Apparently Shannon Brownlee buys into the Tom Cruise notion of mental illness, that it is some mystery or perhaps (my inference with no basis) a Thetan induced stated of disturbance. Here's Ms. Brownlee 'splaining what depression and manic depression is really all about...
"The mind and its illnesses remain as mysterious as the cosmos.."
Meanwhile, all scientists did was support the drug companies in developing medicines that were based on a flimsy excuse to abandon Freud. Shannon again:
"It's not as if physicians can administer a blood test to determine if a patient is depressed or anxious or obsessive-compulsive. Rather, psychiatry defines -- and diagnoses -- psychiatric disorders on the basis of subjective symptoms that are reported by patients or observed by doctors."
Right, and there are no blood tests for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, dementia, cerebral palsy or schizophrenia...so I guess there aren't real diseases either...
Brownlee then crosses the Neutral Zone and into Scientology territory...
"The notion that depression is a biological ailment, like Alzheimer's, proved enormously appealing to patients. It relieved much of the stigma of mental illness, which could now be viewed not as a personal or moral failing, but as a glitch of biology. The serotonin theory also appealed to the medical community, for a slightly different reason. It made the mind seem more knowable, less like a black box, and psychiatry seem more like real science, instead of a lot of Freudian talk about repression and sex. Psychiatrists could now say to patients, you are sick because of a deficiency, and these drugs will restore you to normalcy and mental health.
If only psychiatric disease were that simple. In reality, there is little research to show that being a quart low on serotonin leads to depression, and even less to suggest that patients who commit suicide have lower levels of serotonin than normal people. And nobody really knows what SSRIs actually do in the human brain."
This is called ignorance by choice.
So of course the marketing and prescribing of drugs to people who don't need will lead to horrible events like death, anxiety, etc. But Brownlee and the Scientology types beg a question: if mental illness is not biological in nature, and we know so little about serotonin and other neurotransmitters, how would drugs that can't restore people to health then harm so many?
Sorry, I am interrupting her rant:
"What's more likely is that the field of psychiatry, with its shifting, subjective diagnostic categories and its enthusiasm for new drugs, has been acutely vulnerable to "disease mongering." This is the increasingly common practice on the part of the pharmaceutical industry to broaden the perceived market for a drug by persuading doctors and the public that huge numbers of people suffer from this or that disorder. Between disease mongering and some doctors handing out SSRIs like Pez, antidepressant prescriptions for children have surged 27 percent since the mid-1990s. Today, between 1 million and 3 million kids under the age of 19 are on one or more of these drugs for diagnoses ranging from attention deficit disorder to migraines to schizophrenia. Taking SSRIs has become so commonplace that young people talk casually about needing to "adjust their meds" in response to a rough week at school or a bad breakup.
Meanwhile, doctors have been prescribing these medications without knowing until just recently that, according to the FDA, 2 to 3 percent of their young patients could be at risk for drug-induced suicidal thoughts or actions. Maybe that's because academic psychiatry has been too busy performing research with a very different agenda to answer the fundamental questions. In their haste to partake of industry research funds and other perks, academic researchers have focused much of their effort on what Carroll calls "experimercials" -- studies aimed at expanding the drugs' "off-label," or unapproved, markets.
And so doctors still can't tell which patients are most likely to benefit from taking an SSRI. Nor can they predict which ones are most likely to suffer devastating reactions. They still don't have any idea how, biochemically, the drugs might trigger suicide and bipolar disorder. In his book "Let Them Eat Prozac," psychiatrist Healy writes that the story of the SSRIs "reveals a lack of research so complete that academics cannot avoid questions about how well the health science research community serves us."
PS David Healy is a paid expert witness for trial attorneys. Something Brownlee never mentions...
Add her bias against using medicines to treat mental illness, indeed her belief that mental illness is just a marketing gimmick, you might understand why she and Jeanne (I stole the documents) Lenzer who openly collaborated with Peter Breggin (who has his own ties to Scientology) would attack Fred Goodwin and Peter.
Like I said, context matters. And there is a lot more of it to come.
paxilprogress.org/forums/showthread.php
"The mind and its illnesses remain as mysterious as the cosmos.."
Meanwhile, all scientists did was support the drug companies in developing medicines that were based on a flimsy excuse to abandon Freud. Shannon again:
"It's not as if physicians can administer a blood test to determine if a patient is depressed or anxious or obsessive-compulsive. Rather, psychiatry defines -- and diagnoses -- psychiatric disorders on the basis of subjective symptoms that are reported by patients or observed by doctors."
Right, and there are no blood tests for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, dementia, cerebral palsy or schizophrenia...so I guess there aren't real diseases either...
Brownlee then crosses the Neutral Zone and into Scientology territory...
"The notion that depression is a biological ailment, like Alzheimer's, proved enormously appealing to patients. It relieved much of the stigma of mental illness, which could now be viewed not as a personal or moral failing, but as a glitch of biology. The serotonin theory also appealed to the medical community, for a slightly different reason. It made the mind seem more knowable, less like a black box, and psychiatry seem more like real science, instead of a lot of Freudian talk about repression and sex. Psychiatrists could now say to patients, you are sick because of a deficiency, and these drugs will restore you to normalcy and mental health.
If only psychiatric disease were that simple. In reality, there is little research to show that being a quart low on serotonin leads to depression, and even less to suggest that patients who commit suicide have lower levels of serotonin than normal people. And nobody really knows what SSRIs actually do in the human brain."
This is called ignorance by choice.
So of course the marketing and prescribing of drugs to people who don't need will lead to horrible events like death, anxiety, etc. But Brownlee and the Scientology types beg a question: if mental illness is not biological in nature, and we know so little about serotonin and other neurotransmitters, how would drugs that can't restore people to health then harm so many?
Sorry, I am interrupting her rant:
"What's more likely is that the field of psychiatry, with its shifting, subjective diagnostic categories and its enthusiasm for new drugs, has been acutely vulnerable to "disease mongering." This is the increasingly common practice on the part of the pharmaceutical industry to broaden the perceived market for a drug by persuading doctors and the public that huge numbers of people suffer from this or that disorder. Between disease mongering and some doctors handing out SSRIs like Pez, antidepressant prescriptions for children have surged 27 percent since the mid-1990s. Today, between 1 million and 3 million kids under the age of 19 are on one or more of these drugs for diagnoses ranging from attention deficit disorder to migraines to schizophrenia. Taking SSRIs has become so commonplace that young people talk casually about needing to "adjust their meds" in response to a rough week at school or a bad breakup.
Meanwhile, doctors have been prescribing these medications without knowing until just recently that, according to the FDA, 2 to 3 percent of their young patients could be at risk for drug-induced suicidal thoughts or actions. Maybe that's because academic psychiatry has been too busy performing research with a very different agenda to answer the fundamental questions. In their haste to partake of industry research funds and other perks, academic researchers have focused much of their effort on what Carroll calls "experimercials" -- studies aimed at expanding the drugs' "off-label," or unapproved, markets.
And so doctors still can't tell which patients are most likely to benefit from taking an SSRI. Nor can they predict which ones are most likely to suffer devastating reactions. They still don't have any idea how, biochemically, the drugs might trigger suicide and bipolar disorder. In his book "Let Them Eat Prozac," psychiatrist Healy writes that the story of the SSRIs "reveals a lack of research so complete that academics cannot avoid questions about how well the health science research community serves us."
PS David Healy is a paid expert witness for trial attorneys. Something Brownlee never mentions...
Add her bias against using medicines to treat mental illness, indeed her belief that mental illness is just a marketing gimmick, you might understand why she and Jeanne (I stole the documents) Lenzer who openly collaborated with Peter Breggin (who has his own ties to Scientology) would attack Fred Goodwin and Peter.
Like I said, context matters. And there is a lot more of it to come.
paxilprogress.org/forums/showthread.php
