We’ve heard a lot recently about Mental Health. The Olympics have brought to light the stresses of competition, grueling routines and being under constant public pressure and expectations to win—and carping criticism from spectators if the athlete fails to meet those expectations. It stands to reason that having a solid mental health outlook is a vital part of such challenges. And that it can falter.
We applaud all the athletes for not just their dedication and courage but also their service to sport and their respective countries.
While CCHR exposes psychiatric abuse, ultimately this is so that people can achieve true mental health—a positive outlook both emotionally and in thoughts and actions that enables a better life, not hampered by physically damaging “treatments.”
“Mental health,” as viewed in the psychiatric industry is seen as mental “illness:” using descriptive names based on biased observation to redefine not doing well mentally as a physical disease—with not a single medical test to confirm this. This often leads to the use of physically damaging treatments, but no cures. It is important to differentiate between psychiatry’s definition of “mental disorder” and what is mental health, and not confuse the two.
Rest assured, psychiatrists and psychologists will abuse the current mental health awareness to slip in the need for biochemical “solutions.” Like a Johns Hopkins university psychologist who claims a “really well-structured psychedelic” drug session is “equal to several years of ordinary psychotherapy.”
CCHR has always warned that psychiatry’s power rests on force and that true informed consent does not exist in the mental health system when it fails to inform those needing help that a mental disorder diagnosis is not based on scientific tests and that drugs and electroshock given in the absence of fully informed consent constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Recent United Nations and World Health Organization (WHO) reports agree—vindicating what CCHR has been fighting for for over 50 years!
The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) issued a statement acknowledging the international outrage over psychiatric coercion and called for alternatives to psych drugs and restraint use.
A former United Nations Special Rapporteur on health, Dr. Dainius P?ras, recently was interviewed for Psychiatric Times in the U.S. and condemned coercive psychiatry. He said that psych diagnoses perpetuate discrimination; biological psychiatry hasn’t worked and equated it with “totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.” He called for the “elimination of all forced psychiatric confinement and treatment.”
Relevant to the recent awareness about mental health, Dr. P?ras also said: “There is now unequivocal evidence of the failures of a system that relies too heavily on the biomedical model,” including psychotropic drugs.
Then the WHO issued a new guideline for mental health treatment in July, attacking “coercive psychiatry” as “pervasive” and that it must change. It supported a ban on “forced hospitalization and forced treatment,” including drugs and electroshock.
It is important for people to know the differences between mental health and psychiatric “disease,” and to be informed of the failures of this profession in ensuring mental health is achieved as opposed to creating mental ill-health.
Failed Mental Health Programs
A new major resource from CCHR International answers questions about why is psychiatry so controversial? Why do critics think psychiatry creates unhappiness, rather than curing it? How is it that psychiatric treatment causes harm? Why is that other doctors don’t think psychiatrists are “real doctors”? Why are psychiatrists their own worst enemies, while blaming their failures on both their patients and an “anti-psychiatry” movement that they, in fact, started?
Download and read this new publication, “Why Psychiatry Sees Itself as a Dying Industry — A Resource on its Failures and Critics.”
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