Children are Vulnerable Targets on the Algorithm Superhighway

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Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty;
Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

– Anti-slavery activist Wendell Phillips

It is close to midnight and a group of eight high-level CFOs from the major pharmaceutical companies sit anxiously around a conference table. They all have binders with TransCelerate BioPharma written boldly in black across the cover. These powerful individuals (CFOs from Bristol Meyers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, Sanofi, Abbott, and Astra Zeneca) are members of TransCelerate’s marketing division.

TransCelerate is a consortium born in 2012, whose mission is to accelerate the development of new drugs and bring them quickly to market. There are two reasons for the high level of anxiety that the CFOs in the above meeting are feeling; first, the research and development of new drugs has been slower than predicted and profits not as massive as hoped for. They blame patent expiration and generic competition.

The second reason is alarming; NIMH may soon start cutting research funding and the pharmaceutical companies have depended upon their liaison with NIMH for funds and for political leverage. The pharmaceutical companies were aware of the possible cuts long before the NIMH formally announced its plans. They feel the pressure to expand their membership and forge ahead with new algorithms and new populations to aim at.

The new populations that are potential recipients of new drugs and algorithms are young children and, indirectly, the unborn infants of pregnant women. This would stand to reason as these two groups have been semi-protected until recently and are an untapped source for research and development of new drugs. Since the 1960s scare due to Thalidomide, when infants of mothers who had taken that tranquilizer were being born without arms and legs, pregnant women have themselves been leery of medications.

However, with the current trend toward diagnosing very young children with ADHD, autism-spectrum disorder and numerous sensory disruption conditions, women are re-visiting the concept of treatment at a very young age. Along with this, the promise of new drugs for anxiety and depression may invite more people, including pregnant women, to try the newer medications. They may be influenced by reports that severe depressive and anxious states have physical effects upon the body, and they may  fear that the stress of depression and anxiety may harm the fetus.

The elaborate marketing campaign that TransCelerate has embarked upon is overwhelming in its strategies for streamlining the research and development process for new drugs. An article in the journal CW Weekly points out that the Physician Payments Sunshine Act is a new law whose purpose is to improve financial transparency between doctors, teaching hospitals and the drug industry. The drug companies are hastily trying to fulfill the requirements to document payments and transfers of money from the drug companies to doctors and hospitals.

The Sunshine Act, along with potential funding cuts, is propelling the headlong dash along the superhighway. Perhaps more significantly in terms of vulnerable subjects for research, in this same journal article on pg 4 there is mention of TransCelerate’s focus on children, adolescents and minority populations. The journal quotes Dalvir Gill CEO of TransCelerate:

“’With this initiative we hope to work together with industry, academia, investigative sites and regulators to speed up the development of new drugs for children and adolescents, and we hope to improve the participation of minority patients in our clinical trials,’ said Gill.”

There is more to this story than the birth of TransCelerate and the rush for new drugs to fill the gaps in the available consumer population.

A disturbing case from Texas, for instance, involved a 12-year-old child, Johnson & Johnson’s drug Risperdal, Texas state officials, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, the Texas state hospital, and the University of Texas. The core issue was money and promotion of the expensive drug, Risperdal, for children. The case is about payouts and influence and corruption, but more than that it is about the damaged done to a 12-year-old girl and the possibility of more cases like this in the future.

The girl was labeled with “oppositional defiant disorder” and placed in special education even though her grades were B’s and C’s. Her parents, who have three other children and run a small business, were not alarmed – they had no idea where this label would lead. At this time the University of Texas was doing a study funded by a pharmaceutical company to develop an “algorithm” for treating “mental illnesses” — specifically schizophrenia — with their psychiatric medications.

Court records later revealed that the study and its ties to the University, the State hospital and government-funded clinics in Texas led to psychological screening at the child’s school, in which she was identified as “suicidal” and referred to one of the clinics. Six weeks later a child protection worker came to the home to take the child to the state hospital. Her father absolutely refused, at which point the worker took emergency custody of the child and involuntarily hospitalized her.

The next months were a cycle of psychiatric medications and diagnoses ranging from depressive disorder, mood disorder, and psychosis. Her medications included Haldol, Geodon, Abilify, Cogentin, Depakote and Risperdal. The child recalls being injected, threatened, restrained, and having her head held down so that she would take the medication. She spent a great deal of her time crying in her bed.

Eventually — and luckily — a complaint against the Texas Mental Health system involved an investigator who began to look into the case (and who was suspended several times during that process). He uncovered documents showing that the drug company was spending millions of dollars to influence State officials, and in 2004 he laid out his charges for the New York Times.

Almost six months later the case went to court and the child’s parents saw her for the first time. It took another four months before a judge ordered her released from state hospital. The family sought and found a psychologist who would wean the child off her basket-full of medication, and it is reported that she was able, in time, to go back to school. Her parents noted that she is still not the child that she had been; the gleam in her eyes is still absent.

Unlike many heavily medicated children, this child survived. In January of 2005, six months after she was reunited with her family, Ron Paul introduced The Parental Consent Act into the House of Representatives, a bill which would have forbidden federal funds from being used for any mental health screening of students without parental consent. The bill died.

Seven years later, in January of 2012, Johnson & Johnson settled a lawsuit for $158 million for “overpayment” of medicare claims as a result of false and misleading marketing of Risperdal to children as part of the Texas Medication Algorithm Project. This settlement came after Johnson & Johnson had agreed to pay over $1 billion to the U.S. and a number of states to end civil investigation into Risperdal marketing practices

Along the superhighway we can expect to find accidents and probably some of them will be fatalities. There are, and will be, problems with algorithms (formulas) and as these are directly linked to diagnoses and selection of medication for the diagnoses this needs to be a topic for scrutiny. There are, and will be, problems with the age ranges of children involved in the research. As one study that will be researched for the next article is going to recruit infants of 18 months of age, this is also an area that needs attention. There are and will be problems with drug testing and whether the tests themselves are valid and reliable.

And, of course, there is the concern that the drug companies have historically found strategies to meet their marketing agendas even when there are regulations in place. We cannot leave them to their own devices. We cannot risk the harm that might come to our children and other vulnerable individuals. We owe them our eternal vigilance.

* * * * *

Part 2 in this series will follow up on the issue of testing infants
and the current initiatives that TransCelerate has in store for us.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

***

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34 COMMENTS

  1. Was the story of the executives’ discussion a true story or an image of what probably happens in these meetings?

    Anyway, I’m sure some discussions similar to this happen. It’s pretty scary; this story made me feel like I was reading about a bunch of predatory sociopaths. I have trouble even believing that 2 year olds are being medicated for fictitious diagnoses like ADHD, probably because I’ve never seen it happen. What a tragic waste of youth, innocence, time and money.

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  2. Thank you Margaret for the straight talk. I wish more elders and retired professionals would speak this frankly on the topic of what goes on in the board rooms of major corporations who are targeting our society’s most vulnerable. It’s amazing, how banal evil can be, as banal as CFO’s sitting around discussing marketing strategies.

    Unfortunately, my child, a young adult, is stuck in the system after six years of cycling in and out of institutions due to attempting to come off her meds cold turkey on multiple occasions. During her frequent hospitalizations, my daughter was inconsistently cooperative with providers in the system who were smart, diligent, and compassionate enough to explore the subject of adverse childhood experiences that may have contributed to her original break-down. Those workers, even if they were the exception, not the norm, gave her helpful little insights which she could process when she was receptive, which is saying a lot when you are a ‘sick’ patient and your trust in therapeutic relationships has been shattered because of psychiatric coercion and hypocrisy.

    Which leads me to reflect…I’m convinced that the only reason that trauma informed approaches are not used CONSISTENTLY over pharmacology as the treatment of choice for early psychosis is the sometimes irrational fear that family members harbor that they will be blamed for their child’s distress. I believe that the underlying purpose for NAMI is not to advocate for the ‘mentally ill’ as much as it is to create a networking site so parents can assuage one anothers guilt. Forgive me, if you are like NAMI but I believe that it is an organization for family members, not consumers.

    Even for parents who do not identify with having abused their child(ren), it’s time for parents to do some priority shifting and alleviate some of the huge stresses that our children are experiencing in general. Our society has obviously gone off the rails. In an era when we build nuclear bombs to promote security, when free market capitalism is promoted as a prerequisite to freedom even while human beings are trafficked under our noses, when the price of year round, exotic fruit is artificially made affordable by feudal systems in Central America and by squeezing every last drop of shale oil for shipping. Kids are coming of age sexually in the age of internet porn and we parents who are working multiple jobs to achieve the ‘American dream’ aren’t slowing down long enough to tell our children about love and intimacy, let alone model what it is.

    Any shame or embarrassment that family members may experience by having an honest dialogue with a child(ren) who has received a psychiatric label dwarfs in comparison to the pain and suffering that child is likely to experience after being scapegoated as the ‘sick’ member of the family, stigmatized by society, institutionalized, and forcibly treated with drugs that make them feel suicidal or hopeless.

    As you know, young people who come off their meds cold turkey without supports in place often end up back in the hospital being put on even more drugs, delaying their ultimate recovery and testing the emotional resiliency of their entire family. At times, the discontinuation of meds causes our children to experience akathesia and even become violent, making their legal situation ever more precarious.

    For example, my daughter punched a staff member recently. Even though her violence was clearly the by-product of iatrogenic harm (during a med/dosage switch) this kind of behavior as well as other behaviors such as resisting restraints, and attempting to elope from several institutions, is used as proof of how severely ill she is. Indeed, the fact that she has been hospitalized seven times in the last two years (including one year long stint in the state hospital) is used as proof of her illness, like a kind of circular logic, giving ever greater weight to her back to back ‘civil commitments’, never matter that the criteria for admission to these hospitals, whether private or public, is applied in a wildly inconsistent and discriminatory manner which has more to do with finances and billing, than it does medical or behavioral appropriateness.

    Not only were her previous hospitalizations completely inappropriate at times, they serve to highlight the shocking lack of alternatives available for individuals who would be better served with non-coercive treatment modalities and social supports, such as community based-mobile crisis units that make home visits, peer delivered services, respite houses, and clubs, supported employment and vocational training, open family dialogue, compassion based therapy, theraputic assessment, hearing voices, etc.

    Although I know that this article focuses on children, there is a sizable population of young adults like my daughter (whose brains are not completely developed yet) who are being forcibly treated with neuroleptics just because our communities do not offer alternative interventions or because the iatrogenic harm that resulted from our children’s ‘treatment’ caused them to act in bizarre, even violent ways, in complete contrast to their personal history before they ever experienced psychiatric assault and abuse.

    I merely share this in the hopes that we do not forget about those who have spent time in jail or had one or more violent episodes due to iatrogenic harm. When our children have these episodes documented in their medical records, it dogs them for life. Ditto for children in the juvenile detention facilities. There is a huge trend of drugging ‘deviants’ or treating criminal behavior of children as if there is an underlying ‘disease’ behind it.

    Many young adults, including those without a criminal history are seeking a drug free lifestyle and envision a return to personal balance and health without harmful neuroleptics. Meanwhile, there is a movement underfoot to allow the treatment of children without parental consent. This runs contrary to the goal of families healing together without the use of harmful drugs. In situations where abuse and neglect of children is not evident, we must treat the parents alongside the children and provide supports for children to remain in households where they are loved so long as they feel comfortable at home and as long as parents can receive assistance on how to create a safe, non judgmental environment that is conducive for the healing of children.

    On the bright side, despite my daughter having been forcibly ‘treated’ for nearly six years, even during the times when she was rash or didn’t exercise good judgement, she still manages to display an amazing amount resiliency, hope, and forward momentum, aided by accrued insight. I would counsel other parents to not give up faith in their children which is very tempting when a young adult is given the most stigmatizing label of all: ‘treatment resistant’.

    Treatment resistant is usually doctor’s code for ‘it’s the patient’s fault’ or this person is really f*cked when the reality may be very different such as this person does not succumb to the idea that he/she has a disease. People who are resistant are very often, the people who have gone to great lengths preserve an internal world of their own making to keep their personal truths of living a very normal life alive. Hooray for people who won’t confess that they are mentally ill, like the witches in the Scarlet Letter!

    Even if they appear to be completely ‘lost’ in an internal world, never, ever give up on that person’s ability to regain their interest in consensual reality. Never, ever say that children and young adults lack any insight as if people could be unaware of their own pain or isolation!

    Even individuals who often time appear to be incoherent may be navigating realities we can’t begin to imagine and their pathway to recovery as well as the timing, may be something that only they are privy to! The next time you are presented with someone in this state, no matter how difficult it is, please suspend your judgement and your opinions and simply allow yourself to enjoy their presence. You may not be the hero of that person’ recovery narrative, but for Pete’s sake, don’t get in their way.

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    • Yes and I agree with every point that you make. I spent many years trying to help families and their loved ones to get relief from the oppressive mental health system, I must say that I became emotionally close to each family and their loved ones. I did have some positive results and for that I am happy…they still contact me. I have never met more responsible and compassionate people than the Moms I worked with. Their adult children who were suffering had great personalities when they were not over medicated or being told that they had a lifelong disease that could never be cured. I miss them now that I am not very actively involved.
      I always look forward to your comments. Stay active and involved, you give us all hope

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      • Margie:

        Those moms and their children are lucky to have had someone like you on their team. And frankly, although your education as an MSW trumps my own level of education, it never ceases to surprise me how little one’s level of education has to do with one’s effectiveness on a personal level.

        For a clinician to be helpful and supportive it’s amazing how much it just boils down to whether the clinician has empathy and can exercise common sense which is probably what you did and why your clients still keep in touch.
        In the field of mental health, where recovery would be the norm if we chucked the ‘disease’ model out the door and focused on supporting people as human beings, we have done our children a grave disservice by outsourcing our their mental and emotional needs to medical science. It’s time to empower care givers and educate the entire community on how to welcome back our children, don’t you think?

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        • Madmom

          As you so well point out, you don’t have to have letters behind your name or a big degree from some fancy university medical center to actually be helpful and supportive for people in pain and distress, whether the pain and distress is physical or emotional. Deep and active listening for someone, and actually valuing their story as a unique and priceless treasure can be done by anyone who possesses a shred of empathy and respect for others.

          Yes, it’s time to welcome our children back and then let them be children.

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  3. Some thoughts that come to mind . The necessity of an Anti-Pharmaceutical Cartel Movement at this point seems like a no brainer. Their violations of acceptable human behavior could fill volumes as well as the countless casualties . They are rolling over the people with abandon and no brakes . There are no authorities to appeal to for help, only the people , who all have stories to tell to each other. And together we must stop them before they drug us and/or our loved ones to oblivion.
    I fear they are purposefully engineering these poisons with added addictive property’s to try and prevent people from cold turkeying off of them plus making it extra difficult to wean off ( look what the tobacco companies did) while at the same time creating a legal environment of forced compliance to their will. Sounds to me like some kind of poison chemical coercive time release variation of the 1ooo year reich that hitler wanted to create except this is all slavery and death under the guise of “health care”for our “benefit”. The fact that they boldly target even babies is a sign they believe they can’t be stopped. They must be shown somehow that they are wrong. Maybe under the banner of health freedom . It will probably eventually take mass numbers of people demonstrating strategically to stop them.

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    • I couldn’t agree more! Medical science is rapidly losing credibility on many fronts. Recently, the the saturated fat myth of obesity has been debunked. Oops! We had it wrong about cholesterol all these years, after five trillion dollars of nutritional marketing. Oops! We got it wrong! We didn’t know about the ramifications of over- using antibiotics. Oops! We didn’t predict that developing a disease called menopause and developing a ‘cure’ called estrogen therapy (manufactured from pregnant horse urine) would lead to thousands of women experiencing strokes. Even though all of these mistakes don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the damage that has been meted out in relation to the fraudulent premise of the chemical brain imbalance of mental illness, we should make alliances with people who have been harmed by lousy medical guidelines in general, not just the field of mental health. We need to form a giant consumers union and get someone like Ralph Nadar to understand the magnitude of iatrogenic harm that has occurred because of the undue influence of big Pharma in the field of medicine and start developing a giant patients Bill of Rights that covers every diagnosis under the sun and train people, especially disadvantaged people to value their right to question any diagnosis and treatment.

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    • Yes, THEY have terrible ways of getting around rules and regulations; now that they are forming monopolies and spreading their research widely over this country Europe and Asia it will be more difficult to trace them. In my second article I document some of the medical centers and universities they are using for research on the kids, also I have the studies documented. Tell me what you think about forwarding these articles to media groups. I can post e-mail links if that would help? Let me know what you think
      Thanks
      Margaret

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  4. The “Algorithm Superhighway” has freeways in each of the 50 states; wrecks on every stretch along the way; carnage on every frontage road, underpass, and bridge.

    Algorithm?
    This is a term that has no place in the social “sciences.”
    The study of human behavior is based on neither science nor mathematical algorithms.
    This is true for psychologists and social workers as well, who may have learned the skills of listening, the art of developing a therapeutic relationship…

    This just in: It’s not science!

    Duane

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    • When I do therapy,I become attached to the person and this is considered bad practice. However, the warm attachment always fosters trust and a growth in the person’s self esteem. I never followed protocol…..I still get e mails from people that I worked with and their families.
      I listen and I do what the person wants me to do for them and not what the “system” wants.
      It never came back to haunt or hurt me and I tell that to the people that I supervise. Hopefully they listen too

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  5. This is a very sad piece and which, unfortunately reflects the alarming trend of medicalization of our society when children start to be treated for ‘behavioural’ problems from a very young age. As a former user of psychiatric services I was put once on Risperdal and I almost died as a result (I became suicidal). This drug should be banned all together, both for adults and especially kids. There are some other drugs on the market which actually do a good job (such as Seroquel), but more research is needed into side-effects and what these drugs do to one’s personality and life.

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    • As a grown healthy adult, I became “psychotic” within two weeks of being put on a child’s dose, .5mg, of Rispedal. This was recorded in my medical records as a “Foul up.”

      So I agree, Risperdal is a horrendous drug, and the child’s dose is not safe for adults, so no doubt, is not safe for children either. And this should technically have been recorded in the medical literature in 2002, if psychiatrists had any ethics.

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      • I am glad that you are healthy now, you should’t have had to suffer from that dangerous drug; young kids are at such high risk that its all that I can do to put the info out there and I am glad that you write about it. Your comment gives me strength

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  6. My heart goes out to that little girl who was identified by a formula, taken from her family, and processed in what can only be called a machine designed to make money for pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the lives and wellbeing of society’s most vulnerable members. I find it abominable and all too common. It’s why I will not have children in this country, because were I that little girl’s father I would’ve shot that CPS worker dead the instant she touched my daughter and pleaded I was acting in the defense of my loved ones. If I were punished for it, so be it; my principles and the safety of my loved ones will never be compromised because someone is “just doing their job.”

    A child’s development s an incredibly complex and delicate process. To interfere with that using drugs that numb the mind and stunt the development of thoughts is just a convoluted form of barbarism. It still amounts to harm. And psychiatrists, doctors who have taken the frigging Hippocratic Oath, should know that. And they should feel shame burning what oily rags they call souls for doing harm and betraying the trust of the innocent in exchange for something so common as money.

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  7. My question is why are children being drugged in the first place? Why have we allowed the behaviors of childhood and adolescence to be pathologized and turned into “mental illness”? Why are we allowing the developing brains of babies to be damaged with these toxic drugs? We are allowing the destruction of generations of people and nothing is done about it. Most of the people I deal with in the state “hospital” where I work do not have relationships, do not get married, do not have children, and all of this is encouraged by the system. What is going to happen to the human species if we allow our children, our future on this planet, to be destroyed by psychiatry and the drug companies? What is going to happen to humanity if we allow this to keep chugging along as it is? What in the hell are babies not even two years old being given these toxic drugs for? Beiderman and all of his ilk need to pay for what they’ve created, and they created it at the expense of our children and humanity!!!!!!!

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    • In Time magazine May 29 2015 a strong article “Where’s the Moral Outrage for ADHD Mass Medication? by Diane McWhorter. This is yet another cry for a public outpouring of disgust and dismay at the drug consortium TransCelerate and now the Massachutts Consortium ability to collude and do massive drug testing on kids as young as 18 months. They are getting around new regulations and the clinical trials are progressing at such a fast rate that I can’t even keep track of them. The drug companies have testing sites now world-wide and they are advertising for young recruits for the testing. The drugs that are being tested; Risperdol, Ritalin, Latuda are so strong with so many side effects that I cannot even list them. All of this is in part 2 of my article. I am thinking of how to get a protest to some of the media outlets. If you have any ideas…let us know

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  8. Just to comment about the heartbreaking story of the 12-year-old girl:

    “The next months were a cycle of psychiatric medications and diagnoses ranging from depressive disorder, mood disorder, and psychosis. Her medications included Haldol, Geodon, Abilify, Cogentin, Depakote and Risperdal.”

    I believe “Anatomy of an Epidemic” referred to this type of torture as: going for a ride on the medication-merry-go-round, or something similar. Seems it’s standard practice by psychiatrists that typically ends in disaster. Glad this girl survived.

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  9. I am so glad that you used the word “survived”. Is this all that we can hope for in terms of our youngsters and ourselves after going through the destructive process of abusive treatment? We deserve better , however putting the “self” back together in terms of trust, empathy, hope and love is difficult without a great deal of support. I really believe that MIA with its writers and responders does fulfill a great deal of that empty place.
    Thanks for your comment

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  10. At the very least can’t this story of what happened to this 12 year old girl and her family maybe with even other examples be drawn up as part of a petition that seeks signatures of people that will pledge to physically show up at least in their own state or within so many hundreds of miles from where they live to surround any facility government ,medical, psychiatric ,or University , or pharma facility or home of pharma executives or whoever and wherever and whatever , when a child has been kidnapped by “any authorities”on fabricated evidense and taken by force from her parents . To demonstrate peacefully until release is granted and justice served. Those that choose will doubtless perform acts of civil disobedience in the great tradition of Gandhi and King . With a goal to get a million signatures in each state . Could this be a viable strategy to protect children and families ? With the hope this could expand to protect any human being unjustifiably detained wherever they are held against their will by whoever.

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  11. This sounds good. We can easily get case information(I can do that) and research a bit for a petition template (I can do that also) so that it looks and reads professionally. If some of us can strategise how to get signatures ( I am in L.A. Calif.) we could absolutely do this or send the petition to media folks who are always ready for a story (at least here they are on every corner). It would be good, when we have the petition written out to send it out to the media. What do you think? Also it would be great to start by protesting the drugging of kids and this might be an easier way to go as a first attempt-with signatures on this kind of a well-written petition it would call a lot of attention to the issues.

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  12. This could all work well if we could get some input and coordinate with Ted and other people that organized the recent anti-shock demonstrations . Ted just put up a blog and we know he is interested in saving the children . It’s probably just a matter of timing and details and seeing if this can move forward with more support and fine tuning. I wish more people would show interest in demonstrating or putting forward ideas . In addition to live demonstrations it is even possible a well written petition could go viral online and end up everywhere with lots of support. I live in a small town Reedsport, Oregon 90 miles from Eugene and 250 miles from Portland. David Oaks is another veteran activist who got local TV coverage for the anti- shock demos in Eugene May 16th . It was a great experience for me to attend and was even able to make 2 speeches as a shock survivor and carry a sign I made the night before. I certainly would like to take part in a demo protesting the drugging of children especially if David Oaks was involved . People respond to his organized efforts against psychiatric oppression. It would be interesting to see also how people respond to signing a well thought out petition that Ted and David and others could support that we could pass out and get people to sign . I’m still open if there are better ideas. We do need to act.

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    • Dear Fred
      I have emailed the author of the article in Time magazine who just wrote the article calling for a protest against child-medicating for ADHD. I simply asked for her thoughts on engaging people in a “moral outrage” protest. Your ideas about involving other activists are great-how do we get them involved? I believe that not only kids but we all are at risk given the drug companies current push for faster clinical trials of new drugs and their lack of concern about regulations and the moral implications of what they are doing. The consortiums of drug companies is new-only since 2012 as I have been able to trace back their formation. If this is allowed to go on without oversight and regulation then we are all vulnerable. Let me know your thoughts
      http://time.com/3900515/adhd-medication-moral-outrage/?xid=emailshare
      The website for the article in Time is above

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  13. Fred, I think it is good that you talk about demonstrations, especially civil disobedience. And the psychiatric abuse of children, as I have said many times lately, is a very good place to focus our energy. I know you are in Oregon (I saw your speech on television, by the way) and it appears that in both Eugene and Portland, there was a lot of coverage of the shock demos by the local progressive media. That tells me, which I thought already anyway, that Oregon is a very promising place to concentrate the small forces that we have,

    It is hard to get people to do civil disobedience. Nobody looks forward to going to jail, including me. But it is a way to raise the consciousness of the public that doesn’t require large numbers on our part.

    Another sort of action that does not need large numbers is vigils, especially candlelit vigils at night. People who don’t relate to picket lines see a vigil like this as more of a moral statement, and I think our own people feel more safe joining an action like this.

    In any case, we need to start acting and stop talking so much.

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  14. Dear Ted and all others
    I am ready and able to do whatever you think would be attention-getting, and reform-activating. At this point, given that my research is showing increased testing of very young kids with powerful drugs and no one is even trying to focus the moral spotlight on them, I appeal to you because you have spoken out and put your heart into getting some action on vile practices in mental health…just lets agree on a plan for some kind of action ( a petition? a vigil? e-mailing the media?) Thank you so much you give me hope for helping the kids and by the way we, as mature and professional adults are in their grasp as well, the drug companies with their consortiums are re- defining the very meaning of freedom of choice.

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  15. To Ted ,Margret and others , I agree and am ready to do a civil disobedience action and/ or candle light vigil and/ or protest demonstration against child drugging or other idea that is figured out. I just emailed David Oaks asking him to read this blog asking also for his input [email protected] Whatever we do I hope we can get media attention . What about for example going into a major icon pharmacy like Walgreens getting inside unveiling signs protesting child drugging when asked to leave just sit down with signs chanting “stop psychiatric drugging of children” I believe there is a shock box manufacturer in or near Eugene that could be protested ( I just heard it mentioned once. Maybe there is a drug manufacturing plant somewhere. Maybe a demonstration or vigil followed by a civil disobedience action. Ted if your doing a civil disobedience action it would be an honor for me to do it with you and others if they are willing . I feel the time for action is getting near .

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  16. Just realized a simultaneous banner drop ” PHARMA PSYCH DRUG PROFITEERING = HUMAN SACRIFICE OF OUR CHILDREN’S BRAINS ” “ABOLISH DIABOLICAL TODDLER BRAIN DRUGGING EXPERIMENTS” and whatever people come up with in Walgreens pharmacy’s in as many states in the US as possible at the same time then sit down with appropriate chanting . I guess when police come at that point do what they say . Hopefully at least 2 or 3 people in each action . How about at least 2 or 3 of us do it somewhere. I’m 90 miles from Eugene OR. Someones got to try and get media coverage for this . This is all new to me but I know no ones got a right to harm children and we must try and stop it . At least then we can look at our own faces in the medicine cabinet mirror.

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