115 Suspicious Patient Deaths in Psychiatric Wards

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Exposes 115 Suspicious Patient Deaths in Psychiatric Wards

Physical Abuse, Massive Drugging and Medical Neglect Among Common Abuses

In the early morning of February 13, 2006, 14-year-old Sarah Crider, on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs, died alone at the Georgia Regional psychiatric hospital, lying in a pool of her own vomit. Her horrific and preventable death was exposed in an investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), described in a January 7^th article, which uncovered at least 115 suspicious patient deaths in Georgia’s state psychiatric hospitals between 2002-2006, involving patients choking on food, lack of proper medical care, suicide, physical restraint and other unnatural causes. The AJC article reported that the findings—“employees beating patients with aluminum pipes to doctors widely prescribing sedatives just to maintain order—evoke images [of horrific psychiatric treatment] from the mid-20^th century….” According to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) a mental health watchdog, in just 4 decades, more Americans have died in psychiatric institutions than American soldiers killed in battle in all the wars since 1776—including World Wars I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf Wars and Iraq War.

A testament to the barbaric conditions still found in psychiatric facilities today, the AJC reported that at the end of her last visit to Sarah at the hospital, Sarah’s grandmother “heard a loud, prolonged scream from behind the locked door to Sarah’s unit. A hospital employee explained that a patient was being restrained.” According to Dr. Bernard Aarons, former director of the Center for Mental Health Services, restraint deaths by mental health staff could result in as much as 150 deaths a year.

Due to exposure of these needless and tragic abuses, federal regulations in the United States now prohibit the use of physical and chemical restraints to coerce or discipline psychiatric patients. However, with government-funded psychiatric institutions lacking independent oversight, deaths, rapes and abuses occurring in the facilities routinely go uninvestigated and unpunished. For more information on child deaths resulting from psychiatric "treatment," read The Silent Death of America's Children, a publication by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, or click here to learn more about violent and lethal restraints in psychiatric facilities.

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The above is one more example of why psychiatry is a failure that should be abolished. There are better ways to treat people who are mentally frail and in need of compassionate help. Check out alternative mental health.com .

A medical evaluation field manual was created to help psychiatrists know what medical tests to perform when a person is so deranged that involuntary commitment is imminent. This field manual was created out of research which found that 40% of those people institutionalized had a untreated genuine medical illness that was causing or significantly contributing to the mental illness they had been labeled with.

Every County in America had a "Department of Mental Health". Have you ever heard of a "Department of Diabetes"? or a "Department of Heart Disease"? No and you never will. Psychiatry and the rest of the mental health industry has pushed to have patients forced to accept their treatment coupled with a reliable funding source... namely our tax dollars.

Fraud in the mental health field is not an isolated incident. Dr. Seltzer, M.D. is a psychiatrist who wrote about his experience as a fraud investigator in the Psychiatric Times Vol. XIII Issue 4

He writes: "For mental health providers to get reimbursed from Medicaid, patients had to be diagnosed with a major psychiatric illness, which then qualified them to apply for food stamps, SSD, SSI, free prescriptions and free medical and psychiatric care. Once they received Medicaid benefits patients also were eligible for disability. If they were well enough to work, they couldn't get free psychiatric care.

Thus, the psychiatry provider develops a strong self-interest to approve people for disability, and "patients" who are interested in taking the system for some money learn how to act seriously mentally ill.

It soon became very evident to me that many of my patients could work. One of my patients was on disability for depression. He was taking 20 credit hours at two different colleges, and denied any depressive symptoms.

"Look, Doc," he told me, "I'll get off welfare next year when I get my degree. I'll have to. I have a good job lined up as a nurse."

When I refused to sign his disability papers (he wanted food stamps on top of SSI), the clinic administrator spoke to me.

"I know some people shouldn't be here, but we don't get paid unless they are disabled. If you don't sign, the medical director just signs them off," he said.

The above is another example of an industry which seeks to keep its patients under control for the benefit of the psychiatrist, not the patient.

To learn more about the work of Citizens Commission on Human Rights or Dr. Karl Hoffower, click here for CCHR or here for Dr.Karl's myspace page