MEDICAL FASCISM

2007-01-11T14:39:00.000+11:00

The Big Business of Medicine :
THE USA'S FDA (FEDERAL FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION) IS NOW PARTNER IN THE CRIMES OF BIG PHARMA (THE TRANSNATIONAL DRUG CORPORATIONS)
by Justice Lover

The following article reveals what has been suspected for a long time now, namely, that the FDA, the USA government body which is supposed to protect the USA public, is actually aiding and abetting the colossal crimes perpetrated by Big Pharma worldwide against the people. This is terrorism, fascist terrorism of the worst kind, against millions of innocent victims.

There is, of course, one more partner to those crimes : the profession of psychiatry, and its individual practitioners, particularly the various states' psychitarists. Without this partner most of Big Pharma's crimes could not have been committed and "justified" in the name of medicine.

Here is the article as published today by counterpunch.com :

January 10, 2007
The Big Business of Medicine
How the FDA Protects Big Pharma
by EVELYN PRINGLE

Why would Americans trust the FDA to regulate the pharmaceutical industry? Since the Bush administration took office the FDA has become the industry's partner in crime.

The most notorious protection scheme put in place by the FDA and Big Pharma is the preemption policy that bans private lawsuits against drug companies in state courts once a drug and its label have been approved by the FDA.

On January 18, 2006, the FDA issued new rules for the labeling of prescription drugs, and in the preamble to the rules on page 43, the FDA says, State law actions "threaten FDA's statutorily prescribed role as the expert Federal agency responsible for evaluating and regulating drugs," requiring lay persons to second-guess its expert assessments of a drug's risks and benefits.

So, after all of the concerns raised about the FDA's failure to protect consumers against dangerous products over the last several year, by top experts from all over the world, the FDA has hereby declared itself the sole authority on decisions regarding prescription drugs, including whether a drug's label contains adequate descriptions of indications for use, risks and benefits.

In an October 6, 2006, articled titled, "The Doctrine of Preemption," Stan Kaufman aptly refers to the new policy as the "Doctrine of Preemptive Crony Capitalism." When announcing this multi-billion dollar immunization gift to Big Pharma, the FDA told drug makers:

"We think that if your company complies with the FDA processes, if you bring forward the benefits and risks of your drug, and let your information be judged through a process with highly trained scientists, you should not be second-guessed by state courts that don't have the same scientific knowledge."

The preemption claim reverses a long-standing policy of permitting State actions intended to protect consumers and undermines the States' ability to protect their citizens, yet State and local entities were given no opportunity to object to it.

Under Executive Order 13132, issued first by President Reagan, and then reissued by President Clinton, the FDA is supposed to consult with State and local authorities about the effects of each regulation it issues that affects the States.

Nowhere in the proposed rule did the FDA provide notice or seek comment on the preemption provisions added to the preamble. In the only proposed rule known to State and local officials, the FDA said that the regulation would not preempt State law. In fact, the language published in the Federal Register on December 22, 2000, explicitly stated that "this proposed rule does not preempt state law."

The rule requested comment on products liability issues, but only by asking whether the new "Highlights" section raised liability concerns and, if so, how the FDA might alleviate those concerns without eliminating the Highlights section. This request can hardly be called "notice" of the preemption statement that suddenly appeared in the preamble in 2006.

By relying on this false representation, State and local authorities were robbed of any opportunity to object to the preamble. In a January 2006, letter to Michael Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, the National Conference of State Legislators called the regulation a "thinly veiled attempt on the part of FDA to confer upon itself authority it does not have by statute."
The NCSL also stated the failure to allow for an appropriate comment period constitutes "an abuse of agency process and complete disregard for dual system of government."

Ken Suggs, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, was quoted in the January 19, 2006 Washington Post, as saying, the "fact that the drug industry can get the FDA to rewrite the rules so that CEOs can escape accountability for putting dangerous and deadly drugs on the market is the scariest example yet of how much control these big corporations have over the political process."

Legal experts point out that it was never the intent of Congress to preempt private lawsuits in State courts, and that in fact, when Congress was considering the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, it specifically rejected a proposal to include a private right of action for damages on the ground that such a right already existed under State common law.

According to Houston attorney, Robert Kwok, who handles complex pharmaceutical litigation involving drugs such Fosamax, Norvasc and SSRI antidepressants like Celexa:

"The real losers from this attempted power grab would be the millions of Americans who depend on safe drugs. Without the protection of state laws Big Pharma can ride shipshod over Americans who are injured by their unsafe drugs. That's unacceptable and I'm seeing even conservative judges resist it."

Many members of Congress have also weighed in on the issue and reaffirmed that Congress never intended to preempt State claims in a February 23, 2006, letter to Michael Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, from Representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), John Dingell (D-Mi.), and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (R-NY) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), have threatened to fight preemption through legislation if necessary. Rep. Hinchey issued a press release on January 18, 2006, immediately after the policy was announced, stating that the "FDA has once again gone to bat for the drug industry by fully endorsing a policy that shelters pharmaceutical companies from Americans who want to file lawsuits because a drug has made them or a loved one seriously ill, or in some cases caused death."

Rep. Hinchey also called it "the latest example of the FDA sticking its nose where it does not belong and treating the drug companies as clients rather than regulated entities."

The FDA's language on page 38 of the preamble that states "whether it be in the old or new format, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act preempts conflicting or contrary state law," appears to imply that the preemption policy is retroactive.
Part of the language also says that lawsuits against doctors are preempted for failure-to-warn patients of risks associated with a drug, apparently even when a drug is prescribed "off-label," for a use other than those approved by the FDA.

"Pre-emption would include not only claims against manufacturers," the FDA states, "but also against health-care practitioners for claims related to dissemination of risk information to patients beyond what is included in the labeling."

The FDA has never before, in its entire history, claimed that a drug label preempts actions against health care professionals for failure-to-warn patients about risks. In fact, labels carry no information about the risks or benefits of "off-label" uses.

Critics see this language as an attempt to immunize all the doctors who the industry has convinced to over-prescribe drugs to treat conditions or patient populations for which the drugs have never been approved as safe and effective to increase profits.

"Doctors need to be held just as accountable as the drug manufacturers when things go wrong," attorney Kwok says.
"The profession of medicine is in danger of being totally co-oped by the business of medicine," he warns, "with more and more of the burden is being placed on the consumer."

"And with only minimum consumer protection standards set by the FDA, that isn't very reassuring," Mr Kwok notes.
"I predict there could be a flood of litigation," he says, "before FDA policy changes any more."

In any event, restrictions that the FDA places on drug labeling do not prohibit drug companies from disseminating warnings about a danger by other means. When it originally promulgated these regulations, the FDA made clear that:
These labeling requirements do not prohibit a manufacturer, packer, re-labeler, or from warning health care professionals whenever possibly harmful adverse effects associated with the use of the drug are discovered.

The addition to labeling and advertising of additional warnings, as well as contraindications, adverse reactions, and precautions regarding the drug, or the issuance of letters directed to health care professionals (e.g., "Dear Doctor" letters containing such information) is not prohibited by these regulations. 44 Fed. Reg. 37434, 37447 (June 26, 1979).

One of the main authors of the new labeling rules was the FDA's Chief Counsel at the time, Daniel Troy, who in previous employment fought the FDA in court to allow drug companies to promote drugs to doctors for "off label" use.
Its now obvious when looking back, that Mr. Troy was appointed by the Bush administration to implement tort reform under the guise of preemption, and under the cover of the Office of Chief Counsel at the FDA.

In the midst of the Vioxx and SSRI antidepressant disasters, instead of going after the drug makers for knowingly injuring hundreds of thousands of consumers with dangerous products, Mr. Troy devoted the majority of his time on the clock to filing five amicus briefs on behalf of Big Pharma to be used against the very citizens who were paying his salary.

In his briefs, Mr. Troy focused his main attention on protecting the profits of the makers of SSRIs, drugs second only to Vioxx when it comes to the concealment of studies and information about harm that if revealed, could have prevented tens of thousands of deaths and injuries over the past 20 years.

And even though there has been an infinite number of reports over the past decade regarding an increased risk of suicide with SSRIs, instead of withdrawing the approval of the drugs, requiring more studies, or demanding a warning be added to their label, Mr. Troy did nothing to protect potential SSRI victims as Chief Counsel of the FDA.

In late 2004, Mr. Troy quit the FDA to go back into private practice to once again represent pharmaceutical companies openly against private citizens, only with the added benefit of using the preemption defense he put in place.
On October 9, 2006, Mr. Troy published an article in the Legal Times, that said, "I was also at the FDA while January's Physician Labeling Rule, which contains a statement in its preamble about the FDA's pre-emption authority, was written."

"And I now," he states in an obvious ad for new clients, "advise and represent companies confronting state-law claims that implicate the pre-emptive effect of FDA requirements."

In the Times article, Mr. Troy points out the importance of drug companies staying cozy with the FDA to ensure success in future litigation. "Savvy companies," he wrote, "are recognizing that how they interact with the FDA today may profoundly affect their pre-emption defenses in the future."
"They are trying to ensure their communications with the agency are as formal as they can be," he said, "in light of commercial considerations and the need to stay on the FDA's good side."

"More formal communications," he advises, "can help buttress a future case for why a particular state law claim should be pre-empted."

In the article, Mr. Troy brags that his filing of FDA briefs on behalf of Big Pharma "has reduced the negative consequences of the current pharmaceutical-liability regime."

But for once, he at least mentions that it cost the tax payers plenty. "FDA involvement in state-law cases is not an ideal solution," he writes, "not least because each instance of such involvement involves the costly investment of substantial agency resources."

It should be noted that two years before Mr. Troy filed his first brief as a kick-off for the preemption policy, the "costly investment of substantial agency resources" went for an FDA brief, in which the FDA acknowledged "the historic primacy of state regulation of matters of health and safety" and the appropriateness of a presumption against preemption where the state-law claims allege defective design, negligent manufacturing, or failure-to-warn in, Buckman v. Plaintiffs' Legal Committee, 531 US 341 (2001).

In the Legal Times, Mr. Troy goes on to explain that the new labeling rule is intended to limit the direct involvement of the FDA in lawsuits. "The preamble to that rule," he says, "makes an official statement of FDA's views on preemption easily available to courts hearing state-law tort cases."
"If courts give appropriate deference to this statement of FDA's considered judgment," he notes, "FDA will not be forced to file briefs in individual cases."

Until reading this article, its likely that most people had never realized that Mr. Troy was "forced" to file briefs on behalf of Big Pharma while he worked at the FDA.

In a March 31, 2006 paper, titled, State-Level Protection for Good-Faith Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, Mr. Troy can be found advising State lawmakers to pass shield laws for Big Pharma based on a Michigan model, to "help to reduce the negative consequences of the current pharmaceutical-liability regime," he says.
"In so doing," he states, "they would help to encourage the development of new drugs, preserve the availability of existing drugs, reduce upward pressure on drug prices, and assure rational prescribing."

Such a statement might be a wee bit credible if it also included a suggestion for the lowering of the multi-million dollar annual salary and benefit packages enjoyed by Big Pharma CEOs or a reduction in the billions of dollars that are spent each year on illegal off-label promotion and marketing schemes.

For all the whining he does about litigation keeping products off the market, Mr. Troy cannot cite a single case in which a failure-to-warn claim interfered with the FDA's federal regulatory authority or kept a drug off the market. In fact, in a lecture to Big Pharma attorneys in December 2003, on how to use the preemption defense, Mr. Troy told the attorneys that the FDA had "no good evidence" showing product liability concerns "keep good products off the market," even though he had "combed the literature" to find such evidence.

Apparently to help resolve this nagging little problem, Mr. Troy told the defense attorneys to pay for research to find some evidence to back this claim even if it was weak, stating: "you guys really shoot yourself in the foot by not funding research to this effect. ... I'll even take anecdotal evidence and stories if you have them."

Mr. Troy filed the FDA's first brief in support of Big Pharma in September 2002, in the California Zoloft case titled Motus v. Pfizer, after he was contacted by Pfizer attorney, Malcolm Wheeler, in the summer of 2002, requesting that he get the government involved to help Pfizer win the preemption argument.

Despite the fact that Pfizer had paid Mr. Troy's law firm over $358,000 in the year before he became Chief Counsel, Mr. Troy argued later that he did not become involved in the case until after the 1-year grace period in which employees may not participate in activities involving former clients. From all public accounts, the time period elapsed less then a month before he entered the case.

In the brief, Mr. Troy argued that any warning that suggested a link between Zoloft and suicidality would have been false and misleading, and the FDA would have rejected any effort to add such a warning. However, that argument contradicts 21 CFR § 314.126(b), which requires warnings to be added based on reasonable evidence of an association, even absent proof of a causal relationship. The preemption issue was never decided in Motus because the case was concluded on unrelated grounds.

Legal experts say the preemption defense will not only be used in SSRI-related suicide cases, it will be applied in SSRI cases involving the failure-to-warn about other types of injuries and deaths caused by these drugs as well.
For instance, Big Pharma will no doubt attempt to preempt cases filed on behalf of infants born with birth defects to mothers who unwittingly took the drugs during pregnancy, such as with Lacee Shore, who was prescribed Celexa during her first trimester of pregnancy and as a result, her baby, Gavin Shore, was born with serious heart birth defects and diagnosed with Shone's Complex, which can lead to the obstruction of blood flowing to the body from the left side of the heart.

Gavin has already gone through several surgeries in attempt to correct the heart defects and will have to undergo more in the future.
The successful use of the preemption argument in a case such as this, where the drug maker, Forest Laboratories, could and should have warned doctors and pregnant women about the possibility of birth defects associated with Celexa, would leave the Shore family strapped with the burden of life-long medical costs related to Gavin's condition.

According to attorney Kwok, who is handling the Shore case, the birth defect situation is even more devastating than with patients harmed by Vioxx because the Celexa victims are so young. "Their whole lives," he says, "if they survive, will be under the threat of illness and additional surgery, with a very poor prognosis."

Mr. Kwok points to a 1990 study conducted at the University of Michigan that shows the outlook for infants born with heart defects like Gavin is very poor. "One quarter of patients die after their second operation," he says.
"The second operations are very often necessary," he explains, "because of the complexity of the heart problem."

Forest Labs knew about the potential for birth defects caused by Celexa because more than two years before Gavin was born, on June 9, 2004, Web MD reported that the FDA was concerned about reports that SSRIs may cause adverse effects to babies born to mothers taking the drugs late in pregnancy.
According to Web MD, the FDA had been receiving reports for 10 years. In fact, it said that hundreds of reports on adverse effects in babies were received involving all the SSRIs sold in the US, which would include Prozac, Paxil, Luvox, Zoloft, and Celexa.

In July 2004, the FDA finally asked the SSRI makers to change the labels, warning that some infants had developed problems requiring tube feeding, respiratory support, and prolonged hospitalizations.
On September 1, 2005, the BBC reported that Danish and U.S. scientists found that cardiac birth defects appeared to be 60% more likely in newborns when women used SSRIs.
Studies show that women are prescribed SSRIs twice as often as men and yet the drug makers have made no effort to evaluate the use of these drugs with pregnant women. And as a result, Mr. Kwok says, "new moms are finding out too late that the Celexa they took was putting their unborn baby in grave danger."

A successful preemption ruling would go a long way as far as protecting profits against damage awards based birth defects, because pregnant women represent a major share of the market. According to a May 2005, study in the Journal of American Medical Association, 80,000 pregnant women are prescribed SSRIs in any given year in the U.S., which means there are bound to be many cases where babies were born with birth defects.

The majority of courts that have addressed the preemption argument have ruled against it. One of the first federal courts to specifically rule against the FDA's preamble position was a Nebraska District Court on May 31, 2006, in Jackson v. Pfizer, where the plaintiffs' son took both Zoloft and Effexor and then committed suicide.

The parents alleged that the drugs caused their son to commit suicide and Nebraska law required additional warnings about the suicide risk. The drug maker defendants moved for summary judgment claiming that the State law claims were preempted by the FDA.

The court said that the claims were not preempted because the federal regulations did not conflict with State law and specifically held that there was no Congressional directive that the field was preempted.

The court stated the FDA preamble was not persuasive and pointed out that the Eighth Circuit had adopted the proposition that the FDA prescribes only minimum standards and the Fourth Circuit had declared that complying with federal regulations does not release a manufacturer from liability.
The court also noted that the FDA "failed . . . to allow the states an opportunity to participate in the proceedings prior to a preemption decision," and dismissed the FDA's brief stating that it "will not treat amicus briefs as the force of law."

On May 25, 2006, a federal court in Pennsylvania was the first to grant the FDA's preemption rule full deference in a wrongful death and survival action, with failure-to-warn claims against Paxil maker GlaxoSmithKline, and generic Paxil maker Apotex, in Colacicco v. Apotex, Inc, Civ No 05-cv-5500, 2006 WL 1443357 (E.D. Pa. May 26, 2006).

In this case, the plaintiff alleged that his wife's suicide resulted from the drug makers' failure-to-warn of the increased risk of suicide linked to Paxil and its generic equivalent.
The judge on his own initiative, invited the FDA to file a brief. The current Chief Counsel, Sheldon Bradshaw, went to bat for the drug makers and filed a brief at record speed within 20 days, urging the court to dismiss the lawsuit on the basis of preemption, stating that in October 2003, when Paxil was prescribed to the suicide victim, "there was no reasonable evidence available at the time of an association between adult use of the drug and suicide."
The FDA argued that any such warning regarding an association between Paxil and suicide would have been false or misleading, and thus would have constituted misbranding under the FDCA.

The plaintiff responded by arguing that the court should not afford deference to the brief because 21 C.F.R. § 314.70, does permit manufacturers to strengthen labels without FDA approval and the FDA has no authority to simply declare that a drug is misbranded.

The court disagreed and determined that it was to give significant deference to the amicus brief based on the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Chevron, Medtronic, and Geier which state that an amicus brief is an appropriate form to express preemptive intent and held that the principles of deference do not permit a court to question the FDA's interpretation of its own regulations.
The plaintiff argued that the preamble which was promulgated in 2006 could not be retroactively applied to the October 2003, death of his wife. However, the Court said that preemption could be applied retroactively because the preamble simply clarified the FDA's "longstanding views on preemption," and characterized the preamble as an "interpretive rule," rendering retroactivity concerns "irrelevant."

The Court went on to say that even if the preamble did not apply retroactively, it would have found preemption anyway based on the views previously expressed in amicus briefs by the FDA.

An appeal is pending on the Colacicco decision, and the case has drawn amicus support from a dozen scientists and doctors who contend that preemption "would threaten the public health and eliminate an important counterpart to the public health objectives of the FDA."

The national non-profit consumer advocacy organization, Public Citizen, the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, a national public interest law firm, and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, an international coalition of attorneys, law professors, paralegals, and law students, have together filed an amicus brief supporting Mr Colacicco, stating:
"Products liability lawsuits help to protect patients from drugs with undisclosed risks because the potential for being held liable for harm caused by their products provides a powerful incentive for drug companies to make their products as safe and effective as possible and to revise labels as soon as new risks become apparent.

"Furthermore, because FDA lacks authority to subpoena documents from the companies it regulates, products liability lawsuits help to uncover information that can lead to safer products."

In fact, the group points out, since at least several months before the victim's suicide, the FDA had been reviewing data about a possible link between SSRIs and suicidality, and the agency issued a Public Health Advisory on the topic in October 2003, the same month that Mrs. Colacicco died.
The amicus brief also notes that the FDA's preemption statement lacks the "consistency" needed to warrant any degree of deference because prior to 2002, the FDA's consistent view was that State common law was not preempted by federal drug regulation. "For example," the brief wrote, "in both 1979 and 1998, in preambles accompanying various drug regulations, FDA stated that state tort law did not interfere with federal regulation."

In 1998, when addressing pharmacists' provision of written patient information for "Medication Guides," when issuing the final rule, the FDA rejected calls for the agency to express an intent to preempt State regulation of labeling requirements stating:
"FDA regulations establish minimal standards necessary, but were not intended to preclude states from imposing additional labeling requirements. States may authorize additional labeling but they cannot reduce, alter, or eliminate FDA-required labeling." 63 Fed. Reg. at 66384.
According to the amicus brief, "The authority to regulate drug labeling may carry with it the authority to address state drug labeling regulations, but it does not carry with it authority to determine the preemptive effect of federal regulation on state common-law compensation systems."

It appears that the FDA's own regulations acknowledge that preambles are not statements of law and that they should not be presented as such in legal proceedings.
The amicus group states that the preamble is not part of the regulation, will not appear in the Code of Federal Regulations, and does not have the force of law. "In fact," the brief notes citing FDA regulations, "a longstanding FDA regulation provides that a statement in a regulatory preamble constitutes only an "advisory opinion."

The FDA recognizes that an advisory opinion may be used to "illustrate acceptable . . . procedures or standard, but not as a legal requirement," the brief points out.
"Having made no effort to legislate on the topic of drug-related damages remedies," the brief concludes, "Congress can hardly be said to have authorized FDA to supersede the damages remedies traditionally provided by the states."

There was an extremely important preemption ruling handed down on June 9, 2006, in the Vioxx case of Doherty v. Merck prior to the beginning of the actual jury trial. Merck moved to dismiss the failure-to-warn claim arguing that the preamble barred claims with respect to FDA approved drugs.
The June 9, ruling from the bench, drew massive attention to the case when New Jersey Superior Court Judge, Carol Higbee, refused to exclude the claims.
"The preamble, as I see it, is a political statement by the FDA," she said.
"The primary purpose of it," she stated, "is to criticize state courts and to set forth the FDA's position, not to criticize state courts so much as to set forth the FDA's position that they believe there should be federal preemption of all tort actions."

"What the preamble is saying," Judge Higbee noted, "is the FDA should be the final word."

She refused to dismiss the claims based on the preamble she said, because it "has nothing to do with science." In conclusion, she told Merck defense attorneys:
"It has nothing to do with what happened back in 2000, 2001, 2002, when these issues were being debated. It is contrary to the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions. It is contrary to all the law on preemption.
"And I am not going to allow you to use it."
Merck later enjoyed a victory at trial when a jury decided that Vioxx was not the main cause of Elaine Doherty's heart attack, but a favorable ruling on the preemption issue prior to trial could have potentially saved the company billions of dollars. According to the company's SEC filings, as of October 9, 2006, Merck is a named defendant in about 13,850 Vioxx cases in the New Jersey State court coordinated litigation.

The next victory using the preemption argument was a major win in August, 2006, when a California court dismissed the Celebrex failure-to-warn claims against Pfizer, In re Bextra and Celebrex Marketing Sales Practices and Product Liability Litigation, No M: 05-1699 CRB, 2006 WL 2374742 (N.D. CA, August 16, 2006).
In opposing the motion, the plaintiffs argued that because the FDCA does not provide a monetary remedy, Congress must not have intended the FDA to have authority over damage claims and that the FDA's position on preemption was not entitled to deference because it was clearly erroneous and inconsistent with the regulations.

Saying the FDA specifically considered the safety risks about Celebrex alleged in the lawsuit and determined the risks should not be included on the label, the court said the failure-to-warn claims "conflict with the FDA's determination of the proper warning and pose an obstacle to the full accomplishment of the objectives of the FDCA."
But the judge refused to dismiss the false advertising claims. The plaintiffs argued that the Celebrex ads were false and misleading because they exceeded the labeled and approved gastrointestinal benefits and also minimized the established risks of the drug.
Pfizer claimed that because it submitted the ads for FDA approval, and the FDA did not object, the FDA had determined that the ads were accurate and struck a fair balance of the risks and the benefits of Celebrex.
However, the court refused to preempt the claims without a record showing that the FDA had reviewed each ad and approved it. The court also pointed out the FDA's silence about whether its regulations preempt false advertising claims, in contrast to its stated position on failure-to-warn claims.
A little over a month later, on September 29, 2006, across the country in New Jersey, the court in McNellis v. Pfizer, refused to allow the preemption defense based in part on the fact that the text of FDA regulations had remained unchanged for years, and the regulations did not conflict with New Jersey's failure-to-warn laws.

The McNellis Zoloft-suicide case comes with a history. On December 29, 2005, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey had also denied Pfizer's original motion for summary judgment. The court reasoned that the FDA's approval of a label creates only a minimum standard and that the drug maker may strengthen the warnings as long as the new warning is not false or misleading.

* * *

After the FDA published the new rule and preamble with the preemptive language in January 2006, Pfizer filed another motion asking the court to vacate the order denying summary judgment, or to certify the question for interlocutory appeal
In opposing the motion, Ms. McNellis said that the preamble amounted to nothing more than the FDA's opinion on preemption; the same opinion expressed previously by the FDA in amicus briefs, and the same opinion already rejected by the court. It is irrelevant that this opinion now comes in the form of a preamble to a regulation rather than an amicus brief, she said.
In her brief filed on March 2, 2006, Ms. McNellis argued that the FDA had also exceeded its authority, stating:

"In this instance, an executive agency, the FDA, has expressed an opinion that Congress has never agreed to. Without notice or comment, the FDA found it within its jurisdiction to go against the wishes of Congress as well as the wishes of those states which have product liability failure-to-warn statutes."

Ms. McNellis also pointed out that the last six courts to decide the issue "have found, consistent with this Court's finding, that the FDA regulations establish minimum requirements such that they do not preempt state tort laws."
She also noted that the preamble was not in effect at the time that her father committed suicide as a result of taking Zoloft.

The court held that regulations allow a drug company to increase warnings when new risks emerge, that the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act does not contain a preemption clause, and that Congress gave no implicit empowerment to the FDA to preempt State law.

Following the McNellis decision, on October 16, 2006, a federal court in Pennsylvania refused to grant the drug maker's preemption motion on the failure-to-warn claims in Perry v. Novartis Pharma Corp, --- F Supp 2d ----, 2006 WL 2979388.

This case involved Elidel, a drug used to treat eczema, prescribed to Andreas Perry when he was 2-years-old. Six months after he began using the cream, in October, 2003, Andreas was diagnosed with a form of cancer known as lymphoblastic lymphoma.

Elidel belongs to a class of drugs known as calcineurin inhibitors, so called because they reduce immune activity by inhibiting the activity of the enzyme calcineurin. Prior to the approval of Elidel for treating skin conditions in children over 2 years of age, calcineurin inhibitors were used as systemic immunosuppressants in organ transplant patients.

Systemic use of the drugs has long been known to increase the risk of cancer and the labels on the drugs prescribed to organ transplant patients say so. But because Elidel is applied topically for eczema, it was not known at the time of approval in December 2001, whether long-term use posed a risk of cancer.

This case illustrates why drug companies must be made to alert the public of known dangers as soon as they are known. On February 15, 2005, an FDA advisory committee met to discuss calcineurin inhibitors. In particular, reports of "off label" use of the drugs in children under two caused concern for some members of the committee.

At the meeting, the committee voted to add a "Black Box" warning about the possible increased risk of cancer associated with the topical use of Elidel, and the lack of long-term safety data on the use of the drug.

On March 10, 2005, the FDA told the drug maker to add a "Black Box" warning and issued a public health advisory about the possible cancer risk. However, it was nearly a year later when Novartis finally got around to adding a "Black Box" warning to Elidel's label on January 19, 2006.

In their brief in opposition to the preemption motion to dismiss, the plaintiffs said that the FDA's broad claim of preemption is not entitled to deference, "whether it is expressed in the January 2006 Preamble to the Final Rule," or "in amicus curiae briefs filed by the agency in support of drug manufacturers."
"The FDA's claims," the brief wrote, "which are tantamount to an advisory opinion, lack the force of law and contradict the FDA's governing statute, its regulations, and its regulatory purpose."
It also noted that the FDA's current opinion directly opposes the FDA's longstanding views on preemption. "For these reasons," the brief pointed out, "a majority of courts that have considered this issue, both before and after the FDA issued the Preamble, have held that FDA approval of labeling does not preempt state failure-to-warn claims."

In denying Novartis' preemption motion, U.S. District Court Judge, Stewart Dalzell, of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, wrote in the decision that the FDA's new "Preamble is not entitled to any special consideration in our analysis."
Where the agency attempts to "supply, on Congress's behalf, the clear legislative statement of intent required to overcome the presumption against preemption," no deference is warranted, he noted.

In reaching its decision, the court said preemption would only apply if a specific warning about Elidel and pediatric cancer had been considered by the FDA and found to be unnecessary and that had not happened in this case.
In discussing the FDA's assertions in its amicus brief, the court stated, "To be sure, because of its expertise in the area, the FDA's construction of its own regulations is likely to carry great weight."
"But where an interpretation has changed frequently in significant respects," it wrote, "the persuasive force of the argument diminishes."
The court also said that even if the Preamble represents a change of policy with the force of law, it would not apply to this case. "The FDA cannot retroactively absolve Novartis of a duty it may have owed the Perrys in 2003," it wrote.
The court also noted that the FDCA provides no remedy for an injured consumer and said, "a finding of preemption here will foreclose a remedy that was traditionally available and for which federal law provides no substitute."
In its decision, the court made an interesting observation about the viability of the preemption defense on failure-to-warn claims based on other available methods of warning the public about the dangers of a drug, stating:
"It is worth noting that, even where FDA regulations or other federal law prevent a manufacturer from modifying the approved labeling, a modification of the label is not the only form that a warning could take.
"If, for example, a plaintiff claimed that a manufacturer was negligent in not sending a letter to prescribing physicians or other health care professionals, that might present a different case, even if modification of the approved labeling were prohibited."
In conclusion, citing a September 23, 2006, New York Times report by Gardiner Harris, the court said, "given the recent concerns about the effectiveness of the FDA's safety monitoring of recently approved drugs, . . . the availability of state law tort suits provides an important backstop to the federal regulatory scheme," and further stated:
"If, at some future date, Congress determines that FDA monitoring is sufficiently effective on its own to warrant the elimination of state law incentives for manufacturers to provide adequate warnings, it also has the authority to declare that failure-to-warn suits, like the Perrys' action, are preempted."
"Until it does so, however," the court said, "in the absence of a specific FDA safety determination, such suits can go forward." (Emphasis added - B.M.)

Families seeking legal advice for infants born with birth defects to mothers who were prescribed Celexa during pregnancy can contact Robert Kwok & Associates, LLP at (713) 773-3380; http://www.kwoklaw.com/about.php
Evelyn Pringle is an investigative journalist. She can be reached at: evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net
(

2007-01-05T11:31:00.000+11:00

British Psychiatrist Slams TeenScreen
Excerpts From BBC Interview of Joanna Moncrieff, MD, Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at University College London
emailed by parents_against_teenscreen@earthlink.net

Date:
Thu, 4 Jan 2007 17:10:17 -0500

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio Excerpted from Interview of Joanna Moncrieff, MD. Interviewer: Claudia HammondJanuary 3, 2007Audio can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBfA2OBirBI “All in the Mind” reports from the U.S.A. on the increasing controversial mental health screening programs for school children.

Now, here’s Claudia Hammond with “All in the Mind”.

Claudia Hammond: The biggest screening program is TeenScreen; it’s a quick questionnaire designed for 9-18 year olds. And the idea is to highlight anyone who might have symptoms of a psychiatric problem.But not everyone is happy with the idea. Everyday teenage behaviour might be pathologized as illness and that the more children who are screened the more children will end up on psychiatric medication. And some parents are unhappy that their children were given the test at all.

Claudia Hammond: Joanna, in Chelsea’s case, the issue of consent did seem to be a big problem. But if in principal, if parental consent is obtained and it’s all voluntary, I mean it sounds like a kind of laudable aim to try and screen individuals.

Joanna Moncrieff: Well firstly on the issue of consent, in order for it to be informed consent, parents really ought to be told that there is no evidence that screening is actually going to prevent suicide, which is one of the main reasons it was introduced and also that the evidence about standard psychiatric treatment; such as drug treatments in children is questionable.For example the trials on the use of antidepressants in children are inconsistent and many of them show that antidepressants do not have good effects in children. So parental consent needs to be properly informed consent. And I’m not at all convinced that the parents are getting the full facts when they’re being asked about whether to submit their children to this screening program.I think the problem with screening is that, it’s already suggesting way before you get into a clinical interview ,that it’s already starting to reframe peoples’ problems in medical terms, and so even if the people who do this screening test don’t actually say explicitly to the children that they’ve got a psychiatric disorder called “this”. The children will take away from the experience of screening that they have a psychiatric problem and that they’re psychiatrically ill and in today’s’ climate many people will assume that that means that they need drug treatment. One test of the screening instrument that happened in Colorado diagnosed 50% of children as having evidence of possibly having some psychiatric disorder.

Claudia Hammond: 50%? That really is quite high isn’t it?

Joanna Moncrieff: It is indeed. And although not all of those people would probably have a confirmed diagnoses after a clinical interview, you’ve already started to suggest to them and their families that there’s something’s wrong and that what is wrong is a medical or psychiatric problem.

Claudia Hammond: So Joanna, if it’s all voluntary like that and it’s framed in such a way that the children themselves and their parents know exactly what it is they’re filling in and what this test can do and can’t do; isn’t that sort of reasonable to sort of highlight things if you can do it in a very sensitive way?

Joanna Moncrieff: Well first of all, as you know it hasn’t always been done in a voluntary way; often the screening has been implemented when parents haven’t objected to it rather then actually parents actively agreeing to their children to be screened. But secondly I think although many children will attend a clinical interview and won’t necessarily go on to be diagnosed and put on drug treatment. Actually even the experience of going to see a psychiatrist may be very frightening and very stigmatizing for some people, especially some young people. I think as psychiatrists we get immune to that and loose sight of how perturbing it is to be told that even might have a psychiatric problem. And of course some children will end up on drug treatment and we know that more and more children are being put on drug treatment. And I think that there is not enough concern about that at the moment.

Claudia Hammond: Joanna , what do you think will happen here? Will we see this coming across the Atlantic and being introduced in schools in the U.K. do you think?

Joanna Moncrieff: I don’t know whether we’ll actually get the full screening, with use of screening instruments. But we already see evidence in the U.K. of the sort of attitudes that inspired screening in the U.S.For example, many more childhood behavioural problems are being labelled as psychiatric disorders, are being given diagnostic labels and the use of a range of psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin and stimulants, antidepressants and antipsychotics; their uses all increasing in line with trends in the United States albeit not as dramatically.

Claudia Hammond: If screening programs do start to appear over here we’ll keep you up to date on “All in the Mind” But in the meantime do let us know what you think about the idea of screening teenagers in schools. You can email us at allinthemind@bbc.co

Joanna is a Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at University College London, department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Science. She has published several critical reviews of psychiatric drug treatments, as well as papers on the history of psychiatry. She is the founding member and co chair person of the Critical Psychiatry Network (web site: www.critpsynet.freeuk.com). This is a network of psychiatrists in the UK who challenge some of the orthodox thinking in psychiatry, especially the emphasis on the medical model of psychiatric disorder, and the link between psychiatry and coercion.
(Emphasis added - Justice Lover)

2006-12-24T08:05:00.000+11:00

The following press cutting was emailed to me today by Parents Against TeenScreen.
(Emphasis added).

http://www.dailydem.com/articles/2006/12/08/opinion/opinion1.txt

There are “facts” and then there is the truth

Your recently published a letter from two social workers - Ms. Gutman and Ms. Jarvis - on the subject of TeenScreen. Curiously, it was entitled the "facts" about the TeenScreen program.I think the social workers should crack open a dictionary and look up what a "fact" is. Obviously with no investigation of their own, they accept and spew the "facts" given to them by TeenScreen.

One of the definitions for facts is "something said to be true or supposed to have happened," as in this example: "The facts given by the witness are highly questionable." Yet the public doesn't want or need that kind of "facts" to be presented as truth. They need real facts, as in this definition: "something that actually exists; reality; truth."

Ms. Gutman's and Ms. Jarvis' letter is full of assertions, none of which can be proven by evidence. TeenScreen spawned a lawsuit in Indiana because a teen was screened and labeled with a mental disorder without her parents' knowledge.TeenScreen refuses to release the identity of their mysterious donors.

Many members of TeenScreen's executive board have connections to drug companies. TeenScreen's biggest supporter and co-conspirator is NAMI, which receives millions from drug companies, a verifiable fact because NAMI is a non-profit organization required to reveal its contributors.TeenScreen is intimately involved in treatment, as evidenced by the fact that TeenScreen always partners with a local mental health provider so that identified youth can be directed into treatment. That information can be found on TeenScreen's own website.

Suicide IS a horrible tragedy. No one is denying that. Yet, suicide is very, very, very rare. If you want to see how rare, click on http://www.psychsearch.net/rare/iowa.html You'll see that the suicide rate for youth in Iowa as reported by the CDC is 2.62 per 100,000. That's a very small number. Screening identifies 30% or higher youth as needing further evaluation. Screening is obviously good for finding new customers for the mental health system but it's complete folly to pretend that its purpose is finding those at risk and preventing suicide.

Add to that the FACT that the FDA requires a black box warning on antidepressants, the same ones that will be given to some of these kids entering the mental health system via TeenScreen. This warning states that the drugs can CAUSE suicidal tendencies and violence in young people. Ms. Gutman and Ms. Jarvis neglected to mention that fact. Everything I have stated here is verifiable, backed up by evidence. Though this may be an editorial, I am not stating an opinion. I am stating documented, provable fact.

Doyle Mills

Clearwater, FL

2006-12-17T07:40:00.000+11:00

TEENSCREEN EVIL SISTER SUED BY TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL
by Parents Against TeenScreen

TeenScreen's Evil Sister - TMAP, Texas Medication Algorithm (guidelines) Project is a dastardly plan concocted by drug companies to influence government officials to push the newest most expensive antipsychotic drugs. The below story is the first of surely many more to come.

Both TMAP and TeenScreen were "recommended" by the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

Both are going to go down with a thud but your help is needed.

To augment the national controversy, pick a school in your neck of the woods www.teenscreen-locations.com/index.htm and raise the dickens with school board members, legislators, newspapers, radio and your local TV news. Any talk radio show, for example, would be interested in what you have to say about the national controversy of TeenScreen asking kids as young as 9 years old questions about suicide and then referring them to "treatment" (drugs)

http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/12/16/16drugs.html
Austin American Statesman

State's mental facilities duped into using drug, Abbott allegesLawsuit claims state official pushed drug, was rewarded with money
By Jason Embry, W. Gardner Selby
December 16, 2006

A major corporation and several subsidiaries misrepresented the safety and effectiveness of an anti-psychotic drug and unduly influenced at least one state official to make it a standard treatment in public mental health programs, according to a lawsuit the state has joined.Attorney General Greg Abbott joined a lawsuit filed in Travis County district court by Allen Jones, a former investigator for the state of Pennsylvania, against Johnson & Johnson Inc. and five related companies. Jones says in the lawsuit that he learned of payments to at least one Texas mental health official in interviews he conducted as an investigator. No official is named in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which came to light Friday, seeks to recover for the state untallied alleged overcharges to the state's Medicaid program, which pays for health care for low-income people. Jones' lawsuit alleges that the companies launched a drug named Risperdal in 1994 to treat schizophrenia. About the same time, the state was developing a protocol, or treatment guidelines, for which drugs should be used in public mental health programs. The defendants "provided substantial financial contributions to and improperly influenced the development" of the protocols, the lawsuit said, and Risperdal took precedence in the protocols over cheaper, equally effective medicines.The drug later received recommendations as the medicine of choice in the state's mental health protocol for treating children and adolescents, even though it lacked a Food and Drug Administration indication for those age groups, the lawsuit says.

It says side effects and health risks include increased chance of stroke, renal failure and hyperglycemia.The companies pushed Risperdal in other states through paid consultants on expert panels, peer-to-peer marketing strategies and "administrative decisions made by a select few public officials," the lawsuit says.

The companies sent an unnamed Texas official around the country as a spokesman for the drug, and they hired third-party contractors to conceal their control and funding of medical education programs, speakers' bureaus and clinical research that promoted the benefits and safety of Risperdal, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says at least 17 states, including Texas, have implemented the protocol or are doing so."We allege it's a scheme whereby they passed off as medical science phony representations and misleading facts about the efficacy and appropriateness of these drugs," said Thomas Melsheimer, a lawyer for Jones.

Abbott's office declined to comment on the lawsuit, as did spokesmen for Johnson & Johnson and the state's Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees the Medicaid program. A commission spokesman did say Texas paid 308,000 claims totaling $73.5 million for Risperdal in 2005.

Melsheimer described Jones as a "classic whistle-blower" who filed the lawsuit in 2004 on behalf of Texas to recover the companies' overcharges. Because of his whistle-blower status, the lawsuit was sealed from public view until Abbott joined it. (All emphasis added - B.M.)

-------------

To see how TeenScreen and TMAP relate, here are additional references:
Bush's Texas Two-Step: TeenScreen and TMAP: http://www.onlinejournal.com/health/052705Pringle/052705pringle.html
A Lone Wolf Takes on the Drug Leviathan http://www.rutherford.org/Oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/oldspeak-jones.htm
Over 500 doctors have now signed the TeenScreen petition. Please pass the word: http://www.petitiononline.com/TScreen/petition.html

2006-11-30T08:42:00.000+11:00

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1480.shtml
Federal government launches marketing campaign for psychiatric industry

By Richard A. Warner

Nov 29, 2006

Under the guise of combating the stigma of mental illness, the U.S. government will soon begin a massive campaign of psychiatric indoctrination, designed to increase the acceptance of psychiatric chemical imbalance theories and labeling, and to pave the way for national psychiatric screening, driving more Americans into seeking psychiatric drug treatment.

Regional meetings in support of the National Anti-Stigma Campaign (NASC), a nationwide television, radio and print public service advertising program funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), were held this past summer in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and Washington, D.C. According to a senior technical assistance specialist at the SAMHSA Resource Center to Address Discrimination and Stigma Associated with Mental Illness (ADS Center), the ad campaign, which will target 18-25-year olds, will be launched today. A campaign directed at older adults and ethnic and racial minorities will follow.

On its surface, the campaign’s message may seem perfectly appropriate, even compassionate. Its stated objective is to “encourage, educate and inspire 18-25-year olds to step up and support friends they know are experiencing a mental health problem.” One ad, for example, shows a man with his hand over his eyes. “Sometimes I find myself turning away from or just ignoring someone with a mental illness, avoiding eye contact,” he says. “I know it is not their fault but sometimes I don’t know how to communicate with them.”But there can be no doubt about the real purpose of the campaign’s emotional appeal: to create customers for the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry.

This is clearly evident at SAMHSA’s website and in its literature. It is no accident that 18-25-year olds were chosen as the first target. A SAMHSA “Fact Sheet” states, “Among 18-25-year olds, the prevalence of serious mental health conditions is high . . . yet this age group shows the lowest rate of help-seeking behaviors [emphasis added].” “Help-seeking behavior” is, of course, a euphemism for being psychiatrically diagnosed and drugged. The 18-25-year old demographic represents a huge untapped market for psychiatric drugs and services. According to SAMHSA’s website, the anti-stigma media blitz “has been designed to establish a ‘new norm,’ in which individuals, without hesitation, will seek out the mental health services they need and deserve.”

The drug industry seeds NASCFurther evidence of SAMHSA’s marketing agenda is found in the origins of the National Anti-Stigma Campaign. The program was first recommended by a federal commission that had extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry. In its 2003 report, Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America, the President’s New Freedom Commission (NFC) on Mental Health called for the government to “undertake a national campaign to reduce stigma.” The NFC proposed “national education initiatives” to “shatter the misconceptions about mental illnesses, thus helping more Americans understand the facts and making them more willing to seek help for mental health problems” and advocated “actions of reducing stigma, increasing awareness, and encouraging treatment . . . (emphasis added).”

Several members of the NFC had extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry, principally by way of an industry marketing scheme that was developed in Texas in the 1990s. Known as the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP, it was designed to make the newest and most expensive psychiatric drugs the first (and virtually only) treatment option for mental health care. The project was nurtured at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, a major research center that conducts drug trials for pharmaceutical companies, with significant funding coming from the drug companies themselves. Pharmaceutical company gifts to the Texas Department of State Health Services totaled $1.3 million from 1997 to 2004, with at least $834,000 earmarked for TMAP.Backed by drug industry funding, TMAP was then exported to other states via the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD).

The chair of the NFC, Michael Hogan, was the Mental Health Program Director in Ohio when the Ohio Medication Algorithm Project (OMAP), was adopted there. A 2004 Janssen (makers of the atypical antispsychotic, Risperdal) publication, “Mental Health Issues Today,” lists Hogan as a member of their Advisory Board. In 2005, Eli Lilly (makers of the atypical antipsychotic, Zyprexa and the antidepressant, Prozac) gave Hogan its Lifetime Achievement Award. Hogan was president of the NASMHPD from 2003-2004 and president of the NASMHPD Research Institute, which is heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry, from 1989-2000.Another NFC member, Stephen Mayberg, was the California State Mental Health Program Director when TMAP was adopted in that state. Mayberg is also a past president of NASMHPD and the NASMHPD Research Institute.NFC member Charles Curie, who recently stepped down as the administrator of SAMHSA, was the Deputy Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services in Pennsylvania when PENNMAP was enacted. According Allen Jones, an investigator in the Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General and a whistleblower, Curie is reported to have set up a slush fund from which state employees could solicit grants from the pharmaceutical industry.NFC member psychiatrist Rodolfo Arredondo served on the board of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation during TMAP’s development, while another NFC commissioner, Robert Postlethwait, has had a long career with Eli Lilly and Company.According to Jones, at least 14 of the 22 NFC members have drug industry ties. Not surprisingly, the NFC selected TMAP as a model program and stated that the “biggest challenge” was to ensure that TMAP was “implemented in other states and localities.”

The psychiatric industry is well on its way to meeting that challenge -- with disastrous results for our youth. A similar pattern emerges in states which have adopted TMAP. In Texas, 19,404 teenagers were prescribed an antipsychotic in July or August of 2004. Ninety-eight percent received the newer atypical antipsychotics. In April of 2004, the Texas Comptroller, Carole Strayhorn, released a report, Forgotten Children, that was highly critical of the psychiatric drugging of foster children in Texas.In 2005, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch ran a two-part story, “Drugged Into Submission,” on the psychiatric drugging of children, including 700 babies and toddlers, under state care. Part one was titled, “Forced Medication Straitjackets Kids.”In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for their overburdened caretakers.”

In Pennsylvania, Dr. Stephan Kruszewski, a Harvard trained psychiatrist working for the Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare, complained that children were being heavily drugged with antipsychotics and anticonvulsants (mainly Neurontin). He was fired.

In Washington State, atypical antipsychotics ranked 1, 3, and 5 on the Medical Assistance Administration’s list of top 100 drugs by money paid in 2004, with nearly $78 million spent on those three drugs: Zyprexa ($36 million), Risperdal ($21 million), Seroquel ($20.8 million). Neurontin was #4, at $20.8 million. Antidepressants Zoloft, Effexor and Paxil came in at #7, #11 and #12, with nearly $31 million spent on those three drugs. A 1997 Seattle Post-Intelligencer series charged that an “unmonitored stream of mood drugs imperils children entrusted to state.”

Additional confirmation of the drug industry’s control of SAMHSA comes in the form of an email sent to me by the previously mentioned senior technical assistance specialist at SAMHSA. The email was a response to my inquiry about the anti-stigma campaign. The assistance specialist sent a copy of her response and my original inquiry, to the NASC liaison at NAMI. NAMI, of course, is the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a well-known front group for the pharmaceutical industry. SAMHSA is obviously working hand in hand with NAMI -- even forwarding private communication from the public to NAMI’s offices. In 1999, Mother Jones magazine reported that 18 drug firms gave NAMI a total of $11.72 million between 1996 and 1999. NAMI continually promotes psychiatric chemical imbalance theories, minimizes the damaging effects of psychiatric drugs, and advocates for forced psychiatric drugging programs.On May 28, 2006, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that NAMI “did not disclose that Lilly [Eli Lilly, makers of Zyprexa and Prozac] marketing manager Gerald Radke briefly ran its entire operation. Radke began in 1999 as a Lilly-paid ‘management consultant,’ then left Lilly and served as NAMI's paid ‘interim executive director’ until mid-2001. The group acknowledged this only after being shown Radke's resume listing the job.”According to the Inquirer, Lilly gave NAMI $3 million between 2003 and 2005 and “called its executive loans mutually beneficial.” NAMI’s former executive director for 16 years was Laurie Flynn. Flynn is now the Director of Teenscreen, a psychiatric screening program developed by Columbia University’s Child Psychiatry Research Department and, not surprisingly, recommended by the NFC. TeenScreen’s goal is to screen all teenagers in the U.S. for psychiatric disorders.

NASC and screening: Educating Americans to be good customers

Since psychiatric drugging must, in most cases, be preceded by the assignment of a psychiatric label, psychiatric screening is an essential step in the industry’s plans to expand its market. That’s where the anti-stigma campaign and national psychiatric screening -- both recommended by the NFC -- come into play.The NFC report recommended “early detection of mental health problems in children and adults -- through routine and comprehensive testing and screening . . ." and while NFC chair Hogan has denied that the NFC intended universal screening, in a January 20, 2005 story in the Christian Science Monitor, Hogan said that the commission decided that recommending universal screening would be "a little premature and probably controversial, even though we thought, in the long run, it probably might be the right thing to do.”In other words, the only barrier to screening everyone in America, as the NFC sees it, is the controversy it would generate. It’s “premature.” Americans have to be prepared to accept mass psychiatric interventions. SAMHSA’s NFC-recommended NASC program is their answer -- a three-year, “long run” program to prepare the population for universal screening, followed, of course, by psychiatric labeling and drugging.

The NASC campaign will advertise that mental illness has reached epidemic levels in the population -- a theme that has been repeated in psychiatric marketing campaigns dating back to the 1940s. The psychiatric industry wants Americans to see mental illness everywhere -- to associate any problem in life with a possible psychiatric disorder that can be treated with a psychiatric drug.A PowerPoint presentation available at the NASC website warns that “22% of Americans have a diagnosable mental health problem” but “the majority . . . do not seek help.”

SAMHSA has produced three brochures that focus on the workplace (Mental Health: It’s Part of Our Lives at Work), the elderly (Mental Health: It’s Part of Aging) and college students (Mental Health: It’s Part of College Life). All state that one in five adults in the U.S. experience a mental illness each year. All stress that not enough people are seeking treatment due to stigma.At the same time SAMHSA’s Eliminating Barriers Initiative (EBI) is currently being pushed into secondary schools via school administrators' associations. EBI is being piloted in eight states, (Mass., Ohio, Fla., NC, Calif., Texas, Wisc. Pa.). EBI training presentations promoting psychiatric chemical imbalance theories, stating, “Mental illnesses are brain disorders.”

In Massachusetts, the commissioner of Mental Health was brought to one conference and read a student’s suicide note to the assembled school administrators. Suicide is a favorite theme, even though 1) child suicides are extremely rare (4.6 per 100,000 in 2001, according to the Center for Disease Control) and declining; 2) In 2004, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) found “no evidence that screening for suicide risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality” and "insufficient evidence that treatment of those at high risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality;” and 3) psychiatric drug treatment has been found to increase suicidal thinking and behavior in children under 18.The goal of such programs is clear. SAMHSA, acting as a tool of the psychiatric and drug industries, wants Americans to view the world through psychiatric lenses -- to find mental illness in their children, their colleagues, their family and friends.

The purpose of the NASC campaign is not to educate Americans about psychiatric theories and treatments but to instill acceptance of psychiatric dogma and psychiatric labeling and thus prepare the way for psychiatric screening and drugging. Always the appeal is heavily weighted to the emotions. The elderly brochure, for example, advises, “If you feel shame because you have a mental illness remember: You are not alone.” SAMHSA will tell us that fear of the mentally ill is part of the stigma, while, at the same time, they will be sowing a subliminal fear that mental illness is lurking around every corner.The NASC campaign will spread the gospel of chemical imbalances and suggest that the stigma of mental illness is the result of public ignorance and fear. This is a key element of NASC.

Americans must be taught to locate the source of the stigma in their own personal failure, not the rampant disease mongering and fear tactics of the psychiatric industry.The real source of the stigmaThe real source of the stigma of mental illness lies in the definition of stigma itself. The dictionary says a stigma is “A mark or token of infamy, disgrace or reproach. A small mark; a scar or birthmark.” The word derives from the ancient word for the mark or tattoo that was carved or burned into the flesh of a slave or prisoner to inform everyone of their shameful status.The definition of stigma suggests at once the source of the stigma -- psychiatric “marking” -- and how it could be eliminated: Don’t place the mark. The most direct way to end the stigmatization of the mentally ill would be to stop calling them mentally ill and labeling them with specious disorders. After all, there’s no proof they’re ill. There is no lab test that can verify the presence of any psychiatric disorder.

We could just get rid of the Attention Deficits, the Major Depressives, the Social Anxieties, the Bipolars and the 370 other labels psychiatrists have invented to alienate and marginalize those who are suffering and convince those who are well that they are ill. We could tell the psychiatric prisoners that their diagnostic cells are a thin illusion, that their experience is part of the infinite variety of human experience. We could tell them they are not other than us, they are not sick, they don’t have bad brains. Life is tough, for a thousand different reasons, and most of us struggle.

If we just put an end to psychiatry’s fraudulent pathologizing of life, the stigma of mental illness would disappear.Needless to say, this is not the kind of campaign SAMHSA has planned. There’s too much money at stake. For several decades now psychiatrists have been manufacturing stigmas at a ridiculous rate. Psychiatry’s book of stigmas, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has expanded from 112 stigmas in 1952 to its current 374, under the guiding hand, the New York Times and others recently (April 20) reported, of “experts” with financial ties to drug companies.

According to the Times, a study in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics found that “56 percent of 170 experts who worked on the 1994 edition of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or D.S.M, had at least one monetary relationship with a drug maker in the years from 1989 to 2004.” A report on the study in the Chicago Tribune noted that, “100 percent of the experts on DSM-IV panels overseeing mood disorders and schizophrenia/psychotic disorders were financially involved with the drug industry. These are the largest categories of psychiatric drugs in the world, racking up 2004 sales of $20.3 billion and $14.4 billion, respectively. Depression is the leading mood disorder.”It’s a particularly profitable symbiosis.

Psychiatrists invent the diseases; the pharmaceutical industry makes the snake oil to treat them. And as we have seen, the purpose of the NASC campaign is to help the experts and drug companies cash in on their cozy relationship, to ensure that Americans accept psychiatric branding and become good customers for the psychiatric/pharmaceutical complex.The last thing the psychiatric industry wants is for people to have the facts about psychiatry’s invented illnesses and ineffective, damaging drugs. SAMHSA’s campaign will follow a different script, one with more of a “slaves are people too” theme, one which ensures that psychiatric branding is broadly accepted.A brochure from the ADS center asks that we “remember” that people with mental illnesses “do recover and lead productive lives,” they have the “same needs as everyone else,” they “make valuable contributions to society,” and discrimination “keeps them from seeking help” and “violates their rights.”In other words, we will be educated about how people become slaves (mentally ill); that it’s not their fault (it’s genetic); that slavery touches all of us, and that, while slaves are different, they should be treated with dignity. Slaves can lead productive lives, they have the same needs as everyone, they make valuable contributions, and you shouldn’t discriminate against them. We’ll be told that psychiatric prisoners are fortunate to have kind wardens who treat them with respect and though the whip is occasionally needed, it’s all in their best interests. Just don’t start thinking that they are normal human beings -- they are slaves, i.e., mentally disordered with damaged brains.SAMHSA’s campaign will justify and expand the stigmatization that supports the current mental health system, while chiding us to be nice to those who are thereby victimized. It won’t tell us how psychiatrists invent their diagnoses. It won’t tell that psychiatry’s own diagnostic manual admits that psychiatry can’t distinguish one disorder from another or mental illness from mental health. It won’t tell us that psychiatric diagnostic reliability is low. We won’t be informed that, as Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen wrote in Prozac Backlash, “We do not yet have proof either of the cause or the physiology for any psychiatric diagnosis. . . . In recent decades, we have had no shortage of alleged biochemical imbalances for psychiatric conditions. Diligent though these attempts have been, not one has been proven.”The ineffectiveness of psychiatric drugs won’t be mentioned -- nor the stream of warnings that have issued from the FDA and international agencies over the past several years concerning the dangerous and often lethal side effects of antidepressants, antipsychotics and stimulants.We won’t hear about last year’s study of antipsychotics, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found the newer antipsychotics to be no more effective than the older drugs. In the study 74 percent of patients quit the drugs and “[T]he majority of patients in each group discontinued their assigned treatment owing to inefficacy or intolerable side effects or for other reasons.” (Note: They didn’t quit because they “decompensated,” “lacked insight,” or were “in denial.” The drugs were ineffective and intolerable.)

Instead, our government will tell us of the terrible consequence of failing to seek treatment. We’ll be told to get branded -- and encourage our friends and family to do the same - as soon as possible. We’ll be assured that life on the pill plantation is a wonderful thing.The pitch will touching and benevolent, the unspoken message crystal clear: psychiatric stigmatization is a good thing. Only the ignorant and uncaring fail to embrace it.

You’ll be hearing a lot about the stigma of mental illness in the coming months and with good reason. A trillion dollar industry depends on it.For the past 20 years, Richard A. Warner has been the president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Seattle. He's written several pieces for the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer over the years, been a guest on dozens of local and national radio shows, and testifies regularly at the Washington State capital in Olympia on issues related to mental health. His recent paper on shock treatment can be found at ect.org. (Emphasis added - Justice Lover).

Pass the word: http://www.petitiononline.com/TScreen/petition.html

2006-11-18T13:22:00.000+11:00

UPDATES AND FURTHER DETAILS OF THE
TORTURE BY CLOZAPINE OF MISS REBECCA
MERHAV ARE ON http://www.nocrush.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Unscientific and Experimental "Mental
Health Screening" of American School
Children, by Justice Lover

A stark warning of what's in store for humanity under the global rule of the
transnational corporations can be found in the recent "TeenScreen" experiments on school children in the USA. The leaders of these experiments must be the drug corporations, as the experiments would yield enormous profits to them via their faithful (and bribed) psychiatrists' prescriptions.

If this insane and fascist experimentation would become compulsoy, then the next step would be to screen the entire population for "mental illnesses". To the drug corporations it would bring untold profits, and for the rest of the ruling class it would secure their global rule (globalisation), and all under the supervision of the shrinks ! Those insane and fascist ideas come on top of
other world disasters that those corporations have been perpetrating on us, and first and foremost the disastrous global warning and poisoning of our planet !

It is good news, therefore, the current awakening of ordinary people in the USA in opposition to the "TeenScreen" tests, as is evident from the following petition currently circulating among parents of school children throughout the USA.

Stop TeenScreen's Unscientific and Experimental
"Mental Health Screening" of American School
Children

To: School Board Members and State and Federal Legislators

Whereas children as young as 9, who previously had not thought of the concept of suicide,
are being asked invasive and leading questions by TeenScreen such as: Have you tried to kill
yourself in the last year? Are you still thinking of killing yourself? Have you thought seriously
about killing yourself? Have you often thought about killing yourself? Have you ever tried to kill
yourself?" and kids are being lured into doing the suicide survey by TeenScreen's offers of free
movie passes, food coupons, pizza parties and $50 mall gift certificates;

Whereas the goal of TeenScreen leaders is to screen every American child before they
graduate from high school;

Whereas TeenScreen is based on the controversial and unscientific Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, written by psychiatrists with financial ties to drug companies and
children screened by TeenScreen are not given valid medical testing such as brain scans, blood
test, urine tests, X-Rays or any other valid medical tests to detect evidence of any possible
physical abnormality that may be contributing to certain behavior;

Whereas, according to TeenScreen psychiatrist David Shaffer, mental disorders in the DSM
were developed by psychiatrists "shouting out their opinions from all sides of the room and
whoever shouted loudest tended to be heard. My own impression, coming straight from
England, was it was more like a tobacco auction than a sort of conference." and according to
Shaffer, TeenScreen "... does identify a whole bunch of kids who aren’t really suicidal, so you
get a lot of false-positives. And that means if you’re running a large program at a school, you’re
going to cripple the program because you’re going to have too many kids you have to do
something about";

Whereas TeenScreen has screened children across the nation without written parental
consent in violation of federal law and state laws and has screened children across the nation
without fully informed consent and did not warn parents that after taking the TeenScreen suicide
survey, certain children have been and will be labeled with false mental disorders, based upon
the unscientific DSM and the "chemical imbalance of the brain" theory, which relies solely upon
observation and for which no scientific or medical test exists;

Whereas a federal lawsuit has been filed against a school and psychiatric facility by the
Rutherford Institute on behalf of parents who did not give permission for their child to be
subjected to the TeenScreen suicide survey which resulted in a false diagnosis of a mental
disorder;

Whereas an epidemic already exists with children using psychiatric drugs and will further
skyrocket if children are referred to psychiatrists after screening. According to a survey of
recently trained child psychiatrists it was found that treatment for 9 out of 10 children consisted
of prescription drugs. (Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry
2002);

Whereas TeenScreen's leaders and advisory board members have ties to pharmaceutical
companies and front groups for pharmaceutical companies;

Whereas antipsychotic drugs are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for
children; the FDA's "black box warning" states antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal
thinking and behavior in children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders; and drug safety
experts have recommended additional "black box" warnings be placed on ADHD drugs: for the
increased risk of stroke and heart attack;

Whereas potential recruits are ineligible for military service if they have taken Ritalin and other
stimulants to treat the unscientific "disorder" called ADHD in the previous year;

Whereas most states have laws restricting the purchase of firearms based on an adjudication
of mental illnesses or disorders, and mass screening of all American children for mental
disorders will increase the number of persons labeled with a mental disorder, directly infringing
upon the citizenry's right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the 2nd amendment;

Whereas TeenScreen only partners with and seeks to immediately refer students to "mental
illness" practitioners and does not refer students to medical disciplines that could test for
underlying health problems such as allergies, nutrition, toxicities and physical illnesses;

Whereas child suicides are very rare and have been on a decline for years; and even
according to former TeenScreen director Rob Caruano, "suicides are so rare that you'd have to
screen the whole country to see a difference in mortality between screened and unscreened
students.";

Whereas many and various groups, individuals and legislators across a spectrum of political,
religious, scientific and common sense views are opposed to screening for mental disorders in
schools;

Whereas TeenScreen is very secretive about their suicide survey and refuses to allow parents
to obtain a copy and is also very secretive about which schools they've convinced to use their
suicide survey;

Whereas the United States Preventive Services Task Force reported in May of 2004:
There is no evidence that screening for suicide risk reduces suicide attempts or mortality,
There is limited evidence on the accuracy of screening tools to identify suicide risk,
There is insufficient evidence that treatment of those at high risk reduces suicide attempts or
mortality;

Whereas Ned Calonge, the chairman of the United States Preventive Services Task Force,
who is also the chief medical officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and
Environment, was quoted in the June 16, 2006 Washington Post: "the panel would reach the
same conclusion today... Whether or not we like to admit it, there are no interventions that have
no harms... There is weak evidence that screening can distinguish people who will commit
suicide from those who will not... And screening inevitably leads to treating some people who
do not need it. Such interventions have consequences beyond side effects from drugs or other
treatments... Unnecessary care drives up the cost of insurance, causing some people to lose
coverage altogether.";

Whereas TeenScreen is an intrusion into the rearing of children and false psychiatric labels
could embarrass students and cause turmoil at home;

Whereas many school districts have reservations about using TeenScreen because of liability
and risk issues;

Whereas legislators in various states are proposing legislation to stop state and federal
funding for screening of mental disorders in schools;

Whereas schools should be in the business of educating our children instead of probing each
for unscientific mental disorders;

We, therefore, petition school board members and state and federal legislators to stop using
the TeenScreen suicide survey and to adopt firm policy that will prevent the implementation of
TeenScreen in the future.

That this spontaneous mass resistance is gaining momentum is clear from the following list of
schools which already oppose this insane and fascist "TeenScreen" experimentation.

"NO TEENSCREEN

The following school districts have confirmed that they either are not screening anymore or have
discontinued screening or will not implement TeenScreen.

CONNECTICUT
Bridgeport Public Schools
Bassick High School
Harding High School

Date: Monday, July 18, 2005 9:12 AM
"The program was located at Bassick and Harding High Schools. It was not successful and the
District discontinued it."

FLORIDA
Flagler Palm Coast High School

Screening will halt as of Oct 2006 due to lack of funding.

Hillsborough

Date: Monday, Mar 01, 2004 10:20 AM
"our district has not yet felt comfortable with the information provided by Teen Screen to
implement it anywhere in the district. We are exploring the possiblity of doing a pilot at Gaither
High School, but have not had all of questions answered by the organization. They
[TeenScreen] continue to say to others that Hills. Co. has "partnered" with them when, in fact,
we are still only exploring." Hillsborough decided to not implement screening.

Pinellas County

Date: January 25, 2005, the Pinellas County School Board decided that TeenScreen should not
be implemented. In the Tampa Tribune on January 26, 2005, School Board member Jane
Gallucci said that she was angry that Laurie Flynn told a U.S. Senate committee on health and
education matters 10 months ago that pilot TeenScreen programs were operating in
Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. Board Chairwoman Nancy Bostock called the program "an
intrusion for our students.'' False labels could embarrass students and cause turmoil at home.
"We could seriously do more harm than good," she said.

GEORGIA
Cobb County School District

Date: Sat, June 3, 2006 5:11 PM
"I called TeenScreen on Friday (6/2/06) afternoon and spoke to Mina Fasolo, program
director, to remove Cobb Schools from their wait list. We have decided that TeenScreen was
and is still not a good fit for Cobb Schools."

ILLINOIS
Urbana High School

Date: Thur, Aug 31, 2006 7:01 PM
"We did use TeenScreen last year, but the person who did it left the District. I have been
informed that we will not be doing it again this year."

INDIANA
Clay High School - Southbend Community School System

Date: Tues, Aug 8, 2006 12:55 PM
"The school corporation pulled back because of controversy in another district."

IOWA
West Burlington Jr./Sr. High

Date: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 8:33 AM
"We will not be using the TeenScreen program again"

West DesMoines Schools AEA 11
Valley High School

Date: Fri, Oct 20, 2006 11:49 AM
"Valley High School in West Des Moines, Iowa, is no longer considering the implementation of
Teen Screen."

MICHIGAN
Clio Public Schools

Date: Thursday, Oct 19, 2006 7:25 PM
"We do not now - and have NEVER - permitted TeenScreen to screen our students. Yes....we
DID invite them in to speak with us and we looked at the program. However, we decided not
to go forward."

NEVADA
C.W. Woodbury Middle School

Date: Tue, September 05, 2006 8:01 AM
"We are not going to use TeenScreen again at Woodbury."

NEW YORK
John F. Kennedy Catholic High School

Date: Thur, Oct 19, 2006 at 9:47 PM
"I was also very upset when I first found out that the school was involved in TeenScreen. All
parents on the Parents Advisory Board were as upset as I was as nobody knew about it not
even the school's administration knew of the ramifications of the TeenScreen program and its
consequences for our children. This is to let you know that the Kennedy Catholic High School
in Westchester County, NY is not involved in the discredited TeenScreen program. The
president of the school confirmed that the school is no longer involved in that program
whatsoever"

East Syracuse/Minoa School District
Date sent: Mon, June 12, 2006 10:40:03 AM
"There was a funding issue"

NORTH CAROLINA
Moore County School District

Date: Mon, June 5, 2006 2:29 PM
"We have/had made no commitment to the program and are not planning to implement it."

OKLAHOMA
Douglass High School

Date: Wed, Sept 20, 2006 2:13 PM
"Last year someone contacted us and actually did the program for us. This year I have not
heard from anyone."

Emerson High School

Date: Thur, Sept 28, 2006 6:36 PM
"We are not using the screening program anymore."

WASHINGTON STATE
Lynden School District #504

Date: Wed, June 7, 2006 8:01 PM
"We have been told to halt all screening at this time."

WISCONSIN
Wisconsin School for the Deaf

Date: Fri, October 20, 2006 11:29 AM
"The Wisconsin School for the Deaf has not implemented the TeenScreen instrument."

Washburn School District

Date Thu, June 15, 2006 10:00 AM
"We did receive a mini grant but did not use and returned grant funds."

2006-11-13T23:58:00.001+11:00

THE USE OF PSYCHIATRY BY THE STATE AS A TOOL FOR OPPRESSION AND FOR PUNISHING OPPONENTS
by Justice Lover

Despite the obviously dehumanising and deceptive role of modern psychiatry it has been so far very secure in its positions of power worldwide. The reasons are clear to see, because psychiatry serves not merely the drug corporations, but the entire ruling class. Therefore, the state (which is ruled by the ruling class) is very keen to protect and promote psychiatry and the psychiatrists on its payroll.

In this and in future posts we shall discuss in detail one case of most scandalous victimisation for 29 years now under compulsory psychiatric "treatment". It is the case of Miss Rebecca Merhav of Melbourne, Australia. She has done no wrong to anyone, and she is no danger to anyone, yet the shrinks won't let go of her, and have been insisting on torturing her with Clozapine (she is now on 400 mg per day) with the pretext of "treatment of her illness" for over 19 months now, despite her and her father's protests, and despite her unbearable sufferings, and the deadly risks and dangers associated with the consumption of this very dangerous neuroleptic.The background to her compulsory psychiatric treatment for so long is political, certainly not medical. Her father, Benjamin Merhav, an Israeli anti-zionist peace activist, left Israel following the June 1967 zionist aggression and invasion of Arab lands, and because of his opposition to that war.

Arriving with his wife and two young children in Australia ,in early 1968, he continued his political anti-war activities both against the war in Vietnam and against the zionist war crimes against the Arab people of Palestine. The zionist lobby in Australia (under the direction of the zionist Gestapo in Israel) was furious when he continued to expose zionist crimes in Palestine to a misinformed Australian public. The zionist Gestapo, determined to crush him and his family, then arranged the full blacklisting of him, and when that did not stop him they turned on his daughter. Thus, Rebecca became a hostage by the zionist Gestapo, to punish her father, and eventually to crush the entire Merhav family as zionist vengence.

Here is how Rebecca's father describes the background to her victimisation from then on
( exerpts from his autobiography on http://theautobiographyofbenjaminmerhav.blogspot.com/2007/09/chapter-six-deliberate-crushing-of-my.html ) :

" Then the zionist Gestapo stepped into our lives again, and this time with the evil intention of completely wrecking my family. Using my stepfather's brutal control over my mother, the zionist Gestapo made my mother go with her husband to Australia for the ostensible purpose of "visiting friends"in the Melbourne zionist ghetto. Upon hearing the news I wrote back to my mother, asking her to come here alone, and to actually stay with us, but not with her husband, because I knew of his hostility towards me, and I knew that if he arrives with her there would be trouble for my children. Yet my mother, under the pressure of her husband, arrived with him ,and with the avowed purpose of forcing my family to toe the zionist line. My mother's angry criticism of myself and my children for not speaking Hebrew at home and for other non zionist features of our family life had a devastating impact on my daughter, because she had been taught by me to revere and to love her grandmother...

The 1977 Xmas turned out to be the first in a row of Xmases during which my beloved daughter would be again and again locked up in a loony bin against her will, and despite her protests and mine too. The first shrink I went to see with my daughter and her mother decided - after hearing the mother's complaints against her daughter for refusing to do the house chores - that daughter should be sent to the psychiatric ward of hospital for "observation", namely, to see if she needs any treatment for mental illness. The shrink then asked for the parents' consent in writing. The mother readily signed away her daughter, but I refused to sign. I knew nothing about psychiatry then, but I had enough respect for my daughter's human rights so as to support her refusal to go to that hospital, but for the shrink the signature of the mother was sufficient to incarcerate daughter against her will.

Soon I would find out to my horror that the term "observation" the shrinks had used as a pretext to have my daughter incarcerated, was observation by name only. In reality they considered her as mentally ill from the moment of her arrival, and began to "treat" her with psychiatric drugs against her will and despite her protests. As she protested ( "why me?"she would painfully protest) the higher went the dosage of the potent drugs injected into her by force, both to crush her resistance as well as to comply with the psychiatric practice of considering the patient's resistance in itself as a sign of illness which requires more intense drug treatment. Finally, the psychiatrist in charge (a zionist, as I would find out later) managed to turn my daughter into a living vegetable and a docile patient..."
What followed from then on was described by Rebecca's father in the synopsis which he submitted to Dr. B. Coulson, her present treating psychiatrist. Here it is :

"1. The first wrong diagnosis and unnecessary treatment that followed

Christmas 1977 was the worst day in my daughter's life. It was shortly after she turned 15 that she was caught up in a domestic tangle, not of her making, to be referred wrongly to a psychiatric ward for "observation", following her mother's complaints. Those complaints were based on Rebecca's refusal to do the house chores as required by the mother. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Rebecca, but the mere referral by the diagnosing psychiatrist was
taken,apparently, to be a positive diagnosis of mental illness.

Upon her arrival she was immediately required to consume a psychiatric drug, and when she refused it was injected to her by force. Her refusal , by itself, was considered as a "worsening of her mental illness",therefore more injections followed with higher dosage of neuroleptics. She then absconded, but only to get herself into worse trouble, because the abrupt termination of the neuroleptics played havoc on her brain (see Dr. Breggin below who says on page 16 "All psychiatric drugs can cause problems during withdrawal" ), and when returned to the ward her treating doctor considered her crisis as a "deterioration of her psychotic illness".

An Australian government website, of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, on the 21st of April this year, published a report :
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_1620772.htm
titled, Psychiatry Manual Linked to Drug Money , which proves that the diagnosis manual for psychiatrists was financed by the drug corporations. Could it be that the first wrong diagnosis of my daughter was due to the guidlines by such a manual ?

Furthermore, the financial interests of drug corporations require that compulsory drug treatment be entrenched and widespread so as to maximise their profits. It is well known that the level of drug corporations' profits is so high at present, that it is second only to the armament industry level of profits !

In any case, 29 years of compulsory "treatment" have not produced any
beneficial results for my daughter, and therefore proved to be completely unnecessary. Moreover, most of the neuroleptic drugs she was forced to take have since been declared harmful by the psychiatric profession itself, and are not in use any longer, leaving my daughter with the pain, the trauma, and possibly damaged vital organs (like her liver and her kidneys, but hopefully not her brain) as a result of so much intake of potent and harmful chemicals.
The experience and research done by the USA veteran psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Breggin, http://www.breggin.com/ ,proves that most neuroleptics given to psychiatric patients are harmful rather than helpful (to some people more than to others, of course). However, the drug corporations have produced misleading advertising to sell their harmful drugs.

In his book, Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Drugs, (Perseus Books - Reading, Massachusetts - 1999),Dr. Breggin says that "Precisely because there is so little scientific backing for the use of psychiatric drugs, mystification and slogans are often communicated to doctors by drug advertising, and then to patients by doctors" (p. 112-123).
On page 37 he says that "Despite a hugely successful promotional campaign by drug companies and biological psychiatry, the effectiveness of most or all psychiatric drugs remains difficult to demonstrate. The drugs often prove no more effective than sugar pills, or placebos - and to accomplish even these limited positive results, the clinical trials and data that they generate typically have to be statistically manipulated" . The question then begs itself : why force
a patient to consume a drug which does no good, when the patient is not dangerous - not to herself and not to others ! - and therefore with no public interest in the matter, even if the patient is mentally ill, let alone in a case of wrong diagnosis like the case of my daughter ?

On page 77 Dr. Breggin says that even when a patient is diagnosed as psychotic then neuroleptic drugs do not eliminate the psychotic symptoms : "Contrary to claims, neuroleptics have no specific effects on irrational ideas (delusions) or perceptions (hallucinations). Like all other psychiatric drugs, they have the same impact on healthy animals, healthy volunteers, and patients - namely, the production of apathy and indifference" . Moreover, the neuroleptics do have harmful effects. Here are some of harmful effects mentioned by Dr. Breggin in his above book :
"Neuroleptic drugs cause brain damage evidenced by a movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia, but "Neuroleptics actually suppress the symptoms of tardive dyskinesia while the disease is developing. ... The rates of TD [tardive dyskinesia] are extremely high. Many standard textbooks estimate a rate of 5% - 7% per year in healthy young adults [who are taking neuroleptic drugs]. The rate is cumulative so that 25% - 35% of patients [taking neuroleptics]
will develop the disorder in 5 years of treatment. Among the elderly [taking neuroleptics], rates of TD reach 20% or more per year. For a variety of reasons, including the failure to include tardive akathisia in estimates, the actual rates are probably much higher for all patients" (p. 78).
On page 79 :
"So-called antipsychotic or neuroleptic drugs cause a fatal disease called neuroleptic malignant syndrome in up to 2.4% of people taking them. "Using a low-end rate of 1 percent, Maxmen and Ward (1995, p. 33) estimate that 1,000 - 4,000 deaths occur in America each year as a result of neuroleptic malignant syndrome. The actual number is probably much greater" .
On page 81 :
"Neuroleptic, also known as antipsychotic or major tranquilizer drugs subject almost every system in the body to impairment. Research, including a recent study, indicates that these drugs are toxic to cells in general".
The most dangerous of all the neuroleptics is, of course, the Clozapine (Clozaril), the drug which Rebecca has been forced to take for more than a year now. Here is what Dr. Breggin says at page 82 :

"Clozaril ... was banned in some European countries because it caused so many fatalities; but the escalating power of drug companies subsequently led to its approval by the FDA" in the United States.

There are ,of course, many more deadly risks that any consumer of Clozapine takes, such as diabetes, heart attacks, epilepsy, severe constipation etc. but in the case of Rebecca her immeidate and daily sufferings ( chronic insomnia,back pain, pain in bones and joints etc) make her daily life unbearable, and this is tantamount to torture ! It certainly cannot be considered as a medical treatment !

So this is her situation now, under the Clozapine, but she has been suffering for 29 years now ! Twenty nine years of trauma, torture, humiliation,degradation and loss of the 29 best years of her life ! Now it is already too late for her, for example, to have children and create her own family ! Under such circumstances no one can function better than a human wreck ! Why punish her for the rest of her life too ? Why force on her the risks of death ?

2. The only way to help Rebecca

Knowing my daughter I am hopeful that she is still a very capable and talented person. It is the compulsory drug treatment, the traumatic incarcerations, and her betrayal by her own mother that turned her disabled, a psychiatrically disabled person. Yet, despite her sufferings, despite the limitations imposed on her by the Clozapine, she never lost her hope and her will to return to normal life. She has been looking for a job, any work which would be available to her. She has been interested in various courses to study and improve her qualifications, and she has made many enquiries regarding her possible participation in such courses.She wants to live a normal life ! Why deny her any chance to live a normal life ?

Obviously, the only way to help her - indeed the only way to save her life ! - is to gradually reduce her intake of Clozapine, revoke the CTO, and eventually allow her to take up drug-free alternative treatment ( which was offered to her in Adelaide), to detoxfy her body, to return to society as an active member, to make friends and to live a normal life, the life she wants to live !
She badly needs physical activities ( which she likes very much, like swimming, tennis, netball) ; she badly needs friends to break through her isolation, but the Clozapine makes these important needs impossible for her to achieve. She has all the needs of any normal adult and there is no rational reason to deny fulfilment of her needs to her ! Why torture her instead for the rest of her life ?

The answer to the argument that she needs drug treatment because "she is sick" - and without debating the validity of this argument ! - is that OK, having been been taken off the drugs and then - in the worst case - facing a crisis again, it would never be too late to return to the psychiatric ward anywhere, and to resume the drug treatment, if there is no realistic
alternative !

To close my appeal I would add this very important piece of informatiom :

Around 1995, when Rebecca was getting treatment at Southen Clinic, in Moorabbin, her neuroleptic intake was on the minimum level. That followed her past demands, at the previous clinic at Albert Park, demands which I strongly supported, to start reducing her dose of neuroleptics intake. At first the treating doctors refused to even consider our demands, but then they decided to give it a try, and lo and behold the experiment did work ! With each reduction Rebecca felt better and her performance improved too ! So when she was moved to the Southern Clinic ( because of changing her residence) she was on the lowest level of the neuroleptic. We then asked the treating woman psychiatrist in the Southern clinic to take her off the drug altogether, and she arranged for a meeting with us so that she could consider our request. It was about an hour long meeting at the end of which the treating psychiatrist turned to me and said : "I do not see any reason why she should be on any (psychiatric) drug !"

Upon hearing the good news Rebecca became very happy, and I could hardly catch up with her, as she was dancing (rather than walking) all the way back to her home. However, her happiness did not last long, because she tried to share it with her mother. The mother, who befriended an Israeli psychiatrist in Waiora Clinic ,followed his instructions. That psychiatrist turned out to be a bad man as well as a bad doctor. He told Rebecca's mother that Rebecca should not be allowed to stop taking psychiatric drugs, and he offered his "help" by instructing the mother to get Rebecca moved immediately to Waiora Clinic under his "care".

Rebecca, hardly a couple of weeks in Waiora Clinic, was told to take the Clozapine as the new "medication" for her, or else. She refused, of course, and that bad doctor then ordered the police to pick her up from home and drop her at the Heatherton Hospital ,where he was in charge of the involuntary unit. To cut the story short, he failed to force the Clozapine on Rebecca, as I was strongly opposed to, of course, to this new psychiatric atrocity against my daughter. However, he kept torturing her with the dangerous Risperdal, instead of Clozapine, for the first few years that Rebecca was obliged to get "treatment" at the Waiora Clinic.

I could go on to tell you how Dr. Robert Shields bungled her treatment during last two years in Waiora, but I won't. However, it is important to let you know that after her first incarceration at the Alfred , in July 2005, he did agree to gradually lower her Clozapine dose to 100mg, and with good results ! However, he bungled the treatment by ordering her to take Effexor as well, and when he realized his mistake, he withdraw the Effexor abruptly. The inevitable result was that Rebecca was plunged into a crisis of her doctor's making. Yet he continued his bungle by considering her crisis as a relapse, and by instantly doubling her Clozapine intake ! All of which made things worse for her, and yet Dr. Shields blamed her crisis on her "being very sick ",rather than admit that he was wrong, and try to correct his own mistakes !"

2006-11-13T10:51:00.000+11:00

PSYCHIATRIC "MEDICATIONS", DRUG CORPORATIONS BRIBES,
AND MODERN PSYCHIATRY
by Justice Lover

In his article, Can Psychiatry be Retrieved from a Biological Approach?
http://www.uea.ac.uk/~wp276/Can.htm ,the British psychiatrist D.B. Double, M.D. describes Biologic Psychiatry, the dogma which dominates modern psychiatry, as follows : "The basic assumption of biological psychiatry is that mental illness is due to a biochemical imbalance which can be corrected by medication." Although his definition presumes the existence of "mental illness" - something very doubtful which I strongly dispute - it does point out the gist of the fraud perpetrated on psychiatry by the drug industry. His words, "biochemical imbalance which can be corrected by medication", has got very practical meaning for the shrinks. It means that all that the shrinks have got to do is give a name to that "biochemical imbalance", thus declaring the patient "mentally ill", and presto pick up the "appropriate medication" from the drug industry manual, issue a CTO over the victim, then proceed to the next victim. Easy job, good money, and the world looks at them with admiration, or would it not ?

Mind you, the very word "medication" is false, and is a misrepresentation even according to the psychiatric dogma. Psychiatry itself never dared to claim that it has any cure for any of its list of "mental illnesses". Why, then, call it medication when it is more appropriate to call the drug poison, or psychiatric drug ,which is what it is in reality ? Here is what another dissident American psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas C. Smith, in his brief but important article, says about psychiatric "medications" :

http://www.antipsychiatry.org/drsmith1.htm

"Why Psychiatric Drugs Are Always Bad
by Douglas C. Smith, M.D.

I no longer recommend psychiatric medications to anyone.
This seems radical in this country because we are in the midst of the "biological revolution." Everyone seems to assume medications are are specifically effective for various mental illnesses which are at least in part chemical or genetic in origin. I believe the science behind this is seriously flawed. It is based on false assumptions that lead to self-perpetuating mythology (and huge profits for drug companies).
I first gave up on tranquilizers, then antidepressants, then all psychiatric drugs. I learned that there are certain general principles that govern all psychoactive substances and biologic treatments.
General Principles:
(1) "Mental illnesses," even severe ones, are relational (I'd say spiritual as well). Psychiatry, by focusing almost exclusively on biology, is making itself increasingly irrelevant.
(2) Psychoactive substances provide at best, temporary relief, but always make things worse in the long run. They make things worse directly (chemically) and indirectly by distracting from the real issues.
(3) All psychoactive substances have rebound and withdrawal-related problems. "Relapse" rates, in general, during withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, are about 10 times higher than would be expected if the drug had never been taken.
(4) "All biopsychiatric treatments share a common mode of action -- the disruption of normal brain function" (Peter Breggin, M.D., Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Springer Pub. Co., 1997, p. 3). Drugs never correct imbalances. They never improve the brain. They "work" by impairing the brain and dampening feelings in various ways."
THE AUTHOR, Douglas C. Smith, M.D., graduated from Indiana University (1982 - Phi Beta Kappa) and Indiana University School of Medicine (1986) and completed his psychiatry training in 1990 and is board certified in psychiatry. He also has had additional training in psychoanalysis. He currently lives and practices in Juneau, Alaska. He is on the board of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology.

To explain this obvious violation of the Hippocratic oath by the vast majority of psychiatrists, who follow the dogma-fraud of modern psychiatry, thus passing on to their patients the fraud perpetrated on them by the drug corporations, here is an article by the late American psychiatrist Prof. Loren Mosher :

http://www.antipsychiatry.org/mosher.loren.1.htm

"How Drug Company Money Has Corrupted Psychiatry
by Loren R. Mosher, M.D.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the nationwide organization to which most psychiatrists belong. In some ways it is a trade union. A large proportion of its income is from drug company advertising in its journals and newspaper. It also receives "unrestricted educational grants" and convention revenue from drug companies. Drug company sponsored symposia and exhibitions dominate the two major annual psychiatric conventions. Of course, the symposia speakers are paid handsomely for their half-day appearances. In my opinion, the APA is so dependent on pharmaceutical company support that it can not afford to criticize the overuse and misuse of psychotropic drugs. Perhaps more importantly, the APA is unwilling to mandate education of psychiatrists about the the seriousness of the short and long-term toxicities and withdrawal reactions from the drugs.

The drug companies pay speakers ($1000-2000 per appearance) who give psychiatric grand rounds and/or evening speeches (dinner provided by the company) to local psychiatric societies. Speakers come from lists of psychiatrists who will basically endorse their products. Doctors training to be psychiatrists are specially targeted for these speakers.

The drug companies give contracts to university based and private psychiatric research companies to conduct drug trials that are required for U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drugs they sell. The company provides the protocol and the researcher may receive as much as $40,000 per patient that completes the study. This allows the drug company considerable influence on the way the drug studies are conducted. All of these drug manufacturer activities have increased in scope and intensity since the introduction of newly patented drugs, beginning with Prozac in 1989. They must reap the profits before patents run out.

Research protocols used in studies of psychiatric drugs required for the approval of the FDA are supposed to be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards (IRB's) to be sure they do not pose undue risks to the study subjects. Members of these boards have been found to be highly paid consultants to drug companies whose protocols they review. That is, they have obvious conflicts of interests and are not objective, unbiased reviewers of the psychiatric drug studies over which they pass judgment. The latest "novel" anti-psychotic drug that has been approved by our federal drug regulatory agency (FDA) is Zeldox, which the FDA allowed to be introduced to the US market despite Zeldox's dangers.

In my view American psychiatry has become drug dependent (that is, devoted to pill pushing) at all levels - private practitioners, public system psychiatrists, university faculty and organizationally. What should be the most humanistic medical specialty has become mechanistic, reductionistic, tunnel-visioned and dehumanizing. Modern psychiatry has forgotten the Hippocratic principle: Above all, do no harm."

Bribes are not the only means the transnational drug corporations use to perpetrate and perpetuate the dogma-fraud of modern psychiatry. The professional training of psychiatrists is also under the remote control of the drug corporations. Here is the relevant part of British psychiatrist D.B. Double, M.D, from his above article, Can Psychiatry be Retrieved from a Biological Approach? ,to explain the point :

"The bias of medical training

Medical training assumes a scientific mode of thinking. Medical students are not primed to realise that human behaviour may not follow rules of physical cause and effect. By the time trainees start psychiatric training they have been firmly indoctrinated in the belief that people can be explained and predicted. The weight of philosophical inquiry belies this view (Dilthey 1976). Students need to realise that it is legitimate to question whether an understanding of human nature can take the same form as the laws of natural science. It may come as a shock to medical students to be made aware of this potential because of the mindset which has been created by the unquestioning assumption that natural scientific methods can be applied to human behaviour. Even if students are not surprised, scientific education may have become so entrenched that it is too late for thinking to shift. I am, of couse, using science in the narrow sense of physical science. A broader definition of science would be the application of commonsense. It is in just this sense that medical training seems to be unscienific and mindless. I am aware that such a view will be dismissed as vague and uncertain.

Traditional medical education has fostered in students the notion that uncertainty is a manifestation of ignorance and weakness. Factual knowledge takes precedence over critical appraisal. The inevitable denial and avoidance that result when the limits of rationalism are exposed in clinical practice are reinforced by patients who may expect them to be certain. This vulnerability is made particularly acute in psychiatry when patients try to express their desires and self-destructiveness and describe their abuse and past traumata.
Clinical schools have sometimes said they want to recognise the importance of cultivating creativity and paying closer attention to students' emotional development. Unfortunately, guidance in developing techniques to handle issues raised by uncertainty do not feature prominently in most curricula. In our "post-modern world" there is some truth in the statement that natural science on which medical training is based has now a greater acceptance of subjectivity and uncertainty. It was never realistic, however, to expect that the introduction of social science and medical ethics to undergraduate training would encourage the necessary adjustments to thinking and practice. A more profound focus on the person is required in medical training from the start of training. Of course, I am not encouraging a dualism of mind and body. Biological knowledge needs to be integrated with personal understanding. Enlightened attitudes can only be developed by being open to the limits of medical practice.
A greater recognition of the anxieties experienced by all professional disciplines involved in the delivery of health care should facilitate better use of resources. This means clinicians must explicitly acknowledge and understand the importance of imprecision before such co-operation can be productive.

The myth of biological psychiatry

By the time doctors begin psychiatric training, they are enmeshed in medical indoctrination. There should be little surprise then about their unthinking acceptance of the biological model of mental illness. "Chemical imbalance" explains aberrant behaviour and feelings, as if it understands it. Medication is the simple response and the foundations of trainees' worldview shake if the hypothesis is not true. The belief is so fundamental to the edifice of psychiatry that paradigms about neurotransmitters and receptors do not shift despite contrary pharmacological evidence. Most psychiatrists in their clinical work still think they are correcting dopamine imbalance in their treatment of schizophrenia with neuroleptics, despite the abandonment of the hypothesis by pharmacologists and the widespread acceptance of atypical neuroleptics onto the market. The amine hypothesis still figures at least in the background of psychiatrists' use of antidepressants, encouraged by pharmaceutical companies' rationales for the development of their products. Of course, I am not dismissing psychiatry's base in medicine, which, for example, is useful for understanding the common physical complaints of psychiatric patients.

Lack of self-criticism in psychiatry is stifling. Recognition by a trainee that there may be more factors than "chemical imbalance" involved in a patient’s problems may be dismissed as interesting "psychodynamics". Failure to produce the correct diagnosis in the MRCPsych clinical examination is given more weight than an attempt to understand the patient’s problems, albeit in no more than one hour. When have trainees had demonstrated to them the power of suggestion, rather than the effects of medication, or had any acknowledgement of the influence and power of using medication? Doctors with a designated interest in the mind should be expected to be more aware than other specialities of the power of the placebo. And if so, they might realise that habituation to medication is likely to be common, perhaps particularly with drugs which are thought to improve emotional states. This recognition would help trainees to appreciate why so many people have difficulty discontinuing medication, and would provide an alternative explanation to recurrence of disease when symptoms present themselves on terminating treatment.

Authoritarian attitudes are not conducive to self-criticism. Challenge to the structure of training is marginalised. Creating unhealthy, defensive doctors cannot be in the interest of patients. Narcissistic impulses will have to be renounced along with ideas of omnipotence, although there should be no fear that patients will no longer need services.

And besides, how does a doctor relate to other disciplines who sense their vulnerability but have not the authority to challenge it? After all, it is the doctor who has knowledge about the body and other disciplines do not have accredited training in this field. Even if they can see the bizarreness and absurdity of biological psychiatry’s claims, they may be missing some information. In a power struggle it suits the psychiatrist to keep them thinking this way."

2006-11-11T23:56:00.000+11:00

HAS MODERN PSYCHIATRY GONE INSANE OR IS ITS DOGMA BASED ON A FRAUD PERPETRATED BY THE
DRUG CORPORATIONS ? by Justice Lover

The following ariticle was written by an American psychiatrist and I have downloaded it with
comments by an American neurologist. Both doctors oppose Biological Psychiatry, which is
what modern psychiatry is all about. It is obvious from their analysis ,and from their conclusions,
that modern psychiatry, as it has been practiced worldwide, is detrimental to humanity (to say
the least !). Here are the article and the comments,
http://www.adhdfraud.org/commentary/11-07-00-2.htm:

11/6/00, Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD: I cannot think of a stronger, more accurate, analysis of
‘biological psychiatry’ than this by David Kaiser, MD, psychiatrist, humane physician. This
cannot be said of any psychiatrist who has deserted the 'mind'of their patient, pretending to
diagnose and treat the brain, doing this for profit—for their own profit as well as for that of their
paymaster, the pharmaceutical industry. My comments are inserted within Dr. Kaiser’s text in
brackets […] .

The following article is by David Kaiser M. D.- who has written a number of journal articles and
is on the staff of Northwestern University Medical School Hospital.
http://myweb.rust.net/~norman/kaiser.html Date: 11/5/00 12:35:42 AM Pacific Standard Time

NOT BY CHEMICALS ALONE: A HARD LOOK AT "PSYCHIATRIC MEDICINE"
BY DAVID KAISER M.D.

As a practicing psychiatrist, I have watched with growing dismay and
outrage the rise and triumph of the hegemony known as biologic
psychiatry. Within the general field of modern psychiatry, biologism
now completely dominates the discourse on the causes and treatment of
mental illness, and in my view this has been a catastrophe with
far-reaching effects on individual patients and the cultural psyche at
large. It has occurred to me with forcible
irony that psychiatry has quite literally lost its mind, and along with
it the minds of the patients they are presumably supposed to care for.
Even a cursory glance at any major psychiatric journals is enough to convince
me that the field has gone far down the road into a kind of delusion,
whose main tenets consist of a particularly pernicious biologic
determinism and a pseudo-scientific understanding of human nature and mental illness.

[Dr. Baughman: thus my encountering not just parents, but grandparents as well—two
generations—that believe that the normal rambunctiousness of their children and grand children
are ‘diseases, due a ‘chemical imbalances’ of the brain. No longer can they understand all that is
the trying, challenging normalcy of childhood—things they themselves are best-suited, with
common sense and parental instinct to care for and guide. Now they see such behaviors as
‘diseases’, as ‘chemical imbalances’ that need diagnosing by psychiatrists and other mental
health professionals, and that need, in virtually every case, ‘chemical balancers’—pills. No
longer can they see all that is the width and breadth of normal emotions and behavior in
themselves, their families, communities. They will have been deceived into believing that all of
this need, diagnosis, interpretation, management and treatment from psychiatry and the
mammoth, burgeoning mental health (teachers included) industry.]

The purpose of this piece is not to attempt a full critique or history
of this occurrence, but merely to present some of the glaring problems of
this movement, as I believe significant harm is being done to patients under
the guise of modern psychiatric treatment. I am a psychiatrist trained in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I use both psychotherapy and medication
in my approach to patients. I state these facts to make it clear that this is
not an anti-psychiatry tract, and I am speaking from
within the field of psychiatry, although I find it increasingly
impossible to identify with this profession, for reasons which will
become clear below.

Biologic psychiatrists as a whole are unapologetic in their view that they
have found the road to truth, namely that mental illnesses for the most part
are genetic in origin and should be treated with biologic manipulations,
i.e., psychoactive medications, electroconvulsive treatment (which has made
an astounding comeback) and in some cases psychosurgery.

[Dr. Baughman: they are unapologetic and dictatorial, but, one-on-one, are easily challenged
and intimidated. A young father asked his son’s psychiatrist: "Why the Ritalin?" The psychiatrist
responded: "He has ADHD, due to a ‘chemical imbalance of the brain!" The young father then
asked: "Show me the lab work!" The psychiatrist hemmed and hawed, because of course there
was no lab work there never is, there is never a test or proof of any kind (why I call ADHD,
and all biological psychiatry a total, 100% fraud). The young father persisted, saying, "I want to
see the results of any tests you have done." The psychiatrist, grew flustered and finally ‘lost it’ at
which point he banished both father and son from his office (there is never an examining room),
firing the boy as his patient. I am fond of saying that the "Is it a disease—yes or no?"
question—if ‘yes’ show me the lab work, the scan, the biopsy report, the x-ray, is, to the
biological psychiatrist, like the crucifix to Count Dracula. Both are destroyed by the light of day.
Further, I can tell any lawyer, barrister, how to destroy any biological psychiatrist with the light
of day in any courtroom.]

Although they admit a role for environmental and social factors, these
are usually relegated to a secondary status. Their unquestioning confidence in
their biologic paradigms of mental illness is truly staggering.

In my opinion, this modern version of the ideology of biologic/genetic
determinism is a powerful force that demands a response. And when I use
the word ideology here, I mean it in its most pernicious form, i.e., as
a discourse and a practice of power whose true motivations and sources
are hidden to the public and even to the practitioners themselves, and
which causes real harm to the patients at the receiving end. Biologic
psychiatry as it exists today is a dogma that urgently needs to be
unmasked.

[Dr. Baughman: this is as accurate a description of ‘biological psychiatry’ as I have seen. Having
said that, all that is ‘biological psychiatry’ must now be identified; fingered, exposed to the full
light of day, in all of the proper court rooms, especially in those courtrooms that order parents,
under threat of loss of custody, to consent to treat and to—themselves actively participate in the
treatment of their children with powerful toxic chemicals for the diseases of biological psychiatry
that simply do not exist and, what’s more, will never exist.]

One of the surest signs that dogmatists are at work here is that
they rarely question or attempt to problematize their basic assumptions. In
fact, they seem blissfully unaware that there is a problem here. They act in
seeming unawareness that they are caught up in larger historical and cultural
forces that underwrite their entire "scientific" edifice.
These forces include the medicalization of all public discourse on how to
live our lives, a growing cultural denial of psychic pain as inherent in
living as human beings, the well-known American mixture of ahistoricism
and belief in limitless scientific progress, and the growing power of the
pharmaceutical and managed care industries.

[Dr. Baughman: It is mainly the growing, now-awsome power of the pharmaceutical industry,
and unlimited pharmaceutical dollars (drug money) that permeate the US political process, that
have brought us to this point. Their acquisition—buying of psychiatry (once a profession) was
accomplished without a whimper. Their acquisition of psychology and all else that is ‘mental
health’ (an oxymoron) is largely complete as well. ]

The self-proclaimed visionaries, oblivious to all of this, boast of real
scientific progress over what they consider to be the dogma of
psychoanalysis, which had up until recently reigned as psychiatry's
premier paradigm.

Now, it is not my intention to defend psychoanalysis, which had its own
unfortunate excesses, although I do use psychoanalytic principles in the
kind of psychotherapy I do. However it is quite clear to me that the
grandiose claims of biologic psychiatry are wildly overstated, unproven and
essentially self-serving. Biologic psychiatry has had its successes, particularly
with recent antidepressants like Prozac and newer medications such as
Clozaril.
Medications can effectively improve depression, relieve severe anxiety,
stabilize serious mood-swings and lessen psychotic symptoms. These
successes are real in that they improve the quality of life of patients who are
genuinely suffering. But in reality, i.e., the reality of treating
patients, medications have profound limitations. I know that if the only tool I
had in treatment was a prescription pad, I would be a poor psychiatrist.

The center of treatment will always need to be listening to and speaking
with the patients coming to me. This means listening seriously to what
they say about their lives and history as a whole, not symptoms which might
respond to medications. Although it seems astounding that I would have
to state this, biologic psychiatrists as a whole really only listen to that portion of the
patient's discourse that corresponds to their biologic paradigms of mental
illness.

[Dr. Baughman: As a neurologist my primary role for each new patient was to determine, by
history (subjective) and examination (objective), lab, x-ray, scanning, etc. (objective) whether
abnormality—disease, was present or not. About 2/3 or so of patients I saw had no disease but
had symptoms that were psychological, that is, emotional and behavioral. Where these were not
ingrained and deep-seeded, I would venture brief treatment for them myself. A brief explanation
of how, having ruled out physical (organic) disease left the psychological explanation, the only
alternative, often went a long way toward relieving the patient’s worries, putting them on a
footing to adapt, to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and to prevail—getting back to
normal. By the early 80’s, psychiatrists had embraced the ‘biological’ model such that all almost
every patient I referred to them got was a pill--no talking too, no understanding of where from
amongst their life’s travails, their worrisome symptoms might be coming from. At that time I
stopped sending patients to them and began referring such patients only to mental health
providers without prescription pads. They are much more difficult to avoid nowadays]

It is the nature of dogma that its practitioners hear only what they want to hear.
So what are the limitations of biologic psychiatry? First of all,
medications lessen symptoms, they do not treat mental illness per se. This
distinction is crucial. Symptoms by definition are the surface presentation
of a deeper process. This is self-evident. However, there has been a vast and
largely unacknowledged effort on the part of modern (i.e., biologic)
psychiatry to equate symptoms with mental illness.
For example, the "illness" major depression is defined by its set of
specific symptoms. The underlying "cause" is presumed to be a
biologic/genetic disturbance, even though this has never been proven in the
case of depression.

[Dr. Baughman: or in any psychiatric disorder/disease that is known. In not a single one is there
a confirmatory, objective finding, abnormality or exam, lab, scan, biopsy, culture,
anything—It—biological psychiatry is a total fraud. ]

The errors in logic here are clear. A set of symptoms is
given a name such as "major depression," which is then "treated" with a
medication, despite the fact that the underlying cause of the symptoms
remains completely unknown and essentially untreated.
I have seen repeatedly that, for example, once medications lessen the
symptoms, I am still sitting across from a suffering patient who wants to
talk about his unhappiness. This process of equating symptoms with illnesses
has been repeated with every diagnostic category, culminating in perhaps one
of the greatest sophistries psychiatry has pulled off in its illustrious
history of sophistries, namely the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (currently in its fourth incarnation under the name DSM-IV), the bible
of modern psychiatry.
In it are listed all known "mental disorders," defined individually by their
respective symptom lists. Thus mental illnesses are equated with symptoms.
The surface is all there is.

The perverse beauty of this scheme is that if you take away the
patient's symptoms, the disorder is gone. For those who do serious work
with patients, this manual is useless, because for me it is simply
irrelevant what name you give to a particular
set of symptoms. It is an absolute myth created by modern psychiatry
that these "disorders" actually exist as discrete entities that have a cause
and treatment. This is essentially a pseudo-scientific enterprise that grew
out of modern psychiatry's desire to emulate modern medical
science, despite the very real possibility that psychic pain, because of
its existential nature, may always elude the capture of modern medical
discourse and practice.

[Dr. Baughman: Fail to understand that biological psychiatry is an absolute myth and you fail to
understand ‘biological psychiatry.’ ]

Despite its obvious limitations, the DSM-IV has become the basis for
psychiatric training and research. Its proponents claim that it is a purely a
phenomenological document stripped of judgments and prejudices about the
causes of mental illness. What in fact it has done is the defining and
shaping of a vast industry of research designed to validate the existing
diagnostic categories and to find ways to lessen symptoms, which has
basically meant biologic research. Virtually all of the major psychiatric
journals are now about this, and as such I find them useless to help me deal
with real patients.

[Dr. Baughman: I have begun to write an analysis of the fraudulence of all ‘biological psychiatry’
research. The duplicity is unimaginable and it is just this that they count on. ]

Patients are suffering from far more than symptoms. Symptoms are the signs
and clues to direct us to the real issues. If you take away the symptoms too
quickly with medications or suggestion, you lose the opportunity to help a
patient in a more profound way. As an aside, modern psychiatrists, because
they have forgotten or dismissed the real power of transference, vastly
underestimate the extent which symptom reduction is caused by mere
suggestion. Not that patients should be left to suffer needlessly from what
are often crippling symptoms. Relief of symptoms is a part of treatment.
Modern psychiatry would have us believe that this is all treatment should be.
Meaning, desire, loss and death are no longer the province of the
psychiatrist. In this process patients are reduced to something less than
fully human, as they become an abstract collection of symptoms without
meaning to be "managed" by technicians called psychiatrists.
This is in the service of medical progress and enlightened scientific
thought. The biologic psychiatrist will not make the mistake of imposing
their value systems on patients like in the bad old psychoanalytic days. This
is, of course, a sham. Modern psychiatry now foists on patients the view that
their deepest and most private ills are now medical problems to be managed by
physician psychiatrists who will take their symptoms and return them to
"normal functioning." This is a bit more than malignant.
One of the dominant discourses that runs through the DSM-IV and modern
psychiatry in general is the equating of mental health with "normal
functioning" and adaptation. There is a barely concealed strain of a specific
form of Utopianism here which blithely announces that our psychic ills are
primarily biologic and can be removed from our lives without difficulty,
leaving us better adapted and more productive. What is left completely out, of course, are any
notions that our psychic ills are a reflection of cultural pathology. In
fact, this new biologic psychiatry can only exist to the extent it can deny
not only the truths of psychoanalysis, but also the truths of any serious
cultural criticism.

[Dr. Baughman: leaving such problems un-addressed, in fact, denying that they exist as they
insert biologic defects of the brain’s hard-wiring and of genes (such as the ‘DNA Roulette’ of
Harold Koplewicz of NYU, my alma mater), they give patient’s pills and pills-alone leading to
an end-result that invariably equates to net damage for every patient’s encounter with
psychiatry.]

It is then no surprise that this psychiatry thrives in
this country presently,where such denials are rampant and deeply embedded.
I am constantly amazed by how many patients who come to see me believe or
want to believe that their difficulties are biologic and can be relieved by a
pill. This is despite the fact that modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly
prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness. However, this
does not stop psychiatry from making essentially unproven claims that
depression, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders, alcoholism and a host of
other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in
origin, and that it is only a matter of time until all of this is proven.
This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention
naïve and perhaps delusional..
As in any dogma there is no perspective within biologic psychiatry that can
effectively question its own motives, basic beliefs and potential blind
spots. And thus, as in any dogma, there is no way for the field to curb its
own excesses, or to see how it might be acting out certain specific cultural
fantasies and wishes. The rise and fall of biologic determinism in a culture
likely has complicated and interesting causes, which are beyond the scope of
this paper. A few comments will have to suffice.
This is a culture increasingly obsessed with medical science and medical
health as a sign of virtue. It is not surprising that our psychic ills would
be pulled into this dominant medical discourse, essentially medicalizing our
specific forms of psychic pain. It seems to me that modern psychiatry in step
with a culture which created it, assumes any suffering to be unequivocally
bad, an impediment to the "good life" of progress, productivity and progress.
It is now almost heresy in psychiatry to say that perhaps suffering can teach
us something, deepen our experience, or point us to different possibilities.
Now if you are depressed or anxious, it has no real meaning, because as a
biologic illness similar to, say, diabetes, it is separate from the world of
meaning and merely is. Now any thoughtful person knows that something as
fundamental as depression has meanings such as loss, facing mortality,
unlived desires. lack of power or control, etc., and that these meanings will
continue to exist even if Prozac makes us feel better. There is much more to
life than feeling better or living without pain, and only a superficial and
pathologic culture would deny this. Yet conclusions such as "depression is a
chemical imbalance" are created out of nothing more than semantics and the
wishful thinking of scientist/psychiatrists and a public who will believe
anything now that has the stamp of approval of medical science. It seems to
me that modern psychiatry is acting out a cultural fantasy having to do with
the wish for an omniscient authority who armed with modern science, will
magically take away the suffering and pain inherent in existing as human
beings, and that rather than refusing this projection (which psychoanalysts
were better able to do), modern psychiatry has embraced the role
wholeheartedly, reveling in its new-found power and cultural legitimacy.
I would be remiss if I left out the obvious economic factors in psychiatry's
movement toward the biologic. Pharmaceutical corporations now contribute
heavily to psychiatric research and are increasingly present and a part of
psychiatric academic conferences. There has been little resistance in the
field to this, with the exception of occasional token protest, despite its
obvious corrosive and corrupting effects.
It is as if psychiatry, long marginalized by science and the rest of
medicine because of its "soft" quality, is now rejoicing in its new-found
legitimacy, and thus does not have the will to resist its own degradation.
The fact that the drug companies embrace and fund this New Psychiatry is
cause enough for alarm. Equally telling is a similar embrace by the managed
care industry, which obviously likes its quick-fix approach and simplistic
approach to complicated clinical problems.
When I talk to a managed care representative about the care of one of my
patients, they invariably want to know what medications I am using and little
else, and there is often an implication that I am not medicating aggressively
enough. There is now a growing cottage industry within psychiatry in
advocating ways to work with managed care, despite the obvious fact that
managed care has little interest in quality care and realistic treatment
approaches to real patients. This financial pressure by managed care
contributes added pressure for psychiatry to go down a biologic road and to
avoid more realistic treatment approaches.
What this means in real terms is that psychotherapy is left out. There has
been a triple partnership created between this New Psychiatry, drug companies
and managed care, each part supporting and reinforcing the other in the
pursuit of profits and legitimacy. What this means to the patients caught in
this squeeze is that they are increasingly overmedicated, denied access to
psychotherapy and diagnosed with fictitious disorders, leaving them probably
worse off in the long run.

[Dr. Baughman: I do not think managed care’s dalliance with the pill model of psychiatry will
last or that it is so different in managed care than in what remains of fee-for-service mental
health. Given nothing but a pill, patients are not better off for long, nor do they have an illusion of
being better off for long (as long as it takes for placebo effect to wear off) . Come the time that
the vast majority come back to managed care’s door, not better off but worse, managed care
will take note and will adjust and will find what it takes to get people symptom free and staying
that way, not forever at their door]

It is quite depressing to listen to the discourse
of modern psychiatry. In fact, it has become embarrassing to me. One gets the
strong impression that patients have become abstractions, black boxes of
biologic symptoms, disconnected from the narratives of their current
and past lives. This pseudoscientific discourse is shot through with
insecurity and pretense, creating the illusion of objectivity, an inevitable
march of progress beyond the hopeless subjectivity of psychoanalysis.
Psychotherapy is dismissed and relegated to non-medical therapists.
I actually have no objections to real science in
the field, if, for example,it can help me make better medication decisions or
develop newer and better medications. But in general, biologic psychiatry has
not delivered on its grandiose and utopian claims, as today's collection
of medications are woefully inadequate to address the complicated
clinical issues that come before me every day. This is all not terribly
surprising, given what I have outlined in this piece. There will be no substitute
for the difficult work of engaging with patients at the level of their lived
experience, of helping patients piece together meaning and understanding in
the place of their pain,fragmentation and confusion.
Patients these days are not suffering from "biologic illnesses." What I
generally see is patients suffering from current or past violence, traumatic
loss, loss of power or control over their lives and the effects of cultural
fragmentation, isolation and impoverishment that are specific to this culture
at this time. How this manifests in any individual is absolutely specific;
therefore, one should resist any attempt to generalize or classify, as
science forces us to do. Once you go down the route of generalization, you
have ceased listening to the patient and the richness of their lived
experience.
Unfortunately what I also see these days are the casualties off this new
biologic psychiatry, as patients often come to me with many years of past
treatment. Patients having been diagnosed with "chemical imbalances" despite
the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and that there is no
real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like. Patients
with years of medication trials which have done nothing except to reify in
them an identity as a chronic patient with a bad brain. This identification
as a biologically impaired patient is one of the most destructive effects of
biologic psychiatry.
Modern psychiatrists seem unaware of what psychoanalysts know well, namely
how powerful are the words that a patient hears from an authority figure like
a psychiatrist. The opportunity here for suggestion, coercion and
manipulation are quite real. Patients are often looking to psychiatrists for
answers and definitions as they struggle with questions such as who am I, or
what is happening to me. Of course we all struggle with these questions, and
the human condition is such that there are no definitive answers, and anyone
who comes along claiming they have answers is essentially a fraud.
Biologic psychiatry promises easy answers to a public hungry for them. To
give a patient nothing but a diagnosis and a pill demonstrates arrogance,
laziness and bad faith on the part of the psychiatrist. Any psychiatrist
needs to be continually aware of the very real possibility that they are or
can easily become agents of social control and coercion.

[Dr. Baughman: they are becoming this at a very rapid rate and they revel in the power and in
their allegiance both with political might and monetary—corporate might ]

The way to resist this is to refuse to take on the role assigned through
cultural fantasy, namely the role of omniscient dispenser of magical potions.
As a whole, modern biologic psychiatry has enacted this role with particular
vigor and enthusiasm. At the level of individual patients this means a growing
number of over-diagnosed, over-medicated and disarticulated people less able
to define and control their own identities and lives.

[Dr. Baughman: As a medical-therapeutic pretense the net outcome is invariably negative. In
sum, this is a monstrous crime]

At the level of our culture this has meant an impoverishment of
the discourse around such questions as what is wrong with us, as "scientific"
answers replace more potentially fruitful and truthful psychological and
cultural questioning. If psychiatry is to regain any semblance of legitimacy
and integrity, it must strip itself of false and hubristic scientific
claims and humbly submit itself to the urgent task of listening to individual
patients with patience and intelligence. Only then can we have any real
sense of what to say back to them.
The sole philosophic basis for this New Psychiatry is the championing of
empiricism above all other measures of truth. Something is valid only if it
can be demonstrated through the experimental method, otherwise it is
disregarded or relegated to "subjective" experience, which is presumed to be
inferior. This dominance of empiricism is not limited to psychiatry, and one
can easily trace the invasion of the "hard" sciences into the "soft' or
social studies.
On a larger cultural level this can be detected in the public's infatuation
with "studies," statistics and so on. This hegemony of empiricism over other
ways of thinking and knowing represents an unprecedented modern achievement
that has thoroughly infiltrated the cultural psyche, to the point now where the
average person believes easily the claims of the biologic psychiatrist.
Now, as is clear from my views already expressed, a social science dominated
by empiricism is a vulgar science, and there is a vast tradition in
philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche, which in my view irrefutably demonstrates
this. However, this is well beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say
that modern psychiatrists, like all "scientists" these days, have not time
for the basic philosophic questions that have engaged the most brilliant
minds of the past. Who needs questions about virtue when there is important
data to collect? These biologic psychiatrists never think to ask themselves
whether their own precious methods are perhaps standing on very shaky ground,
e.g., their own disavowed prejudices about what constitutes the good life.
Empiricism is one way of knowing, but certainly not the only or best way.
Biologic psychiatrists often use the standards of empiricism to answer their
critics, in effect saying that their claims are scientifically "proven" and
thus unassailable, clearly a tautological argument. I would further add that
that in my view many of the claims of biologic psychiatry do not even hold up
to their own standards of empiric science, for example their claims about the
biological and genetic bases of many mental illnesses.
In my view, the methods of experimental science are inappropriate and
misplaced when it comes to understanding the complexity of the human psyche,
as they can only objectify the mind and remove subjectivity from the heart of
human experience, thus creating an abstract entity in place of a human mind.
It is no wonder that psychiatry declared the 1990s the decade of the brain
instead of the decade of the mind. In their pursuit of the human brain, they
have quite literally lost their minds.
One way to unmask the dogma that is biologic psychiatry is to ask the
question what kind of human being is being posited as desirable, "normal," or
not disordered. Judging by the DSM-IV, it would be a person not depressed or
anxious, without perversions or sexual "dysfunction," in touch with
"reality," not alienated from society, adapted to their work, not prone to
excessive feeling states and generally productive in their life pursuits.
This is, of course, the bourgeois ideal of modern culture. We will all fit
in, produce and consume and be happy about it. Anyone who dissents by choice
or nature slips into the realm of the disordered or pathologic, is then
located as such by medical science and is then subject to social management
and control.
Now psychiatry has always provided this social function, as admirably shown
by Foucalt and others. I would submit, however, that modern psychiatry, under
the guise of medical and "scientific" authority and legitimacy, has surpassed
all past attempts by psychiatry to identify and control dissent and
individual difference. It has done this by infiltrating the cultural psyche,
a psyche already vulnerable to any kind of medical discourse, to the point
where it is a generally accepted cultural notion now that, say, depression is
an illness caused by a chemical imbalance.
Now when a person becomes depressed, for example, they are less able to read
it or interpret it as a sign that there may be a problem in their life that
needs to be looked at or addressed. They are less able to fashion their own
personal or cultural critique which could potentially lead them to more
fruitful directions. Instead they identify themselves as ill and submit to
the correction of a psychiatrist, who promises to take away the depression so
they can get back to their lives as they are. In short, the very meanings of
unhappiness are being redefined as illness.
In my view this is a dismaying cultural catastrophe. I do not mean to
suggest that psychiatry is solely to blame for this, given how wide a
cultural shift this is. However, I do think that psychiatry has not only not
resisted its role here, but actually has fulfilled it with considerable
hubris.
Thus, in my view the whole phenomenon of biologic psychiatry is itself a
symptom or acting out of a larger, underlying cultural process. Unhappiness
and suffering are not seen as resulting from real cultural conditions; for
example, the collapse of traditional institutions and the ever-increasing
hegemony of rampant consumerism in American culture.
Nor is suffering seen in the context of what it means to exist as a human
being in any historical period. Historical and existential discourse about
unhappiness is increasingly supplanted by medical discourse, and biologic
psychiatry has served as one of the major mouthpieces for this kind of
pseudoscientific and frankly pathetic medical discourse about what ails us.

I am increasingly astonished about how unable the average patient is now to
articulate reasons for their unhappiness, and how readily they will accept a
"medical" diagnosis and solution if given one by a narrow-minded
psychiatrist. This is a cultural pathologic dependence on medical authority.
Granted, there are patients who do fight this kind of definition and continue
to search for better explanations for themselves which are less
infantalizing, but in my experience this is not common. There is a
frightening choking off of the possibility for dissent and creative
questioning here, a silencing of very basic questions such as "what is this
pain?" or "what is my purpose?"
Modern psychiatry has unconscionably participated in this pathology for its
own gain and power. It is a moral, not scientific issue at stake here, and in
my view this is why many astute Americans rightfully distrust this New
Psychiatry and its utopian claims about happiness through medical progress.
So what kind of psychiatry am I advocating here? First of all, I think it is
unclear whether the field can extricate itself from its current infatuation
with technology and its own power to use it. When one reads psychiatric
journals now, one senses a dangerous giddiness about the field's
"discoveries" and "progress," which in my view are wildly and irresponsibly
overstated. All the momentum, which is mainly economically driven, is pushing
psychiatry towards further biologism.
What I am advocating is a psychiatry which devotes itself humbly to the task
of listening to patients in a way that other medical practitioners cannot.

[Dr. Baughman: …and the way psychiatry still did in the 60’s and 70’s. I shared an office at this
time, in Grand Rapids, Michigan with a humane, caring psychiatrist. He made no pretense that
he diagnosed and treated ‘brain diseases’ as is the claim, uniformly, today.]

This means paying close attention to a patient's current and past narrative
without attempting to control, manipulate or define it. From this position a
psychiatrist can then assist the patient in raising relevant questions about
their lives and pain.
The temptation to provide answers or false solutions should be absolutely
avoided here. Medications are used judiciously for lowering painful symptoms,
with considerable attention paid to the psychological effects of medication
treatment. Diagnosis should play a secondary and small role here, given that
little is known about what these diagnoses actually mean.

Above all, coercion, normalization and control need to be
assiduously guarded against, as these are natural temptations that arise
out of the dynamics of power that exist between psychiatrist and patient.

[Dr. Baughman: all on the mental health team--teachers, all school personnel, counselors, social
workers, psychologists, local police, pediatricians, general and family practitioners, neurologists,
child neurologists, adult and child/adolescent psychiatrists, have succumbed to the power trip of
‘brain diagnosis’ and of not only pontificating about the brain of another, but taking charge of it,
the child, the family, by calling in the police and courts to enforce their mutual diagnoses and
their prescriptions—and no just their IEPs—their Individualized Educational Prescription,
nothing but another empty pretense to being medical practitioners.]

A more humane psychiatry, if it is even possible in today's cultural
climate, must recognize the powerful potential of the uses and abuses of
power if it is not to become a tool of social control and normalization. As I
have outlined in this piece, these abuses of power are by no means always
obvious and self-evident, and their recognition requires rigorous thought and
self-examination. The psychiatrist plays a particular role in cultural and
individual fantasies, and an intelligent psychiatrist must be aware of the
complexity of these fantasies if he is to act in a position outside these
projections and fantasies. This requires real moral awareness on the part of
a psychiatrist who wishes to act intelligently.
What I am advocating for in outline form as stated previously are the
minimal requirements necessary for the field of psychiatry to reverse its
current degradation. What is essential at this time is for psychiatrists and
other clinicians to speak out against the ideology known as biologic
psychiatry.

[Dr. Baughman: US biological psychiatry has positioned itself , regarding monetary and political
power, exactly where the ‘biological psychiatry’ of Nazi Germany had positioned itself prior to
and in the early, pre-holocaust months of WWII. Biological psychiatry today, with all of the
involuntary control it seeks in forcing it’s treatments upon us, is the biggest threat to the
American, democratic way of life to appear in our midst since the creation of the Union.
Psychiatrists, even ‘biological’ psychiatrists all went to medical school and all know the
difference between having disease (abnormal) and not having disease (normal). They all know in
making their disease, chemical imbalance pronouncements that they have adduced a diagnostic
abnormality, that they have not proven the presence of disease. For them to say so to the
patient or parents of a child, nonetheless is a knowing violation of the right to informed consent
and is tantamount to medical malpractice.]

2006-11-07T23:48:00.000+11:00

PSYCHIATRIC COERCION SERVES THE DRUG CORPORATIONS AND THE RULING CLASS, NOT PATIENTS, by Justice Lover

To start this blog with this post is necessary if we are to understand the non-medical gist of psychiatry. Unlike medicine in general, psychiatry is not based on science, although it purports to be. As we shall see in subsequent posts, psychiatry is based on speculations, arbitrary "norms", and deceptive conclusions. However, in this post we confine the examination of psychiatry to two aspects of it only : coercion and subservience to the drug corporations.
Both are explained and appropriately opposed by two veteran American psychiatrists : Prof. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry, on the subject of psychiatric coercion, and the late Prof. Loren Mosher, on the domination of psychiatry by the drug industry.

First is the article by Prof. Szasz, then the letter of resignation from the APA by Prof. Loren Mosher. Both articles were downloaded from
http://www.stopshrinks.org/reading_room/frame_docs/1st_idx_4th.html

"The Case against Psychiatric Coercion
by Thomas S. Szasz

"To commit violent and unjust acts, it is not enough for a government to have the will or even the power; the habits, ideas, and passions of the time must lend themselves to their committal."
---Alexis de Tocqueville (1981, 297)

Political history is largely the story of the holders of power committing violent and unjust acts against their people. Examples abound: Oriental despotism, the Inquisition, the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi death camps, and the American war on drugs come quickly to mind. Involuntary psychiatric interventions belong on this list.1

When Tocqueville referred to "unjust acts," he was speaking as a detached observer, viewing state-sanctioned violence as an outsider. From the insider's point of view, state-sanctioned violence is, by definition, just. The Constitution of the United States, for example, recognized involuntary servitude as a just and humane economic policy. Throughout the civilized world people now recognize involuntary psychiatry as a just and humane therapeutic policy. Making use of the fashionable rhetoric of rights, a prominent psychiatrist describes adding the "right to treatment" to the existing criteria for assessing civil commitment as a "policy more realistically and humanely balancing the right to be sick with the right to be rescued" (Treffert 1996).

The fact that the psychiatrist is authorized to use force to impose the role of mental patient on legally competent persons against their will is prima facie evidence that the psychiatrist possesses state-sanctioned power. In 1913, Karl Jaspers ([1913] 1963)2 acknowledged the unique importance of this element of psychiatric practice. He wrote:

Admission to hospital often takes place against the will of the patient and therefore the psychiatrist finds himself in a different relation to his patient than other doctors. He tries to make this difference as negligible as possible by deliberately emphasizing his purely medical approach to the patient, but the latter in many cases is quite convinced that he is well and resists these medical efforts. (839-40)

The systematic exercise of force requires legitimation. Formerly, Church and State, representing and implementing God's design for right living, performed this function. Today, Medicine and State perform it. W. H. Auden ([1962] 1968) put it thus:

What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies.... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental health. (87)

So long as the idea of mental illness imparts legitimacy to psychiatric coercion, the myriad uses of psychiatric compulsions and excuses cannot be reformed, much less abolished. Hence, for those opposed to psychiatric coercion, the principal adversary is its legitimacy.

The Varieties of Power

In social affairs, power is usually defined as the ability to compel obedience. Its sources are coercion from above and dependency from below. By coercion I mean the legal or physical ability to deprive another person of life, liberty, or property, or to threaten such "punishment." By dependency I mean the desire or need for others as protectors or providers.3 "Nature," observed Samuel Johnson ([1709 84] 1981), "has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little" (172). The sexual control women wield (over men who desire them) is here cleverly contrasted with their legal subservience (a condition imposed on them by men).

Because the definition of power as the ability to compel obedience fails to distinguish between coercive and noncoercive means of securing obedience, it is imprecise and potentially misleading. For example, when Voltaire exclaimed, Écrazez l'infâme! he was using the word l'infâme to refer to the power of the church to incarcerate, torture, and kill people, not to the influence of the priest to misinform or mislead the gullible. The distinction I draw here is not novel, yet needs to be stated and restated. As the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead ([1933] 1961) put it, "[T]he intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms, force and persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force" (83).

I use the word force to denote the power to harm, or threaten to harm, another,4 and the word influence to refer to obedience secured by money or other rewards or temptations. The potency of force, symbolized by the gun, rests on the ability to injure or kill the Other, whereas the potency of influence rests on the ability to gratify the Other's desires. By desire I mean the experience of an unsatisfied urge, for example, for food, drugs, or sex. The experience is painful; its satisfaction is pleasurable. Individuals who depend on another person for the satisfaction of their needs (or whose needs or desires can be aroused by another) experience the Other as having power over them. Such (though not such alone) is the power of parents over their children, of doctors over their patients, of Circe over Ulysses. In proportion as we master or surmount our desires, we liberate ourselves from this source of domination.

Dependence, Domination, and Psychiatry

The paradigmatic exercise of psychiatric coercion is the imposition of an ostensibly diagnostic or therapeutic intervention on subjects against their will, legitimized by the state as protection of subjects from madness and protection of the public from the mad. Hence, the paramount source of psychiatric domination is force. Its other source is dependency, that is, the need of the powerless for comfort and care by the powerful. Involuntary psychiatric interventions rest on coercion, voluntary psychiatric interventions on dependency. It is as absurd to confuse or equate these two types of psychiatric relations as it is to confuse or equate rape and mutually desired sexual relations. I oppose involuntary psychiatric interventions not because I believe that they are necessarily "bad" for patients but because I oppose using the coercive apparatus of the state to impose psychiatric relations on persons against their will. By the same token, I support voluntary psychiatric interventions, not because I believe that they are necessarily "good" for patients but because I oppose using the power of the state to interfere with contractual relations between consenting adults (Szasz 1982).5

When people suffer from disease, oppression, or want, they naturally seek the assistance of persons who have the knowledge, skill, or power to help them or on whom they project such attributes. In ancient times, priests, whom people believed to possess the ability to intercede with powerful gods, were the premier holders of power. For a long time, curing souls, healing bodies, and relieving social-economic difficulties were all regarded as priestly activities.6 Only in the last few centuries have these roles become differentiated, as Religion, Medicine, and Politics, each institution being allotted its "proper" sphere of influence, struggled to enlarge their scope and power over the others.
The separation of church and state represents a sharp break in Western political history. Although still paying lip service to an Almighty, the U.S. Constitution is, in effect, a declaration of the principle that only the state (government) can exercise power legitimately and that the sole source of its legitimacy is the "happiness of the people" ensured by securing "the consent of the governed." Gradually, all Western states have adopted this outlook. The Argentinean poet and novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares (1986) satirized the resulting "happiness":
Well then, maybe it would be worth mentioning the three periods of history. When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When man believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons. After dreams that were too long, true nightmares we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which he always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons. (7)
Among these therapeutic reasons, the treatment of mental illness occupies a unique place.

Human beings are intensely susceptible to two types of unpleasant experiences: anxiety-and-guilt and pain-and-suffering. Each is a virtually inexhaustible source of dependency, on soul doctors, body doctors, or both. Religion, by providing myth and ritual, relieves people of anxiety-and-guilt and promises a tranquil eternal life in the hereafter. Medicine, by providing diagnosis and treatment, relieves people of pain-and-suffering and promises a healthy and endlessly extended life on earth. How does psychiatry fit into this picture?
The practice of the branch of medicine we call "psychiatry" began with the confinement of troublesome persons in madhouses. As a result, two symmetrical populations came into being: the kept, called "madmen" or "mad women," and the keepers, called "mad-doctors." During the eighteenth century, the idea of insanity and the institution of the insane asylum became established as important-indeed, socially indispensable-medico-legal concepts and methods of social control. Soon, law, medicine, and popular opinion came to see the insane asylum as the proper place for housing persons authoritatively declared (diagnosed as) insane. Initially, few people were troubled because the situation of the insane in the asylum resembled the situation of the prisoner in jail. The philosophy of the Enlightenment undermined this complacency, projecting the idea of human rights onto the center stage of Western history. Depriving mental patients of liberty had to be reconciled with society's ostensible devotion to human rights. This task was accomplished partly by conflating and confusing the concept of illness (a bodily condition) with the concept of incompetence (non compos mentis, a legal concept and, subsequently, a "mental" condition) and partly by subsuming civil commitment under the rubric of the state's police power, that is, its duty to protect the public from "dangerous" persons (lawbreakers). This dual justification of psychiatric coercion has remained essentially constant for almost 300 years (Szasz 1994).

Legitimizing Psychiatric Coercion

A crucial moment in the legitimation of modern psychiatric coercion occurred in central Europe during the early decades of this century.7 Although psychiatry and psychoanalysis arose as distinct and separate enterprises, they soon merged into a union that proved to be fateful for the future of the "mental health services" industry. Collaboration between Eugen Bleuler and Sigmund Freud and their followers created this union.

Bleuler was born in 1857 in Switzerland. After a successful career in psychiatry, in 1889 he became the head of the famed Burghölzli, the public mental hospital in Zürich. Unlike most psychiatrists, Bleuler wanted to know his patients as persons. Finding the psychiatric dogma of his day useless for that purpose, he looked to Freud's writings for help. By 1902, he had read The Interpretation of Dreams8 and made three complimentary references to it (Ellenberger 1970; Clark 1980). Two years later he initiated contact with Freud, writing him "that he and all his staff had for a couple of years been busily occupying themselves with psychoanalysis and finding various applications for it" (Jones 1953 57, 2:30).

In his biography of Freud, Ernest Jones commented: "Because of the increasingly prominent position Bleuler held among psychiatrists, Freud was eager to retain his support" (1953-57, 2:72). Then, displaying his incomprehension of psychiatric history, he added: "Unfortunately, this state of affairs [friendship between Freud and Bleuler] did not endure . His [Bleuler's] interests then moved elsewhere, from psychological to clinical psychiatry" (73). This statement is wrong. Bleuler had always been a clinical psychiatrist, never relinquished his interest in the psychological understanding of patients, and never renounced his appreciation of psychoanalysis. In 1907, replying to his critics, Bleuler wrote:

I consider that up to the present the various schools of psychology have contributed extremely little towards explaining the nature of psychogenic symptoms and diseases, but that psychoanalysis offers something towards a psychology which still awaits creation and which physicians are in need of in order to understand their patients and to cure them rationally. (Bleuler 1914, 26)

In 1925, in a 17 February letter to Freud, Bleuler expressed this point even more strongly: "Anyone who would try to understand neurology or psychiatry without possessing a knowledge of psychoanalysis would seem to me like a dinosaur-I say 'would seem' not 'seems,' for there no longer are such people, even among those who enjoy depreciating psychoanalysis!" (Bleuler 1925, 117).
In his epochal work, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Bleuler courageously incorporated a psychoanalytic perspective in his interpretation of the behavior of schizophrenic patients. The following example is illustrative. A woman patient declares that "she is Switzerland." Bleuler ([1911] 1950) wrote: "She says, 'I am Switzerland.' She may also say, 'I am freedom,' since for her Switzerland means nothing else than freedom" (429). The patient's "symptom" reveals that she is protesting against her confinement; Bleuler's use of this example reveals that he recognized the legitimacy of her protest.

This is not the place to dwell on Bleuler's monumental work. Suffice it to note that although he defined schizophrenia as a "disease [that] is characterized by a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world" (150), his foregoing remarks show that he recognized that schizophrenic "thinking" was a type of poetry and protest as well.9 However, by pathologizing the schizophrenic's behavior, Bleuler undermined that common-sense judgment and the psychiatric response to it: persons incarcerated in the mental hospital were made to appear as medical patients suffering from a disease; the psychiatrist incarcerating them was made to appear as a medical doctor treating a disease; and the power relations between them were buried more deeply than ever.

But Bleuler, who was honestly seeking the truth, did not let the matter rest there. In 1919, when his reputation as a psychiatrist was second to none in the world, he wrote a book, now virtually forgotten, that is largely a denunciation of psychiatric power. He wrote: "Many a case of 'latent' schizophrenia is diagnosed as total in all certainty. Never does it occur to the doctor to consider all the consequences: confinement of the patient to a mental institution, deprivation of civil rights, abandonment of his profession, etc." ([1919] 1970, 115). Who spoke of the civil rights of mental patients in those days? Not Freud. Not psychiatrists. But Bleuler did. In the final paragraph of his book on schizophrenia, he commented on "the most serious of all schizophrenic symptoms the suicidal drive":

I am even taking this opportunity to state clearly that our present-day social system demands great and entirely inappropriate cruelty from the psychiatrist in this respect. People are being forced to continue to live a life that has become unbearable for them for valid reasons; this alone is bad enough. However, it is even worse, when life is made increasingly intolerable for these patients by using every means to subject them to constant humiliating surveillance. ([1911] 1950, 488)

Bleuler must have felt more than a little guilty to have advanced so disingenuous a disclaimer. No one forces a person to become a jailer confining criminals or to become a psychiatrist confining mental patients.

The Moral Suicide of Psychoanalysis

Notwithstanding the sloppy scholarship of many psychiatric historians, it is important to remember that Sigmund Freud was not a psychiatrist. In late nineteenth-century Europe, the term "psychiatrist" meant a physician working in the public mental hospital system. Because Jews were barred from employment in state bureaucracies, they could not be psychiatrists and hence could not force people to be their unwilling patients.
Not only was Freud not a psychiatrist, most psychiatrists viewed his writings as inimical to psychiatry. For example, the prominent German psychiatrist Franz von Luschan blamed "Bleuler for his astonishing behavior in helping to promulgate the epidemic [i.e., psychoanalysis]" (Jones 1953-57, 2:119). Psychiatrists objected to Freud's writings not because he opposed involuntary psychiatric interventions; in fact, he enthusiastically supported psychiatric excuses and coercions (Szasz [1976] 1990, 136-37). Instead, they disapproved of Freud's work because they wanted to see themselves as physicians with a professional identity firmly anchored in neurology and neuropathology; and because they wanted to see their patients as suffering from bona fide diseases, that is, bodily abnormalities with physical causes independent of the sufferer's personal history. By introducing a new set of disease-causative agents-namely, the patient's life history (especially "traumas" suffered during childhood)-Freud spoiled this purely physicalistic conception of etiology and pathology.10 At the same time, he reinforced the established social prestige of psychiatry with the seemingly scientific prestige of psychoanalysis. The psychiatric profession now became a mighty river, formed by the confluence of two large tributaries: the state hospital system, confining and caring for some of the injured and injurious members of society in institutions; and the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, offering a system of interpreting behavior and counseling to non-institutionalized, fee-paying individuals. As a result of this expansion, psychiatric power became more impervious to criticism than ever.

Although I offer no new information concerning the collaboration between Bleuler and Freud, the inference I draw concerning its impact on the history of psychiatry is, I believe, novel. Historians of psychiatry and psychoanalysis have overlooked how Freud's coveting the blessings of psychiatry combined with Bleuler's perceptive use of psychoanalytic insights reinforced the legitimacy of the psychiatric enterprise, which had previously labored under a cloud of scientific and civil-libertarian suspicion. Consider the evidence.
In his 1914, "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement," Freud (1953-74) wrote: "A communication from Bleuler had informed me that my works had been studied and made use of in the Burghölzli. I have repeatedly acknowledged with gratitude the great services rendered by the Zürich school of Psychiatry in the spread of psychoanalysis" (14:26-27). What did Freud mean here by "psychoanalysis"? Clearly, he could not have meant that its subjects must be voluntary clients, an element that he had identified nine years earlier as intrinsic to the practice of psychoanalysis. In 1905, Freud had declared: "Nor is the method applicable to people who are not driven to seek treatment by their own sufferings, but who submit to it only because they are forced to by the authority of relatives" (1953-74, 7: 263-64, my emphasis). If so, psychoanalysis was even less applicable to people forced to submit to "it" by the authority of policemen, judges, and psychiatrists.

It is reasonable to infer that in reference to his alliance with the psychiatrists at the Burghölzli, Freud did not use the word psychoanalysis to identify a voluntary relationship between a healer and his subject but rather a body of ideas associated with his name. This interpretation is supported by his remark that "Jung successfully applied the analytic method of interpretation to the most alien and obscure phenomena of dementia praecox [schizophrenia], so that their sources in the life-history and interests of the patient came clearly to light. After this, it was impossible for psychiatrists to ignore psychoanalysis any longer" (1953-74, 14:28, my emphasis).

As we know, it was not at all impossible for psychiatrists to ignore psychoanalysis, if the term includes respect for the current life history and civil rights of the patient. Indeed, Freud himself led the legions that joyously proceeded to ignore the most obvious life historical event in the life of the schizophrenic patient: namely, that a psychiatrist is depriving him of liberty. I have called attention elsewhere to Freud's glaring neglect of Schreber's incarceration. In 1976, I wrote:

In his most famous study of schizophrenia, the Schreber case, Freud devotes page after page to speculations about the character and causes of Schreber's "illness," but not a word to the problem posed by his imprisonment or his right to freedom. Schreber, who was "psychotic," questioned the legitimacy of his confinement, and Schreber, the madman, sought and secured his freedom. Freud, who was a "psychoanalyst," never questioned the legitimacy of Schreber's confinement, and Freud, the psychopathologist, cared no more about Schreber's freedom than a pathologist cares about the freedom of one of his specimens preserved in alcohol. (Szasz 1988b, 39)

The writer and literary critic Gabriel Josipovici (1988) reminds us that "We do not decipher people, we encounter them" (307). The psychiatrist's power to coerce the patient negates the possibility of a humane encounter between them. Indeed, interpreted as a command, the rule that we should not decipher but encounter the Other violates the canons of psychiatry and the laws of the Therapeutic State. To remain a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist must view his client as a "patient" afflicted with a dangerous "mental disease," and himself as a physician whose task is not only to treat mental diseases but also to incarcerate innocent patients deemed to be "dangerous" and exculpate guilty patients deemed to be innocent by reason of insanity. No amount of semantic transfusion from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis can, or was intended to, alter these elementary facts of psychiatry, characteristic of twentieth-century life in free and totalitarian societies alike.

I want to offer some additional observations concerning Freud's contributions to the enhancement and legitimation of psychiatric power. In 1914, in his essay "On Narcissism," Freud wrote: "Patients of this kind [schizophrenics] display two fundamental characteristics: megalomania and diversion of their interest from the external world-from people and things. In consequence of the latter change, they become inaccessible to the influence of psychoanalysis and cannot be cured by our efforts" (1953-74, 14:74). Characterizing the schizophrenic as a person who, by turning away from "things and people," deprives himself of the benefits of psychoanalytic treatment is like characterizing the atheist as a person who, by turning away from God, deprives himself of the benefits of religious salvation. Instead of acknowledging that the schizophrenic's avoidance of the ministrations of a psychoanalyst is a decision, similar to a person's decision to avoid the ministrations of a chiropractor or Christian Science healer, Freud defined it as itself a symptom of schizophrenia and implied that if the schizophrenic were willing to submit to the analyst, psychoanalysis could cure him.

Although psychiatrists as well as psychoanalysts now treat psychoanalysis as a branch of psychiatry, the truth is that before psychoanalysis was absorbed into psychiatry, the two enterprises were almost antithetical. Politically, the essence of the psychoanalytic relationship was the absence of the coercions traditionally present in relations between psychiatrists and mental patients. Practically, this meant that the analyst's failure to respect the patient's personal autonomy or the analyst's interference in the client's life was incompatible with the psychoanalytic relationship. The respective aims, values, and practices of psychiatry and psychoanalysis may be summarized as follows:

- To effect a cure, psychiatrists coerce and control their "patients": they incarcerate the (involuntary) victims and impose various unwanted chemical and physical interventions on them.
- To conduct a dialogue, psychoanalysts contract and cooperate with their "patients": they listen and talk to the (voluntary) interlocutors, who pay for the services they receive (Szasz 1988a).

Before psychoanalysis became institutionalized as a profession, the psychoanalytic relationship represented a genuinely new social development, namely, a noncoercive, secular help ("therapy") for problems in living (called "neuroses"). The term "psychoanalysis" then denoted a confidential dialogue between an expert and a client, the former rejecting the role of custodial psychiatrist, the latter assuming the role of responsible, voluntary patient. The psychiatric and psychoanalytic enterprises rested on totally different premises and entailed mutually incompatible practices:

- Traditional psychiatrists were salaried physicians who worked in a mental institution; their source of income was the state; they functioned as agents of bureaucratic superiors and the patient's relatives. Typical mental hospital inmates were poor persons, cast in the patient role against their will, housed in a public mental hospital.

- Traditional psychoanalysts were self-employed professionals who worked in private offices; their source of income was patients; they functioned as agents of the patients. Typical analytic patients were rich persons (usually wealthier than the analyst) who cast themselves in the patient role and lived in their own home or wherever they pleased.

As soon as Freud achieved the recognition he craved, he destroyed the core value of the psychoanalytic relationship. I refer to his assuming the authority of certifying competence in psychoanalysis and requiring that individuals seeking to become psychoanalysts undergo a so-called training analysis. If voluntariness is an essential element of the psychoanalytic relationship, then a compulsory training analysis is a contradiction in terms.11 The betrayal of confidentiality intrinsic to training analysis drove a stake through the heart of the role of the psychoanalyst. The result was the destruction of the moral integrity and healing potential of the human encounter called "psychoanalysis" (Szasz 1958, 1960).

"Power Is Not a Means"

For more than forty years I have argued that the institution of psychiatry rests on civil commitment and the insanity defense and that each is a paradigm of the perversion of medical power. If the persons called "patients" break no law, they have a right to liberty. And if they break the law, they ought to be adjudicated and punished in the criminal justice system. It is as simple as that. Nevertheless, so long as conventional wisdom decrees that mental patients must be protected from themselves, that society must be protected from mental patients, and that both tasks rightfully belong to psychiatrists wielding powers appropriate to the performance of these duties, psychiatric power will remain unreformable.

Of course, many people do threaten society: they assault, injure, rob, and kill others. Some are regarded and managed as criminals, others as mental patients. In either case, society needs protection from the aggressors. What does psychiatry contribute to the management of such persons? Civil commitment and the insanity defense: inculpating the innocent and exculpating the guilty. Both interventions authenticate as "real" the socially useful fictions of mental illness and psychiatric expertise. Both create and confirm the illusion that we are coping wisely and well with vexing social problems, when in fact we are obfuscating and aggravating them. Alas, psychiatric power corrupts not only the psychiatrists who wield it and the patients who are subjected to it, but the community that supports it as well.

As Orwell's (1949) nightmarish vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four nears its climax, O'Brien explains the functional anatomy of power to Winston:
[N]o one seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? (266)
The empire of psychiatric power is more than three hundred years old and grows daily more all-encompassing. But we have not yet begun to acknowledge its existence, much less to understand its role in our society.

References
Auden, W. H. [1962] 1968. The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays. New York: Vintage.
Bleuler, Eugen. 1914. Quoted in Sigmund Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by J. Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1953-74).
---. 1925. Letter to Sigmund Freud (February 17). Quoted in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1953-57).
---. [1911] 1950. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Translated by Joseph Zinkin. New York: International Universities Press.
---. [1919] 1970. Autistic Undisciplined Thinking in Medicine and How to Overcome It. Translated and edited by Ernest Harms, with a preface by Manfred Bleuler. Darien, Conn: Hafner.
Casares, Adolfo Bioy. 1986. Plans for an Escape to Carmelo. New York Review of Books, 10 April.
Clark, W. R. 1980. Freud: The Man and the Cause. London: Jonathan Cape and Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Ellenberger, H. F. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953-74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey. 24 vol. London: Hogarth.
Jaspers, K. [1913, 1946] 1963. General Psychopathology. 7th ed. Translated by J. Hoenig and M. W. Hamilton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Samuel. [1708-84] 1981. Quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms: A Personal Selection. Edited by W. H. Auden and L. Kronenberger. New York: Dorset.
Jones, Ernest. 1953-57. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vol. New York: Basic Books.
Josipovici, Gabriel. 1988. The Book of God: A Response to the Bible. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Orwell, G. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Szasz, T. S. 1958. Psychoanalytic Training: A Socio-Psychological Analysis of Its History and Present Status. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39:598-613.
---. 1960. Three Problems in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Training. A.M.A. Archives of General Psychiatry 3:82-94. ---. 1982. The Psychiatric Will. American Psychologist 37:762-70.
---. [1965] 1988a. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. ---. [1976] 1988b. Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.
---. [1976] 1990. Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.
---. 1994. Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted. New York: Wiley.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1981. Quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms: A Personal Selection. Edited by W. H. Auden and L. Kronenberger. New York: Dorset.
Treffert, D. A. 1996. Dangerousness (Letters). Psychiatric News 31:14.
Whitehead, Alfred N. [1933] 1961. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press.
Acknowledgments: This paper is a revised version of an address presented at the conference on "The Construction of Psychiatric Authority," University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 18-20 June 1996.
*Thomas Szasz is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York.
1. Unless the context calls for a restricted use of the words psychiatry and psychiatrist, I use these terms to refer to all mental health professions and professionals.
2. Jaspers later abandoned psychiatry for philosophy.
3. The spheres of legitimacy of power and dependency are defined by law, custom, and tradition.
4. The legally unauthorized use of force is a felony.
5. Some psychiatric critics, opposing the use of psychiatric drugs, electric shock treatment, or psychotherapy, advocate the legal prohibition of these methods or relationships on the ground that people need protection from the "exploitation" intrinsic to the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy. I regard state-sanctioned "protection" from psychiatric treatment as just as patronizing as state-sanctioned protection from psychiatric illness. Both are state-imposed denials of the basic human right to engage in, or refrain from, making contracts.
6. Jesus and Mother Teresa still project this sort of image.
7. The introduction of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s further legitimated psychiatric coercion. Today, it is reinforced by brain-scanning methods allegedly demonstrating that mental diseases are brain diseases that, nevertheless, ought to be treated by psychiatrists rather than by neurologists.
8. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, the watershed date in the history of psychoanalysis.
9. The points I wish to emphasize here are, first, that thinking, feeling, and relating to the external world are, prima facie, not matters of medical concern; and second, that whatever an "alteration of thinking and feeling" might be, it is patently an inadequate justification for depriving a person of liberty.
10. Depending on one's point of view, one might also say that Freud improved these concepts. In any case, by adding psychogenesis to somatogenesis, and psychogenic diseases (for example, perversions) to somatogenic diseases (for example, pneumonia), Freud expanded the conceptual categories of etiology and pathology.
11. Because children are, by definition, involuntary subjects, child analysis is also a contradiction in terms.
The Independent Review, Vol.I, No.4, Spring 1997, ISSN 1086-1653, Copyright 1997, pp. 485-498."
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"Letter of Resignation from the American Psychiatric Association
4 December 1998

Loren R. Mosher, M.D. to Rodrigo Munoz, M.D., President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)

Dear Rod,

After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this action is my belief that I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association. Luckily, the organization's true identity requires no change in the acronym.
Unfortunately, APA reflects, and reinforces, in word and deed, our drug dependent society. Yet it helps wage war on "drugs". "Dual diagnosis" clients are a major problem for the field but not because of the "good" drugs we prescribe. "Bad" ones are those that are obtained mostly without a prescription. A Marxist would observe that being a good capitalist organization, APA likes only those drugs from which it can derive a profit -- directly or indirectly. This is not a group for me. At this point in history, in my view, psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. The APA could not continue without the pharmaceutical company support of meetings, symposia, workshops, journal advertising, grand rounds luncheons, unrestricted educational grants etc. etc. Psychiatrists have become the minions of drug company promotions. APA, of course, maintains that its independence and autonomy are not compromised in this enmeshed situation. Anyone with the least bit of common sense attending the annual meeting would observe how the drug company exhibits and "industry sponsored symposia" draw crowds with their various enticements, while the serious scientific sessions are barely attended. Psychiatric training reflects their influence as well: the most important part of a resident's curriculum is the art and quasi-science of dealing drugs, i.e., prescription writing.

These psychopharmacological limitations on our abilities to be complete physicians also limit our intellectual horizons. No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts -- rather we are there to realign our patients' neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter -- whatever its configuration. So, our guild organization provides a rationale, by its neurobiological tunnel vision, for keeping our distance from the molecule conglomerates we have come to define as patients. We condone and promote the widespread use and misuse of toxic chemicals that we know have serious long term effects -- tardive dyskinesia, tardive dementia and serious withdrawal syndromes. So, do I want to be a drug company patsy who treats molecules with their formulary? No, thank you very much. It saddens me that after 35 years as a psychiatrist I look forward to being dissociated from such an organization. In no way does it represent my interests. It is not within my capacities to buy into the current biomedical-reductionistic model heralded by the psychiatric leadership as once again marrying us to somatic medicine. This is a matter of fashion, politics and, like the pharmaceutical house connection, money.

In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI (I don't remember the members being asked if they supported such an association) such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the "champion of their clients" the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring: NAMI with tacit APA approval, has set out a pro-neuroleptic drug and easy commitment-institutionalization agenda that violates the civil rights of their offspring. For the most part we stand by and allow this fascistic agenda to move forward. Their psychiatric god, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, is allowed to diagnose and recommend treatment to those in the NAMI organization with whom he disagrees. Clearly, a violation of medical ethics. Does APA protest? Of course not, because he is speaking what APA agrees with, but can't explicitly espouse. He is allowed to be a foil; after all - he is no longer a member of APA. (Slick work APA!) The shortsightedness of this marriage of convenience between APA, NAMI, and the drug companies (who gleefully support both groups because of their shared pro-drug stance) is an abomination. I want no part of a psychiatry of oppression and social control.

"Biologically based brain diseases" are certainly convenient for families and practitioners alike. It is no-fault insurance against personal responsibility. We are all just helplessly caught up in a swirl of brain pathology for which no one, except DNA, is responsible. Now, to begin with, anything that has an anatomically defined specific brain pathology becomes the province of neurology (syphilis is an excellent example). So, to be consistent with this "brain disease" view, all the major psychiatric disorders would become the territory of our neurologic colleagues. Without having surveyed them I believe they would eschew responsibility for these problematic individuals. However, consistency would demand our giving over "biologic brain diseases" to them. The fact that there is no evidence confirming the brain disease attribution is, at this point, irrelevant. What we are dealing with here is fashion, politics and money. This level of intellectual /scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support by my membership.

I view with no surprise that psychiatric training is being systematically disavowed by American medical school graduates. This must give us cause for concern about the state of today's psychiatry. It must mean -- at least in part that they view psychiatry as being very limited and unchallenging. To me it seems clear that we are headed toward a situation in which, except for academics, most psychiatric practitioners will have no real, relationships -- so vital to the healing process -- with the disturbed and disturbing persons they treat. Their sole role will be that of prescription writers -- ciphers in the guise of being "helpers".

Finally, why must the APA pretend to know more than it does? DSM IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document. To its credit it says so -- although its brief apologia is rarely noted. DSM IV has become a bible and a money making best seller -- its major failings notwithstanding. It confines and defines practice, some take it seriously, others more realistically. It is the way to get paid. Diagnostic reliability is easy to attain for research projects. The issue is what do the categories tell us? Do they in fact accurately represent the person with a problem? They don't, and can't, because there are no external validating criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder. So, where are we? APA as an organization has implicitly (sometimes explicitly as well) bought into a theoretical hoax. Is psychiatry a hoax -- as practiced today? Unfortunately, the answer is mostly yes.

do I recommend to the organization upon leaving after experiencing three decades of its history?

1. To begin with, let us be ourselves. Stop taking on unholy alliances without the members' permission.
2. Get real about science, politics and money. Label each for what it is -- that is, be honest.
3.Get out of bed with NAMI and the drug companies. APA should align itself, if one believes its rhetoric, with the true consumer groups, i.e., the ex-patients, psychiatric survivors etc.
4.Talk to the membership -- I can't be alone in my views.

We seem to have forgotten a basic principle -- the need to be patient/client/consumer satisfaction oriented. I always remember Manfred Bleuler's wisdom: "Loren, you must never forget that you are your patient's employee." In the end they will determine whether or not psychiatry survives in the service marketplace. "