1. Mental health homes must be established to replace coercive psychiatric institutions. These must have medical diagnostic equipment, which non-psychiatric medical doctors can use to thoroughly examine and test for all underlying physical problems that may be manifesting as disturbed behavior. Government and private funds should be channeled into this rather than abusive psychiatric institutions and programs that have proven not to work.

2. Establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for psychiatric treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than with the government or its agencies.

3. Clinical and financial audits of all government-run and private psychiatric facilities that receive government subsidies or insurance payments should be done to ensure accountability and statistics on admissions, treatment, and deaths, without breaching patient confidentiality, should be compiled for review.

4. Establish or increase the number of psychiatric fraud investigation units to recover funds that are embezzled through the mental health system.

5. Government, criminal, educational, judicial and other social agencies should not rely on the DSM and no legislation should use this as a basis for determining the mental state, competency, educational standard or rights of any individual.

Next

Back to Contents