Click image to watch our Ad playing on CNN
Thanks to our supporters, CCHR International has been able to get our ads placed on national TV and viewed by millions. Such as this ad, on normal kids being diagnosed with “ADHD” which is part of CCHR’s “Fight for Kids” campaign – giving parents enough information to make educated choices.
Honk (i.e. donate) if you like this ad!!!
A recent British Medical Journal article explores the connection between hypnotic drugs and excessive death. “An estimated 6%–10% of US adults took a hypnotic drug for poor sleep in 2010. This study extends previous reports associating hypnotics with excess mortality.”
This particular study was quite extensive and well-done (over 33,000 people followed for an average of two and a half years), with dramatic conclusions. Great care was taken in this study to eliminate arbitrary factors such as pre-existing conditions or other risk factors.
First, though, what is a “hypnotic” drug? The word comes from a Greek word for “to put to sleep” and means “inducing or tending to induce sleep.” The common hypnotic drugs examined in this study were zolpidem (Ambien), temazepam (Restoril), eszopiclone (Lunesta), and zaleplon (Sonata), and other benzodiazepines, barbiturates and sedative antihistamines.
Temazepam is a benzodiazepine; zolpidem, eszopiclone and zaleplon are non-benzodiazepines that apparently operate similarly to benzodiazepines in the body. All of these drugs appear in the CCHR booklet on psychiatric drug side effects.
This class of drugs should be familiar to CCHR supporters, as they are minor tranquilizers commonly prescribed as an anti-anxiety psychiatric drug. They are majorly addictive and have many nasty side effects.
The main conclusion of this study can be paraphrased thusly: Receiving hypnotic prescriptions was associated with a greater than threefold increased hazard of death, even when prescribed for less than 18 pills per year.
The authors go on to say that, “The meagre benefits of hypnotics, as critically reviewed by groups without financial interest, would not justify substantial risks.”
This study supports and extends the findings in the CCHR booklet “The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs“, available for free download here.
From a psychiatric fraud and abuse point of view, the continued prescribing of these anti-anxiety drugs by psychiatrists and doctors, often disguised as “sleep” drugs, is harmful and unethical, to say the least. Alert your local, state and federal officials to this abuse.
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. Report any adverse psychiatric drug effects to the FDA’s MedWatch program at http://www.fda.gov/medwatch/.
Go here for information on alternatives to psychiatric drugs.
[Study citation: Kripke DF, Langer RD, Kline LE. Hypnotics’ association with mortality or cancer: a matched cohort study. BMJ Open 2012;2:e000850.]
Our U.S. Government at Work
U.S. House of Representatives bill H.R. 751, the Mental Health in Schools Act of 2011, was sponsored in Congress 2/17/2011 by Rep. Grace Napolitano (California, D-38) and acquired 52 co-sponsors.
The stated purpose of this bill is “To amend the Public Health Service Act to revise and extend projects relating to children and violence to provide access to school-based comprehensive mental health programs.”
Representatives Russ Carnahan (D-3) and Emanuel Cleaver (D-5) of Missouri are co-sponsors. The bill is currently in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Health.
To read the bill for yourself, go to the Library of Congress (http://thomas.loc.gov) and search for “H.R. 751”.
The bill summary says, “Amends the Public Health Service Act to revise a community children and violence program to assist local communities and schools in applying a public health approach to mental health services, including by: (1) revising eligibility requirements for a grant, contract, or cooperative agreement; and (2) providing for comprehensive school mental health programs that are culturally and linguistically appropriate and age appropriate. Makes only a partnership between a local educational agency and at least one community program or agency that is involved in mental health eligible for such funding.”
The rationale for this outrageous bill comes from fraudulent statistics provided by the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The bill says that approximately 1 in 5 children have a diagnosable mental disorder, and approximately 1 in 10 children have a serious emotional or behavioral disorder, thus requiring intervention by every school “to respond to the mental health needs of its students.”
While this bill is abhorrent in itself, the real target is not just defeating such blatant trolling for patients by the psychopharmaceutical industry, but should be removing all mental health funding from the educational system, and returning the care of children’s mental health to their families, religious institutions, and legitimate health and medical professionals.
Find your U.S. Representatives and their contact information at http://www.house.gov/representatives/. Let them know what you think.
For more information, read our blog posts on these subjects:
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2012/01/02/federal-funds-for-learning-disorders/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2011/08/17/the-parental-consent-act/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2011/08/13/dc-0-to-3/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2011/03/20/you-paid-for-it-missouri/
There’s a reason psychiatrists prescribe drugs rather than talking therapy: the latter makes no money for pharmaceutical firms
Psychotherapist Harriet Fraad of New York City lambasts psychiatric drugs:
“Do these psycho pharmaceuticals work to restore mental health? Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that they fail. Antidepressants, the most popular psycho-pharmaceuticals, work no better than placebos. They work 25% of the time and stop working when the user stops taking them. In addition, they may actually harm patients in the long run. They disrupt brain neurotransmitters and may usurp the brain’s organic soothing functions.
“All 30 of the available antidepressants have suffered lawsuits within five years of their appearance on the market. These suits are often settled with large payments and gag clauses. … Every major company selling anti-psychotics – Bristol Meyers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca – has either settled investigations for healthcare fraud or is currently being investigated for it.
“Experts agree that there is no long-term improvement in children’s lives from taking anti-psychotic drugs. In fact, these drugs have a substantiated pattern of metabolic problems and rapid weight gain that often leads to diabetes. The use of bipolar diagnoses and bipolar medications is one small example of how market-driven mental healthcare works in the United States. It illustrates the transformation of US healthcare into a system dominated by some of the richest corporations in the world.
“Caring about profit is first, and that is why psychiatry has turned to drug therapy.”
Of course, we do not recommend psychiatric treatment of any kind, drugs or talk therapy. There are good reasons why we do not recommend psychiatric treatment. We do recommend informed consent, and sound medical diagnosis and treatment. For more information, download and read the free CCHR booklet, “Psychiatric Hoax — The Subversion of Medicine.”
Elderly people with dementia are more likely to suffer falls if they are given anti-depressants
The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology reports that the risk of injuries from falls was tripled when elderly patients are given SSRI anti-depressants.
“Even at low doses, SSRIs are associated with increased risk of an injurious fall in nursing home residents with dementia. Higher doses increase the risk further with a threefold risk…”
Elderly Abuse is a common psychiatric human rights violation. For more information about the way the psychiatric industry harms the elderly, download and read the free CCHR booklet, “Elderly Abuse — Cruel Mental Health Programs — Report and recommendations on psychiatry abusing seniors.”
The reality of nursing home and aged–care center life today is often far from the stylized image of communicative, interactive and interested elderly residents living in an idyllic environment. By contrast, more often than not, the institutionalized elderly of today appear submissive, quiet, somehow vacant, a sort of lifelessness about them, perhaps blankly staring or deeply introspective and withdrawn.
If not by drugs, these conditions can also be brought on by the use of electroconvulsive or shock treatment (ECT) or simply the threat of painful and demeaning restraints.
Rather than this being the failure of nursing hospital and aged care staff generally, this is the legacy of the widespread introduction of psychiatric treatment into the care of the elderly over the last few decades.
In the United States, 65–year–olds receive 360% more shock treatment than 64–vear–olds because at age 65 government insurance coverage for shock typically takes effect.
Such extensive abuse of the elderly is not the result of medical incompetence. In fact, medical literature clearly cautions against prescribing tranquilizers to the elderly because of the numerous dangerous side effects. Studies show ECT shortens the lives of elderly people significantly. Specific figures are not kept as causes of death are usually listed as heart attacks or other conditions.
The abuse is the result of psychiatry maneuvering itself into an authoritative position over aged care. From there, psychiatry has broadly perpetrated the tragic but lucrative hoax that aging is a mental disorder requiring extensive and expensive psychiatric services.
The end result is that, rather than being cherished and respected, too often our senior citizens suffer the extreme indignity of having their power of mind heartlessly nullified by psychiatric treatments or their lives simply brought to a tragic and premature end.
According to Fox News, prescription drugs had been found in the Beverly Hills Hilton hotel room where Houston’s lifeless body was discovered Saturday afternoon just hours before a huge Grammy party she was to attend.
Police discovered a half dozen bottles of medication in Whitney Houston’s room, TMZ reported, adding that family members said Houston had been taking the prescription drug Xanax, which is often used to treat anxiety.
When combined with alcohol, Xanax can cause drowsiness. Houston was reportedly found in her bathtub — TMZ says her head was underwater — and could not be revived by paramedics after being removed from the tub.
No alcohol was found in the preliminary sweep of Houston’s room, TMZ reports, but there were multiple reports that Houston had been drinking with friends the night before at the hotel.
Xanax
The anti-anxiety drug Xanax (generic alprazolam), also called a minor tranquilizer, benzodiazepine, or sedative hypnotic, is associated with physical dependence. Addiction can occur after 14 days of regular use. Side effects can include violence, excessive sedation, decreased attention, and amnesia. After a person stops taking Xanax, it takes the brain six to eighteen months to recover. Drug experts say that Xanax is more addictive than most illegal drugs, including cocaine or heroin, and once someone is hooked, getting off it can be a tortuous and even deadly experience.
Not Xanax
Focusing on the drug, evil as it is, hides the real problem.
Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems and anxieties as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior as “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful.
Some doctor prescribed the Xanax and is not being held accountable.
Not a Fluke
Psychiatry has a long history of attacking and harming artists.
Artists are the individuals who dream our future and create the realities of tomorrow. It is the artist who lifts the spirit, makes us laugh and cry and can even shape the spiritual future of our culture. It is artists who make life. Artists are cherished human assets the world over.
Unfortunately, in many cases, they are assets we have lost too soon – losses that have left us poorer. In recent decades we have all mourned the untimely deaths of great artists who enriched our lives, yet left before their work was done. Luminaries of literature, the screen, the theater and the concert stage, names such as Ernest Hemingway, France’s great writer Antonin Artaud, jazz singer Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence, Phil Hartman and many, many more. And now, Whitney Houston.
Faced with even this partial list, it would be easy to form the impression that the lives of artists are unavoidably tumultuous and that for some, the pressures of success bring demands too great to be borne. It would also be easy to believe that to be a successful artist you must be neurotic or some sort of tragic figure.
None of this is true.
In each of the cases above, hidden influences worked to ensure the deadly outcome. The truth is, each of these great artists and many of the others who have left us were offered “help.” Instead they were betrayed and placed on a path which assured their destruction.
This betrayal came through the direct or indirect influence of psychiatrists or psychologists, who claimed they would help but were, in effect, a destructive influence that left these artists dreadfully damaged – or dead – after their foundations of strength and certainty were torn away.
Today there is an added urgency that this message be heard and understood, for the assault upon artists of every genre has only increased in both volume and efficiency. The weapons now include an array of deadly drugs that masquerade as therapeutic cures, just as the prefrontal lobotomy once did. In Hollywood, the mecca of the entertainment industry, those mind-altering and addictive psychotropic drugs are exacting too high a cost in creative lives.
Find out more about artists harmed by psychiatry by clicking here.
STATE-OF-THE-ART TOURING EXHIBIT
OPENS TO EXPOSE PSYCHIATRY AS AN “INDUSTRY OF DEATHâ€
With mounting drug regulatory agency warnings, a new exhibit exposes thousands of child deaths from psychiatric drugs in the U.S.
 Grand Opening: Saturday, 11 February 2012, 2:00 PM
The Griot Museum of Black History
2505 St. Louis Ave.
 St. Louis, MO 63106
Open 7 February – 3 March, Griot Museum, 2505 St. Louis Ave., St. Louis, MO
6-7 February, Missouri State Capitol Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO
24-26 February, Working Women’s Survival Show, St. Charles Convention Center
 WHO: Join the psychiatric watchdog group Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis (CCHR) to open a chillingly informative exhibit, “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.â€Â Free to the public, it warns about the more than 100,000 deaths in psychiatric institutions around the world each year and over 15,000 deaths of children taking prescribed psychiatric drugs in the United States.
WHAT: The exhibit, which is being shown internationally in more than 30 countries, depicts human rights abuses by psychiatry and carries statements from health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities. It traces the origins of psychiatry, the role psychiatrists have played in the oppression of blacks and minorities, the roots of their eugenics programs and the pivotal part they played in the Holocaust. It also reveals how psychiatric drugs are behind the spate of school shooting sprees and how millions of federal dollars allocated to screen American schoolchildren for “mental disorders†could increase both child deaths and acts of school violence. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that psychiatric drugs prescribed to children could cause aggression, hostility, psychosis, mania, homicide, suicide and death.
WHEN & WHERE:
7 February – 3 March, The Griot Museum of Black History, 2505 St. Louis Ave., St. Louis, MO 63106 (Tue-Sat, 10am-7pm)
Mon-Tue 6-7 February, Missouri State Capitol Building Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO (8am-5pm)
24-26 February, St. Charles Convention Center, St. Charles, MO – Working Women’s Survival Show (Fri 10:30am-8pm; Sat 9:30am-8pm; Sun 10:30am-5pm)
CONTACT:Â Â Â Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis, (314) 727-8307
CCHRSTL@CCHRSTL.ORG, www.CCHRSTL.org
http://www.CCHRSTL.org/event.shtml
ORGANIZATION:Â CCHR was founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus from the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, and has successfully achieved hundreds of legislative protections against psychiatric abuse.
“Johnson & Johnson will pay more than $1 billion to the U.S. and most states to resolve a civil investigation into marketing of the antipsychotic Risperdal, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The U.S. government has been investigating Risperdal sales practices since 2004, including allegations that the company marketed the drug for unapproved uses.”
[Read the full article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
According to Bloomberg News on Business Week (January 11, 2012), “Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit paid a Texas mental health official to speak around the U.S. about state guidelines on prescribing antipsychotic drugs that gave preference to the company’s Risperdal medicine.”
What is Risperdal?
Risperdal (generic name risperidone) is an antipsychotic (also called a Major Tranquilizer or Neuroleptic). The ingestion of a single tablet of Risperidal may cause significant toxicity in a toddler. At least 45 children died between 2000 and 2004 from the side effects of antipsychotic drugs like Risperdal. As the FDA’s Adverse Drug Reactions reporting database only collects 1% to 10% of drug-induced side effects and reported deaths, the true child death rate could be between 450 and several thousand for that period.
In June 2008 the FDA issued a warning to healthcare professionals that these antipsychotics are associated with an increased risk of mortality in elderly patients. Risperdal is also associated with significant weight gain and metabolic problems, as well as tardive dyskinesia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome.
Of course, psychiatric drugs are only prescribed as a treatment for various symptoms of mental distress because there are diagnoses in the psychiatric billing bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, for which insurance will reimburse. Watch the CCHR documentary DVD Psychiatry’s Deadliest Scam to find out about how psychiatry invents diseases, fraudulently diagnoses them, and markets harmful drugs for them.
The Financial and Societal Costs of Medicating America’s Foster Children
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Watch the video on PsychNews.
Ke’onte says, “About a year after I was adopted I found out I was on twenty different drugs total, and sometimes I took up to five drugs at one time. … Some of the things I was diagnosed with were Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Insomnia, ADHD, Depression. … I had side effects no one told me about … I think putting me on all these stupid meds was the most
idiotic thing I’ve ever experienced in foster care and was the worst thing someone could do to foster kids.”
For more information:
* CCHR Watchdog Radio podcast “Protecting Foster Children from Psychiatric Drugs“.
*Â ABC News Reports Shocking Use of Psychiatric Drugs With Foster Children.
* “The Psychiatric Drugging of America’s Foster Children” by Peter Breggin.
