Supporting and Treating Officers In Crisis Act of 2019

Posted on August 18, 2019 by cchrstl

Introduced by Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the “Supporting and Treating Officers In Crisis Act of 2019” (S. 998) was signed into law by President Trump on July 25, 2019.

This bill reauthorizes and expands certain Department of Justice grant programs to provide mental health, stress reduction, psychological services, suicide prevention services, and training for identifying, reporting, and responding to officer mental health crises and suicide, for law enforcement officers and their families. The bill authorizes up to $7,500,000 in appropriations each year for fiscal years 2020 to 2024, a maximum total of $37.5 million.

This sounds eminently socially acceptable, and indeed the bill was widely supported by Congress and various national advocacy groups.

The Real Crisis in Mental Health

While society certainly owes significant consideration and support to law enforcement officers (LEOs) and their families, we can’t help noting that in today’s environment, “mental health and suicide prevention services” really means psychiatric drugs and other harmful psychiatric treatments.

The real crisis in mental health care today is not officer stress, but psychiatric fraud and abuse.

While the bill specifically calls for evidence-based programs, the evidence actually shows that psychiatrists don’t know what causes mental trauma, are unable to predict violence or suicide, and cannot cure any mental disorder they claim to treat.

Psychiatric Fraud

By their own admission psychiatrists cannot predict violence or suicide, and often release violent patients from facilities, claiming that they are not a threat. In 1979, an American Psychiatric Association’s task force admitted in its Brief Amicus Curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court that psychiatrists could not predict dangerousness. It informed the court that “‘dangerousness’ is neither a psychiatric nor a medical diagnosis, but involves issues of legal judgment and definition, as well as issues of social policy.” In addition to not being able to predict violent behavior, psychiatrists certainly have no cures for it, a fact that even they admit.

Psychiatric diagnoses are not based on science, but opinion. Psychiatrists do not have any scientific or medical test to diagnose a person’s mental condition and rely upon faulty observation and opinion of behavior. They admit to not knowing the cause of a single mental disorder or how to cure them. The error in their opinions is enormous — they condemn the innocent, release the dangerous, induce violence in others through drugs and commit people who are not in need of help or turn those away who may genuinely be in need of it.

Recommendations

Rather than training psychiatrists and psychologists about LEO mental health, the grants should be used to train LEOs, security personnel, teachers, coroners, and other professionals to recognize that irrational, violent and suicidal behavior could be caused by psychiatric drugs.

Click here to download and read the CCHR report “Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence & Suicide — School Shootings & Other Acts of Senseless Violence.”

Click here to download and read “Psychiatrists Cannot Predict or Cure Violence.“

Cratered by Kratom

Posted on July 6, 2019 by cchrstl

Kratom is an increasingly popular drug of abuse and readily available on the “recreational” drug market. Between 3 million and 5 million people in the U.S. use kratom, and reported poisonings from people taking it have soared.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned against using Mitragyna Speciosa, commonly known as kratom, a tree in the coffee family which grows naturally in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea. The concern is that kratom leaves, which affect the same opioid brain receptors as morphine, appear to have properties that expose users to the risks of addiction, abuse, and dependence.

There are no FDA-approved uses for kratom because there is no scientific evidence to support its medical use, and the FDA urges consumers to report any adverse reactions to the FDA’s MedWatch program.

The race is on to get patents for synthetics and derivatives of Mitragyna Speciosa. Doctors and mental health workers need to be aware of the psychopathological effects of these substances.

Because kratom is still legal in the U.S., it has become a go-to drug for individuals with chronic pain, promoted anecdotally by some psychiatrists both to mitigate pain and to ease withdrawal from other opioids.

Some other psychiatrists are convinced of kratom’s mental health benefits as a potential therapeutic agent.

Here again we see psychiatry, with its long history of harmful drug pushing, justifying and promoting the latest in a long line of such harmful, addictive and psychedelic drugs.

Similar to the dose-dependent characteristics of any drug, in relatively small amounts kratom acts as a stimulant; in relatively larger amounts it causes sedation; and when overdosed it can cause death.

Kratom’s psychoactive compounds, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, are opioid-receptor agonists, which means they are chemicals that bind to the same receptors in the brain to which opioids bind, thus acting in the brain similar to other opioids like morphine and codeine.

Side effects of taking (or withdrawing from) kratom may include dependence, nausea, vomiting, aggression, hallucinations, delusions, psychosis, seizures, thyroid problems, increased risk of suicide, trouble breathing, brain swelling, seizures, liver damage, or death.

In spite of the American Kratom Association’s lobbying efforts to promote this harmful substance, and its repeated references to the American Psychiatric Association for support, we find that there is sufficient reason to be highly skeptical.

Click here for more information about kratom.

NARPA Annual Rights Conference

Posted on June 14, 2019 by cchrstl

ANNUAL RIGHTS CONFERENCE

September 18 – 21, 2019

Holiday Inn Hartford Downtown Area — East Hartford, CT

Visit http://www.narpa.org for registration form and updates.

NARPA’s mission is to support people with psychiatric diagnoses to exercise their legal and human rights, with the goals of abolishing forced treatment and ensuring autonomy, dignity and choice.

###

Attend the conference to promote social justice for people who experience the world in ways the psychiatric industry fraudulently calls “mental illness.”

Mental Health in St. Louis

Posted on June 8, 2019 by cchrstl

A new report (“St. Louis Regional Mental Health Data Report“, May, 2019) outlines mental health trends in the St. Louis, Missouri region.

The St. Louis County Department of Public Health and the City of St. Louis Department of Health prepared the report for System of Care St. Louis Region.

One significant finding is that “…intentional self-harm (i.e., suicide) was the sixth leading cause of death for children under 18 years of age and the third leading cause of death for ages 18 to 24 years in St. Louis County, and it is the tenth leading cause of death for all age groups in both the United States and the state of Missouri.”

Unfortunately, the report fails to notice that there is overwhelming evidence that psychiatric drugs cause suicide and violence.

While there is never one simple explanation for what drives a human being to commit such unspeakable acts of violence, all too often one common denominator has surfaced in hundreds of cases—-prescribed psychiatric drugs which are documented to cause mania, psychosis, violence, suicide and in some cases, homicidal ideation. To date, there has been no federal investigation of the link between psychiatric drugs and acts of suicide and violence.

Mental disorder is not a predictor of aggressive behavior, but rather the adverse effects of the drugs prescribed to treat it. Drug proponents argue that there are many shootings and acts of violence that have not been correlated to psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs, but that is exactly the point. It has neither been confirmed nor refuted, as law enforcement is not required to investigate or report on prescribed drugs linked to suicide and violence, and media rarely pose the question.

Those with a vested, financial interest will continue to champion the use of such drugs, as the psychiatric-pharmaceutical drug industry rakes in an average of $35 billion a year in sales in the U.S. alone. It is that vested financial interest which may be preventing a thorough investigation of the link between prescription psychoactive drugs and increased suicide and violence, especially considering that there have been calls for such investigations since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.

The theory that a person is violent because he “stopped taking his medication” is misleading and omits the fact that it is more likely to be the withdrawal from a drug of dependence that is experienced—-not the return of the person’s “untreated mental illness.” Numerous studies and expert opinions support this. Psychotropic drug withdrawal destroys mental faculties and creates impulsivity.

It is long past time that government agencies answered that call with an investigation. Legislative hearings should be held to fully investigate the correlation between psychiatric treatment and violence and suicide. None can argue against the fact that disclosure of the facts would serve the public interest.

Click here for more information about the link between suicide, violence, and psychiatric drugs.

Depression and The Marketing of Madness

Posted on March 10, 2019 by cchrstl

The high-income partnership between psychiatry and drug companies has created an $80 billion psychotropic drug profit center, requiring constant marketing to push harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs on a vulnerable public.

How did psychotropic drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of harmful side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress? And how did the psychiatrists espousing these drugs come to dominate the field of mental treatment?

Clever marketing hides the harm in a succession of consumer ads constantly churning through “new revelations.”

The most recent we’ve seen have been these gems:

— A new marketing catchphrase is being used in a Trintellix commercial — “Depression is multiple symptoms.”

— Another new marketing catchphrase is being used in a Latuda commercial — “A different type of depression.”

Psychiatry continues heavily pushing false data about depression

The fact is, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and the National Institute of Mental Health admit that there are no medical tests to confirm depression as a disease but do nothing to counter the false idea that these are biological/medical conditions when in fact, diagnosis is simply done by a checklist of behaviors.

There are 77 entries in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) using some variation of the word “depressive”, so that nearly anyone can be so diagnosed and prescribed harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs.

Yes, people experience various symptoms of mental distress. This does not make them “mentally diseased” and there is no evidence of physical/medical abnormality for the so-called diagnosis of “depression.” This doesn’t mean that there aren’t solutions for people experiencing difficulty; there are non harmful, medical alternatives. But they do not require a psychiatric “label” to treat them. There is no mental illness test that is scientifically/medically proven. This isn’t a matter of opinion — psychiatrists who are opposed to the labeling of behaviors as mental illness openly admit this.

Dr. Thomas Szasz said, “The term ‘mental illness’ refers to the undesirable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of persons.” More properly, it is just what psychiatry and psychiatrists have inappropriately labeled as “undesirable behavior;” the prime undesirable antisocial people on the planet telling you what they think is undesirable!

Find out more about the fake “disease” called depression and the harm that anti-depressive drugs do.

Watch the documentary exposing the truth behind the slick marketing schemes and scientific deceit that conceal a dangerous and often deadly sales campaign.

The Marketing of Madness Education Package is the ultimate resource for educating others on the dangerous effects of psychotropic drugs, and the multi-billion-dollar psychiatric-pharmaceutical partnership now dominating the field of mental health. CCHR is offering this kit for free to educators and lecturers to assist them in educating others about the risks of these mind-altering drugs, and to furnish information that is generally not told to patients or physicians. Arm yourself with the facts about psychiatry.

Human Rights in the Mental Health Care Industry

Posted on February 24, 2019 by cchrstl

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 3.4 says, “By 2030, reduce by one third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment and promote mental health and well-being.” This is certainly a laudable goal.

We are particularly interested in promoting mental health and well-being. The United Nations measures its success with this goal by reducing the suicide mortality rate. We think this is a useful measure.

Unfortunately, the current “standard of care” in the psychiatric mental health industry heavily promotes and prescribes harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs which are known to cause violence and suicide, exactly the opposite of this goal. How might we engage to counter this sorry state of affairs?

CCHR To The Rescue

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights® (CCHR) is a non-profit watchdog organization whose purpose is to restore human rights to the field of mental health by ensuring that criminal abuses are speedily investigated and prosecuted and that people’s rights are legally protected. CCHR was founded in 1969 by the late Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus Dr. Thomas Szasz and the Church of Scientology. The CCHR St. Louis chapter was incorporated in 1989 in Missouri.

The mission of CCHR is to investigate, expose and eradicate violations of human rights by the field of psychiatry. To be sure, CCHR’s investigations over the last 50 years have consistently shown that the field of psychiatry itself is a human rights violation.

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.

Through the broad dissemination of CCHR’s internet sites, documentary videos, books, newsletters, booklets and pamphlets, more and more patients, families, professionals, lawmakers and countless others are becoming educated on the truth about psychiatric fraud and abuse, and that effective action can and should be taken.

Has Your Life, or The Life of Someone in Your Family, Been Affected by Fraud or Abuse in the Mental Health Industry?

Here are some examples of psychiatric fraud and abuse:

No Mental Health Help When Needed

ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT, Electroshock)

Harmful and Addictive Psychiatric Drugs

Suicide

Violence

Involuntary Commitment

Being Threatened with Involuntary Commitment or Punishment for Refusal of Treatment

Being Coerced into Hospitalization or Treatment

Treatment Without Prior Informed Consent

Medical Kidnapping

Forcible Removal of Children to Foster Care

Forcible Drugging of Foster Children

Misdiagnosis

Sexual Assault

Elderly Abuse

Insurance Fraud

Forcible Restraints

Psycho-Surgery

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Deep Brain Stimulation

Vagus Nerve Stimulation

Tell us how this has affected you. Report psychiatric Abuse. It’s a Crime.

Missouri child psychiatry project got federal grant

Posted on January 28, 2019 by cchrstl

In November 2018, the St. Louis Business Journal wrote, “The Missouri Department of Mental Health was awarded a $425,000 federal grant to fund expansion of a state project to expand access to mental health care for children.”

“The Health Resources and Services Administration recently awarded $7.9 million combined to 18 states to integrate behavioral health into pediatric primary care.”

This effort targets young children by integrating the efforts of physicians, nurse practitioners, behavioral health clinicians, community health workers, home visitors, and other health care providers to funnel children into the mental health care system.

The Child Psychiatry Access Project in Missouri provides child psychiatry phone consultation to primary care providers in several counties, with a goal of providing these services statewide by October 2020.

The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration of the Department of Health & Human Services says, “State or regional networks of pediatric mental health teams will provide tele-consultation, training, technical assistance and care coordination for pediatric primary care providers to diagnose, treat and refer children with behavioral health conditions.”

Participating agencies are: University of Missouri School of Medicine, Behavioral Health Network, Assessment Resource Center, Behavioral Health Response, Washington University Pediatric and Adolescent Ambulatory Research Consortium, and the National Alliance for Mental Illness.

Why Do We Think This Is Bad?

No one denies that proper mental health care for children is a good thing. Unfortunately, the current state of mental health care for children is mostly prescribing them harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs for fraudulent “mental illnesses.”

They assert that up to 25% of children need this behavioral health care, which is patently false.

Health care providers do not require informed consent from the family to call and discuss a case with these behavioral health consultants.

The trouble is that psychiatric propaganda on the subject of children has thoroughly duped well-meaning parents, teachers and politicians alike, that “normal” childhood behavior is no longer normal; that it is a mental illness. And further, that only by continuous, heavy drugging from a very early age, can the “afflicted” child possibly make it through life’s worst.

Contrary to psychiatric opinion, children are not “experimental animals,” they are human beings who have every right to expect protection, care, love and the chance to reach their full potential in life. They will only be denied this from within the verbal and chemical straitjackets that are psychiatry’s labels and drugs.

Through massive promotion and marketing campaigns, psychiatric drugs are increasingly prescribed as the panacea for life’s inevitable crises and challenges. 17 million schoolchildren worldwide have now been diagnosed with so-called mental disorders and prescribed cocaine-like stimulants and powerful antidepressants as treatments.

Teen suicides have tripled since 1960 in the United States. Today, suicide is the second leading cause of death (after car accidents) for 15 to 24 year-olds. Since the early 1990s, millions of children around the world have taken prescribed antidepressants that U.K. and U.S. authorities have now branded as suicidal agents. In September 2004, a U.S. Congressional hearing into these drugs found that not only do studies show the drugs are ineffective in children; they can drive them to suicidal behavior and hostility.

Psychiatrists are still telling governments that they can deliver the world from delinquency – at a huge cost. Psychiatry remains long on promise and short – in fact empty – on delivery.

Support legislative measures that will protect children from psychiatric interference. Write your legislators about this. In Missouri find your legislators here.

Are You Schizophrenic?

Posted on January 18, 2019 by cchrstl

“Mental health advocates are lobbying Congress to help them get schizophrenia classified as a brain disease like Parkinson’s or Alzheimers, instead of as a mental illness, a move that could reduce stigma and lead to more dollars for a cure.” This according to a January, 2019 article on Politico.com.

More and more health officials, scientists and doctors are recognizing that so-called “mental illnesses” such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are poorly understood and are really physical, medical issues — not some nebulous mental thing for which harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs are prescribed.

There are no clinical tests for these “mental” diagnoses. But there are clinical tests for whatever turns out to be the real medical issue. So why are psychiatrists handing out so many harmful drugs without performing blood or other well-known clinical tests? Could it be because it is profitable, and insurance will pay for them?

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.

Linda Stalters, executive director of the schizophrenia alliance, said, “We are still treating people like they did in the medieval times.”

The late Professor Thomas Szasz stated 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.

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of someone exhibiting signs of what a psychiatrist calls schizophrenia can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Any person labeled with so-called schizophrenia needs to receive a thorough physical examination by a competent medical—not psychiatric—doctor to first determine what underlying physical condition is causing the manifestation.

Any person falsely diagnosed as mentally disordered which results in treatment that harms them should file a complaint with CCHR, the police, and professional licensing bodies and have this investigated. They should seek legal advice about filing a civil suit against any offending psychiatrist and his or her hospital, associations and teaching institutions seeking compensation. In Missouri, file a complaint with the Board of Registration for the Healing Arts.

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, click here to download and read the full CCHR report “Schizophrenia—Psychiatry’s For Profit ‘Disease’“.

Seriously, Is That Funny?

Posted on December 29, 2018 by cchrstl

The earliest known psychotherapy consisted of getting a patient to laugh.

Laughter includes both surprise and rejection. We’re sure you can think of an example; here’s a start — think of a cartoon or a joke that made you laugh. Now observe the surprising part of it, and observe the idea or concept being rejected.

Let’s take an actual example of a joke:

A man goes to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says “You’re crazy.”
The man says, “I want a second opinion!”
The psychiatrist says, “Okay, you’re ugly, too!”

The surprise seems to be the unexpectedness of the second opinion; it wasn’t predicted.

Apparently one also seems to reject the idea that a psychiatrist would actually say something like that when he was being asked for help.

An individual who is too serious has lost his ability to predict, and cannot be surprised into rejection. When one rehabilitates the ability to laugh, just by laughing for no reason, it benefits the person immensely.

We recently have seen many examples of people being too serious and unable to laugh. There are Facebook pages devoted to various jokes and cartoons. One such page requires participants to actively ask for admission, so you know they are viewing and posting on that page on purpose. Then, they make comments on the various jokes and cartoons about how it isn’t funny, or how it is offensive, or how much they dislike it. They have essentially lost their laughter, and are going through life serious as a stone.

A person who is unable to laugh will be strictly literal, unable to tolerate confusion, and unable to appreciate remarks made in fun.

Some psychologists and psychiatrists have learned to respect the value of laughter; as the joke goes, how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but it has to want to change.

Other psychologists and psychiatrists may mistake genuine laughter for ridicule, which is decidedly not the same thing. And some may consider it only as a stress coping strategy rather than the simpler explanation described above. There was a period in psych-influenced education which considered that if you’re laughing, you’re not learning. We actually knew a high school principal once who thought that children could not learn unless they were quiet and sitting down.

The study of laughter is called gelotology, from the Greek word gelos meaning laughter. There is even a branch of yoga called Laughter Yoga, which incorporates breathing, yoga, and stretching techniques, along with laughter. There are at least fifteen English words and phrases describing various kinds of laughs.

When neuropsychiatrists study laughter, of course they mean they are studying the brain; they get hung up in the physiology, brain waves, serotonin, hormones, and other mechanical aspects. They get all scientific on you, talking about “activation of the ventromedial prefontal cortex.” They seem to lose sight of the simplicity of the effect, so that they can patent it and manipulate it with some drug. You can’t charge someone’s insurance for a prescription for laughter.

They’ve even got it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as “cataplexy,” which is a sudden, generally brief muscle weakness, like weak knees, due to strong emotion or laughter. We suppose this is where the acronym ROFL comes from (Rolling On Floor Laughing.)

Well, what’s the bottom line? We think that psychiatry is a joke, but we’re not really laughing about it. Perhaps we should. Check out a few of our psych jokes here.