News Blaze – June 7, 2012
By Bruce Edwin – Editor, Hollywood Sentinel
The rap artist Chill E.B. is bringing the message of freedom from abuse to the masses, in his latest video. One of the rappers main causes is the group CCHR.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a nonprofit mental health watchdog, responsible for helping to enact more than 150 laws protecting individuals from abusive or coercive practices. CCHR has long fought to restore basic inalienable human rights to the field of mental health, including, but not limited to, full informed consent regarding the medical legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis, the risks of psychiatric treatments, the right to all available medical alternatives, and the right to refuse any treatment considered harmful.
In 1976, due to CCHR’s efforts, the first law to protect patients against enforced electroshock and psychosurgery was passed in California, providing informed consent and banning their use on children under the age of twelve. This became a model law, adopted in substance by legislatures across the United States and in other countries. In Texas, psychiatrists must also ensure that autopsy reports are done on any deaths within fourteen days of ECT administration.
In Italy, the birthplace of ECT, the Piemonte regional parliament responded to CCHR’s evidence by unanimously voting to ban the use of ECT on children, the elderly and pregnant women. In the 1990s, CCHR helped uncover and expose the fact that up to 150 restraint deaths occur each year in the US alone, with nearly ten percent of these being children, some as young as six. Federal regulations were passed in 1999 that prohibited the use of physical and chemical (mind-altering drugs) restraints to coerce or discipline patients, ordered a “national reporting system” and cut government funding for any facility that did not comply.
In the 1980s/early 1990s, CCHR spearheaded a campaign to expose and ban Deep Sleep Treatment (DST) at Chelmsford Private Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney, Australia. The “treatment” involved knocking the patient unconscious for three weeks with a cocktail of psychiatric drugs and electroshocking them daily, without their consent. It killed 48 people. CCHR achieved its ban under the Mental Health Act and it is a criminal offense for psychiatrists to administer it. CCHR also obtained the country’s highest level of government inquiry into DST and mental health, leading to significant reforms.
CCHR also documented numerous cases of parents being coerced/ pressured or forced to give their children psychiatric drugs as a condition of attending school, including parents charged with medical neglect for refusing to give their child a drug documented to cause suicide and violence. By working with parents, doctors and numerous civil and human rights advocates, this issue was exposed in the national media, was brought before state and federal legislators and resulted in the 2004 passage of the prohibition on forcing parents to put their children on psychiatric drugs.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child responded to reports from CCHR Finland, Australia and Denmark, expressing concerns that ADHD and ADD “are being misdiagnosed and therefore psychostimulant drugs are being over-prescribed, despite growing evidence of the harmful effects of these drugs.” The Committee recommended, “other forms of management and treatment be used as much as possible to address these behavioral disorders.”
In 1991, largely due to CCHR’s efforts, the FDA held hearings into the antidepressant drug Prozac, where dozens of consumers testified that the drug had turned people with no previous history of psychosis, suicidal and homicidal. Due to the vested interests of the voting FDA board members, no action was taken to protect the public until nearly thirteen years later when CCHR’s more than ten-year campaign to expose the dangers of these drugs came to fruition, and the FDA (under pressure from Congress) finally issued the agencies strongest warning that antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts and actions in those 18 years of age and younger. This was later extended to age 24.
Chill E.B. is a defiant, daring rap artist in the spirit of Public Enemy, that sings out against the abuses of the psychiatric industry. The following here below, is his latest video concerning the topic, along with the lyrics to his powerful, relevant song.
http://newsblaze.com/story/20120607072817ente.nb/topstory.html