Author name: Bob Carter

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“Chemical Imbalance” and “Major Depressive Disorder”: Pure Orwellian 1984 Newspeak

“Chemical Imbalance” and “Major Depressive Disorder”: Pure Orwellian 1984 Newspeak      By Robert Carter/October 17, 2024      “…but if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”      George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, wrote those words in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Although his essay was a post-WWII warning about the manipulative use of language for political purposes, his analysis of the deterioration of a person’s ability to think clearly when using language that has been purposefully corrupted is pertinent to Big Pharma’s marketing of psychiatric medication.      Orwell argued that the deceitful use of language that is then placed into public use easily leads the public to accept ideas without examining them. If language has been corrupted by distorting the meaning of words, a new false vocabulary tends to prevent the public from thinking clearly enough to be able to reject the false terms in it.      Consequently, the purveyors of corrupted language can easily become the “authority.” The insider knowledge they claim through their distorted vocabulary — because it’s a false representation of reality — inhibits public access to actuality.      Corrupt and deceitful terms not only distort the language. They also distort the truth.      This insidious corruption of public thought is all the more dangerous because it is so subtle. In his novel 1984 Orwell called this technique of governmental brainwashing “Newspeak.”      It is the marketing tool used by Big Pharma and psychiatry today.      Take the term “chemical imbalance.” It has so fully entered the public consciousness – despite no laboratory test ever having given any proof that such a thing exists – that millions of Americans now freely ingest antidepressants based on this bogus theory that there’s a bodily chemical imbalance that can somehow be re-balanced by taking a psychotropic drug.      The American government doles out millions of dollars in funding for mental health initiatives based on the groundless idea of “chemical impbalance.” Last month alone, the Biden Administration gave grants of $68.5 million for behavioral health education, training and community programs, based on their acceptance of “chemical imbalance” as the cause of an already bogus psychiatric diagnosis for disorders such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).      Major Depressive Disorder is one more corruption of language by psychiatry which bends its definition away from truth, and that term has now become a popularized psychiatric buzz word. By labeling someone with MDD, antidepressants can then be prescribed…antidepressants that are dangerous enough to warrant the most severe of FDA black box warnings.      Like many other “disorders,” MDD was adopted by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in their 1980 edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That “diagnosis” – which, when called that, is made to sound like a valid medical term, but it is not — is only based on individual’s own reported experiences, and their behavior as reported by relatives or friends, along with a list of manifested symptoms. There is no laboratory test for this “disorder.”      However, Big Pharma was able to reap $18.5 billion in antidepressant sales in 2023 because of this manipulation of language that has convinced people that antidepressants are unequivocally good for them…even though 54.7 percent of Xanax users have attempted suicide or had suicidal thoughts.      Both of these terms – chemical imbalance and major mental disorder — have entered the public vocabulary courtesy of the $1 billion per month marketing expenditures of Big Pharma in America alone (2022 figure). These two misleading terms – as well as many others from the DSM – have corrupted the public’s ability to think clearly about mental illness. And therefore about the truth.      That’s a form of brainwashing.      This corruption of language has unfortunately prevented too many public from seeing that this Big Pharma emperor has no clothes on.

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Biden’s White House: Victim of Big Pharma Propaganda

Biden’s White House: Victim of Big Pharma Propaganda      By Robert Carter/September 25, 2024      This month President Biden signed the bill to ease access for mental health treatments to 175 million Americans with private health insurance. This addendum to the Mental Health Parity Act will make it easier for those people to bill their insurance for mental health help, but it will also significantly increase the flow of dollars into Big Pharma’s antidepressant manufacturers.      Biden announced this Big Pharma windfall by stating that it ensures that “mental health coverage will be covered at the same level as other health care for Americans. There is no reason that breaking your arm should be treated differently than having a mental health condition.”      His parroting of the Big Pharma myth of the “chemical imbalance” theory of biological causes for mental disorders shows the extent to which Big Pharma’s mental health propaganda has penetrated American culture.      That’s not surprising. Last year alone, 2023, Big Pharma spent almost $400 million lobbying congress to support pharmaceuticals and other health products.      In fact, Biden himself is listed on opensectrets.org as the top benefactor ever of Big Pharma’s extravagant donations to congressmen. Biden has received over $9 million in donations from Big Pharma.      In fact, one of the initial sponsors for the original Mental Health Parity Act in 1996, Senator Domenici, himself received over $150,000 in Big Pharma donations during his congressional career.      It is true that mental health issues and substance abuse seem to be on the rise in America, and the passage of this bill will offer more help to those needing it in today’s stressful world. But is pharmaceutical “help” truly a benefit to those suffering if it is based on a debunked “chemical imbalance theory?      Even the former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health is dubious of the value of this kind of mental health treatment.      In 2017 he stated, “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs — I think $20 billion — I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”      Joanna Moncrieff, a consulting psychiatrist at the North London National Health Service and Professor of Psychiatry at University College London, has said, “It is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin. The popularity of the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of depression has coincided with a huge increase in the use of antidepressants. Many people take antidepressants because they have been led to believe their depression has a biochemical cause, but this new research suggests this belief is not grounded in evidence.”      “This belief,” however, is grounded in huge profits for Big Pharma, which has spent untold billions convincing the public and politicians of the validity of this bogus theory.

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Why Psychiatrists Can’t Think Straight

Why Psychiatrists Can’t Think Straight      By Robert Carter/September 25, 2024      A hundred years ago psychiatrists began trying to “cure” an individual’s depression and anxiety – his “schizophrenia,” they called it – by jolting his body into a grand mal seizure.      Insulin shock “therapy” and electroconvulsive shock “therapy” were the brutal tools they used with no measurable “cures’ attained other than the erasure of a person’s memory and, therefore, of the trials and tribulations he might have undergone in life. He was a zombie.      When these inhumane procedures were finally widely revealed to the public in the late 1940s – because they had mostly been administered covertly behind the shadowed walls of psychiatric hospitals – psychiatrists switched to the use of psychotropic drugs to “correct the chemical imbalances in the body” they said were the cause of depression and anxiety. Those also produced zombies.      They still do that. Almost 17 percent of all Americans over twelve years of age are taking an antidepressant today.      No scientific study has found any evidence of a chemical imbalance in the body which is causing mental “illness.” Undeterred, psychiatrists – in collusion with Big Pharma and the FDA — have now launched more studies into genetic disposition and nerve cell circuits in the brain to find exclusively bodily causes for mental illness.      So, what’s the fatal error in their thinking?      That a person is his body. For some reason, psychiatrists have been unable to distinguish between the body and the individual. Everyone who is alive is aware that they have a body. If they take a second, they can  perceive their hands, their feet, their necks, even that large bone atop their spine which we call a head. If one can perceive something, one has to be separate from it. For example, the reason we can perceive a wall in a room is because we are not the wall. If we were the wall, we could not perceive it. There would be no separation.      So too with bodies. Anyone alive can perceive their body. That means they ain’t it. The tribulations of the individual are not necessarily alleviated by addressing a body.      How did psychiatry get so far removed from common sense that they say the individual is a body? How did they get so far away from being able to think clearly?      With their basic premise wrong, that an individual is only a body – like some rat in a laboratory cage — all the conclusions they draw on how to help him — by giving him a lobotomy or electroshock therapy or a psychotropic drug, for instance — will also be wrong.

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Supreme Court Overturns Purdue’s Bankruptcy

Justice Served as Supreme Court Overturns Purdue’s Bankruptcy Attempt to Protect the Sackler Family’s Opioid Fortune      By Robert Carter/September 18, 2024      The Sackler family lawyers are in the process of rewriting their bankruptcy filing because the Supreme Court has just overturned their first attempt to protect the Sacklers after they had moved $11 billion of the Purdue opioid profits into their personal accounts.      Justice Gorsuch wrote in the court’s ruling that “The Sacklers have not filed for bankruptcy or placed all their assets on the table for distribution to creditors, yet they seek what essentially amounts to a discharge. No provision of the code authorizes that kind of relief.”      Purdue Pharma has been facing a multitude of lawsuits for knowingly and fraudulently marketing OxyContin as non-addictive. In the first bankruptcy filing that was overturned, the Sackler family had offered to pay $6 billion in reparations for their part in creating the opioid epidemic, but Justice Gorsuch noted that they had sheltered their company’s opioid profits from the Purdue bankruptcy and had transferred $11 billion of company profit to their own personal account.      In exchange for the reparations, the original bankruptcy filing would have also shielded Purdue and the Sacklers from any future lawsuits against them. Paying $6 billion in reparations after pocketing $11 billion is a pretty small price to pay for that kind of immunity.      Between 1999 and 2021 nearly 650,000 people died from an opioid overdose, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported. Many states are still negotiating with other opioid manufacturers such as Johnson and Johnson, Teva and Allergan for settlements. Total payout from these settlements could reach $50 billion.      Purdue was the largest marketer of opioids to physicians and was particularly aggressive in itsbroad advertising of OxyContin. In 2001 alone it spent $200 million on marketing OxyContin despite knowing the dangers of the opioid. Purdue earned over $35 billion from total OxyContin sales.      “Today is a very good day for justice,” said Ed Bisch, whose 18 year old son overdosed on OxyContin in 2001. Bisch now directs Relatives Against Purdue Pharma. Unfortunately, no justice has yet been meted out to the FDA, which allowed those false claims by Big Pharma, which downplayed the risks of opioids, to continue for nearly twenty- five years without correction.      Big Pharma was motivated by profit. What was the FDA motivated by?      In 2021, 75 percent of the FDA drug division budget — $1.1 billion — was paid for by user fees that Big Pharma is charged when they apply for FDA approval of a medical drug or device. 45 percent of the total FDA budget is paid for by these same Big Pharma fees.      That’s probably pretty good motivation to maintain the FDA collusion with Big Pharma.

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Psychiatrists: Covert Architects of Human Destruction

Psychiatrists: Covert Architects of Human Destruction      By Robert Carter/September 18, 2024      We know of psychiatry’s dark pre-WWII history in Europe.      Austrian psychiatrist Manfred Sakel’s 1927 development of seizure-producing insulin coma therapy to “treat” schizophrenia. Psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti’s 1938 use of the brutal electroconvulsive therapy he had learned from watching pigs being prepared for slaughter, also to “treat” schizophrenia. Nazi psychiatrists supervising the murder of almost 100,000 “unfit” humans in their euthanasia program gas chambers from 1939-1941.      But what about over here in the New World after the war?      Psychiatry’s human destruction continued, but more covertly, in America and Canada in the 1950s through the CIA initiated and psychiatrist run “human experiment” programs such as Project Artichoke and MKUltra. For twenty years unsuspecting subjects were given massive doses of LSD, heroin, morphine, mescaline, and sodium pentothal — usually without their knowledge or consent — in an attempt to develop efficient methods for interrogation. Other unethical mind control procedures and methods were also used, with and without drugs, under the guise of “scientific research.”      A key figure in these now infamous MKUltra mind control experiments was a prominent figure in the world of psychiatry, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association as well as the chairman of the World Psychiatric Association. Between 1953 and 1966 he was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop procedures and to experiment with drugs that would weaken an individual through brainwashing and psychological torture and force a confession from him during interrogations.      Psychiatrists such as Cameron used the MKUltra program to hone their procedures for manipulating subjects’ mental states and brain functions through covert and extensive use of LSD. Electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal abuse, and other types of illegal torture were also used on the unwitting subjects, who were often chosen because they were easy prey: incarcerated criminals, active military, or students who were lied to about the purpose of this “research.”      Psychiatrist Cameron not only used LSD on his subjects, but such paralysis causing drugs as curare, and he also electroshocked them with a voltage cranked up to thirty to forty times its normal setting. He developed a procedure he called “psychic driving” to “de-pattern” subjects. He would put his victims into drug induced comas for weeks at a time while playing a looped tape of recorded statements that could act as implanted commands on them.      Earlier, in the late 1940s, Cameron had given a lecture entitled Dangerous Men and Women in which he described certain mentally ill personalities that he believed were a marked danger to all members of society. Cameron thereafter espoused and promoted the idea that a society in which psychiatry built and then developed the institutions of government, of schools, of prisons and of hospitals would be a society in which science triumphed over its dangerous and “sick” – that is, mentally ill — members.      Perhaps Cameron saw the MKULtra programs as an opportunity for him to fulfill that evil goal.      Cameron stated, “Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves – and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form — and we shall find ways to put an end to them.”      His ideas of ethnic cleansing paralleled the Nazi psychiatrists’ justifications for the extermination of 100,000 of the “impure” in their gas chambers. Now Cameron was working for an American intelligence agency. Different masters. Same agenda.      There is a further dark irony here. Cameron’s purpose to purge society of its “dangerous” personalities – the mentally ill — actually ended up creating through his MKUltra work two of the most dangerous criminals in modern American history: Whitey Bulger and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.      Both were unsuspecting victims of the MKUltra experiments.      Whitey Bulger, while serving an early jail sentence in 1957 – long before his infamous and brutal criminal career from the 1970s to the 1990s — was given LSD every day for a year, per an NPR report. He had volunteered for what he thought was a beneficial research program in exchange for a reduced jail sentence.Instead he spent the rest of his life never able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time because of chronic nightmares and hallucinations.      After successfully remaining at large for sixteen years, he was finally apprehended and convicted in 2013 of eleven murders of the nineteen he was accused of.      Domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, a child genius accepted into Harvard when he was only sixteen, underwent a total of two hundred hours of verbal abuse in the MKUltra program experiments while at Harvard. Kaczynski was submitted to “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” verbal punishment that attacked his ego and his cherished beliefs and ideas in order to cause a high level of stress in him as a participant in the experiments.      These sessions lasted for three years.      In an article written for the Atlantic in 2000, professor Alton Chase wrote that by the time Kaczynski had graduated from Harvard, “all the elements that would ultimately transform him into the Unabomber were in place.”      After living as a recluse in a Montana cabin for decades, in 1998 Kaczynski was finally apprehended after the longest and most extensive investigation in the history of the FBI. He pleaded guilty to murdering three people and injuring twenty-three others with his mail bomb campaign.      Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, are also alleged to have been the unwitting subjects of the MKUltra experiments.      Not only were Bulger’s and Kaczynski’s lives destroyed by these MKUltra experiments, so too were the lives of the almost two dozen victims of these two crazed, psychiatric mind control subjects.      During MKUltra’s twenty year span, more than thirty universities and institutions had been used to find unknowing subjects for 149 projects involving these psychiatric experiments.      Cameron himself was paid $69,000 dollars to do his research at McGill University.      Who knows how many other destroyed personalities are out there as a result of MKUltraprograms?

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Psychiatrist Henry Jarecki Sued for Sex Trafficking

Jeffrey Epstein Associate, Psychiatrist Henry Jarecki, Sued for Sex Trafficking a Young Woman      By Robert Carter/August 21, 2024     In June this year 91 year old billionaire psychiatrist and associate of Jeffery Epstein, Dr. Henry Jarecki, was sued by a woman sixty years his junior for raping her for years and turning her into a “modern day sex slave.”      The woman, who the court has approved to remain anonymous, states that Epstein had referred her to the psychiatrist to whom he had regularly referred his sexual victims. The suit states that Jarecki often shared the medical records of these women with Epstein.      Epstein told this victim that Jarecki was “the best doctor in New York City.” When she met him at his apartment for her first appointment, an “initial mental health consultation,” she discovered otherwise. Jarecki told the woman that he had something that would make her feel happy right away and presented her with an expensive wristwatch. Then he guided her into his bedroom and raped her.      He then coerced her under threat of jeopardizing her immigration status to move into an apartment he set up for her nearby his home and forced her for the next three years to have sex with him and with others he sent there.      He also took her to his private Virgin Island retreat, an island 14 miles from Epstein’s famous Little St. James, which he had purchased a year after Epstein bought his island in 1998. He sexually trafficked the woman there, as well.Jarecki has denied the accusations.      “I had a consensual, non-secretive, and mutually respectful relationship when she was a successful professional in her late 20s,” he has claimed.      Gloria Jarecki, the psychiatrist’s wife of 57 years, has not made any public comment aboutthe lawsuit.      Although Jarecki’s association with Jeffrey Epstein makes this case more newsworthy, sexual  exploitation or assault by psychiatrists is not all that uncommon. Ten percent of all psychotherapists have actually admitted to sexually molesting their patients. Some studies estimate that that figure is actually as high as 25 percent and one California estimated the figure at 48 percent.      Psychiatrists also divorce more often than any other type of doctor, but apparently Gloria Jarecki has not gotten that memo.

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Why Psychiatry Itself Is Schizophrenic

Why Psychiatry Itself Is Schizophrenic By Robert Carter/August 20, 2024 Schizophrenia has been psychiatry’s go-to diagnosis of mental “disease” for more than a hundred years. The National Institute of Mental Health defines it as “a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.” The word comesfrom the Greek words for “split” and “mind.” That split mind of psychiatry has existed since the late nineteenth century and can be seen in the divergent paths of its more benign talk therapy tradition contrasted with its physically abusive therapies of electroshock treatments, prefrontal lobotomies and zombie producing medication. Sigmund Freud and Julius Wagner-Juaregg are iconic representatives of these two “split mind” schools of psychiatric practice. They were born within a year of each other, both grew up in Austria in the mid-nineteenth century, they met while they were attending the University of Vienna together and they practiced their own brand of psychiatry until their deaths, also within a year of each other, ust before WWII. Freud found little attraction to the psychiatric search for a physical cause to a mental problem. Wagner-Juaregg, however, was immediately drawn to the physical treatment of mental problems – often by forceful means – perhaps due to his extreme fascination with dissecting animals during his high school years. Freud wrote that “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.” Wagner-Juaregg wrote that “a man with character needs no principles” and he claimed that “common principles” did not apply to him. After becoming a doctor at the University of Vienna, Freud spent a three year period doing psychiatric medical research by dissecting eels and then by comparing the brains of human beings to those of frogs, lampreys and crayfish. Afterward he worked in a local asylum and in the psychiatric clinic of Theodor Meynert, an early proponent of the idea that biological changes in the brain could be the cause of psychiatric illness. Freud soon resigned his University of Vienna position as lecturer in neuropathology. He opened his own practice in Vienna and became known as the founder of psychoanalysis, a verbal dialogue between counselor and patient with the aim of diagnosing and treating uncomfortable mental and emotional conditions. By the time of Hitler and the occupation of Austria by the Nazis, Freud had become world famous for a pioneering “talk therapy,” but because he was Jewish, he was persuaded finally to flee the Nazis occupation. He arrived in London in June, 1938. Unfortunately his four older sisters were then all exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. Wagner-Juaregg, meanwhile, after completing his own medical studies with Freud at the University of Vienna, worked for four years at the psychiatric clinic of Maximilian Leidesdorf, a psychiatrist searching for a correlation between physical and mental illnesses. During this period Wagner-Juaregg became one of the first psychiatrists who conducted laboratory experiments on animals. He then became Director of the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in Vienna. Part of his research in these years was in an unsuccessful instigation of extremely high fevers in patients to cure their psychoses. Then, at the end of World War I, the German government started an official inquiry into Wagner-Juaregg’s administration of extreme electric shock therapy to the soldiers he had been treating who had been accused of malingering because they claimed to be too mentally upset to return to battle duty. Before his criminal prosecution began, however, his old associate Sigmund Freud intervened with the German authorities and ended up keeping Wagner-Juaregg’s out of jail and probably saving his career. Wagner-Juaregg went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in treating syphilis patients with high fevers created by injecting them with malaria parasites. The damage caused by the high fevers was seen as an acceptable risk because of the availability then of quinine as a palliative to these negative “side effects.” During the nineteen-twenties Wagner-Juaregg would treat his patients who had been deemed “schizophrenic” because of their excessive masturbation by sterilizing them, thus eliminating that mental “problem.” By this time his fellow psychiatrists in the “assault the body to cure the mind” school had begun employing insulin shock therapy, electroshock therapy and prefrontal lobotomies as their acceptable “cures” for mental illness. After those “treatments” became too unpopular, in 1954 the FDA approved medication as the next “therapy” to treat mental illness by adjusting the “chemical imbalance” in the brain of those with mental “disorders.” The FDA approval for pharmaceutical prescriptions opened the gates for Big Pharma’s growth into the $1.6 trillion industry it is today. After Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Wagner-Juaragg began supporting the Nazi Party, but his application to become a member of the party was rejected because his first wife had been Jewish. Nevertheless, he began promoting the concentration camp ideology of racial hygiene known as eugenics, and one of his students whom he had influenced went on to write a handbook on racial psychiatry which stated that Jews were prone to mental illness. By then Wagner-Juaregg was also advocating the forced sterilization of the mentally ill and criminals. Freud and Wagner-Juaregg. Two different doctors. Two different approaches to “helping” the troubled. Two different minds. Two very different men.

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Matthew Perry: A Study in the Risks of Off-label Prescriptions

Matthew Perry: A Study in the Risks of Off-label Prescriptions By Robert Carter/August 17, 2024 Matthew Perry, star of the popular television show Friends, died last October from an overdose of ketamine, the Schedule III drug known as a “dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen.” Ketamine can lead to physical dependence, but it has an even higher potential for psychological dependence. Ketamine was approved in 1970 by the FDA for use as an anesthetic for certain diagnostic and surgical procedures. It was initially used as a veterinary anesthetic. Per reports, Perry spent $55,000 in cash to buy illegal vials of ketamine and had his personal  assistant inject him with it, apparently multiple times the day of his death. It is a sad story. The vials he purchased cost the suppliers $12.00 each, but he was paying nearly $3000 per vial. How did he get in such desperate shape to spend that kind of money to satisfy his addictive craving for the drug? He had been undergoing “legal” ketamine-assisted psychotherapy until the week before his death. In fact, he had begun having daily ketamine infusions as early as 2000. Today there may be as many as 750 ketamine infusion therapy clinics operating in the U.S. Each patient session typically costs between $600.00 and $1000.00. The exact infusion protocol is determined at each individual clinic, but patients usually start at a lower dose of ketamine and increase it if the lower dosage is not effective. It is all off-label drug use, and none of it is approved by the FDA. While the doctors who run the clinics are often anesthesiologists or psychiatrists, there is no standard protocol today for the administration of ketamine infusion therapy. By 2022 annual revenue for ketamine therapy was estimated to be $3.1 billion and projections suggest that figure could arise to $6.9 billion over the next six years. There’s a gold rush mentality within this burgeoning industry, and Googling “ketamine infusion therapy” brings you immediately to a host of sites ushering you toward local ketamine clinics poised and ready to start your off-label therapy immediately. How much of Matthew Perry’s desperate measures to feed his ketamine addiction the week of his death were the result of his increasing addiction to it, fueled by his long term ketamine therapy sessions? One can’t say. But given the black box warning for the drug, its lack of approval for this use by the FDA, the questionable protocol of its administration in today’s unregulated clinics, and at least one prominent example of its dangers in Matthew Perry’s case, and one can say that any current “legal” use of ketamine should be questioned. If ketamine addiction prompts the behavior we saw in Mathew Perry his final days, how many ketamine sessions at a ketamine clinic does it take to begin to move some other unsuspecting soul into the same desperate moves prompted by that addiction?

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Off-Label Drug Prescriptions:

Off-Label Drug Prescriptions: Bending the Rules for More Big Pharma Profit      By Robert Carter/August 16, 2024      An off-label prescription is one that a doctor has written to treat a condition that the FDA has approved it for, but is not the condition that you have. Twenty percent of all prescriptions written today are off-label prescriptions.      For psychiatric drugs, that number increases to thirty-one percent.      Off-label prescriptions are a way for pharmaceutical companies to increase their already outrageous profits by expanding the market beyond what the drug was originally intended for. It’s not illegal — and by those statistics it is obviously commonplace — but the practice raises one more red flag for the collusion between Big Pharma, the FDA and psychiatry.      Surprisingly, a doctor prescribing an off-label drug is not legally obligated to get informed contest from a patient, as is the case with any on-label prescriptions. So this practice also hints at a less than perfect application of the Hippocratic Oath by a doctor to protect one’s patient.      Drugs that are approved by the FDA have to undergo a series of clinical trials that show that the drug is safe and effective for the condition it is designed to treat. Off-label drugs do not have any such research pedigree behind them. Their effectiveness in treating a condition is often merely anecdotal…particularly with psychiatric drugs.      A 2010 article in the The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics found that seventy-seven percent of pediatric antidepressant prescriptions were off-label. Because the “disorders” listed in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals are merely a description of symptoms – not physical causes — in the first place, off-label use of the antidepressants used to treat them is more prone to influence by anecdotal, unscientific conjecture.      The FDA does prohibit the misbranding of medications, which would include the listing of off-label use for a medication, but no court has ruled that a physician must disclose through the informed consent process the potential consequences of off-label use of a drug. That too puts patients at risk.      Most people, in fact, are unaware of the dangers of off-label prescriptions. In one 2006 poll half of all respondents believed that a drug could only be prescribed for its primary, on-label use, as approved by the FDA after successful clinical trials. Two-thirds of those polled then felt that off-label drug use should be banned except for their use in the clinical trials alone.      A sensible viewpoint, but one not shared by the FDA.      The number of psychiatrists who are on the advisory boards of the FDA, and who are also financially connected to and on the boards of pharmaceutical companies is not insignificant. The profit of pharmaceutical companies from off-label prescriptions because of that collusion is also not insignificant.      In 2013, for instance, four pharmaceutical companies – Eli Lilly, GSK, Hoffman-LaRoche and Abbvie — had a profit margin greater than twenty percent. Pfizer had a profit margin of an astounding forty-two percent.      How is it that off-label drug use — with its inherent risks undisclosed to patients through otherwise mandatory informed consent law — still accounts for twenty percent of all prescriptions written?      Follow the money. Archives of Internal Medicine 2006 article

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No Ecstasy for Lykos Therapeutics Right Now

No Ecstasy for Lykos Therapeutics Right Now      By Robert Carter/August 9, 2024      Lykos Therapeutics announced today that the FDA has not approved their application for an MDMA based drug with psychotherapy to treat PTSD because of concerns about how the pharmaceutical company conducted its trials. Lykos Therapeutics was also cited for unethical conduct at one of its research locations after one of its therapists had been accused of practicing without a license and of sexually assaulting one of the participants in Lykos’ MDMA trials.      MDMA – more commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly — is an illicit, mind-altering psychedelic drug that can affect a user’s visual and time perceptions. While usually taken recreationally to chemically increase happiness and energy levels, MDMA can cause potentially severe “side effects” such as high blood pressure, vomiting, heart problems or liver damage, per the National Institute of Health.      MDMA is classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act and it has “no currently accepted medical use,” but it does have “a high potential for abuse.”      Despite that, and apparently prompted by anecdotal “evidence” that taking MDMA may for a few lead to a positive mental shift away from depression and anxiety, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies are now trying to get FDA approval for its use those who have not had relief from taking standard antidepressants.      Such is the interest of this psychedelic avenue of approach that a $3 million professorship was established at Yale University last fall by Vikram Sodhi to study the value of DMT – an illicit derivative drug of the South American shaman potion ayahuasca — to psychiatric treatments for PTSD. Deepak Cyril D’Souza was named the inaugural Vikram Sodhi Professor of Psychiatry at Yale.      “We don’t, as yet, know how long a person needs to have psychedelic effects in order to be able to derive antidepressant effects,” D’Souza said. “Another question is how intense a psychedelic experience do you need order to be able to derive antidepressant effects?”      His questions seem a grim reminder of the MKUltra experiments with psychoactive drugs such as LSD which were carried out by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties to identify drugs that could be used during interrogations. Science Insider has reported that today at least two other pharmaceutical companies are also involved in clinical trials to evaluate the use of psilocybin – known on the street as magic mushrooms – to treat depression.      Despite the early momentum seen for these experimental trials, the Institute for Clinical and  Economic Review reported this year that insufficient evidence has been found for any benefits from the research which would outweigh the known risks of cardiovascular problems, worsening mental health problems, and suicidal thoughts that come from these drugs.

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