Nurses for Human Rights

I found a disturbing report from Janne Larsson, investigative jounalist in Sweden. In 2005, the agencies reporting on unnatural deaths and suicide included parameters to detect what causation could be traced to psychiatric drugs. The results are both alarming and telling. 1255 people committed suicide in 2006 from their report. 71% of women and 48% of men during this time were recently or currently treated with some category of psychiatric drug. I am including the link here for my fellow Legal Nurse Consultants as this is a key action we can take when a family comes in suspecting an unexpected death was caused by the side effect of a medication. The media is reporting more and more that prescription meds are the culprit in unexpected deaths. More deaths are attributed to prescription medications than illegal street drugs. But, just as important, we nurses need to take a step back and ask ourselves are these drugs necessary for the high population we are giving them too? Is it really necessary to treat all children in the foster home programs for PTSD like they are doing in my home state of Florida? Is it safe to add an antipsychotic to children already taking meds for ADHD? It is my personal hope that the stellar nurses in the legal profession put their opinions in writing and band together to change our profession toward more humane mental health treatment. There are a lot of areas we can improve on in the nursing profession. I hope we improve on our right to voice our opinions on the topics that are exploding in the media today. We should be vocal, steadfast on our committments, and banded together collectively to make our intentions to have safe, clinically effective health care delivered to our patients.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 10:27 am and is filed under Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.