Daily, we see the news that people’s “mental health” is suffering because of the restrictions and fears of COVID-19, not unrealistic given the staggering changes to their lives. But CCHR is tracking how psychiatrists and psychologists are turning this natural response into a global mental disorder that will line their pockets from the funds they are demanding to “treat” it.
As CCHR has found, those marketing a “mental health crisis” are often steeped in conflicts of interest with psychiatric drug manufacturers.
An explosive article in Psychology Today just broke detailing how nearly every medical website and resource on antidepressant drug side effects have hugely downplayed the drugs’ risks, and warning of the potential excessive prescribing of antidepressants due to COVID-related stress, despite it being “wrong to view our natural fears as mental health disorders.”
All this, while a local St. Louis psychiatrist just launched a clinical trial “repurposing” an antidepressant to treat people diagnosed with COVID-19 (purportedly for health, not mental health reasons). The same antidepressant was prescribed to one of the most infamous school shooters in history and is documented to induce suicide and violence.
There’s also been an upsurge in demands for research into psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) to become a replacement antidepressant, as the pandemic take its toll. Apparently enough time has passed that the public has forgotten what happened when psychedelics gained notoriety in the 1960s, when LSD pushed by psychiatrists spread into society as a recreational drug and started destroying lives with induced psychosis. 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.
With many Americans facing unsettling times, the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry is setting its sights on getting more drugs prescribed and more profit, while continuing to create patients-for-life due to the harmful drug side effects.
The owner of a St. Louis-area mental health clinic was sentenced February 28, 2020 to 18 months in federal prison for billing for therapy for a patient who was already dead.
Naim Muhammad, 56, of St. Charles, pleaded guilty last November to making a false claim to Medicaid. In addition to prison time, Muhammad must pay $366,185 in restitution to the Missouri Medicaid program.
Muhammad was president of Community Behavioral Health when he billed the Missouri Medicaid program for mental health therapy services to a female patient starting on June 21, 2017. But federal prosecutors said the patient actually died on June 8, 2017. Mr. Muhammad had no psychiatric training or license.
What, did he think no one would notice? The Office of Inspector General investigated this case for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, with assistance from the Division of Professional Registration of the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance.
Mental Health Care Fraud
A significant portion of government appropriations and insurance reimbursements has been lost due to financial fraud within the mental health industry. The United States loses approximately $100 billion to healthcare fraud each year. Up to $40 billion of this is due to fraudulent practices in the mental health industry. One study of U.S. Medicaid and Medicare insurance fraud showed psychiatry to have the worst track record of all medical disciplines.
The mental health monopoly has practically zero accountability and zero liability for its failures. As experience has shown that there are many criminal mental health practitioners, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights has developed a database at www.psychcrime.org that lists people in the mental health industry who have been convicted and jailed.
There is no place for criminal intent or deed in the field of mental health. If you are aware of such malfeasance, you may wish to report what you have seen. Contact CCHR to make a report and find out what actions can be taken.
The Insane Bloat of the Missouri Department of Mental Health Budget from 1971 to 2020
Well Over $2 Billion and Rapidly Rising
Plus an additional $45 Million in the 2020 Supplemental Budget
The 2020 Supplemental Budget authorizes over $6.2 Billion extra in spending for various measures, including mental health and suicide prevention efforts that were not previously included in the regular budget. Note that the Department of Mental Health does not acknowledge that psychiatric drugs can actually cause suicide as a side effect, although the FDA most certainly recognizes this.
Under normal circumstances, the Supplemental Budget funds various governmental functions that were not fully accounted for in the regular budget, plugging holes in the state’s spending as the fiscal year draws to a close on June 30, 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 crisis, the scale of this year’s supplemental budget is unprecedented.
SS SCS HCS HB2014, signed by the Governor on April 10, 2020, will distribute a large portion of Missouri’s federal stimulus dollars, as well as our own state General Revenue to fund Missouri’s fight against COVID-19. Normally, the Supplemental Budget’s price tag is measured in Millions. The staggering amount of budgetary authority in this year’s Supplemental Budget is over $6.2 Billion, and includes significant additional spending by the Department of Mental Health.
Here is a breakdown of additional Department of Mental Health spending authorized in the Supplemental Budget:
Department of Mental Health Federal Stimulus Fund
$5,075,000 For receiving and expending grants, donations, contracts, and payments
$900,000 For suicide prevention initiatives
$15,364,800 For funding community programs
$8,175,000 For paying a pandemic stipend to state employees providing direct care and support to institutionalized individuals during the COVID-19 public health emergency
Department of Mental Health Federal Fund
$970,000 For receiving and expending grants, donations, contracts, and payments
$834,127 For funding youth community programs
$348,724 For funding developmental disabilities services
Department of Mental Health General Revenue Fund
$3,922,500 For paying overtime to state employees
$200,000 To pay the state operated Intermediate Care Facilities for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (ICF/ID) provider tax
$259,530 For Expense and Equipment
$8,175,000 For paying a pandemic stipend to state employees providing direct care and support to institutionalized individuals during the COVID-19 public health emergency
$676,996 Funds to be transferred out of the State Treasury to Department of Mental Health Federal Fund From Intermediate Care Facility Intellectually Disabled Reimbursement Allowance Fund
Total Department of Mental Health additions: $44,901,677.
The introduction and passage of legislation designed to curb psychiatric fraud and abuse can contribute to the reduction of the Department of Mental Health budget. For examples of Model Legislation, click here.
Reports show that:
10% to 25% of mental health practitioners sexually abuse patients.
Psychiatry has the worst fraud track record of all medical disciplines.
The largest health care fraud suit in history [$375 million] involved the smallest sector of healthcare–psychiatry.
An estimated $20-$40 billion is defrauded in the mental health industry in any given year.
Establish or increase the number of psychiatric fraud investigation units to recover funds that are embezzled in the mental health system.
Clinical and financial audits of all government-run and private psychiatric facilities that receive government subsidies or insurance payments should be done to ensure accountability; statistics on admissions, treatment and deaths, without breaching patient confidentiality, should be compiled for review.
A list of convicted psychiatrists and mental health workers, especially those convicted and/or disciplined for fraud and sexual abuse should be kept on state, national and international law enforcement and police agencies databases, to prevent criminally convicted and/or de-registered mental health practitioners from gaining employment elsewhere in the mental health field.
No convicted mental health practitioner should be employed by government agencies, especially in correctional/prison facilities or schools.
The DSM and lCD (mental disorders section) should be removed from use in all government agencies, departments and other bodies including criminal, educational and justice systems.
Establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.
None of the mental disorders in the DSM/ICD should be eligible for insurance coverage because they have no scientific, physical validation. Governmental, criminal, educational and judicial agencies should not rely on the DSM or lCD (mental disorders section).
Provide funding and insurance coverage only for proven, workable treatments that verifiably and dramatically improve or cure mental health problems.
We think it is time to call psychiatry and psychology for what they are — failed pseudo sciences with no basis in fact, pseudo sciences that harm their recipients and line the pocketbooks of their practitioners.
A bill in the Missouri House (HB2561), if it becomes law, would provide a state subsidy up to $40,000 to public schools to hire a mental health professional.
This is part of a nationwide psychiatric effort to turn public schools into mental health clinics, while legitimate educational professionals continue to bemoan the sorry state of public education.
The sponsor of this bill, recently elected Missouri State Representative Yolanda Young (Democrat, District 22 in Kansas City), has an impressive career as a community activist. We suspect she genuinely believes that turning schools into mental health clinics is a way to improve education.
As a result of psychiatric and psychological intervention in schools, harmful behaviorist programs and psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs now decimate our schools.
According to educators, academic, knowledge–based curricula have been jettisoned in favor of psychology that places so-called “mental health,” emotions and belief systems above educational outcomes.
Drugging children with addictive, violence-causing mind-altering psychotropic drugs, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, is the “mental health” currently being employed by the psychiatric mental health industry. The false rationale is, the drugged kids will now be able to compete with children from wealthier families who attend better schools.
Psychiatric drugs and psychological programs have been implicated in increasing child violence. Skyrocketing youth suicide rates have also followed in the wake of widespread psychiatric, drug–based, child programs. Meddling with the brains of children via these harmful and addictive chemicals, and fraudulent “mental health” programs, constitutes criminal assault, and it’s time it was recognized for what it is.
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.
Looking at the News the past several weeks, it seems like every single mental health facility, psychologist and psychiatrist in the country is advertising their services for people with anxiety about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Overall, the number of Americans on drugs used to treat mental trauma has substantially increased since 2001; more than one?in?five adults was on at least one of these drugs in 2010, up 22 percent from ten years earlier. We can only suppose that has continued to increase into present time; the latest data from 2017 shows over 32 million Americans taking anti-anxiety drugs.
Anti-Anxiety Drugs
Anti-anxiety drugs can cause hallucinations, delusional thinking, confusions, aggression, violence, hostility, agitation, irritability, depression and suicidal thinking. They are also some of the most difficult drugs to withdraw from.
There have been 39 warnings from 8 countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States) and the European Union warning that anti-anxiety drugs cause harmful side effects. There are 79 studies from 19 countries (Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom and United States) showing that anti-anxiety drugs cause harmful side effects.
Many people who have taken psychiatric drugs have found out the withdrawal effects of the drugs can persist for months, even years after they stop taking them. No one should attempt withdrawal from psychiatric drugs without a doctor’s supervision due to the potential for serious withdrawal symptoms.
Recommendations
CCHR recommends a full, searching medical examination by a non-psychiatric health care professional, with appropriate clinical tests, to determine if there are undetected and untreated medical conditions that could be causing or contributing to mental distress.
It has been known for a long time that certain kinds of infections are known to cause mental symptoms, but they are rarely considered during psychiatric examinations and diagnosis. Be very wary of any psychiatrist or psychologist who claims you have a mental illness when you are suffering from some infectious disease.
This information is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease; mental symptoms can be caused by many different conditions, so see a qualified health care practitioner (not a psychiatrist) who can perform legitimate clinical tests.
Be prudent, lawful, observant, helpful — basically just be the good people you know you should be anyway!
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation or brainwashing intended to gain control of another person or group and make them question themselves, their memory, their perception, or their sanity.
The term originated from the 1938 play (and subsequent film adaptations) Gas Light, where the protagonist’s husband slowly manipulated her into believing she’s going mad by dimming the gaslights and telling her she was imagining it.
This is apparently a common Hollywood theme; I recall seeing the same premise in a 1960’s Perry Mason episode.
If it’s common in Hollywood, chances are it’s common in real life.
In the current political and social climate, fake news is the new standard for gaslighting. Frankly, this is nothing really new; the Russians have been at it since communism began around 1844, in one form or another.
The psychiatric Connection 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. The practice continues today using mind-altering psychiatric drugs to overwhelm a person and create terrorists who have been drug-deluded into committing heinous crimes against humanity. Not only do psychiatrists commit gaslighting in the form of manipulating terrorists to do their dirty work, but also they cover their tracks by diagnosing and treating the results of such manipulation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) labels as a mental disorder being a “Victim of terrorism or torture”; or more generally, being a victim of psychological abuse.
And on the other side a person can be diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a perpetrator of psychological abuse.
They’ve got you both coming and going; gaslighting and being gaslighted. And then they can prescribe an addictive, mind-altering psychiatric drug to keep you there, since they don’t keep collecting your insurance unless they can keep diagnosing you and “treating” you with psychiatric drugs.
Don’t think we’re making this up; it’s right there in the DSM.
Coercive psychiatrists are themselves often thought by their patients to be perpetrators of gaslighting. This can create a conflict where the patient is unable to trust their own sense of their feelings and surroundings in favor of evaluations by the therapist. Gaslighting has also been observed between patients and staff in inpatient psychiatric facilities.
All in all such manipulations are unhealthy. Since the psychiatric industry itself admits it has no capacity to cure, we observe psychology and psychiatry taking advantage of vulnerable patients for their own purposes instead of the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance.
Don’t be caught gaslighted — execute a Living Will “Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment.”
The FDA has finally, finally, decided to BAN the electric shock devices (ESDs) used at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts, a residential school for people with autism and other developmental or mental disabilities.
ESDs are devices that administer skin shocks in a form of “aversion therapy” for agitation and behavioral “issues.” School staff could trigger a shock to a child by using a remote control. This isn’t the electroconvulsive shock machine (currently in use) but a skin device machine that zapped children with electric current when they misbehaved.
The FDA has finally realized (after 20 years) that these devices “present substantial psychological and physical risks and, in fact, can worsen underlying symptoms—while leading to heightened anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
According to William Maisel, director of the FDA device center’s Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, “Since ESDs were first marketed more than 20 years ago, we have gained a better understanding of the danger these devices present to public health.”
So we ask you, if it took the FDA 20 YEARS to figure out that torturing troubled kids with electric shocks to the skin was a bad idea, do we really want to leave it up to the FDA to figure out that the electroshock machine, still in use after all these decades, which administers up to 460 volts of electricity to the brain to produce a grand mal seizure, and which is currently being administered to children, the vulnerable and the elderly, is also an obviously bad idea?
[UPDATED July 6, 2021] A federal appeals court overturned the FDA ban, stating that it was a regulation of the practice of medicine, which is outside the FDA’s area of authority. Approximately 20% of the center’s 300 patients are being treated with these harmful devices at any given time.
The court’s decision to remove the FDA ban on electrochocking these children, was based on the fraudulent claim that electroshocking children is a medical procedure and that the FDA has no authority to rule on medical issues. The lie in this case is that electroshock is a “medical” procedure; it is not. It is a barbaric method of punishment and has no place in modern society.
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 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
Target 9.5: Enhance scientific research, upgrade the technological capabilities of industrial sectors in all countries, in particular developing countries, including, by 2030, encouraging innovation and substantially increasing the number of research and development workers per 1 million people and public and private research and development spending.
How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 9.5
Basically we see two major ways that psychiatry obstructs scientific research.
1) Psychiatric research is not scientific.
In 40 years, “biological psychiatry” has yet to validate a single psychiatric diagnosis as a disease, or as anything neurological, biological, chemically imbalanced or genetic. While medicine has advanced on a scientific path to major discoveries and cures, psychiatry has never evolved scientifically and is no closer to understanding or curing mental problems.
While medicine has nurtured an enviable record of achievements and general popular acceptance, the public still links psychiatry to snake pits, straitjackets, and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Psychiatry continues to foster that valid impression with its development of such brutal treatments as electroshock (ECT), psychosurgery, the chemical straitjacket caused by antipsychotic drugs, and its long record of treatment failures.
With the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (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” based solely on opinion.
The DSM is the key to false escalating mental illness statistics and psychiatric drug prescriptions and usage worldwide. Untold harm and colossal waste of mental health funds occur because of it. It is imperative that the DSM diagnostic system be abandoned before real mental health reform can occur.
2) Psychiatric treatments and research waste funds and other resources that should be used for legitimate scientific research.
For decades psychiatrists and psychologists have claimed a monopoly over the field of mental health. Governments and private health insurance companies have provided them with billions of dollars every year to research and treat “mental illness,” only to face industry demands for even more funds to improve the supposed, ever–worsening state of mental health. No other industry can afford to fail consistently and expect to get more funding.
Reports show that psychiatry has the worst fraud track record of all medical disciplines. An estimated $20-$40 billion is defrauded in the mental health industry in any given year.
With at least $76 billion spent every year on psychiatric drugs internationally, and billions more in psychiatric research, one would and should expect an improving condition. However, after decades of psychiatric monopoly over the world’s mental health, their approach leads only to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics, massive increases in people taking mind?altering drugs, and escalating funding demands.
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.
Any form of psychiatric funding is actually unethical and harmful, since it precludes patients from finding out what is actually wrong and getting that effectively treated.
Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 9 can occur.
New research using a novel approach to test for harmful drug side effects is showing that the common antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat) interferes with the growth of brain synapses (connection points between neurons), and thus can cause developmental neurotoxicity — which means that it harms children’s developing brains.
Prior to this research the authors believe there were no studies that explored the consequences of long-term exposure of the developing brain to SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors).
As a result of this research the authors basically believe that paroxetine should not be given to pregnant women given the potential for damage to the developing brain of a fetus.
We think such damage extends far beyond the period of pregnancy, and this psychiatric drug should not be given to any child or adult.
Of course, such psychiatric drugs can only be prescribed after a diagnosis of some mental disorder. Unlike diagnoses for real medical conditions, psychiatrists do not have blood tests or any other clinical tests to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness — the diagnosis is purely an opinion. Thus, such diagnoses are fraudulent and abusive.
Anyone diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder has the right to full informed consent before any treatment is undertaken.
Further, if a psychiatrist asserts that your mental condition is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain or is a neurobiological disorder, you have the right to ask for the lab test or other test to prove the accuracy of that diagnosis.
Safe and effective medical treatments for mental difficulties are often kept buried. The fact is, there are many medical conditions that when undetected and untreated can appear as “psychiatric symptoms.” The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry is making a killing — $84 billion per year — based on people being labeled with mental disorders that are not founded on science or medicine, but on marketing campaigns designed to sell drugs.
Because the general public has been so misled by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries about the actual dangers of psychotropic drugs, CCHR has created the psychiatric drug side effects search engine.
This new research suggests it is even more harmful than originally thought. Contact your Federal and State Legislators and tell them what you think about this, and ask them to take steps to abolish government funding for psychiatric drugs.
