Antipsychotics

There were some differences between the study, the abstract, the press release and the media coverage about the risks of taking antipsychotics during pregnancy.

The settlement of an Australian class action lawsuit about Pfizer Parkinson's drugs that caused severe gambling and sex addictions in 172 people has been delayed by a judge concerned that the plaintiffs were not fully informed of their rights.

About 65% of preschool children who were diagnosed with ADHD and given stimulant drugs were still taking those drugs six years later.

The US FDA has requested that Otsuka "immediately cease" distributing some of its educational materials for its top-selling antipsychotic Abilify.

This column is partly a report on the marketing of Abilify, the atypical antipsychotic that has become America’s best-selling drug.   It’s also an appeal for advice and feedback from the RxISK and Mad in America communities, and a call for some brainstorming about strategy.  The plans laid out by drugmakers Otsuka and Lundbeck for Abilify’s future, and the cooperation they’re getting from leading universities, are alarming enough to me that reporting on them seems inadequate.  We need action, although I’m not sure exactly what kind.

In a well-researched, comprehensive article in today's Huffington Post Art Levine has brought to the attention of the mainstream media the government's complicity in the illegal psychiatric drugging of poor children, especially foster children, through Medicaid.  The article, Feds Pay for Drug Fraud: 92 Percent of Foster Care, Poor Kids Prescribed Antipsychotics Get Them for Unaccepted Uses is the only mainstream article I know about that has really pressed the federal government over its refusal to enforce Medicaid's coverage restrictions to "medically accepted indications."

-Johanna Ryan writes about her efforts to avoid following psychiatrists' pressures to take antipsychotics for her depression.

Researchers found some antipsychotics to be worse than others for causing sexual dysfunction.

Antipsychotic drugs increased the risk of children developing diabetes by 50%, and with an antidepressant added, their risk doubled.

About one in five children on Medicaid who are being given long-acting stimulants for ADHD are also being given antipsychotics, often for unapproved conditions.

Over 70% of schizophrenia patients who are "treatment resistant" have apparently developed dopamine supersensitivity psychosis from long-term use of antipsychotic medications.

-A fired government health economist says that his research was showing that 60,000 Americans now taking antipsychotic medications will die prematurely.

The US Food and Drug Administration is still unsure whether a long-acting, injectable antipsychotic killed two people days after they received it.

Antipsychotic medications that are commonly being used to help control behaviors in elderly people with dementia seem to be causing premature deaths at high rates.

I am a psychiatric survivor of over thirty-six years. Since my nervous breakdown in 1978, I have undergone multitudinous experiences ranging from the subtly humiliating to the horrifically debilitating at the hands of incompetent psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists who, in the name of medicine, did more harm than good.

Thirty-one US states have implemented some kind of "prior authorization" policies to try to rein in the unnecessary prescribing of antipsychotic medications to children.

Clinicians are following best practice guidelines only half of the time when giving antipsychotic medications to children, and following FDA-approved indications only one-fourth of the time.

The FDA has approved the atypical antipsychotic Saphris (asenapine) for use in children on the basis of one trial.

In a commentary published in the University of Ottawa nursing journal Aporia, Paula Caplan writes about how Allen Frances and two other academic psychiatrists...

Instead of hope and enthusiasm for their futures, too many children now grow up believing they are inherently defective, and controlled by bad genes and biochemical imbalances. They are shackled by the idea that they have ADHD and then subdued by the drugs that inevitably go along with the diagnosis. Unless something intervenes, many of them will go on to pass their days on Earth in a drug-impaired, demoralized state.

A jury decided Johnson & Johnson must pay a Philadelphia man $2.5 million in damages "for failing to warn that its Risperdal antipsychotic could cause gynecomastia."

There are no proven treatments of any kind for children or adolescents experiencing psychosis or schizophrenia, according to a meta-analysis of randomized comparison trials published in PLOS One.

People who take antipsychotic medications experience many side effects which have "major disruptive impact on their lives," according to research in the Journal of Mental Health Nursing.

Back in 2006, when my son Franklin was in his late twenties and living in a group home in the Boston area, he refused to take Clozaril any more because of the required bi-weekly blood draws. His doctor prescribed Zyprexa as a substitute, and Frank suddenly began to gain weight ... a lot of weight. Later, I would learn that UCLA psychiatrist Dr. William Wirshing had said of Zyprexa prior to its 1996 approval by the FDA: “It is just un-stinkin’-believable. It is the best drug for gaining weight I’ve ever seen.” The doctor indicated that taking ten milligrams of the medication was equivalent to ingesting 1,500 extra calories per day. My outrage knew no bounds.

ProPublica has provided an update on their investigation of Dr. Michael Reinstein. "A former Chicago psychiatrist who was the nation's top prescriber of the...