Af Professor emeritus Peter C Gøtzsche og psykolog Allan Holmgren

(Nedenstående er vores debatindlæg, som Politiken ikke ville udgive)

I Politiken (21. august) kommer folketingsmedlem Matilde Powers (S) med et væld af forkerte påstande om ADHD.

Hun kalder ADHD en biologisk forstyrrelse i hjernen med en nedsat virkning af signalstofferne dopamin og noradrenalin. Man har aldrig kunnet påvise, at personer med en ADHD-diagnose har anderledes hjerner end andre, hverken på scanninger eller kemisk. ADHD er ikke andet end et navn, man har givet personer med en vis adfærd, som mange af os har. Når man bruger de diagnostiske spørgsmål på kursusdeltagere, får mellem en tredjedel og halvdelen diagnosen! …

ADHD er en epidemi af falske diagnoser og skadelig medicinRead More »

On 30 August, I shall publish my new book, which from that date can be downloaded for free on this website. The book is a frontal attack on biological psychiatry, which is extremely harmful for the patients. See the press release. This is the first page in the book (I have removed the hyperlinks in the references):

1 Psychiatry is in crisis

We have a mental health crisis. The existing approaches that focus on drugs are not working. In the UK, mental health disability has almost trebled in recent decades, and the gap in life expectancy between people with severe mental health issues and the general population has doubled.[1] The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations have therefore recently called for systematic mental health reform emphasising psychosocial interventions.[2]

In 2019, a Norwegian study found that 52 of 100 consecutively admitted patients to a psychiatric hospital would have wanted a drug-free alternative if it had existed.[3] As I shall demonstrate in this book, psychosocial interventions are clearly better than drugs. Why can’t people get that then?

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, it is unethical to subject patients to forced treatment.[4] There is a high risk that forced treatment is being used to benefit staff in making their work less stressful. In Europe, oversight comes under the convention prohibiting torture, and a committee has observed that deliberate ill-treatment of patients in psychiatric institutions still occurs.[5] Moreover, fundamental components of psychosocial rehabilitative treatment are underdeveloped or absent, and treatment consists essentially of drugs.

I have studied psychiatry closely for 17 years. I have published many scientific articles and several books,[6] given numerous lectures and interviews, and have been an expert witness in court cases about forced treatment or psychiatric drug harms in Brazil, Canada, USA, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Australia and New Zealand.

This book summarises what I have written before and contains a lot of new material as well. I include many debates I have had with psychiatrists to help historian and filmmaker Janus Bang who wants to write a biography about me, and I think these additions will be of general interest, as psychiatrists reason in the same way everywhere.

Undoubtedly, some will find the book’s title provocative, but if you read the book, you can decide for yourself if you agree that psychiatry is a crime against humanity.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7, crimes against humanity refer to specific crimes committed in the context of a large-scale attack targeting civilians, regardless of their nationality.[7]

Crimes against humanity have often been committed as part of State policies. Prohibited acts include murder, imprisonment, torture, persecution against an identifiable group, and inhumane acts intentionally causing severe mental suffering or serious bodily injury.

State policies may lead to persecution of psychiatric patients. These patients have often described forced treatment as imprisonment and torture, and they have reported that their ill-treatment is sometimes deliberate. It is also a fact that State policies, in the form of clinical guidelines, may lead to much loss of life.

I have shown that psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death.[8] Depression drugs are the major killer, which is because so many elderly people take them. The pills double the risk of falls and hip fractures in a dose-dependent manner,[9] and within a year after a hip fracture, about one-fifth of the patients will be dead.

Doctors and drug regulators are surprisingly unconcerned about all these deaths. When patients die, doctors usually blame their illness rather than the drug or their own incompetence, or they simply don’t know it was a drug death, e.g. if a patient becomes dizzy, falls, breaks a hip, and dies as a result. In contrast, airline pilots are critically concerned with our safety because if we go down, they do too.[10]

[1] Shifting the balance towards social interventions: a call for an overhaul of the mental health system. Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group 2024;May.

[2] Shifting the balance towards social interventions: a call for an overhaul of the mental health system. Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group 2024;May.

[3] Heskestad, Stig, et al. (2019). Medikamentfri psykiatrisk behandling – hva mener pasientene? Tidsskr Nor Legeforen 139. doi: 10.4045/tidsskr.18.0912.

[4] United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: General comment No. 1. 2014;May 19.

[5] Council of Europe. European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). CPT/Inf/E (2002) 1 – Rev. 2013.

[6] Gøtzsche PC. Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2013; Gøtzsche PC. Deadly psychiatry and organised denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015; Gøtzsche PC. Mental health survival kit and withdrawal from psychiatric drugs. Ann Arbor: L H Press; 2022; Gøtzsche PC. Critical psychiatry textbook. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2022 (freely available).

[7] Crimes against humanity. Trial International.

[8] Gøtzsche PC. Prescription drugs are the leading cause of death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Mad in America 2024;April 16.

[9] Hubbard R, Farrington P, Smith C, et al. Exposure to tricyclic and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants and the risk of hip fracture. Am J Epidemiol 2003;158:77-84 and Thapa PB, Gideon P, Cost TW, et al. Antidepressants and the risk of falls among nursing home residents. N Engl J Med 1998;339:875-82; Khanassov V, Hu J, Reeves D, van Marwijk H. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor use and risk of fractures in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry 2018;33:1688-1708.

[10] Healy D. Medical partisans? Why doctors need conflicting interests. Aust N Z J Psychiatry 2012;46:704–7.

Last year, we updated our Cochrane review on mammography screening with more mortality data and sent it to Cochrane in August 2023. The many comments we received on the very minor, fourth update of a well-known and highly cited Cochrane review that has been around for 23 years¹ illustrates that Cochrane has become a highly bureaucratic and ineffective organisation, which is one of the main reasons that all the UK based Cochrane groups lost their governmental funding at the end of March 2023.²

Although we had not included any new trials, it took five months before we got a reply. In January 2024, we received a document to which 11 people had provided comments, 8 from Cochrane and 3 peer reviewers. There were 91 separate, numbered comments over 21 pages (7,290 words, or the size of two normal scientific articles). …

Cochrane advises against preprints, is highly ineffective, and protects its “brand”Read More »

I first published this Cochrane review in 2001 and lastly updated it in 2013. Because many more deaths have now been published, I updated the review again in January 2023, and a month later, my co-author had independently assessed the new data and agreed with what I had found.

The updated mortality data show even more clearly than before that mammography screening does not save lives, and I therefore published them in May 2023 on my website in the public interest.

Breast cancer mortality is an unreliable outcome that is biased in favour of screening, mainly because of differential misclassification of cause of death. We therefore need to look at total cancer mortality and total mortality instead. The trials with adequate randomisation did not find an effect of screening on total cancer mortality, including breast cancer (risk ratio 1.00, 95% confidence interval 0.96 to 1.04). All-cause mortality was not significantly reduced either (risk ratio 1.01, 95% CI 0.99 to 1.04).

As reported earlier, total numbers of lumpectomies and mastectomies were significantly larger in the screened groups (risk ratio 1.31, 95% CI 1.22 to 1.42), as were number of mastectomies (risk ratio 1.20, 95% CI 1.08 to 1.32).

Screening has been sold to the public with the claims that it saves lives and saves breasts. It does neither and increases mastectomies. These results – and indeed, many others – can only lead to one logical conclusion: Mammography screening is harmful and should be abandoned, as I have explained earlier.

Cochrane has become a highly bureaucratic and ineffective organisation. We therefore don’t know when our updated review will be published in the Cochrane Library. When I first published it, in 2001, the Cochrane Breast Cancer Group would not allow us to publish the harms of screening even though they were included in the protocol for the review, the group had approved and published. Back then, we needed to publish our review in The Lancet to ensure the harms became known. It took five years, with complaints to the Cochrane Steering Group, before the harms data also became included in the Cochrane review.

We responded to the peer review comments on our updated review in March 2024, but when we asked in June, the Cochrane editors were unable to tell us when we would hear back from them, and holidays are approaching.

For this reason, we have decided to upload our submitted review on a preprint server. We believe this is helpful for women contemplating if they should attend mammography screening and for authorities who are currently reconsidering their guidelines.

No comment. The cartoons speak for themselves. In November, we shall know if the Americans will vote for a president who is a habitual liar and fraudster and who can pardon himself for his crimes if he gets elected. If he becomes president again, I see no hope for America. See the cartoons

I am convinced that Medicating Normal is the best documentary ever made about how psychiatric drugs destroy people. Everyone with an interest in psychiatry must see this brilliant and very moving film. More than once, actually. The film can be seen for free.

For over three years, the filmmakers documented the journey of five individuals whose lives were profoundly impacted by the medication they were taking and they interviewed many knowledgeable experts about the central issues.

The homepage for the film is very informative, with resources related to psychiatric drugs and how to withdraw safely from them.

Our review of safe withdrawal of depression drugs  shows that length of taper is highly predictive for the chance of success (P = 0.00001). All the randomised studies we reviewed were of poor quality. They confounded withdrawal symptoms with relapse; did not use hyperbolic tapering; withdrew the depression drug too fast; and stopped it entirely when receptor occupancy was still high. We are therefore convinced that the true proportion of patients on depression drugs who can stop safely without severe withdrawal symptoms is considerably higher than the 50% we found.

Our review had a very difficult birth, which I have described on the Mad in America website in the article “Cochrane reviews of psychiatric drugs are untrustworthy,” and our troubles included Cochrane editorial misconduct. …

Our review of safe withdrawal of depression drugsRead More »

En artikel i Jyllands-Posten fra den 14. april var meget frustrerende at læse, men typisk for den helt ukritiske måde, journalister skriver om psykiatri på. Den handlede om, at markant flere midaldrende og ældre får en ADHD-diagnose i dag end tidligere. Det forventer man, at læserne skal synes, er godt. Læs min artikel her.

Peter C Gøtzsche was invited to participate in The Daily Show on 16 September 2014 where he played the role of Deep Throat revealing secrets about organised crime in the drug industry in a garage in New York. The comedian was brilliant. See the satire.

The late Bernard Lown (Harvard cardiologist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) said that capitalist medicine results in two things: undertreatment for people without money or insurance, and overtreatment of those with money.

This is the situation in US healthcare, and I wrote about it in my 2013 book, “Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care.” I documented that US healthcare is one of the worst in the world. Here is what I wrote:

Keeping people healthy is not a priority in America’s profit-driven system, which thrives when people are ill.¹ The propaganda has made nearly half of all Americans believe that the United States has the best healthcare in the world, albeit with a clear political divide (68% of the Republicans and 32% of Democrats).²

The beliefs that what is good for big pharma is also good for the people and that market forces will solve all problems are contradicted by the facts. The Unites States has the most ineffective healthcare system in the developed world.^3,4

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