Neuroleptic Discontinuation Syndrome

Posted on May 7, 2012 by cchrstl

Big words, simple idea:

Neuroleptic = Capable of affecting the brain; Having a tranquilizing effect; Tending to reduce nervous tension by depressing nerve functions; A condition prone to cause violent seizures. From Greek neuro-, nerve + leptis, seizure.

Discontinuation = Withdrawal from, stopping. From Latin dis-, apart, opposite of + continure, to continue.

Syndrome = A group of symptoms that collectively indicate or characterize a disease, psychological disorder, or other abnormal condition. From Greek syn– similar + dromos, race, running.

Putting it all together = the reactions or side effects that occur when one suddenly stops taking a drug or lowers the dosage; i.e. withdrawal symptoms.

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.

Jackson’s First Law of Biopsychiatry: “For every action, there is an unequal and frequently unpredictable reaction.”

This kind of reaction can last weeks or even months.

“So, there have been many examples throughout the history of psychiatry where patients who were never psychotic, but who were placed on anti-psychotic drug, came off of that medicine only to become acutely psychotic or acutely agitated. To the extent that psychiatrists themselves frequently have not thought about these syndromes, means that we have, perhaps, misinterpreted many relapses when we should have been thinking about medication withdrawal syndromes. And when you resume treatment with the medicine in these cases, you eclipse the withdrawal syndromes. The patients almost always seem to get better when the drugs are resumed.” [From a speech by Grace E. Jackson, MD; thanks to Dr. Gary Kohls and to PsychRights.org for this information.]

It could be dangerous to immediately cease taking psychiatric drugs because of potential significant withdrawal side effects. No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent medical doctor.

Some of you may know someone who has tried to come off of psychiatric drugs only to find it too overwhelming to cope with the anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, brain zaps, headaches, weight gain, or flu like symptoms. It is possible to safely withdraw from these drugs. One resource is The Road Back Program at http://www.theroadback.org/.

But what about those who say psychotropic drugs really did make them feel better?

Psychotropic drugs may relieve the pressure that an underlying physical problem could be causing but they do not treat, correct or cure any physical disease or condition. This relief may have the person thinking he is better but the relief is not evidence that a psychiatric disorder exists. Ask an illicit drug user whether he feels better when snorting cocaine or smoking dope and he’ll believe that he is, even while the drugs are potentially damaging him. Some drugs that are prescribed to treat depression can have a “damping down” effect. They suppress the physical feelings associated with “depression” but they are not alleviating the condition or targeting what is causing it.

The drugs break into, in most cases, the routine rhythmic flows and activities of the nervous system. Given a tranquilizer, the nerves and other body systems are forced to do things they normally would not do.

Click here for more information about how drugs work.

There are ;many workable alternatives to psychiatric drugging. Psychiatry, on the other hand, insists there are no such options and fights to keep it that way. Patients and physicians must urge their government representatives to endorse and fund non-drug workable alternatives to dangerous drugs. Write your government representatives and tell them what you think.

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Autism

Posted on May 3, 2012 by cchrstl

We wish we could give you all the true data about autism, but we don’t know it all. Instead, we can give you many related facts and a few opinions; perhaps these can help you evaluate the subject. The reason we discuss it at all is because the psychiatric industry has claimed this disorder for its own purposes, and continues to wrestle with the line between unusual and abnormal behavior. For obvious reasons, we mis-trust anything that psychiatry has to say about the condition, especially about treating it with psychotropic drugs.

The word “autism” was coined in 1912 by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Bleuler (1857-1939) from the Greek autos- “self” + –ismos a suffix of action or of state. The notion was originally of “morbid self-absorption.”

The number of people diagnosed with autism has increased dramatically since the 1980s, partly due to changes in diagnostic criteria and practice; the question of whether actual prevalence has increased is unresolved, since diagnosis is based on behavior, not cause or mechanism.

Autism, sometimes called “autism spectrum disorder,” “pervasive developmental disorder,” or “Asperger syndrome,” apparently does not have a single definitive definition that can be used across the board to correct the condition; it generally refers to a range of symptoms characterized by impairment of the ability to form normal social relationships, by impairment of the ability to communicate with others, and by stereotyped behavior patterns.

A study was once done to figure out how common Asperger’s was, and the results were clear — it was vanishingly rare. Then Allen Frances put it in the DSM, and the number of kids diagnosed with the disorder exploded.

There are many competing theories about its etiology [its causes or origins]. We have seen articles relating autism to toxins (mercury, pesticides, etc.), nutrition, vaccination, genetic predisposition, neurological brain disorders, an alteration in how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize, birth defects, the stress of circumcision, antidepressants, ad nauseum.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, may perpetuate the perception, whether true or false, that autism is related to mental retardation where it discusses atypical autism arising most often in profoundly retarded individuals.

Where to go from here?

Well, we’re not going to spend any more time discussing etiology and treatment, since you can google those thousands of articles as well as we can. The real point we want to make is that psychiatry currently owns autism, and they are on the move to re-define it for the next DSM version. They may change the DSM to make it easier to diagnose, increasing the number of children into the mental health system; or they may make it harder to diagnose, excluding children whose families are currently receiving, or hope to receive, some kind of monetary disability support. In either case, the hue and cry will go up demanding more psychiatric funding for whatever they are currently calling autism.

At least a million children and adults have an autism diagnosis or a related disorder, such as “pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified.”

There are as many recommended therapies for autism as there are theories about the condition; these therapies may include diet, nutrition, behavioral modification, and many other non-invasive alternative health treatments. Of course, the treatment of choice for psychiatrists is the usual list of harmful and addictive antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety drugs, whose devastating side effects are well-documented.

Autism is big business. The word “autism” appears 1,880 times on the Missouri government web site (www.mo.gov); and “autistic” appears 607 times.

The proposed Missouri Department of Mental Health budget for the next fiscal year (House Bill 2010) includes $10,621,176 for various autism services.

A search through the Missouri Accountability Portal (for the purchase of goods and services by the state) for the word “autism” finds expenditures for 2012 in the following table:

ServiceVendor NamePayments
EDUCATIONAL SERVICESCENTER FOR AUTISM EDUCATION$1,600
CLIENT ASSISTANCE SERVICESTOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$50,376
MEDICAL ASSIST SERVICESTOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$134
MEDICAL ASSIST SERVICESTOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$361
MEDICAL ASSIST SERVICESTOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$379
MEDICAL ASSIST SERVICESTOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$69
COPIES OF RECORDSTOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$25
CONVENTION, CONFERENCE & TRAINING
FEES		AUTISM PARTNERSHIP INC$85
ADVERTISING SERVICESMISSOURI AUTISM REPORT$205
PROFESSIONAL SPEAKER & ENTERTAINER
SERV		TOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$600
MENTAL HEALTH PAYMNTS-1099CENTER FOR AUTISM EDUCATION$1,498
MENTAL HEALTH PAYMNTS-1099JUDEVINE CENTER FOR AUTISM$95,252
MENTAL HEALTH PAYMNTS-1099THOMPSON FOUNDATION FOR AUTISM$24,996
MENTAL HEALTH PAYMNTS-1099TOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$2,467,598
PUBLICATIONS &
SUBSCRIPTIONS		TOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$518
CONVENTION, CONFERENCE & TRAINING
FEES		TOUCHPOINT AUTISM SERVICES INC$55
 TOTAL$2,643,750

Granted, there is social justification for providing help to children and families coping with traumatic health situations. Given, however, psychiatry’s history of fraud, abuse, and use of damaging drugs, due diligence suggests examining this field very closely for exaggeration and mis-use.

This just in

An article in the Los Angeles Times on April 23, 2012 headlines, “Report says studies overstate drugs’ ability to treat autism symptoms.” It goes on to say that “Antidepressants are not specifically approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating autism, but they have become the go-to drugs for trying to control some of its key symptoms. By some estimates, the drugs have been prescribed for as many as one-third of children with the diagnosis. … A series of standard statistical tests designed to check the consistency and reliability of the published data [about the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs prescribed for autism] strongly suggested publication bias. The effect appeared to be so great that the researchers could no longer deem the anti-depressants effective.” [Publication bias occurs when studies that show a drug or treatment is effective are more likely to be published than studies with negative findings.]

Find out more about what you can do to expose psychiatric fraud and abuse, and support CCHR St. Louis so that it can continue to expose psychiatric fraud and abuse. Go to http://www.cchrstl.org/takeaction.shtml.

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Psychiatry in the Courts and the Corruption of Justice

Posted on April 30, 2012 by cchrstl

You may recall that on 22 July 2011, Anders Breivik bombed the government buildings in Oslo, Norway, which resulted in eight deaths. He then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers’ Youth League on the island of Utøya where he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers.

A 10 April 2012 article (“Psychiatry May Also Face Scrutiny at Norway Killer’s Trial”) on a New York Times blog discusses two court-ordered psychiatric assessments.

After an earlier psychiatric report declared him to be a paranoid schizophrenic living in a delusional universe, a second evaluation by different Norwegian psychiatrists found Breivik to be legally sane.

“The clinical disagreement prompted some Norwegian news media to speculate that the methods of psychiatric evaluation would also be put on trial along with Mr. Breivik when hearings begin.”

Well, pardon me for the sarcasm, but “duh!” What has CCHR been saying for the last 43 years?

Eroding Justice – Psychiatry’s Corruption of Law

Psychiatric “expert” witnesses are widely criticized for providing testimony to suit their client’s purposes. They have only theories and conflicting opinions about their diagnoses and methods, and are lacking any scientific basis for these.

Dr. Margaret Hagen, author of Whores of the Court, The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (1997), said, “Why not just flip pennies or draw cards? Why not put on a blindfold and choose without being able to identifity the patients? It could hardly hurt [a diagnostic] accuracy rate that hovers at less than one out of three times correct…”

Psychiatry is not based on science and has failed to cure insanity, or predict it or even diagnose it, despite taxpayer funding in the billions of dollars, and it should no longer be accepted as an authority by our courts.

For more information, download and read the free CCHR booklet on psychiatry’s corruption of law by clicking here.

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No Responsibility

Posted on April 22, 2012 by cchrstl

We have all heard the endless sarcastic jokes and sayings:

“What, me worry?”
“Whatever you say!”
“Give it to someone who cares!”
“Like I care!”
“Do I look like I care?”
“Like I give a care!”
or, in a text or tweet, “LIC”

It even has its own “glitter graphic” (yes, I know this is really distracting and offensive; like I care!)

What does it all mean?

The criminal exhibits this “nothing matters” attitude as a cover-up for having committed crimes.

It all comes down to a consideration called “No Responsibility.”

The opposite of having no responsibility for something is caring for it.

So the sarcasm “Like I Care!” just means “I have no responsibility for this!”

How does it relate to psychiatry?

In 1963 Thomas Szasz wrote, in Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, “Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.” In other words, you are considered to be under the care of psychiatry and the State, unless you actively do something about that.

In 1946, Canadian psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, in a speech to the World Federation of Mental Health, said, “If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

Ever since, psychiatry has attempted to remove individual responsibility from everyone, claiming that psychiatrists are the only ones who can be responsible for one’s mental health; and oh, by the way, forget right and wrong, since psychiatrists know best. The Bill of Rights left off one right we all should have, the right to our own sanity. If you cede the right to your own sanity to psychiatry, as they would have it, what responsibility do you have left for your own mental health?

How many times have you, a family member, or a co-worker, said “LIC!” The apathy of “No Responsibility” has seeped into society, just as Chisholm predicted.

What are you going to do about it?

We care that you do something about it. We care that you, your family, your associates and co-workers, do something about it. Because we don’t want a bunch of people around us who don’t care when the men in white coats come for us. Think they won’t come for you if you don’t take your meds? Think again! Maryanne Godboldo found out.

Detroit mother Maryanne Godboldo experienced first hand the effects of the Therapeutic State when she chose to take her daughter off an antipsychotic drug. Maryanne had reluctantly agreed to administer this drug to her daughter, Ariana, under the condition she could take her off of it — at her own discretion. Once Maryanne witnessed the drug’s harmful effects, she worked with a physician to wean her daughter off the drug and pursue non-drug solutions. This decision however, did not sit well with the psychiatrists advising Child Protective Services. They responded to Maryanne’s refusal to drug her daughter with the full force of the Therapeutic State.

Take a lesson. Fight back.

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The Insanity Defense

Posted on April 22, 2012 by cchrstl

According to Associated Press news articles, “A JetBlue Airways captain accused of disrupting a flight when he left the cockpit screaming about religion and terrorists plans to use an insanity defense at trial. An attorney for Clayton F. Osbon filed a motion Wednesday [April 18, 2012] outlining plans to argue Osbon was insane at the time of the incident on the March 27 flight from New York to Las Vegas. Osbon remains jailed in Texas awaiting a court-ordered psychiatric exam to determine his competency for trial and whether he was legally sane when witnesses say he left the cockpit and ran screaming through the plane’s cabin.”

I’ll be the first to admit to having had the rare meltdown; but I have since taken some responsibility for my behavior and this has not happened in a very long time, thank you very much. I can empathize, however.

Supporters of CCHR understand also that psychiatric drugs can actually cause this kind of psychotic behavior. That is not, however, the subject of this newsletter. We are going to discuss the insanity defense.

Dr. Thomas Szasz had the following to say about the insanity defense [from Ideas on Liberty, 50: 31?32 (March), 2000]:

“The insanity defense, as we know it, is a relatively new cultural invention. … The ‘crime’ that led to the creation of the insanity defense was not murder, but a deed long considered even more heinous, namely, self-murder or suicide, punished by both ecclesiastic and secular penalties: the suicide was denied religious burial and his estate was forfeited to the Crown’s Almoner. Because punishing suicide required doing grave harm to innocent parties — that is, to the suicide’s children and spouse — men sitting on coroner’s juries eventually found the task to be a burden they were unwilling to bear. However, prevailing religious beliefs precluded repealing the laws punishing the crime. The law now came to the rescue of the would-be punishers, offering them the option of finding the self-killer non compos mentis and hence not responsible for his deed. In the eighteenth century, it became a matter of routine for juries to arrive at the posthumous diagnosis that the suicide was insane at the moment he killed himself. (The criminal law against suicide was repealed only in the nineteenth century, by which time it had been replaced by mental health laws.) … By validating the fiction that suicides could, post facto, be found to have been non compos mentis, the law had crafted a mechanism for rejecting responsibility — the criminal’s for his deed, the jury’s for its duty — and, aided by the medical profession, wrapped the deception and self-deception in the mantle of healing and science.”

How is it that today we still face the absurd situation of psychiatrists testifying to excuse a wrongdoers’ actions? The answer lies in three places: 1) because psychiatric “experts” are paid an average of $3,600 (in the U.S.) per day to testify for whomever is willing to foot the bill; 2) the goal for psychiatry that was delineated by G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), that therapy be aimed at eliminating the concept of right and wrong; and 3) bolstering this, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Psychiatry’s attempt to eradicate the concept of right and wrong and thereby destroy personal responsibility by inventing excuses for the most flagrant misconduct, undermines the justice system and must be corrected.

In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of the state of Arizona to make laws which excluded many forms of psychiatric testimony in criminal cases. In concluding that the Arizona statute was sufficient to satisfy a criminal defendants’ rights to a fair trial, the Supreme Court quoted a legal source in support of its decision, stating, “No matter how the test for insanity is phrased, a psychiatrist or psychologist is no more qualified than any other person to give an opinion about whether a particular defendant’s mental condition satisfies the legal test for insanity.”

It must be recognized that every person is responsible for his or her own actions and must be held accountable for their actions. State legislators should repeal any laws permitting the insanity defense and diminished capacity pleas. Write your legislators and tell them what you think.

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Medical Ethics – Outcomes

Posted on April 19, 2012 by cchrstl

Medical ethics is a system of principles that applies values and judgments to the practice of medicine. One of the purposes of ethics is to remove the barriers toward optimum survival. And an outcome is an end result or consequence.

When we think about the quality and outcomes of health care, we can think in terms that are important to the patient, or alternatively in terms that are important to others such as family, teachers, insurance companies, or the attending medical professionals.

Joe Jimenez, the CEO of Novartis (a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland), was recently quoted in Business Week (4/5/12) as saying, “Increasingly, in every part of the world, pharmaceutical companies will not be paid on the number of pills they sell but on the outcomes they produce. In the U.S., we spend about 17 percent of GDP on health care. Singapore spends 1.3 percent and gets better health outcomes. Something is very wrong.”

While it is refreshing to hear a pharmaceutical executive allude to poor outcomes in the pharmaceutical industry, we must not forget what the real problems are in health care, and what the real solutions are.

Naturally, in an industry as complex and burdened with problems as health care, there is not going to be just one solution. There needs to be one or more solutions for each problem. One of the problems is that mental health care has lost sight of what is a good patient outcome.

The Real Problem in Mental Health Care

In a nutshell, there is a lack of science and results within the mental health industry. Despite its lack of scientific validity, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is used heavily as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment but also for child custody battles, court testimony, education, and more. While medicine’s scientific procedures are verifiable, psychiatry’s lack of any systematic approach to mental health and its continued lack of measurable results has contributed greatly to its declining reputation.

In spite of record spending for mental health care, the U.S. now faces record levels of child abuse, suicide, drug abuse, violence and crime – very real problems for which the psychiatric industry can identify neither causes nor solutions. Community Mental Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment. Mental health courts assert that criminal behavior is caused by a psychiatric problem and that treatment will stop the behavior; there is no evidence, however, to support this supposition. Many medical studies reveal that psychiatric drugs create violence.

The claim that only increased psychiatric funding will cure the problems of psychiatry has lost its ring of truth. In 2002, the U.S. President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education found that 40% of American children in Special Education programs labeled with “learning disorders” had simply never been taught to read.

More than 6 million U.S. children have been put on mind-altering psychiatric drugs for an invented mental disorder called “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Talk about an unethical outcome! Giving a child psychotropic drugs for a learning disorder when the correct outcome should be teaching the child to read! Whose outcome is this? Not the child’s, for sure.

From these facts it is safe to conclude that a reduction in the funding of psychiatric programs will not cause a worsening of mental health. Less funding for harmful psychiatric practices will, in fact, improve the state of mental health.

Fortunately, many non-psychiatric, humane and workable practices exist in the quest for the achievement and recovery of mental health, even for the most severely disturbed individuals. While psychiatrists strenuously deny it, much knowledgeable and skillful help is administered by non-psychiatric professionals whose focus is on positive patient outcomes.

The same waste of lives and funding occurs whenever the DSM is used to evaluate an individual’s mental health or actions. It is vital that the DSM diagnostic system is universally rejected before any chance of meaningful mental health reform and advancement can occur.

Become a member of CCHR St. Louis today and receive a complimentary copy of the CCHR documentary “Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam.”

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Alternative Therapies

Posted on April 15, 2012 by cchrstl

We are continually asked to recommend alternatives to psychiatric drugs. Frequently, parents tell us that their children are taking psychotropic drugs as a last resort for behavioral issues and they wish there were non-drug alternatives.

This illustrates a major issue with the current state of mental health care. There are non-drug alternatives, and many doctors are either not aware of or not referring their patients to these alternative treatments.

CAM, or Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is a vast subject, worthy of one’s attention.

Perusing a recent article, “Complementary and Alternative Medical Therapies for Children with Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD),” in the Alternative Medicine Review (AMR) (Altern
Med Rev 2011;16(4):323-337) we find quite a number of potential alternatives to psychotropic drugs.

Points to note:

1. The first alternative to drugs is always no drugs. The second alternative is to find and fix the actual cause rather than the symptoms.

2. While ADHD as fraudulently presented by the psychiatric billing bible Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a fake illness, people do exhibit symptoms of mental distress at times and the root cause needs to be properly diagnosed and treated. The correct action on a mentally disturbed person is a full searching clinical examination by a competent, non-psychiatric medical doctor. For more information on the DSM scam, watch the video here.

3. Obviously, CCHR does not provide medical advice, and one should not abruptly stop taking any prescription drugs without the advice of a competent medical doctor, as these drugs frequently have harmful withdrawal side effects. The information presented here and in the referenced AMR publication must not be construed as offering medical advice, but only as an aid to further study and to encourage fully informed consent when discussing treatment options with your health care providers.

More complete discussions of alternatives can be found here on the CCHR St. Louis web site and here on the CCHR International web site.

Without going into a detailed discussion, here are some alternatives discussed in the referenced AMR publication:

Diet

Exercise

Essential Fatty
Acids

Vitamin B6 and
Magnesium

Iron and Zinc

Calcium and
Magnesium

Acetyl-L-Carnitine

Gamma-Aminobutyric
Acid

Glycine

L-Theanine

L-Tyrosine

Taurine

5-Hydroxytryptophan

S-Adenosyl-L-Methionine

Dimethylaminoethanol

Phosphatidylserine and
Phosphatidylcholine

Melatonin

Pycnogenol

Probiotics

Herbals

Rhodiola

Chamomile

St. John’s Wort

Valerian

Bacopa

Homeopathic
Treatment

cartoon

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Grassley Pursues Prescription Drug Abuse in Medicaid, Medicare

Posted on April 12, 2012 by cchrstl

A recent Press Release from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (Republican, Iowa) caught our attention (read the March 22, 2012 press release here.)

Here are some choice quotes:

“The Office of National Drug Control Policy describes prescription drug abuse as the nation’s fastest-growing problem, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has classified prescription drug abuse as an epidemic.”

“Over prescription of these types of drugs strains the financial viability of the Medicaid and Medicare systems and threatens the health and well-being of the American people.”

“In 2010, I sent a letter to all 50 state Medicaid directors asking them for their top ten prescribers of the top eight most over-prescribed drugs on the market. Many states provided the data I requested, and the statistics were alarming.”

“For example, the top prescriber of antipsychotics in Nevada wrote nearly 6,800 prescriptions for the drugs over 2010 and 2011 – more than ten times some of the other top prescribers identified. For context, no individual prescriber in Colorado wrote more than 2,000 prescriptions for the same drugs over the same period. This single doctor in Nevada accounted for $2.75 million in payments from the Medicaid system.”

As a result of Senator Grassley’s request, a number of states began investigations into possible insurance fraud regarding these massive drug prescriptions: South Carolina, Texas, California, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Nevada, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, and Hawaii.

Do we have to spell out how this kind of drug fraud and abuse raises health care and insurance costs for the rest of us?

Are there any other states that should be conducting these investigations into Medicaid and Medicare fraud? Perhaps your state? Write your state legislators and other officials and encourage them to do so.

Now, aside from plain greed, what is the real problem here?

If you said, “DSM”, take a win. The rest of you need to watch the CCHR video documentary “Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam.” If you would like your own copy of this DVD, become a CCHR St. Louis member today and we’ll mail one to you.

You can also read Sen. Grassley’s press release at PsychSearch.net, and we encourage you to get the latest psych news there as well as from www.CCHRINT.org.

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New book reveals Richard Nixon’s secret shrink sessions

Posted on April 9, 2012 by cchrstl
Alright, we know this headline reads like the Weekly Trashmonger, but we simply couldn’t resist relaying this news. It’s not April Fool’s, this is a real book. There may or may not be some huge significance to this, but whenever we see news about the failures of psychiatrists, we think our readers ought to know that psychiatrists are still out there in society causing damage.

Here is what the New York Post has to say:

“It’s the secret file that could have kept Richard Nixon from ever becoming president.

“Today, more than 50 years later, the contents of that file — and the true viciousness of the 1960 Kennedy and Nixon campaigns for president — have been revealed in the new book, “The Gumshoe and the Shrink.”

[The Gumshoe and the Shrink: Guenther Reinhardt, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, and the Secret History of the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon Election by David L. Robb, Santa Monica Press, March 15, 2012]

“The shrink’s patient was then-candidate Nixon, who began seeing Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker in 1952. Nixon was suffering from a battery of symptoms that he suspected were psychosomatic, including back and neck pain and insomnia.

“Hutschnecker not only treated Nixon for his stress and anxiety but became an informal adviser during the 1960 presidential campaign, teaching Nixon how to appear more calm and composed next to the effortlessly cool John F. Kennedy.”

And your point is …?

The real point here is, maybe those shrink sessions did some damage to Mr. Nixon. We can only conjecture about these 50-year-old events, but we certainly know now, after 43 years of CCHR’s in-depth research, that all psychiatric “treatments” are dangerous.

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, have always been dangerous.

In 50 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.

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 deservedly links psychiatry to snake pits, straitjackets, and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Psychiatry has never cured anything. Instead, as a consequence of its extensive use of dangerous drugs, it has created most of the mental ill health that now cries out desperately for cures. Medical studies show that for many patients, what appear to be mental problems are actually caused by an undiagnosed physical illness or condition. This does not mean a “chemical imbalance” or a “brain-based disease,” but a real physical condition with real pathology that can be addressed by a competent medical doctor.

Psychiatry’s approach to mental health care is predicated on bad science and bad medicine but is very good business for psychiatry. The simple truth is that there are workable alternatives to psychiatry’s mind-, brain-, and body-damaging treatments. With psychiatry now calling for mandatory mental illness screening for adults and children everywhere, we urge all who have an interest in preserving the mental health, the physical health and the freedom of their families, communities and nations, to do something about it.

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The Placebo Effect

Posted on April 5, 2012 by cchrstl

Placebo: A substance containing no medication and prescribed or given to reinforce a patient’s expectation to get well [from the Latin word meaning “I shall please.”]

Professor Irving Kirsch, Associate Director of the Program for Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School, has this to say, “The difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people.”

Watch a video interview of Professor Kirsch speaking about his research on the CBS News program 60 Minutes here: http://www.psychsearch.net/psych_news/psych-drugs/the-placebo-effect/

How did Professor Kirsch do his research? He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain unpublished clinical trial data and found that, when combining results with published data, the various antidepressants were no better than dummy pills. As 60 Minutes notes, Kirsch is “dropping a bomb” on a big business – some $11 billion in annual sales and no cures.

Read the full 60 Minutes transcript by clicking here.

What can you do about this tremendous waste of health care dollars? Watch the CCHR DVD documentaries and show them to your family, friends, and associates; write your local, state and federal officials and express your opinion; volunteer or donate to CCHR St. Louis so that we can continue to make a difference against psychiatric fraud and abuse.

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