Antipsychotics are the most commonly used drugs in forced treatment and if we wish to find out how deadly they are, we cannot use the placebo controlled randomised trials in patients with schizophrenia, as they seriously underreport deaths. For example, only 19 of 50 deaths on olanzapine described in trial summaries on websites also appeared in journal articles; and for suicides and suicidal events the numbers were one versus nine and four versus 18, respectively.5 Another reason why trials in schizophrenia are unreliable is their cold turkey design. Patients are almost always in treatment with an antipsychotic drug before they are being randomised,2 and when they are abruptly switched to placebo, their mortality risk increases markedly. One in every 145 patients who entered the trials for risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine and sertindole died, but none of these deaths were mentioned in the scientific literature, and the FDA didn’t require them to be mentioned.6 Many of the patients killed themselves; the suicide rate was two to five times the usual rate for patients with schizophrenia, and a ma*jor reason was withdrawal-induced akathisia.6

Abolishing Forced Treatment in Psychiatry is an Ethical Imperative - Mad In America