The Complete Failure of Our Drug-Based Mental Health System

Source: CCHRINT.org

Congressman Continues to Push for Increased Mental Health while ignoring America’s Prescription Drug Epidemic

By Kelly Patricia O’Meara
July 29, 2015

Following the theater shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana, last week by John Russell Houser, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) released a statement in which he expressed his sympathy for the families of the victims and also his anger that “our mental health system has failed and more families have been destroyed because Washington hasn’t had the courage to fix it.” The problem, though, is that Rep. Murphy’s “fix” is at odds with the facts.

Houser is among a growing list of shooters who not only received lengthy mental health services, but was also prescribed mind-altering psychiatric drugs as “treatment.” Rep. Murphy, while eager to use acts of senseless violence to push for increasing mental health services, fails to even consider Houser’s psychiatric drug “treatment” as a potential cause of the crime. According to his estranged wife, Kellie Maddox Houser, was being “prescribed medication to take daily.” Ignoring Houser’s psychiatric drug “treatment,” Rep. Murphy believes that passage of his legislation, the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, will prevent these senseless acts of violence from occurring and, as a psychologist by profession, Rep. Murphy further believes that the much-needed courage lies in lawmakers’ approval of increased mental health services and “treatments.”

The fact is that the fraud of psychiatric diagnosing must be at the top of the list of any conversation considering increased mental health services. It is the diagnosis that has created the current prescription drug epidemic in America, with one in four being prescribed a psychiatric drug (source, IMS Health). As a psychologist, even Rep. Murphy must be aware that there is no science to support psychiatric disorders as medical abnormalities requiring drugs to “treat” them, and that there are no medical tests (X-ray, CAT, MRI, blood tests) to test for these alleged mental disorders.

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