Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the billing bible of psychiatry, listing every so-called mental or behavioral problem for which diagnosis and treatment can be reimbursed by insurance. There are 374 entries in edition four (DSM-IV), including such “mental illnesses” as “Expressive Language Disorder,” “Nicotine Dependence,” and “Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder.”

The scientific validity of the DSM has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts, calling it junk science. Now the psychiatric industry wants to revise it, adding more fraudulent mental disorders to produce a fifth edition, DSM-V.

Former American Psychiatric Association (APA) president Nada Stotland stated, “We are in the midst of a revolution caused by public and legislative concern about the influence of the for-profit sector…” Part of that public pressure for the APA to disclose its conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies was driven by Lisa Cosgrove Ph.D. et al‘s study of DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR committee members, which found that of the 170 members, 56% had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma’s psychotropic drug profits have soared commensurately with the increasing numbers of disorders voted into successive editions of the DSM.

Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties – no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

The APA should sever all ties to pharmaceutical company interests. The US Senate Finance Committee has investigated at least a dozen APA psychiatrists over their undisclosed financial ties to drug companies.

For more information about psychiatric conflicts of interest visit www.PsychConflicts.org.

Click here for more information about the DSM and its various editions.

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

Volunteer your help here.

Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care

In June of 2010, the US Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of the Federal Government, to investigate the prevalence of prescribed psychotropic medications for children in foster care.

According to a number of foster care experts, children in foster care, who are typically concurrently enrolled in Medicaid, are three or four more times as likely to be on antipsychotic medications than other children on Medicaid. A Texas study from 2004 showed that 34.7 percent of foster children were prescribed at least one psychotropic drug with some children taking five or more.

Foster care parents receive more money if a child is on psychiatric drugs; the children are considered “special needs” children, needing a higher level of care.

Unfortunately, psychiatric drugs are not “care.” Prescribing psychotropic drugs for children is especially troubling given their addictive nature and the potential side effects associated with them, including the increased risk of suicidal and violent behavior.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that House Bill 23 in the Georgia state legislature proposes to create an independent clinic review of the drugs foster children are given, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans because of its efforts to protect the vulnerable. Projections are that it will save the state millions of dollars, as Georgia spends $7.87 million per year in Medicaid funds on mind-altering psychiatric drugs for foster children.

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

Download the report “Drugging Foster Care Children” from the CCHR St. Louis website.

If you are aware of foster care children being abused by psychiatric drugs, please report this to CCHR and to the GAO.

Occasionally, reporters, news media, or other individuals CCHR encounters in the course of its activities, make the startling claim that the information CCHR provides about psychiatric fraud and abuse is “controversial.”

[controversial: something people disagree about or do not approve of; from Latin controversus “turned against, disputed”, from contra– “against” + vertere “to turn”]

We’d like to correct this impression and dispel this myth right now. Although, come to think of it, when you take the meaning of the word as “something people do not approve of,” you do come closer to the truth about psychiatry.

There can be no disagreement with the facts of psychiatric fraud and abuse. These facts have been repeatedly documented by CCHR since its founding in 1969. All the facts are there for your research, laid out in these reference sites:

So, again in fact, there is no controversy about the fraudulent nature of the psychiatric industry, or the harm of its treatments, or the abuse of its patients.

Where could people be getting this mistaken idea of controversy?

Well, among the majority of the general public there is a fundamental disagreement with and disapproval of psychiatry. And the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries certainly disagree with and disapprove of any effort to disseminate the truth and expose their fraud and abuse.

So, when someone tells you that “CCHR is controversial,” do not let them get away with this false idea. Any perceived controversy is actually put there by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries themselves, in their desperate attempt to avoid the truth, their disagreement with being exposed as frauds, and their disapproval of anyone getting in the way of their blood money income.

Research published January 25, 2011 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (“Antidepressant Use in the Absence of Common Mental Disorders in the General Population”) concludes that “antidepressant use among individuals without psychiatric diagnoses is common in the United States,” and these drugs are more likely to have been prescribed by family doctors than by psychiatrists.

Reuters picked up the story and said that “more than a quarter of people in the United States who take antidepressants have never been diagnosed with any of the conditions the drugs are typically used to treat.”

At $10 billion per year, the sale of antidepressants is a major contributor to the high cost of health care insurance. As these drugs often have devastating side effects, they are calculated to create patients-for-life; more and more health care is needed to combat these side effects, while the original symptoms for which they may have been prescribed go undiagnosed and untreated.

The New York Times says (March 5, 2011) that “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns to Drug Therapy.” “Psychiatric hospitals that once offered patients months of talk therapy now discharge them within days with only pills. … A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.” Yet, “Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression.”

Sure, people can have difficult problems in their lives, and at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, anxiety or panic. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatric drugs and psychiatric treatments are not workable.

Find out more about psychiatric drug side effects by clicking here.

For the next few days in St. Louis, you have a unique opportunity to find out about these issues. Visit the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death international touring exhibit before it leaves town. The last day for free tours is Saturday, March 12.

If you read last month’s Gary Greenberg article in Wired magazine about the folly of the DSM-V (“The Book of Woe – Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness“) you may be interested in a follow-up just published in the Wired letters column.

The article covered the controversy surrounding the upcoming fifth edition of psychiatry’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Greenberg said, “What the battle over DSM-5 should make clear to all of us—professional and layman alike—is that psychiatric diagnosis will probably always be laden with uncertainty, that the labels doctors give us for our suffering will forever be at least as much the product of negotiations around a conference table as investigations at a lab bench.”

The follow-up in the March issue is a quote, in response to the article, from Jay S. Kwawer, director of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York, who said, “The DSM is potentially even more pernicious than Greenberg’s account. This manual has increasingly shaped patterns of reimbursement by insurers; clinicians have every incentive to fit the diagnosis to what health insurance companies will pay for. The resulting epidemiological data (incidence, prevalence, comorbidity, and so forth) are skewed by clinicians who barter their integrity in return for fee-for-service. In effect, DSM has contributed to making liars of us all.”

[Epidemiology is the study of patterns of health and illness and their associated factors in a population, from Latin epi demos, “among the people.” Comorbidity is the presence of more than one diagnosis at the same time, from Latin co—morbus, “along with—disease.”]

The scientific validity of the DSM has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts, calling it junk science. The truth is that when we try to fit psychiatry into the definition of a true science, it fails the test. The lack of science behind the DSM gives a clear idea of why it has earned such criticism.

Click here for more information about the DSM-V.

Many people think that psychiatric disorders are the same as medical diseases or illnesses. While mainstream physical medicine deals with diseases such as malaria, bronchitis and hepatitis that have exact, identifiable physical causes, psychiatry deals with disorders.

Disorders are names given to undesirable feelings and behavior for which no exact physical causes have been isolated. These mental disorders are frequently referred to as “illnesses” or “diseases” but they are not the same thing. This difference sets psychiatry far apart from the usual practice of medicine.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by unusual shifts in a person’s mood, energy and ability to function. Its symptoms are severe mood swings from one extreme of overly high and/or irritable (mania) to sad and hopeless (depression), then back again.

In the 1800’s, bipolar was known as manic depression, a term invented by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. In 1953, another German psychiatrist, Karl Kleist coined the term “bipolar.” Other psychiatrists have attempted to describe it, including Kleis’ student, Karl Leonhard.

Bipolar disorder was first officially introduced into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the 1980’s, but was largely considered to be an adult “disorder.”

In January 2002, the Medicine Journal reported: “The etiology (cause) and pathophysiology (the function or action of ‘’abnormal’ states in people) of bipolar disorder (BPD) have not been determined, and no objective biological markers exist that correspond definitively with the disease state.” Nor have any genes “been definitely identified” for bipolar disorder.

Pediatric neurologist Fred Baughman, Jr., wrote: “The fact of the matter is—and a fact to which the country had better wake up—is that there is no abnormality to be found in any of psychiatry’s ‘diseases’—not in infants, not in toddlers, not in preschoolers, not at any age. Without invented ‘diseases,’ the psychiatric-pharmaceutical cartel would have nothing to treat. These are normal children with disciplinary and educational problems that can and must be resolved without recourse to drugs. Deceiving and drugging is not the practice of medicine. It is
criminal.”

Bear in mind that the “treatments” being prescribed are for “disorders” that are not physical illnesses—essentially, they are being prescribed for something that does not exist.

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, anxiety or panic. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatric drugs and psychiatric treatments are not workable.

Click here for more information and to download and read the CCHR Report on Bipolar Disorder.

Make your ideas heard on how to make the Missouri state government more streamlined. Senate Leader Robert Mayer, on behalf of the Missouri Senate, invites Missouri residents to submit ideas on how to reboot Missouri State Government – whether it be through more control, alterations or deletions.

The webpage at http://www.senate.mo.gov/RebootMO/ is one step in the Missouri Senate’s effort to identify ways to make government smaller and more efficient. Every idea will be considered.

Just enter your ideas at http://www.senate.mo.gov/RebootMO/RebootMO.aspx. Anonymous submissions will be accepted. Constituents are also invited to contact their state senators directly to submit ideas. Go here to find out who is your state senator: http://www.senate.mo.gov/.

A Few Suggestions

• Mental Health Insurance Parity needs to be abolished in this state. It acts essentially as a tax give-away to the vested interests of the mental health industry.
• Assign the Department of Health to open “Free State Health Clinics” on the grounds of our state mental hospitals using the saved tax money from the Department of Mental Health. The facilities already exist; we only need good doctors to man the examining rooms.
• Hold open and very public investigations into the activities of the Department of Mental Health. Thousands of Missourian citizens are being harmed by the psychiatrists in state employ. Additionally hundreds are routinely kept incarcerated far past the time of simple prison sentence.
• Severely cut the Department of Mental Health’s bloated wasteful budget. We can easily save millions of tax dollars by using no psychotropic drugs on our citizens. These are now being shown to actually cause more medical problems than they supposedly help.
• Fold the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services. The DMH cannot manage itself, witness State Auditor’s investigation and reported deaths in state-run facilities. DMH is an agency out of control.
• Abolish the practice of Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) in this state. This barbaric pseudo-medical treatment is responsible for thousands of Missouri citizens being on the roles of Medicare and Medicaid. ECT causes permanent brain damage and the victims rely on Medicaid to survive.
• Change the Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity rules in the states legal system. Our (NGRI) rules allow the career criminal to use the system to evade prison. They are routinely released earlier than if they were incarcerated in our prisons. Establish a firm “If you do the crime, then you do the time” policy.

Deadly Restraints

To state the obvious, psychiatric “care” is not supposed to kill patients, and no one expects patients to die in psychiatric hospitals. Yet this is what quietly happens under the watchful eye of psychiatrists every day in psychiatric institutions around the world.

Restraint “procedures” are the most visible evidence of the barbaric practices that psychiatrists choose to call therapy or treatment. Such psychiatric brutality does not soften, as human compassion would deem appropriate, even for the sake of youth or elderly.

Download and read the free CCHR booklet Deadly Restraints — Psychiatry’s “Therapeutic” Assault — Report and recommendations on the violent and dangerous use of restraints in mental health facilities.

Psychiatric restraint procedures, and all other psychiatric procedures for that matter, 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.”