Ezine Archive

Editor’s Comment

Finally, our last issue this year in which we share comments from visitors to Safe Harbor and AlternativeMentalHealth.com:
“I am a sociology honors graduate from Melbourne Australia. I have been keeping up to date with your newsletters and amazing work in the U.S. I have been appointed to sit on an advisory committee to the Minister of Health (Mental Health) in the state of Victoria. I also lecture in Community Development… I am currently putting together a Ph.D. proposal relating to the iatrogenic nature of diagnosed mental illness in Australia. I want to merge some sociological and political theories about mental illness with the kind of work your organization publishes…”

“I have been wanting to tell you how wonderful your medical conference was in June. It had a dramatic effect on my practice. I now use so many of the principles and techniques that were covered. If you have any other conference, PLEASE let me know about them.”

California Health Practitioner

“I wish you continued success in your very important work. Many clinicians appreciate your efforts throughout the country.”

Harvard Psychologist

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Practitioners Invited to Join Integrative Psychiatry Email List
Safe Harbor has created an email list called Integrative Psychiatry. It is for healthcare practitioners who are interested in sharing information on integrative (holistic, complementary) mental health treatments.
To join the list, send an email saying so and saying what kind of practitioner you are to: SafeHarborProj@aol.com.

Country Music Star Says No to Psych Meds

The life of Cledus T. Judd, the most popular comedian in country music and the “King of Country Music Parodies,” will be highlighted at the October 24, 2002, Safe Harbor Awards Benefit in Los Angeles.

Judd, whose biography was featured on the “Inside Fame” show (the most-watched episode of that show) on the CMT (Country Music Today) network, has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed psychiatric medication. “You name it, I tried it,” Judd told Safe Harbor personnel. “Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac – it all made me feel numb. I decided I can’t live my life like that. I’d rather feel the highs and the lows than to not feel at all.”

Excerpts from the “Inside Fame” show and a special video message of hope from Judd himself will be presented as part of the October 24 Safe Harbor program. “I wanted to be there personally,” Judd said, “but my performance schedule just won’t permit it.” Below is full information on the event:

Congress Investigates Overdrugging of Kids

The NY Post reports that heated exchanges occurred at a Congressional hearing convened by the House Government Reform Committee on September 27 to investigate the reported overdiagnosing and overmedicating of mental disorders in children.

Dr. Richard K. Nakamura, head of the National Institute of Mental Health, deflected criticism for such improper diagnoses of ADHD to managed care organizations: “There’s a possibility that physicians are told, ‘You have X amount of time to diagnose XYZ’ by their managed-care organization. I believe physicians are being given too little time and money to properly diagnose.”

The doctors usually make their diagnoses by looking over a school evaluation report on the child’s behavior.

E. Clarke Ross, who heads the 20,000-member group Children and Adults with ADHD (CHADD), was called before the House Government Reform Committee to explain why Ritalin is appropriate for kids. Ross, whose organization has been outspoken in favor of the drug, said the drug is overprescribed in some areas but underprescribed in others. “Nearly shouting,” The Post reports, committee chairman Rep. Dan Burton “charged Ross with creating an appearance that his organization was compromised, since it received money from drug companies.”

In an article titled “Ritalin Pusher Changes His Tune on Schools,” The Post quotes Ross as saying just before his testimony, “Their [schools’] job is to teach and [to] observe barriers to learning, not practice medicine.”

“But Ross denied allegations by advocates and several government agencies that he’s lobbying for Ritalin use – despite the estimated $1 million his organization has received over the past 10 years by Ritalin’s manufacturer.

“Burton said 6 million kids in America are taking Ritalin, while officials with the National Institutes of Health say the number is only 2 million.”

Lisa Marie Presley made the news again by testifying at the meeting.

“I have personally seen the effects of overmedicated children and it terrifies me … especially having two kids of my own,” said Presley. “I became involved with this whole issue because of a little 4-year-old boy, a friend of the family, who has suffered from being overmedicated.”

Presley emphasized that only by looking for alternatives to drugs will parents discover for themselves the numerous simple, workable and drug-free answers to the problems of attention, behavior and learning.

Freedom of Alternative Health Care Access Becomes Law in California

On September 24, 2002, California Governor Gray Davis signed Senate Bill 577 into law. Section 1 of the Bill says it all:
“The Legislature hereby finds and declares all of the following:

“(a) Based upon a comprehensive report by the National Institute of Medicine and other studies, including a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine, it is evident that millions of Californians, perhaps more than five million, are presently receiving a substantial volume of health care services from complementary and alternative health care practitioners. Those studies further indicate that individuals utilizing complementary and alternative health care services cut across a wide variety of age, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other demographic categories.

“(b) Notwithstanding the widespread utilization of complementary and alternative medical services by Californians, the provision of many of these services may be in technical violation of the Medical Practice Act (Chapter 5 (commencing with Section 2000) of Division 2 of the Business and Professions Code). Complementary and alternative health care practitioners could therefore be subject to fines, penalties, and the restriction of their practice under the Medical Practice Act even though there is no demonstration that their practices are harmful to the public.

“(c) The Legislature intends, by enactment of this act, to allow access by California residents to complementary and alternative health care practitioners who are not providing services that require medical training and credentials. The Legislature further finds that these nonmedical complementary and alternative services do not pose a known risk to the health and safety of California residents, and that restricting access to those services due to technical violations of the Medical Practice Act is not warranted.”

For Californians, who spend an estimated 75% of their health care dollar on “alternative medicine” (defined as any protocol, action, or therapy that isn’t “drugs, radiation, or surgery oriented”), this makes healthcare wide open. After decades of being accused of, and sometimes imprisoned for, practicing medicine without a license, Naturopaths, Homeopaths, Nutritionists, and other healthcare professionals are now free to practice without harassment.

Studies Support Inositol Use to Combat “Mood Disorders”

Inositol, a naturally occurring isomer (molecular variant) of glucose, may play an important role in the intracellular “second messenger system” to which several key serotonin receptor subtypes are linked.

Dr. James Greenblatt of McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, is currently using inositol supplementation as part of the treatment of patients diagnosed with depression, panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Inositol’s efficacy in the absence of side effects reportedly makes it an attractive addition to treatment plans for “specific mood disorders.”

Depressive patients show decreased levels of inositol in their cerebrospinal fluid (Levine et al., 1997) and inositol has a similar therapeutic profile to pharmaceutical selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) often used to treat depression (Mishori et al., 1999).

Fux et al. (1996) brought about significant improvement in “OCD” patients by administration of 18 grams/day of inositol in a random, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

Treatment with 12 grams of inositol per day (vs. placebo) has also been shown to significantly reduce the severity and frequency of panic attacks in patients with “panic disorder” (Benjamin et al., 1995) in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover experiment. The average number of panic attacks per week fell from 10 to 3.5 in patients receiving inositol.

Recently, Palatnik et al. (2001) completed a double-blind, controlled, crossover trial of inositol vs. fluvoxamine (Luvox(r), Faverin(r)) in the treatment of panic disorder that reinforces previous research that inositol is effective in treating this serious problem. Fluvoxamine has side effects of nausea and tiredness that often cause patients to stop taking it.

In this study, 20 patients taking inositol (up to 18 grams/day) showed improvements on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety, agoraphobia scores, and the Clinical Global Impressions scale, that were comparable with fluvoxamine. In the first month of treatment, inositol reduced the number of panic attacks per week by 4 compared with a reduction of 2.4 per week with fluvoxamine, a significantly improved outcome (p=0.049). Side effects were considerably less with inositol than with fluvoxamine. This is the first comparison of inositol with an established drug for treatment of panic disorder and suggests inositol may be just as effective as some drugs in the treatment of this disorder, with fewer side effects.

Inositol is not considered an essential dietary nutrient, because it is made in the body and is shuttled around to various tissues as needed. Overconsumption of sugar, however, may disrupt the inositol shuttle system and associated second messenger pathways, essentially leading to deficiency.

Often, the patients that Greenblatt treats are not able to make positive dietary changes, but he has shown that supranutritional doses of inositol are effective in treating illnesses even when the diet is lacking in some way.

Greenblatt is excited about current research on inositol for treating mental disturbances in children because it seems it sometimes can be used alone without the need for pharmaceutical drugs. He is anxious to get the word out to other psychiatrists who are reluctant to use a new and purely nutritional product without the research to back it up. The body of published literature on inositol in treating mental illness is significant, but it still has not been incorporated into mainstream clinical thinking.

Impossible Cures: Effective Mental Health Supplement Highlighted on Discovery Health Channel

On Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 7 PM and 10 PM Mountain Time the Discovery Health Channel (different from the Discovery Channel) will do a one-hour feature on the nutritional supplement developed by the Synergy Group of Canada, also known as TrueHope. The program will be replayed on October 20 at 5 PM Mountain Time.

The show, called “Impossible Cures” will tell the story of the all-natural supplement which has created considerable stir in the Canadian press and is becoming more known in the U.S. and abroad.

An article by Charles Popper, M.D., of Harvard in the December 2001 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, reported that he was able to get 11 of 15 of his bipolar patients off of medication using the TrueHope nutrients. Another article in the same journal by Bonnie Kaplan, Ph.D., reports on a study showing further success with the supplement.

Synergy’s founder, Tony Stephan, reports that the supplement was created in the mid-90s after Stephan’s wife, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, committed suicide, leaving him with 10 children. Stephen, with two children also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, says he met with a friend, an animal feed expert, who pointed out that pigs also exhibit strange behavior which is treated with nutrients.

Their product was developed and soon Stephan’s two bipolar children were on the supplement and were free from the need to take psychiatric drugs. Thousands have now tried the nutrients, called EM Power Plus.

The group’s web site is at www.truehope.com.

Holland Outlaws Advertisement of ADHD As Brain Disease

In a landmark case in Holland, the Advertisement Code Commission declared advertising ADHD as a brain disease to be fraudulent.

Mrs. H. Teunisse-Bruinsma and Mr. E. van Ede brought a case against the Brain Foundation Netherlands for including statements in their advertisements that ADHD is an inborn brain dysfunction, though the cause of ADHD symptoms is not scientifically proven. They accused the Foundation of wrong and misleading representation of the facts.

The Foundation countered with several scientific articles written on the subject of ADHD. However, the Commission found that not one of these articles provided evidence of ADHD being caused by inborn brain dysfunction – on the contrary, they stated that the cause was unknown.

In his comments on the case, neurologist Fred A. Baughman, author of several articles in leading medical journals and an expert witness on the subject of ADHD, said, “The history within the medical/scientific literature of any real medical disease begins with the discovery and description of the objective organic/physical abnormality that is, itself, the disease … In fact, ADHD has never been shown to be other than normal, if troublesome, behaviors in normal children/persons.”

Not only is the cause of ADHD unknown, Dr. Baughman feels it may be a moot point – how can something that doesn’t exist have a cause? “Speaking of its cause/etiology being yet unknown is a common semantic strategy within ‘biological’ psychiatry, meant to distract from the fact that no abnormality = disease is known to exist. Nor has any wholly psychiatric diagnosis/entity been validated as an organic disease or dysfunction, the reason being, that all are arbitrarily grouped behaviors decided upon in committee at the American Psychiatric Association.”

The brain dysfunction argument having failed, the Foundation further attempted defense by claiming that, since it is a nonprofit organization, the ‘advertisements’ were not technically advertisements. The Commission found this also to be false, based on the fact that the Foundation depends upon these advertisements for fund raising, and ordered the Foundation to stop making these claims in their advertising.

Book Review: The Mood Cure by Julia Ross

Review by Dan Stradford

Julia Ross has outdone herself with a magnificent work called The Mood Cure, due out October 24 but available for pre-order on our bookstore page.

At Safe Harbor we routinely recommend Ross’s previous book The Diet Cure to answer people’s questions about the role of diet in mental health.

The Mood Cure is even better. In it she covers the most common causes of various types of depression and anxiety (covering 4 “syndromes”) and how to deal with these naturally for immediate results, sometimes within minutes. She makes heavy use of amino acids and other safe substances.

Her self-treatment plans are loaded with backup options in case the original plans don’t get results, as is often the case when one is hunting and punching around to find the right cause and treatment for mental symptoms.

Can’t handle stress? Can’t enjoy life anymore? Does everything look bleak, even though you know it isn’t? Well, much of this can be caused by bad biochemistry brought on by a poor diet, high-pressured living, and even a genetic inability to process nutrients well.

In The Mood Cure, Ross gives a very full toolbox for the individual or practitioner to use, including supplements and dietary regimens, in reversing these situations and returning to the full vigor of life. I highly recommend it as one of the most practical and useful books to come across my desk (and I see some great books).

Most Lyme Disease Associated with Mental Symptoms

A study in Poland revealed that the majority of patients with Lyme Disease manifest mental symptoms.

The Department of Psychiatry and Department of Infectious and Neuroinfectious Diseases of the Medical Academy in Bialystok, Poland, conducted a study of 174 patients with a variety of symptoms associated with the stages of Lyme Disease. All subjects underwent evaluation of mental symptoms twice – during hospitalization and six months after discharge.

The results showed that in the course of Tick Borne Encephalitis and Lyme borreliosis, the majority of patients experienced mental problems in both the acute and late phases of the disease – 3 to 6 months after onset. The most common manifestations were depression or organic mood disorders, and cognitive deficits which manifest themselves as mild cognitive disorder or dementia.

Drug Industry Warned to Stop Gifts to Doctors

On September 30, the U.S. government warned pharmaceutical companies that they must not offer any financial incentives to doctors, pharmacists or other health care professionals to prescribe or recommend particular drugs, or to switch patients from one medicine to another.

The warning cited practices commonly used in the marketing and sale of prescription drugs that could run afoul of federal fraud and abuse laws.

Specifically, drug makers must not offer incentive payments or other “tangible benefits” to encourage or reward the prescribing or purchase of particular drugs by doctors, health plans or managed care organizations.

The new guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry were issued by Janet Rehnquist, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Doctors have enjoyed expensive perks from drug manufacturers for years. Lavish meals, Broadway plays, and weekend outings at the expense of drug giants have been commonplace. Companies have rewarded middlemen, or pharmacy benefit managers, for putting their products on lists of recommended drugs, known as formularies. Some companies have also rewarded doctors and drugstores for switching patients from one medication to another.

Similarly, doctors in a position to influence the prescribing of drugs for large numbers of patients have been retained as advisers and consultants to drug manufacturers.

While the new standards do not have the force of law, drug makers that ignore them risk closer scrutiny for possible federal fraud and kickback statute violations.

“In today’s environment of increased scrutiny of corporate conduct and increasingly large expenditures for prescription drugs,” Ms. Rehnquist said, “it is imperative for pharmaceutical manufacturers to establish and maintain effective compliance programs.”

The public will have 60 days to comment on the standards. The government may revise them in the light of those comments.

The government said the industry’s marketing practices could drive up costs for Medicare and Medicaid, already weighing in at $400 billion a year.

The new standards say “switching arrangements,” under which drug companies offer financial incentives to shift patients from one drug to another, “are suspect under the anti-kickback statute.”

Paying drugstores or pharmacy benefit managers to encourage doctors or patients to switch drugs are also suspect, the government said, adding that if companies reward pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers for “moving market share” from one product to another, they are breaking the law.

The inspector general said that payments to consultants, advisers and researchers “pose a substantial risk of fraud and abuse” if the payments exceed “fair market value for the services rendered.”

Ms. Rehnquist said that every drug company should appoint a compliance officer, establish a hotline to receive complaints of fraud and abuse and consider paying rewards to employees who report misconduct.

Under the new standards, companies are responsible not only for their own employees, but also for sales agents and contractors who “engage in improper marketing and promotional activities” on their behalf.

Studies Challenge Value of “Trauma Counseling”

“Debriefing” survivors immediately after disasters such as the 9/11 attacks do nothing to prevent psychiatric disorders and may even be harmful, according to two comprehensive analyses released September 5.

There is little evidence that those receiving such “trauma counseling” do better than those who don’t, over the long term, according to a Dutch study of debriefing in multiple situations.

Debriefing “may even put some survivors at heightened risk for later developing mental health problems,” said experts at the National Institute of Mental Health who independently evaluated the technique after Sept 11.

“If this was a drug, we would take it off the market,” said Richard Gist, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Gist depicted the widely popularized practice as “something between a social movement, a pyramid scheme and a cult.”

Tens of thousands have received “debriefing” sessions in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine school shootings, and the 9/11 attacks from a mob of practitioners “armed with proprietary workshops, trade magazines and paperback books.”

NIMH experts said the blanket intervention was inappropriate because most people who received counseling would have recovered on their own. Shock and grief were widespread after Sept 11, but those were considered normal reactions to tragedy and the experts said the “sensible” policy was “to expect normal recovery.”

Debriefing consists of individual or group sessions lasting one to three hours where survivors describe what they have been through and talk about their feelings. The technique seems superficially similar to established therapies that encourage people to desensitize traumatic memories by reliving them. But debriefing usually offers no follow-ups and may simply cause people to become more distressed, researchers said.

The Dutch study analyzed seven studies that examined the effectiveness of debriefing among victims of burns, car accidents, miscarriage, violent crime and combat. The U.S. report is the result of a workshop that brought together senior experts from many of the top branches of the federal government, including the National Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Defense.

Farris Tuma, chief of the NIMH’s traumatic stress research program, said the experts concluded “it’s probably inappropriate to recommend blanket or universal emotional recall of events because of the likelihood of creating additional distress among people who may be coping just fine.”