Critics compare CPS to Frankenstein's monster,
out of control, destroying children and parents alike.
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 A PROTECTIVE SYSTEM GONE AWRY The Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act of 1974 was aimed at protecting children; instead, it enabled psychiatry to pervert the system for its own enrichment. As psychiatrist Bertram Brown (above), then director of the National Institute of Mental Health, proclaimed in 1977, "the tough role — that of change agentry vis a vis the family — has devolved upon the mental health system." In the decades since, psychiatry's role in the "child abuse" arena has mushroomed — with catastrophic effects for families and children. |
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Why?
Because these children were but two of the thousands forcibly separated from their families each year by the Child Protective Services (CPS) system.
Help Becomes Betrayal
Child Protective Services, in the eyes of many parents and advocacy groups, is a cruel misnomer.
One prominent children's rights advocate whose efforts were instrumental in bringing about the legislation that created the CPS system in the 1970s is Walter Mondale, former vice president and senator. Subsequently, Mondale reportedly feared that the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act he introduced in the Senate in 1974 "could lead to systemic abuse in that the state agencies might overprocess children into the system unnecessarily to keep, and increase, the flow of federal dollars."1
That, the record shows, is exactly what has happened, with critics today comparing the system to Dr. Frankenstein's monster — out of control, destroying children and parents alike.
But how did this transformation of a system originally intended to help children come about? Freedom's investigation found the psychiatric industry to be at the core of this perversion, as documented in this report.
As early as 1977, a formative year for the CPS system, psychiatrist Bertram S. Brown, then director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), revealed the self-appointed mission of his profession to gain control of this territory. "The tough role — that of change agentry vis a vis the family — has devolved upon the mental health system," he wrote in the foreword to a 200-page NIMH publication, Child Abuse and Neglect Programs: Practice and Theory.
Subsequently, over the decades, psychiatry's role in bringing about such change has burgeoned — including the vesting of more and more public funds in wasteful and destructive psychiatric drugs and other "solutions." At the same time, psychiatric control of the child-protection system has been detrimental to the system's stated goal of keeping families together, with Rusty and Jessica being but two of an untold number of tragedies.
In interviews with Freedom, mothers described the serious abuse of their children under Child Protective Services programs.
A Mind-Altering Potpourri
In 1995, after her daughter Jessica, then 5, was molested, Audrey Serrano turned to the Massachusetts Department of Social Services for help.
Referred to psychiatrists, including Elliott Pittel at the Herbert Lipton Community Mental Health Center in Leominster, young Jessica was, by age 6, placed on a potpourri of mind-altering pharmaceuticals while still living at home. These included an amphetamine-type drug and three different antidepressants. All three antidepressants prescribed to Jessica are among the drugs that have recently been the subject of multiple warnings from health authorities in numerous nations, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Their labels bear the FDA's most serious "black box" admonition — that they will "increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior." The FDA indicated that the manufacturer of the amphetamine-type drug Jessica had been prescribed would be forced to alter the drug's label to reflect problems "such as visual hallucinations, suicidal ideation, psychotic behavior, as well as aggression or violent behavior."
By 1998, when Jessica was 8, other powerful drugs had been added to her daily regimen, including two powerful amphetamines.
While on these potent drugs, Jessica began to hear voices, a side effect of amphetamine usage. The voices told Jessica, in her mother's words, "to do bad things, to kill people." They also warned that someone was coming to kill her, so Jessica began to sleep with knives under her pillow and under the bed for protection. She talked openly about wanting to kill herself, a side effect of her antidepressants.
She banged her head against walls, dug at her skin with her fingernails, and began to be cruel to animals — tying one cat up in a bag and stuffing another into a toilet.
This array of bizarre behavior bewildered her mother. "This never happened before the drugs," Serrano said.
