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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 

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 public 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 

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 

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 

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 

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