“We estimate there are more than 200 children across Canada who were born with cardiovascular defects because their mothers were on Paxil during pregnancy,” said David Klein, one of the lawyers representing Gibson. “The information from GlaxoSmithKline was totally inadequate with respect to using the drug while pregnant.”
You’ve probably heard of Adderall, the latest flavour of the month in the world of performance-enhancing drugs for athletes. If you haven’t, you surely will soon enough because we are expected to believe a substance used to treat symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is medically required twice as often by baseball players as by people in general. Does that make sense?
You’ve probably heard of Adderall, the latest flavour of the month in the world of performance-enhancing drugs for athletes. If you haven’t, you surely will soon enough because we are expected to believe a substance used to treat symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is medically required twice as often by baseball players as by people in general. Does that make sense?
When all of the rhetoric is stripped away, what psychiatrists have actually done is redefine a set of behavioral characteristics as an illness and drugged it. The expensive chemicals given to those labelled with ADHD produce nullifying effects that are hailed as “demonstrably effective.” What is actually happening is the person has been drugged, and is exhibiting the effects of a dangerous mind-altering foreign substance in his or her body.
This is the saddest moment in my 45 year career of studying, practicing, and teaching psychiatry. The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association has given its final approval to a deeply flawed DSM 5 containing many changes that seem clearly unsafe and scientifically unsound. My best advice to clinicians, to the press, and to the general public – be skeptical and don’t follow DSM 5 blindly down a road likely to lead to massive over-diagnosis and harmful over-medication. Just ignore the ten changes that make no sense.
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