Nursing Homes Falsely Diagnose Patients as Schizophrenic to Sedate Them, Report Says

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From MedPage Today. Dementia patients are given antipsychotics, which FDA warns may increase the risk for death.

“Nursing home staff overdiagnoses their dementia patients with schizophrenia so they can prescribe antipsychotics in order to make the patients easier to manage, a reportopens in a new tab or window from the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) found.

“Nursing homes gave antipsychotic drugs to residents with dementia to manage their behavior for the benefit of staff, despite FDA’s warning that these drugs may increase the risk of deathopens in a new tab or window,” the authors wrote in the report released on Thursday. “Even though antipsychotic drugs pose risks to residents’ health, nursing homes did not take required steps to help protect residents who were given these drugs.”

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  1. I think the problem is much more prevalent and prevalent than the nursing home situation. I suspect the mental health industry in general misdiagnoses clients in order to keep them as perpetual “cash cows.” I’ve seen so many cases of drug addicts being misdiagnosed with what are supposed to be organically occurring disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar. Can this be explained by mere incompetence? One wonders. If the psych providers simply explained to their clients that their symptoms are the direct cause of recreational drugs and they just need to get clean in order to feel better, the retention rate would drop a lot faster than if they tell them that their symptoms AND drug use are due to an underlying biological problem that can never be cured. There are psych patients that openly talked about how their symptoms started with the onset of drug abuse, yet they were given completely erroneous diagnoses (potentially to keep them as return clients). You can read about three such cases here: https://totalmentalhealth.info/all-heroin-users-look-bipolar-when-addicts-are-not-diagnosed-as-addicts/

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