Expert declares mental health and psychiatry are in a tailspin. CCHR warns of psychiatric treatment risks, rising drug deaths, and poor psychiatric outcomes requiring close scrutiny.

By CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
November 22, 2024

Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a leading mental health industry watchdog, is calling for a federal audit of the $280 billion spent annually on mental health services, citing decades of failed outcomes and lack of meaningful improvements.[1] Additionally, as CCHR has been exposing since the 1990s, millions of dollars have been wasted on National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded behavioral and psychiatric research that has included studying whiptail lizards, insects, electric fish and $3.1 million spent on the “vocal learning” of birds. Despite this massive investment, TIME magazine reported that mental health in the U.S. continues to decline. CCHR warns that billions are being squandered on treatment-caused harm, overlooked polypharmacy risks, and rising deaths linked to psychotropic drugs.

President of CCHR, Jan Eastgate, said, “One thing we cannot be thankful for this year is an improved mental health system. We must acknowledge the financial costs and the toll on patients’ health caused by extremely poor therapy outcomes, lack of cures, and rising deaths. The industry is plagued by iatrogenesis—the phenomenon of the ‘healer’ causing harm.”

According to TIME magazine, “The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles…. But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics. Suicide rates have risen by about 30% since 2000.”[2]

Polypharmacy, the practice of prescribing multiple psychotropic drugs simultaneously, is alarmingly common. This approach often leads to harmful drug interactions. Among the most overprescribed drugs and dangerous drugs are benzodiazepines, commonly referred to as “benzos.” From mid-February to mid-March of 2020, prescriptions for them increased by 34%. Within a few short weeks, patients can develop a physical dependence on them ending up worse off than before the medications, struggling with addiction and withdrawal. Benzos can also have serious side effects, including respiratory depression, which can cause death. Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine essay, calls our overprescribing and overuse of benzos a “hidden epidemic.”[3]

Over 21 years (1999-2019), 51,446 psychotropic-drug-implicated deaths (where psychotropic drugs were a contributing cause of death) occurred, with the annual psychotropic-drug-implicated death rate increasing over 3.4 times from 0.40 to 1.37 per 100,000. During the same period, there were also 649,697 psychotropic drug overdoses. The drug mortality crisis extends beyond overdose, with “striking increases” in drugs such as psychostimulants receiving less attention, according to researchers in a study published in the journal Drug Alcohol Dependence.[4]

In psychiatry, iatrogenesis has traditionally been linked to complications of psychotropic drug treatment, Medical Xpress reports. “Current classification systems in psychiatry fail to consider the iatrogenic components of psychopathology related to behavioral toxicity [the negative effects of therapeutic levels of medication].” These drugs’ “paradoxical effects, manifestations of tolerance (loss of clinical effect, refractoriness), withdrawal and post-withdrawal disorders, are increasingly common due to the widespread use of psychotropic drugs in the general population.”[5] In other words, psychiatry often ignores the harmful side effects caused by psychiatric drugs, such as worsening mental health and withdrawal symptoms, which are becoming more common as these drugs are widely used.

There are at least 180 psychiatric drugs on the market, not including all generic versions.[6] Some of the iatrogenic effects include irreversible movement disorders causing uncontrollable muscle contractions such as tardive dyskinesia (TD), akathisia and dystonia. TD occurs in 20%-50% of patients taking antipsychotics and is also linked to antidepressants, mood stabilizers and stimulants.[7]

Some psychotropics are nearly six times more likely to drive the person taking them to suicide than those not taking them, while spending time in a psychiatric hospital can increase that risk of self-inflicted death by 44 times.[8]

Clinical Psychology Science and Practice reported there is considerable evidence of heightened suicide risk and other negative outcomes during and immediately following hospitalization. As such, psychiatric hospitalization is iatrogenic. Despite limited research demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing suicide risk, inpatient hospitalization remains a primary “treatment” (often legally mandated) for individuals with high risk of suicide.[9]

Mental health trends are going in the wrong direction, often because of these drugs. “That’s not true for cancer [survival], it’s not true for heart disease [survival], it’s not true for diabetes [diagnosis], or almost any other area of medicine,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the psychiatrist who ran the NIMH from 2002 to 2015.[10]

In the early 2000s, the NIMH ran a large, multi-stage trial to compare different antidepressants to determine whether some worked better than others. Instead, Insel says, “What we came out with was the evidence that, actually, none of them are very good. It was really striking how poorly all of the antidepressants performed across the entire population.”[11]

The NIMH allocated $42.6 million for a five-year Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) study, which essentially found that the aggressively marketed new antipsychotics did not have fewer side effects than older ones, as anticipated.[12]

Stanton Peele, Ph.D., in a blog titled, “How American Psychiatry Misled the World and Ruined Mental Health Worldwide,” states that “The world of mental health and psychiatry is in a tailspin,” and cites Insel’s “own confessional professional memoir,” admitting, “The United States, a country that leads the world in spending on medical research, also stands out for its dismal outcomes in people with mental illnesses. Indeed, over the last three decades, even as the government invested billions of dollars in better understanding the brain, by some measures, those outcomes have deteriorated.”[13]

CCHR is calling for a transparent audit of the funds allocated to psychiatric services and their outcomes, and mental health research under NIMH. This audit aims to identify the failed treatments and programs that have contributed to the worsening state of the nation’s mental health system.

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References:

[1] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/03/06/broken-promises-in-the-mental-health-industry/ citing https://peele.net/lib/americanpsychiatry.html; “Reducing the Economic Burden of Unmet Mental Health Needs,” The White House, 31 May 2022,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/05/31/reducing-the-economic-burden-of-unmet-mental-health-needs/

[2] Jamie Ducharme, “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” TIME, 28 Aug. 2024, https://time.com/6308096/therapy-mental-health-worse-us/

[3] “Polypharmacy Killed My Son. He’s Not Alone,” TIME, 19 May 2023, https://time.com/6280929/polypharmacy-dangers-essay/

[4] Mike Vuolo, “Trends in Psychotropic-Drug-Implicated Mortality: Psychotropic Drugs as a Contributing But Non-Underlying Cause of Death,” Drug Alcohol Depend, 24, June 2021,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8355085/

[5] “Iatrogenic disorders in psychiatry are common and neglected,” Medical Xpress, 15 July 2019, https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-07-iatrogenic-disorders-psychiatry-common-neglected.html, citing: Giovanni A. Fava, et al., “Iatrogenic Factors in Psychopathology,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (2019). DOI: 10.1159/000500151

[6] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/03/06/broken-promises-in-the-mental-health-industry/

[7] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/10/11/consumers-beware-of-antipsychotics-long-term-debilitating-effects/, Elyse M. Cornett, PhD, “Medication-Induced Tardive Dyskinesia: A Review and Update,” The Ochsner Journal, Summer 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472076/

[8] https://www.cchrint.org/2022/06/03/suicide-attempts-increasing-in-children-including-28-in-6-to-9-year-olds-is-preventable/ citing Matthew M. Large, Christopher J. Ryan, “Disturbing findings about the risk of suicide and psychiatric hospitals,” Soc. Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiology (2014), 49: 1353-1355, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-014-0912-2

[9] Erin F. Ward-Ciesielski, Shireen L Rizvi, “The Potential Iatrogenic Effects of Psychiatric Hospitalization for Suicidal Behavior: A Critical Review and Recommendations for Research,” Clinical Psychology Science and Practice 28(6), Mar. 2020, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339741738_The_potential_iatrogenic_effects_of_psychiatric_
hospitalization_for_suicidal_behavior_A_critical_review_and_recommendations_for_research

[10] Jamie Ducharme, “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” TIME, 28 Aug. 2024, https://time.com/6308096/therapy-mental-health-worse-us/

[11] Jamie Ducharme, “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” TIME, 28 Aug. 2024, https://time.com/6308096/therapy-mental-health-worse-us/

[12] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3242475/; https://www.cchrint.org/2022/03/17/jeffrey-liebermans-topple-from-grace-over-racist-tweet-during-black-history-month-spurs-closer-scrutiny/, citing: Jodi Gonzalez Arnold, Ph.D., et al., “Comparison of Outcomes for African Americans, Hispanics, and Non-Hispanic Whites in the CATIE Study,” Psychiatric Services, 1 Jun. 2013, https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.002412012

[13] Stanton Peele, Ph.D., “How American Psychiatry Misled the World and Ruined Mental Health Worldwide,” The Stanton Peele Addiction Website, 20 June 2022, https://peele.net/lib/americanpsychiatry.html