Pharmaceuticals Anonymous

Showing posts with label ritalin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ritalin. Show all posts

Friday, June 13, 2008

Students relying on Ritalin at College: Generation Rx


Graduation is one of the most exciting events students have to look forward to this time of year. Before they can take the big walk in cap and gown for a diploma, they have to suffer through a rite of passage with which every student is familiar: finals week.

Cramming for those last few papers and exams can mean pulling all-nighters with lots of caffeine. But, rather than starting another pot of coffee, today's students are getting a much more efficient – and dangerous – push toward the finish line.

Since the debut of Ritalin, reliance on prescription analeptics, a class of amphetamines that is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, has become as commonplace as the traditional cup of strong coffee, according to an article by the New York Times.

As many as 20 percent of college students have used Ritalin or Adderall to study, write papers and take exams when the going gets tough, turning students with legitimate prescriptions into small-time campus drug dealers.


Article continues here

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Harvard doc pushes Ritalin, reaps $1.6M

Harvard Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Pharma Income

A Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of antipsychotics in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drugmakers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of the income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators, The New York Times reports.
By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Timothy Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules governing conflicts of interest, US Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican tells the Times, since some of their research is financed by government grants.

Wow!

Follow the money!
Visit Dr. Biederman here

Ironically, pro-force psych profiteer E. Fuller Torrey comments here:
“The price we pay for these kinds of revelations is credibility, and we just can’t afford to lose any more of that in this field,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, which finances psychiatric studies. “In the area of child psychiatry in particular, we know much less than we should, and we desperately need research that is not influenced by industry money.” (NYT)


Brains... they need brains...
Instances of deliberate breach of policy, including failure to file or knowingly filing an incomplete, erroneous, or misleading disclosure form, violations of the guidelines or failure to comply with prescribed monitoring procedures, will be adjudicated in accordance with applicable disciplinary policies and procedures of the Faculty of Medicine and of the affiliated hospitals. Possible sanctions will include the following:
1. Formal admonition;
2. The inclusion in the Faculty Member's file of a letter from the Office of the Dean indicating that the individual's good standing as a member of the Faculty has been called into question;
3. Ineligibility of the Faculty Member for grant applications, Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, or supervision of graduate students;
4. Non-renewal of appointment;
5. Dismissal from the Faculty of Medicine.

http://www.hms.harvard.edu/integrity/conf.html

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Dr. Peter Breggin: Children Poisoning Themselves with Psychiatric Drugs


Led by psychiatry and the drug companies, society is discouraging children from becoming masters of their own lives and encouraging them to become lifelong consumers of psychiatric drugs. Spellbound by these drugs -- that is, rendered unable to perceive their drug-induced mental dysfunction -- the grown adults will accept functioning on a lower level without realizing what they are missing in the way of a drug-free, fully alert mind. This is great news for unscrupulous members of the medical and psychiatric professions, and even greater news for the pharmaceutical industry. But it's terrible news for our children and youth, and the bad news may extent into adulthood. Because their brains have been thrown into biochemical imbalance by years of exposure to psychiatric drugs, many adults find it difficult to go on living without taking more psychiatric drugs. They cannot stop taking stimulants, tranquilizers, antidepressants, neuroleptics or mood stabilizers because the withdrawal reactions have become too long severe and lasting or even permanent. It's time to stop the process in childhood. It's time to stop prescribing psychiatric medications to our children and instead to provide them needed improvements in the home, school and community.

Read the whole article at the Huffington Post


Dr. Breggin's site

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The Roots of Authoritarianism in Psychiatry and Psychology


This is the image that Freud, a cocaine addict, hung above the famous couch where he dispensed "advice".



"In recounting the story of the Rat Man (“A Case of Obsessional Neurosis”, 1909), Freud digresses into that of another patient, a civil servant, who had many eccentricities. One was an obsession with cleanliness: he paid Freud in banknotes which had been ironed in order to get rid of bacteria. Another was his treatment of young girls. Among his friends he would play the role of a jolly uncle. In this role he would invite his friends’ daughters out for a day in the country and would contrive to miss the train so that he and the girl would have to spend the night in a hotel. Although he always arranged a separate room for the girl, he would come to her bed during the night and masturbate her with his fingers. Freud suggested that this was not a good idea on grounds of hygiene: “But aren’t you afraid of doing her some harm, fiddling about in her genitals with your dirty hand?”. To this remarkably mild objection – would such conduct have been acceptable with clean hands? – the civil servant responded by flying into a rage and declaring that his attentions had never done the girls any harm. He stormed out of Freud’s consulting room and never came back. The pattern that emerges, I suggest, is of extreme and excessive indulgence towards patriarchal authority and its abuse, and a lack of sympathy with the women and children who were, and evidently still are, its victims."
The rest of the article is here


Ritalin (an Amphetamine) and Cocaine are chemically almost identical. So Freud was a speed freak....something to think about next time you or your child are offered medication.