Author name: Robert Carter

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Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats

Kickback Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats Robert Carter/January 31, 2025 Illegal kickbacks from Big Pharma giants like Pfizer, Novartis, and Teva continue to be exposed as more out of court  Department of Justice settlements are reported. In 2020 Novartis paid more than $642 million to settle a Department of Justice court case alleging their offering illegal kickbacks to doctors to increase the company’s pharmaceutical drug sales. $642 million was a small price to pay. Their 2023 revenue was over $45 billion. In 2022 Biogen, Inc. agreed to pay $900 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged they paid doctors kickbacks to boost sales of their drugs. Again, a small price to pay. Their 2023 revenue was nearly $10 billion. In 2023 Teva  Pharmaceuticals and Teva Neuroscience paid over $450 million to settle a Department of Justice case that alleged they leveraged assistance foundations to fund patients’ co-pays. Also a small price to pay. In 2023 Teva’s income was $15.8 billion. Last Friday, the  Department of Justice announced that Pfizer has just paid almost $60 million to resolve a case of kickback allegations about its subsidiary, Biohaven, the manufacturer of the migraine prevention drug Nurtec. Another small price to pay. Nurtec delivered $928 million in sales to Pfizer in 2023 alone. Pfizer itself is expected to report a $1 billion dollar revenue from the drug just in the fourth quarter of 2024. The Pfizer kickback case alleges that Biohaven induced doctors to write prescriptions for Nurtec by paying them “improper remuneration” for speaking engagements and by pampering them with lavish dinners at “high end” restaurants. Biohaven also provided junkets for doctors’ spouses, family members, and friends at “educational” events which these people had no realistic reason to attend. An ex-Biohaven staff member came forward as a whistleblower to alert the Department of Justice to these criminal  improprieties, and Pfizer has acquiesced to the out of court settlement of $60 million. A Pfizer spokesperson said that the company is “pleased” to put the legal matter behind them so they could get back to focusing on the needs of their patients. Not to mention getting back to the $1 billion per quarter income that was ever so slightly diminished by this $60 million kickback settlement. There’s apparently no need for Pfizer or any of these other Big Pharma giants to worry about these pesky lawsuits over their illegal and unethical marketing practices if they don’t affect their bottom lines any worse than this. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft

Home Caffeine Blog No Child Left Unmedicated When Is a Diagnosis Not a Diagnosis Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Suicides Occur as FDA Takes 2 Decades to Rule on Dangers of Singulair $267 Million Settlement against Acadia Psychiatric Hospitals Not Enough to Change Their Evil Ways NZ Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog No Child Left Unmedicated When Is a Diagnosis Not a Diagnosis Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Suicides Occur as FDA Takes 2 Decades to Rule on Dangers of Singulair $267 Million Settlement against Acadia Psychiatric Hospitals Not Enough to Change Their Evil Ways NZ Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us No Real Effects, Just Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft      By Robert Carter/January 23, 2025      The FDA’s black box warnings on psychotropic drugs are meant to alert consumers to the dangerous side effects that have been reported for these drugs. “Suicidal thoughts” and “suicide attempts” are the most severe warnings listed for these drugs.      Of course, in their massive television marketing campaigns, Big Pharma focuses the first twenty seconds of their ads on the “effect” they want you to believe you’ll gain from taking the drug. For example, “Depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells and the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance. You just shouldn’t have to feel this way anymore.”      “This way,” of course, means the symptoms voiced in the first seconds of this original Zoloft TV ad: feeling “the weight of sadness, exhausted, hopeless, anxious, and lonely.”      That’s the “effect” Big Pharma claims for Zoloft. They make it sound as if taking it might be worth the risk of that little “side effect” of “suicide attempts.”      British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff wrote in a 2018 bulletin published by the CambridgeRoyal College of Psychiatrists: “Patients should be informed that there is no evidence that antidepressants work by correcting a chemical imbalance, that antidepressants have mind-altering effects, and that evidence suggests they produce no noticeable benefit compared with placebo.”      So much for the “may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals” in Zoloft’s TV ad. Zoloft, now also known by its generic name, Sertraline, was first approved by the FDA in 1991 as a “safe and effective” treatment for depression, but even then they called their approval a “tough decision” because the effect on outpatients with depression was only “modest to minimal.” Some experts noted that the effect of the drug on inpatients was alsono better than the placebos taken during the Pfizer trials.      Oh, well. The psychiatrists on the FDA approval committee who had healthy shares of Pfizer in their portfolio saw there was money to be made there.      Zoloft is most often prescribed for psychiatry’s DSM-designated Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and even Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder.      That last condition is what most women used to just consider the inconvenience of monthly cramps and emotions, but then Big Pharma realized they could make a ton of money with Zoloft when it was prescribed for those natural monthly events that psychiatrists label a “mental disorder.”      In 2016 Zoloft/Sertraline was the most commonly prescribed psychotropic medication in America. It has gone from 28 million prescriptions written for it in 2004 to 40 million prescriptions written in 2022.      What about the “side effects” of Zoloft/Sertraline…even if there may be no beneficial “effects” for one’s well being from this so-called antidepressant?      The FDA Black Box Warning states that “thoughts about suicide or dying” and “attempts to commit suicide” increase with Zoloft, particularly for those younger than 24 yeas of age, and particularly in the first few months of ingestion or when the dose is changed, up or down.      In fact, FDA experts found that there was a 100% increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior in children and adolescents, and a fifty percent increase in those 18-24 years of age.      Sounds like Zoloft makes folks feel more depressed, not less – even to the point

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Suicides Occur as FDA Takes 2 Decades to Rule on Dangers of Singulair

At Least 82 Suicides Occur while FDA Takes Two Decades to Rule on Dangers of Singulair and Its Generic Offspring Robert Carter/January 5, 2025 Big Pharma drug manufacturer Merck has had its asthma medicine, Singulair, and its generic offshoots, named in more than 4800 reports of psychiatric problems, particularly in children. At least 82 suicides have also been reported for those who took the medication, a third of whom are children. However, no lawsuits from Singulair victims have been successful due to the legal, but constitutional loophole of “preemption,” which states that federal law overrides state law in these matters. Two U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2011 and 2013 had barred any lawsuits against generic drug makers which were based on state laws that enabled claims about design defects or about failures to warn consumers of potential dangers. Merck’s patent on Singulair expired in 2012 – after Merck had reaped more than $50 billion in revenue from it – and thereafter a number of generic drug manufacturers started producing the medication. Although 91 percent of all U.S. prescriptions are now generic, per the FDA, the legal “preemption” defense has protected most all generic drug manufacturers from lawsuits over production defects or inadequate black box warnings. Only the original name brand drug manufacturers can still be sued, but it is hard to prove their violations of manufacturing defects or inadequate safety warnings. For example, during Merck’s original clinical trials for Singulair before its 1998 release, one eighteen year old participant had attempted suicide and one twelve year old participant had to be hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts. Although there are still pending lawsuits against Merck over Singulair, Merck still has not yet lost any of the earlier suits. In 2014 the FDA dismissed the relevance of these two suicide events. After Singulair first hit the market in 1998, the reports of psychiatric difficulties and successful suicides after taking the medication continued to accumulate, but it took twenty years before the FDA first took action. It was not until 2008 that an FDA review of the drug’s psychiatric effects and suicide risks recommended “further studies in animals and humans.” That report also suggested the FDA should have Merck conduct its own observational study. However, the FDA never did require such a study, reasoning in part that serious side effects including suicidal thinking “were expected to be quite rare.” In 2014 an FDA investigator of the initial Merck trials for Singulair claimed that those two reported suicide events had been unrelated to ingesting Singulair. The FDA agreed, but it did report that those initial Merck clinical trials were short and were not designed to detect psychiatric side-effects. Stephane Bissonnette, a Merck manager, told the 2014 FDA panel that “suicidality was quite rare” in the trials, using almost exactly the same phrase the FDA itself had used six years earlier. The lethal side-effects of those taking the medication continued to build – including a count of eighty-two suicides – and in 2019 the FDA convened another board to decide whether the drug’s side-effects warranted a black box warning. Following that board’s report, the FDA should have required new studies of Singulair and its generic descendents, but instead the FDA merely announced in March 2020 that it would only add to the existing black box warning of the drug’s “side-effects.” At any number of points during its twenty-two year history monitoring Singulair and its generic offshoots, the FDA could have legally – not to mention ethically — required Merck to redo and improve their trials, given the number of severe negative reactions to the drug, but it did not. If it had, a minimum of 82 suicides might have been prevented and 4800 victims of the psychiatric side-effects of the drug would have been spared their own mental health ordeals. (Thanks to Reuters’ 2023 Special Report for help bringing this travesty to light). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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$267 Million Settlement against Acadia Psychiatric Hospitals Not Enough to Change Their Evil Ways

First $267 Million Settlement against Acadia Psychiatric Hospitals Apparently Not Enough for Them to Change Their Evil Ways Robert Carter/December 16, 2024 Acadia Healthcare, one of the largest chains of psychiatric hospitals in America, had to shell out over $267 million in criminal and punitive damages for two lawsuits in 2019, but the company now has at least six more similar lawsuits pending. The first 2019 lawsuit was for “luring patients into its facilities and holding them against their will” in order to increase and extend insurance profits. Acadia paid out $17 million in that suit. The second 2019 lawsuit was for placing a foster child under their care in the home of a man they knew had been “sexually abusing and sexually assaulting foster children placed in his care.” That one cost Acadia $250 million in punitive damages. The first of these new Acadia lawsuits, filed November 19, 2024, has charges similar to those of that first 2019 case. Apparently Acadia is a slow learneror has enough money not to worry about paying these huge settlements. Indianapolis TV station WRTV reports that a New Whiteland, Indiana, woman, Maria Reagan, has just sued Options Behavioral Health System and its parent company, Acadia Healthcare, alleging she was held against her will and left to clean up another patient’s feces. She was held there for eight days without ever having seen a psychiatrist in person. Her lawsuit also alleges that she personally witnessed staff denying another patient her required insulin for three days. On September 22nd this year, Meagan found herself undergoing a mental health episode and went to the emergency room at Community Hospital South. “I was looking forward to going there to get the help that I needed,” said Reagan. Reagan expected to be there for 72 hours, but instead she was held against her will as a patient for eight days. Options Behavioral Health System staff used threats and intimidation to prevent Reagan from leaving the facility, per her lawsuit. She was only given broken crayons and coloring pages for “help.” There are currently four other lawsuits that have been filed against Options Behavioral Health System and its parent company Acadia Healthcare. Each alleges that the facility held patients against their will without any medical basis. Additionally, a lawsuit has been filed against Acadia alleging that the psychiatric hospital chain has hidden from its investors its practices of locking up psychiatric patients against their will—when detaining them was not medically necessary—in order to maximize insurance payouts and thereby boost the company’s revenues. This class action investor lawsuit was filed this October 21st in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee against Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. and various Acadia executives and alleges securities fraud under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The complaint says that Acadia hid its illegal practices from investors, causing them financial loss. On September 1, 2024, the New York Times had published an article on an investigation it conducted of Acadia and had noted publicly that Acadia had “lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary.” On September 3, 2024, the first trading day after the publication of the article, Acadia’s share price fell $3.72 or 4.5%. The current lawsuit alleges that because of this news, Acadia’s stock price fell $12.38 or 16.4% and that because Acadia concealed these unethical and illegal practices from investors, investors were harmed financially after Acadia’s share price dropped so much. This current batch of lawsuits against Acadia could cost the company many millions more dollars in settlements. How much profit must they be making to be able to shrug off these huge financial penalties? They charge as much as $2200 a day at their 253 behavioral health facilities, with over 11,000 beds, in 39 states and Puerto Rico, for services such as inpatient psychiatric hospitals, specialty treatment facilities, residential treatment centers, and outpatient clinics. Guess that’s enough. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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No Child Left Unmedicated

Home Caffeine Blog No Child Left Unmedicated When Is a Diagnosis Not a Diagnosis Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News NZ Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog No Child Left Unmedicated When Is a Diagnosis Not a Diagnosis Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News NZ Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us No Child Left Behind. And No Child Left Unmedicated By Robert Carter/December 15, 2024 The No Child Left Behind Act was a federal law passed in 2001 with the stated intention of improving the academic performance of American youth. A particular focus was on children from disadvantaged homes. Under the program any ADHD-diagnosed child qualified for special education services, and Medicaid and other funding would even pay for their psychotropic medication. Consequently, between 2003 and 2007 there was a 57 percent increase in ADHD diagnoses among disadvantaged children from poorer, less-resourced schools. Children receiving benefits under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are diagnosed with ADHD at a rate 1.7 times higher than children not on TANF. Nearly 11 percent of the 1.6 million American Indian and Alaska Native children under the age of eighteen have been labeled with ADHD, the highest of any ethnic category of disadvantaged youth. Their prescription medications – including those amphetamines like Adderall, Concerta and Vyvanse for treating ADHD – can be covered by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. That’s easy money for the Big Pharma manufacturers of these amphetamine based stimulants. Unfortunately, that’s almost 200,000 Native American youth being subjected to the dangerous side effects experienced by almost half of those who take these stimulants: trouble sleeping, irritability, high blood pressure, tics, anxiety, depression. There’s another even scarier factor in that high incidence of Native American children being targeted with ADHD diagnoses. In 2013 Psychiatrist Elise Leonard, a deputy director of behavioral health for the U.S. Department of Health Human Services Indian Health Service, Phoenix, asserted that ADHD is “about 80 percent genetically determined.” That idea of a biological cause has of course long since been thoroughly debunked. But Psychiatrist Leonard’s bogus assertion follows a long history, going back to the early 1900s, of labeling Native Americans “feebleminded” and the American eugenics movement’s targeting of indigenous Americans for elimination. Psychologist Lewis Terman, a prominent advisor to the American Eugenics Society, published a paper in Psycho-Asthenics that he’d presented to the Eugenics Society on “borderline cases” in which he describes children having “racial dullness without feeblemindedness in the ordinary sense.” In it Terman wrote “Our experience shows that the average child of Mexican or half-breed Indian parentage falls somewhere near this level.” Terman theorized that a national eugenics movement would assist in “curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency.” In 1928 Terman joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group that promoted the enforcement of compulsory sterilization laws in California. Terman’s own Stanford-Binet test for IQ was used until the 1960s to satisfy the legal criteria needed for the compulsory sterilization of the feebleminded in numerous state laws that could affect an unknown number of Native children and adults. Such laws were closely scrutinized (and admired) by visiting German psychiatrists who had themselves been charged with constructing the Nazi race extermination policies, per the Indian Country Today News. Terman was a firm believer in attempts to improve the human race through selective and restrictive breeding. His “racial dullness and feeble-mindedness” concepts not only made their way into popular culture, but they also became part of the description of ADD, the precursor of ADHD, in the early DSMs. All of which points to an uncomfortable harmonic between earlier Nazi psychiatrists labeling and then exterminating ethnic populations and the current indiscriminate and sometimes marginally racist categories of “mental disorder” voted on by American psychiatrists for inclusion in their DSMs. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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NZ Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse

Robert Carter/November 24, 2024 New Zealand Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse      New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon publicly apologized this month for five decades of horrific abuse of New Zealand children and others in the country’s state run and faith based institutions.      He announced that a National Remembrance Day would be held on 12 November 2025 to mark the first anniversary of the national apology, and he confirmed that the government would invest NZ$32 million into the current redress system. The New Zealand government will also establish a NZ$2 million fund to support those organizations working with abuse survivors.      A Royal Commission of Inquiry released a report this July that revealed that between one hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand children, young people and adults had been abused and neglected between 1950 and 1999 in the country’s institutions. New Zealand Schools, foster care  facilities, state agencies, and mental health facilities were named as liable for abuse or for failure to protect these victims from abuse.      One institution, in particular, Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital, was noted to be an example of some of the worst atrocities committed against New Zealand’s children.      Despite it being a psychiatric facility, most of the children admitted to Lake Alice did not have a mental illness. The Department of Social Welfare records show that 60% of admissions were for “behavioral” problems, and many of the children simply came from disadvantaged communities, including many from the island’s indigenous Maori people. The mean age was thirteen years old.      Former patients of the hospital’s child and adolescent units revealed to the commission that the abuse they endured during the 1970s included being punished by  electroconvulsive therapy without anesthetics and being injected with paralyzing drugs such as paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant). These young patients were also frequently victims of sexual assault on their wards.      All of the children who were shocked, drugged or sexually abused named the same perpetrator, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, the lead psychiatrist of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit.       Leeks administered electric shocks to them for such minor infractions as passing wind, being anti-social, being picky about food, showing off in front of the girls in class, and being argumentative, the Lake Alice medical records show.      Leeks would use electroconvulsive shock treatments as punishment in what he called “aversion therapy,” and he applied the electrodes not just to the temples, but also to the children’s breasts, groins and genitals. He also required some young residents to administer shocks to their peers, and he forced others to watch while their mates were being shocked.      When the first of these children’s allegation about him became public in the 1970s, he dismissed them as coming from “bottom-of-the-barrel kids” who had been lying.      Leeks’ unit at Lake Alice opened in 1972 and over the next six years admitted between 400 and 450 children and adolescents. The unit permanently closed in 1980, but Leeks had already moved to Australia and continued practicing. In August 2006 Leeks was ordered to pay $55,000 in damages for sexually assaulting a former patient. The victim said that Leeks had told her that complaining would be futile.      “You’re a long-term psychiatric patient and no one will believe you,” he had said.      In 2023 more evidence of his abuse was uncovered, but he was by then 92 and was deemed medically unfit for trial.      In 2020 a United Nations committee labeled Leeks’ acts at Lake Alice “torture.”      This sad story is not unique of an institution originally created to help the unfit and the disadvantaged being turned into a psychiatric torture chamber.      Lake Alice had opened in August, 1950, and its therapeutic rural setting included its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, swimming pools, glasshouses, and vegetable gardens.      These facilities could be used for the nineteenth century “moral therapy” concept of physical work and worthy endeavor being used as part of the therapy for resident patients.      Like many similar, charitable institutions around the world which had evolved from the community almshouses of the previous centuries, the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit in New Zealand was intended to be a sanctuary for care and healing. However, like many other once benign institutions for the public good – the word “asylum” means sanctuary, in fact – these facilities became mental hospitals.      Psychiatrists gained control of populations of vulnerable, unprotected people, and without oversight these sadistic “doctors” were now free to unleash the brutality of their insulin shock therapies, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive shocks on innocent victims.      The New Zealand government is now trying to make amends for the brutality of some of these incarcerations. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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When Is a Diagnosis Not a Diagnosis

Home Caffeine Blog Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us When Is a Diagnosis Not a Diagnosis? When It’s in the DSM By Robert Carter/November 23, 2024 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the American Psychiatric Association’s list of 374 named mental conditions that legitimize the prescription of psychotropic drugs to treat them. Big Pharma raked in over $20 billion in 2022 for sales of its dangerous medications. One would think that if someone had been “diagnosed” with one of these conditions, the remedy for it through a psychotropic drug would make sense. That’s what Big Pharma and psychiatry want the public to think. Most people do think that a “diagnosis” means finding the cause of a problem. That is, in fact, one of the definitions of “diagnose” per the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “investigation or analysis of the cause or nature of a condition, situation, or problem.” However, that’s the second definition listed. The first is “the art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms.” That definition is the one the American Psychiatric Association is using in the title of their manual. The second definition is the one most people think is being used. “Analyzing the cause” of something — the second definition — is the way a mechanic diagnoses why your car won’t start on a cold damp morning. When he discovers it’s because your spark plugs are gummed up with decades of carbon and won’t fire properly, he replaces them and your car then starts just fine. When you are referred to a urologist because you are getting up five times a night to urinate, he discovers through laboratory tests and MRI’s that your prostate is five time larger than it’s supposed to be. That diagnosis – finding the cause – prompts him to then prescribe something that shrinks your prostate or in more severe cases he performs the surgery needed to fix the problem. Those 374 mental disorders listed in the DSM are not there because they have been “diagnosed” by finding their cause. They are there simply as a list of the symptoms associated with each named disorder. It’s merely an inventory…like an itemization of the socks in your dresser drawer listed by color, size and material. Neither list tells you anything about where those items – socks or mental disorders — came from. Let alone how to get rid of them. The scam behind this “diagnostic” manual gets even worse than that. Those 374 disorders are, none of them — not one — based on any biological or organic cause discovered behind them. They have all been voted on for the most part by nine psychiatrists sitting around a table saying, “Yes, I’ve seen those symptoms. Let’s now call them Major Depressive Disorder.” Then Big Pharma can take in $18.5 billion in antidepressant sales, in 2023 alone, because of this “diagnosis”…which is not in fact a true diagnosis. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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Innocent CT Woman Locked Up For False Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

From Bad to Worse: Innocent Connecticut Woman Locked up for Eight Months, Given a False Psychiatric Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Robert Carter/November 10, 2024      A Connecticut woman was arrested and incarcerated in the state’s highest security mental health institution after having insufficient ID to show a motel clerk at the Microtel Inn in Montville. She then refused to identify herself to the police officers the clerk had called.      She is not legally required to do so.      The motel clerk had called the police and said that the woman would not leave the premises and that she had used rude language toward him. When the police arrived, they found her sitting on a bench in the lobby sipping coffee. She refused to give the officers her name or show them any identification and she was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the station.      Because refusing to identify oneself is not a crime, she was charged here with interfering with an officer and refusing to be fingerprinted. Bond was set at $500.00 and when she could not pay that, she was locked up.      During a number of court appearances she underwent over the next month, she insisted she had done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Superior Court Judge Jassette A. Henry raised her bail to $50,000. She was then involuntarily committed to the state’s highest security mental health institution, despite the fact she had never shown any impulse to harm herself or anyone else.      She was then diagnosed with schizophrenia because of her “disorganized and tangential thinking that was loose in that it switched from topic to topic irrelevantly and quickly” and her inability to understand her legal situation.      “No, I understand I’m under false arrest,” she said. “I understand I am under false arrest.”      Psychotropic medication was recommended for her. When she resisted taking it, she was taken to probate court by the mental health facility, placed under a conservatorship, and an order was issued for forced involuntary medication.      Eight months later, in June, 2024, newly appointed defense lawyer Michael Brown had a private psychiatric evaluation done on his client. It found her to be competent.      The defense attorney filed a “public interest” appeal. Twenty days later the woman was finally released from custody.      Brown pointed out that “she was never wrong about the core constitutional question aboutwhether she had to give her name to that officer.”      The presiding judge at her final court appearances, Justice Stephen D. Ecker, voiced his opinion about the psychiatric diagnosis of the woman. “Her thinking is tangential because she keeps returning to the point that she is innocent and this is a false arrest. That is clearly a sign of schizophrenia because it is tangential thinking? That seems to me to be absurd.      The idea that she is paranoid is a sign of her illness? She has just been involuntarily hospitalized by the force of the state. It is not an illness. It’s a rational assessment of your circumstances.”      The psychiatrist who had diagnosed her with schizophrenia apparently thought otherwise. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment A Brutal Political Tool

Home Caffeine Blog So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety? Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment: A Convenient, but Brutal Political Tool      By Robert Carter/November 11, 2024      When a government wants to isolate those they perceive as a threat to the status quo, forceful involuntary incarceration is the tool they use. If it’s an armed rebel or a violent insurrectionist, they haul the offender off to prison in the dark of night. Problem solved.      But what if the threat is more a perceived transgression against the social “mores” of the society…like being gay or “odd” or peculiarly obsessive about something or other?      Involuntary psychiatric incarceration can also solve that social problem.      Labeling someone with a mental disorder in America today can allow them to be locked up against their will without any immediate recourse to defend themselves. For them to be deprived of their legal rights in such a way requires an explicit or implicit legal order by a psychiatrist or one acting to enforce a standard psychiatric diagnosis.      The Soviet Union has long used a psychiatric label to justify the removal of a non-compliant individual from their well controlled society. By the nineteen-seventies the Soviet government had established a system of psychiatric hospitals to label and remove from society those they considered a threat, political or otherwise. Psychiatric incarceration was publically seen as a more “politically correct” means of removing a citizen than shipping him off to an isolated gulag in the middle of Siberia.      To accomplish that “legal” incarceration, Russian psychiatrists came up with a politically convenient new diagnosis of mental disorder. “Sluggish schizophrenia” or “reformist delusions” were coined by psychiatrist in a way similar to American psychiatrists voting on a diagnosis for their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.      When a psychiatrist labeled a Soviet citizen with one of those new “mental disorders,” the Serbski Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow would, among others, incarcerate them against their will and easily make them disappear from the world.      Communist China solved their problem of social “misfits” in a similar psychiatric manner. After the death of Mao Tse Tung, it became increasingly difficult to remove misfits from society by using strictly legal means. A psychiatric label was then used to forcefully incarcerate Chinese citizens in one of the twenty newly constructed psychiatric institutions that still exist in China today and that are still used for the same purpose.       Anyone who threatens what the Chinese government might call their “social cohesion” can be labeled by a psychiatrist as insane. As in Russia, psychiatrists in China created a new mental disease, “culture bound disorder,” for this involuntary commitment to a psychiatric institution. The Chinese government and psychiatrists used their new diagnosis, for instance, to incarcerate thousands of members of Falun Gong because of their religious beliefs, which were considered a threat to an ordered Chinese society.      None of that could happen in America, though…could it?      The sad fact is that since the nineteen-eighties, Big Parma’s massive psychiatric marketing campaign has made it appear that much of the country’s population is suffering from depression or anxiety, diagnosed or undiagnosed. Consequently, the forced removal of troublesome individuals through involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric unit by labeling them with a mental disorder has been made legal.      Few question the activity. It is, after all, supposedly used to protect an individual from harming himself or others. Because of Big Pharma’s attempt to brainwash the public into thinking that mental illness is such a prevalent “disorder,” however, involuntary psychiatric incarceration has not much been questioned as a potential danger to the individual freedoms guaranteed in this country.      Laws for involuntary psychiatric incarceration — such as Florida’s Baker Ac t — now exist in all states. They permit the involuntary commitment of people with psychiatric “disorders” who are either dangerous to themselves or others or are gravely disabled.  The person can be held for as long as they pose that risk.       In some jurisdictions laws like Laura’s Law and Kendra’s Law have been passed authorizing court-ordered, forced ingestion of psychiatric drugs for those with “chronic, untreated severe mental illness.”      Silenced by psychotropic drugs, they are no longer a threat.      The rate of involuntary psychiatric detentions has increased

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So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety?

Home Caffeine Blog Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Big Pharma Makes the Guns Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Youth Suicides After Rx Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Contact Us So What’s Wrong, Really, with Feeling Sadness or Anxiety?      By Robert Carter/October 28, 2024      The National Institute of Mental Health and Mental Health America bemoan the “fact” that 20 percent of all Americans experience mental health problems, and that 56 percent of those people do not receive any help for their condition.      How do they know about that 56 percent? By those nine short survey questions that begin “…in the last two weeks have you felt unexpectedly sad or unexpectedly anxious…?”      Depression and anxiety – known through the psychiatric labels of Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, both taken from the DSM – are the most common “mental disorders,” per them. Not surprisingly, of course, two of Big Pharma’s most profitable mental health drugs these days are the antidepressant Xanax and the anti-anxiety medication Lexipro.      How do those drugs “work”?      By making you feel nothing…not any sadness, not any anxiety…and, in fact, not anything at all.      Is that really preferable to feeling a bit of sadness or a bit of anxiety? Aren’t sadness and anxiety part of living life? Don’t most people usually recover all by themselves from the loss of a relative or dear pet or from the rigors of corporate stress…without having to resort to some self-numbing medication?      Interestingly enough, many clinical trials have actually shown that those taking the placebo rather than the antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication being tested do just about as well handling their sadness or anxiety. In other words, taking nothing – a placebo — is pretty close to as effective as taking one of Big Pharma’s dangerous drugs.      Those trial results are hardly well promoted by Big Pharma, but they are there.      Life itself may be like the placebo. Time may or may not heal all wounds, but most people get over the trials and tribulations that life hands them all on their own. And, if you thought you felt bad because of the sadness or anxiety you felt before you started taking Xanax or Lexipro, wait until you see how bad you feel trying to get off thosemedications.      The withdrawal symptoms are brutal. It can take years to taper off from those medications at a rate slow enough that you don’t want to commit suicide just to avoid the unpublicized “side effects” of withdrawal.      As The New York Times reported in 2018, patients who “try to stop taking the drugs often say they cannot.” It cited a survey of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants, where “about half who wound down their prescriptions rated the withdrawal as severe. Nearly half who tried to quit could not do so  because of these symptoms.” Another study of 180 longtime antidepressant users found that more than 130 reported withdrawal symptoms that could be “severe and long lasting.”      Psychiatrists originally told the patients who were suffering these harrowing physical and mental effects of withdrawal that they were just experiencing their original disorder symptoms resurfacing after they discontinued their medication.      That was not so. Many studies now show that the semi-psychotic withdrawal symptoms one experiences after stopping medication are only because of the withdrawal itself from the medication.      Those studies have also not been much promoted by Big Pharma or by psychiatry.      They should be. Revealing to a patient the possibility of grueling withdrawal symptoms should be done by a psychiatrist – legally – as part of their standard Informed Consent protocol.       Maybe none of us thought we were signing up for sadness or anxiety as part of life…but what did most of us know when we signed up for life itself?      A temporary sadness or anxiety, appropriate for the rigors of living life, is a far easier fate to endure than the numbing of all feelings while on a drug, or the horrible intensity of even worse feelings while trying to come off it. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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