Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

Are You Authentic?

Posted on October 24, 2022 by cchrstl

We have noticed a gush of social media posts about “authenticity” or “being real” and thought it might be an appropriate subject for this blog.

Authentic:
– worthy of acceptance or belief
– conforming to an original
– not false or imitation
– true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character
– being really what it seems to be, genuine
– genuineness as a reflection of the true person and not simply of a professional acting in a role

[Ultimately from Greek authentikos, from authent?s perpetrator, master; from autos self + -hent?s accomplisher, achiever.]

Checking it out, we also noticed a surfeit of psychological and psychiatric dialog about authenticity. Apparently the subject is not so well understood, given the excessive amount of scholarly discussion and argument over it. An example is “What the new science of authenticity says about discovering your true self“, a recent article we saw from a psychologist who claims that “it can be challenging to find your authentic self.”

We think the real challenge is recognizing what is authentic in spite of all the psychobabble.

One’s Real Self

We would like to think that everyone would agree with the statement that they are themselves and not someone else. So we can call one’s own self or personality “oneself,” or one’s “identity,” or one’s “beingness.”

Interestingly enough, a person has the ability to combine with or take on parts of another. When done willingly and knowingly, we call this “acting” and extol this ability in actors and actresses.

However, when done unwillingly or unknowingly, this becomes a problem and could be called a “facsimile personality.” Without detouring into the mechanics of how this occurs, we note that a person can display the characteristics of one or more personalities in addition to, or in place of, their own. In extreme cases this might produce a “split personality” or certain symptoms of so-called schizophrenia.

Psychiatric Confusion about Authenticity

Some psychiatrists notice that some thoughts and feelings are genuine expressions of oneself, and some are expressions of mental trauma or the side effects of psychiatric drugs. However, we do not find an effective psychiatric process for self-discovery, or an effective method for recognizing or rehabilitating authenticity.

We do find a lot of psychiatric psychobabble, so instead of burrowing down the rabbit hole of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo, let’s just get down to what we can do about it.

Practical Aspects of Authenticity

The subject of facsimile personalities is extensive, and not something we are going to fully address here. However, we can address some aspects which might prove useful in our original quest for authenticity.

There are three elements that bring about an Understanding of oneself, others, and the world around you. These three elements are Affinity, Communication, and Reality. After all is said and done, authenticity is recognizing what is real. And in no small measure, recognizing what is inauthentic and unreal about psychiatry.

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged psychobabble, psychology, Schizophrenia | Comments Off

Local psychiatrist known for giving medical marijuana cards could lose her license

Posted on October 17, 2022 by cchrstl

Dr. Zinia Thomas, a psychiatrist in St. Louis, Missouri, was arrested September 1, 2022 on felony drug charges for illegally possessing marijuana, which she had allegedly attempted to sell.

Apparently she had also been previously investigated for improperly issuing Missouri medical marijuana cards.

In addition to marijuana, Dr. Thomas also promotes the use of ketamine, a psychedelic anesthetic also called a “date-rape” drug. Basically it knocks you out so you don’t feel so depressed anymore. You don’t feel much of anything, actually, since you’ve just shot up an anesthetic. Psychiatrists pushing ketamine are shameful drug pushers who are making a buck off people’s misfortune.

Psychiatry, in spite of diagnosing cannabis use as a mental disorder, also pushes cannabis as a treatment for mental trauma. In Missouri, “psychiatric disorders” are a top reason that patients are approved for a medical marijuana license.

Medical marijuana sales in Missouri are above $200 million since it went on sale in October 2020. Roughly 17% of approximately 200,000 medical marijuana cards issued in Missouri are for so-called psychiatric disorders, which must be diagnosed by a state-licensed psychiatrist. One popular diagnostic code from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is “Unspecified mental disorder”. Note also that there are 32 diagnostic codes for various mental problems with marijuana use and abuse, including the ever popular “Unspecified cannabis-related disorder”. Notice that a psychiatrist can recommend the issuance of a Missouri medical marijuana card to someone to treat their problems from using marijuana. How convenient is that?

False information published by the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration claimed that “19.9 percent of American adults in the United States (45.1 million) have experienced mental illness over the past year.”

This popular statistic, pushed by the psychiatric industry to justify their existence, is completely false or, at best, highly questionable. The apparent epidemic of “mental illness” is because the psychiatric industry, working with the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration, invents new fraudulent disorders for which more drugs can be prescribed; all-encompassing disorders such as the one noted above, “Unspecified mental disorder.” People can have serious problems in life; these are not, however, some unspecified mental illness caused by a deficiency of marijuana.

The psychiatric industry today has jumped on the cannabis bandwagon for several reasons. Psychiatrists are embracing all things marijuana because they are getting so many patients with marijuana-related problems such as addiction and psychosis.

When psychiatric treatments fail and psychotropic drug patents run out, there are usually efforts to resurrect old treatments as “new miracles,” such as psychedelics. There is a hefty body of evidence showing the lack of science behind psychiatry’s diagnostic system that leads to unworkable and potentially damaging treatments including psychedelics. The psychedelic “therapy” industry is predicted to reach $7 billion by 2027, a powerful draw for a therapist without scruples.

Governments keep investing billions of dollars into psychiatry to improve conditions that psychiatrists admit they cannot cure. Promises are repeatedly made to improve the mental health of the country but the opposite has occurred. The rate of mental trauma keeps soaring, and with it, demands for a blank check for more funding. Contact your local, state and federal officials and demand that they stop funding harmful psychiatric “treatments,” and that psychiatry is held accountable for their harm.

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged DSM, Ketamine, Marijuana, psychedelics | Comments Off

More About the ADHD Hoax

Posted on October 10, 2022 by cchrstl

In 1987, “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD) was literally voted into existence by a show of hands of American Psychiatric Association members and included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Within a year, 500,000 children in America alone were diagnosed with this fraudulent “disease”.

Sarah Durston, Professor of Developmental Disorders of the Brain at the University Medical Center Utrecht in Utrecht, Netherlands, spent 13 years (between 2003-2018) and over 2.5 million euros searching for the source of ADHD in the brain, and did not find it.

She concluded in a 2021 article about ADHD in Scientific American that, “Calling the condition a disorder falsely implies we know of a cause located in the brains of people diagnosed with it—and we don’t.” She says, “The most common psychiatric handbooks (DSM-5 and ICD-11) are clear on the status of their classifications: they are purely descriptive and are not based on underlying causes” and that “ADHD does not cause attention problems any more than low socioeconomic status causes poverty.”

Trying in vain to find a biological cause is not unique to ADHD; this deficiency exists for virtually all 541 disorders in DSM-5. The DSM says, “in the absence of clear biological markers or clinically useful measurements of severity for many mental disorders it has not been possible to completely separate normal and pathological.”

Moreover, the symptoms used to “diagnose” ADHD are typical of the side effects of central nervous system stimulants (such as methylphenidate [e.g. Ritalin, Concerta]) used to “treat” ADHD. This confusion is not so surprising because much ADHD research is done on children who are already taking stimulants.

All stimulants work by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The body must strictly regulate dopamine levels since both an excess and a deficiency can be very problematic. Thus drugs which mess with dopamine play Russian Roulette with your brain.

Methylphenidate is often referred to as “amphetamine-like” or “cocaine-like.” It has hallucinogenic properties as well as being a stimulant. It binds to the same sites in the brain as cocaine, thus producing effects that are indistinguishable from cocaine; in fact, it is more potent than cocaine. For this reason it is also called “kiddie cocaine.”

Why do people who take amphetamine-like drugs such as methylphenidate say that their attention and concentration improves? One explanation is that this drug can cause psychosis, and compulsive-psychotic behavior may make the person less likely to be distracted by external stimuli. This is called “tunnel-focus”, and prompts the additional moniker of “chemical straightjacket.” Long-term use increases the likelihood of addiction and psychosis.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has this to say about methylphenidate: “There is neither specific evidence which clearly establishes the mechanism whereby Ritalin produces its mental and behavioral effects in children, nor conclusive evidence regarding how these effects relate to the condition of the central nervous system;” and “Treatment emergent psychotic or manic symptoms, e. g., hallucinations, delusional thinking, or mania in children and adolescents without a prior history of psychotic illness or mania can be caused by stimulants at usual doses.”

Furthermore, there is no evidence that stimulants result in any long-term improvement in either behavior or academic achievement.

The ADHD diagnosis does not identify a genuine biological or psychological disorder. The diagnosis is simply a list of behaviors that may appear unwanted, disruptive or inappropriate.

Meanwhile, a former nurse practitioner who ran psychiatric clinics in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, admitted October 4, 2022 to writing illegal Adderall prescriptions while suspended for other drug charges. He continued to prescribe Adderall despite his suspension and submitted claims to Medicare for office visits under a co-worker’s license. Adderall is another habit-forming stimulant amphetamine drug prescribed for ADHD.

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a child or adult exhibiting signs of what a psychiatrist calls ADHD can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Any person labeled with so-called ADHD 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.

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, inattention, 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 diagnosis, drugs and other psychiatric treatments are not workable.

Reference
The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry by C.F. van der Horst (Per Veritatem Vis Foundation, 2022)

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged ADHD, Dopamine, DSM, FDA, Fraud, Misdiagnosis, Side Effects | Comments Off

Intuition – Your Friend or Foe?

Posted on October 3, 2022 by cchrstl

Lately there has been an abundance of social media postings about intuition or gut feelings. We were curious about this, as many people seem to be promoting the use of intuition to reach critical Life decisions rather than direct observation and rational thought. We suspect this might be related to a misunderstanding, mistrust, or confusion between rational and emotional reactions to Life situations.

There are many ways to describe and define the word “intuition”:
– insight, a snap judgment
– instinctive knowingness, spiritual perception
– perceive directly without reasoning
– an impression that something might be the case
– knowledge gained without evident rational thought or facts
– knowledge gained by feelings rather than thought
– knowing or understanding something without reasoning or evidence
– knowledge dependent more upon past experience than present perception

[from Late Latin intuitio “act of contemplating”, from Latin intu?ri “to look at, contemplate”]

The idiom “gut feeling” speaks to the visceral sensation or emotional reaction one is said to experience. The idea that emotions are experienced in the gut has a long historical legacy, and many nineteenth-century doctors considered the origins of mental illness to derive from the intestines.

In truth, pure knowingness, not influenced by space or energy, is a property of a spiritual being; it is not dependent upon observation. Below this state there is knowing about, which is the province of data, or speculations or conclusions or methods about data. True knowledge is certainty, not data.

In order to play any game (such as The Game Of Life) one has to reduce one’s knowingness by assuming one cannot know or knows wrongly, since if one fully knew everything about the game (e.g. knowing all the moves of both sides in a card game), it would no longer be a game.

One convenient way many humans accomplish this is to substitute for rational observation in present time with irrational recall of past events. This gives rise to the type of intuition we know as a gut feeling, where unconscious recalls impinge upon the body and mind to produce feelings that may or may not apply to present circumstances.

This type of intuition has a formal definition in psychiatry and psychology: a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience. Psychology and psychiatry provide guesses about how this is supposed to work, with many wasted efforts attempting to justify the substitution of intuition for rational observation and thought.

Of course, consulting one’s past experiences is certainly a valid use of experience in evaluating present time situations. The problem with gut feelings is that this process is unconscious and liable to pull up irrational responses rather than rational ones.

Attempts by psychology and psychiatry to teach people how to use their intuition is, to be blunt, fraudulent; since their concept of intuition is by definition an unconscious process based solely on the past, and as likely to be irrational as it is to appear rational. They may promote meditation as a path to using intuition, and we have written previously about the psychiatric corruption of meditation.

On the other hand, true intuition which is a spiritual knowingness and awareness can be rehabilitated by boosting one’s awareness, and improving one’s ability to consciously observe and consider things in present time, as well as considering consequences in future time. Learning more about how to make good judgments is also a positive approach.

The real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness” and stigmatize unwanted behavior as “diseases,” using the psychiatric billing bible the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as their justification. The bottom line is that all psychiatric “treatments” are harmful, including attempts to focus on intuition where it unconsciously restimulates past events.

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged DSM, Fraud, Games, Meditation, psychology, Social Media | Comments Off

The High Number Of Suicides After Electroshock

Posted on September 26, 2022 by cchrstl

A recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry [1] showed an astounding rate of suicide death for those who received electroconvulsive (shock) therapy (ECT), contrary to the claims of its proponents.

Here is the study’s conclusion: “The risk of suicide mortality 30 days and 1 year following treatment was similar in patients treated with an index course ECT and in a matched group. There was no evidence that an ECT course decreased the risk of death by suicide.”

The electroshock study utilized electronic medical record data from the Department of Veterans Affairs health system between 2000 and 2017 to include 5,157 index courses of ECT therapy, along with 10,097 matched controls who did not receive ECT. Index ECT usually refers to the initial phase of treatment in hospital to induce maximum response. The typical number of treatments is 6–12.

The study found the risk of suicide death was similar in patients treated with an index course ECT and in a matched group who were not given ECT. In the cohort, suicide deaths were: 138.65 per 10,000 in 30 days and 564.52 per 10,000 in 1 year. “ECT does not appear to have a greater effect on decreasing the risk for suicide than other types of mental health treatment provided to patients with similar risk,” the authors wrote.

Assertions by psychiatric organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association that ECT is a life-saving treatment is so misleading that it could constitute consumer fraud.

Between Tricare [DoD health insurance] and Veteran Affairs, the Department of Defense (DoD) spent more than $70 million dollars on electroshock treatment between 2010 and 2019. During this same period, there was a 46% increase in the number of veterans that were given ECT. [2]

The tragic expectation is that more patients will commit suicide after receiving electroshock. Psychiatrists and the FDA will blame this on their “illness” rather than failed treatment. [3]

Electroshock carries the risk of driving people to commit suicide. Patients sold on the fraudulent idea that the treatments correct a “chemical imbalance” or faulty chemical messengers in the brain become hopeless when those treatments fail them and go on to make fatal decisions about their lives.

There needs to be accountability for false claims made in defense of these treatments—better still, take them off the market when their risks are so high. Consumer fraud litigation should ensue in addition to any personal injury claims.

Vulnerable patients seeking mental health care deserve much, much better. Non-harmful practices should be made available to them.

Why Use Shock Treatment At All?

The barbaric and shameful use of shock treatment unfortunately has a lengthy history. ECT had its beginnings in early Roman times when people would place an electrical torpedo fish against their heads to rid themselves of headaches.

The purpose of ECT shock treatment is to cause convulsions and create brain damage in order to reduce one’s awareness of their troubles. Make no mistake, shock treatment is painful. Stick your finger in an electrical outlet if you doubt this. Shock treatment uses an anesthetic to numb the pain and render the patient unconscious. A muscle relaxant is administered, causing a virtual shutdown of muscular activity to reduce damage from the convulsions.

Notice that someone with troubles is already at a lower level of awareness. Pain is then what they are most aware and certain of. The psychiatrist is there to deliver more pain in the mistaken idea that this will cause the insane to be less insane. However, the certainty and awareness of pain which is delivered by such an impact is a non-self-determined certainty. Certainty delivered by force, pain, blows and shock eventually brings about only unconsciousness and the certainty of unawareness.

Today, psychiatry is not particularly interested in increasing awareness; they would rather blunt someone’s awareness in a misguided attempt to make a person less aware of their troubles.

Thus we see that ECT does not and never can cause an improvement in mental health, since it produces only the reduction of awareness.

Psychiatry’s brutal ECT can now be seen for what it really is: an attempt to overwhelm an individual, eventually rendering them unaware of their mental traumas and compromising any efforts to actually get better.

Contact your local, state and federal representatives and urge them to ban ECT.

References:

[1] Bradley V. Watts, MD, MPH, Talya Peltzman, MPH, and Brian Shiner, MD, MPH, “Electroconvulsive Therapy and Death by Suicide,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Apr. 2022, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35421285/

[2] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/05/25/cchr-supports-veterans-against-electroshock-dod-spends-70m-on-shocking-minds/

[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/08/05/new-study-shows-high-number-of-suicides-after-electroshock/

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged alternatives, DSM, ECT, Fraud, suicide | Comments Off

The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry

Posted on September 19, 2022 by cchrstl

Book Review
The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry
Infiltrating the school system, businesses and your home
C.F. van der Horst
© 2022 Per Veritatem Vis Foundation
All rights reserved.
http://www.psychhorrors.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Horrors-Psychiatry-Infiltrating-Businesses/dp/9082177250/

The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry addresses several significant and shocking issues related to psychiatry that have been rarely exposed or are altogether unknown.

Everyone involved with mental health care—and especially caregivers such as physicians, psychologists, nurses, social workers, as well as psychiatrists themselves—should be well aware of these issues. And, because of their far-reaching impact, public representatives, legislators, judges, forensic doctors, lawyers, members of police forces, and employers should also be familiar with this data.

With a chapter dedicated to the current education crisis and increasing illiteracy rates, this book is indispensable for remedial educators, teachers and parents.

Although The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry focuses on ADHD and shows how arbitrary diagnoses are used to medicalize child behavior, it goes far beyond ADHD. Indeed, it pertains to any mental health issue. The general pattern of medicalizing, diagnosing, and drugging or otherwise treating is very similar to the treatment of ADHD.

The well-documented and sometimes horrifying data presented in this book shed new light on medicine and psychiatry, their alliance with the pharmaceutical industry, and the scientific underpinnings of psychiatric diagnoses and potentially very dangerous psychiatric treatments.

These facts show that the hidden horrors of psychiatry can affect you too, professionally or privately, and perhaps sooner than you might think.

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged ADHD, Education, Misdiagnosis, psychiatric hoax, Psychopharmaceutical Industry | Comments Off

Beware the Psychobabble, it gyres and gimbles!

Posted on September 12, 2022 by cchrstl

We read this quote in a “scholarly” psychiatric article: “Polyvagal theory in psychotherapy offers co-regulation as an interactive process that engages the social nervous systems of both therapist and client.”

We call it “psychobabble”, which means “the language that psychiatrists and psychologists use that sounds very scientific but really has little meaning.”

So not only does it use words that no one else will likely understand, but aside from that it has little or no real meaning. The main point of such tangled terms is that anyone can be said to have some form of insanity just by saying a big word. The psychiatrist is the “authority” who sounds impressive but cannot cure anyone’s emotional turmoil.

Well, let’s look at it more closely.

Polyvagal: relating to a theory that specifies two functionally distinct branches of the vagus, or tenth cranial nerve.
Co-regulation: when two people are interacting they continuously affect each other emotionally.

So somehow, when a psychiatrist or psychologist is conversing with a patient, their vagus nerves interact.

The vagus (Latin for “wandering”) nerve stretches from the head, through the neck and chest, to the abdomen. Besides connecting to the various organs in the body (heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, etc.), it conveys sensory information about the state of the body’s organs to the central nervous system. This means that the vagus nerve is responsible for such varied tasks as heart rate, intestinal contractions, sweating, keeping the larynx open for breathing, and so on.

Psychiatry targets the vagus nerve, as part of an “it’s all in the brain” strategy to make their pseudoscience seem more scientific.

But if you buy in to the cry that “it’s all brain” then you have abandoned your humanity, and your spirit, in favor of chemistry; you have bought into the reductio ad absurdum argument that there is no objective reality, it’s all in your brain. And thus we get one psychiatric brain theory after another, in the futile hope that shocking the brain and the nervous system can put some sense into the mentally disturbed.

Of course, once the psychopharmaceutical industry gives all its attention to the brain, then the brain is miraculously transformed into the seat of consciousness, and altering consciousness with drugs becomes commonplace. And we get the disastrous psychedelic psychiatric movement, where magic mushrooms will lead you to a better life; or we get an antidepressant that makes the bad feelings go away for a time (it makes ALL feelings go away, the good and the bad.)

And you can be sure your psychiatrist isn’t really communicating with you, except to hear for which symptom he can prescribe a drug and bill your insurance.

It isn’t, however, the brain. It’s Life. Don’t fall for the psychobabble!

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged Brain, psychobabble | Comments Off

Italian Police Arrested 18 For Allegedly Brainwashing and Selling Children

Posted on September 5, 2022 by cchrstl

It’s old news (27 June 2019), but still shocking nevertheless.

Italian police had arrested 18 people for allegedly brainwashing children into thinking their parents had sexually abused them so they could be sold to foster parents for cash. The accused included psychotherapists working for a social work association.

To brainwash the children, those arrested allegedly forged child-like drawings with sexual connotations and used electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT) to implant fake abuse memories.

ECT is the barbaric psychiatric practice of sending an electric current searing through the brain to create a severe convulsion or seizure of long duration, called a grand mal convulsion, which is identical to an epileptic fit.

The purpose of psychiatric shock treatment is to create brain damage, in the mistaken theory that this is beneficial to human beings. As one can see in this case, it can be used to make someone believe things that are not true.

While ECT obviously has no therapeutic value, its punishment value causes a person to be hypnotically cooperative. The person is given an electric shock and told while the shock is occurring that they must obey and do certain things. It is actually the violence of the shock which subdues and degrades a person into changing their personality and performing outrageous actions, which brutal method has been used for a long time by various governments to create politically obedient slaves.

For example, 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.

Let’s call out ECT for what it really is: a brutal, brain-destroying criminal act. Contact your local, state and federal officials and tell them to ban ECT.

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged Brain, ECT, False Memory Syndrome, Politics | Comments Off

World Psychiatric Group Must Tell Its Members To Expunge Chemical Imbalance Myth

Posted on August 29, 2022 by cchrstl

CCHR, a global mental health industry watchdog, has demanded the World Psychiatric Association advise its 180 members to remove all references to a chemical imbalance causing mental disorders from their websites and literature.

By CCHR International Mental Health Industry Watchdog August 9, 2022

Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a 53-year mental health industry watchdog, has demanded the World Psychiatric Association issue a Positioning Statement urging all of its members to remove any reference or suggestion that a chemical imbalance in the brain causes mental disorders from their websites. In a letter sent to Dr. Afzal Javed, president of the WPA, CCHR called on the organization to condemn the theory and now wants the organization to also send an advisory to national psychiatric associations to inform their members to remove references to the disproved chemical imbalance theory from their websites, literature and any patient informed consent forms.

WPA has 145 member societies, mostly national psychiatric associations, including the American Psychiatric Association, and 36 affiliate member associations, representing some 250,000 psychiatrists worldwide.[1] As the association says it emphasizes the need for “the highest possible standards of clinical practice and ethical behavior in psychiatry,” CCHR says a priority must be that psychiatric groups to stop misleading consumers that a chemical imbalance underlies their mental health issues.[2]

The letter to Dr. Javed at the WPA Congress held in Bangkok, Thailand, pointed out that the chemical imbalance theory was a myth that has been exploited in the mental health field for over 30 years to fuel antidepressant sales, but was recently thoroughly debunked by researchers from University College London (UCL) in a study published in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers reviewed major studies published over several decades and found no convincing evidence to support the theory that a chemical imbalance causes a mental disorder. The letter said the WPA should formally condemn the debunked theory because to do otherwise constitutes consumer fraud and violates patient informed consent rights.

In 2019, the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK had already responded to research that found no proof of low serotonin levels causing depression, and issued a position statement dismissing the idea that antidepressants “correct a chemical imbalance in the brain.”[3] However, the American Psychiatric Association website continued to promote mental health issues as “brain disorders,” without evidence to prove this, and its patient leaflets declared “antidepressants may be prescribed to correct imbalances in the levels of chemicals in the brain.”

As one of the UCL researchers stated, this misleading situation has arisen because it serves the interests of the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical industry. “Our view is that patients should not be told that depression is caused by low serotonin or by a chemical imbalance, and they should not be led to believe that antidepressants work by targeting these unproven abnormalities,” the lead researcher said.

CCHR says the WPA must take immediate action to ensure this view is conveyed to its members. Giving patients misinformation prevents their making an informed decision and has already resulted in many millions of people taking antidepressants or other psychotropic drugs with harmful side effects, erroneously believing these would “correct” something that simply never existed, CCHR wrote to Dr. Javed.

In 2020, WPA issued a Position Statement, “Implementing Alternatives to Coercion” which acknowledged that coercion in psychiatry has long been subject to controversy and contravenes patients’ rights, including violation of “rights to liberty; autonomy; freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment….”

The WPA admitted that coercion in psychiatry is “over-used,” contravening patients’ rights—although CCHR says it should never be used.

It pointed out that practices that constitute coercion include, “treatment without consent (or ‘compulsory treatment’), any form of treatment including the use of psychotropic medication; seclusion locking or confining a person to a space or room alone; restraint actions aimed at controlling a person’s physical movement, including prolonged or unsafe holding by other person(s), the use of any physical devices (‘mechanical restraint’, chaining, etc.) and the use of psychotropic drugs for the primary purpose of controlling movement (‘chemical restraint’).”

It warned that the use of coercive practices “carries the risk of harmful consequences, including trauma” and individuals subject to physical coercion are susceptible to harms that include physical pain, injury and death.”

CCHR wants this statement expanded so that WPA tells its members that to purport, in any way, that a chemical imbalance may be a source of people’s mental travails, harms patients, and could constitute consumer fraud. Troubled patients being misled about what causes their problems and being told that they need to take a psychotropic drug to “correct” this, is a form of coercion and contradicts the WPA 2020 Position Statement and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that the statement is based upon.

References:

[1] https://www.wpanet.org/
https://www.wpanet.org/members-affiliates
[2] https://www.wpanet.org/what-we-do
[3] Royal College of Psychiatrists, “Position statement on antidepressants and depression,” May 2019

Posted in Big Muddy River Newsletter | Tagged antidepressant, Brain, Coercive psychiatry, Fraud, Serotonin, Side Effects | Comments Off

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