It is a central theme of this website that psychiatry has done, and continues to do, a great deal of damage to people it claims to help.
In my opinion, the damage done by neuroleptic drugs is among the most severe. The increasing use of these products ought to be a huge cause for concern.
This is particularly true in that these very toxic drugs are being administered with increasing frequency to children – even to children as young as two years old!
Recently on PR Web I saw a report that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had awarded a $1.2 million grant to Karen Houseknecht, PhD, (University of New England) to study the side effects of “widely prescribed anti-psychotic drugs.” In the opening paragraph of the report it was noted that these “…drugs are increasingly being prescribed off-label to treat a number of … ailments, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children.”
“Anti-psychotics” is what psychiatry/pharma now calls neuroleptics/major tranquilizers. The purpose of the name change is to convey the false impression that these drugs specifically target psychotic thinking. In fact, they are major tranquilizers – they suppress psychotic thinking (somewhat) because they suppress all cognitive activity, at least initially. As the brain habituates to their presence, two things happen. Firstly, it takes increasingly higher doses to maintain the tranquilizing effect; and secondly, the side effects (some of which entail excessive movement) begin to be obvious. There has been some discussion on this website in the past as to what these drugs should be called. Personally, I would like to call them “brain destroyers,” but that could be said of so many psychiatry/pharma products. “Neuroleptics” is probably the best compromise: i.e., something that grabs hold of the brain.
Anyway, my initial reaction to the PRWeb article was positive: somebody’s looking into these side-effects on children. But as I read on, I was a little disappointed. The research is to focus specifically on the effect these drugs have on bone biology. Don’t get me wrong. These drugs are known to cause brain damage, diabetes, and obesity. Identifying bone loss as another adverse side effect is important. But read on: the purpose of the grant is to:
“…study the effects of SGA [second generation antipsychotics] medications on bone biology, and to identify the underlying mechanisms by which these drugs cause bone loss, with the ultimate goals of informing the discovery and development of safer antipsychotic medications and identifying co-therapies that will minimize side effects in patients currently taking SGA medications.”
The agenda, in other words, is not to challenge the use of these dangerous products, but to develop “safer” versions and/or to identify other drugs that could be taken with the neuroleptics that might offset the bone loss problem.
Of course we were told for years by psychiatrists and by pharma that the SGA’s were “safer” than the older neuroleptics.
What’s disturbing about this piece of research is that it assumes that children will go on being prescribed these products. Despite all that has been said and written, the psychiatry/pharmaceutical juggernaut is still on full speed ahead, “saving” humanity one victim at a time from the devastating consequences of its own fictitious illnesses.
Psychiatry/pharma will do absolutely anything it takes to sell more drugs.
And remember, as Dr. Lieberman, president of the APA told us recently: psychiatry has the “moral high ground.”