Haldol nearly killed me this past April. Yes, it caused me to flatline briefly in the hospital.

I lost control of every damn muscle in my body, including for a brief moment, my heart.

I spent 3 weeks in a rehab hospital where I had to learn how to walk again, talk again, do the very basic hygiene. brush my hair, take a shower, brush my teeth.. go to the toilet, .even eat.. and talk.

The reason I was put on Haldol? Because I am currently unemployed, and on a fixed income. A month of Haldol was 4 dollars.A newer drug would have made me unable to pay any of my bills, including rent.

I still have night mares about this. I guess I always will.

Thank you for posting this Philip.

Then there's the understanding that the tardive syndromes are caused by neuroleptics inducing manganese deficiencies.

I couldn't agree more with your observation regarding the omission of Bipolar Disorder in the article. This is what concerns me. Everyone who has "mood swings" is now diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and placed on this class of drugs as a mood stabilizer. Schizophrenia is a seriously debilitating and hard to treat disease which requires this class of drugs. Bipolar Disorder is another animal all together and highly, highly overdiagnosed. I can't tell you how many clients I have worked with who were diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder simply because they were going through some sort of stressful event, or suffering from some kind of old trauma and were simply emotional. Emotions are not well tolerated in our culture and apparently must be medicated into oblivion. Prescribing antipsychotics (relabeled by the pharmaceutical companies as mood stabilizers) for this purpose is absolutely heinous. And to give them to children is simply unthinkable.

With regard to your comment about the lack of safety of the old antipsychotics, I have to question this. Thorazine of course is a medicinal nightmare. It should be taken off the market in my opinion. However, I have to question whether the new meds are safer than Haldol and Prolixin. They both have the potential to cause tardive dyskinesia. This is a very serious side effect, but if monitored properly it can be avoided with med or dose changes or by adding Cogentin. Despite what the pharmaceutical companies claim, the new class of antipsychotics can also cause tardive dyskinesia. However, they can also cause metabolic syndrome and lead to diabetes. The old meds did not do this and in my mind this is a very, very serious side effect. Having watched clients struggle with serious diabetes, slowly having their toes, their feet, their legs amputated I consider this to be a very serious problem.

Aypical antipsychotics are used excessively to treat OCD in teenagers and adolescents. Almost every teen who has had OCD is put on antipsychotics right away. A guy I know who is an adolescent was put on every one of the atypical antipsychotics in a year for OCD. I was put on three antipsychotics and I had generalized anxiety disorder. The funny thing is, a lot of children and teenagers with OCD are put on antipsychotics right away, but adults with OCD are treated differently. OCD is treated like schitzophrenia now and it's all kept under wraps. The thing is, these antipsychotics don't help with OCD, but psychiatrists figure that shutting down the brain will stop the obsessions, but almost everyone who goes on antipsychotics for OCD is usually not helped at all. What I want to know is why are kids with anxiety, depression, OCD, generalized anxiety disorder and ADHD more often prescribed antipchotics than adults? Usually, when you go to a school, you can tell when someone has started an antipsychotic, which is almost always Risperdal first, it's usually the most popular one to give to teens even though it has all these hormones in it which mess up the body. It's really frustrating how you know that every psychiatrist has given out antipsychotics to kids for off label use and they often put pressure on the parents to do so saying "oh, it's safe" "your child needs this" Most people assume that antipchotics are just used for severe disroders but it's really the opposite, doctors use antipsychotics for just about everything and I really want to know why they are so obsessed with prescribing this for off label use in kids and especially adolescents.