Tag: informed consent

In a new report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, calls for a move away from the biomedical model and “excessive use of psychotropic medicines.”

From Benzinga: The FDA has suggested that drug commercials may intentionally list potential side effects in such a rapid-fire, overwhelming way that the warning messages...

Meghann describes starting antidepressant drugs for OCD at the age of 9, how she came to consider her withdrawal after 17 years and how she feels now, 2 years after finishing with the drugs.

This proposed legislation would require practitioners to obtain written informed consent regarding risk of dependency and addiction and risks associated with long-term use. It would also mandate warning labels concerning long-term use.

Gemma talks about her experiences with psychiatric drugs and the difficulties that parents of children with special needs encounter when they seek treatment for emotional or psychological distress

Stevie describes her experiences taking antidepressant drugs and her severe and protracted reaction to trying to withdraw.

I began to have transient moments where I would feel oddly disconnected from my environment or wake up and feel like I was coming out of my skin. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing interdose benzodiazepine withdrawal and it would end up leading me down a path of polypharmacy.

From MinnPost: The Choosing Wisely campaign, which was launched to promote informed consent among patients, is now five years old. The campaign has been very successful...

From the Center for Health Journalism: It is a commonly held belief that more medical care is always better; however, overtreatment can be harmful to...

From Vox: PubMed, a search engine for medical abstracts, has begun displaying conflict of interest data in search results. The abstracts now include a Conflict...

From HealthNewsReview: A recent news release from Florida Atlantic University has urged wider use of Chantix, a prescription medication for smoking cessation. The release made...

From Medical Xpress: According to Greece's justice minister Stavros Kontonis, it is likely that the pharmaceutical company Novartis has bribed thousands of medical professionals and state officials...

From The New York Times: Overprescription is becoming an increasingly prevalent public health issue, especially for older adults with multiple chronic conditions. "Though studies have found...

Daryl, who was only 9 years old when he was taken into mental health services and medicated, talks about being made to take both antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs and he describes the lies told to him to justify treatment.

From The New York Times: Informed consent in health care is disturbingly uncommon. As a patient, it can be helpful to utilize a few strategies to be...

We talk to Giovanna from Australia who was prescribed an antidepressant aged 17 and tried many times to withdraw over the next 23 years. She shares her experiences with us including the advice and support that she received and her hopes for the future.

Claire shares her powerful story of being prescribed antidepressants at the age of 16 and her experiences of trying to withdraw., describing how she tapered gradually over 2 years, but went on to experience SSRI discontinuation syndrome

Based on more than 10 years work in the peer support movement,The Icarus Project and Freedom Center’s 52-page guide is used internationally by individuals, families, professionals, and organizations to support reducing and coming off psychiatric drugs.

From STAT: Two professors at the University of Washington will be offering a new course, "Calling Bullshit In the Age of Big Data." The class...

From Aeon: Medical experiments are increasingly being conducted without the informed consent of participants. Article →­

A new study analyzed over 13,000 doctors and found that physicians had a poor understanding of risks and benefits in every field, including psychopharmaceutical prescription, to CT scans, and cancer screening.

In the light of Study 329, is the consent that people or their families have given to take a medication like paroxetine any more valid than the consent that, after the event, an inebriated woman is claimed to have given?

There is indeed a crisis in the mental health business. The crisis derives from psychiatry's spurious and self-serving premise that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses that are correctable by psychiatric drugs.

The Boston Globe paints a picture (in the vivid way that they so love to do) that pins the system’s decline primarily on budgetary issues, but there is more than one way for a system to be ‘broken.’ In fact, where the Globe goes most wrong in their latest piece, ‘Community Care,’ is in their failure to adequately recognize that the system has always been broken in one way or another in this country.

Organized psychiatry, committed irrevocably and wholeheartedly to drug pushing and to their corrupt and corrupting relationship with pharma, simply will not countenance the fact that their primary product is fundamentally flawed and destructive. So they hire a PR company; they fund and lobby politicians; they parrot slogans; and they encourage one another to ever-increasing heights of self-congratulation. But they will not commission a definitive study to clarify and assess the scale of this problem once and for all. And the reason for this inaction is because they know that it would be bad for business. It would "cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications."