As time passes on more people are corroborating our observations with their own personal stories. Total strangers to us, they don't know us and we don't know them. Some are befuddled parents like us and some are caregivers. Some are professionals like general practitioners or psychiatrists. Some are people who worked as reps for drug makers. They say the same thing we have been saying since 1999 when we observed Danny becoming chronically self-injurious and crazy violent after Risperdal.
We fought to keep Danny off and away from these drugs. His father in February 5, 2001, met with administration asking to stop giving these drugs to Danny because of the serious adverse effects, he showed them videos of his bizarre behaviour as evidence and talked of that Christmas day in 1998 when we found him twisted like a pretzel. His father went on speaking calmly of our concerns, he told them how helpless and scared we were when we saw Danny unable to stop moving on June 5, 1999, of him attacking me on December 25, 1999 and the intensity of his compulsions and obsessions, his physical strength extraordinary for a skinny guy, his frozen postures followed by head bangs. His father was livid when we were dismissed from that meeting with "we will have another meeting", he was so angry that I thought he would have another heart attack, hissing in anger told me, "What else is to discuss?... You can go to all his meetings and talk ad nauseam, they are not going to listen".
We were searching for doctors to helps us to reverse the effects of Risperdal and by the doctors' comments I realized administration were sending to them diagnosis of psychiatric disorders made by their own physician which we have objected to several times, apparently adding some comments about our refusal to accept those diagnosis. I told administration to stop it and the man answered that he couldn't.
Apparently to justify their use of drugs on Danny it was important to them to present us as delusional parents who didn't want to accept the diagnosis that Danny was "psychotic". And to justify the use of deceptive lies in the selling of Risperdal to us in 1995, the physician voiced loudly the reason at one of our parents's meetings, "because parents don't like to hear that their child is psychotic".
After doing intensive research in 1999 we concluded that minor and major tranquilizers aggravated Danny's "autism". We continued our research, we concluded that all those changes on his "behaviours", his "psychosis", moods ("bipolar"), his seizures, abnormal movements, "frozen" catatonic postures, altered state of mind or "out of it" states followed by sudden head banging and aggressive head butting, incontinence, etc. were all adverse effects of the drugs, they were drug-induced.
These drugs made our mild tempered autistic child "dangerous" not only to himself but to his family, to caring caregivers, to the other autistics. Doctors, group home administration and the government had closed wilfully their eyes and decided to ignore the drugs' danger. They are responsible. Took more research to concluded that the bottom line, the reason of their "blindness, deafness and muteness" towards drugs side effects was money. The more "complex" the case, the more money they would get.
We read many books explaining the direct cause and effect of drugs on behaviour. It was all there. Drugs can and do change the behaviour of people and not just some of the developmental delayed like an autistic, anybody could be affected.
Not only we had another mother (Ann Bauer) saying that drugs made her autistic son "crazy" but she also described an unexpected horrific attack on her persona by her beloved son, a very similar incident to my own (December 25, 1999).
And here we have the latest, Gwen Olsen, an ex drug rep, telling it all in a book and speaking up in YouTube under "Ex Drug Rep Manipulating Doctors". There she not only describes the different "strategies" taught by drug makers in order to convince doctors into using their drugs on their patients, but she tells us of her own experience with "mental illness". Gwen goes on describing not only the drug-induced changes in personality but the adverse effects like abnormal movements, the constant progressive mental and physical deterioration she observed in patients, but also the formation of suicidal thoughts and finally drug-induced violence that makes it precarious to live or care for the affected victims.
In her website gwenolsen.com she has a memorial to her niece, a 20-year-old victim of drug-induced "suicidal thought formation".
