Up Close and Personal
The monthly interview with CTM Founder, Phillip Day

ECLUB: How's your attitude this month?
PD: Surprisingly peachy, Brian, thank you for asking. For those who don't know, The Little Book of Attitude is now out, dealing with the 'mental enema' most of us would be well advised to take for a life of carefree smiles and trouble-free miles.
ECLUB: Some may already think they know all there is to know on motivation and attitude. What makes your booklet different?
PD: Most CD series and books on motivation are very long-winded, Americanized, and actually take a pile of their own motivation to get through. I read most of them during my years in America and did learn a lot, but there was a lot of chaff to flog through to get to the wheat. I was interested in doing a guide that was fast, brief, highly effective, and gave bullet-point summaries people could match to their own circumstances to see where the problems lay. If you are gnarly, growly and not having a good life, the last thing you feel like doing is flog through a 500-page book telling you how great everything is going to be.
ECLUB: What, in your view, is the major factor warping most people's attitude?
PD: The media, without any hesitation whatsoever. The media tells perfectly healthy people they've got a problem only drugs can solve. The media tells its readers all news is bad news and the world they live in is a mess. The health side is especially pernicious and they twist this with their choice of coverage, the advertorials they run on behalf of the drug industry, and this is the theme I have chosen for this month's bulletin.
The Street Spirit interview with Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, is especially revealing, and, though lengthy, will get you into the heart of how drug manipulation is done. Also, a surprising piece to appear in a mainstream British paper, Mary Wakefield's comment on 'a pill for every ill'.
ECLUB: In terms of attitude, would you agree stress is the big killer?
PD: Yes, I would. I've spent a lot of time in the past analysing diet and hydration. 'Mental illness', though, is an unusual phenomenon in that it means different things to different people. Stress, as its name suggests, is when a part of someone's life becomes inordinately disproportionate to the role it actually should assume, if at all. By that I mean, work obsession, drugs, sex, drink, football, addictive computer games, constant repetition of a given habit or duty. The brain reacts to this by forming comfort zones (brain patterning) as part of a survival mechanism, believing that we are doing these activities obsessively to survive. On one level, we know we have a stress or addiction problem. On another, we know we are powerless to intervene and stop it from harming us and others. Everyone suffers from these dysfunctions to one degree or another. It's a symptom of the fast-paced world in which we are living our lives.
ECLUB: You mention the hamster wheel in your seminars.
PD: Yes. Advertising, TV, media, film, etc. have given us the motivation to buy more, get more, travel more, phone more, drink and eat more. Now you have that mobile phone, I can reach you on the toilet, isn't life grand? The end result is that the hamster wheel of our lives can spin overly fast if we are not discharging the stress. The end result is we fly off into the water dish with some sort of breakdown. Usually a psychiatrist fishes us out.
ECLUB: You have caused a deal of controversy in the past by saying there is really no such thing as a mental disease. Can you explain?
PD: Diseases have physical symptoms. Most mental problems are lifestyle and addiction issues that should have nothing to do with the medical profession, which does not solve these issues but merely drugs the patient up to make them forget. What we need taught in schools is Life Management, the skills our kids need to thrive and survive in the world out there and avoid the minefields. At the current time, seventeen-year-olds are thrown out of the school system and into the Machiavellian bear-pit of 21st century life with nothing more than the metaphorical toothpick. I would not entirely hesitate to say the lack of granting this sort of education to our children has been deliberate.
ECLUB: Why on earth?
PD: Create problems, offer solutions, the age-old sales formula. Drug companies are not in business to cure mental illness, they're in business to sell drugs. We see it done everyday in the newspapers.
ECLUB: Off to Australia and New Zealand on Monday.
PD: Can't wait. Not spending much time at home these days. New Zealand is first, commencing 1st October in Auckland.
ECLUB: Can you give us some sort of idea of the ground you will be covering?
PD: Certainly. How to change your attitude. How to obtain control over your sense of certainty. Mini-goals: what do you wish to accomplish by bed-time tonight? Re-sorting your life to become stress-free. Illness and depression - what can be done about them. Lack of motivation, addiction, demoralization, unhappiness - the root causes. The dangers of 'retirement'. Owning a good conscience. The fear of death and what to do about it. The secret life of plants -
ECLUB: Plants?
PD: Our leafy friends are all part of the grand picture, Brian.
ECLUB: Strewth. How can people get tickets in New Zealand or Australia if they don't yet have them?
PD: They can order through our secure servers by clicking here. Alternatively they can contact Credence Events Management in Melbourne at +61 (0)3 9891 7883 and order them over the dog and bone.
ECLUB: The phone.
PD: Precisely.
ECLUB: Thank you, Phillip. By the way, when you're in Cairns, can you bring me back another one of those Barrier Reef tee-shirts with the great white sharks on it? Annabelle washed the last one with my pair of my red underpants.
PD: Turn off the tape recorder, Brian.

Criminal Sanctions to Enforce EU Law
by Andrew Sparrow

European commissioners yesterday hailed a landmark legal judgment that could give them the power to use criminal sanctions to enforce EU law.

José Manuel Barroso, the commission president, claimed that the European Court of Justice had made a "watershed decision" that would lead to "more democratic and more efficient lawmaking at EU level".

Eurosceptics said the decision showed that national governments were losing power to determine their own laws.

But Foreign Office sources said that, although the judgment raised the possibility of Britain having to create new criminal offences against the wishes of the Government, in practice EU member states would never agree to such a loss of sovereignty.

The ECJ decision is hugely sensitive because until now the EU has only been able to use the criminal law to enforce its decisions in certain categories where all member states agree legislation by unanimity. In theory, qualified majority voting - which allows EU law to be made against the wishes of a minority of member states - could now be used to take decisions that would have to be enforced throughout the EU by criminal sanctions.

The ECJ issued its ruling following a power struggle between the commission, the EU's unelected bureaucracy, and member states.

Two years ago, member states created a new law on environmental pollution, involving minimum EU-wide penalties for serious offenders, using the unanimity decision-making procedures set out in the so-called "third pillar" of the EU's treaty provisions.

But the commission took the member states to court because they believed criminal sanctions should be available to enforce laws.

Yesterday, the commission claimed that the court decision set an "important precedent" because it would allow "the commission to continue to enhance its efforts to ensure compliance with the provisions of European Community law also by means of criminal law."

The internal market, environmental protection, data protection, protection of intellectual property and monetary matters were all named by the commission as areas where EU law could be backed up by criminal sanctions.

Liam Fox, the Tory foreign affairs spokesman, claimed the decision could be deeply damaging to British national interests. "Despite all Tony Blair's protestations, we in the UK are bit by bit losing control of our own ability to make our own laws," he said.
The Daily Telegraph, 14th September 2005

Further Resources
Fed up with the EU and want to do something about it?

The Real Face of the European Union by Phillip Day, video documentary (PAL format only)
Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day

Click here to purchase or review any of the above.
Click here for telephone sales around the world.

Brussels Wants Immigrants to Swear Allegiance to EU
by Anthony Browne

IMMIGRANTS to Britain will have to swear an oath of allegiance to EU laws and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, rather than the Queen, under a proposal announced by Brussels.

The European Commission also announced measures to counter illegal immigration across Europe and others to promote integration of legal immigrants.

Franco Frattini, the European Commissioner for justice and security, proposed an "oath of faithfulness" requiring all immigrants to the EU to swear allegiance to the union. He said: "One can get every immigrant to somehow declare they will respect national law, EU law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights."

The charter is seen by its supporters as representing the basic values of the EU. It goes considerably further than the old European Convention on Human Rights, offering, for example, the right to parental leave if you adopt a child, the right to continuous training, the right to social security benefits and the right to strike. It has no legal force because it was part of the European constitution, which was rejected by French and Dutch voters.

The Government recently started requiring immigrants to swear allegiance to the Queen and British democracy. Signor Frattini proposed a charter to which 90 per cent of France's immigrants sign up as a model for the rest of Europe.

"All those who enter Europe must respect European laws," he said. "We can insist on respecting the basic values of Europe, and we can demand full respect for existing laws."

The rise of Islamic terrorism, and the growth of alienated ethnic communities, has persuaded many governments that more efforts must be made to promote integration of immigrants, including loyalty oaths.

The oath of allegiance to the EU - which could be in addition to or in place of the oath to the Queen - would be subject to negotiation, but the Government cannot veto it because it gave up its national veto on EU immigration law last year. Britain does have an opt-out, but it would have to reject the entire package of immigration measures.

A government spokesman said: "Questions of citizenship should be organised by member states nationally." An EU diplomat said of the proposal: "It's loony."

Timothy Kirkhope, the leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament, and former immigration minister, said: "I am amazed. You can laugh, but it worryingly shows the views of people who should know better. I swore an oath of allegiance to the Queen. I am not going to take kindly to an Italian gentleman telling me to swear allegiance to unelected people, or to swear allegiance to something I don't agree with - a unified European state."

Mike Nattrass, deputy leader of the UK Independence Party, said: "An allegiance to something with no single culture, no agreed history, no common language and packed with fraud and corruption? The EU must be joking."

Brussels regards building up a sense of European identity, including such measures as harmonising passports and funding pan-European political parties, as one of its most important tasks.

The European Commission has been greatly expanding its powers over immigration and asylum policy since the surrender of national vetos last year. The latest package is aimed at increasing the rate of deportation of illegal immigrants, while promoting their rights.

Last year 650,000 illegal immigrants were ordered to leave the EU, but only 212,000 did so. According to EU figures, Britain told 70,000 to leave, but only 18,000 went.

The proposal of "common standards on return" for illegal immigrants could hamper attempts by the Government to curb illegal immigration. It would ban governments from detaining people for more than six months before deportation.

In Britain, there are 195 people who have been in immigration detention centres for more than six months because of the lengthy appeals process. Under the commission's proposals, the Government would have to release them.

The European Commission said its proposals would not affect Britain's attempts to deport so-called preachers of hate. The Home Office said it would examine them to assess any possible impact.

Signor Frattini did not object to Britain agreeing deals with countries such as Jordan and Algeria to promise not to torture people returned, but he said that it would be better to have such agreements at an EU level.

The Commission also proposed that illegal immigrants deported from one country would be automatically barred from entering any other in the union. At present some immigrants deported from one country can simply take up residence in a neighbouring state.

Brussels has proposed a European Return Fund to promote voluntary repatriation. It is also set to pilot three "regional protection programmes" for illegal immigrants in Ukraine, Tanzania and the Horn of Africa.
The Times, 2nd September 2005

Further Resources
Fed up with the EU and want to do something about it?

The Real Face of the European Union by Phillip Day, video documentary (PAL format only)
Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day

Click here to purchase or review any of the above.
Click here for telephone sales around the world.

Irony as UKIP Receives EU Cash

UKIP this week received  250,000 (£170,000) of taxpayers money to help it campaign against Britain's membership of the EU.

UKIP, which has ten MEPs, received the money from a fund for providing "information" to the public, which is given to all EU political groups.

UKIP, which has accused the EU of spending public funds to promote European integration, will use the money to begin a campaign for a referendum to quit the EU.
The "Let the people decide campaign" will start on Monday with a series of advertisements in national newspapers, and a website.

It is thought to be the first time that EU money has been used to push for withdrawal from the union.

UKIP's grant was met with outrage from Labour MEPs, who branded it a "disgraceful abuse of European taxpayers' money."

Gary Titley, the Labour leader in the European Parliament, said: "This fund was originally intended for the dissemination of information, rather than for political campaigning. I would seriously question whether this is an appropriate use of Parliamentary money."

UKIP's leader in the European Parliament, Nigel Farage, hit back saying: "It is a perfectly valid use of the money - we are delighted with the irony of the situation. I did not hear complaints from Mr Titley when his own group spent their information budget interfering in the referendums in Ireland, Denmark, France, Holland and Malta. All we are doing is a little to redress the balance."

UKIP decided to campaign for a referendum after the government dropped plans for a poll on the European constitution after the French and Dutch no votes. They hope to collect two million signatures in a petition as part of their campaign to push for British withdrawal from the EU.
The Times, 10th September 2005

Further Resources
Fed up with the EU and want to do something about it?

The Real Face of the European Union by Phillip Day, video documentary (PAL format only)
Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day

Click here to purchase or review any of the above.
Click here for telephone sales around the world.

California Accuses Drug Companies of Fraud
by John M Broder

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 25 - The attorney general of California sued 39 drug
companies on Thursday, accusing them of bilking the state of hundreds of millions of dollars by overcharging for medicines.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer charged that the drug makers, including some of the world's leading pharmaceutical concerns, defrauded the state's Medi-Cal system for at least the past decade. Mr Lockyer said the drug manufacturers charged Medi-Cal as much as 10 times the price for some drugs as they charged others, like private pharmacies and hospitals.

Medi-Cal is the state's version of the federal Medicaid program for the poor, which is jointly financed by the states and the federal government. Drug costs account for about $4 billion of Medi-Cal's $34 billion annual budget.

"We're dragging these drug companies into the court of law because they're gouging the public on basic life necessities," Mr Lockyer said at a news conference here. "This scheme has cost California taxpayers potentially hundreds of millions of dollars and is jeopardizing the public health by diverting money away from patient care."

Mr. Lockyer said that each of the companies made as much as $40 million a year in illegal profits. He said he hoped to recover that amount plus the triple damages allowed under the state's false claims act.

Thursday's legal filing amends a 2003 suit against two drug companies, Abbott Laboratories and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, to add about three dozen new defendants, including Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Mylan Laboratories, Novartis and Schering-Plough.

It was immediately consolidated in federal court in Boston with similar litigation filed by more than 10 other states and localities, including New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois.

Officials at several drug companies declined to comment.

Mary Anne Rhyne, a spokeswoman for the American subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline, Europe's largest pharmaceutical company, said that the prices Medi-Cal and other state Medicaid operations pay were standardized and approved by the government. Ms. Rhyne did not deny that different end-users pay widely varying prices for medicines, but said the prices were negotiated with the government and other buyers.

"We follow the law, and we follow government guidelines," she said. "They are fully aware that the government bases payment on the average wholesale price, which represents one of several starting points for negotiation of a reimbursement."

The suit originally arose from a whistle-blower lawsuit filed in 1998 by a Florida pharmacist, who noticed wide discrepancies in prices charged by drug manufacturers. California joined that suit in 2003 and expanded it on Thursday after more investigation. The pharmacist, John Lockwood of Ven-A-Care, a home health care company in Key West, Fla., appeared at the news conference with Mr. Lockyer. "These drugs are far too important to everyone in this country to allow this kind of fraud scheme to continue," Mr Lockwood said.

California officials cited as an example a pint bag of saline solution used as an intravenous drip manufactured by Abbott Laboratories. The lowest price available to health care providers was 95 cents, the officials said. Medi-Cal was charged $9.78 for the same item.

"We have an ocean of it," Mr Lockyer said. "It's called saltwater."

Mr. Lockyer held up a bottle of 50-milligram tablets of Atenolol, a generic high blood pressure treatment manufactured by Mylan Laboratories, for which the state paid $804.70. A pharmacy chain pays $33.85 for the same bottle, he said.

Mr. Lockyer acknowledged that the Medi-Cal system might not always be the most prudent buyer of pharmaceuticals and other medical services. But he said that did not let the drug companies off the hook for what he called an elaborate scheme of fixing prices. (I wonder if the army is still buying $800 toilet seats?)

"I wish there had been more aggressive negotiations along the way," Mr. Lockyer said. "Now we have to clean up after the elephant."
New York Times, 26th August 2005

Per Zeus Information Service
Alternative Views on Health
www.zeusinfoservice.com

Cancer Ward to Offer Free Alcohol
by Amy Iggulden

Cancer patients are to be offered free spirits, wine and beer in their hospital beds after ward nurses decided that the medicinal benefits of alcohol have been overlooked for too long.

A drinks trolley replete with free sherry, gin, wine, Guinness and beer will be trundled around the ward in the North Hampshire Hospital in Basingstoke at least twice a day.

It will be the first time in decades that alcohol has been offered to patients, according to the nurse in charge of the trolley, and should help patients work up an appetite or drift off to sleep.

Junior Sister Caroline Price, 46, who oversees the Wessex Ward where the scheme is to be introduced, said the demonising of alcohol was obscuring its obvious health benefits. "People forget that it can be beneficial," she said. "Alcohol can help by stimulating people's appetites and it can also calm people down and help them to sleep. Stouts and Guinness are a very good source of iron."

Her patients are very keen on the idea, which she resurrected on the understanding that much of the alcohol will be donated by relatives and friends of the ward patients. Sister Price said the practice of prescribing medicinal alcohol was common in the 1970s and early 1980s but had fallen out of fashion. "I think it's unfortunate. I thought it would be good to bring it back," she said.

Medicinal alcohol is routinely given to cancer patients, according to a spokesman for the North Hampshire Hospital. But some cancer charities said the practice was unusual.

The Christie Hospital in Manchester, the biggest single-site centre in Europe, said it had a ban on offering alcohol to patients, unless they had brought their own.

The support service Cancer Bacup said it was not common for alcoholic drinks to be given out. However, Marie Curie Cancer Care said that beer, wine and spirits were offered to patients at its hospice in Hampstead, north London.

The Department of Health said it did not know of any other hospital that offered alcohol. But it added that trusts were free to make their own decision.
The Daily Telegraph, 3rd September 2005

PHILLIP DAY'S COMMENT: This is ignorance at its worst and most deadly. SUGAR FEEDS CANCER. Alcoholic beverages break down into glucose which feeds the fermentation process cancer depends on to thrive. That English hospitals should be the ones bringing this back is entirely consistent with their deadly reputation for failing cancer patients at every turn. If you have cancer and are reading this, AVOID CANCER DOCTORS IF YOU WISH TO LIVE. For more information, take our internet cancer tour and find out how thousands around the world have cleared their problems naturally and with no toxic side-effects. Steve Ransom also does an excellent book, Great News on Cancer in the 21st Century, which can be reviewed by clicking here.

Dangerous Decibels

CHICAGO - Researchers fear the growing popularity of portable music players and other items that attach directly to the ears - including cell phones - is contributing to hearing loss in younger people.

"It's a different level of use than we've seen in the past," says Robert Novak, director of clinical education in audiology at Purdue University in Indiana. "It's becoming more of a full-day listening experience, as opposed to just when you're jogging."

Increasingly, Novak says he's seeing too many young people with "older ears on younger bodies" - a trend that's been building since the portable Walkman made its debut a few decades back.

Everywhere she turns, Angella Day sees people carrying portable music players, often with the ear buds stuffed firmly in place. "They're very widespread," says Day, a senior at Chicago's DePaul University who regularly listens to music on her own iPod while studying or working out. "So addicting."

To document the trend, Novak and colleagues have been randomly examining students and found a disturbing and growing incidence of what is known as noise-induced hearing loss. Usually, it means they've lost the ability to hear higher frequencies, evidenced at times by mild ear-ringing or trouble following conversations in noisy situations.

Hearing specialists say they're also seeing more people in their 30s and 40s - many of them among the first Walkman users - who suffer from more pronounced tinnitus, an internal ringing or even the sound of whooshing or buzzing in the ears. "It may be that we're seeing the tip of the iceberg now," says Dr. John Oghalai, director of The Hearing Center at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, who's treating more of this age group. "I would not be surprised if we start to see even more of this."

Noise-induced hearing loss happens any number of ways, from attending noisy concerts and clubs to using firearms or loud power tools and even recreational vehicles (snowmobiles and some motorcycles are among the offenders).

Today, doctors say many people also are wearing headphones, not just to enjoy music, but also to block out ambient noise on buses, trains or just the street. And all of it can contribute to hearing loss.

"The tricky part is that you don't know early on. It takes multiple exposures and sometimes years to find out," says Dr. Colin Driscoll, an otologist at Minnesota's Mayo Clinic.
One telltale sign that you've done damage to your ears is when you leave a loud venue with ringing ears. If you rest your ears, they might recover, at least partially, doctors say. But with repeated exposure comes more damage to the hair cells in the inner ear, which are key to good hearing.

With long-lasting rechargeable batteries, people who use portable music players also are listening longer - and not giving their ears a rest, says Deanna Meinke, an audiologist at the University of Northern Colorado who heads the National Hearing Conservation Association's task force on children and hearing.

Often, she says, people also turn up the volume to ear-damaging levels. A survey published this summer by Australia's National Acoustic Laboratories found, for instance, that about 25 percent of people using portable stereos had daily noise exposures high enough to cause hearing damage. And further research by Britain's Royal National Institute for Deaf People determined that young people, ages 18 to 24, were more likely than other adults to exceed safe listening limits.

How much is too much?
Meinke says a good rule of thumb comes from a study published in December: Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital determined that listening to a portable music player with headphones at 60 percent of its potential volume for one hour a day is relatively safe.
Experts also recommend protecting hearing in other ways - standing away from loud speakers, for instance, and using hearing protection when using machinery at work, home or for recreation. Day, the DePaul student, concedes that she's never thought to carry ear plugs with her, as Driscoll at Mayo Clinic and others suggest.
"So what if you gave them out at the door at the concert? Would people wear them more?" Driscoll asks. "I think some would."

To that end, professional musicians have formed Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers (HEAR) to promote hearing protection. And Meinke's committee is developing a teacher kit with a meter to show dangerous levels of sound - something educators in Oregon also have demonstrated with a Web-based program called Dangerous Decibels.
"In the future," Meinke says, "I hope people will wear ear plugs the same as they wear their bike helmets or wear a seat belt."
www.dangerousdecibels.org

Electrical Fields Can Make You Sick
by Sarah-Kate Templeton

A GOVERNMENT agency has acknowledged for the first time that people can suffer nausea, headaches and muscle pains when exposed to electromagnetic fields from mobile phones, electricity pylons and computer screens.

The condition known as electro sensitivity, a heightened reaction to electrical energy, will be recognised as a physical impairment.

A report by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), to be published next month, will state that increasing numbers of British people are suffering from the syndrome. While the total figure is not known, thousands are believed to be affected to some extent.

The report, by the agency's radiation protection division, is expected to say that GPs do not know how to treat sufferers and that more research is needed to find cures. It will give a full list of the symptoms, which can include dizziness, irregular heartbeat and loss of memory.

Although most European countries do not recognise the condition, Britain will follow Sweden where electro sensitivity was recognised as a physical impairment in 2000. About 300,000 Swedish men and women are sufferers.

The acknowledgement may fuel legal action by sufferers who claim mobile phone masts have made them ill.

In January Sir William Stewart, chairman of the HPA and the government's adviser on mobile phones, warned that a small proportion of the population could be harmed by exposure to electromagnetic fields, and called for careful examination of the problem.

The HPA has now reviewed all scientific literature on electro sensitivity and concluded that it is a real syndrome. The condition had previously been dismissed as psychological.

The findings should lead to better treatment for sufferers. In Sweden people who are allergic to electrical energy receive government support to reduce exposure in their homes and workplaces.

Special cables are installed in sufferers' homes while electric cookers are replaced with gas stoves. Walls, roofs, floors and windows can be covered with a thin aluminium foil to keep out the electromagnetic field - the area of energy that occurs round any electrically conductive item.

British campaigners believe electrical devices in the home and the workplace, as well as mobile phones emitting microwave radiation, have created an environmental trigger for the syndrome.

There is particular concern about exposure to emissions from mobile phone masts or base stations, often located near schools or hospitals. In January Stewart also called for a national review of planning rules for masts. The review was launched by the government in April.

British sufferers report feeling they are being "zapped" by electromagnetic fields from appliances and go out of their way to avoid them.

Some have moved to remote areas where electromagnetic pollution is lower. The HPA report is eagerly awaited by campaigners. Alasdair Philips, director of the campaign group Powerwatch, said: "This will help the increasing number of people who tell us their GPs do not know how to treat them."

Rod Read, chairman of Electro sensitivity UK, added: "This will be the beginning of an awareness of a new form of pollution from electrical energy."
The Times on Line, 11th September 2005

Eyes Not All Right for Workers

People spend 128,780 hours during their working life in front of a TV or computer screen, a survey claims. The average couch potato clocks up 30.5 hours a week watching TV and workaholics 35 hours at their VDUs. But one in ten Britons has never visited an optician, despite up to 90 per cent of computer users suffering 'screen fatigue' - sore, itchy, irritated eyes or temporary blurred vision. The Eyecare Trust said: "It's vital that computer users visit their optometrists for regular eye examinations."

PHILLIP DAY'S COMMENT: Of course, a regular visit to an optometrist will usually end up with a prescription for glasses, which prevent the eyes adjusting themselves naturally. Remember, over time, your vision adjusts to what you use it for the most. This is not a disease! However, moderation in all things. As an author, my eyesight tends to be short-sighted at the end of a writing project but returns to normality after a few months once I start using it on longer-distance objects.

The 10-Year-Olds High on Ecstasy

Children as young as 10 are downing 50p ecstasy tablets, it emerged yesterday. The youngest reported case was of an eight-year-old trying the killer drug. Some children are said to be bingeing on the pills as prices hit rock-bottom. Drugs charity Lifeline said ecstasy use was at an all-time high, with more than half of youngsters excluded from school having taken the drug. Lifeline's Michael Linnell said: "Although the average age is 14, we are seeing children starting at ten or 12."
Metro, 12th September 2005

For Every Pill, They Invent Another Ill
by Mary Wakefield

It had never occurred to me, before last week, that big pharmaceutical companies might actually be evil. I knew they could be a bit iffy - bribing doctors, failing to mention horrible side-effects, fudging the science - but I always imagined them to be fundamentally well-intentioned.

On Monday I read a new book, Selling Sickness, by an American journalist called Ray Moynihan, and am determined never to be so naive again. Drug companies, it turns out, are not on our side at all. They're misanthropic on an epic, Bond-villain scale. Instead of looking for ways to defeat illnesses, they spend their time trying to create them. Instead of selling cures to the relatively small pool of sick people, they find it more profitable to convince healthy folk that they are unwell. It's creepy and, in a sick way, it's also rather brilliant.

Here's a textbook example of how the disease-mongering works, courtesy of GlaxoSmith Kline. A few years ago, GSK needed to file a new application for one of its anti-depressants, Paxil, in order to extend the patent. What to do? Easy - invent an ailment for it to cure.

They found a brief mention of a little-known nervous condition - Social Anxiety Disorder - in a psychiatric journal somewhere, and hired a PR firm to turn it into a star. The symptoms of SAD - feeling nervous, sweaty, shy at parties - don't amount to much more than the symptoms of being alive, but it was marketed with a serious ad campaign and a catch-phrase: "Imagine being allergic to people."

The PR company rounded up patients, experts, a celebrity sufferer and then presented the SAD story to the press. A new disease? With a famous name? How could an editor could turn it down. The New York Times ran a long, serious feature and American Vogue followed suit.

Instantly, of course, thousands of people decided that they suffered from SAD. Doctors prescribed Paxil, GSK thrived and the PR company won an award for "Best PR Programme of the year".

All week I've been rootling around on the internet, finding out about disease-mongering, and from what I can gather it's a growing, multi-billion-dollar business across America and Europe. Drug companies invent and publicise new "lifestyle disorders" every day, and the public obligingly develop the symptoms and pop the pills.

As all hypochondriacs and pharmaceutical companies know, you only have to read a list of unpleasant symptoms to begin to suffer from them. It's the reverse placebo effect. Once a big drug company has wheedled a disease into the papers, they've as good as sold the cure.
The Sunday Telegraph, 11th September 2005
Mary Wakefield is assistant editor of The Spectator

Melanoma Miracles
by Ginny Fraser

In 2001 I was diagnosed with Stage IV malignant melanoma, with tumours in my brain, spleen, stomach and lungs. I was given six months to live. What saved my life was a radical programme of alternative treatment, including much of what Phillip Day speaks about in his books and talks.

Although this was not my first brush with melanoma, it took me totally by surprise as I had been well for five years. I had had two previous bouts of melanoma. The primary was a mole on my arm back in 1993, which I had excised (along with a chunk of my arm) and then got on with my life without really any introspection about why I had got cancer and what I could do to make sure it didn't come back. Then three years later a tumour was found in the lymph nodes under my right arm. I had surgery to remove the affected nodes, and realised I couldn't just ignore it like I did last time. The approach I chose was the Gerson Therapy, which I did intensively for two years to make sure I was really clear.

So, when I went back to the Marsden five years later neither my doctors nor I were really expecting any melanoma to be showing up to account for my symptoms of squiffy vision, dizziness and profound exhaustion.

I was pretty quickly put onto 16 mg per day of dexamethozone (steroids), and went away for Christmas to contemplate my next steps. My spiritual beliefs have always played a big role in my life, and the Christmas break included a spiritual retreat which provided a great opportunity to muster my inner resources and develop the self-belief and determination to do all I could to get better.

The quest for the best treatment began shortly after my Christmas, by which time I was swollen up with the steroids, with a ravenous appetite and a face like a chipmunk. I enrolled friends in researching the Internet for melanoma treatments (there is SO much out there, and a lot of it is quite upsetting to read, so it's a great task to delegate). After much research I ended up choosing a naturopathic treatment with London-based doctor, Etienne Callebout.

At the same time I was also researching radiotherapy (not knowing at that time that there was any alternative and being pretty scared by the stories of side-effects like early onset of Alzheimer's and brain damage that can result from it). In February 2002 I embarked on a course of whole-brain radiotherapy, daily for two weeks with weekends off. It was easy, painless and took just a few minutes to be "zapped". Its side effects were not so pleasant. I could only walk like an old lady - very slowly. I felt sick and my hair fell out. I was totally exhausted, would sleep in the day and evening then wake at 2am, ravenous. On a few occasions I was "bonkers", which was really scary.

Apart from the radiotherapy, the Marsden could offer me no treatment for the body tumours that had any decent chance of success. There were some chemotherapy agents, but with such low effectiveness that even my doctor told me not to bother. So everything at this point rested on the success of the radiotherapy. A few weeks after the treatment finished I got the results. They were not good. According to the scans, the tumours had not responded.

That was a tough meeting. You always know when it's bad news by the look on the doctor's face the minute they come in the room. The good ones deliver bad news with compassion and empathy. The bad ones either overdo the phoney caring or don't even try, escaping this uncomfortable time as quickly as they possibly can.

Regardless of the bad radiotherapy result, I knew I couldn't give up, and I began Dr Callebout's regime a month or so after radiotherapy ended. He is a qualified medical doctor, homeopath and specialist in alternative treatments for cancer. He admitted he hadn't treated anyone with my level of cancer before but said he would give it a go.

Emotionally this whole time was very different to anything I would have imagined. I felt very strong. I felt incredibly supported. Friends wrote, visited, including four friends who separately travelled from the US to spend time with me. People gave me money. And Stacey, my friend and lodger, chose to spend the time taking care of me. I felt very spiritually connected and supported. I was brought up a Christian and felt a very intimate source of support from Jesus. My mother wrote to dozens of contemplative Anglican orders and asked the nuns to pray for me. The esoteric church I belong to also provided huge energetic assistance. I really felt Grace was extended to me in a big way. I had a new sense of serenity. It was as though all the areas I normally obsess about - money, men, work, was I good enough, was I pretty enough, was I clever enough - they all seemed to wither away in the face of this huge challenge - will I live or will I die? I actually felt very happy, despite the physical difficulties I was undergoing.

The regime I took on was tough, but as I was a survivor of the Gerson Therapy (13 juices a day and five coffee enemas - for two years), I knew I could hack it. My regime consisted of a pure diet - organic vegetables, nothing processed, no booze, no coffee etc. Six freshly squeezed vegetable juices per day, three coffee enemas daily, castor oil rubs, Epsom salts baths, ice packs and hot packs and a footbath in mustard and cayenne pepper. I also had to take 122 tablets per day to boost my immune system and begin to dissolve the tumours.

My tablets included large doses of B17 (Phillip Day has written about these extensively); handfuls of digestive enzymes (as recommended in the Kelley-Gonzales approach) and numerous supplements to boost my system generally.

It was a tough regime, but it felt great to be the one responsible for my own recovery. The sense of empowerment far outweighed the hassle of what was physically involved. But best of all, it worked.

I had a CT scan around four months later which showed that all the tumours had either reduced significantly or disappeared altogether. The hospital took credit for the brain tumours claiming that radiotherapy effects often take a while to kick in and that the previous scan was done too early to show a true result, but they were flabbergasted by the reduction in the other areas where I had had NO conventional treatment. They were surprised, but not interested enough to ask me in any detail exactly how this had been achieved. The term "spontaneous remission" was used - which I have since learned is a commonly heard blanket term used by unenlightened medics for any improvement not caused by conventional medical treatment.

The other day I heard another corker on my regular check-up visit to RMH. This time the doctor commented that the disappearance of the tumours in my body "could well be attributed to the brain radiotherapy"! I've got to the stage now where I am no longer angry about this approach, all I can do is laugh at the sometimes complete reluctance to see any value in anything other than their terrible trio of treatments (surgery, chemo and radiotherapy).

I continued working on my "spontaneous remission" for a further seven months, and a scan in November 2002 showed that everything had gone, bar a small abnormality in my spleen. As I write today in June 2005 I am enjoying excellent health. In fact, in August I am going on a trek in the Himalayas. I still juice, eat organic and do enemas and will always take good care of my health.

Before I got sick I worked as a coach (a bit like a counsellor) and facilitator (running training courses). Now I am using those skills (in combination with my cancer experience and research) to offer coaching support to people affected by cancer who want to take a proactive approach to their recovery. I work over the telephone or face-to-face looking at the two elements Phillip is examining on his current Attitude Tour - the physical and the mental, and how to make changes in both that will lead to wellness on every level.

Someone once said that during their experience of cancer they had wished there was someone like a midwife who could be with them - someone knowledgeable and kind - who could be their witness and their supporter. That's what I wished I'd had and what I am offering to anyone affected by cancer.
Ginny Fraser ginnyf@tiscali.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1483 201020

US Fluoride - Sign the Online Petition
(Fluoride Action Network)
www.fluoridealert.org

FROM PHILLIP DAY: Prof Paul Connett has done a great job organizing this petition, so now it is up to us. All US subscribers to EClub should take a moment now to click here and sign the FAN petition for a full Congressional hearing into the dangers of fluoride additives. There is no better time than now to make your outrage felt.

From: Paul Connett

I was very excited yesterday when the online petition yielded 240 votes in one day. Today was even more incredible. In the last 24 hours we have added 464 votes, going from 2275, at 8:15 pm last night, to 2739 votes at 8:25 pm tonight. Over 700 votes have been added since Saturday morning! But this isn't just about numbers. Please take some time out and read some of the comments.

Some new states have entered the race and so I am expanding the count to the Top 30 states (see below).

And some more exciting news - we have expanded our National Dream Team by three states: Delaware, Pennsylvania and Vermont. Please welcome Alan Muller of Green Delaware <amuller@dca.net>; Bill Smedley of GreenWatch, Pennsylvania <bsmedley@kcnet.org> and Mary Lou Alberts from Bennington, Vermont <loulou@together.net>.

If you live in one of these three states please contact Alan, Bill or Mary Lou and offer your moral (and other) support. We are only going to stop this nonsense if we all work together. Our National Dream Team (see listing below) has already shown us how it can be done. We are still looking for someone from Montana to help relieve the pressure on Sarah Rollins.

Our updated National Dream Team

1) ARKANSAS -Crystal Harvey <Cfharvey@hsnp.com>
2) CALIFORNIA - Gene Burke <burkegene@msn.com>, Maureen Jones <maureenj@pacbell.net>
3) COLORADO - Pati Caputo <mtncentre@aol.com>
4) DELAWARE - Alan Muller <amuller@dca.net>
5) FLORIDA -Jo Anne Johnson <punkinpie@adelphia.net>
6) ILLNOIS - Taylor Moore <taylorgenemoore@yahoo.com>, Joyce Baunach <jbaunach@rcn.com>
7) LOUISIANA -John-Christopher Ward <jc8ward@cox.net> (we haven't heard from J-C we hope he is OK)
8) MARYLAND - Bernie Miltenberger <Bernie_Miltenberger@msn.com>
9) MASSACHUSETTS - Kathy Fontaine <kfont12416@msn.com>
10) MICHIGAN -Gladys Mitchell <gmitchell@creativect.net>
11) MONTANA - Sarah Rollins <rollinsarah@imt.net> -needs help please!
12) NEW HAMPSHIRE -Gerhard Bedding <gbedding@verizon.net>
13) NEW JERSEY - Nancy Coleman - <NJnoFluoride@aol.com>
14) NEW YORK - Eleanor Krinsky, Carol Kopf <NYSCOF@aol.com> and the Connetts.
15) OREGON -Lynne Campbell <ocsdw@pop.earthlink.net>
16) PENNSYLVANIA - Bill Smedley <bsmedley@kcnet.org>
17) TENNESSEE -Dan Stockin <dan@thelilliecenter.com>
18) TEXAS -Earle Cobb (need others) <EarleCobb@cs.com>
19) UTAH - Lorna Rosenstein <lorna@xmission.com>
20) VERMONT -Mary Lou Alberts <loulou@together.net>
21) WASHINGTON - Shirley Jacobson <retiredlady_04@yahoo.com> and Betty Fowler <fowler6704@comcast.net>
22) WEST VIRGINIA -Terri Swearingen <tswearin@verizon.net>
23) WISCONSIN -Dan Zupon <blazercommunications@hotmail.com>

Top 30 report.
2)
California continues its steep climb with another 96 points added today and now occupies first position. Oregon slips to second, even though it added 51 points. Utah and Arkansas remain in third and fourth positions but Florida with another 37 points has jumped over Washington and pulled within 2 points of reaching Arkansas. Nearly 100 points separate 7th placed New York from number 8 Massachusetts. Texas remains in ninth position, but both Pennsylvania and Hawaii have overtaken New Hampshire, to occupy the 10th and 11th spots. Colorado stays at 13th. Georgia added 25 points to jump from 17th to 14th position. Illinois slips to 15th and Michigan squeezes past Kansas to reach the 16th spot. Wisconsin jumps over Missouri and newcomers Ohio, Tennessee and New Jersey push Montana back to the 23rd position.
3)
Only 14 points separate 19th placed Missouri from the three states at equal 26th position, so with the avalanche of votes coming in we can expect some big changes tomorrow. Just checked the latest total at 10:15 pm - 2769 votes. That's 30 votes since I started writing this!
4)
So another very exciting day - congratulations everyone!
5)
Paul Connett September 12th 2005 (2739 counted) Point totals.

1) CALIFORNIA 440
2) OREGON 419
3) UTAH 355
4) ARKANSAS 264
5) FLORIDA 262
6) WASHINGTON 261
7) NEW YORK 253
8) MASSACHUSETTS 158
9) TEXAS 132
10) PENNSYLVANIA 99
11) HAWAII 88
12) NEW HAMPSHIRE 87
13) COLORADO 82
14) GEORGIA 81
15) ILLINOIS 73
16) MICHIGAN 72
17) KANSAS 67
18) WISCONSIN 61
19) MISSOURI 52
20) OHIO 51
21) TENNESSEE 46
22) NEW JERSEY 45
23) MONTANA 42
24) VERMONT 41
25) IDAHO 40
26=) MARYLAND 38
26=) ARIZONA 38
26=) MINNESOTA 38
29) NORTH CAROLINA 33
30) NEVADA 26

Sept 11 (2275 counted) Point totals.

1) OREGON 368
2) CALIFORNIA 344
3) UTAH 329
4) ARKANSAS 260
5) WASHINGTON 228
6) FLORIDA 225
7) NEW YORK 217
8) MASSACHUSETTS 142
9) TEXAS 113
10) NEW HAMPSHIRE 83
11) PENNSYLVANIA 82
12) HAWAII 72
13) COLORADO 66
14) ILLINOIS 65
15) KANSAS 63
16) MICHIGAN 58
17) GEORGIA 55
18) MISSOURI 45
19) WISCONSIN 43
20=) MONTANA 39
20=) VERMONT 39

Sept 10 (2029 counted) Point totals.

1) OREGON 350
2) UTAH 323
3) CALIFORNIA 290
4) ARKANSAS 257
5) WASHINGTON 211
6) NEW YORK 199
7) FLORIDA 176
8) MASSACHUSETTS 132
9) TEXAS 94
10) NEW HAMPSHIRE 80
11) PENNSYLVANIA 63
12) ILLINOIS 61
13) KANSAS 58
14) HAWAII 57
15) COLORADO 55
16) MICHIGAN 53
17) GEORGIA 52
18) WISCONSIN 41
19) MONTANA 39
20) MISSOURI 38

http://www.fluorideACTION.net

FAN Bulletin #339, 12th September 2005

Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans
An Interview with Robert Whitaker

The following is a Street Spirit interview with Robert Whitaker, author of Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. It is reprinted here with permission from the Street Spirit in Oakland, California. The interview is conducted by Terry Messman, editor of Street Spirit.

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 God, 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 hyperactivity disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Is this explosive new prevalence of mental illness among children a real increase, or is it a marketing campaign that enriches the psychiatric drug industry, a bonanza for the pharmaceutical corporations?

RW: You're touching on something now that is a tragic scandal of monumental proportions. I talk sometimes to college classes, psychology classes. You cannot believe the percentage of youth who have been told they were mentally ill as kids, that something was wrong with them. It's absolutely phenomenal. It's absolutely cruel to be telling kids that they have these broken brains and mental illnesses.

There's two things that are happening here. One, of course, is that it's complete nonsense. As you remember as a kid, you have too much energy or you behave sometimes in not altogether appropriate ways, and you do have these extremes of emotions, especially during your teenage years. Both children and teenagers can be very emotional. So one thing that's going on is that they take childhood behaviors and start defining behaviors they don't like as pathological. They start defining emotions that are uncomfortable as pathological. So part of what we're doing is pathologizing childhood with straight-out definition stuff. We're pathologizing poverty among kids.

For example, if you're a foster kid, and maybe you drew a bad straw in the lottery of life and are born into a dysfunctional family and you get put into foster care, do you know what happens today? You pretty likely are going to get diagnosed with a mental disorder, and you're going to be placed on a psychiatric drug. In Massachusetts, it's something like 60 to 70 percent of kids in foster care are now on psychiatric drugs. These kids aren't mentally ill! They got a raw deal in life. They ended up in a foster home, which means they were in a bad family situation, and what does our society do? They say: "You have a defective brain." It's not that society was bad and you didn't get a fair deal. No, the kid has a defective brain and has to be put on this drug. It's absolutely criminal.

Let's talk about bipolar disorder among kids. As one doctor said, that used to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Now we're seeing it all over. Bipolar is exploding among kids. Well, partly you could say that we're just slapping that label on kids more often; but in fact, there is something real going on. Here's what's happening. You take kids and put them on an antidepressant -- which we never used to do -- or you put them on a stimulant like Ritalin. Stimulants can cause mania; stimulants can cause psychosis.

SS: And antidepressants can also cause mania, as you pointed out.

RW: Exactly, so the kid ends up with a drug-induced manic or psychotic episode. Once they have that, the doctor at the emergency room doesn't say, "Oh, he's suffering from a drug-induced episode." He says he's bipolar.

SS: Then they give him a whole new drug for the mental disorder caused by the first drug.

RW: Yeah, they give him an antipsychotic drug; and now he's on a cocktail of drugs, and he's on a path to becoming disabled for life. That's an example of how we're absolutely making kids sick.

SS: It's like society or their schools are trying to make them manageable and they end up putting them on a chemical roller-coaster against their will.

RW: Absolutely.

SS: There's an astonishing number of kids being given Ritalin to cure hyperactivity. But what 10-year-old boy in a confined school setting isn't hyperactive? You write that the effect of Ritalin on the dopamine system is very similar to cocaine and amphetamines.

RW: Ritalin is methylphenidate. Now methylphenidate affects the brain in exactly the same way as cocaine. They both block a molecule that is involved in the reuptake of dopamine.

SS: So they both increase the dopamine levels in the brain?

RW: Exactly. And they do it with a similar degree of potency. So methylphenidate is very similar to cocaine. Now, one difference is whether you're snorting it or if it's in a pill. That partly changes how quickly it's metabolized. But still, it basically affects the brain in the same way. Now, methylphenidate was used in research studies to deliberately stir psychosis in schizophrenics. Because they knew that you could take a person with a tendency towards psychosis, give them methylphenidate, and cause psychosis. We also knew that amphetamines, like methylphenidate, could cause psychosis in people who had never been psychotic before.

So think about this. We're giving a drug to kids that is known to have the possibility of stirring psychosis. Now, the odd thing about methylphenidate and amphetamines is that, in kids, they sort of have a counterintuitive effect. What does speed do in adults? It makes them more jittery and hyperactive. For whatever reasons, in kids amphetamines will actually still their movements; it will actually keep them in their chairs and make them more focused. So you've got kids in boring schools. The boys are not paying attention and they're diagnosed with ADHD and put on a drug that is known to stir psychosis. The next thing you know, a fair number of them are not doing well by the time they're 15, 16, 17. Some of those kids talk about how when you're on these drugs for the long term, you start feeling like a zombie; you don't feel like yourself.

SS: Hollowed-out, blunted emotions. And this is being done to millions of kids.

RW: Millions of kids! Think about what we're doing. We're robbing kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors. That's what growing up is, that's what being alive is! And we're robbing kids of their right to be. It's so criminal. And we're talking about millions of kids who have been affected this way. There are some colleges where something like 40 to 50 percent of the kids arrive with a psychiatric prescription.

SS: It looks like a huge social-control mechanism. Society gives kids Ritalin and antidepressants to subdue them and make them conform. On the one hand, it's all about social control and conformity. But it also has a huge marketing payoff.

RW: You're right, it creates customers for the drugs, and hopefully lifelong customers. That's what they're told, aren't they? They're told they are going to be on these drugs for life. And next thing they know, they're on two or three or four drugs. It's brilliant from the capitalist point of view. It does serve some social-control function. But you take a kid, and you turn them into a customer, and hopefully a lifelong customer. It's brilliant.

We now spend more on antidepressants in this country than the Gross National Product of mid-sized countries like Jordan. It's just amazing amounts of money. The amount of money we spend on psychiatric drugs in this country is more than the Gross National Product of two-thirds of the world's countries. It's just this incredibly lucrative paradigm of the mind that you can fix chemical imbalances in the brain with these drugs. It works so well from a capitalistic point of view for Eli Lilly. When Prozac came to market, Eli Lilly's value on Wall Street, its capitalization, was around 2 billion dollars. By the year 2000, the time when Prozac was its number-one drug, its capitalization reached 80 billion dollars -- a forty-fold increase.

So that's what you really have to look at if you want to see why drug companies have pursued this vision with such determination. It brings billions of dollars in wealth in terms of increased stock prices to the owners and managers of those companies. It also benefits the psychiatric establishment that gets behind the drugs; they do well by this. There's a lot of money flowing in the direction of those that will embrace this form of care. There's advertisements that enrich the media. It's all a big gravy train.

Unfortunately, the cost is dishonesty in our scientific literature, the corruption of the FDA, and the absolute harm done to children in this country drawn into this system, and an increase of 150,000 newly disabled people every year in the United States for the last 17 years. That's an incredible record of harm done.

SS: Everyone gets rich -- the drug companies, the psychiatrists, the researchers, the advertising agencies -- and the clients get drugged out of their minds and damaged for life.

RW: And you know what's interesting? No one says that the mental health of the American people is getting better. Instead, everyone says we have this increasing problem They blame it on the stresses of modern life or something like that, and they don't want to look at the fact that we're creating mental illness.

Overview:
Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans - interview with Robert Whitaker
NewsTarget.com, 31st August 2005

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The Mind Game by Phillip Day

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The Sudoku Workout

Research has shown that keeping the mind agile is just as important as keeping fit in the battle to stay young. In fact, by stretching the brain with regular crossword and Sudoku puzzles, you can make your brain appear up to 14 years younger.

Here, Professor Ian Robertson, of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College, Dublin, who carried out the study of 3,000 men and women, reveals his top 10 tips for keeping the brain sharp and the years at bay.

1 Aerobic Exercise
The benefits of exercise on the body have long been recognised, but a regular cardiovascular workout just three times a week for a minimum of 30 minutes can also significantly boost brain power.

Anything which raises your heart rate and makes you sweat will improve your mental function by pumping more blood to the brain.

Exercise also generates a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which acts like a fertiliser for new brain connections and cells. It also releases serotonin, which is a key chemical for enhancing mood and prolonging the survival of brain cells which might otherwise wither through age.

Try; Brisk walking, jogging, cycling or vigorous gardening for at least 30 minutes, three times a week. Avoid stopping and starting as it is important to maintain your heart rate for a continuous period.

2 Mental Challenges
As we age, we challenge ourselves less and less. Think back to your school days and how many different challenges you faced each day - from mastering a mathematical technique to writing an essay.

Any demand you make on the brain is a form of benign, moderate stress that increases levels of the chemical messenger noradrenalin, which in turn boosts the rate at which connections form between brain cells.

Scientists in Chicago recently found that the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease was 50 per cent lower amongst a group of nuns and monks aged over 65 who were mentally active. To maintain and enhance intellectual function in later life, it is important to challenge the brain.

Try: Stimulate your brain at work by solving problems, juggling a number of tasks or learning a new skill. If your job isn't mentally challenging, or you no longer work, use your recreation time to embrace some of those tasks you once loathed at school - like solving a mathematical problem or learning history. Alternatively, you could join a community action group, undertake voluntary work or take up crosswords or Sudoku puzzles.

3 Memory Gymnastics
Exercising the memory is one of the best ways to stave off doddering old age. There are a number of exercises we can perform.

Try: Visualisation. Train your mind to use pictures and mental imagery to retrieve information. The ancient Greeks used something called 'method of loci' - which means visualising a familiar journey and putting the things you want to remember (names of people you met at a party, or items on a shopping list) at familiar staging posts along the route.

Similarly use visual clues to help you remember new facts or names. Research shows the more bizarre the image, the better our mind retains it. Alternatively invent a rhyme or soundtrack to accompany the words you want to remember.

4 Learning Skills
Many of us who would like to learn a new language or master a musical instrument are put off by the fact that we will not be as 'quick' as we were in our youth. Don't be deterred. Science has proved that the greater our education - regardless of when we achieved it - the more likely we are to live long, full lives.

In particular, the more educated we are, the more densely connected are the brain cells in the left hemisphere of our brain - the area responsible for language and communication.

Try: Mastering a new skill, learning a language, taking a course or getting involved in local politics.

Learning a second language forces your brain to switch tracks continuously, which is one of the most mentally-demanding things you can do. It's particularly effective for honing the frontal lobes - the brain's mind manager - which generally shrink with age.

5 Take Small Steps not a Giant Leap
The older we get, the less we can be 'bothered' to exercise our brains. It is not just fear of humiliation which inhibits us, but trying to do too much and inadvertently setting ourselves up to fail.

Instead, we should break tasks down into small, attainable chunks. Instead of trying to master the saxophone overnight, set yourself a goal of two notes in the first three months. Then, when you have managed this, introduce another two notes.

Try: Keeping a diary. This will help you make time to improve your mind and let you see your progress. First, break the day up into six parts (e.g. early morning, late morning, etc) and write down what you do, categorising each activity as very important, of medium importance and little importance.

After a week, aim to substitute one of the low importance tasks each day with a small mental exercise, such as learning a few notes on the saxophone. Give yourself a gold star when you have mastered the task. You will find your increased confidence encourages you to carry on learning and challenging yourself.

6 Reduce Stress
Many of us are confused about whether stress is a good or bad thing. While a little stress stimulates the mind, too much can have a detrimental effect on brain function. In particular, prolonged stress affects the brain's memory centre, the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is very sensitive to brain chemicals called glutamates that are pumped into the brain under stress. These glutamates can corrode some of the connections in the hippocampus and lead to shrinkage. Research has shown that Vietnam War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder tend to have smaller hippocampi and poorer memories than other veterans. In most cases, these effects disappear when the stress lifts and normal memory function returns.

Try: Relaxing. When you feel particularly stressed, change your mood by playing soothing music, watching a funny film, or just smiling. The happier and more at ease you are, the better you will be at solving intellectual problems.

7 Be Socially Active
Human beings are designed to live in groups, but as we age our social circle inevitably shrinks. Some of the greatest demands on our minds occur as a result of interaction with other people, so it is important to remain engaged in the community around us.

Not only does this provide mental stimulation, it also has a knock-on emotional effect, making us more positive and less prone to depression.

Try: Setting yourself social goals. These can be very small and include some entertainment based activities such as a trip to the cinema or theatre. Or walk to the local shop and challenge yourself to speak to two new people on the journey there and back.

8 Eat a Healthy Diet
A low-fat, high-fibre diet, rich in antioxidants - incorporating five portions of fruit and veg a day - has long been credited with staving off heart disease and helping to combat cancer. It can also have hugely beneficial effects on brain power.

Fish, fruit and vegetables - particularly dark fruits like blackcurrants and dark leafy vegetables like spinach - are vital for a healthy brain. Their high antixodant levels combat free radicals - the highly reactive molecules than can impair brain function.

Fish oils, in particular, help maintain brain cells. Conversely, foods high in saturated fats (such as potato crisps and processed foods) erode mental facilities and should be eaten in moderation.

Try: Eating three portions of oily fish a week. Eat coloured fruit and vegetables like strawberries, blueberries and red peppers. Cut down on saturated fat and salt as these can lead to blocked arteries and impaired mental activity.

9 Thinking Young
Perhaps the old adage 'You're only as old as you feel' should be re-worded 'You're only as old as you think'. A positive mental attitude can help heal the body - and the same may be true of the mind.

Try: Keeping up with young trends and fashions, mixing with younger people, and avoiding outdated ideas about what is 'appropriate' for your age.

10 Let a Little Love into Your Life
While fear and stress can cause brain cells to shrink - by the same token, love can help the brain to grow. Adults can benefit from expressions of love, which is why it is important to cherish partners, family and friends.
Try: Cuddling one person you love every day.

Stay Sharp With The Mind Doctor, by Professor Ian Robertson, published by Vermilion.
The Daily Mail, 13th September 2005

Further Resources

The Little Book of Attitude by Phillip Day

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