The pharma propaganda machine that I used to have some tolerance for since they seemed to have some tolerance for alternative opinions no longer has my tolerance.
This article entitled Mortality Among Bipolar is also ignoring reality:
Bipolar disorders appear to increase the risk of early death from a medical illness, according to a new literature review study.
Researchers comprehensively reviewed 17 studies involving more than 331,000 patients. Evidence suggested that people with bipolar disorder have a higher mortality from natural causes compared to people in the general population of similar age and gender but without mental illness.
The various studies indicated that the risk was from 35 percent to 200 percent higher. The risk is the same for men and women. The most common conditions leading to premature death were heart disease, respiratory diseases, stroke, and endocrine problems such as diabetes.
The article continues not ONCE mentioning that the drugs we take make all these conditions worse and in many cases causes these conditions where they never would have occurred in the first place. This omission from a site that claims to be informative is CRIMINAL.
And there is not place to leave comment on their egregious omissions.
For a little documentation to back up what I’m saying I mention a study just a few days ago in this post that states clearly that these drugs make us sick and docs don’t do a damn thing about it. And now PsychCentral is making it harder for people to even realize they should be asking for monitoring.
UPDATE:
Philip now has the original source on his site in PDF format.
It’s in the first sentence of his article. I can’t get the URL of the PDF with my Macintosh. There must be a way to do it but I haven’t learned how. Macs deal with PDF’s in a totally different way.
UPDATE John Grohol and discussed the issue. The result is that he ended up editing the piece to mention that the drugs themselves can cause harm. (4/24/09) Thanks, John.
See:
Doug Bremner wrote:
“The scientist might ask, did they control for prescription drug use?..”
Is that in response to mine? I think I may have told you, previously, but I have only one question that I can be bothered to ask, these days. I’ve already asked the UK industry body, the ABPI; the UK regulator, the MHRA; GSK and the UK Department of Health, but as yet I haven’t had a serious response of any kind. The question is “given the need for a recognizable benefit, in order to carry out a risk:benefit analysis at the licensing stage of a drug’s life, what is the benefit of Seroxat?”, although I might ask it of any other psychotropic drug on the market, I think.
I know there’s something very wrong, here, because nobody is the least interested in making a failing/ed system work. It’s in somebody’s interest to have it continue to fail, then… I don’t need to know who, and I don’t need to know why. I don’t even need to speculate. That nobody appears to give a fuck is sufficient, for my purposes.
Matt
I’m pretty sure insurance companies already DO deny life insurance to people with Bipolar disorder.
Insurance companies deny life insurance to people simply because of the bipolar diagnosis. This is NOT right.
Philip now has the original paper on his site in PDF format …it’s in the first sentence of his article
yeah, the question of whether they controlled for psych meds is important…it should not be omitted had they done that…which makes me think they did not…
here is another report:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/137577.php
I can’t find the original study.
Too many good replies, no need to leave mine. Kilroy was here.
Hugs,
Moss
The scientist might ask, did they control for prescription drug use? Because since psychotropic prescription drug use can increase mortality (e.g. diabetes, excessive weight gain, etc) this could be what is know in the field as a ‘confounder’.
I didn’t realize that’s what Ashcroft meant! I also like Emily Haines’ lyrics to Doctor Blind:
The lack of light
Hollow sea
Poison beaches
Limousines
Toothless dentists
Cops that kill
My baby’s got the lonesome lows
Don’t quite go away overnight
Doctor Blind, just prescribe the blue ones
If the dizzying highs
Don’t subside overnight
Doctor Blind, just prescribe the red ones
Da dada da daa da da da daa daa da dada
Dada da dada dada dada daa daa
Hard to hold
Cold to touch
Fall to pieces
Treat the rush in hindsight
With prime time talk
All your pain
Will end here
Let the doctor
Soothe your brain, dear
My baby’s got the lonesome lows
Don’t quite go away overnight
Doctor Blind, just prescribe the blue ones
If the dizzying highs
Don’t subside overnight
Doctor Blind, just prescribe the red ones
Daa dadada da da da da daa
Da da dada da daa dada dada
Da da da da daa
Ah aah ah aah
JDB wrote:
“…cozen, deceive, delude, lead on – be false to; be dishonest with.”
I think Hitler was being rather unfair to the masses… For a start, we’re taught to obey authority from birth, or else face the consequences (I would point out, here, that the only authority I recognize is a person who knows more than I do on a given subject, and is prepared to share that information, with me!).
Second, while I think he’s (Hitler), absolutely right that the repetition of bullshit eventually makes it true, the process of going against the view of both the majority and the authority position is enormously stressful, and most people can’t withstand that sort of barrage, particularly when it comes with the usual attendant threats, in the event of disobedience. Eventually, I would argue, like Pavlov’s dog(s), we cease to follow our own judgment, even when what we are being told to do/believe is abhorrent, or at least flagrantly untrue, given the most modest of examinations.
I don’t know if the organizations that Gianna is discussing are the original bullshitters, or just drones repeating what they’re told, but they make me very uneasy, due to their unwillingness to open themselves to scrutiny… Is this because they know they’re talking shite, or because they don’t know what they’re talking about, and really can’t respond to the questions put to them?
Who knows? But bullshit it unquestionably is, because in the words of The Verve “The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse”. And Richard Ashcroft was singing about antidepressants, not Class A narcotics! More to the point, when one realizes what *does* work, one really starts to wonder what’s going on at the head of the snake, and who or what that head is.
Matt
Exactly who are PsychCentral.Com ???
From the horse’s mouth: “Psych Central is privately and wholly owned and operated by Dr. John Grohol.”
So there’s the name of the outfit’s front man – Dr Grohol. But exactly who is bank-rolling him?
From elsewhere on the site, we find the terse statement: “Psych Central accepts pharmaceutical funding…”
And that is about as much information as Grohol is prepared to share on the matter. But by his own admission, he’s a paid puppet of the drug industry. Or to put it bluntly, he’s a Whore of Big Pharma.
Since Grohol has been running this business since 1998 (according to his RIPE database entry), surely it’s time he finally came clean, and revealed the true extent of his business relationship with the drug industry, and its agents.
Grohol should open his financial accounts to public scrutiny.
We have a right to see exactly what he and his “partners” are making out of this cash cow, so we can make an informed judgment on his credibility, and the credibility of PsychCentral as a source of patient information.
This is a simple matter of ethics.
However, it’s not all about money, although obviously that must be a major motivator for Grohol.. It’s about influence, too.
Look carefully at the following wording, published elsewhere on the Grohol site:
“We have a conflicts of interest policy for our writers and editors that requires them to reveal to us potential conflicts of interest…”
Note what that statement doesn’t say… it DOES NOT say that PsychCentral will reveal those writers’ conflicts of interest to us!
The writers and editors must tell Grohol exactly which drug company they are working for, but Grohol makes no promise to pass on that information to us!
I guess Grohol has other reasons for demanding to know about the “conflicts of interest” of his contributors. And those reasons are probably far removed from the sphere of transparency and public ethics.
My guess is Grohol will use those conflicts of interests as bargaining chips when he negotiates advertising contracts with the drug corporations, and their advertising agencies.
“I let you guys plant six fawning articles on Zyprexa onto my website this month, so come on, cough up some more advertising spend!”… “or I run a series of fawning articles on your competititors’ products!”
Grohol also claims that the advertising side of his business is run at arm’s length by a Mr Eric Oldfield of the Waterfront Advertising Consultants…
Hmmm..
Come on Grohol! It’s time the world got to examine your full financial accounts!
A final point..
Grohol is beaming direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription-only medicines into the European Community.. So far as I understand, that is a criminal offence. Someone should alert the Commission.
Grohol is why I gave the site the benefit of the doubt…I contacted him once when one of his bloggers took down several of my very civil but challenging comments after they had been up for days!!
I talked to Grohol and he acted quite shocked and appalled that I’d been censored and restored all I had written…and that is why I said I gave them the benefit of the doubt…
but now…when they write this kind of bullshit that I posted above and don’t even allow informed comment after the article AND the article has been APPROVED by John Grohol…well …no more trying to build bridges with this guy…nope…
Psych central was one of the very first sites I clicked on randomly two years ago before I got into involved in vlogging and blogging about recovery.
It was very disappointing.
In my enthusiastic naivete I talked about the futility of permanent recovery while on psych meds. I railed about my personal misery when I was forced on them. I talked up the powers of self therapy and alternative medicine and so on and so forth.
Honestly I figured that when I finished my account by saying,”that’s how I cured my bipolar” that people would line up to try this stuff out for themselves.
there were a few token congratulations from some but it was the forum mod who swept in like a protective mother hen and said something along the lines of,
“interesting story but most of us have no choice other than to stay on meds and get treatment and support, so everyone that just read her post, don’t even think about going off your meds and trying that unless you want to end up in a hospital again”
I would have to find a receptive audience elsewhere. It was only later after reading blogs like Gianna’s and Philip’s that I was able to ‘see’ the whole PC website and understand what it meant that there so many pharma adds all over those boards.
Obviously there are no limits to how far they’re willing to go in order to make people believe in biological causes, and make them buy their drugs: ‘Oh no, it’s not the drugs, it’s the illness that kills people before time!’ Clearly a response to all those rather disturbing findings about the drugs’ – partly fatal – side effects. A pathetic attempt to rescue the drugs’ reputation. Unfortunately, a lot of people will buy it, no matter how pathetic (indeed, the more pathetic, the bigger the lie, the more likely it is, that people will buy into it), and that’s what makes it criminal, yeah.
I think, I’ve only been to their site once before. “…run by mental health professionals…” is a line, that usually makes me run, as fast as I can. Well, this time I pulled myself together and checked a bit out on what they have to say about so-called “schizophrenia”: I might as well have visited schizophrenia.com…
Shill (definition from http://www.thefreedictionary.com)
Noun 1. shill – a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others
decoy, steerer – a beguiler who leads someone into danger (usually as part of a plot)
Verb 1. shill – act as a shill; “The shill bid for the expensive carpet during the auction in order to drive the price up”
cozen, deceive, delude, lead on – be false to; be dishonest with
i love to go to galveston with my boys…on the beach…
i love to watch the waves come in…..
i also love history….
history is like the waves…the tides…
slow to move, but powerful
part of the nature of the universe, and part of our nature as well….
the tide is turning
let not your heart be troubled gianna,
duane
we are small in numbers, but large in spirit….
keep the faith gianna
the day will come….
as president kennedy said – ‘a myth cannot live forever’
yours in solidarity, and friendship,
duane
wow…Duane…that’s deeply disturbing…
yeah, I’ll leave my link there…my story of undiagnosing myself is on their site too….let’s see if they keep my stuff there…????
Gianna,
In spite of your (legitimate) anger toward Psych Central, I hope you keep your site link there….
I’m leaving mine there (along with Health Central – formerly Wellsphere)….the reason is that these groups need a minority voice….however small – a voice of dissent….without some, they will continue to not only be the status-quo, but the only source of information….
The problem with all of this is that it’s not just a small lie, it’s a big lie…..and, in the words of a Mad-man….a very dangerous mad-man….a big lie is much easier to get away with than a small lie –
“The German people have no idea of the extent to which they have to be gulled in order to be led.”
“The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.”
“All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who are to be influenced by it.”
“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf