Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans (An Interview with Author Robert Whitaker)

By Terry Messman; Saturday, August 27, 2005 - Natural News
http://www.naturalnews.com/011353.html

[Additional Note From MW: Withdrawing from psychiatric drugs (or reducing them) can be dangerous, even life threatening. For information on how to safely withdraw from psychiatric drugs, see Peter Breggin, M.D. and David Cohen, Ph.D's Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications.]

Excerpts:

"Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted the [U.S.] Food and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and conceal the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-name drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa...The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the aggressive tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence prominent critics by defaming them in the press, and by using their money and power to have widely respected scientists and eminent medical researchers fired for daring to point out the hazards and risks of suicide and premature death caused by these drugs."

"...[H]e goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric drugs have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of drug-induced mental illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians to stabilize mental disorders in fact are inducing pathological changes in brain chemistry and triggering suicide, manic and psychotic episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes, pancreatic failure, metabolic diseases, and premature death."

"Whitaker's research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and early deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers have been misled by a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and bought-and-paid-for drug trials. Eminent medical researchers who have tried to warn us of the perils of these drugs have been silenced, intimidated and defamed. In the process, the Food and Drug Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical industry, not its watchdog."

Robert Whitaker: "...[P]art of what we're seeing is nothing more than the creation of a larger market for drugs...[A]s long as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs. So there's a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in as broad terms as possible, and to [label] ordinary, distressing emotions or behaviors...as mental illness."

Robert Whitaker: "What you find with every class of...psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the long term, compared to placebo [sugar-pill]-treated patients...And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself."

RW: "...[T]hese drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these drugs as chemical balancers...in truth we're doing precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known abnormal brain chemistry, and...we're perturbing that normal chemistry."

RW: "The children's story is unbelievably tragic. It's also a really sordid story...Since 1990, the use of anti-depressants in kids went up something like seven-fold...[I]n one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with anti-depressants suffered an adverse event of some kind...The clinical results were telling you that you didn't get any benefit on depression; and you could cause all sorts of real problems in kids -- mania, hostility, psychosis, and you may even stir suicide...It was absolutely covered up...We had psychiatrists -- some of those obviously getting money from the drug companies -- saying the kids are under-treated and they're at risk of suicide and how could we possibly treat kids without these pills..."

RW: "If [academic psychiatrists] sing the tune that the drug companies want...[they] get paid a lot of money to fly around and give presentations about the wonders of the drugs. And [Doctors] who come, and don't ask any embarrassing questions, get the lobster dinners and maybe they get a little honorarium for attending this educational meeting. So if you want to be part of this gravy train, you can. You sing the wonders of the drug, and you don't talk about their nasty side effects, and you can get a nice payment as one of their guest speakers, as one of their experts."

RW: "[Academic psychiatrist] David Healy has this sterling reputation in England. He's written several books on the history of psycho-pharmacology...He gets offered a job at the University of Toronto to head up their psychiatry department. So while he's waiting to assume that position...he goes to Toronto and delivers a talk on the elevated risk of suicide with Prozac and some of the other SSRIs. By the time he's back home, the job offer has been rescinded...Now does [drug company and Prozac producer] Eli Lilly donate some money to the University of Toronto? Absolutely."

RW: "...[R]esearchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the introduction of the atypical anti-psychotics, the death rate among people with schizophrenia has doubled. They have done death rates of people treated with standard [anti-psychotics] and then they compare that with death rates of people treated with atypical [newer] anti-psychotics, and it doubles...It didn't reduce harm. In fact, in their seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died...You're getting respiratory problems, you're getting people dying of incredibly high cholesterol counts, heart problems, diabetes. With...(Zyprexa), one of the problems is that you're really screwing up the core metabolic system. That's why you get these huge weight gains, and you get the diabetes. Zyprexa basically disrupts the machine that...processes food and extracts energy from that food...That's really a sign that you're mucking with something very fundamental to life."

RW: "[Other side effects caused by prolonged use of anti-psychotic drugs are] tardive dyskinesia [a movement disorder similar to Parkinson's Disease], a permanent brain dysfunction; and akathisia, which is this incredible nervous agitation. You're just never comfortable. You want to sit but you can't...It's like you're crawling out of your own skin. And it's associated with violence, suicide and all sorts of horrible things."

Click HERE to read the complete interview, along with numerous links, from Natural News.