Psychiatric Drugs

The conventional wisdom is that antidepressant medications are effective and safe. However, the scientific literature shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed. While all prescription medications have side effects, antidepressant medications appear to do more harm than good as treatments for depression.

Dr. Claudia Gold of Boston.com comments on the recent research finding that "thoughts of suicide, sexual difficulties and emotional numbness as a result of anti-depressants...

Researchers in Japan investigated 139 patients with schizophrenia diagnoses due to be discharged from 19 acute psychiatric units in Japanese hospitals. Polypharmacy and excessive...

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled yesterday that judges can force criminal defendants to take antipsychotic medication in an effort to make them competent for...

It's been over 5 years since I started offering non-medical consultations to people in the process of coming off or hoping to come off psych drugs. I wanted to share here some things I have learned in this process. Despite how far we have come, we have a long way to go in the quest to liberate all who wish to be liberated from psychiatry.

The article “Special K, a Hallucinogen, Raises Hopes and Concerns as a Treatment for Depression,” by Andrew Pollack in the New York Times, December 9, 2014, tells how far afield my field, psychiatry, has really gone - that it is even a consideration to use an hallucinogen for the treatment of depression.

From Flipboard: In a recent study on auditory hallucinations, all participants — not just those who had been diagnosed with psychosis — experienced conditioned hallucinations. The study...

Increased frequency of digital media use can increase symptoms of ADHD among adolescents, study finds.

A study published this week in the Annals of Family Medicine reveals that opioid painkillers, when used long-term, can lead to the onset of depression. The researchers found that the link was independent of the contribution of pain to depression.

In this piece for The Cut, Dyan Neary details the story of Frankie Perry, a man whose life was forever altered by being prescribed an...

I hope this post doesn’t seem like a stretch, because it’s about something so basic it’s almost embarrassing: Walking, the intuitive act of putting one foot in front of the other to carry you from one place to the next. Yet if you’ve ever endured damage or a withdrawal syndrome from a psychiatric medicine, you’ll also know that things, like walking, that look and seem basic to others, and that did so in your past, “pre-medication” life, do not in fact come easily. Sometimes, on the worst days, they don’t come at all.

The International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia. Leff, J.Psychological Medicine, 22 (1992):131-145. The first World Health Organization study that compared schizophrenia outcomes in "developed" and "developing" countries...

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

The majority of children, adolescents and young adults prescribed antipsychotic medications have not been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry.

On April 19, 2014, The Lancet published an article titled Do we underestimate the benefits of antiddepressants?, by German psychiatrists Mazda Adli and Ulrich Hegerl. The authors argue that randomized controlled trials (RCT's), as currently conducted, systematically underestimate the benefits of antidepressants and overestimate the benefits of psychotherapy. But what's interesting is that in all the years that pharma-psychiatry was churning out its fraudulent, spurious and self-serving "findings," I never heard of a single complaint from psychiatry about these kinds of methodological issues.

Chuck Norris writes in WND: "I believe that too many who struggle with mild cases of depression don’t think they can find genuine relief...

Researchers compare differences between research and clinical diagnoses of ADHD and explore the consistency of clinical determinations over time

Over 1% of preschoolers on Medicaid in 36 US states are being given antipsychotics, antidepressants, amphetamine stimulants and other psychiatric drugs.

Researchers studying 309 6-month-olds at Emory University's Infant Development Laboratory found that infants prenatally exposed to antipsychotics showed significantly lower scores on a standardized...

In this piece for The New Inquiry, Sophie Putka chronicles the mental health profession's long history of pathologizing, diagnosing, and medicating women's emotions. "With Freud’s claims...

Physician Daniela Drake writes on Salon that "When we rush to prescribe boatloads of Adderall, we miss lesser-known disorders holding kids back. I know...

The researchers found that while antipsychotic drugs may be slightly more effective than alternative antidepressants, they come with a much higher side effect burden.

In an opinion piece in today's New York Times, Richard A. Friedman notes the increase of PTSD in the miliatary from .2% in 2002...

The Journal of ECT, looking at the question of whether antidepressant medications at the start of ECT reduced post-ECT relapse in a sample of...

I was first given Lithium Carbonate in the spring of 1984, and I was taken off Lithium by my attending physician in 1996, but left on other drugs. It took me until 2012 to realize psychiatry is a sham. So often people tell me, “I don’t care what my life is like ten years from now. I only want to feel good now.” I may have said the same thing twenty years ago. Now I have the hindsight to know that my viewpoint back then was juvenile at best. I try to warn other patients these days. It’s hard to joke around about something that kills people.