Adverse Effects

From Undark Magazine: In late 1970, a pharmacologist discovered that an antibiotic drug designed to cure a disease called SMON (subacute myelo-optic neuropathy) was actually causing...

From BBC: Mad in America Radio Host and Program Director James Moore speaks about the impact that antidepressant withdrawal has had on his life. "The 46-year-old has...

From BBC: A leading UK psychiatrist, Dr. David Healy, speaks out about the dangers of the growing prescription of antidepressants to young people under age...

With at least 59 lawsuits pending over birth defects allegedly caused by Zoloft, Pfizer moves to consolidate litigation near its headquarters in New York. Read...

From The Washington Post: Doctors often turn first to antidepressants when treating patients with depression. However, the evidence shows that alternative treatments such as therapy...

Researchers provide an action-planning framework to engage providers in the reduction of low-value healthcare.

Just last week one person was declared brain dead and five more were hospitalized after taking a psychiatric drug in a clinical trial. Writing for Science, Martin Enserink provides more information about the drug as new details emerge.

A Pennsylvania Superior Court has affirmed a lower court's ruling that GlaxoSmithKline is not responsible for the congenital heart defect that lead Joanne Thomas...

Overall, 16.7% of 242 million US adults reported filling 1 or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2013.

The New York Times reports that a growing number of infants and toddlers are being prescribed dangerous psychiatric drugs. “Almost 20,000 prescriptions for risperidone (commonly known as Risperdal), quetiapine (Seroquel) and other antipsychotic medications were written in 2014 for children 2 and younger, a 50 percent jump from 13,000 just one year before.”

New research suggests that treatable metabolic abnormalities underlie some treatment-resistant cases of depression—and treating the metabolic condition has the possibility of dramatically reducing depressive symptoms

Revealing the false information provided about psychiatry should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of psych drug propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures – heading toward oblivion?”

A meta-analysis of known risk factors for psychosis finds elevated risk with the presence of childhood trauma, adverse life events, and affective dysfunction.

Jürgen Margraf and Silvia Schneider, both well-known psychologists at the University of Bochum in Germany, claim that psychotropic drugs are no solution to mental...

MedPageToday reports that Janssen Pharmaceuticals omitted data from a 2003 study that connected Risperdal with serious side effects. Janssen was previously sued by the FDA for marketing Risperdal for off-label uses and settled for $2.2 billion in 2013. Earlier this year, a man with autism was awarded $2.5 million after growing breasts while on Risperdal. According to MedPage, documents from this latest case reveal missing data tables from a 2003 study “designed to ferret out potential adverse effects of long-term risperidone use.” The missing tables were related to elevated prolactin levels and side effects, including gynecomastia in men.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on legislation being passed in California to go after physicians who overprescribe psychiatric drugs to foster youth. The proposed legislation also targets government agencies that fail to offer nondrug alternative therapies to help foster youth recover from traumatic childhoods.

New intervention shows promise in reducing over-prescription of off-label antipsychotics in older adults.

After an hour of deliberation, jurors decided that the anticonvulsant Topamax (topiramate) had, in fact, caused April Czimmer's son to be born with a...

Disturbingly, our study and others reveal that the black box warning is now ignored in many countries, since antidepressant prescriptions for children are on the rise again. Despite increasing certainty that antidepressants are ineffective and likely cause suicidal behavior in young people, psychiatry continues to claim that they reduce suicide risk.

I have written this story, a story of Exodus to Freedom, a thousand times. I retell it to myself late at night while I lie on my air mattress. In the mornings I may recall these amazing events while running along the beach straight into the sunrise. I walk my dog and tell the story again, hoping passers-by don’t think I’m talking to myself, lest I be called “loco.” But that has never happened. The one aim I had when coming to Uruguay has come true: Not one person here considers me crazy.

Members of the group Benzodiazepine Recovery have created a video about the often debilitating symptoms of benzodiazepine withdrawal. Video →­

A large longitudinal study finds once more that being prescribed antipsychotics significantly increases the risk of diabetes.

A retrospective study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry examined cases of people who suffered sexual dysfunction that endured even after stopping taking SSRI antidepressants.

From the Chicago Tribune: Former drug sales representative Allison Zayas became a whistleblower against her old company, AstraZeneca, after learning that a combination of Seroquel...

How did I become someone who could barely function? I was a high-performing sales executive ranked in the top 2% of an international business communications company. But now, after using powerful psych meds for depression and anxiety for more than a decade, I couldn’t do basic things like go to the grocery store, plan a meal, make dinner, or get together with friends.