The Insanity
Epidemic
Note: This is
one more example of what is very profitable for Big Pharma but insanity for the
American Public. The cause of this insanity, at a deeper level, can be seen as
the Corporate Law that puts stockholder before the
public whenever profits are at stake – a profits-before-people agenda. That
insanity makes merchandise out of people, using them for profit at the expense
of their health and sanity. The common sense that’s uncommon - CR
EXCERPT:
" E. Fuller Torrey, in his 2001 book The Invisible Plague, concluded that
insanity had risen to the level of
an epidemic.
This epidemic has unfolded in lockstep with the ever-increasing use of
psychiatric drugs."
PREFACE:
On February
15th 2009 (01:04),
Dr. Gary Kohls
<gkohls@cpinternet.com>
wrote the following which suggests a steady increase in the number of mentally
ill people in the U.S. In previous articles, I have pointed out that this was
done on purpose in order to facilitate, first U.S. aggressions the world over
and second the elimination of 6.7 billion people, as required by the long range
plans of the International Plutocracy. But read on:
Friends who are
dubious about biologic psychiatry and the nearly universal prescribing of
brain-altering, brain-damaging, neurotoxic, psychotoxic, synthetic chemicals to
people who may be decompensating because of temporary though overwhelming crisis
events in their lives.
The psych drugs
Whitaker talks about are the reason for the epidemic of mental disability in our
nation!
Read "Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of
the Mentally Ill" and then go to the streets. Gary.
---------
Preventive
Psychiatry E-Newsletter # 224
Excerpts from Robert Whitakers Anatomy of an Epidemic:
Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of
Mental Illness in America
Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 7, Number 1, Spring 2005
Full article, with extensive documentation, accessible at:
http://psychrights.org/index.htm
Excerpted, with minimal editing, by Gary G. Kohls,
MD, Duluth, MN
The percentage of Americans disabled by mental illness has increased
fivefold since 1955, when Thorazine remembered
today as psychiatrys first wonder drug was introduced into the market.
There are now nearly
6 million Americans disabled by mental illness,
and this number increases by more than 400 people each
day. A review of the scientific literature reveals that it is our
drug-based paradigm of care that is fueling this epidemic.
The drugs increase the likelihood that a person will
become chronically ill, and induce new and more severe psychiatric symptoms in a
significant percentage of patients.
E. Fuller Torrey, in his 2001 book
The Invisible Plague, concluded that insanity had risen to the level of
an epidemic. This epidemic has unfolded in
lockstep with the ever-increasing use of psychiatric drugs.
The number of disabled mentally ill has
increased nearly six-fold since Thorazine was
introduced.
The number of disabled mentally ill has
also increased dramatically since 1987, the year Prozac
was introduced.
Anti-psychotics, antidepressants, and
anti-anxiety drugs create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions. In
response, the brain goes through a series of compensatory adaptations. Neurons
both release less serotonin and down-regulate (or decrease) their number of
serotonin receptors. The density of serotonin receptors in the brain may
decrease by 50% or more. After a few weeks, the patients brain is functioning in
a manner that is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the
normal state.
Conditions that disrupt brain
chemistry may cause delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking, and mood
swings the symptoms of insanity. Infections agents, tumors, metabolic and toxic
disorders and various diseases could all affect the brain in this manner.
Psychiatric medications also disrupt brain chemistry. Psychotropic drugs
increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill, and they
cause a significant percentage of patients to become ill in new and more severe
ways.
TURNING PATIENTS CHRONICALLY ILL
Neuroleptics
(=Anti-psychotics = Anti-schizophrenics = Major Tranquilizers)
In an NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) study, short-term (6
weeks) anti-psychotic drug-treated patients were much improved compared to
placebo (75% vs. 23%). However patients who received placebo treatment were less
likely to be re-hospitalized over the next 3 years than were those who received
any of the three active phenothiazines.
Relapse was found to be significantly
related to the dose of the tranquilizing medication the patient was receiving
before he was put on placebo the higher the dose, the greater the probability of
relapse.
Neuroleptics increased the patients
biological vulnerability to psychosis. A retrospective study by Bockoven also
indicated that the drugs were making patients chronically ill.
There were three NIMH-funded studies
conducted during the 1970s that examined this possibility (whether first-episode
psychotic episodes could be treated without medications), and in each instance,
the newly admitted patients treated without drugs did better than those treated
in a conventional manner (i.e. with anti-psychotic drugs).
Patients who were treated without
neuroleptics in an experimental home staffed by nonprofessionals had lower
relapse rates over a 2-year period than a control group treated with drugs in a
hospital. Patients treated without drugs were the better functioning group as
well.
The brain responds to neuroleptics which
block 70% to 90% of all D2 dopamine receptors in the brain as though they are a
pathological insult. To compensate, dopaminergic brain cells increase the
density of their D2 receptors by 30% or more. The brain is now supersensitive to
dopamine and becomes more biologically vulnerable to psychosis and is at
particularly high risk of severe relapse should he or she abruptly quit taking
the drugs.
Neuroleptics can produce a dopamine
supersensitivity that leads to both dyskinetic and psychotic symptoms. An
implication is that the tendency toward psychotic relapse in a patient who had
developed such a supersensitivity is determined by more that just the normal
course of the illness.
With minimal or no exposure to
neuroleptics, at least 40% of people who suffered a psychotic break and were
diagnosed with schizophrenia would not relapse after leaving the hospital, and
perhaps as many as 65% would function fairly well over the long term. However,
once first-episode patients were treated with neuroleptics, a different fate
awaited them. Their brains would undergo drug-induced changes that would
increase their biological vulnerability to psychosis, and this would increase
the likelihood that they would become chronically ill (and thus permanently
disabled).
In the mid 1990s, several research teams
reported that the drugs cause atrophy of the cerebral cortex and an enlargement
of the basal ganglia. The drugs were causing structural changes in the brain.
The drug-induced enlargement of the basal ganglia was associated with greater
severity of both negative and positive (schizophrenic) symptoms. Over the long
term the drugs cause changes in the brain associated with a worsening of the
very symptoms the drugs are supposed to alleviate.
Antidepressants
The story of antidepressants is a bit subtler, and it leads to the
same conclusion that these drugs increase chronic illness over time.
Well-designed studies, the differences between the effectiveness of
antidepressant drugs and placebo are not impressive. About 61% of the
drug-treated patients improved, versus 46% of the placebo patients, producing a
net drug benefit of only 15%.
At the end of 16 weeks (in a study
comparing cognitive behavior therapy, interpersonal therapy, the tricyclic
antidepressant imipramine and placebo) there were no significant differences
among treatments, including placebo plus clinical management, for the less
severely depressed and functionally impaired patients. Only the severely
depressed patients fared better on a tricyclic than on placebo. However, at the
end of 18 months, even this minimal benefit disappeared. Stay-well rates were
best for the cognitive behavior group (30%) and poorest for the imipramine group
(19%).
Antidepressants were making people
chronically ill, just like the anti-psychotics were. In 1985, a U.K. group
reported that in a 2-year study comparing drug therapy to cognitive therapy,
relapse was significantly higher in the pharmacotherapy group. Long-term use of
antidepressants may increase the patients biochemical vulnerability to
depression and thus worsen the course of affective disorders. An analysis of 27
studies showed that whether one treats a depressed patient for 3 months of 3
years, it does not matter when one stops the drugs. The longer the drug
treatment, the higher the likelihood of relapse.
Benzodiazepines
Xanax (a benzodiazepine class minor tranquilizer) patients got better during
the first four weeks of treatment; they did not improve any more in weeks 4 to
8, and their symptoms began to worsen after that. A high percentage relapsed and
by the end of 23 weeks, they were worse off than
patients treated without drugs on five different outcomes measures.
Patients tapered off Xanax suffered nearly 4 times as many panic attacks as the
non-drug patients and 25% of the Xanax patients suffered from rebound anxiety
more severe than when they began the study.
Then and Now
Todays drug-treated patients spend much more time in hospital beds
and are far more likely to die from their mental illness than they were in
1896. Modern treatments have set up a revolving
door and appear to be a leading cause of injury and death.
MANUFACTURING MENTAL ILLNESS
It is well-known that all of the major classes of psychiatric drugs
anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for ADHD can
trigger new and more severe psychiatric symptoms in a significant percentage of
patients. It is easy to see this epidemic-creating factor at work with Prozac
and the other SSRIs.
Prozac
quickly took up the top position as Americas most
complained about drug. By 1997, 39,000 adverse-event reports about it had been
sent to Medwatch. These reports are thought to represent only 1% of the actual
number of such events, suggesting that nearly 4 million people in the US had
suffered such problems, which included mania, psychotic depression, nervousness,
anxiety, agitation, hostility, hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence,
convulsions, insomnia and nausea.
The propensity of Prozac and other
SSRIs to trigger mania or psychosis is undoubtedly the biggest problem with
these drugs. The American Psychiatric Association warns that manic or hypomanic
episodes are estimated to occur in 8% to 20 % of patients treated with
anti-depressants.
Anti-depressant-induced mania is not
simply a temporary and reversible phenomenon, but a complex biochemical
mechanism of illness deterioration. Yale researchers reported that 8.1% of all
admissions to a psychiatric hospital they studied were due to SSRI-induced mania
or psychosis.
Thus the SSRI path to a disabling mental
illness can be easily seen. A depressed patient
treated with an anti-depressant suffers a manic or psychotic episode, at which
time his or her diagnosis is changed to bipolar disorder. At that point, the
person is prescribed an anti-psychotic to go along with the anti-depressant,
and, once on a drug cocktail, the person is well along on the road to permanent
disability.
CONCLUSION
There is an outside agent fueling this epidemic of mental illness,
only it is to be found in the medicine cabinet. Psychiatric drugs perturb normal
neurotransmitter function, and while that perturbation may curb symptoms over a
short term, over the long run it increases the likelihood that a person will
become chronically ill, or ill with new or more severe symptoms. A review of the
scientific literature shows quite clearly that it is our drug-based paradigm of
care that is fueling this modern-day plague.
Excerpts From Robert Whitaker -
http://psychrights.org/index.htm