Articles

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.

Guess What? Suicide Prevention Programs Produce More Suicides By Robert Carter/February 25, 2025 In 1999 federal, state and local government agencies launched the first massive suicide prevention program. Screening tests were  devised – written by psychiatrists, of course – and those who were “depressed” were urged to take antidepressants and other psychotropic medication. Since 2000 the use of prescription drugs by Americans has risen steadily. So has America’s suicide rate, which has also risen steadily since 2000. Similar, coincident increases in suicide rates have been discovered in other countries, as well. An Australian research team found in one hundred countries they studied that suicide rates had only increased in countries that had initiated national mental health policies, programs, and legislation. Those 76 countries they discovered had higher suicide rates were countries that spent more on mental health, had passed mental health legislation, had a greater number of  psychiatrists and  psychiatric nurses, had more psychiatric beds, and gave more training in mental health to primary care professionals. Another analysis of 191 countries found that those countries with “better” psychiatric services also had higher suicide rates. A 2016 U.S. Veterans Department study showed that military members who had a “more severe” mental health diagnosis, but were not treated at all by the VA for their “disorder,” had a much lower suicide rate than those service members who had a “less severe” condition, with no  diagnosis, but who were treated with mental health services by the VA. A 2013 Military Times report showed that from 2001 to 2009 $1.1 billion was spent by the Defense Logistics Agency on  psychiatric drugs and pain medications. Antidepressants and anticonvulsants were the most commonly prescribed for mental health conditions. These were part of the treatment that was given to the service members with the higher suicide rate after undergoing mental health services by the VA. Today prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death for all Americans, right behind heart disease and cancer. Suicides are included in those deaths, and the suicide rate for all  Americans increased 37 percent from 2000 to 2022. Nor surprisingly, antidepressant use by Americans increased 65 percent from 2000 until 2014 and then increased by 66 percent from 2016 to 2022. Psychiatrists today say that antidepressants increase only suicidal thoughts, not suicides. They only say that, of course, because they have to agree with the black box warnings of their partner in crime, the FDA. They also  apparently agree with the profits of the Big Pharma companies producing those antidepressants whose advisory boards they sit on. The rise of America’s suicide rates at the same time as the rise of  Americans’ use of antidepressants cannot just be a coincidence, can it, as these psychiatrists suggest? Common sense would tell any one else that’s far more than coincidence.

A Primer on Rockefeller’s Medical Mafia By Robert Carter/February 17, 2025 In the 1800s few doctors actually held medical degrees. Known as physicians, they diagnosed patients and recommended medications. The other “doctors,” who did surgery or who prescribed various health tonics, learned their trade apprenticing under a medical mentor. Meanwhile, John D. Rockefeller, the oil baron, recognized that his monopoly of Standard Oil was about to be broken up by the government’s anti-trust purge, and he began looking for another lucrative business venture. He chose petrochemicals. He recognized that only synthetic drugs made from petrochemicals could be patented — natural health remedies could not — but he then had to clear the way for his creation of what would become a comparable monopoly to Standard Oil in the petrochemical industry. First he created the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901. That organization began pioneering research and development of petrochemical-based medicines such as vaccines, antibiotics and the  chemical-based drugs that would ultimately become the foundation of today’s pharmaceutical industry. This research flew in the face of the most popular health therapies of the day, such as homeopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy, as well as all of the popular “natural” potions and herbal medicines on the market then. Many of these “cures” were mixtures that contained cocaine, heroin, and other dangerous, but then legal chemicals. Their popularity resulted in illness and death, though, and in 1906 the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry was given the power to regulate interstate commerce of foods and drugs and cull the marketplace of these dangerous potions. This fit in perfectly with Rockefeller’s campaign to turn public and government opinion against such popular remedies, and he almost undoubtedly worked behind the scenes to encourage this legislation. In 1910 Rockefeller helped fund the Flexner Report. This broadly disseminated publication ridiculed natural medicine as “unscientific quackery” and called for a standardization of medical education in the country. Abraham Flexner, the author of the report, soon began serving on the Rockefeller Foundation 's General Education Board , and after 1917 he was made its secretary. By the time the Flexner Report was released, Rockefeller had already begun donating millions of dollars to medical schools, starting with the prestigious University of Chicago and Yale medical schools, with the stipulation they only teach pharmaceutical-based allopathic medicine. The American Medical Association, a union of allopathic physicians which had been established in 1847, now came into prominence as the country’s most influential ruling agency with exclusive power over granting and issuing medical licenses in America. Next, Rockefeller and his robber baron associates Carnegie and J.P. Morgan formed a partnership and bought controlling shares of the pharmaceutical giant I. G. Farben, a German pharmaceutical company that would supply the newly patented synthetic medicines that American doctors were now being educated to prescribe. Rockefeller now had a compliant Bureau of Chemistry, which in 1927 became the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Organization (later the Food and Drug Administration) and a significant investment in the production of pharmaceutical medicine that could be patented for profit. Now he only needed to establish a body of doctors who could exclusively write the prescriptions for what he foresaw would become the vast market for  psychotropic medications, given the experimentation that he saw the Nazis doing in this field with the cooperation of I. G. Farben’s laboratories. In 1930 Rockefeller funded a ten year,  $1,000,000 grant to the Yale Medical School to establish their School of Psychiatry. Three years later Charles-Edward Winslow, Professor of Public Health at Yale, founded the  National Committee on Mental Hygiene, the organization that launched the mental hygiene movement in America and set the stage for the widespread chemical treatment of “mental disorders.” In 1938 the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act 1938 was signed into law and in 1951 the Durham-Humphrey Amendment to it defined which dangerous drugs, like barbiturates, could only be prescribed and refilled by licensed doctors such as psychiatrists. In 1992 Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act that requires drug and biologics manufacturers to pay fees to the FDA for product applications and supplements, and other services. The act also requires the FDA to use these funds to hire more reviewers to assess drug applications. Today forty percent of the FDA overall is funded by Big Pharma, and 75 percent of its drug division is  funded by Big Pharma. Psychiatrists predominate on the FDA approval boards for new psychotropic  medication and members of those boards often move on to lucrative employment in Big Pharma companies. The Medical Mafia – the FDA, Big Pharma, and psychiatry – is alive and well and, oh, so profitable thanks to Rockefeller’s overt and covert manipulation of the public and the U.S. government until he died in 1937. By then the damage to America’s health and mental health was done and his new monopoly was firmly in place. It still is.

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.”