Psych doctor wrote 1,000 prescriptions a week for psychotropic drugs

Natural News

Saturday, March 27, 2010 by: E. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) is reporting that a Miami psychiatrist has prescribed nearly 14 million pills to Medicaid patients since 2004. According to the report, Fernando Mendez-Villamil wrote about 285,000 prescriptions in just six years with a total taxpayer cost of $43 million.

The astounding find is part of an investigation into the legitimacy of Mendez-Villamil’s practice; after all, the numbers suggest that he would have had to prescribe about 4,000 prescriptions a month, or 1,000 a week, in order to achieve the large total.

Mendez-Villamil is already recognized as the most profuse drug prescriber in the state of Florida. Prior to the state’s implementation of new computer tracking protocols around 2007, Mendez-Villamil’s prescription rate was at its highest; after those measures began taking effect, his prescription rate slowed by almost 33 percent.

Mendez-Villamil’s highest year was 2004 when he issued over 62,000 prescriptions totaling $12.2 million. The numbers averaged out to almost 2,700 patients that year who all received roughly 23 prescriptions each. When all was said and done, each patient received an average of 1,200 pills in 2004.

Senator Don Gaetz (R-Niceville) instigated the AHCA review into Mendez-Villamil, alleging that he is taking advantage of the system and wasting taxpayer money for illegitimate purposes. Sen. Gaetz is citing the case as evidence that better oversight of the Medicaid system is needed. In response to a freedom-of-information request, the in-depth review he requested was published in Health News Florida.

When recently contacted about the issue, Mendez-Villamil refused to speak to the media. His attorney made a statement in his defense, insisting that all such numbers are normal for the volume of patients seen by the doctor. Mendez-Villamil did personally speak to the media back in December, however, where he explained that he typically sees patients for about 10 minutes every few months which allows him to see a large number of patients. Most of these patients, he said, are on four or five drugs each, all of which he says are necessary.

According to the report, Mendez-Villamil often prescribes some of the most expensive psychotropic drugs to his patients, including Zyprexa which costs about $840 for a 30-day supply. Other common prescriptions include Abilify at over $630 a month and Seroquel at $430.

In 2007, the Bureau of Medicaid Program Integrity received a complaint about Mendez-Villamil which it handed over to the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. The investigation is still in progress but, since receiving more intense scrutiny, Mendez-Villamil has reduced his number of patients by 25 percent.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.healthnewsflorida.org/in…

An unsurprisingly disingenuous look at “marijuana”

Number of Prescriptions Written in UK for Antidepressants Nearly Equals Entire Population

“… there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing…a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

-Aldous Huxley

NaturalNews
Friday, December 04, 2009 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

There were 36 million prescriptions issued for antidepressant drugs in the United Kingdom in 2008, nearly one for every adult in the population, according to numbers obtained by the Liberal Democrat party.

The number is 2.1 million higher than in 2007.

Writing in the Guardian, Ed Halliwell examines the reason for this trend, noting that antidepressant prescriptions have increased more than threefold since the beginning of the 1990s, far outstripping the increase in the percentage of the population classified with a “common mental disorder.” From 1993 to 2007, this number increased by only one million, going from 15.5 percent of the population to 17.6 percent.

Halliwell notes that while national guidelines recommend that psychological therapies are the preferred treatment for mental illness or distress, 75 percent of doctors report having prescribed drugs in cases where they thought that therapy or other non-pharmaceutical treatments would have been more effective. In part, this is because despite government recommendations, psychotherapy treatment remains difficult to find in the United Kingdom, with long waiting lists.

“However, medics also prescribe drugs because that’s what they are trained to do – pills have long been their (and our) default response to depression,” Halliwell writes. “The dominant view of psychiatric illness is that chemical imbalances in the brain are mostly to blame, and that they can be controlled with pharmaceuticals.”

Yet a number of studies have called into question whether antidepressants are really significantly more effective than a placebo, and a much-touted study identifying a “depression gene” was recently discredited by a new analysis.

Halliwell calls for a shift away from a pharmaceutical approach to depression, with a renewed emphasis on more well-proven measures such as “building good relationships, lifelong learning, being kind to others and exercise.”

He acknowledges the challenges inherent in this approach.

“As well as an overhaul of services, it means tackling social fragmentation, greed-based economics and the stress created by a speedy, sensationalist culture,” he writes. “And it means starting a mature debate based on understanding rather than fear of the mind, promoting the ways we can look after our psychological as well as our physical health.”

Sources for this story include: www.guardian.co.uk.

Libertarian freedom activist forcibly hospitalized and drugged

Veteran libertarian civil rights activist Julian Heicklen calls it “an out-and-out kidnapping” when Homeland Security Police forcibly transported him to a hospital where he was injected with Thorazine against his will.

November 4, 11:07 AM Libertarian News Examiner Garry Reed

When faced with arrest, Heicklen goes limp and silent as he did on
October 26 during his previous attempt to exercise his free speech rights
on public property. (Screen capture from YouTube video shot by Derek
DeMarco)

Veteran libertarian civil rights activist Julian Heicklen calls it “an out-and-out kidnapping” when Homeland Security Police forcibly transported him to a hospital where he was injected with Thorazine against his will.

It began shortly after Heicklen arrived at the US District Courthouse in New York City for the third Monday in a row to pass out pamphlets to prospective jurors.

The pamphlet, produced by the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) entitled “A Primer for Prospective Jurors” informs jurors of their right to judge the law and its application as well as the facts in a case, regardless of the judge’s instructions to the contrary.

As in the past, (Jury activist arrested for exercising First Amendment rights) Homeland Security police told him he couldn’t do that on federal property and ordered him to leave. As in the past, Heicklen explained that the First Amendment recognized his right to do what he was doing.

Then, as Heicklen tells it in his email report to supporters, “One of them said that I was under arrest, get his hands behind his back and handcuff him.”

As Heicklen always does when faced with arrest, he dropped to the ground and went limp and silent.

In the past, he was arrested, handcuffed, placed on a gurney and transported to a hospital where he was examined and eventually released in time to be home later the same day.

(Full accounts of this and his first two trips to Manhattan can be read on the New Jersey Libertarian Party website.)

But this time something different happened. “I remained in that position for over an hour,” Heicklen says, “before I was lifted onto a gurney and strapped securely. I was never handcuffed nor received a citation or summons. It was an out-and-out kidnapping.”

At Bellevue Psychiaytric Hospital he remained nonresponsive to questions.

Around 3:00 PM, radio reporter Chris Goldstein called to say that he would start the publicity rolling.

After 4:00 PM or so, Heicklen continues, “I made a fuss to see someone in charge, so that I could either be released or brought in front of a magistrate. My requests were ignored, and became more persistent. Against my wishes four attendants grabbed me and gave me a shot of Thorazine to calm me down. It worked, I got an excellent night’s sleep.”

Heicklen asserts that Dr. Lowe, head psychiatrist for the Bellevue unit, made it a point to see that he was not interviewed the first day.

On Tuesday morning, after being interviewed by two people he identifies as psychiatrist Dr. Striker and social worker Kari Wolf, Heicklen was released at 11:55 AM, just over 24 hours after arriving at the courthouse.

Ever upbeat, Heicklen reports his release this way: “I signed all documents ‘John Galt.’ I was released at 11:55 AM and voted for Ken Kaplan for Governor of New Jersey on my way home.

Ken Kaplan, of course, was the Libertarian Party candidate.

Unfortunately, Heicklen’s report ends on this ominous note:

Warning: You should know that The Federal Protective Service is intercepting my e-mails. Another violation of our civil liberties.

EDITORIAL COMMENT
If it’s true that the government is reading all of the emails that pass between Julian and his supporters and well-wishers, let’s force them to violate everyone’s rights. EVERYONE who reads this article should get on Julian’s email list. Make them spy on the entire American freedom movement. Maybe they’ll even join us! Send your email address to jph13@psu.edu and ask Julian to add you to the “Do Not Spy On Me” list. It will be one small way you can show your support for Julian and for freedom.

This YouTube video shot by Derek DeMarco is from October 26, 2009

Why Psychologists Are Infinitely More Dangerous Than Conspiracy Theorists

I was in the checkout aisle of whole foods yesterday and saw a copy of this issue of psychology today. after hearing Alex Jones defend Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey’s WSJ op ed piece on health care yesterday, on his radio show, it sure seemed like a slap in the face to see that tabloid trash at the checkout aisle. Besides, Psychology Today is full of ads for psychotropic drugs and promoting the psychiatric drug industry goes against everything whole foods stands for.

Great article by Paul Watson….

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, September 3, 2009

They have helped tyrannical regimes throughout history define suspicion of authorities as a mental illness, just as John Gartner did in his Psychology Today hit piece

According to a Psychology Today hit piece written by psychologist John Gartner, people prone to thinking that powerful men might actually get together and plan to maintain and advance their power are borderline psychotics who are a danger to society. In reality, hundreds of years of history has taught us that psychologists routinely aid authoritarian regimes in enforcing tyrannical and inhumane policies while helping them crush political opposition by defining suspicion of authorities as a mental illness.

As we highlighted in our article yesterday, psychologists in the Soviet Union were used to stifle free speech by classifying skepticism and political opposition to the state as a mental illness, which is precisely the implication littered throughout Gartner’s crass hit piece.

In the former Soviet Union, psikhushkas — mental hospitals — were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The Soviet state began using mental hospitals to punish dissidents in 1939 under Stalin.

According to official Soviet psychiatry and the Moscow Serbsky Institute at the time, “ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure.” Treatment for this special political schizophrenia included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture, radiation torture, lumbar punctures, various drugs — such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin — and beatings. Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, indicates that at least 365 sane people were treated for “politically defined madness,” although she surmises there were many more.

The profession of psychology blossoms under tyrannical regimes, as is explored in Ulfried Geuter’s The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany. Under Hitler’s Third Reich, the relationship between the ruling Nazi thugs and psychologists was close and mutually beneficial. People like Nazi psychologist Robert Ritter, Ph. D. (pictured top) were instrumental in persecuting minorities and enforcing eugenicist policies of genocide.

“From Nazi Germany, South Africa, Russia and the former Yugoslavia, to Iraq today, psychiatry has been and/or remains a key player. In fact, the marriage between authoritarian government and psychiatry is as old as psychiatry itself,” writes Jan Eastgate, International President, Citizens Commission on Human Rights, “In the 1800s, Germany’s militaristic “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, utilized psychiatry to influence and control whole populations in order to fulfill his dreams of conquest through war.”

In his book Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and Its Origins in the Mao Era, praised as “eloquent and convincing” in a New York Times Review of Books piece, author Robert Munro exposes how psychiatrists and psychologists continue to be at the forefront of the brutal Communist Chinese system of ascribing mental illnesses to those who express even mildly negative political opinions towards the ruling Party.

The book reveals how, “From the 1950s onward not only Chinese dissidents but people who submitted petitions to the authorities have been detained by the police, examined by psychiatrists, and found to be criminally insane—or, if found mentally “normal,” designated as criminals to be cast into the prison system.”

An official Chinese police designation for those worthy of “psychiatric custody” cited by Munro lists people who write anti-government letters, make anti-government speeches or those who merely express opinions on important domestic and international affairs that could be considered anti-government.

But the use of psychologists in the pursuit of inhumane policies is not just resigned to tyrannical regimes of the first half of the 20th century.

Recent revelations surrounding the torture scandal highlight the role of psychologists in what the Physicians for Human Rights organization alleges amounted to “unlawful human experimentation” and torture on inmates at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other U.S. detention sites.

“PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret “torture programme,” reports the London Guardian.

Doctors and psychologists actively monitored CIA torture techniques and helped evaluate their effectiveness, a “violation of core ethical values” according to the American Medical Association and a flagrant abuse of the 1947 Nuremberg Code, which forbids experimentation on humans without their consent.

The CIA’s close relationship with psychologists and psychiatrists in conducting illegal torture programs stretches back decades.

“Historian Alfred W. McCoy has shed light in this area in his recent book A Question of Torture and in numerous articles and interviews,” writes Stephen Soldz. “He documents the decades-long CIA effort to utilized psychological expertise to develop forms of torture that could break down the personality of detainees, rendering them, it was hoped, incapable of withholding desired information. Many of these technique were utilized during the Vietnam conflict and in the various brutal U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin American in the 1970s and 1980s.”

While Psychology Today’s John Gartner cites a single example of a “conspiracy theorist” who voiced support for Alex Jones entering Bohemian Grove armed with guns, and uses it to make the implication that “conspiracy thinking” is a major threat to society, documented history stretching back hundreds of years shows that psychologists, and particularly their tactic of classifying suspicion of authorities and “conspiracy thinking” as a mental illness, have played a key role in preserving the power of dictatorial elites and helping them to carry out inhumane practices while crushing free speech and legitimate political opposition.

RELATED: Psychology Today Hit Piece Labels Conspiracy Thinking A Psychotic Illness