LOS ANGELES, Nov. 1 /U.S. Newswire/ -- While Americans are busy getting their lives back on track after the September 11 terrorist attacks, some groups are specializing in pushing the idea that many people will never get back to normal. The mental health lobby is marketing trauma for profit, seeking billions of dollars to treat a "mental illness crisis" it falsely says could arise from the attacks, according to The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR).

 In September, a U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on "Psychological Trauma and Terrorism" was told, "Seventy-one percent of Americans said that they have felt depressed by the attacks." An alarming statistic, until it is realized that the survey behind this was conducted just two to six days after the attack, when Americans were still in a state of shock, glued to their television sets and suffering perfectly normal reactions to the horrific tragedy. Who needed a survey to find out that Americans were suffering? Interestingly, the survey sampled 1,200 people, which, by a quantum semantic leap, concluded that an alarming 71 percent of Americans are depressed.

 Using this "survey result," the hearing was told that The Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act should be passed immediately so that counseling could occur in volume. The bill is estimated to cost the private health insurers alone $3 billion, with businesses bearing the brunt for other costs associated with increased mandated mental health insurance.

 "Faced with a slowing economy, falling stock markets and a soaring number of layoffs, this is not the time to be burdening businesses with burgeoning mental health insurance costs," said Ms. Jan Eastgate, international president of CCHR. Eastgate said that treatments offered by psychiatrists and psychologists for trauma are not effective and some studies show them to be harmful.

In fact, Richard Gist, a psychologist who assists the Kansas City fire department, says: "Mental health professionals sometimes undermine the traditional sources of support for those experiencing grief: talking to friends, family, clergy and others.... Maybe what we need to do is give people tea and sympathy and let them talk to their Aunt Tilly. But we should not try to dress Aunt Tilly in a white lab coat and have her talk in psychobabble."

Professor Yvonne McEwan from Fife University, Scotland, who advised the U.S. government after the Oklahoma bombing, said that psychological trauma counseling, for example, is at best is useless and at worst highly destructive to victims seeking help. "By medicalizing what is a non-medical condition and introducing a therapy subject matter that is vastly under-researched, over-used and vastly abused, medicine is propping up a lot of dwindling careers," she says.

A 1996 psychiatric study conducted on burn victims revealed that those who received psychiatric trauma counseling were three times more likely to suffer long-term problems. The British Psychological Society concurs, finding that "psychological debriefing" for trauma may harm rather than heal and that three quarters of those experiencing trauma recover spontaneously within four to six weeks.

Aside from the $3 billion mandated mental health will cost, psychiatrists estimate that $3 billion is needed to "treat" New Yorkers alone, prompting CCHR's warning that the mental health lobby is making victims a "paying proposition."

Eastgate said pushing mind-altering and potentially addictive psychiatric drugs as a solution to "post traumatic stress disorder" is also lucrative. International sales of antidepressants rose 19 percent between 1999 and 2000, reaching $13.4 billion. Since the September 11 attacks, new prescriptions for antidepressants in New York alone jumped 17 percent and prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs rose 25 percent.

According to psychiatrist Sydney Walker, III, author of A Dose of Sanity, "We've been led to assume, by the psychiatric 'crisis teams' sent almost immediately to any disaster scene, that people suffer severe psychic wounds from experiencing such traumas - or even from being in the general vicinity when they occur. DSM -IV (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual for Mental Illness, Edition IV) categorizes the symptoms most survivors experience following a disaster as 'acute stress disorder,' suggesting that they are pathological and require treatment. But are these people really suffering from a 'disorder' requiring psychotherapy and the use of potentially addictive medications? Are they really at great risk of suffering long-term consequences from their trauma? The answers, surprisingly, are 'No,' and 'No.'"

In fact, San Diego psychologist, Michael Mantell, reported that, following the Columbine High School shootings, "the kids were not talking to counselors. They were talking to religious leaders and among themselves. There were a lot more counselors there than counseling going on."

Eastgate warns, "There is no comparison between the funded mechanisms of a sterile and ineffective mental health system, and the true compassion, understanding, support and spiritual boost that comes from one's family, friends, the clergy and other concerned citizens. These inherent and positive qualities in our communities should be our main focus as we recover from recent events, not the reinforcing and expanding of already incompetent psychiatric or psychological systems."

 

CTM Comment: Psychiatry will miss no opportunity to take advantage of any disaster in order to begin pushing ‘counselling’ and mind-altering medications upon a ‘traumatised’ public. While there can be no doubt that September 11^th impacted many lives, psychologically people always adapt and deal with traumas, however serious. What is sinister and underhand is the way the ‘mental health industry’ parasitically ekes out a market for itself on the back of any public disaster and, as the above article points out, medicalises the trauma so that the public gain the impression they cannot survive the disaster without the timely intervention of ‘mental health experts’.