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Posted on 07/13/2011 10:35:51 AM PDT by Cardhu
Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.
It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.
The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.
Not just for psychotics anymore
By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.
Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."
Cost benefit analysis
What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.
Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."
A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."
In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.
In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"
For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.
Turning people into zombies
As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.
A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.
Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."
Bottom line:Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population
well, I would love to see a detailed report by Al Jazeera detailing the psychosis of the Koran on humans.
Before anyone lets their doc put them on these crappy drugs, they need to look into physical reasons for mental problems-pernicious anemia or thyroid issues for example.
If depression is due to a physical ailment like that, all the anti-psychotic drugs in the world will not help it, IMO.
They will only worsen the initial problem and create even more through side effects.
My elderly aunt had Alzheimer’s and was psychotic. She was given anti-psychotic drugs. It changed her to a calm person, she didn’t know anything as a psychotic and that didn’t change with the drugs, she just became a much more peaceful person.
The drugs may be over prescribed but they have their place.
Michael Savage has observed that a large number of liberals take anti-psychotic drugs.
I would say this may be valid, based on the mis-statements and over-the-top lies, and behavior, of many Democratic politicians. Look at the rantings of, for example, Pelosi, Boxer, Reid, Lee of Texas etc. etc. What else could explain this?
You’re believing the crap churned out by Al Jazeera? The article conflates anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic, ADD, and anti-depressants into the inaccurate catch-all, “anti-psychotic” and then claims we’re all on anti-psychotics.
They’re not crappy when you need them. I’m bipolar and went through years of testing for this or that disease. When I finally found a doctor who specialized it brain chemistry and put me on meds that worked it was like someone turned a light on in my life. Those “crappy” drugs probably saved my life and definitely changed the quality of it. Don’t be so quick to judge.
Cindie
Abilify can give young teens suicidal thoughts yet people still get prescribed with them. Adderall is the new ritalin.Adderall is taken by college kids like speed. It all started with the stop smoking anxiety pill and prozac.
It is sad.
When the Obamacare "database" is all "set up", think of all the people that will probably be denied their 2nd Amendment rights, just by "checking" the Obamacare database.
IMHO, Obamacare wasn't about "healthcare".
It WAS all about the "mandatory" database.
Think for a moment....why would the Marxists want your DOCTOR to ask you if you own any firearms??
It's a "two-fer" for the Marxists. You are in the database as owning a firearm, and it can then be checked against your "medications" to see if you can "legally" own one or broke Federal law which would then disqualify you for life.
Don't think that the "background check" is soon going to include the "Obamacare" database??
Keep it in mind the next time you think about asking the doc for something to make you feel "less depressed" and "sleep better".
I’m a practicing shrink. This article has the typical, quasi-fashionable anti-pharma, anti-psychiatry agenda behind it, and is slanted to serve that need. It is nonsense.
The truth is, there have been two stunning breakthroughs in psychopharmacology since the days of Thorazine and Elavil, the likes of which were all we had when I started practcing. Prozac, and all the second generation anti-depressants that followed, was the first one. Clozaril, and all the subsequent “atypical anti-psychotics” that followed, was the second. The latter category of meds have profound benefits for a wide range of disorders far beyond merely Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder.
For those of us who are actually charged with the responsibility of relieving the suffering and incapacitation of mental illnesses - not just sitting around writing about it - these medicines have been a godsend, and overwhelmingly grateful patients agree.
Not judging, only stressing the fact that these drugs are often unnecessarily prescribed.
I’m sure these drugs are a godsend to those who really need them.
FRegards.
I’d almost argue the opposite.
Get yourself on whatever medication you need. Treat the illness, than try to cure it or find its cause.
Shrinks and drug companies, that's who.
I saw this whole Frontline a few years ago. Here’s a small portion of it on YouTube. It was a scary episode.
One poor kid had been on multiple drugs since he was four because he was hyper. As a teen he developed a permanent, uncontrollable head roll, but his family still had him on multiple meds.
The Wholesale Drugging of Children
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSkwp-tDCWg
Here is the first video of the complete episode—it shows the boy with the headroll. The parents act like they are victims, and maybe they are, but they could have told the teachers early on to go pound sand. I know it’s hard when the system is working on you each day, but if the kids don’t have their parents, the system will gladly step in. For this boy it had life altering consequences.
Frontline -The Medicated Child 1 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48KnwKGV0Pw
These drugs are an absolute pestilence. The psychiatric knowledge base used to peddle them is the Same obnoxious, occultist based political garbage that filled the concentration camps in 1930’s Germany.
Freud has already been amply exposed as a complete fraud, so today Carl Jung is its Guru.
http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=246&CFID=25198082&CFTOKEN=77368745
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/carl-jung-a-psychic-pyramid-seller-1355037.html
The industry is continually assuring the public that the drugs treat a biological condition underlying mental illness. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
There is no such thing as a measurable chemical imbalance in any human brain until After the drugs have created it. There is no genetic predisposition in Any person determining/controlling their thoughts or behaviors.
The drug makers bought 57 crooked Docs in the early 90s who formulated the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, a State Mandated Medication Menu, which has spread to every other State in the Union. Here’s the History in brief. Be patient, because the documents load slowly.
http://psychrights.org/Drugs/AllenJonesTMAPJanuary20.pdf
Johnson & Johnson were the ringleaders. The State of Texas is suing them for over a Billion Dollars in State Medicaid Fraud for their anitpsychotic Risperdal.
http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/03/lawsuit-over-jj-risperdal-marketing-can-proceed/
The drugs are in fact, a time release chemical lobotomy.
http://psychrights.org/states/alaska/CaseXX/3AN-08-493PS/JacksonOnNLtoxicity.pdf
They’re sold under the ruse of suicide prevention.
http://jannel.se/suicide.psychiatricdrugs.pdf
The psychiatric drug hustle, over the last Century, has Caused a 1000% Increase in the number of people needing permanent or semi-permanent institutionalization.
http://psychrights.org/articles/ehpppsychdrugepidemic(whitaker).pdf
Drugging Kids With No Verifiable Disease
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/blog/drugging-kids-with-no-verifiable-disease-012.html
We are Lobotomizing our Children with this filth for diseases which don’t even exist. It has to stop.
If some scumbag, Govt or Private, tells you your kid has to be medicated with any Psych Drug for ADHD, your very next stop is a lawyer.
“For those of us who are actually charged with the responsibility of relieving the suffering and incapacitation of mental illnesses”
You First have a responsibility to Scientifically, Biologically Prove that any of your mental illnesses even Exist as anything other than an excuse to churn out Bills to Insurers.
“overwhelmingly grateful patients agree.”
Oh Really?
That’s why for Decades those “Overwhelmingly Grateful Patients” have been tossing Your Garbage Drugs into toilets and trashcans at every opportunity they can find.
http://bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/noncompliant.html
YOUR DRUGS, take 25 YEARS off of a person’s life. Do you tell them That when you prescribe them?
i’m guessing that the large increase in children being classified as disabled relates to the subsequent eligibility for SSI payments ?
excellent point, and good links in #15 and #17!
yes, many adults have truly benefitted, under good doctors.
yes, al-jazeera has an agenda.
but, overall they’re still better than the LA Times.
(and report some things, our MSM won’t.)
the massive drugging of our children, especially boys,
IS a problem!
and there has been plenty on FR about MANY women getting their children on drugs, to get extra disability money.
this is a real problem and has serious consequences in the future...
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