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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
6616 Sunset Blvd.Los Angeles, CA, USA 90028
Telephone: (323) 467-4242(800) 869-2247 • Fax: (323)
467-3720
www.cchr.orge-mail: [email protected]
®
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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
14
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
13
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
4
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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.
12
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
5
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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.
11
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
10
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.
8 9
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