Mind Mental Health Charity Research Team Refuse to Research Side Effects
The UK’s most synonymous mental health charity Mind do some good work, but won’t pursue questions raised over health rights. Mind regularly conduct research surveys. This at one time included an annual one called ‘The Big Mental Health Survey’. Although the survey did include a question asking if patients were warned about side effects when being prescribed medications (and media outlets reported it found out they were not), there was yet again no research included on any details of those side effects themselves, or if they continue to persist beyond treatment.
So I have set up a long-term campaign and petition for Mind to include side effects in their surveys. Please sign it!
The most important area of mental health industry research still completely absent is any follow-up of patient outcomes from treatments, both it’s harms and merits, since the beginning of the industry itself when mental health treatments were still called mental hygiene. Without any research of harm and treatment outcomes no one can evaluate the benefit-to-risk ratio of treatments and mental health professionals cannot provide informed consent.
Mind is in the best placed position to fill in in this gap and by including this vital missing piece research in their surveys, they would be providing a great and unrivalled service to the entire world. Even though Mind collaborate on campaigns such as ‘Time to Change’, ‘Heads Together’, ‘Mental Health First Aid’ and the governments ‘Every Mind Matters’ campaign with entities that do take funding from drug companies. Mind are the only mental health entity of note itself that does not take funding directly from drug companies, unlike other mental health involved charities and bureaucracy such as Rethink (who provide the secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Mental Health), the drug regulator (MHRA), the government, universities, psychiatrists, doctors, Key Opinion Leaders and even the medical journals whom all are unlikely to ever conduct this missing research.
So I contacted Mind by phone to request that they include side effects in their surveys and after some amount of persistence I was given the email address for the Mind research team. I issued them a personal heartfelt reason why this research would improve the health outcomes and safety in mental health. They responded… declining to introduce research into side effects in their surveys.
Having suffered immeasurable life ruining harms myself from mental health treatments being abused as a guinea pig since a young child for having OCD and Tourette’s Syndrome disabilities, I figured it’s best not to just let the failed status quo lie. I have been rendered effectively irreversibly chemically castrated from mental health treatments for these disabilities since I was a young child (about 9) among suffering many other injuries and withdrawal from past treatment. Many of the medications that I was prescribed (or targeted with) have also been used to actually chemically castrate criminal sex offenders. I and my family did not receive any informed consent, we were lied to by mental health experts when a lack of a real knowledge base exists and I have recieved no help in dealing with all this. I know now that I must not be the only one. After all antidepressants and antipsychotics have been used forcibly and under coercion on mental health patients for more than 60 years.
There was a time after these injuries occurred that I attended an ask questions about your medications event held at a group home alongside other adults with serious mental health disabilities (including people being diagnosed with schizophrenia) on mental health medications. I embarrassingly shared that my medications have caused me permanent impotence. The student organizer of the event then asked the rest of the room if they experienced the same thing and almost every other man in the room gradually rose their hand that their medications had too caused impotence.
I conducted a pilot twitter poll to see if the wider universe think that Mind should include side effects in their surveys or not and these were the results.
Mind are in a great position, if not the best position, to defend the safety rights of people with mental health disabilities, against continued and un-researched experimentation because of their more independent financing structure and they simply should not continue to stand by and let this cycle of discrimination and abuse go on any longer.
Mind was originally formed from 3 organizations, the Central Association for Mental Welfare (CAMW), National Council for Mental Hygiene (NCMH), and the Child Guidance Council (CGC), that joined together. The National Council for Mental Hygiene that formed in to Mind was made up of psychiatrists and psychologists whose job it was to identify people in the community who would they would deem not fit to have children, to be sterilized.
Many people have been harmed in a variety of ways from mental health treatment, including Akathasia, Tardive Dyskinesia, Irreversible sexual dysfunction, birth defects, dangerous medication-induced obesity, heart failure, brain damage and trapped in medication addiction to name just a few. There are some people who have been affected by such harms that campaign on twitter under the handle of Prescribed Harm. They have been treated in an appalling way, denigrated, denied, ignored and tossed aside by psychiatry.
No doubt, Mind do a lot of good advocacy work but is it time for Mind to take a stand? What type of history does Mind want to forge?
Please sign the petition for Mind the mental health charity to include side effects in their surveys or find out more at mhpetition.com
Read Part 2 of Mind the mental health charity research team refuse to research side effects
