Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

Depression Screening – A Cruel Fraud; Exposing “National Depression Screening Day”

This year, National Depression Screening Day is on Thursday, October 7. Its purpose is to refer people for psychiatric treatment, which means the prescription of harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs.

In 1991, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) began organizing a “National Depression Screening Day” to encourage family doctors to diagnose depression more often in their patients and to refer them to psychiatrists. The Depression Screening Day was initiated with funds from pharmaceutical companies that have continued to fund it each year.

This is a warning: depression screening is bogus — cashing in on people’s problems in life to get them onto psychiatric drugs and increase drug sales.

Depression screening is the effort of the psychiatric industry, using drug company money, to forward their own unscientific and destructive agenda. Depression screening is based on psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which relies on American Psychiatric Association member votes (opinions only) on whether to call a list of symptoms a “disorder” — something that real medicine would never do. Without these fraudulent diagnoses, pharmaceutical companies could not make psychiatric drugs.

CCHR says that people need to be protected from the risks and human rights violations that can occur because of the DSM, and which are now heightened because of the vested influence of pharmaceutical interests on the decision making process for mental disorders.

Psychiatric adverstising that claims a biological basis to depression and that treatment can “restore brain cell connections and lead to recovery” is disease mongering, psychiatric fraud, and misleads vulnerable people in need of real help into thinking that a mind-altering drug can fix their problems in life.

The FDA warns these drugs cause hostility, agitation, mania and suicide. If you know someone who is taking a psychiatric drug from which they have suffered an adverse side effect, they should report this to the FDA MedWatch site.

If you are asked to screen your teenage son or daughter, and a screening procedure called “TeenScreen” or similar is to be used, ask them to explain why the psychiatrist who invented this says there is a potential 84% failure rate in correctly identifying someone at risk of suicide. Before agreeing to any screening, ask those doing the testing to conduct a physical test — x-ray, blood, urine or other bodily test — that would be necessary to show that depression is a “medical” (i.e. physical) disease in the brain, or are they relying on a list of personal questions (opinion) only. For more information about this bogus program, visit this site.

Click here for more information about mental health screening.

Forest Pharmaceuticals, an Earth City, MO drug maker, has agreed to plead guilty to federal criminal and civil charges and pay more than $313 million to resolve allegations that it made drugs without FDA approval, marketed an antidepressant for pediatric use, and gave kickbacks to doctors for prescribing these harmful drugs.

Forest Pharma, a subsidiary of New York based Forest Labs, signed a plea agreement to settle, among other charges, the illegal promotion of the antidepressant Celexa for children, and causing the submission of false insurance claims for the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro.

The settlement alleges that Forest misled doctors and consumers by failing to disclose a European medical study that determined Celexa was ineffective for pediatric use. Lexapro is the company’s main money maker, with sales of $2.3 billion in fiscal year 2010.

Celexa (citalopram) and Lexapro (escitalopram oxalate) can cause suicidal thoughts or actions in children.

Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as  “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.

Click here for more information about the harmful effects of Celexa and Lexapro.

Electroshock —It’s Not Treatment, It’s Torture

Click Here to Watch

Ask the average person about the use of electroshock treatment in today’s society and 9 out of 10 will respond, “They still shock people?”

They do. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 Americans are electroshocked each year; half are 60 and older, and two-thirds are women.

Electroshock, renamed electroconvulsive therapy or ECT, is not only still being given to hundreds of thousands per year, but frequently without their consent. Documented effects of electroshock include short and long term memory loss, brain seizures, life-threatening cardiovascular events and death. Psychiatrists admit they don’t know how ECT “works” but that doesn’t stop them from administering it to hundreds of thousands of people per year, including the elderly, children and pregnant women.

Recently, press have reported that ECT is making a “comeback” but what most don’t realize, is that electroshock never went away.

Watch and share this 3-minute video and read this article on electroshock.

To find out some of the laws CCHR has helped enact to prohibit/ban this deadly practice see our accomplishments page.

For even more information download and read the CCHR booklet ECT – The Brutal Reality from http://www.cchrstl.org.

The United States Code, Chapter 109a, Title 18, Section 2242, Sexual Abuse, states, “Whoever…knowingly…engages in a sexual act with another person if that other person is…incapable of appraising the nature of the conduct…shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

There is a long-standing consensus in the medical profession that sexual contact or sexual relations between physicians and patients is unethical. The prohibition against such was incorporated into the Hippocratic Oath: “I will come to the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons….”

In no other area of medicine is the patient in such a state of emotional vulnerability as when they visit a psychiatrist or psychologist. It is a relationship in which the patient can be most easily exploited and manipulated.

But psychiatrists and psychologists rarely consider that raping a patient is rape. Instead, it is euphemistically called “sexual contact,” a “sexual relationship” or “crossing the boundaries” when one of its members sexually forces themself on a patient, often with the help of drugs or electroshock treatment.

A review of more than 800 convictions of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists between 1998 and 2005 revealed that more than 30% were for sex crimes.

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

A 1997 Canadian study of psychiatrists revealed that 10% admitted to sexually abusing their patients; 80% of those were repeat offenders.

In a 1999 British study of therapist-patient sexual contact among psychologists, 25% reported having treated a patient who had been sexually involved with another therapist.

As reported in 2001, a U.S. study of therapist-client sex, reported that 1 out of 20 clients who had been sexually abused by their therapist was a minor. The female victims’ ages ranged from 3 to 17, and from 7 to 16 for the males. The average age was 7 for girls and 12 for boys.

Click here to read the full article.

For 50 years, psychiatry has promoted its theory that the only “treatment” for mental “illness” is psychiatric drugs. However, not only is the drugging of patients unnecessary—and expensive—it causes brain– and life–damaging side effects. The simple truth is that there are workable alternatives to psychiatry’s destructive treatments and you as a patient have the right to refuse it.

In this 33–minute Watchdog Radio Podcast, attorney Gary Brown wants people to know that they have a right to say no to psychiatric treatment and drugs, that emotional upsets are a normal part of life—they are not justification for locking someone away as a danger to themselves or others.

Click here to go to this podcast.

Watchdog Radio is brought to you by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog and non–profit organization. CCHR investigates and exposes psychiatric violations of human rights and works shoulder to shoulder with like–minded groups and individuals who share a common purpose to clean up the field of mental health.

For more information about involuntary commitment, read the CCHR publication “Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment — A Crack in the Door of Constitutional Freedoms” available for download by clicking here.

The advent of Community Mental Health (CMH) psychiatric programs in the 1960s would not have been possible without the development and use of neuroleptic drugs, also known as antipsychotics, for mentally disturbed individuals. Neuroleptic is from Greek, meaning “nerve seizing”, reflective of how the drugs act like a chemical lobotomy.

CMH was promoted as the solution to all institutional problems. The premise, based almost entirely on the development and use of neuroleptic drugs, was that patients could now be successfully released back into society. Ongoing service would be provided through government-funded units called Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC). These centers would tend to the patients from within the community, dispensing the neuroleptics that would keep them under control. Governments would save money and individuals would improve faster. The plan was called “deinstitutionalization.”

The first generation of neuroleptics, now commonly referred to as “typical antipsychotics” or “typicals,” appeared during the 1960s. They were heavily promoted as “miracle” drugs that made it “possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society.”

These claims were false. In an article in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2003, Vera Sharav stated, “The reality was that the therapies damaged the brain’s frontal lobes, which is the distinguishing feature of the human brain. The neuroleptic drugs used since the 1950s ‘worked’ by hindering normal brain function: they dimmed psychosis, but produced pathology often worse than the condition for which they have been prescribed — much like physical lobotomy which psychotropic drugs replaced.”

The homeless individuals commonly seen grimacing and talking to themselves on the street are exhibiting the effects of such psychiatric drug-induced damage. “Tardive dyskinesia” [tardive, late appearing and dyskinesia, abnormal muscle movement] and “tardive dystonia” [dystonia, abnormal muscle tension] are permanent conditions caused by tranquilizers in which the muscles of the face and body contort and spasm involuntarily.

For almost 50 years, psychiatry has promoted its theory that the only “treatment” for severe mental “illness” is neuroleptic drugs. However, this idea rests on a fault line. The truth is that not only is the drugging of severely mentally disturbed patients unnecessary – and expensive, thus profitable – it causes brain- and life-damaging side effects.

Mental health courts are facilities established to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies. Rather than allowing the guilty parties to take responsibility for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric treatment center on the premise that they suffer from “mental illness” which will respond positively to antipsychotic drugs. It is another form of coercive “community mental health treatment.”

The Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction reported that the CMH program in Europe created homelessness, drug addiction, criminal activities, disturbances to public peace and order and unemployment.

CMHCs became legalized drug dealerships that not only supplied psychiatric drugs to former mental hospital patients, but also supplied prescriptions to individuals free of “serious mental problems.” Deinstitutionalization failed and society has been struggling with homelessness and other disastrous results ever since.

There are workable alternatives to psychiatry’s mind-, brain- and body-damaging treatments. With psychiatry now calling for mandatory mental illness screening for adults and children everywhere, we urge all who have an interest in preserving the mental health, the physical health and the freedom of their families, communities and nations, to find out for themselves. Something must be done to establish real help for those who need it.

Click here to download and read the full CCHR report Community Ruin — Psychiatry’s Coercive ‘Care’ — Report and recommendations on the failure of community mental health and other coercive psychiatric programs.

Study Finds Nearly One Million Children in U.S. Potentially Misdiagnosed With ADHD

Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest — and most immature — in their kindergarten class, according to new research by a Michigan State University economist.

Many ADHD diagnoses may be driven by teachers’ perceptions of poor behavior among the youngest children in a kindergarten classroom. But these ‘symptoms’ may merely reflect emotional or intellectual immaturity among the youngest students.

[Michigan State University. “Nearly One Million Children in U.S. Potentially Misdiagnosed With ADHD, Study Finds.” ScienceDaily 17 August 2010. 19 August 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100817103342.htm?sms_ss=reddit]

Click here to read the full article.

Click here for more information about fraudulent psychiatric disorders.

http://psychrights.org/PR/100811NicholsonUnsealingNR.pdf

PRESS RELEASE
August 11, 2010
CONTACT
Jim Gottstein
907-274-7686
jim.gottstein@psychrights.org

CONTACT
S. Randolph Kretchmar
(847) 370-5410
s_randolph@earthlink.net

Illinois Medicaid Fraud Case Using PsychRights’ Model Complaint Unsealed

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights^®) announces the unsealing of the first Medicaid Fraud case for prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and youth by someone other than PsychRights using PsychRights’ model Qui Tam Complaint.

United States ex rel Linda Nicholson v. Lilian Spigelman, M.D., Hephzibah Children’s Association, and Sears Pharmacy, was filed in Illinois by attorney S. Randolph Kretchmar as a result of PsychRights’ Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth.

Ms. Nicholson’s daughter was given psychiatric drugs that were not for a “medically accepted indication,” constituting Medicaid Fraud.

“The evidence is overwhelming that these drugs prescribed to children and youth are ineffective, even counterproductive, and extremely harmful to children,” said PsychRights’ president, Jim Gottstein.

Mr. Kretchmar, the attorney handling the case said, “People need to wake up to the huge amount of harm these prescribing practices are inflicting on our children. I am very pleased to follow the lead of PsychRights in addressing this problem and hope through this lawsuit we can help bring the practice to a halt.”

Jim Gottstein continued, “People should expect more of these cases until this pervasive type of Medicaid Fraud stops. The Nicholson case is the first of such cases brought by someone other than PsychRights.”

The lawsuit is brought under the federal False Claims Act, which authorizes private parties to bring fraud actions on behalf of the United States Government and share in the recovery, if any.

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The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is a public interest law firm devoted to the defense of people facing the horrors of forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock. PsychRights is further dedicated to exposing the truth about psychiatric interventions and the courts being misled into ordering people subjected to these brain and body damaging drugs against their will. Extensive information about these dangers, and about the tragic damage caused by electroshock, is available on the PsychRights web site: http://psychrights.org/.

James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq.
President/CEO
Law Project for Psychiatric Rights
406 G Street, Suite 206
Anchorage, Alaska  99501
USA
Phone: (907) 274-7686)  Fax: (907) 274-9493
jim.gottstein[[at]]psychrights.org
http://psychrights.org/