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I bring the issue of mental health care abuses to the strategic Middle East with my feelings this sensitive issue should be raised where ancient civilization had its genesis. It is my sincere hope some of the great minds of the Middle East will decide to work with me towards mental health care reforms internationally. 

A Case Against the American Psychiatrists
12 April, 2008

In 1995 the American Psychiatric Association began to take the position that the concept of "functional mental illness" in people with normal brains was no longer valid. It has become the position of the American psychiatrists that people who are said to be mentally ill all have nonspecific "structural defects" of the brain along with chemical imbalances in the brain. This dangerous trend in American psychiatric thinking has negatively affected attitudes in dealing with mental healthcare internationally.

As such horrible interventions as psychosurgery become popular again in the United States to treat what is called mental illness just as in the 1930s; nevertheless, specific and reproducible markers for what the American psychiatrists call structural defects along with chemical imbalances in patients brains have not materialized. The American psychiatrists have been acting upon antiquated and nebulous theories and insisting that is progress.

Scores of Americans labeled as "functionally" mentally ill under the old classification scheme, often in courts of law, have not been contacted by the American Psychiatric Association, the psychiatrists who treated them or the courts where they may have been taken to force unwanted treatment, to be advised they do not fit into the new diagnostic scheme of mental illness in the United States and therefore they should no longer be considered to have suffered from mental illness. And, as implied there has generally been no new credible scientific evidence to point to structural defects along with chemical imbalances in these peoples brains.

It appears this frightening new trend in American psychiatry has been deviously evolved by the American psychiatrists in order to rationalize the epidemic of irreversible tardive dyskinesia and other neurological disorders caused by psychiatric drugs and to force recalcitrant patients whose instincts have been aimed at self-preservation into a paradigm of lifetime chronicity of mental illness. Tardive dyskinesia is a very painful neurological illness similar to Parkinsons disease which is caused secondary to brain damage from taking neuroleptic drugs prescribed by psychiatrists. Lithium, the other "trendy" psychiatric drug in the United States in this era, is just as dangerous and causes convulsions and seizure disorders in patients even when the drug is taken within therapeutic levels and monitored as such by the psychiatrists and the courts.

This brutality in contemporary American psychiatry presents the United States with a very serious problem in dealing with the sentiments of the American people and foreign nationals alike insofar as what their perceptions of the United States are. The direction of medical sciences in a nation is generally perceived of as a reflection of the nations socio-political attitudes and vice versa. It is therefore my sincere hope to gain support for my initiatives to reform mental healthcare laws, attitudes and practices in the United States and internationally.

Dr Harold Mandel, Director, H Mandel Enterprises Mental Health Care Reform Foundation Click here:   http://www.hmenterprises.org/foundation.aspx


 

Posted by hm 02:01 | General | Comment(0) | Permalink

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