tagged w/ psychotropic drugs
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Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It's his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries out, "Let me go, please. I don't want to be here. Please, let me go." Bobby's physician looks irritated and she tells him, "Come on now, Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax." Bobby turns his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against what he knows is coming.
Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then, after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster family. Her father and
About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other "treatment endeavors." These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel, Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy, amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.
Metrazol had been used in convulsive therapy, but was never considered to be effective, and side effects such as seizures were difficult to avoid. The medical records of several patients who were confined at Vermont State Hospital, a public mental facility, reveal that Metrazol was administered to them by CIA contractor Dr. Robert Hyde on numerous occasions in order "to address overly aggressive behavior." One of these patients, Karen Wetmore, received the drug on a number of occasions for no discernible medical reason. During the same ten-year period in which Metrazol was used by the Vermont State Hospital, patient deaths skyrocketed. In 1982, the FDA revoked its approval of Metrazol.
Here it should be noted that, during the cold war years, CIA and Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) interrogators, working as part of projects Bluebird and Artichoke, sometimes injected large amounts of Metrazol into selected enemy or Communist agents for the purposes of severely frightening other suspected agents, by forcing them to observe the procedure. The almost immediate effects of Metrazol are shocking for many to witness: subjects will shake violently, twisting and turning. They typically arch, jerk and contort their bodies and grimace in pain. With Metrazol, as with electroshock, bone fractures - including broken necks and backs - and joint dislocations are not uncommon, unless strong sedatives are administered beforehand.
A November 1936 Time mag. article seriously questioned the benefits of Metrazol, citing "irreversible shock" as a "great danger." The article described a typical Metrazol injection as such: "A patient receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic centimeters of the drug [Metrazol] are injected into his veins. In about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room, twitches violently, utters a horse wail, freezes into rigidity with his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsions are over and he gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions.... A patient is seldom given more than 20 injections and if no improvement is noted after ten treatments, he is usually given up as hopeless."
The Army, the CIA and Metrazol | This is just important sections go read whole thing!
Army CIC interrogators working with the CIA at prisoner of war camps and safe house locations in post-war Germany on occasion used Metrazol, morphine, heroin and LSD on incarcerated subjects. According to former CIC officer Miles Hunt, several "safe houses and holding areas outside of Frankfurt near Oberursel" - a former Nazi interrogation center taken over by the US - were operated by a "special unit run by Capt. Malcolm S. Hilty, Maj. Mose Hart and Capt. Herbert Sensenig.
Eventually, CIC interrogators working in Germany would be assisted in their use of interrogation drugs by several "former" Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA and US State Department as part of Project Paperclip. By early 1952, the CIC's Rough Boys would routinely use Metrazol during interrogations, as well as LSD, mescaline and conventional electroshock units.
Metrazol-like drugs are still used in interrogations today. According to reports from several former noncommissioned Army officers, who served on rendition-related security details in Turkey, Pakistan and Romania, drugs that produce effects quite similar to Metrazol are still used in 2010 by the Pentagon and CIA on enemy combatants and rendered subjects held at the many "black sites" maintained across the globe. Observed one former officer recently, "They would twist up like a pretzel, in unbelievable shapes and jerk and shake like crazy, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads."
In 2008, at the behest of US Sens. Carl Levin, Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel and in reaction to a March 2008 article in The Washington Post, the Pentagon initiated an Inspector General Report on the use of "mind-altering substances by DoD [Department of Defense] Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror." It is not known if the investigation has been completed. Among the more famous recent cases of the use of drugs upon prisoners concerns one-time alleged "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, who had originally been accused of wanting to set off a "dirty bomb."
The government has gone to great efforts to keep the public uninformed as regards use of drugs on prisoners. In an article by Carol Rosenberg for McClatchy News in July 2010, Rosenberg reported that, when covering the Guantanamo military commissions trials, when the question of "what psychotropic drugs were given another accused 9/11 conspirator, Ramzi bin al Shibh, the courtroom censor hits a white noise button so reporters viewing from a glass booth can't hear the names of the drugs. Under current Navy instructions for the use of human subjects in research, the undersecretary of the Navy is described as the authority in charge of research concerning "consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques," while at the same time is also responsible for "inherently controversial topics" that might attract media interest or "challenge by interest groups."Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to... more
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In 1950, approximately 7,500 children in the United States were diagnosed with mental disorders. That number is at least eight million today, and most receive some form of medication.
Is this progress or child abuse?
ANDREW M. WEISS
Andrew Weiss holds a PhD in school-clinical psychology from Hofstra University. He served on the faculty of Iona College and has been a senior school administrator in Chappaqua, New York. He has published a number of articles on technology in education. E-mail: anweiss [at] optonline.net.
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In the winter of 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study indicating that 200,000 two- to four-year-olds had been prescribed Ritalin for an “attention disorder” from 1991 to 1995. Judging by the response, the image of hundreds of thousands of mothers grinding up stimulants to put into the sippy cups of their preschoolers was apparently not a pretty one. Most national magazines and newspapers covered the story; some even expressed dismay or outrage at this exacerbation of what already seemed like a juggernaut of hyper-medicalizing childhood. The public reaction, however, was tame; the medical community, after a moment’s pause, continued unfazed. Today, the total toddler count is well past one million, and influential psychiatrists have insisted that mental health prescriptions are appropriate for children as young as twelve months. For the pharmaceutical companies, this is progress.In 1950, approximately 7,500 children in the United States were diagnosed with mental... more
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pcole
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added this
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3 years ago
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He Xianggu, an operating room nurse in the Women and Children Health Care Hospital of Hunan Province in China, has been detained in the Hunan Province Brain Hospital for over three months, just because she is a practitioner of Falun Gong. On October 10, she was forcibly injected with psychotropic drugs.
Since 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has illegally sent thousands of Falun Gong practitioners to mental hospitals. Many practitioners have suffered serious damage to their central nervous system after various psychotropic substances treatments received at these hospitals. In fact, mental hospitals have become one of the tools that the CCP uses to torture and persecute Falun Gong practitioners.
Below is the transcript from a phone message received from He Xianggu. In the transcript, she states her wish that her message be released to the international community. Ms. He hopes that her words will help to expose the evil actions committed by the Hunan 610 Office (610 Office is an agency specifically crated and organized by the CCP to persecute Falun Gong) and her workplace, the Women and Children Health Care Hospital of Hunan Province. Both organizations were primarily responsible for her illegal detention and unlawful treatment at the mental hospital.
“My name is He Xianggu, I am a Falun Gong practitioner. I was working at the outpatient operation room of the Hunan Province Women and Children Health Care Hospital. On April 23, I was kidnapped by the Wujialing Police and illegally detained in a detention center. I went on a hunger strike for 17 days to protest my illegal detention. Following the two-year sentence of ‘re-education through labor,’ I was sent to the Baimalong Forced Labor Camp.”
“Because I was diagnosed with coronary heart disease, Baimalong Labor Camp initially refused to accept me as an inmate. Under pressure from the local 610 Office and from my place of work, they finally agreed to accept me. I went on a hunger strike for two months while in the labor camp. As a result, my older brother signed the paperwork which allowed me to leave the camp to receive outside hospital treatment for my coronary heart disease. However the 610 Office arrested me and sent me to the Psychiatric Department of the Hunan Province Brain Hospital (formerly known as the Hunan Province Mental Hospital).
“I gave up the hunger strike when I arrived at the Brain Hospital. I was hoping to be regarded as a normal person and released when they realized that I was not mentally ill. Three months later, Luo Zhaoping, director of the Psychiatric Department asked my workplace to sign the papers that would allow me to leave the hospital. However, my work unit refused.
“Luo asked for instructions from the president of the Hospital and decided that I was to be treated as “psychotic.” They injected me by force with risperidone, which is used to treat schizophrenia. Four or five attendants pushed me onto a bed and gave me the injection. I asked the name of the medicine from Luo, but he refused to tell me. I asked Dr. Chen Zizhen who was the physician-in-charge, but she also refused to tell me. Dr. Chen said to me, ‘Why should we let you know everything?’ She added, ‘If we do not give you the injections we will loose our jobs.’
“Many of the other patients were indignant after seeing the doctor’s behavior in forcing me to accept the injection. Several nurses said they did not want to treat me like this but they had no choice. In order to protest their immoral behavior, I again went on a hunger strike. The hospital staff, however, hooked me to an intravenous drip to provide me with “so-called” nutrition.
“I have said all that I want to say. I am hoping that my words will be heard by the international community and justice will be done on my behalf.
‘Thank you everyone."He Xianggu, an operating room nurse in the Women and Children Health Care Hospital of... more
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