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from OnLineJournal Website
Tens of millions of innocent,
unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health”
system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the
withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering,
brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have
been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy - often in
untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs - to
trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but
well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing
influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical
drug companies, a.k.a.
BigPharma.
His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600 percent increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers.
This uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability.
Many open-minded physicians and many
aware psychiatric patients are now motivated to be wary of any and
all synthetic chemicals that can cross the blood/brain barrier
because all of them are capable of altering the brain in ways
totally unknown to medical science, especially when the patients are
taking the drugs long-term. .
He documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma.
Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to admit:
More evidence to support Whitaker’s well-documented claims are laid out in two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace Jackson.
Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, from the voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly ignored by the clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous consequences of the chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes of psychiatric drugs.
Her second and most powerful book: Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any of the five classes of drugs that are commonly used in psychiatric patients (antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, tranquilizers and anti-seizure/”mood-stabilizer” drugs) have shown microscopic, macroscopic, biochemical, clinical and/or radiological evidence of brain shrinkage and other signs of brain damage, which can result in clinically-diagnosable, permanent dementia, premature death and a variety of other related brain disorders that can mimic mental illnesses.
Jackson’s first book,
Rethinking
Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent was an equally
sobering book warning about the many hidden dangers of psychiatric
drugs.
(Thorazine was the offending drug that all of Jack Nicholson’s fellow patients were coerced into taking at “medication time” in the Academy Award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”)
Thorazine and all the other “me-too”
early antipsychotic drugs are now universally known to have been an
iatrogenic (= doctor or other treatment-caused) disaster because of
their serious long-term, initially unsuspected, brain-damaging
effects that resulted in a number of incurable neurological
disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson’s disease.
Depakote, known to be a hepatotoxin and
renal toxin, was originally developed as an industrial solvent
capable of dissolving fat - including, presumably, the fatty tissue
in human livers and brains.
Both the prescribers and the swallowers
of
BigPharma’s drugs have succumbed to BigPharma’s cunning marketing
campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by attractive drug
company representatives and their “pens, pizzas and post-it note”
freebies in the office, and the patients being brain-washed by the
inane and unbelievable (if one has intact critical thinking skills)
commercials on TV that quickly gloss over the lethal adverse effects
in the fine print while urging the watcher to “ask your doctor”
about the latest unaffordable wannabe blockbuster drug. .
The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent
information about his books can be accessed at
Mad In America. A
recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at
www.wpr.org
(at their radio archives link).
Those people who are hearing about this for the first time need to pass the word on to others, especially their prescribing healthcare practitioners who should be equally concerned.
This is important because the opinion leaders in the highly influential (for good or ill) psychiatric and medical industries have been marketed into submission without hearing the all the facts (which may have been intentionally hidden from them.
If that is the case, they cannot be automatically blamed
for proceeding in a practice that some day might represent
malpractice. It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that is the solemn
duty of ethical practitioners who are in positions of authority to
fully examine potential malpractice issues and then warn others,
especially their patients, of the dangers.
The captains of the drug industry know that the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 weeks. They also know - indeed they hope - that patients will be taking their drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as the only “treatment” for mental ill health.
They know that their brain-altering
drugs are also dependency-inducing (aka addicting, causing
withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic and increasingly
ineffective (a la “Prozac Poop-out”) as time goes by.
And thus we have not yet been given a
billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly obligatory - and
unaffordable - drug prescription or two signifying we are now
chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain off
prescription drugs but with a label and in “the system,” it is hard
to “just say no to drugs.”
America tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus fear-inducing social systems resembling in many ways the infamous police state realities of 20th century European totalitarianism, where people who were different or just dissidents were thought to be abnormal and therefore “disappeared” into insane asylums, jails or concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense.
And many of them were and are drugged
with disabling psychoactive chemicals against their will.
The chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of,
So before filling the prescription, it is advisable to read the product insert labeling under,
Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a “chemical lobotomy.”
That is a useful way to conceptualize
this serious issue, because such chemically brain-altered patients
are often indistinguishable from those who have suffered a
physically traumatic brain injuries or been subjected to ice-pick
lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 50s - before the
drugs came on the market.
...and follow the links.
He was successful in helping significant majorities of his patients get off their drugs using a thorough and therefore time-consuming program that was based on psycho-educational psychotherapy, brain nutrient therapy, a drastic change away from the malnourishing and often toxic Standard American Diet (SAD) plus a program of gradual, closely monitored drug withdrawal.
Dr. Kohls warns against the abrupt discontinuation of any psychiatric drug because of the common, often serious withdrawal symptoms that can occur with the chronic use of any dependency-inducing psychoactive drug, whether illicit or legal.
Close consultation with an aware, informed physician who is hopefully familiar with dealing with drug withdrawal syndromes (starting with the original prescribing physician), who will read and study the above books and become aware of the previously unknown dangers of these drugs and the nutritional needs of the drug-toxified and nutritionally-depleted brain.
He is the editor of the occasional Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.
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