Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

http://psychrights.org/PR/100811NicholsonUnsealingNR.pdf

PRESS RELEASE
August 11, 2010
CONTACT
Jim Gottstein
907-274-7686
jim.gottstein@psychrights.org

CONTACT
S. Randolph Kretchmar
(847) 370-5410
s_randolph@earthlink.net

Illinois Medicaid Fraud Case Using PsychRights’ Model Complaint Unsealed

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights^®) announces the unsealing of the first Medicaid Fraud case for prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and youth by someone other than PsychRights using PsychRights’ model Qui Tam Complaint.

United States ex rel Linda Nicholson v. Lilian Spigelman, M.D., Hephzibah Children’s Association, and Sears Pharmacy, was filed in Illinois by attorney S. Randolph Kretchmar as a result of PsychRights’ Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth.

Ms. Nicholson’s daughter was given psychiatric drugs that were not for a “medically accepted indication,” constituting Medicaid Fraud.

“The evidence is overwhelming that these drugs prescribed to children and youth are ineffective, even counterproductive, and extremely harmful to children,” said PsychRights’ president, Jim Gottstein.

Mr. Kretchmar, the attorney handling the case said, “People need to wake up to the huge amount of harm these prescribing practices are inflicting on our children. I am very pleased to follow the lead of PsychRights in addressing this problem and hope through this lawsuit we can help bring the practice to a halt.”

Jim Gottstein continued, “People should expect more of these cases until this pervasive type of Medicaid Fraud stops. The Nicholson case is the first of such cases brought by someone other than PsychRights.”

The lawsuit is brought under the federal False Claims Act, which authorizes private parties to bring fraud actions on behalf of the United States Government and share in the recovery, if any.

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The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is a public interest law firm devoted to the defense of people facing the horrors of forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock. PsychRights is further dedicated to exposing the truth about psychiatric interventions and the courts being misled into ordering people subjected to these brain and body damaging drugs against their will. Extensive information about these dangers, and about the tragic damage caused by electroshock, is available on the PsychRights web site: http://psychrights.org/.

James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq.
President/CEO
Law Project for Psychiatric Rights
406 G Street, Suite 206
Anchorage, Alaska  99501
USA
Phone: (907) 274-7686)  Fax: (907) 274-9493
jim.gottstein[[at]]psychrights.org
http://psychrights.org/

By JAN EASTGATE

“Summarising his paper ‘Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?’ Gosden states: ‘A preventive medicine campaign based on the type of prodromal [indicating an early stage of a disease] symptoms and risk factors specified in the Australian Clinical Guidelines for Early Psychosis potentially defines the whole generation of young people as being at risk and in need of treatment.’

“The entire concept of pre-drugging children sounds like a page out of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. In it, Huxley depicts a ‘utopian’ but totalitarian society, one that is insane and bent on control using the ‘technique of suggestion – through infant conditioning and, later, with the aid of drugs.’

“Psychiatrists took this to heart in 1967 when a group of prominent psychiatrists and doctors met in Puerto Rico to discuss the plan for psychotropic drug use on ‘normal humans’ in the year 2000. The report on that meeting stated that the ‘breadth of drug use may be trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life in the year 2000.'”

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE [http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/the-brave-new-world-of-pre-drugging-kids-patrick-mcgorry-psychosis-risk-syndrome].

[http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/03/military_psychiatric_drugs_031710w/]

“At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug. … The drugs come with serious side effects: They can impair motor skills, reduce reaction times and generally make a war fighter less effective. Some double the risk for suicide, prompting doctors — and Congress — to question whether these drugs are connected to the rising rate of military suicides. … Defense officials repeatedly have denied requests by Military Times for copies of autopsy reports that would show the prevalence of such drugs in suicide toxicology reports.”

[http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Army-Suicide-Report-Ignore-by-Martha-Rosenberg-100801-596.html]

“The long awaited 2010 Army report, ‘Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention‘ considers the economy, the stress of nine years of war, family dislocations, repeated moves, repeated deployments, troops’ risk-taking personalities, waived entrance standards and many aspects of Army culture. What it barely considers is the suicide-linked antidepressants, antipsychotics and antiseizure drugs whose use exactly parallels the increase in US troop suicides since 2005. … But instead of citing dangerous drugs and drug cocktails for turning troops suicidal (and accident prone and at risk of death from unsafe combinations) the Army report cites troops’ illicit use of them along with street drugs. (The word ‘illicit’ appears 150 times in the Army report and ‘psychiatrist’ appears twice.)”

Write to General Peter W. Chiarelli, Army Vice Chief of Staff, and let him know what you think [1400 Defense Pentagon, Washington DC 20301-1400].

CCHR has been investigating and exposing the suicide risks of psychiatric drugs and the psychiatric assault on society since 1969. For more information click here.

• “Arguably, Szasz has had more impact on the actual practice of psychiatry in this country than anyone since Freud.” — The Journal of Psychiatry & Law
• “No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz. — John
  Leo, social science editor for U.S. News & World Report
• “Szasz is a brilliant debater…. He can turn a topic as somber as insanity and its social context into a book that is extraordinarily entertaining.” — The New York Times Book Review

Thomas Szasz quotes, accolades, articles, books, and more in an easy to navigate and comprehendable format.

[If you do not vote in Missouri, then suggest this legislation to your own state legislators.]

The Missouri Health Care Freedom Amendment, Proposition C will appear on the August 3, 2010 statewide ballot in Missouri as a legislatively-referred amendment. The proposed measure aims to block the federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance and bans punishment for those without health insurance. [Read the full text of the amendment here.]

We urge all Missouri citizens to vote as their civic duty. Here is some additional information about this amendment.

The act prohibits any federal law from interfering with an individual’s health care freedom. If approved by Missouri voters, no federal law could force a patient, employer, or health care provider to participate in any government or privately run health care system.

The ballot will say, “Shall the Missouri Statutes be amended to: – Deny the government authority to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services? – Modify laws regarding the liquidation of certain domestic insurance companies?.”

As Senator Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield), the bill’s sponsor, says, “This legislation simply protects the rights of Missourians to choose their own health care products and services without fear of facing fines or imprisonment. It doesn’t reject any federal health care option, nor take away an individual’s choice to participate in the federal health care plan. The measure expands options, not limits them.”

We think voting for this is a good idea because the recently passed federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is laden with language and funding for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in seeing every man, woman and child in America labeled with some mental disorder and prescribed harmful psychiatric drugs.

Already, the mental health industry defrauds the government up to $40 billion per year. If we divide that $40 billion by the roughly 300 million citizens in the U.S., we are, each and every person in America, already paying over $100 per year more than we should for health care. This new federal health care law gives the mental health industry more patients and more funds, inevitably leading to more fraud.

For some time there has been growing concern that the medicalization of behavior is a principal driver of increased health care costs in the mental health care industry. The medicalization of unhappiness, for example, is a driver for the prescription of harmful and addictive antidepressant drugs. Estimated direct costs associated with various medicalized conditions (including ADHD, sadness, anxiety and behavioral disorders) in the U.S. were approximately $77 billion in 2005.

This act will help prevent Missourians from being forced to suffer fraudulent and abusive psychiatric treatment and drugs mandated by the federal government.

The February 27, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried an article called “Why psychiatry needs therapy,” by Edward Shorter, professor of history at the University of Toronto. Dr. Shorter is a social historian of medicine, specializing in the history of psychiatry.

Shorter says, “Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.”

Making fun of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, is a pastime we understand, and Shorter makes short work of the DSM, calling it horse-trading in symptoms, “defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses.”

Although, to be sure, the DSM is no laughing matter, as it aims to eventually diagnose everyone with some form of mental illness for which harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs can be prescribed.

Here are some actual diagnoses of “mental disorders” in the DSM-IV (DSM fourth edition):

Click here to watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft1RDGVq2LA

Mood disorders such as depression have been a known adverse side effect of drug use since at least the 1950’s.

A drug-induced mood disorder is the onset of symptoms of mental distress while a person is taking or withdrawing from these drugs.

Despite the plethora of reported cases, there are few controlled studies of this phenomenon. Many different drugs have been implicated in the onset of drug-induced mental symptoms. Many different hypotheses have been put forward regarding the etiology of these reactions, but since the actual action of many of these drugs is unknown, these are mostly just guesses.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) even has multiple categories for this “mental illness,” for example:

291.8 Alcohol-Induced Mood Disorder
292.84 Substance-Induced Mood Disorder, and so on.

The many possible symptoms of mental stress caused by drug use or withdrawal make it easy to receive an unfounded or fraudulent diagnosis; i.e. a diagnosis of some psychiatric disorder rather than an adverse drug reaction. Naturally, diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder is treated with a psychiatric drug, adding to the drug-induced stress.

Common symptoms arising from the adverse effects of drugs include depression, fatigue, insomnia or other sleep problems, irritability, gastro-intestinal problems, mania, inattention, lack of motor control, suicidal thoughts, hallucinations. Elderly patients may be more likely to take drugs and therefore may have a greater exposure to the risks of adverse drug reactions.

How can one tell if mental symptoms are drug-related? Quick resolution of symptoms after stopping the drug is a good clue, although one must also watch for withdrawal effects. No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent non-psychiatric medical doctor. In any case, a thorough, searching medical examination by a non-psychiatric medical doctor is encouraged to find and treat any real medical conditions that are contributing to the problems.

For more information about the side effects of common psychiatric drugs, go to http://www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml.

Pregnant women who use antidepressants have an overall 68% increased risk of miscarriage compared with those who do not take them.

Dr. Anick Bérard, a professor at the University of Montreal, and her team conducted a study that was published May 31 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, saying that antidepressants, particularly paroxetine and venlafaxine, were associated with increased risk of miscarriage, and a combination of different antidepressants doubled the risk of miscarriage.

Up to 3.7% of pregnant women receive antidepressants during the first trimester. Antidepressants have also been associated with birth defects.

The generic paroxetine is an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) found in various brands such as Aropax, Deroxat, Paroxat, Paxil, Pexeva, Seropram, and Seroxat.

The generic venlafaxine is an SNRI (Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitor) found in various brands such as Dobupal, Efectin, Effexor, and Pristiq.

These drugs also carry an increased risk of suicide. Warnings against using these drugs during pregnancy have been periodically issued since at least 2005.

Psychiatric drug use during pregnancy has another potential consequence: antidepressants may have a deleterious effect on a developing baby’s brain. In one study, children exposed to antidepressants in the womb are more likely to appear sad or withdrawn at age 3 than those whose moms did not take these drugs. [“Prenatal Effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants …”; Oberlander, Papsdorf, Brain, Misri, Ross, and Grunau; Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 2010;164(5):444-451]

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

The true resolution of many mental difficulties begins, not with a checklist of symptoms, but with ensuring that a competent, non-psychiatric physician completes a thorough physical examination.

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.