Mass psychosis in the US - Opinion - Al Jazeera English Pfizer
How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs. Last Modified: 12 Jul 2011 06:20
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| Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits [GALLO/GETTY] |
| People and Power: Drug Money |
Insert: “(ALL ills ELF transmitted diseases I have been trying to report and since I started trying to go PUBLIC as on my radio interview and the shift to block me until they brainwashed everyone with public event generated including the shuttle going up after decades since no longer needed and now whitewashed creating new excuses to go back up.) Mind Controlled Culture for Gov’t profit.”
Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems. The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.
Not just for psychotics anymore
By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.
Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.
| The most mis-diagnosed ills in AMERICA! |
"The use of psychoactive drugs - including both antidepressants and antipsychotics - has exploded...[yet] 'the tally of those who are disabled...increased nearly two and a half times."Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."Cost benefit analysis
What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.
Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."
A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."
In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"
For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.
Making patients worse
As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis. IT IS ALL BEEN for TAX REVENUE and POWER and since 2008 when I was threatened and pre-empted with going public and their explosion of corruption in gov’t lessor evil!
A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older, less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies. This is mind control not computer generation or just pills being used as scapegoats.
Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."
Bottom line: Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from want only pushing these pills across the population. MIND CONTROL in all professions and we the people to be self destructing!
James Ridgeway writes for The Guardian newspaper, and is the senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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 | Aungsan 3 weeks ago |
- Another failure for capitalism, pharmaceutical companies driven by profit, so what is the best way to make profit? to make addict out of all of us, so, who cares if the drugs actually solve any problem? or if they have side effects? who cares if the are used for problems that they have not been tested? or if it is kids the ones being duped? who cares about moral anyway? when money comes to the picture, and branding and bribing works so well that billions keep coming no matter what, then who cares about moral?
Blogs On and 235 more liked this
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· In large part, its a population dealing with the fallout of self hate and guilt consequence of being a repressed judgmental biblical based society. The puritans set the social tone for this country. Its what war cultures do. Distort the population at a young enough age so what goes on in their own head is demonized, produces angry, confused adults primed and ready to kill. Tell a child "Jesus died for your sins"? Thats a h*ll of a thing to drum into a kids head. "Who is this guy? I don't know any such guy and what did I do?" A kid like that has been emotionally crippled before getting started in life. The pervasive anger in American society at judgementalism having religious roots is everywhere. Which is great if you plan on war. Not so great if you have to deal with that in a civil society. The solution? Drug 'em.
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| | SmokeyWest 3 weeks ago in reply to Gary |
· Growing up in America during the 1950's I was constantly being told that God was going send me to hell if I did anything wrong; that he knew my every thought and deed; and that he was coming at any moment, and that I better not be left behind. At school we were constantly reminded that we could all be destroyed at any minute by the Russian, but that it would be "better to be dead that red." I was told that there were communists in our schools and cities and that if they took over the country they would kill my parents and turn me into a slave. I was encourage to be ever on the lookout for anyone who might be communist agent or sympathizer. We were expected to live in a stae of constant fear.
The 1960's saw my generation drafted and sent to fight a war for corporate profits, where 50,000 died and millions were scarred for life. We were bomabarded with ads for cigarettes, beer, and headache remedies. We were told that if we didn't own the right kind of car the girls would never love us, and that the cool guys all used Aqua Velva aftershave.
Since we were children we have been told what to believe, and that true happiness could be ours if we just bought the latest product or clothing style. Television and the ever present advertising fueled America's consumer society and helped to create a valueless materialistic society.
Now my genration is getting old and now we are being told that the path to happiness lies in the latest product from the pharmacy. My generation was doomed when it started watching "Howdy Doody" and "Captain Kangaroo", because we were used as tools to help corporate America and Wall Street make lots of money. Now the next generations are being used by Facebook and Twitter to sell the latest gadget and encouraged to use on-line chats as a substitute for having a real life.
The 1960's saw my generation drafted and sent to fight a war for corporate profits, where 50,000 died and millions were scarred for life. We were bomabarded with ads for cigarettes, beer, and headache remedies. We were told that if we didn't own the right kind of car the girls would never love us, and that the cool guys all used Aqua Velva aftershave.
Since we were children we have been told what to believe, and that true happiness could be ours if we just bought the latest product or clothing style. Television and the ever present advertising fueled America's consumer society and helped to create a valueless materialistic society.
Now my genration is getting old and now we are being told that the path to happiness lies in the latest product from the pharmacy. My generation was doomed when it started watching "Howdy Doody" and "Captain Kangaroo", because we were used as tools to help corporate America and Wall Street make lots of money. Now the next generations are being used by Facebook and Twitter to sell the latest gadget and encouraged to use on-line chats as a substitute for having a real life.
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| | Matt Wilemon 3 weeks ago in reply to Gary |
· It is not about religion, it is about corporatism. I like and agree with your post however. True there are many problems with American society as it continues to deteriorate but this is just another example of ruthless corporations willing to do anything to make a profit. No one cares about the long term effects as long as the short term profits are there. The fact that the American population is so heavily drugged probably has a lot to do with why we have such a weak and passive population that is too willing to accept increasingly worse and worse conditions and a smaller piece of the pie. You have to be on drugs to believe anything our "leaders" tells us.
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· ---> Rodd64 19 hours ago in reply to Gary "Not unremarkably, the history books of the United States do not reveal Puritan populations centers as wildly criminal, filled with angry, confused adults, primed and ready to kill, as they would if your assertions were true."
Oh? You don't know your history very well.
"The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil's magic—and 20 were executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and it continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later." ~ From The Smithsonian.
Nor do you have a grasp on the thread of Christian history, its history in the US, its hypocrisy, consistent violence and hate mongering while preaching peace and love. It in and of itself is a bi-polar religion producing lots of bi-polar people.
Oh? You don't know your history very well.
"The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil's magic—and 20 were executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and it continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later." ~ From The Smithsonian.
Nor do you have a grasp on the thread of Christian history, its history in the US, its hypocrisy, consistent violence and hate mongering while preaching peace and love. It in and of itself is a bi-polar religion producing lots of bi-polar people.
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· ---> Svetlana Vikkersen "Whatever, your classic discurse/rethoric is well known"
"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack." ~ Winston Churchill
The point? "Your archaic Judeo/Christian/Islamic dogma based on falsehoods is destroying the planet and everything on it." Just because you are blind or brainwashed does not make me wrong. It makes you blind or brainwashed.
"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack." ~ Winston Churchill
The point? "Your archaic Judeo/Christian/Islamic dogma based on falsehoods is destroying the planet and everything on it." Just because you are blind or brainwashed does not make me wrong. It makes you blind or brainwashed.
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· --> Ana Luiza
The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry
The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry
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