Texas teenager David Henry Tuck was sentenced to life in prison after an assault on a Hispanic teenager during which he sodomized the boy with an umbrella, yelling "White Power". The event occurred at a drug party where the main course included Xanax, a Prozac-style "anti-depression" drug.
Tuck has a history of this kind of behavior and was considered by the judge to be beyond rehabilitation. That's fine, but what about the Xanax? We've seen WAY too many violent crimes under the influence of this family of drugs to simply dismiss it. Would he have gone so crazy without the drug? His home town of Houston is where the mother drowned her four kids in a bathtub while she was on Prozac.
These drugs kill and should be outlawed.
Read the story at this link.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Friday, November 17, 2006
TeenScreen Hit Again
Enraged parents' groups around the country are continuing to explode in the face of the TeenScreen program. Seen as an attempt to hijack the school system as a feeder source for down-trending psychiatric funding and drug sales, TeenScreen is a sham program that asks a few questions of school children, then on the basis of these few answers pretends to predict whether these children are prone to suicide or exhibiting other signs of psychosis.
The answers to inane questions like, "Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren't interested in anything?" and "Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren't interested in anything?" children are being hung with psychiatric labels and encouraged or even coerced into taking drugs.
The latest shot across the bow is in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In an article in the Kenosha News (requires subscription) reporter Chris Barncard describes the outraged reaction of the Kenosha Parents Union which has "spoken out against school boundary changes and Columbia University TeenScreen, a suicide risk screening program being considered for Unified eighth-graders."
This is a reaction that is occuring across the United States, as TeenScreen continues to try to circumvent federal law that requires parental permission for children to participate in the program. TeenScreen spokesmen complain that requests for permission from parents have a low return rate, so they try to use "opt out" forms or give prizes to students who can bring back a signed form. But trickery like this only outrages parents' groups more. It's hard to tell Big Pharma and the psychiatry industry they have to go away, but they do. They have no place nosing around our children in the school system.
The answers to inane questions like, "Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren't interested in anything?" and "Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren't interested in anything?" children are being hung with psychiatric labels and encouraged or even coerced into taking drugs.
The latest shot across the bow is in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In an article in the Kenosha News (requires subscription) reporter Chris Barncard describes the outraged reaction of the Kenosha Parents Union which has "spoken out against school boundary changes and Columbia University TeenScreen, a suicide risk screening program being considered for Unified eighth-graders."
This is a reaction that is occuring across the United States, as TeenScreen continues to try to circumvent federal law that requires parental permission for children to participate in the program. TeenScreen spokesmen complain that requests for permission from parents have a low return rate, so they try to use "opt out" forms or give prizes to students who can bring back a signed form. But trickery like this only outrages parents' groups more. It's hard to tell Big Pharma and the psychiatry industry they have to go away, but they do. They have no place nosing around our children in the school system.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Looks Like TeenScreen's Out In Kenosha
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, the school board took a look at Teenscreen and isn't buying it. Citing the fact that it is funded by big pharmaceutical companies that benefit from the sharp increase of kids on psychiatric drugs. Another factor is the ridiculous idea that answering a few questions can tell you a kid is "suicidal". Especially since it identifies a large percentage of the people who answer the quiz as suicidal -- a much larger percentage than actually commit suicide or even try.
Read this story. It's "fair and balanced", quotes people who are in favor of the program, but points up the objections and concludes it's never going to happen.
Read this story. It's "fair and balanced", quotes people who are in favor of the program, but points up the objections and concludes it's never going to happen.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Why Ritalin is a Scam
Now, how are you going to tell your kid not to take a class 2 drug from his friends when you are giving a class 2 drug made out of the same things to his kid sister? If you don’t make sense to your kids they’re not going to listen. Your kids have also checked out the web to see who is paying the school districts to put kids on drugs. In 1985 Congress passed the Individual Development Education Assistance Act (I.D.E.A.), giving funds in the billions to subsidize schools with kids who have learning disabilities.
Here’s the way it works: the US Government will give up to $450 and the state will give up to $160 to a school for each student who is labeled with a learning disability. Let’s do some math. At my old high school we had 2000 kids. The school figures about 10% have ADD, which is about 200 kids. You multiply 200 x $600 and that school gets over $120,000 per year for putting kids on drugs that are in the same FDA schedule classification as cocaine. Now how are you going to tell them not to take drugs?
-From an article by Steve Plog of the Results Project
Here’s the way it works: the US Government will give up to $450 and the state will give up to $160 to a school for each student who is labeled with a learning disability. Let’s do some math. At my old high school we had 2000 kids. The school figures about 10% have ADD, which is about 200 kids. You multiply 200 x $600 and that school gets over $120,000 per year for putting kids on drugs that are in the same FDA schedule classification as cocaine. Now how are you going to tell them not to take drugs?
-From an article by Steve Plog of the Results Project
Monday, November 13, 2006
Ritalin stunts growth of preschoolers; 40 percent develop side effects
A newstarget.com article cites a 70-week government study published in the November edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which states that stunted growth and other side effects can follow treatment with Ritalin.
"The side effects reported on Ritalin's label include stomachaches, headaches and hallucinations, but reports have suggested it also causes more severe reactions such as liver problems and even death," says the article.
Children given the drugs grew about a half inch less than expected during the period of the study, and gained about 2 lbs. less than expected.
Another side effect? Aberrated behavior. "Some children even reacted with severe behaviors including hanging from ceiling fans and playing with fire," says the study.
How long before everyone realizes the emperor has no clothes?
"The side effects reported on Ritalin's label include stomachaches, headaches and hallucinations, but reports have suggested it also causes more severe reactions such as liver problems and even death," says the article.
Children given the drugs grew about a half inch less than expected during the period of the study, and gained about 2 lbs. less than expected.
Another side effect? Aberrated behavior. "Some children even reacted with severe behaviors including hanging from ceiling fans and playing with fire," says the study.
How long before everyone realizes the emperor has no clothes?
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Mental Health "200 to 300 years behind other branches of medicine"
A recent article in the NY Times illustrates the confusion in mental health. A Duke University professor of psychiatry says, "...the system of diagnosis is still 200 to 300 years behind other branches of medicine".
The article appears to be written by someone who is not really anti-psychiatry, but who is trying to make sense of the field. The result is journalistic anguish. One wants to take the writer by the shoulders, shake him and say, "Open your eyes! The field is completely destructive and insane!"
Psychiatry and psychology have been so ineffective for so long that people in the field have "adjusted" to it (to use their own term) and like the murderer who laughingly confesses to his crimes, they now freely admit their impotence, not realizing that such admissions are tantamount to a confession of guilt, in a field where innocence was lost long ago. If a family can find some combination of treatments that help a child improve, “then the diagnosis may not matter much at all," says one psychiatrist, apparently blind to the real implication of such a statement.
The article also exposes the lack of technology in the field, anecdotally relating the story of a family who tried to solve their child's so-called "mental problem" by going from psych to psych and getting different diagnoses and different treatments each time. Psychiatric terms like "ADHD" and "bipolar" are bandied about as if they meant something specific, but the article admits "Children can develop so fast that what looks like attention deficit disorder in the fall may look like anxiety or nothing at all in the summer."
Read the article at this link.
The article appears to be written by someone who is not really anti-psychiatry, but who is trying to make sense of the field. The result is journalistic anguish. One wants to take the writer by the shoulders, shake him and say, "Open your eyes! The field is completely destructive and insane!"
Psychiatry and psychology have been so ineffective for so long that people in the field have "adjusted" to it (to use their own term) and like the murderer who laughingly confesses to his crimes, they now freely admit their impotence, not realizing that such admissions are tantamount to a confession of guilt, in a field where innocence was lost long ago. If a family can find some combination of treatments that help a child improve, “then the diagnosis may not matter much at all," says one psychiatrist, apparently blind to the real implication of such a statement.
The article also exposes the lack of technology in the field, anecdotally relating the story of a family who tried to solve their child's so-called "mental problem" by going from psych to psych and getting different diagnoses and different treatments each time. Psychiatric terms like "ADHD" and "bipolar" are bandied about as if they meant something specific, but the article admits "Children can develop so fast that what looks like attention deficit disorder in the fall may look like anxiety or nothing at all in the summer."
Read the article at this link.
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