Local Saint Louis and Missouri News
Teen patient dies at state psychiatric hospital
[St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12/8/2009]A 16-year-old girl at state-operated Hawthorn Children’s Psychiatric Hospital in St. Louis was discovered choking on a plastic medicine cup on December 2, 2009. She was declared dead at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
Missouri Gets $22 million Settlement from Pfizer
US drugmaker Pfizer has agreed to pay $2.3 Billion in the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Pfizer illegally promoted four drugs and caused false claims to be submitted to government healthcare programs for uses that were not medically accepted. Missouri will receive $22 million as part of the settlement.
The civil settlement also relates to allegations that Pfizer paid bribes to healthcare providers to induce them to prescribe Bextra, an anti-inflammatory drug, Geodon, an antipsychotic drug, Zyvox, an antibiotic and Lyrica, an epilepsy treatment.
While it is not illegal for a physician to prescribe a drug for an unapproved use, federal law prohibits a manufacturer from promoting a drug for uses not approved by the FDA. This promotional activity by Pfizer included: Promoting the use of the antipsychotic drug Geodon for a variety of off-label conditions such as attention deficit disorder, autism, dementia and depression for patients that included children and adolescents.
Geodon is a newer atypical antipsychotic, generic name ziprasidone hydrochloride, in the major tranquilizer category. Suicidal thoughts and violence are among the possible side effects of such antipsychotics. USA Today on May 2, 2006 reported a study that showed at least 45 children died between 2000 and 2004 from the side effects of this kind of antipsychotic drug. Despite an adults-only FDA approval for these drugs, up to 2.5 million children were prescribed them. As the FDA's Adverse Drug Reactions reporting database only collects 1% to 10% of drug-induced side effects and reported deaths, the true child death rate could be between 450 and several thousand.
St. Louis Doctor Disciplined for innapropriate Xanax prescriptions
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Missouri State Board of Registration for the Healing Arts placed Dr. Nai Shu of St. Louis on probation for three years starting last February. According to the board, Shu prescribed inappropriate amounts of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax to six patients in 2006 and 2007, apparently without giving them medical exams.
State center for disabled is not safe, U.S. reports
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8/22/2008:
“A long-awaited Department of Justice investigation of Northwest Habilitation Center scheduled for public release today found serious problems with the care and safety afforded some of the state’s most severely disabled residents.
“The investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division followed the deaths in recent years of two patients at the state-owned and operated center in unincorporated St. Louis County near Overland. Northwest houses 68 residents.
“‘In our judgement, Northwest is not safe,’ investigators concluded in their 23-page report. ‘Northwest fails to address serious issues of harm in a timely manner, fails to adequately protect residents ... and fails to collect reliable risk management data.’”
Lately there has been much noise around a proposed tax increase called “Putting Kids First” pushed by various mental health agencies. This would create a fund generated by an increase of 1 cent on every $4 of sales in St. Louis County, the money to be paid to non-profit agencies who provide mental health and substance abuse services to children aged nineteen and younger in St. Louis County.
On the surface, this seems like a do-gooder kind of thing. In reality, however, much of the money will be used to hook children on addictive and abusive psychiatric drugs.
They say that this money is needed to subsidize them because they are not getting enough funding for mental health and substance abuse services for children and youth. But at the same time, the budget for the Missouri Department of Mental Health in the last 6 years has jumped 170% to over $1.1 billion. The tax money we are already paying is not being well spent; it doesn't make sense to throw more money where over a billion dollars a year is not helping.
Let’s look at this from another point of view. The psychiatric services promoted by “Putting Kids First” usually mean the prescription of psychiatric drugs, they say this on their website. Since 2003, when the Missouri mental health budget started to skyrocket, there have been more than 60 international drug regulatory agency warnings about the risks inherent in taking psychotropic drugs. Antidepressants can cause suicide and hostility; antipsychotics can cause life-threatening diabetes; and stimulants prescribed to children may put them at risk of heart problems, stroke and even death.
Alternative ways of helping those suffering from mental disturbance are buried by the marketing hype that “mental illness” is the result of some neurobiological dysfunction or chemical imbalance that can only be corrected with psychotropic drugs. There is no scientific merit to these claims but they support drug sales of more than $27 billion a year in the United States and $80 billion worldwide.
Not only do psychiatrists not understand the etiology of any mental disorder, they cannot cure them. In effect, psychiatrists are saying that mental problems are incurable and that the afflicted are condemned to lifelong suffering - on psychotropic drugs. Though psychiatry may have given up on mental healing, this is fortunately false. Mental problems can be resolved without drugs, and thankfully so.
While life is full of problems - and sometimes these problems are overwhelming - psychiatry and its diagnoses, treatments and drugs, are not the solution; and we should not be voting for taxes that pay for these fraudulent and abusive diagnoses, treatments and drugs.
There are far too many workable alternatives to psychiatric drugging to list them all here. Psychiatry on the other hand, would prefer to say there are none and fight to keep it that way. That leaves a medical practitioner with a choice between fact and fiction, between cure and coercion, and between medicine and manipulation. For more information about alternatives to psychiatric drugging, read the report Mental Health Care: What is the Alternative to Psychotropic Drugs? available from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of St. Louis.
Missouri to settle suit filed in death of mentally disabled man
By William C. Lhotka
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
06/10/2008
CLAYTON -- The mother of a mentally retarded young man who ingested an ink pen at the Northwest Habilitation Center has reached a tentative out-of-court settlement over her son's death.
Click here to read the full article.
Reporter’s query
Have you or someone you know been wrongly diagnosed with a mental health disorder? Contact health reporter Blythe Bernhard at bbernhard@post-dispatch.com for a story she’s reporting.
This announcement appeared on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch web site http://www.stltoday.com/news on Tuesday, 13 May 2008.
Click Here for Missouri Legislative News
The legislative session is over Friday, 16 May 2008
“New charges are filed in fatal group home fire”
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — The owner of a Missouri group home where 11 people died in a 2006 fire faces a raft of new federal charges. … [He] allegedly ran five southwestern Missouri group homes for the mentally ill despite having a 2002 felony conviction for Medicaid fraud that barred him from operating a business that bills Medicaid.
“Several mentally disabled residents have been rushed to the hospital for injuries they suffered while living at a state-run center.”
Mentally disabled injured at state center By Carolyn Tuft, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, 03/05/2008
“The Missouri Department of Mental Health is investigating the death of a mentally disabled man Sunday morning in a hospital ward at DePaul Health Center.”
By Carolyn Tuft, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, 02/01/2008
Psychiatry: An Industry of Death international touring exhibit and documentaries
Denouncing the fact that internationally more than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions and an estimated 15,000 American children have died as a consequence of taking psychiatric drugs, the St. Louis Chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) presented the “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” international touring exhibit in St. Louis from January 5 through January 19, 2008; and January 21-22 in Jefferson City. Mary “One” Johnson helped open the exhibit which features 15 display panels that incorporate audio-visual presentations depicting human rights abuses by psychiatry and carry statements from health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities. The exhibit also addresses a federal plan that would screen the state’s children for “mental illness” that could lead to a threefold increase in the number of children being subjected to the devastating effects of psychotropic drugs.
The 185-foot, state-of-the-art exhibit exposes psychiatry as an industry driven entirely by profit. It traces the origins of psychiatry, the role psychiatrists have played in the oppression of blacks and minorities, the roots of their eugenics programs and the pivotal part they played in the Holocaust. It also reveals how psychiatric drugs are behind gun-toting teens today going on shooting sprees, and how millions of federal dollars allocated to screen all 52 million American schoolchildren could increase both child deaths and acts of school violence. People touring the exhibit signed a petition opposing funding and implementation of mental health screening in schools.
“The touring exhibit shows psychiatry’s deadly ‘treatments’ in graphic detail,” warns CCHR St. Louis chapter spokesperson, Moritz Farbstein, who listed out psychosurgery, shock treatment, deadly restraint and the prevalent inhumane conditions of psychiatric facilities, and the forced drugging of children as young as six months old. “Most importantly, though, this exhibit provides practical guidance for lawmakers, educators, doctors, human rights advocates and private citizens so they can take action in their own spheres to bring psychiatry to account for their abuses.”
The touring “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death” exhibit theme is patterned after a recently opened museum by the same name at the Los Angeles headquarters of Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a psychiatric watchdog group with 300 chapters worldwide. Co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, CCHR investigates and exposes psychiatric violations of human rights.
Mr. Farbstein said, “Our exhibit shows very clearly how, in the name of ‘help,’ psychiatry, in fact, destroys lives.”
A sampling of current statistics and facts shown in the exhibit bears this out:
- 20 million children worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs, including 10 million in the United States, which can cause suicide, hostility, violence, mania, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes and death.
- Antipsychotic drug prescriptions for children increased fivefold between 1993 and 2002 in the United States, during which time 45 children died from the drugs.
- In recent years, stimulant drugs have caused 19 child deaths, although as only 1% to 10% of drug adverse reactions are reported, the death toll from children taking antipsychotic drugs, stimulants and antidepressants could be as high as 15,000.
- 10% of American teens (2.3 million) are abusing psychiatric stimulants.
- More than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions around the world.
- Psychiatrists are using electroshock, drugs and other barbaric means to torture political dissidents.
- Internationally, psychiatrists kill up to 10,000 people each year with their use of electroshock—460 volts of electricity sent searing through the brain. Three-quarters of all electroshock victims are women.
- Psychiatrists and psychologists have raped 250,000 women. Studies show that 10 to 25 percent of psychiatrists sexually assault their patients; of every 20 of these victims one is likely to be a minor.
Missouri Department of Mental Health Hires Child Abusers
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (“Care centers hire many on abusers list”, 11/15/07) reports that a Missouri state audit turned up “hundreds of people who work with the state’s most vulnerable residents have a history of child abuse and neglect or other criminal activity.”
“The audit turned up nearly 700 cases of people with questionable backgrounds working with the elderly, mentally ill and foster children at various state-run and state-licensed residential centers.” 129 people with probable cases of child abuse and neglect were working at facilities run or licensed by the Department of Mental Health; 447 similar cases were found in the Department of Health and Senior Services; another 105 similar cases were found in the Department of Social Services.
Write a letter to the editor to express your opinion of this appalling trend.
Mental Health Day
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 was Mental Health Day, a day sponsored by the World Federation for Mental Health to advocate the need for more psychiatrists and more funds for mental health treatment. This year’s WFMH slogan is “Mental Health in a Changing World: The Impact of Culture Diversity.” This is really the psychiatric industry’s attempt to cross cultural boundaries to get their fraudulent and abusive methods accepted by everyone.
CCHR St. Louis was “part” of the world Mental Health Day by holding its own public information event with the slogan: “Mental Health in a Changing World: A Time for Treatment Diversity.” In other words, it is time to increase the warnings about the dangers of psychiatric treatments, especially drugs that cause violence, suicide and death, and for governments to channel funding into workable non-drug alternatives.
CCHR is calling on:
- The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to place in a prominent box on both the Drug Information Packaging and bottle, a statement that consumers have the right to report any adverse psychiatric drug reaction to the FDA (MedWatch), and
- All state governments and the federal government to recognize the dangers of psychiatric drugs and to start channeling funds away from unworkable and dangerous psychiatric methods and into medical programs that:
- help wean a person safely off psychiatric drugs, and
- help mentally disturbed individuals with effective medical/alternative, non-psychiatric programs.
Click here to read the Press Release.
St. Louis psychologist accepts punishment for sexual episode
KSDK-TV Channel 5 in St. Louis, MO aired a
story Thursday, July 19, 2007 about a psychologist who
just surrendered his state license to practice for inappropriate
sexual advances to one of his patients. Read
about it here.
Feds look into mental center deaths
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article Monday, July 16, 2007 stating that “Federal authorities are investigating the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s handling of the death of Rutherford ‘Rudy’ Wallace, who died last year after a worker severely scalded the paralyzed and mentally retarded man while giving him a bath.” Read the whole investigation into patient abuse in the Missouri Department of Mental Health here.
A follow-up article on August 31, 2007 said that, “A federal review that found that residents of the Bellefontaine Habilitation Center were at risk of injury or even death has triggered a move to place some 120 residents of the center in private, community-based programs.” The article goes on to say that, “on June 27, an annual federal review of the center resulted in a declaration of ‘immediate jeopardy’ on behalf of a resident.”
Meanwhile, the number of uninsured people in Missouri continues to grow, increasing 15.4 percent from 2005 to 2006. To find out the relationship between the increase in uninsured and failures (fraud and abuse) in the mental health system, read the CCHR publication What Does Mandated Mental Health Parity Pay For?.
