Prescription pills are Britain’s third biggest killer.

"Soaring drug use, a growing number of addicts, far too few clinics to treat them and a rising death toll. This might sound like a scene from an impoverished country run by drug cartels - but it is, in fact, the day-to-day reality for NHS patients who are prescribed psychiatric drugs to treat anxiety, insomnia and depression.

More than 80 million prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are written in the UK every year. Not only are these drugs often entirely unnecessary and ineffective, but they can also turn patients into addicts, cause crippling side-effects - and kill.

For instance, antipsychotics, commonly given to dementia patients to keep them quiet, raise the risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Psychiatric drugs also make falls more likely, and breaking a hip can shorten life significantly, while some antidepressants are linked to a potentially deadly irregular heartbeat.

And the death toll from these pills has been grossly underestimated. As I reveal in a new book, Deadly Psychiatry And Organised Denial, the true figure is terrifying: according to my calculations, based on data from published and unpublished sources, for psychiatric drugs are the third major killer after heart disease and cancer.

As an investigator for the independent Cochrane Collaboration - an international body that assesses medical research - my role is to look forensically at the evidence for treatments."

More on this latest news here.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3234334/Prescription-pills-Britain-s-biggest-killer-effects-drugs-taken-insomnia-anxiety-kill-thousands-doctors-hand-like-Smarties.html

Be wary of some of these anti-psychiatry people, they may be Scientologists.

There is a genuine point in that many of these drugs are overprescribed, for example SSRIs work well for a small subset of depressives but for many while they uprate serotonin they also downregulate dopamine, which neither older nor newer medications do. Likewise there are probably many people who have serious benefits from (atypical) antipsychotics, but they are marketed as a cure-all which they manifestly ain't.

$cientologists want them all banned and replaced with crude lie-detectors made of tin cans.

Curiously all of my "psychiatric" symptoms resolved along with most of my physical symptoms on a low carb diet: in retrospect it was obviously the BG spikes followed by rapid drops which were causing an overreaction in "counterregulatory hormones", not just glucagon but cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine.

Likewise many other "psychiatric" symptoms resolve with an increase of Omega 3 and a decrease in Omega 6s - an imbalance affects the formation and usage of neuroreceptors.

IMO get the diet right and you only need to prescribe these meds to people for whom they are genuinely useful. Oh wait a minute, no profit in that . . .