State
of Connecticut Hearings: Mental Health – Finding Unmet Mental Health Needs in
the State of Connecticut: Budget Considerations:
Statement
on October 19, 2004, by Ms. Sheila Matthews, National Vice President, www.ablechild.org
Thank
you for holding these hearings to assist Governor Rell on input for the upcoming
Fiscal Budget regarding unmet Mental Health Needs in the State of Connecticut.
Our
organization has testified before the FDA Advisory Panel that recommended the
Black Box Warning on Antidepressants, as well as federal and state investigative
congressional hearings on behavioral drugs and public schools.
I personally testified on the first law in the Country to prevent school
personnel from recommending behavioral drugs to parents.
This law now serves as model legislation for states around the Country.
Ablechild.org has diligently worked on reforming foster care and the
rampant drugging of children occurring within it.
We have been featured on CNN, Hannity & Colmes, NPR Radio, and the
Front Cover of the New York Times to name a few.
Ablechild.org
located here in Connecticut, as well as throughout the Country, has identified
several clear unmet mental health needs, which require your immediate attention.
Ablechild asks that you take these unmet mental health needs that we have
outlined below for you and focus on ways that each need could be placed within
the mental health process within our state to protect both overall human rights
and public safety.
We
have six current recommendations, and would like to share them with the State of
Connecticut and look forward to working with the State to ensure their
implementation.
1.
Current informed consent laws must be enforced
that would ensure that potential mental health patients receive
their right to full informed consent prior to psychiatric treatment and their
right to refuse psychiatric treatment. The
state must do better in
this critical area of service. A
public awareness campaign should be calculated into the budget, which should
include non-psychiatric, non-drug industry related inclusion.
It also should be comprised of an independent oversight process, which
would include accountability safeguards.
2.
Another unmet need in the field of mental health is
accountability. It is our
recommendation and request that you create a data bank at the States Medical
Examiner’s office, which would provide an independent clarification of
statistics. These statistics would
include the number of people taking psychiatric drugs and would aid in
determining the amounts of deaths contributed to their use.
3.
Our third recommendation is to open the bidding process beyond
psychiatric and behavioral healthcare vendors to encourage companies
specializing in education, vision, hearing, and nutrition to offer services to
children mandated into State Care. There should be many resources and options to
choose from beyond the psychiatric ones for potential mental health clients.
All must be reminded that
“Right to Treatment” does not mean that potential mental
health clients are forced into psychiatric “treatment”.
4.
Foster care has been the area of focus recently in many states.
Mental health abuse occurring within the foster care system, without
accountability is rampant in this country and needs to be addressed overall.
Connecticut should focus on improving all abuses within its own foster
care system. It is urgent that the
State takes the necessary steps to protect Foster Care children from being
over-drugged, and trafficked into clinical drug trials while in State care.
A plan to track the number of children in state care on psychiatric drugs
needs to be put in place.
Ablechild is eagerly waiting to help the state with this crucial
matter and we have taken the first step by requesting that a full investigation
be launched by the Attorney General’s Office.
We are presently awaiting a response.
5.
Our fifth recommendation and request is to ensure that the budget
does not use mental health grants to market selective research and pro-drug,
pro-psychiatric materials to public schools and to the public as a whole.
Grants must not be used to market bias information to promote the
psychiatric industry.
Grants must be diversified to encompass information and programs
on non-psychiatric approaches to promote and optimize good mental health.
Parents and Advocates must have knowledge via full written
informed consent that they are participating in any services and or programs
funded through grants and be provided with the grant source.
6.
Our last recommendation is based upon the U.K.’s 2003 ban of 8
different antidepressants for children and this year’s investigation by the
FDA itself into the link to suicide and violence caused by these same
antidepressants. This past Friday,
October 15th, the FDA placed the strongest possible warnings, known
as “black box warnings, on these drugs due to their propensity to cause
suicide and violence in patients taking them.
Immediate access to this information needs to be provided to ensure
overall public safety. The state needs to take measures to disseminate this
information to its residents. The
State should employ a public awareness campaign on the link to suicide and
antidepressant use in children, as well as on the dangers of Controlled
substances. Non-psychiatric detoxification programs should be set-up to help
mental health patients withdraw from the antidepressants to ensure proper
oversight to prevent suicides. Overall,
the State should be complying with the 1965 Drug Abuse Control Amendment that
was enacted to deal with problems caused by abuse of depressants, stimulants,
and hallucinogens.
Ablechild
is an organization that works with families that have lost love ones due to
psychiatric drugs. Many of these
families have lawsuits on both a state and federal level regarding these
travesties and the lack of informed consent occurring with them. Ablechild plans
to continue reaching out to the public to protect innocent children and the
general public from wrongful and senseless deaths.
There
is plenty of room for all of us to work together to ensure that human rights and
the right to treatment options are achieved.
Thank
you
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