What is Happiness?

Posted on November 6, 2017 by cchrstl

If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day — go fishing.
If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.
[Chinese Proverb]

What is happiness, really? Is it “happy pills?” Mother’s little helper? Is “happiness” the opposite of “depression,” so that an anti-depressant should make one happy? Unfortunately, what anti-depressants do is actually detach one from reality; and the only happiness accrues to pharmaceutical companies who rake in $80 billion a year worldwide for psychiatric drugs.

As is usual with English words, “happiness” has more than one definition: 1) transient pleasure; 2) overcoming not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal; 3) a condition or state of well-being, contentment, pleasure; 4) joyful, cheerful, untroubled existence; 5) the reaction to having nice things happen to one.

Psychiatry, however, redefines happiness as a manic or hypomanic indication (associated with a bipolar diagnosis) which occurs in 14 separate entries in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5.)

Manic: characterized by frenetic activity or wild excitement; excitement of psychotic proportions manifested by mental and physical hyperactivity, disorganization of behavior and elevation of mood.
Hypomanic: A mild form of mania, marked by elation and hyperactivity; a mood state characterized by persistent dis-inhibition and pervasive euphoria.

“Treatment” generally includes psychotropic mood stabilizers, unless the state is a result of drug abuse or drug side effects — in which case the “treatment” may include psychotropic sedatives. All of these psychotropic drugs are addictive, mess up the central nervous system, and can have many disastrous side effects including violence and suicide.

For more information about mood stabilizers such as Lithium, Depakote (sodium valproate), Depakene (sodium valproate), Lamictal (lamotrigine), Lamictin (lamotrigine), Lamogine (lamotrigine); download and read the booklet Mood Stabilizers — the facts about the effects.

One psychologist even overtly proposed happiness as a psychiatric disorder. [From the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health]. One might think this was an April Fool’s joke, except that it was published in June.

Published in the Journal of Medical Ethics – J Med Ethics. 1992 Jun;18(2):94-8
“A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder”
Richard P Bentall, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool in the UK:

“It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.”

We think we can safely say this psychologist’s attitude is a misanthropic manifestation; the DSM-5 might call it “Adult antisocial behavior”, “Antisocial personality disorder”, or maybe just “Unspecified anxiety disorder”.

It is true that a euphoric condition is often associated with certain hallucinogenic drugs. We wouldn’t actually call that “happiness”, however; and the mania associated with many psychiatric drugs is not sustainable.

What would promote happiness is an actual cure for mental distress. The psychiatric industry itself admits it has no capacity to cure. We generally take cure to mean the elimination of some unwanted condition by some effective treatment. The primary purpose of any mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance. The only effective measure of this treatment must be “patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals.” This, we would call a cure.

While it is illegal for FDA-regulated products to make cure claims, there are in fact many non-drug and non-psychiatric alternatives which may prove effective in handling traumatic conditions. The trick is in finding out what is really wrong and fixing that, not just suppressing the central nervous system with drugs so that one does not feel the bad emotions.

Click here for more information about alternatives to fraudulent and abusive psychiatric treatments.

Click here for the truth about psychiatric drugs.

Click here for The Way To Happiness, the first moral code based wholly on common sense, containing twenty-one basic principles that guide one to a better quality of life.

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Are You Depressed?

Posted on October 23, 2017 by cchrstl

The sudden realization that someone might actually enjoy one’s company is a better antidepressant than anything one could get on a prescription.
[With thanks to Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archive.]

Psychiatry is heavily pushing false data about depression. You should know exactly what psychiatry and psychiatrists are:

  • Psychiatry is an antisocial enemy of the people.
  • Psychiatrists are undesirable antisocial elements.

What exactly is “depression?” The dictionary has this to say about what “depression” means:

A condition of feeling sad, despondent, hopeless, or inadequacy; A reduction in physiological vigor or activity such as fatigue.

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.

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

There are understandable possibilities for someone experiencing symptoms of depression. One is an undiagnosed and untreated medical condition that presents mental symptoms; and there are many of these medical conditions, requiring a full and searching clinical examination by a competent medical—not psychiatric—doctor to find the underlying undiagnosed and untreated physical problem. Go to this site for examples of medical conditions which can have mental symptoms. These all have non-psychiatric-drug alternatives.
A second possibility arises from stress, which is actually a situation in which a person is being suppressed in some area of their life — meaning there is something in their life, such as an antisocial person or element, which is putting them down, stopping them from getting better, invalidating or making less of one or one’s efforts.

Another possibility is simply a life event, such as grief, which has occasioned sadness or fatigue.

In the news now is a major source of false information about depression. Google is promoting this false information by teaming up with the National Alliance for Mental Illness to present a questionnaire to people who search for the word “depression” to recognize if what they are feeling is what psychiatrists call “clinical depression.” Don’t be fooled; this is simply an attempt to funnel vulnerable people into the mental health care system and prescribe them harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs. This questionnaire takes about five minutes to complete, and is just a list of behaviors, or as Dr. Thomas Szasz said, “The term ‘mental illness’ refers to the undesirable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of persons.” More properly, it is just what psychiatry and psychiatrists have inappropriately labeled as “undesirable behavior;” the prime undesirable antisocial people on the planet telling you what they think is undesirable!

This questionnaire has no clinical value, using ten questions such as “Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?” or do you have “trouble falling or staying asleep?” If you are logged in to Google while taking this questionnaire you will be sharing this information about yourself with Google.

Click here for more information about psychiatric abuse.

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GAO Will Review PTSD Treatment in the VA

Posted on October 16, 2017 by cchrstl

U.S. Representatives Mike Coffman (R-CO) and Ann McLane Kuster (D-NH) requested the Government Accountability Office to study how heavily the Veterans Administration relies upon psychotropic drugs to treat their patients for so-called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The GAO agreed September 27, 2017 to conduct the review.

Many people are concerned that the use of psychotropic drugs is a contributing factor to the alarming rate of suicides among veterans.

Express your concern about this by contacting:
Rep. Mike Coffman – https://coffman.house.gov/contact/ and jeremy.lippert@mail.house.gov
Rep. Ann McLane Kuster – https://kuster.house.gov/contact/email-me and lisbeth.zeggane@mail.house.gov
GAO – contact@gao.gov; youngc1@gao.gov; congrel@gao.gov; spel@gao.gov

Today, PTSD has become blurred as a catch-all diagnosis for some 175 combinations of symptoms, becoming the label for identifying the impact of adverse events on ordinary people. This means that normal responses to catastrophic events have often been interpreted as mental disorders when they are not.

The favored “treatment” for PTSD is psychotropic drugs known to cause violence and suicide.

According to the CCHR documentary The Hidden Enemy: Inside Psychiatry’s Covert Agenda, all evidence points in one direction: the soaring rates of psychiatric drug prescribing since 2003. Known drug side effects of these drugs such as increased aggression and suicidal thinking are reflected in similar uptrends in the rates of military domestic violence, child abuse and sex crimes, as well as self-harm.

Pull the string further and you’ll find psychiatrists ever widening the definitions of what it means to be “mentally ill,” especially when it comes to PTSD in soldiers and veterans. In psychiatry, diagnoses of psychological disorders such as PTSD, personality disorder and social anxiety disorder are almost inevitably followed by the prescription of at least one harmful and addictive psychiatric drug.

Psychiatrists know that their drugs do not actually cure anything, but merely mask symptoms. They are well aware of their many dangerous side effects, including possible addiction. If you are in the military, a veteran, a member of a military or veteran support group, or family or associate of a member of the military or a veteran, you quality for a free Hidden Enemy DVD.

Also watch the documentary online here.

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Las Vegas in the Sights

Posted on October 5, 2017 by cchrstl

Stephen Paddock massacred country music fans at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas the night of October 1, 2017 leaving 59 people dead (including Paddock) and 527 injured at last count.

He was prescribed an anti-anxiety drug in June that can lead to violent behavior, as reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal on October 3rd.

Records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program show Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets by Henderson physician Dr. Steven Winkler on June 21. Diazepam, or Valium, is a highly addictive Benzodiazepine known to cause aggressive behavior and suicide. Chronic use or abuse of psychiatric drugs such as diazepam can also trigger psychotic experiences.

Side effects (also called “adverse reactions”) are the body’s natural response to having a chemical disrupt its normal functioning. One could also say that there are no drug side effects, these adverse reactions are actually the drug’s real effects; some of these effects just happen to be unwanted, such as the violence and suicide observed with psychiatric anti-anxiety drugs. While not everyone on psychotropic drugs commits suicide or uncontrolled acts of violence, the effects of the many other side effects, including withdrawal from these addictive drugs, can be horrendous.

For example, between 2004-2008 there were reports submitted to the FDA’s MedWatch program which included 4,895 suicides, 3,908 cases of aggression, 309 homicides and 6,945 cases of diabetes from people taking psychiatric drugs. These numbers reflect only a small percentage of the actual side effects occurring in the consumer market, as the FDA has admitted that only 1-10% of side effects are ever reported to the FDA.

Reporting of adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs by doctors, pharmacists, other health care providers and consumers once those drugs are out in the consumer market, is fundamental to drug safety monitoring. Yet these reports have been frequently ignored or dismissed as “anecdotal” by the FDA even when serious side effects number in the thousands.

For more information about how psychiatric drugs can cause violence and suicide, go here: http://cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

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Psychiatry Ecstatic About PTSD

Posted on September 5, 2017 by cchrstl

The FDA just approved MDMA as a “breakthrough” drug for so-called PTSD and given the OK for clinical trials.

The FDA says that the “Breakthrough Therapy” designation expedites the development of drugs intended to treat a serious condition where preliminary clinical evidence indicates the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapies. The agency behind this effort to promote MDMA is called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (www.maps.org), which was founded in 1986 by Rick Doblin specifically to promote marijuana and psychedelics as “medicines,” after his experiments using psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences.

The randomized, placebo-controlled Phase 3 clinical trials are intended to assess the efficacy and safety of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a group of 200 to 300 participants diagnosed with PTSD aged 18+ at sites in the U.S., Canada, and Israel, pending the raising of $25 Million in private funds to pay for the trials.

MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, generic midomafetamine), a synthetic drug which is the primary ingredient in Ecstasy, is emotionally damaging and users often suffer depression, confusion, severe anxiety, paranoia, psychotic behavior and other psychological problems. It is chemically similar to the stimulant methamphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline, and 92% of those who begin using Ecstasy later turn to other drugs including marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin.

Once MDMA gets into the bloodstream, it prompts a massive release of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. The collective efforts of all three neurotransmitters make the user feel euphoric. MDMA also damages brain serotonin neurons. High doses of MDMA can affect the body’s ability to regulate temperature. This can lead to a spike in body temperature that can occasionally result in liver, kidney, or heart failure or even death.

One has to continually increase the amount of the drug one takes in order to feel the same effects; some people report signs of addiction, including the following withdrawal symptoms: fatigue, loss of appetite, depression, and trouble concentrating. MDMA was first synthesized by a German company (Merck) in 1912 and has been available as a street drug since the 1980s. MDMA was first used in the 1970s as an unapproved aid in psychotherapy. In 1985, The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration labeled MDMA as an illegal drug with no recognized medicinal use. In 2016, the White House found more than 22,000 people were hospitalized due to symptoms related to MDMA in 2011.

To put overall MDMA use in perspective, in 2010 the illicit drug category with the largest number of current users among persons aged 12 or older was marijuana use (2.4 million), followed by abuse of pain relievers (2 million), tranquilizers (1.2 million), Ecstasy (0.9 million), inhalants (0.8 million), and cocaine and stimulants (0.6 million each).

Not to bandy words, the psychiatric movement to promote MDMA as a treatment for anything, let alone for the fraudulent diagnosis of PTSD, is outright unethical and abusive, and can only be motivated by a perverse desire to harm in the name of help and profit.

Click here for more information about why psychiatric drugs do not help.

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Missouri Receives Federal Crisis Counseling Program Grant

Posted on August 28, 2017 by cchrstl

The Missouri Department of Mental Health received a $500,000 “Show Me Hope Crisis Counseling Program” (CCP) grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that funds psychological services for victims of flooding. The money is funneled to six Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC): BJC, Comtrea, Compass Health, Family Counseling Center, Ozark Center, and Ozarks Medical Center.

The CCP is a short-term disaster grant funded by FEMA and administered through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Federal Law authorizes the President to fund mental health assistance and training activities in designated disaster areas. President Donald Trump declared a major disaster in Missouri June 2, 2017 at the request of Governor Eric Greitens. There are other emergency funds being used for cleanup, recovery and other humanitarian efforts.

It is certainly encouraging that the federal government is backing up relief efforts to flood victims in Missouri; however, one does not consider psychological counseling as effective relief.

Natural disasters do not cause mental illness. People have emotions that are appropriate for the situation. If something terrible happens it’s only natural to feel bad. The severity of the disaster would determine the appropriate reaction of tears to hysterics. In fact, it would be abnormal not to have those emotions. Psychology and psychiatry would like you to believe otherwise. Psychologists and psychiatrists are taking the stress of disasters and making them into behavioral issues that can only be treated with “counseling” and harmful psychotropic drugs.

Most people are resilient and can cope with the stress resulting from a disaster. For those that can’t seem to bounce back or recover in a timely fashion, they will be the ones targeted by psychiatrists, psychologists and pharmaceutical companies to get them on counseling and drugs. Instead, the solution is not to agree with the false data and bogus diagnoses, but to actually find a true physiological cause of the symptoms. That way the cause can be treated and the symptoms would disappear.

Community Mental Health psychiatric programs started in the 1960s, made possible with the development and use of neuroleptic drugs, also known as antipsychotics, for mentally disturbed individuals. Neuroleptic is from Greek, meaning “nerve seizing”, reflective of how the drugs act like a chemical lobotomy. Service is provided through government-funded units called Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC). These centers tend to patients within the community, dispensing neuroleptics to keep traumatized individuals under control.

CMHCs became legalized drug dealerships that supply psychiatric drugs to their patients. There has been much debate within the psychology profession about the medicalization of counseling, since psychology has largely subscribed to the fraudulent biological model of psychiatry, in which psychotropic drugs are assumed to be needed to fix some chemical imbalance in the brain, an assumption that has never been clinically proven. Nearly every year legislation is introduced to allow psychologists to prescribe psychiatric drugs.

Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University founded “experimental psychology” in 1879. Declaring that man is an animal, with no soul, he claimed that thought was merely the result of brain activity — a false premise that has remained the basis of psychiatry and psychology until this day.

The entirety of psychological and psychiatric counseling programs are founded on the tacit assumptions that mental health “experts” know all about the mind and mental phenomena, know a better way of life, a better value system and how to improve lives beyond the understanding and capability of their patients. The reality is that all mental health counseling programs are designed to control people’s lives towards specific ideological objectives at the expense of the person’s sanity and well-being.

A review of studies regarding disasters shows that the psychological treatment offered to individuals does more harm than good. Professor Yvonne McEwan, advisor to the U.S. government after the Oklahoma City bombing, said the booming profession [psychology] was at best useless and at worst highly destructive to victims seeking help: “Professional counseling is largely a waste of time and does more to boost the ego of the counselor than to help the victim….”

Click here for more information about the failure of community mental health programs.

Tell Debra.Walker@dmh.mo.gov what you think about this. Ms. Walker is with the Office of Public Affairs at the Missouri Department of Mental Health. Tell Mark Stringer at directormail@dmh.mo.gov, Director of the Missouri DMH, what you think about this. Tell Patrick Baker at Patrick.Baker@ltgov.mo.gov, Missouri Flood Recovery Coordinator, what you think about this.

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Knock Yourself Out

Posted on August 28, 2017 by cchrstl

The drug Ketamine is now being advertised as a “treatment” for “depression.” Don’t be fooled; this drug is serious business.

Ketamine, categorized as a “dissociative anesthetic,” is used in powdered or liquid form as an anesthetic, on animals as well as people. It can be injected, consumed in drinks, snorted, or added to joints or cigarettes.

By “dissociative anesthetic” we mean that this drug distorts perception of sight and sound and produces feelings of detachment (dissociation) from the environment and self.

Short- and long-term effects include increased heart rate and blood pressure, nausea, vomiting, numbness, depression, amnesia, hallucinations and potentially fatal respiratory problems. Ketamine users can also develop cravings for the drug. At high doses, users experience an effect referred to as “K-Hole,” an “out of body” or “near-death” experience.

Due to the detached, dreamlike state it creates, where the user finds it difficult to move, ketamine has been used as a “date-rape” drug. The increase in illicit use prompted ketamine’s placement in Schedule III of the United States Controlled Substance Act in August 1999.

[Update 9/5/2018 from Consumer Reports] “All these drugs [Ketamine, Phenylbutazone, Chloramphenicol] are prohibited in beef, poultry, and pork consumed in the U.S. Yet government data obtained by Consumer Reports suggest that trace amounts of these and other banned or severely restricted drugs may appear in the U.S. meat supply more often than was previously known.”

Ketamine is being promoted as an intravenous treatment for depression by an anesthesiologist in the St. Louis area. It does not cure anything, any effect it does have is of short duration, and must be administered on a regular basis to have a continuing effect. Its actual mechanism of operation is not well understood, but one can see that as an anesthetic it simply reduces ones general awareness, so the awareness of one’s depressive thoughts are suppressed. These return once the drug wears off.

Note that “depression” is not an actual medical illness; it is simply a symptom of some undiagnosed and untreated condition.

Currently, ketamine is not approved for the treatment of depression, and so this is an off-label use. Ketamine use as a recreational drug has been implicated in deaths globally. 10% to 20% of patients at anesthetic doses experience adverse reactions.

Its use to treat so-called depression is unethical and actually harmful, since it precludes the patient from finding out what is actually wrong and getting that treated.

Go here for more information about alternatives to drugs.

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Psychiatry and Other Enterprises

Posted on July 30, 2017 by cchrstl

Book Review

Psychiatry and Other Enterprises
Personal Experiences and Reflections after 57 Years in the Field of Psychiatry
by Nelson Borelli, MD (Mill City Press, Inc., 2015)
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern University

“Psychiatry as it stands now, a neurological and drug-oriented enterprise, poses a bleak predicament for those suffering from emotional or existential problems.

“Psychiatry’s pursuit of the enterprising route as a means of survival is backfiring: psychiatry is on the brink of extinction as a medical specialty to once again become a stepchild of neurology. …

“Organized psychiatry lost a chance to achieve solid medical identity after WWII because its leadership refused to analyze itself, to listen to its critics, and to consider a new paradigm. Instead psychiatry sank its head into the ground to continue to rely on State support for its survival.

“The possible survival or the new birth of psychiatry would need a new paradigm. A paradigm which priority and main clause would be: separation-from-the-State.”

Dr. Borelli emphasizes that a fuller understanding of psychiatry’s failures can be found by following the money trail, particularly the governmental money trail.

Over the course of his career it became clear to Dr. Borelli that the people that consulted with him were not “mentally ill”; that the consultees either had medical problems with emotional symptoms or had ordinary life problems caused by poor management. As a Life Analyst, Dr. Borelli assists people seeking help in managing their personal lives. Rather than diagnosing and treating medical conditions, he now identifies the blind spots in the assessment and management of the life of his clients. He does not tell people how to live their lives. He strongly believes that psychiatry should do away with the forced treatment of people (involuntary commitment) and the insanity defense practice.

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Patients With Mental Disorders Get Half Of All Opioid Prescriptions

Posted on July 19, 2017 by cchrstl

A June 26, 2017 article on Kaiser Health News by Vickie Connor presents the information that, “Adults with a mental illness receive more than 50 percent of the 115 million opioid prescriptions in the United States annually.”

Not surprisingly, it also says that while the opioids are prescribed primarily for pain, patients with mental illness find that the drugs alleviate their mental issues, too. We don’t know about you, but if we’re in severe pain our mental health suffers. Then again, you’ve probably heard of the “hammer effect” — if you’re having symptoms of mental trauma, smack your finger smartly with a hammer and we guarantee that you won’t be thinking about your mental troubles for a while. (This is one of those “please don’t try this at home” pieces of advice.)

Understand that when news media say “mental illness,” we read “mental symptoms,” since the symptoms are real but the illness is not. There may indeed be some physical, medical illness; but the fact is, there is no such thing as a “mental illness” the way the psychiatric industry touts it. In 40 years, “biological psychiatry” has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition/diagnosis as an abnormality/disease, or as anything neurological, biological, chemically imbalanced or genetic.

In any case, the best treatments for chronic pain are not opioids, but finding the underlying causes for the pain, learning how to deal with those, and treating those with workable, non-psychiatric methods. See also “The Medicalization of Addiction” for more information about the current craze of treating opioid addiction with more addictive drugs.

Opioid addiction and related deaths have become such an issue in Missouri that  Missouri Attorney General Joshua Hawley filed a lawsuit June 21, 2017 in the Circuit Court of St. Louis City against several pharmaceutical companies. Opioid sales now generate nearly $10 billion in sales per year, while countless individuals have become addicted to opioids as a result of the use of opioids for chronic-pain treatment, often with tragic results.

“Missouri faces an urgent public-health crisis. Each year, hundreds of Missourians die from opioid overdoses, while tens of thousands more are hospitalized or require emergency treatment. Opioid addiction and abuse have destroyed the lives of countless Missourians and ravaged communities across the State. This opioid epidemic is the direct result of a carefully crafted campaign of deception carried out by Defendants. For years, Defendants fraudulently misrepresented the risks posed by the drugs that they manufacture and sell, misleading both doctors and consumers.”

We don’t really know which came first — the mental trauma or the physical pain; but it doesn’t really matter which comes first. The bottom line is that neither opioids nor psychiatric drugs are workable treatments. Click here for more information about workable treatments.

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What Makes Special Education Special?

Posted on July 16, 2017 by cchrstl

The Special School District in St. Louis County, Missouri has an annual budget over $400 Million for 7 schools, over 2600 teachers, and over 24,000 students.

The July 2002 President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education revealed the source of a deeply troubled Special Education system: 40 percent of kids are being labeled with “learning disorders” simply because they have not been taught to read. This finding leaves no doubt that the subjectivity of the term “learning disorder” must be a central point of Special Education reform.

Eighty percent of children (or 2.4 million) labeled as having a “specific learning disability” could be taught in a normal school setting but with greater emphasis on phonics and academic basics. We suspect that all children, not just special school district children, could benefit from this.

State and federal governments are already wasting $28 billion per year due to unscientific categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). This money would be better channeled into providing more teachers and workable educational methods that get actual results.

The DSM-5 lists these ridiculous items of “mental illness”:

  • “Academic or educational problem”
  • “Specific learning disorder”
  • “Specific learning disorder, With impairment in mathematics”
  • “Specific learning disorder, With impairment in reading”
  • “Specific learning disorder, With impairment in written expression”

The primary purpose of Congress’ original IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act) law in 1975 was to provide a free and appropriate education for children with hearing, sight, speech and other physical handicaps. When the term “handicapped” was changed to “learning disabled,” children who fidget, interrupt their teachers, or simply fall behind academically were suddenly considered “disabled.”

Over the ensuing years, the funding has been largely funneled, instead, to children with “learning disorders,” a term so subjective that children who fidget, butt into line or interrupt their teachers are so labeled. In most cases the children were subsequently prescribed cocaine-like, mind-altering drugs. Many of these children simply have never been taught to read. Clearly, there is a critical need to provide an objective, scientifically based definition of “learning disability,” and this must be the central point of reforming IDEA.

Labeling a child with these “disorders” led to school personnel threatening parents to place their child on a psychiatric drug as a requisite to remaining in class, or face the child being dismissed from school.

Due to the hazards of these drugs, in order to receive federal funds under the IDEA, the “Prohibition on Mandatory Medication Amendment” (H.R.1350) was signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 3, 2004 and requires schools to implement policies that prohibit schoolchildren being forced onto psychiatric drugs as a requisite for their education. The law states, “The psychological/psychiatric system should not be able to abuse Special Education by diagnosing childhood and educational problems and failure as ‘mental disorders.'”

Email Special School District Superintendent Don Bohannon at dbohannon@ssdmo.org and let him know what you think about this.

Click here for more information about mental health screening in schools.

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