Tag Archives: Citizens Commission on human rights

NY Times—Payments to Doctors by Pharma Raise Issues of Conflicts, CCHR warns of tainted mental health policies

The financial relationships raise questions about the influence of drug companies on prescribing patterns or research results. The practice “puts patients and tax dollars at risk,” said Lee Spiller, the policy director for the Texas branch of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a nonprofit mental health watchdog. “It taints the whole process. I’d hate to think donations were shaping state mental health policy in particular.”

International human rights group protest as public distrust of psychiatry mounts

Hundreds of protesters opposing the junk science and dangerous drugs that make up psychiatry marched through Brighton last week.

The protest coincided with the opening of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Annual Conference at the Metropole Hotel on Kings Road. The march started in Victoria Gardens and finished outside the hotel to highlight the use of dangerous psychiatric drugs that have resulted in multiple deaths of teenagers who had been labelled with so-called ‘disorders’.

In Soviet Relapse, Critics Sent to Psychiatric Hospitals

In the Soviet Union, dissidents were labeled schizophrenics, thrown into psychiatric hospitals and drugged just for questioning the government. It wasn’t until the Soviet demise that officials grasped the difference between criticism and mental illness.

But old habits die hard.

Galina Yartseva, 47, editor of a small opposition newspaper in Veliky Novgorod, learned this the hard way after she took on the city establishment, accusing local officials of corruption and a local plant of air pollution damaging to children’s health.

She was slammed with dubious charges of showing disrespect to a judge in 2010, but cleared by a jury. A few weeks later, the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal at the request of regional prosecutors and sent the case back to the regional court.

In Australia – Electric shock therapy on the rise for young

More than 1 million people are electroshocked every year, including children, the elderly and pregnant women. This is simply a brutal, invasive and damaging ‘treatment’ where up to 450 volts of electricity are sent through the skull. Psychiatrists admit they don’t know how electroshock ‘works’ and the reason behind this is simple: it doesn’t work. Not unless you consider cognitive impairment, brain seizures, permament memory loss and death ‘workable.’ Now in Australia, the use of electroshock for the young is on the rise. Mentioned in this article are the atrocities that were committed in Chelmsford psychiatric hospital where patients were put into drugged induced coma’s and electroshocked, killing dozens. That lethal and inhumane practice was exposed and then banned due to the efforts of CCHR. No organization has done more to expose the deadly practice of electroshock, or helped enact more international laws restricting or prohibiting its use, than CCHR.

US expert slams Patrick McGorry’s psychosis model

PATRICK McGorry’s model of early diagnosis of psychosis, favoured by the federal government and the Coalition in their mental-health policies, has come under attack from a leading US psychiatrist, who warns that predicting psychosis is unreliable and could lead to patients being wrongly medicated.

Allen Frances, who chaired the committee that produced the current diagnostic bible for psychiatry, the DSM-IV, has warned that Professor McGorry’s Early Psychosis Intervention Centres do not have a reliable early diagnosis tool.

Professor Frances, an emeritus professor at Duke University in North Carolina, fears early diagnosis could lead to people without psychosis being put on medications that have serious side-effects, including massive weight gain.

He has also attacked the Gillard government’s plans to spend $222 million expanding Professor McGorry’s EPIC program by another 16 centres as a “vast untried public-health experiment”.