Two hundred (200) prescription drugs used in the U.S. list depression or suicidal symptoms as possible adverse effects according to a new paper from researchers at Columbia University in New York, NY, USA.

The percentage of people reporting depression using drugs with depression as a possible side effect were:

• 4.7% of people taking no (0) risky drugs
• 6.9% of people taking one (1) risky drug
• 9.5% of people taking two (2) risky drugs
• 15.3% of people taking three (3) risky drugs

Antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs have not caused disability rates to fall as one might expect, but instead, these drugs have caused disability rates to skyrocket according to author and journalist Robert Whitaker as he noted in a 2010 interview that he did with Joseph Mercola, DO, and in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

Number of people on government disability went from 1.25 million in 1987 to 4 million 20 years later

Whitaker notes that in 1987 when Prozac was introduced, there were 1.25 million people [ in the US ] on government disability due to mental illness.

As of 2010, twenty years later, there are 4 million people on government disability due to mental illness.

“So here we have this new embrace of a medication that is said to be a wonder drug and what do we see, we see disability rates do to depression and disability rates do to bipolar illness are skyrocketing [ because of these drugs ],” Whitaker says.

People over the age of 65 taking mirtazapine (Remeron) or venlafaxine (Effexor), referred to as “other antidepressants”, were 1.7 times more likely to die during the study period compared to when antidepressants were not being used according to a 2011 study from the U.K.

People over the age of 65 taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) for depression were 1.7 times more likely to fall (and 1.6 times more likely to get a fracture) compared to when antidepressants were not being used according to a 2011 study from the U.K.

Short-term randomized trials of older people show that antipsychotics kill one (1) out of every 100 people notes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

In people 65 and older in the USA and Europe alone, antipsychotics, antidepressants and benzodiazepines kill more than 500,000 people per year Dr. Gøtzsche estimates.

Antidepressants have been found to have very little effect when compared to an active placebo—a placebo which causes dry mouth so that neither the patients nor the researchers can guess who is getting the real drug—notes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

He notes that the effect of the real antidepressants—tricyclic antidepressants in these trials—found a difference of only 1.3 points on the Hamilton Depression Scale, but the smallest effect that can be perceived is 5-6 points.

[Note: Studies show that serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSIR’s) are no more effective than tricyclic antidepressants.]

[For example, a meta-analysis published in 2000 which compared the efficacy of these two classes of drugs concluded that “There is no overall difference in efficacy between SSRIs and TCAs [tricyclic antidepressants such as amitriptyline].”]

Patients improve by the same amount naturally within a few days

Dr. Gøtzsche also notes that other antidepressant studies have found that it only takes a few days longer for the placebo group to improve by 1.3 points on the Hamilton Depression Scale which is simply the spontaneous remission of the disease.

In other words, antidepressants have very little effect and most of the improvement that people experience over time is simply the natural, spontaneous remission of the depression.

I realized this in 1994 when my mother was told to take an antidepressant for two months to see if it was going to work, followed by another antidepressant for two months, followed by another antidepressant.

At the time I thought how incredibly ineffective these drugs must be if it takes two months for them to have an effect.

Below is a quote of exactly what Dr. Gøtzsche wrote.

“Under-reporting of deaths in [drug] industry funded trials [of antidepressants] is another major flaw. Based on some of the randomised trials that were included in a meta-analysis of 100,000 patients by the US Food and Drug Administration, I have estimated that there are likely to have been 15 times more suicides among people taking antidepressants than reported by the FDA,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

Antipsychotic drugs used for schizophrenia have very little effect on improving the disease notes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

These drugs effect on improving symptoms of the disease when measured on a scale used for schizophrenia (the PANSS) was only 6, when the difference that is considered minimally clinically relevant is 15.

“The benefits of drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are also uncertain.
    “The short term relief seems to be replaced by long term harms, and animal studies strongly suggest that these drugs can produce brain damage, which is probably the case for all psychotropic drugs,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

“Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm—by dropping all antidepressants, ADHD drugs, and dementia drugs (as the small effects are probably the result of unblinding bias) and using only a fraction of the antipsychotics and benzodiazepines we currently use,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.
    “This would lead to healthier and more long lived populations.
    “Because psychotropic drugs are immensely harmful when used long term, they should almost exclusively be used in acute situations and always with a firm plan for tapering off, which can be difficult for many patients.
    “We need new guidelines to reflect this.”

“We also need widespread withdrawal clinics because many patients have become dependent on psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, and need help so that they can stop taking them slowly and safely,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

“Psychiatric drugs are responsible for the deaths of more than half a million people aged 65 and older each year in the Western world [in the US and the European Union],” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

Later in the article he writes,
    “I used Danish prescription statistics to estimate the number of deaths caused by these three classes of drugs.
    “Because falls, which are much more common in older people, are an important cause of death in people taking psychotropic drugs, I included only people at least 65 years of age and used conservative death rates: 1% for antipsychotics, 1% for benzodiazepines and similar drugs, and only 2% for antidepressants.
    “The total number of deaths a year in Denmark (3693) when scaled up corresponded to 539,000 in the United States and European Union combined.”

“The randomised trials [of psychiatric drugs] that have been conducted do not properly evaluate the drugs’ effects,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.
    “Almost all of them are biased because they included patients already taking another psychiatric drug.
    “Patients, who after a short wash-out period are randomised to placebo, go “cold turkey” and often experience withdrawal symptoms.
    “This design exaggerates the benefits of treatment and increases the harms in the placebo group, and it has driven patients taking placebo to suicide in trials in schizophrenia.

[This creates the illusion of adverse effects in the placebo group because people in the placebo group are experiencing drug withdrawal from being taken off of their previous psychiatric drug, which then makes the drug group look better relative to the placebo group, and the drug companies can claim that the drug group did better than placebo, and can claim there was no difference in numbers of adverse events between the two groups, which is an illusion because of the way the study was designed.]

“A well conducted cohort study of patients of average age 55 found that benzodiazepines and similar drugs doubled the death rate; the excess death rate was about 1% a year,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

“A cohort study of patients older than 65 who were their own control found that all cause mortality was 3.6% higher when patients were taking the newer antidepressants for one year than when they did not take antidepressants,” writes Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

[The study he is referring to found that the death rate for all-cause mortality was 7.04% per year when patients were not taking antidepressants versus 10.61% per year when they were taking SSRI’s and 11.43% for other antidepressants not including tricyclic antidepressants.]

“One of the classic uses of benzodiazepines is as sleeping pills, but this usage also does more harm than good,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 4 titled Anxiety of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“The trials are biased, and a meta-analysis found that after adjustment for this, patients at least 60 years of age with insomnia slept 15 minutes longer on benzodiazepines or similar drugs than on placebo,” Prof. Gotzsche continues.

“Adverse cognitive events were five times [5X] more common, adverse psychomotor events three times [3X] more common, and daytime fatigue four times [4X] more common than if the patients received placebo.

“After a few weeks, the pills don’t work any longer and all that is left are the harmful effects.

Patients who took such drugs had a higher risk of falls – which cause many deaths because of hip fractures – and motor vehicle crashes.

“A study showed that benzodiazepines doubled the risk of injurious falls in people at least 80 years of age; these falls cause almost 1,800 deaths every year in France.

“In another large cohort, benzodiazepines or Z drugs [Zaleplon (Sonata), Zolpidem tartrate (Ambien), Zopiclone (brand names Zimovane and Imovane)] doubled the death rate.”

“If you ask me, no one should take antidepressants,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 16 What can patients do? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“It is clear that the risk of suicide caused by SSRIs has been grossly underestimated in the trials, and there are many reasons for this,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 16 What can patients do? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

• “Fraud.
• “The investigators didn’t report suicide attempts or didn’t even look for them.
• “Many suicidal events have been coded as something else.
• “By only recruiting people at very low risk of committing suicide for their trials, the drug industry has taken great care not to get in trouble.
• “The companies have urged investigators to use benzodiazepines in addition to the trial drugs, which have prevented some of the violent reactions that would otherwise have occurred.
• “Some trials have run-in periods on active drug, and patients who don’t tolerate it aren’t randomised.
• “Most patients were in antidepressant treatment before they were randomised, which leads to withdrawal symptoms in the placebo group that predispose to suicide.
• “Events occurring shortly after active treatment is stopped were rarely registered.
• “Many trials are buried in company archives and these are not the most positive ones.
• “Patients are carefully monitored in trials and drug intake is likely to be stopped before a serious problem develops.
• “Patients in trials have contact with other people and get hope, therefore the risk of suicide is less than in real life.”

“There are likely to have been 15 times more suicides on antidepressant drugs than reported by the FDA in its meta-analysis of 100,000 patients in 2006,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 16 What can patients do? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“There were only five suicides in FDA’s analysis of 52,960 patients on SSRIs (one per 10,000 patients), but an internal Lilly memo from 1990 described nine suicides in 6,993 patients on fluoxetine in the trials (13 per 10,000).

“An analysis of prescriptions written by general practitioners in the UK immediately after the drugs came on market is similarly revealing. The patients had an average age of 50 and 79% had depression, but although the follow-up was only about six months, there were 90 suicides among patients receiving fluoxetine, sertraline or paroxetine, which was 24, 17 and 27 suicides per 10,000, respectively.”

“Virtually all trials of psychotropic agents are flawed, not only because of the unblinding problem, but also because of their design,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 3 titled Depression of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“This was recognised decades ago, but drug trials and reviews have continued to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, likely because the psychiatrists choose to ignore everything that threatens the myths they have built up around their profession.

“There are many tricks.

“Some studies exclude patients who improve in the placebo lead-in period; some studies use active drugs in this period and exclude people who experience troublesome side effects; and some studies have both types of ‘cleansing,’ which was the case for one of the very few trials of fluoxetine in children that purported to have shown an effect.

“But even with this extremely biased design, the children fared no better on the drug than on placebo on self-rating scales or on ratings by their parents.

“The ‘effect’ was only seen on a secondary scale filled out by the psychiatrists who were paid by Lilly to run the trial!”

“In a survey of 1,829 patients on antidepressants in New Zealand, 62% reported sexual difficulties, 60% felt emotionally numb, 52% felt not like themselves, 39% cared less about others, 47% had experienced agitation and 39% had experienced suicidality,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 3 titled Depression of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“We have used antidepressant drugs for more than 50 years, but it is unlikely that they have a real and useful effect on depression, whereas their many harmful effects are not in doubt,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 3 Depression of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

More Harm Than Good

Antidepressants cause more harm than good

“Antidepressants cause more harm than good,which the remainder of this chapter is about.”

The subheading for this section in the book is “Antidepressant drugs don’t work for depression”.

“Allen Frances, chairman for the DSM-IV task force [for creating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which define psychiatric conditions], now believes the responsibility for defining psychiatric conditions needs to be taken away from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and argues that new diagnoses are as dangerous as new drugs: “We have remarkably casual procedures for defining the nature of conditions, yet they can lead to tens of millions being treated with drugs they may not need, and that may harm them,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

3 False Epidemics

This created 3 false epidemics

“Frances noted that DSM-IV created three false epidemics because the diagnostic criteria were too wide: ADHD, autism and childhood bipolar disorder.”

“Very few leading psychiatrists are willing to admit that their specialty has spiralled out of control and when issues of overdiagnosis and overtreatment are brought up, their standard reply is that many patients are underdiagnosed,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“In a 2007 survey, 51% of 108 Danish psychiatrists said they used too much medicine and only 4% said they used too little.”

“In the United States, 1% of children up to only four years of age are on psychotropic drugs, although the first three years of life are a period of rapid neurodevelopment, and about a quarter of the children in American summer camps are medicated for ADHD, mood disorder or other mental health problems,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“It is psychiatry that has become insane, not our children.

“Some child psychiatrists brag that they can make an initial assessment of a child and write a prescription in less than 20 minutes, and for some paediatricians it takes only five minutes.”

“It should be forbidden to make new diagnoses while the patient is in treatment with psychotropic drugs, and if psychiatrists cannot resist the temptation, they should by default call it a likely drug-induced disorder,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“Doctors need to realise that it’s impossible to judge whether a patient truly also suffers from these additional “illnesses,” as long as the patient is under influence of mind-altering chemicals.”

“I have heard several senior psychiatrists say it cannot hurt anyone to get a diagnosis. Such people shouldn’t work as psychiatrists,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“All professional interventions in citizens’ lives, including giving people diagnoses, can cause harm.

“It is a paradox that public debates and reports in the news media are dominated by the beneficial effects of diagnoses and interventions when the first thing we know about any intervention is that it can be harmful.

“If this were not the case, it could not have any potentially beneficial effect.”

“When I – as invited speaker at large scientific meetings for psychiatrists – have pointed out how harmful screening for depression is, they didn’t pay the slightest attention,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 3 Depression of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“This organised denial has shocked me, particularly when the professor at my own hospital – in reply to my remark that screening leads to treatment of many healthy people with antidepressants – said that it didn’t matter because antidepressants have no side effects!

“Really?

“To a substantial extent, the “risk groups” comprise those who have lived more than five decades, and antidepressants kill many of these (see Chapter 14).”

“Psychiatric drugs are so harmful that they kill more than half a million people every year among those aged 65 and over in the United States and Europe (see Chapter 14),” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 1 Introduction of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“This makes psychiatric drugs the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer.”

“Very many people are wongly diagnosed with schizophrenia,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“A 1982 study found that two-thirds of 1,023 African-Americans with schizophrenia didn’t have symptoms necessary for this diagnosis according to current guidelines.

[In other words, 67% were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.]

“In 1985, the chief psychiatrist at Manhattan State Hospital reviewed the records of 89 patients with schizophrenia and concluded that only 16 should have gotten the diagnosis.”

[In other words, 82% were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.]

“It’s not surprising that when therapists were asked to use DSM criteria [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] on healthy people, a quarter of them also got a psychiatric diagnosis,” writes Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche, MD in Chapter 2 What does it mean to be mentally ill? of his excellent book Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial.

“Our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them,” notes Prof. Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, author of the new book “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare”.

“It is inescapable that their availability creates more harm than good.”

“In 2012, I found out that the ten biggest drug companies in the world commit repeated and serious crimes to such a degree that they fulfill the criteria for organised crime under US law,” notes Prof. Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, author of the new book “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare”.

“They involve colossal thefts of public monies and they contribute substantially to the fact that our drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.”

“The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs,” notes Prof. Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, author of the new book “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare”.