How FDA and Big Pharma mislead millions into taking dangerous anti-depressants

Here in the States, where pharmaceuticals are advertised in newspapers and magazines, radio, and especially TV, anyone seeing happy actors proclaiming how and an anti-depressant changed their lives can almost demand that drug from even a primary care physician, and usually get it.

A limited hangout is intelligence spook speak for letting out just enough information to appease investigations or grass roots suspicions. But only part of the picture is revealed, not the whole big picture…CBS did not reveal the horrible side effects from anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs. They did interview a British medical official who was part of a UK commission that banned anti-depressant use on mild to moderately depressed patients.Even Medscape lists these side effects from SSRI and SNRI anti-depressants: Abnormal bleeding, hepatitis, headache, hyponatrenia (potentially deadly low sodium), toxic epidermal necrolysis (potentially deadly skin death), impotence, abnormal sensations, mania and suicide.

The disgrace of a nation that treats old people like animals

Let’s imagine for a moment that it’s routine practice in this country to sedate babies who won’t settle: that the more they cry, the more drugs are poured down their tiny throats.

The same treatment, let’s imagine, is also routine for the mentally disabled: whenever they create too much disturbance, we simply cosh them with chemicals.

There would be a national outcry. Heads would roll. Money would be found immediately to train medical staff and carers so that such a scandal could never, ever happen again.

Now let’s stop imagining and face the appalling truth. The nightmare scenario that I’ve just painted is precisely what’s happening to some of the most vulnerable people in the land — the elderly.

Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by 1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians; and 2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Prescription Drug Overdoses More Deadly Than Car Crashes—U.S. in epidemic of prescription drug overdoses

A government health agency says the United States is in the grip of an epidemic of prescription drug overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more people die from such overdoses than from all illegal drugs combined. And accidental prescription drug deaths in the United States each year outnumber highway traffic fatalities. Recent celebrity deaths from apparent prescription drug overdoses have helped to put this public health problem into the spotlight.

The death of American singer and actress Whitney Houston has sparked discussion about accidental overdosing on prescription drugs.

What Benefit? Antidepressants & The Placebo Effect—60 Minutes Exposes the Facts

We all know about the placebo effect. But a Harvard Medical School professor has applied the same theory to antidepressants and his findings are likely to rile drugmakers. Why? He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain unpublished clinical trial data and found that, when combining results with published data, the various antidepressants were no better than dummy pills.

“These are the studies that show no benefit of the antidepressant over the placebo. What they did was they took more successful studies – they published most of them – and they took their unsuccessful studies, and they didn’t publish that…. If they were mildly or moderately depressed, you don’t see a difference at all. The only place where you get a clinically meaningful difference is at these very extreme levels of depression,” Irving Kirsch tells 60 Minutes.

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