[PAA-Discuss] Fwd: [wildestcolts] America's mental illness epidemic: It turns out that the drugs are the problem

Fri Aug 27 23:51:08 EDT 2010

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From: Andrea Ball <aball001 at neo.rr.com>
To: wildestcolts at yahoogroups.com
Sent: Fri, Aug 27, 2010 9:49 pm
Subject: [wildestcolts] America's mental illness epidemic: It turns out 
that the drugs are the problem

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6267.shtml

  Health  Last Updated: Aug 26th, 2010 - 00:35:19

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America’s mental illness epidemic: It turns out that the drugs are the 
problem
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Aug 26, 2010, 00:19

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Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired 
deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by 
the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, 
brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have 
been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy -- often in 
untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs -- to trusting 
and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians 
who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely 
profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies, a.k.a. BigPharma.

That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and 
health science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in 
America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the 
Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600 percent increase (since 
Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and 
permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This 
uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the 
life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers 
of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, 
taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit 
unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing 
evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the 
diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability. 
Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients are now 
motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can cross 
the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering the 
brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the 
patients are taking the drugs long-term. .

In Whitaker’s second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, 
Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in 
America, he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He 
documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new 
field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, 
BigPharma. Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and 
salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far 
more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to 
admit: These drugs, it turns our, are fully capable of disabling -- 
often permanently -- body, brain and spirit.

More evidence to support Whitaker’s well-documented claims are laid out 
in two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace 
Jackson. Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, 
 from the voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly 
ignored by the clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous 
consequences of the chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes 
of psychiatric drugs. Her second and most powerful book: Drug-Induced 
Dementia: A Perfect Crime, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any 
of the five classes of drugs that are commonly used in psychiatric 
patients (antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, 
tranquilizers and anti-seizure/”mood-stabilizer” drugs) have shown 
microscopic, macroscopic, biochemical, clinical and/or radiological 
evidence of brain shrinkage and other signs of brain damage, which can 
result in clinically-diagnosable, permanent dementia, premature death 
and a variety of other related brain disorders that can mimic mental 
illnesses. Jackson’s first book, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide 
for Informed Consent was an equally sobering book warning about the 
many hidden dangers of psychiatric drugs.

This sad truth is that the seemingly knee-jerk prescribing (without 
very much information being given to patients about the long list of 
serious long-term adverse effects) of potent and often 
addicting/dependency-inducing psychiatric drugs has become the standard 
of care in American psychiatry since the introduction of the so-called 
anti-schizophrenic “miracle” drug Thorazine in the mid-1950s. 
(Thorazine was the offending drug that all of Jack Nicholson’s fellow 
patients were coerced into taking at “medication time” in the Academy 
Award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”) Thorazine and 
all the other “me-too” early antipsychotic drugs are now universally 
known to have been an iatrogenic (= doctor or other treatment-caused) 
disaster because of their serious long-term, initially unsuspected, 
brain-damaging effects that resulted in a number of incurable 
neurological disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson’s 
disease.

Thorazine and all the other knock-off drugs like Prolixin, Mellaril, 
Navane, etc., are synthetic “tricyclic” chemical compounds similar in 
molecular structure to the tricyclic “antidepressants” like imipramine 
and the similarly toxic, obesity-inducing, diabetogenic, “atypical” 
anti-schizophrenic drugs like Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel.

Thorazine, incidentally, was originally developed in Europe as an 
industrial dye. That doesn’t sound so good although it may not be so 
unusual in the closely related fields of psychopharmcology and the 
chemical industry, especially when one considers that Depakote, a 
popular drug marketed initially as an anti-epilepsy drug but now is 
being heavily used as a so-called “mood stabilizer.” Depakote, known to 
be a hepatotoxin and renal toxin, was originally developed as an 
industrial solvent capable of dissolving fat -- including, presumably, 
the fatty tissue in human livers and brains.

Some sympathy and understanding needs to be generated for the various 
victims of BigPharma’s compulsive drive to expand market share and 
”shareholder value” (share price, dividends and the next quarter’s 
financial report) by whatever means necessary. Both the prescribers and 
the swallowers of BigPharma’s drugs have succumbed to BigPharma’s 
cunning marketing campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by 
attractive drug company representatives and their “pens, pizzas and 
post-it note” freebies in the office, and the patients being 
brain-washed by the inane and unbelievable (if one has intact critical 
thinking skills) commercials on TV that quickly gloss over the lethal 
adverse effects in the fine print while urging the watcher to “ask your 
doctor” about the latest unaffordable wannabe blockbuster drug. .

For a quick overview of these issues, I recommend that everybody with 
an open mind read a long essay written by Whitaker that persuasively 
identifies the source of America’s epidemic of mental illness 
disability (a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in Third World nations 
because costly psych drugs are not prescribed so cavalierly as in the 
US).

Whitaker and Jackson (among a number of other ground-breaking and 
whistle-blowing authors who have been essentially black-listed by the 
mainstream media and mainstream medical journals) have proven to most 
critically-thinking scientists, alternative practitioners and assorted 
“psychiatric survivors” that it is the drugs -- and not the so-called 
“disorders” -- that are causing our nation’s epidemic of mental illness 
disability. The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent information about 
his books can be accessed at Mad In America. A recent interview on 
Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at www.wpr.org (at their radio 
archives link) and a long interview with Dr.Joseph Mercola can be heard 
here.

After reading and studying all these inconvenient truths, mental health 
practitioners must consider the medicolegal implications for them, 
especially if the information is ignored or if the information is 
dismissed out of hand by practitioners who might be tempted to not take 
the time to study this new information. Those people who are hearing 
about this for the first time need to pass the word on to others, 
especially their prescribing healthcare practitioners who should be 
equally concerned. This is important because the opinion leaders in the 
highly influential (for good or ill) psychiatric and medical industries 
have been marketed into submission without hearing the all the facts 
(which may have been intentionally hidden from them. If that is the 
case, they cannot be automatically blamed for. proceeding in a practice 
that some day might represent malpractice. It shouldn’t have to be 
pointed out that is the solemn duty of ethical practitioners who are in 
positions of authority to fully examine potential malpractice issues 
and then warn others, especially their patients, of the dangers.

Sadly, it must be admitted that most of the over-worked, double-booked 
care-givers in medical clinics have not yet heard the news that most if 
not all of the brain-altering synthetic chemicals known as psychotropic 
drugs (which are treated as hazardous waste unless they are packaged in 
a swallowable capsule!) have been marketed as safe and effective -- but 
only for short-term use. The captains of the drug industry know that 
the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only 
been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 
weeks. They also know -- indeed they hope -- that patients will be 
taking their drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving 
safety and efficacy) as the only “treatment” for mental ill health. 
They know that their brain-altering drugs are also dependency-inducing 
(aka addicting, causing withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic 
and increasingly ineffective (a la “Prozac Poop-out”) as time goes by.

The truth is that the people diagnosed as “mentally ill” for life are 
often simply those unfortunates who find themselves in acute or chronic 
states of crisis or “overwhelm” due to any number of preventable, 
curable and treatable (without the use of drugs) bad luck accidents 
such as poverty, abuse, violence, torture, homelessness, 
discrimination, underemployment, brain malnutrition, 
addictions/withdrawal, brain damage from electroshock “therapy” and/or 
exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in their food, air, water or 
prescription bottles.

Those labeled as the “mentally ill” are just like us “normals” who have 
not yet decompensated because of some yet-to-happen, crisis-inducing, 
overwhelming (however temporary) life situation. And thus we have not 
yet been given a billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly 
obligatory -- and unaffordable -- drug prescription or two signifying 
we are now chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain 
off prescription drugs but with a label and in “the system,” it is hard 
to “just say no to drugs.”

The victims of hopelessness-generating situations like simple bad luck, 
bad circumstances, bad company, bad choices, bad government, big 
business, and a competitive society that generates a few winners but 
mostly losers. America tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus 
fear-inducing social systems resembling in many ways the infamous 
police state realities of 20th century European totalitarianism, where 
people who were different or just dissidents were thought to be 
abnormal and therefore “disappeared” into insane asylums, jails or 
concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense. And 
many of them were and are drugged with disabling psychoactive chemicals 
against their will.

The truth is that most, if not all, of BigPharma’s psychotropic drugs 
are lethal at some dosage level (the LD50, the lethal dose that kills 
50 percent of lab animals, is calculated before efficacy testing is 
done), and therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The 
chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, 
brain damage, loss of creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of 
empathy, loss of energy, loss of strength, fatigue and tiredness, 
permanent disability and a multitude of metabolic adverse effects that 
can readily sicken the body, brain and soul by causing insomnia or 
somnolence, increased depression or anxiety, delusions, psychoses, 
paranoia, mania, etc. So before filling the prescription, it is 
advisable to read the product insert labeling under WARNINGS, 
PRECAUTIONS, ADVERSE EFFECTS, CONTRAINDICATIONS, TOXICOLOGY, OVERDOSAGE 
and the ever-present BLACK BOX WARNINGS ABOUT SUICIDALITY.

Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be 
regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like 
Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a “chemical lobotomy.” That 
is a useful way to conceptualize this serious issue, because such 
chemically brain-altered patients are often indistinguishable from 
those who have suffered a physically traumatic brain injuries or been 
subjected to ice-pick lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 
50s -- before the drugs came on the market.

America has a mental ill health epidemic on its hands that is grossly 
misunderstood because it is worsening, not by the supposed disease 
progression, but because of the neurotoxic, non-curative drugs that are 
somehow regarded as first-line “treatment.”

For more information of these extremely serious topics check out these 
websites: www.mindfreedom.org, www.breggin.com, www.icspp.org, 
www.cchr.org, www.drugawareness.org, www.psychrights.org, 
www.benzo.org.uk, www.quitpaxil, org, www.wildscolts.com, 
www.endofshock.com, www.mercola.com and www.madinamerica.com and follow 
the links.

Dr. Kohls is a family physician who, until his retirement in 2008, 
practiced holistic mental health care. His patients came to see him 
asking for help in getting off the psychotropic drugs that they knew 
were sickening and disabling them. He was successful in helping 
significant majorities of his patients get off their drugs using a 
thorough and therefore time-consuming program that was based on 
psychoeducational psychotherapy, brain nutrient therapy, a drastic 
change away from the malnourishing and often toxic Standard American 
Diet (SAD) plus a program of gradual, closely monitored drug 
withdrawal. Dr. Kohls warns against the abrupt discontinuation of any 
psychiatric drug because of the common, often serious withdrawal 
symptoms that can occur with the chronic use of any dependency-inducing 
psychoactive drug, whether illicit or legal. Close consultation with an 
aware, informed physician who is hopefully familiar with dealing with 
drug withdrawal syndromes (starting with the original prescribing 
physician), who will read and study the above books and become aware of 
the previously unknown dangers of these drugs and the nutritional needs 
of the drug-toxified and nutritionally-depleted brain.

Dr. Kohls is a member of MindFreedom International and the 
International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. He is 
the editor of the occasional Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.

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