(A note for 2020: This bill did not pass thanks to many who fought against the insanity. However, with another Democrat reaching for the White House, I am not confident that a similar insanity is far away.)
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Mothers Act. But its back. It’s through the House and in what’s termed a fast track in the Senate. It puts into law that every new mother will get psychiatric screening, which also means, when the doctor has the urge, psychiatric treatment. Imagine, as a new mother, going in for a checkup and being ordered to take psychiatric drugs (or receive electroconvulsive shock or whatever) or face having your children taken away. In other words, Eli Lilly and friends are not happy doping our school children and our spouses, now they want the mothers and the newborns. Supporters of the bill claim there is no such screening requirement, even a few supporters on Senate staffs.
However, here’s where the document can be seen, and I’ll give you the excerpt.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-1375, Section 520K “Establishment of Program Grants”, Part (a).
`(1) provide education to women who have recently given birth, and their families, concerning postpartum depression, postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, and postpartum psychosis (referred to in this chapter as `postpartum conditions’) before such women leave their birthing centers and to screen new mothers for postpartum conditions during their first year of postnatal checkup visits, including the standard 6-week postnatal checkup visit …
This group has more information: https://www.ablechild.org/
There is nothing I despise and oppose more strongly than the psychiatric state. Here is a copy of a letter I am sending to every Senator on the HELP committee. You can call the senators too. I have.
April 7, 2009
Senator,
The Mothers Act just flew through an uninterested and ignorant House. We cannot let it do same through the Senate. This act, despite what may be said, implicitly requires that every new mother be given psychiatric screening.
I do not know if you support this bill.
If you do not support the act, perhaps my words will lend you courage to continue the fight.
If you do support this bill, are there any words that I can write, is there any information I can bring, that will allow you to change your mind?
I suppose those sound like silly questions. But I am no longer a young man, and I no longer believe that anything is a given. So, should I save my words?
If so, please stop reading now and simply let me know.
Yet, if I could persuade you, I would write that whatever limits you have been told exist, the real language of the bill describes screening for every mother in this country. This is personally horrifying, for I am all too familiar with the efficacy of psychiatric tests in “finding” what they deem illness.
If you were interested, I could tell you about a teenage girl, someone I know very well, someone very dear, about her trip to the local physician. She must have been sixteen and having trouble with her menstrual period. And being sixteen, life was not always so clear and easy. The physician administered a screening, the exact sort of screening as outlined in the Stokes bill. She came home from the doctor’s office with a paper bag full of psychiatric drugs. The doctor had told her she was, in layman’s terms, crazy, and would be for the rest of her life. His prescription to her was to sample the drugs he had given her and find one she liked. It took him no more than fifteen minutes. In fact, less time than that. They gave her a questionnaire, one conveniently supplied by a drug company, and walked away. A nurse spent a few seconds matching the young girl’s answers to the drug company’s requirements, and then the doctor came returned, told her she was disordered, and prescribed psychoactive drugs for the remainder of her life. She needed only to pick one.
The doctor was very convincing. He believed himself, certainly. When he was done, his patient was also convinced. When she came home, her father and her mother faced a child who had accepted her own doom, utterly distraught, convinced she was crazy, certain that she could not face life without psychiatric drugs.
Her parents threw the drugs away and spent a long night holding their daughter, persuading her that her life was not ended. I will not give you details, for they are not mine to divulge. I do know that only because they fought so hard, they succeeded. I know this. I was a witness. The next day their daughter was willing to believe that it was possible she was not insane and might be able to live a normal life. And she does. She was no more crazy than any other teenager. She only needed to grow up. That was simply a matter of enough years, enough mistakes, enough pain and enough joy. She has a full life, has gained an education, and is finding her way. Actually, one of the less confused among her generation. She has her own children, as bright and sane any you’ll ever find.
That doctor tried to steal that from her. Her parents did not let that happen.
Yes, I am familiar with these screenings. If it would do any good, I could tell you about my wife, how she started suffering a reaction that left her exhausted and unable to breath. We were terrified. I was terrified. I can bear many things, but the loss of my wife least. The worst occurred on a weekend. I insisted we stop at the local emergency room. The doctor there, after seeing my wife for a total of at least ninety seconds, diagnosed her as suffering from some sort of panic. The only question was, which psychiatric drug would she like?
We left that place, and left the physician sneering at out ignorance in not accepting his wisdom, and my wife began her own investigation. Eventually she determined she had developed reactions to a few common foods. She stopped eating those foods. The condition went away. Were that anyone but my wife, she would still be suffering from the reactions but now have that coupled with an addiction to psychiatric drugs. To heal herself, she would then need to cure both. How many do you think would find that cure?
If you were to read this and take the chance on accepting what I say, I could tell you about my mother. I could take you to her grave, and we could stand there for many, many hours while I told you about a life destroyed by psychiatric treatment and told you about eight children, long grown to adults, whose lives are still twisted by the long years of exposure to their mother’s degradation. I could tell you about long nights I spent helping her walk off her latest overdose. I could tell you how she stole to support her habit. I could tell you about lies told, blaming one child to another to cover her larceny. These and so much more. So many things. As I said, we could talk for a long, long time.
Some would say, “She was ill. Not the psychiatrist’s fault.” But that was not true, not when it started.
She was overweight and suffered from the condition of having an overbearing mother and a driven husband. At the worst, what she needed was a divorce and to face her mother down. Instead, the prescription was pills, lots of pills, pills that carried her to increasing desperation and addiction. As she destroyed her life seeking relief with her “medicine,” her only remedy was the unconsciousness she achieved with the pills. Later, her doctors were so pleased with the success of their medicines that they prescribed shock treatments. This was not to cure her addiction. It was not to cure her at all. It was just to make her quieter.
It worked. When they were done, what was left was a shell. No longer even a competent thief. Still addicted, still with only one desire, that of more unconsciousness, but no longer able to express any dissatisfaction. She knew better than to talk about anything like unhappiness. She knew what they would do if that subject came up.
Eventually she succeeded in killing herself. The doctor called it a heart attack, but that is not likely. If so, that heart gave out after more overdoses than I could ever count. And yet I remember her when I was very young. She was not a suicide, not an empty husk and not a criminal. Even in the end, there were times, brief moments when the little bit of her that was left would peek out from the shattered mind and the enveloping drug haze.
We used to live for those moments when we were younger, when the moments were more frequent.
The psychiatrists who say they fought a losing battle to save my mother simply lie. I was there. I watched and could not stop it. The doctors succeeded in everything they tried to do. Succeeded to the bitter end. Succeeded because men believe the lies and look the other way. Succeeded because the lies are smooth. Succeed because the truth is so dark, and the lies are so much easier to hear. Succeeded because there is money in it, so very, very much money, billions beyond billions and then billions of dollars more.
Yet these are but a few of the reasons I oppose the psychiatric state.
With this act, in a few short months, we will have children born addicted to psychiatric drugs. Not crack. Not cocaine. More likely Prozac–or whatever is the profit maker this year. How can I say this? Because already physicians are prescribing these drugs to pregnant women. Does anyone believe a congressional mandate will decrease this madness? These same drugs have known, well documented side-effects of paranoia, depression, suicide, even homicide. This act will bring terror to mothers and children.
One last item. It may be true in theory that a mother can decline the screening, but the words relayed to me from one nurse in New Jersey say it all, “But honey, declining is the same as failing.”
So, what would it take, Senator, should you require persuasion, what would you need to see or hear or experience that would allow you to change your mind? Please, tell me. If there is even the slightest crack in your certainty, what would you let slip in that might allow you to change your mind? Please, let me know. I will find it for you. I will march it to your door. I will beg you find the time to look.
You need only ask.
Sincerely,
John Richter
*****
Senators on the HELP committee:
Lisa Murkowski, R: 202-224-6665, AK
John McCain, R: 202-224-2235, AZ
Christopher Dodd, D: 202-224-2823, CT
Johnny Isakson, R: 202-224-3643, GA
Tom Harkin, D: 202-224-3254, IA
Pat Roberts, R: 202-224-4774, KS
Edward Kennedy D: 202-224-4543, MA
Barbara Mikulski D: 202-224-4654, MD
Richard Burr, R: 202-224-3154, NC
Kay Hagan, D: 202-224-6342, NC
Judd Gregg, R: 202-224-3324, NH
Jeff Bingaman, D: 202-224-5521, NM
Sherrod Brown, D 202-224-2315, OH
Tom Coburn, R 202-224-5754, OK
Jeff Merkley, D 202-224-3753, OR
Bob Casey, D 202-224-6324, PA
Jack Reed, D 202-224-4642, RI
Lamar Alexander R 202-224-4944, TN
Orrin Hatch R 202-224-5251, UT
Bernard Sanders, I: 202-224-5141, VT
Patty Murray, D, 202-224-2621, WA
Michael Enzi, R, 202-224-3424, WY