Post by Honest AbePost by ThetaworksPsychiatry: An Industry of Death Documentary DVD with Booklet
Through rare historical and contemporary footage and interviews with
more than 160 doctors, attorneys, educators, survivors and experts on
the mental health industry and its abuses, this riveting documentary
blazes the bright light of truth on the brutal pseudoscience and the
multi-billion dollar fraud that is psychiatry.
The DVD companion brochure contains over 150 photos and graphics that
track the history of psychiatry from it's macabre 18th century origins
to today, where 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric
institutions and 20 million children have been put on potentially
lethal, mind-altering drugs.
We think you have the right to know the cold, hard facts about
psychiatry, its practitioners and the threat they pose to our
children.
Order Psychiatry: An Industry of Death documentary and companion
brochure. Distribute it to others (associates, family and friends).
Warn them about psychiatry's damaging treatments. When you watch the
DVD you will be outraged and will want to act to end these abuses.
This appears to have been posted by a shill for the cult of $cientology.
That's entirely an assumption on your part. So the rest of your post
attacking Scientology is irrelevant.
Post by Honest AbeHe seems ignorant of the fact that psychiatry, unlike $cientology, is based
on medical science. Thus it improves and evolves over time, and
professional organizations and government agencies exist through which
abuses and grievances can be addressed and corrected. For whatever
shortcomings may exist, psychiatry does help most patients, even if only
symptomatically.
Psychiatry has unfortunately become mainly a money-making industry in
partnership with hospitals.
UNJUSTIFIED PSYCHIATRIC
COMMITMENT in the U.S.A.
by Lawrence Stevens, J.D.
U.S. Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado held hearings
investigating the practices of psychiatric hospitals in the United States.
Rep. Schroeder summarized her committee's findings as follows: "Our
investigation has found that thousands of adolescents, children, and adults
have been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment they didn't need; that
hospitals hire bounty hunters to kidnap patients with mental health
insurance; that patients are kept against their will until their insurance
benefits run out; that psychiatrists are being pressured by the hospitals to
increase profit; that hospitals 'infiltrate' schools by paying kickbacks to
school counselors who deliver students; that bonuses are paid to hospital
employees, including psychiatrists, for keeping the hospital beds filled;
and that military dependents are being targeted for their generous mental
health benefits. I could go on, but you get the picture" (quoted in: Lynn
Payer, Disease- Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are
Making You Feel Sick, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992, pp. 234-235).
...
Unjustified involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals has
become so blatant Reader's Digest published an article in the July 1992
issue exposing the unethical practice:
"Similar storm clouds are appearing over the mental - health
field. Alarmed by exploding costs, insurance companies began scrutinizing
payments more carefully - and ultimately trimmed the average patient's
length of hospital stay. As a result, 'private hospitals that once made a
great deal of money are now desperate for patients,' says Dr. Alan Stone,
former president of the American Psychiatric Association.
"That desperation has opened the door for fraud. Among the
alleged abuses: patients abducted by 'bounty hunters'; others hospitalized
against their will until their insurance runs out; diagnoses and treatments
tailored to maximize insurance reimbursement; kickbacks for recruiting
patients; unnecessary treatments; gross overbilling.
[A]n administrator at a psychiatric "hospital"
told me competition between psychiatric hospitals is what she called "cut
throat". Combine this intense competition with America's poorly written
involuntary commitment laws and judges who refuse to impose protection from
unwarranted commitment that bona-fide due process requires, and the result
is a lot of people being deprived of liberty and suffering psychiatric
stigma unjustifiably. In the field of so-called mental health where large
amounts of money can be made, in large part because of health insurance, and
where there is a competitive environment where there are too few psychiatric
"patients" to fill psychiatric beds, self-interest biases the supposed
psychiatric or psychological experts in favor of a "diagnosis" which
justifies commitment, including involuntary commitment where necessary. As
Harvard Law professor Alan M. Dershowitz has said, psychiatry "is not a
scientific discipline" ("Clash of Testimony in Hinkley Trial Has
Psychiatrists Worried Over Image", The New York Times May 24, 1982, p. 11).
The opinion of many legislators and judges that impartiality, objectivity,
and scientific expertise of mental health professionals makes the kind of
due process needed elsewhere unnecessary in psychiatric commitment is
mistaken.
As was noted in the above quoted Reader's Digest article, much
of this unjustified involuntary psychiatric commitment of normal and
law-abiding people to the prisons called psychiatric hospitals is motivated
by the financial needs of psychiatric hospitals and the people who work in
them. Although it has been reaching newspaper headlines in only the last
several years, unwarranted psychiatric commitment has been going on for over
a century, including in the USA where freedom is supposedly a cherished
value and where human rights are supposedly respected. Recent inventions
such as health care insurance have made the abuses more frequent, but the
willingness of mental health "professionals" to violate the sacred right of
each law-abiding person to liberty isn't new.
...
"Two of the country's largest insurance
companies filed suit yesterday against a national chain of private
psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals, charging it with illegally
admitting patients who did not need treatment and then not releasing them
until their insurance benefits ran out" Michael Unger, "Hospitals Called
Cheats Insurers say health-care chain pulled off nationwide scam", New York
Newsday, Thursday, September 15, 1992, Business section, page 33).
Insurance fraud involving psychiatrists treating people who do
not want or need treatment illustrates a more serious underlying problem
that still has not been adequately addressed: .
THE AUTHOR, Lawrence Stevens, is a lawyer whose practice has included
representing psychiatric "patients". His pamphlets are not copyrighted. You
are invited to make copies for those who you feel will benefit.
(P.S. You can be forced to pay for your own involuntary commitment even if
you don't have health insurance)