Jump to content
IndiaDivine.org

Fwd: [SSRI-Research] The Hidden Side of Psychiatry by Gary Null, PhD

Rate this topic


Guest guest

Recommended Posts

JustSayNo

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 18:03:35 -0500

[sSRI-Research] The Hidden Side of Psychiatry by Gary Null, PhD

 

The Hidden Side of Psychiatry

by Gary Null, PhD

 

http://www.tldp.com/issue/162/162psych.htm

 

Gary Null, PhD, award winning investigative reporter, has authored 50 books on

health and nutrition, as well as numerous articles published in leading

magazines. Dr. Null holds a PhD in human nutrition and public health science

from the Union Graduate School. Former publisher of Natural Living Newsletter,

the current Gary Null's Natural Living Journal reports on healthy alternatives

in today's medicine, nutrition and lifestyle choices, ten times a year, and is

available by calling 516-547-7177. Null hosts a nationally syndicated radio

show, Natural Living, from New York City. Call 212-799-1246 for a radio listing

in your area.

 

Part 1 (Issue #162)

 

Mental illness is at an all-time high, with 40 million Americans affected,

according to reports emanating from organized psychiatry. But just how accurate

is this account? As you will see, people seeking help from the mental health

industry are often misdiagnosed, wrongfully treated, and abused. Others are

deceptively lured to psychiatric facilities, or even kidnapped. No matter how

they arrive, though, once they are there, inmates lose all freedoms and are

forced to undergo dangerous but sanctioned procedures, such as electroconvulsive

therapy and treatment with powerful drugs, that can leave them emotionally,

mentally, and physically marked for life. Some psychiatric patients are

physically and sexually abused. Millions more are told that they need harmful

medications, such as Prozac and Ritalin, but are not told of the seriously

damaging side effects of these.

 

Add to all this a mammoth insurance fraud which we all pay for and what we have,

in sum, is the dark side of psychiatry. Millions of individuals are being

grievously harmed by the mental health profession, and it's time that we as a

society faced this.

 

Fraudulent Practices in Mental Health

 

Fraud in the mental health industry goes beyond being a problem; it's more like

an all-pervasive condition. By way of introductory illustration, let's look at

the recent legal problems of a company that owned several chains of psychiatric

hospitals, National Medical Enterprises (NME). As author Joe Sharkey reported in

his book Bedlam 1,2 in 1993 the FBI completed its investigation of fraud in

NME's psychiatric hospitals and raided several NME facilities, in Texas,

Colorado, Indiana, Arizona, Missouri, California, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Sharkey described the extent of the morass into which this enterprise had sunk:

 

An estimated 130 lawsuits were filed against NME's psychiatric hospitals by

patients. Between 1992 and early 1993, three major suits were filed by insurance

companies against NME for insurance fraud. These suits identified more than $1

billion in claims paid to NME's psychiatric hospitals. One month after the FBI

raids, NME agreed to pay $125 million to settle two of the large insurance

company lawsuits. Soon after, they settled the third suit bringing the total

costs in legal fees and settlements to about $315 million....

 

In April 1994, NME paid almost $375 million in fines to the US Department of

Justice for violations of Federal law. NME had announced that it would

completely divest itself of its psychiatric hospitals and reserved $237 million

to cover the write-offs for selling them. All told, NME's settlements and fines

have totaled $927 million.

 

 

Insurance Scams

 

The wrongdoings of NME are not the exception; indeed, insurance fraud seems to

be the bread and butter of the mental health industry. Scams occur whenever a

psychiatrist or a psychiatric institution bills Medicare, Medicaid, or private

insurance companies for work they didn't do, for unnecessary or bogus

treatments, or for patients confined against their will. Here are a few

examples.

 

 

Patient Brokering

 

Consider this story, carried by the Los Angeles Times in 19943:

 

Michael quickly realized that A Place For Us wasn't a place for him. Overweight

and suffering from stress, the New Yorker had flown cross country to attend what

was advertised as a weight loss clinic in southern California. The airfare was

free and the treatment, he was told, was fully covered by his Blue Cross plan.

But when Michael reached Los Angeles, he was shocked to see himself booked into

a psychiatric hospital in a rundown section of [town] where he was diagnosed as

suffering from psychotic depression and bulimia, conditions he denies ever

having. Then he was told he couldn't leave. Michael is one of many stories

emerging from federal and state lawsuits in Los Angeles in which insurers accuse

A Place For Us of enlisting doctors and hospital staff to falsify diagnosis and

medical records in order to obtain payment for treatment that, whatever its

value to patients, was not covered by their health plans.

 

Michael's story is not an isolated incident. Overweight people are frequent

targets of insurance scams. Patient brokers fraudulently advertise 1-800 numbers

on television, and people call in thinking that they are talking to health spa

representatives. In actuality, they are speaking to sales agents of psychiatric

facilities whose only motive is to determine whether or not potential clients

have insurance, since the size of their commission depends upon how many

patients they can get into the hospital and how long they can keep them there.

 

It's hard to believe that this is going on in America, but the reality is that,

as a result of gross deception by sales agents, people are frequently unaware of

the fact that they are about to enter psychiatric institutions. If an

unsuspecting party has coverage, the person is flown free to a facility, usually

located in Florida or California. A limo awaits at the airport, and the place

seems very accommodating until the person actually arrives at the facility and

is locked up against his or her will. Once the person realizes what is going on,

it's too late. People who become upset and attempt to leave can be threatened or

diagnosed as combative.

 

Civil litigation attorney Randy Lakel works pro bono to represent patients who

were voluntarily committed to psychiatric facilities by deceptive patient

brokers. He describes a case involving two men from eastern Pennsylvania who

were approached by people in the crowd at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting and

taken aside.4 The brokers suggested to them that maybe they needed a little

extra help, which could be offered by professionals at overeaters' clinics. The

men were lured to the institution under false pretenses and then locked up.

 

Lakel believes that the problem has reached huge proportions: ...There are

federal grand juries investigating this. I've also spoken to general counsel

from very large insurance companies that have called me up to inquire whether

their insurance company was involved in any of my investigations.. The general

impression I got from the mention of a grand jury investigation and the general

counsel from a large insurance company was that it was not an isolated incident

that I was dealing with.

 

The broken world of patient brokering encompasses more than fat farm fraud; it

affects people who might need help with all types of problems. A nine-month

investigation of deceptive brokering practices conducted by Florida's St.

Petersburg Times was enlightening and upsetting.5 It was found that patient

brokers sometimes share their finder's fees with school counselors who help

provide likely young candidates for the brokers' institutions, or with public

health workers, union representatives, or police and probation officers who

steer prospective patients their way. Finder's fees can be as high as $3000 per

patient. Another investigation finding was that patients are sometimes given

false diagnoses, for insurance purposes. This is not surprising. The trouble is

(on a personal level, and letting alone the issue of massive fraud!) these false

diagnoses of mental illness can return to haunt patients throughout their lives.

Indeed, according to Randy Lakel, the worst part of the problem

is having a psychiatric record for life:

 

Once people are committed, it goes on their insurance record. These people...are

appalled that they now have a psychiatric record for the rest of their lives. It

can interfere with any kind of employment opportunity. One of the people I

talked to was a professional in the medical field. In her application, she was

afraid that they were going to ask her if she ever had psychiatric commitment.

How do you get that off the record? That, from a legal point of view, is clearly

a damage.4

 

A disturbing aspect of patient brokers and referral services is that they are

largely unregulated. As the St. Petersburg Times reported,5 in Florida and other

states, referral personnel do not need licenses or special training before they

can deal with the sick and the troubled. So people with criminal records are

among the brokers, many of whom will do whatever it takes to get one more body

into a treatment center.

 

Says Paul McDevitt, a licensed Massachusetts mental health counselor5: These

people have no ethics at all. They're morally bankrupt. They're like the grave

robbers in old England who provided cadavers for the medical schools. The grave

robbers of today are taking the bodies of those so confused as to be dead and

shipping them out to treatment centers where they never get well. And the

doctors who are the pillars of society are still reaping the benefits and still

never asking where the bodies come from.

 

 

Bogus and Nonexistent Treatments

 

Psychiatric facilities consistently charge consumers for nontherapeutic

treatments or services not performed. Adolescent facilities are common

perpetrators of this abuse. One Texas hospital, for example, billed insurance

companies $40 a day for relaxation therapy. This treatment, which simply

consisted of turning on Muzac while teenagers were getting undressed, was

actually far more exorbitant when you consider that each patient's insurance

company was billed that price for one person turning on the Muzac one time.

 

Bruce Wiseman is president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an

organization that champions mental health consumer protection.6 He can provide a

plethora of examples of how psychiatrists rip off the system. Wiseman tells of a

Texas psychiatrist who was known for his hundred-dollar handshake. All he would

do was walk by the beds of various patients, shake hands with them, and then

bill each person's insurance company a hundred dollars. Another investigation

discovered that charges for nutritional counseling were to cover the person

going to lunch. Insurance companies are also charged for individual therapy when

a group of people are placed in a room together and told to scream at each other

for a couple of hours. These would be a little bit funny if they weren't so

devastating in terms of what they do to insurance premiums and our taxes.7

 

Wiseman states that psychiatrists collect $600,000 to 900,000 a year on bogus or

nonexistent treatments. We have plenty of cases where they just bill the

insurance company or the government for treatment that was never given. They

don't even see the patient and they send the bills in.7

 

 

Abusive Treatments

 

The scenario worsens when you consider that economic exploitation is often

coupled with physical abuse. Wiseman tells how an adolescent facility in Reno

tormented a 15 year-old boy and then billed his parents' insurance company

$400,000:

 

They would drug this kid with Haldol, a so-called antipsychotic drug, until he

was in a stupor, and then tie him in four-point restraints. They would tie his

hands and feet to the bed, and then tickle him until he was hysterical. For that

treatment this child's parents' insurance company was billed $400,000, and the

insurance company paid it! If anyone else does to a child what the psychiatrist

does, it is called child abuse. But here the insurance company pays almost half

a million dollars for it. This is the kind of treatment and insurance fraud that

exists.8

 

This is not an isolated incident, Wiseman explains, but typical of what goes on:

In the Reno facility, children are subject to frequent take-downs. If a kid

smarts off' or jumps the guards, he or she is physically abused. One patient in

a Texas hospital had her legs strapped to a chair for four hours because she was

moving her legs. They called it purposeful exercise, which she was not supposed

to do. Kids are made to stand and look at a wall for 16 hours a day for months

on end. There is also sexual abuse regularly going on in these hospitals.8

 

Nickie Saizon, who regrettably placed her son in a psychiatric facility, says

that routine punishments were called treatment. Her insurance company was billed

exorbitant amounts for these procedures:

 

If they punished them with a time out, they had to sit in a chair in the hallway

all day without moving. They charged $37.50 for that. When the kids would get

mad and angry, they would have a nurse and counselors surround the kids and tell

them, Get mad, get it out, have your fit.' They would keep on until they got mad

and really started having a big fit. Then they put them down on the floor, held

them there, and cut their shirt off. For that they charged $45. Then they put

them in a room which they call a think tank. The room is bare and empty. There

is no carpet, no chairs, nothing. They have to go in there and think over how

they should have handled the problem....They charged $87.50 for this room. Every

time you turned around there were hidden costs.9

 

Wiseman believes that people would be outraged to learn what really goes on in

these institutions: The general public isn't aware of it, but one would be hard

pressed to walk into any psychiatric hospital and not weep at the treatment'

that occurs in these places.8

 

 

Your Taxes Pay for This

 

In the final analysis, fraudulent insurance practices hurt taxpayers since the

maintenance of moderate insurance rates becomes virtually impossible. Consider

these figures. The American public is swindled out of $42 billion a year. That's

$3 billion a month, $800 million a week, $116 million a day, $4 million an hour,

$80,000 a minute, and $1300 a second.

 

The federal government and the insurance industry are finally waking up to the

problem and starting to fight back. In 1993, seven of the largest insurance

companies sued one of the largest psychiatric hospital chains, National Medical

Enterprises, for $750 million. In addition, every attorney general now has an

assistant attorney general to oversee health care fraud prosecutions. As a

result, some progress has been made. Wiseman states:

 

Psychiatrists make up 8% of doctors, but 18% of those health care practitioners

that have been kicked out of the Medicare system for fraud. Last year, $411

million was paid to the government in fines and penalties for health care fraud

and 90% of that was paid by psychiatrists or psychiatric institutions.7

 

Although this is a start, it is Wiseman's belief that to truly resolve the

problem the public must become more informed about what's going on, and insist

on putting an end to the corruption.

 

 

Psychiatric Research

 

Each year, hundreds of millions of tax dollars are wasted on pointless research

conducted by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). For instance,

these are examples of the types of studies they are funding under the guise of

learning more about sexual behavior: a four-year study of horses masturbating,

an eight-year study of castrated quail, a four-year study on the nasal cavities

of hamsters during intercourse, a two-year study on the sexual preference and

behavior of prairie moles, an 11-year study in which female pigeon genitals were

stimulated to measure how hormones affect sexual behavior, a 9-year study of

maternal licking of the genital region of male versus female ferret babies, a

9-year study on the sexual behavior of lizards, a 23-year study of sexual odors

and social factors that affect male Asian monkeys, and a 23-year study on the

sexual behavior of male rats as a biological basis for human behavior.

 

To study the effects of drugs, a 13-year study was undertaken in which rats were

given hallucinogens, such as LSD, to see how they react when startled; and a

31-year study looked at how rhesus monkeys respond to torture while on mind

altering drugs.

 

The NIMH also carried out a 32-year study on the chemical reactions in the jaw

muscles of pigeons to better understand eating disorders in humans.

 

This is what the NIMH is doing with our tax dollars, says Bruce Wiseman. We

think it's a travesty, and we think that organization should be eliminated.7

 

Wiseman goes on to describe an NIMH study on sexual offenders that placed a

Florida community at risk: A few years ago, [NIMH] spent over a million dollars

on a program down in Florida where they took 100 known child molesters, showed

these guys pornographic material, and then turned them loose on the community to

see how they would behave. Then, when these child molesters came back and

reported their behaviors to these so-called researchers, they were immune from

passing that information along to the authorities.7

 

If the NIMH were studying how to alleviate mental illness, it would be

different. Unfortunately, these studies provide nothing useful to the

alleviation of mental suffering. According to Wiseman:

 

Billions and billions and billions of dollars are poured into the psychiatric

industry. If they could have cured anything, they would have done so over the

last few decades.... [Psychiatrists] don't actually know what bothers people.

Their answer to virtually everything is to drug it. They have convinced

governments that they need billions in appropriations. We wonder why we can't

balance our budget when studies [such as the above] cost the taxpayers millions

and millions of dollars. I don't think there are many Americans who realize that

their tax dollars are being spent on studying the nasal cavities of hamsters

during intercourse. On the one hand, it's ludicrous. On the other hand, it is

destructive and wasteful.7

 

 

Inhumane Treatment

 

Involuntary Commitment

 

Each year, approximately one and a half million people are taken to psychiatric

institutions against their will. That averages out to one person every 75

seconds. Often, there is no reasonable justification for committing a person.

According to Bruce Wiseman, psychiatrists commonly make off-the-cuff diagnoses,

having no real basis in medical fact, that result in people getting thrown into

psychiatric facilities. This is not only possible, but easy to do, as it is

sanctioned by state laws. Psychiatrists are given the police power to lock

people up against their will. Sometimes, Wiseman states, people are put away for

some of the most ridiculous reasons imaginable:

 

A man who was picked up was pronounced schizophrenic by a psychiatrist and taken

to a hospital, stripped and shocked. Subsequently, they found out that the man

was simply speaking Hungarian.... That kind of thing goes on, on a very regular

basis.

 

Legislation has come out of Texas in the last year or so after the kidnapping'

of a guy named Kyle Williams whose estranged wife apparently talked to a

psychiatrist, and probably didn't have kind things to say about him. As a

result, the psychiatrist ordered the guy picked up a totally normal fellow and

he was thrown into a hospital.8

 

Laws vary, but individuals are usually locked up for at least three days. During

that time, they have no constitutional rights, and no access to an attorney or

due process of law. Treatment usually consists of drugs, and sometimes

electroconvulsive therapy. After three days, they are then brought before a

judge to determine whether or not they're sane. At this point, chances for

release are slim since people are generally not in very good shape after all

that has been done to them. Chances for release are far slimmer if the person's

insurance pays for treatment. Wiseman reports:

 

We get hundreds and hundreds of reports like this: A young mother took her child

into a psychiatric hospital for an evaluation and the hospital insisted that the

child stay. The mother decided to stay with the child just to comfort her. Then

the mother wanted to leave; the hospital wouldn't let her. When she demanded to

leave they placed her in a straitjacket and drugged her.

 

A fellow was checked into a psychiatric hospital for back pain. Some doctor

referred him, thinking that maybe it was psychosomatic. He was thrown into

classes on sex abuse and chemical dependency, which had nothing to do with his

problem whatsoever. He demanded to go home and they refused to let him. When he

got angry, they diagnosed him as suicidal and involuntarily committed him. Of

course, they bill the insurance companies tremendous amounts of dollars.8

 

Concerning insurance companies' bills, while it's true that companies are bilked

out of tremendous amounts of money to pay for people in mental hospitals who

shouldn't be there, we should not feel entirely sorry for the insurance

industry. According to Dr. Duard Bok, a former employee of Psychiatric Hospitals

of America, the insurance companies pay out on one side, but get it back on the

other side. They are double-dipping, because they can disregard their billings

from patients because they get it back as shareholders.10

 

 

Electroconvulsive Therapy

 

Actually, it's electric shock treatment. But as the Citizens Commission of Human

Rights points out, the people who profit from it like to call it

electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), because this sounds a little better. Regardless

of the label you give it, what this treatment amounts to is the destruction of

brain cells by electricity. In other words, it's physician-induced brain damage.

 

In ECT, 180 to 460 volts of electricity are fired through the brain, for a tenth

of a second to six seconds, either from temple to temple (bilateral ECT) or from

the front to the back of one side of the head (unilateral ECT). The result is a

severe convulsion, or seizure, of long duration i.e., a grand mal convulsion, as

in an epileptic fit. The usual course of treatment involves 10 to 12 shocks over

a period of weeks.

 

This extreme treatment is given for severe depression, and it does work in the

short term. That's because a facet of the brain damage caused is memory loss,

and so patients forget what they were depressed about. Unfortunately, the memory

loss is often permanent. Also, permanent learning disability can be another

effect of ECT, with disastrous career, not to mention emotional, ramifications.

The bottom line: When the patient's underlying problems return, she or he is

even less able to deal with them than before the treatment, because of the brain

injury that has been sustained. It should be noted that women are twice as

likely as men to receive ECT.

 

The continued use of this medieval-seeming therapy would perhaps be

understandable if it had been shown to be effective. But as explained in a

recent article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior,11 Follow-up studies about

the effects of ECT in which recipients themselves evaluate the procedure are

both rare and embarrassing to the ECT industry. The outcomes of these studies

directly contradict propaganda regarding permanent memory loss put forth by the

four manufacturers of ECT devices in the United States (Somatics, MECTA, Elcot,

and Medcraft), upon whom physicians and the public rely for information, much as

the public relies upon pharmaceutical companies for information on drugs.

 

Former ECT recipient Diana Loper, of the World Association of Electric Shock

Survivors,12 stresses that the only way ECT stops depression is that it wipes

your memory out so you don't know what you were depressed about. Then, Loper

says, after two weeks of a brain-damage high, people want to kill themselves

when they have never before been suicidal. Loper is passionate in her work to

totally ban the procedure, which she says only causes brain damage and sometimes

death:

 

ECT is non-FDA approved. The machines were grandfathered to a certain extent but

they were put in category 3, the most hazardous category that there is....

They're coming in with new machines now saying that they're new and improved,

but there's nothing new and improved about this procedure. Why do I want to see

this procedure banned? Why does our organization want to see it totally out of

the way? Because it's damaging. Psychiatrists...are not only damaging people's

brains, they are killing people.... The APA task force states that 1 in 10,000

people die of ECT.

 

Our organization will stop this procedure. This is a promise I made. I kept a

diary when I was being shocked. And I read my diary and I read it every day. And

the last thing I said to my doctor is, Some day you'll never do this to anyone

again....' We passed a law in Texas, last session. We have the strongest

informed consent bill in the nation.13

 

Electroshock treatments send several hundred volts of electricity through the

brain. The brain then becomes starved for oxygen and pulls more blood into the

brain. This causes blood vessels to break, damage to the brain, and eventual

brain shrinkage. As a result of the lack of oxygen and the destruction of the

nerves in the brain, the person has a seizure.

 

This treatment is nothing but barbaric. If anyone else did it, they would be

locked up as a terrorist. Yet 100,000 people a year in America get

electroshocked, generating $3 billion to the psychiatric industry. That faction

of the health care industry doesn't help. They're an enemy of the people and

they're destructive.7

 

Internationally known psychiatrist and author Dr. Peter Breggin adds that the

treatment is so off base that doctors fabricate reasons to support it:

Psychiatrists end up distorting a great deal and forcing people into a model

that's incorrect, Breggin explains. Some of my colleagues claim that some

undefined biochemical imbalance causes a problem like anxiety or depression,

when we've never found a biochemical imbalance. Then, having suggested that

maybe there is such a thing as a disturbance in the brain that's hurting a

person, my colleagues go and do terrible things to the brain, such as shock

treatments for the depressed person.

 

Breggin believes that this makes as much sense as deliberately putting patients

in an automobile accident. It traumatizes the brain horribly. Each person who

gets shock treatment goes into a state called delirium or an acute organic brain

syndrome. As a result, they're confused, they don't know which end is up, they

may forget where they are and how to get around the hospital ward. They have an

electrically induced closed head injury, with all the things you find in other

closed head injuries. People are often permanently changed. They don't recover

their memories and they don't recover other mental functions.14

 

Diana Loper discusses a major motivation behind the popularity of ECT profit:

ECT is the psychiatrist's most lucrative treatment, averaging between $800 and

$1000 per individual treatment. A single series averages between 12 and 15

treatments, costing between $10,000 and $15,000. This isn't even including

hospitalization. ECT is administered in private, for-profit psychiatric

hospitals. In all states, insurance is what pays for this treatment.15

 

 

Deep Sleep Therapy

 

Deep sleep therapy, a procedure that has been used in the United States and

throughout the world, consists of placing people in a comatose state via

barbiturates, hypnotics, and sedatives for two to three weeks, and shocking

their brains on a daily or twice-daily basis. Jan Eastgate, the international

president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, reports on its damaging

effects: Patients suffered brain damage, pleurisy, double pneumonia, blood

clots, and at least 48 people died. It was used in mind control experiments

during the 1960s up in Canada as well. And yet it was passed off as a therapy.16

 

Deep sleep therapy has been combined with psychosurgery for the treatment of

asthma, Eastgate reports: Women who had asthma attacks were given deep sleep

therapy. One woman who had an asthma attack was also given psychosurgery.

Sixteen years later she was washing her scalp and cut her finger. She was rushed

to the hospital and they said, did you know that you had metal plates sticking

out of your head? She didn't realize that when they did the psychosurgery they

had actually left metal plates with a serrated edge inside her head. They had to

be removed.16

 

Eastgate says that the treatment has been banned in certain countries, such as

Australia, but that international cooperation between psychiatrists allows

patients to be transported from nations where the procedure is prohibited to

places where it is used. For example, Eastgate says that some Australian

patients were sent to a Santa Monica psychiatrist. So you have, internationally,

some pretty horrific abuses.16 The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is

currently carrying out an international investigation into the matter.

 

 

Sexual Abuse

 

" Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining

free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual

relations with female and male persons, be they free or slaves. "

 

These words are part of the Hippocratic Oath, sworn to by all physicians. You'd

never know it, though, considering the results of a 1987 survey of over 1400

psychiatrists,17 described in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The survey found that 65 % of the psychiatrists reported treating patients who

had been sexually involved with previous therapists, and 87% of the

psychiatrists surveyed believed that the previous involvement had been harmful

to the patients. An interesting finding was that only 8% of the psychiatrists

polled reported their colleagues' behavior to a professional organization or

legal authority. This finding does not speak well for the concept of

professionals policing their own ranks. One factor here might be that they all

have a vested interest in keeping malpractice insurance premiums down.

 

Sydney Smith, in a report on The Seduction of the Female Patient,18 reports that

nearly half of the patients that are sexually abused by psychiatrists have

previously been the victims of sexual abuse of one type or another. Confusion

arising from these earlier experiences can make patients easier to victimize and

less willing to come forward with complaints when they are victimized. Plus if

they do come forward, they may seem less credible in their complaints; perhaps

it was all a result of garbled memories.

 

Sometimes patient confusion is induced by psychiatrist-administered drugs.

Consider the case of Barbara Noel, who, in the book You Must Be Dreaming, 19

details her years of sexual abuse by a renowned psychiatrist. Indeed, Dr. Jules

Masserman was known worldwide as a leader in the psychiatric field.

 

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights summarized Noel's story:20 A past

president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and honorary president

for life of the World Association for Social Psychiatry, Masserman was a

powerful man who abused that power often.

 

Barbara Noel, who worshipped him and considered herself lucky to have him as her

psychiatrist, realized how deep the deception ran when she awoke during a

frequent drug-induced sleep administered by Masserman to find him panting loudly

as he sexually assaulted her.

 

Although this was just a step above necrophilia, Masserman convinced Noel that

she could get in touch with her real feelings' by taking sodium amytal (a

barbiturate), which ironically had been used in mind control experiments and was

found to block memory rather than, as Masserman claimed, enhance it.

 

Noel became enraged when she finally realized how she had been abused for years

by a supposedly respected' professional. However, with Masserman claiming Noel

was sick' and lying, it took seven long years, court victories by her and two

other women who went public after hearing of Noel's case, and even more women

breaking their silence, before the APA upheld the Illinois Psychiatric Society's

decision to suspend Masserman for only five years. And even that suspension was

for inappropriate use of drugs, not rape.

 

Scandalously, Masserman remained as a member of the APA's Board of Trustees.

 

Comments the CCHR: It is hard to imagine a teacher who molests a young student

would ever be allowed to teach again, but apparently a different set of

standards exist for psychiatrists.20

 

In psychiatric facilities, patients are commonly sexually exploited as they are

made to barter sex for freedom. Joanne Toglia, whose story is further told in a

later section, says, of her abuse by a mental health counselor in a private

hospital: Finally, the bottom line came down to, if I slept with him, I'd get

out. If I didn't, I'd go to the state mental hospital. And at the time, I had

four children 2, 3, 4 and 6. I was desperate to see them, so after three weeks

of being locked up, I finally slept with him.2

 

Reports of sexual abuse are less frequent in outpatient settings, where

psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors generally act in supportive and

professional ways. But in too many instances they do betray their patients'

trust, as the Masserman saga illustrates. Attorney Steve Silver, who represents

clients that were sexually abused by their therapists, gives one account of how

unethical behavior on the part of a therapist can devastate patients' lives:

 

I prosecuted a case against a female alcohol counselor who was roughly ten years

older than her male patient, a married man with a couple of kids. The alcohol

counselor ended up doing psychotherapy' on this gentleman, his wife, and on

their two children. Ultimately, she seduced the man while telling his wife that

because of her background of psychological problems she should withhold sexual

relations from her husband.

 

My client, who was the husband and father in this situation, left his family and

married the alcohol counselor. This is a perfect example of even a low-level

therapist, such as an alcohol counselor, being able to manipulate an entire

family to ultimately serve her own romantic and sexual needs. Of course, it was

incredibly destructive to all four members of the family, particularly the

children.22

 

The problem is compounded by the fact that grievances against psychiatrists have

little effect, leaving them free to prey on numerous other patients. Even if

they are punished in one state, psychiatrists can easily set up shop in another.

Silver says psychiatric boards are understaffed and in need of increased

government regulation and money. If these types of abuses are to be stopped,

there needs to be a public investigation and sufficient resources to prosecute

these bad shrinks and stop them from practicing.22 Psychology and social work

boards are better about investigating sexual abuse, according to Silver, and

their investigations can lead to the offending therapist losing his or her

license to practice.

 

 

Exploitation of Minorities

 

Psychiatry is built on a foundation of prejudice against minorities,

particularly African Americans. In the 1700s, for instance, none less than the

father of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, asserted that African Americans

were black because they had a disease called Negritude, and that we should not

tyrannize over them, but rather find a cure for this disease. In the 1840s a new

so-called mental illness was discovered Drapetomania; it was what caused slaves

to run away! In 1887, G. Stanley Hall, founder of the American Journal of

Psychology and first president of the American Psychological Association, put

forth the idea that Africans, Indians, and Chinese were members of adolescent

races in a stage of incomplete growth.23 Thus, these people's lack of equality

was justified, because they were not fully adult. From these historical roots of

racism, according to the CCHR's Jan Eastgate, all minority groups have become

marked for psychiatric abuse:

 

You have had a targeting of the African American community, the American

Indians, Hispanic groups, as having a lower IQ than so-called whites. Based on

this scientific' justification, psychiatrists have sterilized African Americans.

By 1929, up to 6000 Californians were sterilized, and they were largely African

Americans. If you look at the statistics now, psychiatrists involuntarily commit

African Americans three to five times as often as they do whites. The diagnosis

of African American men as having schizophrenia, by public and private

institutions, is 15 times as high as whites. African American adolescents

between the ages of 13 and 17 are far more likely to be coerced into going to

community mental health centers where they are placed on mind-altering drugs,

major tranquilizers. And they are given higher dosages even than white people.

So there's a concerted effort by psychiatry to target minority groups in this

country by diagnosing them with spurious labels and then giving

them mind-altering drugs and electric shock.16

 

 

Abuse of Senior Citizens

 

After being placed in nursing homes, older people are routinely forced into

taking psychotropic medications as a way of keeping them sedated. Eastgate

comments on this and other lamentable treatments: I think it's a sad indictment

of society when people [who have put so many years and so much effort] into

working, some of them fighting for this country, end up in a nursing home, are

drugged out of their heads, electric shocked, and have to live out their final

days in such misery.16

 

Actually, an alarming trend today is that many elderly people are being taken

out of nursing homes and put into private mental hospitals. But it is not their

family members who are doing this. Indeed, family members are often not

consulted. The initiators of these transfers are social workers and other

employees of private psychiatric hospitals, who, amazingly, have the legal power

to transfer people to the institutions with which they're affiliated, based

solely on these employees' say-so. A powerful motive exists for these forced

visits to mental institutions Medicare money. The government will pay the many

hundreds of dollars a day that it costs for a person to stay in one of these

private hospitals, while the nursing home from which the person was snatched can

continue to collect charges for his empty bed during his absence. The situation

has grown so widespread and horrendous that it was documented on a 20/20 TV news

magazine segment recently.24

 

As documented by 20/20's hidden camera, for-profit psychiatric institutions are

not doing much to improve their inmates' mental health. Rather, they're mainly

holding pens for people while their insurance money is procured. An example

shown of these hospitals' modus operandi: doctors billing for psychotherapy for

Alzheimer's patients who clearly could not participate in a psychotherapy

session. But note that not all of the senior citizens captured by these

institutions have Alzheimer's or any mental problem, for that matter. As shown

by 20/20, some are mentally and emotionally fine. Their only problem is that

they're old, and seemingly easy marks for being, basically, kidnapped.

 

A factor in this problem is the growth of the for-profit hospital industry,

which only makes profits when its beds are filled, and which finds the elderly

to be the most easily procurable bed-fillers. Author Joe Sharkey describes the

upsurge in for-profit institutions25:

 

The private for-profit psychiatric hospital industry has its roots in the

mid-1960s with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid programs. These programs

created the climate in which a huge corporate hospital industry could thrive.

The rapid rise in health-care spending over the last 30 years has paralleled the

expansion of both private health insurance coverage and federal insurance

programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Federal spending for health care via

Medicare and Medicaid programs has risen from 51% of the total health care

spending in 1960 to more than 80% in 1983. The for-profit hospital became an

investor-driven enterprise, and profits drove the expansion of the industry. By

1990, nearly half of all U.S. community hospitals were owned by a multiunit

organization, including the large national chains. One out of every four US

hospitals was owned by a national corporate chain.

 

The extent of the fraud perpetrated by mental hospital chains is staggering.

Explains The New York Times: In the past, estimates have put fraud and abuse at

about 10% of the nation's health care costs, between $60 billion and $80

billion. But law enforcement officials and fraud specialists like Edward J.

Kurtansky, New York State Deputy Attorney General, say that accumulating

evidence, particularly the new findings at the for-profit psychiatric hospitals,

indicates that because so much abuse goes undetected or unreported that the

percentage is probably much higher.26 Unfortunately, it is the elderly who are

frequently the victims in private-hospital fraud.

 

By the way, anyone who doubts that the for-profit hospitals take the for-profit

part of their identity very seriously should consider that their internal

handbooks set admissions goals. According to a manual obtained by the Fort Worth

Star Telegram, Psychiatric Institutes of America (which was a part of the

infamous National Medical Enterprises) set a greater than 50% admission goal for

people requesting free evaluations at their numerous hospitals. The manual also

states that the goal of reasonable hospitalizations jumps to 70% for those

facilities that didn't advertise, apparently because they would attract more

serious cases.27

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...