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Psychiatric Hospitals and Mental Health Institutions in South Africa

Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, psychiatric wards, mental institutions, psychiatric clinics and mental asylums, are facilities that specialise in using harmful treatments to "correct" mental disorders.

Psychiatric Hospital Assessments, Evaluations and Tests

With billions in insurance payouts and government appropriations allocated for mental hospital treatments, just how safe and effective are psychiatric hospitals?

Psychiatric Hospital Mental Health Services and Treatments

In psychiatric hospitals and clinics there is no mental healing. Problems are usually masked with the prescription of powerful mind-altering drugs that may alleviate "symptoms" but don't address the cause.

In a 2002 survey of doctors, when asked to distinguish between a "mental disorder" and physical illness, 65% of non-psychiatric physicians said that physical examinations and clinical diagnostic testing should be employed to first rule out physical problems. Psychiatric hospital treatments don't employ this rule of first checking for actual physical health problems.

Treatments Used in Government and Private Psychiatric Hospitals

With heavy government funding and health insurance payouts, private and government psychiatric hospitals are able to rake in huge sums of money for psychiatric treatments that effectively don't work. Regardless of patient status; whether an inpatient, outpatient or wanting emergency mental hospital treatment, the basis of psychiatric treatment is the same - to mask the symptoms only and not cure mental illness. Mental health treatments used in psychiatric hospitals in South Africa and across the World use force to overwhelm an individual's problems. These treatments suppress symptoms, they don't cure. Here are some hospital treatments used for psychiatric disorders:

• Psychiatric Clinics that Treat ADD/ADHD

ADD and ADHD treatment is huge business for psychiatric hospitals in South Africa. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) are usually treated in clinics with psychiatric drugs. A hospital's resident psychiatrist or staff may try to convince you that ADHD and learning difficulties are the result of something being wrong with your brain. This is not true. There is no real scientific evidence to prove this. You might be shown lots of coloured pictures of the brain, but as neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman Jr. says, "the drugs the person has already taken probably caused the changes that appear to be in the brain". Remember, all drugs, whether cocaine, heroin or psychiatric drug, are brain altering.

• Psychiatric Hospitals that Use Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

Worldwide, about one million people a year - including pregnant women and children under the age of 5 - are subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Here's how this "therapy" is done. Psychiatric hospital staff shoot up to 460 volts of electricity through a patient's brain to induce a grand mal seizure. They claim that the seizure "resets" the brain. It's a theory that has never been proven. Psychiatric hospitals deceptively cloak this procedure with medical legitimacy: the hospital setting, white-coated assistants, anaesthetics, muscle paralyzing drugs and sophisticated-looking equipment. The effects of electroconvulsive therapy are horrible.

• Psychosurgery for Mental Health Disorders

Unlike medical brain surgery that alleviates actual physical conditions like tumours, psychosurgery attempts to brutally alter behaviour by destroying perfectly healthy brain tissue. The most notorious psychosurgery treatment is the lobotomy and despite the lethal and damaging effects of the operation, psychiatrists continue to advocate its use for mental disorders. In view of the fact that psychiatry does not know what actually causes mental health disorders, it must be considered that psychosurgery is in fact a deadly gamble of cutting-up and removing pieces of a patient's brain.  Psychosurgery has many names but the results are the same - brain damage.

With ECT and psychosurgery under intense critical public scrutiny, psychiatry is now feverishly searching for a new "breakthrough miracle"-"deep brain stimulation," "transcranial magnetic stimulation" (TMS) and "vagus nerve stimulation" (VNS) (vagus nerve is the cranial nerve that connects the brain to the internal organs in the body). Deep Brain Stimulation involves threading wires through the skull and into the brain. Psychiatric hospitals are experimenting with these on the "mentally" ill. Over the past few decades, many critics have drawn comparisons between psychiatric experiments and the unconscionable "science" perpetrated by Nazi doctors in concentration camps.

Psychiatrists remain committed to calling "schizophrenia" a mental disease despite, after a century of research, the complete absence of objective proof that it exists as a physical brain abnormality. Today, psychiatry in South Africa clings tenaciously to antipsychotics as the treatment for "schizophrenia," despite their proven risks and despite studies that show that when patients stop taking these drugs, they improve. Antipsychotic drugs temporarily dim psychosis but, over the long run, make hospital patients more biologically prone to it. A side-effect of antipsychotics in patients is what is called "akathisia" [a, without, + kathisia, sitting; an inability to keep still]. This side effect has been linked to assaultive, violent behaviour. A 1990 study determined that 50% of all fights in a psychiatric ward could be tied to akathisia.

Bipolar Disorder is supposedly characterized by alternating episodes of depression and mania - thus, "two poles" or "bipolar." In January 2002, the Medicine Journal reported: "The etiology [cause] and pathophysiology [functional changes] of bipolar disorder (BPD) have not been determined, and no objective biological markers exist that correspond definitively with the disease state." Nor have any genes "been definitively identified" for BPD. This still remains the case today. There is no evidence of a "brain-biochemical imbalance" that is pushed as the cause for most mental disorders including bipolar disorder. If you are told you have bipolar disorder by clinical or psychiatric staff in a mental hospital; tell them to prove it with actual physical biological tests.

While diagnosing a patient's mental health condition in a psychiatric hospital may look scientific, when one examines the questions asked, they are utterly subjective, based on what the patient reports or the rater's impressions. The symptoms of depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders and every other psychiatric disorder are subjective emotional states, making a diagnosis extremely vague. Today, a psychiatric clinic diagnosis almost always results in the prescription of a psychiatric drug. But are these drugs the "miracle pill" that hospital psychiatrists say they are? Actually no; these drugs come with a host of horrific and sometimes permanent side effects.

The failure of the war against drugs is largely due to the failure to stop one of the most dangerous drug pushers of all time: the psychiatrist. Clearing away psychiatry's false information about drugs and addiction is not only a fundamental part of restoring hope, it is the first step towards achieving real drug rehabilitation in South Africa. A close review of alcohol and addiction rehabilitation today shows it is a field nearly monopolized by psychiatry in rehab clinics and hospitals. One of the psychiatric rehab clinic's treatments for chemical dependency is the use of substitute medication and drugs such as methadone - also a drug that in itself is addictive and worse still, methadone withdrawal is even tougher than heroin withdrawal.

There is hardly any group more victimized and exploited than the elderly in psychiatric wards. And for many, life becomes a fate worse than death. Families have been lied to in order to keep their elderly relatives in the hands of psychiatric hospitals for dementia treatments. They have been forced to undergo regimens of powerful mind-altering drugs for misdiagnosed mental illnesses that do not exist. They have submitted to electroshock "treatment" that has left them the empty shells of who they once were. And, sadly, they have died premature and unnecessary deaths, by the thousands.