NAMI promoting Childhood Bipolar and the dangerous drugging of kids for their Pharmaceutical Corporation pay masters

NAMI and Big Pharma coming after your child with dangerous drugs and a forever label

NAMI promoting Childhood Bipolar and the dangerous drugging of kids for their Pharmaceutical Corporation pay masters

NAMI that supposed pseudo advocacy organization that receives roughly 80% of it's operating budget from huge Pharmaceutical Corporations to pimp their drug wears has not changed their ways since being publicly outed in an investigation by Senator Charles Grassley.

The evidence is here -namipharma



In fact NAMI is operating business as usual just like their corporate masters by ignoring public criticism regarding their shady shill ways. NAMI, like DBSA, and CABF have only a one profitable agenda which does not include the best interest of patients, children, or families. That interest being first and foremost their stated platform of encouraging dangerous drugging and permanent damaging labels upon innocent persons. This is NAMI's only stock and trade way of staying alive as a touted Big Pharma Spokespersons. NAMI and their like clones groups are very much part of a huge and devastating problem negatively effecting America's health and well being, and have never been part of the solution. So today let us take another look at what they continue to spew on their web sites.

NAMI has joined with CABF, DBSA in propagating the Bipolar Child Myth and the Marketing of disease for profit.

Below are a wealth of evidence sites that barely touch the surface of this shady and deeply conflicted organization:

FDA: Loss of integrity and consumer protection: creating pediatric bipolar disorder, ghostwriting, & C.A.B.F.

Alison Bass: NAMI exposed: the drug money behind this supposedly grassroots group

Pfizer Turned NAMI Into “Trojan Horse” to Push Geodon Off-Label to ...

The following text is taken directly from the NAMI web site ( you would think in reading this, it was from the CABF propaganda pages) which I will once again here insert commentary in color purple text.

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http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illness&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=102859

Child and Adolescent Bipolar Disorder

Can children and adolescents get bipolar disorder? Not if they wash their hands often, eat healthy, brush their teeth after each meal, never tell a lie, and wear condoms! NAMI speaks about Child Bipolar like it was a common cold virus or some sort of pathogen. All of these coined methods they use are unproven myth and marketing schemes.

Bipolar disorder can occur in children and adolescents and has been investigated by federally funded teams in children as young as age six. This is an underhanded way of saying this supposed mood disorder has not been validated or confirmed by science. In fact both outside of America and within the medical community Child Bipolar diagnosis is a hotly disputed and debated issue. This has not stopped NAMI from pushing this dangerous and profitable agenda anywise. Why? because they receive big bucks from Big Pharma to do their bidding. In fact NAMI and like organizations would not exist without the steady flow of Pharma funding dollars.

How common is it in children and adolescents?

Although once thought rare, caseloads of patients examined for federally funded studies have shown that approximately 7 percent of children seen at psychiatric facilities fit the research standards for bipolar disorder. So what exactly are these research standards you might ask, well they are just making foolish guesses while using children as lab rats for dangerous experimental drug treatments. In fact childhood bipolar is a completely made up disorder that does not even come close to meeting any of the standard criteria stated in the DSM for Bipolar disorder. The Pharmaceutical Industry wanted to expand their profitable markets for their products are using NAMI ( and like drug pimp organization shills), and unethical well paid doctors like Harvard's J. Biederman and his gang of hit men and women to create disease where none exist.

What are the symptoms of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents?

One of the biggest challenges has been to differentiate children with mania from those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Actually their only real challenge is how to make normal childhood behavior fit into some made up mood disorder diagnosis that can open them up to a lifetimes of being labeled and drugged into permanent disability. Since both groups of children present with irritability, hyperactivity and distractibility, (do they mean to define that a child challenging authority and acting like a normal child in now in their twisted view abnormal?) these symptoms are not useful for the diagnosis of mania. By contrast, elated mood, grandiose behaviors, flight of ideas, decreased need for sleep and hypersexuality occur primarily in mania and are uncommon in ADHD. You can see how they have used one questionable diagnosis to somehow validate a new questionable diagnosis. But then the disease mongers believe happiness, joy, imagination, childhood attention span, and even a search for sexual identity are somehow abnormal and need to be categorized as disease. Below is a brief description of how to recognize these mania-specific symptoms in children.

• Elation. Elated children may laugh hysterically and act infectiously happy without any reason (interesting that these so call experts are virtually saying they are able to slip inside a child's mind and determine their thought process and reasoning behind each and every action and behavior. - some might call that reaching for something that isn't there and just full of nothing more than targeted speculation) at home, school or in church. If someone who did not know them saw their behaviors, they would think the child was on his/her way to Disneyland. If some does not know your child, would you want to rely on their observations and conclusions related to judging their behavior and what is normal or not? Parents and teachers often see this as "Jim Carey-like" behaviors. Jim Carey happens to be an adult comedian that shows calculated behavior in a fanatical entertainment venue, and to use this as what teacher's and parents should be looking for as a mood disorder marker is not only grossly ignorant, but paramount to true insanity.
  
  
• Grandiose behaviors. Grandiose behaviors are when children act as if the rules do not pertain to them. For example, they believe they are so smart that they can tell the teacher what to teach, tell other students what to learn and call the school principal to complain about teachers they do not like. Some children are convinced that they can do superhuman deeds (e.g., that they are Superman) without getting seriously hurt, e.g. "flying" out of windows. Yes, some children may actually question authority ( we used to call that learning limits) and some actually believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Super Hero's and all kinds of creative and imaginative things. If this is the criteria these Pharma Minions have created, then just put the drugs in the MILK supply, because every kid is crazy.
  
  
• Flight of ideas. Children display flight of ideas when they jump from topic to topic in rapid succession during a normal conversation—not just when a special event has happened. I guess NAMI means when kids are acting just like normal kids with creativity, energy, and imagination this is a HUGE warning sign of some horrible bipolar disease. Give us a frigging break....
  
  
• Decreased need for sleep. Children who sleep only 4-6 hours and are not tired the next day display a decreased need for sleep. These children may stay up playing on the computer and ordering things or rearranging furniture. Of course there can be many reasons a child's sleep patterns can alter from time to time. The last place you would want to jump to conclusions is with a mental health diagnosis. In fact you would hopefully rule out all other possibilities including that some children don't need to sleep as much as others first. One of the most dangerous and insane approaches NAMI uses is this one size fits all concept used to push children into a mental health diagnosis box.
  
  
• Hypersexuality. Hypersexual behavior can occur in children without any evidence of physical or sexual abuse in children who are manic (so what is manic in a childhood population exactly?) . If fact just because there is lack of verifiable evidence does not mean either this precludes or includes possible physical or sexual abuse. In fact making a subjective call or guess with no evidence other than a child may skirt the lines of what they have drawn somehow in stone as what a child should act or feel like at a predetermined age. These children act flirtatious beyond their years, may try to touch the private areas of adults (including teachers) and use explicit sexual language.

In addition, it is most common for children with mania to have multiple cycles during the day from giddy, silly highs to morose, gloomy suicidal depressions. It is very important to recognize these depressed cycles because of the danger of suicide. Yes, your child is deemed sick and needs to be drugged into a stupor if they have changes in normal human developmental emotions like going from happy, to demanding, to irritable, to tired, to sleepy, and back again. I guess all those terrible two's, three's, and such are just diseases and not part of normal toddler-hood.

What treatments—medications and psychosocial—have been shown to be effective and what are their side effects?

Medications mentioned in this section Abilify* Aripipazole Depakote* Lithium Olanzapine Quetiapine Resperidol* Risperidone Seroquel* Topamax* Topiramate Valproic acid Zyprexa* *Brand name

First, it is important to recognize that bipolar disorder in children and adolescents is an emerging field and there is much more to learn. That NAMI's way of saying they don't have a frigging clue and have so little information to draw any validated conclusions upon that this is nothing more than a large scale and well funded drugging experiment using your children as lab rats. A comprehensive evaluation including family history is essential to understanding the diagnosis and the consideration of other possible diagnoses. They are using their other false premise as a fall back position, there is no valid or proven connection to a genetic component for any DSM mood disorder. It fact there is no proven pathology what so ever for any mental health disorder NAMI speaks about.

Bipolar disorder raises many risks in youth including substance use, suicide and poor school performance. what NAMI doesn't say here is that by drugging our youth there is a far greater likelihood of prolonged/worsening mental health conditions down the road, while both educational and vocational outcomes are far worse for those that have been labeled and treated with dangerous drugs early in life.

Be sure to ask your clinician about a comprehensive treatment approach. For an example of how expert clinicians conceptualize approaches to treatment for this condition, please review the Treatment Guidelines by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from March 2005. We have seen documented proof time and time again how conflicted doctors working for the pharmaceutical industry have given us in skewed and unreliable information in the form of ghost written journal articles, untrustworthy clinical studies, and having buried important negative data from a corrupted and inept FDA and you the public. This appears to continue unabated to present day. Just check out the names of those doctors they rely upon, and check that list against those under investigation for unethical and conflicted practices.

There are medications that have been FDA approved for use in teens with bipolar disorder. All other medication use is “off label” which means that it has not been approved by the FDA for this purpose. Those drugs that are FDA approved were studied for effectiveness in short-term studies—which means we do not understand the positive impact and side effects of longer term use.What NAMI isn't saying here is that there are long term studies that are telling us the long term out come for children and adolescents are catastrophic from the pharmacological model they are touting. In fact they are conveniently ignoring and helping bury the truth from the NIMH studies referred too in Robert Whitaker's book "Anatomy of an Epidemic".

Antipsychotics

Several of the atypical antispychotics—aripipazole (Abilify), quetiapine (Seroquel) and risperidone (Resperidol)—have FDA approval for bipolar disorder in youth ages 10 to 17. Olanzapine (Zyprexa) has FDA approval for youths ages 13 to 17 with bipolar 1 disorder. Though we know they are in fact using these drugs in children as young as preschool age. The truth: can cause psychosis, depression, suicidal behaviors, metabolic abnormality, obesity, diabetes, permanent movement disorders, may cause a decrease in brain tissue mass at the rate of 1% or more per year. In fact data is now showing that long term use of these drugs may take 20 or more years off the life span of the individual. Add in THAT there are many other dangerous and life threatening side effects that I have not included here, and still more yet to be discovered. This is about as reckless and unethical as it gets in Medicine.

In fact for children given these drugs the long term outcomes appears to tell us they are going to experience a much higher rate of permanent and increased serious mental health problems. In fact this drug class actually cause far more serious problems than ever imagined. But NAMI and their drug maker masters don't appear to concerned about these matters. There are huge profits to be made drugging children and creating life time consumers. You might want to ask them in not so uncertain terms who are they actually are advocating for? It's certainly not the children.

Lithium

Lithium, which is a mood stabilizer that is not an antipsychotic, also has FDA approval for youths aged 12 to17. All of these compounds have important side effects that can include weight gain, increased cholesterol and diabetes risk for the antipsychotics. Lithium has risks in thyroid and kidney side effects. More needs to be learned about the safe and effective use of these medications over time in youth with bipolar disorder. Yes, at some point down the road the kidney's will shut down, and we also know thyroid issues weigh heavily when speaking about mental health concerns. But to have those labeled children in behavioral handcuffs, is there no price to high to pay?

Anticonvulsants

The use of anticonvulsants such as valproic acid (Depakote) and topiramate (Topamax) are not FDA approved for use in youth with bipolar disorder. They are not approved because they have not shown to be effective long term and the negative psychical side effects a so numerous. Of course the main reason NAMI isn't giving them glowing approval here, is that most are off patent and they have more profitable products they are being paid to market for their masters.

Antidepressants

The FDA warning on antidepressants and the increased risk of suicidal idealization is also worth noting as some youth present first with depressive symptoms.

The medication management of youth bipolar disorder requires a clear understanding of the limited scientific data for longer term use So how exactly get a clear understanding and tout dangerous drug treatments with this limited scientific data?. It is also important to know what side effects need to be monitored in youth.

There are no FDA approved medications for youth under age 10. yet we know there has been an explosion of off label use of these drugs including powerful and dangerous anti-psychotic in populations of pre-school age. Is NAMI going to tell us this has nothing to do with their and other front organizations like themselves. That claim would be absolutely laughable if it wasn't for the horrendous and grievous harm they are doing to are youth.

Are there any side effects associated with these treatments, including those that may only occur in young people?

Side effects that are particularly troublesome and that are worse in children include the following. Atypical neuroleptics (except aripiprazloe) are associated with marked weight gain in many children. Yet, NAMI attempts to muffle this startling negative drugging information with a fantastical message of "someday" we will have reliable science, not now, but "someday". One day we hope to have specific genetic tests that will tell us beforehand which people will gain weight on these medications, but right now it is trial and error Yes, today NAMI is saying we want your child as a lab rat to use for are disease mongering campaign. In fact NAMI is behind the whole preemption theory of treating these made up and created diseases before they even manifest in any normal behaviors that they have now deemed not normal. The dangers of this weight gain include glucose problems that may include the onset of diabetes and increased blood lipids that may worsen heart and stroke problems later in life. In addition, these drugs can cause an illness called tardive dyskinesia—irreversible, unsightly, repeated movements of the tongue in and out of the mouth or cheek—and some other movement abnormalities. Depakote may also be associated with increased weight and possibly with a disease called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), whic in some cases may be associated with infertility later in life. Lithium has been the market the longest and is the only medication that has been shown to be effective against future episodes of mania and of depression and of completed suicides. Some people who take lithium over a long time will need a thyroid supplement and in rare cases may develop serious kidney disease. After all that, NAMI goes on to say still use these medications and be monitored by the quack doctor that would put a child on these drugs in the first place. Thank you for that sound advice NAMI. Yet, bullshit is still bullshit in the real world until you attempt to redefine it with another awareness campaign.

It is very important that children on these medications be monitored for the development of serious side effects. These side effects need to be weighed against the dangers of bipolar disorder itself, which can rob children of their childhood. Who is robbing who of their childhood NAMI? It sure appears the NAMI's drugging and disease mongering marketing efforts for your masters is doing more to rob children of their childhoods than anything since the dark ages black plague which killed an estimated one third of the world's population..

How do children and adolescents with this disease fare over time and as adults?

At this time, regrettably, bipolar disorder in children and youth appears to be more severe (prove it, show us the science, this is fear mongering and nothing more at it's worst) and have a much longer road to recovery than is seen with adults. What NAMI doesn't want you to know is that by medicating a child we have learned through long term studies that we are creating more long term serious and debilitating mental health disorders and far worse outcomes. While some adults may have episodes of mania or depression with better functioning between episodes, children seem to have continuous illness over months and years.

Does bipolar disorder in children have an impact on educational achievement?

It is challenging to educate a child whose mood is much too "high" or too "low." Therefore educators need to be aware of the diagnosis and make special arrangements. What NAMI haven't said here is that once a child has a mental health label, many schools will not allow them to attend classes unless they are medicated. In fact when you correlate the side effect profiles from these drugs including brain mass loss. The educational achievement impact may have a much more detrimental effect on a child's emotional and social development than any medical diagnosis treatment plan will ever entail.

Is suicide a risk?

Talking about wanting to die, asking why they were born or wishing they were never born must be taken very seriously. Even quite young children can hang themselves in the shower, shoot themselves or complete suicide by other means. Yes, but those so call treatment drugs increase suicidal thoughts and behaviors. In fact the the pharmacological intervention modality has had little or no impact of suicide statistics or outcome since their charge onto the scene in the mid-1970's. We do know by actual events that there have been many high profile cases recently where the drugs were a leading factor in the behavior leading up to a catastrophic suicides in children.

So in conclusion, next time you read about supporting a NAMI walk or event; you might want to take pause for a moment and ask yourself some serious questions. If NAMI is working as a well paid marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry, are they really looking out for your or your loved one best interest?