posted March 07, 2008 08:57 PM         

(NaturalNews) A new law being considered in the U.S. Congress would attempt to prevent postpartum depression in new moms by drugging them with SSRI antidepressant drugs while they're still pregnant. This legislation is being aggressively pushed by pro-pharma front groups in an effort to expand the customer base for SSRI drugs by targeting pregnant women as new "customers" for the chemicals. It's an example of the latest insanity from Big Pharma, whose drugs are already killing over 100,000 Americans each year while inciting violence and suicides in teens. Every single shooting massacre we've seen in the last ten years has been carried out by a person taking SSRI antidepressant drugs. The mainstream media pays no attention to this link, and the FDA ignores the reports in order to keep these drugs on the market.

SSRI drugs have never been approved for use on newborns, yet this new MOTHERS Act will effectively drug unborn babies and newborns with drugs like Prozac. This will certainly have an impact on their developing brains, and the bulk of the research available today shows that the impact will be negative. Will these children be more prone to violent thoughts and behavior? Will they contemplate suicide at younger ages? And what will be the impact of the drugs on the mother?

For one mother who was drugged with antidepressants -- Amy Philo -- the drugs caused her to experience thoughts of violence against her own newborn babies. After taking antidepressants prescribed by her doctor, she had visions of killing them (and herself). Upon returning to her doctor, Amy was told to increase the dosage! Eventually, Amy realized the drugs were wrecking her own brain chemistry, and she stopped taking the pills entirely, causing the thoughts of violence and suicide to subside.

Rest of article here: http://www.naturalnews.com/022789.html

This is insane!! SSRI’s worked so well for Andrea Yates that they want to give them to every mother with postpartum depression????

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“TIME-OUT” FOR ANTIDEPRESSANT DRUGS

Andrea Yates, the Houston mother recently sentenced to life in prison for drowning her five children in the bathtub, has become the latest horror story in an alarming string of domestic atrocities occurring in the wake of mental health drug treatment. From the killer kids of Columbine, to the sickies of Springfield, Oregon, and Santee, California, to U.S. Capitol cop-killer, Russell Eugene Weston, runs an almost predictable pattern of antidepressant drug treatment (sometimes coupled with other psychiatric drugs intended to counter the side-effects of the first or to deal with other alleged mental illnesses), followed by loss of impulse control.

Maybe I’m missing the finer points of Mrs. Yates’ preparation for trial, but does this make sense? Here’s a woman who methodically drowned all five of her children, so doctors give her megadoses of psychiatric drugs until she is sane enough to stand trial for murders she committed while on megadoses of psychiatric drugs? If she’s “sane” now, on the new drug regimen, how was anyone to know whether she was sane then on the old drug regimen?

I mean, doesn’t this bring criminal justice to a whole new level? If someone does something illegal — anything at all, like speeding — while taking a prescription, psychotropic drug, couldn’t lawyers just argue that, well, this person was prescribed thus-and-such drug by a doctor, and if the judge will simply order a revised drug regimen, the accused would be happy to drive down the same street again, at the posted speed limit.

Of course, Mrs. Yates was said to be suffering from a particularly severe form of post-partum depression. Some hypothesized that her husband was partly to blame by keeping his wife continually pregnant, resulting in physical and emotional exhaustion. Others presumed some causal link between the “social isolation of home-schooling” and the simultaneous stress of infant care. Yet I could find no recorded incident of this magnitude in the days before birth control, modern anesthetics, and “opportunities” for women — when large families, long hours, and few amenities were the norm. Given the money the Yates family spent on mental health treatment, including on psychiatrist Muhammad Saaed and the various drugs prescribed over the years, Mrs. Yates could have hired some help at home. She could have had her “tubes tied” — a simple out-patient procedure — had she been desperate to avoid further pregnancies. But by all accounts, she loved her children and her husband dearly. Something else had to be going on.

There has been a shift in the ethical winds in the field of medicine. In particular, psychotropic drugs do not appear to be held to the same standard as other medications. Whether this is due to profiteering by drug manufacturers or whether people have been so taken in by promise of feel-good medications and insist upon having them is unclear. What is clear is that the safety criteria for mental-health products are not as rigorous as for those aimed at physical well-being, like antibiotics and pain-killers.

Fifteen years ago, I got a prescription pain-killer called Zomax following dental surgery.It stopped the throbbing immediately; didn’t make me sleepy, “spacey,” or nauseous; and wasn’t habit-forming. Two years later, I was under the knife again for an abscessed tooth. I expected another Zomax prescription. I was told it had been pulled from the market. The substitute medication I was given not only didn’t work but made me sick. Pacing the floor with a throbbing jaw, I was furious. Why did a perfectly good drug get pulled?

One person apparently had died from it, my dentist said.

“One person?” I spat. “One person, and a drug line gets pulled?” That seemed a huge overreaction, until I thought about it. I guess that’s why we have a Food and Drug Administration. Only in America would the death of one person warrant rethinking an entire product line — except in the case of psychotropic drugs.

Of course, one expects individual (“idiosyncratic”) reactions to most drugs. But when the brain is the target of treatment, not only is the patient at risk of adverse reactions, so is society.

There are two schools of thought concerning the use of legal psychotropic drugs. One, from the mental health industry, insists that troubled individuals who see a psychiatrist and are prescribed drugs simply evidence their need of them. The failure of the substances in question to control violent impulses is viewed not as a failure of the drugs per se but as a failure of society to impose mandatory early-detection programs — for example, post-natal counseling for new mothers and behavioral screening for schoolchildren — the way schools and insurance companies demand physical examinations.

An opposing view — increasingly prevalent among pediatricians, neurologists, nutritionists and allergists — is that mood-altering drugs are insufficiently tested and so unpredictable that they can push even normal adults over the edge, not to mention troubled individuals and children. These experts complain of pressure to attribute the physical complaints of patients to mental causes whenever a diagnosis is elusive, time-consuming, or costly.

Rest of article here: http://www.chelationtherapyonline.com/anatomy/p24.htm

Email your Senator or Representative easily here, just enter your zip code to get a link to their web form: http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt

posted March 08, 2008 03:32 PM         

It seems governments everywhere are pliant and willing puppets in the hands of the powerful drug lobby -- Money Talks, all over the world.....
And the people continue to die for the pharmaceuticals' greed.....