Monday, November 19, 2012

Jubilant email from a heroic crusader


Subject: KABLAM!!! TEENSCREEN DEAD! KAPOW!!!
Date: Nov 19, 2012 8:56 AM


TeenScreen is dead, according to their website TeenScreen.org.

Their announcement"We are sorry to inform you that the TeenScreen National Center will be winding down its program at the end of this year. Accordingly, we will no longer train or register new programs. We will provide updates on the TeenScreen website for a limited time with respect to any other screening programs of which we become aware.”

TeenScreen was a huge program for psychiatrists. This was their massive plan intended to infiltrate every school and mentally screen every kid in the United States. It was THE program the psychs were counting on to get their hands on every child in America - so that the next generation would all become their victims.  

And now - it is dead.

We dealt TeenScreen various fatal death blows from which it never recovered and that ultimately led to its demise.   We won the internet fight.  OnGoogle we never relinquished the top 2 or 3 spot when searching for TeenScreen.  We defeated TeenScreen on YouTube by never giving up the #1 spot when searching for TeenScreen.  We worked with the press across the country and had a massive number of stories published. We informed schools who booted it out.   This all spawned coast to coast demonstrations.

TeenScreen was a very controversial national so-called "diagnostic psychiatric service", aka suicide survey; done on children who were then referred to psychiatric treatment. The evidence suggests that the objective of the psychiatrists who designed TeenScreen was to place children so selected on psychotropic drugs.

TeenScreen was originally investigated and exposed by PsychSearch.net when there was ZERO negative information on the net.   We were informed about TeenScreen by Sylvia DeWall, a Clearwater event promoter who was alarmed after seeing a TV news report, where the Florida Mental Health Institute was attempting to implement TeenScreen in Pinellas County schools. DeWall’s alarm was justified.   

TeenScreen’s pharma connected Director Laurie Flynn had her sights set on Pinellas’ kids. This was revealed in one of Flynn’s emails to a Florida official, which PsychSearch.net obtained in a public records request: “I’m looking for a horse to ride here!” and “I need to get some kids screened”.  PsychSearch.net investigated and the resulting expose’ led to a firestorm of emails to Pinellas County school district officials from concerned citizens protesting TeenScreen. This resulted in Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times stories and the Pinellas County school board booting TeenScreen out.

The controversy was then off to the races as it exploded on the World Wide Web and spread across the country spawning media across the country as school after school rejected TeenScreen.  We lost track of how many reporters we provided documentation and quotes to.  

Recently we have been tracking the departures of TeenScreen’s directors Laurie Flynn and Leslie McGuire. One source close to the scene said that Flynn and McGuire left with disagreements over policy issues. The source said that psychiatrist Mark Olfson was the “interim director” who we discovered only showed up once a week on Wednesdays for one hour!

What has been happening at TeenScreen has been hush-hush.  Even one of TeenScreen's National Advisory Council members, psychiatrist Joe English told us.  "Your e-mail is the first information I have on what may have happened here."

Thanks to all of those Clearwater area folks who were there in the beginning, went to battle and kicked butt!   See Video

Thanks goes to the legal team at the Rutherford Institute, writer Evelyn Pringle, the Eagle Forum and all those groups from many walks of life, nationwide, who fought this.

Special thanks  goes to those I call the TeenScreen Dream Team, Sandra Lucas in Salt Lake City, who offered public relations guidance and political strategy; Doyle Mills, Clearwater, Fl who commanded the Letters to the Editor Attack Force (LEAF) and wrote articles himself and Sue Weibert, Buffalo, New York, investigator and google-fu master.

And a very special thank you to my good friends Michael and Teresa Rhoades, who fought with the fury you would expect from parents whose child was mentally screened without their permission.

We have never really tooted our own horn, but today, for your enjoyment, we solemnly play Taps(wink wink)

To the psychiatric adversaries in our path – get a head start on your counterparts - surrender now! J

I am not kidding.

Sincerely,

Ken Kramer
Researcher
PsychSearch.net

P.S. If you now believe PsychSearch.net is worthy of your support, click the below red button.  If we haven't won your confidence yet, perhaps you will be convinced
when you hear very soon what else has been accomplished!

Trashing Dear Abby (again)

Jeanne Phillips, 70-year-old daughter of the original Abigail Van Buren, Pauline Phillips, has always told almost everyone who writes to her to see a psychiatrist as the "common-sense" solution to whatever problem they are having.

Today, her omnipresent Dear Abby column inadvertently reveals the obnoxious agenda of all psychiatric shills, particularly so-called "family support" groups like NAMI.

Abby sagely suggests to a writer she calls "Hearing Voices in Illinois" that the only reason her family might think she doesn't need psych drugs is that they're "reluctant to admit" what Hearing's psych would confirm -- that in fact, there is a mental illness in the family.

In other words, if the family weren't so irrationally prejudiced against people with diseases of the brain as opposed to the heart, kidney or stomach, then they'd surely see the obvious logic of taking drugs which reduce your life expectancy by twenty-five years and do virtually nothing to help you.

Abby speculates that Hearing's nephew could go online to research mental illness since he is gifted. She presumes that this gifted nephew will clearly see the truth -- that the orthodox, hyper-medicalized view of all human problems absolutely must rule.

Families are only to be respected when they tell people to take psych drugs. If they tell people not to get "treatment" then they're wrong, and they deserve no respect. That's the way NAMI has always operated. Today's Dear Abby just takes the implication to a more obvious, blatant and pedestrian level.

I could just laugh at something so utterly stupid as Dear Abby. Jeanne Phillips is really so out of touch with the issues she's writing about that I have to wonder where she is in time, and why anybody pays her anymore. Her readers are certainly smarter than she is -- they've heard about black box warnings, billions in judgements for false advertising and fraud, etc.... haven't they?

This "most popular and widely syndicated column in the world" has the common sense of a late-night TV commercial and the youthful perspective of ... someone about Jeanne Phillips' age!

But people are stupid. Maybe such destructive falsehood should be kept out of the mass media for the protection of the public.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Two cases (discussion)

I was down at 26th & California today to pick up a transcript of Dr. Watson's testimony in Billy's case. When I walked into the courthouse, there was a small demonstration (3 or 4 people) out in front.

One guy had a flag and a megaphone, but in my rush I did not recognize his cause for protest. His voice was remarkable, however, with a cadence almost Martin-Luther-King-like.

When I left the courthouse, the demonstrator was still there, yelling over his megaphone and waving the flag. I remarked to someone walking by that he had a great voice, and got the response, "Yeah, but he talks the wrong shit."

I wasn't quick enough, so I missed the opportunity to paraphrase William Munny, my all-time favorite Clint Eastwood character: We all talk the wrong shit, kid.

Maybe we all helped put both Billy and Johnny in the nuthouse. After all, Billy murdered somebody, and Johnny tore up too much furniture in the middle of the night. So something had to be done with both of them, and the psychs are convenient "experts". Who wouldn't wish for a clean, merciful, medical solution to stuff like this?

The problem is, that clean, merciful, medical solution is a delusion.

If Billy had gone along with the state plan, he'd be taking antipsychotic medications just because his psych wanted him to, even though it didn't do anything but disable him. He would be more dangerous and less able to ever contribute to society again under his own steam. That is definitely not what the taxpayers want, nor what the Illinois Department of Human Services advertises.

If Johnny had bought into his psych "diagnosis" he'd be on drugs, too. He be a mental health consumer for life, chronically mentally ill, a confirmed victim, with every excuse to fail his family. His daughters would worry about genetic risk of mental illness. That's definitely not the result Johnny's parents were after when they called the police, nor any advantage of paying medical insurance premiums up-to-date.

We will have to walk and talk with our own crazy people, not just give them away to experts. Otherwise we will all be slaves.

Or at best, we'll sure be talking the wrong shit.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Two cases (continued)

I'll call my client in the second case Johnny.

Johnny was having business problems, and stress at home due to his basement flooding repeatedly. He had also decided to get himself off Ambien, which he worried he had become physically dependant upon.

Johnny's family actually did not know about the Ambien. When he began getting up in the middle of the night to battle mice and bugs which he believed were infesting the furniture, they figured he was having a psychotic break. Finally one morning the police were called and Johnny was packed off to a local emergency room. Although he had no previous psychiatric issues, the behavioral health in-take coordinator (after scouting out the insurance coverage) assured everyone that Johnny was in serious need of treatment whether he wanted any or not. She coerced family members to re-write their initial affidavits and add statements about fears of suicide.

Johnny had never been violent or suicidal in his life. He was not violent that morning, and he had no thoughts of suicide whatsoever. No matter, with just the right words on a piece of paper, the in-take coordinator had her paying involuntary patient. Johnny was committed and drugged into insensibility.

After a few days Johnny got out. But the hospital was paid in full by his insurance provider, even though he called them and specifically ordered them never to pay a single dime. Johnny also had a new label, "bipolar", which would be with him for life. After several days of being constantly asked about suicide and surrounded by people who were suicidal, he had actually become slightly obsessed by the idea.

After a year Johnny was pretty well back to normal. He had stopped all psych meds, stopped seeing "counselors", and pried various records out of the hospital, which convinced him that the in-take coordinator and others had broken the law and committed various torts. It took awhile for him to reconcile with his family, but he finally decided not to make them defendants in the lawsuit he intends to file.

Johnny remains outraged by what was done to him. He was assaulted, insulted, falsely imprisoned, dehumanized. He is determined to get justice. The idea of just forgetting about it is contrary to any sense of legitimate society or self respect.

I met with Johnny and his family. Nobody believes that what happened was OK. They are all horrified by the actions of the so-called "mental health system" and happy to tell anyone who asks to stay as far away from psychiatrists as they possibly can.

(To be continued...)

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Two cases

(Opposite ends, in a sense, of the spectrum of legal complexity which is psychiatric coercion...)

FIRST CASE

I'll call my client Billy. He is a college graduate, former stockbroker, English teacher at a foreign university, and a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War.

In 1986 Billy was fired from his job with the Veteran's Administration. Twelve years later he laid in wait at a train terminal for his former supervisor, and fatally shot him several times in the back.

At trial it was found that Billy had believed he was the victim of a conspiracy wherein the government had been reading his mind by electronic means, and that he had been forced to kill his supervisor in order to stop the intolerable government intrusion. He was adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) and committed to Elgin Mental Health Center for treatment. Prior to the murder and NGRI commitment, Billy had no psychiatric history and no history of substance abuse.

By 2004, Billy had recovered sufficiently that he no longer suffered hallucinations or delusions. He began to refuse psychotropic medications because they made him feel worse and prevented him from thinking clearly. Possibly because he did not accept the orthodox treatment model, he was not granted expanded privileges for several years. However his recovery continued unabated.

I began to advocate for Billy, and the treatment team was soon willing to collaborate. In late 2011, the facility recommended to the court that he be granted supervised off-grounds passes. The psychiatrist in charge never completely stopped hoping he would take psychotropic medications again some day, but she indicated that the drugs were not necessary for him to qualify for these passes.

For his part, Billy promised he would be willing to go back on meds if he ever became symptomatic of psychosis. The obvious point was, he hadn't been symptomatic for many years.

As is usually the case in Cook County, Illinois (largest criminal jurisdiction in the USA), the State's Attorney's Office simply considers it their job to keep anyone like Billy locked up as long as possible, "treated-or-punished-who-cares". Thus, presented with a motion for privileges, their knee-jerk response in this case was to find any possible way to prevent Billy from progressing toward an eventual conditional release.

The SA's first tactic was to request an independent evaluation from the court's own stable of psychiatrists up on the 10th floor at 26th & California, in the hope that such evaluation would be contrary to the Elgin treatment team's request. As luck would have it, the 10th floor didn't like Billy much, and the doctor up there made kind of a big deal about the fact that he's not taking meds. So, that was probably all the court needed to say no to the privileges request.

Billy and I decided that although this was only a privileges request, not a motion for conditional release, sooner or later the prejudice about taking meds would have to dealt with head-on anyway. He has some money, and he was willing to hire a truly independent psych.

Enter, a brilliant mental health professional: Dr. Toby T. Watson, Psy.D.

Dr. Watson testified as an expert on behalf of Billy's privileges motion on November 6th. He was compelling in his arguments that, a) antipsychotic drugs may be helpful at reducing positive symptoms in the very short term, but they increase the likelihood that a person who continues to take them will become chronically ill; b) long-term recovery rates are much higher for unmedicated patients; c) antipsychotics cause a host of debilitating side effects and lead to premature death; d) the new "atypical" antipsychotics are not better than the older drugs and may be worse; and e) being diagnosed with schizophrenia or any other psychiatric disorder does not indicate any real disease: mental illness is, rather, a metaphor.

Basically, the idea that Billy should be held back in his progress through the system for not taking psych drugs was revealed as arbitrary and contrary to the whole purpose of the system itself. The SA's cross-examination of Dr. Watson was quite ineffective.

When the State presents testimony by the 10th floor psych, I'll cross-examine. And I sure am looking forward to it.

(To be continued...)