Mental Health Exhibition on Southbank Highlights Dangers of Psychiatric ‘Treatments’

The public must be informed of the effects of mental health drugs, say experts speaking at the exhibition’s opening.

An exhibition exposing the hidden agendas and dangers of the psychiatric industry was opened at the OXO Tower in London.

Called Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, the exhibition, was organized by the psychiatric watchdog the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), to raise public awareness and to expose the lack of transparency in the field of mental health, where so often only selective data is made available to patients.

At the opening of the exhibition, invited speakers from London spoke of the need for informed consent in relation to mental treatment. Display panels in the exhibition pointed to information that many in the psychiatric industry choose to ignore, such as the aggression, violence and suicidal thoughts that so often result from prescribed drugs such as antidepressants.

Keynote speaker at the opening, Mr. Moazzam Ali Sandhu, solicitor and chairman of the International Lawyers Club UK said, “CCHR is a well established international organization. Its mission is to eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health. The exhibition is an extraordinary effort, which highlights human rights issues relating to mental health and psychiatry, bringing awareness of the abuses of human rights within psychiatry. I offer my services to CCHR to support their cause legally and give them more strength. It is an honor to be here today and support this work.”

The issue of informed consent was highlighted in relation to children and adolescents. Part of the exhibition focused on needless young deaths that could have been avoided if parents had been fully informed about the effects of psychiatric drugs. A majority of the schoolyard shootings were shown to have been connected to drugs prescribed for so-called disorders. These have resulted in hundreds of fatalities.

The dangers of the treatments were confirmed by exhibition visitors, bearing witness to the mounting public distrust of the psychiatric profession.

Despite the concerns surrounding the use of antidepressants, £4.7 billion of NHS funds have been spent on antidepressants in England since 2000. The efficacy and safety of the drugs has been an ongoing problem, one which was recently highlighted at the United Nations in Geneva, when CCHR made a submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Recommendations from that meeting are expected to be implemented in the UK, which will hopefully act as a layer of protection for people in the UK who are unaware of the dangers of psychiatric drugs.

Brian Daniels, spokesperson for CCHR in the UK, reinforced the words of the speakers. He said, “Psychiatry is the only profession that has to continually advertise its failures to get more government funding. If people were fully informed of the dangers of the profession, it would probably go out of business.”

Daniels also pointed to the fact that most doctors like to treat patients humanely, giving them a choice when it comes to treatment. He said, “Choices often don’t exist in psychiatric hospitals. It’s no wonder doctors increasingly shy away from a profession where forced treatment is the order of the day, and where you become a jailer, not a doctor, if the person doesn’t comply.”

CCHR is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by members of the Church of Scientology and the late professor of psychiatry, Dr Thomas Szasz.