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Psychiatric Watchdog Warns Against Psychiatric Industry's "Damage Control" on Antidepressant Risks

Public outrage has increased following recently disclosed studies that confirm Selective Reuptake Serotonin Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants cause children to become suicidal. But the furor escalated after last month's British Medical Journal (BMJ) revelation that these same antidepressants were known to cause violence in patients more than 10 years ago. These disclosures came too late for many victims of antidepressant-induced suicides and homicides, including the families and victims destroyed by teenage school shooters who were all under the influence of the psychiatric drugs.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) says the psychiatric industry is now attempting damage control over this controversy, by refuting claims made by the BMJ that the antidepressant studies in question went "missing" for 10 years - when they had been turned over to the proper authorities. However, the real issue, the group says, is that psychiatrists knew more than 14 years ago that antidepressants cause violence and suicide and ignored the dangers.

In 1991, CCHR presented the psychopharmacological panel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with adverse reaction reports linking more than 500 deaths to the first SSRI antidepressant. Despite testimony from medical experts, family members, victims and experts, the panel comprising nine psychiatrists and a psychologist ignored the many deaths and tragedies attributed to the drug and refuted the need for any public warning. Since then, thousands of deaths have been blamed on SSRI antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs.

With the proliferation of these into society, the 1990s heralded in some of the most senseless acts of violence ever committed by children and teens:

• Many of the teens responsible for school shootings were taking antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs, leaving 19 dead and 57 wounded. ·

• Hundreds more adolescents have committed heinous acts: A 17-year-old boy used an axe and sledgehammer to bludgeon his parents to death; a 15-year-old fired a shot gun through a bathroom door where his mother was hiding, killing her; another 15-year-old raping and killing a 7-year-old girl, and a 16-year-old girl pushed her mother down a flight of stairs, then beat her to death with a hammer-All were under the influence of prescribed psychotropic drugs at the time. ·

• Many would later describe their acts as "watching from a distance" or "being in a dream." ·

• Yet despite these incidents and the knowledge that these drugs could create killer and suicidal kids, between 1995 and 1999, the use of antidepressants for 7 to 12 year olds increased 151% and 580% for children under 6, with some as young as 5 committing suicide. ·

• Children 5 years old and younger are now the fastest-growing segment of the non-adult population using antidepressants today

Bruce Wiseman, President of CCHR U.S. says, "For more than a decade, psychiatrists have pounded the public with lies about the safety of these drugs, all the while manufacturing so called mental 'diseases' to expand their drug market and creating walking time bombs just waiting to go off. You can't turn on the TV without seeing how shyness or feeling awkward in social circumstances has been repackaged as an 'illness.' Psychiatrists create disorders then promote the drugs to 'treat' it. There's no science to it; it's a very lucrative $13 billion a year business."

For years CCHR has exposed how psychiatrists fraudulently promoted that a "chemical imbalance" was the source of "mental disorders" when there are no tests to prove this-no X-rays, blood tests, brain scans or any form of scientific evidence exists to prove a physical abnormality for any so-called mental disorder.

Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen, author of Prozac Backlash, recently exposed the chemical imbalance fraud on ABC's Primetime Live. The only brains that have been tested belong to dead rats, and that's after the rats' brains have been put through a blender. Glenmullen stated, "This is where the hypothesis of a serotonin imbalance comes from: extrapolating to human beings from test tube studies of blenderized rat brains. Obviously, this is faulty logic, pseudoscience again."

CCHR is calling for federal action to investigate the fraudulent diagnoses being promoted as "diseases" in order to sell the public on taking drugs, and the complete lack of science to psychiatry's "billing bible," The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This investigation should demand answers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding the approval of what are now known to be violence- and suicide-inducing drugs for conditions that have no scientific merit.

For more than 36 years CCHR has worked to safeguard the public from psychiatric abuse, enacting more than 150 reforms that protect patients worldwide. The Church of Scientology established CCHR in 1969 to investigate, expose, and eradicate psychiatric violations of human rights.


Published: May 02, 2001
Author: Marla Filidei

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