Obama Has Failed The First Test: To Protect Our Mothers and Children
Celia Farber
A sudden death to my newly developed enthusiasm for Obama who apparently supported the "Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act" bill.
Via Vera Sharav, Association For Human Research Protection:
The bill, HR 20, incorporating S. 1375, is promoted as "The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act" ostensibly to combat postpartum depression. The bill would authorize "screening" and "treating" women deemed "depressed" after giving birth. The bill's covert intent is to INCREASE use of SSRI antidepressants and antipsychotics.
What's scary is that HR 20, authorizing appropriations for fiscal years 2008-2010, has already passed the House with ne'er any resistance!
Instead, a grass roots crusader against HR 20, has stepped up to the plate:
Amy Philo, a mother who became homicidally psychotic following ingestion of Zoloft prescribed by a psychiatrist who kept increasing the dose to frightening ill effects.
Her experience led her to found Children and Adults Against Drugging America
See her story and videos on YouTube:
and
Sign the petition to stop the "Mothers Act" which will benefit the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, but cause great harm to American women, children and their families.
(Later tonight I will try to make active links out of all those.)
I forwarded this to a few dozen friends and contacts, with this note:
Researching SSRI's for my next book, I came across this:
Please watch it. Once you have, I don't think you will need my prodding to sign the petition and join the human chain to stop this insanity.
(I am sorry to learn that Mr. Obama lent his name to this malevolent bill.)
I don't think, personally, this country is facing any greater threat right now than the threat of the pharmaceutical industry's constant desecration of all human freedoms, starting in utero.
With respect and thanks for your time--
Celia
Related Posts (on one page):
- Hard Data on SSRI's and Murder/Suicide
- Obama Has Failed The First Test: To Protect Our Mothers and Children
You're in a tuff spot, as neither party is for less, only more of the 'samo samo'.
Big Pharma and George Soros are just two of the ghosts in the political process.
The Passion of the Obama
Vanderleun added a whole bunch of stuff since the original post.
Whatever you feel about the pharmaceutical companies, they have no power to force anyone to use their products. The schools, via their ability to make things miserable for the kids of parents who won't go along, do have this power to a certain extent.
And you know how Tom Cruise hates that, praise be his name!
It's fascinating that people can actually believe that pharmaceuticals are incapable of treating depression, but magically do have the power to completely control your thoughts and be responsible for all bad things in your psyche.
The case I would make is quote the opposite: If drugs can alter the mind for good then drugs can alter the mind for ill. That is not a risk I find acceptable. Too much tinkering. I think you should try to get past Tom Cruise and listen to the testimonials of these mothers.
I'm not convinced anti-depressants and anti-psychotics are over-prescribed in general. (Ritalin clearly is, praise be the public schools.) My experience, though, is colored by the two people I know who are completely scary off their anti-psychotic medicines, and my personal experience with anti-depressants. (For example, since starting on Wellbutrin, I have not felt what was a previously common temptation to steer into the path of oncoming semis on two lane highways. That I never did owed as much to my sympathy with the driver of the semi, who doesn't deserve the psychological or physical damage he might get from that event, than it did to my (otherwise fairly powerful) sense of self-preservation.) They aren't like antibiotics, they aren't cures, but they are lifesavers.
your anger is directed at the wrong source. The bill's covert intent is not to increase the use of SSRIs. The bill's only intent is to have make sure that women with post-partum depression have access to the standard of care. If you have a problem with SSRIs, your beef is not with Obama or any member of congress, but rather with the doctors and pharaceutical companies determining the standard of care.
Feb. 27, 2008 -- A study suggesting the widely prescribed antidepressants Prozac, Paxil, and Effexor work no better than placebo for most patients who take them does not present an accurate picture of the research as a whole, a leading depression expert says.
The research analysis included published and previously unpublished data submitted to the FDA by the manufacturers of the three drugs, as well as a fourth, Serzone, which is no longer sold in the U.S.
The researchers concluded that when taken as a whole, the data showed that only a small group of the most severely depressed patients benefited from taking one of the antidepressants.
Great post, Celia!
Post partum depression is rooted in metabolic disruption and pernicious malnutrition. Not exactly the kind of biochemical profile one should be pumping full of SSRIs.
But contraindications be damned! Give mom drugs and abandon her to her fate; soon to be coming to a grocery store or Toys R Us near you where poor abandoned medicated mom will be trying to shoot the wrong people.
Someday we'll wake up and ask what is Congress' medicine cabinets. For the children.
Celia - there are quite a number of these bills cropping up around the country. I believe there was one last year in Illinois maybe? There are also quite a few bills mandating the screening of children in school that I find particulary disturbing. I'll try to dig some info up for you later today.
Who are YOU citing? Anecdotal experiences with no coherent etiology?
And as everyone has already pointed out, your anger is entirely misdirected in any case. Giving people access to medical care is itself not the problem if your beef is simply the standard of care given by doctors. Your beef is with the standard of care. Going after giving people more access to medical care is just plain nutty.
"The case I would make is quote the opposite: If drugs can alter the mind for good then drugs can alter the mind for ill."
That's true of ANYTHING has any medical effect. I guess you should quit modern medicine again... but you won't.
"That is not a risk I find acceptable."
What risk? This area of medicine certainly isn't as well fleshed out as others, but neither is it all a scam.
"Too much tinkering. I think you should try to get past Tom Cruise and listen to the testimonials of these mothers."
Testimonials are worthless, often worse than worthless (because they are often an extremely incomplete picture with all the usual error biases), when it comes to trying to figure out the efficacy of some medical intervention. Scaremongering doesn't help clarify anything.
Vic - you are completely missing the major objections to this type of legislation. Read the bills, they are not proposing that we get more people access to care - they are mandating it. I would have no objections to a project that built a mental health clinic and offered aid to those who would seek it. That's not what these proposals do. These proposals mandate care whether you seek it out or not. They mandate "mental health screening" without any proof these screenings prevent or detect mental illness. These screenings are crude questionaires given by untrained personnel. Answer a question the wrong way and you are steered into a mandatory treatment program.
Very scarey stuff if you ask me.
4. To further clarify and summarize, the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act encourages the U.S. Department of Health &Human Services (HHS) to coordinate and continue research to expand the understanding of the causes of, and find treatments for, postpartum conditions. It also encourages a national public awareness campaign, to be administered by HHS to increase awareness and knowledge of postpartum depression and psychosis. It encourages HHS to make grants available for projects for the establishment, operation and coordination of systems for the delivery of essential services to individuals with postpartum depression.
Melanie Blocker Stokes leapt to her death as a result of postpartum psychosis which was not promptly diagnosed and treated.
On February 23, 2001, Melanie Blocker-Stokes, a Chicago, IL, native and successful pharmaceutical sales manager, wife, and mother, gave birth to a daughter. After the birth of her daughter, Mrs. Blocker-Stokes developed a devastating mood disorder known as postpartum psychosis. She was admitted to Chicago-area hospitals three times, each time for 7 to 10 days. Despite medical assistance and the support of her family and friends, Mrs. Blocker-Stokes lost her battle with postpartum psychosis and jumped from a 12-story window ledge to her death on June 11, 2001.
"Read the bills, they are not proposing that we get more people access to care - they are mandating it."
Cite? You seem to get to this position via some rather torturous logic.
All doctors are required to do something if they suspect someone is a risk to themselves or others. This has been the way its been, and the way it will continue to be.
It's certainly true that the best way to deal with mental illness isn't always clear, and drugs may well get overused without enough work to justify their efficacy. Nevertheless, this sort of hysteria is not a reasonable part of that discussions, and claiming that increased screening for PPD is a bad thing is, well, plain old hysteria.
Next you'll be telling me that vaccines are poison.
And this will obviate any need for anti-depressant drugs. Enough so, that even Celia Farber shall be rendered infinitely happy, contented, and without tears or tremors. The mimosa reopening itself.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
2) If it didn't have a side effect, it wouldn't be a drug.
Modern medical orthodoxy's True Believers are loathe to admit they have NO EMPRICAL DATA on dumping SSRI's into women suspected of post partum depression. No studies have been done which establish the safety or usefulness of SSRI's in this unique human population subgroup.
Further, they have NO DATA establishing an appropriate diagnostic path or clinical path for this distinct patient class presenting with a "symptom cluster" used to describe PPD -a transitioning distressed medical condition with multivariate potential causes; many rooted in pernicious, undiagnosed metabolic and/or nutritional deficits.
Allopathic medicine has become "dump and run (to the bank) medicine" and exists much afoul the hippocratic oath.
I cannot urge enough.. the problem is not the SSRIs per se... but the drug dumping and systematic marginalization of the patient who will be given drugs per policy in lieu of more aggressive and singularly appropriate diagnostics to identify the specific causality in each patient. They are using drugs to ration medical care and diagnostics; drugs in lieu of medical treatment - not as medical treatment, but in lieu of.
Get that? The policy goal is to RATION MEDICAL CARE and RATION DIAGNOSTICS. The policy goal is to AVOID medically engaging the patient by rote administration of drugs.
Dump drugs on the patient and abandon. That's the allopathic medical model that has displaced our great tradition of medicine and the precious primacy of the hippocratic oath.
This is AIDSinc all over again. After murdering millions, more money will be indicated. There will be the next round of sacrificial Duesbergs and Bialys. And the needlessly dead.
The Moores and Gallos never went away. They'll just change the colors of the ribbons.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.