsuits claiming, among other allegations, that the company actively marketed the drug for use in children and adolescents, and also sought to market it as a treatment for dementia in the elderly.

In some of the retrieved documents, AstraZeneca employees and employees of a consulting firm hired by the company reference plans to “broaden Seroquel use on- and off-label,” specifically mentioning adolescents and people suffering from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. Areas where the company could promote this use are listed, including sales calls and meetings with medical professionals or patient advocacy groups.

In a 2001 public relations plan, the company says that it seeks to “encourage and support [Seroquel] use outside schizophrenia into a broad range of other patient populations including bipolar disorder and the elderly.” The document calls for “aggressive market penetration” of the drug in the demographics of adolescents, the elderly and bipolar patients.

This came five years before the drug’s approval as a treatment for bipolar disorder. To date, the drug has never been approved for use in children, adolescents or patients with dementia or Parkinson’s disease.

AstraZeneca has applied for FDA approval to use Seroquel as a treatment for adolescent schizophrenia and acute bipolar mania in children and adolescents. No antipsychotic drugs have yet been approved for use in children, as there is nearly no evidence on their safety or effectiveness in that population.

The Seroquel lawsuits are only one of a number of recent scandals in which pharmaceutical giants have been accused of illegally promoting off-label drug use. Eli Lilly recently agreed to pay a $1.42 billion settlement to end charges that it promoted its antipsychotic Zyprexa (olanzapine) off-label.

Click here for full report

Antipsychotics Cause Weight Gain in Kids

October 28, 2009

U.S. News

By Nathan Seppa

Many young children and adolescents taking drugs for severe psychiatric problems gain substantial weight and, in some cases, show increased levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood, researchers report in the Oct. 28 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Although the data from this study need to be replicated over a longer time frame, the findings nonetheless raise worrisome questions about anti-psychotic drugs that often benefit children who have schizophrenia, autism, tics, severe bipolar disorder or aggressive behavior.

“We are between a rock and a hard place here,” says study coauthor Christoph Correll, a psychiatrist at the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y. These mental disorders are severe and can lead to suicide or to educational problems and emotional scars, he says. On the other hand, weight gain during youth predisposes an individual to chronic health problems later in life, he says.

Weight gain has been noticed before in children and adolescents taking commonly prescribed drugs for severe psychiatric problems. But studies seeking to link that weight gain to the medications were often muddied because patients had taken one of the drugs beforehand at some point — and may have already put on weight from it or reset their body metabolism to adjust to the drug somehow.

In the new study, Correll and his colleagues monitored 272 children, ages 4 to 19, between 2001 and 2007. Of these, 257 were getting psychotropics for severe problems for the first time, and 15 others refused the drugs but agreed to be seen by a doctor. The drugs were olanzapine (Zyprexa), quetiapine (Seroquel), risperidone (Risperdal) or aripiprazole (Abilify). Restricting the study to first-timers eliminated problems encountered in earlier studies.

After a median follow-up period of nearly 11 weeks, these patients had gained 10 to 19 pounds on average, depending on the drug. Kids on Zyprexa gained the most, on average, while those taking Abilify gained the least. The 15 patients who had refused drug treatment gained less than one pound on average during the monitoring period.

The pace of weight gain seems to level off over time, Correll says, but further study will be needed to clarify that trend.

“This is a really good study of relatively short-term effects,” says Christopher Varley, a child psychiatrist at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Seattle Children’s Hospital. But longer-term data are needed, he says, “because you never really treat a kid with one of these conditions for only 12 weeks — it’s more like six to nine months or a year or two.”

Click here for full report

FDA Approval of Antipsychotics for Children Mirrors Bayer, AMA Approvals of Heroin as Cough Medicine for Children

June 11, 2009

NaturalNews.com

by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) Today an FDA advisory panel approved the prescribing of powerful mind-altering chemicals for children. Seroquel, Zyprexa and Goedon have now been approved by the advisory panel to be prescribed to children as young as 10 years old to treat a fictitious disease invented by psychiatrists and given the name “bipolar disorder.” (There is no such thing as a bipolar disorder disease. It is merely a name assigned to children demonstrating the predictable side effects of correctable dietary imbalances.)

In light of this disturbing decision, it is instructive to remember the history of pharmaceutical medicine and children. One hundred and ten years ago, Bayer marketed heroin to children as a non-addictive alternative to morphine. Did I say “non-addictive?” Yes, it’s right from the company’s own marketing materials. It just goes to show you that drug companies have been lying to the public (and poisoning the children) for well over one hundred years.

Much like the FDA’s present-day endorsement of antipsychotic drugs for children, the American Medical Association endorsed Bayer Heroin for kids, touting its ability to ease coughs. Heroin definitely eases coughs. And so does smoking meth! In offering this endorsement, the AMA apparently borrowed some of the FDA’s screwy logic, which claims “The benefits outweigh the risks.”

This means, of course, that the benefits to the drug companies outweigh the risks to the children!

During all this, of course, the AMA utterly failed to inform parents that heroin was a highly addictive narcotic drug. So parents were dosing their babies with heroin — all with the full approval of the American Medical Association!

Today, the FDA spearheads the promotion of drugs to children, doing its best to promote toxic synthetic chemicals that artificially alter brain chemistry while outlawing any mention of natural remedies that work much better (like omega-3 oils, which are natural brain chemistry stabilizers). The FDA also utterly fails to ban toxic chemical food ingredients known to destroy healthy brain chemistry (like MSG and artificial food coloring).

Thus, in one hundred and ten years, western medicine has learned nothing! It still poisons the children with the full approval of “health authorities” all while enriching the powerful drug companies.

Big Pharma’s ties to Nazi Germany

In remembering the endorsement by the AMA of heroin treatments for children, it’s helpful to consider a bit more of the history of Big Pharma:

The name Heroin comes from the German word heroisch, which means “heroic.” Take enough heroin, and you might feel heroic, too. (At least until the high is gone.)

Bayer, of course, is a German pharmaceutical company with all sorts of interesting ties to Nazi Germany and the medical experiments conducted on Jewish prisoners during World War II. In 1956, for example, Fritz ter Meer became the chairman of Bayer. What’s so interesting about that? This was after he served seven years in prison for carrying out experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz.

One minute you’re committing crimes against humanity, and the next minute you’re the Chairman of Bayer. Amazing, isn’t it? (Amazing how deep the criminal backgrounds go for these Big Pharma people, it seems…)

More recently, Bayer has been found contaminating the U.S. rice crop with genetically engineered rice seeds.

There’s a lot more you probably didn’t know about the true history of Big Pharma’s dangerous experiments on humans.

Pushing narcotics for children – the Big Pharma way!

Bayer eventually pulled its heroin from the market in 1910, by the way. In 1914, the U.S. Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which allowed heroin to continue to be prescribed as a medicine. In wasn’t until 1924 that the U.S. Congress banned heroin sales outright.

Interestingly, 85 years later, narcotics are routinely prescribed to U.S. schoolchildren as “ADHD medications” (they are actually amphetamine drugs). And now, with the help of the FDA, drugs like Seroquel and Zyprexa can be legally prescribed to children by doctors.

And yet even that is just a hodge-podge of FDA theater, because in reality, doctors have been illegally prescribing these drugs to children for well over a decade, and not one doctor has ever been arrested or fined for engaging in this “off-label prescribing” of dangerous, mind-altering chemicals. In fact, the FDA’s decision today isn’t really about medical science at all: It’s about sweeping under the rug the routine crimes of America’s psychiatrists who have been poisoning children’s minds with dangerous drugs for years on end.

And rather than enforcing existing medical laws that forbid off-label prescribing of drugs, the FDA apparently finds it more convenient to simply legalize the criminal behavior of psychiatrists via a politically-motivated vote.

A hundred and ten years from now, this decision will be viewed with the same disbelief that we now evoke when looking back at the AMA’s endorsement of heroin cough syrup for children. Future citizens of our world will look back and ask themselves, “Were these people on drugs?”

And the answer, of course, is yes, the decision makers are all on drugs. They’re taking drugs, pushing drugs and profiting from drugs. And now they’re going after the children with those same drugs because there’s more profit to be found by expanding the age range of victims who can be targeted for financial exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry. Children are simply the next target on the corporate profits priority list.

Let’s be honest here: These are crimes against our children. And those FDA advisory panel members who voted to whitewash these crimes are, themselves, guilty of crimes against humanity (and should be arrested and tried accordingly).

The Nazis gassed Jewish children with Zyklon B. America now openly drugs its own children with Zyprexa.

Both chemicals, not coincidentally, were invented and manufactured by the same industry: The pharmaceutical industry.

Click here to read the full story and get all the links from NaturalNews.com.

SF Chronicle Promotes Prescribing Antipsychotics for Kids

June 22, 2009

SF Chronicle

by Erin Allday

Increasingly powerful antipsychotic drugs are available on the market.  And growing evidence that shows starting these medications early can help children with conditions like bipolar disorder is putting doctors under more pressure than ever to diagnose and treat young people with mental illnesses.

As a result, some doctors say, mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, has been overdiagnosed much the same way attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was in the 1980s.

“ADHD was the diagnosis du jour in the ’80s. Now it’s become bipolar disorder,” said Dr. Andrew Giammona, who heads the psychiatry department at Children’s Hospital Oakland. “We’re in a quick-fix society, and parents want to believe that if we had this treatment we can get it fixed and move on.”

Before the 1990s, bipolar disorder was a rare diagnosis in children under age 19. By 1994, U.S. doctors were reporting about 25 cases per 100,000 young people, and by 2002 that number had jumped to 1,000 cases per 100,000, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Medication was prescribed for about two-thirds of those patients, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Antipsychotic medications are among the most popular made by pharmaceutical companies. Earlier this month, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel recommended approval of three antipsychotic drugs for use in treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in children and teens. The FDA will make a final decision on Geodon, Seroquel and Zyprexa in the coming weeks.

While better drugs and increased diagnoses have been a blessing for many families, at FDA hearings in Washington, doctors and parents voiced concerns that the medication can cause long-term health problems – specifically, extreme weight gain that can lead to metabolic disorders like diabetes.

NOT A TRIVIAL DECISION

“It would be controversial enough if it was just a diagnosis, but the diagnosis comes with these very potent medications,” said Glen Elliot, chief psychiatrist and medical director of the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto. “My main message is parents need to be apprised that this is a cost-benefit analysis. You don’t trivially put somebody on a medication.”

As with ADHD, many thousands of children and teens really do have a mental illness that can be treated effectively with medication and therapy. Oakland parent Barbara Carlson said her son was 7 when he started having fits of violent rages, smashing windows and throwing chairs. After several days of testing, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder – but she was reluctant to put him on medication. “He was just so young,” Carlson said. “I thought, ‘He has his whole life ahead of him, what if this is the wrong diagnosis?’ It was very scary to put him on medications.”

Seven years later, she said the drugs have improved his life dramatically. He’s had weight problems, but he’s excelling in school and is active in sports and making friends.

Many mental health experts said they’ve felt pressure from families with troubled children to make a diagnosis and start treatment – a reaction that’s understandable if the child is clearly having problems. But if doctors don’t have the proper training to accurately diagnose a mental illness, children may not get the right treatment, said Dr. Robin Dey, director of mental health services for Northern California Kaiser Permanente.

DEPRESSION AND MANIA

“I tell doctors, ‘You have to be honest with yourself about your own level of experience with this condition,’ ” Dey said. “We have to be honest with ourselves about whether the medications are working, and if they’re not working you need to keep questioning the diagnosis.”

Bipolar disorder is thought to affect about 1 percent of children, although studies vary and some experts believe it affects as many as 5 percent of children.

The disorder in adults is marked by extended cycles of depression and mania, although people can have long periods of time where they have no symptoms at all. During manic periods, adults may get grandiose ideas, feel euphoric and be impulsive and make poor decisions.

Children with bipolar disorder tend to cycle through moods faster than adults, and they are more likely to be extremely irritable than euphoric, said Dr. Kiki Chang, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Disorders Program at Stanford University School of Medicine. Experts note that these children are not just kids with behavior problems.

“An irritable kid is most likely not bipolar, he’s probably just upset about something,” Chang said. “Bipolar kids may be extremely explosive, extremely angry. But they have to have these other symptoms: they’re not sleeping as much, their mind is going faster and they’re making poor decisions.”

HARD TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE

It’s not always easy for doctors to tell the difference between a kid with bipolar disorder and one who’s dealing with teenage angst or has some other problem, like post-traumatic stress. Giammona at Oakland Children’s Hospital said he once diagnosed a child with bipolar disorder only to discover later that the patient had a food allergy that was making him extremely irritable.

“There’s a lot of overlap with other potential diagnoses,” he said. “There can be lots of reasons for symptoms that look like bipolar disorder. Just because they have the symptoms of the disorder doesn’t mean they have it.”

Dale Milfay, vice president of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in San Francisco, said it’s crucial that children with mental illness get a correct diagnosis as soon as possible and start treatment right away. There may be medical advantages to early treatment, she said, but children also benefit from staying in school and developing crucial relationships with friends and family.

“The earlier people are diagnosed, the better their chances,” Milfay said. “But you wouldn’t want these drugs to be overused. There needs to be some real criteria that this is not something a primary care doctor can just diagnose.”