Introduced by Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the “Supporting and Treating Officers In Crisis Act of 2019” (S. 998) was signed into law by President Trump on July 25, 2019.
This bill reauthorizes and expands certain Department of Justice grant programs to provide mental health, stress reduction, psychological services, suicide prevention services, and training for identifying, reporting, and responding to officer mental health crises and suicide, for law enforcement officers and their families. The bill authorizes up to $7,500,000 in appropriations each year for fiscal years 2020 to 2024, a maximum total of $37.5 million.
This sounds eminently socially acceptable, and indeed the bill was widely supported by Congress and various national advocacy groups.
The Real Crisis in Mental Health
While society certainly owes significant consideration and support to law enforcement officers (LEOs) and their families, we can’t help noting that in today’s environment, “mental health and suicide prevention services” really means psychiatric drugs and other harmful psychiatric treatments.
The real crisis in mental health care today is not officer stress, but psychiatric fraud and abuse.
While the bill specifically calls for evidence-based programs, the evidence actually shows that psychiatrists don’t know what causes mental trauma, are unable to predict violence or suicide, and cannot cure any mental disorder they claim to treat.
Psychiatric Fraud
By their own admission psychiatrists cannot predict violence or suicide, and often release violent patients from facilities, claiming that they are not a threat. In 1979, an American Psychiatric Association’s task force admitted in its Brief Amicus Curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court that psychiatrists could not predict dangerousness. It informed the court that “‘dangerousness’ is neither a psychiatric nor a medical diagnosis, but involves issues of legal judgment and definition, as well as issues of social policy.” In addition to not being able to predict violent behavior, psychiatrists certainly have no cures for it, a fact that even they admit.
Psychiatric diagnoses are not based on science, but opinion. Psychiatrists do not have any scientific or medical test to diagnose a person’s mental condition and rely upon faulty observation and opinion of behavior. They admit to not knowing the cause of a single mental disorder or how to cure them. The error in their opinions is enormous — they condemn the innocent, release the dangerous, induce violence in others through drugs and commit people who are not in need of help or turn those away who may genuinely be in need of it.
Recommendations
Rather than training psychiatrists and psychologists about LEO mental health, the grants should be used to train LEOs, security personnel, teachers, coroners, and other professionals to recognize that irrational, violent and suicidal behavior could be caused by psychiatric drugs.
Click here to download and read the CCHR report “Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence & Suicide — School Shootings & Other Acts of Senseless Violence.”
Click here to download and read “Psychiatrists Cannot Predict or Cure Violence.“