Posts Tagged ‘Mental Health’

New York City Goes Big-Time For Involuntary Commitment

Monday, December 12th, 2022

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a major effort on November 29, 2022 to involuntarily commit the homeless and anyone found suffering from mental trauma.

Involuntary Commitment, sometimes euphemistically called “Civil Commitment”, is a profound violation of Human Rights, and a major tool of coercive psychiatry to funnel government funds into the mental health system.

As the late Professor Thomas Szasz said, “coercive psychiatrists function as judges and jailers not physicians and healers” with the power of life and death over the most vulnerable people.

“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.

Coercive psychiatry is not intended to cure anything. On the contrary, psychiatry is the science of control and entrapment, and having power over distressed and vulnerable individuals. Wherever men have advocated and advanced totalitarianism, they have used psychiatric principles to control society, to put limits on individual freedom, to suppress and punish dissent, and to trap people into worsening conditions. It is actually a mis-use of power, since its intentions are to make less of a person’s self-determinism and give more power to others and the State.

The World Health Organization (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.”

There is a heavy ongoing push country-wide, called Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), to train police officers to “handle” difficult situations involving “suspected mental illness.” In the name of “help”, it removes unwanted citizens from the street and forces them, using government funds, into mental health facilities.

Your mental health, and the mental health of your family, friends and associates, can be questioned by CIT-trained police. If this makes you uncomfortable, execute a Living Will (Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment) and then express your opinion to your local, state and federal officials, especially if you live in New York City.

Psychiatrists in Brussels Prescribing Museum Visits

Monday, October 31st, 2022

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

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

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

What Is Art?

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

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

The Psychiatric Connection

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

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

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

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

Recommendation

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

Are You Woke?

Monday, August 8th, 2022

“In an effort to raise awareness of social injustices, the woke Left has gotten Scrabble to ban 400 ‘offensive’ terms that refer to racial slurs, sexuality, and gender identity.”

[Washington Examiner, July 12, 2022]

Woke has evolving meanings due to rapidly changing social conditions and the speed of social media. It can also be used in a positive or negative sense.

[Past tense & past participle of wake, akin to Latin vegere to enliven.]

Examples:
A play on the word “awake”.
Spiritual and intellectual enlightenment; a higher sense of awareness.
A sudden understanding of what’s really going on.
A politically correct narrative.
Acutely aware of issues of social justice or injustice.
A state of intense self-realization induced by psychedelic drugs.
(Positive) Expressing admiration for someone who is au courant and in-the-know.
(Negative) Branding someone as pompous or stupid for being trendy, or for pretending to be of greater intelligence or awareness than they actually are.

Of course the psychiatric industry has its own take on the woke phenomenon. Those in the know call wokeism “Critical Social Justice Theory”, such as the woke doctrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and the scramble to find racism everywhere while insinuating that one’s mental health is at risk.

Interestingly enough, “woke mental health” has likely led to the Drug Enforcement Administration loosening its restrictions on prescriptions for Schedule II controlled drugs via telehealth appointments during a public health emergency. Such drugs previously required in-person physical evaluations. Nothing like a pandemic to increase the patient pool for psychiatric mental health care.

We call it “care” loosely. It isn’t really care; it’s coercive social control.

According to psychiatric thinking, the solution for everything from the most minor to the most severe personal problem is strictly limited to diagnosis with the fraudulent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), assigning a mental illness label, and prescribing a restrictive, generally coercive and costly range of harmful treatments, none of which have been shown to cure anything.

Ultimately, psychiatry must be eliminated from all social institutions and their coercive and unworkable methods should never be funded by the government. Contact your local, state and federal officials and let them know what you think about this.

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.

Is That Adderall There Is?

Monday, May 9th, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one denies that people can have difficult problems in their lives, that at times they can be mentally unstable. Mental health care is therefore both valid and necessary. However, the emphasis must be on workable mental healing methods that improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society by restoring people to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being. Psychiatry is not workable.

Alien Mind Wipe

Is Overthinking a Mental Illness?

Monday, March 7th, 2022

Overthinking is the habit of thinking too much or too long about something, or making something more complicated than it actually is. Overthinking is also known as “analysis paralysis” because by thinking too much one is getting stuck and stopped from taking action.

Overthinking is a favorite topic for psychiatric and psychological review, as a symptom of a possible mental health issue like so-called depression or anxiety, with recommended treatments of psychotropic anti-anxiety or antidepressant drugs, or other harmful psychiatric interventions.

Sometimes the word “rumination” is used as a scholarly euphemism for overthinking. It means “obsessive or abnormal reflection upon an idea or deliberation over a choice.”

Overthinking may also be a symptom of justified thought, which is one’s futile attempt to analytically explain an irrational reaction to something.

Another word for this is a “via,” as in “They took a via instead of a direct approach.” That’s a Latin word meaning “way.” In this sense it means a roundabout way, instead of just a straight A to B. A via is a relay point in a communication line, and represents some interference between a cause and an effect. A totally rational activity strings a straight line between cause and effect; the reasons one cannot are vias. Enough vias between cause and effect make a stop. Almost all anxieties in human relations come about through an imbalance of cause and effect.

Well, how does one determine if one’s route is A to B, or if it is A to C to X to B? In other words, to B or not to B?

That is indeed the question!

We’d like to emphasize that overthinking is not a mental illness. However, psychiatrists have many ways to call this phenomenon a mental disorder, so that they can make a buck, and a patient for life, off of an unsuspecting and vulnerable person.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is used to diagnose a number of related symptoms that could be presented by one’s overthinking:

  • Intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
  • Unspecified intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder)
  • Unspecified mental disorder
  • Unspecified neurocognitive disorder
  • Unspecified communication disorder
  • Generalized anxiety disorder
  • Other specified anxiety disorder
  • Unspecified anxiety disorder

Basically, if you think at all, you can be diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs.

Back to the question. How does one effectively deal with this?

It can’t hurt to address it as a manifestation of anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion, and is really a conflict, or the restimulation of a conflict, or something containing indecision or uncertainty — in other words as above, obsessive deliberation over a choice. It is exemplified by a conflict between something supporting survival and something opposing survival. It is rooted in an inability to assign the correct cause to something, which itself is rooted in an inability to observe. The cure is not a drug, but in observing the correct cause.

Opposing ideologies, violent revolutions and a frail social economic structure have subjected more than one-third of the world’s population to oppression, poverty and brutal human rights violations. Terrorism and a global economic crisis rips at the very fabric of society, propagating a mindset governed by hysteria, fear and anxiety. It’s no small wonder why some are gripped by anxiety and its attendant overthinking.

The Bottom Line

Anything one can do to improve one’s condition in life, enhance one’s ability to get along well in life, to make good judgments and decisions, to reduce anxiety, and to relieve stress in the environment and in society, can likely help. But however one addresses the condition, the wrong way to deal with it is with psychiatry.

Overthinking is not a mental illness.

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.

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/

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

Is Sneezing Related to Mental Health?

Monday, January 3rd, 2022

Do you sneeze when you emerge into bright sunlight?

Sneezing is a natural response that removes irritants from the nose. But is sunlight a nasal irritant?

Officially known as “photic sneeze reflex” or “photic sneeze syndrome”, sun sneezing is a condition that triggers a sneeze when people are exposed to bright lights. It affects an estimated 18 to 35 percent of the population. Some think it is a genetic condition, as it often occurs within families.

Apparently the reflex isn’t triggered by light itself, but by a change in light intensity.

Sun sneezing has been documented for many centuries. While the exact mechanism of the photic sneeze reflex is not understood, the most common explanation can be traced to psychiatrist Henry Everett whose 1964 theory proposed that the effect resulted from mixed up nerve signals in the brain.

Some psychiatrists and psychologists have jumped on this bandwagon, possibly because the phenomenon can’t yet be explained, so it may be a ripe area for getting government funds for brain research.

One study suggested that individuals who sun sneeze are more likely to suffer from psychological distress.

Another theory says that intractable sneezing is a manifestation of a psychiatric condition called “conversion disorder” [a condition in which the brain and body’s nerves are unable to send and receive signals properly, sometimes thought to occur because of a psychological conflict].

In the psychiatric billing bible the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), there are nine entries with some type of “Conversion disorder,” or “functional neurological symptom disorder.”

So if you sneeze when you walk outside, you can be labeled with a mental disorder and prescribed an antidepressant.

The fifth cranial nerve, called the trigeminal nerve, is thought by some to be related to sneezing. Some psychiatrists speculate that a malformation in this nerve causes it to be overstimulated in bright light. Some psychiatrists have also targeted the trigeminal nerve for harmful therapies.

For example, a prescription-only device, called the Monarch external Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation (eTNS) System from NeuroSigma, sends an electric current into the brains of children diagnosed with so-called ADHD.

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Why does sudden exposure to the sun cause sneezing?