More Or Less Biology In Psychiatry–That Is The Question

Much newsprint has been wasted recently on the split between the APA (American Psychiatric Association) and the NIMH over the revision of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)  that is going to be called the DSM-5. In my view, letting the 100,000 manuals bloom is not going to be any better of a solution than letting the 100,000 diagnoses bloom in the long run. If we are going to treat every patient as an individual, for the sake of the individuality of his or her condition (and genetic makeup), that’s going to make for a whole lot of variation in disorder (and/or order) expression.

The New York Times covers the story, regarding the NIMH APA divide, in a story with the heading, Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out Of Touch With Science, Experts Say. Of course, it always depends on which experts you ask. The experts the mass media is still slow to consult, and the New York Times is no exception in this regard, are those experts with lived experience on the receiving end of mental health treatment.

While typically critics of the DSM have tackled the subject from one side of the political psychiatric spectrum, here comes mob boss Thomas Insel, godfather of the NIMH, attacking from the other. In the first instance, you have people who object to the biology in biological psychiatric theory, (Theory, now there’s as important a word as any.) in the second, you have a group that doesn’t think the APA is biologically grounded enough.

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

The DSM focuses on symptoms precisely because we don’t know the causes. Dr. Thomas R. Insel, apparently, thinks otherwise.

Precision seems to be a big part of the problem. In psychiatric diagnosis, theoretical speculations aside, there are no precision tools.

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”

Or, a possibility not considered here, we’ve got five misdiagnoses floating around for which there was no underlying condition in the first place.

Solution. The NIMH is developing it’s own manual, Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC.

About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories” because “patients with mental disorders deserve better.” His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.

Consider, ripples sent throughout the mental health community, ripple throughout the “mental illness” community (i.e. the mental health ghetto). Now whether “patients with mental disorders” are going to get “better” treatment thereby is a big leap. Too big a leap in fact to make. So sorry, my poor victims of standard psychiatric malpractice!

Whatever you call it, my guess is that this switch still represents a way of billing insurance companies, the most important role for patient consumers a psychiatrist assumes. Of course, given that this paradigm change is all about biological explanations, I expect the treatment the insurance companies will be paying for is a chemical fix. Given this situation, the extent to which pharmaceuticals damage patients is still the great unasked question biological psychiatrists do their best to avoid asking.

The Evolution Revolution

Forced treatment is the big secret in the mental health “care” world today. Once upon a time, not that long ago, there was only one form of mental health treatment available, and that was it.

The American Psychiatric Association in fact grew out of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutes for the Insane. Where once you had the heads of what were then called Lunatic Asylums, now you have an association of professional pill pushers.

The big lie is that the pills they are pushing, and whose usage they are promulgating, are good for people, and not people in general, but specific people. People diagnosed with a “mental disorder”. This diagnosis is thought to make the people who have been given one somehow different from the general run of humanity and, therefore, in need of the fix that comes with a drug.

The truth is that mental health treatment is about social control. We have this law that permits confinement of anybody acting oddly on the grounds that they may cause harm to themselves or others. It would be a serious mistake, albeit a common one, to assume that people are held in psychiatric institutions because they are dangerous.

People in mental hospitals are not there because they were given a trial by jury. Usually they are there because they were given a hearing by judge, attorney, and psychiatrist in which judicial opinion subordinates itself to the whims of professional bias and procedural habit. Mental health commitment hearings, in other words, in the present day and age, are little more than kangaroo courts.

Drugs can’t fix people. Drugs can damage people. Drugs can’t straighten out faulty logic. Education can teach logical deduction. Drugs can’t supply insight. Drugs generally mask a problem rather than correct it. Masking a problem is not dealing with it, and coming  up with a solution to it.

Waiving independence in order to be treated by the mental health authorities, usually as a charity case, is not the best course of action to take as a rule. Doing so often involves forfeiting rights we think of as basic to our species. This revelation may take time to register and resonate, but it should come in time.

Yes, Virginia, there is life beyond the confines of the Mental Health clinic. One is not bound to the human services system the way a rat can be restricted to its track through a maze.  The thing is that that system shares many similarities with a rat maze. If it didn’t, researchers wouldn’t be studying rats with the idea of better understanding human behavior. I would strongly suggest that if success in the world is at all important to you, you should abandon the maze.

The irony found in the heading of this post comes with the realization that more complex organisms evolved from less complex organisms. The butterfly in a display frame is not a butterfly in flight. Our capacity expands to the extent that we learn to escape those boxes that other people would try to contain us within. Quite apart from biological limitations, and barring extreme circumstances, we have minds that allow us this advance and that departure.

Ending Discrimination By Ending Forced Mental Health Mistreatment

A view point peddled in the “mental health” literature current today states that often people who are thought to need mental health treatment are reluctant to seek mental health treatment because of some “stigma” or other attached to that treatment. This view neglects to consider that many people, regardless of need, who don’t want any mental health treatment whatsoever are being treated by force and entirely against their will and wishes. In fact, before voluntary treatment became as acceptable and popular as it is today, most people who received mental health treatment received that mental health treatment against their will and wishes.

Now any reasonable adult should realize why receiving unwanted medical treatment would be a problem for anybody receiving that unwanted medical treatment. What’s more, any reasonable adult should realize why a person receiving unwanted treatment should be outraged at receiving a bill for that unsought and unwelcome treatment. When the treatment received was also restrictive, harmful, and fundamentally unhelpful, all the more so. There is certainly more than “stigma”, whatever that word could be eluding to, involved in this process of imposing treatment on people who have no desire to be treated whatsoever.

Much of the mental health treatment regime confronting the unwilling participant is directed at convincing the prisoner that he or she is “sick” and, therefore, in need of confinement, and whatever excuse for “treatment” comes with that confinement. The prisoner who doesn’t admit to being “sick” is seen as “sicker” than the prisoner who confesses a “sickness”. Such a prisoner would be considered by staff then further from discharge than the prisoner who confessed to having an “illness”.  Given intimidation, the prisoner learns to do what the warders expect of him or her, or the prisoner doesn’t leave his or her prison called a hospital.

I think we have to think long and hard before depriving people of those rights said to belong to them by virtue of their species. The bill of rights to the US constitution, contains legal protections based on natural rights, and the derivation of human rights from those rights thought natural. Deprivation of the rights protected by the bill of rights is the hall mark of a lower class of citizenship than that of the average citizen. It is, in fact, the license for a more bestial type of arrangement. This bestial relationship is not a relationship of equals. It is the relationship of a group of people who have been granted more rights to a group of people who have been granted fewer rights.

Time in a psychiatric institute, following recent violence blamed on people with troubled lives, more and more, is likely to get a person on a criminal background check list.  This listing means two things. The person on this list is outlawed from purchasing a firearm legally, and the person’s name will come up as a potential suspect any time a violent crime is committed in his or her area. This list, in itself, is prejudicial and completely uncalled for. People who have done time in psychiatric institutes are, by and large, innocent, not only of violent crime, but of any crime. Criminalizing people in mental institutions is not likely to lessen the violent crime rate one iota. If anything, it might actually raise that violent crime rate substantially.

The way to eliminate so many negative associations connected with mental health treatment is to abolish forced mental health treatment. Force in mental health is the thing that permits the rationalization of all sorts of negative responses to people because of the psychiatric labels that they have received. The only way to abolish forced mental health treatment is to repeal mental health laws. When all mental health treatment is voluntary mental health treatment, prejudicial and discriminatory practices will be reduced correspondingly. Forced treatment is the biggest discriminatory and prejudicial obstacle to compassionate and caring understanding of these, no, not mental patients, but human beings that we presently have. It’s time we owned up to the challenge. End forced mental health treatment, and we also restore to them many of the civil rights that we just took away from them.

Obviously a long and hard civil rights struggle is ahead for people who have experienced the mental health system. This struggle is a struggle to be treated as an equal among equals. No self-serving leadership elite can win that struggle for everybody impacted by oppression within the mental health system. Self-serving leadership elites are exclusive clubs like, to give a parallel example, officers’ clubs. In this sense the mental health system itself must do it’s own part, at least as far as a good part of it is concerned, to self-destruct. If it is to do this, it will need the help of newly emergent leaders rising out of the rank and file at the grassroots level. We know what happens where elites develop. The next thing you know you have an establishment, and an establishment that is most intent on tending it’s own.  What amounts to a “mental illness” system actually needs a self-destructive element within it if we are ever to arrive at the goal of maximizing mental health for all.

On Restricting The Citizenship Rights Of People With ‘Mental Illness’ Labels

Lawmakers, politicians, and some mental health professionals complain that our jails and prisons are  becoming holding cells for people labeled with “mental illness”. They call this detainment criminalization, and they look to jail diversion, mental health courts, and other such  methods to minimize the problem. There is another type of criminalization. This is the matter of adding every patient who has been hospitalized involuntarily, and even some that have been hospitalized voluntarily, onto a national criminal background check system. If that isn’t criminalization, tell me what is? Every time a violent crime is committed the name of anybody in this database is going to come up as a potential suspect.

There is much talk in certain quarters about some “stigma” or other attached to “mental illness”.  This “stigma” is thought to be whatever prevents a person labeled “mentally ill” from receiving the special treatment he or she thinks he or she needs or deserves on account of his or her conjectured “disease”. Countering “stigma” has become any man or woman’s excuse to convalesce for a lifetime. Anti-”stigma” campaigns accompany the biological medical model theory of psychiatry.  The biological medical model theory of psychiatry has a profoundly cynical attitude towards people’s natural ability to recover from the downturns and pitfalls of everyday living. These anti-”stigma” campaigners are fine with fighting the insults and abuses that occur on a mostly surface level, but when it comes to such matters as adding names to a criminal background check database, these campaigners grow curiously silent.

Opposition to “stigma” has essentially become a two faced lie supporting the prejudice and discrimination directed against people who have known imprisonment in this nation’s psychiatric institutions. People recover from the major upsets and defeats they’ve encountered in day to day living and they get on with their lives. There is no “stigma” attached to mental and emotional stability. There is a great deal of prejudice and discrimination directed against those people who have had their lives disrupted by medical model psychiatry. While prejudice and discrimination are real, “stigma” is a ruse.  “Stigma’ is the flip side of the psychiatric label. You don’t have one without the other. All the damage that takes place in the psychiatric system starts with a diagnostic tag. Become more lax about applying the label, and you save a lot of people from the damage that accompanies treatment, including “stigma”.

Mental health treatment has become an excuse for enacting laws violating the constitutional rights of certain citizens of the USA. According to medical model psychiatry these people have defective genes, and thus they must be somewhat less human than the rest of the population with their more capable genes.  This physical defect, in other words, prevents them from ever completely recovering their sanity, and behaving in a reasonable fashion. Given a less than fully capable  human population, our law makers feel obliged to restrict the freedoms of this population in the same way that they once restricted the freedoms of people owned by other people due to the color of their skin. As anybody and everybody is a potential candidate for the loony bin, this assault on the freedom of a minority is a threat to the freedoms that our forefathers were so intent on  preserving and defending for everybody.

When you  deprive people of the rights that our constitution grants them as citizens, you create a subordinate class of less than full citizens. You create a second, third, or even lower, class of citizenry. Doing so, you devalue the human beings who have had their freedoms so restricted to a place beneath that of other human beings who have not had their rights so restricted. If, as the Declaration of Independence states, we are all created equal, and endowed with inalienable rights, this would not be true if some of us were condemned by birth to a more restrictive existence on account of mutated and defective genes.  There is no more evidence that emotional distress and mental disturbances are due to defective genes than there is that racial distinctions are due to defective genes.  While we no longer keep slaves, once held to be a fraction of the value of a human being of European ancestry, we still keep people who have experienced the mental health system down by denying their basic humanity.

Many people who have known the abuses of the mental health system first hand realize the struggle ahead of them to achieve equality of rights will be a hard one. Freedom and equality will never come without  a ferocious struggle to attain them. People in power have a vested interested in keeping other people down. Institutionalization, labeling, drugging, screening, prejudicial legislation and intimidation are ways of keeping some people down and out. Keeping people down and out are the ways some people have of keeping themselves up and in. When people have been reduced to the state that some of these treatments and laws have reduced them to, there is only one direction to go in, and that direction is up. There is also only one way to achieve one’s personal aims and goals in this upward climb, and that is by attaching oneself in solidarity to the aims and aspirations of one’s fellows. So long as there is one person who is devalued as a human being, those aims for each and every one of us cannot be said to have been fully met.

Advocating For Human Rights and Against Mistreatment

I am not a mental health advocate. I have absolutely no interest in contributing to the current treatment crisis we’ve got going in this country. First, you’ve got the people doing the treatment. They call themselves mental health advocates. Then you’ve got the people they treat. Some of them call themselves mental health advocates, too. This breaks down into two groups of people, professionals or providers and patients or consumers. The providers are the people selling the treatment, and the consumers are the people buying the treatment.

You can’t sell the treatment without someone to sell the treatment to, and so, therefore, the providers must become sellers of the idea of consumption, or need. The mental health provider in essence is a seller of “mental illness”. Thus, if we read mental health advocacy as the advocating of mental health treatment, there is an unstated conflict of interest involved here. Your advocates must also be advocates of “mental illness” in order to have a large stock of people to treat.

If 1 in 5 people in the USA are consumers buying mental health treatment, people described as “mentally ill”, 4 in 5 people in the USA are not consuming mental health treatment. Problem. 1 in 5 is in danger of becoming 2 in 5 which could then become 3 in 5, etc. Then there’s the matter of how much of the population, given this increase, would need to be mental health workers, that is, providers. In that eventuality, given a nation in which the majority of the people within that nation are mental health consumers, perhaps we should add to an M to USA. This would make us the United Medical States of America.

Back to the statistic that presently applies. 4 in 5 people in the nation are not consuming mental health at this time. If we take mental health to mean mental health treatment,  4 in 5 people in this country have no need for mental health. Nobody has turned this statistic around to ask, well, how many people in the 20 % that we’re saying consume mental health treatment don’t really need to consume mental health treatment. This isn’t the kind of question people who advocate for mental health treatment ask. They don’t want fewer people in treatment, they want more. There is only one direction to go in for them, and that direction is upward in so far as numbers are concerned.

Should anyone have any hesitations about seeking treatment, these mental health advocates have this word “stigma” that they throw out with such abandon. Funny thing about “stigma”, the people selling this idea of “stigma” aren’t talking about how much of the treatment they are referring is unwanted treatment. There was a time, not that long ago, when the only mental health treatment people received was forced mental health treatment. So long as there are people being treated against their will and wishes, this lie about “stigma” is only a ruse. People aren’t reluctant to go into treatment because of any “stigma”, people are reluctant go into treatment because treatment always results in prejudice and discrimination.

As I stated, I am not a mental health advocate. I am not a mental health advocate because I am a human rights advocate. I am opposed to forced mental health treatment on principle. Forced mental health treatment doesn’t take place without violating a person’s rights as a citizen and a human being. You can’t force treatment on a person without taking away that person’s liberty. I have nothing against treating people who want to be treated. I simply think all mental health treatment should be voluntary treatment.

This opposition to force means that I believe people should not be imprisoned, tortured, and poisoned in prisons called hospitals in the name of mental health. Doing so doesn’t result in good outcomes as a rule. Not only are the results poor, but you can only do so by violating the basic rights of the individuals being so mistreated. There are other ways of treating human beings. I advocate using some of those other ways.

Civil rights and civil liberties lose ground along the beltway

Generally, and to make it look good, in the context of mental health care gun restriction laws only go after people who have come under some kind of court order. The criteria for civil commitment, after all, most typically has something to do with being construed ‘a danger to oneself or others’. The legislature of the state of Maryland though has outdone itself by enacting laws to restrict gun use among former patients who went into the hospital voluntarily.

The story, as reported at delmarvaNow.com, bears the heading, Mental illness gun report usage questioned.

The gathering took place just hours after the Senate Judicial Proceedings committee passed Gov. Martin O’Malley’s gun bill with an amendment to restrict access to guns by voluntarily admitted patients.

Now the fact that former mental patients aren’t violent as a rule didn’t seem to phase the law makers behind this legislation one bit. Nor the fact that people labeled “mentally ill” are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime, by a 3 to 1 margin, according to one recent study.

Previously only those involuntarily hospitalized for mental illnesses were placed on a list of individuals who cannot purchase regulated guns in Maryland, according to the bill.

Personally I have a great deal of trepidation about restricting the constitutional rights of my fellow Americans, even when those fellow Americans have seen harder times than the average citizen.

This is certainly a shot in the arm for so called “stigma”. I could not see myself in good faith encouraging anybody to enter a psychiatric facility if it was going to mean, as it will in Maryland, a reduction of his or her rights as a citizen.

On The Presumption Of Future Guilt

Now is not a good time to be in mental health treatment. Although people talk about reducing the “stigma” associated with “mental illness” labels, give the public a tragic massacre of the dimensions we saw at Sandy Hook, and everybody who has ever received mental health treatment automatically becomes a suspected future mass murderer.

It just ain’t so.

The problem is not medical, the problem is human. You take any individual who is not solely concentrated on making a million dollars by the time he or she turns thirty, and you’ve got a troubled individual. Our view of success is twisted in the extreme. We’ve got all these so called mental health advocates screaming, “Give, give, give”, because  all sorts of behaviors and emotions are being pathologized.

Bad conduct is not a disease. Shyness is not a disease. Boredom and inattention are not diseases. Anxiety and sadness are not diseases. Elation and excitement are not diseases. Silliness is not a disease. They aren’t real diseases anyway, but you can begin to get some idea of how these mental health treatment sales people put out these crazy (and I don’t mean “mentally ill”) 1 in 4 needy people statistics.

With 1 in 4 people characterized as “mentally ill”, it’s easy to see how any individual from out of this large population of people could cause devastating damage with a gun. With 3 in 4 people characterized as not needing “mental health” treatment, it’s easy to see how any individual out of this large population could cause devastating damage as well. Problem is, once that damage is done, the 3 in 4 becomes a 1 in 4. The armchairs come out, and the diagnosing begins.

Multiple murder is not a symptom of “mental illness”. Multiple murder involves the commission of multiple felonies.  The law imagines every man, woman, and child of us to be capable of committing murder. The only people the law picks up as potential suspects in future murders are people who have been diagnosed “mentally ill”.  If they had the rights of people in the criminal justice system they would not be presumed,  individually or collectively, guilty of these future crimes.

Sage advice is something young people aren’t born possessing. Inexperience always was one of the shortcomings of youth, and walking arm in arm with inexperience goes folly. If you’re going to learn by trial and error, you’re training is going to be fraught with many errors. Wisdom, it has been said, comes with age. Inexperience is not a disease either, but the problem with treating it as such is that then wisdom becomes more elusive than ever. There is no wisdom drug on the market, and there is not likely to be one any time soon.

A pill bottle is not a good substitute for parents, nor is a pill bottle a good substitute for sage advice. When the parenting role has been demoted due to conflicting responsibilities and priorities, the social mentoring role assumes all that much more importance. Folly is a right. Making mistakes comes with making decisions. Making decisions comes with freedom of choice. You are going to make a wrong decision. To err is human, to correct an error is also human. When correcting error ceases to be a human endeavor, you will have nothing but errors.

Forcing mental health treatment on people out of a fear of future violence is one of the biggest threats to freedom this country has ever faced. Force involves the deprivation of liberty.  Liberty is one of the fundamental values behind the foundation of this nation. When 1 in 4 people are categorized as “sick”, 1 in 4 people in this nation become suspected future killers. This 1 in 4 is much more than it once was, before mental health treatment, and with mental health treatment, drug company profits, became such a hot item.

The tragedies at Columbine, V-Tech, and Sandy Hook are byproducts of this mental health system pharmaceutical industry honeymoon, romance, and marriage. Perfect children don’t shoot perfect children. Perfect children don’t exist. Imperfect children have been deemed fodder for the pharmaceutical industry. Imperfect children are all children. Inexperienced children are innocent children. Wise children are adults. What did I say? You’re not going to find wisdom in a pill bottle.

Governmental Persecution of Former Mental Patients

What’s wrong with entering the names of people who have been in the mental health system into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database, and barring them from gun purchases?

1. The law behind this action deprives US citizens who have committed no crime of their constitutional second amendment right to bear arms. In doing so, it is an UNCONSTITUTIONAL and, therefore, ILLEGAL law.

2. The act of depriving this group of their second amendment rights is an example of PREJUDICE directed people who have been on the receiving end of the mental health system. People who have received mental health treatment are being made the SCAPEGOATS for gun violence in this nation, and gun violence for which they are absolutely in no way, shape, or form responsible; they are being made to pay for gun violence of which they are completely INNOCENT.

3. Statistics show people who have received treatment for psychiatric labels to be more often the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. They are, as a rule, peaceful, law abiding, and NONVIOLENT citizens. As they are more often the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators, and as it is merely a few frustrated and failed individuals for whom they are taking the rap. This rap is a matter of extreme prejudice, and it is entirely unjustified.

4. Placing the names of former mental patients on, of all things, a criminal background check list, is a blatant example of CRIMINALIZING people who have had mental health treatment. As I pointed out, most of them have broken no laws, and they are, therefore, not criminals. Not being criminals, there is no reason to place them on such a list.

5. When black people are harassed at traffic stops on account of their skin color by law enforcement, we call this harassment racial profiling. Use of the names and information entered into this database are going to be used, as that is its purpose, for doing psychiatric or MENTAL HEALTH PROFILING, that is, targeting former mental patients for harassment by law enforcement. This is not the way we should be treating our fellow citizens, neighbors, and human beings.

6. Through the names and information entered into this database police officers and federal agents are going to have access to people’s mental health treatment records. This access amounts to a BREACH OF CONFIDENTIALITY between patient and therapist at a massive level. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was designed to guard people’s confidential relationships for health reasons, but the law pertains to the mental health system and civil actions, and it can be entirely superseded by the criminal justice system. The result of these breaches ultimately usually serves neither health nor justice.

We’ve got better things to do with our time and energy than to CONDEMN people UNTO PERPETUITY for the mental health treatment they have received. This NICS database only represents one more way of furthering the misfortunes of people who have experienced the mental health system  first hand as patients. It constitutes one more INJURY directed against this group of people, and as such, it cannot be said to be in the interests of mental health and recovery to maintain it.

Let me reiterate for the sake of those of you who may not have been paying attention. The law behind the NICS database is unconstitutional. It is illegal. Former mental patients are being made the scapegoats for violence in this country. Entering information on former mental patients onto a criminal background check database is a form of criminalization. This list is going to be used for mental health profiling, that is, police harassment. It is also going to be used to disarm innocent people who are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime. It is a massive government intrusion and an invasion of privacy. It serves neither the interests of social justice nor of mental health.

Okay then. Why the bad law? Law makers, confronted with a monumental tragedy in the form of a number of copy cat crimes, have to give the impression that they are doing something to relieve the situation. Unfortunately, it is more important for them to do something about the issue than it is for them to do something about the issue that is effective or that makes sense. They have their electorate to think about. If they do nothing, they are going to be savaged in the media and by the public. If they have no guilty parties in custody, then someone is going to have to take the heat. In this case, that someone is the set of people who have done time in mental institutions.

Governor Seeks To Change Massachusetts Law For The Worse

The performance of various states differs when it comes to ratting out people who have done time in the Loony Bin. It has been reported that 14 states, for example, have 5 or fewer people listed on the federal background check database for reasons of mental health.

I recently had a close encounter with a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mass. doesn’t share mental health data. Apparently in Massachusetts it’s illegal to provide the government with information on a person’s mental health treatment background.

Massachusetts has among the toughest gun laws in the nation, but a 43-year-old law bars the state from providing mental health records to an FBI database for gun background checks.

Of course, when it comes to law breakers there are no law breakers like law keepers, take the FBI, for instance.

The Boston Globe reports that the FBI has processed 1.6 million background checks of Bay State residents who seek to buy guns from federally licensed dealers.

The governor is trying to bring Massachusetts law in line with much of the rest of the nation as far as  the oppression, harassment, and persecution of mental patients and former mental patients is concerned.

Gov. Deval Patrick has twice tried unsuccessfully to get legislative approval for the sharing of mental health data, but both have failed in part because of opposition from gun rights activists.

One of his most recent proposals involves calling for universal background checks in his state to include mental health information.

This insistence begs the question of a citizen’s constitutional rights to bare arms. The federal government has been persistently violating the 2nd amendment rights of a good number of citizens on the grounds that it has them on this list. Officials in Massachusetts, in other words, are not the only folks violating the law.

The news of this friction only goes to further substantiate the recent flurry of rumors about a rash of ‘schizophrenia’ outbreaks in high places, especially among officials in state and federal government..

Mental health profiling and the struggle for civil rights

The public mental health system serves as a second arm of police-force for the federal government. People who break the law are contained by the criminal justice and penal system. People who break rules not necessarily even written into law are contained by the mental health state hospital system. Our legislators have written this loophole into law, mental health law, that allows for exceptions to be made to the rule of law. Let’s call these unwritten rules, these exceptions, pseudo-law.

Pseudo-laws are laws pertaining to violent pre-crime, in other words, the threat of future violence. The legal definition of insanity invariably targets suspected potential dangers “to oneself or others.” No crime need be committed if one is deemed “mentally ill”, that is, of a violent pre-criminal disposition. People are not locked up because they have any illness, people are locked up because they are perceived of as threats to the public. There is an all too often ignored contradiction here as well in that members of the public are being detained, by a government agency that may be perceived as a threat to them, as a threat to the public.

You cannot separate a section of the population unfavorably from the population at large without resorting to alienation. The proper term for this alienation is dehumanization. This minority population, in other words, must be perceived as somehow different, and therefore, less worthy and deserving than the majority population. Difference is a matter of the degree of unfamiliarity, for this separation is a separation from the basic units of which the larger society is made. Those people are not our families. Those people are the shadows in the closets of our families.

The mental health system is a social control system. The system ensures conformity with certain social rules and regulations by holding over people’s heads the threat of institutionalization if they misbehave. Violence is only the convenient excuse for locking people up. People are not locked up because they actually are violent. People are locked up for having behaved in ways that are deemed unacceptable. The mental health system constitutes a system of rewards and punishments used in order to get these errant individuals back into the conformingly acceptable fold.

Alienated dehumanized second class citizens do not have the same rights as full citizens because we have made laws bypassing constitutional protections with regard to people who fit that category. An obvious example of this demotion of rights can be seen in the case of the military service veteran who must petition the court for the right to own a gun due to a history of mental health treatment. Although our laws may have been envisioned as serving all citizens equally the reality is anything but equal treatment. This circumstance inevitably makes the struggle for equality under the law crucial in the redemption of people damned by professional opinion.

The government now states that it wants universal background checks on all people purchasing firearms. The problems this action is creating are twofold. The names of all people outlawed from gun ownership are to be listed in a federal database that contains the informational ruse used for depriving them of their second amendment citizenship rights. This breach of confidentiality is going to end up harming people in court cases. This also creates a situation where people with histories of one sort or another are literally being targeted for profiling by law enforcement.

Given all the talk about erasing “stigma”, here is another example of reinforcing negative stereotypes and, thereby, creating “stigma”. This is also a matter of prejudice, discrimination, and what both of those movements of mind and body entail, a denial of civil rights. Any denial of civil rights means a struggle to regain civil rights for the people who have had their rights denied. People who have been through the mental health system, and come out on the other side, know this intimately.  Their struggle for equality under the law, far from being over, is far from ending.