Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

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.

A recently published study [“National trends in psychotropic medication polypharmacy in office-based psychiatry”, Mojtabai and Olfson, Archives of General Psychiatry 2010 Jan;67(1):26-36] investigated patterns and trends in what is known as psychotropic polypharmacy, meaning the prescribing of two or more psychiatric drugs to be taken at the same time.

The study concludes that, “There has been a recent significant increase in polypharmacy involving antidepressant and antipsychotic medications. While some of these combinations are supported by clinical trials, many are of unproven efficacy. These trends put patients at increased risk of drug-drug interactions with uncertain gains for quality of care and clinical outcomes.”

In other words, drugs are being given to patients in all sorts of combinations without sound science showing they even work well together, much less that these drug cocktails are safe to take. In fact, the researchers point out specific dangers of taking multiple psychiatric drugs.

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

The Insane Bloat of the Missouri Department of Mental Health Budget from 1971 to 2009 – now over $1.2 Billion

Vital Statistics – Order of Magnitude:

1. Every 12 seconds another child takes drugs for the first time. Every 20 seconds a child in the U.S. takes an antidepressant so dangerous that the FDA has issued its strongest “black box” warning, alerting the public that these drugs can cause suicidal thoughts and actions.

2. 20 million children worldwide take psychiatric drugs daily, 9 million of those in the U.S. These drugs potentially cause violent behavior, psychosis, hallucinations, strokes, heart attacks, obesity, life-threatening diabetes and even suicide.

3. Psychiatric drugs do not improve academic performance. The National Institutes of Health reports “there is little improvement in academic achievement or social skills” by children taking stimulant drugs.

4. 628,000 violent crimes occur every year in our schools.

5. $600 billion is generated by the legal and illegal drug trades.

6. 100,000 deaths occur in psychiatric facilities each year.

7. Over 100 million people worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs right now.

8. Psychiatric drugs can cause serious adverse reactions.

9. Every 75 seconds another citizen is incarcerated by psychiatry.

10. Every month psychiatric drugs kill an estimated 3,000 people worldwide.

11. Today, an estimated 70 percent of all psychiatric drugs are prescribed by general physicians.

12. Pharmaceutical companies have expanded their roster of psychiatric drugs from 44 in 1966 to 174 today.

13. The top five psychiatric drugs combined gross more money than the gross national product of each of over half the countries on Earth.

14. Altogether, the psychiatric industry rakes in a third of a trillion dollars a year.

15. Studies show that as many as 20 percent of psychiatrists have sex with patients. One of every 20 of their victims is a minor.

What will it truly take to halt psychiatric fraud and abuse?

[Opinion – Editorial]

* Giving more tax dollars to the Department of Mental Health merely perpetuates the cycle of state tax largesse. Curtailing and cutting the budget will force the Department of Mental Health to reduce their costs, thereby forcing useless and unnecessary state institutions either to improve their services or close shop.

* A budget cut will force the Department of Mental Health to re-evaluate all citizens held in state custody and thus force the Department to recommend release of those who are no longer deemed a threat to the body politic thus saving the state more money. It is an obvious fact that the more patients, residents and clients the Department must care for, the more tax money they can ask for.

* Those citizens who are no longer deemed a threat need to be unconditionally released. This will allow these citizens to return to their families and to make the readjustment back into a tax paying citizen.

* Increasing the Department of Mental Health’s budget covers expensive and debatable psychiatric drugs as necessary medical costs. Many international warnings have been issued on the harmful side effects of various psychiatric drugs, which include suicide, violence, addiction, liver damage, and heart attacks.

* The state is not primarily responsible for a person’s entire life, thus the Department of Mental Health is not responsible for a citizen’s entire life. Some citizens need to be cared for but the primary responsibility lies first with the individual, then his family, then his religious affiliation, then the state government and finally the federal government.

* The Department of Mental Health is also an easy place to cut spending in the long, difficult effort to save our health-care system, as the citizens of this state have long used the Department of Mental health as an emergency health care provider. The unprecedented use of Missouri’s Mental Health psychiatric facilities as emergency health care has hidden a long overlooked problem that the state’s poorer citizens are enduring.

* It may be time to consider the idea of folding the Department of Mental Health into the Department of Health and Senior Services; to restructure the Department of Mental Health and allow the new system to provide emergency medical services to this state’s poorer citizens.

* The Department of Mental Health’s motto should be “We care for those who cannot care for themselves”; not “We want to care for all”.

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 the U.S.

1 February – 28 February 2010, Jamestown Mall, Florissant, MO

8-9 February 2010, Missouri State Capitol Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO

19-21 February 2010, 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 185-foot, state-of-the-art exhibit, which is being shown internationally in more than 30 countries, features 15 display panels that incorporate audio-visual presentations depicting 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:

1 February – 28 February, Jamestown Mall, Florissant, MO (Mon-Sat: 10am-9pm; Sun: Noon-5pm)

8-9 February,  Missouri State Capitol Building Rotunda, Jefferson City, MO (7am-5:30pm)

19-21 February, St. Charles Convention Center – Working Women’s Survival Show (Friday 11am-8pm; Saturday 10am-8pm; Sunday 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 at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, and has successfully achieved hundreds of legislative protections against psychiatric abuse.

According to information leaked to the press, ten different drugs, including various psychiatric drugs, were found in pill bottles next to the bed of actress Brittany Murphy following her death.

• Topamax (anti-seizure)
• Methylprednisolone (anti-inflammatory)
• Fluoxetine (antidepressant, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor)
• Klonopin (anti-anxiety)
• Carbamazepine (bipolar drug)
• Ativan (anti-anxiety)
• Vicoprofen (pain reliever)
• Propranolol (hypertension drug)
• Biaxin (an antibiotic)
• Hydrocodone (pain medication)

According to the Drug Interaction Checker at

http://www.medscape.com/druginfo/druginterchecker

severe interactions (adverse side effects) may occur between Carbamazepine and Biaxin, and between Klonopin and Fluoxetine. Moderate interactions may occur between Vicoprofen and Propranolol; between Carbamazepine and Fluoxetine; and between Fluoxetine and Vicoprofen.

When multiple drugs are administered at the same time, the incidence of adverse drug interactions rises exponentially. Not only do individual psychiatric drugs have the potential for severe side effects such as suicide, but also these various drugs in combination escalate the potential for adverse drug interactions.

What can be done about this?

• Coroners must test for the presence of psychiatric drugs.

• State legislatures must establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.

• Report adverse drug side effects to the Food & Drug Administration’s MedWatch program (http://www.fda.gov/medwatch/).

New research exposes the fraud: depression would be better treated with alternatives to antidepressant drugs, which do not help patients much more than an inactive placebo. [“Antidepressant Drug Effects and Depression Severity”, JAMA. 2010;303(1):47-53]

“They would have done just as well or just about as well with a placebo,” said Robert DeRubeis, one of the study authors and a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

The study’s conclusion states that, “The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo … may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.”

While the study suggests that antidepressants help the symptoms of major depression, one has to ask what that “help” entails. Antidepressant drugs are a chemical straight-jacket, temporarily interfering with normal body processes enough to give an impression of symptomatic relief. Like banging your thumb with a hammer to cure a headache, the pain in the head pales in comparison to the pain in the hand; for a short period, the headache is apparently gone.

Antidepressants can have a “damping down” effect. They suppress the physical feelings associated with “depression” but they are not alleviating the condition or targeting what is causing it. The drugs break into the routine rhythmic flows and activities of the nervous system. The human body, however, is unmatched in its ability to withstand and respond to such disruptions. The various systems fight back, trying to process the chemical, and work diligently to counterbalance its effect on the body. But the body can only take so much. Quickly or slowly, the systems break down. Tissue damage may occur. Nerves stop functioning normally. Organs and hormonal systems go awry. This can be temporary, but it can also be long lasting, even permanent. Like a car run on rocket fuel, you may be able to get it to run a thousand miles an hour, but the tires, the internal parts, were never meant for this. The machine flies apart.

Bizarre things happen: worsening depression, addiction, exhaustion, diminished sexual desire, trembling, nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety, panic, psychosis, heart attack, irritability, violence, aggression, suicide. Side effects are, in fact, the body’s natural response to having a chemical disrupt its normal functioning. Once the drug has worn off, the original problem remains. As a solution or cure to life’s problems, antidepressants do not work.

Why then use an antidepressant which has the potential for virulent side effects, when non-drug alternatives work just as well or better?

The only answer is drug company profits. More than 164 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in 2008, totaling nearly $10 billion in U.S. sales.

For more information, read the booklet “What is the Alternative to Psychiatric Drugs” available for download from www.CCHRSTL.org.

[see also http://video.foxnews.com/v/3961682/do-anti-depressants-really-work/?playlist_id=87249]