Something shocking has been going on with the SNRI antidepressant drug Effexor since the drug was listed in the 2015 list of drugs to be banned, published by the European Medicines Agency ¹. Equally shocking, there are hundreds more drugs banned in Europe, but not in the US or Canada.

Various drugs, about 700 in number including Effexor, were originally approved based on what we now know was false information and discredited testing results. A company called GVK Biosciences reported false and misleading information to the FDA and elsewhere. Based on this information, Effexor (and 700 other drugs) were approved for marketing to the public. This fiasco was uncovered by French inspectors in 2014. As a result, health regulators banned Effexor in Malta, Poland, The Netherlands, Portugal and Germany. But the FDA’s and Health Canada’s silence hangs as eerily as a cloud of fog over a toxic swamp.

Black Box Warning Inadequate

The black box warning on Effexor (venlafaxine) informs only of increased risk of suicidality. No other warnings are listed. However, The New England Journal of Medicine published a 2004 article ² citing important information from clinical research concerning babies affected by pregnant or nursing mothers taking antidepressants.

Some of their findings included:

• Antidepressants doubled the number of miscarriages and still births compared to the control group (not on medication).
• Antidepressants quintupled premature births.
• Antidepressants tripled birth defects relating to congenital heart malformations.
• Infants exposed to antidepressants have a six-times greater risk of a fatal lung problem called persistent pulmonary hypertension.
• One third of women who take antidepressants have had a baby who died, was premature, or suffers seizures.

Effexor Lack of Success

Quite apart from the harm to infants and suicidality and violent psychosis in children, teens, and adults, a combined majority of those taking Effexor either report no positive effect, or adverse effects, leading to wanting to stop the drug. Effexor withdrawal is difficult to accomplish due to the extreme reactions encountered when stopping the drug.

Women who become pregnant may also decide to come off an SNRI drug to avoid the risks mentioned above. Young people who were prescribed the drug (despite the warnings on the black box not to) may experience suicidal thoughts and are also likely to want to come off the drug. Not exactly a success story.

The FDA warns never to stop Effexor abruptly; always seek medical oversight and guidance to stay safe.

Effexor and Brain Damage

SNRI drugs are thought to influence and degrade the delicate neurochemistry of the CNS and brain in at least two major ways. Effexor creates an overabundance of norepinephrine, or the hormone called adrenaline. At the same time, the drug also causes a temporary buildup of serotonin which is a down-regulating or inhibitory neurotransmitter. In effect, SNRI drugs gun the gas pedal while stomping on the brakes. Pfizer might better have called this drug “Jekyll and Hyde”. Or perhaps “the two-headed monster of a pill”.

Drugs do not create more hormones or neurotransmitters, they only use them up. Eventually, these two hormones (serotonin and norepinephrine) atrophy, becoming useless, leaving the person in a deficit of both. Studies have begun to reveal that SNRI’s make changes to the workings of the brain that may become permanent. In any case, there is little to no success to report, and even more tragically, much destruction that has hurt an awful lot of people over the years.

Lack of Information Can Be Dangerous

One must remain vigilant and alert because of the conspicuous lack of information provided by our regulatory bodies. Where prescription drugs like Effexor are concerned, it’s “buyer beware”. One should do one’s own research carefully and thoroughly, and seek out non-harmful treatment options before agreeing to something that statistically is likely to inflict such abhorrent risks.

Many people have had success with holistic, drug-free treatments to alleviate emotional distress and suffering. Thankfully, there are more and more physicians and caregivers who have become aware of the dangers of unnecessary and even permanent damage caused by prescription drugs like Effexor. Keep informed. Keep safe.

(1) Products for which the marketing authorisations are recommended for suspension by the CHMP on 21 May 2015, European Medicines Agency, EMA/344050/2015, (Effexor listed under generic name “Venlafaxine”),  http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Other/2015/05/WC500187078.pdf
(2) First-Trimester Use of Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitors and the Risk of Birth Defects, New England Journal of Medicine 2007; 356:2675-2683, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa067407

When he committed suicide on August 11, 2014 comedy icon Robin Williams joined a long list of artists who suffered tragically at the hands of psychiatrists.

On the surface, Williams’ death seemed straightforward. According to USA Today’s website, the Marin County coroner’s report ruled his death as a “suicide by hanging, with no evidence of alcohol or illegal drugs in his system and only therapeutic concentrations of prescribed medications.”

True, all the drugs in his body were legal. But those “therapeutic” medications included mirtazapine, an antidepressant used for “major depressive disorder.”

Also known as Remeron, it carries 10 international drug regulatory warnings on causing suicidal ideation.

In total, there are 32 possible side effects, says Drugs.com, including mood or mental changes, abnormal thinking, feelings of not caring, mood or mental changes, anger, mood swings and unusual excitement.

There’s more. The antipsychotic Seroquel was also found at the scene. While there were no traces of it in his body, eight pills were missing from the bottle.

This drug, says Drugs.com has 10 possible adverse reactions: psychosis, hallucinations, paranoid reactions, delusions, manic reaction, depersonalization, catatonic reaction, emotional lability, suicide attempt, and euphoria.

Despite all this, several news websites cast a suspicious eye toward Lewy body dementia as it has symptoms similar to Parkinson’s. As the “second most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s disease, it causes a progressive decline in mental abilities”, says the Mayo Clinic.

Which may be why “unnamed family sources” in the Williams’ family claimed that Lewy body dementia was a critical “triggering” factor in his suicide.

However, the Mayo Clinic website does not list suicidal thoughts or behavior among the possible symptoms of this condition.

That agrees with Gayatri Devi, an attending neurologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York who has treated such patients. He noted that “suicide does not usually occur in Lewy body dementia patients.”

And so, the loose strings remain ignored by the media and the medical community.

Meanwhile, we lose a talent who was equally talented in all genres. His peers and the public agreed: with 106 acting credits, he garnered two Emmys, five Grammys, six Golden Globes and two Screen Actor Guild Awards.

No one should attempt to get off of psychiatric drugs without a doctor’s supervision.

By Peter Gøtzsche, MD;  Co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration.

At the Nordic Cochrane Centre, we have researched antidepressants for several years and I have long wondered why leading professors of psychiatry base their practice on a number of erroneous myths. These myths are harmful to patients. Many psychiatrists are well aware that the myths do not hold and have told me so, but they don’t dare deviate from the official positions because of career concerns.

Being a specialist in internal medicince, I don’t risk ruining my career by incurring the professors’ wrath and I shall try here to come to the rescue of the many conscientious but oppressed psychiatrists and patients by listing the worst myths and explain why they are harmful.

Myth 1: Your disease is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain

Most patients are told this but it is completely wrong. We have no idea about which interplay of psychosocial conditions, biochemical processes, receptors and neural pathways that lead to mental disorders and the theories that patients with depression lack serotonin and that patients with schizophrenia have too much dopamine have long been refuted. The truth is just the opposite. There is no chemical imbalance to begin with, but when treating mental illness with drugs, we create a chemical imbalance, an artificial condition that the brain tries to counteract.

This means that you get worse when you try to stop the medication. An alcoholic also gets worse when there is no more alcohol but this doesn’t mean that he lacked alcohol in the brain when he started drinking.

The vast majority of doctors harm their patients further by telling them that the withdrawal symptoms mean that they are still sick and still need the mediciation. In this way, the doctors turn people into chronic patients, including those who would have been fine even without any treatment at all. This is one of the main reasons that the number of patients with mental disorders is increasing, and that the number of patients who never come back into the labour market also increases. This is largely due to the drugs and not the disease.

Myth 2: It’s no problem to stop treatment with antidepressants

A Danish professor of psychiatry said this at a recent meeting for psychiatrists, just after I had explained that it was difficult for patients to quit. Fortunately, he was contradicted by two foreign professors also at the meeting. One of them had done a trial with patients suffering from panic disorder and agoraphobia and half of them found it difficult to stop even though they were slowly tapering off. It cannot be because the depression came back, as the patients were not depressed to begin with. The withdrawal symptoms are primarily due to the antidepressants and not the disease.

Myth 3: Psychotropic Drugs for Mental Illness are like Insulin for Diabetes

Most patients with depression or schizophrenia have heard this falsehood over and over again, almost like a mantra, in TV, radio and newspapers. When you give insulin to a patient with diabetes, you give something the patient lacks, namely insulin. Since we’ve never been able to demonstrate that a patient with a mental disorder lacks something that people who are not sick don’t lack, it is wrong to use this analogy.

Patients with depression don’t lack serotonin, and there are actually drugs that work for depression although they lower serotonin. Moreover, in contrast to insulin, which just replaces what the patient is short of, and does nothing else, psychotropic drugs have a very wide range of effects throughout the body, many of which are harmful. So, also for this reason, the insulin analogy is extremely misleading.

Myth 4: Psychotropic drugs reduce the number of chronically ill patients

This is probably the worst myth of them all. US science journalist Robert Whitaker demonstrates convincingly in Anatomy of an Epidemic that the increasing use of drugs not only keeps patients stuck in the sick role, but also turns many problems that would have been transient into chronic diseases.

If there had been any truth in the insulin myth, we would have expected to see fewer patients who could not fend for themselves. However, the reverse has happened. The clearest evidence of this is also the most tragic, namely the fate of our children after we started treating them with drugs. In the United States, psychiatrist collect more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty and those who take most money tend to prescribe antipsychotics to children most ofter. This raises a suspicion of corruption of the academic judgement.

The consequences are damning. In 1987, just before the newer antidepressants (SSRIs or happy pills) came on the market, very few children in the United States were mentally disabled. Twenty years laterm it was over 500,000, which represents a 35-fold increase. The number of disabled mentally ill has exploded in all Western countries. One of the worst consequences if that the treatment with ADHD medications and happy pills has created an entirely new disease in about 10% of those treated – namely bipolar disorder – which we previously called manic depressive illness.

Leading psychiatrist have claimed that it is “very rare” that patients on antidepressants become bipolar. That’s not true. The number of children with bipolar increased 35-fold in the United States, which is a serious development, as we use antipsychotic drugs for this disorder. Antipsychotic drugs are very dangerous and one of the main reasons why patients with schizophrenia live 20 years shorter than others. I have estimated in my book, Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime, that just one of the many preparations, Zyprexa (olanzapine), has killed 200,000 patients worldwide.

Myth 5: Happy pills do not cause suicide in children and adolescents

Some professors are willing to admit that happy pills increase the incidence of suicidal behavior while denying that this necessarily leads to more suicides, although it is well documented that the two are closely related. Lundbeck’s CEO, Ulf Wiinberg, went even further in a radio programme in 2011 where he claimed that happy pills reduce the rate of suicide in children and adolescents. When the stunned reporter asked him why there then was a warning against this in the package inserts, he replied that he expected the leaflets would be changed by the authorities!

Suicides in healthy people, triggered by happy pills, have also been reported. The companies and the psychiatrists have consistently blamed the disease when patients commit suicide. It is true that depression increases the risk of suicide, but happy pills increase it even more, at least up to about age 40, according to a meta-analysis of 100,000 patients in randomized trials performed by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Myth 6: Happy pills have no side effects

At an international meeting on psychiatry in 2008, I criticized psychiatrists for wanting to screen many healthy people for depression. The recommended screening tests are so poor that one in three healthy people will be wrongly diagnosed as depressed. A professor replied that it didn’t matter that healthy people were treated as happy pills have no side effects!

Happy pills have many side effects. They remove both the top and the bottom of the emotions, which, according to some patients, feels like living under a cheese-dish cover. Patients care less about the consequences of their actions, lose empathy towards others, and can become very aggressive. In school shootings in the United States and elsewhere a striking number of people have been on antidepressants.

The companies tell us that only 5% get sexual problems with happy pills, but that’s not true. In a study designed to look at this problem, sexual disturbances developed in 59% of 1,022 patients who all had a normal sex life before they started an antidepressant. The symptoms include decreased libido, delayed or no orgasm or ejaculation, and erectile dysfunction, all at a high rate, and with a low tolerance among 40% of the patients. Happy pills should therefore not have been marketed for depression where the effect is rather small, but as pills that destroy your sex life.

Myth 7: Happy pills are not addictive

They surely are and it is no wonder because they are chemically related to and act like amphetamine. Happy pills are a kind of narcotic on prescription. The worst argument I have heard about the pills not causing dependency is that patients do not require higher doses. Shall we then also believe that cigarettes are not addictive? The vast majority of smokers consume the same number of cigarettes for years.

Myth 8: The prevalence of depression has increased a lot

A professor argued in a TV debate that the large consumption of happy pills wasn’t a problem because the incidence of depression had increased greatly in the last 50 years. I replied it was impossible to say much about this because the criteria for making the diagnosis had been lowered markedly during this period. If you wish to count elephants in Africa, you don’t lower the criteria for what constitutes an elephant and count all the wildebeest, too.

Myth 9: The main problem is not overtreatment, but undertreatment

Again, leading psychiatrists are completely out of touch with reality. In a 2007 survey, 51% of the 108 psychiatrists said that they used too much medicine and only 4 % said they used too little. In 2001–2003, 20% of the US population aged 18–54 years received treatment for emotional problems, and sales of happy pills are so high in Denmark that every one of us could be in treatment for 6 years of our lives. That is sick.

Myth 10: Antipsychotics prevent brain damage

Some professors say that schizophrenia causes brain damage and that it is therefore important to use antipsychotics. However, antipsychotics lead to shrinkage of the brain, and this effect is directly related to the dose and duration of the treatment. There is other good evidence to suggest that one should use antipsychotics as little as possible, as the patients then fare better in the long term. Indeed, one may completely avoid using antipsychotics in most patients with schizophrenia, which would significantly increase the chances that they will become healthy, and also increase life expectancy, as antipsychotics kill many patients.

How should we use psychotropic drugs?

I am not against using drugs, provided we know what we are doing and only use them in situations where they do more good than harm. Psychiatric drugs can be useful sometimes for some patients, especially in short-term treatment, in acute situations. But my studies in this area lead me to a very uncomfortable conclusion:

Our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them. It is inescapable that their availability creates more harm than good. Psychiatrists should therefore do everything they can to treat as little as possible, in as short time as possible, or not at all, with psychotropic drugs.

Source: http://davidhealy.org/psychiatry-gone-astray/