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Baughman learned that all four veterans had been diagnosed with PTSD and all were taking the same three-drug cocktail consisting of Seroquel, an atypical antipsychotic, Paxil, an antidepressant, and the anti-anxiety drug, Klonopin.
His investigation determined they did not commit suicide or go into a coma, as a result of an accidental mixed drug overdose, as suggested by the military. "None of the veterans who died in their sleep were drunk, drugged, or overdosed when they went to bed, they all appeared normal," Baughman says.
Within a year, he had learned of between 70 and 80 more similar cases. "These are undoubtedly sudden cardiac deaths," he reports, "due to the prescription of antipsychotics and antidepressants."
"Although antipsychotics and antidepressants have been proven to increase the risk of sudden cardiac death, they are routinely prescribed together, as if no such risk is known," Baughman warns.
He points to the January 2009 study, Ray et al, which reported that antipsychotics double the risk of sudden cardiac death, and that on March 17, 2009, Whang et al reported antidepressants, as well, increase the rate of sudden cardiac deaths.
Sudden cardiac death has been defined as the "unexpected natural death" from a cardiac cause. Some studies suggest that 85 to 90% of these deaths result from ventricular tachyarrhythmias and medications may contribute to the risk of these underlying arrhythmias. Ray et al found atypical antipsychotics increased the risk for arrhythmias.
As of May 24, 2010, by conducting Google searches on the internet, veteran's wife, Diane VandeBurgt, of Charleston, found 128 deaths of veterans using terms such as "dead in barracks," "in bed," "at work station." Diane's husband quit taking Seroquel, prescribed as sleep aid as part of his PTSD treatment, after experiencing many terrible side effects.
Andrew White joined the Marines because he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his older brothers. One brother served in the army and the other in the Navy.
Andrew returned from Iraq in September of 2005 and less than two weeks later his brother was killed in Afghanistan. "Andrew had not even emptied his bags when we all had to deal with this loss," his mother Shirley recalls. Shirley and her husband, Stan, have been on a non-stop mission to find answers for Andrew's death and the deaths of other veterans.
The soldiers, veterans, and their families deserve the truth about this epidemic of antipsychotic-antidepressant sudden cardiac deaths in the military, Baughman states.
"Most importantly," he says, "they cannot be allowed to continue to cover up these deaths and dole out psychiatric drug cocktails as they are doing to the exclusion of psychotherapy."
"The number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketing from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today is an iatrogenic, physician induced epidemic that will only mount in the future," Dr Baughman says. "The utter, complete fraud based on the fiction of psychiatric diseases has got to stop."
Invented Diseases
Unlike a medical diagnose that indicates a probable cause, treatment and prognosis, mental disorders are voted into existence by committees representing the American Psychiatric Association, a roughly 38,000 member professional group, that gets to decide what is normal, and what is not, for the more than 300 million other people in the US.
The APA's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders IV (DSM IV)," contains all the billable mental disorders and amounts to nothing much more than a bunch of checklists of symptoms. The original 1952 version contained just over 100 disorders. By the fourth edition the number had more than tripled to over 350. The DSM5 is due for publication in May 2013.
The DSM is immensely important to drug makers because the FDA will not approve a medication to treat a disorder unless the condition is listed in the manual. For the DSM IV, fifty-six percent of of the 170 panel members, and one-hundred percent of the experts involved in writing diagnostic criteria for "mood disorders" and "schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders," for which medication is standard treatment, had financial ties to the drug companies, according to a 2006 study titled, "Financial Ties Between DSM-IV Panel Members and Pharmaceutical Industry," in the "Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics" journal.
