Jon Rappoport’s blog February 24 2013

Nightmares, out-of-control aggressive behavior, extreme sadness and passivity, confusion, hallucinations, mania, brain damage, suicide, homicide—these are just a few central effects of psychiatric drugs.

Read the staggering statistics reported by Robert Whitaker, the author of Mad in America: “The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.

“This epidemic has now struck our nation’s children, too. The number of children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.”

My exploration started in 1999, as I covered the Columbine school shooting.

I was already familiar with the pioneering work of Dr. Peter Breggin and his classic book, Toxic Psychiatry. I knew the drugs were toxic and that some of them could push people into violence.

It emerged that one of the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, had been on Luvox, a violence-inducing drug, an SSRI antidepressant.

This, of course, was very troubling, because children and adults all over America were taking these antidepressants. And in Dr. Breggin’s book, I saw a summary of a review-study on Ritalin, done in 1986 by Joseph Scarnati. Ritalin, far from being a “soft” drug, was essentially speed, and it carried with it significant dangers.

It could cause hallucinations, aggressive behavior, and even psychotic breaks. Several million children in America were taking Ritalin.

What I came to call a “Johnny Appleseed specter” loomed over America. If psychiatrists dispensed enough of these drugs, seeding the population, we would be in for random shootings and killings and suicides on into the indefinite future. And psychiatrists were, in fact, handing out these drugs like candy. No one at the FDA or any enforcement government agency was ringing alarm bells.

In the wake of Columbine, I wrote a white paper, “Why Did they Do It: School Shootings Across America,” for The Truth Seeker. It gained wide online attention. The report mentioned other instances where children, on psychiatric drugs, had committed murder and suicide.

In the ensuing years, I became much more aware of the influence of drug companies in this Johnny Appleseed operation. They had, in fact, struck a deal to rescue the sinking profession of psychiatry. The arrangement was simple and potent: Big Pharma would bankroll psychiatric conferences and education, prop up flagging journals with advertising money, and generally promote the repute of psychiatry, in return for a certain kind of research:

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