Mass psychosis in the US—How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

Big lies from Big Insurance drown out the proper cure

Reviews published in the two most recent issues of the New York Review of Books (NYRB), taking the psychiatric profession to task for the shameful influence of the pharmaceutical industry, demonstrate the potentially destructive impulse of the profit motive.

Psychiatry has almost dropped its original reliance on therapy in favor of pills, despite evidence that therapy or, surprisingly, exercise are usually just as effective for depression as the new prescription drugs. There is more money in prescribing pills. Diagnosis of mental illness has expanded dramatically so that, as the review author ironically reports, “It looks though it will be harder and harder to be normal.”

International human rights group protest as public distrust of psychiatry mounts

Hundreds of protesters opposing the junk science and dangerous drugs that make up psychiatry marched through Brighton last week.

The protest coincided with the opening of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Annual Conference at the Metropole Hotel on Kings Road. The march started in Victoria Gardens and finished outside the hotel to highlight the use of dangerous psychiatric drugs that have resulted in multiple deaths of teenagers who had been labelled with so-called ‘disorders’.

Put away the Prozac: Feeling sad ISN’T an illness

Back in 1966, the Rolling Stones recorded Mother’s Little Helper — a bitter satire on the barbiturates women had taken to popping just like sweeties.

‘Mother needs something today to calm her down.
And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill.
She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper.
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.’

It’s 45 years since those lyrics were written and the situation today is even worse.

Governor Patrick moves to curtail shock therapy on disabled

Lawmakers may have scrapped a plan to heavily restrict the use of skin shock therapy in Massachusetts for severely disabled residents, but the Patrick administration is moving ahead with a proposal that would eliminate the practice for all future patients and require annual reviews for patients already receiving the controversial treatment.

CCHR International

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