(1888PressRelease)
June 19, 2006 - A second study in less than two months has lifted the curtain on the highly lucrative psychiatric practice of the massive prescribing of potent antipsychotic drugs known to cause a plethora of life-threatening side effects. An alarming new study from Columbia University found that prescriptions for antipsychotic prescriptions leaped more than fivefold from 1993 to 2002. Although little to no data exists on long-term effects of these deadly drugs, the total amount of prescriptions jumped from 201,000 in 1995 to 1,224,000 in 2002.
A recent analysis taking FDA data collection from 2000-2004 exposed antipsychotics for causing deaths in up to an estimated 450 children and 1,328 reports of adverse side effects, some life-threatening. These include but are not limited to tremors, involuntary severe muscle contractions, writhing, painful muscle spasms, irregular blood pressure and cardiac problems. Yet antipsychotics are dolled out like candy to even preschoolers. Just last year, the FDA asked manufacturers of the newer antipsychotic drugs to issue warnings on the increased risk of death the drugs posed to the elderly.
There have been several other warnings on the drugs as reported in the Report on the Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs. Brian Beaumont, president of the Vancouver chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights said, “Despite the documented studies, warnings, child deaths and the countless lives ruined due to irreversible side effects, psychiatrists were found by Columbia University and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (the world's leading psychiatric watchdog organization) as the main peddlers of these mind-numbing drugs”.
Dr. Julie Magno Zito, an associate professor of pharmacy and medicine at the University of Maryland added, "If you're going to put children on three or four different drugs, now you've got a potpourri of target symptoms and side effects...How do you even know who the kid is anymore?" Dr. John March, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Duke University states, "We are using these medications and don't know how they work, or at what cost...It amounts to a huge experiment with the lives of American kids, and what it tells us is that we've got to do something other than what we're doing now" to asses the drugs' overall impact. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was established by the Church of Scientology in 1969 to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.
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