Five dementia sufferers die every day from antipsychotic drugs

Five dementia sufferers die each day after being wrongly prescribed “chemical cosh” drugs, the Department of Health has warned. A Government-commissioned report published in 2009 estimated that 180,000 dementia sufferers are being prescribed anti-psychotic drugs but in as many as 150,000 cases they are unnecessarily being taken, often to keep patients quiet in hospital or nursing homes.

Because the “chemical cosh” drugs are feared to worsen other medical conditions and speed up mental decline, it is estimated that they lead to 1,800 needless deaths – five a day – every year. In addition, they are thought to cause 1,620 strokes, half of which are severe.

Pharma-Funded Psychiatrists Behind Bogus Child ‘Bi-Polar’ Epidemic- Disciplined for Conflicts of Interest

The primary promoters–inventors, one might say– of diagnosing children with “bipolar” disorder, who for over a decade, aggressively promoted the biopolar diagnosis and use of antipsychotics in children, were disciplined by Harvard University and its affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

An investigation, prompted by Sen. Charles Grassely, was conducted by Harvard University-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. It concluded (earlier this month) that psychiatrist Joseph Biederman and two of his proteges, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens -each of who failed to disclose millions of dollars they had each received from the makers of antipsychotics, the drugs they promoted for the treatment of bipolar in children–had indeed violated the University’s/ and hospital’s conflict of interest reporting standards. The companies that paid them millions include: Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

PEOPLE’S PHARMACY:Can drugs cause violent behavior?

Americans revere personal responsibility. It resonates with our respect for accountability and frontier justice. That may explain why we have a hard time believing that medications could alter people’s personalities or lead them to behave badly. Violence as a drug side effect seems preposterous to patients, pharmacists, physicians and even juries. Trying to use the “Prozac defense” to justify killing or hurting someone is often met with scorn..

Antidepressant prescribing information, for example, warns physicians that, “All patients being treated with antidepressants for any indication should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, and unusual changes in behavior.” Drugs such as citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil) and sertraline (Zoloft) carry warnings about aggressiveness, agitation, hostility, impulsivity and irritability.

The stop-smoking medication varenicline (Chantix) also comes with warnings about agitation, hostility, depressed mood and changes in behavior. The trouble with such warnings is that people don’t imagine that these bad things could happen to them.

Are You Taking Pills You Don’t Need? Here Are Some Reasons Why

Most people blame direct-to-consumer advertising, especially on TV, for elevating everyday anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder, childhood behavior problems to psychiatric illnesses, lack of sleep to excessive sleepiness, migraines to epilepsy drug deficiencies and old age to hormone deficiency

But ghostwriting also helps the national malaise of people suffering from and treating diseases that didn’t even exist before and ballooning government and private health plans costs.

According to Psycho/Pharma—1 In 66 Americans Is A Psycho

A recent story in Al Jazeera by James Ridgeway of Mother Jones illuminates the efforts by major pharmaceutical companies to get doctors prescribing medicines like Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Abilify to patients for whom the drugs were never intended. Focusing on psychiatrists because they rely on subjective diagnoses, the drug reps have been so successful that they’ve changed the criteria for mental illness and disability payments. Ridgeway quotes former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell.

“[T]he tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 – from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.” Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are “simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.” Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, “Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people.”

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