la face caché de la PSYCHIATRIE
par Gary Null, Ph.D.
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Remarque: les informations sur ce site Web ne se substituent pas à
diagnostic et traitement par un professionnel qualifié et agréé.
Remarque: les informations sur ce site Web ne se substituent pas à
diagnostic et traitement par un professionnel qualifié et agréé.
La maladie mentale a atteint un niveau record avec 40 millions d'Américains
selon les rapports émanant de la psychiatrie organisée. Mais
à quel point ce compte est-il précis? Comme vous le verrez, les personnes en quête d'aide
de l'industrie de la santé mentale sont souvent mal diagnostiqués, à tort
traité et abusé. D'autres sont trompés attirés dans des établissements psychiatriques,
ou même enlevé. Peu importe comment ils arrivent, cependant, une fois qu'ils sont
là-bas, les détenus perdent toutes leurs libertés et sont contraints de subir des
procédures sanctionnées, telles que la thérapie électro convulsive et le traitement
avec des médicaments puissants, qui peuvent les laisser émotionnellement, mentalement et
physiquement marqué à vie. Certains brevets psychiatriques sont physiquement et
abusés sexuellement. Des millions d'autres se font dire qu'ils ont besoin de nuisibles
médicaments, tels que le Prozac et le Ritalin, mais ne sont pas informés de la gravité
effets secondaires dommageables de ceux-ci.
Ajoutez à tout cela une fraude à l’assurance mammouth - que nous payons tous
En somme, nous avons le côté obscur de la psychiatrie. Des millions de
la profession de la santé mentale nuit gravement aux individus,
et il est temps que notre société affronte ce problème.
Pratiques frauduleuses en santé mentale
La fraude dans le secteur de la santé mentale ne se limite pas à
problème; cela ressemble plus à une maladie omniprésente. En guise d'introduction
illustration, regardons les problèmes juridiques récents d’une entreprise qui
appartenant à plusieurs chaînes d’hôpitaux psychiatriques, National Medical
Entreprises (NME). Comme l'auteur Joe Sharkey a rapporté dans son livre Bedlam
[1, 2), en 1993, le FBI a achevé son enquête sur la fraude dans les NME
hôpitaux psychiatriques et ont perquisitionné plusieurs installations NME, au Texas,
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Colorado, Indiana, Arizona, Missouri, Californie, Wisconsin, et
Minnesota. Sharkey a décrit l'étendue du bourbier dans lequel cette
l'entreprise avait coulé:
"Environ 130 poursuites ont été intentées contre les NME
hôpitaux psychiatriques par les patients. Entre 1992 et le début de 1993, trois
les compagnies d’assurance ont intenté des poursuites importantes contre NME
fraude. Ces poursuites ont permis d'identifier plus d'un milliard de dollars de réclamations versées à NME.
hôpitaux psychiatriques. Un mois après les raids du FBI, NME a accepté de payer
125 millions de dollars pour régler deux des grandes poursuites intentées contre des compagnies d’assurance. Bientôt
ensuite, ils ont réglé la troisième action, soit le total des frais en frais de justice et
règlements à environ 3 15 millions de dollars ...
"En avril 1994, NME a payé près de 375 millions de dollars d'amende au
US Ministère de la justice pour violation de la loi fédérale. NME avait
a annoncé qu'il se désengagerait complètement de son traitement psychiatrique
hôpitaux et réservé 237 millions de dollars pour couvrir les amortissements pour la vente
leur. Au total, les règlements et les amendes de NME ont totalisé 927 millions de dollars. "
L’affaire NME faisait partie d’une vaste enquête qui a débuté
en 1991 et découvert la fraude systématique au sein de la psychiatrie à but lucratif
industrie. Les enquêteurs des compagnies d’assurance ont été enquêtés sur 50 000 cas,
les examiner pour la fraude, et ce qu'ils ont trouvé était étonnant. 32,6%
contenait un diagnostic frauduleux correspondant à la couverture d’assurance,
43,4% des cas ont été facturés pour des services non rendus. [ New York
Times , le 24 novembre 1991, des chaînes d'un hôpital psychiatrique accusées de beaucoup
Tricher sur l'assurance ]
Le Washington Post a signalé que des hôpitaux psychiatriques étaient
participer à des «programmes de gagner de l'argent à l'échelle nationale qui traitent
compagnies d’assurance, mais offrait peu de traitements ... "
L’un des aspects les plus obscènes de ces «systèmes» était le ciblage des
les enfants. Utilisation de campagnes publicitaires manipulatrices exécutées de manière stratégique
lors de la remise des bulletins scolaires, les hôpitaux du Nevada ont suggéré de
parents que les mauvaises notes pourraient être le produit de la maladie mentale.
Les hôpitaux psychiatriques placeraient également des «volontaires» dans le conseil scolaire
bureaux afin de canaliser les enfants dans les installations. [ Washington Post ,
Mercredi 29 avril 1991, Des abus du système de santé mentale cités dans les soins
des adolescents ]
Dans un témoignage présenté à la Chambre des représentants des États-Unis
Comité spécial de l'enfance, de la jeunesse et des familles le 28 avril 1992
Le sénateur de l'État du Texas, Mike Moncrief, a relaté un grand nombre de frissons
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histoires d'anciens patients psychiatriques et de membres de leur famille dans son
Etat:
"Au Texas, nous avons découvert certains des plus élaborés,
schémas agressifs, créatifs, trompeurs, immoraux et illégaux utilisés
remplir des lits d'hôpitaux vides avec des patients assurés et payants. "
[Publication de la CCDH, Fraude de plusieurs milliards de dollars en psychiatrie ,
1993, p. 16]
Témoignant devant le même comité, le psychiatre Charles
Arnold a déclaré qu'une installation de Houston lui avait demandé de signer les formulaires d'admission et
fournir des tests inutiles totalisant 900 000 $ par an. Arnold a résumé
ce que Patricia Schroeder, Représentante, a qualifié de «l’un des plus
épisodes scandaleux et scandaleux de l’histoire des soins de santé en
Amérique.":
“Malheureusement, un grand nombre de psychiatres, psychologues,
les travailleurs sociaux, les thérapeutes et les hôpitaux psychiatriques ... ont trahi le
la confiance du public… pour se procurer des avantages financiers.
[ États-Unis d’aujourd’hui , 29 avril 1992]
Tactics Shady sondés ]
Construire la machine des promesses non tenues
Au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, de grands psychiatres ont témoigné devant le
Congrès des États-Unis que le pays avait besoin de plus de psychiatres pour que
le monde pourrait être délivré de la délinquance et du malheur. En 1962,
le même groupe a influencé le gouverneur de New York Nelson Rockefeller à
soutenir un «plan directeur de lutte contre la maladie mentale» qui
fournir «des soins, une recherche et des soins communautaires plus modernes» - ce qui était
devrait coûter 20 millions de dollars à New York pour la première année seulement. Comment
pourrait-il nier un tel appel attentionné? Ainsi, le gouverneur a annoncé que le
«Le défi posé par une maladie mentale majeure doit être relevé par le biais de
programmes améliorés. "
Et élargir ils ont fait - bien que le montant de l'amélioration pourrait être
débattre avec acharnement. L'année suivante, en 1963, sous l'emprise d'un psychiatre
William Menninger, président John F. Kennedy, a appelé à un
politique de santé mentale qui «repose principalement sur les nouvelles connaissances et
nouvelles drogues ... qui permettent à la plupart des malades mentaux d'être
traités avec succès et rapidement dans leurs propres communautés ».
loi mettant en œuvre les centres communautaires de santé mentale (SCHL)
ont été altruistiquement rejetés par les psychiatres dans une campagne calculée comme
une alternative aux «fosses à serpents» des établissements psychiatriques. L'Amérique a donc mis
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la scène de la nouvelle vague de "soins de santé mentale élargis" que beaucoup
d'autres pays suivraient.
Cela a également ouvert la voie à une augmentation massive du financement gouvernemental.
Selon le professeur émérite de psychiatrie, Thomas Szasz,
«Le remède miracle proposé par Kennedy était simplement le traitement psychiatrique.
La dernière huile de serpent de la profession: Drogues et désinstitutionnalisation ...
sonnait grand. Malheureusement, c'était un mensonge. Les forces qui réellement
propulsé le changement étaient économiques et juridiques, en particulier, le transfert
du financement des services psychiatriques des états au fédéral
gouvernement, et le changement de mode juridique-psychiatrique de longue durée
l’hospitalisation à la drogue à long terme. "
Au cours des 30 prochaines années, les coûts d’exploitation de la SCHL et
les cliniques psychiatriques ambulatoires ont grimpé en flèche de plus de 6 800% - de 140 $
millions en 1969 à 9,75 milliards de dollars en 1994. Et le système national de santé mentale
le budget est passé de 3,2 milliards de dollars en 1969 à 33,1 milliards de dollars en 1994 - une augmentation de 934%
augmenter. En 1999, c'était 80 milliards de dollars. Pour répondre à cette demande créée, le
Des années 50 aux années 70 ont vu des subventions fédérales pour la formation des psychiatres
dépasser 2 milliards de dollars.
Henry Foley et Steven Sharfstein dans Madness and
Gouvernement, publié par l'American Psychiatric Association (APA),
les auteurs déclarent franchement: «Naturellement, le public espérait un retour sur
investissement .... Les revendications extravagantes des passionnés - que de nouveaux traitements
étaient très efficaces, que toutes les futures victimes potentielles de maladie mentale
et leurs familles seraient épargnées par la souffrance, que les grandes économies de
l'argent serait bientôt réalisé - ont été autorisés à passer sans contestation par
le côté professionnel [psychiatrique] du leadership politico-professionnel.
Promettre plus que ce qui pouvait raisonnablement être livré est devenu un mode de vie
pour ce leadership [APA]. "
L’introduction de Medicare a également été bénéfique pour l’industrie.
assurance (pour les personnes âgées) et Medicaid (pour les pauvres) en 1965. Medicare
les remboursements pour hospitalisation mentale dans les hôpitaux généraux étaient
illimité. Et les assemblées législatives des États fortement soumises au lobbying ont commencé à convaincre
l’assurance maladie pour couvrir le coût des soins hospitaliers pour
maladie mentale. En 1985, une majorité d’États avaient adopté des lois obligatoires
lois sur la couverture en santé mentale. Ceci a provoqué une explosion du nombre de
profit »des hôpitaux psychiatriques.
Joe Sharkey, auteur de Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud
dans un système de santé mentale devenu fou souligne: «En 1965, quand
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Medicare et Medicaid ont été adoptés, la facture totale des soins de santé aux États-Unis a été
65 milliards de dollars; en 1993, ce serait 939 milliards de dollars. "
Une partie importante de ces recettes est entrée dans
poches psychiatriques. En 1984, il existait 220 hôpitaux psychiatriques privés;
en 1990, ils étaient 466. À la fin des années 1980, quatre établissements psychiatriques
sociétés hospitalières contrôlaient environ 80% de l'industrie et Sharkey
souligne que «leur traitement était axé de manière décisive sur les clients
Assurance."
La croissance des hôpitaux psychiatriques privés à but lucratif directement
est parallèle à l’augmentation des mandats de couverture en santé mentale. En 1991,
Richard Lamm, l'ancien gouverneur du Colorado appelé psychiatrique
hôpitaux "la nouvelle vache à lait", ajoutant: "Il y a tellement de sangsue
dans ce. Quand on parle d'hôpitaux psychiatriques, on ne parle pas de
soins de santé, nous parlons de jouer le système. "De même,
Le représentant Schroeder, en 1992, a trouvé «un plan systématique de
patients de leurs dollars durement gagnés, les dépouillent de leur dignité et laissent
pire qu’ils ne l’étaient avant de demander de l’aide. »[CCHR,
Psychiatry: Committing Fraud , 1999, p.7-9]
Fraude en santé mentale communautaire
Ce ne sont pas les seules avenues
ouvert à la fraude psychiatrique. En 1990, un congrès
comité a publié un rapport estimant que Community Mental Health
Les centres (SCHL) ont utilisé entre 40 et 100 millions de dollars pour
utilisations impropres, et que le quart de toutes les SCHL ont complètement échoué
s’acquitter de leurs obligations de se soumettre légalement au recouvrement immédiat des
fonds fédéraux. Diverses SCHL ont construit des courts de tennis et nagent
piscines avec leurs subventions fédérales de la construction et, dans un cas, utilisé un
Le personnel fédéral accorde une subvention pour engager un maître nageur et un moniteur de natation.
Dans un autre cas, les fonds fédéraux pour la santé mentale, qui étaient
censés construire des centres et fournir des services aux pauvres, ont été détournés
des terrains de volley-ball, des salles informatiques et des services non liés qui
fait des profits illégaux des hôpitaux.
Le détournement de fonds se poursuit malgré le rapport du congrès. Dans
Septembre 1998, Medicare a interdit à 80 CMHC dans neuf États de servir
personnes âgées et handicapées après que les investigateurs aient découvert que les patients avaient été
fait payer 600 $ à 700 $ par jour pour regarder la télévision et jouer au bingo,
au lieu de recevoir des soins.
Aux États-Unis seulement, entre 20 et 40 milliards de dollars
un an est fraudé dans le domaine de la santé mentale de plusieurs milliards de dollars. Mettre ceci
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en termes humains. C'est un gaspillage choquant. C'est assez d'argent pour embaucher
entre 500 000 et 1,1 million de nouveaux enseignants; 1 million de familles pauvres
pourraient profiter de la chaleur et de la sécurité de posséder leur propre maison, ou chaud
des repas pourraient être fournis à chacun des 33,8 millions de personnes âgées du pays
citoyens âgés de plus de 65 ans pendant neuf mois de cette année.
Bien que le gaspillage financier soit sinistre, le coût en vies humaines et en
la misère est beaucoup plus épouvantable. Comme vous le verrez, la santé mentale
industrie commet non seulement une fraude financière, mais même une fraude destructive
les domaines de diagnostic et de traitement. Et dans ce jeu, les enjeux sont
considérablement plus élevé que les dollars. [CCDH, Psychiatrie: S'engager
Fraude , 1999, p. 9]
Escroqueries d'assurance
Les méfaits de NME ne sont pas l'exception; effectivement,
la fraude à l'assurance semble être le pain du beurre de la santé mentale
industrie . Les escroqueries se produisent chaque fois qu'un psychiatre ou un établissement psychiatrique
facture Medicare, Medicaid ou des compagnies d’assurance privées pour un travail qu’ils
n'a pas fait, pour les traitements inutiles ou faux, ou pour les patients confinés
contre leur volonté. Voici quelques exemples.
Courtage de patients
Considérez cette histoire, publiée par le Los Angeles Times en 1994
[3]
"Michael a vite compris que A Place For US n'était pas un endroit
pour lui. En surpoids et souffrant de stress, le New Yorker avait
traversé le pays pour assister à ce qui était annoncé comme une clinique de perte de poids
dans le sud de la Californie. Le billet d'avion était gratuit et le traitement, il était
dit, était entièrement couvert par son plan de la Croix Bleue. Mais quand Michael
atteint Los Angeles, il a été choqué de se voir réservé dans une
hôpital psychiatrique dans une partie délabrée de [ville] où il était
diagnostiqué comme souffrant de dépression psychotique et de boulimie, conditions
il nie avoir jamais eu. Puis on lui a dit qu'il ne pouvait pas partir. Michael est un
de nombreuses histoires provenant de poursuites fédérales et étatiques à Los Angeles
dans lequel les assureurs accusent A Place For Us d’avoir enrôlé des médecins et des hôpitaux
personnel pour falsifier les diagnostics et les dossiers médicaux afin d'obtenir le paiement
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traitement qui, quelle que soit sa valeur pour les patients, n’était pas couvert par leur
plans de santé. "
L'histoire de Michael n'est pas un incident isolé. Personnes en surpoids
sont fréquemment la cible d'escroqueries par les assurances. Courtiers patients frauduleusement
annoncer à la télévision des numéros 1-800, et les gens appellent en pensant que
ils parlent aux représentants des centres de santé. En réalité, ils sont
parler aux agents de vente des établissements psychiatriques dont le seul motif est de
déterminer si les clients potentiels ont ou non une assurance, puisque la taille
de leur commission dépend de combien de patients ils peuvent entrer dans
l'hôpital et combien de temps ils peuvent les y garder.
Il est difficile de croire que cela se passe en Amérique, mais le
En réalité, en raison de la déception flagrante des agents de vente, les gens sont
souvent pas au courant du fait qu'ils sont sur le point d'entrer en psychiatrie
institutions. Si une partie non méfiante a une couverture, la personne est pilotée
gratuit pour une installation, généralement située en Floride ou en Californie. Une limousine attend
à l'aéroport, et l'endroit semble très accommodant jusqu'à ce que la personne
arrive effectivement à l'établissement et est enfermé contre sa volonté.
Une fois que la personne a compris ce qui se passe, il est trop tard. Les gens qui
être contrarié et tenter de partir peut être menacé ou diagnostiqué
combatif.
Le procureur en litige civil Randy Lakel travaille bénévolement pour
représentent les patients qui ont été volontairement engagés dans psychiatrique
installations par des courtiers patients trompeurs. Il décrit un cas impliquant deux
les hommes de l'est de la Pennsylvanie qui ont été approchés par des gens dans le
foule à une réunion Overeaters Anonyme et pris à part. [4] Le
les courtiers leur ont suggéré qu’ils avaient peut-être besoin d’un peu plus d’aide,
qui pourraient être offerts par des professionnels dans les cliniques des mangeurs. Les hommes
ont été attirés à l’institution sous de faux prétextes, puis enfermés.
Lakel estime que le problème a atteint des proportions énormes: "
. . . Il y a de grands jurys fédéraux qui enquêtent. J'ai aussi parlé à
avocat général de très grandes compagnies d'assurance qui m'ont appelé
demander si leur compagnie d’assurance était impliquée dans l’un de mes
enquêtes. . . L’impression générale que j’ai eu de la mention d’un
enquête du grand jury et l'avocat général d'une grande assurance
compagnie était que ce n’était pas un incident isolé que je traitais ".
Le monde brisé du courtage patient englobe plus que
fraude de la ferme grasse; il affecte les personnes qui pourraient avoir besoin d'aide pour tous les types de
problèmes . Une enquête de neuf mois sur les pratiques de courtage trompeuses
en Floride par le St. Petersburg Times était éclairant - et
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bouleversant. [5] Il a été constaté que les courtiers patients partagent parfois leurs
frais de viseur avec les conseillers scolaires qui aident à fournir de jeunes potentiels
candidats pour les courtiers ». institutions, ou avec des agents de santé publique,
représentants syndicaux, ou policiers et agents de probation qui dirigent
patients potentiels leur chemin. Les honoraires du chercheur peuvent aller jusqu’à 3000 $ par
patient, il a été trouvé. Une autre enquête a révélé que les patients sont
parfois donné de faux diagnostics, à des fins d'assurance. Ce n'est pas
surprenant. Le problème est (à un niveau personnel, et laisser seul la question
de fraude massive!) ces faux diagnostics de maladie mentale peuvent revenir à
hanter les patients tout au long de leur vie. En effet, selon Randy Lakel,
le pire du problème est d'avoir un casier psychiatrique à vie:
"Une fois que les gens se sont engagés, cela figure dans leur dossier d’assurance.
Ces gens. . . sont consternés qu'ils ont maintenant un dossier psychiatrique pour
le reste de leur vie. Il peut interférer avec tout type d'emploi
opportunité . Une des personnes à qui j'ai parlé était un professionnel du
domaine médical. Dans sa candidature, elle craignait qu'ils
lui demander si elle a déjà eu un engagement psychiatrique. Comment obtenez-vous cela
l'enregistrement? Du point de vue juridique, cela constitue clairement un préjudice. "[4)
Un aspect inquiétant des services d’aide aux patients et aux courtiers est
qu'ils sont en grande partie non réglementés. Comme l'a rapporté le St. Petersburg Times [5)
, en Floride et dans d’autres États, le personnel de référence n’a pas besoin de licences
formation spéciale avant de pouvoir s'occuper des malades et des troublés. Alors
les personnes ayant un casier judiciaire sont parmi les courtiers, dont beaucoup vont
faire ce qu'il faut pour obtenir un corps de plus dans un centre de traitement.
Selon Paul McDevitt, un spécialiste de la santé mentale du Massachusetts
conseiller [5]:
"Ces gens n'ont aucune éthique. Ils sont moralement en faillite.
Ils sont comme les pilleurs de tombes dans la vieille Angleterre qui ont fourni des cadavres à
les écoles de médecine. Les pilleurs de tombes d'aujourd'hui prennent les corps de
ceux qui sont si confus d'être morts et de les expédier au traitement
centres où ils ne vont jamais bien. Et les médecins qui sont les piliers de
la société récolte encore les bénéfices et ne demande toujours jamais où le
les corps viennent de.
Traitements fictifs et inexistants
Les établissements psychiatriques facturent systématiquement aux consommateurs
Traitements non thérapeutiques ou services non effectués. Installations pour adolescents
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sont les auteurs habituels de cet abus. Un hôpital du Texas, par exemple,
compagnies d’assurance facturées 40 $ par jour pour la thérapie de relaxation. Ce
traitement, qui consistait simplement à allumer Muzac pendant que les adolescents
se déshabiller, était en réalité beaucoup plus exorbitant quand vous
considérer que la compagnie d’assurance de chaque patient a été facturée à ce prix
une personne allumant le Muzac une fois.
Bruce Wiseman est président de la commission des citoyens le
Human Rights, une organisation qui défend les consommateurs de santé mentale
protection [6). Il peut fournir une pléthore d’exemples de la façon dont
Les psychiatres déchirent le système. Wiseman parle d'un psychiatre du Texas
qui était connu pour sa poignée de main de cent dollars. Tout ce qu'il ferait était
marcher près des lits de différents patients, leur serrer la main, puis
la compagnie d'assurance de chaque personne cent dollars. Un autre
L'enquête a révélé que les accusations de conseils nutritionnels devaient
couvrir la personne qui va déjeuner. Les compagnies d’assurances doivent également payer
pour individuel
traitement thérapeutique quand un groupe de personnes est placé dans une pièce ensemble et invité à
hurler l'un à l'autre pendant quelques heures. "Ce serait un peu
drôle s'ils n'étaient pas si dévastateurs en termes de ce qu'ils font à l'assurance
les primes et nos taxes. " [7]
Wiseman déclare que les psychiatres collectent entre 600 000 et 900 000 dollars par an.
année sur les traitements faux ou inexistants. "Nous avons beaucoup de cas où
ils facturent simplement la compagnie d'assurance ou le gouvernement pour le traitement
n'a jamais été donné. Ils ne voient même pas le patient et ils envoient les factures
dans. "[7)
Traitements abusifs
Le scénario s’aggrave lorsque l’on considère que l’économie
l'exploitation est souvent associée à la maltraitance physique. Wiseman raconte comment
établissement pour adolescents à Reno a tourmenté un garçon de 15 ans, puis facturé
la compagnie d'assurance de ses parents 400 000 $:
"Ils drogueraient ce gamin avec Haldol, un soi-disant anti-
drogue psychotique, jusqu'à ce qu'il soit dans un état de stupeur, puis attachez-le en quatre points
contraintes. Ils lui attachaient les mains et les pieds au lit, puis chatouillaient
lui jusqu'à ce qu'il soit hystérique. Pour ce "traitement" des parents de cet enfant
compagnie d’assurance a été facturée 400 000 $ et elle a payé
il! Si quelqu'un fait à un enfant ce que fait le psychiatre, cela s'appelle un enfant.
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abuser de. Mais ici, la compagnie d'assurance paie près d'un demi-million de dollars
pour ça. C'est le genre de fraude en matière de traitement et d'assurance qui existe. "[8)
Ce n’est pas un incident isolé, explique Wiseman, mais typique
de ce qui se passe:
"Dans l’établissement de Reno, les enfants sont soumis à de fréquentes
bas. Si un enfant sourit ou saute les gardes, il est physiquement
abusé. Un patient dans un hôpital du Texas a eu les jambes attachées à une chaise
pendant quatre heures parce qu'elle bougeait les jambes. Ils l'appelaient intentionnelle
exercice, ce qu'elle n'était pas censée faire. Les enfants sont faits pour se tenir debout et
regardez un mur 16 heures par jour pendant des mois. Il y a aussi sexuel
abus se passe régulièrement dans ces hôpitaux. "[8]
Nickie Saizon, qui a malheureusement placé son fils dans un établissement psychiatrique
établissement, dit que les punitions de routine ont été appelés traitement. Sa
compagnie d'assurance a été facturé des montants exorbitants pour ces procédures:
"S'ils les punissaient avec un temps mort, ils devaient s'asseoir
dans une chaise dans le couloir toute la journée sans bouger. Ils ont facturé 37,50 $ pour
cette. Quand les enfants se fâchent et se fâchent, ils ont une infirmière
et les conseillers entourent les enfants et leur disent: 'Soyons fous, sortez-le, ayez
votre forme. 'Ils continueraient jusqu'à ce qu'ils se fâchent et commencent vraiment
avoir un gros ajustement. Ensuite, ils les ont mis sur le sol, les ont maintenus là,
et couper leur chemise. Pour cela, ils ont facturé 45 $. Puis ils les mettent dans un
chambre qu'ils appellent un groupe de réflexion. La pièce est nue et vide. Il y a
pas de tapis, pas de chaises, rien. Ils doivent y aller et réfléchir à comment
ils auraient dû gérer le problème. . . Ils ont facturé 87,50 $ pour cette
pièce. Chaque fois que vous vous retourniez, il y avait des coûts cachés. "[9)
Wiseman pense que les gens seraient outrés d'apprendre ce que
se passe vraiment dans ces institutions: "Le grand public n’en a pas conscience,
mais on aurait du mal à entrer dans un hôpital psychiatrique et
ne pleurez pas sur le «traitement» qui se produit dans ces endroits. "[8]
Vos impôts paient pour cela
En dernière analyse, les pratiques d’assurance frauduleuses font mal
contribuables puisque le maintien de taux d’assurance modérés devient
virtuellement impossible. Considérez ces chiffres. Le public américain est
escroqué de 42 milliards de dollars par an. C'est 3 milliards de dollars par mois, 800 millions de dollars
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une semaine, 16 millions de dollars par jour, 4 millions de dollars par heure, 80 000 dollars par minute, et
1300 $ la seconde.
Le gouvernement fédéral et le secteur des assurances sont enfin
se réveiller au problème et commencer à riposter. En 1993, sept des
les plus grandes compagnies d’assurance ont poursuivi l’un des plus grands psychiatres
chaînes d’hôpitaux, National Medical Enterprises, pour 750 millions de dollars. Dans
En outre, chaque procureur général dispose désormais d'un procureur général adjoint.
superviser les poursuites pour fraude en matière de santé. En conséquence, des progrès ont été accomplis
a été fait . Wiseman déclare:
"Les psychiatres représentent 8% des médecins, mais 1 8% des
ces praticiens de la santé ont été expulsés de l'assurance-maladie
système de fraude. L’an dernier, 4,1 milliards de dollars ont été versés au gouvernement en
amendes et pénalités pour fraude en matière de soins de santé et 90% de celle-ci a été payée
par des psychiatres ou des institutions psychiatriques. "[7]
Bien que ce soit un début, Wiseman est convaincu que pour vraiment
résoudre le problème, le public doit être mieux informé sur ce que «5
passe, et insiste pour mettre fin à la corruption.
Recherche psychiatrique
Chaque année, des centaines de millions de dollars d’impôts sont gaspillés
recherches inutiles menées par les National Institutes of Mental Health
(NIMH). Par exemple, il s’agit d’exemples des types d’études qu’ils étudient.
sous prétexte d’en apprendre davantage sur le comportement sexuel: un
année d'étude sur la masturbation des chevaux, une étude de huit ans sur la caille castrée,
une étude de quatre ans sur les cavités nasales des hamsters pendant les rapports sexuels, un
étude de deux ans sur les préférences sexuelles et le comportement des taupes des Prairies, un
1 étude de 1 an dans laquelle les organes génitaux de pigeon ont été stimulés
mesurer la manière dont les hormones affectent le comportement sexuel, une étude de la mère
léchage de la région génitale des bébés furets mâles et femelles, 9 ans
étude sur le comportement sexuel des lézards, une étude de 23 ans sur les odeurs sexuelles
et sociaux qui affectent les singes asiatiques mâles, et une étude de 23 ans sur
le comportement sexuel des rats mâles comme base biologique du comportement humain.
Pour étudier les effets des médicaments, une étude de 13 ans a été entreprise chez
quels rats ont reçu des hallucinogènes, tels que le LSD, pour voir comment ils réagissent
quand surpris et une étude de 31 ans a examiné comment les singes rhésus
répondre à la torture tout en prenant des drogues psychotropes.
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Le NIMH a également mené une étude de 32 ans sur le produit chimique
réactions dans les muscles de la mâchoire des pigeons pour mieux comprendre manger
troubles chez l'homme.
"C’est ce que le NIMH fait avec nos impôts", dit
Bruce Wiseman. Nous pensons que c'est une parodie, et nous pensons que cette organisation
devrait être éliminé. " [7]
Wiseman décrit ensuite une étude du NIMH sur les relations sexuelles
délinquants qui ont mis une communauté de Floride en danger: "Il y a quelques années,
[NIMH) a dépensé plus d’un million de dollars pour un programme en Floride où
ils ont pris 100 agresseurs d'enfants connus, ont montré ces gars pornographiques
matériel, puis les a lâchés sur la communauté pour voir comment ils
se comporterait. Puis, quand ces agresseurs d'enfants sont revenus et ont signalé
leurs comportements à ces soi-disant chercheurs, ils étaient à l'abri de
transmettre cette information aux autorités. " [7)
Si le NIMH étudie comment soulager la maladie mentale, il
serait différent. Malheureusement, ces études ne fournissent rien d’utile pour
le soulagement de la souffrance mentale. Selon Wiseman:
"Des milliards et des milliards et des milliards de dollars sont versés dans le
industrie psychiatrique. S'ils avaient pu guérir quoi que ce soit, ils auraient
fait au cours des dernières décennies. . . . [Psychiatres) ne savent pas réellement
ce qui dérange les gens. Leur réponse à pratiquement tout est de le droguer.
Ils ont convaincu les gouvernements qu’ils avaient besoin de milliards de dollars
crédits. Nous nous demandons pourquoi nous ne pouvons pas équilibrer notre budget quand
études [comme celle ci-dessus] coûtent aux contribuables des millions et des millions de
dollars. Je ne pense pas que beaucoup d'Américains se rendent compte que leur impôt
des dollars sont dépensés pour étudier les cavités nasales des hamsters au cours de
rapports. D'une part, c'est ridicule. Par contre, c’est
destructeur et inutile. " [7]
Traitement inhumain
Engagement involontaire
Chaque année, environ un million et demi de personnes sont
emmenés dans des établissements psychiatriques contre leur volonté. C'est en moyenne à
une personne toutes les 75 secondes. Souvent, il n'y a pas de justification raisonnable
pour commettre une personne. Selon Bruce Wiseman, des psychiatres
généralement des diagnostics improvisés, n’ayant aucune base réelle dans le domaine médical.
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En fait, des personnes sont jetées dans des établissements psychiatriques. C'est
non seulement possible, mais facile à faire, comme le prévoient les lois des États.
Les psychiatres ont le pouvoir de police pour enfermer les gens contre leur
volonté. Parfois, déclare Wiseman, des gens sont mis à l'abri pour certains des
raisons les plus ridicules imaginables:
"Un homme qui a été ramassé a été déclaré schizophrène par
un psychiatre et emmené à l'hôpital, déshabillé et choqué. Par la suite,
ils ont découvert que l'homme parlait simplement hongrois. . . . Cette
genre de chose se passe, sur une base très régulière.
"La législation est venue du Texas au cours de la dernière année environ
le «kidnapping» d'un gars nommé Kyle Williams dont la femme séparée
apparemment parlé à un psychiatre, et n'a probablement pas eu de bonnes choses à
dire de lui. En conséquence, le psychiatre a ordonné que le type soit ramassé - un
gars tout à fait normal - et il a été jeté à l'hôpital. "[8)
Les lois varient, mais les personnes sont généralement enfermées pendant au moins
trois jours. Pendant ce temps, ils n’ont aucun droit constitutionnel, et aucun
accès à un avocat ou à une procédure régulière. Le traitement consiste généralement en
médicaments, et parfois de la thérapie électro convulsive. Après trois jours, ils
sont ensuite traduits devant un juge pour déterminer s’ils sont sains d’esprit ou non.
À ce stade, les chances de libération sont minces car les gens ne sont généralement pas
en très bonne forme après tout ce qui leur a été fait. Les chances pour
les libérations sont beaucoup plus minces si l’assurance de la personne paie le traitement.
Wiseman rapporte:
"Nous recevons des centaines et des centaines de reportages comme celui-ci: Un jeune
mère a emmené son enfant dans un hôpital psychiatrique pour une évaluation et la
l'hôpital a insisté pour que l'enfant reste. La mère a décidé de rester avec le
enfant juste pour la réconforter. Alors la mère a voulu partir; l'hôpital
ne la laisserais pas. Quand elle a demandé à partir, ils l'ont placée dans un
camisole de force et la droguée.
"Un type a été transféré dans un hôpital psychiatrique
douleur. Un médecin l’a recommandé, pensant que c’était peut-être
psychosomatique. Il a été jeté dans des cours sur l'abus sexuel et chimique
dépendance, qui n’a rien à voir avec son problème. Il
demandé de rentrer à la maison et ils ont refusé de le laisser.
Quand il s'est mis en colère, ils l'ont diagnostiqué comme suicidaire et involontaire
l'a engagé. Bien sûr, ils facturent énormément aux compagnies d’assurance
montants de dollars. "[8]
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En ce qui concerne les factures des compagnies d’assurance, il est vrai que
les entreprises sont libérées d’énormes sommes d’argent à payer pour
personnes dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques qui ne devraient pas être là, nous ne devrions pas nous sentir
tout à fait désolé pour le secteur des assurances. Selon le Dr Duard Bok, un
ancien employé des hôpitaux psychiatriques d’Amérique ", l’assurance
les entreprises paient d'un côté, mais le récupèrent de l'autre. Elles sont
double déduction, car ils peuvent ignorer leurs factures des patients
parce qu'ils le récupèrent en tant qu'actionnaires. " [dix]
La thérapie par électrochocs
Histoire de la thérapie électro convulsive
Le "traitement" de choc a été utilisé pour la première fois en 1938 par le psychiatre Ugo
Cerletti. Il a développé la procédure après un voyage dans un abattoir local
où il a vu des porcs être électrocutés par des pinces métalliques fixées à
leurs têtes. Les porcs, qui sont rarement morts sur le coup de l’électrocution,
pourrait ensuite être tué et massacré tranquillement. La mesure a été prise pour
rendre les porcs "indolores" et "humains".
Cerletti a décidé d'expérimenter avec des animaux pour voir s'il pouvait
appliquer ce qu'il avait vu à l'abattoir à l'homme. Il a choqué
chiens, courant électrique dans différentes directions à travers leur
têtes et corps entier. Les chocs ont été augmentés progressivement pour découvrir
ce qu'il faudrait pour tuer un animal. La plupart des animaux de Cerletti iraient
en convulsions ou devenir temporairement inconscient. Selon
Cerletti:
«Les animaux qui ont reçu le traitement le plus sévère sont restés
rigides ... puis après une crise convulsive violente, ils seraient couchés sur le côté
pendant un moment, parfois pendant plusieurs minutes, et finalement ils seraient
essayer de se lever. Après de nombreuses tentatives ... ils réussiraient à se lever
and making a few steps until they were able to run away. Celles-ci
observations gave me convincing evidence of the harmlessness of a few
tenths of a second of application through the head of a 125-volt electric
current...At this point I felt we could venture to experiment on man...”
[Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment , 1978, p.8-9]
Evidently, to Cerletti, anything less than fatal was “harmless.”
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The first person to ever undergo shock “treatment” was a 39-
year-old engineer who had been sent to Cerletti for “observation” after
being arrested at a train station for wandering around departing trains
without a ticket, according to the police commissioner of Rome. Cerletti
described the man as “lucid, well oriented.” Nevertheless, he became
Cerletti's first shock victim. The first jolt hit with force and surprise. À
the objections of Cerletti's staff, he announced that he would shock the
man again at a higher voltage to which the engineer pleaded, according to
Cerletti's own account, “Not another one! It's deadly!” [Leonard Roy
Frank, The History of Shock Treatment , 1978, p.9]
Early in its use psychiatrists presented various theories as to
how ECT “worked.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders
reported that it might be the “due to the discomfort, pain and terror...”
connected with convulsive treatments. According to the Journal, “Since
this terror is often very real...we were inclined to believe that the patient
might have been shocked back into reality by the fury of the assault on
him.” [Leonard Roy Frank, The Histoy of Shock Treatment , 1978, p.22]
Creating terror in mental patients was looked upon as
“therapeutic” in psychiatry. In 1812, Benjamin Rush stated that, “Terror
acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and
should be employed in the cure of madness...FEAR, accompanied with
PAIN, and a sense of SHAME, has sometimes cured this disease.” To
frighten, injure and degrade were, in essence, a goal of early psychiatric
“treatment.” [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment , 1978,
p.11]
Cerletti proclaimed the procedure “electroshock”, but as the
Citizens Commission of Human Rights points out, the people who profit
from it like to call it electro convulsive therapy (ECT), because this
sounds a little better. Regardless of the label you give it, what this
treatment amounts to is the destruction of brain cells by electricity. Dans
other words, it's physician-induced brain damage.
This extreme treatment is given for severe depression, and it
does work--in the short term. That's because a facet of the brain damage
caused is memory loss, and so patients forget what they were depressed
about.
In the 1940s, The Psychiatric Quarterly reported that “electric
shock therapy abolishes almost entirely the ability to recall recently
learned material....” [The Psychiatric Quarterly, vol. 19, no.2, A Review
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of the Research Work of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and
Hospital for the Year 1944, April, 1945, p. 223]
The American Journal of Psychiatry reported that the
procedure had been labeled “annihilation” therapy because “this [ECT]
results in severe amnesic reactions” and produced results comparable to
prefrontal lobotomy. [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock
Treatment , 1978, p.20]
Unfortunately, the memory loss is often permanent, a fact
generally denied by modern psychiatry. Also, permanent learning
disability can be another effect of ECT, with disastrous career, not to
mention emotional, ramifications. The bottom line: When the patient's
underlying problems return, she or he is even less able to deal with them
than before the treatment, because of the brain injury that has been
sustained.
The American Journal of Psychiatry reported this in 1947.
Patients who had been shocked were unable to do tasks they had done
every day for 20 years. Here is the Journal's own description of the
damaging effects following shock treatment:
“There is a definite restriction in their intuition and imagination
and inventiveness. This is a post-lobotomy picture but in a less severe and
dramatic form...The findings tend to indicate that shock therapy increases
the frequency of readmission and thus raises the question of whether the
time saved in the hospital at the first admission is not lost by the early
readmission following shock treatment. This is particularly significant
since it seems likely that shock therapy does produce deterioration and
personality changes which may explain this increased readmission
frequency.” [Leonard Roy Frank, The History of Shock Treatment , 1978,
p.31]
It should be noted that women are twice as likely as men to
receive ECT.
In ECT, 180 to 460 volts of electricity are fired through the
brain, for a tenth of a second to six seconds, either from temple to temple
(bilateral ECT) or from the front to the back of one side of the head
(unilateral ECT) . The result is a severe convulsion, or seizure, of long
duration--ie. , a grand mal convulsion, as in an epileptic fit. L'habituel
course of treatment involves 10 to 12 shocks over a period of weeks.
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According to an expose by USA TODAY , the psychiatric
industry has grossly misled the public about the number of deaths caused
by shock treatment. While publicly admitting to one death per 10,000
people, the mortality rate has been independently verified as being more
on the order of 1 in 200, a rate 50 times higher.
Still, psychiatrists claim that ECT is “safe and effective” -while
having no idea of how it works. This hasn't stopped them from using it to
make $3 billion per year in America alone. In the '70s in the UK,
psychiatrists gave patients up to 20 shocks a day, arguing that it could
“wipe the mind clean and let it re-grow.'
ELECTROSHOCK: CRUELTY IN THE NAME OF THERAPY
If Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway were alive
today, he would probably conduct a heated argument with psychiatrists
who hold him up as an example of “great writers with mental illness.”
Tricked into a psychiatric institution, he was stripped of his clothes and
his dignity, and given more than 20 electroshocks. Several weeks later, he
confided to a friend, “What these shock doctors don't know is about
writers and such.... They should make all psychiatrists take a course in
creative writing so they'd know about writers.... Well, what is the sense
of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and
putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the
patient....”
In July 1961, days after being released from the Mayo
psychiatric clinic, Hemingway committed suicide. [CCHR , Psychiatry:
Manipulating Creativity , 1997, p32]
Shocks, Drugs, and Deaths
Between 1963 and 1979, Chelmsford was a tranquil-looking
psychiatric hospital in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Australia. But behind
its nondescript exterior, lives were quietly being ripped apart with a cruel
psychiatric treatment called “deep sleep” treatment. People were
slammed into a coma with an often lethal cocktail of barbiturates and
sedatives, shackled naked to their beds, and kept unconscious for two to
three weeks, during which time they were given painful electroshock
treatments, sometimes twice daily.
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Frequently the patients were shocked without their consent.
Some expressly refused ECT, but were treated anyway. Some were told
they were going to have a long sleep to “switch off” their brain. Autres
were told less; they just went to sleep one night and woke up weeks later
- brain damaged, sick with pneumonia, nursing blood clots, and with an
irreversibly altered personality. Some never woke.
The survivors suffered in silence until 1990, when a full
government investigation issued the findings of its 288-day inquiry into
deep sleep treatment, and the truth emerged. Forty-eight people had died
as a direct result of deep sleep treatment; in all, 183 died either in hospital
or within one year of being discharged, and the files of another 18
fatalities were missing. More than 1,100 people - some as young as 12 -
had been subjected to “deep sleep” for everything from depression and
drug addiction to anorexia, and even some for “ticklish coughs.” Of these,
977 were diagnosed as brain damaged. Those fortunate to survive
continued to suffer frightening mental effects resulting directly from the
traitement.
In 1985, the perpetrator of these atrocities, Dr. Harry Bailey,
was found dead in his car on a lonely dirt road. Ironically, he'd taken an
overdose of Tuinal - one of the barbiturates with which he had destroyed
the lives of others.
The continued use of this medieval-seeming therapy would
perhaps be understandable if it had been shown to be effective. But as
explained in a recent article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior [1 1) ,
"Follow-up studies about the effects of ECT in which recipients
themselves evaluate the procedure are both rare and embarrassing to the
ECT industry. The outcomes of these studies directly contradict
propaganda regarding permanent memory loss put forth by the four
manufacturers of ECT devices in the United States (Somatics, MECTA,
Elcot, and Medcraft) , upon whom physicians and the public rely for
information, much as the public relies upon pharmaceutical companies
for information on drugs."
Former ECT recipient Diana Loper, of the World Association
of Electric Shock Survivors, [12) stresses that the only way ECT stops
depression is that "it wipes your memory out so you don't know what you
were depressed about. " Then Loper says, after two weeks of a "brain-
damage high, " people want to kill themselves when they have never
before been suicidal. Loper is passionate in her work to totally ban the
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procedure, which she says only causes brain damage and sometimes
death:
"ECT is non-FDA approved. The machines were grand
fathered to a certain extent but they were put in category 3 , the most
hazardous category that there is. . . They're coming in with new machines
now saying that they're new and improved, but there's nothing new and
improved about this procedure. Why do I want to see this procedure
banned? Why does our organization want to see it totally out of the way?
Because it's damaging. Psychiatrists. . . are not only damaging people's
brains, they are killing people. . . The APA task force states that 1 in
10,000 people die of ECT.
" Our organization will stop this procedure . This is a promise I
made . I kept a diary when I was being shocked. And I read my diary and
I read it every day. And the last thing I said to my doctor is, 'Some day
you'll never do this to anyone again. . . . ' We passed a law in Texas, last
session. We have the strongest informed consent bill in the nation. " [13]
What makes Electroshock so damaging? Bruce Wiseman
emphasizes that the procedure always creates grand mal seizures:
"Electroshock treatments send several hundred volts of electricity through
the brain. The brain then becomes starved for oxygen and pulls more
blood into the brain. This causes blood vessels to break, damage to the
brain, and eventual brain shrinkage. As a result of the lack of oxygen and
the destruction of the nerves in the brain, the person has a seizure.
"This treatment is nothing but barbaric. If anyone else did it,
they would be locked up as a terrorist. Yet 100,000 people a year in
America get electro shocked, generating $3 billion to the psychiatric
industry . That faction of the health care industry doesn't help. They're an
enemy of the people and they're destructive. " [7]
Internationally known psychiatrist and author Dr. Peter
Breggin adds that the treatment is so off base that doctors fabricate
reasons to support it: "Psychiatrists end up distorting a great deal and
forcing people into a model that's incorrect," Breggin explains. "Some of
my colleagues claim that some undefined biochemical imbalance causes a
problem like anxiety or depression, when we've never found a
biochemical imbalance. Then, having suggested that maybe there is such
a thing as a disturbance in the brain that's hurting a person, my colleagues
go and do terrible things to the brain, such as shock treatments for the
depressed person.
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Breggin believes that this makes as much sense as deliberately
putting patients in an automobile accident. "It traumatizes the brain
horribly. Each person who gets shock treatment goes into a state called
delirium or an acute organic brain syndrome. As a result, they're
confused, they don't know which end is up, they may forget where they
are and how to get around the hospital ward. They have an electrically
induced closed head injury, with all the things you find in other closed
head injuries. People are often permanently changed. They don't recover
their memories and they don't recover other mental functions. " [14]
Diana Loper discusses a major motivation behind the
popularity of ECT, profit: "ECT is the psychiatrist's most lucrative
treatment, averaging between $800 and $1000 per individual treatment. UNE
single series averages between 12 and 15 treatments, costing between
$10,000 and $15,000. This isn't even including hospitalization. ECT is
administered in private, for-profit psychiatric hospitals. In all states,
insurance is what pays for this 'treatment. ' " [15]
Deep Sleep Therapy
Deep sleep therapy, a procedure that has been used in the
United States and throughout the world, consists of placing people in a
comatose state via barbiturates, hypnotics, and sedatives for two to three
weeks, and shocking their brains on a daily or twice-daily basis. Jan
Eastgate, the international president of the Citizens Commission on
Human Rights, reports on its damaging effects:
"Patients suffered brain damage, pleurisy, double pneumonia,
blood clots, and at least 48 people died. It was used in mind control
experiments during the 1960s up in Canada as well. And yet it was passed
off as a therapy. " [16]
Deep sleep therapy has been combined with
psychosurgery for the treatment of asthma, Eastgate reports:
"Women who had asthma attacks were given deep sleep
thérapie. One woman who had an asthma attack was also given
psychosurgery. Sixteen years later she was washing her scalp and cut her
doigt. She was rushed to the hospital and they said, did you know that
you had metal plates sticking out of your head? She didn't realize that
when they did the psychosurgery they had actually left metal plates with a
serrated edge inside her head. They had to be removed. " [16]
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Eastgate says that the treatment has been banned in certain countries,
such as Australia, but that international cooperation between psychiatrists
allows patients to be transported from nations where the procedure is
prohibited to places where it is used. For example, Eastgate says that
some Australian patients were sent to a Santa Monica psychiatrist. "So
you have, internationally, some pretty horrific abuses. " [16] The Citizens
Commission of Human Rights is currently carrying out an international
investigation into the matter.
Abus sexuel
“Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the
sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in
particular of sexual relations with female and male persons, be they free
or slaves.”
These words are part of the Hippocratic Oath, sworn to by all
médecins. You'd never know it, though, considering the results of a
1987 survey of over 1400 psychiatrists, [17]described in the Journal of
the American Medical Association. The survey found that 65 percent of
the psychiatrists reported treating patients who had been sexually
involved with previous therapists, and 87 percent of the psychiatrists
surveyed believed that the previous involvement had been harmful to the
patients . An interesting finding was that only 8 percent of the
psychiatrists polled reported their colleagues' behavior to a professional
organization or legal authority . This finding does not speak well for the
concept of professionals policing their own ranks. One factor here might
be that they all have a vested interest in keeping malpractice insurance
premiums down.
Sydney Smith, in a report on "The Seduction of the Female
Patient, " [18], reports that nearly half of the patients that are sexually
abused by psychiatrists have previously been the victims of sexual abuse
of one type or another. Confusion arising from these earlier experiences
can make patients easier to victimize--and less willing to come forward
with complaints when they are victimized. Plus if they do come forward,
they may seem less credible in their complaints; perhaps it was all a result
of garbled memories.
Sometimes patient confusion is induced by psychiatrist-
administered drugs. Consider the case of Barbara Noel, who, in the book
You Must Be Dreaming, [19) details her years of sexual abuse by a
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renowned psychiatrist. Indeed, Dr. Jules Masserman was known
worldwide as a leader in the psychiatric field.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights summarized Noel's story
[20]:
"A past president of the American Psychiatric Association
(APA) and honorary president for life of the World Association for Social
Psychiatry, Masserman was a powerful man who abused that power
souvent.
"Barbara Noel, who worshipped him and considered herself
lucky to have him as her psychiatrist, realized how deep the deception ran
when she awoke during a frequent drug-induced sleep administered by
Masserman to find him panting loudly as he sexually assaulted her.
"Although this was just a step above necrophilia, Masserman
convinced Noel that she could get in touch with her 'real feelings' by
taking sodium amytal (a barbiturate) , which ironically had been used in
mind control experiments and was found to block memory rather than, as
Masserman claimed, enlace it.
"Noel became enraged when she finally realized how she had
been abused for years by a supposedly 'respected' professional. cependant,
with Masserman claiming Noel was 'sick' and lying, it took seven long
years, court victories by her and two other women who went public after
hearing of Noel's case, and even more women breaking their silence
before the APA upheld the Illinois Psychiatric Society's decision to
suspend Masserman for only five years. And even that suspension was for
inappropriate use of drugs, not rape.
"Scandalously, Masserman remained as a member of the APA's
Board of Trustees.
Comments the CCHR "It is hard to imagine a teacher who molests a
young student would ever be allowed to teach again, but apparently a
different set of standards exist for psychiatrists." [20]
In psychiatric facilities, patients are commonly sexually
exploited as they are made to barter sex for freedom. Joanne Toglia,
whose story is further told in a later section, says, of her abuse by a
mental health counselor in a private hospital:
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"Finally, the bottom line came down to, if I slept with him, I'd
Sortez. If I didn't, I'd go to the state mental hospital. And at the time, I
had four children--2, 3, 4 and 6. I was desperate to see them, so after
three weeks of being locked up, I finally slept with him. "[2]
Reports of sexual abuse are less frequent in outpatient settings,
where psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors generally act in
supportive and professional ways. But in too many instances they do
betray their patients' trust, as the Dr. Masserman saga illustrates. Attorney
Steve Silver, who represents clients that were sexually abused by their
therapists, gives one account of how unethical behavior on the part of a
therapist can devastate patients' lives:
“I prosecuted a case against a female alcohol counselor who
was roughly ten years older than her male patient, a married man with a
couple of kids. The alcohol counselor ended up doing 'psychotherapy' on
this gentleman, his wife, and on their two children. Ultimately, she
seduced the man while telling his wife that because of her background of
psychological problems she should withhold sexual relations from her
mari.
"My client, who was the husband and father in this situation,
left his family and married the alcohol counselor. This is a perfect
example of even a low-level therapist, such as an alcohol counselor,
being able to manipulate an entire family to ultimately serve her own
romantic and sexual needs. Of course, it was incredibly destructive to all
four members of the family, particularly the children."[22]
The problem is compounded by the fact that grievances against
psychiatrists have little effect, leaving them free to prey on numerous
other patients. Even if they are punished in one state, psychiatrists can
easily set up shop in another. Silver says psychiatric boards are
understaffed and in need of increased government regulation and money.
"If these types of abuses are to be stopped, there needs to be a public
investigation and sufficient resources to prosecute these bad shrinks and
stop them from practicing . " [22) Psychology and social work boards are
better about investigating sexual abuse, according to Silver, and their
investigations can lead to the offending therapist losing his or her license
to practice.
Exploitation of Minorities
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Psychiatry is built on a foundation of prejudice against
minorities, particularly African Americans. In the 1700s, for instance,
none less than the father of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush,
asserted that African Americans were black because they had a disease
,Rush's theory of Negritude, and that we should not tyrannize over them,
but rather find a cure for their disease. In 1970, the American Journal of
Psychiatry reviewed Rush's theory:
“In a brief paper written in 1799, Rush was concerned with
uncovering the cause or causes of the Negro's blackness. His conclusion
was that the black complexion of the Negro stemmed from a leprous-type
maladie. He maintained that by seeking a cure for this condition and
subsequently removing the Negro's blackness, a great service could be
rendered to mankind...He therefore maintained that the removal of the
Negro's blackness would render him a certain amount of happiness since
it was obvious that some Negroes had difficulty accepting their
blackness: “Forever how well they appear to be satisfied with their color,
there were many proofs of their preferring that of the white people.” The
Journal was not critical of Rush, but stated that he “understood well the
impact of physical differences on mental attitudes that is a vital factor in
racial prejudice...” [ The American Journal of Psychiatry , vol. 127, no.6,
1970, Benjamin Rush and the Negro , Betty L. Plummer]
Rush would become known as the “Father of American
Psychiatry” with his face immortalized on the seal of the American
Psychiatric Association, perhaps a permanent reminder of how psychiatry
sees illness where none exists.
Renowned author and professor emeritus of psychiatry, Dr.
Thomas Szasz, wrote in his book, The Manufacture of Madness , "With
this theory, Rush made the black a medically safe domestic, while at the
same time called for his sexual segregation as a carrier of a dread
hereditary disease. Here, then, was an early model of the perfect medical
concept of illness--one that helps the physician and the society he serves,
while justifying social maltreatment as medical prophylaxis [protection
from disease]." [CCHR, Psychiatry: Creating Racism, 1995, p.9]
When Africans were torn from their families and homes and
sold into slavery in the United States, science stood ready to define any
disobedience or insubordination by them as a "mental illness."
As early as 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana
physician, published an essay entitled "Report on the diseases and
physical peculiarities of the Negro race" in the "New Orleans and
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Surgical Journal." Cartwright claimed to have discovered two mental
diseases peculiar to blacks, which he believed justified their enslavement.
These were called "Drapetomania" and "Dysaesthesia Aethiopis."
The first term came from 'drapetes', to run away, and 'mania',
meaning mad or crazy. Cartwright claimed that this "disease" caused
blacks to have an uncontrollable urge to run away from their "masters."
The "treatment" for this "illness" was "whipping the devil out of them."
Dysaesthesia Aethiopis supposedly affected both mind and
corps. The diagnosable signs included disobedience, answering
disrespectfully and refusing to work. The "cure" was to put the person to
some kind of hard labor which apparently sent "vitalized blood to the
brain to give liberty to the mind."
Much "scientific" and statistical rhetoric was used to justify
slavery. One 1840 census "proved" that blacks living under "unnatural
conditions of freedom" in the North were more prone to insanity. Dr.
Edward Jarvis, a specialist in mental disorders, used this to conclude that
slavery shielded blacks from "some of the liabilities and dangers of active
self-direction." The census was later found to be a racist facade in that
many of the Northern towns credited with mentally deranged blacks had
no black inhabitants at all! [CCHR, Psychiatry: Creating Racism, 1995,
p.8]
In 1887 , G. Stanley Hall, founder of the American Journal of
Psychology and first president of the American Psychological
Association, put forth the idea that Africans, Indians, and Chinese were
members of "adolescent races , in a stage of , incomplete growth.
[23]Thus, these ~ lack of equality was justified, because they were not
fully adult. From these historical roots of racism, according to the
CCHR's Jan Eastgate, all minority groups have become marked for
psychiatric abuse:
"You have had a targeting of the African American
community, the American Indians, Hispanic groups, as having a lower IQ
than so-called whites. Based on this ' scientific' justification, psychiatrists
have sterilized African Americans . By 1929, up to 6000 Californians
were sterilized, and they were largely African Americans . If you look at
the statistics now, psychiatrists involuntarily commit African Americans
three to five times as often as they do whites . The diagnosis of African
American men as having schizophrenia, by public and private
institutions, is 15 times as high as whites. African American adolescents
between the ages of 13 and 17 are far more likely to be coerced into
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going to community mental health centers where they are placed on
mind-altering drugs, major tranquilizers. And they are given higher
dosages even than white people. So there's a concerted effort by
psychiatry to target minority groups in this country by diagnosing them
with spurious labels and then giving them mind-altering drugs and
electric shock."[16]
Eastgate's statements may seem shocking but are mild
compared to the figures presented in psychiatric literature. Par exemple,
the 1986 Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology admits:
“state hospital admission rates for the black poor are 75 times
that for whites”... “These and similar findings, widely known and
reported, tend to be neglected and ignored...”
The text also reported that a cross-national study revealed that
psychiatrists at the New York State Psychiatric Institute had “a bias
toward diagnosing schizophrenia in black patients” when compared to
psychiatrists in London. [ Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology ,
A Sociopolitical Perspective of DSM-IIIR , Rothblum, Solomon, and
Albee, p. 168 and 174]
In 1994 the American Psychiatric Press' Textbook of
Psychiatry also acknowledged that studies suggesting a higher rate of
schizophrenia in African Americans may have been skewed “due to a
systematic bias to over diagnose schizophrenia in blacks.”
In addition to what has been already outlined here about IQ, US
eugenics advocate Dr. Paul Popenoe published the findings of his study,
entitled "Intelligence and Race--a Review of the Results of the Army
Intelligence Tests--The Negro in 1918." With astounding arrogance, he
fabricated and propagated the idea that the IQ of blacks was determined
by the amount of "white blood" they had. The lighter skinned the black
was, the higher his IQ, and the blacker he was, the lower the IQ.
Popenoe concluded, "...the Negroes' low mental estate is
irremediable...The Negro is mentally, therefore eugenically, inferior to
the white race. All treatment of the Negro...must take into account this
fundamental fact."
Psychiatric "treatment" of African Americans has included
some of the most barbaric experiments ever carried out in the name of
"scientific" research--and not very long ago. In the 1950s in New
Orleans, black prisoners were used for psychosurgery experiments which
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involved electrodes being implanted into the brain. The experiments were
conducted by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Heath from Tulane University and
an Australian psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Bailey, who boasted in a lecture to
nurses 20 years later that the two psychiatrists had used blacks because it
was "cheaper to use Niggers than cats because they were everywhere and
cheap experimental animals."
Heath had also been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) to carry out drug experiments which included LSD and a drug
called bulbocapnine, which in large doses produced "catatonia and
stupor." Heath tested the drug on African American prisoners at the
Louisiana State Penitentiary. According to one memo, the CIA sought
information as to whether the drug could cause "loss of speech, loss of
sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, loss of will power and an increase in
toxicity in persons with a weak type of central nervous system."
At the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research
Center in Kentucky in the mid-1950s, drug-addicted African Americans
were given LSD, with seven of them kept hallucinating for 77
consecutive days. At this same center, healthy African American men
were still being used as test subjects almost 10 years later, this time for an
experimental drug, BZ--100 times more powerful than LSD. [CCHR,
Psychiatry: Creating Racism, 1995, p.9-11]
Nazi Influences on American Psychiatry
Perhaps there was no psychiatrist more influential in Nazi
Germany than Ernst Rudin. Rudin was a world leader in the eugenics
movement, the pseudo-science which asserts that a “superior” human can
be created by selective breeding, allowing only “superior” individuals the
right to procreate and preventing that right to what eugenicists called
“inferior” individual. That is, those with physical or mental “defects.” A
long-time advocate of eugenics, Rudin co-founded the German Society of
Racial Hygiene in 1905 with his brother-in-law, psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz
who demanded the “extirpation of the inferior institution provided
employment for the island, there was no local incentive to close it down.
elements of the population” and battled against those of “Jewish and
Slavic blood.” [ Ideology of Death , Why the Holocaust Happened in
Germany .; John Weiss, p.105-106]
In 1930, Rudin spoke in Washington, DC, at the First
International Congress on Mental Hygiene and called for all associated
with the movement, later known as “mental health,” to make eugenics the
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principle aim of mental hygiene. Rudin was cold and to the point in
expressing his philosophy:
“More mental and physical suffering, illness,
deficiency, infirmity, poverty, chronic alcoholism, criminality, etc., than
we can describe have as the main cause a bad hereditary tendency. Une fois que
such a person is born...they need the best and most extensive mental
hygiene...It would be better, however, if such persons were not born at
all, and that calls for eugenics.”
[ Proceedings of the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene ;
Volume One; Frankwood E. Williams, editor, 1932, p.473]
In 1932, Rudin was elected president of the International
Federation of Eugenic Organizations propelling him to world leader in
the eugenics movement. Within the IFEU, Rudin headed the Committee
on Race Psychiatry. [Stefan Kuhl; The Nazi Connection ; Oxford
University Press; 1994, p.21-22]
When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Rudin was appointed to
help lead Germany's Racial Purity program and he served on the Task
Force of Hereditary Experts headed by Nazi SS officer Heinrich
Himmler. Rudin helped write and give “scientific” interpretation to the
Nazi Sterilization Laws. According to psychiatrist Peter Breggin, “It was
Rudin who influenced Hitler, not Hitler who influenced Rudin.” [Peter
Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, 1991, p.102]
The sterilization campaign grew to include Jews and Gypsies,
who Rudin referred to as “inferior race types.” By 1938 pilot killing
programs were established in Germany psychiatric hospitals and the first
to die in the Holocaust were some 375,000 German mental patients. Dr.
Michael Berenbaum, project director of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, says the killing program “involved virtually the
entire German psychiatric community.”
[Dr. Michael Berenbaum,The World Must Know, The History of the
Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
1993, p.64]
Over the coming years millions of “inferiors” would be
slaughtered in the name of eugenics. Adolph Hitler honored Rudin with a
medal for his work as “Pathfinder of Hereditary Hygiene” for the Third
Reich. Rudin praised Hitler in a letter stating that “racial hygiene” had
only become known in Germany “through the political works of Adolph
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Hitler and it was only through him that our dream of more than thirty
years has become a reality and the principles of racial hygiene have been
translated into action.” . [Dr. Thomas Roder, Volker Kubillus, Anthony
Burwell, Psychiatrists: The Men Behind Hitler, 1995, p.94]
The principles of racial hygiene would give Europe the
Holocaust.
In a special 1943 issue of Rudin's Journal, Archive for Racial
and Social Biology , Rudin praised Hiltler for making racial hygiene a fact
among the German people, and applauded the sterilization laws for
“preventing the further penetration of the German gene pool by Jewish
blood.” [Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors , 1986 p.28]
In 1945 Ernst Rudin was called “the most evil man in
Germany” and was credited with creating the “Nazi science of murder”
by news reporter Victor Bernstien who interviewed the aging
psychiatrist. Rudin admitted to Bernstien that when “the killing program
began...I was not informed because it was not thought right that I should
have such a matter on my conscience.” He fled Germany after the war
and was stripped of his Swiss citizenship and placed under house arrest
Là. He died in 1952. [ PM Daily , Created Nazi Science of Murder:
Meet 'Gentle” Prof. Rudin, Theorist of 'Aryanism', Tuesday, Aug. 21,
1945, p.5]
In 1996 a German psychiatric journal published “ Ernst Rudin--
a Swiss psychiatrists as the leader of Nazi psychiatry--the final solution
as a goal .” In the article, Rudin was called a “racial fanatic” whose work
did not “withstand scientific criticism.” Rudin demanded “coercive
measures against the reproduction of...in the racist's view, undesirable
personnes. With this objective in mind, he started his psychiatric
research...[which] confirmed his preexisting opinions.” [ Fortsch Neurol
Psychiatr , Sept; 64[9]:327-343]
Despite being a racist, a Nazi, and an advocate of the
sterilization of Jews, Rudin is still praised by today's leading psychiatric
texts. For example, the 1994 Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry
credits Rudin for laying the foundation for the genetic theory of
schizophrénie. In 1990, the National Alliance for Research on
Schizophrenia and Depression published an article which praised Rudin
for his pioneering work in the field of psychiatric genetics in its Winter
Newsletter.
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The eugenics movement did not end in Nazi Germany. In 1936
psychiatrist Franz Kallmann left Rudin's fold at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute and traveled to the New York State Psychiatric Institute [NYSPI]
at Columbia University. He was appointed to head its psychiatric
genetics program, a field founded by Ernst Rudin. Selon
psychiatrist Nolan Lewis, then director of NYSPI, “the genetic research
division was stabilized by the appointment of Dr. Franz J. Kallmann as
senior research psychiatrist. It seems certain that the promotion of long-
term research dealing with genetic and eugenic problems of mental
disease will prove to be a step in the right direction.” [The Psychiatric
Quarterly, Vol. 19, No.2, 1945, p.235]
Lewis encouraged psychiatrists to use the common sense of
“any animal or plant breeder” when dealing with psychiatric patients. À
Lewis, it was important to determine “the character of the stock” on
individuals and their relatives. Lewis would become Chairman of the
American Psychiatric Association's Task Force on Nomenclature and
Statistics for the first edition of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders.
Prior to leaving Nazi Germany, Kallmann, arguing before
Hitler's interior ministry, Kallmann called for the sterilization of
“schizophrenics” and their apparently healthy relatives. In a 1938 study,
Kallmann referred to the mentally ill as “a source of maladjusted crooks,
the lowest type of criminal offender...even the most faithful believer in
liberty would be better off without those...” In his research, Kallman
used less than scientific criteria for making a diagnosis. He included as
schizophrenic anyone who was “bull-headed”, “cold-hearted,”
“indecisive,” “asocial,”...his list went on and on.
He felt that if psychiatry was to make eugenic progress on a
population, sterilization was necessary for “the tainted children and
siblings of schizophrenics.” After the Holocaust, Kallmann testified on
behalf of psychiatrist Otmar von Verschuer, one of Rudin's staff who had
personally selected individuals to be killed during the psychiatric killing
programme. With such aid from the scientific community, von Verschuer
was fined $300, declared free from all responsibility for Nazi crimes, and
allons y. Von Verschuer's name would show up in the 1950s on the
membership list of the American Eugenics Society.
Franz Kallman was on the board of directors of the American
Eugenics Society and in 1954, the Society announced that the foundation
was in place for a program of “negative eugenics” in the United States.
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Negative eugenics is the suppression of the reproduction of what are
considered “inferior” people. According to the March, 1954 Eugenics
Quarterly, the editors stated “there can be no arbitrary decisions as to who
should or should not have children” and that such a program, targeting
those with “inferior” genes, would make it possible to “diminish the
heavy burden of the socially inadequate and other defective hereditary
types.” Admittedly, the difficulty of such a plan was in educating the
public; the editors stating that such a broad educational program must
start “with the leaders in education.” [Eugenics Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1,
1954, The Role of the American Eugenics Society, p.1-3]
Just as Rudin had pushed to prevent the reproduction of what
he considered “inferior race types,” the American Eugenics Society, was
making a pitch in the US to do the same thing.
Finally, the Society stated that the ultimate goal was to
“increase the proportion of children born with the promise of sound
character and good intelligence.” This mission statement would lead to
psychiatry's interest in “character disorders” of children and would also
pave the way for “learning disabilities.” It would become the focus of
psychiatry to examine the character and intelligence of US school
children in the years to come. The board of directors of the American
Eugenics Society included not only Franz Kallmann, but men like Paul
Popenoe who openly praised Hitler's sterilization policy. Perhaps most
disturbing was that fact that the American Eugenics Society's board was
also represented by Dr. Gordon Allen of the National Institute of Mental
Health .
From the 1940s until his death in 1965, NIMH funded
Kallman's research and the American Psychiatric Association’s
American Journal of Psychiatry regularly ran an annual “progress” report
authored by Kallmann titled “Progress in Psychiatry-Heredity and
Eugenics.” Kallmann frequently cited the works of Nazi psychiatrists in
his publications as well as citing prominent eugenic publications. le
Journal even published Kallmann's brief acknowledgment of Nazi Ernst
Rudin upon his death in the early 1950s. The eugenics movement was
under scrutiny because of what transpired in Nazi Germany. Kallmann
a écrit:
“Perhaps it was a reflection of the turbulence of our times that
the death on October 22, 1952 of Professor Ernst Rudin, one of the
founders of psychiatric genetics, went practically unnoticed.” [ The
American Journal of Psychiatry , Vol. 109, No.7, 1953, p. 491]
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In 1961 the National Institute of Mental Health and American
Eugenics Society co-sponsored a celebration honoring Kallmann for 25
years of work at NYSPI.
In the early 1960s Kallmann worked with medical geneticist
Linda Erlenmeyer-Kimling, also at NYSPI. Erlenmeyer-Kimling was a
member of the American Eugenics Society and was interested in
determining what children were at “high risk” for becoming adult
schizophrenics, Kallmann's “tainted children.” In May of 1964, the New
York Times reported that research conducted by Kallmann and
Erlenmeyer-Kimling showed that the birth rate of schizophrenics was
rising “at an alarming rate.” Kallmann was concerned that no one was
“doing anything about it” and felt that if not held in check, the birth rate
of schizophrenics would eventually surpass that of the general population.
It was important for Kallmann to “do something”, but first those that
needed something done with them had to be identified. The early
identification as children of potential carriers of defective genes was also
a goal of Kallmanns teacher, Ernst Rudin. This would become the goal of
Kallmann's associate, Linda Erlenmeyer-Kimling, to discover what
children were, in her words, the “schizophrenic-to-be.”
In the late 1960s, Erlenmeyer-Kimling hypothesized that
“attentional deficits” might characterize children susceptible to
schizophrénie. She helped organize a conference with other eugenic
psychiatrists, such as Irving Gottesman, on “The Genetic Restructuring of
Human Populations.”
In 1971, along with Gottesman, also an AES member,
Erlenmeyer-Kimling published an article titlted “A Foundation for
Informed Eugenics.” They begin, “Who's minding the quality of the
human gene pool? Hardly anybody, it seems, except for a large handful of
eugenically minded scientists, some of whom are organized under the
flag of the American Eugenics Society...” The two writers called for
people to be ranked by “an Index of Social Value” or ISV. They argued,
“the big question about an individual is not ... his IQ, income... but what
is his social value.” They argued for family size limits and insisted
“policy making should be guided by the goals of optimizing the quality of
the gene pool...via an index of social value.” All of this could be
“cautiously pursued in an enlightened society.” [ Social Biology, Vol.
18, 1971, A Foundation for Informed Eugenics , Irving I. Gottesman and
Linda Erlenmeyer-Kimling, p. S1 and S7]
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That same year, the National Institute of Mental Health began
funding Erlenmeyer-Kimling and NYSPI to conduct the “New York
High-Risk Project” for the proposed purpose of finding a “characteristics
that typify...individuals who will later become schizophrenic.”
[Erlenmeyer-Kimling, The New York High Risk Project , from Children at
Risk for Schizophrenia , Watt, Anthony, Wynne, and Rolf 1984,
p.169]
The term eugenics was becoming dated going into the 1970s
and in 1972 the American Eugenics Society changed its name to the
Society for the Study of Social Biology and in 1976 Erlenmeyer-Kimling
became its president. Eugenicists were now “social biologists” dealing
with “social biology”...the term used by Nazi Ernst Rudin.
In 1981, the American Handbook of Psychiatry published the
first decade of findings of “high risk” research. Citing Erlenmeyer-
Kimling's work, psychiatrist Clarice Kestenbaum, who worked with
Erlenmeyer-Kimling on the project, reported that the “preschizophrenic
child has ... problems in attention that lead to school difficulties and
social problems.” “Pre-manic depressives” were said to be distractible
and manifested subtle learning disabilities. In other words, as eugenicists
had stated decades earlier, children considered to be future
“schizophrenics” were not of “sound character or good intelligence.” The
Handbook recommended “genetic counseling” for the parents of children
with attention problems and learning disabilities. [ The Child at Risk for
Major Psychiatric Illness , Clarice. J. Kestenbaum, in The American
Handbook of Psychiatry , 1981, p. 166]
About the same time the American Psychiatric Association
officially recognized “Attention Deficit Disorder.” Even early on, when
ADD was called “Minimal Brain Damage,” it was seen to be a possible
precursor to schizophrenia by psychiatrist Paul Wender. Wender had
spent the 1960s working at NIMH with psychiatrist Seymour Kety and
psychologist David Rosenthal conducting adoption studies, trying to find
the types of mental illness that were common to adopted away children of
“schizophrenics.” Kety would go on to become a director of the
American Eugenics Society under it new name during the 1980s.
In the late 60s, the three NIMH scientists attended an
international conference on the “Transmission of Schizophrenia”
organized by Kety and Rosenthal. They picked the participants. One third
of those in attendance were, or would become officers or directors of the
American or British Eugenics Society. In the Forward of the proceedings
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of the meeting, Kety and Rosenthal acknowledged Nazi Ernst Rudin.
Wender would popularize “minimal brain damage” and “hyperactivity” at
the beginning of the 1970s. He was once asked what he had learned from
his adoption studies to which he is said to have replied, “You should
breed with exquisite care, then marry whomever you choose.”
In the early 1960s, children who were “hyperactive”, talkative,
overly curious, who had a short attention span, and showed poor motor
skills such as not being able to write inside the lines on writing paper
were said to have “childhood schizophrenia.” The cause of the
schizophrenia? “Attentional deficits.”
Within the next decade, organized psychiatry would have
parents, teachers, and “support groups” searching for children with
“attention deficits.” This was precisely the goal of the American
eugenics movement. In 1976, while president of the Society for the
Study of Social Biology, Elenmeyer-Kimling stated that “it is not
unreasonable to assume that vulnerable children [ to schizophrenia ]
...could eventually be located through mass screening programs
using...identification measures originally worked out in the studies of
high-risk groups.” [Erlenmeyer-Kimling, Schizophrenia: A Bag of
Dilemmas, in Social Biology, Vol. 23, No. 2 1976, p. 133]
In 1991 the US Department of Education mandated that
teachers actively seek to identify “ADD” children. The mass screening of
children with “attentional deficits” had begun.
Throughout the 90s, individuals like Erlenmeyer-Kimling and
Irving Gottesman have remained close to NIMH serving on the advisory
board of its Schizophrenia Bulletin. Erlenmeyer-Kimling also received
acknowledgement for her contribution to the section on childhood
psychiatric disorders in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV . [p.853]
Our gene pool is still being “protected.”
Nazi-Like Solutions in the 70s
In 1972, psychiatrist TL Pinklington, former Vice President of
the World Federation of Mental Health from 1966-1970, advised other
doctors that the number of children being born with IQs below 100 was
increasing around the world. Pinklington felt that the constant absorption
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into the worlds gene pool of such individuals would have devastating
social and economic consequences in the future. He suggested that
“technologically advanced nations are obliged to review the complexity
of life they create” and “embark upon a modern eugenics program...or
consider some form of legalized euthanasia” to reduce the number of
below-100 IQ individuals. According to Pinklington, this, combined
with other methods of prevention might be “the final solution” to this
particular psychiatric problem. [Pinklington, The Concept and
Prevalence of Mental Retardation, in The Practitioner, Vol. 209, No.
1249, 1972, p. 75]
In 1975, Gordon Allen of the National Institute of Mental
Health was vice president of the Society for the Study of Social Biology,
formerly the American Eugenics Society. Allen was also on the editorial
board for the society's publication, Social Biology. That year, Social
Biology ran a 16 page article exploring the possibility of having the state
regulate who could or could not have children by granting a license to
have children, this to allow “regulating the quantity and quality of the
human population.” Author David Heer suggested that such a plan could
be enforced by “immediately putting to death unlicensed babies.” But
some children could be given up for adoption to parents who could not
have children of their own, and, According to Heer, this would mean
“only putting to death those children who could not be given up for
adoption.” Also suggested was the placement of long-term surgically
implanted contraceptives into girls upon reaching puberty. Any children
born without a license would be the property of the state. Parents who
already had two children but wanted more would have to “prove the
genetic superiority of their existing children.” [Heer, Marketable
Licenses for Babies, Boulding's Proposal Revisited, in Social Biology,
Vol. 22, no. 1, 1975, p. 1, 3, 4, 13]
The ideas generated by Ernst Rudin could still be seen in
modern “scientific” publications.
Abuse of Senior Citizens
After being placed in nursing homes, older people are routinely
forced into taking psychotropic medications as a way of keeping them
sedated. Eastgate comments on this and other lamentable treatments: "I
think it's a sad indictment of society when people [who have put so many
years and so much effort) into working, some of them fighting for this
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country, end up in a nursing home, are drugged out of their heads, electric
shocked, and have to live out their final days in such misery." [16]
Actually , an alarming trend today is that many elderly people
are being taken out of nursing homes--and put into private mental
hospitals. But it is not their family members who are doing this. Effectivement,
family members are often not consulted. The initiators of these transfers
are social workers and other employees of private psychiatric hospitals,
who, amazingly, have the legal power to transfer people to the institutions
with which they're affiliated, based solely on these employees' say-so. UNE
powerful motive exists for these forced visits to mental institutions--
Medicare money . The government will pay the many hundreds of dollars
a day that it costs for a person to stay in one of these private hospitals,
while the nursing home from which the person was snatched can continue
to collect charges for his empty bed during his absence. The situation has
grown so widespread and horrendous that it was documented on a
"20/20" TV news magazine segment recently [24].
As documented by 20/20's hidden camera, for-profit
psychiatric institutions are not doing much to improve their inmates'
mental health. Rather, they're mainly holding pens for people while their
insurance money is procured. An example shown of these hospitals'
modus operandi: doctors billing for psychotherapy for Alzheimer's
patients who clearly could not participate in a psychotherapy session. Mais
note that not all of the senior citizens captured by these institutions have
Alzheimer's--or any mental problem, for that matter. As shown by 20/20,
some are mentally and emotionally fine. Their only problem is that
they're old, and seemingly easy marks for being, basically, kidnapped.
A factor in this problem is the growth of the for-profit hospital
industry, which only makes profits when its beds are filled, and which
finds the elderly to be the most easily procurable bed-fillers. Author Joe
Sharkey describes the upsurge in for-profit institution. [25]:
"The private-for-profit psychiatric hospital industry has its
roots in the mid 1960s with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid
programmes. These programs created the climate in which a huge corporate
hospital industry could thrive . The rapid rise in health-care spending over
the last 30 years has paralleled the expansion of both private health
insurance coverage and federal insurance programs like Medicare and
Medicaid. Federal spending for health care via Medicare and Medicaid
programs has risen from 51 percent of the total health care spending in
1960 to more than 80 percent in 1983 . The for-profit hospital became an
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investor-driven enterprise, and profits drove the expansion of the industry
. By 1990 , nearly half of all U. S . community hospitals were owned by a
multi-unit organization, including the large national chains. One out of
every four U. S . hospitals was owned by a national corporate chain.
The extent of the fraud perpetrated by mental hospital chains is
staggering. Explains The New York Times: "In the past, estimates have
put fraud and abuse at about 10 percent of the nation's health care costs,
between $60 billion and $80 billion. But law enforcement officials and
fraud specialists like Edward 3. Kurtansky, New York State Deputy
Attorney General, say that accumulating evidence, particularly the new
findings at the for-profit psychiatric hospitals, indicates that because so
much abuse goes undetected or unreported that the percentage is probably
much higher. " [26) Unfortunately, it is the elderly who are frequently the
victims in private-hospital fraud.
By the way, anyone who doubts that the for-profit hospitals
take the for-profit part of their identity very seriously should consider that
their internal handbooks set admissions goals According to a manual
obtained by the Fort Worth Star Telegram,
Psychiatric Institutes of America (which was a part of the
infamous National Medical Enterprises) set a greater than 50-percent
admission goal for people requesting free evaluations at their numerous
hospitals. The manual also states that the goal of reasonable
hospitalizations jumps to 70 percent for those facilities that didn't
advertise, apparently because they would attract more serious cases. [27]
Prozac: Second Opinion
Prozac is one of the most heavily prescribed psychiatric drugs
in use today, but there are good reasons to challenge its popularity .
While this medication is primarily prescribed as an antidepressant, it is
itself associated with depression, and other severe side effects , such as
nervous system damage . What' s more , its use has been implicated in
suicides and homicides. To understand why this drug was approved in the
first place and how the public became brainwashed into embracing it, we
must first investigate cover-ups during the testing phase and then look at
the powerful interest groups behind its promotion.
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Worthless Clinical Trials
Dr. Peter Breggin, author of Talking Back to Prozac: What
Doctors Aren 't Telling You About Today 's Most Controversial Drug,
believes strongly that Prozac should never should have been approved.
He backs up his assertion with a multiplicity of reasons.
First, studies were performed by the manufacturer's own hand-
picked doctors who chose to ignore evidence of Prozac's stimulant
Propriétés. Patients becoming agitated were administered sedatives, such
as Klonopin, Ativan, Xanax, and Valium. This fact in itself, Breggin says,
invalidates the studies, because whatever effect the patients were
experiencing was not provided by Prozac alone. "Basically, " Breggin
argues, "the FDA should have said, 'We're approving Prozac in
combination with addictive sedatives. " [14]
Second, researchers lied about the number of people tested. Eli
Lilly, the manufacturer, claims that thousands of people received Prozac
in controlled clinical trials during its testing phase. In actuality, the
numbers were far lower, since those who failed to complete the studies
due to negative side effects were never accounted for. FDA material,
derived via the Freedom of Information Act, shows that up to 50 percent
of the test patients dropped out of the studies because of serious side
effects . In his book [28) , Dr. Breggin reports that, in the final analysis,
only 286 people were used as a basis for Prozac's approval. Significantly,
Lilly has never challenged this information. "They've had me under oath
in court," Breggin says, "and they haven't contested a single word that
I've written in the book." [14]
Third, tests purposefully excluded the kinds of patients who
would later receive Prozac--those who are suicidal, psychotic, and
afflicted with other emotional/mental disorders. Even now, Breggin
reminds us, Lilly could easily study how many people have attempted or
committed suicide since the drug's release:
"One of the easiest things to study is whether your patients are alive or
ne pas. It's much easier to study that than whether they've gotten over their
depression. That's a hard thing to judge. How do you know somebody's
feeling better or not feeling better? C'est très compliqué. But it's very
easy to see if a person made a suicide attempt or if a person committed
suicide. . Lilly excluded all suicidal patients from its outpatient studies
that were used for the approval of the drug. They also excluded patients
who were psychotic, who had all kinds of problems for which the drug
nonetheless is now given. " [14]
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We are now reaping the consequences of irresponsible
approbation. Dr. Breggin has testified as a medical expert in an ongoing
lawsuit, the case of Joseph Wesbecker, who, while taking Prozac, shot 20
people, killing eight of them and then himself. The data in that trial
indicated that Lilly knew beforehand that patients taking Prozac were
having much higher suicide attempt rates than patients taking placebos or
other drugs.
The Medical Industrial Complex
Why did Eli Lilly and the FDA use trickery to approve a drug
it knew to be ineffective and unsafe? Breggin says this happened because
psychiatry is part of the medical industrial complex, which, like any
industry, is looking to sell products:
"One way to look at this is to consider the "industrialization"
of suffering. Getting Prozac from a doctor is very similar to getting a
Ford or a Toyota from a car dealer. We are at the end point of an
industrialized process with a product. Now, psychiatrists are like
salesmen in the car showroom. We go to a psychiatrist and he's going to
try and sell us a car, only the car in this case is a psychiatric drug, and
very frequently it's going to be Prozac. . . The FDA is influenced by what
the manufacturers do and what the manufacturer tells them. " [14]
Prozac is not the first pharmaceutical to be questioned after
FDA authorization. Hundreds of drugs that initially pass their tests end up
having major label changes--ie. , a major new warning has to be made--
or wind up being withdrawn. In the field of psychiatry, the rate is
especially high. During the time Prozac was approved, about 16 other
psychiatric drugs passed inspection, and nine of these have since had
major label changes. Breggin says that the FDA reveals the truth of the
matter to physicians, but not to the public: "A few months ago, " he
reports, "I attended a full day's seminar put on by the FDA where they
were openly admitting this. . . They had a black poster there that said,
'Once a drug is approved, is it safe? No , it's not! ' They were making the
point that many drugs turn out to be very dangerous after approval. " [14]
There are a number of reasons why dangerous effects of
medications are not known early on. One is that the individual studies
performed by the FDA usually have a hundred patients or less . Quatre
thousand patients may be tested as 40 groups of 100. According to
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Breggin, this means that scientists are less likely to notice a reaction in
one patient:
"They may think, Jane got depressed when she took Prozac but she was
probably going to get more depressed anyway. In 40 different studies, 40
or more people may be missed. Perhaps a fatal reaction shows up once in
5 ,000,000. That's a lot of fatalities but it may not show up at all in a
group of 5000. Or it may be missed. Eli Lilly was developing a drug for
the treatment of a liver disorder. A couple of people died from this drug
but it was missed in the early stages of the study. So, it's very easy for
things to get through. " [14]
In addition, FDA doctors have close affiliations with drug
companies . Paul Leiber, who approves psychopharmacological drugs at
the FDA, is known to have friendly communication with Lilly. Breggin
states, "This guy is a friend to Prozac. One statement I found in the Lilly
material even says so. You have some real issues here having to do with
the collaborative kind of relationship. " [14]
There are always doctors who can be easily bought. Quand
violence and suicide were related to Prozac at FDA-held hearings,
Breggin reports that "most of the doctors who were making the judgment
at the hearing were taking money from drug companies. " One consultant,
who supported Prozac in court, was getting paid huge sums by Lilly to
write a paper on the subject. Another doctor who voted in favor of the
drug was paid by Lilly to tour the country and make speeches on its
safety and benefits. "Dozens of them are getting paid by Lilly and doing
clinical research for them. Nonetheless, they think they can sit fairly in
judgment about whether Prozac is harmful or not. " [14]
Breggin stresses that it all comes back to the fact that
organized psychiatry is part of a medical industrial complex. "It is out to
push drugs, not ethics, " he feels. "It's not science but a myth. They're part
of industry. They're no more objective than doctors who work for tobacco
companies and say tobacco doesn't cause cancer." [14]
Side Effects of Prozac
Overstimulation
Prozac acts like a stimulant, and some of its side effects are
thus the same as those of amphetamines. Breggin explains that "the major
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adverse effects of the amphetamines--like those of Prozac--are
exaggerations of the desired effects, specifically stimulation, including
insomnia, anxiety, and hyperactivity. . . As is now commonly done with
Prozac, amphetamines were often prescribed along with a sedative to
relieve over stimulation. " [29].
Over stimulating the central nervous system can cause a wide
range of symptoms, including agitation, anxiety, nervousness, increased
headaches, sweating, nightmares, insomnia, weight loss, and loss of
appetite. Two common manifestations of overstimulation are akathisia
and agitation, discussed below.
Akathisia
The term akathisia refers to a need to move about. Une personne
feels driven to shuffle his or her feet, or to stand up and walk around. À
the same time, there is an inner sense of anxiety or irritability, "like chalk
going down a chalkboard, only it's y6ur spine. " [14] The feeling can be
mild or torturous.
Agitation. Prozac can produce extreme feelings of agitation,
often associated with akathisia. Studies have shown 30 to 40 percent of
people on Prozac, even when some of them are taking sedatives, get
agitated or get akathisia. Both of these conditions are associated with
violence and suicide because they are related to a breakdown of impulse
contrôle.
Psychosis
When overstimulation becomes extreme, a patient's
nervousness reaches psychotic proportions. People become manic and do
outlandish things. They start directing traffic naked, or spending all their
argent. Extreme overstimulation can ruin lives . People can become
paranoid and extremely dangerous to others , as well as bizarrely
depressed and compulsively suicidal. This effect was noted in FDA
controlled studies that were only four to six weeks long. Out of the 286
people who finished the short-term studies, 1 percent became psychotic.
Actually, the rate may be higher than 1 percent since these were such
short, controlled studies, and the population of people studied was so
étroit. As mentioned earlier, the people chosen for the study were
carefully screened to exclude those with a history of being manic
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depressive, schizophrenic, or suicidal. As a result, one can see that the
craziness people experienced was strongly associated with the drug.
Dépression
Depression is an after-effect of overstimulation. Tandis que
researching FDA materials on Prozac, Breggin discovered that Lilly knew
Prozac caused depression and that, in fact, the company initially reported
it:
"Lilly admitted on paper, in its final statement about the drug's
side effects, that it commonly caused patients to get depressed. Then it
got scratched out at the FDA, along with a whole bunch of other things. Il
went from being 'common, ' and being scratched out, to not even
appearing under 'uncommon. ' It just disappeared from the label. " [14]
In other words, the manufacturer admitted that Prozac causes
the very thing it is supposed to cure. Ultimately, this places patients in
jeopardy. Breggin explains:
" [People] start taking the drug, and in the beginning they feel
meilleur. Maybe, after all, because it's just good to get a drug. They feel
like, wow, I'm doing something for myself. Or maybe the drug gives
them a burst of energy. Stimulants will do that. They will make people
feel energized. Then they get more depressed.
They get suicidal feelings. They don't know the drug hasn't
been tested on suicidal patients. They don't know that Eli Lilly once listed
depression as an effect of the drug . And so they end up thinking they
need more Prozac , and their doctor agrees. When that fails to work, they
end up eventually getting shock treatment, never knowing that if they
hadn't been started on Prozac they might never have gotten so severely
depressed. " [14]
Tardive Dystonia and Tardive Dyskinesia
There have been reports of serious nerve damage with Prozac.
Some former users charge that Prozac has essentially wrecked their
nervous systems, leaving them with permanent disabilities such as tardive
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dystonia, a condition in which muscles tense up involuntarily, or tardive
dyskinesia, in which there is involuntary movement.
Many psychiatric drugs, such as Haldol and Thorazine, are
recognized as causing tardive dyskinesia (TD) in roughly one out of five
long-term users, and warnings are contained in the manufacturers '
prescribing information cautioning against this permanent brain damage
caused by the drugs . But no such warning is provided with Prozac by the
fabricant. The Prozac package insert does note that users of the drug
have developed dystonia and dyskinesia, but it contains no suggestion
that these conditions could become permanent. Current medical
knowledge holds that the permanent damage of TD is not expected to
develop until the person has been on the psychiatric drug for a year or
more, hence the name "tardive" (meaning "late developing"). Avec
Prozac, however, the condition can develop rapidly and without warning.
Tardive dystonia and dyskinesia are conditions that should not
be taken lightly, because they can stigmatize a person for life. le
movements and postures associated with these conditions can look
bizarre, and may make a person seem quite mentally ill when in fact his
or her movements are side effects of medications intended to alleviate
maladie mentale. These symptoms can persist long after the person has
come off the drug, and in some cases they never remit at all because parts
of the brain that control muscle function have been destroyed by the drug.
Sexual Dysfunction
Prozac affects serotonin levels and may therefore cause sexual
dysfunction. Men may find themselves unable to ejaculate or get an
erection, and women may have difficulty obtaining an orgasm. One study
showed this problem to occur in half the people using the medication.
Breggin says the percentage may be even higher, noting that many people
taking Prozac won't complain about sexual dysfunction because this drug
tends to make them less interested in other people. In fact, Breggin terms
Prozac an anti-empathy drug" for this reason. Even those in psychiatry
who praise the drug, Breggin points out, admit that it reduces sensitivity.
"That, of course, can reduce sexual interest, and diminish whether you
care about having a sexual problem. " [14)
"Again, when Lilly studied this matter for the FDA, " reports Breggin,
"they found only a small number of people were having sexual
dysfunctions . Then after the drug was approved, they found out that they
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were wrong and that a very large percentage of people were having this
problème particulier. " [14)
Skin Rashes
Several kinds of rashes are associated with Prozac use. At the most
serious extreme, rashes that appear reflect serious immunological
disorders, such as lupus erythematosus or serum sickness, which is
accompanied by fever, chills, and an abnormal white blood cell count. UNE
few deaths have been associated with Prozac-induced skin rashes.
Cancer
Animal studies show that Prozac, as well as a number of other
antidepressants, enhance tumor growth.
The Chemical Imbalance
Are “chemical imbalances” real? Psychiatrist David Kaiser
commented on psychiatry's promotion of such imbalances to the public in
the December, 1996 Psychiatric Times . "Unfortunately what I also see
these days are the casualties of this new biologic psychiatry, as patients
often come to me with many years of past treatment. Patients having been
diagnosed with "chemical imbalances" despite the fact that no test exists
to support such a claim, and that there is no real conception of what a
correct chemical balance would look like." Additionally, Kaiser points
out that “modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the
genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. This does not stop
psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that depression,
bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, and a host of other
disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin, and
that it is only a matter of time until all this is proven.”
Kaiser is not alone in his opinion. Psychiatrist Loren Mosher
resigned from the APA after 35 years of membership stating that “what
we are dealing with here is fashion, politics, and money. This level of
intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue
to support by my membership.” [David Kaiser, Against Biologic
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Psychiatry , in Psychiatric Times , Vol. 13, Issue 12, 1996, internet article
text does not include page numbers]
The “Chemical Imbalance” is Born
In 1963, a time in US psychopharmacological infancy, LIFE
magazine introduced the broad public to the concept of brain chemical
imbalances. Psychiatrists had been experimenting with drugs, particularly
LSD, and astounding themselves at the wide variety of behaviors,
emotions, and personality changes they could induce in someone with
only a tiny spec of the drug. A hypothesis was born out this. If such wide
variations in behavior could be made with such a small amount of a drug,
which no doubt affected the brain, then any variations from “normal”
behavior must be due to extremely fine changes in brain chemistry. le
idea that some other external cause of behavioral disturbance could exist
seemed to be discarded. Brain chemistry simply needed to be “balanced.”
Psychologists such as BF Skinner said that scientists could and should
control human behavior and predicted that in the future an individuals
mood, emotions, and motivation would be maintained at any desired level
through the use of drugs.
In 1967, psychiatrist Nathan Klien, an MK-Ultra participant,
made a chilling prediction which showed just how much psychiatry
wanted to use drugs for behavior control, not for “treating mental illness.”
Klien had been studying the effects of psychiatric drugs on “normal
humans” and reported that “...the present breadth of drug use may be
almost trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical
substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of
man's life by the year 2000...if we accept the position that human mood,
motivation, and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the
brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid, expedient means to produce
any desired neurochemical state we wish. The sooner that we cease to
confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can
consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to provide for
people.” [ EIR , British Psychiatry: From Eugenics to Assassination ,
Anton Chaitkin, October 7, 1994, p.39]
Psychiatrists had decided they would provide the public with
the types of chemical personality they saw fit. What would follow in the
years to come would be the medicalization of any behavior psychiatry
deemed “inappropriate.”
As David Kaiser had noted, psychiatrists cannot measure levels
of neurotransmitters in the brain in the way doctors can measure sugar
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levels in a diabetic patient. The question must be asked then, how can you
balance or adjust something which cannot be measured? Plus
importantly, does an actual chemical imbalance exist? Parents are told
routinely that children given an ADD diagnosis have a chemical
imbalance and that amphetaminelike drugs will balance the child's brain
chemistry.
Thomas J. Moore, Senior Fellow in Health Policy at George
Washington University Medical Center writes that while some "claim
hyperactivity in children is a 'biochemical imbalance'...researchers
cannot identify which chemicals...or find abnormal levels" in children.
"The chemical imbalance theory has not been established by scientific
evidence." [Thomas J. Moore, Prescription for Disaster , 1998, p.22]
It has been pointed out by psychiatrists themselves that the
downfall of psychiatric diagnosis is that psychiatrists never look beyond
symptoms. If a child is "hyperactive" - a symptom - the psychiatrists say,
"He has hyperactivity!" Psychiatrist Sidney Walker says this is like
telling your doctor you have a bad cough - a symptom - and getting a
"diagnosis" of "coughing disorder", without finding out if the cough is
caused from a cold, lung cancer, or tuberculosis. [Sidney Walker, The
Hyperactivity Hoax , 1998 p. 6]
Psychiatrists never look beyond "symptoms", they merely
classify symptoms as the "disease." Dr. Mary Ann Block says she hates
to see children given labels of “hyperactivity” or “attention deficit
disorder.” In fact, she refuses to use such labels. She says, “How sad it is
to see children drugged while their underlying health problems go
untreated.” [Mary Ann Block, No More Ritalin, Treating ADHD Without
Drugs , 1996 p.49]
“Theory Begging”
In psychology and psychiatry there is a phenomenon called
'theory begging' which can explain the notion of 'chemical imbalances.'
Theory begging is the reporting of a scientific theory as 'fact' so often
that it becomes accepted as fact within the profession despite having
never been proven. For example, it is taken for granted by psychiatry that
patients said to have 'mental illness' have a 'chemical imbalance' in their
brain. The 'chemical imbalance' is taken for granted, not actually found
and verified by medical test. As Nathan Klien had said, psychiatry had
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“accepted the position” of chemical imbalances, a position that has yet to
be verified.
While the rest of medicine has made great advances in
diagnostic techniques, psychiatry has lagged behind. In 1994
psychiatrists Richard Keefe and Philip Harvey explained the current
process of psychiatric diagnosis:
“The process of diagnosis is very different in psychiatry. Puisque
there are no clear indications of a specific biological abnormality that
causes any of the psychiatric disorders, no laboratory tests have been
developed to confirm or refute any psychiatric diagnosis.” [Richark Keefe
and Philip Harvey, Understanding Schizophrenia , 1994 p.19]
In fact, they state that psychiatrists must rely only on what they
observe and what they are told from friends or relatives to make a
psychiatric diagnosis. Could a cardiologist accurately and safely treat
patients using this type of diagnostic protocol?
Psychiatrist Mark Gold says that “up to 40% of all diagnoses of
depression are misdiagnoses of common and uncommon physical
illness...There are as least 75 diseases that first appear with emotional
symptoms. People with these diseases often get locked up in psychiatric
hospitals.” [Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression, 1986, p.XV]
Gold admits that psychiatrists do not rule out other
medical problems, rather, they rule in their diagnosis, failing to diagnose
the nearly one hundred medical illnesses which contain 'depression' as a
symptom of that disease process.
In a Florida study, 100 consecutively admitted patients to a
psychiatric hospital who had been given a psychiatric diagnosis were
given a complete medical examination. Doctors concluded that nearly
half of the patients' psychiatric problems were secondary manifestations
of an undiagnosed medical problem. According to Gold, nearly all of
these patients would have ended up warehoused in state run mental
health facilities, which costs the patients their health with tax dollars
paying for the negligence. Some patients die confined in mental hospitals
as there real illness, cancer for example, goes untreated.
In the Florida study, psychiatrists missed diagnosing physical
illness in 80% of the cases. Gold said he was “embarrassed” at how bad
psychiatrists were at “doctoring” and that one third of psychiatrists admit
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feeling incompetent to give a patient a complete physical examination.
[Mark Gold, The Good News About Depression , 1986, p.22-24]
Dr. Sydney Walker III, a neurologist, psychiatrist and author of
A Dose of Sanity , says that psychiatric labels have “led to the unnecessary
drugging of millions of Americans who could be diagnosed, treated, and
cured without the use of toxic and potentially lethal medications.”
Charles B. Inlander, president of The People's Medical Society, and his
colleagues write in Medicine on Trial , “People with real or alleged
psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed - and harmed -
to an astonishing degree...Many of them do not have psychiatric problems
but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so
they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a
limbo from which they may never return....” [CCHR publication,
Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.14]
Dr. Walker refers to a case from Frederick Goggan's book,
Medical Mimics of Psychiatric Disorders , in which a 27-year-old
executive was hospitalized after attempting to kill herself by overdosing
on the antidepressants prescribed by her psychiatrist. The attempted
suicide followed a year of psychotherapy that had failed to relieve her
fatigue, cognitive problems, and despondency. This time, however,
doctors did a thorough physical exam and found what the psychiatrist
didn't even look for. She had hypothyroidism which can manifest with
“listlessness, sadness, and hopelessness.” She was given thyroid
supplements and has since been free of all “psychiatric symptoms” and
has “thrived both personally and professionally.”
In another case reported by Dr. Walker, John, a happy and successful
family man, began suffering from inexplicable sadness and exhaustion.
Unable to concentrate at work, he cut down his overtime, slept in late on
weekends, and lost control of his emotions, inexplicably subjected to fits
of uncontrollable weeping. He saw three doctors, two of them
psychiatrists, who saddled him with a variety of DSM labels and treated
him with 26 different drugs. A fourth doctor conducted a thorough
medical diagnostic and physical evaluation and found that John was
suffering from a slow-growing tumor of the brain lining. John's tumor
was removed, and his sadness and fatigue rapidly cleared. [CCHR
publication, Psychiatry: Committing Fraud, 1999, p.15]
Biochemical Imbalance
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If you don't have a biochemical imbalance before starting
Prozac, you certainly will have one once you are on it! Prozac has been
shown to have drastic effects on the brain's serotonergic system.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, that normally
connects to receptor sites and fires nerves. Prozac prevents serotonin
from being removed from the active place where it's working in the brain.
It keeps the sparks alive longer, and as a result, a lot of excess firing takes
endroit. The brain doesn't like all the overstimulation and eliminates 30-40
percent or more of receptors. The brain, in effect, is saying, I'm not going
to have receptors for all this serotonin. It's a compensatory mechanism for
the overstimulation. Receptors can be compared to catcher's mitts. le
balls being thrown are like serotonin. After awhile the brain just
eliminates its catcher's mitts. It says, I'm catching too much serotonin. je suis
going to get rid of my catcher's mitts.
Eli Lilly knew about the disappearance of receptors from their
laboratory experiments. What they failed to study, however, was whether
or not receptors ever come back. The experiment, which would have been
simple to perform, could have consisted of stopping the drug, waiting a
couple of weeks, sacrificing some of the animals , and then seeing if their
brains had come back to normal . The information could also have been
indirectly gleaned from performing spinal taps on human beings before
and after they had taken Prozac, to see if the breakdown products
indicated that the brain returns to normal . Neither of these approaches
were ever attempted. Obviously, Lilly is not concerned with this issue.
Dependence
Since Prozac's release, millions of Americans have come to
depend on it and to believe that their lives are better because of it.
Concerning this reality, Breggin says:
"First of all, I don't think Prozac should have been approved. But now
that it's out there it shouldn't be taken away from anybody who thinks that
it's helping them. People should be warned, however, about its dangerous
effects. If, for example, Joseph Wesbecker committed a mass murder
while on Prozac, then we're weighing the potential good of the drug
against some real disasters.
"The other issue to look at is why people like to take drugs. The fact that
so many people feel helped by this drug doesn't necessarily mean you or I
would feel helped.
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"Evidence from the FDA trials suggests that this is a very poor drug.
Even a New York Times article recently said that follow-up studies show
Prozac as not very effective.
"But when you give something to people and tell them it's a
miracle, they'll believe it. . . Also, the drug does have stimulant effects.
And while we no longer believe that stimulants should be given for
depression, certainly people can feel like it's helping them. " [14)
Overcoming Depression Without Drugs
At the core of the problem are psychiatric theories that limit
the range of acceptable human behavior.
Psychiatrists consider that any behavior that limits an
individual's survival as a biologic organism, any behavior that is not
centered on a bell curve, is going against evolution and is in some way
destructive, even if only to the individual. Consider New York State
Psychiatric Institute's Donald Klien's explanation of how psychiatry
should determine whether or not someone is “ill.”
“...there is a strong presumption that something has gone wrong
if something is sufficiently unusual...If we do not equate infrequency with
dysfunction, we need another basis to infer abnormality: deviation from a
specific standard...Can we arrive at a standard that is not simply an
expression of personal preference, but is given to us by the biology of the
situation? I propose that evolutionary theory allows us to infer such a
standard -- suboptimal functioning -- and further helps us to specify the
optimum. This often allows us to state that something is biologically
wrong, not simply unusual or objectionable.”
In other words, if a particular behavior does not meet the
“optimum” as set by the psychiatrist, a person can be “considered” ill.
This is illness by declaration, not diagnosis.
So emotional upsets are considered diseases. When a child is
anxious or can't concentrate in school, it is called a disease. If someone is
sad or depressed, it's called a disease. Breggin says that counter to current
dogma, there are real reasons for emotional pain, and ways of becoming
healthy that do not involve drugs:
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"I think that depression comes from many different sources. I
think anybody who is depressed should have a medical evaluation. Là
are tests for whether your blood sugar is flinctioning normally, whether
you have diabetes, whether you have hypothyroid disease, whether you
have Cushing's disease, whether your nutrition is poor, and whether you
need to improve your nutrition. So general health matters.
"While there are some diseases, on occasion, that can make a person
anxious, afraid, or depressed, it's far, far more likely that the sources of
human suffering at any given moment come from something other than a
psychiatric disease. . . Most people become depressed because of their
life experiences. Life is very difficult. Life is full of tragedy. De
childhood on, people are exposed to a great many stresses. Women, in
particular, become depressed more often than men and have good reason.
It's harder for them to get many of their desires fulfilled. It's often harder
for them to make a relationship feel satisfying. It's harder for them to
have the same achievements in the career arena. Almost anyone I talk
with about being depressed has a reason somewhere along the line for
why their view of life is filled with hopelessness.
Breggin feels that coming out of a depression involves
understanding what has gone into your life that has led up to your being
depressed and what ideas you have about life that aren't helping you to
live better, as well as learning new principles that are more positive and
creative. "What I try to provide, " he says, "and what I think every good
therapist tries to provide, is a warm, supportive, encouraging relationship
to help a person rebuild hope and confidence in themselves, to rebuild an
idea about how to live life."
Breggin believes that a holistic approach to treating depression allows a
patient the opportunity to look at his or her life, and to choose to live in a
new and far better way. Depression, in that light, is viewed as a signal
that something is wrong, something is not understood, or some values are
not being fulfilled. While drugs can jerk people out of their depression,
they fail to help them deal with life. Unfortunately, Breggin says, drugs
are out there and millions are taking them. "Now, they are a basic part of
American life and it is really a matter of following the dollars back to the
drug companies and to organized psychiatry. " [14)
Psychiatry's Influence on Education
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It began with Edward Lee Thorndike, who implemented
experimental psychology into the American educational system in the
early 1900s, a move which came to influence the rest of the world. À
Thorndike, a committed "animal psychologist," teaching was "the art of
giving and withholding stimuli with the result of producing or preventing
certain responses.... Education is interested primarily... in all the changes
which make possible a better adjustment of human nature to its
surroundings."
Essentially, Thorndike proposed that schools transform themselves from
places of learning to places of "therapy."
In 1927 psychiatrist William Alanson White agreed, saying
"Education has been... too much confined to teaching. It needs to be
developed as a scheme for assisting and guiding the developing
personality."
The training manual of the US National Training Laboratory
(NTL) which re-educated teachers, shows that the agenda was chillingly
put into place: "Although they [children] appear to behave appropriately
and seem normal by most cultural standards, they may actually be in need
of mental health care in order to help them change, adapt, and conform to
the planned society in which there will be no conflict of attitudes or
beliefs."
This attitude persisted throughout the century, but might never
have gathered the strength it did were it not for government sponsorship
and involvement in the psychiatric education movement in the early
1960s.
In 1961, psychologist Carl Rogers decided that academic
evaluation would "damage" a child's "self-esteem." The result was the
virtual elimination of traditional subject matter such as math and
literature in favor of the "exploration of feelings," with teachers as
"facilitators."
Author Joe Sharkey summed up the sequence of events: "By
the 1950s, 'child psychology' was a familiar term, conveying the now
firmly established idea that psychoanalytic intervention, usually in a
school or child guidance clinic staffed by psychologists, was a way to
protect the well-being of children.... By the late sixties, federal health
planners were seriously considering proposals to require that all children
be given a baseline psychological screening at age two or three as a way
to predict future problems." Since the inception of non-directive therapy
into our classrooms, "Rogerian education" has hidden under many
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different names: Values Clarification, Encounter Groups, Self-Esteem
Training, Mastery Learning. And now, after all of its old names have
fallen into disrepute, Rogers' unworkable educational technique has today
emerged under a new banner: Outcome-Based Education, or "OBE."
OBE requires its students to attain preordained "outcomes"
before they are allowed to graduate. These outcomes do not provide skills
or knowledge, but train children in behavior, attitudes and feelings. Dans
effect, what the schools are telling students is, "If you don't think the way
we want you to, you cannot get a diploma."
The result of Rogerian education was a total collapse of our school
system, and even Rogers knew it. Toward the end of his life, he came to
call it a "pattern of failure." His colleague, psychologist William Coulson,
did likewise, describing OBE as "the idea where we drop subject matter
and we drop Carnegie Units [grading from A to F] and we just let
students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the
politically correct attitudes."
By then, however, it was too late. A whole movement had
grown up around Rogers and Coulson, one which they could no longer
contrôle. And today, as psychiatric influence continues to grow in our
schools, we have children who cannot read or apply simple math to
everyday problems.
By the mid 1980s, 13 percent of American 17-year-olds were
functionally illiterate, ie, cannot read above the fourth grade level.
Between 25 and 44 million American adults cannot read the poison
warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from a child's teacher, or the front
page of the daily newspaper.
As of 1993, it was conservatively estimated that there were
almost 100,000 people with literacy difficulties in New Zealand. UNE
survey carried out on Australians in 1989 showed that some 32 percent
"had problems completing job histories or reading commercial medicine
labels."
Meanwhile, in Britain, more than 2 million people are said to
be completely illiterate. And according to a United Nations report,
between 500,000 and 800,000 Germans were totally illiterate in 1989.
[CCHR, Psychiatry: Destroying Morals, 1995, p. 8-11]
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The Management of Child Behavior Through Medication
A growing number of children are being referred by their
schools to doctors for the treatment of behavioral and learning disorders
attributed to brain dysfunction. Millions of students are now sent to
special education classes or given prescriptions for Ritalin and other
powerful, addictive medications for conditions termed learning
disabilities, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),
and attention deficit disorder (ADD). Fred Bauman, MD , a specialist in
child neurology for 35 years, contends that these children are said to have
conditions that do not really exist:
"I diagnose these children the same way that I diagnose real
diseases, such as epilepsy, brain tumors, and so on, and I find that they
are normal. I do not find that I can validate the presence of any disease in
this population of children.
"Nonetheless, the diagnosing and labeling continues, and schools, not
liking my verdict, have access to plenty of physicians that will validate
their diagnoses and give them the prescription they want, which is a
medication or a referral to special education. That's what is going on.
After all these years, neither dyslexia nor ADHD are diseases that can be
validated in the true sense of the word, and that's the bottom line. " [30)
Dr. Bauman's statement is confirmed by current educational research. Dans
a study in the Harvard Educational Review, the accuracy of labels
ascribed to young children was questioned, and it was determined that
"more than 80 percent of the student population could be classified as
learning disabled by one or more of the definitions presently jinn use. "
Furthermore, "based upon the records of those already certified as
learning disabled and those not, experienced evaluators could not tell the
difference. " [31)
Psychiatrist and board certified neurologist Sidney Walker:
“These children are labeled hyperactive by family
practitioners, neurologists, and psychiatrists. Some of them are initially
'diagnosed' by teachers, school counselors, or nurses. There's only one
problem with this scenario: Hyperactivity is not a disease. It's a hoax
perpetrated by doctors who have no idea what's really wrong with these
children.” [Sidney Walker, III, The Hyperactivity Hoax, 1998 p.5]
Walker says that the real underlying medical problems facing
many children labeled “ADD” go undiagnosed and untreated. Il a
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found a disturbing link between adult cocaine addiction and early use of
the amphetamine-like drug Ritalin. In a survey of adult cocaine users, he
found that most of them had an untreated physical complaint that existed
since childhood. About two thirds of those individuals had been given
Ritalin as children. While Walker admits that one survey does not
necessarily prove a link between undiagnosed medical problems, Ritalin
use, and subsequent drug use, it does raise questions which should be
explored.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration has looked at this
issue as well. A 1995 DEA report cited a study which showed an increase
in adult cocaine use in individuals exposed to Ritalin as children when
compared to children given the same psychiatric diagnosis but not treated
with Ritalin.
Why are schools misdiagnosing and mislabeling
les enfants? The problem is rooted in the failure of the school system to
acknowledge that it is not particularly good at teaching children who
stand out from average learners. Rather, the system blames students for
not fitting in. Such children may rate poorly on culturally biased
standardized tests, enter school less experienced at reading and writing
than their classmates, be resistant to socialization practices, or even be
more intelligent than their peers.
In Learning Denied, Denny Taylor, a distinguished educator
and award-winning Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Urban and
Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, tells how
the educational system repeatedly misdiagnosed a bright, articulate,
literate first grader named Patrick, and recommended that he be placed in
special education and under medical management.
Taylor writes that problems are bureaucratic, not child-
centered: " . . . Recent research presented in the social science literature
indicates that there are many children like Patrick who have been (and
continue to be) handicapped by our educational system. Patrick's case is
not atypical. Relying on testing to find out what is 'wrong' with the child,
blaming the child when he or she does not learn in the ways expected in
our public institutions, and searching for the glitch in the child's
neurological makeup so that the school (system) can be exonerated if and
when the child 'fails' are ~all typical of the ways in which we 'educate'
les enfants. " [32)
She then quotes educational researcher Sapon-Shevin, who explains that
"Viewing children as deficient leads special education to direct its efforts
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toward forcing the child to change in order to fit in or be accepted. Ce
approach legitimizes behavioral and medical management techniques
which attempt to 'fix' the child." [33)
An increasingly used tool for "fixing" children is drug therapy,
promoted by child psychiatrists and neurologists who infiltrate schools in
order to make a profit. Bauman points out that "there is a great deal of
money involved here and there are powerful industries connected with
ce. Since the early 70s, we've had a tremendous overproduction of
physicians of all sorts in this country, specifically specialists .
Unfortunately , most specialties have to invent things to do , to pay the
bills, as it were. Child psychiatry, in particular, has had a game plan to
connect with the public schools of the country. They give their
consultative services free. For-profit and not-for-profit child psychiatric
hospitals offer free evaluations to the schools and give in-service
conferences where they convey these disease theories to educators. . . .
So, there is a real quid pro quo arrangement going on between public
education and academic medicine. . . . " [30)
He goes on to assert that unnecessary medication will end only when
doctors are held accountable for their actions: "Before a physician can
administer a certain therapy to your child, there has to be an informed
consent in writing. According to Maitonson vs. Klein (1960), a physician
administering treatment without informed consent of the patient is guilty
of malpractice, no matter how skillfully the treatment may be
administré. If a physician wants to put your child on an addictive
medication to treat ADHD, and say that it is a proven disease or a
biochemical imbalance in the brain, that is a misrepresentation because
there is no validation of ADHD as a disease. " [30)
Student Psychological Records
n 1989, Carolyn Steinke founded the group Parents Involved in
Education after she learned of another serious problem in our schools--the
intrusion into the personal lives of children and their families . Elle
formed the California-based organization after discovering that the
emphasis of educational curriculums had radically shifted from what
children should know when they graduate to what they should be and
demons~ate. An integral part of this new emphasis, Steinke says, is the
administration, by teachers, of psychological tests to children. This, she
learned, was an invasion of Federal Code 98.4, the Hatch Amendment,
which says that no student shall be required, as part of any test or
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curriculum, to reveal information concerning mental or psychological
problems that can be potentially embarrassing to the student or his family,
as well as other personal and family information, such as political
affiliations. Steinke's group is attempting to make parents aware of what
may or may not legally transpire in a classroom.
She tells the story of one emotionally fragile sixth grade boy, who was
asked to write about personal trauma in his life:
"This child came from an emotional background that was very sad. His
mother was very unstable emotionally and had even gone so far as to put
a gun to the father's head in front of the children, and threaten to kill him.
In a court of law, she lost custody. This little boy now is living with his
daddy, a new mama, and a new baby.
"Here he is in the sixth grade and he's taking a stress test called the Kid's
Stress Test. The mom and dad were never told that their child was taking
this test. The only reason we got our hands on it was because he took it
maison.
"The test starts out by saying, life can be hard when you're a child
grandir. Grown-ups think that kids have it easy. They say that all we
have to do is go to school and play and that they can take care of us so we
really have nothing to worry about. Well, grown-ups aren't so smart after
all. They don't know everything . Kids have plenty of things to worry
about and here are some stories. . . . Some kids get beat. Some are
screamed and yelled at. Some come from divorced homes.
"He was supposed to write down which stories he identified with and
then answer a list of questions which directly related to the home: Do you
have too much responsibility? Not enough responsibility? Do you live in
a crowded home? Are conditions at home physically not good? Are they
dirty or messy or are you poor? Do you not have enough to eat? Est
someone at home on drugs or alcohol? Are your parents separated or
divorced? Does a person physically pick on you at home? I never have
enough time to study for tests; I have too many chores and
responsibilities; I don't have enough money; on and on and on....
"At the end of the test, the child was to total up his score based on how
much stress he had. Then he was asked: Are you surprised at your stress
level? Is it good or bad? Is there anything you can do to help yourself?
Do you think your relative is suffering from stress? If yes , what can you
do to help them? " [34)
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Steinke is concerned about the possible effects of these tests on troubled
les enfants. For instance, the sixth-grade boy who had endured so much
trauma at home did not need that all brought back as a result of a written
tester. As Steinke puts it, "If children really have emotional problems and
you open them up to hemorrhaging , who is going to be there to close
them?"
She also asks, "What are they doing with the answers to these
questions?" Parents Involved in Education has learned that the
information obtained by the federal government is being stored, and that
it can potentially be used against children at some later date:
"Electronic portfolios store the information for each child. We find states
all over the nation that are adopting legislation to put into there what they
call the speedy express, ' that is, an electronic transcript. It is the
exchange of permanent records electronically for students in schools from
the National Center on Education Statistics. . We see what kind of
information they are keeping on our children, and it is absolutely privacy-
invading. " [34)
Steinke reports that on the federal level, the Department of Labor's
Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills has made an
alliance with the Department of Education. Together, they've developed a
"learning for living blueprint on performance. " This hook-up between
the Departments of Labor and Education is called Workiink, and it
functions as a school-to-work records system. Worklink is promoted to
employers as having information they need to know in order to make
sound hiring decisions.
Steinke tells how Workiink is promoted as a tool for businesses:
"Employers are told, the more information you have about an applicant's
real skills, the better your hiring decisions and the less your employee
turnover work will be. Teachers' confidential ratings are supplied of
students' work-related behaviors, attitudinal evaluations , and
psychological evaluations Workiink has all this information on an
electronic database. An employer can search for a list of names that
match their needs." [34)
Parents Involved in Education expresses grave concern about this entire
process of obtaining, storing, and using information about children.
Steinke explains how a teacher's ratings might "blacklist" a child much
later in life. "Their honesty , their integrity , and what they get out of the
classroom, can be used against the child all of their life. If they get a 6 out
of a low on honesty, do you think they'll ever get hired? " [34)
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Who is Mentally Ill?
Is our culture too bent on finding a mental "condition" to explain away
whatever is wrong in people's lives, or whatever doesn't meet the norm?
As we've seen, underlying some of the questionable practices in
psychiatry today is the issue of who is really mentally ill. At this juncture
it's important to ask ourselves whether we are over-medicalizing our
lives.
For instance, is a child who is uncontrollable in school really suffering
from a disorder (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), or is he simply
in need of a different type of learning environment? The answer may
determine whether he is put on a powerful drug for many years . Should a
depressed senior citizen be considered a patient with a disease, or simply
someone responding to the changing circumstances of her life? le
answer may determine whether she will become subject to repeated
electric shocks to the brain. Clearly, the question of whether we're too
disease- or condition-oriented is more than an academic one for many
personnes.
Dr. Thomas Szasz, distinguished author and professor of psychiatry
emeritus, is one psychiatrist who has never believed in the mental-
condition-oriented
mindset [35) "Ever since I first reflected on matters such as madness and
madhouses and especially the incarceration of insane persons in insane
asylums--long before I went to college, much less medical school--it has
seemed to me that the entire edifice of psychiatry rests on two false
premises, namely: that persons called 'mental patients' have something
others do not have--mental illness; and that they lack something others do
have--free will and responsibility. In short, psychiatry is a house of cards,
held up by nothing more, or less, than mass belief in the truth of its
principles and the goodness of its practices. If this is so, then psychiatry is
a religion, not a science, a system of social controls, not a system of
treating illness."
One of Szasz's themes has always been that people's behavior should be
viewed first and foremost as a reaction to circumstances, rather than as
manifestations of disorders. If we're too mechanistic in our view of
behavior, then "joy and sadness, fear and elation, anger, greed--all human
aspirations and passions--are thus interpreted as the manifestations of
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unintentional, amoral, biochemical processes. In such a world, nothing is
willed; everything happens.
Yet, this mechanistic, disease-oriented mindset is predominant, and
increasing. As the Citizens Commission on Human Rights puts it, [37)
"Psychiatry has consistently invented more and more mental illnesses
during the last decades, and the pharmaceutical companies have then
invented the chemical 'cures.' Worse, the effects of these drugs create yet
more categories of mental illness. It is a circle that profits everyone but
the patients."
An article in the Journal of Mind and Behavior [38) elaborates:
"The first DSM, published in 1952, listed 60 types and
subtypes of mental illness. Sixteen years later, DSM II more than doubled
the number of disorders. The number of disorders grew to more than 200
with DSM III in 1980. The current guide, DSM III-R (1987) includes
tobacco dependence, developmental disorders and sexual dysfunction,
school learning problems, and adolescent rebellion disorders. DSM IV
9in preparation) will add more disorders. Clearly the more of the ordinary
human problems in living that are labeled 'mental illnesses , ' the more
people will be found who suffer from at least one of them--and a cynic
might add, the more conditions that therapists can treat and for which
they can collect health-insurance payments."
Patients Speak Out
The best way to learn about psychiatry's darker side is from the firsthand
accounts of patients. The individuals who tell their stories here are not
exceptional cases . In fact, their tales of what happened to them behind
the locked doors of mental health facilities are representative of many,
many others. Nor are these people necessarily mentally ill. These are in
many senses average Americans who have the same questions, concerns,
and problems as anyone else, but who mistakenly placed their faith in
psychiatry . These people tell us that what happened to them could
happen to anybody . What they share is a knowledge that our mental
health industry is very sick and needs immediate reform. Let's hear their
side of the story.
Angele Painter "They treated me like a criminal."
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At 63 , Angele Painter was forcibly taken from her home without any
provocation, handcuffed, and dragged to a psychiatric facility where she
was strip searched, forcibly drugged, and made to stay against her will.
This all as a result of her having called a city agency about environmental
pollutants in her home that were making her sick. Il convient de noter que
Aligele is of Armenian origin and has a noticeable accent (but does speak
English fairly well and understands it, since her husband is American).
Her accent, combined with her frustration at having been given the
runaround by various governmental offices, may have led to a
misunderstanding over the phone. Be that as it may, there is no excuse for
the way she was treated. This is an abbreviated account of her almost
surrealistic nightmare:
"The house we bought over four years ago had mechanical problems. It
had chemical contamination and I became sick. I had a bitter sensation
and a headache, and I suffered. I called our lawyer and he suggested I call
the health department.
"I did, and two or three people came. One of them suggested [a particular
home remodeling plan) since the furnace was in the laundry room and
that's why the odor was traveling. It would cost a lot of money and we
couldn't afford to do that. It was a very bad situation.
"Since we couldn't afford it, I called social services because I thought
they might have a senior citizen's program. I called and explained. Ils
might have misunderstood me because the next thing that happened was
that the police and the Kimball Hospital aides and nurses came. Ils
were holding flashlights and hollering. They wanted to come in and they
scared me. They forced themselves in.
Then they started blaming
me for calling them and complaining. They accused me and said there
was nothing wrong with the furnace, that I was just making up the story.
They treated me like a criminal. They didn't let me call my husband. je
was scared and shocked. I said, 'I can't believe this, treating me like a
criminal. I haven't done anything. '
"They said, 'We have to take you to the hospital' and I said 'What for?
We can sit and talk. ' 'No, ' they said, 'if you don't come, we'll cuff your
mains. ' I was more scared. Then they called another policeman. Ils
cuffed my hands and dragged me out. The nurses were so angry at me.
They were scary looking people. They humiliated me in front of the
neighbors. I mentioned to the nurses that I had back problems and was
taking medication. Ils s'en fichaient. One of the nurses said to the police
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that I might have a gun and shoot. They started checking me and I got
dérangé. They shoved me in the back of the police car.
"They took me to Kimball Hospital. It was awful, scary. A nurse's aide
came and asked me questions and wrote things down. Then they wanted
to give me medication. I refused. Four big men came and held my hands
as they gave me a shot of medication against my will.
"Later, a psychiatrist came and I said to him, 'This is wrong what they
are doing. Thank God, I'm of sound mind, I'm intelligent. This is unfair
and unjust.' He just smiled and said, 'Mrs. Painter, you must have
problèmes. We'll take you away.
"They put me on a gurney and then into an ambulance and took me to
Hampton Hospital. I was cold and I couldn't believe what was happening.
Then a gentleman came towards morning. He said, 'Mrs. Painter, I have
your statement here. It says that you have told them that you want to
commit suicide. ' I said, 'This is absolutely wrong. I have never thought
à propos de ça. I have never said anything. Whatever I have said, they have
written the wrong thing.'
"When I explained the situation, he told me I could get a lawyer. I
begged the doctor to let me go but he said to me, 'Once you are here, you
are under our observation. ' I suffered a lot.
"Finally [through my husband's intercession) I got out. But it was a
terrible experience. During my stay there, I met other people that had
come wrongfully. One of them calls it police brutality . " [39)
Amy Rankin: "Shock treatments have destroyed my life."
Amy Rankin has been in the hands of psychiatric authorities for most of
her childhood and adolescent years. An abused child, she was placed in a
hospital at 1 3 for depression and suicidal tendencies after years of
counseling and prescribed medication. There she remained for the next
five years of her life. This is her account of how five years of "therapy" in
an institution, which included a weekly series of electric shock treatments
, left her emotionally crippled for life:
"At first, I was in a private institution. But when my insurance ran out I
was moved to a state facility . After being in therapy for awhile the
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doctors decided to give me electric shock. I was 14 at the time. Dans une
year, I had anywhere from 40 to 60 treatments.
"The whole experience was frustrating and horrifying. I never
participated in my own life decisions; decisions were always being made
by adults. I was always being told what to do and where to go. I had no
sense of control and felt totally discounted by the people who were
supposed to be there to help me. As an abused child, I felt discounted by
my own family. Then I felt discounted by the very people who were
supposed to be helping me. Instead of realizing that it was a living
problem, they thought I had some kind of biological disorder in my brain.
"If we showed any kind of anger or if we were feeling discounted and we
tried to express that, it was seen as psychotic behavior. We were tied in
restraints and given shocks to make us calm down. We were given
medication that has the same effect as a straitjacket. You can't move and
you can , t think because you re on Thorazine or Mellaril. You can't write
letters or communicate with anyone because you're so drugged up.
"As a result of the shock treatments, I have been left with a closed head
blessure. That's the best way I can describe it. It was not an effective way of
dealing with depression because everything that was disturbing me was
still there. I just didn't know why I was disturbed. It's like knowing that a
square peg won't fit into a round hole but not knowing why.
"Shock treatments have destroyed my life. I still have to deal with
emotional stress, and I have not learned how to deal with it.
"My whole life has been complicated by shock treatments . I was an
eighth grader when I got shocked. After shock, I have third- and fourth-
grade academic skills . As an adult, that has prevented me from knowing
where the letter 0 is in the alphabet. It's difficult to know what has more
value, a dime or a nickel. I have to ask someone how to spell coffee 16
fois. If I walk down the street, it means not being able to read a street
signe. It means not being able to fill out an application that asks me to
explain how some of my skills can help in the job. It means not
knowing how to write words that I want to use. It means going into a
grocery store, giving the clerk a $5 bill, and not knowing whether or not I
get back the correct change because I can't remember how to count
argent. That's what it's like. Ça ne part pas. It's permanent and it's
totally frustrating. It's not a matter of relearning these things. It's having
to live with a closed head injury on top of everything else.
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"I run a national newsletter for shock survivors who feel they've been
harmed by this treatment. Almost everyone who reads the newspaper and
contacts me tells me that they feel they've been harmed. Not one survivor
has told me that this treatment has benefited them. I would encourage
shock survivors and mental health consumers to really take a look at how
they're being oppressed. " [15)
Sandra: "When the psychiatrist suggested hospitalization, I trusted his
Conseil. .
In 1968, a woman named Sandra sought psychiatric help for depression
over the death of her baby . When her psychiatrist suggested
hospitalization, she trusted that he knew what was best for her. Once in
the hospital, though, she quickly changed her opinion:
"We're taught in this society to see a psychiatrist for depression. And
that's what I did. I started seeing a psychiatrist for a normal real-life
sadness in my life. Anybody would be sad after the death of a baby. Et
when the psychiatrist suggested hospitalization, I trusted his advice and
walked into the hospital of my own free will. I was no danger to myself
or to anyone else. I was there because I had a broken heart over the death
of my baby . And they started shock treatments on me.
"When I had had the first one, I woke up terrified and with an
excruciating headache. I couldn't think straight. When I tried to leave the
hospital, the nurse called the guards. The elevators were stopped. j'étais
dragged to my room and tied to my bed in four-point restraints. Four-
point restraints is having each ankle and wrist bound securely so that you
can't move or fight or get away. I was force-drugged and force-shocked. je
was literally left laying in my own sweat and tears until I smelled like a
filthy animal. I received this treatment over and over again until by the
time I got out of the hospital I couldn't connect my thoughts well enough
to even carry on a normal conversation. I was born and raised in the
Birmingham, Alabama area. I didn't know my way around town anymore.
I couldn't even find my way to the store. One of my sisters said that I
reminded her of a zombie . Another sister said that I seemed to have the
mentality of a three-year-old child. It literally took me years to be able to
connect my thoughts well enough to carry on a normal conversation.
"When I learned that the same thing is happening to other people today I
had to start getting involved. I got heavily involved with children's issues
because this is so sad, and started a group called CRY, Citizens Rescuing
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Youth, to stop psychiatry from making mental patients out of our
les enfants. Psychiatry is zeroing in on the fact that Medicaid pays hundreds
of dollars a day for the in-house psychiatric evaluation of children.
" One of the cases I handled personally was that of a mother who literally
lost all vital signs because she had an ovary rupture. They were able to
bring her back but she was unable to care for herself much less her two
young sons . She signed what she thought was temporary custody of these
two children to the State Department of Human Resources. Puisque
psychiatry had been lecturing at the State Department of Human
Resources on how they can help these foster children in state custody,
these children, who were normally upset about being away from their
mother, were put in a psychiatric hospital.
"When their mother was able to get them back, they weren't given to her.
She was denied visiting rights for months. The youngest child, age 7, was
overmedicated on psychiatric drugs and put in what they call a quiet
room, which is actually a padded cell. He was so broken-hearted that
while he was having hallucinations from the drugs they had given him, he
tried to hang himself on his own shoe laces . [40)
Diana Loper. "It only takes a minute to destroy a brain.
At 24, Diana Loper was given electroshock for post-partum depression
and an inability to sleep after the birth of her child. After 24 treatments,
she was released in a far worse condition, and could no longer care for
herself or her family . As a result, her husband divorced her and her child
was taken away by the courts. This is her story:
"My story is many stories. There are thousands. Over a hundred
thousand persons per year receive ECT I don't even like to use the term
therapy--this is only a procedure.
"I had a premature child, post-partum depression, and sleep deprivation.
The post-partum depression is, of course, what we call the baby blues,
and the sleep deprivation was from having a very sick child. j'étais
married to a preacher and we decided to go to a psychiatrist to talk about
what was going on with me. This psychiatrist decided that I needed shock
traitements.
"I didn't go for everything they said but my husband did. The psychiatrist
told my husband, 'Well, you know, she's very depressed, and all we have
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to do is put her to sleep. There will be a little bit of a jolt through her
body, and she'll have a little convulsion. It will be like going to sleep.
And then she'll wake up the next day and everything will be fine. She'll
be happy again. She won't be depressed. ' I remember looking at that
psychiatrist and saying, 'Let's get real here. What are you going to do to
moi? Are you going to wipe out all the bad that ever happened to me. . . ? '
My husband then said, 'Now, honey, listen to me. You cry all the time.
Let's try this procedure. It won't hurt. It will only take a minute.'
"So, they gave me 24 shock treatments for my post-partum depression
and sleep deprivation. If I had been allowed to go ahead and play this out
and let it go through its natural course, I probably would have been
bien. But young, new husband, new baby, away from home, you go to
these people you supposedly trust. My husband signed for the treatments
believing that this was going to do some good. God only knows how he
thought that but that's what he thought. And so, I was shocked against my
volonté. I was straitjacketed and forcibly shocked.
"What happens with ECT is they give you a certain drug that puts you to
dormir. Then, when you wake up, your grief is supposedly over. After this
procedure had been given to me, I woke up in a room by myself and
didn't know where I was or who I was because what this procedure does
is it puts you on a euphoric high, a brain-damage high. They might as
well just take a sledge hammer and knock you in the head with it because
after a head injury you walk around like, what's going on? The world is
wonderful. The world is fine. It will put you on this high. . . But six
months after shock~, after your brain-damage high is over, you're
suicidal. I did not go into the hospital because I was suicidal. After they
got through shocking me, I was.
"After the insurance money runs out, they will put you on the street.
Well, they put me on the street. I had no way of starting life because they
did no follow-up. . . . So, what it did was wiped out my life, and I had to
start over, but I did not know where to start over or who to start over
avec.
"After the shock treatments, I didn't know my child, I didn't know my
mari. My husband didn't want to be married to me anymore because I
wasn't the same person that I was. So my husband divorced me. le
courts took my child away from me . I read on what was probably a
second-grade level and did math on a sixth-grade level. I kept a diary
during this whole process of being shocked and remember the last thing I
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wrote. It states that if it's the last thing I do before I die, you'll never be
able to do this to anyone again.
"I got back on my feet with the help of my parents. I learned what a
toothbrush was again, and I learned how to put my shoes on the right
pieds. I kind of started my life all over again because I knew that I had a
child that I had to find and I didn't want him to find this basket case of a
mother running around.
"It only takes a minute to destroy a brain. And those doctors destroyed
my brain and my life. Now I have epilepsy. I have two grand mal seizures
a day because of this procedure. The only reason I did not lock myself up
in my house and never come out again was to stand up for what I know is
droite. I know that this is a treatment that needs to be banned. There's
nothing good about this treatment. It's a brain-injury high. It's a closed
head injury. The recipients of this horrible treatment who join our
organization, The World Association of Electroshock survivors, say that
their memory never returns to normal after ECT " [13,41)
Karen Robbins: "I've been falsely imprisoned."
Karen Robbins was imprisoned at the University Behavioral Center in
Orlando, Florida, after responding to a phony health spa advertisement
promoted by a patient broker via television. Her case is currently in
litigation:
"I was watching a TV program and I made a 1-800 call about going to a
health spa in Florida. I thought, 'Gee, that would be a wonderful thing to
do. ' It was during a time in my life when I wanted some changes made
and I thought a health spa would be wonderful for weight loss.
"When I got to Florida I was picked up by limousine. When I entered the
lobby of the center, it was very nice and friendly. But when they closed
the doors behind me and locked them, I could not leave. I noticed that the
people who were there were mental patients. It was very obvious. Là
were people who were shaking and people who had no control of
themselves . There were one-on-one caregivers. I was terrified. Ils ont gardé
me there for seven days against my will and they billed my insurance
company over a thousand dollars a day.
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"The first thing I did was ask to talk to someone and they said that
because it was going on 6 : 00 there was no one there who could help me
out, that I would have to wait until the next day. The next day, they gave
me another runaround. They told me that I was a very, very sick person,
that I was totally depressed, co-dependent, and extremely violent. Je viens
looked at them and I said, 'I'm sorry, but there must be someone else in
this room because that's not me.'
"I tried to leave on several occasions but there were very, very large
guards and they denied me access to the door. I told them that I wanted to
go home, that first of all they had kidnapped me, they had brought me
there under false pretenses, and they were keeping me there against my
volonté. They were interested in only two things: money from my insurance
company, and keeping me there as long as they could to obtain that
argent.
"It was six days of telling them I wanted to be released. I did not sleep all
the while I was there. From morning until night there was violence going
sur. There was screaming . There were outbursts . I was afraid to sleep .
They told me I could go in 72 hours. The doctor said, 'I have the right to
keep you. I said, 'you have no right to keep me here. I've been falsely
imprisoned.'
"Finally on Monday, I told them, 'if you do not release me I am going to
have a class action lawsuit against you. ' I said, 'you are keeping me here
against my will and you are harming me instead of doing me any good. '
With that, they called the patient broker that got me in there and the
broker said, 'Let her go; she's a trouble-maker. ' " [42)
Nickie Saizon: "He came out worse than when he came in.
Nicki's insurance company was milked after she admitted her son to a
psychiatric facility, in good faith, to help him overcome a drug problem.
Five and a half weeks and thousands of dollars laterq her son, never
having gotten the help he needed, came out worse than when he entered:
"In October 1987, my son told me that he had a drug problem and that he
wanted help. I had no idea where to turn so I looked in the Yellow Pages
and found a place in Ft. Worth called Care Unit. First, I had to go up
there and meet with a counselor. They said that they had to see if he was
eligible to come in. I found out later that they were checking to see if we
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had insurance, which unfortunately we did. He was eligible so I put him
in there.
"It was supposed to cost about $300-$400 per day but they have a lot of
hidden costs. They had a community room with a TV but they would
charge $35 to watch. They had Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings
where they would charge anywhere from $30-60 per meeting. Puis ils
had what they call family week. They required that you go all week. Après
I got there, they told me it was $150 extra. They also charged $15 for a
meal ticket. And they had a different psychologist there. Ce n'était pas le
psychiatrist that I got the bill from. I talked to him maybe 15 minutes out
of the whole week. I never met the psychiatrist I got the bill from.
"They did nothing. I finally pulled him one evening after going to visit
lui. I was sitting across from the nurse's station waiting for the NA
meeting to end so that I could visit with my son. When the [fleeting
ended and all the kids came out, I did not see him. I waited a few minutes
and finally asked one of the kids where he was. They said they didn't
know and walked off. Then one of the kids came back and said he was in
his room. I went in his room where I found him so doped up on
tranquilizers that he did not know what day it was, what time it was,
rien. He came out and the nurse said, 'We have been so concerned.
I've been taking your blood pressure and checking on you to see if you
were still breathing. ' I said, it's over, and we went home. My total bill for
Care Unit for 5 weeks was $15,663.07." [9)
Later, on the recommendation of one of the nurses from Care Unit who
stayed in touch with her son, Nickie admitted her son to a state facility,
which resulted in more expense and devastation:
"One of the nurses kept in contact with him by phone and we ended up
readmitting him on Christmas Eve. But then they called me and said they
couldn't handle him and wanted to transfer him to the psychiatric institute
in Ft. Worth. I later found out that this is like a big corporation. They all
work together.
"When they go to the Psychiatric Institute (P1), they are locked in. We
couldn't bring in anything, not toothpaste, shampoo, or anything. Ils
had to get it through the hospital. They would give him small sample
tubes of shampoo and the shampoo would cost $8 a bottle and the
conditioner was $10 a bottle. When he went in, he had some burns on his
arms and they used the tiny sample tube that the pharmaceutical
companies give them, and charged $25 for that little tube. Puis ils
charged you $20 for the nurse to put it on. I mean, they had it all broken
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down. Everything was under lock and key, elevators, everything. I had to
go there once a week and meet with a psychologist. They charged $125 a
week for that. My bill for P1 was $38,231.95.
"I dropped my son off at Psychiatric Institute on December 27th. I
picked him up February 27th. I dropped my son off on December 27th. je
picked up a stranger on February 27th. When he was up there, some kids
were there who were in with the skinheads and he got involved with
leur. He came out worse than when he came in. " [9)
Evelyn Woodson: "They put my child on Ritalin without my permission.
Evelyn Woodson's son was placed in a psychiatric facility while a
neurological problem went undiagnosed:
"It's very painful for me to retell this story. The reason I do it is because I
don't want other people to experience what my son and I experienced.
"The first time that I noticed that my child had some sort of visual
problem was when he was an infant. . . At about 18 months, he would go
upstairs without our noticing, and fall downstairs. This happened several
fois. . . .X-rays never indicated any damage. . . Then, when he was five,
he fell while running and broke his arm. Again, this let me know that
there was a persisting visual impairment of some sort. I sought all types
of diagnoses from various medical doctors and it was always a question
mark. Nobody could give me a clear diagnosis of what the problem was.
"In intelligence, he did not manifest any type of deficit whatsoever. To
the contrary, he was much more intelligent than children his own age. Il
could hold conversations with me about things that I was very surprised
at. For instance, he knew what bionics were. He could draw robots before
age five, he could design rocket ships....
"As he entered elementary school, there were always complaints that he
didn't complete his assignments. He was subjected to corporal
punishment because he could not complete the work, and each time that I
approached the schoolteacher and the principal regarding these matters, I
was degraded and blamed for upholding my child in wrongdoing and not
forcing him to conform. I found that to be very frightening. It's like trying
to fit a square peg into a round hole. They did not have a program or an
individual assessment where they could figure out where this child was
and where he needed to go . They were not willing to make any type of
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an educational plan for this child. I let him go through the third grade in
public school . Then I took him out and put him in private school . C'était
very difficult for me because I wasn't working and I was separated from
my husband at the time.
"At one point, the school psychologist got involved. They shifted the
focus from a possible medical problem to a behavioral disorder. At that
time, I was not aware that people were being exploited just for the sake of
money . That was a hard lesson that I learned.
"When he was 12, I was told by the school psychologist that he needed
to be in a residential program. This occurred because I asked them to
assess my son's IQ and to give him an aptitude test in order t6 properly
place him in the school system. Rather than dealing with this, it was
easier for them to blame my son. Again, I went to a neurologist. Ils
told me that my son needed to have a brain scan. The brain scan did not
manifest any type of tumor or any type of problem....
"In 1985, he was admitted to a residential program. That was a very bad
expérience. When I first took him to be admitted, I had to give them $800
cash up front. They told me that I could see my child any time of the day
or night. They told me I could call and speak to someone at the facility at
any time . But once they got my child in and the doors were locked,
everything changed. They put my child on Ritalin without my permission.
They did not allow me to see my child. . . . When I did get the
opportunity to speak to my son, I questioned him and he told me that the
drugs that they had given him made him hyper. They put him in a room
with a child who was totally psychotic and the child attacked my son.
" . . . I called the administrator and explained to them that I had been told
un
thing and something else was happening. I basically got the brush-off.
They set up an appointment for me to come in and speak with them. je
thought I was going to talk about the conditions that my son was being
subjected to. Later, I found out that they disguised that as an evaluation
for me. There were things being written
up about me without my knowledge I later got the transcripts from the
facility and found out they labeled me as a 'black woman that is striving
to be white. ' My child is interracial and his father is white.
"In that evaluation, I was asked about my background, my history, and
what kind of childhood I had. I said that my stepmother was white, and
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she was. My mother died when I was 13 months so I never knew her. ma
stepmother was the person who raised me, and that was the only female
role model that I related to. I figured that was something that swayed me
to not have prejudice, and thereby eventually marry into a white family .
That was twisted and misused to make it look as if I was some kind of a
sick person for being in a mixed marriage . That was eventually used in
court to try to prosecute my son when he ran into some legal problems
later on.
"As he got older, the problems persisted. In 1989, when he was 15 , I
took him to a neurologist, and the neurologist said that he didn't think my
son had any type of medical problem. I knew better because I'm a mother
with two other older children. I knew this child was manifesting a
medical problem because he was very, very forgetful. He would do his
homework many times and he would lose it before he got to school. Or he
would leave it at home. He just couldn't remember things.
"All the way through this, there was a lot of insurance fraud. And my son
was put on Prozac in another institution without my permission, and it
has destroyed him. He is not able to hold a job. He'll be 21 years old. il est
not eligible for 551 or any type of assistance. He is married and has a
child and cannot support the child. I'm basically having to do that.
"My son was diagnosed in 1991 with a right temporal lobe lesion. That's
almost like a brain tumor, and that was there all along.
"The lesson is that the people that are working in the psychiatric field are
not always healthy people, because they have an addiction to money and
power. That's what I ran into, compulsive obsession over money and
exercising power over people because they use the law to lock people up
and hold them against their will. They can get judges to sign orders to
hold people, but when the insurance money runs out, they throw the
person out destroyed with drugs and by having been exposed to people
that really do have a lot of psychological problems. My son wasn't t born
with psychological problems. They have manufactured them through
paperwork and through drugs. " [43)
Luninging Pasion: "Then they found out that we did not have a job with
Assurance. My son was released."
Luninging Pasion's 16-year-old son had been feeling sad, but never
suicidal, due to normal adolescent romance problems . Yet he was
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abducted from his school and placed in a psychiatric facility for no
apparent reason--other than the fact that somebody thought his family had
couverture d'assurance. When Luninging tried to get him back, the
psychiatrist threatened to report her to child services and to take her son
away for good. Only upon learning that the family had no insurance
coverage did they let him go:
"My son was taken out of school when he was 16 years old. They told
me the reason they took my son was because he was suicidal. But before
they took my son, I was called to the school and my insurance was
checked by the sex and drug counselor. Then the sex and drug counselor
gave my telephone number to an institute that called me and asked me to
bring my son to them. I told them that there was no need for my son to be
brought to that hospital.
"When they found that I was not going to bring my son to them, they
insisted on doing a free evaluation at the school, even though I told them
that there was no need for my son to be brought there. I was forced to say
yes to the free evaluation because they wouldn't put down the phone until
I said yes.
"The following day, the lady from the institute went to the school and
took my son without even telling me that they were going to take out him
from school. I don't know why they took him out of the school. le
school even told me that my son wasn't doing anything wrong. They just
told me that this lady took my son from school....
"Then when I went there they didn't want to give my son to me. They
told me that they had the legal right to hold my son. They told me that my
son was disoriented and confused . But I remember on that same morning
having brought my son to school and he was alright. Every day I went
there, for about four days. I didn't have any chance of talking to my son
for longer than five minutes. My son told me that he would be there until
Avril. He was taken February 22nd. I told my son, they cannot do that. je
am going to try to take you out of this place.
"After 72 hours, I went to the institute and this lady told me that, whether
I liked it or not, my son would remain here. I prayed at the time because it
was really painful. They didn't want to listen to me. They didn't want to
understand me. All they wanted to do was to lock my son up. Then, after
praying, I told them that in 1 983 , my husband was laid off because I
wanted to tell them that I did not have any money to pay their business. je
knew that if you bring somebody into the hospital you have to pay for it.
So, I told the woman there that I could not pay her. After hearing that my
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husband was laid off, she started asking me where my husband was
travail. Then they found out that we did not have a job with insurance.
My son was released. " [44)
Lillian: "It was a virtual hellhole."
Lillian's family and work problems, combined with her hypothyroidism,
were causing her to experience depression. But when she sought
psychiatric help, the potent medications she was given caused side effects
that worsened her condition. As a result, she was institutionalized at the
Carrier Center near Princeton, New Jersey, for 60 days, during which
time she was strip-searched, tied to chairs, forced to take drugs, and given
electroshock therapy without her consent:
"Up until five years ago, I had a full-time job teaching. I was taking care
of an invalid mother who had Alzheimer's disease. Then my mother died
after being in the hospital for a month. I discovered I had a very severe
hypothyroid condition, and I was being evicted from my apartment after
living there for 40 years. It was being turned into a condominium and it
was being renovated over my head. Walls were being knocked down and
pipes were getting broken, causing leaks and so on.
"I developed a major depression and went to visit a psychiatrist, the first
one I
ever encountered in my life. He gave me strong doses of Xanax. Et
when I went to see him again, he added another strong medication called
Desyrel. As a result, I developed side effects. The most severe ones were
breathing difficulties and hair loss. This difficulty in breathing made my
life very uncomfortable. And since no one at that time realized that it was
from the side effect of the medication, I was diagnosed as being
psychotic.
"I was taken to a psychiatric facility where, after a two-minute evaluation
by the admitting physician, I was put into the intensive care unit. j'étais
given constant supervision, so much so that I wasn't allowed to go to the
bathroom myself. I would have to wait maybe 1 5 , 20 minutes before
someone would get ready to take me . I was not allowed to eat with a fork
and knife, only a spoon, and at the end of our meal, when spoons were
counted, if one was missing, we were strip-searched. I found myself
being tied to a chair to keep me from walking when I wanted to.
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"Somehow, while I was there, I developed an injury to my arm, a torn
tendon. When I didn't want to take the medication that was given to me,
because I was afraid of side effects, I was given it involuntarily. j'étais
held down by two male, so-called medical assistants, and it was injected
into my buttocks. For two hours, we were locked out of our room so that
they could search our drawers and closets for whatever they wanted to
trouver. I couldn't use a telephone when I wanted to. When my husband
would come to visit, someone was sitting there listening to our
conversation. It was a virtual hellhole. It was the Carrier Institute near
Princeton, New Jersey, and they 'charged my insurance company $550 a
day just for room and board. That didn't include the payments to the
attending physicians and whatever other expenses were encountered.
"During the time I was there, I was forcibly given ECT without my
consent, although I found out later that my husband had given them
autorisation. The lesson I learned is that before people do anything like
that to another person, and listen to other people's misguided advice, they
should think more carefully and think about alternative treatments for
Quelqu'un. I was just fortunate that I came out alright. " [45)
Marsha Stocker. "when my insurance was up, I was dumped."
Marsha Stocker thought she was entering a clinic for a checkup--not a
psychiatric hospital that would lock her up for 48 days and force surgery
on her:
"I was told that I had an eating disorder and that I needed to go to the
hospital for some tests. What I didn't know was that they had no patients
scheduled to come in and that they were apparently preying on people
with private insurance . I went down and explained to them my problem.
They told me that I had an eating disorder, and I told them I didn't think
alors. I was told that I was denying or lying, and I told them I wanted to
laisser. I got up to leave and the next thing I knew, I was being carted off
to the psychiatric ward and told that I could not take care of myself, and
that I was suicidal. I was in shock and I didn't know what to do. They did
say that I could talk to an attorney . He told me that by law they could
keep me for 96 hours and that I had to stay.
"I was given Prozac and told that if I did not take it I could be put in the
state hospital and kept there involuntarily and indefinitely. I was told that
I could be given shock treatments . I was told that no one in my family
would know where I was. They didn't have to give out any information
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about me. All my identification, everything, was taken away. So, I did
what I had to: I took the medication and waited for a hearing. But I did
not go to a hearing. I was kept for 48 days. During that time, I was given
surgery that I did not want. I repeatedly asked to leave and was repeatedly
told that I could not care for myself.
"When the doctor came in after 96 hours, he asked me about my past
medical history and I told him I had a lump on my breast, which I had
had for 16 years. Two other doctors had told me that it was a
calcification. I was 42 years old and this was normal. All of a sudden, it
was cancer and I needed an $1 1 ,000 surgery. During the surgery, nerves
were severed in my arm, which has left me with permanent damage. j'ai eu
a lumpectomy and radiation. I've since asked doctors to look at the slides
. They tell me that it shows calcifications but they have no way of
knowing whether or not it was cancerous without the biopsy slides, which
I have never received.
"When my insurance was up, I was dumped, and here I am today, still
struggling to find out what really went on. " [46)
Joanne Toglia: "If I slept with him, I'd get out."
Joanne Toglia was supposed to get help for her problems in the hospital.
Instead, she was made to endure sexual abuse by her counselor there:
"I was an abused wife who went to a preacher for help. In return I got
locked up in a mental hospital behind three sets of locked doors . La première
day I was there, they took away everything I had. They took all of my
clothes away from me my purse and everything else, and they put me in a
room with nothing in it. Any time I wanted to use the telephone, they had
an excuse. I couldn't call my family. I was put on drugs, antidepressants,
and different things like that. Every time I attempted to get out, they'd
have an excuse for me not to. Finally, the bottom line came down to, if I
slept with him [the counselor) , I'd get out. If I didn't, I'd go to the state
mental hospital. And at the time, I had four children, 2, 3 , 4, and 6 . j'étais
desperate to see them so after three weeks of being locked up, I finally
slept with him.
"There are two parts to the hospital--there's a locked unit and an open
unité. In the locked unit I slept with him once and in the open unit I slept
with him twice. I went home and just when I thought I was free of
everything, he started coming over to my apartment. I thought he might
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send me to the state hospital if I didn't sleep with him so I did for awhile.
Then, as I got more strength, and I realized that I was out in the
community, I turned him in to the police.
"I was talking to my friends when I got out of the hospital--we had made
friends--it came up in a conversation that he had made them do it too. À
that point, we knew we totally had him.
"The day we turned him in, he got picked up by the police. They looked
through the records. In the records it had things like, he had hugged and
kissed at private counseling. . . There was never any doubt about what
happened to us: He got put in jail--but just until he could get bond. Et
then once he went to trial, there were no charges because there was no
gun or knife used. Had he used a gun or knife, it would have been a
different situation. According to people in the community, he is still
practicing today. " [21)
Gloria Denanya Jones: "You need to know your rights."
Gloria sought professional help after discovering that her husband was
unfaithful. As a result, she was labeled suicidal, locked up, and
stigmatized:
"I was taken to a psychiatric facility by a member of my family because
of some personal problems that I was experiencing, normal problems, like
infidelity, which happen every day; I was a little upset about some of the
things that I was finding out about my husband's relationships. I went
there for an interview to see if I possibly needed an evaluation but they
decided that they would keep me. The doctor said that my mind was
racing because I was talking very fast. I said that I did not want to stay. je
tried to leave and the men in white came after me. This is when the doctor
told me that I better sign myself in or she would put me in lockup and I
would not like that at all. I had to sign myself in.
"They took all my personal possessions and gave me a pamphlet which
told me my rights but, since they had taken my reading glasses from me, I
really couldn't read anything. They put me on a drug called lithium,
which made me very, very calm, almost comatose. And I had to sit there
for 72 hours. They kept saying that I was there on a hold and I kept
saying that I was not. But when we would go into what they called a
cognitive therapy program, which is 1 to 2 hours a day--they had a group
of anywhere from 4 to 12 people, whoever they had in the hospital who
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were not in lockup--they kept asking me if I was suicidal. I said I was
never suicidal. I was never a threat to myself or anyone else. I said, I
came in here for a personal problem. And they kept telling me, well,
you're here on a hold, and you're only here on a hold if you are a threat.
And I said, this is something that I don't understand.
"I refused to sign any papers as far as releasing them from any obligation
or responsibility for any medication that I took. I did take their
medication because I did not want to go to lockup . I was next to the
lockup and I saw exactly what it was that happened to people when they
were locked up. They were strapped down and put in a room. After they
unstrapped them, they locked them in a room, and they were only allowed
to come out whenever they needed to , I guess to smoke a cigarette or eat.
Sometimes they never even got to get out of their room. Anyway, I was
there and I just kept protesting and saying that I shouldn't be there and
that they had no right to do this. Some of the people there kept telling me,
'if you don't stop saying that, they are going to put you in lockup. ' So, I
just did basically what I was told and I just had to stay there the 72 hours.
I believe that had my insurance covered that part of the stay that they
probably would have kept me longer.
"I have learned from this experience that people need to know what their
rights are. I was denied my rights for due process. I was taken away from
my child, my home, my business--and it was against my will--for
something that was a domestic problem, for something that had nothing
to do with any type of real depression.
"You need to know your rights. The public is not aware. I have talked to
several people about this because I came out and said I was committed
and held for 72 hours. They had similar stories. And I can't believe that
this happens today. Ce n'est pas vrai. It's just not right. " [47)
Danielle Deschamps: what the psychiatric establishment has done is
usurp the judiciary power.
Danielle Deschamps was kidnapped and taken to a psychiatric institute
for reasons unbeknownst to her at the time. A native of France, she
noticed a large percentage of foreign people in her ward. She reported
that of the 12 to 15 people in the ward, there was a Polish woman, a
woman from Colombia, a man from Belgium, and a Polish man:
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"I was kidnapped on Columbus Day, October 8, 1990, at 9:00 in the
Matin. I had a wonderful night. I was very happy to have the day off. je
fed my pets. I drank my coffee outside and was just starting the laundry
All of a sudden a policeman and a psychiatrist came, a very fancy
femme. They told me to follow them or I would be put in restraints. Il
was what I heard happened in Europe. As a little girl, some of the
members of my Catholic family were picked up and sent to concentration
camps . I could not believe that this was happening to me here in
America! I could not believe it!
"When they arrived at my house, they took me by total surprise. All they
said was You follow us immediately . ' So I called a friend of mine and
she came right away. She said, 'There is no need to take her away. Ne pas
take her away. ' And she cried. She came with me in the police car and
once we got there, she still took my side....
"I didn't know why I was committed. I wasn't told anything. I didn't
know why, when I got to the snake pit, my clothing was taken away from
me . I was in a cage in the emergency room with two glass windows. Ce
is in Bergen Pines, Paramus, New Jersey.
"When I arrived in the glass cage, there were male policemen there and
two nurses . They told me to immediately undress . I said no because I
had a good night's sleep and I am not sick. I have no reason to be here.
They told me to be quiet and give my clothing to them immediately . je
understood that I was all by myself. I don't have a single relative in the
US So, out of panic, I undressed. One hour later, they ordered me to take
some pills. I said no because I never take any pills except aspirin, very
seldom. . . I'm not a person for drugs. And they called the policeman, got
one who was six feet tall, and took a needle and ripped down my pants
and injected me.
"I asked to call the French consulate and they said no way. They barely
let me go to the bathroom. I was accompanied by police. Then I was sent
to unit Ci . I still thought I would come home the same night. I didn't
know it would go that far. Little by little, I took Haldol and lithium. I fell
into a coma, what they call comatose sleep , one that has been denounced
by many American organizations and by myself....
"Three years later, thanks to the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights,
I have been able to obtain my records. . Now I know why I was arrested. je
was arrested for allegedly scratching, biting, and throwing hot water on
my husband. I never did that but he must have signed a statement saying I
fait. He must have signed this as an excuse. What the psychiatric
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establishment has done is usurp the judiciary power. If my husband
accused me of biting him, I should have gone before a judge. Là
should have been proof of bite marks. There were no bite marks. I never
bit anybody in my life, not even my husband on bad days!
"I demand reparation for this. My reputation has been completely
wrecked. My daughter, who was 12 years old at the time, does not
understand why her mother was put into a mental institution. . . . " [48)
Pat Garring: "When I went to turn him in. . . I realized I wasn't 't the only
one."
Pat's story is one of sexual abuse in an outpatient setting:
"My story takes place over a 20-year period. Actually, the sexual abuse
started in 1987-1989. I was married at the time and my husband was his
patient. Then, I became his patient and was given many drugs His idea of
sex was to make you feel like you were inadequate. He had a lot of power
and a lot of control. He was doing this to other women at the same time,
and he had been doing this to these other women for 20 years.
"I finally got enough courage to turn him in. When I went to turn him in
to the investigators, I realized that I wasn't the only one. After I told one
investigator who he was, he said, 'I was afraid that you were going to say
his name. I need to call in a special investigator. ' And that's what he did.
They told me there were 17 cases ahead of mine but mine was the
strongest. That was back in August 1991 and he came to trial in March
1994. I testified for 4 hours against this man. Only four of us were in any
condition to testify, but my testimony was the strongest.
"He ended up surrendering his license at the end of March but essentially
he went into retirement because, in Utah, it is not a felony, it is not a
crime, to sexually abuse a patient. It is only grossly immoral. That has to
changement.
"I went on television, September 9, 1993 , in shadow so no one could see
my face, to tell people about this man, hoping other people would come
vers l'avant. Not many did. Then, in March 1994, I went on television full-
faced, with full name, because he had surrendered his license. Un autre
lady was on the TV but they shadowed her out because she just couldn't
take everything that happened to her. For 20 years, her whole session was
drugs and to sit on the couch and have sex. [49]
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Endnotes
1 . Joe Sharkey, Bedlam, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994, pp.273-4.
2
"NME to Settle US Fraud Charges, " New York Daily News,
Apr. 15, 1994.
3 Thomas Mulligan, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 10, 1994.
4
Gary Null interview with Randy Lakel, Feb. 17, 1995.
5 C. Marbin and I. Testerman, "The Patient Pipeline, " St. Petersburg
Times, Nov.
14, 1993.
6
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights can be reached at
1-800-869-2247.
Help is free.
7 . Gary Null interview with Bruce Wiseman, Feb . 20, 1995.
8 Gary Null interview with Bruce Wiseman, Nov . 8 , 1994.
9 Gary Null interview with Nickie Saizon, Feb . 20, 1995.
10 M. Smith and C. Rugeley, "Hospital Abuses Lead Lawmakers to
Rethink Controls, " Houston Chronicle, Oct 27, 1991.
11 DG Cameron, ''ECT: Sham Statistics, The Myth of Convulsive
Therapy, and Case for Consumer Misinformation, " The Journal of Mind
and Behavior, 15 : 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 1994, p.177
12
Write to World Association of Electroshock Survivors, PO
Box 16164, Austin
TX 78761 to get involved in banning ECT worldwide and to receive The
Disconnect News.
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13
Gary Null interview with Diana Loper, Feb. 21, 1995.
14
Gary Null interview with Dr. Peter Breggin, Nov. 9, 1994.
15
Gary Null interview with Amy Rankin, Feb. 20, 1995.
16 Gary Null interview with Jan Eastgate, Feb . 2 1 , 1995.
17
Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, American Medical
Association,
" Sexual Misconduct in the Practice of Medicine , " Journal of the
American Medical
Association, Nov. 20, 1991, 266:19, pp.2742-4.
18 Sydney Smith, "The Seduction of the Female Patient, " in Sexual
Exploitation in
Professional Relationships (GO Gabbard, ed.), American Psychiatric
presse
Washington, DC, 1989.
19
Barbara Noel with Kathryn Watterson, You Must Be
Dreaming, Poseidon Press, New York, 1992.
20
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Psychiatric Rape
(booklet), Los Angeles, 1995, p.6.
21 Gary Null interview with Joanne Toglia, Feb . 2 1 , 1995.
22
Gary Null interview with Steve Silver, Feb. 17, 1995.
23 Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Psychiatry 'S Betrayal
(booklet), Los Angeles, 1995, p.5.
24
"20120," CBS, Jan. 26, 1996.
25
Joe Sharkey, op. cit., pp.239-40.
26
Peter Kerr, "Mental Hospital Chains Accused of Much
Cheating on Insurance, " The New York Times, Nov. 24, 1991.
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27
"Psych Chain's Handbook Sought Admission Quotas, " San
Antonio ~press-News, Dec. 5, 1991.
28 Peter R. Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac:
What Doctors Aren 't Telling You About Today '5 Most Controversial
Drug, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994, p.40.
29
Ibid., p.121.
30
Gary Null interview with Dr. Fred Bauman, Feb. 17, 1995.
31. A. Gartner and DK Lipsky, "Beyond Special Education: Toward a
quality system for all students, " Harvard Educational Review, 1987,
57:373.
32
Denny Taylor, Learning Denied, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH,
1991 , p.7.
33 Sapon-Shevin, M. , "Mild Disabilities: in and out of special
education, " in Denny Taylor, op. cit.
34
Gary Null interview with Carolyn Steinke, Feb. 17, 1995.
35 Thomas Szasz, ''Law and Psychiatry: The Problems That Will Not
Go Away,'' Journal of Mind and Behavior, 11 :3 and 4, Summer/Autumn
1990, p.557.
36
Thomas Szasz, Jnsanity--The Idea and its Consequences, John
Wiley and Sons, New York, 1990, p.350.
37
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Psychiatry Destroying
Morals (booklet), Los Angeles, 1995, p.6.
38
GW. Albee, "The Futility of Psychotherapy, " The Journal of
Mind and Behavior, 1 1 :3 & 4, Summer/Autumn 1990, p.372.
39
Gary Null interview with Angele Painter, Feb. 20, 1995.
40
Gary Null interview with Sandra, Feb. 20, 1995.
41 Gary Null interview with Diana Lopez, Feb. 16, 1995.
42 Gary Null interview with Karen Robbins , Feb . 16 , 1995.
43 Gary Null interview with Evelyn Woodson, Feb. 16, 1995.
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44
Gary Null interview with Luninging Pasion, Feb. 16, 1995.
45
Gary Null interview with Lillian, Feb. 16, 1995.
46
Gary Null interview with Marsha Stocker, Feb. 16, 1995.
47 Gary Null interview with Gloria Denanya Jones , Feb . 21 , 1995.
48. Gary Null interview with Danielle Deschamps , Feb . 21 , 1995.
49
Gary Null interview with Pat Garring, Feb. 21 , 1995.