The Prime Minister’s Office announced yesterday the MHRA‘s intention to advise prescription drug users to report adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products, in response to a petition started by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in London, which called for ‘Black Box Warnings’ on psychotropic drugs.

According to CCHR, whose mission is ‘to expose and eradicate psychiatric violations of human rights,’ there have been 119 international warnings against psycho-pharmaceuticals since the year 2000. Included among these are well-known psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin, Prozac and Seroxat.^[1]

Responding to the petition, the Government pointed to the Yellow Card Scheme, which is run by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the Commission on Human Medicines (CHM), and which collects information on side effects and adverse drug reactions.

Supporting the petition’s aim, the Government announced a change to Patient Information Leaflets, rather than on-the-box warnings:

“As part of the MHRA’s strategy to raise public awareness of the Yellow Card Scheme, the Agency is seeking to include a statement in Patient Information Leaflets making consumers aware of the need to report suspected adverse drug reactions. While this is not currently a requirement of European legislation, in the UK it is considered good practice.”^[1]

CCHR supporters highlighted child suicides linked to psychiatric antidepressants at a demonstration in Liverpool last week, in response to the annual meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists which took place at Liverpool’s BT Convention Centre. Supporters included members of the Church of Scientology, which originally founded the organisation with Jewish Professor of Psychiatry Dr Thomas Szasz in 1969.

CCHR is said to be happy with the petition response.

Related Links:

• MHRA
• Yellow Card Scheme
• CCHR UK
• Prime Minister’s Office

First published at NowPublic.com

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) was founded by members of the Church of Scientology, which is how I became aware of it and its mission. The following is a news article about a demonstration staged by CCHR in Liverpool…

Attendees arrived at the annual meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Liverpool yesteday, amid fierce protest from human rights watchdog the ‘Citizens Commission on Human Rights’ (CCHR), whose supporters donned black t-shirts and waved placards with photos of children who have died as a result of psychiatrist-prescribed medications or psychiatric abuse.

CCHR’s national spokesperson Brian Daniels pointed to the example of Adrian Keegan from Shropshire, a 19-year old boy who hanged himself after becoming suicidal as an apparent “side effect” of the antidepressant Seroxat.

“While it can’t be denied that children and adolescents do experience problems, that some can be argumentative, boisterous or even disruptive, psychiatry’s fixation on labelling such difficulties as a mental ‘disorder’ is not only unscientific but medical fraud,” argues Daniels. “Representing that these troubles can only be alleviated with dangerous pills is dishonest, harmful and deadly.”

Founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and Dr Thomas Szasz, former professor of psychiatry and author of the infamous critical text ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’, CCHR recently celebrated four decades of campaigning to eradicate abuse in the mental health profession.

Some psychiatrists in attendance welcomed the protesters’ stance against ambiguous drugs such as Ritalin, prescribed for the controversial ADHD—Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder—which CCHR describes as “a fraudulent label” with “no scientific basis”. One psychiatrist said they felt “intimidated”.

This week also sees a five-day stopover in Liverpool of CCHR’s travelling exhibition ‘Psychiatry: An Industry of Death’, modelled on the permanent museum of the same name, which is housed at CCHR’s international headquarters in Los Angeles.

One visitor gave an emotional account of her own brush with what she felt was psychiatric abuse as she was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility whilst pregnant.

“I took the pills the first time and I just felt dead,” said the woman from St. Helens, Merseyside. “I pretended to take the rest and just had to act a bit nutty so they wouldn’t notice. It was horrible.”

Psychiatrists and others in attendance at the Royal College’s meeting were also invited to visit the exhibition, which is open to the public at the Friends Meeting House in Liverpool city centre until this Friday.

To report a case of psychiatric abuse of human rights, contact CCHR in confidence—details at www.cchr.org.uk.

First published on NowPublic

“[B]enzodiazepines [a class of drugs that includes Valium and Xanax] can produce a wide variety of abnormal mental responses and hazardous behavioral abnormalities, including rebound anxiety and insomnia, psychosis, paranoia, violence, antisocial acts, depression, and suicide.”

For an anti-anxiety medication, it’s pretty worrying that possible adverse reactions to the drug would include anxiety! Furthermore, its listed side effects also include anxiety among the more concerning ones, like “liver problems” and “memory impairment”. If a person is anxious, what the hell are they doing taking something like this?

Chimps are some of our closest relatives, taxonomically speaking. Travis the chimp, who lived in Connecticut, USA, was raised by his owner Sandra Herold, now 70 years of age, as if he was a human child. Seldom causing any trouble in the past, 15-year old Travis was normally mild-mannered and did many things just as humans do, including getting in and out of cars and his house, dressing himself and eating at the table. One day he takes Xanax and flips out. How does that bode for our own race? Well judging by the above, it’s a pretty dangerous narcotic. So “not very well” is the answer as far as anyone prescribed Xanax should be concerned.

It’s beyond me why drugs would be prescribed for this kind of thing anyway. The Scientology Handbook, based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard, shows one source of anxiety (in humans of course) to be the environment in which we live. Solutions for a Dangerous Environment is a chapter and booklet from the Handbook that shows you how to deal with feeling afraid or helpless, as if you can’t do anything about the things going on around you, like the rapes, murders, robberies and so on that you see, read or hear about in the news. And let me assure you there are no drugs involved.

Psychiatrists will prescribe the most random drugs for situations the likes of which occur to many people at some time in their life. Why must every facet of human nature be labelled as a “disorder”? It mustn’t. Don’t let them get away with it. Get the facts; fight back—visit CCHR.org and find out how you can help eradicate psychiatric abuse and clean up the field of mental health.

The US presidential elections are huge news, spanning the globe with their influence. Recently we’ve tuned in to criticism of Sarah Palin, Republican candidate John McCain’s chosen running mate for the potential Vice Presidency. She’s a pro-life Christian and said that evolution and creationism should both be discussed in schools. She’s under heavy fire at the moment and I’m not about to take sides, but she’s been very open about her personal beliefs, which is a bold move in politics. A professor at the Royal Society said that creationism should be taught as a ‘world view.’ He was blasted in readers’ comments because he is also a Christian minister.

All doom and gloom? I don’t think so. Perhaps the most religious people I know are atheists. “What?!” you say. Well if we’re going to talk about ‘religious’ in terms of firmly set beliefs and a kind of stubbornness toward changing them, then to me it’s those who believe that ‘religion’ is nonsense who are the most guilty. I, of course, am willing to deal with that, as I do every day in our increasingly secular society, isolated from religion by an increasing mockery of it in the media. Religion vs. science is a far more heated debate, and I’m not about to throw myself as bait to the likes of Richard Dawkins, who I see as the [un]spiritual leader of the atheist movement. Oh, have a laugh won’t you? Let’s not get serious.

So back to school, as they say. We’re looking here at two viewpoints that have been represented as diametrically opposed to one another. Creationism is defined by Oxford as “the belief that the universe and living creatures were created by God in accordance with the account given in the Old Testament.” Evolution is a bit different. In our sense, we’re looking at what Oxford says is “the process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed, especially by natural selection.”

Genetics is a subject that deals with evolution as a principle. When I studied genetics in biology and additional classes, the process of natural selection was discussed. It was stressed however that this is a theory for which much evidence exists, but which cannot be conclusively proven. Genetic anomalies and the survival of unwanted hereditary conditions such as night blindness, were cited as examples of its unpredictability. In addition, it was postulated that the improvement of modern medical procedures could have had an impact on the process of natural selection, because we can now save the lives of those with traits that would, in theory, have been made extinct by the evolutionary process.

Then there’s creationism. When I was at school, Religious Education was compulsory. I had one good R.E. teacher and he left the teaching profession to become a priest. The rest of my R.E. teachers made lessons boring and restricted thinking during classes so that it just became a chore. For me it became a game: how can I annoy the R.E. teacher today? I would regularly write “God” without a capital “G,” refer to anything but Christianity in my essays, and try to find ways to fault the teacher. Needless to say, I’ve grown up since my school days. But there was always a sense of what I termed ‘ramming it down your neck’ in those lessons. I am emphatically not a proponent of such teaching methods. But even in R.E. lessons, at least during secondary (high) school, creationism was rarely discussed. It was left to the personal beliefs of the students. The one time it was discussed was in debating the possibility that the Bible could be interpreted as symbolic rather than literal, an idea which many Christians I know hold true.

But if evolution says that life changes and adapts, and creationism says that life was created by God, how can the two be positioned in a head-on battle? The simple answer is, they can’t. Creationism is a religious and personal belief about the coming into existence of life and the physical universe. Evolution is a theory postulated by Charles Darwin about which much scientific evidence exists. But nothing in history has succeeded in discounting the possibility that there is another influence on evolution than mere ‘chance’; indeed, it is seldom stated that this is impossible, or even improbable.

The Big Bang is another theory which is almost as difficult to prove as the existence of God. But scientists have clung to it because it explains many phenomena which they see in space. It tends to reconcile the evidence they have before them. You might note that this similar to a line used by some atheists in ‘explaining’ why people hold religious beliefs: “It tends to explain what they see around them.” Either way, many scientists also hold religious beliefs and the idea that you have to be an atheist in order to be a scientist is false, and I cannot stress that enough.

The most important thing in all of this is one’s integrity. In short, this is being true to your observations and knowledge. If you see something and as far as you’re concerned, you know it happened, then that’s fine with me. Just because I didn’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for you. And it works both ways. If you don’t believe in miracles because you’ve never experienced one, or if you know miracles can be because you have experienced them, then I would say both are equally correct. The problem comes when the two opposing views begin to, well, oppose one another. If I were to criticise everything that I heard about that wasn’t in line with what I personally believed, I would be seen as a bigot, most likely.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself and when you lose that you have lost everything.
—L. Ron Hubbard, Personal Integrity.

Destruction of an opposing reality is far from the nicest thing one can do. That’s not to say we should be passive about radical ideas that could have a negative impact, nor that we should teach the theory of evolution as a mere ‘belief.’ In a school science lesson however, the possibility of other, perhaps spiritual factors, in shaping the course of evolution, should not be attacked. It probably shouldn’t be promoted either, as this would be seen as unscientific due to the lack of tangible evidence. But there is no tangible evidence for the existence of ‘chance’ either, and scientists should be reminded of this. In my opinion, creationism is not a matter of scientific interest. The Big Bang then, should always be taught as a theory until such a time as more evidence becomes apparent. But the opposition of science and religion should not be brought into the school system and nor should their separation.

Before you get too excited, I moderate these comments. I’d love to hear what you think about this, but let’s not get carried away. I understand this is a touchy topic…

NEW YORK—A video was released today of a woman in need of medical attention who died in a hospital waiting room after collapsing on the floor. The woman was ignored by medical and security staff and died before they tended to her.

The patient was identified as 49-year old Esmin Green from Jamaica, who had arrived at Kings County Hospital Center’s psychiatric emergency room on 19 June this year. After collapsing on the floor, Ms. Green is seen in the video to have been ignored by a security guard and medical staff, who took almost an hour to realise she needed urgent attention. By the time someone came to her aid, she had already died. Reports indicate Ms. Green had waited almost 24 hours after being involuntarily committed to the psychiatric centre the previous morning.

The incident comes as a blow to the state facility in Brooklyn, New York, after its psychiatric centre was criticised last year by the New York State Mental Hygiene Legal Service and the New York Civil Liberties Union, who filed a suit against the hospital calling the psychiatric centre “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.”

Deaths in psychiatric care or under treatment with psychotropic drugs is at an all time high, with correctly administered medications in the top five causes of death in many countries, including the United States. In the case of Ms. Green however, the problem arose after she was not treated for the physical condition that led to her collapse. Involuntary commitment to the psychiatric centre for what was described as ‘agitation’ would eventually lead to her death.

The practice of involuntary commitment is described as “using legal means or forms as part of a mental health law to commit a person to a mental hospital, insane asylum or psychiatric ward against their will.” The controversial practice is permitted by law in many countries, and has met criticism from human rights groups, physicians and former psychiatrists.

Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry Thomas Szasz wrote that “all history teaches us to beware of benefactors who deprive their beneficiaries of liberty…. There is neither justification nor need for involuntary psychiatric interventions.”

In a paper on involuntary commitment procedures, Dr. Lawrence Stevens, J.D. writes “Of course, mental “hospitals” are jails for all persons detained there against their will.  Furthermore, they are places where people may be incarcerated with no showing of prior illegal (or otherwise harmful) conduct – only “mental illness”…”

Psychologist and professor Dr. Jeffrey Schaler is another respected professional to have spoken out against the psychiatric industry. “The controversy regarding the myth of mental illness and psychiatry is not about science or medicine; it’s about power,” he said.

One thing however is free from doubt on all sides—the death of Ms. Green arose out of negligence and ignorance, and could well have been prevented were she given the appropriate care. Six people lost their jobs at Kings County over the incident, and the video has been passed on to prosecutors in the case against the hospital. Arrangements are being made for her body to be flown to Jamaica, where a funeral service will be held.

For more information regarding psychiatric abuse, visit the Citizens Commission on Human Rights