Tag Archives: psychiatry

Under China’s Current System of compulsory mental health treatment, healthy people are being forced into psych hospitals

BEIJING – Members of the legal profession have warned that loopholes in China’s current system of compulsory mental health treatment are at risk of forcing healthy people into psychiatric hospitals. Under the current system, people can be sent to asylums for treatment against their will by blood relatives or spouses, who only need to claim that they are suffering from a serious mental illness. Once committed, they are only eligible to be discharged from the hospitals by those who had them committed in the first place. Afterward, the person who had them committed automatically becomes their guardian.

Antipschotic Drugs—Side Effects May Include Lawsuits

FOR decades, antipsychotic drugs were a niche product. Today, they’re the top-selling class of pharmaceuticals in America, generating annual revenue of about $14.6 billion and surpassing sales of even blockbusters like heart-protective statins. Lawyers suing AstraZeneca say documents they have unearthed show that the company tried to hide the risks of diabetes and weight gain associated with the new drugs. Positive studies were hyped, the documents show; negative ones were filed away. According to company e-mails unsealed in civil lawsuits, AstraZeneca “buried” — a manager’s term — a 1997 study showing that users of Seroquel, then a new antipsychotic, gained 11 pounds a year, while the company publicized a study that asserted they lost weight. Company e-mail messages also refer to doing a “great smoke-and-mirrors job” on an unfavorable study.

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals—How Female Sexual Dysfunction (a “mental disorder”) was invented by the drug industry

Female sexual dysfunction – which is claimed to affect up to two thirds of women – is a disorder invented by the pharmaceutical industry to build global markets for drugs to treat it, it is claimed today. Drug companies have invested millions in the search for a female equivalent of Viagra, so far without success. But while doing so they have stoked demand by creating a buzz around the disorder they have created, according to Ray Moynihan, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Making a Market in Antipsychotic Drugs: An Ironic Tragedy

Remember not so long ago when Prozac became the world’s largest selling medication of any kind, and then for years how Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft took over many of the top 10 spots? Remember the explanations at the time–that they were wonder drugs and that 15-50 percent or more of Americans would need them some time in their lives? To many people this seemed like a scientific breakthrough when in reality it was … a triumph of marketing.