Samizdat Health Writer’s Co-operative Inc.
A writers collective
Fiction: A Break in the Wall by Bruce D. Lachter
A Break in the Wall is at once a bold satire of contemporary psychiatry, and a chronicle of the hubris of the wounded healer. Death is not the only ending. There is also madness, which, like prison, is easier to enter than to leave… A Break in the Wall by Bruce D. Lachter (Author)
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…
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
Malcharist Reviews on Amazon. “Don’t Miss This Brilliant and Breathtaking First Novel by The Gifted Paul John Scott,”Dr. T. “The Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction,” Kevin Miller. “Fascinating and fun. Worth the time and money,” Jeff
Study 329, which was a trial of paroxetine for depression in adolescents, is often held up as the poster child for fraud in clinical trials of psychiatric drugs. In Children of the cure: Missing data, lost lives and antidepressants, David Healy, Joanna Le Noury and Julie Wood painstakingly detail the entire sordid affair, including efforts to get the study retracted and to reanalyse the patient-level data. However, they do so with a larger purpose in mind. Study 329 is not presented as an aberration, but rather as emblematic of a systemic failure in modern medicine (or at least in psychiatry), which leads to prescribing practices that do great harm.
Malcharist Review by Annie Bevan Malcharist bounds like a hound as Lee Majors spies with his own eyes, his master is unaware he is up-the-creek, without a paddle. Griffin Wagner is fighting the devil’s work and suddenly his botched-up visions give him a break into a new world where right is wrong and wrong is […]
This is a novel that takes the reader deep inside the Pharmaceutical Empire which invents diseases, creates “patient advocacy organizations” to sell these diseases to the public, manufactures and controls the evidence base purporting to show their nostrums are safe and effective remedies for these diseases, relentlessly gaslights those unfortunate victims harmed by their patent medicines, and smears all who question any of this as “Luddites, anti-vaxxers, tin-foil hatters, and Scientologists.”
A novel by Paul John Scott
A closely-observed, panoramic thriller about medical science gone wrong, and the people who make dangerous pills seem safe.
It’s Manhattan in the winter of 2010, and Shivani Patel is carrying the secrets of a trade that no one understands: medical ghostwriting. A Cambridge-trained scientist and wordsmith for the world’s largest drugmaker, she makes her soaring pay by delivering the sleight-of-hand needed to move new drugs into journals and onto market. Then she watches as a parade of aging males take credit for her work…
