Posts Tagged ‘Community Mental Health’

If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It!

Monday, June 20th, 2022

[Flaunt: To show oneself off or move in an ostentatious way.]

Social media often emphasizes a need for one to promote oneself, to have a “brand”, to make oneself and one’s abilities known and available.

Saying “flaunt it” is somewhat of a dramatic usage, perhaps even melodramatic, but it serves to emphasize that there are things one can do to make oneself and one’s abilities known and used.

A much less vivid expression, perhaps, would be “If you’ve got it, use it; if you can’t use it, get rid of it.”

Why is this important?

There are group insanities that suppress people from being effective. It can be manifested in a number of ways.

Here are some examples:
1. Exclusion of others — an obvious example is a refusal to employ someone or allow them to belong.
2. A failure to use people — Making practical and effective use of people; if they are well-trained in an area but not allowed to perform in that area. There can also be a disparity between what someone is doing and what they consider is their purpose or interest.
3. The substitution of violence for reason, all too common in this current society.

We’re sure you can think of other examples. One’s optimum survival, and the optimum survival of all the groups to which one belongs, depends on being effective, having a high worthwhile purpose, and demonstrating a mutual confidence between the individual and the group.

Yet there is one group dedicated to suppressing these things.

It should be obvious by now that psychiatry is not an encouraging industry, neither by definition nor by example. Psychiatry is an Industry of Death.

The main resource in consideration here is people, the most critical building blocks of society. Yet psychiatry has no cures, and depends on damaging their patients to continue in business.

Psychiatrists proclaim a worldwide epidemic of mental health problems and urge massive funding increases as the only solution. Yet Community Mental Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.

The end result of psychiatric treatment is not a cured patient, returned to society as a well-adjusted, functioning contributor, but rather a person with the same or worse mental symptoms, told they must remain on debilitating psychiatric drugs for life, because psychiatrists know of no other cure.

Psychiatry defines “self-promotion” as an aberration of presenting oneself to others as accomplished, and that it is boastful and obnoxious. An entire category of psychological research is devoted to so-called “Imposter Syndrome”, making people wonder if they are really competent or not, and heavily suggesting that one may need psychiatric treatment for such. There is a psychiatric lobby for including this fraudulent condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

We’re totally sure that you can promote yourself effectively without bragging or being obnoxious. After all, the whole subjects of Marketing and Public Relations are involved with making things known and well-liked. Just don’t depend on psychiatry to help you with that!

The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options.

New Study Tells Consumers the Truth of Potential Lethal Electroshock and Antidepressant Risks

Monday, February 21st, 2022

Over 14,800 ECT patients were 16 times more likely to try to commit suicide than a control group of 58,369; antidepressants can also induce suicidal feelings and frightening long-term withdrawal effects.

By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
February 7, 2022

A new study published in Psychological Medicine questions the two principle physical treatments recommended for depression: antidepressants and electroshock therapy (ECT) and raises the alarm about their adverse effects on the brain.[1] Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a 53-year mental health industry watchdog, says the study contains vital information for consumers recommended for ECT, including the risk of suicide, all of which adds weight to the argument that the potentially brain-damaging practice should be prohibited as a mental health treatment.

The study by two UK experts, John Read, Ph.D., a psychologist and Joanna Moncrieff, M.D., a psychiatrist, discusses the need for non-harmful alternatives that are safe and effective. They cite the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandates that ECT machines have signs stating: “The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT treatment has not been demonstrated.” Yet, the practice is given to an estimated 100,000 Americans every year, including, in some states, children aged up to five years old.

Antidepressants can also cause long-term sexual dysfunction and severe withdrawal effects, the study shows.

The authors wrote: “With the World Health Association and the United Nations calling for a paradigm shift away from the medicalization of human distress, new evidence about millions of people struggling to get off antidepressants, and ongoing debate about the value and safety of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT),” and questions “biological psychiatry’s ‘medical model’ when we become sad or depressed.”

The authors debunk the theory that chemical imbalances cause depression and that treatments work by correcting underlying biological dysfunctions, triggered, for example, by a supposed genetic predisposition. They point that “there is no evidence that there are any neurochemical abnormalities in people with depression, let alone abnormalities that might cause depression.”

Many medical experts confirm there are no medical tests (X-rays, blood or urine tests, MRIs, etc.) that can prove a physical source for people’s emotional issues.[2]

Yet, the authors add, until January 2021, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) website advised: “Psychiatric medications can help correct imbalances in brain chemistry that are thought to be involved in some mental disorders.” This is not true.

The authors went on to say, “At present, most drugs are assumed to work according to a ‘disease-centered’ model of drug action, which proposes that they act on the biological processes assumed to underpin symptoms, in the same way as drugs do in most medical conditions.” However, “Like other psychiatric drugs, [antidepressants] are psychoactive substances that cross the blood-brain barrier and alter normal mental processes and behavior by changing the normal functioning of the brain.” [emphasis added]

“That long-term antidepressant use may lead to persistent brain modifications is also evidenced by the prolonged and severe withdrawal state they can induce…around 56% of people experience withdrawal effects after discontinuing antidepressants, and for 46% of those the effects are severe. In general, the longer someone takes an antidepressant, the more likely they are to experience a withdrawal reaction, and the more severe it will be.”

The study also discloses:

  • Hundreds of placebo-controlled trials suggest that antidepressants are marginally better than placebo at reducing depressive symptoms as measured by depression rating scales.
  • The majority of placebo-controlled trials have been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry, which has an investment in inflating results, but government-funded research also fails to confirm that antidepressants have beneficial effects.
  • SSRI antidepressants cause “sexual dysfunction in a large proportion of users, and more worryingly, some people report that this persists after stopping the drug.”
  • “The adverse effects of withdrawal can be so intolerable that some people trying to discontinue treatment have to reduce by tiny amounts over many years, and accumulating evidence suggests that the effects may even persist for months or years after the drugs are finally stopped.” 

Electroshocking Harms Mental Health

As is the case for antidepressants, the various biological deficits that are supposedly corrected by ECT have never been demonstrated, the authors continue. “[T]he story of ECT appears to be one of a biological intervention being claimed to correct biological deficits, but in reality having negative effects on healthy brains, some of which are misconstrued as signs of improvement.” 

A neutral observer would assume that the effects on the brain of repeatedly passing sufficient electricity through it to cause seizures are likely to be negative. ECT advocates, however, “tend to interpret abnormal brain changes caused by multiple electrocutions as beneficial, sometimes even linking them to reduced depression. They don’t consider that the changes might be negative or might be characterized as brain damage.”

The authors further discuss inequities in ECT studies:

  • In the 84 years since the first ECT there have only been 11 randomized placebo-controlled studies (RCTs) for its target diagnosis, depression, all before 1986. A recent review, involving Dr. Irving Kirsch, Associate Director of Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School, highlighted the poor quality of the 11 studies.
  • Only four studies describe their processes of randomization and testing the blinding (procedure in which one or more parties in a trial are unaware of which participants are subjects of the treatment and those who are not, and helps to reduce bias). None convincingly demonstrate that they are double-blind. Five selectively report their findings. Only four report any ratings by patients. None assess Quality of Life. The studies are small, involving an average of 37 people.
  • No studies showed that ECT outperforms placebo beyond the end of the treatment period.
  • Nevertheless, all five meta-analyses of these flawed studies somehow conclude that ECT is effective.
  • The meta-analyses failed to identify any evidence that ECT prevents suicide, as often claimed. Numerous studies have found ECT recipients are more likely than other patients to kill themselves.
  • In a 2020 study, 14,810 ECT patients were 16 times more likely to try to kill themselves than a matched control group of 58,369. Other studies cited so-called reduce suicides were so small as to be negligible and were not even for depression.
  • A 2021 U.S. study found that 1,524 homeless US veterans who received ECT had made significantly more suicide attempts, at 30 days follow up, than 3,025 matched homeless veterans who hadn’t had ECT. The difference remained significant at 90 days and 1 year.
  • A review of 82 studies found that one in 39 ECT patients (25.8 per 1000) experience ‘major adverse cardiac events,’ the leading cause of ECT-related deaths.
  • As well as the short-term memory loss, which is widely acknowledged, between 12% and 55% of ECT recipients suffer persistent or permanent memory loss (typically defined as six months or longer).
  • Even the APA acknowledges that “ECT can result in persistent or permanent memory loss.”

The fact that discrepancies and bias in ECT studies are exposed draws strong opposition from advocates of the procedure, as doctors Read and Moncrieff point out. The advocates’ “defense” is to “shoot the messenger.”

“Researchers and ECT recipients who question the efficacy and highlight the adverse effects of ECT, are often publicly denigrated, by ECT advocates, as ‘anti-psychiatry ideologues’, ‘extremists’ ‘Scientologists’ and ‘non-medical zealots,’” or “part of a ‘guild war’ between professions.” [See CCHR’s report, Why Psychiatry Sees Itself as a Dying Industry.]

Read and Moncrieff continue: “The President and Chair of the International Society for ECT and Neurostimulation recently accused authors (including two ECT recipients) who had published some inconvenient findings of being ‘ideologically driven,’ of ‘spreading misinformation’ and of having ‘questionable motives.’”

Of note, the Church of Scientology established CCHR in 1969 as an independent organization, along with eminent professor of psychiatry, the late Dr. Thomas Szasz. CCHR comprises members of the church and people of various faiths or none at all. It has been outspoken against electroshock since its inception and has been pivotal in obtaining laws that either introduced safeguards such as informed consent to treatment (and the right to refuse it), as well as banning use of ECT on minors. In Australia, CCHR obtained a ban on deep sleep treatment (DST) that involved ECT and drugs, with criminal penalties, including jail, should anyone administer it. Indeed, in 2002, U.S. psychiatrist Richard Abrams, co-owner of Somatics LLC, which manufacturers an ECT device, wrote: “Absent Scientology there would hardly be an organized anti-ECT movement in the United States or anywhere else.”[3] This, from a “doctor,” who egregiously and misleadingly claims that ECT is about ten times safer than childbirth![4]

A Call for Alternatives

Read and Moncrief call for non-harmful alternatives: “We propose an alternative understanding that recognizes depression as an emotional and meaningful response to unwanted life events and circumstances.” This alternative view, they say, “is increasingly endorsed around the world, including by the United Nations, the World Health Organization and service users who have suffered negative consequences of physical treatments that modify brain functions in ways that are not well-understood.”

Furthermore, “believing you have a brain disease requiring medical intervention can be profoundly disempowering. It encourages people to view themselves as the victims of their biology, to adopt pessimistic views about recovery, increases self-stigma and discourages people from taking active steps to improve their situation.”

“Common sense,” they add, “suggests that the conditions needed to lead an emotionally balanced and fulfilling life, relatively free of major ongoing worry and distress, include a dependable income, housing, secure and rewarding employment, engaging social activities, and opportunities to form close relationships. Some people may need relationship counselling or family therapy, others support with employment or finances. People who feel severely depressed for a long time may simply need to be cared for, reassured with kindness and hope, reminded of times when they have felt good, and kept safe until they feel better, which they often do with time. There is no scientific evidence for some of these suggestions. We learn how to support our fellow humans through our life experience, through being cared for ourselves, and sometimes through art and literature.”

As the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Dr. Dainius P?ras, a Lithuanian psychiatrist, wrote: “Current mental health policies have been affected to a large extent by the asymmetry of power and biases because of the dominance of the biomedical model and biomedical interventions. This model has led…to the medicalization of normal reactions to life’s many pressures, including moderate forms of social anxiety, sadness, shyness, truancy and antisocial behavior.”

In 2021, the World Health Organization echoed these sentiments in its “Guidance on Community Mental Health Services” which says the biological model has resulted in “an over-diagnosis of human distress and over-reliance on psychotropic drugs to the detriment of psychosocial interventions.”[5] The document offers 22 examples of alternatives to drugs and electricity, Read and Moncrieff stress.

CCHR’s has a strong position against ECT; it wants it prohibited. Over 125,000 people have supported its online petition calling for the ban. Sign here.

References:

[1] John Read, Ph.D., Joanna Moncrief, M.D., “Depression: why drugs and electricity are not the answer,” Psychological Medicine, Cambridge University Press, 1 Feb. 2022, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/depression-why-drugs-and-electricity-are-not-the-answer/3197739131D795E326AE6913720E6E37

[2] “No Medical Tests Exist,” CCHR International, https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-disorders/no-medical-tests-exist/

[3] Richard Abrams, M.D., Electroconvulsive Therapy, Fourth Edition, (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 10

[4] Richard Abrams, M.D., “The Mortality Rate with ECT,” Convulsive Therapy, 1997

[5] Jan Eastgate, “World Health Organization New Guidelines Are Vital To End Coercive Psychiatric Practices & Abuse,” CCHR International, 11 June 2021, https://www.cchrint.org/2021/06/11/world-health-organization-new-guidelines-are-vital-to-end-coercive-psychiatric-practices-abuse/

Psychiatry is Not a Sustainable Industry

Monday, March 8th, 2021

Reference:
United Nations Promoting Sustainable Development

Resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September 2015
Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Sustainable: Of, relating to, or being a method or lifestyle for using resources so that the resources can be maintained and continued, and are not depleted or permanently damaged.

[from Old French sustenir (French: soutenir), from Latin sustineo, sustinere, from sub– (under) + teneo (hold, uphold, possess, guard, maintain)]

The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their 169 associated targets adopted in 2015 and accepted by all Member States seek to realize the human rights of all and balance economic, social and environmental factors towards peace and prosperity for all.

To this end we examine some of the existing factors which block or inhibit the realization of these goals, and which must be eliminated so that the goals can be achieved in practice.

SDG 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global
Partnership for Sustainable Development.

Target 17.16: Enhance the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in all countries, in particular developing countries.

How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 17.16

It should be obvious by now that psychiatry is not a sustainable industry, neither by definition nor by example.

The main resource in consideration here is people, the most critical building blocks of society. Yet psychiatry has no cures, and depends on damaging their patients to continue in business.

We see the globalization of biomedical psychiatry as undemocratic, unsustainable and without a clear ethical focus.

Green Mental Health Care

Green Mental Health Care is based on the preservation and treatment of the mind and body (for they are not separate functions) using non-toxic, non-addictive, and non-invasive strategies that produces good mental health. Green Mental Health Care has not only proven to be superior in patient outcomes than any other treatment method, including the use of psychiatric drugs, but it achieves the patient’s health goals at a fraction of the cost while saving them from the life-threatening health risks associated with psychiatric drugs.

Unsustainable Psychiatric Practices

Unsustainable prescription drug costs will ultimately create pressures on health systems and insurers to reduce spending in other areas or to decrease benefits.

ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT), or shock therapy, is a highly lucrative but damaging psychiatric practice. The purpose of shock treatment is to create brain damage. This brain damage is what brings about the memory loss and learning disability, as well as the spatial and temporal disorientation which always follows shock treatments. All physical damage done to the brain by ECT is permanent and irreversible. There is evidence that the damage, once begun by ECT, is progressive and feeds on itself, leading to further brain deterioration, including physical shrinkage of the brain and a shortening of the life of the victim. This barbaric “treatment” is currently being pushed on an unsuspecting and vulnerable patient population for major depression, but in reality it creates a patient for life due to this brain damage. Sign the petition to Ban ECT.

With mental health treatment costing up to 300% more than general medical treatment, spiraling costs are unavoidable when mental health care is mandated.

Psychiatrists and psychologists proclaim a worldwide epidemic of mental health problems and urge massive funding increases as the only solution. Yet Community Mental Health programs have been an expensive and colossal failure, creating homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unemployment all over the world.

Whenever a “mental patient” commits an act of senseless violence, psychiatrists invariably blame the tragedy on the person’s failure to continue their medication. Such incidents are used to justify mandated community treatment and involuntary commitment laws. However, statistics and facts show it is psychiatric drugs themselves that can create the very violence or mental incompetence they are prescribed to treat.

The end result of psychiatric treatment is not a cured patient, returned to society as a well-adjusted, functioning contributor, but rather a person with the same or worse mental symptoms, told they must remain on debilitating psychiatric drugs for life, because psychiatrists know of no other cure.

“Biomedical psychiatry” has yet to validate a single psychiatric diagnosis as a disease, or as anything neurological, biological, chemically imbalanced or genetic. Decades of psychiatric monopoly over mental health has only lead to upwardly spiraling mental illness statistics and continuously escalating funding demands — the very definition of unsustainable.

The claim that only increased funding will cure the problems of psychiatry has lost its ring of truth. Psychiatry and psychology should be held accountable for the funds already given them, and irrefutably and scientifically prove the physical existence of mental disorders they claim should be treated and covered by insurance in the same way as physical diseases are.

The many critical challenges facing societies today reflect the vital need to strengthen individuals through workable, viable and humanitarian alternatives to harmful psychiatric options.

Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 17 can occur.

How psychiatry Promotes Homelessness

Monday, June 1st, 2020

Reference:
United Nations Promoting Sustainable Development
Resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September 2015 “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Sustainable: Of, relating to, or being a method or lifestyle for using resources so that the resources can be maintained and continued, and are not depleted or permanently damaged.

[from Old French sustenir (French: soutenir), from Latin sustineo, sustinere, from sub– (under) + teneo (hold, uphold, possess, guard, maintain)]

The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their 169 associated targets adopted in 2015 and accepted by all Member States seek to realize the human rights of all and balance economic, social and environmental factors towards peace and prosperity for all.

To this end we examine some of the existing factors which block or inhibit the realization of these goals, and which must be eliminated so that the goals can be achieved in practice.

SDG 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
Target 11.1: By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums.

How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 11.1

We bet you have not yet made the connection between psychiatry and homelessness.

We’re here to tell you about it.

Community Mental Health Centers

The advent of Community Mental Health (CMH) psychiatric programs in the 1960s would not have been possible without the development and use of neuroleptic drugs, also known as antipsychotics, for mentally disturbed individuals. Neuroleptic is from Greek, meaning “nerve seizing”, reflective of how the drugs act like a chemical lobotomy.

CMH was promoted as the solution to all institutional problems. The premise, based almost entirely on the development and use of neuroleptic drugs, was that patients could now be successfully released back into society. Ongoing service would be provided through government-funded units called Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC). These centers would tend to the patients from within the community, dispensing the neuroleptics that would keep them under control. Governments would save money and individuals would improve faster. The plan was called “deinstitutionalization.”

The first generation of neuroleptics, now commonly referred to as “typical antipsychotics” or “major tranquilizers,” appeared during the 1960s. They were heavily promoted as “miracle” drugs that made it “possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society.”

These claims were false. In an article in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2003, Vera Sharav stated, “The reality was that the therapies damaged the brain’s frontal lobes, which is the distinguishing feature of the human brain. The neuroleptic drugs used since the 1950s ‘worked’ by hindering normal brain function: they dimmed psychosis, but produced pathology often worse than the condition for which they have been prescribed — much like physical lobotomy which psychotropic drugs replaced.”

Mental health courts are facilities established to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violent felonies. Rather than allowing the guilty parties to take responsibility for their crimes, they are diverted to a psychiatric treatment center on the premise that they suffer from “mental illness” which will respond positively to antipsychotic drugs. It is another form of coercive “community mental health treatment.”

Homelessness

The homeless individuals commonly seen grimacing and talking to themselves on the street are exhibiting the effects of such psychiatric drug-induced damage. “Tardive dyskinesia” [tardive, late appearing and dyskinesia, abnormal muscle movement] and “tardive dystonia” [dystonia, abnormal muscle tension] are permanent conditions caused by tranquilizers in which the muscles of the face and body contort and spasm involuntarily.

For almost 50 years, psychiatry has promoted its theory that the only “treatment” for severe mental “illness” is neuroleptic drugs. However, this idea rests on a fault line. The truth is that not only is the drugging of severely mentally disturbed patients unnecessary — and expensive, thus profitable — it also causes brain- and life-damaging side effects.

The Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction reported that the CMH program in Europe created homelessness, drug addiction, criminal activities, disturbances to public peace and order, and unemployment.

CMHCs became legalized drug dealerships that not only supplied psychiatric drugs to former mental hospital patients, but also supplied prescriptions to individuals free of “serious mental problems.” Deinstitutionalization failed and society has been struggling with homelessness and other disastrous results ever since.

The psychiatric establishment cries for more funding because “so many homeless people suffer from mental illness.” They dissemble, because the psychiatric establishment itself is creating the mental trauma which results in homelessness.

Recommendations

There are workable alternatives to psychiatry’s mind-, brain- and body-damaging treatments. With psychiatry now calling for mandatory mental illness screening for adults and children everywhere, we urge all who have an interest in preserving the mental health, the physical health and the freedom of their families, communities and nations, to find out for themselves. Something must be done to establish real help for those who need it.

Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 11 can occur.

Human Rights Concerns with the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015

Saturday, July 18th, 2015

Human Rights Concerns with the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015

Congressional Rep. Tim Murphy (R., PA) originally introduced the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R.3717) in 2013. Not to be outdone by H.R.6 the 21st Century Cures Act, he has reintroduced it to this year’s Congress as H.R.2646 the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015.

Rep. Murphy is a psychologist, and a staunch supporter of “mental health care” as defined by the psychiatric and psychological industries; not to mention the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

Official Title of the Act: “To make available needed psychiatric, psychological, and supportive services for individuals with mental illness and families in mental health crisis, and for other purposes.”

The Act creates a new position in the Department of Health and Human Services – an official to be known as the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders. (As if we need another bureaucracy in the psych industry.)

The Act creates more funding for psych-based “treatments.”

The Act expands the bureaucracy surrounding “parity in mental health and substance use disorder benefits” under Medicare and Medicaid.

The Act provides for grants in early childhood intervention and treatment programs, and specialized preschool and elementary school programs.

The Act provides for grants in “Assisted Outpatient Treatment” programs.

The Act requires states to have a law that enforces court-ordered involuntary mental health treatment for the “mentally disabled” if the state want to receive certain federal funding.

The Act expands mental health training for primary care physicians.

This isn’t even half of the proposed legislation.

The Act spends lots more money on “suicide prevention” all up and down the entire educational chain, from elementary school through college.

The Act establishes an entirely new bureaucracy called the “Interagency Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee.”

Of course, the Act also expands the availability of and insurance coverage for psychiatric prescription drugs, as well as lifting limits on Medicare payments for inpatient psychiatric hospital services.

The Act expands the Community Mental Health Care programs.

The Act increases funding for the National Institute of Mental Health.

And even that’s not all the Act does to strengthen the already fraudulent and abusive psychiatric mental health industry.

CCHR Supporters should really consider contacting their Congressmen to express their opinions about this affront to rationality.

Let us know when you contact your Congressmen about this, and any response you may receive.