I was in Atlanta all day yesterday teaching a Seminar and visiting with some sick friends, so I missed the back and forth in the comments on the post about CABF’s name change [what’s in a name? that which we call a rose… ] except to approve them as dinged on my iPhone. While the fur flew a bit more than my liking, I decided that everyone involved was an adult and could take care of themselves. The things being expressed were heart-felt, driven by well-earned pain. This morning, I read back over those comments and all my own posts about the Childhood Bipolar issue [the table at the end of this post]. Two things came to my mind.
I thought back to my own activist days – the Civil Rights Movement here in the South. It was one of the few times in my life that I felt sure I was right about something, and it was consuming. So in the mid-70’s when I got out of the Air Force and was looking for a place to settle down, I came home and we bought our first house in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood. Our social world became other couples who were doing the same thing, and they remain our closest friends to this day. We all were there to enroll our kids in the integrated public schools in the city and make them work, so were very active in school matters. Our other friends were mostly doctors drawn to Atlanta for other reasons. They were a liberal lot as a rule, but we watched them send their kids to private schools, one after another. I think they thought we were sacrificing our daughter’s education to our own ideology. We frankly thought they were copping out. But it wasn’t discussed much. I learned that when it comes to others’ children, walk very softly [by the way, all the kids did fine, mine included].
The second thing I thought after reading those comments is that I’m angry too – like in the movie Network – "We’re as mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore." I’m that kind of angry.
I’m not very mad at CABF or the The Balanced Mind Foundation or its parent members. They’re doing the same thing I was doing in the 70`s – being ombudsmen for their kids as best they can. I question some things, but not angrily – maybe the 2003 Guideline make me kind of mad [not much solid ground…, the other side…]. And I am mad at the Pharmaceutical Companies, but not Network mad. They’ve stepped way over the line, but they’re liable and deserved to be whacked for what they’ve done. My Network anger is for these people:
From my perspective, all that fur that was flying in the blog comments yesterday ultimately lands at their feet. Each person up there signed articles in our literature that were either ghost-written by pharmaceutical companies or so heavily influenced that they might as well have been. They let their need for academic success or just plain greed over-ride the medical ethic they swore to uphold. No one of them has a defense worth listening to. They get no credit for whatever good things they’ve done, or academic credential they have amassed. In my way of thinking, nothing neutralizes their level of bowing to pharmaceutical influence, whether for fame or for money. These aren’t mistakes or slip-ups.
If you don’t know why I’m saying that, please read the posts below. If you think I’ve missed the mark, let me know…
That’s how I feel.
If it wasn’t for the corrupt, lies, ghostwritten abstracts etc KOLs no doctor would have said to me “Hey I just got back from a conference and I think it’s bipolar because a big wig said so” and MY daughter may not be disabled as a result of this theory these KOLs created that ppl believe exists, which uses drugs no one can say how they work, why they work, they never DO work or they work for minimal amts of time, the russian roulette played w meds is a dangerous one, and YES I regret going to seek help from a psychiatrist when my child was having a drug reaction, THAT I cannot erase. But I CAN forewarn others to watch what they do, because my child is now a trailblazer of the worst kind, the result of this atrocity based on lies and greedy KOLs.
That line up of mug shots up there is what it should be, MUG SHOTS for prison. Why on earth is Melissa DelBello taking $215,000 for the first Q1 of 2011 from Lilly and still allowed to be Principal Investigator of a current Zyprexa trial????
Until we have cleaned up this act we will NEVER have science ppl can depend on and parents will continue to be duped and use the meds these ppl tout as end all be all to treatment.
Kids are being drugged even younger now and these ppl such as the conflicted ones up in that line up walk into the sunset with massive amts of money. Well I would like them to pay for a care facility that’s nice for my child!
Thank you Dr.., for writing this blog.
PS. It just occurred to me, it’s the norm. They actually succeeded in a medicating children for all and prevention and long term the norm, wow. That makes me sick.
Parents need to read the internal documents from lilly and zyprexa to see how they lied on purpose just like astrazeneca and seroquel to market those drugs, at the expense of our children.
Has anyone listened to the audio of John Blenkinsopp? he is an ex medical director from AstraZeneca who was asked to lie abt the weight gain for seroquel by the marketeers…..
http://seroquellawsuitblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-does-astrazeneca-want-former.html
That should give perspective on how our kids really aren’t cared about by the KOLs it’s all for marketing, and prestige and money….
Can we truly go, as Nietzsche pleaded, “Beyond Good and Evil?” That is, can we realize that few things in life are all evil or all good? And can we realize that just because something feels good doesn’t mean it IS good?
I see this playing out right now in the issue of child psychiatry. I honestly don’t think child psychiatry is “evil,” it’s just far more flawed than it needs to be for the reasons Mickey so articulately pointed out in this post (basically, corruption of the KOLs).
Psychiatry has opened one hell of a can of worms and honestly could not have flourished in a more perfect time and place than America in the last few decades. Americans’ spirits have become sick and diseased, starving for easy answers that promise leisure and pleasure; it’s the sign of an empire in decline. Corruption probably doesn’t matter to a lot of parents or adults in psychiatry who have good outcomes because as long as the treatment makes them feel good, it MUST be good and thus true. Instead of ferociously attacking corruption at the roots, so many are willing to say, “well, it works well enough for me, so I’m not going to bother to attack the corruption, or even acknowledge it.” But what they fail to see is that everyone — including themselves! — could benefit from ending corruption in medicine.
Meanwhile we’re less and less equipped every passing year to accept life as it is and let life be our teacher, no matter how painful the moment may be. Only then can one be in control when one owns and masters EVERY moment, and psych meds may or may not allow that.
I say may or may not because I’m open to the possibility that some people really CAN benefit from psych meds if their illness is so intractable, and only once they have a clear mind can they then set themselves to doing life’s work of making the most of every moment, no matter how challenging.
But we’ll NEVER KNOW just how “good” psych meds are with the current culture of corruption.
Sad.
*PS: I totally agree, Mickey, that it must be just BRUTAL to be a parent these days. My god, the gauntlet a parent must go through if their child is even the slightest bit outside the moving target of “normal.” That’s why I have more sympathy than most for parents who put their kids on meds. Honestly, what is a parent to do? Or whom are they to trust? The potential for suffering and uncertainty is infinite.
My ‘network’ anger is also for the ‘doctors’ whose careers were made, by their unethical work—the advisers for one ‘advocacy’ group is hardly a complete list. I believe that the current state of psychiatry and the outrageously horrible outcomes for patients, and for society, primarily rests with the miscreants who pretended to be scientific investigators. In truth, they allowed their professional status to be a tool used to confer legitimacy to a corrupt industry, to further an marketing agenda. These relative few however, were successful due to the cooperation of the many…An Edmund Burke quote is apropos, “Evil prevails when good men do nothing.” While Rome is burning it seems more appropriate to put out the freaking fire before trying to attribute blame…
What makes me utterly and absolutely disgusted, is the manner in which the academic elite have chosen to defend the psychiatric profession’s damaged credibility and questionable, “integrity” by defending the obviously flawed Science Base—-and by extension, defending the unethical conduct of members who have corrupted it.
It is my hope that there will be a realization that trust and integrity can only be restored by being willing to rely only on ethical and valid research, ethical conduct, by being transparent and accountable. How can any effort to be honest and practice psychiatry with ethical integrity be taken seriously without demonstrating that a professional is held accountable for unethical conduct? Professional integrity is not a ‘given.’ Any attempt to regain trust is doomed to fail if psychiatric professionals choose to defend the profession, while refusing or failing to repudiate the criminal behavior of individual members.
In all reality, continuing to use textbooks, Professional Journal articles and treatment protocols that rely on conflicted and questionable work is the larger problem. Thugs will be thugs—and I would be willing to bet that there are thugs in every profession—The nature of nogoodniks is universal, professional groups failing to hold members accountable—within professional groups is also common. But it is this failure which has the potential to sully the entire profession—It seems to me that for trust to be effectively re-established, the products derived from biased, unethical or otherwise tainted research needs to be removed from textbooks and Professional Journals. It wouldn’t hurt to start encouraging academic debate, instead of stifling it. It would really restore some trust and show true integrity if members of the psychiatric profession stopped bullying professionals who have the temerity to publish something which is critical of the Standard Practices, particularly since it is in truth Standard Practices which have led to the massive drugging of all types of distress . It would really go a long way to restoring the integrity of the profession to stop claiming that genetics, and biological processes are responsible; that psychiatric diagnoses are ‘diseases’ and chemical imbalances, when the claims are based on a hypothesis, yet to be validated. The hopeful aspirations of psycho-pharmacology researchers and pharmaceutical companies, are the basis of the claim. Medical professionals have a duty that claims made are grounded in science, not supposition— a claim that is not a medical certainty, and should not have been made should be officially and definitively refuted—this particular claim, has shaped public policy and has spurred Legislation—-Talk about failing to act with integrity…
Dishonesty is not worthy of respect. Researchers who exaggerated the benefits whilst minimizing serious risks of drugs, are the worst offenders; but they are not the only offenders.
I appreciate your efforts more than I can possibly express.