-- The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) is a 50-year mental health watchdog responsible for more than 185 laws worldwide that protect mental health patients from abuse. Until the group’s formation in 1969, the inequity in the mental health system and laws meant patients could be involuntarily incarcerated without legal representation, forcibly treated and damaged—even raped in institutions—without recourse. Psychotropic drugs, known to cause violent or suicidal behavior and permanent damage to the nervous system were the treatment status quo, with no right to refuse them. Consequently, CCHR developed a Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a guideline that, if implemented, can prevent abuses, reduce the costs of a coercive system driven by hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and save lives.
Among the reforms CCHR has achieved using this Declaration are dozens of laws enacted in U.S. States that now make it a criminal offense for a psychiatrist, psychologist or therapist to have sexual contact with a patient. Children can no longer be forced through schools to take a psychotropic drug as a requisite for their education. A Federal hearing in 1991 exposed the link between antidepressants and violence/suicide. This eventually led to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Black Box warning on antidepressants that CCHR and many others fought for to inform parents that the drugs could cause suicide in children.[1]
Today, however, with increasing acts of violence in schools and the community, CCHR says government reaction has been to resort back to punitive and coercive practices, including wider powers to involuntarily commit someone who appears to be a danger. CCHR insists that this only begets more violence.
Recent research reported in the Los Angeles Times found that “in the two years after a fatal school shooting, the rate at which antidepressants were prescribed to children and teens rose by 21% within a tight ring around the affected school.” However, writer, Martha Rosenberg noted that this reflects a “genuine deterioration in our mental health system” when doctors continue to prescribe SSRI antidepressants to young people despite their boxed warning that says they “may increase suicidal thoughts or actions in some people 24 years of age and younger.” The warning could add “homicidal thoughts,” Rosenberg states.[2]
Jan Eastgate, CCHR’s international president says, “The drugs prescribed to children for an understandable upset over the violence witnessed or experienced, have the potential of causing the very condition they are seeking relief from.”
One international expert on these antidepressants estimated that at one time the drugs were implicated in about 90% of school shootings. “We’ve got good evidence that the drugs can make people violent and you’d have to reason from that that there may be more episodes of violence,” Prof. David Healy stated.[3] At least 15 published medical studies show psychotropic drug adverse effects that include mania, psychosis, violence and homicidal ideation. Read CCHR’s report Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence and Suicide.
Rosenberg and others’ concerns were reflected in a 2017 United Nations Special Rapporteur report on the right to health, wherein Dr. Dainius Pūras called for a revolution in mental health care around the world to “end decades of neglect, abuse and violence.” He stated: “The use of psychotropic medications as the first line treatment for depression and other conditions is, quite simply, unsupported by the evidence. The excessive use of medications and other biomedical interventions, based on a reductive neurobiological paradigm causes more harm than good, undermines the right to health, and must be abandoned.”
Dr. Puras was refreshingly straight forward about the widespread proliferation of psychiatric drugs stating, “There is now unequivocal evidence of the failures of a system that relies too heavily on the biomedical model of mental health services, including the front-line and excessive use of psychotropic medicines, and yet these models persist.”[4]
CCHR says that with 20 million children a year prescribed psychotropic drugs and at least 1.4 million individuals globally being electroshocked, governments should heed the UN’s concerns about mental health.
Eastgate states says, “Real mental health awareness comes from enacting rights to protect against intrusive and abusive psychiatric and psychological practices. That unwanted incarceration and damaging treatment can still be mandated by law if you are subjectively considered a ‘danger’ must change.”
Among the rights the Declaration addresses are:
• Full-informed consent, including information that unlike for physical diseases, there are no scientific/medical tests to confirm a diagnosis of psychiatric disorder; it’s a subjective practice.
• Recognizing that behavioral disorders are not physical diseases, and, therefore, the mental health system should prohibit physically damaging treatments such as electroshock and psychosurgery, to treat emotional problems.
• The right to refuse psychiatric drugs documented by international drug regulatory agencies to be harmful, addictive or potentially lethal.
• Full disclosure of all documented risks of any proposed drug or other mental or psychological treatment.
The right to be informed of all available medical treatments as alternatives to physically damaging practices.
• No one may be denied his or her personal liberty by reason of mental disorder, without a fair jury trial by laymen and with proper legal representation.
• No person shall be admitted to or held in a psychiatric institution, hospital or facility because of their political, religious or cultural or social beliefs and practices.
CCHR encourages patients or their families to avail themselves of its online abuse case form to report any abuses. CCHR is increasing its public awareness campaign over the holiday season and throughout 2020.
CCHR is the mental health watchdog responsible for more than 180 laws that now protect patients from damaging practices. DONATE to support its work here: www.cchrint.org/cchrint-donate
References:
[1] www.cchrint.org/about-us/cchr-accomplishments/
[2] www.opednews.com/articles/School-Shootings-Drive-Ant-by-Martha-Rosenberg-Drug-Abuse-Alcohol_Drug-Abuse-Use_Drug-Companies-Marketing_Drugs-Prescription-191218-527.html
[3] www.wnd.com/2012/12/psych-meds-linked-to-90-of-school-shootings/#i1JviHwg3g2T7KSt.99; www.upi.com/Analysis-Anti-depressants-tied-toviolence/85331158030000/
[4] www.hhrjournal.org/2017/04/world-health-day-power-imbalances-and-inequalities-big-part-of-poor-mental-health; www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21689
Release ID: 88940425