|
|
| Bjarne Skovasger
|
Donald Persson
|
|
|
| James White
|
Kolathur Unni
|
The
unscrupulous
violation of patients
- Danish psychologist Bjarne Skovsager was sentenced to six years
in prison for sexual abuse of three immigrant boys.
- British psychiatrist Christopher Allison was jailed for 10 years
for raping and sexually abusing six patients.
- Dr Wulf Aschoff, child psychiatrist and former head of Germany’s
Albert Schweitzer Clinic, was charged in 1999 with photographing,
videoing and fondling naked children. His medical license already
revoked, he committed suicide two days before his trial.
- Ivan Zagainov, a psychiatrist in the Czech Republic, was sentenced
to 13 years in jail for the strangulation murder of a fifteen-year-old
female patient.
Psychiatrists and therapists are notorious for exploiting their patient’s
vulnerabilities and trust to take sexual advantage of them. CCHR has
campaigned vigorously for legislation to protect persons from sexual
assault. More than 23 psychiatric rape laws, regulations or crime law
amendments have been passed to date—in Sweden, Germany, Israel, the U.S.
and Australia—making it a criminal offence for any psychiatrist,
psychologist or psychotherapist to have any form of sexual relationship
with a patient.
More than 1,200 mental health practitioners have been convicted and
jailed for sexual and other crimes over the last decade.
|
Insurance has been a major area of psychiatric fraud, particularly among private,
for-profit hospitals. In the United States, CCHR’s investigations resulted
in media exposure of fraud and patient abuse—including stories of hapless teenagers,
as well as adults, locked up against their will until their insurance benefits
ran out. CCHR’s work with insurance fraud investigators, the U.S. Department
of Justice, the FBI, and other federal agencies resulted in a U.S. hospital
chain paying nearly €777 million in fines for insurance fraud committed by
their psychiatric branches.
Psychiatry is a field that seems to attract people who are having trouble with their own emotional stability. One survey of 531 psychiatrists showed 25% had chosen the field of psychiatry because of their own psychiatric problems
or treatment. The British Medical Journal has pointed to the disproportionate
number of suicides among psychiatrists.
Unfortunately, their patients all too often suffer the same fate.
