“Psychiatric Drugs Are Doing Us More Harm Than Good” – Peter Gøtzsche

10
285

Peter Gøtzsche comments in The Guardian, on the occasion of the launch of the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry, that “My studies of the research literature in this whole area lead me to a very uncomfortable conclusion: the way we currently use psychiatric drugs is causing more harm than good.”

Psychiatric drugs are doing us more harm than good (The Guardian)

Previous articleNeuroplasticity: My Newest Friend
Next articleI’m Going, Are You? How to Get Involved in the Annual Protest of the American Psychiatric Association
Kermit Cole
Kermit Cole, MFT, founding editor of Mad in America, works in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a couples and family therapist. Inspired by Open Dialogue, he works as part of a team and consults with couples and families that have members identified as patients. His work in residential treatment — largely with severely traumatized and/or "psychotic" clients — led to an appreciation of the power and beauty of systemic philosophy and practice, as the alternative to the prevailing focus on individual pathology. A former film-maker, he has undergraduate and master's degrees in psychology from Harvard University, as well as an MFT degree from the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate with the Taos Institute and the Free University of Brussels. You can reach him at [email protected].

10 COMMENTS

    • This is the kind of massive fraud and resulting harm to society that results when competition is replaced with a “too big to fail” corporatocracy. We need to break these pharmaceutical companies (and companies in many other oligopolisticly controlled industries) up.

      Report comment

      • I don’t think medicine should be so commercialized anyway. Pharmaceutical companies should not be charged with developing new drugs, they should be allowed to produce drugs and that’s it. And even this under frequent control. Drug development should be completely dissociated from the profit motif, otherwise you’d always run into the same problem.

        Report comment

  1. It’s the cold, hard truth. Even beyond the deaths, too many people are being made unhealthy and are risking or undergoing organ failure and psychoses, among other horrible things, as a result of these drugs. They’re a one-way ticket to hell.

    Report comment

  2. Certainly doing harm – white collar mental health fraud is costing the UK Health System billions, and ruining lives.

    The real evidence shows that the most Labelled people can make full recovery without any drugs, and that its the misuse of these drugs that causes the long term disability.

    People in crisis seeking help with problems, are generally speaking not mad in the sense that they can’t communicate – this is how the medical description dresses them up. The crisis time is the best time for talking – but this is also the time that the person can be exploited.

    Report comment

    • The only known answer for them is to drug you insane. As long as you’re “calm” (which in many cases means: unconscious, amnesiac, drooling in the corner of a room etc.) it’s called being stabilized. The problem is they can’t really define what they are trying to achieve. I remember asking my “doctors” what these drugs are supposed to do. The answer was invariably silence, sometimes maybe followed by “they will make you calmer”. They don’t have any idea what the f*** they’re doing.

      Report comment

  3. Let me clarify that further:

    Although Janssen-Cilag’s own literature on the toxic rubbish that my son has forcibly injected into him every fortnight against his wishes and the wishes of his family hypothesises at length over what their product MAY do, it actually admits, in the small, small, print:

    ‘THE MECHANISM OF ACTION IS UNKNOWN’

    Can you get your breath ? How in God’s name is that morally or legally acceptable ?

    Report comment

  4. What is kind of astounding is that psychiatrists are all too ready to claim subtle and as yet undetected brain anomalies causing all sorts of psychiatric disorders, but they deny that any such damage could occur in the case of ECT, despite the obvious fact of memory loss and a lot more subtle changes in cognition that are reported. Why would the person have memory loss if their brain was not damaged? There is also a report of a “reduction in connectivity” between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain – how would you get a “reduction in connectivity” without damaging brain tissue?

    It is readily acknowledged that seizures of sufficient strength and duration can and do cause brain damage. It’s also acknowledged that ECT causes a seizure. Ergo, ECT can cause brain damage. Don’t know how anyone can deny this connection, and yet they do so again and again.

    As the Nazi propagandist Goebbels said, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

    — Steve
    —- Steve

    Report comment

    • I can tell you how. The same way they can claim that it is impossible to get PTSD from psychiatric abuse with forced drugging, restraint and physical assault but by the same kind of abuse done by anyone else. The same way they claim that benzos cannot cause amnesia even though other doctors use it for exactly that purpose (to induce specific memory loss of invasive medical procedures). This is quite simple – it’s selective use of facts. Another way to call it is lying.
      A comparison to Goebbels is quite appropriate for a profession with good old Nazi roots.

      Report comment

LEAVE A REPLY