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Maryanne Godboldo—The Detroit Mother Who Refused to Defer to Authority & Drug Her Child

On February 11th, 2012, CCHR presented one of its annual human rights awards to Ms. Maryanne Godboldo. Previous award winners include doctors, state and federal legislators, whistleblowers, attorneys, human and civil rights activists and parents such as Maryanne, who have turned their personal battles to protect their children into a crusade for children’s rights.

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Ron Paul Reintroduces The Parental Consent Act 2011- Prohibits Federal Funding For Psychiatric ‘Screening’ of Kids

Congressman Ron Paul has re-introduced The Parental Consent Act , A bill which prohibits federal funds from being used to establish or implement any universal or mandatory mental health, psychiatric, or socioemotional screening program.

“Many children have suffered harmful side effects from using psychotropic drugs. Some of the possible side effects include mania, violence, dependence and weight gain. Yet, parents are already being threatened with child abuse charges if they resist efforts to drug their children. Imagine how much easier it will be to drug children against their parents’ wishes if a federally-funded mental-health screener makes the recommendation.” – RON PAUL

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“Psychogeddon” in the UK: The manipulation of “mental health” discourse

We keep hearing about hordes of dangerous lunatics wandering our streets just waiting to do unmentionable things to us. But fear not! The mental health police are there to protect you from all those crazed psychopaths! Reality, as usual, has quite a different story to tell. According to the latest report by the Information Centre for Health and Social Care (NHS, UK, October 2010) there were 30,774 formal admissions to mental hospitals (i.e. being locked up in psychiatric prisons) across England in 2009/10 which represent an increase of 7.3 per cent from 2008/09. Only 7% of these formal admissions occurred via the criminal justice system, i.e. court and prison disposals, with people having already spent their time in prisons or at least a part of their sentence, and spending a considerable longer time in “mental hospitals” than they would otherwise spend in prison for their crimes. This of course means that the vast majority of people incarcerated in mental hospitals have not been charged with committing any crimes.

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25 Good Reasons Why Psychiatry Must Be Abolished

by Don Weitz, Psychiatric Survivor

1. Because psychiatrists frequently cause harm, permanent disabilities, death – death of the body-mind-spirit.
2. Because psychiatrists frequently violate the Hippocratic Oath which orders all physicians “First Do No Harm.”
3. Because psychiatrists patronize and disempower people, especially their patients.
4. Because psychiatry is not a medical science.
5. Because psychiatry is quackery, a pseudo-science which lacks independent diagnostic tests, testable hypotheses, and cures for “schizophrenia” and all other types of alleged “mental illness” or “mental disorder”.
6. Because psychiatrists can not accurately and reliably predict dangerousness, violence, or any other type of human behaviour, yet make such claims as “expert witnesses”, and with the media promote the “dangerous mental patient” myth/stereotype.
7. Because psychiatrists have caused a worldwide epidemic of brain damage by promoting and prescribing brain-disabling treatments such as the neuroleptics, antidepressants, electroconvulsive brainwashing (electroshock), and psychosurgery (lobotomy). Read the rest…

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Billion Dollar Drug Company Law Firm Restructures Connecticut Welfare System

For some time now, Sheila Matthews has been suspicious about her home state of Connecticut’s treatment of its most vulnerable children. As a mother of two children and co-founder of Ablechild, her instincts led her to scrutinize the dubious relationships among Connecticut’s Department of Children and Family Services [DCF], the pharmaceutical industry and a billion dollar law firm who has defended the likes of Pfizer Inc and Merck & Co., among others. Sheila’s investigation has led her on a journey that links a non-profit children’s advocacy group, with assets over $15 million [2009] with nationally-renowned mass tort and class action defense law firms, to the Connecticut DCF – an $865 million bureaucracy, as described by the Connecticut Mirror.

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Psychiatry’s Billing Bible Prompts ‘Bickering, Contention, Organized Revolt and finally, A Backdown’

EFFORTS to update the psychiatrists’ bible – the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – have led to bickering, contention, organised revolt and, finally, a backdown.

The association announced it has abandoned plans to class so-called attenuated psychosis syndrome and internet addiction as psychiatric disorders.

And four disputed additional criteria for diagnosing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been dumped: “impatience”, “acting without thinking”, “uncomfortable doing things slowly and systematically” and “finds it difficult to resist temptations or opportunities”.

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New Scientist—’Label jars, not people’: Lobbying against the shrinks

“LABEL jars, not people” and “stop medicalising the normal symptoms of life” read placards, as hundreds of protesters – including former patients, academics and doctors – gathered to lobby the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) annual meeting.

The demonstration aimed to highlight the harm the protesters believe psychiatry is perpetrating in the name of healing. One concern is that while psychiatric medications are more widely prescribed than almost any drugs in history, they often don’t work well and have debilitating side effects. Psychiatry also professes to respect human rights, while regularly treating people against their will. Finally, psychiatry keeps expanding its list of disorders without solid scientific justification.

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How Big Pharma and the Psychiatric Establishment Drugged Up Our Kids

In his book Psychiatryland, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out into traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder, the latter marked by “grandiose delusions” that she was special and cars could not harm her.1

How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive “pediatric psychopharmacology” that finds ADHD, pediatric conduct disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, assorted “spectrum” disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders, and even schizophrenia under every rock? And how did this branch of psychiatry come to find the answer to the “psychopathologies” in the name of the discipline itself: pediatric psychopharmacology? Just good marketing. Pharma is wooing the pediatric patient because that’s where the money is. Just like country and western songs about finding love where you can when there is no love to be found at home. Pharma has stopped finding “love” in the form of the new blockbuster drugs that catapulted it through the 1990s and 2000s. According to the Wall Street Journal, new drugs made Pharma only $4.3 billion in 2010 compared with $11.8 billion in 2005—a two-thirds drop

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According to Psychiatry…Everybody must be addicted

Seems like such a win-win change to the DSM. The Drug Czar wins because with all these new people “needing treatment” it justifies his emphasis on treatment. The drug companies win because they get to drug people up on drugs for which they get paid. The treatment industry wins because they get a ton of new people “needing treatment” that aren’t difficult cases, and with health care covering much of it, they can just rake in the dough without really having to do anything.

As far as I can tell, the only ones who lose are, well, the people.

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Critics Blast Big Psychiatry for Invented & Redefined Mental Illnesses—13,000 Professionals Petition the APA

“[The DSM] is wrong in principle, based as it is on redefining a whole range of understandable reactions to life circumstances as ‘illnesses,’ which then become a target for toxic medications heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry,” clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone with a Health Board in Wales told Reuters. “The DSM project cannot be justified, in principle or in practice. It must be abandoned so that we can find more humane and effective ways of responding to mental distress.”

Countless other experts agree, according to recent news reports, with many questioning whether a private group of individuals who stand to benefit by creating more diseases should really be writing the manual in the first place. Among the most vocal critics of the new proposals is Duke University psychiatry Prof. Allen Frances, who told the New York Times that the overly broad and vague definitions would create more “false epidemics” and increase the “medicalization of everyday behavior.”

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Detroit Mom Maryanne Godboldo, Who Faced Down Swat Team & Tanks, Fights Back— Files Civil Rights Lawsuit

Thursday afternoon, Maryanne Godboldo filed a civil rights lawsuit. In it, there are new allegations that her daughter’s prosthetic leg was taken while in state care, to stop the child from trying to get back to her mother.

“Just one betrayal after another. It’s a lie – bring us your children and we will help you. That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Bring me your children, and we’ll take them,” Maryanne Godboldo told 7 Action News Investigator Heather Catallo.

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Official CCHR International website & blog featuring medical experts/information on psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric drugs, informed consent, consumer rights related to mental health and alternative medical solutions for treating problems of attention, learning, behavior and mood. CCHR is a non-profit mental health watchdog organization.