Saving the Family
Big Brother does not make a good parent. The psychiatrist-dominated CPS system,
which places labeling and drugs above responsibility and accountability,
proves this.
Many decision-makers now realize that government will not love and nurture a child the way a parent will. Hence, some states are changing their programs to emphasize keeping families together. Although these changes may not "maximize federal reimbursements" in the short run, viewed from a larger perspective, such reforms are best for children and families and for society as well.
In Utah, for example, following the Roska family's victory in the courts, the legislature considered nearly 20 bills intended to reform the treatment children received at the hands of CPS and mental health professionals in that state. By the end of the 2004 legislative session, 10 of the measures had been signed into law.
In California, the state with the largest number of foster children, Governor Schwarzenegger made it part of a budgetary plan to change how private foster care contractors get paid. Rather than funding solely on the number of children in the system, payment would be based on positive outcomes.
Shirley Washington of California's Department of Social Services told Freedom the state implemented a measure that "will provide additional foster care funds to help keep children out of high-level care through family-centered, home-based services."
"We need to raise the threshold for taking children from their families to begin with so fewer children get into the system," Gregory Hession said. "Then they won't be drugged and ruined and crushed and killed and raped and murdered and everything else that happens to them. That is the starting point: take fewer kids."
Walter Mondale told Freedom that the original intent of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) was to accomplish several objectives to stem child abuse.
"It enacted for the first time federal legislation that recognized the horrors and the persistence of child abuse," he said. "It tried to look at child abuse not just as a law enforcement problem — although sometimes it is — but in the context of troubled families, of the phenomenon of inter-generational repetition of abuse, which was reported to be quite common, and it tried to engage the local governments in reaching out and trying to spot these problems before they worsened."
But today, while many well-intentioned people work in the system CAPTA created, the problem is that the system has been subverted by the psychiatric industry into a revenue-generating entity more important than the children and the families it was formed to serve.
"The abuse my daughter suffered at the hands of psychiatrists tells me that the system would be far better off without them," Audrey Serrano said.
To revamp the system, the first step is to once again prioritize the family and to work to keep families together.
As the former vice president said, "If a family isn't so important, if a husband and wife taking care of kids isn't so important, why is it that every society, all over the world, for nearly a million years has ended up with essentially that system for raising children? Family life is indispensable."
Mark Stout contributed to this article.
References*
RESEARCH EVIDENCE DESTROYED
Swedish Drugging Advocate
Slapped Down by Courts
 |
CHRISTOPHER GILLBERG and two other psychiatrists were fined for destroying
some 100,000 pages of records that may have shown a childhood "disorder" spawned
by Gillberg to be based upon questionable or even fraudulent research.
|
|
The lack of science to support psychiatry's mental disorders has become the focus
of a storm of controversy — particularly so after a series of warnings from
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the hazards posed by drugs that
psychiatrists use to "treat" those alleged disorders.
Diagnosis is the crux of the matter, and child advocate and author John Breeding,
Ph.D., is one of many authorities passionate on the subject.
"It is not just that people are misdiagnosed, but that the psychiatric diagnoses
themselves are fraudulent," he told Freedom. "There is no real disease, no physical
or chemical abnormality; there is only a subjective observation of behavior they
call a disease."
Psychiatrist Christopher Gillberg's recent legal troubles in Europe has only
added fuel to the fire.
An international pundit on childhood "disorders," Gillberg has been widely promoted
by psychiatric front groups in the United States, such as Children and Adults
with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD).
Shredding Vital Evidence
When a sociologist and a pediatrician challenged Gillberg to produce his research
into "Deficits in Attention, Motor control and Perception (DAMP), which is
similar to ADHD, he refused to do so voluntarily. After a Swedish court ordered
him to turn over the records, Gillberg appealed and lost.
Rather than surrender the papers, two colleagues and a staff assistant shredded
two decades of state-funded research — some 100,000 pages — that formed
the basis for Gillberg's plans to put tens of thousands of children on drugs.
The perpetrators included Gillberg's wife, psychiatrist Carina Gillberg. On
June 27, 2005, Christopher Gillberg was found guilty of official misconduct
and fined 37,500 kronor (roughly $4,800), ordered to pay court costs of 75,000
kronor ($9,600) and given a suspended jail sentence. His colleagues were also
fined.
Today, scientists and other authorities continue to point out the highly questionable,
if not fraudulent, nature of Gillberg's papers, books, doctoral theses and
journal articles.
British attorney and physicist Clifford G. Miller, for example, asked, "Where
does this place any scientific papers published on the basis of this now non-existent
evidence? Papers which were being, it seems, challenged for inconsistencies
in litigation? Will these papers now have to be withdrawn by the journals which
published them? Will the journals do so voluntarily? How many papers are concerned?
In which journals are they published? Will the journals publish any caveat
about reliance on the papers concerned?"
"The most rational, albeit very cumbersome, course of action would be to withdraw
all research relying on the data," said Sociology Professor Thomas Brante of
Lund University in Sweden. "Just like Volvo revokes its cars when a construction
fault is discovered, a faulty (or non-existent) scientific diagnosis and its
implications must be possible to revoke."
"Virtually All His Research Reports Were Bogus"
Gillberg's American counterpart in "popularizing" speed-type drugs for children,
psychologist Stephen Breuning of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School,
was convicted in federal court on charges of research fraud.
"Virtually all his research reports were bogus — nearly all the experiments
they purported to report had not been conducted; there was no basis for believing
that what they 'reported' was true. These specific research reports, moreover,
had provoked frightening consequences," wrote author Robert Bell in the book,
Impure Science. Bell noted that "the reports had been relied on nationwide
in determining drug therapy" for many children and that Breuning had contributed
"24 out of the 70 papers published on the subject between 1979 and 1983."1
Breuning was sentenced to five years on probation, ordered to 60 days in a
halfway house and 250 hours of community service, and had to repay $77,352
to the federal government. The University of Pittsburgh reimbursed the federal
government more than $163,000 it had received for Breuning's research. But,
tragically, the use of dangerous drug "solutions" for our children — based to a degree on that same bogus research
— only increased.
Breuning's and Gillberg's light sentences send a disturbing message: when it
comes to doping our vulnerable children, manipulated and even fraudulent research
presents low risks to the perpetrators.
This decades-long charade thus begs the question: Whose interests are forwarded
by slanted, pseudo-scientific studies of unproven "behavior disorders," with
side effects ignored or minimized?
The pattern is clear: with researchers like Gillberg and Breuning tied to the
marketers of dangerous psychiatric drugs, the consumer is getting more fiction
than fact.
1. Robert Bell, Impure Science, (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1992),
pages 105 — 106
|
* References:
1. Nev Moore, “State’s Child Protection Agencies Collude with Judges to Defraud Federal Government,” January 2002.
2. Initiatives Training Resources, California Department of Social Services, 2003.
3. Michael Nott, “Justice Out of Balance,” Nexus Magazine, October-November 2004.
4. David Cohen, “Scourge of the Child Snatchers,” The Evening Standard, February 24, 2003.
5. “California Department of Social Services Releases Stakeholder Redesign of Child Welfare Services Report,” State of California press release, September 25, 2003.
6. “For the Sake of the Children: Restructuring Foster Care in California,” State of California Little Hoover Commission, April 9, 1992.
7. Letter from State of California Little Hoover Commission Chairman Michael E. Alpert, February 4, 2003.
8. Richard Wexler, Executive Director, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, “Take the Child and Run,” New England Law Journal, Fall 2001.
9. Troy Anderson, “Foster Care in Crisis,” Los Angeles Daily News, December 27, 2003.
10. Ed Oliver, “DSS Social Workers Must be Accountable,” Massachusetts News,
March 6, 2002.
11. “Guinea Pig Kids,” BBC News, November 29, 2004.
