0:06 - Introduction to Mental Illness
1:48 - The Scale of Mental Illness
4:15 - The Growth of Psychiatric Medications
7:43 - The Impact on Children
8:48 - Lack of Biological Evidence
13:27 - Expert Opinions on Mental Illness
18:30 - The Inefficacy of Medicinal Treatments
22:03 - Alternatives to Traditional Treatments
24:14 - The Role of Racism in Psychiatry
28:27 - Military and Mental Health
33:53 - The Risks of Psychiatric Drugs
36:42 - Financial Conflicts in Psychiatry
40:54 - The Politics of Mental Health Coverage
45:59 - Conclusion: Rethinking Mental Illness
47:24 - Final Thoughts and Non-Drug Solutions
This lecture by Stefan Molyneux, titled "There is No Such Thing as Mental Illness," presents an argument against the conventional understanding of mental health disorders. He begins by emphasizing a critical distinction, stating that while experiences of discomfort, anxiety, and depression are genuine and often debilitating, labeling them as "mental illnesses" implies that they fall within a medical framework. Molyneux contends that mental illness is mischaracterized as a disease or deficiency, often attributed to a chemical imbalance in the brain, which he argues lacks scientific substantiation.
Molyneux cites alarming statistics, such as 26% of Americans experiencing mental illness annually and the financial implications of psychiatric drugs, which have ballooned to a $76 billion global market. He critiques the widely accepted notion that psychiatrists can accurately diagnose and treat mental disorders effectively, highlighting that despite the rise in prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, the incidence of diagnosed mental illness has simultaneously increased. Between 1955 and 2007, the number of adults designated as mentally ill surged from approximately 355,000 to over four million, underscoring what he views as a pervasive failure of psychiatric intervention.
The lecture takes a pointed look at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), criticizing its evolution from a limited set of diagnoses to an expansive catalogue that he argues facilitates the pharmaceutical industry's growth. Molyneux questions the validity of these diagnoses by asserting that there is no definitive laboratory test to confirm any supposed mental disorder, as all diagnoses are behavior-based rather than rooted in observable physical symptoms. He cites experts who argue that modern psychiatry has not convincingly established biological causes for any mental illnesses, maintaining this trend over decades despite intensive research efforts.
Molyneux delves into the consequences of widespread psychiatric drug use, detailing the poise of medications like SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) that can induce manic or psychotic episodes, particularly in children, further complicating their conditions. He also discusses how the psychiatric industry's financial motivations—stemming from government funding and pharmaceutical influence—have led to a debased and exploitative system. Mental health diagnoses, according to Molyneux, are often determined by consensus rather than rigorous scientific inquiry, suggesting that the rise of various psychiatric labels is tightly interwoven with financial incentives from the drug industry.
He presents a rigorous critique of various treatment outcomes, referring to studies indicating that individuals without medications often fare better than those who receive standard psychiatric treatments. Molyneux highlights alternative approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapy, as more effective and sustainable than psychiatric medication, which he argues not only fail to address the root causes of mental distress but may also exacerbate symptoms.
In conclusion, Molyneux urges a rethink of the characterization of mental health issues, advocating for recognition of the real suffering individuals experience while simultaneously challenging the foundational concepts of mental illness as a medical category. He encourages a critical examination of the current psychiatric paradigm, particularly regarding its impact on children and society at large, emphasizing the need for more compassionate and understanding approaches over chemical interventions that may lead to long-term dependency and adverse effects.
[0:00] Hi everybody, my name is Stefan Molyneux, and I'm the host of Freedomain Radio, which is the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
[0:07] This is a presentation entitled, There is No Such Thing as Mental Illness. And please, before we start, understand that I'm not trying to imply or state that depression and anxiety and other forms of discomfort and agony are not very real, very palpable, and sometimes debilitating. The experts that I've said here are going to argue that it does not fall into the category of illness, which is very, very important. So what is the theory around mental illness? Well, the idea is that there are billions of people around the world who suffer from this thing called mental illness or a disease of the mind. 26% of Americans suffer from mental illness. And according to the National Institute of Mental Health study in 2010, almost 60 million Americans are going to suffer from an episode of mental illness in any given year. Now, the general theory is presented that mental illness is a disease or a deficiency that is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain that is corrected by psychiatric drugs, Zoloft and Prozac and Xanax and so on. The idea is put forward that psychiatrists can accurately diagnose mental illness and have safe and effective treatments for it.
[1:20] And thus psychiatry is considered a valid medical specialty like cardiology and so on and the claims of the movement are based on scientific research that is the theory that is put forward what is the scale of this well we touched on this in the previous slide the scale is enormous, global sales of antidepressants and stimulants anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs reached more than $76 billion a year. That is more than double the annual U.S.
[1:48] Government budget that is spent on the so-called war on drugs.
[1:55] Internationally, 54 million people are taking antidepressants which are known to cause addiction, violence, and homicidal behavior. Last year, this is 2011, last year, one in four women were taking mental health meds last year. 20% of all Americans, that's 15% of men. 20 million school children worldwide have now been diagnosed with these mental disorders and prescribed cocaine-like stimulants and powerful antidepressants as treatment. Psychiatric drug use and abuse is surging worldwide more than 100 million prescriptions for antidepressants alone were written in 2002 at a cost of 19.5 billion dollars.
[2:47] One in seven prescriptions in france for instance includes a psychotropic drug and more than 50 percent of the unemployed almost two million people take psychotropic drugs.
[3:00] Combined spending on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around 500 million dollars in 1986 to nearly 20 billion dollars in 2004, The scope is huge. Driven by DSM, a DSM is the diagnostic manual for psychiatrists. It started off with just a few dozen, and now there are hundreds and hundreds of diagnoses of these mental illnesses. So driven by DSM-derived mental illness statistics, the international mental health budget has skyrocketed over the past 10 years. So in 1994, in the U.S., the mental health budget was $33 billion. Dollars in 1994 to almost to more sorry more than 80 billion dollars today. Switzerland's spending on mental health has increased from a little over 70 million dollars in 1988 to 184 million dollars over a 10-year period and these are all adjusted for inflation. Germany currently spends more than two and a half billion dollars per year on mental health. France, the mental health costs have soared adding $400 million to the country's deficit.
[4:15] Let's look at the growth of these medications.
[4:21] So, if you have a medication that claims to cure malaria, and you have a population which is significantly infected by malaria, and you have a cure, then as you apply the cure, you should expect the cases of malaria to go down. That's one of the ways you know in which a medication is efficacious. You have a disease and you have a cure. As you apply the cure, the disease incidence should shrink, should diminish. So it should have declined. The per capita incidence of mental illness should have declined over the past 50 years since the introduction of the first mental health meds. So let's look. In 1955, there were 355,000 adults in state and county mental hospitals with a psychiatric diagnosis. During the next three decades, which was the era of the first generation of psychiatric drugs, the number of disabled mentally ill rose from 355,000 to 1.25 million.
[5:16] Prozac arrived on the market in 1988, and during the next 20 years, the number of disabled mentally ill grew to more than 4 million adults in 2007. The prescribing of psychiatric medications to children and adolescents just exploded during this period 1987 to 2007 and as this medical practice took hold the number of youth in america receiving a government disability check because of a mental illness leapt from 16 200 in 1987 to 561 569 in 2007 a 35 fold increase.
[6:00] So it gives them more growth. If we go back even further, at the turn of the last century, 1903, about 1 in 500 people was hospitalized for mental illness. From 1955 to 1987, the antipsychotic drugs Thorazine and Haldon and the tricyclic antidepressants such as Elavil and Anafranil, the number of disabled mentally ill increased fourfold to 1 out of every 75 persons. Now, 1 in every 50 Americans is disabled by mental illness. The number of mentally disabled people in the U.S. has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987. That's an increase every day over the past 17 years of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness. The drugs appear to be exacerbating the supposed illness. There's a reason for that, which we'll get into.
[6:56] There is an escalation to the application of the psychotropic meds so these are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or ssris is the foundational component of these meds, so you have some sort of depression and you're given these drugs and a certain percentage of people will suffer either a manic or psychotic attack which is directly induced by the drug they're taking. And so now they've gone from depression to depression plus mania or psychosis and they go to the emergency room and at which point they're shipped off to another psychiatrist who now gives them a diagnosis of bipolar and they're given an antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressants and at this point they're moving down the path to chronic disability.
[7:44] Let's have a look at this growth. These are disability claims or recipients under the age of 65 diagnosed by mental illness from 87 to 2007. You can see they're just going way up and way up and way up. This is not a cure.
[8:02] Oh, the kids. From 1990 to 2010, as we mentioned, the number of disabled mentally ill children rose 35 times. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children. 50% of the total kids on SSI rolls in 2007 were considered mentally ill, mentally disabled. In Massachusetts, 60 to 70% of kids in foster care are now on psychiatric drugs. Why? Do they have some genetic difference? No. They're in foster care. They're traumatized.
[8:32] Kids are often put on antidepressants or stimulants like Ritalin. Stimulants can cause mania. Stimulants can also cause psychosis. And this puts the kids on the escalating meds problem. So, what is the fundamental issue that is occurring?
[8:49] Well, psychiatrists and psychiatric researchers have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause or a genetic origin. They have been trying this for many, many years. And they have not come up with anything conclusive. And at this point, it doesn't matter. If they come up with something conclusive tomorrow, it still does not explain the last 50 years.
[9:11] Psychiatry has yet to develop a single physical test that can determine whether or not an individual has a particular mental illness. There is not a single blood test or brain scan or MRI or anything like that, which can determine whether anybody has a single or particular mental illness. The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders this is the dsm-4 there's a dsm-5 coming out with newly minted fresh categories of psychiatric disturbance coming out in 2012 and remember at one point homosexuality was considered mental illness now it's not they voted in and out of existence so this dsm uses behavior not physical symptoms to diagnose mental illness lacks both scientific reliability and validity. It's a checklist of behavior. It is not a physical test. Let's look at the lack of evidence. Surgeon General's report, 1999, states that the precise causes or etiology of mental disorders are not known. There is no definitive lesion, laboratory test, or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify a mental illness. If you have an infection, you have red, you have swelling, you have increased white blood counts, You can't find anything like that when it comes to these so-called mental illnesses.
[10:27] The textbook of clinical psychiatry, again from 99 states, validation of the diagnostic categories as specific entities has not been established. This is 40 plus years into the mass medication of millions of people.
[10:43] Psychiatric disorders are not medical diseases. There are no lab tests, no brain scans, no x-rays or chemical imbalance tests that can verify that any mental disorder is a physical condition. Let's hear from the experts, which of course I'm not one of. Dr. David Kaiser, a psychiatrist, says modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic slash biological cause of any single mental illness. Patients have been diagnosed with chemical imbalances despite the fact that no test exist to support such a claim. And there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like. And the fact that some people claim to feel better after they take these meds is no evidence of cause or deficiency. If you have a headache and you take an aspirin, can it reliably or scientifically be said that the reason you had a headache was because of a deficiency of aspirin? Of course not. Dr. Ron Liefer, a psychiatrist, quote, there's no biological imbalance. When people come to me and say, I have a biochemical imbalance, I say, show me your lab tests. There are no lab tests. So what's the biochemical imbalance? Dr. Joseph Glenn Mullen, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, quote, while there has been no shortage of alleged biochemical explanations for psychiatric conditions, not one has been proven. Quite the contrary. In every instance where such an imbalance was thought to have been found, it was later proven false.
[12:07] Dr. Elliot Valenstein The theories are held on to not only because there is nothing else to take their place but also because they are useful in promoting drug treatment Let's keep going Dr. Thomas Sass, who's actually been on this show before Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry Quote There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of mental illness as there is for most bodily diseases, If such a test were developed, then the condition would cease to be a mental illness and would be classified instead as a symptom of bodily disease. Dr. Sidney Walker III, quote, I believe until the public and psychiatry itself see that DSM labels are not only useless as a medical, quote, diagnosis, but also have the potential to do great harm, particularly when they are used as means to deny individual freedoms or as weapons by psychiatrists acting as hired guns for the legal system. Bruce levine phd author of common sense rebellion quote no biochemical neurological or genetic markers have been found for attention deficit disorder oppositional defiant disorder depression schizophrenia anxiety compulsive alcohol and drug abuse overeating gambling or any other so-called mental illness disease or disorder.
[13:28] Tena Dedeen, sorry, Tena Dedeen, PhD psychologist. Unlike medical diagnosis that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment, and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV are terms arrived at through peer consensus. Dr. Joseph Glenn Mullen again, quote, No claim for a gene for a psychiatric condition has stood the test of time in spite of popular misinformation.
[13:54] David Kaiser, psychiatrist, quote, modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic slash biological cause of any single mental illness. Dr. Fred Bowman, junior child neurologist, fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, quote, in 40 years, quote, biological psychiatry has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition slash diagnosis as an abnormality or disease, or as anything neurological, biological, chemically imbalanced, or genetic.
[14:26] Definitions of disease. Dr. Colin Ross says, the way things get into the DSM is not based on blood test or brain scan or physical findings. It's based on descriptions of behavior. And that's what the whole psychiatry system is. Dr. Stefan Krasuski, Harvard-trained Pennsylvania psychiatrist, quote, we can manufacture enough diagnostic labels of normal variability of mood and thought that we can continually supply medication to you. But when it comes to manufacturing disease, nobody does it like psychiatry. Dr. Thomas Dorman, quote, In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of, quote, disease, formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket, furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough. The creation of, quote, disease.
[15:36] Psychiatry's diagnostic criteria are literally voted into existence and inserted into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. What is voted in is a system of classification of symptoms that is drastically different from, and foreign to, anything else in medicine. None of the diagnoses are supported by objective evidence of physical disease illness or any kind of science.
[16:06] Voting in illness what does this process look like mental disorders are established without scientific basis and procedure the low level of intellectual effort was shocking this is according to a psychologist attending the dsm hearings diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. Then it's typed into the computer. It may reflect on our naivete, but it was our belief that there would be an attempt to look at the things scientifically. Lynn Rosewater, a psychologist who attended a DSM hearing presided over by one of the manuals, leading architect, psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, reported, quote, they were having a discussion for a criterion about masochistic personality disorder, and Bob Spitzer's wife, social worker and the only woman in that meeting, on Spitzer's side of the debate says, I do that sometimes. And he says, okay, take it out. You watch this and you say, wait a second, we don't have to write to criticize them because this is a science?
[17:07] Schizophrenia. Edward Drummond, MD, Associate Medical Director at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire says, there is no accepted ideology of schizophrenia, although there have been many theories. The unfortunate truth is that we don't know what causes schizophrenia or even what the illness is. Thomas Sass again says in his book Schizophrenia, the Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry, there is, in short, no such thing as schizophrenia. In the epilogue of their book Schizophrenia, Medical Diagnosis or Moral Verdict, Theodore Sarban and James Mancuso say, quote, we have come to the end of our journey. Among other things we have tried to establish that the schizophrenia model of unwanted conduct lacks credibility the analysis directs us ineluctably to the conclusion that schizophrenia is a myth.
[18:03] Efforts to prove a biological basis for so-called schizophrenia have invoked brain scans of pairs of identical twins when only one is a supposed schizophrenic. And they do indeed show that the so-called schizophrenic has brain damage, his identical twin lacks. The flaw in these studies, of course, is that the so-called schizophrenic has inevitably been given brain-damaging drugs, called neuroleptics, as a so-called treatment for his so-called schizophrenia.
[18:30] It is these brain-damaging drugs, not schizophrenia, that has caused the brain damage. Anyone treated with these drugs would have such brain damage. The inefficacy of these medicines.
[18:47] After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions, and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression. Antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft work. And so do sugar pills. A new analysis has found that in the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades, sugar pills have done as well as or better than antidepressants. Companies have had to conduct numerous trials to get two that show a positive result, which is the Food and Drug Administration's minimum for approval. So you need two that show positive results you'd expect in the bell curve distribution of drug trials you would get two positives eventually you just keep running them until you get the two positives and then you say look we have a pill that cures depression, what's more the sugar pills or placebos cause profound changes in the same areas of the brain affected by the medicines according to research published recently one researcher has ruthlessly concluded that a higher percentage of depressed patients get better on placebos today than 20 years ago. So what that means is, even if you're given a placebo, and possibly it's the care and attention given to the problem, to the person, that helps us, but the brain changes, whether you're on these drugs, which harm the brain, or you're on a placebo, which doesn't.
[20:10] The new research may shed light on findings, such as those from trials last month that compared the herbal remedies in John's Wort against Zoloft. St. John's Wort fully cured 24% of the depressed people who received it, and Zoloft cured 25%. But the placebo, fully cured 32%. So why is this happening? Why is this nonsense going on? Well, according to Dr. Margaret Hayden, psychologist and author of Whores of the Court, the Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony, and the Rape of American Justice, is blunt about the real motive that lies behind the DSM voting system. If you can't come up with the diagnosis, you can't send a bill. The amount of money the US spends on psychiatric drugs is more than the gross national product of two-thirds of the world's countries.
[21:03] The efficacy of the supposed treatment. In an eight-year study, the World Health Organization found that severely mentally disturbed patients in three economically disadvantaged countries whose treatment plans do not include a heavy reliance on drugs, India, Nigeria, and Colombia, found that patients did dramatically better than their counterparts in the United States and four other developed countries. A follow-up study reached a similar conclusion. And by the by if you've seen the movie a beautiful mind professor nash is portrayed in the movie as having gotten better as a result of being on medication this is not true dr nash recovered on his own which is true of a lot of people with these kinds of disorders and he'd been drug free for 20 years and he vehemently was outraged and protested the portrayal of meds in the movie but of course didn't really achieve very much in the u.s in the 1970s the late dr lauren moshe's Soteria House experiment was based on the idea that schizophrenia can be overcome without drugs.
[22:03] Soteria clients who didn't receive neuroleptics actually did the best, the best, compared to hospital and drug-treated control subjects. Swiss, Swedish, and Finnish researchers have replicated and validated the experiment and are still using this today.
[22:21] In Italy, Dr. Giorgio Antonucci dismantled some of the most oppressive psychiatric wards by treating severely disturbed patients with compassion and respect and without drugs. Within months, the most violent wards became the calmest. Because the meds produce violence in people. And remember, people diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problems with their neurotransmitter systems. And these drugs perturb or disturb the normal functioning of neurotransmitters. The drugs cause the problems. Why is it that when we treat these supposed ailments or illnesses with these drugs that we get an increase in these ailments? Because the drugs cause problems. Barry Jacobs, a Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given these SSRI antidepressants. 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. You mess up people's serotonin levels. You mess up their receptors in their brain.
[23:34] The effects on teens and kids is particularly brutal. In one trial, 75% of the youth who were treated with antidepressants suffered an adverse reaction of some kind. In one study by the University of Pittsburgh, 23% of children treated with an SSRI developed mania or manic-like symptoms. An additional 19% developed drug-induced hostility. Remember all these school shootings? The trials revealed no benefit for depression and all sorts of real problems were created in kids. Mania, hostility, psychosis, and even potential suicidality. This is why the recent black box labels have been put on these drugs.
[24:15] Psychiatry has, unfortunately, a strong history with racism. So, for instance, in Britain, black men are 10 times more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic than white people and more likely to be prescribed and given higher doses of powerful psychotropic and mind-altering drugs. They're also more likely to receive electroshock treatment, which is 400 volts of electricity burning through somebody's brain, and to be subjected to physical and chemical restraints. What's the biological basis for this? There is none In the US, African American and Hispanic children In predominantly white school districts Are often classified as learning disabled More often than whites This leads to millions of minority children Being hooked onto prescribed mind-altering drugs Some more potent than cocaine To treat this quote mental disorder.
[25:05] On the other side of the time pendulum We have elderly abuse, so these tranquilizers also known as benzodiazepines can be addictive after only 14 days of use in australia the elderly are prescribed these psychiatric drugs drugs in nursing homes for being noisy for wanting to leave the nursing home and for pacing, in canada between 1995 and march 1996 428 000 prescriptions for one particular highly addictive tranquilizer were written, with more than 35% of these for patients 65 and older. This is livestock management.
[25:46] British Coroner's Report reports showed benzodiazepines as more frequently contributing to unnatural death each year than cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and all other illegal drugs.
[26:00] Antipsychotic drugs such as Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel place the elderly at increased risks of strokes and death and have a box warning to emphasize the risk.
[26:12] SSRIs cause suicidal thoughts and behavior. Paxil, for example, is seven times more likely to induce suicide in people taking it than those taking a placebo or sugar pill, according to a Norwegian study. In the U.S., 65-year-olds receive 360% more shock treatments than 64-year-olds. Why? Because at the age of 65, government insurance coverage for shock typically takes effect. It's being driven by finance.
[26:43] Elderly death. The authors of a BMJ report, Antidepressant Use and Risk of Adverse Outcomes in Older People, Population-Based Cohort Study, analyzed data for 60,746 people in the UK who were over 65 and diagnosed with depression between 1996 and 2007. And they followed these people until December 2008. They found that all of these people who were depressed, of all of these people who were depressed. Those who are prescribed SSRI antidepressants are at an increased risk of death and heart attack, stroke, falls, and seizures than those who were prescribed the older, cheaper, tricyclic antidepressants. During these 10 years, patients not taking any antidepressants, they're all depressed, the people not taking antidepressants had a 7% risk of dying from any cause. The risk rose to 8.1% for those taking the older antidepressants and increased to 10.6% for patients prescribed SSRIs.
[27:45] This is a quote from the report. All classes of antidepressant drugs were associated with significantly increased risks of all causes of mortality, attempted suicide, self-harm, falls, fractures, and upper gastrointestinal bleeding compared with when these drugs were not being used. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and the group of other antidepressant drugs were associated with increased risks of stroke, transient ischemic attack, and epilepsy seizures. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors were also associated with increased risks of myocardial infarction and hyponatromia.
[28:27] Soldiers and brain meds. Now, of course, generals have used drugs from the dawn of time to mess with their soldiers' heads and make them more efficient killers. George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge. During World War II, the Nazis fueled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War. And actually, the very word assassin is derived from the word hashish, which was used to train Muslim assassins in the Middle Ages. One in six military members is prescribed psychiatric drugs, such as Zoloft, Lexapro, Paxil, or Prozac, even though the FDA warns that antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in some.
[29:12] Combat veterans and PTSD. According to government data, 10 to 20% of soldiers who see heavy combat develop lasting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and about a fifth of those who are treated are prescribed an antipsychotic drug. The JAMA report by prominent psychiatrists on the faculty of Yale University examined the treatment outcome for veterans suffering from PTSD, whose treatment with SSRI antidepressants failed and who were then prescribed antipsychotics. The finding after six months of treatment of veterans was that veterans who were prescribed Risperdal were doing no better than a similar group of 124 veterans who were given a placebo. About 5% in both groups recovered and 10 to 20% reported at least some improvement based on standardized measures. Interestingly enough, you know, whenever there's a major tragedy, the grief counselors come swooping in, studies have shown that those who receive grief counseling are far worse off mentally after the event than those who received none.
[30:13] Quote, we didn't find any suggestion that the drug treatment was having an overall benefit on their lives, said Dr. John Crystal, the director of this study. Murder, violence, suicide. A lot of people have been under the care of psychiatrists and subject to these kinds of terrible drugs who had pretty wretched outcomes. Ernest Hemingway, France's great writer, Antonina Artaud, jazz singer Billie Holiday, Julie Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Vivian Leigh, Kurt Cobain, the great Michael Hutchins, the comic Phil Hartman, the list goes on. 66 school shootings and incidents have been reported or recorded involving these SSRIs. Let's look at the physical damage. The brain damaging potential of Ritalin and other of the psychostimulants, most of the memphetamines have become increasingly clear. These drugs cause brain atrophy, that is brain shrinkage.
[31:10] Over the past 15 years, psychiatric researchers have maintained that the brains of children with ADHD, as seen in brain scans, were on average 10% smaller than those of normal control groups. Of course, what they have withheld from the public and their readership and professionals that attend their professional meetings is that virtually all of the ADHD subjects in these many studies over the past 15 years had been on long-term stimulant treatment, and that this treatment was the only physical difference between the ADHD subjects and the normal control group. Of course their brains were smaller. It's a known effect of ADHD drugs.
[31:46] A study that will be highlighted, I guess was highlighted in Miami, researchers found that brief low-dose amphetamine use in primates caused possibly permanent cognitive impairment. What about the antipsychotics? Well, these antipsychotics profoundly block dopamine receptors. They block 70 to 90 percent of the dopamine receptors in the brain so the brain adapts what does it do in return it sprouts about 50 percent more dopamine receptors it tries to become extra sensitive to dopamine like if you if you blind yourself you become much better at hearing so basically when you give somebody antipsychotics you're creating within them an imbalance in the dopamine system in the brain so like on the one hand it's like you've got the accelerator down that's the extra dopamine receptors and the drug is the break trying to block this but if you release that break if you abruptly go off the drugs you now do have a dopamine system that's overactive as a result of this medication you have too many dopamine receivers and what happens, people who go abruptly off the drug tend to have severe relapses.
[32:55] So, of course, if you're mucking up the dopamine system, you're increasing the risk of psychosis, which leads to another diagnosis and more medication. And when you look at people medicated on antipsychotics, you start to see a shrinking of the frontal lobes, the crucial area that makes us human, allows for higher functioning. Ritalin and cancer risks. So, researchers fed Ritalin to adult mice over a two-year period at doses close to those prescribed to children. The mice developed statistically significant incidences of liver abnormalities in tumors Including highly aggressive rare cancers Known as hepatoblastomas.
[33:35] The National Toxicology Program concluded that Ritalin is A possible human carcinogen and recommended the need for further research Have you heard about this? Apart from cancer risks, there is also suggestive evidence That Ritalin induces genetic damage in blood cells of Ritalin-treated children.
[33:53] All this for an illness that is not an illness. Concerns on Ritalin's cancer risk are more acute in view of the millions of children treated annually with the drug and the escalating incidence of childhood cancer by some 35% over the last few decades, quite apart from the delayed risks of cancer in adult life. We've been pumping this drug into millions of children.
[34:18] We've got a 35% increase in cancer. Researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the introduction of the atypical antipsychotics to death rate among people with schizophrenia has doubled.
[34:32] So according to the experts, psychiatry is a pseudoscience. So this is some approaches to what actually makes a scientific discipline. So this is some philosophers of science, especially Karl Popper. So if a theory is going to qualify as hard science, it's got to have the following characteristics parsimony as straightforward as the phenomena to be explained allow since occam's razor the most simple and brief explanation empirically testable and falsifiable what's falsifiable about mental illness can't find it anywhere how do you know that you don't have it and people have gone professors and and researchers and reporters have gone into psychiatric wards and then have acted completely normal and have almost never been released, even when the other patients know that they're shamming. Psychiatrists never seem to. Is the theory changeable? What change is made to the theory is new data is discovered. Well, if these drugs are supposed to treat these illnesses and the illness gets worse, is the drug regimen changing? No. Progressive. It encompasses previous successful descriptions and explains and adds more. Provisional. It's a tentative. The theory does not attempt to assert that it is a final description or explanation. How many of these does psychiatry accord with?
[35:53] Psychiatrists Colin Ross and Alvin Pam maintain that biopsychiatry does not qualify as a science on many counts. Why is this happening? Follow the money. What's changed? Government funding. 73% of the approximately $23 billion spent by all mental health organizations in the U.S. in 1988 came from public funds. And the FDA's funding changed in the 1990s. It was originally funded through taxes now, or in the 90s, an act was passed, so that a lot of the FDA's funding came from the drug industry. So when drug companies applied for an FDA approval, they had to pay a fee. And these fees became what is funding a large portion of the FDA's review of drug applications. And, of course, the revolving door between the regulators and the industry leaders, between the pharma companies and the FDA, is well known.
[36:42] Conflicts of interest are legion. It's almost impossible to find a psychiatrist who doesn't have ties with a drug company to approve any of these supposed studies.
[36:53] Involuntary confinement. This is a pretty strong civil rights issue. Because each year, approximately one and one half million people are taken to psychiatric institutions against their will. That's one person every 75 seconds being confined against their will and drugged often. And wouldn't you know it, the chances that that person is going to be released are far slimmer if the person's insurance is paying for the treatment, if they are a cash cow.
[37:21] Let's just take a brief look at the history of the funding so we can understand how we got to this place. Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 created academic community mental health centers through government funding. In 1965, reimbursements by Medicare and Medicaid, as well as disability insurance, for mental health issues pushed a lot of money out into psychiatry. In the 1970s, this is very, very important, psychiatric lobbyists demanded prohibitions against insurance policies if they did not include psychiatric coverage. In other words, it became illegal to provide health insurance if it did not include mandatory government-enforced psychiatric coverage. This was not driven by the market. It was not driven by consumer demand. It is driven by law, by force, by government, fiat and mandate. By the 1980s, a majority of states in the U.S. had passed mandated mental health coverage laws. Of course, people who want mental health coverage always want other people to subsidize it. So they get the government, through the psychiatric lobbyists, they get the government to enforce it on everyone else so that they have to pay much less because the costs are absorbed into the general population of people buying the insurance. Of course, the psychiatrists want it mandated because then lots of people have lots of free coverage, quote free coverage, which they can then spend on psychiatrists.
[38:39] Between 1984 and 1988 as a result of this the number of psychiatric institutions doubled, government forces people to pay there's a massive spigot of money that comes out of course you're going to water this desert of futility the number of psychiatric hospitalizations rocketed 350 in just four years so when insurance began to pay people began to be hospitalized and kept there, this is not a science let's look at some more history from 1955 to 1977 spending on mental illness went in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1.2 billion dollars to 20 billion dollars it's going to draw a lot of people into the field my friends the number of psychiatrists tripled psychiatric social workers went from 20,000 to almost 90,000 a study reported that average payments for those using psychiatric services from insurance companies were three times higher than for those who did not. Businesses reported that mental health claims were consuming up to 40% of their healthcare dollars, and it was rising since the beginning of the healthcare crisis. Foster Higgins, an insurance benefits consulting firm, reported that mental health costs of the average company again doubled between 1987 and 1991 in just four years. You open up this fire hose and everybody wants to drink from it.
[40:01] Now, the reality is that mental health coverage was always available for those who wanted to pay the additional premium. It's just that very few people felt that it was worth the cost. But once it was mandated, once it was, quote, free, once it was subsidized by everyone and didn't matter whether you took it or not as far as your payments went, people began to use it. And psychiatry, as a result, of course, began to find it much more profitable to spend 15 minutes with people and prescribe the meds rather than an hour and actually explore their psyches. Let's look at the backing. Well, the psychiatry movement's major source of funding is the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical industry funds drug research, psychiatric journals, and the American Psychiatrics Association itself, which in turn funds advertising to doctors and the public, and even funds lay groups such as the NAMI to the tune of at least $11 million, and children and adults with attention deficit disorder, at least a million dollars. So you understand the money flow here.
[40:55] The government forces people to pay for mental health, And then it's much more profitable to invent an illness or a disease which can be treated by a pill rather than actually explore people's thinking and help them come to more rational conclusions about their lives and understand where their lives need to change, how their relationships need to be solved, fixed, or abandoned.
[41:16] And so the pharma companies pour all this money on the psychiatrist to prescribe meds, and the psychiatrist get all of this money to do that. They see fewer patients. They prescribe more. it's become, as again, one of the psychiatrists described, a complete racket. Monstrous. Let's look at the public funding of all of this. Medicaid is the largest source of funding, public and private, for the treatment of the mentally ill. Government money. Where you have government money, you have corruption and inefficiency. Medicare, of course, is the federally funded healthcare, which begins at age 65. Coverage includes mental healthcare. Federal government also allocates funds for the mental healthcare needs of military veterans.
[41:57] The Social Security Administration has two programs to help people pay for mental health treatment. The first is Supplemental Security Income, while the second is Social Security Disability Insurance. So to be eligible for these, your mental condition needs to be such that you're unable to make a considerable amount of money by working. And we can see how this happens, partly through fraud, partly through faking it, of course, because there's no objective test, so it's much easier to fake, and partly because these poor people get escalating amounts of meds because they're supposed to have these, quote, illnesses, which then begins to wreck their minds and renders them absolutely and tragically disabled, often permanently. In 2001, 52% of selected mental health and substance abuse expenditures were government-funded. This is a much lower estimate than it is in reality because this does not include Medicare for those qualifying for Social Security or disability insurance or the federal grants to states for mental health spending. So in 1993, onwards, Medicaid legislation passed to build reimbursement for essential services for people with serious mental, quote, illnesses. In 1996, Clinton announced parity of health insurance coverage for mental disorders under federal employee health insurance plans. So you couldn't discriminate between mental disorders and, say, cancer or heart disease and so on.
[43:15] Now, just to end up here, let's briefly have a look at how Prozac was approved. Now, this is truly appalling. So the studies to approve prozac were performed by the manufacturer's own hand-picked doctors who chose to ignore evidence of prozac's stimulant properties right the aggression and suicidality and psychoses and patients who became agitated when being given this stimulant were administered sedatives sedatives such as clonopin ativan zanex and valium right so the drugs that were being tested weren't just prozac it was prozac plus anyone who showed evidence of stimulation being coupled with these sedatives researchers lied about the number of people tested eli lily the manufacturer claims that thousands of people received prozac in controlled clinical trials during its testing phase in actuality the numbers were far lower since those who failed to complete the studies due to negative side effects were never accounted for so you start with thousands and up to half of these people drop out because of serious side effects, and you don't have to count those in your final numbers.
[44:22] In the end, only 286 people were used as a basis for Prozac's approval, and these were people who most likely happened not to experience these horrendous side effects.
[44:35] And tests purposefully excluded all the kinds of patients who would later receive Prozac. So they excluded those who were suicidal or psychotic and afflicted with other emotional or mental disorders, for which this stuff is regularly prescribed.
[44:50] So during the time that prozac was approved in the late 80s about 16 other psychiatric drugs passed inspection and nine of these have later since had major label changes introduction of significant black box or other kinds of warnings from the fda this was not a safe approval process, prozac causes biochemical imbalances so serotonin is in your transmitter or chemical messenger that normally connects to receptor sites and fires nerves. Prozac prevents serotonin from being removed from the active place where it's working in the brain. It keeps the sparks alive longer and as a result a lot of excess firing takes place. And the brain doesn't like all of this overstimulation and eliminates 30-40% or more of these receptors. This is why these drugs are so hard to get off and might relapse. Critical, worse relapse is so common. So, let's conclude. Look, let's say tomorrow conclusive evidence for biological sources of mental illnesses is discovered. It does not justify the past 50 years at all.
[46:00] It does not justify the past 50 years at all. If I'm running a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme, and then I happen to win the lottery and pay off a bunch of people, that doesn't mean that I wasn't running a scam for that long.
[46:13] Suffering and anguish are very very real and i don't want to minimize that or say oh these people just need to feel better or stiff upper lip or take a cold shower i mean this is very serious stuff i mean if anyone's interested i mean mental illness has afflicted my family just terribly with electroconvulsive therapies shock treatments involuntary institutionalization i mean it's just been absolutely brutal on my family the anguish is extremely real it's very real does not qualify according to these experts, as an illness. And if I injure my back, then I have a real injury. I have a real injury which causes me real pain. That is not an illness. If I spend my days hunched over like a question mark and develop back problems, that is not an illness. That is an injury, a repetitive strain injury. I'll make the case as to what I think is going on, if you don't mind an amateur's opinion, in another video. But I don't want for people to think that I don't believe that this suffering is real. I believe that it is.
[47:10] There are effective non-drug solutions available. I'm a big fan of cognitive behavioral therapy. I myself was in therapy for many years found it incredibly effective and powerful. So there are non-drug solutions that are available which last in a way that these drugs don't.
[47:25] So thank you for your patience for this rather lengthy presentation. You can have a look at the sources for this data at fdrurl.com forward slash mental illness. And thank you so, so much for taking the time. If you can share this with other people, I think this is an incredibly important issue, particularly for the children in society who deserve the chance to grow up without being addicted to these terrible brain shrinking, stimulants and who have a chance, who should have a chance for a more normal and healthy adult life. Thank you so much for taking the time.
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