---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 07:43:39 -0600

Reply-To: MadNation Activism Announcement List


Subject: [MADNATION] STUFF: November 15, 1998

November 15, 1998
MadNation Daily Stuff

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The first of the long awaited Boston Globe articles on medical
experimentation on people with mental illnesses.

http://www.***.com/

DOING HARM: RESEARCH ON THE MENTALLY ILL
Testing takes human toll
By Robert Whitaker, Globe Correspondent and Dolores Kong, Globe Staff,
11/15/98
First of four parts

"The light flickered on for Shalmah Prince one day in 1994.

Sitting in a doctor's office, she spotted an article in U.S. News & World
Report on human radiation experiments conducted in the 1950s. Her mind, she
said, raced back to a wrenching experience from her past.

She had been in an experiment of some type. Had she too been used?

Prince, a portrait artist who suffers from manic depression, also known as
bipolar disorder, dug into her medical history and documented a chilling
story.

In 1983, she had been in an experiment in which investigators withdrew her
medication, did nothing to intervene as she became increasingly manic, and
then injected her with apomorphine, a chemical that other researchers had
tested to see if it could provoke psychosis.
Prince became so delusional that she had to be placed in leather
restraints, a descent into madness that didn't fully subside for 10 days.

''I was never the same person again,'' Prince said. ''My perception of
myself and who I was completely changed. I had a sense of shame and
embarrassment. Who would have ever thought that doctors would create
psychosis like that?''[...]"

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Vera Hassner Sharev is quoted ion the Globe story.  Her written testimony
to the National Bioethics Commission is on MadNation.

http://www.***.com/

" (HUMAN SUBJECTS SUBCOMMITTEE)

"My name is Vera Hassner Sharav, I am the Co-founder and Director of
Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry & Research (CRCP&R), an
independent nonprofit network of concerned citizens, families and patients.
Our mission is to improve the treatment of persons with psychiatric
disorders and to ensure that they are not harmed or exploited as human
guinea pigs in invasive, high risk experimental studies in which painful
disabling relapses are triggered for speculative or commercial purposes,
and carried out without their knowledge or understanding -- therefore
without their informed consent. (Shamoo,Keay, 1997) Twenty five years after
the Tuskegee Syphilis study was halted, those at highest risk of
exploitation in unethical experimentation are mentally disabled
schizophrenia and Alzheimer's patients.

The patient and families we have brought before you are victims of
therapeutic neglect, betrayal of trust and institutional deception.
Vulnerable patients who have no voice and no choice have become unwitting
"martyrs for science". The ordeals their loved ones endured in
ill-conceived, but peer-approved, highly speculative, relapse-producing
experiments may have served the interests of the investigators and their
academic institutions, but they clearly undermined the best medical
interests of the subjects, often causing them profound harm. The absence of
adequate protections for these vulnerable human beings has led to
widespread violations of human rights (Hirschowitz, 1996; Davidson 1987)
and medical treatment standards. These living witnesses represent the
countless of others who have been harmed and abused in experimental
research but who remain silent. Under our current system no one is
responsible for the welfare or outcome of the human subjects of
experimentation -- no one has been held accountable for any injury,
preventable long-term harm or even death.[...]"

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