A note about real actions, attentions, and critiques of 'professional' activities and 'treatment' methods - [ie] is the level of awareness and the intelligence of the opposition adequate to actually remove the harm? Shouldn't the discussion have effects that help counteract and adequately identify contemporary authoritarian techniques? Slogans are nice, jokes are better, scientific discussions and evidence are simply the best! Though does anyone else really know what is actually being done to people? What to do about it? Is it ever really articulated?
AGAINST THE FORCED TREATMENT OF EXCEPTIONAL OTHERS
I would like to offer opposition to a sophisticated, though essentially brutal repression - the professional need to control exceptional others. While forced electroshock and forced drugging are often, except for the people these devastate, symbolic issues, the real story is that the situation for mental health patients is really bad. Needless to say, in terms of the aesthetic environment, mental health treatment is a disaster. It also seems that these concerns are never adequately dealt with. As with attempts at governmental health care reform, the contex of reality, thought, and social control is a subject that is never artiulated or exposed in a way that allows for public action or understanding. Because of this, instead of the world realising truth and freedom, the world suffers through coercion and deception. In microcosm and at crises base, these issues are also found in mental health treatments. The exposition is one that I regret wasting on psychiatric terms.
Different Explanations- My personal situation partly results from the exclusionary stigma of a forced treatment and attention. I am seriously and adversely affected by a manipulation of health, survival, crisis, and the accompanying possibility of horrible and desperate situations. It is almost impossible, though, to scientifically demonstrate that dissenting minds suffer unexplained harm, mental stress, incarcerative effects, and sleep problems that are caused by hostile third causes. There is no ‘evidence' of this, just many who suffer, fail, and fear... or worse. Ironically, trying to speak, reason, or articulate events this way is what psychiatrists would refer to as ‘losing contact with reality' or ‘delusional or paranoid thinking.' I believe there is a better explanation than the clinical analysis. Consider that another explanation may actually remove the harm.
Freedom of Mind- Whether a person has the ability to ‘challenge the therapeutic state' is probably an invitation to an undue scrutiny and other social problems. To interfere with psychiatry's deterministic function is a very serious risk. For reasons like this, there is presently no public examination of psychiatry's methods and goals. From tragic personal experience, I can only say that no one who loves freedom would agree with the horrendous practises that I have seen. This is why I don't trust their justifications or methods. Alas too, due to the enormous power of manipulative professionals, an overly simplistic and diverting rhetoric, and also due to an often misrepresented [‘therapeutic'] public image, they are allowed to make most important decisions.
Ending Misuse of Psychotropic Drugs and Treatments- In forced treatments, the vital consent issue is mired in discussions of ‘incompetence' and a failure of the courts to protect patient's civil liberties. Seen in the extreme by those affected, it seems like a system of uninformed violation and slavery. Seen in terms of mental health's popular image, what happens to patients is justified and even desirable. Even with the system's intentional obscuration of the health and rights issues, forced electroshock is an extreme measure. It exposes the real inhumanity of forced psychiatry. In this issue, for once, the repressive parts of the psychiatric community have actually been caught [provably] harming people. Forced psychiatric drugging, because of its extensive biophysical chemical intrusion, is also important. When these drugs [neuroleptics] are over-prescribed or are given to those not acutely in need, the side effects are horrible. These effects are what authoritarian psychiatric practitioners depend on to make difficult and rebellious patients docile. Possibility of release makes many subjects cooperate. Many though, never again become independent. Though done to seemingly few people, even a symbolic opposition to these excesses creates an awareness of real freedom from other, less obvious repressions.
The Fundamental Problem [With] The System - Most of the public, seeing physicians as sympathetic figures, would say that most are not authoritarian, not likely to misprescribe. Doctors' own well-meaning ethical standards actually expose the fundamental problem with the mental health ‘system.' The professional community, as an institution, is not as interested in the individual's happiness and cure as they are in trying to control and eliminate a sort of activity and thought they call ‘psychosis.' ‘Psychosis,' to psychiatric enforcement, is what should not be acted out, known, or thought. In accomplishing this, the professional community allows themselves a much greater information than those they limit. They attempt to become the ultimate judges of what is thought, realised, and lived. [This is not an exaggeration.] I would like to except myself from this.
To be certain that there are no challenges or exceptions, the professional community has developed many very efficient means of controlling and maintaining ‘catchment areas,' as well as the ability to apply social and economic pressure, punish, divert attention, and maintain a secrecy. This enforcement can get pretty frightening. I don't think the rest of the medical community can actually afford to care what is done. Even if they do care, there is a very real possibility that they can no longer legislate control of these powerful institutions and people.
Misplaced Justifications- After so many protests, though, why has psychiatry consistently resisted humanising its practises? What could possibly be worth betraying the trust and freedom of so many people? Many psychiatrists really believe they are [inarguably] right to suppress all ‘psychotic' thoughts and actions - and - will tolerate any means to accomplish this ‘greater goal.' Psychiatrists really believe that ‘uncontrolled' events are a threat to everyone's security. Because of the dramatic importance of these ‘survivability' issues [in almost monolithic proportions], psychiatrists see no one as qualified to criticise their actions.
Mistrust of doctors is sad, because there are possibly good situations to consider healthful medical help. When having overwhelming memories, having no alternative, I voluntarily used anti-psychotic medications. I appreciated anything that would help remove the pain of it. Unfortunately, though, two years later, I was forcibly medicated because I refused to reenter the mental health system in a different area. The pressure there to make an example of those who would not participate was so great that professionals felt obliged to make personally destructive and inaccurate interpretations to commit me. Even at my worst, I have never been a danger to others.
Trails of Betrayals- It became starkly evident that the hierarchy of involuntary authority, the enforcement and policing of human consciousness, was permeated with betrayal. Talking, especially talking to professionals, became an act of degradation. I was informing upon those I shared an exceptional existence with. The professional system consistently forced the betrayal of honesty and goodness. I realised then that I had not been free ever since my first restrictive contact with the professional community. The efficiency with which they had done this was astonishing, with mental abilities, means, and scenarios that were completely beyond any ‘normal' explanatory discussion. The forced drugging was dismal, the damage to my existence, irretrievable. The medication was a punishment, a means of control. In a wider sense, it is a reasonable possibility that the medication's ‘socially acceptable thoughts and behaviors' eliminate dissent, and this dissent interferes with professional attempts to enforce their versions of allowable ‘knowledge' and ‘behavior.'
Unaware people should know that the lengths that the professional community has gone to are quite beyond belief. They are not giving us the whole story. It is a more sophisticated, diverse, and advanced world than others are allowed to realise. The professional community's real methods are almost never discussed in the terms that they occur. All that any concerned person is left with is symbols, hopefully to coincide with an action that has a real effect for freedom.
Life Into Art- This issue is helpless people against overwhelming odds. Professional domination is a grotesque degradation. It degrades civilisation, thought, and the aesthetics of existence. We should instead help protect the weak and set their minds free. Please consider humanist intervention in the way professionals are trained and established. Please consider a symbolic act to remove the injustice.
Robert D Ewbank
*Since this and many people's real concerns never receive any real exposition, I would appreciate any opinion of this sent to me.
e-mail drake@efn.org
ps- this letter has really screwed up my existence...
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