Articles

The Arbitrary Injustice of Involuntary Commitment      By Robert Carter/October 5, 2025      A study of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, involuntary hospitalizations published this July as a Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report shows just how arbitrary the application of involuntary commitment laws can be. The scientifically valid study reviewed 16,630 evaluations for involuntary hospitalization done by 424 physicians at 14 hospitals in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, from 2013 to 2023.      Pennsylvania law allows police, medical professionals, social workers, family members, friends, colleagues, and even neighbors to call a public hotline to ask for another person to be evaluated for involuntary hospitalization. In other words, even the people most unqualified to asses the mental stability of another can unleash the cops on anyone they wish to.      This study found that an unbelievable 84% of those 16,630 people reported as needing involuntary hospitalization were taken under force to local hospital emergency rooms and evaluated by a psychiatrist or physician. Only about a thousand of them were released. The remaining 13,000 were forced into involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric ward or psychiatric hospital for up to five days.      As arbitrary as the original reports were about these people who the cops dragged to the hospital ERs, their treatment by the psychiatrists they saw there was hardly less arbitrary. The study found that forty-six of the psychiatrists or physicians at the ERs involuntarily committed every single person they saw. Other physicians committed only one out of every ten patients who were brought to them.      The arbitrary nature of involuntary commitment decisions for these people did not improve for them when they were sent to court, if they resisted their incarceration. Almost five thousand of those people had their five day enforced incarcerations extended to at least twenty days, or more, through court hearings. A judge without any formal mental health training or background was allowed to rule on the sanity of these individuals and their danger to themselves or others.      Although much public outcry has been made about how the homeless are affected by mental disorder, and about the danger they are to themselves and to others, only 3 percent of those brought to the ER had ever been to a homeless shelter.      That means that 97% of those picked up by the police were, as the study’s authors wrote, those individuals who were often “actively engaged in society, including through formal employment.”      Even worse than all that injustice, these researchers also found that “involuntary hospitalization increases the probability of being charged with a violent crime by 2.6 percentage points and increases the probability of death by suicide or overdose by 1.0 percentage point in the three months following an evaluation.”      In other words the arbitrary involuntary incarceration of an individual only increases their chances of harming themselves or others.      That goes beyond mere injustice. That’s evil. 

FDA’s Refusal to Order ECT Trials Is Criminal Neglect By Robert Carter/September 27, 2025 Psychiatrists and proponents of ECT tend to minimize the importance of the amount of “lived experience” personal stories published about the crippling effects of shock therapy on thousands of people. ECT advocates try to diminish the significance of these stories by claiming they are “merely anecdotal,” not scientific, and psychiatrists add that “There is no clinical trial evidence that ECT causes memory loss or brain damage.” That’s true, but that’s only because there have been no placebo-based clinical trials of ECT since 1986, and the handful that were done before that were also conducted under questionable scientific standards. So, while there may not be any evidence that ECT is dangerous, there is also no evidence that it does anybody any good…particularly in the long term. We don’t even know how many people receive ECT today. The last publication about national trends for ECT was in 1992, and the most quoted figure since then has been that 100,000 Americans receive ECT each year. However, since the FDA reclassified the ECT shock devices from Class III (very high risk) to Class II (moderate risk) in 2018, for some mental disorders, that 100,000 number may have increased considerably. Today there is no national mandate requiring the number of ECT sessions performed to be reported, let alone reporting anything about the negative effects from the procedure. What little public information that has recently gleaned about patients who have received ECT shows only their short term responses to the procedure. No long term studies exist on ECT’s negative effects. Consequently, the vast accumulation of personal stories by those individuals who have suffered negative effects from ECT are the only real evidence we now have of its long term negative effects. The lived experience of these people may be “anecdotal” evidence, but it’s the only evidence we have. We need to pay attention to it. Too many of these personal stories show the damage ECT can do to a life: staggering memory loss, dangerous cardiac events, seriously diminished cognitive ability. A recent petition to the FDA to stop ECT, for example, contained 2200 signatures and 800 comments from ECT survivors. The three most common words they used to describe ECT were “damage,” “barbaric,” and “torture.” One 2025 survey of 858 people from 44 countries who had received ECT did show that about 40 percent of those surveyed found ECT helpful, especially in the short term. However, 60 percent of those who had received ECT found it “not at all helpful.” A full 50 percent of those who had received ECT reported their quality of life as “much worse” or “very much worse” after ECT. Almost 84 percent of ECT recipients reported memory loss, and half of those people said their memory loss lasted more than three years. Is all the “evidence” from this 2025 study also anecdotal? Sure. But the numbers of ECT recipients who reported severe long term negative effects from ECT shows that the FDA’s continuing refusal to conduct standard scientific research on ECT is nothing but criminal neglect. Every other US governmental health agency that should be concerned about the welfare of Americans, but is doing nothing about ECT, is also complicit.

Big Pharma Marketing: Innocently Incompetent or Evil?      By Robert Carter/September 8, 2025      In our August 9, 2025 blog on Lydia Green, Big Pharma marketing writer, we said it was too bad she waited thirty years to expose the dishonesty of the psychiatric drug marketing industry in her recent article in Mad in America. On September 6, 2025 Mad in America published a follow-up piece by her to address the angry comments she received after her first article. She’d been called “greedy and evil” by readers for her dishonest copywriting work promoting dangerous antidepressants like Risperdal.      In her new article we find that she apparently removed herself from that work after about twenty years. Robert Whitaker offered her the chance to defend herself against the vitriol against her with this follow-up piece.      She entitles one section of this article “Pharma People Are Nice—So Why Do They Do Harm?” Her answer is their simple “denial” of doing wrong. Green had read one book that suggested that good people can act unethically in corporate, group-think settings, and she heard a Harvard professor speak at a conference and say that “humans have an enormous capacity to rationalize bad behavior.”      Green concluded that “My clients weren’t bad; they were just unaware. The harm wasn’t caused by personal evil, but by a system that put profit ahead of moral behavior and normalized the compromises needed to keep it going—a system I was still complicit in.”      Evil is usually defined as immoral behavior that causes unnecessary pain and suffering to others. It more than the innocent “oops” moment that Green seems to have concluded is behind the destruction of human lives after the horrific “side effects” of drugs like Risperdal were intentionally camouflaged by Big Pharma copywriters.      Johnson & Johnson paid out more than $2.2 billion in 2013 to resolve civil and criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice related to its illegal Risperdal marketing. Since then juries have awarded individuals almost $80 million who have suffered crippling conditions from taking Risperdol. Most of the other individual lawsuits with J & J have resulted in undisclosed, out of court settlements.      Her additional “My clients…were just unaware…and not personally evil” seems a conveniently glib appraisal of the intentions – which some do call evil — behind Big Pharma’s hiding of the truth about these destructive drugs that have, factually, destroyed many people’s lives.      There are two odd revelations by Green in her more recent piece.      After she had been working for seven years as a Big Pharma copywriter for antidepressants, her brother, a lawyer, committed suicide by intentionally overdosing on the depressants he’d been taking for years since his two tours in Vietnam. He had been in and out of hospital psychiatric units and, the previous year, had spent more time in them than not. His antidepressants had apparently not helped him, but – as we now know from recent studies – may have actually contributed to his suicide.      Her father too had been on antidepressants, and yet he too still had attempted suicide, but unsuccessfully. Psychiatrists labeled him “treatment resistant” and had him scheduled for electroshock treatments, but he died from an  undiagnosed cancer condition just days before those were to begin.      After those two deaths, Green writes, “my doubts continued to grow” about what she was doing. She moved to Montana to work on a political campaign, but four years later she was back at Madison Avenue earning $100,000 a year working on the Risperdal account.      In 2014 she did change career directions and founded the on-line non-profit RxBalance.org to demonstrate how advertising can promote evidence-based medicine, but also to expose the “hidden sides” of Big Pharma.      Are those amends still too little, too late?

Studies Show SSRIs Make You Worse, but Make Big Pharma Wealthy      By Robert Carter/August 29, 2025      Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors are a class of antidepressant that – in theory anyway – allow more serotonin to remain in the synapses of the brain’s nerve cells and, hence, “make you feel better.” They are the most commonly prescribed antidepressants and include Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft.      Several studies show that not only do they not work any better than placebos, but that they actually make you worse.      The 2006 NIMH funded STAR*D study was the first to show that SSRIs were not only relatively ineffective in the short term, but that they had a negative effect on well being in the long term. The study’s results showed that being prescribed an SSRI for several months was no more effective than taking a placebo. Being prescribed an SSRI for a year was actually less effective than taking a placebo.      More recent studies confirm those findings. Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic lists the scientific evidence that shows SSRIs worsen mental disorders rather than alleviating them. Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen has shown that SSRIs create brain disturbances, not correct them, and medical journal editor Dr. Giovanni Fava has found that SSRIs increase the chances of depressed patients relapsing and, worse yet, decrease their chances of ever recovering.      In 2017 Dr. Peter Goetzsche reviewed 17 drug trials and found that SSRIs double the risk of suicide and violence for those being prescribed them. In 2018 a Journal of the American Medical Association article specifically named Celexa as the major SSRI in the STAR*D study which causes depression, not relieves it.      Of course, you’d never know that from Big Pharma’s ongoing marketing of the “value” of taking SSRIs. Their overriding message is that SSRIs correct the “chemical imbalance” of serotonin in the brain to alleviate your depression or anxiety…even though there is no scientific evidence for any such chemical imbalance.      2024 revenue in the US for antidepressants was $8.6 billion. SSRI’s accounted for almost half that. In the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 antidepressant use rose from 18.4 million to 70.9 Americans. Half of those were prescribed SSRIs.      That’s an awful lot of selective serotonin uptake that has nothing to do with your depression or anxiety. But that is $4.3 billion dollars worth of annual serotonin happiness in the pockets of Big Pharma.      (Thanks to Allan Leventhal, Professor Emeritus at American University, for his article in Mad in America alerting readers to this and to the valuable work of the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group over the years in exposing these dangers).

Insider Exposes Big Pharma Marketing Sins of Omission By Robert Carter/August 9, 2025 Pharmacist Lydia Green spent thirty years as an advertising professional writing marketing copy for Big Pharma. Today, after realizing the distortions she was for so long paid to contrive in order to boost pharmaceutical profits, she runs RxBalance, a site devoted to telling the truth about pharmaceutical products. Today the Mad in America website posted a lengthy article by her which exposes the many tricks of the marketing trade she was involved in to maximize Big Pharma profits of Risperdal while minimizing its  dangerous long term effects on consumers. She gives a point by point list of the unethical distortions  Johnson and Johnson employed her agency to use to make Risperdal its biggest selling antipsychotic. To do that she had to redefined schizophrenia, rewrite the safety  parameters for antipsychotics, and then manipulate the Risperdal narrative for behind-the-scenes medical thought leaders, academic  authorities, and finally the NAMI principals who could increase the chances of Medicare and Medicaid funding Risperdal  prescriptions. It’s a scary tale. It’s a tale that should be heard. In a short TEDx talk that Lydia Green gave four years ago, she lists the three cardinal strategies Big Pharma marketers use to establish and expand a drug’s viability. First, they exaggerate the benefits of the drug, second, they inflate the size of its potential market, and third, they minimize the risks associated with the drug. Cherry picking which scientific and often pseudo-scientific “data” to use and which to leave out to paint the most positive picture of the drug is the skill a savvy Big Pharma marketer develops. Green labels these activities sins of omission – not commission – and points out that because these distortions of the truth come from absences of data, not inclusions of it, marketing manipulations are not easily visible to the general public. Antidepressants and antipsychotics are made desirable, and the 43 million Americans who take them every year do so because the dangerous side effects and risks of suicide from severe withdrawal symptoms are not made known. Big Pharma advertising does not include these facts and, worse yet, because of its behind-the-scenes  marketing efforts — also containing these sins of data omission — the doctors who are prescribing them fail to inform their patients of the true risks. Lydia Green is helping to open consumers’ eyes to the Big Pharma wool that’s been pulled over them for so long, but unfortunately 43 million pairs of eyes is an awful lot of eyes to uncover. It’s too bad she waited thirty years. Even twenty years ago the dangerous side effects of Risperdal were already coming to light: there were serious metabolic side effects and the drug was increasingly associated with significant weight gain, diabetes, and, in adolescent boys, gynecomastia, breast development. Independent research from Canada and America’s National Institute of Mental Health showed that Risperdal was not nearly as effective as Big Pharma had originally claimed. Not only has Risperdal not been doing anybody all that much good, it has been causing severe, long term health conditions for them, as well.

How Involuntary Incarceration Laws Help Big Pharma Make Money from the Homeless      By Robert Carter/July 28, 2025      Forced psychiatric incarceration has now come full circle in America.      After the ever increasing money that state taxpayers had had to pay to keep the “insane” institutionalized up until the nineteen-fifties, the FDA’s approval for the use of psychotropic medications such as Thorazine offered an alternate, less expensive “treatment” for those mentally disturbed members of society who had been kept in horrible institutions for the previous hundred years.      President Kennedy’s signing of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 opened the doors of America’s state psychiatric institutions, and they began to release thousands of residents, mostly labeled schizophrenic, out into the world. To house and care for these poor souls, a national network of 1500 community mental health centers was to be constructed.      However, less than half of those facilities have ever been built. Instead, many of those released from mental hospitals have ended up homeless on our streets. In 2024 there were about three quarters of a million homeless people in the United States. Most of them, correctly or incorrectly, are considered “mentally ill” or – psychiatry’s catch all diagnosis – “schizophrenic.”      In the last few years involuntary incarceration laws have been strengthened in many states so that these people can more easily be rounded up and forced back into the institutions they were freed from fifty years ago.      State and federal taxpayers will again foot the bill, but today all that revenue goes to Big Pharma to pay for the prescribed medications these people take or will be forced to take.        To make rounding up these individuals from off the streets simpler, a new diagnosis had to be coined by psychiatry to label these folks. They have “anosognosia.” It’s defined as “lack of insight” and is “a biological condition that prevents some people with severe mental illness from knowing they are experiencing symptoms of a brain disorder.”      In other words, it’s the perfect Catch-22 for incarcerating a person involuntarily. If they claim they are not schizophrenic, or have some other psychiatric “disorder,” they are then labeled as anosognosic, and – bingo! – the law now has reason to lock them up and involuntarily keep them on hold for an indeterminate time. And, yes, they can be forced to take heavy psychotic medication as well.      The revenue from all those prescriptions – paid for now by the state or the federal government – goes right into the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies.      Anosognosia is listed as a “biological condition,” despite the fact that the whole chemical imbalance theory has been thoroughly debunked by tons of competent research. There is no physical or biological cause behind any of the psychiatric labels – like anosognosia – that are contained in the psychiatrists’ bible, the DSM.      Civil rights activists have brought lawsuits alleging these policies that violate one’s constitutional guaranty of due process and equal protection, as well as one’s right to privacy, autonomy and liberty. So far, none of these harsh laws have been overturned.      Meanwhile, even more expensive psychiatric drugs for the “treatment” of those who have anosognosia are being developed, such as Bristol Myers Squibb’s KAR XT, which is already projected to earn $7 billion by 2028.      That’s an awful lot of money to be earned from people who, once again, do not have a choice.