it's summer. and. my memories really are really

. a strange story out of florida this morning where the mother of three children drove into the ocean on the daytona beach. test this is a statewide required monthly test of the emergency alert system originating from the pennsylvania emergency management agency harrisburg and it is only a test. we're plunged into darkness unable to process what is real and what is mercury's. autumn stringin realized this all too young was the summer after i turned eight she

should not be alive and she knows it was the moment. that shattered trust. you know how do you know how to trust anybody after that. forced to confront a mystery beyond comprehension she spent decades haunted in search of answers in pursuit of peace when something like killing all six of her children. made sense enough to put the kids in the bronco and drive into the river i see it. gravels it again water flying and kids screaming and somehow she managed to dig it out to back out of that. and that's an incredible victory for somebody in that state of mind you know there are other mothers. autumn's mom did eventually

die by suicide alone on a country tony steph and was now widowed with eight children and i'm laying in bed at night in my room listening to a houseful of mourning and it just shattered the whole family just shattered the children shattered me it has become so commonplace these irrational acts and horrific scenes that we've almost become numb to it we've seen them in schools and public spaces in homes and churches all over the news try as we might to understand them we can't try as we might to ignore them they call to us we call the paramedics. they tried to revive or. i was right there about them but. it was cold it's two thousand and four and the downings world has just been shattered his daughter a victim of an unimaginable act of violence but it was how this eleven year old go

died the truly horrified the world. cut candace hanged herself when candace first started i and we just we asked ourselves how could we not know she was then unhappy the downings didn't realize it at the time of course but her case was not a rare event no candace was far from alone she started on this drug somewhere around january and these things make you unafraid they make you do things you wouldn't do normally they make you. able to put a rope around your neck and hang yourself. they were still dizzy from death traumatized and broken when they solve the mystery the drugs responsible they say a cold s s r i's and they're among the best selling drugs in the world s s r i's

a better known as antidepressants these are some symptoms of the previous psychiatric drugs like assess our eyes have been defended with religious zeal by their believes and damned by others as some of the most dangerous drugs on the planet distinguishing truth from tim has been a challenge and this is place the public in the an enviable position of deconstructing the scientific and medical dogma on their own in the midst of a thirty he a social experiment as director of the national institutes of mental health thomas insel has been at the center of a storm of contradictions about the use of these drugs so i think we have to be very humble about this right now because we've often been so self-congratulatory because we have after all many people feel made great strides. the numbers don't really support that dr insoles candor is sure to shock and upset many on all sides of the debate the word failure is one few have dad to utter fundamentally why we

failed here why has the suicide rate not come down why have as they measures disability whatever those might be why have those continued to go up instead of down all the numbers are going in the wrong direction so we're already failed what's gone wrong here a lot of people say it's because of stigma and access the fact is that actually more people are getting more treatment than ever before so it's hard for me to point believe that i would just submit that from the end i am age perspective. the answer about why we failed is a little more disruptive and that answer is that we don't know enough to hear the director of the end i am h. say now that all of the axle taishan is about psychotropics from the meat. from academia from the profession from governments were not merited is unsettling after billions of prescriptions and hundreds of billions of dollars in drug company profits how did this occur i think that our field has gone off track here by

devoting so much of its resources over the last twenty or thirty years both publicly and privately to under trying to understand how the drugs work but you've got medications here that at most reduce some of the symptoms of mood disorders of psychotic disorders they don't in any sense provide a cure this change of heart contradicts what we've been told about psychiatric drugs for a generation now and raises serious questions about how and why these drugs have been dispensed so indiscriminately using antidepressants or any of the psychiatric drugs is simply not it's not understood is not explained it's not do well to ponder i think they're in a different class of drugs from most of the drugs that we take for our other elements in the eighty's and ninety's s.-s. our eyes were the first in a class of new mental health potions heralded as wonder drugs and miracle curious

they were extolled as safe and effective solutions for the age old problem of depression and were marketed as such thus began an aggressive march towards a new era in psychiatry one which boasted chemicals for the mental health conditions that a dog humankind for millennia thirty years later however the window on that era and its bold proclamations appears to be closing in the immediate it can make a huge difference you could have someone going from being psychotic to being non-psychotic which is a pretty amazing change in behavior. but i think what we we need to recognize had that happened or last fifty years is that they haven't. shown to be as good as we thought they were. while the drug companies ruthlessly defended their magic bullets in the courts and through the press they were in effect stigmatizing people who were harmed by using them in the early one nine hundred ninety s.

this issue had reached a peak was prozac causing violence and suicide but what happened was that there psychopharmacology committee almost everybody on the committee worked for the drug companies so the conflicts of interest was so enormous that the f.d.a. had to give them or letters for giving them with their conflicts of interest they can be sued it was a manner of how do we cover it up how do we hide it at every step of the process towards approval and marketing thereafter was designed to hide and mislead the public and physicians about the suicide side effect lilly's own secret files implicate the f.d.a. . robert temple and thomas as being complicit in a scheme to whitewash the dark facts about prozac. has been called the house that the president before the drug was introduced clearly reported earnings of six hundred million dollars annually prozac changeless fortunes and the company banked

at least twenty one billion dollars in profits from the drug over the life of the patent. when i say to some people prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in our society that seems to be the dividing line for some people who already know what's true or have read about and understand it and then there's others who think that's a myth that can't be true they simply can't conceive of so they stop listening terence young is a member of parliament in canada serving oakville ontario just outside of toronto after a prescription drug caused the death of his daughter vanessa he founded an advocacy group drug safety canada vanessa collapse in front of me her heart had stopped basically she said. it up to go upstairs when you lose a child your world is upside down and i was thrown into a study of medicine of medical jargon of how the house i'm works and when it

doesn't work and i didn't ask for it but it was my way of dealing with the loss of an s. or so it was in a sense my way of grieving and it started the day she died for five years young investigated the practices of the medic on drug industries and in doing so he says he realized have pharmacy influence had permeated every construct of modern society the loss of his daughter coupled with the shocking truth see uncovered through his medical research led him to write death by prescription and become one of canada's most od and proponents of informed choice. german interests and european interests are really deeply into trying to with each other i think the the worlds of. nations was having the

interests the truly opposed to those of elevations the sort of one side goes toward the opposite coasts of news that's really exactly the world so. it isn't relevant to the. kind of adopted because we're called pirates for so long. i mean they're in the small ball of sticks in a hard pool of ships and it's. not up to. the little self to big fish already ninety percent of the dot and paul conner. concept fifteen scoops seventeen times they do it several times a day with a big fleet oh you're getting the you know my culture. we have to

understand we can all stay still and just. be witness of the deal going on because i. am doing this because i want them for the future world to future generations to have and enjoy the ocean we have. boxall smith kline is just paid the largest fine in the history of the united states related to fraud and criminal acts for a drug company they paid three billion dollars for illegal marketing of paxil wellbutrin and avandia paxil and avandia both having been drugs that caused

a lot of deaths due to adverse drug reactions and they paid it in cash this action constitutes the largest health care settlement in united states history it was in their business plan because those three drugs in the years involved sold twenty five billion dollars worth and the drugs are marked up in the thousands of percent psychiatric unscientific ethics were cast aside in exchange for profits no one went to jail and real people paid the price. worries hard on his sleeve he just. he loved to sing from a very young age new zick was part of our life and part of what he he adored what i miss most about brennan is he came in it always give me a hug he had at. him a hug i still think to this day he's going to walk through the door we were driving not too long ago nancy myself and our other son hayden and i looked in the backseat

and hayden was sleeping and i went to look to see if britain was there just out of habit if he was sleeping too. i saw brennan walk out of this house he was very robotic. brain and where are you going it's ok mom i just gotta go put on his winter coat brennan it's hot out today it's ok mom i just gotta go put on his winner halle said brennan it's hot out today you won't need that it's ok mom i've just got to go and i said i need you here for a minute no it's ok mom i've just got to go and that ollie could say to me and this was a child who was very articulate who would who is so verbose that sometimes he would just say ok enough and therefore ready for days prior brennan went to the family doctor with a chest cold and inexplicably came home with a sample pack of the antidepressant super next at the time of his disappearance he was exhibiting the classic signs of. i let him go out the door

and that was the last time i saw him of i have. and he brought us rope from the local store. and drove to a conservation area. texted us. and then hanged him self before long other teens across the canadian province of ontario would dying just like brennan did for terence young the problem hit close to home again when friends and constituents faced the same hora he in the mccartney's had my wife call my son hard to the phone and we heard him say a few words and the bang the phone down and ran upstairs obviously quite upset and we were inside what happened he said sarah curran hanged herself and we had met sarah who was eighteen years old just a few weeks before in our back deck they were part of a same social group and overall they played guitar and sing songs and do karaoke or whatever.

because of my own research the first thing i thought about when an otherwise healthy young person dies is was a prescription drug involved and of course it was in fact there's no doubt my mind that paxil and withdrawing from paxil was the cause of sarah carlin's demise her suicide a young woman hanging herself is an extremely rare thing to happen she went home one saturday night at two o'clock in the morning took off her makeup and hanged herself in her parents' basement. i reached out to turn to one point because i was in contact with the coroner's office i was starting to put pieces together it wasn't until after sarah is death. that we actually started to connect the dots were brief others we have a great connection with terrence opened the inquest doctors would talk to us after we fought hard for an inquest because we needed to understand and after syria had

died then we started doing research on the drug that's why i really found out about the drug that's the first time we realised that paxil one of the side effects was suicidal thinking is videotape of the coroner's council saying on the very first day of the inquest we will show that paxil didn't play a part in their carlin's death well the whole point of the inquest was to see whether or not and the presence played a part here is to have the courts acknowledge that this medication can increase thoughts of suicide in particular patients but they don't think that the medication played a role in sarah carlin's down at the inquest the odds were stacked against the condoms the jury i think was very courageous but they were specifically instructed by the coroner that they couldn't actually find paxil as a cause the jury made twelve key recommendations these were detailed

recommendations to prevent similar doubts six of them were aimed at the drug industry and of the drug company so if they didn't think that paxil caused or played a critical role in sarah carlin's death they certainly wouldn't put six recommendations aimed at the pharmaceutical industry in there are a good decision. rejoinder forty pounds of fury oh goodness yes and i was not easy to deal with my son joseph at that time was fifteen years of age stream lee hill it didn't matter what it was very very violent the drop of a pin would set me off you could actually say he would be everything that a schoolyard shooting is made out of. in the years after debbie steffen drove the family's nine hundred ninety into a raging river with her children inside the mental states of both autumn string him and her brother joseph steffen deteriorated whether the cause was genetics or sheer trauma they both were diagnosed with bipolar disorder just like mom joseph in

particular seemed headed for disaster he was just a sweetheart but boy when he hit puberty he he really went over and became incredibly manic and incredibly violent in spain and he was scary my dad with. joseph was medicated with lithium i believe he was taking seven hundred fifty milligrams of of lithium and he was up to nine hundred milligrams of let him. for a period of time to try and control it was i having huge mood swings yeah that stuff definitely started i mean i've been through a lot of pain with the death of my mother and various events that happened in my life after my mother had committed suicide. i was the most violent person that i knew of i used to wander the streets at night and i'd go pick fights with the local people and i had this aluminum bat that i had found and i

beat it against the curb so it was just jagat and torn up and you know that was my weapon of choice and i mean i'm lucky i never touched anybody with that thing. my children are already saying to me come on dad you got to get them out of the house he's going to kill somebody you've got to do something dad didn't matter what we threw at this situation it wasn't going to get better and i'm going to lose him to a suicide or he's going to have to be institutionalized a thousand miles away or tim was also struggling desperately now married with a child she too was caught in the grip of a mother's madness at that point in my life i just felt like everything was ashes you know i just lost my mom to suicide my diagnosis had been upgraded so i now is rapid cycling bipolar one schizophrenia tendencies which was it seemed really dark like i wasn't going to get over that and so i had actually planned to commit

suicide with one child ingesting a five drug cocktail and contemplating suicide and the other engulfed by violent thoughts tony stephens family was under siege. so i was left in a terrible state. a terrible state where i had to find an answer because you see my family was literally coming unglued before my eyes i was going to lose my family stephan resolved to find an answer and prevent any further suicides in his family. as part of the research for his book called the book of woe gary greenberg was imbedded with psychiatrists as they debated the new edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders the d.s. and five all along it's been clear that the d.s.m. is such a work of fiction it's the way that psychiatrists have of saying if

if there are mental disorders if they exist in nature the ways illnesses like diabetes exist then these are what they are changing the way we understand ourselves is intimately related to the development of the diagnostic and statistical manual the d.s.m. is often referred to as the bible of psychiatric disorders it is the quintessential diagnostic instrument over four hundred thousand mental health professionals in the united states use the d.s.m. and in order to get third party reimbursement one has to have a d.s.m. diagnosis so the d.s.m. is extremely instrumental in two thousand and five two respected academics lisa kos grove of you must boston and sheldon crim ski of tufts released their investigation into conflicts of interest between d.s.m. four panel members and the pharmaceutical industry i think the data really speak for themselves the strongest statistics include the panel members for the mood

disorders and schizophrenia and psychotic disorders one hundred percent of those panel members and yes that's right every single panel member has financial cessations with the pharmaceutical industry and if you look at it in terms of the sheer amount of money the antidepressant market and the anti-psychotic markets are the fourth and fifth leading therapy classes of drugs with annual sales of twenty billion and fourteen billion respectively there are one hundred seventy d.s.m. panel members that's the total inclusive of all the working groups of those one hundred seventy panel members fifty six percent had at. least one financial says yes for the pharmaceutical company. the d.s.n. decision makers actually the last thirty years have reverberated in some. ways to it my dad and i have always been really close you know both my parents did

everything for my brother and i was you know if there's a spot he wanted to pick up or if there's something that we wanted to do we did everything my dad built my brother halfpipe in our backyard and it was like a professionally built half pipe like this thing was phenomenal and we had kids from all over the neighborhood come there to ride it because it was huge or there's nothing more accelerating the being at that high in everything that i've ever done it was magical moments our daughter jenna was born in one thousand nine hundred and our son he was born in one thousand nine hundred two and both my wife and i took a nurturing approach to parenting didn't get everything they wanted but they certainly had a lot of opportunity when they were young and it was it was wonderful the common cause perfect family began to unhinge shortly after david began taking paxil i really didn't know very much more mental illness until when i was forty five years old then i had my first major depression and i was chewed with paxil and in fact when i look back on it now there's no question i was manic when i was on packs of

the first time that was the very person i'm at or even look that issues around drugs and side effects so. i noticed that there was a big difference before he started taking medication and then while he was taking the medication i remember him snapping on me about something very small and i remember him spending so much time in his office i remember him just being just being more quiet and not being himself and looking stressed out and. just fucking different should be just. tremendous discomfort with being on that particular drug it really made me wonder you know should i be on it. there's a strategy betting all the market. just them are betting strategy that's like if

you had to roulette wheel you bet on red you lose the bet on red again and you bet on red again and you bet on the until you went run out of money before you won it's famously used on wall street by firms like goldman sachs who make bad bets but says they have an open cash window at the fed with money limited funds at zero percent borrowing rates they never run out of money that's why i like all that sachs and j.p. morgan can report thirty sixty ninety one hundred twenty straight days of profits on their trading portfolios as they don't take any fricken risk what about people that are not so smart. little bottle o. murchu and. islamic states claims it was behind the month just a terror attack by the north front so kill the priest every time a terrorist attack happens all these people are out there screaming i says so bad someone needs to do something against them and for me was like yeah why don't you

do something. that. you. told those numbers. in the local level that i have a good. chuckle. chinese toughens. is going. to kill innocent. you. know we're in with a good scene over him thanks. and this is

a very special. i will be asked me what i might do you just moments are so multimedia so much. i could introduce you eat it is home to the most colorful drug syndicate why you're growing marijuana and north tomatoes it's a young people there's a big good deal of the grown people at the market for the long term for your money watch the people. of your. to be. a. little bit more than most times the government knows what they do and they do nothing.

but. the. president trying to mount to impose more sanctions on north korea over its nuclear weapons program. and cause. the. tensions rise in the french capital as tens of thousands of demonstrators hit the streets to vent baron. fundamentally wrong neighborhood for. russia warned the u.s. to retaliate and if it fails to prevent the top phone syrian government positions indeed at a little while washington box rebel.