My Patch Story Creates Presidential Petition to Ban Fraudulent "Chemical Imbalance of the Brain"

NEW JERSEY -- A few months back I decided, that as a retired Grandmother, I would take a try at an old goal of freelance writing to help create some social change and didn’t expect that a little story in the Manchester, NJ Patch could turn into a movement of people fighting against people being harmed by fraudulent psychiatric drug marketing.

The February 4th story that I updated in the Patch on March 30th with more information had to do with documents I received from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) that showed how they are discarding old theories of how and why mental disorders occur in favor of new theories. These old and disproven theories on chemical imbalance of the brain and levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine are the ones that have fraudulently pushed 20% of the US population onto these drugs, often against their will.

The Petition to President Obama that you certainly should feel free to sign, was posted by a Massachusetts non-profit called Bulldozer Health and asks President Obama to “Tell the FDA to Ban any psychiatric drug ads with false claims that the drug corrects a chemical imbalance.”

The story of how I decided to do the Freedom of Information request to NIMH started with a “wait-what?” moment after seeing a 2011 quote in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) magazine, Psychiatric Times, by former APA Director Ronald Pines saying, “…[T]he “chemical imbalance” image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding. In truth, the “chemical imbalance” notion was always a kind of urban legend- - never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”

I wanted to verify whether or not this was true as EVERYBODY taking these drugs is doing to based on this brain chemical imbalance information that the APA Director is calling untrue and “urban legend.” The data linked in my NIMH Freedom of Information articles of February 4th and March 30th confirmed that the APA Director’s seemingly outrageous admission, was in fact, true.

While the heavily-pharmaceutical-funded general media did not pick up on this vital information, the Patch and social media did. This quick Google search shows how my little Patch article has spread onto major websites and Facebook pages of people interested in mental health issues.

So, if you want to make change, don’t under estimate how it can start as simply as putting a little contribution article into the Patch.

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