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[mefree]

Suicide Group Launched In Auckland - Voxy
24 August 2010, 4:56 pm

Steve Green, Director of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) also spoke of his support as a founding member of CASPER, encouraging people to find out the facts and raise awareness of these issues. "People need practical help not psychotropic drugs with their horrendous side effects; it's time a thorough inquiry is conducted into suicide, its causes, prevention and mental health failings must be a part of this," Mr Green said.

CASPER aims to achieve a voice for families bereaved by suicide and to ensure they are accorded similar rights of families who were victims of crime.

What CASPER Believe:

Knowledge is power

Suicide is a social, not medical, issue.

Empowered, well informed families and communities are the key to suicide prevention

Suicide flourishes in silence.

Current suicide prevention strategies do not, and can not, work.

What CASPER does:

Gather and analyse national and international information on suicide and its prevention.

Put the information into a format able to be shared with those who can make a difference - families and the community.

Lobby for changes to legislation, policy and practice.

Support families seeking truth, justice and accountability.

It seems that Scientology's front groups have front groups.

more at http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/suicide-group-launched-auckland/5/60064

another article: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/4062089/Concerns-raised-over-groups-scientology-link

[ethercat]

Suicide Group Launched In Auckland - Voxy
24 August 2010, 4:56 pm

Steve Green, Director of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) also spoke of his support as a founding member of CASPER, encouraging people to find out the facts and raise awareness of these issues. "People need practical help not psychotropic drugs with their horrendous side effects; it's time a thorough inquiry is conducted into suicide, its causes, prevention and mental health failings must be a part of this," Mr Green said.

CASPER aims to achieve a voice for families bereaved by suicide and to ensure they are accorded similar rights of families who were victims of crime.

What CASPER Believe:

Knowledge is power

Suicide is a social, not medical, issue.

Empowered, well informed families and communities are the key to suicide prevention

Suicide flourishes in silence.

Current suicide prevention strategies do not, and can not, work.

What CASPER does:

Gather and analyse national and international information on suicide and its prevention.

Put the information into a format able to be shared with those who can make a difference - families and the community.

Lobby for changes to legislation, policy and practice.

Support families seeking truth, justice and accountability.

It seems that Scientology's front groups have front groups.

more at http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/suicide-group-launched-auckland/5/60064

another article: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/4062089/Concerns-raised-over-groups-scientology-link

If CASPER is a CCHR front, and we already know that CCHR is a scientology front, and if CASPER, CCHR, and scientology have the answers to reducing the suicide rate, then one would expect that there wouldn't be any suicides among these people with the answers, right?

Oh really?  No suicides?  Wait, what are these:

Noah Lottick: http://www.whyaretheydead.info/Noah_Antrim_Lottick_24/index.html
Greg Bashaw: http://www.rickross.com/reference/scientology/scien453.html
Patrice Vic: http://www.whyaretheydead.info/Patrice_Vic_31/index.html
Albert Jaquier: http://www.whyaretheydead.info/krasel/diary_ot7.html
Dale Bogen: http://www.xenu-directory.net/accounts/mary2006.html
John Buchanan: http://www.holysmoke.org/cos/debt.htm
Kaja Bordevich Ballo: http://synthesis.net/2008/04/15/scientology-kills-norwegian-girl/
Philip Gale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Gale

and there are many, many more. 

Philip Gale's mother, Marie Gale, was "director of the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in the Carolinas and chief national spokeswoman for CCHR."  If that doesn't say something about the qualifications and ability of CCHR (and CASPER, as well as scientology) to provide any answers about suicide, I don't know what does.

And we haven't even gotten to the attempted suicides and murders, yet.

[mefree]

Dr. Stephen Wiseman is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and Consultant Psychiatrist at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, BC. For a number of years he has been researching Scientology, its inventor L. Ron Hubbard, and the organization's anti-psychiatry arm, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

He very kindly offers us a few words on CASPER after reviewing the articles linked in the original post.

August 27, 2010

Hello Xxxxxxx,
 
Thank-you for your email and for drawing this to my attention. Clearly, this process follows Scientology's/CCHR's typical modus operandi of creating a legitimate-sounding front group, enlisting the help of bereaved or distressed members of the public (and probably putting them in a propaganda video at some point), and cherry-picking / misinterpreting a piece or two of real research to provide a patina of "science" to the whole enterprise.
 
The subject of suicide, suicide risks and rates, and suicide prevention is incredibly complex; pulling one or two papers and interpreting them to suit your own needs is not demonstrating any type of understanding of this area. Also, the 2004 study quoted, as it mentions in its own abstract, cannot be used to make conclusions about causation...only correlation, which may be on account of many different factors. CCHR/Scientology makes this mistake over and over again, probably in a very cynical fashion, when it presents stories of people committing suicide or homicide while receiving psychiatric treatment and then concluding the treatment CAUSED the action. And then they call psychiatry a "pseudoscience"?
 
Suicide rates vary across the lifespan, and in general, older folks (particularly men) end their lives far more frequently than others. So, in an aging population, you will see rates increase even if measures are put in place to reduce them. As there is no control group in this type of study, one simply doesn't know what would happen if the intervention programs DIDN'T exist. Changing rates and trends re: substance abuse are also key factors and need to be considered.
 
New Zealand figures for child/adolescent suicide are highly influenced by the challenges faced by the aboriginal population, and here one must agree with CASPER in that solutions must be found not only from the perspective of mental health programs, but from larger social and societal changes as well. One cannot separate illness from social conditions/circumstances in this struggling population; to twist this fact into a club by which to strike psychiatry, as CCHR is doing, is as usual both perverse and odious.
 
The best part of all of this remains the charge that psychiatry is a pseudoscience, when it is an article, or articles, published by mental health professionals in psychiatric journals, that is identifying the issue jumped upon by the CCHR. One of the hallmarks of true science is that a scientist looks long and hard in the mirror, and asks herself the difficult questions, and does not hold on to beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. The fact that psychiatry is looking at, and publishing on the surface negative results about, suicide prevention programs is not an example of psychiatry's failure, but of its honesty, courage, and success as a science.
 
Can you imagine Scientology supporting research and then publishing results identifying situations and circumstances in which auditing has been shown to be entirely unsuccessful? Or journals of homeopathy publishing results suggesting that their methods do not beat a credible placebo in virtually any circumstance? Or an astrology publication letting us know just how many predictions they are failing to make when they look up at the planets?
 
Finally, CASPER asserts that current methods of reducing suicide rates "cannot work". How do they reach this conclusion? Again typically, what they seem good at is attacking and trying to tear down psychiatric practice...but what do they offer in the alternative? What, specifically, are they suggesting WILL work?
 
Psychiatry, as a science dedicated to helping people, would love to see CASPER be able to come up with an idea, direction, or program ultimately able to meaningfully reduce suicide rates in children and adolescents. This would be something to be celebrated, applied universally, and "owned" by none. What, specifically, do they propose? And, importantly, how do they propose to measure the results and compare them to the status quo so that we all can know indeed if the new ways are truly effective? This is the standard by which every aspect of psychiatric practice is measured. Of course, it is not perfect, and the desire over time is always to improve.
 
So, CASPER, the ball is in your court. How do you propose to proceed?

Kind regards,
 
Steve Wiseman

Videos featuring Dr. Wiseman:

Vancouver Skepticamp -Scientology v. Psychiatry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIPsJxpN5Cs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMxMMLONSbI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7RNJYSD0sI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io4KtHZKOQE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyqpBFFoxw

Dr. Wiseman speaks on CCHR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBrLmUZIkVU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXxPu40S_3

Dr. Wiseman Investigates Thomas Szasz, co-founder of CCHR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk691rHIrkE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3czo_EAQplc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cTG7hSY9dc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8vS6b-52Lc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdAX7rdhB6w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xRCHtxAo-0