Carney at Davos
Like or loathe his politics, unless I am missing something, Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister and Liberal party leader, seems a decent man. As the Canadian standing up to Donald Trump, whether you are pro- or anti-Trump, you are likely interested to see how this contact sport plays out. (Even Curling is close to being a contact sport these days).
On January 20, at a meeting of the rich and famous at Davos, Carney’s Speech, telling countries they need to get to the Table if they want to avoid being a Dish served up to the Great Powers, stood out.
Liberalism
Being at the Table was the key driver behind the nineteenth century birth of Liberal and Socialist politics. It wasn’t safe to leave decision making to the nobles, the wealthy – the conservatives who didn’t want change.
Liberals and Socialists couldn’t easily argue against creating new factories, new jobs and wealth, especially in a world where if we don’t create them someone else will and will gobble us up. The only effective response lay in the dead bodies or injuries happening in those factories. If they are too risky to work in, you won’t be able to compete against a motivated workforce.
Health was the Trump card.
Factories were like nations. At a time when the British didn’t give a fig about killing off millions of Irish, forcing them to emigrate or viewing them as vermin when they arrived in Britain, the French and Germans had realized that the nation with the most able-bodied mobilizable men was likely to win the Wars (contact sports) between them.
These considerations led to an alliance between Conservatives and Socialists in Germany in 1871 that, ironically excluding Liberals, set up a first ever national health insurance scheme.
Rudolf Virchow’s Liberals, meanwhile, installing sewage works in Berlin made it habitable and sustainable. Its population grew, and markets thrived demonstrating that public works could be good for business.
The history of these nineteenth century interactions between health and politics is outlined in Shipwreck of the Singular.
Born in the USA
Few Americans understand that, while communists wanted to destroy the Table, socialists in contrast wanted a seat at it.
After World War I, socialists and liberals in Germany soothed political tensions by expanding healthcare coverage for War related mental and physical injuries. They also combined to put down a communist revolution, executing its leaders – See The Great Silence.
In America, Table dynamics played out most clearly during the 1980s AIDs crisis, when ACT-UP (AIDs-Coalition-To-Unleash-Power) took to the streets.
ACT-UP’s success hinged on getting people with AIDs to come out. Some fabulously brave individuals, not afraid to stand up for their homosexuality, led the way.
Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), Post-Finasteride Syndrome (PFS) and Post-Retinoid Syndrome (PRS) are another pharmaceutical and sex saga that began in the 1980s. These are conditions that can permanently obliterate our ability to make love. They cause profound shame. Sufferers, however, weren’t facing an immediate death sentence with nothing to lose and have been slower to achieve what ACT-UP achieved. But this slower burning fuse has links to recent events in Tumbler Ridge.
An essentially political decision meant that AIDs was all over the media in the 1980s creating a platform for ACT-UP. Today’s political decisions, aimed at avoiding deterring people from seeking treatment, mean the public don’t hear about drug induced injuries like PSSD or the resulting deaths. Heaping Insult on Injury, the public get told the prior mental state of those damaged has been to blame.
Events like those in Tumbler Ridge recently offer a crack through which some light might get in. It’s one thing not to deter people from seeking the benefits of a treatment that clearly saves lives but SSRIs, Finasteride and Isotretinoin lead to more loss of life than would otherwise be the case. Is loss of life or loss of profits at stake?
Faced with almost no progress by the mid-1990s ACT-UP began to fracture. The ‘communists’ within wanted to take sledgehammers to the healthcare Table and start anew. The liberals and socialists clung onto a place at the Table from which they could shape what was happening.
Triple Therapy
Triple Therapy emerged just as the fracture was taking shape. Companies had made several ineffective antivirals. The epidemic would have killed a lot more people if companies had been left to market minimally effective meds and charge crazy prices for them. The initiative to combine several weak antivirals came from folk with AIDs. Clinical trials weren’t needed. People on Triple Therapy got up off death beds and walked.
Triple Therapy stands as one of the few pharmaceutical treatments from t1980 onwards that saves lives. It’s price is reasonable, because as Goldman Sachs noted – saving lives is a bad business model generating as it does immense pressure to lower the cost of treatment.
For more on this history of AIDs and politics – see Shipwreck.
Carney at Tumbler Ridge
Having had such an impact at Davos, Carney’s choice to pull out of an important Global Defense meeting in Munich a few weeks later surprised many.
Just before he was about to fly, at Tumbler Ridge, a small town near the British Columbia (BC) Alberta border, an 18-year old shot his mother and brother, 6 students in the local school, and himself.
Carney opted to attend a vigil at Tumbler Ridge rather than go to Munich. It looked like Canadians coming together in the face of a natural disaster. But it wasn’t a natural disaster.
Tumbler Ridge was even more of a man-made disaster than a fire at Crans Montana 3 weeks before Davos, when an accident with lighted candles set a club on fire killing 41.
Iron Cages
In 1919, Max Weber, many people’s favorite Liberal, said Liberals and Socialists had problems to sort out before they could collaborate at the same Table. While both had similar goals, the socialist impulse to systematize risked creating an Iron Cage of process.
Weber was referring to socialist success at the replacement of an aristocracy that figured they knew what was best for people with a set of impersonal procedures. With a bureaucracy that relentlessly codified what at one point might seem rational. Without a good way to later undo what at one point might have appeared best for people, rather than helpful this would lead to politically correct but stifling tokenism and disaster – like he Holocaust some have since suggested.
For Weber this was not a specifically German problem. Iron Cage logic almost necessarily was totalitarian.
Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt
Recognizing countries need bureaucracy, Weber stressed the need for political leadership. He explained what he meant by saying Leaders would be like Doctors, professionals who when needed could ensure a people took what might be a necessary but not very pleasant medicine. Like doctors, leaders would make judgement calls and take responsibility for their calls rather than hide behind process.
He explicitly recognized that our developing medical capabilities would enable us to engineer births and death – putting medical assistance in dying (MAiD) on our Tables. Reading this now, many likely assume Weber figured doctors as leaders would not get locked into the Iron Cage of procedure.
Rather than seeing the Holocaust as a painting of our past, others have seen a window onto our present – onto Modernity.
Around 1940 German medicine, in particular psychiatry, led the world. Set a political goal to engineer the healthiest nation on earth, German health authorities cautioned against tobacco use before anywhere else did.
Without any coercion, German psychiatrists and other physicians sterilized roughly 360,000 men and women, terminated the lives of over 170,000, and ran dangerous medical experiments on over 15,000. Close to all German doctors participated. None were coerced. None who refused to collaborate were sanctioned.
Canada now leads the world in mental health related MAiD – thanks in part to an erstwhile Liberal Senator, who also had a part in what led to Tumbler Ridge.
None of the Christian Churches that Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, presented in Munich as our saviors from civilizational erasure, raised a peep in the 1940s.
We Wanted You to Hear
About 6 hours before Rubio’s Valentine’s day speech, in Tumbler Ridge Mark Carney said:
We wanted you to hear that Canadians are with you. That we will always be with you. That whatever portion of your sadness that Canadians can bear to help ease your heavy load we will gladly do so When some of you go back to quiet houses, to empty rooms, please know that you are not alone.
I have a colleague who knows a great deal about the harms psychotropic medicines have the capacity to cause. Her daughter living in BC was recently killed by a man with a BC treatment history. Even though a proper assessment of the effects of his medication might mitigate his sentence or provide grounds for a not-guilty plea, she would like him assessed by someone capable of doing so. Not knowing what happened makes sitting alone in a quiet house more difficult.
Neither my colleague nor I know any physician in Canada with the forensic skills to make an assessment of the effects of this man’s drugs. It would mean going outside Canada.
Her request for an assessment to the prosecutor she is dealing with, for whom she has great respect, comes up against current procedures which make no accommodation for something as obviously sensible as this.
On the other side, even if this man could afford the best lawyers money can buy, and they were handed a report with good grounds to bring the medication he was taking into play, they almost certainly would not attempt to plead not guilty. They would pressure their client instead to accept a plea deal – his own lawyers in other words would make him a felon and downplay the hazards medication poses.
The doctor who prescribed the medicines will be told by his/her medical insurers than on no account can the medication be blamed for what happened. S/he must blame the terrible illness and if s/he doesn’t feel capable of this, s/he needs to let the insurer’s lawyer make that case – See When Will Medical Insurers Stop Killing People.
The system in other words systematically conceals what is happening in cases like the one that drew Carney to Tumbler Ridge.
Another colleague lived with his two sons just over the BC border in Alberta. Unbeknownst to his father, one of his boys was put on an SSRI by a BC family physician, with the dose elevated to double the toxic levels. The first the father knew about any meds was when his son shot himself. This lack of knowing could not legally have happened if a BC child was prescribed treatment by an Alberta family physician.
For several years now, my colleague has come home to an empty house shorn of its shining light sensing that Canadians want nothing to do with his pain.
In France 16 year old Romain Schmitt was put on paroxetine by his doctor. When it was raised beyond toxic levels, Romain stepped in front of a high speed train. His family have similarly had the light go out on their lives. Their case that paroxetine killed their son is compelling but just as in Canada it seems to be close to impossible to get a medical expert, even from among those who claim to be critical of the pharmaceutical industry, to agree to undertake a report.
French Experts claim not to have the expertise to write such a report, which begs the question as to whether they are fit to practice medicine – See Clinical Details Confuse Expert Doctors.
Homicides
Woody Witczak lived just over the Alberta border in Minneapolis with his wife Kim. He had no health problems of any sort. He and Kim had good jobs. They were planning a family and had booked trips away.
Woody went to a decent doctor in need of something for a few nights good sleep. He was given Zoloft, an SSRI. He became agitated and told Kim she wouldn’t believe the thoughts going through his head. In line with process based practice, his doctor told Woody to persist with treatment. Trusting his doctor, he did. Soon after, he hung himself.
After his death Kim learnt that killing her was among the thoughts in his head – Health, Care and Science in Real Life..
We have known for 70 years that for healthy people taking drugs acting on serotonin systems:
“the first few doses frequently made them anxious and apprehensive… they reported increased feelings of strangeness, verbalized by statements such as ‘I don’t feel like myself’… or ‘I’m afraid of some of the unusual impulses that I have”.
These reports come from people with no mental history being treated for raised blood pressure.
Companies making SSRIs have known for over 40 years that these drugs can cause healthy volunteers to become suicidal and commit suicide, as well as aggressive and homicidal and can obliterate sexual function permanently even after stopping in some cases. Investigators on company trials, like me, were told not to ask about sex.
Everyone agrees the unusual impulses above included suicide. Cases like Woody’s make clear that while the drugs cause suicidality sometimes the suicides may be completed in order to avoid worse happening.
My colleague in Alberta and friends in France mourn the loss of a child without being aware that this loss may have been occasioned in part because of their children’s horror at what they might do to their parents. We cannot know if this was the case for these two boys, but it certainly can be the case, as might have been the case in Tumbler Ridge.
Asexual
Besides the direct drug induced suicidality, the two boys above were not told they would have a loss of sexual function while on treatment, with an impossible to ignore profound genital numbing. This is not the kind of thing a teenager can discuss with his parents. Did either wonder about homosexual or transgender issues? Did either find out from the web that this loss can be permanent? Romain inexplicably smashed his phone before stepping in front of a high speed train.
The Eating Process
At present in Canada, SSRIs are de facto sterilizing more Canadians than German doctors did in the 1940s[1]. These drugs have almost certainly medically assisted more Canadian deaths than German doctors ever assisted.
The difference between the 1940s and today is that people are not dying in intentional medical experiments now. Their deaths are process driven, but the suffering inflicted on fellow citizens is no less excruciating.
Coercion and sanctions are more likely to brought into play today against physicians who refuse to adhere to our health service processes than was the case in Nazi Germany – See Gaslighting, Milgram, Madness. While there may have been criminals among doctors in Germany, and there may be among doctors today, the root problem is political.
We have a process in which doctors and other healthcare staff, most of whom are decent and we have no reason to think weren’t decent in Germany in the 1940s, are trapped. Running fraudulent studies and portraying hearsay as evidence has been central to creating this process.
Stan Kutcher, a former Liberal Senator, has played a significant part in this process. He is listed on the authorship line of a ghostwritten article about Study 329, a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) trial of paroxetine in adolescent depression, that transformed a statistically significant excess of suicidal and related behavioral events on paroxetine into a Safe drug. Documents indicating the article was fraudulent led New York State to take a fraud action against GSK and factored into a Department of Justice action against GSK that resulted in a USD 3 Billion settlement.
Paroxetine is almost certainly a pharmaceutical sibling of one of the drugs the Tumbler Ridge shooter was on, all of which have the capacity to cause homicide.
No one should assume that the medical literature on our medicines is anything but ghost-written and de facto fraudulent or shaped by the fact that medical journals are too scared to run anything other than material supporting treatment benefits. Even a former CEO of Britain’s NICE Guideline process recognized that the ‘evidence’ treatment guidelines involving psychotropic drugs is based on is deeply flawed but asked what alternative did guideline makers have? See The NICE before Xmas.
I make these points as a physician convinced our use of SSRI and related medicines could not just be much safer, but their sensitive use also could reveal important aspects of our subjectivity, currently hidden, if, like Triple Therapy, their use is not bent solely to making a profit – See I Come to Praise SSRIs.
Healthcare needs Leadership. In a reversal to Weber’s metaphor, given that pharmaceutical companies believe few doctors have a thought in their minds not put there by them, Leadership seems unlikely to come from medicine.
Socialists sitting at the healthcare table are predisposed to gorging themselves on the edibles – refusing to let anyone deny them any of the 12 psychotropic drugs a day ‘their industry’ provides them with. As a result Western Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy is falling. This is not sustainable.
We have a probably then unforeseeable end-game to the dilemma Weber brought into view. Other than offer tasty soundbites, can a Liberal like Mark Carney do anything to stop us being served up as a Dish on Big Pharma’s Corporate Table?
Footnote
[1] SSRIs sterilize by depleting sperm counts and implantation hormones, through miscarriages and by causing neurodevelopmental delay in offspring – in addition to killing libido which may not recover to normal in up to 50% of us.
It would have been too much (and too parochial) to add this amuse bouche into the multiple course meal laid out above. So here it is in a pass-if-you’re-stuffed form.
Britain has a ‘faculty’ of pharmaceutical medicine (FPM) which is a charity and professional membership body not apparently linked to an institution, whose declared mission is to advance the science and practice of pharmaceutical medicine.
‘We’ (sock/glove?) set the highest scientific and ethical standards to help unlock the full potential of new medicines and make sure they are as safe as possible for patients.
Their Annual General Meeting In November 2022 was titled –
Can we? Should we? Fostering trust through ethical practice
https://www.fpm.org.uk/blog/meet-the-speakers/
While there were some decent people among the speakers, the ethics of others seemed more likely to reflect the ethics of the ruling class – it’s ethical to have a ruling class as Charles 1 said, just before being beheaded, and the ethics of the ruling class just like the ethics of a bureaucracy are to keep on doing this job (which of course means above all perpetuate our role).
For many of the other speakers, especially those linked to the Science Media Centre and Sense about Science about Science, the ethics appear to be about branding all talk of adverse events as misinformation.
One of the speakers may now be giving the rest the same kind of feeling Deepak Chopra, Sam Harris and perhaps Freda Lewis-Hall, once of Pfizer, had when liaising over ideas about Medical Security Teams (MST) with Jeffrey Epstein in 2016. See the comments section on Isotretinoin and Consent post on RxISK.
It’s even easier these days than back then for an FPM to anesthetize all members of an MST with MST (morphine sulfate tablets) and ease any ethical discomforts members of an MST might feel and ensure there isn’t a thought in their heads not put there by pharma.
We are Missing a Safety Team (MST). What would an MST for those of us taking medicines look like – This is an issue the Isotretinoin and Consent and Finasteride and Consent posts on RxISK seek to work out.
D
This article should be required reading for every politician, healthcare administrator, and medical professional. The central thesis that we have created a ‘process’ where doctors are trapped, insurers forbid blame, lawyers pressure plea deals, and the system systematically conceals drug-induced harms explains how tragedies like Tumbler Ridge happen and why they keep happening. The reference to Study 329, ghostwritten articles, and the $3 billion GSK settlement is a reminder that this is not conspiracy theory; it’s documented history. Thank you for this courageous and necessary analysis. Keep up the great work.
President Trump has yet another attempt on his life, with a 21-year-old, mad, crazed kid who drove through the gate of Mar-a-Lago with a gas can and a shotgun. Like many, many young kids in the US on prescription drugs, will this be scrutinised. Will Robert Kennedy raise his eyebrows, whilst he is looking in to studying violence with SSRIs.
We had a member of the Royal Family, Tom Kingston, where it was accepted that two SSRIs were responsible for his death by shotgun.
Didn’t we all say years ago, that if it happened to high-profile persons, it would lift-the-lid. How high-profile do you have to be, RF and US President.
Carney;take heed
International Expert; does not tread lightly
Annie
We have to take care here. None of us know what members of Trump’s, Kennedy’s or Carney’s families might be taking. They may be on SSRIs and doing well. Guilt by Association can be dangerous as Deepak Chopra, Sam Harris and Freda Lewis-Hall likely now think having appeared in the Epstein Files – See Isotretinoin and Consent comments.
In the same way, Ben Goldacre, Fiona Fox, Alison Cave and others may now be feeling uncomfortable with their links to a mover and shaker in their world as the link in the above comment shows.
The established problems that no one is doing anything about are
1. The Fraudulent Literature built into Guidelines etc
2. The failure of our doctors to keep us safe – what has gone wrong with doctors and can it be put right. Very few of them associate with Pharma but yet many of them end up with no thoughts in their heads that aren’t put there for them. How does this happen?
D
Facing hell with dignity, is it possible?
We have 8 children in this blog. One in Alberta, one in France, six shot in Tumbler Ridge. Who has the most credibility for being dead. The two who killed themselves, over-medicated with toxic doses of Fluoxetine and Paroxetine or the six shot because a man/woman was severely over-medicated and where the police had been called several times for medical matters and where the police allowed guns in to the home. There is currently an Independent Investigations Officer, Jessica Bergland, perusing police behaviour to see if there is a case to answer.
The children at the school will not go back to school. Tumbler Ridge is providing classrooms out with the school and there are counsellors on hand to help the community. The RCMP continue to do forensics, collect information, and do their job. They will provide written reports for an inquiry. News is scarce since the shooting, but several families have now been threatened and the RCMP are now doing a protection job.
The Drugs, the Doctors
We can wonder how Jesse got on with his doctors and the tumultuous amount of medication he was on. Tumbler Ridge has a population of 2,400, there can’t be that many doctors, but there are Mental Health Teams apparently who were responsible for some psychiatric in-patient stays. Well-known to the RCMP, and the little matter of RCMP, knowing full well there were quite a few guns in the house.
I find this all this astonishingly naïve in a day and age when school shootings hit headlines and fill the news. Is Tumbler Ridge, a closet community immune from all the red-flags in their midst.
This is not in reply to Annie – it is also from Annie
Study 329: the big fraud is finally under review
https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/study-329-the-big-fraud-is-finally-under-review/
I was shot to pieces with Paroxetine.
I not only violently almost killed myself with a gas oven, using a car exhaust, grabbing our large kitchen knife, bloodied, and in a toxic drug state, I made a noose and stood on a chair in our Nissen hut in the garden, and then charged back to the kitchen to swallow 28 beta-blockers.
Leading up to this, doctors would not listen to me, in the village surgery daily, palpitating, hyperventilating, wanting to scream in the waiting room, until I got in front of the lady doctor. She had taken me off Paroxetine cold-turkey several weeks beforehand. I managed six weeks of off-the-wall affects until coping no longer, I restarted Paroxetine. Then all-hell-let-loose and there I was in front of her again and telling her she must send me to hospital ‘or I will……..I never got to finish what I was thinking as she judged it imperative to give my Consultant Psychiatrist a call and tell him to expect me shortly. She told me to drive myself to his mental hospital straight away. I had a partner who was an airline pilot, trying to fly, during all this, a young child and a big dog. She had never bothered to enquire about my personal circumstances. She was quite new to our village and did not know me from Adam.
When she made the call to the psychiatrist she did not tell him anything. Nothing about cold-turkey from Paroxetine, nothing about how she had disregarded important information from him in a letter he had written earlier on about instructions if I ever came off Paroxetine. Further disregarding this, she took it upon herself to give me Lorazepam, Diazepam, hundreds of beta-blockers, Librium and then eventually Prozac.
The Consultant Psychiatrist was totally unaware of her prescribing, but he was aware of her writing, countless descriptions in referrals, by her, of a seemingly deranged family life, of being in a fractious relationship that was doing harm to my young daughter. Upping the dose of Paroxeine to 40 mg. was just profoundly stupid.
Nowhere, in any of this did any concern relate to my young daughter.
My partner was away flying, no one considered the affect this had on him, trying to keep it together, whilst his partner was falling apart from the toxic drug affects of Paroxetine.
As I look back on the disgraceful behaviour of my doctor, and the absurd psychiatrist who made no effort to pick up on all this, I have to look back on my little girl watching and living this.
I made extra-ordinary efforts for her, but when the Paroxetine affects took such a toll that I was unable to pretend any longer, and had to resort to my bed, as I couldn’t contain it any longer, this poor child, expecting the usual mum was presented with a horror no child should endure.
She broke. “You are not my mother, I hate you” she cried, coming to the bedroom. My arm shot from the bed and inadvertently struck her across the face. That night ended with me curled up in her bed hugging her tight with us both in a mass of tears and fright.
My brilliant child, academically, was on route to university, Paroxetine blew all that away. I had to recover and quickly, forced to recover quickly, but her education was ruined. School became no longer an option and we had to revert to home education in which she excelled. Prior to leaving school in her early teens, she took me around the school and went in to each classroom to thank each individual teacher personally.
Our very loving relationship resumed when I finally got Paroxetine out of my life, and much fun and laughter resumed spontaneously. I bought her a pony, with a small legacy, and this animal provided years of much-needed therapy for us to put our hearts and soul in to. We were up-and-running again.
Everyone is picking up the pieces from shattered lives – but reports from all doctors are vanishingly thin on the ground – shouldn’t this be any first-point-of-call or are doctors so deluded “it ain’t nothing to do with me” and this washes over everyone…
This is in Reply to Annie not David Healy.
The FPM has a journal which you can find in this link. Alastair Benbow, whom Annie will know and everyone who has been harmed by paroxetine will know, had an article in it 8 years ago in what looks like perhaps the first issue – see the link for a good flavour on how pharma play the game.
MY LIFE IN PHARMACEUTICAL MEDICINE. JFPM Edition 2 May2018, pp14. https://www.fpm.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/jfpm_ed_2_may_2018.pdf
During my career, I have had some significant challenges that live long in my memory. In one example, issues with antidepressants where the media attacked the industry (and GSK in particular) when I was running the Clinical Psychiatry division. The conventional approach was to weather the storm, keep your head down and wait for it to blow over. I didn’t agree and persuaded the company, by going to the very top, to listen and give our perspective externally. I wanted to ensure patients had the opportunity to be heard, but also to benefit from an important product. I met with patient groups, some who were suing us, some who just wanted to be heard. I visited them, including in their homes, and listened and gave a ‘human’ industry perspective which they valued.
I had multiple difficult experiences bringing an industry and patient view on news bulletins, chat shows (e.g. Richard and Judy) and several interviews for Panorama. I discovered (especially on Panorama) that the producers often weren’t interested in facts or benefit, only a story where industry and I were the bad guys. The personal attacks in the media, on social media and by individuals, continued for years and still, occasionally, resurface.
Would I engage with patients in this way again? I think so.
Better prepared for sure and realising that you have to do this in addition to the day job. But fundamentally, because standing up for the patients we serve, the benefits we bring, and the value of pharmaceutical medicine in bringing new medicines to market and keeping patients safe, is so important to me. Being prepared to put our point of view forward is important; we need more people to do it.
Ian Hudson’s picture is here
https://www.fpm.org.uk/news/fpm-presidents-medal-awardees-2019/
D
This is an additional DH in reply to DH comment
The original FPM was created by George Beaumont, who worked with Ciba-Geigy, and was later the editor of Primary Care Psychiatry. George and a colleague Mervyn Whitford around the year 2000 published articles on the hazards of SSRIs – including suicide – that BMJ and no-one else would go near.
I used to say in lectures and anywhere anyone would listen if you want to get material Clinical Scarecrows are too scared to publish, go to a journal with an industry Editor. They know when Pharma are bluffing and it’s safe to publish.
Around this time industry doctors took calls from family doctors and patients, investigated cases and deciding their drug had caused the problem, included it in the label of the drug.
This all changed when the lawyers companies were using decided their defense lay in Lilly/GSK/Pfizer’s argument that our (fraudulent) clinical trials show no evidence Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft cause suicide and you should pay no heed to the Anecdotes.
Before that someone like Alastair Benbow was somewhat free to meet someone like Annie and tell the company we have to include suicide and withdrawal in our label. After that he could only tell you about the benefits of paroxetine and listen to or pay heed to your reports as how wonderfully it had transformed your life.
Do AB’s instincts to meet people reveal a basic decency or was it all a sham. Opinions will likely divide on this.
D
What a beauty.
‘At no stage did he ever harm children, because fortunately they were undercover Police officers, nor were there any indecent images of children involved.’
https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-rod-files/dr-ian-hudson–03-feb-26.pdf
For those unaware of what’s going on Ian Hudson was head of Britains FDA for a decade. He has been convicted as the link indicates. The report on a linked Hearing indicates he was having a tough time and had XXX.
Its not clear what XXX is. One potentially consistent possibility is Depression. It would be not just an irony but a quite astonishing one if he is claiming the events were depression or SSRI related
D
Perhaps someone will know whether I am correct but it seems to me that former MHRA CEO Ian Hudson’s pediatric peccadillos were committed between 28 June 2023 and 17 July 2023, yet he carried on working for Gates Foundation until February 2024?
Can’t be right, can it?
David,
I had the good fortune of taking a workshop and attending a lecture with you in Toronto back in the 1980s. From you I learned about the fraud being committed by (some, at least) pharmaceutical companies, the potential dangers of SSRIs, the extent to which universities will compromise their integrity in order to acquire funding, and more.
So I am surprised to read that you believe Mark Carney is a “decent” person and it seems you hold out hope based on his speech in Davos that he might do something to prevent “us” from being served up to the corporate elites. I have listened to that speech two or three times and still fail to see why people think it was brilliant and offered hope. True, he did give a description of some of the global antics being played out but he did not position himself, as the “leader” of Canada, in those antics. At another time he has openly admitted that he is one of those elites. So it seems that people are hoping that the wolf will guard the henhouse and not prepare for himself a tasty chicken stew!
As a born, raised and still alive citizen of Canada who has never taken an SSRI in her life, I can tell you that this country is not what it was; it has lost its way. Millions of people are needing to avail themselves of food banks. Despite government’s and their bought and paid for media’s statements, inflation is very real and prosperity is diminishing, as is our birth rate. Resources are languishing while we are being taxed to death. Carney’s attitude is condescending and dismissive, and despite his apparent tears at Tumbler Ridge has little real feeling for this country and its people.
When he deigns to show up at his day job in Ottawa he is exposed as inept, as anyone can see if they care to watch parliamentary proceedings–the very public Question Period. He claims to have followed the rules regarding his assets and the companies he has managed but the blind trust is anything but blind and the deals he tries to make inevitably feather his own nest as can be seen if one cares to follow the thread of corporate ownerships and his blind entrusted investments in such.
I could go on, but I shall end by saying that I remain open to accepting that Carney is “decent” but I’d appreciate seeing the assessment on which you based that conclusion. Awaiting that, I simply don’t find it helpful when people of stature support and place hope in this corporate elitist who is hell bent on global governance and the minions be damned (and manipulated).
Evelyn
You may be missing one or two subtleties – maybe my fault. From the outside (the UK),Carney gets good coverage and comes over better than Trudeau did – at least in his later years.
But I didn’t think that the last section of the post – The Eating Process – held out much hope Carney was likely to make a difference. This is not a comment on him so much as on the difficult situation. It’s almost an article of faith for progressives to figure that no additional helping of health could possibly do anything but good.
The post challenges Carney with his own Metaphor – or is it a Simile? Not that he is likely to become aware of the challenge.
D
Thanks for clarifying. You may have noticed I’m not a big fan of MC. Maybe that blinded me to the subtleties of your article.
Evelyn
I only have one comment about this otherwise excellent post: You write: “Woody Witczak lived just over the Alberta border in Minneapolis with his wife Kim.” Minnesota borders the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario. Alberta is a long ways away….
What happened with Woody was tragic, and avoidable, in whatever state he lived in and in whatever Canadian province it bordered.
You are absolutely right. Not sure how I made that mistake. Could have sworn i was figuring on driving down from Alberta into Minnesota at one point
D
Comment
Peter Wood 1 day ago
If they ever do launch an inquiry, there should be no sacred cows. In most cases of school shootings, investigations explore lots of angles but bypass any look at certain factors. In a disproportionate number of school shootings, notably the “motiveless” ones where the shooters kill themselves or die in predictable shootouts with police, starting with Columbine, the shooter was on mind-altering medications, usually psychiatrist-prescribed SSRI antidepressants. Research has clearly shown that these meds cause a significant minority of takers to experience violent and suicidal thinking. A foremost expert on these drugs, Dr David Healy, has pointed this out a number of times, but it seems that there is a general agreement that this one variable cannot be considered along with other potentially important factors. This may be due to pharma influence on the media, which has prevented many important questions about drug safety (remember Vioxx? Propulsid? Avandia? Thalidomide?) from being asked in time.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-newman-we-need-an-inquest-into-the-tumbler-ridge-shooting
Terry Newman: We need an inquest into the Tumbler Ridge shooting
Edited
A picture is quickly emerging of a community that was failed on multiple levels by mental-health services and law enforcement. Now that the dust has settled, it’s time for an independent investigation into how this tragedy happened in the first place, in the hope that changes can be made so that something like this never happens again.
Van Rootselaar’s rampage appears to be, in part, a failure of British Columbia’s mental-health system. Van Rootselaar’s mental-health conditions were well-documented and included trying to set the family home on fire, substance abuse and multiple visits by police due to mental-health concerns.
Van Rootselaar was apprehended more than once for involuntary psychiatric assessments, most recently last spring. For some reason, upon release, Van Rootselaar was not placed on “extended leave,” which would have required continued treatment and supervised support from community care providers. Continual monitoring may have allowed a care provider to intervene before it was too late.
Shockingly, police actually seized firearms from the shooter’s residence a couple years ago, but later returned them. The RCMP told reporters that neither of the weapons had ever been seized by police and that one of the firearms was unregistered. Still, it is unclear why any weapons would be permitted in a home where an individual was experiencing consistent and severe mental-health issues.
As if these flags weren’t glaringly red enough, we recently found out that there were even more signs this tragedy could have been prevented.
What is clear is that the Tumbler Ridge tragedy requires a thorough, independent inquest into the failures of multiple systems and processes, which will hopefully lead to reforms around mental-health services, gun control and, maybe, a better-safe-than-sorry policy … https://nationalpost.com/author/tnewmanpostmedia-com/
I know we’re all rather distracted by world events– but I did listen to Mark Carney’s speech after reading this post, having only seen the headlines before.
He is undoubtedly a highly intelligent man and effective central banker. The line you seized on – ‘if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu’ – is a cracker to be kept in the back pocket
But ‘decent’ is debatable. I read Evelyn’s comment with interest. Instinctively I’ve never liked the cut of Carney’s bespoke Saville Row jib. When he was Governor of the Bank of England, as you will know, he was dubbed the ‘Unreliable Boyfriend’ – blowing hot and cold so markets never quite knew where they were. He always struck me as far too pleased with himself to care about human beings less well favoured. And importing Vaclav Havel, albeit with intellectual elegance into his speech, felt philosophically dishonest.
I know next to nothing about Canadian politics – except one Canadian friend in the prescribedharm community described his country in the last days of Trudeau’s reign as a ‘neoliberal hellhole’. I looked up what seemed like a thoughtful Canadian’s critique of Carney’s speech – and it supported your challenge and my instincts:
‘Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on apital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond.
And yet. Every provincial health care system in Canada is currently in a crisis. Affordability continues to price an entire generation out of their start in the world. Our post-secondary education systems are failing because we underfunded them, forced them to rely on high paying international students, and then stopped that immigration program. Wealth inequality is the biggest threat to our survival as a democracy. And yet we still cut taxes’.
https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/havel-carney-and-living-in-truth/
I looked even further at the country’s position vis-à-vis the medicalisation of the human condition and the drugging of its young people. It is predictably iron cage. Essentially – as you will; know:
Antidepressant prescribing to children and young people nosedived in the early 2000s after the black box warning, but then revved right back up again – in line with a switch in the regulatory/industry marketing narrative to ‘ the risks of untreated depression and anxiety outweighed the risks of the medication.’
‘Between 2000 and 2018, there was a statistically significant increase in suicide rates for females aged 10–19 and 20–29’ – reflecting a global pattern. Just as women are prescribed these drugs twice as much as men.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cap.2019.0121
Also, interestingly, middle aged males, as they are everywhere, are the group most likely to take their own lives.
But, in young people, 15-19 females are far more likely to self-harm and make suicide attempts – 5 x more than male peers, suicide plans 4 x as much, serious attempts 2 x as much. And, unsurprisingly, this awful state worsens in deprived and remote communities, biased towards indigenous populations.
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/mental-health/suicide-self-harm/
As ever, this grim imbalance is attributed to our female susceptibility to ‘mental health’ issues – some contributing factors fair enough – eating disorders, sexual abuse. Postpartum deaths feature – but nobody thinks to question post partum care.
Nobody thinks to put the obvious two and two together.
Mark Carney’s maths must be pretty sharp. Will he do his female suicidality sums? Will he give power to the powerless? I doubt it.