Vancouver, British Columbia -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/22/2005 -- Denouncing the fact that internationally more than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) held the grand opening this weekend of a new museum in Hollywood called Psychiatry: an Industry of Death.
The museum features 14 documentaries with statements from scores of health professionals, academics, legal and human rights experts, and victims of psychiatric brutalities ranging from electroshock and involuntary commitment to political torture, psychosurgery and the devastating effects of psychotropic drugs. The state-of-the-art museum documents that psychiatry is an industry driven entirely by profit, and provides practical guidance for lawmakers, doctors, human rights advocates and private citizens to take action in their own sphere to bring psychiatry under the law.
Community and government leaders were joined by ardent celebrity supporters Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley, Danny Masterson, Giovanni Ribisi, Leah Remini, Jenna Elfman, Catherine Bell and Marisol Nichols at the grand opening.
Stating that “no adult should be victimized by drugs or treatments that are not cures, and no government should support harm in the guise of help,” Martin Whitely, a member of parliament from Western Australia, sounded the call for “all those with common sense and a passion for human rights” to stand behind CCHR to “make the truth about psychiatric abuses widely known and bring about the reforms that are so badly needed.”
Joining the Australian lawmaker and the more than 2,300 in attendance were Georgia Senator Nancy Schaefer, American University Professor of Psychology and outspoken human rights advocate Jeffrey Schaler and Liberty Committee Executive Director Kent Snyder.
Jan Eastgate, president of CCHR International stated, “There have been 18 psychiatric drug warnings issued in the last year alone, which link suicide, hostility, worsening depression, mania, hallucinations and death to psychiatric drugs that reap $80 billion dollars a year—an abuse CCHR has persistently exposed for three decades.”
Tana Dineen a British Columbia psychologist and author of Manufacturing Victims, says, "Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV are terms arrived at through peer consensus"—a vote by American Psychiatric Association committee members. In other words, there is no objective science to them.
Brian Beaumont President of the Vancouver British Columbia Chapter of CCHR said “A staggering 46 thousand electroshocks have been given to British Columbians by psychiatrists in the past 5 years, almost doubling the amount delivered in the previous 5 years and totaling 3,143,536 taxpayer dollars in their pockets. The number of shocks peaked in the year 2000 when psychiatrists got a pay increase to $70.66 each time they pulled the switch, a practice which a Coquitlam, British Columbia woman, says wiped out large segments of her memory”.
A sampling of current statistics and facts shown in the new museum include:
Psychiatrists are using electroshock, drugs and other barbaric means to torture political dissidents.
17 million children worldwide are taking psychiatric drugs, which can cause suicide, hostility, violence, mania and drug dependence.
More than 100,000 patients die each year in psychiatric institutions.
Annually, psychiatrists kill up to 10,000 people with their use of electroshock—460 volts of electricity sent searing through the brain. Three-quarters of all electroshock victims are women.
Psychiatrists and psychologists have raped 250,000 women. Studies show that 10 to 25 percent of psychiatrists sexually assault their patients; of every 20 of these victims one is likely to be a minor.
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 at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Scientologists’ stand on psychiatry comes from a deep concern about the brutality that is the hallmark of this practice.
The opening of the new Museum, Psychiatry: an Industry of Death and the expanded facilities of CCHR mark the beginning of a new era of enlightenment on the motivation, history and crimes of psychiatry.
For more information contact Marla Filidei at 323-467-4242 or visit www.cchr.org
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Museum Targets Psychiatry As An