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by Jon Rappoport February 24, 2013 from JonRappoport Website
Nightmares, out-of-control aggressive behavior, extreme sadness and passivity, confusion, hallucinations, mania, brain damage, suicide, homicide - these are just a few central effects of psychiatric drugs.
Read the staggering statistics reported by Robert Whitaker, the author of Mad in America - Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill:
My exploration started in 1999, as I covered the Columbine school shooting.
I was already familiar with the pioneering work of Dr. Peter Breggin and his classic book, Toxic Psychiatry. I knew the drugs were toxic and that some of them could push people into violence.
It emerged that one of the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, had been on Luvox, a violence-inducing drug, an SSRI antidepressant.
This, of course, was very troubling, because children and adults all over America were taking these antidepressants. And in Dr. Breggin’s book, I saw a summary of a review-study on Ritalin, done in 1986 by Joseph Scarnati.
Ritalin, far from being a “soft” drug, was essentially speed, and it carried with it significant dangers. It could cause hallucinations, aggressive behavior, and even psychotic breaks. Several million children in America were taking Ritalin.
What I came to call a “Johnny Appleseed specter” loomed over America.
If psychiatrists dispensed enough of these drugs, seeding the population, we would be in for random shootings and killings and suicides on into the indefinite future. And psychiatrists were, in fact, handing out these drugs like candy. No one at the FDA or any enforcement government agency was ringing alarm bells.
In the wake of Columbine, I wrote a white paper, "Why Did they Do It - School Shootings Across America," for The Truth Seeker. It gained wide online attention. The report mentioned other instances where children, on psychiatric drugs, had committed murder and suicide.
In the ensuing years, I became much more aware of the influence of drug companies in this Johnny Appleseed operation.
They had, in fact, struck a deal to rescue the sinking profession of psychiatry. The arrangement was simple and potent: Big Pharma would bankroll psychiatric conferences and education, prop up flagging journals with advertising money, and generally promote the repute of psychiatry, in return for a certain kind of research:
The research would “prove” that all mental disorders were the result of chemical imbalances in the brain, and no amount of talk therapy would resolve these issues. Instead, it would take drugs, which of course would be developed and sold by Pharma.
In order for this scheme to work, the FDA, which certifies all medicines as safe and effective before releasing them for public consumption, would have to play along. That was no problem. The FDA basically serves the pharmaceutical industry.
Roughly five years after Columbine, I (and other investigators) began to see how widespread the research fraud really was. Peter Breggin was already aware of it and had published extensively on the subject.
For example, clinical trials of psychiatric drugs were being done over very brief periods of time; in some cases, the trials were as short as six weeks. This was the case with Xanax. A brief testing period would hide many of the adverse effects of the drugs.
But then I also saw how clinical trials that were failures, that revealed how badly the drugs were performing, could be hidden altogether, as if they’d never happened. The results of these trials weren’t published at all. A pharmaceutical company, running a number of studies on a drug, could cherry pick a few studies that looked good and shelve the others.
In 2009, searching the literature and interviewing several psychiatrists off the record, I came to understand that the whole idea of “chemical imbalances in the brain” was a fraud. No one had ever established a normal chemical level of balance. In other words, there was no scientific standard that, by comparison, could show what an “imbalance” was.
It was a myth, and it was widely accepted, even by the public.
I began talking to parents. The full force of what was happening, on the ground, was driven home to me. Lives were being derailed and destroyed at an early age. Children were being warped by these drugs. A diagnosis of one psychiatric condition, followed by a drug prescription, often resulted in another diagnosis, and more drugs. The effects were devastating.
The time of childhood, of innocence, was being destroyed. It was all in the service of carving up behavior into categories of mental disorders and then selling drugs behind those diagnoses.
Children’s brains were being twisted.
There was a growing trend to diagnose children at six, at four, or even earlier, with mental conditions - and give them drugs. Papers and books were being written to justify this. The publications were called “breakthroughs.” A whole industry of “bipolar children” was created out of thin air, and the scientific fraud was accepted as holy writ.
This was not just fraud. It was evil. It was remorseless evil, perpetrated by elite academics and researchers. These were people who should have been put in prison for the rest of their lives.
But nothing was happening to them. They were praised instead, and celebrated.
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Where was the national conscience? Where were the people in the Department of Justice, who should have been serving warrants and making arrests and building court cases?
What I saw was obvious, and it had been in front of my face for more than a decade. The federal government was supporting and certifying psychiatry/psychology as the single science of mental health. This wasn’t just a wink and a nod; it was rock solid.
Where in the Constitution was there any basis for that? Nowhere. The very idea, when you isolated it and held it in your hand and looked at it, was preposterous. The federal government has no conceivable right to enable psychiatry in any way.
Yet, it was happening. It was happening to such a degree that nothing was being done to punish the whole profession for destroying countless lives with toxic drugs. Indeed, this was government-approved behavior.
It still boggles my mind to think about that. Yes, one can offer many excuses and rationalizations, but at the end of it all, that’s what we’re left with: the government is certifying the destruction of millions of lives.
Read Toxic Psychiatry, and Dr. Breggin’s later book, Medication Madness. Read Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. That will get you started. You’ll find lucid evidence of the many destructive effects the drugs produce, all the way from mania to motor brain damage.
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I thought I had reached the end of the road. What more was there to discover? What more did anyone need to know?
No matter which way you sliced it, psychiatric destruction was a government-certified program.
But then, several years ago, I realized I didn’t know how many mental disorders existed. I knew, of course, there was a bible of the psychiatric profession. It is called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. So far, there have been four editions. A fifth is due out in the spring of 2013.
The editions of the DSM are put together by committees of psychiatrists. The DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association, lists and defines every officially-certified mental disorder. It is used by psychiatrists to bill insurance companies.
So I quickly found out there are 297 mental disorders. This is absurd on the face of it. Reading the descriptions of these disorders, one sees they are menus of behaviors.
I assumed some of these disorders were based on nothing but speculation. They were inventions. Concoctions.
But after a few conversations with psychiatric sources, I saw I had been underestimating the extent of the fraud.
In fact, all 297 mental disorders are arrangements and clusters of behaviors. The DSM committees hold meetings and argue and hash out the composition of the clusters and the accompanying mental-disorder labels.
Then I found an article: Wired Magazine, December 27, 2010, "Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness," by Gary Greenberg.
It was an interview with a psychiatrist, Dr. Allen Frances. Frances wasn’t just any psychiatrist. He was a star of stars. He had been in charge of assembling the fourth edition of the bible, the DSM.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances,
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances, talking to Wired’s Greenberg, said the following:
This was on the order of the Pope asserting there was no real reason to believe in God.
After a pause, Dr. Frances remarked,
Frances might have been referring to the fact that his DSM-IV had expanded earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar, to permit many more diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds, like Valproate and Lithium.
Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:
Frances was basically admitting that the nice neat definitions of mental disorders were a delusion. But to justify it, he called the whole enterprise an exercise in partial map-making.
The Wired interview was explosive, to say the least.
The most influential psychiatrist in America was confessing that you couldn’t clearly define mental disorders.
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But no, that wasn’t all.
There were a few more steps to the bottom of the rabbit hole. They were taken by Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
In an episode of the PBS Frontline series, titled “Does ADHD Exist,” the Frontline interviewer stated:
Dr. Barkley replied:
First of all, Dr. Barkley’s comments are not unique. I have heard his points echoed by many psychiatrists. It’s time to take this assertion apart, because it is truly staggering.
The “illiteracy about science” belongs to Dr. Barkley. The scientific method requires that when a researcher draws a conclusion, he provides the evidence for it. The burden of proof is on him.
If a committee of psychiatrists says disorder X exists, it must demonstrate that.
Barkely confirms that no mental disorder has a lab test to back up a diagnosis. It doesn’t matter what disorder you pick. Schizophrenia, ADHD, Bipolar, clinical depression. None of them can be tested for.
No blood test, no urine test, no saliva test, no brain scan, no genetic assay.
That is a titanic fact.
And being a fact, it destroys the whole DSM and everything it stands for. It destroys the validity of every one of the 297 official mental disorders.
Science requires that the claim for the existence of a mental disorder must be backed up by hard evidence. Since there is no evidence, and since the burden of proof is on the psychiatric profession, the inevitable inference is clear:
Retract every one of the 297 mental disorders. Erase their names. It’s over. There is no proof any of these disorders exist. They only have the status of fictions.
Psychiatry doesn’t have some special dispensation to do “a different brand of science.”
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When this was finally made clear to me, I knew I had reached the bottom of the rabbit hole.
There were other paths to follow, concerning the issue of conscious intent to do harm to millions of people, but as far the science was concerned, that was It.
Of course, those who are confused by this bottom-line revelation will say that many people are suffering from mental illness. They will say it is obvious. No, what is obvious is that many people have problems. Many people suffer. Many people are desperate. Many people experience emotional and physical pain.
The actual causes for all this can’t be neatly categorized and labeled. To make a meaningful diagnosis or assessment involves much deeper investigation - and also an appreciation of what is front of one’s own eyes.
When it comes to human suffering and emotional distress, we could be talking about causes ranging,
The list goes on.
This is a partial collection of real causes - instead of the false, non-existent mental disorders, which are excuses to drug people.
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The whole profession of psychiatry is an outright fraud and an ongoing crime of the highest order.
At the same time, as long as psychiatrists sit in offices and the drugs are available, and no one is prosecuted and sent to jail for dispensing these “medicines,” adults have the freedom to choose to take the drugs or not. And if some of them say they have benefited, that’s also their decision.
But without knowledge and authentic informed consent beforehand, the landscape is rife with danger.
When it comes uninformed or uncaring parents dealing away their children’s lives to psychiatrists, that is an ever-expanding tragic nightmare.
Each day that the profession of psychiatry continues to practice its sophisticated brand of poisonous fakery, and each day that the federal government of the United States continues to back it up and support it and fund it and give it primacy and monopoly, there is an ongoing RICO crime in progress. A crime of gangsters and thugs organized as a mob.
It is as if the Mafia declared its shootings and beatings to be scientifically based. It is exactly like that.
Here are several quotes, out of hundreds I could offer, on the subject of the adverse and chilling effects of psychiatry:
Dr. Peter Breggin, the eminent psychiatrist and author (Toxic Psychiatry, Talking Back to Prozac, Talking Back to Ritalin):
Dr. Joseph Tarantolo is a psychiatrist in private practice in Washington DC. He is the past-president of the Washington chapter of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians.
Tarantolo states that,
In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin mentions that the Donahue show (Feb. 28, 1991),
Breggin also cites a troubling study from the February 1990 American Journal of Psychiatry (Teicher et al, v.147:207-210) which reports on,
A shocking review-study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1996, v.184, no.2), written by Rhoda L. Fisher and Seymour Fisher, called “Antidepressants for Children,” concludes:
The well-known Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics states that Ritalin is,
In Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin discusses the subject of drug combinations:
In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate”) [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].
Scarnati listed over a hundred adverse affects of Ritalin and indexed published journal articles for each of these symptoms.
For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects then, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:
In commenting on Dr. Lawrence Diller’s book, Running on Ritalin, Dr. William Carey, Director of Behavioral Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has written,
The 1994 Textbook of Psychiatry, published by the American Psychiatric Press, contains this review (Popper and Steingard):
In his book, Talking Back to Ritalin, Peter Breggin expands on the drug’s effects:
Dr. David Healy, professor of psychiatry and former Secretary of British Association for Psychopharmacology, author of Let Then Eat Prozac and Mania:
Dr. David Healy:
Dr. David Healy:
Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic:
Robert Whitaker:
Dr. Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and author of The Myth of Mental Illness:
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