The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a
psychiatric watchdog group, said Tom Cruise's remarks on
NBC's Today Show (Friday, June 24) represent a growing
public awareness about the national crisis of children and adults
being prescribed mind-altering drugs. More than 8 million children
in the United States now take these drugs; millions more abuse them.
Today the group released a White Paper on
"Common Psychiatric Drugs and Their Effects"
that educates people about the physically and mentally damaging effects
of psychotropic drugs that are often prescribed for a
"chemical imbalance" medical experts say doesn't exist.
Accompanying this is a
video documentary
on the group's website,
www.cchr.org, that includes
prominent doctors, neurologists and psychiatrists debunking the
hoax of mental disorders being physically based or the result of a
chemical imbalance.
"The paper provides information that psychiatrists are
not going to tell people, enabling them to make an
informed choice," CCHR's international president,
Jan Eastgate said. She slammed the
American Psychiatric Association (APA) and
affiliated mental health organizations that tout false statistics
to the media about the number of Americans suffering from
"mental illness" which she said is a fraudulent
misrepresentation.
Ms. Eastgate said, "The Today Show interview was a warning
that people need to study psychiatry and its purported research rather
than accepting at face value concepts such as a chemical imbalance in
the brain is causing their problems, which can deny them real help. In
any media interview with a psychiatrist he should be asked what lab test
he uses to determine this. There isn't one."
The "chemical imbalance" theory, popularized by marketing,
is "no more than psychiatric wishful thinking," the group's
U.S. president, author and former educator, Bruce Wiseman says.
"It has been thoroughly discredited by researchers, doctors and
scientists. The only reason it exists is that it makes it easier for
psychiatrists to drug vulnerable and often desperate individuals.
It is driven by more than $23 billion in drug sales each year."
Appearing in CCHR's video is Dr. Julian Whitaker, author and founder
of the highly respected Whitaker Wellness Center in California, who
says that psychiatry is a pseudoscience. "There's no pathology.
There's no blood test. There's no lab test. There's no x-ray.
Psychiatrists list out and vote on clusters of behavior and call them
a disease. They are giving drugs to millions of people who do not have
a defined medical problem."
Also interviewed is New York psychiatrist Ron Leifer who says,
"There's no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they
say, ‘I have a biochemical imbalance,’ I say,
‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So
what's the biochemical imbalance?"
Based on this false theory, millions of people have fallen prey
to psychiatric treatment: stimulants and antidepressants have induced
teenagers to go on murderous shooting sprees (8 out of 13
school shootings, such as the Columbine High School shooting in 1999,
were committed by teens on psychiatric drugs). Mothers on these drugs
have killed their children or cut off the arms of their baby while
taking these drugs. Electroshock — the firing of up to
460 volts of electricity across the temples — is damaging the
brains of over 100,000 Americans every year.
Because of the influence of psychiatry in the nation's schools,
hundreds of parents have also been forced to place their children on
psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their education, an abuse
CCHR and others countered with congressional support last year. The
Prohibition of Mandatory Medication amendment now prohibits this
practice.
For 14 years, CCHR, which was established by the
Church of Scientology, has also worked with parents and
concerned groups to expose the violence and suicide-inducing effects
of antidepressants. Last October, the Food and Drug Administration
ordered a "black box" label for antidepressants that the
drugs could cause suicide. But these reforms are not enough to curb
what CCHR says is a "national crisis" of child drugging
and psychotropic drug abuse.
The International Narcotics Control Board says that 80% of the
world's Ritalin consumption is in the United States. This is a drug
that medical studies show can predispose children to later cocaine
use because Ritalin and cocaine derive from similar
chemical properties. A study of 500 children over 26 years by
researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that
Ritalin is basically a "gateway drug" to other drugs, in
particular cocaine. A recent survey by the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America found 10% of teens abuse the
stimulants Ritalin and Adderall. Between 1995 and 1999, the use of
antidepressants increased 580% in the under-6 population and 151%
in the 7-12 age group.
In some communities, 20% of children are taking stimulants,
according to Drug Enforcement Administration pharmacologist
Gretchen Feussner. "That should be a wake-up call that something
isn't right," Feussner said.
"Psychiatrists are society's biggest drug pushers,"
Wiseman says. "People do suffer from serious mental difficulties
or life-crippling problems and their methods of coping with this can
fail. Psychiatrists exploit this, marketing drugs for conditions they
admit they do not know the cause of or can cure. Fraud involves
intentional deception or deliberate misrepresentation to secure money,
rights or privilege. Americans are waking up to this
psychiatric fraud."
The group's White Paper,
"Common Psychiatric Drugs and Their Effects,"
and other website publications warn people that they should not stop
taking psychiatric drugs unless it is under medical advice and
supervision. They stress the need to find competent medical
(not psychiatric) doctors who can do thorough physical examinations to
determine what could be underlying and causing emotional problems.
