Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

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.

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.

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.

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.

Make your ideas heard on how to make the Missouri state government more streamlined. Senate Leader Robert Mayer, on behalf of the Missouri Senate, invites Missouri residents to submit ideas on how to reboot Missouri State Government – whether it be through more control, alterations or deletions.

The webpage at http://www.senate.mo.gov/RebootMO/ is one step in the Missouri Senate’s effort to identify ways to make government smaller and more efficient. Every idea will be considered.

Just enter your ideas at http://www.senate.mo.gov/RebootMO/RebootMO.aspx. Anonymous submissions will be accepted. Constituents are also invited to contact their state senators directly to submit ideas. Go here to find out who is your state senator: http://www.senate.mo.gov/.

A Few Suggestions

• Mental Health Insurance Parity needs to be abolished in this state. It acts essentially as a tax give-away to the vested interests of the mental health industry.
• Assign the Department of Health to open “Free State Health Clinics” on the grounds of our state mental hospitals using the saved tax money from the Department of Mental Health. The facilities already exist; we only need good doctors to man the examining rooms.
• Hold open and very public investigations into the activities of the Department of Mental Health. Thousands of Missourian citizens are being harmed by the psychiatrists in state employ. Additionally hundreds are routinely kept incarcerated far past the time of simple prison sentence.
• Severely cut the Department of Mental Health’s bloated wasteful budget. We can easily save millions of tax dollars by using no psychotropic drugs on our citizens. These are now being shown to actually cause more medical problems than they supposedly help.
• Fold the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services. The DMH cannot manage itself, witness State Auditor’s investigation and reported deaths in state-run facilities. DMH is an agency out of control.
• Abolish the practice of Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) in this state. This barbaric pseudo-medical treatment is responsible for thousands of Missouri citizens being on the roles of Medicare and Medicaid. ECT causes permanent brain damage and the victims rely on Medicaid to survive.
• Change the Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity rules in the states legal system. Our (NGRI) rules allow the career criminal to use the system to evade prison. They are routinely released earlier than if they were incarcerated in our prisons. Establish a firm “If you do the crime, then you do the time” policy.

Deadly Restraints

To state the obvious, psychiatric “care” is not supposed to kill patients, and no one expects patients to die in psychiatric hospitals. Yet this is what quietly happens under the watchful eye of psychiatrists every day in psychiatric institutions around the world.

Restraint “procedures” are the most visible evidence of the barbaric practices that psychiatrists choose to call therapy or treatment. Such psychiatric brutality does not soften, as human compassion would deem appropriate, even for the sake of youth or elderly.

Download and read the free CCHR booklet Deadly Restraints — Psychiatry’s “Therapeutic” Assault — Report and recommendations on the violent and dangerous use of restraints in mental health facilities.

Psychiatric restraint procedures, and all other psychiatric procedures for that matter, 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.”

In today’s high–pressure world, tradition is too often replaced by more “modern” means of dealing with the demands of life. For example, while once heavily community–, church– and family–based, today the task of caring for our parents and grandparents routinely falls to organizations such as nursing homes or aged–care centers. There we trust that professionally trained staff will take care of our elders as we would.

For those who contemplate how to arrange care for much–loved and aging parents or grandparents, it is vital to know that psychiatry abusing seniors with cruel mental health programs is not an exception in elder care today.

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.

For more information, download and read the free CCHR booklet Elderly Abuse — Cruel Mental Health Programs — Report and recommendations on psychiatry abusing seniors.

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.

STATE-OF-THE-ART TOURING EXHIBIT OPENS TO EXPOSE PSYCHIATRY AS AN “INDUSTRY OF DEATH”

With mounting drug regulatory agency warnings, a new exhibit exposes thousands of child deaths from psychiatric drugs in U.S.

Grand Opening: Saturday, 5 February 2011, 1:00 PM, Portfolio Gallery, 3514 Delmar (at Grand), St. Louis, MO 63103

5-26 February 2011, Portfolio Gallery, 3514 Delmar (at Grand), St. Louis, MO

7-8 February 2011, Missouri State Capitol Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO

25-27 February 2011, St. Charles Convention Center (Working Women’s Survival Show), St. Charles, MO

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.” 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 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:

5-26 February 2011, Portfolio Gallery, 3514 Delmar (at Grand), St. Louis, MO (Mon-Fri: 1pm-7pm; Sat: 10am-5pm)

7-8 February 2011, Missouri State Capitol Building Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO (8am-5pm)

25-27 February 2011, St. Charles Convention Center – Working Women’s Survival Show (Fri 11am-8pm; Sat 10am-8pm; Sun 11am-5pm)

CONTACT:

Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis, (314) 727-8307

CCHRSTL@CCHRSTL.ORG, www.CCHRSTL.org

ORGANIZATION:

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.

We wondered if our readers had noticed a marked increase in violence and suicide reported recently in the media, and that many of those perpetrators had been in psychiatric hands or taking psychotropic drugs?

We are sure you also knew that the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) started out as a psychiatric drug.

LSD was discovered in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. In the early 1950s, according to documents obtained from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act, the agency was concerned that the Russians were trying to buy the entire world’s supply of LSD. Both sides used the drug for mind-control and interrogation purposes.

To ensure a domestic supply of LSD, the CIA in 1953 signed a $400,000 contract with an American drug company to manufacture and supply the drug. This was done under Subproject 18 of the MK ULTRA program.

The first North American acidheads were psychiatrists, intelligence officers and military personnel themselves. Psychiatrists then turned America on to LSD. They distributed it to subjects in experiments and then used it in “treatment.”

Due to the severe adverse reactions from psychiatric drugs finally becoming a matter of public knowledge, as well as studies proving psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebo, the psychiatric drug lords have now come up with what they are trying to sell as a novel approach — prescribe patients LSD.

The December, 2010 issue of Scientific American contains an article titled “Hallucinogens as Medicine,” suggesting that hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin be used to “treat” smoking, alcohol and drug addiction, depression, and other mental symptoms.

If you would like to write a letter to the editor about this, send it to Scientific American, 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10013-1917.

For more information about LSD click here.

Police Perspective

For every violent murderer reported in the mainstream media as having been “taking medicine for depression,” there are many, many more incidences of violence that never make headlines.

Among the information that 911 dispatchers are trained to gather is the involvement of drugs or alcohol in the situations which are reported to 911. Ask any 911 operator if they have ever taken an emergency call that involved violence and psychiatric drugs and you are likely to get a “yes.”

This week’s Watchdog Radio show guest is Ronald Harvel, Chief of Police in Hurst, Illinois, population 805. Despite the size of his jurisdiction, he has found that the involvement of psychiatric drugs in reports to 911 is significant enough to warrant public concern and discussion.

Click here to get the podcast.