CCHR Int @CCHRInt

Thirty years after CCHR sued the FDA for the Prozac files, SSRI side effects are still not fully disclosed. CCHR was the only organization to fully press for disclosure of the suppressed SSRI evidence both through FOIA and by suing the FDA. It would still take another 12 years before the internal safety data that CCHR had fought to expose finally came to light. More than 35 years ago, the FDA already possessed substantial evidence that SSRIs could trigger severe adverse effects, including agitation, suicidal ideation, and violence. Internal company documents from the 1980s, clinical trial data, and a rapidly growing volume of adverse reaction reports already pointed to these risks long before the drugs became household names. Through persistent Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation against the FDA itself, CCHR obtained and publicized critical safety data that regulators and manufacturers already held. If a mental health industry watchdog could uncover and document these risks, the mental health industry handing out the drugs like candy had every opportunity to do the same—and act on it. To this day, many psychiatrists and defenders of psychiatry’s ignorance of drug risks claim they “didn’t know” about these dangers. But the data has been there all along for anyone who cared to listen to the patients or press for the facts. In the 1980s, when Prozac, the first SSRI, came on the market, CCHR began receiving hundreds of case reports of people experiencing severe side effects. These reports, which started accumulating in the late 1980s, described agitation, suicidal ideation, violence, and other serious adverse reactions. If CCHR was receiving this many reports, the psychiatric industry was certainly receiving them too—but took no action. CCHR, on the other hand, responded to these alarming consumer reports by filing a Citizen Petition seeking to remove the drug from the market and pressing the FDA for greater scrutiny of the emerging safety signals. This pressure contributed to the FDA’s decision to convene its Psychopharmacological Drugs Advisory Committee (PDAC) for a public hearing on 20 September 1991. Dozens of patients and family members gave firsthand testimony describing how Prozac had triggered suicide attempts, completed suicides, and acts of violence. Despite this powerful evidence, the majority of the panel—many of whom had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and were granted conflict-of-interest waivers—chose to ignore the witnesses. The committee voted that there was no credible evidence linking the drug to suicidality or violence and recommended no changes to the label. (It would take another 13 years for the FDA to finally add safety warnings on SSRIs for suicidal ideation — the black-box warnings — which the American Psychiatric Association protested against.) Following the hearing, CCHR continued its efforts by submitting a broad FOIA request in June 1992 for all FDA records concerning Prozac, including the clinical trial data submitted by the manufacturer, the New Drug Application files, and the individual adverse-reaction reports. When the agency’s response proved incomplete, CCHR sued. In Citizens Commission on Human Rights v. FDA (45 F.3d 1325, 9th Cir. 1995), the Ninth Circuit largely upheld the FDA and Eli Lilly on the adequacy of the search and most withholdings, but remanded on the individual adverse-reaction reports, which the agency conceded were not exempt. The largest volume of material kept from public view was protected under FOIA Exemption 4 as trade secrets or confidential commercial information—Lilly’s internal clinical-trial analyses, data tables, and strategic memos. Those documents later surfaced through product-liability discovery and a 2004 leak to the British Medical Journal. They included a November 1988 Lilly report showing that 38% of Prozac patients experienced new “activation” symptoms (agitation, anxiety, insomnia) versus 19% on placebo, internal compilations indicating higher reported rates of suicide attempts and hostility compared with older antidepressants, and company discussions from the 1980s acknowledging these risks and considering how to limit their impact on labeling and prescribing. Psychiatrists and clinical researchers employed by or contracted to the company were directly involved in generating, reviewing, and interpreting the safety data that the company treated as confidential and that only later emerged through litigation. Had Exemption 4 not been invoked, that internal safety data would have been available to the general public years earlier. The same internal safety data was leaked anonymously to the British Medical Journal in December 2004. The psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry failed to act then, just like they are failing to act today, dismissing PSSD, and other well documented SSRI side effects as anecdotal while patients continue to be injured by these drugs.

"When will we recognize and publicly identify the medical criminals among us? Or is it the very possibility of perceiving many of our leading psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions in this way precluded by the fact that they represent the officially ‘correct’ views and practices. Is it precluded because they have the ears of our lawyers and legislators, journalists and judges? Or is it precluded because they are control the vast funds, collected by the state through taxing the citizens, which finance an enterprise whose basic moral legitimacy we should call into question?” - Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry

Another pharmaceutical disaster.

cchrint.org/about-us/co-fo…

Parents Need Better Information about Psychiatric Drug and Hospital Risks and to be warned against companies that forcibly transport “troubled” teens to residential treatment facilities and wilderness camps. Distressed families pay $2,000–$4,000, and sometimes a consultant fee of up to $10,000 more, to have children taken from bed at night and driven across state lines, even when the child is of consenting age, and locked in abusive programs thousands of miles from home. The practice is known as “gooning.” About 40,000 children, including some from Canada, are held in U.S. behavioral facilities. The U.S. behavioral market was valued at $92.14 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $132.46 billion by 2032. One study put youth treatment spending at approximately $12 billion. By 2015, 82% of residential facilities still used seclusion and restraints. At least 145 children died of preventable causes in residential centers over three decades; at least 62 died from asphyxiation or restraint injury. cchrint.org/2026/09/18/par…

Psychiatric drugs and violence - Without systematic toxicology and psychotropic drug history data, policymakers cannot measure how often these drugs were present or spot patterns that warrant study. cchrint.org/2026/09/28/cor…

2/5 The top prescriber in Illinois prescribed psychiatric drugs to nearly 4,000 Medicaid children in one year. More than 15 children every working day. Six years running. $203,711 in ADHD reimbursements alone.

In 2023, 270,000 of the children being drugged under Medicaid alone were 0-5 year olds... 👇

Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin

5 days ago

1/5 In 2023, Medicaid spent $1.78 billion prescribing psychiatric drugs to nearly 3 million children across 32 states. 270,000 were under five. Not one of those drug classes has FDA approval for children under five.

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Alberta court just signed off on a $7.5m Paxil birth-defect payout. - GSK still won’t say the drug did it. - Lawyers still take their cut. - The kids still have the defects. - Same old Paxil routine. - Settle. Deny. Move on. If the evidence was that weak, they wouldn’t keep writing the cheques. canadianlawyermag.com/practice-areas…

If only the FDA had acted in the public interest rather than the psycho- pharmaceutical interests when they knew the damage these drugs cause... more than 30 years ago

Kim Witczak 💜 @woodymatters

2 weeks ago

I often wonder how different the SSRI antidepressant story might have been if the @FDA had acted differently in 1991. At the time of the 1991 FDA hearing on the emergence of suicide and violence with antidepressants, Prozac had the HIGHEST number of adverse-event reports

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Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin

2 weeks ago

Imagine teaching an entire generation that discomfort is a disease before they're old enough to tie their shoes. Then act surprised when they can't handle adulthood.

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youtu.be/Om2J9g-ssKo?is… Look at the financial conflicts of the 1991 FDA Psychopharmacologic Drugs advisory committee members at the end of video. Majority had ties to makers of antidepressant products. There was no voice representing the public on this committee then. Fast forward, I spent the last 9 years as consumer Rep on this same committee. I was often only NO vote.

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Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff

2 weeks ago

All young women who are considering taking an antidepressant should be shown this graph, and informed about the pregnancy complications associated with taking antidepressants.

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"And for some people, man, it's doing this weird thing where it doesn't just kill their sexual feeling, like they no longer orgasm, but they don't have any sexual desire anymore, like ever." @joerogan once again mentions the speech by PSSD sufferer Lauren Friedman (@lololizzle).

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Justin Garson @justin_garson

3 weeks ago

There's only one true mental disorder: the compulsive need to classify everybody that you find different, weird, disturbing, unpleasant, or difficult - and to derive some kind of perverse satisfaction when you find just the right label.

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ADHD drugs are handed out like candy when the FDA requires a black box warning for addiction—even when taken as prescribed and the US DEA classifies them as Schedule II drugs with a “high potential for abuse”— in the same category as OxyContin and fentanyl.

Daily Mail @DailyMail

3 weeks ago

Record high ADHD pill prescriptions: Number of adults on the pills rises by 41,000 in just three months - as tablets are linked to deadly side effect trib.al/L4d4sge

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Ban Coercive Psychiatric Practices and Abuse Global health and human rights agencies—including the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO)—report that coercion and human rights abuses remain entrenched in mental health systems worldwide. Both have called for the abolition of such practices. Coercive psychiatric practices include involuntary hospitalization, forced drugging, electroshock, seclusion, and physical, chemical, and mechanical restraints. The WHO warns that coercion “can inflict severe pain and suffering…with long-lasting physical and mental health consequences,” leading to “substantial trauma and even death,” and that these practices “violate the right to be protected from torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” Urgent Changes and Abolition Measures Needed: • Abolish all coercive practices, including involuntary hospitalization and forced treatment. • Eliminate financial incentives that support institutionalization and coercion. • Ban forced drugging and community treatment orders, which violate fundamental rights. • Replace forced interventions like drugging, electroshock, and psychosurgery with fully informed consent-based approaches, guaranteeing the right to refuse treatment. • Reject the biomedical model approach to mental health. • Shift from pharmaceutical and neurobiological dominance toward rights-based models of care. • Mandate legislation that prohibits all involuntary measures and requires non-coercive responses in all mental health services. • Respect advance directives (Psychiatric Living Wills), ensuring people can refuse psychiatric interventions during a crisis. • Ensure accountability by enforcing penalties for violations, • Guarantee access to justice, including the right to file complaints, challenge abuses, enforce rights, and prosecute or penalize those responsible for abuse and coercion, along with providing civil, administrative, or criminal sanctions and compensation. “All persons should be able to exercise their right to give free and informed consent to accept or reject treatment in mental health systems. Denial of legal capacity, coercive practices, and institutionalization must end.” – World Health Organization Ultimately, all forced treatment, especially electroshock, psychosurgery and other damaging brain-intervention treatments must be banned. In 2025, at the United Nations’ global human rights epicenter in Geneva, CCHR International addressed a UN committee, calling for the abolition of electroshock and forced drugging—especially of children—while citing governments’ failure to enforce strong penalties against those responsible for such abuse.

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Antipsychiatry @AntipsychiatryU

4 weeks ago

Psychiatry is not medicine. Medicine treats bodies that can be injured, infected, or scanned. Psychiatry treats conduct, speech, and suffering by renaming them disease. There is no lesion that proves schizophrenia the way a tumor proves cancer. There is no assay that locates

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Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin

4 weeks ago

The foundation of the psychiatric industrial complex is built on lies, manipulation, fraud and systematic deception. Its a house of cards and its crumbling. The voices of harmed patients are being heard. The tidal wave is coming. Be on the right side of history

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Welcome to the world of psychiatry— diagnosis by opinion and drugs by "trial and error"