To Drug or Not to Drug?

“The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law.” -Catechism of the Catholic Church

There is a stealthy game, being played by corrupt pharmaceutical companies, using our children’s lives to distribute psychiatric drugs (1). This game must end! Parents must start learning the truth, regarding the long-term and permanent injury that these drugs inflict on our children. The harm incurred by these toxic drugs is not an “if” situation, but a “when”, and the damage caused is not only irreversible, but deadly. This is precisely why these drugs contain a “black-box warning”, the strictest cautioning in the labeling of prescription drugs by the FDA. Depending on many genetic and biological factors, which include a child’s “antioxidant system” and their ability or inability to metabolize a drug, it is like playing Russian roulette every time a pill is given. The short-term “behavior fix” is not worth the long-term consequences that are suffered throughout our children’s lifetime.

During the 1960’s, Ritalin was only administered to hospitalized children or children in residential facilities. By the end of the 1970’s, 150,000 children in the United States were taking Ritalin. In 1980, for the first time, “attention-deficit disorder” was identified as a disease; and shortly after, in 1987, it was renamed as “attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD). Then, in 1991, ADHD was included as a disability that would be covered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Following this coverage, the number of children diagnosed rose to nearly 1 million in 1990 and more than doubled over the next five years (2). Today, more than 10 million children in the United States are being prescribed addictive stimulants, antidepressants, and other psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs for educational and behavioral problems. Children 5 years old and younger are the fastest-growing segment of the non-adult population prescribed antidepressants in the U.S. Children as young as 5 years old have committed suicide while under the influence of these drugs, while children as young as 4 have attempted (3).

Although parents are led to believe ADHD is a brain disease, caused by a chemical imbalance, the truth is that its exact causes to this day still remains unknown. A panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health reiterated this fact: “After years of clinical research and experience with ADHD, our knowledge about the cause or causes of ADHD remains largely SPECULATIVE” (my capital emphasis) (4). American Psychiatric Press’s 1997 Textbook of Neuropsychiatry confessed, “efforts to identify a selective neurochemical imbalance [in ADHD children] have been disappointing” (5).

It is through perverse counseling and clever marketing that we have been led to believe ADHD is real and that psychiatric drugs are needed to “fix” or “make normal” our children’s behavioral problems. After being told these problems stem from a chemical imbalance, a diagnosis is given and a prescription soon follows to correct this “supposed” chemical imbalance. What parents do not know is that prescribing these dangerous drugs is based solely on a diagnosis that is fraudulent. There does not exist, nor has there ever been, a test to prove one has ADHD or a chemical imbalance. This is not a claim that there may not be something legitimately wrong or taking place that is contributing to a child’s symptoms, but blindly accepting a scientific-sounding name only prevents the real contributing factor(s) from ever becoming identified. Would we allow our children to receive powerful cancer treating drugs, without a valid medical test confirming that they had cancer? ADHD is not a disease; therefore, doctors and psychiatrists should never have been allowed to prescribe dangerous psycho-stimulant medications to our children.

So why are we allowing our children to be prescribed powerful, toxic, mind-altering drugs based solely on a “speculated” diagnosis? Despite the very minimal and questionable short-term benefit, would we still allow our children to take these drugs if we were aware of the serious long-term consequences? These include bi-polar (17), enduring a future life of disability (2), committing suicide (1,2) and the silent phenomenon known as Psychiatric Drug-induced Chronic Brain Impairment (CBI) (6). Per Dr. Peter Breggin, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time consultant at NIMH, “Psychiatric drug-induced CBI is now a much greater threat to society than the emotional problems that the drugs are supposed to treat” (7). Studies, which include all classes of psychiatric drugs, can be found that demonstrate brain shrinkage and a lifetime of mental dysfunction (2,7).

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among persons aged 10-24 years in the United States (8). This statistical tragedy should be screaming out to all of us that something is seriously wrong. These drugs are not preventing suicide but are actually contributing to or causing it just as the drug warnings concede (9,10). The fact remains that psychiatric drugs are involved in almost every school shooting, school-related violence, mass shooting, homicide and suicide known (9,10,18). We are allowed to think, via media or by other sources that the person who commits such a horrific tragedy is just simply of a crazed mind. However, it is those very actions committed that are as a result of what these drugs’ well-known side effects warn they can cause – mania, violence, psychosis, irritability, aggression, homicidal and suicidal ideation, and suicide. The side effects cited are a clear and blatant warning of the destruction these drugs are capable of creating to one’s mind and nor should we believe that these would never pertain to our own children.

Becoming educated on the dangers of psychiatric drugs before ever walking away with a prescription is the KEY to protecting our children and preventing suicide. We cannot allow our children to become pawns in a devious game played only for the sake of greed. Please consider the following:

In a 2004 editorial in the Lancet, it was written “The story of research into selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor use in childhood depression is one of confusion, manipulation, and institutional failure.” The fact that psychiatrists at leading medical schools had participated in this scientific fraud constituted an “abuse of the trust patients place in their physicians” (11).

Colin Ross, an associate professor of psychiatry at Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, wrote in his 1995 book, Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry, “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that clinical depression is due to any kind of biological deficit state” (12).

In 2000, the authors of Essential Psychopharmacology told medical students “there is no clear and convincing evidence that monoamine deficiency accounts for depression; that is, there is no ‘real’ monoamine deficit” (13).

In his 1998 book Blaming the Brain, Elliot Valenstein, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Michigan, wrote “the evidence does not support any of the biochemical theories of mental illness (14).

The U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher in his 1999 report Mental Health confessed that “the precise causes [etiologies] of mental disorders are not known” (15). He also declared in 2001 that the deteriorating mental health of the nation’s children constituted “a health crisis” (16).

In 1995, Harvard psychiatrists determined that 25 percent of children and adolescents diagnosed with depression convert to bipolar illness within two to four years. They explained that “antidepressant treatment may well induce switching into mania, rapid cycling or affective instability in the young, as it almost certainly does in adults” (17).

As written by Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, “Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a “serious mental illness.” That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness” (2).

It may be akin to finding a needle in a haystack, but searching for the real underlying cause(s) of our children’s symptoms is a needle that we as parents should be tirelessly searching for – not relying on drugs as the “magic behavior pill”. We as parents need to be accountable for our children’s health and welfare!

“Love righteousness, you who judge the earth; think of the Lord in goodness, and seek him in integrity of heart; because he is found by those who do not test him, and manifests himself to those who do not disbelieve him. For perverse counsels separate people from God, and his power, put to the proof, rebukes the foolhardy. Because into a soul that plots evil, wisdom does not enter, nor does she dwell in a body under debt of sin.” (Wisdom 1:1-4)

Books/Additional Resource Info:

“Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare” by Peter C. Gotzsche

“Anatomy Of An Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America” by Robert Whitaker

References:

The Truth Warrior

Every Life Matters

To Drug or Not to Drug?