Patrick McGorry Voodoo Early Psychosis

Would you give this child harmful drugs?

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As an advocate for children and youth mental health I’m concerned about a worrying trend to ‘catch the early signs of psychosis’ in very young children and young adults based on Patrick McGorry’s evangelical rantings. There is no current definitive scientific test that can distinguish the early signs of mental illness in youths or adults.

The current catch cry from psychiatrists is, ‘Detecting Early Psychosis will result in earlier treatment and better quality of life’. This Early Psychosis prevention is NOT based in science and has been and continues to be evangelized without one shred of verifiable evidence by psychiatrists like Patrick McGorry in his EPPIC and PACE programs.

It’s also disturbing to see Canada involved in a  four-year-old early intervention and psychosis program that is [in part] Government funded being touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread, even without long-term health studies of future repercussions.

Recently Patrick McGorry was willing to undertake (with Australian Government funding) Human Drug Trials to systematically medicate large numbers of young people with anti-psychotic medication to find the one person he says ‘needs to have these drugs’. These Human Drug Trials are experimentations with old drugs that have been proven to have scant benefit but massive side effects.

The Sunday Age recently revealed information relating to, “13 local and international experts [who] lodged a formal complaint calling for the trial not to go ahead due to concerns children who had not yet been diagnosed with a psychotic illness would be unnecessarily given drugs with potentially dangerous side effects”.

Patrick McGorry’s EPPIC and PACE programs systematically medicate large numbers of children and young people with anti-psychotic medications like Quetiapine, sold as Seroquel, in the ‘hope’ of finding the one child that ‘may’ at some [undisclosed] time require mental health assistance. This makes me think that maybe we’re not paying attention to what’s happening in the world of Psycho-medication.

It’s also disturbing to uncover that one of the medications recommended by Patrick McGorry, Quetiapine (Seroquel), is manufactured by AstraZeneca, one of the largest sponsors providing unlimited funding to McGorry. Endeavoring to find the one young person that ‘may’ succumb to early psychosis by attempting to evaluate every child (via a tic-the-box system) and then medicating a large group of children suspected of developing psychosis in the future is akin to practicing Voodoo Science and administering Snake Oil on the part of any medical professional.

Considering the vast number of debilitating and some-times fatal side effects adults are currently experiencing from pharmaceutical medications, one has to ask, Do we want to subject innocent children to a lifetime of legal drug exposure disguised as Early Psychosis Prevention?

Katherine McCormick (CEO)
Utopia Research Institute Limited