Drugs' double-edged sword (From L.A. Times)

By Melissa Healy - Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2008

A young man reportedly taking the antidepressant Prozac has a history of significant psychiatric troubles, including self-cutting, obsessive thoughts and anxiety. But among the 27-year-old's current teachers and acquaintances, he has a reputation as a caring, dependable friend and a highly motivated student.

Surely, say mental health professionals, this recovery was brought about by Prozac.

The same young man, saying the drug makes him feel "like a zombie," abruptly discontinues his antidepressant and begins to behave erratically. About three weeks later, he steps from behind a curtain in a classroom at his alma mater and begins shooting, killing five students before turning the gun on himself.

Just as surely, say critics of antidepressants' widespread use, this unraveling was brought about by Prozac.

Steven Kazmierczak's bolt-from-the-blue shooting spree on Feb. 14 reignited a long-running debate over the benefits and risks of antidepressants -- taking them and discontinuing them.

"It's sad to watch this," says Ann Blake Tracy, executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness and co-founder of a website, SSRI stories.com, that catalogs violent crimes like Kazmierczak's and links them to psychiatric drug use. "You find suicide, murder, rape, arson" -- all caused by drugs such as Prozac, she says. "How did they convince us that this is therapeutic?"

Most in the psychiatric profession would counter that antidepressants overwhelmingly save lives, and salvage those hobbled by sadness and anxiety. They doubt that coming off these drugs -- especially Prozac, which Kazmierczak was reported to have taken -- led the Illinois gunman to kill.

And they fret that depressed patients who believe the charges of critics like Tracy will turn their backs on medicine that can work wonders if taken -- and stopped -- correctly.

"When a story like this is brewing, people think, 'If this medication can possibly be related to a bad outcome, I'd better get off it now,' " says UCLA psychiatrist Andrew Leuchter. "We're talking about millions and millions of people who've been treated successfully with these drugs and stopped treatment without any kind of dramatic changes of behavior."

At the center of the latest tempest over psychotropic drugs is a long-recognized phenomenon called Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome. First identified in psychiatric journals in the late 1990s, the condition is an assortment of symptoms that can plague patients for several weeks and, in a few cases on medical record, months after coming off a wide range of antidepressants. They include dizziness, headache, fatigue, changes in sleep patterns and appetite, vivid or disturbing dreams, agitation and anxiety. Some patients experience tingling or "electric zap" sensations passing through their extremities or head and, in rare cases, spasmodic jerking in the extremities, especially while sleeping.

Though the symptoms of the syndrome can be distressing for patients, many psychiatrists insist that they are rarely dangerous and can be managed by weaning a patient off antidepressant medication very slowly. As patients taper off their meds, however, they and their doctors must assess whether symptoms such as anxiety and agitation, which may affect a patient's behavior and reactions, are a sign of the syndrome or a recurrence of the illness that led to the medication in the first place.

It's not always an easy call, says Dr. Richard Shelton of Vanderbilt University, a leading researcher on antidepressants and their effects.

Lightning rod for debate

Twenty years after Prozac appeared on the U.S. landscape, roughly 10% of American women and 4% of American men take an antidepressant regularly. The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and their close cousins have revolutionized attitudes toward mental illness and its medication in this country. But they remain a lightning rod for controversy.

The role that antidepressants played in Kazmierczak's violent end probably will never be clear. Did Prozac, which Kazmierczak's girlfriend, Jessica Baty, said he had been on but had recently discontinued, help keep the 27-year-old's mental illness in check and, when halted, allow it to roar back? Or did it distort his personality, contort his thoughts and, when abandoned, cause a chemical storm in Kazmierczak's brain that spawned a fury of aggression?

The weight of clinical observations and psychiatric research favors the view that antidepressants helped Kazmierczak until the time he abandoned them. But skeptics charge that antidepressants may have caused or contributed to Kazmierczak's spasm of violence. And mental health experts acknowledge they cannot rule out that possibility.

"You're going to get some unpredictable reactions if you have millions of people taking them and going off. The potential for violent behavior, suicide and particularly impulsive suicide exists," says Shelton, a professor of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. "And the sicker the person is coming in the front door, the more likely they are to have a bad crash when they go off. We do see these extreme reactions."

In a category of drugs so widely used, how could potentially dangerous side effects remain a matter of uncertainty? For several reasons, experts say.

For starters, individuals' responses to antidepressants, though mostly predictable, can vary widely. Psychiatric diagnosis and medication decisions are imprecise and can be disastrously wrong; in cases where a patient with bipolar disorder is misdiagnosed and put on antidepressants, for example, the medicine has been found in some cases to bring on an episode of mania.

And, as the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged in 2007 when it warned of a heightened risk of suicide and suicidal thoughts among young patients starting on many of these drugs, 20 years after their arrival on the scene a full picture of antidepressants' side effects may still be emerging.

Research on animals points strongly to the possibility of heightened violence with the abrupt withdrawal of most antidepressants. Studies using cats and rodents have long shown that sudden declines in the neurotransmitter serotonin (the chemical that most antidepressants, in some fashion, make more available in the brain) will suppress an animal's natural caution and intensify its aggressive reactions toward other animals.

Though the human brain may have more powerful braking mechanisms than a cat's, the role of serotonin in inhibiting impulsive aggression is well established, says neuroscientist Allan Siegel of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, author of "The Neurobiology of Aggression and Rage."

It is expected to be several weeks before Kazmierczak's medical records and postmortem results are fully evaluated and made public. If they suggest that Kazmierczak's murderous act was linked to his abrupt discontinuance of an antidepressant, those findings may dismay the many patients who were not warned from the start of the risks they might face when going off such medicine.

Such findings could also be a sobering reminder to patients that these are not drugs to be dropped on a whim. Currently, an estimated half of patients who start on antidepressant therapy go off their medication in less than a year.

For medical professionals, the case of Steven Kazmierczak may hold other lessons: It could put physicians on alert for symptoms of Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome that lie at the extreme, including violence and suicide. It could underscore that when prescribing antidepressants, physicians need to alert patients that coming off these medications can be a bumpy road.

It may also remind physicians that they should take the same care to monitor a patient's state in the first several weeks off the medication as they do when a patient is just getting started.

According to a 2006 review article published in the journal Primary Psychiatry, the "untoward post-treatment effects" of the syndrome are believed to affect a majority of those who have taken antidepressants in the same class as Prozac for more than six weeks and then stopped. The unnerving symptoms can be particularly acute in cases where, as Kazmierczak is believed to have done, patients abruptly stop taking their medication.

The antidepressants venlafaxine (also marketed as Effexor) and paroxetine (also marketed as Paxil) are most often associated with pronounced discontinuation reactions, which, in these cases, are usually felt quickly -- within two to three days after a patient stops taking these drugs.

Such negative post-treatment effects are considered rare among patients taking Prozac, which Kazmierczak's girlfriend said he had been taking until about three weeks before the shooting. When the effects do happen, experts said they tend to be felt several weeks after fluoxetine, Prozac's chemical name, has been discontinued, because fluoxetine lingers in the body longer than venlafaxine or paroxetine do.

While acknowledging that there is little research to show which patients are most affected by discontinuation effects, Vanderbilt psychiatrist Shelton says he has observed that those who suffer from depression coupled with obsessive-compulsive disorder "seem to be prone to pretty significant reactions."

Shelton cautions that in cases where a patient's reaction to going off an antidepressant seems extreme, a physician should taper the dose "excruciatingly slowly." In Shelton's experience, he says, a gentle reduction of medicine can not only minimize discontinuation symptoms, but may make recurrence of depressive symptoms less likely.

"It's not a horse race. No one says you have to be off medications in three weeks or even three months," Shelton says.

In the war of words over antidepressants, this may be a point of rare consensus between those who believe in the power of antidepressants and those intent on raising alarms.

"As firm as I am on the dangers of these drugs, I'm afraid of withdrawal," says Tracy of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness. "Because if people quit, and don't know how to come off the right way, we're really going to be in trouble."

melissa.healy@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-antidepressants25feb25,1,7942842.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

IS PSYCHIATRY SCIENTIFIC AND DANGEROUS?
By Dr. James Howenstine, MD.
May 1, 2007

When you look below the surface at the specialty of psychiatry what you uncover is so ludicrous it is difficult to believe that it is really true. Prominent psychiatrists from all over the world gather annually for a meeting at which new diseases are invented. There are no objective findings that establish the diagnosis of these diseases. These new diseases are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases. Potential new diseases are discussed at these meetings and new diseases are voted in or out by a show of hands . [1] Among the new diseases are social anxiety disorder (everyone who is uncomfortable in a social setting has this disease) and mathematics disease (anyone who has struggled over a math problem has this disease). Gender identity disorder, passive-aggressive disorder, disorder of written expression and sexual disorder are other examples of invented diseases that will follow the individuals tagged with these ridiculous diagnoses the remainder of their lives. Naturally all these phony diseases have a psychoactive drug which supposedly ameliorates this disease.
This is laughable but it has serious consequences. When a child is diagnosed with depression the child is often placed on a potent SSRI drug. The manufacturer of one of the leading SSRI drug knew for many years that the drug caused loss of the ability to control violent behavior thus increasing violence toward self (suicide) and others (mass murders). This information was covered up because it would have hurt sales of the drug. Nearly every teen involved in the Columbine and Red Lake mass murders was taking an SSRI drug. There is a fundamental flaw in a nation more concerned about sales of drugs than the welfare of children.
An annoyed teacher is allowed to make a diagnosis of Hyperactive Disease. Hyperactive children are routinely given the very addictive drug Ritalin. More than 1.5000,000 children are taking Ritalin which is known to cause zombie like behavior, suppressed appetite, weight loss, serious addiction problems, retarded growth, paranoid symptoms, auditory and visual hallucinations and insomnia. Public schools get financial rewards from the government for increasing the number of students taking Ritalin and the number of children completing vaccine programs. Following a nutritious diet restricted in sugar content and colorants but replete with vitamins and minerals goes a long way toward eliminating most cases of hyperactivity.
What is Teen Screen?

Big Pharma has formulated a program that will eventually enable all citizens to be placed on psychoactive drugs. (Does this sound like Orwell's 1984?) Just as the indications for dangerous statin drugs get liberalized annually so that more persons qualify to be placed on statin drugs there are other programs steadily being used to increase the number of children and adults taking unsafe psychoactive drugs for bogus psychiatric diagnosis. One such program is Teen Screen. [2] Without parental knowledge children are given questionnaires to fill out. The goal of Teen Screen is to do a "suicide survey" on every teen in the USA. This has to be a marketing tool by the pharmaceutical industry to increase the number of persons using their products. The actual number of teen suicides is quite low (less than 50 yearly out of 4,000,000 students in the state of Florida), about equal to the number of persons struck by lightning. These children will often be placed on SSRI type drugs which actually do increase the risk of suicide. Among questions asked to 9 year olds and older are these:
Have you ever felt very nervous when you have to do things in front of people?
Have you ever worried before you were going to play a sport or game or do some other activity?
In the last 3 months have you thought of killing yourself?
Are you still thinking about killing yourself?
Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

Because there are no valid objective tests to establish a psychiatric diagnosis the evaluating psychiatrist has to decide which disorder label does an individual patient best fit into. Psychiatrists have been forced to admit that drug therapies do not cure any of their disorders. Therefore when one drug fails to help a bogus disease the dose must be increased and then a second dangerous drug may need to be added. This dangerous process is all often in the pursuit of a bogus disease.
Infectious Diseases Frequently Cause Psychiatric Symptoms
This lack of any scientific method in diagnosing and treating patients often makes psychiatrists a danger to patients visiting them. Very few psychiatrists are aware that infectious diseases often cause psychiatric symptoms. Infections that are well known to cause psychiatric symptoms include pneumonia, urinary tract infection, sepsis, malaria, Legionaires Disease, syphilis, Chlamydia, typhoid fever, diphtheria, HIV, rheumatic fever and herpes.
Lyme Disease caused by the Borrelia burgdorfi spirochete can mimic every disease in the Diagnostic Manual of Psychiatric Diseases. The ordinary psychiatrist is very unlikely to consider the possibility of bacterial, parasitic, fungi, yeast, mycoplasma infection when a patient has weakness, fatigue and depression. Yet these symptoms may appear when the infectious organisms release neurotoxins that interfere with hypothalamic function resulting in hypothyroidism and adrenal insufficiency. Mothers who have infection with Herpes Simplex Type 2 virus are 6 times more likely to have a child who later becomes schizophrenic, than mothers without Herpes 2 infections. Acute infection with Toxoplasma Gondi can produce personality changes and psychosis including delusions and auditory hallucinations.
Johns Hopkins virologist Robert Yolken and Psychiatry Professor Dr. E. Fuller Torrey believe that toxoplasmosis is one of several infectious agents that cause most cases of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Mental patients were found to have a 53.8% incidence of parasitic infections in a 2 year study conducted in the University of Ancona, Italy involving 238 inpatient residents in 4 Italian psychiatric institutions.
In addition to the infections mimicking schizophrenia or maternal infections during pregnancy that predispose children to become schizophrenic there are many other patients with symptoms compatible with schizophrenia. What are the factors producing these symptoms?
Schizophrenia
The generally accepted conventional medical concept about schizophrenia is that the disease is caused by excessive levels of dopamine and that decreasing the levels of dopamine improves patients with schizophrenia. The evidence for high levels of dopamine is poor [3] and Parkinson's Disease like symptoms appear when patients are treated for dopamine excess. Since Parkinson's Disease is known to stem from a dopamine deficiency, it is probable that drugs provoking these symptoms are creating a lack of dopamine, not correcting an excess of dopamine.
Genetics must play a role in schizophrenia because 50% of patients have a family member with the illness. There are four genetic disorders seen with greater than normal frequency in schizophrenic patients. All four of these genetic defects cause a higher than normal exposure to adrenochrome (an adrenaline metabolite) or an abnormal sensitivity to the adverse effects of adrenochrome. One of the genetic advantages of schizophrenia is an unusual resistance to developing cancer particularly lung cancer.
There has been a striking rise in the frequency of schizophrenia since the industrial revolution. The prevalence of insanity has risen sevenfold between mid 18th century and mid 20th century. Genetic disease cannot occur in epidemics. Therefore, industrial societies must have factors that increase the body's production of adrenochrome or provoke the body to create adrenochrome. Three such factors are stress, excess sugar consumption and increased exposure to allergic substances.
Adrenochrome has hallucinogenic properties and is a potent neurotoxin that damages the thyroid gland by antagonizing the hormone triiodothyronine. Chronic schizophrenics have permanent thyroid gland damage. Adrenochrome creates many free radicals, which produce oxidative stress. This eventually wears out the antioxidant defense system producing deficiencies of glutathione peroxidase, superoxide desmutase, and catalase.
Assuming that adrenochrome produces schizophrenia, eight valuable therapies are suggested. Allergic reactions to the environment cause over-oxidation of adrenaline. Therefore, measures to decrease allergic reactions from environmental stressors will be beneficial.
Genetic and environmental screening can improve selection of therapies that are likely to be helpful. Allergy testing to correct allergies decreases adrenochrome production. A low sugar diet blocks the insulin spikes caused by excess sugar. Absence of these spikes prevents the subsequent adrenaline release caused by low blood sugar values. Schizophrenics oxidize the released adrenaline from hypoglycemia and have worse symptoms.
Medical therapies using medication that quickly reduce the damaging impact of adrenochrome are valuable. High dosage of niacin or niacinamide, vitamin B1, riboflavin B2, and ubiquinone (CoQ 10) all lower excessive adrenochrome levels with niacin seeming to be the most effective.
The adrenochrome antagonist, triidothyronine, is quite effective in treating schizophrenia particularly when used in the first six months of illness. All 80 schizophrenics with less than six months of symptoms who were given 120 to 1200 mg of desiccated thyroid for 100 days recovered [4] unless they stopped the thyroid therapy. Schizophrenics are very resistant to thyroid medication and must be treated with high dosages.
Eating foods that contain tryptophane, which is converted into serotonin, is worthwhile because serotonin antagonizes adrenochrome. Such foods include beans, cod, pork, soybeans, and cheese. Be certain these foods do not cause allergy.
All possible efforts to repair the antioxidant defense system are worthy. Glutathione can be given intravenously and n-acetyl cysteine raises glutathione levels.
Schizophrenics with MTHFR C677TT genetic dysfunction have excessive levels of homocysteine and lack of methionine. These defects can be repaired with folic acid, vitamin B12, pyridoxine, zinc, and trimethylglycine. Homocysteine accelerates brain aging and plays an important role in causing arteriosclerosis.
Brain atrophy may develop in chronic schizophrenia. These patients have low levels of glutathione peroxidase. Supplementation with the four substances needed by the body to create glutathione peroxidase (selenium, cysteine, glutamine, and tryptophane along with intravenous glutathione) can be of great value. The fish oil (eicosapentaenoic acid) also is able to reverse brain atrophy and should be given.
The eighth vital step to help schizophrenics is restoration of their self worth by helping them gain employment, respect and compassion.
All this material about schizophrenia is from University of British Columbia History Professor Harold Foster's valuable book, What Really Causes Schizophrenia? A free copy of this book can be downloaded from www.hdfoster.com.
Causes And Therapy Of Depression.

Ten percent of persons visiting physicians in the USA suffer from depression. Many persons with depression have either undiagnosed hypothyroidism, are lacking omega 3 fatty acids in their diet, or are deficient in vitamin D. The RDA for vitamin D, at 400 IU daily, is set far below needed levels. Everyone probably needs more than 800 IU daily, and persons with depression or living far from the equator may benefit from 1200 IU or more daily. Correction of any of these three common conditions may eliminate the depression.
Countries with the highest intake of fish have the lowest incidence of depression. Less than 1% of Japanese, who average 140 pounds of fish annually, have depression whereas 6% of persons in New Zealand are depressed where they eat only forty pounds of fish annually. Fish contain abundant omega 3 fatty acids. Countries with higher average fish consumption also have lower rates of homicide, bipolar disorder, depression, and suicide.
What Is Avea?
Turmeric (curcumin) has long been used in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine as an anti-inflammatory, to treat digestive disorders and liver problems and for the treatment of skin diseases and wound healing. Curcumin stimulates the production of bile and facilitates emptying of the gall bladder. In animals curcumin protects the liver, has anti-tumor action, reduces inflammation and fights some infections.
Avea is an extract from the root of Curcuma longa, commonly know as turmeric. Nutramedix has a proprietary formulation of curcumin that is more effective than conventional curcumin because of special extraction and enhancement techniques.
The German Commission E reports that curcumin has no known contraindications, no known side effects and no known interactions with other drugs. In May 2005, toxicology studies were completed on Avea at the University of Guayaquil, Ecuador. No toxic effects were seen even when the animals were given doses 160,000 times the equivalent human dose.
Patients suffering from depression often report relief from depression within a few hours to a few days after starting Avea. A 38 year old woman had been seriously depressed for more than ten years despite therapy with several different pharmaceutical drugs. When started on her first dose of Avea she felt less depressed after thirty minutes. The depression was gone in 24 hours but the therapy was continued.
The dosage of Avea is ten to twelve drops three or four times daily. Patients who respond rapidly to Avea should remain on this therapy for one to two months to allow the body to reset neurochemical balances in the brain. Patients who have been taking SSRI drugs should slowly taper off SSRI therapy over many weeks if they wish to terminate SSRI therapy.
We think that persons trying Avea for depression will be pleased with this safe rapidly acting therapy. Avea can be obtained from naturalhealthteam.com phone 1-800-416-2806 and from www.nutramedix.com phone 1-561-745-2917. ( or http://www.herbalremedies.com/turmeric.html )
What Is The Future For Psychiatry?
My hope is that many persons will be able to avoid the use of the dangerous, poorly researched drugs provided by the pharmaceutical industry for use in psychiatric conditions. Safe effective natural therapies .are available to treat schizophrenia and depression. Natural therapies will never become widely used because of the pharmaceutical industry's control over the media and their full support by U.S. government agencies(FDA, NIH,).
Psychiatry is a complete fraud and the problems caused by the drugs used(gastrointestinal bleeding, tardive dyskinesia, etc.) by these practitioners have, as usual, been covered up or ignored. Making money for drug companies has taken precedence over careful scientific research searching for truth in the interests of piling up bigger profits for an enormously wealthy industry.
At this time psychiatry is a very valuable asset for the pharmaceutical industry. Psychiatrists are busy writing prescriptions for drugs all day long. The prospects for the future are even brighter, as more and more Americans of all age brackets are recruited by programs aimed at having every living man, woman and child taking a psychoactive drug daily.
Why do the insurance companies pay for worthless pharmaceutical prescriptions while refusing to pay for curative natural therapies? Why should Big Pharma bother to waste money doing careful scientific research when flawed dangerous drugs are not exposed by a watch dog media and there is no government agency the least bit concerned about the health of the American people. Remember 90% of us are useless eaters that are targeted for removal by the elitists running the world.
The list of unexposed health scams is mind boggling (GMO foods, mercury amalgams, dangerous root canals millions done annually, chemotherapy drugs and radiation to treat malignancies, widespread use of transfats in cooking, worthless soil thanks to government mandated nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus fertilizer which omits sulfur a key nutrient, chlorine and fluoride in drinking water, mandated dangerous vaccines for children, statin drugs to lower cholesterol, bypass surgery, aspartame, suppression of heparin burn therapy, ignoring Dr. Abram Hoffer's safe effective therapies for schizophrenia, etc.). These problems are typical of those occurring when a totalitarian government has taken complete control over a country. Truth has become irrelevant.
Last fall I took a vacation to visit intelligent relatives and friends. In my luggage were many copies of an article carefully documenting the irrefutable scientific facts proving that 9/11 was an inside job. Not a single one of these relatives and friends believed this article. The U.S. media has done its usual superb job of selling 9/11. Joseph Goebbels has to be green with envy if he is receiving this type of information. The world is currently locked in a titanic struggle between good and evil. The Bible warns us that the end times would be marked by deception and apostasy. We must all do as good a job as possible trying to avoid fraudulent operations. Staying out of the dangerous drug pushing psychiatrist's office is a good place to start.
Dr. James Howenstine is in need of proof reading assistance for the second edition of his book A Physician's Guide To Natural Health Products That Work Vol. 2 707 pg. If you are qualified in this area please contact him at dr.jimhow@gmail.com or by writing Dr. James Howenstine, C/O Remarsa USA SB 37, P.O. Box 25292, Miami. Fl. 33102-5292
Footnotes:
1, Whitaker, Julian Fraudulent Medicine Health &Healing September 2006 Vol 16, No.9 pg 3-6
2, Kramer , Ken Crazy Makers Big Pharma Involved In Stealth Agenda With School Districts To Screen Teenagers For Mental Illnesses Without Parental Approval Crusader Dec/Jan 2005/2006 pg 5-6
3, Issa, F., et al A multidimensional approach to analysis of cerebro spinal fluid biogenic amines in schizophrenia: 1. Comparisons with healthy control subjects and neuroleptic-treated/untreated pairs analysis. Psychiatry Research, 52(3), 237-249 4, Danziger, cited by Hoffer, A. (2001). Thyroid and schizophrenia. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, 16(4), 205-212
2007 Dr. James Howenstine - All Rights Reserved