Author name: Bob Carter

Common Sense or Copious Profit? Big Pharma Chooses – Guess Which — for Benzos By Robert Carter/February 6, 2025 Valium, Xanax, Halcion, Ativan, and Klonopin are the most prescribed benzodiazepines. By 2020 more than thirty million people were taking them in the United States. That’s over twelve percent of our country’s population. Benzos, as they are commonly known, are most often prescribed to reduce anxiety. Per the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration they “produce sedation and hypnosis and relieve anxiety and muscle spasms,” but are associated with “amnesia, hostility, irritability, and vivid or disturbing dreams.” Benzos are highly addictive. The DEA reports that patients who try to stop taking them can experience panic attacks, sweating, confusion, vomiting, depersonalization, seizures, and suicidal ideation. They are prescribed twice as often for women as for men. Are there really twenty million women in America who need that level of “sedation and hypnosis” to treat their anxiety? Dr. Heather Ashton, a British psychopharmacologist, was the first in the medical profession to realize the dangers of benzos after so many patients had begun reporting the problems they experienced after long term benzo use. People who had been taking them for months or years came to her and reported their fears that the drugs were actually making them more ill. Their anxiety or depression was no better, and they had begun to have muscle weakness, memory lapses, and heart and digestive issues. Through extensive research, Dr. Ashton then recognized that the problems people were having with benzo dependence were the result of the medication being over-prescribed. She concluded that benzos might be useful in the short term, but that they should never be taken for longer than two to four weeks. Her further research showed that tapering off the dosage — sometimes for a period as long as six months — was the only way to help someone successfully withdraw from these dangerous, menacing drugs without experiencing hideous side effects. Her 1999 publication, Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw , became the medical profession’s definitive work for anyone seeking to quit these prescription drugs safely. It is now known as just “The Ashton Manual.” By 2013 the British National Formulary had updated its guidelines and recommended benzodiazepines for short-term use only. They also suggested a withdrawal protocol based on The Ashton Manual. In 2020 the FDA finally did update their black box warning for benzos to include “the risk of withdrawal reactions, including seizures, when stopping suddenly or reducing the dose too quickly.” But there is still no FDA recommendation for short term use only of benzos. The global revenue in 2022 for benzo sales was just over $2 billion, and it is projected to rise to $3 billion over the next seven years. Guess Big Pharma and the FDA don’t want to cut into that goldmine by limiting benzo prescriptions to a mere two to four weeks, eh?

You Probably Haven’t Heard of Ernst Rudin. You Should Have.      By Robert Carter/January 19, 2025       Psychiatry was divided into two schools of practice by 1900. The “talk therapy” guys like Freud introduced a psychoanalytic approach to mental health which tried to help people by having them talk about their emotional and mental troubles. They addressed the mind.      The “biological-cause-of-mental illness” guys like Emil Kraepelin, “the father of modern psychiatry,” who continued their pursuit of an answer to mental illness by addressing the body. They addressed the brain.      The debunked theory of “chemical imbalance” can trace its roots back to these biological cause guys and even to the phrenologists of the early nineteenth  century. From them also came the psychiatric  practices of electroconvulsive therapy and prefrontal lobotomies during the nineteen-thirties to “correct” mental illness.       Kraepelin, like many other psychiatrists of his day, considered  schizophrenia a biological illness, and in 1907 he took on as his assistant at the University of Munich Ernst Rudin. Besides sharing a biological view of mental illness, they both supported the idea that the German race was becoming degenerated by a  “domestication” that was causing higher rates of mental illness.      Rudin began publishing articles on the genetic causes of schizophrenia and he soon became known as the “father of psychiatric genetics,” an advanced theory of body-based mental illness. Rudin’s colleague and brother-in-law was Alfred Ploetz, who himself was known then as the “father” of racial hygiene after the  publication of his “Racial Hygiene Basics” in 1895.      By 1903 Rudin had already argued for the sterilization of incurable alcoholics, and by 1905 he had helped co-found the German Society for Racial Hygiene with Ploetz. In 1917 Emil Kraepelin established the Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich and he installed his cohort Rudin as head of its Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies.      By 1920 another Rudin colleague, psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, had  published  “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living.” In 1928 Rudin’s department was expanded greatly due to financial assistance from the American Rockefeller Foundation. By 1932 Rudin was in contact with the British psychiatrist Carlos Blacker and Rudin sent him a copy of the pre-Nazi voluntary sterilization laws.In the 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation funded further studies in psychiatric genetics by      Rudin’s department under the direction of genetic psychiatrists Eliot Slater and Franz Kallmann. Kallmann claimed in 1935 that minor anomalies found in any relatives of diagnosed schizophrenics should be grounds for compulsory sterilization. By that time Rudin’s colleagues had dubbed Rudin the  Reichsfuehrer for Sterilization.      In his 1934 speech praising Adolf Hitler’s racial hygiene program, Rudin wrote “Whoever is  not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children.”      By 1942 Rudin spoke of the value of “eliminating young children of clearly inferior quality,” and he began financially supporting the work of psychiatrist Carl Schneider, whose activity at the University of Heidelberg involved setting up a training center for the Nazi Action T4 euthanasia program that killed children “for scientific purposes” at thirty facilities over a three year period.      Although Rudin was arrested after the war for his Nazi activities, he was released in 1947 and only given a 500 mark fine. Speculation is that he avoided being charged at the Nuremberg Trials because of his financial connections to American genetics researchers and to American funding entities.      Some say, however, that Rudin was a more influential architect of Nazi extermination policies than the infamous Josef Mengele, who attended Rudin’s lectures and was employed under him. Investigative journalist Victor Bernstein wrote that psychiatrist Ernst Rudin was “one of the most evil men in Germany.”      How is it that the field of psychiatry so often draws in such evil men?      Is it that the brain-based theories of mental illness are themselves malevolent, or do evil psychiatrists just find that those biological theories are perfect for masking their own evil intentions toward humanity?

John D. Rockefeller Single-handedly Ruins American Medicine      By Robert Carter/December 23, 2024      By the early 1900s John D. Rockefeller had become the richest man in the world by taking over the American oil industry and making it his own personal monopoly. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court found him guilty of illegal business practices and racketeering.      He had to find himself another business venture that might be equally as profitable.      “Hey, how about drugs?” he decided.      Although the health of his own immediate family had always thrived on homeopathic remedies, he knew that these natural cures could not be patented. No money there.      But synthetic drugs could be patented, and there was BIG money there…if he could figure out how to corner that market, just as he had with his oil  monopoly.      He figured it out.      First, he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the country’s most reputable medical schools – University of Chicago and Yale, to start with – provided they agreed to teach only allopathic, pharmaceutical based medicine. No more natural, nutrition based remedies would be spoken in those hallowed halls.      Then he invested in the German pharmaceutical giant I. G. Farben.      Yes…the same guys who from 1930-1938purged their company of every Jew, used 30,000 prisoners from Auschwitz as free, forced labor in one of their factories, and concocted the Zyklon B poisonous gas to help Hitler kill over a million prisoners in his gas chambers.      Next Rockefeller funded Abraham Flexner to tour the Rockefeller funded medical schools to  “evaluate” the new  treatments they were teaching. His 1906 Flexner Report helped persuade U.S. lawmakers to enact legislation that would license only those physicians trained in patented, chemical based pharmacology and surgery.      The AMA began a campaign of ridiculing any non-allopathic medical practices as “quackery” and soon our country’s natural remedy doctors were mostly out of business.       No more “Take two vitamin C and call me in the morning” from an American doctor.      Meanwhile the FDA had been evolving from the earlier Bureau of Chemistry, and it inherited from that agency the proviso that there was a “plausible deniability” for any legal culpability for harmful effects of the chemicals they monitored. That legal protection against pharmaceutical companies’ lawsuits remained in place until recently.      By 1916 Rockefeller had became the world’s first billionaire.      In 1930 Rockefeller expanded into psychiatry his influence over American medical practices when he established the Yale School of Psychiatry with a ten year grant totaling $1,000,000.      The 1930’s were already turning out to be a heyday for psychiatrics as they began conducting their experimentation with electroconvulsive shocks and trans-orbital lobotomies … all hidden from the public by using subjects from within their own psychiatric hospitals.      Kind of like the psychiatrists’ own little concentration camps.      In the 1930s Yale Medical School Professor C.E.A. Winslow worked to publicize and popularize America’s growing “mental hygiene movement,” and he helped position mental health treatment next to physical health treatment. Doing so helped usher in the age of massive public psychotropic prescriptions which began in the 1950’s after the brutality of psychiatrists covertly administering electroshock and lobotomy “treatments” had been publicly exposed.      Ironically, almost ninety-nine percent of all these psychotropic  pharmaceuticals contain petrochemicals, and so the Rockefeller family is still deriving its fortune from oil, even if today some of John D’s descendents do donate philanthropically to humanitarian non-profits.      However, we can still thank John D. alone for gifting us with what is now the medical mafia: Big Pharma, the FDA, and psychiatry.

LSD and Mini-ECT: Psychiatry Says They’re Just What Your Kid Needs      By Robert Carter/December 6, 2024      On October 30 th the Child Mind Institute held its annual On the Shoulders of Giants Symposium. The theme of the virtual event was promoted as “a celebration of scientific achievement in child and adolescent psychiatry” and two “breakthrough” treatments for childhood mental disorders were touted as next generation innovative therapies.      The two treatments?      Deep brain stimulation and an LSD derivative medication.      Just what your kid needs, eh?      Deep brain stimulation is a sort of street legal  variation of electroconvulsive shock. It’s used to fend off the legal restrictions looming on the horizon for banning the use of ECT’s horrific voltage being applied to youngsters. Four states have already passed legislation against its use on minors and more state legislatures will probably follow suit.      To treat a child with deep brain stimulation, a small electrode is surgically and permanently placed in the brain to deliver an electrical impulse that is supposed to regulate a child’s moods. The shocks are emitted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.      The FDA has only  approved deep brain  stimulation for such  physical disorders as  Parkinson’s Disease and dystonia, both chronic diseases of the brain. The National Institute of Health notes that “it is not  understood precisely how DBS affects the  dopaminergic networks within the brain” and that “DBS is not entirely without risk, and complications such as infection, hemorrhage, and even mortality have been noted.”      Nice, huh?      The other “breakthrough” treatment of the Child Mind Institute symposium is the proposal for an LSD derivative medication to treat child anxiety.      LSD was classified as an illegal Schedule 1 drug in the 1960s because it has a "high potential for abuse" and is without any "currently accepted medical use in treatment." In fact, in the 1950s psychiatrists used LSD research to try to replicate the effects of mental illness, and their infamous MKUltra  experiments used LSD on often unsuspecting subjects to help develop workable mind control techniques.      The United States Drug Enforcement Administration has reported that the use of LSD in psychotherapy largely has been debunked” and “drug studies have confirmed that the powerful hallucinogenic effects of this drug can produce profound adverse reactions, such as acute panic reactions, psychotic crises, and ‘flashbacks’ especially in users ill-equipped to deal with such trauma.”      Like young children.      Although the symposium literature lists these two treatments as  “breakthrough,” that term is actually only a designation used by the FDA – “breakthrough therapy” — to expedite the development and review of drugs that might demonstrate improvement over available therapy. It’s a fast track to clinical trials so that potentially more dangerous medications can be brought to market more quickly through clinical trials.     Go, Big Pharma. Their funding of seventy-five percent of the FDA’s pharmaceutical department budget will have been a small price to pay for the profits possible when these two “breakthrough” therapies are FDA approved for public consumption.          With approval, Big Pharma’s huge marketing budget can then be directed toward convincing you that a little LSD and a little electroshock really is just what your kid needs. (A thank you to Barbie Rivera of Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, Miami for alerting us about this in her recent newsletter).

Killing Vets Softly with a Psychiatric Solution      By Robert Carter/November 20, 2025      U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced this week that American active duty military suicides are up again in 2023. The number of military who have  committed suicide has been a rising trend since 2011.  The Army and the Air Force had the largest rise in  suicides with the number of active duty troops killing themselves going from 331 to 363.      Austin said these numbers “urgently  demonstrate the need for the Department to redouble its work in the complex fields of suicide prevention and post-vention. There’s still much more work to do, and we won’t let up.” He added the Department of Defense is “moving urgently” to put changes in place by increasing “mental health assistance” to troops.      Part of Austin’s program focuses on education of troops on gun safety, locks, and storage. That seems an odd target as active duty troops probably have more access to firearms than any other population in the country, and they also have more training in their use and their safety than anyone else.      The problem is in the urge to commit suicide, not in the means available to do it. The increase in what Austin calls “mental health assistance” to active duty troops will undoubtedly include easier access to counselors, therapists and psychiatrists as well as the tools that are included with that therapy.      Psychotropic medication, of course, is one of the most frequently used “tools.”      According to a 2013 Military Times report, antidepressants and anticonvulsants were the most commonly prescribed psychotropic medications for service members with mental health conditions. Records show that from 2001 to 2009 alone, the Defense Logistics Agency, which manages the entire Department of Defense supply chain, spent $1.1 billion on common psychiatric drugs and pain medications.      Austin’s current proposal to increase “mental health assistance” for the military will undoubtedly boost that drug budget well beyond that $1.1 billion.      Can it be that the military does not know of the studies that show that taking psychotropic medication increases one’s risk of committing suicide?      Research shows that Xanax, for instance, the benzodiazepine drug most prescribed for anxiety, doubles the risk of suicide for those taking it. One study has shown that after taking Xanax, a person has a 54% increase in suicide thoughts or attempts at suicide.      Could it be that the billion dollar military expenditure on psychotropic drugs is itself the cause of the continuing increase in active duty military suicides?       Now there’s a chance that even more psychotropic drugs will be prescribed and further increase the number of suicides…the very deaths they are supposed to prevent.      “Strumming my pain with his fingers,      killing me softly with his song.”

How to Sue a Shrink      By Robert Carter/November 3, 2024      We are not advocating here the willy-nilly suing of a psychiatrist. In this increasingly litigious society there are already far too many frivolous lawsuits.      However, if one suspects a psychiatrist has strayed from professional, legal or ethical standards of practice, one can report the individual to the state licensing board. There are also a number of websites with standard report forms to submit which list the specifics of the suspected transgression. CCHR and PsychSearch are two such reputable websites, and they immediately forward these reports to the appropriate authorities.      One can, of course, also sue a psychiatrist for malpractice, if the facts warrant it.      State laws do vary, but generally speaking, any time a medical professional’s actions no longer adhere to a standard of care used by the majority of responsible health care providers, a psychiatrist may be subject to a lawsuit as well as to discipline by a state medical board.      Here are the two most common categories of legal transgressions by a psychiatrist which show a level of negligence that would support a malpractice suit.      More practically, this list can also be used to assess for non-standard practices that should be reported to medical authorities, regardless if there are grounds for a successful lawsuit or not.      General unethical conduct: Having a sexual relationship with a patient Verbal or physical abuse Planting false memories in a patient. Trading medical treatment for other goods or services Failing to keep a patient’s medical information confidentialMedical malpractice:Failure to adequately deliver and have a signed Informed Consent procedure Not carrying out a thorough neurological evaluation when the condition calls for it Failure to adequately test and monitor a patient’s response to medication Any other significant p rescription medication errors Misdiagnosing a patient’s condition Failing to adequately monitor a patient, especially one with a risk of suicide Improper record keeping, including falsification of medical records      Should you sue a shrink?      Yes…if there are obvious grounds for it. Apparently, there often are.      The website PsychSearch offers a list of psychiatrists – state by state and country by country – who have either been disciplined by their medical boards or have been successfully prosecuted for medical and ethical “sins.”      It is not a short list.      In fact, according to a 2020 article in Clinical Psychiatry News, “Forty-one percent of U.S. psychiatrists have been sued for malpractice at least once.”      That’s close to a fifty/fifty chance you have that the psychiatrist you see has a practice…or that he has a malpractice.