Meet the New Advocate for Foster Children

Meet the New Advocate for Foster Children—Giovan
Bazan

Your Rights as a Parent

Imagine for a moment that you’re a child in the foster care system in the US; you don’t have a family, you live in a state-run institution, and you along with more than half of the other foster kids are forced to take psychiatric drugs which give you horrific side effects. You are literally treated worse than a prisoner, and you’re just a kid. The horrible truth is that today, 52 percent of foster care kids are being given psychiatric drugs including antidepressants and powerful antipsychotics. That’s about a quarter of a million kids in the U.S. alone on drugs that cause depression, psychosis, aggression, mania, violent and suicidal tendencies. These children need a voice.

Meet this week’s Watchdog Radio show guest, Giovan Bazan. A former foster child himself, he has been to hell and back and lived to tell about it.

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The Coercive State

Coerce: to force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; to compel, dominate, restrain, or control forcibly. From Latin coercere, to control, restrain; from co-, together + arcere, to shut up, enclose, confine.

Psychiatry is a coercive practice. One can see this intuitively, as no one would voluntarily subject themselves to psychiatric treatment knowing its devastating consequences.

There are a number of ways that the psychiatric industry forces treatment on unwilling victims.

Involuntary Commitment

Between 1.5 and 2 million persons are committed or coercively admitted to psychiatric facilities annually. Every 75 seconds, someone in the U.S. becomes the next victim of involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.

In his book, Reign of Error, psychiatrist Lee Coleman discovered that for each formal involuntary commitment, “there are several more in which patients are pressured to ‘sign in’ in order to avoid formal commitment.” In short, coercion and manipulation by mental health professionals push the published statistics downward and obscure the true number of involuntary commitments.

Commitment laws have been used for every wrong reason: financial, sexual, business advantage, inheritance, political suppression, and even to maintain governmental secrecy.

When any psychiatrist has full legal power to cause your involuntary physical detention by force (kidnapping), subject you to physical pain and mental stress (torture), leave you permanently mentally damaged (cruel and unusual punishment), with or without proving to your peers that you are a danger to yourself or have committed a crime (due process of law, trial by jury) then, by definition, a totalitarian state exists.

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first spending cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who prefer not to be mentally treated. Involuntary commitment laws hike federal, state, county, city and private health care costs under the strange circumstance of a patient-recipient who cannot say no.

Involuntary commitment creates an astonishing debt load on our health care system. Given a very conservative daily cost of $940 for hospitalization and treatment, each involuntary commitment costs around $16,700. With up to 1.5 million people committed yearly, and using the conservative individual figure of $16,700, the annual health care drain is almost $25 billion! And this is paying for a service that most would refuse if given the chance.

Coercive Restraints

Being denied human rights is not the only loss that a patient risks in psychiatry’s coercive system. The patient’s life can be at risk from chemical and physical restraints. Restraint “procedures” are visible evidence of the barbaric practices that psychiatrists choose to call therapy or treatment.

Psychiatric restraint procedures qualify as “assault and battery” in every respect except one — they are lawful. Psychiatry has placed itself above the law, from where it can assault and batter its unfortunate victims with a complete lack of accountability, all in the name of “treatment.”

Restraint use is not motivated by concern for the patient. A lawsuit in Denmark revealed that hospitals received additional funding for treating violent patients. Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Clark reported that in America patients are often provoked to justify placing them in restraints, also resulting in higher insurance reimbursements – at least $1,000 a day. The more violent a patient becomes – or is made – the more money the psychiatrist makes.

Today, there are several methods of restraint being used – all violent, all potentially lethal – in which hospital staff physically and brutally restrict a patient’s movement. The victim can be forcibly pinned to the ground face down. Mechanical restraints include straitjackets, leather belts or straps that cuff around each ankle and wrist. Soundproof rooms, opened only from the outside, are used for seclusion. Mind-numbing drugs are administered as a chemical straitjacket.

Mental Health Courts

“Mental health courts” are facilities established to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies. Rather than punishing individuals or allowing them to take responsibility for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric treatment center on the premise that they suffer from “mental illness” and that psychiatric treatment will stop the criminal behavior. There is no evidence that supports this false premise.

In a review of 20 mental health courts, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law found that these courts “may function as a coercive agent – in many ways similar to the controversial intervention, outpatient commitment – compelling an individual to participate in treatment under threat of court sanctions. However, the services available to the individual may be only those offered by a system that has already failed to help. Too many public mental health systems offer little more than medication.”

For more information download and read the CCHR booklet “The Real Crisis in Mental Health Today” from www.CCHRSTL.org.

Terrorism

Psychological “brainwashing” methods employed by terrorist groups include a three-stage process involving “unfreezing,” “changing” and “refreezing.” “Unfreezing” physically removes the person from his routines, sources of information, social relationships and support structures, and then humiliates the individual so that he perceives himself as unworthy, supposedly motivating him to change. “Changing” directs the person towards learning new attitudes, quite often through coercion. “Refreezing” involves the integration of the changed attitudes into the rest of the personality.

Colin Ross, M.D., author of Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists and an authority on coercive psychiatric methods, revealed that a variety of techniques could be exploited by a skilled psychiatric technician to program an individual to commit violent acts. Hypnosis exerts a more powerful influence when combined with drugs and pain. Ross suspects the number of suicide bombers who are programmed with drugs is close to 100 percent.

Coercive Vaccination

There is some evidence to suggest that such symptoms known as ADHD, Autism, and Bipolar Disorder could sometimes be vaccine injuries mis-labeled as “mental illness” and mis-treated with amphetamines and dangerous psychiatric drugs.

Mental Health Screening

Mental health screening based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Disease (ICD)—a key international psychiatry strategy—is a major situation right now that not only is the means by which the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries drum up new business, it is a major threat to the civil liberties and freedoms of all those in the U.S. and elsewhere. Read more about it here.

Something Can Be Done About It

There needs to be an increase in humane and rational alternatives to psychiatric involuntary institutionalization.

Involuntary commitment laws must be abolished and this unconstitutional and coercive practice stopped.

Any psychiatrist found to be using coercion, threats or malice to get people to “accept” psychiatric treatment, or who hospitalizes a patient against their will should be charged with assault and false imprisonment.

The use of physical and mechanical restraints should be outlawed. Until this occurs, any psychiatric staff member – and the psychiatrist who authorized the procedure – should be criminally culpable should the restraint result in physical damage or death.

Write, call and visit your local, state and federal representatives and tell them what you think about this.

Please become a member of CCHR St. Louis to help victims of psychiatric fraud and abuse fight back.

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Second Annual PsychOut Conference

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DSM-V A Conflict of Interest Promising More Pharma Profits

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the billing bible of psychiatry, listing every so-called mental or behavioral problem for which diagnosis and treatment can be reimbursed by insurance. There are 374 entries in edition four (DSM-IV), including such “mental illnesses” as “Expressive Language Disorder,” “Nicotine Dependence,” and “Caffeine-Induced Sleep Disorder.”

The scientific validity of the DSM has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts, calling it junk science. Now the psychiatric industry wants to revise it, adding more fraudulent mental disorders to produce a fifth edition, DSM-V.

Former American Psychiatric Association (APA) president Nada Stotland stated, “We are in the midst of a revolution caused by public and legislative concern about the influence of the for-profit sector…” Part of that public pressure for the APA to disclose its conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies was driven by Lisa Cosgrove Ph.D. et al‘s study of DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR committee members, which found that of the 170 members, 56% had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma’s psychotropic drug profits have soared commensurately with the increasing numbers of disorders voted into successive editions of the DSM.

Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties – no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.

The APA should sever all ties to pharmaceutical company interests. The US Senate Finance Committee has investigated at least a dozen APA psychiatrists over their undisclosed financial ties to drug companies.

For more information about psychiatric conflicts of interest visit www.PsychConflicts.org.

Click here for more information about the DSM and its various editions.

Please become a member of CCHR St. Louis to help victims of psychiatric fraud and abuse fight back.

Volunteer your help here.

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Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care

Psychotropic Drug Use in Foster Care

In June of 2010, the US Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of the Federal Government, to investigate the prevalence of prescribed psychotropic medications for children in foster care.

According to a number of foster care experts, children in foster care, who are typically concurrently enrolled in Medicaid, are three or four more times as likely to be on antipsychotic medications than other children on Medicaid. A Texas study from 2004 showed that 34.7 percent of foster children were prescribed at least one psychotropic drug with some children taking five or more.

Foster care parents receive more money if a child is on psychiatric drugs; the children are considered “special needs” children, needing a higher level of care.

Unfortunately, psychiatric drugs are not “care.” Prescribing psychotropic drugs for children is especially troubling given their addictive nature and the potential side effects associated with them, including the increased risk of suicidal and violent behavior.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that House Bill 23 in the Georgia state legislature proposes to create an independent clinic review of the drugs foster children are given, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans because of its efforts to protect the vulnerable. Projections are that it will save the state millions of dollars, as Georgia spends $7.87 million per year in Medicaid funds on mind-altering psychiatric drugs for foster children.

Click here for more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs.

Download the report “Drugging Foster Care Children” from the CCHR St. Louis website.

If you are aware of foster care children being abused by psychiatric drugs, please report this to CCHR and to the GAO.

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There is NO Controversy

Occasionally, reporters, news media, or other individuals CCHR encounters in the course of its activities, make the startling claim that the information CCHR provides about psychiatric fraud and abuse is “controversial.”

[controversial: something people disagree about or do not approve of; from Latin controversus “turned against, disputed”, from contra– “against” + vertere “to turn”]

We’d like to correct this impression and dispel this myth right now. Although, come to think of it, when you take the meaning of the word as “something people do not approve of,” you do come closer to the truth about psychiatry.

There can be no disagreement with the facts of psychiatric fraud and abuse. These facts have been repeatedly documented by CCHR since its founding in 1969. All the facts are there for your research, laid out in these reference sites:

So, again in fact, there is no controversy about the fraudulent nature of the psychiatric industry, or the harm of its treatments, or the abuse of its patients.

Where could people be getting this mistaken idea of controversy?

Well, among the majority of the general public there is a fundamental disagreement with and disapproval of psychiatry. And the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries certainly disagree with and disapprove of any effort to disseminate the truth and expose their fraud and abuse.

So, when someone tells you that “CCHR is controversial,” do not let them get away with this false idea. Any perceived controversy is actually put there by the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries themselves, in their desperate attempt to avoid the truth, their disagreement with being exposed as frauds, and their disapproval of anyone getting in the way of their blood money income.

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You Paid For It, Missouri

First, some facts. The Missouri Department of Mental Health (DMH) budget for the current fiscal year is $1,199,029,884; that’s nearly $1.2 billion. Of that total, $575,426,388 is from General Revenue (state taxes), $578,775,972 is Federal dollars, and $44,827,524 is from other sources such as state trust funds. Based on current state population, that’s $200 per person per year going to the MO DMH for facilities, personnel, administration, and rugs. Missouri will spend $466 million this fiscal year on non-Medicaid mental health treatment. For another perspective, if you drive or walk through downtown St. Louis, just count the number of homeless people sleeping on park benches or panhandling on street corners.

For the last five years, Missouri has received grants of Federal money funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), roughly $750,000 per year, and managed by a Governor-appointed committee called the Transformation Working Group.

SAMHSA is the federal agency that recently published a report falsely stating that 1 out of 5 people in the U.S. is mentally ill.

The Missouri Mental Health Transformation Working Group published its Comprehensive Plan for Mental Health, 2011 Action Plan Update on September 30, 2010. Let’s see what they did with your money:

  • They incorporated a non-profit agency and appointed a board of directors.
  • They sponsored a banquet for fund raising.
  • They held a conference for consumers of mental health services.
  • They created a new website to promote their activities.
  • They trained some people on mental health in early childhood education.
  • They pushed a program called Positive Behavior Support into 597 schools.
  • They expanded the number of older adults eligible for mental health treatment for depression.
  • They added a new Medicaid mental health billing code for Federally Qualified Health Centers.
  • They worked on electronic claims reporting systems for Medicaid.
  • They trained some people in Motivational Enhancement Therapy.
  • They trained some people on how to access their mental health services.
  • They conducted some surveys and gathered some statistics about people’s quality of life.

Are you seeing the pattern here yet? I’m going to shout it out:

NONE OF THEIR GOALS SPECIFIED IMPROVED PATIENT OUTCOMES (CURES) AND BETTER MENTAL HEALTH FOR INDIVIDUALS.

NONE OF THEIR ACCOMPLISHMENTS INDICATED ANY IMPROVED PATIENT OUTCOMES (CURES) OR BETTER MENTAL HEALTH FOR INDIVIDUALS.

THE ENTIRETY OF THEIR ACTIVITIES WERE FOR MARKETING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS, AND TRAINING PEOPLE ON HOW TO PUSH HARMFUL PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENTS INTO SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the real problem, the one that this “transformation” program does not address, is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases.”

Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.

People can have problems in life; these are not, however, some mental illness caused by a deficiency of psychotropic drugs in their brains. There are workable alternatives to harmful psychiatric drugs and treatments.

Find Out!

Fight Back!

Write your state and local legislators and officials now, today, and demand that funding for fraudulent and harmful psychiatric practices be stopped.

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Antidepressants often used for no valid reason

Research published January 25, 2011 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (“Antidepressant Use in the Absence of Common Mental Disorders in the General Population”) concludes that “antidepressant use among individuals without psychiatric diagnoses is common in the United States,” and these drugs are more likely to have been prescribed by family doctors than by psychiatrists.

Reuters picked up the story and said that “more than a quarter of people in the United States who take antidepressants have never been diagnosed with any of the conditions the drugs are typically used to treat.”

At $10 billion per year, the sale of antidepressants is a major contributor to the high cost of health care insurance. As these drugs often have devastating side effects, they are calculated to create patients-for-life; more and more health care is needed to combat these side effects, while the original symptoms for which they may have been prescribed go undiagnosed and untreated.

The New York Times says (March 5, 2011) that “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns to Drug Therapy.” “Psychiatric hospitals that once offered patients months of talk therapy now discharge them within days with only pills. … A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.” Yet, “Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression.”

Sure, people can have difficult problems in their lives, and at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, anxiety or panic. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatric drugs and psychiatric treatments are not workable.

Find out more about psychiatric drug side effects by clicking here.

For the next few days in St. Louis, you have a unique opportunity to find out about these issues. Visit the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death international touring exhibit before it leaves town. The last day for free tours is Saturday, March 12.

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The DSM-V Folly

If you read last month’s Gary Greenberg article in Wired magazine about the folly of the DSM-V (“The Book of Woe – Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness“) you may be interested in a follow-up just published in the Wired letters column.

The article covered the controversy surrounding the upcoming fifth edition of psychiatry’s billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Greenberg said, “What the battle over DSM-5 should make clear to all of us—professional and layman alike—is that psychiatric diagnosis will probably always be laden with uncertainty, that the labels doctors give us for our suffering will forever be at least as much the product of negotiations around a conference table as investigations at a lab bench.”

The follow-up in the March issue is a quote, in response to the article, from Jay S. Kwawer, director of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York, who said, “The DSM is potentially even more pernicious than Greenberg’s account. This manual has increasingly shaped patterns of reimbursement by insurers; clinicians have every incentive to fit the diagnosis to what health insurance companies will pay for. The resulting epidemiological data (incidence, prevalence, comorbidity, and so forth) are skewed by clinicians who barter their integrity in return for fee-for-service. In effect, DSM has contributed to making liars of us all.”

[Epidemiology is the study of patterns of health and illness and their associated factors in a population, from Latin epi demos, “among the people.” Comorbidity is the presence of more than one diagnosis at the same time, from Latin co—morbus, “along with—disease.”]

The scientific validity of the DSM has come under increasing attack from medical professionals and scientific experts, calling it junk science. The truth is that when we try to fit psychiatry into the definition of a true science, it fails the test. The lack of science behind the DSM gives a clear idea of why it has earned such criticism.

Click here for more information about the DSM-V.

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The Bipolar Disorder Hoax

Many people think that psychiatric disorders are the same as medical diseases or illnesses. While mainstream physical medicine deals with diseases such as malaria, bronchitis and hepatitis that have exact, identifiable physical causes, psychiatry deals with disorders.

Disorders are names given to undesirable feelings and behavior for which no exact physical causes have been isolated. These mental disorders are frequently referred to as “illnesses” or “diseases” but they are not the same thing. This difference sets psychiatry far apart from the usual practice of medicine.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by unusual shifts in a person’s mood, energy and ability to function. Its symptoms are severe mood swings from one extreme of overly high and/or irritable (mania) to sad and hopeless (depression), then back again.

In the 1800’s, bipolar was known as manic depression, a term invented by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. In 1953, another German psychiatrist, Karl Kleist coined the term “bipolar.” Other psychiatrists have attempted to describe it, including Kleis’ student, Karl Leonhard.

Bipolar disorder was first officially introduced into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in the 1980’s, but was largely considered to be an adult “disorder.”

In January 2002, the Medicine Journal reported: “The etiology (cause) and pathophysiology (the function or action of ‘’abnormal’ states in people) of bipolar disorder (BPD) have not been determined, and no objective biological markers exist that correspond definitively with the disease state.” Nor have any genes “been definitely identified” for bipolar disorder.

Pediatric neurologist Fred Baughman, Jr., wrote: “The fact of the matter is—and a fact to which the country had better wake up—is that there is no abnormality to be found in any of psychiatry’s ‘diseases’—not in infants, not in toddlers, not in preschoolers, not at any age. Without invented ‘diseases,’ the psychiatric-pharmaceutical cartel would have nothing to treat. These are normal children with disciplinary and educational problems that can and must be resolved without recourse to drugs. Deceiving and drugging is not the practice of medicine. It is
criminal.”

Bear in mind that the “treatments” being prescribed are for “disorders” that are not physical illnesses—essentially, they are being prescribed for something that does not exist.

bipolar disorder

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable, subject to unreasonable depression, anxiety or panic. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatric drugs and psychiatric treatments are not workable.

Click here for more information and to download and read the CCHR Report on Bipolar Disorder.

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