A Human Rights Watch report found that many nursing homes are sedating their dementia residents by misusing antipsychotic drugs.
Former nursing home administrators admitted doling out drugs without having appropriate diagnoses, securing informed consent or divulging risks.
Having observed this personally for myself in a local St. Louis elder care facility, it is no surprise.
The report estimates that each week more than 179,000 elderly people living in U.S. nursing homes are fraudulently given antipsychotic drugs, without an approved psychiatric diagnosis, to suppress difficult behaviors and ease the load on overwhelmed staff.
This abusive practice benefits drugmakers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, largely at the expense of the U.S. government.
Furthermore, the FDA has not deemed antipsychotic drugs an effective or safe way to treat symptoms associated with dementia. In fact, the FDA cautions that these drugs pose dangers for elderly patients with dementia, even doubling the risk of death.
Missouri’s antipsychotic use rate has remained around 18.5% or higher since 2016, and at 18.6 percent it’s now fifth worst in the nation.
Current research indicates that the fewer nurses available per patient, the more likely antipsychotics are to be improperly prescribed.
The shocking truth is that one in five seniors in the U.S. suffers from abusively prescribed psychoactive drugs. The psychiatric industry gets away with this abuse because they have fraudulently redefined old age as a “mental illness” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Examples of diagnoses that could be age-related
DSM-5: Phase of life problem, Problem related to living in a residential institution, Insufficient social insurance or welfare support, Alzheimer’s disease; and of course the catch-all Unspecified mental disorder
ICD-11: Various categories of Dementia; and in contrast to the DSM, the ICD just names it outright as Old age
A For-Profit Disease
To psychiatrists old age is a “mental disorder,” a for-profit disease for which they have no cure, but for which they will happily supply endless prescriptions of psychoactive drugs or electro-convulsive therapy. In most cases, the elderly are merely suffering from physical problems related to their age; for which psychiatry’s answer is to label them “depressed” or having “dementia.”
Through these fraudulent diagnoses, psychiatrists can involuntarily commit the elderly to a psychiatric facility, take control of their finances, override their wishes regarding their business, property or health care needs, and defraud their health insurance.
If an elderly person in your environment is displaying symptoms of mental trauma or unusual behavior, ensure that they get competent medical care from a non-psychiatric doctor. Insist upon a thorough physical examination to determine whether an underlying, undiagnosed physical problem is causing the condition.
For more information, download and read the CCHR booklet “Elderly Abuse – Cruel Mental Health Programs – Report and recommendations on psychiatry abusing seniors.”
