Just when one might have thought that the U.S. was getting a handle on opioid addiction, another harmful and highly addictive opioid-like drug has appeared in widespread use.
The March 2021 issue of Consumer Reports has a comprehensive article about Tianeptine, an illegal drug linked to reports of harm, abuse and deaths.
Tianeptine acts in the brain as an opioid. The FDA says it is illegal and unsafe in the U.S., although it is approved as a prescription antidepressant in some European, Asian, and Latin American countries.
Reports indicate that tianeptine is even more addictive, with more severe withdrawal adverse reactions, than opioids and heroin.
Yet some proponents, possibly motivated by greed if not by malign intentions, are trying to get the FDA to approve it as a prescription drug for depression in the U.S.
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 mental disorders 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.
Sustainable: Of, relating to, or being a method or lifestyle for using resources so that the resources can be maintained and continued, and are not depleted or permanently damaged.
[from Old French sustenir (French: soutenir), from Latin sustineo, sustinere, from sub– (under) + teneo (hold, uphold, possess, guard, maintain)]
The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals
The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their 169 associated targets adopted in 2015 and accepted by all Member States seek to realize the human rights of all and balance economic, social and environmental factors towards peace and prosperity for all.
To this end we examine some of the existing factors which block or inhibit the realization of these goals, and which must be eliminated so that the goals can be achieved in practice.
SDG 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.
Target 17.16: Enhance the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in all countries, in particular developing countries.
How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 17.16
It should be obvious by now that psychiatry is not a sustainable industry, neither by definition nor by example.
The main resource in consideration here is people, the most critical building blocks of society. Yet psychiatry has no cures, and depends on damaging their patients to continue in business.
“Green Mental Health Care is based on the preservation and treatment of the mind and body (for they are not separate functions) using non-toxic, non-addictive, and non-invasive strategies that produces good mental health. Green Mental Health Care has not only proven to be superior in patient outcomes than any other treatment method, including the use of psychiatric drugs, but it achieves the patient’s health goals at a fraction of the cost while saving them from the life-threatening health risks associated with psychiatric drugs.“
Unsustainable Psychiatric Practices
“Unsustainable prescription drug costs will ultimately create pressures on health systems and insurers to reduce spending in other areas or to decrease benefits.“
ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT), or shock therapy, is a highly lucrative but damaging psychiatric practice. The purpose of shock treatment is to create brain damage. This brain damage is what brings about the memory loss and learning disability, as well as the spatial and temporal disorientation which always follows shock treatments. All physical damage done to the brain by ECT is permanent and irreversible. There is evidence that the damage, once begun by ECT, is progressive and feeds on itself, leading to further brain deterioration, including physical shrinkage of the brain and a shortening of the life of the victim. This barbaric “treatment” is currently being pushed on an unsuspecting and vulnerable patient population for major depression, but in reality it creates a patient for life due to this brain damage. Sign the petition to Ban ECT.
With mental health treatment costing up to 300% more than general medical treatment, spiraling costs are unavoidable when mental health care is mandated.
Psychiatrists and psychologists proclaim a worldwide epidemic of mental health problems and urge massive funding increases as the only solution. Yet Community Mental Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.
Whenever a “mental patient” commits an act of senseless violence, psychiatrists invariably blame the tragedy on the person’s failure to continue their medication. Such incidents are used to justify mandated community treatment and involuntary commitment laws. However, statistics and facts show it is psychiatric drugs themselves that can create the very violence or mental incompetence they are prescribed to treat.
The end result of psychiatric treatment is not a cured patient, returned to society as a well-adjusted, functioning contributor, but rather a person with the same or worse mental symptoms, told they must remain on debilitating psychiatric drugs for life, because psychiatrists know of no other cure.
“Biomedical psychiatry” has yet to validate a single psychiatric diagnosis as a disease, or as anything neurological, biological, chemically imbalanced or genetic. Decades of psychiatric monopoly over mental health has only lead to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics and continuously escalating funding demands — the very definition of unsustainable.
The claim that only increased funding will cure the problems of psychiatry has lost its ring of truth. Psychiatry and psychology should be held accountable for the funds already given them, and irrefutably and scientifically prove the physical existence of mental disorders they claim should be treated and covered by insurance in the same way as physical diseases are.
The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options.
Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 17 can occur.
Both facilities have a long history of handling involuntarily committed individuals from the criminal justice system.
By combining the two hospitals for a total of 230 patient beds, the department hopes to be able to take advantage of natural efficiencies across both campuses.
They claim to reintegrate individuals into the community, but in the case of Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Services (SORTS), individuals are involuntarily committed for the rest of their lives after having completed their prison terms.
The DMH budget for 2020-2021 is approximately $2.4 Billion. Roughly $36.8 Million from General Revenue is allocated to the SORTS program. Roughly $30.5 Million from General Revenue is allocated to the two St. Louis adult psychiatric hospitals. This does not include any Federal funds or State funds other than General Revenue.
The MO DMH Division of Behavioral Health (DBH) operates six adult inpatient facilities and one children’s psychiatric hospital. The two forensic hospitals under discussion are in this Division.
Involuntary Commitment: A Crack In The Door Of Constitutional Freedoms
Every 1¼ minutes, someone in the U.S. becomes the next victim of involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. Because of their ubiquity and far–reaching powers, involuntary commitment laws lay a truly concrete foundation for totalitarianism. And they are not, it must be stressed, a threat of what might be, but a present danger — representing America’s gaping breach in the otherwise admirable wall of individual Constitutional rights.
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.
Involuntary commitment creates an astonishing debt load on our health care system. Given a very conservative daily cost of $940 for hospitalization and treatment, each involuntary commitment costs around $16,700. With up to 1.5 million people committed yearly, and using the conservative individual figure of $16,700, the annual health care drain is almost $25 billion! And this is paying for a service that most would refuse if given the chance.
The Missouri Revised Statutes (RSMo) Chapter 552 Section 20, Chapter 632 Section 300, Chapter 632 Section 305, Chapter 632 Section 484, and Chapter 660 Section 290 specify the conditions under which, and by whom, someone can be forcibly incarcerated in a mental health facility. It isn’t always called “involuntary commitment”; other euphemisms are “detention” or “civil commitment”.
The fact that these actions are couched in such Orwellian doublespeak as “for his own good,” “to prevent him from committing harm,” etc., is unfortunate, for it obfuscates the intention, which is undeniably to harm instead of help.
The first thing to realize is that if mental asylums were places of rest, where people did not fear to seek help, knowing they would not be assaulted with restraints, drugs and electric shock — but where they could receive real medical help — people would be more approachable about being helped.
The dangerous person who is violent must be dealt with independent of psychiatrists. If a dangerous offense is committed by a person, then the fact remains criminal statutes exist to address this. As the late psychiatrist 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.”
What Must Be Done?
First there needs to be an increase in humane and rational alternatives to psychiatric involuntary institutionalization.
Second, involuntary commitment laws must be abolished and this unconstitutional and coercive practice stopped.
Third, any psychiatrist found to be using coercion, threats or malice to get people to “accept” psychiatric treatment, or who hospitalizes a patient against their will should be charged with assault and false imprisonment.
Take the initiative today towards achieving human rights in this country and contact your local, state, and federal officials to have these oppressive commitment laws abolished.
CCHR recommends that citizens execute a Living Will, or Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment, which directs that psychiatric incarceration, hospitalization, treatment or procedures not be imposed on you.
Great Circle, the largest provider of residential psychiatric treatment for juveniles (mainly in foster care) in Missouri, announced February 15 2021 that it will shut down its residential treatment program in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis.
The FBI raided them on February 2, 2021 due to alleged child abuse. The Missouri Department of Social Services had suspended placements there on January 22, 2021. Webster Groves police arrested three of their employees on suspicion of child abuse. The nonprofit’s former CEO, Vincent Hillyer, was charged with child abuse in 2019.
Great Circle has 12 other residential facilities in Missouri for juvenile psychiatric treatment which so far remain open, although the FBI raid included their facility near St. James, Missouri.
The psychiatric abuse of foster children is a growing concern, especially the use of harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs as a restraint mechanism.
Roughly 13,000 children are in Missouri’s foster care system. More than 30% of them are prescribed these harmful drugs, and 20% are taking two or more drugs at the same time. Medicaid pays for a majority of the healthcare services that children in foster care receive, including psychotropic drugs.
Most psychotropic drugs have not been FDA approved to treat children, who are at great risk of serious harm from these drugs because the drugs play Russian Roulette with neurotransmitters in the brain.
[UPDATE 3/31/2021] A Missouri Department of Social Services audit of Medicaid claims for services paid through the state to Great Circle identified $1,992,157 in “improper billing.”
Effective Definitions Logic — the subject of reasoning; the ability to think clearly and reach correct conclusions. [ultimately from Greek logos “speech, reason, word”] Superstition — an irrational attitude or notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary. [ultimately from Latin super- “over” + stare “to stand”]
What Is Logic?
Logic is a process of observation and thought that leads to correct conclusions. This process is called “reasoning.” Reason depends upon data. When data is faulty or unobserved the conclusions are unreasonable (i.e. illogical.)
What Is Superstition?
Superstition is the substitution of false or faulty data for correctly observed data leading to incorrect, unreasonable or illogical conclusions.
One of the primary ways superstition takes hold is by having fixed ideas. A fixed idea is something accepted without personal inspection or agreement. It may appear normal or reasonable, but on close observation and inspection can be shown to be faulty.
Sanity and Insanity
It can be seen that sanity is one’s reasoning toward optimum survival. Specifically it is one’s ability to recognize differences, similarities and identities. This is a necessary ability one must have to be logical. [Sanity: Soundness of judgment or reason; derives ultimately from Latin sanus “healthy”.]
The opposite of sanity is insanity, which can be seen to be faulty reasoning leading toward nonsurvival, or the inability to recognize differences, similarities and identities. The result of this is to be illogical.
Cause and Effect
No amount of logic can replace some good, solid, imaginative superstition, which is the assignment of cause to something or someone other than the person themself.
By this we mean that in the absence of a person’s ability to be responsible and cause things to happen — that is, the person is only being the effect of others — logic is ineffective and superstition will take its place.
Notice that one of the main uses of both logic and superstition in this case is to covertly justify how one is not responsible and has not caused anything. It’s always something or someone else — i.e. “The Why Is God!” syndrome. Thus, someone will say “It’s only logical” when on close inspection it isn’t logical at all. This red herring leads to no end of superstition and failures.
Psychiatry Is Superstition
In the case of psychiatry, the Why is the Brain. Insanity is all the brain’s fault; and they justify this with both (faulty) logic and (imaginative) superstition. They’ve got it covered.
In the case of psychiatry, neither logic nor superstition is sanity. In fact, psychiatrists do not know what sanity or insanity is, since it is clear that psychiatry cannot distinguish the sane from the insane. This, psychiatrists when pressed about it, readily admit.
“We do not know the causes [of any mental illness]. We don’t have the methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” —Dr. Rex Cowdry, psychiatrist and director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 1995
As a result, all psychiatric diagnoses and treatments are based on superstition, which is called a “pseudoscience.”
The only thing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is good for is to bill insurance for bogus treatments.
“In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.” [Dr. Thomas Dorman, Member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Canada]
Recommendations
Government, criminal, educational, judicial and other social agencies should not rely on the DSM and no legislation should use this as a basis for determining the mental state, competency, educational standard or rights of any individual.
The Missouri Revised Statutes (RSMo) contains several explicit mentions of the DSM in Chapter 376 on Life, Health and Accident Insurance. Contact your Missouri State legislators and ask them to remove all references to the DSM from Missouri State Law.
Brain Scan: Also called neuroimaging or brain imaging. The use of various techniques to produce an image of the structure, function or other aspects of the brain.
Many different electrical, magnetic, chemical, x-ray, optical, ultrasound, and radioactive techniques can be used to visualize different brain features. As scientific endeavors to find out more about how the brain works, these are certainly interesting; perhaps even medically useful.
What isn’t so useful is the psychiatric obsession with the brain as the source of mental disorders; or worse yet, as a target for surgical, electrical, magnetic, or chemical manipulation based on the flimsiest of guesses about how the brain actually works.
Knowing nothing about the underlying causes of serious mental disturbance, psychiatry still sears the brain with electroshock, tears it with psychosurgery and deadens it with dangerous drugs.
Many brain scan studies cannot be reproduced or scientifically validated. Yet sensationalist psychiatric public relations tout claims only meant to sell the latest drug or other “treatment.”
In fact, there is flatly no scientific evidence showing a definitive link between brain scans and mental disorders. In a study published in Nature (20 May 2020), 70 teams of neuroimaging researchers analyzed the same brain scan data, looking to verify the same nine hypotheses about the results. Every single team picked a different way to analyze the data, and their results varied wildly.
In short, Brain Scans in psychiatry are really Brain Scams.
“People need proper and effective healthcare, not damaging drugs and electroshock that passes for mental health treatment today. Funds should be redirected from psychiatry into safe, accountable non-psychiatric medical care and social programs. This is especially true for the African American community, given psychiatry’s long history of racist eugenics theories which still permeate modern day mental health care.“
—Reverend Fred Shaw
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.
In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.
This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.
For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.
148.5 million people were reached through CCHR International’s actions and campaigns, including media articles, TV and documentary views.
12 psychiatric facilities shut down; 16 lawsuits were filed against behavioral facilities and the companies profiting from them and/or staff in the psychiatric system.
Press releases against for-profit psych hospital abuse alone increased by 133% and the number of media stories almost doubled.
Half a million Americans signed petitions supporting the closure of two major for-profit psychiatric hospital chains.
$132 million in criminal and civil fines against such facilities—up 676% from 2019.
Skin electric shock used for “behavior modification” (punishment) on children banned.
Rev. Fred Shaw, CCHR Int’s Public Affairs Director, established CCHR’s National Taskforce against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics, with 81 members now representing clergy, psychologists, civil rights attorneys, educators, radio hosts, NAACP representatives and more. A new website was produced for the Task Force, detailing psychiatry’s long-term role in creating and maintaining modern racism, and psychology’s disastrous role in training police.
Our Fight For Kids campaign (and website) has expanded enormously, with major organizations joining our fight to ban incarceration of children in psychiatric facilities, brutal restraint practices on children, and many more organizations joining the fight to ban electroshock.
At least 7 U.S. psychs lost their licenses to practice following CCHR Int complaints, which means safeguarding patients’ lives.
And right now, we are speeding up our work on the next steps in the update of our psychiatric drugs side effects online searchable data base. The next steps are exciting ventures that we are ramping up on for year-ending. Already, 2.4 million adverse drugs reports (ADRs) were pulled from the Food and Drug Administration for 400 psych drugs—up from 900,000 ADRs currently on CCHR’s original site launched in 2013.
With psychiatrists promoting increased psychotropic drug use in response to COVID concerns, CCHR’s drug database is vital for shining the light of truth on psychotropic drug risks. Through this we can all give consumers and families the chance to be properly informed and make safe decisions!
Let’s say goodbye to 2020 and bring in the new year with a commitment to imparting more truth and safeguards to help mankind! Take Action Now!
Sustainable: Of, relating to, or being a method or lifestyle for using resources so that the resources can be maintained and continued, and are not depleted or permanently damaged.
[from Old French sustenir (French: soutenir), from Latin sustineo, sustinere, from sub– (under) + teneo (hold, uphold, possess, guard, maintain)]
The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals
The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their 169 associated targets adopted in 2015 and accepted by all Member States seek to realize the human rights of all and balance economic, social and environmental factors towards peace and prosperity for all.
To this end we examine some of the existing factors which block or inhibit the realization of these goals, and which must be eliminated so that the goals can be achieved in practice.
SDG 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
Target 16.3: Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all.
How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 16.3
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 1940’s, 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.” And they did, with the consequence that today, because of their influence, the justice system is failing.
The psychiatric “insanity defense” and its derivatives have done the most damage. The psychiatric industry jumping on the “not guilty by reason of insanity” (NGRI) bandwagon has lead to a massive erosion of public confidence in the justice system’s ability to mete out swift and equitable justice.
Psychiatric “expert” witnesses are widely criticized for providing testimony to suit their clients’ purposes.
With each new failure to rehabilitate the criminally insane, psychiatry merely asks for more money since they are unable to cure anyone.
A major part of the “treatment” for prison inmates is a regimen of powerful psychotropic drugs, despite numerous studies showing that aggression and violence are tied to their use.
Because of the complete lack of scientific validity, legal and medical experts recommend eliminating psychiatric and psychological testimony from the courts.
Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 16 can occur.
Reference: “Erectile dysfunction drug packaged with antidepressant in ‘product mix-up’” [12/10/2020]
“Pharmaceutical distributor AvKare issued a voluntary recall of 100 mg tablets of both sildenafil, an erectile disfunction medication [the active ingredient in Viagra], and trazodone, an antidepressant [such as Desyrel], after a mix-up led to some of the prescription drugs being packaged together.“
We can think of some lewd suggestions of how this combination might work as an antidepressant, but our better judgment prevails.
Sildenafil is also prescribed for pulmonary arterial hypertension (high blood pressure in the lungs) because it relaxes blood vessels to increase blood flow.
If this goof isn’t bad enough, try putting your mind around the horrific side effects of trazodone, should anyone goof by actually taking it.
Trazodone is what’s known as a “newer antidepressant”. Some of its side effects are: flushing, chest pain, abnormal bleeding, ringing in the ears, dizzyness, fainting, changes in sexual ability, and painful erections.
Some of the side effects of sildenafil are: flushing, chest pain, nosebleeds, ringing in the ears, dizzyness, fainting, painful erections.
Gee, it might be difficult to tell which pill you’ve taken since both were in the same bottle and have the same side effects!
We make fun of it because we think it’s too good of a joke to let be; but the fact is, trazodone is not really a joking matter. Its side effects also include suicidal thoughts or behavior, violent behavior, psychotic episodes, deeper depression (which is ironic for an “antidepressant”), and many more serious adverse reactions.
Trazodone, like other such psychiatric drugs, raises the level of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Since it is not known exactly how this drug is supposed to work, taking it is playing Russian Roulette with your brain.
Trazodone is also routinely prescribed off-label for insomnia. Care must be used when stopping it, since it can have withdrawal symptoms. Psychiatrists euphemistically call this “discontinuation syndrome.”
We now know that Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old man accused of killing 12 people in a gun rampage at the Washington Navy Yard September 16, 2013, was taking trazodone.
Recognize that the real problem is not even this awful drug, but that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior as “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.
It is vital that you, your family and friends watch the video documentary “Making A Killing – The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging“. Containing more than 175 interviews with lawyers, mental health experts, the families of psychiatric abuse victims and the survivors themselves, this riveting documentary rips the mask off psychotropic drugging and exposes a brutal but well-entrenched money-making machine. The facts are hard to believe, but fatal to ignore. Watch the video online.
