#20. No Pros, No Cops, No 911 - Policing Suicide Must End

This is Day 20 of our 30-day blog on the Declaration of Principles adopted by the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression held in Toronto, May 14-18, 1982.  (More info here.)  Today we are talking about Principle 20.

Principle 20 reads in full as follows:

We believe that suicidal thoughts and/or attempts should not be dealt with as a psychiatric or legal issue.

Basic Rationale

Modern society has created a world that many of us do not want to live in. Many of us are in pain and can't imagine this ever changing. We sincerely ask if life is worth the effort.

No one should face these kinds of difficult decisions alone. These are difficult matters of conscience. We have not arrived at this place lightly. Almost invariably, there are overwhelming challenges, significant experiences of life to date and important competing values and needs.

Nor should anyone facing such difficult matters of life and death be met with the modern crisis response.  Human beings in desperate need call crisis services sincerely wanting help, hoping for help and desperately hoping that something that feels like help exists. To die or not to die...?  This is likely the hardest decision any of us will ever face. We want - deserve -  someone on our side, who believes in us and cares about what we are going through in ways that are clearly more than 'just a job.'

Ideally, there would also be someone who can offer meaningful aid.  Someone who has access to resources that address the overwhelming real life needs that human beings in distress so often have. With regard to services that claim to offer 'professional help', we legitimately hope for, long for, have a right to expect that there will be someone on the other end of the line who knows how to navigate the world that we - not just they - actually live in.  In a world that claims to offer meaningful reasons for staying alive, we legitimately hope for, long for, have a right to expect that such people will appreciate the full extent of what we are going through -- plus offer realistic opportunities to go somewhere better from here.

So, who ever thought, in a 'civilized' society, that 'help' would come to mean that armed militia show up at your door, drag you off in handcuffs, forcibly inject you with debilitating poisons, mistake your compliance for recovery, and then proceed to bill you for the insult. If you weren't 'really' suicidal before, you certainly have good reason to be now.

Suffice it to say, the outcomes speak for themselves.  One of highest peaks for suicide is one week into hospitalization.  In other words, exactly when we discover the current system for the cold, hollow, empty shell that it is.  About that time, we put two and two together and our reasoning has never been more painfully rational or sane:

I was already miserable and desperate before.  I knew I couldn't find the way on my own.  I did the right thing. I swallowed my pride and called for help. I put my known life at risk (home, job, family, community respect).  Against my better judgment, I did what I was told and turned my fate over to the 'true' experts.  Yet, I feel worse and more hopeless than ever before. If this is the best my community has to offer, then what hope is there...?

Nor is it any surprise that our other peak for suicide is one week after discharge.  At this point, the system has convinced us we are better off on our own. We may or may not still want to die.  But, we certainly know the answer is not to be found inside the institutional walls.  So, we paste a smile on our faces, start looking grateful, and do whatever it is we need to do to convince the powers in charge to release us.

More often than not, we return to lives than have shattered in our absence.  Bills went unpaid, jobs were lost, partners left, kids were removed from the home.  Cherished pets starved to death. Everyone around us treats us both as if nothing happened -- and as if we are irreparably broken. The ambulance bill arrives.  Then the hospital bill.  Then the bills from all the independent providers not covered by insurance.

It's far worse than before.  Worse, in fact, than we imagined possible.  Yet, attempts at meaningful conversation are met with, Have you told that to your doctor?  The invariable response to legitimate feelings, Do you need to take your meds?  It's like conditioning the right to freedom of Jewish concentration camp survivors on the post-release assessment of their former Nazi guards.

This is a massive failure of human community if there ever was one.  What the vast majority of us want - what we wanted in the first place - are human beings who get it.  They don't need to be super-person, savior or healthcare expert extraordinaire.  In fact, it is often a lot better if they aren't.  A lot of what pushes a lot of us over the edge is feeling like we're the only ones.  Like somehow everyone else has it figured out, is living their little happy lives, and we're the only ones who are missing out.

So you can't imagine how healing - what a relief it can be - just to connect with others who are willing to admit to the questions.  They don't have to have the answers.  Just the fact that they're in the same boat and struggling too, is often enough.

These are the true heroes of our lives.  They're the folks who are able to show up as ordinary human beings.  They're willing to admit vulnerability and uncertainty.  Their biggest asset is just that they know what it's like to be there.  They get how overwhelming the challenges are, and how unbelievably painful and unrelenting the feelings have been. They have experienced, first hand, how slim the hope and possibilities can seem.  They know - not because they took a class but on a gut level because they've lived it - how much it is to ask someone to keep up hope and to keep putting one foot in front of the other in trying times like these.

When we find each other, it's priceless.   Contrary to the system assumption that we'll push each other over the edge or plot our shared demise, almost always we are just what we needed.

And, contrary to the system assumption that we can't be left to our own devices because we don't comprehend the value of life, in fact, we value life greatly.  We simply disagree as to how that valuing is best expressed.

Unlike the dominant culture, we see life as far more valuable than just the rote matter of going through the motions of staying alive.  We actually value the fundamental personhood of the human beings who are making that effort.  We respect their evaluation of whether - on whole - society has done its job.  Whether on whole, the effort required and returns offered are worthy of the person in question and have earned their trust and good faith in continuing to walk the earth.  In this regard, we respect one another to choose wisely.   We don't pretend to know what is right for someone else. We don't impose our vision or answers or values or judgment or conscience on anyone else.

From what we have experienced, this is the far safer, wiser option. It responds to the true needs of the person in the moment.  It offers sincere the respect, dignity, valuing of the individual as a person that is so often missing in the culture at large.  Compare this to the rote responses of a callous system that treats every 911 call the same and is concerned, first and foremost, with managing risk and liability. Imagine, if you will for just a moment, the sense of outrage and betrayal a person might feel - on the worst and possibly last day of their life - to find out the so-called help they've been offered actually has nothing to do with them. It's only about some hired gun's need to cover their a**?  That's more than enough to put you over the edge right there....

Instead of trying to convince or coerce human beings who have given up to keep on living, we need to invest our effort in a different direction.  We need to create the kind of communities that offer hope.  We need to offer relationships that are worthy of human effort and trust.  We need to open up a vision of a future that is worth someone staying alive for.  We need to clear the path to the resources needed to make what is possible actually attainable.

And if or when we fail to do that, we need to take stock of ourselves. This issue is way bigger than individuals, friends or families.  On a community and societal level, we need to look at how we are failing each other. We need to ask ourselves what is getting in our way?  Why wasn't someone, somewhere out there able to create a relationship meaningful enough - and why wasn't our community life as a whole rich enough or accessible enough - to inspire our comrade to stay alive.

We also need to consider long and hard what the person may have been trying to tell us.  We need to consider long and hard what - consistent with our own needs for self-preservation - we could have done differently.  We consider, long and hard, how not just the person, not just us, but also our whole concept of help - and our whole approach to helping - might need to fundamentally change.

Some Commitments We Could Make to Each Other

• No pros, no cops, no 911
• Offer human rights-informed, coercion-free spaces
• Share from the heart & make space for each other to do the same
• Hold each other’s truths with dignity, respect, interest and willingness to learn
• Maintain a heavy dose of humility for the things we don't yet know or understand
• Respect each person’s conscience and right to decide for themselves
• Create real community, instead of 'support groups'
• Change the world in ways that make it livable for all human beings
• Support each other’s human rights, including the right to be left alone

.

Questions for Reflection

We are building this work together.  Your lived experience is needed and valued.  It is essential to building our shared knowledge and expertise as a movement.  Please comment on any or all of these questions or in any way that speaks to you personally.

1. Have you ever experienced a police or public safety offensive in response to a sincere expression of distress or a sincere question about staying alive?   

2. Have you ever been coerced, forced or policed to stay alive? 

3. What would you like others of conscience to know about your experience?

4. Think of a time you actually received sincere, truly helpful assistance from another human being.  What were the outcomes then?  

5. If standards of care were really caring, at a mimimum, that attitudes and behaviors should people in need be able to expect from professional helpers?

6. What are the most important things professional helpers can do to get better outcomes?   

7.  If we were sincere in our effort to make crisis help truly helpful, how would our approach to these issues change?  

August 20, 2016:  Conference on Principle 20

We will talk about Principle 20, including your responses, on August 20 from 9-11  PM EST.  The conference will convene on BlogTalkRadio.com/Peerly-Human

To join:

By Phone: (1)646-378-1629

By Internet: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peerly-human

We welcome your participation.  Simply press #1 on your phone to speak with the show hosts.

More details are available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peerly-human

Post-Conference Reception

Those wishing to continue the discussion after the conference – or to talk informally with others who participated – may join us for the Post-Conference reception.  The reception will start immediately after the conference (11 PM EST) and continue til the wee hours or for as long as there is interest.

To join: 

By phone: (1)331-205-7196 (dial *67 for added privacy)

By internet: Uberconference.com/peerlyhuman

International: Local access numbers available at Uberconference.com/international

#19. People Have the Right to Be...

This is Day 19 of our 30-day blog on the Declaration of Principles adopted by the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression held in Toronto, May 14-18, 1982.  (More info here.)  Today we are talking about Principle 19.

Principle 19 reads in full as follows:

We believe that people should have the right to live in any manner or lifestyle they choose.

Basic Rationale

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired and exhausted by a world that always seems to be asking for a better me.  I’m tired of the politics of scarcity and not enough.  I’m tired of kicking myself, driving my body and mind, to produce the next thing on the horizon that always seems urgently necessary.  I’m tired of what that does to me.  I’m tired of what that does to us – to the people around me, to the world around me, to the trees, grass, fields, animals, air, sky and water upon which we depend for shared existence. To the life within me that needs all of these things to live and with which I’ve been entrusted by the Universe to do right by during my time on the planet.

My body, every body, is made up of living cells. Tiny living beings that depend on us for their existence.  Tiny living beings that are every day giving themselves up – spending all of their tiny short existence, living and dying in good faith - in order to support the much larger enterprise that is we represent to them to be. 

I can tell you from lived experience -  from listening to their many voices – that, at least as regards to me, these tiny living beings upon which my life depends are not at all sure that the enterprise of me is worth it.  They are not at all sure it stands for something they believe in.  They are not at all sure that they are up for what I’m asking them to do.  They wonder, on a regular basis whether any good will come of their effort. 

Every day, the modern world is asking me to push them, cajole them, make them produce.  Every day the demands of modern life are asking me to force them to boot up, buck up, go along and get along.  Every day the propaganda of modern life is asking me to tell them – this is as good as it gets, stop complaining, get with the program.  If you want to survive, these are the terms, this is what you have to do.

These are the beings that are in ground level contact with how my existence is going.  They trying to get me an accurate read about that from their perspective.  They sincerely want me to know how they see it from where they are sitting.  They are trying to communicate with me honestly as to what is working, what isn’t, how it could be better, and what needs to change …

My objection to psychiatry is that it kills their right to vote.  Medical model (drug, shock, surgery) psychiatry doesn’t just affect me as a person, although the impact has its analogy.  To psychiatry, I’m basically just a human-sized cell.  Their job is to get me to function in a useful way so that the societal enterprise human beings have created has what it needs to function.  The meaning of my existence, from a psychiatric perspective, is to get me to the point where I can be plugged into one of the so-called essential organs of society that makes up our collective social body.  That way, I do my part to help produce the energy and functioning that support the world economy of corporate human existence. 

The drugs, shock, psychosurgeries that psychiatry is selling are all designed to make me useful from that perspective.  Basically, it is tantamount to being told by the larger systems that depend upon my energy and participation: You don’t like it?  Here’s a pill.  Now boot up, shut up, get back in the assembly line of life.

Seen for what it is, the core message of psychiatry is that we don’t effing matter:

·       

• Even if the big organism we belong to (human body, family, community, society) is doing something totally wrong for living beings. 
• Even if the dominant culture we are a part of (individual, family, industry, race, religion, town or country) is heading itself – and all who support and depend on it - in directions that are killing all concerned, along with the resources needed for living. 
• Even if the vast majority of voices are unhappy on the inside despite the appearance of conformity on the outside. 
• Even if, as a body, person, culture or world we are passengers on a steam-roller to our collective physical, emotional, moral and spiritual demise. 
• Even if our cumulative silence and compliance is what is allowing this to happen…. 

Even if any or all of these things, the message of psychiatry and the industry interests that allow it, is still the same.  Our collective voice, our collective concerns, our cumulative opposition don’t effing matter.  Our intuition, subjective knowing, voices, visions, beliefs, meanings, activations, animated and urgent expressions don’t matter.  The massive levels of anxiety and distress don’t matter.   The massive sum and culmination of every diagnosis on the books  - each registered not only visibly publicly to the families, neighbors, organizations and communities that refer us to psychiatry, but also individually, privately, behind closed doors that only the ‘experts’ are allowed to see and address - all don’t matter. 

None of these mechanisms for getting the collective body of human social existence good information about what human society is doing to human beings (not to mention other living beings) matters to psychiatry or the industries that support it one wit.

I can’t live with that.  I think your little vote counts and mine does too.  I hate that we are living this lie, telling each other to boot up and buck up, rewarding each other for doing that and killing everything valuable about living, each other, and the world we live in along with it. 

I suspect many others are out there who feel that way too. I suspect this is a big part of what it means to end up being the kind of person that gets labeled by psychiatry.  I suspect this is a big part of what transforms so many of us from confused compliant pill-popping patients to full-fledged fire-breathing, fiercely-determined anti-psychiatry activists, protestors and survivors. 

Something about the life spirit in us started rebelling against this a long time ago.  Something in us started questioning, resisting, pushing against, insisting, trying to find a better, more livable way.  As a people, as a movement, many of us are tired, beaten down, demoralized from this struggle. 

This principle is for us.  It was written in our honor.  It is dedicated to us and our efforts.  It affirms and advances our collective right to be.  It is about the value, the imperative, the absolute necessity of respecting human diversity.  It’s about the need to sincerely stop, look and question – rather than force compliance – when one of us breaks down.  It’s about trusting, listening to – actively seeking out -  the wisdom inherent on an individual, cellular level. 

It’s about taking seriously the egalitarian, inclusive, belief – inherent in the concept of being ‘peer.’ 

Not as ‘mentally ill’ peers on a recovery journey, but as worthy, respected human peers on a worthwhile, respectable human journey.  

In the former sense, we are tied to the opinions of experts, who substitute their judgments for our own about the value of our insights and truths – and ultimately the value of our lives.  As peers in the latter sense, we are entirely different beings. 

We are human beings, members of a human family.  We all are people of worth with valued insight.  

We all are endowed with reason and conscience uniquely our own.  We are born, each of us, with capacities and perspectives of value that urgently need to be seen and understood by those around us with shared power to affect our relevant worlds. 

As peers in this latter sense, none of us has the right to ‘Trump’ the value or lived experience of another. 

As peers in this latter sense, we give new meaning to ‘peer support.’  We take each other seriously – none of us as The Expert – but all of us as holding needed, valuable expertise.  

We determine to lean into the question of Rodney King, why can’t we all get along? We determine to go forward together, with mutual regard, leaving none of us behind. We determine to accept the challenge of Intentional Peer Support as social change:

 “It’s only working if it works for all of us.”

It stopped working for a lot of us a long time ago.  Perhaps, except in bits or blips, the working for all of us part never really even got started. 

At the same time, in my heart of hearts, I really want it to work for you, not just me.  I also really believe you want it to work for me, not just you.

That, for me, is the beauty of this thing called life.  It’s the beauty of the essential nature of the spirit that makes each of us alive, rather than dead. It says I’m willing to give a lot, sacrifice a tremendous amount.  Just don’t leave me out – don’t leave me behind.  I want me vote to count.  I want my vote to matter. 

It is willing in the voice of Dr. King to say, I may not get there with you.  On some level, that’s ok with me.  Painful but ok.  Just so long as you are paying attention.  Listening.  Being aware.  Doing your best do register the heart and soul of what I am trying to communicate here. 

Because more than anything else, I want my existence to matter. I want to make it better for those here now.  I want to make it better for those who come on after.

Like you, like me, our families, neighbors, people across the planet we’ve never even met – like plants, like trees, like everything living on this earth.   - Like the cells in our bodies giving the best they have every day to make the enterprise of us possible - in good faith, even though they don’t particularly enjoy how we are going about it or the effects we are producing…

None of us, anywhere, on any level or dimension, wants our lives to be in vain. 

We all want our existence to express the preciousness of the spirit in us. 

We all know on some level that it is precious or we wouldn’t work so hard to protect it. 

We all want, on some level, living others to be there with us. 

We all want, on some level, to be there on the same page with living others.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so darn painful when we clearly aren’t.   

Questions for Reflection

We are building this work together.  Your lived experience is needed and valued.  It is essential to building our shared knowledge and expertise as a movement.  Please comment on any or all of these questions or in any way that speaks to you personally.

1. What dose it mean to you to have the right to be you...? 

2. How has psychiatry - and the overall psychiatrization of human experience - interfered with that right?   

3. What has it that cost you, those you care about, and psychiatry at large, when others have insisted you be something that you're not?

4. If we took seriously the value and message of human diversity, how could we change the world for the better?

5. What would need to change about how we are relating to ourselves and each other to truly value and respect each other's 'right to be'?

6. I, personally, would like to redefined 'help' from meaning how to get each other to 'make it' based on socially defined standards to 'supporting each other to voice the truth of our experience and to live fully into who we long to be.'  That's what would work for me.  But how about you: How would you redefine help in a way that respects and honors you right to be?  

August 19, 2016:  Conference on Principle 19 

We will talk about Principle 19, including your responses, on August 19 from 9-11  PM EST.  The conference will convene on BlogTalkRadio.com/Peerly-Human.

To join:

By Phone: (1)267-521-0167

By Internet: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peerly-human

We welcome your participation.  Simply press #1 on your phone to speak with the show hosts.

More details are available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peerly-human

Post-Conference Reception

Those wishing to continue the discussion after the conference – or to talk informally with others who participated – may join us for the Post-Conference reception.  The reception will start immediately after the conference (11 PM EST) and continue til the wee hours or for as long as there is interest.

To join: 

By phone: (1)331-205-7196 (dial *67 for added privacy)

By internet: Uberconference.com/peerlyhuman

International: Local access numbers available at Uberconference.com/international

#18. Psychiatric Jargon is a Sham, a Gimmick, the Ultimate Shell Game

This is Day 18 of our 30-day blog on the Declaration of Principles adopted by the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression held in Toronto, May 14-18, 1982.  (More info here.)  Today we are talking about Principle 18.

Principle 18 reads in full as follows:

We oppose the psychiatric system because they substitute jargon for plain English and are fundamentally stigmatizing, demeaning, unscientific, mystifying, and superstitious. 

Examples:

Plan English vs. Psychiatric Jargon

Psychiatric inmate.................... Mental patient
Psychiatric Institution........... Mental hospital/mental health center
Psychiatric system. .............. Mental health system
Psychiatric procedure............... Treatment/therapy
Personal or social difficulties in living..... Mental Illness
Socially undesirable characteristic or trait................................ Symptom
Drugs........... Medication
Drugging...................... Chemotherapy
Electroshock................. Electroconvulsive therapy
Anger................... Hostility
Enthusiasm....... Mania
Joy.....................  Euphoria
Fear  …..   Paranoia
Sadness/unhappiness... Depression
Vision/spiritual experience. ............... Hallucination
Non-conformity ........................ Schizophrenia
Unpopular belief. ......................... Delusion

Basic Rationale

Today's commentary was provided by an anonymous donor.  Thank you!

This is a society that seeks to label everything. When we call something a name, we make an association. For example, if I type purple, you automatically know what the word means. Sometimes labeling things helps us understand and make sense of the world around us. But there are also times when giving something a name and defining it to never challenge it again can be destructive. I write the words mentally ill and we all have an individual conception of what that is whether we are right or wrong or somewhere in between. The term “mental illness” is one that is diffuse and has little meaning. It clumps all the diagnostic terms of the DSM into a nice neat group. But, life is seldom that easy and we have been duped into the idea that we are “helping” someone by acting this way.

Psychiatry, in labeling people with mumbo jumbo terms that have no basis in science, is engaging in bullying. The amazing thing that I see is that they have a whole society coming alongside of them to engage in the same power play. We are so accustomed to calling someone “bi-polar” or an “addict” that we don't even take the time to understand what we are saying much less challenging what it means and what we are doing to the person we are placing a notch below us socially. This is often done with some kind of reasoning that ends with “mental health services help people”. But are they helping or marginalizing? Are they assisting or engaging in subtle abuse? If psychiatry were viewed as a bully (which they are by engaging in derogatory means of describing people and asserting their power in doing so) as our school children are the outrage would spark a flurry of at least lip service regarding a problem. Amazingly enough though, our whole society has no hesitation to label someone with a psychiatric term and see nothing wrong with it.

But, there is something wrong with this. There is something wrong with the lack of anyone talking about the power struggle between the service providers and those they deem “in need of treatment”. Psychiatry is a product not a discipline of medicine and “mental health” is what they promote without so much as being questioned to describe what the product is. And even though they can show little quantifiable success or substantiate their practices with scientific proof of any kind, they are trusted without question. And thousands are funneled into this system, stripped of basic human rights, and are silenced because they are “crazy”. Such is the power that words can have. This is the power that psychiatry has been given to destroy lives in a subtle socially acceptable way. And, the really frightening part is to understand that those selling mental health for profit have found their way into true medicine, court systems, social services, group homes, schools, supportive employment programs, homelessness, the military, politics... it's hard to think of a place they haven't claimed. We have promoted their name calling, their codes of “disease speak” to a level that is simply staggering. This would not be as terrifying if psychiatry were actually able to do what they say they will and “help” people. But, this group has little interest in doing any such things and one simply needs to read a paper, volunteer at a school or walk down a city street to understand this isn't happening. I wonder how much longer it will be before average people begin to understand this and demand more. For now it seems people are happy handing out labels that don't fit and are wrong, humiliating and demeaning so those who are in power can hand out a pill that the drug companies have told them works to help. This is a gimmick. A sham. The ultimate form of the shell game and no one seems to be willing to call it what it is. 

If history is an indicator then it seems this problem will not change until there is such a large number who are injured by the practices of social control and moral policing that psychiatry engages in actually turn the tide. The real challenge here is to start in your own daily life to stop going for the quick fix for your own guilt and see people differently. Stop using words like “anxiety” and “depression” to describe yourself. Quit using the terms AD/HD to describe children and “dementia” to describe the forgetfulness of the elderly. Stop placing everyone, including yourself, in a box of someone else's making. Quit buying the product and quit trying to sell it. In the end that's all psychiatry really is. A quick answer that makes us all feel good for “helping” when in fact nothing has changed for the person we put a name to. In order to truly help we have to change us and how we act and stop casting our shadows on those who are vulnerable.

Questions for Reflection

We are building this work together.  Your lived experience is needed and valued.  It is essential to building our shared knowledge and expertise as a movement.  Please comment on any or all of these questions or in any way that speaks to you personally.

1. Have you experienced psychiatric labeling? 

2. What would you like others of conscience to know about this experience?  

3. How do you define your experience on your own terms??

4. Compare your own understandings with that of psychiatry - which do you find more useful and why?  

5. What if any needs does labeling serve for you? What other, more respectful ways could we address them?

6. If we really valued human differences and/ or the inner wisdom of our experience, what would happen to derogatory labeling? 

7.  How would we need to think about each other differently to get beyond derogatory labeling - psychiatric or otherwise?  

August 18, 2016:  Conference on Principle 18 

We will talk about Principle 18, including your responses, on August 18 from 9-11  PM EST.  The conference will convene on BlogTalkRadio.com/TalkWithTenney.

To join:

By Phone: (1)267-521-0167

By Internet: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

We welcome your participation.  Simply press #1 on your phone to speak with the show hosts.

More details are available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

Post-Conference Reception

Those wishing to continue the discussion after the conference – or to talk informally with others who participated – may join us for the Post-Conference reception.  The reception will start immediately after the conference (11 PM EST) and continue til the wee hours or for as long as there is interest.

To join: 

By phone: (1)331-205-7196 (dial *67 for added privacy)

By internet: Uberconference.com/peerlyhuman

International: Local access numbers available at Uberconference.com/international

#17. Psychiatrizing Every Day 'Life': How We've Been Duped

This is Day 17 of our 30-day blog on the Declaration of Principles adopted by the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression held in Toronto, May 14-18, 1982.  (More info here.)  Today we are talking about Principle 17.

Principle 17 reads in full as follows:

We oppose the medical model of "mental illness" because it dupes the public into seeking or accepting "voluntary" treatment by fostering the notion that fundamental human problems, whether personal or social, can be solved by psychiatric/ medical means.

Basic Rationale

By Tina Marie

The principle 

​about​

 which I write today, is a delicate matter that 

​frequently ​

raises cries of outrage by users of psychiatry

​ who feel that anyone who rejects the medical model of "mental illness" as based on valid medical diagnoses of a biological nature, is denying the validity of their suffering. So, I want to be clear to readers who use psychiatric services and those taking medications that (you feel) provide a sense of relief from your suffering...the perspective I am putting forth in support of this principle does absolutely nothing to invalidate your pain. And no, my views do not "stigmatize" you. They do the opposite. I want to make it clear that, I too, once shared your belief system. I too, spent many, many years cycling in and out of psychiatric units, taking enormous quantities of psychiatric drugs, seeing and feeling treatment results that appeared to confirm that my brain was biologically diseased by "bipolar disorder". My understanding is personal.

I was "voluntarily" sucked into the psychiatric system as a severely traumatized teen, where I remained trapped well into young-adulthood, hospitalized about 30 times, tried on nearly every psychiatric drug available, threatened with ECT, threatened with long-term psychiatric incarceration. You cannot begin to tell me that I just don't know how badly you or your family member suffers. I know in my heart, that even while you may embrace the medical model of "mental illness", somewhere underneath that lies the despair of believing oneself to be biologically broken and capable only of managing your "illness". That construct alone brings its own grief. But that's a topic for another time.

Although the medical model almost always fails to acknowledge the clear role that trauma plays in the vast majority of experiences that bring the designated patient into the psychiatric system, it continues, despite the lack of empirical validation, to be the model most embraced by users of psychiatry, their families and treatment providers. When trauma is, on occasion, acknowledged for its role in extreme distress, it is usually couched in terms of nothing more than a "trigger" for the onset of "the disease", which we are expected to understand as a "brain disease" that will then require life-long "treatment" with psychiatric drugs, ECT, incarceration in psychiatric facilities, monitoring in the community and any other intervention deemed necessary by the psychiatric "treatment" providers. Many survivors of psychiatry discovered this dragnet after "voluntarily" entering the psychiatric system.

Why does the Declaration of Principles place the word, voluntary, in quotes? Why do I put the word into quotes? 

I'll ask you to ponder whether your willingness to seek psychiatric treatment, or your agreement to accept psychiatric treatment can be truly voluntary if you've been misinformed, or not informed at all about the risks associated with the treatment, the efficacy of the proposed treatment, and the long term outcomes of that treatment? Can it be truly voluntary if you were never offered other models of distress, other models for recovery, or lacked access to other, more (personally) desirable options for support and healing that you might have tried before "voluntarily" agreeing to accept psychiatric treatment based on the medical model of "mental illness"?

What if your doctor had said, "I don't know what's really causing your distress, but these chemicals might dull your pain and your joy as well. We don't know what the treatment might do to you in the long-term, or how it will affect your brain and body, but we have seen some very dangerous adverse effects in the clinical trials. We're also noticing that some of the chemicals cause atrophy in the pre-frontal cortex, but we don't intend to mention that to the public for at least another 20 years. These chemicals may cause diabetes and morbid obesity, but diabetes and morbid obesity are better than being crazy, right? Would you like to try this treatment?"

Would you volunteer to give it a go?

Lack of informed consent does not and cannot lead to a voluntary agreement to psychiatric treatment even if you've walked on your own into the psychiatrist's office or the hospital and asked for treatment.

For nearly three decades now, the medical model of "mental illness" has been beamed into our homes via pharmaceutical ads on TV, news broadcasts and talk shows, and more recently on that timeline, the internet. Everyone "knows" that "mental illness is just like diabetes". Right? Only an ignoramus would not know this "fact" by now.  Not one discussion of "mental illness" by laypeople takes place without the (scientifically dispelled) assertion of the "chemical imbalance" theory as medical fact. You hear it all the time...people claiming that psychiatric drugs treat "mental illness" in the same way insulin treats diabetes. But there's no medical evidence to support that notion. Retaining excess amounts of serotonin in your neuronal synapses via the ingestion of Sertraline HCL does not treat the source of your "depressive disorder". If it makes you feel better, that's a separate matter. But your decrease in psychic pain doesn't validate the medical claims that were put forth so heavily in the mid-1990s via heavy-hitting direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. SSRIs don't address emotional distress or chemical "deficiencies" any more so than alcohol makes a person feel better by treating an ETOH "deficiency".

You may recall the original Zoloft commercial from the early to mid 1990s  For my generation and those that follow, this is where our indoctrination really began. Prozac had already been on the market for a few years, but this little cartoon was advertising genius.  Pfizer gave us a non-threatening, empathy-inducing, sad blob with which to relate and explained to us in very simple terms that if we feel badly and are having trouble enjoying things we used to enjoy, we have SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION, A SERIOUS MEDICAL CONDITION. It doesn't tell us that those "symptoms" are also part of the normal range of human emotions and behaviors, and it never suggests that there could be reasons other than A SERIOUS MEDICAL CONDITION that is at the root of our suffering. No, what it does is go on to explain that, "The cause of depression is unknown", and it "It may be due to a chemical imbalance"...cue the cartoon neurons spilling cartoon chemical molecules into their cartoon synapses. That's the psychiatric "science" on which the younger generations of users and survivors of psychiatry have cut their teeth. Many of us were small children, or not born yet at the time the Declaration of Principles were outlined, yet the explosion of pharmaceutical and psychiatric collusion in direct-to-consumer advertising overshadowed the warnings inherent in these principles. What most of our society now takes for granted as valid, scientifically-based medical fact was nothing more than a highly successful advertising ploy.

But what if you asked for it? 

Let's examine treatment consent by a true medical standard: If your cardiologist wants to perform a procedure on you that might shorten your lifespan by 25-32 years, would you expect to be told that was a potential adverse effect? Of course, you would. And any cardiologist performing a procedure that might contribute to, or directly cause your death, must disclose the risks to you and obtain your signed consent. If you still agree to the procedure after being informed of the risks vs the benefits, then you are making a voluntary choice. If, as a cardiology patient, you refuse the proposed procedure, there won't be a team of nurses, techs and doctors coming to your room to take you down, strip your clothing, inject you and carry you off for a heart operation "for your own good".

For the psychiatric "patient" refusing "treatment", the outcome is often a show of force by "treatment" providers, whether by way of coercion and threats, actual physical force, or even incarceration in a psychiatric facility. It's important for the uninitiated to understand, that even if you walk into the emergency department or call 911 and go "voluntarily" for psychiatric treatment, once there, you have forfeited many of your civil rights. Even if you asked for the "treatment", you will be viewed as mentally ill and less than capable of rational decision-making.

I want to get into the underlying social problems that make this principle so crucial to reforming the ways we, as a society, view and approach people experiencing extreme states. I want to talk about how vulnerable we were and are to accepting and embracing the medical model, why this dysfunctional, ineffective model persists in dominating the discourse around "mental illness" and the approaches we take as a society to helping people in distress. But I also want to talk about how and why many users of psychiatry and their families remain deeply wedded to these constructs that have been falsely put forth as medical facts.

I'm going to lead into this next part of discussion by briefly touching on my own history and induction into the psychiatric system:

Like many other users and survivors of psychiatry, I survived long-term childhood trauma. By the time my abuser left our household, I was 16, already very broken, suicidal, left with the enormous responsibility of caring for two younger siblings while our custodial parent worked 65 hours week, including overnights, and had absolutely no idea that I was a trauma survivor, or that anything about my family or living situation, or the things I'd endured for 16 years to that point were not healthy, not normal and were extremely abusive. I would (and did) tell people I had no reason to be distressed. I just was. I "knew" I was defective, and that it had to be some fault within me that I would feel terrified and hopeless and unable to function. I was totally and primed and ready to hear The Good News About Depression:Cures and Treatments in the New Age of Psychiatry. I spent my babysitting money to buy it, and I was sold. There was my answer. I had a medical problem, and medication can make it better. That explained it. Next, I needed to convince my dad that I needed to see a psychiatrist for the magic bullet. It wasn't hard. Families love this model too.

You see, it wasn't anyone's "fault" that I was abused and neglected and pretty relentlessly tormented by the violent parent that took off on my family the Autumn after the summer of my 16th birthday. No, I was just dealing with a medical problem.  It was okay with me that there was no real reason for my suffering other than this mysterious medical condition known as "depression". It was okay with me, mainly because I thought my family was "normal" and that I was the problem. I had everything I needed and more. I lived in a 5 bedroom house with a swimming pool on a half acre in a rural suburb of upstate NY just minutes from the lake. I had my own room. I had my own car even though I didn't have my driver's license. My dad had a great job at a Fortune 500 company. We had health insurance, and I had access to health care!

That access to health care made the whole downward spiral possible. Yes, I was "willing and able to access treatment". For, I had heard the Good News! (first about Jesus Christ and then about psychiatry) And no one ever told me that there might be some reason other than a medical issue, or that maybe I didn't need medication, (or didn't need medication forever and ever, amen.) I walked into a psychiatrist's office by appointment and walked out with a prescription and samples of Prozac to start that evening. The psychiatrist had run down a "symptom" list first, but never inquired about potential causes. I simply had a "disease" called "Depression", because I felt bad for more than two weeks, and this all happens for "unknown reasons" that may be due to a "chemical imbalance". Hooray for modern medicine!

Within a few days, I attempted suicide with many more attempts to follow over the years to come during my time as a professional psychiatric patient. The attempt was seen as part of the "disease", although; we now know that SSRIs are highly dangerous for children and adolescents, a warning that was already being heeded in the UK. That was the beginning of my decline, and a history that's far too detailed to address here.

The question I had for the first couple of years afterward was, Did I go into that treatment voluntarily? I now say no. No, I did not. I was duped, like so many users and survivors of psychiatry have been duped. Families have been duped. They seek treatment for their beloved children thinking they are doing what is right. Other families seek to force psychiatric control and "treatment" on family members as a way to avoid culpability for abuse, to gain financial control, to gain custody and for many other self-serving purposes. It's easy to be angry at those who intentionally inflict psychiatric labels and treatment for their own gains. It's harder to blame those families who have also been duped, but we still need to look at the motivations of those families to wholeheartedly embrace the medical model without question.

I'm reminded of an instance during my second psychiatric incarceration on a general hospital psychiatric unit at age 21, when an elderly mother labeled with "schizophrenia" spoke about her guilt as a parent and shared that her adult son was diagnosed with mental illness that she attributed to her self-described abusive parenting. Here was a parent admitting abuse, saying that she recognized her treatment of her adult child caused him severe mental health problems. Well-informed mental patient that I was, I pointed out to the mom that it couldn't have been anything she did to her son. Mental illness is genetic. It runs in families, and it wasn't her fault. No ma'am! I also remember the deep relief that spread across her face. Her bodily tension released. She smiled and thanked me profusely. Staff looked at me approvingly. I knew I'd done well. To this day, I feel guilt that I might have eliminated any chance that she and her son could work through what had happened to him, so that he might heal. She was also suffering deeply, and we were there together trying to figure things out. I don't know what I would say if placed in that position today, but it would be very different and probably not much of an immediate relief.

In the American culture of rugged individualism, when you're tired and broken and need and want help, you have the option to "legitimize" your pain with a medical "diagnosis", and this is a comfort to people. I know this "legitimization" via the doctor's excuse is a compelling factor to people in distress. To treat our human problems, both social and personal, as a medical problem in need of medical treatment is enticing on multiple levels. But beyond that, this medicalization of distress has become mandatory for the vast majority of people seeking mental health care and support systems that are often only affordable by way of health insurance.

I get it when users of psychiatry and family members want to, or need to embrace the suffering as a medical problem, to take pills, go to programs and to fall into step in a regime that rewards compliance in a way that mommy or daddy would never have approved of you.The simple act of complying, or even appearing to comply with psychiatric "treatment" can reap huge rewards for the designated patient in the family, often also referred to as the family scapegoat. When families report "improvement", what's really taking place?

Aside from being released from the (unreasonable) socially-dictated expectation of taking personal responsibility for pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, the medical solution continues to absolve our society from working to resolve the social problems of poverty, abuse, poor nutrition, inadequate education and homelessness to name a few. The medical model places human distress generated by all those social and personal problems into a dirty, little bundle, labels it medical and ships the bundle off for sanitizing by a system that reaps massive financial profits. We don't even need to talk about the motivations of a for-profit health care system when it comes to creating life-long "patients". Medicalizing "mental illness" has been a dreadfully successful means of ensnaring people in distress in a system that rarely ever addresses the underlying issues, but rather, de-voices, disconnects and disempowers us, uses us as cash cows, and promotes a culture that dehumanizes us as unacceptably different by way of mental defect.

Earlier in this post, I pointed out that my rejection of the medical model of "mental illness" does nothing to invalidate your suffering. I also told you that my views (and Principle 17, I should add) don't "stigmatize" you. This is truth.

A stigma is a mark of disgrace. The mark you are given as a user (and or survivor) of psychiatry is the "diagnosis", or usually multiple "diagnoses". Those are the stigmata. They have marked you and declared you to be "mentally ill". When you shout about "stigma", what you're really referring to is discrimination, unjust actions that are based solely on a malefactor's perception of you as defective in some way and unworthy of equal rights and equal treatment . The psychiatric labels you embrace and wear, often as a deeply embedded false identity, are the very thing you denounce, the very thing that opens the door to discrimination. When you embrace that psychiatrically stigmatized identity, you negate yourself and your lived experience. I know that's something that will make some readers intensely angry. It used to make me angry as well. I didn't see that connection while I was immersed in the system. It's a painful realization.

Studies from around the world have shown that the medicalization of "mental illness" has led to increasingly negative views of people labeled with "mental illness". Treating emotional distress and extreme states as problems that can be solved by psychiatric and medical means has not led to greater understanding and empathy. It has not led to a reduction of discrimination, or as some improperly call it, "stigma". It has, in fact, increased these problems exponentially. 

From The Americanization of Mental Illness:

“The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,” Mehta wrote. “We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.” The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

The medical model of "mental illness" as a means to deal with social and personal problems, with criminal justice issues, with poverty, homelessness, with addictions and violence, has been a miserable failure, and it will continue to fail. It can't do anything else. Our society is crumbling, and it's not for lack of psychiatric treatment. Psychiatry cannot and does not address the root causes of the social and personal disasters that bring people down and keep them down. It simply doesn't have the tools. It doesn't have the motivation, and too many people still want the mirage of hope that psychiatry projects to the world.

August 17, 2016:  Conference on Principle 17

We will talk about Principle 17, including your responses, on August 17 from 9-11  PM EST.  The conference will convene on BlogTalkRadio.com/TalkWithTenney.

To join:

By Phone: (1)267-521-0167

By Internet: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

We welcome your participation.  Simply press #1 on your phone to speak with the show hosts.

More details are available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

Post-Conference Reception

Those wishing to continue the discussion after the conference – or to talk informally with others who participated – may join us for the Post-Conference reception.  The reception will start immediately after the conference (11 PM EST) and continue til the wee hours or for as long as there is interest.

To join: 

By phone: (1)331-205-7196 (dial *67 for added privacy)

By internet: Uberconference.com/peerlyhuman

International: Local access numbers available at Uberconference.com/international

#16. Using 'Mental Illness' To Market Mood-Altering Medicine

This is Day 16 of our 30-day blog on the Declaration of Principles adopted by the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression held in Toronto, May 14-18, 1982.  (More info here.)  Today we are talking about Principle 16.

Principle 16 reads in full as follows:

We oppose the medical model of "mental illness" because it justifies involuntary psychiatric intervention including forced drugging

Basic Rationale

The following is by Jeanne Smith.  She details the medical model, how it works and how it operates to control and oppress our People.  Jeanne's experience additionally highlights how the medical model is used to dupe people into treatment (Principle 17, tomorrows topic) and how vulnerability - especially poverty - is exploited by the medical model (Principles 11 and 12) for industry profit.

By Jeanne Smith

In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association published The DSM lll which was created to standardize psychiatric diagnoses as the profession changed in response to the new behavior-control chemicals that were being invented by pharmaceutical companies. These drugs were effective at controlling the physical symptoms of distress. And since the profession now had “medicine” that could mask the symptoms they had been treating it was time to aggressively disseminate the concept to the public. Now, madness of every description was really a matter of chemicals in people’s brains which doctors could manage medically.

In 1984 psychiatrist and educator Nancy Andreasen published The Broken Brain and officially launched to era of “no-fault brain diseases” which were now considered to be the basis of all aberrant behavior that has been defined as psychiatric illness

In 1985 I was living in Vermont with my two toddlers, recently divorced, on welfare…and suing my father for having sexually assaulted me for 12 years as a child. One afternoon I brought my sick baby to Dr. John Matthew at The Plainfield Health Center. I was not in great shape due to poverty, lack of sleep and the stress of revealing my abuse history in this very public manner. Dr. John poked his finger in my back and I jumped. He said these fateful words to me:

“Aha! The tenderness of your trigger point proves that you have the disease “fibromyalgia” which is a symptom of depression. Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. We can fix that! You will have to take a chemical for the rest of your life, just like insulin for diabetes.”

When I asked if there was a test to show what the imbalance was he said that there was not one at present, but soon! (30 years later, still no objective tests to prove the presence or absence of any brain chemical imbalances) I also asked about the possibility of dependency on mood-altering chemicals and he insisted that the drugs were not addictive.

“My wife is an alcoholic and she swears by these drugs!” He said.

A biocracy is a political system that is based on dividing and controlling people based on physical, biological aspects such as sex or skin color or perceived disability. Psychiatry is a biocratic system of control that ascribes the effects of social injustice and cultural and personal trauma to the presence of biological, genetic brain diseases that can only be managed through psychiatric interventions such as behavior-control chemicals and electroshock to the brain.

I was a Brownie leader in Plainfield and also a member of a low-income tenants’ housing association. I talked to moms and kids and many of them were also patients of John Matthew who prescribed them ADHD drugs, antidepressants, and benzodiazepines. Why would they ever question what he was doing, you trust your DOCTOR not to do something that could hurt you, right?

Medicaid was paying the bill for the general practitioner, John Matthew, to test these dangerous chemicals on the poor. And it was an experiment, as I came to realize as I became sicker and sicker on the drugs. I looked up the drug in the PDR each time I was given something new and the entry always said, “The mechanism of action for this drug is unknown.” As I was researching during my long and painful detox I read books such as Mad in America, which informed me that the drugs were only tested for 8 weeks before they were released to be tried out on the public. And Medicaid was giving carte blanche to drug the poor.

I was there at the beginning of the biopsychiatric revolution and I watched it develop. I was one of the victims, but sadly, I became one of the proponents as I worked as a peer within the mental illness system and served on various “mental health’ boards in the community.

I was part of a peer-run support group. Our group had a shrink who was “friendly” to our cause, who was willing to certify the people we served, mostly the homeless and the dirt poor, as mentally ill in order to qualify for SSI payments. At the time I really believed this was harmless and that we were beating the system in order to provide human services for the underclass.

In my defense I have to say that I was being prescribed a cocktail of psychiatric chemicals, but I was still able to advocate for those I considered to be my disadvantaged peers, i.e. those of us who had been labeled as “mentally ill.” In my role as a peer counselor I was often confided in and the most common tale I heard was that my peers had been victims of incest, rape, domestic violence and –always- crushing poverty.

The larger peer group in my community was active in lobbying the Vermont legislature to stop forced psychiatry. In the 1990’s we proposed legislation that would pressure the MH system to consider trauma as an aspect of receiving a psychiatric diagnosis. Our slogan was, “Let’s ask - What happened to you? instead of What is wrong with you.”

Finally, I wanted to speak to the terrible practice that is commonplace among doctors.  Once a person receives a psychiatric diagnosis doctors begin to disbelieve anything that they report about their physical condition. I suppose the reasoning behind this is that crazy people are by definition not in touch with reality (liars) and are not reliable reporters on the status of their own health.

This attitude led to unimaginable suffering and early, painful death to dozens of people I worked with in the peer community in Vermont. Instead of responding to complaints about the side effects of the behavior-control cocktails they prescribe to this population, doctors, were simply adding more chemicals to the mix in order to shut people up. My next door neighbor, who had started the peer group I worked at, suffered for weeks with chronic incontinence and confusion. His “care team” at the community mental health center did not respond to his distress and he died alone in his apartment of kidney failure from lithium kidney damage.

Questions for Reflection

We are building this work together.  Your lived experience is needed and valued.  It is essential to building our shared knowledge and expertise as a movement.  Please comment on any or all of these questions or in any way that speaks to you personally.

1. What is your experience with psychiatry as a system of medical corrections? 

2. What do wish people of conscience to understand about how you were medically abused by the psychiatric system?

3. What is your vision of an alternative for those who experience extreme mental states?

4. How can we move our culture to an understanding of how the effects of social injustice have been medicalized in order to blame and control victims?

August 16, 2016:  Conference on Principle 16

We will talk about Principle 16, including your responses, on August 16 from 9-11  PM EST.  The conference will convene on BlogTalkRadio.com/TalkWithTenney.

To join:

By Phone: (1)267-521-0167

By Internet: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

We welcome your participation.  Simply press #1 on your phone to speak with the show hosts.

More details are available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

Post-Conference Reception

Those wishing to continue the discussion after the conference – or to talk informally with others who participated – may join us for the Post-Conference reception.  The reception will start immediately after the conference (11 PM EST) and continue til the wee hours or for as long as there is interest.

To join: 

By phone: (1)331-205-7196 (dial *67 for added privacy)

By internet: Uberconference.com/peerlyhuman

International: Local access numbers available at Uberconference.com/international

#15. Yelps of Lived Experience: "The Inquisition, Chattel Slavery, Nazi Camps."

This is Day 15 of our 30-day blog on the Declaration of Principles adopted by the 10th Annual Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression held in Toronto, May 14-18, 1982.  (More info here.)  Today we are talking about Principle 15.

Principle 15 reads in full as follows:

We oppose the psychiatric system because it is frighteningly similar to the inquisition, chattel slavery and the Nazi concentration camps.

Basic Rationale

The 'inquisition', 'chattel slavery', 'Nazi camps'.  This is how service users rate the experience of institutional psychiatry.

This is hardly a thing of the past.  Here are recent first-hand accounts (documentary clip) from the Devoiced: Human Rights Now! project by  Lauren Tenney.

To understand more about the how and why of it, here's a paper from Tina Minkowitz, founder of the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry.  The paper deals with Article 11 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Freedom from Torture).  But, as you can see, the parallels are to tortures past (Inquisition, slavery, Nazi camps) are legion and timeless:


 Article 11 – Freedom from Torture

Supplementary Paper prepared by the International Disability Caucus

Advocacy Note:

Forced Interventions Meet International Definition of Torture Standards

Tina Minkowitz

Forced interventions on people with disabilities, which are aimed at preventing, correcting, improving or alleviating any actual or perceived impairment, meet the elements of the definition of torture under international law. 

The Convention Against Torture defines torture as an intentional act that inflicts severe pain or suffering on the victim, done for one of a number of purposes.  The required intent is not a specific intent to cause the victim to experience pain or suffering, but a general intent to perform the act knowing that severe pain or suffering is likely to result. 

Torture usually requires the participation of a public official, but failure to provide redress or protection from acts of private violence which would otherwise qualify as torture may also violate this norm.  Forced interventions are often performed by public officials or pursuant to authority delegated by law; meaningful redress and protection are virtually unheard of.

Doctors, traditional healers and others who may perform forced interventions know that severe pain or suffering is likely to result.  The victim’s resistance, refusal to consent, or expression of fear, anger or despair in response to the proposed intervention convey the information that it is unwelcome.  Furthermore, the contexts in which forced interventions are performed reflect a systemic imbalance of power, often including deprivation of liberty, routine violations of human rights and dignity, and dehumanization of human beings as medical objects based on disability.  Perpetrators reveal a profound indifference to the effects of such interventions on people with disabilities, even when it is commonly accepted that similar interventions on non-disabled people would cause severe pain and suffering.   This indifference demonstrates that forced interventions are carried out with the requisite knowledge and intent.

Forced interventions cause severe pain and suffering to disabled people.  These interventions are rationalized as attempts to prevent, correct, improve or alleviate an impairment, without appreciating that impairment is a value-laden concept meaning deficiency, lack or absence.  People with disabilities experience ourselves as whole human beings and any attempt to alter us against our will attacks our sense of identity as well as mental and bodily integrity.  The experience often results in lifelong trauma as well as additional disability. 

Purposes of torture include obtaining information or a confession, intimidation, coercion, punishment, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind.

Discrimination is always a factor in forced interventions.  Encouragement or coercion to make us more closely resemble non-disabled people perpetuates a hierarchical classification of human beings according to disability, contrary to the principle of “acceptance of disability as part of human diversity and humanity” and the right to be different as expressed in the UNESCO Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice.  Furthermore, often interventions used on disabled people do not make us non-disabled; they make us differently disabled and may create additional impairments; such interventions do nothing to address the social and environmental dimension of disability.  The pain, suffering and diminishing of existing capacities inherent in many interventions used against disabled people reflects the discomfort of non-disabled people when faced with non-conforming body types, sensory abilities, self-expression and behavior, and a willingness to sacrifice people with disabilities in the name of saving us from ourselves. 

Coercion is a factor in forced interventions, not only in that they are by definition coercive, but also in the attempt to undermine our identity and cause us to accept subordination to authorities which are purported to have expert knowledge of our condition. A person’s body and mind are integral to identity and every human being has the right to have his or her physical and mental being, no less than other aspects of identity such as religion and political beliefs, protected from interference.  Furthermore, forced intervention is also used in directly coercive ways, as when behavior is attributed to a disability and interventions are used to prevent the behavior, either by being used as a deterrent to the undesired behavior, or by diminishing the person’s physical or mental capacities to carry out the undesired behavior. 

Punishment is a factor in forced interventions, since in institutions or other situations of power imbalance, interventions that assault a person’s identity and mental and bodily integrity are a convenient method of punishment.  The threat of forced interventions is also used to intimidate people with disabilities into complying with demands of people in positions of authority, including the demand to comply with interventions on a voluntary basis.

The Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture clarifies the international definition by presenting a variation:  measures intended to obliterate the personality or diminish the physical or mental capacities of the victim, whether or not such measures cause pain or suffering.  Commentators believe that such measures are implicit in the prohibition of torture in the UN Convention Against Torture, since such measures may not cause immediate pain or suffering but cause psychological or physical damage that can become evident in the long term. 

As already discussed, forced interventions on people with disabilities are often designed to diminish the person’s mental or physical capacities, and to change important aspects of the person’s identity.  Some egregious interventions are intended to obliterate the personality.  This provision from the Inter-American Convention is widely understood to refer particularly to use of mind-altering substances and procedures, which is one of the most predominant types of forced interventions.

The above exposition shows that forced interventions satisfy the elements of the international definition of torture.  Since the aim of the norm against torture is to prevent and protect against all instances of torture, and since protection of minority groups is explicitly encouraged by incorporating discrimination into the definition of torture, international instruments and jurisprudence should address forced interventions on people with disabilities as a matter of utmost concern.

Finally, there's a compelling argument that forced treatment is Psychiatry Slavery.  Dissident psychiatrist Thoma Szasz devoted a whole book to the topic in 1977, which is summarized here by JA Schaler:

Institutional psychiatry is an extension of law: institutional psychiatrists are agents of the state, not of their patients. Doctors who practise contractual medicine are agents of their patients, not of the state. The importance of this difference cannot be overemphasised.

People labelled by institutional psychiatrists as mentally ill are concurrently defined by the courts as less than human, in much the same way ‘Negroes’ in America were once defined as three-fifths persons. This is how Black people were, and people with mental illnesses are, deprived of liberty and justice by the state. Labelling of anyone as less than human is legal fiction, something false that is asserted as true, that the courts will not allow to be disproved. Just as defining Negroes as three-fifths persons served to maintain the institution of slavery, defining people as mentally ill serves to maintain the institution of psychiatry.

A person has a right to refuse treatment for cancer. A person does not have a right to refuse treatment for mental illness. If institutional psychiatrists are deprived of their power by the state to deprive mentally ill persons of their liberty, that is, if the state did not allow psychiatrists to enslave their patients in the name of liberating them, institutional psychiatry would go the way of slavery, as well it should.

All of this seems a bit telling.  Torture, inquisition, Nazi camps, slavery remain consistent themes across service user reviews over decades.  If a restaurant, hotel, shoe store or even a regular doctor's office got this kind of customer ratings, market factors would ensure a swift, dispassionate, decisive end to the enterprise in question.  Fees would be refunded, apologies made. There would be bokoo lawsuits left and right.  If by some miracle (political ties, monopoly power), the industry managed to persist, everybody - consumers, parents, public interest groups -  would be clammering for consumer protection legislation.

Just goes to show how far you can get with a white coat, Pharma dollars and toxic levels of prejudice. Still, I am wondering what might happen if our community started 'Yelping' our ER, inpatient, Pharma and shock experiences on the internet consumer/ user reviews sites ...?

It's not as far-fetched as it seems.  About a year ago, the Medicated & Mighty crowd crashed out in favor of treatment, making compliance look all but 'sexy.'  With relative anonymity, and using established mechanisms, we could start posting our own set of honest reviews of the businesses in question. Plus, there's nothing like the unifying wrath of customer dissatisfaction to ignite a bit of energy and shared passion. There's also nothing like the unity of born of common commercial spurning to rekindle the fierce shared loyalties of good old-fashioned peer support.

Questions for Reflection

We are building this work together.  Your lived experience is needed and valued.  It is essential to building our shared knowledge and expertise as a movement.  Please comment on any or all of these questions or in any way that speaks to you personally.

1. Have you ever experienced forced psychiatry? If so, what comparisons did you draw the inquisition, slavery or Nazi camps?  

3. What would you like others of conscience to know about your experience?

4. What, in your experience, allows torture to happen in the name of treatment?  

5. What social and systemic factors enable it to continue?

6. If we were serious about honoring human rights, how would you recommend we go about this? 

7. Who would need to be involved and how?

8. What changes would you make and why?

9. Some people think the current system is the only way to meet certain needs.  What would you say to them? How could human rights be respected and still address other important social needs? 

August 15, 2016:  Conference on Principle 15

We will talk about Principle 15, including your responses, on August 15 from 9-11  PM EST.  The conference will convene on BlogTalkRadio.com/TalkWithTenney.

To join:

By Phone: (1)267-521-0167

By Internet: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

We welcome your participation.  Simply press #1 on your phone to speak with the show hosts.

More details are available at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney

Post-Conference Reception

Those wishing to continue the discussion after the conference – or to talk informally with others who participated – may join us for the Post-Conference reception.  The reception will start immediately after the conference (11 PM EST) and continue til the wee hours or for as long as there is interest.

To join: 

By phone: (1)331-205-7196 (dial *67 for added privacy)

By internet: Uberconference.com/peerlyhuman

International: Local access numbers available at Uberconference.com/international