Posts Tagged ‘Human Rights’

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Study Adds to Research Showing Involuntary Psychiatric Hospitalization Does More Harm Than Good

Monday, July 24th, 2023

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Citizens Commission on Human Rights, National Affairs Office

WASHINGTON, DC, July 13, 2023 — A new study has found that involuntary hospitalization for substance abuse treatment is not effective, adding to the growing body of research finding that forced behavioral health treatment does more harm than good and raising ethical questions about the use of coercion by the psychiatrists typically in charge of the treatment.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston investigated the outcomes of 22 patients involuntarily committed for substance abuse treatment after first coming to a hospital emergency room. The result was that after release, none of the patients stayed off their alcohol and/or drugs, and all of them ended up back in the emergency room within a year because of their substance misuse.

“One year following involuntary commitment, all patients had relapsed to substance use and had at least one emergency department visit,” wrote lead author John C. Messinger. Half reverted to substance abuse within two months after the start of their involuntary treatment.

“The study adds to a growing literature recognizing the harms of involuntary commitment for substance use disorder,” the researchers concluded.

Other research has found that forced hospitalization is also ineffective and harmful for mental health treatment. A study earlier this year found no benefit to patients’ mental health condition and no lower risk of death from nonconsensual mental health treatment.

This follows a 2020 study which found that psychiatric in-patients were actually more likely to attempt suicide after release if they were admitted and treated against their will as compared to those who were not.

The harm and lack of benefit from involuntary commitment for psychiatric treatment has resulted in some people avoiding mental health treatment. The U.S. 2011-2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health revealed that one in four depressed young adults cited their concern over being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility or forced to take psychiatric drugs against their will as a reason not to seek mental health treatment.

The potential of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization and treatment doing more harm than good has led some medical professionals to argue that such acts violate the Hippocratic oath of “first do no harm” and should be abolished.

Among them is the co-founder of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the late professor of psychiatry and humanitarian Thomas Szasz, M.D., who advocated an end to forced psychiatric treatment. Considered by many scholars and academics to be psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, Dr. Szasz wrote: “Increasing numbers of persons, both in the mental health professions and in public life, have come to acknowledge that involuntary psychiatric interventions are methods of social control. On both moral and practical grounds, I advocate the abolition of all involuntary psychiatry.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) has also taken a strong position against coercive mental health practices. In a series of guidelines issued in 2021, WHO stated that nonconsensual practices are used “despite the lack of evidence that they offer any benefits, and the significant evidence that they lead to physical and psychological harm and even death.”

The guidelines further state: “People subjected to coercive practices report feelings of dehumanization, disempowerment and being disrespected. Many experience it as a form of trauma or re-traumatization leading to a worsening of their condition and increased experiences of distress.”

WHO’s call for an end to involuntary mental health treatment extends even to those experiencing acute mental distress. The guidelines note that individuals in mental health crisis “are at a heightened risk of their human rights being violated, including through forced admissions and treatment.”

WHO challenged United Nations member nations, including the United States, to ensure that their mental health services are free from coercion, including forced drugging, the use of physical and chemical restraints and seclusion, electroshock without consent, and involuntary institutionalization.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has been a global leader in the fight against the coercive and abusive use of involuntary commitments, seclusion and restraints, psychiatric drugs, and electroshock. In 1969, CCHR issued a Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights that laid out fundamental human rights in the field of mental health to ensure the right to one’s own mind and the right to be free from forced mental health treatment.

CCHR was co-founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and Dr. Szasz to eradicate abuses and restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health. CCHR has been instrumental in obtaining 228 laws against psychiatric abuse and violations of human rights worldwide.

The CCHR National Affairs Office in Washington, DC, has advocated for mental health rights and protections at the state and federal level. The CCHR traveling exhibit, which has toured 441 major cities worldwide and educated over 800,000 people on the history to the present day of abusive and racist psychiatric practices, has been displayed at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, DC, and at other locations.

Anne Goedeke
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, National Affairs Office

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How to Cultivate Empathy

Monday, February 13th, 2023

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing; to “walk in their shoes” so to speak.

[Derived from Ancient Greek ???????? (empatheia, “physical affection or passion”).]

We notice a huge amount of social media commentary about this concept, including a surfeit of pithy quotes. Wikipedia, for one example, discusses empathy extensively. We’re not going to go into it in such extraordinary depth, but we hope to add some useful observations.

One observation is that whenever there is so much back and forth discussion about a concept, there tends to also be major misunderstandings about it. We’d like to add our two cents.

Besides the obvious usefulness of empathy in the general social contexts of communication and understanding with others, there is also a practical application in marketing and public relations. For example, a product or service gets empathy by tying it in to one’s public using their local environment. This makes it more acceptable and improves its reach. As a local example, many products and services in the St. Louis metropolitan area are tied in name or picture with the Gateway Arch.

Some confuse empathy with compassion or sympathy. These are closely related but definitely different. Consult any good dictionary to understand the differences. (I recommend https://onelook.com/ to look up words online.)

One of the abiding concerns of commentary on empathy is how to teach it, how to develop it in a person when it is lacking. It is really a function of a living being’s awareness.

A large part of awareness training would be learning how to confront others and situations, while being open to all perceptions and remaining unrestimulated by noise and confusion. In this context, confront means to face without flinching.

People are not naturally aware of other people; they have to be drilled on observing others in order to bring about awareness. In many cases this normally occurs during one’s upbringing; in other cases this ability to observe may be lacking to greater or lesser degree and requires training. A century of psychological “know-best” that people are animals, not spiritual beings, has blunted this ability to observe in many unfortunate cases. Thus we get so much conversation on social media about how to develop empathy for others, which basically depends upon observing and being aware of others.

At the bottom of the scale of awareness there is delusion, in which a person sees one thing but thinks it is something else. This is more prevalent than one might suspect. Observational drills may not be enough to repair this failing.

Ways to Bring About a Heightened Sense of Empathy

A sensitivity to Human Rights is one way to cultivate empathy. Some notice that teaching about Human Rights brings about changes in attitude and behavior leading to more empathy toward others.

Another way to approach this is to recognize ways in which one’s awareness is turned to unawareness, and remedy those. A prime example of creating unawareness is psychiatric drugs.

These drugs create many of their effects by modifying the expression of neurotransmitters in the brain, which we call “playing Russian Roulette with your brain.”

Common and well-documented side effects of many psychiatric drugs include hallucinations, delusions, emotional disturbance, emotional numbing, confusion, akathisia (restlessness), brain damage, forgetfulness, memory lapses, hostility, aggressive behavior, and vision problems.

One can easily see that such side effects may contribute to one’s unawareness of what is going on around them, thus bringing about a destruction of empathy. The obvious remedy is to wean off taking these drugs and find non-drug alternatives for one’s troubles.

We hope these few observations have contributed to your understanding of empathy, and lead to a resurgence of your awareness of others.

Alien Mind Wipe

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The Serotonin Theory Of Depression Is In The News Again

Monday, August 1st, 2022

While the fraudulent psychiatric “brain chemical imbalance” theory has been debunked for many years, it has been held firmly in place by the psycho-pharma public relations machine in order to sell more harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs. These drugs make patients for life since the drugs do not cure anything and have devastating side effects.

We discuss serotonin because many psychiatric drugs deliberately alter the levels of serotonin in the brain, in the mistaken belief that this is the cause of depression.

July 20, 2022 marks the publication of another study debunking the serotonin theory of depression, the so-called brain chemical imbalance theory.

To quote the study, “Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. … This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression. … We suggest it is time to acknowledge that the serotonin theory of depression is not empirically substantiated.”

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter hormone synthesized in the adrenal glands and elsewhere in the body from the essential amino acid tryptophan, found in the brain, blood, and mostly the digestive tract, which allows nerve cells throughout the body to communicate and interact with each other.

Since serotonin impacts every part of the body, messing with it can cause unwanted and dangerous side effects. Obviously, the body must closely regulate and balance the level of serotonin, since both a deficiency or an excess can be extremely harmful.

Psychiatrists have known since the beginning of psychopharmacology that their drugs do not cure any disease. Further, there is no credible evidence that depression is genetic or linked to serotonin transport; these are just public relations theories 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. Psychiatric drugs are fraudulently marketed as safe and effective for the sole purpose of earning billions for the psycho-pharmaceutical industry.

Messing with neurotransmitters in the brain without totally understanding how they work is serious business, essentially one is playing Russian Roulette with one’s brain.

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.

Contact your local, state and federal officials and insist they stop funding this insanity.

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Mental Health Rights Policy To Prevent Patient Torture

Monday, January 31st, 2022

The word “compulsory” and the practice of coercion must be removed from any mental health policy. Effective mental healing should improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society, by restoring individuals to personal strength, ability, competence, responsibility, and spiritual wellbeing.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a mental health industry watchdog, launched a policy for governments to adopt to prevent abuse and coercive psychiatric practices that constitute torture. This is based on reports and guidelines issued by the World Health Organization (WHO—guidance on community mental health services) and United Nations representatives for health and against torture. In 2020, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture presented a report on “psychological torture” to the UN Human Rights Council, with the strongest condemnation to date of involuntary psychiatric interventions.

Currently, New Zealand is in the process of transforming its mental health law away from coercive and compulsory incarceration and treatment and towards a human rights approach—something CCHR says is urgently needed throughout the United States and worldwide. Recently in the U.S., the mental health system has been rocked with allegations of staff physical, sexual and chemical assaults of patients, especially children and teens in for-profit behavioral facilities, including restraint use leading to death. In 2021, fourteen staff from behavioral hospitals faced criminal proceedings over patient abuse and deaths.

Yet, U.S. psychiatrists have called for the power to increase their rights to involuntarily detain and treat patients, based on the arbitrary argument that persons are a danger to themselves or others. Such arguments fly in the face of the March 2020 UN Special Rapporteur on Torture report on “psychological torture” presented to the UN Human Rights Council, berating involuntary psychiatric interventions based on the supposed “best interests” of a person or on “medical necessity.” Such interventions, the report says, “generally involve highly discriminatory and coercive attempts at controlling or ‘correcting’ the victim’s personality, behavior or choices and almost always inflict severe pain or suffering…such practices may well amount to torture.”

WHO states that forced treatment is not proven to prevent violent practices yet are relied upon “despite the lack of evidence that they offer any benefits, and the significant evidence that they lead to physical and psychological harm and even death.”

Psychiatrists and psychologists are unable to predict whether a person is a danger to oneself or others as this relies upon subjective opinion, not science. “Violence is not a diagnosis nor is it a disease. Potential to do harm is not a symptom or a sign of mental illness,” and cannot be scientifically assessed.

Recommendations

  • Prohibition of all ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT) and psychosurgery, with criminal penalties to those administering these in violation of the law.
  • Informed Consent must be obtained with all major treatment risks documented in writing; the person informed that there are diverse opinions and disagreements about the medical legitimacy of psychiatric diagnoses which cannot be determined with physical-medical tests; the patient has the right to refuse treatment and revoke consent at any time, as well has the right to all available alternatives.
  • Abolish mechanical and chemical restraints, with criminal penalties if used and resulting in harm or death of the patient.
  • Proper medical testing to be conducted as part of the patient assessment, ruling out underlying and undiagnosed physical conditions that may manifest in “psychiatric” symptoms.
  • Facilities established to safely withdraw patients from psychotropic drugs.
Forced Psychiatry is Legislated Violence

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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.

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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

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Something is Rotten in Canton

Monday, July 19th, 2021

Let’s Electroshock Children Who Misbehave

In March of 2020 the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) banned the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts from using electric shock devices on their autistic and other mentally troubled children. In July of 2021 a federal appeals court removed the ban. The school is once again electro shocking about 60 students a day.

The school administers electric skin shocks in a form of “aversion therapy” for aggressive or self-injurious behavior. School staff trigger a shock to a child by using a remote control that zaps children with electric current when they misbehave. The school calls this a “medical device.” Since 1987 a state court must determine that such forced treatment is appropriate.

This electrical stimulation device delivers a powerful and painful electric shock to the wearer’s skin in an effort to punish. This school is the only facility in the country that uses coercive electric shock therapy to “treat” individuals who severely self-injure or are aggressive.

The FDA finally recognized in March 2020 (after 20 years) that these devices “present substantial psychological and physical risks and, in fact, can worsen underlying symptoms—while leading to heightened anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned the FDA ban on July 6, 2021, stating that the ban was a regulation of the practice of medicine, which is outside the FDA’s area of authority.

The History of Abuse

In April 2016, the FDA first proposed banning electrical stimulation devices for self-injurious or aggressive behavior.

In 2018, the media reported that the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center would be allowed to continue administering electric shocks to its special needs students after a judge ruled the procedure conformed to the “accepted standard of care,” in spite of the practice being condemned by disability rights groups and the ACLU.

On December 3, 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of The Organization of American States published a Precautionary Measure calling for the school to immediately cease electroshocking special needs children as a disciplinary measure.

In March 2020 the FDA finally determined that the devices presented a substantial and unreasonable risk to self-injurious and aggressive patients, justifying banning the devices for that purpose.

The Appeals Court

The appeals court examined the question, “Does the FDA have legal authority to ban an otherwise legal device from a particular use?”

The court concluded that current law prohibits the FDA from regulating the practice of medicine, and therefore it vacated the FDA’s rule banning electrical stimulation devices for self-injurious and aggressive behavior. There was one dissenting opinion; the Chief Judge found in favor of the FDA. [Read the full court opinion here.]

Of course, the lie in the argument is that electro shocking children is “practicing medicine.” In fact it is torture, not medicine.

The Case Against Torture

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment has remarked that Electro Convulsive Treatment (ECT) amounts to torture. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also stated that there are no indications for the use of ECT on minors. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) calls for a ban on “forced treatment.”

Granted that ECT is more severe than electric skin shocks, just have someone force you to stick your finger into an electric wall socket and tell us that this is not torture.

“Disguising social control as medical treatment is a deceit which conceals an abuse.” This is a de facto abuse of power, as it seeks to limit and control the individual instead of helping the individual to get better and improve their conditions in life.

In the United Nations July 24, 2018 Annual Report of the High Commissioner “Mental health and human rights,” it states, “States should ensure that all health care and services, including all mental health care and services, are based on the free and informed consent of the individual concerned, and that legal provisions and policies permitting the use of coercion and forced interventions, including involuntary hospitalization and institutionalization, the use of restraints, psychosurgery, forced medication, and other forced measures aimed at correcting or fixing an actual or perceived impairment, including those allowing for consent or authorization by a third party, are repealed. States should reframe and recognize these practices as constituting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and as amounting to discrimination against users of mental health services, persons with mental health conditions and persons with psychosocial disabilities.”

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, formally adopted on December 10, 1948 states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

CCHR’s own Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1969, states these rights, among others:
“The right to refuse any treatment the patient considers harmful.”
“No person shall be given psychiatric or psychological treatment against his or her will.”

Sign the petition to ban electroshock here.

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What Exactly is Mental Health?

Monday, March 22nd, 2021

We speak and write often about mental trauma, and how and why psychiatry is not the answer to good mental health care. But we rarely address exactly what mental health is. There are continuous loads of social commentary about mental health without even clearly defining what is good mental health.

We’ll try to remedy that. There are a number of useful approaches to defining good mental health. As usual with most English terms, there are multiple definitions; but we can certainly isolate some common attributes and characteristics. One can delineate both positive and negative characteristics; one can list contributing factors toward good mental health, and alternatively one can list contributing factors toward bad mental health.

WHO Says What is Mental Health

The World Health Organization (WHO) describes mental health as: “a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”

For a practical approach, this is a good start.

Additional Approaches to What is Mental Health

We might also call good mental health an absence of psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic ills; leading to a state of mental well-being.

The Wales Mental Health in Primary Care Network has an interesting viewpoint of good mental health:
“The central role of relationships in health and wellbeing suggests that relationships set the initial conditions and the simple values that lead to the emergence of health and wellbeing outcomes. Relationships that are positive between people and within organisations are the simple small inputs that lead to the much bigger output of improved outcomes and health gain. … The gold standard for mental health and wellbeing is the gold standard for caring relationships.”

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.”

What is a Cure?

We generally take cure to mean the elimination of some unwanted condition with some effective treatment. The primary purpose of any mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance, leading to a cure. The only effective measure of this treatment must be “patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals.” This, we would call a cure. Psychiatry produces no cures, which they readily admit.

“We do not know the causes [of any mental illness]. We don’t have the methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” [Dr. Rex Cowdry, psychiatrist and director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1995]
“The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.” [Norman Satorius, president of the World Psychiatric Association in 1994]

The Effects of Stress

According to top experts, the majority of people having mental problems are actually suffering from non-psychiatric disorders, which can cause emotional stress. We might characterize mental stress as inorganic or organic. Organic conditions are characterized by physical and biochemical indicators, while inorganic conditions manifest only as distressing experiences or undesirable behavior. In either case, an underlying cause would be some form of stress.

An individual’s health level, sanity level, activity level and ambition level are all monitored by their own concept of the dangerousness of their environment. You are as successful as you adjust your environment to yourself, rather than the environment enforcing itself on you which produces stress.

Human Rights and Mental Health

Mental health refers to psychological, social, behavioral, and emotional aspects of health.

The Right to Mental Health is an important human rights issue.

“The right to health contains both freedoms and entitlements. Freedoms include the right to control one’s health, including the right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment and experimentation. Entitlements include the right to a system of health protection (i.e. health care and the underlying social determinants of health) that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable standard of health.”

The highest attainable standard of mental health care “includes the provision of equal and timely access to basic preventive, curative, rehabilitative health services and health education; regular screening programmes; appropriate treatment of prevalent diseases, illnesses, injuries and disabilities, preferably at community level; the provision of essential drugs; and appropriate mental health treatment and care.”

What is a Good Patient Outcome?

When we think about the outcomes of mental health care, we can think in terms that are important to the patient, or alternatively in terms that are important to others such as family, teachers, insurance companies, or the attending medical professionals.

A good patient outcome is one that leads toward optimum survival for the patient and all their associations.

The Highest Attainable Standard of Mental Health

It should be obvious by now that the term “mental health” has multiple effective meanings. It should also be obvious that psychiatry is not engaged in good mental health care, so the highest attainable standard of mental health would certainly eliminate psychiatric involvement.

The Bottom Line? Pick one or more of the above standards for good mental health and apply it to your own situations and interests; use them to guide your activities toward a higher standard. After all, good mental health is not a fixed state; one can always aspire and work toward a better state.

The Complete Removal of Psychosis
The Complete Removal of Psychosis

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Psychiatrists: An Invasive Alien Species?

Monday, November 23rd, 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 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and
reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Target 15.8: By 2020, introduce measures to prevent the introduction and significantly reduce the impact of invasive alien species on land and water ecosystems and control or eradicate the priority species.

How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 15.8

While calling psychiatrists an invasive alien species may be facetious, it highlights the abhorrent characteristics of the psychiatric industry.

The role of a true scientist is to make a better world for all men and women. Psychiatry claims it is a science, yet its actions clearly indicate otherwise.

Psychiatry, from its outset, has had two main goals: the degradation and dominance of Man, and the harvesting of government billions.

Psychiatry breaks the most basic laws of humanity. Psychiatry itself is an abuse of human rights.

— Psychiatry promotes easy-seizure involuntary commitment laws, clearly an affront to human rights.

— Psychiatrists developed the racial purity ideology used by Hitler which lead to the Nazi euthanasia program, and they ran the Nazi concentration camps.

— Psychiatrists around the world have used incarceration of patients for political reasons, to suppress the rights of political dissidents.

— Psychiatric mind-altering drugs are used to create terrorists.

— Psychiatric fraud is rampant. The United States loses up to $40 billion annually due to fraudulent practices in the mental health industry.

— Between 10% and 25% of mental health practitioners sexually abuse their patients. To cover up their crime, psychiatrists have used drugs or electroshock in an effort to eliminate the patient’s memory of the rape.

There is more. CCHR has been documenting psychiatry’s human rights abuses since 1969. Psychiatry might as well be an invasive alien species, since it certainly does not represent decent human beings.

Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 15 can occur.

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How psychiatry Usurps Climate Change Planning

Monday, August 17th, 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 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Target 13.2: Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning.

How Psychiatry Obstructs Target 13.2
The psycho-pharmaceutical industry has jumped full-time onto the climate change bandwagon. Scholarly articles are being published claiming that climate change affects mental health, along with the typical cries to fund more research, prescribe more antidepressants, and prepare for the worst.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does not lack for possible disorders that can be tied to some climate change disaster for which antidepressants can be prescribed.

It used to be called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (SAD). Although this is no longer classified as a unique disorder, it can still be diagnosed as a “mood disorder with a seasonal pattern.” SAD is considered a subtype of major depression or bipolar disorder. An example of a SAD diagnosis might be “Major Depressive Disorder, Recurrent Episode, Moderate, With Seasonal Pattern”.

Here we have the “dangerous environment” in full bloom. Wherever psychiatry intervenes, the environment becomes more dangerous, more unsettled, more disturbed. A dangerous environment only persists if we fail to spread a safe environment across the world. What makes a dangerous environment? Confusion, conflict and upset.

The psychiatrists who promote a dangerous environment make it seem as threatening as possible so that they can profit from it. How do you counter this? You stop spreading the chaos and spread the truth instead. Behind the truth comes the calm. You may still need technology to handle climate change, but you don’t need antidepressant drugs to do so.

The issue is not “is there or is there not climate change?” The issue is, get rid of the psychiatrists who are promoting and profiting from the confusion.

Psychiatric fraud and abuse must be eradicated so that SDG 13 can occur.

Climate Change

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