citizens commission on human rights...psychiatry’s coercive ‘care’ a public service report...

PSYCHIATRY’S COERCIVE ‘CARE’

A Public Service Report from Citizens Commission on Human Rights

COMMUNITY RUIN

CCIITTIIZZEENNSS CCOOMMMMIISSSSIIOONN OONN HHUUMMAANN RRIIGGHHTTSS

The Citizens Commission on HumanRights (CCHR) was established in 1969 bythe Church of Scientology to investigateand expose psychiatric violations of humanrights, and to clean up the field of mentalhealing. Its co-founder is Dr. ThomasSzasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus andan internationally renowned author. Today,CCHR has more than 130 chapters in over30 countries. Its board of advisors, calledCommissioners, includes doctors, lawyers,educators, artists, business professionals,and civil and human rights representatives.

CCHR has inspired and caused manyhundreds of reforms by testifying beforelegislative hearings and conducting publichearings into psychiatric abuse, as well asworking with media, law enforcement andpublic officials the world over.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:CCHR International

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19137 CCHR Pamphlet - Homeless 10/28/04 5:11 PM Page 2

RECOMMENDATIONS

1 Abolish involuntary and community mental healthtreatment laws that rely upon mandatory and therebycoercive measures. Dismantle or prevent “mentalhealth courts” which are another conduit for druggingour communities.

2 Housing and work will do more for the homeless thanthe life-debilitating effects of psychiatric drugs andother psychiatric treatments that destroy responsibili-ty. Many homeless just simply want a chance.

3 If you or a family member or friend has been coer-cively treated or abused by a psychiatrist, consult alawyer to determine your right to prosecute crimi-nally and civilly the responsible psychologists orpsychiatrists, their colleges and associations.

Caution: No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the adviceand assistance of a competent non-psychiatric medical doctor.

PHOTO CREDITS: Cover: Mark Peterson/Corbis; 2: Peter Turnley/Corbis; 5: Wally McNamee/Corbis;10: Peter Turnley/Corbis.

mental problems are actually caused by an undiag-nosed physical illness or condition. This does not meana “chemical imbalance” or a “brain-based disease,” buta real physical condition with real pathology that canbe addressed by a competent medical doctor.

There is no mystery about the increase ingratuitous violence, criminality, youth suicides, armiesof homeless wandering our cities and numerous othernegative mental health indices in communities today.But they are not an expanding mental illness problemdemanding more community mental health“treatments.” Rather they represent an increasingmental health problem created by psychiatrists andtheir treatments.

15© 2004 CCHR. All Rights Reserved. CITIZENS COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, CCHR and the CCHR logoare trademarks and service marks owned by Citizens Commission on Human Rights. Printed in the U.S.A. Item#FLO 19137

1. Allen Jones, Investigator in the Commonwealth ofPennsylvania Office of Inspector General (OIG), Bureau ofSpecial Investigations, Law Project for Psychiatric Rights,Internet address: http://psychrights.org, 20 Jan. 2004, p. 31.2. Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine,and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (PerseusPublishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002), pp. 227–228.3. Peter Schrag, Mind Control (Pantheon Books, New York,1978), p. 45. 4. Thomas Szasz, M.D., Cruel Compassion (John Wiley & Sons,Inc., New York, 1994), p. 160.5. Dr. Dorine Baudin, “Ethical Aspects ofDeinstitutionalization in Mental Health Care, Final Report,Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction,”Program No. BMH 5-98-3793, July 2001, p. 14.6. Vera Hassner Sharav, “Children in Clinical Research: AConflict of Moral Values,” The American Journal of Bioethics,Vol. 3, No. 1, 2003.7. Op. Cit, Whitaker, p. 256.

8. Ibid, p. 188.9. Erica Goode, “Leading Drugs for Psychosis Come UnderNew Scrutiny,” The New York Times, 20 May 2003.10. “Compulsory Admission and Involuntary Treatment ofMentally Ill Patients – Legislation and Practice in EU-MemberStates,” Final Report, Mannheim, Germany, 15 May 2002,Intro, pp. 2–8.11 “Diet Mulls Fat of Mentally Ill Criminals,” The Japan Times,8. June 2002.12. Michael McCubbin and David Cohen, “The Rights ofUsers of the Mental Health System: The Tight Knot of Power,Law, and Ethics”, XXIVth International Congress on Law andMental Health, Toronto, June 1999.13. Dr. Tana Dineen, Ph.D., Manufacturing Victims, ThirdEdition (Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing, 2001), p. 86.14. Sydney Walker III, A Dose of Sanity: Mind, Medicine andMisdiagnosis (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, 1996), pp. 207, 225.

This publication was made possible by a grant from the United StatesInternational Association of Scientologists Members’ Trust.

“The neuroleptic drugs used since the 1950s ‘worked’

by hindering normal brain function:they dimmed psychosis, but

produced pathology often worsethan the condition for which theyhave been prescribed—much like

physical lobotomy whichpsychotropic drugs replaced.”

— Vera Sharav writing in the American Journal of Bioethics, 2003

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CCHHAAPPTTEERR FFIIVVEEIMPROVING

MENTAL HEALTH

W hen any psychiatrist has full legal power tocause a person’s involuntary physicaldetention by force (kidnapping), to subjecthim to physical pain and mental stress (torture) thatleaves him permanently mentally damaged (crueland unusual punishment), all without proving thathe has committed a crime (due process of law, trial byjury) then, by definition, a totalitarian state exists.

In his book, Psychiatric Slavery, Dr. Szasz wrote,“When people do not know ‘what else’ to do with,say, a lethargic, withdrawn adolescent, a petty crimi-nal, an exhibitionist, or a difficult grandparent—oursociety tells them, in effect, to put the ‘offender’ in amental hospital. To overcome this, we shall have tocreate an increasing number of humane and rationalalternatives to involuntary mental hospitalization.Old-age homes, workshops, temporary homes forindigent persons whose family ties have been disin-tegrated, progressive prison communities—theseand many other facilities will be needed to assumethe tasks now entrusted to mental hospitals.”

Proper medical screening by non-psychiatricdiagnostic specialists is a vital preliminary step inmapping the road to recovery for any mentally dis-turbed individual. Medical studies have shown timeand again that for many patients, what appear to be

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W ith the rapid growth of government“Community Mental Health” programsfor mentally disturbed individuals nowcosting billions of dollars, how is mental healthfaring in our communities today?

The U.S. New Freedom Commission onMental Health issued a report in 2003 thatclaimed, “Effective, state-of-the-art treatmentsvital for quality care and recovery are now avail-able for most serious mental illnesses and seriousemotional disorders.” [Emphasis added]

For those who know little about psychiatryand Community Mental Health, this appears to begreat news. However, exactly what are these vital“treatments”?

They principally involve the prescription ofdrugs called neuroleptics (nerve seizing), reflective of how the drugs act like a chemical lobotomy. A2004 report estimated the cost of neuroleptics for thetreatment of so-called schizophrenic patients acrossthe U.S. at over $10 million [€8.2 million] a day.1

Then again, what should we pay for quality,state-of-the-art care, for recovery, for the opportu-nity to bring these people back to productive lives?

According to several non-psychiatric andindependent research experiments, the answer tothat question is “Not much at all.” Quality careresulting in recovery and reintegration can be veryinexpensive, as well as permanent and most sig-nificantly, drug free.

In an eight-year-study, the World HealthOrganization found that severely mentally dis-turbed patients in three economically disadvan-taged countries whose treatment plans do notinclude a heavy reliance on drugs—India, Nigeriaand Colombia—found that patients did dramati-cally better than their counterparts in the UnitedStates and four other developed countries. A fol-low-up study reached a similar conclusion.2

In the United States in the 1970s, Dr. Loren

IINNTTRROODDUUCCTTIIOONNHARMING THE DISTURBED

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CCHHAAPPTTEERR FFOOUURRINVENTED DISEASES

U nderlying all of the problems discussed in thispublication and more is a system of diagnosisof mental disorders that is unscientific to thepoint of being an outright fraud.

The psychiatric bible for diagnosing mental disor-ders is the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA)Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders orDSM. “Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a prob-able cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis,the disorders listed in DSM-IV are terms arrived atthrough peer consensus”—a vote by APA committeemembers—and designed largely for billing purposes,reports Canadian psychologist, Dr. Tana Dineen.13

There is no objective science to it.Dr. Sydney Walker, psychiatrist, neurologist and

author of A Dose of Sanity warned about the dangers ofrelying upon the DSM: “It can be used to keep a crim-inal in jail or to release a murderer back into society. Itcan be used to invalidate your will, to break your legalcontracts, or to deny you the right to marry without acourt’s permission. If giving that much power to onebook sounds scary, it is.

“…DSM labels are not only useless as medical‘diagnoses’ but also have the potential to do greatharm—particularly when they are used as means todeny individual freedoms, or as weapons by psychia-trists acting as hired guns for the legal system.”14

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Mosher’s Soteria House experiment was based onthe idea that “schizophrenia” can be overcomewithout drugs. Soteria clients who didn’t receiveneuroleptics actually did the best, compared tohospital and drug-treated control subjects. Swiss,Swedish and Finnish researchers replicated andvalidated the experiment.

In Italy, between 1973 and 1996, Dr. GiorgioAntonucci dismantled some of the most

oppressive psychi-atric wards by treat-ing severely dis-turbed patients withcompassion, respectand without drugs.Within months, themost violent wardsbecame the calmest.

Robert Whitakerrevealed in his bookMad in America that thetreatment outcomes for

people with “schizophrenia” have actually wors-ened over the past 25 years. Today, they are no bet-ter than they were in the early 20th century, yet theU.S. has by far the highest consumption of neu-roleptics of any country.

For 50 years, psychiatry has promoted its theo-ry that the only “treatment” for severe mental “ill-ness” is neuroleptic drugs. However, not only is thedrugging of mentally disturbed patients unneces-sary—and expensive—it causes brain- and life-damaging side effects.

The simple truth is that there are workablealternatives to psychiatry’s destructive treatments.

With psychiatry now calling for mandatoryscreening for mental illness for adults and childreneverywhere, we urge all who have an interest inpreserving the mental health, physical health andthe freedom of their families, communities andnations, to read this publication. Something mustbe done to establish real help for those needing it.

Jan Eastgate, PresidentCitizens Commission on Human RightsInternational

“Psychiatry promotesthat the only ‘treatment’

for severe mental ‘illness’ is neuroleptic [antipsychotic] drugs.

The truth is the druggingcauses brain- and life-

damaging effects.” — Jan Eastgate

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option” in professional deliberations on mentalhealth policy.

Article 5 of the European Convention onHuman Rights guarantees, “Everyone who isdeprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall beentitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulnessof his detention shall be decided speedily by a courtand his release ordered if the detention is not law-ful.” The United Nations Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights recommends similar protections.

Yet every week, thousands are seized withoutdue process of law as a result of psychiatric involun-tary commitment laws. The majority of these citi-zens have fewer rights and less legal protectionsthan a criminal, yet they have not violated any civilor penal code.

Depriving the liberty of a “mentally disor-dered” person by involuntary incarceration in a psy-chiatric facility and then forcing “treatment” uponhim or her, especially after a person’s explicit refusalto undergo potentially dangerous treatment, vio-lates the most fundamental freedoms that areenjoyed by all other citizens including those under-going medical treatment.

MENTAL HEALTH COURTS “Mental health courts” are facilities established

to deal with arrests for misdemeanors or non-violentfelonies. Rather than allowing the guilty parties totake responsibility for their crimes, they are divertedto a psychiatric treatment center on the premise thatthey suffer from “mental illness” which will respondpositively to antipsychotic drugs. Offenders are sen-tenced to a psychiatric diagnosis and drug treatment.

In a review of 20 mental health courts, theBazelon Center for Mental Health Law found thatinstead of helping criminals reform, these courts“may function as a coercive agent.”

Government endorsement of mental healthcourts and “community policing” (as it is referred toin some European countries) will see more patientsforced into a life of mentally and physically danger-ous drug consumption and dependence, with nohope of a cure.

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CCHHAAPPTTEERR OONNEECOMMUNITY MENTALHEALTH ORIGINS

C ommunity Mental Health (CMH) is a majorpsychiatric expansion initiative. It began in theUnited States in the 1960s and spread to othercountries in the 1980s. It has netted psychiatry manybillions of dollars over the last four decades.

Prior to this, patients had been warehoused inBedlam-like conditions in psychiatric institutions,pumped full of drugs to make them submissive andleft to wallow in their drug-induced stupors.

CMH was promoted as the solution to institu-tional problems. The premise was that patients couldnow be successfully released back into society.Ongoing service would be provided through govern-ment-funded units called Community Mental HealthCenters (CMHCs). These centers would tend to thepatients from within the community, dispensing theneuroleptics that would keep them under control.Governments would save money and individuals

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emotionally disturbed in a tormented state. However,such claims are based on the dual premises that: 1)psychiatrists have helpful and workable treatments tobegin with and 2) psychiatrists have some expertise indiagnosing and predicting dangerousness.

Both suppositions are patently false. Most commitment laws are based on the con-

cept that a person may be a danger to himself orothers if not placed in an institution. However, anAmerican Psychiatric Association task force admit-ted in a 1979 amicus curiae brief to the U.S. SupremeCourt that, “Psychiatric expertise in the predictionof ‘dangerousness’ is not established.”

Terrence Campbell in an article in the MichiganBar Journal wrote, “Theaccuracy with which clinicaljudgment presents futureevents is often little betterthan random chance. Theaccumulated research litera-ture indicates that errors inpredicting dangerousnessrange from 54% to 94%,averaging about 85%.”

In 2002, KimioMoriyama, vice president of the JapanesePsychiatrists’ Association, expressed psychiatry’sinability to foresee correctly what a person’s futurebehavior might be, saying it was “impossible.”11

Another psychiatric ruse is the claim that invol-untary commitment protects the person’s “right totreatment.” Quite aside from the fiction of “treat-ment,” involuntary commitment laws are totalitarian.

Michael McCubbin, Ph.D., associate researcher,and David Cohen, Ph.D., professor of social ser-vices, both of the University of Montreal, say thatthe “‘right to treatment’ is today more often the‘right’ to receive forced treatment.”12

According to Professor Szasz, “Whether weadmit it or not, we have a choice between caring forothers by coercing them and caring for them onlywith their consent. At the moment, care withoutcoercion—when the ostensible beneficiary’s prob-lem is defined as mental illness—is not an acceptable

As a result of enforced community mentalhealth treatment, wenow have millions of drugged andincapable individualsroaming homeless on the streets.

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would improve faster. The plan was called “deinstitu-tionalization.”

Author Peter Schrag wrote that by the mid-1970s,enough neuroleptic drugs and antidepressants “werebeing prescribed outside hospitals to keep some threeto four million people medicated full-time—roughly 10times the number who, according to the [psychiatrists’]own arguments, are so crazy that they would have tobe locked up in hospitals if there were no drugs.”3

Dr. Thomas Szasz,professor of psychiatryemeritus, declared thatpsychiatry’s miraculousofferings were “simply thepsychiatric profession’slatest snake oil: Drugs anddeinstitutionalization. As usual, psychiatristsdefined their latest fad as acombination of scientificrevolutions and moralreform, and cast it in therhetoric of treatment and civil liberties.” Theyclaimed that psychotropic

drugs “relieved the symptoms of mental illness andenabled the patients to be discharged from mentalhospitals. Community Mental Health Centers weretouted as providing the least restrictive setting fordelivering the best available mental health services.Such were the claims of psychiatrists to justify the pol-icy of forcibly drugging and relocating their hospital-ized patients. It sounded grand. Unfortunately, it wasa lie.”4

Deinstitutionalization failed and society has beenstruggling with the disastrous results ever since. Dr.Dorine Baudin of the Netherlands Institute of MentalHealth and Addiction reported that the CMHC pro-gram in Europe had created “homelessness, drugaddiction, crime, disturbance to public peace andorder, unemployment, and intolerance of deviance.”5

Psychiatrists have consistently blamed the failureof deinstitutionalization on a lack of funding. In reality, they create the drug-induced crisis themselvesand then, shamelessly, demand yet more money.

“‘Community mentalhealth’ would not

merely treat people butwhole communities; it would treat society

itself and not merely itsindividual citizens and it was the drugs which

gave it its most powerfultechnology.”

— Peter Schrag, author of Mind Control

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CCHHAAPPTTEERR TTHHRREEEEA ‘CRUEL COMPASSION’

A ccompanying the psychiatrists’ push forexpanded community mental health is theirdemand for greater power to involuntarilycommit individuals.

Currently in the United States, one person isinvoluntarily incarcerated in a psychiatric facilityevery 1 1⁄4 minutes. In 2002, a study found increasingrates of involuntary commitment in Austria, England,Finland, France, Germany and Sweden, withGermany recording a 70% increase over eight years.10

Before you finish reading this publication, 10people—perhaps a friend, a family member, or aneighbor—will have been committed and, moreoften than not, brutally treated.

Psychiatrists disingenuously argue that involun-tary commitment in hospitals or the community is anact of kindness, that it is cruel to leave the

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T he advent of Community Mental Healthpsychiatric programs would not have beenpossible without the development and use ofneuroleptic drugs, also known as antipsychotics ormajor tranquilizers.

The first generation of these drugs, now com-monly referred to as “typical antipsychotics” or“typicals,” appeared during the 1960s. They wereheavily promoted as “miracle” drugs that made it“possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully andquickly treated in their own communities and returned toa useful place in society.” [Emphasis added]

These claims were false. In an article in theAmerican Journal of Bioethics in 2003, Vera Sharav stated, “The reality was that the therapies damagedthe brain’s frontal lobes, which is the distinguishingfeature of the human brain. The neuroleptic drugsused since the 1950s ‘worked’ by hindering normalbrain function: they dimmed psychosis, but pro-duced pathology often worse than the condition forwhich they have been prescribed—much like physi-cal lobotomy which psychotropic drugs replaced.”6

CCHHAAPPTTEERR TTWWOODANGEROUS‘TREATMENT’

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moderate-to-high doses of one major tranquilizermade half of the patients markedly more aggressive.8

According to a study of one antipsychotic,“Extreme anger and hostile behavior emerged ineight of the 80 patients treated” with the drug. Onewoman who had no history of violence before takingthe tranquilizer “erupted with screams on the fourthday, and held a steak knife to her mother’s throat forseveral minutes.”

In 2003, The New York Times reported, “Theywere billed as near wonder drugs, much safer andmore effective in treating schizophrenia than any-thing that had come before.” However, now “thereis increasing suspicion that they may cause seriousside effects, notably diabetes, in some cases leadingto death.”9 Between 1994 and 2002, 288 patients tak-ing the new antipsychotics developed diabetes; 75became severely ill and 23 died.

Rather than fewer side effects, the newer antipsy-chotics have more severe side effects. These includeblindness, fatal blood clots, swollen and leakingbreasts, impotence and sexual dysfunction, blood dis-orders, seizures, birth defects, extreme inner-anxiety

and rest lessness ,death from liver fail-ure, suicide rates twoto five times more frequent than for the general “schizo-phrenic” population,and violence andmayhem, especially inyoung patients.

The homeless individuals commonly seengrimacing and talking to themselves on thestreet are exhibiting the effects of such psychi-atric drug-induced damage. “Tardive dyskine-sia” (tardive, late appearing and dyskinesia,abnormal muscle movement) and “tardive dys-tonia” (dystonia, abnormal muscle tension) arepermanent conditions caused by tranquilizers inwhich the muscles of the face and body contortand spasm involuntarily.

“In short, the drug-induced reactions are ofsuch a nature that an observer could be forgivenfor assuming the person so affected was mentallyill and perhaps even dangerous. A person suffer-ing from such a reaction, even to a minor degree,

would experience greatdifficulty in beingaccepted by the man inthe street as ‘normal,’”wrote Pam Gorring,author of MentalDisorder or Madness?

As for improvingthe patients’ quality oflife, neuroleptics haveproduced a miserablerecord. A patient sur-vey found 90% of neu-

roleptic patients felt depressed, 88% felt sedated,and 78% complained of poor concentration.7

There is no argument that the public must beprotected from violent and psychotic behavior.However, the idea that this is the major risk weface from severely mentally disturbed patientsbecause of their mental condition is a lie manufac-tured by psychiatrists themselves. So is the ideathat we should minimize this “risk” by druggingpatients, against their will if necessary. The truth isthat neither the absence of such drugs, or the fail-ure to take them, is the problem. The drugs them-selves create violent impulses.

A 1990 study determined that 50% of all fightson a psychiatric ward were tied to akathisia (drug-induced agitation). Another study concluded that

“[B]ehind the publicfacade of medical

achievement [of theneuroleptics], is a story

of science marred bygreed, deaths, and the

deliberate deception ofthe American public.”— Robert Whitaker, author,

Mad in America

The major tranquilizers (antipsychotics) damage the extrapyramidalsystem, the extensive complex network of nerve fibers that moderatesmotor control, resulting in muscle rigidity, spasms, and various involuntarymovements; drawing the face and body into bizarre contortions.

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