THE SOLUTION IS AT WWW.CCHR.ORG
LOSING A CHILD is a tragedy. Losing a child needlessly is a crime.
Ten-year-old Harry Hucknall exemplifies this. In March, West Cumbria Coroner Ian Smith found that Harry, the cousin of Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall, had hanged himself while taking an antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac) and Ritalin.
The post-mortem tests revealed Harry had above the normal therapeutic level of the antidepressant given to adults. “This was not suicide for one minute,” the coroner determined. “I record that Harry died as a consequence of his own actions without understanding their true consequences.”
Harry’s death is not an isolated case, which is why in 2003 the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) ruled that antidepressants should not be prescribed to those younger than 18 years old.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the same warning a year later. A year too late for 17-year old Matthew Steubing prescribed Lexapro for usual teenage angst. The avid sportsman committed
suicide eight weeks later.
Matthew’s death sparked a mother’s search for the truth about antidepressants to discover the information that she and Matthew had been denied. Information that had Celeste Steubing known, Matthew would be alive today. And even, perhaps, Harry.
Dead Wrong: How Psychiatric Drugs Can Kill Your Child is a compelling film produced by award-winning documentary makers for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), an acclaimed international psychiatric watchdog group established by the Church of Scientology in 1969.
Of course, one could reasonably expect Mrs. Steubing should have been able to get the facts from a responsible drug company or psychiatrist, but the reasons she couldn’t are very much a part of the story you see in Dead Wrong and hardly surprising when you consider statistics.
The number of schoolchildren prescribed antidepressants and mind-altering drugs has more than quadrupled in the last decade in the UK.
Under-16s were given drugs for “psychiatric” problems more than 631,000 times in 2006, compared to just 146,000 in the mid-Nineties.
Use of Ritalin, known as the “chemical cosh,” have doubled in just four years and is nearly 100 times greater than in the early Nineties. Doctors dispensed 254,000 prescriptions for the drug last year, up from 208,500 in 2001,according to figures from the Prescription Pricing Authority.
And therein lies the greater reason for parents being denied the facts. Psychiatrists and others prescribing the drug rake in a pretty penny. Ritalin costs between £200 and £1,000 per year per child, depending on the dose and follow up assessments. NHS spending on the drug between 1999 and 2003 alone more than
trebled from about £251,000 to £786,000.
Parents are also not informed that the “psychiatric” disorders for which these drugs are prescribed cannot be medically confirmed with any physical test as medical conditions can. NHS admits, “There is no cure for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder….”
Brian Daniels, UK spokesperson for CCHR, said, “Parents deserve to know the truth. The facts in Dead
Wrong can help protect children and their families. There are alternatives to mind-altering and potentially
lethal drugs and parents need to demand to be informed of these.”
Mrs. Steubing adds, “We hope that by sharing Matthew’s story, other families will be spared the devastating heartbreak we live with every day.”
You can watch Dead Wrong at www.cchr.org.uk/videos or order copies from CCHR UK, as well as their own documentary, All Fall Down: Psychiatry’s Plague of Drugging Children www.cchr.org/en_GB/store/
The number of schoolchildren prescribed antidepressants and mind-altering drugs has more than quadrupled in the last decade in the UK.
Links
Did John Mappin Commit the Sin of Speaking Out?
John Mappin - Unusual help for Artists
Visit Camelot Castle Website
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John Mappin - a brief biography
The John Mappin Fan Site
