The pharmaceutical industry and organized psychiatry act as if the greatest challenge today is to identify new psychiatric disorders, to promote the supposedly high prevalence of existing disorders, and to find new blockbuster drugs, all the while heavily promoting current moneymakers. Even the United Nations is involved in “World Mental Health Day,” announcing that depression is a “global health crisis”:

Children throughout America are being given these drugs for everything from insomnia to ADHD. Some of these children are developing horrific side adverse effects, including gynecomastia in preadolescent boys and girls who develop breasts indistinguishable from those of adult women. Sometimes these breasts grow back after surgical removal, despite stopping the medications.

A recent blog of mine described how unethical and illegal drug company activities have driven the prescription of toxic antipsychotic drugs to children. Now the “success” of this campaign has been documented in the Archives of General Psychiatry. In a comparison between the years 1993-1998 and 2005-2009, prescriptions of antipsychotic drugs for per 100 children (0-13 years old) rose from 0.24 to 1.83. That’s more than a sevenfold increase.

Medication compliance — the patient adhering to the doctor’s prescription instructions — is an important concern in medicine. Family members are asked to be involved to make sure patients comply with taking their medications as instructed.

Johnson & Johnson, the company that makes the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, has tentatively agreed to a settlement of $2.2 billion to resolve a federal investigation into the company’s marketing practices. Although details are not fully finalized, this includes “a roughly $400 million criminal fine for the illegal promotion of the antipsychotic Risperdal,” according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s been well documented that Johnson & Johnson confidentially paid psychiatrists such as Harvard’s Joseph Biederman to promote adult drugs such as the powerful antipsychotic drug Risperdal for children. The company has even ghost-written at least one of the Harvard professor’s “scientific” articles.

As described in my previous blog, during this same period of time the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) began a lengthy investigation of Glaxo, resulting in recent civil and criminal fines of $3 billion for improper off-label marketing of the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, and Advair. (Although recording-breaking, the penalty was paltry in comparison to sales for the three drugs, with Advair by itself pulling in considerably more than twice that much per year for several years.)

In the last few years in a series of civil and criminal suits, the federal government has been hitting the pharmaceutical industry with billions in fines, often for false or misleading marketing practices. Many of these suits have involved psychiatric drugs.

Suicides and personal violence in the military have continued to escalate since some of us first began warning about these problems and their relationship to the simultaneously escalating prescription of psychiatric drugs to active duty soldiers. The Associated Press has reported:

A new study shows ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) causes brain damage? That’s not what you will find in the many promotional press releases published in the mainstream media. As usual, biopsychiatric press releases always come out before the research articles are easily available, making critical analysis impossible until the wave of false promotional euphoria has passed.