Antidepressants For Women of Childbearing Age
(What Big Pharma Wants)
Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD
Director of the National Foundation, March of Dimes, West Michigan Birth Defects Clinic, 1965-1975
Author: The ADHD Fraud
http://www.Trafford.com
(1193 words)
In the Women Speak blog from Obstetrician-Gynecologist, Dr. Tameeka Law of the Medical University of South Carolina, (MUSC), addresses the question: ‘Can I Continue to Take Antidepressants in Pregnancy?’ http://tinyurl.com/mlyjqc
Dr. Law’s first obligation, like that of every prescribing physician involved in the care of women-of-reproductive-age is to the physical-medical health and well-being of possibly-pregnant, pregnant, or just-delivered women, whether nursing or not, as well as to the embyo, fetus or baby in the equation.
And yet we find Dr. Law espousing views about psychiatry and psychiatric drugs not consistent with her Hippocratic obligation to assure the physical-medical well-being of the patient or patients—mother and embryo, fetus or child.
Consider at the start that Dr. Law and I, and all physicians, regardless of what specialty we enter—go to medical school for 4 years, study all thing normal (biological chemistry, anatomy and physiology) all things abnormal (pathology, diseases) and, in their clinic years, how to tell those who are normal, disease-free, from those who are abnormal—diseased. The other thing we learn going through medical school is that there are no physical abnormalities-diseases in psychology and psychiatry. There is no such thing as a mental, psychological, psychiatric ‘disease.’ But this is not the impression one gets today as the almighty pharmaceutical industry (big pharma) with its bought-and paid for control over psychiatry, the entire medical profession and its medical schools and faculties insists, commands that all things emotional, behavioral, psychologic and psychiatric be called diseases or chemical imbalances so the public will see no logic but to forego “strength of character,” ‘pulling oneself up by the bootstraps,” love, talk therapy, etc, and commit to the drugs, pills, and ‘chemical balancers’ for ‘chemical imbalances’ of the brain they are, drum-beat, told they have (by virtually all of their physicians, joining the making “patients” of normals) and have come to believe they have.
And now, back to Dr. Law and the pregnant mother’s question “Can I continue to take Antidepressants in Pregnancy?”
Having said “depression affects 10 to 15% of pregnant women (how many million in this ‘epidemic’?) Dr. Law admits depression’s symptoms are “difficult to differentiate from normal changes of pregnancy.” In fact depression is a blue, dark, or melancholy mood to which all human beings are subject, from which virtually all emerge. Appropriately, Dr. Law lists the psycho-social factors that can lead to depression but claims that depression alone, as if a disease, “is associated with an increase in such negative physical outcomes of pregnancy as prematurity, low birth weight, and poor fetal growth.” Has Dr. Law been ‘bought,’ influenced? Has her department? Medical school? Is she stacking the deck in favor of antidepressants, in favor of the psychiatry-big pharma cartel—the biggest drug cartel of all time?
Next, ignoring the well-known physical-medical reproductive risks of SSRI antidepressants, Dr. Law says “overall antidepressants are safe to use during pregnancy” (for mother, developing embryo, or fetus) or while breastfeeding (for mother and nursing infant) and their use has not been shown to cause birth defects” Quite a blanket exoneration—this.
As if a salesman, Dr. Law continues to minimize the well-established, well-known risks of SSRI antidepressants for all women of child-bearing age. She continues: “… approximately 1 in 10 women will have major or minor depression sometime during pregnancy and the postpartum period.” Again, a target population of millions as is the well-worn strategy of “biological” psychiatry.
Contrary to glowing assessment of Dr. Law, numerous studies have shown that exposure to SSRIs late in pregnancy has been associated with complications in newborns that include jitteriness, seizures, respiratory distress, rapid respirations, weak cry, poor muscle tone, and an increased rate admission to the neonatal intensive care unit (meaning, in essence that their life is in the balance). Further, the use of Paxil (paroxetine-Prozac like) during the first trimester of pregnancy has been associated with an increased risk of congenital heart malformations leading the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a public health advisory and require the manufacturer to change its pregnancy category from “C” to “D” meaning the drug has been found to be harmful to human fetuses (refers to the unborn from weeks 7-9 of pregnancy to delivery)
We begin to get a different picture than that painted Dr. Law for the pregnant women of South Carolina. The mother’s symptoms from SSRIs antidepressants can include insomnia, rashes, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach upset, nausea, diarrhea; reduced blood clotting increasing the risk for stomach or uterine bleeding; diminished sexual interest, desire, performance, and satisfaction, and, finally, the increased risk that antidepressants will incite violent or self-destructive actions (toward any and all present–family members, the embryo, fetus or newborn). When compared with a sugar pill, a.k.a. placebo, all antidepressants, including SSRIs, seem to double the risk of suicidal thinking, from 1%–2% to 2%–4%, in both children and adults.
And what of this? With all these side effects, SSRI antidepressants are no more effective that the sugar pill-placebo in curing depression.
In December, 2006, pro-psycho-pharmaceutical drugging statement, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said to the women of child-bearing age of America that decisions about depression treatment should involve the obstetrician and the mental health clinician (MFCC? Psychologist? Social Worker?) along with the patient, ideally prior to pregnancy. However, the ACOG recognized the inconvenient truth that “because approximately 50% of pregnancies are unplanned, preconception planning for women with depression will not always be feasible, and treatment decisions about SSRIs will undoubtedly occur during pregnancy,” i.e., after mother and the already-conceived, embryo, fetus, child-to-be has been intoxicated, poisoned by the antidepressant which is not known to target a defined abnormality/disease, not in anyone.
Given the facts above, we have every reason to believe nothing would be better than to return to the un-perverted medical science and ethics of the 1960s and 1970s, which would dictate that there being no such thing as a psychiatric disease, there is no such thing as an essential psychiatric drug, especially not for women who are pregnant or could possibly be.
There is no group or classification of psychiatric drugs proved to be without physical-medical risk, short-term or long, to the embryo, fetus, newborn, nursing newborn, nursing infant, or nursing toddler and, for that matter there is no group or classification of psychiatric drugs known to be without physical-medical risk, short-term or long- for their mother or father or for any member of the human race. Look at the rates of Sudden Cardiac deaths with antidepressants (Whang, et al, 2009), Ritalin and all ADHD psychostimulants (Gould et al, 2009), and antipsychotics (Ray et al, 2009). After all they are exogenous compounds, foreign to the body, with no abnormality to make normal, no abnormality to make less abnormal. They are, like all drugs—poisons.
What’s more all physicians, especially those at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists know this. But knowing this their industry economic ties are such that they, like Dr. Law, can no longer speak the truth, not even to their patients: mothers who will give birth to children—healthy and whole or defective, deformed, subnormal, who–whichever they are–that parent will have to care for all of their life.
To restore both the scientific basis of its medical practice and its conscience the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should immediately acknowledge there is no such thing as a psychiatric ‘disease’ or an essential psychiatric drugs and immediately re-write its ACOG’s Committee Opinion #354, “Treatment with Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors During Pregnancy,” published in the December 2006 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, to read “the best possible, psycho-social-familial management should be assured in every case, eschewing all non-essential (including all psychotropic medications) medications.
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Filed under: antidepressants, Birth Defects, child endangerment, Christian Delahunty, Christiane Schultz, Collusion, experimentation, mothers act, Pregnancy, Birth Defects, Fred Baughman, March of Dimes, MUSC, Pregnancy, SSRIs, Tameeka Law MD, Women Speak
Since the horror of the Thalidomide scandal in the 1960s, pharmaceutical companies and medicines regulators have been acutely aware of the dangers drugs may pose to the unborn child. Establishing what the effect of a drug may be on a foetus, however, is no simple task. Companies must rely on animal studies in the early stages of research and hope that the drug will behave in humans in the same way. Trials on pregnant women are rarely carried out, for obvious reasons.
by Alexis Jetter
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