(1888PressRelease)
July 07, 2008 - In 1990, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) asked American psychiatrists and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue warnings about the latest psychiatric drug causing violence and suicide: the antidepressant Prozac. CCHR filed complaints and provided evidence. In response, on September 20, 1991, the FDA ordered an advisory committee to hold a hearing to investigate the safety and effectiveness of antidepressant drugs. A panel of nine psychiatrists, many with financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, heard chilling testimony from medical experts as well as the victims of these drugs—and did nothing.
It wasn’t until 13 years later, on October 15, 2004, that the FDA finally ordered pharmaceutical companies to add a “black box” warning to antidepressants, saying the drugs could cause suicidal thoughts and actions in children and teenagers. It took nine months for the FDA to issue another advisory, warning doctors to watch for suicidal behavior in adults taking antidepressants.
The FDA advisories vindicated CCHR’s allegations and patient and family testimony in 1991. However millions of men, women and children were needlessly subjected to dangerous drugs for more than a decade. Now, with controversy growing over the previously undisclosed dangers of psychiatric drugs, international warnings are being issued at escalating rates, citing side effects of drug dependence, addiction, mania, hostility, aggression, psychosis, suicide and violence.
Over 80 warnings have now been issued internationally on the previously undisclosed dangers of psychiatric drugs since October 2004. This comes on the heels of public awareness campaigns by watchdog organizations, independent medical doctors, patients and their families repeatedly requesting independent evaluations of clinical drug trials and accountability for the harm and loss of lives. While drug regulatory agencies such as the FDA should be accountable for failing to act sooner, it must be noted that psychiatrists have been their advisors, and have a vested interest in maintaining a multi-billion dollar psychiatric drug industry.
Psychiatric drug sales have soared in recent years based solely on psychiatry’s criteria for a myriad of “mental disorders,” which are simply a checklist of behaviors, emotions and attitudes. Promoting these disorders as medical conditions requiring drug treatment is misleading to the public, governments and patients.
There are no blood tests, X-rays, brain scans or any scientific/medical means by which psychiatry’s diagnoses can be verified. Subsequently millions of men women and children have been wrongly diagnosed as mentally ill, and prescribed dangerous and potentially lethal psychiatric drugs.
The FDA should not be approving such drugs for mental “disorders” that cannot be medically/scientifically proven to exist.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights ( @ ) cchr dot org.
