Pharmaceutical companies have hijacked healthcare in America, and the results are life-threatening. Dr. David Healy documents a riveting and terrifying story that affects us all. Comments I thought this would be a good place to reprint a recent article from Medscape. In a very sad way, it may show the "chickens coming home to roost" with regard to the official silence on anti-psychotic drugs and suicide. The study it describes looked at 31,603 individuals who died by suicide -- 203 of whom were physicians. The physicians were much more likely than non-physicians to die with anti-psychotics, benzodiazepines or barbiturates in their systems, but "not more likely" to have antidepressants present. Their anti-psychotic use was astronomically higher than the overall group, while benzo and barbiturate use was modestly higher. The spin that was put on this survey by the article was typical: Physicians are undertreated for depression; we need to increase access and reduce stigma! The "undertreatment" concept was apparently drawn from the antidepressant figures -- but no numbers were given. To me, "not more likely" means the dead doctors had AD's in their systems at "about the same" levels as dead non-physicians. What were those levels, I wonder? They could be pretty high -- not only because AD's can (fairly rarely) cause suicide but because they can (more frequently) simply fail to prevent it. My guess about the meaning of these figures: the doctors in question, even more so than civilians, received "Lonely Treatment": pills only, either self-prescribed or passed