While United Nations’ reports call for a revolution in mental health against coercive psychiatric practices and for forced biomedical models—drugs, electroshock—to be banned, Australia pours…
CCHR hopes study will put an end to the psychiatric practice of pre-drugging children with powerful psychotropic drugs to prevent the possible onset of a…
FORMER Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry has aborted a controversial trial of antipsychotic drugs on children as young as 15 who are “at risk” of psychosis, amid complaints the study was unethical.
The Sunday Age can reveal 13 local and international experts lodged a formal complaint calling for the trial not to go ahead due to concerns children who had not yet been diagnosed with a psychotic illness would be unnecessarily given drugs with potentially dangerous side effects.
I never would have entered the DSM-5 controversy were it not for two of its proposals that risk furthering the already frightening overuse of antipsychotic medication, particularly in children and teenagers. DSM-5 plans to introduce two new and untested diagnoses that would offer natural targets for poor drug prescribing–psychosis risk syndrome (AKA attenuated psychotic symptoms) and temper dysregulation (AKA disruptive mood dysregulation). There is no evidence whatever that antipsychotics would confer any benefit on the kids so labeled (and too often mislabeled), but great reason to worry that this would not stop their being used needlessly and recklessly.
It seems McGorry has a growing army of critics, pity the Aussie government can’t see through his crystal ball gazing as many others can – it’s akin to taking a losing lottery ticket up to a paypoint and…well, being paid the jackpot prize.