While I respect people’s opinions. I have to disagree with you and many others who do not believe in mental illness or in psychiatric drugs.

There is some truth there, take for example what I posted about about how drugs increase suicide and suicidality. This can only be if there is some sort of biological underpinning that the drugs are effecting. I have seen people who clearly responded to psychiatric drugs in a very good way. My problem is that when we know of problems or that other approaches might be better we hide the problems and simply push drugs that we know are ineffective or dangerous in certain situations or people just to make money.

I do not want to completely stop the use of psychiatric drugs or the practice of psychiatry. I want the truth to come out so we can do the best we can with what we do know and not be so money hungry that we destroy people and their families simply to make a buck. Even so people will still be hurt because we can’t make a totally safe drug and we can’t predict 100% who will be hurt and who will be helped. But we need to honestly address the problems and minimize the harm as best we can. Drug companies will never do this on their own and they have so completely take over all the checks and balances that I am personally very afraid. I do not know yet if we can trust the incoming administration and Congress to do anything. If not then I fear we are looking at death and maiming on a massive scale worldwide.

Salmon

Salmon

O where o where do I begin with Lamictal. This drug will go down as a classic of how Pharma hides toxicities and markets things.

Notice in the labeling how they talk about suicidality being inherent in bipolar illness. Well what you really need to get is the data for a head to head comparison with placebo eith the same duration of exposure, and look at the time frames and when it occurs. None of this well we continued people on Lamictal for a year, i.e. those who didn’t commit suicide in the first month when it occurs, and when we express the 10 cases on Lamictal per month we get a lower rate than the 1 case on placebo that also occurred during the first month. But we didn’t continue anybody on placebo longer than 1 month in part because it would have screwed up our normalization.

In other words 10 suicides in 100 people on Lamictal during the first month, and only 1 suicide on placebo in 100 people during the first month. Now we continue Lamictal for a year with no more suicides but we don’t continue placebo. So we get 10 suicides per 100 people years on Lamictal and 12 suicides per 100 people years on Placebo.

Now I don’t know if this is what was done with Lamictal but I do know that this has been done with several other drugs for bipolar illness.

Salmon

And Salmon’s remark about the extreme danger of Lamictal is spot on - came within a hair of losing my daughter to it from suicidality. She was prescribed it for bipolar depression. Another crock from Glaxo.

They all come tumbling down. Go Grassley Go!

Just to clarify, you wrote: “Even this article’s description of the web site as offering this service is inaccurate and misleading.”

I wasn’t the one chose to describe the site in this way. I was reporting Grassley’s description - two different things.

Regards
ed

One of the things that Representative Van Hollen has repeatedly pointed to in his legislative career in the Maryland Senate is that he repeatedly pushed for the forced psychiatric medication of patients, which includes forcibly medicating children.

Representative Van Hollen is currently Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and serves on the Oversight and Government Reform committee which oversees FDA.

Prior to running for Congress Representative Van Hollen was in private practice in a lobbying firm that represented many pharmaceutical companies. If you look at the source of his money much of it also appears to be from his ex-associates, and he appears to be building a war chest to run for Senator Mikulski’s seat when she retires and to replace her on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions committee.