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ET VAKKERT SINN A BEAUTIFUL MIND Suksessfilmen ET VAKKERT SINN går nå på kino. Den er absolutt verdt å se. Den handler om nobelsprisvinneren John Nash og hans schizofreni. Det er likevel sneket seg inn en alvorlig feil eller forfalskning. Det er grunn til å undre seg over hvorfor og hvordan? Filmen gir et sterkt inntryikk av at Nash's helbredelse kunne skje takket være nyere medisiner - nevroleptika - anti-psykotiske piller.. Sannheten er tvert imot at Nash nektet å ta medisiner. Psykiateren Barry Duncan (PhD) forfatter av boken "The Heroic Client" sier at filmen kan skade mennesker som har diagnoser på psykiske lidelser. . Robert Whitaker skriver i USA Today (4.3.02) at hans helbredelse kunne sees i sammenheng med at han nektet å ta nevroleptika. Både Nash og forfatteren av hans biografi har bekreftet at dette med at han tok medisiner er ren fantasi. Nash selv undrer seg over hvorfor og hvordan dette kan ha sneket seg inn i filmen. Filmen bygger løselig på biografien til Sylvia Nasar. Men ifølge boken sluttet Nash med medisiner i 1970. (Nobels pris i 1994) Naser sier at medisiner trolig ville umuliggjort at Nash kunne vende tilbake til et normalt liv og funksjonere optimalt. Selv WHO (Verdens Helseorganisasjon) har igjen og igjen funnet at helbredelsesraten for schizofreni er langt større i fattige land, hvor det ikke brukes medikamenter, enn i vestlige land. WHO sier at hvis en bor i et vestlig land er det "a strong predictor" - en sterk indikator eller bestemmende faktor på at pasienten aldri vil bli frisk. Med disse opplysningene i bakhodet anbefales filmen på det beste - aller varmeste. Terningkast 6. Det er alminnelig enighet både blant tilhengere og motstandere av nevroleptika at det er svært utilrådelig å slutte med medisiner på egenhånd. Det må gjøres i samråd med lege. Tore Lende
22. mars. 2002
Tore Lende. Rishagen 12, 4321 Sandnes
Psykiatriens
livstidsdom. Av spesialist i klinisk psykologi Reidun Ueland
NY
16.10.03
Hvis dette interesserer deg, se også Arnhilds gripende historie om hvordan hun ble frisk fra schizofreni http://www.lende.no/frisk Innleggelse
gjør meg sykere (Aftenbladet 23.11.04 )
Dagbladet 25.03.02 Titusener av gamle
dopes ned helt unødvendig viser undersøkelse av sykehjem
i Bergen: http://www.dagbladet.no/print/?/nyheter/2002/03/25/321263.html
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2002 2:09 AM
Universal Studios
Dear Julie Brantley, I am informed by David Oaks of Support Coalition International, in the following public statement, of a call for an apology and clarification over the false portrayal in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" of John Nash's recovery being linked to taking "newer medications" at the time he received his Nobel Prize, when infact he had been drug free since 1970 and recovered without any psychiatric drugs. I would like to see Universal Studios publish a pamplet to be given to every movie goer correcting this distortion of facts as well as a correction statement added to the begining trailers on the movie screen. Please let me know what your intentions are for correcting this, soonest. Regards
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PUBLIC STATEMENT - March 6, 2002 From: Support Coalition International To: Universal Studios, Imagine, and
The film "A Beautiful Mind" has an ugly distortion: Author Robert Whitaker revealed in a USA Today commentary on March 4th that John Nash's recovery was linked to his refsual to take psychiatric drugs called "neuroleptics." [See copy of Whitaker's column below.] Apparently bowing to political correctness, the filmmakers instead had Nash claim he was taking "newer medications" at the time he received his Nobel Prize. John Nash and his > biographer have confirmed this statement is fictitious. Nash was drug free. This film is helping millions admire the resilience of psychiatric survivors. But this film also seriuosly misleads the public. The fact is, many people -- like Nash -- recover without taking psychiatric drugs. By caving in to pressure, the film > has become an advertisement for the psychiatric drug industry. Nash himself wonders if the fact that one of the film's writers is related to a psychiatric professional played a role in this distortion. This film says it was inspired by Nash's life. But it dishonors his hard won victory. On behalf of 100 grassroots groups advocating for the human rights of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, we request that Universal, Imagine and DreamWorks Pictures issue a public statement of apology and > clarification about this distortion. Sincerely, David Oaks, Director
-end - USA Today_ March 4, 2002 Page 13A Mind drugs may hinder recovery By Robert Whitaker The movie A Beautiful Mind, nominated
for eight Academy Awards, has brought welcome attention to the fact
that people can and do recover from schizophrenia, a severely
disabling > disorder that affects about one in 100 Americans. Unfortunately,
the film fabricates a critical detail of John Nash's recovery
and in so doing, obscures a question that should concern us
all: Do the medications we use to
In the movie, Nash -- just before he receives a Nobel Prize -- speaks of taking ''newer medications.'' The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill > has praised the film's director, Ron > Howard, for showing the ''vital role of medication'' in Nash's recovery. But as Sylvia Nasar notes in her biography of Nash, on which the movie is loosely based, this brilliant mathematician stopped taking anti-psychotic drugs in 1970 and slowly recovered over two decades. Nasar concluded that Nash's refusal to take drugs ''may have been fortunate'' because their deleterious effects ''would have made his gentle re-entry into the world of mathematics a near impossibility.'' His is just one of many such cases. Most Americans are unaware that the World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly found that long-term schizophrenia outcomes are much worse in the USA and other ''developed'' countries than in poor ones such as India and Nigeria, where relatively few patients are on anti-psychotic medications. In ''undeveloped'' countries, nearly two-thirds of schizophrenia patients are doing fairly well five years after initial diagnosis; about 40% have basically recovered. But in the USA and other developed countries, most patients become chronically ill. The outcome differences are so marked that WHO concluded that living in a developed country is a ''strong predictor'' that a patient never will fully recover. Myth of medication There is more. In 1987, psychologist
Courtenay Harding reported that a third of chronic schizophrenia
patients released from Vermont State Hospital in > the late 1950s
completely recovered.
In 1994, Harvard Medical School researchers found that outcomes for U.S. schizophrenia patients had worsened during the past 20 years and were now no better than they were 100 years earlier, when therapy involved plunking patients into bathtubs for hours. And in 1998, University of Pennsylvania investigators reported that standard anti-psychotic medications cause a specific area of the brain to become abnormally enlarged and that this drug-induced enlargement is associated with a worsening of symptoms. Comprehensive care succeeds All of this has led a few European physicians to explore non-drug alternatives. In Finland, doctors treat newly diagnosed schizophrenia patients with comprehensive care: counseling, social-support services and the selective use of anti-psychotic medications. Some patients do better on low doses of medication, and some without it. And they report great results: A majority of patients remain free of psychotic symptoms for extended periods and hold down jobs. John Nash's recovery from schizophrenia is a moving story. But we are not well served when the movie fibs about the anti-psychotic drugs' role in his recovery. If anything, his story should inspire us to reconsider anti-psychotics' long-term efficacy with an honest, open mind. That would be a first step toward reforming our care -- and if there is one thing we can conclude from the WHO studies, it is that reform is vitally needed. Perhaps then we could even hope that schizophrenia outcomes in this country would improve to the point that they were equal to those in poor countries such as India and Nigeria. Robert Whitaker is the author of
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and
- end -
To get a copy of Mad in America,
plug the
http://www.mindfreedom.org/madmarket/
Does
Drug Company Marketing Now
By Barry Duncan, PhD, Author
of
Have pharmaceutical companies learned that product placement in high grossing movies is an excellent way to influence public opinion? Have drug company advertising execs watched too many einiken/Swordfish commercials? Consider the high profile and now Oscar nominated film "A Beautiful Mind." In the film, the mathematical genius John F. Nash played by Russell Crowe says, "I take the newer antipsychotics. They don't cure me, but they help." This is a totally fictionalized statement; By all accounts, Nash took no antipsychotic medication after 1970. This of course predates the so-called > "newer antipsychotics" by some 20 plus > years. Consider the following corroborations of the fact that Nash did not take these drugs: 1. Sylvia Nasar in her award winning biography of Nash, "A Beautiful Mind," writes on page 353, "Nash's refusal to take the antipsychotic drugs after 1970, and indeed during most of the > periods when he wasn't in the hospital during the 1960s, may have been fortunate." 2. Sylvia Nasar, once again, in a
1994 article (The New York Times, Sunday, November 13, pp. 3, 8),
"The Lost Years of a Nobel Laureate" reports the impressions
of arguably the two most
3. John Hoey, MD, in the article,
"The Peculiar Genius of John Nash" published in the Canadian
Medical Association Journal in 1999 (160:870) said, "How to > account
for this spontaneous
4. And John Nash's own words in his
1994 autobiography on the Nobel Prize Website: http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html
5. Finally, in a recent (February,
2002) phone interview, Nash was questioned about the impression the
movie gave that his recovery was due to the newer medications. He
was asked
It is not coincidental that many articles and reviews of the movie close with information about the newer antipsychotics, commenting on their less serious side effects than the older varieties like Thorazine. For example, consider this excerpt from the _Seattle Times_ (February 3, 2002): "Nash's approach came at a time when the pharmaceutical industry was coming out with more effective drugs whose side effects were milder than those he had initially been placed on. Today, there have been major advances, and mental health experts say newer anti-psychotics such as Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon do not have the debilitating side effects of some of the older drugs." Setting aside the questionable scientific veracity of those marketing statements (new drugs always promise more effectiveness and less side effects only to be shown later to be comparable to their predecessors, e.g., tricyclic antidepressants v. SSRIs), the process through which one man's story of courage and determination fueled by hope and the love of his partner is channeled toward the marketing of "modern medical breakthroughs" is both remarkable and curious. The justification that will be given
for the fabricated line in the script will be fear of giving the
"wrong message" about recovery from schizophrenia. "Experts"
will say that cure without drugs is very rare and could give
those suffering and their families a false hope that something
other than drugs can help them. However, it is not rare at all.
Longitudinal studies show that many actually share Nash's story and
reclaim their lives with community support and the love of
family and friends. This "right" message is particularly ironic
because Nash actually had to escape treatment and psychiatry before
making
Barry Duncan, PhD <Barrylduncan@cs.com> - end -
To get a copy of "The Heroic Client,"
plug the
http://www.mindfreedom.org/madmarket/ You are encouraged to forward this
NEWS RELEASE
For more information: David Oaks, Director
email: oaks@mindfreedom.org
Win human rights in the mental health
system!
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NEWS RELEASE - March 5, 2002
IN THE SIX MONTHS SINCE 9/11, THE PSYCHIATRIC DRUG INDUSTRY CASHES IN AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION'S NEWSPAPER REPORTS THAT DRUG COMPANIES VASTLY INCREASED ADVERTISING & SALES AFTER 9/11 HUMAN
RIGHTS GROUP ASKS FDA TO "STOP THE DRUG COMPANIES FROM
NEW YORK CITY - It's been six months
since 9/11... and the drug companies are creating new victims of the disaster,
says a human rights group. Immediately after the atrocities of 9/11,
the psychiatric drug industry swung into action, saturating the
market with ads for their common "anti-depressant" psychiatric drugs...
and boosting their income. Critics of the psychiatric drug
industry claim the advertising seriously misleads a public left
vulnerable by the trauma of 9/11. David Oaks, president of Support
Coalition International, especially picked Pfizer for criticism:
"Here is drug company based in New York City itself, but after 9/11
they vastly increased their ads for Zoloft, lying to the public
about the mechanism and dangers of their products. The FDA
should pull these Pfizer ads now." In their TV & web ads, Pfizer
claims Zoloft "corrects a chemical imbalance"... though no
such imbalance has ever been proven:
http://www.zoloft.com/
Pfizer also assures the public that Zoloft is "not habit-forming,"
even though researchers are familiar with a common "discontinuation
syndrome" when subjects try to quit SSRI-type anti-depressants. "Pfizer
is playing word games," said Oaks. "Pfizer claims a drug is abit-forming
only when there's craving... but there are other > types of dependency
and addiction." The American Psychiatric Association's own newspaper,
_Psychiatric News_,> noted that the rapid inrease advertising and
income in the psychiatric drug > industry came at the same time researchers
showed there are few differences between the products advertised
(see BELOW). - end -
Psychiatric
News March 1, 2002
Jim Rosack September 11, pharmaceutical companies drastically increased their expenditures for television advertising of antidepressants and prescription sleep aids. The increased advertising came at the same time as a new head-to-head comparison of the top three SSRI antidepressants raised serious questions about the grounds on which the drugs' manufacturers rest their marketing assertions [see story on AT BOTTOM]. According to data compiled by Nielsen >
Media Research, the independent media research company best known
for its television ratings, pharmaceutical commercials increased
dramatically in the weeks after September 11. GlaxoSmithKline,
maker of Paxil (paroxetine)--generally considered to be the
market sales leader among SSRIs--spent a whopping $16.5 million
on television ads promoting the drug
To bolster sales after the events of September 11, Lilly spent just over $2 million on television ads during > October 2001. Comparative figures for > Lilly's promotion of Prozac and Prozac > Weekly during October 2000 were not > available. Sleep Medications Companies manufacturing medications to promote sleep also increased their advertising spending after September 11. The leading prescription sleeping aid, Ambien (zolpidem), made by G.D. Searle and Co., was heavily advertised in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. The company spent just under > $5 million on television ads during > October 2001, about three times the $1.7 million it spent during the same month a year earlier. With the four products being advertised to the tune of $28.6 million during the month of October 2001 alone, many > critics of the pharmaceutical industry believe that the expensive promotional budgets only lead to higher prices for medications. Whether that is true will continue to be debated, but few doubt the effectiveness of the advertising. Total Drug Sales According to NDCHealth, an Atlanta-based independent research firm that tracks prescription data, total sales of the three brand-name SSRIs amounted to $499.6 million during the month of October 2001--an increase of 19 percent over a year earlier. If sales of generic fluoxetine are added to those of the brand, that figure increases to just over $650 million. In only its third month of sales, generic fluoxetine racked up $154 million in October 2001 compared with Prozac's $71 million. A year earlier, just under $200 million worth of Prozac was sold during the month of October, making it the market sales leader at the time. With the clinical and research community continuing to group all SSRIs into one general category, with each drug being relatively equivalent in efficacy and safety, the pharmaceutical companies are pressed even harder to differentiate their own brand names in the consumer's minds. Even though that is an expensive proposition, it appears, according to the marketing data, that they are willing to foot the bill. http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/37/5/
Psychiatric News March 1, 2002 Volume 37 Number 5 Page 25
Clinical & Research News
Jim Rosack The three most popular SSRIs went head to head in an industry-funded study of > depression treatment in primary care.> The surprise: none of the three came out the winner. At a time when pharmaceutical companies are engaged in an escalating marketing campaign to distinguish their antidepressant medication from all the rest [see story above], a new large and comprehensive study has concluded that the three best-selling selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are nearly indistinguishable as first-line treatments of depression in primary care. In an attempt to study the effectiveness of SSRIs in the setting in which the vast majority of them are prescribed, a large group of primary care physicians conducted a clinical trial of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft) to look for differences in effectiveness, safety, and side-effect profile. The study's results appear in > the December 19, 2001, Journal of the > American Medical Association. The outcome appears to have surprised > the primary care physicians and, one would imagine, troubled pharmaceutical-industry marketing executives. The irony is that the study was funded by a grant from Eli Lilly and Company, maker of Prozac, one of the three SSRIs being evaluated. Lilly did not exert any > influence over the research, despite the possibility that results might not have been favorable to its product, according to sources. Kurt Kroenke, M.D., a primary care specialist and researcher at the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care in Indianapolis, led a group of collaborators at 37 clinics within two primary care research networks in the > United States. The primary care > physicians enrolled 601 patients, of whom 573 completed the study. The group compared the effectiveness of the three > SSRIs in an open-label, randomized, intention-to-treat study that would closely mirror the conditions of depression diagnosis and medication treatment in primary care settings. "This study was very appropriate from the standpoint that [primary care] is where the action is," John Greden, M.D., Rachel Upjohn professor and chair of psychiatry and clinical neurosciences at the University of Michigan, told Psychiatric News. "If we don't look at it there, then we are missing a great deal--[psychiatrists] are not seeing people until they are much worse, in > the later stages of depression." The study was designed to resemble real-world practice in that the decision to initiate antidepressant treatment was based solely on the primary care physicians' (PCP) judgment that there was clinical depression present that warranted treatment with medication. It did not require that criteria for specific diagnoses, such as dysthymia or major depression, be proven. Both the PCP and the patient knew that all subjects would receive one of the three active SSRI medications; however, neither knew which drug the patient was randomized to nor the milligram strength of the drug (relative strengths such as "low dose" or "moderate dose" were used). The physician was free to adjust dosing or change to one of the other two antidepressants based on his or her judgment of clinical response; however, medication was intended to be continued for the entire nine months of the trial. The investigators used the Medical Outcomes Study 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) Mental Component Summary (MSC) as the primary measure of > depression. Secondary measures included two SF-36 subscales that correlate highly with depression, a modified subscale of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist and Brief Symptom Inventory, and the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD), which was used to correlate retrospectively patients' symptoms with DSM-IV criteria > as well as to qualify diagnostic subgroups. Greden, chair of APA's Council on Research, noted that he would have preferred to see "a real measure of depression severity used, such as the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale or the Beck Depression Inventory." DSM-IV criteria for major depression were met in 74 percent of the sample at baseline, the researchers found, while 0 18 percent met the criteria for dysthymia and the remaining 8 percent for minor depression. "The data clearly speak for themselves," said Greden, who directs the University of Michigan's Depression Center. "And they did find that all > three medications had the same onset,> the same amount of effectiveness, and the same adverse-event profile." After three months on one of the medications, the proportion of patients in the entire sample meeting criteria for major depression dropped to 32 percent from 74 percent at the beginning of the study. By nine months, only 26 percent met the criteria for major depression. It is important to note that the study protocol did not include any provision for providing psychotherapy. "That is certainly consistent with the care delivered in such settings," Greden noted, adding that with the constraints on time and resources within primary care, psychotherapy is rarely conducted. "But the fight between psychotherapy and medication has been fought most vigorously within psychiatry itself, not in primary care," Greden added. For people with chronic depression, he said, the data are clear that the most effective treatment includes both therapy and medication. "But this study does illustrate that in a primary care setting, you can make a significant difference in depression." No statistically significant differences were reported for any of the outcome measures between the three SSRIs. The three medications studied did not differ significantly on any of the outcome measures. In addition, the number of subjects who continued to take the drug to which they were initially randomized for the duration of the nine-month trial was around half for each of the three drugs studied. The proportion of patients who > stopped taking any of the SSRIs or who > switched to another drug steadily increased over the nine months, from 13 percent at one month to over 40 percent at nine months (see chart). Again, however, no significant difference was seen among the three SSRIs when switching or stopping the medication was assessed. Reported side effects were relatively rare and did not differ by drug. Cost Implications of Findings The study demonstrates, wrote the authors, that "these three SSRIs do not differ across a wide array of psychological, social, work, and other health-related, quality-of-life domains in either the magnitude or the time course of response." They note that with generic SSRIs now becoming available, the results have "important implications for health care costs." While not all SSRIs are created equal, they concluded that "none of the three > SSRIs in this study can be recommended over another in terms of effectiveness." In an editorial accompanying the article, Gregory Simon, M.D., M.P.H., a research assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington, noted that "the fact that SSRI drugs are equally effective on average does not mean that they are equally effective for individual patients." Simon argued that the results of the
primary care study may lend credence to the push to use drug formularies
to restrict prescribing options to the lowest-cost SSRI. However,
he cautioned that physicians must retain the flexibility to
be able to switch a patient to another drug when the lowest-cost
choice is not successful. >
The Take-Home Message Greden said he was not surprised by the robustness of the response in a patient cohort in which nearly three-fourths of the subjects met the criteria for a DSM-IV diagnosis of acute major > depression at the start of treatment. "This was a primary care setting," he said. "That means that you are catching the disorder earlier in its life, when it is best treated and most responsive." Greden said the study certainly confirms that good results are possible > in treating depression in primary care settings. "And this is the message of the study that needs to be emphasized. What really counts is earlier detection, earlier intervention, and prevention of recurrences." An abstract of the study, with a link to the editorial, is posted online at http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v286n23/abs/joc10747.html http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v286n23/abs/joc10747.html
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