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Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the groundbreaking book Mad In America, is now pursuing a fascinating line of research into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the American public by covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish and disease caused by the most widely prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotic medications.

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted the Food and Drug Administration's drug review process, and co-opted
research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and conceal
the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-name drugs
like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa.

The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the aggressive tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence prominent critics by defaming them in the press,
and by using their money and power to have widely respected scientists
and eminent medical researchers fired for daring to point out the hazards and risks of suicide and premature death caused by these drugs.

Whitaker starts by debunking the effectiveness of these massively hyped wonder drugs -- antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, and the new atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa. His research shows how they often are barely more effective than placebos in treating mental disorder and depression, despite the glowing adulation they have received in the mainstream media.

But he goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric drugs have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of drug-induced mental illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians to stabilize mental disorders in fact are inducing pathological changes in brain chemistry and triggering suicide, manic and psychotic episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes, pancreatic failure, metabolic diseases, and premature death.

Whitaker originally was a highly regarded medical reporter at the Albany Times Union and also wrote off and on for the Boston Globe. A series he
co-wrote for the Boston Globe on harmful psychiatric research was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. When he began his investigative
research into psychiatric issues, Whitaker was still a believer in the
story of progress that psychiatry has been telling the public for decades.

He said, "I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these antipsychotic drugs actually had improved things and that they had
totally revolutionized how we treated schizophrenia.
People used to be locked away forever, and now maybe things weren't
great, but they were a lot better. It was a story of progress."

That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out when he gained new insight from his research into torturous psychiatric
practices such as electroshock, lobotomy, insulin
coma, and neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists told the public that these
techniques "cured" psychosis or balanced the chemistry of the brain.

But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments was the attempt to suppress "mental illness" by deliberately damaging the
higher functions of the brain.
The stunning truth is that, behind closed doors, the psychiatric
establishment itself labeled these treatments as "brain-damaging
therapeutics."

The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced brain pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and essentially shutting down many higher brain functions. In fact, when antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were first introduced, psychiatrists themselves said that these neuroleptic drugs were virtually indistinguishable from a "chemical lobotomy."

In recent years, the media have heralded the arrival of so-called designer drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zyprexa that are supposed to be superior and have fewer side effects than the old tricyclic antidepressants and the first antipsychotics.
Millions of Americans have believed this story and have enriched drug
companies like Eli Lilly by spending billions of dollars annually to purchase these new medications.

Whitaker's research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and early deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers have
been misled by a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and
bought-and-paid-for drug trials.
Eminent medical researchers who have tried to warn us of the perils of
these drugs have been silenced, intimidated and defamed. In the process,
the Food and Drug Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical industry, not its watchdog.

Street Spirit interviewed Robert Whitaker about this new "epidemic" of mental disorders, and how the giant drug companies have profited from selling drugs that make us sicker.

Street Spirit: Your new line of research indicates that there has been an enormous rise in the incidence of mental illness in the United States, despite the seeming advances in a new generation of psychiatric drugs. Why do you refer to this increase as an epidemic?

Robert Whitaker: Even people like the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey wrote a book recently in which he said it looks like we're having
an epidemic of mental illness. When the National Institute of Mental
Health publishes its figures on the incidence of mental illness, you see
these rising numbers of mentally ill people. Some recent reports even say that 20 percent of Americans now are mentally ill.

So what I wanted to do was two-fold. I wanted to look into exactly how dramatic is this increase in mental illness, and particularly severe
mental illness. Part of this rise in the number of people said to be
mentally ill is just definitional. We draw a big wide boundary today and
we throw all sorts of people into that category of mentally ill. So
children who are not sitting neatly enough in their school rooms are
said to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and we created a new disorder called social anxiety disorder.

SS: So what used to be called simply shyness or anxiety in relating to people is now labeled a mental disorder and you supposedly
need an antidepressant like Paxil for social anxiety disorder.

RW: Exactly. And you need a stimulant like Ritalin for ADHD.

SS: This increases psychiatry's clients, but doesn't it also increase the number of people that giant pharmaceutical companies can sell their psychiatric drugs to?

RW: Absolutely. So part of what we're seeing is nothing more than the creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as
long as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries
of mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs.
So there's a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in as
broad terms as possible, and to find ordinary, distressing emotions or behaviors that some people may not like and label them as mental illness.

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people who have a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems
counterintuitive, but is it true that you believe much of this increase
is caused by the overuse of some of the new generations of psychiatric
drugs?

RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely disabled mentally ill -- people who aren't working or who are
somehow dysfunctional because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart
through history the percentage of the population who are considered the
disabled mentally ill.

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the United States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the start
of the modern era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of every 300
people was disabled by mental illness. Now, let's go to 1987, the end of
the first generation of antipsychotic drugs; and from 1987 forward we
get the modern psychiatric drugs. From 1955 to 1987, during this first
era of psychiatric drugs -- the antipsychotic drugs Thorazine and Haldol
and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as Elavil and Anafranil) -- we
saw the number of disabled mentally ill increase four-fold, to the point
where roughly one out of every 75 persons are deemed disabled mentally
ill.

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill between 1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by
1987, we had gone through social change, and we were now placing people
in shelters, nursing homes, and some sort of community care, and gave
them either SSI or SSDI payments for mental disability. In 1987, we
started getting these supposedly better, second-generation psychiatric
drugs like Prozac and the other selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI)
antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get the new, atypical
antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine), Clozaril and Risperdal.

What's happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued to increase until it's now one in every 50 Americans. Think about that: One
in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness today. And it's still
increasing. The number of mentally disabled people in the United States
has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987.
That's an increase every day over the last 17 years of 410 people per
day newly disabled by mental illness.

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has introduced these so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and
Zyprexa, why is the incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?

RW: That's exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form of care where we're using these drugs in an ever more expansive
manner, and supposedly we have better drugs and they're the cornerstone
of our care, so we should see decreasing disability rates. That's what
your expectation would be.

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the number of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7 million
people in the United States. In that time, our spending on psychiatric
drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending on antipsychotic
drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500 million in 1986 to
nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the question: Is the use of
these drugs somehow actually fueling this increase in the number of the
disabled mentally ill?

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics, the
antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin
used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly
more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of depression better than a placebo over the short term.

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the
long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on the target symptoms,
there's greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms. And you
see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more
severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself.

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are told will help them recover?

RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A certain percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have some form of depression will suffer either a manic or
psychotic attack -- drug-induced. This is well recognized. So now,
instead of just dealing with depression, they're dealing with mania or
psychotic symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced manic episode,
what happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they're
newly diagnosed. They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an
antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that point,
they're moving down the path to chronic disability.

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their claim that abnormal brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia and depression?

RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is the answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have
this long-term problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They
hypothesize that these drugs work by correcting an imbalance of the
neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed that
chemical imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they're like
insulin is for diabetes;
they're fixing an abnormality. With the antidepressants, the theory was
that people with depression had too low levels of serotonin; the drugs
upped the levels of serotonin in the brain and therefore they're
balancing the brain chemistry.

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into what was actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out that
antipsychotics blocked dopamine and so they theorized that people had
overactive dopamine systems. Same with the antidepressants. They found
that antidepressants upped the levels of serotonin; therefore, they
theorized that people with depression must have low levels of serotonin.

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and wishes psychiatry would come clean on: They've never
been able to find that people with schizophrenia have overactive
dopamine systems. They've never been able to find that people with
depression have underactive serotonin systems. They've never found
consistently that any of these disorders are associated with any
chemical imbalance in the brain. The story that people with mental
disorders have known chemical imbalances -- that's a lie. We don't know
that at all. It's just something that they say to help sell the drugs
and help sell the biological model of mental disorders.

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb how these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm is:
People diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with their
neurotransmitter systems; and these drugs perturb the normal function of
neurotransmitters.

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely prescribed drugs distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.

RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a
paper in 1996 that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain. He
wrote that all these drugs create perturbations in neurotransmitter
functions. And he notes that the brain, in response to this drug from
the outside, alters its normal functions and goes through a series of
compensatory adaptations.

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic drug is blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of
antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the fact that you're
blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is to
adapt in the opposite way. So, if you're blocking dopamine in the brain,
the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually increases the
number of dopamine receptors. So a person placed on antipsychotic drugs
will end up with an abnormally high number of dopamine receptors in the
brain.

If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite. It stops
producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it reduces the
number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone who is on an
antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally low level of
serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman concluded about
this: After these changes happened, the patient's brain is functioning
in a way that is "qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from
the normal state." So what Stephen Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has
done is present a paradigm for how these drugs affect the brain that
shows that they're inducing a pathological state.

SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the brain
that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these new
wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?

RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these
drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing
precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known abnormal
brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we're perturbing
that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry Jacobs, a Princeton
neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an SSRI
antidepressant. "These drugs," he said, "alter the level of synaptic
transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under normal
environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or physiologic
change produced under these conditions might more appropriately be
considered pathologic rather than reflective of the normal biological
role of serotonin."

SS: One of the SSRI antidepressants that's widely believed to be a wonder drug is Prozac. Yet your research found that the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) received more adverse reports about Prozac than any
other drug. What sort of ill effects were people reporting?

RW: First of all, with Prozac and the SSRIs that followed, their level of efficacy was always of a very minor sort. In all the clinical
trials of the antidepressants, roughly 41 percent of the patients got
better in the short term versus 31 percent of the patients on placebo.
Now just one other caveat on that. If you use an active placebo in these
trials -- an active placebo causes a physiologic change with no
benefit, like a dry mouth -- any difference in outcome between the
antidepressant and placebo virtually disappears.

SS: Weren't the early drug tests of Prozac so unpromising that they had to manipulate test results to get FDA approval at all?

RW: What happened with Prozac is a fascinating story. Right from the beginning, they noticed only very marginal efficacy over placebo;
and they noticed that they had some problems with suicide. There were
increased suicidal responses compared to placebo. In other words, the
drugs was agitating people and making people suicidal who hadn't been
suicidal before. They were getting manic responses in people who hadn't
been manic before. They were getting psychotic episodes in people who
hadn't been psychotic before. So you were seeing these very problematic
side effects even at the same time that you were seeing very modest
efficacy, if any, over placebo in ameliorating depression.

Basically, what Eli Lilly (Prozac's manufacturer) had to do was cover up the psychosis, cover up the mania; and, in that manner, it was able to
get these drugs approved. One FDA reviewer even warned that Prozac
appeared to be a dangerous drug, but it was approved anyway.
We're seemingly finding all this out only now: "Oh, Prozac can cause
suicidal impulses and all these SSRIs may increase the risk of suicide."
The point is, that wasn't anything new. That data was there from the
very first trial. You had people in Germany saying, "I think this is a
dangerous drug."

SS: Even back in the late 1980s, they already knew?

RW: Before the late 1980s -- in the early '80s, before Prozac gets approved. Basically what Eli Lilly had to do was cover up that risk of mania and psychosis, cover up that some people were becoming
suicidal because they were getting this nervous agitation from Prozac.
That's the only way it got approved.

There were various ways they did the cover-up. One was just to simply remove reports of psychosis from some of the data. They also went back
and recoded some of the trial results. Let's say someone had a manic
episode or a psychotic episode; instead of putting that down, they would
just put down a return of depression, and that sort of thing. So there
was a basic need to hide these risks right from the beginning, and
that's what was done.

So Prozac gets approved in 1987, and it's launched in this amazing PR campaign. The pill itself is featured on the cover of several magazines!
It's like the Pill of the Year [laughs]. And it's said to be so much
safer: a wonder drug. We have doctors
saying, "Oh, the real problem with this drug is that we can now create
whatever personality we want. We're just so skilled with these drugs
that if you want to be happy all the time, take your pill!"

That was complete nonsense. The drugs were barely better than placebo at alleviating depressive symptoms over the short term. You had all these
problems; yet we were touting these drugs, saying, "Oh, the powers of
psychiatry are such that we can give you the mind you want -- a designer
personality!" It was absolutely obscene. Meanwhile, which drug, after
being launched, quickly became the most complained about drug in
America? Prozac!

SS: What were the level of complaints when Prozac hit the market?

RW: In this county, we have Medwatch, a reporting system in which we report adverse events about psychiatric drugs to the FDA. By the way, the FDA tries to keep these adverse reports from the
public. So, instead of the FDA making these easily available to the
public. so you can know about the dangers of the drugs, it's very hard to get these reports.

Within one decade, there were 39,000 adverse reports about Prozac that were sent to Medwatch. The number of adverse events sent to Medwatch is
thought to represent only one percent of the actual number of such
events. So, if we get 39,000 adverse event reports about Prozac, the
number of people who have actually suffered such problems is estimated
to be 100 times as many, or roughly four million people. This makes
Prozac the most complained about drug in America, by far. There were
more adverse event reports received about Prozac in its first two years
on the market than had been reported on the leading tricyclic
antidepressant in 20 years.

Remember, Prozac is pitched to the American public as this wonderfully safe drug, and yet what are people complaining about? Mania, psychotic
depression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation, hostility,
hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence, convulsions, insomnia,
nausea, suicidal impulses. It's a wide range of serious symptoms.

And here's the kicker. It wasn't just Prozac. Once we got the other SSRIs on the market, like Zoloft and Paxil, by 1994, four SSRI
antidepressants were among the top 20 most complained about drugs on the
FDA's Medwatch list. In other words, every one of these drugs brought
to market started triggering this range of adverse events. And these
were not minor things. When you talk about mania, hallucinations,
psychotic depression, these are serious adverse events.

Prozac was pitched to the American public as a wonder drug. It was featured on the covers of magazines as so safe, and as a sign of our
wonderful ability to effect the brain just as we want it. In truth, the
reports were showing it could trigger a lot of dangerous events,
including suicide and psychosis.

The FDA was being warned about this. They were getting a flood of adverse event reports, and the public was never told about this for the
longest period of time. It took a decade for the FDA to begin to
acknowledge the increased suicides and the violence it can trigger in
some people. It just shows how the FDA betrayed the American people.
This is a classic example. They betrayed their responsibility to act as
a watchdog for the American people. Instead they acted as an agency
that covered up harm and risk with these drugs.

SS: In light of the FDA's failure to warn us about Prozac, what about their recent negligence on the issue of the risk of suicide in
children given antidepressants like Paxil? Weren't England's mental health
officials far better than their American counterparts in the FDA in
warning about the dangers of suicidal attempts when antidepressants are
given to youth?

RW: Yes. The children's story is unbelievably tragic. It's also a really sordid story. Let's go back a little to see what happened to
children and antidepressants. Prozac comes to market in 1987. By the
early 1990s, the pharmaceutical companies making these drugs are saying,
"How do we expand the market for antidepressants?" Because that's what
drug companies do -- they want to get to an ever-larger number of
people. They saw they had an untapped market in kids. So let's start
peddling the drugs to kids. And they were successful. Since 1990, the
use of antidepressants in kids went up something like seven-fold. They
began prescribing them willy-nilly.

Now, whenever they did pediatric trials of antidepressants, they found that the drugs were no more effective on the target symptom of
depression than placebo. This happened again and again in the pediatric
drug trials of antidepressants. So, what that tells you is there is no
real therapeutic rationale for the drugs because in this population of
kids, the drugs don't even curb the target symptoms over the short term
any better than placebo; and yet they were causing all sorts of adverse
events.

For example, in one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with antidepressants suffered an adverse event of some kind. In one study by
the University of Pittsburgh, 23 percent of children treated with an
SSRI developed mania or manic-like symptoms; an additional 19 percent
developed drug-induced hostility. The clinical results were telling you
that you didn't get any benefit on depression; and you could cause all
sorts of real problems in kids -- mania, hostility, psychosis, and you
may even stir suicide. In other words, don't use these drugs, right? It
was absolutely covered up.

SS: How was it covered up?

RW: We had psychiatrists -- some of those obviously getting money from the drug companies -- saying the kids are under-treated and
they're at risk of suicide and how could we possibly treat kids without
these pills and what a tragedy it would be if we couldn't use these
antidepressants.

Finally, a prominent researcher in England, David Healy, started doing his own research on the ability of these drugs to stir suicide. He also
managed to get access to some of the trial results and he blew the
whistle. He first blew the whistle in England and he presented this data
to the review authorities there. And they saw that it looks like these
drugs are increasing the risk of suicide and there are really no signs
of benefits on the target symptoms of depression. So they began to move
there to warn doctors not to prescribe these drugs to youth.

What happens in the United States? Well, it's only after there's a lot of pressure put on the FDA that they even hold a hearing. The FDA sort
of downplays the risk of these drugs. They're slow to even put black box
warnings on them. Why? Aren't kids lives worth protecting? If we know
that we have a scientifically shown risk that these drugs increase
suicide, shouldn't you at least warn about it? But the FDA was even
digging in its heels about putting that black box warning on the drugs.

SS: If Prozac is the nation's most complained about drug, if Paxil is shown to be a suicide risk for youth, how do these
antidepressants continue to have a reputation as near-magic cures for
depression? And why did the FDA failed to warn us about Paxil and Prozac
for such a long time?

RW: There's a couple reasons for that. The FDA's funding changed in the 1990s. An act was passed in which a lot of the FDA's funding came
from the drug industry:
the PDUFA Act, or Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Basically, when drug
companies applied for FDA approval they had to pay a fee. Those fees
became what is funding a large portion of the FDA's review of drug
applications.

So all of a sudden, the funding is coming from the drug industry; it's no longer coming from the people. As that act comes up for renewal,
basically the drug lobbyists are telling the FDA that their job is no
longer to be critically analyzing drugs, but to approve drugs quickly.
And that was part of Newt Gingrich's thing: Your job is to get these
drugs to market. Start partnering with the drug industry and
facilitating drug development. We lost this idea that the FDA had a
watchdog role.

Also, in a human way, a lot of people who work for the FDA leave there and end up going to work for the drug companies. The old joke is that
the FDA is sort of like a showcase for a future job in the drug
industry. You go there, you work awhile, then you go off into the drug
industry. Well, if that's the progression that people make, in essence
they're making good old boy network connections, so they're not going to
be so harsh on the drug companies. So, that's what really happened in
the 1990s. The FDA was given new marching orders. The orders were:
"Facilitate getting drugs to market. Don't be too critical. And, in
fact, if you want to keep your funding, which was coming now from the
drug industry, make sure you take these lessons to heart."

SS: So the giant pharmaceutical companies have a vast amount of power to cook the results of drug tests and make researchers and even
the FDA itself bow to their will?

RW: The FDA, in essence, was kneecapped in the early 1990s, and we really saw it with the psychiatric drugs. The FDA became a lapdog for
the pharmaceutical industry, not a watchdog.
It's only now that this has become common knowledge. We have Marcia
Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, write a
book in which she says that the FDA became a lapdog. It's basically now
well recognized that you had this decline and fall. As the editor of
the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical
journal we have, Marcia Angell is someone who was at the very heart of
American medicine,
and she concluded that the FDA let down the American people. And she
lost her job at the New England Journal of Medicine for starting to
criticize pharmaceutical companies.

She was the editor of the journal in the late 1990s and there was a corresponding doctor named Thomas Bodenheimer who decided to write an
article about how you couldn't even trust what was published in the
medical journals anymore because of all the spinning of results.
So they did an investigation about how the pharmaceutical companies are
funding all the research and spinning the trial results, so you can no
longer really trust what you read in scientific journals. They pointed
out that when they tried to get an expert to review the scientific
literature related to antidepressants, they basically couldn't find
someone who hadn't taken money from the drug companies.

Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the Massachusetts Medical Society which publishes a lot of other journals,
and they get a lot of pharmaceutical advertising.
So what happens after that article appears by Thomas Bodenheimer and an
accompanying editorial by Marcia Angell about the sorry state of
American medicine because of this? They both lose their jobs! She's gone
and so is Thomas Bodenheimer. Think about this. We have the leading
medical journal firing people, letting them go, because they dared to
criticize the dishonest science and the dishonest process that was
poisoning the scientific literature.

So we have the FDA that's acting as lapdogs. You can't trust the scientific literature. All this shows how the American public was
betrayed and didn't know about all the problems with these drugs and why
it was kept from them. It has to do with money, prestige and old boy
networks.

SS: It also has to do with the silencing of critics. Eli Lilly uses the media to trumpet Prozac's benefits and gives perks to doctors
to attend conferences to hear about its benefits, and buys off
researchers. But don't they also use their power and money to silence
their critics?

RW: An example is Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who also works for Harvard University Health Services, and who wrote a book
called Prozac Backlash to warn about the dangers of Prozac. He's finding
that the drugs are being overused and cause severe side effects. He
even raises questions about long-term memory problems with the drugs and
cognitive dysfunction. Well, Eli Lilly then mounted a public relations
campaign to try to discredit him. They sent out notices to the media
questioning his affiliation with Harvard Medical School, etc. It was all
about silencing the critics.

If you sing the tune that the drug companies want, at the very top levels, you get paid a lot of money to fly around and give presentations
about the wonders of the drugs. And those who come, and don't ask any
embarrassing questions, get the lobster dinners and maybe they get a
little honorarium for attending this educational meeting. So if you want
to be part of this gravy train, you can. You sing the wonders of the
drug, and you don't talk about their nasty side effects, and you can get
a nice payment as one of their guest speakers, as one of their experts.

But if you're one of the ones saying, "What about the mania, what about the psychosis?" -- they do silence you. Look at what happened to David
Healy. Healy is even the best example. David Healy has this sterling
reputation in England. He's written several books on the history of
psychopharmacology. He's like the former Secretary of the
Psychopharmacology Association over there. He gets offered a job at the
University of Toronto to head up their psychiatry department. So while
he's waiting to assume that position at the University of Toronto, he
goes to Toronto and delivers a talk on the elevated risk of suicide with
Prozac and some of the other SSRIs. By the time he's back home, the job
offer has been rescinded.

Now does Eli Lilly donate some money to the University of Toronto? Absolutely. So, to answer your question, yes, Eli Lilly silences
dissenters as well.

SS: What is the story behind the secret settlement between Eli Lilly and the survivors who sued the company after Joseph Wesbecker shot
20 coworkers after being put on Prozac?

RW: During this trial in which Eli Lilly was being sued, the judge was going to allow some very damaging evidence showing wrongdoing
by Eli Lilly in a previous instance. The judge said, "Go ahead and
introduce this at the trial." But next thing you know, they don't
introduce this; and in fact, all of a sudden, the plaintiffs no longer
are presenting very damaging evidence to make their case. So the judge
wonders why they are not presenting their best case anymore. He smells a
rat. He suspects Eli Lilly has settled with the plaintiffs secretly and
the deal is that, as part of this settlement, the plaintiffs will go
ahead with a sham trial so that Eli Lilly will win the trial. Then Eli
Lilly can claim, "See our drug doesn't cause people to become violent."

And, indeed, that's what happened. Eli Lilly felt it was going to lose this trial. They went to the plaintiffs and said they would give them a
lot of money. They agreed to go ahead and settle the case, but had the
plaintiffs go ahead with the trial. That way Eli Lilly can publicly
claim that they won the trial and Prozac doesn't cause harm.

SS: How did this even come out into the light of day?

RW: We would never have known about this except for two things. One, believe it or not, the judge, in essence, appealed the decision in
his own court. He said, "I smell a rat." And through that, he found out
that there was this secret settlement and that it was a sham proceeding
that continued on. He said it was one of the worst violations of the
integrity of the legal process that he'd ever seen. And second, an
English journalist named John Cornwell wrote a book called Power to
Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial. He wrote about this case, and
yet in the United States, we got almost no news about this secret
settlement and this whole perversion of the legal process. It was an
English journalist who was exposing this story.

My point here is this: They silence people like Marcia Angell. They pervert the scientific process. They pervert the legal process. They
pervert the FDA drug review process. It's everywhere! And that's how we
as a society end up believing in these psychiatric drugs. You asked the
question a while back, "Why do we still believe in Prozac?" One of the
reasons is that the story about Prozac is, in effect, maintained. It's
publicly maintained because we do all this silencing along all these
lines.

The other thing to remember is that some people on Prozac do feel better. That's true. That shows up, just in the same way that some
people on placebos
feel better. And those are the stories that get repeated: "Oh, I took
Prozac and I'm feeling better." It's that select group that does better
that becomes the story that is told out there, and the story that the
public hears. So that's why we continued to believe in the story of
these wonder drugs that are very safe in spite of all this messy stuff
that gets covered up.

SS: Let's now move from the antidepressants like Prozac to consider another new group of supposed wonder drugs -- the new
antipsychotic drugs. You write that long-term use of antipsychotic drugs
-- both the original neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine and Haldol and
the newer atypicals like Zyprexa and Risperdal -- cause pathological
changes in the brain that can lead
to a worsening of the symptoms of mental illness. What changes in brain
chemistry result from the antipsychotics, and how can that lead to the
most frightening prospect you describe -- chronic mental illness that is
locked in by these drugs?

RW: This is a line of research that goes across 40 years. This problem of chronic illness shows up time and time again in the research
literature. This biological mechanism is somewhat well understood now.
The antipsychotics profoundly block dopamine receptors. They block 70-90
percent of the dopamine receptors in the brain. In return, the brain
sprouts about 50 percent extra dopamine receptors. It tries to become
extra sensitive.

So in essence you've created an imbalance in the dopamine system in the brain. It's almost like, on one hand, you've got the accelerator down --
that's the extra dopamine receptors. And the drug is the brake trying
to block this. But if you release that brake, if you abruptly go off the
drugs, you now do have a dopamine system that's overactive. You have
too many dopamine receptors. And what happens? People that go abruptly
off of the drug, do tend to have severe relapses.

SS: So people that have been treated with these antipsychotic drugs have a far greater tendency to relapse, and have new episodes of
mental illness, as opposed to people who have had other kinds of
non-drug therapies?

RW: Absolutely, and that was understood by 1979, that you were actually increasing the underlying biological vulnerability to the
psychosis. And by the way, we sort of understood that if you muck with
the dopamine system, that you could cause some symptoms of psychosis
with amphetamines.
So if you give someone amphetamines enough, they're at increased risk
of psychosis. This is well known. And what do amphetamines do? They
release dopamine. So there is a biological reason why, if you're mucking
up the dopamine system, you're increasing the risk of psychosis. That's
in essence what these antipsychotic drugs do, they muck up the dopamine
system.

Here's just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed with
schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the brains
of these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the moment of
diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18 months to see
how those brains change. Now during this 18 months, they are being
prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the researchers
report? They reported that, over this 18-month period, the drugs caused
an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that uses
dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change in morphology, a
change in the size of an area of the brain, and that's abnormal. That's
number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug causing an abnormality in
the brain.

Now here's the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred, it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a worsening
of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with modern technology,
a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we see how an outside
agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes an abnormal
enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement causes a
worsening of the very symptoms it's supposed to treat. Now that's
actually, in essence, a story of a disease process -- an outside agent
causes abnormality, causes symptoms...

SS: But in this case, the outside agent that triggers the disease process is the supposed cure for the disease! The psychiatric drug is
the disease-causing agent.

RW: That's exactly right. It's a stunning, damning finding. It's the sort of finding you would say, "Oh Christ, we should be doing
something different." Do you know what those researchers got new grants
for, after they reported that?

SS: No, what? You'd guess they got funding to carry out these same studies on other classes of psychiatric drugs.

RW: They got a grant to develop an implant, a brain implant, that would deliver drugs like Haldol on a continual basis! A grant to
develop a drug delivery implant so you could implant this in the brains
of people with schizophrenia and then they wouldn't even have a chance
not to take the drugs!

SS: Unbelievable. Designing an implant to provide a constant dose of a drug that they had just discovered causes pathology in the brain
chemistry.

RW: Right, they had just found that they're causing a worsening of symptoms! So why would you go on to a design a permanent implant?
Because that's where the money was.
And no one wanted to deal with this horrible finding of an enlargement
of the basal ganglia caused by the drugs, and that is associated with
the worsening of symptoms. No one wanted to deal with the fact that when
you look at people medicated on antipsychotics, you start to see a
shrinking of the frontal lobes. No one wants to talk about that either.
They stopped that research.

SS: What other side effects are caused by prolonged use of these antipsychotic drugs?

RW: Oh, you get tardive dyskinesia, a permanent brain dysfunction; and akathisia, which is this incredible nervous agitation.
You're just never comfortable. You want to sit but you can't sit. It's
like you're crawling out of your own skin. And it's associated with
violence, suicide and all sorts of horrible things.

SS: Those kinds of side-effects were notorious with the first generation of antipsychotic drugs, like Thorazine, Haldol and Stelazine.
But, just as with Prozac, so many people are still touting the new
generation of atypical antipsychotics -- Zyprexa, Clozaril and Risperdal
-- as wonder drugs that control mental illness with far fewer side
effects. Is that true? What have you found?

RW: No, it's just complete nonsense. In fact, I think the newer drugs will eventually be seen as more dangerous than the old drugs, if
that's possible. As you know, the standard neuroleptics like Thorazine
and Haldol have had quite a litany of harm with the tardive dyskinesia
and all.
So when we got the new atypical drugs, they were touted as so much
safer. But with these new atypicals, you get all sorts of metabolic
dysfunctions.

Let's talk about Zyprexa. It has a different profile. So it may not cause as much tardive dyskinesia. It may not cause as many Parkinsonian
symptoms. But it causes a whole range of new symptoms. So, for example,
it's more likely to cause diabetes. It's more likely to cause pancreatic
disorders. It's more likely to cause obesity and appetite-disregulation
disorders.

In fact, researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among people with schizophrenia has doubled. They have done death rates
of people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that
with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and it
doubles. It doubles! It didn't reduce harm. In fact, in their
seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died.

SS: What were the causes of death?

RW: All sorts of physical illnesses, and that's part of the point. You're getting respiratory problems, you're getting people dying
of incredibly high cholesterol counts, heart problems, diabetes. With
olanzapine (Zyprexa), one of the problems is that you're really screwing
up the core metabolic system. That's why you get these huge weight
gains, and you get the diabetes. Zyprexa basically disrupts the machine
that we are that processes food
and extracts energy from that food. So this very fundamental thing that
we humans do is disrupted, and at some point you just see all these
pancreatic problems, faulty glucose regulation, diabetes, etc. That's
really a sign that you're mucking with something very fundamental to
life.

SS: There's supposedly an alarming increase in mental illness being diagnosed in children. Millions are diagnosed with depression,
bipolar and psychotic symptoms, attention deficit <a href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3Lm5hdHVyYWxuZXdzLmNvbS9oeXB...