Turns Blind Eye To Victims, Sponsors Deadly MOTHERS Act

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Turns Blind Eye To Victims,

Sponsoring Deadly MOTHERS Act

by Amy Philo, 214-705-0169, 817-793-8028

amy@...

MEDIA ADVISORY –August 7, 2008 – The Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act, a bill

to institute nationwide screening and “treatment” of expectant and new mothers

at risk for depression, anxiety, and other “mental illness,” has been pushed by

pharma-backed groups for the past several years with little success until recent

months. Countless millions of dollars are already being spent each year

marketing drugs to women of childbearing age, and an astounding one third of

all pregnant women in the U.S. take psychotropic drugs according to the

American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. But pharmaceutical companies are

apparently not happy with their current record-breaking profits. When

advertising returns diminish and black box warnings for suicide threaten to

scare off potential customers, government mandates can sure come in handy.

 

Senator Bernard (I-VT) is one man co-sponsoring The

MOTHERS Act. (See

his recent PAC contributions here. They include tens of thousands of

dollars from various groups such as a PAC for “advancing psychology,” “New

Jersey First,” and numerous other questionable donations that could alone

explain his co-sponsorship of this bill.) An email sent by Senator ’

office responding to opposition against the bill stated that The MOTHERS Act

has nothing to do with medication. When asked for a comment, ’ press

secretary on behalf of the Senator guaranteed that no women would be forced to

take psychiatric drugs as a result of the legislation, should it pass.

 

Who will put their faith in Senator ’ assessment of a

bill that he co-sponsors quite possibly only because of who contributes to his

reelection campaigns? Should the public ignore the fact that a diagnosis of

depression, or being “at risk” for depression in the large majority of cases

results in a prescription for antidepressants, which then lead to psychosis,

homicidal and suicidal ideation and subsequent force drugging with more

antidepressants, anti-psychotics, anti-anxiety drugs, as well as electroshock?

Or are we supposed to just relax and trust that if Bernard says so,

passing The MOTHERS Act would not increase the disastrous practices of doctors

and others in the mental “health” field?

 

Rather than face the deception of pharmaceutical companies

in promoting antidepressants and anti-psychotics as protective against suicide,

the sponsors of The MOTHERS Act continue to turn a blind eye. In addition to

suicide and homicide, documented deadly risks of antidepressants include preterm

birth, spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, cardiac birth defects, pulmonary

hypertension, and fatal birth defects, among others. Because these dangers are

undeniable, the financially conflicted proponents of The MOTHERS Act now make

desperate attempts to distract from the central goal of the legislation and to

appear unbiased and even holistic.

You decide, which is worse - the preemptive and arrogant

denial of deaths, serious trauma and emotional suffering that this legislation

would bring about for millions of families, or the promotion of these outcomes

by some of the most outspoken medication advocates pushing for the bill? And

how does Bernard justify his claim that more women will not be forced

when compulsory drugging is already an everyday occurrence in this country? Why

pass a bill to screen the nation’s mothers and get them into treatment at all,

when women already have the freedom to seek “help?”

In 1988 Hatch was placed in a Michigan state mental

institution for postpartum psychosis and drugged with Haldol. She stayed there

for nine days until she could be transferred to a private hospital, where she

says she fought back with the staff on the medication issue for two weeks.

Ultimately the private hospital sent back to the state hospital and she

fought medications for six more days, telling everyone that she was

breastfeeding a baby and could not take their drugs. A judge then ordered "90

days additional incarceration in the hospital and forced meds." She was

sent back to a private hospital where they forced Lithium, Stelazine, and

Prozac. When she became extremely suicidal on Prozac, the Stelazine was

withdrawn and the Prozac was doubled. Ultimately after finally leaving the

hospital, located a doctor who helped her wean off all medications over a

six-month period. She also followed up by beginning a full body detoxification

and then went on to have four more children, fortunately with zero psychiatric

pills to follow.

 

Over the last 18 years has advocated against forced

drugging and her story has been publicized in various magazines and books. But

for psychiatry, old habits die hard. In a recent blog entry, wrote about

two women who had contacted her who had a history of psychosis and were told

that if they ever had any more children, they would be ordered to take

antipsychotic drugs for two full years following the births in order to

“prevent” PPP. Similarly, New Jersey’s “MOTHERS Law,” passed in 2006, has

already resulted in mothers being forcibly taken to the hospital by police

simply for mentioning to their doctors they were depressed or calling a PPD

hotline. Force is certainly nothing new in psychiatry, and in fact it has been

central to the field for its entire history. It seems that the drug pushers

care only about maintaining income at all costs. Those caught by psychiatry

cannot be called patients at all but rather, victims.

 

In 2004 my firstborn, three-day-old son nearly died from choking while trying

to vomit formula at Children’s Hospital. We had only arrived at the hospital a

few minutes before he choked, and when they sent us home the next day, the

trauma of nearly losing my son hit me hard in the form of a panic attack. I was

told that having had a panic attack meant I would get severe PPD and should

take drugs to “prevent” that from happening. I took Zoloft for only three days

before hallucinating murdering Isaac when he was only nine days old. When I

sought help at the hospital I was involuntarily incarcerated and forced to

swallow more Zoloft despite my suspicions about the drug. They did let me go

home eventually, when I faked being stable on the meds because I could not

handle the forced separation from my baby and my family. For months I waited

for the drug to work and even took higher and higher doses, which resulted in

the homicidal obsessions progressing from frequent to constant and being

focused on my mother, husband, cats and neighbors in addition to my baby. The

higher the dose I took, the less I felt disturbed by these thoughts, and these

constant ideas of homicide were followed by thoughts of suicide to protect my

son from me. I stopped taking Zoloft after giving it five months to “start

working,” and “miraculously” my intense obsession with murdering my son and my

family and committing suicide disappeared within a few weeks of my last pill. I

survived psychiatric treatment, but that is more than we can say for

Stokes, who went through four hospitalizations and four series of drug

cocktails as well as electroshock before her suicide.

Which brings us to the infamous “non-profit” group, Postpartum “Support”

International, who claims to be the lead sponsor of The MOTHERS Act, while also

maintaining that they have no interest in seeing pharmaceutical companies do

well. This group has put countless women in danger by pushing drugs with

absolutely no remorse and no mention of the risks, and it has dishonored

Stokes by doing so much of this in her name. PSI also pushes government

agencies and the private sector to advertise depression in print and on TV so

that women will “admit” their depression and seek “help.” The group espouses

the idea that the universal mental screening proposed by The MOTHERS Act is

justifiable because too many women apparently do not realize they are depressed

and need a screening to tell them so.

Despite being a “non-profit,” the organization consists of numerous mental

health professionals who directly benefit from increased diagnosis and drugging

of mothers. They also will be eligible to receive grants to carry out

enforcement of the nationwide detection of women considered at risk of mental

illness, should The MOTHERS Act pass, and they even have these enforcers ready

and waiting to start their surveillance as soon as the bill becomes law (or as

they hope it will).

 

So we’re supposed to trade our freedom and our lives for

this bill, and accept that women who do not feel depressed can trust a quiz to

tell them that they are so depressed that they can’t live without “treatment?”

(Mental Illnesses: The Only ‘Diseases’ Spread Through Pop Quizzes)

 

Shari Lusskin M.D., who is a long-time member of the

advisory board of Postpartum Support International (PSI) and a professor of

“reproductive” psychiatry at NYU, discussed PTSD in new mothers for a recent

Wall Street Journal article written by Zimmerman. The article promoted

diagnoses of mental illness for women who go through traumatic childbirth, as

well as prevention of “PTSD” via the use of drugs like Zoloft during pregnancy.

With this new push to redefine aftershock from trauma as a disease, any woman

having an emergency c-section, or any woman whose baby has a life-threatening

complication, or any woman whose baby’s heart rate drops during labor, or any

woman giving birth to a dead baby could be classified as mentally ill rather

than deemed to be reacting normally to an emergency surgery or the death or

threat of death to her own baby.

In this Wall Street Journal PTSD article Lusskin said that mothers who

experience traumatic births should not jump to the conclusion that they will

get PTSD. This statement is highly ironic considering her employment as a

speaker for Wyeth, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and GlaxoKline. In a separate

presentation made to mental health “professionals” Lusskin promoted a range of

psychotropic medications and even electroshock for use by pregnant and nursing

mothers.

In the same article,

Stone, the immediate past president of PSI, discussed The MOTHERS Act,

stating that “the law's intent is to provide ‘effective’ care, whether it's

talk therapy, medications or some combination, to suffering mothers.”

I find this article absurd considering that with the push to prevent depression

and PTSD by drugging women before they give birth, more babies will die or be

born with life-threatening complications. More babies will suffer drops in

heart rate as the drugs given to their mothers for labor interact with those

given to them for depression or prevention of PTSD, causing more traumatic

emergency c-sections and stillbirths. And more women who lose their babies as a

result of preemptive drugging will become severely depressed and doctors will

try to drug away their grief. So much for treating or preventing PTSD.

 

Considering the fact that PSI recently sponsored an event to

push drugs on anxious women called “Beyond The Blues,” cosponsored by

AstraZeneca, it is more apparent why The MOTHERS Act mentions medications and

biological agents and not simply antidepressants. Because we wouldn’t want to

rule out the government-sponsored drugging of women with drugs given for

anxiety and panic attacks.

 

Zimmerman’s timing in publishing this PTSD promo article is

impeccable. The PTSD marketing all ties in quite neatly with the next big

epidemic. Perhaps if antidepressants cannot be shown to help depression, drug

companies can resort to marketing them for numbing the effects of PTSD, as the

patients taking them become psychotic and no longer show any remorse, regret,

or fear. In fact, the Pentagon just launched a $300 million project to study PTSD

in the military. I can think of many ways that money could be better spent for

our military than by administering drugs and waiting to see their effects. Yet

many people want to do the same thing for all the nation’s mothers.

 

Edgington, whose son Manie was born with

Paxil-caused Transposition of the Great Arteries, wrote to Zimmerman of

the Wall Street Journal in protest of the “perinatal PTSD” article. “My mission

has become very difficult especially when reporters want to demean what has

happened to my son by singing the praises of antidepressant use to help with

postpartum depression. The MOTHERS Act is set up to screen women even during

pregnancy for depression and the only listed treatment is biochemical. What

does this mean? It means this world better get ready for many many more babies

to be born like my son if this act is passed. Paxil is now a Class D drug yet

GSK continues to tell women to take the drug if the benefits outweigh the risk.

When the risk is serious and deadly birth defects why would they tell women to

take this drug? The same reason they want to pass the MOTHERS Act. The same

reason why they said nothing when they knew years before I became pregnant with

my son that their drug caused heart defects. They are not scared to get away

with murder.”

 

No amount of settlement money from GlaxoKline, no

apology, no ban on drugs and no prison terms for pharmaceutical employees could

take away Manie’s heart defect, resurrect all the stillborn and miscarried

babies who died because of psychotropic drugs, or turn back the clocks and hold

Stokes back from the ledge of her twelfth-story hotel window. Nothing

that anyone does could remove my memory of being homicidal toward my son and my

family. But we must continue to hold accountable all those who find preventable

deaths and ruined lives to be nothing worth worrying about.

 

Over the past several months I have been confronted numerous

times by drug apologists slamming me for my opposition to The MOTHERS Act. In

my replies I have used my story, the FDA suicide and birth defect warnings, the

irony of the way this bill dishonors Stokes, and numerous other facts

including studies documenting no benefit for antidepressants, only tremendous

harm. On more than one occasion top members of PSI including Stone and

Birdie Meyer, the current President, persisted with claims that antidepressants

are generally safe and effective. Stone also wrote that in many cases of

claimed adverse effects such as a drug-induced suicide or murder, it was the

“underlying disease” and not the drug that caused the tragedy, although she

said that there may be a “small number” of people experiencing adverse events

from the drugs.

 

Apparently the track record of this organization is not very

good, considering that several of the people who contacted me admit to numerous

cases of the women they worked with ultimately committing suicide or killing

their children. Yet Stone refers to The MOTHERS Act as a “no brainer.” Clearly

the only way that this bill could end anyone’s suffering would be via permanent

relief for the depressed mother in the form of suicide or lethal injection in

prison.

Given that PSI operates internationally, perhaps they would have noticed that

many countries do not drug quite as many of their mothers as the U.S. does, and

these countries have better outcomes. Unlike the U.S.A., the U.K. has actually

banned the sale of antidepressants for children and teens due to the suicide

risk. But in the U.S. PSI finds it acceptable to drug America’s unborn and

newborn babies through their mothers’ bodies.

 

Would this madness be tolerated in any normal society? Will

the U.S. professionals’ affinity for drug-murder of families spread around the

world like an infectious disease? In Sweden, where minimal monitoring of

suicide victims’ health histories is conducted, 86% of all suicides have been

committed by people taking psychotropic medications. 77% of these cases

involved antidepressants and neuroleptics. Most patients were taking multiple

medications at the time of death, due to the common practice of “treating” the

dangerous effects of drugs by adding more.

I suppose it would be fitting if The MOTHERS Act could be

totally rewritten and really would put a stop to the mistreatment of new

mothers in a way that would honor the untimely drug and electroshock-induced

death of Stokes. But instead, it will only perpetuate psychiatry’s

death grip, expanding the magnitude of the drug-net by adding the force of a

federal mandate to the industry’s current efforts to “screen” women for mental

disorders - all without offering informed consent or alternatives to drugs.

When the Seventeen Magazine-style pop psychology quizzes inevitably tell

hormonal women that their feelings are signs of mental illness, are we supposed

to believe that doctors will not prescribe drugs? Will the federal government

engage in any sort of monitoring to determine how ineffective and deadly the

program is and compare the percentage of women killing their children in the

next five years to the previous five? Will black box warnings be given to

women, or will doctors hand out samples after removing the drug labels as was

done to me? And will Bernard and all of the people voting for this bill

take responsibility for these deaths, this violence against our most vulnerable

citizens, which risks the life of every new baby born in our country?

 

Clearly the U.S. has already fallen below anyone’s lowest

expectations for how severely our government has betrayed its own people and

offered them up as human sacrifice for the sake of greed, yet we are facing the

possibility of the passage of The MOTHERS Act, among other nightmare

legislation, with the consequence of even more intrusion, suffering, and death.

 Sincerely,Amy Philo214-705-0169 home817-793-8028 cellURGENT! Sign the petition against the MOTHERS Act at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-the-dangerous-and-invasive-mothers-actVisit www.uniteforlife.org