Missouri Legislative News

Posted on May 27, 2013 by cchrstl
Please note our new phone number: (314) 567-2004.

Missouri Legislative News

The 2013 Missouri legislative session (97th General Assembly, 1st Regular Session) adjourned Friday, May 17. We thought we’d give you a brief rundown of a few bills of interest to the CCHR community. Truly Agreed and Finally Passed (TAFP) legislation generally becomes law ninety days after the end of the session; the Governor has 45 days after adjournment to sign, not sign, or veto a TAFP bill. The bill becomes law if the Governor signs it or does not sign it within this time period. A veto causes the bill to be reconsidered in the House or Senate. The progress of the Governor’s actions on bills presented to him for signature is recorded here. If you have strong feelings about Governor Nixon approving or disapproving any particular bill, now is the time to contact him with your encouragement or concerns.

CCHR STL has gone to the State Capitol building each year early in the legislative session and put up an exhibit in the Capitol Rotunda. During this visit we brief legislators on our issues and distribute DVDs and other literature. This year in February we provided copies of the CCHR documentary DVD The Age of Fear – Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror to each legislator. Some legislators also receive this email newsletter. CCHR STL encourages you to participate with us early in the next legislative session so that more anti-psych bills are passed and more pro-psych bills are defeated.

Anti-psychiatric Bills Passed

SB 33 — Access to Public Accommodations and Use of Service Dogs for Mentally Disabled. This guarantees equal access to public accommodations for persons with mental disabilities and allows them to use service dogs on the same terms as other disabled such as the blind. This is perhaps not as much “anti-psych” as it is “pro-patient,” and will help individuals currently under the mental health establishment to gain more independence in life.

SB 229 — Mental Health Employment Disqualification Registry. This adds to the list of offenses that disqualify a person from working in a direct care role in a mental health facility, in the interests of patient protection. Such additional felony crimes include drug and stealing offenses, violations of aiding the escape of a prisoner and supporting terrorism as well as certain alcohol related offenses.

Pro-psychiatric Bills Killed

HB 69 – Limitations Of Liability For Inmate Suicides. This bill sought to set a standard of gross negligence for actions for damages brought against any public or private correctional or detention facility as a result of a death by suicide of any inmate, thus making it easier for incompetent or criminal psychs to avoid blame or penalty for their failure. A committee hearing was held but the bill was not advanced and died in committee.

HB 131 – Insurance Coverage For Eating Disorders. This bill sought to mandate insurance coverage for eating disorders, including psych treatment. A hearing was held but the bill was not advanced and died in committee. Also SB 160 – Same as HB 131; Senate version also had a hearing but was not advanced and died in committee.

HB 290 – Psychologists In Adoption Investigations. This bill would have authorized licensed professional counselors and psychologists to conduct adoption investigations, thus giving more power and funding to the psych industry. A hearing was held but the bill was not advanced and died in committee.

HB 337 – Licensed Counselors. This bill would have prohibited political subdivisions from discriminating between licensed professional counselors and other mental health professionals when promulgating regulations or recommending services, thus expanding the gravy train, so to speak. A hearing was held but the bill was not advanced and died in committee.

HB 344 – Behavior Assessment And Intervention. This bill would have required MO HealthNet (Medicaid) reimbursement for certain services based on the new behavior assessment and intervention codes under the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) coding system. It would have meant more money for psych behavioral treatment. This bill passed the House and was scheduled for a hearing in the Senate but did not advance and died in committee.

HB 347 – Prescription Drug Monitoring Program. This would have established a whole structure and reporting system for monitoring prescription drugs, in an attempt to defeat prescription drug abuse. It included provisions to refer abusers to psych drug treatment. A similar bill came close to passing last year, but with the current scandal about privacy violations of driver’s license and concealed carry permit records by another government agency, it seems the legislators were not in a mood to create yet another highly intrusive database, and the bill didn’t even get a hearing this year. Also SB 146 & SB 233 – Same as HB 347; The Senate version did get a hearing but was not advanced and died in committee.

HB 360 – Mental Health For Child Abuse Victims. This bill sought to prohibit denial of mental health care and treatment for children who are alleged victims of abuse and neglect and also to require guardians ad litem to have training in child abuse and neglect or in mental health. It died without even coming to a hearing.

HB 402 – Family Intervention Orders For Substance Abuse Treatment. This very intrusive legislation would have established “Family Intervention Orders” for treatment of persons who abuse chemical substances. A family member may file a petition with the court for a Family Intervention Order against another family member who has a substance abuse problem. This will result in a court ordered evaluation if the other family member is a substance abuser per the DSM, and if so, a recommendation for treatment will result. Although the treatment is not mandatory, the court can apply sanctions against the person such as reducing custody and visitation and can hold the person in contempt of court, so in effect, the person is forced into treatment. Social services personnel are required to ask if there might be a substance abuse element in various situations, and if so to inform the person that they can file for a Family Intervention Order. This bill passed through committee but never made it to the floor and died with the close of the session.

HB 565 – Professional Counseling And Diagnosis. This bill would have revised the definition of “professional counseling” for licensing purposes to grant licensed professional counselors the right to do diagnosis of mental disorders. This would have been a terrible advance of the medicalization of human distress and would have placed more innocent persons at risk, who merely sought some help from a counselor. The bill was passed by committee but did not proceed further and died with the close of the session.

HB 732 – Use Of Restraints. This bill would have allowed an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse to order use of restraints in psychiatric facilities, which can currently only be ordered by the head of the facility. The bill died in committee without a hearing. Also SB 178 – Same as HB 732; The Senate version passed through the Senate and was on the House calendar for 3rd reading but died with the close of the session.

HB 797 – Community Children’s Services Fund. This bill would expand allowable uses of this fund to include “preventative services designed to prevent substance abuse and mental abuse,” in other words, more psych funding. A hearing was held but the bill was not advanced and died in committee.

HB 801 – Drug Treatment Programs For Mo Healthnet. This bill would have required recipients of MO HealthNet (Medicaid) who have been convicted of a crime involving drug use to enroll in a drug treatment program in order to continue receiving Medicaid benefits, which would have forced more persons into psych treatment. It died in committee without receiving a hearing.

HB 816 – Drug Testing For Legislators. This bill would have required legislators to submit to drug testing within 60 days of the start of the legislative session and would have required them to complete a certified drug treatment program if they tested positive. The bill died in committee without a hearing.

HB 822 – Missouri Universal Health Assurance Program. This bill proposed a publicly financed, statewide health insurance program for all residents of the state, including mental health. The bill died without a hearing.

HB 929 – Standards For Mental Health Detention. This bill sought to expand the criteria for holding a person for mental health detention and evaluation. Under current law, this can only be done if the person is considered to be a danger to himself or others. The new law would have required the person to be held if they were mentally ill and “gravely disabled,” defined as “a result of mental illness or mental disorder, lacks judgment in the management of his or her resources and in the conduct of his or her social relations to the extent that his or her health or safety is significantly endangered and he or she lacks the capacity to understand that this is so.” Proponents of the bill said it would make it easier for parents to get their adult children committed at an earlier stage, before their “illness” had advanced to the point where they became an active danger to themselves or others. Obviously with such a loose definition, it could be used way beyond that. The bill was passed by its committee but died in the Rules committee. Also SB 226 – Same as HB 929; The Senate version passed through the Senate but did not progress in the House and died with the end of the session.

HCR 20 – Resolution Of Support For Mental Health Legislation. This non-binding resolution relating to gun safety would have expressed support for legislation that “increases the ability to identify and treat persons with mental and behavioral issues that threaten public safety.” It was referred to committee and died without a hearing.

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DSM Shortcomings

Posted on May 16, 2013 by cchrstl

DSM Shortcomings

The DSM (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is in the news again. This time Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the government agency that finances mental health research, “has just declared that the most important diagnostic manual for psychiatric diseases lacks scientific validity and needs to be bolstered by a new classification system based on biology, not just psychiatric opinion.” [Quotes here are from a New York Times editorial on May 11, 2013]

The editorial goes on to say, “The psychiatric association’s diagnoses are mostly based on a professional consensus about what clusters of symptoms are associated with a disease, like depression, and not on any objective laboratory measure, like blood counts or other biological markers.”

Psychiatrists might like to base their practice on biology instead of opinion; the thing is, “such a biology-based system will not be available for a decade or more.” If ever.

The truth is, the disorder / disease model psychiatrists use with the DSM has no basis in fact. These are not diseases, they are symptoms of a person’s physical, emotional, or spiritual trauma. They cannot be fixed with psychiatric drugs; they can, however, be healed if the real problems are actually found and fixed. Many, if not a majority, of these problems can be traced back to legitimate medical causes with known medical solutions.

NIMH director Insel doesn’t mention it himself, but one bets that his DSM decision is related to the White House’s Brain Initiative, to be given $100 million next year for brain research.

Read more about Insel rejecting the DSM here.

People can and do experience depression, anxiety and sadness, children do act out or misbehave, and some people can indeed become irrational or psychotic. This doesn’t make them “diseased.” There are non-psychiatric, non-drug solutions for people experiencing mental difficulty, there are non-harmful medical alternatives. Read more about this here.

[Quotes following are from Psychology Today magazine, May 4, 2013]

“Just two weeks before DSM-5 is due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest funding agency for research into mental health, has indicated that it is withdrawing support for the manual.”

Insel “made clear the agency would no longer fund research projects that rely exclusively on DSM criteria. Henceforth, the NIMH, which had thrown its weight and funding behind earlier editions of the manual, would be ‘re-orienting its research away from DSM categories'”, explaining that the weakness of the manual is its lack of validity.

“The agency’s overwhelming focus is to remain on the brain as the alleged seat and cause of psychiatric suffering.”

Of course, you see the problem here. While we applaud the NIMH for rejecting the DSM, you can see clearly that they still believe that the brain is the cause of these symptoms; which we take to mean that they are just hoping that $100 million dollars worth of brain research produces more psychiatric drugs, which cannot and never will heal the real physical, emotional or spiritual causes of mental trauma.

And now the British Psychological Society is getting their nerve up to join the fray. The UK Guardian on May 11 had this to say:

“There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists.

“In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday [May 13] issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a ‘paradigm shift’ in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out ‘reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems’, used by psychiatry.”

You, too, can get your nerve up to speak out. Contact your local, state and federal officials and let them know what you think.

If you appreciate this newsletter, please forward it to your family, friends and associates and recommend that they subscribe.

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The Role of Infections in Mental Symptoms

Posted on May 12, 2013 by cchrstl

The Role of Infections in Mental Symptoms

A brief article in the January, 2013 Scientific American (“Linking Immunity and Mental Health”) discusses an immune treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin which is made of blood plasma from donors. This medical treatment apparently helps ward off infection and reduces inflammation. It is being considered as a potential treatment for some forms of symptoms known as schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which some researchers think may have autoimmune causes, such as antibodies to a Streptococcus bacteria infection crossing the blood-brain barrier.

This kind of connection between mental symptoms and infection has been known for some time, and is presented in a 2004 paper available on the CCHR STL web site. Download and read “The Role of Infections in Mental Illness” by Frank Strick here.

Note that this information is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease; and that mental symptoms can be caused by many different conditions, some of which are described here.

While certain kinds of infections are known to cause mental symptoms, they are rarely considered during psychiatric examinations and diagnosis. The problem is not the lack of a well-defined medical body of knowledge, but the lack of mental health practitioners qualified to make such a diagnosis or even suspect it.

Remember, the brain is your body’s most energy–intensive organ. It represents only three percent of your body weight but uses twenty–five percent of your body’s oxygen, nutrients and circulating glucose. Therefore any significant metabolic disruptions can impact brain function first. “Mental” symptoms may improve dramatically when hidden neuroimmune infections are treated successfully and normal brain metabolism resumes.

If you appreciate this newsletter, please forward to your family, friends and associates and recommend that they subscribe.

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Suicides Are Increasing

Posted on May 5, 2013 by cchrstl

Suicides Are Increasing

An article in the May 3rd Wall Street Journal (“Middle-Aged Suicides Surge“) relates that “The number of deaths caused by suicide has risen precipitously in the past decade, surpassing those caused by car crashes and even some of the most fatal diseases. … For adults aged 35 to 64, the group most responsible for the increase, suicide is now the fourth most common cause of death, behind cancer, heart disease and unintentional injury.”

The human interest part of this story describes the 2004 suicide of a mid-30’s man named Carson J. Spencer, who had struggled with “bipolar disorder” since his teens. The article did not specifically say he was taking psychotropic drugs, but we all know that psychiatric drugs known to cause suicide (either while taking or withdrawing from them) are the typical “treatment” for these symptoms.

Meanwhile, numerous suicide prevention organizations have been springing up all over the country, all resolutely ignoring one of the likeliest causes.

For more information download and read the CCHR booklet Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence and Suicide.”

If you appreciate this newsletter, please forward to your family, friends and associates and recommend that they subscribe.

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Medicare

Posted on May 1, 2013 by cchrstl

Medicare

Continuing our discussion of psychiatric fraud (see our recent newsletter on Medicaid), we highly recommend an excellent article on Medicare and Medicaid fraud by Chris Parker in the St. Louis Riverfront Times (RFT) (“Thieves’ Bazaar: Hospitals, doctors and dealers have made Medicare the nation’s sweetest crime”, 4/25/2013).

Medicare is a federal government health insurance program for people age 65 or older, people under age 65 with certain disabilities, and people of all ages with end-stage renal disease (permanent kidney failure requiring dialysis or a kidney transplant).

Following are some quotes and paraphrases from the RFT article.

“Think of the Medicare program as a bank that never bothered to buy a safe. Everyone from HMOs to drug dealers have been caught robbing it time and time again, stealing the kind of money that makes the sequester look like pocket change.”

Since 2007 the federal Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) has charged 1,480 defendants with $4.8 billion in fraud.

In 2011 Mohammad Khan, administrator of Houston Riverside General Hospital, confessed to federal fraud investigators for enriching the hospital through a kickback scheme, paying “recruiters” $300 a head to bring Medicare patients to Riverside’s six psychiatric clinics.

“They arrived by the van-load for daily therapy sessions they rarely qualified for or received. Medicare picked up the $116 million tab.”

“Kahn ratted out CEO Earnest Gibson III as his co-conspirator. The feds also nabbed Gibson’s 35-year-old son, Earnest IV. He ran one of the psychiatric clinics and was charged with billing nearly $700,000 for care that ‘was not medically necessary and, in some cases, not provided,’ according to prosecutors.”

“Investigators discovered that, since 2005, the hospital had been swindling the feds to the tune of $22 million a year. Kahn pleaded guilty. The two Gibsons and five others await trial on charges of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.”

Cuban expat Armando Gonzalez started several outpatient psychiatric clinics in Miami with a scheme similar to Riverside’s. “Gonzalez paid assisted-living facilities kickbacks to bus in residents suffering from retardation and dementia. The clinics would then bill Medicare for services the ‘patients’ weren’t eligible for or didn’t receive. By the time the feds started sniffing around in 2008, Gonzalez had already made off with $28 million…He closed shop in Miami, only to reopen in North Carolina. When he was finally arrested last year, Gonzalez was planning to expand into Tennessee.”

In 2010 Frank Walther of the Medicare fraud task force helped take down American Therapeutic, the highest-billing mental-health center in the country. “The company was cycling addicts, alcoholics and Alzheimer patients through its six clinics. Patients’ diagnoses were changed so they would qualify for expensive group therapy.”

In 2011 “Minnesota was pumping up its Medicaid reimbursements to cover losses in a state program that Medicaid doesn’t reach.”

Then there’s the Las Vegas Cocktail, mixing Xanax, Soma and Vicodin for a powerful opiate high. Michigan’s Monroe Pain Center, near the Toledo, Ohio, border, went from seeing 40 patients a day to as many as 250, prescribing 5 million doses of narcotics over two years, defrauding Medicare out of $5.7 million.

New York state centers for people with mental issues were charging the feds $5,000 per day per patient while Arizona only charges $200 a day. New York’s estimated overcharges: $15 billion.

Oh, my! Who’s paying for all this fraud? Medicare and Medicaid are government programs, financed by your tax dollars (and the federal debt.) Can anyone guess why health care costs are so high and continuing to rise?

What shall we do? What do you think? Has your own health insurance cost increased recently? Shall we just let this fraud continue?

These are not purely rhetorical questions. They do have some answers.

You are one of the answers. Contact your local, state and federal officials and representatives; let them know what you think about this situation. Suggest that they find out about all the money wasted on fraudulent and abusive psychiatric mental health care, and recommend that they reduce or eliminate the use of harmful, coercive and abusive psychiatric treatments and psychiatric drugs in favor of non-psychiatric alternatives, so that people with mental trauma can actually be helped rather than harmed.

Forward this newsletter to your family, friends and associates and tell them to subscribe.

More information about psychiatric fraud can be found by clicking here.

By the way, report Medicare fraud here.

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The New DSM-5

Posted on April 27, 2013 by cchrstl

The New DSM-5

When the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) hits the stores on May 22nd, it will extend the reach of psychiatry further into daily life, making many more of us eligible for psychiatric diagnoses and thus for even more psychotropic drugs than we are already taking as a nation. More than ten per cent of American adults already take antidepressants, for example.

Gary Greenberg says on The New Yorker blog April 9, “Psychiatry has already reached far into our daily lives, and it’s not by virtue of the particulars of any given D.S.M. It’s because the A.P.A., a private guild, one with extensive ties to the drug industry, owns the naming rights to our pain. That so significant a public trust is in private hands, and on such questionable grounds, is what we ought to worry about.”

Greenberg’s account of the history behind the DSM and the deeply flawed process by which the DSM-5 has been revised is told in his new book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry.

120 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with mental disorders and placed on psychiatric drugs as “treatment.” And while people are led to believe a diagnosis of mental illness or having a mental disorder is based on medical evidence or tests that these disorders are legitimate medical conditions, the fact is they are simply based on checklists of behaviors. People are also convinced that the only solution for treating problems of emotion, mood or behavior for themselves or their child, is drug treatment.

The truth is, there are no medical or scientific tests that can prove mental disorders are medical conditions. Psychiatric diagnosis is based solely on opinion. Unlike medical disease, where tests can verify the existence of a medical condition (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.) psychiatric diagnoses are based solely on checklists of behaviors, not on any medical tests.

People can and do experience depression, anxiety and sadness, children do act out or misbehave, and some people can indeed become irrational or psychotic. This doesn’t make them “diseased.” There are non-psychiatric, non-drug solutions for people experiencing mental difficulty, there are non-harmful medical alternatives.

Safe and effective medical treatments for mental difficulties are often kept buried. The fact is, there are many medical conditions that when undetected and untreated can appear as psychiatric “symptoms.” The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry is making a killing — $84 billion per year — based on people being labeled with mental disorders that are not founded on science or medicine, but on marketing campaigns designed to sell drugs.

The larger problem is that the biological drug model (based on bogus mental disorders) is a disease marketing campaign which prevents governments from funding real medical solutions for people experiencing difficulty. There is a great deal of evidence that medical conditions can manifest as psychiatric symptoms, and that there are non-harmful medical treatments that do not receive government funding because the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars on advertising and lobbying efforts to counter any medical modality that does not support their biological drug model of mental disorders as a disease.

Because the general public has been so misled by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries about the actual dangers of psychotropic drugs, CCHR has created the psychiatric drug side effects search engine. Visit it to Get the Facts. Fight Back.

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Exchange

Posted on April 21, 2013 by cchrstl

Exchange

Many readers of this newsletter have provided support for CCHR St. Louis, either as volunteer helpers or as monetary donors; many have not. We wanted to provide a way for all our readers to easily exchange for receiving the benefits of this newsletter.

Exchange: Trading something of value in return for something of similar value.

For example, permitting someone to receive something of value without their valuable contribution in return, or permitting someone to give something of no value while receiving something of value, are alike encouraging criminal behavior.

We delight in providing readers this newsletter; and although we certainly would not discourage volunteer help or monetary donations, an exchange that would significantly help us, which is of great value to us, would be your forwarding this newsletter to your family, friends, and associates — and asking them if they might like to subscribe. We would not even discourage you from recommending a subscription to this newsletter, should you find it of value. It is easy to subscribe, and easy to unsubscribe.

Send them here to subscribe: www.cchrstl.org/subscribe.shtml

Of course, the concept of exchange also applies very much to the mission and purpose of CCHR. The psychiatric industry is totally out of exchange with the rest of human society. They are selling something harmful and calling it helpful. This is criminal fraud.

Fraud: A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain; deliberately misrepresenting something to secure profit; dishonest dealings, cheating or trickery; selling something harmful but calling it helpful.

The United States loses approximately $100 billion to health care fraud each year; up to $40 billion of this is due to fraudulent practices in the mental health industry.

The mental health monopoly has practically zero accountability and zero liability for its failures.

Psychiatric drugs don’t cure anyone and they don’t prevent disease.

Despite more than a decade of healthcare fraud investigations and convictions in the U.S. alone, psychiatrists and psychologists have not reformed the fraudulent practices that are rife within its ranks.

Psychiatry’s predatory and profit-driven practices are international in scope and fraudulent to the core.

With mental health care insurance coverage being mandated in the U.S., fraud levels escalate.

Community Mental Health Centers have led to massive increases in government spending and fraud, with no commensurate results.

Drug abuse and drug fraud are commonplace in the psychiatric system.

Studies in numerous countries reveal that between 10% and 25% of psychiatrists and psychologists admit to sexually abusing their patients.

One of psychiatry’s most successful means of defrauding those who pay for psychiatric treatment is through the use of its unscientific Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Mentally troubled persons living in residential psychiatric facilities are easy targets for exploitation: fraud, assault and sexual or financial abuse.

The primary purpose of mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance. It must never be the financial or personal gain of the practitioner. Those suffering are inevitably vulnerable and impressionable. Proper treatment therefore demands the highest level of trustworthiness and integrity in the practitioner.

What should be done about fraud in the mental health industry?

This is another area where you can contribute and make a valuable exchange for receiving this newsletter. Contact your local, state and federal officials and representatives and let them know what you think about fraud and abuse in the mental health industry; let them know that psychiatry is a criminal exchange; demand they Do Something About It!

A good start would be to demand that the DSM should be removed from use in all government agencies, departments and other bodies including criminal, educational and justice systems. None of these so-called “mental disorders” should be eligible for insurance coverage because they have no scientific, physical validation. Provide funding and insurance coverage only for proven, workable treatments that verifiably and dramatically improve or cure mental health problems.

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Medicaid

Posted on April 18, 2013 by cchrstl

Medicaid

It’s in the news today, constantly. What is it, and what should we know about it? What’s all this talk about expanding state Medicaid?

Medicaid is a state and federal partnership providing health coverage for people who qualify. Across the U.S. over 62 million people are enrolled in Medicaid, with a total federal plus state budget of $400 billion per year.

The Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS) is one of six Centers within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). CMCS serves as the focal point for all national program policies and operations related to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

If you don’t have and are unable to afford health insurance, you and your family may qualify for free or low-cost health insurance coverage through Medicaid.

Each state operates its own Medicaid program that provides health coverage for lower-income people, families and children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. The eligibility rules for Medicaid are different for each state.

Enacted in 1965 through amendments to the Social Security Act, Medicaid is a health and long-term care coverage program that is jointly financed by states and the federal government. Each state establishes and administers its own Medicaid program and determines the type, amount, duration, and scope of services covered within broad federal guidelines. States must cover certain mandatory benefits and may choose to provide other optional benefits.

Federal law also requires states to cover certain mandatory eligibility groups, including qualified parents, children, and pregnant women with low income, as well as older adults and people with disabilities with low income. States have the flexibility to cover other optional eligibility groups and set eligibility criteria within the federal standards.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 creates a new national Medicaid minimum eligibility level that covers most Americans with household income up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. This new eligibility requirement is effective January 1, 2014, but individual states may choose to expand their Medicaid coverage before this date. For a household of one person, 133% of the current federal poverty level is an annual income of $15,282 (and add $5,347 for each additional person.)

Medicaid is the single largest payer for mental health services in the United States. Examples of provided mental health services include screening, counseling, therapy, medication management, psychiatric services, licensed clinical social work services, peer supports, and substance abuse treatment.

There is a large and active Medicaid fraud culture, both provider and participant fraud, that wastes billions of dollars per year. For example, estimates range between $2 billion and $4 billion in fraudulent psychiatric drug claims per year nationally. Medicaid spends roughly $25 billion per year on prescription drugs.

Some of the more common provider fraud includes: billing for services when no service was provided; billing for a more expensive treatment or service than was actually provided; billing for unnecessary services; billing for the same service multiple times; receipt of kickbacks; excessive compensation for medical directorships or consultancies; physicians referring patients to obtain services from a Medicaid provider whom the physician or physician’s immediate family member has a financial relationship.

Some of the more common participant fraud includes: signing documentation indicating services were provided when not provided; selling prescription medications obtained through the Medicaid program; forging prescriptions to obtain medications; allowing someone other than the card holder to use a Medicaid card; falsifying information to qualify for Medicaid services.

Of course, CCHR supporters will understand that all psychiatric treatments and drugs are harmful and fraudulently prescribed.

Medicaid is an enormous and complex bureaucracy, making it extremely difficult to distill meaningful statistics across all 50 states and the federal government. Diligent research is required to isolate relevant information.

In Missouri, the Medicaid program is known as MO HealthNet. Of the 6 million people in Missouri, over 1 million are Medicaid recipients. Each year, Missouri Medicaid spends over $8 billion to provide health services. Roughly $6 billion is provided by the federal government, and Missouri contributes another $2 billion per year. $600 million goes toward prescription drugs; $43 million goes toward long term mental health care facilities; roughly $500 million goes toward all mental health services, not including drugs.

Missouri offers home- and community-based programs for developmentally disabled adults and children, provided by the Department of Health and Senior Services or the Department of Mental Health. There have been double-digit increases in yearly Medicaid drug spending since 1995. Psychiatric drugs are among Medicaid’s most costly and commonly prescribed drugs. One-third of seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in Missouri’s Medicaid program are prescribed psychotropic drugs.

What do we think about all this? We don’t necessarily think that Medicaid is a bad idea. We do think that expanding Medicaid without also expanding fraud control is a mistake. We think that expanding Medicaid without reducing or eliminating the use of psychiatric treatments and psychiatric drugs is a mistake. We think there are enough non-psychiatric alternatives so that people with mental trauma can actually be helped rather than harmed.

Write your state legislators and let them know what you think about this. More information about psychiatric fraud can be found by clicking here.

By the way, report Medicaid fraud in Missouri to Missouri Medicaid Fraud & Compliance.

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Cogitations on BRAIN

Posted on April 11, 2013 by cchrstl

Cogitations on BRAIN

The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative, a project President Obama discussed in his most recent State of the Union address, was formally announced April 2 at the White House.

The White House would like to spend $100 million taxpayer dollars in 2014 to find new ways to treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

They’re talking about things such as molecular-scale probes that can sense and record the activity of neural networks; examining how thoughts, emotions, actions, and memories are represented in the brain; and exploring how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves information.

Given that brain researchers to date have been unable to recognize the pivotal role of psychiatric drugs in PTSD, for example, we have little faith that another $100 million will be used for developing anything but more abusive psychiatric drugs or more torturous devices such as Vagus Nerve Stimulation or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

The cornerstone of psychiatry’s disease model today is the theory that a brain-based, chemical imbalance causes mental illness. Despite the billions of pharmaceutical company funding in support of the chemical imbalance theory, this psychiatric “disease” model is thoroughly debunked. The whole theory was invented to push drugs.

For example, the “brain scans” that have been pawned off as evidence that schizophrenia or depression are brain diseases, have been disproven as valid research. Most have not been done on drug naive patients, meaning someone who has not been on psychiatric drugs such as antipsychotic drugs, documented to cause brain atrophy (shrinkage). Other brain scans have shown the brains of smaller children to show smaller brains in comparison to larger/older children and then claimed children with ADHD have smaller brains. None have been conclusively proven to verify mental disorders as abnormalities of the brain. If there were such verifiable brain scans, or in fact any medical/scientific test that could show a physical/medical abnormality for any psychiatric disorder, the public would be getting such tests prior to being administered psychiatric drugs.

The larger problem is that the biological drug model based on bogus mental disorders prevents governments from funding real medical solutions for people experiencing difficulty. There is a great deal of evidence that medical conditions can manifest as psychiatric symptoms, and that there are non-harmful medical treatments that do not receive government funding because the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars on advertising and lobbying efforts, and on wasteful things like this BRAIN initiative.

A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2010 claimed to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk” in infants just a few weeks old. We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study: there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or brain abnormality to start with. There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one. So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads) — it means nothing.

There is a concerted push in the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries for the global implementation of a new mental health paradigm called “preventative mental health” — pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging children before they show any “signs” of a mental disorder. In other words, if we wait to administer drugs to them it may be too late.

This is the BRAIN initiative in action. Desperately seeking justifications for more drugs earlier in life.

BRAINThis is your
BRAIN on psychiatric drugs.

Please express your outrage to your government representatives.

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The Aurora Shooter Case Confirms CCHR Predictions

Posted on April 8, 2013 by cchrstl

The Aurora Shooter Case Confirms CCHR Predictions

Two mind-altering prescription psychiatric drugs, alcohol and a gun … and the media blamed the gun.

April 4, 2013 – The Los Angeles Times reveals that a search of James Holmes apartment found 48 containers of beer and other liquor, and prescription medication for the psychiatric drugs sertraline and clonazepam.

Holmes was charged with 166 counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder and weapons charges after a shooting rampage at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater that left 12 dead and 70 injured in July, 2012.

Details about the case have been tightly sealed from the earliest days of the investigation. Yet on April 4 District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. reversed previous rulings on public access and made public the arrest affidavit and 12 search warrants. The newly unsealed documents provide a list of things found in Holmes’ apartment: chemicals used for explosives, rounds of ammunition, pistol cases and paper targets, 48 containers of beer and other liquor, and prescription psychiatric drugs sertraline and clonazepam.

The fact missed by most is that psychiatric, mind-altering drugs have been found to be the common factor in an overwhelming number of acts of random senseless violence and suicide. The scientific research documenting the connection between violence, suicide and psychiatric drugs is overwhelming.

There have been 22 international drug regulatory warnings issued on psychiatric drugs causing violence, mania, hostility, aggression, psychosis, and other violent reactions. Sertraline, a generic form of Zoloft, is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant, known to cause violence and suicidal actions. Clonazepam is a highly addictive hypnotic anti-anxiety drug, also known to cause violence and suicidal actions. These adverse side effects can occur both on taking the drugs and withdrawing from the drugs. Use of alcohol while taking clonazepam greatly intensifies the side effects of the drug. Combining sertraline with alcohol is also generally highly discouraged. Finding alcohol, sertraline and clonazepam in Holmes’ apartment, and the resulting violent behavior, strongly suggest he was taking them all together.

We have to ask whose purpose was served by keeping this information secret for so long? How can we use this information now to prevent further tragedies? Take every opportunity you can to make the connection between violence and psychiatric drugs known, and insist that authorities ask the proper questions in every case of senseless violence or suicide:

  • Was the perpetrator subjected to psychiatric treatments prior to the violence?
  • Was the perpetrator on psychiatric drugs at the time of the violence?
  • Has the perpetrator been on psychiatric drugs in the past?

Even now, in the case of the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, the authorities refuse to release this information. Despite a formal request from AbleChild, a Parent’s Rights organization, citing numerous state and federal laws supporting the release of Adam Lanza’s toxicology results and medical records, Connecticut Medical Examiner, H. Wayne Carver, M.D., has arbitrarily denied the request.

The M.E.’s decision to withhold the information is at odds with Connecticut law, the State’s Constitution, federal law and the United States Constitution. In response, AbleChild has filed an appeal with the State’s Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) for the release of the records and, if necessary, is prepared to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sheila Matthews, a founder of AbleChild, understands the immediate implications of the Lanza toxicology results saying, “The M.E. admitted toxicology testing could provide vital insight into Adam Lanza’s mental state, but in denying our request, it appears that he is the only one worthy of knowing that insight. We disagree and absolutely believe the public has a right to know the results… lives may depend on it.”

Sign the petition to release Adam Lanza’s toxicology report.

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