The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a psychiatric
watchdog group established by the Church of Scientology, has asked a Victoria, British Columbia coroners inquest
to take Ellie Boisvert’s dying words to
heart and put the psychiatrist responsible for her care and treatment at the
forefront of the investigation. The
group has also asked that justice actions be taken against the psychiatrist.
According information brought out at the inquest conducted by
Regional Coroner Rose Stanton, Ellie Boisvert, 56, left the Eric Martin
Pavilion, the psychiatric ward of the Royal Jubilee Hospital, on July 29, 2005,
on a four to six-hour pass.
According to the Times Colonist, Ms.Boisvert didn’t return
from her pass and was found dead on Aug. 17, 2005, in Layritz Park. Near her
body was a note, which police investigation revealed was Boisvert’s own
handwriting. Ms. Boisvert said in the note she didn’t want to spend one more
moment in the “EMP.” Nor did she want to continue living as a psychiatric patient
growing steadily worse. “It’s not life.”
Another fault in
the psychiatric industry, according to a study by Lisa Cosgrove, a psychologist
from the University of Massachusetts and Sheldon Krimsky, a Tuft University
professor, is psychiatry’s billing bible itself , the Diagonstic and Satistical
Manual of Mental Disorgers (DSM). The
study documents how pharmaceutical companies who manufacture drugs for “mental
disorders” funded psychiatrists who defined the disorders for the manual. One hundred percent of the “experts” on
DSM-IV panels overseeing so-called “mood disorders” (which includes
“depression”) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorders” were financially involved
with drug companies. These are the largest categories
of psychiatric drugs in the world: 2004 sales of $20.3 billion for
antidepressants and $14.4 billion for antipsychotic drugs alone.
Victoria psychologist, Dr. Tana Dineen,
the author of Manufacturing Victims that debunks the DSM, says that
unlike medical diagnoses, DSM disorders are “voted” into existence by APA
members. They can also be removed if
they are too much trouble. In 1973,
the APA voted—5,584 to 3,810—to cease calling homosexuality a mental disorder
after gay activists picketed an APA conference.
The DSM wields enormous power for a document that is so fickly
determined and is, as Dr. Cosgrove says a “political process.”
Brian Beaumont, President of
the Vancouver chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights said, “Never
have incidents of psychiatric injustice been more evident than in the mental
health field where laws have empowered psychiatrists to seize people and,
without trial, not only deprive them of their liberty, drug or electric shock
them or, in the case of Ellie Boisvert, drive them to suicide”.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international
psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and
Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of
New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human
rights.
