http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com / by Jon Rappoport / February 24, 2013
In the ensuing years, I became much more aware of the influence of drug companies in this Johnny Appleseed operation. They had, in fact, struck a deal to rescue the sinking profession of psychiatry. The arrangement was simple and potent: Big Pharma would bankroll psychiatric conferences and education, prop up flagging journals with advertising money, and generally promote the repute of psychiatry, in return for a certain kind of research:
The research would “prove” that all mental disorders were the result of chemical imbalances in the brain, and no amount of talk therapy would resolve these issues. Instead, it would take drugs, which of course would be developed and sold by Pharma.
In order for this scheme to work, the FDA, which certifies all medicines as safe and effective before releasing them for public consumption, would have to play along. That was no problem. The FDA basically serves the pharmaceutical industry.
Roughly five years after Columbine, I (and other investigators) began to see how widespread the research fraud really was. Peter Breggin was already aware of it and had published extensively on the subject.
For example, clinical trials of psychiatric drugs were being done over very brief periods of time; in some cases, the trials were as short as six weeks. This was the case with Xanax. A brief testing period would hide many of the adverse effects of the drugs.
But then I also saw how clinical trials that were failures, that revealed how badly the drugs were performing, could be hidden altogether, as if they’d never happened. The results of these trials weren’t published at all. A pharmaceutical company, running a number of studies on a drug, could cherry pick a few studies that looked good and shelve the others.
In 2009, searching the literature and interviewing several psychiatrists off the record, I came to understand that the whole idea of “chemical imbalances in the brain” was a fraud. No one had ever established a normal chemical level of balance. In other words, there was no scientific standard that, by comparison, could show what an “imbalance” was. It was a myth, and it was widely accepted, even by the public.
