Feel Better™

There’s a new University of Michigan web site, purportedly to help students get help with mental health issues, called “Campus Mind Works.”

It contains a lot of info about therapy and seems rather benign and even potentially helpful, at first glance. But once you know who’s running the site- U-M Psychiatry, this deceptive little piece of marketing makes a lot more sense.

First Check out the scrolling slideshow

Frame 2 caption:

“The sooner you seek help, the sooner you will feel better.”
- Jenna, U-M student

Frame 6 caption:

“The sooner you seek help, the sooner you will feel better. Why wait?”
- Leena, U-M student

Oh well then, since both Leena and Jenna think I need some pills, let me just march right on over there ask my doctor.  I mean, I do want to Feel Better™, right?

Ladies- the fact that there are 13 women and 4 men in this thinly-veiled commercial should give you a clue that you are being targeted by the drug industry disproportionately.

Is it because you’re more trusting of authority than men?  Are you just more likely to use drugs because you’re more emotional?  Or are they targeting you as part of a larger agenda that is not purely market driven?

I don’t know the answers to these “why” questions, but one thing I do know is there are a lot of women out there hooked on antidepressants and anxiety drugs.  Based on some studies, women are about twice as likely to take antidepressants as men.

You probably won’t realize that the main purpose of this site is slinging happy drugs to students until you actually follow thru and speak with a doctor.  Thats when they sell you hard on the drugs.

There’s no free lunch.  Good luck with the brain zaps.

Antidepressant use during pregnancy associated with increased risk of spontaneous abortion

A study published in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ) has found an association between antidepressant use during pregnancy and increased risk of spontaneous abortion.  The authors were cautious not to suggest a causal relationship, however they did attempt to control for confounding variables and still found the risk is more than doubled (5.5% vs 2.7%).

I found this choice of words from the abstract to be unfortunate, however in all fairness, when up against an industry like the phychiatric drug mafia, I can understand why they’d soften the blow in order to cover their own asses.

The risk of relapse of depression or the diagnosis of some other psychiatric disorders during pregnancy necessitates the use of antidepressants despite possible adverse effects.

But really, Necessitates?  What did female humans do with their emotions during pregnancy for  the 50,000 years prior to the invention of these wonder-drugs?  Here’s the problem:  We’re a society of useless, weak morons who would rather give our babies birth defects than take control over our own emotions.

… Whether such use increases the risk of spontaneous abortion is still being debated.

An odd place for this statement, considering the conclusions clearly state the risk is more than doubled.  Of course, anyone can debate anything they want.

After adjustment for potential confounders, we found that the use of antidepressants during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of spontaneous abortion.

If they’ve made “adjustment for potential confounders” and still found more than double the risk of spontaneous abortion, I believe this does imply a causal relationship and not merely an association.

The use of antidepressants, especially paroxetine [Paxil], venlafaxine [Effexor] or the combined use of different classes of antidepressants, during pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of spontaneous abortion.

In my experience, women are trusting of authority and establishment medicine, which makes them perfect targets revenue streams patients for the psychiatric industry. Instead of teaching girls how to manage their emotions in a rational and constructive manner- by working things out verbally, doing exercise, and maintaining a proper diet, we tell them they need mood-altering, addictive drugs to treat their “disease.”

There is no doubt that reproductive hormones can alter mood and behavior in both women and men, but is it acceptable to pawn that burden off on our unborn children in the form of birth defects?  Are we so weak we can’t deal with the physiological issues that all our ancestors dealt with to bring us into this world?  If they hadn’t met the challenge– if they’d decided to drink alcohol excessively, or take Laudanum, cocaine, or other mood altering drugs that were available (without prescriptions), they might not have carried those babies to term.

When my (now x) wife was pregnant with our child, they tried to push antidepressants on her.  It was a struggle to convince her to look at new research that showed increased risk of birth defects and miscarriage. This isn’t the only study showing increased risk of complications and birth defects associated with antidepressants.

Psychiatrists and doctors said the drugs posed no risk to the baby, weren’t habit forming, etc.  It was 100% pure profit-motivated bs and thank god I was able to help her make the right decision.

Moral of the story: Don’t take mood-altering drugs during pregnancy (duh).

Antidepressant Use Increases Risk of Stroke

Taking antidepressants may significantly increase the risk of stroke in post-menopausal women, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Bridget O’Connell of Mind, who was not involved in the study, noted that antidepressants are already known to carry a wide range of side effects that vary highly from individual to individual.

The study relied on data from the Women’s Health Initiative study, which was responsible for proving that hormone replacement therapy significantly increased the risk of heart attack, stroke, cancer and death in postmenopausal women.

The researchers studied 136,293 women between the ages of 50 and 79 for an average of six years each. They found that those taking antidepressants were 45 percent more likely to suffer from a stroke in that time than women not taking the drugs, and 32 percent more likely to die from any cause.

Depression is already a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease and stroke, but the researchers attempted to control for this risk in their data analysis.

The risk of stroke for a postmenopausal woman taking an antidepressant was roughly one in 200 in each given year. On a population scale, the researchers noted, this risk becomes a serious health concern.

The increased stroke risk from antidepressants remained the same regardless of which drug class women were taking — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or tricyclics. SSRIs appeared to pose a higher risk of one specific type of stroke, however – a hemorrhagic stroke caused by brain bleeding.

“We are already aware of links between depression and the risk of stroke and we are currently funding further studies to look into this,” said Joanne Murphy of The Stroke Association. “Everyone can help reduce their risk of stroke by making lifestyle changes, such as reducing their blood pressure, giving up smoking, reducing alcohol intake, improving their diet and getting plenty of exercise.”

Number of Prescriptions Written in UK for Antidepressants Nearly Equals Entire Population

“… there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing…a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

-Aldous Huxley

NaturalNews
Friday, December 04, 2009 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

There were 36 million prescriptions issued for antidepressant drugs in the United Kingdom in 2008, nearly one for every adult in the population, according to numbers obtained by the Liberal Democrat party.

The number is 2.1 million higher than in 2007.

Writing in the Guardian, Ed Halliwell examines the reason for this trend, noting that antidepressant prescriptions have increased more than threefold since the beginning of the 1990s, far outstripping the increase in the percentage of the population classified with a “common mental disorder.” From 1993 to 2007, this number increased by only one million, going from 15.5 percent of the population to 17.6 percent.

Halliwell notes that while national guidelines recommend that psychological therapies are the preferred treatment for mental illness or distress, 75 percent of doctors report having prescribed drugs in cases where they thought that therapy or other non-pharmaceutical treatments would have been more effective. In part, this is because despite government recommendations, psychotherapy treatment remains difficult to find in the United Kingdom, with long waiting lists.

“However, medics also prescribe drugs because that’s what they are trained to do – pills have long been their (and our) default response to depression,” Halliwell writes. “The dominant view of psychiatric illness is that chemical imbalances in the brain are mostly to blame, and that they can be controlled with pharmaceuticals.”

Yet a number of studies have called into question whether antidepressants are really significantly more effective than a placebo, and a much-touted study identifying a “depression gene” was recently discredited by a new analysis.

Halliwell calls for a shift away from a pharmaceutical approach to depression, with a renewed emphasis on more well-proven measures such as “building good relationships, lifelong learning, being kind to others and exercise.”

He acknowledges the challenges inherent in this approach.

“As well as an overhaul of services, it means tackling social fragmentation, greed-based economics and the stress created by a speedy, sensationalist culture,” he writes. “And it means starting a mature debate based on understanding rather than fear of the mind, promoting the ways we can look after our psychological as well as our physical health.”

Sources for this story include: www.guardian.co.uk.

The Biochemical Manipulation of Humanity

David Rothscum Reports
22 July, 2009

Many prominent scientists and authors have on various occasions stated that in the future, the common people would be manipulated through chemicals in their food, water and injections, to suit the needs of the people that govern them.

In his 1931 book, the Scientific Outlook, Bertrand Russell wrote:

“Perhaps by means of injections and drugs and chemicals the population could be induced to bear whatever its scientific masters may decide to be for its good.”

One of the most famous examples of the idea of biochemical manipulation of the underclass was raised in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in 1932. In Brave New World, the lower classes are exposed to a variety of chemicals before they are “born” that reduce their intelligence and adult height, and prepare them for the role they will fullfil when they grow up. Alcohol is used, lower castes receive less oxygen, and they are exposed to x-rays. The lower castes are also exposed to certain hormones to make them infertile. 70% of women are exposed in the womb to male hormones, and turned into so called “freemartins”, sterilized women who exhibit masculine behavior.

Bertrand Russel wrote in 1952 in “the impact of science on Society”, that:

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.

Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin, wrote in his 1952 book,
‘The Next Million Years’ that:

Looking a little deeper there is the possibility of substantially altering the intellectual and moral natures of individuals by some sort of hormonal injections; already great effects have been produced on animals.

John Holdren, who currently works for the Obama administration as his adviser on science, wrote in 1977:

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

All of these ideas may sound terrible, but Bertrand Russel himself explained that: “Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s.”

This article will discuss the various artificially induced disease states that are becoming more common every day, the methods by which they are induced, and the reasons behind this.

Masculinization and sterilization of women.

Many products used today contain Bisphenol A, a chemical first synthesized in 1891. It was discovered to have hormonal effects on the human body in 1938. Because of this, in the 1930′s it was used as a synthetic estrogen. Later, after it’s effects were known, in the 1950s it began to be used in the production of Polycarbonate, a plastic now used in many food products. There are hundreds of types of plastic, many of them having no effect on the endocrine system, but the industry insists on using Bisphenol A.

The effects on women are well known. Scientists have discovered that women who have had three or more consecutive miscarriages had 3 times higher levels of Bisphenol A in their blood than women who had successfully given birth. Studies in rats have also shown that at levels that humans are exposed to Bisphenol A masculinizes the brain of females, which resulted in the female mice exhibiting behavior typical of male mice.

A growing epidemic in predominantly the Western world is Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Polycystic ovary syndrome is a syndrome that is characterized by women receiving an abundance of male hormones, and symptoms include infertility, excessive body hair, loss of hair on the head, obesity, and deepening of the voice. Estimates of how common this problem is vary from anywhere between 2 and 20 percent of women worldwide, but what is clear is that the problem is caused by Bisphenol A. Studies have shown that levels of Bisphenol A are significantly higher in women with PCOS.

The masculinization and sterilization of women in the womb as described in Brave New World could thus effectively be carried out using Bisphenol A.

Polycarbonate, the plastic that leaches Bisphenol A, was developed in Germany and the United States at the same time, in 1955, by Bayer in Germany and General Electric in the United States respectively.

The history of Bayer is interesting. Bayer was the result of the break up of IG Farben in 1951.
IG Farben was the company that manufactured the Zyklon B that Nazi Germany used in the gas chambers during the Holocaust.
Of course, many people who had worked for IG Farben while it produced Zyklon B continued to work for Bayer after the break up of IG Farben.
Fritz Ter Meer for example, was a board member of IG Farben since 1925. During the Second World War he was responsible for the construction of the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz, in which around 30 000 slave labourers went to their deaths. In July 1948 at the Nuremberg IG Farben trial ter Meer was sentenced to seven years in prison for enslavement and looting.
After his release in 1952 he immediatly began working for Bayer again, and in 1955 he became a boardmember of Bayer, and a year later he became chairman of the board.

The question how anyone could thus knowingly sell products that contain dangerous synthetic estrogen that can sterilize people and have various other negative health effects is thus easily answered: The same people who started producing this product produced the Zyklon B that Nazi Germany used in the Holocaust.

The question of how Bayer and General Electric could come up with this product at the same time and make a deal to sell it can be explained using Anthony Sutton’s book, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Like I. G Farben, General Electric was instrumental in funding Nazi Germany.

International General Electric was the largest shareholder (30%) of German General Electric (A. E. G.), the company that funded Hitler in the early days of his rise to power. Several of A. E. G.’s Directors were also on the board of I. G. Farben. I.G. Farben and International General Electric also had the same shareholders. The Warburg Manhattan bank, and the Rockefeller Chase Bank had a large interest in General Electric. The Rockefeller Family also had a controlling interest (25%) In Standard Oil, which worked together with I G Farben as well according to Sutton.

I. G. Farben was owned and controlled by Warburg family members as well. Max Warburg was a member of the board from it’s inception in 1925 until 1938. His brother, Paul Warburg, was a board member of the American I. G. Farben, which was controlled by the German I. G. Farben.
Sutton proves that the Electric Industry was turning into a trust, and specifically mentions that the companies were no longer competing for patents. It should be no surprise that a decade later Bayer and General Electric together brought this toxic plastic on the market that is now used to package our food and drinks.

It’s important to note that Bayer later ran into trouble when the company knowingly sold and continued producing blood products contaminated with HIV, while it had a safe alternative available.

Because a ban on Bisphenol A is now becoming likely, the Coca Cola company panicked, and leaked internal memo’s that show the company planned a propaganda campaign that would include using a “pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA” as their ‘holy grail’ spokesperson. According to the Environmental Working Group, this campaign would be specifically targetted at the poor and ethnic minorities.
The leaked memo can be found here.
I have covered forced sterilization campaigns carried out primarily against women through the use of vaccinations before. For more information on this subject, click here.

The Sterilization and Feminization of Men.

The global decline in fertility in men has been well documented. John Holdren mentioned that chemicals added to the water supply could be used to sterilize people, and indeed, chemicals are added to the water that reduce fertility. One of these chemicals is Fluoride. As I pointed out before, Sodium Fluoride reduces men’s sperm count, and communities with higher levels of Fluoride in the water have a lower birth rate than communities with lower levels of Fluoride.
Sperm counts worldwide have fallen by about 50% per ml (for sources, see) in 50 years.
Various chemicals are found in the water that act as endocrine disruptors, widely held responsible for the increasing number of problems found in men. However, these chemicals could be easily filtered out of the water, but this is not done, due to the false threat of global warming.
As I mentioned before, Soy also sterilizes men, and changes their brain:

A study done with rats showed that even moderate amounts of soy caused these animals to spend less time in social interaction with other rats. Another study down in adult male monkeys fed phyto-estrogens showed changes in their behavior as well. Time spend together with other monkeys was halved. Furthermore, the monkeys showed a threefold increase in submissive behavior.

Reduction of IQ, and inducement of learning disabilities in children.

As should be known by most people by now, Fluoride in the water has been shown in multiple studies to reduce the IQ of children. Other methods are used to bring about the same effect.
A study showed for example, that boys who received all three hepatitis B vaccines have a 9 times higher risk of developmental disability than boys who receives no hepatitis B vaccine. Another study found that receiving a single vaccine containing Thimerosal increased the risk of autism and ADHD. Another study by Verstraeten found that the risk of autism and ADHD increased significantly in children that received vaccines. Unfortunately, his supervisors wanted to see a different result, and thus he changed the outcome by excluding a large number of children. The initial outcome of the study can be found here. A larger amount of evidence showing how vaccines cause autism can be found here.
Russel’s prediction, that injection’s would be used to manipulate the behavior of people was correct.

Cancer.

Multiple viruses that cause cancer are found in our vaccines. The first of these viruses was created with funding of the Rockefeller family. Many people ask themselves how such a thing can happen. The answer is that we should be surprised if these vaccines were not a method to harm people. The same people in charge of the pharmaceutical companies headed America’s biological warfare program. On a government website we find the following:

From the moment of its birth in the highest levels of government, the fledgling biological warfare effort was kept to an inner circle of knowledgeable persons. George W. Merck was a key member of the panel advising President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was charged with putting such an effort together. Merck owned the pharmaceutical firm that still bears his name.

Depression.

Depression is becoming more common throughout the Western world. Depression is caused by brain inflammation, because brain inflammation depletes the body of serotonin. This brain inflammation is the result of vaccines. A good explanation can be found here. It goes without saying that the same companies that produce the vaccines are the ones that sell the anti-depressants. Anti-Depressants are now the most sold drugs in the United States, and adult use of antidepressants almost tripled between the periods 1988-1994 and 1999-2000. The most popular anti-depressant is Prozac, an SSRI patented by Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly also has the patent on Thimerosal, the mercury compound that is added to vaccines and involved in causing autism. In the United States, 37% of autistic children are given SSRI’s like Prozac.
It’s easy to make a profit when you sell products that treat the symptoms caused by the products you sell.

Update (29/08/09): I want to thank everyone who helped spread this report. James Corbett’s website, Corbettreport.com, was one of the first major websites to carry this article.
Hagbud of Infokrieg.TV took the effort to translate this article into German, making my research available to the German speaking public.

St. John’s Wort Again Proven Better than Antidepressant Drugs

(NaturalNews) The popular herbal extract St. John’s wort is more effective at treating the symptoms of depression than any antidepressant drug, and has fewer side effects, researchers from the Centre for Complementary Medicine in Munich have concluded.

“Overall, the St John’s Wort extracts tested in the trials were superior to placebo, similarly effective as standard anti-depressants, and had fewer side effects than standard anti-depressants,” lead researcher Klaus Linde said.

In a study published by the Cochrane Library, the researchers compiled the results of 29 prior trials, involving a total of 5,489 participants who were randomly assigned either St. John’s wort, a placebo, tricylclic antidepressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat mild to moderately severe depression. All studies were double-blind, meaning that neither patients nor researchers knew what kind of treatment each participant was receiving.

St. John’s wort was found to be more effective than a placebo and at least as effective as both tricylics and SSRIs, but with fewer side effects. Patients receiving the herbal treatment were significantly less likely to drop out of studies due to negative side effects than those assigned to take tricyclic antidepressants.

The researchers called their study the most thorough to date, and possibly the first to show that St. John’s wort is effective at treating not only mild, but also severe depression (also known as major depression).

St. John’s wort, known officially as Hypericum perforatum, is a native European perennial herb with distinctive yellow flowers and now grows wild in many parts of the Americas as well. It derives its common name from the tradition of harvesting its flowers on St. John’s day (June 24). Also known as Klamath weed or Tipton’s weed, the plant has been used for centuries as an herbal remedy for depression and sleeping problems.

In recent years, the popularity of the herbal antidepressant has soared as new concerns continue to emerge over pharmaceutical antidepressants, especially SSRIs. In Germany, doctors regularly prescribe it to children and teenagers. In the United Kingdom, it is currently used by two million people.

SSRIs have been shown to significantly increase the risk of suicide in those under the age of 18, and evidence suggests that they may have a similar effect on adults, as well. Recent evidence has also linked use of the drugs by pregnant women with an elevated risk of oral and heart-related birth defects.

With Western health care systems emphasizing drugs for the treatment of mental illness, however, many doctors feel they have no alternatives but to prescribe tricyclics or SSRIs, in spite of the risk. The new study may lead more doctors to prescribe St. John’s wort instead.

Another recent study, conducted by St. James’ University Hospital in Leeds, England, found that St. John’s wort was the only herbal supplement effective at treating depression, in contrast to cat’s claw, ginseng, gingko biloba, liquid tonic and royal jelly.

Researchers remain unsure precisely how St. John’s wort works, in part because the plant contains chemicals from at least seven different families. The most favored explanation is that the herb acts much like an SSRI, slowing the rate at which the neurotransmitter serotonin is removed from the brain. The chemical hyperforin is posited by some as the most active chemical agent in the herb, and has been linked to slowed uptake of not only serotonin but also the neurotransmitters dopamine, noradrenaline, GABA and glutamate. St. John’s wort extracts from which hyperforin has been removed, however, have still been shown to function as effective antidepressants.

Government wants to drug nursing moms on anti-depressants: HR-20 passes house

Five years ago, when my wife was pregnant with our son,  I fought a battle over this issue, to keep them from drugging my wife.  And believe me, if your wife is anything like mine, and trusts the psychiatric industry, this is a difficult battle to fight.  But I did it to protect my son from the known brain damaging effects of antidepresants that pass thru the placenta and the milk into the baby, and cause permanent neural damage. Luckily she didn’t go on the drugs.

Disagreements like this cost me my marriage but thank God she got thru the pregnancy without going on the drugs like they (and she) wanted. My son is healthy and absolutely brilliant. I can only imagine how he would have turned out if he had suffered a daily Prozac drugging.

Babies who’s moms have taken prozac while pregnant often have “weak or absent cry,” or are born “emotionless.”  Any drug that can suppress this essential instinct in a newborn is going to have profound and permanent detrimental effects on neural development.

Big pharma and corporate media will deny it, but seriously people, use a little common sense.  I’ve heard rationalizations such as “If the mother gets upset it reduces blood flow to the fetus, and that can be dangerous.” Even if there is a grain of truth to this, there are millions of years of biological precedent for a fetus to survive maternal distress and anxiety. There is absolutely zero biological precedent for a fetus to survive being poisoned by brand new (evolutionarily speaking) antidepressant drugs.

I don’t want to sound callous with regard to the very real emotional turmoil many women experience while pregnant and post-partum.  Preganancy is no joke.  But do you want to fry your baby’s brain so you can get what you think is going to be some relief from depression and anxiety?

Some studies show SRI drugs are no better than placebo at treating depression.  But many studies show they do cause psychotic breaks, suicide, and other aberrent behavior in a small but significant percentage of users.

This bill only deals with screening for post-partum depression, but I’ve seen first hand how they push drugs on pregnant women as well.  There is plenty of opportunity for them to “evaluate” pregnant women for depression due to constant doctor and hospital visits during pregnancy, and they have no reservations about prescribing anti-depressants in spite of research showing negative impact on neural development of the fetus/baby.

Women: Be strong.  Do not cave to the will of big pharma.  Do not let them fry your baby’s brain in utero and do not let them deny you one of the greatest gifts you can give your child, breastfeeding.

http://www.govtrack.us/co…

A sweeping government policy for all new births in the United States has just passed the House of Representatives and is now headed to the Senate. The Mother’s Act, if passed, will mandate that all new mothers be screened by means of a list of subjective questions that will determine if each mother is mentally fit to take their newborn home from the hospital. Just imagine that after your child is born, you are told that you can’t take them home since a multiple choice questionnaire wasn’t answered correctly. Just imagine being told that the only way you can take your child home is if you or your spouse goes into treatment or on anti-depressants which we know causes psychosis, delusions, and even homocidal thoughts. It just doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, this bill is on a fast track–No public debate, no public disclosure of the broad impact on our society and that is why we need you to act now!

The Mother’s Act violates our Constitutional right to privacy and your right to liberty and it is just outright dangerous. That is why we need you to help stop this. We urgently need you to call and email each Senator on the HELP Committee and tell them you STRONGLY OPPOSE the MOTHER’S ACT and that you are OUTRAGED that there was NO public debate or disclosure on the impact this would have on our society as a whole.

Send a letter by going here: http://salsa.democracyina…

Please call the following Senators on the HELP Committee and tell them that you want the Mother’s Act to die in committee.

Lisa Murkowski, R: 202-224-6665, AK
John McCain, R: 202-224-2235, AZ
Christopher Dodd, D: 202-224-2823, CT
Johnny Isakson, R: 202-224-3643, GA
Tom Harkin, D: 202-224-3254, IA
Pat Roberts, R: 202-224-4774, KS
Edward Kennedy D: 202-224-4543, MA
Barbara Mikulski D: 202-224-4654, MD
Richard Burr, R: 202-224-3154, NC
Kay Hagan, D: 202-224-6342, NC
Judd Gregg, R: 202-224-3324, NH
Jeff Bingaman, D: 202-224-5521, NM
Sherrod Brown, D 202-224-2315, OH
Tom Coburn, R 202-224-5754, OK
Jeff Merkley, D 202-224-3753, OR
Bob Casey, D 202-224-6324, PA
Jack Reed, D 202-224-4642, RI
Lamar Alexander R 202-224-4944, TN
Orrin Hatch R 202-224-5251, UT
Bernard Sanders, I: 202-224-5141, VT
Patty Murray, D, 202-224-2621, WA
Michael Enzi, R, 202-224-3424, WY

Thank you so much for caring enough to call and take action! Remember “We The People” are in charge!
Respectfully,
Sheila Matthews
Cofounder www.ablechild.org

Depression Drug Illegally Marketed to Kids, Kickbacks Paid, FDA Approved Anyway

Written by Derek Markham
VIA EcoChildsPlay
March 22, 2009

A five year probe of Forest Laboratories by the U.S. Justice Department into illegal marketing of Lexapro to children has an ironic twist to it: The FDA just approved the use of Lexapro for depression in children.

“Federal health care programs have paid thousands of false and fraudulent claims for Celexa and Lexapro prescriptions that were not covered for off-label pediatric use and/or were ineligible for payment as a result of illegal kickbacks paid by Forest.”

On February 25, the Justice Department accused Forest of bribing pediatricians to prescribe Celexa and Lexapro with things like spa visits, sports tickets, Broadway shows, and fishing trips. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead to use Lexapro to treat depression in adolescents aged 12 to 17.

Federal prosecutors say Celexa is not any more effective for children or teenagers than taking a placebo, and more patients taking Celexa attempted suicide or reported suicidal thoughts.

The Justice Department prosecutors also claim that both Lexapro and Celexa, another of Forest’s antidepressants, have been improperly used for treating depression in children for a long time. One study showed that Celexa was not effective for use in children, and even Forest admits that the effectiveness was not shown in two different studies, a Lexapro trial with patients aged 7 to 17 and another study of Celexa in adolescents.

Even weirder, Forest Laboratories said that Lexapro’s ability to maintain control of symptoms in adolescents had not been demonstrated, but the FDA concluded that maintenance efficacy can be “extrapolated” from adult data. How’s that for federal intervention – the FDA contradicts the maker of the drug. Makes me wish we had a “WTF?” category for this blog, ’cause “Health” is kinda misleading…

Forest Labs claims that 2 million adolescents in the United States are affected by depression, and Lexapro is only the second approved drug for that age group.

Not surprising, Lexapro is Forest Laboratories’ highest selling product, bringing in over $2 billion a year, and the fifteenth top seller of all prescription drugs in the US.

So who’s getting paid off here?

There’s never any mention made in studies of depression in children about diet or lifestyle, yet many experts have made the connection between the foods we eat and the way we feel. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our practice of prescribing drugs to children was a last resort and not driven by a heavily marketed, payola-based scheme?