Contest: criminalize all those who work in a locked psychiatric ward after 1/1/2009

René Talbot
To: Verborgene_Empfaenger
Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 2:22 AM

[Please snowball this message in your e-mail address list and post it in appropriate newsgroups]

The International Association Against Psychiatric Assault would appreciate your entry in our contest.
(The contest is also published on our website: http://www.iaapa.de/competition.htm )

René Talbot
(Secretary of IAAPA www.iaapa.ch )



PRIZE-WINNING COMPETITION:

Find an appropriate slogan to criminalize all those who work in a locked psychiatric ward after 1/1/2009!

criminalize!

From 1/1/2009 onwards, most countries will ratify* the UN convention of the rights of persons with disabilities, which prohibits the deprivation of liberty and bodily harm also of people who are slandered as being "mentally ill".

We take it for granted that in these countries, according to the UN-Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the mental health laws allowing the use of force will become illegal and therefore from 1/1/2009 the violent acts of the psychiatric staff and all others who work in a locked psychiatric ward become a crime and these people should therefore be declared to be criminals.

But this explanation is too long and complicated. We in IAAPA therefore suggest to campaign now against those criminals and at the same time inform the public about the issue by a public competition for such a slogan:

1st Prize: -100 Euros
2nd Prize: --70 Euros
3rd Prize: --40 Euros

* look here for the date of the ratification in your country: www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=257
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Conditions of the competition, to which each participant agrees:

1. Entries should be sent to:
IAAPA Secretariat, Vorbergstr. 9a, 10823 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: r.talbot@berlin.de

2. The language of the competiton is English. Entries in other langauges may be made but only the English translation is valid for the voting. (We will try to be of assistance for this translation.)

3. All entries must reach the above address by midnight on January 12th, 2009.

4. The next General Assembly of IAAPA on Tuesday, 13th of January 2009 by majority vote will make a pre-selection by excluding entries deemed to be not interesting enough.

5. The remaining entries will be made public on this website on January 14th, 2009.

6. For one month up to February 14th, these entries will be open to voting by the general public over the internet - details of the exact procedure will follow.

7. The author of all entries agrees to renounce all copyright claims to his/her slogan against IAAPA.

8. The author of all entries agrees to have his/her name published. However, on his/her request their entry can be posted anonymously with an "artist name" suggested by the author.

9. The decisions of IAAPA concerning the winning entries are final and cannot be contested in court.

(Resolution Point # 1 of the IAAPA General Assembly of December 9, 2008)

http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2008/11/25/papers_reveal_push_on_drug_firm_funds/

Papers reveal push on drug firm funds

Prominent doctor tied to efforts

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

November 25, 2008

Newly disclosed court documents portray Dr. Joseph Biederman, a leading Harvard child psychiatrist, as courting drug company money by promising that his work at Massachusetts General Hospital would help promote the use of antipsychotic drugs for youngsters diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Biederman is one of the central figures in the growing legal and political backlash against potential conflicts of interest in medicine, particularly in psychiatry. He could not be reached for comment yesterday, but Massachusetts General Hospital said it would thoroughly investigate the allegations against him.

The psychiatrist is the country's most prominent advocate of diagnosing bipolar disorder in children, even those under age 6, and using antipsychotic drugs to treat many of them, even when federal regulators have not approved the drugs for that use. Congressional investigators led by Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, accused Biederman this summer of failing to disclose more than $1 million in payments from drug companies. Harvard Medical School is investigating those reporting discrepancies.

He is now also emerging as a key witness in a huge, multistate lawsuit brought on behalf of more than 2,000 patients, including children, who claim to have been injured by psychiatric drugs known as atypical antipsychotics, including the Johnson & Johnson drug Risperdal, also known as risperidone.

Biederman is not a defendant in the case, but the plaintiffs' lawyers submitted more than two dozen documents aiming to present him as an exam ple of how drug companies and researchers conspired to boost "off-label" prescriptions that go beyond federally approved uses of a drug.

The plaintiffs' lawyers sought to compel Biederman to let them interview him - a legal fight they won. He is expected to be interviewed under oath by January.

Biederman issued a statement earlier this year saying he had complied with conflict of interest rules at Mass. General and Harvard.

It is legal for doctors to prescribe drugs for off-label purposes, but not for drug companies to actively market such uses. To get around that restriction, drug marketers recruit and pay respected "opinion leaders" like Biederman to discuss their off-label prescribing experiences with colleagues at company-sponsored "educational" talks or meetings.

In one internal 2002 e-mail that the plaintiffs' lawyers submitted, executives of Janssen Pharmaceuticals - the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that markets Risperdal - discuss Biederman's repeated proposals for the company to help fund a center on pediatric bipolar disorder at Massachusetts General. "The rationale of this center is to generate and disseminate data supporting the use of risperidone in this patient population," it says.

It wasn't until five years later, in 2007, that the Food and Drug Administration approved Risperdal for children with bipolar disorder.

Another document, the 2002 annual report of the center that was ultimately created and directed by Biederman, states that one of the center's "essential features" is its ability to conduct research that "will move forward the commercial goals of J&J" - Johnson & Johnson. An e-mail from November of that year mentions at least $700,000 in Johnson & Johnson payments to the center.

Massachusetts General Hospital issued a statement yesterday saying that the center, the MGH-Johnson & Johnson Center for the Study of Pediatric Psychopathology, existed from 2002 to 2006 and gave many researchers "the infrastructure necessary to complete projects related to the psychiatric care of children in an efficient, expeditious, and integrated manner."

The hospital controlled the center's programs, it said, and, "The grant agreements stated that the center was for scientific and educational purposes only and not for purposes of promoting, directly or indirectly, the products of Johnson & Johnson and its affiliates."

The allegations in the Risperdal case "have raised significant questions and concerns about the implementation of those agreements," the statement said. "The MGH takes these allegations very seriously and intends to investigate these issues thoroughly."

Attempts to reach Biederman at his office were unsuccessful.

Some of the legal documents reflect the ticklish dealings that drug company employees had with Biederman.

In one 1999 e-mail, a Janssen employee seeking to make sure Biederman receives $3,000 that the company owes him writes frantically to his superiors: "Dr. Biederman is not someone to jerk around. He is a very powerful national figure in child psych and has a very short fuse."

Another document in the court case suggests that Janssen employees ghost-wrote a summary of a study, to be presented at a 2002 meeting of child psychiatrists, on which Biederman was to be listed as presenting author. They appeared to seek his help in making the results appear more positive for Risperdal. In a reply, he agreed to be named as author but it was not clear whether he provided the requested help.

Carey Goldberg can be reached at goldberg@globe.com.

http://www.furiousseasons.com/archives/2008/12/psychiatrist_slams_psychiatry.html
December 09, 2008
Psychiatrist Slams Psychiatry

The following was written by Gene Combs, a psychiatrist in Illinois who has also written books about narrative therapy, including "Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities." Combs is also an associate professor of psychiatry at Loyola University, Chicago. He wrote these thoughts to a friend and then passed them along to me and I am printing them here with his permission because it's refreshing to see someone be so reflective about his profession and the huge issues around "corporate psychiatry" and the bipolar label.
Share your thoughts in comments and please be polite.

"I'm a psychiatrist. I don't always like being a psychiatrist, largely because it seems my colleagues are either greedy, self-important, unreflective bozos (like I imagine Dr. Biederman to be) or ordinary people who have huge responsibilities and are caught up in a system that they don't know how to question, who assume that the very poor excuse for science that they get in their professional literature can be trusted and should be followed.

"Being a psychitrist, I'm caught up in the same web of discourses. Being a psychiatrist, the huge bulk of referrals I get involve questions about psychotropic medications. These days it's rare for a person to come with the question of whether or not to take a medication. It's usually that they want some advice as to WHICH medication. Often, it's not even that; it's that their teacher has told them they need Adderall, or they heard on television that Paxil would help them win friends and influence people.

"Being a psychiatrist, I prescribe medications many times a week. I try to do this thoughtfully. I try to stay up on which medication might do the most good for which constellation of symptoms, and to notice those time when the best choice might not involve medication.
"Being a psychiatrist who is also a family therapist and a student of postmodernism/poststructuralism, and of the history of my profession, I am deeply and disturbingly aware of how easily we delude ourselves. I try to cultivate an awareness of the many conflicting purposes at work in the world, and to find ways of acting that move the discourse toward 'the good' as far as I'm able to discern that.

"WHEW! That was quite a preface. Are you still with me?

"What I'm trying to say is, I'm not anti-meds. I am against corporate capitalism masquerading as science. I am, I think for good reason, highly suspicious of any and everything that comes from organized psychiatry these days. This Biederman thing is just the tip of the iceberg. Big Pharma is just one of the forces that is at play in the takeover of the University by corporate capitalism. The whole DSM project is a bitter joke, an embarassment to the name of scientific inquiry. Then there is the insurance industry, which treats the DSM as if it's real, and demands that if I'm going to be paid I have to put each person I see in a DSM pigeonhole whether they really fit it or not. This further contributes to the dumbing-down of my profession. I'm full of bile about this. I foam at the mouth about it at the slightest provocation.

SEE? I'm doing it again, even though I'm trying to be reasonable here.
"Because of the over-reach of Biederman, and the bad effects of his influence I see several times a week in my own office, I'm very cautious about using the word 'Bipolar' in reference to anybody, adult or child, these days. The label used to have a meaning, but now, in my part of the country at least, it is being applied to anyone who shows any strong emotion in a way that causes anyone discomfort."

We need more people in psychiatry like Combs.



(Emphasis by Justice lover)