In Italy, Family Is Everything
Vincenza Palmieri is the founder and president of multiple organizations that protect human rights, families and children; a bestselling author; a sought-after speaker; and one of Italy’s foremost authorities on psychiatric abuse. She tirelessly crusades to protect children and families in a nation that lives by the motto la famiglia è tutto—the family is everything.
Her anti-psychiatric commitment began in the 1980s as a university student. She founded the international program Living without Psychotropic Drugs and, in 2000, she fought against a health law that started what she calls the “psychiatric supply chain.”
Her front-line role continued in 2010 after the passage of Italy’s Law 170, which mandated screening of schoolkids for “specific learning disabilities.” The number of children deemed “learning disabled” tripled in just five years, fueling the psychiatric supply chain. In schools across Italy, such “evaluations” were being conducted without parental consent.
Parents who said no to drugs or evaluations risked having their children taken away, imprisoned in facilities and given psychotropic drugs.
“A child deprived of freedom, a child deprived of his parents—it is inhumane to allow such a thing,” says Palmieri.
Word spread among desperate parents that there was someone willing to fight for their rights. Having earned two bachelor’s degrees and four master’s degrees, Palmieri qualified as an expert court witness. In case after case, Palmieri challenged psychiatrists’ false diagnoses, saving children from harmful psychotropic drugs and reuniting them with their families.
“A child deprived of freedom, a child deprived of his parents—it is inhumane to allow such a thing.”
Palmieri has written 13 books, including three bestsellers detailing this corrupt system, and launched a national campaign to end coercive psychiatry and its power to remove children from their families. She has helped more than 10,000 people get off psychiatric drugs and delivered over 1,000 lectures exposing psychiatric abuse.
Palmieri enlisted legal experts who called out mandatory psychiatric treatment as “a fundamental violation of the Italian Constitution.” In 2017, Italy’s Supreme Court agreed, issuing its ruling: No child may be screened without parental consent.
This victory inspired Palmieri to dig deeper. She noticed a disturbing pattern that indicated a massive kickback scheme involving foster home administrators and politicians, with psychiatric diagnoses key to the business model.
Public outrage boiled over when a prosecutor in the town of Bibbiano provided evidence that psychiatrists had manipulated children into making false abuse allegations against their parents. Eighteen people were charged with falsifying reports in order to rip children away from their parents. News of the horrific scheme erupted throughout the nation.
Palmieri organized the General Conference on the Protection of Minors, where she stressed that this was not an isolated case, but instead symptomatic of psychiatry operating all over Italy. She wrote her bestseller The Psychiatric Supply Chain in Italy, exposing the vested interests behind the operation. Her work contributed to investigations, arrests and closure of facilities.
Palmieri has thereby identified how to eradicate psychiatric abuse by combating the psychiatric supply chain. “Every time we break a link in this chain, without its ‘allies,’ psychiatry loses strength and power. Every time we save a child, we cut off the chain. We have already done it and will continue to do it. We can win.”
END PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE
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