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Reno Psychiatrist’s Remedy for Patient’s Suicide Attempt

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 o 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 appropriate investigation. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil

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Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharma Companies Skew Efficiency Results

Study Shows Funding of Antidepressant Clinical Trials by Pharmaceutical Companies Skews Efficiency Results Robert Carter/October 19, 2024      This month the University of Chicago Press published the results of an Ohio State University study that shows that the source of funding for a clinical trial influences the reported efficacy of the drug being tested. Those trials funded by antidepressant and antipsychotic pharmaceutical manufacturers show their own product on an average to be 49 percent more effective than identically conducted studies funded by independent entities.      “The funding interests of a given drug can explain almost half of the relative efficacy of that drug,” Tamar Oostrom, the author of the study, writes.      Pharmaceutical company sponsored trials for their own products show their drugs are 43 percent more likely to produce statistically significant improvements in the well being of their trial participants, compared to identically run trials sponsored by a research facility other than the manufacturer or its marketing agent.      A full 73 percent of these pharmaceutical manufacturer sponsored trials also show that their drug is more efficient than any competitor’s comparable product. Of course, that then results in greater sales.      How can this occur? It boils down to two main variables in the conduct of the trials. First, a company sponsored trial is one that is much more likely to be published. Therefore, its effect on the market is greater than those unpublished trials that show less beneficial outcomes to trials of the antidepressant’s manufacturer. Those “other” outcomes then remain hidden from the medical industry and from the pubic in their unpublished obscurity.      In other words, the published trials take on a greater validity merely because they are the ones that are most prominently displayed to the medical and the general public through their appearance in respectable medical journals.      Second, the clinical trial designs for company sponsored and independently sponsored tests can be different, although each is supposedly scientifically based. The length of the trial, the drug’s dosage, and the demographics of the tested population (that is, age, gender, severity of diagnosis, etc.) can be different from sponsored to unsponsored trials and still be scientifically “valid.”      However, the manipulation of those parameters allows sufficient wiggle room for potentially quite different trial outcomes. Oostrom calls his findings the “sponsorship effect.” Per his study, that effect “consistently represents approximately half of the average difference in efficacy between trial arms.”      Oostrom concludes that if that “sponsorship effect” bias were eliminated from clinical trials, only the more effective medicines would be approved by the FDA, and that would translate into fewer psychiatric drug approvals and therefore fewer psychiatric drug prescriptions written.      He notes that would benefit the welfare of consumers because they would then be subject to more effective drugs or – better yet, from this reporter’s perspective – to seeking alternative treatments. Oostrom reports that 70 percent of clinical trials are funded by the pharmaceutical industry at an average cost of $35 million per trial. He also notes that the pharmaceutical market in America is valued at $480 billion.      This is not then a bad return on the pharmaceutical companies’ initial $35 million investment.      Oostrom also points out that the results of these company sponsored trials influence regulatory, prescribing, and medical treatment decisions for decades afterward. Worse, These skewed results also have direct consequences on the health and well-being of American consumers. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win

Big Pharma Covert Marketing Win: SAMHSA Lauds Biden’s $68.5 Million Grant for Mental Health Services Robert Carter/October 4, 2024      The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) applauded last month the Biden Administration grants of $68.5 million for behavioral health education, training and community programs.      SAMHSA has been one of the chief suppliers of mental health statistics to Mental Health America, which bills itself as the nation’s leading national non-profit dedicated to the promotion of mental health, well-being, and illness prevention. Mental Health America asserts that 20 percent of Americans experience mental health issues, but that 56 percent of those people do not receive any treatment for their condition.      Those statistics are frequently quoted in the media to show the mental health epidemic the country is now facing. Keeping people in fear is standard fare for the media, of course, but these statistics are also used to make Big Pharma’s myriad medications to “solve” this problem seem more essential, even given the Black Box warnings of their suicidal side effects.      But where do those SAMHSA statistics about the nation’s mental health come from?      Since the Covid years, a good portion of them come from short, on-line screening questionnaires that people can take to see if they are suffering from depression or anxiety, among other mental health issues. The nine brief questions they are asked are of the “In the last two weeks have you felt noticeably sad about an event in your life?” format.      These questions for each of the SAMHSA screening forms were written by psychiatrist Robert L. Spitzer of Columbia University and his third wife, Janet Williams, now Professor Emerita of Clinical Psychiatric Social Work at Columbia University. The funding for their work was through a grant to Columbia by Pfizer, the manufacturer of Zoloft and the first Big Pharma company to broadly advertise the now debunked “chemical imbalance” theory as a cause of mental illness.      Pfizer also financed the British screening questionnaire now used by the National Health Service on people to see – some would say “suggest” – the possibility of a mental illness condition.      Biden’s $68.5 million dollar grant can now help usher into the mental health treatment industry those screened candidates who have self-diagnosed as having emotional stress. The 56 percent of untreated American respondents then become an ideal new market for Pfizer’s antidepressants.      It’s hardly surprising that it is Biden’s administration that has made these mental health grants available.From 1990 to 2024 Senator Joe Biden was the highest congressional benefactor of Big Pharma money. In his career he was given $9,056,663 in donations from Big Pharma companies like Pfizer. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit

America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit Robert Carter/September 12, 2024      Acadia Healthcare, one of the largest chains of psychiatric hospitals in America, has been “luring patients into its facilities and holding them against their will” in order to increase and extend insurance profits, the New York Times has just reported.      Acadia charges insurance $2200 per day for some of its in-house services. Its profits have doubled since Covid by keeping patients in its facilities “with no excuses or valid reason,” the report said.      The Times cited the case of one social worker who had to spend six days in an Arcadia psychiatric hospital after she had only come in to get her psychotropic bipolar medication dose adjusted. Another person, an employee at a local Indiana children’s hospital, was held for seven days at an Acadia psychiatric facility after coming there only to get therapy.      Acadia is accused of holding people against their will by misusing laws only meant to protect patients from self-harm. Acadia employees enforce psychiatric incarceration for these “patients,” and afterward they exaggerate or falsify their conditions in order to increase greater insurance compensation and keep them until their insurance runs out. In twelve states where Arcadia operates psychiatric hospitals, its patients, Acadia employees and even police officers have reported that Acadia has been detaining people through means that violate the law.      This is not the first time Acadia has run into trouble with the law for its psychiatric facility practices.      In May, 2019, in Charleston, West Virginia, Acadia settled with state and federal authorities to pay out $17 million to resolve allegations against the company’s fraudulent billing that defrauded Medicaid of $8.5 million.      In another 2019 lawsuit filed against Acadia, a New Mexico jury awarded a judgment of $485 million — including $250 million in punitive damages against Acadia — for negligence in an eight year old girl’s foster care case. The jury found that Acadia, through one of its Familyworks, Inc. subsidiaries, had placed the foster child in the home of a man they knew had been “sexually abusing and sexually assaulting foster children placed in his care.” The lawsuit stated that this foster care father then repeatedly raped the young girl after she was placed in his home.      Later that year the New Mexico Desert Hill Acadia facility responsible for the girl’s welfare was shut down after further accusations were made that the staff there had been instigating “fight clubs” with the children and had been sexually abusing them. That year, too, an Acadia facility in Montana was discovered to have been using drug injections as punishment for the children under its care.      Acadia’s psychiatric facilities are not alone in these criminally abusive activities. There are currently over 800 psychiatric hospitals in America and apparently many of them are exploiting their patients for profit.       A joint US Senate Committee report that was just released in June, 2024 accused four of the largest behavioral healthcare companies in America of putting profit above the safety and treatment of children placed in their care.  Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health, Vivant Behavioral Healthcare, Universal Health Services and, yes, Acadia Healthcare are all listed in their scathing report, “Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abusein Youth Residential Treatment Facilities.”       The report lists fourteen major types of abuse in these facilities which investigators found in their two year study. For example, four of those state that “Children suffer routine harm inside Residential Treatment Facilities. These harms include sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and inadequate provision of behavioral health treatment; the risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model; children inside RTFs often do not get the treatment they need for mental and behavioral health needs, despite RTFs being reimbursed to provide intensive services; horrific instances of sexual abuse persist unremediated inside RTFs.”       Enough said. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced for $19 Million Insurance Fraud

Mass General and Harvard Psychiatrist Gustavo Kinrys Sentenced to Eight Years in Prison for $19 Million Insurance Fraud Robert Carter/September 2, 2024      Psychiatrist Gustavo Kinrys, a Massachusetts General Hospital staff doctor and a Harvard Medical School educator, was sentenced to eight years in prison this June after being convicted last year of billing insurance for $19 million of services he never delivered.      Kinrys billed Medicare and private insurers for millions of dollars worth of in-person psychotherapy sessions that never occurred. He was on vacation in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and the Czech Republic on those days he had billed for. His nine hundred fraudulent sessions included 382 claims of delivering more than twenty-four hoursof sessions in a single day, and on one day in particular in June, 2017, he claimed to have delivered an hour long session to each of seventy different patients.      He also billed Medicare and private insurers for $10.6 million for thousands of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMA) sessions he never delivered, including claims for 8,000 TCM sessions to seventy patients who never underwent even the first treatment.      TCM is a controversial therapy using electromagnetic stimulation of the brain cells in an attempt to treat depression. It is called a “non-invasive” therapy. An electromagnetic coil delivers its pulses directly into the patient’s brain, but it is not as “invasive” as ECT, the electroconvulsive therapy that delivers up to 400 volts of electricity into a patient as “therapy” to trigger a grand mal seizure.      Besides his positions at Mass General Hospital and Harvard, Kinrys owned and operated Advanced TMS Associates and delivered TMS therapy and psychotherapy there to patients suffering from depression. A single session of TMS costs between $300 and $500 and a “normal” course of treatment consists of 20 to 30 sessions.      The investigation of Kinrys revealed that he and an employee had created false patients records for both Medicare and private insurers, and that he had created even more fraudulent patient records in response to a 2018 subpoena from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General.      In addition to convicting him of $19 million of insurance fraud, a jury also found him guilty of six counts of false statements about health care matters in general, seven counts of wire fraud, and one count of obstruction of justice.      When the jury announced in the courtroom their conviction of him on those charges, he threatened and maligned his own attorney and then announced that one day his prosecutors would receive a “reckoning.” “Karma is a bitch,” he said.      He should know.      The month before his court case, October, 2023, Kimrys had actually filed lawsuits against the insurers that he had defrauded and claimed that they still owed him money, despite the fact that he had signed a Voluntary Agreement Not to Practice in December, 2020, with the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. It is not clear if he did report the surrender of his license, as he was legally obligated to after forfeiting it, to his employers at Massachusetts General and Harvard or to his own TMS clinic. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children

Florida Finally Follows WHO and UN Call for Ban of ECT on Children Robert Carter/August 9, 2024 July 2024           Bills to ban electroconvulsive shocks and psychosurgery on anyone under the age of eighteen had been filed this 2024 session in the Florida state legislature, but the bills did not pass the House. Such restrictions do not exist anywhere else in America, and only California, Texas, Tennessee and Colorado have passed laws limiting or stopping ECT being given to children.      This Florida legislature finally follows the 2023 recommendations by the World Health Organization and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights which condemn any involuntary patient commitment, use of restraints and seclusion, and any forced treatment such as electroshock. Their joint published guidelines on “Mental Health, Human Rights, and Legislation” are designed to protect patients from coercive psychiatric practices, and the WHO and UN have both committed to a “zero tolerance” policy on these practices.      “Electroshock causes brain damage and should be prohibited on children” their declaration reads.      Coercive psychiatric practices “in mental healthcare violate the right to be protected from torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,” the declaration also states.      The two organizations further recommend that “legislation must ensure accountability for any transgressions of laws providing for civil and criminal sanctions” as well as compensation.      Since the publishing of this WHO and UN human rights proclamation, the Florida Citizens Commission on Human Rights along with other civic minded Florida non-profit organizations and state legislators alert to abusive psychiatric practices have helped passed fourteen pieces of legislation in 2023 alone which protect mental health human rights in the state. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud

A.D.H.D. Executives Accused of $100 Million Adderall Fraud Robert Carter/July 22, 2024      The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that the chief executive and the clinical president of Done, the telehealth company, had been arrested and accused of participating in a scheme to distribute Adderall and other stimulants for A.D.H.D. to patients who did not need the medications, and to bill insurers for …Jun 18, 2024 Read here: A.D.H.D. Startup Executives Accused of $100 Million Fraud in Adderall Scheme United States Sues Telehealth Providers and Executives for Unfair and Deceptive Conduct   Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits

Michigan Psych Patients Committed Involuntarily for Medicaid Profits Robert Carter/July 12, 2024 February 2024     Michigan resident Bri Jackson was involuntary detained in the psychiatric ward of Pontiac General Hospital for nine days after she had innocently tried to get her prescription for anti-depressants filled.      Reporter Heather Catallo of WXYZ TV conducted the investigation into Bri Jackson’s case and in doing so turned up seven other official complaints of similar involuntary incarceration at local psychiatric facilities under the watch of psychiatrist Dr. Nagy Kheir.      Bri has a law degree, but after losing her job and her health insurance, she was approved for Medicare coverage in the fall of 2023. She went to her regular physician to update her prescription for her depression now that she could afford it again — but he said she needed to go to the ER of Ascension Providence Hospital and have the psychiatrist at their psych unit write her prescription renewal.      Once she arrived at the ER psych unit, Bri was never able to see a psychiatrist, she was not allowed to make any phone calls to her relatives, and she was told she could not leave. This went on for three days.      She told them that she felt sad, but the Petition for Mental Health Treatment – a legal form used to involuntarily commit someone — diagnosed her with “suicidal ideation.” She told them she was definitely not suicidal, just depressed. The Clinical Certificate that was also filled out then listed her condition as “Psychosis” and was signed by a psychiatric doctor there, who may have only been an intern and who she never saw.      Next she was involuntarily transferred to the psychiatric ward at Pontiac General Hospital and told to sign a form that would legally permit her to be voluntarily committed. She was threatened that they would submit the Petition and Certificate they had to the court to involuntarily commit her if she didn’t “sign in” voluntarily. She did.      Nine days and $9700.00 of Medicare payments to to the hospital later, she was released. She had been told she was being treated for “depression” while she was there, but her release paperwork listed her condition as “Bipolar.” It was signed by Dr. Kheir, apparently to conform to the diagnosis necessary to receive the Medicare payments.      Until this KXYZ TV story broke, Dr. Kheir was the head psychiatrist at the hospital, but he resigned after Heather Catallo had started her investigation.      Among other things, she discovered that since 2017 Pontiac General through the Oakland Community Health Network had received almost $25,000,000 in Medicare payments for mental health services there. That included more than $6,700,000 for “Bipolar Diagnosis” patients and more than $14,000,000 for patients with a “Psychosis” diagnosis.      She also discovered a file of Certificates pre-signed by Dr. Kheir to expedite the process of what would often become an involuntary commitment of a pateint.Seven complaints against Dr. Kheir from similarly coerced patients had been formally filed since 2013 and reviewed by a local board of psychiatrists, but they declined to pursue any further investigation or to issue any penalties for all but one of the complaints. In 2021 a Michigan state Administrative Law Judge ruled that Dr. Kheir did violate the public health code for failing to spend more than ten minutes with one other patient for his diagnosis.      The use of the court system, or the threat of using it, to involuntarily commit a patient, inaccurately diagnosis them with a severe enough condition to qualify for Medicare payments, and possibly also prescribe them psychotropic medications they do not need is probably not unique to this Pontiac Michigan institution.      The damage done to an individual through a process such as this, which is also an utter violation of their civil rights, is one more psych crime that too often remains under normal investigatory radar because its victims have become too frightened – understandably – to speak up.      Bri Jackson’s case is one more example of “prescriptions for profit,” in this case paid for by the U.S. taxpayer at a rate of $880 to $990 per day by Medicare. Comments are moderated. You must be logged in to comment. Please keep it civil 

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