Mental Health Advocates or Big Pharma Groups?

From The Truth About Prone Restraint, another example of how "patients' rights" groups are often fronts for big pharma interests.

Makes you ask yet again where oversight of the medical profession is, no? The government has historically given undue authority to the medical industry at the expense of patients' rights. If they wish to treat health care as a human right, the government will have to undo the creep of free license and abuse the industry is accustomed to, with the collusion of doctors organizations (who do not want to be regulated) and the Conservative right which fears "socialism" or any government regulation of free markets.

According to the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights Internation (CCHRI) – A Mental Health Watchdog group. According to CCHRI, Mental Health Advocacy Groups the following MH organizations are paid front men for the pharmaceutical companies. All the companies in favor of banning a person’s right to defend themselves or others. Their solution — dope them up.

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)

Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA)

Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA)

Center for the Advancement of Children’s Mental Health (CACMH)

Children and Adults with ADD (CHADD)

Herbert Pardes: Creating The Front Group Pipe Line

Mental Health America (Formerly National Mental Health Association)

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

National Association for Research on Schizophrenia And Depression (NARSAD)

Screening for Mental Health, Inc

Signs of Suicide (SOS)

Suicide Prevention Action Network USA (SPAN)

TeenScreen National Center for Mental Health Checkups

The Jed Foundation

These are groups operating under the guise of advocates for the “mentally ill,” which in reality are heavily funded pharmaceutical front groups.

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.[i] Several groups emerged first on the scene during that period: The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADDA), 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.