Propaganda on the BBC
Lotus
Paroxetine ('Seroxat' 'Paxil'). It's very destructive stuff:
GlaxoSmithKline publicity material voiced-over in sombre tones about
the mood changes in the first few weeks of use... as I write, there's
tear-jerking propaganda footage about some young man (North-of-England
scenes, books on the bedroom shelf, sad tones describing his ambition
to be a musician) all leading up to the dreadful evil of
antidepressants and the tragedy of a young life lost.
Doubtless we'll see some pro-forma statement by GSK - lit to make them
look like the villains the viewers now know them to be - bracketed by
interviews with heroic defenders of the public against the evils of
Big Business.
Paroxetine's overprescribed. Some of that's due to GSK promoting the
drug for profit.
It's an SSRI - that means it'll take weeks to work, and it'll have
horrible side effects. Among other problems, the patient will be
emotionally vulnerable. Cruelly, the initial lifting of depression may
give them sufficient deciosion-making ability and resolve to kill
themselves.
Sometimes the side effects are too severe to continue.
It's beneficial, but rarely effects a complete 'cure' on its own:
advanced countries prescribe antidepressants alongside therapy. Many
GP's in England don't.
Sometimes it doesn't work at all, no matter what you do.
Some people are cured of depression, or helped through an episode of
it, with the help of Paroxetine. A disease serious enough to justify
using a drug with terrible side effects - far worse than any
Paroxtine's - because people die with this disease. Others wish they
could. Many lose decades of a life to the disease and never have the
things that smug propagandists with TV production budgets take for
granted.
Some of the truth will make it into the programme. Some of it won't.
Some things that might, in a court of law, be defensible as 'true'
will be presented so as to lie by distorting public perceptions.
Maybe there was a time when TV documentaries were about the
presentation of fact: that time is now gone. Journalism is about
stories, and about presenting a case - one particular point of view -
and occasionally some words of disagreement to give 'balance'. Facts
and footage are accessories to the story and serve to reinforce the
message to the viewer.
If Paxil - or antidepressants in general - becomes harder to obtain,
some of us will die. Remember that, when you encounter people whose
perception of the truth has been distorted by the BBC tonight. One of
them might be your GP. Another might be a lay member of the local NHS
trust. Others will be people you thought you trusted with the
knowledge that you were on a medication: now they know, because they
heard it on the BBC, that you are pill-popping to feed an imaginary
illness, grasping at the excuse of an invented condition and the false
salvation invented by Glaxo's advertising copywriters.
Lotus
Little Miss Mikey
silico...@yahoo.com says...
<snip>
I doubt the doctors or NHS will be influenced by the programme, they have
the statistics to show how many patients it has helped.
I went through hell with the side-effects when I started the drug, I
became very suicidal & started self-harming after months of not doing.
Personally though, I think my mental attitude was more to do with being
diagnosed with depression than any side-effect of the drug.
Which ever way, I battled through it, and after a few weeks the drug
kicked in and I'm better now than I have been for years.
I'd say to anyone who is prescribed the drug, don't be put of by whatever
has been said on TV tonight, grit your teeth and prepare yourself for a
couple of rough weeks when you start on it. It's worth going through if
the drug saves you years of misery in the future...
--
Little Miss Mikey
Lachlan
Felt like my head was turning inside out.
"Lotus" <silico...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:b7fe392.02101...@posting.google.com...
Ivanalias
>From: silico...@yahoo.com (Lotus)
>as I write, there's
>tear-jerking propaganda footage about some young man (North-of-England
>scenes, books on the bedroom shelf, sad tones describing his ambition
>to be a musician)
That'd be Newport, Monmouthshire, which has somehow moved several hundred miles
to the North overnight then, eh? Dohhh....
Ivan
Lotus
"Ivanalias" <ivan...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20021013190905...@mb-fj.aol.com...
> That'd be Newport, Monmouthshire, which has somehow moved several hundred
miles
> to the North overnight then, eh? Dohhh....
>
> Ivan
It'd be "Somewhere North Of Watford Gap" and I doubt that the BBC
news and Current Affairs Unit know the difference. Nevertheless, Mea Culpa.
Lotus
A quick note: check your headers when replying. This is cross-posted to a
politics group critical of the BBC.
I know, It's not considered good manners by all - but it is permissible
where the content of the post is relevant to both groups.
Lotus
welsh witch
"Lotus" <silico...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:b7fe392.02101...@posting.google.com...
<snip>.
>
> If Paxil - or antidepressants in general - becomes harder to obtain,
> some of us will die. Remember that, when you encounter people whose
> perception of the truth has been distorted by the BBC tonight. One
of
> them might be your GP. Another might be a lay member of the local
NHS
> trust. Others will be people you thought you trusted with the
> knowledge that you were on a medication: now they know, because they
> heard it on the BBC, that you are pill-popping to feed an imaginary
> illness, grasping at the excuse of an invented condition and the
false
> salvation invented by Glaxo's advertising copywriters.
>
>
>
> Lotus
*****************************************************
I've just watched Panorama too. I don't know anyone who's been on this
drug but I am really sick of the BBC and all their bias and
propaganda.
(If you find Paxil/anything else hard to obtain why not get it from
the world pharmacies by the way?) Go to www.Google.com type in
"on-line pharmacies"
There was an article re the BBC and their lefty bias and inclination
to propaganda in one of the Sunday papers....can't remember which one
as we have most :-) but its still here in the pile.
We along with lots of others watch Channel 5 news, then the BBC and
then ITV because you simply cannot get a truthful picture of anything
on BBC now.
Look a their Question Time programmes too... Have you ever seen such a
biased collection of people. It would be great if someone filled in
their forms with a lefty agenda/answers who was in fact of the
opposite persuasion!
Women everywhere have been traumatised for the past month re birth
pills and HRT. and breast cancer and heart attacks/strokes but when
the figures are actually analysed the number crunching brings the
instances in the latter case down to about 8 in 10,000 etc AND don't
forget when they;re giving out these figures as Miriam Stoppard says
you're not starting from a position of zero (yes I know:-)
Taking a chance is what life's all about. If you're depressed enough
its better to try something....anything out before you're depressed
enough to jump off a tower block. I do believe depression to be a
really terrible thing and all attempts to cope with it are a must but
its probably to tip toe into a new drug if there is overwhelming
evidence of problems.
I wonder if half or more than half the trouble society has with
depression isn't due to environmental influences rather than something
in the makeup of the patient. The sprays used on crops, the water full
of hormones which it seems can't be filtered out etcetc
--
http://www.walk-wales.org.uk/finland.htm
http://reminis.co.uk
Nick Cooper
> A quick note: check your headers when replying. This is cross-posted to a
> politics group critical of the BBC.
You mean, "a politics group where many of the posters are critical of the BBC."
Lain
with last night's Parorama. It was completely one sided. Shelley Jofre's
interview with GSK was particularly poor. Not only was she wrong to quote
from Oxford Dictionary for a medical term "addiction", there appeared to be
a blurring between causation and coincidences. Coincidences does not connote
causation! It is evident in all medical literature that there will be
withdrawal symptoms when coming off SSRIs. Can anyone here honestly say that
they did not know about withdrawal symptons of SSRIs?
Brian Sunderland
symptons of SSRIs?
Well, obviously, the amount of potential compensation I might be able to
screw out of GSK (or SKB as it was when I was on Seroxat) may have a bearing
on my answer. ;-)
Bri
--
Om mani pémé hung
Anna Begins
says...
In fact, the policy of the p-doc and the hospital where I was a day
patient had a policy to *not* tell patients about any adverse effects,
and to remove information leaflets from packets of pills.
And this was pre-Internet, so I could't have looked them up on Google!
--
Anna
We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we
can find in our travels is an honest friend.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Tamas Gyursanszky
There was something fishy about this Panorama programme.
The clinical researcher that the BBC interviewed assidiously
avoided mentioning the names of the other SSRIs that he had
researched even though he had found that those rival drugs had
similar profiles of adverse reactions. That to me spoke volumes.
I too known nothing about paroxetine, although I understand that
the side-effects of each SSRI are virtually indistinguishable.
Maybe the BBC, in broadcasting this vehemently anti-Seroxat programme,
was doing it as a service for Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Prozac,
the main rival to Seroxat?
In damaging Seroxat, by explicitly attributing all these problems
specifically to it and not its rival drugs, was intended to increase
prescriptions for Prozac et al...
I don't think anyone as of late disputes that the BBC is a dirty whore -
willing to sell herself to the highest bidder and it is with that
in mind that I suspect, admittedly without any proof, that the BBC's
highest bidders this time around could well be GlaxoSmithKline's rival
companies....
Tamas Gyursanszky
I meant to add... there's an interesting article knocking around
showing how CNN, the American "news" channel, boosts its profits... it
basically threatens corporations with smear campaigns _unless_ they
spend shedloads on advertising on CNN... I know the Beeb doesn't
screen adverts (except for itself..) but perhaps something similar
is happening here... Or maybe GSK has just pee-ed off HMG in some way..
Maybe its donations to "New" Labour have not been as large as were expected,
and we all know that "New" Labour is essentially bankrupt...
Lain
to prosecute GSK, depicting it as an evil corporation. They completely
dismissed evidence provided by GSK. And she wrongly equated withdrawal
symptoms with addiction. Very dismayed with a propaganda-type one-sided
programme.
Dan Scorpio
"Lain" <yt...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:aogpv8$6jo$1...@paris.btinternet.com...
...and look at what they talked down (or did
not even talk about at all).
Those are the basic techniques, although there
are a lot of variations (distractions, etc.).
We had an excellent, but long, post on uk.politics.misc
about it (Brave New World Revisited) last week.
I'll cut and paste it here if anybody wants a butchers.
Brock Lesnar
Dan Scorpio <Dan.S...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:aoho5k$aht$1...@helle.btinternet.com...
> We had an excellent, but long, post on uk.politics.misc
> about it (Brave New World Revisited) last week.
> I'll cut and paste it here if anybody wants a butchers.
Please do.
It really erodes your faith in the media when you see them
bandying about propaganda and opinion like this.
Brock
Dan Scorpio
"Brock Lesnar" <hor...@barrysworld.com> wrote in message
news:F62r9.1723$v_5.1...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be
true, or it might be false.
They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our
Western capitalist democracies---the development of a vast mass
communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true
nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally
irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost
infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this
appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were
not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and
rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest
approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where
the performances, though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For
conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must
return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by
frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment---from
poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to
all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public
executions.
But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now
provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the
cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most
fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumble-puppy)
are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of
preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of
the social and political situations.
The other world of religion is different from the other world of
entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly
"not of this world." BOTH ARE DISTRACTIONS and, if lived in too
continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the
people" and so a threat to freedom.
Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are
constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves
effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members
spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now
and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant
other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical
fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who
would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on
repetition, suppression and rationalization---the repetition of
catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of
facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization
of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party of the
State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better
understood, the dictators of the future will doubtlessly learn to
combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the
West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the
rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty
and the survival of democratic institutions.'
[Aldous Huxley: 1958]
Brock Lesnar
>
> "Brock Lesnar" <hor...@barrysworld.com> wrote in message
> news:F62r9.1723$v_5.1...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > Dan Scorpio <Dan.S...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
> > news:aoho5k$aht$1...@helle.btinternet.com...
> >
> >
> > > We had an excellent, but long, post on uk.politics.misc
> > > about it (Brave New World Revisited) last week.
> > > I'll cut and paste it here if anybody wants a butchers.
Ta.
Brock