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Home Caffeine Blog Defer the FDA Bribery into the Future New FDA Ban of Mini-Electroshock Device Shows Hypocrisy Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft 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 Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats 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 Defer the FDA Bribery into the Future New FDA Ban of Mini-Electroshock Device Shows Hypocrisy Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft 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 Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats 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 The Psychiatric Lie of “Schizophrenia” By Robert Carter/March 17, 2025 The term “schizophrenia” (literally, split mind) was first coined in 1908 by the Swiss racist psychiatrist, Paul Eugen Bleuler. He described what he claimed were the specific symptoms of what in the nineteenth century had been known simply as “madness.” He further claimed that a person had “schizophrenic genes.” In other words, schizophrenia was  hereditary. Hence, he advocated the eugenic sterilization of people diagnosed with  schizophrenia so that a race would not deteriorate from those he called “mental and physical cripples.” This new diagnostic term of schizophrenia was nothing more than a description of observed symptoms. His claim that it came from a genetic disease was made with no physical or objective proof, but by labeling schizophrenia genetic, it was made a medical disease as well as an incurable one and therefore beyond any mental or physical help. Using Bleulal’s gene-based diagnosis of  schizophrenia, the Nazi regime began holding “hereditary health courts” that authorized the  sterilization of more than 400,000 Germans between 1934 and 1939 after they had been labeled “mentally ill.” Soon psychiatrists developed the physical brutality of insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and pre-frontal lobotomies to “treat” schizophrenia.  Their justification that schizophrenia is a “potentially incurable physical disease” prompted these therapies that the United Nations has now deemed “torture.” By the nineteen-fifties these cruel practices were replaced by antidepressants and psychotropic  medication to “treat” schizophrenia and its three hu ndred or so derivative disorders now described in the Diagnostic and  Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders. The word “diagnostic,” by the way, refers only to “The process of identifying a disease, condition, or injury from its signs and  symptoms.” To identify means simply “to say what something is.” In other words, all these mental disorders, which stem from Bleulel’s original diagnostic term “schizophrenia,” are merely descriptions of what symptoms have been  observed in someone who is “mad.” No one has been able to find a genetic or biological cause behind any of them. Another school of mental health practitioners, however, has suggested that the described symptoms of schizophrenia are cultural, not biological, and they have attributed these mental conditions to the inability of some individuals to cope satisfactorily with a stressful world or with a sometimes half-mad culture. The therapies these practitioners have evolved are verbal and pragmatic and do not involve shocking, cutting, or anesthetizing the body. Author Courtenay Harding’s 2024 book, “Recovery from  Schizophrenia: Evidence, History and Hope” shows the results of one ten year long, innovative Vermont recovery program that fully validates the non-biological premise it used to help cure schizophrenia. The schizophrenics in this program had been the worst of the worst. They had been labeled “mentally ill” for, on average, sixteen years, had been considered “disabled” for ten years, were institutionalized, and in many cases were still smearing feces on walls, running around without clothes, and speaking animal-like gibberish. With an amazing insight, Dr. George Brooks

Home Caffeine Blog New FDA Ban of Mini-Electroshock Device Shows Hypocrisy Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft 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 Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats 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 New FDA Ban of Mini-Electroshock Device Shows Hypocrisy Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft 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 Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats 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 The Perfect Solution to FDA Advisors’ Conflicts of Interest: Defer the Bribery into the Future By Robert Carter/February 17, 2025 The FDA has recently come under scrutiny for its approval of various psychiatric drugs between 2013 and 2024 when there was little positive evidence for their value, and when the FDA’s advisory committees had actually voted against their approval. These unwarranted approvals suggest hidden conflicts of interest for the advisory board members voting their approval for these psychiatric drugs. For example, in 2016 the antipsychotic drug  pimavanserin demonstrated only one favorable trial out of the four the FDA reviewed. The FDA medical reviewers deemed the drug “not approvable,” but their decision was overturned by the FDA after the advisory board voted to approve it. In 2023 the  antidepressant gepirone, which had been rejected for approval twice earlier, was approved despite only two of the twelve trials the FDA reviewed having positive outcomes. The antidepressant Spravato was approved by the FDA despite only one of its three trials showing it worked any better than a placebo. Six more  effectiveness trials were conducted, and in only one of them did Spravato beat the placebos. The FDA does have a system in place to identify potential conflicts of  interest between voting advisory board members and their financial holdings. These “medical experts” must reveal their financial holdings before voting on a drug, and if they either have investments in that firm or have been financially employed or rewarded by it, they are disqualified from the vote. The FDA does a have a waiver for special circumstances to allow members to vote even if they have financial connections to a pharmaceutical firm. There is a loophole in all of this, though. The financial rewards that are received from the pharmaceutical company by the voting member now occur in the future, not in the present or past. Hence, no apparent conflict of interest at the time of the vote. Of one hundred and seven physician-advisers that the publication Science examined in 2018 who  voted on the approval committees, forty received more than $10,000 in earnings or research support from the makers of the drugs that the panels had voted to approve. Twenty-six of those members were rewarded more than $100,000 from the Big Pharma firms, and six of those approval board physicians were compensated more than $1 million by the drug manufacturers afterward. Only forty-one of them – just 38 percent — received no compensation whatsoever. The sixteen top-earning advisory board members received more than $300,000 each from the $24 million plus in personal payments or research support from the  pharmaceutical industry. More importantly, 93% of that money came from the makers of drugs (or from their competitors) that those advisers had previously reviewed.These FDA advisory board members therefore look squeaky clean in the past and in the present. No conflicts of interest there. But in the future? That’s when they become the criminals. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Home Caffeine Blog Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft 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 Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats 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 Dangerous Side Effects of Antidepressant Zoloft 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 Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats 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 New FDA Ban of Mini-Electroshock Device Shows the Hypocrisy of This Psychiatry-Controlled Agency By Robert Carter/February 13, 2025 A Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED) delivers electric shocks as punishment to a person in order to control his or her behavior. The device was created by Matthew Israel, the founder of the Judge Rotenberg Center, as part of his behavior modification “utopia” school for children in Canton, MA. After an investigation into the device by  independent human rights experts working for the United Nations, the U.N. human rights agency condemned the use of Israel’s GED as “torture.” In 2011 the FDA ordered the Judge Rotenberg Center to stop using the GEDs because they were not FDA approved. Matthew Israel ignored that order and continued using the devices on his residents until the FDA finally and officially banned their use for behavior modification in 2020. The center was the only institution in the country using the GED for its harsh aversion therapy protocol. The Rotenberg Center has been a controversial institution for its ongoing behavior modification programs that include punishments of food deprivation, long term restraints, and sensory deprivation to control its young residents’ behavior, as well as the GED electroshocks. The GED was used on residents as young as seven or eight years old and reports have surfaced of children receiving as many as seventy-seven shocks at a time. GED  devices were worn in the daytime, during sleep, and even during showers, and shocks were administered at any of those times to the resident youth there, diagnosed with severe emotional and behavioral disorders or developmental disabilities. A 2006 report by the New York State Education Department found that the shock device was regularly used for minor infractions such as failing to be neat, rapping one’s foot around the leg of a chair, stopping work for more than ten seconds, using the  bathroom without permission, urinating on oneself after being refused the right to use the  bathroom, and screaming while being shocked. Six residents have died at the center for other reasons since it was founded in 1971. Human rights advocates and autism and disability support organizations have tried unsuccessfully to shut down the center for decades. A year after the FDA banned its GED use, a federal appeals court overturned the ban, saying that the FDA had to ban the device altogether or not all, referencing the 2020 FDA ban’s limit to aversion behavior modification therapy alone. In 2022 the United States Congress then amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to expand the FDA’s authority to ban such devices. The FDA has stated that “the risks presented by electric shock devices are both psychological (including suffering) and physical (including pain), each having a complex relationship with the electrical parameters of the shock. The FDA is now preparing its case to again ban them, but still only for their use in controlling self-injurious or aggressive behavior. The FDA is not proposing to ban electric shock devices currently used for other “therapeutic” purposes, such as smoking cessation, obesity,  alcoholism, gambling, anger issues, and other unwanted lifestyle behaviors. The question then becomes, if there are “risks presented by electric shock devices” which are

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

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

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

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

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 

Home Caffeine Blog 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 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 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 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 Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients      By Robert Carter/October 19, 2024      The U.S. telehealth industry has grown at a remarkable rate since it was implemented during the pandemic. In 2019 its market value was estimated at $11 billion. By 2020, only one year later, it had grown at a compound annual growth rate of 59% and its value increased to $18 billion. By 2022 it had expanded to $29.6 billion.      That high growth rate is projected to continue through the next decade and predictions are that by 2030 telethealth will be a $150 billion industry.      Like any industry with a meteoric rise such as this in revenue, a gold rush mentality can come into play which attracts all manner of carpetbaggers, flim-flam men and grifters. One telehealth example of this greed for quick profit is the indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice in June this year of both the chief executive and the clinical president of the Done telehealth company for their $100 million scheme to defraud taxpayers and bill insurers for writing on-line prescriptions with no legitimate medical purpose.      One interesting statistic that has recently emerged about the telehealth industry is that in 2021 only 4.5 percent of telehealth visits were to regular MDs, whereas 43.2 percent of visits were to psychiatrists.      That’s a striking disparity. How could that be?      Traditional medical doctors only diagnose medical conditions based on specific, objective evidence, the kind that comes from blood tests, EKGs, urine analysis, blood pressure counts, and so forth. Doctors might be able to gather initial information about symptoms a prospective patient is experiencing, but before they make a diagnosis and issue a treatment plan – just as they’re supposed to, per informed consent law – they want to see the patientsitting right in front of them, look at his tongue coating, tap his knee with a little hammer, and send off various bodily specimens to a laboratory.      The new on-line telehealth protocol for a psychiatrist is utterly different than that.      A prospective mental health patient often just answers a short, nine question form asking him if he’s been experiencing sadness or anxiety or some such symptom in the last couple of weeks. If the answer is affirmative, the “diagnosis” is made and he’s written a prescription for an antidepressant or another psychotropic drug. He might also be scheduled for a counseling appointment.      In other words, the psychiatrist accepts the self-diagnosis of a patient answering these questions – many of which were written by psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, by the way, funded by Big Pharma giant Pfizer – and matches the patient’s reported symptoms to a category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. From that he puts together a treatment plan that most often includes medication.      The psychiatrist’s diagnosis is therefore utterly subjective.      It is based on the patient’s own answers about his symptoms and the opinions of those psychiatrists who sat around a board room table and decided on the three hundred disorders that are listed in the DSM. Not one of those disorders can be verified by any objective laboratory test.      It is medical practice by opinion, not science.      It’s an easy way to be prescribed drugs, and it’s an easy way for psychiatrists and Big Pharma to make money.      Lots of it.      The gold rush is on. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Home Caffeine Blog 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? Youth Suicides After Rx You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia 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 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? Youth Suicides After Rx You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia 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 Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws… Even If They Wanted To      By Robert Carter/October 3, 2024      For over one hundred years medical professionals have been legally required to inform patients of their diagnosis and of the scientific reasons for it. They must also specify the benefits and risks of the treatment recommended, of the alternative treatments that are available, and of doing nothing at all.      The patient then signs the informed consent form as part of his medical records to show that this legal requirement has taken place. That full disclosure helps keep patients in control of their own medical decisions and it is both a legal and an ethical requirement for the medical field.      If you are diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, for instance, your doctor will show you the results of the blood tests, albumin tests, and sodium tests that show the physical evidence for that diagnosis.      A psychiatrist has no such objective criteria on which to base his diagnosis. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists 374 categories of “diagnosis,” but none of them are based on any physical, objective criteria. There is no such thing, for instance, as a “chemical imbalance,” as has been proven by many studies over the years.      Instead, each mental disorder in the DSM is voted on by a small panel of psychiatrists and then published in the current edition of the manual. The first edition in 1952 listed 106 disorders, but that number has more than tripled over the years to the three hundred plus categories now listed in the fifth edition.      There is no scientific test for any of them.          They are all based on the opinions of psychiatrists who, at best, are working from the reports of their patients about what symptoms they’re experiencing.      That’s like asking someone if they think they have cirrhosis of the liver to get a medical diagnosis. The patient doesn’t know. He just knows he doesn’t feel well. The patient and his doctor have to rely on the results of the lab tests, MRI’s, CAT scans, and EEGs that are performed to come up with a trustworthy diagnosis.      A psychiatrist does not have that ability, given the subjective nature of the DSM’s list of disorder diagnoses like “Unspecified Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder” or “Unspecified Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.” You don’t even have to be experiencing particularly specific symptoms to be so diagnosed. A psychiatrist’s diagnosis is not anobjective medical statement, but it is necessary so that your insurance company will pay for the medication he prescribed for you.      If his diagnosis is questionable, so too then is his going over the informed consent points for the risks and benefits of the recommended treatments. He – and you, his patient – are off on the wrong foot to recovery from the get-go.      Chances are good that a psychiatrist will recommend some medication for your “condition,” but chances are not so good that he will fully inform you of the benefits and the risks of that medication. He might not read you the black box warnings on antidepressants, for instance, which warn of the risk of suicidal behavior or thought, liver damage, reduced blood clotting or decreased sexual desire or performance.      A psychiatrist may also not be well informed on the myriad of alternative, natural treatments available. Med schools don’t spend more than a couple hours on a Thursday afternoon going over the constitutional benefits of vitamins and supplements, let alone acupuncture or yoga.      You might not also be told of the benefit of doing nothing at all other than waiting for a few weeks for your “depression” to subside after the death of your grandmother before you can once again go on happily with your life…rather than being drugged into a zombie state to mask the appropriate emotions by ingesting a psychotropic drug. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil