Released on: September 19, 2008, 11:13 am

Press Release Author: Citizens Commission on Human Rights International

Industry: Non Profit

Press Release Summary: After 25 years of psychiatric research attempting to single
out a genetic component to verify the medical existence of schizophrenia, a panel of
medical researchers from Australia, France, and the United States concluded that no
such genes exist, nullifying the genetic theory that psychiatrists have passed off
as factual despite any conclusive evidence.

Press Release Body: The study entitled “No Significant Association of 14 Candidate
Genes with Schizophrenia in a Large European Ancestry Sample: Implications for
Psychiatric Genetics,” published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found there
is no significant association of schizophrenia with hereditary markers previously
thought to be indicative of it.

“Research has never shown any link between genes and schizophrenia,” said Mary
Boyle, emeritus professor of clinical psychology from the University of East London.
“There has been a vast amount of time and money spent. Yet nothing has come from it.
If people want to continue this research, good luck to them. But my worry is that
they are being given public funding.”

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) says this latest study reinforces
their call for governments to stop wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars
for psychiatric research that has failed to find a single verifiable cause for
mental illness in more than fifty years. According to figures from the National
Institutes of Health, an average of over $350 million has been spent on
schizophrenia research each year since 2004, approximately $1.4 billion in the past
four years alone. This exorbitant government spending has played a role in
justifying the development and subsequent approval of dangerous, mind-altering drugs
that are sold to millions who have been convinced that the diagnosis of
schizophrenia is a verifiable medical condition on par with physical disease.

Decades ago, the late psychiatrist Loren Mosher, former chief of schizophrenia
research for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), from 1968 to 1980,
questioned the psychiatric pretense that schizophrenia is a type of physiological
disorder requiring psychotropic drugs to correct it, and even proved that patients
diagnosed as schizophrenic could be successfully treated without drugs as early as
1971. Mosher used NIMH funds to test his theory stating “schizophrenia can be
overcome with the help of meaningful relationships rather than with drugs, and that
such treatment would eventually lead to unquestionably healthier lives.” He opened
Soteria House, a place where patients diagnosed schizophrenic lived drug free with
non-professional staff trained to listen, understand and provide them with
companionship. Mosher’s experiment results exceeded his expectations and in six
weeks, patients recovered as quickly as those treated with drugs in hospitals,
without the risk of highly dangerous and even life-threatening antipsychotics. The
Soteria House patients also stayed well longer, relapse rates were lower, they were
better at holding jobs and attending schools. Unfortunately, Mosher’s success
outraged mainstream psychiatry, due to the fact it did not support or promote the
biological drug model, prompting NIMH to cut off funding for Soteria House, causing
its closure. In 1998, Mosher publicly resigned from the American Psychiatric
Association (APA), stating, “The major reason for this action is my belief that I am
actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association.” He added,
“A Marxist would observe that being a good capitalist organization, APA likes only
those drugs from which it can derive a profit — directly or indirectly.”

Mosher’s viewpoint that schizophrenia is not a physiological condition requiring
drugs but a psychological one requiring humane, workable treatments and his approach
to non-drug treatments, has been validated not only by the schizophrenia gene
candidate study — showing there is no genetic marker to validate schizophrenia as a
genetic medical condition, but also by several recent medical studies, including one
entitled “Factors Involved in Outcome and Recovery in Schizophrenia Patients Not on
Antipsychotic Medications: A 15-Year Multifollow-Up Study,” which proved that after
15 years, people with schizophrenia who discontinued taking the anti-psychotic drugs
prescribed them fared better than patients who took the drugs.

For almost 40 years, CCHR has been exposing the fraud of psychiatrists promoting
biological factors to mental disorders that have never been scientifically proven to
exist, in order to justify administering potentially lethal drugs to millions.
Antipsychotic drug sales are a $19 billion industry.

This message is a public service announcement provided by the Citizens Commission on
Human Rights International (CCHR ®). CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of
Scientology to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. For
more information go to www.cchr.org.

Web Site: http://www.cchr.org/

Contact Details: Address: 6616 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90028
Phone number: 800 869 2247