Tag Archives: Citizens Commission on human rights

Prescription Drug Overdoses More Deadly Than Car Crashes—U.S. in epidemic of prescription drug overdoses

A government health agency says the United States is in the grip of an epidemic of prescription drug overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more people die from such overdoses than from all illegal drugs combined. And accidental prescription drug deaths in the United States each year outnumber highway traffic fatalities. Recent celebrity deaths from apparent prescription drug overdoses have helped to put this public health problem into the spotlight.

The death of American singer and actress Whitney Houston has sparked discussion about accidental overdosing on prescription drugs.

Ron Paul reintroduces Parental Consent Act, prohibiting federal funding for psychiatric screening of children

As a practicing physician, Paul has the most insight into what is right – and wrong – with the U.S. healthcare system among all the GOP candidates. As such, when he re-introduces legislation such as the Parental Consent Act, which he first proposed in 2009 and which would keep federal funds from being used to establish or implement any universal or mandatory mental health, psychiatric, or socioemotional screening program, you should listen.

Though first introduced a couple of years ago, the repackaged Parental Consent Act of 2011 (H.R. 2769 – previously H.R. 2218 in 2009) would keep “federal education funds from being used to pay any local educational agency or other instrument of government that uses the refusal of a parent or legal guardian to provide consent to mental health screening as the basis of a charge of child abuse, child neglect, medical neglect, or education neglect until the agency or instrument demonstrates that it is no longer using such refusal as a basis of such charge,” according to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International.

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.