Friday, November 11, 2005

Mothers Who Kill

As civilized people we have fundamental agreements that define the type of world in which we live and the type of people who we are. One of the, if not the most, fundamental agreements has to do with the state of Motherhood. Motherhood is an institution sacred to those of all faiths, or no faith. Mothers would rather face harm themselves than let anything happen to their child. So, anything that would contribute to a mother harming their own child must indeed be evil - the stuff of nightmares, found in science fiction and horror movies.

Well, such a thing does exist - and not just in fiction. It has infiltrated real life and the lives of many people around us. It is the most horrible thing that we could confront, and confront it we must. To avert future tragedies, we must know: what could turn a loving mother into a murderer? What could possibly induce a mother to kill her own child?

Statistical analyses, medical studies and studies of individual cases have shown that psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric practices create insanity and cause violence. People who have become violent, usually for the first time, after psychiatric treatment are reported in the newspapers with alarming frequency. Each of those cases was in psychiatric hands before committing his or her crime of violence. Each was a psychiatric failure. And each was victimized by destructive psychiatric practices capable of pushing persons toward violence.

A 1988 study documented the tendency of a major tranquilizer to increase hostile and violent behavior. According to the study, many persons who had no prior history of violence, “were significantly more violent while on [this drug.]” And a March 2004 FDA Public Health Advisory warned, “Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia [severe restlessness], hypomania [abnormal excitement, mild mania] and mania [psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur and overproduction of ideas], have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants…both psychiatric and non-psychiatric.”

These are only two studies of many linking psychiatric drugs to new aggressive behaviors in those taking them.

A New Zealand report stated that withdrawal from psychoactive drugs can cause new physical symptoms. Antidepressants, according to the report, can create “agitation, severe depression, hallucinations, aggressiveness, hypomania [abnormal excitement] and akathisia [severe restlessness].”

Using bogus labels with no medical or scientific diagnoses to back them up, psychiatrists are turning emotionally stressed mothers, who turn to them for help, into monsters who murder their own children.

October 2005: Relatives described Lashaun Harris as a devoted and loving mother whose life began spiraling out of control when she was labeled with a “mental illness” two years previously. A 23-year-old overwhelmed single mother, she sought help after the birth of her third child. She fell into the wrong hands, and they turned her into a killer.

Harris was labeled as “schizophrenic,” hospitalized and put on the same anti-psychotic drug that was the subject of the 1988 study linking it to increased hostile and violent behavior. Recently, she had stopped taking the drug - without medical supervision, and despite warnings that abrupt withdrawal can create new symptoms. Soon after, Harris stripped her three children naked, hoisted them over a safety rail and plunged them into San Francisco Bay's chilly waters.

November 2004: Dena Schlosser cut off the arms of her 11-month-old daughter, killing her. Schlosser had seen a psychiatrist and was hospitalized for “post-partum depression.”

October 2003: Rebekah Amaya, a 32-year-old Colorado woman, drowned her two kids in the bathtub. She had previously received mental health treatment.

May 2001: Texas mother Andrea Yates methodically drowned all five of her children in the family bathtub. Mrs. Yates had several suicide attempts, psychiatric treatments and was on antidepressants and antipsychotics. CCHR Texas obtained independent medical assessments of Mrs. Yates’ medical records. Science consultant Edward G. Ezrailson, Ph.D. reported that the cocktail of drugs prescribed to Mrs. Yates caused involuntary intoxication. The “overdose” of one antidepressant and “sudden high doses” of another “worsened her behavior,” Ezrailson said. This “led to murder.”

November 1997: Christina Riggs, a nurse, smothered her two children in their beds. Before suffocating her older child, she injected him with potassium chloride, the chemical used in death penalty executions. She had been prescribed an antidepressant after her marriage broke up.

October 1994: Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother, drowned her two children by driving her car into a lake. She had undergone family counseling and had been hospitalized in 1988 after her second suicide attempt.

No violation of human rights is greater than that which causes a mother kill her own child. No family should have to live through the horrors and traumas experienced by the Harris, Schlosser, Amaya, Yates, Riggs or Smith families.

From as early as 1990, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) asked the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) for the inherent dangers in psychiatric drugs to be made evident to doctors, patients and patient families. CCHR worked exhaustively to make this data known. Finally the FDA issued the first “black box” warning for a psychiatric drug in October 2004.

This was followed by another 16 warnings and alerts from the FDA and other medical and regulatory agencies around the world. The recent CCHR White Paper, Report on the Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs, documents each of these warnings, as well as providing recommendations for non-psychiatric treatments for those with emotional distress.

It is vital that CCHR increase their actions in making known the brutal and terrifying practices that are psychiatry and today’s “mental health care” system now, before they turn more mothers into killers. We are the only group in existence that can accomplish this. Contribute now and help the final stages of the museum renovation and reconstruction. The museum is the core of our message that psychiatry is the industry of death, and that we will not allow any more innocent people to become gruesome statistics of their failures to “help.” We are willing to do whatever it takes, but we need your donations to make this possible. Help get us back into our headquarters and the museum open and spreading the word that psychiatry kills.

You CAN make the difference. Defend and help save families from psychiatric drugs and despair. We need you to play a vital role in making known the dangers of these psychiatric “treatments.” We appreciate any donation you can contribute to this action. But, please, donate generously - otherwise, we will be paying the cost with our children. We must act now if we are to succeed. And we can succeed.

It is imperative that we reach as many parents, groups, allies, policy makers and media as possible in order to bring about further safeguards and action by the voting body necessary for getting such psychiatric treatment outlawed.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Psychiatry: Tool of Fascist States

The release of political prisoner Wang Wanxing after 13 years in a Chinese psychiatric institution exposes another example of psychiatry's long tradition of using governments for its totalitarian purposes. Wanxing was picked up on the eve of the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown for displaying a banner critical of the Communist Party and, having committed no criminal offense was sent to a psychiatric facility called an ankang where he was electroshocked and drugged. He watched other inmates die in the ankang.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights says the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) and psychiatrists in general falsely claim that the atrocities committed against political prisoners are the result of governments abusing psychiatry. However, psychiatry is a willing accomplice, and has been since they designed and operated the Nazi death camps and before.. They create death camps such as the gulags in Russia and psychiatric slave labor camps in South Africa and get paid for assaulting and killing patients. The WPA has an appalling track record of failing to address and discipline its members' ethics. It has ignored and stonewalled reports of psychiatric abuse until such time as external pressure makes it imperative, for its own reputation, to make claims that it has been abused.

Russian historian, Professor Anatoli Prokopenko, was commissioned by President Yeltsin to investigate the plight of Soviet political dissidents. According to Prokopenko:

"When I chronicled a purely historical analysis of the sources of Soviet punitive psychiatry I initially believed that psychiatry was a science. I thought that it was the totalitarian Bolshevist regime that exploited them in its own political interest.

"However, I realized that no matter what regime may be established, it was the psychiatric community that sought to be above the law, intimidating leaders of the states with fictitious statistics on the legions of the mentally ill and the need to control them. The Serbsky Psychiatric Research Institute, psychiatric gulags and the KGB were the basis of punitive psychiatry in the USSR. To this day, Soviet leaders of psychiatry have refused to publicly declare their responsibility in damaging the mental health and liberty of millions of citizens."

China's psychiatric abuse is not limited to political prisoners. Lobotomies and similar brain operations are reportedly performed on inmates each year. Because there is no science to psychiatry, practitioners have invented "diagnoses" such as "delusions of reform" and "political maniacs" to justify incarceration of the members pf the religious group, the Falun Gong and inmates have been punished with "intravenous injections that made their tongues bulge out of their mouths and by extremely painful acupuncture that applied an electric current to the sole of the foot."

Disconnect Between Ads and Scientific Literature

In the Old West the wagon selling Snake Oil as a cure for everything went from town to town, then got out before people realized it was a swindle.

Today the big drug companies are much more sophisticated. But as Abraham Lincoln once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And some of the people are catching on.

"Serotonin and Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Lieterature" is the name of a new essay by Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo.

Their attack on the drug industry is brutal: "In the United States, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are advertised directly to consumers. These highly successful direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns have largely revolved around the claim that SSRIs correct a chemical imbalance caused by a lack of serotonin. For instance, sertraline (Zoloft) was the sixth best-selling medication in the US in 2004, with over $3 billion in sales likely due, at least in part, to the widely disseminated advertising campaign starring Zoloft's miserably depressed ovoid creature. Research has demonstrated that class-wide SSRI advertising has expanded the size of the antidepressant market, and SSRIs are now among the best-selling drugs in medical practice," the report says, pointing up the fact that the antidepressant market is largely created, not preexisting.

The essay goes on to say that given the multifactorial nature of depression and anxiety, and the ambiguities inherent in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, some have questioned whether the mass provision of SSRIs is the result of an over-medicalized society. These sentiments were voiced by Lord Warner, United Kingdom Health Minister, at a recent hearing: “…I have some concerns that sometimes we do, as a society, wish to put labels on things which are just part and parcel of the human condition."

Subsequently, British regulators have forbidden the use of SSRIs on patients under 18 years of age.

The essay says that sentiments such as Lord Warner's, about over-medicalization, are exactly what some pharmaceutical companies have sought to overcome with their advertising campaigns. For example, Pfizer's television advertisement for the antidepressant sertraline (Zoloft) stated that depression is a serious medical condition that may be due to a chemical imbalance, and that “Zoloft works to correct this imbalance”. Other SSRI advertising campaigns have also claimed that depression is linked with an imbalance of serotonin, and that SSRIs can correct this imbalance.

The shocking truth is that no one has ever discovered a way to measure such an imbalance or even to prove that it exists. It has never been anything more than a theory. And that's not because they haven't tried to prove it exists. There have been dozens of experiments and tests. Even the attempt to induce depression by artificially reducing the amount of serotonin didn't produce any significant results, and huge increases in serotonin were ineffective at relieving depression. Despite this, the industry still sells their snake oil on the basis that it "controls" the serotonin levels in the brain, thereby inducing sanity.

In short, there exists no rigorous corroboration of the serotonin theory, and a significant body of contradictory evidence. Far from being a radical line of thought, doubts about the serotonin hypothesis are well acknowledged by many researchers, including frank statements from prominent psychiatrists, according to the essay.

Consumer advertising for SSRI drugs started in 1998. Since then the specious theory of "chemical imbalance in the brain" as a source of mental illness has been widely promulgated, with cute bouncing animated figures and convincing scenarios with people suffering from symptoms said to be curable with SSRIs. But this very advertising may be the thing that backfires for Big Pharma. Eventually people see through the lies. Abe Lincoln had it right; sooner or later people are going to want to run snake oil salesman out of town on a rail.