Articles

Only One out of Ten Doctors Obeys Informed Consent Law   July 17th, 2026 – Robert Carter       A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that a mere nine percent of all surveyed doctors fully apply informed consent protocol to their patients.      The 1999 Braddock study analyzed 1,057 patient and physician encounters and evaluated 3,552 clinical decisions. The providers surveyed were 59 primary care physicians and 65 general or orthopedic physicians.      The study reveled that only one of every ten doctors surveyed performed a full informed consent disclosure of the risks and benefits of their treatments. Consequently, and worse yet, only 2 percent of the patients surveyed actually understood their recommended treatments.       Maybe that’s why 80,000,000 Americans are on antidepressants today. The legal requirements for informed consent demand informing a patient of the reason for the diagnosis, the risks as well as the benefits of the treatment, the alternative treatments available with their risks and benefits, and the risks of doing nothing at all. Federal law requires a full enough disclosure that a “reasonable decision” can be made by a patient about taking any recommended treatment.      Because antidepressants have such proven high risk for emotional blunting, sexual dysfunction, increased suicidal thought, and a near impossibility of quitting them, many “reasonable” patients might seek safer alternatives than psychiatric drugs to handle minor depression or anxiety.      Some doctors have claimed that because insurance only pays them for an abbreviated interview time with patients, they are forced to curtail any informed consent discussions.      That, however, is a decision based on finances, not on patient welfare.      “First, do no harm” says the Hippocratic Oath.       Not “First, make enough money to afford a Mercedes.”

Women’s “Weakness” an Ideal Market for Psych Drug Profit   July 13th, 2026 – Robert Carter       It started when the patent for Prozac, Eli Lilly’s high profit drug, ran out in 2001. Lilly had reaped $22 billion in revenue for the thirteen years it was on the market, and it earned them a full one third of all their income during that time period. When a federal court blocked Lilly’s appeal for a Prozac patent extension, Lilly got tricky.      Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder had been relegated to an appendix of the 1994 DSM-IV, but it was “revived” to a full blown diagnosis in the DSM-V. That “disorder” made the symptoms of a monthly period that women experience a “mental disorder” for which lucrative medication could be prescribed by a psychiatrist.      Perfect. Eli had a hot flash of inspiration and they re-branded Prozac as Sarafem so it could now be prescribed for this unfortunate mental “weakness” of women, over which they had no control. Eli Lilly now had another full run of patent protection for Prozac, the drug they re-branded simply by changing the capsule it came in from green and yellow to pink and purple and calling it Sarafem.      When Sarafem was launched in 2001, Lilly made $80 million dollars from it – less than they’d hoped — and in 2002 they sold the rights to Sarafem (aka Prozac) to Galen Holdings for $295 million.      Today there are four SSRI’s and other antidepressants that are usually prescribed for PMDD. The market has dwindled considerably for each Big Pharma manufacture, but it is about to be expanded to include far more, younger, premenstrual women.      It turns out, per psychiatry and Big Pharma, that there can be another premenstrual disorder that women experience before they ever even get to PMDD. It’s perimenopause, a condition that precedes menopause itself – the culprit behind PMDD – and it too, of course, has unpleasant emotional and mental symptoms associated with it which will need to be medicated for women to continue to enjoy life.      The good news for Big Pharma is that perimenopause begins ten years earlier than menopause itself, which can start as early as forty. Perimenopause, though, can start for a woman as early as thirty. So the market for drugging middle age women for a condition that is only natural to them — not a mental or emotional weakness for their “hysterical” gender — has just been increased by another decade full of pre-premenstrual women.      There are already tons of SSRI’s and antidepressants available to address plain old PMDD. All Big Parma has to do now is market this new “disorder” correctly to a female market with increasingly more disposable income.      It’s time now to handle your own, even more prevalent and younger, hot flashes, ladies.

Lost in Language: the Myopic Blur of a Psychiatrist’s Mind   July 4th, 2026 – Robert Carter       Last year Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring posted an hour and a half long interview with Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist who has become a controversial spokesman for the general validity of contemporary psychiatric practice. Much of the criticism has been directed at his glossing over valid concerns about inadequate diagnostic tools, over-medication, and sketchy informed consent protocol about the harm of psychiatric drugs and the potential ordeal of trying to quit them.      In his interview, Dr. Josef brings these points up and asks Aftab about them. Aftab confirms those flaws in modern psychiatric practice in a long winded, multi-syllabic, academic reiteration of them. “It’s a complex, multi-causal picture, in reality,” he concludes.      Dr. Josef then asks him what the consequences are for patients from those deficiencies in the psychiatric system.      Aftab’s answer reveals an aspect of the psychiatric mind which shows how removed from human reality psychiatry has become. Or, possibly, has always been. “On the one hand, the consequences are kinda conceptual and narrative,” Aftab answers. “On the other hand, they relate to treatment factors. People have a distorted understanding of the nature of their problems.”      That’s the main personal harm from psychiatry today? A patient’s lack of conceptual understanding of his condition?      Not the stigmatization of a misleading “mental disorder” label? Not the numbing of one’s emotions, the sexual dysfunction, and the increased likelihood of suicide from psychiatric drugs? Not the Catch-22 ordeal of not being able to get off the drug when you want to return to a normal state without a painful eighteen month tapering process?      Aftab is a man who is lost in language. The symbols of the words are more significant to him than the troubled human conditions they are trying to describe and repair. A neat and tidy, well groomed theory of psychiatry is more important to him than the effects on a human being of the application of psychiatric theory.      This is a man so lost in mental concepts that he is utterly removed from the world around him. Actual living human beings and their troubles in life are not real to him. Worse, those patients are apparently of secondary importance to the throne of psychiatric theory, and therefore to its authority.

If an Ice Pick Is No Longer Politically Correct… June 23, 2026 – Robert Carter Yale trained physician Walter Freeman’s idea for curing mental illness would be seen as simply ludicrous buffoonery if he hadn’t taken it seriously. Instead, he travelled around the country in his “lobotomobile” training hospital staff to stick an ice pick-like tool under a patient’s eyelid and pound it through the skull bone with a mallet before twisting it around in the brain to sever the neural paths which were suspected to cause the patient’s mental illness. Over his forty year career he performed nearly four thousand of his lobotomies on mental patients. One hundred of his patients died of cerebral hemorrhage. Countless others had their lives ruined. Some of his victims were only twelve years old. He was finally banned from performing his surgery in 1957, and since then modern ethical medical boards strictly prohibit this barbaric procedure. But psychiatry has a fix for this. Another Yale educated physician, William Scoville, had a “hunch” that psychosurgery would cure one of his patient’s epilepsy. Scoville surgically “re-sectioned” – a euphemism if ever there was one — part of his patient’s brain, but unfortunately ended up destroying the man’s ability to remember anything. Nonetheless, Scoville helped develop the psychosurgery procedure (called a bilateral cingulotomy) which has replaced the now quite politically incorrect Freeman lobotomy. Today the procedure for damaging a specific part of a patient’s brain is used as the psychiatric treatment of last resort, even after ECT has failed to help a “treatment resistant” mental patient. The surgery involves drilling burr holes through the skull and then focusing intense heat inside the brain to sever the neural circuits that are presumed – yes, only “presumed” – to connect psychiatric distress with negative emotional responses and habitual undesirable behavior. The procedure is used to treat patients with major depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. “When in doubt, cut it out.” That’s apparently still the psychiatric operating basis here. Remove those parts of the brain causing that chemical or neural imbalance that, per psychiatry, is behind all mental illness. Only about thirty percent of cingulotomy surgery patients “respond positively” without that part of their brain still in their head. Short term “side effects” include mild headaches, nausea, vomiting, and temporary confusion. Longer term symptoms can be apathy, diminished drive, or mild memory lapses following surgery. More serious “complications” involve seizures, bleeding, or infection. But no ice picks are involved.

80 Million Junkies Can’t Be Wrong June 16, 2026 – Robert Carter One million Americans are addicted to heroin. Eighty million Americans take prescriptions for antidepressants. Both groups use these drugs to give them relief from those problems in life which they have not been able to handle. Both drugs are almost impossible to quit without experiencing horrible symptoms of withdrawal. The government’s solution for heroin addicts is to replace one drug for another by making methadone available for them. Both are opioids. Heroin is a partially synthetic drug that is derived from the poppy plant whereas methadone is a fully synthetic drug, totally lab produced. Heroin, of course, is illegal, but methadone can be prescribed to “help” addicts by offering them a drug that is not illegal. There’s no moral stigma to taking it. Antidepressant users have no such easy option if they want to stop taking their drugs. Only hyperbolic tapering has been shown to help them wean themselves from these fully synthetic lab drugs without the horrific symptoms of withdrawal. Those debilitating effects prevent most from stopping antidepressants because the withdrawal pain is far worse than whatever life pain they were initially using antidepressants to avoid. Antidepressants, of course, are legal. That’s why there are eighty times as many Americans taking them rather than heroin. There is no moral stigma attached to taking antidepressants. There is a big one, of course, for shooting heroin, and that itself might be enough to stop millions of people from becoming junkies. The moral deterrent is too great to snort or shoot that first hit of heroin and risk ending up a zombie in one of the country’s urban homeless camps. Even the “cure” for heroin use – methadone — is based on removing the moral stigma of its illegality, not on freeing an individual from drug addiction by safely withdrawing the person from its pernicious clutch. Big Pharma, however, has made sure there is no such moral stigma to taking an antidepressant. After more than forty years of appeal from their marketing campaigns, there is instead a subtle encouragement for the everyday person, especially a woman, to pop a pill to solve any life woe…because they are merely correcting a “chemical imbalance,” which does not actually exist. You’re wrong if you use heroin, but you’re right if you use antidepressants. How evil a message is that?

Psychiatrists Have Become Our Jailers   June 5, 2026 – Robert Carter       Three hundred years ago, as commerce drove the Western world to abandon farms and populate cities, more and more “lunatics” appeared on the streets. Poverty, malnutrition, and probably just plain isolation spurred an increasingly larger group of people who had suddenly became a “problem” for the rest of “civilized” society.      The asylum was born. The early institutions that housed these poor souls were for the most part cruel jails for those who had committed no crime. The “insane” were warehoused in away from society and were often starved while chained to walls and left to rot far way from the easily offended eyes of a new urban middle class.      By the early nineteenth century an effort was made to rehabilitate the “mad” through moral treatment sanctuaries that offered a kinder treatment with the goal of returning these “deviants” to productive lives. That movement did not last long, however, perhaps given the huge growth of urban metropolises and the need for confining these abnormal folks in larger and larger, more and more punitive, and less and less rehabilitative institutions.      It was at this time that psychiatrists found their niche. These newly evolved “doctors of the mind” had for some reason set their sights on analyzing the insane – not the mentally healthy – to develop their practice. These dark madhouses, hidden from society, provided them with perfect laboratories to develop their cruel “treatments” of insulin coma therapy, electroshock, and lobotomies.      All those treatments the World Health Organization now lists as torture. Behind he alls of these jail-like institutions, out of the public eye, psychiatrists could destroy one body after another in their mad efforts to cure insanity. Instead, they ended up jailing thousands of unfortunate souls in their own damaged bodies.      Once the extent of these institutional horrors were exposed to the public in the early 1950s – – and lobotomies were made illegal and ECT was at least curtailed — psychiatrists had to find another means of jailing those they considered insane.      Bingo. Thorazine was created, and three quarters of a century of debilitating psychotropic drugs have followed in its path. Any “unhappy” soul can now be imprisoned in a body poisoned by these toxic chemicals prescribed by a psychiatrist who’s chosen the right DSM label for someone’s “lunacy.”      Today eighty million American souls on antidepressants have become incarcerated in their own body jails. With the help of Big Pharma’s bogus marketing, they have come to believe they are now somehow free from life’s tribulations.      There’s only one tribulation in any kind in a jail, though…the tribulation of not being free.

Big Pharma Authors Are a Corrupt Crowd   May 28, 2026 – Robert Carter      A recent study published in the Spanish health journal Gaceta Sanitaria shows that eighty percent of 704 Big Pharma clinical practice guideline authors received some form of compensation by pharmaceutical companies. The research was done by Spain’s Department of Public Health and it assessed the honesty of those authors to report any conflict of interest industry compensation.      One third of those authors whose public records show compensation from Big Pharma filed no required conflict of interest statements. Ten percent of them did file, but claimed they had received no Big Pharma payments, despite the public records showing they did. Another ten percent claimed some compensation, but not all of their pharmaceutical industry payments.      In fact, the Department of Public Health concluded that only seventeen percent of the 704 clinical practice guideline authors had reported their Big Pharma compensation at all reliably. That’s quite a collection of dishonest folks. That’s quite a corrupt industry where that many employees accept Big Pharma bribes and then lie about them.      Yes, this is a study in Spain only. Yes, it only covers a six year span, but it’s recent, 2017- 2023. Yes, the payments reported to these authors came from pharmaceutical records and themselves may therefore not be the most reliable admission of compensation. Is it possible that this level of corruption is only unique to Spain? Yes…but that is highly unlikely.      The greater probability is that this study reveals a level of dishonesty prompted by the lavish compensation by Big Pharma to these authors. They are apparently willing to work in an inherently evil industry, producing harmful drugs, because they have been so well bribed by the financial rewards available to them there.      Big Pharma greed breeds more greed, both in employer and employees.      Thanks to Richard Sears for bringing attention to this study in his recent Mad in America post.

Cult Recovery Steps Work for Psychiatric Drug Survivors Too   May 22, 2026 – Robert Carter      Kelsey Decker spent eight years in a high-control spiritual group, The Ishaya’s Ascension. Also known as The Bright Path, it offered costly brainwashing meditative techniques under an authoritarian leadership. She managed to extricate herself from it twenty years ago, but spent the first ten years struggling to reorient herself to real life and to her real self. At first, she hadn’t even known she had been in a cult.|      She has now published The Unofficial Survival Guide to help others recover from similarly destructive manipulation in other “cults.” She lists eighty-nine specific tips for recovery as survivors progresses through eight general aspects of restoring themselves after suffering the trauma of destructive manipulation by a cult.Those eight aspects of recovery apply equally as well to anyone who has been harmed by the “cult” of psychiatric medicine. They include nervous system and psychological healing, identity reconstruction, relationships and social recovery, and spiritual recovery.      Long term ingestion of such toxic substances as Lexapro, Zoloft, Prozac, and Celexa disrupt the natural harmony of the nervous system and consequently the stability of one’s psyche. A safe, slow tapering off these drugs is essential before a full recovery can occur and a sane reconstruction of one’s identity can begin.A psychiatric patient has been told by an “authority” who cannot be challenged and who “knows” more than any patient does – in other words, the psychiatrist – that one has a mental disorder occasioned by a chemical imbalance. One is therefore stigmatized for life because of one’s mental “disease.” All false, of course, but often difficult labels to get out of one’s head.      A person recovering from psychiatric treatment often needs to reestablish bonds with family and community. The semi-zombie state that these drugs can induce put one out of human touch to a greater or lesser degree from those one has been close to. Those bonds need to be re-established for full recovery.      A spiritual recovery will also need to take place. One needs to un-brainwash oneself from the idea that one is one’s brain and is subservient to it. One might be intimately connected to one’s mind – which itself is non-physical and separate from the brain – but the mind  s much closer to one’s native spiritual identity than the brain. That truth that will need to be discovered or re-discovered and newly experienced for recovery. The manipulative “religion” of psychiatry is, in fact, the least spiritual religion on the planet.      Psychiatry a cult? Who knew?      There are eighty million Americans on anti-depressants who apparently don’t know, just as Kelsey Decker didn’t know she was part of The Bright Path cult. Better buy anybody you know taking antidepressants a copy of her Unofficial Survival Guide so they have a chance of extricating themselves from this dangerous psychiatric cult.

How Mistaking Relapse for Withdrawal Can Lead to ECT   May 15, 2026 – Robert Carter      Dr. Anders Sørensen, a Danish clinical psychologist specializing in psychiatric drug withdrawal, helps people taper safely off psychiatric drugs by using gradual, hyperbolic dose reductions. He also helps them work through any prior underlying emotional or mental symptoms. He is the author of Crossing Zero: The Art and Science of Coming Off and Staying Off Psychiatric Drugs .      He was recently invited to Washington DC to speak at the Mental Health and Over – medicalization Summit about how withdrawal from psychiatric drugs is repeatedly mistaken for relapse. That misidentification puts someone right back on their medication and, in some cases, even increases it. A complete transcript of his talk is on his May 8th Substack post.      Sorensen presented the key factors leading to this dangerous mis-identification and the ensuing and further over-medication of patients. He cites the 2025 study in The American Journal of Medicine which revealed that the major antidepressant trials available only follow medicated patients for eight weeks, on average.      That short duration of study shows little to nothing about the long term effects of those antidepressants on the body and the brain.      Consequently, the results of those short term trials are virtually worthless because the median duration of antidepressant use in America is a full five years. An eight week study has little practical applicability to those taking antidepressants in the real world.      Over that long term ingestion of antidepressants, Sorensen points out, the body adapts to its altered brain chemistry. The longer the duration of taking antidepressants, the harder it is for the body to adapt back again to a medication-free state. If someone tries to stop their medication too quickly, the system rebels and is thrown quite out of balance.      Hence, severe withdrawal symptoms. One begins to experience dizziness, nausea, headaches, muscle discomfort, shaking, burning sensations, and fatigue…in varying levels of intensity. Such abrupt drug cessation can be painful. One also experiences a host of debilitating emotional and mental states such as anxiety, panic, insomnia, irritability, depressed moods or mood swings, brain fog, difficulty concentrating and bothersome, unexpected thoughts.      In other words, these intense physical and emotional withdrawal symptoms can look like the patient is relapsing into the original symptoms of the initial diagnosis that started their antidepressant prescription in the first place.      When this misidentification occurs, the patient is then put back on the original medication, its dosage is often raised, other psychotropic drugs can be added to it, and when none of that full cocktail works, the patient is labeled “treatment resistant” and is given electroshock therapy, voluntarily or involuntarily.      Sorensen does not cover that in the transcript of his report to the Washington Summit, but that is what happens too often in the real world when proper, careful, slow tapering is not done and when psychiatrists are too blind to distinguish withdrawal from relapse.      And that gap matters. Especially when it comes to dependence and withdrawal.       Time matters. Because the body adapts.      If you alter brain chemistry for long enough, the body adapts – not overnight, but gradually, over months and years. And the longer that adaptation has been building, the more sensitive it becomes to change, and the harder it gets to come off.      In many cases, that means tapering over years. Because when you then remove the drug or reduce the dose too quickly –the system is thrown out of balance. That imbalance is what we call withdrawal; an imbalance between what the system expects – and what it gets.      What’s confusing is that withdrawal from psychiatric drugs isn’t just physical symptoms. It’s not just dizziness, nausea, headaches, muscle pain, shaking, burning sensations, fatigue. It’s that, too.      But it’s also anxiety, panic, insomnia, irritability, depressed mood, mood swings, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts. Withdrawal can mimic relapse. Or new diagnoses.

On-line AI Mental Health Chatbots: Feeding the Tapeworm May 1, 2026 – Robert Carter Richard Sears reported on the Mad in America website this week about a new AI mental health chatbot study just published in the Journal of Medical Internet  Research. A Syracuse University research team recruited 1805 participants between 18 and 49 years of age for their anonymous on-line survey about on-line AI mental health chatbot use. The invitation to participate was made through an on-line participant recruitment system that described the survey as focusing on perceptions and attitudes toward seeking mental health help, but it did not refer to AI. The overall question for this young to middle age audience was to name the sources they typically turn to when facing mental health concerns. Amazingly, a full one third of the respondents said they consulted an on-line AI chatbot at least once a week about mental health concerns. Participants who self-reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression or anxiety were 71 percent more likely to discuss their mental health with an AI chatbot. This was not the most scientifically exacting survey, of course, but was more a self-reported data collection. However, given such a significant number of participants, it does suggest an underlying tapeworm-like motif to AI mental health chatbot use. Just as an insatiably hungry tapeworm is caused by ingesting contaminated food, these heavy users of AI mental health chatbots develop an uncontrolled appetite for obsessive self-diagnosis aided by these AI programs. The original contamination? Their acceptance of a DSM-based label of a mental disorder for themselves. The enforced stigma of being so labeled – either by another or by themselves – sets off their insatiable search to solve this mystery about their mental make-up through hours of on-line interaction with these chatbots…programmed, of course, by the same minds that came up with the DSM labels in the first place. The sad irony is that there is no mystery solve about their mental health. There is only the original mental contamination from that false DSM label that they’ve been given. The sad, hopeless on-line pursuit that they’ve taken on to try to solve that unsolvable mystery is what follows. They’ve innocently ingested a DSM tapeworm that keeps trying to eat its own tail.