Mental health services have become increasingly dominated by psychiatry’s ”medical model”

Mental health services have become increasingly dominated by psychiatry’s ”medical model”, which claims that feeling depressed, anxious or paranoid is primarily caused by genetic predispositions and chemical imbalances.

This has led to alarming rises in chemical solutions to distress. In New Zealand, one in nine adults (and one in five women) is prescribed antidepressants every year.

The public, however, in every country studied, including Australia, believes that mental health problems are caused by issues such as stress, poverty and isolation. The public also prefers talking therapies to drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Research suggests the public is right. For example, the single best predictor of just about every mental health problem is poverty, followed by other social factors such as abuse, neglect and early loss of parents in childhood, and – once in adulthood – loneliness and a range of adverse events including losses and defeats of various kinds.

Psycho/Pharma’s Next Target? Shy Kids

Children who are shy or considered moody run the risk of being diagnosed with mental illnesses and given powerful drugs like Prozac, psychologists have warned.
Experts said mental health diagnoses are likely to increase from 2013 as new guidelines on the definition of mental illness are being drawn up in America and are likely to be replicated in Britain.

Psychologists in the UK fear school-age children could be diagnosed with mental illnesses like ‘social anxiety disorder’ if they are quieter among their peers, or depression if a child is temporarily sad or is battling bereavement.Meanwhile, youngsters who appear to lose their temper easily or answer back to adults could be classed as having ‘oppositional defiant disorder’.

Once diagnosed, psychologists say children are likely to be treated with powerful drugs like Prozac or Ritalin to curb their behaviour – without fully understanding the long-term impacts.

Online database lets you research the side effects of common psychiatric drugs

(NaturalNews) If you have ever seen a commercial for a pharmaceutical drug, you are probably familiar with the long list of dangerous side effects that are rattled off in the last five seconds of the advertisement, just after viewers are told how Drug “X” is going to save their lives, improve their memories or give them unlimited energy. What was that? Did he just say that pill might cause bleeding out of my eyes? Drug companies do a great job – and spend a lot of money – to ensure that most consumers aren’t aware of the harmful side effects of common drugs prescribed for conditions like depression, heart disease, arthritis, ADHD or high blood pressure. Unfortunately, the result of this has created a society where the average person with a health problem is captivated by the promises delivered in clever advertising. There is a drug for everything? All I have to do is talk to my doctor? How convenient.

But what if there was a way to take back control of our lives and our health? What if, despite talking to your doctor, you still have questions or concerns about the safety of a drug?
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) has a database that allows you to do just that. It’s called the Psychiatric Drug Database, and it allows consumers to research the potential side effects of common psychiatric drugs, such as Ritalin or Wellbutrin.

Politics and mental health a poor mix

Imagine a tribunal where the public could challenge clinical decisions by neurosurgeons or cardiologists. It would be ridiculous. But mental health is different. Unlike other medical specialties, it resembles law or politics: fields where subtle variations in the interpretation of a word can alter the entire trajectory of a patient’s treatment.

That’s why the right to appeal clinical decisions by mental health professionals through a tribunal, announced recently by the NSW government, met with public approval. Mental health possesses a built-in capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. A patient’s psychiatric diagnosis has enormous cultural power in many other fields, from the marketing of antidepressant medications, to general practice, disability claims and legal proceedings.

Miami couple faces lengthy sentence for Medicare fraud

Lawrence Duran was a Miami healthcare executive who regularly lobbied Congress in favor of legislation to boost government subsidies for his industry: community mental health centers. He visited with U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Washington to drum up support. He, his girlfriend and other members of his lobbying organization threw a fundraiser for another Miami congressman, Rep. Kendrick Meek, when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

But Justice Department officials paint a far more sinister portrait of Duran and his girlfriend, Marianella Valera. They say the lobbying work was all a front to help them steal more money from the taxpayer-funded Medicare program.

Now Duran and Valera, who each pleaded guilty this year to Medicare fraud charges of running the biggest mental-health racket in the nation, face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison for orchestrating the $205 million scam.

CCHR International

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