Posts Tagged ‘CCHR’

What Is “Normal Behavior?”

Monday, December 5th, 2022

Psychiatry’s billing bible DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, revision 5) released in May, 2013, and its current update DSM-5-TR (Text Revision of 2022) are the latest versions of the standard handbook of “mental illnesses” as determined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

The DSM purports to diagnose abnormal human behavior, although failing to define what is normal. In fact, it is not possible to define normal human behavior by using the DSM, since there are no clinical tests for these conditions for which a range of results could be specified as either normal or abnormal in the general population of society. Diagnosis with the DSM is purely an opinion, usually a psychiatrist’s opinion of something they do not like. This led the late Dr. Thomas Szasz (co-founder of CCHR) to say, “If we recognize that ‘mental illness’ is a metaphor for disapproved thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we are compelled to recognize as well that the primary function of Psychiatry is to control thought, mood, and behavior.”

Normal: Generally free from impairment; Within a range considered safe, healthy, or optimal; Routine; A standard, model or pattern regarded as typical for a specific group or situation.
[From Latin norm?lis “forming a right angle;” from norma “carpenter’s square” + -?lis “related to”.]

No psychiatrist has succeeded in defining abnormal or normal behavior in a precise and workable way. This is one reason we say that psychiatry is not workable. In addition, any form of etiology (the cause or origin of disease) is missing from the DSM.

How then can we get to a definition of normal human behavior? This is not a simple assignment. But we can approach it in a different way. We can ask, “What is the Ideal of Human Behavior?”

An Ideal might be described this way: The absence of unwanted mental, physical and spiritual conditions; Sane, ethical and responsible behavior as a well-adjusted, functioning and productive contributor to society. OK, we get that this is also difficult to enumerate.

Perhaps we should examine another factor that leads to fraudulent DSM diagnoses. The proliferation of psychiatric diagnoses is exceedingly profitable for the vested interests of the psychiatric industry.

What is a “vested interest?”

Here are some definitions of a vested interest:
— enjoying benefits from an existing economic or political privilege
— a special concern or stake in maintaining or influencing an arrangement especially for selfish ends or to protect one’s money, power, or reputation
— cooperating or competing in pursuing selfish goals for personal gain and exerting a controlling influence to maintain such.

Could it be that psychiatric vested interests are engaged in such activities because of an abiding fear of losing their livelihood should there appear to be more normal people than abnormal?

Baldly, the psychiatric profession has a profit interest in ensuring that society is focused on the abnormal rather than the normal, and in ensuring that psychiatric “treatments” worsen these conditions in order to preserve and expand the patient base.

Coming up with new lists of behaviors and new “disorders” is the bedrock of the multi-billion dollar psychiatric industry. It’s how they get paid. Remember, no psychiatric label, no billing insurance. No psychiatric label, no drug prescribed. The psychiatric labels are backed by corporate interests, not medicine, and not science.

The psychiatric industry must be deprived of their unearned billions and the world made safe for both the normal and the abnormal (whoever and whatever they are) to pursue an effective route to an Ideal of Human Behavior.

Reference
The Hidden Horrors of Psychiatry by C.F. van der Horst (Per Veritatem Vis Foundation, 2022)

CCHR

Psychiatry’s Dying Industry

Monday, September 6th, 2021

Report On Failed Mental Health Programs

A new resource on failed psychiatric treatment programs serves as advice to policymakers being asked to support and fund a resurgence of psychedelic drug therapies when in the sixties these caused harm and violence in the community.

The mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) has launched its online report and resource about failed mental health programs which are impacting psychiatric policy today. The release of Why Psychiatry Sees Itself as a Dying Industry—A Resource on Its Failures and Critics coincides with California legislators considering passing a law that will legalize possession of psychedelic hallucinogens and promote researching the mind-altering chemicals as treatment for “mental illness.”

A petition that CCHR’s Sacramento chapter posted online opposes this, joining many others concerned about resurrecting psychedelics that were a past failed psychiatric experiment. In California, LSD was also linked to the horrific Charles Manson murders in the 1960s.

It was the street use of and research into LSD in the 60s and 70s that led to Congress shutting down all LSD mind-control research in 1977.

CCHR says resurrecting LSD—a failed and dangerous therapy—to replace current failed treatments shows a fundamental disregard for human life because of the drugs’ mind-altering properties, also borne out by the psychiatric-intelligence community’s past research of LSD, psilocybin and amphetamines. As extensively researched in Tom O’Neill’s book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, LSD helped create the mindset of the Charles Manson Family who, after many months of use of the drug, gruesomely murdered nine-month pregnant actress, Sharon Tate and four others in California August 1969.

CCHR’s report highlights similar failed mental treatment programs using a hefty body of evidence showing the lack of science behind psychiatry’s diagnostic system that led to unworkable and potentially damaging treatments, which includes psychedelics. United Nations Special Rapporteur and psychiatrist Dainius P?ras, M.D., recently noted that with psychiatry’s reliance upon biomedical interventions, we shouldn’t be surprised that “global psychiatry is facing a crisis, which to a large extent is a moral crisis, or a crisis of values.”

In October 2020, the World Psychiatric Association issued a Position Statement about improving mental health care, because widespread coercion in psychiatry violates patients’ “rights to liberty; autonomy; freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment….”

CCHR says that when treatments fail and psychotropic drug patents run out, there are usually efforts to resurrect old treatments as “new miracles,” such as electroshock treatment and now psychedelics. The reason for the new market is there’s profit to be made. The psychedelic “therapy” industry is predicted to reach $7 billion by 2027.

CCHR, which was established in 1969, is responsible for over 190 laws that inform and protect consumers about mental health treatment risks. It suggests policymakers and appropriations committees apprise themselves of past psychedelic drug research risks, read CCHR’s report to prevent funding programs that have failed and involve dangerous practices, and base reforms on CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights.

Psychiatry an Industry of Death
Psychiatry an Industry of Death

Mental Health vs Mental Illness

Monday, August 23rd, 2021

We’ve heard a lot recently about Mental Health. The Olympics have brought to light the stresses of competition, grueling routines and being under constant public pressure and expectations to win—and carping criticism from spectators if the athlete fails to meet those expectations. It stands to reason that having a solid mental health outlook is a vital part of such challenges. And that it can falter.

We applaud all the athletes for not just their dedication and courage but also their service to sport and their respective countries.

While CCHR exposes psychiatric abuse, ultimately this is so that people can achieve true mental health—a positive outlook both emotionally and in thoughts and actions that enables a better life, not hampered by physically damaging “treatments.”

“Mental health,” as viewed in the psychiatric industry is seen as mental “illness:” using descriptive names based on biased observation to redefine not doing well mentally as a physical disease—with not a single medical test to confirm this. This often leads to the use of physically damaging treatments, but no cures. It is important to differentiate between psychiatry’s definition of “mental disorder” and what is mental health, and not confuse the two.

Rest assured, psychiatrists and psychologists will abuse the current mental health awareness to slip in the need for biochemical “solutions.” Like a Johns Hopkins university psychologist who claims a “really well-structured psychedelic” drug session is “equal to several years of ordinary psychotherapy.”

CCHR has always warned that psychiatry’s power rests on force and that true informed consent does not exist in the mental health system when it fails to inform those needing help that a mental disorder diagnosis is not based on scientific tests and that drugs and electroshock given in the absence of fully informed consent constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Recent United Nations and World Health Organization (WHO) reports agree—vindicating what CCHR has been fighting for for over 50 years!

The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) issued a statement acknowledging the international outrage over psychiatric coercion and called for alternatives to psych drugs and restraint use.

A former United Nations Special Rapporteur on health, Dr. Dainius P?ras, recently was interviewed for Psychiatric Times in the U.S. and condemned coercive psychiatry. He said that psych diagnoses perpetuate discrimination; biological psychiatry hasn’t worked and equated it with “totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.” He called for the “elimination of all forced psychiatric confinement and treatment.”

Relevant to the recent awareness about mental health, Dr. P?ras also said: “There is now unequivocal evidence of the failures of a system that relies too heavily on the biomedical model,” including psychotropic drugs.

Then the WHO issued a new guideline for mental health treatment in July, attacking “coercive psychiatry” as “pervasive” and that it must change. It supported a ban on “forced hospitalization and forced treatment,” including drugs and electroshock.

It is important for people to know the differences between mental health and psychiatric “disease,” and to be informed of the failures of this profession in ensuring mental health is achieved as opposed to creating mental ill-health.

Failed Mental Health Programs

A new major resource from CCHR International answers questions about why is psychiatry so controversial? Why do critics think psychiatry creates unhappiness, rather than curing it? How is it that psychiatric treatment causes harm? Why is that other doctors don’t think psychiatrists are “real doctors”? Why are psychiatrists their own worst enemies, while blaming their failures on both their patients and an “anti-psychiatry” movement that they, in fact, started?

Download and read this new publication, “Why Psychiatry Sees Itself as a Dying Industry  A Resource on its Failures and Critics.”

Support CCHR

Your support in helping CCHR would mean a great deal. Your help, as always, is an integral part of our success in raising awareness and being able to deliver the facts. Please donate to support the cause.

Volunteer help is also appreciated.

What’s Wrong with U.S. Healthcare

Monday, April 19th, 2021

Reference: “What’s Wrong with U.S. Healthcare and how to Fix it: A Systematic Approach to Improved Healthcare at Lower Cost”
by Les Ruthven, Ph.D.
November 16, 2020
Available on Amazon

“Unfortunately one must be especially skeptical of all pharmaceutical industry sponsored health research for drugs and also for many medical devises, the latter especially mental health problems.”

Dr. Ruthven is a psychologist specializing in clinical neuropsychology and behavioral health management. He believes that a better quality of healthcare occurs when patients have information they can apply to resolving their own health problems. Much of this book is an examination of standard of care psychiatric practices that do not appear to meet necessary scientific standards of proof.

He says, “I can think of no better way to achieve affordable healthcare than by insisting that a particular drug or therapy is only reimbursable if the treatment has been proven to be substantially effective (and safe) by sound research and not just because practitioners believe the treatment is effective or that the treatment is FDA approved.”

Of course, CCHR has been documenting the facts about psychiatry, psychiatric drugs and other harmful psychiatric treatments for over 50 years, and can state with certainty that:

1. psychiatric “disorders” are not medical diseases;
2. psychiatrists deal exclusively with mental “disorders,” not proven diseases;
3. psychiatry has never established the cause of any “mental disorders”;
4. the theory that mental disorders derive from a “chemical imbalance” in the brain is unproven opinion, not fact;
5. the brain is not the real cause of life’s problems.

CCHR’s work will only be complete when psychiatry’s fraudulent practices are eliminated and it is held accountable for its harmful treatments and human rights violations.

Find out more here: http://www.CCHRSTL.org/

http://www.cchrstl.org/

Going On Hoping

Monday, April 5th, 2021

Hope is the desire that sometime in the future, one will cease to have something which is no longer wanted but one can’t seem to get rid of (like a chronic pain), or that one will acquire something wanted.

“Going On Hoping” is the condition where one continues to hope in spite of no possibility of realizing one’s goal, particularly when one is not actively involved in realizing the goal.

Giving something a lick and a promise and hoping it will somehow be all right stems from laziness and stupidity. I hope that doesn’t offend anyone.

The better alternative is to control one’s environment by doing things well and thoroughly, leading to one’s goals.

The Psychiatric Way

Psychiatrists speak about “adaptation to one’s environment” as the way to handle Life. One of the primary ways psychiatric treatment attempts to adapt one to one’s environment is with drugs, which reduce or block restimulative stimuli by deadening the perceptive abilities of the central nervous system.

Many psychiatric studies on the topic emphasize how one’s environment, over which one apparently has little control, influences or controls one’s troubles. Toxins and contaminants in the environment; stress in the environment; one’s genes; one’s community and its social factors; the climate; PTSD; crime and other violent or dangerous situations in the environment; endemic systemic pandemic polemics.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, promotes these environmental factors against which one supposedly cannot fight back as the diagnostic criteria showing the presence of a “mental disorder”. One such is the diagnosis of “Victim of crime.”

Of course, one can certainly find situations where it is helpful to adapt to an environment. Think of wearing a protective suit in a hostile environment such as outer space or under water.

We don’t minimize these environmental factors, which have been found to be major contributors to mental stress and trauma. Rather, we point out that the common psychiatric point of view is to only find ways a person can adapt to such stress, when there might also be ways to exert more control over the environmental factors and adapt the environment to oneself. There are even terms to describe this psychiatric viewpoint, such as “stress-adapted children”; meaning that they have learned how to adapt to stress in their environments.

In fact, the data indicate that drug treatment is not usually necessary if a proper interpersonal environment and social context is provided as alternatives to psychiatry.

The Better Alternative

It has also been found that if one knows the technology of how to do something and can do it, and uses it, he cannot be the adverse effect of it. So for example in the matters under discussion here, the more one knows about something in the environment, and the more one can handle and control that, the less bad effects it can cause one. This leads to the insight that the more one can adapt the environment to oneself, instead of only adapting oneself to the environment, then the less the environment can harm one.

One may exclaim all kinds of ifs, ands and buts in the matter. But the fact remains that it behooves one to find out more about whatever the trouble is, and search diligently for ways to influence or control that.

Recommendations

CCHR recommends various strategies to proactively cope with psychiatric fraud or abuse, an environmental stress to which one may be subjected. For example:

The Motto here is “FIND OUT! FIGHT BACK!

Task Force Against Racism & Modern Day Eugenics

Monday, February 1st, 2021

People need proper and effective healthcare, not damaging drugs and electroshock that passes for mental health treatment today. Funds should be redirected from psychiatry into safe, accountable non-psychiatric medical care and social programs. This is especially true for the African American community, given psychiatry’s long history of racist eugenics theories which still permeate modern day mental health care.

—Reverend Fred Shaw

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is the leading mental health industry watchdog in the world, responsible for helping to enact more than 180 worldwide reforms that protect the public from abusive mental health practices.

In 2020, CCHR International spokesperson Reverend Fred Shaw, started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, educators and doctors. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protesters as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.

This type of rampant abuse of African Americans within the mental health industry continues to this day. Shaw has now launched a Task Force to combat institutional racism and empower the African American and minority communities with facts about modern eugenics masked today as “mental health care.” The Task Force comprises African American leaders, including ministers, attorneys, doctors, psychologists and civil rights advocates.

For generations eugenics—the fraudulent, dehumanizing and harmful psychological theory that certain races of color were not equal to whites and, therefore, “deserved” fewer rights—has been used in the mental health system and in other social policies to justify horrific oppression of African Americans and minorities.

https://www.cchrtaskforce.org/

2020 CCHR International Accomplishments

Monday, January 25th, 2021
  • 148.5 million people were reached through CCHR International’s actions and campaigns, including media articles, TV and documentary views.
  • 12 psychiatric facilities shut down; 16 lawsuits were filed against behavioral facilities and the companies profiting from them and/or staff in the psychiatric system.
  • Press releases against for-profit psych hospital abuse alone increased by 133% and the number of media stories almost doubled.
  • Half a million Americans signed petitions supporting the closure of two major for-profit psychiatric hospital chains.
  • $132 million in criminal and civil fines against such facilities—up 676% from 2019.
  • Skin electric shock used for “behavior modification” (punishment) on children banned.
  • Rev. Fred Shaw, CCHR Int’s Public Affairs Director, established CCHR’s National Taskforce against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics, with 81 members now representing clergy, psychologists, civil rights attorneys, educators, radio hosts, NAACP representatives and more. A new website was produced for the Task Force, detailing psychiatry’s long-term role in creating and maintaining modern racism, and psychology’s disastrous role in training police.
  • Our Fight For Kids campaign (and website) has expanded enormously, with major organizations joining our fight to ban incarceration of children in psychiatric facilities, brutal restraint practices on children, and many more organizations joining the fight to ban electroshock.  
  • A new website featuring an online virtual tour of the Industry of Death Museum was created so anyone can tour our museum at any time.
  • At least 7 U.S. psychs lost their licenses to practice following CCHR Int complaints, which means safeguarding patients’ lives.

And right now, we are speeding up our work on the next steps in the update of our psychiatric drugs side effects online searchable data base. The next steps are exciting ventures that we are ramping up on for year-ending. Already, 2.4 million adverse drugs reports (ADRs) were pulled from the Food and Drug Administration for 400 psych drugs—up from 900,000 ADRs currently on CCHR’s original site launched in 2013.

With psychiatrists promoting increased psychotropic drug use in response to COVID concerns, CCHR’s drug database is vital for shining the light of truth on psychotropic drug risks. Through this we can all give consumers and families the chance to be properly informed and make safe decisions!

Let’s say goodbye to 2020 and bring in the new year with a commitment to imparting more truth and safeguards to help mankind!
Take Action Now!

Babies Under a Year Old Being Given Harmful Psychiatric Drugs

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020

CCHR International obtained the real statistics on the number of U.S. children being prescribed psychiatric drugs: 7.2 million.

Of those, 508,000 are aged 2-5 years old, equal to the entire population of Sacramento, California. 125,000 are babies aged 0-1.

If you’re trying to visualize that number, it’s more babies than would fit into the largest college football stadium in the U.S. (Michigan Stadium, also known as “The Big House.”)

Why this isn’t generally reported is because we were only able to obtain these statistics through the purchase of a costly official report, a truly vital endeavor, made possible only through your donations.

From this, the question you’re probably asking is How on earth could 125,000 babies be put on powerful mind altering drugs?

It’s a logical question. We believe we have the answer and that with your help, together we can do something about it.

CCHR has long suspected that one of the reasons there are so many children on drugs, particularly ones so young and even babies, is through MEDICAID, which is state and federal funding for low income families, their children, as well as for foster care children. There is a financial incentive for child drugging because of Medicaid, as the states receive funding based on costs incurred for treating children, including with psychotropic drugs.

A 2015 report on Medicaid found: “The high rates of psychotropic medication use in the Medicaid population, risks associated with these drugs, and research documenting inappropriate prescribing, have raised concerns, especially for children involved in the child welfare system.”

While there has been some media coverage on this issue and concern raised by legislators, nothing truly effective is being done about it. Moreover, there has never been a state-by-state analysis of exactly how many babies and toddlers are being drugged, using taxpayer dollars (i.e. Medicaid).

In order to fully expose this, and what state legislators are unwittingly funding (baby, toddler and child drugging), CCHR International began filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for state Medicaid records (FOIA only applies to government agencies). What we have found to date is confirming our suspicions. Consider the number of Medicaid-funded children being drugged in the following states:

Georgia 177,469
Pennsylvania 150,250
Illinois 74,635
Utah 46,241

For Missouri in 2014, for example, there were 24,388 children, in or out of foster care, who were receiving public mental health services (meaning they were likely on one or more psychotropic drugs.) Total foster care drug costs have averaged roughly $16 Million per year in Missouri. More than 30 percent of Missouri’s roughly 13,000 Medicaid foster children per month are on at least one psychotropic medication, with 20 percent taking two or more psychotropic medications at the same time.

We can pretty much guarantee that state legislators are unaware that funds are being used to drug so many toddlers and infants. And because Medicaid is funded by the states, legislators can do something about it.

The idea of putting vulnerable babies and toddlers on drugs is horrifying. All of this can be hard to confront. But we must. With your help we can not only expose it, but demand that those in power do something about it.

Please contact your State Representatives and Senators and let them know what you think about this. In Missouri, find your Representative and Senator by 9-digit Zip Code here:http://www.senate.mo.gov/legislookup/ZipLookup.aspx.

Be a Hero and help someone who has been a victim of psychiatric abuse by making a tax deductible donation to CCHR St. Louis!

Psychiatry: An Industry of Death Museum – Virtual Tour Now Available

Tuesday, September 1st, 2020

The Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights International is pleased to announce the launch of our Psychiatry An Industry of Death Museum as a virtual tour! This multimedia experience includes 18 Virtual Reality sections, 14 videos and hundreds of images.

Now you can tour the Los Angeles museum from anywhere in the world!
Get the truth about psychiatry’s abusive practices, and arm yourselves, your  loved ones and associates with enough information to protect all from psychiatric fraud and harm.

Please enjoy our new virtual museum, feel free to give us your feedback, and continue to support the cause!

YES! I WOULD LIKE TO SUPPORT THE CAUSE

SEE THE NEW WEBSITE AND VIRTUAL TOUR

CCHR Presents Psychiatric Drug Search Engine and Video

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

CCHR Presents Psychiatric Drug Search Engine and
Video

If you are as tired of the psycho/pharmaceutical industry misleading the public about the safety and efficacy of their drugs as we are then this is the video for you. Created by the staff of CCHR International, this video announces our Psychiatric Drug Search Engine and the viewer can click the live link at the end of this video to visit the search engine.

We’ve created the ultimate resource for the public containing all psychiatric drug warnings, studies and adverse reaction reports filed with the US FDA, in one easy to search online resource.

No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent, non-psychiatric, medical doctor.

It is only through your tax-deductible donations that we are able to provide the public with the vital FREE services to educate them about the dangers of psychiatric drugs. Please continue to support our cause.