They came up with a cute new marketing gimmick -- the name Vioxx, with two exes. Very cute.
A jury in Texas says they did some marketing things they shouldn't have, though.
We're talking about Merck -- the drug company.
For instance, they targeted doctors that were not friendly to Vioxx to either bring them into the fold, or else to neutralize or discredit them. "Neutralize" meant get them to change their mind, said the head of Merck's epidemiology department. Notes subpoenaed from her department suggest that "neutralization" may take the form of payoffs and bribes -- or if you want to be polite, research grants -- to doctors. She said such grants are common.
Her definition of "discredit" was somewhat murkier.
The marketing department reportedly taught reps to handle antagonistic doctors with drills called "Dodge Ball". But the company representative said this doesn't mean they dodge questions.
The marketing department also downplayed or misrepresented Vioxx safety concerns in expensive and aggressive advertising campaigns, according to FDA warning letters exposed in the trial.
Now the jury in a Texas case says Vioxx was the cause of death for a 59-year-old produce manager at a Wal-Mart in Fort Worth. He wasn't a couch potato. He ran marathons and worked as a personal trainer. Then he died. After he took the Vioxx. So the jury says Merck needs to pay a lot of money to the man's survivors -- about a quarter of a million dollars.
Thus went the first of hundreds or perhaps thousands of lawsuits against Merck, being generated by survivors of people who died using the drug, which vascillated on and off the market over a period of a few years as the company ran roughshod over multiple evidences of heart trouble in users.
The risk of heart attack more than doubled when Vioxx was taken, according to a Swiss study in 2000. Swiss researchers say this should have caused Merck to pull the drug at that time.
Those who did that study say the data was ignored. They not only attacked Merck. They also attacked "drug licensing authorities" (read FDA in our case) who "did not evaluate the data available on Vioxx sooner."
This writer is normally something of a free market animal, and detests the idea of lawsuits dragging down hard-working business people and crashing commerce. But in the case of drug companies such suits are more than justified. We've seen the evidence in the world of SSRI psychiatric drugs and drugs like Ritalin -- products that reap obscene profits, which are used by the drug companies to counter or cover up the destructive effects of the drugs.
Today's Robber Barons are Big Pharma. But the world is catching on. Something tells us this is only a little first step in the avalanche to come. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
The Authority Technique In Drug Sales
Drug companies and psychiatrists/psychologists are always dreaming up new subterfuges to sell their wares. The idea of a "screening" program for mental illness is one of the most clever and most seditious. If you "screen" people for something that can't be proven to exist or not exist, i.e. mental illness, you have no way to judge the "screen" except the opinion of one or more human beings. If you are mentally ill in the opinion of somebody with authority, the consequences could destroy your life.
The stinky part is that the people who are offering their opinion stand to gain financially by saying yes rather than no. Now that sucks, to use the vernacular. In other words, we are asking someone for his expert opinion on whether someone is sane, and he makes money if he says no, but makes no money if he says yes. Backed by Big Pharma, he is going to be looking for ways to say yes.
The nutty "teenscreen" program that was supposed to sweep the country's school systems is just such a recruiting program for the purveyors of Prozac and Ritalin. The "authority" tag of the psychs who administer such a program is more than a suggestion of what might help. It's a raw insistence, backed by threats in many cases. Parents have had their children taken away from them for refusing to give them psychiatric drugs.
It would seem that the biggest conflict here is the odd concept that someone with an opinion can establish the existence of a mental illness or deficiency where it cannot be proven or verified with any kind of science. Unlike measles, mumps and whooping cough, ADHD cannot be scientifically verified with a blood test or an x-ray or in any other way.
But the larger data inconsistency is the statistic that goes with the violence that all of this is supposed to solve or prevent -- the emergence of the phenomenon of the madman (or child) who shows up with a gun and shoots everyone in sight, including in many cases him or herself, just out of frustration, with no apparent clear cut motive of the type we used to associate with murder (i.e. large sums of money, etc.) The statistic is that this kind of violence is closely associated with psychiatric and psychological help and with psych drugs. The people who do this, at any age, are victims of psychiatry, psychology and psych drugs.
And make no mistake, this phenomenon is new. If you're not old enough to remember when this stuff never happened, talk to someone who is. It's a new phenomenon, it's not normal, and it correlates with the introduction of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs into the society. In 1955 there was almost never any such phenomenon in the public school system. Now it repeats and repeats. And the people who do it are usually hopped up on psych drugs.
And the sequence is the key. These people go crazy and start shooting after they get their anger management counseling and psychiatric drugs, not before.
So to "prevent" violence, we are subjecting people to the very social phenomenon that causes violence -- psychiatric counseling and drugs like Prozac, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil and others. These drugs make billions of dollars per year for the manufacturers, but the cost people their sanity and in many cases their lives.
The latest "screening program"? Massachusetts wants to screen veterans who return from service in Iraq. That oughta sell a lot of pills. Do you rest better knowing that some expert wants to authoritatively give an opinion based on nothing as to whether these veterans are sane? If Mr. Authority says they're not up to snuff, he's going to give them treatment that causes homicide and suicide in many cases. That's a great idea.
The army has a better view. They won't take a soldier who has been on psychiatric drugs. They know it causes these guys to become wild men who are too dangerous to trust with a gun. Eric Harris, the shooter that killed his fellow students at Columbine school in Colorado, had tried to join the army -- but they found out he was a psych patient, and they said no.
Let's just say no to these cretins that want to drug up our children and our soldiers. We only need one "screening" program. We need to screen out people who want to use their authority to push psychiatry on unsuspecting victims in our schools and in our society.
The stinky part is that the people who are offering their opinion stand to gain financially by saying yes rather than no. Now that sucks, to use the vernacular. In other words, we are asking someone for his expert opinion on whether someone is sane, and he makes money if he says no, but makes no money if he says yes. Backed by Big Pharma, he is going to be looking for ways to say yes.
The nutty "teenscreen" program that was supposed to sweep the country's school systems is just such a recruiting program for the purveyors of Prozac and Ritalin. The "authority" tag of the psychs who administer such a program is more than a suggestion of what might help. It's a raw insistence, backed by threats in many cases. Parents have had their children taken away from them for refusing to give them psychiatric drugs.
It would seem that the biggest conflict here is the odd concept that someone with an opinion can establish the existence of a mental illness or deficiency where it cannot be proven or verified with any kind of science. Unlike measles, mumps and whooping cough, ADHD cannot be scientifically verified with a blood test or an x-ray or in any other way.
But the larger data inconsistency is the statistic that goes with the violence that all of this is supposed to solve or prevent -- the emergence of the phenomenon of the madman (or child) who shows up with a gun and shoots everyone in sight, including in many cases him or herself, just out of frustration, with no apparent clear cut motive of the type we used to associate with murder (i.e. large sums of money, etc.) The statistic is that this kind of violence is closely associated with psychiatric and psychological help and with psych drugs. The people who do this, at any age, are victims of psychiatry, psychology and psych drugs.
And make no mistake, this phenomenon is new. If you're not old enough to remember when this stuff never happened, talk to someone who is. It's a new phenomenon, it's not normal, and it correlates with the introduction of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs into the society. In 1955 there was almost never any such phenomenon in the public school system. Now it repeats and repeats. And the people who do it are usually hopped up on psych drugs.
And the sequence is the key. These people go crazy and start shooting after they get their anger management counseling and psychiatric drugs, not before.
So to "prevent" violence, we are subjecting people to the very social phenomenon that causes violence -- psychiatric counseling and drugs like Prozac, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil and others. These drugs make billions of dollars per year for the manufacturers, but the cost people their sanity and in many cases their lives.
The latest "screening program"? Massachusetts wants to screen veterans who return from service in Iraq. That oughta sell a lot of pills. Do you rest better knowing that some expert wants to authoritatively give an opinion based on nothing as to whether these veterans are sane? If Mr. Authority says they're not up to snuff, he's going to give them treatment that causes homicide and suicide in many cases. That's a great idea.
The army has a better view. They won't take a soldier who has been on psychiatric drugs. They know it causes these guys to become wild men who are too dangerous to trust with a gun. Eric Harris, the shooter that killed his fellow students at Columbine school in Colorado, had tried to join the army -- but they found out he was a psych patient, and they said no.
Let's just say no to these cretins that want to drug up our children and our soldiers. We only need one "screening" program. We need to screen out people who want to use their authority to push psychiatry on unsuspecting victims in our schools and in our society.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Beverly Eakman On Psych-Based Education
This great article can be read in its entirety at http://www.newswithviews.com/Eakman/beverly31.htm
In the article, Eakman talks about the "brouhaha surrounding actor Tom Cruise and his Hollywood colleague, Brooke Shields, regarding their respective views on antidepressant drugs."
"Inevitably," she says, "psychotherapies in general became intertwined with the topic of mind-altering substances -- and so did Scientology, the bête noire of the psychiatric profession."
Eakman clarifies that she is not a Scientologist. She sayst that until Scientology’s spin-off organization, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, contacted her in 1996 concerning two of her books on education, she had only heard of it in passing and had never heard of CCHR.
She had, however, independently discovered that psych-based education was ruining the school system. In fact, she says it is why she quit her job as a teacher. "Long ago and quite independently, I had come to certain conclusions, the primary one being that psychology had compromised the educating process. That was why I left the teaching profession. The new emphasis on emotions meant that academics took a back seat. It inaugurated what I felt was a phony and counterproductive self-esteem movement. Finally, psychologized education brought in a counseling industry that undermined the moral authority of adults, with the consequence that teachers were handling little 'mob-ocracies' instead of kiddy cliques."
"With the arrival of the counselor-therapist," she says, "I got the sinking feeling that psychology in schools was 'morphing' into something more ominous: psychotherapy and drugs were replacing the discipline and character-building functions that had been the staples of education and childrearing."
Her suspicions were confirmed by the time reports started appearing, in the late 1980s, alleging that schools were intimidating parents into putting their children on psychiatric drugs.
She says, "Not only was real, scientific research on learning methods being scuttled, but I couldn’t find any hard, statistical validity behind the claims for psychiatric drugs that were being prescribed for behavioral problems. Eventually, renowned experts in government and on the boards of major pharmaceutical companies were blowing the whistle on unreported side-effects, unsubstantiated claims, and outright fraud -- and they weren’t Scientologists. Experts and authors like Drs. Peter Breggin, David Healy, Charles Medawar, and (more recently) former Pennsylvania Inspector General Allen Jones were, in many cases, actually hostile toward Scientology.
"Today, reports that many antidepressants have no more effect than a placebo are ubiquitous. Which brings up the question: Is the aggressive marketing of psychotropic drugs creating a market based on the power of suggestion?"
She says she takes most of what Hollywood stars say "with a grain of salt," and that Tom Cruise’s June 24th interview on NBC’s “Today Show” may not have been the most articulate discussion about drugs or that whole field technically known as “behavioral science.” She says Mr. Cruise was particularly blasted for suggesting that vitamins and exercise could serve as solutions for emotional and mental problems.
"But we must remember," she goes on, "that such interviews revolve around sound bites. That’s all television journalists really want: short sentences that explain little but are easily merged into a 7-minute topic segment that TV executives believe will keep viewers keep from changing channels. Hollywood’s stars know whatever they say must be condensed down to a sentence.
Experts increasingly are learning how to do that, too."
Her indictment is scathing. She says, "The fact is, there is nothing in the medical, scientific literature that confirms objective abnormality (“objective abnormality” equates to disease) in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Conduct Disorder (CD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), Post-partum Depression, “math disorder” or hundreds of other “diseases” that psychiatrists swear up and down are “biological.” If they were biological, scientists would be able to see evidence in blood workups, x-rays, urinalyses, taps of spinal fluid, or something. But they can’t. No one knows, for example, how much serotonin (the chemical associated with depression) is normal, or how much is too much or not enough. But medical doctors can tell for sure if you have a vitamin deficiency, and they can tell you which vitamin, too. Vitamin deficiencies, allergies and sedentary lifestyles frequently do contribute adversely to mental function."
This is a former educator and a very articulate writer who sees the insanity being perpetrated on our school system by psychiatrists, psychologists and psych-based education.
The article is worth the read.
In the article, Eakman talks about the "brouhaha surrounding actor Tom Cruise and his Hollywood colleague, Brooke Shields, regarding their respective views on antidepressant drugs."
"Inevitably," she says, "psychotherapies in general became intertwined with the topic of mind-altering substances -- and so did Scientology, the bête noire of the psychiatric profession."
Eakman clarifies that she is not a Scientologist. She sayst that until Scientology’s spin-off organization, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, contacted her in 1996 concerning two of her books on education, she had only heard of it in passing and had never heard of CCHR.
She had, however, independently discovered that psych-based education was ruining the school system. In fact, she says it is why she quit her job as a teacher. "Long ago and quite independently, I had come to certain conclusions, the primary one being that psychology had compromised the educating process. That was why I left the teaching profession. The new emphasis on emotions meant that academics took a back seat. It inaugurated what I felt was a phony and counterproductive self-esteem movement. Finally, psychologized education brought in a counseling industry that undermined the moral authority of adults, with the consequence that teachers were handling little 'mob-ocracies' instead of kiddy cliques."
"With the arrival of the counselor-therapist," she says, "I got the sinking feeling that psychology in schools was 'morphing' into something more ominous: psychotherapy and drugs were replacing the discipline and character-building functions that had been the staples of education and childrearing."
Her suspicions were confirmed by the time reports started appearing, in the late 1980s, alleging that schools were intimidating parents into putting their children on psychiatric drugs.
She says, "Not only was real, scientific research on learning methods being scuttled, but I couldn’t find any hard, statistical validity behind the claims for psychiatric drugs that were being prescribed for behavioral problems. Eventually, renowned experts in government and on the boards of major pharmaceutical companies were blowing the whistle on unreported side-effects, unsubstantiated claims, and outright fraud -- and they weren’t Scientologists. Experts and authors like Drs. Peter Breggin, David Healy, Charles Medawar, and (more recently) former Pennsylvania Inspector General Allen Jones were, in many cases, actually hostile toward Scientology.
"Today, reports that many antidepressants have no more effect than a placebo are ubiquitous. Which brings up the question: Is the aggressive marketing of psychotropic drugs creating a market based on the power of suggestion?"
She says she takes most of what Hollywood stars say "with a grain of salt," and that Tom Cruise’s June 24th interview on NBC’s “Today Show” may not have been the most articulate discussion about drugs or that whole field technically known as “behavioral science.” She says Mr. Cruise was particularly blasted for suggesting that vitamins and exercise could serve as solutions for emotional and mental problems.
"But we must remember," she goes on, "that such interviews revolve around sound bites. That’s all television journalists really want: short sentences that explain little but are easily merged into a 7-minute topic segment that TV executives believe will keep viewers keep from changing channels. Hollywood’s stars know whatever they say must be condensed down to a sentence.
Experts increasingly are learning how to do that, too."
Her indictment is scathing. She says, "The fact is, there is nothing in the medical, scientific literature that confirms objective abnormality (“objective abnormality” equates to disease) in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Conduct Disorder (CD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), Post-partum Depression, “math disorder” or hundreds of other “diseases” that psychiatrists swear up and down are “biological.” If they were biological, scientists would be able to see evidence in blood workups, x-rays, urinalyses, taps of spinal fluid, or something. But they can’t. No one knows, for example, how much serotonin (the chemical associated with depression) is normal, or how much is too much or not enough. But medical doctors can tell for sure if you have a vitamin deficiency, and they can tell you which vitamin, too. Vitamin deficiencies, allergies and sedentary lifestyles frequently do contribute adversely to mental function."
This is a former educator and a very articulate writer who sees the insanity being perpetrated on our school system by psychiatrists, psychologists and psych-based education.
The article is worth the read.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Another Prozac Murder
Another Prozac murder. Or maybe it's another anti-depressant, but Prozac is the most popular one. Which anti-depressant wasn't specified in the article. This one will make you wince:
In Brockton, Massachusetts a man lifting his infant daughter out of his car was killed in an apparent case of road rage by a motorist "who obviously exploded" and shot him four times at close range in front of dozens of witnesses, authorities said.
The victim's 10-month-old girl was covered with blood but uninjured when police found her in a car seat on the floor of the vehicle.
Walter R. Bishop, 60, who was taking medication for depression, was arrested Tuesday and charged with first-degree murder in the death of 27-year-old Sandro Andrade. He pleaded innocent and was ordered held without bail; a hearing was scheduled for Aug. 26.
Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz said Bishop had made a calculated decision to "shoot a man in cold blood in broad daylight on the streets of Brockton."
Bishop told investigators he was driving his wife to the train station when Andrade's vehicle backed toward him on Main Street, Cruz said. The two exchanged heated words.
"He said his wife was scared, and he said he was angry at that encounter," Cruz said of Bishop. "He said he made up his mind right there that he had to do something."
After dropping his wife off, he allegedly returned to the scene of the confrontation, pointed a handgun through an open window and fired, police said.
Boy, think about how crazy Bishop would be if he wasn't taking his psychiatric drugs. No! Wait! He didn't kill anybody BEFORE he took the drugs!!! But the drugs are supposed to HELP you. Can it be that anti-depressants actually MAKE people insane????? Huh? Can it??
In Brockton, Massachusetts a man lifting his infant daughter out of his car was killed in an apparent case of road rage by a motorist "who obviously exploded" and shot him four times at close range in front of dozens of witnesses, authorities said.
The victim's 10-month-old girl was covered with blood but uninjured when police found her in a car seat on the floor of the vehicle.
Walter R. Bishop, 60, who was taking medication for depression, was arrested Tuesday and charged with first-degree murder in the death of 27-year-old Sandro Andrade. He pleaded innocent and was ordered held without bail; a hearing was scheduled for Aug. 26.
Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz said Bishop had made a calculated decision to "shoot a man in cold blood in broad daylight on the streets of Brockton."
Bishop told investigators he was driving his wife to the train station when Andrade's vehicle backed toward him on Main Street, Cruz said. The two exchanged heated words.
"He said his wife was scared, and he said he was angry at that encounter," Cruz said of Bishop. "He said he made up his mind right there that he had to do something."
After dropping his wife off, he allegedly returned to the scene of the confrontation, pointed a handgun through an open window and fired, police said.
Boy, think about how crazy Bishop would be if he wasn't taking his psychiatric drugs. No! Wait! He didn't kill anybody BEFORE he took the drugs!!! But the drugs are supposed to HELP you. Can it be that anti-depressants actually MAKE people insane????? Huh? Can it??
Letter To South Florida Sentinel Newspaper
Regarding the latest hype about the drugging of America, I cannot believe how gullible people have become regarding mental illness. We're being snowed. Millions are spent on developing and advertising psychotropic drugs to get people to "feel" better. The drug companies and psychiatrists want a stoned population that can't really face anything. They've put billions of dollars in their pockets without coming up with any cures. Wouldn't it be better to have a population that can have a chance of solving its own problems by confronting them? We're in a society of legalized drug pushing.
Why? Because the psychiatrists put a label on an ordinary problem and the drug companies develop a drug to "treat" it. They certainly don't cure anything. Just read the letter by your writer whose wife has been on anti-depressants for 12 years. Kudos to the Scientologists. They're promoting finding ways to make people feel better without drugs. Now that's new!
Why? Because the psychiatrists put a label on an ordinary problem and the drug companies develop a drug to "treat" it. They certainly don't cure anything. Just read the letter by your writer whose wife has been on anti-depressants for 12 years. Kudos to the Scientologists. They're promoting finding ways to make people feel better without drugs. Now that's new!
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
"Big Pharma" is using "Western Medicine" to Destroy America...
Opinion by consumer Advocate Tim Bolen
In the United States every company with over two hundred employees is required to provide full health insurance coverage to its employees. Since 1999, when the US FDA allowed "Big Pharma" to advertise directly to the American consumer, the cost of the average prescription drug has increased 500% - with no reason other than greed.
The same prescription drugs cost five to twenty times as much in the US as other countries. Because of this, the average cost of health insurance for a family of four, including the amount a company pays, and what the employee pays, is now $14,700 per year.
No company in the US can afford those increases in health care costs - so just to survive, at all, much less compete in a word-wide market, US companies are sending their labor requirements overseas - and shutting down US production facilities, laying off US workers, supervisors, managers, vice presidents, etc.
It's time America recognized "Big Pharma" for what it really is - the enemy of mankind - and does something about it.
To read the entire article, click on the URL below:
http://www.quackpotwatch.org/opinionpieces/big%20pharma%20destroying%20America.htm
In the United States every company with over two hundred employees is required to provide full health insurance coverage to its employees. Since 1999, when the US FDA allowed "Big Pharma" to advertise directly to the American consumer, the cost of the average prescription drug has increased 500% - with no reason other than greed.
The same prescription drugs cost five to twenty times as much in the US as other countries. Because of this, the average cost of health insurance for a family of four, including the amount a company pays, and what the employee pays, is now $14,700 per year.
No company in the US can afford those increases in health care costs - so just to survive, at all, much less compete in a word-wide market, US companies are sending their labor requirements overseas - and shutting down US production facilities, laying off US workers, supervisors, managers, vice presidents, etc.
It's time America recognized "Big Pharma" for what it really is - the enemy of mankind - and does something about it.
To read the entire article, click on the URL below:
http://www.quackpotwatch.org/opinionpieces/big%20pharma%20destroying%20America.htm
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Psychology Today Tells The Truth!
This partial article is from Psychology Today. You can read the whole article here.
PSYCHIATRIST LOREN MOSHER RECENTLY RESIGNED IN DISGUST FROM THE American Psychiatric Association, claiming that some of his colleagues are too quick to hand out drugs in what he terms an "unholy alliance" between psychiatrists and drug companies. A substantial number of cases of misdiagnosis and fraud support his view that patient care may be in jeopardy.
"I Want No Part of It Anymore"
The trouble began in the late 1970s when I conducted a controversial study: I opened a program--Soteria House--where newly diagnosed schizophrenic patients lived medication-free with a young, nonprofessional staff trained to listen to and understand them and provide companionship. The idea was that schizophrenia can often be overcome with the help of meaningful relationships, rather than with drugs, and that such treatment would eventually lead to unquestionably healthier lives.
The experiment worked better than expected. Over the initial six weeks, patients recovered as quickly as those treated with medication in hospitals.
The results of the study were published in scores of psychiatric journals, nursing journals and books, but the project lost its funding and the facility was closed. Amid the storm of controversy that followed, control of the research project was taken out of my hands. I also faced an investigation into my behavior as chief of the National Institute of Mental Health's Center for Studies of Schizophrenia and was excluded from prestigious academic events. By 1980, I was removed from my post altogether. All of this occurred because of my strong stand against the overuse of medication and disregard for drug-free, psychological interventions to treat psychological disorders.
I soon found a less politically sensitive position at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. Eight years later, I re-entered the political arena as the head of the public mental health system in Montgomery County, Md., but not without a fight from friends of the drug industry. The Maryland Psychiatric Society asked that a state pharmacy committee review my credentials and prescribing practices to make sure that Montgomery County patients would receive proper--read: drug--treatments. In addition, a pro-drug family advocacy organization arranged for more than 250 furious letters to be sent to the elected county executive who had hired me. Fortunately, my employers were not drug-industry-dominated, so I kept my position.
Why does the world of psychiatry find me so threatening? Because drug companies pour millions of dollars into the pockets of psychiatrists around the country, making them reluctant to recognize that drugs may not always be in the best interest of their patients. They are too busy enjoying drug company perks: consultant gigs, research grants, fine wine and fancy meals.
Pharmaceutical companies pay through the nose to get their message across to psychiatrists across the country. They finance major symposia at the two predominant annual psychiatric conventions, offer yummy treats and music to conventioneers, and pay $1,000-$2,000 per speaker to hock their wares. It is estimated that, in total, drug companies spend an average of $10,000 per physician, per year, on education.
And, of course, the doctors-for-hire tell only half the story. How widely is it known, for example, that Prozac and its successor antidepressants cause sexual dysfunction in as many as 70% of people taking them?
What's even scarier is the greed that is directing a good deal of drug testing today. It is estimated that drug manufacturers have, on average, 12 years to recoup costs and make profits on a given medication before a generic form can be made. So pressure to test new drugs mounts. In the field of psychiatric drug testing, organizations make a profit of as much as $40,000 for every patient who successfully completes a trial. And university psychiatry departments, private research clinics and some individual doctors live on this money.
The good news is that the press is catching on. The New York Times, Dallas News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and New York Post have recently run articles or series on how pharmaceutical companies use cash incentives to encourage doctors to prescribe their drugs.
This spring, the New York Post revealed that Columbia University has been cashing in. Its Office of Clinical Trials generates about $10 million a year testing new medications--much of which is granted to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute for implementing these tests. The director of the institute was being paid $140,000 a year by various drug companies to tour the country promoting their drugs. He also received payments of nearly $12,000 from a drug manufacturer to head up a study on panic disorders. How could he rate these drugs fairly when his livelihood was dependent on the success of the drug manufacturer? The director resigned in the aftermath of the article's publication.
At least one drug company, Wyeth-Ayerst Research, has spoken out against offering cash bonuses and other incentives to researchers. But company representatives admit it's difficult to stay competitive when other groups so eagerly violate ethical concerns.
The APA Connection
The American Psychiatric Association--representing the majority of psychiatrists in America, with about 40,000 members--is also unduly influenced by pharmaceutical dollars. The association:
o receives substantial rent from drug companies for huge symposia spaces at national conventions.
o derives an enormous percentage of its income from drug companies--30% of its total budget is from drug company advertising in its many publications.
o accepts a large number of unrestricted educational grants from drug companies.
This relationship is dangerous because researchers and psychiatrists then feel indebted to the drug companies, remain biased in favor of drug cures, downplay side effects and seldom try other types of interventions. And they know they have the unspoken blessing of the APA to do so.
Collectively, these practices aggressively promote reliance on prescription drug use-so much so that many people think drugs should be forced on those who refuse to take them. The APA supports the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, which believes that mentally ill patients should be coerced to take medication. I am appalled by this level of social control. Mentally ill people should be given a choice to have their illness treated in alternative ways.
Over the last decade, ! have written a number of letters bringing my concerns to the APA's attention but have received no response. The association claims that what it's doing is in the "best interest of patients," but its strong ties to the drug industry suggest otherwise.
Recently, it was dues-paying time for the APA, and I sat there looking at the form. I thought about the unholy alliance between the association and the drug industry. I thought about how consumers are being affected by this alliance, about the overuse of medication, about side effects and about alternative treatments. I thought about how irresponsibly some of my colleagues are acting toward the general public and the mentally ill. And I realized, I want no part of it anymore.
Loren R. Mosher, M.D.
PSYCHIATRIST LOREN MOSHER RECENTLY RESIGNED IN DISGUST FROM THE American Psychiatric Association, claiming that some of his colleagues are too quick to hand out drugs in what he terms an "unholy alliance" between psychiatrists and drug companies. A substantial number of cases of misdiagnosis and fraud support his view that patient care may be in jeopardy.
"I Want No Part of It Anymore"
The trouble began in the late 1970s when I conducted a controversial study: I opened a program--Soteria House--where newly diagnosed schizophrenic patients lived medication-free with a young, nonprofessional staff trained to listen to and understand them and provide companionship. The idea was that schizophrenia can often be overcome with the help of meaningful relationships, rather than with drugs, and that such treatment would eventually lead to unquestionably healthier lives.
The experiment worked better than expected. Over the initial six weeks, patients recovered as quickly as those treated with medication in hospitals.
The results of the study were published in scores of psychiatric journals, nursing journals and books, but the project lost its funding and the facility was closed. Amid the storm of controversy that followed, control of the research project was taken out of my hands. I also faced an investigation into my behavior as chief of the National Institute of Mental Health's Center for Studies of Schizophrenia and was excluded from prestigious academic events. By 1980, I was removed from my post altogether. All of this occurred because of my strong stand against the overuse of medication and disregard for drug-free, psychological interventions to treat psychological disorders.
I soon found a less politically sensitive position at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. Eight years later, I re-entered the political arena as the head of the public mental health system in Montgomery County, Md., but not without a fight from friends of the drug industry. The Maryland Psychiatric Society asked that a state pharmacy committee review my credentials and prescribing practices to make sure that Montgomery County patients would receive proper--read: drug--treatments. In addition, a pro-drug family advocacy organization arranged for more than 250 furious letters to be sent to the elected county executive who had hired me. Fortunately, my employers were not drug-industry-dominated, so I kept my position.
Why does the world of psychiatry find me so threatening? Because drug companies pour millions of dollars into the pockets of psychiatrists around the country, making them reluctant to recognize that drugs may not always be in the best interest of their patients. They are too busy enjoying drug company perks: consultant gigs, research grants, fine wine and fancy meals.
Pharmaceutical companies pay through the nose to get their message across to psychiatrists across the country. They finance major symposia at the two predominant annual psychiatric conventions, offer yummy treats and music to conventioneers, and pay $1,000-$2,000 per speaker to hock their wares. It is estimated that, in total, drug companies spend an average of $10,000 per physician, per year, on education.
And, of course, the doctors-for-hire tell only half the story. How widely is it known, for example, that Prozac and its successor antidepressants cause sexual dysfunction in as many as 70% of people taking them?
What's even scarier is the greed that is directing a good deal of drug testing today. It is estimated that drug manufacturers have, on average, 12 years to recoup costs and make profits on a given medication before a generic form can be made. So pressure to test new drugs mounts. In the field of psychiatric drug testing, organizations make a profit of as much as $40,000 for every patient who successfully completes a trial. And university psychiatry departments, private research clinics and some individual doctors live on this money.
The good news is that the press is catching on. The New York Times, Dallas News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and New York Post have recently run articles or series on how pharmaceutical companies use cash incentives to encourage doctors to prescribe their drugs.
This spring, the New York Post revealed that Columbia University has been cashing in. Its Office of Clinical Trials generates about $10 million a year testing new medications--much of which is granted to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute for implementing these tests. The director of the institute was being paid $140,000 a year by various drug companies to tour the country promoting their drugs. He also received payments of nearly $12,000 from a drug manufacturer to head up a study on panic disorders. How could he rate these drugs fairly when his livelihood was dependent on the success of the drug manufacturer? The director resigned in the aftermath of the article's publication.
At least one drug company, Wyeth-Ayerst Research, has spoken out against offering cash bonuses and other incentives to researchers. But company representatives admit it's difficult to stay competitive when other groups so eagerly violate ethical concerns.
The APA Connection
The American Psychiatric Association--representing the majority of psychiatrists in America, with about 40,000 members--is also unduly influenced by pharmaceutical dollars. The association:
o receives substantial rent from drug companies for huge symposia spaces at national conventions.
o derives an enormous percentage of its income from drug companies--30% of its total budget is from drug company advertising in its many publications.
o accepts a large number of unrestricted educational grants from drug companies.
This relationship is dangerous because researchers and psychiatrists then feel indebted to the drug companies, remain biased in favor of drug cures, downplay side effects and seldom try other types of interventions. And they know they have the unspoken blessing of the APA to do so.
Collectively, these practices aggressively promote reliance on prescription drug use-so much so that many people think drugs should be forced on those who refuse to take them. The APA supports the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, which believes that mentally ill patients should be coerced to take medication. I am appalled by this level of social control. Mentally ill people should be given a choice to have their illness treated in alternative ways.
Over the last decade, ! have written a number of letters bringing my concerns to the APA's attention but have received no response. The association claims that what it's doing is in the "best interest of patients," but its strong ties to the drug industry suggest otherwise.
Recently, it was dues-paying time for the APA, and I sat there looking at the form. I thought about the unholy alliance between the association and the drug industry. I thought about how consumers are being affected by this alliance, about the overuse of medication, about side effects and about alternative treatments. I thought about how irresponsibly some of my colleagues are acting toward the general public and the mentally ill. And I realized, I want no part of it anymore.
Loren R. Mosher, M.D.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Medical Society, Magazine Split Over Drug Company Influence
Medical societies like the American Medical Association and their journals have a history of influence by Big Pharma, often forwarding their own agenda (read that as Big Pharma's agenda) without regard for the opinions or best interests of individual physicians who make up the society they represent, much less the best interests of the general public. For half a century or more the agenda of the AMA was not closely aligned with the interests of doctors at all, but was intent on pushing surgical/pharmaceutical medicine as a monopoly, trying to push out by whatever means necessary any other type of help for health problems.
But in an interesting twist, the American Society of Hypertension, which represents docs that specialize in handling high blood pressure, is splitting with its journal, the American Journal of Hypertension, pulling its official support for the magazine. Why? Because the magazine is accusing the Society of being a Big Pharma sycophant, accepting drug company payoffs to promote drug solutions, presumably to the exclusion of non-drug solutions.
This is indeed a new phenomenon.
It's hard to tell the whole story from the outside, but it appears we have a magazine and its editor that wants to put in ethics on its group and has gotten into a fight over it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Journal's Editor Dr. John Laragh, a researcher at Cornell University's Weill Medical College, has accused the society's leaders of being improperly influenced by financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry and becoming, in essence, marketers for drug companies, which pay them consulting and speaking fees.
Hmmm. It might not mean a lot. But it is part of a mounting body of evidence of a tear in the straitjacket Big Pharma has on the medical community. One of these days the straitjacket is going to come off. Big Pharma's days as an ethics-free power hungry industry that seeks social domination through the promulgation of drugs, whether they are needed or not, and whether or not they represent the best solution in all cases, is slowly coming to an end. It's not yet time to sell Lilly stock short, but it's certainly no time to buy it.
But in an interesting twist, the American Society of Hypertension, which represents docs that specialize in handling high blood pressure, is splitting with its journal, the American Journal of Hypertension, pulling its official support for the magazine. Why? Because the magazine is accusing the Society of being a Big Pharma sycophant, accepting drug company payoffs to promote drug solutions, presumably to the exclusion of non-drug solutions.
This is indeed a new phenomenon.
It's hard to tell the whole story from the outside, but it appears we have a magazine and its editor that wants to put in ethics on its group and has gotten into a fight over it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Journal's Editor Dr. John Laragh, a researcher at Cornell University's Weill Medical College, has accused the society's leaders of being improperly influenced by financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry and becoming, in essence, marketers for drug companies, which pay them consulting and speaking fees.
Hmmm. It might not mean a lot. But it is part of a mounting body of evidence of a tear in the straitjacket Big Pharma has on the medical community. One of these days the straitjacket is going to come off. Big Pharma's days as an ethics-free power hungry industry that seeks social domination through the promulgation of drugs, whether they are needed or not, and whether or not they represent the best solution in all cases, is slowly coming to an end. It's not yet time to sell Lilly stock short, but it's certainly no time to buy it.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Psycho-Sadists Running Mental Institution In California
Here -- you read it. I don't think I could say it any better than this Associated Press writer...
By KIM CURTIS The Associated PressThursday, July 28, 2005; 8:55 PM
SAN FRANCISCO -- Patients at a state mental hospital overdosed on illegal drugs, were improperly restrained for hours on end and were forced to spend 12 hours in soiled diapers, according to a scathing report issued by the U.S. Justice Department.
The report said the problems were among "widespread and systematic deficiencies" at Napa State Hospital, including suicide and inadequate medical care. Some patients were bathed only very two to four weeks, the report said.
State officials were given until Aug. 15 to implement "minimum remedial measures" at the mental hospital, which has about 1,100 patients.
Lupe Rincon, a hospital spokeswoman, said many allegations were based on inaccurate information from family members, advocates and old surveys. But she said she could not respond to specific complaints.
"Releasing further information could compromise our negotiations for a settlement agreement" with the Justice Department, she said.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office had no response to the report, contained in a June 27 letter to him, and directed inquiries to the state Department of Mental Health.
The Justice Department investigation began in January 2004. The California Department of Mental Health has refused to cooperate, repeatedly preventing access to the facility, said the letter from Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Department of Mental Health spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre said Thursday the department did not deny access, but simply asked for a delay because an investigation is "a huge diversion of resources" and because time and money was already being spent on preparing for the hospital's reaccreditation, which takes place this fall.
"I'm not saying we're perfect on patient care," said Macintyre, who added that the department already has improved some of its problem areas. "But you have to present things in a fair light."
The report also said that hospital staff punished patients who sought release, failed to provide English interpreters and refused to intervene during violent episodes among patients.
Three patients also overdosed on methamphetamine or cocaine in the fall of 2004 and one died, according to the report. Three other patients were able to use heroin, the report said.
Restraints and seclusion also are overused at Napa, according to the Justice Department. The report cited one patient who was restrained for 369 consecutive hours.
By KIM CURTIS The Associated PressThursday, July 28, 2005; 8:55 PM
SAN FRANCISCO -- Patients at a state mental hospital overdosed on illegal drugs, were improperly restrained for hours on end and were forced to spend 12 hours in soiled diapers, according to a scathing report issued by the U.S. Justice Department.
The report said the problems were among "widespread and systematic deficiencies" at Napa State Hospital, including suicide and inadequate medical care. Some patients were bathed only very two to four weeks, the report said.
State officials were given until Aug. 15 to implement "minimum remedial measures" at the mental hospital, which has about 1,100 patients.
Lupe Rincon, a hospital spokeswoman, said many allegations were based on inaccurate information from family members, advocates and old surveys. But she said she could not respond to specific complaints.
"Releasing further information could compromise our negotiations for a settlement agreement" with the Justice Department, she said.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office had no response to the report, contained in a June 27 letter to him, and directed inquiries to the state Department of Mental Health.
The Justice Department investigation began in January 2004. The California Department of Mental Health has refused to cooperate, repeatedly preventing access to the facility, said the letter from Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Department of Mental Health spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre said Thursday the department did not deny access, but simply asked for a delay because an investigation is "a huge diversion of resources" and because time and money was already being spent on preparing for the hospital's reaccreditation, which takes place this fall.
"I'm not saying we're perfect on patient care," said Macintyre, who added that the department already has improved some of its problem areas. "But you have to present things in a fair light."
The report also said that hospital staff punished patients who sought release, failed to provide English interpreters and refused to intervene during violent episodes among patients.
Three patients also overdosed on methamphetamine or cocaine in the fall of 2004 and one died, according to the report. Three other patients were able to use heroin, the report said.
Restraints and seclusion also are overused at Napa, according to the Justice Department. The report cited one patient who was restrained for 369 consecutive hours.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Eli Lilly and Prozac Dirty Tricks
Nobody begrudges a profit to individuals and companies that produce and sell the things we need and want – least of all this author. I do what I do best, and sell it to you. You do what you do best and sell it to me. We both make a profit, and we use that profit to buy what we need.
But when the profit motive assumes more importance than ethics, we have a damaging aberration – like cancer cells that grow much like normal cells, except they’re out of control and they don’t know when to quit – until they kill the organism.
One organism that’s about to be swallowed up in its own cancerous appetite for money is Big Pharma. This industry is the Robber Baron business of this century – much like the financiers who earned that title by ripping off Americans a hundred years ago.
Perhaps the reason the dark side of this activity is so hard to confront is because like cancer, it doesn’t make sense. Why would major pharmaceutical corporations, already among the world’s richest industries, want more and more even at the expense of human life; without regard for the consequences?
Increasingly, drug companies aren’t just selling cures. They’re also marketing disease, according to Bradford Plumer in the most recent edition of Mother Jones. The result is accelerating health care costs, and the primary beneficiary of this increased outlay is Big Pharma and the medical support structure that supports it.
But don’t confuse this with the medical doctors who work in this system. They aren’t getting the money. In fact, doctors make less and less and are being sued more and more – creating a shortage of physicians, actually, as young people enter the medical profession at startlingly decreasing rates. Hospitals are importing doctors from foreign countries to fill their needs, and still don’t have enough. This works in the favor of Big Pharma. They don’t need doctors. Doctors might cure something. Big Pharma would rather have patients who need pills – lots of them, and ongoing, with no end in sight. A quick prescription takes no time at all for a harried doctor. Instead of examining a kid to see whether he is diabetic or hypoglycemic or underslept or allergic, a quick slip of paper and he’s out the door. The pay to the doctor is the same. But Big Pharma gets a drug addict with a habit sanctioned by and supported by the state. That’s worth a lot of money. And if the people at Big Pharma have any trouble sleeping nights, they have a drug for that too.
The craziest practice is the contorted procedures drug companies go through to save a profit that would be lost at the end of a patent period when a drug goes generic. The Plumer story in Mother Jones describes how Big Pharma handles this situation with a damaging subterfuge we all pay for. An example is Prozac. The patent for Prozac was expiring in 1998. Woops! There goes a lot of profit! But wait – if the drug were found to be useful for handling some disease other than the one it was originally marketed for, it would be eligible for an extended patent period!!
What happens after that sound like something from Saturday Night Live. If Peter Sellers were alive today it would be a quaint English movie – something in the Inspector Clousseau vein. Imagine Sellers working the boardroom. “We need a new disorder. I need ideas here!”
“We need a psychological disease, something that doesn’t presently exist and something that can’t be proven scientifically,” says one wizened advisor. “Why would that be?” says the new kid who just ascended to the board because of his family connections.
“Don’t be silly!” says the older man, “If we call it a mental disease, then nobody can argue with us! There’s no way to prove anything! So they will take us at our word. If we name a real illness that can be scientifically proven, we will then have to scientifically prove that Prozac cures it. Prozac doesn’t actually cure anything, so that option is out.”
The end of the story (this part is not satire, it’s actually true) is that Lilly dug up a controversial new disease nobody had ever heard of, and drummed up interest in it until it became a legitimate accepted condition, then said the drug solved it – and extended their cash cow patent. Read the story. It’s fantastic.
But it doesn’t stop there. What do you do when you need some “authority” for a story in a large respected medical publication? You plant the story in little insignificant medical publications, then you quote those publications as sources for the story in the big influential publication. The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association were doing this regularly in the 1950s when they were on a rampage attacking medical practices that fell outside their purview, such as Chiropractics. Huge lawsuit recoveries were made toward the end of the century when this sleazy practice finally caught up with them. But the drug companies still do it.
A question arises about whether there are unacceptable side effects to the drug when it is used for this newly discovered unprovable condition? All you have to do is plant a story in some small medical magazines saying that the fears are unfounded, then in the big magazine you publish that articles in many small magazines report that the fears are unfounded. It’s beyond fantastic.
There is more about this incredible business in the book Selling Sickness by Moynihan and Cassels.
It’s time to look at the ethics of Big Pharma. And it’s time to hold their feet to the fire. It’s time to say, “You made plenty of money ethically. Now you’ve been making excess profits. And they’re not excess because they are too much money, they’re excess because they’re being made unethically, on the backs of people who are being treated for non-existent diseases, and whose lives are damaged or ruined by the use of drugs that have extreme and violent side effects, including increased likelihood of homicide and suicide and real addiction that makes getting off them more difficult, in the opinion of some, than kicking heroin.
The lawsuits are accelerating. That’s good. But when do we start talking criminal responsibility? How many people have to die before some individuals are guilty of manslaughter?
But when the profit motive assumes more importance than ethics, we have a damaging aberration – like cancer cells that grow much like normal cells, except they’re out of control and they don’t know when to quit – until they kill the organism.
One organism that’s about to be swallowed up in its own cancerous appetite for money is Big Pharma. This industry is the Robber Baron business of this century – much like the financiers who earned that title by ripping off Americans a hundred years ago.
Perhaps the reason the dark side of this activity is so hard to confront is because like cancer, it doesn’t make sense. Why would major pharmaceutical corporations, already among the world’s richest industries, want more and more even at the expense of human life; without regard for the consequences?
Increasingly, drug companies aren’t just selling cures. They’re also marketing disease, according to Bradford Plumer in the most recent edition of Mother Jones. The result is accelerating health care costs, and the primary beneficiary of this increased outlay is Big Pharma and the medical support structure that supports it.
But don’t confuse this with the medical doctors who work in this system. They aren’t getting the money. In fact, doctors make less and less and are being sued more and more – creating a shortage of physicians, actually, as young people enter the medical profession at startlingly decreasing rates. Hospitals are importing doctors from foreign countries to fill their needs, and still don’t have enough. This works in the favor of Big Pharma. They don’t need doctors. Doctors might cure something. Big Pharma would rather have patients who need pills – lots of them, and ongoing, with no end in sight. A quick prescription takes no time at all for a harried doctor. Instead of examining a kid to see whether he is diabetic or hypoglycemic or underslept or allergic, a quick slip of paper and he’s out the door. The pay to the doctor is the same. But Big Pharma gets a drug addict with a habit sanctioned by and supported by the state. That’s worth a lot of money. And if the people at Big Pharma have any trouble sleeping nights, they have a drug for that too.
The craziest practice is the contorted procedures drug companies go through to save a profit that would be lost at the end of a patent period when a drug goes generic. The Plumer story in Mother Jones describes how Big Pharma handles this situation with a damaging subterfuge we all pay for. An example is Prozac. The patent for Prozac was expiring in 1998. Woops! There goes a lot of profit! But wait – if the drug were found to be useful for handling some disease other than the one it was originally marketed for, it would be eligible for an extended patent period!!
What happens after that sound like something from Saturday Night Live. If Peter Sellers were alive today it would be a quaint English movie – something in the Inspector Clousseau vein. Imagine Sellers working the boardroom. “We need a new disorder. I need ideas here!”
“We need a psychological disease, something that doesn’t presently exist and something that can’t be proven scientifically,” says one wizened advisor. “Why would that be?” says the new kid who just ascended to the board because of his family connections.
“Don’t be silly!” says the older man, “If we call it a mental disease, then nobody can argue with us! There’s no way to prove anything! So they will take us at our word. If we name a real illness that can be scientifically proven, we will then have to scientifically prove that Prozac cures it. Prozac doesn’t actually cure anything, so that option is out.”
The end of the story (this part is not satire, it’s actually true) is that Lilly dug up a controversial new disease nobody had ever heard of, and drummed up interest in it until it became a legitimate accepted condition, then said the drug solved it – and extended their cash cow patent. Read the story. It’s fantastic.
But it doesn’t stop there. What do you do when you need some “authority” for a story in a large respected medical publication? You plant the story in little insignificant medical publications, then you quote those publications as sources for the story in the big influential publication. The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association were doing this regularly in the 1950s when they were on a rampage attacking medical practices that fell outside their purview, such as Chiropractics. Huge lawsuit recoveries were made toward the end of the century when this sleazy practice finally caught up with them. But the drug companies still do it.
A question arises about whether there are unacceptable side effects to the drug when it is used for this newly discovered unprovable condition? All you have to do is plant a story in some small medical magazines saying that the fears are unfounded, then in the big magazine you publish that articles in many small magazines report that the fears are unfounded. It’s beyond fantastic.
There is more about this incredible business in the book Selling Sickness by Moynihan and Cassels.
It’s time to look at the ethics of Big Pharma. And it’s time to hold their feet to the fire. It’s time to say, “You made plenty of money ethically. Now you’ve been making excess profits. And they’re not excess because they are too much money, they’re excess because they’re being made unethically, on the backs of people who are being treated for non-existent diseases, and whose lives are damaged or ruined by the use of drugs that have extreme and violent side effects, including increased likelihood of homicide and suicide and real addiction that makes getting off them more difficult, in the opinion of some, than kicking heroin.
The lawsuits are accelerating. That’s good. But when do we start talking criminal responsibility? How many people have to die before some individuals are guilty of manslaughter?
Monday, July 18, 2005
Drug Company Merck Cover-Up of Test Data
We spend most of our time here going on about Big Pharma's long-time wide-scale cover-up of the devastating effects of psychiatric drugs, especially the class known as SSRIs such as Prozac, Luvox, Paxil and others. But an interesting side note of our investigation of this group of companies shows that their actions, which are criminal in our opinion, are not limited to psych drugs. They believe in cover-up and put very little value on human life.
The latest information about Vioxx is a case in point.
Merck pulled Vioxx from the market when evidence began to mount that it was killing people -- causing heart attacks. Vioxx is supposed to be a pain reliever. But people who took the drug started having heart attacks by the bucket full. Within a year after its initial release in 1999, public studies found that people who took it were as much as five times more likely to have a heart attack.
The FDA investigated, Merck pretended to cooperate, but fought for the continued approval of the drug. They wrangled with the FDA for two years, then agreed to a warning label, and off they went again with sales of the drug. But they were finally forced to remove it from the world market after new studies showed without a doubt that the drug doubles the risk of heart attack if the drug is taken for an extended length of time.
There are plenty of pain relievers, of course, but in our opinion the release of Vioxx was for the same reason a lot of the new drugs get released. The drug companies lose their patent on an older drug, and subsequently they lose profits. So they dream up a newer drug that can be patented -- never mind the value of the old drug that still works fine.
That's just background to what came out this week. Merck internal documents that show Merck knew the drug would cause heart attacks have surfaced. They were given inadvertently to a plaintiff's attorney in a lawsuit. We are told that the judge in that lawsuit suppressed the documents because they were inadvertently given to the plaintiff, and were subject to attorney-client privilege. So they never came out.
But they won't go away, and this time they are being splattered all over the press, regardless of whether a judge allows anyone to use them in court; and another judge might have a different opinion about that issue -- we'll see.
A side comment: It's a sad thing when "legal" procedure prevents a court from being able to prove a crime has been committed by suppressing the truth. The truth is the truth.
These memos document an internal Merck dialogue involving the patent office, where they realized the drug was causing heart attacks, and they considered adding another chemical to Vioxx that would reduce that risk! In fact, they patented the changed formula -- but they didn't use it.
Why they abandoned the idea of altering the Vioxx formula to reduce the heart attack risk isn't known. But like the makers of Prozac, Paxil and other killer drugs, Merck knew it would kill people, put corporate profits above ethics, and covered up.
The lawsuits go on. But when will our justice system, which is a part of a government that is swimming in money from drug companies, realize that there are corporate executives here guilty of manslaughter? When will that happen? It's just a matter of time. So far the drug companies have been able to avoid close scrutiny by using their financial power. Only recently a law was passed that the approval board of the FDA has to be made up of people who are not on the drug company payroll. That's a start. Now we need to look at the politicians who are beholden to drug companies and figure out who is looking the other way, and for what reason.
The latest information about Vioxx is a case in point.
Merck pulled Vioxx from the market when evidence began to mount that it was killing people -- causing heart attacks. Vioxx is supposed to be a pain reliever. But people who took the drug started having heart attacks by the bucket full. Within a year after its initial release in 1999, public studies found that people who took it were as much as five times more likely to have a heart attack.
The FDA investigated, Merck pretended to cooperate, but fought for the continued approval of the drug. They wrangled with the FDA for two years, then agreed to a warning label, and off they went again with sales of the drug. But they were finally forced to remove it from the world market after new studies showed without a doubt that the drug doubles the risk of heart attack if the drug is taken for an extended length of time.
There are plenty of pain relievers, of course, but in our opinion the release of Vioxx was for the same reason a lot of the new drugs get released. The drug companies lose their patent on an older drug, and subsequently they lose profits. So they dream up a newer drug that can be patented -- never mind the value of the old drug that still works fine.
That's just background to what came out this week. Merck internal documents that show Merck knew the drug would cause heart attacks have surfaced. They were given inadvertently to a plaintiff's attorney in a lawsuit. We are told that the judge in that lawsuit suppressed the documents because they were inadvertently given to the plaintiff, and were subject to attorney-client privilege. So they never came out.
But they won't go away, and this time they are being splattered all over the press, regardless of whether a judge allows anyone to use them in court; and another judge might have a different opinion about that issue -- we'll see.
A side comment: It's a sad thing when "legal" procedure prevents a court from being able to prove a crime has been committed by suppressing the truth. The truth is the truth.
These memos document an internal Merck dialogue involving the patent office, where they realized the drug was causing heart attacks, and they considered adding another chemical to Vioxx that would reduce that risk! In fact, they patented the changed formula -- but they didn't use it.
Why they abandoned the idea of altering the Vioxx formula to reduce the heart attack risk isn't known. But like the makers of Prozac, Paxil and other killer drugs, Merck knew it would kill people, put corporate profits above ethics, and covered up.
The lawsuits go on. But when will our justice system, which is a part of a government that is swimming in money from drug companies, realize that there are corporate executives here guilty of manslaughter? When will that happen? It's just a matter of time. So far the drug companies have been able to avoid close scrutiny by using their financial power. Only recently a law was passed that the approval board of the FDA has to be made up of people who are not on the drug company payroll. That's a start. Now we need to look at the politicians who are beholden to drug companies and figure out who is looking the other way, and for what reason.
Friday, July 08, 2005
Tom Cruise Sets The Tone
Tom Cruise isn’t the first person to catch on to the fraud of psychiatry. Groups like The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) have been trumpeting it for years – even decades. But Tom Cruise has a greater audience than the rest of us. A few courageous remarks by him on national media and suddenly everyone is starting to take a second look at psychiatry and psychology, especially psychiatric drugs. It’s about time.
The worm has turned. It seems like only a short time ago those of us who knew what Prozac and other similar psychiatric drugs could do were just lonely voices in the wilderness – listening to the echo of our own words, unheard by the bustling busy world of people coming and going from work and school, making their way through the maze of life.
The workplace killings didn’t do it – even though psychiatric drugs are a proven part of most of these crazy events where a disgruntled worker shows up with a gun and kills his boss, his co-workers, then himself. The United States Post Office was one of the earliest large employers to offer psychiatric coverage on their health plan. Not long after, so many postal workers had gone psychotic that the term “going postal” became a synonym for the condition.
Then the school killings started. The kids who do it are usually under the influence of psychiatry, taking “anger management” therapy and/or downing Prozac or other similar (SSRI class) drugs. But nobody looks at that. In many cases the fact that the killer was on psychiatric drugs was an afterthought from the viewpoint of the news. Hours of interviews with grief-stricken friends and relatives focuses on supposed causes like how “the other kids teased him” – always missing the one common denominator. Many times I’ve followed a major case for days – like the recent one in Red Lakes, Minnesota where 17-year-old Jeff Wiese killed 10 people – before it finally came out, usually from some casual remark by a friend or relative, that psych drugs were involved.
And to make things worse, the psychiatrists have invented a disease called ADHD. Unlike pneumonia or AIDS or measles, ADHD has no scientific basis. There is no blood test, no microscopic microbe, no saliva test… nothing. Only opinion, by someone who makes his living drugging children, that the child shows one or more of the incredibly common “symptoms” of ADHD, such as being unable to sit still in one’s seat, looking out the window instead of paying attention to teacher, or running around madly on the playground. The cure for this “disease”? It’s another drug, of course. A cocaine-class stimulant called Ritalin, that may make junior sit still in his seat, but his education goes right out the window as he stares through the fog of a drug experience intense enough to satisfy any 1960s hippie druggie.
But times they are a changin’, in the words of Bob Dylan.
First the psychiatrists grabbed onto LSD soon after its discovery in 1938. During the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, LSD was a “therapy” drug, used by psychiatrists not only with individual patients, including some famous ones like Cary Grant and Time Magazine owners Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce, but also as a part of wicked CIA and military-backed mind-control experiments, in conjunction with electric shock and other Neanderthal tortures. Then psychiatrist Timothy Leary went public with the drug and suggested everyone should try it. The disastrous effect when “everyone” did immediately identified the drug for what it was – a way to cause insanity, not a way to cure it. It was quickly relegated to the status of an illegal street drug, and everyone forgot it was introduced to the world by psychiatry. Other psychiatric drugs followed suit, going from therapy status to street-drug ignominy, including PCP and Ecstasy. Other psych favorites like downers and uppers bounce back and forth between legitimacy and infamy.
So the makers of psychiatric drugs forged ahead, wiser for their failures. The introduction of Prozac, about 20 years ago, was incredibly well planned. Dozens of tests were performed with the drug, but only the successful ones were presented to support its acceptance by the FDA. Years later we find out about multiple suicides even in early test groups. Britain and Germany at first rejected the drug as unsafe, but when the FDA in the United States pushed it through, it became a juggernaut. Nobody noticed that the board that approved it for the FDA was populated with psychiatrists, drug company employees, ex-drug company employees, and others who were beholden to the drug industry for their livelihood.
Years later, the protest built to a crescendo. The FDA was forced to act. They voted to place the “black box warning” about children and suicide on Prozac/SSRI class drugs (including Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and others) in spite of the nay votes of the psychiatrists on the panel. Then a few weeks ago, on the same day Brooke Shields appeared on the front page of the old Henry Luce/Clare Booth Luce rag Time Magazine, recommending psychiatric drugs, the FDA went further and issued a new warning that extended to adults as well.
Recognizing where the weakness in the system was, Congress has passed a law that prevents anyone who is on the payroll of the drug companies from serving on the FDA drug approval committee. That should help. Another law that recently went into effect prevents schools from requiring parents to place their children on psychiatric drugs and gives parents some rights in the matter. Until recently, there have been repeated horror stories about parents whose children were taken away from them on the pretense of child abuse for refusing to give their children the drugs they “need”.
Now we need to take it a step further and get the psychs out of the schools. Then we need to dry up the government funding for psychiatry. Without it psychiatry would have no means of support – most people don’t consider psychiatry valuable enough to pay for it on their own.
But what about the drugs? Like LSD and the others that are now “street drugs”, Ritalin is already developing an underground trade. And why not? It’s readily available, unlike its relative Cocaine. It’s not too hard to get a prescription to the stuff, and the pills sell on the playground.
We have a job to do. It’s not even clear what steps we’re going to have to take to handle the problem. But at least America is becoming aware of it. Thank you, Tom Cruise. You may be an actor, but you’re also a man with the courage to speak his own mind. As one news article said, this characteristic is “very refreshing” in a business that’s intensely public relations conscious and controlled by press agents. Good luck to you… and to us all.
In the 1960s, when LSD broke out everywhere, the bard of the day was Bob Dylan. What does he say today about psychiatry? In a Rolling Stone interview he said, “I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public. Billions of dollars have changed hands that could be used for far better purposes.” Maybe he's been talking to Tom Cruise? Or maybe Tom isn’t the only person who sees that the emperor has no clothes.
The worm has turned. It seems like only a short time ago those of us who knew what Prozac and other similar psychiatric drugs could do were just lonely voices in the wilderness – listening to the echo of our own words, unheard by the bustling busy world of people coming and going from work and school, making their way through the maze of life.
The workplace killings didn’t do it – even though psychiatric drugs are a proven part of most of these crazy events where a disgruntled worker shows up with a gun and kills his boss, his co-workers, then himself. The United States Post Office was one of the earliest large employers to offer psychiatric coverage on their health plan. Not long after, so many postal workers had gone psychotic that the term “going postal” became a synonym for the condition.
Then the school killings started. The kids who do it are usually under the influence of psychiatry, taking “anger management” therapy and/or downing Prozac or other similar (SSRI class) drugs. But nobody looks at that. In many cases the fact that the killer was on psychiatric drugs was an afterthought from the viewpoint of the news. Hours of interviews with grief-stricken friends and relatives focuses on supposed causes like how “the other kids teased him” – always missing the one common denominator. Many times I’ve followed a major case for days – like the recent one in Red Lakes, Minnesota where 17-year-old Jeff Wiese killed 10 people – before it finally came out, usually from some casual remark by a friend or relative, that psych drugs were involved.
And to make things worse, the psychiatrists have invented a disease called ADHD. Unlike pneumonia or AIDS or measles, ADHD has no scientific basis. There is no blood test, no microscopic microbe, no saliva test… nothing. Only opinion, by someone who makes his living drugging children, that the child shows one or more of the incredibly common “symptoms” of ADHD, such as being unable to sit still in one’s seat, looking out the window instead of paying attention to teacher, or running around madly on the playground. The cure for this “disease”? It’s another drug, of course. A cocaine-class stimulant called Ritalin, that may make junior sit still in his seat, but his education goes right out the window as he stares through the fog of a drug experience intense enough to satisfy any 1960s hippie druggie.
But times they are a changin’, in the words of Bob Dylan.
First the psychiatrists grabbed onto LSD soon after its discovery in 1938. During the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, LSD was a “therapy” drug, used by psychiatrists not only with individual patients, including some famous ones like Cary Grant and Time Magazine owners Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce, but also as a part of wicked CIA and military-backed mind-control experiments, in conjunction with electric shock and other Neanderthal tortures. Then psychiatrist Timothy Leary went public with the drug and suggested everyone should try it. The disastrous effect when “everyone” did immediately identified the drug for what it was – a way to cause insanity, not a way to cure it. It was quickly relegated to the status of an illegal street drug, and everyone forgot it was introduced to the world by psychiatry. Other psychiatric drugs followed suit, going from therapy status to street-drug ignominy, including PCP and Ecstasy. Other psych favorites like downers and uppers bounce back and forth between legitimacy and infamy.
So the makers of psychiatric drugs forged ahead, wiser for their failures. The introduction of Prozac, about 20 years ago, was incredibly well planned. Dozens of tests were performed with the drug, but only the successful ones were presented to support its acceptance by the FDA. Years later we find out about multiple suicides even in early test groups. Britain and Germany at first rejected the drug as unsafe, but when the FDA in the United States pushed it through, it became a juggernaut. Nobody noticed that the board that approved it for the FDA was populated with psychiatrists, drug company employees, ex-drug company employees, and others who were beholden to the drug industry for their livelihood.
Years later, the protest built to a crescendo. The FDA was forced to act. They voted to place the “black box warning” about children and suicide on Prozac/SSRI class drugs (including Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox and others) in spite of the nay votes of the psychiatrists on the panel. Then a few weeks ago, on the same day Brooke Shields appeared on the front page of the old Henry Luce/Clare Booth Luce rag Time Magazine, recommending psychiatric drugs, the FDA went further and issued a new warning that extended to adults as well.
Recognizing where the weakness in the system was, Congress has passed a law that prevents anyone who is on the payroll of the drug companies from serving on the FDA drug approval committee. That should help. Another law that recently went into effect prevents schools from requiring parents to place their children on psychiatric drugs and gives parents some rights in the matter. Until recently, there have been repeated horror stories about parents whose children were taken away from them on the pretense of child abuse for refusing to give their children the drugs they “need”.
Now we need to take it a step further and get the psychs out of the schools. Then we need to dry up the government funding for psychiatry. Without it psychiatry would have no means of support – most people don’t consider psychiatry valuable enough to pay for it on their own.
But what about the drugs? Like LSD and the others that are now “street drugs”, Ritalin is already developing an underground trade. And why not? It’s readily available, unlike its relative Cocaine. It’s not too hard to get a prescription to the stuff, and the pills sell on the playground.
We have a job to do. It’s not even clear what steps we’re going to have to take to handle the problem. But at least America is becoming aware of it. Thank you, Tom Cruise. You may be an actor, but you’re also a man with the courage to speak his own mind. As one news article said, this characteristic is “very refreshing” in a business that’s intensely public relations conscious and controlled by press agents. Good luck to you… and to us all.
In the 1960s, when LSD broke out everywhere, the bard of the day was Bob Dylan. What does he say today about psychiatry? In a Rolling Stone interview he said, “I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public. Billions of dollars have changed hands that could be used for far better purposes.” Maybe he's been talking to Tom Cruise? Or maybe Tom isn’t the only person who sees that the emperor has no clothes.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Non-Compliance With Treatment Disorder
Non-compliance with treatment disorder? That's the ultimate psychiatric bullet. If you refuse to accept the diagnosis some charletan gives you, then you also have this one.
But wait! What other disorders are there? Would you believe 350 of them? And the way these disorders find their way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for psychiatrists and psychologists is by... well, it is a democracy isn't it?... by... I'm having trouble saying this. Here goes: BY VOTE!
Is there any science involved? No. It's a show of hands. At conventions of the American Psychiatric Association, someone gives a paper on a new supposed mental disease, then they decide whether this disease should be published in the next issue of the DSM -- by vote!
These are the guys in charge of the incredible new Teen Screen program -- also known as 1984 comes to your neighborhood! But Teen Screen is running into opposition. In Illinois, a child came home to mommy with a diagnosis that she had terrible mental problems. Mom said, "But she has a good disposition, gets good grades, and besides, who said it was okay for her to get these tests?" Mom is suing. Big time. Read about it here.
But wait! What other disorders are there? Would you believe 350 of them? And the way these disorders find their way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for psychiatrists and psychologists is by... well, it is a democracy isn't it?... by... I'm having trouble saying this. Here goes: BY VOTE!
Is there any science involved? No. It's a show of hands. At conventions of the American Psychiatric Association, someone gives a paper on a new supposed mental disease, then they decide whether this disease should be published in the next issue of the DSM -- by vote!
These are the guys in charge of the incredible new Teen Screen program -- also known as 1984 comes to your neighborhood! But Teen Screen is running into opposition. In Illinois, a child came home to mommy with a diagnosis that she had terrible mental problems. Mom said, "But she has a good disposition, gets good grades, and besides, who said it was okay for her to get these tests?" Mom is suing. Big time. Read about it here.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Depression Medication = Abduction, Threatened Suicide
"It's not like him to do something like this," said his mother, at home in Alabama. His friends agreed, saying they were baffled how a churchgoing family man and selfless volunteer could go so wrong on a short business trip to Southern California.
But the only reason they don't understand is they don't realize that anti-depressants cause insanity. His mother let the cat out of the bag. She said he has been taking "diet pills and other medication for depression".
So another one snaps. Like all crime suspects, he now has three names instead of two. Dennis Elliot Shellhouse, 45, attempted an abduction in Lake Sherwood, California, then led authorities on a 75-mile chase. When he was cornered he threatened suicide. Finally, after being shot, teargassed and bitten by a police dog he was take into custody.
Too bad, Mr. Shellhouse. It's too bad nobody warned you about that "medication for depression". Nothing depresses people quicker than that stuff. How do we know nobody warned you? Because here you went crazy (after taking the drugs that are supposed to handle mental problems, not before) and even your poor mother doesn't know it was the drugs. "He may have gone crazy," she correctly assumes, but she wonders why.
We know.
But the only reason they don't understand is they don't realize that anti-depressants cause insanity. His mother let the cat out of the bag. She said he has been taking "diet pills and other medication for depression".
So another one snaps. Like all crime suspects, he now has three names instead of two. Dennis Elliot Shellhouse, 45, attempted an abduction in Lake Sherwood, California, then led authorities on a 75-mile chase. When he was cornered he threatened suicide. Finally, after being shot, teargassed and bitten by a police dog he was take into custody.
Too bad, Mr. Shellhouse. It's too bad nobody warned you about that "medication for depression". Nothing depresses people quicker than that stuff. How do we know nobody warned you? Because here you went crazy (after taking the drugs that are supposed to handle mental problems, not before) and even your poor mother doesn't know it was the drugs. "He may have gone crazy," she correctly assumes, but she wonders why.
We know.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Fraud Probes of Big Pharma
The current investigation of drug company fraud could net a billion dollars in fines, according to state and federal prosecutors.
The charges are that the drug companies cheat state and federal health-care programs by inflating prices, while giving secret discounts to non-governmental buyers. They also charge that they are selling more expensive drugs that aren't approved for the purposes they are being used for, instead of selling the right drug at a much lower price.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Peter Keisler, who oversees the Justice Department's civil-fraud unit, said that "the most frequent defendant in fraud cases today is in health care" and that the industry now accounts for "the lion's share of fraud, both in number of cases and dollar amounts -- and those numbers are going up."
The Journal goes on to give a shocking example of this behavior: [Drug maker] Abbott faces pricing-fraud claims brought two years ago by California's attorney general, based on alleged overcharges to government-paid drug programs for vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic. Abbott is alleged to have reported to the state Medi-Cal program an average wholesale price of $55 a dose while charging pharmacies only $6.29 a dose. The alleged scheme, apparently intended to help the drug gain market share, cheated taxpayers by falsely setting a high reimbursement rate, the suit said. Under Medicaid rules, companies are generally required to give the government the best price that they give to any purchaser of a drug.
But what do you expect from an industry that cares more about profits than lives?
The charges are that the drug companies cheat state and federal health-care programs by inflating prices, while giving secret discounts to non-governmental buyers. They also charge that they are selling more expensive drugs that aren't approved for the purposes they are being used for, instead of selling the right drug at a much lower price.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Peter Keisler, who oversees the Justice Department's civil-fraud unit, said that "the most frequent defendant in fraud cases today is in health care" and that the industry now accounts for "the lion's share of fraud, both in number of cases and dollar amounts -- and those numbers are going up."
The Journal goes on to give a shocking example of this behavior: [Drug maker] Abbott faces pricing-fraud claims brought two years ago by California's attorney general, based on alleged overcharges to government-paid drug programs for vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic. Abbott is alleged to have reported to the state Medi-Cal program an average wholesale price of $55 a dose while charging pharmacies only $6.29 a dose. The alleged scheme, apparently intended to help the drug gain market share, cheated taxpayers by falsely setting a high reimbursement rate, the suit said. Under Medicaid rules, companies are generally required to give the government the best price that they give to any purchaser of a drug.
But what do you expect from an industry that cares more about profits than lives?
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Five Dead In O-Hi-O
The death tally from a National Guard reaction to protesting students at Kent State University during the Vietnam War was four -- a number immortalized in the chorus of a Crosby, Stills and Nash that says, "Four dead in O-hi-o." That was a tragedy. But this week another example of that new phenomenon, the school shooter, took out not four, but five -- including his grandparents, his mother and two friends. Some of them were killed in their sleep, according to the news.
The news reports that there is a "mystery" as to why he did it, but we know the answer. The evidence hasn't appeared in the news yet, but it will. He was, in our opinion, on psychiatric drugs. That is almost always the case when these unexplainable incidents occur.
Anybody want to start a pool on how long it will be before the news comes out?
The news reports that there is a "mystery" as to why he did it, but we know the answer. The evidence hasn't appeared in the news yet, but it will. He was, in our opinion, on psychiatric drugs. That is almost always the case when these unexplainable incidents occur.
Anybody want to start a pool on how long it will be before the news comes out?
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Speech By Georgia State Senator Nancy Schaefer
The following is excerpted from a speech made by Georgia State Senator Nancy Schaefer at a protest rally outside the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association in Atlanta:
"Parental rights must be protected. Parental notification regarding children must be made a priority whether it is about clubs and organizations at school, abortion, surveys for children to answer, or health issues. Children belong to parents. Parents are responsible to make decisions regarding their children.
"Children and families are under dangerous assault today! Parents are coerced to put their children on psychotropic medications and children are dying from it.
"In the United States alone, 8 million children and adolescents are on mind altering drugs that put them at risk of violent and suicidal side effects, all while being told it is for your good. Behavior programs such as outcome based education, values clarification, mastery learning, psychological and psychiatric questionnaires, and self esteem are nothing more than a psychologically controlled environment to induce certain beliefs or politically correct thinking."
"Parental rights must be protected. Parental notification regarding children must be made a priority whether it is about clubs and organizations at school, abortion, surveys for children to answer, or health issues. Children belong to parents. Parents are responsible to make decisions regarding their children.
"Children and families are under dangerous assault today! Parents are coerced to put their children on psychotropic medications and children are dying from it.
"In the United States alone, 8 million children and adolescents are on mind altering drugs that put them at risk of violent and suicidal side effects, all while being told it is for your good. Behavior programs such as outcome based education, values clarification, mastery learning, psychological and psychiatric questionnaires, and self esteem are nothing more than a psychologically controlled environment to induce certain beliefs or politically correct thinking."
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
For Illegally Selling Anti-Depressants, They Made Him Take Anti-Depressants
In the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, the story is out about 52-year-old Kent Hamilton.
Hamilton was selling Xanax illegally, on the street. Xanax is a psych drug, in the same class with other anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox etc. This killer group of drugs poses innocently as a tool for psychiatrists to help people who are crazy. The truth is this class of drugs makes people crazy.
So they packed Hamilton off to jail for illegally selling psych drugs. But somehow, Hamilton got put onto psych drugs himself! When he got out of jail he was a real lulu. He was still on probation when he tried to stop taking his psych drugs. It is well known that withdrawal from these drugs is extremely difficult. Some people say it is more difficult than withdrawing from heroin. One only has to look up the chat/support sites for victims of these drugs to see the sordid world these people live in when they're trying to get off these drugs.
Next thing he's wandering around the neighborhood barefoot, dressed in his wife's pants, as his house is burning. Then they figured out that he (allegedly) set it on fire. Now he's up for arson, and the wife is off living with relatives. Their house burned to the ground.
Normally we feel a lot of compassion for people who are driven crazy by psych drugs. But in this case...
Hamilton was selling Xanax illegally, on the street. Xanax is a psych drug, in the same class with other anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox etc. This killer group of drugs poses innocently as a tool for psychiatrists to help people who are crazy. The truth is this class of drugs makes people crazy.
So they packed Hamilton off to jail for illegally selling psych drugs. But somehow, Hamilton got put onto psych drugs himself! When he got out of jail he was a real lulu. He was still on probation when he tried to stop taking his psych drugs. It is well known that withdrawal from these drugs is extremely difficult. Some people say it is more difficult than withdrawing from heroin. One only has to look up the chat/support sites for victims of these drugs to see the sordid world these people live in when they're trying to get off these drugs.
Next thing he's wandering around the neighborhood barefoot, dressed in his wife's pants, as his house is burning. Then they figured out that he (allegedly) set it on fire. Now he's up for arson, and the wife is off living with relatives. Their house burned to the ground.
Normally we feel a lot of compassion for people who are driven crazy by psych drugs. But in this case...
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
More On Psychiatric Misconduct from Phillip Day
More material exerpted from Phillip Day's excellent book The Mind Game:
WHEN IS A RAPE NOT A RAPE?
Psychiatry is naturally aware of the widespread sexual misconduct of its practitioners, but understandably fights shy of admitting rape. The term used to describe sexual intimacy between a psychiatrist and patient is the morally neutral 'psychiatrist-patient sexual contact'. Bruce Wiseman comments: "Like other 'non-judgmental' and 'values neutral' phrasing that psychiatry seems to enjoy, 'psychiatrist-patient contact' says nothing of the damage this activity inflicts or even whether it is good or bad…. Should we be surprised to find such a closet full of sexual abuse in this profession?
Perhaps not…. [Psychiatrists] have long preached the foolishness and stressfulness of morality. Their primary philosophy is that they are mere bodies ruled by biochemistry and, therefore, like all other humans, who are rife with irresistible impulses and diminished capacities, there are times when they cannot help themselves. The majority of the profession are atheists and agnostics, thus have no religious standards to answer to."
As we have seen, key leaders and 'founding fathers' of psychiatry have consistently preached sexual promiscuity and carnal relations with their patients, in brazen defiance of the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors who take the Oath swear that: "Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both male and female persons, be they free or slaves."
Yet many patients, as will soon become evident, walked into their therapist's office free, but became slaves and thus victims to the carnal and criminal depravations of the errant philosophies of psychiatry. And the example was set right at the top. In 1990, US News and World Report told the world: "many practitioners, among them some of Freud's disciples - even married former patients or conducted lengthy affairs with them in full public view."
In March 1988 an Australian behavioural science student named James Spencer sexually assaulted and penetrated a seven-year-old girl. He filmed the act on video. When brought to court, Spencer claimed that he had been conducting 'psychological research'. Dr Neville Yeomans, a Sydney psychiatrist, defended Spencer's actions by stating that child rape was perfectly permissible in certain psychiatric situations, and filming the experiment was proof that Spencer only had the interests of his science in mind. Besides, Dr Yeomans reasonably pointed out, the child appeared to be enjoying it. The judge didn't agree. Spencer was jailed for five years.
Child psychiatrist Dr Wuld Aschoff, former head of Germany's Albert-Schweitzer clinic, was charged in 1999 with photographing and videoing naked children and playing with their genitals. In police interviews, Aschoff claimed his therapy "helped his patients to get a more intense feeling for their body". Two days before his criminal trial, the German psychiatrist committed suicide.
James Tyhurst, a Canadian psychiatrist, was charged with sexual assaults on four of his female patients, who told the court Tyhurst had insisted they enter into slave/master relationships as part of the therapy. Tyhurst was a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. He denied whipping, beating and having sexual intercourse with the four women. He was sent to prison for four years.
In April 1988, Louis J Poetter pleaded guilt to 19 counts of sodomising young boys. As founder and director of the Anneewakee psychiatric centre for adolescents at Douglasville, Georgia, Poetter had encouraged sex between staff and children as 'good for the boys'. The settlement to resolve the eight lawsuits was a massive $35 million, believed to be the biggest in Georgia's history. Louis Potter went to prison for eight years.
A few cases from the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) investigations reveal that the abuse is constant and taking place at all levels of the psychiatric ladder:
In 1989, Dr Paul A Walters, psychiatrist in charge of student health at Stanford University, Massachusetts, and former head of Harvard University's Health Services' mental health Division, was forced to resign after allegations that he had 'frequent sex' with a female patient. The patient, who had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, was awarded more than $200,000 in an out-of-court settlement. She said Walters had used her to perform oral sex on him 'sometimes as often as two out of three psychiatric analysis sessions per week'.
In 1990, Robert Ferguson, a psychologist, pleaded guilty to state child sex-abuse charges and federal charges of transporting child pornography.
In 1975, A New York Jury convicted psychiatrist Renatus Hartogs of malpractice, awarding $350,000 in damages to Julie Roy, a secretary at Esquire magazine whom Hartogs had seduced while she was his patient.
Early in 1992, John Hamilton, deputy medical director of the APA, stepped down from office and had his license suspended for only a year, after having sexual relations with a patient who, in turn, filed a complaint. Ironically Hamilton wrote and edited the APA peer review manual.
In 1991, Orange County, California, psychiatrist James Harrington White was charged with and convicted of the forced sodomy of a male patient. White was also found to have drugged young men, then videotaped himself having sex with them. The psychiatrist was also alleged to have sodomised his adopted son for years, drugged him, forced him to dress as a female, and to have given him hormones to make him look feminine. To guarantee the boy's co-operation and silence, the court heard how the doctor is said to have administered sodium pentothal and electroshock with hypnosis. Even when the young man finally left home and married, his psychiatrist 'father' continued the sexual abuse, ultimately castrating the young man when he discovered the man's wife was pregnant. James Harrington White was sent to prison for seven years.
In the US, Lisa Roth underwent 'therapy' at Jefferson County Mental Health Center for depression and alcoholism. Her 'treatment' involved sleeping with her female therapist. The therapist, Lynda Robinson, also invited Roth to sleep with her husband. During a 1994 civil suit by Roth seeking damages for this unorthodox 'treatment', Robinson's defence attorney stated that the therapist couldn't remember anything about the psychotherapy she had given Roth or any bedroom incidents because her silicone breast implants had leaked, causing toxicity in her brain and, conveniently, memory loss.
COWED INTO SILENCE
Many ask why the abused patients themselves don't go to the medical authorities or the police. Kenneth Pope and Jacqueline Bouhoutsos are two psychologists who have studied therapist/patient sexual interaction extensively. They have constructed a hypothetical model, based on the experiences and accounts of victims, of common circumstances that lead to psychiatric rape and the silencing of the victim:
"Karen is a 14-year-old victim of incest. Dr Louis, a hypnotherapist, is treating her for the incest trauma. He makes her lie on the couch and attempts to put her in a deep trance. She is so nervous that she is unable to concentrate on what he is saying. She does not trust him, does not want to be seeing him, and lies on the couch, her face covered by her hands, crying.
He says that it looks like she needs reassurance, and he lies down next to her. He tells her she has nothing to be afraid of, that he will protect her and comfort her. He presses himself against her and, before she can scream, puts his hand over her mouth. He holds her so that she can neither cry nor move. He rapes her.
When he is finished, he tells her it never happened, that she is crazy and imagined the whole thing. He tells her that if she tries to tell anyone, that no one will believe her. Everyone will believe that she is psychotic and needs to be put away in a hospital. If she tries to tell anyone, they will know that she was just making up stories about the incest, so they will either return her to her father or put her in jail. No matter where they put her, he will still be in charge of her treatment and they will always believe a famous hypnotherapist rather than a hysterical little girl who is always making up fantastic stories that show what a dirty mind she has.
He may even tell the authorities that she tried to seduce him and told him that she had made up the stories about the incest because she had been unable to seduce her father. He told her that if she tried to tell anyone what she had imagined had happened, that he would prescribe drugs that would make her a vegetable and might even operate on her brain. If he felt like it, he might arrange for her to die. As she got dressed to leave, he slapped her to stop her from crying. He told her not to be late for their next appointment."
WHERE ARE THE THOUGHT POLICE?
That charges of psychiatric rape should be glossed over by the American Psychiatric Association, or attempts made to trivialise the charges, is not so surprising, given the explosion in class action lawsuits and a commensurate rise in malpractice insurance that would inevitably result. Once again, the APA, and hence world psychiatry find themselves in the dock with an image problem. Why aren't psychiatric chiefs clamping down on the rank and file? Researcher Kenneth Pope offers one explanation. His 1988 American study discovered that a higher incidence of sexual abuse existed among prominent doctors in psychiatry - tenured professors and chairmen of ethics committees - than among the rank and file.
But some do speak out, and the extent of the problem has proven a monumental embarrassment and further tarnished the already tattered reputation of psychiatry. Psychiatrist Nanette Gartrell, a member of the APA Committee on Women, reports that increasing numbers of class action and malpractice suits are being filed as the wall of silence comes down: "It became clear that this was a problem which potentially was affecting large numbers of women patients throughout the country and undoubtedly larger numbers than we were even hearing about."
Psychiatry was still dismally failing to police itself in this area six years later. APA president Lawrence Hartmann told the Association in 1992: "For posterity's sake, I would like to record that perhaps never in the history of the American Psychiatric Association has an APA president been called upon to spend so much of his time considering psychiatrist-patient sexual contact as this year."
CCHR reports: "A Los Angeles survey showed that 10% of male psychiatrists engaged in sexual contact with their patients. In a nationwide survey reported in a 1986 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 7.1% of the male psychiatrists and 3.1% of the female - over 6% of the respondents overall - acknowledged having what is euphemistically called 'sexual contact' with their patients. Yet 65 percent of psychiatrists questioned said they had treated patients who were sexually involved with previous therapists. Only 8 percent reported the misconduct, which might serve further to illustrate how much responsibility is assumed by the profession's members in policing themselves.
Be that as it may, this casts a suspicious light on that 10 percent figure. In fact, in a 1990 US News & World Report article, experts put the sexual shenanigans at more like 25 percent, or one out of every four psychiatrists. And a 1973 California study claims the figure is an astronomical 51 percent."
HANDS IN THE TILL
But what are we to make of 'doctors' who believe they can get away with raping or sexually assaulting their patients, and then billing their time to their victims' insurance companies as 'therapy' services?
Dr Paul A Walters, a Riverside, California psychiatrist, was charged with 16 counts of 'inappropriate sexual activity', grand theft, fraud and prescribing drugs for no legitimate medical purposes. Lowinger billed medical insurance giant Medi-Cal for 'therapy' consisting almost entirely of having sex with his patients. The case was settled in August 1994 when a payment of $7.1 million was made to the plaintiff, ex-patient, Francine Rahn.
A New Zealand group of psychotherapists, headed up by psychiatrist Bill Rowntree and psychiatric nurse Bert Potter, was investigated by authorities for sexually abusing children in its care as 'therapy'. This service to the community was charged out at inflated rates. Potter presided over one incident involving a three-year-old girl performing oral sex on men, who was later given the drug Ecstasy as part of her treatment. Potter was also charged with having sex with an adolescent in his care to remove an 'emotional block' to her personality. Potter, in spite of being sent to prison for six years for his crimes, remained unrepentant: "Sexual activity initiated by the child and kept at their level is not harmful." Freud would have been proud.
Even psychiatrists who do not sexually assault their patients have discovered the tremendous cash benefits of 'creative accounting'. One scheme being bilked for all it was worth was the federal Civilian Health and Medical Program in the United States (CHAMPUS). CHAMPUS has been a veritable cash cow for psychiatry. Outraged US Congresswoman Pat Schroeder headed up an investigation into psychiatric fraud that was to have far-reaching implications for the industry. Addressing the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, she thundered: "We are here this morning to shed light on, and we hope help to put a stop to, one of the most disgraceful and scandalous episodes in the history of health care in America. I am referring to the unethical and disturbing practices in mental health care that are taking place from coast to coast."
David Mancuso, Assistant Inspector General for Investigations for the Department of Defense (DOD), was the administrative watchdog for CHAMPUS. During the hearings, Mancuso outlined several scams psychiatrists were employing to receive maximum payouts under the health scheme: "Investigations have disclosed a scheme known as 'contract max'. We have found the 'contract max' fraud in psychiatric care as it concerns hospital stays. Patients have actually been kept in the hospital for extended periods because the maximum stay allowed by their insurance had not been reached."
Louis Parisi appeared at the hearings to give testimony. As Director of the Fraud Division of the Department of Insurance for the State of New Jersey, Parisi rolled off a whole litany of schemes he had investigated within private psychiatric institutes. These included:
- Forcefully confining patients, often against their will, in private psychiatric hospitals until their insurance coverage had expired. Once expired, the patients were dumped out on the streets and pronounced 'cured'.
- Billing insurance companies for services not performed.
- Billing insurance companies for services provided by unlicensed, unqualified personnel, made to look like they had been carried out by doctors.
- Billing insurance companies for higher rates than patients without medical coverage.
- Billing insurance companies for an endless battery of tests without sound medical reasons to inflate the bill.
- Billing insurance companies for an endless supply of potentially harmful, mind-altering drugs which were prescribed to patients without sound medical reasons to inflate the bill.
- Organising bonuses for staff within the hospital, where those who kept the highest number of patients in the hospital for the longest period of time (until their benefits ran out) were paid the highest commission on top of their basic salaries.
Mancuso's appraisal was withering: "A situation has developed in this country in the field of medical care where some hospitals and substance abuse centres can achieve a reputation for professionalism and a high level of patient care and that reputation is only a façade. The reputation for professional medical care has been replaced with a reputation for a sure-win moneymaker for the principals involved in the stock ownership and upper management levels of these billion-dollar businesses."
Parisi cited many abuses, including how patients were often released on the very day their benefits expired. "We even discovered situations where the local municipal police were called to a hospital to remove a patient from the facility. The insurance benefits had terminated but the patient had not been successfully treated and did not want to return to a life of substance abuse uncured."
Texas State Senator Mike Moncrief presented his evidence as Chairman for the Texas Senate Interim Committee on Health and Human Services. Moncrief had received a pamphlet in the mail from an anonymous source. The material was entitled 'Books as Hooks'. The handout, commissioned by a national psychiatric health group, described how pamphlets such as these were highly effective, inexpensive marketing tools for increasing psychiatric patient intake. One substance abuse centre director especially was quoted: "We've been using these books for three years.… Families love these books and they do help us fill the hospital."
AIRPORT BLUES
At the time these investigations were being conducted in the United States, the Canadian government was doing its own research into excessive bills charged by US psychiatric hospitals to Canadian insurance companies. Canadian nationals were apparently being lured south of the border for their psychiatric treatment with complementary airfares, limousines and luxury accommodation in treatment programs in California, Florida and Texas.
Bruce Wiseman also investigated the scam uncovered by Moncrief: "It was a goldmine while it lasted. The aggressive marketing resulted in claims from US hospitals for Ontario patients alone increasing from $5.4 million in 1988 to $51.3 million just two years later. In 1990, approximately 2,500 Ontario residents were brought to the US for treatment. One man was referred to as the 'half a million dollar man'. He reportedly received more than 20 months of psychiatric treatment in five different Houston hospitals and returned to Canada a cocaine addict."
Moncrief reported that after the Canadian government moved to crack down on the US fraud, imposing strict limits to the levels of insurance reimbursement to US hospitals, reports were received of dozens of Canadian patients being taken to Houston airport by psychiatric hospitals in the region and dumped with no return tickets.
Moncrief's huge accumulation of psychiatric fraud evidence cited other instances:
· In San Antonio, Texas, 1-800 (free) numbers were publicised as 'suicide hotlines', which in turn referred the caller to a 1-900 (toll) number, "where they make $2.00 a minute off of your call while you're deciding whether to take your own life."
· Dozens of ex-patients provided testimony on how they were miraculously cured and suddenly discharged on the day their insurance benefits ran out.
· Others related how they voluntarily checked into clinics for eating disorders and other troubling ailments and then were incarcerated against their will.
· A bill was submitted for a patient for 36 prescription drugs in one day, including 8,400mg of the anti-depressant Lithobid, almost five times the maximum dose listed in the Physician's Desk Reference, and lethal had it been given to the patient.
· A mother who was persuaded to check into a Texas psychiatric hospital for a few days to be with her daughter, who, a psychiatrist had determined, may have been sexually molested by a family member. Both were covered by the federal CHAMPUS reimbursement scheme. The mother and daughter however were kept apart and only allowed to see each other at mealtimes. When the mother came to check out, testimony later given to the local Chief of Police stated that she had been overpowered by several hospital staff and given an injection. Both mother and daughter were later released after they contacted the local police department, who came to investigate.
MONEY FROM CHILDREN
But by far the most lucrative boost to psychiatry's social and financial fortunes has come from their ability to evolve the education system from one that teaches children the knowledge and skills they need to a system that minutely analyses the child population for evidences of eccentric or abnormal behaviour that may indicate the existence of a 'mental illness' requiring psychiatry's services. So much has been made of these 'childhood problems' in the media that the public has become resigned to accepting that a significant percentage of our kids 'must have something wrong with them'. And so, we defer to the experts. It is an indication of how much blind faith we place in these doyens of the mind sciences, that we allow our children and elderly folk to be medicated with highly addictive, behaviour-altering medications, all the while ignoring the ethical conflicts in the backs of our minds. After all we have learned so far, can we any longer fool ourselves, even for a fleeting instant, that psychiatry has any place in a modern, civilised society?
© Copyright 2003 Phillip Day
Extracted from The Mind Game
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Phillip Day On Psychiatric Misconduct
The following is an exerpt from The Mind Game by Phillip Day:
Given the all-encompassing expertise on mental health apparently possessed by psychiatry, it would follow that psychiatrists and psychologists should be among the sanest, wisest and most stable of all the population, especially in light of the fact that they are responsible for our 'mental health' and constantly advise the public on what is best for us. It would follow that they would be paragons of mental stability, have great marriages, and set an enduring example to society which would prove that the tenets of psychiatry can stand the tests of pressure and time.
The truth is very different.
PSYCHIATRIST SUICIDES
In America, arguably the nation with the most 'medically developed' approach to mental health, psychiatrists commit suicide twice as often as doctors in general. This figure is five times the rate of the general population. During their residencies, psychiatrists are committing suicide almost nine times as often as the general population to whom they give mental health advice. Psychiatrist deaths are by far the leading suicides in any medical profession, and this suicide rate is quite stable. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that "…the occurrence of suicides by psychiatrists is constant year-to-year, indicating a relatively stable oversupply of depressed psychiatrists from which the suicides are produced."
Other studies were to confirm this alarming trend: "A joint study carried out by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in 1987 confirmed that psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate of any medical profession. Researchers interviewing the surviving families found that by far the most common reason given for the death - in 94% of the cases - was 'to escape from mental pain', which, of course, is the very thing psychiatrists claim they can alleviate. Additionally, 'more than half (56 percent) of those in the suicide group had prescribed a psychoactive drug for themselves.' Forty-two percent had been seeing a mental health professional at the time of their death."
A Swiss study compares the military conscription records of those who later went on to become psychiatrists with those who later became doctors, internists or other medical specialists. Significantly more of the eventual psychiatrists had themselves been declared unfit for military service due to psychiatric disorders.
ALCOHOLISM
When the physician membership of Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States was studied, it was found that 17% were psychiatrists, even though psychiatrists in America make up only 8% of the medical profession. A similar study in 1983, this time reviewing female psychiatrists, discovered that 22.1% of the alcoholic female doctors were psychiatrists, even though they make up only 9.5% of women doctors. Whether male or female, psychiatrists appear to be twice as likely to become alcoholics than doctors from other branches of the medical profession.
GETTING HIGH ON THEIR OWN SUPPLY
Today's problem of drugs, of course, extends throughout society. Most however don't even consider the concept of drug-taking by physicians and psychiatrists. Phil Hammond MD states that substance abuse is often a 'safety valve' for the incredible stresses that build up among healthcare workers. Examining the problem in the UK, the famous British broadcaster reports: "Drinking and drug abuse are clearly coping mechanisms picked up in medical school, but it is impossible to predict which of the many heavy student drinkers will go on to develop a problem. The British Medical Association estimated that up to 13,000 practising UK doctors are addicted to drugs or alcohol. If each makes 2,000 clinical decisions a year, at a conservative estimate, that is 26 million decisions affecting patient care [including prescribing potentially lethal drugs] made by doctors who can't function without alcohol or other drugs."
A 1986 report in the New England Journal of Medicine provides a bleak insight into psychiatry getting high on its own supply. Nearly half the psychiatrists surveyed reported that they were currently taking self-prescribed psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs. The report also stated that "psychiatrists had much higher rates for all types of [psychotropic drug] use at any time (83%)… than did other groups of physicians."
One clinical psychoanalyst's view of his profession? "I question your calling it a myth that therapists are crazy because the fact is that most of them are. If you need any proof, let me tell you that every patient who comes into this office who has had a previous experience with another therapist has some kind of horror story to tell, about some major failing on the therapist's part, including, quite often, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, things that cross the boundary of mere bad technique and come pretty damn close to the criminal."
THE 'IRRESPONSIBLE' MILLIONS
How qualified, in the light of the above studies, are psychiatrists to analyse and 'cure' society's apparent rampant problems of mental illness? Consider that mental health promoter Tipper Gore, the wife of the erstwhile Vice President, is doggedly telling everyone that 28% of the American population is mentally ill because of problems outside of their control. This translates to over 70 million Americans not deemed responsible for their actions, an unsettling belief held by the wife of a one-time presidential hopeful aiming to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. Mrs Gore goes on to state that over a quarter of her country's population cannot help themselves and therefore are in need of the ministrations of the psychiatric profession, almost half of whose physicians are themselves apparently dependent on self-prescribed psychoactive medication.
"What do you do when you don't know what to do?" muses British psychiatrist R D Laing in 1985. "No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession."
SEXUAL TURMOIL
A survey in Medical Economics illustrates that the problems of psychiatrists don't end with alcoholism, suicide or drug abuse. Psychiatrists also lead other branches of medicine in marriage difficulties - including sexual problems. In a personal interview, Dr Al Parides, Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA in Los Angeles, declared that psychiatric values had been "very influenced, especially by the Freudian influence in regard to sex and morality generally…. If you look at the personal lives of all Freud's followers - his initial disciples - these people certainly have an unbelievable amount of particular problems in the sexual area… The amount of deviancy as far as their sexual behaviour and so forth is enormous. If you are saying that psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behaviour - yes, I would agree."
Today's psychiatrists, according to studies, have the shortest marriages of seven branches of medicine studied and are most likely to have extra-marital affairs, as are their spouses. But extra-marital affairs with whom… and where…?
"Barbara Noel felt herself floating towards consciousness. It was Friday, 21st September 1984, and she was in her psychiatrist's office in Chicago, waking from a dose of sodium amytal, a barbiturate he had been giving her in order to help her explore her subconscious. This morning though, instead of awakening dreamily by herself, she says she felt a weight on top of her. A man was breathing heavily onto her shoulder. Still sedated, Noel moaned and stirred. The breathing stopped, and the body on top of her carefully lifted away. Pretending to sleep, Noel opened her eyes a crack. She could make out a person standing at a sink with his back to her. He was bald, with a tanned back and stark white buttocks. Noel's heart stopped. The man, she says, was Dr Jules Masserman, her psychiatrist of 18 years."
Subsequent action against Dr Jules Masserman solicited a fervent denial by the latter of the charges. Psychiatry all over the world winced as they followed the descending fortunes of Masserman, the 1979 president of the American Psychiatric Association. The case was finally settled when Masserman agreed to pay malpractice settlements to Noel and three other women. He also signed an agreement never to practise psychiatric therapy again in the United States.
More on psychiatric sexual misconduct in my next segment...
© Copyright 2003 Phillip Day
Extracted from The Mind Game
Further Resources
The Mind Game by Phillip Day
Click here to purchase or review any of the above.
Click here for telephone sales around the world.
Click here if you wish to contact Credence for information on treatment options or resources.
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