Drug-Induced Dementia: The Perfect Crime

"Under the influence of declining birth rates, expanding longevity, and changing population structures around the world, the global prevalence of senile dementia is expected to increase more than four-fold within the next forty years. Within the United States alone, the number of affected individuals over the age of 65 is expected to rise exponentially from 8 million cases (2% of the entire population in the year 2000), to 18 million retirees (roughly 4.5% of the national census in the year 2040). Although they are striking, these statistics quite likely underestimate the scope of the coming epidemic, as they fail to consider the impact of under-diagnosis, early-onset disease, and the potential for a changing incidence of illness in the context of increasingly toxic environments.

In the face of this imminent crisis, concerned observers have called for policies and practices which aim to prevent, limit, or reverse dementia. Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime is a timely resource which reveals why and how medical treatments themselves – specifically, psychopharmaceuticals – are a substantial cause of brain degeneration and premature death.

A first-of-its-kind resource for patients and clinicians, the book integrates research findings from epidemiology (observational studies of patients in the “real world”), basic biology (animal experiments), and clinical science (neuroimaging and autopsy studies) in order to demonstrate the dementing and deadly effects of psychiatric drugs.

Highlighted by more than 100 neuroimages, slides of tissue specimens, and illustrations, the book uniquely describes:

Ø the societal roots of the problem
(target organ toxicity, regulatory incompetence, and performativity)

Ø the subtypes and essential causes of dementia

Ø the patterns, prevalence, and causes of dementia associated with antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, and stimulants

and

Ø the actions and reforms which patients, providers, and policy makers might immediately pursue, in an effort to mitigate the causes and consequences of this iatrogenic tragedy."

Link

The Quickening Maze

Mental Health in Fiction

The asylum in the forest
Andrew Motion applauds a vividly sympathetic exploration of poetry, madness and identity

Andrew Motion
The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009

High Beach, on the edge of Epping Forest in Essex, is a strange poetic vortex. Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas were stationed there during the first world war; we have no evidence that they met. Seventy-odd years earlier, a better-known literary overlap occurred in the same vicinity, thanks to one Matthew Allen. Allen was founder of the High Beach Private Asylum, the institution that first gave shelter to John Clare. He was also a friend of Alfred Tennyson, doctor to Tennyson's brother Septimus, and eventually (by persuading them to put money into a half-baked wood-carving scheme) the cause of their bankruptcy. You wouldn't know any of this today, driving through the Epping commuter belt, but it's a resonant place for literary archaeologists.

The Quickening Maze has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Link




I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

~ John Clare

Is mental health an occupational hazard of poets? Link

We think the problem is nutritional; once that weakness is mended, the individual remains creative - and is well.

America is hooked on drugs, and a lot of them are made in China

Check out this link - and this.

Spiritual help for mental disorders: Dion Fortune's The Secrets of Dr. Taverner

Mental Health in Fiction
Occultist Dion Fortune's fictional Dr. Taverner is modeled on her mentor, and his assistant, the young Dr. Rhodes, is modeled after herself. Taverner runs a nursing home in which patients suffer from a variety of "psychological" disturbances which seem to be psychiatric. Dr. Taverner is a sort of psychic Sherlock Holmes, an adept of an occult order, and is able to cure the sufferers using unusual means.

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner - Dion Fortune

Canada - The Battle Against Bill C-6

The battle continues...

The Battle Against Bill C-6
September 2009 Features
How Proposed New Legal Principles are Undermining Your Health Freedom

by Shawn Buckley
Introduction by Helke Ferrie

“The numbers on the Bills have changed, but whether the Prime Ministers are Liberal or Conservative, the message remains unchanged. Bills C-27 and C-28 of 2004 became C-51 and C-52 in 2008, and now we have C-6.

The first batch of bills, a “modernization” of the Food and Drugs and Hazardous Products Acts, would have “prevented Canadians from suing Health Canada for negligence, even for flagrant failures like … the tainted-blood scandal [and] greatly increased the likelihood that unsafe drugs and hazardous products make their way to market” (The Globe and Mail, November 10, 2004). The shift was from the international “precautionary principle” to the corporate “risk management” – meaning all industries regulate themselves without any independent oversight. Agricultural chemicals, drugs untested and of mysterious chemistry, pest control products, and food additives were completely exempted from being identified as “adulteration” at residues higher than internationally permitted. Ottawa’s The Hill Times wrote on April 25, 2005: “Hocus-pocus, adulteration is not adulteration if the Minister of Health says so! The effect of bill C-28 is to eviscerate the Minister of Health’s statutory duty to protect the public from health hazards and fraud…”

When the Liberals lost to the Conservatives, Stephen Harper continued where Paul Martin had left off by re-introducing the same Bills, only now far meaner, namely C-51 and C-52. In an open letter to the PM, I observed that if these bills were “passed into law, they would pose a threat to public health, the rule of law, and the freedom of scientific research. Both Bills, to my mind, display an equally unparalleled disregard for the spirit, and most probably also the letter, of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” An analysis of these four Bills is found in my book What Part of No! Don’t They Understand? available for free downloading from kospublishing.com.

Article continues here.

F.D.A. Reveals It Fell to a Push by Lawmakers

F.D.A. Reveals It Fell to a Push by Lawmakers

By GARDINER HARRIS and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: September 24, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that four New Jersey congressmen and its own former commissioner unduly influenced the process that led to its decision last year to approve a patch for injured knees, an approval it is now revisiting.

The agency’s scientific reviewers repeatedly and unanimously over many years decided that the device, known as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics Inc., was unsafe because the device often failed, forcing patients to get another operation.

But after receiving what an F.D.A. report described as “extreme,” “unusual” and persistent pressure from four Democrats from New Jersey — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. and Steven R. Rothman — agency managers overruled the scientists and approved the device for sale in December.

All four legislators made their inquiries within a few months of receiving significant campaign contributions from ReGen, which is based in New Jersey, but all said they had acted appropriately and were not influenced by the money. Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, the former drug agency’s commissioner, said he had acted properly.

The agency has never before publicly questioned the process behind one of its approvals, never admitted that a regulatory decision was influenced by politics, and never accused a former commissioner of questionable conduct.

“The message here is that there were problems with the integrity of F.D.A.’s decision-making process that have solutions,” Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the agency’s principal deputy commissioner, said in a conference call with reporters.

Quit Smoking with Cream of Tartar

Thanks and a tip of the Mad Hatter's Hat for this great information!

Link