In quintessential triviality for years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

god, i just wanna take my eyes out.  you know, you drive me absolutely fucking crazy. 

the difference between me and you is that you believe things, you anoint them in your way, as if important, or true.  they're neither!  but i love you madly anyway, even if repugnant about the entire affair!

i am mad.  i long to be entangled with someone, but at the same time, i am often casually entangled.  it's just that i've become a sloth.  if i bothered to move once in a while, maybe.  maybe things'd be different.  i need to lose about a million pounds, and learn to move my lips a little better.  a lot better. ella ha escrito.

tu amas.  no soy la dama quien tu tienes la amor.  i often think what you do is make people believe things about themselves, things that hardly leave them, and only make them continue to itch.  you make her believe it is her fault, that she is not quite independent, or free. you are neither, my friend!  who is?  who is when you adhere to some sort of canny philosophy, some dictum that tells you to read, breathe, fuck, pretend, make picture shows, be somebody.  you sicken me, muchacho.  one day i will be wearing something very rustic and dark, and you'll find my shadow rolling around a corner, and then you'll find your stare one on one with mine, except you'll be met with a certain  lucidity there in the eyes, like dark water.  there'll be a glimmer there, like that undulating light poised above water, a light capturing absence in a gleam.  it will give you a very definite yet unnamed feeling.

i am moving through, and i realize, all those times, laying close to the ground, or buried beneath quilts, longing just to cease, i know now, it is not that i desire death, nor that i am even truly sad, drinking from my sedating cocktail, and perhaps this is why now i am not so sad my mother's dead and gone, as she has not got these things to worry about or to bog her down so heavily. it's that i want not to be seen, not even in my own scope, not to have this lump of body, obstructing and intruding on my view and my way; it obstructs the clarity of seeing what's around me, you see, if i am distracted by myself, and by my sadness, and my demands.  i marvel at those of you who are thin and racy, like bones moving between pages; you're so thin like a waif, it's almost as if you're barely here, and i envy it, though i know i could never manage to wither down to that size, for let's face it, i'm far too indulgent.  i see it though, the less you partake, the less you're feeding yourself, the less you're giving to yourself, the less of you that's actually here, the least that's vulnerable, the less open to being swindled by those who'd have you believe that there's something that can stand in your stead, an idea that can replace you, embody your life, like some memento, and the less of yourself here the less opportunity to be suddenly swept into something like love that captures yourself entirely, something that makes you want to stay in one way forever, when both things are substitutes, just objects for a changing mind, merely momentary. 

and i remember when i did nothing, literally, because i relished so the feeling of absence, of not having to do anything because what was doing something anyway, and what was it to do, instead of just being, and i didn't sleep for days and i ate almost nothing, and though those were painful days when you know there is also some grain of pleasure in doing that, some backward dignity, something you can say you did for yourself, or to do away with yourself, whichever, they're the same, to secret something of yourself away, for a time, until someone comes along and forces you to wake up from that stupor, to show yourself and give yourself and open yourself to everything else, and forget what you saw when nothing, no one was around, not even you, only a shadow of your eyes.

i know i'll have a nice life, but i won't write anything of substance, and i won't feel anything earth-shaking, not anymore, not with what's happened. nothing surprises me.  my two uncles died this year, as did my mother, almost all without warning, my mother the youngest, though all three in their fifties. 2 weeks ago another uncle of mine was suddenly diagnosed with a very rare auto-immune disease. it's him attacking himself.  funny, it's not much different here. 

i guess you've got to to be truly free, to truly separate yourself from it all.  it's a painful division, taking the headlines out of your head, to separate notions from the 'will-not-be.'  it's not easy. you've got to, but it's not easy.

-finish working at the nursery until August.
-return to school in fall to get a major in History with a concentration in Native American History.
-Apply to teach on a reservation and/or apply to Graduate school next year.
-Move out and live among puppies, kitty, and chinchillas.
-start writing everyday again (here).
-start exercising 5 days a week.
-finish fall garden.
-explain myself to you all, or to anyone who cares.

stay tuned?

_{(short explanation. my mother died on March 21, 2008.)}


Let's forget everything that has happened before.

Not that I will forget it, because I remember it all. I'm just asking you to forget about it. Unless, of course, I'm the one bringing it up.

I believe it has been months since I wrote a decent piece of anything. I mean, a decent piece of napkin, for christ's sake. A decent piece of notebook paper. I simply open my car door, and close it. Sit down, and drive. I do this everyday to go, only to come back. The light in the early morning clings silver to every branch and patch of grass. It is that sharp edge that early light seems to have. That may be only how it appears through glass windshields, with light brought more clearly into focus, I am sure. Everything shines with the morning wet, the sky always that silver haze, neither gray nor blue, but lit, and it seems as if the edges of everything were illuminated. I admit I am not actually very sure.  It could be the smoke drifting off the wildfires, burning in the pocosins, far off.  I hear that repeated on the news, a daily headline:"The wildfires continue to burn in the Pocosin Lakes..." I remember the black snaky river I once canoed in. I remember the water so dark with murk it seemed to roll thickly off the oars, and the pines and cypress stands so choked with green needles that it seemed to blot out anything beyond that place.  At the time it hadn't stopped me from thinking beyond it.  Most every morning the smoke moves in from there, and most every morning they repeat that same headline, and it sets off a signal in some cavity of my skull where a light, enfeebled by fatigue, pulses and burns.  And always I continue on the road, and I see the news from far away slowly manifest before me, and smoke settles over shielding trees until it becomes something like a frightening shimmer, that edge that I speak of.  As if everything were a heat mirage, burning off the black, in some searing, thirsty afternoon. I continue on. My eyes are tired, and my head aches behind my eye sockets, as they do when I have remembered something too hard.

I pass by hills. Mounds have been dug open. Stripped hill-faces overhang a yellow backhoe. The clay has been gouged and spills downward. After rains have washed them, it is the iron and metals that are left. The earth rusts. Out in the open, under the sky, the earth rusts. I could never believe it.  However, the earth is not nearly as raw as blood, which is why I cannot really claim it to be red.  The hills are not really red either, and the smoke not silver. It is faulty simile, you see. They are merely blots, made distinct by light. These are loose forms that lend shape to formless things. These are the ideas that you are ignoring in your head as you drive. They appear without mention as the montage you see in the side window of the car. They go unaddressed. We have other places to go.

These are things that appear as if on the other side of some expanse of river, merely made out by the lines, treelines, floating foliage, like clouds converging on the horizon. It is hard to say how an opened plot of earth recalls feelings you never put into any formation of language. Perhaps this is why I recall things as silvery. It seems to be a glint of something, a spark in an instant, that one never has the chance or even the impulse to name. When I see these things laid under the sun, the big bull cow lying prostrate by the fencepost, there is some dissatisfaction, some sadness without reason, that it calls up from some recess in me. He lies in the dirt, dark lashes flitting flies, his horns dulled down to nubbins, licking, with complacence. His hip bones are sharp and triangular.  He licks, slowly. He is surrounded by junked cars. A toppled hunting tower, once used to shoot deer, now lies on its side littering the paddock with a few wood planks. It is still brightly painted but has not been fixed in the months since I pass it. The cows are usually standing all around there.

There is something like a rash of this expanse, spreading along every road.  The smoke settles easily over these open expanses. It is easy to say nothing and only to listen. "The wildfires continue to burn on the Pocosin Lakes..." It is even easier to feel nothing. I see it all but I only ache, for some indispensable reason, whether it is so many things tossed by the way side or some other reason, I cannot say. Or whether they are, the cows and fences and tossed cars, I mean, some sort of plaything my mind makes use of when I am not making use of my mind. It is all incongruous anyway. It only matters that what I see does not stand testament to any sort of infinity, written about or believed. The only thing we believe is what we see around us in instances. There remains some property of matter, some finite balance, that no matter is destroyed, only slowly and more slowly broken, and finally dissipated, into some other form. And goes on, continuing, but irreversibly changed. "And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. ... We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye..." (1 Corinthians 15:49 & 15:52). 

I do not often quote the bible, and many people say there is no use for it now; it's true these days I find little use for it, for a solitary God that uses misery to force learning, to give one unwanted apple for another.  We say we must learn through sorrow, that these instances happen for a reason, but it is no reason other than some fruitless knowledge that could have been gleaned some other way, had God the will to do so.  I do not agree that the bible is useless, as its symbols and image are those which become the body and the flesh of our thoughts, and to use a biblical phrase, to make the word flesh.  However, its texts are not the answer but rather only a system of which to express questions and glancing observations about the world that we, over hundreds and hundreds of repeated years, have looked about us and reacted, in instances, in the same, conditioned way, given to these impulse thoughts so often that they have become code, and they have become law, and they have become something to believe in for the ever-foreseeable future and beyond. 

It is with that I turned my back on God, for even he knows that no good can come of static ideas, as this world does not exist in stasis, and in fact there is no such verisimilitude as promised to children in tales of heaven and of love that remains constant.  And he knows that there is no good in a system sparked within a hollow human head that does not grasp the entirety of its vision, only half-perceives, and thus believes as wholly true the things it wrote down as half-truths, on impulse and with incomplete observations of a vast and unfamiliar world.

Perhaps I am too hard on God, but he has left me alone.  Perhaps God never promised me these things, only people, and people have always been steadily unreliable.   But at the same time, what has he left?  I barely find any relish in words or thought.  I seek to avoid them.  I awake to dread and what I see before my eyes leaves me heavy and tired.  I am so tired of others who believe in abstraction, who have not understood not just the mentality but the physicality of being alone, who have felt a heaviness weigh their body or auras spark before their eyes from migraines sharpening against their skull, who have felt apart even from themselves, who have felt the exhaustion descend more upon them a little more each day until finally it seems there is no reason to even draw the shades.  No reason.  No one has understood being lonely until they have felt death.  Until they have felt emptiness not as an absence but as a foreboding presence.  Until the things that are visceral become some effervescent gleam, in the wind, on the nightstand, glancing in, thrown from the street. 

You do not know me, and I hate to think that you do.  You do not even know yourself, for what are you but a few fleeting emotions and a bag of bones, waltzing in the garden under sprinklers throwing spray, every which way finding flashes between the leaves, looking to the thin man that you have inexplicable feelings for (no, not feelings, romantic notions, Lolita-esque, of old and young) and to the other man, trusted, marriageable (pragmatic, i don't deny), and the other man, so young, naive and flushed with fire (and self-absorbed, a liar), that you have inexplicable feelings for, and why not? Each is only more without reason than another, and all feelings must surrender, any way, in time, to the mercuriality of going, living through.  We must accept these as only things we see momentarily, eye to eye.  But acceptance does not mean we do not feel some heaviness, some yielding to something beyond ourselves.  We feel the same way, we react the same way, even if we expect it, just as the smoke rolls in, the same, every day.

playing? natural beauty. neil young.
a natural beauty should be
preserved like a monument
to nature.

goddamn, i realize, you wanted me to be alone.

_{"I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now.
In my life, why do I give valuable time, to people who don't care if I live or I die?"
--MORRISSEY}

If this is what you have given me, America, then I opt out.  I must have somewhere to spit my vitriol. A 10 hour day where I see no daylight, where I am one in the line of hundreds on the freeway, when I have learned to taste bitterness and feel revulsion at the sight of others, of the many, of the faceless on my way to where I'm going...always going and never getting there. I will have this job in order to get another, I will go to this school to get into another, I am always pushing forward! Forward, America!

Where we hundreds swallow pills because we cannot think, it is too troubling, where we are tough and we are not unhappy, we are imbalanced; there are certain criteria one must diagnose, here, it is all listed in this diagnostics and statistical manual, it is an illness, after all. It has little to do with external factors, more of a inclination toward disorder, you see, it is inside your head, you know, and your childhood. Where was your smothered childhood? In the schoolhouse built exactly like a penitentiary, no exaggeration or lie, under sickly yellow fluorescent lights watching a transparency screen? Did your parents scream every night? Do you avert your eyes from them? Do they avert their eyes from you? You were made to not care. Must we turn everything sterile? Must everything be given to regulation, to reproduction on a massive scale, ones and millions in the same docketed household, taxed and filed? America, I am bored, and I am tired of your demands. Must children wear ties? Must fifth graders study and worry about PSATs? Must we excise all knowledge and condense education to a neat and tidy test?  Why must everything, even personality, intellectual capacity, be codified? Numbers, results.

<sub>Intellectually, Ms. Sheehan has above average mentality and has excellent abstract reasoning skills.  She is comfortable and skilled in concrete reasoning but prefers to deal with more hypothetical ideas.  She is extremely well read and has excellent reading comprehension.  She responded to the test in a manner that reflected her wide range of knowledge and background information.  Finally, she has an exceptional ability to separate essential from non-essential information.  Ms. Sheehan works best when challenging her mentally in her work environment.  If required to work with mundane tasks for a lengthy period of time, she may become quite discontent due to the absence of mental challenge.

Verbally, Ms. Sheehan has excellent receptive and expressive vocabularies.  She is in the top quartile in her verbal fluency and her scores are reflective of persons who are superior in vocabulary capacity.  She has been exposed to words that are used in the workplace as well as social circles.  She can be extremely persuasive due to her verbal understanding and is able to communicate exceptionally well when she so desires.

Ms. Sheehan tends to be slightly apprehensive and concerned.  This internal stress will make her appear fearful, worried, uncertain, and troubled.  Individuals like Ms. Sheehan will look beyond probable outcomes and fret over the less likely, though maybe critical, situations.  This small degree of uncertainty can sometimes promote depression, internal tension and nervous behavior in the workplace.  Individuals like Ms. Sheehan who are at times apprehensive may be occasionally plagued by feelings of incapability and inadequacy.  It would be suggested that Ms. Sheehan try to seek hobbies or interests which will promote further confident and secure behavior.</sub>

Here is where we glorify mediocrity, where I step into the half-million, million dollar house and find no art, and very little books,where we are stuck in our chairs, using our minds but to keep up the movement of numbers that gives our lives sustainability, a means. Even independence. I say, when I get a receipt from the bank, those numbers do not adhere to me, not like my spit, they do not build anything, not like my hands, and it hurts to wonder, what else can I do? We are so settled in our ways, even I cannot imagine them differently, I am too comfortable, too fat, so fat, just like everyone else, and those who have learned only to laugh at the situation, laugh and point satire. How can one laugh? Or have you become efficient? Have you become only motion without thought? I have grown until I feel nothing but hate, and sorrow, in chopping bouts almost too hard to take. With these excesses, we are all driven to distraction.

America, why must you always operate via the hypothetical? Why must the nebulous be the final rule? Why must green numbers in a constant scroll dictate the sway of our minds, our worries, our lives? My grandfather's house flooded, he is 80 years old and so worried he had a heart attack because, as I ask myself, asking as if everyday were a disaster, what else can I do? Where there are bayou dotted by bright blue tarps, the makeshift homes of the homeless, where those that are bereft have been given plastic trailers, egg cartons, to ward off the rain. Is this like your levies, America? You do not support those who live behind your walls, who huddle at your feet. And because government has failed we all decry it, we all hear the rallying call, the less government the better!, but when has it ever been that when something has failed us, America, that we dispose of it? When have we become so careless? So unforgiving? So devaluing of life? Having left those huddled under tarps, under bridges? Having wheeled out those unable to pay from our hospitals? Having passed by huge dead bears on our highways, rotting carcasses, sticky blood and bristled black hair baking under the sun? When have we forgotten what we have? We can still salvage it.

When the constitution was made, was it not made for modification, for renewal, for the words to be resealed in ink with new agreements? It was not made to be discarded with the apathetic cheer of a reductionist, eager to relinquish what we have. Because it is easier to stop. It is easier to stop caring, to move forward as is, as reconsideration only hampers progress. Because it is more proficient to move forward rather than look back, to face the horrors, to bear them, and right them.

Let us just say, this was inspired somewhat by a far better poem.

Seeya later Allen Ginsberg.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

How fantastic it is for that one to be engaged.  You know, how sickening are the cinches that twist fate.  If only it weren't bedlam, if only I could have been closer, had been there, it could have been me, that is, if I had been beautiful. If I only I'd been there, and beautiful. That red haired girl could have very well been alone.  Instead, I'm here, in my room.  And she's the fair one.  That cheeky eye.  You know, I remember it very clearly.  (As I often do, blessed or cursed with a clear memory, I'm not quite sure, but nonetheless.)   I remember you said, I don't like her very much.  But I knew better, I knew enough.  Where did it go?  The thinness of the air when we sat at night in the car? That blown out car?  And oh, with a hole, couldn't speak, thin air. I couldn't speak, not for the heavy hole where my throat was.  How I wanted to say I cared where you'd go.  I cared what they did to you.  And the joke was, you didn't care. And I spent nights staring, wondering. Oh, yes, the glare on your skin in the movies, the glow, and my weakness, how weak, when you didn't know I was looking.  And why does it transpose?  To him, oh always him, to you, (he said he wanted to ravage me in the movies, I was wanted, once) and how it crackles when I see your black eyes, oh you, and that low look, brooding.  Did you show her your lyrics?  I'm doubting.  Why was I never worth the words, the chance?  That's all it was.  Chance.  Issued in our earliest moves, while we danced, ignorantly, among suburban walls with daisied wallpaper and down aisles of half-deserted malls, and winding streets of neighborhoods crowded with fences and stripped of all the tallest trees, it could have happened to anyone, we all thought it was so much and we made it so.  Don't you see, it hardly even meant anything at all?  It hardly even mattered? We made our way regularly and at random chance you bumped into her, and in the school halls, you thought, this will do, this is comfortable.  And quick.

Comfortable. I felt comfortable before.  It's all so sick.  That you and her should happen to meet, and never think twice, never quit, not even once!  Why so perfect, why so predictable?  Down the avenues, walking, you chose her and not me, and her, and her, and even another girl, people meet and stick, because they're lonely.  Fuck, this marriage will only lead to more houses and more ground thick with picket fences, and your very own closed off world that I could have told you would happen when I was sixteen years old.  Why her? Why red haired girl?  It could just as easily have been me, and yet I'm not there. Why do I feel, why did I always feel, even milling in a crowd, even among people throwing themselves into confusion, onto couches, heavy, panting, even in the dead night streets when we louses are drunk and grasping for bare hands, bare skin, and you feel the thick of tongues and lips, that I am not and was never there?  And that I'm off, the quiet floating music in the air, the thinness of the moon slanting in the air, that one time, laying on the floor, bare, in the very cold, as someone is kissing me, my mouth, my breasts, my eyelids and my ears, my fallen hair... all I can do is listen.   While you are kissing me, even while strangers are kissing me I listen to the music playing, the oriental blare, the tinkling of the guitar strings, the thuds of feet on floorboards.    The air. They dance around me, you dance upon me, the chimes play on the front stair, as I remember.  I will always remember those faint chimes. You're one and all the same, and I am not there.  It was easiest to find her, I can't be touched, not really. I'm not really there.

why is it that all i can ever do is apologize to you?  apologize for you? 

i am sorry,

i am sorry again.

i am sorry i am not your lily-flower and

that i can never be enough for anyone,

much less a friend.

i am sorry i am little more than average, but then

who isn't anymore

and when i think of that i am sure

i will never burn again

What I am about to post is a clear revelation to me, not only as a voter and taxpayer to the power of the pharmaceutical lobby in politics, but to me as a patient, vulnerable in their suffering from depression, who trusted their doctor and the drugs they prescribed to help me when I needed it most.  I openly admit that I have been diagnosed with depression for the purposes of informing others of the effects of the drugs I have taken. Hopefully it will not go unheeded: Clinical depression affects about 7% - 18% of the population before the age of 40.  Personally, I know at least 6 people in my family and friends alone that have also taken antidepressants at some time in their lives or are still taking them. 

Coping with depression and treatment is difficult. I have experienced some stigma associated with taking the drugs, including having to leave a job because my admitting to being treated with drugs caused undeserved skepticism about my performance and general mental capacity (in general, prejudice).  I have had to convene with many university officials and associate deans in order to attempt to explain poor performance in school influenced directly by side effects caused by the potency of the drugs, and in these meetings was accused openly of being ill prepared for life's demands or basically proposing an excuse for my poor performance.  The only time I have ever done poorly in school was during my time under treatment with antidepressants. Not only that, but the multi-year treatment with the drugs has of course inflicted many side effects, including some that rendered necessary a trip to the Emergency Room.  Subsequently, the additional suffering I've dealt with over the years came to me unexpectedly, as I was never informed of the extent of these side effects; furthermore, now that I wish to end my treatment with antidepressants, I was ill-informed on how to go off of them and the often debilitating withdrawal symptoms to accompany cessation of the drugs. 

I wanted to post the following for any of you who have ever taken or considered taking an antidepressant drug.  I do not want to be fully negative and say that these drugs are not at all beneficial; in fact, they probably saved my life when I first began to take them.  However, I believe without proper warning about their potential side-effects and the severe withdrawal symptoms that may occur when stopping the drug when taken on a long-term basis, that they have wrought and will continue to cause untold harm to the patients who need them, including myself. These drugs need to be carefully considered before a program is began.  According to recent studies, the diagnostic criteria for depression are far too broad, leading to people who are not truly clinically depressed being diagnosed due to a normal reaction to negative events. However, most importantly, the information on their powerful effects needs to be openly provided.  Below, I have provided the checklists of both side effects and withdrawal symptoms, and reported my own experiences.  If I experienced these symptoms, I will mark it with an asterisk. I will add more asterisks depending on the severity--the more asterisks, the more severe the side effect or withdrawal symptom.This long list is to provide fair warning to any who would consider these drugs lightly.

CHECKLIST OF ANTIDEPRESSANT SIDE EFFECTS
(my note: These are often mistaken for a worsening of the patient's underlying psychiatric condition, which then causes doctors to prescribe more of the drug to 'treat it', often making the side effects worse)

Side effects that may make patients suicidal:
Insomnia**
Anxiety/panic attacks*
Akathisia (drug-induced agitation or aggression)*
Irritability/hostility/impulsivity (disinhibition)
Mania-like reactions (rapid speech, racing thoughts, distractibility, reckless behavior, delusions) (often mistaken for undiagnosed Bipolar Disorder)
Paranoid reactions
Psychotic reactions (delusions, hallucinations)

CHECKLIST OF ANTIDEPRESSANT WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS:
(my note: withdrawal symptoms are experienced when the patient accidentally misses a dose, lowers their dosage, or tries to stop the drug too quickly or abruptly)

Psychiatric Symptoms

That Mimic Depression:

1. Crying spells**
2. Worsened mood*
3. Low energy (fatigue, lethargy, malaise)***
4. Trouble concentrating*
5. Insomnia or trouble sleeping*
   
6. Change in appetite
7. Suicidal thoughts**
8. Suicide attempts

That Mimic Anxiety Disorders:

9. Anxious, nervous, tense*
10. Panic attacks (racing heart, breathless)**
11. Chest pain
12. Trembling, jittery, or shaking*

Irritability and Aggression:
13. Irritability*
14. Agitation (restlessness, hyperactivity)
15. Impulsivity
16. Aggression
17. Self-harm**
18. Homicidal thoughts or urges

Confusion and Memory Problems:
19. Confusion or cognitive difficulties
20. Memory problems or forgetfulness

Mood Swings:
21. Elevated mood (feeling high)
22. Mood swings
23. Manic-like reactions

Hallucinations:
24. Auditory hallucinations
25. Visual hallucinations

Dissociation:
26. Feeling detached or unreal**

Other:
27.  Excessive or intense dreaming***
28. Nightmares**

Medical Symptoms:

That Mimic the Flu:
29. Flu-like aches and pains
30. Fever
31. Sweats
32. Chills
33. Runny nose
34. Sore eyes

That Mimic Gastroenteritis:
35. Nausea
36. Vomiting
37. Diarrhea
38. Abdominal pain or cramps*
39. Stomach bloating

Dizziness:
40. Disequilibrium
41. Spinning, swaying, lightheaded***
42. Hung over or waterlogged feeling***
43. Unsteady gait, poor coordination*
44. Motion sickness

Other:
45. Headache***
46. Tremor

Sensory Abnormalities:
47. Numbness, burning, or tingling
48. Electric zap-like sensations in the brain
49. Electric shock-like sensations in the body** (in my case, it was around my eye socket)
50. Abnormal vision sensations
51. Ringing or other noises in the ears
52. Abnormal smells or tastes

Other:
53. Drooling or excessive saliva
54. Slurred speech*
55. Blurred vision
56. Muscle cramps, stiffness, twitches
57. Feeling of restless legs
58. Uncontrollable twitching of the mouth

These can be anywhere from mild or moderate to severe.


Even for those of you have not or never will experience debilitating depression or anxiety, the widespread corruption and sway pharmaceutical companies hold over medical information and legal regulation is something we should all know, if only to try to stem the tide, and make informed decisions when voting for candidates that may stand a chance of opposing this dangerous trend.

The following article is lengthy, but I assure you it is eye-opening. Thank you to any who read this and understand my predicament and the predicament of millions of consumers of antidepressants in this country alone.


From The Antidepressant Solution, by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D.

This should never have needed to be written.  When Paxil was introduced, GlaxoSmithKline reported that withdrawal reactions are "rare" with the new drug, which became a multibillion-dollar-a-year best seller.  When Zoloft was introduced, Pfizer made a similar claim that withdrawal reactions are "rare" with its best selling drug.  For perspective, keep in mind that officially the pharmaceutical industry itself defines rare side effects as occuring in less than one patient in a thousand, or .01 percent.  Paxil and Zoloft have since been shown to cause withdrawal reactions not in .01 percent but in 66 percent and 60 percent of patients, respectively.  How could pharmaceutical companies with their vast scientific and financial resources have been so wrong?  How could companies miss withdrawal reactions that occur in 66 and 60 percent of patients so egregiously that they claimed they occurred in only .01 percent of patients?

When pharmaceutical companies test new antidepressants to win FDA approval, withdrawal reactions are typically not evaluated.  The studies usually only last six to eight weeks, a remarkable fact given that patients subsequently take the drugs for years, even decades.  At the end of the six to eight weeks,  the studies are over when the patients take their last dose.  Since the studies are over, withdrawal symptoms are not assessed after the patients stop taking their drugs.  This is sometimes referred to as the "Don't ask and you won't know" approach to evaluating--or, more accurately, not evaluating--side effects.  That is how the companies were able to declare that withdrawal side effects rarely occur in patients.  Elsewhere in the fine print of their official information on the drugs, the pharmaceutical companies note that dependence has "not been systematically studied."

Why would pharmaceutical companies not want their drugs to be associated with withdrawal reactions?  The answer is: Withdrawal implies dependence and addiction.  In fact, in the modern era virtually all blockbuster psychiatric drugs have fallen on the sword of withdrawal, dependence, and addiction, along with other serious side effects.  The drugs include Valium-type anti-anxiety agents, barbiturates, amphetamines, narcotics, and cocaine (originally a popular prescription drug, as described below).  With Valium-type anti-anxiety agents, the last best sellers prior to today's best-selling antidepressants, by the 1990s pharmaceutical companies and the profession had learned the general principle that psychiatric drugs with short half-lives cause worse withdrawal and dependence.  Withdrawal, dependence, and addiction have been the side effect that has plagued blockbuster psychiatric drugs.  Why did we have to spend over a decade relearning this with today's antidepressants while countless patients and their families suffered?

Of the earlier classes of popular psychiatric drugs, today's antidepressants are most closely related to cocaine.  A little over a hundred years ago, cocaine was the first prescription antidepressant of the modern era.  In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cocaine was the most popular prescription medication in Europe, prescribed for everything from depression to shyness, just as today's antidepressants are.  At the turn of the century, Freud wrote three famous "cocaine papers" extolling cocaine's benefits.  At the height of its popularity, cocaine was [of course] the essential ingedient in Coca-Cola, which is named after cocaine.  It took pharmaceutical companies decades to acknowledge cocaine's dangerous side effects, including severe withdrawal reactions and addiction.  Only afterwards did caffeine replace cocaine in Coca-Cola.

Surprisingly, cocaine is a "reuptake inhibitor" that increases the signals of three "feel good" neurotransmitters, or chemical signals, in the brain: serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenalin, the form of adrenalin found in the brain.  I say surprisingly, because as seen in the following data A.1, today's popular antidepressants are promoted as also increasing one or more of these closely related "feel good" signals.  Indeed, most of today's antidepressants boost these signals by the same principle mechanism as cocaine.  Like cocaine they are "reuptake inhibitors."  The first of today's popular antidepressants, Prozac,  boosts serotonin and is marketed as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI.  The next one, Zoloft, boosts serotonin and dopamine.  Effexor boosts serotonin and noradrenalin; it is marked as a serotonin and noradrenalin reuptake inhibitor, or SNRI.  Wellbutrin boosts dopamine. Many patients are prescribed "cocktails" or two or three antidepressants, such as Effexor and Wellbutrin, which together boost all three neurotransmitters, much like cocaine.  All of the drugs listed in the following data A.1 have secondary effects on other neurotransmitters that are not fully understood.  None of the drugs are identical to one another but they are closely related in their mechanisms of action and effects on brain chemicals.

Data A.1 Comparison of Cocaine with Today's Antidepressants
                   
Cocaine - Serotonin, Noradrenalin, Dopamine
Prozac - Serotonin
Zoloft - Serotonin, Dopamine
Paxil - Serotonin
Luvox - Serotonin
Celexa - Serotonin
Lexapro - Serotonin
Effexor - Serotonin, Noradrenalin
Cymbalta - Serotonin, Noradrenalin
Serzone - Serotonin, Noradrenalin
Wellbutrin - Dopamine
Remeron - Serotonin, Noradrenalin
"Cocktail" of Wellbutrin and an SSRI - Serotonin and Dopamine
"Cocktail" of Wellbutrin and an SNRI or Remeron - Serotonin, Noradrenalin, Dopamine

According to Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmalogical Basis of Therapeutics, the leading medical textbook of pharmacology, when cocaine is taken orally at doses that are not excessive (ie, at doses that are legally prescribed), it produces increased energy, alertness, ability to concentrate, self-confidence, and a sense of well-being, much like today's anti-depressants.  The overstimulating, "high" effects associated with cocaine occur when it is abused in high doses, especially when taken via routes of administration more rapid than oral adminstration--that is, via snorting or intravenous injection.  The cravings associated with cocaine occur when it is abused in these illicit ways.  When taken at prescription doses, cocaine did not cause the cravings seen in patients who abuse the drug but it did cause withdrawal reactions if stopped abruptly.

If cocaine were discovered today and promoted as a new antidepressant, it would likely be marketed as a serotonin, noradrenalin, and dopamine reuptake inhibitor, or SNDRI.  Since this is a mouthful, cocaine would probably be promoted as a "super neurotransmitter" reuptake inhibitor, because it boosts all three "feel good" chemicals in the brain.  In fact, "new" antidepressants that boost all three signals are already in the pipeline.  THey are on the cutting edge of research and development of "new" antidepressants.  Indeed, they have already been named "super neurotransmitter" reuptake inhibitors.  But, isn't this all too much like reinventing cocaine?  How could the pharmaceutical industry have thought drugs this closely related to cocaine would not cause withdrawal and dependence?

Some fifteen years after today's popular antidepressants were first introduced, writing like this was necessary to set the record straight: to provide patients and doctors with the information they need on antidepressant withdrawal and dependence... The current attention being given to the serious side effects of today's antidepressants is appearing....10-20, and even 30 year[s] after the fact. Once new drugs are released on the market, the FDA lacks a systematic program for monitoring their side effects.  Instead, the agency relies on spontaneous reports from doctors who are typically too busy to notify the FDA of all the side effects they see in patients.  Indeed, Dr. David Kessler, former head of the FDA and now dean of Yale School of Medicine, has stated "only about 1 percent of serious [side effects] are reported" to the agency.

As a result, it often takes a decade before the most serious side effects of a new class of psychiatric drugs are identified.  Because pharmaceutical companies have adamantly denied the side effects, it takes another decade for enough data to accumulate for the problems to be undeniable and for a number of patient advocates to be sounding the alarm.  Yet a third decade typically decade typically elapses before the slow bureaucracies of regulatory agencies and professional organizations act to change treatment guidelines and prescribing pattern patterns.  By this time, what were once "new" drugs have become old, their patents have expired, and they are no longer profitable.  The pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the drugs and moved on to newly patented, more profitable ones that can be promoted as "safer" largely because their side effects are unknown.  Indeed, in some instances the companies turn on their old drugs whose patents have expired, helping to discredit them to pave the way for new ones...

In some instances, the manufacturers of certain drugs will fund and publicize studies of the side effect of a competing company's drug in an effort to gain market share for their own drug.  For example, in the mid-1990s, the manufacturers of Wellbutrin and Serzone funded studies of antidepressant-induced sexual side effects, comparing their drugs to SSRIs like Prozac and Zoloft.  The studies corroborated the high incidence of sexual side effects found in patients taking SSRIs, some 60 percent of patients, and claimed an advantage for Wellbutrin and Serzone.  Company-funded researchers even held a press conference to announce the results.  The resulting publicity was largely responsible for alerting doctors and the public to the high incidence of sexual side effects in SSRI-type antidepressants.  Unfortunately, many other serious side effects of antidepressants do not receive this kind of careful study and publicity when no one drug has such a clear advantage.  Under these circumstances, no company is motivated to fund the necessary studies [for further information on side effects].  That such politics and marketing play a large role in what side effects we have good data on is regrettable.

In the case of antidepressant withdrawal reactions, Prozac has an advantage.  In a large-scale, systematic study of over 200 patients, 14 percent of patients stopping Prozac had withdrawal reactions.  By contrast, 66 percent of patients stopping Paxil and 60 percent of patients stopping Zoloft experienced withdrawal reactions.  Not surprisingly, Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, is the company that funded the study comparing its own drug Prozac to competitors Paxil and Zoloft....While "educating" doctors about the advantages of Prozac, Lilly had to avoid called unwanted attention to the phenomenon of antidepressant withdrawal, with its serious implication--that is, dependence--for all antidepressants.  Negotiating this tricky balance, Lilly is also the company that funded the campaign to rename antidepressant withdrawal reactions to "antidepressant discontinuation syndrome." In a carefully orchestrated effort, the Lilly-funded campaign deflected attention away from the more serious implications of antidepressant withdrawal reactions while Prozac gained the advantage over competitors...

Prozac's advantage in the Lilly-funded study on withdrawal has been controversial...because of Prozac's long half-life, withdrawal reactions typically do not appear within five to eight days.  Rather, they take two to three weeks or more.  In the study Lilly conducted to test for withdrawal reactions, patients stopped their antidepressants abruptly for only five to eight days...

Lilly conducted a separate study that addresses this issue.  In this study, patients stopped Prozac for six weeks.  However, in this study, patients were not systematically monitored, not requiring checklists of specific withdrawal symptoms, but only asked open-ended questions about "general well-being..."  In other words, Prozac was not held to the same standard that Paxil and Zoloft had been...

To conduct and publish such studies, pharmaceutical companies work closely with industry-friendly academic psychiatrists.  Jerrold Rosenbaum, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, conducted the key study of Eli Lilly that compared Prozac to Paxil and Zoloft...Rosenbaum also coauthored the study specifically looking at Prozac withdrawal that did not hold Lilly's drug to the same standard to which its competitors were held.  And, Rosenbaum was a key player in the Lilly-funded campaign to replace the term "antidepressant withdrawal" with the less threatening "antidepressant discontinuation syndrome." ...

Rosenbaum is no stranger to controversy over his relationship with Eli Lilly and Prozac.  He played a pivotal role in the controversy over the suicidal effects of today's antidepressants when the controversy first exploded in the media in the early 1990s.  At the time, only Prozac, the first of today's antidepressants, was on the market.  As the controversy raged, Rosenbaum came to Prozac's defense in 1991, publishing the definitive study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry insisting Prozac does not make adults suicidal.  In the study, Rosenbaum compared data on Prozac with data on earlier classes of antidepressants, claiming that his statistical analysis showed that Prozac does not cause higher rates of suicidality.  Rosebaum's study was hugely influential in large part because he appeared to be an academic psychiatrist independent of Eli Lilly.  Similar defenses of Prozac published by in-house Eli-Lilly psychiatrists did not have the same impact.  But a May 7, 2000 Boston Globe expose revealed that Rosenbaum's "1991 study on Prozac and suicide [has been] criticized by at least two sets of researchers as well as the FDA."  The critiques the Boston Globe was referring to, including the one by the FDA, argued Rosenbaum got his statistics wrong: his own data show that Prozac is associated with a threefold greater incidence of suicidality than older, comparison antidepressants, the critics said.  What is more, the  Boston Globe revealed that Rosenbaum had a "cozy" relationship advising Eli Lilly's marketing department on Prozac since "before Prozac was launched," in the late 1980s.  Rosenbaum did not reveal his behind-the-scenes ties to Lilly's marketing department, yet his was the key study silencing the controversy over antidepressant-suicide for more than a decade.  This is the same side effect in adults that has reemerged in recent years because of newly revealed studies showing that children and adolescents become suicidal on many of today's antidepressants.  In the meantime, pharmaceutical companies have paid scores of secret settlements in lawsuits involving antidepressant-induced suicides and murder-suicides of adults and children.  If Rosenbaum had divulged this information earlier, perhaps these could have been prevented...

Internal GlaxoSmithKline documents reveal that the manufacturer of Paxil lost no time organizing a response to Lilly...a June 5, 1997 memo from GlaxoSmithKline's public relations firm, Ruder Finn, describes the steps it is taking for the pharmaceutical giant to refute "what Rosenbaum et al. state or allege."

The Ruder Finn memo provides a rare glimpse into how the public relations firm of pharmaceutical behemoths seek to influence the practice of medicine behind the scenes.  The Ruder Finn memo states that the public relations firm has ghostwritten two proposed responses to Rosenbaum and his colleagues' articles.  The memo suggests the GlaxoSmithKline-friendly psychiatrists will issue the responses.  The memo proposes that one of the pieces will be authored by Dr. Bruce Pollock, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  Four months later, Dr. Pollock published a response to Rosenbaum...in the October 1998 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.  Pollock's published piece is expanded and elaborated in more formal, academic language...but if follows the same line of argument as Ruder Finn's work.  ...The Ruder Finn memo provides direct evidence of pharmaceutical company public relations firms seeking to influence academic publications authored in the name of seemingly independent psychiatrists.  Pollock's published piece does not mention his apparent behind-the-scenes relationship to GlaxoSmithKline or Ruder Finn.  Though it isn't mentioned, he has been a consultant to the company and has received grant research money, been paid honoraria, and been a member of the company's...advisory boards.

In the late 1990s, GlaxoSmithKline went to considerable effort to train its sales force in how to "educate" doctors about the growing concerns of Paxil withdrawal.  Repeated studies have shown that pharmaceutical company sales representatives have enormous influence over doctors who rely on them for up-to-date information.  GlaxoSmithKline instructed its sales representatives...to assure doctors that "discontinuation syndrome" symptoms are "generally mild," "transient," and "infrequent."  Indeed, despite a confidential, internal comapny report describing studies indicating as many as 62 percent of people stopping Paxil developed withdrawal symptoms that in some cases could be "severe" and "disabling," a GlaxoSmithKline "Business Plan Guide" told its sales force to continue to reassure doctors that Paxil withdrawal occurs in "two in 1,000 patients or 0.2%" (Note that the guide also had the math wrong: two in 1,000 patients is .002 percent.) ...

A transmittal memo that accompanied one confidential, internal GlaxoSmithKline report on "Paxil and the incidence of discontinuation symptoms" cautions: "Please not that this information is for in-house use only and is not to be passed to regulatory authorities [such as the FDA], external investigators, or clinicians [ie practicing doctors]."  It also raissed the question: "Discontinuation: Why this is an issue." It answers: "Paxil sales to end [of] Sept. [1997] already exceed $1 BILLION."  The "$1 BILLION" is in large, bold letters.  Beneath the bold headline is artwork showing a huge moneybag with a dollar sign emblazoned on it.

One internal GlaxoSmithKline memo to the "Paxil selling team" on "discontinuation syndrome" ends with a particularly offensive cartoon of a woman patient.  The headline of the cartoon says: "Let's face it...The only thing the anxious and agitated patient will be saying is 'Where's my Paxil!!!!!!'"  The cartoon depicts a hysterical-looking woman sitting at her desk, screaming at the top of her lungs, throwing her hands up, and tossing all her papers into the air while yelling "Where's my Paxil!!!!!!"...Most people would be surprised by such a derogatory attitude toward patients and by such a carefully orchestrated effort to mislead doctors and patients.  The cruel irony is that patients can be distraught enough to ask, "Where's my Paxil?" when they are in severe Paxil withdrawal...

For over a decade "cozy" relationships have flourished between pharmaceutical companies and a small coterie of academic psychiatrists who can each make millions consulting to the companies, advising their marketing departments, doing research for them, and publishing papers that can be ghostwritten by the companies.  When pharmaceutical companies design research so that it is biased in favor of their drugs or when they selectively publish only those results that are favorable to their drugs, they are misleading practicing physicians who need complete, unbiased information to exercise their professional judgment in the best interest of patients....

Unfortunately, in the last decade deceptive practices have become routine in the researching, publishing, and marketing of psychiatric drugs, making it extremely difficult for patients and even for doctors to get accurate, balanced information.  Now, since the FDA has issued a warning that antidepressants may may children and adults suicidal and with the British equivalent of the FDA, the MHRA, placing a ban on many antidepressants for children, these practices are coming under closer scrutiny.  Both GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer paid settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars on charges of deceptive marketing before the cases could go to trial...The FDA has not done enough to hold pharmaceutical companies and their appointed "opinion leaders" (friendly psychiatrists) accountable.

Indeed, the FDA has contributed significantly to the problem of both of the antidepressant side effects currently receiving widespread attention: withdrawal reactions and antidepressant-related suicide.  In the case of the drugs making patients suicidal, the FDA learned of this side effect more than a decade ago, in the early 1990s, shortly after Prozac was introduced.  The FDA convened an advisory panel of nine experts and held a hearing on the issue in September 1991 because of widespread public and professional concern. Unfortunately, due to the five of the nine commitee members' ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and even though 1/3 of the committee voted for a warning, nothing was done.

With regard to antidepressant withdrawal reactions, the FDA has not demanded that pharmaceutical companies assess withdrawal symptoms adequately when they test new antidepressants for FDA approval.  The FDA knew or should have known from experience with earlier classes of psychiatric drugs that antidepressants with short and ultra-short half-lives would inevitably cause withdrawal and dependence.  The FDA has allowed pharmaceutical companies to call withdrawal reactions antidepressant "discontinuation" symptoms in their official information on the drugs.  Withdrawal reactions are still listed as "rare" side effects of drugs like Paxil and Effexor in the companies' offical information....The FDA approves the companies' official information word-for-word and lets them get away with this semantic gamesmanship at the expense of patients and doctors.  Hiding behind the term "antidepressant discontinuation syndrome," the industry has repeatedly denied that today's antidepressants cause withdrawal reactions.  The companies have promoted antidepressants as "non habit-forming," "not associated with dependence or addiction," and "causing mild, usually temporary, side effects" with FDA approval.  When a patient advocacy lawsuit convinced a California judge to ban such deceptive advertising, the FDA intervened on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, claiming the judge had no jurisdiction.  The FDA's mandate is to protect consumers, not company profits.  The FDA's actions are another example of the unprecedented behind-the-scenes political power wielded today by the pharmaceutical industry lobby.  In addition to political pressure on the FDA, critics point to lucrative pharmaceutical company consulting contracts awarded to FDA officials even while they are working at the agency or just after they leave it.

Another federal agency expected to be an objective, impartial protector of the public interest is the National Institute of Health, NIH.  Unfortunately, it, too, has been rocked by scandal: In December 2003, a Los Angeles Times expose revealed that top NIH scientists received hundreds of thousands of dollars--and in some cases, over a million dollars--in consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies.  In some instances,  NIH department heads received behind-the-scenes consulting fees while their departments were providing the pharmaceutical companies with millions of taxpayer dollars in NIH research grants.  The FDA's and NIH's pro-industry stances have left the American public with inadequate consumer protection and patient advocacy in the face of pharmaceutical company political clout.

Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, describes the pharmaceutical industry's pervasive influence over academic medicine, the FDA, and the NIH as examples of the industry's ability to "co-opt every institution that might stand in its way."  As one of the most profitable industries in the country,  the pharmaceutical industry is awash with money with which to buy influence.  Pharmaceutical companies defend their price gouging and outrageous profits as necessary to support their research and development activities.  Yet in reality the pharmaceutical industry's spending on research and development is dwarfed by its spending on marketing and advertising campaigns.  The industry spends more than a third of its revenues on marketing, more than two and half times more than what it spends on research and development.  Because heavy advertising and marketing substantially increase the costs of drugs, costs that are ultimately paid for by health insurance, the pharmaceutical industry's exorbitant promotion of its drugs drains the financially strapped health care system. (My note: our country is the only one of two countries in the world that allow television commercials and marketing for prescription drugs.  The other is New Zealand, which is considering a ban because of misleading content which companies devise in order to make an increasingly receptive public that they are in need of medication when in most cases they are not.)

...Unfortunately, psychiatry is particularly vulnerable to the pharmaceutical industry's deceptive practices when researching and marketing drugs.  This is because the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions and the response to psychiatric medication is so subjective and therefore so easily manipulated.

Practicing doctors do not want to mislead patients.  Most doctors want to make decisions in the best interests of their patients.  Not surprisingly, doctors are upset to discover that pharmaceutical companies and the "expert" doctors who work closely with the industry have misled them.  Doctors and patients need to take medicine back from the pharmaceutical industry and its appointed "experts."  An independent FDA committed to consumer advocacy and protection would seem a reasonable expectation for a publicly funded government agency.

To make amends for misleading patients and doctors about antidepressant withdrawal and dependence, at a minimum, pharmaceutical companies should be required to:

• Make pills available in many more milligram sizes to facilitate tapering today's antidepressants
• Conduct a well-funded campaign to educate doctors and the public about antidepressant withdrawal, including television, newspaper, and magazine advertisements
• Abandon the misleading term "antidepressant discontinuation syndrome" for the straightforward "antidepressant withdrawal reaction" in all descriptions of the phenomenon
• Include warning labels on patients' antidepressant prescription bottles that the drugs can cause severe withdrawal symptom, should not be stopped abruptly, and need to be taken every day exactly as prescribed to avoid withdrawal reactions that could be confused with a worsening of the patient's underlying psychiatric condition.
• When testing all future antidepressants for FDA approval, systematically monitor and accurately report the percentage of patients who have withdrawal symptoms
• Publish all psychiatric drug studies, not just those favorable to the companies' marketing interests