Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

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.”

In today’s high–pressure world, tradition is too often replaced by more “modern” means of dealing with the demands of life. For example, while once heavily community–, church– and family–based, today the task of caring for our parents and grandparents routinely falls to organizations such as nursing homes or aged–care centers. There we trust that professionally trained staff will take care of our elders as we would.

For those who contemplate how to arrange care for much–loved and aging parents or grandparents, it is vital to know that psychiatry abusing seniors with cruel mental health programs is not an exception in elder care today.

The reality of nursing home and aged–care center life today is often far from the stylized image of communicative, interactive and interested elderly residents living in an idyllic environment. By contrast, more often than not, the institutionalized elderly of today appear submissive, quiet, somehow vacant, a sort of lifelessness about them, perhaps blankly staring or deeply introspective and withdrawn.

If not by drugs, these conditions can also be brought on by the use of electroconvulsive or shock treatment (ECT) or simply the threat of painful and demeaning restraints.

Rather than this being the failure of nursing hospital and aged care staff generally, this is the legacy of the widespread introduction of psychiatric treatment into the care of the elderly over the last few decades.

For more information, download and read the free CCHR booklet Elderly Abuse — Cruel Mental Health Programs — Report and recommendations on psychiatry abusing seniors.

In the United States, 65–year–olds receive 360% more shock treatment than 64–vear–olds because at age 65 government insurance coverage for shock typically takes effect.

Such extensive abuse of the elderly is not the result of medical incompetence. In fact, medical literature clearly cautions against prescribing tranquilizers to the elderly because of the numerous dangerous side effects. Studies show ECT shortens the lives of elderly people significantly. Specific figures are not kept as causes of death are usually listed as heart attacks or other conditions.

The abuse is the result of psychiatry maneuvering itself into an authoritative position over aged care. From there, psychiatry has broadly perpetrated the tragic but lucrative hoax that aging is a mental disorder requiring extensive and expensive psychiatric services.

The end result is that, rather than being cherished and respected, too often our senior citizens suffer the extreme indignity of having their power of mind heartlessly nullified by psychiatric treatments or their lives simply brought to a tragic and premature end.

STATE-OF-THE-ART TOURING EXHIBIT OPENS TO EXPOSE PSYCHIATRY AS AN “INDUSTRY OF DEATH”

With mounting drug regulatory agency warnings, a new exhibit exposes thousands of child deaths from psychiatric drugs in U.S.

Grand Opening: Saturday, 5 February 2011, 1:00 PM, Portfolio Gallery, 3514 Delmar (at Grand), St. Louis, MO 63103

5-26 February 2011, Portfolio Gallery, 3514 Delmar (at Grand), St. Louis, MO

7-8 February 2011, Missouri State Capitol Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO

25-27 February 2011, St. Charles Convention Center (Working Women’s Survival Show), St. Charles, MO

WHO:

Join the psychiatric watchdog group Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis (CCHR) to open a chillingly informative exhibit, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.” Free to the public, it warns about the more than 100,000 deaths in psychiatric institutions around the world each year and over 15,000 deaths of children taking psychiatric drugs in the United States.

WHAT:

The exhibit, which is being shown internationally in more than 30 countries, depicts human rights abuses by psychiatry and carries statements from health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities. It traces the origins of psychiatry, the role psychiatrists have played in the oppression of blacks and minorities, the roots of their eugenics programs and the pivotal part they played in the Holocaust. It also reveals how psychiatric drugs are behind the spate of school shooting sprees and how millions of federal dollars allocated to screen American schoolchildren for “mental disorders” could increase both child deaths and acts of school violence. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that psychiatric drugs prescribed to children could cause aggression, hostility, psychosis, mania, homicide, suicide and death.

WHEN & WHERE:

5-26 February 2011, Portfolio Gallery, 3514 Delmar (at Grand), St. Louis, MO (Mon-Fri: 1pm-7pm; Sat: 10am-5pm)

7-8 February 2011, Missouri State Capitol Building Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO (8am-5pm)

25-27 February 2011, St. Charles Convention Center – Working Women’s Survival Show (Fri 11am-8pm; Sat 10am-8pm; Sun 11am-5pm)

CONTACT:

Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis, (314) 727-8307

CCHRSTL@CCHRSTL.ORG, www.CCHRSTL.org

ORGANIZATION:

CCHR was founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus from the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, and has successfully achieved hundreds of legislative protections against psychiatric abuse.

We wondered if our readers had noticed a marked increase in violence and suicide reported recently in the media, and that many of those perpetrators had been in psychiatric hands or taking psychotropic drugs?

We are sure you also knew that the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) started out as a psychiatric drug.

LSD was discovered in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. In the early 1950s, according to documents obtained from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act, the agency was concerned that the Russians were trying to buy the entire world’s supply of LSD. Both sides used the drug for mind-control and interrogation purposes.

To ensure a domestic supply of LSD, the CIA in 1953 signed a $400,000 contract with an American drug company to manufacture and supply the drug. This was done under Subproject 18 of the MK ULTRA program.

The first North American acidheads were psychiatrists, intelligence officers and military personnel themselves. Psychiatrists then turned America on to LSD. They distributed it to subjects in experiments and then used it in “treatment.”

Due to the severe adverse reactions from psychiatric drugs finally becoming a matter of public knowledge, as well as studies proving psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebo, the psychiatric drug lords have now come up with what they are trying to sell as a novel approach — prescribe patients LSD.

The December, 2010 issue of Scientific American contains an article titled “Hallucinogens as Medicine,” suggesting that hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin be used to “treat” smoking, alcohol and drug addiction, depression, and other mental symptoms.

If you would like to write a letter to the editor about this, send it to Scientific American, 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10013-1917.

For more information about LSD click here.

Police Perspective

For every violent murderer reported in the mainstream media as having been “taking medicine for depression,” there are many, many more incidences of violence that never make headlines.

Among the information that 911 dispatchers are trained to gather is the involvement of drugs or alcohol in the situations which are reported to 911. Ask any 911 operator if they have ever taken an emergency call that involved violence and psychiatric drugs and you are likely to get a “yes.”

This week’s Watchdog Radio show guest is Ronald Harvel, Chief of Police in Hurst, Illinois, population 805. Despite the size of his jurisdiction, he has found that the involvement of psychiatric drugs in reports to 911 is significant enough to warrant public concern and discussion.

Click here to get the podcast.

A recent review of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or shock treatment) has concluded that ECT is so harmful, with so little or no benefit, that its use cannot be scientifically justified.

This paper, “The effectiveness of electroconvulsive therapy: A literature review,” by Professors John Read and Richard Bentall, appeared in the April 19, 2010 issue of Epidemiologia e Psichiatria Sociale.

Quoting from the paper’s Summary: “These placebo controlled studies show minimal support for effectiveness with either depression or ‘schizophrenia’ during the course of treatment (i.e. only for some patients, on some measures, sometimes perceived only by psychiatrists but not by other raters), and no evidence, for either diagnostic group, of any benefits beyond the treatment period. There are no placebo-controlled studies evaluating the hypothesis that ECT prevents suicide, and no robust evidence from other kinds of studies to support the hypothesis. Conclusions – Given the strong evidence (summarised here) of persistent and, for some, permanent brain dysfunction, primarily evidenced in the form of retrograde [loss of memory for past events] and anterograde [inability to retain new information] amnesia, and the evidence of a slight but significant increased risk of death, the cost-benefit analysis for ECT is so poor that its use cannot be scientifically justified.”

There are “significant new findings confirming that the brain damage, in the form of memory dysfunction, is common, persistent and significant, and that it is related to ECT rather than to depression.”

The authors go on to say, “The continued use of ECT therefore represents a failure to introduce the ideals of evidence-based medicine into psychiatry. This failure has occurred not only in the design and execution of research, but also in the translation of research findings into clinical practice. It seems there is resistance to the research data in the ECT community, and perhaps in psychiatry in general.”

For more information, download and read the free CCHR report, “Psychiatry Destroys Minds – ECT: The Brutal Reality” from http://www.cchrstl.org/ect.shtml.

Notice: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has opened a public docket (FDA-2010-N-0585) to receive information and comments regarding the classification of electroconvulsive therapy devices (ECT.) In other words, the FDA wants to classify ECT machines as safe and effective medical devices. If you have comments regarding the safety of ECT machines, they must be filed by January 25, 2011. Obviously, these machines are not safe, seeing the outright harm they cause to individuals; please let the FDA know what you think. Submit written comments and information to the Division of Dockets Management (HFA-305), Food and Drug Administration, 5630 Fishers Lane, Room 1061, Rockville, MD 20852. Submit electronic comments and information to http://www.regulations.gov by searching for Docket FDA-2010-N-0585 and clicking the Submit a Comment button for the “Neurological Devices Panel of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee; Notice of Meeting.”

A recent article in Nature magazine [“The Drug Deadlock” 11/11/2010] had some interesting comments on psychiatric drugs and drug research.

In January, 2005 a four-year $43 million clinical trial of schizophrenia drugs ended, making it clear that newer psychiatric drugs were barely different than the old ones.

They ran this drug trial because the old drugs had horrific side effects, and they wanted to compare those old drugs to the newer drugs. What they found, and did not expect, was that the side effects of the new drugs were just as bad. Overall, three-quarters of the patients abandoned their drug during the trial due to side effects, regardless of which drug they took.

Within a few years, several large drug companies chose to pull out of psychiatric pharmacology altogether in order to cut costs.

Now, however, drug companies are looking again at schizophrenia drug research, because schizophrenia represents a huge potential market, particularly given that most patients seem to manifest such symptoms in their early twenties and could be on daily drugs for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, schizophrenia is not a real mental disease, and psychiatric drugs are not a real cure.

This condition was first called dementia praecox by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the late 1800’s, and labeled “schizophrenia” by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908.

Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, says the patients that Kraepelin diagnosed with dementia praecox were actually suffering from a virus, encephalitis lethargica (brain inflammation causing lethargy) which was unknown to doctors at the time.

Psychiatry never revisited Kraepelin’s material to see that schizophrenia was simply an undiagnosed and untreated physical problem. “Schizophrenia was a concept too vital to the profession’s claim of medical legitimacy. The physical symptoms of the disease were quietly dropped. What remained, as the foremost distinguishing features, were the mental symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre thoughts,” says Whitaker. Psychiatrists remain committed to calling “schizophrenia” a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality.

Today, psychiatry clings tenaciously to antipsychotics as the treatment for “schizophrenia,” despite their proven risks and studies which show that when patients stop taking these drugs, they improve.

Professor Thomas Szasz states that “schizophrenia is defined so vaguely that, in actuality, it is a term often applied to almost any kind of behavior of which the speaker disapproves.”

These are normal people with medical, disciplinary, educational, or spiritual problems that can and must be resolved without recourse to drugs. Deceiving and drugging is not the practice of medicine. It is criminal.

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.

For more information, download and read the free CCHR report, Schizophrenia—Psychiatry’s For Profit ‘Disease’ – available at http://www.cchrstl.org/schizophrenia.shtml.

A recent research article [Moore TJ, Glenmullen J, Furberg CD (2010) Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others. PLoS ONE 5(12): e15337. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015337] has concluded that “acts of violence towards others are a genuine and serious adverse drug event … Varenicline … and serotonin reuptake inhibitors were the most strongly and consistently implicated drugs.”

Varenicline (also known as Champix or Chantix) is a benzodiazepine-based anti-anxiety drug promoted for smoking cessation. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors are psychotropic drugs known as “newer antidepressants.”

More information about the side effects of these drugs can be found at http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

It should be noted that these drugs mask the real cause of problems in life and debilitate the individual, so denying him or her the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future.

Psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as “mental illness” for which they can prescribe harmful and addictive drugs. Let others know how bad this is. Get the Facts. Fight Back.

Exposing the Psychiatric Diagnosis Fraud

One prevailing psychiatric theory (key to psychotropic drug sales) is that mental disorders result from a chemical imbalance in the brain. As with its other theories, there is no biological or other evidence to prove this. People do experience problems and upsets in life that may result in mental troubles, sometimes very serious. But to represent that these troubles are caused by incurable “brain diseases” that can only be alleviated with dangerous pills is dishonest, harmful and often deadly.

Such drugs are often more potent than a narcotic and capable of driving one to violence or suicide. They mask the real cause of problems in life and debilitate the individual, so denying him or her the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future. Dr. David Stein exposes this psychiatric diagnosis fraud in this week’s Watchdog Radio show.