Citizens Commission on Human Rights International | Mental Health Watchdog

A routine inquiry a decade ago by an investigator for the Pennsylvania inspector general exposed a pattern in which pharmaceutical companies showered trips, meals and other perks on state officials in positions to influence which drugs would be used to treat patients under Medicaid. The efforts appeared to have been particularly successful in Texas, which has one of the largest Medicaid populations. In 2004, Allen Jones, a whistle-blower who worked with the Pennsylvania inspector general, filed suit alleging that pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson improperly marketed its antipsychotic drug Risperdal for unapproved uses while funneling money to members of a state panel charged with recommending drug treatments for those in state health programs. More »

Drug industry corruption, scientifically unreliable diagnoses and pseudoscientific research have compromised the values of the psychiatric profession. The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, then you probably have not heard of Rebecca Riley, and how the highest levels of psychiatry described her treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.” More »

Johnson & Johnson will pay more than $1 billion to the U.S. and most states to resolve a civil investigation into marketing of the antipsychotic Risperdal, according to people familiar with the matter. J&J, the world’s largest health products company, reached an accord last week with the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, according to the people, who weren’t authorized to speak about the matter. It doesn’t resolve negotiations over a possible criminal plea, they said. The U.S. government has been investigating Risperdal sales practices since 2004, including allegations the company marketed the drug for unapproved uses, J&J has said in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The company said it has been in negotiations with the U.S. to settle this investigation. J&J, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, disclosed in August that it reached an agreement to settle a misdemeanor criminal charge related to Risperdal marketing. The company is in negotiations to pay about $400 million more to settle this portion of the investigation, one of the people said. More »

ZHENGZHOU, China – The electric acupuncture needles stung her scalp, and the drugs bloated her weight, gave her heart palpitations and brought on premature menopause. But Wu Chunxia consented to the treatments at the psychiatric hospital because if she didn't, she knew she would be strapped to her bed and left vulnerable to assaults from violent inmates. "It was worse than hell in there," says Wu, 37, of the Henan provincial psychiatric hospital in Xinxiang. "I feared I would be strangled at night by other patients." Wu was not at the hospital for reasons of mental health. She was committed there in 2008 by the Chinese government for 132 days as punishment for protesting about local injustice to higher authorities. The Communist Party does not acknowledge its mental facilities are used to silence critics, but according to numerous human rights groups and Chinese dissidents, China's Communist-led government has for decades incarcerated healthy people in mental wards to suppress dissent. In the past two years, wrongful confinement cases have sharply increased, says Liu Feiyue of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a human-rights organization based in Suzhou. More »

Someday our grandchildren’s grandchildren are going to sitting in college classroom learning about the early 21st century and wonder how a society so seemingly advanced could have such primitive ideas about mental health.They will no doubt be shocked and appalled that our major diagnostic tool for psychiatry is a book full of subjective checklists—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM versions I-IV). More »

The most surprising critic of the DSM is a one-time pillar of the psychiatric establishment. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University, chaired the task force that created the DSM-4. Now he’s railing against both the process and proposed content of the new DSM in blogs on the website for Psychology Today that blast the new revision as “untested” and “unscientific.” Psychiatric diagnoses are loose enough already, Frances told me, and that laxity has led to “epidemics of over-diagnosis in child psychiatry” causing huge numbers of children to be unnecessarily labeled with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder and treated with medications. More »

The United States has a passion for pills, being the world's biggest users of psychotropic drugs, consuming 60 per cent of them. And pharmaceutical firms are keen to keep cashing in on the multibillion-dollar market, even if it costs people's health. America is regarded as a country with a prodigious appetite for consumption. Today, a widespread fondness for pharmaceuticals has turned the US into a nation of pill-poppers. More »

The most vulnerable among us are the littlest victims. Young children, torn from their birth families through various, often unspeakable tragedies. These children end up in state supervised foster care and too often are passed from hand to hand, house to house. There were approximately 662,000 children in foster care in the United States in 2010. Now there is a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report confirming that foster children in five states -- Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas -- are receiving shocking amounts of psychiatric drugs. In the words of ABC News, they are "being prescribed psychiatric medications at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in these five states alone. And hundreds of foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time despite absolutely no evidence supporting the simultaneous use or safety of this number of psychiatric drugs taken together." The ABC News report shows one 7-year-old holding a bag filled with 13 psychiatric medications that she had taken. More »

FIRST it was ADHD drugs, then organ donation, now WA Labor MP Martin Whitely is hoping to get some action on the fatal risks of antidepressant drugs, such as Prozac, to children. Anti-depressant manufacturers warn that products such as Prozac should not be given to children, because of the potentially tragic consequences, but they are prescribed every day to Australian kids. This is what happened, with fatal results, in the case of a 16-year-old boy in Canada who stabbed a friend to death. For the first time in criminal history, a murder was attributed to an anti-depressant drug. More »

The jury verdict in the case of State of South Carolina versus Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson, Inc. has been upheld and requests for a new trial denied, affirming groundbreaking $327 million in civil penalties against the manufacturers of the drug Risperdal. More »