The problem is compounded by the fact that grievances against psychiatrists have little effect, leaving them free to prey on numerous other patients. Even if they are punished in one state, psychiatrists can easily set up shop in another. Silver says psychiatric boards are understaffed and in need of increased government regulation and money. "If these types of abuses are to be stopped, there needs to be a public investigation and sufficient resources to prosecute these bad shrinks and stop them from practicing."22 Psychology and social work boards are better about investigating sexual abuse, according to Silver, and their investigations can lead to the offending therapist losing his or her license to practice.
Exploitation of Minorities
Psychiatry is built on a foundation of prejudice against minorities, particularly African Americans. In the 1700s, for instance, none less than the father of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, asserted that African Americans were black because they had a disease called Negritude, and that we should not tyrannize over them, but rather find a cure for this disease. In the l840s a new so-called mental illness was "discovered" - "Drapetomania"; it was what caused slaves to run away! In 1887, G. Stanley Hall <education/leipzig_connection_2.htm>, founder of the American Journal of Psychology and first president of the American Psychological Association, put forth the idea that Africans, Indians, and Chinese were members of "adolescent races" in a stage of "incomplete growth."23 Thus, these people's lack of equality was justified, because they were not fully adult. From these historical roots of racism, according to the CCHR's Jan Eastgate, all minority groups have become marked for psychiatric abuse:
"You have had a targeting of the African American community, the American Indians, Hispanic groups, as having a lower IQ than so-called whites. Based on this 'scientific' justification, psychiatrists have sterilized African Americans. By 1929, up to 6000 Californians were sterilized, and they were largely African Americans. If you look at the statistics now, psychiatrists involuntarily commit African Americans three to five times as often as they do whites. The diagnosis of African American men as having schizophrenia, by public and private institutions, is 15 times as high as whites. African American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 are far more likely to be coerced into going to community mental health centers where they are placed on mindaltering drugs, major tranquilizers. And they are given higher dosages even than white people. So there's a concerted effort by psychiatry to target minority groups in this country by diagnosing them with spurious labels and then giving them mind-altering drugs and electric shock."l5
Abuse of Senior Citizens
After being placed in nursing homes, older people are routinely forced into taking psychotropic medications as a way of keeping them sedated. Eastgate comments on this and other lamentable treatments: "I think it's a sad indictment of society when people [who have put so many years and so much effort] into working, some of them fighting for this country, end up in a nursing home; are drugged out of their heads, electric shocked, and have to live out their final days in such misery.''l6
Actually, an alarming trend today is that many elderly people are being taken out of nursing homes - and put into private mental hospitals. But it is not their family members who are doing this. Indeed, family members are often not consulted. The initiators of these transfers are social workers and other employees of private psychiatric hospitals, who, amazingly, have the legal power to transfer people to the institutions with which they're affiliated, based solely on these employees' say-so. A powerful motive exists for these forced visits to mental institutions - Medicare money. The government will pay the many hundreds of dollars a day that it costs for a person to stay in one of these private hospitals, while the nursing home from which the person was snatched can continue to collect charges for his empty bed during his absence. The situation has grown so widespread and horrendous that it was documented on a 20/20 TV news magazine segment recently.24
As documented by 20/20's hidden camera, for-profit psychiatric institutions are not doing much to improve their inmates' mental health. Rather, they're mainly holding pens for people while their insurance money is procured. An example shown of these hospitals' modus operandi: doctors billing for psychotherapy for Alzheimer's patients who clearly could not participate in a psychotherapy session. But note that not all of the senior citizens captured by these institutions have Alzheimer's - or any mental problem, for that matter. As shown by 20/ 20, some are mentally and emotionally fine. Their only problem is that they're old, and seemingly easy marks for being, basically, kidnapped.
A factor in this problem is the growth of the for-profit hospital industry, which only makes profits when its beds are filled, and which finds the elderly to be the most easily procurable bed-fillers. Author Joe Sharkey describes the upsurge in for-profit institutions25:
"The private for-profit psychiatric hospital industry has its roots in the mid-1960s with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid programs. These programs created the climate in which a huge corporate hospital industry could thrive. The rapid rise in health-care spending over the last 30 years has paralleled the expansion of both private health insurance coverage and federal insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Federal spending for health care via Medicare and Medicaid programs has risen from 51% of the total health care spending in 1960 to more than 80% in 1983. The for-profit hospital became an investor-driven enterprise, and profits drove the expansion of the industry. By 1990, nearly half of all U.S. community hospitals were owned by a multiunit organization, including the large national chains. One out of every four US hospitals was owned by a national corporate chain."
The extent of the fraud perpetrated by mental hospital chains is staggering. Explains The New York Times: "In the past, estimates have put fraud and abuse at about 10% of the nation's health care costs, between $60 billion and $80 billion. But law enforcement officials and fraud specialists like Edward J. Kurtansky, New York State Deputy Attorney General, say that accumulating evidence, particularly the new findings at the forprofit psychiatric hospitals, indicates that because so much abuse goes undetected or unreported that the percentage is probably much higher."26 Unfortunately, it is the elderly who are frequently the victims in private-hospital fraud.
Cont ...