The FDA’s Latest Black Box Warning: Don’t Mix Opioids, Benzos

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration yesterday mandated updated labels for nearly 400 opioids and benzodiazepines, following a review of scientific evidence and a citizen...

Benzos Fail to Prevent, May Increase PTSD

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In a review of the evidence regarding benzodiazepines, researchers from the University of Michigan find that benzodiazepines used in the treatment of PTSD are...

Prescription Drug Addiction: Government Launches Investigation

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From The Guardian: The British government has ordered an investigation into the growing problem of addiction to prescription drugs such as opioids, benzodiazepines, and antidepressants. Article...

Culturally Numb

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Experiencing emotional pain is a necessary part of life. Emotional pain often contains valuable lessons to help us on our journeys. We need to make sure we are not numbing our hearts to those that are hurting. We need to de-stigmatize the struggles, joys and pains that come with being human. We need to not just mindlessly pursue happiness - though we might think of that as an inalienable right - and avoid pain. We need to do the only thing that brings true joy: embrace all of life and each other, as we experience together all that makes us human.

Duty to Warn – 14 Lies That Our Psychiatry Professors in Medical School Taught...

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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?”

Long-Term Benzos Worsen Anxiety

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Long-term use of benzodiazepines for anxiety remains a widespread, despite guidelines that recommend against it, according to a roundtable discussion at the annual conference of...

Stumble Biscuits and the Murk of Benzo Disability

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Two years ago, when I first felt the dizzy confusion of benzo disability, I talked about it openly. I remember discussing it briefly with an older friend who found my plight strangely fascinating. He asked if I remembered Quaaludes, a sedative-hypnotic that was all the rage in the 1960s and ‘70s. “We called them ‘Stumble Biscuits,’” he told me, “because you’d stumble down the street and hit one car and then stumble over and hit something else and it was just happy and goofy. It’s too bad they took them off the market. Those things were great.”

“A River of Lost Souls Runs Through Western Colorado”

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The Washington Post investigates the epidemic of suicide and the overuse of psychiatric drugs that is sweeping through towns in Colorado.

More on Benzos and Cognitive Damage

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There is mounting evidence that benzodiazepines are causing Alzheimer's Disease. I cannot imagine any genuine medical specialty ignoring or downplaying information of this sort. But psychiatry, with the perennial defensiveness of those with something to hide, promotes the idea that they are safe when used for short periods, knowing full well that a huge percentage of users become "hooked" after a week or two, and stay on the drugs indefinitely.

Playing the Odds, Revisited

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It is hard to believe that a year has gone past since I posted Playing the Odds: Antidepressant Withdrawal and the Problem of Informed Consent. The feedback I received underscored the more controversial aspects of SSRI toxicity.  Common themes concerned the abrupt onset of new symptoms 3 to 12 months after stopping the drug, reinstatement of the drug failing to help withdrawal related symptoms, the possibility that withdrawal-related symptoms can persist indefinitely and concerns about using benzodiazepines to help with tardive akathisia.

Rise in Psychiatric Prescriptions With NOS Diagnosis

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A “not otherwise specified” (NOS) diagnosis is often used when an individual may have some symptoms related to a psychiatric diagnosis but does not meet enough criteria to warrant a particular diagnosis. A new study, published online ahead of print in Psychiatric Services, reveals that the proportion of mental health visits resulting in such NOS diagnoses rose to nearly fifty percent, and that these diagnoses do not result in more conservative psychiatric drug prescriptions.

Major National Newspaper Looking for Drug Withdrawal Stories

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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...

Anxiety Medication Associated With Significant Increase in Mortality Long-Term

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A study of data from over 11 million patient records in the General Practice Research Database, "the largest anonymized, longitudinal primary care database in...

VA Still Using Benzos for PTSD Despite Warnings

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Military.com reports that doctors from the Department of Veterans' Affairs are continuing to prescribe tranquilizers such as Valium and Xanax despite the VA's guidelines...

Latest World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day (W-BAD) Video

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“We asked people from all over the world to share about the iatrogenic injury they sustained from taking benzodiazepines as prescribed and why they...

Assessing the Cost of Psychiatric Drugs to the Elderly and Disabled Citizens of the...

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ProPublica is well known for creating interesting data bases that allow anyone hooked up to a computer to see by name whether a physician is accepting Big Pharma payments — from dinners to speaking engagements to consulting services. What may be lesser known is that occasionally ProPublica will publish other data that when carefully mined can reveal even more about the use of psychiatric drugs especially when there is a public funding source available.

The Gauntlet of Protracted Benzodiazepine Withdrawal

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My doctor insisted that my symptoms could not be associated with withdrawal – they had to be symptoms of an underlying condition. I have since learned from legitimate sources that protracted withdrawal syndrome from benzodiazepines can intensify long before it abates, with some symptoms lasting for years.

Antidepressants Associated With Increased Driving Risk

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Researchers from the Taiwan and the United States find through a study of 5,183 subjects with motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) and 31,093 matched controls...

“Delray Beach: Xanax, Addiction and Death”

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“The anguish, anxiety and nightmares were unbearable,” the former film executive Tod Abrams had wrote in a note to his family. “It was only...

The Cocktail Party

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As a prescription drug and addiction expert for The O’Reilly Factor, Fox National News and many other news outlets, I am often called when a celebrity death occurs. While the loss of a talented actor or musician is tragic, I know from personal experience that the magnitude of devastation from legal drugs is happening to millions of innocent people – through psychoactive medications.

Benzodiazepine Use of 50% of Elderly Patients is Not Monitored

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The American Psychiatric Association (APA) publication Psychiatric News has released an article about the recent British Medical Journal study finding strong links between long-term...

New Video For World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day

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In a new video for World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day (W-BAD) people from all over the world share about the iatrogenic harm they sustained from taking...

Prescription Drugs in Great Lakes Don’t Dilute as Expected

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Concentrations of pharmaceuticals in Lake Michigan are undiluted two miles from treated sewage outfalls, according to research published in Chemosphere. Research has linked pharmaceuticals...

Who and What Killed Prince and Michael Jackson? Will the Role of Benzos Ever...

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It is the deadly cocktail of benzodiazepines and opiates that is most responsible for the rising rate of opiate overdose deaths... and benzos may actually be THE decisive deadly component in the lethal drug combination. Yes, fentanyl and propofol can be dangerous drugs, but to focus the main attention in this crisis on these rarely used drugs is deliberately misleading...This minimizes the critical role of benzos and rather conveniently lets certain institutions and their leaders off the hook as the main suspects in such a vast number of cases that should be labeled as crimes of negligent homicide.