Psychiatric drugs for insomnia, depression and anxiety are the third major killer in the West after heart disease and cancer, a major new review has concluded.
More than 80 million prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are written in the UK alone every year. Not only do they have only short-term benefits, at best, they make addicts of many patients, and cause dangerous side-effects and even kill, says Prof Peter Gotzsche at the University of Copenhagen and a researcher with the Cochrane Collaboration.The antipsychotics, often given as a 'chemical cosh' to keep disruptive patients quiet, increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke, while psychiatric drugs increase the risk of a patient falling, and antidepressants can cause potentially deadly irregular heartbeat.
And the suicide rate alone for people on antidepressants is 15 times higher than official figures suggest.
Reviewing all the published, and unpublished, data, Prof Gotzsche estimates that psychiatric drugs are the third major killer in the West, after heart disease and cancer.
What Doctors Don't Tell You Sept. 2015Well this article is based from the UK. What about the United States? The use of psychotropic drugs by adult Americans increased 22 percent from 2001 to 2010, with one in five adults now taking at least one psychotropic medication, according to industry data. In 2010, Americans spent more than $16 billion on antipsychotics, $11 billion on antidepressants and $7 billion for drugs to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The rapid growth of all three classes of drugs has alarmed some mental health professionals, who are concerned about the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs by elderly nursing home residents and the prescription of stimulants to children who may have been misdiagnosed with ADHD. Are we treating nutritional deficiencies as chemical deficiencies? Yes
Dr. J
