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A dissenting view: The myth of mental illness

Friday, August 5th, 2011

Online Opinion – August 5, 2011
by Robert Spillane

American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argued that mental illness is a metaphor: minds can be sick only in the ways that jokes or economies can be sick. If there is no mental illness there can be no 'treatment' or 'cure' for it. Click image for more by Szasz

“No mental illness has, or ever will be, diagnosed on the basis of medical signs, for a simple reason. If people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia are found to have a brain lesion, they are suffering from a brain illness, not a mental illness. The presence of a medical sign in people who have been labelled mentally ill proves that they are not suffering from a mental illness. Psychiatry is, therefore, that branch of medicine where diagnoses of ‘illnesses’ are made in the absence of objective evidence: they are based, not on what people have, but on what they do and say. And if they act in ways that annoy, upset or offend others, they may find themselves diagnosed as mentally ill and treated medically against their will.” – Robert Spillane

Government publications routinely announce that around 45% of Australians aged between 16 and 85 will experience a mental illness, while 20% will experience a mental illness in any given year. Australian businesses, we are told, lose over $6.5 billion each year by failing to provide early intervention and treatment for employees with mental health conditions. In 2006-7 there were 20.6 million mental health-related PBS/RPBS prescriptions which accounted for $670 million of benefits, or 10.8% of total expenditure.

Mental illness means, literally, an illness of the mind, as opposed to an illness of the brain. But can minds be ill? I argue that they cannot. Mental illness is, therefore, a myth. Since illness affects only the body and the ‘mind’ is not a bodily organ, the mind cannot be ill. ‘Mental illness’ is, therefore, an oxymoron.

In ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’, American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz argued that mental illness is a metaphor: minds can be sick only in the ways that jokes or economies can be sick. If there is no mental illness there can be no ‘treatment’ or ‘cure’ for it.

If, as many people believe, the mind is really a brain process, then mental illness is really brain illness a valid diagnosis of which must be based on objective medical signs, not on subjective communications or complaints. This is no mere semantic quibble since Australian law accepts the distinction between brain illness (e.g. multiple sclerosis) and mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia). People cannot be locked up in a hospital and treated against their will for multiple sclerosis. Similarly, people may be found not guilty of a serious crime because of their ‘paranoid schizophrenia’, but the same rules do not apply to people with brain tumours.

No mental illness has, or ever will be, diagnosed on the basis of medical signs, for a simple reason. If people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia are found to have a brain lesion, they are suffering from a brain illness, not a mental illness. The presence of a medical sign in people who have been labelled mentally ill proves that they are not suffering from a mental illness. Psychiatry is, therefore, that branch of medicine where diagnoses of ‘illnesses’ are made in the absence of objective evidence: they are based, not on what people have, but on what they do and say. And if they act in ways that annoy, upset or offend others, they may find themselves diagnosed as mentally ill and treated medically against their will.

People change their behaviour with or without the intervention of psychiatrists or psychologists. Such intervention is nowadays called ‘treatment’ when, in some cases, it should be called ‘torture’. When these interventions produce acceptable changes in behaviour, they are called ‘cures’. The cure of mental illness, it is argued, produces a state of mental health which is universally regarded as desirable. But if mental illness is a myth, mental health is too.

Since the middle-1990s the term ‘mental health literacy’ has been used to describe people who endorse an illness ideology and so agree with biological psychiatrists who bemoan the public’s alleged ignorance. Many attempts to reduce prejudice against the ‘mentally ill’ have been based on the attempt to make the public think like biological psychiatrists. This approach is based on the assumption that if you are ill your behaviour is beyond your control and you cannot be held responsible for it. Psychologist, John Read, reports evidence from seventeen countries that reveals that citizens have steadfastly resisted this propaganda, preferring to attribute mental illness to problems in living. Biological psychiatrists, eagerly supported by pharmaceutical companies, have consistently tried to tell people that they are wrong. This ‘illness’ approach to de-stigmatisation ignores the impressive body of evidence that biological explanations actually fuel prejudice.

The authors of the psychiatric bible known as ‘The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-IV-TR) admit that ‘no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of ‘mental disorder”. Faced with the undeniable fact that mental illnesses cannot be diagnosed on objective medical grounds, DSM IV nonetheless provides more than 350 examples including: academic disorder, ADHD, expressive language disorder, gambling, gender-identity disorder, mathematics disorder, neglect of child disorder, partner-relational disorder, phase of life disorder, rumination disorder, written expression disorder and premature ejaculation. It seems that when females climax quickly it is ‘sexy’, when males climax quickly it is a mental illness!

In English there are success verbs, like ‘discover’ – one cannot discover something that does not exist. ‘Invent’ is not a success word since one can invent something that does not exist. Brain illnesses are discovered, mental illnesses are invented.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12427

To find out more about Dr. Thomas Szasz click here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/

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America conned: Psycho pharma drug pushing empire under fire

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

NaturalNews – July 26, 2011

by Monica G. Young

"psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed."

Is America truly stricken with widespread mental illness? Do tens of millions need mind-altering drugs? A recent flurry of media articles lead readers to a realization that Big Pharma and the “mental health” industry have deceived Americans on a grand scale.

The “New York Review of Books” two-part article by Dr. Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, summarizes it extremely well. She analyzes three books by authors Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. Each deconstructs the apparent mental illness epidemic and theory that mental disorders stem from brain chemical  imbalances which can be corrected by drugs.

Dr. Angell’s review has sparked a host of other journalists to applaud her and fuel the fire. An article in Forbes even concludes, “psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed.”

As an overview:

Ten percent of Americans over age six take antidepressants. Antipsychotic drugs, once reserved for schizophrenics, have become the top-selling class of drugs in the US, with over $14 billion in sales in 2009. ADHD, bipolar and autism diagnoses have exploded in the past two decades with at least 5 million US kids now on psychiatric drugs.  Ten percent of boys take drugs for ADHD. Half a million kids take antipsychotics, including preschoolers.

The chemical imbalance theory rose to fame when Prozac hit the market in 1987, accompanied by massive hype that it corrected a chemical deficiency in the brain. In the years that followed, the number of people prescribed drugs for mental illness skyrocketed. Today, “treatment” for mental disorders is synonymous with psychoactive (mind-altering) drugs.

Tracing the origin of this theory shows it wasn’t that chemical imbalances were discovered in the mentally ill and then drugs were devised to correct the imbalance. Instead, drugs created for other purposes were incidentally found to also affect brain chemicals and blunt mental symptoms. Drug companies, hungry for new markets, and   psychiatry, eager to build stature in the medical arena, leapt on this. They conducted a vast campaign to popularize chemical imbalances as the cause of mental disturbance and push drugs as the answer.

As Dr. Angell writes, “instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.” “Or similarly,” she says, “one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin.”

Many scientific studies disprove the chemical imbalance theory. After fifteen years of research, Irving Kirsch – psychologist and author of “The Emperor’s New Drugs” – concludes, “It now seems beyond question that the traditional account of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is simply wrong.” Research studies show psychoactive medications actually disrupt brain chemistry and causes the brain to function abnormally. This year prominent neuroscientist, Dr. Nancy Andreason, announced proof that antipsychotics shrink the brain.

Studies also demonstrate that long-term recovery rates are higher for nonmedicated patients. For instance, the World Health Organization conducted an investigation in fifteen cities around the world and out of 740 depressed individuals studied, those that weren’t on psychiatric drugs had the best long term outcomes.

In the pre-medication era, it was known that with time, people usually recovered from depression. If kids had tantrums, were unruly or shy, they were apt to outgrow it. Today, individuals branded with disorders are likely to receive long-lasting diagnoses, endless prescriptions and the poorer ones tend to remain on disability for life.

Big Pharma manipulation

Dr. Marcia Angell says the author of each of the three books agrees on “the disturbing extent to which the companies that sell psychoactive drugs – through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery – have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated.”

According to IMS Health, an information and consulting company, pharmaceutical companies spent $6.1 billion in 2010 in marketing to US doctors. Another $4 billion was spent on direct-to-patient advertising.

Drug trials, used to bring a drug to market, are funded by drug companies, heavily biased and misleading. Companies may sponsor as many trials as they like until they have just two positive ones to submit to the FDA. Great care is taken to hide negative trials. The highly positive results of placebo trials are downplayed: a high percentage of patients recover on a fake drug (like a sugar pill) – proving that the more a person believes he will benefit from a treatment, the more likely he will experience a benefit.

In regards the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – the psychiatric bible of mental disorders, used in prescribing drugs – Dr. Angell points out “in all of its editions, it has simply reflected the opinions of its writers.” The majority of the psychiatrists involved in creating the current edition had financial ties to drug companies.

Author Daniel Carlat points out that “psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies.”

Crime against humanity

And where has the “mental health” industry and “drug therapy” brought our nation?

As Americans line up at their local pharmacy, documented side effects are legion: weight gain, deadened emotions, diabetes, heart problems, liver damage, stunted growth in kids, shortened life spans and on and on. Those prescribed one psychoactive drug are commonly prescribed another to address side-effects, with many on daily cocktails of meds.

An estimated 2.2 million Americans are hospitalized each year for adverse drug reactions. Over 100,000 die from them.

Instead of decreasing, the number of adults on disability pay for mental illness has soared 250% since 1987 and for kids it’s a 35X increase.

The greatest  crime to humanity is the mass drugging of children. Yet it’s perpetrated within schools, doctors offices, foster homes and juvenile facilities daily.

There is good news. In the past few years, drug companies have faced a rise of multi-billion dollar class action suits. The key popularizer of childhood bipolar and antipsychotics for kids, Dr. Joseph Biederman, was publicly sanctioned by Harvard Medical School for failing to report $1.6 million he pocketed from drug companies. Some drugmakers are steering away from pursuing new psychoactive drugs.

Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

This chemical-imbalance/drug therapy lie has been told big enough and repeated enough, that much of America believes it. Isn’t it time we all put a stop to it?

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The Voices Inside Their Heads – Gail Hornstein’s Approach To Understanding Madness

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Note from CCHR:  This is a very interesting article, and reminds us of the movie A Beautiful Mind and the great disservice it did to Nobel prize winner John Nash, by completely altering the most remarkable element that led to his recovery— the fact he refused to continue taking psychiatric drugs, thereby changing the entire success of what Nash was able to accomplish—a drug free recovery. The film portrays Nash as taking “newer medications” at the time of winning his Nobel Prize, (which was false) thereby directly implying it was psychiatric drugs that cured him.  Nash, himself, says this is pure fiction; he hadn’t take psychiatric drugs for 24 years and stated that he willed his own recovery.   Why invent a fictitious pharma-friendly ending when the truth was so much more inspiring? The fact that the screenwriter’s mother was a psychiatrist may have had something to do with the film’s distortion, Nash said. The point is that psychiatry has long refused to admit psychiatric disorders are not medical conditions, and have vehemently suppressed workable non-drug treatments to overcome mental difficulties, even of the severity experienced by John Nash.  In the 1970′s, psychiatrist Loren Mosher, Chief of Schizophrenic Research for the National Institute of Mental Health, (who openly stated the diagnoses of schizophrenia had no medical merit), established a drug-free program — Soteria House — for patients diagnosed schizophrenic, “The idea was that schizophrenia can often be overcome with the help of meaningful relationships, rather than with drugs, and such treatment would eventually lead to unquestionable healthier lives,” Mosher said. Between 85 percent and 90 percent of the acute and long-term clients were able to return to the community without use of conventional hospital treatment.

But like “A Beautiful Mind,” this amazing accomplishment was buried and discredited. According to Mosher, “By 1980, I was removed from my post altogether. All of this occurred because of my strong stand against the overuse of medication and disregard for drug-free, psychological interventions to treat psychological disorders.”

There is no doubt that people suffer from a wide range of emotional, behavioral and mental difficulties.  But psychiatric diagnoses (disorders) are not medical conditions, evidenced by the fact there is not one proven medical test for any psychiatric disorder, including “schizophrenia.”  Falsely “medicalizing”  these problems benefits only two groups—the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric industry—not those seeking real help.  For more information: http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-disorders/

The Sun – July 19, 2011
by Tracy Frisch

The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.

TRACY FRISCH lives in Washington County, New York, where she is a freelance journalist, homesteader, and grassroots organizer leading a “zero-waste” campaign. She derives much of her bodily and spiritual sustenance from her almost-year-round vegetable garden.

As a teenager Gail Hornstein developed a fascination with first-person accounts of mental illness, and in the decades since, she has collected more than seven hundred patient memoirs, autobiographies, and witness testimonies. She likens them to survivor accounts or slave narratives, with patients struggling against the psychiatric system to make their voices heard.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately one in four Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. Our society has gone further than any other in classifying unwanted behaviors and emotions as diseases demanding medical — and often pharmaceutical — treatment.

Hornstein, now a Mount Holyoke College professor of psychology, questions whether this labeling benefits those being labeled. She also rejects the idea that psychiatric patients, however severe their symptoms, have a physical disease. Even schizophrenia and other types of psychosis, Hornstein suggests, can result from trauma, abuse, and oppression. She offers a popular course for psychology majors in which they read only books by patients, and she urges a more open-minded inquiry into what causes mental illness and how people get better.

Frisch: You express enormous empathy for those labeled “mentally ill,” yet you avoid romanticizing their lives. How do you walk this fine line?

Hornstein: I try to understand people as they understand themselves. If you ask them what their experience is or read their own accounts, you’ll find they can be articulate and psychologically sophisticated. Even people who lack formal education can offer highly nuanced descriptions of their emotional lives. I’ve adopted a phrase from my uk colleagues: “experts of their own experience.” This view helps me avoid either romanticizing their experience — seeing it in a more positive way than they do — or seeing it only as a tragedy with no redemptive qualities.

Emotional distress is highly individualized, and we shouldn’t come to any general conclusions about it. There are people who feel they’ve learned something profound from the experience of hearing voices, but there are plenty of others who are frightened and just want the voices to go away. One woman said to me, “If I could wake up tomorrow and not hear any voices, I would open up a bottle of champagne.” Yet she’d discovered the strength to get through it.

Frisch: Why do you feel so strongly about avoiding the phrase “mental illness”?

Hornstein: The term “mental illness” is heavily charged, politicized, and ambiguous. I prefer to talk about “anomalous experiences,” “extreme emotions,” and “emotional distress.” The main reason I don’t use medical language is that people who are suffering often don’t find it very helpful. No one experiences “schizophrenia” — that’s just a technical name for a lot of complicated feelings.

People who have been taught that “mental illnesses are brain diseases” see psychiatric patients as dangerous and unlikely to recover. And those in crisis are often understandably reluctant to consult mental-health professionals, because the stigma of mental illness is so severe: it’s possible to lose your job, your home, and your family as a consequence of being diagnosed with a mental illness. In cultures that take a social view of emotional distress, by contrast, people more readily seek help because they aren’t as likely to be ostracized and are assumed to be capable of full recovery.

The World Health Organization did an international study comparing outcomes for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in “developed” countries — including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Denmark, and others — and in “developing” countries such as Colombia, Nigeria, and India. To their astonishment, they found that outcomes were much better in the developing countries. As often happens when a study produces unexpected results, the findings weren’t believed at first. So the study was repeated a few years later with a more stringent definition of what constituted improvement for the patients. The results were the same.

Two hypotheses have been put forward to explain these findings. One is that developing countries don’t use medications over the long term because they can’t afford it. Without long-term medication, patients don’t become chronically disabled. The other hypothesis is that people in developing countries are more likely to be cared for at home and be a part of their community, rather than being isolated or sent away to a hospital, and this helps them recover.

Frisch: How does what is commonly called “mental illness” differ from physical disease?

Hornstein: In psychiatry mental illness is a metaphor imposed on people’s behavior. There aren’t any physical methods of diagnosing a mental illness: There’s no blood test. There’s no mri. So-called mental illnesses are diagnosed on the basis of behavior. The “chemical-imbalance” theory was invented by the marketing departments of drug companies to try to convince doctors to prescribe their products. Some doctors say depression is just like diabetes: you have an imbalance of a neurotransmitter, the way a diabetic might need more or less insulin, and this drug will restore your balance. But with diabetes it’s possible to measure the amount of sugar and insulin in your blood. We know what a balanced level is. No doctor who has given anyone an antidepressant has ever measured the level of a neurotransmitter in the patient’s body. There is no independent means by which to tell if someone has a “chemical imbalance.”

Frisch: Do any mental illnesses have a known physiological basis?

Hornstein: The initial symptoms of Huntington’s disease resemble the symptoms of mental illness. When folk singer Woody Guthrie first manifested Huntington’s disease, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Similarly people in the early stages of brain cancer may behave in anomalous ways. If you don’t know they have cancer, you might think they’re having a psychiatric breakdown. But once they get a cat scan, you can see the brain tumor. You can’t see schizophrenia.

Frisch: I have always taken it for granted that only mystics or crazy people hear voices, but you suggest that it’s more common than we think.

Hornstein: Many people who hear voices never attract the attention of the psychiatric system. Estimates are that 4 percent of the uk population hears voices — approximately the same percent that has asthma. In Western society we most often associate hearing voices with illness. If we lived in a part of the world that was given to greater religiosity, unusual psychological experiences might be labeled as divine gifts. All the major religions of the world include figures who heard voices or had other anomalous psychological experiences. If the pastor in an Evangelical Christian church tells the congregation, “God spoke to me last night,” no one in that church thinks he has lost his mind.

Whether a phenomenon is considered “abnormal” or not depends on the circumstances, the person’s suffering, the reactions of others, and many more factors. One of the main goals of my book Agnes’s Jacket is to give readers the opportunity to learn about people who have unusual experiences and to encourage them to tolerate a wider range of behavior in themselves and others.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/427/the_voices_inside_their_heads

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

Friday, May 13th, 2011

By Dominik Ritter, Psychologist
May 13, 2011

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.

It seems to me that we are dealing with a moral panic here rather than an actual threat to society posed by the so called “mentally ill”. But what exactly are moral panics? One can conceive of them as controversies that involve arguments and social tensions between different groups of people that appear to threaten the social order. Stanley Cohen, author of “Folk Devils and Moral Panics” (1972), stated that a moral panic occurs when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are often referred to as “moral entrepreneurs” (e.g. mental health activists) while people who supposedly threaten the social order are commonly called “folk devils” (e.g. people defined as “mentally ill”). A folk devil is a person or group of people who are portrayed as outsiders and deviant (e.g. because they transgress some social norms and conventions such as having different beliefs and values, taking illegal substances, being unemployed, poor, homeless, etc.), and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems such as the demise of morality and tradition, poverty and disease resulting in pervasive campaigns of hostility through gossip and the spreading of myths (e.g. “mental illness” exists and is caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain”, “mental patients are dangerous”, etc.).

The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation and often get in on the act and profit from a seemingly endless supply of horror stories. In relation to this Cohen (1972) coined the term “deviancy amplification spiral”, which is a media hype phenomenon defined as an increasing cycle of reporting on “undesirable” behaviours or events. The spiral usually starts with some “deviant” act that is either criminal (e.g. murder; rape) or considered by mainstream society to be morally repugnant (e.g. suicide; self-harm). Reported cases of such “deviance” are often presented as just “the tip of the iceberg” together with the assertion that the actual number of cases is most definitely significantly larger than the ones we know about. This then results in minor issues beginning to look more serious and rare events beginning to appear more common. The increase in public concern about welfare, safety and security then typically leads to state interventions such as politicians passing new laws to deal with the perceived threat (e.g. Mental Health Act 1983) and various law enforcement systems (e.g. psychiatrists, social workers) to focus more resources on dealing with the specific deviancy than it warrants (e.g. forced admissions and detentions of people who are defined as “mentally ill”, removal of children from their parents).

I would like to conclude by stating that it is a very difficult task to challenge the misinformation (e.g. that there is a thing called “mental illness”, or that people who are defined as “mentally ill” are dangerous) which is being spread by the mental health movement. This is predominantly so because there is no money to be made from the alternative (i.e. there is no “mental illness” ergo there is nothing to be treated) and because the people concerned (i.e. “mental patients”) as well as supporters of alternative viewpoints are far less powerful than the international multi-billion dollar per year pharmaceutical companies and affiliated mental health services. It is what Adolph Hitler would have described as a “Big Lie”, a lie that appears to be too big to be called out. Too much money and power seems to be at stake. Furthermore, the mental health ideology offers very simple and convenient explanations and solutions to problems in society that are now deeply assumed to be caused by a bunch of “lunatics” who are believed to suffer from serious mental health problems for which they supposedly require psychiatric treatment. Scary sounding names have been invented (e.g. schizophrenia, manic depression, antisocial personality disorder) by mental health activists to trick people into believing that there is something seriously wrong with some people and that it would be better to have them locked up, drugged, and shocked. As noted above, the prolonged imprisonment of “mental patients” in “mental hospitals” does not really seem to have anything to with any real crimes but actually more with how one thinks and feels about oneself, others and the world in general. One could describe these kinds of behaviour as thought crimes or offences against a mental health ideology for which one has to pay with one’s health and liberty.

Dominik Ritter is a psychologist, writer, lecturer, social critic, and founder of the Blue Panthers Party, a critical psychiatry group.

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Note to Press Re: Arizona Shooting—Before Touting Pharma’s “More Mental Health Treatment Needed” Line – Try Asking The Right Questions

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

By CCHR International

10 recent massacres were committed by those under the influence of psychiatric drugs resulting in 54 dead and 105 wounded

Every single time there is a school shooting, or some senseless massacre, the press are quick to start touting the need for more mental health treatment to “prevent” these tragedies—well before the facts of the case have been investigated. In fact, most of the press don’t appear as interested in bringing the facts to light as they are in making “recommendations” based on assumptions and calling for more mental health services/treatments.   How one can make recommendations before finding out what actually occurred seems illogical to us, and we’re hoping we’re not the only ones.   What also seems illogical is the lack of direct questioning and demand for answers given the facts already known about prior massacres/shootings, such as:  The majority of those who committed such acts had already undergone mental health “treatment,”  and were already on psychiatric drugs.   Drugs documented by international drug regulatory agencies to cause violence, mania, psychosis, hallucinations, suicide and even homicidal ideation.

In the case of prior massacres/shootings, what has repeatedly occurred is that when the facts finally came out,  due solely to the efforts of those few  determined investigative reporters (such as Fox National News reporter Douglas Kennedy), and it was revealed that the shooter had been under the influence of psychiatric drugs, or in withdrawal from them,  most of the press were quick to counter the drug/violence connection by featuring some Pharma mouthpiece touting the “there is no evidence that these drugs cause violent or homicidal behavior” line.

Really?    No evidence? There have been 22 International Drug Regulatory Agency Warnings on psychiatric drugs causing violence, mania, psychosis and even homicidal ideation.   These warnings have been issued by drug regulatory agencies in the United States,  the European Union, Japan,  The United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

And consider that just last week, TIME Magazine reported on a study from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices that  “based on data from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System has identified 31 drugs that are disproportionately linked with reports of violent behavior towards others.”  And out of the Top 10, 8 were psychiatric drugs.

From Time Magazine: “When people consider the connections between drugs and violence, what typically comes to mind are illegal drugs like crack cocaine. However, certain medications — most notably, some antidepressants like Prozac — have also been linked to increase risk for violent, even homicidal behavior.

The Top 10 included  the Antidepressants Pristiq, Effexor, Luvox, Paxil, Prozac, ADHD Drugs, Strattera and the Anti-Anxiety drug,  Halcion.

Now, to be perfectly clear, we’re not saying for a fact that Loughner was taking  psychiatric drugs at the time of the shooting, or in the past, which studies show can cause long-term  damage long after an individual has stopped taking them.   We’re saying, why aren’t the press finding out?   Consider that 10 recent massacres were committed by those under the influence of psychiatric drugs documented to cause mania, psychosis, violence and even homicide, resulting in 54 dead and 105 wounded—and those are just the ones we know about. In several cases, medical records were sealed or autopsy reports not made public or, in some cases, toxicology tests were either not done to test for psychiatric drugs, or not disclosed to the public.   But let’s just consider what we do  know about the mental health “treatment” of those who committed these acts of violence:

  • Dekalb, Illinois – February 14, 2008: 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 16 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amount of Xanax in his system.
  • Omaha, Nebraska – December 5, 2007: 19-year-old Robert Hawkins killed eight people and wounded five before committing suicide in an Omaha mall.  Hawkins’ friend told CNN that the gunman was on antidepressants, and autopsy results confirmed he was under the influence of the “anti-anxiety” drug Valium.

  • Jokela, Finland – November 7, 2007: 18-year-old Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School in southern Finland, then committed suicide.

  • Cleveland, Ohio – October 10, 2007: 14-year-old Asa Coon stormed through his school with a gun in each hand, shooting and wounding four before taking his own life.  Court records show Coon had been placed on the antidepressant Trazodone.

  • Blacksburg, Virginia – April 16, 2007: 23-year-old Seung Hui Cho shot to death 32 students and faculty of Virginia Tech, wounding 17 more, and then killing himself.  He had received prior mental health treatment, however his mental health records remained sealed.

  • Red Lake, Minnesota – March 2005: 16-year-old Jeff Weise, on Prozac, shot and killed his grandparents, then went to his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation where he shot dead 7 students and a teacher, and wounded 7 before killing himself.

  • Greenbush, New York – February 2004: 16-year-old Jon Romano strolled into his high school in east Greenbush and opened fire with a shotgun.  Special education teacher Michael Bennett was hit in the leg.  Romano had been taking “medication for depression”.

  • El Cajon, California – March 22, 2001: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman, on the antidepressants Celexa and Effexor, opened fire on his classmates, wounding three students and two teachers at Granite Hills High School.

  • Williamsport, Pennsylvania – March 7, 2001: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was taking the antidepressant Prozac when she shot at fellow students, wounding one.

  • Conyers, Georgia – May 20, 1999: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded six of his classmates.

  • Columbine, Colorado – April 20, 1999: 18-year-old Eric Harris and his accomplice, Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 26 others before killing themselves.  Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox.  Klebold’s medical records remain sealed.

  • Notus, Idaho – April 16, 1999: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school, narrowly missing students.  He was taking a prescribed SSRI antidepressant and Ritalin.

  • Springfield, Oregon – May 21, 1998: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22.  Kinkel had been taking the antidepressant Prozac.

So, given the fact that these shooters were on psychiatric drugs, given the fact that 22 international drug regulatory agencies warn these drugs can cause violence, mania, psychosis, suicide and even homicide, given the fact that a major study was just released confirming these drugs put people at greater risk of becoming violent,  here are the questions we think deserve to be answered.

1) Court records show that a case against Jared Loughner was dismissed on Dec. 9, 2008, after he completed some type of diversion program.    What was the diversion program?  Did it include mental health treatment or do the case notes include any information about any prior mental health treatment  Loughner may have undergone?  Such was the case of Columbine shooter Eric Harris’s “diversion program”, where case notes dated 4/16/98 revealed that “Eric has been having difficulty with his medication for depression.  A few nights ago he was unable to concentrate and felt restless.  He went to the doctor and the doctor is changing his medication.”

* Further note to press: Sometimes finding the psychiatric drug connection requires a bit more due diligence than just asking the question; case in point,  following the Columbine massacre, the Coroner’s office initially reported no drugs were found in Eric Harris’ tox reports.   Following this, an investigative reporter found that Harris was rejected from the military and psychiatric drug use was suspected as the cause for the rejection.   When this became known,  the coroner’s office seemed to find that  Harris did in fact have the antidepressant Luvox in his system.

2) The Wall Street Journal reported, “One high-school pal said Loughner had become suicidal”.  Considering the FDA has issued black box warnings that antidepressants can cause suicidal ideation (as can other psychiatric drugs) was Loughner already under the influence of these drugs?

3) The press has reported that Loughner was “barred from campus pending a psychological evaluation.”  So what happened?  Did he get one?  Was he ever in mental health treatment, or prescribed a psychiatric drug? Ever?

As a final note:  Whether or not Loughner was yet another in the long list of shooters under the influence of drugs documented to cause mania, psychosis, hallucinations, aggressive behavior, suicidal and homicidal ideation—Given the international drug regulatory agency warnings & studies, the just released Institute for Safe Medication Practices study, this much we know for certain; the  last thing we need is more kids on psychiatric drugs.    And given what we already know about the risks of these drugs, any recommendation for more mental health treatment, meaning more people and more kids put on these drugs, is not only negligent, but considering the possible repercussions, criminal.

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Mental health patients ‘locked up in hospitals without legal authority’ — Health regulator says blanket measures introduced in the name of patient security may infringe human rights law

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Note from CCHR: This article highlights the need for CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights to be universally adopted.  CCHR is the only organization to have drafted human rights guidelines for the field of mental health,  something desperately needed as there are virtually no rights granted to those psychiatry determines, by opinion alone, are “mentally ill.” Read the declaration here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/declaration-of-human-rights/

The Guardian, October 27, 2010

by Randeep Ramesh

Mental health patients are increasingly being locked up in hospitals without legal authority, a practice which may infringe human rights law, the health regulator said today.

The Care Quality Commission said the proportion of people in low secure beds has increased significantly since 2006. More than a quarter of psychiatric patients are now in held in low secure units (LSUs). Three years ago, the figure was less than a fifth.

Such changes in the pattern of care have rung alarm bells at the commission. It says patients were being subjected to a regime of close observation behind high fences and “airlocks”, where patients sometimes faced “unsafe or abusive practices”.

The regulator cited cases where the mentally ill were limited to “two to six sheets” of toilet paper and where nurses were unable to administer care because they were busy guarding patients.

One example saw a male nurse assigned “to preserve the dignity” of a highly disturbed female patient who was constantly attempting to remove her clothing. Other female patients in a different unit also complained that male nurses were involved “during night-time observation, bathing and toileting”.

The commission said these were “serious concerns for the dignity and safety of vulnerable [people]“. “Examples of poor practice being followed in the name of patient security included blanket measures that risked infringing human rights law, and disregard for privacy and dignity that was verging on unsafe or abusive practice,” said the report.

There had also been an alarming trend of security measures that banned mobile phones or forbade patients from preparing their own meals. The commission said, in some circumstances, this could “amount to an unwarranted infringement of patients’ ECHR article eight rights to a family and private life”.

The commission recommends reviewing the national policy of standards in such units. Matt Kinton, the report’s author, said there was a “real worry that the more mental health wards look like prisons, the less they function as hospitals where people will get better and be able to live independently”.

Kinton said one of the driving forces of this trend towards security was that the private sector had built many new low-security wards. “It is the old adage that if you build a hospital, patients will fit it.”

The regulator also noted that there was a sharp rise in the doctors prescribing compulsory treatments for mental health problems. On average, 367 community treatment orders (CTOs) have been made each month. This is at least ten times the number anticipated when the legislation was introduced in 2008.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/27/mental-health-patients-hospital-law

Watch CCHR’s video: What We Believe, here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/

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Americas Mental Illness Epidemic

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Rense.com
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
August 25, 2010

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy ­ often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs – to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies aka, BigPharma.

That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and health science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600% increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability. Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients are now motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can cross the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering the brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the patients are taking the drugs long-term..

In Whitaker’s second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma. Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to admit: These drugs, it turns our, are fully capable of disabling ­ often permanently – body, brain and spirit.

More evidence to support Whitaker’s well-documented claims are laid out in two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace Jackson. Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, from the voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly ignored by the clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous consequences of the chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes of psychiatric drugs. Her second and most powerful book: Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any of the five classes of drugs that are commonly used in psychiatric patients (antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, tranquilizers and anti-seizure/”mood-stabilizer” drugs) have shown microscopic, macroscopic, biochemical, clinical and/or radiological evidence of brain shrinkage and other signs of brain damage, which can result in clinically-diagnosable, permanent dementia, premature death and a variety of other related brain disorders that can mimic mental illnesses. Jackson’s first book, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent was an equally sobering book warning about the many hidden dangers of psychiatric drugs.

This sad truth is that the seemingly knee-jerk prescribing (without very much information being given to patients about the long list of serious long-term adverse effects) of potent and often addicting/dependency-inducing psychiatric drugs has become the standard of care in American psychiatry since the introduction of the so-called anti-schizophrenic “miracle” drug Thorazine in the mid-1950s. (Thorazine was the offending drug that all of Jack Nicholson’s fellow patients were coerced into taking at “medication time” in the Academy Award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.) Thorazine and all the other “me-too” early antipsychotic drugs are now universally known to have been an iatrogenic (= doctor or other treatment-caused) disaster because of their serious long-term, initially unsuspected, brain-damaging effects that resulted in a number of incurable neurological disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson’s disease.

Thorazine and all the other knock-off drugs like Prolixin, Mellaril, Navane. etc, are synthetic “tricyclic” chemical compounds similar in molecular structure to the tricyclic “antidepressants” like imipramine and the similarly toxic, obesity-inducing, diabetogenic, “atypical” anti-schizophrenic drugs like Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel.

Thorazine, incidentally, was originally developed in Europe as an industrial dye. That doesn’t sound so good although it may not be so unusual in the closely related fields of psychopharmcology and the chemical industry, especially when one considers that Depakote, a popular drug marketed initially as an anti-epilepsy drug but now is being heavily used as a so-called “mood stabilizer”. Depakote, known to be a hepatotoxin and renal toxin, was originally developed as an industrial solvent capable of dissolving fat – including, presumably, the fatty tissue in human livers and brains.

Some sympathy and understanding needs to be generated for the various victims of BigPharma’s compulsive drive to expand market share and “shareholder value” (share price, dividends and the next quarter’s financial report) by whatever means necessary. Both the prescribers and the swallowers of BigPharma’s drugs have succumbed to BigPharma’s cunning marketing campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by attractive drug company representatives and their “pens, pizzas and post-it note” freebies in the office, and the patients being brain-washed by the inane and unbelievable (if one has intact critical thinking skills) commercials on TV that quickly gloss over the lethal adverse effects in the fine print while urging the watcher to “ask your doctor” about the latest unaffordable wannabe blockbuster drug..

For a quick overview of these issues, I recommend that everybody with an open mind read a long essay written by Whitaker that persuasively identifies the source of America’s epidemic of mental illness disability (a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in Third World nations because costly psych drugs are not prescribed so cavalierly as in the US).

Whitaker and Jackson (among a number of other ground-breaking and whistle-blowing authors who have been essentially black-listed by the mainstream media and mainstream medical journals) have proven to most critically-thinking scientists, alternative practitioners and assorted “psychiatric survivors” that it is the drugs – and not the so-called “disorders” – that are causing our nation’s epidemic of mental illness disability. The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent information about his books can be accessed at www.madinamerica.com A recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at www.wpr.org (at their radio archives link) and a long interview with Dr.Joseph Mercola can be heard at: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/05/08/robert-whitaker-interview.aspx

After reading and studying all these inconvenient truths, mental health practitioners must consider the medicolegal implications for them, especially if the information is ignored or if the information is dismissed out of hand by practitioners who might be tempted to not take the time to study this new information. Those people who are hearing about this for the first time need to pass the word on to others, especially their prescribing healthcare practitioners who should be equally concerned. This is important because the opinion leaders in the highly influential (for good or ill) psychiatric and medical industries have been marketed into submission without hearing the all the facts (which may have been intentionally hidden from them. If that is the case, they cannot be automatically blamed for proceeding in a practice that some day might represent malpractice. It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that is the solemn duty of ethical practitioners who are in positions of authority to fully examine potential malpractice issues and then warn others, especially their patients, of the dangers.

Sadly, it must be admitted that most of the over-worked, double-booked care-givers in medical clinics have not yet heard the news that most if not all of the brain-altering synthetic chemicals known as psychotropic drugs (which are treated as hazardous waste unless they are packaged in a swallowable capsule!) have been marketed as safe and effective – but only for short-term use. The captains of the drug industry know that the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 weeks. They also know ­ indeed they hope – that patients will be taking their drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as the only “treatment” for mental ill health. They know that their brain-altering drugs are also dependency-inducing (aka addicting, causing withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic and increasingly ineffective (a la “Prozac Poop-out”) as time goes by.

The truth is that the people diagnosed as “mentally ill” for life are often simply those unfortunates who find themselves in acute or chronic states of crisis or “overwhelm” due to any number of preventable, curable and treatable (without the use of drugs) bad luck accidents such as poverty, abuse, violence, torture, homelessness, discrimination, underemployment, brain malnutrition, addictions/withdrawal, brain damage from electroshock “therapy” and/or exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in their food, air, water or prescription bottles.

Those labeled as the “mentally ill” are just like us “normals” who have not yet decompensated because of some yet-to-happen, crisis-inducing, overwhelming (however temporary) life situation. And thus we have not yet been given a billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly obligatory – and unaffordable – drug prescription or two signifying we are now chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain off prescription drugs but with a label and in “the system”, it is hard to “just say no to drugs.”

The victims of hopelessness-generating situations like simple bad luck, bad circumstances, bad company, bad choices, bad government, big business, and a competitive society that generates a few winners but mostly losers. America tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus fear-inducing social systems resembling in many ways the infamous police state realities of 20th century European totalitarianism, where people who were different or just dissidents were thought to be abnormal and therefore “disappeared” into insane asylums, jails or concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense. And many of them were and are drugged with disabling psychoactive chemicals against their will.

The truth is that most, if not all, of BigPharma’s psychotropic drugs are lethal at some dosage level (the LD50, the lethal dose that kills 50% of lab animals, is calculated before efficacy testing is done), and therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, brain damage, loss of creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of empathy, loss of energy, loss of strength, fatigue and tiredness, permanent disability and a multitude of metabolic adverse effects that can readily sicken the body, brain and soul by causing insomnia or somnolence, increased depression or anxiety, delusions, psychoses, paranoia, mania, etc. So before filling the prescription, it is advisable to read the product insert labeling under WARNINGS, PRECAUTIONS, ADVERSE EFFECTS, CONTRAINDICATIONS, TOXICOLOGY, OVERDOSAGE and the ever-present BLACK BOX WARNINGS ABOUT SUICIDALITY.

Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a “chemical lobotomy”. That is a useful way to conceptualize this serious issue, because such chemically brain-altered patients are often indistinguishable from those who have suffered a physically traumatic brain injuries or been subjected to ice-pick lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 50s – before the drugs came on the market.

America has a mental ill health epidemic on its hands that is grossly misunderstood because it is worsening, not by the supposed disease progression, but because of the neurotoxic, non-curative drugs that are somehow regarded as first-line “treatment.”
Read the rest of this article here: http://www.rense.com/general91/edi.htm

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Now Psychiatrists Want to Repackage Grief as a “mental disorder”

Sunday, August 15th, 2010
The New York Times
by Allen Frances, an emeritus professor and former chairman of psychiatry at Duke University, was the chairman of the task force that created the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Illustration credit: Cyprian Koscielniak

A startling suggestion is buried in the fine print describing proposed changes for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — perhaps better known as the D.S.M. 5, the book that will set the new boundary between mental disorder and normality. If this suggestion is adopted, many people who experience completely normal grief could be mislabeled as having a psychiatric problem.

Suppose your spouse or child died two weeks ago and now you feel sad, take less interest and pleasure in things, have little appetite or energy, can’t sleep well and don’t feel like going to work. In the proposal for the D.S.M. 5, your condition would be diagnosed as a major depressive disorder.

This would be a wholesale medicalization of normal emotion, and it would result in the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of people who would do just fine if left alone to grieve with family and friends, as people always have. It is also a safe bet that the drug companies would quickly and greedily pounce on the opportunity to mount a marketing blitz targeted to the bereaved and a campaign to “teach” physicians how to treat mourning with a magic pill.

It is not that psychiatrists are in bed with the drug companies, as is often alleged. The proposed change actually grows out of the best of intentions. Researchers point out that, during bereavement, some people develop an enduring case of major depression, and clinicians hope that by identifying such cases early they could reduce the burdens of illness with treatment.

This approach could help those grievers who have severe and potentially dangerous symptoms — for example, delusional guilt over things done to or not done for the deceased, suicidal desires to join the lost loved one, morbid preoccupation with worthlessness, restless agitation, drastic weight loss or a complete inability to function. When things get this bad, the need for a quick diagnosis and immediate treatment is obvious. But people with such symptoms are rare, and their condition can be diagnosed using the criteria for major depression provided in the current manual, the D.S.M. IV.

What is proposed for the D.S.M. 5 is a radical expansion of the boundary for mental illness that would cause psychiatry to intrude in the realm of normal grief. Why is this such a bad idea? First, it would give mentally healthy people the ominous-sounding diagnosis of a major depressive disorder, which in turn could make it harder for them to get a job or health insurance.

Then there would be the expense and the potentially harmful side effects of unnecessary medical treatment. Because almost everyone recovers from grief, given time and support, this treatment would undoubtedly have the highest placebo response rate in medical history. After recovering while taking a useless pill, people would assume it was the drug that made them better and would be reluctant to stop taking it. Consequently, many normal grievers would stay on a useless medication for the long haul, even though it would likely cause them more harm than good.

The bereaved would also lose the benefits that accrue from letting grief take its natural course. What might these be? No one can say exactly. But grieving is an unavoidable part of life — the necessary price we all pay for having the ability to love other people. Our lives consist of a series of attachments and inevitable losses, and evolution has given us the emotional tools to handle both.

Read the rest of this article here http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15frances.html

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OpEdNews.com—The Mothers Act: How Pharmaceutical’s Control Puts New Mothers & Infants in Grave Danger

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Note: To see side effects of psychiatric drugs on pregnant women that have been reported to the US FDA,  click on this link http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/medwatch_psych_drug_adverse_reactions.php scroll all the way down in the Drug Class/Drug Name drop down link and select ANTIDEPRESSANTS, then in the AGE RANGE category, select  age range of 0-1 years.

OpEdNews
By K. L. Carlson
August 5, 2010

Mom’s Opportunity to Access Health, Education, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression Act sounds very supportive of new mothers. The truth is just the opposite. The cleverly worded title can be shortened to the Mothers Act and it was written by and for the pharmaceutical industry. It was introduced by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey; the state with the most pharmaceutical companies’ headquarters. According to the public interest group, Common Cause, Senator Menendez received over $2 million from the healthcare industry, including drug companies.

The Mothers Act was included in the immense health plan that was recently signed into law. New mothers need to be made aware that this Act was not written to benefit them, but to benefit the drug companies. This Act will have grave results literally.

Postpartum depression, as defined in the Act, is a “mood disorder” that has three categories. The most severe category is “postpartum psychosis.” Notice the use of psychiatric terms. The public is supposed to believe that motherhood can cause mental illness. Fear of a new mother suffering “postpartum psychosis” is then increased by the Act stating that one in every one thousand new mothers will suffer the mental illness.

The Act states that postpartum depression goes undiagnosed and untreated due to “social stigma surrounding depression and mental illness.” So giving birth and becoming a new mother with vastly fluctuating hormones and physiological changes, as well as the demands of a new baby, is now a mental illness. What is the probability the Mothers Act would have been written if psychiatric drugs did not reap more than $330 billion dollars a year?

The Act establishes federally funded grants to screen all new mothers before they leave their birthing centers and to continue screening during the first year. Although it is unknown why some women suffer depression after giving birth, and most likely there are many reasons including concerns of financially supporting a new baby, the pharmaceutical industry has ensured that it is considered a mental illness that will lead to non-curing, addictive, dangerous psychiatric drugs. As stated in the Act, “the new mother shall be referred to an appropriate mental healthcare provider.”

“There is no evidence that any mental disorder is caused by chemical imbalance,” a Surgeon General’s report states. The much-touted idea of brain chemical imbalance is a total myth with no scientific research ever supporting it. All psychiatric “disorders” are voted into existence by the American Psychiatric Association and have no objective diagnostic tests, such as blood tests or hormone tests. The Mothers Act is the latest version of the old story of the Emperor’s New Clothes – get people to believe something exists when in fact it does not. Mothers who have trouble emotionally after giving birth do not have any mental illness. They may have temporary hormonal imbalance. They may need a stronger emotional support system to feel confident they can get help with the new baby. They may need financial assistance. But they are not mentally ill.

The Act also funds clinical research “for the development and evaluation of new treatments for postpartum conditions, including new biological agents.” That means synthetic drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has ensured more tax dollars will continue to flow into its coffers.

“The suicide rate is 718 for every 100,000 people taking SSRI/SNRI drugs in clinical trials,” Dr. Arif Khan told NIH in August 2002. SSRI/SNRI drugs are antidepressant drugs, which is an oxymoron because the drugs cause depression. They should be called pro-depression drugs. The suicide rate in the general population not taking psychiatric drugs is about 11 for every 100,000 people. In fact, all 33 brands of SSRI/SNRI drugs carry the FDA’s most severe warning, a Black Box Warning, for suicide. Besides suicide the drugs have more than 100 other severe side effects, including anxiety, panic attacks, irritability, hallucinations, hostility, aggressiveness, and mania. Antidepressants are mind-altering drugs that have never been shown in any clinical study to help depressed people much more than the herb St. John’s Wort or the placebo (sugar pill). In one study the placebo group had significantly better results than the group receiving the antidepressant drug, confirming that the body has natural ways to deal with the ups and downs of life.

Once people are labeled with a mental disorder, such as postpartum psychosis, their behavior is then blamed on the disorder when in fact the drugs are causing the behavior. For a real life example, check out Amy Philo’s story on You Tube. She was anxious because her newborn son had a severe allergic reaction to a formula given to her by a physician. Amy’s fear and anxiety for her child was absolutely normal and would have subsided once she had her baby safely at home. Instead, she was diagnosed as suffering from postpartum depression and given an antidepressant. She asked if the drug would be safe for her baby since she was breast-feeding. A physician told her yes, the drug would make her baby happy too. Research results do not support what the doctor told Amy. “In conclusion, our results suggest that maternal exposure to fluoxetine (Prozac, Luvox, Sarafem, and Symbyax) during pregnancy and lactation results in enduring behavioral alterations “throughout life.” All psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, are neurotoxins. That means they kill nerve cells everywhere in the body.

“After only being on the antidepressant for a couple of days I had thoughts of killing my baby.” Amy was horrified, but instead of blaming the drug’s known side effects, the physician blamed the label of postpartum depression. Obviously, Amy’s “mental illness” had worsened and she now needed to be put in a psychiatric ward. She didn’t agree to the incarceration but her resistance was again labeled as due to her mental illness. The white coats know best! Fortunately Amy’s story has a happy ending. She suspected the antidepressant was causing her strange thought patterns. She managed to be released from the psychiatric ward after only a brief stay and she stopped taking the drugs they had given her. All of Amy’s symptoms that had been labeled by the medical community as postpartum depression symptoms ceased when she stopped taking the drugs. Her baby and she were home together. A happy ending. That will not be the case when they initiate the Mothers Act. Since every mother is potential income to psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, we can predict that the majority of new mothers will be labeled and drugged for postpartum depression. It is about money, not health.

The pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry are conjoined twins joined at the wallet. “Adoption of the Mothers Act is a positive development for women and their families,” says Alan F. Schatzberg, MD, President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Scharzberg was one of several influential psychiatrists who Senator Grassley’s investigations found had failed to disclose financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.

“In order to survive we psychiatrists must go where the money is,” Dr. Steven Sharfstein, APA Vice President told Congress. The money is in prescription psychiatric drugs as demonstrated by the astounding fact that in 2007 the five leading psychiatric drugs grossed more money than the gross national product of half the countries in the world.

The French philosopher Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” The conjoined twins of the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry are doing their best to have the public believe the absurdity that the stress and emotional roller coaster of becoming a new mother is a mental illness. Then they get these vulnerable women to commit the atrocity of taking mind-altering, addictive antidepressant drugs that go directly into the baby through the mother’s milk. These drugs can make a new mother’s life a living hell. Ask Amy Philo.

Even if the mother does not suffer visible side effects from an antidepressant, she is still consuming an addictive drug that is a neurotoxin. And if she breast feeds, her baby is consuming a drug that has been shown to cause severe, irreparable damage.

Pregnant women taking antidepressants have babies who are 6 times more likely to have primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH) or a developing lung disorder. PPH is extremely serious. The drug causes developmental distortion of the lungs leading to lack of oxygen to crucial organs such as the brain, kidneys and liver. PPH is often fatal. Babies who initially survive PPH have long-term health problems including breathing difficulties, seizures and developmental disorders.

K.L. Carlson is a former drug rep turned whistleblower, author of the compelling expose, Diary of a Legal Drug Dealer – One Drug Rep. Dares to Tell You the Truth. She is also a CCHR International Commissioner (advisor)

Read the rest of this  article here:  http://www.opednews.com/articles/PHARMACEUTICAL-S-CONTROL-P-by-K-L-Carlson-100803-846.html

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Renowned human rights lawyer—Persecution of Chinese political dissidents under guise of psychiatric treatment increasing

Monday, May 31st, 2010

The Epoch Times
By Gao Zitan
May 30, 2010

Although Beijing has always denied charges of psychiatric abuse of dissidents, the National Conference of Ankang Asylums held by the Ministry of Public Security in Wuhan, Hubei Province, on May 26 and 27 has inadvertently admitted these charges.

Ankang Asylums are special psychiatric hospitals administered by the police. According to a document issued by the Ministry of Public Security on January 29, 1988, Ankang hospitals serve two functions: to maintain social order and to provide medical treatment. The document also points out that Ankang hospitals, as a special means of maintaining societal control, are an integral part of the public security services.

As of now, there are 22 Ankang hospitals in China, and the ministry has asked that at least one Ankang asylum be set up in each province, according to a report in state-run China Daily on May 29.

The recently-held National Conference pointed out that Ankang hospitals should play a more important role in social surveillance and control, and that they should work closely with public security bureaus, police stations, and criminal investigation units. It also stressed that Ankang hospitals should not admit anyone who is not mentally ill “without the approval of public security bureaus.”

People from mainland China read it as an indirect admission that Ankang hospitals can detain perfectly sane people as long as it is approved by the police. They comment that, in the past, police have incarcerated mentally healthy petitioners into psychiatric hospitals without a word. Now they send out a warning.

Persecution under cover

Zhang Ningzan, a renowned human rights lawyer told The Epoch Times that persecution, especially of political dissidents and petitioners under the guise of psychiatric treatment, occurs more often nowadays.

News broke on April 25 that a peasant named Xu Lindong from Henan Province was locked up in a mental hospital for six and a half years for supporting his neighbor Zhang Guizhi in a land dispute between Zhang and the township government. He was shackled 48 times and given electric shocks 54 times during his incarceration.

Ding Hongyun, deputy head of the Psychiatric Hospital of Luohe in Henan Province explained that Xu was incarcerated because of his insistence on visiting Beijing to lodge complaints against the local government, thereby disrupting social order, according to a China Youth Daily report.

Yangcheng Evening News reported on April 9 that Peng Baoquan and Deng Fuhua, two residents of Shiyan, a city in Hubei Province, were detained in a mental hospital because they took pictures of a protest.

According to Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, on April 22, 2009, Pan Xiang, a citizen of Baoying County, Jiangsu Province, was kidnapped by local police and detained in a Yangzhou psychiatric hospital for nearly two months. Pan had asked the authorities to provide him with a letter allegedly written by Wen Jiabao in response to an earlier letter sent by Pan. He was forced to take medication, and as a result of an allergic reaction, developed edema in his legs.

Read entire article:  http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/36505/

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