Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

CCHR International’s New
Psychiatric Drug Search Engine
310 International Drug Regulatory Warnings & Studies & 194,000 Adverse psychiatric drug reaction
reports

Psychiatric drugs sales generate $80 billion dollars per year with Big Pharma spending $4.7 billion per year on TV and Print ads, and $1 billion per year on internet advertising.

As a result the number of people worldwide taking psychiatric drugs has skyrocketed to 100 million (20 million of them children) with documented side effects of worsening depression, mania, psychosis, violence, suicidal and homicidal ideation, birth defects, heart attack, stroke and sudden death — to name but a few.

International drug regulatory warnings have increased by 400% in the last 10 years, yet the general public has nowhere to go to find this information online in an easy to search, concise format.

Until now.

CCHR International, the world’s leading mental health watchdog, has created a free public search engine featuring:

• 160 psychiatric drug warnings from international drug regulatory
  agencies
• 151 drug studies from international medical journals
• 194,558 adverse reaction reports on psychiatric drugs filed with the
  FDA between 2004-2008 from doctors, pharmacists, other health care
  providers, consumers and lawyers.

People can search international drug regulatory warnings, or studies, or both. They can search by the brand name of a drug (such as Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin) or by drug class (such as antipsychotic, stimulant, antidepressant, etc.) or by type of side effect or by country issuing the study/warning. All information is summarized and
easy to read.

CCHR International has also decrypted the FDA’s Adverse Drug Reaction reports which include psychiatric drug side effects reported to the FDAs Medwatch program. This lists who reported the side effect (Doctor, Pharmacist, etc.) the side effect of the drug and also the age range.

Any medical term that appears in the search results can be defined simply by double clicking the word, and a small bubble will appear defining the word.

No other mental health watchdog or government agency is offering this service to the public. This is the world’s only searchable online psychiatric drug database containing all international studies, warnings and adverse reaction reports on
psychiatric drugs in existence.

You can try out the new Psychiatric Drug Search Engine here. Help get the word out. The information is free.

http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/

“The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion) [in 2002]. Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.” — Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

US Kids Represent Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

by Evelyn Pringle, Investigative Journalist

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs.

Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.

On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.

In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.

The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as “mood stablizers” and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.

Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://www.truthout.org/1213091

Actions to Take — What concerned citizens should do

1. Fill out the Psychiatric Living Will: follow the steps it recommends toward protecting yourself against enforced psychotropic drugging. Download it from www.cchr.org/education.

2. Use the advance directives: Sign the “Parent’s Exemption Form Prior to Mental Health and Psychological Screening or Counseling” and the “Student Exemption Form Prior to Mental Health and Psychological Screening or Counseling.” Download these from www.cchr.org/education.

3. Promote and distribute the model law for protection against invasive mental health screening and psychotropic drugs. Download “Regulation of the Use of Psychotropic Substances in Children and Teenagers” from www.cchr.org/education.

4. Increase public awareness by distributing CCHR booklets, pamphlets and DVDs, and promoting the CCHR web sites. Go to www.cchr.org/education for more information.

5. Report adverse drug reactions to the FDA at http://www.fda.gov/medwatch/

6. Help victims of human rights abuses by psychiatrists obtain justice. Go to www.cchr.org/education and download the “Chronology of Sample Lawsuits about Psychotropic Drugs.”

by Dr. John Breeding, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses.

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. In Australia, it was recently revealed that psychiatrists had electroshocked 55 toddlers age four and younger. In the UK, three year olds have been brutalized with it. And one of the country’s leading mental health “patients’ rights” groups—the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI)—recently endorsed the use of electroshock on pregnant women. One would wonder why a patients’ rights group would endorse such an obviously harmful procedure if not for the fact that the group has recently been exposed as a major front for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry.

Read the rest of this article by Dr. John Breeding, psychologist, author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses.

For the truth about electroshock click here – CCHRSTL.org.

Newsweek magazine, in the February 8, 2010 issue, has an interesting cover story about antidepressant drugs by Sharon Begley [http://www.newsweek.com/id/232781] with the tag line, “Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a placebo, in fact, they may be worse.”

Here are a few choice quotes from the article:

“[The benefit of antidepressants] is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill — a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.”

Dr. Irving Kirsch, author of a new book, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, is quoted as saying, “The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong.”

“Unfortunately, the serotonin-deficit theory of depression is built on a foundation of tissue paper. … Direct evidence doesn’t exist.”

and

“Maybe it is time to pull back the curtain and see the wizard for what he is. As for Kirsch, he insists that it is important to know that much of the benefit of antidepressants is a placebo effect. If placebos can make people better, then depression can be treated without drugs that come with serious side effects, not to mention costs. Wider recognition that antidepressants are a pharmaceutical version of the emperor’s new clothes, he says, might spur patients to try other treatments.”

If you are taking these drugs, do not stop taking them based on what you read here. You could suffer serious withdrawal symptoms. You should seek the advice and help of a competent medical doctor or practitioner before trying to come off any psychiatric drug.

Prescribed for everything from learning and behavioral problems, bedwetting, juvenile delinquency, aggression, criminality, drug addiction and smoking, to handling the fears and problems of our elderly, antidepressants are among the most widely prescribed drugs on Earth, with fifty-four million worldwide currently on them.

But for many, taking antidepressants comes at a severe cost. For more information about the side effects of psychiatric drugs, go to www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml. Needless to say, allowing yourself to be treated with psychiatric drugs is very risky, since there is very little science to back it up.

According to top experts, the majority of people having mental problems are actually suffering from nonpsychiatric disease that is causing emotional stress. For more information about medical causes of psychiatric symptoms, go to www.cchrstl.org/causes.shtml.

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating psychiatrist Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million. Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote studies supporting CDC’s claims that mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children. His study has long been criticized as fraudulent. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/central-figure-in-cdc-vac_b_494303.html]

Approximately 1.5 million people in the United Kingdom are addicted to prescription or over-the-counter drugs, many of which were legally acquired. In July, the Department of Health launched a review of the problem, after the House of Commons All-Party Group on Drug Misuse called for greater awareness, better doctor training and more treatment options. Although medical guidelines discourage doctors from prescribing benzodiazepine tranquilizers such as Valium for more than four weeks at a time, many patients still become addicted. [http://www.naturalnews.com/028375_painkillers_addiction.html]

The study data from the National Institute of Mental Health’s Sequence Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression, or STAR*D trial, did not report a “real-world” number for remission rate of depressed patients given several different prescriptions trying to find one that “worked.” It’s a number that tells of a “theoretical” remission rate, and it hides the fact that many remitted patients then quickly relapse. [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mad-in-america/201003/fact-checking-the-new-yorker]

GlaxoSmithKline has paid out close to $1 billion to resolve lawsuits involving Paxil since the drug came on the market in 1992, according to a December 14, 2009 Bloomberg report. But the billion dollars does not cover the more than 600 Paxil birth defect cases currently pending in multi-litigation in Pennsylvania.

Click here to read the whole article.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported an obituary March 11 (page A21 in the print edition) for actor Corey Haim, who died March 10 in Los Angeles at the age of 38, apparently from pulmonary congestion.

The article quoted a 2004 interview with Mr. Haim, “After a period in rehab … Mr. Haim was put on prescription drugs. ‘I started on the downers … but one led to two, two led to four, four led to eight, until at the end it was about 85 a day … and that was just the Valium.'”

Other news reports speculate that Mr. Hain’s death may have involved a drug overdose; police reported recovering four prescription drugs in his room. One can also speculate about the damage done by Mr. Haim’s previous use, or abuse, of Valium.

Valium (diazepam) is a psychiatric antianxiety drug, also called a minor tranquilizer, benzodiazepine, or sedative hypnotic.

Daily use of therapeutic doses of benzodiazepines is associated with physical and psychological dependence, and abrupt cessation can lead to severe withdrawal symptoms, including suicide. Withdrawal from drugs like Valium is more prolonged and often more difficult than withdrawal from heroin.

The benzodiazepine’s exact mechanism of action is unknown. Clinically, all benzodiazepines cause a dose-related central nervous system depressant activity varying from mild impairment of task performance to hypnosis.

Unlike medical drugs, which commonly may prevent or cure disease or improve health, psychiatric drugs are only designed to suppress symptoms that return once the drug wears off.

Like illicit drugs, psychiatric drugs provide no more than a temporary escape from problems, unwanted behavior or unpleasant emotions.

Psychiatrists keep on prescribing these drugs in spite of the known problems of addiction and harmful side effects. Today, at least 20 million people worldwide are prescribed these “minor tranquilizers.” Meanwhile, we are facing epidemic levels of citizens hooked on these drugs. In fact, an estimated 60% of people taking antianxiety drugs become addicted and suffer adverse reactions to the drugs, such as extreme anger and hostile behavior.

There is no question that people do experience problems and upsets in life that may result in mental troubles, sometimes very serious. But to say that these can only be treated with dangerous drugs is dishonest, harmful and often deadly. What psychiatric drugs do instead is mask the real cause of problems, often denying one the opportunity to search for workable, effective solutions. While Mr. Haim may have abused prescription drugs, he was also abused by those prescribing those drugs to him.

Everyone is encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit the FDA MedWatch website or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

For more information about psychotropic drugging, watch the Making A Killing video. For more information about psychiatric drug side effects, go to www.cchrstl.org/sideeffects.shtml. For more information about alternatives to psychiatric drugs, go to www.cchrstl.org/causes.shtml.

Green Mental Health Care: The Alternative to Toxic Psychiatric Drugs

(Click to watch video)

An important new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry reveals that fish oil supplements beat mental illness. The study involved 81 people deemed to be at high risk for psychosis. The randomized, placebo-controlled study provided fish oil supplements to half the study subjects for just 12 weeks (the other half received placebo supplements). The results? While 11 people in the placebo group developed a psychotic disorder, only 2 in the fish oil group did.

The study concludes, “[omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids] reduce the risk of progression to psychotic disorder and may offer a safe and efficacious strategy for indicated prevention in young people with subthreshold psychotic states.”

For more information read this article at Natural News.

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights®) announces the unsealing (1/25/2010) of a major Medicaid Fraud lawsuit against psychiatrists, their employers, pharmacies, state officials, and a medical education and publishing company for their roles in submitting fraudulent claims to Medicaid.

(http://psychrights.org/pr/100125MatsutaniUnsealingNR.pdf)

The defendants are:

Osamu H. Matsutani, M.D.
William Hogan, Commissioner Of the Alaska Department Of Health And Social Services
Tammy Sandoval, Director Of The Alaska Office Of Children’s, Services
Steve McComb, Director Of The Alaska Division Of Juvenile Justice
William Streur, Director Of The Alaska Division Of Health Care Services
Juneau Youth Services, Inc.
Providence Health & Services,
Elizabeth Baisi, M.D.
Ruth Dukoff, M.D.
Charter North Star Behavioral Health System
Kerry Ozer, M.D.
Claudia Phillips, M.D.
Southcentral Foundation
Sheila Clark, M.D.
Hugh Starks, M.D.
Lina Judith Bautista, M.D.
Heidi F. Lopez-Coonjohn, M.D.
Robert D. Schults, M.D.
Mark H. Stauffer, M.D.
Ronald A. Martino, M.D.
Irvin Rothrock, M.D.
Jan Kiele, M.D.
Alternatives Community Mental Health Services, D/B/A Denali Family Services
Anchorage Community Mental Health Services
Lucy Curtis, M.D.
Fairbanks Psychiatric And Neurologic Clinic, Pc
Peninsula Community Health Services Of Alaska, Inc.
Bartlett Regional Hospital Foundation, Inc.
Thomson Reuters (Healthcare), Inc.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Safeway, Inc.
Fred Meyer Stores, Inc.

Law Project for Psychiatric Rights v. Matsutani, et al., United States District Court, District of Alaska, Case No. 3:09-cv-0080-TMB.

The lawsuit, which was filed on April 27, 2009, and required to be kept under seal (secret) until now, is brought under the federal False Claims Act, which authorizes private parties to bring fraud actions on behalf of the Government. These cases are also called “whistleblower suits” or “qui tam” actions, and those who file them are entitled to a share in the recovery, if any. Each offending prescription carries a minimum penalty of $5,500.

The Complaint walks through the lack of science supporting the practice and the methods used by the pharmaceutical industry to induce psychiatrists to improperly prescribe these drugs. “Even though the drug companies have been using these methods to induce psychiatrists to prescribe these drugs, it is the psychiatrists’ responsibility to base their decisions on the facts, not drug company marketing,” said Mr. Gottstein, continuing, “the uncritical acceptance of pharmaceutical company hype represents a massive betrayal of trust by the psychiatrists prescribing these drugs to children and youth.”

PsychRights has also developed a streamlined model Qui Tam Complaint for use around the country. See, PsychRights Launches Campaign Against Medicaid Fraud With Model Lawsuit, July 27, 2009. The model Qui Tam Complaint is drafted for former foster youth to bring the lawsuits and receive the whistleblower’s share of the recoverey, but anyone with knowledge of specific offending prescriptions, such as parents and mental health workers, can bring these suits.

Last fall, Mr. Gottstein gave talks at two national conferences, the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA), and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP), where he presented on how to bring and conduct these cases. Mr. Gottstein is also gave a presentation in New York City, February 2nd following oral argument in Lilly v. Gottstein.

Mr. Gottstein indicates a number of these cases are percolating around the country. In one that is not as far along as some others, Ted Chabasinski, a Berkeley, California, lawyer, is seeking a former foster youth as a client to bring such a lawsuit in the Bay Area. Any former foster youth in the Bay Area who was given psychiatric drugs within the last 6 years can call Mr. Chabasinski at (510) 843-6372 to talk to him about bringing such a case. “Foster children are singled out for psychiatric drugging because they and their foster parents have almost no legal protections and no way they can refuse these damaging drugs,” says Mr. Chabasinski, who as a foster child, was electroshocked at the age of six as part of an experiment involving hundreds of foster children.

While PsychRights and Mr. Chabasinski are not bringing these cases for the money, such cases represent a tremendous financial opportunity for attorneys to do well by doing good.

“These are about as open and shut as cases can get,” said Mr. Gottstein, “it is Medicaid fraud to cause or submit prescriptions to Medicaid for reimbursement if they are not for a medically accepted indication. End of story.” PsychRights has developed a Medically Accepted Indications Chart showing what is allowable for common psychiatric drugs. Every other use of these drugs in children and youth and submitted to Medicaid is fraudulent. PsychRights conservatively estimates that at least half of psychotropic drug prescriptions to children and youth submitted to Medicaid are not for medically accepted indications and therefore fraudulent.

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

TOURING EXHIBIT TARGETS PSYCHIATRY AS AN “INDUSTRY OF DEATH”

With public distrust of psychiatry mounting—and government agency warnings about psychiatric drugs at an all-time high—a new exhibit in St. Louis, Missouri shows that it could get much worse.

Denouncing the facts that internationally more than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions, and every month psychiatric drugs kill an estimated 3,000 people worldwide, the St. Louis Chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)is launching the Grand Opening of “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” international touring exhibition and documentaries.

You are invited to hear the featured Keynote Speaker, Mr. William Garrett, Vice President for Information and Public Contact at Applied Scholastics International in Spanish Lake, Missouri, officially open the exhibit at 2:30 PM on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at Jamestown Mall in Florissant, Missouri.

The exhibit features display panels that incorporate audio-visual presentations depicting human rights abuses by psychiatry, and carry statements from health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities. The exhibit also addresses a federal plan that would screen the state’s children for “mental illness” that could lead to a threefold increase in the number of children being subjected to the devastating effects of psychotropic drugs.

The exhibit exposes psychiatry as an industry driven entirely by profit. 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 gun-toting teens today going on shooting sprees, and how millions of federal dollars allocated to screen all 52 million American schoolchildren could increase both child deaths and acts of school violence. People touring the exhibit can sign a petition opposing funding and implementation of mental health screening in schools.

“The touring exhibit shows psychiatry’s deadly ‘treatments’ in graphic detail,” warns CCHR St. Louis chapter spokesperson, Moritz Farbstein, who listed out psychosurgery, shock treatment, deadly restraint and the prevalent inhumane conditions of psychiatric facilities, and the forced drugging of children as young as six months old. “Most importantly, though, this exhibit provides practical guidance for lawmakers, educators, doctors, human rights advocates and private citizens so they can take action in their own spheres to bring psychiatry to account for their abuses.”

The touring “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” exhibit theme is patterned after a permanent museum by the same name at the Los Angeles headquarters of Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a psychiatric watchdog group with 300 chapters worldwide. Co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, CCHR investigates and exposes psychiatric violations of human rights.

Mr. Farbstein said, “Our exhibit shows very clearly how, in the name of ‘help,’ psychiatry, in fact, destroys lives.”

A sampling of current statistics and facts shown in the exhibit bears this out:

• 20 million children worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs, including 9 million in the United States, which can cause suicide, hostility, violence, mania, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes and death.
• Antipsychotic drug prescriptions for children increased fivefold between 1993 and 2002 in the United States, during which time 45 children died from the drugs.
• In recent years, stimulant drugs have caused 19 child deaths, although as only 1% to 10% of drug adverse reactions are reported, the death toll from children taking antipsychotic drugs, stimulants and antidepressants could be as high as 15,000.
• 10% of American teens (2.3 million) are abusing psychiatric stimulants.
• More than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions around the world.
• Psychiatrists are using electroshock, drugs and other barbaric means to torture political dissidents.
• Internationally, psychiatrists kill up to 10,000 people each year with their use of electroshock—460 volts of electricity sent searing through the brain. Three-quarters of all electroshock victims are women.
• Psychiatrists and psychologists have raped 250,000 women. Studies show that 10 to 25 percent of psychiatrists sexually assault their patients; of every 20 of these victims one is likely to be a minor.