Posts Tagged ‘Covid-19’

Psychotropic Drug Use Tied to Dementia

Monday, April 4th, 2022

Older adults taking psychotropic drugs before contracting COVID-19 are at increased risk of dementia in the year following the illness, from a study published 18 March 2022.

Results from this large study of more than 1700 patients who had been hospitalized with COVID showed a greater than twofold increased risk for post-COVID dementia in those taking antipsychotics and mood stabilizers/anticonvulsants.

The study concludes: “In this cohort study of older adults hospitalized with COVID-19 at a large health system in New York, exposure to pre-COVID psychotropic medications was associated with greater 1-year incidence of post-COVID dementia.”

The psychiatric community continues to find that there are great liabilities to the use of psychiatric drugs, yet they continue to prescribe them.

How did psychotropic drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of harmful side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress? And how did the psychiatrists espousing these drugs come to dominate the field of mental treatment? We think you deserve to know the truth.

It’s the story of big money — drugs that fuel a $330 billion psychiatric industry, without a single cure. The cost in human terms is even greater — these drugs now kill an estimated 42,000 people every year. And the death count keeps rising.

“Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected society within the last 60 years.” [The late Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus]

Watch the CCHR documentary “The Marketing of Madness — Are We All Insane?” and find out what you can do about this.

Marketing of Madness
Marketing of Madness

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The Suicide Risk Assessment Fraud

Monday, February 28th, 2022

“A disappointing, and perhaps the most telling, finding was that there has been no improvement in the accuracy of suicide risk assessment over the last 40 years.”

Suicide Risk Assessment doesn’t work. In fact, research suggests it not only doesn’t help, but also it may hurt.

One study looked at the last 40 years of suicide risk assessment research. They found no statistical method to identify patients at a high-risk of suicide in a way that would improve treatment.

Another study of people who had already harmed themselves found that there was no evidence to support the use of risk assessment scales.

Combined with ineffective suicide risk assessment, patients labeled with depression or suicidal ideation often receive prescriptions for dangerous psychotropic drugs laden, and even labeled, with side effects that encourage the exact symptoms they are marketed to treat.

Suicide prevention is a social issue, rather than a medical one. A psychiatrist prescribing an antidepressant is thus not really providing a valid treatment, and the widespread use of suicide risk assessment diverts social and health care practitioners from engaging with patients to find out and handle whatever is really the problem.

Risk assessments, screenings, school mental health programs and more funding are often presented as solutions to suicide, and since the onset of the Covid pandemic calls for more screenings and funding are louder than ever. Yet these so-called solutions are actually contributing to the problem by masking truly effective solutions and proliferating the use of psychotropic drugs whose side effects include suicide and violence.

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.

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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!

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Public Service Announcement — Psychiatry Kills!

Monday, November 9th, 2020

Recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, TV has been saturated with advertisements for psychiatric mental health care.

One of the most common is Robin Meade’s “Public Service Announcement” (PSA) hustling for NAMI.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) was founded in 1979. It has since changed its name to National Alliance on Mental Illness. The group has and continues to rely upon pharmaceutical funding—-more than $41 million since 1996.

NAMI says it is a “grassroots mental health organization,” but falsely claims that 20% of the population are mentally ill.

NAMI’s campaign to “stop the stigma” and “end discrimination” against the mentally ill is really a pharmaceutical-funded front to sell harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs; the “Founding Sponsors” of the campaign were Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, SmithKline Beecham and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs.

You should know the chain of ownership that produced this NAMI PSA. Robin Meade is a news anchor at HLN TV, which is owned by CNN, which in turn is owned by WarnerMedia. The PSA was produced by WarnerMedia.

The whole purpose of this PSA, apparently, is to funnel people affected by the pandemic into the for-profit psychiatric mental health system.

The real NAMI encourages you to think you are mentally ill and relentlessly pushes psychiatric drugs and electroshock, gets millions from Pharma, and lobbies for Pharma’s vested interests. “Grassroots” indeed!

While these are definitely uncertain times, NAMI and the mental health industry are taking advantage of people’s fears and creating a market for dangerous psychotropic drugs in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. One thing is certain — psychotropic drugs with their innumerable dangerous side effects are not the solution.

Take Action Now and Support CCHR.

Drinking too much coffee.

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Prevalent Proliferation of Pandemic Panic

Monday, August 24th, 2020

Following the lockdown of many schools due to Covid-19, we are seeing reports that teachers are being instructed to emphasize emotional and stress-related curricula instead of academics. We are also seeing increasing reports of emotional and stress related issues with the teachers themselves.

Prestigious universities and foundations are devoting considerable resources to “research” the emotional and stress-related issues of both teachers and students due to panic over Covid-19 and lockdowns. Such research continually demands more funds from both governments and private sources, making funds less available for urgently needed research with a better return on investment.

We predict a renewed effort by the psychopharmaceutical industry to put more “mental health screening” into schools countrywide. This is a very bad idea.

A “screen” is a test for some condition, in this case a test for mental illness. A person who is screened and found to exhibit so-called symptoms of mental illness can then be diagnosed with a mental “disease” or “disorder” and referred to a psychiatrist or psychiatric facility (or even to a General Practitioner) to be prescribed psychiatric drugs. Typical screens are usually nothing more than a few questions about one’s level of stress or anxiety, since there are no clinical tests for mental disorders.

Mental health screening aims to get whole populations on drugs and thus under control. The kinds of drugs used create further medical and social problems due to their adverse side effects, and these subsequent complications require additional taxes and laws such as the expansion of Medicaid to handle them. The net result is a sick and fearful population dependent on the government to “solve” all their problems. The pandemic is the perfect foil.

We remind people that resilience and unity have kept us all on track before without resorting to mind-altering drugs to get through. Epidemics do take a significant toll, also creating uncertainties and worries about the future. But we also want to ensure that one of the legacies of the Coronavirus is not minds damaged by psychotropic drugs and other harmful psychiatric interventions that can carry with them long-term risks and harm.

CCHR encourages anyone who is being advised that they or a loved one should take psychiatric drugs to demand a “differential diagnosis” where the doctor obtains a thorough history and conducts a complete physical exam, ruling out all the possible problems that might cause a set of symptoms and explains any possible side effects of the recommended treatments with Full Informed Consent.

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