INSANE PSYCHIATRY
A Profession Run Amok
By Nicholas Regush
Redflagsweekly.com
What’s needed is something akin to a War Crimes Tribunal to investigate
psychiatry’s relationship to major pharmaceutical companies. Haul all the big
product champions and psychiatry associations in and determine their
involvement with money-grubbing schemes and the abuse of patients. And let me
re-emphasize this point: this is a medical specialty that is second to none in
ripping off and abusing patients.
The situation has long been out-of-control. It is no longer a matter of a few
bad apples screwing everyone left and right. It’s become a full-scale assault
on humanity.
The sad part of this story is that some people with moderate problems can be helped
– however scattershot the effects of various drugs on the brain are – when
thoughtful doctors truly prescribe carefully and conservatively and cut back or
stop the medication at the first signs that there are problems brewing. But
that’s not how she blows. Psychiatric drug prescription has become a
free-for-all.
The companies are very bold about their products because they know they have a
sizeable portion of the so-called "profession" on the take. They have
bought the opinion leaders. They have bought the journals, the editors and
reviewers and they have bought the science. They have made peer review a joke.
The companies know that these drones will come out of hiding at the drop of a
dollar bill and defend the product unequivocally and also attack those who have
the nerve to raise fundamental questions about prescribing habits.
Which brings to mind an incident that occurred when Dr. Joseph Glenmullen,
wrote a book a couple of years ago called Prozac Backlash. Not a bought
physician, Glenmullen raised some important issues about Prozac, including the
fact that the numerous side-effects of Prozac and the other antidepressants are
very poorly tracked. In other words, pepper patients with drugs and then forget
about what may be happening to them.
I got interested in the book because I have, over the years, found so few
doctors willing to raise issues, particularly those that challenge drug
companies.
Eli Lilly and company, Prozac’s manufacturer, denounced the book as loaded with
"omissions," "half-truths," and "anecdotes."
I contacted Eli Lilly about their claims and they referred me to several
"impartial" doctors who could comment on Glenmullen’s claims. One of
them told me that there were "gross exaggerations" in the book,
although after hitting him with some direct questions, he fessed up that he had
only skimmed about 70 of the 386 pages. This "bought" bozo was
obviously shilling for Eli Lilly. And so were the other two drones who I
interviewed.
On the subject of Eli Lilly, I once received a call from a company bigwig after
I produced a piece on Prozac for World News Tonight With Peter Jennings. The
report essentially indicated that much of Prozac’s action could be explained
away as being no more stirring than what could be expected from a placebo. The
caller tried to intimidate me. You know, Mr. Offended. My Drug Company I Live
For Thee. I told him that if he had contrary data that he should ship it to us
at World News immediately. That had pretty much the same effect as telling him
to take a hike.
This is what it has come to: a huge marketing enterprise that tries to control
the reality surrounding what little science there is to prove its product
claims. Add to the recipe all the "professional" sycophants and
movers-and-groovers with their grubby little hands held out for their next
perks, and that’s modern psychiatry.
Back in the 70s, there was indeed a sign of hope that this
"profession" could make great progress. Moderately-effective drugs
began to appear on the market. But unfortunately, the brain, that
extraordinarily complex communications system, in our skull has proved to be
much more protective of its secrets, and remains poorly understood.
At a time when it appeared that brain science would rapidly begin to unlock
some of those secrets, psychiatry got bold and became co-opted by a drug
industry that behaved as though some of the mysteries had actually been solved.
And that co-optation is at the heart of psychiatry’s grand collapse. It opted
for filthy bucks and lies, and the inevitable explosion of drug prescriptions,
rather than slow and careful progress.
Is it any surprise that the "profession" has gone full-tilt at
children? The vast overprescription of Ritalin and other mind drugs to kids,
even babies, is an obvious indication of just how far the corruption has
festered in psychiatry. Children with problems that often may be related to bad
home environments and rotten teaching are now being criminally abused with
Ritalin. Given half a chance, modern psychiatry will have 50 per cent or more
of school kids on attention deficit disorder-type drugs before long. In one
recent report from the National Institute of Environmental Health Resources, as
merely one example, "more than 15 per cent of boys in grades one through
five had been diagnosed with ADHD and about 10 per cent (or two-thirds of those
diagnosed) were taking medication.
The American Psychiatric Association, a whorish group with huge ties to
industry, has been claiming that three to four percent of those kids were
diagnosed as ADHD.
In fact, bring on a War Crimes Tribunal, first for the abusive prescription of
Ritalin and then let’s work our way through the abusive prescription of
antidepressants.
A
CHALLENGE TO THE AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION
From Nicholas Regush,
Editor, Redflagsweekly.com
February 23, 2002 - After hearing from hundreds of people this week who read my
column, Insane Psychiatry, it comes as an easy task to award this week's SCREAM
to the American Psychiatric Association. There are obviously many people who
believe they have been the victims of this medical society's preoccupation with
questionable pharmaceutical approaches to illness, both real and imagined.
A couple of years ago, I had written one of my regular columns at abcnews.com
about the vast over-prescription of mind drugs. One of my critics was Dr.
Rodrigo Munoz, then President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
For example, he defended the prescription of mind drugs to children and teens
unequivocally. My retort was that he was way in over his head and was clearly
unaware of how inadequate his knowledge was of scientific issues related to
such widespread prescription, particularly the prescription of antidepressants
to teens. I then challenged him to a debate on the merits of the science.
Over a period of several weeks and a back-and-forth of emails, Munoz finally
agreed to meet me in a debate at an APA function in New Orleans. The idea was
to web-cast this event so that people around the world could listen to and
watch the debate. For reasons that are still unclear to me, the event never
took place - and I never heard again from Munoz.
I might have expected as much. As someone who has reported on medicine for more
than twenty-five years, I have learned that an MD attached to someone's name
can sometimes mean as little as buying a degree at some mill. The public should
never assume that all those years in medical school produce someone whose
intellect is functioning on a reasonable number of cylinders. Not to put too
fine a point on it, I have discovered in my years as a medical journalist that
psychiatrists often compensate for their lack of intellect by turning
pretentiously to a body of incomplete and questionable esoteric knowledge about
how the brain works - which is, of course, the gateway to pill prescription.
So, here's the challenge to the American Psychiatric Association. Volunteer
your best expert on your staff and I'll debate him/her on the scientific merits
underlying the widely-held viewpoint in psychiatry that one of five individuals
in the United States suffers from a diagnosable mental illness in any six-month
period. I consider this statistic to be monstrous and fueled by what some
people might refer to as "pig pharma."
Contact me at redflagsweekly.com and we'll set up the conditions of the debate
and the location. Let's see if we can actually pull this debate off. Let's see
if the APA has the guts to face an experienced journalist.
[END]