Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis

The newly-forged 1990-page “Affordable Health Care for America Act” (H.R.3962) drafted by the U.S. House of Representatives is filled with mental health provisions intended to prop up psychiatry as well as the pharmaceutical industry with billions in future income.

Key mental health components of this House bill include: The Mothers Act, school based health clinics for mental health screening/treatment of children, mental health parity (psycho/pharma industry billing initiative) and more.

The MOTHERS Act
The bill includes the language of the MOTHERS Act, to “expand treatment for postpartum conditions” and calls for the development of “improved screening and diagnostic techniques,” but makes no provisions to ensure any entities doing such research are free from conflicts of interest or pharmaceutical funding.

For example, Screening for Mental Health, Inc., and its sub-organization Signs of Suicide, who heavily promote and conduct mental health screening, received $4,985,925 from pharmaceutical companies prior to 2008, and ten leading psychiatric researchers have been exposed in the last year for failing to disclose millions of dollars in pharmaceutical payments.

Yet this bill contains no provisions for full disclosure of conflicts of interest for any “entity” that could receive federal taxpayer funded grants, do research or promotional campaigns – such as the provision in the bill calling for a national PR campaign using TV, radio public and other public service announcements to urge women be screened and seek treatment for postpartum depression.

The bill also calls for “clinical research” for the development of new treatments (drugs), but again, no guidelines for ensuring that any researchers/research entities are free from pharmaceutical funding or conflicts of interest. [Section 2529, Page 1418]

Mental Health Parity
The bill mandates Mental Health Parity, or equal insurance coverage for mental disorders as what are covered for physical diseases, whether under their regular health insurance or whether a person gets their new coverage through the Health Insurance Exchange.

Psychiatric patients are traditionally “cured” when their insurance benefits run out. In this bill, those benefits never run out. Considering there are no medical tests to verify the existence of any psychiatric disorder, and without anything other than a psychiatrist’s opinion about whether or not the person’s “illness” is “cured,” this legislation becomes nothing more than taxpayer funded billions to the psycho/pharmaceutical industry who will continue their jihad of mass drugging of Americans.

This provision could easily encompass all 374 diagnoses in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, covering everything from Phase of Life Problem to Arithmetic Disorder.  [Section 214, Page 100]

Home Visitation Programs for Families with Young Children or Families Expecting Children
The bill creates a home visitation program for families with young children or which are expecting children or who have certain “risk factors.” The program provides assessments regarding matters of “age appropriate behaviors,” for children, prevention of family violence and referral to outside services.  [Section 1904, Page 1177]

School Based Health Clinics
The bill includes funding for School Based Health Clinics that will include subjective psychiatric mental health screening (called mental health assessments) of children, and “referral to a continuum of services including emergency psychiatric care, community support programs, inpatient care, and outpatient programs” as part of their “comprehensive primary health services.” This is a direct feeder line for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry directly into our schools. [Section 2511, Page 1352]

Wellness Program Grants for Small Employers
The grants in the bill serve as an incentive for employers to include “mental health” as part of the Wellness Program Grants to businesses. Part of the program entails a “Behavioral Change Component” that encourages “healthy living through counseling” and may include programs relating to “tobacco use, obesity, stress management, depression and mental health.” [Section 112, Page 67]

Federally Qualified Behavioral Health Centers
The bill creates new “Federally Qualified Behavioral Health Centers” and in order for existing community mental health centers to qualify, they have to provide, among other things, “mental health screening, assessment, and diagnosis,” as well as “outpatient clinic mental health services, including screening, assessment, diagnosis, psychotherapy and medication,” in addition to “crisis mental health services including 24-hour mobile crisis teams.”  [Section 2513, Page 1367]

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Your voice needs to be heard in Washington on this outrageous bill. Call, fax, or email your Representative and tell them that you are opposed to the above points in the Health Care Reform bill.

To find your Representative and get their contact information, go to http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt to look them up (you need to enter your zip code). You can also call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

Click here to watch video

featuring G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, a critically acclaimed book about the U.S. Federal Reserve — on Congressman Ron Paul’s “Reading List for a Free and Prosperous America”.

PBS News just reported on how Chinese dissidents, whistleblowers and government petitioners are being labeled “mentally ill,” incarcerated in psychiatric wards and subjected to electroshock — a tactic reminiscent of Soviet Russia and the alliance between psychiatry and the police state.

The marriage of psychiatry with communist/socialist and police state regimes has spanned countries across the globe as an effective means to deal with political dissension. These practices are not limited to Russia, China, Cuba or Uzbekistan, all of which have recently employed similar psychiatric incarceration of citizens for political protest.

In the UK, a specialized unit called the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre has been granted the authority to incarcerate anyone who has given “inappropriate or threatening communications” to a member of government into a psychiatric ward. The assessment teams are made up of police, psychiatrists and psychologists who have been given the authority to evaluate, accuse and detain anyone against threat into a mental facility — indefinitely.

If you think this couldn’t happen in the U.S., think again.

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More than 4 million children in the U.S. alone have been labeled with ADHD and put on drugs documented by the FDA to cause tics, stunted growth, heart attack, stroke and sudden death. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) classifies Ritalin, Concerta and other ADHD drugs in the same class of highly addictive drugs as cocaine, morphine and opium.

Psychiatric drugging of kids is big business. ADHD drugs sales alone generate $3.1 billion a year. Parents need to be informed that not only is the diagnoses of ADHD completely subjective (a child fidgets, stares out the window, forgets his homework and he can be diagnosed ADHD) but that there are non-drug solutions for solving children’s problems of behavior, attention and learning. Parents have a right to this information.

Dr. Mary Ann Block, Medical Director & Founder of the Block Center, and author of No More ADHD is our featured blog/video interview this week: click here .

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Psychiatrist Colin Ross, author of
The CIA Doctors and Military Mind Control exposes the longstanding relationship between the CIA, the military and psychiatry in mind control experiments including the use of LSD, psychiatric drugs, hypnosis, radiation, brain electrode implants and torture—verified through declassified CIA documents. If you think these mind control experiments are a thing of the past, think again.

“My book, The C.I.A. Doctors, is based on 15,000 pages of documents I received from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act and dozens of papers published in medical journals. These papers report the results of research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of the Army, the Office of Naval Research and the CIA.”

To read the rest of this blog article, click here

Doping up our children

(Orlando Sentinel Editorial)

Watch our new video, CCHR: What We Believe

Then read CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights.

Get the facts about “Depression Testing” of kids from a real Insider
—renowned whistleblower, Allen Jones

Click here to watch video

Allen Jones gained international attention and press coverage as a whistleblower after he uncovered pharmaceutical industry payments to government officials for the purpose of implementing a national mental health screening/psychotropic drug treatment plan. In this video interview and blog, Allen describes the pharma funding and psycho/pharma agenda behind mental health “screening” of schoolchildren.

To read the rest of this blog article, click here

Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz’s brainchild, the Living Will, is a document which provides for people of sound mind to reject the imposition of psychiatric treatment should their rights be compromised at any time in their future.

While not legally tested in every country, in 1999 it served to protect the rights of one woman. Soon after a bitter fight with her mother, the young woman suffering from pneumonia, received a knock on her door. An attorney and police officer then forcibly removed her to a nearby psychiatric hospital. Once admitted, she phoned CCHR for help, explaining that she had signed the Living Will a year earlier. CCHR faxed the signed copy of the Will to the hospital authorities and the attorney. The woman was immediately released.

Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment

Should you be in a position where you may be subject to unwanted psychiatric hospitalization and/or mental or medical treatment, you may want to have copies of this signed and notarized declaration available. People who are of sound mind can sign this declaration (sometimes also called an Advance Directive) stating that they do not wish to be incarcerated and/or treated in any psychiatric facility or undergo any enforced psychiatric treatment.

What Circumstances Might Trigger the Need for a Living Will?

Speculation has been occurring about forced vaccination in response to the possibility of a flu epidemic. It may not be farfetched to imagine psychiatric involuntary commitment as a means of enforcement or quarantine.

While CCHR is not involved in the forced vaccination issue, we see it as an opportunity to remind you about the Living Will as a valid response to the general possibility of involuntary commitment or other enforced psychiatric treatment. Every 1¼ minutes, someone in the U.S. becomes the next victim of involuntary incarceration (also called Civil Commitment) in a psychiatric hospital.

Laws vary by state, but generally Emergency Detention is used most often to deprive people of liberty in order to subject them to treatment. Under most state laws it has to be determined that persons are a danger to themselves or others or are “gravely disabled.” Under some laws, however, if you are found walking down the street intoxicated, or if you get into a violent altercation with your neighbor, either would be sufficient cause to be picked up and carted off to a psychiatric hold. Emergency Detention is the fastest and easiest method of commitment; it circumvents the judicial process and deprives the person of nearly all rights. Find out more about Involuntary Commitment from here.

Download the Living Will from here.

The FDA Wants to Declare Electroshock Machines Safe Without a Safety Investigation

TELL THEM NO!

The following newsletter from the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights solicits your attention and follow through. More information about shock treatment is available from the CCHR publication The Brutal Reality: Harmful Psychiatric ‘Treatments’ – report and recommendations on the destructive practices of electroshock and psychosurgery — download it by clicking here.

If individuals wish to report an adverse event associated with the use of an ECT device, please use the MedWatch Online Voluntary Reporting Form available at https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/medwatch/medwatch-online.htm. The FDA will review information submitted through the MedWatch program prior to making any changes to the classification of ECT devices.

The Food and Drug Administration is in charge of regulating medical devices just as it does drugs, including the machines used to give electroshock. But it is not doing its job. It has allowed these machines to be used on millions of patients over the past generation without requiring any evidence whatsoever that shock treatment is safe or effective!

This is so even though shock machines are Class III–high risk–devices, which by law are supposed to be investigated by clinical trials as thoroughly as new drugs and devices just coming onto the market.

But because of intense lobbying by the American Psychiatric Association–which claims the devices are safe but opposes an investigation–the FDA has disregarded its own law.

(For the full story of how shock survivors have fought for a scientific safety investigation of Electroshock for the past 25 years, see Linda Andre’s terrific new book, Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Shock Treatment.)

In April 2009–20 years after it first ruled the devices high-risk and named brain damage and memory loss as risks of the treatment–the FDA belatedly announced it would call on the manufacturers of the devices to provide evidence of safety and efficacy. The deadline for submissions has passed, but the manufacturers have not conducted any clinical trials, claiming they cannot afford them. They simply point to the opinions of shock doctors (including those who have financial interests in companies making electroshock machines) as evidence that shock is safe.

The FDA is now supposed to require electroshock machines to undergo the rigorous PreMarket Approval process (PMA) that is required of new devices, including clinical safety trials. These machines, technically known as “devices,” are referred to as Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT), but this is a euphemistic term for running electricity through people’s brains.

The FDA could have called for this investigation any time in the past 30 years but has previously failed to do so. There is great risk the FDA will down-classify ECT machines to the low-risk Class II, without scientific evidence of its safety.

As a Class II device, electroshock machines would never have to go through the PMA process. The amount of damage that electroshock has been allowed to inflict is an outrage. We now finally have a chance to at least register our opposition because the FDA has opened up a new docket for public comment on electroshock machines. It is important for as many people as possible to write in with their opposition. Comments will be accepted up through January 8, 2010.

If you have personal knowledge or expertise about electroshock, writing about that can be good. Or you can pull information from various sources. Linda Andre’s book, Doctors of Deception is a gold mine of information. Leonard Roy Frank issued the Electroshock Quotationary in June 2006, which is a good source of material, and there is also a brand new web page of historical materials from Leonard at http://psychiatrized.org/LeonardRoyFrank/FromTheFilesOfLeonardRoyFrank.htm Also, PsychRights has quite a large collection of materials at http://psychrights.org/Research/Digest/Electroshock/electroshock.htm from which comments can be drawn.

Read the instructions for docket #FDA-2009-N0392 and submit electronic comments and information to http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#submitComment?R=0900006480a20202.

If you are not in a position to write something up, then please mail in the coupon below.

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