From �Snake Pits� to �Snake Oil�

Author Peter Schrag wrote that by the mid-1970s, enough neuroleptic drugs and antidepressants �were being prescribed outside hospitals to keep some three to four million people medicated full-time�roughly 10 times the number who, according to the [psychiatrists�] own arguments, are so crazy that they would have to be locked up in hospitals if there were no drugs.�

Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry emeritus, declared that psychiatry�s miraculous offerings were �simply the psychiatric profession�s latest snake oil: drugs and deinstitutionalization. As usual, psychiatrists defined their latest fad as a combination of scientific revolutions and moral reform, and cast it in the rhetoric of treatment and civil liberties.� They claimed that psychotropic drugs �relieved the symptoms of mental illness and enabled the patients to be discharged from mental hospitals. Community Mental Health Centers were touted as providing the least restrictive setting for delivering the best available mental health services. Such were the claims of psychiatrists to justify the policy of forcibly drugging and relocating their hospitalized patients. It sounded grand. Unfortunately, it was a lie.�

Even the American Psychiatric Association (APA) publication Madness and Government admitted, ��[P]sychiatrists gave the impression to elected officials that cures were the rule, not the exception � inflated expectations went unchallenged. In short, CMHCs were oversold as curative organizational units.�

The truth is that CMHCs became legalized drug dealerships that not only supplied psychiatric drugs to former mental hospital patients, but also supplied prescriptions to individuals free of �serious mental problems.�

Deinstitutionalization failed and society has been struggling with the disastrous results ever since.

In 2001, Dr. Dorine Baudin of the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction reported that the CMHC program in Europe had created �homelessness, drug addiction, crime, disturbance to public peace and order, unemployment, and intolerance of deviance.�

U.S. consumer advocate Ralph Nader called CMHCs a �highly touted but failing social innovation.� It �already bears the familiar pattern of past mental health promises that were initiated amid great moral fervor, raised false hopes of imminent solutions, and wound up only recapitulating the problems they were to solve.�

In Australia in 1993, federal Human Rights Commissioner Brian Burdekin announced that deinstitutionalization was a �fraud� and a failure. In 1999, British officials also acknowledged the failure of community mental health care.

Meanwhile, psychiatry�s CMHC budget in the United States soared from $143 million in 1969 to over $9 billion in 1997�a more than 6,000% increase in funding, for a mere 10 times increase in the number of patients and, more importantly, no results. Today the estimated costs are around $11 billion a year.

If collecting these billions in inflated fees for non-workable treatments wasn�t bad enough, in 1990, a congressional committee found that CMHCs had diverted between $40 million and $100 million to improper uses; i.e., right into the pockets of psychiatrists.

Ironically, the psychiatrists have consistently blamed the failure of deinstitutionalization on a lack of community mental health funding. In reality, they create the drug-induced crisis themselves and then, shamelessly, demand yet more money.

COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH Exorbitant Cost, Colossal Failure
In 1963, the United States psychiatric research body, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), under psychiatrist Robert Felix, implemented a community health program which relied heavily on the use of mind-altering psychiatric drugs. Spawning an international trend, it sent drugged patients into the streets, homeless and incapable. After more than $47 billion spent on it between 1969 and 1994 alone, the program is an abject failure. Spending on Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs in the United States) has increased more than 100 times faster than the increase in number of people using CMHC clinics. Despite eating up taxpayer billions, the clinics have failed their patients and become little more than legalized drug dealerships for the homeless.

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