The General Who Went to War On Suicide

On the evening of July 19, 2010, Major General Dana Pittard, the new commander of Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, got a call from the base’s 24-hour duty officer. A SWAT team had been sent to the house of a young sergeant named Robert Nichols. Nichols was inside with a gun, threatening to kill himself.

Pittard arrived at the soldier’s home just in time to see the soldier step out of the house, put the gun to his chest and fire. Neighbors and police crowded the street, but Pittard was the only officer from the Army base at the scene. He went home, where his boxes were still packed from his move 10 days before, feeling disturbed and helpless.

Health Canada brushes off reports of serious side effects

A Bolton teen hanged himself from a tree four days after he started taking Cipralex, an antidepressant. His mother went online and filed a side-effect report to Health Canada.

A pediatrician, troubled by the spate of side effects he was seeing in kids taking a generic version of an ADHD medication, faxed 25 reports to Health Canada over two months.

After a 49-year-old York Region man killed himself while taking smoking-cessation drug Champix, his sister called in a side-effect report to Health Canada.

All three say their reports were ignored.

Ottawa keeps ADHD reports secret

Health Canada has detailed records of probes into ADHD drug safety, including fatalities, that it is keeping secret from the public.

Every six months to a year, drug companies submit summaries of side effects suspected to have been caused by their drugs worldwide, information Health Canada says it evaluates.

These summaries, called periodic safety update reports, are not available to the public.

“They may contain personal or confidential business information,” Health Canada said in an email to the Star.

Leona Aglukkaq defends Health Canada over concerns about side effects of ADHD drugs

OTTAWA—Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq is defending Health Canada in the wake of a Star investigation that found children on attention deficit drugs may be suffering worrisome side effects.

Aglukkaq signalled no plans to change procedures, despite a chorus of concerns that Canadians need to be better informed about reports of side effects suspected to have been caused by their prescription drugs.

Instead, she says parents worried about the potential side effects attention deficit drugs have on their children should be talking more to their doctors and checking Health Canada’s website.

Troubling news on attention-deficit medication for young people

Just a few days ago the issue of psychiatric drugs being prescribed to kids having trouble concentrating in class arose in a private conversation I had with friends of high school-aged children. This morning the sorts of troubling questions we talked about were on the front on my morning Ottawa Citizen and an opinion piece prominently featured in the Sunday New York Times.

The Citizen’s story, by health reporter Sharon Kirkey, reported on a Canadian Journal of Psychiatry study that showed a dramatic increase in the prescribing of the latest generation of antipsychotic drugs to kids in Manitoba, a trend the researchers suspect is happening across the country. Most troubling is the finding that doctors are resorting to drugs to treat conditions for which they are not even approved by Health Canada. The scale is disturbing:

“Researchers looked at the number of prescriptions for antipsychotics dispensed for those aged 18 and younger between 1998 and 2008,” Kirkey writes of the Manitoba study. “Overall, antipsychotic use increased from 1.9 per 1,000 in 1999, to 7.4 per 1,000 in 2008. The total number of prescriptions for the newer antipsychotics also increased significantly, from 2,746 in 1999, to 21,320 in 2008.”

In the Times, L. Alan Sroufe,  professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, points to reasons doctors might be so inclined to try putting kids on drugs—and on why this tendency to prescribe isn’t, in the long run, good medicine. He cites finding published in 2009 from a study that had been going on for more than a decade:

“The study randomly assigned almost 600 children with attention problems to four treatment conditions,” Sroufe writes. “Some received medication alone, some cognitive-behavior therapy alone, some medication plus therapy, and some were in a community-care control group that received no systematic treatment. At first this study suggested that medication, or medication plus therapy, produced the best results. However, after three years, these effects had faded, and by eight years there was no evidence that medication produced any academic or behavioral benefits.”

Parents and teachers in my circle, and I suspect across the continent, will find these stories deeply unsettling. It’s not the first time these concerns have been brought to light, but clearly the healing professions and health policy leaders need to take a closer, critical look at what’s going on.

Original Article
Source: macleans 
Author: John Geddes 

Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction, Attention Deficit Disorder and the Destruction of American Childhood

A Democracy Now! special with the Canadian physician and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté. From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Dr. Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing.

Video