(1888PressRelease)
January 27, 2008 - Due to innovative patient safety legislation in Sweden passed in 2005, expanding the information available in the country’s Medical Drugs Registry, researchers were able to uncover that a staggering 52% of all women who committed suicide in Sweden in 2006 were taking antidepressants (Psychiatric Services, “Ethnic Differences in Antidepressant Treatment Preceding Suicide in Sweden,” Jan 2008). Although concerns about suicidal/violent side effects plague the antidepressant market worldwide, instead of increasing the scrutiny of these deadly risks, as was done by the Swedish legislators, the U.S. Congress is being coerced by vested into enacting legislation to get more women on these dangerous drugs.
Already, the consumption of antidepressants is 4,000% greater in the U.S. than in Sweden, raking in a profit of $13.5 billion in 2006. The latest attempt by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries to increase their customer base for these drugs is a bill called the “Mother’s Act”. This bill calls for increased screening of new mothers for “postpartum depression”—a diagnosis that stigmatizes effects of pregnancy and childbirth as “mental illness” and needing “treatment” with powerful, mind-altering drugs. The mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), says that with the international controversy surrounding the suicide and violence inducing effects of antidepressant drugs, Congress must withdraw support from the Mother's Act and instead enact similar regulations to Sweden that would make prescription data available for an analysis of how many women and children committing suicide were taking these drugs.
Another report published this month in New England Journal of Medicine sheds light on exactly how these vested interests have been able to mislead the public for so long about the safety and efficacy of antidepressants. The researchers revealed that negative studies on antidepressants are either not being published, or are skewed in a way that makes them appear positive.
CCHR says the issue of buried side effects is particularly important given the current push by vested interests to prescribe these drugs to new mothers for “postpartum depression”, which cannot be confirmed through any physical tests, and may be a manifestation of hormonal changes, lack of sleep, nutritional deficiencies and a myriad of other situations accompanying pregnancy and birth which do not require the prescription of dangerous, psychotropic drugs.
For more information on the dangers of psychiatric drugs, read CCHR's publication, The Report on the Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs. To learn more about financial ties between psychiatrists and drug manufacturers, read Psychiatric Diagnostic Manual Link to Drug Manufacturers.
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.
