The dark side of psychiatric drugs
USA Today Magazine
Thorazine, Haldol, and other medication prescribed by psychiatrists
can destroy the lives of people who take them.
VIRTUALLY ALL persons who go to psychiatrists are put on one or more
drugs. However, psychiatric drugs, which are unpredictable and
extremely deadly, do not cure anything, and instead destroy the life
of the person who takes them.
The most dangerous of these are major tranquilizers, also known as
neuroleptic (nerve-seizing) drugs or anti-psychotics. Of the more
than two dozen in this class, introduced in the mid 1950s, the most
commonly used are Haldol (haloperidol), Compazine (prochlorperazine),
Thorazine (chlorpromazine), Navane (thiothixene), Prolixin
(fluphenazine), Mellaril (thioridazine), and Trilafon (perphenazine).
Their purpose is to create "maximum behavioral
disruption"--a goal clearly reflected in 1950 tests conducted
with rats on Thorazine. Through chemicals, psychiatrists sought to
sabotage thought processes and thereby deny the person control of his
own body.
At the time the major tranquilizers were introduced, the lobotomy was
touted highly and widely used by psychiatrists. With the procedure,
the shredded brain was damaged forever, generating objections from
family and friends of the patient.
The major tranquilizers were able to create a zombie state, identical
to that seen after a lobotomy, in a person whose brain remained
intact. For this reason, Thorazine became known as a "chemical lobotomy."
"[On Thorazine] my thoughts spun and never got too far. My hands
were rubber and I could hardly hold a fork," said one patient
who had been put on the drug by a psychiatrist. "After six weeks
. . . I felt like my mind had been put through a meat grinder. No
longer could I think clearly; no longer could I speak articulately;
no longer could I act confidently."
Another stated that, after a week on Haldol, "I was unable to
speak. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't say anything out loud
and spoke only with the greatest difficulty.... It was as if my whole
body was succumbing to a lethal poison."
The horrifying mental upheaval and devastation this lobotomizing
effect causes was precisely what appealed to psychiatrists. These
chemicals would enable people to be warehoused with the least
"inconvenience" to psychiatrists and staffs of psychiatric institutions.
Today, these drugs are being used against the elderly in enormous
quantities to straitjacket them chemically. By 1985, the National
Disease and Therapeutic Index reported that, while adults 60 years
and older made up 11 % of the population, they used more than one-
third of all antipsychotic drugs. A study of 2,000 pharmacies in 1986
showed that 60.5% of prescriptions for nursing home residents over 65
years of age were for major tranquilizers and 17.1 % for minor versions.
A Harvard Medical School study of 55 Boston-area rest homes published
in the Jan. 26, 1989, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine
reported that 55% of the 1,201 nursing home residents it surveyed
took at least one psychiatric drug with 39% being given anti-psychotics.
These are not prescribed to "treat" any condition. They are
administered solely to turn the patient into a zombie incapable of
complaining or presenting problems to staff Concerning their use on
the elderly, Jerome Avorn, director of the program for the Analysis
of Clinical Strategies at Harvard, pointed out, "Drugs do work.
They do quiet them down. So does a lead pipe to the head."
Larry Hodge, administrator at the Life Care Center in Tennessee,
described the impact on the elderly of these drugs: "Too often
they were so zonked out during their meals that their heads were in
the mashed potatoes."
Wilda Henry told The Arizona Republic that her 83-year-old mother
became "a vegetable" five weeks after taking Haldol. This
powerful mind-altering chemical, which the Soviet Union used for
years to control dissidents, left her mother babbling, drooling,
shaking, and unable to control her bowel functions.
Anise Debose of Washington, D.C., said her 76-year-old father entered
a nursing home active, laughing, and talking. Four days later, after
taking Mellaril and four other drugs, "He was restrained to a
chair as rigid as a board when I saw him. His head was thrown back
and his mouth was limply hanging down. Both eyes were closed. The
impression all of us had was that he was dead."
In 1989, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Aging reported that,
while those over 60 years of age make up 17% of the population, they
accounted for more than half the fatalities resulting from drug
reactions. Acording to the American Hospital Association, of the
10,800,000 elderly admitted to hospitals each year, 1,900,000 are due
to drug reactions. Four percent of those cases, an estimated 76,000
elderly a year, die. This annual death rate far exceeds the 58,021
Americans who lost their lives during the Vietnam War. An average of
more than 200 elderly Americans die each day from drug reactions.
"People don't just die of old age," Theodore Leiff,
professor of gerontology, Eastern Virginia University School of
Medicine, points out. "Their deaths are caused by
something." As case after case demonstrates, they are being
killed behind the locked doors of nursing homes by lazy, incompetent,
or criminal psychiatric staffs who use deadly drugs to quash
complaints before they ever are voiced.
Creating insanity
These chemicals, capable of throwing the minds of users into chaos,
have a long and well-documented history of creating insanity in
persons who take them. In 1956, two years after the introduction of
Thorazine, researchers reported that the drug caused psychosis,
hallucinations, and increased anxiety. They speculated that this
drug-induced insanity arose from the chemically straitjacketing
effect of the drug.
In 1961, researchers reported the case of a 27-year-old man who was
given Thorazine, after which he "complained of 'feeling like an
empty shell, floating around in the air,'" and said that he
heard voices coming "from two small men standing on his
chest." The researchers concluded that Thorazine was the cause
of the man's "toxic psychosis."
Yet another paper, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in
1964, found that major tranquilizers can "produce an acute
psychotic reaction in an individual not previously psychotic." A
1975 paper described a negative effect called akathisia, a
drug-induced inability to sit still comfortably.
Researcher Theodore Van Putten reported that nearly half of the 110
persons in the study had experienced akathisia. "[One woman]
started to bang her head against the wall three days after an
injection of [a major tranquilizer]. Her only utterance was: 'I just
want to get rid of this whole body."' A woman who had been given
these drugs for five days experienced "an upsurge in
hallucinations, screaming, even more bizarre thinking, aggressive and
also self-destructive outbursts, and agitated pacing or dancing."
A third woman stated that, while on the tranquilizer, she felt
hostile and hated everybody, and heard voices taunting her. Others
complained of an "abject fear or terror" that was difficult
for them to explain.
Such drug-induced symptoms are far worse than any underlying problems
a person might have. Even more damning is the evidence that the
damage caused by these drugs can be permanent.
Many types of psychiatric drugs, including the major tranquilizers,
can cause lasting, grotesquely disfiguring nerve damage known as
tardive dyskinesia or tardive dystonia. The muscles of the face and
body contort and spasm involuntarily, drawing the face into hideous
scowls and grimaces and twisting the body into bizarre contortions.
These horrifying effects occur in more than 20% of persons
"treated" with major tranquilizers and currently affect
400,000-1,000,000 Americans.
Psychiatrists theorize that these drugs damage the muscle-control
portion of the brain in a way that makes it permanently
"supersensitive" to messages passing down nerve pathways
into the brain. The result is that this portion of the brain becomes
permanently deranged. While the precise location of this brain damage
is not known with certainty, there is no question that it exists. It
is clearly visible in the faces of its tragic victims.
In the same way that major tranquilizers can throw the muscle-control
portion of the brain into chaos, they also can make the
thought-control area of the brain supersensitive, driving the person
permanently insane. A 1980 study published in The American Journal of
Psychiatry described 10 patients who suffered from this condition,
which has been labeled "supersensitivity psychosis."
In the first stage, the individual becomes psychotic for a few days
immediately after he or she stops taking the drugs. In the second,
the insanity that emerges upon withdrawal from the psychiatric drug
is persistent and may be irreversible. In the third stage, the
psychosis is evident even while the patient is taking the psychiatric
drugs. The study notes that, when this stage is reached, "in
most cases" the person is doomed to be insane for life. This
condition has created thousands of tortured victims, permanently
destroyed, cast out of mental institutions to forage in garbage cans
while wrestling with inner terrors implanted in their minds by
psychiatric drugs.
There also is evidence that these psychiatric drugs can cause people
to become violent. A Canadian research team that studied the effects
of psychiatric drugs on prisoners found that "violent,
aggressive incidents occurred significantly more frequently in
inmates who were on psychotropic [psychiatric or mind-altering]
medication than when these inmates were not...." Inmates on
major tranquilizers were shown to be more than twice as violent as
they were when not taking psychiatric drugs. The researchers
attributed the marked increase in violence to akathisia.
The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, four
days after a patient started taking Haldol, "he became
uncontrollably agitated, could not sit still, and paced for several
hours." After complaining of "a jumpy feeling inside, and
violent urges to assault anyone near him," the man attacked and
tried to kill his dog. The researcher noted the irony that the
chemical could cause violence, "a behavior the drug was meant to alleviate."
Killers on psychiatric drugs
Another article published in the American Journal of Forensic
Psychiatry described five cases of extreme acts of physical violence
caused by Haldol. In the first, a 23-year-old male with a history of
developing severe symptoms of akathisia after being given Haldol was
injected with the drug in the admissions room of a psychiatric unit.
After the injection, the man escaped, ran to a park, disrobed, and
tried to rape a woman. "When pulled off by the husband, he
proceeded down the street, broke down the front door of a house where
an 81-yearold lady was sleeping. He severely beat her with his fists,
'to a pulp,' by his own description, following which he found knives
and stabbed her repeatedly, resulting in her death." He then ran
into another woman who was with her child and "repeatedly
stabbed the woman in front of the child, where upon he moved on to he
next person he encountered, a woman whom he severely assaulted and
stabbed to the extent that an eye was lost and an opening into the
anus was created resulting in major surgery."
The report describes four other cases of violence attributed to
akathisia caused by Haldol. One was a suicide. Another was a suicide
attempt in which a man stabbed himself repeatedly and later remarked
that "he could never even feel the knife when stabbing
himself." The third was a man who beat his mother to death with
a hammer.
In the fourth case, a man "had been receiving Haldol as an
outpatient for approximately four months and described how
progressively his head was rushing, that he felt speeded up, that he
was in great pain in his head and had an impulse to stab someone to
try to get rid of the pain. He went to the nearby grocery store he
frequented on a regular basis and impulsively and repeatedly stabbed
the grocer whom he had known for some time."
Many similar acts of violence have been linked with these psychiatric
drugs. One example is the 1989 case of David Peterson, who walked out
of a mental institution in Middletown, Conn., bought a hunting knife,
and then stabbed a nine-year-old girl 34 times, killing her. Peterson
said he killed the girl to get back at his psychiatrist for not
changing the drug he was being given, a major tranquilizer, that was
causing him "pain."