Posts Tagged ‘Psych Drugs’

Foster Children Prescribed Psychiatric Drugs At Four Times the Rate of Non-Foster Children, New Study Finds

Monday, September 4th, 2023

Previous government recommendations for improved oversight of psychotropics in foster care have not resolved the overdrugging problem.

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Citizens Commission on Human Rights, National Affairs Office

WASHINGTON, DC, August 24, 2023 — Despite government recommendations over more than a decade for more oversight of the psychotropic drugs given to foster children, a new study reveals that the powerful, mind-altering drugs are still disproportionately prescribed to these children as compared to non-foster youth.

Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, reviewed the Medicaid prescription claims of 397,340 children ages 1 to 18 to investigate the rates of psychotropic drug prescriptions for foster children as compared to youth not in foster care. Psychotropic drugs include antidepressants, antipsychotics, stimulants (ADHD drugs), antianxiety drugs, and mood stabilizers.

They found that foster children were prescribed at least one psychotropic drug at four times the rate (35%) of non-foster children (8%).

“Across all age groups, children in foster care on Medicaid were prescribed psychotropic medications disproportionately more than their non-foster peers on Medicaid,” concluded lead author Rachael J. Keefe, MD, MPH, FAAP, a pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics-public health, writing in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.

The study comes at a time of renewed scrutiny of the amount of psychotropic drugs administered to children in the foster care system. These are children already traumatized by being removed from their homes, where they may have been abused or neglected. Giving them psychotropic drugs exposes them to the risk of having to also deal with drug side effects, some of the most serious of which are significant weight gain, uncontrollable restlessness (akathisia), uncontrollable muscle movements (tardive dyskinesia), heart problems, mania, violence, and suicidal thoughts and actions.

In April, a federal judge in Texas said he was appalled at “the massive amount of drugs that are given to these [foster] children” in psychiatric residential treatment facilities and expressed concern for the children’s safety. The judge was responding to a report on visits to 14 facilities housing foster children, which also showed a lack of proper monitoring of children taking the drugs.

Earlier this year, a federal class-action lawsuit was filed by several disability and civil rights organizations against the Maryland Department of Human Services and its Social Services Administration, alleging that up to 34% of Maryland foster children are prescribed psychotropic drugs, with over half of them prescribed more than one drug. The suit suggests that the drugs are being used on some children as a form of chemical restraint, according to a media report.

More than a decade ago, after an analysis of psychotropic drug use by Medicaid children in five states, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in 2011 finding that foster children were prescribed psychotropic drugs at double to quadruple the rate of non-foster children. The GAO further found that hundreds of children were taking five or more psychotropic drugs, and thousands were prescribed doses higher than maximum levels recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The GAO recommended government guidance be provided to increase oversight and protections for these children.

A seminal series of articles in 2014 in the San Jose Mercury News brought national attention to the problem again, detailing the high rate of psychotropic prescriptions continuing for children in the California foster care system.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) investigated claims for antipsychotics, a large class of psychotropic drugs, paid for by Medicaid, the health provider for most foster children. Its 2015 report included findings of too many drugs or wrong doses being prescribed and poor monitoring of the children taking the drugs. The OIG recommended enhanced government oversight and reviews of psychotropics prescribed to children.

The OIG issued another report three years later, revealing that one in three children in foster care receiving psychotropic drugs did not receive required treatment planning or medication monitoring. The OIG again recommended better government oversight of psychotropic prescriptions.

Now, the new Texas study shows that the overdrugging of foster children is still occurring. Government recommendations for improved oversight to date have not resolved the problem.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights urgently calls on state and federal governments to act to protect foster children from the massive overprescribing of psychotropic drugs and the physical and mental health risks the drugs carry.

WARNING: Anyone wishing to discontinue or change the dose of a psychiatric drug is cautioned to do so only under the supervision of a physician because of potentially dangerous withdrawal symptoms.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) continues to raise public awareness of the risks of serious side effects and withdrawal symptoms from antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, so that consumers and their physicians can make fully informed decisions about starting or stopping the drugs. CCHR supports safe and science-based non-drug approaches to mental health.

CCHR also recommends a complete physical examination with lab tests, nutritional and allergy screenings, and a review of all current medications to identify any physical causes of depression or other unwanted mental and behavioral symptoms, which might otherwise be misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated as a psychiatric disorder.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was co-founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and the late psychiatrist and humanitarian Thomas Szasz, M.D., recognized by many academics as modern psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, 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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You’re Not Paranoid, It’s Really Happening

Monday, April 26th, 2021

Paranoia is an unfounded or exaggerated distrust of others, sometimes reaching delusional proportions. The word comes from the Greek word paranous “distracted”, ultimately from para- “irregular” + nous “mind”.

It’s a popular psychiatric designation, occurring in the fraudulent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as “Paranoid personality disorder”. As “paranoid schizophrenic” it can also come under one of the several DSM headings related to schizophrenia, meaning “delusions of persecution”.

It’s also the subject of various jokes such as:

“The mental-disease-of-the-month club is being disbanded because during paranoia month all the members moved and left no forwarding address.”
“What does a paranoid have in common with the all-knowing master of time space and dimension that secretly controls all of our lives? … Right, like you don’t know.”

What is it really?

Paranoia is a dramatization, which is an irrational set of thoughts and actions coming about from the restimulation of past moments of pain and unconsciousness, often containing a phrase such as “You’re all against me.” Some drugs in particular can restimulate this type of behavior.

Various Other Restimulants of Paranoia

Newer antidepressants such as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) may have a side effect of paranoia. Smoking crack cocaine, marijuana, or taking LSD, methamphetamines or ecstasy (MDMA) can also cause paranoid behavior. The ADHD drugs Adderall, Concerta, Strattera, and Ritalin all have a potential side effect of paranoia. The psychedelic dimethyltryptamine (DMT) has a side effect of paranoia.

Being bullied may lead to a feeling that people plan to harm you, which can be misconstrued by a psychiatrist as a “mental illness” and considered a psychotic symptom for which psychotropic drugs can be prescribed, some of which then also have more paranoia as a side effect.

Addressing a person’s difficulties with getting a good night’s sleep, or with getting proper nutrition, may lead to improvements in psychotic symptoms such as paranoia.

Hypothyroidism, an insufficient production of thyroid hormone, can lead to paranoia.

A deficiency of vitamin B12 or folic acid (vitamin B9) can produce paranoia.

An allergic response to wheat, corn, cow’s milk, or tobacco can produce paranoia.

Undiagnosed and unhandled infections such as pneumonia, urinary tract infection, sepsis, malaria, Legionnaire’s disease, syphilis, typhoid, diphtheria, HIV, rheumatic fever and herpes can all cause such devastating mental symptoms.

Recommendations

One can plainly see that the symptom of paranoia has many possible triggers which are unrelated to any so-called psychiatric “mental disorder”.

Any medical doctor who takes the time to conduct a thorough physical examination of a person exhibiting signs of what a psychiatrist calls paranoia can find undiagnosed, untreated physical conditions. Any person labeled as paranoid needs to receive a thorough physical examination by a competent medical—not psychiatric—doctor to first determine what underlying physical condition is causing the manifestation.

The use of various psychiatric drugs, since they can themselves trigger a paranoid response, should be specifically avoided.

Any person falsely diagnosed as paranoid which results in treatment that harms them should file a complaint with the police and professional licensing bodies and have this investigated. They should seek legal advice about filing a civil suit against any offending psychiatrist and his or her hospital, associations and teaching institutions seeking compensation.

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Give Me Your Attention Please

Monday, April 12th, 2021

As an English word, “attention” can mean one of many definitions:

  • applying the mind to something
  • selective focusing one’s perception or awareness
  • consideration with a view to action
  • an act of civility or courtesy
  • sympathetic consideration of someone’s needs and wants
  • a position assumed by a soldier
  • considering or taking notice
  • dealing with or taking special care
  • focusing interest

[From Latin attendere, from ad- ‘to’ + tendere ‘stretch’.]

Attention is a built-in attribute of living beings. For people (and some animals), it’s generally the ability to self-determinedly focus awareness (to greater or lesser degree); for plants, one might observe a more physical characteristic such as motion toward a light source.

There are two extremes of attention. Introversion is looking inward. Extroversion is looking outward. Attention can be aberrated such that it becomes too fixed and unable to sweep, or too dispersed and unable to focus. Somewhere in between these extremes is an optimum level for a given situation.

A simple remedy for excessive introversion is extroversion — a good look at and communication with the wider external environment; Take A Walk and Look At Things! A simple remedy for excessive extroversion, which is sometimes called “being buttered all over the universe”, could be “mindfulness” — which is just being in Present Time.

Attention is actually a flow of energy; it can flow outward, inward, or appear relatively motionless. As long as you can keep someone’s attention fixated or confused they can be controlled; this is how hypnotism works.

In the current environment of society, especially in psychiatric mental health “care”, it is all too common for attention to be manipulated by drugs, shock or impact. Picture being slapped in the face: got your attention, did it? Unfortunately such an impact can have two entirely opposite outcomes. On the one hand it might cause one to focus fixedly on the source of the impact. On the other hand it might cause one to lose consciousness and be unable to focus attention at all. Which way it goes depends on the suddenness and strength of the force. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or shock treatment, is an extreme but prevalent example of psychiatric brutality.

Another often unsuspected cause of attention issues is illiteracy or study problems. The many side effects of reading and comprehension difficulties are a main barrier to one’s ability to focus attention. For example, the July 2002 George W. Bush President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education revealed the source of a deeply troubled Special Education system: 40 percent of kids are being labeled with “learning disorders” simply because they have not been taught to read.

The Attention-Deficit Fraud

In 1987, “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD) was literally voted into existence by a show of hands of American Psychiatric Association members and included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Within a year, 500,000 children in America alone were diagnosed with this fake disease.

ADHD actually represents the spontaneous behaviors of normal children. When these behaviors become age-inappropriate, excessive or disruptive, the potential causes are limitless, including: boredom, poor teaching, inconsistent discipline at home, reading difficulty, tiredness, street drugs, nutritional deficiency, toxic overload, and many kinds of underlying physical illness.

The main “treatments” for so-called ADHD are psychotropic drugs which have known side effects of violence and suicide. Some of these drugs are no more than amphetamine-like stimulants, designed to shock one into focusing attention. Aside from the physical impact, there are also severe emotional conditions caused by even short-term use of such drugs. Hallucinations and psychotic behavior are not uncommon.

Due to the hazards of these drugs, in order to receive federal funds under the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act), the “Prohibition on Mandatory Medication Amendment” (H.R.1350) was signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 3, 2004 and requires schools to implement policies that prohibit schoolchildren being forced onto psychiatric drugs as a requisite for their education. The law states, “The psychological/psychiatric system should not be able to abuse Special Education by diagnosing childhood and educational problems and failure as ‘mental disorders.'”

Recommendations

People do not have a deficiency of attention, nor do they have a deficiency of attention drugs. They may have barriers that prevent or inhibit effective use of attention, but these have non-psychiatric-drug solutions.

1. Support legislative measures that will protect children from psychiatric and psychological interference and which will remove their destructive influence from our schools.

2. Ultimately, psychiatry and psychology must be eliminated from all education systems and their coercive and unworkable methods should never be funded by the State.

3. No person should be given psychiatric or psychological treatment against their will.

4. Government funding should never be used for mental health screening or treatment programs and should be allocated, instead, to better educational facilities, teachers and tutoring to improve the literacy and educational standards of students.

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Depersonalization – Another Fake psychiatric Disorder

Monday, March 29th, 2021

Are you feeling unreal? Are you a stranger to yourself? You may have “Depersonalization Disorder”!

ROFL, forgive me. Like we don’t already have a surfeit of fake diseases in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)! Oh, wait! It’s already in the DSM-5, as “Depersonalization/derealization disorder” (DDD).

There is increasing evidence that psychotropic drugs evoke an unbearable state of mind, such as feeling unreal, feeling detached, feeling like a stranger to oneself, not having sensations, or feeling like a walking cadaver — so much so that the person opts for suicide or violence as a means of relief.

Oh, wait again! This sounds just like some of the side effects, or adverse reactions, of various psychiatric drugs! Note that derealization means that the perception of the world and of external reality are altered. Sounds like a hallucination or delusion, which are known side effects of antidepressants.

For example, newer antidepressants have reported side effects of: abnormal thoughts; agitation; akathisia (severe restlessness); anxiety; confusion; delusions; emotional numbing; hallucinations; mood swings; panic attacks; paranoia; suicidal thoughts or behavior; violent behavior; withdrawal symptoms including deeper depression.

And since DDD is in the DSM, a psychiatrist can prescribe additional harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs for this diagnosis.

Psychiatrists do not know what causes these symptoms or how to cure it, and there are no clinical tests which can diagnose it. Diagnosis is based solely on opinion. Treatment is generally an antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug, often in combination with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) which is basically telling the patient what is wrong with them (evaluating for them).

There are whole organizations devoted just to DDD, providing a base for requesting research funds, getting articles published, and of course “treating” victims with more psychiatric drugs — when the actual treatment should include getting off the psychiatric drugs which are causing these side effects in the first place.

What about the person who experiences symptoms of so-called DDD without being on any drugs? Well, yes, Life can certainly include trauma needing some kind of relief; but it shouldn’t include drugs which can continue to cause these same symptoms, making the person a patient for life.

So What Actually Is The Condition Known As Depersonalization or Derealization?

A person’s inability to feel the reality of things stems directly from the introduction of some arbitrary consideration — something which has no basis in natural law or fact. This is often called “superstition.” For example, some person is feeling under the weather, and someone tells them “it’s all due to the lack of Prozac in your diet.” The person’s acceptance of this “solution” to their problem causes some unreality, since it is arbitrary and false. The introduction of any arbitrary thing into a problem or a solution invites further arbitraries to help “explain” it away. Eventually, one’s life becomes one exception after another, all arbitraries trying to correct the original misconception and on down the line.

One resolution is to trace back these arbitraries throughout one’s life and get the original one corrected. Obviously, psychiatric drugs cannot do this, as they merely deaden the nervous system to suppress symptoms and can never actually correct any arbitrary.

Recognize that the real problem is that psychiatrists fraudulently diagnose life’s problems as an “illness”, and stigmatize unwanted behavior as “diseases.” Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax – unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.

Contact your public officials and tell them what you think about this.

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Stop the Stigma: Buy More Psych Drugs?

Sunday, October 28th, 2012
Little known but Extremely Relevant Fact: The Campaign to “Stop the Stigma” of “Mental Illness” was launched by the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Lately we have been reading a deluge of news articles from all around the country about various campaigns to “stop the stigma of mental illness.” We wondered what all the fuss was about.

With a seemingly altruistic agenda, the fact is the campaign to end the “stigma” of mental illness is one driven and funded by those who benefit from more and more people being labeled mentally ill — pharma, psychiatry and pharmaceutical front groups such as NAMI and CHADD.

For example, take NAMI’s campaign to stop the “stigma” and “end discrimination” against the mentally ill — the “Founding Sponsors” were Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, SmithKline Beecham and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs. So next time you see an ad promoting “stop the stigma” see it for what it is, a pharmaceutical marketing campaign.

The majority of the public may or may not be familiar with these so-called mental health advocacy organizations, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD), or the myriad of bipolar, depression or ADHD “support groups” that are inundating the internet.

But they need to be.

ARE THESE SO-CALLED MENTAL HEALTH ADVOCACY GROUPS FOR PATIENT’S RIGHTS OR PHARMA’S RIGHTS? YOU DECIDE!

These are groups operating under the guise of advocates for the “mentally ill,” which in reality are heavily funded pharmaceutical front groups — lobbying and working on state and federal laws which effect the entire nation — from our elderly in nursing homes to our military, pregnant women, nursing mothers and school children.

Presenting themselves as patient advocacy groups is highly disingenuous not only to their membership, many of which may have a sincere desire to help a loved one or a family member with mental problems, but to legislators, the press and the American public — for they have consistently lobbied for legislation that benefits the mental health and pharmaceutical industries which fund them, and not patients they claim to represent.

Certainly any organization claiming to be for the rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill would have as their primary goal, full informed consent in the field of mental health — including full and complete disclosure of all drug risks, the right to refuse treatment, the right to know that psychiatric diagnoses are not medical conditions (evident by the fact there is not one confirmatory medical or scientific test). Above all such groups would provide patients with an abundance of information on non-harmful, non- drug, medical solutions and options considering the dangerous and well documented risks of psychiatric drugs by international drug regulatory agencies.

These groups do not.

To put it simply, these groups are not what they appear to be. Yet their influence over legislation, lobbying, drug regulation (or lack thereof), and public relations campaigns is substantial and effects the entire nation. For they claim to be the voice of the “mentally ill.” But are they? Or are they the result of a brilliant marketing/lobbying campaign designed to benefit the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry that funds them?

Go here to read how all this started!

There are groups that are not funded by pharmaceutical companies, that truly do have the best interests of the consumer/patient and parent as their goal. You can find out more about such organizations here.

Do Something About It

Show a CCHR documentary DVD to all your family, friends, neighbors, and associates.

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