“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 1

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Human Rights Law and Returning Veterans

Medical
Whistleblower is an advocacy network, providing information and support to
those who report medical fraud, patient abuse and neglect and human rights
violations. In 2009 Dr. Janet Parker DVM, Executive Director of Medical
Whistleblower, brought a shadow report to the United Nations in Geneva to
report that there was not adequate protection for those who report human rights
abuses. Medical Whistleblower is dedicated for those who cannot speak for
themselves, the vulnerable in society and to those who are Medical
Whistleblowers and the Defenders of Human Rights.

It is hard to
personally face the mind wrenching trauma of war. When veterans return from
combat to their families and their communities, those adaptations that made
them effective in a wartime environment are no longer effective and can be
detrimental to full inclusion into their communities. Our combat veterans may
not perceive themselves as vulnerable, however Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
can make the most fearsome warrior vulnerable.

One essential
aspect of PTSD trauma is the exposure of the person to events which were
life-threatening and over which the individual had no control. So treatment for
PTSD must include the right to have control over the choice of treatment
options. Giving the PTSD patient this control is very empowering for them.
Supportive services should include all viable treatment options, especially non
drug therapies proven over years of professional assessment by the Veterans
Administration to be viable treatments for PTSD such as Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy and EMDR.

Medication side
effects are the #4 leading cause of death in the U.S. annually (JAMA 1998). Yet, few people receive adequate
information when medication is prescribed. Veterans have the right to make
informed, intelligent choices about medications and natural alternatives to
maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of treatment. There are effective
treatment strategies for PTSD that do not use drug therapy. Cognitive
Behavioral therapy and EMDR have both proven effective treatment for PTSD.
Veterans and their families should have social support services that are
independent of Pharmaceutical Company pressure and financing. Veterans have the
right to informed choice of care and should be given all options including non
drug options. Veterans have the right to have dedicated experienced peer
counselors who understand their needs and relate well to them in a personal
way. Veterans have the right to have strong advocates working for them to get
answers and to be a part of the decision making process at the Veteran's
Administration.

Many veterans
are understandably fearful of the new drug therapies especially if they read
the reports of adverse side effects or have themselves experienced these
negative effects themselves. But this should not mean that our veterans do not
get care. We should be in the habit of providing care and support in a manner
that takes into account the needs and social preferences of the individual
veteran, not a one pill fits all mentality. Many veterans are now refusing to
engage with social services because of the fear of the drug treatment being
forced on them; instead they face divorce, lost of family, loss of employment and
eventually homelessness where they live on the street, in tent cities and under
bridges.

Homeless veterans
is greater than the number of service persons who died during that war -- and
Desert Storm and Iraq. Now the problem facing our veterans is a human rights issue. Those who have served our
country deserve better care upon return to their communities than they are
currently receiving. It is a shocking statistic that about one-third of the
adult homeless population has served their country in the Armed Services.
Approximately 131,000 Veterans (male and female) are homeless on any given
night and perhaps twice as many experience homelessness at some point during
the course of a year. Many other Veterans are considered near homeless or at
risk because of their poverty, lack of support from family and friends, and
dismal living conditions in cheap hotels or in overcrowded or substandard
housing. Right now, the number of homeless male and female Vietnam er and Afghanistan veterans are also appearing in
the homeless population. It is inconceivable that PTSD is not related to the
realities of facing life in a combat zone.

The
Pharmaceutical Industry wants to use the returning veterans as a huge potential
pharmaceutical drug customer base. With the US government picking up the tab,
the Pharmaceutical companies are lobbying heavily to increase their expected
profits from the sales of drugs for PTSD sufferers. The huge numbers of
returning veterans are a prime target of their sales efforts. Big Pharma pours lots
of money into the political campaigns of those who support their agenda. The
Big Pharmaceutical Companies have persons on the President's New Freedom
Commission on Mental Health that are pushing to do wholesale marketing of
SSRI's and other mind altering drugs to veterans with PTSD.

When SSRI
antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft were first introduced in the
late 1980's and early 1990's there were reports of increasing violent behavior
including suicide and homicide. There were in 2003 reports by British
authorities and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about unpublished studies
showing an increased risk of suicide in children and teenagers taking Paxil.
Prior reports of suicidal and homicidal acts in adults taking SSRIs have been
minimized by the pharmaceutical company defenders and mainstream doctors, who
claim that suicide is common in depression anyway.

The recent violence Nov. 5, 2009 at Fort Hood in
Texas in which a military psychiatrist shot and killed 13 people and wounded 30
others gives us good reason to reconsider these psychiatric drug treatments for
military personnel and veterans. This incident reminded me of the Northern Illinois University mass shootings where
former grad student Stephen Kazmierczak killed 5 students and wounding dozens
of others before committing suicide himself. This gunman had been taking the
drug Paxil prior to his mass killings. The drug manufacturer had been
deliberately withholding information about violent behavior as an adverse
effect of the medication. See the insightful article by Drs. Healy, Herxhiemer
and Menkes on Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the interface with
medicine and law. Now the drug Paxil carries a black box warning
about homicide and suicide.

Sept 14, 2004, an FDA panel voted 18
to 5 to require manufacturers of all antidepressants to add black box warnings
to their product labeling. A month later, the FDA adopted the panel's
recommendations. The warning reads in part:

"Antidepressants
increased the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in
short-term studies in children and adolescents with Major Depressive Disorder
(MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. Anyone considering the use of [Drug
Name] or any other antidepressant in a child or adolescent must balance this
risk with the clinical need. Patients who are started on therapy should be
observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in
behavior."

The warning
specifically links antidepressant use to suicidal behavior in four percent of
kids on these drugs compared to two percent for kids on placebos.

Although it is
true that no type of antidepressant is helpful in every clinical case, it is
also true that SSRIs can create a unique combination of side effects that may
severely impair judgment and impulse control in individual patients. Excessive
doses of antidepressants can cause brain dysfunctions including disorientation,
confusion, and cognitive disturbances. In combat veterans suffering PTSD,
impulsive behavior, especially if coupled with impaired cognitive functioning,
can be dangerous. Antidepressants can also trigger similar, manic-like symptoms
in people whose depression is part of a manic-depressive syndrome, which often
gets overlooked when people are given SSRIs.

NAMI - National
Alliance on Mental Illness is not a consumer run organization although it is a
nonprofit nongovernmental organization with tax exempt status. NAMI gets 56% of its financial funding directly from the
Pharmaceutical Industry. NAMI provides to the public educational
information about psychiatric drugs. This information does not include the
potential severe side effects of some of these drugs such as suicide and
homicide. NAMI has been reaching out to veteran's spouses and families at
battered women's shelters, domestic violence counseling centers and other
similar social support systems to try to get the families to pressure veterans
to stay on these medications, even when there are significant adverse side
effects. This in pharmaceutical industry talk is called customer compliance and
customer retention. NAMI because of its dependence on Pharmaceutical Industry
funding refuses to give accurate information about adverse side effects to
veteran's families and pushes for high drug doses that will increase
pharmaceutical company profits. They also push for lifelong therapy when that
may not be necessary. The direct result of interfering with the right of
patients and their families to have accurate information increases the
possibility of family violence. Often what would be best for the patient would
be a decrease in dosage or even a change in medication or in some cases going
off medication and a loss of a drug using consumer.

Medical
Whistleblower wants all veterans to know that on July 30, 2010 the President of
the United States Barack Obama signed the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) which is a international treaty
defining the rights of persons with disabilities under international human
rights law. Although not yet ratified, it is the first international treaty on
disability rights. All disabled veterans including those with PTSD should have
their Human Rights honored. I ask you as advocates for the returning veterans
to look carefully at the treaty that the President signed. It contains strong
language that protects the rights of our vulnerable disabled veterans. Please
join me in encouraging the ratification of the CRPD. Do this for all the
veterans you know who have served their country honorably and deserve to have
their human rights protected. Please acquaint yourself with the excellent work
of Theresia Degener in regards to the rights of those with a mental health
disability. Please note these relevant sections of the Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/disability-convention2006.html

Wounded Veterans Return Home

Returning Veterans - What Kind of Welcome?

There are now VA employees known as Transition Patient
Advocates, whose job is to reach out to our newest veterans and their families.
We follow one Advocate in Pennsylvania as he helps veterans learn about their
benefits and navigate the VA system. Visit http://www.patientadvocate.va.gov/
to find a Patient Advocate near you. See http://www1.va.gov/opa/feature/amerve...
for the Section 508 compliant version of this video.

"Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy,
forget in time that men have died to win them."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Soar As An Eagle

Veterans Transitional Outreach Program

Veterans and Suicides

Veterans and PTSD Facts

The Department of Veterans Affairs says
that the military has diagnosed 78,000 cases of PTSD among veterans but the
real number is closer to 800,000. Less than half of these veterans will seek
medical help.

PTSD causes unemployment: Post-9/11 veterans
have an unemployment rate of “10.9
percent, compared to 8.5 percent unemployment overall. And “more
than 20 percent of young Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were unemployed
last year.”

PTSD is destructive of family life and
increases divorce: A 2005 Pentagon study found that the divorce rate for
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was up 78
percent since 2003.

PTSD and suicide: Studies show that
having PTSD correlates
to having a higher chance of committing suicide; over “50 percent of
all trauma survivors worldwide will attempt suicide in their lifetimes.” The
National Institute of Health estimates that people suffering from PTSD are six
times more likely to committ suicide. American veterans now account for one
in every five suicides.

“People grow old only by deserting their ideals, Macarthur
had written. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the
soul. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your
self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope as old as your
despair. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So
long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are
you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice
of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old. And then, indeed as the
ballad says, you just fade away.”

Douglas MacArthur
quotes (American General who commanded the Southwest Pacific Theatre in World
War II, 1880-1964)

Reconstructing Lives — A Tale of Two Soldiers December 21, 2006, Okie S.,N Engl J Med 2006; 355:2609
-
2615 One had
traumatic brain injury (TBI), which has been called the signature wound
of this war. Both also had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Among more than 22,600 U.S. soldiers wounded in the conflicts in Iraq,
Afghanistan, are returning home as of November 4, 2006, This article ﻿explores the challenges and problems facing them in their reintegration.

Critical care services are highly valued because they can often restore
function in patients with acute life-threatening illnesses. In this
context, advances in medical science have led to increased expectations
for favorable outcomes of episodes of critical illness, even when the
patient has severe coexisting chronic disease. The Healing Power of Listening in the ICU, Craig M. Lilly, M.D., and Barbara J. Daly, Ph.D, R.N.,N Engl J Med 2007; 356:513-515February 1, 2007

Americans as Survivors by Dr. Lifton. September 1, 2005, N Engl J Med 2005; 353:957
-
958Most
exposed persons manifest impressive resilience or quick recovery from
their initial responses to the trauma. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
developed in only a minority of those exposed to combat in Vietnam,
Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Acknowledging the Psychiatric Cost of War Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), because there is better information about this disorder than about others and because PTSD was the biggest problem noted in the responses to an anonymous survey among those returning from active military service. July 1, 2004, Friedman M.J., N Engl J Med 2004; 351:75
-
77

"The real rulers in Washington are
invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."

Justice Felix Frankfurter

(1882-1965)
U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Secret Deals in Court Cases Hide the Truth about SSRI's

The pharmaceutical industry wants to
use the returning veterans as a huge potential pharmaceutical drug customer
base. With the US government picking up the tab, the pharmaceutical companies
are lobbying heavily to increase their expected profits from the sales of drugs
for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) sufferers. The huge numbers of
returning veterans are a prime target of their sales efforts. Big Pharma pours
lots of money into the political campaigns of those who support their
agenda. These huge pharmaceutical companies have persons on the
President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health that are pushing to do
wholesale marketing of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI's)
and other mind altering drugs to veterans with PTSD. The constantly
expanding prison population is another target for the SSRI drug marketing and
especially those prisoners facing re-entry and who will soon have
Medicaid/Medicare to pay their pharmaceutical bills.

When SSRI antidepressants such as
Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft were first introduced in the late 1980's and early
1990's there were reports of increasing violent behavior including suicide and
homicide. There were in 2003 reports by British authorities and the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration about unpublished studies showing an increased risk of
suicide in children and teenagers taking Paxil. Prior reports of suicidal and
homicidal acts in adults taking SSRIs have been minimized by the pharmaceutical
company defenders and mainstream doctors, who claim that suicide is common in
depression anyway.

The recent violence Nov. 5, 2009 at
Fort Hood in Texas in which a military psychiatrist shot and killed 13 people
and wounded 30 others gives us good reason to reconsider these psychiatric drug
treatments for military personnel and veterans. This incident reminded me of
the Northern Illinois University mass shootings where former grad student Stephen
Kazmierczak killed 5 students and wounding dozens of others before committing
suicide himself. This gunman had been taking the drug Paxil prior to his
mass killings. The drug manufacturer had been deliberately withholding
information about violent behavior as an adverse effect of the
medication. Now the drug Paxil carries a black box warning about
homicide and suicide. (See the insightful article by Drs. Healy, Herxhiemer and
Menkes on Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the interface with medicine
and law.)

On Sept 14, 2004, an FDA panel voted 18
to 5 to require manufacturers of all antidepressants to add black box warnings
to their product labeling. A month later, the FDA adopted the panel's
recommendations. The warning reads in part: "Antidepressants increased the
risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in short-term studies in
children and adolescents with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and other
psychiatric disorders. Anyone considering the use of [Drug Name] or any other
antidepressant in a child or adolescent must balance this risk with the
clinical need. Patients who are started on therapy should be observed
closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in
behavior." The warning specifically links antidepressant use to
suicidal behavior in four percent of kids on these drugs compared to two
percent for kids on placebos.

No type of antidepressant is helpful in
every clinical case or even indicated. As a class of drugs SSRIs can
create a unique combination of side effects that may severely impair judgment
and impulse control in individual patients. Excessive doses of antidepressants
can cause brain dysfunctions including disorientation, confusion, and cognitive
disturbances. In combat veterans suffering PTSD, impulsive behavior,
especially if coupled with impaired cognitive functioning, can be dangerous.
Antidepressants can also trigger similar, manic-like symptoms in people whose
depression is part of a manic-depressive syndrome, which often gets overlooked
when people are given SSRIs.

Is
public safety enhanced when “patients” are given SSRI’s and are persons on
SSRI’s less likely to do gun violence? The pharmaceutical corporations
would lead you to believe that a person taking these drugs is less likely to
commit suicide and less likely to do gun violence to others. But is that
really true?

The
use of secret settlements to withhold information about a known harm of a
pharmaceutical drug was very evident in the Fentress case, in which the
Kentucky Supreme Court found that lawyers who engaged in an ongoing trial after
a secret settlement had already been reached. Judge Potter said their conduct
showed "a serious lack of candor with the trial court, and there may have
been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial process or perhaps
even fraud." [Potter v. Eli Lilly & Co., 926 S.W.2d 449, 454 (Ky.
1996).]

In
summary the Fentress case was about a violent incident in September 1989.
Joseph Wesbecker armed himself with an AK-47, walked into the Louisville
printing plant where he had worked, and started shooting his former
co-workers. After killing eight people, wounded twelve more, and the man
finished matters by committing suicide with his gun. Only one month before,
Wesbecker had begun taking Prozac. The known problems of violent behavior
of patients on this medication had been withheld from the public, governmental
regulators and even medical professionals. The lawyers for the shooting
victims soon focused on the drug Prozac, manufactured by Eli Lilly, as the
cause for Wesbecker's unexpected violence. With the sales of the drug
Prozac at $1.7 billion in 1994 there was a lot at stake in this legal case. The
Plaintiff's counsel had information about the withholding of research findings
regarding another Eli Lilly drug Oraflex. In 1985, Lilly had pled guilty to
twenty-five criminal counts of failing to report adverse reactions to Oraflex,
including four deaths, to the Food & Drug Administration. But then suddenly
during the trial the Oraflex evidence was no longer going to be presented to
the court.

There
was an experienced and astute Judge on the case John Potter, who suspected
something was afoul despite the lawyers' denials and their references to a
damages phase, Potter suspected that a deal had been made before closing
argument. When the plaintiffs didn't file a notice of appeal, Potter
became suspicious and thus called in the lawyers from both sides for
consultation. But the lawyers continued to deny that a settlement had
been reached. When the appeals court ruled against Judge Potter saying he
no longer had jurisdiction, Potter was not satisfied and appealed the case to
the Kentucky Supreme Court. Finally in a Supreme Court hearing, lawyers
for both sides finally acknowledged that they had indeed settled all money
issues and had agreed to go through only the liability phase of the trial no
matter what the result. Judge John Potter took the "high road,"
acting consistently with the judiciary's responsibility, and protecting the
public interest. Thus the role of the judiciary in deciding matters of
privacy and sealed records is an important balancing act of sometimes competing
interests but which must also take into account the public's right to know especially
when there is a compelling public interest.

National
Council on Disability, Understanding the Role of an International Convention on
the Human Rights of People with Disabilities: An analysis of the legal, social,
and practical implications for policy makers and disability and human rights
advocates in the United States (May 2002): http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/2002/unwhitepaper_05-23-02.htm

"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself." Confucius

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who
points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds
could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and
again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but
who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms,
the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at
the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who
at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so
that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
neither know victory nor defeat."

Theodore
Roosevelt- Excerpt from the speech "Citizenship In A Republic",
delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910

Medical Whistleblower Commitment to Non-Violence

Medical Whistleblower has a commitment to improving the protection of all civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights as defined in, among others, the following regional and international legal instruments:

• UN legal instruments pertaining to human rights, including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the international covenants on civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights; the conventions providing for monitoring mechanisms (torture, racial discrimination, discrimination against women, the rights of the child, rights of migrant workers and their families); and the conventions and standards of the International Labor Organization;

• Special procedures and non-treaty mechanisms of the United Nations;

• The Declaration on Human Rights Defenders;

• The UN resolution establishing the mandate of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on human rights defenders;

• The United Nations guidelines on human rights defenders;

In addition, Medical Whistleblower upholds the principle of a code of ethical and moral conduct that all means used by Medical Whistleblower will not include violence - We exclude the use of violence to advance political aims. We work with and in collaboration with existing governmental structures and systems but put pressure on governments in a non-violent manner to achieve human rights protections and goals.

"The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience."

“When we call anything a person’s right, we mean that he has a
valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it, either by the
force of law, or by that of education and opinion”

John Stuart Mill

"The adversarial system of justice is by nature unfair and unjust. It favours the strongover the weak. It accentuates social and cultural differences, favouring the rich whoare able to engage and pay for the services of one or more layers."

Justice MinisterMadame Guigou, 1999

“Everything that is done in this world is done by hope.”
―Martin Luther

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“The most powerful individual in the state will be cautious of committing any flagrant invasion of another’s right, when he knows that the fact of his oppression must be examined and decided by twelve indifferent men.”

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“I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something
that I can do.”
― Edward Everett Hale

"A soldier above
all seeks peace,because it is the soldier who bears the deepest scars and
wounds of war"

Gen Douglas MacArthur

Film on Residential Child Abuse

Over the GW - Available on DVD

Make Torture of US Citizens on US Soil illegal

IF YOU NEED HELP

Vietnam
Veterans of America, Crisis Phone Number. Special
Notice: If you are a veteran in emotional crisis and need help RIGHT NOW, call
this toll-free number 1-800-273-8255 available 24/7, and tell them you are a
veteran. All calls are confidential. http://www.vva.org/.

Veterans’
Crisis Intervention Hotline: 1-888-899-9377.
A Crisis Intervention Hotline has been established by the VA Heartland Network
to assist veterans who may be dealing with a mental health crisis or difficult
issue in their lives. The hotline will also aid family members or friends of
veterans who need help in assisting a veteran in crisis.

Safe Harborincludes links to find medical doctors (by zip code) who can assist with helping people safely get off of psychiatric drugs and medical personnel who will treat people without the use of psychiatric drugs.