Involuntary Commitment « Citizens Commission on Human Rights St. Louis

Posts Tagged ‘Involuntary Commitment’

Alexa Is Listening For Your Own Good

Sunday, April 5th, 2020

Recently I was at my sister’s house and I told a joke that had the word “suicide” in it. Unbidden, Alexa started to tell us how to call a suicide hotline. For a moment I half expected the police to barge in and take me away.

You see, in Missouri and all other states, involuntary commitment “for your own good” is the law.

According to the Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) state law 192.2465, when a peace officer has probable cause to believe that an adult will suffer an imminent likelihood of serious physical harm if not immediately placed in a medical facility the officer may summarily take the person against their will to a psychiatric hospital.

Missouri law euphemistically calls this “civil detention”; also known as civil commitment or involuntary commitment.

There is a religious exemption, so CCHR recommends that you execute a Living Will (Letter of protection from psychiatric incarceration and/or treatment) that expresses this.

Involuntary Commitment

Can this really happen in America today? Can this happen in a country where even criminals are set free if they are not given their rights, where the strongest Constitution in man’s history guarantees the individual his liberties? It not only can, but it does. The fact is, more than 1.5 million U.S. citizens per year become the next victim of involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, forced to undergo dangerous and harmful treatments against their will. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

This less-than-charitable “concern for the troubled individual” yields the psychiatric industry upwards of $25 billion per year. And it is ultimately financed by the unwitting taxpayer who, more likely than not, has never even heard of involuntary commitment procedures.

While involuntary commitment laws enrich the psychiatric industry, they not only deprive individuals of their freedom of choice, but milk millions of health insurance dollars annually from private, state, national and military health plans. And while psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals are today being investigated nationally and in state hearings for insurance fraud, mistreatment of patients, sexual violations and other crimes, the crux of their power — involuntary commitment laws — receives no focused attention.

Contact your state legislators and tell them what you think about this.

For more information download and read the full CCHR report “Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment — A Crack In The Door Of Constitutional Freedoms“.

Tags:Involuntary Commitment, Living Will, Missouri, suicide
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Power to the Patients

Monday, January 27th, 2020

Listening to a radio program about considerations of political power in the Middle East made us wonder more generally about the concept of power. Their main consideration was the accumulation of power in order to control various elements of society. We noticed how this might apply to abuses in the mental health industry.

Power is one of those English words with multiple definitions. Generally it means “the ability to act or produce an effect”. In other contexts, for example in physics, it has the definition “the time rate of doing work.” In the referenced radio program it meant “relating to political, social, or economic control.” There are other specific definitions in mathematics, religion, business, law, etc.

In a very practical personal sense power means “being able to do what one is doing when one is doing it.” In another practical sense it means “the ability to hold a position in space.” Power represents total abundance where nothing can strike you down. A Zone of Power could be considered the area over which one has responsibility and control.

We ask how all this might relate to patient abuse in the mental health industry.

Coercive Psychiatry

When we speak of “coercive psychiatry” we mean that psychiatry is used as a means of social control against which one has no recourse and cannot fight back. Prime examples are involuntary commitment and enforced treatment.

As the late Professor Thomas Szasz said, “coercive psychiatrists function as judges and jailers not physicians and healers” with the power of life and death over the most vulnerable people.

“Disguising social control as medical treatment is a deceit which conceals an abuse.” This is a de facto abuse of power, as it seeks to limit and control the individual instead of helping the individual to get better and improve their conditions in life.

Coercive psychiatry is not intended to cure anything. On the contrary, psychiatry is the science of control and entrapment, and having power over distressed and vulnerable individuals. Wherever men have advocated and advanced totalitarianism, they have used psychiatric principles to control society, to put limits on individual freedom, to suppress and punish dissent, and to trap people into worsening conditions. It is actually a mis-use of power, since its intentions are to make less of a person’s self-determinism and give more power to others and the state.

All too often people may mistakenly disparage their own strength or power; do not allow psychiatry to crush you even further.

Click here to read more about psychopolitics — the art of asserting power over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals and the conquest of enemy nations through “mental healing”.

Tags:Coercive psychiatry, Cures, Involuntary Commitment, Politics, Psychopolitics, Szasz
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Never Out of SORTS

Monday, October 28th, 2019

The Missouri attorney general’s office convinced a Jasper County jury that an 86-year-old former minister is still at risk of sodomizing teenage boys, even after he completed a 15-year prison sentence for doing so. He was sentenced to involuntary commitment in a secure state psychiatric facility essentially for the rest of his life.

The Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Services (SORTS) program in Missouri has been criticized since it started in 1999. It currently costs Missouri taxpayers $36.5 million per year to fund additional life sentences disguised as treatment for 257 patients after they have already completed their normal criminal prison terms.

Missouri Statutes 632.480 and 632.484 define a sexually violent predator as someone who suffers from a mental abnormality which makes the person more likely than not to engage in predatory acts of sexual violence if not confined in a secure facility — as determined by either a psychiatrist or psychologist.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

The fact is, when a psychiatrist or psychologist points the sexual predator finger at a person, they are likely doing so to remove suspicion from themselves or their profession. Research shows that between 10% and 25% of mental health practitioners sexually abuse their own patients. To cover up their crimes, psychiatrists have used drugs or electroshock in an effort to eliminate the patient’s memory of the rape, and use the involuntary commitment of others convicted of sexual predation to take the heat off themselves.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) labels child sexual abuse as a mental disorder, when it is actually an ethical failure. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to the “disorders,” the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” and forced incarceration based solely on opinion.

Contact your Missouri State Senator and Representative and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from Missouri State Law.

In the case of SORTS, the person has paid their debt to society as determined by a criminal court, and further enforced incarceration by civil commitment is clearly a violation of Constitutional rights.

The fact that civil commitment is couched in such doublespeak as “for his own good,” or “to prevent him from committing harm,” is unfortunate, for it obfuscates the actual intention, which is to harm in the name of help.

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who have paid their societal debt and prefer not to be further 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.

The crime rate, including sexual violence, is on a long-term increase, and has reached epidemic proportions. The fact that most criminals pass through psychiatry’s portals before the crime speaks for itself. The number of mentally ill, per the statistics of psychiatric bodies themselves, continues to rise each year — which serves to point out the ironic existence of a profession which must constantly advertise its failures in order to gain greater government funding.

Psychiatrists’ own conduct, their interest in easy seizure of people, their inhuman acts and torture committed in the name of “treatment” and their fraudulent and failing “science,” is at complete variance to their public facade of “mental health.”

If a dangerous offense is committed by a person, then the fact remains criminal statutes exist to address this. As the late Dr. Thomas Szasz stated, “All criminal behavior should be controlled by means of the criminal law, from the administration of which psychiatrists ought to be excluded.”

Contact your Missouri State Senator and Representative and ask them to remove the SORTS program from Missouri law.

Tags:DSM, Involuntary Commitment, Missouri
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Psychiatric Destruction of Justice

Monday, August 5th, 2019

We still see regular news stories about one criminal or another being sentenced to the state’s mental health system after pleading mental incompetence.

“Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” (NGRI) is an aspect of criminal procedure, defined in the Missouri Revised Statutes Chapter 552 Section 30 as “A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect such person was incapable of knowing and appreciating the nature, quality, or wrongfulness of such person’s conduct.”

The normal result of the court’s acceptance of an NGRI plea is the involuntary commitment of the accused to the Department of Mental Health for custody in a secure state mental health facility.

CCHR has documented many thousands of individual cases that demonstrate that psychiatric drugs and other brutal psychiatric practices actually create insanity and cause violence. Particularly, the neuroleptic [nerve seizing] drugs forced onto patients in institutions and in the community not only create the sort of violence or mental incompetence that would give apparent cause for involuntary incarceration, they also place the patient at greater risk mentally and physically.

When psychiatry entered the justice and penal systems, it did so under the subterfuge that it understood man, that it knew not only what made man act as he did, but that it knew how to improve his lot. This was a lie. Psychiatry has had opportunity to prove itself. The experiment has been a miserable failure.

In the 1940s, psychiatry’s leaders proclaimed their intention to infiltrate the field of the law and bring about the “re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong.”
[Canadian Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm]

A 1954 decision by the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. held that a mentally defective person is not criminally responsible for unlawful acts. This, and the psychiatric industry jumping on the NGRI bandwagon, has lead to a massive erosion of public confidence in the justice system’s ability to mete out swift and equitable justice.

Once there was the idea that a person is responsible for his own actions; so how is it that we face the absurd situation of psychiatrists testifying to excuse the wrongdoers’ actions?

It all started in 1812, when psychiatrist Benjamin Rush claimed that crime was a mental disease, curable by psychiatry.

Today, psychiatric “expert witnesses” are paid an average of $3,600 per day to testify for whomever is willing to foot the bill.

The late Dr. Thomas Szasz said, “Crimes are acts we commit. Diseases are biological processes that happen to our bodies. Mixing these two concepts by defining behaviors we disapprove of as diseases is a bottomless source of confusion and corruption.” If a dangerous offense is committed by a person, then the fact remains criminal statutes exist to address this. As Szasz also said, “All criminal behavior should be controlled by means of the criminal law, from the administration of which psychiatrists ought to be excluded.”

Compassion decrees that the criminal must be given the opportunity to face up to what he has done and reform himself to become a productive member of the group. In this way justice benefits the individual and society.

Psychiatry’s attempt to eradicate the concept of right and wrong and thereby destroy personal responsibility by inventing excuses for the most flagrant misconduct, undermines the justice system.

Recommendations

1. First and foremost it should be recognized that every person is responsible for his or her own actions and must be held accountable for their actions.

2. State and federal legislators should repeal any laws permitting the insanity defense and diminished capacity pleas.

3. Judges, attorneys and law enforcement officers need to ensure that psychiatric evidence is removed from the courts and that psychiatrists and psychologists are no longer afforded “expert” status.

4. Remove psychiatrists and psychologists as advisors or as counselors from police forces, prisons and criminal rehabilitation and parole services. Because psychiatrists have no scientific foundation for their claims, do not permit them to render opinions about or to treat drug addiction, criminal behavior and delinquency, or to probe for alleged dangerous behavior.

5. Prosecute as a criminal offense any and all cases of physical damage caused through psychiatry’s use of electroshock, brain surgery or abusive drug “treatment.”

For more information and the full history of psychiatry’s corruption of justice, download and read the CCHR booklet “Eroding Justice – Psychiatry’s Corruption of Law – Report and recommendations on psychiatry subverting the courts and corrective services“.

Tags:Involuntary Commitment, justice, Missouri, violence
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Mental Health and Social Justice

Sunday, August 26th, 2018

Social Justice: Fair and just relations between the individual and society, assigning rights and duties in the institutions of society, so that people receive basic societal benefits in return for their cooperation and participation.

In the Health Care field, social justice often means affordable access to ethical and effective health care.

In the field of Human Rights, we defer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

In Mental Health Care, we promote the Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights. 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. Under the banner of the Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights, tens of thousands of people around the globe have joined CCHR and taken to the streets to protest psychiatric drugging and other inhumane mental health practices.

Through stigmatizing labels, unscientific diagnoses, easy seizure commitment laws and brutal, depersonalizing “treatments,” thousands around the world suffer under psychiatry’s coercive system every day. It is a system that exemplifies human rights abuse. Modern psychiatry still has no scientific veracity and knows and admits it, but keeps up the charade for the sake of profit.

By depicting those they label mentally ill as a danger to themselves or others, psychiatrists have convinced governments and courts that depriving such individuals of their liberty, is mandatory for the safety of all concerned. Wherever psychiatry has succeeded in this campaign, extreme abuses of human rights have resulted.

One of CCHR’s primary concerns with psychiatry is its unscientific diagnostic system. Unlike medical diagnosis, psychiatrists categorize symptoms only, not disease. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5) published by the American Psychiatric Association is notorious for low scientific validity.

Understanding this fraudulent diagnostic premise, we can see why psychiatry and psychology, entrusted with billions of dollars to eradicate the problems of the mind, have created and perpetuated them. Their drug panaceas cause senseless acts of violence, suicide, sexual dysfunction, irreversible nervous system damage, hallucinations, apathy, irritability, anxiousness, psychosis and death. And with virtually unrestrained psychiatric drugging of so many of our schoolchildren, it is no surprise that the largest age group of murderers today are our 15–to–19–year–olds.

Drugging children with addictive, violence-causing mind-altering psychotropic drugs is the “social justice” currently being employed by the psychiatric mental health industry. The rationale is, the drugged kids will now be able to compete with children from wealthier families who attend better schools. Rutgers psychiatrist Ramesh Raghavan, formerly at Washington University in St. Louis, chillingly said, “We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal [to ‘level the playing field’ in low-income neighborhoods], which is psychotropic medicine.”

The whole basis for this “social justice” program in low-income communities—that the ADHD drugs will improve school performance of kids and “level the playing field,” so they can compete academically with children from wealthier families—this whole program is based on a lie to begin with.

Meddling with the brains of children via these chemicals constitutes criminal assault, and it’s time it was recognized for what it is.

CCHR believes that everyone has the right to full informed consent regarding psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric treatments. Find out more by clicking here.

Tags:ADHD, Child Drugging, DSM, Human Rights, Informed Consent, Involuntary Commitment, justice, Mental Health, Psychiatric Drugs, Social Justice, violence
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Mental Health “Care” Coming to Your Community

Sunday, March 18th, 2018

News articles extolling “Community Mental Health” continue to be published across the United States and abroad. We thought you should know more about this.

These articles generally discuss funding, either the lack or availability of public funding, for various mental health care programs — such as Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC), police Crisis Intervention Teams, Suicide Programs, Veterans Programs, Mental Health Courts, Emergency Management or Crisis Counseling, Violence Prevention, School Safety, or other public/private ventures in the mental health care industry. They also generally complain about the lack of a sufficient number of psychiatrists or psychologists in relation to the target population. Let us help put the record straight about this.

History of CMHC

In 1955, a five-year inquiry by the U.S. Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health recommended replacing psychiatric institutions with Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs). According to Henry A. Foley, Ph.D., and Steven S. Sharfstein, M.D., authors of Madness in Government, “Psychiatrists gave the impression to elected officials that cures were the rule, not the exception,” a claim that the psychiatric industry could not and still cannot substantiate.

The advent of Community Mental Health 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.

These community facilities and programs were 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 as long as they were taking these drugs. 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, as neuroleptics are now known to have devastating side effects. 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.”

Author Peter Schrag wrote in Mind Control, by the mid-seventies enough neuroleptic drugs and antidepressants “were being prescribed outside hospitals to keep some three to four million people medicated fulltime – roughly ten times the number who, according to the [psychiatrists’] own arguments, are so crazy that they would have to be locked up in hospitals if there were no drugs.”

After a decade of the Community Mental Health program, consumer advocate Ralph Nader called it a “highly touted but failing social innovation.” It “already bears the familiar pattern of past mental health promises that were initiated amid great moral fervor, raised false hopes of imminent solutions and wound up only recapitulating the problems they were to solve.”

As for the funding of CMHCs and psychiatric outpatient clinics, the fact is that psychiatry’s budget in the United States soared from $143 million in 1969 to over $9 billion in 1997 – a more than 6,000% increase in funding, while increasing by only 10 times the number of people receiving services. The estimated costs today are over $11 billion.

If collecting these billions in inflated fees for non-workable treatments wasn’t bad enough, in 1990 a congressional committee issued a report estimating that Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) had diverted between $40 million and $100 million to improper uses, and that a quarter of all CMHCs had so thoroughly failed to meet their obligations as to be legally subject to immediate recovery of federal funds.

Psychiatrists have consistently blamed the failure of deinstitutionalization on a lack of community mental health funding. In reality, they create the drug-induced crisis themselves and then, shamelessly, demand yet more money.

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

Accompanying the psychiatric push for expanded community mental health programs is their demand for greater powers to involuntarily commit individuals. Psychiatrists disingenuously argue that involuntary commitment is an act of kindness, that it is cruel to leave the disturbed in a tormented state. However, such claims are based on the dual premises that 1) psychiatrists have helpful and workable treatments to begin with, and 2) psychiatrists have some expertise in diagnosing and predicting dangerousness. Both suppositions are patently false.

In spite of receiving huge increases in funding in the United States, psychiatry and psychology not only failed but managed to make things drastically worse; rates of drug abuse, suicide, illiteracy and crime continue to rise.

The real message is this: in spite of an investment of billions of dollars for psychiatric promises, the world has received nothing but presumptuous demands from psychiatric vested interests for more money.

Contact your local, state and federal authorities and legislators and demand that funding for psychiatric promises be revoked until the mental health industry can prove its effectiveness with actual cures.

Tags:antipsychotic, CMHC, Fraud, Funding, Involuntary Commitment, Mental Health, Psychiatric Drugs, psychology, Side Effects
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The Russians Are Coming? No, They Never Left!

Sunday, March 4th, 2018

In 1966 the movie “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” dramatized the Cold War as a plot to make the world die laughing.

We had to laugh about it, because the reality of Soviet infiltration to topple America was too serious to confront.

In fact, as current events are unfolding, the Russians are apparently still at it — attempting to infiltrate via fake news and social media and destabilize American society for their own evil purposes. But frankly, this is nothing new; they’ve been at it since communism began around 1844, in one form or another.

For a communistic state to exist, slaves to the state need to exist. The marriage of psychiatry with communist regimes has spanned countries across the globe as an effective means to deal with political dissension by making people into slaves. They have been using psychiatry ever since as a significant part of the plot.

Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University, who founded “experimental psychology” in 1879, declared that man is an animal with no soul, claiming that thought was merely the result of brain activity — a false premise that has remained the basis of psychiatry until this day. In 1884, Russian psychologist and physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his countryman Vladimir Bekhterev studied under Wundt. They later developed what they called “conditioned reflex” which laid the groundwork for much of behavioral psychology used in schools today. What is not well known is that Pavlov performed the same type of experimentation on children to see if humans could be conditioned that way, too.

The 1920’s Russian Revolutionary Communistic plan for world domination as originally conceived used psychiatry as a weapon designed to undermine the social fabric of the target country. Using psychiatrists trained as agents provocateurs that were sent in by the KGB (Soviet Secret Police), the Communists of Russia controlled a vast empire. Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953), the founder of the KGB, using his crude and brutal methodology of beating a person half to death in his version of brainwashing, created a feared and dangerous spy network. Eventually surer techniques were stolen from the American intelligence services and then taught at the Lenin University in Moscow. It has been estimated that 80 million people have died as a result of coercive psychiatry in Russia.

Here are some relevant quotes from BRAIN-WASHING – A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics (Charles Stickley, 1955; from Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria). Click here to download and read this manual. You have to know what the enemy is up to in order to fight back against it.

“PSYCHOPOLITICS—the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing’.”

“To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our first most important step. Our fruits are grown in chaos, distrust, economic depression and scientific turmoil.”

“You must work until every teacher of psychology unknowingly or knowingly teaches only Communist doctrine under the guise of ‘psychology’.”

“With the institutions for the insane you have in your country prisons which can hold a million persons and can hold them without civil rights or any hope of freedom. And upon these people can be practiced shock and surgery so that never again will they draw a sane breath. You must make these treatments common and accepted. And you must sweep aside any treatment or any group of persons seeking to treat by effective means.”

“Entirely by bringing about public conviction that the sanity of a person is in question, it is possible to discount and eradicate all of the goals and activities of that person. By demonstrating the insanity of a group, or even a government, it is possible, then, to cause its people to disavow it. By magnifying the general human reaction to insanity, through keeping the subject of insanity itself forever before the public eye, and then, by utilizing this reaction by causing a revulsion on the part of a populace against its leader or leaders, it is possible to stop any government or movement.”

“Exercises in sexual attack on patients should be practiced by the psychopolitical operative to demonstrate the inability of the patient under pain-drug hypnosis to recall the attack, while indoctrinating a lust for further sexual activity on the part of the patient.”

“Defamation is the best and foremost weapon of Psychopolitics on the broad field. Continual and constant degradation of national leaders, national institutions, national practices, and national heroes must be systematically carried out.”

“Mental health organizations must carefully delete from their ranks anyone actually proficient in the handling or treatment of mental health.”

“The psychopolitical operative should also spare no expense in smashing out of existence, by whatever means, any actual healing group… .”

“Should any whisper, or pamphlet, against psychopolitical activities be published, it should be laughed into scorn, branded an immediate hoax, and its perpetrator or publisher should be, at the first opportunity, branded as insane, and by the use of drugs the insanity should be confirmed.”

“By various means, a public must be convinced, at least, that insanity can only be met by shock, torture, deprivation, defamation, discreditation, violence, maiming, death, punishment in all its forms. The society, at the same time, must be educated into the belief of increasing insanity within its ranks. This creates an emergency, and places the psychopolitician in a saviour role, and places him, at length, in charge of the society.”

“The psychopolitician has his reward in the nearly unlimited control of populaces, in the uninhibited exercise of passion, and the glory of Communist conquest over the stupidity of the enemies of the People.”

Tags:Abuse, ECT, Insanity, Involuntary Commitment, Mental Health, psychology, Religion, Sanity
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Take Action – Missouri Legislature

Wednesday, December 27th, 2017

Periodically we let you know the progress of various proposed legislation making its way through the Missouri General Assembly and suggest ways for you to contribute your viewpoint to your state Representative and state Senator.

The Missouri General Assembly is the state legislature of the State of Missouri and is composed of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The General Assembly is responsible for creating laws for governing the State of Missouri. The Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) are electronically available on this site: http://revisor.mo.gov/.

You can find your Representative and Senator, and their contact information, by entering your 9-digit zip code here.

The Ninety-Ninth General Assembly, Second Regular Session, will convene at 12:00 P.M., Wednesday, January 3, 2018. Pre-filing of bills started December 1, 2017.

This time we’d like to discuss several bills which we’d like you to write your legislators about. Please write from your viewpoint as an individual or professional, and not as a representative of any organization. Let us know the details and any responses you get. The full text of each bill can be found on the House and Senate Joint Bill Tracking site. Just put the bill number into the search box (e.g. SB661).

Check out our handy discussion about How to write to a legislator.

If you are not a voting resident of Missouri, you can find out about legislation in your own state and write your own state legislators; also, we are looking for volunteers to monitor legislation in Missouri and the states surrounding Missouri — let us know if you’d like to help out.

Very Bad Bills

These are bills that further psychiatric abuses of human rights. Please express your opposition and opinions about these to your legislators and copy the sponsors.

1) SB661 – Senate Bill 661 – sponsored by Senator Jeanie Riddle (Republican, District 10).

This act provides that after a person accused of committing a crime has been involuntarily committed to the Department of Mental Health due to lack of mental fitness to stand trial, the legal counsel for the Department shall have standing to participate in hearings regarding involuntary medications for the accused.

The subject of this bill had been introduced previously in 2016 and 2017. We think it is very bad because it allows the Department of Mental Health to force psychiatric drugs on involuntarily committed citizens. Both of these actions — involuntary commitment and enforced drugging — are psychiatric abuses of human rights.

2) SB785 – Senate Bill 785 – sponsored by Senator Jamilah Nasheed (Democrat, District 5).

This act establishes the Coordinating Board for Mental Health Issues in Higher Education (CBMHI). Each public institution of higher education in Missouri shall have one representative, who is either an administrator or counseling director, on the CBMHI.

It requires setting standards and regulations for student counseling facilities that relate to mental health problems, and developing a process for measuring a higher educational institution’s ability to meet student mental health needs. In other words, it will promote psychiatric and psychological counseling, and likely recommend psychiatric drugs as well. While this sounds altruistic, we know that the current state of psychiatric and psychological counseling is an abuse of human rights.

3) HB1363 – House Bill 1363 – sponsored by Representative Bill Kidd (Republican, District 20).

This bill requires teachers and principals to complete two hours of suicide prevention education each school year.

Again, while this sounds altruistic, the current state of so-called “suicide prevention education” is a recommendation for harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs, which are known to cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent, which is violence and suicide.

4) HB1419 – House Bill 1419 – sponsored by Representative Marsha Haefner (Republican, District 95).

This bill requires certain health care professionals to complete two hours of suicide prevention training as a condition of licensure.

More of the same — the current state of so-called “suicide prevention training” is a recommendation for harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs, which are known to cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent, which is violence and suicide.

Very Good Bills

These are bills that support human rights and oppose psychiatric abuses. Please express your support and opinions about these to your legislators and copy the sponsors.

1) SB672 – Senate Bill 672 – sponsored by Senator Andrew Koenig (Republican, District 15).

This act provides that during a child protective investigation if the child is at risk for possible removal the Children’s Division shall provide information to the parent about community service programs that provide support services for families in crisis. Additionally, a parent may temporarily delegate to an attorney-in-fact any powers regarding the care and custody of a child, where a child subject to such power of attorney shall not be considered placed in foster care.

This returns parental rights to the parents instead of forcing a child into foster care. We think this is supportive of human rights, not to mention preventing a child from receiving psychiatric drugging which almost always occurs in foster care.

2) SB786 – Senate Bill 786 – sponsored by Senator Jill Schupp (Democrat, District 24).

This bill modifies provisions relating to “whistle-blower’s” protection for public employees by broadening its scope of application and extending protections to the whistle-blower.

3) HB1294 – House Bill 1294 – sponsored by Representative Cheri Toalson Reisch (Republican, District 44).

This bill specifies that parental liberty to direct the upbringing, education, and care of his or her children is a fundamental right. The State of Missouri and any political subdivision of the state is prohibited from infringing on this right without demonstrating a compelling governmental interest.

Needless to say, we support parental rights as a basic human right. Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.” And Article 26 says, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

4) HB1451 – House Bill 1451 – sponsored by Representative Karla May (Democrat, District 84).

This bill prohibits the use of electroconvulsive therapy on children under 16 years of age. Any person or mental health facility that administers electroconvulsive therapy to someone under 16 years of age will be fined up to $100,000 or imprisoned for two years, or both, and will be liable for compensation to the person that was given the electroconvulsive therapy.

What can we say? About time! Get this one passed! Write your legislators now!

Tags:ECT, Foster Children, Involuntary Commitment, Legislation, Missouri, TakeAction
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Citizens Commission on Human Rights St. Louis

Posts Tagged ‘Involuntary Commitment’

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Posts Tagged ‘Involuntary Commitment’

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The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

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