CCHR Exposes Increased Push for Dangerous Psychiatric Drugs During the Holidays

During holiday festivities, mental health watchdog exposes push for psychiatric drugs for “seasonal blues,” cautioning against profit-driven pathologizing.

Los Angeles, United States - November 27, 2023 /PressCable/ —

While the holiday season can be challenging for many, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International warns of increasing efforts within the mental health industry, to convince people troubled by the festive months to take psychotropic drugs. CCHR has documented how this can exacerbate people’s problems, as they are led to believe sadness is a mental “disease” requiring “medication” that is mind-altering and potentially harmful. CCHR said it is thankful for those researchers, doctors and media raising awareness about the risks associated with drugs like antidepressants prescribed as a solution to seasonal blues.

Psychiatric Times once blamed “the blues” relating to Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year on the “annual rite for media outlets to warn of the peculiar mental health dangers posed by the holidays.” However, media portrays these concerns as legitimate “disorders” without knowing their origin. In 1955, James P. Cattell, a Harvard- and Columbia-trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, coined the term “the holiday syndrome,” describing it as a reaction in some patients that manifests itself beginning around Thanksgiving and ending a few days after January 1st.

However, as with all of the mental disorders in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), CCHR adds this was not based on physical science, or any medical test confirming the condition.

Dr. Jeffrey Schaler, a psychologist and retired professor of justice, law, and society at American University, says, “Many people believe that once a doctor says that behavior is diagnosable, they’ve discovered something that characterizes the behavior as a disease or as stemming from a disease.” However, “We cannot find any biological marker that is correlated consistently with abnormal behavior called ‘mental illness.’ We can’t. It doesn’t exist.”

Dr. Toby Watson, a clinical psychologist supports this, stating: “There’s no biological test or scan that can be given to any individual to match up with a [psychiatric] diagnosis.”

CCHR notes that if an oncologist diagnosed patients with cancer and gave them multiple rounds of toxic chemicals without doing a single test, this would arguably constitute malpractice and fraud.

Telling someone that their seasonal upsets are biologically based diseases is a form of malpractice, CCHR says. It points to the ground-breaking study from the University of London last year that showed the decades-old psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry theory that a chemical imbalance causes depression—and by extension seasonal blues and anxieties—was fabricated.

Researchers Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz reported: “The idea was endorsed by official institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association,” which told the public that “differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.” People accepted what they were told. “And many started taking antidepressants because they believed they had something wrong with their brain that required an antidepressant to put right.” In fact, “our study shows that this view is not supported by scientific evidence. It also calls into question the basis for the use of antidepressants.”[1]

Yet, between October to December 2022, 22 million antidepressants were prescribed to an estimated 6.6 million identified patients in the UK, where the study was published.[2]

Many studies have shown that antidepressants are barely more effective at improving mood than placebo, giving false assurances to consumers that these are improving their “disorder.” The so-called improvement is so small that some scientists argue it’s non-existent. A large-scale meta-analysis in the British Medical Journal, considering data from 232 studies of antidepressant use dating back to 1979, showed that 85% gained no benefit from their use.[3]

International psychopharmacology expert, Prof David Healy, says the prescription of antidepressants to teenagers, for example, is doing more harm than good. He told a global health conference that in 29 pediatric clinical trials of antidepressants, every single one failed to produce an obvious benefit: “At the same time, in every single one of these trials it has produced more harms than benefits in the sense that it has made children become suicidal who wouldn’t have become suicidal if they hadn't been put on these drugs.” Additionally, “We have a situation where if you are following the evidence no-one should be using these drugs.”[4]

And yet antidepressants and other psychotropics are extensively prescribed, despite potential damage. In the U.S., there are 76.9 million people taking psychiatric drugs.[5] Notably, over 45.2 million individuals are prescribed antidepressants, with a concerning 5.7 million falling within the age group of up to 24 years old—a demographic that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identifies as being at a heightened risk of suicide associated with these medications.

In an article published in the Journal of Addictive Disorders and Mental Health, Jose Luis Turabian, a professor of medicine at Complutense University in Spain, says drugs alter “neurobiology, causing sometimes permanent and irreversible changes. He argues that these changes can turn what may have been transient symptoms into chronic, and in some cases, lifelong, mental illness. By using psychotropics to treat symptoms and alleviate acute short-term suffering, practitioners may be paradoxically increasing the duration of suffering.”

Turabian further writes that “psychotropic drugs cause permanent biological changes that can structure and chronify [transition from acute to chronic] mental illnesses that would have evolved towards improvement without psychotropic drugs.”[6] The drugs “change thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that over time become structural and permanent.”[7]

Some of the documented side effects of psychiatric drugs include heart problems, cardiovascular problems, stroke, agitation, hostility, aggression, and suicidal or violent behaviors.[8]

CCHR says that if an individual experiences seasonal blues it does not mean that they are “diseased,” requiring powerful mind-altering drugs. Dr. Watson says, “Calling mental disorders or difficulties of life a mental disease happens every day and it’s fraud every day….”

CCHR urges people to avail themselves of its psychiatric drugs side effects database online to get the facts about adverse drug reactions taken from 409 drug regulatory agency warnings, 553 studies, and over 400,000 adverse reaction reports filed with the FDA.

[1] economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/keep-the-antidepressants-away-new-study-says-chemical-imbalance-in-brain-isnt-causing-depression/articleshow/93029558.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

[2] nhsbsa-opendata.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/mumh/mumh_quarterly_dec22_v001.html

[3] www.zerohedge.com/political/new-brave-new-world

[4] www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-42917452

[5] www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/people-taking-psychiatric-drugs/

[6] www.madinamerica.com/2021/12/overuse-psychiatric-drugs-worsening-public-mental-health-doctor-argues/

[7] www.researchgate.net/publication/357029022_Psychotropic_Drugs_Originate_Permanent_Biological_Changes_that_go_Against_of_Resolution_of_Mental_Health_Problems_A_View_from_the_General_Medicine

[8] www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/

Contact Info:
Name: Amber Rauscher
Email: Send Email
Organization: Citizens Commission on Human Rights International
Address: 6616 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90028, United States
Phone: +1-323-467-4242
Website: https://www.cchrint.org

Source: PressCable

Release ID: 89114068

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