Medicating Normal (2020)

This film unleashes the truth that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about Benzodiazepines an SSRI's can do to you. This film hits home on the desperation and anguish patients go through when trying to stop using these drugs. There is no informed consent by providers and should be. There needs to be accountability for prescribing these medicines.

I have personally watched a loved one go through the exact withdrawal symptoms that are portrayed by these brave people. Unfortunately the withdrawals got the best of our family member and they took their life.

This film accurately portrays what patients can expect to encounter when taking these medicines longer than 2 weeks, sometimes less.

This film is a must-see for anyone interested in what prescribed medications like antidepressants or Benzos actually do and what potential harms they have. I can only admire the courage of those who relate their personal stories in the film in such a clear and compelling way. The evidence given around the bigger picture of what is going on is simply eye-opening.

Seven million American children under eighteen are on psychiatric drugs. One in five Americans take psychiatric drugs. Why? A medical model is a "set of procedures in which all doctors are trained," but what if it's wrong, corrupt, and causing harm to people? Edward Shorter, PhD says, "The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5 (the Bible of Psychiatry) arose from a tradition filled with haphazard science and politically driven choices."

This film is one of the most important films I've ever seen. It tells the story of what I study as a patient safety educator and the devastating results I've seen in my life and my twenty-five+ year career in the health care field based.

The medical field and pharmaceutical companies created a disease model for which they, of course, have an expensive "quick fix," that ropes people in long-term. They culturally embedded this so-called magic bullet theory. Their disease model centers on chemical imbalance for which there are no physical findings, just a myth of genetics that need to be corrected by a pill. The drugs actually create a chemical imbalance and cause a large percentage of the population either indifferent outcomes or bad to tragic outcomes.

When consumers have bad to tragic side effects to medications, (as a significant part of the population does), the attribution is blamed on their mental condition instead of to the medication, so psychiatrists layer on drug after drug to people they label with abhorrent behaviors that they can never overcome. This destroys lives are creates a permanent revenue stream for profiteers.

Medicating Normal follows five people who suffered significant harm by psychiatric drugs that they didn't need in the first place. Their short-term stressors or normal grief were pathologized. They were put on one drug after another in a cruel, archaic, non-scientific trial and error routine.

Two of the subjects in the film were military veterans diagnosed with PTSD and other disorders. Their stories are heartbreaking and compelling. They speak of being misled, misdiagnosed, and mistreated. Discontinuing the medication is so painful and causes terror levels of anxiety.

The people in the film and countless consumers on social media cry out about how much worse psych medications made them. Some say they were never suicidal except when on medication. One teenage girl had terrifying hallucinations due to psych meds. The black box warnings are on there because there is overwhelming scientific evidence that these are a danger and cause people to commit harm against themselves and others. I recommend checking out the site Mad in America.

And how did this begin? A "committee" - without a science base - decided that a behavior they label abhorrent is a "disease" if it lasts from three to twenty-eight days. Conveniently for them, twenty-eight days is four of treatment in an outpatient billing cycle. Drug companies spend circa $80 billion dollars a year on marketing and lobbying. They spend much, much less on research.

In the 1980s, a drug company did a study on Xanax for panic disorder. At eight weeks, Xanax group was doing better than the placebo group. At the end of fourteen weeks, Xanax patients were doing much, much worse. Some people were unable to get off the drug. The published study focused on four-week results and completely ignored fourteen-week results. This created a story of an "effective" new treatment leading to Xanax becoming a best seller.

"The longer you take a study out, the more likely you are to see people not doing well on that drug or developing side effects from that drug, so the pharmaceutical industry doesn't favor long-term studies for monetary reasons and for outcome reasons. They don't want to show that their drug actually doesn't do well. There's as much marketing in the tests that are devised to measure the outcomes by the people hired to conduct the study. All that stuff is marketing but it's presented and manufactured and published as science."

In less time than it takes to talk about all of the bad effects, psychiatrists will prescribe one of these medications. Tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed, but one cannot sue the manufacturer of a generic drug, so there is no one to hold accountable.

Academic scientists at prestigious Universities Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, were paid by drug companies as speakers and advisors. These academics were sold as Thought Leaders. The pharmaceutical companies design clinical studies to make their drug look good. Their own people analyze the studies. The papers are written by ghostwriters hired by the drug company, and the 'Thought Leaders' sign off on the ghostwriters' papers and become the authors of the published paper. The former editors of the medical journals JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the British Medical Journal, all said they became vehicles to story laundering.

Practicing doctors believed the bigwigs at Harvard. They prescribe, for example, Prozac, which didn't work in the trials and had all sorts of adverse effects. In the 1980s, Prozac was on the cover of magazines touting that modern medicine can give you any personality that you want. But in the 1970s, the very first studies done in Germany showed psychotic events, worsening of depressions, homicidal, suicidal impulses, so much that German authorities refused to approve it. But in the American studies, suddenly the psychosis and homicidal problems are gone. "Imagine you are a mother who said to their kid who got depressed over breaking up with a girl or something. The doctor says Prozac doesn't increase suicidal risk, then a week later the kid hangs himself. That's in a real case. Can you think of any greater corruption than that?"

It has been shown that half of the deaths that occur in psychiatric drug trails are never published. They disappear. You have an expression in America, "Torture your data until they confess." And this happens all the time. The difference between an honest data analysis and one you have manipulated can be worth billions on the world market, so what do you think they'll do?

• I used a few quotes from medical doctors and PhD's people in the film. I cannot recommend this film strongly enough. I saw it on Amazon.