Psychiatric Drugs Kill 500K Western Adults Every Year, Study

Psychiatric drugs, whose benefits are "minimal" and "vastly overrated", are killing more than 500,000 elderly citizens above 65, said a Danish scientist, according to rt.

The research director at Denmark's Nordic Cochrane Centre, Professor Peter Gøtzsche, pointed out that most of the antidepressants and dementia drugs can be stopped immediately, without harming patients in any way.

The article was published in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday.

Even though the issue is debatable, antipsychotic drugs have been "overprescribed" to dementia patients in order to calm them down.

Gøtzsche warned: "Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal. Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm."

Gøtzsche, who is also a clinical trials expert, is convinced that the experiments conducted and funded by pharmaceutical giants give lopsided results, because "many patients took other medication prior to the tests".

At first, patients stop the older drugs and then go through one period of withdrawal before taking trial pharmaceuticals, which seem beneficial in the beginning, but could be harmful later.

Drugs which are at first found to be "safe" wonder drugs, create harmful side effects, including addiction and withdrawal symptoms. The drugs can also cause brain dysfunction, according to encognitive.

In fact, there has even been a studied link between drugs and violence, according to thenewamerican. "In virtually every mass school shooting during the past 15 years, the shooter has been on or in withdrawal from psychiatric drugs," observed Lawrence Hunter of the Social Security Institute. "Yet, federal and state governments continue to ignore the connection between psychiatric drugs and murderous violence..."

The Danish professor says that "fatalities from suicides in clinical trials are significantly under-reported". For many kinds of drugs, "short-term relief" is overtaken by the "long term harm."

"Animal studies strongly suggest that these drugs can produce brain damage, which is probably the case for all psychotropic drugs," he said.

"Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm - by dropping all antidepressants, ADHD drugs and dementia drugs ... and using only a fraction of the antipsychotics and benzodiazepines we currently use. This would lead to healthier and more long-lived populations."

Hence, they are "immensely harmful" if used for prolonged periods. They should almost exclusively be used in acute situations and always with a firm plan for tapering off, which can be difficult for many patients," he adds.

In the debate published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Gøtzsche's arguments are contradicted by Professor of Mood Disorders Allan Young and John Crace, who argue that the drugs are useful.

"For some critics, the onus often seems to be on the drug needing to prove innocence from causing harm rather than a balanced approach to evaluating the available evidence," they write." Whether concerns are genuine or an expression of prejudice is not clear, but over time many concerns have been found to be overinflated."