“CCHR respects medicine practiced as medicine: honest, ethical, and centered on the patient’s real health. We reject the quick-fix antidepressant or other psychiatric drug prescription biological model that can produce physical and mental disability, addiction, cognitive impairment, and even death, at enormous human and fiscal cost.”

Federal deprescribing push and Florida’s new guidance underscore CCHR’s decades-long call to prevent misdiagnosis, harmful drugs, and needless suffering.

By Jan Eastgate
President CCHR International
August 14, 2026

CCHR has long demanded medical testing to rule out physical conditions that mimic so-called psychiatric symptoms—preventing needless diagnoses and mind-altering prescription drugs that mask and, therefore, potentially exacerbate untreated physical disease. This principle was recently reinforced in Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo’s “Avoidance of Psychotropic Pharmacotherapy in Children Age 5–17: Guidance Statement.” The statement recommends completing a full physical examination, including laboratory tests for nutritional, endocrine and blood disorders, heavy metals, and mold exposure before any psychotropic drug is considered.[1]

Over 76 million Americans take psychiatric drugs, including more than 45 million on antidepressants. Of these, 6.1 million are ages 0–17, with 2.1 million on antidepressants not recommended for children due to suicide risks.[2] The current nationwide plan to deprescribe antidepressants and curb psychiatric drug overprescribing—particularly in children—prioritizes consent, prevention, transparency, and holistic care and would align with this initiative.[3]

Florida’s Guidance Statement recommends against the use of psychotropic drugs in children for treatment of mental health conditions, emphasizes that the drugs should not be stopped abruptly and that discontinuation may need to be gradual depending on the length of use.

The consequences of skipping physical testing can be catastrophic. One patient endured five years of psychiatric treatment for headaches, dizziness, and staggering gait before a medical examination finally revealed an untreated brain tumor.[4] In 2025, Sarah-Jane Doherty, 24, from Doncaster in Yorkshire, UK, experienced extreme exhaustion, depressive episodes, psychosis, hallucinations, mood changes, vision problems, headaches, and electric-shock sensations down her arm, was wrongly diagnosed as bipolar and prescribed an antipsychotic. The drug worsened her condition. On June 23, 2026, Sarah-Jane was taken to emergency care with a severe headache. A CT scan and MRI of her head revealed she had a brain tumor around the size of a golf ball that required surgery.[5]

Austin was hailed as “the poster child for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” and prescribed stimulants. He was thrown out of 11 preschools in three years for doing everything from shouting obscenities and hitting other children to poking a teacher in the eye with a pencil. However, after Austin, aged 10, went to a hospital to have a blockage removed from his colon, his behavior completely changed. He was able to sit quietly and was a joy to be around. He stopped taking the drugs. According to leading pediatric gastroenterologists, the connection between behavior and chronic colon issues in children is not uncommon. “The bad behaviors disappear as soon as the impaction is removed,” said Dr. Paul Hyman, chief of pediatric gastroenterology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City. Hyman said that the negative behavior can be caused by fear and pain the child may not even be aware of.[6]

Psychiatrists, who rely upon subjective opinion for a diagnosis, frequently fail to properly diagnose medical conditions, which should be the first step taken with anyone admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

The CATO Institute confirms psychiatric diagnoses differ from most of medicine because they rely on subjective mental phenomena and behavioral symptoms instead of physical symptoms or biomarkers. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has progressively broadened the boundaries of major psychiatric categories over successive revisions. It states, “There is reason to believe that psychiatric diagnoses have become less precise, not more… Broad diagnostic criteria often interact with screening instruments that cannot reliably distinguish clinical conditions from normal variation… When diagnosis is subjective, and payment depends on diagnosis, the system will reward expanding the definition of illness.” In the American healthcare system, “diagnoses serve as keys that unlock streams of taxpayer dollars.”

In conclusion, “Psychiatric overdiagnosis is the predictable result of financial incentives that shield all participants from the true cost of care. The outcome is exactly what economic theory would predict: steady growth in diagnoses, services, and public spending, with little ability to assess whether patients are better off.”[7]

A negligent psychiatrist can wreak havoc in the lives of individuals who are misdiagnosed and drugged. Common injuries caused by psychiatric negligence include worsening mental and physical health, increased risk of suicide and self-harm, adverse psychiatric drug reactions, including addiction and dependency, memory loss and cognitive impairment.[8]

First Rule Out Physical Causes

Such harm is preventable: the very diagnostic manual psychiatrists rely on requires them to first rule out physical disease. Even the DSM-IV TR notes the importance of distinguishing general medical conditions from mental disorders with a thorough evaluation.[9] The manual acknowledges the symptoms of “Major Depressive Disorder” are “identical to the characteristic signs and symptoms of general medical conditions (e.g., weight loss with untreated diabetes, fatigue with cancer).”[10]

To reiterate, CCHR’s 57-year experience as a mental health industry watchdog has repeatedly found that psychiatrists fail to properly diagnose medical conditions. In 1982, CCHR campaigned for a California law that established a pilot project to provide medical evaluations of people admitted to public psychiatric hospitals. CCHR was represented on the advisory committee established to oversee the pilot. The findings, officially published in 1989, showed that many patients studied had a physical disease that had been undiagnosed by mental health professionals and defined the medical tests that should be conducted.[11]

According to the California Mental Health Medical Evaluation Field Manual—developed from extensive research in the 1980s—mental health professionals “have a professional and a legal obligation to recognize the presence of physical disease in their patients.” A targeted medical screening algorithm proved far less costly than full evaluations yet detected up to 90% of the physical diseases found by complete work-ups. Up to 80% of those screened were found to have underlying physical disease, many of which either caused or exacerbated the person’s mental health conditions.[12]

Dr. Mary Ann Block, DO, is unequivocal about the need for thorough medical testing: “Everyone deserves to have a physician who will take a thorough history, do a complete physical exam, and look for the true underlying medical cause of a person’s symptoms. No one should accept a doctor who just listens to your chief complaint and hands you a prescription. Everyone deserves more.”[13] She adds: “Only with a thorough history and complete physical exam and lab tests can the true and underlying medical causes of symptoms be diagnosed. Handing over a prescription after simply listening to the chief complaint is insufficient.”[14]

CCHR’s co-founder, the late Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate, stated that the primary function of the DSM was to lend credibility to the claim that certain behaviors—or more accurately, misbehaviors—are mental disorders and therefore medical diseases. Pathological gambling is thereby given the same status as myocardial infarction. He long ago observed that “there is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases. If such a test were developed, then the condition would cease to be a mental illness and would be classified as a symptom of a bodily disease.”[15]

Dr. Block’s conclusion is equally as stark: “If a physical cause can be found for a psychiatric disorder, the disorder ceases to exist.”[16] 

Psychiatric Treatment Causes Worsening Mental Health

David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, points out that despite psychotropic drugs, mental health in society has worsened in the last few decades. Rather, “Besides being a scientific failure, the mental health system is a runaway commercial and cultural success,” he said. “Drugs sedate and quiet people, but we still don’t know if we are curing anything or even treating anything,” Cohen concluded.[17]

Florida’s efforts began four years ago when the Surgeon General appointed a state Mental Wellbeing workgroup.[18] The 2022 Expert Panel met virtually on April 2, 2022, to review and update the previous version of the Florida Best Practice Psychotherapeutic Medication Guidelines, which was published after the last consensus meeting in November 2018. For children ages 6 to 17, it was recommended that a full medical history, including a sleep history, medical work-up, physical examination, and nutritional status evaluation, be conducted. It recognized the extrapyramidal side effects of antipsychotics and the potential to cause prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus when prescribing atypical antipsychotics. Deprescribing (reducing to minimum dosage) was recommended—a structured approach to identifying and discontinuing psychotropic drugs when potential harms exist, although cessation of the drugs are also a potential.[19]

Antidepressants have many serious adverse effects—so many that CCHR International wrote a recently released white paper, Antidepressants: A Public Health Catastrophe – Evidence of Harm, Decades of Cover-Up, and the Urgent Need for Reform. The report quotes internationally respected Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, who has published more than 100 papers in the top five general medical journals, and his scientific works have been cited over 150,000 times. In July 2026, he reported:

“The worst harm of antidepressants is that they double suicides in adults and very likely also in children. Moreover, they impair the sex life in half the patients” and “when the patients try to come off the drugs, half of them experience withdrawal symptoms….”

He questions: “What does the psychiatric establishment do when facing documentation in the randomized trials that antidepressants don’t work, double suicides, and cause important harms in half the patients, and when the patients prefer a placebo for an active drug? They don’t draw the only honorable and evidence-based conclusion, which is that these drugs shouldn’t be used by anyone. To protect their harmful specialty, they continue deceiving the public. This is why I have called psychiatry the only medical specialty that survives on lies.”[20]

As the author of Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity?, Dr. Gøtzsche further concludes that:

“Some of the psychiatric leaders should be in jail because they knowingly spread falsehoods about psychiatric drugs that kill so many people that psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death…”

“Antidepressants are the major killer. Not just because they can cause suicide and homicide, but because elderly people may lose balance, fall, and break their hip, which kills one-fifth of them within the next year.

“I cannot see any role for antidepressants in treating depression. These drugs should be taken off the market as they are harmful.”[21]

Workable alternatives to psychiatric drugging exist and must be prioritized. Psychiatry prefers to claim there are none—and fights to keep it that way—yet the evidence from Florida’s guidance, the California pilot studies, and physicians like Dr. Mary Ann Block shows that thorough medical evaluation routinely uncovers treatable physical causes and ends the need for mind-altering drugs. The federal deprescribing initiative, with its emphasis on consent, prevention, transparency, and holistic care, offers a critical opportunity to embed mandatory medical testing as standard practice nationwide.

CCHR respects medicine practiced as medicine: honest, ethical, and centered on the patient’s real health. We reject the quick-fix antidepressant or other psychiatric drug prescription biological model that can produce physical and mental disability, addiction, cognitive impairment, and even death, at enormous human and fiscal cost. Mandating the tests CCHR has demanded for more than five decades would protect millions of lives, especially children, and stop the cycle of misdiagnosis that has already exacted too high a price.

[1] “Avoidance of Psychotropic Pharmacotherapy in Children Age 5–17: Guidance Statement,” Florida Department of Health, Office of the State Surgeon General, 24 July 2026

[2] https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/people-taking-psychiatric-drugs/; https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychiatric-drugs/

[3] “HHS Launches MAHA Action Plan to Curb Psychiatric Overprescribing,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 4 May 2026, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-launches-maha-action-plan-curb-psychiatric-overprescribing.html

[4] Tomas Bjorkman, “Many Wrongs in Psychiatric Care,” Dagens Nyheter, 25 Jan. 1998

[5] Abigail Nicholson, “‘I was misdiagnosed as mentally ill until doctors learned terrifying truth a year later.’” Daily Mirror, 10 July 2026, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-misdiagnosed-mentally-ill-until-37413768

[6] Article “Colon Trouble Diagnosed as ADHD” in CCHR booklet, Psychiatric Malpractice: The Subversion of Medicine, citing R.S. Pollack, “Operation brings boy’s turnaround,” Sun Sentinel News, 4 Mar. 2002

[7] Adam Omary and Jeffrey A. Singer, “How the American Healthcare System Rewards Psychiatric Overdiagnosis,” CATO at Liberty, 21 Mar. 2026, https://www.cato.org/blog/how-american-healthcare-system-rewards-psychiatric-overdiagnosis

[8] “What Is Psychiatric Malpractice?” Disparti Law Group, https://www.dispartilaw.com/what-is-psychiatric-malpractice/

[9] DSM-IV-TR, p. 181

[10] DSM-IV-TR, p. 351

[11] https://www.cchrint.org/2026/07/31/cchrs-decades-long-fight-for-parental-rights-and-psychiatric-drug-protections/

[12] https://www.cchrint.org/2019/08/05/getting-it-right-about-antidepressants/; Lorrin M. Koran, M.D., Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, MEDICAL EVALUATION FIELD MANUAL, Stanford, CA, 1991, pp. 3-4, 18. https://www.alternativementalhealth.com/medical-evaluation-field-manual/

[13] Dr. Mary Anne Block, Just Because You’re Depressed Doesn’t Mean You Have Depression (Block Systems Books, 2007), p. viii.

[14] Dr. Mary Anne Block, Just Because You’re Depressed Doesn’t Mean You Have Depression,” (Block Systems Books, 2007), p. 8.

[15] Prof. Thomas Szasz, M.D., “PSYCHIATRIC FRAUD BLAMING THE BRAIN: Diagnosis By Design,” CCHR booklet, PSYCHIATRIC MALPRACTICE, The Subversion of Medicine, 2004

[16] Dr. Mary Ann Block, Just Because You’re Depressed Doesn’t Mean You Have Depression,” (Block Systems Books, 2007), p. 12.

[17] “Cohen on Social Impact of Psychiatric Medication,” UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs podcast, 20 Sept. 2021, https://luskin.ucla.edu/cohen-on-consequences-of-psychiatric-medication

[18] https://floridaship.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2022-2026-State-Health-Improvement-Plan-PAW-charter_MWSAP.pdf

[19] “2022-2023 Florida Best Practice Psychotherapeutic Medication Guidelines for Children and Adolescents,” pp. 2, 6, 8, 11, 12

[20] Peter C. Gøtzsche, “A Story of Bad Science: How Defenders of Antidepressant Efficacy Make Their Case,” Mad in America, 28 July 2026, https://www.madinamerica.com/2026/07/a-story-of-bad-science-how-defenders-of-antidepressant-efficacy-make-their-case/

[21] Peter C. Gøtzsche, “A Story of Bad Science: How Defenders of Antidepressant Efficacy Make Their Case,” Mad in America, 28 July 2026, https://www.madinamerica.com/2026/07/a-story-of-bad-science-how-defenders-of-antidepressant-efficacy-make-their-case/