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Dec. 9, 2010 - InfoWars Special Reports
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Bruce Levine is a clinical psychologist living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Bye.
He's the author of Common Sense Rebellion, as well as America's Depression Epidemic.
He's a regular contributor to Z Magazine, Alternet, and the Huffington Post.
I'm Dr. Bruce Levine.
I'm a clinical psychologist in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I've been in practice here for over 25 years.
I've written a few books.
The last one is Surviving America's Depression Epidemic.
Prior to that was a book called Common Sense Rebellion, Taking Back Your Lives from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy.
I write regularly for Alternate Magazine, Z Magazine, Huffington Post, Ecologist.
My clientele is I work with adults and families and teenagers, probably at any given time about a third teenagers.
I work with folks who are By and large, I would call them anti-authoritarian population, although my business would diagnose them with oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder or substance abuse.
So, what I found is a lot of people who end up here and feel comfortable with me, that they are anti-authoritarians, usually without any kind of political consciousness.
And often they are rebelling with self-destructive ways.
And sometimes they're rebelling in a positive, life-affirming way, and they have no validation, they have no support.
But for the most part, they're folks who are feeling utterly alienated.
by their surroundings whether it's a school or it's a job or it's a society and they've got a lot of pain off of that and without validation of their pain and support, human beings tend to react and rebel often self-destructively.
So they'll just drink 12 packs all day long with their pain rather than doing something that's actually going to transform their society or culture.
It's just what all of us human beings do when we get down low enough We get down when we're hurting enough.
We don't really act sometimes in ways that are in our best self-interest.
Psychology, to become a licensed clinical psychologist, PhD, you go through graduate training, and you do not have a medical degree, which is exactly why I wanted to have it.
Because if you're a psychiatrist, it means you're an MD, you're a physician.
And if you're a psychiatrist and you're an M.D., it's the standard of care, increasingly, for almost everybody who's having some difficulty in life, is to medicate them, to drug them with psychotropic drugs.
Whereas if you're a Ph.D.
psychologist, you can't prescribe.
Except in a few states, some psychologists have fought for prescription rights.
But ordinarily, there isn't that kind of a legal, peer, professional pressure, if you're a Ph.D.
psychologist, to medicate everyone.
Whereas if you are an M.D.
psychiatrist, There is that pressure.
That you're actually doing something wrong because you're not putting some kid on speed, Ritalin, Amphetamines, you know, because the kid's not paying attention to school and he's paying attention to only things he's interested in.
One of the things that I see And this is not just me, it's historians of all genuine democratic movements, whether it was the American Revolution or, more recently, was the populist movement, which was big in Texas and lots of other parts of the United States.
And in that populist movement and in the American Revolution, you see that there were two things that people had, which they don't have so much today, psychologically.
One was individual self-respect.
And the second thing that you need for a democratic mass movement is collective confidence or trust in one another.
And when you're living in a kind of society that breaks people's self-respect and breaks their bonds of trust with one another, it makes it much more difficult to have any kind of a democratic revolutionary movement.
There's a lot of different aspects to our society and our culture that has made us feel broken or demoralized or defeated.
I'll give you one example.
What any psychologist should know are the famous learned helplessness experiments.
A lot of them were done on dogs, so one of the most famous learned helplessness experiments was you had three groups of dogs.
One group of dogs received no electroshock, a control group.
The other two groups received equal amounts of electroshock.
But the difference was, in one group, these dogs had control over being able to stop their electroshock.
In the other group, they had no control.
They learned helplessness.
No matter what they did, their shocks, they could not stop their shocks.
They moved into passivity, into depression.
And then, when all these dogs were given tasks, Where they could just jump over a barrier to escape from their electric shock.
Very simple task.
The ones who had learned helplessness, the ones who had learned that no matter what they do, the shocks do not go away, they did not even try to jump over the barrier.
Whereas the dogs that had learned that if they used their nose to press the panel and the shocks went away, they figured out how to jump over the barrier and escape.
Well, think about what people get to do every election day.
National elections, presidential elections.
They get to choose a Republican.
They get to vote for a Republican and basically vote for unnecessary wars and corporate control.
Or they get to vote for a Democrat, and they vote for unnecessary wars and corporate control.
Or they vote for a third party candidate.
Maybe a Libertarian, maybe a Green Party.
And the way it's set up is those third parties have no chance.
The media makes sure they have no chance.
So when they vote for those third parties, they still get a Democrat or Republican and corporate control and unnecessary wars.
Or there's a fourth choice that people can make.
They can choose not to vote at all, which is what a lot of people in America do.
Forty, you know, forty to fifty percent in presidential elections don't bother voting.
You know, in off-year elections, it's a huge majority of people don't bother voting.
So what do they get by not voting?
Corporate control and unnecessary wars.
And so that's learned helplessness.
No matter what you do, as long as you're taking seriously that electoral process, you're going to be helpless.
You're going to get that same degree of pain.
And so that's one way that people have become helpless and hopeless.
They feel that there's nothing that they could do to focus on the electoral process as a way of changing.
And no matter what they do, it creates just pain for them.
They can't make it go away.
So that's one arena.
Another area that, and I ask myself, why is it this generation more passive than the last generation?
Why is it that, for example, you had an election in 2000 where, regardless of the fact of how you feel about Al Gore, regardless of the fact that you think the guy was not much different than George W. Bush, regardless of that fact, this was this guy who had 51 million votes, Roughly.
500,000 more than George W. Bush.
They were going to have a recount in Florida, you know, to see if he actually won that state.
The politicized Supreme Court comes in, stops that recount.
51 million Al Gore voters are totally screwed.
They're disenfranchised.
What happens?
Are the streets filled with people protesting?
Eh, there's a handful here, there's a hundred here, maybe a thousand here in front of the Supreme Court.
Compare that to Mexico in 2006.
They also had a similar kind of election where a slightly more progressive guy got, you know, screwed out of election by a slightly more conservative guy.
He had almost 3 million people on the streets.
In Iran, 2009, okay?
Same deal.
Again, those people are facing a death if they get out there on the streets.
Literally, people died and got arrested and had lives ruined.
You had anywhere by estimates a million to three million people out on the streets in Iran.
What is it about the United States?
Okay?
That when people get disenfranchised in their elections, that they are more helpless, more hopeless, they just give up.
Well, there's a lot of reasons, and one of them, it seems clear to me in this generation, is the issue of a broken population of people on student loans.
One big difference.
Years back, when I was growing up in America here, You know, if you were rich, you went to these wealthy institutions.
If you were working class, you go to public institutions.
They were free.
When you walked out when you were in your 20s, which is the time in life where you're most likely to rebel and protest and demonstrate, you walk out, maybe you have no job, you have nothing to lose, but you're not worried about being saddled with a $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 debt, which is what young people are saddled with in our society.
Average debt.
Average just for undergraduates is over $20,000.
Any kind of professional training, it moves closer to $100,000 a year.
Well, let me tell you, if I walked out, okay, when I was in my 20s with that kind of debt, it would have broken me.
I wouldn't have resisted.
I wouldn't have rebelled.
I just would have went along with the program, been terrified of not having a job, been terrified of everything being taken away from me.
And so, we've allowed, we've done two things in our culture.
We've pushed shamed parents to make them feel like they're horrible parents if all their kids not only don't go to school, they don't go to prestigious school, they don't go get masters, they don't get their professional training.
We've got a president who's shaming, you know, whole society because they're not graduating from college.
And then on the other hand, we have allowed these young people to lose all their grants, all their support, or low tuition, and have them pay these ridiculous rates and student loans.
And debt breaks people.
It's one of the ways that people have historically known that you will get broken when you're in debt.
So that's one way that they're broken.
Historically, there's other ways that you break a population, too.
And I would say That there's three major ways that young people have been broken for many years in our society.
One is television, two is schools, not necessarily in this order, and the third is my profession, the mental health profession.
If you take a look at your average young person and their 24-hour school day, if you get rid of their whatever six to nine hours in bed and their couple hours of, you know, eating meals and personal hygiene, what are they doing in that day?
You know, what's their socialization?
Well, seven hours of school, you know, one or two hours of homework.
Alright?
And then the rest of their day is filled with television and video games.
I mean, that's the major socializing forces in their lives.
Alright?
So, what does that teach them?
What's going on for them?
Well, there's a lot of horrible things that happen in school.
One is, kids lose their interest in reading, which is great for an authoritarian society.
We have research That shows that the difference between kids who are in first grade versus when they move up to third and fourth grade is they're less likely to want to read books independently.
So school, naturally, by forcing kids to read things that they're not really interested in, and a whole bunch of other things like that, school actually makes it less likely people really are critical thinkers, curious, interested in reading, all those kinds of things.
Overall, there's always exceptional teachers, but in general, that's what happens.
Kids internalize the idea that the only way that you get an education is through some authority granting it to you.
Some authority's lectures, some authority's degrees, which is the opposite of the way people really get educated.
Real education is through your own curiosity, through your peers.
So, school is an authoritarian-based pacifier in many, many ways.
Then you move to the whole video game television area, especially television.
Nowadays, kids on average are spending four or five hours a day in front of a television.
They can watch it many different ways now besides just watching on a television set.
There's alternative mediums to be able to watch it on their laptop, on their phone.
You know, so they're watching as much and more as ever TV.
What are they learning there?
Well, besides their seeing shows, the vast majority of their programming is on stations that are owned by six corporations in America.
You know, the News Corp.
Murdoch's and Viacom and all these.
Besides the content, they're learning something even worse.
They're learning through these things that the only way that you get entertained is through some authority.
Alright, and they're learning that in their video games as well.
Now, the video games are not quite as pacifying, at least if they're doing it with their friends.
They're not in that kind of total zombie brainwave state that they are watching television.
But either way, they're learning that the way you entertain yourself is through some authority.
Here you've got television and you've got schools, both teaching kids that your education and your entertainment is via some authority, not through yourselves.
For years, kids knew that you entertained yourself.
After school, you'd go out and play with your friends and you'd figure out stuff to have some fun.
You didn't need any authority to entertain you.
The third area that kids, not all kids, are exposed to But the kids who are most rebellious, they get exposed to my business, the mental health profession.
And here in my profession, increasingly, the pacifying force is medication, right?
Any kid who has got oppositional defiant disorder, which you get by often arguing with adults and often refusing to comply with adults, those are the official symptoms.
You get treated with behavior modification manipulations, or medication, or any kid with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which means they're not paying attention to some teacher because they're boring, but they are willing to pay attention to things that are interesting for them, or if they're getting paid for it.
These research shows that.
That's most of these kids who are diagnosed with ADHD can pay attention to things that they are actually interested in.
They just rebel against things that they're not interested in.
What our society, parents, children, media, accept the authority of these mental health professionals as being able to be the ones in our society to designate what personality types, what temperaments are mentally ill, disorders, and which temperaments are good, are healthy.
And so I could tell you in 25 years of being in practice, no parent has ever dragged their kid into my office because the kid was too compliant.
They were listening to teachers too well.
Or they were too conformist.
Well, a society that would care about excessive compliance or fascism would care about something like that.
But our society certainly doesn't care about that.
Our society cares about making sure that we don't have kids creating tension, rebelling against the status quo.
So, that's what my profession does.
It sort of functions as a sort of interpersonal police force in terms of designating certain temperaments, certain personalities as mentally ill or disordered.
So again, we have a situation where you have parents, society, kids, believing in some
authority's view of what's mentally healthy, what's normal, and not their own good.
So those three major socializing forces for kids, what do the adults they see besides
their parents?
They see teachers, right?
They see adults on television.
And they see mental health professionals.
These are the major socializing forces in their lives, and they're all teaching them to succumb to an authority's definition of education, of entertainment, of, in fact, their abnormality of mental health.
DSM, which stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses, this is the bible, the psychiatric bible of mental diagnoses.
And this first came into being in 1952 when the book was like this, this thick.
And nowadays we're in what we call the DSM-IV.
You know, it's the fourth edition.
Actually, there's been five.
And the book is like this big, and they're planning another one that's going to be coming out in a few years.
Now, historically in the DSM, which is the publication of the American Psychiatric Association, that very few diagnoses are taken out.
They are at it.
Lots of diagnoses are at it.
And so 1980 was a real interesting year because that was the year of a real gigantic childhood expansion of diagnosis.
So prior to 1980, which was the DSM-III, there was no such thing as oppositional defiant disorder, which is one of these diagnoses that I often talk about with People from the media, they think I'm being sarcastic because they ask me, is that for juvenile delinquents?
Is that for kids who are really getting into trouble with the law?
And I said, no, that's a whole other diagnosis.
That's conduct disorder.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder kids are doing nothing illegal for the most part.
They're just arguing with adults.
They're refusing to comply with adults.
They're angry with adults.
They're resentful with adults.
Those are the official symptoms.
And that's what's added in 1980.
Tension Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, that was thrown in in 1980.
The interesting thing was in 1980, there was one famous diagnosis that was taken out.
And it actually had been taken out a few, in the 1970s it had been taken out.
But it had been in the DSM-II.
And it's very telling how it was put in and why it was taken out.
Up until the DSM-III, homosexuality was a mental illness.
In the early 1970s, there was gay rights activists who got very upset about being called mentally ill because they were gay.
And so they became politically active.
And one year there was actually the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, it wasn't that bright, they had their convention in San Francisco.
And they got protested in major ways.
And they got scared.
They literally, these psychiatrists really got scared of these gay guys and these gay women.
And they were gay psychiatrists who were in the closet afraid to say anything, but they were kind of root-informed.
And politically, through lots of political processes and demonstrations, homosexuality was kicked out as a mental illness in the 70s, and it wasn't in the DSM-III in 1980.
And the important thing for people to remember that it was put in, obviously, for political, cultural
reasons as a mental illness, and that homosexuality was taken out for political, cultural
reasons. And in fact, every so-called disorder and illness in that DSM is in there for political,
cultural reasons. Some of them are just more or less obvious. Homosexuality was one oppositional
defiant disorder outside of the American Psychiatric Association. It's pretty
obvious to the American people that that's not an illness or even a disorder. That's just
something you don't like. You'd rather kids be more compliant, so let's call them a mental
illness. But I would tell you that almost all of these things, there's very few
conditions in that DSM that are actually organic conditions that you can see with a lab test or an x-ray.
And most of those are not really psychiatric conditions, they're neurological conditions.
The vast majority of the things in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM ...are just behaviors that people have decided they don't like, because they create havoc within a family, within a school, within a society.
Nowadays, the most common so-called mental illness, mental disorder, is depression.
Depression, 25-30 years ago, it was very, very rare.
Anti-depressants, the most famous being Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft, these are handed out by, not just psychiatrists, but by general practitioners, like aspirin almost.
And...
There's skyrocketing rates of depression in the United States over the last 50 years.
So if you do take a look at epidemiological studies, epidemiological surveys, you'll find that there's a tenfold, maybe twentyfold increase in the rate of depression in the last 50 years.
Well, why is that?
Well, some people who are Critics of psychiatry, of which I'm one, they say that it's just all about these people making much to do about nothing.
That they're taking normal human sadness, normal human grief, that people are going through, and labeling it as a disease and labeling it as depression.
That certainly is the case.
We have actual studies that show, that happens all the time, that people who are going through
just normal human loss, you know, kick off these depressive symptoms, which are, you
know, which they have, you know, low energy, inability to experience pleasure, lack of
sex drive, these typical classics, depression symptoms, because they're going through a
normal human grief period.
So that's one reason why you have these skyrocketing rates of depression, medicalizing, diseasing
of normal human processes.
But I think there are other reasons why you have these skyrocketing depression rates that
have to do with our culture as well.
So, for example, we know, and this is common sense, but lots of research shows that social isolation, lack of support, lack of community is highly associated with depression.
Real scientists will ask the question, well, does depression cause social isolation, or does social isolation cause depression?
Well, the answer is both.
There's a kind of vicious interactional cycle.
But what we also know in our society is that, remember, depression rates are going through the roof.
We also know that, besides that social isolation is related and associated with depression, we know that there's a dramatic increase of social isolation in America.
So, last U.S.
Census showed that we now have far more people living alone than there were 10 years, 20 years before.
Almost 25% of the population living alone.
But even more significant than that, okay, because maybe some of these people who are alone have friends and they're not socially isolated, more significant than that was a study that came out a few years ago, which got a lot of attention, was that it talked about the number of confidants people had in their life, the number of people who they really trusted.
And what we know now in America is that as of 2004, 25% of Americans say they have zero, no confidence at all in their life, compared to 1985 when only 10% of people said there was nobody in their life that they could talk about the serious, most important things that are going on for them.
So, lots of reasons why we have this kind of social isolation and why people have been decimated in terms of community.
But part of it is when you have a society that only is controlled by corporations, that only cares about bottom line, you know, most money for shareholders, and you don't care about human needs, you do things all the time that break up community that break up society people lose their jobs they
lose their entire industry
they have to move constantly so lots of different things are going on you build
you know you build highways so that people are are constantly in their cars
and suburbia versus you keep letting people live in small towns in the
country in the cities where they could be closer with one another so there's all
different forces out there that create more social isolation
social isolation is highly associated with depression depression rates are going through the roof that's not the
only reason why we've got increasing rates of depression but that's that's
that's one major increasingly in our society uh... childhood so-called
childhood disorders which you never would have soared would be very very rare
almost You almost never see, 25, 30 years ago, any kind of kid, any child taking any kind of psychiatric medication.
Now this is common, right?
I mean, I talk to kids all the time, and they tell me the statistics that they hear 10% or so of them are on psychiatric medication is totally wrong.
They laugh.
And most of the kids that I talk to, they tell me 25 to 30% of the kids in their schools
are taking some kind of a ADD medication, Ritalin or Adderall or Addy's as they call
them.
Or they're taking some kind of a antidepressant, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft medication.
Or increasingly, more of them are taking anti-psychotic chasers, you know, with these drugs.
They're taking these drugs called Risperdal and Zyprexib, which were really the replacements
for these heavyweight tranquilizer drugs, Haldol and Thorazine, that went off patent.
And the pharmaceutical companies created these so-called atypical anti-psychotics, which
are really not that much different than the old-fashioned ones.
And they are creating enormous amounts of side effects.
Many reasons why you have obese kids out there.
More and more of American children are obese.
Lots of reasons for that, but one of the least talked about ones is that so many of them are on these antidepressants, on these antipsychotics, which make it more likely that they're going to be obese.
So, all of these kids are being diagnosed with depression, with bipolar.
The idea of any kind of kid being diagnosed with bipolar 25-30 years ago was absurd.
Kids were moody, right?
Kids went up and down.
Kids, you know, would talk about feeling like suicidal one day and talking about like they're gonna be, you know, the President of the United States the next day.
This was a kid kind of thing, but somewhere along the way, the psychiatry, pharmaceutical, industrial establishment, and make no mistake, they're proud partners.
They don't hide this.
There's a proud partnership between pharmaceutical companies and the American Psychiatric Association and the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.
They're proud partners with one another financially.
And between them, they decided That all kinds of kids wore disorder, attention deficit disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and a whole bunch of other kids were mentally ill, seriously mentally ill, and so now you have literally two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and given major heavyweight drugs, anti-psychotic drugs.
It's problematic enough that all these kids who weren't paying attention to boring schools were given speed amphetamines, which is what Adderall is.
Now, they're given these heavy, sedating, zombifying, anti-psychotic drugs like Risperdal, like Zuprexil, like Seroquel.
When you talk about diagnoses in psychiatry, There's almost zero reliability in any kind of diagnosis because when you take a kid, I've seen many, many kids who've come in here diagnosed by some other doctor with Attention Deficit Disorder, Hyperactivity Disorder.
You know, I've seen many, many kids and I ask, well, how is this diagnosis made?
And it turns out, always, that these diagnoses are made by these questionnaires that were handed out to parents to fill out or teachers to fill out.
And routinely, I'll look at these questionnaires and I'll tell a kid, before I even meet them, I'll say, I bet you I know which teacher that you really like.
And of course it's the one teacher that didn't diagnose the kid with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
So what determines often You know, whether an adult perceives a kid with ADHD or any of these other diagnoses is, you know, how much trouble that kid is giving them.
How much they like or dislike that kid.
They won't admit this, but I see this all the time.
And so, when you take a look at the reliability of paper and pencil subjective tests, it's going to be very low.
Or you move towards depression.
How is that diagnosed?
You know, if you take a look at these drug studies that assess people as being severely depressed and assess their remission rate, they're often used, the most common measurements that's used is something called the Hamilton Rating Scale for depression.
It's within the public domain.
You know, people can look it up on the internet.
They can look at these questions themselves.
on this Hamilton rating scale.
And what you'll discover is that there's an awful lot of questions there that have to
do with your sleeping.
For example, you can earn two points for having difficulties going to sleep, two points for
difficulties staying asleep, two points...
You can earn up to six points for having difficulties sleeping, which is almost enough points to
make you declare like you're in remission or out of remission.
How many points do you get if you're, like, thinking seriously about killing yourself?
You know, only a couple of points.
You know, why is that?
Well, these tests are loaded up so that it's more likely, you know, these drugs are going to affect things like your sleeping.
Drugs can make you sleep better.
Are they going to make you feel less suicidal or not?
Well, they set up these tests, these evaluations, these measurements, so it doesn't matter so much.
So in fact, you've got antidepressants, and this is not Bruce Levine saying this, this is finally now the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, black box warnings, saying that these antidepressants, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, make it more likely that a young person, a kid, a teenager, a young adult, will have suicidal thoughts.
Then if they're not taking them, okay?
Twice as likely, actually, if you take a look at the statistics.
And so, you have to ask, what kind of population buys into the fact that something is an antidepressant, an antidepressant drug, that actually makes it more likely you have suicidal thoughts and feelings?
That seems to me more like a pro-depressant drug.
But, you know, it doesn't seem that way, I guess, to a lot of doctors out there who are being told that just because, you know, the FDA approves something for something, you can use it.
The whole idea of what off-label prescribing means is that there are many, many drugs out there that the FDA has not approved for a particular use.
But, and this frightens a lot of people when they discover this,
is once a drug is an approved drug, a doctor can choose to prescribe it for anything.
They can use an antidepressant, you know, for somebody.
They can decide somebody's like, well, they're laughing too much out there in life, you know,
or they're having too good a time, or they're, you know, or whatever.
They decided that somebody's in a grief state.
Their father died a month ago and they should have gotten over it.
And so we can prescribe anything that's approved.
And so the interesting thing that drug companies have gotten in trouble for lately Major fines.
Eli Lilly, a lot of the other major drug companies, Eli Lilly makes Niprexa, makes Prozac, a lot of the other drug companies, what they have gotten in trouble for, in some cases multi-million dollar, in some cases even billion dollar fines, is for marketing off-labeling drugs. And what that means is that while
doctors, any doctor, any physicians allowed to prescribe any drug for anything,
drug company sales representatives, okay, they're not allowed to pitch drugs for off-market use and
they've done a lot of that kind of stuff.
So for example, Zyprexa being one of Eli Lilly's drugs, they've had off-label marketing for that
to sedate old people who weren't psychotic, okay, or sedate young people who weren't labeled with psychoses,
and their salespeople were caught doing this kind of stuff, and so that's one
thing that they are really not allowed to do.
Drug companies often When they start messing around with a drug, it's routine, a lot of these psychiatric drugs that become famous psychiatric drugs originally, they weren't being planned for the use that they were given, that they ultimately had.
One of the things that people, when you're talking about drug development, is that a lot of people don't know that the Food and Drug Administration does not do any independent tests on these drugs.
That these drugs, every drug that's approved, the drug company themselves does the testing on these drugs.
So, some people immediately, they get shocked and they say, that sounds like, you know, the fox guarding the house.
You mean we're using all drugs off of the data that was furnished, that was drug company data?
I said, yeah.
I mean, what happens is the drug companies do tests on these drugs and then they are registered, these tests are registered with the FDA and they furnish this data to the fda
and so we're basing uh... potentially multi-billion dollar blockbuster drugs
that the drug companies of or the some millions of dollars in we're not trusting
that these drug companies
are being completely out front about everything that that they're doing
we know from experience that that's been a bad idea
Okay, so these drugs get submitted to the FDA, and then evaluators from the FDA, the drug tests, supposedly for a drug to win approval, the drug company can have done 10, 20 different tests, and the drug has been found to be ineffective, no better than a placebo.
But all they need to do is find a couple of these studies that the drug does a little bit better than a placebo.
And so the drug companies, what they want to do all the time is there's two ways to make a drug do better than a placebo.
One is to have a really great drug, but that's hard.
It's much easier to have a really crappy placebo.
That's easy.
And so what they do for the case of antidepressants, when you do real science, you find that there's almost no difference between the antidepressants Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and placebo drugs.
The way that you kind of somehow try to create a slight difference, and you have to understand that
even with all this drug company dice loading of the experimental design,
in the majority of drug trials, the placebo still does better or as well as the drug.
But they do lots of dice loading.
One is what I mentioned before, the actual research instrument that they use to assess whether a drug is effective.
Something like the Hamilton Rating Scale for depression, which is heavily loaded in items influenced by the drug and don't talk about whether people are feeling more meaningful and more satisfying in their lives and that kind of thing.
So you load it that way.
Another interesting way that the drug testing is loaded is that in real science, the whole idea of giving a placebo is to have something what we call a double-blind control, which means that neither the researcher nor the subject knows You know, who's getting the drug and who's getting the sugar pill placebo?
You do that because we know from science, especially when you're talking about things like depression, people's expectations are hugely important in determining whether they're going to get better or not.
So, you try to tease out whether somebody's getting better just because of their expectations, or they're getting better because this drug actually has something therapeutic about it.
That's why you do these kinds of things.
So in real science, what you would do is have what we call an active placebo versus a sugar
pill.
Why do we do that?
Because we know when people take sugar pills, they can penetrate the double blind.
They can guess that they're taking a sugar pill, and they know that they're not taking
the drug.
So to do real science, the whole point of real science, having a double blind control,
is so that the subject nor the researcher can identify who's really taking the placebo
and who's taking the drug.
And so what you do in real science is give somebody what we call an active placebo.
So something that's not a therapeutic agent, but something that creates some physiological
effects unlike a sugar pill.
So it would be much more difficult to penetrate the double blind.
Of course, drug companies are never going to do that.
No drug company study ever uses an active placebo because it's making it more likely
that the placebo will do as well as the drug.
There's a lot of other techniques that drug companies do in their research design to make
it more likely their drug will look better than placebo.
But with all of their dice loading, it hasn't worked out that well.
And so we've got a lot of, been in the mainstream press over the last few years, that there's a lot of stuff out there showing that these research, when you look at it in aggregate, the placebos do as well or better than the drugs.
Why don't doctors know that?
Well, one of the reasons why doctors don't know that is drug companies have control over what gets published in journal articles or not.
They make sure that the things that get published in journal articles are the studies that show these drugs are effective.
Over 90% of the studies that showed these drugs to be effective, these antidepressants to be effective, were published in journal articles.
But if you took a look at all the studies registered with the FDA, none of the ones that were showing them to be ineffective were getting published.
So there was really only about Half of the studies registered with the FDA show these drugs to be effective, but 90% of them were getting published.
The drug companies are paying the folks who are doing the research.
That's how you make big money if you're a psychiatrist, you're a consultant, you're a researcher, or any doctor, not just psychiatrists, physicians in general, that you're getting paid by drug companies to do the research.
I mean, what's the likelihood of a drug company paying a researcher a second time after that researcher has done a study that showed the drug not to be effective and they published it in a prestigious journal?
You think that researcher is going to get paid again by that drug company to do another study?
Why should they?
It wouldn't be in their best corporate interests.
I mean, they're spending money to make money.
And when they do a study, you know, and when they're paying a researcher, they're hoping that the thing has some credibility with the FDA and the general public, but it's good for them financially.
You could make these drug companies, the major pharmaceutical companies, who make enormous amounts of profits, higher on average than any other industry out there, contribute to a pool for the Food and Drug Administration.
Or you wouldn't even do that.
Even a better way to do it, if we're going to have things that are any kind of a Food and Drug Administration, that it would be financed by the public.
Because the way it's set up now, the way the Food and Drug Administration is set up now, it really is almost like winning the Oscars or winning the Grammys.
It's a revolving door industry, the Food and Drug Administration, The people who are favorable to pharmaceutical companies, they leave out and they get good jobs at the pharmaceutical companies.
No different than the military industrial complex or the energy industrial complex.
All these industrial complexes are boringly the same.
And so there's all kinds of incentives when you are in the Food and Drug Administration,
unless you're those rare people, and they're all whistleblowers or people with great integrity,
but for the most part, the financial incentives are to do things to curry favor with drug
companies so that when you get out, you get a great job with a drug company, which happens
all the time. If you were a CEO or you were an executive in a pharmaceutical company,
Your loyalty is not to the patients, customers out there.
Your loyalty is to your shareholders.
That's who your official loyalty is.
You're going to do everything you can to make sure that if you put a certain amount of money down on a product, that it's going to become one of these blockbuster drugs.
So there's every disincentive in the world.
once you've done some, you know, 50 million, 100 million in research development and you
get to the stages where you're actually testing these drugs on people, that there's all kinds
of jobs that'll be lost and all kinds of money to be lost when it's found out that this drug
is dangerous or it's not as effective as a placebo.
So it does happen.
There are people in all these places, even in drug companies and in the FDA, who have
integrity, but the whole system is set up to disincentivize that and to incentivize
people doing things that are going to create unsafe and ineffective drugs.
Once these drugs become approved, then there's every incentive for these pharmaceutical companies to want to use these drugs for as many things as possible.
So for example, way back, the whole anti-psychotic industry Um, 20-25 years ago, drugs like Haldol or Thorazine or Trilofan, it was only a $200 million a year industry.
It was very rare that people would be labeled as crazy enough or wild enough or psychotic enough to be medicated, um, with these major tranquilizing drugs.
But the drug industry discovered that we could use a lot of these newer drugs that don't have these drugs called Zyprexa and Risperdal and Seroquel, that we don't have to just use them for people who've been labeled psychotically agitated.
We can use them For all kinds of people who we'd like to control a lot more, so some kid in the classroom.
And so all of a sudden you went from an industry, a total industry of anti-psychotic drugs being a $200-$250 million dollar industry, to Zyprexor a couple years back.
One anti-psychotic drug alone topping $3 billion dollars a year, okay, by being used for all kinds of ways, including, you know, chilling out people, you know, old folks in nursing homes who You know, we're understaffed, you know, chilling out, kids in classrooms here who are driving their teachers maybe a little bit crazy.
So you can just expand the usage of these things.
How does that zombify and pacify a population?
Well, it's quite obvious.
I mean, you know, it's literally write pages out of Brave New World, Huxley's Brave New World.
You've got a population Where you've got giant pharmaceutical companies who are incentivized to create drugs that are used for more and more populations that are creating some degree of havoc.
There's no institutions that are stopping that.
The American Psychiatric Association, they work in financial partnership with pharmaceutical companies.
National Alliance for the Mental Ill, so-called a family group, they take millions of dollars from drug companies in grants.
National Institute of Mental Health, which is the government agency.
There's a revolving door of employment between the NIMH and the drug companies.
Same with the Food and Drug Administration.
So there's no major institutions blocking this huge growth of drugs for people out there.
It's become almost mainstream to see the similarities between SOMA, the drug used in Brave New World, And all the psychiatric drugs that are being used now.
It's a drug to kind of, you know, drugs to kind of get people to chill out.
I ask kids all the time, what's the actual effect on you of that ADHD drug, that Ritalin, that Adderall, you know, all these other drugs, Dexedrine that they've used, you know, what's the actual effect?
Well, for many of them, and their parents and their teachers, you know, agree that it doesn't have any kind of effect in making them pay more attention.
But for some of them it does.
Some of them, Superficially, they look like they are paying attention.
They're certainly more manageable and more compliant in a classroom.
That does, in fact, happen.
And those are the kids I'm really interested in.
I say, well, what's happening?
What's happening to you?
And they're saying, well, you know what happens to me, Bruce?
I know at some level I'm just as bored as ever, but I don't care as much.
And I'm just not as antsy or as agitated about being bored.
Sort of in similar ways to people who use nicotine and smoke cigarettes on crappy jobs that they're in.
They know they're just as bored as ever, but if they could get their nicotine hit, it takes the edge away from that.
And so that's in lots of ways what psychotropic drugs do.
Illegal drugs are psychotropic drugs, like marijuana and heroin, and psychiatric drugs are all psychotropic drugs.
And what that means is that they're drugs that affect your neurotransmitters.
Some of the famous neurotransmitters nowadays are serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine, which, by the way, are the neurotransmitters that cocaine affects.
And they're the same neurotransmitters that amphetamines affect.
Which are kind of synthetic cocaine.
And that's what you give to kids with ADHD.
These synthetic cocaine amphetamines.
That's what they're being given.
It doesn't have the same effect when you're taking something in pill form as it is when you're snorting it or when you're IVing something.
But these drugs are very, very much similar.
And almost all of these drugs that are psychotropic drugs Some of them are more likely to be uppers, right?
You know, the amphetamines.
Some of them are more likely to be downers.
But what they all have in common is, is they disconnect you from what you're really feeling.
And so you ask people all the time, when we're on these stuff, or you ask kids, it's like, you know, they'll say stuff like, well, I think I used to care about that.
And I kind of, I think I still care about it, but I don't feel as much caring.
You know, I think I hate that person.
You know, I think I hate that guy who's mean to me, but I don't feel that hate as much.
It takes the edge off of negative emotions.
It takes the edge off of positive emotions here.
And for some people, they call that successful treatment.
For guys like me, this is like Brave New World.
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