Posts Tagged ‘Abuse’

White Paper on Improving Psychiatric Patient Outcomes

Monday, July 3rd, 2023

Reference:
WHITE PAPER on Improving Patient Outcomes, Addressing Treatment Caused Trauma & Injuries, Enhancing Patient Rights, and Grievance Procedures for the Report Required by § 36 of CH 41 SLA 2022 (HB172)
by James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq.; Faith Myers; Susan Musante, LPCC; David Cohen, PhD; Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD; David Healy, MD; The International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry
April 2023, Addenda May 2023
Anchorage, Alaska

[Note: Full references and citations are provided in the original White Paper.]

On July 15, 2022, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed HB172 into law which requires the Department of Health, Department of Family and Community Services, and the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority to report on, among other things, improving psychiatric patient outcomes, institutional trauma, enhancing patient rights, the grievance process, and patient injuries.

The Legislation was enacted to comply with a settlement over a successful lawsuit brought against the State of Alaska for illegally confining people for extended periods of time in correctional facilities and emergency rooms awaiting admission to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute for court ordered psychiatric evaluations.

This White Paper provides input for the required Report to the Legislature, focusing on improving patient outcomes, enhancing patient rights, having an effective and legitimate grievance process, and addressing patient injuries and treatment-caused trauma.

Executive Summary of the White Paper

If the fundamental purpose of the mental health system is to improve the lives of psychiatric patients it is failing miserably. That the State does not keep track of institutional trauma and patient complaints, and has no legitimate grievance process are illustrations of the lack of commitment to improving patients’ lives.

The mental health system’s standard treatments are counterproductive and harmful, and often forced on unwilling patients. The overreliance on psychiatric drugs is reducing the recovery rate of people diagnosed with serious mental illness and reducing their life spans. Psychiatric incarceration, euphemistically called “involuntary commitment,” is similarly counterproductive and harmful, adding to patients’ trauma and massively associated with suicides. Harmful psychiatric interventions are being imposed on people by judges in proceedings where the facts about treatments and their harms are not being presented by appointed counsel, rendering the proceedings shams.

Court proceedings to psychiatrically incarcerate people on the grounds it is necessary to protect other people from harm should be eliminated; predictions of violence are not accurate and no one else besides someone who receives a psychiatric diagnosis is incarcerated for something they might do in the future. Court proceedings to psychiatrically drug people against their will on the grounds it is in their best interest should be eliminated. They are not in people’s best interest if unwanted. “If it is not voluntary it is not treatment.” If such proceedings are nonetheless held, they should be conducted in a legitimate manner.

The most important elements for improving patients’ lives are People, Place and Purpose. People—even psychiatric patients—need to have a safe place to live (Place), relationships (People), and to have activity that is meaningful to them, usually school or work (Purpose). People need to be given hope these are possible. Voluntary approaches that improve people’s lives should be made available instead of the currently prevailing counterproductive and harmful psychiatric drugs for everyone, forever regime often forced on people. The White Paper lists at least 8 successful non-drug treatment programs that already exist for people experiencing mental distress. Brutal incarceration and coercive psychiatry is not the only option.

By implementing these approaches, Alaska’s mental health system can improve the recovery rate. As bad as it is for adults, the psychiatric incarceration and psychiatric drugging of children and youth is even more tragic and should be stopped. Instead, children and youth should be helped to manage their emotions and become successful, and their parents should be given support and assistance to achieve this.

What Is Your Emotional Intelligence?

Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

We notice continuing discussions in social media about “emotional intelligence”, although with few successful attempts to actually nail it down.

It used to simply be called “maturity.” Attempts by psychiatry and psychology to dissect it make it more complicated and subject to argument about what it really is. We thought we’d like to weigh in on the discussion, and relate it to psychiatric fraud and abuse.

Some definitions:
[These are not all the possible definitions, but are useful ones.]

Emotional: Relating to a state of feelings or sensations created or experienced by an individual or a body; the physical, mental and spiritual state of an individual manifested as a gradient scale of an individual’s state of being.
[From Latin emov?re to remove, displace, from e– + mov?re to move.]

Intelligence: The ability to perceive, pose and resolve problems; the ability to recognize differences, similarities and identities, and evaluate relative importances.
[From Latin intellegere, to understand.]

Maturity: Relating to a condition of full growth or development; behaving in a sensible way; well-balanced in personality and emotional behavior.
[From Latin maturus, ripe.]

We take the term “Emotional Intelligence” to mean the ability to use one’s emotions intelligently and appropriately in different situations.

Some psychiatrists and psychologists relate emotional intelligence to mental health disorders. Witness the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which describes numerous fraudulent diagnoses for which they can prescribe any number of harmful, mind-altering psychiatric drugs. [The purpose of which is to be able to bill insurance for counseling or drugs for any of these diagnoses.] Here are some of those absurd DSM diagnoses:

— Adjustment disorder, With mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct
— High expressed emotion level within family
— Borderline intellectual functioning
— Intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
— Disinhibited social engagement disorder

This over-complication of an essentially simple concept leads to endless speculation, the wasted funds for hundreds of research papers, and no end of descriptions about its components and what to do about it.

There is one very simple way to learn to be more emotionally intelligent — by learning to identify the emotions one is feeling as well as understanding them. You won’t learn this, however, from a psychiatrist.

Take Action – Missouri Legislature

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Psychiatry’s Attack on 1st Responders

A “1st Responder” is typically a person with specialized training who is among the first to arrive and provide assistance or incident resolution at the scene of an emergency such as an accident, fire, or other rescue or Emergency Medical Service situation. First Responders typically include law enforcement officers, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and firefighters.

This session of the Missouri Legislature has several bills demonstrating the psychiatric industry’s attempts to make First Responders a new patient category.

Why Is This Bad?

We all support First Responders, and are particularly grateful for their training and services. We also recognize that they can be subject to many stresses on their jobs; stresses which may compromise their good mental health. Mental health care is thus 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.

The issue is that, while these bills may have some helpful provisions for First Responders, they also serve to funnel First Responders into the psychiatric mental health “care” system, where they will likely be prescribed harmful, mind-altering psychotropic drugs and other harmful psychiatric “treatments.” Read the text of the bills to see how this can be, and urge your Missouri state legislators to reject these bills in their current form.

The Missouri Legislature

Periodically we let you know the progress of various proposed legislation making its way through the Missouri General Assembly and suggest ways for you to contribute your viewpoint to your state Representative and state Senator.

The Missouri General Assembly is the state legislature of the State of Missouri and is composed of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The General Assembly is responsible for creating laws for governing the State of Missouri. The Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) are electronically available on this site:  http://revisor.mo.gov/.

You can find your Representative and Senator, and their contact information, by entering your 9-digit zip code here.

The 2023 Regular Session (102nd General Assembly, 1st Regular Session) convened on Wednesday, January 4, 2023, and will end on Friday, May 12, 2023. You can see the House Bills (HB) by clicking here; and the Senate Bills (SB) are listed here.

If you are not a voting resident of Missouri, you can find out about legislation in your own state and write your own state legislators; also, we are looking for volunteers to monitor legislation in Missouri and the states surrounding Missouri — let us know if you’d like to help out.

Check out our handy discussion about How to write to a legislator.

We Urge You To Contact Your Legislators To Express Your Own Viewpoints.

We’d like to describe some bills about which we’d particularly like you to contact your legislators. Please write, call or visit to express your viewpoint as an individual or professional, and not as a representative of any organization. Let us know the details and any responses you get. The full text of each bill can be found on the House and Senate Joint Bill Tracking site. Just put the bill number into the search box (e.g. SB123 or HB123).

Four Very Very Bad Bills

SB24 Creates the “Missouri First Responder Mental Health Initiative Act”, promoting First Responder access to psychiatric behavioral health care services.
Sponsor: Senator Lincoln Hough (Republican, District 30, Part of Greene County)

SB654 Establishes a pilot program for certain medical services for veterans and other first responders. It promotes transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for veterans, first responders, and law enforcement officers. Physically intrusive and damaging practices such as TMS create the appearance of scientific progress, but in the end, psychiatry is no closer to identifying any causes or effecting any cures.
Sponsor: Senator Bill Eigel (Republican, District 23, Part of St. Charles County)

HB539 Creates the “Missouri First Responder Mental Health Initiative Act”. This is similar to SB24, promoting First Responder access to psychiatric behavioral health care services.
Sponsor: Representative Adam Schwadron (Republican, District 105, St. Charles County)

HB1274 Creates new provisions relating to occupational diseases diagnosed in first responders, defining certain psychiatric diagnoses as an “occupational disease.”
Sponsor: Representative Anthony Ealy (Democrat, District 036, Jackson County)

Summary

The real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior 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.

Psychiatrists in Brussels Prescribing Museum Visits

Monday, October 31st, 2022

Psychiatrists at Brugmann University Hospital in Brussels, Belgium will be able to write a “museum prescription” that encourages patients and their friends and family to visit one or more of Brussels’ cultural institutions.

The initiative is a six-month pilot program starting in September, 2022 to evaluate the impact of cultural institutions on mental health and well-being. This is the latest in a number of studies and initiatives that correlate mental health with the experience of art.

“Art museums have great potential to positively impact people, including reducing their stress, enhancing positive emotional experiences, and helping people to feel less lonely and more connected,” said Katherine Cotter, Postdoctoral Fellow, Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

What Is Art?

Art is a word which summarizes the quality of communication. If art speaks to you, it has achieved its purpose in communicating a message. What does art say? In the first place art produces an emotional impact.

Art is not just observed. The observer contributes back to the art — one contributes one’s own interpretations, emotions, or motions; one discusses it with others. Thus art is a curative for loneliness, which is simply a lack of communication.

The Psychiatric Connection

The highest level of spiritual sensation is aesthetics, and beauty is a consideration of aesthetics. Unfortunately, psychiatry denies the beauty in all of us.

Psychiatry and psychology have a long history of attacking creativity and artists. For years, psychiatrists and psychologists have labeled the creative mind as a mental “disorder,” mischaracterizing an artist’s “feverish brilliance” as a manic phase of craziness, or melancholic performances as depression. Vision was redefined as hallucination.

Psychiatrists notoriously and falsely “diagnosed” the creative mind as a “mental disorder,” invalidating the artist’s abilities as “neurosis.” They lectured on the supposedly thin line dividing madness and sanity.

This current effort to promote art for the rehabilitation of mental trauma is welcome indeed. One must, however, be vigilant that traditional biological psychiatry does not usurp and corrupt this healing method as they have done in the past.

Recommendation

People in desperate circumstances must be provided proper and effective care. Sound medical (not psychiatric) attention, good nutrition, a healthy, safe environment, and opportunities for participation in aesthetics will do far more for a troubled person than the normal psychiatric “treatments” of repeated drugging, electroshocks and other psychiatric abuses.

Is That Adderall There Is?

Monday, May 9th, 2022

The Wall Street Journal (April 28, 2022) wrote “Some of the nation’s largest pharmacies have blocked or delayed prescriptions over the last year from clinicians working for telehealth startups that have sprung up to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,” over concerns that too many prescriptions are being written for Adderall and other stimulants and benzodiazepines, suggesting that the drugs are being abused or being fraudulently prescribed from a 30-minute telephone or online interview. Adderall is classified as a Schedule II controlled substance due to its potential for abuse.

Adderall is a psychostimulant of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine that has been linked to suicide and violent behavior and can be habit-forming. The FDA requires stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall to carry a boxed warning that states the drug is “a federally controlled substance because it can be abused or lead to dependence.”

Approximately 15 million Americans are getting high on prescription drugs, painkillers and psychiatric drugs such as Xanax and the stimulants Ritalin and Adderall. A growing number of teens and young adults are overdosing on the abuse of these “mental health” drugs.

Adderall and other psychostimulants generally increase dopamine levels in the brain by a variety of mechanisms. The body must strictly regulate dopamine levels since both an excess and a deficiency can be problematic. Thus drugs which mess with dopamine are playing Russian Roulette with your brain.

Psychiatrists have known since the beginning of psychopharmacology that their drugs do not cure any disease. Further, there is no credible evidence that mental health is linked to dopamine transport; this is just a public relations theory to support the marketing and sale of drugs. The manufacturers of every such drug state in the fine print that they don’t really understand how it works. These drugs are fraudulently marketed as safe and effective for the sole purpose of earning billions for the psychiatric industry.

These drugs mask the real cause of problems in life and debilitate the individual, so denying him or her the opportunity for real recovery and hope for the future. This is the real reason why psychiatry is a violation of human rights. Psychiatric treatment is not just a failure — it is routinely destructive to the individual and one’s mental health.

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable. 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. Psychiatry is not workable.

Alien Mind Wipe

Missouri Psychiatrist’s License Revoked

Monday, December 6th, 2021

Missouri Medical Board Revokes License of Psychiatrist Gerald Slonka Based on Controlled Substance Violations

On April 26, 2021, the Missouri State Board of Registration for the Healing Arts ordered that the medical license of Parkville [Kansas City Metropolitan Area] psychiatrist Gerald F. Slonka be revoked. Prior to the revocation, suspensions of his license had been ordered in 2016, 2017, and 2018 for failure to file or pay state taxes.

The current revocation order was based on Slonka’s violation of various drug laws and regulations.

He unlawfully possessed controlled substances not prescribed to him; failed to use an appropriate form or sign a digital order when taking possession of and distributing schedule II controlled substances; and failed to maintain proper records, receipt and/or inventory of the controlled substances he possessed and distributed.

In addition, he did not maintain a controlled substance administration and dispensing log separate from patients’ charts, and failed to provide adequate controls to detect and prevent the diversion of controlled substances into unauthorized channels.

The Board found the discipline imposed necessary to protect the public.

[Source: Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Order of Revocation in Default, Case No. 2018-003364, Missouri State Board of Registration for the Healing Arts v. Gerald F. Slonka, M.D., April 26, 2021.]

Crime and Fraud in the Mental Health Industry

A prison term or revoked license has not always stopped a psychiatrist from later attempting to acquire a license elsewhere or even to take up unlicensed practice or practice in a sector of the healing arts that is not regulated.

For this reason, Citizens Commission on Human Rights exposes people in the mental health industry who have been criminally charged, convicted and/or sentenced as well as those who have been investigated and charged by state health care licensing boards.

To report psychiatric fraud or abuse, fill out and submit the form here:
https://www.cchr.org/take-action/report-psychiatric-abuse.html

To file a Complaint about a psychiatrist in Missouri, fill out and submit the form here:
https://pr.mo.gov/healingarts-complaint-forms.asp

To file a Complaint about a psychiatrist in other states, go here:
https://www.psychsearch.net/complaints/

Arrest Warrant

CCHR Notifies Electroshock Hospitals On The Failure To Inform Patients Of Risks

Monday, November 1st, 2021

Watchdog says electroshock must be banned, but until this occurs, hospitals are being notified that omitting patient information of how electroshock treatment causes brain-damage and memory loss may constitute consumer fraud.

Until ECT is banned, CCHR intends to investigate and monitor precisely what information is provided to potential ECT patients and their families by electroshock-hospitals, so that such information may be available to regulatory entities and legal counsel for the those harmed by this practice.

CCHR is writing to the more than 400 psychiatric facilities in the U.S. delivering ECT alerting them to the recognized risks that patients must be informed of to protect them and to avoid consumer fraud action being taken against the hospital and psychiatrists administering ECT. As part of a worldwide movement that wants electroshock permanently banned, until this occurs, every known risk of the damaging practice must be disclosed along with all safer, non-physically invasive alternatives that are available.

CCHR’s review of hospital websites offering ECT and electroshock informed consent forms, shows grossly inadequate information, which is misleading to patients. At a time when mental health is so prevalent in the news, better information must be disclosed until this brain-damaging procedure is banned.

Example: Approximately 150,000 people get ECT every year in the US, with 2,000 shock treatments being done every year by Washington University in St. Louis psychiatrists at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, who still claim that this abusive treatment is safe and effective in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary. When psychiatrists say ECT is “effective”, they mean the patient feels less depressed; of course, the patient doesn’t feel much of anything anymore, good or bad. In fact, what ECT really does is similar to smacking your thumb with a hammer, making it seem that no other problem is important. (Of course, they give you a general anesthetic to suppress the pain. The body still feels it; shocking, isn’t it?)

So why do they still perform ECT? Because they charge up to $2500 per session; and if you are on Medicare you are a prime candidate for this barbaric “treatment.”

The bottom line is that electroshock should be banned and because, arguably, its use constitutes assault and battery — certainly from a patient’s perspective. It does not belong in any mental health system.

Take Action

ECT is a brutal practice and people should sign CCHR’s online petition supporting a ban.

Epes Tut Zikh (Something Is Happening)

Monday, September 20th, 2021

The Yiddish idiom “epes tut zikh” (????? ??? ???) loosely translates to “something is happening”. It expresses the idea that one does not know the reason for whatever is happening. For example, being stuck in traffic without knowing why is “epes tut zikh.”

Things are happening today on many fronts with no discernible reasons to explain exactly why.

Now, the physical Universe in which we live is unthinking, and there are no “reasons” for things that happen solely in the physical Universe, in the sense that the Universe has “thought” about it with some purpose.

However, living beings do think and have purposes, and so can have (but do not have to have) a reason for doing something.

When we look around we see any number of events and situations with no clearly discernible reasons. If there are reasons, they might be considered hidden. Or in many cases, there are so many possible reasons that no one can agree on them, provoking constant and debilitating argumentation.

If one actually knew all the true reasons for some unwanted event or situation, it could theoretically be terminatedly handled. Whenever such an event or situation occurs which persists and resists being handled, the true reasons are generally widely unknown or unacknowledged; and speculation, gossip, and arguments predominate.

Examples:

Antisemitism
Random senseless violence
School shootings
Motiveless and unpredictable suicide
Racism
War
Terrorism
Religious intolerance
Sexual discrimination
Pandemic outbreak

It is to the advantage of certain professions to let, or even encourage, this kind of negative situation to persist. This is called “the dangerous environment,” in which it is thought that one’s livelihood would be compromised or endangered if the situation were to be totally handled.

This includes professions which require a dangerous environment for their continued existence, because they make their living off of it — such as the politician, the policeman, the newspaperman, the insurance salesman, the undertaker, the terrorist, the psychiatrist, and others.

Why Does psychiatry Persist?

Since 1969 CCHR has documented and exposed the failures, fraud and abuse of psychiatry; yet psychiatry persists in its relentless quest to harm as many people as it can.

“So, why is the truth of psychiatry’s consistent record of getting it wrong and doing damage not setting society free to toss psychiatry on the garbage heap of history?”
[10 Reasons Why Psychiatry Lives On, by Bruce Levine, PhD]

“How is it that governments keep investing billions of dollars into psychiatry—known within the mental health system as a “non-science”—to improve conditions it admits it cannot cure?”
[“Why Psychiatry Sees Itself As A Dying Industry“]

These references highlight many of the hidden reasons psychiatry continues its fraudulent and abusive practices. Underlying these is a common human failing — the inability to confront evil.

Evil takes a bit of confronting. One must start with observation and education. The information is there; the reasons are there; we’ve pointed you to it. Find Out! Fight Back!

Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.
Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.

Putting Profit Above Children’s Lives

Monday, August 30th, 2021

The child mental health industry is a system that puts profit above children’s lives, preying on unsuspecting parents and taking advantage of disadvantaged children, such as those covered under Medicaid (state and federal health coverage for lower income families and those with disabilities). It is rife with abuse, yet this hugely profitable industry is rarely held to account for its rampant abuse of our most vulnerable—children.

It is an industry which milks the foster care system for huge profit, where children are four times more likely to be given mind-altering psychotropic drugs than non-foster care children, and much more likely to be prescribed cocktails of these drugs.

It is an industry that electroshocks children including babies, using state funds for lower income families (Medicaid).

It is a business masquerading as healthcare which sells parents and legislators on the idea of helping troubled children. Yet this help is more often simply incarcerating children in behavioral schools or psychiatric wards, where treatment consists of psychiatric drug cocktails, degradation, solitary confinement, and brutal restraint procedures which have killed children. And all of this is done under the guise of helping children.

The abuse is not limited to one chain of psychiatric facilities or one mode of psychiatric behavioral “treatment.” This abuse in the child mental health industry is systemic—yet unknown to most of the public.

For example: Information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveals that 19 states are currently administering electroshock to children, with 7 of those states electroshocking children aged 0-5 years old. These are all children being electroshocked while psychiatrists and facilities bill Medicaid for their “treatment.”

Yet another example — Only one month after the world witnessed the tragic death of George Floyd, unable to breathe as he was physically restrained and held to the ground, 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick, an African American, was physically restrained at Sequel Youth & Family Services’ facility in Michigan, and also cried out, “I can’t breathe!” before passing out. Thirty hours later, on May 1, 2020, he was dead. Cornelius had gone into cardiac arrest while being restrained by Lakeside Academy staff, a residential psychiatric facility that treated foster care and other kids with behavioral issues. A witness to Cornelius’s restraint said, “[T]his kid threw a sandwich. He was being unruly and they couldn’t control him. So, four guys…the size of rugby players tackled him.”

Cornelius is not alone; countless children have suffocated and died after being subjected to deadly restraints within these psychiatric facilities and behavioral treatment centers.

This is not healthcare. This is child abuse. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Please help us to support the cause and end the abuse of children in the psychiatric industry. We are making incredible progress, as many of the psychiatric facilities abusing these children are now under investigation. And many state legislators want to put an end to this abuse. There is more to be done, and so we ask you to continue to support our Fight For Kids campaign. Please support the cause and also watch our latest video here.

For more information, visit our Child Psychiatric Treatment page here.

Childhood Is Not A Mental Disorder

Britney Spears’ Conservatorship Challenge

Monday, August 9th, 2021

[Condensed from Jan Eastgate, President, CCHR International]

The pop icon’s traumatic story of being held captive by a punitive guardianship law, with abusive psychiatric evaluations and forced mood-altering drugs, has prompted legislators to act. But proposed laws, while applaudable, fall short on needed protections.

Conservatorships, which place guardians over the control of a person’s life when deemed incompetent, are often based on a subjective psychiatric evaluation. As such, while it is very easy for someone to be placed under a conservatorship order because of a psychiatric diagnosis, it’s very hard to get out of one. The diagnosis is stigmatizing and is hard to disprove because of its subjectivity. It can also expand over the years, especially where there may be deterioration in the individual from powerful psychotropic drugs prescribed to them.

The late professor of psychiatry and co-founder of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) Dr. Thomas Szasz, warned against state intervention that allows psychiatry to circumvent individual and constitutional rights. He called it “The Therapeutic State,” where the state gives psychiatry the power to be an institution of social control. “When I use the term therapeutic state, I use it ironically, it’s therapeutic for the people who are doing the locking up, who are doing the therapy, it’s not therapeutic for the victims, for the patients,” Szasz said. “The therapeutic state seeks to remedy personal and social problems defined as diseases; its beneficiaries are often ‘helped’ against their will; it is a totalitarian state, governed by the rule of therapeutic discretion.”

CCHR asks legislators to review the World Health Organization’s recent guideline for protections of people with mental health disabilities. WHO recommends countries “repeal guardianship and other substitute decision-making legislation and replace it with laws that recognize legal capacity and promote supported decision-making, including the use of advance plans [living wills] and best interpretation of will and preference.”

In Britney’s case, the conservatorship was put into place in 2008, while she struggled with her mental health, and gave her father broad control over her life and finances. Britney obtained a court order recently to reinforce her inherent right to obtain the legal counsel of her choice. Her new attorney must petition the court to have the current conservatorship removed.

Britney pleaded that the conservatorship over her affairs has made her feel “demoralized and enslaved.” She has been subjected to numerous psychiatric evaluations and medications, stating: “I want to end the conservatorship without being evaluated,” she said. The system in place is “abusive,” Britney said in court, accusing her conservators of forcing her to take mood-stabilizing drugs and perform against her will.

Britney also told the court that her previous psychiatrist (who died in 2019) was abusive in his treatment of her. She alleged that she was subjected to lengthy psychological evaluations, forced into a $60,000-a-month inpatient facility and told that she wouldn’t be able to see her children if she failed to comply. “To be totally honest with you, when [the doctor] passed away, I got on my knees and thanked God,” she said. She was then forced to see a therapist three days a week. Paparazzi humiliated her by taking photos of her crying after the emotional sessions. She asked the judge last month to be allowed to be part of her own care plan.

NBC News reported that allegations of abusive psychiatrists in conservatorships are not uncommon. Doctors are asked to file capacity declarations with the court which form about 75 percent of how judges base their decisions to keep someone under court-ordered guardianship.

The WHO’s “Guidance on community mental health services: Promoting person-centered and rights-based approaches” released in June 2021, is very clear about abuse in the mental health system: “Many people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities are denied the right to exercise their legal capacity; that is, the right to make decisions for oneself and to have those decisions respected by others. Based on stigmatizing assumptions about their status – that their decisions are unreasonable or bring negative consequences, or that their decision-making skills are deficient, or that they cannot understand and make decisions for themselves or communicate their will and preferences – it has become acceptable in services in countries throughout the world, for others to step in and make decisions for people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities. In many countries, this is implemented through schemes like guardianship, supervision and surrogacy, and is legitimized by laws and practices.”

As an organization that has exposed abuses in the mental health industry for more than fifty years, CCHR has definitely come across unscrupulous guardians that have been able to secure the help of psychiatrists to maintain control over an individual, especially their finances. The diagnostic aspect of conservatorship needs closer scrutiny.

State laws need to ensure that someone who is subject to a psychiatric evaluation also has freedom of choice and the right to obtain a second medical—as opposed to a psychiatric—opinion. Contact your state legislators and express your viewpoint about this.

The WHO guidelines are clear about protecting individual rights to choose. It also recommends people sign a Living Will to express their treatment and guardianship preferences should their liberty be threatened by competency issues.