CoachBri’s Blog

Editor’s note: Dr. Carl Elliott, an M.D. and Ph.D., is the author of “White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine” (Beacon Press, 2010).

(CNN) — If you want to understand the way prescription drugs are marketed today, have a look at the 1928 book, “Propaganda,” by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations in America.

For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. When Bernays was working as a salesman for Mozart pianos, for example, he did not simply place advertisements for pianos in newspapers. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, Bernays persuaded reporters to write about a new trend: Sophisticated people were putting aside a special room in the home for playing music. Once a person had a music room, Bernays believed, he would naturally think of buying a piano. As Bernays wrote, “It will come to him as his own idea.”

Just as Bernays sold pianos by selling the music room, pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is “disease branding.”

To brand a disease is to shape its public perception in order to make it more palatable to potential patients. Panic disorder, reflux disease, erectile dysfunction, restless legs syndrome, bipolar disorder, overactive bladder, ADHD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, even clinical depression: All these conditions were once regarded as rare until a marketing campaign transformed the brand.

Once a branded disease has achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy, there is no need to convince anyone that a drug to treat it is necessary. It will come to him as his own idea.

Disease branding works especially well for two kinds of conditions. The first is the shameful condition that can be destigmatized. For instance, when Pharmacia launched Detrol in the late 1990s, the condition the drug treated was known to doctors as “urge incontinence.” Patients called it “accidentally peeing in my pants” and were embarrassed to bring it up with their physicians.

Pharmacia fixed the problem by rebranding the condition as “overactive bladder.” Whereas “incontinence” suggested weakness and was associated mainly with elderly women, the phrase “overactive bladder” evoked a supercharged organ frantically working overtime.

To qualify for a diagnosis of “overactive bladder,” patients did not actually have to lose bladder control.” They simply needed to go to the bathroom a lot.

The vice president of Pharmacia, Neil Wolf, explained the branding strategy in a 2002 presentation called “Positioning Detrol: Creating a Disease.” By creating the disease of “overactive bladder,” Wolf claimed, Pharmacia created a market of 21 million potential patients.

Another good candidate for branding is a condition that can be plausibly portrayed as under-diagnosed. Branding such a condition assures potential patients that they are part of a large and credible community of sufferers. For example, in 1999, the FDA approved the antidepressant Paxil for the treatment of “social anxiety disorder,” a condition previously known as “shyness.”

In order to convince shy people they had social anxiety disorder, GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, hired a PR firm called Cohn and Wolfe. Cohn and Wolfe put together a public awareness campaign called “Imagine being allergic to people,” which was allegedly sponsored by a group called the “Social Anxiety Disorders Coalition.”

GlaxoSmithKline also recruited celebrities like Ricky Williams, the NFL running back, and paid them to give interviews to the press about their own social anxiety disorder. Finally, they hired academic psychiatrists working on social anxiety disorder and sent them out on the lecture circuit in the top 25 media markets.

The results were remarkable. In the two years before Paxil was approved for social anxiety, there were only about 50 references to social anxiety disorder in the press. But in 1999, during the PR campaign, there were over a billion references.

Within two years Paxil had become the seventh most profitable drug in America, and Cohn and Wolfe had picked up an award for the best PR campaign of 1999. Today, social anxiety disorder, far from being rare, is often described as the third most common mental illness in the world.

It is hard to brand a disease without the help of physicians, of course. So drug companies typically recruit academic “thought leaders” to write and speak about any new conditions they are trying to introduce. It also helps if the physicians believe the branded condition is dangerous.

When AstraZeneca introduced Prilosec (and later Nexium) for heartburn, for example, it famously repositioned heartburn as “gastroesophageal reflux disease,” or GERD. But it also commissioned research to demonstrate the devastating consequences of failing to treat it.

If all drugs were harmless, disease branding would be relatively harmless, too. But no drug is completely benign.

For example, Detrol can make elderly people delirious and may cause memory problems. Paxil is associated with sexual dysfunction and dependence. It also carries a black-box warning for suicide in children and adolescents. Side effects like these are a part of every drug. But they are never part of the brand.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Carl Elliott.

from http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/06/10/pf-14356871.html

June 11, 2010

At graduation, Sara Carlin was a straight-A student who dreamed of becoming a doctor. (Photo courtesy the Carlin family)

Sara Carlin had everything to live for: She was smart, athletic, beautiful and pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor.

But on May 6, 2007, that bright future ended abruptly with a piece of electrical wire.

The promising 18-year-old had hung herself in her family’s Oakville basement and her grieving parents blame her suicide on the Paxil antidepressant she’d been prescribed more than a year before.

In emotional testimony that left many fighting back tears, Sara’s mother Rhonda told a coroner’s inquest that her daughter earned 90’s in school, played baseball and women’s hockey, held a part-time job at an optometrist’s office and tutored other kids in math.

“She was a pretty exceptional girl, she was absolutely loving and she was beautiful,” her mom proudly recalled Wednesday before the presiding coroner, Dr. Bert Lauwers. “She really was an exceptional daughter.”

But in the early part of 2006, Sara began to change. During the family’s March break vacation to Palm Springs, she wouldn’t get out of bed most days and got drunk at dinner. “It was so unlike her,” her mom said.

It was only later that she learned Sara had complained of anxiety and depression to her family doctor and had recently been prescribed Paxil, one of the antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

“I said, ‘Why on earth, Sara would you be on antidepressants?’ I was astounded,” she recalled for the five-member jury. “Why, why would he be giving these to her? This was a wonderful, happy girl.”

While Sara lost her much older brother to a drug overdose in 2000, her mother believed her daughter had coped well with his death and never wanted the counselling she’d been offered.

So this need for antidepressants, she said, came out of the blue.

“She was very troubled, much more troubled than any of us knew,” her mother acknowledged.

While her parents repeatedly voiced their reservations about Paxil, Sara brushed them off, saying her doctor told her it would make her feel better. “I didn’t even know the horrific side effects of Paxil at that time,” her mom said. “I certainly didn’t know what I know now.”

Health Canada issued warnings in 2003 and 2004 that prescribing antidepressants to teens could lead to behavioural or emotional changes that might put them at increased risk of suicidal behaviour.

Over the next few months, Sara’s behaviour changed even more. She suddenly quit her job and stopped playing hockey. Her mom said she was unaware Sara was drinking and doing cocaine; she just knew she wasn’t herself.

“She was really lethargic and tired and pale. She’d lost weight. We were concerned. “

Just as she was starting her first year in health sciences at the University of Western Ontario, Sara was diagnosed with mononeucleosis. Her parents were almost relieved, hoping it explained the change in their daughter.

But her downward spiral continued at university to the point where she had drug debts, was missing classes and was eventually taken by ambulance to a London emergency room after mixing her prescription medications with alcohol and cocaine.

She withdrew from school and came home to Oakville.

It was the first time her mom learned Sara was doing coke and was now on four prescribed medications: Paxil, a second antidepressant, Ativan and a sleeping pill.

The night before her suicide, Sara held a pre-drink for friends in her basement and then headed to a local pub where she continued drinking. A friend eventually drove her home, but not before stopping at a home where he thinks she picked up drugs.

When her mom found her room empty the next morning, she just assumed Sara had gone out early for breakfast. As the day wore on, she and her husband Neil became increasingly worried when no one could locate her.

“Then I heard Neil just screaming, screaming and you could hear it all the way in the backyard,” she recalled, the tears rolling down her face. “Neil was screaming, ‘She hung herself.’”

Saturday 12 December 2009

by: Evelyn Pringle, t r u t h o u t | Report
from http://www.truthout.org/1213091

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.

On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.

In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.

The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as “mood stablizers” and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.

Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement.

Psychiatric Drugs Explained

During an interview with Street Spirit in August 2005, investigative journalist and author of “Mad in America,” Robert Whitaker, described the dangers of psychiatric drugs. “When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs,” he said, “you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD.”

“All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks,” Whitaker said. However, what “you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety, over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients.”

“So even on the target symptoms, there’s greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms,” he reports, “And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself.”

Whitaker told Street Spirit that the rate of Americans disabled by mental illness has skyrocketed since Prozac came on the market in 1987, and reports: (1) the number of mentally disabled people in the US has been increasing at a rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987, (2) that represents an increase of 410 new people per day and (3) the disability rate has continued to increase and one in every 50 Americans is disabled by mental illness.

The statistics above beg the question of how could this happen when the so-called new generation of “wonder drugs” arrived on the market during the exact same time period. The truth is, the “wonder drugs” cause most of the bizarre behaviors listed by doctors to warrant a mental illness disability.

Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

The CIA “World Factbook” estimate the world population to be about 6.8 billion and the US population to be a mere 307 million. In an April 2008 report, the market research firm Datamonitor reported that the “US dominates the ADHD market with a 94 percent market share.”

ADHD drug prices at a middle dose for 90 pills at DrugStore.com, are: Adderall $278, Concerta $412, Desoxyn $366, Strattera $464 and Vyvanse $385. Daytrana costs $437 for three boxes of 30 nine-hour patches.

The SSRI and SNRI antidepressants include GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil and Wellbutrin, Pfizer’s Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs, Luvox by Solvay, Wyeth’s Effexor and Pristiq and Lilly’s Prozac and Cymbalta. The average price of these drugs is about $300 for 90 pills at DrugStore.com.

The prices for anticonvulsants can run as high as $929 for 180 tablets of Glaxo’s Lamictal, and $1170 for 180 tablets of Johnson & Johnson’s Topamax.

In 2008, the atypical antipsychotics took over the slot as the top revenue earners in the US, and include Seroquel by AstraZeneca; Risperdal and Invega marketed by Janssen, a division of J&J; Geodon by Pfizer; Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb; Novartis’ Clozaril and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa. The average price on these drugs for 100 pills at DrugStore.com is about $1,000. Lilly also sells Symbyax, a drug with Zyprexa and Prozac combined, at a cost $1,564 for 90 capsules at DrugStore.com in May 2009.

The briefing material submitted to an FDA advisory panel in April 2009 reported that an estimated 25.9 million patients worldwide had been exposed to Seroquel since its launch in 1997 through July 31, 2007, in the US, and the second quarter of 2007 for countries outside the US. Of that number, an estimated nearly 15.9 million took Seroquel in the US, compared to only ten million patients in the rest of the world. In 2008, the US accounted for roughly $3 billion of Seroquel’s $4.5 billion in worldwide sales.

For the full-year of 2008, Eli Lilly reported worldwide Zyprexa sales of about $4.7 billion, with US sales of $2.2 billion and only $2.5 billion for the rest of the world.

FDA as Promotional Tool

On June 12, 2009, an FDA advisory panel gave the green light to expand the marketing of Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon for use with 13 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with schizophrenia and 10 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The FDA usually follows its advisers’ recommendations.

“Such approval gives manufacturers a shield from liability – for illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.

“And such approval ensures increased use of these drugs,” she warned. “Manufacturers and mental health providers will profit while children’s physical and mental health will be sacrificed.”

“The body of evidence showing these drugs to be harmful is irrefutable,” she said, “it is documented in FDA’s postmarketing database, and in secret internal company documents uncovered during litigation.”

According to Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the atypicals increase the risk of obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke.

He said the drugs were marketed as safer and easier to tolerate than the older, cheaper antipsychotics because they would cause fewer neurological injuries like tardive dyskinesia and akathisia.

Those claims turned out to be totally false, he said, and “they continue to cause same neurological side-effects as the older antipsychotics.”

“Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs, especially when it pertains to large-profit-margin psychiatric drugs, which can be wrought with issues of non-compliance because of their horrendous side effect profiles,” according to a June 29, 2009 paper titled, “Drugging Our Children to Death,” in Health News Digest.com, by Gwen Olsen, who spent over a decade as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and authored the book, “Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher.”

Children are forced to take their drugs by doctors, parents and school personnel, she said. “So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and ‘longevity.’”

“In other words,” Olsen noted, “they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!”

“The initiative to drug our children for profit has exceeded all common sense boundaries and is threatening the welfare of every American child,” she stated, and it “is up to each and every one of us to stop this madness!”

Drug Makers Busted

Most all of the psychiatric drug companies have come under investigation over the past several years for promoting their drugs for off-label use, especially with children. However, the fines they end up paying are trivial compared to the profits earned through the illegal marketing campaigns.

In September 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into a $515 million civil settlement with the US Department of Justice for illegally marketing drugs, including Abilify, for off-label uses. In the first six months of 2009, Abilify had sales of $1.9 billion. In 2008, the salary and compensation package of Bristol-Myers’ CEO, James Cornelius, was $23,150,236, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch Database.

On January 29, 2009, Paxil and Wellbutrin maker, GlaxoSmithKline, announced that it would record a legal charge in the fourth quarter of 2008 of $400 million relating to an ongoing investigation initiated by the US attorney’s office in Colorado into the US marketing and promotional practices for several products for the period 1997 to 2004. The government inquired about alleged off-label marketing as well as medical education programs for doctors, “other speaker events, special issue boards, advisory boards, speaker training programmes, clinical studies, and related grants, fees, travel and entertainment,” according to a Glaxo annual report.

In January 2009, Eli Lilly settled with the DOJ and more than 30 states for $1.4 billion over the off-label marketing of Zyprexa. The agreement included a $615 million fine for a federal criminal charge. But $1.4 billion was chump change considering that Zyprexa was still Lilly’s best seller in 2008, with sales of $4.69 billion. Lilly also has paid over $1 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Zyprexa patients. In the first six months of 2009, Zyprexa sales were $1.5 billion. In 2008, Lilly’s CEO, John Lechleiter, had a pay package worth $12,856,882

In September 2009, the DOJ reached a $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer related to the off-label promotion of several drugs, including the psychiatric drugs, Geodon, Zoloft and Lyrica, in the largest health-care fraud settlement in history. But even though Pfizer took the entire $2.3 billion as an earnings charge for the fourth quarter of 2008, the drug maker was still able to post a fourth quarter profit of $268 million. Pfizer’s CEO in 2008, Jeffrey Kindler, had a salary and pay package of $15,547,600.

Johnson & Johnson is also dealing with the DOJ and state-level investigations into the off-label marketing of Risperdal. The company’s latest SEC filing lists nine subpoenas received by the company involving promotions of Risperdal, including one “seeking information regarding the Company’s financial relationship with several psychiatrists.” In the first six months of 2009, Risperdal earned $660 million. J&J’s CEO, William Weldon, had a pay package worth $29,127,432 in 2008.

AstraZeneca’s third quarter SEC filing lists a $520 million tentative settlement agreement with the US attorney’s office in Philadelphia to resolve allegations related to the off-label marketing of Seroquel. At “least 34 states are pursuing separate investigations of AstraZeneca’s marketing practices as part of a joint investigation and others may be conducting their own probes,” according to Ed Silverman on Pharmalot.

“A half a billion dollar one-time settlement is just a small cost of doing business for a company that sold $17 billion worth of the offending drug in the last five years,” Dr. Roy Poses points out on the Health Care Renewal web site. In 2008 alone, Seroquel had world-wide sales of more than $4.4 billion.

As of July 13, 2009, AstraZeneca was also defending approximately 10,381 served or answered personal injury lawsuits and approximately 19,391 plaintiff groups involving Seroquel, according to SEC filings. Some of the cases also include claims against other drug makers such as Eli Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceutica and/or Bristol-Myers Squibb, the filing notes.

On September 23, 2009, Shire Pharmaceuticals received a subpoena from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in coordination with the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, seeking production of documents related to the sales and marketing of Adderall XR, Daytrana and Vyvanse, according to Shire’s third quarter report for 2009.

In a November 6, 2009, SEC filing, Abbott Labs said the federal prosecutor for the Western District of Virginia was conducting an investigation for the US Justice Department of whether the company’s sales and marketing of Depakote violated civil or criminal laws, including the Federal False Claims Act and an anti-kickback statute related to reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid programs to third parties.

In 2008, Depakote had sales of $1.36 billion and Abbott CEO, Miles White, had a salary and compensation package of $28,253,387.

In February 2009, the DOJ unsealed a lawsuit alleging that Forest Laboratories marketed the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro for unapproved uses in children, and paid kickbacks to induce doctors to promote the drugs, including Dr. Jeffrey Bostic at Harvard University. In its latest SEC filing, Forest disclosed that it reached an agreement in principle in May 2009 to settle the civil aspects of US federal and state probes. “Penalties in the civil settlement are covered by a $170 million reserve Forest created in April,” according to a November 9 report by Dow Jones.

Forest also disclosed that the agreement “does not resolve the government’s ongoing investigation into potential criminal law violations” related to Celexa and Lexapro, and thyroid drug Levothroid, Dow Jones notes. In 2008, the salary and compensation for Forest CEO, Howard Solomon, was $6,565,324.

Over the past year and a half, a large number of so-called “Key Opinion Leaders” in the field of psychiatry have been exposed for not fully disclosing money received from many of the drug companies above through an investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee under the leadership of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

The list so far includes Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens; Charles Nemeroff and Zackery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association from Stanford; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas and Fred Goodwin, the former host of a radio show called “Infinite Minds,” broadcast by National Pubic Radio.

Fines as a Business Expense

The fraud settlements are “merely a cost of doing business to these pharmaceutical Goliaths and, in fact, caps their liability for these crimes,” said Alaskan attorney Jim Gottstein, the leader of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), a public interest law firm.

“Most importantly,” he noted, “these settlements have not stopped the practice of psychiatrists and other prescribers giving these drugs to children and youth and Medicaid continuing to pay for these fraudulent claims.”

“Because of the massive, harmful, increase in the psychiatric drugging of America’s children and youth, who are inherently forced, PsychRights has made addressing the problem a priority,” he said.

Gottstein conducted an investigation and determined that the vast majority of off-label psychotropic drug prescriptions for children and youth that are paid for by Medicaid constitute Medicaid fraud.

PsychRights now has a national “Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth,” designed to address this problem by “having lawsuits brought against the doctors prescribing these harmful, ineffective drugs, their employers, and the pharmacies filling these prescriptions and submitting them to Medicaid for reimbursement,” according to its web site.

“Anyone who submits or causes claims to be submitted to Medicaid for drugs that are not for a ‘medically accepted indication’ is committing Medicaid Fraud,” said Gottstein, in a July 27, 2009 press release announcing the launch of the national campaign.

“Those guilty of this Medicaid Fraud include psychiatrists and other physicians prescribing these drugs, their employers, and pharmacies submitting the false claims to Medicaid,” he pointed out.

PsychRights estimates that over $2 billion in such fraudulent Medicaid claims are being paid by the government each year.

“Once one sues over specific offending prescriptions, all of such prescriptions can be brought in, which means that any psychiatrist on the losing end of such a lawsuit will almost certainly be bankrupted, because each offending prescription carries a penalty of between $5,500 and $11,000,” PsychRights explained.

It is hoped that once the doctors and pharmacies realize they are subject to financially ruinous Medicaid fraud judgments, the practice will be stopped or substantially reduced.

“Each prescriber may have a million dollars or few, at most, to lose, but the pharmacies’ financial exposure can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and it is hoped this will attract attorneys to take these cases,” the web site noted.

In September and October 2009, Gottstein gave presentations on the initiative at the annual conferences of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in order to find people who are potentially interested and willing to pursue such cases.

“This was successful and we have at least a few such cases cooking,” he reported. “PsychRights stands ready to help people interested in bringing such suits.”

In late 2006, Gottstein won international fame by subpoenaing and releasing thousands of documents involving Eli Lilly’s illegal marketing of Zyprexa, which resulted in front page stories in The New York Times.

PsychRights also has an appeal pending on a lawsuit filed against the state of Alaska and responsible state officials seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that Alaskan children and youth on Medicaid have the right not to be administered psychotropic drugs unless and until a number of specific conditions are met. The lawsuit seeks to prohibit the state from paying for psychiatric drugs prescribed off-label to children and youth.

In responding to the lawsuit, the state claimed that they do have any control over or responsibility for the psychiatric drugging of children in their custody, or any responsibility under Medicaid, and moved for dismissal on the grounds that PsychRights does not have standing, or the right to bring the suit, because it was not harmed by the state’s actions.

The court agreed and dismissed the case. “We think the judge is wrong and have filed an appeal,” said Gottstein.

In May 2009, Gottstein sent letters to Sens. Charles Grassley and Herb Kohl and Reps. Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, John Dingell and Barney Frank, describing the massive Medicaid fraud involved in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children in the US and asked for “assistance in stopping these illegal reimbursements.”

As of November 8, 2009, Gottstein reported, “I haven’t gotten as much as an acknowledgment of receipt from any of the members of Congress to whom I wrote.”

While pursuing causes on behalf of PsychRights, Gottstein donates all of his time on a pro bono basis.

from http://www.truthout.org/1213091
via Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license

On August 7th and 8th, the first annual Human Potential Plus Conference was held at the home of John and Sandy Maaskant. We all had a great time, met some fantastic new people and enjoyed the discussions. We’re looking forward to next year’s conference! 

Bill Maher is an intelligent man. However, all of his arguments are still put together by a fragmented view of the world. He says some very powerful things that point to America’s deception. Yet the real deception in the world is the external conditioning that creates the fragmenting and deception of our own psychological sickness. Patriotism to any flag creates chaos that robs people of their brotherhood and connectedness. To think from any religious point of view is to put limitations on the power of human possibility for insight. The things of thinking can never in themselves bring about fundamental change! Thought cannot perceive or reach anything deeper than itself. So any movement, be it political, economic, or religious, will never go to the core of the problem that creates all this human disorder. Unless we stop being poisoned by the cultures we live in, or start to raise our children to be citizens of the earth, who don’t have to spend their life conforming to the culture we live in, we will remain self-centered, egocentric and violent. The picture the world has of mental health is of a person able to conform to a pattern of society and succeed in it by making a their fortune, whatever that may be. They forgot that actual success in this society is truly an indication of sickness. Less than 1% of the richest people in the world have 85% of the world’s wealth. This past bailout will end up, when it is all over, costing America trillions of dollars. Once we see we are stimulating the economy for the rich, by the rich, we will also see that we are costing coming generations hardship.

The world economy is based on war and the machine of war. This is nothing more than a reflection of our own consciousness, which is always setting up conflict, or the inability to get along. Bill Maher is a comedian who does a great job of pointing out fragmentation and holding it up for us all to look at. By doing this well he casts the idea into our minds that because we see the fragmentation or sickness of this world is it does something. BUT IT DOES NOT.

The only thing that will change the human experience is to remove from our hearts the things of the mind. That is the journey we are all on. To empty is to have no religion or political identification and to not let conflict become the dictator of thought itself. The pattern set out by thought is the wrong pattern. Any pattern thought projects itself into is a place where it doesn’t belong. Compassion, insight, and love can use thought and then thought has a purpose. Without compassion conflict will never end.

Coach bri

It was 2:15 AM and I suddenly awoke. I put on my shoes and jacket and entered into a warm November morning. It all seemed so strange – the night was dark warm and had the feeling of summer. As I left the confines of my house and entered onto the path between the tall trees, the stars became visible. It was a calm and still night and there was a profound silence. As I took the path to the driveway and then onto the road, I felt as if I was the intruder. I walked down the road for some time, just watching my own thoughts and how each one connected or had some type of feeling with it. I was amazed at my own mechanical state of thinking, watching how I was thinking and feeling and had so much residue of the past. I eventually came to the small town and sat in the silhouette of the street lamp. The small town had such a different feeling at night. Everything seemed so much smaller held in the canopy of darkness. A small amount of light that seemed to hold the town in place offered one a sense of certainty. I stayed there for several minutes and then took the road back to my house. As I walked across the property I made my way to the pond and sat down on the wooden bench overlooking the small pond. The fountain of the pond seemed to offer a gentleness as all moving water seems to. I leaned back on the bench, stretched out my arms and tilted my head to the heavens. I breathed the warm November air in deeply and felt that amidst silence all thought seemed to come to an end. I felt the rapture of every living thing around me. I felt the song of silence remove all thought and false security of the self. I watched the heavens move and the changing canopy of the trees as the sun peaked its head on the horizon.

In the last month or so people have been consumed by the Canadian election and now the American election. There are some people who are not interested at all and have become apathetic and I can relate to their apathy. The greed of the American economy created by deception and corruption has been fed more lies and deception by a massive bailout that in time will probably reach about $2 trillion. There is so much corruption within politics, economics, and religion. Such things have stupefied the brain. What is going on today has been going on since the dawn of time. Political, economic and religious revolt, one group trying to overthrow the other. This has been the history of humankind and every generation plays out the same sorrow, misfortune and corruption, thinking that they are going through it for the first time. We refuse to see that our brains are stupefied by beliefs. In America religious idealism in the name of Jesus and the common phrase of “God bless America” has stupefied the person’s brain. In the Eastern world the Muslims have the same fanaticism as the Christians, each pointing the finger at each other, creating conflict that eventually will lead to war. This has been the history of humankind and no political movement to the left or to the right will put humankind in a better position. Every president in the United States that has tried to govern with some sense of truth and principal has been assassinated. America is not the only country that has dealt with assassinations. But the fact remains, whether Obama or McCain become elected, the disorder, corruption and greed will continue. Whoever gets elected gets elected based on the favors for the money they’ve received to push their campaign.

In all religions the goal is to turn humanity in a different direction, a different course than we are presently on and no religion has been able to do it. Instead, it has created fanatical belief systems that people have been willing to kill for. Religion has become an instrument of war, claiming peace. Political and economic policy, however noble, will never change a human being. All throughout history everything has been tried to educate humankind toward a different movement that allows us to live together peacefully and satisfy our basic needs without preventing others from meeting and satisfying theirs. The failed system of communism has the intention of offering economic equality. But because of the external control psychology of human beings, we aren’t able to bring about economic equality because inwardly we are corrupt. Every ism, anti, philosophy or belief system that thought invents will never change humanity. The very nature of that philosophy or belief system is put together through the process of thinking which in itself is a mechanical and corrupt movement. Most human beings are caught in the web and the network of thinking. Thinking has become the dominant factor operating in human beings and everything that it creates is limited.

When you hear the Sarah Palins of the world discussing their stupefied belief system, they act as a mirror to see your own. Why can’t we set our belief systems aside and see clearly that if you have a strong belief in God, in the state, in politics, in your country or in economics, that belief is created by thinking? We want to be rescued by God and do things in the name of God, because we love that approach to life and then we are not responsible for what we do or think. Beliefs remove the power of doubt and skeptical thinking and it is only through doubt and skeptical thinking that human beings can begin to solve their internal problems. And then there are external problems. The movement to solve the external problems is the same position as communism. Communism tries to create the environment of the equality without first removing the poison that prevents equality. These are the internal forces created by thinking, such as agreed and self-centeredness.

Obama may be elected, although I do have my doubts, because the election will probably be fixed. America is a country that shoots its own presidents and then covers it up, as in the case of JFK, and will not open Pandora’s box and make those people responsible for the death of the Kennedys. In light of this mentality, how can we possibly expect of America to heal itself when lies and deception are more important than truth? America has become a nation of personal beliefs, based on a false religion of Christianity. Every time a person amounts to some good or has a sense of clarity or insight, we have been trained through our conditioning to connect that insight to some tradition or belief system we hold so dear. But the fact is people come upon goodness from insight and compassion, which is an internal intelligence because they have gotten their self-centeredness out of the way.

Throughout the world, America has been hated because they keep putting themselves in the position of telling other people what’s best for them and ramming down other people’s throats their identification with a piece of colored cloth called the flag. This is a sick form of motivation. Human beings, regardless of creed and colour are one organism, as all trees are one organism. Regardless of the type of tree, it is still a tree and it reaches its potential as all things in nature do, except human beings. Our minds have become mediocre because we are full of the things of thinking. We are not Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, and Communists. This is all a sign of our deep internal sickness because we have identified with the outside. We are one world, one people, and one planet. I have lots of good American friends and most of them see beyond the political organizing and don’t identify who they are with their flag.

Billions of years ago tribes warred over belief systems. Today those tribes are nations with just more sophisticated belief systems interwoven with instincts that have now given us the arrogance to destroy our planet or create genocide. When you think of Obama, who attends a Christian church regularly, and the Republicans call him a Muslim, and then you have McCain who they call a Christian who doesn’t attend church at all, this shows you how nuts and stupefied the American brain is. All beliefs stupefy the brain and that stupefaction brings about conflict. That conflict leads to division and war and that is an absolute fact. You have only to look at your daily life with your husband or wife or your children and see that conflict of belief is playing out – it happens on a personal scale so it’s happening on a global scale. The only way out of this stupefaction is to end one’s beliefs and set the thinking process in a safe place, which is dealing with technological things.

Where thinking creates the psychological entity of the self, that self will look for certainty and that certainty will be false. If any country invaded another country people within that country would rise up and protect their homes and fight for their life. But why is it that psychologically people come in, peddling their beliefs, religious political or otherwise, and we will fight to the death to maintain our psychological beliefs. We constantly give up our power to doubt and discriminate to some religious or political authority because we have become mediocre and complacent, fueled by our greed. We are addicted to the pleasure that thought brings and we have bought into the pleasure of thought and are paying an enormous price. Beliefs give us a great sense of pleasure but create unbelievable insecurity. Therefore our ability to discern, our ability to make our own decisions, or our ability not to decide, has been crippled because we have lost the capacity to listen. Listening now is simply listening through the content we have of the other’s content. This is sensory listening and that sensory listing is corrupt. To really listen is to set aside one’s prejudice, one’s content, so that through that listening the false can be perceived. Most of us are not interested in anything but maintaining our own pleasure. And until we began to look deeper into the structure of ourselves we will never change because we are the world that we have created – the mess is ours.

Coach bri

I have received a lot of questions lately – some deep, some not so deep. I am always amazed that people want to know what I am thinking especially around certain topics!

So here is a question I recently received. Please be advised that this is just what I see.

Brian, what do you think of what is happening is the U.S? The bailout, and all that?

Why do you want to know how I see it? Isn’t it more important to look and see what you think and feel about something?

True but I want to know what you think about all this.

Please tell me why?

You seem to see deeper into things I guess.

Well, please take this with a gain of salt sir most of it is opinion and therefore worthless!

It may not be!

First sir, in America a majority of the people are conditioned by religion, politics, being patriotic, and the need to conform. They don’t think for themselves. Most are extremist, pointing their fingers at the extremes of the east. Being so heavily conditioned (as we are also in this country), we are not really interested in change. We only want change that betters us economically. The debt of America is smoke and mirrors, the left hand bullying the right. The right hand tries to find away to get the bully back.

If we were really serious about change we would not be a part of any war, or the building up of armaments. Politicians are the children of the external control psychology that is destroying the world. Most will crawl into bed with anyone or one anything to get the vote. Is this not the way of politics? The crisis in America and in any country is in each individual conscience. It is here we have the tribalistic attitude that has created nationalism, the flag and all that is done in the name of it. This nationalism is at the root of war, poverty and the American way. In the same way, much of religion and the return to fundamentalism is a sign of deep confusion because it ends inquiry and confronting how petty and small our lives really are. Small minds criticize other, live in beliefs, and find security in religion and politics as a means to escape and be entertained. Take a look at the 700 billion dollar bailout, a trillion dollar war, and oil companies and other war profiteers making billions off the people they say they care about. They cut the soul out of their own people. Anyone who commits atrocities outside their own borders soon creates them within them. As you do on to others you do onto yourself. There are people in America that are awake and they have been silenced because they are not good entertainment. To get people to think for themselves you have to show them they are not themselves but what their nation wants them to be. But what their nation wants them to be does not create freedom! It is exile and tyranny. Freedom implies space! You can’t think if you think as a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew, an American, a Canadian, or an Iranian.

All of this clouds the brain and creates reaction. The word react means to “re-in-act”, to do something one has done before. This doing what we have done before is external psychology. To free the brain from it means to be clear so that you can embrace you enemy, which is one’s self and all its self-interest. This is what cripples America and all nations the world over.

Coach bri