Antidepressants

There’s an article in Science Daily (April 29, 2013) titled “Antidepressants Linked with Increased Risks After Surgery,” which I found courtesy of Monica on Twitter. You can see it here. The article is a report of a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. You can see an abstract of the study here. The study was conducted by Andrew Auerbach MD et al, and involved examining the records of 530,416 patients who had undergone major surgery between January 2006 and December 2008 at 375 US hospitals. ...

There has been a great deal of discussion on this topic in recent years. Families of suicide victims tend to blame the pills; the pharma companies blame the depression for which the pills were prescribed. Personally, I’ve read and heard a good many reports from people who have taken the pills and shortly afterwards experienced fairly strong suicidal urges pretty much out of the blue. The frequency and similarity of these accounts is – at the very least – cause for concern. ...

On March 5, 2013, a bipartisan panel of leading mental health experts and parents of children with “mental disorders” held a conversation (that’s newspeak for meeting) in Washington D.C. on the topic: Violence and Severe Mental Illness. The invited panelists were: Thomas Insel, MD, Director of NIMH Harold Koplewicz, MD, President of Child Mind Institute E. Fuller Torrey, MD, Founder of Treatment Advocacy Center Michael Welner, MD, Founder and Chairman of The Forensic Panel Michael Fitzpatrick, MSW, Director of NAMI And three parents of "diagnosed" children ...

This is the title of a 2010 research report by Thomas J. Moore, Joseph Glenmullen, and Curt D. Furberg, published in PLOS One, an online peer-reviewed journal. The authors of the study searched the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System from 2004 to September 2009, and flagged reports indicating violence. They concluded: "Acts of violence towards others are a genuine and serious adverse drug event associated with a relatively small group of drugs." ...

I came across an interesting article Psychiatric Medication or Play Therapy? by Bob Fiddaman, a New Zealand writer. The article compares the efficacy and dangers of play therapy vs. pharmaceutical products for children with various problems. Here are some quotes: "…play therapy outcome studies support the efficacy of this intervention with children suffering from various emotional and behavioral difficulties." "Pharmaceutical companies spend billions on marketing psychiatric medication." "Front groups that purport to fly the mental health flag are, in fact, nothing more than agents, pimps for the pharmaceutical industry." ...

There is an interesting article in last month’s issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry. The article, titled Psychiatry beyond the current paradigm, was authored by Pat Bracken, an Irish psychiatrist, and 28 other British and Irish psychiatrists. The gist of the piece is that the current psychiatric paradigm, which the authors describe as “applied neuroscience,” is not supported by the evidence and needs to be abandoned. Here are some quotes: ...

This issue has been debated for years, but was finally considered to have been put to rest by NIMH’s 2004 Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS). This study essentially “found” that fluoxetine (Prozac) was effective in treating depression and did not involve an increased risk of suicide. Robert Whitaker’s most recent post points out that TADS actually found that adolescents treated with fluoxetine had a markedly higher risk for suicidal activity than those who received a placebo. Robert also outlines the various statistical and methodological ploys that were used to conceal this finding and to sanitize the final report. ...

The debate is over. Antidepressants are only very marginally more effective than placebos. And yet the “depression-is-an-illness” lobby continues to grasp for straws. Fiona Godlee, editor of the British Medical Journal, recently cited “evidence” of the efficacy of antidepressants. For a critique of the Godlee article go to Duncan Double’s website “Critical Psychiatry.” Surprise finding! - Antidepressants are only very marginally more effective than placebos. What this means in effect is that people are “curing” their own depression (gasp), and perhaps don’t really need the mental health practitioners (double gasp). ...