Pharmaceutical Industry

On September 27, Psychiatric Services, a journal of the APA, published an article called Blog Brings Doctors, Patients Together to Address MH Issues. It was written by Vabren Watts, a Psychiatric News Journalist. The article is a booster piece for the recently-formed CFYM (Care For Your Mind): "…an online forum for people with mood disorders—along with their families and psychiatrists—to discuss the mental health care system and changes that may affect them under health care reform." ...

SSRI’S AND SUICIDE Bob Fiddaman has a post up today called MHRA Consultant Calls for Antidepressant Use in Young. The article highlights some of the dangers associated with SSRI’s, and also describes some of the attempts to suppress or discount the significance of this information. Apparently in 2010, Swedish psychiatrist Göran Isacsson, MD, PhD, published a paper in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. The piece was titled Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression, and reported that of a group of 1,077 depressed people who had committed suicide, only 15.2% had measurable amounts of antidepressants in the blood stream at the time of the suicide. ...

 I’ve recently read an article called Safeguarding a Generation of Children from Over-diagnosis and Prescription of Psychotropic Drugs. It’s written by Dave Traxson, who works as an Educational Psychologist in the UK, and is posted on the DxSummit website, an online platform for rethinking mental health, a forum in which the concepts underlying pharma-psychiatry are questioned and challenged. Here are some quotes from the article: "I view the trend towards mass medication of children with mind altering and potentially toxic drugs and ‘drug cocktails’ as a form of psycho-economic imperialism. By that I mean that young peoples’ developing minds are being colonized, using biochemicals, for huge commercial profit and in effect, increased social control. This has resulted from carefully constructed ‘business plans’ in boardrooms which some years ago saw the population of children in the western world as a great market expansion opportunity. The pharmaceutical companies have reaped the huge financial rewards of this rich and very bitter harvest ever since." ...

There’s a new article on Psychiatric News titled Change, Challenge, and Opportunity: Psychiatry Through the Looking Glass of Research. It’s dated October 17, and was authored by Steven Hyman, MD, and Jeffrey Lieberman, MD. Thanks to Mental Health Law on Twitter for the link. Dr. Lieberman is President of the APA. Dr. Hyman was Director of NIMH from 1996 to 2001, and is now the Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute. The Broad Institute is affiliated with Harvard University, and Dr. Hyman is a Harvard Distinguished Service Professor. ...

If you haven’t seen Jon Rappoport’s blog, please take a look. Here are two quotes from his September 22 post, Psychiatry targets college students for destruction: "The concept called 'mental disorder' is a sales pitch backed up by extraordinary PR, money, academic gibberish, and government-granted official status." "People need to wake up to the fact that the whole panoply of human suffering has been co-opted, taken over, redefined, re-translated into a lexicon of pseudoscience." ...

A mass murder occurred yesterday, September 16, at the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington D.C. There are reports of at least 12 dead, and several wounded. Early news stories describe the perpetrator as having “mental issues,” and it is reported that he “…had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems.” It is likely that this “treatment” involved the prescription of psychiatric drugs. And still no government inquiry into the link between psycho-pharmaceutical products, especially SSRI’s, and acts of violence/suicide. ...

Thanks to Graham Davey and Richard Pemberton on Twitter for the link to an interesting article in the August 29, 2013 issue of the Lancet. It’s titled Global burden of disease attributable to mental and substance use disorders: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, and was written by Harvey A. Whiteford, et al. The Global Burden of Disease survey is a systematic, scientific attempt to quantify the comparative magnitude of disease, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time. ...

There’s an interesting article, recently published in Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, on Springer Link. It’s titled Shooting the Messenger: The Case of ADHD, and it was written by Gretchen LeFever Watson, PhD, et al. Apparently some of the authors had noted in 1995 a marked increase in the “diagnosis” and “treatment” of the condition known as ADHD in southeastern Virginia. This is a large urban conglomeration of six different cities, including Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach. ...

Courtesy of Carl Elliott via Twitter, I’ve recently read Dr. Lieberman’s latest post on Psychiatric News. It’s called – believe it or not – Time to Re-Engage With Pharma? dated August 1, 2013. And it’s classic Dr. Lieberman sleight of hand. His opening statement, for instance, reads: "Drug companies aren’t held in high esteem by the public these days." This may or may not be true. But note what he's done. The issue here is the long-standing and corrupt relationship between psychiatry and the manufacturers of drugs. But from his first sentence, Dr. Lieberman has taken psychiatry out of the equation. He has also lumped the makers of legitimate medicines in with the makers of psychiatry’s drugs. ...

There was an interesting article Big pharma mobilising patients in battle over drugs trials data in last Sunday’s Guardian, a UK newspaper. It was written by Ian Sample, the Guardian’s science correspondent. Here are the two opening sentences: "The pharmaceutical industry has 'mobilised' an army of patient groups to lobby against plans to force companies to publish secret documents on drugs trials." "Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves, but regulators want to ban the practice. If companies published all of their clinical trials data, independent scientists could reanalyse their results and check companies' claims about the safety and efficacy of drugs." ...