Samizdat Health Writer’s Co-operative Inc.

A writers collective

Books

A Story of Iatrogenic Insanity: “Prescription for Sorrow”

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There are quite a few books published about the lack of benefit and harm caused by so-called “anti-depressants.”  The fact that so many people have felt compelled to write such books is interesting in itself.  Prescription for Sorrow, by Patrick Hahn, is simply the best one I have read.  It is the most engaging and readable.  This is aided by victim vignettes of real people killed by these drugs to make the data real. 

A book review of “Prescription for Sorrow” by Jim Gottstein

Health Services, Bullshit Jobs, and the Defining Struggle of the Twenty-First Century

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Beginning in 2014, life expectancy in the United States dropped every year for five years straight. This was before the time of Covid, by the way. This is an absolutely unprecedented development which has been completely ignored by the mainstream media.  What is behind this staggering drop in life expectancy? David Healy, a professor of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, points the finger at a health care system…

A book review of Shipwreck of the Singular by Patrick D Hahn

Has your doctor prescribed you an antidepressant?

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Prescription for Sorrow: A book review by Mira de Vries, MeTZelf

Read this book first. SSRIs, falsely called antidepressants, are poisons. They do not relieve depression but do have grave undesirable effects, including homicidal and suicidal behavior.

This is Hahn’s message, told very well. His style is direct and concise, without the fancy language that inflates other works on this subject. See more…

Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare’s Castaways

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Shipwreck of the Singular looks at our changing environment through a healthcare lens rather than an economic one. One advantage to this is that each of us are better placed to put right what is going wrong in the climate of healthcare than we are to tackle the global climate. In tackling what needs changing in health, we may solve our wider climate crisis.

This book does not come with recommendations from people of distinction, or experts who have turned a blind eye to developments that have landed us in the mess we now have.

The people best placed to grasp what is going wrong and force our ‘betters’ to justify the distinctions that have been bestowed on them are those whose lives have been touched by what is going wrong in healthcare.

Shipwreck shows you how we got to the point of peril we are now at. It points to a Care that needs courage. A book won’t get us there. It needs you to engage and engage others.

Shipwreck of the Singular

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by David Healy

Shipwreck of the Singular took more time to write than all my other books combined. The others tumbled out – often in just a few weeks.

Unpublishable?

Pharmageddon took 3 weeks. But it then took 4 years to find a publisher. I took on an agent to help get a publisher. Faced with Shipwreck, the same agent said it would never be published. She didn’t know why. She didn’t want to waste her time finding out. This made it clear to me the publishing world was changing just like everything else was.  It led to Samizdat, which is part and parcel of Shipwreck.

It’s the forgotten, the disenfranchised who might buy into ‘Rescue’. Those who control our health, economic and publishing systems won’t.

It’s Always Been One Story

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Prozac, arguably the most famous drug of our lifetimes, was never approved for sale.

by Paul John Scott

Rather, Prozac when combined with anti-anxiety medication was approved for sale. In an unpromising design that seems so very much at home with the rest of the strange deeds set forth in this clarifying, well-curated new book, for a third-to-half of the patients studied, the antidepressant fluoxetine was studied as part of a cocktail, even though the approval went to Prozac alone.

This was because, when taken by itself, Prozac made people too agitated.

A Bad Penny

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Like a bad penny, this one just keeps coming back.

By Patrick D Hahn

As youth prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed, so have youth suicides. A recent diatribe in MedPage Today by Stephen Soumeri and Ross Koppel is the latest attempt in an ongoing campaign to blame soaring rates on youth suicides not on the drugs but on the FDA black box warning linking these drugs to youth suicide –  an idea was first put forth by statistician Robert Gibbons in 2007. It was easily refuted by data then, and it is just as easily refuted now.

Prescription for Sorrow

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One could scarcely have been alive and conscious anywhere in the Western world any time in the past twenty-five years and not have been aware of a raging controversy surrounding antidepressants, suicide, and violence—a controversy that shows no sign of abating. During that same period, prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed. So what is the story?

“Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence” by Patrick D. Hahn

Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence

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On 14 September 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a forty-seven-year-old former pressman at Standard Gravure of Louisville, Kentucky, entered his erstwhile place of employment armed with a Polytech AK47S semi-automatic rifle, a Sig Sauer P226 9mm pistol, two MAC 11 9mm machine pistols, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, a bayonet, and over a thousand rounds of ammunition. Wesbecker opened fire, killing eight employees and wounding twelve more. He also shot up the water sprinklers, and a police officer responding to the scene would later recall the place ran with what looked like rivers of blood.

From the Preface of Prescription for Sorrow by Patrick D. Hahn

Malcharist: Fact or Fiction? Big Pharma, Psychiatry and Ghostwriters

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Malcharist, by Paul John Scott, is a fictional account of one of psychiatry’s most influential key opinion leaders (KOLs), his ghostwriter, and a journalist on the trail of a big scandal in the world of Big Pharma. The story didn’t happen in reality, but Scott has done his homework in such a way that one of medicine’s darkest secrets is exposed in all of its sordid detail.

For those of us familiar with industry-sponsored clinical trials such as GlaxoSmithKline’s studies 329 and 352, it doesn’t take much imagination to draw analogies to an all-too-common theme: a psychiatrist and a ghostwriter who helped create an illusion. He takes all the credit for her labors and she disappears into the background. What is presented to the medical community, however, is a story of pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science.