IMPORTANT FACTS

1. There are numerous medical conditions that can cause mental symptoms such as anxiety and depression.

2. In one study, 97% of cases of visual hallucinations were found to be of medical origin.

3. A California state Mental Health Medical Evaluation publication states, “Mental health professionals … have [an] obligation to recognize … physical diseases in their patients … physical diseases may cause a patient’s mental disorder. …”

4. There are many workable alternatives to ECT and psychosurgery.

CHAPTER FOUR Provide Help, Not Harm

Physically intrusive and damaging practices such as ECT and psychosurgery violate the doctor’s pledge to uphold the Hippocratic Oath and “Do no harm.”

The first and most obvious solution to the psychiatric abuses described in this publication is to eliminate funding for psychiatric practices that perpetrate those abuses. If insurance companies and governments did not pay for psychiatrists to deliver brain-damaging shocks and psychosurgery, these methods would quickly fade into oblivion.

Once the psychiatrist who profits by keeping his patients ignorant of effective treatments is gotten out of the way, dozens of workable alternatives come into view. Persons who have been “diagnosed” to have a psychiatric disorder should get a full and searching clinical examination by a competent, non-psychiatric physician.

Fatigue, disorientation, delirium, confusion, inability to concentrate, inexplicable pains and hundreds of other symptoms can be caused by a plethora of known physical conditions, which psychiatrists never thoroughly investigate before prescribing their unworkable, debilitating treatments.

Researchers Richard Hall and Michael Popkin list 21 medical conditions that can cause anxiety, 12 conditions that can cause depression, 56 conditions that can cause mental disturbance in general, and 40 types of drugs that can create “psychiatric symptoms.”

In 1967 they wrote, “The most common medically induced psychiatric symptoms are apathy, anxiety, visual hallucinations, mood and personality changes, dementia, depression, delusional thinking, sleep disorders (frequent or early-morning awakening), poor concentration, changed speech patterns, tachycardia [rapid heartbeat], nocturia [excessive urination at night], tremulousness and confusion.

“In particular, the presence of visual hallucinations, illusions or distortions indicated a medical etiology [cause] until proven otherwise. Our medical experience suggests this to be the most reliable discriminator [between medical and mental problems]. We are able to define a specific medical cause in 97 of 100 patients with pronounced visual hallucinations.” [Emphasis added]

Charles B. Inlander, president of The People’s Medical Society, and his colleagues wrote in Medicine on Trial, “People with real or alleged psychiatric or behavioral disorders are being misdiagnosed—and harmed—to an astonishing degree … Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return.”

According to the California Department of Mental Health Medical Evaluation Field Manual (1991)—which CCHR assisted in introducing— ”Mental health professionals working within a mental health system have a professional and a legal obligation to recognize the presence of physical disease in their patients ... physical diseases may cause a patient’s mental disorder [or] may worsen a mental disorder.”

Persons in desperate circumstances must be provided proper and effective medical care. Mental health facilities should have non-psychiatric medical experts on staff and be required to have a full complement of diagnostic equipment, which could prevent more than 40% of admissions by finding undiagnosed physical conditions.

Psychiatry has proven one thing. Without the protection of basic human rights, there can only be diminished mental health. With the inherent contradiction between alleged treatment and results, which create long-term psychiatric patients, it falls to the wider community to expose psychiatric abuse and demand reforms.

The educational institutions responsible for training psychiatrists should also be held accountable for the havoc psychiatry’s treatments wreak. The tuitions they are paid are spent on creating a clique of people who have no regard for human rights and, in many instances, human life. Harsh words? Maybe. But academic freedom cannot succeed when the final result is massive physical and emotional harm for countless people.

Psychiatric colleges, their institutions and psychiatrists themselves must be held accountable for the abuses of basic statutory and human rights committed daily in the name of “help.”

In 1993, the Texas governor with state legislators, signed an innovative ECT law, prohibiting ECT on children under 16 and implementing mandatory reporting on ECT usage, side effects and deaths. In 1999, the Piedmont region in Italy banned ECT use on children, pregnant women and the elderly.

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