Adverse Effects

Researchers found some antipsychotics to be worse than others for causing sexual dysfunction.

-A fired government health economist says that his research was showing that 60,000 Americans now taking antipsychotic medications will die prematurely.

From The Province: Mothers alleging that taking Paxil during pregnancy caused heart problems for their children have reached a settlement of $6.2-million with GlaxoSmithKline U.K. Article...

Despite little evidence for benefit, and substantial risk of harm, antipsychotics are commonly prescribed to children diagnosed with ADHD

How does physical activity affect people diagnosed with bipolar, schizophrenia and major depressive disorders?

A new study offers radical solutions for improving the cardiovascular health of people with mental health diagnoses: reducing antipsychotic prescriptions..

A new study found that children taking ADHD drugs had, on average, lower bone density than their peers. This included children on common stimulants...

In September of 2017, DK Law Group, LLP filed a Class Action Complaint against the manufacturers of ECT shock devices, alleging that they caused injury to patients by withholding from the FDA data relating to serious iatrogenic brain injuries resulting from ECT. The following developments have taken place since then.

“In 2003, Kim’s husband, Tim ("Woody") Witczak, sought help for insomnia. His doctor prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft. Five weeks later, Witczak's father found Woody...

The Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry announces the release of a new book called 'The Sedated Society: The Causes and Harms of our Psychiatric Prescribing Epidemic.'...

The US Food and Drug Administration has announced that there will soon be a public meeting to explore providing drug companies with greater flexibility in promoting off-label indications to doctors. When it comes to prescribing medications to children, and particularly psychiatric medications, this is a bad idea. I write both as a former consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and as a father who lost a son to the toxic effects of antipsychotics prescribed off-label.

“Do they make people less aggressive? Yes, sometimes they do. Will they sedate people? Absolutely. Will they make kids easier to manage? They will,” Robert Whitaker tells Liz Spikol for Philadelphia Magazine. “But I know of no study that shows that medicating these kids long-term will help them grow up and thrive. The developing brain is a very delicate thing. The narrative is that these side effects are mild, and that’s just not true, and that the benefits are well-established, and so often they’re not.”

The larger narratives put forth by psychiatry and neuroscience often eclipse the equally important stories of lived experience. The easiest way to understand how people are engaging spiritually with their prescriptions is to hear it in their own words.

BPS releases report encouraging behavioral interventions for people with dementia, rather than antipsychotics

Increasing numbers of children with sleep disorders are being treated with the hormone melatonin, but the medication has not been approved for such use.

Study finds that 74% of patients with a psychotic disorder off antipsychotics at end of 10 years are in remission.

A new study suggests that smoking cessation is related to depressive symptom improvement, but that depression may also make it harder to quit.

A review of treatment guidelines published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics found that guidelines “shy away from stating clearly that SSRIs/SNRIs, like BDZs, are often (though...

From the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry: A major national newspaper is looking for people in the UK willing to share recent stories of negative effects...

Psych meds can not only put weight on regardless of how you otherwise care for yourself, they also tend to make people feel gravely lethargic and vaguely sick all the time. I could not exercise as I had before. Could not. It doesn't matter how much mental health professionals try to tell us that if we just exercised we'd be okay in the face of neurotoxic drugs that cause weight gain, because the fact is the drugs impede that capacity. This is not widely appreciated or understood and people on psych meds are again traumatized and made to feel guilty for something that is truly outside of their control as long as they are taking these medications.

The first of more than 1,000 lawsuits about Zoloft and birth defects has gotten underway.

BBC news conducts a video interview with a young man named George. He was prescribed antidepressants when he was 15, after only a five-minute...

-New York Magazine discusses two recent studies that looked at the long-term relationships between use of psychedelics and the development of mental illnesses.

Marci Webber is a single mom who experienced a medication-induced psychotic episode, during which she killed her daughter, believing it would "save" her, and then tried to kill herself. For over seven years now, Marci and I have been trying unsuccessfully to get the mental health system and judicial system to acknowledge the true cause of her crime and let her go.

Maternal antenatal depression is highly correlated with a history of the mother having been mistreated in childhood, and these two facts significantly increase the...