Canadian Mindscape Monitor

Sorry, dear readers, that we’ve been delinquent in our posts. Too much work, too little pay for this blogging (i.e. none!) etc etc… But we do feel it’s important to follow up on an earlier story.  When asked by CMM if he could provide even one scientific reference for his grandiose claims to the media that youth benefit immensely from psychiatric treatments (CMM knowing full well there isn’t any), Dalhousie University child and adolescent psychiatric specialist Dr. Stan Kutcher replied that he was, “too busy”. Those, in fact, were all the words in the reply. When asked when he might be less busy, and provided with a few simple yes and no response questions, he simply did not respond at all.

But go ahead, take your children to these people.

A U.S. News and World Report commentator rightly raises questions about a much bally-hooed “blood test” that supposedly helps screen women who “might” eventually get post-partum depression.

Ya gotta love how psychiatry, unsatisfied with its failed struggles to develop tests that can identify mental illnesses, is increasingly resorting to developing tests that identify mental illnesses that might in future develop. But gee, wasn’t a fundamental tenet of scientific evidence supposed to be an ability to falsify a particular scientific claim? Yet how can anyone possibly prove false the claim that an illness might in future exist???

Commentator Deborah Kotz rightly raises alarm that certain states have made it illegal for doctors NOT to perform these dubious blood tests on pregnant women. But what’s particularly irritating (and CMM posted a comment on the article) is that then Kotz endorses a question and answer screening test which is even more bogus. CMM did the test, answering honestly, and studiously answering negatively any questions that hinted at possible violence, and guess what — we were still told we should see our doctor asap for possible post-partum depression. Apparently our blog is just one big call for help!

“Treat mental health problems early, avoid trouble later” is the headline for an article today in the Halifax, Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald on mental illness in children and youth.  The main source cited is Dr. Stan Kutcher:

“Caught early, the mental disorders that might otherwise derail young lives can be treated very effectively, said Dr. Stan Kutcher, an IWK Health Centre psychiatrist and Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health at Dalhousie University.”

Unfortunately, this bold, grandiose claim doesn’t square with any scientific evidence that CMM has ever seen. So we’ve sent a letter to Dr. Kutcher personally.  We requested of Dr. Kutcher: “Could you please forward some scientific references… that clearly establish that mental disorders can  be effectively diagnosed and cured or ‘treated effectively’ in children, with unequivocal long term benefits for those children?”

So stay tuned for the sure-to-be-rivetting developments… Are we at CMM going to be forced at last to swallow our own pathetic lack of knowledge of psychiatric science? Or…  what else might happen…?

The inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski in the Vancouver Airport after being Tasered 5 times by RCMP officers has exploded across the national and international media again following the testimony of Richmond Fire Capt. Kirby Graeme. Graeme called the RCMP officers “unprofessional” and said the RCMP officers even “obstructed” paramedics who wanted to help Dziekanski.

An aspect of this story that has received almost no coverage, though, was the attack on the Canadian government issued by the Polish Embassy.  When deciding not to lay charges against the RCMP officers, the BC Criminal Justice Branch released this utterly bizarre “assessment” of the case, which is literally nothing more than several pages of  criticism of Dziekanski as a person, and includes essentially no discussion at all of the actual issue, the conduct of the RCMP officers. The Polish Embassy called the BC government’s report “disappointing” and “disconcerting”: “It appears that the main reason for Mr. Dziekanski’s death was his fear of flying, tiredness and lack of ability to communicate in English.” The Embassy also objected to the “factually baseless” but repeated “insinuations” of Dziekanski being an alcohol abuser.

Various and sundry Canadian media covered with relatively little fanfare or controversy the recent decision of sitting “independent” Senator Lillian Dyck to become a Liberal.  Along the way, they casually described her background, which includes a PhD in Biological Psychiatry and studies into antidepressants and antipsychotics. She’s also patented some mental health drugs herself.  So how much money from pharmaceutical companies has Dyck taken over the years? How much more does she stand to make as our government pushes the psycho-pharmaceutical agenda through its Mental Health Commission?

Interestingly, discussion at Maclean’s magazine has focused mainly on how it’s positive to have a “scientist” on the Senate.  Of course, the research shows psychiatry is much more religion and business than science (just read the summary quote from the Research Agenda for the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in CMM’s right sidebar, for example). And indeed, that’s exactly why most people won’t worry about such a blatant conflict of interest — a PhD in Psychiatry inspires such faith.

Sorry, dearest readers, that we’ve been delinquent here at CMM lately getting posts up… We’re trying to get back on the job after binge-working on the aforementioned feature article about the rights of seniors in BC care homes. But we couldn’t let you miss today’s New York Times coverage of the latest on the lawsuit against Eli Lilly regarding its “antipsychotic” drug Zyprexa.  Earlier coverage on this issue (including from CMM about the secret internal documents in the ZyprexaKills.tar.gz file) revealed that Lilly execs had been hiding their knowledge of the drugs dangers and illegally promoting it for uses for which it was not approved. One special tidbit that caught our attention:

“In one marketing effort, the company urged geriatricians to use Zyprexa to sedate unruly nursing home patients so as to reduce “nursing time and effort,” according to court documents. Like other antipsychotics, Zyprexa increases the risks of sudden death, heart failure and life-threatening infections like pneumonia in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis.”

We can confirm that Zyprexa is being given to the elderly woman in our aforementioned feature being held in a nursing home against her will who has been diagnosed with heart problems and dementia — showing vividly just how stupid and dangerous average doctors and psychiatrists can be when it comes to prescribing psychotropics.

This relatively short NYT piece is worth reading also because it provides a good overview of the broader problem throughout the drug industry — e.g. pointing out that even this proposed $1.4 billion U.S. settlement barely scratches the surface of the profits Lilly’s illegal actions have brought in.

This is rich. British Columbia’s Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman told the Victoria Times-Colonist that the government was engaged in a review of the BC Mental Health Act, partly with an eye to begin forcing homeless people into emergency shelters on cold nights. This comment came in the wake of a Vancouver woman dying when her cardboard shelter caught fire.

Obviously, there are many reasons any reasonable person might not want to stay in a typical inner city emergency shelter these days: lack of privacy, bedbug infestations, lack of security, inability to bring in pets, children or belongings, noise etc, not to mention the possibility of being targeted for rerouting to a psychiatric hospital where they could be forcibly treated with electroshock or sedatives. But people like Coleman can apparently still feel a pang of compassion when people actually die as a result of being homeless, so his response is to FORCE them into a shelter to avoid his feelings of guilt.

What Coleman demonstrates, then, is the whole problem that emerges when we over-psychologize what are essentially political and economic problems–problems which, in this case, have dramatically worsened in BC since Coleman and the Liberals came to power. Well, the CMM Thinktank has come up with some radical alternative proposals: What about instead increasing subsidizing housing? What about instead raising welfare rates so people can actually afford rooms and apartments?… Naah, that’s just thinking waaaay too far outside the box, isn’t it? It’s so much easier to just take away even more of people’s most basic rights…

CMM editor Rob Wipond has just published an article in Focus magazine about the overlapping mental capacity and mental health laws which allow elderly people in British Columbia to easily and quickly be stripped of all their legal rights. Check out “Who Has the Right to Control Your Life?“

The Vancouver Sun has published a lengthy story on a company that has begun marketing a multivitamin treatment for bipolar or manic depression. The concoction is called EMPowerplus from Truehope. Interestingly, they supposedly hit upon the idea after making batches of special calming feed for trapped, aggressive pigs. After some success stories, including the involvement of a practising clinical psychiatrist, a six-year legal struggle with Health Canada ensued, but finally it looks like two official, certified double-blind studies are going to be conducted, one in Calgary and one in San Diego. Maybe the grandfather of megavitamin treatments Dr. Abram Hoffer will live long enough to see the revolution, after all.

San Jose Mercury News reports that Santa Clara University has recently replicated Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1974 study in which people were told to administer painful electrical shocks on others.  Due to appear in the journal American Psychologist, the new study found once again that the vast majority of people will continue to intensify torturous electrical shocks if prodded to do so by an “authority figure”, even as the victims are screaming and pleading for them to stop. These researchers note that the lesson may not be simply “how cruel people can be”, so much as “how influential institutional circumstances can be” on human behaviour.  That is to say, the study shows how easily and quickly most people can adjust to the idea of torturing other humans, so long as the torture is given some quasi-legitimate rationale in an institutional setting… Certainly something to think about in relation to the American and Canadian government’s newfound justifications for torture, as well as in relation to forced psychiatric treatments in hospitals–particularly electroshock.

In response to the enormous public embarrassment they’ve suffered in the past when it was revealed how much more political and economic the whole process is than scientific, all the psychiatrists working on the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have had to sign non-disclosure agreements about the process, according to a New York Times article. What’s particularly interesting to note is that, while many of us are horrified at all the normal behaviours being labelled as “mental illnesses”, other groups are working hard to get their pet concerns into the DSM, because that helps them get insurance coverage and research funding. So here’s an idea: Get yourself labelled as a mental illness! If you can get yourself into the DSM, you can live off disability insurance and be first in line for research funding in your area of specialty–YOU! A plumb chair in your name at a university is just around the corner! All right, up with CMM Syndrome!

With the release of Tom Cruise’s latest movie, Cruise has been prompted to apologize for the upbraiding of Matt Lauer he did in 2005 (watch the video here) while discussing Brooke Shields’ advocating of psychiatric drugs. Cruise was widely attacked and ridiculed along with his religion, Scientology, for questioning the scientific underpinnings of psychiatry. Yet what was in some ways even more remarkable, and got far too little media play, was how The Today Show tried to make up for their “mistake” of letting Cruise talk doctor on TV by inviting American Psychiatric Association president Steven Sharfstein and psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Glenmullen on to straighten things out the following day. (Watch that video in full here.) Dr. Sharfstein sets the stage by parroting the “Cruise is just a stupid, irresponsible actor playing doctor” line, while Dr. Glenmullen very politely–but with admirable persistence–keeps pointing out that, in fact, Cruise had made a lot of very good, and very accurate points which the public should be more aware of. When Couric’s increasing bafflement about whether “chemical imbalances in the brain” are real or not finally pushes the dialogue to a climax, it is Sharfstein who buckles and concedes no one actually has any evidence to support a biochemical theory of mental illness. But Sharfstein then promptly suggests this debate about the actual scientific veracity of psychiatry’s claims is only appropriate within the halls of professional academia, and is not for the poor, lost, possibly mentally ill peons of the general public like you and I to hear about.

All of which returns us to Cruise’s apology… He needn’t have. Because the very fact that most people and most media ignored this important follow-up discussion, while continuing to lambast Cruise for his statements to this day, shows that even Cruise’s intense personal attacks on Lauer for “promoting” drugs were not misplaced. After all, the media and general public have a very, very important role to play in all this and if Tom Cruise doesn’t speak the truth, it seems relatively few ever even listen otherwise.

Les Leyne has written a good column for the Victoria Times-Colonist about the decision not to press charges against the RCMP officers who infamously on video killed Robert Dziekanski while he was pleading for help in Polish in a Vancouver airport: “It’s easier to blame Robert Dziekanski”. Yes, that about sums it up, right down to the invented cause of the killing, “Sudden Death Following Restraint”. It’s bad enough they’re inventing “diseases” these days like “shyness”; now they’re making them up to define deaths that “inexplicably” happen after you’re tasered five times and have a boot pressed to your neck. . .  Leyne wrote a good follow-up article, too, quoting from the enormous amount of public feedback he heard after his first column. CMM agrees with the public outrage, but at the same time, we’re not surprised at all, and it’s important to note what it really means. A retired RCMP inspector noted, as disgusting as the RCMP’s actions were, in fact, they weren’t by current standards of police behaviour unusually reckless, and so it could not reasonably be expected that they could be indicted in court for even departing from police procedures, let alone for having criminal intent.

So let this be a lesson to everyone: These days, recklessly outrageously brutally Tasering someone who’s pleading for help is pretty standard police behaviour.

“Saving lives”, tyeah.

A Masters student from Toronto’s York University has started a petition to save the old Weyburn Asylum in Saskatchewan. Her plea included on this blog post reminds us of some of the history of international significance which took place within its walls. For a long time a veritable hell-hole warehouse for patients, Weyburn eventually became home to the pioneering work of psychiatrist Dr. Abram Hoffer, whom CMM has written about before. Hoffer and Dr. Humphrey Osmond were amongst the first psychiatrists anywhere to work with the psychedelic drug LSD in the 1950s; unlike the now notorious CIA-backed McGill University MKULTRA experiments run by Ewan Cameron, Hoffer and Osmond administered LSD to volunteer patients exploring its healing and human growth potential rather than forcing it onto patients to test its usefulness for brainwashing. Hoffer also worked with Linus Pauling in developing megavitamin, nutrition and exercise programs to try to help people suffering through psychological disturbances. In any case, Weyburn Asylum was home to some of the worst and some of the best of what psychiatry has ever offered to psychiatric inmates in Canada, and perhaps it is a landmark worth saving as a testament to the many who suffered, died, persevered, and sometimes grew or healed within its walls.

The Canadian Press is reporting that the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada is “endorsing the principles” of a April 2008 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges which recommended cutting off the stream of kickbacks and perks like free pizza parties, refrigerators and sunbelt trips being given to med students by pharmaceutical companies. “The public has to trust that the doctors that they see do not have any debts to pay to individual pharmaceutical companies or the sector as a whole,” said Irving Gold, the association’s vice-president of government relations and external affairs. “We have to model good behaviour in this context. And if we want to teach professionalism (to medical students), a part of teaching professionalism is by implementing these sorts of policies.”

Sounds great! But CMM says, don’t hold your breath. Gosh, you don’t think he actually MEANS that they are going to DO SOMETHING, do you? Gold quickly clarified that they are not actually implementing the report’s recommendations but are simply endorsing “in principle” the “principles” endorsed in the report, and now they have to figure out “how do these principles articulate themselves” into action… if they do… And he notes that the pharmaceutical industry will of course be participating in those discussions…

British Columbia police are pulling their X26 Tasers out of field use after BC’s Solicitor General also found, like many others before have found, that Taser shock levels can vary a lot and dangerously in actual field use. It’s little more than a show for the public, though — police will simply use other models which haven’t been as thoroughly tested, or begin “calibrating” Tasers better. But the real issue remains, as CMM has written extensively about before, that police too often use Tasers in utterly inappropriate situations and too often shock people repeatedly. One very interesting point was raised by attorney Walter Kostecky, who’s representing the mother of Taser-victim Robert Dziekanski: “There is no testing protocol. If you buy a toaster or an iron or any other electrical appliance in Canada, it has to meet Canadian Standards Association approval. The Taser is not subjected to any of those kinds of things. It doesn’t have to meet CSA approval. It has escaped scrutiny because it’s also not considered a firearm.”

The Globe and Mail cites perennial involuntary committal promoter and Schizophrenia Society rep John Gray as saying that 60,000 people are involuntarily treated in Canada each year. It’s a stunning statistic. And you can bet it’s actually much higher if we add in all the “treatment by forcible coercion” numbers, because it’s common practice for psychiatrists to say to patients in hospitals, “Stay here and accept treatment, or we’ll simply commit you involuntarily and force treatment on you.”

Ironically, and unfortunately typically, the longer email-web discussion with Gray begins with a completely false statment: “…civil rights have swung to a point where involuntary hospitalization and treatment are next to impossible.  Only those who pose an imminent danger to others can be held and treated…” In fact, the opposite is true, which Gray himself points out later — people can now be treated involuntarily in most of Canada simply for having the potential to experience “physical or mental deterioration”.

Gray goes on to point out what he thinks is an irony: “The irony is that treatment with medication, compulsory if necessary, is the only known scientific means of treating people sick enough to have been involuntarily admitted.”

What’s REALLY ironic, Mr. Gray, is that a recent survey of the scientific literature about forced treatment published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing found, “There is a dearth of literature in the area of coercion in administration of medication and much more research is needed examining all aspects of this contentious practice.” The BBC also covered the story this week, quoting the lead researcher from the Institute of Psychiatry saying that they found only 14 studies had ever been done worldwide on forced treatment, and none of them had even looked at the possibility of alternatives: “We feel that this is unacceptable and more needs to be done to establish sound clinical evidence and viable alternatives to this contentious approach.”

Canada’s Mental Health Commission has spun off a fundraising arm, “Mental Health Partnerships of Canada”. The MHC announced recently that it had developed a “strategic alliance” between Mental Health Partnerships of Canada and the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation to raise money “to support the goals of the Mental Health Commission of Canada”. However, Mental Health Partnerships Canada came into existence, apparently, at the exact same time as this new alliance with the heavily-pharmaceutical-company funded CPRF, leaving CMM to wonder if MHC chair Michael Kirby and MHPC chair Michael Kirby are up to something suspicious… Why create a quasi-independent agency to handle all the fundraising for a government organization? Is Kirby trying to create a faux-distance between the Mental Health Commission tasked with leading Canada’s national mental health strategy and pharmaceutical industry money? But why would he want to do that? Better stay tuned…

Why is the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation hiding its biggest corporate funder? If you look at the “Partners and Corporate Contributors” section of their website, you see a fairly innocuous-looking list of corporate contributors:

The Frank Cowan Foundation
CIBC
CIBC World Markets Children’s Foundation
RBC Financial Group
Scotiabank
TD Bank Financial Group

That’s the whole list. But delve into their official Annual Report, which isn’t legally allowed to lie or mislead quite so easily, and suddenly there’s a different corporate name right at the top of the list, more than double any other contributors: AstraZeneca Canada Ltd, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

But gosh, why would this research foundation, that’s heavily funded by taxpapers and dedicated “to improve the well-being of Canadians”, not want the general public to know it’s simultaneously deeply in bed with Big Pharma? It’s the kind of thing you’d think they’d be proud of.

We here at CMM have been worrying that we might one day see striking workers and protesters rounded up, declared mentally ill and forcibly sedated en masse, but it seems that day has already arrived and psychiatrist Dr. Lyle Rossiter has gone much further than our worst nightmares. We thought it was actually a viral urban myth from The Onion when we first read it on several blogs and news websites, but no, former army psychiatrist and Chicago clinical practitioner Rossiter actually does have a book called The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness and his whacky writings really are being featured on Townhall.com, one of the biggest right wing media sites in the United States,  which also carries columns by extremist heavyweights like Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rich Tucker and George Will.

“The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error,” writes the self-evidently moronic Rossiter. “Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche.”

Yeah, it sounds laughable. But note our bolded word above, and beware.