Bitter pill for chief of Forest Labs

The government, fed up with Forest’s encouraging doctors to prescribe for children antidepressants approved only for adults, has demanded that Mr. Solomon be sent packing. If the company fails to comply, Washington will effectively bar Medicare and Medicaid from buying its drugs. Such a move “could amount to a corporate death sentence,” according to a memo co-authored by Kenneth Breen, a partner at Paul Hastings, a law firm that has represented Forest in the past.

The company also got in trouble with the Food and Drug Administration, which in a 2003 letter warned Forest to stop marketing an unapproved new drug. Rather than comply immediately, prosecutors said, Forest tried to move as much of the item as possible, going so far as to override computer systems, hire extra trucks and pay staffers overtime at a St. Louis distribution facility before halting shipments a day after receiving the FDA missive.

Forest pleaded guilty last November to obstructing justice, distributing an unapproved drug and distributing a misbranded drug. In addition to agreeing to $313 million in penalties—equal to about a third of earnings in the last fiscal year—Forest signed a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general.

Australia: New laws to ban electric shocks on children

ELECTRIC shock therapy on young children will be banned and psychiatrists could be jailed for carrying out the controversial treatment on teenagers and adults without strict legal checks, under proposed legislation. Under a review of Victoria’s Mental Health Act, new legislation has been drafted that would outlaw electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ECT, for children aged 12 and under.

Harvard Expert Ties Mental Illness “Epidemic” to Big Pharma’s Agenda

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — better known as the DSM — has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there’s the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That’s a label almost everyone can lay claim to.Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

Drug firms paid ‘independent’ experts

Doctors working in state hospitals and community mental health centers began switching patients to the atypical antipsychotics because they were deemed the best treatment by an expert panel convened by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

But a detailed examination of public records documents on file in a whistleblower lawsuit that has been joined by the Texas Attorney General’s Office allege that the experts hired to evaluate the drugs and make recommendations for their usage were also accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the companies developing and marketing the medications.

It started in the middle 1990s when MHMR contracted with University of Texas and some of its professors to evaluate the medications and develop a set of treatment guidelines.

The program was named the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP. The result was step-by-step guidelines for treating major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Psychiatric disease labeling of children exposed as scam by non-profit group

Child drugging has been a huge profitable market for Big Pharma, earning them $4.8 billion dollars a year. They have done everything in their power to convince the press, legislators and especially parents why children need to be put on drugs. They claim that ADD/ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, etc., are medical conditions, and consider them on par with cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. But in reality there is no actual evidence that proves that psychiatric disorders are indeed medical conditions. They simply diagnose a child by using a behavioral checklist.

There are 20 million children in the United States who have been diagnosed with some kind of psychiatric disorder and drugged for it. It’s practically an epidemic. Innocent children are being turned into patients for simply acting like kids.

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