Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

What is America’s most dangerous prescription drug? It’s not Adderall or Oxy. It’s Klonopin. And doctors are doling it out like candy, causing a surge of hellish withdrawals, overdoses and deaths.

Klonopin is the brand name for the generic clonazepam, which was originally brought to market in 1975 as a medication for epileptic seizures. Since then, Klonopin, along with the other drugs in this class, has become a prescription of choice for drug abusers from Hollywood to Wall Street. In the process, these substances have also earned the dubious distinction of being second only to opioid painkillers like OxyContin as our nation’s most widely abused class of drug.

Klonopin is used as an anti-anxiety drug, in the class of drugs that are also called minor tranquilizers, benzodiazepines or sedative hypnotics. Daily use of these drugs is associated with physical dependence, and
addiction can occur after only 14 days of regular use. The typical consequences of withdrawal are anxiety, depression, sweating, cramps, nausea, psychotic reactions and seizures. There is also a “rebound effect” where the individual experiences even worse symptoms than they started with as a result of chemical dependency.

Alcoholics and drug addicts are most likely to run into Klonopin during detox, when it is used to prevent seizures and control the symptoms of acute withdrawal. Klonopin takes longer to metabolize and passes through the system more slowly than other benzodiazepines, so in theory you don’t need to take it so frequently. But if you like the high it gives you, and  keep increasing your dosage, the addictive effects of the drug accumulate quickly and can often be devastating. The drug’s label clearly specifies that it is “recommended” only for short-term use—say, seven to 10 days—but once exposed to the pill’s seductive side-effects, many patients come back for more. And not surprisingly, many doctors are happy to refill prescriptions to meet this consumer demand.

Read much more about this at
http://www.cchrint.org/2011/06/02/americas-most-dangerous-pill-klonopin/

and find out more about psychiatric drug side effects at
http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

Florida has plied children in state juvenile jails with heavy doses of powerful antipsychotic medications.

The pills, widely viewed as the “big guns” of psychiatry, can cause suicidal thoughts and other dangerous side effects.

Yet, in state-run jails and residential programs, antipsychotics were among the top drugs bought for kids – and they routinely were doled out for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

Reacting to the newspaper’s findings, the head of Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice ordered a sweeping review of the department’s use of antipsychotic medications. As it stands now, DJJ doesn’t track prescriptions and has no way of telling whether doctors are putting kids on pills simply to make them easier to control.

Read the full article in The Palm Beach Post here.

All human rights organizations set forth codes by which they align their purposes and activities. The Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights articulates the guiding principles of CCHR and the standards against which human rights violations by psychiatry are relentlessly investigated and exposed.

A. The right to full informed consent, including:

1. The scientific/medical test confirming any alleged diagnoses of psychiatric disorder and the right to refute any psychiatric diagnoses of mental “illness” that cannot be medically confirmed.

2. Full disclosure of all documented risks of any proposed drug or “treatment.”

3. The right to be informed of all available medical treatments which do not include the administration of a psychiatric drug or treatment.

4. The right to refuse any treatment the patient considers harmful.

B. No person shall be given psychiatric or psychological treatment against his or her will.

C. No person, man, woman or child, may be denied his or her personal liberty by reason of mental illness, so-called, without a fair jury trial by laymen and with proper legal representation.

D. No person shall be admitted to or held in a psychiatric institution, hospital or facility because of their political, religious or cultural beliefs and practices.

E. Any patient has:

1. The right to be treated with dignity as a human being.

2. The right to hospital amenities without distinction as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political opinion, social origin or status by right of birth or property.

3. The right to have a thorough, physical and clinical examination by a competent registered general practitioner of one’s choice, to ensure that one’s mental condition is not caused by any undetected and untreated physical illness, injury or defect and the right to seek a second medical opinion of one’s choice.

4. The right to fully equipped medical facilities and appropriately trained medical staff in hospitals, so that competent physical, clinical examinations can be performed.

5. The right to choose the kind or type of therapy to be employed, and the right to discuss this with a general practitioner, healer or minister of one’s choice.

6. The right to have all the side effects of any offered treatment made clear and understandable to the patient, in written form and in the patient’s native language.

7. The right to accept or refuse treatment but in particular, the right to refuse sterilization, electroshock treatment, insulin shock, lobotomy (or any other psychosurgical brain operation), aversion therapy, narcotherapy, deep sleep therapy and any drugs producing unwanted side effects.

8. The right to make official complaints, without reprisal, to an independent board which is composed of nonpsychiatric personnel, lawyers and lay people. Complaints may encompass any torturous, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment received while under psychiatric care.

9. The right to have private counsel with a legal advisor and to take legal action.

10. The right to discharge oneself at any time and to be discharged without restriction, having committed no offense.

11. The right to manage one’s own property and affairs with a legal advisor, if necessary, or if deemed incompetent by a court of law, to have a State appointed executor to manage such until one is adjudicated competent. Such executor is accountable to the patient’s next of kin, or legal advisor or guardian.

12. The right to see and possess one’s hospital records and to take legal action with regard to any false information contained therein which may be damaging to one’s reputation.

13. The right to take criminal action, with the full assistance of law enforcement agents, against any psychiatrist, psychologist or hospital staff for any abuse, false imprisonment, assault from treatment, sexual abuse or rape, or any violation of mental health or other law. And the right to a mental health law that does not indemnify or modify the penalties for criminal, abusive or negligent treatment of patients committed by any psychiatrist, psychologist or hospital staff.

14. The right to sue psychiatrists, their associations and colleges, the institution, or staff for unlawful detention, false reports or damaging treatment.

15. The right to work or to refuse to work, and the right to receive just compensation on a pay scale comparable to union or state/national wages for similar work, for any work performed while hospitalized.

16. The right to education or training so as to enable one to earn a living when discharged, and the right of choice over what kind of education or training is received.

17. The right to receive visitors and a minister of one’s own faith.

18. The right to make and receive telephone calls and the right to privacy with regard to all personal correspondence to and from anyone.

19. The right to freely associate or not with any group or person in a psychiatric institution, hospital or facility.

20. The right to a safe environment without having in the environment, persons placed there for criminal reasons.

21. The right to be with others of one’s own age group.

22. The right to wear personal clothing, to have personal effects and to have a secure place in which to keep them.

23. The right to daily physical exercise in the open.

24. The right to a proper diet and nutrition and to three meals a day.

25. The right to hygienic conditions and nonovercrowded facilities, and to sufficient, undisturbed leisure and rest.

With the close of this session of the Missouri legislature on May 13, a budget was finally passed for the Missouri Department of Mental Health (DMH) for the coming year (Fiscal Year 2012.)

Here are the damages:

General Revenue consists of individual and corporate state income taxes, sales and use taxes, and other general income. Federal Funds come from the U.S. Federal Government (taxes again, and likely a healthy dose of borrowed money.) Other Funds include various special purpose trusts.

The total this year, over $1.2 billion dollars, is slightly greater than last year’s budget. Based on the current state population of nearly 6 million, that averages to $207 per person.

Several salient points can be made from the graph of Missouri DMH budgets over the last 41 years.

1. There was a huge jump in the budget starting in 2004.

2. Most of that huge jump has been federal money.

3. Are you kidding? $1.2 billion dollars out of, roughly, $23 billion for the whole state? That’s about 5% of the whole state budget!

Something Can Be Done About It

Although this budget has been passed for the coming year, it is not too soon to start visiting, calling and writing your local, state and federal officials and representatives to make your views known for the next set of budget deliberations. Here are some suggestions.

Giving more tax dollars to the Department of Mental Health merely perpetuates the cycle of state tax largesse and promotes psychiatric fraud and abuse. Curtailing and cutting the budget would 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 would 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, 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.

The Department of Mental Health is an easy place to cut spending in the 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.

Establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.

Provide funding and insurance coverage only for proven, workable treatments that verifiably and dramatically improve or cure mental health problems.

Become a member of CCHR St. Louis and help support the purpose of restoring human rights to the field of mental health.

People who obediently follow the herd, never markedly sad, angry or excited; children who play quietly and never annoy or talk out of turn – this is the object of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industries. And when anyone steps out of line, the answer is simple: stamp them “abnormal” and give them a pill.

Psychiatry’s worst social meltdown concerns our youngest. The threat of ADHD, bipolar, autism and other alleged childhood diseases – which duped teachers, counselors and parents are on constant lookout for – presses children into a “socially acceptable” mold.

And who decides when a child or adult has crossed from normality into abnormality? Psychiatrists – a field financially joined at the hip with Big Pharma.

Read the full article here.

What can you do about it?

Get educated about psychiatric fraud and abuse.

Write your local, state and federal representatives and express your dismay about mental health screening of children.

Become a member of CCHR St. Louis and help us fight back.

Mental health testing planned for three-year-olds as part of early intervention program

Every three-year-old child in Australia could have their mental health tested under an early intervention program currently being funded by the Australian government.

Patrick McGorry, an Australian psychiatrist at the University of Melbourne who pushes early intervention programs, has a following in the psychiatric industry who are eager to exploit a large class of potential patients, children as young as three years old whom they can diagnose as “at risk of developing psychosis.”

They use an organization called the  International Early Psychosis Association to promote early intervention internationally.

Of course, their primary published recommendations for “treatment” are antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and sedatives.

Since you already know that psychiatric drugs are harmful for adults, what do you think the effects would be on a three-year-old?

What kind of lunacy would screen toddlers for “the potential to develop mental illness later in life” and give them harmful and addictive mind-altering drugs?

For more information about this, read these posts:

http://www.cchrint.org/tag/early-intervention/

and

http://www.cchrint.org/2011/04/21/psychiatrist-patrick-mcgorry-ticked-off-cchrs-busted-him-over-bogus-early-intervention-claims/.

What can you do about it?

Get educated about psychiatric fraud and abuse.

Write your local, state and federal representatives and express your dismay about mental health screening of children.

Become a member of CCHR St. Louis and help us fight back.

“Nearly one in seven elderly nursing home residents, nearly all of them with dementia, are given powerful atypical antipsychotic drugs even though the medicines increase the risks of death and are not approved for such treatments, a government audit found.”

[http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/article_f0fc1438-7aaf-11e0-8be7-0019bb30f31a.html]

Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said, “Too many of these institutions fail to comply with federal regulations designed to prevent overmedication, giving nursing home patients antipsychotic drugs in ways that violate federal standards for unnecessary drug use.”

The summary from HHS report OEI-07-08-00150 published May 4, 2011, said, “For the period January 1 through June 30, 2007, we determined using medical record review that 51 percent of Medicare claims for atypical antipsychotic drugs were erroneous, amounting to $116 million.”

For more information about psychiatry harming the elderly, download and read the CCHR booklet, Elderly Abuse — Cruel Mental Health Programs — Report and recommendations on psychiatry abusing seniors, from http://www.cchrstl.org/elderly.shtml.

Newsweek, May 1, 2011
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/01/my-favorite-mistake-stevie-nicks.html

Seen on a T-Shirt:

I take Aspirin for the headache caused by the Zyrtec I take for the hayfever I got from Relenza for the uneasy stomach from the Ritalin I take for the short attention span caused by the Scopederm Ts I take for motion sickness I got from the Lomotil I take for the diarrhea caused by the Zenikal for the uncontrolled weight gain from the Paxil I take for the anxiety from Zocor I take for my high cholesterol because exercise, a good diet, and regular chiropractic care are just too much trouble.

Health care costs are being driven out of control by litigation, malpractice suits, fraud, and the coercive use of drugs and medical devices.

Mandated mental health parity is an effort by the mental health industry to have governments force insurers, employers, consumers and taxpayers pay for a service they will not buy of their own free will. It drives up the cost of insurance and has skyrocketed the number of uninsured.

By one estimate, one of out every four uninsured people has been priced out of the market by state-mandated health insurance laws.

With mental health treatment costing up to 300% more than general medical treatment, spiraling costs are unavoidable when mental health care is mandated.

In May, 2001, the Office of the Inspector General reported that one-third of out-patient mental health care services provided to Medicare beneficiaries were “medically unnecessary, billed incorrectly, rendered by unqualified provider, and undocumented or poorly documented.”

Psychiatrists proclaim a worldwide epidemic of mental health problems and urge massive funding increases as the only solution. But before we commit more millions, do we know enough about the “crisis?”

Community Mental Health programs have an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.

Mental health courts assert that criminal behavior is caused by a psychiatric problem and that treatment will stop the behavior. There is no evidence to support this.

Individuals are sometimes forced to pay for a legal defense against treatment that they do not want and against incarceration that consumes their insurance coverage.

Psychiatry’s budget in the United States for Community Mental Health Centers and outpatient clinics soared from $143 million in 1969 to over $9 billion in 1997. In 2011 the Missouri Department of Mental Health budget alone is over $1 billion per year.

When governments and courts are lobbied to strengthen involuntary commitment and community treatment laws, and to establish “mental health courts” to promote treatment rather than punishment, they are never told of the lack of scientific basis for psychiatric methods, of the consequences of those treatments for the patient or of the lack of accountability for those treatment outcomes.

Whenever a “mental patient” commits an act of senseless violence, psychiatrists invariably blame the tragedy on the person’s failure to continue their medication. Such incidents are used to justify mandated community treatment and involuntary commitment laws. However, statistics and facts show it is psychiatric drugs themselves that can create the very violence or mental incompetence they are prescribed to treat.

Proper medical screening by non-psychiatric diagnostic specialists could eliminate more than 40% of psychiatric admissions. Health insurance coverage for mental health problems should only be provided on the proviso that full, searching physical examinations are first undertaken to determine that no underlying and, thereby, untreated physical condition is causing the person’s mental health condition.

In 2002, the U.S. President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education found that 40% of American children (2.8 million) in special education programs labeled with “learning disorders” had simply never been taught to read.

Decades of psychiatric monopoly over mental health has only lead to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics and continuously escalating funding demands.

While psychiatry strenuously denies it, much knowledgeable and skillful help is administered by non-psychiatric professionals. There are many non-psychiatric, humane and workable practices for the achievement and recovery of mental health, even for the most disturbed individuals.

The claim that only increased funding will cure the problems of psychiatry has lost its ring of truth. Psychiatry and psychology should be held accountable for the funds already given them, and irrefutably and scientifically prove the physical existence of mental disorders they claim should be treated and covered by insurance, in the same way as physical diseases are.

The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options.

For more information and recommendations, download and read the CCHR booklet The Real Crisis in Mental Health Today – Report and recommendations on the lack of science and results within the mental health industry.

Meet the New Advocate for Foster Children—Giovan
Bazan

Imagine for a moment that you’re a child in the foster care system in the US; you don’t have a family, you live in a state-run institution, and you along with more than half of the other foster kids are forced to take psychiatric drugs which give you horrific side effects. You are literally treated worse than a prisoner, and you’re just a kid. The horrible truth is that today, 52 percent of foster care kids are being given psychiatric drugs including antidepressants and powerful antipsychotics. That’s about a quarter of a million kids in the U.S. alone on drugs that cause depression, psychosis, aggression, mania, violent and suicidal tendencies. These children need a voice.

Meet this week’s Watchdog Radio show guest, Giovan Bazan. A former foster child himself, he has been to hell and back and lived to tell about it.