Get the Word Out
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Portland psychiatrist and self-styled “Dr. Death” receives license suspension
Stuart Weisberg, MD, who ran a solo psychiatry practice in Northwest Portland and planned to open an assisted suicide clinic in Sellwood, had his medical license suspended on June 24 for unrelated violations, including questionable prescribing practices.
Weisberg said his assisted suicide business was inspired by Jack Kevorkian, a pathologist and euthanasia advocate known as “Dr. Death.”
The Oregon Medical Board issued an Order of Emergency Suspension after the 38-year-old doctor violated the terms of a previous disciplinary order. Weisberg was already on probation and had agreed to meet with a practice mentor twice a week for discussion and chart review. However, earlier this month, Weisberg told the board that he would no longer meet with his mentor, who “no longer supported his ideas pertaining to practice.”
The board found Weisberg in violation of their Corrective Action Order, and added two additional cases to the evidence against him. In one case, Weisberg’s treatment of a patient with depression included Ketamine, a drug in the same class as PCP that is sometimes called “Special K.” In the second case, Weisberg signed a medical marijuana card for a patient with bipolar disorder and a history of substance abuse.
The Oregon Medical Board found that Weisberg’s continued practice would pose an immediate danger to the public and his patients, and directed him to stop practicing medicine immediately.
Weisberg recently began promoting his assisted suicide venture, “Dignity House,” a location where people with terminal illnesses could end their lives in accordance with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, approved in 1997.
Weisberg says he acquired the skills necessary to induce death by treating opiate addicts. His “End of Life Consultants” website details the effects of a fatal overdose, up to and including a “gurgle and a death rattle.” The menu of services includes the following:
- Weisberg’s personal presence at the death, along with his therapy dog: $1,200
- Camera service for a “tasteful, professionally-edited video”: $600
- Catering for breakfast, lunch and dinner: $400
- Media relations (8 hours with a personal assistant/beautician): $400
- Linens and flowers “lovingly” picked from Weisberg’s garden: $400
Oregon’s assisted suicide law requires two doctors to evaluate the patient for depression or signs of psychological impairment that would affect their decision-making capability. The only other states that allow assisted suicide, Washington and Montana, also exclude people whose decisions may be influenced by mental illness.
In Switzerland, however, assisted suicide has been available to persons with mental illness since 2007. The Swiss law was changed after a man with bipolar disorder petitioned the court for the right to end his life, and the court agreed that a lethal dose of medication was appropriate.
Read more: Oregon Medical Board Disciplinary Actions for Stuart Weisberg
2010 Order of Emergency Suspension
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Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
“The proposed DSM5 would be a giant step backwards for psychiatry. American psychiatrists should petition the APA to drop this ill-conceived and badly executed project.”
Psychiatric Times
By Irwin Feinberg, MD
May 27, 2010
A vital consideration we learn in medicine is that continuing life support for a moribund patient past a certain point is harmful to the lives of all concerned. We have reached that point with DSM5. Dr Allen Frances has outlined compelling clinical arguments against many of the new disorders DSM5 proposes and he has shown how their adoption could have far-reaching, unintended, and damaging consequences for the patients we have pledged not to harm, and for society generally.
I write from the vantage point of 50 years of psychobiological research. Most of it is in the field of sleep neuroscience. However, as often happens in science, one thing leads to another and my observations enabled me to propose that the human brain undergoes a profound reorganization during adolescence driven by synaptic pruning and that some cases of schizophrenia might be caused by errors in this process. My association at NIMH with Edward V. Evarts, one of the great neurophysiologists of the last half century, stimulated me to propose that the hallucinations of schizophrenia result from a failure of feed-forward mechanisms that distinguish self-initiated neural activity from that produced by external stimulation, resulting in auditory hallucinations and other first-rank symptoms.
It is difficult and time-consuming to produce reliable new knowledge; it cannot be accomplished by committee fiat, as Drs Kupfer, Schatzberg and Regier seem to be believe. Dr Frances has mentioned the damage to psychiatric research that several new, ill-conceived categories in DSM5 could inflict. He also pointed out that changing nomenclature and diagnostic standards in the absence of compelling scientific justification will severely damage psychiatric research as well as clinical practice. Many of these changes would make it impossible to compare decades of epidemiological results with new findings. Moreover, the sloppy thinking and language in the proposed revision will be apparent to any educated layman. The “field trials” and timetables proposed for new categories are laughable to any statistically trained psychologist. The inevitable public exposure of the gross defects in DSM5 will bring our entire field into disrepute and diminish public support for the research we need.
There have been no research advances that demand new diagnoses and syndromes. Despite many intriguing findings, no psychiatric disease can be diagnosed by a biological or psychological test.
Read entire article: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/display/article/10168/1576554?CID=rs
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The Marketing of Madness: Are we all insane?
A Documentary review by Ingri Cassel
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has been on the cutting edge of exposing the criminal enterprise we know as psychiatry. The documentary, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, chronicled the sordid history of “diagnosed” mental illness and the birth of the psychiatric industry, and became CCHR’s classic debut in professional documentaries. Their latest documentary, The Marketing of Madness, is professionally produced and well organized – in three parts separated into 13 chapters, including a great booklet for summarizing what was presented, and ending with a list of 11 important actions that can be taken after viewing this shocking and compelling documentary.
The film starts out with a brief history of psychiatry and psychology, and how the drug industry reclassified apparent mental disorders of a soul/psyche basis to a brain disorder that required shock therapy, lobotomies and finally drugs (chemical lobotomies) for treatment. To date, psychiatrists have never had to prove that mental conditions they prescribe drugs for have a physical disease basis in the brain. Furthermore, no nutrient deficiency is ever explored in this Pharma-controlled racket to explain various mental anomalies such as depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia, etc., even though countless independent studies using orthomolecular nutrition and diet have been used successfully. Articles printed in medical journals and funded by drug companies claim there is a chemical imbalance in the brain for which psychotropic drugs are necessary to correct the imbalance despite the fact there are no tests performed to support such a claim.
So who was the man historically responsible for this focus on drugging for mental conditions? None other than Sigmund Freud, the man responsible for explaining away parental incest with the Oedipus and Electra complexes, and much more… Freud created a major cocaine epidemic throughout Europe, benefiting Merck and Parke-Davis and making $millions. When this scam was exposed, psychiatrists turned to amphetamines until these drugs were also discovered to be highly addictive, ineffective and toxic.
In 1952 psychiatrists published the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that listed 112 mental disorders that were based on psychiatrists voting for each disorder that is included. With each new edition of the DSM, the number of voted-on behaviors expanded and now encompasses whole population segments. The latest one being voted on will include such behaviors as internet surfing addiction, religious preoccupation and political conspiracy paranoia, making sure the entire population can be classified as mentally ill to justify the need for drugs. In 2007, the market for antipsychotic drugs was a $22.8 billion a year industry.
How safe is this new class of anti-depressant drugs? During the trials, on healthy adults, for Prozac – the first psychotropic drug of its kind, – 50 percent experienced suicidal ideations. But since drug safety testing is done by the drug companies themselves, researchers skewed the results in favor of FDA approval. We now have psychotropic drugs being prescribed for nearly every emotional state, including premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and under a variety of brands – Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Zyban, Celexa, Sarafem, etc. Although these drugs were never approved for use in children, foster children are being prescribed these drugs at alarming rates. In Texas, 60 percent of foster children as young as 3 yrs. old are prescribed psychtropics, and in Massachusetts 66 percent of them are prescribed these drugs. An alarming 75 percent of our soldiers are on psychotropics, leading to the fact that more soldiers are now dying from suicide than in combat.
How can a class of drugs so provably dangerous and addictive be legally prescribed and their use encouraged by psychiatrists, doctors, the government, the media and schools? It all boils down to the power and influence of the pharmaceutical companies through money. Doctors and nurses are required to take continuing medical education (CME) to maintain their state licenses. These classes are state approved yet funded by pharmaceutical companies. Psychiatrists are paid handsomely to teach CMEs since it has been proven that prescribing rates skyrocket after such classes. In other words, CME equates to glorified drug indoctrination classes. An estimated 66 to 75 percent of medical journal articles are funded by drug companies, and 50 percent of medical journal articles endorsing psychiatric drugs are “ghostwritten”. Authors of such studies are unfamiliar with the study data when interviewed. The American Psychiatrist Association convention is also funded by the pharmaceutical industry with both of them lobbying federal and state legislators. This is how programs such as Teenscreen get into our schools. Nine out of ten children screened in schools are prescribed psychotropic drugs with 84 percent of teens being falsely diagnosed. The goal is to get our children hooked on drugs making them lifetime consumers. 66 percent of patient advocacy groups are also funded by drug companies –groups for eating disorders, cancer, depression, addictions, etc.
We are bombarded in the media, on the internet and through “educational” programs:”You are sick; we have the answer; Ask Your Doctor.” There are obvious conflicts of interest due to $millions in media advertising – the reason we are not hearing of the provable adverse reactions to these drugs and the resulting suicides, homicides and addictions. Due to the ignorance of consumers and the ability to pump subliminal messages through TV commercials, doctors are now being told by their patients what drugs they want them to prescribe. An independent study was conducted where actors went to doctors requesting a specific drug and a full 50 percent of doctors were willing to fulfill their prescription requests. How can this be? Since 1997, the year that Big Pharma pressured Congress to relax advertising rules via commercials on TV/radio, requiring that only a few of the adverse side effects be mentioned at the end of the commercial, has lead to the average TV viewer watching 16,000 hours of drug advertising per year.
And this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding what this information–packed, SHOCKING documentary contains. For those of you who value your soul’s connection to your Creator, these drugs were designed to cut off this connection. Once you are addicted to these drugs, it is SO important that you follow a very specific protocol for getting off of them. Frankly, if we are going to save our country at this stage of the game, it will be because enough people were able to assimilate this documentary and take the appropriate action to put an end to this madness.
The Marketing of Madness is a full three-hour documentary on DVD. It is recommended that you take the time to watch it in two segments, taking notes. Available from The I.O. for $25 including S&H. Send check or M.O. to P.O. Box 457, Spirit Lake, Idaho 83869 or order through PayPal by clicking here.
“I think we’re going to see a huge, huge increase in viOlence and suicide and a lot of bizarre behaviors that we haven’t seen. Because only in the last sixty years have we really started intoxicating our brain with these incredibly toxic, toxic substances”
The Idaho Observer – http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20100226.html
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Drug linked to suicide: coroner
Andrew Livingstone
Northern News Services
Published Monday, March 15, 2010
SOMBA K’E/YELLOWKNIFE – A drug commonly prescribed to deal with depression is beginning to show a pattern of problems, according to the territory’s chief coroner, particularly when given to people who are suicidal.
A recently released report on a 20-year-old man who committed suicide in 2009 has spurred the coroner’s office to recommend changes as to how Venlafaxine, more commonly known as Effexor, is given to patients who are at a high risk of harming themselves.
The young Inuk man, who was living in Yellowknife before his death, had a history of alcohol abuse and previous suicide attempts before his death Feb. 1, 2009. He had gone to Stanton Territorial Hospital that day with an empty bottle of Venlafaxine, an antidepressant he had been prescribed less than a month prior to his death. During a medevac flight to Calgary for further treatment, he suffered cardiac arrest, forcing the plane to land in Edmonton, where he died shortly after.
A toxicology report revealed the man had a fatal dose – 59 times the therapeutic level – of Venlafaxine in his blood stream.
“When you’ve got someone who is threatening suicide, you don’t give them that much medication, any kind of medication,” said Garth Eggenberger, chief coroner for the NWT.
“Our office is having a problem with Effexor. Looking at the stuff, you can appreciate that it’s not the best drug out there.”
On Effexor’s website, it states, “Patients of all ages who are started on antidepressant therapy should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behaviour.”
It also reports that overdoses are most commonly associated with the use of other drugs and alcohol. An overdose can cause a rapid heartbeat, seizures, liver damage and deaths have been reported, according to the company.
Effexor’s manufacturer, Wyeth, also reports that prescriptions should be given in only small doses.
Late Friday afternoon, Eggenberger released another coroner’s report, this one into the death of Phil McNeil, the Yellowknife man who went missing in October 2008. McNeil’s remains were found by a hiker last May near Con Mine.
Two days prior to his death McNeil was prescribed Effexor by his psychiatrist. “We see a concern with the effects of the Effexor and people not understanding the side-effects,” said Eggenberger.
“I know that from a few of the drug stores, the person had to ask for (information) and you really need to understand what you’re reading. (We’re) asking for a plain language thing.”
Eggenberger said the territorial Mental Health Act needs to be reviewed, particularly when it comes to the period of time health authorities can take people suffering from mental illnesses into custody, which is currently a maximum of 24 hours.
“It’s our feeling that the time spent there (at Stanton) is not long enough to address their other issues.”
He said a Kugluktuk man who had stopped taking medication prescribed for his schizophrenia and hanged himself is another example of the limitations of the Mental Health Act. “We’ve had other cases where they’ve been to the psych ward and they’ve been there for 24 hours and they are asked if they’re going to harm themselves and they say no and then they are on their way,” said Eggenberger.
The coroner’s office determined the death of a Yellowknife man in 2006, while considered accidental, was caused by an overdose of Effexor. The man, 32 at the time, had “a high level” of the drug in his system.
In 2004, Health Canada advised that Effexor can cause “severe agitation-type adverse events coupled with self-harm or harm to others. The agitation-type events include hostility and aggression, and in “some cases, the events occurred within several weeks of starting treatment.”
In the month leading up to his death, the 20-year-old Inuk man had attempted suicide three times, all while intoxicated – once by cutting himself, the other two by drug overdose. He was given a three-month prescription, 90 tablets, for Venlafaxine after being released from the hospital on Jan. 4, 2009, the first of three admittances that month.
Police were called to his home Jan. 7, 2009 because he had apparently taken some of the prescription and assaulted his mother. While police were at his home, he swallowed a handful of the pills.
“He was on the psychiatric ward a couple of times so he would’ve seen the psychiatrist,” Eggenberger said. “Part of the problem is the way the Mental Health Act is written. If he’s not doing imminent harm to himself or another individual then he has to be released.”
The report on his death, completed by deputy chief coroner Cathy Menard, also recommends to Health and Social Services that physicians be educated on how to deal with high-risk patients when prescribing medication, preferably giving partial prescriptions. The department should also provide warning notices on the dangers of prescribing Venlafaxine to patients “where mental depression or suicidal tendencies” may be of concern, she wrote.
Eggenberger said events in previous cases form a pattern, and said something needs to be done to address the ability of the health care system to deal with patients having suicidal thoughts.
“We are looking at that as long as we get the right case,” he said. “That’s the problem. We have to wait for the case to justify our recommendation. It’s unfortunate, we can see a pattern but until we get the right case we can’t bring the pattern forward. We have to rely on the evidence. We know there is something wrong.”
Umesh Sutendra, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Services, said the department just received the chief coroner’s report and wouldn’t be able to comment on it until later this week.
Nunavut’s chief coroner has ordered an inquest into the dramatic death of Julian Tologanak-Labrie, a 20-year-old Cambridge Bay man who committed suicide in April 2009. The inquest is scheduled for next month in Cambridge Bay.
On the night of April 14, 2009, an agitated Tologanak-Labrie was taken from a hotel to Stanton Territorial Hospital by Yellowknife RCMP. He was released the next morning. Later that afternoon, he jumped 7,000 metres to his death from an Adlair Air King Air 200 plane during a flight home between Yellowknife and Cambridge Bay.
http://nnsl.com/northern-news-services/stories/papers/mar15_10drg.html
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Taking Antidepressants During Pregnancy Doubles Heart Defect Risk of Newborn
Friday, February 19, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
(NaturalNews) Women who take certain antidepressant drugs while pregnant may double their child’s risk of being born with a certain variety of heart defect, according to a study conducted by researchers from Aarhaus University in Denmark and published in the medical journal BMJ.
“Anyone who is pregnant or considering becoming pregnant and has any concerns about the treatment for depression should speak to their doctor,” said Cathy Ross of the British Heart Foundation.
Researchers compared the risk of birth defects in 1,370 children born to women who took at least one selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) while pregnant with the risk in 400,000 other children whose mothers had not taken any SSRIs while pregnant. They found that the drugs fluoxetine (marketed as Prozac), sertraline (marketed as Zoloft) and citalopram (marketed as Celexa) all significantly increased the risk that a child would be born with a defect in the septum, which separates the right and left halves of the heart.
Septum defects include a variety of conditions from minor blood vessel problems to outright holes in the heart. The researchers found that one extra septum defect would develop for every 246 pregnant women taking an SSRI during the time period from 28 days before through 112 days after conception.
Taking more than one SSRI drastically increased the risk of septum defects. While the risk of the defects was 0.5 percent in mothers not taking the drugs and 0.9 percent in those taking one drug (an 80 percent increase), it was 2.1 percent in mothers taking two or more (a more than 300 percent increase).
Sertraline appeared to increase the risk more than citalopram or fluoxetine did.
The study is not the first linking SSRIs to birth defects. Previous research has found a link between the drugs and defects of the heart and of other bodily systems.
http://www.naturalnews.com/028202_antidepressants_heart_defects.html; Sources for this story include: www.reuters.com; www.telegraph.co.uk.
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The Mothers Act Disease Mongering Campaign
The Mothers Act represents the ultimate example of disease mongering at its worst because the eight-year attempt to pass this federal legislation has evolved into profiteering never before exhibited so conspicuously.
Disease mongering “is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments,” according to Ray Moyniahan and David Henry in the April 11, 2006 paper in PLoS Med, titled, “The Fight against Disease Mongering.”
Click here for the five-part investigative article series by award-winning journalist Evelyn Pringle. Courtesy of NaturalNews
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Mothers Act Promotes Pregnancy as Cottage Industry
Women of childbearing years represent the most lucrative market for the makers of psychiatric drugs. The knowledge that infants were being born with birth defects and suffering a withdrawal syndrome when these drugs were used during pregnancy was hidden for decades. Knowledge of these terrible risks would have caused a major drop in sales to this customer base.
Ever since the warnings about birth defects started trickling out a few years ago, the drug companies apparently have been plotting to find ways to reverse their negative impact. But the most sinister plot ever developed is a bill moving for approval in the US Senate right now called the “Melanie Blocker-Stokes Mother’s Act,” to set up the screening of all pregnant women for mental illness.
Read more at: http://uniteforlife.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/mothers-act-promotes-pregnancy-as-cottage-industry-by-evelyn-pringle/
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How Vested Interests Created the Perfect Marketing/Lobbying Machine: Mental Health “Advocacy” Groups—Funded by Pharma
by CCHR International
An ongoing U.S. Senate investigation headed by Senator Charles Grassley has sought disclosure of pharmaceutical funding paid to researchers, physicians, medical schools and medical journals. Some of the nation’s most prominent psychiatrists have now been exposed for extensive conflicts of interest amounting to millions in undisclosed pharmaceutical funding, including Dr. Charles Nemeroff, Dr. Joseph Biederman, Dr. Melissa DelBello, Dr. Timothy Wilens, Dr. Thomas Spencer, Dr. Alan Schatzberg, Dr. Martin Keller, Dr. A. John Rush, Dr. Karen Wagner, Dr. Jeffrey Bostic and Dr. Frederick Goodwin — many of which serve as advisory board members to mental illness “advocacy groups” which are now also the subject of the Senate investigation for their undisclosed pharmaceutical funding.
Read entire article at: http://www.cchrint.org/2009/12/10/3472/
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http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/1208/1224260292813.html
The Irish Times – Tuesday, December 8, 2009
ECT without consent
Madam, – On the subject of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) without consent (Home News, December 7th), it is important we listen to people such as Mary Maddock who are speaking after having had ECT, and personally suffered its effects.
Professionals who advocate it don’t have to undergo it. Instead, they note that after the shock is administered to patients, there is sometimes a lightening of mood – euphoria (which is the natural reaction to shock), but very soon this subsides, and the patient returns to depression again, this time with an impaired brain.
It may be that ECT is a drastic remedy, but the cure may be worse than the disease. Trust and confidence are slow to repair, and the loss to memory, especially the time leading up to the treatment – makes the patient very vulnerable. The fact that vessels and connections are ruptured, and cannot be repaired, as it is a closed head wound – all make this treatment undesirable. In some cases the result is more incapacity.
The loss of memory can be permanent and the nature of the treatment, which is invasive and akin to rape by machine, makes it difficult to justify. There may indeed be desperate cases requiring desperate remedies, but this is as if you could fix a television or engine with a sledgehammer – you might just hit on the right bit! Sometimes it works, but the usual result is further damage.
It is often sensitive individuals, prone to emotional illness, who are given this treatment, where there is no respect for mind, or bodily integrity. They live out their lives in fear, until people like Mary Maddock speak out. Thankfully, some have survived: like Austin Clarke, and Paul Durcan, but it a slow process.
This treatment has been described by Ted Hughes as “an atrocity” in a letter to me about Sylvia Plath and her experience of ECT (which is now in the British Library).
I should add that I am a survivor myself. – Yours, etc,
ROSEMARIE ROWLEY,
Rosemount Court,
Booterstown, Co Dublin.
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Gabriel Myers finally matters.
Too late for him — the foster kid we addled with anti-depressants and anti-psychotics without quite knowing the effects drug cocktails might have on a 7-year-old.
One potential side effect of feeding Lexapro, Zyprexa and Symbyax to a 67-pound child became grotesquely obvious. Young Gabriel coiled a shower hose around his neck and hanged himself in the bathroom of his Miramar foster home.
Gabriel’s death on April 15 roiled child advocates, critics of the pharmaceutical industry, the media. But this week, a child’s suicide finally elicited a reaction where it matters.
“I tell you, we’re going to do something. We’re going to do a full-court press,” said State Sen. Tony Hill, a Jacksonville Democrat, still shocked after members of the Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee were briefed Wednesday by the Gabriel Myers Task Force.
UNACCEPTABLE
Committee Chair Rhonda Storms, a Valrico Republican, told reporters, “I cannot accept or believe that a little child cannot be reached except by drugging him and drugging him and drugging him.”
The task force catalogued drug regimens for foster children that the FDA never approved for children. It described a system blighted by haphazard oversight. No one within the child-care bureaucracy took direct responsibility for the child’s complex psychological needs. No one was looking out for a profoundly troubled child’s best interest.
Hill railed that Gabriel’s foster parents, schools, case workers and doctors hardly spoke to one another as his problems escalated. “No communication,” he said, his voice rising in anger.
Child advocate Andrea Moore
No one acted as a parent. A vigilant, caring parent would have questioned a pharmaceutical solution to the little boy’s behavior. Child advocate Andrea Moore read the task force report and worried that the doctors had responded more to bureaucratic needs of the system than the therapeutic needs of children. About 22 percent of the foster children aged 6 to 12, and a third of foster kids 13 to 17, are on psychiatric drugs. Such numbers, utterly out of whack with the general population, defy any explanation other than foster kids were to be transformed into compliant little zombies.
“We’re going to find out,” Hill promised, describing a bipartisan fury. “We’re going to find out why doctors are writing these prescriptions, and we’re going to find out about the relationship between the doctors and drug companies.”
`MAJOR CHANGE’
Advocates like Moore have long complained that state foster care facilities administered psychotropics in lieu of providing real therapy. Five years ago, the Legislature passed supposed safeguards to rein in the pill madness. Obviously, they didn’t work.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies have been encouraging doctors to prescribe unapproved, off-label uses for their expensive, profitable drugs.
DCF has promised to revisit psychotropics regulations. Hill promised tough legislation. “Major, major change is coming. The whole committee is behind this.” He said drug companies “can lobby all they want. They can’t stop this.”
It took the death of a child to arouse the legislators. “I admit, I didn’t know this was going on before Gabriel,” Hill said, using the boy’s name to describe a tragic event. “That should never have happened to a child.”
But now, hopefully, it matters.
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It’s now clear that the pharmaceutical industry that claims its goal is to improve lives is just as likely as any other industry to manipulate the truth to make a buck. Even more disturbing: Drug companies have found a stable of doctors willing to help them in exchange for cash or prestige. Doctors should know better, particularly those affiliated with medical schools, and the medical schools should adopt stricter rules.
Recent disclosures, forced by court cases or federal regulators, have laid bare the complicity of doctors, including some in Tampa Bay, in helping drug companies sell their products. Experts estimate for each $1 spent on such marketing, companies reap $12 in increased prescription sales. When doctors receive thousands of dollars from drugmakers to help deliver their message, it creates an inherent conflict of interest with their primary job: Caring for their patients. Medical schools should be attacking this ethical problem directly, particular in an era when costs are leaving many uninsured.
Some schools, such as Harvard and Stanford, have banned the lucrative relationships. Short of that, medical schools should at least require strict reporting and public disclosure, with serious consequences for lapses. That hasn’t been the case in the past at the University of South Florida College of Medicine.
The St. Petersburg Times‘ Kris Hundley reported on Sunday how drugmaker Wyeth for years paid for and influenced the ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing education conferences in an effort to boost sales of its hormone treatments for menopause. The campaign continued even after a federal study indicated the drugs might make it harder to detect breast cancer in patients. Dr. James Fiorica, then a professor at USF and head of the gynecologic oncology program at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, was among those who participated. He chaired a Wyeth-backed conference and signed his name to two ghostwritten articles. He, like other doctors earning money from pharmaceutical companies, said he never signed his name to a position he couldn’t scientifically defend.
And last month, Hundley wrote about Eli Lilly & Co.’s program that paid physicians tens of millions of dollars in the first quarter of this year to talk about its drugs. One of Lilly’s highest paid physicians and its top earner in the Tampa Bay area is Dr. Maria-Carmen Wilson, a neurologist and USF professor who is director of Tampa General Hospital’s Headache & Pain Center. She was paid $54,400 in the first quarter of the year for speaking with fellow doctors about Lilly’s Cymbalta drug on 27 occasions. Wilson reached Lilly’s annual cap of $75,000 in May.
Nonetheless, Wilson failed to follow USF policy to get prior approval before making presentations on behalf of a drugmaker. Wilson also failed to inform USF when she took free trips to Scotland and Spain for drugmaker Astra-Zeneca. Last month, USF approved Wilson’s Lilly activities retroactively.
Another USF-affiliated physician, Dr. Brian Keefe, also failed to disclose earning $15,000 from Lilly in the first quarter.
In April, USF medical school announced new reporting guidelines for interactions between faculty and drug and medical device makers. But it seems the message has not gotten through, and faculty who ignore the rules are retroactively given a pass.
USF’s answer is that more clarity is coming. Dr. Stephen K. Klasko, CEO for USF Health and dean of the College of Medicine, says he has convened a group to look at all faculty relationships with pharmaceutical companies in order to make new rules and reporting requirements “as simple and as consistently enforceable and as clear as possible.”
“We’re going to have a zero tolerance policy,” Klasko says.
That can’t happen soon enough. Patients rely on doctors to give them the best treatment possible, not just the treatment they’re paid to support.
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August 18, 2009
Psychiatrist gets 10 months, gave fake citizenship waivers to 492
BY BEN SCHMITT
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
A West Bloomfield psychiatrist was sentenced to 10 months in prison today for conspiring to commit naturalization fraud, admitting he falsified diagnoses to help people gain U.S. citizenship without passing the English proficiency portions of naturalization exams.
Between 1999 and 2001, Chilakamarri Ramesh, 55, worked at a Dearborn immigration clinic called Four A’s Hope Global Psychological Evaluation Center and performed psychiatric evaluations on naturalization applicants, according to federal agents.
Ramesh falsely diagnosed applicants with mental retardation, post-traumatic stress disorder, learning disabilities and dementia.
According to the indictment in U.S. District Court in Detroit, Ramesh signed 953 false and fraudulent naturalization waiver forms for 492 citizenship applicants in Dearborn, Cleveland, St. Louis and Chicago. He pleaded guilty May 18 in front of Judge Julian Cook.
“We must be vigilant to prevent fraud in connection with citizenship applications,” said U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg. “Those who seek the privilege of becoming U.S. citizens must do so honestly and without any misrepresentations.”
Brian Moskowitz, special agent in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office for Michigan and Ohio, said: “American citizenship is a privilege, not a right. Obtaining citizenship through fraud is an affront to every person who has played by the rules.
Ramesh has been an assistant professor at Wayne State University since 1990 and was chairman of the St. John Hospital department of psychiatry in 1995-2000.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Leonid Feller and Jonathan Tukel.
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August 5, 2009
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/health-care/1595
All Doped Up
Written by R. Cort Kirkwood
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 12:30
Between 1996 and 2005, Reuters reports, the use of anti-depressants doubled to nearly 10 percent of the American population. In 1996, the figure was 13 million. Now, it’s 27 million.
Those numbers, obviously, should cause some worry.
For one thing, the suicide rate for middle-aged people is rising, Reuters reported, suicide being a risk factor in taking antidepressants. According to the Journal of Preventative Medicine, the suicide rate for middle-aged Americans increased 16 percent from 1999 to 2008, which roughly coincides with the massive increase in anti-depressant use.
Indeed, such is the risk for suicide that each container carries a “black box warning.” The Food and Drug Administration issued the mandate to carry the warning in 2007. Studies had shown the drugs increased the risk of suicide in teens and children. Clearly, as the psychiatrist quoted for the Reuters piece suggested, they might just increase the risk for the middle-aged as well.
For another thing, while these folks, most of them baby boomers, are usually killing only themselves, their children aren’t. The baby boomers’ kids take others with them before they commit suicide.
Recall that several of the notorious school shooters were taking such medications, most notably Eric Harris, one of the two shooters at Columbine High in Colorado. Harris and his partner, Dylan Klebold, slaughtered 12 students and a teacher, while injuring 21, before killing themselves. Harris was taking Luvox.
Kipland P. Kinkel was taking Prozac when he shot up Thurston High in Springfield, Oregon, killing two and injuring 25. Kinkel is serving life in prison.
Jeff Weise, who murdered nine, including his grandfather and five students at Red Lake High School in Minnesota, before killing himself, also was taking Prozac.
Investigators also believed Cho Seung Hui was taking an antidepressant when he massacred 30 persons at Virginia Tech, then killed himself, in 2007.
Given the school shootings, one wonders whether the drugs increase the risk not just of suicide but of violent behavior as well. One peer-reviewed journal flatly asserts that antidepressants foment violent behavior.
Yet even more frightening than nearly 10 percent of Americans taking drugs is one subset of the population taking them. It isn’t just baby boomers and their teenagers. Even two- and four-year-olds are getting doped. No one, of course, knows what these drugs do to a developing brain.
The point here isn’t that some people don’t need anti-depressants. Depression is a real and debilitating condition. Some medicine may help. Therapy may help as well. Point is, common sense should tell us that the number of people suffering real depression could not have doubled in a less than 10 years.
That leaves the question of why so many Americans are popping pills. The report says the stigma associated with treatment for depression has abated, and its less expensive to take a drug than see a therapist. But given that more Americans than ever are taking the drugs, and the patients receiving them are taking more of the drugs than ever, another answer is obvious: the psychiatrists who prescribe them, and the drug companies who sell them, are making a fortune. Sales topped $11 billion in 2008. Two drugs, Effexor and Cymbalta, captured half the market share, $6.63 billion.
It’s a fast way to make a buck.
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July 27, 2009
Medical Whistleblower interviews Eli Lilly Insider Dr. John Virapen
Diary Entry by MedicalWhistleblower
Medical Whistleblower will be interviewing Dr. John Virapen live on BlogTalk Radio on Monday July 27 at 9 AM Central Time. Dr. John Virapen has been working for more than 30 years for the pharmaceutical industry, as manager for Eli-Lilly and Novo Nordisk. There have been years of withheld information regarding the adverse side effects of pharmaceuticals promoted by Eli Lilly.
Medical Whistleblower will be interviewing Former Eli Lilly executive, Dr. John Virapen Ph.D. on Monday July 27, 2009 at 9 AM Central Time on BlogTalkRadio. Dr. John Virapen has been working for more than 30 years for the pharmaceutical industry, as manager for Eli-Lilly and Novo Nordisk. He lives now in Germany and has written about his experiences in the pharmaceutical industry in a block buster book, Side Effects: Death, which is available in English, Swedish and German. This information is very especially important in the wake of the recent $1.4 billion settlement from drug maker, Eli Lilly. The drug giant, Eli Lilly, recently plead guilty to promoting its drug Zyprexa for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Eli Lilly was found guilty of pushing Zyprexa for extra label uses, withholding research to the public and false advertising. The criminal fine of $515 million is the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind. Eli Lilly will also pay up to $800 million in a civil settlement with the federal government and the states.
There have been years of withheld information regarding the adverse side effects of pharmaceuticals promoted by Eli Lilly, including the possible role of Prozac in inducing suicide and homicide. The signs of drug induced violence and suicidality were there since Prozac was first tested in premarketing trials. There were reports of Prozac’s adverse side effects of psychotic episodes; reports of completed suicides and attempted suicides, seizures, and even movement disorders.
Oraflex, the American version of Benoxaprofen, was withdrawn from the market in 1982, just one month after gaining FDA approval. A British medical journal found five cases of death due to jaundice in patients taking the drug and the FDA accused Eli Lilly of suppressing unfavorable research findings.
The health risks of Zyprexa included an increased risk for diabetes through Zyprexa’s links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar. Zyprexa is Lilly’s top-selling drug, with sales of $4.2 billion and over 20 million people worldwide who have taken Zyprexa. Eli Lilly is accused of aggressively marketing Zyprexa and other drugs for extra-label uses by primary care physicians. Long term effects of the use of SSRI’s like Zyprexa have not been fully independently studied but these drugs are routinely prescribed for long term use. Preliminary studies point to serious potential adverse side effects of chronic use including movement disorders, cardiac problems, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
Join us for the radio show on Monday July 27 at 9 AM Central Time (10 AM Eastern Time or 7 AM Pacific Time) call (34…. click on the Medical Whistleblower show on the internet and listen through your computer at www.blogtalkradio.com/medicalwhistleblower.
See Dr. John Virapen on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-8ItXRMPfA
Read about his story on the web at: click here
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July 24, 2009
Pfizer faces first Neurontin court fight
July 24, 2009 — 10:20am ET | By Tracy Staton
Pfizer goes to court next week in its first defense of the epilepsy med Neurontin. In what’s expected to be the first of some 1,200 cases involving the drug’s possible links to suicide, the presiding judge has already called the suit “very tough” for the plaintiffs to win, Bloomberg reports. Nonetheless, the legal community is watching this trial closely for indications of Pfizer’s defense strategy.
Court filings offer a taste of what’s to come. Pfizer claims that the suicide victim, Susan Bulger, had attempted suicide “multiple times” before she ever took Neurontin. In addition, Bulger had a history of addiction to cocaine, heroin, Methadone and Oxycontin, Pfizer filings claim. Robert Rabin, a law professor at Stanford, told Bloomberg, “If she was taking other drugs, there’s a question if this particular drug contributed to the suicide.”
Complicating matters for Pfizer, however, is a recent FDA warning that epilepsy meds boost the risk of suicide. Plus, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Mark Lanier–well known from his involvement in Vioxx litigation–says he plans to highlight Pfizer’s checkered past with Neurontin. As you know, the company’s Warner-Lambert unit paid $430 million in 2004 to resolve off-label marketing claims from the U.S. Justice Department. The plaintiffs in the Bulger case are allowed to introduce evidence about that settlement, Bloomberg notes.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=adHMfqi6biJU#
:::::::: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090722/ap_on_re_us/us_virginia_tech_shooting
Va. Tech gunman’s mental records found in home
RICHMOND, Va. – Mental health records for Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho that were missing for more than two years have been discovered in the home of the university clinic’s former director, according to a state memo sent to victims’ family members.
Cho killed 32 people on April 16, 2007, then committed suicide as police closed in. His mental health treatment has been a major issue in the vast investigation of the shootings, yet the records’ location had eluded authorities until they were uncovered by attorneys for some families of Cho’s victims.
A memo from Gov. Tim Kaine’s chief legal counsel to victims’ family members says Cho’s records and those of several other Virginia Tech students were found last week in the home of Dr. Robert C. Miller. The memo was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The memo said Cho’s records were removed from the Cook Counseling Center on the Virginia Tech campus more than a year before the shootings, when Miller transferred from his position at the clinic. Records for several other students were also at his home, the memo said.
“I appreciate your call, but I’m not making comment at this time,” Miller said when reached at a number for his private practice.
Kaine said a Virginia State Police criminal investigation was under way into how the records disappeared from the center where Cho was ordered to undergo counseling. Removing records from the center is illegal, he said.
Kaine said he was dismayed that it took two years before they were found by the attorneys.
“That is part of the investigation that I am very interested in and, of course, I’m very concerned about that,” Kaine said.
The medical records are protected under state privacy laws. The state planned to release the records publicly as soon as possible, either by consent from Cho’s estate or through a subpoena.
The discovery calls into question the thoroughness of the criminal probe two years ago and the findings of a commission Kaine appointed to review the catastrophe, one victim’s relative said.
“Deception comes to my mind in my first response,” said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings.
“To say it doesn’t make sense is an injustice,” she said. “It gives me the impression: ‘What else are they hiding?’”
She praised Kaine’s willingness to investigate the disappearance of the records and have them released.
“Until we get all the answers to what happened on that day and days prior, there’s no sense of closure,” Grimes said.
Andrew Goddard, whose son, Colin, survived four gunshots, welcomed the new information.
“We’re not looking to hang people. We’re looking for more of the truth about what happened,” he said.
While a large part of the shooting investigation focused on how university officials and law enforcement responded following the first reports of deaths in a Virginia Tech dormitory, family members of victims have also inquired how the troubled Cho slipped through the cracks at university counseling.
In April, on the second anniversary of the shootings, families of two slain students sued the state, the school and its counseling center, several top university officials and a local mental health agency, claiming gross negligence in the chain of events that allowed Cho to commit his killing spree.
The lawsuits also claim the local health center where Cho had gone to say he felt suicidal did not adequately treat or monitor him.
The discovery shakes up that lawsuit, an attorney for the two families said.
“Why would he (Miller) take any student mental health records to his home at any time, and why that student?” Robert T. Hall said.
“It certainly is a question of whether there is more to the Seung-Hui Cho mental health history than we’ve been told,” Hall said in a telephone interview from vacation in Vermont.
Goddard, who was appointed last year to the state board of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services, said he wasn’t sure how helpful the records would be.
But he said if they showed Cho was “anything other than this mildly upset student,” that needed to come out.
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http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=821203&category=ALBANY
Shock treatment stirs debate in state:
Woman who ‘lost years’ works to ban procedure
By PAUL GRONDAHL, Staff writer
First published in print: Saturday, July 18, 2009
They are lost years for Linda Andre.
Andre was a graduate student studying writing and photography at New York University when she was subjected to involuntary electroshock therapy in 1984 during a period of severe depression and commitment to a psychiatric hospital.
“Those years were taken away from me, just erased. I have no memory of several years after I was told shock treatment was harmless. I’ll never get those years back,” said Andre, author of a new book critical of the controversial treatment in which a jolt of electricity is sent though electrodes attached to a person’s temples at a level that produces a grand mal seizure in the brain.
The 49-year-old New York City resident was in Albany this week to lobby legislators to pass a bill banning shock treatment on children and to
take part in a protest in front of the state Office of Mental Health.
She also planned to sign copies of her book, “Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Shock Treatment,” recently published by Rutgers University Press.
Andre has become a leading voice in a national debate over electroshock treatment, pitting patients who say they received relief from crushing depression by being shocked against people who say it did not work and left them with serious memory loss and other cognitive impairments.
Electroshock treatment, which is legal in New York and most states, is depicted in memorable and horrifying scenes in movies ranging from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “The Changeling.”
The American Psychiatric Association and other medical experts, however, as well as federal and state regulators, consider shock treatment done with a patient’s consent and under accepted guidelines to be a relatively safe and effective means to combat severe and chronic depression among patients who have considered suicide and for whom other treatments have not worked.
More refined equipment and techniques have improved shock treatment to the point that it no longer resembles the barbaric, gruesome cinematic images or the way it was routinely administered as recently as two
decades ago, its supporters say.
A leading proponent of shock treatment is Kitty Dukakis, the wife of
former presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who in her 2006 book, “Shock,” credited the “last resort” treatment with saving her life after a lifetime of depression, battles with drug and alcohol addiction and 25 years of taking antidepressants.
But a group of advocates, led by Andre, are seeking an outright ban of electroshock treatment, as a handful of states, including Texas, have adopted.
“There is no such thing as a safe amount of shock. That’s a myth. Any current through your brain is too much current,” Andre said.
On Monday, in advance of Tuesday’s protest, state OMH officials released a policy advisory that requires tighter restrictions and additional limits on the use of shock treatment, also known as electroconvulsive therapy, on children under the age of 16.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/nyregion/15hospital.html
July 15, 2009
Criminal Inquiry Begins in Waiting-Room Death
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
A criminal investigation has begun into the death of a patient on a
waiting room floor at a city-run psychiatric hospital in Brooklyn last
year, the Brooklyn district attorney said on Tuesday.
The district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said that a grand jury had
begun an inquiry into the death of Esmin Green, 49, who died early on
June 19, 2008, about 24 hours after arriving by ambulance at Kings
County Hospital Center’s psychiatric emergency room, where doctors said she was schizophrenic and ordered her to be involuntarily committed.
According to hospital protocol, Ms. Green should have been given a
medical examination before she was admitted.
Instead, she was left in the waiting room, where she eventually
collapsed on the floor and died of a blood clot the next morning.
The case became a symbol of callous treatment of psychiatric patients
after the New York Civil Liberties Union and other lawyers released a
security video that showed Ms. Green writhing and lying on the floor
while workers ignored her.
Last month, the city’s Department of Investigation issued a report that
could become a template for the grand jury investigation. It named
three doctors and three nurses or nurse’s aides, saying that they were
complicit either in the neglect of the patient or in a cover-up over a
period of four shifts.
Although the medical examiner found that Ms. Green had died of a blood
clot, ruling out homicide, it is possible that the grand jury could
consider lesser charges related to her death or to the falsification of
hospital records. A spokesman for Mr. Hynes declined to say what
charges might be considered.
The city report said that contrary to protocol, Bernardita Cabildo, the
head nurse for the midnight to 8 a.m. shift on June 18, did not add Ms.
Green to the “24-Hour Observation Sheet” that lists incoming patients.
Dr. Rashed Abedin told investigators, according to the report, that he
had made three unsuccessful attempts to examine Ms. Green during the
next shift, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.; he
said she was uncooperative.
But investigators found that Dr. Abedin’s account was contradicted by
the surveillance video and by written notes.
The city found that two other doctors, Dr. Dimitru Magardician and Dr.
David Estes, who ultimately pronounced her dead, made no effort to
examine Ms. Green during a third shift, and that during the fourth, Ms.
Green had no contact with any doctors and little contact with nursing
staff until she died at 6:35 a.m.
The city found that a senior nurse, Aida Gonzalo, made three false
entries in Ms. Green’s medical records, making it appear that she had
been in normal condition 45 minutes before she was discovered on the
floor. A nursing aide, Royal Easton, was found to have made false
entries indicating that he had checked on Ms. Green and found that she
was sleeping, when in fact Mr. Easton was on a break.
There were so few patients in the waiting room during the night that
the two nurses, Ms. Gonzalo and Ms. Cabildo, were taking a break at the
time Ms. Green collapsed about 5:30 a.m., the report said.
Ana Marengo, a spokeswoman for the city’s Health and Hospitals
Corporation, said the agency would be “fully supportive” of the
investigation. She said that the three doctors and one nurse, Ms.
Cabildo, were still working at the hospital.
Calls on Tuesday afternoon to the doctors at the hospital and at their
homes were not immediately returned. Ms. Cabildo, reached at the
hospital, declined to comment. Ms. Gonzalo did not respond to a message left on her home phone. Mr. Easton has been reassigned outside Kings
County hospital, and has been recommended for firing pending
disciplinary hearings, Ms. Marengo said. A woman who answered the phone at his home said he would have no comment.
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/2009/07/20/0720beam_edit.html
COMMENTARY
Beam: So who’s crazy now?
Alex Beam, THE BOSTON GLOBE
Monday, July 20, 2009 Every couple of decades or so, psychiatrists publish their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which functions as the instruction booklet for their profession. The manual always attracts its fair share of mockery, and the last one was no exception.
That 886-page volume, published in 1994, famously included snoring (”Breathing-Related Sleep Disorder”; DSM code 780.59), smoking (”Nicotine Dependence”; 305.10), quitting smoking (”Nicotine Withdrawal”; 292.0), and jet lag among the nation’s mental disorders. One writer called it “a naked land grab by a profession threatened with marginalization by biomedical research.”
I am quoting my past self, doubtless a diagnosable disorder of some kind.
Surprise, surprise, the psychiatrists are at it again. The fifth edition of DSM is in the making, and already the fur is flying. “What began as a group of top scientists reviewing the research literature has degenerated into a dispute that puts the Hatfield-McCoy feud to shame,” wrote Dr. Daniel Carlat, a professor at Tufts Medical School, on his blog recently.
What’s going on? For one thing, there is continuing pressure to keep adding questionable diagnoses to the DSM stew. There is talk of expanding the ever-fashionable ADHD diagnosis (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to include an adult-onset version. Last time around, some shrinks wanted to include PMS (premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or premenstrual syndrome), an effort headed off at the pass because it risked stigmatizing healthy women. Eating disorders will probably be broadened, too.
In an editorial published in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Allen Frances, the editor of DSM-IV, called DSM-V “a wholesale imperial medicalization of normality that will trivialize mental disorder and lead to a deluge of unneeded medication treatment – a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry but at a huge cost to the new false positive ‘patients’ caught in the excessively wide DSM-V net.”
Frances and others say there hasn’t been enough progress in sussing out mental disorders to merit publication of a new $89 volume. “The idea was that in these 20 years the science would have progressed to where it had hard scientific and biological markers for diagnoses,” Carlat told me. “It just hasn’t happened. We are wrestling with our identity as medical professionals. The lack of biological markers to help us diagnose has made us feel in some ways inferior to other medical professionals, as if we were not real doctors because we don’t base our decisions on hard science.”
In a prepared statement, the American Psychiatric Association, publisher of the DSM, accused Frances and another critic of conflict of interest, noting that they “continue to receive royalties” on the DSM-IV and “related case book and study products.” That seems a little rich to me. Frances said his royalties amount to about $10,000 a year and that he “never regarded this as a motivation for anything.”
While the APA and Frances were trading insults, Jane Costello, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University, volubly quit one of the DSM-V working groups. In a letter explaining her actions, she wrote: “I am increasingly uncomfortable with the whole underlying principle of rewriting the entire psychiatric taxonomy at one time.” Concerning new DSM diagnoses, she writes: “More and more, changes seem to be made for reasons that have little basis in new scientific findings or organized clinical or epidemiological studies.”
The most serious, recurring accusation is that the pill-pushing shrinks are dreaming up ever-new syndromes at the behest of their funders in the pharmaceutical industry. Such diverse critics as Tufts, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the occasionally loony CounterPunch magazine have highlighted the extensive ties between Big Pharma and the DSM’s authors.
“The drug barons’ ongoing campaign to pathologize entirely natural emotional responses to hunger, humiliation, financial insecurity, racism, sexism, overwork, and isolation is a mercenary tactic, designed to create markets, maximize profits, and minimize dissidence,” Eugenia Tsao writes in the current CounterPunch. You would think the APA would respond to these accusations of self-dealing, but a spokeswoman assured me that DSM representatives were too busy to speak with me.
Who are the losers? The mentally ill, of course. Meaning the men and women for whom a few days’ worth of jet lag or the “pain” of nicotine withdrawal would be a welcome walk in the park. Because ultimately a profession that medicalizes trivial conditions, and seeks reimbursement for treating them, will find itself being reimbursed for nothing.
I am quoting myself again. Maybe I should see someone.