$24 million lawsuit filed in 2004 Elkhart Ciunty Jail Death of Pychiatric Patient

As seen in the South Bend Tribune, another situation where the practice of law did not mix well together.

The attorney for a Michiana family whose 22-year-old son reportedly starved to death while inside the Elkhart County Jail has filed a $24 million lawsuit against the county.

Nicholas Rice was detained inside the jail for more than a year on an attempted bank robbery charge while doctors and court officials disputed whether he was competent to stand trial. The diagnosed schizophrenic inmate was found dead in his cell Dec. 18, 2004. Autopsy reports later listed malnourishment and dehydration as factors in Rice's death.

The Tribune first reported on Nicholas Rice's case -- "Out of Sight: Mental illness and the criminal justice system" -- in a six-day series in February.

Niles-based attorney Sean Drew filed the suit last week, alleging that Rice was "denied the ultimate liberty interest of life guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment" and "subjected to inhumane treatment amounting to torture and as a result died."

Elkhart County sheriff officials did not return messages Friday and Monday seeking comment. A secretary referred all questions Monday to Elkhart County attorney Michael DeBoni. He had not returned a message or e-mail by late Monday.

The negligence suit filed in federal court names multiple defendants, including the Elkhart County Sheriff's Department, Oaklawn -- a Goshen mental health facility -- and Correctional Medical Services, a private company that provides medical services to the jail. Oaklawn communications manager Gloria Miller Holub said Monday that the company would not comment on the case.

Spokesman for Correctional Medical Services Ken Fields also said he would not comment on the pending litigation or Rice's case but did say CMS has provided services for the Elkhart County Jail for nine years and is committed to meeting the physical "and mental health care needs" of its patients.

"We are essentially dealing with a lot of patients who have serious complicated medical conditions," he said, adding that employees assess each case individually and recommend off-site specialists or hospitalization when needed.

Drew, who has worked on the Rice case for more than a year, said, "There's no comparisons. It's difficult to fathom a (regular) person in the very stressful setting, (deprived) of basic medical care, let alone a schizophrenic."

"It went on literally for 15 months."

A downhill road

Rice was arrested in Michigan in 2003 for stealing a vehicle that was later tied to an attempted bank robbery in Nappanee. Although he was found incompetent to stand trial in Michigan, Rice was later moved to Elkhart on the bank robbery charge.

In addition to allowing Rice to starve himself while inside the facility, the lawsuit accuses jail officials of withholding his medication and not protecting him from abuse.

During Rice's year and a half behind bars, he was assaulted with a broomstick by another inmate and received medical treatment for slicing his own neck open with a razor, according to the suit and jail records.

The inmate was constantly naked in his single cell, refused meals and required bathing by jail staff, records and videos show. By the time of his death, the 22-year-old had lost 50 pounds since he arrived at the facility.

Family members say they tried desperately to convince court officials how sick Rice was, enlisting outside help and providing medical records, but to no avail.

Rice was taken to a hospital emergency room on Oct. 5, 2004, after the court issued a 72-hour commitment for medical and psychiatric treatment in a secure facility.

"Patient is dying from malnourishment," jail psychiatrist Bryce Rohrer wrote in Nicholas' application for emergency detention.

A judge finally committed Rice to a state mental facility, but the inmate died in the jail while waiting for an open bed, family members say.

Father Rick Rice said Friday he wants someone to be held accountable for his son's death and he hopes the suit will bring some closure.

"Every day I still think about Nicholas," he said. "The system is broke."

The federal lawsuit was filed on Oct. 5, exactly two years from the day the emergency detention form was written foreshadowing Rice's future.

Rice's mother, Diane Waldrop, said Friday she would like her son's story to open the eyes of officials and stop another preventable death from happening.

"Hopefully this never happens again," she said, "and justice is done."

Teen Screen – Creating A Nation Of Victims

As seen in this opinion piece

It is unpopular with parents. It is being picketed. There is a petition against it. It is called Teen Screen. Its intention is to screen every American teenager for mental illness.

Teen Screen underlies the scheme to screen every American of any age for mental illness. It has its horrors, for the result of the screening is most often a prescription for mind-altering psychiatric drugs.

But a new horror surfaces. Teen Screen and its counterparts are signs of our country moving from cause to effect. "Cause" would mean creating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by positive thought and action. In other words, you make things happen. "Effect" would be having others create and control your life for you, with little liberty or happiness. In other words, things happen to you, you don't make them happen.

Let us go back a century and look at Abraham Lincoln. He was poor and underprivileged; had to walk miles to school. Check your history books. They wrote often about his "melancholy." Look at his sad face. His ambitions and incredible desire to learn might have also earned the title of "obsessive-compulsive personality." Certainly Lincoln would have been labeled "depressed" by modern day psychiatrists and given antidepressants or other mind-altering drugs.

Yet there can be no doubt of Lincoln’s leadership; his statesmanship, courage and ability. He brought a divided nation through its most trying times and delivered the potential of freedom to an entire race. He was a causative person who rose above his surroundings and even his emotions.

TeenScreen gets cooperation by the use of a shocking word - suicide. Teens are asked probing, personal questions supposedly designed to root out any signs of depression. TeenScreen questions don’t screen for abilities or causation. They are all "effect" questions. "Has there been a time when you felt you couldn't do anything well or that you weren't as good-looking or as smart as other people?" "Have you often felt very nervous when you've had to do things in front of people?" "How often did your parents get annoyed or upset with you because of the way you were feeling or acting?"

Could feelings of depression be the result of a teen’s own causation? This question is never even asked. Yet, as anyone who has ever been a teenager or raised a teenager can attest, the teenage years are the years when youth not only question authority but often go against it. They do things that violate the rules and mores they were taught. With their bodies and ideas in flux, they often go against their own best judgment – they do things just to be popular which don’t seem right to them. Commonplace is being cruel to a sibling; disrespectful to a parent; cheating at school, not doing homework, lying, and being promiscuous, even trying drugs. These things add up to lowered self esteem, stress, and depression but in today’s world are never addressed. Taking a pill will not cure one’s causation, responsibility or lack of it. Medicating our youth can only further lower their causation.

Teen Screen addresses feelings and attitudes, not the causative factor of the individual. Worse, it puts forward an "excuse" for failure and unhappiness. Today’s ads on television communicate "take this pill to be happy." Kids are "told" they are the chemical responses in their brains and if they just take a drug, they will be happy and do well.

This is a lie! We all know it. Our country was built on causation, on people rising above their ailments, their feelings, their inadequacies because they had a dream, because they believed in something. They were busy creating a better tomorrow, a better life for themselves and their offspring.

Counseling, before the advent of psychiatry, was done mainly through churches. Ministers often directed individuals to look at their lives, what they were doing that was wrong in some fashion and change it. Prayer, repentance and penance were some of their methods. These methods worked by addressing the causation of the individual.

Teen Screen asks “what inadequacy you feel you have?” It further MAKES the teen inadequate by sending him or her to a psychiatrist who prescribes a pill that further lowers ability. Drugs lower perception and ability. Don’t believe me – read the adverse effects on the labels: decreased sexual interest, feeling sick and anxious, difficulty in remembering, confusion, insomnia, indigestion, diarrhea, tremor, and drowsiness. Furthermore, the FDA Black Box warning says that antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. No Edison, Mendelsohn or Itzhak Perlman — a man disabled and crippled with plenty of reasons for failure — will come from those "helped" by psychiatric medications.

If I had my way, I would screen kids for abilities, for dreams and ambitions. Then I would help each one to achieve them. You can hardly stop a man who has a dream and works toward it. There are countless stories in history to make man proud of those who achieved wonders despite a poor upbringing or some feeling of inadequacy or momentary depression.

The future is vast and just waiting to be filled. Let it be filled by causative people who actively create a better civilization. Let’s move our kids toward cause. The future of Teen Screen and mandatory health screening of every man, woman and child is a population controlled and made effect by psychiatric drugs.

Let’s redeem our country, with its very causative roots, by banning Teen Screen and mental health screening, which validates the effect side of life, and makes people more effect. Please sign the petition and send it, causatively, to everyone you know. Then send copies of it to your local school board and officials.

Elyse Van Breemen is an author and activist, currently working on a book on psychiatric abuse. If you have a personal story to tell, please contact her at psychabuse@mailmight.com

World Mental Health Day: 'No such things as psychiatrists'

Another satire regarding modern psychiatry seen in The Spoof.

The broadly-ranging term 'psychiatrist' must be abolished as being a delusional term for a wide grouping of symptoms associated with the pharmaceutical industry's outreach workers who have been programmed to implant over-reliance on chemical solutions into the chronically intervention-dependent.

That is the main finding of the World Mental Health Day Forum which meets tomorrow amid growing media concerns that the medical profession has produced a hybrid form that stigmatises people as being violent, dangerous and untreatable.

But the announcement has been met with some skepticism by scientists who still maintain that these specialists exist in order to deal with the delusions, hallucinations and disordered perceptions of reality among their own ranks.

Their spokesman has noted today that "although the terms is scientifically meaningless, it does group together a whole range of different problems under one label", and is proven to encourage the widespread use of drastic biomedical interventions without which the pharmaceutical industry would have gone down the pan a long, long time ago.

The main thrust of the Forum's campaign will focus on the message that the obsolete term "psychiatrist" must now be acknowledged as "scientifically meaningless, clinically unhelpful and ultimately damaging to patients/customers.

"It's associations with violence, dangerousness, unpredictability, inability to recover, constant illness, constant need for medication, interminable whining and an inability to work is a profoundly stigmatising label", continued the Forum's spokeman.

"And the concept that people can be healed by licensed practitioners advocating the use of presciption medication is contentious.

"Anybody who's ever read 'Fat Freddy's Cat' in the "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers' series of ethnographs will be familiar with the universally applicable mantra:

"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope."

The notion of obsolescence will be put to a vote tomorrow at the Institute of Psychiatry which is seeking legal advice regarding to the validity of its own existence should the motion be carried successfully on the Forum's opening day.

Their Emeritius Professor of Disorderly Studies will be kicking off the day's proceedings with a debate on "How do we really know we exist?" and will be calling expert witnesses from the pharmaceutical industry to testify to its own behalf for the continuing need to hire specialist staff to create dependence zones in otherwise totally unprofitable sectors of intervention-dependent society...

Pharmaceuticals for healthy people

As published in Le Monde:

US pharmaceutical companies have long known that the potential market for their products is limited by the finite number of sick people; so they have turned to the healthy for further expansion of their markets, using exploitative, fear-inducing advertising techniques.

By Alan Cassels and Ray Moynihan

Thirty years ago the head of one of the world’s best-known drug companies, Merck, made some over-candid comments. The aggressive chief executive, Henry Gadsden, who was close to retirement at the time, told Fortune magazine of his distress that Merck’s potential markets had been limited to sick people; he said he would have preferred Merck to be more like the chewing-gum manufacturer Wrigley, because then Merck would be able to “sell to everyone”; it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. His dream has since come true.

The marketing strategies of the world’s biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy. The ups and downs of daily life have become classified as mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more people are turned into patients. The $500bn pharmaceutical industry is changing what it means to be human, with promotional campaigns that exploit our deepest fears of death, decay and disease. Rightly rewarded for saving life and reducing suffering, the global drug giants are no longer content with selling medicines only to the ill. As Wall Street knows well, there is a lot of money to be made telling healthy people that they’re sick.

At a time when many of us lead longer, healthier and more vital lives than our ancestors, saturation advertising and slick awareness-raising campaigns turn the worried well into the worried sick. Mild problems are described as serious disease, so shyness becomes a sign of “social anxiety disorder” and pre-menstrual tension is turned into a mental illness, “pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder”. Just being at risk of an illness has become a disease in its own right.

The epicentre of this selling is the United States, home to many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population but represents almost 50% of the global market in prescription drugs. Pharmaceuticals spending in the US continues to rise more rapidly than anywhere else, increasing by almost 100% in just six years, not only because of steep increases in the price of drugs, but because doctors prescribe more and more of them.

Vince Parry is the cutting edge of that global marketing. An expert in advertising who works from his mid-town Manhattan office in New York, Parry specialises in the most sophisticated form of medicine salesmanship: he works with drug companies to help create new diseases.

In an astonishing publication, The Art of Branding a Condition, he recently revealed the ways in which companies are involved in fostering the creation of medical disorders (1). Sometimes a little-known condition gets fresh attention, sometimes an old disease is redefined and renamed, and sometimes a whole new dysfunction is created. Parry’s personal favourites include erectile dysfunction, adult attention deficit disorder, and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (which is so controversial a classification that some researchers say it doesn’t exist).

Branding disease

With rare candour Parry explains how pharmaceutical companies take the lead, not just in branding such blockbuster drugs as Prozac and Viagra, but in branding the very conditions that create the markets for those drugs. Under the leadership of the drug marketers, Madison Avenue experts such as Parry collude with medical experts to “create new ideas about illnesses and conditions”. The goal, Parry says, is to give drug company customers around the world “a new way to think about things”. The aim is to make a direct link between the condition and the company’s medicine, to maximise its sales.

The idea that drug companies help to create illnesses may sound strange to the rest of us but it is familiar to industry insiders. A recent Reuters Business Insights report designed for drug company executives argued that the ability to create new disease markets is bringing in billions in soaring drug sales. One of the chief selling strategies, said the report, is to change the way people think about common ailments and to make natural processes into medical conditions. People must be convinced that “problems they may previously have accepted as, perhaps, merely an inconvenience” are now worthy of medical intervention.

Celebrating the development of profitable new disease markets, the report was upbeat about the financial future for the pharmaceutical industry: “The coming years will bear greater witness to the corporate-sponsored creation of disease.”

With many medical conditions, there is uncertainty about where to draw the line that separates the healthy from the sick. The boundaries that separate normal and abnormal are often highly elastic, they may differ dramatically from country to country, and they can change over time. Clearly, the wider the boundaries that define a disease can be drawn, the wider the pool of potential patients and therefore the bigger the markets for those making drugs.

The experts who sit down to draw those lines today often do so with drug company pens in their hands, and they are drawing the boundaries wider almost every time they meet. For example, they claim that 90% of elderly people in the US have a condition called “high blood pressure”, that almost 50% of women in the US have a sexual dysfunction called FSD, and that some 40 million US citizens should be taking drugs to lower their cholesterol. With help from headline-hungry media, the latest condition is routinely described as widespread, severe and, crucially, always treatable with drugs.

Alternative ways of understanding or treating health problems, and lower estimates of the numbers affected by those problems, are often ignored because of drug company promotions. The payment of money doesn’t necessarily buy influence, but many people believe that drug companies and doctors have become too close.

While the boundaries defining disease are pushed as wide as they can be, the causes of these supposed epidemics are defined as narrowly as possible. In the world of drug marketing, a major public health problem such as heart disease can be reduced to a narrow focus on cholesterol levels or blood pressure. The practical matter of preventing hip fractures among the elderly becomes a narrow obsession with the bone density statistics of healthy middle-aged women. Personal distress is seen as due mostly to a chemical imbalance of serotonin in the brain, an explanation that is as narrow as it is outdated.

This narrowing of focus is making it harder to see the bigger picture of health and disease, sometimes at great cost to the individual and community. If improvements in health were really our primary aim, some of the billions that are currently invested in expensive drugs to lower the cholesterol of the worried well might be far more efficiently spent on enhanced campaigns to encourage them to reduce smoking, increase physical activity and improve their diet.

Marketing fear

There are many different promotional strategies in the selling of sickness, but the common factor among them all is the marketing of fear. The fear of heart attacks (and of ageing itself) was used to sell women the idea that menopause was a medical condition requiring hormone replacement therapy. The fear of suicide among the young is used to sell parents the idea that even a mild depression in their children must be treated with powerful drugs. The fear of an early death is used to classify high cholesterol as a condition requiring a pharmaceutical prescriptions.

Yet the much-hyped medicines sometimes cause the harm they are supposed to prevent. Long-term hormone replacement therapy seemed to increase the risk of heart attacks for women, while antidepressants appear to increase the risk of suicide among the young. At least one blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug has been withdrawn from the market because it was implicated in deaths. A drug sold as a treatment for common bowel disorders led to constipation so severe that some of its users died; in this case the official government regulators were more interested in protecting drug company profits than the public’s health.

A loosening of advertising regulations in the late 1990s in the US led to unprecedented drug market advertisements that were targeted at ordinary people, who now see an average of 10 such advertisements every day. A similar deregulation in New Zealand had the same effect. Elsewhere in the world the industry is fighting for more ad deregulation.

Over three decades ago the maverick thinker Ivan Illich warned that an expanding medical establishment was medicalising life itself, undermining the human capacity to cope with the reality of suffering and death, and making too many well people into patients. He criticised a medical system “that claims authority over people who are not yet ill, people who cannot reasonably expect to get well, and those for whom doctors have no more effective treatment than that which could be offered by their uncles or aunts” (2).

A decade ago medical writer Lynn Payer described the process she called disease-mongering, in which doctors and drug companies unnecessarily widened the boundaries of illness to recruit more patients and sell more drugs (3). Her writings have become ever more relevant as the industry’s marketing roar becomes louder and its grip on the healthcare system much stronger.

Ray Moynihan is a journalist specialising in health issues in the ‘British Medical Journal’, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine; Alan Cassels is a pharmaceutical policy researcher at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This article is adapted from their book ‘Selling Sickness. How Drug Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients’ (Allen & Unwin, 2005)

(1) Vince Parry, The Art of Branding a Condition, Medical Marketing & Media, London, 2003.

(2) Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health, Marion Boyars, London, 2001.

(3) Lynn Payer, Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2002.

Drugs, Silence and Suicide

Another wasted life and tragis death associated with Psych drugs, as reported here

Drugs, Silence and Suicide
by Angela Bischoff

I lost my best friend. I’m a suicide survivor. My soul-mate of 17 years, Tooker Gomberg, suicided on March 3, 2004. My life was turned upside down — I lost my best friend and the world lost a warrior.

The pain around suicide is unfathomable, and indescribable, for those left behind, but especially for the person driven to take his/her own life. Unless you’ve been there, you just can’t know this darkest torture of the soul. I saw Tooker’s anguish, an anguish so deep and riveting that he saw no choice other than to end the suffering through death. What could possibly drive him to such despair?

Tooker Gomberg, internationally renowned environmental, peace and justice activist, gave up the ghost at age 48. He was in an excellent relationship for 17 years; he had skills and friends; he was kind, humorous, courageous, a fighter, a leader, an environmental and social justice advocate; and he had fame and respect around the world.

His first depression hit in 2001-02 following the free trade agreement protest police clamp-down and horrific mass poisoning (tear gas, etc.) in Quebec City. Tooker was discouraged and exhausted, and his depression zapped the spark out of him for nine months. He tried many holistic alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs before turning to an SSRI antidepressant drug. Nothing seemed to help but, in time, he climbed out of his despair.

When his second depression hit a year later after moving to a new city and being unemployed, he sought help through counseling and pharmaceutical drugs, partly because he was desperate, but also because that was the only option the health care system would pay for. Psychiatrists are covered and the drugs they prescribe are covered, but doctors of Naturopathic medicine aren’t, nor are Cognitive Behavioral Therapists, massage therapists or acupuncturists, etc.

Tooker’s doctor prescribed Remeron, an antidepressant drug in a class of its own, but sometimes referred to as an SNRI. His anxiety and agitation went through the roof – clearly an adverse reaction – however his psychiatrist didn’t perceive it as such, and encouraged him to stick with the program, increasing the dosage to the maximum. After just five weeks on the drug, Tooker’s agitation sent him over the railing of the MacDonald Bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He wrote in his suicide note that he was anxious, felt like a zombie and couldn’t think.

Three weeks after Tooker died, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) publicly associated antidepressant drugs with worsened depression and suicidal ideation. I was dumbfounded and immediately immersed myself in this field, reading everything I could on what had been written to corroborate this bold assertion. It became obvious to me that Tooker was most definitely affected adversely by the drug he was on.

I’m no expert. I’m not a scientist. I’m a survivor who was motivated to peek behind the corporate curtain and study what the independent experts were saying about the connection between antidepressant drugs and suicide. And what I learned astounded me.

I read the writings of two experts: Dr. David Healy from England and Dr. Peter Breggin from the U.S., both distinguished physicians of high academic standing and international credibility. Much of what they published in their books came from years in the courts as medical experts, pouring over company data made available through court injunctions previously unavailable to the public, such as unreported clinical trial data, internal memos, etc.

What I learned is that, typically, one in four patients feels worse when beginning any antidepressant drug and “drops out” or quits use of the drug within the first month; almost half quit within three months. That is to say that while antidepressant drugs may help some people, they are not reliable, not even close.

That might not be such a problem if drug companies were straight up about this, but that wouldn’t be good for sales. On the contrary, doctors are instructed, through industry propaganda, to “reduce” patient drop-out by “managing” the side effects and encouraging patients to stick with the program rather than encouraging physicians to listen to patients’ individual sensitivities. Perhaps if Tooker’s doctor had been better informed about the adverse reaction of agitation, Tooker would be alive today. Instead, his doctor repeatedly upped the dosage and prescribed a tranquilizer to calm his agitation.

Agitation is a very common side effect of antidepressant drugs, primarily during the early stages of treatment or shortly after a change in dosage (up or down). Extreme agitation is known as akathisia, an internal unrest, turmoil or torture. In clinical trials for SSRIs (the most commonly prescribed family of antidepressants), this reaction has been well-recognized and documented since the early ‘80s. Prozac’s own clinical trials, prior to its launch in 1988 and post-launch, recorded rates of agitation and akathisia from between five and 25 percent.

Conservatively speaking then, one in 20 patients becomes agitated on antidepressant drugs – five percent is a significant adverse reaction that doctors need to be informed about and need to warn patients about, but they generally don’t. The concern is that agitation is a very potent predictor of suicide and violence.

By extrapolating from clinical trial data and multiplying by numbers of users, Dr. David Healy claims that one in 500 users of antidepressant drugs will complete suicide because of the drug. That’s 100,000 tragic and unnecessary deaths. Clearly, drug companies have a lot to lose if this information becomes well understood, since there are 40 to 50 million people world wide on antidepressant drugs and the number is growing – there was an 80 percent increase in antidepressant prescriptions in Canada from 1999 to 2004.

In February 2005, an incredible study authored by Dr. Dean Fergusson was published in the British Medical Journal. Dr. Fergusson is a scientist with the Ottawa Health Research Institute and teaches in the Department of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. His meta-analysis reviewed data on 90,000 patients from some 700 clinical trials. His team found that patients are twice as likely to attempt suicide on antidepressants as on sugar pills. This result confirmed other study results of 2000 and 2001. Huh? Patients are put on antidepressant drugs to lower suicide risk, not double it!

Just how effective are antidepressants in relieving symptoms of depression? Incredibly, there is little evidence that antidepressant drugs actually produce benefits. We know that they may help some people in the short term, but over the long term we find a worsening of depression or anxiety compared to placebo-treated patients. Too often, new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself, such as drug-induced manic or psychotic attacks, which just means more drugs to counter those symptoms, and so on. For everyone helped by a drug treatment, there may be another harmed.

And then there’s the disturbing and very real issue of dependence on antidepressants. When you try to stop taking these drugs, you can suffer an emotionally-distressing withdrawal that includes “crashing” with depression, fatigue and feelings of hopelessness, and often involves painful physical symptoms such as flu-like syndrome, muscle cramps and shock-like headaches.

A causal relationship between antidepressants and suicide has been established since the early ‘80s; why did it take until 2004 before regulatory agencies requested of drug companies that they warn consumers and physicians? How many people needlessly died in that time? How many are still to die?

Light a Candle

Clearly it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. With intelligence and integrity, and with the intention of patient safety rather than profit motive, we can save lives. With compassion and skill – and a dose of generosity – each of us can reach out to those we love during their dark times. We must. It will come back to us in spades. We’re all making a difference. We all can change the world. The last word goes to Tooker: “We can do it. If we will it.”

Angela Bischoff is Tooker Gomberg’s surviving spouse. For 17 years, the two of them traveled the world, educating and advocating on environmental and justice issues. In the mid 1990s, they began contributing to Natural Life magazine. Since Tooker’s passing, Angela has been researching, writing and speaking about the dangers of anti-depressant drugs. For more information about Angela’s work, Tooker’s legacy and the relationship between antidepressants and suicide, visit the website www.greenspiration.org.

Marine Scientists Report Massive 'Dead Zones'

Are cause by accumulation of human and industrial waste products in the ocean. Why is this being reported on this website? Well, there are certain special side effects, as seen in this report

Such waste can contain high levels of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and excreted pharmaceuticals. The latter pose risks that are only beginning to be understood. Emerging research shows negative impacts on marine life from residues of birth control and antidepressant drugs like Prozac even at extremely low concentrations of less than one part per billion.

"The big unknown" is what effect these pharmaceutical residues might have on chronically exposed plants, animals and people, Christian Daughton, chief of the environmental chemistry branch at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has been reported as saying.

All this negative impact, and yet we still insist on ingesting these things into our bodies.

Ending Prozac's Secret Kick Back Program

As seen in this Australian report

Pharmacists would forgo secret kickbacks from drug companies in return for compensation costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars, under a scheme the federal Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, is believed to be considering.

Pharmacists have fought to keep the under-the-counter discounts of up to 70 per cent for dispensing some of the most lucrative prescription drugs, quadrupling profit margins approved under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

For generic versions of one cholesterol-lowering drug, for example, pharmacists can reap more than the government-approved profit of $10.74, and end up with $49.89, according to figures provided to the Herald. But it is understood Mr Abbott is considering a scheme that includes an interim plan to return to pharmacists the PBS savings from scrapping the discount deals.

The aim is to lift the secrecy cloaking the discounts drug manufacturers pay pharmacists.

This has been proposed as part of a government revamp to unlock potential savings to the PBS on generic drugs that cost significantly less overseas. The PBS sets the price the Government pays for a prescription drug, allowing pharmacists $10.74 in mark-ups and dispensing fees for a standard prescription.

Generic makers of chemically identical medicines can vie for business by offering discounts of 50-70 per cent to persuade chemists to dispense their brand.

For the generic version of the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin this can mean a 70 per cent price cut for the pharmacy, which would pay $16.78 for the drug, which is listed by the PBS at $55.93. As well as the profit margin of $39.15, they also get the $10.74 payment, increasing their profit to $49.89.

Generic versions of Fluoxetine, originally Prozac, have a PBS-approved price of $23.72 but can be sold to pharmacies for about half that.

Mr Abbott is getting heat from other ministers, including the Treasurer, Peter Costello, and the Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane, to keep the savings available from the rise of generics. Mr Macfarlane is said to be outraged at the kickbacks to pharmacists. But Mr Abbott is also under intense pressure from the influential Pharmacy Guild to protect member revenues.

Under the PBS subsidies, concession card holders pay only $4.70 for a prescription, while others pay up to $29.50. The Government pays the rest if the cost of the medicine is higher.

Critics say although the PBS has delivered universal access to modern high-cost drugs, it fails to provide real competition to keep pharmacy prices down.

Chris Bilkey, a former drug company chief executive, said there was an overwhelming need to change the PBS. Mr Bilkey was the Australian chief of the former drug giant Pharmacia and later managing director of the generic company Bellwether Pharma.

He said analyses by both companies had shown the Government was paying $500 million a year more than it needed to for generic medicines.

Yesterday Mr Abbott said he would take seriously any proposal that a reputable organisation put to the Government to offer a better deal on generic medicines.

Uphill Battle - Warning Pharma Customers about Dangers of SSRIs

We have come across another excellent article by Evelyn Pringle:

Recent concerns about the adverse effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants (SSRIs) have focused on suicide risks. However, a new study published in the September 2006 journal, Public Library of Science (PLoS), reports that in addition to self-harm, the drugs can also cause some patients to become violent and homicidal.

Professors David Healy and David Menkes from Cardiff University in Britain, and Andrew Herxheimer from the Cochrane Centre, conducted the study to determine the risk of violent behavior in people taking SSRIs.

During their investigation, the researchers reviewed all available clinical data on SSRIs and summarized a series of what they refer to as "medico-legal" cases involving patients who became violent on SSRIs in which they have given evidence.

In addition, they analyzed 1,374 emails from patients on SSRIs sent in response to a British television program on Paxil featured on Panorama.

The authors focus mostly on Paxil because they had access to more medico-legal case material for Paxil patients than other drugs and because GlaxoSmithKline recently submitted data on the rates of "hostile" events for the review of SSRIs by the British regulatory Committee on Safety of Medicines Expert Working Group.

Dr Healy is one of the world's leading authorities on SSRIs. He is the author of over 120 articles and 12 books, including, Let Them Eat Prozac, The Antidepressant Era, and The Creation of Psychopharmacology.

His expert testimony at the trial of a Wyoming lawsuit involving violence associated with Paxil in 2001, was a deciding factor in the return of a favorable verdict for the plaintiffs. The trial involved the tragic case where 60-year-old, Donald Schell, shot and killed his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself after taking Paxil for only two days.

Mr Schell's surviving family members sued Glaxo and won. Another decisive factor in the Wyoming case relevant to the results of the current study, is that the company's own internal clinical trial data revealed at trial showed that Glaxo knew prior to 1998, when the deaths occurred, that Paxil had caused some patients to become violent and suicidal.

The data included an unpublished study of incidents of serious aggression in 80 patients, 25 of which involved homicide. After weighing all the evidence, the jury said that Paxil "can cause some people to become homicidal and/or suicidal," and ordered Glaxo to pay the plaintiffs $8 million.

In the PLoS study, Dr Healy and his colleagues warn that, "The new issues highlighted by these cases need urgent examination jointly by jurists and psychiatrists in all countries where antidepressants are widely used."

However, that might be easier said than done because according to Dr Healy, "even though PLoS is braver than most journals and less influenced by industry than most, it still took close to 18 months for this article to appear."

"I have several articles that have taken this long," he reports. "The hold up," he says, "is the journal - whether PLoS or BMJ being terrified of industry and a legal action against them."

"This stands in contrast" Dr Healy points out, "to the good news about drugs which industry manages to get out rapidly in the best quality, highest impact factor journals, apparently authored by the biggest name academics in the field."

"But these articles," he advises, "are based on selected data and no-one has access to the full dataset and no-one makes a judgment based on full access."

Investigative reporter, Kelly Patricia O'Meara, author of, "Psyched Out, How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills That Kill (2006)," is also painfully aware of the difficulties involved in getting the information published about SSRIs and violence that most experts have known about for years.

"It seems to me that the "new" study is an old issue," she says. "I don't believe there is anyone remotely familiar with these drugs who wouldn't admit a strong correlation between them and violence."

"It is an issue that must be addressed," she warns, "given the numbers of violent acts that appear to be associated with their use."

"The issues the doctors raise about the medical/legal aspects," Ms O'Meara says, "are extremely pertinent."

Specifically, she notes, in recent weeks in the Washington DC area, there have been three cases reported in the Washington Post all dealing with violence/murder associated with "mental illness."

"While all three cases reportedly were receiving psychiatric care," she says, "only one of the cases mentions the use of psychotropic drugs."

"Naturally," she points out, "any progress on this will depend largely on whether the press is informed enough to even ask the question: were they on prescription mind-altering drugs?"

Dr Healy acknowledges that, "SSRIs can be very useful and there are unquestionably people who are hugely helped, but the benefits have been over-hyped," he says, "and the risks concealed and denied."

It would be helpful, he notes, to have access to all the data on the violence side effect associated with SSRIs. "Based on access to all the data in this area," he explains, "we might be able to work out if men or women are at greater risk or young or old or people being treated for anxiety rather than depression."

"Until then," he advises, "the key thing is that people being put on these pills need to be warned that they may not suit them and if they feel odd or more anxious they should either stop treatment or return to their doctor."

"The worry," Dr Healy has, "is that doctors indoctrinated by company input on this will still only see the risks from the condition being treated and faced with a patient saying they feel worse will double the dose of the treatment rather than reducing the dose or halting the treatment or switching to a different kind of treatment."

"This would be exactly the wrong thing to do if the drug is the source of the problem," he warns.

Other recognized experts on SSRIs share the same concerns. According to Dr John Abramson MD, author of Overdosed America, and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, a double standard exists in the way that information is received by physicians.

"Commercially advantageous "knowledge" travels fact and is delivered by many paths," he says, "while commercially disadvantageous information, though available sometimes in a legalistic sense, is not communicated in the way that doctors have been formally and informally trained to receive new information."

In the Paxil trials reviewed for the PLoS study, aggression and violence were coded under the term "hostility" which included homicide, homicidal acts, and homicidal ideation as well as aggressive events and conduct disorders, but no homicides were reported in the trials.

When combined, hostile events in both the adult and pediatric trials, during therapy and the 30-day tapering off phase, 60 out of 9,219 patients experienced hostile events.

The study found hostile events in excess in both adults and children, and across all indications. The hostility rates were highest among children with obsessive-compulsive disorder, where the rate of a events was 17 times greater.

In their submissions to the Committee on Safety of Medicines, Glaxo also reported clinical trials comparing 11,491 patients on Paxil and on other SSRIs, and there were 44 hostile events in patients on Paxil or other drugs.

In the trials comparing Paxil with another SSRI, there were 16 hostile events in a group of 2,418 patients. These SSRI comparator trials may be confounded by indication, the researchers note. They might, for instance, have included a higher proportion of OCD patients.

However, most noteworthy in this review, the researchers found that in healthy volunteer clinical trials that took place in the late 1980s or early 1990s, hostile events occurred in three of the 271 healthy volunteers taking Paxil, while none occurred in the 138 volunteers taking a placebo.

"Although not statistically significant," the authors point out, "this finding is striking because hostile events are unusual in healthy volunteer trials, and this figure was higher than the rate reported in clinical populations above."

Glaxo attributed these events to the fact that the volunteers were confined, although the study authors note that both the Paxil and placebo volunteers were confined.

But here again, Dr Healy acknowledged the significance of the findings in the healthy volunteer trials 6 years ago. "We can make healthy volunteers belligerent, fearful, suicidal and even pose a risk to others," he wrote in the June 2000, Primary Care Psychiatry.

"People don't care about the normal consequences as you might expect," he stated. "They're not bothered about contemplating something they would usually be scared of."

Four years later, on September 21, 2004, Dr Healy is sounding the alarm again and quoted by The Guardian, as saying, "I think there is very clear evidence for all of the SSRI group of drugs that in addition to making people suicidal, they can make people homicidal or seriously aggressive and the data have been sitting in the MHRA's files on this issue."

"It is there for children across a range of different problems," he said, "it is there for healthy volunteers and a range of adults and the MHRA has paid no heed to this."

Another recognized expert on SSRIs, Ann Blake Tracy, PhD, Executive Director, International Coalition For Drug Awareness, and author of, "Prozac: Panacea or Pandor?" has been investigating the adverse events associated with SSRIs for the better part of two decades and says that, "This study confirms all of the previous data we have on increased levels of serotonin and violence."

Ms Tracy has been working to make her findings public for the past 16 years. "This understanding that increased levels of serotonin - the exact so called "therapeutic" effect that antidepressants are designed to have," she states, "has long been associated with psychosis, mania, suicide, violent crime (including rape, arson, murder), and could have saved many, many lives in the past two decades that these drugs have been in such widespread use worldwide."

According to Ms Tracy, research has shown that impairing serotonin metabolism will produce tension and anxiety which appear from out of nowhere, depression, suicide - especially very violent suicide, hostility, violent crime, impulsive behavior with no concern for punishment, and argumentative behavior.

"How anyone ever thought it would be "therapeutic" to chemically induce these reactions is beyond me," she states. "Yet, these reactions are exactly what we have witnessed in our society over the past decade and a half as a result of the widespread use of these drugs."

She makes a very good point when she poses a thought provoking question. "Can you remember two decades ago," she asks, "when depressed people used to slip away quietly to kill themselves rather than killing everyone around them and then themselves as they do while taking SSRI antidepressants?"

In the PLoS violence study, the authors provide an excellent example of the bizarre violent murders and suicides that Ms Tracy refers to, when they discuss the 1989 case of Joseph Wesbecker who shot and killed eight people, and injured 12 others, before killing himself at his place of employment in Kentucky after taking Prozac for about four weeks.

This incident also led to a lawsuit against Prozac maker Eli Lilly. The case was tried and settled in 1994, and a number of documents about drug-induced activation were made public back then.

The cases of out of character acts of violence by persons taking SSRIs are not isolated incidents or limited to certain age groups. Delnora Duprey has observed first hand the horror that can result from prescribing SSRIs to children. She is the maternal grandmother of Christopher Pittman, who at 12-years-old was placed on Paxil and Zoloft simultaneously, and subsequently murdered his paternal grandparents by shooting them as they lay sleeping and then burning the house down.

The following morning, two hunters found young Christopher hysterical in the woods yelling and waving a loaded shotgun over his head.

Ms Duprey says that she would like to stress as a family member who has gone through a terrible tragedy due to these drugs, that she knows how they can change people. "Our Christopher went from a sweet shy good kid," she recalls, "to an angry hyper aggressive person in a very short time period."

"This was not a normal change in a personality," she states, "it was the medication."

Ms Duprey, along with every other relative, blames the SSRIs, and says that Christopher would never have murdered his grandparents because he adored them both.

"While off the medication our Chris is back," she says, "he has gotten his GED and has done very well under some rough conditions."

Christopher has remained in jail ever since the night he killed his grandparents in 2001.

He was tried as an adult, found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

At a sentencing hearing his aunt, Melinda, the daughter of the slain grandparents, begged the court to show mercy toward her nephew, stating that her parents would want the court to show mercy toward Christopher.

The South Carolina Supreme Court has opted to hear an appeal and the case is set for a hearing in October 2006.

Through their review of adverse event records in the UK, Dr Healy and his collegues found that by 2003, there were already 121 cases of aggression in patients on Paxil reported to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and furthermore, by January 2006 that number had risen to 211.

The authors specifically point out that such reporting systems estimate that doctors only report between one and ten percent of adverse effects.

The data reviewed for the study that was submitted by Pfizer on Zoloft's pediatric trials showed aggression to be the most common cause for discontinuation in the two Zoloft placebo-controlled trials in depressed children.

In the Pfizer trials, eight of 189 patients in the Zoloft group discontinued for aggression, agitation, or hyperkinesis (a coding term for akathisia), compared to no dropouts for these reasons in the group of 184 patients on a placebo.

When discontinuations were considered for any treatment-induced activation including suicidal ideation or attempts, aggression, agitation, hyperkinesis, or aggravated depression, there were 15 drop outs by patients on Zoloft and only two in the placebo group.

In the only other placebo-controlled Zoloft pediatric trial, of children with OCD, out of 92 patients on Zoloft, there were ten dropouts. Five for behavioral activation, two for agitation, one for aggression, one for nervousness, and one for emotional lability.

In comparison, in the group of 95 children taking placebos, there was one discontinuation for hyperkinesis out of two dropouts overall.

In addition, one healthy volunteer trial on Zoloft reported aggressive behavior in one volunteer.

Finally, in pediatric trials of Wyeth's Effexor, 2% of the children dropped out because of hostility, more than double the rate of children on a placebo.

The researchers also analyzed the 1,374 emails that were received by the BBC television following a program on Paxil and found that many people described emotional storms and thoughts and acts of violence or self-harm.

The analysis, they said, indicated a clear link between severe mood changes when Paxil treatment began, or later when the dosage was increased, decreased, or withdrawn.

Remarkably, the analysis found reports of violence in patients with no prior history of violent behavior. The results, the authors note, were also consistent with an analysis of reports by people on Paxil submitted to the MHRA by doctors between 1991 and 2002.

The authors say the strength of the current study showing an association between violence and SSRIs is that the data are unselected, but consistent even though it comes from a variety of sources.

"A weakness of the study," they note, "is that we have been able to include only a subset of existing data in the analysis."

"Data on aggression on other antidepressants will necessarily have been collected as part of the development programmes for these drugs," they state, "but these data are not in the public domain."

"Earlier reports have linked antidepressants to violence," they note, "but this is the first independent study to offer a quantitative analysis of the issue; no other studies exist with which our results can be compared."

By now many experts are questioning whether it can be said that the benefits of SSRIs outweigh their risks or whether they have any benefits at all. According to Dr Peter Breggin, another well-known expert on SSRIs, and author of, The Antidepressant Factbook, "study after study has confirmed that antidepressants typically perform only a little better than sugar pills."

"In some studies," he notes, "antidepressants actually turn out to be less effective than the lowly sugar pill."

He also points out that "if depression is a product of our conflicts, stressful life experiences, and stifled choices, a drug would have no direct effect on treating it."

Another expert in the field, and author of, The ADHD Fraud, Dr Fred Baughman, says, "we have the "disease-ing" of emotional and behavioral problems—of life's problems with never a mention that the causes can be found in every-day life difficulties—things people can and must be helped with."

He says when people get help in solving their work problems or marital and family problems or financial problems their "mental illness" is often gone in a day.

"The drugging psychiatry-pharmaceutical cartel," Dr Baughman warns, "is too anxious to "disease" and "disable" those with real-life problems and the emotional symptoms they beget."

Dr Healy has said that most patients diagnosed with mild or moderate depression would be better characterized as suffering from "community nervousness." And although he views the condition as a real disorder, he says that it "could be due to a host of different factors such as overwork, stress, and constitutional deficits. But clinicians everywhere are diagnosing depression because that's what they have a treatment for."

"The Prozac story," he writes in the book, "Let Them Eat Prozac," is one of a "wholesale creation of depression on so extraordinary and unwarranted a scale as to raise grave questions about whether pharmaceutical and other health care companies are more wedded to making profits from health than contributing to it."

SSRI Legal Help

If you or your child has experienced suicide ideation or violent behavior while taking Paxil, please send your [Paxil] or [SSRI] complaint to a lawyer for a free case evaluation.

Psychiatrist may have been dead for several months

Weird news from the Belleville News Democrat:

Authorities are attempting to learn the circumstances surrounding the death of a psychiatrist whose body was found this week in the town house she shared with her 58-year-old daughter in one of Chicago's most exclusive neighborhoods.

The Cook County Medical Examiner's office said Dr. Ruth Koenig, 86, may have been dead for several months before her badly decomposed body was found in a second-floor bedroom Thursday by police officers who had been called to make a well-being check by the Chicago Department on Aging.

Officers said Koenig's daughter at first refused to let them in, but they smelled the odor of decomposition and eventually persuaded her to open the door.

Dr. Scott Denton of the medical examiner's office, who performed an autopsy Friday, told the Chicago Sun-Times he believed the daughter "had some mental health issues."

"She didn't want to face or realize that her mom was dead," Denton said. "She was kind of living in a world where her mom was still alive."

Denton said his examination found no evidence of injury on Koenig's body, and noted that she suffered from severe coronary artery disease.

Neighbors on Elm Street in the city's Gold Coast neighborhood said they last saw Koenig alive in early June, when she returned from a stay in a nearby nursing home. They said she had been hospitalized on and off over the past five years.

Koenig was the widow of the late Dr. Harold Koenig, a physician who died in 1992. The couple bought the town house about 40 years ago, and Ruth Koenig continued to run her psychiatric practice from the residence through the 1990s.

All of which ties into a certain stereotype about the mental health of children of psychiatrists.

Disgraced psychiatrist loses appeal over deregistration

From this report

A former Launceston psychiatrist has failed in his bid to overturn his removal from the medical register.

Ian Anthony Martin was found guilty of professional misconduct last year and struck from the register.

The Medical Complaints Tribunal found that he had had a sexual relationship with the woman between January and March 2004.

During the hearing, the tribunal accepted that a swab taken from the patient contained traces of DNA that later matched a profile taken from him.

He appealed on the basis that the tribunal should not have accepted the DNA evidence, because it amounted to a breach of the Forensic Procedures Act.

He also appealed on the ground that when the patient gave evidence at the tribunal, his lawyer did not ask her whether she had planted the doctor's DNA on herself.

But Supreme Court judge Peter Evans dismissed the appeal.

Psychiatrist under investigation for mis-handling sex-change cases

The gay community in the British Commonwealth is rather upset about reports that British psychiatrist and sex change counselour Dr Russell Reid is being investigated:

This week the General Medical Council began to hear allegations of professional misconduct against Dr Russell Reid, an internationally-renowned consultant psychiatrist specialising in transgender and gender reassignment issues, commonly referred to medically as gender dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder (GID).

The allegations are that between 1984 and 2003 Dr Reid prescribed sex-change treatment for some transgender patients too quickly and without a sufficient cooling off period to allow patients to change their minds.

It is claimed that he failed to adhere to the guidelines advised by the US-based Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. Although not legally binding, these guidelines about how soon to start hormone treatment and how soon to undertake surgery are followed by many specialists in gender dysphoria.

The guidelines state that patients should have been living in their desired gender role for at least three months before being prescribed hormones, or have had at least three months of psychotherapy. Patients should also undergo a minimum of 12 months hormone therapy and live in their desired gender role for 12 months before referral for gender change surgery.

The allegation is that Dr Reid began treating some transgender patients earlier than the guidelines stipulated.

Dr Reid denies the charge of misconduct. He claims to have given full consideration to the guidelines as part of a thorough assessment of each patient’s needs, but that inflexible guidelines were not in the best interest of some patients.

Of course, Sexuality is one of the major causes of confusion in the life of most humans walking the face of the Earth today. We therefore feel that any major body alterations to address these and other issues need to be addressed with the utmost care and caution, for the sake of all of those involved.

We recalled an early sequence of shows featured on Oprah many years ago, where a young man wanted to have a sex change operation. The man's mother mortgaged the house to pay for the operation. After the operation, the young man had an epiphany, and realized that he had made a terrible mistake. and wanted to go back to being a man.

It is due to cases like this that cautious rules have been made. This is not intended to invalidate those with Gender Identity issues. We merely feel that a proper respect of persons requires that great care be exercised in determining the truth in these very personal matters.

Regular readers of this site can imagine our opinions of the psychiatrist under current investigation.

See also this earlier report

Boy who killed dad given 10 more years in custody

Another case of child violence where Prozac is involved.

After a trial that some members called the saddest experience of their lives, a jury decided Thursday that a boy who climbed into his father's sport utility vehicle and shot him to death should spend 10 more years in custody.

The verdict ended three days of deliberations in a Harris County juvenile court where the boy, now 12, was held responsible for the August 2004 slaying of physician Rick Lohstroh.

But although they agreed last week that he "committed an act of delinquent conduct" in shooting his father, jurors said they thought about his best interests in deciding what should be done with him. Two of them, and the attorneys for both sides, agreed that he had been badly traumatized by his parents' bitter relationship.

His mother, Deborah Geisler, wept as she left the downtown Houston courtroom after hearing the verdict and did not speak to reporters.

[...]

Defense attorney Chris Tritico said the case will be appealed. He said the boy, whom the Houston Chronicle is not identifying because of his age, suffered from psychosis brought on by 90 milligrams of Prozac he took weekly for anxiety and depression disorders.

The boy also was traumatized by parental fights that brought police to the family's home more than two dozen times in seven years, Tritico said. He said Geisler "poisoned" the boy against his father.

The shooting took place after Lohstroh, a 41-year-old physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went to his ex-wife's home to pick up the boy and his younger brother. Investigators said the boy got into Lohstroh's SUV with his mother's .45-caliber pistol and fired through the back of the driver's seat.

Magness, a high school English teacher, said jurors were one vote shy of giving the boy probation at one point. They finally decided it was best to keep him in a youth facility away from his mother, said Magness, 38.

"This case is the saddest thing most of us have been involved with," he said.

Testimony showed that the boy had "as bad a home life as any child you have ever seen," Magness said.

Fellow juror Lee Kennerson, a 69-year-old retiree, agreed.

The boy, who was 10 at the time of the shooting, faced a sentence ranging from probation to 40 years in custody.

"I think justice was served," said prosecutor Bill Hawkins. "It's sad that it has to be this way."

[...]

The Greenes' wrongful-death lawsuit against Geisler and Swanson is set for trial in December. The complaint also names the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and Co. and Mallinckrodt Inc., alleging that the older boy's use of the antidepressant fluoxetine, commonly known as Prozac, created a state of "agitation, depersonalization, hostility and mania leading to violence. ... "

Geisler said her son was still piecing together happened at the trial, struggling to understand. When she spoke to him Thursday, she said, he asked her to bring Chinese food and chocolate during her next visit.

"He knows very little about where he is going to be going," she said.

Fraud fears over Ritalin

We have this report from New Zealand. Remember, this is the same stuff that is supposed to be helping your kids.

Police fear doctors are being duped by drug peddlers into dishing out Ritalin prescriptions, which have skyrocketed in the past five years.

Police say abuse of Ritalin, often dubbed "poor man's speed", is rife in Christchurch and some doctors have got a name among "druggies" as easy targets for supplying the drug.

Pharmac figures released to The Press show 11,524 prescriptions for methylphenidate – the chemical name for drugs such as Ritalin – were issued in Canterbury in the year to June. This is 4000 prescriptions more than in 2001.

Canterbury issues more Ritalin prescriptions than any other region in New Zealand, with Waitemata the next closest at 6931.

Detective Sergeant Greg Murton, of the Christchurch drug squad, said Ritalin was "one of the most abused prescription medicines available".

Some Christchurch doctors were known by offenders and police as easy targets for Ritalin prescriptions.

He declined to identify those doctors and said police had not yet targeted them in a bid to stem the trade, although this could be considered.

"Some doctors give it out willy-nilly," Murton said.

In some cases, parents would get a Ritalin prescription for their children and sell it on.

A 10mg Ritalin tablet could sell for $15, a 20mg tablet for $30 or a card of 10 tablets for $80.

Murton said that this week police dealt with a man who got a Ritalin prescription and one hour later had sold it to drug users.

"The guy we dealt with is a total shambles; a wreck of a human being."

Murton said he had no doubt that doctors targeted by Ritalin abusers thought they were helping their patients.

Pegasus Health clinical leader Dr Graham McGeoch said there were strict rules for prescribing Ritalin.

These included requiring patients to be assessed by a specialist to determine their need for the drug.

The child can then be approved as a Ritalin user and referred to a GP, who must closely monitor the Ritalin use.

The specialist is also required to keep regular tabs on the original drug approval.

"It's hard to see how it (wrongly prescribing Ritalin) could go on for 12 months with more than one doctor involved," McGeoch said.

Doctors would be happy to meet police and discuss their concerns.

In the past, doctors and police had worked out a good system to stem morphine abuse and a similar system could be used for Ritalin.

"Doctors can be vulnerable to people they often feel they are helping, but they get sucked in," McGeoch said.

Drug Arm Christchurch branch manager Geoff Howard said Ritalin could make a big difference in the lives of people who used it properly.

As with any drug, a small group of abusers could create problems, he said.

Pharmac figures show a total of 71,185 prescriptions for methylphenidate were issued nationwide in the year to June.

The population of New Zealand is estimated to be slightly over 4 million, about the same size as Kentucky or South Carolina, and slightly larger than Puerto Rico.

Medicare Fraud Becomes Election Issue

As seen in the Amherst Times from this press release Of course, we have run many stories about the problem of psychiatrists and their involvement with medicare fraud. Psychiatry has an ongoing problem addressing the problem of crime within their own ranks..

Jeanine Pirro, candidate for Attorney General, today criticized her opponent Andrew Cuomo’s statement to Crain’s editorial board that he favored granting amnesty to Medicaid cheats, allowing them to evade criminal prosecution for stealing public funds by giving the stolen money back.

“No experienced prosecutor would ever think that the solution to Medicaid fraud is to make stealing from the Medicaid system risk-free,” Pirro said. “You want to stop the fraud? Start putting Medicaid cheats in jail. Give the crime real consequences. Wake people up to the fact that defrauding the Medicaid system will end very badly for them.”

Pirro has been a vocal advocate for treating Medicaid cheats like the criminals they are.  An article she authored – The Crime of Medicaid Fraud – appears on her website: www.jeaninepirro.com.

“Andrew Cuomo wants the title of Attorney General, but doesn’t want the job,” Pirro said. “The Attorney General’s responsibility to our Medicaid system is to investigate and prosecute cases of criminal fraud. I know how to conduct fraud investigations and prosecutions; I’ve done them. If Andrew doesn’t, then he should step aside – not try to hide his inexperience with short-sighted proposals like amnesty.”

Pirro extolled her record in this area:

* In 2005, as District Attorney of Westchester, Pirro took down a $12 million medical mill and indicted 34 defendants – doctors, ambulance drivers, public employees – a massive enterprise designed to bilk the medical insurance system.


* In 2005, Pirro shut down pharmacies that were telling insurance companies they were dispensing large quantities of expensive drugs, while giving patients smaller amounts of cheaper drugs – fraudulent claims totaling some $4 million.


* Pirro also convicted the operator of two storefront heath-care businesses for making $160,000 worth of fraudulent medical claims to the State of New York (as well as the government clerk he bribed to process these claims, knowing they were false).


* Pirro investigated, prosecuted and convicted a psychologist who billed insurance companies for a thousand treatment sessions that had never occurred.


“All New Yorkers pay for Medicaid fraud through their property taxes,” Pirro said.

“New York desperately needs an Attorney General who won’t shirk from the responsibility of battling these cheats aggressively and effectively.”

Psychiatrist supports 'FrankenBunny' research

The Psychatrist in question is Professor Christopher E Shaw,
a professor at King's College Institute of Psychiatry in London, England. As seen in this report.

Scientists are planning to create a "frankenrabbit" by fusing together human cells with a rabbit egg.

It is hoped the "chimeric" embryos, which would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, could lead to breakthroughs in stem cell research which could one day cure diseases such as Alzheimer's or spinal cord injury.

The embryos will allow scientists to perfect stem cell creation techniques without using human eggs.

"If we learn how to do this with animal eggs, we should be able to have more success with human eggs, and I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result," said Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry.

"We know this is a huge challenge after Dr Hwang in South Korea failed to get stem cells despite having 2,000 human eggs."

Teams in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle are to submit application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority this month, requesting licences to create embryos that will be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit or cow.

The HFEA is encouraging the applications after legal advice. The embryos will be allowed to grow for only 14 days, at which point they will be cells smaller than a pinhead.

Ex Psychiatrist on trial for making and selling drugs

A bizarre case. As seen in this report

A former psychiatrist on drug making and selling charges told a housemate amphetamines were good for treating depression, a court was told yesterday.
Joanne Littleford told the Supreme Court in Hobart Dr Kim Patrick Ryan was "very anti the traditional method of psychiatry and medications".

"He believed that psychiatrists overmedicated," she said.

"He said that use of amphetamines in depression was a good thing and he explained it all and theorised about it."

Dr Ryan, 51, of New Town, has pleaded not guilty to making methylamphetamine in December last year and to selling a controlled precursor for the manufacture of a controlled drug between June and October 2005.

He is accused of travelling around the state buying Sudafed flu medication, which contains a necessary ingredient for making methylamphetamine, and selling it to others.

Ms Littleford told the court she let Dr Ryan move into her Kingston home about October or November last year after he had been kicked out of where he had been living.

They met while working at the Eureka Clubhouse, a social and rehabilitation service for people with mental illness.

She said that on December 23 last year Dr Ryan asked her and her sons to spend a couple of days at the Wrest Point Casino and that he would pay for it.

They returned on Christmas Day and that night Dr Ryan and a friend of his began making amphetamines in her kitchen.

Ms Littleford said her relationship with Dr Ryan became "nasty and volatile", which she blamed on him using amphetamines.

She said she asked him to leave after he began arguing with her youngest son and became aggressive.

Cross-examined by Dr Ryan's lawyer, James Crotty, Ms Littleford denied having a sexual relationship with Dr Ryan.

She also denied using amphetamines herself except when she was 17.

"We had a lot of problems in the end because he was using amphetamines and it was causing problems," she said.

The court has heard Dr Ryan had his medical registration suspended in 2004.

The trial is continuing.

NH House candidate had M.D. license pulled, had once fled the country

Now there is this report from the NH Union Leader regarding the notorious Psychiatrist and political candidate Edward Rowan. It seems that, as seen below, due to a series of unusual coincidences, suspicions are that he once fled the country to avoid legal difficulties.

A retired psychiatrist running for the state House of Representatives had his medical license suspended in 1995 after a patient accused him of having a two-year sexual relationship with her.

The patient abruptly withdrew the complaint against Dr. Edward L. Rowan of Exeter about a week after it was filed in October 1993, but the state Board of Medicine continued to investigate the charge as possible physician abuse while also questioning if Rowan had paid or pressured the patient to recant.

Rowan denied the charge 13 years ago and again yesterday. He also denied paying the woman to withdraw the charge.

The board said Rowan refused to cooperate with its probe or submit any information to support his denial. As a result, the board suspended his privilege to be re-licensed until he produced the information. The suspension was for lack of cooperation, not for misconduct, since that charge was never proven.

Rowan said yesterday he wanted to submit what the board sought but could not because the patient refused to allow it. The patient, identified in public documents as Donna Roach, then a Concord resident, also refused to provide the board with any information.

Rowan appealed the board's Nov. 8, 1995 license suspension, but the state Supreme Court upheld the board's action in June 1997.

Rowan said that in more recent years he tried three times to regain his license, "but the lawyers say I'm being buried in discovery ... I've given them everything they asked for."

Long before the controversy, Rowan, now 65, had been the director of forensic unit at the state hospital for the mentally ill from mid-1983 to 1985. Rowan said that when the forensic unit was transferred to the corrections system in the mid-1980s, he became medical director of the corrections department.

He later went into private practice in Concord and occasionally provided expert testimony in criminal trials.

In early 1994, shortly after Roach made the sexual accusation, and about the time the board began its probe, Rowan closed his practice and moved with his wife to New Zealand.

Rowan said yesterday he did not move out of the country because of the accusation or probe. He said that when he told Roach he would be closing his office, "it made her angry and she filed the complaint." But, he noted, "She withdrew it about a week later."

Rowan said that since returning to the United States 10 years ago, he has authored four books.

In his 2000 book, "The Joy of Self-Pleasuring," Rowan promotes masturbation as a key ingredient of a healthy sex life. In the 2006 work, "Understanding Child Sex Abuse," Rowan condemns abuse of children as socially unacceptable but attempts to explain the thinking of abusers. He also says that the effectiveness of treatment programs for child sex offenders is subject to question. He discusses ways to minimize risks to children, the pros and cons of public child sex offenders lists and concludes, "Much work is yet to be done to understand both sides of the adult-child sexual experience."

In 2005 he authored, "To Do My Best: James E. West and the History of the Boy Scouts of America" and "Cass Street Stories," a look at the histories of the homes on his street in Exeter.

Rowan is among seven Democrats and eight Republicans running in the Nov. 7 election for the eight House seats available in Rockingham County District 13. He said he is entering elective politics for the first time because "the local folks here asked me to" and because he wants to help Gov. John Lynch at the State House.

Roach's October 1993 complaint to the board stated, "I was a patient of Dr. Rowan from 1986 to 1993. During the last two years, Dr. Rowan had a sexual relationship with me while I was his patient. I am beginning to understand how badly Dr. Rowan's behavior hurt me ... I want to make sure that Dr. Rowan does not hurt anyone else."

But about a week later, Roach wrote the board, "I have decided to withdraw the complaint that I filed against Dr. Edward L. Rowan on Oct. 29, 1993. Upon reflection, I do not wish to pursure (sic) this complaint."

While probing the charge nearly two years later, the board took notice of a story in the Concord Monitor about Roach's battle with crack cocaine addiction.

The May 12, 1995 story said, "In October, she came into $10,000 but blew it all on crack by Christmas." The story did not specify what year she "came into" the money or how she got it. But the passage apparently prompted the board's hearing officer to seek from Rowan details "concerning the closure of his practice, his treatment of Ms. R, and any financial arrangements he may have had with Ms. R, as well as copies of Ms. R's medical records."

The board said Roach had "arguably waived any privilege she may have in the confidentiality of her treatment records" by filing her complaint, "and by disclosing both her history of substance abuse and receipt of a $10,000 payment 'last October.'"

In several public documents, the board shows suspicion about a financial arrangement. A pre-hearing order, for example, asked Rowan to detail "all contact he, or his representatives, may have had with Ms. R. during the period between Sept. 1, 1993 and the present and specifically admit or deny whether he entered into any written agreement with Ms. R. or any other person acting on her behalf or paid any money or other thing of value to Ms. R. during this period." An assistant attorney general later told the state Supreme Court that the board became "concerned that Ms. R. may have been pressured into withdrawing" her complaint.

Zyprexa Takes Major Hit In Alaska

Part of a much longer article, as seen here.

A major legal victory recently occurred in the highest court in the state of Alaska, for all people who oppose forced psychiatric drugging. In a resounding affirmation of personal liberty, the Alaska Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Myers v Alaska Psychiatric Institute and found Alaska's forced drugging regime to be unconstitutional.

One of the drugs that the Institute tried to force on the plaintiff was Zyprexa and from here on in, the state cannot force people to take Zyprexa, or any other psychiatric drug, without first proving it to be in the patient's best interests and that there are no less restrictive alternatives available. The ruling is specific to psychiatric drugs.

"By requiring the least intrusive alternative to forced psychiatric drugging," says Jim Gottstein, the triumphant attorney in the case, "this decision has the potential to change the face of current psychiatric practice, dramatically improving the lives of people who now find themselves at the wrong end of a hypodermic needle."

Mr Gottstein acknowledges that the ruling will effect drug company profits. "The issue of Big Pharma profits is a big one, of course," he says, "and the Myers decision is perhaps most relevant where it states, "a valid debate exists in the medical/psychiatric community as to the safety and effectiveness of the [drugs]."

"This is judicial confirmation," he explains, "that the safety and efficacy of these psychiatric drugs has not really been established and can be used to support that contention."

"Most importantly in my mind," Mr Gottstein continued, "is that if the Myers stricture that people can't be forced to take these unwanted drugs if there are less restrictive alternatives results in these non-drug approaches being used, that will directly cut down on their use. "

"The key ruling that I think can be used to benefit other people who are faced with forced drugging," he advises, "is that under the Myers decision the state can't force drug people if there is a less restrictive alternative."

"This can be used to require that such alternatives be supported," he added.

"While the Supreme Court ruling is only binding in Alaska," says patient advocate, Vince Boem, "the ruling can be cited as persuasive authority in other states, and the legal theories involved can serve as a road map for attorneys arguing similar cases."

Faith Myers, the plaintiff in the case, said of the decision, "It makes all of my suffering worthwhile."

While acknowledging that some people find psychiatric drugs helpful, Mr Gottstein said he pursued this case because, in addition to the drugs' serious physical health risks, he is concerned about the rights of those who find the drugs both unhelpful and intolerable.

"No other field of medicine allows this sort of forced treatment," he points out.

"For people who want to try non-drug approaches," he explains, "the research is very clear that many will have much better long-term outcomes, including complete recovery after being diagnosed with serious mental illness."

"This decision restores the rights of those people to pursue that potential," he states.

Notorious Psychiatrist Now a Political Candidate in New Hampshire.

[A updated repost of an earlier item, now that the original source article has returned online.] As originally seen in the Free Republic. The original poster has removed their post, but now it has returned. And now can be seen here

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006, Dr. Edward L. Rowan of Exeter won the Democratic nomination for the New Hampshire House of Representatives in District 13 which includes Exeter, Stratham and North Hampton.

Ed Rowan is a retired psychiatrist. He was sanctioned by the medical board for having a sexual relationship with a patient. He appealed the decision to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, claiming the board had no right to sanction him.

(Note that the State did not agree with this)

Of course, the major controversy for the Free Republic is that the ex-shrink is a Democrat, with the suggestion that he once wrote a book promoting masturbation. We consider this criticism catering somewhat to the purient interests of their readership.

Our problem with him is that he was sanctioned for sexual relations with a patient, which display extraordinary lack of concern for another human being trusted to his care. As an illustrative example of a character flaw, this does not bode well for his ability to handle a public trust, such as a public office.

As for the flaw of having once been a psychiatrist, our concerns should be obvious.

Footnotes:
1) see the NH Primary Winner's list, Rockingham County, District 13
2) the book: The Joy of Self-Pleasuring
3) Portsmouth Herald write-up on the candidates
4) State Supreme Court: Opinion vs Dr. Rowan

State Fines New York Psych Clinic $16.5 Million in Medicaid Inquiry

From the NY Times, another psychiatrist gets caught handing out inappropriate drugs and treatments for the sake of profits. This is also another example of psychiatric abuse of the elderly.

Some patients at a Queens substance abuse clinic who had only minor alcohol problems were given intensive treatments, four or five days a week, for up to two years, with Medicaid picking up the bill, investigators said. Other patients needed more serious psychiatric care but were instead kept in unnecessary treatments for chemical dependency, again at taxpayer expense.

The clinic, Community Related Services Inc., which investigators said specialized in treating elderly patients from the former Soviet bloc, was fined $16.5 million for overbilling the Medicaid system, Gov. George E. Pataki’s office said yesterday.

It was the largest fine levied by the state’s new Medicaid inspector general’s office, created last year to combat rampant abuse in the joint federal-state health care program for the poor.

The state also froze $30 million in payments to the clinic, on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park, and began proceedings to revoke its license.

The inspector general and the state’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services cited the clinic for what they said were 45 regulatory violations, like improper patient assessments and poor record-keeping, and issued 25 findings of “serious Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse.”

The clinic can request an administrative review or challenge the fine in court, said Henry Zwack, executive deputy commissioner of the alcoholism and substance abuse office.

State records say the clinic, a profit-making entity, is owned and operated by Dr. Yelena Mamedova-Braz, a psychiatrist, and Maya Gurevich. Phone calls were placed to both owners yesterday, but they could not be reached for comment.

The clinic was founded in 1998 in an area of Queens that has a large number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. According to Mr. Zwack, the clinic treated about 600 people a day, most of them elderly women from Uzbekistan.

Investigators found that patients had visited the clinic an average of 152 times a year, compared with an average of 34 visits a year for other chemical-dependency centers regulated by the state. The state also determined that patients at the Queens clinic tended to stay in treatment an average of 20 months, compared with 3.7 months at other clinics.

The agency also cited the clinic for paying its counselors based on the number of sessions they had with patients, creating an incentive for counselors to overbill. This system contributed to the high volume of services for patients who seemingly had minor or negligible histories of alcohol and drug abuse, investigators wrote.

Mr. Zwack said that investigators had found some people who needed mental health services but were getting alcohol treatment instead, or no services at all. For some patients, he said, the clinic acted more as a “senior day care center, a place for people to come together, speak the same language and interact.” He also said that English courses offered by the clinic had been billed as treatment.

The clinic billed Medicaid an average of $11 million a year.

“What this company was sucking out of Medicaid could have provided care for 2,400 more patients who really needed it,” Mr. Zwack said.

According to the report by the substance abuse agency, the clinic made an interest-free loan of $3.52 million in 2004 to another company that Dr. Mamedova-Braz and Ms. Gurevich owned, Advanced Community Services Inc., after the owners became aware of an investigation by the office of the state’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. When asked about the loan, Ms. Gurevich told investigators that it was made to ensure that they had money in case the clinic’s money was seized, the report said.

Mr. Zwack said that Dr. Mamedova-Braz was in the process of trying to get licensing for another mental health clinic. But if the Queens Boulevard clinic loses its license, Mr. Zwack said, she and Ms. Gurevich could be permanently barred from the Medicaid system.

Investigators found other problems as well, including what they said was poor record-keeping and what they described as the unethical treatment of patients. According to an agency report, Russian-born counselors referred to themselves as “real Russians” and made disparaging comments about the ethnic backgrounds of their patients.

In justifying extensive treatment programs, the clinic’s director-owner, Dr. Mamedova-Braz, told investigators that her patients had limitations due to intermarriage. “These marriages, according to Dr. Braz, produce generation after generation of mentally disabled individuals who lack the capacity to function successfully and independently,” investigators wrote.

Mr. Zwack said, “It’s just not the kind of description any of us would expect a doctor to have.”

Billing irregularities were initially discovered by the state attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, Mr. Zwack said. A spokesman for the attorney general, Darren Dopp, declined to comment on whether the clinic was still under investigation.

The governor created the inspector general’s position and appointed Kimberly O’Connor, a former prosecutor in Schenectady County, to fill it last year after articles in The New York Times detailed widespread abuse and poor oversight in the state’s $45-billion-a-year Medicaid program.

This year, at the governor’s urging, the Legislature set aside money for 81 positions to monitor Medicaid fraud. But in a report in June, auditors with the federal Department of Health and Human Services said that Mr. Pataki’s changes, while laudable, were not sufficient to make up for years of staff cuts and lax enforcement.

Tenfold increase in Ritalin prescriptions for ADHD children sets off U.K. investigation

According to this report

After studies revealed a nearly tenfold increase in Ritalin prescriptions in the U.K., public backlash spurred an investigation of doctors' prescription procedures by the National Health Service. However, the results of the review may not be available until March of 2008.

The delay has left some parents and doctors unsure of whether ADHD drugs are the right move for their children.

While one mother in Scotland said Ritalin had been indispensable in calming her son, another said her child became incredibly aggressive and hard to manage while on Ritalin, injuring his brother by throwing him through a glass door.

"I think in 10 years time we will say that ADHD was too simple an explanation for many children," said Dr Gwynedd Lloyd, head of Educational Studies at the Edinburgh University, adding that many doctors label children as having ADHD and prescribe them the amphetamine Ritalin without investigating other possibilities. "We will ask ourselves what we were thinking giving these children amphetamines," she said.

Dr. Dave Coghill, senior lecturer in child and adolescent psychiatry at Dundee University, disagreed, saying Ritalin was an effective drug. "By inhibiting impulsive behavior in children with ADHD it allows them to socialize and develop normally," he said. "Despite the risks, the medication can work for some children."

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is usually diagnosed when children show signs of inattention, hyperactivity and an inability to start and foster social relationships. For many children, the alternative isn't better, as the side effects of ADHD drugs such as Ritalin can include loss of appetite, sleeping problems and death.

The FDA assigned Ritalin its most serious safety warning -- the "black box" warning -- last month after 25 deaths were linked to cardiac problems caused by the drug. Seven U.K. children are also thought to have died due to Ritalin side effects.

"Why is it conventional medicine, and even some parents, are so willing to rely on drugs to control children's behavior?" Asked consumer advocate Mike Adams, who has written extensively on ADHD at NewsTarget.com, and interviewed experts in the field such as Dr. Fred Baughman. "If colorful cereals made from processed sugar and refined grains didn't pass for a 'complete breakfast,' and soft drinks and fruitless 'fruit drinks' weren't standard lunchtime fare, we'd notice a marked improvement in the behavior and learning ability of our school-aged children.

"Ritalin is handed out like candy simply because the drug companies know it is a huge revenue producer, and school administrators support the practice because medicating students makes them more sedate," he added.

Psychiatrist's Racist Comments gets Talk Show in Trouble.

The Canadian Radio-television and telecommunications Commission has reprimanded Quebec's top-rated Sunday night talk show Tout le Monde en Parle (All the World in Talk, i.e., Everyone's Talking About It) over racist comments by one of its guests, Psychiatrist Pierre Mailloux. As seen in this report:

Quebec's top-rated Sunday night talk show was reprimanded by the Canadian Radio-television and telecommunications Commission last week over racist comments by one of its guests.

Canada's broadcast regulator found that Pierre (Doc) Mailloux made comments about blacks on the Radio-Canada program Tout le monde en parle that were "denigrating, insulting and offensive."

On the Sept. 25, 2005 program, psychiatrist Mailloux claimed to have studies that "demonstrate that the average intelligence quotient of blacks and American Indians is clearly lower than 100."

The CRTC's reprimand came as Quebec National Assembly committee conducted hearings last week on racism and discrimination affecting the seven per cent or close to 500,000 Quebec citizens who are classified as visible minorities.

Senegal-born professor-turned-humourist Boucar Diouf, who provides a look "at Quebec culture through African eyes" on Radio-Canada's morning radio show in Quebec City, said Mailloux's extreme statements are not an isolated case.

"There are lots of Doc Mailloux in the media," he said. "I don't call them racists. They are I-don't-give-a-damns (je-m'en-fou'istes). Because they do it to increase their ratings."

Diouf appears on Radio-Canada television's La fosse aux Lionnes and does humorous folk-wisdom capsules on the morning radio show.

"My role is to get up on stage to knock down these images," he said.

Racism and discrimination have no place in a responsible society, said Diouf, who has been following the National Assembly hearings.

"Otherwise we will get to the point where they are in France today with people who were born in the country, who grew up in the country and who absolutely do not feel French."

Documents prepared for the hearings suggest overt statements such as Mailloux's are only one of the types of discrimination facing visible minorities.

They note that while unemployment among Quebec blacks, Arabs, Asians and other visible minorities can be as high as 20 per cent, well above the eight-per-cent provincial average, 22 per cent of visible minorities have university degrees, above the 14-per-cent provincial average.

Among black Quebecers, 15 per cent have university degrees, while 32 per cent of Arab Quebecers, the province's fastest-growing visible minority, have university degrees.

But Alexandre Boulerice, of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said repeated public commitments by ministers in favour of minority hiring do not always translate into jobs.

"There is an old-boys club," he said.

While the Quebec Treasury Board has a goal of 25 per cent visible minorities, aboriginals, anglophones and handicapped, and 14 per cent of recent hirings are from these groups, the average remains near four per cent.