Happy pills: Hundreds of thousands of healthy people, many of them children, are needlessly being drugged
By
Peter Hitchens
How easy it is for bad things to
go on under our noses. How many people in Cleveland, Ohio, must have
wondered if something odd was happening in the house of Ariel Castro,
but did nothing about it because, well, everyone else seemed to think it
was OK?
And so three women were imprisoned there for ten years, a few yards from the normal world, but ignored by all who passed by.
Well,
here’s a chance for you to prove that you would not have been one of
the people who failed to see that anything was wrong.
For, smack in the middle of our
society sits a great and dangerous scandal, which you can help to stop
by protesting against it and by refusing to be taken in by it any
longer.
At present you are
paying for it (at least £250 million a year) out of your taxes. Somebody
you know, perhaps a close neighbour or a relative, may be the victim of
it.
It involves the
needless drugging of hundreds of thousands of healthy people, many of
them children. It also involves one of the greatest confidence tricks
ever attempted, and some of the most shocking greed.
It is exposed this week in a new book
that should be read by every doctor, and also by everyone in politics
and the media, not to mention any concerned citizen.
The book, Cracked – Why Psychiatry Is
Doing More Harm Than Good, by James Davies, published by Icon, is calmly
and clearly written in straightforward layman’s English.
The
author has serious academic qualifications which entitle him to take a
view on the subject. He has spoken to a wide selection of experts.
And he shows that most of what we believe about modern mental health medicine is wrong.
I plan to put a much longer review on my blog,
but in the end the book’s the thing. You will gasp with amazement at
the sheer nerve of the medical profession, as you turn its pages. Here
is what it shows:
There is no objective scientific diagnosis (and so no objective treatment) for almost all so-called mental illnesses.
They are defined every few years by a committee, which once described homosexuality as a sickness (and now doesn’t).
It
is currently seriously considering creating an illness called
‘Complicated Grief Disorder’, for those who grieve over a bereavement
for more than six months.
There
is no scientific proof, repeat, none at all, repeat none whatever, for
the idea (still believed by millions) that depression is caused by a
chemical imbalance in the brain, though this is the whole basis for most
antidepressant prescriptions.
Drug
companies control the research into their own products. They fail to
publish results that suggest their pills don’t work. They doctor results
to make their pills look better than they are.
In most cases, there is no significant difference in effect on depression between antidepressant pills and dummy sugar tablets.
But
the pills do have potent side effects (often these are most radical
when people stop taking them, which is why they should only be given up
under medical supervision).
Government regulation of this behaviour is feeble.
Many of the medical experts who
recommend these pills, in the media and to other doctors, receive large
fees from the drug companies, without disclosing this.
Many of the medical experts who recommend these
pills, in the media and to other doctors, receive large fees from the
drug companies, without disclosing this
Many medical journals gain
substantial income from large orders for reprints, which come from the
drug companies. The profits from this industry are colossal.
Doctors who fail to toe the line lose
valuable consultancy work, and in one case a leading psychiatrist had
the offer of a major professorship withdrawn after he delivered a
lecture criticising antidepressants.
There it is, going on near you, a grave disgrace that you can help to end. Will you? Or will you walk on by?
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