WARNING: A Psychiatric tsuNAMI is Upon Us.

madinamerica

By Lauren Tenney, PhD, MPhil, MPA, Psychiatric Survivor November 29, 2016

Well, our government is at it again.

It is not clear if this is the last stop, or where in the process we even are, but as best I can tell: happening any moment, Congressman Tim Murphy (R, Pennsylvania) will be making another speech at another hearing about the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646) which is now part of a new bill, H.R. 34.

H.R. 2646 was the controversial legislative package that did everything from increasing and sanctioning state-sponsored forced and court-ordered psychiatry to the re-organization of SAMHSA. There was not a group that went unscathed: babies, pregnant and lactating women, children, teens, adults, and veterans. The mixing of drug experimentation, programming, payments, delivery, tracking systems, prison systems, psychiatric systems, medical systems, educational systems—everything accounted for in 996 pages.

This new bill, introduced on the day after Thanksgiving, November 25, 2016 is part of a pattern of the government trying to slip controversial psychiatric policy through when no one is thought to be watching. We recently saw this with the FDA's shock treatment regulation for comment being released days before the new year and due the day after a celebrated holiday.

This bill, H.R. 34, the Tsunami Warning, Education, and Research Act of 2015 [21st Century Cures Act] is the subject of a hearing at the Capitol, in H-313, tonight on Tuesday, November 29, 2016 at 5:00 PM. Among the most problematic issues this bill presents are multiple provisions for forced psychiatry not limited to IOC/AOT, ACT Teams, and Prison Psychiatry.

H.R. 34 also includes: SAMHSA reorganization, condoning of HIPPAA violations, electronic health records, a study of peer support specialists for future controls of the field, multiple attacks on young people and veterans, and a host of other potential human rights violations. Psychiatry is a fraud and this bill perpetuates it.

Tell your legislators to VOTE NO on H.R. 34!

Demand that your legislators stop sneaking controversial, damaging bills into other bills at the last minute. What is being called a “simple parliamentary procedure” seems rather shady to me. The legislature has not been able to pass some version of Murphy’s bill for years, and now they are going to try to sneak it in merged with the 21st Century Cures Act under the title Education, Research and Tsunami Warning Act of 2015. These actions further problematize our legislative processes.

It is urgent that people realize that no child will grow up without psychiatric evaluation. All people will become, in a generation or two, acclimated to being psychiatrized; psychiatry and its arms of drugs and institutions will become even more standard in our society.

At the very moment that people are becoming more vocal about the need for equality, eliminating racism and racist practices and systems, calling out sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other forms of structural oppression, and addressing the outright fraud and other structural problems of psychiatry and its subdivisions, the government will solidify psychiatric practice in our society. This includes a great expansion of psychiatric reach into the prison industry and court systems.

Do not be fooled, this is a one way path that will allow the new administration the type of reach they want to keep us contained as they break down the existing structure, creating greater disparities, and further subjecting us, as a people who are already often oppressed, into further social control and subjugation to psychiatry.

Follow up with your legislators, and all legislators you can. Inform them about the dangers of psychiatry. Inform them about the dangers of this bill. Tell them that a bill that has been combined with multiple other bills totaling 996 pages (and involving who knows how many billions of dollars in taxpayer resources)—a bill that was introduced 3 business days prior to its hearing and 4 days prior to its assumed vote, under the name of a bill that has already passed, but has been deleted and replaced by this mess that has not been able to pass on its own for years—is not acceptable.

I am sure analyses of what the bill entails need to be made and many are working on making them. For now, take action. Call your elected officials today, tonight, tomorrow, and continue to do so to make your voice heard. The pro-psychiatry, pro-forced psychiatric treatment advocates are launching campaigns against us. We need to speak out, once again, for ourselves. No one else will. Make your calls now.

Find your Representatives in Congress

Find your Senators

H.R. 34 Bill Text

H.R. 34 Hearing Information

Those who want to take a closer look at this bill, please read on:

Even a cursory glance at the Table of Contents and the twenty-five titles it encompasses makes one have to take a deep breath to get the scope of how this bill can fundamentally transform our society—and not for the better.

Division A – 21st Century Cures starts off with Title I, NIH Innovation Projects and State Responses to Opioid Abuse. Title II includes Innovation Projects and includes privacy protections for human research subjects—a section called “High Risk, High Reward Research” is included here, as is the development of a “Taskforce specific to pregnant and lactating women.” These need to be read carefully.

Title III is Development and includes provisions such as patient-focused drug development, advancing new drug therapies, and a host of other sections designed for research on physical health.

Title V addresses Savings and this looks at issues of Medicare and Medicaid, and affects the Affordable Care Act.

Section VI looks at Leadership and Accountability and this is where the re-organization of SAMHSA is laid out and the provisions for the establishment of the “Interdepartmental Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee” can be found.

Title VII is designed for “Ensuring mental and substance use disorders prevention, treatment, and recovery programs keep pace with science and technology” and has both regional and national goals.

Title VIII is for “Supporting state prevention activities and responses to mental health and substance use disorder needs” that work on block grants.

Title IX is for “Promoting access to mental health and substance use disorder care” and these include grants for “treatment and recovery for homeless individuals”; “jail diversion programs”; “promoting integration of primary and behavioral health care”; “National Suicide Prevention Line” and other types of programs that track and turn in people to the system, acting as a pipeline to psychiatry. Section 9014 is “Assisted outpatient treatment” and Section 9015 is the Assertive Community Treatment grant program. It is important for people to specifically speak out against Sections 9014 and 9015 as inherently problematic for protecting human rights.

Subtitle B of Title IX is focused on “Strengthening the Health Care Workforce” and this includes education and training programs. Subtitle C targets college campuses.

Title X is for “Strengthening mental and substance use disorder care for children and adolescents” and increases pediatric access, programming, treatment, and interventions for young people, “screening and treatment for maternal depression” and Section 10006 is particularly worrisome, “Infant and early childhood mental health promotion, intervention, and treatment.”

Title XI is the loss of privacy rights under HIPAA (you may recall issues around Matsui’s bill that was basically incorporated into the structure).

Title XII further strengthens “Mental Health Parity” which works on the premise that psychiatry is as legitimate a science as physical health medicine, and perpetuates the fraud of the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industries, ensuring also that training, education, information and awareness of eating disorders are covered under these processes.

Title XIII is for “Mental Health and Safe Communities” Subtitle A includes the expansion and over reach of Law Enforcement and Psychiatry working hand in hand through Involuntary Outpatient Commitment (torture) “Assisted Outpatient Commitment” (as a second section in this same bill, here Section 14002. Title XIII also includes “Federal drug and mental health courts”; “mental health in the judicial system”; “Forensic Assertive Community Treatment Initiatives”; “mental health training for Federal uniformed services”; “school mental health intervention teams”; “Active-shooter training for law enforcement”; “Improving Department of Justice data collection on mental illness involved in crime”; and “Reports on the number of mentally ill offenders in prison”, further attempting to discriminate against people with psychiatric histories. In this section, the limited patients’ rights for the Department of Veterans Affairs are noted, and this of course is and continues to be a concern; for example, we know veterans and their fetuses are being subjected to shock treatment.

Subtitle B focuses on “Comprehensive Justice and Mental Health” in prisons and jails, local and federal law enforcement training, and GAO reporting and needs to be looked at very carefully in the future.

Title XV addresses Medicare Part A and reimbursements. Title XVI, Medicare Part B and treatment/payments/ and Continuing Access to Hospitals Act of 2016; all of which need thorough review.

Title XVII includes other Medicare provisions and XVIII still other provisions around employer health reimbursement.

Division D is “Child and Family Services and Support” and includes Title XIX, “Investing in Prevention and Family Services”, restructuring prevention services, programs, and payments as they relate to foster care, and perhaps one of the few sensible things, Section 19032, “Development of a statewide plan to prevent child abuse and neglect fatalities.”

Title XXI looks also and securing support for foster families and children and Title XXII addresses “reauthorizing adoption and legal guardianship incentive programs.”

Title XXIII is for “Technical Corrections” for data and programming and “Technical corrections to State requirement to address the developmental needs of young children.”

Title XXIV is for “Ensuring states reinvest savings resulting from increase in adoption assistance” and like “Title XXV, Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results” and the extension of the TANF program and other types of social supports, this needs to be read and understood.

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Lauren Tenney, PhD, MPhil, MPA, Psychiatric Survivor
http://www.LaurenTenney.us

Lauren Tenney, PhD, is a psychiatric survivor and activist first involuntarily committed at age 15. Her work aims to expose the institutional corruption which is a source of profit for organized psychiatry, and to abolish state sponsored human rights violations, such as murder, torture and slavery. www.laurentenney.us

Thank You Dr Tenny and MIA. 


"to abolish state sponsored human rights violations, such as murder, torture and slavery"

Thank You again Dr Tenny. 

wiki: Indentured Servitude.

wiki: 13th Amendment To The United States Constitution.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.^[1]

We know Christmas is coming and you're busy.

So is Tyranny.

Pick up the phone and tell your legislators, respectfully but without equivocating, to vote NO.

Write them a real letter: Stamp and Envelope. They get so much email that most it gets flushed unread.

NAMI's Bio-Based Bullshit Blows Through Stratosphere in 2012

In light of Senator Grassley's dragging NAMI out to disclose their Funding sources:

April 2010: 81% of NAMI Contributions of $5,000 and More Come From Drug Companies.

It Appears NAMI has dug in and purchased themselves a 440V Bullhorn to broadcast their owner's Bio-Based Pill Peddlings.

MindFreedon has;

Charting NAMI Web Use of "Biologically Based"

Charting NAMI Web Use of "Biologically Based"

While more and more NAMI members support MindFreedom's mission, a few NAMI leaders have worked over the decades to oppose campaigns for human rights and alternatives in mental health. One reason they may be creating this divisiveness in the mental health advocacy community is a bias toward a narrow "medical approach" that promotes a theory promoting psychiatric drugs over and above any other approaches. For nearly a decade, MindFreedom has held a count of NAMI's web site to reveal this bias. [Updated August 2012]

NAMI "Biological Based" Count

by David W. Oaks, MindFreedom Director

Unfortunately, NAMI's 'medical chart' isn't looking very well in 2012.

Hmmmm... perhaps a doctor needs to be called. Or perhaps NAMI has been calling on a few too many doctors too often!

A search of the NAMI web site conducted by MindFreedom International shows the number of references on the NAMI web site to the phrase "biologically based" mental health problems is skyrocketing in 2012, over this past decade.

A search on 13 February 2012 shows the number of references is 734, more than four times what it was just two years ago, in 2010:

Tracking Biased Language on the NAMI Website

An informal survey conducted by MindFreedom International since 2003 (shown in the graph above) raises some interesting questions.

"NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness" has been one of the few major nonprofits in the mental health field that - even though it receives a great deal of funding from the psychiatric drug manufacturing industry - chose for decades not to disclose the exact amount, even to its own members.

US Senator Grassley held an investigation, and forced NAMI to disclose that more than half of their money had, for years, come secretly from psychiatric drug company donations. You can read about that US Senate investigation here.

Apparently this large amount of secret funding influences the philosophy of the organization. Or perhaps drug money tends to be attracted to a group that is promoting a drug-based approach. 

Either way, there is a simple way to keep track of this bias. 

Periodically MindFreedom uses the Google search engine to count the number of times the NAMI web site uses the term, in quotation marks:

"biologically based"

Of course, this is an unscientific survey. For example, the use of all phrases would increase as a web site gets far larger, or decrease as old web pages are automatically removed.

However, the use of this particular phrase is at least a general indication of the orientation within NAMI toward a narrow medical model approach. 

NAMI tends to use this phrase with a sense of certainty in describing mental health issues, as the "one true way," even though there is no conclusive scientific evidence, and there are many other competing paradigms. This "medical model" approach is also promoted in countless NAMI printed brochures.

In reality, of course, there are many theories about mental and emotional problems and crisis, and there is no scientific data that one particular approach has been proven. 

In fact, at the start of this web search in 2003, MindFreedom held a hunger strike on this very topic, called the "Fast for Freedom." While the American Psychiatric Association was willing to engage in an extensive dialogue with hunger strikers about the lack of science behind 'medical model' claims, NAMI absolutely refused any official communications on the subject. Throughout the hunger strike, NAMI leaders created a special recorded message that said very little; when any phone inquiry was made, the caller was automatically referred to this.

NAMI Web Site Takes Turn for the Worse

You'll see from the graph that in the year 2010, finally, NAMI's use of the phrase apparently started to go down.

But unfortunately in 2012, it's gone sharply up. 

Perhaps this change in the use of the phrase is a function of an increased number of their web pages. However, one would hope NAMI would become aware of public concern about the influence of the millions of dollars of drug company money that has privately supported more than half of NAMI's budget for the last few years.

NAMI ought to stop using the phrase "biologically based," or at least explain that scientifically speaking this is one of a range of theories.

See the graph above for representation of the following data:  

Number of times phrase "biologically based" appears during a Google search conducted by MindFreedom of the domain http://www.nami.org

120 - count date: Summer 2003

163 - count date: 8 June 2008 

195 - count date: 16 February 2009

136 - count date: 11 October 2010

734 - count date: 13 February 2012

For more info on NAMI on the MindFreedom web site click here:

http://www.mindfreedom.org/search?SearchableText=nami

If you want to ask NAMI in a civil but strong way about their amount of pharmaceutical industry funding you can phone:

NAMI Main:           703-524-7600

NAMI HelpLine:      800-950-NAMI (6264)

Or use the NAMI web contact form here:

http://www.nami.org/template.cfm?section=Contact_Us

Change Within NAMI

We should all keep in mind that more and more NAMI members support a more inclusive and diverse approach. In fact, quite a number of NAMI members are also members and/or supporters of MindFreedom. 

But these NAMI members tend to especially oppose the way that NAMI has been hijacked by an extreme and unscientific opposition to human rights, creating divisiveness in a mental health advocacy community that ought to be united.

These courageous NAMI members are continuing to make changes within NAMI. In the meantime, if a few NAMI extremists continue to promote an anti-rights agenda, please let them know that if our community is targeted we all speak out, together.

Truth Injection

Don't you think that NAMI's positions need a "truth injection"?

There's a simple flyer you can download on the MindFreedom web site to photocopy and hand out, busting myths about mental and emotional well being.

Click here for the Truth Campaign:

http://www.mindfreedom.org/truth

Wherever you see a brochure promoting the medical model of the mental health system - whether it's a health center or library - demand that copies of the "Truth Injection" brochure be included, too! Let MindFreedom know if any public space refuses to include both sides of the story. 

Perhaps by the 10th anniversary of the hunger strike in 2013, NAMI leaders may at least become open to civil and open dialogue about these scientific questions. 

Related content

•  Let's Stop Saying "Mental Illness"!
•  Grassley Probes Financing of Advocacy Group for Mental Health
•  2012: Graph of NAMI web site use of "biologically-based" phrase
•  Prozac.org: An influential mental health nonprofit finds its 'grassroots' watered by pharmaceutical millions
•  Original Statement by the Fast for Freedom in Mental Health
•  Does Your Mental Health System Need a Truth Injection?

Thank You Mind Freedom and Mr Oaks.



And Now, to inject a little Balance, here's about the best to be said of NAMI we've found yet.

NAMI Dearest

CATIE: $44 Million Study Swept Under The Rug

""The Bonkers Institute For Nearly Genuine Research has;

CATIE & You

Methodius Isaac Bonkers, M.D.
Institute for Nearly Genuine Research 




You've heard the hype: New psychiatric drugs like Zyprexa and Risperdal, called atypical antipsychotics, are a vast improvement over old drugs like Haldol.

Whether or not the new drugs work any better, they make a lot of money for the drug companies.   While a month's supply of an old drug like Haldol costs less than $30, a month's supply of Zyprexa can cost well over $500.

To determine if these drugs are worth their outrageous price, the National Institute of Mental Health conducted one of the largest and longest independent studies ever, the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness, or CATIE.   Four years and $44 million later, the CATIE study, published in September 2005, reached a startling conclusion: the new drugs "have no substantial advantage" over the old ones.

Atypical antipsychotics, it turns out, are a massive rip-off.   They're no better than old drugs which weren't very good to begin with.

Government programs like Medicaid pay for over 90 percent of all antipsychotic prescriptions.   Across the nation, state budgets are being squeezed by Medicaid, and Medicaid is being squeezed by the high cost of prescription drugs.   Atypical antipsychotics are among the most expensive.

Studies by Mark Duggan, professor of economics at the University of Maryland, reveal these facts:

* Among the top 30 drugs by total U.S. revenue, Zyprexa has the highest price per prescription.

* Between 1996 and 2001, while Medicaid spending on prescription drugs doubled and spending on psychiatric drugs tripled, Medicaid spending on atypical antipsychotics jumped over 600 percent.

* Looking at the rate of hospitalization and side effects like movement disorders, diabetes, and weight gain, Duggan concluded that atypical antipsychotics "have not led to significant improvements in the health of schizophrenia patients... If anything, the results suggest that health outcomes decline following the shift to the new drugs."   (Does Medicaid Pay Too Much for Prescription Drugs? A Case Study of Atypical Anti-Psychotics, 2003.)

We're paying all this money for high-priced drugs, yet patients are getting sicker, not healthier.   It's a scandal of monstrous proportions.

From the minute CATIE's results were announced, the pharmaceutical industry and front groups like the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) have rushed to defend their favorite drugs: the most profitable ones.

APA's medical director, James Scully, said it would be a "dire mistake" to restrict doctors from prescribing certain drugs "based on cost."   The APA apparently believes taxpayers should pay for any drug no matter how expensive and ineffective, so long as doctors follow APA guidelines approved by the drug companies.

NAMI responded to CATIE in predictable fashion, blaming the study's unexpected results on patients who participated in the study.   Many patients dropped out or discontinued medication, NAMI said, because they suffer from a co-occurring disorder called anosognosia, or "lack of insight" into the need for treatment.

NAMI also complained that CATIE "only lasted for 18 months."   Curiously, NAMI has never criticized drug company clinical trials lasting 12 weeks or less.   Such trials provide the basis for claiming new drugs are safer and more effective than old ones.

Drug companies themselves have responded to CATIE, bending over backwards to find a silver lining inside a dark cloud. Pfizer boasted that its drug, Geodon, is less likely to cause weight gain than Zyprexa, not mentioning other side effects which caused 79 percent of those on Geodon to stop taking it.

Johnson & Johnson, maker of Risperdal, followed NAMI's lead and blamed the patients.   "The CATIE study reinforces the overwhelming need for greater medication compliance," the company web site says.   In 2003 Janssen Pharmaceuticals introduced the first atypical "long-acting injectable," which allows doctors to forcibly inject the drug whether patients want it or not.   This guarantees compliance.

Business goes on as usual, and CATIE appears to have changed nothing.   Drugmakers and mental health professionals have a long history of ignoring the results of scientific studies they don't like.

In December 2000, the British Medical Journal published a systematic review of 52 randomized trials comparing atypical antipsychotics with older drugs, concluding there was "no clear evidence that atypical antipsychotics are more effective or better tolerated than conventional antipsychotics."   The study was ignored.

In November 2003, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a two-year randomized trial comparing patients on Zyprexa with patients on Haldol, concluding there were "no significant differences" between the two groups.   Zyprexa had no advantage over Haldol in terms of compliance, symptoms, or overall quality of life.   The study was ignored.

In October 2005, one month after CATIE was published, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a meta-analysis of 15 randomized trials of more than 5,000 elderly patients treated with atypical antipsychotics. Patients taking the drugs had a 54 percent increased chance of dying within 3 months, compared with patients taking placebo sugar pills.   The study was ignored.

Atypical antipsychotics continue to be prescribed in growing numbers not only to patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, but also to nursing home residents, prison inmates, and even schoolchildren labeled with learning disorders.

Judging by third quarter 2005 profits, business is booming:

* Sales of Risperdal, Johnson & Johnson's biggest-selling drug, reached $916 million, up 23 percent.


[Ed; this piece is from 2005 and sales increased just a weeeee, bit higher as time went on.

"Testimony at trial indicated that the profit margin for sales of Risperdal was 97% or $28.90 Billion for the period of 1994-2010"  

South Carolina Judge Calls J&J "Detestable"]

* AstraZeneca's Seroquel, $706 million, up 32 percent.

* Bristol-Myers Squibb's Abilify, $206 million, up 58 percent.

* Pfizer's Geodon, $148 million, up 18 percent.

* Eli Lilly's Zyprexa, $1.035 billion, up 1 percent.

Eli Lilly said the company's diabetes drugs earned $653 million, up 13 percent.   Among all drugs studied by CATIE, Lilly's Zyprexa was most likely to cause weight gain and high blood sugar leading to diabetes.

Now that CATIE has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, will our government take action to punish drugmakers and mental health professionals who deceived the public, harmed patients, and defrauded taxpayers?   Don't bet on it.

What happens when expensive drugs are found to be unsafe and ineffective?   Not much.


This article was originally published December 2005 in Ragged Edge Magazine.


Thank You Bonkers Institute

"NAMI also complained that CATIE "only lasted for 18 months."   Curiously, NAMI has never criticized drug company clinical trials lasting 12 weeks or less."

And just for fun, let's Diagnose NAMI.

NAMI, Another Pharma Store Front

NAMI: Another PHARMA STORE FRONT

CCHR has;

National Alliance on Mental Illness

And for those of you who might question CCHR's Bone Fides because they, GASP, actually know some Scientologists:

Thanks to Senator Grassley (R-IA), NAMI themselves, FINALLY, made available pdfs detailing their major funding sources.

NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness, Major Foundation and Corporate Support

Which should paint you a Clearer picture of the objectivity driving NAMI Science.

On to the actual History of:

National Alliance on Mental Illness

"How it all started: In the late 1970s and 1980s, prominent American Psychiatric Association (APA) psychiatrists, directors and researchers with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) were in need of more government funding, and devised a plan to create a “growth of consumer and advocacy organizations with the intention of getting these groups to help lobby Congress for increased funding for psychiatric research. Several groups emerged first on the scene during that period: The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA), National Depression & Manic Depressive Association (NDMDA, now called Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, DBSA) and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD).

In an incestuous relationship, many of these groups were formed by the directors or researchers from NIMH—the very organization that needed mental health advocacy groups to make demands on Congress for increased funding. All of them had board or advisory board members with financial ties to Pharma and the majority of them were heavily funded by Pharma. So this was a brilliant marketing/lobbying strategy – Set up patients rights groups to lobby for the funding needed for psychiatry and big Pharma while claiming to be “advocates” for the mentally ill.

NAMI: The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) was founded in 1979. It has since changed its name to National Alliance on Mental Illness. The group has and continues to rely upon pharmaceutical funding—more than $41 million since 1996. A U.S. Senate investigation revealed that in just two years alone (2006-2008) Pharma funded NAMI to the tune of $23 million, representing about three-quarters of its donations.

Groups like NAMI were established with representatives of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the American Psychiatric Association. Along with the pharmaceutical industry, this triage helped to secure greater funding for NIMH and psychiatric researchers.

In fact, psychiatrist Herbert Pardes, director of NIMH (1978-1984) spoke at the forming meeting of National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI, now called the National Alliance on Mental Illness). Joining him was Samuel Keith (20 years in NIMH heading its Schizophrenia Research Program), along with other NIMH psychiatric researchers.^[1] He remains an advisor to NAMI today.^[2] He remains an advisor to NAMI today, as well as head of NARSAD’s Scientific Council.^[3]

In 2006, NAMI president Michael Fitzpatrick told the Philadelphia Enquirer: “Nobody from the pharmaceutical industry tells us what to do.”^[4] This is a blatant lie as court documents revealed and The New York Times exposed in 2009.

• Between 1996 and mid 1999, 18 drug firms gave NAMI $11.72 million, including: Janssen ($2.08 million), Novartis ($1.87 million), Pfizer ($1.3 million), Abbot Laboratories ($1.24 million), Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals ($658,000), and Bristol-Myers Squibb ($613,505).^[5]

• NAMI’s top donor was Eli Lilly. The company gave $2.87 million, $1.1 million of which was given in 1999 to help fund NAMI’s “Campaign to End Discrimination” against the mentally ill. This was a marketing scheme aimed at finding a way to force more insurance companies and government health care programs to quit “discriminating” against the psychiatry and Big Pharma’s mentally ill customers.

• In 2002 – 2003, pharmaceutical companies gave NAMI a further $4 million per year, according to a 2009 lawsuit naming NAMI.^[6] Eli Lilly donated at least another $3 million to NAMI between 2003 and 2005.^[7]

• In 2009, the US Senate Finance Committee investigated this conflict of interest and found that between 2006 and 2008, another $23 million had been given NAMI, representing about three-quarters of its donations. It included an AstraZeneca grant of $1.44 million in 2008.^[8]

• Documents The New York Times obtained showed that drug makers had also given NAMI direct advice about how to advocate forcefully for issues that affect industry profits. For example, on December 16, 2003, NAMI leaders met with AstraZeneca sales executives. Slides from a presentation delivered by the salesmen showed that the company urged the alliance to resist state efforts to limit mental health drugs. “Solutions: Play Hard Ball,” one slide was titled. “Hold policy makers accountable for their decisions in media and in election,” another stated.^[9]

• NAMI also failed disclose that Eli Lilly’s marketing manager Gerald Radke ran its entire operation. In 1999, Radke was a Lilly paid “management consultant,” then left Lilly and served as NAMI’s “interim executive director” until mid-2001.^[10]

• In September 2009, media exposed how Pfizer had funded NAMI “in order to turn the nonprofit into a ‘Trojan Horse’ that would promote the antipsychotic drug Geodon for non-approved use in children. The number of antipsychotic scripts written for children doubled to 4.4 million between 2003 and 2006.^[11]

• During the time he was president of NAMI, James McNulty received thousands of dollars for regularly speaking on behalf of Pfizer and other drug makers at various company sponsored events.^[12]

• The March, 2000 newsletter of the Washington State Association of Counties credited former Eli Lilly executive turned NAMI Washington lobbyist Brad Boswell, and NAMI’s director Tom Richardson, for getting the legislature to spend $1 million on atypical antipsychotics. ^[13] A lawsuit against Lilly in which NAMI is named points out that in 2000, Lilly gave NAMI Washington State $91,000. “During the time, NAMI Washington State, in an effort led by NAMI lobbyist Brad Boswell lobbied the state legislature for $1 million specifically for atypical antipsychotic drugs….NAMI also joined a suit initiated by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America (PhRMA) against the state of Michigan in order to increase physician access to higher cost pharmaceuticals—including atypical antipsychotics—under the state’s Medicaid program.” (Point 197 of the lawsuit).^[14]

• Between about 2001 and 2003 psychiatrist Rex Cowdry was Medical Director of NAMI. He spent 23 years at NIMH and was its acting director (1994-1996) during which time he told Congress—are for than 40 years of federal funding and while demanding millions more—“We do not know the causes [of mental illness.] We don’t have methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.”^[15]

• On February 12, 2001, NAMI sent out a press release heralding the approval by the FDA of Geodon. When the drug had come up for approval in 1998 the FDA refused to approve it due to concerns about a heart beat irregularity that can be caused by it, leading to sudden death. However, NAMI intervened directly, and soon the FDA was singing a different tune about Geodon. By April 2001, Geodon had already been approved for use in 46 state Medicaid systems. Pfizer may have received an assist on this from NAMI in their “grass roots advocacy” lobbying of the federal Health Care Finance Administration (HCFA Medicaid and Medicare oversight agency) to force Medicaid to pay for atypical (new) antipsychotics.^[16]

• In a 2006 lawsuit filed by the “Local 28 Sheet Metal Workers,” a union health and welfare fund, against Eli Lilly it is alleged that the drug company’s funding of and partnership with NAMI in the late 90s/early 2000s was “designed to accomplish through a non-profit organization what it could not on its own: giving the appearance of independent analysis and a grassroots movement encouraging the use of atypical antipsychotics by state and private insurers.” According to the lawsuit: “The scheme worked and Lilly certainly benefited from its significant donations to NAMI. Zyprexa was the leading antipsychotic in the world in 2000, capturing nearly 40% of the global antipsychotic market. A year later, Zyprexa was sixth highest selling pharmaceutical product in the world, with $3.2 billion in sales.”^[17]

• It also reports that in 2001 the “Access to Effective Medications” brochure produced by NAMI National for legislators and paid for by Lilly—lays out a blueprint for nationwide NAMI lobbying of state governments to reduce or remove any limitations for atypical antipsychotics, again down playing the side effects of such drugs.” (Point 176)^[18]

• In April 2002, the Government Accounting Office issued a report entitled “VA Health Care: Implementation of prescribing guideline for atypical antipsychotic drugs generally sound.” The VA’s policy on antipsychotic drugs was simply to ask psychiatrists to use less expensive one, which the GAO found was a sound policy. The VA was trying to control costs, since the cost of antipsychotic drugs for the agency had shot up 29% from $123 million in 2000 to $158 million in 2001, and was eating up 7% of the VA’s total drug budget. NAMI and the National Mental Health Association (Mental Health America) were cited as the lone critics of the GAO policy. This was cited in a similar lawsuit to the Sheet Metals union, but filed in 2006 by the Sergeants Benevolent Association and Health and Welfare Fund on behalf of itself and others (Point 198 of lawsuit).^[19]

• Such a policy would have no effect whatsoever but to continue to drive up VA usage of the most expensive antipsychotics, sending greater and greater revenues to the drug makers who donate so generously to NAMI.

• No doubt unknown to the GAO was that both groups had helped Big Pharma devise a psychiatric drug plan (see TMAP below) that pushed the most atypical antipsychotics for states’ use.

• On December 18, 2003, The New York Times also reported how NAMI had bused scores of protestors to a hearing in Frankfort, Kentucky, took out full page ads in newspapers, and sent angry faxes to state officials, all protesting a state panel proposal to exclude the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa from Medicaid’s list of preferred medications. According to the article, “What the advocacy groups did not say at the time was that the buses, ads and faxes were all paid for” by the manufacturer of Zyprexa, Eli Lilly.^[20]

NAMI’s Many Faces

• The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill Children and Adolescents Network (NAMI-CAN) was formed in May 1990. It produced newsletters that ran initial articles touting the benefits of SSRI antidepressants, newly on the market in 1988, such as “Serotonin and the Neurobiology of Depression”^[21] Under its website, it is “extremely pleased” that the New Freedom Commission report (NFC) on mental health “calls for mental health screening” and particularly the use of TeenScreen, a non-scientific questionnaire that could label and stigmatize any child as “depressed” and requiring dangerous antidepressants. It calls on its members to report to NAMI national any “anti-screening attacks.”^[22]

• In 1995, NAMI formed the NAMI Research Institute (NRI) with E. Fuller Torrey (NIMH, APA) as president. Board members included Laurie Flynn and Robert Post (NIMH, APA).^[23] Its mission is to “drive national, state, and local debates on reforms and investments in the nation’s mental illness delivery and financing system”—more taxpayers’ dollars going into the biomedical approach to treating people’s problems.^[24] Dr. Post was Unit and Section Chief and then Chief of Biological Psychiatry at NIMH, a group that “won” research awards from NARSAD and NDMDA.^[25] He organized the Stanley Foundation Bipolar Network (1995-2002), now continuing as the Bipolar Collaborative Network that aims to increase studies in bipolar—and with his biological psychiatry background, most likely drug “solutions.”^[26] He has served on speakers’ bureaus for Bristol-Myers Squibb and GSK and as a consultant for Abbott Labs, AstraZeneca, GSK, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer and UCB Pharma and Shire.^[27]

• The NRI recommends psychiatric drugs under Medicaid “be available without restriction for persons with mental illness include:
  1. Antipsychotic medications;
  2. Anticonvulsant medications;
  3. Antidepressant medications;
  4. Antianxiety medications; and
  5. Any other medication that is cross-indicated as a central nervous system drug recognized to treat mental illness.”^[28]

• This is further Driving Up Healthcare Costs, as psychiatric drugs are among Medicaid’s most costly and commonly prescribed drugs.^[29]

• In 1996, NAMI set up the “NAMI-Anti-Stigma Foundation” with Laurie Flynn as a Board Member and said its campaign to end discrimination “accepts unrestricted contributions from pharmaceutical companies and others.”^[30] While it claims an altruistic motive of dispelling stigma against and stereotyping of mental illness, it has a near neo-Nazi approach in reporting anyone the group considers opposed to its agenda.^[31] Not even Halloween escapes them as the group scare heads a campaign against ghoulish “insane asylums” being a theme of the night—although many patients in these asylums would argue it is like a “Halloween nightmare” being locked up and treated in one.^[32]

• In 1996, NAMI started a five-year campaign marketed as “Campaign to End Discrimination” that pushed for insurers to pay out unlimited funds for psychiatric treatments. “The “Founding Sponsors” of this campaign were eight pharmaceutical companies that manufacture psychiatric drugs—Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, SmithKline Beecham, Wyeth-Ayerst Labs.^[33]

• 1997: NAMI formed the “Treatment Advocacy Center” with E. Fuller Torrey and Laurie Flynn as Board Members. Torrey was a NIMH researcher and between 1987 and 1991 had received more than $780,000 in grant awards from NIMH for research on “schizophrenia.” He is the chairperson of the Stanley Foundation “Research Program on Serious Mental Illness.” The NAMI Research Institute oversees at least one Stanley Foundation program, “The Stanley Scholars program,” and supplies money to 29 psychiatric research centers at Universities in the U.S. and Canada. According to Torrey, the Stanley Foundation has been supporting psychiatric research since 1988 and “provides a NAMI staff person to evaluate and oversee NIMH research efforts.”^[34]

• On April 18, 1997, NAMI commended Janssen for its “Person-to-Person” initiative—a program Janssen and the APA launched “to link people who use Risperdal for schizophrenia to an array of community support systems.”^[35]

• December 1997: NAMI touted the benefits of the “new generation of atypical antipsychotic drug therapies,” quoting psychiatrist Jeffrey A. Lieberman, who receives funding from makers of antipsychotics. NAMI’s press release stated: “An additional benefit of atypical antipsychotics is increased patient compliance due to a decrease in potential side effects and severity of subsequent episodes.” And in light of the revolutionary new drugs, NAMI was quick to reiterate is policy that there should be no limitations on their availability—a “philosophy,” it says is supported by the APA.^[36]

• 1998: Eli Lilly invented the “Welcome Back Award” to “fight the stigma associated with depression and promote understanding that it is treatable” [with Prozac and other antidepressants.] In 2004, Lilly awarded this to the Consumer Services Director of NAMI-DE, for serving the “depression community.”^[37] Winners will share a total of $55,000–$15,000 each—to be donated to the not-for-profit organizations of their choice.^[38]

• 1998: NAMI released its “PACT Model of Community-Based Treatment for Persons with Severe and Persistent Mental Illnesses: A Manual for PACT Start-Up” as part of its Anti-Stigma Foundation. The PACT manual and standards outline what NAMI considers to be the most effective treatment—drugs—with the plan to get it implemented by every state by 2002.^[39] Part of this is the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) that includes patients being forced to take psychiatric drugs in the community and increases psychiatrists’ powers to force and coerce patients in taking drugs made by those companies funding NAMI.^[40] The program endorses greater involuntary commitment powers for psychiatrists.

• Patricia Spindel and Jo Anne Nugent of Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology who researched PACT also voiced concerns about its stigmatizing effects by trampling on patients’ rights: “The PACT model would seem to be a throwback to a time when the rights of those being ‘treated’ were not of much concern to mental health practitioners.” Further, “The emphasis placed upon medication management and ‘managing difficult clients’ points to a process which stigmatizes and labels people for not following the wishes of society in general, and their doctors and workers in particular….”^[41]

• A February 8, 2001 article about the dangers of the PACT program published on the website of the Sutherland Institute—a Public Policy Research Institute based in Utah noted that based on these PACT standards, admission criteria included “significant functional impairments” such as “inability to be consistently employed at a self-sustaining level or inability to consistently carry out the homemaker role (e.g. household meal preparation, washing clothes, budgeting, or child-care tasks and responsibilities.” Further, “Lack of good personal hygiene, not obtaining medical care, and not meeting one’s nutritional needs are other indicators that a person might need PACT’s services. If one in 15 people are in need of care, a lot of bad housekeepers could find themselves subject to involuntary psychiatric treatment, which can include the administration of psychotropic medication.”^[42]

• And showing NAMI’s further hypocrisy about stigma, “PACT standards do not require that a patient’s consent be obtained before he is admitted to the program,” with calls from NAMI to loosen existing involuntary commitment laws to enforce treatment. ^[43]Yet no medical patient could be stigmatized in the same way and be forced to undergo medical treatment. As the Sutherland Institute pointed out, “Loosening the standard for involuntary commitment would allow PACT to treat patients presenting a marginal danger to themselves or others and would open the door to involuntarily treat people, who like the bad housekeeper, merely differ from society’s accepted norm. …”^[44]

• A review of 27 clinical trials on PACT programs done by Tomi Gomory, Ph.D. in 1999 found, “The current promotion of PACT appears to be based more on professional enthusiasm for the medical model than upon any benefit to the clients.” A negative effect of the PACT model found in Dr. Gomory’s review was an increased incidence of suicide in PACT settings. One study found that during an 8-month period in one hospital doing the program 10% of the PACT client group attempted suicide while none of the other group of patients had done so (Hoult, et al. 1983). Another study noted that several PACT patients were judged improved by PACT experts immediately before they committed suicide.^[45]

• Sarah Thompson, M.D., a policy specialist, authored another article for the Sutherland Institute on PACT stated, “Once a precedent is created for incarcerating and drugging people for minor deviations from ‘normal’ thoughts and behavior, how far are we from creating a system such as that used by the former Soviet Union, where people were incarcerated and drugged for politically incorrect beliefs?”^[46]

• 1999: Laurie Flynn, director of NAMI worked on the “Expert Consensus Guideline Series: Treatment of Schizophrenia 1999” to establish uniform “medication guidelines” for schizophrenia. Pharmaceutical companies involved in the development of TMAPgenerously funded the development of the guidelines.^[47]

• 2002: NAMI’s Living With Schizophrenia & Other Mental Illnesses educational program was renamed “In Our Voice: Living With Mental Illnesses.” Funded by a grant from Eli Lilly, the program was implemented into 10 states. The “program also serves as a gateway to other NAMI programs, including the organization’s 12-week Family-to-Family curriculum.”^[48]

• Other campaigns were NAMI C.A.R.E. (Consumers Advocating Recovery through Empowerment), NAMI Provider Education Program, NAMI Family-to-Family Education Program, (as of 2003 in 45 states and the District of Columbia), Peer to Peer, and Hearts and Minds.^[49] NAMI C.A.R.E. announced it would significantly expand due to “an exclusive multi-year partnership with AstraZeneca, LP.” “We look forward to enhancing an already successful partnership with AstraZeneca through the expansion of NAMI-C.A.R.E,” said Suzanne Vogel-Scibilia, M.D., president of the NAMI national board.^[50]

• October 2002: The catch-sounding “Campaign for the Mind of America” pushed for an all out mental health screening of all ages, stating: “The Campaign highlights the need to build a comprehensive, efficient system to screen, evaluate, diagnose and treat mental illnesses at every stage of life.”^[51] [Emphasis added]

• In the third and fourth quarters of 2008, Pfizer gave NAMI a grant of $357,000 for “Campaign for the Mind of America.” Lilly is also funding the Campaign for the Mind, with grants of $450,000 in both 2007 and 2008. Lilly also provides extra funding to NAMI groups all over the country for the “Walk for the Mind of America.” In 2007, walking money totaled $41,500 and in 2008, $50,000. ^[52]

• In 2007, NAMI presented a $50,000 “Mind of America Scientific Research Award” Dr. A John Rush—under Senate investigation for his failure to disclose drug company dollars he’d taken as a researcher. ^[53]

• November 2007: It established an online Veterans Resource Center to “help support” active duty military personnel, veterans and their families facing serious mental illnesses.^[54]

On April 6, 2009, Senator Charles Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee sent a letter to NAMI asking for the disclosure of all funding from drug makers and industry created foundations over the past few years.

Sally Zinman of the California Network of Mental Health Clients summarized the primary omission made by most mainstream media when crediting NAMI as a valid source of information on mental illness: “NAMI is seen by the media as the voice of the mental health community, but the integrity of its work is called into question by its sources of funding.”^[55]

NAMI & MHA FRONT FOR TMAP

In 1997, Texas initiated a drug protocol called the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, TMAP, for state mental health programs. The drug protocol calls for prescribing new and very expensive psychotropic drugs, as well as more prescriptions, which caused Texas Medicaid spending on five antipsychotic drugs to skyrocket from $28 million in 2002 to $177 million in 2004—almost $700 million combined. That did not include care for those who are in state institutions.^[56]

TMAP is the subject of a major lawsuit filed by Allen Jones, former Pennsylvania fraud investigator and the Texas State Attorney General’s office that accuse Janssen Pharmaceutica of using false advertising and trips and other perks to get its antipsychotic drug Risperdal listed on TMAP.^[57]The Texas health department received as much as $6 million in contributions from Janssen and other parties to implement TMAP.^[58]

After the guidelines were adopted, Janssen “experienced a significant increase in sales of Risperdal” in Texas and worked to bring the program to other states, the suit alleges.^[59] NAMI Texas and the Mental Health Association (Mental Health America) were part of the “collaborative effort” along with pharmaceutical companies that developed TMAP, which is currently the subject of a major lawsuit.^[60]

Along with them were Laurie Flynn, former NAMI director and founder of TeenScreen, another psychiatric-pharmaceutical front group, and Michael Hogan, Ph.D., former director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health, chair of the 2003 President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC) and currently an Advisory Board member of Janssen’s “Mental Health Issues Today.” Hogan is also member of TeenScreen’s Advisory Council.^[61]

NAMI’s website recommends the group’s “support the continued development and evaluation of the efficacy of TMAP as an alternative to Medicaid cost containment strategies.”^[62] NAMI is simply stroking, not biting, the hand that feeds it.

• TMAP was seeded with a $1.6 million grant from the Janssen Pharmaceutica (subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson), which makes the antipsychotic Risperdal and other at least 10 other drug companies.^[63]

• The panel members that devised TMAP were paid on the side from the companies that manufacture antipsychotics.^[64]

• Of the 46 members of the three panels, 27 had conducted research on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, served on drug company speakers’ bureaus or served as consultants to a drug company.^[65]

• At least two psychiatrists on the panel, Dr. A. John Rush and Dr. Karen Wagner, were under Senate Finance Committee investigation for failing to disclose pharmaceutical company funding. Between 2000 and 2007, Dr. Rush failed to report $12,000 from various drug companies and Dr. Wagner, $150,000.^[66]

• In 1999, Hogan and Laurie Flynn collaborated on at least one other project, the “Expert Consensus Guideline Series: Treatment of Schizophrenia 1999” to establish uniform “medication guidelines” for schizophrenia. NAMI was not only given credit for their collaboration on the overall TMAP project, but 51 representatives from chapters of NAMI were listed as “Policy Experts” in the “Expert Consensus Guideline Series for Schizophrenia.” Eli Lilly and Co., Janssen, Novartis, Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical, Pfizer, and Zeneca Pharmaceuticals exclusively and generously supported the development of these guidelines.^[67]

• Karen Dineen Wager, under Senate finance committee investigation for her failure to disclose Pharma money she’d taken, served on the TMAP panel. She was hired by the state of Texas to make recommendations to the state mental health department for the treatment of depressed children.^[68]

Ray Moynihan, Alan Cassels, authors of Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients also found from extensive research that “partnering with patient groups has become a key element of marketing strategies for every major medical condition, with virtually every drug company.”^[69]

Thank You Very Much CCHR