Tag Archives: psychiatric

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.

Chinese citizens sent to mental hospitals to quiet dissent

ZHENGZHOU, China – The electric acupuncture needles stung her scalp, and the drugs bloated her weight, gave her heart palpitations and brought on premature menopause.
But Wu Chunxia consented to the treatments at the psychiatric hospital because if she didn’t, she knew she would be strapped to her bed and left vulnerable to assaults from violent inmates.

“It was worse than hell in there,” says Wu, 37, of the Henan provincial psychiatric hospital in Xinxiang. “I feared I would be strangled at night by other patients.”

Wu was not at the hospital for reasons of mental health. She was committed there in 2008 by the Chinese government for 132 days as punishment for protesting about local injustice to higher authorities.

The Communist Party does not acknowledge its mental facilities are used to silence critics, but according to numerous human rights groups and Chinese dissidents, China’s Communist-led government has for decades incarcerated healthy people in mental wards to suppress dissent. In the past two years, wrongful confinement cases have sharply increased, says Liu Feiyue of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a human-rights organization based in Suzhou.

Prozac is now a defense for murder, writes Australian Member of Parliament Martin Whitely

FIRST it was ADHD drugs, then organ donation, now WA Labor MP Martin Whitely is hoping to get some action on the fatal risks of antidepressant drugs, such as Prozac, to children. Anti-depressant manufacturers warn that products such as Prozac should not be given to children, because of the potentially tragic consequences, but they are prescribed every day to Australian kids. This is what happened, with fatal results, in the case of a 16-year-old boy in Canada who stabbed a friend to death.

For the first time in criminal history, a murder was attributed to an anti-depressant drug.

Vindicated—Detroit Mom gets daughter back & all charges dropped following police stand off over refusing to drug daughter

Two courts gave Maryanne Godboldo early Christmas presents Monday — her child and dismissal of multiple felonies from an eight-hour standoff with police last spring.

“Thank you for just doing your job and following the law,” a weeping Godboldo said in the morning after Wayne County Circuit Judge Gregory Bill ruled that a lower court judge was correct in tossing out the criminal charges from the March incident.

Godboldo had held off child welfare workers and police who were try to remove her teenage daughter because Godboldo would not give the child Risperdal, a drug prescribed for an undisclosed psychiatric condition. Godboldo insisted that the drug, also used to stem aggressive behavior, was harming her daughter.

Is the American Psychiatric Association in Bed with Big Pharma? Answer: Yes

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders, which is used in the United States and to some extent internationally, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and policy makers. The DSM is produced by a panel of psychiatrists, many of whom have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. It is considered the “bible” of American psychiatry. The latest edition — DSM-IV — was published in 1994.

In 1952, the DSM was a small, spiral-bound handbook (DSM-I), but the latest edition (DSM-IV), is a 943-page magnum opus. Over time, psychiatric diagnoses have increased in the American population and in turn, drugs that affect mental states are then used to treat them. The theory that psychiatric conditions are caused by a biochemical imbalance is often used as a justification for their widespread use, even though the theory in unproven. Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and what is normal and abnormal is often unclear, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones.