Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

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.

Coerce: to force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; to compel, dominate, restrain, or control forcibly. From Latin coercere, to control, restrain; from co-, together + arcere, to shut up, enclose, confine.

Psychiatry is a coercive practice. One can see this intuitively, as no one would voluntarily subject themselves to psychiatric treatment knowing its devastating consequences.

There are a number of ways that the psychiatric industry forces treatment on unwilling victims.

Involuntary Commitment

Between 1.5 and 2 million persons are committed or coercively admitted to psychiatric facilities annually. Every 75 seconds, someone in the U.S. becomes the next victim of involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.

In his book, Reign of Error, psychiatrist Lee Coleman discovered that for each formal involuntary commitment, “there are several more in which patients are pressured to ‘sign in’ in order to avoid formal commitment.” In short, coercion and manipulation by mental health professionals push the published statistics downward and obscure the true number of involuntary commitments.

Commitment laws have been used for every wrong reason: financial, sexual, business advantage, inheritance, political suppression, and even to maintain governmental secrecy.

When any psychiatrist has full legal power to cause your involuntary physical detention by force (kidnapping), subject you to physical pain and mental stress (torture), leave you permanently mentally damaged (cruel and unusual punishment), with or without proving to your peers that you are a danger to yourself or have committed a crime (due process of law, trial by jury) then, by definition, a totalitarian state exists.

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first spending cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who prefer not to be mentally treated. Involuntary commitment laws hike federal, state, county, city and private health care costs under the strange circumstance of a patient-recipient who cannot say no.

Involuntary commitment creates an astonishing debt load on our health care system. Given a very conservative daily cost of $940 for hospitalization and treatment, each involuntary commitment costs around $16,700. With up to 1.5 million people committed yearly, and using the conservative individual figure of $16,700, the annual health care drain is almost $25 billion! And this is paying for a service that most would refuse if given the chance.

Coercive Restraints

Being denied human rights is not the only loss that a patient risks in psychiatry’s coercive system. The patient’s life can be at risk from chemical and physical restraints. Restraint “procedures” are visible evidence of the barbaric practices that psychiatrists choose to call therapy or treatment.

Psychiatric restraint procedures qualify as “assault and battery” in every respect except one — they are lawful. Psychiatry has placed itself above the law, from where it can assault and batter its unfortunate victims with a complete lack of accountability, all in the name of “treatment.”

Restraint use is not motivated by concern for the patient. A lawsuit in Denmark revealed that hospitals received additional funding for treating violent patients. Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Clark reported that in America patients are often provoked to justify placing them in restraints, also resulting in higher insurance reimbursements – at least $1,000 a day. The more violent a patient becomes – or is made – the more money the psychiatrist makes.

Today, there are several methods of restraint being used – all violent, all potentially lethal – in which hospital staff physically and brutally restrict a patient’s movement. The victim can be forcibly pinned to the ground face down. Mechanical restraints include straitjackets, leather belts or straps that cuff around each ankle and wrist. Soundproof rooms, opened only from the outside, are used for seclusion. Mind-numbing drugs are administered as a chemical straitjacket.

Mental Health Courts

“Mental health courts” are facilities established to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies. Rather than punishing individuals or allowing them to take responsibility for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric treatment center on the premise that they suffer from “mental illness” and that psychiatric treatment will stop the criminal behavior. There is no evidence that supports this false premise.

In a review of 20 mental health courts, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law found that these courts “may function as a coercive agent – in many ways similar to the controversial intervention, outpatient commitment – compelling an individual to participate in treatment under threat of court sanctions. However, the services available to the individual may be only those offered by a system that has already failed to help. Too many public mental health systems offer little more than medication.”

For more information download and read the CCHR booklet “The Real Crisis in Mental Health Today” from www.CCHRSTL.org.

Terrorism

Psychological “brainwashing” methods employed by terrorist groups include a three-stage process involving “unfreezing,” “changing” and “refreezing.” “Unfreezing” physically removes the person from his routines, sources of information, social relationships and support structures, and then humiliates the individual so that he perceives himself as unworthy, supposedly motivating him to change. “Changing” directs the person towards learning new attitudes, quite often through coercion. “Refreezing” involves the integration of the changed attitudes into the rest of the personality.

Colin Ross, M.D., author of Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists and an authority on coercive psychiatric methods, revealed that a variety of techniques could be exploited by a skilled psychiatric technician to program an individual to commit violent acts. Hypnosis exerts a more powerful influence when combined with drugs and pain. Ross suspects the number of suicide bombers who are programmed with drugs is close to 100 percent.

Coercive Vaccination

There is some evidence to suggest that such symptoms known as ADHD, Autism, and Bipolar Disorder could sometimes be vaccine injuries mis-labeled as “mental illness” and mis-treated with amphetamines and dangerous psychiatric drugs.

Mental Health Screening

Mental health screening based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Disease (ICD)—a key international psychiatry strategy—is a major situation right now that not only is the means by which the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries drum up new business, it is a major threat to the civil liberties and freedoms of all those in the U.S. and elsewhere. Read more about it here.

Something Can Be Done About It

There needs to be an increase in humane and rational alternatives to psychiatric involuntary institutionalization.

Involuntary commitment laws must be abolished and this unconstitutional and coercive practice stopped.

Any psychiatrist found to be using coercion, threats or malice to get people to “accept” psychiatric treatment, or who hospitalizes a patient against their will should be charged with assault and false imprisonment.

The use of physical and mechanical restraints should be outlawed. Until this occurs, any psychiatric staff member – and the psychiatrist who authorized the procedure – should be criminally culpable should the restraint result in physical damage or death.

Write, call and visit your local, state and federal representatives and tell them what you think about this.

Please become a member of CCHR St. Louis to help victims of psychiatric fraud and abuse fight back.