Soweto Festival Hosts Psychiatry Exhibition
Unrestrained Psychiatrists Create Social Chaos, Destroy Artists, says the Scientologists
By Novell Zwangendaba
JOHANNESBURG – The Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), a lobby group that was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology says psychiatry continues to cause social chaos and is destroying artists.
The lobby group says CCHR seeks to “investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights and to clean up the field of mental healing, a gesture doubted by several critics of the religious cult. Labeling CCHR an alarmist pseudo-human rights organization.
Recently French judges fined the Church of Scientology about $1-million for defrauding vulnerable followers, and stopped short of banning the controversial group from operating in France.
Scientology’s Celebrity Center and its bookshop in Paris, the two branches of its French operations, were fined for preying on its followers since 1990s. The cult which has a sizeable number of international celebrities and superstars as its religious members, staged for the first time in Africa an interactive full multi-media exhibition at the Soweto Festival.
Dubbed ‘Psychiatry an Industry Of death’, the exhibition ran concurrently to the World Arts Summit and the Arts Alive International Festival that ran sporadically this September in Johannesburg, South Africa. It sought to highlight the ‘evils’ of psychiatry through rare historical, contemporary footage, and interviews with more than 160 doctors, attorneys, educators, survivors and experts on mental health
industry and its abuses.
The multi-media exhibition which harnessed the information technologies showcased riveting documentaries unearthing the brutal pseudoscience and the alleged multi-billion fraud in psychiatry.
CCHR which boasts more than 250 chapters in 34 countries says, “Unrestrained psychiatrists continue to harm in the name of help.” In inviting the festival revelers to public action, the voluntary group whose membership includes doctors, lawyers, educators, artists, civil and human rights activists, says, “Only public disclosure of their (psychiatrists) criminal practices and determined action by individuals has effected change.”
The exhibition of psychiatry as ‘path of destruction’, sought to track a chronology of its development, spread and practiced expansion as it used eugenics to justify holocaust, blatant racism, wild acts of terrorism, and the infamous apartheid, thereby ‘creating social chaos, and destroying artists’.
CCHR says through torture and terror the history of psychiatry consists, not of methods of healing, but of brutal practices that no self-respecting medical profession would ever call treatment.
“Despite massive funding increases over the last 60 years, psychiatrists have failed to define, let alone cure the causes of mental problems,” says the lobby group.
So when did the artists fall prey to psychiatry? CCHR says that psychiatry and psychology infiltrated Hollywood at the beginning of the 20th century, “redefining creativity as a form of neurosis”.
In 1916, psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, a student of Germany’s ‘experimental psychology’ Wilhelm Wundt, wrote the book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in which he said, “The [movie] screen ought to offer a unique opportunity to interest wide circles in psychological experiment and mental tests.”
Munsterberg was one of the first to suggest that psychologists, as self-appointed experts on the mind, should be hired to advise the creative industry.
According to Professors Krin and Glen Gabbard, between 1957 and 1963, Hollywood began to portray psychiatrists as the “authoritarian voices of reason, adjustment and well-being.”
By legitimizing itself on the silver screen, psychiatry popularized the notion that drugs, analysis and other psychiatric treatments held the secrets to happier lives.
“As a result, many great artists have been lured into dangerous clutches of psychiatrists and paid with their sanity, sometimes with their lives,” says the CCHR documentary.
Indeed several known cases have pointed to alleged loss of lives as having been caused by psychiatrists failure in saving artists from absolute collapse.
Legendary Bhundu Boys’ lead vocalist, the late Zimbabwean superstar, Biggie Tembo became one of the independent country’s early victim of psychiatry’s complete and utter failure after he violently took his own life inside a psychiatric cage. He had been subjected to antidepressants and addictive psychiatric drugs.
Kurt Cobain, a creative musical genius, was labeled hyperactive and prescribed Ritalin, a drug known to lead to illegal drug abuse. He turned to heroin in quest to ‘quench the five in his gut’. Thirty-six hours after admission to a psychiatric rehab centre, he fled from the facility and shot himself. Psychiatric drugs were found in his
bloodstream.
South African gospel sensation, Lundi Tamara who underwent psychiatric rehab after an agitated state following a fatal drunk-driving accident and a spate of suicidal drug-related adventures, was recently hogging media limelight for his renewed violence behavior a few years after seeking help and confessing to the former South African president, Mr. Thabo Mbeki that he had become an addict. Reports suggest his demise
stemmed from drugs and perceived psychiatric rehabilitation has failed to transform the famous young artist’s life.
Actress Marilyn Monroe, convinced to undergo psychoanalysis to ‘tap all her explosive energy’, was referred to a psychiatrist who prescribed addictive drugs. On her last day, she saw psychiatrist Ralph greenson for six hours before succumbing to a drug overdose.
The self-proclaimed King of Pop, the late Michael “Wacko Jacko” Jackson, who had reportedly complained of depression, collapsed during his comeback-tour rehearsals, and was subsequently pronounced dead. Ensuing investigations allegedly revealed he had been subjected to psychotropic drugs.
Many unreported artists in the creative industry might have succumbed to psychiatry, but a few cases indicate some have escaped.
“He put me on this medication that nearly destroyed my career, nearly destroyed me, nearly destroyed my parents, they just lost me for those years,” Stevie Nicks, lead singer of Fleetwood Mac is quoted in the CCHR’s documentary supplement.
CCHR says growing evidence of the dangers of psychiatric drugs has finally begun to spread into the public domain; antidepressants have been labeled with a warning that they can cause suicide. Several countries have also issued warnings.
Psychiatrists know the dangers of the drugs they prescribe. Thorozine causes irreversible damage to the nervous system and, together with similar anti-psychotic drugs has killed almost 100 000 victims.
Ritalin and other stimulants were scheduled in the same abuse category as morphine, cocaine and opium. It is more potent than cocaine, and suicide is a major complication during withdrawal.
Tricyclic antidepressants cause partial paralysis was marketed as safe and virtually side-effect free. By 2004 other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI’s) were in use. These drugs allegedly cause bizarre dreams, sexual dysfunction, confusion, suicidal thoughts, hostility, and other violent behavior.
New antipsychotic drugs were hailed as breakthrough treatments, with fewer side-effects than Thorazine; CCHR says the fact is that they cause leaking breasts, liver and kidney problems, life-threatening diabetes, respiratory arrest and heart attacks.
In 1967, psychiatrists met in Puerto Rico to develop their plan for ‘Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000: Use by Normal Humans’. The conference report stated; “Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances.”
In 2005 a new wave of psychiatric drug sales raised internationally reaching US$76-billion per year.
According to Jan Eastgate, President of the CCHR International, “Psychiatric service costs exceed those of general medical services by almost 200%, yet psychiatrists do not know how to cure a single mental problem.”
“On contrary psychiatrists ruin lives and undermine society at huge cost,” she says.
Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association, declared, “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future, the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.”
“According to one study, psychiatric treatment scored a 99% failure rate in patient recovery,” Eastgate concurred.
In other words, is psychiatry a complete and utter failure?
