Tag: Adverse Side Effects
My Sister Lucy’s Death and Life: Picturing an Alternate Timeline of...
I’ll never forget standing beside my sister Lucy as she was strapped to a gurney during a midnight admission to an E.R. in Cambridge, Mass.
There Is No Such Thing as a Side Effect
There is no such thing as a side effect. There are only the real effects — plain and simple. If you’ve been through what I’ve been through, shuffling through life in a drug-induced haze for eight years — well, you don’t want to hear about “side effects” anymore, or anything about how they’re “secondary.”
For the Record
Here and now, I am Ativan-free and slowly tapering off Wellbutrin after 25+ years. Unable to work due to the severity of iatrogenic injury, I sometimes think of myself as a healing journeywoman. When the terrain is especially rough, I reflect on the words: "The best revenge is living a happy, healthy life." When circumstances and symptoms permit, I’m doing just that.
Makers of Risperdal Sued for Breast Development in Boys
Thousands of boys and young men are lined up in courthouses around the country to sue J&J for gynecomastia caused by taking Risperdal as young children. The condition is irreversible except by surgical removal. Collectively, they have become known as the Risperdal Boys.
Abilify Drives Users to Binge on Risky Behaviors
From Daily Mail: The anti-psychotic drug Abilify is at the center of hundreds of lawsuits accusing the drug of dangerous side effects including compulsive gambling,...
Women on the Pill More Likely to be Treated for Depression
From Daily Mail: A recent study shows that women taking hormonal contraceptive pills are more likely to be treated for depression.
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Is Society or Psychiatry to Blame for the “Seriously Mentally Ill”...
Adults in the U.S. diagnosed with “serious mental illness” die on average 25 years earlier than others. This is not controversial, as establishment psychiatry and its critics agree. What is controversial is who is to blame?
What’s the Harm in Taking an Antidepressant?
We know that all drugs have side effects. That’s just part of the deal right? But is it really possible that an antidepressant can cause a sane person to act like a cold-blooded criminal?
Exploring Psychiatry’s “Black Hole”: The International Institute on Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal
When Carina Håkansson sent out an invitation for a symposium on "Pharmaceuticals: Risks and Alternatives," some of the world's top scientists, along with experts-by-experience, came from 13 countries to explore better ways to respond to people in crisis.
Backing Away from Psychiatry
I believe now that fifteen years is more than a fair try. Fifteen years of getting treatment without returning to function is actually insanity. I should have given up after year two. Instead of trusting my intuition and insight, I pushed it down and down... until it finally fought its way back to the surface.
Moving Forward in the Science of Psychiatric Medication Discontinuation/Reduction
This week Live & Learn launched a research study on the experience of people labeled with mental disorders who have tried to stop taking psychiatric medications. This project -- the Psychiatric Medication Discontinuation/Reduction (PMDR) Study -- aims to understand the process of coming off psychiatric medications in order to better support those who choose to do so. The study seeks to answer the question: What helps people stop their psychiatric medications? What gets in the way of stopping?
Who Will Guard the Guardians of Psychiatry?
The assertion that the so-called antidepressants are being over-prescribed implies that there is a correct and appropriate level of prescribing and that depression is a chronic illness (just like diabetes). It has been an integral part of psychiatry's message that although depression might have been triggered by an external event, it is essentially an illness residing within the person's neurochemistry. The issue is not whether people should or shouldn't take pills. The issue is psychiatry pushing these dangerous serotonin-disruptive chemicals on people, under the pretense that they have an illness.
A Worldwide Epidemic – The Misuse of Anti-Depressant Medications
Not all people who have letters after their names are actually "gods" or even people who have any special powers to know things about us more than we can learn about ourselves, about our own bodies, and our own minds. Blindly following what someone says we need to be doing for our own health (mental or physical) and well-being just because they have a white jacket on (so to speak) is usually not in our best interests.
Making the Case Against Antidepressants in Parliament
On Wednesday, May 11, there will be an inquiry by a work group in the U.K.’s Parliament into whether increases in the prescribing of antidepressants are fueling a marked increase in disability due to anxiety and depression in the U.K. I wrote about a similar rise in disability in the United States in Anatomy of an Epidemic, and the All Party Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence, which is the Parliamentary group that organized the debate, asked me to present the case against antidepressants.
GSK to Face Class Action over Antidepressants for Children
A Sydney, Australia law firm has launched a class action on behalf of people who as children and adolescents were prescribed Glaxosmithkline's drug Paroxetine. Despite...
Antidepressant Made Germanwings Co-pilot “Panic”
Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz wrote, in a desperate, final email to his psychiatrist two weeks before slamming his A320 jet into the French Alps...
Further Evidence of the Adverse Effects of Antidepressants, and Why These...
When the idea that selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) might make people feel suicidal first started to be discussed, I admit I was sceptical. It didn’t seem to me the drugs had much effect at all, and I couldn’t understand how a chemical substance could produce a specific thought. Because these effects did not show up in randomised controlled trials, they were dismissed and few efforts were made to study them properly. Then some large meta-analyses started to find an association between the use of modern antidepressants and suicidal thoughts and actions, especially in children.
Psychiatry’s Thalidomide Moment
The authors of Study 329 began recruiting adolescents for a comparative study of Paxil, imipramine and placebo in 1994 and finished their investigations in 1997. They dropped a large number of their original cohort, so the randomness element in the study must be open to question. Late in 1998, SmithKline Beecham, the marketers of Paxil, acknowledged in an internal document that the study had shown that Paxil didn’t work for adolescents in terms of the two primary and six secondary outcomes they had established at the start of the study. In a nutshell, Study 329 was negative for efficacy and positive for harm, contrary to their succinct upbeat conclusion.