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4 April 2011

Schizophrenia Does Not Shrink Brains – Antipsychotics Do: JAMA Study

Schizophrenia is not to be taken lightly and sufferers often lead difficult lives ruled by the the ongoing battles in their minds. Psychiatrists have labeled schizophrenia as a “brain disease” capable of shrinking the mass of the brain and created a venue to manufacture pharmaceutical chemical cocktails as treatment. Now there is evidence of the futility and damage of such claims as a new study by researchers at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine shows that schizophrenia does not damage brain tissue. Instead, it is prescribed antipsychotics that causes this physical loss of the mind.
The most concerning victims of these chemical cocktails is children. Held captive by bogus labels of mental disease, this vulnerable population – our future – is being medicated at increasingly younger and younger ages. Recent data conducted by IMS Health shows that 24 million U.S. children are on ADHD medications, almost 10 million are on antidepressants with another six and a half million on other antipsychotics. No doubt, the medication of children has become quite the industry.[1]
This research is clear: the longer a person is on drugs and the higher the dose, the more damage is done. Damage that surpasses that of substance abuse issues. The outrage of this ongoing medical maiming gives more evidence of the necessity to stop the trend of drugging versus healing.
~Health Freedoms
One of psychiatry’s favorite claims is that schizophrenia is a “brain disease”. By that, they mean it’s caused by a physically defective brain. They try to prove it by claiming that the disease causes the brain to shrink. Of course, they make this claim without a shred of proof—and the fact that it’s an invention is now proven by a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Here’s how authors of “Long-term Antipsychotic Treatment and Brain Volumes” described the reason for their study:
Progressive brain volume changes in schizophrenia are thought to be due principally to the disease. However, recent animal studies indicate that antipsychotics, the mainstay of treatment for schizophrenia patients, may also contribute to brain tissue volume decrement. Because antipsychotics are prescribed for long periods for schizophrenia patients and have increasingly widespread use in other psychiatric disorders, it is imperative to determine their long-term effects on the human brain.
So, Beng-Choon Ho and his fellow researchers at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine investigated by studying 211 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. All had received MRIs soon after diagnosis, and they each had an average of 3 scans in 7.2 years. They examined brain volume changes over time, focusing on how long the illness had lasted, whether antipsychotics were used, the severity of the illness, and other substance abuse to see how they affected brain shrinkage.
Here are the results in a nutshell:
  • The longer a patient was on antipsychotics, the more the brain shrank.
  • The more antipsychotics a patient was given, the more the brain shrank.
  • The severity of illness had little or no effect on brain shrinkage.
  • Substance abuse had little or no effect on brain shrinkage.
Psychiatrists and pharmaceutical manufacturers have invented the claim that schizophrenia is a brain disease and that it shrinks the brain. They have trotted out pictures from brain imaging to “prove” that people they’ve diagnosed with schizophrenia need to take their brain-destroying chemicals—all the while ignoring the simple fact that the pictures were of brains that had been treated with those chemicals.
National Institute of Mental Health’s Policy
It’s interesting to note that, though the study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), an agency that seems to exist for the promotion of psychiatric drugs. They had no involvement with the manuscript’s approval or review. Considering how strongly NIMH advocates for antipsychotic use in schizophrenia, among a myriad of other conditions, this detail is important. Frankly, I do not believe that the study would ever have been produced if they’d had any control over how the study was reported.
NIMH’s official policy is so antipsychotic-slanted that it states that non-drug treatment should only be applied in patients who are receiving antipsychotics. They believe that only those “who are already stabilized on antipsychotic medication” should even by considered for psychosocial treatment.(1) In other words, according to the NIMH, the problem is physical and must be treated with chemicals.
Antipsychotic Treatment of Children for an Invented Disorder
Children—people whose brains are supposed to be developing—are given antipsychotics! Worse, as in many other nonexistent diseases, psychiatry has invented another “pre” disorder: early onset schizophrenia spectrum (EOSS) disorder. Yes, since children rarely become schizophrenic, they’ve invented pre-schizophrenia. Of course, the treatment of choice is antipsychotics.
What is happening to these children’s developing brains? How are their lives circumscribed by such brutality?
The invention of a nonexistent brain disorder has resulted in psychiatric researchers speculating that “a static lesion occurring in the perinatal period could negatively interact with developmental changes that occur much later, closer to young adulthood, when onset of the disorder typically occur”.(2) Based on absolutely nothing but wishful thinking, they postulated the existence of a brain defect that results in a nonexistent “pre” disorder that they’ve named EOSS.
And they call themselves scientists! They expect us to take them seriously—so seriously that we’re supposed to turn our children over to them to stunt their brains while they call it therapy.
Evasion of Testing Whether Antipsychotics Have Harmful Effects
According to research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry back in 2000, studies have found brain damage, that is, atrophied brain tissues, in patients with schizophrenia—but they have not investigated whether it happened in the absence of antipsychotic drugs.
Psychiatry has hidden behind the claim that their antipsychotics are so effective and so safe that it would be wrong to use control groups in tests. The authors of the JAMA brain shrinkage study even stated in their report:
The current study could have been strengthened by having control groups, eg, schizophrenia patients assigned to deferred or no antipsychotic treatment or healthy volunteers treated with antipsychotics for comparable periods. However, ethical standards in human subject research prohibit such comparison groups.
They have no problem dividing people into drug and no-drug groups when testing for the efficacy of a chemical believed to be lifesaving, as in cancer drugs, but they claim that it’s unethical to do the same thing in people with schizophrenia! (This is the same excuse given for not testing vaccine efficacy.)
Whenever modern medicine claims that it would be unethical to study the effects of a drug or treatment against a placebo group, they’re claiming that the efficacy of the treatment and its relative lack of adverse effects is so dramatic that it would be a moral offense to withhold the treatment from a placebo group. It’s an argument used only when there is no desire to actually find out of the treatment is either effective or safe.
There is only one moral offense in this sordid tale. It’s the one committed by doctors, Big Pharma, and pseudo scientists who play these games with people’s lives. Children’s entire lives are distorted, disabled, diminished, and devastated by these vicious games. Adults are treated as nothing more than repositories of their profitable drugs and treatments, no matter how much harm is done. Shrinking people’s brains is an acceptable cost of scooping up profits and fees. The only real trick is to hide it from the public for as long as possible.
By: Heidi Stevenson
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