Florida panel protects abusive assisted living facilities

Can you imagine a panel put together to do something about death and abuse in assisted living facilities that winds up doing the diametric opposite of what it was designed to do, and instead puts its energies into protecting assisting living facility operators? This is exactly what happened in Florida. The Tallahassee report on the matter in the Tampa Bay Times bears the much too polite heading, Gov. Rick Scott’s panel goes soft on ALF industry, critics say.

Gov. Rick Scott used tough language in the summer of 2011 when he created a panel to help fix the deadly abuse and neglect in Florida assisted living facilities.

Right, and now for the result.

In a change of tide, Scott’s panel issued its final report this week, calling for diminished transparency and fewer regulations. The panel calls for the state to better enforce existing rules rather than create new ones. And to give homes more money to raise their standards but not punish them through fines and other sanctions when they perform badly.

“Diminished transparency” means a continuing cover up, and “fewer regulations” means more neglect, abuse, and death. Rather than punishing the operators of bad assisted living faculties, in effect, this decision means rewarding them for their failures.

The article goes on to say, “not everyone is cheering”. Duh.

The panel was picked after a series of Miami Herald articles exposed the death and abuse taking place in assisted living facilities across the state. The back story is as follows.

The furor from the Herald series prompted Scott’s panel to offer a variety of solutions in 2011, from stricter educational requirements for ALF caretakers to more government oversight for facilities that cause patient harm. Those emerged shortly after the series was published and served as a foundation for sweeping legislation that lawmakers softened and then defeated in 2012, under pressure from powerful industry lobbyists.

In Florida, at least, it looks like those powerful industry lobbyists have won the day for the time being. This is bad news for people who seek to reform Florida’s broken assisted care system, and it is bad news for residents of assisted living facilities who may be subjected to abuse and neglect with no recourse to redress. The effect of this “final” decision is that people in assisted living faculties are going to be in no better shape than they were before an investigation revealed the extent to which they were abused, neglected, and dying. Certainly there have to be better courses of action to take than that of making a bad situation worse. Unfortunately, this is not the direction the state of Florida has chosen to take. If there is any silver lining to this situation, it is to be found in the fact that if the situation gets bad enough, the federal government will be forced to intervene.

We Need More Liberties For American Citizens, Not Fewer

I generally don’t think anybody should be forcibly treated in a psychiatric hospital, but I make an exception in the case of David Vognar. I think Mr Vognar, and another Huffington Post blogger mentioned previously, DJ Jaffe, might be able to benefit a great deal from forced mental health intervention. Mr. Vognar claims to have been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Mr. Vognar has apparently not spent much time imprisoned in a state hospital, or he wouldn’t have written a Huffington Post blog post like the one he did recently calling for an expansion in the use of involuntary treatment on people labeled “mentally ill”. The post bears the leading, and extremely prejudicial, heading, We Need to Expand Involuntary Treatment for Severe Mental Illness. I happen to vehemently disagree with Mr. Vognar on this issue. I don’t think we need to expand the federal penitentiary system, one of the largest in the world, in this country either.

If Mr. Vognar and Mr Jaffe were confined to a state mental hospital for the length of their lives, I think it would be fair to say that a great number of the rest of the people on this planet could sleep more secure. If Mr. Vognar and Mr. Jaffe were subjected to a perpetual regimen of mind snuffing pharma-tortures, and seizure inducing mini-electrocutions, as well as the complete suppression of their personal opinions, I have no doubt that the world as a whole would be a much better place in which to live. Intolerance and hate crimes are a plague, and the best way to deal with this plague is by putting the worst offenders out of commission. Mr. Vognar and Mr. Jaffe are too ‘seriously disturbed’ to ever be ‘cured’. They are, like I say, ‘seriously disturbed’, and to suggest that they could change their behavior in any way, shape, or form is merely to “stigmatize” them. They, being “sick”, don’t have the control necessary to manage such a transformation. We should therefore, out of the kindness in our hearts, imprison them in a state hospital for the duration of their days. Understand that this is a preventive measure, by detaining them in this fashion we have prevented the detention of a great many more people in coercive *cough* ‘care’.

5/5/12 Philadelphia

Connecticut college student and monitor of the event, Caitlin Belforti, speaking at the Friends Center in Philadelphia.

New York activist Daniel Hazen speaking.

Aki Imai is from Ohio. He launched the Our Life After Labels submission-based blog.

Joe Rogers, a Philly local, is the director of the National Mental Health Self-help Clearinghouse.

Signs of the times.

John Judge read a statement of support from Paula J. Caplan who was unable to attend.

Long time San Francisco activist and retired attorney Ted Chabasinski.

The backdrop for the mornings events.

Godly Mathew once spent one hundred consecutive days protesting against psychiatric abuse outside Philadelphia’s Friends Hospital.

Down with psychiatric labels. Up with human beings.

Ted’s banner.

Inside the Friends Center events get underway.

Outside of the Friends Center where the rally took place.

Inside again.

The march to the Convention Center minutes away.

Director of the Anchorage Alaska based Center for Psychiatric Rights lawyer Jim Gottstein.

The demonstration outside of the Convention Center.

Pedestrians crossing the street.

Protesters outside of the Convention Center.

Demonstrators and pedestrians.

The Icarus Project well represented.

The shrinks label bible, in revision, and its discontents.

What’s that? Psychopharmacomania?

David Oaks, director of MindFreedom International, at the microphone beside Philadelphia native Susan Rogers.

Amid other not so spontaneous eruptions of Mad Pride!

Occupy the APA Counter-Celebration and Protest In Philadelphia on May 5

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is holding its annual convention in Philadelphia this year. The 5th revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s label bible, edited by members of the APA, is scheduled for release in 2013. The number of labels contained in the present label bible, the DSM-IV, is up to 374. Expect more, this number climbs with each new revision.

“Mental illness” labeling is at epidemic proportions. Pick up any newspaper in the country, and you are likely to find a story about the increasing numbers of people being labeled “mentally ill”. The APA with its DSM is the major force behind this upswing in the selling of “mental disorder” labels and the treatments that goes along with those labels. These epidemics are largely human made, and the people doing the making are members of this same APA.

Studies have shown people in the mental health system to be dying at an age on average 25 years younger than the rest of the population. This mortality gap is climbing. People in the mental health system are dying because of the drugs that they are being given purported to treat the labels they have recieved. These drugs cause a metabolic syndrome associated with a number of life-limiting and shortening physical ill health conditions. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are among those life threatening conditions. This death and disease rate represents an international tragedy that is largely being suppressed and ignored in the mainstream media.

“Off label” drugging, or prescribing drugs for purposes for which they have not been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is rampant in the mental health field. Unruly children and demented nursing home patients are being managed and restrained by these powerful and potentially harmful drugs. These drugs have been known to cause the premature of death of senior citizens suffering from dementia. There is little question that many of the young people given these drugs ‘off label’, who otherwise would have had a brilliant future ahead of them, wind up lifelong mental patients, or mental health consumers, harmed by these drugs.

The APA has many strong financial connections with the pharmaceutical industry. 69 % of the committee members revising the DSM-5 have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. This is to be contrasted with the committee revising the DSM-IV when 57 % of the committee members had such financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Despite regulations put into place over conflict of interest issues, the committee’s relationship to the pharmaceutical industry is growing stronger rather than weakening.

For these and other reasons a number of ex-patients, psychiatric survivors, mental health consumers, dissident professionals, friends and allies will be gathering in Philadelphia for an Occupy the APA counter-celebration and protest. These people, of whom I include myself, will be there to support healthy, safe, and drug-free alternatives to conventionally harmful psychiatric treatment. They will be there to support other ways of dealing with troubled people besides harming them with drugs and giving them psychiatric labels.

We encourage other people in Philadelphia and at home to join us in our protest. There are other protests planned in sympathy and solidarity in Toronto Canada, Denver Colorado, Anchorage Alaska, Boston Massachusetts, and in other areas around the same time. You can find out more about this event by visiting the Occupy the APA page on the MindFreedom International website. Please, consider any direct action that you can take, be it ever so slight, to let the public know that the labeling, drugging, and harming of American citizens is not something that we can, nor should, take lightly.

Related post:

Spring Cleaning With The Trash Can Labeled “Antipsychiatry”

End forced mental health treatment and reduce “stigma”

How’s this sentence, from a blog, for a leading statement: “Many people think that talking with a mental health professional is a sign of weakness in the individual seeking counseling, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.” Actually the question as to whether counseling could be a sign of weakness for some hasn’t been answered here. I would say that it always depends upon the circumstances. Seeking counseling could be a sign of strength, but it could also be a sign of weakness. When a person decides he or she can’t handle something on his or her own, and this person seeks a counselor to assist with the matter, that’s one thing. When a person uses counseling as an excuse, or a crutch, or makes an addiction of it, that’s another. I’m not beyond saying that both instances occur.

A “stigma” attached to the “mental illness” label is perceived as the reason why many people don’t seek professional counseling. The assumption behind this claim is that there are many people out there in need of counseling who are not receiving it. Such an assumption serves the mental health business above all other interests. How convenient it must be to have an endless supply of potential clients? This kind of slant leaves a number of essential questions unasked, such as, do all the people receiving counseling need this counseling, could not some of the people entering counseling not be in need of it in the first place, and is this counseling at all detrimental. There is also much question as to whether the assumption behind the need is even correct. We haven’t answered any of these questions by making sure our weird Aunt Carol or our goofy Uncle Sol are taken care of.

Some people, most people in fact, don’t seek mental health treatment. I would say that this is probably due to the fact that most people don’t see themselves as “mentally ill”. I think that it is perfectly okay for most people not to think of themselves as emotionally disturbed. I think that if some of the people who thought of themselves as disturbed decided that they weren’t so disturbed after all that this would be a good thing, too. You’ve got a problem person when you’ve got a person convinced that he or she is emotionally or mentally unstable. If there’s any “stigma” attached to emotional turmoil, maybe it had better just as well remain a “stigma”. When donning the “mental illness” label becomes a fashionable trend, then we will be on the verge of what is referred to in medical parlance as an epidemic. An epidemic, and I hear we’re having one now, of “mental illness” would not be a good thing to have.

While some people actively seek mental health treatment, there are other people who make no effort whatsoever to be treated for any mental health issues, but who find themselves in treatment all the same. A “stigma” isn’t preventing them from seeking treatment, they don’t want any such treatment in the first place. In some cases, the treat they receive seems much more like a trick, and an occasion of much horror. I’m speaking about people who find themselves committed to state hospitals against their will and wishes by a court of law. This can only happen through a loophole in the Constitution of the USA, with its Bill of Rights, known as mental health law. People are treated involuntarily, and against their will, regardless of any “stigma” attached to you name it. No other branch of medicine treats people in a, essentially totalitarian, and like manner. People in this system are locked up, not because they’ve broken any of the laws of the land, but merely because it is feared they will break a law in the future. Mental health law is pre-crime law. The fact is we shouldn’t have laws against crimes that have not been committed. We couldn’t have people locked up from crimes that have not been committed (i.e. involuntary mental patients) if it weren’t for mental health law.

What I’m saying here is that if you want to do anything about any “stigma” attached to mental health issues, you’re talking through both sides of your mouth if you aren’t also for the repeal of mental health law. It is through this mental health law that people in the mental health system are disempowered, marginalized, and reduced to second class citizenship status. Involuntary mental health treatment wouldn’t occur if people thought better of troubled people in troubling situations. This involuntary treatment involves disarming people and violating their second amendment rights. It also involves violating their rights to due process of law. Being a civil matter, people are presumed “sick” until pronounced otherwise. There is no question of reasonable doubt. There is no jury trial. Life, liberty, and property are all at risk in this process. There is no sense in talking about a “stigma” attached to mental health issues if you don’t address the issue of the loss of power and confidence that comes of the keeping of mental health treatment records either. You’ve created a paper trail for purposes of damning unwanted people. If you don’t want to damn (“stigmatize”) them, repeal the law, burn the paper, and see to the welfare of the people involved. Some of them might be your siblings, some of them might be your children, and some them might even peer back at you from the mirror.

When we have an all volunteer mental health system, then and only then will emotional travails and troubles become less of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” matter. People who have survived and endured forced mental health treatment know better than to look on most mental health professionals without apprehension. We’re now calling abduction, assault, imprisonment, torture, and poisoning mental health “treatment”, and let me tell you, abduction, assault, imprisonment, torture, and poisoning are good for nobodies mental health. The two faced and hypocritical nature of contemporary mental health treatment will only change when force is removed from the equation, and this force can only be removed by repealing what amounts to an unjust law. If you want an end to any “stigma” attached to mental health issues get rid of the law that makes mental health issues a confineable offense. When we have done so, and only when we have done so, will we have made the matter of experiencing personal problems less of an object for shame, scorn, derision, and ridicule. You can say one thing, but when you do another, sooner or later your actions are going to give you away, and then the game will be entirely up for grabs. Much of this talk of “stigma”, because it doesn’t tackle the problem of coercion, is actually part and parcel of the very thing it would be attacking.

On A Person’s Right To Refuse Mental Health Treatment

There has been much ink spilled over some sort of “stigma“ attached to seeking mental health treatment. I think there is some question as to just how much of this mental health treatment is freely sought. Some mental health treatment, after all, is entirely unwanted.

I was an observer at a meeting of a task-force connected with the Virginia Supreme Court commission to reform mental health care in that state. The chair of this taskforce gave an introductory speech stating that a person would have to be “mentally ill” to oppose coercive mental health treatment. I myself was amazed that nobody on this taskforce strenuously objected to that statement. I don’t think opposition to coercive mental health treatment makes people “mentally ill” any more than I believe that support for state sanctioned assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment and torture makes a person “mentally healthy”. I, in fact, believe that the notion of forced treatment runs counter to the ideal of independence fought for so fiercely by our forebears. I would go so far as to call it un-American.

I have heard ex-patients speak about being grateful for the forced treatment they received, but I have also heard ex-patients express much outrage over the forced treatment they endured. Responses vary, as they should, from individual to individual. I don’t think that an ex-patient being grateful for the forced treatment received justifies thinking there is some kind of “stigma” attached to forcing treatment on people that needs to be countered. My feelings are, “stigma” or no “stigma”, forced treatment is wrong.

On the wall of an outpatient facility I once frequented there was a list of what purported to be “mental patient rights”. One of the rights listed on this list was the right to receive treatment. Nowhere on this list was there mentioned a right to refuse treatment. This kind of caving in to tyrannical attitudes and policy I think outrageous. I don’t think a person should have a right to receive treatment who doesn’t also have the right to refuse treatment. I believe mental health treatment, like all other truly medical treatments, should be a matter of choice and not compulsion.

The mass media is such that it is easily manipulated by big money and power interests. The major vehicles within the mass media are often owned by such interests. This ownership often means that our free press is not nearly so free as its rhetoric would have us suppose. That press which is bought and sold, in other words, is not free. This has created a situation where the typical voice of mental health treatment in the media is a voice that has been hand picked by the mental health authorities for its qualities of obsequiousness. There are other voices within the mental health system, and I believe these voices should be listened to as well.

The voice of people critical to force needs to get a hearing, too. Not everybody is happy with having their civil liberties and human rights entirely ignored and disgracefully trampled on. There is certainly a great deal about conventional mental health treatment that needs changing. If the mainstream media won’t carry those voices of dissent that occur forward, then it is up to those critics to make their own media, and to see that those voices get a hearing in the arena of public opinion.

Studies have shown that provoking a disbelief in free will causes many negative effects in subject participants. Among these negative effects are increased lying, cheating and stealing. I think it sad that mental patients, and mental health consumers, are encouraged not to believe in their own self-control as self-control is a matter of free will. I also think that mentioning a right to receive treatment while denying any right to refuse treatment is a matter of trying to cancel any notion of free will.

There is way too much dependency, and way too little interdependency, in the mental health system as it is. Dependency is a one way street. The more powerful look down on the less powerful. Interdependency is a matter of equals working together to achieve goals each holds in common. As it is, the system is often more destructive, for this reason, than it is constructive. It often becomes, given this situation, a crippling matter for some of the people who get stuck in it. Understanding this trend, I think it is often better for some people to work for change in the mental health system outside of that system altogether.

My ten-cents on the DSM-5 debate debacle, part 2

I was going to drop the DSM-5 discussion last week, but another article came to light, and I just couldn’t do it. Sorry. This time its an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Not Diseases But Categories of Suffering.

It’s not the current A.P.A.’s fault. The fault lies with its predecessors. The D.S.M. is the offspring of odd bedfellows: the medical industry, with its focus on germs and other biochemical causes of disease, and psychoanalysis, the now-largely-discredited discipline that attributes our psychological suffering to our individual and collective history.

Actually the delusion of the APA is that the DSM will resolve this conflict, it’s revisionist editors from the very beginning have been the very people behind ‘the discrediting’, mentioned in the above paragraph, of psychoanalysis.

The American Psychiatric Association has been trying to do just that ever since, mostly by leaving behind ideas about the meaning of our suffering in favor of observation and treatment of its symptoms. In 1980, it hit on the strategy of adopting a medical rhetoric, organizing those symptoms into neat disease categories and checklists of precisely described criteria and publishing them in the hefty — and, according to its chief author, “very scientific-looking” — D.S.M.-III.

The pathologizing of human suffering, and not suffering symptomatic of any known physical disease, but rather that suffering which can be said to have arisen from emoting and thinking. Types of suffering are seen as disease manifested through a variety of symptoms.

Previously I stated that this process was a matter of normalizing medicalization, and this is so, what we’ve got here is medicine’s incursion into areas that, strictly speaking, are specifically not medical, and specifically not science.

In this Op-Ed piece we read the following, “And as any psychiatrist involved in the making of the D.S.M. will freely tell you, the disorders listed in the book are not “real diseases,” at least not like measles or hepatitis. Instead, they are useful constructs that capture the ways that people commonly suffer.” I wonder why does so much of the mental health industry rhetoric and literature insist then on stating that “mental illnesses” are real, that they are real diseases, and not only that they are real diseases, but that they are diseases of the brain. We’re stuck with an either/or that would be a both/and, but…Hey, whatever stretch you can come up to resolve that one has got to break on close examination.

My feeling has always been that this clamor is going to fizzle to a uncomfortable grumble once the volume is released in 2013. If such is the case it will be unfortunate indeed. For years now we’ve been uncomfortably enduring the fruits of the DSM-IV. Those fruits are these growing epidemics of autism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and depression. My feeling is that as the DSM usually works by division and addition rather than subtraction (starting with 28 mental disorders, now you’ve got something like 374) the 20 % USA labeled “mentally ill” rate is likely to go up rather than down.

The DSM has been referred to as the psychiatrists’ bible. The bible is the number 1 best selling book of all time. The DSM is doing none too poorly itself.

On the other hand, given that the current edition of the D.S.M. has earned the association — which holds and tightly guards its naming rights to our pain — more than $100 million, we might want to temper our sympathy. It may not be dancing at the ball, but once every mental health worker, psychology student and forensic lawyer in the country buys the new book, it will be laughing all the way to the bank.

‘Laughing all the way to the bank’ together with drug company executives riding piggyback on this volume of sheer non-sense. The mortality gap for people in treatment labeled with psychosis is widening, not narrowing. This mortality gap is the direct result of our societies over reliance on the quick and chemical fix. The quick and chemical fix is one of the results of using this balderdash to treat people who suffer. At one time we as a nation were a lot better off where our emotional stability was concerned, and at that time there was no DSM. We could be a lot better off again if we were to chuck the present volume into the trash heap now, and call off any future revisions. The internal national enemy of a rising “mental illness” rate is not going away anytime soon as long as this book is used to alienate, marginalize, and disempower an increasingly large segment of the American populace.

The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery Chastises Dr. Oz

The Sacramento Bee is to be commended for running the story, National Mental Health Coalition Calls “Dr. Oz” Electroshock Show One-Sided, on The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery’s (NCMHR) view of a segment The Dr. Oz Show is running on electro-shock.

The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR) calls upon the producers of “The Dr. Oz Show” to provide balanced and truthful coverage of the risks of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), in which grand mal seizures are electrically induced, usually to treat severe depression.

Dr. Oz apparently wants to give the impression that electro-shock is a safe procedure. If efforts on Capitol Hill to get the electro-shock devices declared safe by the FDA without further research failed, maybe Dr. Oz should listen to those people who have had first hand experience with this issue.

“Shock survivors” and many other mental health advocates assert that ECT’s disabling effects – including permanent memory loss and cognitive deficits – outweigh possible benefits, and call for potential ECT recipients to be told the risks so they can make an informed choice.

Informed consent is never truly informed consent until it is fully informed consent.

“The research is clear: ECT causes closed head injury, temporary euphoria, then return of depression but with enduring memory loss,” says Dr. Daniel B. Fisher, psychiatrist and NCMHR board member. Among the show’s false claims are that less electricity is used in unilateral ECT. “In reality,” Dr. Fisher said, “unilateral ECT requires more electricity.” Calling the show’s claim of 80 percent effectiveness “vastly exaggerated,” Dr. Fisher pointed out that, while many may experience a lifting of depression, this is only temporary, but the disabling side effects are permanent. In addition, many ECT recipients say their depression was exacerbated by the stress associated with their ECT-related cognitive disabilities.

Electro-shock survivors need to be listened to regardless of whether their experiences have been positive or negative. This kind of suppression of the evidence in the name of doing harm to the gullible is something that must be frowned on in all instances for basic humanitarian reasons.

The segment of The Dr. Oz show in question was called The Shock That Could Save Your Life. It would only be fitting and fair, not to mention truthful, if Dr. Oz were to air another segment of his show called The Shock That Could Take Your Life.

Shock survivors and other critics of psychiatric violence are encouraged to give Dr. Oz a piece of their mind in the comment section below the page containing the video.

Former Mental Patients Suing Hospitals Over Electroshock

I was surprised to come across this tidbit of information today. It’s from an article in Stuff, a New Zealand rag, Shock treatment ‘needed’.

The retired Timaru woman has every reason to have an opinion on the 250 former psychiatric patients who are suing psychiatric hospitals throughout New Zealand over their treatment and the use of ECT. Miss Lister also received the treatment, but her views of it are very different to those taking the legal action.

New Zealand has 250 former patients to take on electro-shock!? If it didn’t have much of a survivor movement in the past, it certainly has one now.

The news media picks up on one woman who didn’t mind ECT so much, but preferred LSD. She goes back to the time when they experimented with that substance legally on psychiatric patients. There are, let’s see, at least 250 people out there with harsher views on the subject of ECT.

I did a little Google search of my own to see what this is all about, and one thing is for certain, if anything is going on here, the press don’t seem to have picked up on it yet. I did find an earlier more balanced article in Stuff again, Electroconvulsive therapy endures.

Women receive ECT nearly twice as much as men do, and elderly women receive the most. Reasons for this could include loneliness and isolation, specialists say.

You don’t mean those elderly women, already at a risk for Alzheimers and dementia, do you?

Why do I call them survivors?

Memory returns within six weeks after treatment for 95 per cent of patients, but “it might take a bit longer” for the other 5 per cent, she [psychiatrist Pamela Melding] says. The greatest risk was to people with cardiovascular problems, but this was monitored and considered before treatment. Muscle pains, ringing in the ears, headaches and nausea are other adverse effects.

A certain number of these patients die during the procedure. Shock, coupled with cardiovascular problems, for instance, can produce a cadaver.

My feeling is that this lack of coverage has something to do with the way mental patients and former mental patients are treated in general.

“We will look back on ECT as we now look back on lobotomies.”

Such were the concluding sentiments of University of Auckland psychologist and researcher John Read.

Having seen the ups and downs of the movement against shock in this country, the USA, I would say celebrating is still a bit premature. I would also wager that the eclipse won‘t happen without direct action, but the good news is at least New Zealanders have the people to make a start at changing things for the better where people facing mental health treatment are concerned in their homeland.

Penalties needed for nursing homes that drug seniors government inspector says

The Washington Post has a story about government inspectors going after nursing homes over the issue of dispensing neuroleptic drugs for dementia. The article bears the very promising headline, Gov’t inspector says penalties needed to curb use of psychiatric drugs in nursing homes.

Government inspectors told lawmakers Wednesday that Medicare officials need to do more to stop doctors from prescribing powerful psychiatric drugs to nursing home patients with dementia, an unapproved practice that has flourished despite repeated government warnings.

This is, in my opinion, a very good move.

An inspector for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told the Senate Committee on Aging that the federal government’s Medicare program should begin penalizing nursing homes that inappropriately prescribe antipsychotics, according to written testimony obtained by the Associated Press.

Yay! Somebody is suggesting doing something that makes sense for a change. It’s an action that is sorely needed as the extent of this “off label” prescribing practice is beyond alarming.

A report by [Health and Human Services Inspector General] Levinson’s office issued in May found that 83 percent of Medicare claims for antipsychotics were for residents with dementia, the condition specifically warned against in the drugs’ labeling. Fourteen percent of all nursing home residents, nearly 305,000 patients, were prescribed antipsychotics. The HHS Inspector General’s office Medicare claims during a 2007 six month period.

As nursing home staff are disregarding these warning labels, penalties are called for. If nursing homes aren’t penalized it will mean many more needless deaths.

Bravo, government inspector, but this is only the tip of the iceburg when it comes to “off label” drugging. This is not a problem that exists just among the elderly. We need to penalize foster care workers and juvenile justice facilities that would use powerful neuroleptic drugs on children and adolescents as a controlling devise as well. Hopefully there, too, the government will get around to doing the only thing that will help curtail “off label” prescribing practices, and that’s punishing the biggest offenders.