Obamacare: here come the toxic psychiatrists

The toxic psychiatrists are already here, but under Obamacare their mission will expand.

A recent Washington Post article parroted the usual unscientific statistic on numbers of people in America with mental disorders: 20% of all adults have “experienced a mental-health issue.”

Propaganda focuses heavily on children, with claims that “half of all mental-health disorders first show up before a person turns 14.”

“Three-quarters of mental-health disorders begin before 24. But less than 20% of children and adolescents with mental disorders receive the treatment they need.”

Obamacare has an “essential list” of services, and “mental-health treatment” is one of them. You can be sure the targeting of children will expand.

More and more children will be brought into the system and receive diagnoses of mental disorders and the toxic drugs psychiatrists routinely prescribe. More kids will be screened for depression and undergo “behavioral assessments.”

The influence of psychiatry in young children’s lives is going to expand beyond anything we’ve yet seen. America is going to experience another sea change: the medicalization of children’s behavior will blanket the country.

First of all, as I’ve established many times, NO so-called mental disorder is defined scientifically. There are no physical diagnostic tests: no blood tests, no urine tests, no saliva tests, no genetic tests, no brain-scan tests.

If there were, you would find them in the DSM, the bible of the psychiatric profession, which lists the, yes, 300 mental disorders.

Instead, disorders consist of menus of behaviors assembled by committees of psychiatrists, who decide which clusters of behaviors rate a disorder label.

In a PBS Frontline interview, during the episode called “Does ADHD Exist?”, Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, was asked about the lack of a blood test for ADHD. He made this extraordinary statement:

“That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid. There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.”

Dr. Barkley has his own definition of science. If, say, physics surrendered the need for physical tests, it could claim the sun revolves around the Earth, all oceans end in steep cliffs, and unexplored forests automatically contain dragons.

But “psychiatry is different.” Committees of men can assemble lists of behaviors and call them disorders. 300 and counting.

This is why all assessments of numbers of people who have mental disorders are useless. The disorders themselves are arbitrarily concocted.

But there are very serious consequences: drugs and more drugs.

When it comes to their toxicity and behavioral effects, I recommend several sources. The website “SSRI stories” presents a number of studies of the SSRI antidepressants (e.g., Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft). Consult the work of Dr. Peter Breggin, David Healy, and Robert Whitaker. Read Breggin’s essential book, Toxic Psychiatry.

Here is important information about one psychiatric drug: Ritalin.

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

Paranoid delusions
Paranoid psychosis
Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
Activation of psychotic symptoms
Toxic psychosis
Visual hallucinations
Auditory hallucinations
Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
Effects pathological thought processes
Extreme withdrawal
Terrified affect
Started screaming
Aggressiveness
Insomnia
Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
Psychic dependence
High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
Decreased REM sleep
When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
Convulsions
Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”

Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and prescribes other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium. (To see some of the toxic and dangerous effects of these two drugs, read my article, “The lying liars who lie about psychiatry.”)

In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land. Under Obamacare, with psychiatry firmly placed on a par with other branches of medical practice, the plague is going to spread further, as previously uninsured people enter the system.

At the website, “SSRI stories”, you can also read numerous reports of antidepressants’ links to violent behavior, including suicide and homicide. The correlation is not meant to establish a perfect causative chain, but the shocking number of incidents is more than suggestive.

After commenting on some of the adverse effects of the antidepressant drug Prozac, psychiatrist Peter Breggin notes, “From the initial studies, it was also apparent that a small percentage of Prozac patients became psychotic.” Paxil and Zoloft are in the same class of drug as Prozac.

Prozac, in fact, endured a rocky road in the press for a time. Stories on it rarely appear now. The major media have backed off. But on February 7th, 1991, Amy Marcus’ Wall Street Journal article on the drug carried the headline, “Murder Trials Introduce Prozac Defense.” She wrote, “A spate of murder trials in which defendants claim they became violent when they took the antidepressant Prozac are imposing new problems for the drug’s maker, Eli Lilly and Co.”

Also on February 7, 1991, the New York Times ran a Prozac piece headlined, “Suicidal Behavior Tied Again to Drug: Does Antidepressant Prompt Violence?”

In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin mentions that the Donahueshow (Feb. 28, 1991) “put together a group of individuals who had become compulsively self-destructive and murderous after taking Prozac and the clamorous telephone and audience response confirmed the problem.”

Breggin also cites a troubling study from the February 1990 American Journal of Psychiatry (Teicher et al, v.147:207-210) which reports on “six depressed patients, previously free of recent suicidal ideation, who developed “intense, violent suicidal preoccupations after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment.” The suicidal preoccupations lasted from three days to three months after termination of the treatment. The report estimates that 3.5 percent of Prozac users were at risk. While denying the validity of the study, Dista Products, a division of Eli Lilly, put out a brochure for doctors dated August 31, 1990, stating that it was adding ‘suicidal ideation’ to the adverse events section of its Prozac product information.”

An earlier study, from the September 1989 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, by Joseph Lipiniski, Jr., indicates that in five examined cases people on Prozac developed what is called akathesia. Symptoms include intense anxiety, inability to sleep, the “jerking of extremities,” and “bicycling in bed or just turning around and around.” Breggin comments that akathesia “may also contribute to the drug’s tendency to cause self-destructive or violent tendencies … Akathesia can become the equivalent of biochemical torture and could possibly tip someone over the edge into self-destructive or violent behavior … The June 1990 Health Newsletter, produced by the Public Citizen Research Group, reports, ‘Akathesia, or symptoms of restlessness, constant pacing, and purposeless movements of the feet and legs, may occur in 10-25 percent of patients on Prozac.’”

The well-known publication, California Lawyer, in a December 1998 article called “Protecting Prozac,” details some of the suspect maneuvers of Eli Lilly in its handling of suits against Prozac. California Lawyer also mentions other highly qualified critics of the drug: “David Healy, MD, an internationally renowned psychopharmacologist, has stated in sworn deposition that ‘contrary to Lilly’s view, there is a plausible cause-and-effect relationship between Prozac’ and suicidal-homicidal events. An epidemiological study published in 1995 by the British Medical Journal also links Prozac to increased suicide risk.”

When pressed, proponents of these SSRI drugs sometimes say, “Well, the benefits for the general population far outweigh the risk,” or, “Maybe in one or two tragic cases the dosage prescribed was too high.” But the problem will not go away on that basis. A shocking review-study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1996, v.184, no.2), written by Rhoda L. Fisher and Seymour Fisher, called “Antidepressants for Children,” concludes: “Despite unanimous literature of double-blind studies indicating that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos in treating depression in children and adolescents, such medications continue to be in wide use.”

In wide use. This despite such contrary information and the negative, dangerous effects of these drugs.

Under Obamacare, mental-health professionals are looking forward to a much larger piece of the “treatment pie.” Huge numbers of previously uninsured people, including vulnerable children, will now move under the psychiatric umbrella, and their futures are at extreme risk.

Psychiatry has deeply troubling similarities to the Surveillance State. It profiles people and labels them. However, it then treats them with highly toxic and dangerous drugs.

In the wake of recent mass killings, Obama has shown his preference for psychiatric treatment in a number of statements. He’s also launched the so-called “brain mapping project,” which aims to detect more “mental problems” that need fixing by drugs and other invasive methods, and he’s promised to establish new community mental-health centers across the nation.

This, taken together with Obamacare, signals a catastrophe, and spells out the need for public resistance.

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atwww.nomorefakenews.com