Documenting Psychiatrists Behaving BadlyOf all professions, psychiatrists seem to get into the most trouble. I have been collecting stories about psychiatric screwups for a while. Sadly, it has been disgustingly easy to do. We post stories with links to the original sources. We couldn't make this stuff up if we wanted to. My Name is Sickmind Fraud.
A noted specialist in the fields of attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is facing charges related to the alleged groping of a woman.
Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, who was in Waltham District Court on Monday for a hearing on the charge of indecent assault, is accused of squeezing the buttocks of a makeup artist last October. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and instructor at Harvard Medical School, was videotaping an interview in Watertown. The woman, whose name was redacted from the police report, filed the charges about a month after the alleged incident.
She said that Hallowell put his hand on her shoulder and touched her. "He followed my shape and he took his time," the police report says.
When interviewed, police said he called the incident a "terrible misunderstanding." “My client has a long and distinguished record in his field," said William Crowe, Hallowell's attorney. "It was not his intention to offend anyone and he is troubled his actions were perceived in any way as inappropriate. We are confident that Dr. Hallowell will be cleared and this matter will be resolved in his favor," Crowe said.
Hallowell is the founder Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health in Sudbury.
Medical malpractice is not limited to surgery, and the case of Paul Lozano illustrates this better than any other example. Lozano had been sexually abused by his mother as a child, and his psychiatrist, Margaret Bean-Bayog, decided to try a form of therapy known as “reparenting”, where the psychiatrist simulates the different stages of lifespan development in an attempt to “reprogram” the patient. She coddled him, read him stories, called him “baby”, made him call her “mother”, and made him learn cue-cards off by heart. One such card read “I’m your mom and I love you and you love me very much. Say that 10 times”. Other cards were more sexual, and more notes were found that appeared to be erotica featuring Lozano and his doctor. It was also reported that they did in fact have sexual relations. After about five years, he committed suicide.
When Bean-Bayog's graphic love notes were discovered, two other therapists informed state authorities. But no investigation was launched until Lozano's suicide made newspaper headlines. Even then, other psychoanalysts circled the wagons, claiming their colleague was the victim of the affair.
A psychiatrist at Arbour-Fuller Hospital has been given a reprimand by the state Board of Registration in Medicine as a result of his arrest in 2012 on domestic assault charges.
Dr. Christopher M. Palacios was arrested in 2012 following an altercation with his then wife, and subsequently admitted sufficient facts to charges of misdemeanor assault and battery in 2013. The charges were dismissed last year after Palacios completed a court-ordered anger management course, the board announced.
The board reprimanded Palacios "for engaging in conduct that undermines the public confidence in the integrity of the medical profession."
Palacios, who was then working at Salem Hospital, was arrested after an altercation in Marblehead with his estranged wife.
He was charged with pushing, kicking and sexually assaulting the woman, the Daily Item in Lynn reported at the time. Palacios denied any sexual assault, and that charge was subsequently dropped.
Palacios is a 2000 graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine and is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
He has been licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts since 2005 and is currently affiliated with Arbour-Fuller Hospital, according to the board.
The board licenses more than 40,000 physicians, osteopaths and acupuncturists.
An independent monitoring group will open an office inside troubled Bridgewater State Hospital for the next two years to make sure that prison guards and clinicians continue reducing their use of isolation and physical restraints on mentally ill patients, under a deal with the state that averts a lawsuit.
“The agreement guarantees that over the next couple of years, someone will be in there watching, looking at the data, talking to the patients and staff, and really trying to make sure that people are treated appropriately as patients and not as prisoners,” Christine M. Griffin, the executive director of the federally funded Disability Law Center, which reached the agreement with the Patrick administration, said Tuesday.
The center had threatened to sue Massachusetts for what it said were widespread human rights abuses at Bridgewater, where the Globe has identified three deaths in recent years related to the use of restraints to control patients.
Under the agreement worked out over the last five months with Governor Deval Patrick, the center will not sue as long as the state follows through on a host of promises of better care, including a plan to move most of the patients to a proposed facility at an undetermined location to be run by the Department of Mental Health.
[...]
The Disability Law Center launched a six-week, on-site investigation into practices at Bridgewater after a series of stories in the Globe, including a detailed account of the death of Joshua K. Messier, a 23-year-old mental health patient sent to Bridgewater for a psychiatric evaluation who died as guards wrestled him into four-point restraints, cuffing his wrists and ankles to a small bed.
[...]
A more recent Globe story recounted the deaths of two more mental health patients — Bradley Burns and Paul Correia — whose deaths were attributed by the state medical examiner’s office to the use of restraints. Burns was held in five-point restraints for 16 months, 23 hours a day, before he died of a heart arrhythmia.
Under the agreement with the Disability Law Center, the administration has pledged to discontinue the use of five-point restraints — strapping a patient down by chest, wrists, and ankles — altogether and to revise its official policy on the use of seclusion and restraints by mid-January.
Meanwhile, Bridgewater State Hospital officials have replaced existing restraint beds with larger, more comfortable beds, and cut the overall use of restraints by 86 percent and the use of seclusion by 68 percent, since January, according to the Department of Correction.
The church therapist who treated a Vermont Roman Catholic priest accused of molesting boys later became the target of a Massachusetts lawsuit alleging he, too, engaged in sex acts with a boy for nine years, beginning when the boy was 9.
The Rev. Thomas Kane of Whitinsville, Mass., was executive director of the House of Affirmation in Whitinsville. That's where the Diocese of Burlington sent the Rev. Edward Paquette to be treated after learning Paquette had molested two boys in Rutland.
Court papers in Vermont and Massachusetts indicate the dates of Kane's alleged abuse of the Uxbridge, Mass., boy -- 1968 to 1977 -- coincide with the period from 1974 to 1978 that Paquette was being treated, for much of the time via monthly visits, at the House of Affirmation.
There's no evidence that officials in the Vermont diocese, including then-Bishop John Marshall, were aware of Kane's alleged sexual misconduct during the period he was providing therapy to Paquette.
Kane's alleged victim filed suit in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston in 1993; the case settled out of court two years later for $42,500. The Associated Press does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse.
Nineteen lawsuits have been filed in Vermont alleging that Paquette molested boys while serving as a priest in Burlington, Montpelier and Rutland in the 1970s. Four have ended with jury verdicts or been settled out of court and 15 are pending.
Church records in Vermont show that Marshall knew Paquette had a history of molesting boys at parishes in Massachusetts and Indiana, but allowed him to join the Vermont diocese after being told by a church psychiatrist in Indiana that Paquette's problem had been cured.
Kane also provided a positive review of Paquette's progress in therapy. "It is my opinion that Father Paquette should return as soon as possible to a parish setting and observe the signals of caution which we have discussed," Kane wrote to Marshall on Nov. 6., 1974.
Another exchange of letters between Kane and Marshall in 1978 showed new allegations of sexual misconduct were being directed at Paquette.
Marshall wrote to Kane that he was considering leaving Paquette in his role as parish priest at Christ the King Church in Burlington despite the new allegations.
"Despite the demands of two sets of irate parents that 'something be done about this,' Father Paquette's pastor and I are determined to take the risk of leaving him in his present assignment," Marshall wrote to Kane on April 4, 1978.
"Our thinking is that, knowing the awareness of others concerning his problem, Father Paquette will have reason for 'self control'," the bishop added. "Do you agree with this thinking?"
Kane replied, "I do agree with your thinking. I do not believe it is 'too risky' to leave Father Paquette in his present assignment but, of course, can make no predictions."
Later that month, increased pressure from parents in the parish forced Marshall to change his mind. He wrote to Kane, "The situation had become so explosive that I had no other recourse but to ask Father Paquette to leave the parish immediately."
No telephone listing could be found Sunday for Edward Paquette at his last known address in Westfield, Mass. A message left at the headquarters of the Diocese of Worcester, which includes Whitinsville, was not immediately returned Sunday. News reports from 2002 placed Kane in Mexico.
Last week on August 1st, they released this press regarding the regulation of Drug Company Marketing Practices, etc in the state of Massachusetts.
Legislature Passes Rx Drug Marketing Reforms And Other Measures To Control Health Care Costs
The legislature enacted and sent to the Governor last night a Health Care Cost Control Bill that will begin to reign in aggressive and inappropriate marketing tactics by drug companies and medical device companies. Those excessive marketing tactics have resulted in excessive prescription drug costs and compromised care. Direct-to-physician industry marketing promotes the prescribing of expensive drugs in place of equally safe and effective lower-cost drugs and the prescribing of newer brand name drugs that have the least safety and efficacy information. The excessive marketing of Vioxx, for example, led to the prescribing of a new drug that ended up causing unforeseen heart problems that killed 40,000 people.
“While the bill does not include a complete ban on industry gifts to prescribers it does make a giant step forward in shining the light on this marketing practice through the disclosure of anything of more than $50 value, giving the DPH authority to ban some gifts, and including significant fines for violations of the new regulations,” said Deirdre Cummings, Legislative Director of MASSPIRG.
The final bill also included the following cost control reforms:
RX Drug Marketing Regulations: Requires pharmaceutical and medical device companies to disclose payments to health care providers of $50 or above to DPH which will make the disclosures publicly available. Directs DPH to establish regulations on pharmaceutical and medical device marketing, using the industry’s own Code as a minimum standard, and establishes a $5000 penalty for violation, enforceable by the Attorney General.
Creation of an Academic Detailing Program: A much needed counterweight to the industry’s commercial detailing and gift-giving marketing efforts. Academic detailing programs are cost-effective ways to improve physician prescribing behavior and so reduce health care costs: Based on other states’ experiences with academic detailing programs, Massachusetts can expect to save two to three dollars for every dollar we spend on academic detailing.
Use of Uniform Claim Codes: Currently, nearly one-third of all dollars spent on health care go toward administrative costs – and much of that is wasted on managing the tangle of bureaucratic claim codes created by different insurance plans. Conservative estimates project that the adoption of uniform claim codes will save Massachusetts hospitals over $50 million annually in administrative costs.
Public Reporting of Healthcare-Associated Infections and Serious Reportable Events: Requires facility-specific public reporting of infections, as already required in twenty-two other states and the reporting of, and allows for the nonpayment for, serious reportable events.
Taken together, these provisions will begin to contain the cost of health care in the commonwealth helping Massachusetts citizens continue to have access to affordable health care.
They spent $8.2 billion marketing their drugs last year.
And they don't exactly scrimp when it comes to hiring lobbyists to represent their interests on Beacon Hill, either.
Maybe that's why they're so upset that things didn't go their way last week, when the Legislature voted for the Health Care Cost Control Bill, which included reforms to curb drug companies' over-the-top marketing gimmicks.
But Big Pharma isn’t about to back down. They've already set their sights on the one person they think might overturn the decision: Gov. Deval Patrick.
Tell Gov. Patrick to stand up to the pressure and sign the Legislature's Health Care Cost Control Bill into law:
Follow these 3 easy steps to help out. 1. Look over the message below, and feel free to add your own comments. Using your own words makes the message more meaningful. 2. Sign the letter by filling in the form below. We will not share your information with anyone else. 3. Click the button to send your message.
We encourage citizens from the Sate of Massachusetts to sign the petition
Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been accused of sexually abusing one of her patients and contributing to his suicide, offered to resign her medical license today.
The offer was made four days before the state Board of Registration in Medicine was scheduled to present evidence against Dr. Bean-Bayog that could have led to the loss of her license.
After meeting tonight, members of the medical board announced that they would forward the letter and accompanying documents to the administrative judge in charge of the case for a decision on whether to go forward with the hearing on Monday, as scheduled.
But Jack Fabiano, the lawyer hired by the board to present the evidence against Dr. Bean-Bayog, called the resignation attempt "invalid" and said, "I view this as a highly improper attempt to circumvent normal trial procedures."
A member of the medical board, Paul Gitlin, said there were complications with Dr. Bean-Bayog's letter proposing her resignation, which would be permanent and would prevent her from practicing medicine anywhere in the nation. In most states, however, the loss of her medical license would not prevent Dr. Bean-Bayong from practicing as a therapist.
Continues to Declare Innocence
In her letter, Dr. Bean-Bayog continued to declare her innocence and denounced the board and the way it has treated her. Dr. Bean-Bayog said the hearing would be a "media circus" staged for "purely political purposes."
Dr. Bean-Bayog, who is 48 years old, said she wished to resign rather than endure "any further pandering to the public appetite for preposterous, salacious scandal." She specifically denounced both the state Secretary of Consumer Affairs, Gloria Larson, who has jurisdiction over the medical board, and Mr. Fabiano.
"I am not resigning because I fear the potential outcome of this hearing process," she wrote. "It is the process itself, which has already taken a heavy toll on me and my family, and not any potential verdict, that I find daunting."
Confession Unacceptable
In the last few weeks Dr. Bean-Bayog had been negotiating with the board for a settlement, but in her letter she said the board's offer to suspend her license was unacceptable because, she wrote, "It required me to confess to conduct I did not commit."
The medical board had prepared a strong case against her, people familiar with the case said, and it would have introduced evidence questioning her therapy methods and suggesting that she had become sexually involved with her patient, Paul Lozano, a Harvard Medical School student. Mr. Lozano, who began therapy with Dr. Bean-Bayog in 1986, killed himself with a large overdose of cocaine in April 1991 after she had stopped treating him.
Mr. Lozano's family has filed a lawsuit against Dr. Bean-Bayog charging her with malpractice and wrongful death. Andrew Meyer, the Lozano family's lawyer, said that Dr. Bean-Bayog's resignation would tend to help the family's case. Allegations Attract Notoriety
The case has attracted enormous national attention because of the sexual allegations and because of 3,000 pages of medical records introduced by Mr. Meyer that include sexual fantasies written by Dr. Bean-Bayog. At least two books and two television movies are in the works, and some of the hearing was to have been televised on Court TV. Officials of the state Division of Administrative Law Appeals, an independent state agency that is conducting the hearing, said they had received so many requests for press credentials that they had decided to move the proceeding to the State House auditorium, with a seating capacity of 600.
Dr. Bean-Bayog and some of her friends in the psychiatric community have said she is being unfairly singled out because she is a woman. They have argued that neither the press nor the medical board would have pursued the case so vigorously if she were a man.
Another psychiatrist, Dr. William Barry Gault, who also treated Mr. Lozano, first reported possible abuse by Dr. Bean-Bayog in late 1990. But it was not until last March, after Mr. Meyer filed 3,000 pages of evidence with the court and after the press subsequently began reporting about the case, that the medical board began its inquiry.
Sexual Fantasies Documented
Mr. Meyer's evidence included sadomasochistic sexual fantasies handwritten by Dr. Bean-Bayog, allegedly about Mr. Lozano, and flashcards she gave him.
One of the cards said: "Run over these cards every day until you know them all by heart and are starting to believe them." Another said, "I'm your mom and I love you and you love me very, very much. Say that 10 times." Still another said, "I'm going to miss so many things about you, the closeness and the need and the phenomenal sex."
Dr. Bean-Bayog has argued that these are examples of an accepted therapeutic technique called transference, in which the patient is asked to imagine the therapist as his mother.
Therapists often take patients back to their childhood to discover the source of troubling emotions. But Dr. Howard Zonana, a professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School, said: "It is one thing if you do this in a role-playing session. It's another thing if someone's reality is getting confused. Most doctors would not actually say they are the mom."
The most serious allegations against Dr. Bean-Bayog, and those that would provide the board with its clearest cause to strip her of her license, are very hard to prove: that she sexually abused Mr. Lozano and that she contributed to his death. Dr. Bean-Bayog has denied any sexual involvement with Mr. Lozano.
Nevertheless, the board appeared ready to try to prove these accusations. Its expanded list of charges, filed in June, includes one that she "improperly conducted and utilized psychotherapy sessions." According to people familiar with the case, the board will use this to introduce testimony from several other psychiatrists who treated Mr. Lozano that he had told them she slept with him and masturbated in front of him during therapy sessions.
'Somewhat Unconventional'
On the issue of suicide, the board's charges contend that "Dr. Bean-Bayog's failure to conform to the standards of accepted medical practice caused harm to Paul Lozano." The board is expected to call expert witness on that subject.
A second difficulty is that while the medical board has charged Dr. Bean-Bayog with failing "to conform to the standards of accepted medical practice," there is widespread disagreement among therapists about the boundaries of proper psychotherapy. In one of her few public statements, Dr. Bean-Bayog acknowledged that her treatment was "somewhat unconventional," but she asserted that this was necessary because Mr. Lozano was an especially troubled patient.
What Dick Cheney is to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, psychiatrist Joseph Biederman is to the explosion of psychiatric medications in American children. Recently, Biederman was nailed by congressional investigators and the New York Times for overestimating just how greedy an elite shrink is entitled to be. Beyond a peek into the corruption of psychiatry at its highest levels, the scandal is an opportunity to reconsider the Big Pharma financed view of why kids become disruptive and destructive.
On June 8, 2008, the New York Times reported the following about Joseph Biederman: "A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful anti-psychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given congressional investigators."
Due in part to Biederman's influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, and as Bloomberg News reported (September 2007), "The expanded use of bipolar as a pediatric diagnosis has made children the fastest-growing part of the $11.5 billion U.S. market for anti-psychotic drugs."
Pediatrician and author Lawrence Diller notes about Biederman, "He single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map." Biederman has been in a position to convince many doctors to diagnose bipolar disorder in children and to medicate them with anti-psychotic drugs. In addition to being a professor at Harvard, Biederman is also chief of research in pediatric psychopharmacology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, which publishes more than 30 papers yearly on psychiatric disorders. And Biederman himself has authored and co-authored approximately 500 articles, 70 book chapters, and more than 450 scientific abstracts, as well as being on the editorial board of many professional journals.
Biederman (and two of his colleagues in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School who received an additional $2.6 million from drug companies from 2000 to 2007), by failing to report income from drug companies while at the same time receiving federal funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), violated rules designed to police conflicts of interest, according to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley concluded, "Obviously, if a researcher is taking money from a drug company while also receiving federal dollars to research that company's product, then there is a conflict of interest." In one example, Biederman neglected to report his 2001 income from Johnson & Johnson (makers of the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal); Johnson & Johnson reported to Grassley that it had paid Biederman $58,169 in 2001. In addition to his popularization of bipolar disorder for children, Biederman is one of the most significant forces behind the commonplace diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Congressional investigators also found that Biederman conducted studies of Eli Lilly's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug Strattera that were funded by NIH at the same time he was receiving money from Lilly that exceeded the maximum amount permitted.
NIH rules state that researchers cannot take more than $20,000 in payments from a drug company whose drug they are funded by NIH to research and that researchers must disclose any payment received from a drug company of $10,000 or more. Apparently, for drug researchers taking federal funding from NIH, there is no law against being on the take from drug companies, but there are rules against greed.
Mental health treatment in the United States is now a multibillion-dollar industry, and all the rules of industrial complexes apply. Not only does Big Pharma have influential psychiatrists such as Biederman in their pocket, virtually every mental health institution from which doctors, the press, and the general public receive their mental health information is financially interconnected with Big Pharma. The American Psychiatric Association, psychiatry's professional organization, is hugely dependent on drug company grants, and this is also true for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other so-called consumer organizations. Harvard and other prestigious university psychiatry departments take millions of dollars from drug companies, and the National Institute of Mental Health funds researchers who are financially connected with drug companies.
The corporate media, dependent on drug company advertising, occasionally reports on egregious scandals, but the corporate media is generally timid in reporting the big picture of how drug companies spread around millions of dollars to make billions of dollars. There are certainly many troubled and disruptive American children who are sometimes extremely destructive to themselves or others. However, any attempt to understand these kids will be corrupted by financial dependency on drug companies, which have a vested interest in viewing all attentional, emotional, and behavioral difficulties as diseases that can be fixed with drugs.
There are several commonsense nondisease reasons why children become troubled and behave disruptively and destructively. For more than two decades, I have worked with annoying, disruptive, and destructive children. Many of these children had been previously diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, and other serious psychiatric diagnoses, and they were routinely given a variety of drug combinations. Their parents most often reported that drugs were prescribed after being questioned by doctors about symptoms but without any exploration of reasons as to why their children were behaving as they did.
In America's assembly-line medicine, drug prescriptions are routinely written without any exploration of commonsense reasons as to why a child might be behaving problematically. Is the child resentful over a perceived injustice? Is the child experiencing deep emotional pain? Is the child simply bored? Does the child feel powerless? Does the child have low self-worth because a lack of life skills and thus behaves immaturely so no expectations are placed on him or her? Is the child starving for attention? Has the child lost respect for his or her parents because these adults have not acted like adults? Has the child's basic physical needs -- such as proper nutrition, physical activity, or sleep -- not been met? Routinely, few if any of these areas are explored before a prescription is written.
One of the most common reasons that children behave problematically is that well-meaning parents are having difficulty relating to their child's personality. Perhaps the parents are, by nature, compliant and conformist, and their child has a nonconformist and rebellious temperament. Good parents feel guilty when they have difficulty relating to their child, but all of us -- including doctors -- are human, and we all need to admit our limitations. The reality is that children who feel that nobody "gets them" are more likely to be troubled and disruptive. In another era, if a parent had difficulty relating to his or her child, there would more likely be at least one grandparent, uncle, aunt, friend, or other adult in the community who could easily relate. In our increasingly disconnected society (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone for a detailed picture of the destruction of American community), there are increasing numbers of children without even one adult who they believe relates to them.
Moreover, as society demands increasing machinelike efficiency, more of us -- children and adults -- will not be able to fit in; but a corporate media cannot confront a corporate culture that produces widespread painful alienation, which in turn creates a variety of attentional, emotional and behavioral problems.The corporate media may at times report on egregious corruption of an individual or an institution, but it does not ask this question: In an increasingly homogenized and standardized society, should we drug those who do not neatly fit in -- or should we consider transforming such a society?
The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Massachusetts is an institution that has long earned our distaste and disdain. So news of a search with a search warrant is most welcome. As reported in the Boston Globe earlier this month
State Police seized documents late last week from the offices of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton that are related to a prank phone call last summer that led two students to wrongfully receive dozens of punishing electrical shocks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the investigation.
The collection of evidence has to do with a yearlong grand jury investigation led by the office of Attorney General Martha Coakley, said Kenneth Mollins, a New York lawyer who has filed several lawsuits against the school and who said he spoke to a representative of Coakley's office about the Rotenberg investigation. Mollins said he was told the grand jury is also examining possible financial improprieties by the school.
The second source, who works for the state and asked to remain nameless because this person is not authorized to speak about grand jury proceedings, said State Police investigators came with a search warrant and left with boxes of documents. The source said the investigation had an ambitious scope and involves multiple government agencies.
Reached last night, Ernest Corrigan, a spokesman for the school, did not confirm that a seizure of documents had occurred last week. He said only that school officials have been cooperative with state and local police ever since they reported the prank phone call to police last summer.
"We've been supportive of the investigation," he said.
A spokesman for Coakley declined to comment, saying the office never confirms or denies an ongoing investigation.
The special-education school, which serves about 250 adults and children from across the country with emotional and behavioral problems, has been the target of numerous government investigations related to its unorthodox behavior-modification methods, including skin-shock treatments to deter inappropriate behavior. Rotenberg officials, who have weathered two attempts by Massachusetts officials to close the center, have defended its treatment methods as effective for some students.
School officials have also said they have instituted numerous safeguards to prevent a repeat of the Aug. 26 incident, in which two emotionally disturbed students wrongfully received dozens of electrical shocks based on instructions from a caller posing as a supervisor. The incident was caught on 24-hour surveillance tapes, which were shown to investigators last summer. The tapes were subsequently destroyed by school officials, even though investigators had instructed them to preserve the tapes.
After hearing about the destruction of the tapes, Senator Brian A. Joyce, a Democrat from Milton who has sought to ban shock therapy at the school, said he intended to ask the attorney general's office to look into the matter.
The estate of 4-year-old Rebecca Riley, who died after an overdose of psychiatric drugs, has sued her psychiatrist for medical malpractice, claiming the doctor is responsible for the girl’s death.
The attorney who represents Rebecca Riley’s estate said that Tufts Medical Center psychiatrist Dr. Kayoko Kifuji misdiagnosed the girl as bipolar and having attention deficit disorder when she was less than 2 1/2 years old, then prescribed a series of powerful drugs that eventually killed the girl. Kifuji diagnosed Rebecca’s brother and sister, now 13 and 7, with the same illnesses and prescribed drugs for them as well.
The siblings are the beneficiaries of Rebecca’s estate. They are together in a foster home in Massachusetts, a relative told the Patriot Ledger today.
Rebecca Riley died at her parents’ apartment in Hull in December 2006. The family formerly lived in Weymouth.
Her parents, Carolyn and Michael Riley, are awaiting trial on second-degree murder charges, accused of killing their daughter by intentionally overdosing her with powerful drugs, including Clonidine, a blood-pressure medication used as a sedative in children. Clonidine was one of several drugs prescribed by Kifuji.
Andrew Meyer Jr., the attorney who represents the estate, says the battery of powerful drugs Kifuji prescribed made the girl a “4-year-old zombie” and eventually killed her.
The suit was filed Thursday in Suffolk Superior Court.
Investigators in the Riley case said that a school nurse at the Johnson Early Childhood Center in Weymouth where Rebecca was a student had talked to Kifuji and Carolyn Riley about the girl’s medication. The nurse said that the staff was concerned because Rebecca was too lethargic from the drugs to fully participate in school, investigators said.
Kifuji has not been charged in the case but voluntarily surrendered her medical license while the case is being reviewed by state regulators.
Tufts Medical Center said it supports Kifuji and the care she provided.
The defense attorneys for both Carolyn and Michael Riley have from the start blamed Kifuji for overmedicating the little girl.
As Reported in the Boston Globe. While not a psychiatrist, since this involves allegations of child abuse, we might be able to make an exception in our reporting this time
A renowned pediatrician and best-selling author who served for 14 years as chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston was accused of sexually abusing at least seven children in his care in a lawsuit filed today in Suffolk Superior Court.
The lawsuit, filed by one unnamed plaintiff, alleges that Dr. Melvin D. Levine "sexually assaulted, battered, and abused" him between 1980 and 1985.
"Levine, during his treatment sessions, under the guise of performing repeated but unnecessary physical examinations, sexually assaulted John No. 5, including numerous acts of genital fondling, masturbation, and other attempted and threatened acts of assault," the lawsuit alleges.
In a statement, Levine’s Boston lawyer Edward Mahoney said the doctor is innocent.
"Dr. Mel Levine has provided pediatric care to more than 15,000 children over 40 years and categorically denies that he has ever been abusive in any way toward any patient," Mahoney said. "He adamantly denies these claims. Dr. Levine is distressed about the distorted or misinterpreted memories from decades past, and questions the motivations. He prefers not to participate further in counsel’s efforts to obtain free advertising for his legal practice."
In a separate statement, officials at Children’s Hospital said Levine worked there between 1971 and 1985, specializing in children with developmental and educational issues.
"This work led to Dr. Levine developing a national reputation as an expert in these fields," according to the statement.
Hospital officials said they "never had any complaint from any patient or parent of any patient suggesting inappropriate conduct of any nature by Dr. Levine."
They added: "Children’s Hospital’s most important goal is to protect children’s health and promote their well being. Our staff is trained and experienced in detecting abuse and mistreatment of children. Such behavior, if identified, is treated with the utmost seriousness and addressed immediately."
Levine, who trained as a resident at the hospital starting in 1965, went on to practice at the University of North Carolina Medical Center.
Dr. Mel Levine is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Dr. Levine is also the co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, a non-profit institute for the study of differences in learning, with financier Charles R. Schwab.
Over the past thirty years, Dr. Levine has pioneered programs for the evaluation of children and young adults with learning, development, and/or behavioral problems. In 1995, Dr. Levine received the C. Anderson Aldrich Award for outstanding contribution to the field of child development. In 2005, he was named the most admired person in education by Scholastic Press.
Dr. Levine graduated summa cum laude from Brown University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in England. He later graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his pediatric training at The Children's Hospital in Boston. Dr. Levine served for fourteen years as Chief of the Division of Ambulatory Pediatrics at The Children's Hospital and was an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at The Harvard Medical School before moving to North Carolina. Dr. Levine served as Director of the University of North Carolina’s Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning for 21 years.
We can only hope that he was not infected with the "psychiatric disease"
Apparently she didn't feel like leaving a party to do her job, and then was acting offensively and arrogant, etc -- well you read the story. As reported in the Worcester Telegram
State medical regulators last week suspended the license of a local psychiatrist, who practiced at UMass Memorial Medical Center and at a private practice in Westboro, after the doctor allegedly ignored an on-call assignment last spring and then assaulted two hospital police officers and a nursing supervisor later that day.
Dr. Perveen Rathore, 51, of 5 Arrowhead Lane, Westboro, voluntarily agreed not to practice medicine in early June 2007, shortly after the fracas at UMass Memorial. The state Board of Registration in Medicine yanked her medical license March 5, according to state records.
The board’s order alleges Dr. Rathore was the on-call psychiatrist for UMass Memorial on Sunday, May 20, but refused to come in to evaluate an uncooperative patient because she was at a party at the time.
When she showed up at the hospital later that day — after another psychiatrist had been summoned to do the competency evaluation — Dr. Rathore refused to leave the building and grew increasingly belligerent, according to the order. A nursing supervisor called hospital police when she found Dr. Rathore typing an e-mail in the building after being told to leave several times.
“Two UMass police officers approached the respondent and instructed her to leave the hospital, but the respondent ignored them and kept typing,” the order states. “One of the police officers reached over to shut off the computer monitor, and the respondent struck him.”
When the officers moved to arrest Dr. Rathore, she screamed and fought with them and also struck the nursing supervisor, according to the order.
Dr. Rathore was charged with three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (shod foot), disorderly conduct and trespassing. The charges were later dismissed in Central District Court, according to court records.
UMass Memorial spokeswoman Alison Duffy said the hospital accepted the state board’s disciplinary action against Dr. Rathore.
“She did not practice here after the May 2007 incident. She was removed from service at that point,” Ms. Duffy said.
Dr. Rathore also had a private practice called Child and Family Services of Westborough, according to the report. The West Main Street psychiatric office’s telephone number has been disconnected.
After the incident with UMass Memorial police, the doctor was taken to the emergency room complaining of chest pain. She was civilly committed to Wing Memorial Hospital in Palmer that day and released two days later, according to the order.
Dr. Rathore’s home telephone number in Westboro is unlisted, and her Boston lawyer didn’t return a call yesterday.
The suspension of her medical license could be lifted if she successfully completes a program of behavioral modification and treatment, according to the order.
“The board’s primary goal is always to ensure patient safety, but it always wants to help physicians return to health practice,” said Russell Aims, spokesman for the Board of Registration in Medicine.
An interesting attempt by drug maker Pzifer to stop the bleeding of bad reviews and bad news related to its products. Report seen in the Independent
A multinational drugs company is trying to force a medical science journal to reveal the confidential statements made by the journal's expert reviewers in a test case that could undermine one of the central tenets of the scientific process.
Pfizer, the manufacturer of the anti-impotency drug Viagra, is trying to force the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) to release the names and comments of its anonymous peer reviewers who judged a dozen studies into two of the company's pain-killing drugs.
Pfizer has issued a subpoena demanding that the journal release the identities and comments of its referees, who normally remain anonymous so that they will feel free to give their honest opinions.
A US district court judge is expected to rule this week on whether the drug company can force the NEJM to release the information, which some scientists claim would damage the confidential peer-review system that science uses to evaluate the merits of prepublication research.
Pfizer, which is based in New York, is being sued for damages allegedly caused by the drugs Celebrex and Bextra. Both pain killers belong to the same class of Cox-2 inhibitors as Vioxx, which was withdrawn in September 2004 because of fears that it had caused thousands of heart attacks and strokes. Although Bextra has been withdrawn, Celebrex is still on sale.
As part of its defence, Pfizer is seeking any additional information that may support its case. "Scientific journals such as NEJM may have received manuscripts that contain exonerating data for Celebrex and Bextra which would be relevant for Pfizer's causation defence," the company says in its motion.
But Donald Kennedy, the editor of the journal Science, said that this amounts to a fishing expedition. "If this motion succeeds, what journal will not then become an attractive target for a similar assault?" he wrote in a signed editorial. At stake is the public's interest in a fair system of evaluating and publishing scientific work.
The motion filed by Pfizer claims that the public has no interest in protecting the editorial process of a scientific journal.
The sad story of a very sweet girl who died as the result of complication of side effects of medications she was on, which included Antidepressants. From this report
Emily Maurand had a vision.
It might not have been a vision others could see. But to her, it was clear and it was vibrant.
“She started drawing once she could hold a pencil,” recalled Emily’s mother, Jeanne Maurand. “I have drawings from when she was 3 years old.” Through her early years, her artistic ability and vision grew.
“She could see things other kids didn’t and could put it on paper,” said Jeanne. “She loved movement and color.”
Flipping through a portfolio of her work, Jeanne can see her daughter in the drawings of angels and self-portraits. Others such as a cartoon sketch of an old woman watching television with a sock puppet covering one hand leave her wondering what her daughter was thinking.
After graduating from Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School in 2000, Emily went on to attend the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., where she earned a degree in computer animation.
Jeanne said Emily loved color so she was naturally drawn to animation, where she could scan her illustrations onto a computer and then add and change the color until she was satisfied with the result. Animation also allowed her art to take another form through movement.
During her time at college, Emily sketched in many different genres, such as classical, medieval and whimsical. She also enjoyed designing clothes and cakes. Her senior thesis, entitled “The Field,” included a series of animated flowers and plants that seem to come alive off the page.
Jeanne said her daughter never seemed satisfied with dreaming small, instead always going after the big ideas such as the dream of one day writing, producing and acting in her own feature film.
“She wanted to do it all,” said Jeanne. “She was highly motivated.”
When Emily was 9 that dream was realized on the small screen she wrote a story, had her sister, Lauren, tape it, and Emily and her younger brother, Jordan, acted in it. She would also write scripts for her friends to act out, such as “Conversations at a tea party,” said Jeanne.
At the Regional, Emily had taken some film and editing classes, and after graduating college in 2005 had been helping Bill Melvin tape local concerts on the town’s Comcast network. She had decided to attend the Academy of Art Film School in San Francisco and was to attend in the fall of 2007.
Emily’s dream, however, came to an abrupt end on Feb. 13 of last year, when she was 25.
Jeanne described her daughter’s accidental death as “out of the blue” and “traumatic.” Emily was looking forward to so many things and was very busy. But her many self-portraits show a young woman of many moods. She had been taking an anti-depressant, unbeknownst to her family, and her mother said the cause of her death was related to a complication from the prescription medication she was taking.
She loved her time at the Ringling School and so her family has set up an art scholarship in her memory to help future students there.
They are hosting a benefit on Sunday, Feb. 10, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Community House of Hamilton and Wenham, 284 Bay Road, Hamilton.
The event hopefully will begin the process of raising money for the scholarship, but it is also intended to “show people her artistic vision with an art show,” said Jeanne. “The second part of the evening is dedicated to music.”
The event will feature an art show of Emily’s work, both her visual art and her animations shown on the movie screen. Her aunt, Chris Van Dyke, will play her Celtic harp, along with musical performances from other friends and family. Her uncle, Curtis, will play a John Denver tune and the Solstice Singers, of which Jeanne is a member, will also sing.
For Jeanne and the rest of her family her husband, David, and their two other children organizing the event helps them to work on something positive.
“We have been grieving hard this past year,” she said. “With the anniversary of her death coming, I feel like I have to do something special.”
The family has also kept the wonderful memories of Emily alive, such as the fact that Emily liked to dress up and wear costumes. Her favorite time of the day was the morning because a new adventure was about to begin.
“She was the sunshine in the morning,” said Jeanne.
Refreshments will be served at the event, where all ages are welcome.
Donations will be accepted for the scholarship that evening or can be sent to Dennis Barnett at Salem Five, 2 Bay Road, South Hamilton, MA 01982.
A psychiatrist who founded a methadone clinic in Westbrook has lost his appeal of his conviction and six-month prison sentence for prescription fraud.
A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston denied the appeal of Dr. Marc Shinderman, who was found guilty in 2006 of writing prescriptions for controlled substances using another doctor's name and drug registration number.
Shinderman, who started CAP Quality Care in 2001, was not licensed to write the prescriptions in Maine and said he believed that the arrangement was acceptable.
In its ruling Tuesday, the appeals court rejected all four of Shinderman's arguments, including the trial judge's refusal to allow jurors to hear his proposed entrapment defense and the use of an obstruction of justice enhancement during sentencing.
As Reported in The Boston Globe, via the Raw Story Weblog. It seems that the tape was intentionally destroyed because it was incriminating.
A special education school destroyed videotape showing two of its students being wrongly given electric shock treatments despite being ordered to preserve the tape, according to an investigator's report.
One student was shocked 77 times and the other 29 times after a prank caller posing as a supervisor ordered the treatments at a Judge Rotenberg Educational Center group home in August. The boys are 16 and 19 years old and one was treated for first-degree burns.
The Disabled Persons Protection Commission planned to release the report Tuesday concluding that one of the teenagers was severely physically and emotionally abused by the treatments. The commission has referred the case to the Norfolk district attorney's office.
The videotapes compiled footage from cameras inside the home in Stoughton. An investigator with the commission, which examines abuse allegations and can refer cases for criminal prosecution, viewed the tapes and asked for a copy, according to the commission's report obtained by The Boston Globe.
But school officials declined, saying they "did not want any possibility of the images getting into the media." The investigator told the school to preserve a copy so state police could use it in their criminal investigation. A trooper later told the investigator the tapes had been destroyed.
School spokesman Ernest Corrigan said school officials worried the images would be leaked to the public, further disrupting the lives of the two students who were wrongly shocked.
Earlier this week, the school's founder and director Matthew Israel said the tapes were reviewed by several investigators and were not preserved because the investigation "seemed to be finished."
The Judge Rotenberg Center is the only one in the nation that uses shock treatments for its special education students, most of whom are mentally retarded, autistic or emotionally disturbed.
Parents praise the shock therapy as the only treatment that has helped their children, but critics say it's abusive and often administered for only minor infractions. State Sen. Brian Joyce, who has long sought to ban shock therapy from the school, said Israel and his staff should be investigated for obstruction of justice.
"I believe the tape was intentionally destroyed because it was incriminating," said Joyce, a Democrat. "I intend to ask the attorney general to investigate."
A YouTube video on Autism Issues at the Judge Rotenburg Center in Canton, Massachusetts. Human rights abuses against autistics are investigated in this docu-short.
Electric Shock is used and Advocated by the Judge Rotenburg Center. We are of the opinion that Electric Shock is cruel and unusual punishment disguised as therapy. We feel that it should be banned.
The Judge Rotenburg Center has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student.
But how dis it get its name?
In 1985, after representations from the National Society for Autistic Children and other advocacy groups, the Massachusetts Office for Children sought to close the Institute. It was allowed to continue operation using aversion therapy under a settlement agreement approved by Chief Judge Ernest Rotenberg, and subsequently became known as the Judge Rotenberg Center.
Until the late 1980s, aversion therapy was administered in the form of spanking with a spatula, pinching the feet, and forced inhalings of ammonia.
Later the Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED) was invented to administer painful electric skin-shocks by remote control through electrodes worn against the skin at all times. More conventional treatments such as psychotherapy and psychiatric medication are not provided.
Concerns into the treatment regime prompted investigation by New York City Council[6] and an independent report was commissioned which was critical of both processes and oversight at the facility. In spite of these findings, and the deaths of six students enrolled in the school, the school remains open.
Furthermore, members of the autistic community have expressed great concern that the methods of treatment are ineffective, excessive, and possibly a human rights violation.
Many parents of difficult children are highly supportive of the treatment, especially as they can use the GED on home visits. Said one mother, "[All I have to do is show it to my son and...] he'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'... It's made him a human being, a civilized human being."
Wonderful, Terrorism as a form of parenting. Kids behaving based on intense fear, not based on education, example, or empathy. Didn't they try this at Abu-Grabe?
All of which sounds like the doctrine of "The beatings will continue until morale improves"
Recently, the Center has come under fire thanks to the Mother Jones article "School of Shock, which publicized the questionable treatment used at the the Center.
Dr. Matthew Israel, founder of the JRC, has been known to utilize the GED on children who merely suffer from ADD. The article documents a case in which one of the childcare "professionals" (who don't even possess college degrees) shocked a young girl who sneezed for asking for a tissue.
More severe offenses are punished by strapping the child to the board and shocking them again and again for ten straight minutes. Also, their is a current lawsuit against the center filed by the parents of a former patient.
The Center petitioned the courts to give the plaintiff a court appointed guardian, who authorized the Center to use a GED on the child, thus bypassing parental consent.
Also, although Israel points to the theories of B. F. Skinner as evidence for the effectiveness of aversive therapy, Skinner himself denounced the treatment late in his life.
In light of this new publicity, many activists are now speaking out against the Center. Massachusetts teenagers have formed the group Massachusetts Students United Against the Judge Rotenberg Center, which is based at Brandeis University in Waltham, 20 miles away from the school's Canton campus. Currently, this group, along with others such as the Association of Retarded Citizens, is campaigning for harsher restrictions on the use of aversive therapy.
A legislative committee will examine the use of electric shock treatments on students at a controversial special education school.
Today’s hearing follows a state investigation into an incident last summer at a group home in Stoughton run by the Judge Rotenberg Education Center. Two emotionally disturbed students were wrongly given dozens of shocks after a prank call from a person posing as a supervisor.
The Committee on Children, Families and Individuals with Disabilities is considering a bill that would prohibit aversive therapy and another that would restrict its use.
Psychologists and former Rotenberg employees are among those expected to testify in favor of the legislation. But some parents are scheduled to testify about what they say are the benefits of the therapy.
Of Interest is this letter to the editor in the Boston Globe by a psychiatrist from the State of New York, regarding the recent start of mental health screening for children under the care of the Medicaid program.
As a psychiatrist since 1947, I am appalled that mental health screening is now being required of Massachusetts children on Medicaid ("Mental screening for young to begin," Page A1, Dec. 27). Such screening greatly exaggerates the significance of the normal variations in psychological state. more stories like this
Normal kids will therefore be labeled "sick" and referred for "treatment." That labeling is often harmful in itself; once tagged, how does a kid prove he's not mentally ill?
In some middle-class families, treatment may be individual or family counseling. Whether it helps or is merely wasteful, it usually causes relatively little harm. For Medicaid kids, however, treatment will almost always involve powerful drugs whose serious side effects can include the stunting of growth. Mental health screening is thus a harmful invasion of the privacy of Medicaid youngsters.
An effort to expand the psychiatric services market to children in Massachusetts is now underway. This despite the horrific death of young Rebbecca Riley due to overdoses of psychiatric drugs.
This is part of a court ordered remedy due to another psychiatric screwup. Unfortunately, the inappropriate answer ordered was more psychiatry. Inappropriate due to the woeful track record of psychiatry, especially as documented on this site.
As of Monday, annual checkups for the nearly half a million Massachusetts children on Medicaid will carry a new requirement: Doctors must offer simple questionnaires to detect warning signs of possible mental health problems, from autism in toddlers to depression in teens.
The checklists vary by age but ask questions about children's behavior - whether they are spending more time alone, seeming to have less fun, having trouble sleeping - that are designed to trigger discussion between parents and doctors. The conversations may or may not lead to a referral to a specialist.
Over the last several years, such questionnaires have increasingly become the standard of care in pediatric practices, but - spurred by legal action - Massachusetts is jumping ahead of other states by requiring the screens for all its young Medicaid recipients.
The new requirement represents "a huge step forward in a direction that is a national trend," said Dr. Robin Adair, a University of Massachusetts Medical School pediatrician and screening specialist.
Supporters say the screening can catch issues earlier, before they develop into hard-to-manage crises.
Skeptics warn that more children could end up on heavy-duty medications that they don't really need.
"In a more perfect world, screening for mental illness amongst children would clearly be a good idea," said Dr. John Abramson, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and author of "Overdosed America."
"But let's look at the realities of the world we live in," he said. "What happens is that there's a very quick translation of mental health symptoms into drug treatment."
Others wonder how Massachusetts' overburdened mental health system for children will handle the new patients the screening is expected to identify.
Already, children's psychiatrists and psychologists are often overbooked. Children with serious mental illness sometimes end up stuck in psychiatric hospitals for lack of mental health services in the community.
If, as expected, the new screening requirement turns up more children with mental health problems, "I do think it creates a potential additional access problem," said Dr. David DeMaso, chief of psychiatry at Children's Hospital Boston.
The new screening requirement stems from a lawsuit, Rosie D. v. Romney, that accused the state of falling down on its obligations to poor, mentally ill children. The federal judge in the case ruled in January 2006 that Massachusetts must improve its care, and the new requirement is the first step in the state's court-ordered remedy plan.
Families may decline the screening if they wish. If a screen turns up signs of potential trouble, it is also up to the family whether to pursue further help and an official diagnosis.
The new requirement applies to the 460,000 children and young adults covered by MassHealth, the state Medicaid program, at annual checkups from birth to age 21.
The state's private insurers generally already reimburse children's doctors for such written screens, and Medicaid will now pay $9.73 to cover the testing.
[...]
As the routine screening gets underway, the state will be tracking how many children are tested and how many screens indicate a need for follow-up, said Emily Sherwood, who is overseeing the state's remedy for the Rosie D. case as director of its Children's Behavioral Health Interagency Initiatives. The state also plans to expand mental health services for children and make them more family friendly.
Factoid 01
In the 1999-2000 US election, the drug industry spent more money on political lobbying than any other industry.
Factoid 02
There are some very strange strong political links between the current President Bush, and psych drug maker Eli Lily
Factoid 03
In at least one state, psychiatrists are more than 7 times more likely to be a sex abuser compared to other physicians
Factoid 04
The World Health Organization concludes that living in a developed country is a ''strong predictor'' that a patient never will fully recover from Schizophrenia.
Factoid 05
Study reveals that sudden deaths are 5 times more common in people with a history of psychiatric
contact
Factoid 06
74% of children and adolescents have suffered a bad sideffect during their treatment with SSRI Psych Drugs
Factoid 07
At least 21 thousand avoidable suicides may have been induced by Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft side effects, without any warnings to the victims or their families.
Factoid 08
What are the odds that male psychiatrists will be disciplined for sexual misconduct sometime in their careers?
Factoid 9 A Critical Investigation of the History of Psychiatry reveals that Psychiatry is not everything that it is cracked up to be.
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