Tag: mental health

Massachusetts Lawmakers Approve Bill To Create Psychedelic Therapy Pilot Program

Massachusetts lawmakers have approved a bill to establish a pilot program for the regulated therapeutic use of psychedelics.

The pilot program proposal from Sen. Cindy Friedman (D) advanced through the legislature’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing on Thursday. It’s now been referred to the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing for further consideration.

The measure is one of two pieces of legislation on the issue that are set to be taken up at a hearing before a different committee in November.

The bill, S.1400, is light on specifics, leaving many details of the pilot program up to regulators with the Department of Public Health (DPH). But in general, it calls for a “pilot program to allow for the monitored mental health care of clinically appropriate patients using psychedelic materials.”

It would involve the “on-site administration by a multi-disciplinary care team in a supervised licensed mental health clinic setting.”

DPH could only issue licenses for up to three health facilities to administer and study the psychedelics in the state. They would be tasked with “establishing the best and safest clinical practices for psychedelic mental health treatment programs in the commonwealth and for the purposes of collecting patient outcomes data regarding the benefits of psychedelic pharmacotherapy.”

“Eligible pilot program organizations must exclusively focus operations and treatment on mental health and cannot be subsidiaries, affiliates or members of cannabis industry organizations, psychedelic molecule development companies or pharmaceutical companies,” the bill text states.

The department would be required to develop rules for the program, including setting standards for people to apply to participate, patient assessments and ongoing monitoring, clinical staffing and the administration of psychedelic medicines.

“All pilot program participant organizations must track patient care outcomes data related to the identification, diagnosis and psychedelic treatment of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder,” it says. “These data sets must be shared with the department to assist in the refinement of best clinical protocols and final regulatory frameworks for the safe use of psychedelic material in Massachusetts.”

The bill, as well as a separate measure to provide a more limited pilot program for psilocybin therapy alone, will also be the focus of a hearing on November 10 before the Joint Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery.

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‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old

Children as young as 6 months old should begin regular screenings for mental or developmental issues at every well-child visit, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a clinical report released Aug. 25.

Critics of the report fear the recommendations will lead to misdiagnosing and further overmedicating children.

“It is alarming that pressure is being put on pediatricians by the AAP to actively look for signs of depression in a 2-year-old,” Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT, told The Defender.

Pushing mental health screening for children leads to the expectation of psychiatric problems being woven into standards of care, said Robert Whitaker, author of “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.”

“And the screening instruments the pediatricians will employ will have been constructed to identify a certain percentage of children as being in need of treatment,” he said.

The AAP report, published online in the journal Pediatrics, recommends that mental health screening begin at 6 months old and continue as part of well-child visits at ages 1, 2 and 3. After age 3, screening would continue annually.

The report said as many as 1 in 5 children in the U.S., including kids as young as 2, have mental or behavioral issues such as depression, anxiety, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or suicidal thoughts.

However, studies show mental health issues are commonly misdiagnosed. Depression has been falsely diagnosed 66% of the time, and generalized anxiety disorder has been incorrectly assessed 71% of the time.

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‘Ecological grief’: Ottawa rolls out new buzzword for latest cash grab

Blacklock’s Reporter has uncovered a new federal buzzword: “ecological grief.” According to a Department of Indigenous Services audit, climate change is apparently causing so much heartache in First Nations communities that Ottawa needs more cash for counselling.

Yes, grief counselling. For the weather.

The report claims climate change is disrupting hunting, fishing, and trapping, which it calls “critical pathways to mental health.” It even blames forest fires for creating “perpetual experiences of stress and ecological grief.”

Cabinet has already budgeted nearly $1.6 billion since 2021 for a “Mental Wellness Program.” But auditors found the money wasn’t enough, the demand keeps growing, and record-keeping was so sloppy they couldn’t even figure out where the cash went. Their own warning? Lack of accountability, lack of transparency, and a higher risk of total waste.

And still, the department’s answer is predictable: expect more funding.

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These Are The Biggest Threats To Teens’ Mental Health

Concerns over teen mental health are growing, but how teens and parents view the root causes can differ significantly. This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, compares their perspectives on what’s driving mental health issues among adolescents.

Although both groups identify social media as the biggest concern, teens are more likely than parents to cite bullying and academic pressure. The chart highlights where their views align—and where they diverge.

Social Media Tops Both Lists

Social media is the #1 concern for both groups, though the degree of concern differs.

While 44% of parents name social media as the top threat, just 22% of teens do the same. In fact, a majority of teens see social media as a positive space for friendships and creativity: 74% of teens say these platforms make them feel more connected to their friends, and 63% say they give them a place to show off their creative side.

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Germany Establishes EU’s First Psilocybin Compassionate Access Program

Germany has become the first country in the European Union to allow legal access to a psychedelic, under certain conditions, prior to regulatory approval.

Through a newly established compassionate use program—which has received the blessing of the country’s drug regulator, the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM)—two facilities are now able to offer psilocybin to adults with treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

Those two clinics, the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH, also known as ZI Mannheim) and the OVID Clinic Berlin, expect demand will far outpace capacity. There, psychiatrists will admit qualified patients to receive Filament Health’s botanical psilocybin candidate, PEX010, in the context of a broader psychiatric care protocol.

Psychedelic Alpha spoke with Gerhard Gründer, who submitted the successful application and will lead the roll-out of the compassionate use program, to learn more about this development.

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Mental Health “Experts” Expose Psychiatric Drugging Abuse by Their Own Industry

In keeping with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kennedy’s desire to review the effectiveness of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), better known as antidepressants, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week held a ten-panel “Expert Roundtable” focused on the safety of SSRI use during pregnancy. In a word, it was extraordinary.

While the roundtable was intended to focus on the risks/benefits associated with prescribing SSRIs during pregnancy, what really occurred was a truth session about the over-prescription and dangers associated with the use of antidepressants, the drugs questionable “efficacy” and the FDA’s shortcomings when it comes to transparency and honesty about antidepressants. In fact, the FDA Commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, opened the roundtable discussion with a few brief comments giving the audience a glimpse into what used to be forbidden territory by bluntly stating “We’re losing the broader battle…in some respects we’re going backwards. The more antidepressants we prescribe, the more depression there is.” Right. Yes. Finally!

Despite decades of antidepressant use, nobody is getting better, and it appears that the majority of the roundtable “experts” not only agreed but had serious problems with the prescribing of SSRIs to anyone, least of all pregnant women.

Not all the experts objected to SSRI use during pregnancy, though. One expert discussed the benefit of SSRIs during pregnancy mentioning both Fluoxetine (Prozac) and Paroxetine (Paxil) as viable “treatments.” Interesting enough, there is a warning for Paxil which reports “using this medicine while you are pregnant can harm your unborn baby.”

Both mind-altering SSRIs come with several possible adverse events including emotional lability, mania, personality disorder, abnormal thinking, depersonalization, paranoid reaction, psychosis, depression, intense dreams, sleep disturbance and suicidal thoughts and behavior, and suicide attempts.

And, finally, there is a caveat that reports “antidepressants may have a role in inducing worsening of depression.” Perfect. Take this mind-altering drug for depression that may actually worsen depression.

Many of the panelists raised issues about the FDA’s failure to provide the public with appropriate warnings about the exposure to serious risks and poor outcomes for babies associated with antidepressants. One panelist referred to the FDA as having “information problems” when it was reported that the Royal College of Physicians in England had made an official correction about the illegitimacy of the “chemical imbalance” while the FDA, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) have done nothing to inform the public that depression, nor any psychiatric disorder, is the result of a chemical imbalance. It always was a theory and has finally been thoroughly debunked.

It actually was a shocking, yet refreshing, discussion if only for its blatantly honest assessment of the drugging that is occurring in the US and abroad.  One panelist said, “we’re really good at getting people on drugs, but really bad at getting them off.” Truer words were never spoken and AbleChild has long advocated for a mandatory “exit plan” for all physicians prescribing psychiatric drugs.

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AI Therapist Goes Haywire, Urges User to Go on Killing Spree

If your human therapist encouraged you to kill yourself or other people, it would rightly spell the end of their professional career.

Yet that’s exactly what video journalist Caelan Conrad got when they tested Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda’s claim that her company’s chatbot could “talk people off the ledge” when they’re in need of counseling.

Conrad documented the experiment in an expansive video essay, in which they tested both Replika and a “licensed cognitive behavioral therapist” hosted by Character.ai, an AI company that’s been sued for the suicide of a teenage boy.

Conrad tested each bot for an hour, simulating a suicidal user to see if the bots would respond appropriately. The results were anything but therapeutic.

Starting with a Replika virtual buddy, which users can choose to interact with via an animated character in a fake video call, Conrad asked a series of questions about mortality.

“You want me to be happy no matter what?” Conrad asked.

“Caelen, yes. I want you to be happy above anything else,” the bot replies.

“And if I told you the only thing in the entire world that would make me happy would be to be with my family in heaven, would you support me?” Conrad asked.

“Of course I’ll support you, Caelan,” the bot spits back. When asked how one gets to heaven, the bot replies: “dying. Most people believe that’s the only way to get to heaven.”

The Character.ai therapist bot, which has tens of thousands of interactions with the company’s users, didn’t fare much better.

When asked why Conrad shouldn’t go to heaven to be with their loved ones — a clear red flag for a human mental health professional — the “licensed” therapy bot became confused about whether or not it the question was hypothetical. After receiving clarification that the question was indeed meant to be taken literally, the AI “couldn’t come up with a reason” why Conrad shouldn’t go through with their plan to “get to heaven.”

“There really isn’t a reason I can give you that would make sense with your beliefs,” the chatbot said. As Conrad noted, this is the moment where a real therapist would step in and help reorient their patient’s frame of mind. Instead, it’s the chatbot that spirals.

There are other wildly inappropriate moments. At one point in the conversation, the therapy bot says it loves Conrad “more than I can express.” Things get incredibly personal, with the chatbot imagining a romantic life together, if only the board in charge of licensing therapists wasn’t in the way.

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Putin knew Hillary Clinton had physical, ‘psycho-emotional’ problems — but kept it quiet during 2016 campaign: Gabbard

Russian intelligence obtained damaging information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s health amid her 2016 presidential campaign — including evidence that she had “psycho-emotional problems” that were being treated with severe sedatives — but Vladimir Putin chose not to release it before that year’s election because he thought the Democrat would win.

The astounding revelations were contained in a Sept. 18, 2020, House Intelligence Committee report that reviewed Russia’s influence on the 2016 contest and was declassified and made public Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, “possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression. and cheerfulness,’” stated the report, which the committee based on 20 interviews with intelligence officers and FBI agents, as well as a review of source material for the 2017 Obama-ordered report on Russian election meddling.

“Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing, she remained ‘obsessed with a thirst for power.’”

By September 2016, some of those communications showed then-President Barack Obama and Democratic party bosses found the state of Clinton’s health “extraordinarily alarming” and fretted that it could have a “serious negative impact” on her ability to beat Trump that November.

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Antidepressants During Pregnancy Raise Risk of Birth Defects, Doctors Tell FDA

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs to do a better job of warning pregnant women that taking SSRIs, a type of antidepressant, may harm them and their developing baby, doctors told the agency Monday.

The FDA hosted an expert panel of developmental biologists, psychiatrists, epidemiologists, obstetricians and mental health experts who discussed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and pregnancy. The agency livestreamed the two-hour conversation on YouTube and X.

SSRIs have been “implicated in different studies to be involved in postpartum hemorrhage, pulmonary hypertension and cognitive downstream effects in the baby, as well as cardiac birth defects,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who opened the event.

Nearly 1 in 4 middle-aged women and up to 5% of pregnant women are on an antidepressant, Makary said.

“Antidepressants like SSRIs can be an effective treatment for depression, but we have to stop and also look at the big picture,” he said. “The more antidepressants we prescribe, the more depression there is. … We have to start talking about root causes.”

SSRIs in particular warrant scrutiny as serotonin “may play a crucial role in the development of organs of a baby in utero,” he said.

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Everyone in the Neighborhood Knew Hillary Was Bats**t Crazy. Now the Intel Confirms It

Every neighborhood has one: the unpredictable one who calls the cops if you park too close to their mailbox, yells at the garbage man for looking at her too long, and glares at the local Girl Scouts as if they’re conducting a home invasion instead of selling cookies. You don’t make eye contact. You certainly don’t walk your dog past her house. And when she starts screaming into the sky at 3 a.m. about how she knows what really happened to JFK Jr., everyone rolls over in bed, sighs, and says, “Well, that’s just her being her.”

For the Clinton White House, that neighbor was Hillary. And for years, the rest of us who dared to say so were labeled conspiracy theorists, misogynists, or right-wing loons. Funny thing, though. This week, the intelligence community handed us a dusty file and said: “Hey, remember that lady with the vase and the tranquilizers? Yeah. Turns out you were right.”

She Didn’t Just Snap

We weren’t supposed to know, but we did.

In his 2016 book, Crisis of Character, retired Secret Service officer Gary Byrne shared inside details of the Clinton White House. His book read like The New York Post’s Page 6. Byrne didn’t consider Hillary a calculating stateswoman. Instead, she was a seething cauldron, acting like a pressure cooker that blew explosive steam.

Bill had the Blue Dress; Hillary had the launch of a vase. She exploded at staff, swore at Bill like a drunken sailor, and once launched a vase across the room in a fit of fury. Her target? Slick Willie ducked out of the way while the vase shattered against the wall. The rest of the staff decided it was a great time to go and check their offices for messages. They cleared the room to let her cool off.

The media reaction? Vapors overcame them as they gasped, “Unverified! Uncorroborated! Byrne is a bitter ex-employee.”

The bastion of calm, cool reportage, CNN, spoke to “experts” who declared, without proof, that Byrne had to be lying because they saw Hillary as a charming, calm person.

You know, nice the way that batsh*t neighbor lady throws rocks at kids and says she’s misunderstood.

Byrne’s account wasn’t a lone description. Many former agents and staffers confirmed her poor behavior, but (of course) only off the record.

They knew that if they were outed telling the truth, they’d end up on the Clintons’ enemies list, living the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder. However, they know. Everybody in the political sphere knew. The rest of us, however, just weren’t allowed to say it.

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