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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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Telehealth Statistics Highlight Psychiatry’s Reliance on Opinion, NotFact, to Treat Their Patients

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 

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Psychiatrists Cannot Adhere to Informed Consent Laws

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 

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Psychiatry Turns Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit

Home Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma Makes the Guns Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Contact Us Home Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma Makes the Guns Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Contact Us Psychiatry Turns Once Humane Asylums into Inhumane Centers of Profit By Robert Carter/September 10, 2024 An asylum, by definition, is a place of refuge, a sanctuary. The original asylums were the almshouses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which were mainly funded by nobility as homes for the elderly and incapable. By the end of the eighteenth century these institutions had begun to house “lunatics” as well, and their reputation as protective sanctuaries changed into one of punitive facilities with harsh, inhumane conditions. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, those houses of horror were increasingly exposed to the public for their brutality, and a new regimen of “moral treatment” was proposed for this population to replace the barbaric incarceration that almshouses had become. The mentally ill could now be made healthy and productive by giving them fresh air, a decent diet, exercise, calm, pleasant quarters, and a productive job in the workshops and farms of these new asylums. These “moral treatment” institutions were funded by socially conscious citizens and by state governments, and their buildings were often marvelous structures designed by prominent architects. By 1880, 139 of these beautiful Victorian mansions and facilities, with carefully landscaped grounds, had been built in America. By the end of the nineteenth century, the country’s workforce had become predominantly urban and industrial and no longer rural and agrarian. The extended families native to America’s farmland no longer existed to house their elderly, infirm or odd family members. More and more of those who could not survive after moving to Industrial Age cities for jobs ended up in these asylums. Their housing capacities became so strained and state budgets were so crippled by the skyrocketed expense of maintaining these overpopulated institutions that squalid, inhumane living conditions soon ensued within these once grand buildings. They came to be known as nuthouses and loony bins, not benign houses of refuge. By WWI the practice of “moral treatment” for this now huge population was no longer feasible with their untrained staff and under the impossible demands of their budgets. The modern mental hospital was born. Psychiatrists were quick to move in and begin the ugly practice of their new “treatments” on a population of people society no longer cared about and only wanted to hide from scrutiny. In the 1930s these unsuspecting, unprotected, incarcerated souls became the perfect subjects for psychiatrists to practice their brutal new “therapies” of lobotomy and electroshock treatment. These horrific practices could be safely hidden from the world at large behind these disgraced public institutions’ walls. Few patients were ever cured with these brutalities, but many were rendered zombie-like and so were no longer a disruptive threat to those running the mental hospitals. In the late 1940s the devastating effects of a lobotomy or of electroschock on a person were exposed to the public by the press and these cruel psychiatric practices were no longer widely tolerated in mental institutions. In the 1950s the FDA authorized the first use of Thorazine, as well as other mind-umbing antipsychotic drugs. These could then be used as a perfect means to controlling what by then had become an enormous population of mental patients in both psychiatric facilities and regular hospitals. In fact, by 1950 fifty percent of all hospital beds in use in the United States were for psychiatric patients. Giving a patient a pill also appeared far less harmful than cutting out part of his brain or applying 400 volts to his temples. Psychiatric medication became politically correct. The new FDA sanction of these psychiatric drugs also made it possible to release a drug controlled population back into society, and in 1963 President Kennedy signed a bill that provided over $300 million to build “community health centers” for this purpose. In 1965 President Johnson then signed the bills for Medicare and Medicaid and these government funds could now be used to pay for the institutional care of mental patients and their new drug diets. It was a godsend both to state budgets and to psychiatry’s wallets. With the increased marketing of antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs from the 1960s through the 1980s to handle spurious mental conditions, the market for mental health services expanded exponentially. Today psychiatry’s frightening claim is that twenty percent of America’s adult population suffers from mental illness. Psychiatrists and Big Pharma, abetted by the FDA, can now reap a financial bonanza from the “mentally ill.” The global pharmaceutical market in 2023 was $1.6 trillion. The unfortunate demise of those exemplary asylums of the nineteenth century led to the take over of the mentally ill by psychiatrists in the 1930s, and ever since psychiatrists – with the help of the FDA and Big Pharma – have been able to maintain their stranglehold on the mentally distressed through their vast marketing of psychotropic drugs. All the while making a financial killing. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in

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Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility

Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma Makes the Guns Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Big Pharma Makes the Guns Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Fear Sells. So Does Irresponsibility. By Robert Carter/September 2, 2024 Fear is a persuasive sales tool. Marketing experts have been using it forever. “If a hurricane hit, you’ll be ruined financially if you don’t have flood insurance.” “You know, if your transmission went and you had this warranty, you’d be all set. If you didn’t…I hate to say.” Today Big Pharma’s marketing of antidepressants and psychotropic drugs is based on this successful sales model, and they start it by scaring you with a screening form to fill out when you visit your regular doctor. “Have you been feeling sad at times recently?” “Are there moments when you have felt anxiety before going to work or school?” In other words, “Do you think there might be something wrong with you? Take a good look now.”   Fear sells. They get to ask those questions only because of the bogus diagnoses listed in the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It’s the “bible” insurance companies use to authorize their payment for the drugs that treat mental illnesses like “Grief” and “Anxiety” listed in the DSM, and also for those obviously made up “illnesses” like Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (an uncomfortable menstrual period) or Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (a temporarily unruly child). Moments of sadness or moments of anxiety are part of life. They come and go. Family members get sick. Pets die. Stressful projects at work or in school occur. They’re normal, as is an emotional response to them. Big Pharma, though, wants you to think you’re abnormal if you experience sadness or anxiety. They’re playing into the universal human fear of not being normal, of not being “one of the crowd.” That’s their first lie. Then comes the second lie. Those feelings are not you. They’re your brain. It’s got a chemical imbalance. So you yourself are not responsible. Of course, there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance causing your sadness or fear, but that false idea then opens the door for their solution. “We can re-balance your brain. We’ve got drugs that can do that. Tons of them.” Big Pharma uses irresponsibility to sell…as well as fear. You aren’t responsible for all those “abnormal” feelings of grief or anxiety that you’re having, all those moments of irrational behavior when you cry for no reason or feel nervous about who knows what. It’s not you, Big Pharma says. You’re not responsible. “Just take this little pill and you’ll be fine. In fact, take lots of them.” Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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Big Pharma Makes the Guns

Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Big Pharma Makes the Guns, the FDA Approves Them, but Psychiatrists Pull the Trigger By Robert Carter/August 26, 2024 There are plenty of dangerous antidepressants around. Just read the FDA required black box labels on them. “Increased risk of suicidal thought and behavior” they say. Just like a handgun, a drug can be inherently dangerous. But only after someone pulls the trigger. Even the FDA says so…but only after approving them for widespread use just as long as Big Pharma puts that little black box on the label and on the instructions. In the gun industry, quality control is achieved either by full inspection of all the parts – generally too expensive – or a statistical analysis of small batches of individual parts – a less costly method and the one more often used. It’s similar to the trial processes new antidepressants undergo to assure efficiency and safety of the products that the FDAapproves for public use. Both products – guns and antidepressants — are probably made as safely as they can be. (We might, however, question that safety in another blog addressing Big Pharma’s manipulation of their drug trials). In any case, it’s not the manufactured guns that kill people. It’s the shooters. With antidepressants it’s the psychiatrist. He writes the prescription. Sometimes it’s also the uninformed or greedy doctor who pulls the trigger when they write someone that dangerous prescription. Dangerous because of that “increased risk of suicidal thought and behavior.” Sort of like holding a handgun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger. Or holding it to one’s own head and then deciding to pull the trigger after one too many weeks of taking Adderall. Suicide statistics for those who take Adderall show a strong increase in successful suicides.Hence the boldface black warning box on the bottle. If we applied those Adderall statistics to someone who bought a handgun, we would see a thirty percent higher risk of them using the gun on themselves or on another…rather than on a Budweiser can balanced on their back fence. People are smart enough, though, not to need black box warnings on guns. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants?

Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants?      By Robert Carter/August 2, 2024      The FDA has two criteria for testing and approving a medication: its efficiency and its safety.      “Efficiency” means does it handle the condition it is supposed to handle. “Safety” means does it handle it without undue risk to the consumer.      If a new antibiotic, for instance, is created to eliminate a particular virus from the body, extensive trials are conducted to see if it actually does so and does so without too many negative “side effects.” If so, that medication is approved for use by the public, but the FDA then further monitors its widespread use for any negative side effects.That is not the way it works with antidepressants, though.      For antidepressants on the market before 2004, the standard FDA “side effect” alerts were part of the user information given out with these prescribed drugs. By 2004, however, so many reports of severe suicidal “side effects” had been reported by the public on nine commonly prescribed drugs that the Black Box warnings were mandated by the FDA on all of them them. Celexa, Luvox, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Remeron, Serzone, andWellbutrin were determined to result in a high risk for suicide when prescribed to adolescents.      The FDA did not remove them from the market, however.      Antidepressants (SSRIs) are one type of psychotropic drug, and it is estimated that there are 42,000 deaths a year from psychotropic drugs.       So much for the FDA’s safety factor for antidepressants.       How about the efficiency factor?      With many medicines, effectiveness can be measured by conducting sufficient trials to see if the unwanted condition the medicine addresses is diminished or eliminated by the medicine. With an antibiotic designed to address an unwanted “XYZ” virus, for instance, laboratory tests can be done to see if the “XYZ” virus has been eliminated from the body after the antibiotic is given.      There is no test, however, that can be done to measure a “chemical imbalance” in the brain associated with depression, anxiety or any other emotional condition. “Chemical imbalance” is a myth promoted by Big Pharma to legitimize psychiatrists as medical doctors and unwanted emotional conditions as diseases.      There is no such thing, and there is no laboratory test for it.      Therefore, the efficiency of an antidepressant has no objective, scientific way of being measured in the same way that other medications like antibiotics can be.      So much for the FDA’s efficiency factor for antidepressants.      That doesn’t leave any other factors, does it? So why does the FDA continue to approve them? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality

Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality      By Robert Carter/July 22, 2024      The U.S. Department of Justice negotiated an $8 billion dollar settlement in 2020 with Purdue Pharma LP for the OxyContin manufacturer’s prioritizing money over the moral imperative to care for the health and well being of patients. Purdue was guilty of “greed and violation of the law,” according to the Department of Justice.      More than half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses since 1999. Today the number of opioid overdose deaths is eight times higher than it was in 1999. Purdue’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin while dishonestly downplaying its addictive nature significantly contributed to those deaths.      The public applauded the settlement against Purdue and its owners, the Sackler family.      But that has not been the end of Big Pharma’s reach for profit at the expense of the public through their marketing of opioids. Instead, with opioid kingpin now Purdue out of the way, its competitors increased their aggressive marketing of these horrifyingly addictive oxycondone products to fill the supply void that had just been created.      University of Washington research from data provided by 600,000 prescribers showed that from 2014 to 2015 – before that court case — Purdue pharmaceutical sales reps spent $1.5 million for food and drinks on their visits to prescribers so they could promote Oxycontin.      From 2016 to 2017 – after the lawsuit – those Purdue sales reps’ expenditures dropped to $54,000, a 94 percent decrease.  However, pharmaceutical sales reps from competing Big Pharma opioid production companies increased their food and drink expenditures by 160 percent during that same time period, 2016 to 2017.      The ravages of the opioid epidemic that had been created in America by Big Pharma were conveniently and immorally ignored for the prospect of easy profit in a now less well supplied opioid prescription market.      This University of Washington study also showed that after Purdue’s court case there was no decrease in the marketing of opioids by other manufacturers to those areas of the country most devastated by the opioid crisis. Prescribers in Appalachia were being marketed to as aggressively as prescribers in other parts of the country.      In 2020 opioids that had been prescribed – not obtained on the street – still accounted for one quarter of all opioid overdose deaths.      How many more victims need there be before Big Pharma starts policing itself and curbing its greed? Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy

Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy      By Robert Carter/July 11, 2024      How did Big Pharma become that Big?      You can thank the man who makes it possible for you to ice skate in mid-town Manhattan. John D. Rockefeller.      Once the U. S. government had begun to break up his oil holdings in the early 1900’s because they had become too much of a monopoly, Rockefeller started looking around for another unconscionably profitable business venture. The Supreme Court had also just found him guilty of illegal business practices and racketeering.      His oil companies had made him the richest man in the world and America’s first billionaire, but he now needed to replace his staggering income with something else. Preferably something made from petrochemicals, a by-product of his remaining oil holdings.      “Ah,” he thought. “Drugs!”      Although he himself knew the benefits of natural remedies – like most Americans in the nineteenth century, his family had thrived on homeopathy and natural remedies – he discovered that vitamins and other natural elements could not be patented. No money there.  But drugs could be. Big money there. He set out to take over that industry.       He started “investing” in medical schools. $550,000,000 right off the bat to the most prominentmedical schools, like the University of Chicago and Yale, but with the provision that they “teach” only allopathic, pharmaceutical based medicine. No natural cures here, please.      Meanwhile, what was to become the FDA was then evolving from the Bureau of Chemistry, an early consumer rights organization that had become an agency that protected chemical companies from being sued because there was now a legal “plausible deniability” factor for any culpability for the harmful effects of chemicals. That early protection transferred to pharmaceutical companies — with the U. S. Government’s sanction – and that protection has remained in place for drug companies until only the last few years.      Since its lifting, large, billion dollar penalties have finally been leveled against Big Pharma. Somebody is apparently waking up.      In the early twentieth century Rockefeller – with his profit greedy pal, Andrew Carnegie — then set out to further remove the medical field from any involvement with natural remedies by hiring Abraham Flexner to tour medical schools and “evaluate” the treatments they taught. His 1910 Flexner Report helped persuade lawmakers to enact legislation that would license only physicians trained in patented, chemical based pharmacology, and in surgery.      No “Take two Vitamin C and call me in the morning” advice from our practitioners,thank you very much. The “drug and cut” foundation of American medical practice was born.      Thus the Medical Mafia was born: the AMA, the FDA and Big Pharma. And that, boys and girls, is how Big Pharma has become so big. And that’s why you’re worth more to them sick or crazy. All of Big Pharma’s synthetic, lucratively patentable drugs now prescribed by allopathic doctors are not designed to cure your physical or mental ills. They’re designed to make Big Pharma money.      John D. was not unskilled in greed or in creating monopolies, you know. There’s another even spookier tale about Rockefeller’s investment in the German  pharmaceutical giant I. G. Farben, which helped put Hitler into power and used his concentration camps to experiment on the innocent with their hideous drugs.      But that’s another story. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal

Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Home Contact Us Caffeine Blog Big Pharma: Follow the Money, Not the Morality Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal You’re Worth More Sick or Crazy than Healthy Youth Suicides After Rx Can Anyone Trust “FDA Approval” for Antidepressants? Free Books, DVDs, etc Order form Other Resources Latest News Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Research Shows No Gene Causes Schizophrenia Contact Us Psychiatric Drugs and Going Postal      By Robert Carter/July 11, 2024      Michael Moore, director of Bowling for Columbine, suspected it.      The Canadian government, in its 1975 study researching the effects of psychiatric drugs on prisoners, discovered it.      Even the American F.D.A. knows it from their recent studies.      Psychiatric drugs breed violence.      Either while you’re on them or while you’re coming off them. How much more “caffeine” news on this subject does the general public need to wake up to the menace of psychiatric drugs and to understand that it is not guns that are the problem with mass killings, it is guns in the hands of psychotically medicated individuals?      Sure. People can get pretty antsy going through the withdrawal when they’ve stopped smoking those Marlboros, but they never drown five members of their family in the bathtub because of it. Like Andrea Yates did. She was on the anti-depressant Effexor.      They didn’t shoot and kill their grandparents before going to their school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation and kill seven students and a teacher and wound seven more…as well as kill himself. Like sixteen year old Jeff Weise did. He was on Prozac.       They didn’t kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-six others at Columbine High School before he too killed himself. Like eighteen year old Eric Harris did. He was on the anti-depressant Luvox.      The list goes on and on.      Sixteen year old Luke Woodham stabbed his mother to death and then went to his high school and shot nine people, killing two and wounding seven others. He was on Prozac.      Fourteen year old Michael Carneal opened fire on students in a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky, killing three and wounding five others. He was on Ritalin.      Fifteen year old Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, murdered his parents and then went to his high school where he killed two students and wounded twenty-two others. He was on Prozac and Ritalin.      Twenty-seven year old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded sixteen others at Northern Illinois University before killing himself. He had been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien.      The list truly does go on and on.      Unfortunately, many youth who are on these evil medications are teenagers whose parents approved their being given these prescriptions. Some people estimate that seventy-five percent of those who have “gone postal” in our country have been on or are just coming off psychiatric drugs. It’s no wonder. That 1975 Canadian study discovered that “violent, aggressive incidents occurred significantly more frequently in inmates who were on psychotropic medication than when those inmates were not on psychotropic drugs.”      That F.D.A. study found that thirty-one “suspect” drugs accounted for 1,527 of the 1,937 case reports of violence in their database from the period 2004 to 2009. Of that total, 387 cases were homicides, 404 were physical assaults, 896 were cases of homicidal ideation and 223 were “violence related symptoms.” That’s almost eighty percent of all severely violent episodes caused by drugs.  Antidepressants were responsible for 572 of those case reports of violence toward others. Three ADHD drugs were responsible for 108 of the violent acts. That’s forty-five percent of all of the violent acts studied caused by those who were on psychiatric medication.      Following his extensive research into the Columbine tragedy, film maker Michael Moore said:      “In Bowling for Columbine, we never really came up with the answer of why this happened. I think we did a good job of exposing that all the reasons that were given were a bunch of B.S.      And none of it really made any sense. That’s why I believe there should be an investigation in terms of what…prescribed pharmaceuticals these kids were on…”“It just would be shocking…to the millions of parents who prescribe this for their kids if it was finally explained to them, if this is the case, that this perhaps occurred for no other reason other than because of these prescriptions.”      It is time for that investigation.      Ask your congressmen to start it. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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