Natural News – April 29, 2014
By J. D. Heyes
The U.S. military has been experiencing its highest-ever suicide rates for the past several years, and a new documentary film lays out shocking evidence that the Pentagon’s reliance on psychotropic antidepressants is feeding the epidemic.
The film, The Hidden Enemy: Inside Psychiatry’s Covert Agenda, produced by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, details psychiatry’s rise in the military, from World Wars I and II to its prominence today, laying bare a sinister conspiracy to use men and women in uniform as nothing more than guinea pigs.
Watch Chapter 7 of CCHR’s documentary, The Hidden Enemy: Inside Psychiatry’s Covert Agenda—“Epidemic: Suicide”:
As noted in the film, the dramatic rise in military suicides can be directly linked to a similar dramatic rise in military personnel being prescribed mind-altering psychotropic drugs for “mental health conditions” that have never been scientifically validated. But why? What makes today’s fighters so much less capable than those of earlier periods?
Is it “combat stress”? That’s the reason being given by the military psychiatric community. But the very visible effects of combat stress have been chronicled by warriors, writers and other observers going back to ancient times.
The name has changed, but the treatment remains the same – and dangerous
In more recent conflicts, the condition has been called “soldier’s heart,” “battle fatigue” and “shell shock.” Whatever its name, militaries for centuries have acknowledged that sometimes the horror of combat can get to be too much for soldiers to bear.
However, in 1980 the label changed again; psychiatrists began calling it “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” or PTSD, and later they claimed, without supporting evidence, that it was some kind of brain dysfunction.
And like other psychiatric disorders, PTSD was never found through scientific testing. It was lobbied for by military psychiatrists and literally voted into psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Now, today, it is military psychiatry’s most popular diagnosis, and it is rapidly spreading into the civilian world. Right now, more than one-third (37 percent) of war veterans are being “treated” for PTSD. Once they are diagnosed, 80 percent of them are given a psychiatric medication. Of those who are drugged, 89 percent are given antidepressants and 34 percent are given powerful antipsychotics.
As a result, spending on drugs to treat PTSD and brain injuries has rocketed up some 400 percent since 2003.
The thing is, if most psychiatrists ever bothered to actually do a physical exam, there is a good chance that they would find legitimate physical damage that could be verified with a brain scan. This condition is called “Traumatic Brain Injury,” or TBI, and it is estimated that 320,000 soldiers suffer from this condition, which is most commonly caused by concussive blasts from roadside bombs known as IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. TBI can cause an inability to focus, short-term memory loss and trouble with rage or anger.
What’s more, while this very real problem gets worse, it is often masked with mind-altering medications, which can make things much, much worse.
Deadly drugs that are addictive
Most people — even those who have never served — understand that life as a soldier is demanding. They are trained to be alert, decisive and focused, and are expected to be in top physical and mental shape. These are necessities.
Then why are so many being prescribed psychiatric drugs, when psychiatrists know that they make soldiers ineffective?
The problem is that nobody really knows what kind of physical and emotional side effects psychiatric drugs are going to cause. But those who make them and those who prescribe them know of their inherent risks:
— Antidepressants commonly prescribed for PTSD can cause blurred vision, low blood pressure, internal bleeding, weight gain, seizures, impaired cardiac function, sexual impotence and psychosis.
— Antipsychotics frequently given for sleeping problems are known to cause organ damage, body twitching, severe weight gain and sudden cardiac death.
— Anti-anxiety drugs such as Valium and Xanax create dissociation, increased aggression, hallucinations and acute amnesia. They are extremely addictive, to boot.
— Stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin are also very addictive and can result in manic behavior, heart palpitations, brain shrinkage, insomnia, cardiac arrhythmia and even sudden death.
Psychiatrists will tell their patients that the benefits of these drugs outweigh any risks, but that is simply not true. There have been large studies proving that psychiatric drugs like antidepressants and antipsychotics work no better than a dummy sugar pill.
And some of them — especially when taken in combination with each other — can be deadly.
Watch the shocking documentary on the connection between psychiatry and military suicides today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHC2wH_iGYM
http://www.naturalnews.com/044909_psychiatry_military_suicides_psychotropic_drugs.html