 We are back and tonight I am going to be joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Bruce Levine. I want to talk to him a little bit about how all these kids in schools are being suspended and expelled for things like bringing a paper gun to school. He's authored actually several books including Surviving America's Depression Epidemic and Common Sense Rebellion, Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and A World Gone Crazy. He joins us now. Thank you for coming on today, Dr. Levine. Sure, great to be here. Well, okay, since the Sandy Hook shooting we've seen, for lack of a better word, people are basically freaking out over guns in this country and our government is now openly trying to restrict our second amendment and in the last couple months in schools we've actually seen a lot of incidences of children being suspended and expelled for bringing toy guns to school. We've seen kindergartners expelled for playing cops and robbers on the playground and using their finger as a gun and saying, pow, we even saw a little girl with a piece of paper, it was shaped like an L and they said that's a paper gun, you can't have that, and they searched her in front of the class, they were calling her a murderer, even a little five-year-old with a Hello Kitty bubble gun, they said it's a terrorist threat, and these kids are having nightmares, they're crying, what does it do to these little kids when they do this to them in their school? Well, certainly when adults overreact and show poor judgment and suspend, expel kids for young kids for doing that kind of thing, I mean one of a couple of things are going to happen depending on their temperament, depending on these kids' personality, some of them will get very depressed and feel ashamed and feel something's horrible about themselves, they'll be traumatizing, for some of these other kids they'll just, it'll be an early experience of having no respect for authorities, they'll immediately think these authorities are idiots, they don't know what they're talking about, so those are some of the different kinds of reactions that kids will have when adults use really poor judgment and overreact. Well, I mean does a five-year-old even really have a concept that their little toy is a gun or their finger saying, pow, is a threat to anybody, and do they even really understand that? I think they're thinking they're just being, I mean they're just being kids, they're not thinking that they're doing anything violent, and for most of society a five-year-old pointing their finger and going bang and playing cops and robbers prior to all these school shootings, prior to Sandy Hook would have, would have not been noticed, would have not, nothing would have been stated about it unless it was going on in the classroom and it was disrupting some kind of teaching, which is, is not the case with these kids. Well, doesn't it, I mean it doesn't just affect the kid that's being punished either, it also affects all the rest of the kids in class, it's sort of like a group brainwashing almost and saying that guns are bad, we need to not even look at a gun, don't play with a gun, don't even think about a gun. Right, but I think part of it is, is that on these extreme examples in some ways we're missing the larger, scarier point. In these examples that you're talking about, they certainly have gone on where teachers and administrators have used colossally horrible overreacting judgment here, a lack of judgment, but that's less scary for me because those really, those are a handful, you know, not that many events have happened on that kind, I mean every one that have happened we're going to see on the news, but the ones that are happening, millions of events are happening all the time where kids are normally going through being depressed or maybe obsessing too much on something or having anxiety and these kids are being labeled and pathologized and put on medications that we now know are often making these kids more likely to commit violent acts, we know these from the statistics. Well actually that brings up my next point because a frequent contributor to Infowars, John Rappaport wrote an article about all these incidents and he said that it's really more like an operant conditioning kind of thing for a thought crime where they'll say these are adverse thoughts you're having when you have these little guns or you play cops and robbers and use that as an excuse to then later put these kids on psychiatric medications. Well I don't think a lot of these kids who you know who are just pointing their fingers, I mean psychologists, psychiatrists, they are doing a lot of horrible things but I mean even a lot of those reports that you talk about they're some of the psychologists themselves were laughing that these were overreactions and a kid lots of kids who were just pointing a finger or five-year-old are not going to be immediately put on a prozac or antidepressants. That's not the scary thing is the scary things are that there are millions of kids who actually are depressed, they actually have good reasons to be angry, they maybe are worrying a lot about things and these are the kids who are being just easily five-year-old, seven-year-olds being put on medication and we now know that there's a lot of strong negative reactions to these medications that they produce a manic responses that a lot of these school shooters we know documented over 66 of these school shooters have been on medications, been on antidepressants, been on these psychostimulants like Ritalin and these are the really scary kinds of things. Definitely well actually that brings up a good point too because in the president's executive orders that he issued after Sandy Hook one of the things he said is that they want to get more young people on treatment it just said treatment isn't that like saying they're they're basically going to put more young people on these drugs which we know have side effects they cause hostility they cause increased suicidal tendencies aggression mood swings all kinds of things. That's the scary thing now a lot of these kids really do need help but mental health treatment at least standard mental health treatment in America is exactly what you said it's like if a kid is labeled as depressed and we know from the CDC in 2011 among teenagers 12 to 17 3.7 percent are on antidepressants which translates out to over a million kids in America are on antidepressants just in that age group and we also know and this is off of a manufacturer's report the people who make lovex which by the way was the drug that Eric Harris who was a shooter in a column line that 4% this is this is Solve this is their their report it's very conservative 4% have manic reactions so 4% using manufacturers report of a million kids on antidepressant that's over 40,000 kids who are going to have manic reactions what's that poor judgment impulsivity agitation sometimes even delusions hallucinations and and that's off of the you know lots of other folks who've looked at these things say that that manic reactions are much higher when these kids go off of these drugs which they do because they're kids they'll withdraw off of them you'll have these extreme kind of what the anti antidepressant discontinuation syndrome which is just a withdrawal response that can make a kid have acuthesia which makes you feel like you're you're coming out of your skin and so we know just off of that one class of drugs antidepressants we we've turned loose thousands of kids who are going to potentially do some things very destructive and of course kids lots of we've got three and a half million kids in America on these Ritalin Adderall speed ADHD kind of drugs we know that perhaps as many as 10% of these kids move into these kind of manic reactions and get diagnosed as bipolar so there's another couple a hundred thousand kids that we've just turned loose out there on because the reaction in America today is when kids are having any kind of difficulty when they're somewhat depressed often for good reasons or they're they're anxious often for good reasons we put them on medication and and we're not looking at these horrific adverse effects that when you look at them in the aggregate of these huge amount of numbers even if they're small percentages like four percent become manic well four percent of a million kids on antidepressants is a lot of kids who could become manic and dangerous. I've actually read several things in the last few days that have really disturbed me about SSR is one of them being that the fastest growing age group that's taking these medications is actually preschoolers. Well I haven't seen those statistics you know that that but we know that in America you know when I was starting out and practiced 25 years ago you would never see a little kid on these psychiatric drugs. I mean the idea of pediatric bipolar disorder was unheard of it was you know the idea of labeling a three and four year old with a bipolar disorder just seemed ridiculous. I mean the symptoms of bipolar having to do with poor judgment and grandiosity and mobility these are all these symptoms were what people said was what a normal for a three year old and this whole idea of kids being labeled younger and younger with these kinds of conditions that are just kind of normal kids who are three and four years old who are just not paying attention because they're three year olds or four year olds being labeled with ADHD and be given given the speed amphetamine type of drugs. This is all very new stuff in the last 10 15 years and it's terrifying and of course it's all driven by drug company profit. Well that's my next question actually because I mean there's been a huge uptick. We've seen an increase of like 400% I read in antidepressant use since 1988. Last year it was declared that it was one of the number one prescriptions in the age group from 18 to 44. I mean we're using a massive amount of antidepressants in this country. I think it's one in 10 people now take it. Most people that take it take it for more than two years. The majority and what is this causing this huge uptick in all this antidepressant use? Well just in this one class of drugs you know we're focused on antidepressants. In terms of the whole issue of potential of violence school shooters we know for example as I mentioned before and viewers could look this up on there's a lot of websites on this SSRI stories is one good website but we know there's 66 documented school shooters and that's not included. There's a lot of these ones people suspect okay like this recent Adam Wanzer but this is that's not even included among the 66 because we don't have the coroner's report on that yet but these are these are confirmed the 66 school shooters have been on these different kinds of medications so I mentioned Eric Harris on the antidepressant Lovex the column one one of the two column one shooters lots of these folks who are famous here Kip Kenkel in our Springfield Oregon was on Prozac and on Ritalin the kid in red like Minnesota who shot him around 10 folks he was on 60 milligrams of Prozac and so it goes on and on and we know that this is no accident because again as I mentioned before a significant number of folks who are taking these drugs are going to have manic reactions they're going to be what we call disinhibited so when you take a psychotropic drug of any kind whether it's Prozac or cocaine all these psychotropic drug means that a drug that affects one's neurotransmitter serotonin dopamine a norepinephrine and for many people who take these you get the sense of being disinhibited which means that you just do things that you would never ordinarily do okay which often happens when people use alcohol it's just one of those things that happen for when you're not on these kind of psychotropic drugs things pass through your mind that you never act on you're not impulsive you don't do anything about but when you're on these kinds of drugs you're much more likely to act on thoughts you would never act on and that and if for kids who are walking around with a lot of rage that spells trouble and it has spelled some serious destructive trouble for the world for society for their schools and for themselves yeah and we see these commercials on tv all the time when the commercials first started for these drugs it was more specific about what your symptoms were and it was like ask your doctor today and now it just seems like these commercials say do you have emotions tell your doctor to give you drugs i mean it's amazing right i mean and they know these drug these the people who work for the make these commercials are very very clever very very smart they're smart enough to realize that they could put on these drug commercials which by the way were illegal in america up until 1997 when the drug company power convinced um the government to allow these commercials on tv so we're one of the two countries in the industrial world that allow these commercials on and they're very clever they realized that they could they could spend 75 percent of that commercial listing side effects horrific side effects if you actually listen to the commercials and don't mute them which a lot of us do including myself nowadays i get so sick of hearing them but but but it doesn't matter because because the visuals the visuals of seeing a person who's upset and hurting and all of a sudden taking a pill and then the happy music and the happy small those are powerful manipulative forces that get people to ask their doctor and we also know from lots of studies is once you go in and you ask your doctor for some prozac or paxil or any kind of antidepressants you're gonna get them you may not have an easy such an easy time scoring benzo diazepines like valium and xanax doctors are a little bit more reluctant because they've been taught those things are highly addictive but you can score prozac paxil like from any doctor very easily almost like a candy machine sure when did you become aware that that these things weren't actually helping anybody when did i become aware of that that they were hurting more than helping well we've known for a long time i mean anything you do in life is a you know it's a cost benefit analysis and the scary thing about antidepressants is is that we've known for a long time and now this is finally being revealed in the mainstream press it's actually 60 minutes today big story on this is that that we know prozac compared to placebo really doesn't work very well in fact in the majority of trials when you compare prozac or any of these antidepressants to a sugar pill placebo the the antidepressants fail to outperform the placebo so in general um the effects the positive effects of these antidepressants are really we would be better off if doctors could still get placebo sugar pills and so there's there's not a really great positive effects as there are with things like antibiotics are very important for certain people with certain infections so there's very little scientifically in terms of positive effects and there's horrible adverse effects so in terms of a drug having been approved these drugs should never have been approved when you consider how horribly adverse effects are and how problem and how little any kind of beneficial effects now that's not to say there's not going to be 25 30% of people out there who take these prozac paxilzola who say oh it's saved their life it was great but that's true for sugar pills as well okay so you have what we call the placebo effect is mostly what makes these drugs really really work for people well i i want to get your opinion on this i actually wrote an article it's up on info words today about this a study was released yesterday that actually claims that people who have major depressive disorder if they take antidepressants it will help make their vaccines more effective that's the new and it was co-written there were 20 authors on this study four of them are actually employed by murk and the vaccine that they were talking about was one of murk's vaccines for shingles there you go i mean that's the thing i think that your audience is much more aware of than the general public but that all of these studies that are performed on any of these antidepressants they're all being funded by by the and on all these drugs in general all being funded by the drug companies a lot of americans still have the fantasy that the food and drug administration actually actually studies these drugs independently and it's not the case all of these drugs the data that is given to the FDA for approval is off of studies that are paid for by the drug companies themselves and we know drug companies have gotten into some serious trouble over the years some serious fines because they've held back held back a negative effects on these drugs and also too the way they perform the studies again because they've already sunk millions of dollars in the pre-approval process once they get to do these studies there's so much incentive to have them look good that they doctor up these studies the research design makes these drugs always look much better than they really are and so over the years a lot of us have come to see this this phenomenon that that these drugs have been declared especially psychiatric drugs like antidepressants have been declared safe and effective and then low and be old as these drugs are moving towards the end of their patent which has happened with prozac it's no longer patented you know is that all of a sudden you see these studies showing like well it's not really that safe and it's pretty dangerous why is that because drug companies don't care anymore they don't care when they when generics can be handed out on them they want everybody to get all excited about the new group of drugs that they've patented that they can make a ton of money on so that's been the cycle since i've been a psychologist for over you know the 30 years that we hear all this nonsense about these drugs being safe and effective and on and on until they're until they're about ready to go off patent and then we hear all the truth well i actually read that america though though we're obviously not the largest country in the world we take the most psychiatric medications of any other country in the world why do you think that is well a couple of reasons one one is is that the drug companies have so much more power here than anywhere else they're able to get these commercials on television here where a lot of the rest of the world realizes it's insane to expose the general public especially kids to propaganda about go ask your doctor if you got the breast so drug companies have that going for them they also in america are able to throw money at the american psychiatric association throw money at the national lines for the mentally ill throw money at psychiatric departments and universities and almost every way that the general public and doctors hear about drugs get information about these drugs is is really if you follow the money trail not that far you have to follow it it all comes from drug companies so it's very rare that anybody is getting any kind of information seeing any kind of studies that isn't drug company bad and so and i think about it if you were running a drug company where you had products like even these antipsychotics i give an example i've written a lot about zyprexa which is made by lili lili which that was their big money maker after prozac um and so zyprexa has achieved four billion dollars a year five billion dollars a year this is a huge amount of money and when you're and and when you're when you know that your your product could potentially make that kind of money to throw a million here to a university department a couple of million here to an institution or throw a couple of million here to somebody who's leaving national institute of mental health who's been friendly to you this is chump change you know so they're spending a little bit of a little bit of money they even tolerate huge fines against them which is also the case of lili they were busted for off-label marketing this zyprexa which means they illegally marketed this antipsychotic to to people um to doctors to use for kids who weren't psychotic to use for all people who are disruptive and in old age homes you're not allowed to do that it's illegal it's off-label marketing but so they get fined a billion dollars well it's about what they make in a quarter one quarter for zyprexa so so it's all about these drug companies are smart enough to spend the few bucks here to make tons of money elsewhere and you could pull that off in the united states of america well excuse the pun but it's crazy well thank you so much for joining us today dr levine sure glad to be here and people can find you at brucelevine.net do you have any projects coming up nope last a lot of i've written about this book a lot about this in surviving america's depression epidemic which is my prior book before get up stand up and in survivors in america's depression epidemic i talk about this a lot of what we're talking about here today but also different ways of dealing with depression besides uh besides the pharmaceuticals well people definitely need to look into this thank you so much again for joining us today thank you melissa and that about wraps it up for tonight's info wars nightly news if you're watching this on youtube please subscribe 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