Here are two stories of people who feel they’ve been exploited:

 

• James* at nine years of age had respiratory problems due to a cleft palette and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. He was prescribed anti-depressants and other medication for mental illness, leaving him in the clinic for roughly a year. His mental state kept deteriorating. He ended up in a vegetative state as a result of all the medication. What followed was a lengthy legal battle between his mother and the clinic. In the end, she won the lawsuit and received all the money spent on James’ medical bills and legal fees. James is now much older and has thankfully recovered fully. Upon hearing about Kara’s history (below), James was astounded that these clinics are still exploiting people more than ten years later.

 

• Kara*, a mother of two, was referred to the doctor after being diagnosed with high-blood pressure and was referred to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had her admitted to a psychiatric clinic where she was diagnosed for mental illness. What seemed like a good opportunity to restore her health resulted in the complete opposite. Her medication made her more tired while her ‘sleeping pills’ caused insomnia. R38 000 later and she was more sick and tense than usual, although this time it was the weight of medical bills weighing her down. What she described as someone stopping medication, sounded similar to that of a drug-addict going ‘cold turkey’: immense weight-gain and severe hair loss. Now, a year later, she’s suffering from panic attacks and seizures (a problem she never had before).

 

If you think these are rare horror stories, there are other people who now live in psychiatric institutions with brains damaged to the point where the patients no longer know their own names. Psychiatric drugs have reportedly also caused school violence and death. The substances, capable of throwing the minds of patients into chaos, have a drawn-out and well-documented past of creating insanity in many individuals who use them. Researchers for The American Journal of Psychiatry discovered in 1964 that major tranquilisers can ‘produce an acute psychotic reaction in an individual not previously psychotic’. Shocking, right?