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Control, Not Cure: Randy Cima’s New Book Exposes the History of Force in Psychiatry Robert Carter/April 9, 2025       Dr. Randy Cima has just published The Zombie Theory, a concise, but thorough history of the use of force — physical and chemical – as psychiatry’s preferred method of controlling the “mad.”      Psychiatry’s tools of insulin shock, lobotomy and electroshock therapy to handle the “mad” are late links on the historical chain of man’s misguided attempts to handle the troubled. Thousands of years before Christ, holes were bored in the skulls of those who were dangerously abnormal in order to release the “bad energy” or demon spirits that were making them crazy.      Even if they were not cured, the reasoning went, they at least were no longer suffering. Throughout history other equally brutal physical practices evolved in an attempt to at least quiet, if not cure, the mad. In the Middle Ages, flogging, bloodletting, and forced vomiting were used to “beat insanity out of the body,” as Cima notes in his April 4th blog on the Mad in America website.      As cities expanded their populations after the Renaissance, the problem of the “mad” became more apparent on urban streets. They could no longer be housed in a relative’s basement or attic, hidden from public view as a social eyesore. However, once the threat of leprosy had declined, the large physical institutions built to incarcerate lepers away from public exposure became available. Cima describes how these vacant compounds were then used to remove the “mad” from the streets.      Suddenly there were enough asylums available to house these unfortunate souls. By the mid-19 th century the earliest medical doctors – then known as alienists – became the in-house caretakers of this involuntarily incarcerated population. “But their role wasn’t to cure. It was to control,” writes Cima.        The Zombie Theory goes on to chronicle the horrific procedures psychiatrists developed in the 20th century to “beat insanity out of the body.” At first the “mad” had their teeth pulled, their ovaries excised, and their colons resected , because madness stemmed from bodily infections, it was postulated. Then even more brutal psychiatric treatments were devised to beat the madness out of the body — the lobotomy and ECT, for example.      Cima notes that the aftereffects of these horrific treatments were too politically incorrect to be applauded by family members. Fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles were all left vegetablized zombies whose madness had only been quelled, but not cured.       Next came the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine in the 1950s, and Cima calls that drug psychiatry’s holy grail. It was a chemical lobotomy…without any blood or bruises. Cima writes, “Patients could walk, talk, even return to daily life — just dulled enough to function. Just dulled enough to obey. Submission, once carved with a scalpel, now came byprescription.”      And that’s where we’re at today. The troubled are still only quieted, not cured. “The architecture of confinement simply moved inside the patient,” writes Cima. Except that today, thanks to the tsunami of Big Pharma’s positive  marketing, everyone – not just the “mad” — is told he or she – especially she — can cure their troubles with the ingestion of a little pill.      The Zombie Theory is well worth the read. Cima clearly shows how  psychiatry has for so long falsely claimed itself to be the mental health authority by intentionally turning life’s pains and struggles into a pathology that, they claim, they can still beat out of the body with the force of their psychotropic drug  Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Lucrative Crosspollination: Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni Goes from Pfizer to FDA and Back to Pfizer Robert Carter/March 28, 2025      Big Pharma giant Pfizer announced last month that psychiatrist Patrizia Cavazzoni is joining their company – again – as Chief Medical Officer. She’ll be in charge of Pfizer’s regulatory, pharmaco-vigilance, and drug safety operations for a reported salary of $500,000 per year, excluding bonuses.      She’s just resigned from her position as the Food and Drug Administration as the head of their Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. It has 5,000 employees and a budget exceeding $1 billion. While serving in that role, she was the highest paid employee of the FDA, earning $400,000 per year.      There were no bonuses for her there, unless you take into account the junkets and advisory positions she was rewarded with during her FDA tenure. Her net worth today is estimated between $6 and $17 million.      Prior to the FDA position, she was also employed by Pfizer in a series of vice president positions. In one of them she advised on a lawsuit alleging that Pfizer downplayed the risks of birth defects associated with the depression drug Zoloft. Pfizer settled that suit for $2.3 billion, which included a record breaking criminal fine of $1.3 billion.      Before Pfizer, she was a director of surveillance and epidemiology at Eli Lilly, and there too she helped with a lawsuit, this one over their antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. Lilly ended up paying out $500 million to settle those lawsuits.      Before that Cavazzoni was an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa and published numerous academic and industry articles on, of all things, antipsychotic medications. She’d originally earned her medical degree as a  psychiatrist from McGill University.      Cavazzoni resigned from the FDA in January this year, just before Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took office as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, which regulates the FDA. She was not alone in jumping the lucrative FDA ship, given Kennedy’s accusation that the FDA has been too influenced by Big Pharma interests. He noted that nearly two-thirds of the FDA’s funding comes from the pharmaceutical companies it regulates, and he often has pointed at the inappropriate “revolving door” of employment between pharmaceutical companies and government health agencies.      Back again at Pfizer, fresh from the FDA, Cavazzoni is again an example of a high paid psychiatrist passing through that revolving door.      Do pass Go. Do collect two hundred dollars. Or more.      While in charge of the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Cavazzoni came under heavy criticism in 2021 for approving Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm despite there being one incomplete, barely positive study of the drug, followed by an equally negative second study. In effect, Carazzoni’s approval of Aduhlem overruled the FDAscientists and the FDA Advisory Committee of Alzheimer experts who all had argued that Aduhlem did not lead to clinical benefits, nor was it safe enough for FDA approval.      A 2021 Forbes article by Dr. David Gortler labeled her approval of the Biogen drug “Unforgivable Hypocrisy.”      Even if Aduhelm showed no signs of being effective, the drug did fit conveniently into the Biden administration’s campaign pledge to defeat Alzheimer’s. Cavazzoni was, in fact, promoted to her position as head of the CDER at the FDA by Biden, and Biden himself has been the top political benefactor of Big Pharma PAC contributions, at a total of $1 million.      He too had apparently passed GO, and, like Cavazzoni, collected more than two hundred dollars.      In her January 18, 2025 resignation letter, Cavazzoni wrote, “Leaving CDER was an extremely difficult decision, but the time has come for me to be more present for my family, who have taken the back seat over the past few years due to the demands of my role.”      Now, barely one month later, she is the new Chief Medical Officer for Pfizer. Family again takes a back seat, apparently, while Patricia takes another lap around the lucrative Big Pharma/FDA monopoly board. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Antidepressant Use Puts Women at Much Greater Risk for Osteoporosis and Bone Fractures Robert Carter/March 5, 2025 A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders last month found that adult women who take antidepressants have a highly increased risk for osteoporosis and bone fractures. Osteoporosis causes bones to become brittle and weak because the body is losing bone mass faster than it is building it. Often the first indicator of osteoporosis is a bone fracture in the wrist, spine or hip. White, post-menopausal women do have a risk for osteoporosis generally, but this recent Qatar University study showed that if any woman takes antidepressants, she has a 44% greater risk of developing osteoporosis and a 62% greater risk of bone fractures. Women who take two antidepressants have a 78% risk of osteoporosis and those who take three have a scary 141% risk. The Qatar research studied the statistics of over 30,000 women over a two decade period, 1999-2020. Participants’ records contained complete osteoporosis or bone mineral density data and complete prescription medication data, as well as data on other life variables. The use of antidepressants by adult women in the U.S. increased in this same two decade period between 1999 and 2020. The study showed the greatly increased risk of osteoporosis and fractures for women was true regardless of the antidepressant they were taking. The study also showed that for each year taking a single antidepressant, a woman’s risk of osteoporosis increases by 6 percent. This study, in effect, acts as a long term clinical trial that now points out one more dangerous side-effect for women when they’re taking antidepressants. Currently, the longest clinical trials needed for the FDA to initially approve an antidepressant last 8-12 weeks. Many trials are only 3-4 weeks long. Without long term studies such as this Qatar research, the chances for over-prescribing antidepressants become far greater as doctors are prescribing them without knowing the true risks. Women are prescribed antidepressants twice as often as men are, and 82% of all advertising for antidepressants is aimed at women. Women are Big Pharma’s targets. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Involuntary Psychiatric Hospitalization…a Communist’s Tactic? Nope. Today It’s America’s Robert Carter/Febuary 25, 2025      Reuters published an article on the 10th of this month alerting the public to the large increase since the start of the Ukraine war in compulsory psychiatric incarceration of Russians for their political views. 48 dissidents have recently been institutionalized involuntarily.      Instead, Reuters should have published an article on the one million involuntary psychiatric hospital commitments in America in 2022.      “Punitive psychiatry” had been a method of social control used in the Soviet Union since the nineteen-sixties. Today Russia is following suit by again using psychiatrists to label Ukraine war protestors with a mental disorder so that they can be put in a mental hospital.      Russian human rights activist Robert Van Voren notes that these involuntary commitments have quadrupled since 2022, the beginning of the Ukraine conflict. Still, they’re only 38.      To accomplish a “legal” incarceration, Russian psychiatrists had originally come up with two politically convenient diagnoses of mental disorder. “Sluggish schizophrenia” and “reformist delusions” were the terms coined by their psychiatrists, in the same manner that American psychiatrists vote for the inclusion of a new mental disorder into their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.      Communist China solved their problem with social “misfits” through a similar psychiatric tactic. A new mental disorder had been created by Chinese psychiatrists which allowed forceful psychiatric incarceration of Chinese citizens. They were labeled as suffering from what psychiatrists called “culture bound disorder.” Thousands of Falun Gong members, for instance, had been incarcerated in this way because their religious beliefs were considered tobe a threat to an ordered Chinese society.      In America today, the rate of involuntary psychiatric detentions has increased sharply over the past two decades. In 2014 the rate of all emergency involuntary detentions was 357 per 100,000 people. Today the rate of involuntary psychiatric incarceration in the United States ranges up to a new high of 966 per 100,000 in Florida.       Laws for involuntary psychiatric incarceration — such as Florida’s Baker Act — now exist in every state. In some jurisdictions, legal mechanisms like Laura’s Law and Kendra’s Law have been passed which authorize court-ordered, forced ingestion of psychiatric drugs for those with “chronic, untreated severe mental illness.”      These laws are said to be used to protect an individual from harming himself or others. However, they can too easily be misused when in the wrong hands, as they have been in Russia and China under the complicity of their  psychiatrists.      The problem in America, of course, may not then be the laws themselves. It is the use of them by  psychiatrists who are able to incarcerate someone involuntarily in a mental institution through the use of one of their DSM labels of a “mental disorder” which has no scientific basis. The psychiatrist does not even always see in person the one who is being incarcerated.      A psychiatrist just writes down on a form one of the semi-bogus “mental  disorders” from the DSM. Those disorders – like Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, a label for the cramps and heightened emotions for a woman during her monthly cycle – may be no more valid than the “sluggish schizophrenia” or “cultural bound disorder” coined by America’s psychiatric counterparts in Russia and China.      Yet in 2022 American psychiatrists or their proxies forcefully  committed just over one million people by ordering these involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Kickback Penalties a Small Price to Pay for Big Pharma’s Fat Cats Robert Carter/January 31, 2025 Illegal kickbacks from Big Pharma giants like Pfizer, Novartis, and Teva continue to be exposed as more out of court  Department of Justice settlements are reported. In 2020 Novartis paid more than $642 million to settle a Department of Justice court case alleging their offering illegal kickbacks to doctors to increase the company’s pharmaceutical drug sales. $642 million was a small price to pay. Their 2023 revenue was over $45 billion. In 2022 Biogen, Inc. agreed to pay $900 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged they paid doctors kickbacks to boost sales of their drugs. Again, a small price to pay. Their 2023 revenue was nearly $10 billion. In 2023 Teva  Pharmaceuticals and Teva Neuroscience paid over $450 million to settle a Department of Justice case that alleged they leveraged assistance foundations to fund patients’ co-pays. Also a small price to pay. In 2023 Teva’s income was $15.8 billion. Last Friday, the  Department of Justice announced that Pfizer has just paid almost $60 million to resolve a case of kickback allegations about its subsidiary, Biohaven, the manufacturer of the migraine prevention drug Nurtec. Another small price to pay. Nurtec delivered $928 million in sales to Pfizer in 2023 alone. Pfizer itself is expected to report a $1 billion dollar revenue from the drug just in the fourth quarter of 2024. The Pfizer kickback case alleges that Biohaven induced doctors to write prescriptions for Nurtec by paying them “improper remuneration” for speaking engagements and by pampering them with lavish dinners at “high end” restaurants. Biohaven also provided junkets for doctors’ spouses, family members, and friends at “educational” events which these people had no realistic reason to attend. An ex-Biohaven staff member came forward as a whistleblower to alert the Department of Justice to these criminal  improprieties, and Pfizer has acquiesced to the out of court settlement of $60 million. A Pfizer spokesperson said that the company is “pleased” to put the legal matter behind them so they could get back to focusing on the needs of their patients. Not to mention getting back to the $1 billion per quarter income that was ever so slightly diminished by this $60 million kickback settlement. There’s apparently no need for Pfizer or any of these other Big Pharma giants to worry about these pesky lawsuits over their illegal and unethical marketing practices if they don’t affect their bottom lines any worse than this. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

At Least 82 Suicides Occur while FDA Takes Two Decades to Rule on Dangers of Singulair and Its Generic Offspring Robert Carter/January 5, 2025 Big Pharma drug manufacturer Merck has had its asthma medicine, Singulair, and its generic offshoots, named in more than 4800 reports of psychiatric problems, particularly in children. At least 82 suicides have also been reported for those who took the medication, a third of whom are children. However, no lawsuits from Singulair victims have been successful due to the legal, but constitutional loophole of “preemption,” which states that federal law overrides state law in these matters. Two U.S. Supreme Court rulings in 2011 and 2013 had barred any lawsuits against generic drug makers which were based on state laws that enabled claims about design defects or about failures to warn consumers of potential dangers. Merck’s patent on Singulair expired in 2012 – after Merck had reaped more than $50 billion in revenue from it – and thereafter a number of generic drug manufacturers started producing the medication. Although 91 percent of all U.S. prescriptions are now generic, per the FDA, the legal “preemption” defense has protected most all generic drug manufacturers from lawsuits over production defects or inadequate black box warnings. Only the original name brand drug manufacturers can still be sued, but it is hard to prove their violations of manufacturing defects or inadequate safety warnings. For example, during Merck’s original clinical trials for Singulair before its 1998 release, one eighteen year old participant had attempted suicide and one twelve year old participant had to be hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts. Although there are still pending lawsuits against Merck over Singulair, Merck still has not yet lost any of the earlier suits. In 2014 the FDA dismissed the relevance of these two suicide events. After Singulair first hit the market in 1998, the reports of psychiatric difficulties and successful suicides after taking the medication continued to accumulate, but it took twenty years before the FDA first took action. It was not until 2008 that an FDA review of the drug’s psychiatric effects and suicide risks recommended “further studies in animals and humans.” That report also suggested the FDA should have Merck conduct its own observational study. However, the FDA never did require such a study, reasoning in part that serious side effects including suicidal thinking “were expected to be quite rare.” In 2014 an FDA investigator of the initial Merck trials for Singulair claimed that those two reported suicide events had been unrelated to ingesting Singulair. The FDA agreed, but it did report that those initial Merck clinical trials were short and were not designed to detect psychiatric side-effects. Stephane Bissonnette, a Merck manager, told the 2014 FDA panel that “suicidality was quite rare” in the trials, using almost exactly the same phrase the FDA itself had used six years earlier. The lethal side-effects of those taking the medication continued to build – including a count of eighty-two suicides – and in 2019 the FDA convened another board to decide whether the drug’s side-effects warranted a black box warning. Following that board’s report, the FDA should have required new studies of Singulair and its generic descendents, but instead the FDA merely announced in March 2020 that it would only add to the existing black box warning of the drug’s “side-effects.” At any number of points during its twenty-two year history monitoring Singulair and its generic offshoots, the FDA could have legally – not to mention ethically — required Merck to redo and improve their trials, given the number of severe negative reactions to the drug, but it did not. If it had, a minimum of 82 suicides might have been prevented and 4800 victims of the psychiatric side-effects of the drug would have been spared their own mental health ordeals. (Thanks to Reuters’ 2023 Special Report for help bringing this travesty to light). Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

First $267 Million Settlement against Acadia Psychiatric Hospitals Apparently Not Enough for Them to Change Their Evil Ways Robert Carter/December 16, 2024 Acadia Healthcare, one of the largest chains of psychiatric hospitals in America, had to shell out over $267 million in criminal and punitive damages for two lawsuits in 2019, but the company now has at least six more similar lawsuits pending. The first 2019 lawsuit was for “luring patients into its facilities and holding them against their will” in order to increase and extend insurance profits. Acadia paid out $17 million in that suit. The second 2019 lawsuit was for placing a foster child under their care in the home of a man they knew had been “sexually abusing and sexually assaulting foster children placed in his care.” That one cost Acadia $250 million in punitive damages. The first of these new Acadia lawsuits, filed November 19, 2024, has charges similar to those of that first 2019 case. Apparently Acadia is a slow learneror has enough money not to worry about paying these huge settlements. Indianapolis TV station WRTV reports that a New Whiteland, Indiana, woman, Maria Reagan, has just sued Options Behavioral Health System and its parent company, Acadia Healthcare, alleging she was held against her will and left to clean up another patient’s feces. She was held there for eight days without ever having seen a psychiatrist in person. Her lawsuit also alleges that she personally witnessed staff denying another patient her required insulin for three days. On September 22nd this year, Meagan found herself undergoing a mental health episode and went to the emergency room at Community Hospital South. “I was looking forward to going there to get the help that I needed,” said Reagan. Reagan expected to be there for 72 hours, but instead she was held against her will as a patient for eight days. Options Behavioral Health System staff used threats and intimidation to prevent Reagan from leaving the facility, per her lawsuit. She was only given broken crayons and coloring pages for “help.” There are currently four other lawsuits that have been filed against Options Behavioral Health System and its parent company Acadia Healthcare. Each alleges that the facility held patients against their will without any medical basis. Additionally, a lawsuit has been filed against Acadia alleging that the psychiatric hospital chain has hidden from its investors its practices of locking up psychiatric patients against their will—when detaining them was not medically necessary—in order to maximize insurance payouts and thereby boost the company’s revenues. This class action investor lawsuit was filed this October 21st in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee against Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. and various Acadia executives and alleges securities fraud under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The complaint says that Acadia hid its illegal practices from investors, causing them financial loss. On September 1, 2024, the New York Times had published an article on an investigation it conducted of Acadia and had noted publicly that Acadia had “lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary.” On September 3, 2024, the first trading day after the publication of the article, Acadia’s share price fell $3.72 or 4.5%. The current lawsuit alleges that because of this news, Acadia’s stock price fell $12.38 or 16.4% and that because Acadia concealed these unethical and illegal practices from investors, investors were harmed financially after Acadia’s share price dropped so much. This current batch of lawsuits against Acadia could cost the company many millions more dollars in settlements. How much profit must they be making to be able to shrug off these huge financial penalties? They charge as much as $2200 a day at their 253 behavioral health facilities, with over 11,000 beds, in 39 states and Puerto Rico, for services such as inpatient psychiatric hospitals, specialty treatment facilities, residential treatment centers, and outpatient clinics. Guess that’s enough. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

Robert Carter/November 24, 2024 New Zealand Government Apologizes for Fifty Years of Psychiatric Institution Abuse      New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon publicly apologized this month for five decades of horrific abuse of New Zealand children and others in the country’s state run and faith based institutions.      He announced that a National Remembrance Day would be held on 12 November 2025 to mark the first anniversary of the national apology, and he confirmed that the government would invest NZ$32 million into the current redress system. The New Zealand government will also establish a NZ$2 million fund to support those organizations working with abuse survivors.      A Royal Commission of Inquiry released a report this July that revealed that between one hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand children, young people and adults had been abused and neglected between 1950 and 1999 in the country’s institutions. New Zealand Schools, foster care  facilities, state agencies, and mental health facilities were named as liable for abuse or for failure to protect these victims from abuse.      One institution, in particular, Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital, was noted to be an example of some of the worst atrocities committed against New Zealand’s children.      Despite it being a psychiatric facility, most of the children admitted to Lake Alice did not have a mental illness. The Department of Social Welfare records show that 60% of admissions were for “behavioral” problems, and many of the children simply came from disadvantaged communities, including many from the island’s indigenous Maori people. The mean age was thirteen years old.      Former patients of the hospital’s child and adolescent units revealed to the commission that the abuse they endured during the 1970s included being punished by  electroconvulsive therapy without anesthetics and being injected with paralyzing drugs such as paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant). These young patients were also frequently victims of sexual assault on their wards.      All of the children who were shocked, drugged or sexually abused named the same perpetrator, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, the lead psychiatrist of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit.       Leeks administered electric shocks to them for such minor infractions as passing wind, being anti-social, being picky about food, showing off in front of the girls in class, and being argumentative, the Lake Alice medical records show.      Leeks would use electroconvulsive shock treatments as punishment in what he called “aversion therapy,” and he applied the electrodes not just to the temples, but also to the children’s breasts, groins and genitals. He also required some young residents to administer shocks to their peers, and he forced others to watch while their mates were being shocked.      When the first of these children’s allegation about him became public in the 1970s, he dismissed them as coming from “bottom-of-the-barrel kids” who had been lying.      Leeks’ unit at Lake Alice opened in 1972 and over the next six years admitted between 400 and 450 children and adolescents. The unit permanently closed in 1980, but Leeks had already moved to Australia and continued practicing. In August 2006 Leeks was ordered to pay $55,000 in damages for sexually assaulting a former patient. The victim said that Leeks had told her that complaining would be futile.      “You’re a long-term psychiatric patient and no one will believe you,” he had said.      In 2023 more evidence of his abuse was uncovered, but he was by then 92 and was deemed medically unfit for trial.      In 2020 a United Nations committee labeled Leeks’ acts at Lake Alice “torture.”      This sad story is not unique of an institution originally created to help the unfit and the disadvantaged being turned into a psychiatric torture chamber.      Lake Alice had opened in August, 1950, and its therapeutic rural setting included its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, swimming pools, glasshouses, and vegetable gardens.      These facilities could be used for the nineteenth century “moral therapy” concept of physical work and worthy endeavor being used as part of the therapy for resident patients.      Like many similar, charitable institutions around the world which had evolved from the community almshouses of the previous centuries, the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit in New Zealand was intended to be a sanctuary for care and healing. However, like many other once benign institutions for the public good – the word “asylum” means sanctuary, in fact – these facilities became mental hospitals.      Psychiatrists gained control of populations of vulnerable, unprotected people, and without oversight these sadistic “doctors” were now free to unleash the brutality of their insulin shock therapies, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive shocks on innocent victims.      The New Zealand government is now trying to make amends for the brutality of some of these incarcerations. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

From Bad to Worse: Innocent Connecticut Woman Locked up for Eight Months, Given a False Psychiatric Diagnosis of Schizophrenia Robert Carter/November 10, 2024      A Connecticut woman was arrested and incarcerated in the state’s highest security mental health institution after having insufficient ID to show a motel clerk at the Microtel Inn in Montville. She then refused to identify herself to the police officers the clerk had called.      She is not legally required to do so.      The motel clerk had called the police and said that the woman would not leave the premises and that she had used rude language toward him. When the police arrived, they found her sitting on a bench in the lobby sipping coffee. She refused to give the officers her name or show them any identification and she was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the station.      Because refusing to identify oneself is not a crime, she was charged here with interfering with an officer and refusing to be fingerprinted. Bond was set at $500.00 and when she could not pay that, she was locked up.      During a number of court appearances she underwent over the next month, she insisted she had done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Superior Court Judge Jassette A. Henry raised her bail to $50,000. She was then involuntarily committed to the state’s highest security mental health institution, despite the fact she had never shown any impulse to harm herself or anyone else.      She was then diagnosed with schizophrenia because of her “disorganized and tangential thinking that was loose in that it switched from topic to topic irrelevantly and quickly” and her inability to understand her legal situation.      “No, I understand I’m under false arrest,” she said. “I understand I am under false arrest.”      Psychotropic medication was recommended for her. When she resisted taking it, she was taken to probate court by the mental health facility, placed under a conservatorship, and an order was issued for forced involuntary medication.      Eight months later, in June, 2024, newly appointed defense lawyer Michael Brown had a private psychiatric evaluation done on his client. It found her to be competent.      The defense attorney filed a “public interest” appeal. Twenty days later the woman was finally released from custody.      Brown pointed out that “she was never wrong about the core constitutional question aboutwhether she had to give her name to that officer.”      The presiding judge at her final court appearances, Justice Stephen D. Ecker, voiced his opinion about the psychiatric diagnosis of the woman. “Her thinking is tangential because she keeps returning to the point that she is innocent and this is a false arrest. That is clearly a sign of schizophrenia because it is tangential thinking? That seems to me to be absurd.      The idea that she is paranoid is a sign of her illness? She has just been involuntarily hospitalized by the force of the state. It is not an illness. It’s a rational assessment of your circumstances.”      The psychiatrist who had diagnosed her with schizophrenia apparently thought otherwise. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt: Sex. With Him.      By Robert Carter/October 28, 2024      Per the Psych Search website, the Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners filed a complaint this August against Psychiatrist Abdollah Assad for having sex with a suicidal patient.      Assad had been treating his thirty-one year old female patient for a history of “anxiety and problematic relationships” according to the complaint. In 2020 the patient was staying in a motel and she contacted Assad and said she had attempted suicide. The psychiatrist did not immediately tell her ““to go to an emergency room, call an ambulance, or call police,” as he legally and ethically was obligated to do.      Instead, he went to her motel, picked her up, and took her to another motel and “engaged in sexual intercourse with her.” The complaint notes that he did this despite being aware of her “troublesome relationships in the past and her obvious fragile state” at that time.      Afterward he continued to prescribe Adderall for her.      Assad is charged with six counts: malpractice; influencing a patient to engage in sexual activity; engaging in sexual activity with a patient; unsafe or unprofessional conduct; terminating medical care without adequate notice to a patient; and violation of patient trust and exploitation of physician and patient relationship for financial or personal gain.      A second complaint was also presented by the Board of Medical Examiners against Assad for improperly prescribing controlled substances to a thirty-three year old male patient in 2019 and 2022.      For that crime Assad is charged with malpractice; failure to complete medical records; terminating medical care without adequate notice to a patient; violation of standards of practice, violations of model policy; and violations of standards of practice established by regulation as well as with unreasonable additional fees for a lab test.      The PsychSearch.net website that this article appeared in recently is a compendium of crimes committed by psychiatrists internationally in their practices based on the public records that are available and the media reports of them. One can search lists on the site by country or, in America, by state. One can also search the site country by country or state by state to easily see if a particular psychiatrist is under current investigation or has been sentenced for crimes.      It is also possible to file a complaint against a psychiatrist in the site’s on-line form, either anonymously or by identifying yourself. The complaint is immediately forwarded to the appropriate state or country licensing board for an investigation. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil