THE 18TH BLOG FOR THE OUTLAW OF PSYCHIATRY NOW

2012-01-24T10:55:00.028+11:00

MORE ON CONFESSIONS BY THE SHRINKS, THE DOCTORS OF DECEPTIONS
by Benjamin Merhav

The current anti-psychiatry movement was formed by psychiatrists some 60 years ago. If it would have been formed earlier, it might have been able to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of "mental patients", including the lives of 250,000 patients in Germany who had been mass murdered by top German shrinks during the Hitler regime there. Yet, even today, and even amongst the current anti-psychiatry shrinks, a firm and clear demand to outlaw psychiatry is not put forward. Most of them would be happy to just reform psychiatry, and to try to "improve" it.

The very term psychiatrist is wrong and misleading. The dictionary provides "Related Words for : psychiatrist head-shrinker, shrink". Shrink is a far more accurate term for the practitioners of psychiatry. By forcing Antipsychotic drugs "treatments" they cause the patients' brains to shrink. Such atrocities are worsened by the egregious electric shocks and/or lobotomies "treatments", and they are currently all legal in Australia and elsewhere. Yet they are all covered up by the frauds of psychiatry, frauds which are legal too , and are imposed on people with the full force of the entire state apparatus. Therefore, very little hope for humanity can be expected from the shrinks and from their supporters.

However, there have always been shrinks who had tried to make a name for themselves (as well as get the money - all kinds of payments and benefits - from the state and from Big Pharma) by dissenting, or even by exposing some psychiatric crimes. Amongst them all I managed to discover only one who is genuinely confused by psychiatry. He had been a veteran 38 years practicing psychiatrist, mind you. He is Dr. Michael Benjamin, and he had stated as follows : "As a Psychiatrist, I still do not know what our profession is trying to do." (See : http://3rdoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2007/07/confession-by-38-years-experienced.html ).

All the other shrinks know very well what their profession is trying to do, and that they themselves are accomplices to crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Big Pharma-psychiatry combine. Thus, for example, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, M.D., is the current Director of NIMH, a top psychiatry body in the USA, and he had confessed to a meeting of shrinks as follows :

"Insel told psychiatrists at the meeting that psychiatric diagnosis today is made by observation of symptoms, detection of illness is late, prediction of illness is poor, etiology is unknown, and treatment is trial and error. There are no cures and no vaccines."
(See : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/05/httpalert.html).

The article below is another example of psychiatric frauds covered up by the shrinks as follows :

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/01/psychiatrys-grand-confession/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=psychiatrys-grand-confession

"Psychiatry’s Grand Confession

Posted on January 23, 2012
by Jonathan Leo, Ph.D. / Jeffrey Lacasse, Ph.D.

The psychiatry profession has finally come clean and confessed on a national media outlet that there is no evidence to support the Serotonin Theory of Depression. Today, on NPR’s Morning Edition there is a segment about the chemical imbalance theory, and virtually all the psychiatrists who are interviewed acknowledge that the there was never any evidence in support of the idea that low serotonin causes depression. But then, amazingly, they go on to say that it is perfectly fine to tell patients that serotonin imbalance causes depression even though they know this isn’t the case.

Several years ago in PLoS Medicine we wrote a long piece about the serotonin theory and the disconnect between what research psychiatrists say in professional journals and textbooks and what the advertisements say. While the advertisements presented the theory as scientific fact, the scientific sources clearly did not. Given the enormous marketing programs that pushed this theory combined with the media’s lack of skepticism, we were sympathetic to the general public who could hardly be faulted for thinking that theory had some foundation in fact. Following the publication of our piece a reporter contacted us and suggested that we were attacking a well accepted theory. We pointed out to the reporter that we weren’t attacking a sacred cow but that instead we were pointing out the mainstream psychiatry didn’t even accept this theory. We urged the reporter to contact the FDA, NIMH, APA, etc and ask them about the science behind the advertisements. He did, and as expected, an expert from the FDA explained that the theory was really just a metaphor. The problem is that patients who heard their physician explain the serotonin theory thought they were hearing real science. They weren’t told it was a metaphor and hence thought it was a fact. When a doctor talks about high cholesterol, diabetes, or hypothyroidism, they are talking about scientific measurement, not a metaphor. How is a patient with high cholesterol and depression who listens to their doctor’s explanation of their conditions supposed to know when the doctor has moved from science to metaphor?

Several months ago Ronald Pies published an interesting article in Psychiatric Times entitled, “Psychiatry’s New Brain-Mind and the Legend of the Chemical Imbalance.” Pies, just like the experts on NPR, acknowledges that the Chemical Imbalance theory is not true. However, according to Pies, it was the pharmaceutical companies who espoused the theory, and not well-informed, practicing clinicians, because the psychiatry community has known all along that the theory is not true.

But if the Psychiatry Community knew all along that the theory was not true, then why did they not clarify this issue for the general public? Shouldn’t they have pointed out to the general public and patients that what the pharmaceutical companies were saying about psychological stress was not true? Why did the professional societies not publicly set the record straight?

There are many angry comments on the NPR website. These comments are interesting, because apparently many patients who were told that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance never understood that were hearing a metaphor and not science. Since the chemical imbalance theory is often presented as a rationale for taking SSRIs, such patients now understandably feel lied to by their clinicians.

Perhaps the most interesting part about the NPR piece is that the reporter seems to not understand that the idea of telling a falsehood to patients because you think it is good for them is a serious violation of informed consent. Shouldn’t the reporter have asked the obvious questions, such as:

1) Do you feel it is acceptable to present a scientific theory as fact even though you know it is false?
2) Is it okay for psychiatrists to tell patients stories about their conditions that psychiatrists know are false?
3) Is there not an ethical issue when a psychiatrist informs their patient that they have a serotonin imbalance, when the medical textbooks on the shelf clearly say this is a falsified theory?

In general, we are fans of NPR, but hopefully the next news outlet that covers this topic will be more investigative in their approach."

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2012-01-10T07:19:00.014+11:00

CONFESSIONS OF TOP USA PSYCHIATRISTS TO PROVE THAT PSYCHIATRY IS A LEGALISED FASCIST QUACKERY
by Benjamin Merhav

The article below is by a top USA shrink (former head of DSM IV and currently Psychiatry Professor Emeritus at Duke University), Alan Frances. He wants to improve psychiatry, and in doing so he reveals some of the psychiatric atrocities that he claims that are not necessary. Yet his confessions are about the fundamentals of the psychiatric dogma, therefore impossible to reform. Thus, for example, he states as follows :

"It simply makes no sense that the antipsychotics are now the largest revenue producers among all classes of medicines -- bringing in $15 billion per year -- much of it coming from excessive use in vulnerable populations of children and the elderly. Antipsychotics often cause large weight gains increasing the risks of diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy."

However, psychiatry cannot exist without Antipsychotic drugs, and not merely because of its subordination to the pharmaceutical drug corporations. Once the shrinks invented "mental illnesses" and "psychoses" they felt obliged to impose "treatments", or else there would be no reason for the existence of psychiatry as a "medical specialty". As for the deadly risks and the damage to the patients, the shrinks say that they "weigh" the risks and damages against the "potential benefits". Those "benefits" are the keeping of patients under control and making them behave like obedient zombies; never mind the shortening of their life expectancy; never mind the risks of death as a result of diabetes and heart disease; never mind the brain damage; never mind the physical torture and the humiliation of the patients; never mind the psychiatric stigma and the ruined lives.

Furthermore, Alan Frances admits that the shrinks "still know very little about what causes the mental disorders." Well, if the shrinks know very little about the causes of psychiatric "disorders", why are they allowed to impose their "treatments" on people ? Moreover, Frances also states as follows :

" The overdiagnosis of mental disorders has recently gotten out of hand with faddish false epidemics of childhood bipolar disorder (increased by forty fold), autism (increased by twenty fold), and attention deficit (doubled). One quarter of the general population would now qualify for a diagnosis in any given year, more than half lifetime."

This frightening information confirms the fearful reality, namely, that despite the fact that psychiatry is a fraud it keep on speading and gaining more power over more people around the world.

Another top USA psychiatrist repeats Frances confessions, adding the following :

"Psychiatrists often overdiagnose disorders of questionable scientific validity, they have become overly fixated on medication solutions to life’s problems, and many have accepted a steady flow of drug industry money, creating so many conflicts of interest that it is impossible to know who we can trust."(see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/httpwww.html).

Here is the Frances article :

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/america-is-over-diagnosed_b_1157898.html

Allen Frances

Professor Emeritus, Duke University

"America Is Over Diagnosed and Over Medicated

Posted: 1/9/12

The history of medicine has its glorious moments, but is also littered with false theories, blind allies, and harmful treatments. The emergence of invasive therapies in ancient Greece inspired Hippocrates to make 'First, Do No Harm' the foundational injunction of western medicine. Psychiatric medicines are quite effective when correctly prescribed for clearcut disorders. But Americans are taking too much medicine, often casually and unnecessarily prescribed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and causing lots of needless harm.

The really bad news is that the bulk of psychiatry is no longer done by psychiatrists. Psychiatric medicines are most often prescribed by primary care doctors who are always busy and usually under trained in psychiatry. And their diagnostic and treatment decisions are heavily influenced by drug company advertising aimed directly at patients combined with aggressive marketing campaigns aimed at doctors.

The result is massive overprescription of medicine for off label, untested, and inappropriate indications. Drug companies have more unregulated freedom in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world to push their product where it does not belong. Their success is measured in returns to shareholders, not benefits to patients.

It simply makes no sense that the antipsychotics are now the largest revenue producers among all classes of medicines -- bringing in $15 billion per year -- much of it coming from excessive use in vulnerable populations of children and the elderly. Antipsychotics often cause large weight gains increasing the risks of diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy. Almost equally concerning is that eleven percent of U.S. adults are taking an antidepressant medicine, making these the fourth most lucrative class for drug companies. Perversely, only a third of severely depressed people get the medicine they so desperately need, while many taking antidepressants do not need them at all and receive no more than placebo effect. And 4% of our kids are on stimulants for ADD, sometimes without a careful diagnostic workup and consideration of alternative approaches. A large secondary market has encouraged a third of college students to use stimulants for performance enhancement and/or recreation. We seem to be creating a brave new world in which everyone will take a psychiatric medicine, and some will take two or three or even more.

Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is particularly subject to fads and undue drug company influence because judgments are still based on subjective data that cannot be confirmed or disproved by laboratory tests. The pride of psychiatry is the enormous neuroscience base accumulated in the past thirty years, but the brain is the most complicated organ in the known universe and reveals its many secrets only very slowly. We have learned a great deal about normal brain functioning -- but still know very little about what causes the mental disorders. This enormous leap from basic brain science to clinical psychiatry will take decades to bridge in very small steps. In the meantime, decisions about diagnosis and treatment are only as good as the people making them -- and too often they are made after brief and cursory evaluations that ignore best diagnostic and treatment practices.

I am a psychiatrist and was chair of the group that prepared DSM-IV -- the manual that currently guides psychiatric diagnosis. Sad to say, DSM-IV is often used carelessly or not at all (especially in primary care) -- resulting in a great deal of mislabeling and unnecessary treatment. The overdiagnosis of mental disorders has recently gotten out of hand with faddish false epidemics of childhood bipolar disorder (increased by forty fold), autism (increased by twenty fold), and attention deficit (doubled). One quarter of the general population would now qualify for a diagnosis in any given year, more than half lifetime.

The next edition of the diagnostic manual (DSM 5) is in preparation now and will become official in 2013. I'm terribly concerned that it will make our current worrying situation a great deal worse. Unless its ambitions are trimmed dramatically, DSM 5 will promote the misdiagnosis of tens of millions of people and an even greater misuse of potentially harmful medication. It proposes to introduce many new diagnoses and broaden the criteria for existing ones. Normal grief will be mislabeled major depression; everyday worries, stress, and sadness will become mixed anxiety/depression; one episode of binge eating a week will label you mentally ill; older people with expectable memory problems will be inaccurately warned that they are on the road to dementia; difficult to manage kids will be given unproven diagnoses that will lead to even more misuse of antipsychotic drugs, and there will be a further boost to the false epidemic of attention deficit disorder.

The people working on DSM 5 mean well, are not drug company shills, and genuinely believe their suggestions will help patients. The problem is that they are researchers who have worked in ivory tower settings with little experience in how the diagnostic manual is often misunderstood and misused in actual practice. A suggestion that might be fine in their own hands can cause disaster if misapplied by a less expert primary care doctor. As researchers they are much less worried than I am that their proposals are largely untested. They call them 'scientific hypotheses' that can always be tested and corrected after DSM 5 is published. This is dead wrong and dangerously reckless. DSM 5 will have a dramatic effect on peoples lives and everything in it must be certified safe and scientifically sound.

Final decisions on DSM 5 will be made soon. I will post a series of blogs highlighting its worst proposals and updating the efforts to shoot them down before they can become official. Public health will be adversely affected by DSM 5 -- the public should become informed and have its say before it is too late."

(Emphasis in red is added - B.M.)

2012-01-09T07:49:00.015+11:00

PSYCHIATRY IS A THREAT TO HUMANITY, NOT JUST TO THE SANITY OF AMERICANS

By Benjamin Merhav

The article below is by a well known USA psychologist. He states that he has been "embarrassed by the mental health profession for seven major reasons". By "mental health profession" he means psychiatry, of course, which has the monopoly over the mental health profession worldwide. This by itself is a reason for outrage, not merely embarrassment, at least here in Australia where a state psychiatrist can issue at will - almost capriciously - a compulsory treatment order ( they call it here "Community Treatment Order") against anyone who happens to be a "mental patient" here.

Amongst the reasons for the author's embarrassment there is no mention of at least two major reasons for condemning, nay, for outlawing psychiatry. The first is that psychiatry has not the scientific basis which is required of any medical specialty (which the shrinks claim that it is). There is no proof - and there cannot be any ! - of the existence of any "mental illness" for which the shrinks claim to offer "treatment". All "mental illnesses" have been invented by shrinks, and with no scientific proof of their existence.

The other major reason for the outlaw of psychiatry missed by the author is the imposition of psychiatric "treatment" - including deadly dangerous drugs, electric shocks and lobotomies - on innocent people. It is a legal licence to torture, maim or kill people by state shrinks, and it has the full approval of the entire state apparatus, including the courts. The shrinks are considered - in Australia, at least - as the ultimate source of expertise in mental health matters, which allows them to get away with murder, literally , of their own patients !

The upshot of these two missing reasons must be ,then, that psychiatry is a very dangerous quackery (rather than a medical specialty) which is serving as a fascist tool of oppression against people (rather than providing any necessary mental health treatment).

http://www.truth-out.org/7-reasons-americas-mental-health-industry-threat-our-sanity/1326036648

"America's Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity

Friday 6 January 2011

by: Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet [3] | News Analysis

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout [4])

Why do some of us become dissident mental health professionals?

The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children.

If that sounds hyperbolic, then you probably have not heard of Rebecca Riley, and how the highest levels of psychiatry described her treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

When Rebecca Riley was 28 months old, based primarily on the complaints of her mother that she was “hyper” and had difficulty sleeping, psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji, at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, diagnosed Rebecca with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kifuji prescribed clonidine, a hypertensive drug with significant sedating properties, a drug Kifuji also prescribed to Rebecca’s older sister and brother. The goal of the Riley parents—obvious to many in their community and later to juries—was to attain psychiatric diagnoses for their children that would qualify them for disability payments and to sedate their children making them easy to manage.

By the time Rebecca was three years old, again based mainly on parental complaints, Kifuji had given Rebecca an additional diagnosis of bipolar disorder and prescribed two additional heavily sedating drugs, the antipsychotic Seroquel and the anticonvulsant Depakote.

At the age of four, Rebecca was dead.

At the time of her death, Rebecca had a life-threatening amount of clonidine—enough to kill her—in her body, according to the former director of the Massachusetts toxicology lab and the medical director of a regional poison control center. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy concluded that Rebecca died from intoxication of clonidine, Depakote and two over-the-counter cold and cough medicines that led to heart failure, lungs filled with bloody fluid, coma, and then death. Rebecca’s abusive parents went to prison for the over-drugging that led to their daughter’s death.

Kifuji’s fate? The psychiatric establishment rallied around Kifuji, enabling her to return to Tufts Medical Center practicing child psychiatry without any restrictions, penalties or supervision. After Rebecca’s death, Tufts-New England Medical Center defended Kifuji. A Tufts spokesperson told “60 Minutes” in 2009, “The care we provided was appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

Apparently, psychiatric care that is considered appropriate and within responsible professional standards includes diagnoses of ADHD for a two-year-old and bipolar disorder for a three-year-old when the symptoms of those disorders are normal behaviors for those ages; prescribing three heavily sedating drugs that have not been approved by the FDA for child psychiatric treatment; ignoring the warnings from a school nurse about over-dosages for Rebecca; and making diagnoses based almost entirely on the reports of Rebecca’s mother, who herself was diagnosed with mental illness and heavily medicated to the point of falling asleep in Kifuji’s office.

Long before the Rebecca Riley tragedy hit the headlines, I was embarrassed by the mental health profession for seven major reasons:

1. Corruption by Big Pharma

How did it become within responsible professional standards for a two-year-old to get an ADHD diagnosis, for a three-year-old to get a bipolar diagnosis, and for toddlers to be prescribed multiple heavily sedating drugs? The short answer is drug company corruption of the mental health profession.

Congressional hearings in 2008 revealed that psychiatry’s “thought leaders” and major institutions are on the take from drug companies.

On June 8, 2008, the New York Times reported about psychiatrist Joseph Biederman: “A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.”

Due in large part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. Pediatrician and author Lawrence Diller notes about Biederman, “He single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map.” In addition to his popularization of bipolar disorder for children, Biederman is one of the most significant forces behind the expanding numbers diagnosed with ADHD; and congressional investigators also discovered that Biederman conducted studies of Eli Lilly's ADHD drug Strattera that were funded by National Institute of Health at the same time he was receiving money from Lilly.

Not only does the drug industry have influential psychiatrists such as Biederman in their pocket, virtually every major mental health institution is financially interconnected with Big Pharma. Congressional hearings also exposed the American Psychiatric Association psychiatry’s premier professional organization, as being on the take from drug companies. In 2006, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the APA’s $62.5 million in financing. Most relevant here, the APA is the publisher of the psychiatric diagnostic bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and thus the APA is the institution responsible for creating mental illnesses and disorders.

2. Invalid Illnesses and Disorders

Psychiatry’s first DSM (1952) and its DSM-II (1968) listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Only because of a fierce political fight waged in the 1970s by gay activists did the APA abolish homosexuality as an illness and eliminate it from its DSM-III (1980). Gay activists’ fight was not only a victory for themselves but a service for everyone else, as it made public the important scientific problem of psychiatric disorder invalidity. Specifically, are psychiatric disorders scientifically valid illnesses, or are they simply behaviors that create discomfort for some authorities at a given moment in time?

While psychiatry lost homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1980 DSM-III, the APA found other groups it could pathologize, groups that could not mobilize and resist, most notably children, who are now routinely given psychiatric diagnoses for behaviors that many of us view as normal for their ages.

Psychiatry sees it as within responsible professional standards to diagnose three-year-olds such as Rebecca Riley with bipolar disorder. The symptoms of bipolar disorder include irritable and rapidly changing moods, severe temper tantrums, defiance of authority, agitation and distractibility, sleeping too little or too much, poor judgment, impulsivity and grandiose beliefs.

Psychiatry also sees it as within responsible professional standards for Rebecca Riley to have been diagnosed at 28 months old with ADHD. The symptoms of ADHD are inattention (easily distracted and bored, difficulty organizing and completing tasks, losing things, not seeming to listen, not following instructions); hyperactivity (fidgeting, talking nonstop, having trouble sitting still, difficulty with quiet tasks), and impulsivity (impatience, blurting out inappropriate comments, interrupting conversations).

Today, children and teens are also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), the symptoms of which include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.”

The standard for a medical disorder should not be whether or not an individual causes friction.

3. Scientifically Unreliable Diagnoses

Even if you believe that bipolar disorder for three-year-olds, ADHD for two-year-olds, ODD for teenagers, and all the other DSM diagnoses are valid disorders, there is still the scientific issue of diagnostic unreliability—the lack of diagnostic agreement among professionals examining the same person.

A generation ago, psychiatrists admitted that their diagnoses were unreliable and agreed that this was a major scientific problem. So in 1980, in an attempt to eliminate this embarrassment, they created the DSM-III with concrete behavioral checklists and formal decision-making rules, but they failed to correct the problem. Psychiatric diagnoses remain unreliable, but now psychiatry no longer talks about the unreliability problem.

If a measurement is a reliable one, then clinicians trained with it should be in high agreement on the diagnosis. A major 1992 study, conducted at six sites with 600 prospective patients, was done to examine the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. Experienced mental health professionals were given extensive training in how to make accurate DSM diagnoses. Because of the extensive training, one would expect that diagnostic agreement would be much higher than in typical clinical settings. Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk summarize the study in Making Us Crazy (1997):

What this study demonstrated was that even when experienced clinicians with special training and supervision are asked to use DSM and make a diagnosis, they frequently disagree, even though the standards for defining agreement are very generous. . . . [For example,] if one of the two therapists made a diagnosis of Schizoid Personality Disorder and the other therapist selected Avoidant Personality Disorder, the therapists were judged to be in complete agreement of the diagnosis because they both found a personality disorder—even though they disagreed completely on which one! So even with this liberal definition of agreement, reliability using DSM is not very good.
Kutchins and Kirk conclude: “Mental health clinicians independently interviewing the same person in the community are as likely to agree as disagree that the person has a mental disorder and are as likely to agree as disagree on which of the over 300 DSM disorders is present.”

4. Biochemical Imbalance Mumbo Jumbo

Just as nothing was more important in selling the Iraq war in 2003 than the Bush administration’s certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, nothing has been more important in selling psychiatric drugs than psychiatry’s certainty of biochemical brain imbalances as the cause for mental illnesses.

Prior to psychiatry’s proclamation that depression was caused by too little of the neurotransmitter serotonin, few Americans were taking antidepressants. But by declaring that depression was caused by a serotonin imbalance analogous to diabetes and an insulin imbalance, depressed Americans became far more receptive to serotonin-enhancing drugs such as the “selective-serotonin-reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.

SSRIs can make some depressed people feel better; however, alcohol makes some shy people less shy, but that’s not enough evidence to say that shyness is caused by an alcohol imbalance. The truth is—and scientists have known this for quite some time—that serotonin levels are not associated with depression.

Researchers have used a variety of methods to test the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, including comparing serotonin metabolites in depressed and nondepressed people, and depleting serotonin levels through a variety of means and then observing whether this resulted in depression. Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, reviewed the research in his book Blaming the Brain (1998) and reported that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.”

In 2002, the New York Times reported: “Researchers knew that antidepressants seemed to raise the brain’s levels of messenger chemicals called neurotransmitters, so they theorized that depression must result from a deficiency of these chemicals. Yet a multitude of studies failed to prove this precept.”

Yet even now, many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals continue to promulgate the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, and polls show that the majority of Americans continue to believe it.

5. Pseudoscientific Drug Effectiveness Research

There are multiple tricks that psychiatric drug manufacturers and their researcher psychiatrists and psychologists use to make their drugs look more effective than they really are. One of the most common depression measurements used by researchers paid by drug companies is the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression. In the HRSD, researchers rate subjects, and the higher the point total, the more one is deemed to be suffering from depression. On the HRSD, there are three separate items about insomnia (early, middle and late) and one can receive up to six points for difficulty either falling or remaining asleep; however, there is only one suicide item, in which one is awarded only two points for wishing to be dead. The HRSD is heavily loaded with items that are most affected by drugs, and it is therefore especially damning for antidepressants that even with such measurement dice-loading, these drugs routinely fail to outperform placebos—even dice-loaded placebos.

Proper drug research requires that neither subject nor experimenter knows who is getting the drug and who is getting the placebo (a true double-blind control). Drug company antidepressant researchers use inactive placebos such as sugar pills (which don’t create side effects). Independent research on inactive placebos show that many subjects in antidepressant and other studies can guess if they are getting the actual drug or not, which changes their expectations and subverts the double-blind control. In order to make it more difficult to guess correctly, an active placebo (which creates side effects) should be used. In 2000, a Psychiatric Times article concluded: “In fact, when antidepressants are compared with active placebos, there appear to be no differences in clinical effectiveness.”

Dice-loading depression measurements and placebos are just two of many techniques drug company researchers use to make antidepressants look more effective than they really are. But even with such dice-loading, antidepressants have not fared well, at least when one examines all the studies.

Drug companies try to ensure that those studies showing antidepressants to be no more effective than placebos are not published; however, all studies must be submitted to the FDA. So independent researcher Irving Kirsch and his research team at the University of Connecticut used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to all data, and analyzed 47 studies that had been sponsored by drug companies on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone. Kirsch discovered that in the majority of the trials, the antidepressant failed to outperform a sugar pill placebo (and in the trials where the antidepressant did outperform the placebo, the advantage was slight).

6. Psychotropic Drug Hypocrisy

Chemists consider psychiatric prescription drugs and illegal mood-altering drugs all to be psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. Cocaine and ADHD drugs such as Adderall and other amphetamines affect the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine; and antidepressants used in combination also affect the same neurotransmitters. Not only are prescription psychotropics and illegal psychotropics chemically similar, they are used by people for similar reasons, including taking the edge off their discomfort so they can function. The hypocrisy surrounding illegal and prescription psychotropic drugs is harmful to society in at least two ways.

At one level, because people are being misinformed about the realities of prescription psychotropic drugs, they are more likely to gulp them down and to give them to their children. This has helped create a tragic phenomenon detailed by investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010). Psychiatric drug use turning mild and episodic conditions into severe and chronic ones has helped create a huge increase of Americans with severe mental illness, especially among children.

At a second level, this psychiatric-illegal psychotropic drug hypocrisy allows for unfair criminalizing and incarceration of people using illegal psychotropics.

7. Diversion from Societal, Cultural and Political Sources of Misery

When we hear the words disorder, disease or illness, we think of an individual in need of treatment, not of a troubled society in need of transformation. Mental illness expansionism diverts us from examining a dehumanizing society.

In addition to pathologizing normal behavior, the mental health profession also diverts us from examining a society that creates the ingredients—helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, and isolation—that cause emotional difficulties. We are diverted from the reality that many emotional problems are natural human reactions to loss in our society of autonomy and community. Thus, the mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo.

Today, a handful of dissident mental health professionals do challenge and resist their profession’s dehumanizing standard practicies. I know several of these dissidents, and they are the only psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals that I have any respect for."

2011-12-05T15:10:00.047+11:00

ARE THE SHRINKS ,WHO STILL CONTINUE THE 34 YEARS PSYCHIATRIC TORTURE OF MY DAUGHTER , FASCIST SADISTS OR ARE THEY CHRONIC PSYCHOPATHS ?

by Benjamin Merhav

There are numerous questions hanging over psychiatry and over the legal power invested in shrinks, its practitioners, to impose their "treatment" on people they declare "mentally ill". Questions such as : why does the law endorse the false claim by the shrinks that psychiatry is part of medicine when in reality psychiatry is no more than a fascist quackery ? And why does the law endorse the false claim by the shrinks that psychiatry is "treating the mentally ill" without even an iota of evidence, neither for the "mental illnesses" nor for the "need for psychiatric treatment"(see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/09/httpwww_28.html) ? And why does the state subsidises psychiatry and its state shrinks when there is clear proof that psychiatry is a fraud ( see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/08/dr_11.html), and that its subservience to the huge pharmaceutical corporations amounts to an international racket ?

These and many more questions which are detrimental to humanity have not been answered by the shrinks. Instead, they keep on telling lies with complete impunity, and with utter disregard for the numerous protests by their patient-victims, and even for other members of the medical profession who oppose psychiatry.

There are 228 posts on this blog alone which prove that psychiatry is a fraud, and that its history has been an ongoing barbaric and fascist series of atrocities and crimes against humanity. Some of these posts report the ongoing psychiatric atrocities against my daughter for 34 years and against my son for 20 years here , in Melbourne, Australia. All my complaints and protests on their behalf have been ignored with impunity, as the entire state apparatus, including the courts, are on the side of the shrinks. So much so that even the ombudsman has refused to investigate the complaints I submitted on their behalf to his office. As a result, the torture of my daughter and of my son continues unabated risking their well being and their lives. Thus, for example, I have pointed out to the Chief Psychiatrist here that according to recent research, life expectancy of long term patients on Antipsychotic drugs is reduced by 25 years; and even if they survive they are likely to get permanent brain damage ( see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/02/scientific-proof-antipsycho-tics-shrink.html ), but she rejected my complaint saying that such are the results of the "mental illness", not of the Antipsychotic drugs. In other words, the state's shrinks here are getting away with murder !

Following are 3 of my latest letters of comlaints/appeals on behalf of my daughter and of my son to the heads of psychiatry in Victoria, Australia :

1. http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-second-open-letter-to-minister-for.html

2. http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/09/my-appealcomplaint-to-minister-for.html

3. 11 November, 2011

Dr. Karleen Edwards Executive Director,

Mental Health and Drugs Division,
Department of Health, Vic. Melbourne

Dear Dr. Edwards,

I write to you on behalf of my daughter, Miss Rebeckah Merhav. This is not a formal letter to you, as I have had the opportunity to meet the Chief
Psychiatrist and my daughter's consultant psychiatrist yesterday, on
the 10th of November. Legally speaking, therefore, this could have been
the last resort, but justice and the well being of my daughter prompted
me to appeal to you for the help which I failed to get at that meeting.
Another reason for this appeal to you is your well known efforts for
amending/replacing the current Mental Health Act which would have helped my daughter get both the justice and the well being of which she has been deprived so far, if the new bill would have been in force as an act
of parliament at present.

This month marks 34 years since my daughter was first incarcerated in a
local psychiatric ward at the age of 15. Those have been, off and on,
mostly years of compulsory psychiatric treatment under CTO. I did
describe that during the above meeting yesterday, pointing out that all
those years of torture and suffering of my daughter have had no
justification - not morally, not medically-scientifically, and not even
according to proper psychiatric practice, as my daughter was never any
danger to the public nor to herself. This ongoing compulsory psychiatric
torture of my daughter for 34 of her best years of life have left her now unable to bear children nor form a family of her own, yet they still won't let go of her even now !

I did mention to the Chief Psychiatrist, who expressed her view that this
compulsory psychiatric "treatment" might continue for years to come,
that even if my daughter survives (which recent research proves very
doubtful following long years of Antipsychotics consumption) she would
get her brain damaged permanently as a result. In reply she said that my
daughter is mentally ill ("schizophrenic") therefore needs the
"treatment" she is getting, or else her situation would deteriorate. The
Chief Psychiatrist added that if my daughter gets brain damage it would
be the result of her "mental illness", rather than the result of the
Antipsychotic drugs.

My above meeting with the Chief Psychiatrist was a very polite and cordial meeting on all sides, and we parted as friends, strangely enough.
However, the views she expressed are very conservative, and long
outdated even by psychiatrists. These views have no scientific basis
whatsoever. Thus, for example, it is well known now that the average
lifespan of all long term psychiatric patients is reduced by 25%. It is
also well known now that long term use of Antipsychotics causes the
patients' brains to shrink permanently as an irreversible brain damage.
However, the most outrageous of all psychiatric wrongs is the
fundamentally unproven claim by psychiatry that there is such a thing as
"mental illness" for which psychiatry provides the "necessary
treatment". This is simply not true, and without any scientific
justification ! There is not one single "mental illness" which has been
discovered and proven by scientific methods, as is the general practice
amongst all medical specialties. All psychiatric illnesses have been invented by psychiatrists without providing any scientific proof of their existence.

During the above meeting with the Chief Psychiatrist I also pointed out that according to section 8(1) of the Mental Health Act, 1986, one necessary requirement for the issue of a CTO by a psychiatrist is that there is no alternative treatment available for the patient. In the case of my daughter I kept on pointing out repeatedly that she has several offers
for effective alternative therapies without the use of drugs, including
an offer by a Melbourne psychiatrist who had provided a written second
opinion too ! Yet , the Chief Psychiatrist refused to accept this
argument saying that any alternative therapy must be in addition to the
psychiatric "treatment" rather than to replace it.

Another issue I have raised during that meeting was the ban on any
communications between myself, as representative of my daughter, and the psychiatric clinic to which she is attached. This ban has been in force
since April 2008 as punishment for my complaints on behalf of my
daughter. This ban has been imposed in violation of the Chief
Psychiatrist Guidelines, but it is still on, and the Chief Psychiatrist
expressed her view that I should be allowed to contact the treating
psychiatrist not more than once a month.

The most urgent of all the issues I have raised there was the deprivation
of restful night sleep which my daughter suffers for six years now, ever
since she has been forced to consume the current dose of Clozapine and
Risperdal. This was an ongoing complaint by my daughter which has been
ignored by the relevant psychiatrists. This reason alone should be
sufficient for the gradual tapering off these drugs, but the
psychiatrists refused all my daughter's pleas, and the Chief Psychiatrist approves of their refusal.

I am sure that if this appeal on behalf of my daughter would be supported by yourself, Dr. Edwards, the Minister for Mental Health would be in favour of my daughter's call for help too. It could save her life and her well being.

Respectfully yours, Benjamin Merhav
=================

Obviously, the top state psychiatrists in Victoria Australia have shown complete disregard for my daughter (for 34 years now) and my son's sufferings (for 20 years now) under the psychiatric "treatment" forced on them by the local state shrinks. This attitude is tantamount to telling them that they have got to continue to suffer and risk their well being, and even death. The shrinks' pretext is that they are hallucinating, therefore they are "psychotic", therefore must continue to consume the deadly dangerous Antipsychotic drugs pushed to them by the shrinks. My explanations that in the case of my daughter her hallucinations are the result of the Antipsychotic drugs she is forced to consume; and in the case of my son he has been deliberately programmed by a zionist cult to go on fasting, therefore needs deprogramming, not Antipsychotic drugs, have not been considered by the shrinks. The subservience of psychiatry to the giant pharmaceutical corporations makes the shrinks insist on the compulsory "treatment" even if it would cause death or permanent brain damage to the patient-victims who survive.

2011-10-25T09:35:00.002+11:00

http://www.examiner.com/health-in-national/american-styled-psychiatric-tyranny-serves-as-a-model-worldwide

American styled psychiatric tyranny serves as a model worldwide

Harold Mandel,MD

Health Examiner

October 24, 2011

Psychiatric tyranny across the entire United States as enforced by the nation's psychiatrists and the federal and state governments ranks as the most brutal and unethical in the world. Even in the Communist nations of China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea there have not been such large investments in devising schemes to use psychiatry to crush dissent while controlling the thoughts, minds, and actions of people so efficiently.

As a matter of fact the only real criteria to be an American psychiatrist in this era is a very firm commitment to enslavement, torture and slow murder of the arbitrary targets of psychiatric cruelty in the nation. The long years in medical school simply serve as a front for the final goal of the psychiatrists to clean up financially off of chronic quackery and treachery.

And a consistently more criminal U.S. government by the day which is fixated on its self-proclaimed right to be the only justified mass torturers and murderers in the United Nations has been using satellite transmitted high energy waves to blast the brains of alleged social and political dissidents to mimic mental illness in them and to run them down and cripple them if they refuse to take the psychiatric drugs such as neuroleptics and lithium, when not under court orders to do so, which are used for this purpose.

Perfectly healthy and sane men, women and children who are doing just fine at work and in school are pushed out of work and school daily with the use of such treachery coupled with government organized public bullying and ridicule campaigns in order to be told they are incapable of functioning well at work and in school so they can be placed on the psychiatric killer drugs which finally actually cripple them. The U.S. government working with the American psychiatrists also uses the methodical butchering of its targets of generally unprovoked sadistic aggression to drive families into poverty and split up marriages so they can insist that the divorces which they are actually directly responsible for are signs of mental illness.

This scheme of Americanized psychiatric tyranny has been serving as a model in other nations across the world which have found this all to be a very clever manner to insist their nations respect and admire democratic reforms and free will just as the United States insists it does, while nevertheless brutally cracking down on all democratic freedoms and free will in such manners with the psychiatric weapon of brutal destruction.

2011-10-15T07:36:00.004+11:00

http://www.examiner.com/health-in-national/president-obama-has-invested-heavily-psychiatric-genocide

President Obama has invested heavily in psychiatric genocide

by Harold Mandel

October 14, 2011

President Barak Obama, like other surviving Democratic Party presidents, such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, has proven to be a smooth talking con artist with a character pattern many could view as being sociopathic in nature. If a physician, lawyer or business person misrepresented themselves and what they have to offer the public as seriously as Barak Obama has done they would be facing federal fraud charges and long prison terms. They would also be facing civil mental health care charges of persistent and chronic lying of the nature which psychiatrists claim people suffering from bipolar disorder display.

It may be true that the more conservative Republicans under contemporary American presidents such as George W Bush and his father, George Bush, also let the ravaged victims of psychiatric tyranny down by not encouraging policies to help them get back to work and stay at work in healthy and constructive manners. However, the Republicans admittedly never went over board to swear on their mother's souls that they would institute radical and affirmative social reforms across the country, as Obama has done. And paradoxically the very new sector of black majority voters who have put Obama in office are statistically suffering worse from his policies, although whites, asians, hispanics and others who have been let down by Obama have also been thrown down so deep into America's depths of painful poverty that they often feel their is no way out of the quicksand of escalating despair which poverty brings with it.

America's psychiatric abuse victims have been hardest hit by Obama's so called reforms which have seen them sitting around doing nothing aside from fighting to survive the pain of their situations ever since Obama became president. Obama's answer to these victims of this filthy side of the abusive American mental health scheme has been to either keep them drugged up with poisons to knock out their senses in the mental hospital and half-way house filthy concentration camp schemes, or if they are lucky enough to have some money to push them into poverty or keep them in poverty and on welfare instead of encouraging them to leave the horrible past with experiences of psychiatric human rights abuses behind them, have a glass of fresh orange juice with some multiple vitamins in the morning, get a pep talk at school or work and get back into the mainstream of life.

Barak Obama, who insists he is a social reformer, does not and never saw the potential for the victims of "The American Psychiatric Genocide Machine" to get their lives back together in such manners, because he like the county judges who legalize psychiatric tyranny in swift, fixed civil court appearances, feel these people are subhuman entities whose sins have simply gone too far for good taste. The catastrophic misdiagnoses of the like-minded diabolically insane and chronically incompetent American psychiatrists, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are generally based on nothing more than sins, the enjoyment of which in the American experience is clearly reserved for the extremely wealthy such as Hugh Hefner of Playboy who can afford powerful enough lawyers to fight off accusations of mental illness because he still enjoys playing around with sexy young women at his age.

Other wealthy aristocrats across the nation enjoy such health giving experiences as full oil body massages in their offices and hotel suites daily while the victims of American psychiatry are beaten up, drugged up, handcuffed and thrown into isolation chambers if they dare to try to enjoy this side of natural health in such manners. And all along the victims of American psychiatry are generally not criminals and have never actually suffered from any mental illness. Instead they are often very intelligent, well educated and warm people who if simply given a fair chance in life could have lead healthy, happy and productive lives. These victims of American psychiatry nevertheless sometimes get very sick from being tortured in a sadistic American society where legalized psychiatric genocide is simply a very lucrative business.

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-10-13T20:17:00.007+11:00

PSYCHIATRY DISCREDITED BY A VETERAN BRITISH PSYCHIATRIST WHO IS NOT ANTI-PSYCHIATRY
by Benjamin Merhav

Below is an article which was emailed to me today by Dr. Bob Johnson, MD,a British veteran consultant psychiatrist. Here are his professional details as he emailed me today, and following that his email message and his article.

"Dr Bob Johnson

Consultant Psychiatrist,

Suite 106, Rivington House, 82 Great Eastern Street, London EC2A 3JF.

07976 228 444 –for messages

http://twitter.com/BobTrustConsent VIDEO at http://tinyurl.com/PDvid

e-mail DrBob@TruthTrustConsent.com www.DrBobJohnson.org

GMC speciality register for psychiatry reg. num. 0400150

formerly Head of Therapy, Ashworth Maximum Security Hospital, Liverpool

formerly Consultant Psychiatrist, Special Unit, C-Wing, Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight.

MRCPsych (Member of Royal College of Psychiatrists),

MRCGP (Member of Royal College of General Practitioners).

Diploma in Psychotherapy Neurology & Psychiatry (Psychiatric Inst New York),

MA (Psychol), PhD(med computing), MBCS, DPM, MRCS.

Author Emotional Health ISBN 0-9551985-0-X

Author Unsafe at any dose ISBN 0-9551985-1-8

Hi Ben

I append below an article which will appear in the UK Prisoners Newspaper, Inside Time, on 28 October. I've asked people to write to the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrist, as you can see, with three pertinent questions. Perhaps your contacts might like to do the same?

Hope you like it.

thanx
Bob
=========

Why Today’s Psychiatric Diagnoses Will Never Work

DIAGNOSIS – the highest activity to which a human can aspire, the pinnacle of ineffable skill, a vital and delicate bastion against a chaotic and dastardly cosmos. Oh yeah? Ask around 80% of prisoners, and perhaps a billion others if this applies to psychiatric diagnoses, and your answer would be a raspberry, or worse. And you know what? Despite 20 years as a fully qualified Consultant Psychiatrist – I agree. No wonder I’ve been ejected from seven Consultant Psychiatric posts, the first by Michael Howard, the last by Tony Blair and Jack Straw – I must be doing something right.

Let’s take a closer look at what diagnosis does, or should do – starting with a non-medical crisis. Your sister is getting married – you're the best man/bridesmaid, you're late, you jump in the car. And it won’t start. You know that cars need petrol, so you overfill the tank. Nothing happens. What’s wrong? It’s not a fuel problem, it’s a flat battery. Your diagnosis is wrong. Flooding the car with petrol is precisely the worst thing to do – treat the real cause of the disease, or you’ll make things worse – guaranteed.

Suppose you get the car going, and you’re rattling along, when suddenly there’s a fearsome grinding sound – what to do? Well the one thing you don’t do, is turn the radio up so loud you can’t hear the noise – this is called ‘symptom-suppression’ and it’s the lowest form of medical practice. If you don’t (or can’t) work out where the noise is coming from, then your journey is likely to be incomplete, if not fatal. The term for working this out is ‘diagnosis’ – and the more accurate the diagnosis, the more effective the treatment. And the key to any realistic diagnosis is uncovering its causative factors.

So that’s what diagnosing is really all about – looking for the root causes of the problem and tackling them first, before you do anything else. But bear in mind that in real life, we live in a multi-threaded universe, so there is never just one cause for any single event whatsoever – there is always a cloud of causes, which is why doctors use the cumbersome term ‘aetiology’, never causation. The key skill is prioritising these multiple causes, and that only comes with practice.

Say you’re afflicted with severe abdominal pain. You call the doctor, who takes a careful history, and prods you about. Next you see the surgeon. But suppose the surgeon then says “I’m not interested in causative factors, I’m going to open you up anyway”. You don’t need a medical degree to see that this is disastrous. Without a diagnosis, anything can happen, and usually does.

Wait for it – but this is precisely what psychiatry has now been saying for 31 years. Hard to believe, I know, but there it is in black and white. The 1980 edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-III, instructs all go-ahead psychiatrists to refrain from asking any questions as to where the symptoms come from. What a disaster. If you want chapter and verse, try page xxi of DSM-IV-TR, and you’ll see the Alice-in-Wonderland claim that the “major advance” in psychiatry is being “neutral with respect to theories of aetiology”. In other words, take no interest in any causative factors that underlie the clinical problem in front of you. This strangulates clinical medicine at birth, kisses goodbye to all hope of prevention or cure in mental health, leaving instead, oodles of psychiatric symptoms, resulting, inevitably, in three decades of rudderless psychiatry. (Any psychiatrist reading this, might consider reverting to DSM-I, 1952, a tenth the size and 100 times more real.)

What next? Well, two things – firstly, if you believe, as I do that children are impressionable, this gives a vital clue as to where today’s anti-social or lunatic symptoms are coming from. If you ask enough people as I have done, you find that childhood fears become self-perpetuating when they’re too terrifying to be thought-through – the sufferer can’t even tell themselves the real trauma that is dominating their emotional life, let alone the doctor. By persuading them to do just that, a cure becomes available for every psychiatric disorder in the book, given enough time, resources and consent – from bi-polar to BPD, psychosis to self-harm, Personality Disorder to ‘psychopathy’ – that’s a 100% cure because you’ve eradicated the root.

Secondly, you could write to the Royal College of Psychiatrists – “Dear President, Please stop being ‘neutral’ to causative factors. Please stop insisting on ‘symptom-suppression’. Why not try looking at childhood fears?” Send this short letter to Inside Time [GB – SO30 4XJ] who will forward it on, copies to the Editors of the Lancet and the British Medical journal. Perhaps if there are enough of you, you’ll have more success going through the tradesman’s entrance, than I have had, trying to go through the front door.

2011-10-10T09:24:00.014+11:00

THE SHRINKS HAVE NO MONOPOLY ON PSYCHOPATHY

by Benjamin Merhav

As I have pointed out in my previous post, most shrinks have a lot in common with psychopaths. They share the same indifference to the well being of their patient-victims, the same dishonesty, the same absence of conscience, the same acting out of pretence, the same intransigence, the same selfishness, the same extreme egocentricity etc. However, shrinks have no monopoly on psychopathy, because there are psychopaths also amongst politicians, army chiefs and in other top positions of the state apparatus. In fact, the capitalist system encourages psychopaths and psychopathy, and provides them with privileges.

The following article is about the role of psychopaths in our society and about the tools they devise to protect their privileged positions.

http://truthjihad.blogspot.com/2011/10/psychopaths-develop-technology-to.html

"Psychopaths develop technology to detect angry normals

by Kevin Barrett

A cabal of psychopaths that rules the former USA has developed a new tool to detect and neutralize non-psychopaths who threaten their power. That, at least, is the implication of a recently-uncovered Department of Homeland Security document revealing the existence of Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) - a "pre-crime" detection unit not unlike the one dystopian novelist Philip K. Dick dreamed up for "Minority Report," which inspired the Tom Cruise film. And by way of homage to another great dystopian writer, George Orwell, FAST will red-flag individuals harboring what the ruling psychopaths call "malintent."

As DailyTech.com reports :

This new "pre-crime" detection facility was discovered via a June 2010 DHS document that was acquired by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The document states that information is currently collected and retained on "members of the public" as part of the pre-crime system, which is called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST).

FAST is made up of algorithms that use factors including gender, age, ethnicity, heart rate, body movements, occupation, voice pitch changes, body heat fluctuations and breathing patterns to identify clues as to whether the individual(s) will commit a crime in the future.

The idea behind FAST is to prevent crimes from happening before individuals even have a chance to commit them based on the factors listed above. It is able to do this through the use of sensors that collect audio recordings, video images and psychophysiological measurements.

"The department's Science and Technology Directorate has conducted preliminary research in operational settings to determine the feasibility of using non-invasive physiological and behavioral sensor technology and observational techniques to detect signs of stress, which are often associated with intent to do harm," said Peter Boogaard, the deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

The problem is that this kind of emotion-detection technology does not work against psychopaths - especially those psychopaths or near-psychopaths who have been trained to beat it by professional criminal organizations and intelligence agencies. Psychopaths compose that 1%-2% of the population that lacks normal emotional inhibitory barriers to grossly immoral and/or antisocial conduct. As Harrison Koehli said on my radio show, "If you were locked in a room in a burning building with an axe at hand, you would chop through the door to get away. A psychopath would chop through a human being just as easily as you would chop through that door."

John Perkins describes how he was selected by IMF banksters as an economic hitman: They discovered that he was a bright guy who had been peripherally involved in a low-level crime and had successfully lied to cover up the more serious involvement of a friend. The bankers then administered Perkins a battery of tests. We may assume that the banksters were administering their own version of the standard exam for psychopathy, tweaked to select the kind of people they were looking for: those who score in the top 20% or so on the psychopathy test, who have high IQs and decent social skills, and who are capable of teaming up with other relatively amoral people against what we might call the moral majority, if that word hadn't already been appropriated by another, religious-manipulative variety of psychopath.

Perkins, we may assume, is not a psychopath - not one of the top 1%. That's why they made him an economic hit man, rather than one of the professional killers or "asteroids" sent to murder heads of state who refused to take Perkins' bribes. And that's why he had enough of a conscience that the sight of the smoking rubble at Ground Zero, and the knowledge that his former colleagues had done it, made him a whistleblower. ( Listen to John Perkins on my radio show.)

My point is that the banksters behind the series of coups d'état beginning with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the aborted Smedley Butler coup in the 1930s, the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s, the October Surprise of 1980, and the mother of all coups on 9/11/2001, have assembled a team of psychopaths and near psychopaths to take over and rule the planet. (The banksters themselves are probably DIPs, or Dominant Inbred Psychopaths, as Karen Tostado put it on last Wednesday's radio show.)

Their problem: The psychopaths are being found out, and the normals are getting angry.

How to stop angry normals from coalescing into an anti-psychopath coalition capable of overthrowing the pathocracy? To stop the angry normals, the pathocrats need a detection system. They need to be able to figure out which normals are angry at the pathocracy, and intent on acting against it - in other words, which normals have "malinent" toward the DIPs.

And that's where emotion-reading technologies like FAST come in. Psychopaths, unlike normal people, cannot "read" emotions naturally and empathically. They spend their lives trying to cerebrally figure out how to predict and control the behavior of normal humans, by coldly "reading" emotional signs and responding with the appropriate manipulations. Shock-and-awe operations like 9/11 are designed by such high-IQ psychopaths as Paul Wolfowitz and Philip Zelikow to induce learned helplessless in the terrorized majority of normals, allowing the DIPs to run roughshod over them.

The pathocrats are designing a dystopia that would boggle the combined minds of Philip K. Dick and George Orwell. They would love to set up a FAST-style pre-crime detection system to red-flag people harboring inappropriate emotions, such as anger at the pathocracy, which - when combined with a certain kind of steadfastness - marks that person a potential threat to their misrule.

I don't know about you, but I am one of the people that FAST would red-flag: I am furious at the pathocracy, and committed to bringing it down by any means necessary.

We had better act swiftly, before FAST is deployed and all of us anti-pathocrats are neutralized."

2011-10-01T06:54:00.031+10:00

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOPATHY ?
by Benjamin Merhav

In the previous post I pointed out that practitioners of psychiatry employed by the state are practicing terrorism in the guise of "treatmet". I also pointed out the opinion of 3 mental health experts - including the head of the American Psychiatric Association - which condemn the theory and the practice of psychiatry. There are some more such experts which can be added to the list, including Dr. Thomas Szasz, emeritus professor of psychiatry, who wrote the book titled, The Myth of Mental Illness, some 50 years ago. Yet the majority of the shrinks continue to ignore their critics, including the opinion and complaints of their patient-victims. They continue their business of psychiatry as usual, business as usual, and worse still - they have got the full support of the politicians and of the state. This "business as usual" has caused death and suffering to numerous thousands of people, yet the shrinks continue to ignore these facts and they continue to pretend that they offer necessary "treatments" to help the people who "need" them.

Such attitudes put the sanity of the shrinks themselves under question mark. Could it be that the shrinks themselves hide under the mask of sanity to perpetrate atrocities against innocent human being of all ages ? Could it be that their intransigence is just a symptom of psychopathy ? There is only one alternative explanation to their atrocities, and it is political, namely, that they are fascists who despise ordinary people, as part of their service to the ruling class. This post is ignoring this political explanation, focusing instead on the similarities between psychiatry and psychopathy.

The dictionary defines psychopathy as follows : "a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc." The article below is dealing very cautiously with the similarities between psychiatry and psychopathy, but there is one article which is bolder and with a much more explicit approach. Titled, THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity, it opens as follows :

"Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered." (see : http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm).

Any survivor of psychiatry, and certainly any patient-victim of any state shrink, would recognise the "treating" shrink in the above description of a typical psychopath. It is as if all the state shrinks and all the psychopaths have the same mother. Yet these state shrinks have got the legal power to force their "treatments" on innocent people of all ages; and they have got the official monopoly - recognised and enforced by all the state's institutions - as the "experts" on mental health.

Here is the article with a softer attitude to the psychopath-shrinks for comparison :

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/making-the-most-of-psychopaths-20110930-1l1fb.html

Making the most of psychopaths

Amy Corderoy

October 1, 2011

WHEN the author Jon Ronson read a psychiatric manual, he quickly diagnosed himself with generalised anxiety disorder. And 11 other conditions, from a nasty case of malingering, to an arithmetic learning disorder which probably led to a parent-child relational problem.

Ronson's exercise in self-diagnosis is a case-in-point of a bizarre phenomenon sweeping the world in which both problematic under-diagnosis and over-diagnosis of mental illness seems to be occurring.

Mental-health experts increasingly describe the area as in a state of crisis. And in an era when doctors seek patient empowerment and access to information, psychiatry remains mysterious. Most people know little about what goes on in psychiatric institutions, and the doctors and bureaucrats who run them can be resistant to scrutiny.

The most recent book by Ronson - who has previously delved into the shadowy worlds of political extremists and secret US military units trying to kill using only the power of their minds - is a simultaneously funny and frightening insight into that world.

"What I am doing is writing … in a sort of mystery novel way about a world that is actually of real importance to people," Ronson said, speaking about his book The Psychopath Test before his Sydney visit to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

His focus is psychopathy, and he meets several, including Tony, a man stuck for years in a British high-security hospital after pretending to be mentally ill to avoid being found guilty of a violent assault. He also interviews Bob Hare, the man who devised the checklist for diagnosing pyschopaths.

Reading the book it is almost impossible to resist the urge to diagnose. The criteria, including lack of empathy, manipulative behaviour and grandiose self-worth, seem to manifest themselves in many a former colleague or acquaintance.

"Lots of people have had experiences with bafflingly cruel people and they want to work out why that person screwed up their life," Ronson said.

Mr Hare believes they can be found in all areas of life, in particular the stock exchange and business world and that they are incurable.

The power of diagnosis fascinates Ronson. It, along with power over the allocation of scarce resources, is one reason why the debate about the nature and treatment of mental illness is fought so bitterly.

Ronson was surprised by people's extreme responses to the topic. Some argued there were no questions about the profession, or the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on it.

But internally psychiatry is facing fundamental questions. For decades it has been mostly free of random treatments and vague diagnoses, depending more on the doctor's view than the patient's symptoms.

But the explosion of drug treatments has confused this approach.

Specific conditions are increasingly treated with a variety of drugs that apparently work by targeting markedly different processes in the brain.

A former Australian of the year, Patrick McGorry, and others have campaigned to increase mental health funding to levels equivalent to funding for other areas of health that have a similar impact on the community.

But suspicion about psychiatric treatments and the small amount of evidence for some methods McGorry promotes has seen him subjected to vicious attacks questioning his motivations and independence.

Ronson said he was surprised to find even well-informed and intelligent people who argued psychiatry was nothing more than a pseudo-science and was "wicked and wrong".

2011-09-28T09:17:00.023+10:00

MORE ON THE GLOBAL ATROCITIES PERPETRATED BY THE PRACTITIONERS OF PSYCHIATRY
by Benjamin Merhav

The article below provides a typical case of psychiatric atrocity, but there are many similar atrocities perpetrated by the shrinks around the world. The case of my own daughter here in Australia included ,of course. The atrocities are under the typical guise of psychiatric "treatment", but psychiatry is not the "medical specialty" that it purports to be, "treating mental illnesses" that do not exist, by deadly dangerous drugs, and/or by electric shocks, and/or by deadly dangerous lobotomies. Such coercive "treatment", coupled with the patient-victims confinement in detention centres ( called "hospitals" or hospital "wards") is in reality torture by terrorism, legal terrorism, which has killed many innocent people around theworld !

The famous Rosenhan experiment had proven already 48 years ago that the entire psychiatric procedure of diagnosis and treatment of "mental patients" has no scientific basis, therefore no justification to force it on anyone ( see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/10/rosenhan-experiment-had-proved-that-any.html ).

Dr. John Oldham, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) president, has recently admitted that psychiatrists "do not understand the mechanism of mental illness, nor of the drugs we use to treat it." He also confessed that "there is no question that among the medical professions, psychiatry is the most scientifically primitive."He also confessed as follows :

"Psychiatrists often overdiagnose disorders of questionable scientific validity, they have become overly fixated on medication solutions to life’s problems, and many have accepted a steady flow of drug industry money, creating so many conflicts of interest that it is impossible to know who we can trust."(see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/08/top-shrinks-continue-to-attack-dr.html).

Dr. Fred Baughman, MD, the renowned American neurologist, recently stated as follows :

"All psych treatments work by damaging the brain, and, incidentally, the body. They ablate the most recent, painful of mind ‘sets’ and in so doing ease mind pain and suffering. They are nothing but pain pills always treating a symptom, never a disease. It is long past time that all mental health professionals realized there is nothing to debate that psychiatry that victimizes the laity at large is no less than a total, 100% fraud. Continuing to debate its legitimacy—its ‘science,’ its ‘diseases,’ ‘epidemics,’ treatments etc. has seen the ADHD epidemic rise 21 % from 2003 to 2007 to 5.4 million—the greatest health care fraud in history (along with every fake psychiatric ‘chemical imbalance’ ‘disease’). " (see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/08/dr_11.html ).

Here is the article :

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/historic-hearing-begins-into-broadmoor-patient-seeking-his-freedom-2362090.html

"Historic hearing begins into Broadmoor patient seeking his freedom

His legal counsel argued his problems stemmed from being detained for so long for a relatively minor offence

Haines has spent 25 years in detention and is currently held at Broadmoor.

A Broadmoor patient who has spent nearly 25 years behind bars is still a danger to himself and the public according to testimony given during the first ever mental health tribunal to be heard in public.

Albert Haines, 52, is seeking to be discharged from Broadmoor Hospital after nearly a quarter of a century detained under the Mental Health Act at high- and medium-security facilities. He insists that doctors misdiagnosed him and that he would pose no threat to the public if he were to be released.

But Dr Jose Romero-Urcelay, a forensic psychiatrist at Broadmoor's personality disorder ward, told a tribunal yesterday that Mr Haines was still in need of psychiatric help – although he admitted he could feasibly be released within two years if he agreed to treatment.

"My clinical view is that Mr Haines is presenting with paranoid psychosis, in the sense that his preoccupation with the injustice he believes the psychiatric system has caused him is out of proportion with reality," Dr Romero-Urcelay said. "He believes that we are persecuting him".

The tribunal, the first of its kind to ever be heard in public, is at the centre of a legal landmark case which was brought by Mr Haines against Britain's best-known high-security hospital.

He was first brought to Broadmoor in 1986 after pleading guilty to two counts of attempted wounding. In 1992 he was moved to Three Bridges, in Ealing, a medium-secure unit where he spent 16 years before being moved back to Broadmoor after a series of confrontations with staff.

After losing faith in the mental health system he began – and won – a campaign to have his tribunals heard in public. The result is a two-day tribunal hearing which began yesterday in which members of the press and public were able to attend for the first time.

The case allows those outside the mental healthcare system a rare glimpse inside the hidden workings of Britain's high-security hospitals and how psychiatrists decide whether someone remains a threat. The tribunal heard how over the past two decades numerous doctors had given Mr Haines different diagnoses, causing him to lose faith in the psychiatric system and seek public arbitration.

Dr Romero-Urcelay, his treating clinician, admitted psychiatry was an ineaxct science but said the intention of him and his staff was always to keep people "for the minimum required time".

"We are not a precise science," he said. "We don't have a blood test or an X-ray." He also said it was unusual for someone to be detained as long as Mr Haines, stating that only one in 20 Broadmoor patients have been locked up for more than two decades. Mr Haines' legal representation argued that many of his problems have stemmed from being indefinitely detained for so long for a comparatively minor index offence. Aswini Weereratne, representing Mr Haines, pointed out that he had not killed anybody and argued that "to spend 25 years as a result of these incidents seems disproportionate".

In a statement given to the tribunal, Mr Haines explained: "I am labelled as having a mental disorder which I do not accept. So long as I am in a psychiatric setting I will be seen as a patient who needs treatment. Everything I do or say will be interpreted on this basis."

The hearing continues today."

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.).

2011-09-19T19:30:00.004+10:00

MY APPEAL/COMPLAINT TO THE MINISTER FOR MENTAL HEALTH OF VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
by Benjamin Merhav

The Hon. Mary Wooldridge, MP
Minister for Mental Health
Melbourne, Victoria.

Dear Minister,

this is an urgent appeal/complaint to you on behalf of my daughter, Miss Rebekah Merhav. As you know, my daughter has been subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment (under CTO) for almost 34 years now, yet the current treating psychiatrist won't let go of her even now. There is absolutely no justification for this refusal, not even from a psychiatric point of view, as she is no danger to herself or to anyone else.

As a representative of my daughter I have complained numerous times against this ongoing torture (psychiatric "treatment") which makes her suffer both physically and mentally for no scientific reason and at the risk of her death. Thus, for example, ever since she was forced to consume clozapine and risperdole, some 6 years ago, she has not been able to have a restful night sleep ( not a single full night sleep !), which can cause death, as I pointed out in my previous complaints. Yet, rather than investigating my complaints, and gradually reducing the dosage of the Antipsychotics my daughter has been forced to take, I was punished by the head of Alfred psychiatry - with the approval of the then Chief Psychiatrist - for making these complaints on behalf of my daughter.

In a letter to me ,dated 1st April, 2008, by the Legal Counsel of Bayside Health, acting on behalf of the Head of Psychiatry at Alfred Hospital who is in charge of the regional Clinics, I was accused of stalking the treating psychiatrist. Since then I was banned from making any contact with anyone in the clinic. The only liaison nurse who was appointed for weekly contact with me happened to be so busy that she had not contacted me for many months, eventually stopping all contacts with the notice that I should contact my daughter's "case manager" instead. I did so, but the "case manager" has refused to meet me for many weeks now.

Today, she phoned me to let me know that she arranged for me a meeting with my daughter's registrar, but when I asked her to arrange a meeting with my daughter's consultant psychiatrist instead she refused.

This sordid and arbitrary attitude to my daughter and to her appointed representative by the relevant psychiatrists and by their subservient nurses has had the approval of all psychiatric echelons so far. As a result my daughter continues to suffer and to be subjected to the risk of death. Hence the urgency of this appeal to you . I therefore ask you to intervene in the matter immediately, before it is too late !

2011-09-18T17:03:00.009+10:00

MORE ON THE COMPLETE CORRUPTION OF PSYCHIATRY
by Benjamin Merhav

The article below is not opposed to psychiatry, despite the author's strong disappointment. I chose to republish it because it proves that even such health professionals like the author consider psychiatry beyond repair. However, the full truth about psychiatry - and consequently the urgent need to outlaw it for activities tantamount to terrorism - is far more horrifying.

Apart from the inherent corruption of psychiatry there are several more major reasons for the immediate outlaw of psychiatry. Each of such reasons alone requires the immediate outlaw of this terrorist profession, let alone the combined necessity of them all. Thus, for example, it is a fact which has been repeatedly mentioned by Dr. Fred Baughman, MD, the renowned American neurologist, that psychiatry in its entirety is a fraud ! Another reason is the history of psychiatry which proves its inherent cruelty, and its flagrant violations of basic human rights are ongoing to this day by forcing its patient-victims to be incarcerated and forced to consume deadly Antipsychotic drugs, and/or electric shocks, and or lobotomy "treatments".

Here is the article :

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-roving-psychologist/201109/has-psychiatry-been-corrupted-beyond-repair

Has Psychiatry Been Corrupted Beyond Repair?

fake science is causing real harm

Published on September 15, 2011
by John D. Gartner, Ph.D. in The Roving Psychologist

We know that corporations can show few scruples in hiding the damage done by their products. Cigarette makers hid the link to lung cancer for decades. Energy companies and their political allies deny any link between burning fossil fuels and global warming. But no industry has been as systematic nor as successful as drug companies in infiltrating the knowledge base concerning their products. The results have been high profits. The top ten pharmaceutical companies in the Fortune 500 make more money than the other 490 companies combined.

Imagine this: What if every scientist studying global warming was paid by Exxon? New York would be underwater before anyone knew global warming even existed. Yet, that is exactly the state of scientific research in psychiatry. Over 80 percent of the psychiatric research studies conducted in academic medical centers are funded by the drug industry. And that's the good news. With increasing frequency, Big Pharma is paying marketing companies with no ties to academia to generate studies that put their products in the best possible light; they then pay academics to put their names on the resulting studies as authors, even though they had no participation in the research whatsoever. To see what results, take the example of Neurontin.

About 12 years ago, I noticed that many of my bipolar type II patients were being put on a new drug, Neurontin. None of my patients seemed to get much benefit from it, and most suffered side effects. Now, I understand why.

We now know from independent research--research not funded by drug companies--that Neurontin produces absolutely no benefit in the treatment of bipolar disorder. None. But then, why did we ever believe it did? The Neurontin story is a particularly egregious example of science run amok, but not an atypical one. Psychiatrists were falsely induced to prescribe a medicine that was both unsafe and ineffective.

The study that Warner Lambert used to prove Neurontin was effective for the treatment of bipolar disorder was flawed and titled toward positive results, according to a recent article published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Even worse, evidence of adverse consequences in this study was suppressed: 73 patients in this trial had adverse reactions, and 11 patients died.

How did this happen? In 1993 Warner Lambert had a problem. Neurontin, their new anti-epilepsy drug, had been given only limited FDA approval for use only as a second line epilepsy drugs--it could only be used if other epilepsy drugs already on the market failed. "Neurontin was a turkey." Wrote Daniel Carlat in Unhinged. What to do?

The company hired marketing firms--not scientists--to produce scientific articles demonstrating the benefits of Neurontin for bipolar disorder, and paid physicians $1,000 a piece to allow their names to be listed as authors of the studies that they neither conducted nor wrote (and perhaps never even read).

While the FDA requires a reasonably high level of scientific evidence to approve a drug for the treatment of a specific condition, once the drug is approved, doctors are free to prescribe any drug for any condition, off label. To convince them to do this, weak or massaged data can be dressed up to prove a drug is effective, and no FDA scrutiny is required. It's a crime for a drug company to market drugs to doctors for off label purposes, but that's exactly what happened. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote: "the company had carried out a massive illegal scheme to promote Neurontin for off label uses--mainly by paying academic experts to put their names on flimsy research."

Drug reps descended on practicing psychiatrists. Warner Lambert senior executive John Ford exhorted his reps to "hold their hands and whisper in their ears...Neurontin for bipolar disorder." He went further, encouraging them to exceed the FDA recommended dose of 1800 mg/day, adding "I don't want to hear that safety crap." Warner Lambert paid 430 million in fines for its deceptive and illegal marketing of Neurontin to psychiatrists.

Is Neurontin isolated incident? Academic ghost authorship of studies produced by marketing companies is standard procedure. In 2001, drug companies paid $7 billion to a thousand contract research organizations to produce data that put their drugs in a most favorable light. How deeply has this penetrated psychiatry? Some 57 percent of the published scientific articles about Zoloft, for example, were written by the marketing firm Current Medical Directions and ghost authored by academics who had no part in the studies. These articles appeared in top journals including the American Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Thus, for at least one anti-depressant, the bulk of the medical literature was literally written by the drug company that manufactured the drug, which is about as glaring a manipulation of science as one can imagine," wrote Carlat. And in a New York Times op-ed piece Carl Elliot wrote, "Pharmaceutical companies promote their drugs with pseudo-studies that have little if any scientific merit."

There are many ways to put your finger on the scales. One is to simply not publish negative results. Not surprisingly, drug company sponsored research is four times more likely to produce positive results than independent research. Wrote Carlat: "If I relied on the published medical literature (and what else can I rely on?) it would appear that 94 percent of antidepressant trials are positive." However, using the power of the Freedom of Information Act, Erick Turner demanded the FDA turn over all antidepressant trial data, and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that across all the studies only 51 percent of the results were positive. Essentially, you might as well flip a coin.

In The Emperor's New Drugs, Irving Kirsh who also used the Freedom of Information Act to get suppressed FDA research reports, found similar results: 40 percent of antidepressant clinical trial data had been suppressed because they showed negative results. "When we analyzed all the data--those that had been published and those that had been suppressed--my colleagues and I were led to the inescapable conclusion that antidepressants are little more than active placebos."

Not only has the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs been oversold, but the real harm they may be doing has gone mostly unreported. For example, according to an impressive array of evidence presented by Pulitzer Prize nominated investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic, antidepressants appear to increase the lifetime rates of rapid cycling in bipolar patients. So the drugs that provide short-term relief actually worsen the disease they are meant to treat in the long-term. The response has been to add mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics, which have their own often disabling side effects, to offset the long-term instability produced by the antidepressants. So suppressing findings doesn't just give us billion dollar placebos. It gives us patent medicine that may be doing real harm.

Psychiatry, to its credit, has not taken these shocking ethical breeches lying down. Recently, the field had brought in tighter regulations in direct response to this and other scandals. Grand rounds speakers now must disclose their drug company funders; doctors can no longer accept valuable gifts, trips, or lavish meals from drug companies; drug reps' access to residents has been restricted; the FDA puts all results on-line, including negative results. That's progress.

But we need to face facts: Psychiatric research has become corrupted, not around the margins, but at its core. The scientific evidence that underlies psychiatrists' day-to-day prescription decisions is really marketing propaganda packaged as science. As a result, we can no longer trust psychiatrists' judgments and recommendations. "Garbage in, garbage out" is an old research aphorism--if the data is biased the results will be too. In this case, garbage data may be putting garbage toxic chemicals into our patient's bodies. We don't know, and can't know, if the pill psychiatrists are pushing today is the next Neurontin, or worse.

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-09-15T08:35:00.011+10:00

MORE ON WHY PSYCHIATRY CANNOT BE REFORMED NOR TRUSTED BY THE PUBLIC
by Benjamin Merhav

The article below is by a psychology professor. He seems to be the first academic to challenge the mental health system here in Victoria, Australia. It is to his credit that he is opposed to the monopoly of psychiatry and to its doctor practitioners. Also to his credit is his objection to the ongoing manipulation of people ("mental patients") by dangerous and harmful psychiatric drugs and by electric shocks ("ECT").

However, Professor John Read, the author of the article below, ignores three basic factors. The first is the power of coercion that psychiatrists have by law, a power which allows them - with very few nominal checks - to impose their will and their "treatments" on any person they declare "mentally ill", including young children. The second factor is the alliance of psychiatry with Big Pharma. The third is the barbaric and fascist history of psychiatry which includes the mass murder of 250,000 "mental patients" in Germany during the Hitler regime, and the invention of electric shocks by an Italian psychiatrist under the Mussolini regime in 1938. Psychiatry is not, and never was, a therapeutic method/profession, and least of all a "medical specialty" for helping people to recover from an emotional crisis.

Psychiatric coercion is the most crucial factor. Deny the shrinks the power to impose their "treatment" on people, and you thereby deny them the monopoly over the mental health system. The law must be changed to accommodate for the needs of people. Therefore public opinion, which is reflected in the relevant articles published by The Age, should be welcomed and encouraged rather than knocked back as Professor John Read does to The Age. This is a human rights issue, as well as a public health issue of utmost importance. It is also a fundamental democracy issue.

The title of the article below reveals its purpose, namely, to provide psychological conversation therapy to "mental patients" rather than the current psychiatric drugs/electric shocks/lobotomy "treatments" currently imposed by the shrinks. However, without the legal rebuke of psychiatric coercion nothing much would change, even if the shrinks formally adopt the talk therapy principles. Moreover, psychiatry must be banished from the medical profession, and eventually outlawed altogether as a danger to the public as much as terrorism is !

Here is the article :

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/with-more-talk-in-mind-20110914-1k9m2.html

With more talk in mind

by John Read

September 15, 2011

Opinion

SERIOUS problems in Victoria's mental health system have been revealed recently in The Age. The important thing now is to find solutions. In doing so we should remember that although Victoria is in the spotlight, similar ''crises'' occur regularly all over the world. Perhaps this is because Victoria is not alone in having a system based on fundamentally flawed principles.

Mental health services have become increasingly dominated by psychiatry's ''medical model'', which claims that feeling depressed, anxious or paranoid is primarily caused by genetic predispositions and chemical imbalances.

This has led to alarming rises in chemical solutions to distress. In New Zealand, one in nine adults (and one in five women) is prescribed antidepressants every year.

The public, however, in every country studied, including Australia, believes that mental health problems are caused by issues such as stress, poverty and isolation. The public also prefers talking therapies to drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Research suggests the public is right. For example, the single best predictor of just about every mental health problem is poverty, followed by other social factors such as abuse, neglect and early loss of parents in childhood, and - once in adulthood - loneliness and a range of adverse events including losses and defeats of various kinds.

Meanwhile, reviews of studies on anti-depressants (which only recently have been able to include those previously kept secret by drug companies) conclude that they are superior to placebos only for those at the extreme end of the ''most severe'' group of depressed people. This represents less than 10 per cent of the people who are receiving these drugs.

A recent Cochrane review (the type most highly regarded in the scientific community) for risperidone, a leading anti-psychotic drug, ''suggests that there is no clear difference between risperidone and [a] placebo''.

A placebo (from the Latin meaning ''I please'') is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed the talking therapies are effective partly because, if done well, they too instil hope and expectations of recovery.

The problem is that psychiatric drugs often have serious adverse effects. Anti-psychotics, for instance, can cause rapid weight gain, loss of sexual function, diabetes, heart disease, neurodegeneration and reduced life span.

As previously reported, my review of ECT studies (with Professor Richard Bentall of Liverpool University) found that this treatment is ineffective for most recipients and frequently causes permanent memory loss. This in itself can be depressing.

ECT also has a slight but significant risk of death, most frequently from cardiovascular failure.

Inpatient units are equally ineffective and can also be damaging. When will we learn that putting large numbers of extremely distressed people in the same building is not a good idea?

What I conclude from all this is that any review of mental health services in Victoria, or anywhere else for that matter, should probably be led by anyone other than a psychiatrist - and certainly not in Victoria's case the state's Chief Psychiatrist, whose job, according to Dr Ruth Vine herself, is "to watch over how the system is functioning".

It is unfair to expect Dr Vine to take an objective view on the failure of the system for which she is responsible. That lack of objectivity is amply demonstrated by her claims that ECT is "safe and effective" and that the problem is the public's "negative" views.

Perhaps a lawyer from the Mental Health Legal Centre might be a good choice.

Any review should include mental health service users and their families, and other mental health professionals, including social workers, occupational therapists, psychologists and nurses.

(Psychiatric nurse Philip Lynch reminds us that there are thousands of staff "who quietly continue to do important work every day, often in challenging circumstances"; so why only listen to the doctors?)

The review should also investigate what percentage of people receive drugs, and what percentage receive safer, more effective alternatives, and how a better balance can be achieved. It must scrutinise the contact and transactions between psychiatrists and drug company reps and consider ways to reduce or eliminate these, and as well find ways to reduce the pressure on psychiatrists by helping them feel OK about sharing decision-making. When things go wrong, as they inevitably will sometimes, everyone should share responsibility, and support one another.

The review would need to explore the ''recovery model'' recently introduced in many other countries, including New Zealand. (No, I am not saying New Zealand is superior to Australia - except, of course, when it comes to rugby.)

Further, the review would need to learn from the many innovative non-government organisations, such as Voices Vic and Mind, and study ways to prevent mental health problems developing - perhaps by focusing on providing safe and nurturing environments in the first few years of life. Also, simply listen to the public. Finally, The Age can assist by reporting the issues without exaggerated headlines such as "1000 DEATHS".

Dr John Read is a professor of clinical psychology at Auckland University. He advises that no one should reduce or come off medication on the basis of information in this article but should, if they have concerns, consult the prescribing doctor.

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-09-05T08:53:00.020+10:00

36 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED BY PSYCHIATRIC "TREATMENT" IN VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, ALONE OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS
by Benjamin Merhav

There are several public scandals - if not crimes - involved in these killing of patients by the shrinks' psychiatric "treatments", at least in Victoria, Australia, as reported below. The first is that all psychiatric "hospitalisations" are no more than arbitrary detention of people in detention centres ("psychiatric wards", "psychiatric hospitals"). These detention centres have no therapeutic function, which is why they should be shut down because proper hospitals are places for recovery, not for punishment. Therefore it is not enough to be concerned only about ''unethical and illegal" practices" in such detention centres.

The second public scandal is the existing monopoly by the shrinks over the entire mental health system, a monopoly given to them by the Mental Health Act, 1986, and interpreted as such by all the state's departments and institutions. This is doubly wrong and harmful, because not only is psychiatric treatment harmful rather than therapeutic as are other effective therapeutic alternatives, but as a coercive "treatment" it violates the basic human rights of patient-victims.

The third public scandal is that psychiatry wrongly claims to be a "medical specialty" which offers "treatment" to its patient-victims. In a recent comment by the renowned American neurologist, Dr. Fred Baughman, MD , he emailed me as follows :

"Psychiatrists never diagnose—establish the existence of a physical abnormality—gross microscopic or chemical (aka disease), but with ECT (and all of their drug treatments) they invariably damage the brain and body. A seizure, no matter how mild is always a sign—proof of damage to the brain regardless of whether or not there are obvious lasting neurological deficits (on physical-neurological examination. Since claiming all mental psychological symptoms to be disease they can no longer rightly claim to be a legitimate part of the medical profession."

Here is the local press report about the psychiatric public scandals :

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/state-urged-to-act-on-shocking-death-rates-in-mental-care-20110904-1jsh1.html

State urged to act on 'shocking' death rates in mental care

Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker

September 5, 2011

More needs to be done to prevent unexpected, unnatural or violent deaths in the mental health system.

VICTORIA'S disabilities watchdog has called for urgent reforms to address the ''shocking'' number of people dying in the state's psychiatric facilities - 36 over two years - amid fresh revelations about the mistreatment of mentally ill people.

The Public Advocate, Colleen Pearce, says more needs to be done to prevent unexpected, unnatural or violent deaths in the mental health system - and to ensure grieving families and the public are told why such deaths are occurring, and at such a high rate.

Her call comes as an investigation by The Age has found that:

■ The Brumby government was warned in 2010 that mentally ill people were dying as a result of ''unethical and illegal'' practices.

■ Peninsula Health chief Sherene Devanesen wrote in 2008 about three ''unexpected deaths'' in a mental health ward over a short period. She also wrote that ''some areas of practice and behaviour were not consistent with Peninsula Health values and … contemporary psychiatric practice.

■ Anthony Travaglini, 40, who died in a psychiatric ward in September 2008, was severely mistreated by ''very aggressive'' staff who repeatedly medicated him despite his deteriorating state, according to fresh claims.

These allegations are contained in a letter sent to the Department of Human Services by the director of the Mental Illness Awareness Council, Isabell Collins, who met staff and patients from Eastern Health's Upton House shortly after Mr Travaglini's death.

In her letter, Ms Collins said a patient had told her he had ''expressed concern to staff that Anthony did not look OK and suggested they take his observations, but they just gave him more drugs''.

A forensic pathologist has found Mr Travaglini's death was most likely caused by a combination of drugs in his system.

Mr Travaglini is one of three people who had an unexpected and unnatural death, and whose cases the The Saturday Age revealed were linked to allegations of serious failings by senior mental health staff at state-run psychiatric wards in recent years.

Ms Collins told The Age that the existing system of oversight into the deaths of Victorians in state-run mental health facilities, or shortly after they are discharged, needs an overhaul.

Her views are supported by the Office of the Public Advocate - an independent statutory body created to protect the rights of disabled and other vulnerable people - which has called on Victoria's Chief Psychiatrist, Ruth Vine, to follow the lead of the Victorian Child Death Committee and make public more information about unexpected or unnatural deaths and associated systemic issues.

Dr Vine's past public reports contain minimal detail about the causes of deaths

and associated systemic issues.

Ms Pearce said discrepancies in figures released by various state agencies, along with the lack of detail about why the deaths were occurring in the system, had to be addressed.

''The community expects that people will be safe from harm in hospitals. The number of people dying while under the care of the mental health system is shocking. There needs to be urgent changes to tackle preventable deaths and improve mental health care. This must be a priority,'' said Ms Pearce.

Ms Pearce's call came in response to revelations in The Saturday Age that 36 people had died unexpected, unnatural or violent deaths inside mental health facilities between 2008 and 2010. The figures are based on files released by the Coroners Prevention Unit, which also reveal that 119, or nearly a quarter, of the 502 coronial inquests held in Victoria between 2008 and 2010 involved people with diagnosed mental illnesses.

Of those 119 mental health coronial cases, almost a third involved deaths of patients while they were being treated at state-run and private mental health facilities.

Ms Pearce said: ''The question for us is why? Why did they die, how could they die [in a mental health facility] and what can we do to prevent it? Families want answers … Why shouldn't families know why their loved ones have died and what did the system do to improve or address the problem?''

She has also called for far greater support for mental health patients before and after they are discharged, including access to appropriate housing and treatment for alcohol and drug dependencies. ''There is a huge campaign on the road toll. Why aren't the same resources put into saving these people?''

Among leaked mental health service documents obtained by The Age is an email by a senior psychiatrist from one of the state's busiest acute mental health units. It was sent in January 2010 to then community services minister Lisa Neville and states: ''You may already be aware that Eastern Health Adult Psychiatry Service has [among] the highest rate of unnatural deaths in the state. What you may not be aware of is the unethical and illegal practices that are resulting in such poor outcomes and the resignation of over 22 senior medical staff since the commencement of management there.

''I would like an audience with you to bring to your attention in confidence some of the practices that are causing such poor outcomes and suffering. I have tried to raise these issues locally but unfortunately been met with vicious attacks on my personal and professional reputation.''

The psychiatrist, who asked for his name to be withheld because he still works in the health system, said his concerns were never addressed.

The Age has also obtained emails written in 2009 by a member of Eastern Health's Community Advisory Committee, which was set up in 2001 to give community representatives input into the health services operations.

The emails show that efforts by a committee member to get information about problems in mental health wards were constantly thwarted.

''I'm seriously thinking of resigning from the Community Advisory Committee as it is too restrictive and I seem to keep getting into trouble for asking questions,'' one email states.

Greg Oke, who was employed for four years as an adviser to Eastern Health on ways to protect the rights of patients, said mental health facilities tended to adopt a ''custodial approach'' to mentally unwell people rather than an approach respecting people's dignity.

Mr Oke, who left Eastern Health in mid 2009, said: ''People using Victorian mental health services are being treated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading way. Their human rights are being degraded on a daily basis.''

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-08-26T09:28:00.003+10:00

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/832/9/

Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children

Thursday, 25 August 2011

"Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children... the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform. But the 20th century witnessed a momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation."

An Op Ed in The New York Times by Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, is the author of “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children,” provides insight into the conflict between laws enacted to protect children's best interest and the newly emerging laws that protect corporate best interests.

This conflict of interest has resulted in devastating consequences: children's best interest--their health and welfare have been sacrificed for corporate profits.

Bakan cites childhood obesity resulting from irresponsible advertising by the purveyors of junk food. And the proliferation of toxic chemicals in children's environment that have undermined children's health. And he cites under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices, noting that corporate deception led to widespread prescribing of psychotropic drugs for children :

"we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices.

In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe.

The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments."

While the statement is true, readers are not informed about the actual scope and magnitude of the deceptive practices by pharmaceutical companies and their professional healthcare "partners" in government and academia that are undermining children's health and welfare.

Read Corrupt Practices section on the AHRP website. For example, Confidential Expert Witness Report Documents Psychiatrists' Corrupt Practices.

Vera Hassner Sharav

==============

THE NEW YORK TIMES

August 21, 2011
The Kids Are Not All Right
By JOEL BAKAN

Vancouver, British Columbia

WHEN I sit with my two teenagers, and they are a million miles away, absorbed by the titillating roil of online social life, the addictive pull of video games and virtual worlds, as they stare endlessly at video clips and digital pictures of themselves and their friends, it feels like something is wrong.

No doubt my parents felt similarly about the things I did as a kid, as did my grandparents about my parents’ childhood activities. But the issues confronting parents today can’t be dismissed as mere generational prejudices. There is reason to believe that childhood itself is now in crisis.

Throughout history, societies have struggled with how to deal with children and childhood. In the United States and elsewhere, a broad-based “child saving” movement emerged in the late 19th century to combat widespread child abuse in mines, mills and factories. By the early 20th century, the “century of the child,” as a prescient book published in 1909 called it, was in full throttle. Most modern states embraced the general idea that government had a duty to protect the health, education and welfare of children. Child labor was outlawed, as were the sale and marketing of tobacco, alcohol and pornography to children. Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children.

By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform.

But the 20th century also witnessed another momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation. Lawyers, policy makers and business lobbied successfully for various rights and entitlements traditionally connected, legally, with personhood. New laws recognized corporations as legal — albeit artificial — “persons,” granting them many of the same legal rights and privileges as human beings. In an eerie parallel with the child-protective efforts, “the best interests of the corporation” was soon introduced as a legal precept.

A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children.

Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.

Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments.

Children today are also exposed to increasing quantities of toxic chemicals. We know that children, because their biological systems are still developing, are uniquely vulnerable to the dangers posed by many common chemical compounds. We also know that corporations often use such chemicals as key ingredients in children’s products, saturating their environments. Yet these chemicals remain in circulation, as current federal laws demand unreasonably high proof of harm before curbing a chemical’s use.

The challenge before us is to reignite the guiding ethos and practices of the century of the child. As Nelson Mandela has said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” By that measure, our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul. The good news is that we can — and should — work as citizens, through democratic channels and institutions, to bring about change.

Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, is the author of “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children.”
(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-08-19T13:13:00.003+10:00

MORE ON THE LIES AND DANGERS OF "EARLY INTERVENTION" TREATMENTS BY SHRINKS

The former Australian of the Year shrink, professor Patrick McGorry, is either a deliberate liar and a corrupt Big Pharma patsy, or else he is suffering from delusions. In the latter case an "early intervention" - although not early enough ! - which would stop his delusions might save the lives of thousands of young Australians, not to mention hundreds of millions of Australian tax payers' dollars ! Certainly the parents of the young Australian victims should not collaborate in the implementation of McGorry's plans, if their children are dear to them ! They would do well to heed the warning of an American psychiatrist who in his 1998 letter of resignation from the APA stated as follows : "(the parents) set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring. For the most part we ( in the APA) stand by and allow this fascistic agenda to move forward." He was referring only to conventional psychiatry, not to the not-as-yet-popular and far more dangerous "early intervention" delusions of McGorry and his gang ! ( See the letter here :http://www.oikos.org/mosher.htm ).

The ABC inteview with McGorry pasted below is very vague. McGorry avoids any detailed honest answers which would expose his dangerous delusions. However, when pressed to give details he simply provides lies ! Thus, for example, he tells the interviewer that to reduce the "psychosis risk syndrome"he is using harmless therapies like "cognitive behaviour therapy, a psychological treatment, omega three fatty acids, a fish oil... and low-dose anti-psychotic medication." These must be lies for two reasons. First is that according to psychiatry there is no substitute for psychiatric-Big Pharma produced "medications", and McGorry himself has never criticised the use of such "medications". Secondly, fish oil and other natural products are needed for people who are deficient in certain nutrients, and this has nothing to do with psychiatric illness of any kind.

Finally, McGorry states during the interview as follows : "I've been a researcher in this area for 20 years, I'm a scientist; this is not advocacy, this is not faith, this is absolutely hard evidence."These are all lies, of course. He says that he "researched" early intervention "treatment" for 20 years, but if he did really he would not have continued to advocate psychiatric atrocities, and he certainly cannot claim to be a "scientist" as a result.
(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2011/s3297040.htm

Professor McGorry defends early intervention

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Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 18/08/2011

Reporter: Tony Jones

Professor Patrick McGorry argues the early intervention model he promotes has been proven to reduce mental illness symptoms and reduce costs to the health system.

Transcript

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Mental health expert and former Australian of the year Professor Patrick McGorry joins us now from our Parliament House studio.

Pat McGorry, thanks for being there.

PATRICK MCGORRY, MENTAL HEALTH CAMPAIGNER: Thank you, Tony.

TONY JONES: Now you've talked about the federal pledge of $1.5 billion of new funding. What will you be asking from the state premiers tomorrow?

PATRICK MCGORRY: Well, all Australians know that the mental health system is broken and we need transformational change, and despite the Federal Government having put a significant amount of money - obviously as John Mendoza just said, a lot more is required - but it is a significant investment and it is across the board. It's across all of life's stages.

Only 25 per cent of the investment is actually focused on young people, so I think some of the comments you just heard earlier are quite misleading.

But it is across the board, and as David Crosby said, we've had this famine mentality in the field with people fighting over these scraps. We've got to invest across the board, but we've got to invest also where the major gaps are and where the most change can actually make a difference.

And that's why, as John Mendoza just said, investing in young people where the peak surge of incidence of new cases actually occurs through adolescence and in early adulthood, and we also know the facts are - these are facts, not really to be debated, because they're National Mental Health Survey facts.

The weakest access across the whole life span is in the age group who have the most need, so this is why governments have actually gone down this track.

But they also recognise - and the biggest single investment in the Government's package is $500 million for people with severe and enduring mental illness, so still the biggest investment is in this group. What we'd be looking for from the premiers is co-investment in these critical programs that will transform things, particularly ...

TONY JONES: Can I just interrupt you there? When you say co-investment, do you mean matching funding? Are you basically asking the premiers as a group and those from the Territory, the leaders from the Territory to put up $1.5 billion to match the $1.5 billion of the Federal Government?

PATRICK MCGORRY: Well that would be nice, but I think the ask is more modest than that. It's to match investment in the programs where the Commonwealth has said it will pay for 50 per cent of the investment.

For example the EPPIC program that was mentioned by several of the speakers earlier; that requires state governments, if they want to have those services developed in their jurisdictions, to co-invest with the Commonwealth to create that new transformational change.

And the other areas under the national partnerships agreement to try to tackle issues for people with severe and enduring mental illness, notably housing issues and programs that might take the pressure off the very beleaguered acute health system, the emergency departments.

So those are the areas of co-investment.

And the problem is that the state governments, over the last decade or so, almost to a man, or to a state, have allowed their community mental health services to deteriorate quite seriously, and that's really a legacy of mainstreaming of mental health services within acute hospitals where the community mental health budget's just sitting there like a big cash cow which can be drawn upon to prop up other services within the acute hospital, with the result that the community mental health services buckle, they don't work very well then and more and more people end up in emergency departments.

Everyone knows this. The most important immediate thing the premiers can do tomorrow is to ring-fence or quarantine the mental health budgets within those acute hospitals, and that's not just about young people, it's about all stages of life.

TONY JONES: Well I know you've said the issues with young people comprise only 25 per cent of the funding.

In recent months though a number of critics, some quite harshly, have questioned your key focus on early psychosis intervention. You've just heard a little bit of that. What is going on here? Is it, as Mr Crosby suggested, that there's an envy in certain parts of the psychiatric community or is there a genuine fear that you're actually getting this wrong?

PATRICK MCGORRY: Well, look, let's take the early psychosis reform for a start. This was something that was pioneered in Australia in the early '90s. We had a national early psychosis project in the late '90s which started to build that infrastructure in this country. It was allowed to just ebb away and nothing happened in this country for 10 years.

Let's be clear: what happens when - to young people and their families when we don't have these programs is long delays in getting access to care, even for severe psychotic illnesses, and when they do get access, it's very cursory and there is no psycho-social wrap-around or recovery program for these patients to make a proper recovery and reintegrate back into society.

So it's all very well for people to say that there's a risk of over-medication. Actually these programs provide the opposite; they provide less reliance on medication and much more emphasis on psycho-social care. So, again, ...

TONY JONES: OK. Let me go to this question of evidence. Is there statistical evidence over this period that your programs have been running to show that there've been significant percentages of young people who do not experience worse psychosis because of the early intervention?

PATRICK MCGORRY: Absolutely. This is - of all the things in the Government's package in May, this is the most evidence-based reform. It's been going for 20 years, countries all round the world have contributed to the evidence base.

Because we dropped the ball in the '90s, it's been on the backburner in Australia, so other countries have gone ahead, implemented these reforms across the board in many, many Western countries and much of the evidence has come from overseas. So, Australians have been missing out because of these misinformed critics who are actually giving the wrong impression about this reform. There is very good evidence.

TONY JONES: One of the harshest of those critics is an American psychiatrist, Professor Alan Frances. He calls Australia's early intervention programs the "... largest and most reckless public health experiment ever attempted." I mean, it's a pretty extravagant criticism. How do you respond to that?

PATRICK MCGORRY: Well, it's quite bizarre. Dr Frances has obviously no knowledge of the Australian health care system nor of the processes that these reform proposals have had to go through to get to this stage.

I mean, it's been - we've debated these issues in the journals, in the health reform commissions, we've even debated them on the beaches, I would say. I mean, it's been a massive effort to actually get it through all these lenses.

So I think what we're seeing now is some disaffected critics who, as David Crosby said, are not happy with the result. They've had their chance to put the case; the case hasn't got up from their point of view.

I've been a researcher in this area for 20 years, I'm a scientist; this is not advocacy, this is not faith, this is absolutely hard evidence. These programs improve outcomes and they reduce costs.

So an early psychosis program will end up costing per patient per annum about a third of what the standard adult mental health care costs. So actually these reforms release money for other areas of psychiatry, so it's very self-defeating for people to criticise their implementation.

TONY JONES: I was trying to figure out why an American would be amongst your strongest critics, and it seems that Professor Frances and others are quite worried that what you're doing here in Australia will entrench a newly-described state of mental illness known as "psychosis risk syndrome".

Is what you're doing here really that revolutionary that it could affect the way psychiatry is practiced all around the world?

PATRICK MCGORRY: Well, my colleague Alison Yung and I in the early days of our early psychosis work in the '90s, patients were presenting to the first episode psychosis programs with lot of distress, a lot of functional impairment, but with warning signs of psychosis.

So, these patients were in need of some kind of assistance. So what we set about doing was first of all following up these patients in a supportive way and we learned that they had a very high risk of transitional to psychosis, something like 30 to 40 per cent within 12 months, which is very, very high, about 400 times higher than the general population.

And so obviously there was a need to try to reduce that risk, so a number of research studies, which I think Jon Jureidini referred to, were conducted both here and overseas. There are about six randomised control trials, if he wants to talk evidence, showing that a range of treatments will reduce that risk to about 10 per cent.

Now, the sort of things that work in reducing risk are cognitive behaviour therapy, a psychological treatment, omega three fatty acids, a fish oil, both of which studies we have done, and low-dose anti-psychotic medication. Now that's the controversial bit.

But what the studies actually show is there is no need to use anti-psychotic medications as first line in these patients. So the fears that Dr Francis is fanning in this country are actually the converse of what the reality actually shows from the research.

So, I think we're on very firm ground knowing how to help these young people and they certainly need help. And they shouldn't be turned away, as Dr Jureidini implied. They should be helped and they can be helped within this new blend of Headspace and EPPIC models which will be rolled out hopefully to most of Australia over the next few years.

TONY JONES: Pat McGorry, very interesting to hear you spell that out. We have to leave you there for now. We'll come back no doubt to talk about this again in the future. We thank you very much for joining us once again on Lateline.

PATRICK MCGORRY: Thanks a lot, Tony.

2011-08-18T10:42:00.006+10:00

More on the Denial of Basic Human Rights to People by Shrinks in Australia
by Benjamin Merhav

The monopoly on mental health matters by the shrinks in Australia is both astounding and outrageous. It is completely out of control too, as the Sydney newspaper cutting below reports. In Victoria there is a Minister for Mental Health, but any complaint to her is automatically referred to the Chief Psychiatrist, thus making him completely unaccountable to anybody other than to his fellow shrinks. Even the Ombudsman refuses to deal with any complaint against the Chief Psychiatrist !

The Mental Health Act, 1986 here in victoria ostensibly provides "protection of people with mental illness in Victoria", but this "protection" is also under the control of the shrinks. Any "involuntary mental patient" can appeal to the Mental Health Review Board against any shrink's decision to issue a "Community Treatment Order" (the CTO actually stands for compulsory treatment order ) against him/her. However, if the shrink states that the patient "needs" treatment. to "prevent the patient's situation from getting worse" then such an appeal is dismissed by the panel. On each panel of the Mental Health Review Board there is a psychiatrist, and he is considered as the "expert" by the other two members.

Then there is an appeal avenue for the appealing patient, to appeal again to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, but it too would automatically approve the "treating psychiatrist decision", as he is regarded as the "expert". Then, as a last resort, and only in exceptionally arbitrary cases, there is an appeal to the Supreme Court, but it too would rely on the "expert" opinion of the "treating psychiatrist", and costs of such an appeal are extremely prohibitive. Besides, psychiatric wards for involuntary patients are no better than detention centres or prisons. Why are the shrinks allowed to attach their detention centres to hospitals ? A hospital is a place for therapeutic recuperation, not for psychiatric torture; a place for saving lives not for destruction of lives !

The press report below presumes that psychiatry is a "medical specialty", and that psychiatric "treatment" is a necessary "medical treatment", but this is hogwash, and it is admitted to be so by top shrinks ! (see, for example : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/08/top-shrinks-continue-to-attack-dr.html ). As Dr. Fred Baughman has repeatedly stated, Psychiatry is a total fraud, and the only mental illnesses it is dealing with are those which are caused by its treatments (see, for example : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/08/dr_11.html ).

Here is the press report :

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/denial-of-rights-in-psychiatric-treatment-20110817-1iy8u.html

Denial of rights in psychiatric treatment

Amy Corderoy Health
August 18, 2011

"Not acceptable" ... the system of detainment for mentally ill patients is under attack. Photo: AFR

PSYCHIATRIC patients who have been detained involuntarily are being held without independent review for more than a month, and some hospitals are refusing access to lawyers and providing inadequate information to patients and their families.

The practices have been revealed in previously secret papers from a group set up to monitor the implementation of a decision by the Mental Health Review Tribunal to shift automatic reviews of patient detention from one week after it occurs to three weeks.

In just three meetings the group exposed a litany of problems in the treatment of involuntary patients - some of which have been made worse by the changes to the reviews.

The president of the tribunal, Greg James, said some hospitals refused to let doctors be questioned or did not properly notify patient carers of hearings.

He wrote to hospital medical superintendents after discovering patients had been held for more than five weeks without being presented to the tribunal, the papers show.

But Mr James defended the decision to delay hearings. He said that in the financial year to June 2010 there had been more than 10,600 inquires into involuntary treatment started but only 4828 were concluded, meaning most were adjourned and did not progress to a full hearing.

Figures provided to the monitoring group showed under the new system in the three months to the end of January 28.5 per cent of patients, 303 people, were seen by the tribunal three to four weeks after their detention. Nearly 3 per cent of patients were seen after their 28th day.

A lawyer who has worked in mental health but asked to remain anonymous told the Herald that hospitals were not properly informing patients of their right to appeal detention.

Whereas early hearings forced hospitals to provide information within a week, "quite often" now it was given weeks later, only a day or so before their hearing.

The papers show some hospitals have also been giving inadequate notice to family members and lawyers of tribunal hearings. One refused to allow Legal Aid lawyers to conduct advice clinics on some occasions.

The Greens MP and health spokesman, John Kaye, who requested the papers under parliamentary rules, said they exposed a systematic denial of patients' rights.

Patient appeals against detention had risen two-fold since the later reviews were instituted, he said.

Sascha Callaghan, a lawyer and researcher at the centre for values ethics and the law in medicine at the University of Sydney, said in areas such as the criminal justice system people were not held for long periods without review.

"From a rights perspective it's not acceptable," she said.

A clinical senior lecturer in the school of psychiatry at the University of NSW, Matthew Large, said patients could be detained on a little more than a couple of doctors' say-so.

"The restriction of freedom of movement is a very basic right that should not be removed … by non-judicial means," he said.

High numbers of adjournments could potentially cause problems, but in reality they were like full hearings which heard evidence from clinicians and assessed the case.

A psychiatrist and honorary associate at the University of Sydney, Christopher Ryan, said doctors were unlikely to detain patients for no reason but there should be protections in place.

2011-08-16T07:53:00.007+10:00

Alliance for Human Research Protection

A Catalyst for Debate

www.ahrp.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling...

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Op Ed

August 14, 2011

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

By WARREN E. BUFFETT

Omaha

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav

veracare@ahrp.org

212-595-8974
(Emphasis in red Added - B.M.)

2011-08-12T21:33:00.019+10:00

THE SHRINKS AND BIG PHARMA, BAD AS THEY ARE, MAKE UP ONLY PART OF THE SURVIVAL PROBLEM FOR HUMANITY

By Benjamin Merhav

A written testimony by Dr./Col. BART P BILLINGS, PH.D. was emailed to me by him following my previous post (titled, The Truth About Psychiatric Drugs) with the following words :

"Thanks for the summation. I have been fighting this battle since 1974 with military vets. See attached congressional testimony I offered 1 1/2 years ago."

I should add here my own opinion on extreme mental stress and emotional crisis generally within human societies, and on the far more accentuated mental problems within the USA military IN PARTICULAR. It must be understood that the emotional state of people and societies are closely linked to life under political regimes of countries inhabited by these societies. There is a direct correlation between injustices perpetrated or encouraged by the rulers of countries and their citizens who either suffer from injustice or inflict on other fellow human being injustices.

Our emotional and mental states suffer as a result of such inhumanity. It is therefore primarily a political and moral problem rather than a therapeutic problem, and certainly not a medical problem. Thus, for example, the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya by the USA and by its allies are unjust and inhuman, as are the military interventions by the USA in other parts of the world, including the sponsorship of the aggressive zionist apartheid regime of Israel. These imperialist crimes must stop for the good of the entire humanity, including the well being of young American soldiers themselves.

Moreover, there are direct and indirect links between Big Pharma with its subservient shrinks and the other sections of the American ruling class. For the latter unlimited profit making ranks far higher than any human values, including the sanctity of human lives. Hence the insistence on the use of dangerous psychiatric poisons within the USA military with the full support of Congress.

The suicides of many American soldiers who have been told to take psychiatric drugs to overcome stress have been the direct result of these dangerous drugs. No doubt about it. However, the stress itself was the result of taking part in unnecessary wars. Therefore, the entire ruling class must be confronted, not just Big Pharma and its subservient drug-pushers-shrinks.

2011-08-12T08:13:00.005+10:00

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/831/96/

The Truth About Psychiatric Drugs

Thursday, 11 August 2011

Three new studies--one,, a pharmaco-genetic study, is groundbreaking--confirm that widely prescribed psychotropic drugs that pose serious risks of harm, offer no therapeutic benefit.

For two decades, medical professionals, the public, and public health policy officials who determine the allocation of public funds for healthcare, have been misled about the safety and benefits of psychiatric drugs--in particular, the newer, expensive drugs, the so-called SSRI antidepressants, and the new neuroleptics, marketed as 'atypical antipsychotics'.

Pharmaceutical industry marketing hype, deceptively packaged as "scientific study findings," gained the appearance of legitimacy when they were accepted by the FDA for licensure, and accepted for publication in medical journals. Those reported "findings" were fraudulent, concocted and aggressively disseminated by manufacturers of these drugs.

The deception has seriously undermined the integrity of the scientific literature, and misled physicians who unwittingly prescribed hazardous drugs causing patients irreparable harm.

Thanks to years of litigation during which company documents have been uncovered, the truth has been revealed. We now know that SSRI antidepressants and the 'atypical' antipsychotics have failed decisively to demonstrate therapeutic benefits in clinical trials and in clinical practice Instead, these drugs have triggered debilitating, chronic illness and even life-threatening risks: antidepressants increase the suicide risk and trigger serotonin syndrome, which is potentially fatal. Antipsychotics undermine normal metabolic, cardiovascular, hormonal function, resulting in cardiac arrest, obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

1. A groundbreaking pharmaco-genetic study by Australian psychopharmacology experts--Dr. Yolande Lucire, a forensic psychiatrist, and Christopher Crotty, a pharmacogeneticist--report in the peer reviewed journal, Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine , (abstract below) an alarming finding. They report a significant association among genetic variants, metabolism of psychiatric drugs, and severe, homicidal akathisia.

The authors examined the relationship between genetic variants in the CYP450 family, the interaction of antidepressant-induced akathisia, and violence, including homicide in 129 forensic patients who had referred to Dr. Lucire by lawyers.

Of 138 persons tested for CYP450 genes, 129 had experienced adverse events, "mainly akathisia, due to psychiatric drugs, and nine were first degree relatives of those treated who also had a history of adversity on other drugs."

Of the 129 persons who experienced drug-induced adverse effects, 8 had committed homicide, 3 had committed suicide, and one had sleepwalked to her death.

The authors report that:

" In all of the cases presented here, the subjects were prescribed antidepressants that failed to mitigate distress emerging from their predicaments, which encompassed psychosocial stressors such as bereavement, marital and relationship difficulties, and work-related stress. Every subject’s emotional reaction worsened while their prescribing physicians continued the “trial and error” approach, increasing from standard to higher dose and/or switching to other antidepressants, with disastrous consequences. In some cases the violence ensued from changes occasioned by withdrawal and polypharmacy.

In all of these cases, the subjects were put into a state of drug induced toxicity manifesting as akathisia, which resolved only upon discontinuation of the antidepressant drugs."

" This paper has detailed and substantiated in specific terms how the metabolism of each of the antidepressant drugs used by the subjects would have been seriously impaired both before and at the time they committed or attempted homicide. They were experiencing severe reported side effects, adverse drug reactions due to impaired metabolism complicated by drug–drug interactions against a background of variant CYP450 alleles."

The authors further state:

"The results presented here concerning a sample of persons given antidepressants for psychosocial distress demonstrate the extent to which the psychopharmacology industry has expanded its influence beyond its ability to cure. The roles of both regulatory agencies and drug safety “pharmacovigilantes” in ensuring quality and transparency of industry information is highlighted."

Two other recently published studies, one in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the other in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also challenge the validity of psychiatry's prescribing practices whose rationale is mostly commercially propagated.

2. The authors of the BMJ report, "Antidepressant Use and Risk of Adverse Outcomes in Older People: Population Based Cohort Study," analyzed data for 60,746 persons in the UK who were over 65 and diagnosed with depression between 1996 and 2007. The authors followed the subjects until December, 2008.

The authors of this study found that those prescribed SSRI antidepressants are at increased risk of death and heart attack, stroke, falls and seizures than those who were prescribed the older, cheaper, tricyclic antidepressants.

During those 10 years, patients not taking any antidepressants had a 7% risk of dying from any cause. But the risk rose to 8.1% for those taking the older antidepressants and increased to 10.6% for patients prescribed SSRIs.

" All classes of antidepressant drug were associated with significantly increased risks of all cause mortality, attempted suicide/self harm, falls, fractures, and upper gastrointestinal bleeding compared with when these drugs were not being used. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and the group of other antidepressant drugs were associated with increased risks of stroke/transient ischaemic attack and epilepsy/seizures; selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors were also associated with increased risks of myocardial infarction and hyponatraemia."

3. According to government data, 10% to 20% of soldiers who see heavy combat develop lasting symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and about a fifth of those who are treated are prescribed an antipsychotic drug. The JAMA report, by prominent psychiatrists on the faculty of Yale University, examines the treatment outcome for veterans suffering from PTSD, whose treatment with SSRI antidepressants failed, who were then prescribed antipsychotics. See, "Adjunctive Risperidone Treatment for Antidepressant-Resistant Symptoms of Chronic Military Service–Related PTSD A Randomized Trial."

The finding: after six months of treatment, the veterans who were prescribed Risperdal were doing no better than a similar group of 124 veterans, who were given a placebo. About 5% in both groups recovered, and 10% to 20% reported at least some improvement, based on standardized measures.

“We didn’t find any suggestion that the drug treatment was having an overall benefit on their lives,” said Dr. John H. Krystal, the director of the clinical neurosciences division of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD and the lead author of the study.

The New York Times reports: "The surprising finding, from the largest study of its kind in veterans, challenges current treatment standards so directly that it could alter practice soon, some experts said."

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Charles Hoge, a senior scientist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who was not involved in the study, stated: “I think it’s a very important study given how frequently the drugs have been prescribed. It definitely calls into question the use of antipsychotics in general for PTSD.”

Although the study focused on one antipsychotic, Johnson & Johnson's Risperdal, experts agree that the results most likely extend to the entire class, including the drugs, Seroquel, Geodon and Abilify.

These three reports are the latest in a string of scientific reports, untainted by industry influence, that examined the evidence and found that current psychiatric drug prescribing practices are of little, if any, therapeutic value. But since the drugs pose serious risks of harm by triggering drug-induced (iatrogenic) illness--which significantly increases healthcare costs--why does the U.S. government waste billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize their cost ?

Posted by Vera Hassner Sharav

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-08-11T11:35:00.008+10:00

DR. FRED BAUGHMAN, MD, EXCHANGE WITH A READER OF MY PREVIOUS POST
by Benjamin Merhav

The following exchange was emailed to me today by Dr. Fred Baughman, MD :

"From: Loretta Wilson

Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 8:25 AM

To: fredbaughmanmd@cox.net

Subject: Obviously Psychiatry!

"Dr. Baughman, are you for real?

Did you say the following?

The only diseases/abnormalities in psychiatry are those due to their treatments—of which there is always a risk.

Sincerely,

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD

If you spoke the above words then I would like to know more about you and your work. I hope you don't mind this contact. The above words were in an e-mail from a man named Ben.

Sincerely,

Loretta"

To which Dr. Baughman replied as follows (with my added emphasis in red) :

"Loretta,

Yeh, I said it. Should I have said – of which there is always injury most of it chemical and microscopic at first and not detectible (only the drug is detectible at this point in every organ and every body fluid), sooner or later conspicuous, and beyond that permanent and more or less disabling...with death much more common than generally realized. All psych treatments work by damaging the brain, and, incidentally, the body. They ablate the most recent, painful of mind ‘sets’ and in so doing ease mind pain and suffering. They are nothing but pain pills always treating a symptom, never a disease. It is long past time that all mental health professionals realized there is nothing to debate that psychiatry that victimizes the laity at large is no less than a total, 100% fraud. Continuing to debate its legitimacy—its ‘science,’ its ‘diseases,’ ‘epidemics,’ treatments etc. has seen the ADHD epidemic rise 21 % from 2003 to 2007 to 5.4 million—the greatest health care fraud in history (along with every fake psychiatric ‘chemical imbalance’ ‘disease’). These stats by the way are from our very own Centers for Disease Control CDC—selling and disseminating a fraud to the very same US public that pays for all they do...the FDA, NIMH...every single US government health care agency and body (Congress too) all having become functionaries of BIG PHARMA. Pretty sickening, eh what?

Fred Baughman, MD

2011-08-09T11:31:00.008+10:00

DR. FRED BAUGHMAN, MD, COMMENTS ON DR. ANGELL'S DEBATE WITH TOP SHRINKS
by Benjamin Merhav

The comment below was emailed to me by Dr. Baughman in regard to my post titled,TOP SHRINKS CONTINUE TO ATTACK DR. MARCIA ANGELL, MD, FOR EXPOSING SOME OF THE LIES ON WHICH PSYCHIATRY IS BASED (see :
http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011_07_31_archive.html). Dr. Fred Baughman, MD, does not need any introduction, as he is a renowned American neurologist. He has been renowned both for his professional expertise, as well as for his fearless honesty. It is a great honour for me to publish here his letter to me as follows ( emphasis in red added ) :

"Ben,

I too have been mystified as Dr. Angell’s failure to make as her main argument the fact that there is no such thing in psychiatry as a disease, meaning objective abnormality—gross, microscopic or chemical—anywhere in the body or brain. This is psychiatry’s universal claim--invented ‘diseases’ as diseases, solely for the purpose of having something to treat-‘chemical imbalances’ needing chemical balancers. I think this difference between M. Angell and myself stems from the fact that I was in the full-time clinical practice of diagnostics (neurology)—always answering the question is there a disease, yes or no? Although she took a medicine residency she was a pathologist. This is a major failing of M. Angell, the main reason they consent to debate her. None of them will debate me or Szasz for that matter. Their total 100% fraud still needs exposing far and wide. Almost all academic physicians—those in the nation's medical schools and teaching hospitals know perfectly well that their academic psychiatrist colleagues never diagnose or deal in any way with real diseases, but they, en masse, cannot say so because they especially--like all of US medicine are under the control of Big Pharma, and dare not incur its wrath. Our own University of California San Diego, School of Medicine is about to forge even more extensive ties with Pfizer becoming part of the drugging consortium, less able still, to say anything critical of a drug, even a killer drug. There being no physical abnormalities (diseases) in psychiatry there is nothing for their drugs, ECT or psychosurgery to make normal. The only diseases/abnormalities in psychiatry are those due to their treatments - of which there is always a risk.

Sincerely,

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD"

NEUROLOGY AND CHILD NEUROLOGY

(Board Certified)

FELLOW, AMERICAN ACADEMY OF NEUROLOGY

fredbaughmanmd@cox.net

1303 HIDDEN MOUNTAIN DRIVE

EL CAJON, CA 92019

Tele:(619) 440-8236 Fax: (619) 442-1932

2011-08-08T14:01:00.002+10:00

VULTURES ARE FIGHTING OVER THE CARCASS OF "MENTAL HEALTH" IN AUSTRALIA
By Benjamin Merhav

The Australian press report below reflects the competing interests of local shrinks and of Big Pharma for the Australian governments' - federal and state governments - health budgets. Typically, it is only when they are competing over the money that the competing shrinks reveal to the public some of the nasty activities of their opponents. Thus, for example, a recent article by Dr. Allen Frances, a top USA shrink, strongly criticised the former Australian of the year psychiatrist, Dr. Patrick McGorry, for his "early intervention" theories and activities (see :
http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/06/httpwww.html ). He had also attacked the Gillard government's plans to spend $222 million expanding Professor McGorry's EPIC program by another 16 centres as a "vast untried public-health experiment". Now a local group of shrinks are accusing McGorry of overstating the evidence for early intervention for young people at risk of psychosis , and the newspaper report below reveals as follows :

"Several mental health specialists have told The Sunday Age the focus on early intervention for adolescents and young adults has been ''massively oversold'' by the ''McGorry lobbying machine''.

A top Australian shrink is quoted by the newspaper as follows :

"Louise Newman, past president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, said the focus on early intervention was too narrow and could lead to young people being overmedicated, prematurely diagnosed and stigmatised."

This is the only psychiatric opinion which has come close to the heart of the issue. The scandalous impunity of "early intervention" is a double issue. The first is the psychiatric "treatment" of children - young children in particular - whose developing brains risk permanent damage by the "treatment". The other aspect of the scandal is the forced psychiatric "treatment" on individuals who are not "mentally ill", not even by psychiatric standards ! Dr. Louise Newman hints at 3 kinds of psychiatric atrocities which are acceptable as part of the psychiatric "treatment" of adults, namely, overmedicating of patients, premature diagnosis of patients, and the stigmatising of patients. If she would have been a honest doctor she would have opposed these and other psychiatric atrocities altogether. However, the other shrinks are not interested even in the little limitations on psychiatry that she stands for !

http://www.smh.com.au/national/mcgorry-accused-of-conflict-of-interest-20110806-1igxd.html

McGorry accused of conflict of interest

Jill Stark

August 7, 2011

PSYCHIATRISTS, psychologists and patients' groups say there is a growing backlash against the federal government's mental health reforms and have accused its expert adviser, former Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry, of a conflict of interest.

Several mental health specialists have told The Sunday Age the focus on early intervention for adolescents and young adults has been ''massively oversold'' by the ''McGorry lobbying machine''.

They claim he used his position on the government's mental health expert working group to recommend funding for programs he founded.

David Castle, head of psychiatry at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, said Professor McGorry, - who founded headspace (Australia's national youth mental health foundation) and the early psychosis prevention and intervention centres - and Professor Ian Hickie, a headspace board member, had overstated the evidence for early intervention for young people at risk of psychosis.

Headspace is a service for 12 to 25-year-olds with mild to moderate problems such as bullying, stress and relationship difficulties. Patients do not require a GP-referral. The early psychosis prevention and intervention centres provide integrated psychiatric, psychological and social support for 15 to 24-year-olds.

Between them, the two services received almost a quarter of the $2.2 billion mental health package in the May federal budget. Both professors McGorry and Hickie were on the government's mental health expert working group that advised the Prime Minister.

''It's extremely worrying that the government is listening to professional lobbyists who have a massive personal investment in the programs they're recommending - and they are undoubtedly overstating the evidence. There's a massive conflict of interest there,'' Professor Castle said.

The row comes after US psychiatrist Allen Frances - chairman of the committee that produced the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, the key psychiatric diagnostic source - described Australia's investment in early intervention as a ''vast untried public-health experiment'', claiming there was little evidence it had long-term benefits.

The dispute is in part a turf war about where limited funding should go. Some argue traditional GP and psychiatrist-led care has failed teenagers and youths who fall between paediatric and adult services, leading to delays in treatment.

About 14 per cent of children aged four to 17 have mental health problems, with depression and anxiety disorders the most common. About 2 per cent suffer from a psychotic illness.

George Patton, professor of adolescent health research at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, praised Professor McGorry's work but said his faith in early intervention was not shared by everyone. ''There's a real groundswell of concern amongst the senior psychiatric community that we are running ahead of the evidence,'' he said.

Professor McGorry rejected the claims, accusing critics of being a small minority who are ''disaffected, destructive and irresponsible'', and who are misusing scientific evidence to protect their turf and the ailing traditional mental health model.

''The reforms around early psychosis and headspace advantage patients and families, and have 20 years of solid evidence behind them, with successful upscaling in hundreds of communities worldwide,'' Professor McGorry said.

He said there was no conflict of interest as he and Professor Hickie headed non-profit organisations, and while ideally all services would have received more funding, young people had the most acute needs.

Peter Birleson, former director of mental health services at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, disagreed. ''The McGorry machine is distorting things in Australia. There's people in the UK who look at what's happening in adolescent and youth psychiatry here and think that it's completely mad. While McGorry champions the cause of youth and young adults, actually 50 per cent of lifelong mental disorders appear before the age of 14, so there should be a massive shift towards strengthening services to children,'' Dr Birleson said.

Professor Hickie said he and Professor McGorry had long advocated for services outside the youth area, and had no more influence than anyone else on the government's working group.

''People taking cheap shots is disappointing but it's characteristic of the mental health area. When there's been very little investment, people end up fighting over the crumbs,'' he said.

Louise Newman, past president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, said the focus on early intervention was too narrow and could lead to young people being overmedicated, prematurely diagnosed and stigmatised.

However, David Crosbie, chief executive of the Community Council for Australia and former head of the Mental Health Council of Australia, said professors McGorry and Hickie were being targeted for challenging current practice. ''I have nothing but admiration for Pat and for Ian, who are prepared to go well beyond what their roles are to try and make a difference - and it's a pity that other people in the sector couldn't support improvements for the greater good of mental health.''

Another supporter, SANE Australia's executive director, Barbara Hocking, said Professor McGorry had championed services he wasn't involved with and was instrumental in getting more funding for the sector overall.

Money for the early intervention programs came from cuts to the over-budget Better Access scheme, which provides psychological services through GPs, psychologists and social workers.

The cuts were opposed by the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, and the Australian Psychological Society, which claim people with anxiety and depression now will be priced out of treatment.

Professor Hickie and Monsignor David Cappo, who is also on the government's working group, opposed the Better Access scheme. Prior to the budget they, along with Professor McGorry, released a blueprint to transform mental health. It listed 30 ''best buys'' in mental health - Better Access was not among them.

Ben Mullings, head of the Association of Counselling Psychology, said the government's working group could not claim to be independent when panellists were direct beneficiaries of funds.

Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council director Isabell Collins said she respected Professor McGorry's commitment to youth but felt other age groups were being neglected."

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-08-06T21:47:00.006+10:00

TOP SHRINKS CONTINUE TO ATTACK DR. MARCIA ANGELL, MD, FOR EXPOSING SOME OF THE LIES ON WHICH PSYCHIATRY IS BASED
by Benjamin Merhav

As I mentioned in my previous post on this weblog, Dr. Marcia Angell had failed to expose the deceptive foundation of psychiatry, namely, the big lie about "mental illness",and the "medical specialty" lie, with its "psychiatric treatment" atrocities which are its derivatives. As a well respected and honest physician, she ought to have demanded the expulsion of psychiatry from the medical profession, and for many reasons. First and foremost reason for such expulsion must be the fact that psychiatry has nothing to do with medical science , neither in its methods nor in its invention of "mental illnesses".

Dr. John Oldham, the APA president, has admitted that psychiatrists "do not understand the mechanism of mental illness, nor of the drugs we use to treat it." He also confessed that "there is no question that among the medical professions, psychiatry is the most scientifically primitive."He also confessed as follows :

"Psychiatrists often overdiagnose disorders of questionable scientific validity, they have become overly fixated on medication solutions to life’s problems, and many have accepted a steady flow of drug industry money, creating so many conflicts of interest that it is impossible to know who we can trust." (See all the above admissions and confessions in my previous post on this weblog).

Yet some shrinks had the temerity to attack Dr. Marcia Angell in the aftermath of her debate with Dr. John Oldham and his lieutenants. Thus,for example, Psychiatry Online, the newspaper of the APA, published an artice titled, Prominent M.D.'s Book Reviews Give Negative View of Psychiatry. The article opens as follows :

"A two-part book review in the New York Review of Books on June 23 and July 14 by Marcia Angell, M.D., senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, has garnered the attention—and the ire—of APA leaders and other psychiatrists."(See : http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/15/8.1.full ).

The Los Angeles Times published a brief article titled, Psychiatrists protest criticism from well-known physician. The article quotes the APA top shrinks' attack on Dr. Angell as follows : "The bottom line is that these medications" - namely, the psychiatric drugs the shrinks are forcing their patient-victims to take - "often relieve the patient's suffering, and this is why doctors prescribe them," APA leaders wrote. (See : http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-psychiatry-angell-20110805,0,1283292.story ). This is a lie, of course, because those "medications" are actually causing the adverse effects which the shrinks prescribe against.

I wish to conclude this brief post by quoting with thanks one of my readers, Ron Unger, a USA Clinical Social Worker, who sent the following comments on my previous post :

"I notice that Dr. Angell says at one point that "I know very well that all thoughts, emotions, and behaviors have their origin in the brain." This is another example of common psychiatric mythology that Angell fails to challenge.

A more sophisticated approach would be to see all thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as having some reflection in the brain, but not necessarily their "origins." The "origin" may have been events in the person's life, which then interacted with the person to produce what is in the brain. If we look at things that way, we are likely to think in a more complex way about what the person is experiencing."

(Emphassis in red added - B.M.)

2011-08-01T13:33:00.014+10:00

ON THE DEBATE BETWEEN DR. MARCIA ANGELL AND 3 TOP USA SHRINKS
by Benjamin Merhav

The link below is to the debate between Dr. Marcia Angell, MD and 3 USA top shrinks titled, ‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange John Oldham, Daniel Carlat, Richard Friedman, and Andrew Nierenberg, reply by Marcia Angell.

Quoted below is only the reply by Dr. Marcia Angell, because I consider what the other three say as dishonest hogwash. However, Dr. Angell's weak point (which allowed all the three to pounce on) is that she does not challenge the deceptive foundation of psychiatry ,namely , that there are "mental illnesses" for which psychiatry provides treatments as a "medical specialty." The entire arguments of all the three shrinks are built on this false dogma. Consequently, her line of defence is limited mostly to the inherent corruption of psychiatry and of its shrinks, and their alliance with and subservience to Big Pharma.

The 3 top shrinks seem to have divided amongst themselves the arguments jobs. The first one, who is the head of the APA, does the job of confessing some of the obvious and undeniable wrongs of psychiatry, so as to leave Dr. Angell with as little ground as possible to stand on in her defence. The second shrink has made a name to himself as the "knight on the white horse" who objects to corruption in collusion with big Pharma. His job seems to have been to produce as much hogwash as possible so as to make the issues confused and complicated. The third one seems to be in charge of manufacturing and producing statistics and trivia to show how great psychiatry is, thus making Dr. Angell look like an unreliable amateur.

Our main focus, therefore, is on what the head of the APA says in defence of psychiatry. He begins with the following admissions :

"Her argument is correct in its essentials. Psychiatrists often overdiagnose disorders of questionable scientific validity, they have become overly fixated on medication solutions to life’s problems, and many have accepted a steady flow of drug industry money, creating so many conflicts of interest that it is impossible to know who we can trust."

There are here some very important admissions which no other top shrink has ever made before. First, he admits that "Psychiatrists often overdiagnose disorders of questionable scientific validity." This being the case, then all psychiatric wards around the world should be immediately shut down because all the "mental patients there" have been overdiagnosed with "mental illnesses" of questionable validity ! Also compulsory psychiatric treatment orders must be outlawed immediately !
Also in that same admission he concedes that the shrinks"have become overly fixated on medication solutions to life’s problems, and many have accepted a steady flow of drug industry money, creating so many conflicts of interest that it is impossible to know who we can trust." If they cannot be trusted why do we need psychiatrists at all ?

He then goes on to make the following admission : "Dr. Angell makes much of the fact that we do not understand the mechanism of mental illness, nor of the drugs we use to treat it. While this is true...". Well then, if the shrinks do not understand the mechanism of "mental illness", and if they do not understand the drugs they use ("Medications" ?) , why give them the power to force psychiatric "treatments" on people ? Why give them legal protection from claims by the victims they have hurt ?

However, the most important confession by the president of the APA is as follows : "There is no question that among the medical professions, psychiatry is the most scientifically primitive." This is very close to an admission that psychiatry has no scientific basis, therefore no justification for considering it as a "medical specialty", and for imposing psychiatric "treatment" on innocent people !

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/illusions-psychiatry-exchange/

Marcia Angell replies:

All three of these letters simply assume that psychoactive drugs are highly beneficial, but none of them provides references that would substantiate that belief. Our differences stem from the fact that I make no such assumption. Any treatment should be regarded with skepticism until its benefits, both short-term and long-term, have been proven in well-designed clinical trials, and those benefits have been shown to outweigh its harms. I question whether that is so for many psychoactive drugs now in widespread use. I have spent most of my professional life evaluating the quality of clinical research, and I believe it is especially poor in psychiatry.

The industry-sponsored studies usually cited to support psychoactive drugs—and they are the ones that are selectively published—tend to be short-term, designed to favor the drug, and show benefits so small that they are unlikely to outweigh the long-term harms. The problem with relapse studies, like that of John Geddes, which is cited by Friedman and Nierenberg, is that they don’t distinguish between a true relapse and withdrawal symptoms that result from the abrupt cessation of drugs.

Both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry profession have strong financial interests in convincing the public that drug treatment is safe and the most effective treatment for mental illnesses, and they also have an interest in expanding the definitions of mental illness. Even Dr. Carlat, whose excellent book I reviewed, admitted that he and other psychiatrists make nearly twice as much money prescribing drugs as providing talk therapy. In his letter, which seems somewhat inconsistent, he states that the “unequivocal, if perplexing truth about psychiatric drugs” is that “they work” (his italics), and that all the major psychoactive drugs “are robustly more effective than placebos in double-blind controlled trials.” (In fact, the trials yield varying outcomes, many of which fall far short of robustness.) But elsewhere in the letter, he says, “There is no question that among the medical professions, psychiatry is the most scientifically primitive,” and in his book, although he claims anti- depressants work, he comes close to Kirsch in concluding that “much of this response is undoubtedly due to the placebo effect.”

Carlat mischaracterizes Kirsch’s work by suggesting that he contradicted himself. Kirsch did indeed find that the six antidepressants he studied were more effective than placebos, but the difference was very small (similar to the difference found by Turner and his colleagues, in the study cited by Carlat). Kirsch then speculated that even this small effect might not be real, because patients who received the antidepressant instead of an inert placebo would experience side effects that might enable them to guess that they were receiving an active drug, and therefore might make them more likely to report an improvement in their depression. In support of this hypothesis, Kirsch pointed to a few trials employing placebos that themselves had side effects, where no differences were found between drug and placebo. But despite the persuasiveness of his theory, Kirsch acknowledged that it remains to be proven.

The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) develops treatment guidelines for the National Health Service on the basis of benefits and costs. It concluded that because improvements in the 51-point Hamilton Depression Score (HAM-D) of less than three points are not clinically discernible, antidepressants that on average fail to provide at least that level of improvement could not be recommended. While that cut-off is indeed arbitrary, as Carlat says, so are many other conventions in medicine, e.g., the number of symptoms required for a diagnosis of a major depressive episode or the accepted standard (P less than 0.5) for statistical significance. The NICE cut-off strikes me as eminently reasonable. Friedman and Nierenberg point out that a reanalysis found a 2.68 point difference instead of a 1.8 difference, but that is still below NICE’s threshold for clinical significance.

Contrary to Dr. Oldham, I did not say that mental disorders were invented in order to create a market for psychotropic drugs. What I did say is that the boundaries of mental illness are being stretched for a variety of reasons—to increase drug company sales, to enhance the income and status of the psychiatry profession, and to get insurance coverage or disability benefits for troubled families. It may be that, as Oldham says, the disorders that these medications treat have been around for all of recorded history, but they weren’t necessarily considered “disorders,” rather, simply emotional states or personality traits. Just as a cigar is sometimes only a cigar, unhappiness might have been considered just that, not a medical condition.

The letter by Drs. Friedman and Nierenberg is filled with inaccuracies and assertions masquerading as fact. They are simply wrong in asserting that psychiatry, in using drugs to treat signs and symptoms of illness without understanding the cause of the illness or how the drugs work, is no different from other medical specialties. First, mental illness is diagnosed on the basis of symptoms (medically defined as subjective manifestations of disease, such as pain) and behaviors, not signs (defined as objective manifestations, such as swelling of a joint). Most diseases in other specialties produce physical signs and abnormal lab tests or radiologic findings, in addition to symptoms.

Moreover, even if the underlying causes of other diseases are unknown, the mechanisms by which they produce illness usually are, and the treatments usually target those mechanisms. For example, we may not know what causes arthritis, but we do understand a great deal about the mechanism, and we know how anti-inflammatory agents work. Even when there are only symptoms, such as nausea or headache, other medical specialists, unlike psychiatrists, would be very reluctant to offer long-term symptomatic treatment without knowing what lies behind the symptoms.

Contrary to Friedman and Nierenberg, I do not “deny that depression has any biological basis at all.” I know very well that all thoughts, emotions, and behaviors have their origin in the brain. But it is a great leap from recognizing the obvious fact that mental states arise in the brain to knowing why and how they arise. Friedman and Nierenberg make much over recent advances in neuroscience research, but so far this research hasn’t produced much improvement in diagnosis and treatment.

In fact, Allen Frances, the chairman of the task force that wrote the current version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), opposed undertaking the ongoing revision because he thought there had not been sufficient new data on the biological causes of mental illness to justify a new edition. As for the chemical imbalance theory of depression being a straw man, I still hear it invoked frequently. Even Oldham seems to entertain it in his letter, saying “…there is no consensus on whether these imbalances are causes of mental disorders or symptoms of them.”

Friedman and Nierenberg are right that the National Comorbidity Survey showed very little change in the prevalence of three particular types of mental disorders in adults between 1991 and 2003, although the increase in the percentage of people treated was dramatic. But the frequency of some diagnoses, such as bipolar disease and autism, has soared. Moreover, the survey showed a prevalence of mental illness of about 30 percent, which surely represents either a major epidemic or rampant overdiagnosis. One of the most remarkable findings was that 20 percent of randomly selected adults were undergoing treatment for emotional disorders at the time of the later survey, about half of whom did not even meet the DSM-IV criteria for a mental disorder.

Friedman and Nierenberg refer to the death of Rebecca Riley, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well as ADHD when she was just two years old, as a “tragic anecdote.” While that is true, I believe it should also be seen in the context of the extraordinary epidemic of juvenile bipolar disease that was stimulated largely by the teachings of some of Dr. Nierenberg’s colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Three of them were recently disciplined by the hospital for not having disclosed some of their hefty payments from drug companies.

If readers check the NYR website, they will see that Dr. Nierenberg discloses his external sources of income, which include consulting arrangements with some of the major manufacturers of psychoactive drugs. While I am not in a position to, and will not, comment on Dr. Nierenberg’s consulting work, it seems to me that in general, one of the risks of close collaborations with industry is that even the best of physicians might develop an insufficiently critical attitude toward a company and its products, as well as to pharmacologic treatment generally.

Dr. Friedman seems to agree. In a review of a book by Alison Bass, published in The New England Journal of Medicine (June 26, 2008), he refers to the handsome payments by drug companies to physician researchers who test their drugs, and goes on to say, “Bass’s riveting and well-researched account of these disturbing ties should be widely read by members of the medical profession, many of whom continue to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are immune to the influence of drug companies.”

Finally, Friedman and Nierenberg accuse me of downplaying the devastating consequences of untreated psychiatric illness. I do no such thing. But it is no favor to desperate and vulnerable patients to treat them with drugs that have serious side effects unless it is clear that the benefits outweigh the harms.

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-07-31T09:48:00.010+10:00

PSYCHIATRISTS IN VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, STILL REFUSE THE BAN OF ELECTRIC SHOCKS (ECT), NOT EVEN ON VERY YOUNG CHILDREN
By Benjamin Merhav

The local press report below has a tiny bit of good news for potential "mental patients" here, in the state of Victoria, Australia. There is a bill which would ban the use of electric shocks (ECT) here against very young children under the age of 12. If this bill would be voted into an act of Parliament it would save the lives of many very young children, but not the lives of older children and adults. However, if such a law would be the first step of a policy which would bring some sanity into the mental health jungle here, then it would be good news, of course.

As I have pointed out many times - with proven scientific evidence ! - psychiatry is not a "medical specialty" and its mental illness dogma has no basis in reality nor in science (see for example my recent post on this
blog: http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/07/httpblog.html) therefore any psychiatric coercion is a flagrant violation of human rights, and has no place in a society which is not ruled by fascism.

However, even if we ignore truth and science, and accept the psychiatric dogma, namely that there are "mentally ill" people who need "psychiatric treatment" to be forced on them, there certainly is no place for such "treatment" of very young children, including even infants, whose brains are still developing !

Yet, we are informed by this press report that "Doctors from the University of Melbourne department of psychiatry mounted the most strident objections to the changes, arguing they imply doctors are ''evil and want to harm their patients''. Well, if they are not evil and want to harm their patients ,why do they insist on torturing very young children by electric shocks (ECT) "treatment" , even against the objections of the childrens' parents ?

Which brings us to the history of ECT. This psychiatric "treatment" was invented in 1938 by Ugo Cerletti (1877 - 1963), an Italian psychiatrist. The Wikipedia tells us that "the idea to use ECT in humans came first to him by watching pigs being anesthetised with electroshock before being butchered, in Rome"( see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugo_Cerletti ). Cerletti lived in Rome because he was by then "the Chair of the Department of Mental and Neurological Diseases at the University of Rome La Sapienza." Italy had been then under the fascist regime of Mussolini whose "Black Shirts" henchmen have terrorised the Italian people. The motto of these "Black Shirts" was "Me ne frego" (I do not give a damn"). Cerletti must have followed this motto too when he applied the electric shocks used on pigs as a "treatment" for his patient-victims.

Back in Australia now we find the website of the son of a "mental patient"whose mother was forced to get the ECT. He concludes his front page as follows :

“ELECTROSHOCK IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY AND IT MUST BE BANNED UNIVERSALLY NOW” (see: http://www.electricshocktherapy.info/my-story.html).

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/new-laws-to-ban-electric-shocks-on-children-20110730-1i5px.html

New laws to ban electric shocks on children

Jill Stark

July 31, 2011

Electric shock therapy machines. Photo: Brendan Read

ELECTRIC shock therapy on young children will be banned and psychiatrists could be jailed for carrying out the controversial treatment on teenagers and adults without strict legal checks, under proposed legislation.

Under a review of Victoria's Mental Health Act, new legislation has been drafted that would outlaw electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ECT, for children aged 12 and under.

Doctors would still be able to use it on 13 to 17-year-olds without their parents' consent if they can convince a mental health tribunal that all other treatment options have been exhausted.

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The same rules will apply to adults, with the final decision on whether to use shock therapy taken out of psychiatrists' hands and given to the tribunal. Doctors who breach the laws will face up to a year in jail.

The treatment, immortalised in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, induces seizures by delivering an electrical current to the brain.

Proponents say the movie unfairly stigmatised the procedure, and the use of anaesthetic and advances in technology have made it safer. But its use on children, whose brains are still developing, remains contentious.

ECT is usually used to treat patients with severe depression or extreme mania whose conditions have not improved with other treatments. While it is still unclear how the treatment works, it is thought the shock-induced seizures affect chemicals in the brain that influence mood.

In submissions to the mental health review, legal groups including Youthlaw and the Law Institute of Victoria, along with Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary, the Mental Health Council of Australia and the national depression group beyondblue, have welcomed the changes, saying they provide greater protection for vulnerable patients. Others want the legislation to go further, with a complete ban for anyone under 18.

However, psychiatrists say the new laws are too punitive and could lead to increased suicides as severely depressed people are denied ''life-saving'' treatment.

Last year The Sunday Age revealed there had been a 10 per cent rise in the number of patients receiving shock therapy since the previous year.

Almost 20,000 sessions were carried out on 1791 patients in Victorian hospitals in the 2009-10 financial year, including 46 sessions on seven children under 17 and a further 163 on an undisclosed number of 18 to 19-year-olds.

In submissions, the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and the Victorian branch of the Australian Nursing Federation called for the draft bill to be amended to allow shock therapy on children.

Doctors from the University of Melbourne department of psychiatry mounted the most strident objections to the changes, arguing they imply doctors are ''evil and want to harm their patients''.

One of the doctors, David Castle, who is also chair of psychiatry at St Vincent's Hospital, told The Sunday Age that while shock therapy on children was extremely rare, it was a valuable treatment option.

''Anything that categorically bans it could be enormously damaging because some youngsters do get very severe depression and ECT is an extremely effective and very safe treatment. The new law means it's going to be very difficult to give it to a patient, especially in an emergency when people are in a totally dire situation where they're not eating or drinking or intensely suicidal,'' he said.

Under the draft laws, doctors would be limited to a maximum of 12 sessions of electric shock therapy per patient and would have to seek permission from a mental health tribunal.

Youthlaw's submission expressed concern about the effects of shock therapy on the developing brain and called for a ban on the treatment for patients up to the age of 25.

A spokeswoman for Mental Health Minister Mary Wooldridge said the reforms were complex and the state government was reviewing feedback.

2011-07-25T21:58:00.002+10:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2011/jul/25/speak-out-about-psychiatry-treatment

Mainstream psychiatry is failing – but there is another way

Speak Out About Psychiatry wants to change the way mentally ill people are treated in the UK

I am sick of seeing friends who are seriously mentally distressed neglected and damaged by mainstream psychiatry. I am fed up hearing about people being detained, locked up and forced to take damaging medication before anyone has found out why they are distressed. I am angry about children being forced to take addictive psychoactive drugs by health professionals because no one could be bothered to work out why they are playing up. I met some others who wanted to change things and together we formed an organisation called Speak Out Against Psychiatry.

Speak Out Against Psychiatry is a group of service users, carers and advocates with direct experience of the psychiatric industry. We know that people who are mentally distressed need compassionate understanding and intense social support. We know that there have been many successful units around the world that have helped people resolve their problems with little or no medication. They have been relatively cheap and successful yet they are not being taken up in the UK. Why not?

Take Western Lapland, in Finland. There, the mental health system is based on a method called Open Dialogue: lots of long conversations with family and friends. It has the best outcomes for first episode psychosis in the developed world. About 80% of participants are back at work or training within two years. Very little medication is used. These results should be the envy of the medical professional yet it is mainly ignored. Similarly, the Family Care Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden, allows seriously disturbed people to live with rural families for a year or more. They get therapy and the family can regularly talk over how things are going. It gets people off medication, a frightening contrast with the standard treatment from the NHS.

Here, psychiatrists' main activity is diagnosis, yet many people do not find this helpful. They find talking about their lives and their symptoms helpful. Yet talking about hearing voices or the unusual ideas expressed by people experiencing psychosis is discouraged by mainstream psychiatry.

Most people who are extremely distressed have experienced immense personal trauma. Two-thirds of people diagnosed with schizophrenia had experienced physical or sexual abuse. Most psychiatrists ignore the evidence and prefer to talk about unproven brain disorders and imbalances in neurotransmitters. So the causes of mental distress are not fed back into wider social policy.

Then there are the drugs. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has no scientific basis and concerns about the drug Ritalin, used to 'treat' it are well documented. There are other ways of helping children who are in conflict with their parents and teachers that do not use potentially addictive medication. Equally, the prescribing of major tranquillisers such as Haloperidol to elderly people in hospital and nursing homes can be dangerous yet is becoming standard practice instead of developing staff skills in dealing with people experiencing dementia. Meanwhile, anti-depressants may be no more effective than a placebo. The serotonin hypothesis of depression is rubbish. It is a marketing ploy by drug companies. Anti-depressants are potentially addictive and sometimes dangerous, yet one in three women take them some time in their lives. On top of this, electroconvulsive therapy is still used yet there has been ample research showing its dangers and it is just about useless.

Speak Out Against Psychiatry is inviting people to come along at 4pm on Wednesday 27 July, outside the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Belgrave Square, London, to tell us about their experiences of the damaging treatment they have received. We want to hear your stories and we want the Royal College to hear them too.

After the Speak Out we are going to Hyde Park for a picnic and to discuss our next move. I repeat, all the evidence shows that mainstream psychiatry and psychiatric medication is a waste of public money. There are better ways of helping people who are mentally distressed and we need to start using them.

2011-07-14T18:14:00.017+10:00

MORE ON THE REASONS WHY PSYCHIATRY IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG, AND NOT MERELY ITS DMS-5
By Benjamin Merhav

The history of psychiatry is a history of barbarism and of fascism. It never has been about therapy and healing ( see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/01/big-boat-of-psychiatry-is-sure-sinking.html ).

The renowned and honest American neurologist, Dr. Fred Baughman, MD has exposed the crimes of psychiatry on many occasions. In his email message to me on the 3rd of January, 2009 he commented as follows :

"There is no ethical, moral, scientific, or healing justification for the continued existence of psychiatry as it exists today. They are entirely criminal. This point must be driven home to every government agent and agency..." (emphasis in red added - B.M. - see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/01/further-comments-on-psychiatry-by-dr.html ).

The famous Rosenhan experiment had proven already 48 years ago that the entire psychiatric procedure of diagnosis and treatment of "mental patients" has no scientific basis, therefore no justification to force it on anyone ( see : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/10/rosenhan-experiment-had-proved-that-any.html ).

My previous post provides a link to a video which testifies to the big lies which are the foundation of psychiatry : http://18thoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-on-fraud-of-psychiatry-by-justice.html .

The following article ignores the above information, and confines its criticism to the DMS-5 alone, as if without it psychiatry is acceptable. This is wrong, of course, yet the accusations leveled against this latest "bible of psychiatry" would continue to be valid against psychiatry even without this DMS-5 scandal.

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/07/%E2%80%9Cthe-madness-of-normality%E2%80%9D-on-why-the-dms-5-is-fundamentally-wrong/

“The Madness of Normality” – On why the DMS-5 is fundamentally wrong

Published July 14, 2011 | By Oliver Matthes

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is the world widely recognized classificatory system of psychiatric disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It is currently under major revision; the release version DSM-5 is expected in May 2013. The “psychiatrist´s bible“ has overwhelming impact: Inclusion in the DSM carries weight far beyond the psychiatrist’s office. It has major influence on whether insurers will cover therapy for a condition, whether research will be pursued for a specific disease or whether the health technology assessment agencies will approve medications that can be marketed for it.

Many interesting issues in DSM-5 could be discussed: the prevailing categories “substance abuse” and “dependence” will be substituted by “addiction and related disorders”, gender and ethnicity specific distinctions will we introduced and instead of distinguishing different entities like “Autistic disorder” or “Asperger´s disorder”, the manual introduces the term “Autism spectrum disorder”.

In this blog post, I want to focus on one particular innovation: The introduction of so-called risk syndromes. This is a collective term for all those conditions, which do not “yet” meet the “full” clinical diagnostic criteria, e.g. for schizophrenia: In this case, you would suffer from the “attenuated psychotic syndrome”. The aim is obvious: “Young people at risk for later manifestation of a psychotic disorder can be identified“. (http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevision/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=412#). This is a clear paradigm shift towards early diagnosis and prediction in psychiatry. Is this shift ethically justified?

Although these changes seem to be well intentioned, I think the DSM-5 suggestions are fundamentally mistaken and must be perceived as one step more towards medicalizing normality. If an adolescent for example suffers from hallucinations or disorganized speech for at least a month and at least once a week, he can be labelled diagnostically as “pre-schizophrenic”. Interestingly, this diagnosis can be made purely clinically regardless of any biomarkers, genetic testing or neuroradiological examinations. At first sight it seems quite convincing to compare this procedure to diagnosing cardiovascular diseases: “The diagnosis and therapy of schizophrenia at the moment of the first psychosis is comparable to the treatment of cardiovascular diseases at the stage of the first heart attack – it is too late“, says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, head of the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany. I personally think this comparison is inappropriate, because the false positive cases are not comparable at all.

The key to understanding my objection is to look at the natural relationship between specificity and selectivity of a test: “The problem is that every increase in the sensitivity of a psychiatric diagnosis is accompanied by a concomitant drop in its specificity“ (quoted from Allen Frances; interestingly, he – the former head of the DSM-4 committee – is one of the main critics of DSM-5). You can only reduce false negatives by the cost of producing more false positives. And the consequences for these supposedly “pre-schizophrenics“ are grave:

They receive unnecessary treatment. The only “sure” thing for these patients personally is the severe side effects of the medication. Furthermore, in a health system with scarce resources, I perceive this to be a big waste!
They have to deal with the stigma and the label of psychiatric conditions. I imagine that even the diagnosis itself can worsen the course of disease; comparable to a self fulfilling prophecy.
They will have massive difficulties to get life insurance etc.

Another interesting issue is raised by Allen Frances: He predicts “yet another round of costly and dangerous iatrogenic epidemics“, if the DSM-5 would be released in the current version.

Bearing in mind that studies predict, that about 30% of patients with “attenuated psychosis” will actually develop schizophrenia in the future, – in my opinion – the possible benefits for 30% do not outweigh the above named burdens of the false positives.

I would find the DSM-5 suggestions more adequate, if there was a more specific diagnostic test and a more beneficial treatment (better therapeutic-effect / side-effect ratio) available. But the dilemma of false positives remains. This can only be solved, if the scientific progress made in genetics and neurosciences finally had great impact in the clinic. Otherwise the space between disease and health is likely to become a medicalized purgatory!

2011-07-12T19:29:00.012+10:00

THE DANGERS OF PSYCHIATRY AND OF BIG PHARMA GROW TOGETHER
By Benjamin Merhav

The article below exposes the aggressive expansion of Antipsychotic drugs production by Big Pharma in partnership with psychiatry; it is a lethal partnership which increasingly threatens the well being of humanity. However, the author of the article is still trapped by the basic lies of psychiatry, namely, that there is such a thing as "mental illness", that psychiatry provides the necessary "treatments" for it, and that it is all properly done under the roof of the medical profession. What he mainly objects to is the off-label use of Antipsychotic drugs, namely, the excessive use of the dangerous drugs on groups of people who are not considered "mentally ill" , like young children and elderly people (see ,for example, a similar report which was published 5 years ago by AHRP : http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/271/146/).

The truth is, of course, that there are no proven "mental illnesses", therefore no need for any psychiatric "treatment" - drugs, electric shocks, or lobotomy surgeries - for them. The truth is also that psychiatry is not a "medical specialty" as nothing in psychiatry is based on medical science nor proven by it. Despite that psychiatry is vested with the legal power of coercion which allows the shrinks to force on their patient-victims the psychiatric "treatments".

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html

"Mass Psychosis in the US

How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.

James Ridgeway

Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits [GALLO/GETTY]

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore

By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."

Cost benefit analysis

What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."

A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."

In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"

For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.

Turning people into zombies

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.

A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.

Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."

Bottom line: Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population."

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-06-26T18:23:00.001+10:00

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/is-medical-psychatry-a-scam/

Is medical psychiatry a scam?

by Dr. Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D

(Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a member of both the Committee on Genetics and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology).

A while back I did some research on the genetics of mental illness, and was appalled to discover some disturbing things about medical psychiatry (by “medical psychiatry” I mean psychiatry centered on drug therapy rather than talk therapy). First of all, for the vast majority of drugs used to combat mental illness—and especially depression—the doctors had no idea how they worked, yet they pretended they did. Patients were regularly told, when prescribed antidepressants like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors; Prozac is the classic specimen) that their depression was due to a chemical imbalance in the brain. SSRIs, for example, increase the amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the synapses (gaps) between neurons by preventing its reabsorption by the neurons. Because these drugs seemed to work (more on that below), doctors and pharmaceutical companies blithely concluded that depression resulted from a deficit of serotonin. But that’s ludicrous, for just because a drug alleviates a symptom doesn’t allow you to conclude that the symptom was due to the deficit of that drug. It’s like saying that headaches are caused by a deficit of aspirin! As Marcia Angell notes in her reviews below, “. . . instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

An acquaintance of mine, visiting a psychiatrist for depression, was told that her “brain was wired up wrong”! That verges on medical malpractice.

I also learned that the genetics of mental illness is a subject rife with uncertainty and unreproduceable results. For every study localizing a “gene” or gene region responsible for a condition like depression, there was a counter-study showing no effect at all. Nevertheless, medical students in psychiatry are taught that the major mental illnesses have a genetic basis (I’ve seen the textbooks).

Despite all this, psychiatry continues to be increasingly “medicalized,” that is, talk therapy is replaced by drug therapy (doctors can make a lot more money prescribing drugs than talking, for during the hour occupied by a talk therapy session, a psychiatrist could see and prescribe meds to three or four patients). And pharmaceutical companies make millions of dollars prescribing drugs for mental illnesses, so they continually try to expand the range of conditions that count as drug-requiring “illnesses,” including obsessive-compulsive disorder, various attention-deficit syndromes, and so on.

The whole mess is encapsulated in the book used by doctors to “diagnose” mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is now undergoing its fifth revision. If you ever get a chance to look at it, do. You’ll find that “diagnosis” is based on conforming to a certain number of symptoms in a numbered list. To be diagnosed with a “major depressive episode,” for example, you need to have five out of the nine symptoms described by the DSM. But what if you have only three or four? Then you don’t get your meds. It’s all quite bizarre, and I concluded that the whole drug/genetics/diagnosis nexus is driven by three things: the desire of psychiatrists to be like “regular” doctors who treat well defined illnesses with well defined medications, the nebulous and ill-defined character of mental illnesses, and the desire of pharmaceutical companies to milk the public out of as many dollars as possible. This does not deny, of course, that mental disorders are often serious and life-threatening conditions that require some type of treatment or intervention.

And these conclusions—and other ones just as dire—are shared by Marcia Angell, author of two new articles in The New York Review of Books “The Epidemic of mental illness: Why?” and “The illusions of psychiatry” (they’re free, so have a look). Angell is a pathologist with an M.D., studied microbiology, and was the first woman editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. Her piece is basically an essay centered on four books, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker, Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelation about a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat, and the latest DSM, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are so widely prescribed in America that if you’re not taking them yourself, you certainly know someone who is, so you owe it to yourself to have a look at these articles. Among Angell’s eye-opening statements and conclusions are these:

Mental disorders are increasing at a furious rate in America, especially for children. While 1 in 184 Americans qualified for government disability aid for mental illness in 1987, the number more than doubled (1 in 76) by 2007. In children, the rise was an astonishing 35-fold! This almost certainly reflects not a genuine jump in disorders, but an increase in the frequency of diagnosis.

As we all know, psychiatric talk therapy has been largely supplanted by the use of drugs. Medical students are now given minimal training in talk therapy and maximal training in how to prescribe drugs.

There is no substantive evidence that mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.

Antidepressants are far less effective than people think: in fact, they may not be effective at all. Trials are typically only a month or two long, and I am not aware of any long-term tests of these drugs. More disturbing is that the drugs are barely better than placebos. Pharmaceutical companies doing blind testing of antidepressants are required to submit only two blind clinical studies with positive results, and these could be out of a much larger number of studies showing no positive results. That, in fact, seems to be the case. When Irving Kirsch investigated the studies, he found that while antidepressants were three times as effective as no treatment at all, they were only marginally better than placebo drugs, which “cured” depression at a rate 82% that of real antidepressants. Moreover, when you look at the degree of improvement of antidepressants over placebos, the difference, though statistically significant, is miniscule. Few people taking antidepressants know these depressing statistics.

Doctors observed that other drugs with no effect on serotonin, like synthetic thyroid hormone, also appeared to relieve depression. What these drugs had in common was that they all had side effects. Was it the side effects, then, that helped depression? Sure enough, when doctors used placebos that had side effects (“active placebos”; one of these is atropine) rather than inactive placebos, they found no difference between antidepressant and placebo. A reasonable conclusion from this study is that patients, when they experience side effects, think that they’ve “broken the blind test,” and are taking the real drug. They then improve simply as a result of realizing that they’re taking something that’s supposed to help them.

Whitaker’s book reaches an even more depressing conclusion. He realized that the “natural history of mental illness” has changed over the decades: while schizophrenia and depression, for instance, used to recur episodically, separated by periods of normality, now they are “chronic and lifelong”. Whitaker concludes that psychoactive drugs actually change the brain in a way that prolongs and intensifies mental disorders, for the brain tries to compensate, ineffectually, for the chemical imbalances induced by drugs. Here is a really disturbing passage from Whitaker’s book:

“Imagine that a virus suddenly appears in our society that makes people sleep twelve, fourteen hours a day. Those infected with it move about somewhat slowly and seem emotionally disengaged. Many gain huge amounts of weight—twenty, forty, sixty, and even one hundred pounds. Often their blood sugar levels soar, and so do their cholesterol levels. A number of those struck by the mysterious illness—including young children and teenagers—become diabetic in fairly short order…. The federal government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists at the best universities to decipher the inner workings of this virus, and they report that the reason it causes such global dysfunction is that it blocks a multitude of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain—dopaminergic, serotonergic, muscarinic, adrenergic, and histaminergic. All of those neuronal pathways in the brain are compromised. Meanwhile, MRI studies find that over a period of several years, the virus shrinks the cerebral cortex, and this shrinkage is tied to cognitive decline. A terrified public clamors for a cure.

Now such an illness has in fact hit millions of American children and adults. We have just described the effects of Eli Lilly’s best-selling antipsychotic, Zyprexa.”

The DSM book resulted from a deliberate decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to “remedicalize psychiatry” in the late 1970s. Each time it is revised, the number of disorders included increases drastically: the latest has 365, more than doubling the 182 in the DSM-II. Angell notes a serious lack of scientific underpinning:

“Not only did the DSM become the bible of psychiatry, but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions. That is an astonishing omission, because in all medical publications, whether journal articles or textbooks, statements of fact are supposed to be supported by citations of published scientific studies. (There are four separate “sourcebooks” for the current edition of the DSM that present the rationale for some decisions, along with references, but that is not the same thing as specific references.) It may be of much interest for a group of experts to get together and offer their opinions, but unless these opinions can be buttressed by evidence, they do not warrant the extraordinary deference shown to the DSM.”

The connection between drug companies and psychiatrists has always been congenial—I would call it corrupt. The companies pay for the doctors to go to conferences, often in vacation-y places, they sponsor their research, and give them huge fees as consultants and speakers. Angell notes that in states that must reveal financial connections between drug companies and doctors, psychiatrists get more largesse than any other group of physicians. And 20% of the funding of the American Psychiatric Association (which, of course, publishes the DSM) comes from drug companies.

More than half of the contributors to the new version of the DSM (95/170) have financial ties to drug companies, “including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.”

Drug companies also give a ton of money to patient advocacy groups, like the National Alliance on Mental Illnesses—groups whose agendas include a strong push for drug therapy for mental disorders.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing in Angell’s articles is the huge increase in drug therapy for mental disorders in children, who are often treated with drugs not approved by the FDA for their diagnosed disorder. “Juvenile bipolar disorder” increased 40-fold between 1993 and 2004, and autism more than fivefold. As Angell notes, “Ten percent of ten-year-old boys now take daily stimulants for ADHD—’attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder’—and 500,000 children take antipsychotic drugs.”

Angell and the authors she reviews describe further disturbing things, like the drug industry’s illegal push to get doctors to prescribe drugs for conditions for which those drugs haven’t been approved by the FDA (American Food and Drug Administration). If you are a patient, or know someone who is, you must have a look. These articles, and the data presented by Angell, have convinced me more than ever that medical psychiatry is largely a scam, a rotten-to-the-core coalition between psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies. Now I know that many psychiatrists are deeply motivated to help their patients, for mental disorders are among the most frustrating and recalcitrant conditions faced by doctors, and many patients indeed need urgent medical or therapeutic attention. But the way it’s being done now is not only ineffective, but positively harmful—although lucrative for doctors and drug companies. The few researchers and psychiatrists crying out against the madness, as in the three books under review, are largely shouting in the wilderness.

UPDATE: To the readers who are taking medications for mental disorders, do not take this post as an incitement to quit your medications. I hope nobody interpreted my piece this way, but I wanted to make that crystal clear. I am not a physician and am merely recounting my own experience, conclusions, and the article of Dr. Angell. But I do urge you to read that article, whether or not you’re a patient.

I would add, though, that personal testimony that a drug has “helped” a person is not the same thing as positive results in a double-blind study. Many people claim that they have been helped by homeopathic medicine or other “cures” that can’t be documented scientifically. The placebo effect (which must be operative in homeopathy) is well documented.

Finally, for similar views on the self-serving behavior of the pharmaceutical industry with respect to treating mental illness, see Frederick Crews’s (open-access) 2007 NYRB piece, “Talking back to Prozac,” a review of three books on psychiatry and “Big Pharma.”

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-06-25T05:49:00.002+10:00

NO JOKE : "dogs should replace psychiatrists" !
by Benjamin Merhav

A long time ago I had advocated the replacement of psychiatrists by dogs. The dogs would certainly do no harm ! Big Pharma would have no influence on them ! They would also be much easier and much cheaper to maintain ! Here is the latest echo to my proposal, and by an Australian psychiatrist, as reported by a serious Australian daily :

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/a-doggone-good-way-to-beat-the-blues-20110624-1gjph.html

"...Dr Anne-Marie Swan recently told a meeting of Australian psychiatrists that dogs were emerging as useful ''co-therapists'' in psychiatry because of their non-judgmental ways and ability to soothe. The Sydney-based specialist said her Italian Lagotto Romagnolo, Fabio, had assisted her with many patients in her private practice in recent years, especially those experiencing depression, bereavement and psychosis. He tended to give paranoid patients a wide berth, though, she said, probably because he picks up fear or a sense they feel threatened.

Dr Swan said Fabio was particularly good at helping her establish a therapeutic alliance with patients who can find it difficult to trust a stranger enough to divulge their innermost thoughts.

''No matter how hard I try, I can't communicate a warmth in the same uncomplicated, direct, unconditional way that he does. And, of course, the dog has absolute confidentiality, so they know he's not going to talk about what he's heard,'' she said.

Dr Swan said Fabio could also offer patients another ear to talk to when they were finding it hard to deal with her. He had also acted as mediator when there was tension in the room.

''Once when I was irritable with a patient, he sat up right beside her in a very protective way and positively glared at me. It was very funny, he caught me out and the patient felt totally validated,'' she said. ''It allowed us to talk about it.

''Freud also thought that his dog reacted very well to people who were depressed, and I agree. Fabio will sometimes cross a room from a sleeping position and put a paw on a patient or lie down beside them if they are distressed.''

Studies have shown that animal-assisted therapy can decrease anxiety, depression, anger and aggression and increase social interaction by reducing the threat of the treatment environment. However, few studies have examined dogs' apparent ability to empathise with humans.

A group of Portuguese researchers recently hypothesised a theory of convergent evolution between dogs and humans given that dogs possess some human-like social skills that apes do not. Writing in the journal Biology Letters, they said research had shown that dogs yawned when humans yawned, a trait that is linked to high levels of empathy when seen in humans.

Furthermore, the researchers said studies had found that some untrained dogs got upset when familiar humans faked distress. There were also reports of dogs summoning help in emergencies involving humans.

American psychiatrist Myron Glucksman recently wrote that while his dog, Joe, was an excellent co-therapist, he was also a wonderful comfort to him in what could be a tiring and thankless job at times.

''An idealising, loving dog is an additional bonus that makes up for the many hours that often go unrewarded during the therapeutic journey,'' he wrote in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry.

Dr Swan agreed wholeheartedly, but said she was very mindful of ensuring that Fabio was enjoying his work.

''He's a shockingly well-looked-after dog … If he wasn't enjoying it, I would let him retire immediately,'' she said."

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-06-20T18:11:00.010+10:00

Excerpts From "The Illusions of Psychiatry" by Dr. Marcia Angell, MD (a 2 parts article )

July 14, 2011

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/?page=2

"Not only did the DSM become the bible of psychiatry, but like the real Bible, it depended a lot on something akin to revelation. There are no citations of scientific studies to support its decisions. That is an astonishing omission, because in all medical publications, whether journal articles or textbooks, statements of fact are supposed to be supported by citations of published scientific studies. (There are four separate “sourcebooks” for the current edition of the DSM that present the rationale for some decisions, along with references, but that is not the same thing as specific references.) It may be of much interest for a group of experts to get together and offer their opinions, but unless these opinions can be buttressed by evidence, they do not warrant the extraordinary deference shown to the DSM. The DSM-III was supplanted by the DSM-III-R in 1987, the DSM-IV in 1994, and the current version, the DSM-IV-TR (text revised) in 2000, which contains 365 diagnoses. “With each subsequent edition,” writes Daniel Carlat in his absorbing book, “the number of diagnostic categories multiplied, and the books became larger and more expensive. Each became a best seller for the APA, and DSM is now one of the major sources of income for the organization.” The DSM-IV sold over a million copies.

As psychiatry became a drug-intensive specialty, the pharmaceutical industry was quick to see the advantages of forming an alliance with the psychiatric profession. Drug companies began to lavish attention and largesse on psychiatrists, both individually and collectively, directly and indirectly. They showered gifts and free samples on practicing psychiatrists, hired them as consultants and speakers, bought them meals, helped pay for them to attend conferences, and supplied them with “educational” materials. When Minnesota and Vermont implemented “sunshine laws” that require drug companies to report all payments to doctors, psychiatrists were found to receive more money than physicians in any other specialty. The pharmaceutical industry also subsidizes meetings of the APA and other psychiatric conferences. About a fifth of APA funding now comes from drug companies.

Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.⁵

The drug industry, of course, supports other specialists and professional societies, too, but Carlat asks, “Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.” Unlike the conditions treated in most other branches of medicine, there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness—no lab data or MRI findings—and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses, in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology. And drug companies have every interest in inducing psychiatrists to do just that.

In addition to the money spent on the psychiatric profession directly, drug companies heavily support many related patient advocacy groups and educational organizations. Whitaker writes that in the first quarter of 2009 alone,

Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] and its local chapters, $465,000 to the National Mental Health Association, $130,000 to CHADD (an ADHD [attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder] patient-advocacy group), and $69,250 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

And that’s just one company in three months; one can imagine what the yearly total would be from all companies that make psychoactive drugs. These groups ostensibly exist to raise public awareness of psychiatric disorders, but they also have the effect of promoting the use of psychoactive drugs and influencing insurers to cover them. Whitaker summarizes the growth of industry influence after the publication of the DSM-III as follows:

In short, a powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980’s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases. Pharmaceutical companies provided the financial muscle. The APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the enterprise. The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] put the government’s stamp of approval on the story. NAMI provided a moral authority."

"The pharmaceutical industry influences psychiatrists to prescribe psychoactive drugs even for categories of patients in whom the drugs have not been found safe and effective. What should be of greatest concern for Americans is the astonishing rise in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in children, sometimes as young as two years old. These children are often treated with drugs that were never approved by the FDA for use in this age group and have serious side effects. The apparent prevalence of “juvenile bipolar disorder” jumped forty-fold between 1993 and 2004, and that of “autism” increased from one in five hundred children to one in ninety over the same decade. Ten percent of ten-year-old boys now take daily stimulants for ADHD—”attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder”—and 500,000 children take antipsychotic drugs.
There seem to be fashions in childhood psychiatric diagnoses, with one disorder giving way to the next. At first, ADHD, manifested by hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity usually in school-age children, was the fastest-growing diagnosis. But in the mid-1990s, two highly influential psychiatrists at the Massachusetts General Hospital proposed that many children with ADHD really had bipolar disorder that could sometimes be diagnosed as early as infancy. They proposed that the manic episodes characteristic of bipolar disorder in adults might be manifested in children as irritability. That gave rise to a flood of diagnoses of juvenile bipolar disorder. Eventually this created something of a backlash, and the DSM-V now proposes partly to replace the diagnosis with a brand-new one, called “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria,” or TDD, which Allen Frances calls “a new monster.”⁷
One would be hard pressed to find a two-year-old who is not sometimes irritable, a boy in fifth grade who is not sometimes inattentive, or a girl in middle school who is not anxious. (Imagine what taking a drug that causes obesity would do to such a girl.) Whether such children are labeled as having a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs depends a lot on who they are and the pressures their parents face.⁸ As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, “This has become the new welfare.” Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.
Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs. According to a New York Times story, a Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines."
"At the very least, we need to stop thinking of psychoactive drugs as the best, and often the only, treatment for mental illness or emotional distress. Both psychotherapy and exercise have been shown to be as effective as drugs for depression, and their effects are longer-lasting, but unfortunately, there is no industry to push these alternatives and Americans have come to believe that pills must be more potent. More research is needed to study alternatives to psychoactive drugs, and the results should be included in medical education.
In particular, we need to rethink the care of troubled children. Here the problem is often troubled families in troubled circumstances. Treatment directed at these environmental conditions—such as one-on-one tutoring to help parents cope or after-school centers for the children—should be studied and compared with drug treatment. In the long run, such alternatives would probably be less expensive. Our reliance on psychoactive drugs, seemingly for all of life’s discontents, tends to close off other options. In view of the risks and questionable long-term effectiveness of drugs, we need to do better. Above all, we should remember the time-honored medical dictum: first, do no harm (primum non nocere)."
(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-06-16T09:27:00.022+10:00

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/822/9/

Confidential Expert Witness Report Documents Psychiatrists' Corrupt Practices

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

"From the start, the [Tri-University Schizophrenia Practice Guidelines] project subverted scientific integrity, appearing to be a purely scientific venture when it was at its core, a marketing venture for Risperdal."

The case filed against Johnson & Johnson by Allen Jones and the State of Texas was recently postponed until November. But some of the documents from the case are now publicly available at the Travis County, Texas courthouse.

The confidential Expert Witness Report by Dr. David Rothman of Columbia University (March 22, 2011), is the most damning document that we've seen in which not only is J & J's "detestable" conduct--as described by Judge Couch who presided over the court decision against J & J in South Carolina--laid bare, but Rothman's report also describes the shameless active collaboration by prominent academic psychiatrists--including the Chairman of the DSM-IV(Dr. Allen Frances, the one who calls psychiatry a "noble profession" - B.M. ) .

The prominent academic psychiatrists who were paid by Johnson & Johnson to formulate the Tri-University Guidelines are: Dr. Allen Frances, Chairman of the Dept. of Psychiatry, Duke University; Dr. John P. Doherty, Professor and Vice Chairman of Psychiatry, Cornell University; and David A Kahn, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; who took the lead in designing and developing the Tri-University Guidelines as a marketing strategy designed to elevate their then new so-called, Atypical Antipsychotic, Risperdal, to first-line treatment.

The report describes how these prominent psychiatrists developed commercially driven prescribing algorithms that they helped masquerade as legitimate, science-based medication prescribing guidelines.

"Not only were Frances, Doherty, and Kahn ready to violate standards of conflicts of interest in mixing guideline preparation with marketing for J&J, but also in publicizing the guidelines in coordination with J&J. The three men established Expert Knowledge Systems [EKS]. The purpose of this organization was to use J&J money to market the guidelines and bring financial benefits to Frances, Docherty, and Kahn.

Dr. Rothman's report states that the 1995 Tri-University Schizophrenia Practice Guidelines was the first of subsequent psychotropic drug prescribing guidelines formulated by prominent academic psychiatrists at the behest of Johnson & Johnson. The best known of these Guidelines was the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), which adopted the Tri-University Guidelines en masse.

Excerpt describing the inception of the Tri-University Guidelines, page 14: [link]

"As one of its first activities, and in disregard of professional medical ethics of principles of conflict of interest, in 1995 J&J funded a project led by three psychiatrists at three medical centers [Duke, Cornell, and Columbia] to formulate Schizophrenia Practice Guidlines. From the start, the project subverted scientific integrity, appearing to be a purely scientific venture when it was at its core, a marketing venture for Risperdal. In fact, the guidelines produced by this project would become the basis for the TMAP algorithms, giving a market edge to the J&J products in Texas.

Three psychiatrists, Dr. Allen Frances, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, Duke University, Dr. John P. Doherty, Professor and Vice Chairman of Psychiatry, Cornell University and David A Kahn, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, took the lead in designing and developing the Tri-University Guidelines. The project would employ three questionnaires to establish the guidelines: one went to academic experts, one to clinicians, and one to policy experts. Including the third group was in all likelihood J&J’s idea as witness to the fact that Frances wrote J&J: "This is new to us and requires additional discussion. The panel members would include mental health commissioners, community mental health directors, NAMI representatives, experts in pharmacoeconomics, and so forth."

These were precisely the constituencies that J&J was eager to influence. J&J was the exclusive supporter of the project, dividing an "unrestricted" grant of $450,000 among the three schools. It further agreed to a $65,000 bonus incentive payment if the team was timely with its product. The team met the requirement, requested the additional payment, and received it.

The guideline team promised wide distribution of its product, including publication in a journal supplement. The team was prepared to have J&J participate in its work, not keeping the company even at arms length. With a disregard for conflict of interest and scientific integrity, the group shared its drafts with J&J. On June 21, 1996, Frances wrote Lloyd: "We are moving into the back stretch and thought you would be interested in seeing the latest draft of the guideline project… Please make comments and suggestions." So too, the group was eager to cooperate with J&J in marketing activities. Frances wrote without embarrassment or equivocation: "We also need to get more specific on the size and composition of the target audience and how to integrate the publication and conferences with other marketing efforts."

Indeed from the start J&J had made it apparent to the team that this was a marketing venture. In a letter to Frances, Lloyd set forth what he called an "aggressive time line" for the project, and added: "There are a number of other Treatment and Practice Guidelines for schizophrenia being developed or published during this same period that may well serve our marketing and implementation needs at a substantial lesser cost."

EKS wrote to Janssen on July 3, 1996 that it was pleased to respond to its request to "develop an information solution that will facilitate implementation of expert guidelines." It assured the company: "We are also committed to helping Janssen succeed in its effort to increase its market share and visibility in the payor, provider, and consumer communities." Now that the "first phase" was completed, with guidelines created, "EKS is now ready to move forward in a strategic partnership with Janssen." The strategy will allow Janssen to influence state governments and providers… Build brand loyalty and commitment with large groups of key providers around the country."

EKS also promised "rapid implementation," with particular attention to having an impact on Texas decision making. "It is our intent to work with the State of Texas immediately in implementing this product in a select number of CMHC’s with the assistance of A. John Rush, MD." Again, EKS emphasized: "It is essential for Janssen to distinguish Risperidone from other competitors in a timely and creditable way." In its Summary of the document, EKS wrote: "Your investment in the development of state of the art practice guidelines for schizophrenia is already beginning to pay off in terms of positive exposure in the Texas implementation project."

The costs for these various activities included: $250,000 for "educational conferences;" and dissemination of publication at $177,659. J&J agreed to them. So all told, J&J paid at least $942,659 on the production and marketing of the Tri-University guidelines.

The report is posted at: http://boringoldman.com: pp.1-20; pp. 21-42; pp.43-65 ; pp. 66-86

Vera Hassner Sharav

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-06-15T13:44:00.004+10:00

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all/1

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

By Gary Greenberg

Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Then an odd, reflective look crosses his face, as if he’s taking in the strangeness of this scene: Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (universally known as the DSM-IV), the guy who wrote the book on mental illness, confessing that “these concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.” For the first time in two days, the conversation comes to an awkward halt.

But he recovers quickly, and back in the living room he finishes explaining why he came out of a seemingly contented retirement to launch a bitter and protracted battle with the people, some of them friends, who are creating the next edition of the DSM. And to criticize them not just once, and not in professional mumbo jumbo that would keep the fight inside the professional family, but repeatedly and in plain English, in newspapers and magazines and blogs. And to accuse his colleagues not just of bad science but of bad faith, hubris, and blindness, of making diseases out of everyday suffering and, as a result, padding the bottom lines of drug companies. These aren’t new accusations to level at psychiatry, but Frances used to be their target, not their source. He’s hurling grenades into the bunker where he spent his entire career.

One influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids failed to disclose money he received from the makers of the bipolar drug Risperdal.

As a practicing psychotherapist myself, I can attest that this is a startling turn. But when Frances tries to explain it, he resists the kinds of reasons that mental health professionals usually give each other, the ones about character traits or personality quirks formed in childhood. He says he doesn’t want to give ammunition to his enemies, who have already shown their willingness to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not an unfounded concern. In its first official response to Frances, the APA diagnosed him with “pride of authorship” and pointed out that his royalty payments would end once the new edition was published—a fact that “should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.”

Frances, who claims he doesn’t care about the royalties (which amount, he says, to just 10 grand a year), also claims not to mind if the APA cites his faults. He just wishes they’d go after the right ones—the serious errors in the DSM-IV. “We made mistakes that had terrible consequences,” he says. Diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and bipolar disorder skyrocketed, and Frances thinks his manual inadvertently facilitated these epidemics—and, in the bargain, fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life’s difficulties to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.

The insurgency against the DSM-5 (the APA has decided to shed the Roman numerals) has now spread far beyond just Allen Frances. Psychiatrists at the top of their specialties, clinicians at prominent hospitals, and even some contributors to the new edition have expressed deep reservations about it. Dissidents complain that the revision process is in disarray and that the preliminary results, made public for the first time in February 2010, are filled with potential clinical and public relations nightmares. Although most of the dissenters are squeamish about making their concerns public—especially because of a surprisingly restrictive nondisclosure agreement that all insiders were required to sign—they are becoming increasingly restive, and some are beginning to agree with Frances that public pressure may be the only way to derail a train that he fears will “take psychiatry off a cliff.”

At stake in the fight between Frances and the APA is more than professional turf, more than careers and reputations, more than the $6.5 million in sales that the DSM averages each year. The book is the basis of psychiatrists’ authority to pronounce upon our mental health, to command health care dollars from insurance companies for treatment and from government agencies for research. It is as important to psychiatrists as the Constitution is to the US government or the Bible is to Christians. Outside the profession, too, the DSM rules, serving as the authoritative text for psychologists, social workers, and other mental health workers; it is invoked by lawyers in arguing over the culpability of criminal defendants and by parents seeking school services for their children. If, as Frances warns, the new volume is an “absolute disaster,” it could cause a seismic shift in the way mental health care is practiced in this country. It could cause the APA to lose its franchise on our psychic suffering, the naming rights to our pain.

(Emphasis in red added - B.M.)

2011-06-14T07:29:00.021+10:00

PSYCHIATRY WOULD HAVE BEEN A GLOBAL JOKE IF IT DID NOT HAVE THE LEGAL POWER TO FORCE ITS DEADLY DANGEROUS "TREATMENTS" ON PEOPLE , THUS TORTURING AND/OR KILLING THEM
by Benjamin Merhav

The first of the two articles below is about Australia, and is published by an Australian daily. While quoting top USA psychiatrist,Allen Frances, as opposed to the so called "early treatment" of adolescents by Australian psychiatrist, Patrick McGorry, the article also quotes another psychiatrist who criticises McGorry for not forcing his treatment on even younger children.

Here is what Frances says about McGorry's "early treatment" :

"early diagnosis could lead to people without psychosis being put on medications that have serious side-effects, including massive weight gain"because "early Psychosis Intervention Centres do not have a reliable early diagnosis tool."

This government financed McGorry psychiatric experiments on Australian children is scandalous and outrageous, of course, and it would be egregious to extend it to very young children. However, the aggressive impunity with which psychiatry has been operating - in theory and in practice - would continue to be backed up by the politicians because Big Pharma is behind the shrinks, and the politicians need the Big Pharma bribes for their reelection.

Then there is the article's short line of comment behind which McGorry - as most other shrink culprits - likes to hide as follows : "Professor Frances's arguments have been seized on by Scientologists, who argue against the notion of mental illness." This is a false defence, no defence at all for any psychiatric experimentation with human beings. The objective reality is - with or without the Church of Scientology - that there is no psychiatric illness, and nobody has ever proven scientifically that there is one, so why force psychiatric "treatment" on people ? Which leads us to the 2nd article below.

Quoting Dr. Marcia Angell, MD, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, the 2nd article states as follows :

"the main problem with the theory (of mental illness) is that after decades of trying to prove it, researchers have still come up empty-handed."

As for the continuous increase of "mentally ill " people Dr. Marcia Angell says :

"Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn't we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising ? "

The article concludes as follows :

"Despite psychiatry's medical pretensions, the equation of mental illnesses with brain diseases remains little more than an assumption. In fact, as Thomas Szasz observes in the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of The Myth of Mental Illness, once a particular pattern of behavior can be confidently ascribed to a physical defect, such as the brain damage caused by advanced syphilis or Alzheimer's disease, it is no longer considered a psychiatric issue. "Contemporary 'biological' psychiatrists tacitly recognized that mental illnesses are not, and cannot be, brain diseases," Szasz writes. "Once a putative disease becomes a proven disease, it ceases to be classified as a mental disorder and is reclassified as bodily disease."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/us-expert-slams-patrick-mcgorrys-psychosis-model/story-fn59niix-1226074544901

US expert slams Patrick McGorry's psychosis model

EXCLUSIVE: Sue Dunlevy
From: The Australian
June 14, 2011 12:00AM

PATRICK McGorry's model of early diagnosis of psychosis, favoured by the federal government and the Coalition in their mental-health policies, has come under attack from a leading US psychiatrist, who warns that predicting psychosis is unreliable and could lead to patients being wrongly medicated.

Allen Frances, who chaired the committee that produced the current diagnostic bible for psychiatry, the DSM-IV, has warned that Professor McGorry's Early Psychosis Intervention Centres do not have a reliable early diagnosis tool.

Professor Frances, an emeritus professor at Duke University in North Carolina, fears early diagnosis could lead to people without psychosis being put on medications that have serious side-effects, including massive weight gain.

He has also attacked the Gillard government's plans to spend $222 million expanding Professor McGorry's EPIC program by another 16 centres as a "vast untried public-health experiment".

"The Australian experiment will be flying blind on an airplane that is not at all ready to leave the ground," he said in a blog posted on Psychology Today in the US.

His concerns are shared by Adelaide University psychiatry professor Jon Jureidini, who says the Gillard government should have shared mental-health funding around many different early intervention projects to see what worked best.

"A lot of the evaluation of EPIC shows any advantages it has disappear over time, so that tends to suggest that in terms of intervention they are good while they are happening, but they don't necessarily give long-term protection," Professor Jureidini told The Australian.

Their criticism came as the past president of the Royal Australian College of Psychiatrists, Louise Newman, attacked the $197 million the government will spend on expanding the number of Headspace youth mental health centres from 60 to 90.

"There have been certain statements about the efficacy of the Headspace approach that have been overstated," she told Australian Doctor magazine.

Early intervention to prevent mental illness needed to happen at a much earlier stage of development than adolescence, Dr Newman said.

A spokeswoman for Mental Health Minister Mark Butler said the government was making substantial investments in youth mental health and early psychosis prevention services. "We are confident these evidence-based models will be of benefit to young Australians," she said.

Professor Frances's arguments have been seized on by Scientologists, who argue against the notion of mental illness.

Although Professor Frances chaired the committee that produced the fourth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1994, he has been left off the panel developing the fifth version.

He has written extensively of his concerns about how strict medical definitions of mental illness can lead to misdiagnosis by non-experts.

Professor McGorry dismissed Professor Frances's attack as a "beat-up", and said no one received anti-psychotic drugs at his centres unless they had had a psychotic episode.

While Professor Frances agreed that Professor McGorry did not recommend anti-psychotic medication as a preventive measure, he feared general practitioners might overuse the drugs if they started using Professor McGorry's diagnostic tool for early psychosis.

Professor Frances said in his Psychology Today blog that early intervention to prevent psychosis required first that there be an accurate tool to identify who would become psychotic.

"The false positive rate in selecting pre-psychosis is at least 60-70 per cent in the very best hands and may be as high as 90 per cent in general practice . . . these are totally unacceptable odds," he said.

Professor McGorry agreed that false positive rates of diagnosing prepsychosis were high, but said the first line of treatment for people who had sub-threshold psychosis was supportive care.

==================

http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/13/half-of-us-are-mentally-ill-an

Half of Us Are Mentally Ill (and the Other Half Are Undiagnosed)

Jacob Sullum | June 13, 2011

In a New York Review of Books essay, Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, considers three books that take skeptical looks at "the epidemic of mental illness" sweeping the country:

The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades....

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives.

Angell poses some questions about this epidemic:

Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn't we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?

As those questions suggest, Angell seems to share the skepticism of the authors whose books she reviews: University of Hull psychologist Irving Kirsch, who in The Emperor's New Drugs shows that antidepressants are only slightly more effective than placebos, so slightly that the difference may be attributable to stronger expectations of improvement primed by the drugs' side effects; the journalist Robert Whitaker, who in Anatomy of an Epidemic argues that the "astonishing rise of mental illness if America" can be understood largely as an outgrowth of the desire to sell psychiatric drugs; and Daniel Carlat, a Boston psychiatrist who confesses his profession's shortcomings in Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry. Angell notes that "none of the three authors subscribes to the popular theory that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain." She adds that "the main problem with the theory is that after decades of trying to prove it, researchers have still come up empty-handed."

That may come as a surprise to uncritical viewers of pharmaceutical commercials or credulous readers of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But it is a truth acknowledged even by many psychiatrists, including the chief editor of the current DSM, who recently despaired that the attempt to define mental disorders is "bullshit." Despite psychiatry's medical pretensions, the equation of mental illnesses with brain diseases remains little more than an assumption. In fact, as Thomas Szasz observes in the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of The Myth of Mental Illness, once a particular pattern of behavior can be confidently ascribed to a physical defect, such as the brain damage caused by advanced syphilis or Alzheimer's disease, it is no longer considered a psychiatric issue. "Contemporary 'biological' psychiatrists tacitly recognized that mental illnesses are not, and cannot be, brain diseases," Szasz writes. "Once a putative disease becomes a proven disease, it ceases to be classified as a mental disorder and is reclassified as bodily disease."

Angell does not mention Szasz in the first installment of her essay, and I suspect he will be absent from the second part as well. It is OK to agree with Szasz about psychiatry's lack of scientific rigor as long as you do not acknowledge that you are agreeing with him. In an upcoming book review for Reason, I note that the renegade psychiatrist's ideas are is routinely dismissed as obsolete at a time when they seem more relevant than ever.

(Emphasis in red is added - B.M.)

THE 18TH BLOG FOR THE OUTLAW OF PSYCHIATRY NOW

"America Is Over Diagnosed and Over Medicated

PSYCHIATRY IS A THREAT TO HUMANITY, NOT JUST TO THE SANITY OF AMERICANS

"America's Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity

American styled psychiatric tyranny serves as a model worldwide

THE SHRINKS HAVE NO MONOPOLY ON PSYCHOPATHY

by Benjamin Merhav

Making the most of psychopaths

Amy Corderoy

"Historic hearing begins into Broadmoor patient seeking his freedom

Has Psychiatry Been Corrupted Beyond Repair?

With more talk in mind

by John Read

State urged to act on 'shocking' death rates in mental care

Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker

THE NEW YORK TIMES

August 21, 2011 The Kids Are Not All Right By JOEL BAKAN

Professor McGorry defends early intervention

Transcript

Denial of rights in psychiatric treatment

FELLOW, AMERICAN ACADEMY OF NEUROLOGY

McGorry accused of conflict of interest

Jill Stark

Marcia Angell replies:

New laws to ban electric shocks on children

Jill Stark

Mainstream psychiatry is failing – but there is another way

“The Madness of Normality” – On why the DMS-5 is fundamentally wrong

Is medical psychiatry a scam?

Excerpts From "The Illusions of Psychiatry" by Dr. Marcia Angell, MD (a 2 parts article )

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

US expert slams Patrick McGorry's psychosis model

August 21, 2011
The Kids Are Not All Right
By JOEL BAKAN