mental health

  •  The Icarus Project and Freedom Center's Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs is now available in Spanish.
     Will Hall, one of the principals on the editorial team that prepared this booklet said the group's goals included:

"We wanted -- and I think succeeded in creating -- a guide that would accurately represent psych drug risks and benefits fairly, without falling into simplistic pro- or anti- camps. We wanted to give essential lessons about how the coming off process works, without acting like we could predict what people would go through or provide any kind of definite blueprint for action. We wanted to counter pharmaceutical propaganda and psychiatric myths.
     "We wanted to explore the helpfulness of meds for some people in the same discussion as we explored the harm of meds for others. We needed to cover complicated issues like biology and genetics accurately, and gather the most state-of-the-art research in a very politicized and confusing area of science. We had to ensure the factual information was all backed up and air-tight (thanks to the British survivor movement for their help in this), and fearlessly swim against the brain-disorder mainstream belief system, while also not making any claims we couldn't support with solid sources."

You can read a more complete account of the making of the Harm Reduction Guide at the Freedom Center's website.

  •  Health Care Renewal reports the FDA's tacit support to suppress negative findings about drug testing.

"It is worth mentioning that the [US] FDA [Food and Drug Administration] has encouraged this state of affairs, by viewing negative studies as uninformative, due to the possibility of being 'failed' rather than truly negative (ie, the sample may have simply been unresponsive, or dosing might have been too low and so on). Thus drugs could have two positive studies, and 10 or so negative ones (as did a number of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), and the FDA not only allowed approval but it did not require that the pharmaceutical industry publish its negative results."

This appeared in the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health [Gahemi SN. The failure to know what isn't known: negative publication bias with lamotrigine and a glimpse inside peer review. Evidence Based Mental Health 2009; 12: 65-68. Link here.]

  •  In the first half of 2005, pharmaceutical manufacturers spent more on media campaigns than any other industry except the automobile industry. Studies show that when a patient requests a specific drug, doctors may prescribe it even if the drug is not in the patient’s best interest. Your doctor, not a drug company, should be deciding about your diagnosis and treatment. You may not need a drug at all.
     But there are some who work to correct the efforts of BigPharma who tries to deceive people just to get them to take drugs. One group working to counter the propaganda mills run by drugco shills is Pharmed Out. Their goal is to "provide access to unbiased information about drugs. Led by a team of physicians and academics and is contributed to by a diverse group, Pharmed Out provides lectures at Grand Rounds, meetings, conferences, and medical student events. They offer access to free, web-based, pharma-free CME – enough for any physician in the U.S to fulfill annual CME requirements without taking industry-funded courses. Their courses have been given the endorsement of the Federation of State Medical Boards Foundation..
     PharmedOut is funded through the Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Education grant program, created as part of a 2004 settlement between Warner-Lambert, a division of Pfizer, Inc., and the Attorneys General of 50 States and the District of Columbia, to settle allegations that Warner-Lambert conducted an unlawful marketing campaign for the drug Neurontin® (gabapentin) that violated state consumer protection laws.

  •  Not just mental health, per se, but the Kaiser Family Foundation has posted side-by-side comparisons of Congress's Health Care Bills. The Kaiser Foundation is an independent expert voice in a U.S. health system dominated by commercial, political, and ideological interests; a place where people can turn for unbiased and non-partisan analysis, basic facts, and explanation of the biggest domestic and global health policy issues and public opinion shaping them.
     Kaiser's "product" is information, always provided free of charge — from the most sophisticated policy research, to basic facts and numbers, to information young people can use to improve their health or elderly people can use to understand their Medicare benefits.
     The Kaiser Family Foundation is not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries.

Thanks to Larry Drain for providing the link to Kaiser Family Foundation.