Missouri Senate Bill 644, sponsored by Senator Denny Hoskins (Republican, District 21), passed by a large majority on May 15 and sent to the Governor for signature, modifies existing law regarding service animals. We’re sure this legislation was so important that it needed to be passed on the last day of the regular 2020 session.
The media emphasizes that the new law makes it illegal to knowingly misrepresent a dog as a service animal when it is not. They’ve been trying to pass this legislation against fake service dogs for eight years, since it’s such a serious national problem. It’s one more rule about the proliferation of people traveling, shopping and dining with a variety of so-called “emotional support animals.”
But the real purpose of this new law is the addition of “mental health” to the reasons why people may use a service dog.
Here’s the new part of this law:
A “mental health service dog” or “psychiatric service dog” is a dog individually trained for its owner who is diagnosed with a psychiatric disability, medical condition, or developmental disability recognized in the most recently published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to perform tasks that mitigate or assist with difficulties directly related to the owner’s psychiatric disability, medical condition, or developmental disability.
What’s So Wrong With This?
The psychiatric industry continues to invade the everyday lives of people, expanding the areas of society it influences and increasing the number of people targeted for “mental health treatment”.
The really fake thing about this is the DSM. The DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, revision 5) released in May, 2013 is the latest and current version of the standard handbook of “mental illnesses” as determined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It extends the reach of psychiatry further into daily life, making many more of us eligible for psychiatric diagnoses and thus for even more psychotropic drugs than we are already taking as a nation. More than ten per cent of American adults already take antidepressants, for example.
With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific or medical validity to the “disorders,” the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening “treatments” based solely on opinion.
And now they are using the DSM to train and sell dogs.
Mental “disorders” are voted into and out of existence based on factors that have nothing to do with medicine. In fact, psychiatry admits that it has not proven the cause or source of a single mental “illness”.
Patients with actual physical conditions are routinely misdiagnosed with psychiatric disorders, drugged, institutionalized, and sold emotional support dogs. Proper medical screening by non-psychiatric diagnostic specialists could eliminate more than 40% of psychiatric admissions.
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, education standard, disability, or rights of any individual.
The Missouri Revised Statutes (RSMo) already contains several explicit mentions of the DSM, now adding this one to the list. Contact your Missouri State Senator and Representative and ask them to remove all references to the fraudulent DSM from Missouri State Law.
