‘She Was Unrecognisable’ – Families Warn of Fatal Effects of Antipsychotic Drug Clozapine

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From The Guardian: “The health secretary is under pressure to respond to growing concerns about the use of a controversial antipsychotic drug linked to deaths of psychiatric patients. Following claims by family members that two people died after being prescribed clozapine, coroners have written to [UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] Matt Hancock asking how he intends to ensure the drug does not claim more lives.

Julia MacPherson, 54, died while under the care of Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust in May 2016 after being put on a trial of clozapine, even though she did not have psychosis and begged not to be put on the medication. MacPherson had addiction problems, borderline personality disorder and was distraught after her marriage ended, but her family was shocked at the drug’s side-effects.

‘She looked different, sounded different, had lost her sense of humour, cognitive function, coordination; she couldn’t eat properly, dress or wash. It was horrendous to see,’ said her sister, Sarah MacPherson. ‘She was an attractive, intelligent person but on clozapine she was unrecognisable.’

Initially the family was told she had died from a hereditary heart condition. But an inquest established that clozapine was a factor in her death. The family had raised concerns with various health officials but the dosage was increased, resulting in MacPherson becoming frail.

‘There is a thing called the clozapine shuffle,’ her sister said. ‘It literally knocks them out. It’s awful, like something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Some people respond very badly to it.’

The coroner’s report found that MacPherson died as a result of choking ‘because she was unable to chew or swallow her food’, her sister explained. […]

Clozapine is heavily restricted in other countries but concerns about its potentially fatal side-effects in the UK appear not to have been heeded. Five years ago the Observer reported that postmortems into the deaths of four men in a psychiatric unit at St Andrew’s hospital in Northampton had concluded that antipsychotic medications such as clozapine ‘were possible contributory factors’.”

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14 COMMENTS

  1. Doctors and scientists that believe the lie that the drugs are medicines usually write” natural causes” to the death of psych patients, or like in this article “died from a hereditary heart condition”. They falsify the science and still claim it is science . The Nazi’s did something similar.
    https://www.britannica.com/event/T4-Program
    “The relatives then received condolence letters, falsified death certificates signed by physicians, and urns containing ashes.”

    other story
    Death From Meds’ Side Effects Ruled “Natural Causes”
    https://www.madinamerica.com/2014/02/uk-mans-death-medication-side-effects-ruled-natural-causes/

    and the 25 twenty five earlier death rate of the mentally ill , they do attribute it to “cardiovascular, respiratory
    and infectious diseases, diabetes and hypertension” https://www.who.int/mental_health/management/info_sheet.pdf.

    If they are faking the cause of death, any attempts to fix the problem will obviously not work. And they will not be caught until another fifty years of evidence builds up to prove they are lying.

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      • Somewhere along the line “mental health” doctors have given themselves permission to kill their patients (and this has been accepted by the regulators).

        When I complained at Galway (Southern Ireland, circa 2013) about my own “near death” experience on psychiatric drugs – a psychiatrist explained to me that their approach was much the same as everywhere elses. At least this psychiatrist (though psychopathic), was being honest.

        When I complained to the Irish Medical Council about my “near death drug experience” – they “laughed” at me.

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      • Gas chambers were more humane in some respects. As opposed to slowly poisoning a “mentally ill” person to death over 20-30 years. Way less lucrative making soap out of our body fat though, then billing tax payers for the $$$$$$ of “safe effective poisons” to kill us with.

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    • Actually this is a major issue across the board in medicine. Death certificates do not usually include the things that actually led to the person’s death, and so the effects of many underlying medical illnesses (and therefore the effects of drugging people) are not properly accounted for. Whenever I see analyses of death certificates, I know the researcher is conducting a meaningless study.

      I learned this the hard way. My father went to the hospital with an allergic reaction to Lipitor, got better enough within a couple of days to be transferred to rehab as a step down to going home. He acquired the flu during those couple of days he was in the hospital, within another day he was on a ventilator and (without anything resembling PT, he lost all muscle tone) so he remained that way for 8 months until he kidneys failed and everyone agreed to stop torturing the man who was conscious but unable to speak or move, or indeed to breathe on his own. Then on his death certificate, it only said ‘respiratory failure’, with zero mention of WHY he went into respiratory failure. His death should have been listed as respiratory failure resulting from hospital acquired H1N1 infection at the very least.

      Relatives of people who’ve died as a result of opioid overdoses are experiencing the same issue, finding their loved ones death certificate listing for example, respiratory failure, which is the response to the cause of death, not something that happened without the opioid suppressing the CNS and therefore control of respiratory function. This is causing underreaporting of the true number of cases involved in the opioid epidemic. And the only excuse I’ve heard raised for this criminal withholding of the true cause of death is that it seems there is some kind of bizarre desire to prevent the dead person from being stigmatized as a drug addict.

      In any case, examining death certificates to analyze rates of disease is useless with the current system of assigning a cause of death without any context at all. No one looking my dad’s death certificate would be able to make any educated analysis about the state of his health leading up to his death and that’s a shame for scientific inquiry.

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        • Eh, he’s been dead a long time, but thanks.

          I’m more sorry for the loss to science when these death certificates are studied and researchers present the results as being in any way meaningful.

          Additionally, the amount of misinformation in medical charts leads me to pretty much dismiss the conclusions of any type of aggregated studies using doctor gathered patient data.

          There are some patient powered studies going on though, which rely directly on patient reports rather than institutional records. MyLymeData is one of those, and now has over a million patient-reported data points for study (and a brand new $800,000 grant from the NSF to do so). I really hope that this kind of real world patient reported data becomes more widespread in medical research, and less reliance is placed on these unreliable records which mostly contain professional interpretations of patient reports.

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    • Another aspect is military deaths on psych drugs. In the U.S., one suicide (successfully) completed a day, with many on the psychiatric medicines. They estimate 22 or 20 suicide attempts a day. Do they blame the drug, the access to the drug, the drugs effects on cognition that predisposes someone to perform more foolish actions? Suicide is attributed to mental illness, not the drug. And those that who accidentally take an overdose, is it suicide or an overdose? What is written on the death certificate?

      Canada “Suicide toll reveals how system failed Canada’s soldiers and veterans”
      https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/number-of-soldiers-vets-who-died-by-suicide-after-afghanistan-on-rise/article32673192/

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  3. “even though she did not have psychosis and begged not to be put on the medication.”

    I always call forced drugging rape cause they are forcing things inside a persons body.

    “coroners have written to [UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] Matt Hancock asking how he intends to ensure the drug does not claim more lives.”

    The drug does not “claim lives” it just sits in the bottle on the shelf doing nothing till the staff in hospitals kill people by forcing them to ingest it.

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  4. Tom Jackson’s family THOUGHT his odd thoughts were better because he quit talking. Not always true! My mom thought a mega dose of Haldol helped me since I was too zoned out to complain semi coherently about my ruined life.

    Still angry and devastated. But I can control my speech now. Glad I’ll be dead soon since my body’s a wreck. Left psychiatry too late. At 45 there’s nothing to salvage.

    My life is just a big awful waste. Countless people like me had a lot to offer that no one wanted. They preferred to throw us away like worthless garbage!

    Are you “healthy” Western Society? Are you “normal” to write people off–to segregate and lock up the innocent so we slowly die from cruel, pointless experiments?

    I hate your “health”! I spit upon your “normality”! You deserve to die Western Civilization–for you have no pity on the weak and vulnerable.

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