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Patrick D Hahn

Patrick D Hahn is the author of Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide, and Violence (Samizdat Health Writer's Cooperative) and Madness and Genetic Determinism: Is Mental Illness in Our Genes? (Palgrave MacMillan). Dr. Hahn is an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Loyola University Maryland.

Most Recent Articles by Patrick D Hahn:

“Chemically lobotomized"

Beginning in 2009, television viewers were treated to a series of commercial messages featuring animated images of winsome young mothers whose lives had been turned around by taking Abilify. In one memorable spot, an actress declaims in voice over: “My antidepressant worked hard to help with my depression. But sometimes I struggled to get going – even to get through the day.”
- Sunday, April 5, 2015

“Works like a thermostat”

David Healy is a medical doctor, the author of Pharmageddon, and an outspoken critic of the psychopharmaceutical industry. He also is a practicing psychiatrist and he does prescribe neuroleptics to his patients. But, he cautions, “The drugs are tranquilizers, and they were originally called tranquilizers. They are not curative.
- Saturday, April 4, 2015

A medicinal lobotomy

Abilify belongs to a class of drugs called "neuroleptics." Chlorpromazine was the first of the neuroleptic drugs, and indeed the first of the modern-day psychiatric medications, and its history is instructive.
- Friday, April 3, 2015

“Psychiatry has destroyed my life

“Psychiatry has destroyed my life in so many ways.” So says Jarrett, a young man from Orange County, who for the past three and half years has been taking a cocktail of various psychiatric medications, including America’s best-selling drug, Abilify.
- Thursday, April 2, 2015

"I can't enjoy anything"

Just last August, a study was published in JAMA in which adolescents were screened for depression and then randomized either to a collaborative care intervention or usual care. An accompanying editorial called for integration of depression screening into primary pediatric care, noting that "depression is associated with serious mental health problems (e.g., suicide)."
- Monday, January 5, 2015

Dead bodies

In the meantime the media and the FDA were flooded with tales of suicidal and homicidal violence committed by patients, including children, who had been taking Prozac. Faced with mounting pressure, the agency conducted a meta-analysis of 23 industry-sponsored RCT's on pediatric patients for nine antidepressants: Prozac, Celexa, Zoloft, Remeron, Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Luvox, and Serzone.
- Sunday, January 4, 2015

Better than well

Sadness, sorrow, and despair have been a part of the human condition from the beginning. More than two thousand years ago, the author of The Book of Job wrote, "I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul." Around the same time, Siddhartha Gautama is said to have told his followers, "Life is suffering." It is only in the last 150 years that these conditions have come to be regarded as diseases that can and should be treated by the pharmaceutical industry.
- Saturday, January 3, 2015

Part I: “They’re very safe”

“It’s like being in a torture chamber all your life.” That’s how Brenda, a young woman from the southeast of England, describes her experience with prescription antidepressants.
- Friday, January 2, 2015


A double whammy

Part 1: “I’ve lost everything” Part 2: A double whammy The article was buried in the New York Times health blog: “Anti-anxiety drugs tied to higher mortality.” The article referred to a study, published March 19 in the online version of BMJ, by psychiatrist Scott Weich of the University of Warwick and his colleagues.
- Monday, August 25, 2014


"My quality of life shot"

Part 1: “I was in a coma for four days” Part 2: “It was really a sham” Part 3: "My quality of life shot" Between 1994 and 2007, annual per-patient spending on diabetes drugs more than doubled, from $495 to $1048 per. A study by Doctor Caleb Alexander of the University of Chicago Hospitals found that during the same period, the three-year death rate for people with type 2 diabetes dropped by less than one in two hundred.
- Thursday, August 21, 2014



The statinization of society

Part 1: A $29-billion-dollar-a-year industry Part 2: The selling of a disease Part 3: The statinization of society In 2011, the Cochrane Collaboration published a meta-analysis, or a study of studies, on the effectiveness of statins for primary prevention of CVD. They concluded that 223 people with no previous history of CVD would have to be treated with statins for three years in order to avert one death. Even that figure was an exaggeration, since the meta-analysis included studies in which as many as 10 percent of participants did have a previous history of CVD. The authors concluded "Only limited evidence showed that primary prevention with statins may be cost effective and improve patient quality of life. Caution should be taken in prescribing statins for primary prevention among people at low cardiovascular risk."
- Wednesday, August 13, 2014

The selling of a disease

Part 1: A $29-billion-dollar-a-year industry Part 2: The selling of a disease Part 3: The statinization of society When he was nearing the end of his career, Henry Gadsden, then-CEO of pharmaceutical giant Merck, gave an interview to Fortune magazine in which he said that he regretted that he couldn’t sell drugs to healthy people. He said his dream was to be able to peddle his company’s wares to everybody, like chewing gum giant Wrigley’s.
- Tuesday, August 12, 2014


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