120-foot long exhibit opens in downtown Chicago exposing the real crisis in mental health January 5th - 9th

CHICAGO - A controversial exhibit on psychiatry, recently featured in the Chicago Tribune, will be open to the public in downtown Chicago as part of a world tour that has included stops in Rome, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, and the Federal legislature in Mexico City among the 33 cities and 6 countries where it has been displayed. In the U.S. it has been featured at the state Capitols of Georgia, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and a federal building in New York City.

The organizers of the exhibit, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog, say that the psychiatric abuses portrayed throughout the exhibit though graphic, are a documented portrayal of the rampant abuses committed daily under the guise of mental health—and effecting some of our most defenseless citizens—particularly children, the elderly, and the mentally or emotionally vulnerable.

Hosting the exhibit in Chicago will be Bruce Wiseman, CCHR's U.S. President, who says the exhibit is a wake-up call to Illinois citizens to protect their rights against psychiatric abuse, "Unfortunately, the state has a history of institutional abuse, forced drugging, and patients injured by improper use of restraints. Illinois also has a heavy representation of convicted mental health practitioners with crimes ranging from sexual assault, battery, theft, fraud, and child molestation."

CCHR also found that children are still being forced onto potentially addictive psychiatric drugs despite Illinois passing legislation in 2002 mandating school boards to implement policy prohibiting such coercion. CCHR has spearheaded the campaign for these legislative protections, now passed in seven states, adding to more than 100 laws that it has helped to pass protecting the rights of patients against mental health abuse.

Thousands of people are expected to tour the exhibit, and can speak with CCHR representatives as well as parents supporting the exhibit, including Mrs. Vicky Dunkle, Vice President of the national group Parents for a Label and Drug Free Education. In 2001, her 10-year-old daughter Shaina died in her arms due to toxic levels of the drug prescribed by her psychiatrist, "I am here because there was no reason that my daughter had to die. I have to live with that every day - that I trusted the so-called professionals. If I can help to educate other parents, to help protect their children from harm, then Shaina's death will not have been in vain."

As evidenced by the information in the exhibit, psychiatrists have little or no accountability for the damage they inflict on patients or the billions they receive in appropriations, when the truth is that psychiatry repeatedly fails to deliver a scientifically measurable positive result. Yet mental health budgets keep soaring. In the U.S., the psychiatric industry's mental health budgets were up 142% from $33 billion in 1994 to more than $80 billion in 1999. In Illinois over $600 million was allocated to mental health in 2003 alone.

Despite record spending on mental health, psychiatrists readily admit that they cannot "cure" anyone—Dr. Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association, admitted that, "The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone."

So why the billions in appropriations? Wiseman says its all part of a mental health scam perpetrated upon governments and taxpayers —a campaign to convince the public that more and more people are "mentally ill," in order get more government funding. "The cash-cow for psychiatrists is their 'billing bible', the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) with its ever-expanding list of illnesses, none of which can be scientifically proven to exist."

Thomas Dorman, M.D. and Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom says its all about selling the idea of a disorder - the idea of mental illness, in order to get more funding, "… the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of 'disease,' formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough."

In fact the DSM has increasingly come under criticism, with even TIME Magazine reporting in its Jan 12, 2003 article, "How We Get Labeled" that "Though it's fashionable these days to think of psychiatry as just another arm of medicine, there is no biological test for any of these disorders… In the end, though, the DSM can't achieve certainty because psychiatry can't."

The exhibit, features an entire section on some of the ludicrous "mental illnesses" featured in the DSM, including "caffeine disorder," "mathematics disorder" and the all encompassing "Phase of Life" disorder. Wiseman says that though the so-called disorders are ridiculous, the damage that psychiatrists can use them for is quite serious, "You could be drugged, electroshocked, involuntarily committed - all based on a psychiatric label. No one could prove you were not mentally ill because it is all based on opinion. That is the true danger - there is no science to psychiatry - only stigmatizing labels and damaging treatments."

CCHR will also be releasing its latest publication in Chicago - "The Real Crisis in Mental Health" which will be given to state legislators, promising to tell a different story to the psychiatric hype that is used to sell governments on increasing mental health funding. It provides medical commentary not only on psychiatry's failed diagnostic system and the unnecessary drugging of millions of children, but also why community mental health and psychiatric involuntary commitment have been a costly failure, the real reason why psychiatry needs to rely upon such forceful measures and physically abusive treatments.

The exhibit will be open to the public from 10:00 am to 5:00 p.m. at the Thompson Center in downtown Chicago. To find out more about CCHR, call 1-800-869-2247.

Published: January 05, 2004
Author: Marla Filidei

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights@cchr.org.