Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a Full Story »
Posted by Walter Cox - via Tshiung Han See (t), David Wardell (t), Gianni D'Anna (t), miker1717 (t)
An exceptional piece which details emerging suspicions that the perveyors of psychoactive drugs may be doing more harm than good. Physician Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of "The New England Journal of Medicine," reviews three newly published books and contrasts the viewpoints of the authors. Extremely well-written with information that will be relevant to almost all of us. First of a two-part series.
At least one family member was badly affected by an early SSRI (Paxil) and found it very difficult to break the resulting dependency. Drug companies have aggressively censored negative reports concerning their products--especially violence related to the use of SSRIs--and my personal opinion is that a great deal of harm has come from the indiscriminate pushing of psychoactive drugs by the medical community.
...a fascinating, but not too surprising assessment of the tendency to over-prescribe drugs for perceived mental disorders. The author not only questions the efficacy of the drugs, but also the distinct possibility that they may be doing more harm than good, particularly to young children and teenagers who seem to be over-diagnosed with "disorders" that are treated with powerful drugs with unknown side-effects.
Whereas conditions such as schizophrenia and depression were once mainly self-limited or episodic, with each episode usually lasting no more than six months and ... More »
Most of this article reflects good journalism. One glaring exception is the substitution of aspirin for the drugs to show that the drugs introduce chemical imbalance. The other drugs, besides aspirin, are already in the brain and the drugs do introduce an effect by increased or decreased presence of them during the test. Aspirin, on the other hand, does not have a presence in the untreated body and introduction of the aspirin could not have the same effect as the drugs that increase an already naturally occurring element.
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