Antipsychotic Drugs, Their Harmful Effects

[Dzana]

Harm Caused by Antipsychotic Drugs

For illustrative purposes, I'll focus on the newer antipsychotic drugs, the so-called atypicals, including Zyprexa, Risperdal, Geodon, Seroquel, and Abilify. These drugs produce horrendous adverse effects that often lead the victims or their surviving families to consider bringing lawsuits against doctors, health care facilities, or drug companies.

First, the antipsychotic drugs produce tardive dyskinesia. Tardive dyskinesia involves drug-induced abnormal movements that commonly disfigure patients and in some cases result in lifelong pain and total disability. The disorder frequently begins with out-of-control movements of the face, eyes, tongue, and mouth, including grimacing, chewing and tongue protruding. The muscles of the neck, torso, limbs, and fingers and toes can be involved. The ability to walk is often impaired. Speech, breathing, and swallowing can be afflicted. One variant called tardive dystonia results in agonizing muscle spasms, often leading to gross distortions in posture and gait. Another, tardive akathisia, causes neurological sensations that are excruciating and drive the patient to move about in an effort to relieve them. Some have been driven to suicide.

Tardive dyskinesia and its related disorders commonly begin to occur after only a few months or less of drug exposure and the risk accumulates over time. Rates for the older antipsychotic drugs are well demonstrated and reach or exceed 5% a year, cumulative. Fifteen percent or more of patients will develop tardive dyskinesia after three years of taking antipsychotic drugs. In the elderly tardive dyskinesia rates exceed a shocking 20% a year. With the newer drugs, the rates for developing tardive dyskinesia are said (by drug advocates) to be lower, but they remain very significant. In addition to innumerable cases of tardive dyskinesia in adults, I have also personally evaluated dozens of cases in children caused by the newer antipsychotic agents like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Abilify.

There is no effective treatment for tardive dyskinesia. Most cases are permanent and some worsen over time.

Tardive dyskinesia is especially insidious in onset because the drugs that cause tardive dyskinesia also mask or suppress the initial symptoms while the disease is developing. If the doctor does not carefully monitor and periodically stop the drug to check for the early development of tardive dyskinesia, a full-blown disabling case can develop before anyone realizes what has happened.

Second, the newer antipsychotics frequently cause diabetes and pancreatitis.

I have been a medical expert in fatal cases. Eli Lilly has paid more than one billion dollars in order to settle hundreds of diabetes cases related to Zyprexa without admitting any wrongdoing and without releasing their in-house safety data for public and professional scrutiny.

Third, these drugs also produce a potentially disastrous "metabolic syndrome" that includes elevated blood sugar, elevated cholesterol, elevated blood pressure, and severe obesity. They can also cause direct harm to the function of the heart. Overall, it's a prescription for cardiac disease and premature death. New studies in children have found astronomical rates of pathological obesity after only a few months exposure.

Fourth, these drugs cause gynecomastia--abnormal breast tissue growth and even milk secretion--in children and adults. A twelve-year-old boy can be devastated by the development of one or more large breasts. Sometimes these abnormal growths remain after the drug is stopped, and even recur after surgical removal. According to attorney Stephen Sheller, Risperdal and then Seroquel are the major offenders in his extensive experience with cases of gynecomastia.

Fifth, these drugs cause neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a potentially fatal disorder that mimics viral encephalitis.

For all of these disorders, patients and their families need to be warned about the risks and educated about how to identify early signs. Patients needed to be monitored and the drugs must be stopped at the earliest sign of one of these disorders. The need for the drugs, a rational treatment plan, and patient consent should be documented in the medical record. Unfortunately, physicians too often fail to meet these standards while cavalierly prescribing these dangerous agents to adults and, at times, to small children.

And that's only the beginning of the list of disastrous adverse effects caused by antipsychotic drugs. I believe these drugs would be outlawed in a rational society, especially for children. Instead, the FDA has recently been expanding their use in children.

Ironically, the FDA is approving these drugs for use in children at the same time that the Justice Department has been fining drug companies for illegally marketing these drugs to children. The illegal marketing corrupted and contaminated medical practice, encouraging physicians to prescribe off label, eventually leading the FDA to then approve off label prescribing. The studies used to justify this approval have been wholly developed and supervised by these same drugs companies using handpicked doctors who have often been involved in encouraging off label use. Drug companies commonly ghostwrite the research publications that appear under the names of these doctors.





Peter R. Breggin, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca, New York. The facts about tardive dyskinesia are presented in detail with hundreds of scientific references in Dr. Breggin's book, Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex, second edition (200. Dr. Breggin's book, Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Murder (200 describes cases of tardive dyskinesia and many of his experiences as a medical expert. Dr. Breggin's highly informative website is Psychiatric Drug Facts with Dr. Peter Breggin - HOME.

[ladycolorado]

All I can say is WOW great post Dzana! Really fascinating. It is disturbing how many children in this day and age seem to be overprescribed medicines. Their bodies (and brains) are still growing.

With the FDA I think too much deregulation had taken their teeth away regarding pharmatceutical companies. Protecting the health and welfare of people should come first. Sadly in this day and age it does not. Spreading misinformation to feed companies greed does.

(LC)

[carla]

All the stories in the media about people going on killing rampages or murdering their families, will say somewhere the killer was being treated for depression .
These drugs make people homicidal/suicidal.

[Dzana]

I had no problems with antidepressants in the past but now i do my body cant take it..
the problem is they prescribed antipsychotics to me since having full blown.. and I asked question why>> 1psychiatrist working together with derm at Royal London told me to combat itching????? and another psychiatrists who obviously received the letters of my diagnosis from previous ones told me cos I M PSychotic?? and 1 of them also told me due to my history of depression I have predisposition for psychosis??//

when i went back for the appointment in royal london she asked me why i did not took antipsychotic when i WAS GIVEN TO __ I SAID I REFUSED TO BE TREATED FOR SOMETHING THAT I M NOT HAVING ...... SHE SAID THEY CAN GIVE ME INJECTIONS I COULD SEE ANGRY EXPRRESSION ON HER FACE >>>>>> THESE PPL R INSANE>> THEY R FORCING US .>> THEY WANNA KILL WITH GIVING WRONG MEDICATION...........I NEVER WENT BACK TO THAT HOSPITAL BUT LET ME TELL U ONE THING.... EVEN THOUGH I REQUESTED OTHER DERMS THEY R REFUSING TO TREAT ME WITHOUT THE ONE FROM ROYAL LONDON AS IF HE IS THE BEST FOR THAT>>>>> AND THE ONE IN ROYAL LONDON WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PSYCHIATRIST WHO TREATS MORGS WITH PSYCHOTIC DRUGS>>>??? I GOT NO MORE CHOICE WHEN IT COMES TO NHS>>> THIS IS ALL SET UP........ WITH US HAVING NOWHERE ELSE TO SEEK FOR HELP

I hade a conversation with JO here from MDR she told me psychotic medicines r used as first line option???????

I tried it >>> got numb, almost paralysed, angry, mad, could not eat, could not walk ............ HELL WITH IT.......
i just ask quetsion WHY.............. why we r being treated this way

why they do not go back to initial diagnosis when i was given antibiotics and menthol creams etc... first derm saw me took biopsy etc... u see what happens when they keep sending u from one to another etc......... u get mistreated misdiagnoed milllions of times ,,, being given this and that just to have your immunity further destroyed..........

[ladycolorado]

For the most part the derms , the infectious disease doctors are the WORST doctors to see. Most of them have some type of agenda why I do not know.

A holistic doctor or homeopathic, or on that treats Chronic Lyme might be a better choice. Some advice to those out there as well:

If you DO find a good doctor who will work with you, DO NOT post who they are on here. Also DO NOT talk to sceptical family members or hostile doctors from before, this often sets the good doctors to be harrased.

(LC)

[Dzana]

Originally Posted by ladycolorado

All I can say is WOW great post Dzana! Really fascinating. It is disturbing how many children in this day and age seem to be overprescribed medicines. Their bodies (and brains) are still growing.

With the FDA I think too much deregulation had taken their teeth away regarding pharmatceutical companies. Protecting the health and welfare of people should come first. Sadly in this day and age it does not. Spreading misinformation to feed companies greed does.

(LC)

I m just lost for words ... how quick docs r in prescribing these to very young children.............