Posts Tagged ‘TakeAction’

Take Action – Missouri Legislature – Very Bad Bill SB551

Friday, March 26th, 2021

Periodically we let you know the progress of various proposed legislation making its way through the Missouri General Assembly and suggest ways for you to contribute your viewpoint to your state Representative and state Senator.

The Missouri General Assembly is the state legislature of the State of Missouri and is composed of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The General Assembly is responsible for creating laws for governing the State of Missouri. The Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) are electronically available on this site:  http://revisor.mo.gov/.

You can find your Representative and Senator, and their contact information, by entering your 9-digit zip code here.

The 101st General Assembly Regular Session convened on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, and will end on Friday, May 14,  2021.

This time we’d like to discuss a bill about which we’d like you to contact your legislators. Please write, call or visit to express from your viewpoint as an individual or professional, and not as a representative of any organization. Let us know the details and any responses you get. The full text of each bill can be found on the House and Senate Joint Bill Tracking site. Just put the bill number into the search box (e.g. SB551).

Check out our handy discussion about How to write to a legislator.

If you are not a voting resident of Missouri, you can find out about legislation in your own state and write your own state legislators; also, we are looking for volunteers to monitor legislation in Missouri and the states surrounding Missouri — let us know if you’d like to help out.

Very Bad Bill

This is a bill that furthers psychiatric abuses of human rights, and is moving swiftly toward becoming law. Please express your opposition and opinions about this to your legislators and copy the sponsor.

SB551 – Senate Bill 551 – sponsored by Senator Karla May (Democrat, District 04 – Parts of St. Louis City & St. Louis County). Related to SB26.

“This act establishes the “Critical Incident Stress Management Program” within the Department of Public Safety. The program shall provide services for peace officers to assist in coping with stress and potential psychological trauma resulting from a response to a critical incident or emotionally difficult event.

“This act provides that all peace officers shall be required to meet with a program service provider once every three to five years for a mental health check-in. The program service provider shall send a notification to the peace officer’s commanding officer that he or she completed such check-in.

“This act creates the “988 Public Safety Fund” within the state treasury and shall be used by the Department of Public Safety for the purposes of providing services for peace officers to assist in coping with stress and potential psychological trauma resulting from a response to a critical incident or emotionally difficult event. Such services may include consultation, risk assessment, education, intervention, and other crisis intervention services.”

This act is substantially similar to provisions in SB 26.

Why is this bill bad?

This bill coerces police officers into the psychiatric mental health system, where they can be prescribed harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs which have known side effects of violence and suicide.

The estimated net financial effect is to cost the State of Missouri $7,243,500 over the next four years for servicing roughly 24,145 police officers. This does not include the costs for full-time personnel to implement the program, nor does it include the additional costs for the Missouri State Highway Patrol. 

When we speak of “coercive psychiatry” we mean that psychiatry is used as a means of social control against which one has no recourse and cannot fight back. This bill is a prime example of enforced treatment.

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.

Download and read the full CCHR report “Community Ruin — Psychiatry’s Coercive ‘Care’ — Report and recommendations on the failure of community mental health and other coercive psychiatric programs.

Great Circle Child Abuse in Missouri

Monday, February 22nd, 2021

Great Circle, the largest provider of residential psychiatric treatment for juveniles (mainly in foster care) in Missouri, announced February 15 2021 that it will shut down its residential treatment program in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis.

The FBI raided them on February 2, 2021 due to alleged child abuse. The Missouri Department of Social Services had suspended placements there on January 22, 2021. Webster Groves police arrested three of their employees on suspicion of child abuse. The nonprofit’s former CEO, Vincent Hillyer, was charged with child abuse in 2019.

Great Circle has 12 other residential facilities in Missouri for juvenile psychiatric treatment which so far remain open, although the FBI raid included their facility near St. James, Missouri.

The psychiatric abuse of foster children is a growing concern, especially the use of harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs as a restraint mechanism.

A previous lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Social Services claimed that children in Missouri foster care are at increased risk of being improperly or unnecessarily administered psychotropic drugs, leaving the children vulnerable to various serious adverse effects, including hallucinations, self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

Roughly 13,000 children are in Missouri’s foster care system. More than 30% of them are prescribed these harmful drugs, and 20% are taking two or more drugs at the same time. Medicaid pays for a majority of the healthcare services that children in foster care receive, including psychotropic drugs.

Most psychotropic drugs have not been FDA approved to treat children, who are at great risk of serious harm from these drugs because the drugs play Russian Roulette with neurotransmitters in the brain.

Contact your State legislators and let them know what you think about this.

[UPDATE 3/3/2021] Four additional employees of Great Circle are now charged with abusing residents, including two children with autism. 

[UPDATE 3/31/2021] A Missouri Department of Social Services audit of Medicaid claims for services paid through the state to Great Circle identified $1,992,157 in “improper billing.”

Psychiatry Cashing In On COVID-19

Monday, April 27th, 2020
Daily, we see the news that people’s “mental health” is suffering because of the restrictions and fears of COVID-19, not unrealistic given the staggering changes to their lives. But CCHR  is tracking how psychiatrists and psychologists are turning this natural response into a global mental disorder that will line their pockets from the funds they are demanding to “treat” it.
 
As CCHR has found, those marketing a “mental health crisis” are often steeped in conflicts of interest with psychiatric drug manufacturers.

An explosive article in Psychology Today just broke detailing how nearly every medical website and resource on antidepressant drug side effects have hugely downplayed the drugs’ risks, and warning of the potential excessive prescribing of antidepressants due to COVID-related stress, despite it being “wrong to view our natural fears as mental health disorders.”

All this, while a local St. Louis psychiatrist just launched a clinical trial “repurposing” an antidepressant to treat people diagnosed with COVID-19 (purportedly for health, not mental health reasons). The same antidepressant was prescribed to one of the most infamous school shooters in history and is documented to induce suicide and violence.

There’s also been an upsurge in demands for research into psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) to become a replacement antidepressant, as the pandemic take its toll. Apparently enough time has passed that the public has forgotten what happened when psychedelics gained notoriety in the 1960s, when LSD pushed by psychiatrists spread into society as a recreational drug and started destroying lives with induced psychosis. Here again we see psychiatry, with its long history of harmful drug pushing, justifying and promoting the latest in a long line of such harmful, addictive and psychedelic drugs.

With many Americans facing unsettling times, the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry is setting its sights on getting more drugs prescribed and more profit, while continuing to create patients-for-life due to the harmful drug side effects.

Here are some things you can do to take action against this now.
psychiatry Creating Customers Not Cures
psychiatry Creating Customers Not Cures

NARPA Annual Rights Conference

Friday, June 14th, 2019

ANNUAL RIGHTS CONFERENCE

September 18 – 21, 2019

Holiday Inn Hartford Downtown Area — East Hartford, CT

Visit http://www.narpa.org for registration form and updates.

 NARPA’s mission is to support people with psychiatric diagnoses to exercise their legal and human rights, with the goals of abolishing forced treatment and ensuring autonomy, dignity and choice.

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Attend the conference to promote social justice for people who experience the world in ways the psychiatric industry fraudulently calls “mental illness.”

Press Release – CCHR STL Visits Missouri State Capitol

Friday, February 8th, 2019

Jefferson City, Missouri – February 6, 2019

Citizens Commission on Human Rights, founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the late psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz, has been vigilant in exposing the lack of science behind psychiatry’s diagnostic methods and treatments that, left unquestioned for years by authorities and insurance companies, led to soaring increases in both health care costs and the prescription of dangerous and addictive psychiatric drugs.

It is time for the Missouri legislature to put an end to this lucrative scam and thereby help protect our citizens. Instead put our citizen’s money into proven physical health care and education, where it will produce real results. An example of a real positive result would be: patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals. The introduction and passage of legislation designed to curb psychiatric fraud and abuse can contribute much to this effort.

To this end, CCHR St. Louis once again visited the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City February 5 and 6, 2019, and set up a display in the Capitol Building, talking to legislators and their aides about fraud and abuse in the mental health care system.

Volunteers personally visited with many Representatives and Senators, distributing packages containing the CCHR documentary DVD “Making A Killing – The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging” (MAK) and explanatory materials about harmful electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and the over-drugging of foster children.

The MAK documentary exposes the problem of psychotropic drugs, the profits they generate and the harm they do. CCHR recommends investigating the link between psychotropic drugs and the sharp rise in violence and suicide.

Claims that ECT is safe and effective are not supported by clinical science and its use remains a theoretical practice with no conclusive mechanism determined to prove how ECT works. CCHR recommends outlawing this barbaric practice.

In Missouri as well as nationwide, there is a significant problem over-drugging foster care children with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs. CCHR recommends legislation to develop explicit foster children’s rights.

Legislators welcome the contact, so contact them, let them know you appreciate what they do, and make specific suggestions to correct the egregious abuses of the psychiatric industry in Missouri. Subscribe to the CCHR STL newsletter so you receive our legislative take-action alerts.

Neurodiversity – The Latest Psychiatric Disability Trend

Wednesday, October 31st, 2018

We’ve written a considerable amount previously about topics involving various disabilities and their relation to psychiatric fraud and abuse; here is a small selection for example:

People With Disabilities

The Disabled Community has many advocates helping them survive better in the world. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) defines a disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”. Traditional physical disabilities such as blindness, deafness, missing or impaired body parts, all have their advocates.

However, the psychiatric industry has made it their special emphasis to target people with so-called mental disabilities: Autism, PTSD, Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia (problems with reading), ADHD, Dyspraxia (problems with movement or coordination), Dyscalculia (problems with mathematics), Tourette Syndrome (involuntary, repetitive movements and vocalizations), Hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the brain.)

Neurodiversity

With so many different “mental disorders” and no real clues about curing them, psychiatrists needed a new all-encompassing word to describe them. They picked “neurodiversity” — diversity based on some neurological condition.

Neurodiversity is a concept where neurological differences are to be recognized and respected as any other human variation. Neurodiversity activists may reject the idea that any of these conditions should be cured, since they don’t know how to do so, advocating instead for support systems that help people get along in life with their disability.

Now, we’re not advocating for any particular support system, and we certainly think that helping people with disabilities get along better in life is a laudable activity and deserves support.

Psychiatry

One theory of biological psychiatry is that these various neurological conditions are the result of normal variations in the human genome. Unfortunately, this attitude tends to lean toward eugenics, which is the track taken in Nazi Germany to eliminate anyone with so-called genetic defects from the breeding population. Psychiatrists developed the racial purity ideology used by Hitler which lead to the Nazi euthanasia program and, later, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

We question whether the psychiatric industry has anyone’s best interests at heart, let alone the interests of the disabled. In 2009, the Florida Sun Sentinel reported about the use of dangerous prescription medications for children and adults in residential and group home facilities licensed by the Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities.

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, and to expand the client base it has also been associated with Asperger syndrome and Autism spectrum disorder.

In 2018, the media reported on a Massachusetts school [Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, MA] which will 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.

[Update 3 December 2018] On December 3, 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of The Organization of American States published a Precautionary Measure calling for the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts to immediately cease electroshocking special needs children as a disciplinary measure.

Our Point

The psychiatric industry continues to find new patient populations in the disability community, and imposes coercive and damaging “treatments” that further compromise people’s mental and physical health.

A parent with a child on psychotropic drugs can receive disability payments as a financial incentive. We observe that psychiatric drugs cause disability, regardless of any pre-existing conditions.

Even the United Nations recognizes the pervasiveness of abuse in the mental health care system. In its 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.”

We rest our case. We need your help. Let us know if you have some volunteer hours to help us expose psychiatric fraud and abuse.

Order versus Disorder

Saturday, September 29th, 2018

Shades of Your High School Physics Class

You may have encountered this word before — entropy.

Stick with us, we’re going to make it simple.

Basically, without getting all scientific about it, the word means “the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system”. It comes from the Greek roots en– (within) and trop– (change, turn).

This physical universe tends toward disorder, or increasing entropy. In other words, if you leave the universe alone, it will get more disordered on its own. Things break down; it gets harder to predict the future.

Living Beings Create Order

Living beings, however, have an ability to put order into something — decreasing entropy in their local environments. Birds pick up disorderly litter and build cozy nests; spiders spin intricately patterned webs out of threads; plants grow specialized whorls of colorful petals out of basic chemicals.

And of course, sane and competent human beings put order continuously into everything around them. Sweeping up litter; making their beds; filing papers; putting all the same-sized paper clips into the same box; putting a tool back in the same place it was found; stringing random sounds together into symphonies; making poetry.

You get the idea.

A sane, competent, unaberrated person is an order machine.

But this can go bad. An insane, incompetent, aberrated person is a disorder machine. There are reasons this happens, which is not really the focus or purpose of this missive. Suffice to say that there are ways to correct this and rehabilitate one’s desire and ability to create order.

Psychiatry Creates Disorder

The real reason we discuss this at all is because the psychiatric mental health care industry is a disorder machine. This is something you need to know.  Consider the litany of psychiatric treatments —

1. Psychiatric drugs interrupt the normal functioning of the body and mind. Drugs break into, in most cases, the routine rhythmic flows and activities of the nervous system. Sure, the suppression of unwanted pains or emotions may seem to be an improvement, but the body can only take so much. Quickly or slowly, the systems break down. Human physiology was not designed for the continuous manufacture of euphoric, tranquilizing, or antidepressant sensations. Yet it is forced into this enterprise by psychiatric drugs.

Like a car run on rocket fuel, you may be able to get it to run a thousand miles an hour, but the tires, the engine, the internal parts, were never meant for this. The machine flies apart. Bizarre things happen: addiction, exhaustion, diminished sexual desire, trembling, nightmares, hallucinations, and psychosis. Side effects are, in fact, the body’s natural response to having a chemical disrupt its normal functioning. Once the drug has worn off, the original problem remains. As a solution or cure to life’s problems, psychotropic drugs do not work. They cause disorder.

2. Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT), or shock therapy, interrupts the normal functioning of the brain. ECT creates a nerve–wracking convulsion of long duration. And it leaves irreversible brain damage and disorder. Why, then, is it used so frequently? There are two reasons. 1) It is lucrative, and 2) The actual purpose of shock treatment is to create brain damage. In 1942, the psychiatrist Abraham Myerson said: “The reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process.” Creating disorder, ECT makes a patient for life, ensuring continued income for psychiatry.

3. Other direct assaults on the brain — psycho-surgery (cutting out part of the brain); transcranial magnetic stimulation; vagus nerve stimulation — all involve physical damage and disorder to the brain.

4. Physical restraints qualify as “assault and battery” in every respect except one; they are lawful. Psychiatry has placed itself above the law, from where it can assault and batter its unfortunate victims with a complete lack of accountability, all in the name of “treatment.” You might suppose that restraints impose order, since they limit movement, until you consider that they are enforced against one’s will. When you coerce order you get punishment, which is really order gone bad. You might call it “negative order”, because the emotional component is so unpleasant.

5. What about talk therapy? Surely this isn’t brain damaging? Well, done correctly, it is certainly possible to help someone with communication. But consider something like psychiatry’s “cognitive behavioral therapy.” This is not just talking with someone. It is telling the person what’s wrong with them and demanding they change their behavior. Again, coercive therapy is not really therapy, it is causing disorder in the mistaken idea that it will jerk someone out of their problem. It is akin to smacking someone’s thumb with a hammer; they sure won’t be thinking about their mental problems for a while.

So, now that you have some examples of order and disorder, which would you prefer?

The Trick About It

There is one more trick about this that you should know. It may help explain some puzzling things that happen with order and disorder.

When you start to put order into a massive disorder, the original confusion comes into being again. The resolution is to continue putting order into it until the confusion goes away and order reigns.

Let’s give an example. Suppose you have a drawer into which you have dumped many different things over a long time. You open the drawer, but everything is jumbled together and you cannot find what you are looking for. How do you resolve this? One solution is to take the drawer out and dump all its contents onto the floor. You now have a very visible confusion, with everything all mixed up and jumbled about. This confusion may seem daunting, but you persist. You pick up each single thing and put it where it belongs. You continue, putting like or similar things together, and putting them where they belong. Eventually, everything is in its proper place, the drawer is completely in order, and you have found what you were looking for.

Let’s apply this to the field of mental health care, which is a confused mess because psychiatrists are deliberately mucking it up with drugs and other harmful treatments.

You start to put some order into it by getting some patients’ rights laws passed, taking away some of the psychiatric funding for abusive practices, and jailing some criminal psychiatrists who are electroshocking and drugging children. All of a sudden, the news is full of articles about how hopeless mental health care is, how suicide is a big problem, how more funding is needed, how drugs and shock are miracle cures, and how psychiatrists are the salvation of society.

The original confusion is starting to blow off and the perpetrators become visible.

You continue exposing psychiatric fraud and abuses, improving patients’ rights, cutting Medicaid funding for psychiatric drugging of foster children, and jailing psychiatrists who rape their patients. Eventually, psychiatry comes under the law, mental health care starts to improve, traumatized people get better, doctors stop giving children psychiatric drugs, the suicide rate declines, and society starts to get back on track.

Where do you think we are in this process? Do you get the idea we need your help to put some order back into the mental health care system? It’s time for you to Find Out and Fight Back!

The Solution to Entrapment

Monday, May 28th, 2018

Coercive psychiatry is not intended to cure anything. On the contrary, psychiatry is the science of control and entrapment.

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.

Communism, fascism, Nazi national socialism, psychiatry, psychology — alike are all violently opposed to a free society.

They advocate that man is a soulless stimulus-response animal who can be manipulated to keep society barely running, and to keep themselves in power.

You bet this is a conspiracy.

If these groups had any handle at all on how to improve the conditions of life, there would be improvements. But when you put criminals in charge of crime, the crime rate rises. When you put criminals in charge of education, literacy drops. When you put criminals in charge of health care, harmful and addictive drugs become the norm.

Society is held together by the heroic efforts of a few, hampered in all directions by institutions dedicated to slowing and stopping freedom and progress — expert witnesses corrupting the judicial system; educational psychologists ruining literacy; atheists attacking religions; racists aborting babies; police deluded into involuntarily committing the most vulnerable citizens; dumping hallucinogenic drugs on children. You’ve seen it; but if you speak out against it you’re called a crazy conspiracy theorist.

The basic idea of weakening or corrupting a population has been used for thousands of years. The development of the atomic bomb made direct confrontation by war too dangerous, so the techniques of cultural destruction were welcomed by those wanting to be in control. The standard cultural institutions that used to uphold civilization (such as education, religion, the arts, health care, civil rights, police and justice, the military, and politics) have been infiltrated and discredited by psychiatrists, psychologists and their front organizations and special interest groups, to the end of perverting freedom and keeping people trapped in a downward spiral of worsening conditions.

There are two ways of trapping someone — one is with physical universe barriers; the other is with fixed ideas. Fixation occurs only in the presence of one-way communication. If one is not allowed to communicate, one becomes trapped. The incessant pounding of psychobabble from all of these psychiatrically-compromised social institutions wears one down. The antidote is to talk back. If you see an injustice, make a complaint. If we ask you to write your legislators, please do so. Talk to your government and political representatives, your church groups, your parent-teacher organizations, your networking groups, your hairdresser, your business associates, your peers, your family and friends. Show them the CCHR documentary DVDs (let us know and we’ll send you one.) Forward this newsletter and suggest they subscribe. Find Out! Fight Back!

Let us know what you have done.

Take Action – Missouri Legislature – Very Bad Bills

Thursday, April 5th, 2018

Periodically we let you know the progress of various proposed legislation making its way through the Missouri General Assembly and suggest ways for you to contribute your viewpoint to your state Representative and state Senator.

The Missouri General Assembly is the state legislature of the State of Missouri and is composed of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The General Assembly is responsible for creating laws for governing the State of Missouri. The Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) are electronically available on this site:  http://revisor.mo.gov/.

You can find your Representative and Senator, and their contact information, by entering your 9-digit zip code here.

The Ninety-Ninth General Assembly, Second Regular Session, convened on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, and will end on Friday, May 18,  2018.

This time we’d like to discuss several bills which we’d like you to write your legislators about. Please write from your viewpoint as an individual or professional, and not as a representative of any organization. Let us know the details and any responses you get. The full text of each bill can be found on the House and Senate Joint Bill Tracking site. Just put the bill number into the search box (e.g. SB661).

Check out our handy discussion about How to write to a legislator.

If you are not a voting resident of Missouri, you can find out about legislation in your own state and write your own state legislators; also, we are looking for volunteers to monitor legislation in Missouri and the states surrounding Missouri — let us know if you’d like to help out.

Very Bad Bills

These are bills that further psychiatric abuses of human rights, and are moving swiftly toward becoming law. Please express your opposition and opinions about these to your legislators and copy the sponsors.

1) SB661 – Senate Bill 661 – sponsored by Senator Jeanie Riddle (Republican, District 10; Audrain, Callaway, Lincoln, Monroe, Montgomery, & Warren counties). Related to HB1970.

This act provides that after a person accused of committing a crime has been involuntarily committed to the Department of Mental Health due to lack of mental fitness to stand trial, the legal counsel for the Department shall have standing to participate in hearings regarding involuntary medications for the accused.

The subject of this bill had been introduced previously in 2016 and 2017. We think it is very bad because it allows the Department of Mental Health to force psychiatric drugs on involuntarily committed citizens. Both of these actions — involuntary commitment and enforced drugging — are psychiatric abuses of human rights.

2) SB846 – Senate Bill 846 – sponsored by Senator Jill Schupp (Democrat, District 24; St. Louis County). Related to HB1419.

Requires two hours of suicide assessment and prevention training for licensure as a psychologist. Behavior analysts, professional counselors, social workers, baccalaureate social workers, and marital and family therapists must complete two hours of suicide assessment, referral, treatment, and management training as a condition of initial licensure and as a condition of license renewal.

While this sounds altruistic, the current state of so-called “suicide prevention education” is a recommendation for harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs, which are known to cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent, which is violence and suicide.

3) HB1363 – House Bill 1363 – sponsored by Representative Bill Kidd (Republican, District 20; Jackson County).

This bill requires teachers and principals to complete two hours of suicide prevention education each school year.

Again, while this sounds altruistic, the current state of so-called “suicide prevention education” is a recommendation for harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs, which are known to cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent, which is violence and suicide.

4) HB1419 – House Bill 1419 – sponsored by Representative Marsha Haefner (Republican, District 95; St. Louis County). Related to SB846.

This bill requires certain health care professionals to complete two hours of suicide prevention training as a condition of licensure.

More of the same — the current state of so-called “suicide prevention training” is a recommendation for harmful and addictive psychiatric drugs, which are known to cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent, which is violence and suicide.

5) HB1658 – House Bill 1658 – sponsored by Representative Chuck Basye (Republican, District 47; Boone, Randolph, Howard, & Cooper counties).

This bill prohibits any third-party payer for health care services from limiting coverage or denying reimbursement for treatment for emotional, mental, or behavioral symptoms for children with physical or developmental disabilities. This is another attempt to enforce “Mental Health Care Parity“.

Parity is the concept that insurance reimbursements for mental health care must be equal to that for purely medical issues. Mental health parity amounts to a blank check for a mental health industry that cannot police itself, frequently abuses patients and rips off the health care system. Due to mandated mental health insurance parity there is more widespread patient abuse and fraud, as well as increasing insurance premiums and number of uninsured.

6) HB2384 – House Bill 2384 – sponsored by Representative Jay Barnes (Republican, District 60; Cole County). Related to SB1098.

This bill is basically another attempt to expand mental health care parity. See the discussion under HB1658.

7) The following bills refer to something called “Trauma-Informed Care”. Stay tuned for our Big Muddy River Newsletter on April 9th for more about this concept. Think “PTSD on steroids.” It’s really just re-defining words to create a new class of patients who are ripe for psychiatric fraud and abuse.

SB1004 – Senate Bill 1004 – sponsored by Senator Jill Schupp (Democrat, District 24; St. Louis County). Creates a “Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families” Board; a public-private partnership to promote using this style of treatment for children and families.
SCR47 – Senate Concurrent Resolution 47 – sponsored by Senator Jill Schupp (Democrat, District 24; St. Louis County). Establishes the Task Force on Trauma-Informed Care for Veterans.

Take Action – Missouri Legislature – Abolish ECT on Children

Wednesday, March 21st, 2018

Periodically we let you know the progress of various proposed legislation making its way through the Missouri General Assembly and suggest ways for you to contribute your viewpoint to your state Representative and state Senator.

The Missouri General Assembly is the state legislature of the State of Missouri and is composed of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. The General Assembly is responsible for creating laws for governing the State of Missouri. The Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) are electronically available on this site:  http://revisor.mo.gov/.

You can find your Representative and Senator, and their contact information, by entering your 9-digit zip code here.

We’d like you to write your legislators about the bill discussed below. Please write from your viewpoint as an individual or professional, and not as a representative of any organization. Let us know the details and any responses you get. The full text of this bill can be found here.

Check out our handy discussion about How to write to a legislator.

If you are not a voting resident of Missouri, you can find out about legislation in your own state and write your own state legislators; also, we are looking for volunteers to monitor legislation in Missouri and the states surrounding Missouri — let us know if you’d like to help out.

Very Good Bill
This bill supports human rights, particularly those of children. Please express your support and opinion about this to your Missouri State Representative.

HB1451 – House Bill 1451 – sponsored by Representative Karla May (Democrat, District 84, St. Louis City).

This bill prohibits the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) on children under 16 years of age. Any person or mental health facility that administers electroconvulsive therapy to someone under 16 years of age will be fined up to $100,000 or imprisoned for two years, or both, and will be liable for compensation to the person that was given the electroconvulsive therapy.

What can we say? You are being hoodwinked by a small group of psychiatric industry special interests who claim that electroshock is good for you. About time to get this one passed! Write your legislators now! Stick your finger in an electric socket if you think ECT is good for anyone!

In fact, we just heard about a case in Missouri where a 5-year-old child was given electroshock. This is unconscionable, and a no-brainer to pass into law.

When we speak with people about electroshock, the typical response is, “We didn’t know that was still being done.” In fact, ECT is a huge money-maker for psychiatry in Missouri, because the damage it does to the brain makes a patient for life. Barbaric practices like shock treatment need to be eradicated.

Despite modern ECT being promoted as “new and improved,” there is much evidence that contradicts this claim. California, Colorado, Tennessee and Texas have already banned the use of ECT on those aged 0-12 and 0-16. The Western Australian government banned the use of ECT on those younger than 14, with criminal penalties if this is violated. ECT should never be used on children.

In light of the fact that the FDA admits ECT can cause cardiovascular complications, memory loss, cognitive impairment, brain damage and death and that psychiatrists admit they do not know how ECT “works,” we call upon the Missouri legislature to pass HB1451 into law this session.