Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

[If you do not vote in Missouri, then suggest this legislation to your own state legislators.]

The Missouri Health Care Freedom Amendment, Proposition C will appear on the August 3, 2010 statewide ballot in Missouri as a legislatively-referred amendment. The proposed measure aims to block the federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance and bans punishment for those without health insurance. [Read the full text of the amendment here.]

We urge all Missouri citizens to vote as their civic duty. Here is some additional information about this amendment.

The act prohibits any federal law from interfering with an individual’s health care freedom. If approved by Missouri voters, no federal law could force a patient, employer, or health care provider to participate in any government or privately run health care system.

The ballot will say, “Shall the Missouri Statutes be amended to: – Deny the government authority to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services? – Modify laws regarding the liquidation of certain domestic insurance companies?.”

As Senator Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield), the bill’s sponsor, says, “This legislation simply protects the rights of Missourians to choose their own health care products and services without fear of facing fines or imprisonment. It doesn’t reject any federal health care option, nor take away an individual’s choice to participate in the federal health care plan. The measure expands options, not limits them.”

We think voting for this is a good idea because the recently passed federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is laden with language and funding for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in seeing every man, woman and child in America labeled with some mental disorder and prescribed harmful psychiatric drugs.

Already, the mental health industry defrauds the government up to $40 billion per year. If we divide that $40 billion by the roughly 300 million citizens in the U.S., we are, each and every person in America, already paying over $100 per year more than we should for health care. This new federal health care law gives the mental health industry more patients and more funds, inevitably leading to more fraud.

For some time there has been growing concern that the medicalization of behavior is a principal driver of increased health care costs in the mental health care industry. The medicalization of unhappiness, for example, is a driver for the prescription of harmful and addictive antidepressant drugs. Estimated direct costs associated with various medicalized conditions (including ADHD, sadness, anxiety and behavioral disorders) in the U.S. were approximately $77 billion in 2005.

This act will help prevent Missourians from being forced to suffer fraudulent and abusive psychiatric treatment and drugs mandated by the federal government.

The February 27, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried an article called “Why psychiatry needs therapy,” by Edward Shorter, professor of history at the University of Toronto. Dr. Shorter is a social historian of medicine, specializing in the history of psychiatry.

Shorter says, “Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.”

Making fun of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, is a pastime we understand, and Shorter makes short work of the DSM, calling it horse-trading in symptoms, “defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses.”

Although, to be sure, the DSM is no laughing matter, as it aims to eventually diagnose everyone with some form of mental illness for which harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs can be prescribed.

Here are some actual diagnoses of “mental disorders” in the DSM-IV (DSM fourth edition):

Click here to watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft1RDGVq2LA

Mood disorders such as depression have been a known adverse side effect of drug use since at least the 1950’s.

A drug-induced mood disorder is the onset of symptoms of mental distress while a person is taking or withdrawing from these drugs.

Despite the plethora of reported cases, there are few controlled studies of this phenomenon. Many different drugs have been implicated in the onset of drug-induced mental symptoms. Many different hypotheses have been put forward regarding the etiology of these reactions, but since the actual action of many of these drugs is unknown, these are mostly just guesses.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) even has multiple categories for this “mental illness,” for example:

291.8 Alcohol-Induced Mood Disorder
292.84 Substance-Induced Mood Disorder, and so on.

The many possible symptoms of mental stress caused by drug use or withdrawal make it easy to receive an unfounded or fraudulent diagnosis; i.e. a diagnosis of some psychiatric disorder rather than an adverse drug reaction. Naturally, diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder is treated with a psychiatric drug, adding to the drug-induced stress.

Common symptoms arising from the adverse effects of drugs include depression, fatigue, insomnia or other sleep problems, irritability, gastro-intestinal problems, mania, inattention, lack of motor control, suicidal thoughts, hallucinations. Elderly patients may be more likely to take drugs and therefore may have a greater exposure to the risks of adverse drug reactions.

How can one tell if mental symptoms are drug-related? Quick resolution of symptoms after stopping the drug is a good clue, although one must also watch for withdrawal effects. No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent non-psychiatric medical doctor. In any case, a thorough, searching medical examination by a non-psychiatric medical doctor is encouraged to find and treat any real medical conditions that are contributing to the problems.

For more information about the side effects of common psychiatric drugs, go to http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

Pregnant women who use antidepressants have an overall 68% increased risk of miscarriage compared with those who do not take them.

Dr. Anick Bérard, a professor at the University of Montreal, and her team conducted a study that was published May 31 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, saying that antidepressants, particularly paroxetine and venlafaxine, were associated with increased risk of miscarriage, and a combination of different antidepressants doubled the risk of miscarriage.

Up to 3.7% of pregnant women receive antidepressants during the first trimester. Antidepressants have also been associated with birth defects.

The generic paroxetine is an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) found in various brands such as Aropax, Deroxat, Paroxat, Paxil, Pexeva, Seropram, and Seroxat.

The generic venlafaxine is an SNRI (Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitor) found in various brands such as Dobupal, Efectin, Effexor, and Pristiq.

These drugs also carry an increased risk of suicide. Warnings against using these drugs during pregnancy have been periodically issued since at least 2005.

Psychiatric drug use during pregnancy has another potential consequence: antidepressants may have a deleterious effect on a developing baby’s brain. In one study, children exposed to antidepressants in the womb are more likely to appear sad or withdrawn at age 3 than those whose moms did not take these drugs. ["Prenatal Effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants ..."; Oberlander, Papsdorf, Brain, Misri, Ross, and Grunau; Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 2010;164(5):444-451]

Click here for more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs.

The true resolution of many mental difficulties begins, not with a checklist of symptoms, but with ensuring that a competent, non-psychiatric physician completes a thorough physical examination.

Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.

Read the rest of this article here.

Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

A comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States.

Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, has a new book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, which looks at the history of mental illness in America, with disturbing results.

Why has the number of adults and children disabled by mental illness skyrocketed over the past fifty years? There are now more than four million people in the United States who receive a government disability check because of a “mental illness,” and the number continues to soar.

Every day, 850 adults and 250 children with symptoms of mental distress are added to the government disability rolls. What is going on? Are they really being helped by psychiatric drugs, or are these drugs really a colossal hoax?

Check it out!

Watch this new two-minute CCHR video —

How GlaxoSmithKline had to pay out over 1.1 Billion Dollars in litigation over the antidepressant Paxil (so far…)

Featuring attorney Karen Barth Menzies, who has been at the forefront
of the SSRI antidepressant litigation for more than a decade against
defendants such as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Pfizer and Eli Lilly, in cases
involving antidepressant–induced suicide, withdrawal and birth defects.

Click here to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpex0n0DXuc

Attorney Karen Barth Menzies

Medication Madness
The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Murder
by Peter Breggin, M.D.
St. Martin’s Press 2008

Watch a 10-minute video interview of Dr. Breggin discussing his book here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ8zBCSAxZE

The program “Your Turn with Kathy Fountain” aired on Tampa FOX 13 TV on Friday, December 26, 2008.

Medicalization is the process by which non–medical problems, such as normal life events, become defined and treated as medical problems, usually as illnesses or disorders.

For some time there has been growing concern that the medicalization of behavior is a principal driver of increased health care costs in the mental health care industry. The medicalization of unhappiness, for example, is a driver for the prescription of harmful antidepressant drugs.

Peter Conrad, a sociologist at Brandeis University, and his team have published a recent paper in which they estimate the costs of medicalization ["Estimating the costs of medicalization" Social Science & Medicine, Volume 70, Issue 12, June 2010, Pages 1943-1947].

The paper estimates direct costs associated with twelve medicalized conditions (including ADHD, sadness, anxiety and behavioral disorders) in the U.S. at approximately $77 billion in 2005, which was 3.9% of the total domestic expenditures on health care. This amounts to about $256 per person for the current U.S. population of roughly 300 million.

Conrad is quoted as saying, “We spend more on these medicalized conditions than on cancer, heart disease, or public health.” [Science Daily]

Certainly one of the primary culprits of mental health medicalization is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which is currently being revised to include even more medicalized behavioral disorders, for which more harmful drugs can be prescribed.