Celebrities Honor Psychiatric Industry Whistleblowers
February 23, 2007 (PRLEAP.COM) Health News
At the annual awards banquet of the psychiatric watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), actors Kirstie Alley, Kelly Preston, Priscilla Presley, Marisol Nichols (24) and Anne Archer (Patriot Games, Fatal Attraction) awarded mental health industry whistleblowers who have risked their professional careers to warn the public about the dangers and fraudulent marketing of psychiatric drugs. Exemplifying the effort to inform parents and consumers, former pharmaceutical sales representative Gwen Olsen, and former Pennsylvania government investigator Allen Jones, were presented with CCHR’s annual Human Rights Awards for their courageous contributions to mental health reform.Like Russell Crowe’s character in the film The Insider, Allen Jones reluctantly stepped forward as a whistleblower. Kirstie Alley presented Jones with his Human Rights Award for exposing several pharmaceutical companies who bribed Texas government officials to implement mental health treatment laws requiring the use of their brand name drugs.
Recently, a four-year-old Massachusetts girl died from a deadly cocktail of psychiatric drugs, calling into question the psychiatric practice of drugging small children with powerful anti-psychotic drugs. Last week, the story ran on the front page of The New York Times and was featured on Fox National News, drawing national attention to the culpability of the prescribing psychiatrist, and the growing controversy over psychiatrists drugging children and toddlers with powerful drugs.
Tragic cases like this compelled Gwen Olsen, former pharmaceutical sales representative, to leave her profitable career and write the book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher. In presenting Olsen with her Human Rights Award, Kelly Preston told Olsen’s story of giving misinformation to doctors in selling the drugs, while being encouraged by the pharmaceutical companies she worked for to minimize the side effects in her pitches.
Olsen’s story was featured on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric
in which she explained that psychotropic drugs given to children, "clamp down on the central nervous system, in effect they reduce your mobility…sort of like a chemical straight jacket."
The celebrities at CCHR’s anniversary banquet joined hundreds of legislators, doctors, attorneys, parents, human rights activists and others to acknowledge these heroic individuals who have warned the public about damaging psychiatric techniques. Also winning human rights awards were a psychiatrist who exposed psychiatric CIA mind control experiments and a neurologist who revealed the debilitating side effects of electroshock (ECT).
With the public largely getting their information from the industry that benefits from putting children on drugs, celebrities and human rights activists are advising parents and consumers that the mental health watchdog CCHR has the facts about the dangers of psychotropic drugs and the subjectivity of the diagnoses for which they are prescribed. CCHR has been researching and documenting this issue since 1969 and offers simple, easily understandable information about psychiatric drugs risks with the purpose of informing the public, and has this information posted on its website, www.cchr.org.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights was established by the Church of Scientology in 1969 to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.
If you know anyone, including a child, who has been abused or harmed by a psychiatrist call The Citizens Commission on Human Rights at 1-800-670-2247. Complete confidentiality assured.