AstraZeneca Plc, the U.K.’s second- biggest drugmaker, agreed to pay about $55 million to settle around 5,500 lawsuits related to side effects of the antipsychotic Seroquel, people familiar with the accords said.
And you thought Tom Szasz was yesterday’s hero? This paper brings us up to date. Future historians may well cast Thomas Szasz as an intrepid campaigner for the blindingly obvious: people do not have “mental illnesses” but experience a wide range of moral, interpersonal, social and political “problems in living.” All such problems concern, or have an impact on, our sense of who and what we are and could just as easily be called spiritual crises. However, despite his prodigious scholarly output, Szasz might well be written out of history, as punishment for his single-handed and persistent exposure of the greatest hoax of the modern age – the construction of the “myth of mental illness” and psychiatry’s ludicrous attempts to “treat” it.
Patient advocates filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday charging that New Jersey psychiatric hospitals routinely medicate patients against their will without a review by an outside arbiter, a practice that is banned in most other states.
We spend more than £250 m a year on antidepressants in the UK – and it’s a complete waste of money. They are not much better than sugar pills, they have nasty side – effects, such as sexual dysfunction, and they increase young people’s risk of suicide. New research shows they don’t even work on the brain in the way we thought they did.
The widespread use of antidepressants by soldiers could be contributing to the Army’s escalating suicide rate (“Leaders criticized in Army suicides,” News, Friday). Antidepressants can increase the risk of suicide or suicidal behavior in certain population groups.
SHARE YOUR STORY/COMMENT: