Why Cut the Department of Mental Health’s Budget?

The Insane Bloat of the Missouri Department of Mental Health Budget from 1971 to 2009 – now over $1.2 Billion

MO DMH Budgets


Vital Statistics – Order of Magnitude:

1. Every 12 seconds another child takes drugs for the first time. Every 20 seconds a child in the U.S. takes an antidepressant so dangerous that the FDA has issued its strongest “black box” warning, alerting the public that these drugs can cause suicidal thoughts and actions.

2. 20 million children worldwide take psychiatric drugs daily, 9 million of those in the U.S. These drugs potentially cause violent behavior, psychosis, hallucinations, strokes, heart attacks, obesity, life-threatening diabetes and even suicide.

3. Psychiatric drugs do not improve academic performance. The National Institutes of Health reports “there is little improvement in academic achievement or social skills” by children taking stimulant drugs.

4. 628,000 violent crimes occur every year in our schools.

5. $600 billion is generated by the legal and illegal drug trades.

6. 100,000 deaths occur in psychiatric facilities each year.

7. Over 100 million people worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs right now.

8. Psychiatric drugs can cause serious adverse reactions.

9. Every 75 seconds another citizen is incarcerated by psychiatry.

10. Every month psychiatric drugs kill an estimated 3,000 people worldwide.

11. Today, an estimated 70 percent of all psychiatric drugs are prescribed by general physicians.

12. Pharmaceutical companies have expanded their roster of psychiatric drugs from 44 in 1966 to 174 today.

13. The top five psychiatric drugs combined gross more money than the gross national product of each of over half the countries on Earth.

14. Altogether, the psychiatric industry rakes in a third of a trillion dollars a year.

15. Studies show that as many as 20 percent of psychiatrists have sex with patients. One of every 20 of their victims is a minor.

What will it truly take to halt psychiatric fraud and abuse?


[Opinion – Editorial]

* Giving more tax dollars to the Department of Mental Health merely perpetuates the cycle of state tax largesse. Curtailing and cutting the budget will force the Department of Mental Health to reduce their costs, thereby forcing useless and unnecessary state institutions either to improve their services or close shop.

* A budget cut will force the Department of Mental Health to re-evaluate all citizens held in state custody and thus force the Department to recommend release of those who are no longer deemed a threat to the body politic thus saving the state more money. It is an obvious fact that the more patients, residents and clients the Department must care for, the more tax money they can ask for.

* Those citizens who are no longer deemed a threat need to be unconditionally released. This will allow these citizens to return to their families and to make the readjustment back into a tax paying citizen.

* Increasing the Department of Mental Health’s budget covers expensive and debatable psychiatric drugs as necessary medical costs. Many international warnings have been issued on the harmful side effects of various psychiatric drugs, which include suicide, violence, addiction, liver damage, and heart attacks.

* The state is not primarily responsible for a person’s entire life, thus the Department of Mental Health is not responsible for a citizen’s entire life. Some citizens need to be cared for but the primary responsibility lies first with the individual, then his family, then his religious affiliation, then the state government and finally the federal government.

* The Department of Mental Health is also an easy place to cut spending in the long, difficult effort to save our health-care system, as the citizens of this state have long used the Department of Mental health as an emergency health care provider. The unprecedented use of Missouri’s Mental Health psychiatric facilities as emergency health care has hidden a long overlooked problem that the state’s poorer citizens are enduring.

* It may be time to consider the idea of folding the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services; to restructure the Department of Mental Health and allow the new system to provide emergency medical services to this state’s poorer citizens.

* The Department of Mental Health’s motto should be “We care for those who cannot care for themselves”; not “We want to care for all”.

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