Tag: Citizens Commission on Human Rights

Categories
General News

Human Rights Group Welcomes World Health Organization’s Stand Against Dehumanizing Involuntary Psychiatric Treatments

WHO cites no proven benefit, but significant evidence of harm from coercive mental health treatments, including forced drugging, restraints, and electroshock.

By Citizens Commission on Human Rights, National Affairs Office

New guidelines for mental health services issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) are a strong call to action for United Nations (UN) member countries, including the United States, to take bold steps to ensure that their mental health services are free from coercion, including forced drugging, the use of physical and chemical restraints and seclusion, and involuntary institutionalization.

WHO’s rejection of nonconsensual mental health treatment echoes the long-time advocacy of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to end involuntary treatment and harmful psychiatric practices and restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health.

A series of reports issued in June by WHO emphasize that coercive mental health practices are used “despite the lack of evidence that they offer any benefits, and the significant evidence that they lead to physical and psychological harm and even death.”

“People subjected to coercive practices report feelings of dehumanization, disempowerment and being disrespected,” WHO states.  “Many experience it as a form of trauma or re-traumatization leading to a worsening of their condition and increased experiences of distress.”

WHO’s call for an end to involuntary mental health treatment extends to those experiencing acute mental distress.  WHO notes that individuals in mental health crisis “are at a heightened risk of their human rights being violated, including through forced admissions and treatment….  These practices have been shown to be harmful to people’s mental, emotional and physical health, sometimes leading to death.”

CCHR’s co-founder, Thomas Szasz, M.D., a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry considered by many scholars and academics to be psychiatry’s most authoritative critic, agreed.  “The most important deprivation of human and constitutional rights inflicted upon persons said to be mentally ill is involuntary mental hospitalization,” he wrote.

The UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), signed in 2006, lays out the right to liberty and security for the disabled, including the mentally disabled.  This right also challenges the coercive treatment legally allowable under involuntary commitment laws, even when “justified” by criteria like “a need for treatment,” “dangerousness” or “lack of insight.”

Beyond involuntary commitment, WHO points out that additional rights in CRPD to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and to freedom from exploitation, violence and abuse also prohibit coercive practices, including seclusion, restraint, and administering psychiatric drugs, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and psychosurgery without informed consent.

The WHO reports lay out a vision of holistic mental health services, as contrasted with today’s narrow focus on the diagnosis and drugging of individuals to suppress symptoms, a mental health approach that results in “an over-diagnosis of human distress and over-reliance on psychotropic drugs.”

Additionally, WHO states that a series of UN Human Rights Council resolutions have called for a human rights approach to mental health services and for nations to tackle the “unlawful or arbitrary institutionalization, overmedication and treatment practices [seen in the field of mental health] that fail to respect…autonomy, will and preferences” of those seeking to recover from mental health challenges.

Years ahead of the WHO reports, Dr. Szasz advocated an end to forced psychiatric treatment, writing: “increasing numbers of persons, both in the mental health professions and in public life, have come to acknowledge that involuntary psychiatric intervention are methods of social control.  On both moral and practical grounds, I advocate the abolition of all involuntary psychiatry.”

As a human rights organization and mental health industry watchdog, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights has exposed and campaigned against the abusive use of involuntary institutionalization and psychiatric treatments given without consent, including forced drugging, restraints, and involuntary electroshock.  CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights enumerates the rights we believe each individual is entitled to in the mental health system.

CCHR was co-founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and Dr. Szasz to eradicate abuses and restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health.

Categories
General News

American Psychiatric Association Apology Fails To Fully Admit Psychiatry’s Racial Human Rights Abuses and Role In Creating Racism

The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) recent apology for its support of structural racism understates psychiatry’s racial human rights abuses and its long history of instigating racism by providing “rationales” that justified and perpetuated it.

Over the last 50 years, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has exposed that sordid history and intensified its efforts last June by forming the Task Force Against Psychiatric Racism and Modern Day Eugenics.

The APA’s apology, issued January 18, states: “The APA apologizes for our contributions to the structural racism in our nation….”

The APA further admits: “These appalling past actions, as well as their harmful effects, are ingrained in the structure of psychiatric practice….”

But the APA glosses over “those appalling past actions” by merely admitting that psychiatric “practitioners have at times subjected persons of African descent and Indigenous people who suffered from mental illness to abusive treatment, experimentation, victimization in the name of ‘scientific evidence,’ along with racialized theories that attempted to confirm their deficit status.”

That bare-bones admission fails to adequately portray the magnitude of psychiatrists’ role as prime instigators of “scientific racism,” creating and promoting the false theories of racial inferiority that have been widely used to “justify” the oppression, segregation, and population control of Black Americans.

It is noteworthy that in the late 1700s, psychiatry’s own “Father of American Psychiatry,” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slave owner, created a medical justification for racism by claiming Blacks suffered from a disease called “negritude,” supposedly a form of leprosy, and recommended their segregation to prevent them from “infecting” others.  A logo with the image of Benjamin Rush is still used for APA ceremonial purposes and internal documents. The APA still gives a Benjamin Rush Award.

Psychiatrists in the American mental health movement later latched onto and promoted the false science of eugenics (from the Greek word eugenes, meaning “good stock”), which claims some humans are inferior to others and should not have children.

Pushed by mental health practitioners, the eugenics idea of racial inferiority became ingrained in the U.S. and led to efforts such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s plan to reduce the Black population through sterilization and the Ku Klux Klan’s white supremacist activities.

Further, the APA’s brief confession of “experimentation [and] victimization” of people of color “who suffered from mental illness” not only downplays the barbaric psychosurgery and psychiatric experiments conducted on African Americans, but also fails to honestly admit that many subjects in these experiments were perfectly healthy.  Those experiments include:

  • In 1951, psychiatrist Walter Freeman experimented with lobotomies on Black patients at the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, describing the procedure as “a surgically induced childhood.” (A lobotomy is psychiatry’s surgical procedure of cutting into the brain to try to alter behavior.)
  • In the 1950s, Black prisoners in New Orleans were used by psychiatrists Robert Heath and Harry Bailey for psychosurgery experiments that implanted electrodes into their brains. Bailey later boasted it was “cheaper to use [Blacks*] than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.” [*Bailey’s racial slur is omitted here]
  • Psychiatrist Robert Heath conducted CIA-funded secret drug experiments on Black prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary using LSD and the drug bulbocapnine, which can produce severe stupor, to see if the drug would cause “loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, [and] loss of will power.…”
  • In the mid-1950s at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), drug-addicted African Americans were given LSD in an experiment that kept many hallucinating for 77 consecutive days. In the 1960s, NIMH again used Black men as test subjects for an experimental hallucinogen, the chemical warfare drug BZ, which was many times more powerful than LSD.  In the 1970s, following riots in a predominantly black section of Los Angeles, NIMH experimented on African Americans, including children as young as five, to see if they had a violence gene that could be controlled by psychiatric drugs.

The APA has not admitted practitioners’ role in creating the present-day mental health system of psychiatric labeling, forced psychiatric drugs and treatment, and incarceration in psychiatric facilities that enabled racist treatment.

African Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with mental illness and disproportionately committed to psychiatric facilities.  They are more likely to be labeled with conduct disorder and psychotic disorders, especially schizophrenia, and overly prescribed antipsychotic drugs.  Black men are more likely to be prescribed excessive doses of these psychiatric drugs.  Black children are overly labeled with ADD/ADHD.

The APA is correct, therefore, in stating, “The APA is beginning the process of making amends….”  There is much, much further to go in publicly taking responsibility for psychiatrists’ essential role in instigating and perpetuating racism and for the human rights violations of its experiments and treatments.

Until it does so, its incomplete apology may be viewed as political pandering and an attempt to whitewash history to pave the way for the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry to expand – very profitably – into the African American community.

Categories
News for Colorado

Study Finds Antidepressants Double The Risk Of Suicide And Violence in Adults With No Mental Disorders

A study recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine concluded that antidepressants double the risk of events leading to suicide and violence in adults with no signs of any mental disorder.

As the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has been warning for years, the study confirms that antidepressant drugs themselves cause violence and suicide.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires its most serious black-box warning on all antidepressants to warn that the drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in young adults ages 18 to 24, but the warning does not currently extend to adults older than 24.

The link between antidepressants and violence, witnessed firsthand in Colorado in the deadly actions of Eric Harris at Columbine and James Holmes at an Aurora movie theater, is not yet reflected in any FDA black-box warning.

The new study, which reviewed published clinical trials found in online searches and clinical study reports obtained from European Union and United Kingdom drug regulators, concluded that the harm being caused by antidepressants extends to all age groups and that the harm includes violence.

bullets“While it is now generally accepted that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide and violence in children and adolescents (although many psychiatrists still deny this), most people believe that these drugs are not dangerous for adults,” the study authors wrote.

“This is a potentially lethal misconception.”

The researchers calculated that one of every 16 mentally healthy adults taking antidepressants experienced harm related to suicide or violence.

Warning: Anyone wishing to discontinue an antidepressant or any other psychiatric drug is cautioned to do so only under the supervision of a competent medical doctor because of potentially dangerous withdrawal symptoms.

If you or someone you know experienced violence or suicidal thoughts or actions from taking an antidepressant or any other psychiatric drug, please report it to the FDA by clicking here.  And we want to talk to you about your experience.  You can contact us privately by clicking here or by calling 303-789-5225.  All information will be kept in the strictest confidence.

Categories
General News News for Colorado

If Drugging Children Wasn’t Bad Enough, Now Psychiatrists Want to Shock Them

Coloradans joined concerned citizens from around the nation on May 14 in a march organized by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to protest the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) recent push to get the FDA to approve electroshock (ECT) for children and to get electroshock devices reclassified into the same category of risk as electric wheelchairs and hearing aids.

ECT shoots as much as 460 volts of electricity through the brain in order to produce a seizure.  Every year 100,000 Americans are electroshocked, even though no one has ever been able to explain exactly how this barbaric practice “works” as mental health treatment.  In fact, neither the effectiveness nor the safety of ECT devices has ever been clinically proven, and never will be if the APA gets its way.

The APA is pushing for ECT to be given to children who are “treatment resistant” to psychiatric drugs.  Eight million American children are on psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs – one million of them as young as 0-5 years old.  Many of them will get worse and will be labeled “treatment resistant,” instead of the treatment itself being labeled harmful and ineffective.

ECT is already a $1.2 billion a year industry.  If the APA gets its way, that industry will be growing by shocking the still-developing brains of children and subjecting their young bodies to convulsions.

The protest march is an annual event of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), timed to deliver a strong message of opposition to harmful psychiatric practices when psychiatrists attend the APA annual conference, this year in Atlanta. Click here to read CCHR International’s press release on this year’s march.

Categories
Military in Colorado/Wyoming News for Colorado

Psychiatry’s Role in Military Suicides Exposed

Today, with the military around the world awash in psychiatric drugs, 23 soldiers and veterans are committing suicide every day.  More soldiers are dying from psychiatric “treatment” than on the battlefield.

CCHR’s powerful new documentary, “Hidden Enemy: Inside Psychiatry’s Covert Agenda,” is the first to fully expose the decades-long history of psychiatry’s use of military personnel as guinea pigs for experimentation.  The documentary also details the link between the now-widespread use of mind-altering psychiatric drugs in the military and the growing epidemic of military deaths – especially suicides.

“We have never drugged our troops to this extent and the current increase in suicides is not a coincidence.  Why hasn’t psychiatry in the military been relieved of command of Mental Health Services?  In any other command position in the military, there would have been a change in leadership.”
— Lt. Col. Bart Billings, Clinical Psychologist U.S. Army Reserve, Ret.

Featuring over 80 interviews with soldiers and experts in a number of related fields, this penetrating documentary reveals how psychiatry is destroying our world’s militaries from within.

Here are some of the chilling facts contained in this documentary:

  • Officially, one in six American service members is taking at least one psychiatric drug.
  • Since 2002, the suicide rate in the U.S. military has almost doubled.  From 2009 to 2012, more U.S. soldiers died by suicide than from traffic accidents, heart disease, cancer and homicide.
  • Combat stress has been a fact in the military since ancient times.  But in 1980, psychiatrists created a new label for it: “post-traumatic stress disorder,” or “PTSD,” and later claimed, without any evidence, that it was a brain disorder.  Today, 37% of recent war veterans have been labeled “PTSD,” and 80% of them have been given a psychiatric drug for it.

 

Your help is needed to save lives. 

  • First, view the documentary yourself.  You can view the DVD online at no charge at the CCHR International website by clicking here.
  • If you are an active-duty member of the military, veteran, member of a military or veteran support group, or family member or associate of an active-duty member of the military or veteran, you can order a free copy of this DVD from CCHR International by clicking here.
  • Sign CCHR’s Petition for a Congressional Investigation into the Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Military Suicides and Sudden Deaths by clicking here.
  • Please help us get this powerful documentary into the hands of military personnel, veterans, and those who are responsible for their care.  Contribute what you can by clicking here. Donations to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights® of Colorado are tax-deductible charitable contributions for U.S. income tax purposes.
  • See for yourself what the harmful side effects are, for the drugs being prescribed to the military personnel and veterans you know.  Warnings from international regulatory authorities and research studies on the harmful side effects of psychiatric drugs can be accessed through CCHR International’s psychiatric drug side effects search engine.

WARNING: Anyone wishing to discontinue psychiatric drugs is cautioned to do so only under the supervision of a competent medical doctor because of potentially dangerous withdrawal symptoms.

If you know an active-duty member of the military or a veteran who has been harmed by psychiatric drugs or other mental-health treatment or experimentation, we want to talk to you.  You can contact us privately by clicking here or by calling 303-789-5225.  All information will be kept in the strictest confidence.  We welcome your comments on this article below.

Categories
Colorado Mental Health Institute News for Colorado

Patient Allegedly Kidnapped by State Hospital Staff

Civil Rights Lawsuit Filed in Denver Federal Court

A lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court in Denver alleging that a woman languishing in legal limbo at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo (CMHIP) was kidnapped by CMHIP staff and forcibly transported to a Denver area hospital to undergo a surgical procedure against her will.

Gabriele Gundlach, 57, of Boulder, was found incompetent to proceed by Boulder County Court in October 2011 in cases involving minor traffic-related offenses and was sent to CMHIP.         

While there, physical conditions requiring that she receive medical treatment were detected, including possible breast cancer.  Gundlach, who has never been found incompetent to make decisions concerning her own body, researched treatment options and medical facilities.  She arranged to receive treatment at Rose Medical Center and lined up funding to cover the cost.

However, Gundlach was told by CMHIP staff that University Hospital was the only facility to which CMHIP patients can be taken for medical treatment, and that patients are treated there at state expense.  These are “bare-faced lies,” according to the complaint filed in the district court by Gundlach’s lawyer, Boulder civil rights attorney Alison Ruttenberg.

Gundlach told CMHIP staff she would not consent to undergo treatment at University Hospital, explaining that for continuity of care reasons, Rose Medical Center would refuse to treat her if she received any part of the treatment for her condition at any other facility.  It also would not meet federal guidelines for funding her long-term care.  She also explained she had chosen a less invasive treatment option available only from a doctor at Rose.

In direct opposition to Gundlach’s wishes, CMHIP staff allegedly scheduled a surgical procedure for her at University Hospital without her consent or knowledge.  When Gundlach was finally informed, she cancelled the appointment.  Ruttenberg called CMHIP Assistant Superintendent Beverly Fulton, who allegedly assured the attorney that CMHIP would never transport Gundlach to a medical procedure she did not want.

But that is exactly what happened on the morning of January 3, 2013.  According to the lawsuit, CMHIP charge nurse Pamela Jones forced Gundlach to get out of bed and prepare to be transported.  Gundlach was driven under guard and against her will to University Hospital for a surgical procedure that had been cancelled and that, if administered, would have destroyed her chance to receive her preferred treatment from her chosen doctor at Rose Medical Center and to receive federal funding for her long-term care.

Because the CMHIP staff had no court order or other authority to transport her against her will, the civil rights complaint asks the U.S. District Court for damages from those responsible for kidnapping her and unlawfully seizing her body (under the color of law) for the purpose of having a surgical procedure performed that she did not want or consent to.  Color of law refers to an act done under the appearance of legal authority, when in fact no such right exists.  It further asks the court to declare it a violation of her Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from unlawful seizures of her body without due process of law.

Gundlach alleges she suffered enormous emotional distress.  She also says she was informed at University Hospital that she would have had to pay for the procedure herself if it had been done there.

According to Ruttenberg’s civil rights complaint, “Ms. Gundlach has a Constitutional right to refuse any medical procedure she does not want, and the bullies at CMHIP have no right to force her to undergo invasive surgical procedures that she refuses, for their financial convenience or otherwise.”

The complaint continues: “She has the capacity and ability to make an informed decision regarding what is going to happen to her body and who is or is not going to have the privilege of cutting into it.  Her decisions regarding the course of care for the suspected breast cancer are reasonable, rational and hers alone to make.”

When Gundlach arrived back at CMHIP, her psychiatrist, Myra Kamran, M.D., allegedly threatened Gundlach with having a guardian appointed who would agree to Gundlach being forced to have the medical procedure either at University Hospital or on-site at CMHIP.

(Myra Kamran is not currently listed on the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies website as a licensed physician or listed under any other licensed profession.  The Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Colorado has asked the Colorado Medical Board to investigate the matter.)

Again in violation of Gundlach’s rights, the medical procedure was scheduled to be performed on-site at CMHIP.  According to the lawsuit pending in Boulder County Court, on the morning of Monday, January 7, 2013, the charge nurse allegedly told Gundlach to get ready to be taken to the CMHIP clinic for the procedure.  Gundlach was left with the clear impression that she would be put in restraints to receive the procedure if she refused to cooperate.

It was only cancelled by last-minute intervention by a member of the Colorado chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, who called the Superintendent’s office to draw their attention to the civil rights lawsuit that had been faxed to the Superintendent the previous Friday evening.

The legal complaint alleges that the psychiatrist for Gundlach’s ward at CMHIP, Thomas Ingraham, M.D., admits Gundlach is not gravely ill, is not a danger to herself or others, and that he is not treating her for any illness or condition.

It further alleges Gundlach’s continuing, unlawful confinement at CMHIP is not only a violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, but is also life-threatening, and asks the court to order the woman’s immediate release.

Troubles Began with Minor Traffic-related Offenses

Gundlach’s troubles began when she was arrested in Boulder in 2010 and charged with minor traffic-related offenses after allegedly being involved in an auto accident. 

After telling Boulder County Court she did not want to be represented by the public defender with two large black eyes and a large lump on her forehead who visited her in jail, she was not provided with another public defender and subsequently represented herself pro se in court proceedings.  The lawsuit alleges that she never was properly advised of the charges against her or her right to a new attorney. 

In September 2011, the Court ordered a competency evaluation.  Based on a CMHIP psychiatrist’s report, the Court found Gundlach incompetent to proceed in her court cases and sent her to CMHIP in October 2011.

Six months later, during which time Gundlach refused psychiatric drugging, another evaluation at CMHIP found that Gundlach was competent to proceed and had a good understanding of her legal situation.

Inexplicably, however, her Boulder County public defender asked for yet another competency evaluation to be done.  Gundlach refused this and all subsequent attempts to re-evaluate her because she already had received a finding of competency.

Nevertheless, two subsequent competency reports, one by a psychiatrist and the other by a licensed psychologist at CMHIP, were sent to Boulder County Court, each concluding Gundlach was not competent to proceed.  According to the lawsuit, neither doctor ever interviewed or even met with Gundlach, who continued to refuse to be re-evaluated.

In October 2012, a third Boulder County public defender moved to terminate all criminal proceedings against Gundlach.  The motion was denied in December in Boulder County Court when the Boulder District Attorney wrongly represented to the Court that Gundlach was no longer refusing treatment, including medications, at CMHIP.

Not only was Gundlach continuing to refuse to be medicated at the time, but CMHIP in November 2012 sought a court order to forcibly drug Gundlach against her will.  The lawsuit alleges that the list of drugs Gundlach’s psychiatrist wanted to give her were variously at a dangerously high dosage, meant for mental or physical conditions for which Gundlach had never been diagnosed, or prescribed solely for the purpose of patient control, which is a violation of  ethical standards for physicians.  The motion for a hearing in Pueblo County Court on the issue of involuntary drugging was eventually withdrawn.

During this time, Gundlach contacted the Colorado chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which started an investigation of her complaint, following which three legal pleadings were filed in separate actions by Ruttenberg.

A petition filed in the Colorado Supreme Court for Gundlach’s immediate release was denied, apparently on jurisdictional grounds.

A renewed motion to dismiss charges against Gundlach is currently pending in Boulder County Court.  This motion additionally challenges the constitutionality of the state law [C.R.S. 16-8.5-116(1)] that permits a defendant to be incarcerated at the state hospital up to the maximum amount of time the person could be sentenced if convicted, when in actual practice a maximum sentence would not be imposed on each of multiple charges and would not be imposed consecutively.  Therefore because Gundlach is being held as mentally ill, CMHIP is interpreting the law to allow them to involuntarily incarcerate her for 33 months, which is from 21 to 30 months longer than for someone who is not held at CMHIP.

Gundlach’s plight has been made worse by the fact that neither she nor her attorney have been given access to legal records relating to her court cases.  The civil rights complaint pending in U.S. District Court in Denver cites Debra Cross, Clerk of the Boulder County Combined Courts, for her unconstitutional policies of denying Ruttenberg, as Gundlach’s counsel of record, access to any portion of Gundlach’s prior court file, and asks the court for relief.  It further asks the court to declare that Crosser’s refusal to ensure that Gundlach’s legal mail is sent to her at CMHIP instead of her prior home address, then throwing it into the court file when it is returned as undeliverable, violates Gundlach’s constitutional rights to due process and access to the courts. 

The complaint pleads that Gundlach’s “continued incarceration at the CMHIP without due process, without a hearing, given the fact that she is competent, is not only unconstitutional, it is life-threatening.”

If you or someone you know has experience with the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, we want to talk to you. You can contact us privately by clicking here or by calling 303-789-5225. All information will be kept in the strictest confidence. We welcome your comments on this article below.

Categories
News for Colorado

There is NO Suicide Epidemic in Colorado

Data being misused to alarm the public is consistent with marketing programs of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry

Data recently released by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment show that the trend in suicides in the state in effect has been statistically flat for at least 22 years.  There are wide fluctuations from year to year in the rate of suicides per 100,000 population, but all within a long-term, essentially unchanged trend, as the chart below of the data illustrates.  There isno suicide epidemic in Colorado.

Particularly false is the claim of a supposed epidemic of suicides among young people.  The fact is that suicide is very rare among children.  While the death of any child is tragic, statewide there were just 11 suicides last year in an estimated population of 1,040,402 children through age 14, for a rate of 1.1 suicide per 100,000 in 2009 – almost exactly the same rate as the 20-year average rate for this age group of 1.0.  The facts show there is no suicide epidemic among younger children.

Concerning teenage suicides, the statistic currently making headlines is that suicide is the second-leading cause of death among teenagers in Colorado.  But this is only because there are very few teenage deaths for any reason.  While the death of any child is tragic, the fact is that there were 49 suicides last year in an estimated population of 362,423 teens ages 15 through 19 statewide, for a rate of 13.5 suicides per 100,000 population in 2009 – almost exactly the same rate as the 20-year average rate for this age group of 13.1.  The facts show that suicides are not spreading more rapidly or extensively among teenagers.  There is no suicide epidemic.

At a minimum, these statistics stand as testament to the monumental failure of psychiatry to lower the suicide rate after decades of prescribing antidepressants in Colorado – to the point that antidepressant residues are measurable in our waterways.

More alarming is the fact that psychiatric drugging is leading to suicides.  An estimated 50% of all Americans who commit suicide are on psychiatric drugs.

Antidepressants are known to cause worsening depression, birth defects, sexual dysfunction, anxiety, panic attacks, hostility, aggression, psychosis, violence, suicide and many, many other adverse events.  Long-term antidepressant users frequently report that their emotions have been deadened so much that they feel like zombies.

The dangers of antidepressants have led the FDA and regulatory authorities around the word to issue warnings concerning their use, including the FDA’s most severe, “black box” warning.

International warnings & studies on psychiatric drugs can be found through the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International’s psychiatric drug search engine.

Adverse psychiatric drug reactions reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Medwatch can be searched here.

Despite the fact that the suicide rate for teenagers in Colorado has been essentially unchanged for at least 20 years, “suicide as the second-leading cause of death among teenagers” is being used to gain sympathy and support from the public, school administrators, physicians, public officials, and state legislators for requiring children to be screened for depression in the name of suicide prevention.

The screening surveys used, however, consider the normal variations in human behavior as symptoms of mental illness.  In particular, teenagers, with their wide range of behavior, are found to have “mental disorders” in high numbers.  This is because screening that targets teenagers, such as TeenScreen, asks questions that could be answered “Yes” by almost any normal teenager, such as:

  • Has there been a time when nothing was fun for you and you just weren’t interested in anything?
  • Has there been a time when you felt you couldn’t do anything well or that you weren’t as good-looking or as smart as other people?
  • How often did your parents get annoyed or upset with you because of the way you were feeling or acting?
  • Have you often felt very nervous when you’ve had to do things in front of people?
  • Have you often worried a lot before you were going to play a sport or game or do some other activity?

A pilot program using TeenScreen should serve as a chilling warning to Coloradoans about what it means when teenagers are screened for depression.  During 2001-03, TeenScreen was used on teenagers at a Denver public high school and a Denver homeless shelter.  The results, unabashedly published at the time on the website of the Mental Health Association of Colorado (now Mental Health America of Colorado), are shocking to anyone – except apparently those with ties in with the psychiatric industry:

  • Half (50%) of the screened high school students were found to be at risk of suicide!
  • Nearly three out of four youths (71%) screened at the homeless shelter were found to have psychiatric disorders!

Clearly these screening surveys are identifying all sorts of young people as “mentally ill” when they are not.  Even the developer of the TeenScreen survey, psychiatrist David Shaffer, who has been the recipient of huge dollars from pharmaceutical companies (see “TeenScreen, A Front Group for the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex”), himself admits that TeenScreen “does identify a whole bunch of kids who aren’t really suicidal, so you get a lot of false-positives. And that means if you’re running a large program at a school, you’re going to cripple the program because you’re going to have too many kids you have to do something about.”

And what happens when the screening identifies so many children “you have to do something about?”  It means a bonanza for the pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatrists who make a living from psychiatric drugging.  Young people with their wide range of childhood behavior, or with behavioral symptoms caused by any number of underlying, often undiagnosed physicalillnesses or abnormalities, will be labeled with “mental disorders” that follow them through life.

They will likely get referred to a psychiatrist, who will in all probability prescribe powerful, mind-altering psychiatric drugs, with their long lists of harmful and even life-threatening side effects.  The results of a survey published several years ago in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry revealed that 9 out of 10 children who see a psychiatrist will be prescribed psychiatric drugs.

The facts show that there is no epidemic of suicides in Colorado.  So who is behind the hysteria being whipped up in the state over suicides?   Pharmaceutical companies have three steps in their marketing programs, the first of which is to elevate the importance of a condition, making it appear far more serious & widespread than previously thought.  This first step is well underway in Colorado, forwarded by psychiatrists and psychiatric-industry front groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), using disinformation about a nonexistent “epidemic of suicides” supposedly sweeping the state.

The story of the unholy alliance between psychiatry and the drug companies, with the slick marketing schemes and scientific deceit that have created an $80 billion profit center, has been documented in “The Marketing of Madness: Are We All Insane?”, a multi-award-winning documentary film produced by CCHR International.  To order your free copy of the DVD, click here.

If you, a loved one, or someone you know has been harmed by a psychiatrist or other mental-health worker and you want to talk about it, we want to talk to you.  Email us or call 303-789-5225. All inquiries and communication will be handled in strictest confidence. We will take action.

error

Don't miss out on new articles:

RSS
Twitter