Citizens Commission on Human Rights St. Louis

Inventing Disorders
By EVELYN PRINGLE

http://counterpunch.org/pringle04212010.html

Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, “the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society,” warns the world-renowned expert, Dr. Peter Breggin, often referred to as the “Conscience of Psychiatry.”

“We’re bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you’re told, or you get diagnosed and drugged,” he points out.

Breggin considers the situation to be “a national tragedy.” “To inflict these drugs on the growing brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive,” he contends.

The kids who get drugged are often our best, brightest, most exciting and energetic children, he points out. “In the long run, we are giving children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems.”

Dr. Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, “Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs,” believes that giving infants and toddlers “powerful, brain-effecting psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity.”

Click here to read the full article.

CCHR International’s New
Psychiatric Drug Search Engine
310 International Drug Regulatory Warnings & Studies & 194,000 Adverse psychiatric drug reaction
reports

Psychiatric drugs sales generate $80 billion dollars per year with Big Pharma spending $4.7 billion per year on TV and Print ads, and $1 billion per year on internet advertising.

As a result the number of people worldwide taking psychiatric drugs has skyrocketed to 100 million (20 million of them children) with documented side effects of worsening depression, mania, psychosis, violence, suicidal and homicidal ideation, birth defects, heart attack, stroke and sudden death — to name but a few.

International drug regulatory warnings have increased by 400% in the last 10 years, yet the general public has nowhere to go to find this information online in an easy to search, concise format.

Until now.

CCHR International, the world’s leading mental health watchdog, has created a free public search engine featuring:

• 160 psychiatric drug warnings from international drug regulatory
  agencies
• 151 drug studies from international medical journals
• 194,558 adverse reaction reports on psychiatric drugs filed with the
  FDA between 2004-2008 from doctors, pharmacists, other health care
  providers, consumers and lawyers.

People can search international drug regulatory warnings, or studies, or both. They can search by the brand name of a drug (such as Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin) or by drug class (such as antipsychotic, stimulant, antidepressant, etc.) or by type of side effect or by country issuing the study/warning. All information is summarized and
easy to read.

CCHR International has also decrypted the FDA’s Adverse Drug Reaction reports which include psychiatric drug side effects reported to the FDAs Medwatch program. This lists who reported the side effect (Doctor, Pharmacist, etc.) the side effect of the drug and also the age range.

Any medical term that appears in the search results can be defined simply by double clicking the word, and a small bubble will appear defining the word.

No other mental health watchdog or government agency is offering this service to the public. This is the world’s only searchable online psychiatric drug database containing all international studies, warnings and adverse reaction reports on
psychiatric drugs in existence.

You can try out the new Psychiatric Drug Search Engine here. Help get the word out. The information is free.

http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/

“The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion) [in 2002]. Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.” — Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

US Kids Represent Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

by Evelyn Pringle, Investigative Journalist

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.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://www.truthout.org/1213091

1. Fill out the Psychiatric Living Will: follow the steps it recommends toward protecting yourself against enforced psychotropic drugging. Download it from www.cchr.org/education.

2. Use the advance directives: Sign the “Parent’s Exemption Form Prior to Mental Health and Psychological Screening or Counseling” and the “Student Exemption Form Prior to Mental Health and Psychological Screening or Counseling.” Download these from www.cchr.org/education.

3. Promote and distribute the model law for protection against invasive mental health screening and psychotropic drugs. Download “Regulation of the Use of Psychotropic Substances in Children and Teenagers” from www.cchr.org/education.

4. Increase public awareness by distributing CCHR booklets, pamphlets and DVDs, and promoting the CCHR web sites. Go to www.cchr.org/education for more information.

5. Report adverse drug reactions to the FDA at http://www.fda.gov/medwatch/

6. Help victims of human rights abuses by psychiatrists obtain justice. Go to www.cchr.org/education and download the “Chronology of Sample Lawsuits about Psychotropic Drugs.”

by Dr. John Breeding, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses.

Ask the average person about the use of electroshock treatment in today’s society and 9 out of 10 will respond, “They still shock people?”

They do. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 Americans are electroshocked each year; half are 60 and older, and two-thirds are women. In Australia, it was recently revealed that psychiatrists had electroshocked 55 toddlers age four and younger. In the UK, three year olds have been brutalized with it. And one of the country’s leading mental health “patients’ rights” groups—the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI)—recently endorsed the use of electroshock on pregnant women. One would wonder why a patients’ rights group would endorse such an obviously harmful procedure if not for the fact that the group has recently been exposed as a major front for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry.

Read the rest of this article by Dr. John Breeding, psychologist, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses.

For the truth about electroshock click here – CCHRSTL.org.