In Santa Cruz CA, where 9% of adults have taken psych drugs, advocates launch 1st Green Mental Health Care Day

Genita Petralli, president of nonprofit Green Body and Mind, director of Patient Services at Alternative to Meds Clinic, and an author of several books, says it’s her mission to “educate all those interested in what is causing the epidemic mental health crisis of today, how to avoid it, how to get off psychiatric drugs if you are on them now, and why toxic drugs should not ever be called medicine.” To that end, Petralli launched the area’s first Green Mental Health Care Day, a day where speakers and healers came together to address the problems of psychiatric drugs and offer several alternative solutions.

Irish psychiatric wards deemed “unfit for human habitation” – patients found abused, mistreated, electroshocked

Irish health inspectors have uncovered evidence of bad management and untrained medical staff administering electric shock therapy to patients in psychiatric wards around the country. Many of Ireland’s psychiatric wards may be closed as they are “unfit for human habitation.”

Op Ed: New Year’s Resolutions for the Drug Industry for 2010

Clearly the drug industry needs New Year’s Resolutions–and to honor them better than the Corporate Integrity Agreements with the government it keeps breaking. How about: “We will stop upgrading anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder to ‘treatment resistant depression’ to sell drugs. We will admit that studies are beginning to show that the reason depression is sometimes treatment resistant is because it wasn’t depression to begin with but consumer advertising.”

Advocates want new rules to protect abuse of nursing home patients with antipsychotic drugs

In Illinois, advocates are calling for restrictions on Medicaid’s reimbursement for antipsychotic drugs and for enforcement of rules requiring informed patient consent, among other measures.

Cooking the Books:The statistical games behind “off-label” prescription drug use

Study patients took the anti-seizure drug Neurontin, and researchers measured tons of possible outcomes (like pain with touch, pain with cold, excessive pain with pinpricks, more than a dozen different scales for psychiatric symptoms, and so on). By random chance, if you measure enough outcomes, at least some of them will appear better after drug treatment. When the time came to report the findings, however, the researchers systematically omitted the outcomes on which the drug had no effect—and presented only the data showing benefit. That’s like dealing dozens of hands of poker to yourself but showing only the hand with good cards.

CCHR International

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