Samizdat Health Writers

A writers collective

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

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

Medical Assistance in Dying: Enduring Sexual Dysfunctions

Canada put Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation in place in June 2016. This allowed for medical assistance in dying in cases where death was reasonably foreseeable. In 2019, in Truchon v Attorney General of Canada, the Superior Court of Québec declared the “reasonable foreseeability” criterion unconstitutional. This decision forced a review of the original legislation.

Medical Assistance in Dying: Treatment Resistant Depression

The provision of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is under review in Canada with debate about access for patients with mental illness.

An amendment to the draft legislation eliminating the exclusion of people with mental illness was proposed by Senator Stan Kutcher, arguing mental illness is as real as physical illness, that it can lead to great distress and people taking their own life in any event.

A Break in the Wall: A Bold Satire of Contemporary Psychiatry

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)

Has your doctor prescribed you an antidepressant?

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…

It’s Always Been One Story

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

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.

Shipwreck of the Singular: Rescued

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.

Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence

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

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.

CounterPunch on The Zyprexa Papers

CounterPunch.org has just published a great review of The Zyprexa Papers, Jim Gottstein’s book about his battle over Zyprexa (Olanzapine) with drug marketing giant Eli Lilly. Written by Bruce E. Levine, a psychologist and social critic, the review addresses the broad social issues raised by Jim Gottstein’s story. “The Zyprexa Papers is not simply about the harm done by blockbuster psychiatric drugs and drug company illegal marketing. It is also about the perversion of the U.S. legal system, as Gottstein illuminates the courts’ use of secrecy orders in settlement agreements to the detriment of the public.”