A Prescription for Teen Suicide

Julie was in her final year of high school and looking forward to her plans for life, which included marriage and children. When she began having trouble at a new school after a bout of insomnia, she became withdrawn and quiet. A psychiatrist prescribed her an antidepressant. One week later, her father walked into his garage and found his daughter had hanged herself from the ceiling.

12-year-old Caitlin hanged herself using shoelaces in a school bathroom stall. Only two months prior, she had been labeled as depressed and prescribed an antidepressant, which led to prescriptions for three other psychiatric drugs. Her father stated: She wasn’t in control of the drugs and they were driving her feelings to the point where she couldn’t stand it anymore.

After moving to a new neighborhood, Matt’s parents noticed he was a bit sullen. Teachers recommended that Matt, aged 13, get professional help. A psychiatrist gave him a free sample of an antidepressant. Seven days later, Matt’s mother went to collect the laundry from her sons room and found he had hanged himself inside his closet.

Over 100 children have committed suicide while taking antidepressants like Prozac, prescribed for what their parents were led to believe was a chemical imbalance in the brain. However, little did they know that this was a drug company-marketing scheme designed to increase the sales of antidepressants. This admission by several executives of the American Psychiatric Association was made in 2005, some 18 years after Prozac came on the market.

Facts:

Unlike medical diseases, for which physical tests exist to diagnose, no such test exists for any mental disorder. The director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health testified before Congress that not a single cause or cure has been established for any mental disorder.

Drug companies produced new antidepressants with claims that they could correct a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes depression despite no test existing to prove this. The FDA there to protect the health of American citizens did not require any proof of this theory either. Investigative journalists determined drug company scams to get psychoactive (mind altering) drugs approved, reporting:

Drug companies fund studies that show the drugs efficacy in treating an obscurely known mental disorder in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the billing bible of psychiatry.

Prominent psychiatrists are recruited to publicly affirm the malady as a huge problem.

PR firms (for the drug companies) launch campaigns to promote the new disorder, using dramatic statistics from corporate-sponsored studies.

Patient groups subsidized by drug makersare recruited or invented to serve as the public face for the disorder, supplying quotes for the media.

The drug gets approved for use in this now epidemic problem.