Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

A federal judge gave final approval October 1, 2010 to an agreement worked out between the State of Illinois and a coalition of legal services organizations, for individuals with mental illnesses to move out of Illinois’ outmoded, segregated nursing home system and receive the services they need in the community.

Approximately 4,300 persons with mental illnesses will be given the choice to move out of large nursing homes known as “Institutions for Mental Diseases” (IMDs) and into community-based settings with the support they need to be successful.

Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, one of five legal organizations representing the plaintiffs, said, “There simply is no rational, medical reason for forcing persons with mental illnesses to receive the treatment they need in a large, institutional setting living with hundreds of other people with mental illnesses. We do not require such living arrangements for other diseases – it is indefensible for those with mental illness.”

The Illinois Governor’s Nursing Home Safety Task Force, after examining the state’s troubled and scandalized nursing home system, recently concluded that “(t)here is … remarkable consensus that many people currently admitted to nursing homes with serious mental illness would be better cared for in specially designed and monitored community residential settings.”

An individualized plan for each person will be developed. One can only hope that these plans will not rely on harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs or other abusive psychiatric treatments.

For more information on the alternatives to abusive psychiatric treatments and harmful psychiatric drugs, download the CCHR report, “What is the Alternative to Psychotropic Drugs” from http://cchrstl.org/alternatives.shtml.

Midazolam

“Midazolam injection is used before medical procedures and surgery to cause drowsiness, relieve anxiety, and prevent any memory of the event. It is also sometimes given as part of the anesthesia during surgery to produce a loss of consciousness. Midazolam injection is also used to cause a state of decreased consciousness in seriously ill people in intensive care units (ICU) who are breathing with the help of a machine. Midazolam injection is in a class of medications called benzodiazepines.”

“If you receive midazolam injection in the ICU over a long period of time, your body may become dependent on it. Your doctor will probably decrease your dose gradually to prevent withdrawal symptoms such as seizures, uncontrollable shaking of a part of the body, hallucinations (seeing things or hearing voices that do not exist), stomach and muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, sweating, fast heartbeat, difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, and depression.”

[Quotes are from MedlinePlus, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a609014.html]

Midazolam (brand name Versed^®) also comes as a syrup to take by mouth when it is prescribed for children before medical procedures, or before anesthesia for surgery or dental surgery, in order to cause drowsiness, relieve anxiety, and prevent any memory of the event. It can also be given to prevent seizures, or for chemical restraint (such as for an agitated psychiatric patient,) and may be administered through the nose with an atomizer to an already unconscious person (such as someone having a seizure.) It may also be given by emergency medical personnel outside of a hospital setting.

In one study, the researchers found that “No patient on the low-dose midazolam infusion in our protocol was able to recall any time during paralysis, a testament to the amnestic qualities of this drug.”

More information about the side effects of this drug, and benzodiazepines in general, can be found in the CCHR booklet, “The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs,” which can be downloaded free from http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

What You Should Take Away From This Information

Children and adults can be given this drug with or without permission, in or out of a hospital, by psychiatrists or non-psychiatric doctors or emergency medical personnel. One of the primary reasons for using this drug is to prevent any memory of the event, which has also led to its abuse as a date-rape drug. Psychiatric drugs are not just for psychiatric patients anymore.

While psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness” and stigmatize unwanted behavior or study problems as “diseases” for which they can prescribe harmful and addictive drugs, some of these drugs are now also in standard medical use for non-psychiatric conditions, producing the same horrific side effects, and no one is the wiser. Except you. Let others know. Get the Facts. Fight Back.

Psych Meds in Jails

“A ground-breaking, year-long investigation by Youth Today has uncovered ample evidence that many youths incarcerated in American juvenile facilities are getting potent anti-psychotic drugs intended for bipolar or schizophrenic patients, even when they have not been diagnosed with either disorder.”

“Ken Kramer, a researcher with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida, obtained detailed annual Medicaid expenditures for the five most prescribed atypicals in 30 states. In 2003, Medicaid spending on the atypicals for adolescents in those states was about $238.7 million. Kramer found that by 2007 – the year Abilify became the first to gain approval for adolescent use – spending had more than doubled to $562.4 million.”

“It is clear that in at least some states, atypical anti-psychotics have become a major part of the medical protocol in juvenile facilities, and prescriptions for the drugs are tied to a wide range of diagnosed conditions.”

Read the full article by John Kelly here:
http://youthtoday.org/view_article.cfm?article_id=4344

For more information download this booklet from www.cchrstl.org: Child Drugging — Psychiatry Destroying Lives — Report and recommendations on fraudulent psychiatric diagnosis and the enforced drugging of youth.

Depression Screening – A Cruel Fraud; Exposing “National Depression Screening Day”

This year, National Depression Screening Day is on Thursday, October 7. Its purpose is to refer people for psychiatric treatment, which means the prescription of harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs.

In 1991, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) began organizing a “National Depression Screening Day” to encourage family doctors to diagnose depression more often in their patients and to refer them to psychiatrists. The Depression Screening Day was initiated with funds from pharmaceutical companies that have continued to fund it each year.

This is a warning: depression screening is bogus — cashing in on people’s problems in life to get them onto psychiatric drugs and increase drug sales.

Depression screening is the effort of the psychiatric industry, using drug company money, to forward their own unscientific and destructive agenda. Depression screening is based on psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which relies on American Psychiatric Association member votes (opinions only) on whether to call a list of symptoms a “disorder” — something that real medicine would never do. Without these fraudulent diagnoses, pharmaceutical companies could not make psychiatric drugs.

CCHR says that people need to be protected from the risks and human rights violations that can occur because of the DSM, and which are now heightened because of the vested influence of pharmaceutical interests on the decision making process for mental disorders.

Psychiatric adverstising that claims a biological basis to depression and that treatment can “restore brain cell connections and lead to recovery” is disease mongering, psychiatric fraud, and misleads vulnerable people in need of real help into thinking that a mind-altering drug can fix their problems in life.

The FDA warns these drugs cause hostility, agitation, mania and suicide. If you know someone who is taking a psychiatric drug from which they have suffered an adverse side effect, they should report this to the FDA MedWatch site.

If you are asked to screen your teenage son or daughter, and a screening procedure called “TeenScreen” or similar is to be used, ask them to explain why the psychiatrist who invented this says there is a potential 84% failure rate in correctly identifying someone at risk of suicide. Before agreeing to any screening, ask those doing the testing to conduct a physical test — x-ray, blood, urine or other bodily test — that would be necessary to show that depression is a “medical” (i.e. physical) disease in the brain, or are they relying on a list of personal questions (opinion) only. For more information about this bogus program, visit this site.

Click here for more information about mental health screening.

Forest Pharmaceuticals, an Earth City, MO drug maker, has agreed to plead guilty to federal criminal and civil charges and pay more than $313 million to resolve allegations that it made drugs without FDA approval, marketed an antidepressant for pediatric use, and gave kickbacks to doctors for prescribing these harmful drugs.

Forest Pharma, a subsidiary of New York based Forest Labs, signed a plea agreement to settle, among other charges, the illegal promotion of the antidepressant Celexa for children, and causing the submission of false insurance claims for the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro.

The settlement alleges that Forest misled doctors and consumers by failing to disclose a European medical study that determined Celexa was ineffective for pediatric use. Lexapro is the company’s main money maker, with sales of $2.3 billion in fiscal year 2010.

Celexa (citalopram) and Lexapro (escitalopram oxalate) can cause suicidal thoughts or actions in children.

Recognize that the real problem 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.

Click here for more information about the harmful effects of Celexa and Lexapro.

Electroshock —It’s Not Treatment, It’s Torture

Click Here to Watch

Ask the average person about the use of electroshock treatment in today’s society and 9 out of 10 will respond, “They still shock people?”

They do. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 Americans are electroshocked each year; half are 60 and older, and two-thirds are women.

Electroshock, renamed electroconvulsive therapy or ECT, is not only still being given to hundreds of thousands per year, but frequently without their consent. Documented effects of electroshock include short and long term memory loss, brain seizures, life-threatening cardiovascular events and death. Psychiatrists admit they don’t know how ECT “works” but that doesn’t stop them from administering it to hundreds of thousands of people per year, including the elderly, children and pregnant women.

Recently, press have reported that ECT is making a “comeback” but what most don’t realize, is that electroshock never went away.

Watch and share this 3-minute video and read this article on electroshock.

To find out some of the laws CCHR has helped enact to prohibit/ban this deadly practice see our accomplishments page.

For even more information download and read the CCHR booklet ECT – The Brutal Reality from http://www.cchrstl.org.

The United States Code, Chapter 109a, Title 18, Section 2242, Sexual Abuse, states, “Whoever…knowingly…engages in a sexual act with another person if that other person is…incapable of appraising the nature of the conduct…shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

There is a long-standing consensus in the medical profession that sexual contact or sexual relations between physicians and patients is unethical. The prohibition against such was incorporated into the Hippocratic Oath: “I will come to the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons….”

In no other area of medicine is the patient in such a state of emotional vulnerability as when they visit a psychiatrist or psychologist. It is a relationship in which the patient can be most easily exploited and manipulated.

But psychiatrists and psychologists rarely consider that raping a patient is rape. Instead, it is euphemistically called “sexual contact,” a “sexual relationship” or “crossing the boundaries” when one of its members sexually forces themself on a patient, often with the help of drugs or electroshock treatment.

A review of more than 800 convictions of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists between 1998 and 2005 revealed that more than 30% were for sex crimes.

Studies in numerous countries reveal that between 10% and 25% of psychiatrists and psychologists admit to sexually abusing their patients.

A 1997 Canadian study of psychiatrists revealed that 10% admitted to sexually abusing their patients; 80% of those were repeat offenders.

In a 1999 British study of therapist-patient sexual contact among psychologists, 25% reported having treated a patient who had been sexually involved with another therapist.

As reported in 2001, a U.S. study of therapist-client sex, reported that 1 out of 20 clients who had been sexually abused by their therapist was a minor. The female victims’ ages ranged from 3 to 17, and from 7 to 16 for the males. The average age was 7 for girls and 12 for boys.

Click here to read the full article.

For 50 years, psychiatry has promoted its theory that the only “treatment” for mental “illness” is psychiatric drugs. However, not only is the drugging of patients unnecessary—and expensive—it causes brain– and life–damaging side effects. The simple truth is that there are workable alternatives to psychiatry’s destructive treatments and you as a patient have the right to refuse it.

In this 33–minute Watchdog Radio Podcast, attorney Gary Brown wants people to know that they have a right to say no to psychiatric treatment and drugs, that emotional upsets are a normal part of life—they are not justification for locking someone away as a danger to themselves or others.

Click here to go to this podcast.

Watchdog Radio is brought to you by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog and non–profit organization. CCHR investigates and exposes psychiatric violations of human rights and works shoulder to shoulder with like–minded groups and individuals who share a common purpose to clean up the field of mental health.

For more information about involuntary commitment, read the CCHR publication “Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment — A Crack in the Door of Constitutional Freedoms” available for download by clicking here.

The advent of Community Mental Health (CMH) psychiatric programs in the 1960s would not have been possible without 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.

CMH was promoted as the solution to all institutional problems. The premise, based almost entirely on the development and use of neuroleptic drugs, was that patients could now be successfully released back into society. Ongoing service would be provided through government-funded units called Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC). These centers would tend to the patients from within the community, dispensing the neuroleptics that would keep them under control. Governments would save money and individuals would improve faster. The plan was called “deinstitutionalization.”

The first generation of neuroleptics, now commonly referred to as “typical antipsychotics” or “typicals,” appeared during the 1960s. They were heavily promoted as “miracle” drugs that made it “possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society.”

These claims were false. In an article in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2003, Vera Sharav stated, “The reality was that the therapies damaged the brain’s frontal lobes, which is the distinguishing feature of the human brain. The neuroleptic drugs used since the 1950s ‘worked’ by hindering normal brain function: they dimmed psychosis, but produced pathology often worse than the condition for which they have been prescribed — much like physical lobotomy which psychotropic drugs replaced.”

The homeless individuals commonly seen grimacing and talking to themselves on the street are exhibiting the effects of such psychiatric drug-induced damage. “Tardive dyskinesia” [tardive, late appearing and dyskinesia, abnormal muscle movement] and “tardive dystonia” [dystonia, abnormal muscle tension] are permanent conditions caused by tranquilizers in which the muscles of the face and body contort and spasm involuntarily.

For almost 50 years, psychiatry has promoted its theory that the only “treatment” for severe mental “illness” is neuroleptic drugs. However, this idea rests on a fault line. The truth is that not only is the drugging of severely mentally disturbed patients unnecessary – and expensive, thus profitable – it causes brain- and life-damaging side effects.

Mental health courts are facilities established to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies. Rather than allowing the guilty parties to take responsibility for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric treatment center on the premise that they suffer from “mental illness” which will respond positively to antipsychotic drugs. It is another form of coercive “community mental health treatment.”

The Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction reported that the CMH program in Europe created homelessness, drug addiction, criminal activities, disturbances to public peace and order and unemployment.

CMHCs became legalized drug dealerships that not only supplied psychiatric drugs to former mental hospital patients, but also supplied prescriptions to individuals free of “serious mental problems.” Deinstitutionalization failed and society has been struggling with homelessness and other disastrous results ever since.

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 find out for themselves. Something must be done to establish real help for those who need it.

Click here to download and read the full CCHR report Community Ruin — Psychiatry’s Coercive ‘Care’ — Report and recommendations on the failure of community mental health and other coercive psychiatric programs.