Psychiatry Said To Be Culpable For Woman’s Suicide

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a psychiatric watchdog group established by the Church of Scientology, has asked a Victoria, British Columbia coroners inquest to take Ellie Boisvert’s dying words to heart and put the psychiatrist responsible for her care and treatment at the forefront of the investigation. The group has also asked that justice actions be taken against the psychiatrist.

According information brought out at the inquest conducted by Regional Coroner Rose Stanton, Ellie Boisvert, 56, left the Eric Martin Pavilion, the psychiatric ward of the Royal Jubilee Hospital, on July 29, 2005, on a four to six-hour pass.

According to the Times Colonist, Ms.Boisvert didn’t return from her pass and was found dead on Aug. 17, 2005, in Layritz Park. Near her body was a note, which police investigation revealed was Boisvert’s own handwriting. Ms. Boisvert said in the note she didn’t want to spend one more moment in the “EMP.” Nor did she want to continue living as a psychiatric patient growing steadily worse. “It’s not life.”

Another fault in the psychiatric industry, according to a study by Lisa Cosgrove, a psychologist from the University of Massachusetts and Sheldon Krimsky, a Tuft University professor, is psychiatry’s billing bible itself , the Diagonstic and Satistical Manual of Mental Disorgers (DSM). The study documents how pharmaceutical companies who manufacture drugs for “mental disorders” funded psychiatrists who defined the disorders for the manual. One hundred percent of the “experts” on DSM-IV panels overseeing so-called “mood disorders” (which includes “depression”) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorders” were financially involved with drug companies. These are the largest categories of psychiatric drugs in the world: 2004 sales of $20.3 billion for antidepressants and $14.4 billion for antipsychotic drugs alone.

Dr. Cosgrove also raised crucial points about the lack of science behind the DSM, stating, “No blood tests exist for the disorders in the DSM. It relies on judgments from practitioners who rely on the manual.”

Victoria psychologist, Dr. Tana Dineen, the author of Manufacturing Victims that debunks the DSM, says that unlike medical diagnoses, DSM disorders are “voted” into existence by APA members. They can also be removed if they are too much trouble. In 1973, the APA voted—5,584 to 3,810—to cease calling homosexuality a mental disorder after gay activists picketed an APA conference. The DSM wields enormous power for a document that is so fickly determined and is, as Dr. Cosgrove says a “political process.”

Brian Beaumont, President of the Vancouver chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights said, “Never have incidents of psychiatric injustice been more evident than in the mental health field where laws have empowered psychiatrists to seize people and, without trial, not only deprive them of their liberty, drug or electric shock them or, in the case of Ellie Boisvert, drive them to suicide”.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.