Every time the FDA is even thinking about taking measures to protect the public from the increased risk of suicide associated with SSRIs, Big Pharma sends out the hired guns to publish some half-baked study to dispute the suicide risk.
An FDA advisory committee is holding a public meeting on December 13, 2006 to once again review the data that experts say show SSRIs to be associated with suicide in adults and is expected to vote on whether to add a Black Box label to SSRIs, including Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, and Celexa, about on the risk.
So true to form, last month Big Pharma's hired guns attempted to pass off a bogus study as science that claims suicide risks do not increase in children taking SSRIs. The so-called "research," was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
In the study, the researchers contend that if no prescriptions for SSRIs were written, there would be 253 more suicides each year among children and adolescents in the US.
To reach their conclusions, the researchers say they looked at county by county suicide data across the US for children aged 5 to 14, for the 2-year period of 1996 through 1998, and found that the counties with the highest prescription rates for SSRIs had the lowest suicide rates in this age groups.
According to Dr Stefan Kruszewski, MD, a Psychiatrist and Addictionologist, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, studies such as this are fiction. "These retrospective data analysis," he says, "generally cherry-pick the suicide statistics that the authors wish to use to attempt to transform an association of facts to something that it is not."
"For several decades," he notes, "reports have appeared periodically in the psychiatric and mental health literature that suggest or infer a casual relationship between the enormous rise in prescriptions written for antidepressants and apparent changes in the numbers of completed suicides."
"However," he reports, "there is no evidence that there is a causal relationship."
Who are these guys?
One of the study's co-authors, John Mann, is a member of the, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology Task Force on SSRIs and Suicidal Behavior in Youth.
ACNP has served as a major shill for Big Pharma for years. This same gang issued a report complete with a press conference, ten days in in advance of the scheduled February 2, 2004, FDA advisory committee hearings on SSRI use with children, that said after reviewing the evidence it was the task force's view that SSRIs were safe and effective and well-tolerated by children.
At the time the ACNP report was called a thinly veiled attempt by the drug companies to preempt the FDA by making a public announcement in favor of SSRI use with children.
Mr Mann himself has served as a paid speaker, consultant, and expert witness for SSRI makers and has received tens of millions of dollars in grants from the same companies to fund his research over the years - resulting in studies that always just happen to favor the drug makers' position.
While testifying in a jury trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on May 21, 2006, Mr Mann served as an expert witness for Paxil maker, GlaxoSmithKline, and the now famous Houston attorney, Andy Vickery, asked Dr Mann about how much money he had received from drug companies to conduct his research.
According to the trial transcript, Mr Vickery said, "we've looked at it just straight from your CV from 1990 or '91 to the present, and it looks like the total amount of grants was $31,520,124."
I'm a retired psychologist who spent 30+ years in the practice of psychology here in the good ol' USofA; 10 years in community mental health centers and then Thank GOD ( or whoever is up there ); I escaped those insane-asylums- pretending- to-be-treatment- centers-while- reaping-hundreds -of-BILLIONS- of-tax-dollars- over-the- past-40-years and entered private practice in 1978.
Though it only took me about 10 minutes after I left graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas back in 1968; degrees in hand , to discover that 90% of mental health science is bogus; it was a few years later that I concluded that about 90% of its activity is destructive, dangerous and unconscionable and carried out by either sickos or sociopaths or idiots or, more likely, all the above.
The entire mental health effort began to be usurped by big pharma back in the 1950s when Miltown began to be universally prescribed as " moma's little helper " and quickly our mothers and grandmothers became addicted. Today, the progression from miltown to valium to tofranil to elevil to triavil to prozac to zoloft to paxil to..... has addicted a huge percentage of our population.. ..how else to explain the elections of idiots and crazies like Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, ...and culminated by
the colossally inexplicable election of George Dumbya twice!?
The Prozac-Zoloft- Paxil-Devil-made-me-do-it scenario is the only viable answer to that enigma.
I was also present at the earliest dawning of the the most hideous mental health scam yet perpetrated:The biological explanation for all the woes of parenting challenges. An added bonus was also available as the biological explanation led to the gold mine and easy " sales pitch " that the problems of our kids lies not in the stars or poor parenting skills but in the synapses of the children. In fact the movement was birthed at the Child Study Center in Little Rock, Arkansas in the mid-1960s. Back then the condition of ADD to morph into ADHD was labeled MBD: Minimal Brain Dysfunction --- which, I suspect was a far too ominous label to market and thus quickly became the more palatable SLD industry-Specific Learning Disability. The obvious beauty of all this was it took the burden and ,better still, the guilt off the parents so they'd become much more willing to enter and stay with treatment of "their little darlings "; at least until the mental health insurance benefits were exhausted!
And....of course, The drug industry,Big Pharma, was quickly in hot pursuit of the riches accruing from pills to solve the synaptic misfires. Like bandits and desperados in search of a train, they rushedly pursued the scam likkety split!
Since all difficult children ( meaning male behavior mostly ) was now organic; it was only logical that medicine was the treatment of choice. Enter Tegretol! Tegretol is an anti-convulsant used to help control seizures and since the original diagnostic nonsense was called Minimal Brain Dysfunction; a drug related to treatment of actual brain dysfunction was an initial solution dreamed up by the idiots at Big Pharma,albeit administered at a lower level...but the idea suffered a minor glitch ...it didn't work.
NOT TO BE DISCOURAGED :
An unintended consequence of stimulants in children was noted along about this time. Pre-pubescent children exhibited a paradoxical reaction to stimulants in that it seemed to sedate them rather than excite them. Voilla!
" Let's give the antsy-pantsy kids some SPEED.....i. e. RITALIN (an amphetamine derivative ).The added benefit is the stuff is addictive and we can hook the little buggers in primary school and then have lifetime customers. My God it can't get any better than this " the Big Pharma criminals must have gleefully exclaimed!
Now more than thirty years later we are experiencing an epidemic of Crystal Methamphetamine addiction running amuck in the USofA. Duh....suppose there's a connection between decades of state/education sponsored Ritalin abuse and our societal ills of the speed-freak generation?Before parents of the rare child who actually might truly benefit from stimulants begin screaming like gut shot panthers, please note I did occassionally bump into a child with demonstable ADHD......I repeat.....I did OCCASSIONALLY BUMP INTO AN AUTHENTIC CASE and in that rare case all bets were off.
As if the mental health/prescription drug pushers could not have become vile, rest easy ye of little faith. The bastards are now practicing a method called, 'Drug Cocktailing'. The current crop of criminals calling themselves psychiatrists now prescibe multiple psychoactive drugs to individual children, thus annihilating said child's childhood. This latest PROFOUNDLY TOXIC MENTAL HEALTH MOVEMENT and the Bushevik's Teen Screen Movement are but modern abominations which could only be dreamed up by the ilk of a Gonzales, an Ashcroft, a Rumsfeld.... yeah the same Rumsfeld who has become filthy rich peddling his artificial sweeteners uh,.. poisons... such as aspartame( Nutrasweet) to generations of victims.
If one wishes to look for causes of our childrens ills that are organic, how about examining the primary poisons our children ingest....sucrose, aspartame, transfats,Pschoactive Prescription Drugs!
by
Roy Murtishaw (14 articles, 0 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 77 comments)
on Thursday, December 7, 2006 at 1:43:58 PM
1 comments
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