“A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” – A truism attributed to Dr Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.

“I saw thousands who could’ve overcome the darkness, but for the love of a lousy buck I watched them die.” – Bob Dylan

Myth # 1: 
“The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) tests all new psychiatric drugs”

Myth # 2: 
“FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is effective long-term”

Myth # 3:
 “FDA approval means that a psychotropic drug is safe long-term”

Myth # 4:
 “Mental ‘illnesses’ are caused by ‘brain 
chemical imbalances’”

Myth # 5:
“Antidepressant drugs work like insulin
 for diabetics”

Myth # 6: 
“SSRI ‘discontinuation syndromes’ are 
different than ‘withdrawal syndromes’”

Myth # 7: 
“Ritalin is safe for children” 

Myth # 8: 
“Psychoactive drugs are totally safe for 
humans”

Myth # 9: 
“Mental ‘illnesses’ have no known 
cause”

Myth # 10: 
“Psychotropic drugs have nothing to do with the huge increase in disabled and unemployable American psychiatric patients”

False. See Myths # 2 and # 3 above. In actuality, recent studies have shown that the major cause of permanent disability among the “mentally ill” is the long-term, high dosage and/or use of multiple neurotoxic psych drugs – any combination of which, as noted above, has never been adequately tested for safety even in the animal lab. Many commonly-prescribed drugs are fully capable of causing brain-damage long-term, especially the “major tranquilizers” like Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Clozapine, Abilify, Clozapine, Fanapt, Geodon, Invega, Risperdal, Saphris, Seroquel and Zyprexa, any of which can cause brain shrinkage that is commonly seen on the MRI scans of drugged-up, so-called “schizophrenics” finding that are deceptively pointed out as “proof” that schizophrenia is an anatomic brain disorder that causes the brain to shrink! (Incidentally, non-psychiatric patients who had been on major tranquilizer drugs for reasons other than mental health have been known to experience withdrawal hallucinations and withdrawal psychoses when they quit the drug. 

Astonishingly, some of these unfortunate patients have been told by psychiatrists that their new schizophrenia was “uncovered” because of the drug - a ridiculous claim very similar to the one psychiatrists used to use when unipolarly depressed patients who had been on SSRI’s suddenly developed drug-induced mania and were then told that their real diagnosis of bipolar disorder was uncovered by the drug!)

Of course, highly addictive “minor” tranquilizers like Valium, Ativan, Klonopin, Librium, Tranxene and Xanax can cause withdrawal symptoms too. All tranquilizers, both major and minor, are dangerously dependency-inducing and very difficult to withdraw from. 
Tranquilizer drug withdrawal syndromes, especially caused by abrupt withdrawal, can easily cause difficult-to-treat rebound insomnia, panic attacks, agitation, violence, and seriously increased anxiety, and, after long-term use, memory loss, dementia, loss of IQ points and the high likelihood of being mis-diagnosed with the so-called “Alzheimer’s dementia” of “unknown etiology” instead of the real diagnosis: “iatrogenic dementia”).

Myth # 11: 
“So-called bipolar disorder can mysteriously ‘emerge’ in patients who have been taking stimulating antidepressants like the SSRIs”

False. Actually, alternating, erratic, crazy-making behaviors like mania, agitation and aggression are commonly caused by the so-called anti-depressant drugs like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, and Lexapro. The long list of adverse drug effects from these SSRIs includes a syndrome called akathisia, a severe, drug-induced, sometimes suicidality-inducing internal restlessness - like having restless legs syndrome over one’s entire body and brain. In the history of medicine, akathisia was once understood to only occur as a long-term adverse effect of antipsychotic drugs (See Myth # 10). So it was a shock to many psychiatrists to see that SSRIs could also cause that deadly problem. Because of this new reality, it is my considered opinion that SSRIs should be called “agitation-inducing” drugs rather than “anti-depressant” drugs. 

The important point to make is that SSRI-induced mania, SSRI-induced agitation, SSRI-induced akathisia and SSRI-induced aggression is NOT bipolar disorder “of unknown cause”, and that SSRI-induced psychosis is NOT schizophrenia. 
A more sobering realization, of course, is that all those disorders are iatrogenic (doctor-caused or drug-caused) and therefore preventable.
I urge readers to go to www.ssristories.net, to read some 6,000 mainstream media-documented stories of SSRI-induced aberrant behaviors, including numerous school shootings, numerous road rage incidents, numerous cases of postpartum depression, cases sexual misconduct among female school teachers, a multitude of murders, hundreds of murders-suicide and other acts of violence including workplace and school violence. These cases only represent a small fraction of the possible cases, since psych drug use by the perpetrators of newsworthy irrational violence is usually not reported in the mainstream media.

Myth # 12: 
“Antidepressant drugs can prevent suicides”

False. Actually, there are zero psychiatric drugs that are FDA-approved for the prevention of suicidality because psych drugs, especially the so-called antidepressants, actually INCREASE the incidence of suicidal thinking, suicide attempts and completed suicides. Over the past decades, drug companies have spent billions of dollars futilely trying to prove the effectiveness of various psychiatric drugs in suicide prevention. Even the most corrupted drug company trials have failed to accomplish that goal! The fact remains that every one of the so-called “antidepressant” drugs actually increase the risk of suicidality. 

The FDA requires black box warning labels to be published on drug handout materials when research has proved that a drug increase suicidality. Drug-makers, marketers and prescribers naturally did all they could to oppose the FDA’s action. Those, all of whom feared that such truth-telling would hurt their profits (it hasn’t). What can and does avert suicidality, of course, are not drugs. Instead, suicide prevention requires the interventions by caring, compassionate and thorough teams of care-givers that includes families, faith communities and friends as well as aware psychologists, counselors, social workers, relatives (especially wise grandmas!) and, obviously, the limited involvement of psychiatric drug prescribers.

Myth # 13: 
“America’s school shooters and other mass shooters are ‘untreated’ schizophrenics who should have been taking psych drugs”

False. Actually, 90% or more of the infamous homicidal and suicidal mass school shooters have, prior to the shootings, been under the “care” of psychiatrists (or other psych drug prescribers) and therefore they have typically been taking (or withdrawing from) cocktails of psychiatric drugs. SSRIs such as Prozac and psychostimulants (such as Ritalin) have been the most common classes of drugs involved in school shootings. Antipsychotics are too sedating, although any previously abused, disrespected and justifiably angry teen who is withdrawing from major or minor tranquilizers could easily become a school shooter if given access to lethal weapons. 

The 10% of school shooters whose drug history is not yet known, have typically had their medical files sealed by the authorities – probably in order to protect the drug companies and the medical professionals who were responsible for the shooters having the drugs. 
Every industry that is responsible for supplying the offending drugs to those who were involved in crimes such as mass school shootings have spent an enormous amount of advertising money to get the public to buy the notion that these adolescent, white male school shooters were mentally ill rather than under the influence of their crazy-making, impulse-altering, brain-altering psych drugs (or going through withdrawal from them). 

Parents often comment on how their children suddenly developed an “I-don’t-give-a -damn attitude” after going on psych drugs. Nothing good can ever come out of a situation where brain-altering psych drugs are prescribed for a teased, abused, isolated, disrespected, justifiably angry and understandably vengeful adolescent boy who has access to lethal weapons.

A CBS’s 60 Minutes television program several years ago made the outrageously false claim that “untreated schizophrenics” were responsible for “half of the mass shootings in America”. The four examples mentioned in the segment were, in fact, almost certainly patients who had been “made crazy” by their past “treatment” with brain-altering psychiatric drugs by unnamed psychiatrists and clinics who obviously were being protected by CBS from public identification or interrogation by the authorities as accomplices (or at least witnesses) to the crimes. 

Because of this secrecy, the public was being kept in the dark about exactly what crazy-making, homicidality-inducing, suicidality-inducing psych drugs could have been involved. The names of the drugs and the Big Pharma corporations that have falsely marketed them as safe are also being protected from scrutiny, and thus the chances of prevention of future drug-related shootings or suicides is being squandered. Such decisions by America’s corporate ruling elites represent public health policy at its worst, and it is a disservice to past and future shooting victims and their loved ones. 

The four most notorious mass shooters that were highlighted in the aforementioned 60 Minutes segment were the Virginia Tech shooter, the Tucson shooter, the Aurora shooter and the Sandy Hook shooter whose wild-eyed (actually “drugged-up”) photos had been carefully chosen for their dramatic “zombie-look” effect, so that most ill-informed, frightened, paranoid Americans could be convinced that it was a crazy “schizophrenic”, rather than a victim of another cocktail of inebriating, psychoactive, crazy-making drugs (or the withdrawal from those drugs) that likely made them perpetrate the otherwise irrational violence.

Parenthetically, it needs to be emphasized that all major media outlets profit handsomely from advertising revenues from various pharmaceutical and medical industries. Therefore, those outlets have a compelling financial incentive to protect the names of the drugs, the names of the drug companies, the names of the prescribing MDs and the names of the clinics and hospitals that could otherwise be linked to the crimes. 

Certainly, if a methamphetamine-intoxicated person shot someone, the person who sold the intoxicating drug to the perpetrator would be considered an accomplice to the crime, just like the bartender who supplied the liquor to some inebriated customer who later killed someone in a car accident could be held accountable. A double standard obviously exists when it comes to powerful, respected and highly profitable corporations whose honorable drug dealers wear lab coats or three-piece suits and hobnob with the elites.

A thorough study of the scores of American school shooters, starting with the University of Texas tower shooter in 1966 and (temporarily) stopping at Sandy Hook, reveals that the overwhelming majority of them (if not all of them) were taking brain-altering, mesmerizing, inebriating, impulse-destroying, “I don’t give a damn” psych drugs that had been prescribed to them by well-meaning but too-busy psychiatrists, family physicians or physician assistants who somehow claimed to be unaware of or misinformed about the homicidal and suicidal risks that the drugs posed to their equally unsuspecting patients.

Most practitioners who wrote the prescriptions for the mass shooters or for a patient who later suicided while under the influence of the drug, will probably defend themselves against the charge of being an accomplice to murder or suicide by saying that they didn’t know about the lethal dangers of these often cavalierly-prescribed drugs because they had been deceived by the drug companies that had convinced them of their benign nature. 

Such a defense is obviously a very weak one simply because those lethal side effects have been widely published and have been listed in the prescribing information.

Myth # 14:
“If your patient hears voices it means 
he’s schizophrenic”

False. Auditory hallucinations are known to occur in up to 10% of normal people; and up to 75% of normal people have had the experience of someone that isn’t there calling their name. (http://www.hearing-voices.org/voices-visions/). Hearing voices does necessarily not mean you are crazy.
Vivid nighttime dreams, hearing voices while experiencing a nightmare and daytime flashbacks of past military traumas in combat veterans probably have similar origins to daytime visual, auditory and olfactory hallucinations, and many psychiatrists don’t think that they represent mental illnesses. Indeed, hallucinations are listed in the pharmaceutical literature as potential side effects (or represent withdrawal symptoms) of many drugs, especially psychiatric drugs. These syndromes are called substance-induced psychotic disorders which are, by definition, neither mental illnesses nor schizophrenia. Rather, substance-induced or withdrawal-caused psychotic disorders are temporary and directly caused by the intoxicating effects brain-altering drugs, malnourishing or toxic foods or other exposures to combinations of common substances such as alcohol, the neurotoxic aluminum and mercury in injectable vaccines, diet soda, chemical toxins, etc, etc. 

Psychotic symptoms, including hallucinations and delusions, can be caused by substances such as alcohol, marijuana, hallucinogens, sedatives, hypnotics, and anxiolytics, inhalants, opioids, PCP, and the many amphetamine-like drugs (like Phen-Fen, [fenfluramine]), cocaine, methamphetamine, Ecstasy, and, of course, agitation-inducing, psycho-stimulating drugs like the SSRIs).

Psychotic symptoms can also result from sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and the withdrawal from certain drugs like alcohol, sedatives, hypnotics, anxiolytics and especially the many dopamine-suppressing, dependency-inducing, sedating, and zombifying so-called anti-psychotic drugs. 
Examples of other medications that may induce hallucinations and delusions include anesthetics, analgesics, anticholinergic agents, anticonvulsants, antihistamines, antihypertensive and cardiovascular medications, some antimicrobial medications, anti-parkinsonian drugs, some chemotherapeutic agents, corticosteroids, some gastrointestinal medications, muscle relaxants, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications, and Antabuse.

Summary

The very sobering information revealed above should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to ask: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable victims of Big Pharma’s highly profitable psych drugs over the last half century have actually been mis-labeled as incurably mentally ill (and then tragically mis-treated as incurably mentally ill) and sent down the convoluted path of psychiatric therapeutic misadventures that often resulted in permanent disability?” 

In my mental health care practice, I treated hundreds of patients who had been given a series of confusing and contradictory mental illness labels, many of which had been one of the new “diseases of the month” for which there was a new “psych drug of the month” that was being heavily marketed on TV to potential patients and in clinics across America by thousands of Big Pharma’s drug sales representatives. 

Most of my patients had been victimized by unpredictable and unforseeable adverse drug-drug interactions (far too often drug-drug-drug interactions) which had then been erroneously mis-diagnosed as representing the symptoms of a new mental illness!
Extrapolating my 1200+ patient experience to what surely has been happening in the rest of America boggles my mind. There has been a massive iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) epidemic going on right under our noses that has affected tens of millions of suffering victims who could have been cured if not for the drugs. 

A lyric from one of Bob Dylan’s songs comes to mind when I think about the massive amounts of human suffering caused by the un-ending search for profits that motivates the pro-drugging agendas of Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Psychiatry and fosters the willful ignorance of well-meaning, unaware healthcare practitioners that have victimized so many equally unaware, potentially curable patients. Dylan sang “I saw thousands who could’ve overcome the darkness, but for the love of a lousy buck I watched them die.”

A few of the many myths of mental illness are noted above. The time to act knowledge is long overdue.

Partial Bibliography

(Authors and books that I used as background for the assertions in the above article)
 
Toxic Psychiatry; Your Drug May Be Your Problem; Talking Back to Prozac; Medication Madness; by Peter Breggin; 

Prozac Backlash; and The Antidepressant Solution: A Step-by-Step Guide to Safely Overcoming Antidepressant Withdrawal, Dependence, and Addiction; by Joseph Glenmullen; 

Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill; and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America; by Robert Whitaker; 

Soteria: Through Madness to Deliverance; by Loren Mosher and Voyce Hendrix; 

Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare; by Peter Goetzsche; 

Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent; and Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime; by Grace Jackson; 

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to do About It; by Marcia Angell; 

Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression; and The Antidepressant Era; by David Healy; 

Blaming the Brain: The TRUTH About Drugs and Mental Health; by Elliot Valenstein; 

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History; by Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk

Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels,: The Revolt Against theMental Health System; by Seth Farber;

Excitotoxins: by Russell Blaylock;

The Myth of Mental Illness; by Thomas Szasz,

White Coat Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine; by Carl Elliott

Selling Sickness; How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients; by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels; 

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs; by Melody Petersen; 

The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying our Brains and Harming our Children; Carol Simontacchi