Citizens Commission on Human Rights International | Mental Health Watchdog

Dr. Dina Panagiotopoulos, a pediatric endocrinologist at BC Children’s Hospital, says “second-generation” antipsychotics are being prescribed to two- and three-year-olds for aggression. More »

The American Psychiatric Association's (APA) billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM, finally has been outed for the fraud it is. The National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, has declared the "the weakness of the manual is its lack of validity." That's the good news. The bad news is that while the nation's premier mental health agency has finally admitted the uselessness of psychiatry's manual, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, still is using the DSM criteria to lend credence to mental illnesses that are not based in science. More »

Thomas Insel, director of the U.S. Institute of Mental Health — essentially the country’s top psychiatrist — has announced that his agency is “re-orienting” its research away from the DSM over the book’s “lack of validity” while it pursues its own alternative diagnostic system, which Insel promises will be more firmly anchored in brain science. More »

“Pretty soon everyone's going to have a mental disorder or two or three, and it's time we reconsider how we want to define this and whether the definitions should be in the hands of the drug companies, which is very much what's happened in recent years,” More »

Once again the military and mainstream press are searching for all the reasons for troop suicides except for the quadrupling of drugs being prescribed that cause suicide. Before, during and after deployment, today's military personnel are subject to a stew of drugs—antidepressants, antipsychotics and anticonvulsants—that carry clear suicide warnings. More »

No other major branch of medicine has such a single text, with so much power over people’s lives. And that is worrying. Because in no other branch of medicine is the scientific reality underpinning the pronouncements of doctors so uncertain. More »

Deaths reported in children prescribed 'newer generation' antipsychotics—Health Canada is receiving growing numbers of reports of serious complications in children taking powerful antipsychotics, including deaths. More »

British psychologists are to say that current psychiatric diagnoses such as bipolar disorder are useless. There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain's clinical psychologists. More »

Last week, Blue Rider Press published Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, a powerful critique of the entire DSM methodology. Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist who also authored Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of an American Disease and The Noble Lie. He has been referred to as “The Dante of our Psychiatric age,” by Errol Morris, and blogs about the DSM for the New Yorker. With The Book of Woe, written during and after his own participation in the revision process of the DSM-5, Greenberg doesn’t just paint the DSM as irrelevant, but as an arbitrary and totalitarian influence in the treatment of mental and emotional distress. More »

It's already old news that the National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, the mother ship of mental health research in world, has officially diagnosed psychiatry's billing bible - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 - as suffering from extreme lack of science, proclaiming it dead on arrival. What isn't known are the implications of NIMH's announcement. Yes, the NIMH director, Dr. Thomas Insel, is another in a long line of well-regarded experts who have publically criticized the validity of the DSM, stating "patients with mental disorders deserve better." More »