In July 2010, the Children’s Minister Sarah Teather launched a government report following concerns that the SEN or Special Educational Needs labelling practice was being used to excuse poor behaviour.
Now in May 2012, changes are being made to the way children with SEN are identified, that will see fewer children labelled as having special needs. It is a definite step in the right direction. Continue reading
By John Naish – Daily Mail – May 15, 2012
Depression levels in Britain continue to spiral. Last year alone, more than 43 million prescriptions for antidepressants were handed out — 25 per cent more than three years before. But are antidepressants the panacea we hope them to be?
Drugs such as Prozac were hailed in the early Nineties as wonder pills that would banish depressive blues for good. But in the past five years, growing scientific evidence has shown these drugs work for only a minority of people. And now controversial research in a respected journal claims that these antidepressants can make many patients’ depression worse.
Continue reading
How many people know about the Yellow Card Scheme that exists in the United Kingdom? How many people know the purpose of the Scheme?
If you have ever taken psychiatric drugs or know someone who has been prescribed the drugs, it is advisable that you know about it and its purpose.
CCHR produced a series of information booklets, giving the facts about the effects of psychiatric drugs, such as, but not limited to antipsychotics, antidepressants and psychostimulants. These booklets give the facts about the effects of these drugs.
Recognising the effects is an important step. Another equally important step is reporting the effects, which are also referred to as Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs). This is where the Yellow Card Scheme comes in.
Founded in 1964 after the thalidomide disaster, the Scheme was developed by Dr Bill Inman. It is run by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the Commission on Human Medicines (CHM).
Effects of the drugs or ADRs can be reported by anyone; this is usually done by healthcare professionals – including doctors, pharmacists and nurses – but patients and carers can also make reports.
Yellow Cards are available from pharmacies. Reports can also be submitted online through the MHRA-run Yellow Card Scheme website.
NOTE: If you cannot easily report an adverse drug reaction, write a letter to the MHRA and your MP on the need to make this system consumer-friendly i.e., very easy to file a report.
By Laura Clark – Daily Mail – May 7, 2012
Prescriptions for ‘chemical cosh’ drugs to treat hyperactivity have soared four-fold in a decade amid evidence that children as young as three are taking the medication. The number of prescriptions for Ritalin leapt from 158,000 in 1999 to 661,463 in 2010, NHS figures have revealed.
Psychologists said they were seeing a sharp rise in the number of children below the age of six, and some as young as three, being prescribed the drug. They also warned dosages were getting stronger, with children increasingly given a powerful ‘kickstart’ dose in the mornings.
Ritalin – whose generic name is methylphenidate hydrochloride – can cause nausea, fatigue and mood swings and has also been linked to suicides. Most prescriptions would have been given to those diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder, with symptoms including an inability to concentrate and restless or impulsive behaviour. Continue reading
By Katherine Faulkner – Daily Mail – April 27, 2012
Anyone who works in child protection will tell you that one of the worst aspects of the job is having to take a youngster from its mother’s arms, possibly for ever.It is heart-breaking enough, even when you are 100 per cent sure that being taken into care is the best thing for that child. But what if you are forcibly removing a child from a mother you believe to be a good and caring parent?
Keira Roberts never imagined that she would find herself in such a position when she accepted a job with an eminent psychiatrist who specialised in helping local authorities identify dangerous or neglectful parents.
Dr George Hibbert was regarded as one of country’s leading experts on child abuse, had lectured at Oxford and had advised MPs on the family courts system.
When Keira agreed to work for him, it was at one of his Family Assessment Centres — places where families who had come to the attention of social services departments were referred. They were placed under round-the-clock observation while it was determined what should happen next.
It was a very intrusive set-up, but Keira assumed that Dr Hibbert — who was highly trusted (and very well paid) by a string of local authorities — knew what he was doing. And in the wake of the Baby P scandal, she understood how important it was for any concerns about parental abuse to be acted on. Continue reading
A teenager who used to vomit up to 15 times a day, spent six months on a psychiatric ward before her mother finally convinced doctors she had a physical condition, rather than a eating disorder.
Lyam Baker, 15, shrank from a healthy size 12 to a size zero within months after developing Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome – a physical condition that causes sufferers to vomit several times a day. But medics believed the teen was purposely making herself sick – and held her on a mental health ward for months before her mother finally convinced them she was suffering from CVS.
The condition caused Lyam, from Birmingham, West Midlands, to vomit up to 15 times a day – and at her worst, she weighed just six and a half stone. Her mum, Carol, a nurse, desperately tried to convince doctors that her daughter was not suffering from an eating disorder – after watching her desperately trying to stop herself from vomiting. But they didn’t realise that Lyam was actually suffering from the rare condition, which started after she got scared on a school camping trip.
Ms Baker said: ‘Lyam’s illness very quickly took over our lives. Her vomiting cycles were furious and frequent and she spiralled downwards quickly, and her weight declined rapidly. She went from being a bright, bubbly girl, to constantly being exhausted and a shell of her former self- it is a very lonely illness. I painfully watched my daughter withering away while the doctors kept insisting she was doing this to herself – she said she wasn’t and I believed her. I had to fight and fight to get the doctors to listen to me – I don’t want any other family to have to go through what I did.’ Continue reading
ANALYSIS: Is our approach to mental health compromised by the drugs industry’s financial ties with health professionals?
By Carl O’Brien – Irish Times – April 16. 2012
THE GLOSSY health brochure and website look innocuous enough. “Solutions for Wellness”, it says, along with information on nutrition, wellness and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It’s a programme being rolled out by health professionals in many mental health services across the country.
There is no mention of drugs of any kind – until you notice the programme itself is sponsored by drug manufacturer Eli Lilly, the makers of some of the most commonly prescribed mental health drugs such as Prozac and Zyprexa.
It’s something which makes Agnes Higgins – an associate professor in mental health at Trinity College Dublin’s school of nursing – feel uncomfortable.
“This is information which has been created by a pharmaceutical company and carries their logo. We are supposed to be providing impartial advice and support to patients. Should we be uncritically accepting or distributing this information?”
For many, it is part of a worrying trend in recent years in which drug companies are playing a more active role in sponsoring medical events, research and education, potentially compromising the independence of nurses and doctors.
Patient groups and growing numbers of health professionals fear the boundaries between education and promotion are becoming increasingly blurred, while patients can be left in the dark over the true value of medication.
Mental health medication is big business. The number of prescriptions on the medical card in Ireland have increased by more than 25 per cent between 2006 and 2010, costing the State in excess of €100 million. This figure does not include private prescriptions, which would push the overall value of the market higher still. Continue reading
Bracknell News – April 15, 2012
NEARLY 80 workers at a Broadmoor Hospital specialist unit that closed last week have been made redundant.
West London Mental Health NHS Trust, the body that runs the high-security hospital in Crowthorne, had been given Government funding to run a pilot Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) unit, but ministers later decided to end the project.
The unit’s last ward at Broadmoor shut on Wednesday last week. Of the staff, 60 took voluntary redundancy, 18 were made compulsorily redundant and nine were redeployed.
Trust spokeswoman Megan Singleton said: “The DSPD pilot provided funding for 48 patients only through central funding from the Department of Health/National Offender Management Service; a government decision was made last year to decommission the service and redirect the funds into other programmes within the prison/probation service.
“The pilot was effective for those patients who were treated. They responded to treatment In the DSPD service and have since moved to other clinical settings.”
However, a human rights watchdog questioned the worth and cost of the pilot in the light of its closure.
Brian Daniels, spokesman for the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights (UK), said: “The failure of the DSPD unit is yet another example of significant public funding directed at mental health that has been wasted.
“The closing unit has been described as an expensive way of providing public protection with treatment that has been largely ineffective. Now we learn Broadmoor Hospital is to get a £256m revamp using taxpayers’ funds.
“It leads to the conclusion that psychiatry is one of the very few professions that has to continually advertise its failures to get more government funding.
“If it actually cured anyone, it would go out of business.”
Eddie Jaggers, regional organiser for Unison, said the union had worked with colleagues at Unite and the Royal College of Nursing and the trust management to reduce the number of redundancies, at one point feared to be 200, and push for redeployment.
He said: “We are going through a difficult time but the local unions did extremely well, working with management, to achieve a relatively low number of compulsory redundancies.”
As previously reported in the News, the trust was given planning permission by Bracknell Forest Council last month to build a replacement high security psychiatric hospital next to the existing facilities and an access road with roundabout onto the A3095 Foresters Way.
The trust says many of its present buildings are no longer suitable. It plans to rebuild are conditional on approval by the Department of Health.
Read article: http://www.bracknellnews.co.uk/news/crowthorneandsandhurst/articles/2012/04/15/58643-80-jobs-lost-at-broadmoor-unit/
A mother was wrongly accused of putting her 11-year-old son at “significant risk of harm” by a top psychiatrist at The Priory who never met the parents or child.
By Tom Harper – London Evening Standard – April 11, 2012
Lucy Allan and her son
Dr Emma Whicher claimed that Lucy Allan, a prospective MP, had a temporary bout of depression that would have a “significant impact on her parenting”.
The false concerns added to fears that her son would be taken into care and forced the ex-investment banker to stand down as a Conservative councillor, quit as a school governor and remove herself from David Cameron’s A-list of potential MPs.
She spent £10,000 on legal fees to clear her name and protect her family from further action by officials at Wandsworth council. Ms Allan told the Standard: “An eminent ‘expert’ passed judgment on my parenting abilities without my knowledge and without having met me or my son. Continue reading
There’s nothing smart about taking psychiatric drugs as a form of cognitive enhancement. An article in the Daily Telegraph has reported on an increase in the use of ‘smart drugs’ to boost intelligence and lose weight, while pressures to achieve the standards is driving a generation into buying illicit drugs online in the belief they are not ‘good enough’.
The only thing remotely smart about the whole charade is the pharmaceutical marketing techniques used in an attempt to convince students they might get better grades or they might enhance their life in some other way by taking psychiatric stimulant drugs.
Once reserved for the mentally disturbed, today it would be difficult to find someone – a family member, a friend or neighbour – who hasn’t taken some form of a psychiatric drug. These drugs have become such a part of life for many people that ‘life without drugs’ is simply unimaginable.
From the cradle to the grave, we are bombarded with information pushing us towards this type of chemical ‘fix’ when in reality, it’s just the latest initiative in an attempt to increase profits for the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries.
It’s no secret that if you want to stay awake, an amphetamine-like substance or stimulant will do the job. It’s also no secret that amphetamine-like substances can be used to suppress appetite. So it is that central nervous system stimulants are the types of psychiatric drugs being touted as ‘smart’ or ‘cognitive-enhancing.’ A student may stay awake and complete the assignment, but the ‘chemical crutch’ has nothing to do with intelligence.
Studies have found that children who take amphetamine-type or other prescribed, mind-altering drugs do not perform better academically. In fact, children who take these drugs fail just as many courses, and drop out of school just as often, as children who did not take them.
Psychiatric drugs are habit-forming and addictive where withdrawal from them can be far more difficult than from illegal drugs. The evolution of these drugs has been a procession of claimed “miraculous” new developments that were all eventually found to be harmful, even deadly.
Some of the side effects associated with stimulant drugs include aggression, blurred vision, depression, dizziness, drowsiness, hallucinations, headaches, nausea, restlessness, nervousness, stomach aches, anxiety, seizures, irritability, vomiting, psychosis or paranoia, stunted growth and suicidal thoughts.
Further, stimulant drugs are also known as ‘gateway drugs’ that lead to addiction to street drugs such as cocaine. The claims made for these drugs is nothing more than a profit-driven marketing technique at the expense of healthy individuals.
Read more: http://www.cchr.co.uk/downloads/psychostim-booklet.pdf