Blog posts

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.

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?