When Help is Harm: The Doctor Doesn’t Always Know Best

When we think of doctors, we generally think of someone highly educated and able to help us heal and feel better. In many cases that may still be true. But too often today, doctors are merely Prescribers who, within minutes and no testing will diagnose a patient and immediately prescribe pharmaceutical drugs. More often than not, the only information the Prescriber has about the drug is the information provided to them by a pharmaceutical drug sales representative. The Prescriber may even receive a bonus incentive from a pharmaceutical company each time that drug is prescribed to a patient. Such practices are the driving force behind nearly every mass killing and suicide for the past few decades in the United States.

For those who lived in the US before 1997, you may recall mass killings and school shootings were not an epidemic like they are today. It wasn’t until the Columbine massacre in 1999 that the road was paved for the mass tragedies that seem so commonplace today. What changed?

Where pharmaceutical drug ads were directed primarily only to doctors, in 1997, President Bill Clinton and his FDA eased restrictions and opened the door to Direct-to-Consumer Marketing of pharmaceutical drugs. The United States became the only nation in the world to advertise pharmaceutical drugs directly to the public; a practice followed only by New Zealand. Soon thereafter, commercial advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs flooded every form of media. Rather than being healers, doctors became drug dealers: Prescribers.

When I was thirty-one I was enjoying a coveted career working backstage in music concerts and going on worldwide tours with some of the biggest rockstars in music. In 2001, I had a little time off to enjoy a sunny vacation in Florida with a friend. After a sudden onset of pain and numbness in my right hand, I sought help at a hospital there. Finding nothing broken, the doctor diagnosed me with anxiety. Asking for further assessment, the doctor referred me to another doctor who was associated with the hospital. After five minutes and zero testing with the referral doctor, I was told my female menstrual cycle disrupted my serotonin levels. I was given sample boxes of a psychotropic anxiety drug, an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor), along with a one-year prescription for the drug.

Upon drug intake, I became high. Within weeks, the high escalated to euphoria. Euphoria intensified to grandiose, until mania overtook me. I lived delusions, paranoia, and insomnia. I endured radical, obsessive, and irrational antics. Oblivious, other people noticed. After running and screaming through the neighborhood, I was brutally taken into police custody. I then kicked out the back window of the police car, barefoot, and dove through the shattered glass.

Taken to the same hospital where I had originally sought help for the pain and numbness in my hand, the emergency room described me as impaired, disheveled, impulsive, combative, and threatening. They said I suffered from depersonalization, derealization, and acute psychosis. Held in four-point restraints, I was committed to a mental crisis facility and drugged more. Days after my release, law enforcement visited me again after I called 911 twelve times repeatedly. Police arrived to find me with a razor in hand, screaming about killing myself while begging police to do it for me. Forced into a total appendage restraint position, I was committed to a psychiatric facility and drugged even more. Upon my release, I made it home to New Jersey, detoxed from all pharmaceutical drugs, and rebuilt my life.

Two years later, after reading a newspaper article about a girl who experienced adverse SSRI drug effects similar to mine, I began researching the drugs I was given. The side effects read like a checklist for me.

In 2006, I testified at the FDA Psychopharmacologic Drug Advisory Committee Hearing in Washington DC. Afforded three minutes to speak, I began my testimony: “I would like to thank myself for the miracle of my being here today.” After hearing all victim testimonies, yet not wanting to discourage people from taking the drugs, the FDA expanded Black Box Warnings for "children, teens, and young adults."

In 2018 I published my harrowing memoir, C℞AZY or NOT Here I Come, only to have it hijacked, and shut down, without ever receiving royalties for book sales. Fed up with waiting on the judicial process, I doubled down, added 100 more pages of content, experiences, resources, testimonies, correspondence and full-color photo images. I formed my own publishing company, and, in March 2023, I published, THE MAD ROAD: A Mental Health Memoir to Save Lives.

There have been hundreds of cases of homicides and suicides that were all committed by someone under the influence of psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs prescribed to them by a doctor. These cases include; a co-pilot who flew a Germanwings airplane into a mountain, the boy who beheaded his mother, the mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub, another mother who strangled her three children with a yoga band, the man who massacred people at a Las Vegas concert, or at a Charleston church, a Sutherland Springs church, and a Colorado movie theater to name a few.

My full story, THE MAD ROAD is available in Paperback and eBook on Amazon and most book retailers. It is my hope you will read my story and help me save lives.