while i’ve been away

So much news and so little time to comment but here are a few stories worth reading:

Most NAMI Money is From Psychiatric Drug Industry! BIG surprise (not) but thank you Sen. Grassley for continuing to fight for awareness and human rights while most members of Congress sit back and don’t say a word.

The FDA has approved yet another drug for schizophrenia, Fanapt. Keep your eyes on this one. Soon to be the next Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify, etc. When will this madness stop? The FDA continues to disappoint.

Two recent trials show akathisia occurred in 25% of Abilify patients compared to 4% of placebo patients. I’m glad I got off this one quick-even though I still have doctors pushing it. and I am growing increasingly tired by the constant Abilify ads on TV. I’m about to storm Bristol-Myers Squibb’s headquarters. Here’s their advertisement for the drug:

Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal. Well, this one leaves me speechless.

The Scientist has reported that, yes, it’s true, Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist.

What’s wrong with this is so obvious it doesn’t have to be argued for. What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!

Psych Rights sent letters to several members of Congress:

Massive Medicaid Fraud Exposed: PsychRights Calls on Members of Congress for Assistance
In letters to Senators Charles Grassley and Herb Kohl, and Representatives Henry
Waxman, Bart Stupak, John Dingell & Barney Frank, the Law Project for Psychiatric
Rights (PsychRights®) has exposed massive Medicaid Fraud. While working on
PsychRights v. Alaska, its lawsuit to prohibit the State of Alaska from the largely
ineffective and always harmful psychiatric drugging of children and youth, PsychRights
“discovered that it is illegal for the vast bulk of these prescriptions to be reimbursed by
Medicaid.”

Extrapolating from Alaska Medicaid Claims, PsychRights calculates over $2 Billion in
fraudulent claims are being paid nationally every year for drug treatments Congress has
explicitly prohibited, and it is probably well over $4.5 Billion, based on the total amount
paid by Medicaid. Stating the carnage caused by the practice will be “recognized as the
largest iatrogenic (doctor caused) public health disaster in history,” PsychRights
analogized the situation, “to our current economic debacle caused by unrestrained Wall
Street greed,” but noted, it is much worse, ” because children’s and youth’s future, health,
and even lives, have been sacrificed and continue to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate
profits.”

Also, “because most current child psychiatrists no longer know how to help children and
youth without resort to the drugs” PsychRights suggests “the savings be used to fund
approaches that have been proven to be safe and effective.”

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is a public interest law firm devoted to the
defense of people facing the horrors of forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock.
PsychRights is further dedicated to exposing the truth about psychiatric interventions and
the courts being misled into ordering people subjected to these brain and body damaging
drugs against their will. Extensive information about these dangers, and about the tragic
damage caused by electroshock, is available on the PsychRights web site:
http://psychrights.org/.