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.

Missing ‘The Psyche’ In Psychiatry

I came across in this Information About Psychiatry blog a post, Origins of the words Psychology and Psychiatry, on the word origin of the specialty beginning with a sentence on psychology.

The word psychology first appeared in the English language in the 17th century and derives from psyche (soul) and ology (study of).

Closing with a paragraph on psychiatry.

Later, in 1808 the word “psychiatry” was coined by Johann Christian Reil. This word means “doctoring the soul”, coming from psyche (soul) and iatros (doctor). This new word allowed psychiatrists to take matters of the soul away from religion and into their own, incapable hands.

It was quite fascinating to think that the second half of the word psychiatry seemed to have the same root as the first half of one of my favorite words, iatrogenic, or doctor caused. Used in a sentence: Psychiatry is the source of much iatrogenic illness found in the world today.

The base of iatrogenic, according to Mosby’s Medical Dictionary.

Etymology: Gk, iatros, physician, genein, to produce.

Soul, in this instance, often translates interpretively into mind, and the word mind in its origins is related to memory.

I know of people who see conventional twenty-first century psychiatric practice as ‘soul killing’ or fostering ‘soul death’. This has to be ironic as the psychiatrist was initially viewed as a person who would be a healer of souls.

Much of this direction away from the original slant of psychiatrist has come with the ascendancy of biological psychiatry. Biological psychiatry sees human problems primarily in terms of brain dysfunction, and it does not tend to look to psyche or consciousness for the source of, or the solution to, those problems.

Re-translating psychobabble into bio-babble certainly hasn’t increased the success rate for the field. In fact, the biological approach to problems in living seems resigned to a belief that subtle birth defects are the source of psychiatric disorders.

One has to point out, time and time again, that there is very little concrete proof for a biological basis to psychiatric problems. There has been, on the other hand, much heavy-handed theorizing and thoroughly biased verbiage expended to bolster such a faith.

Specialty Specialist Word Usage Timeline

psychology 1653

mad doctor 1703

psychologist 1727

psychiatry 1846

alienist 1864

psychiatrist 1890

shrink 1966

Mad About The Middle Ages

I have suggested at one time or another that acting classes, a course in logic, or survivalist training might be good for a person’s mental health. A flyer about a demonstration I played a part in recently suggested protest was therapeutic. Here’s another idea…Maybe archeology could help return a person to his or her wits.

A medieval village in Herfordshire England is slowly resurfacing. The story appears in the BBC News Hereford & Westchester, under the headline, Remains of ‘medieval village’ found in Herefordshire.

Excavation work began a week ago on land in the Brockhampton Estate, near Bromyard and experts say it gives a glimpse of rural 13th Century life.

Seems there was once a village called Studmarsh in a place known as Grove.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The project is being undertaken by volunteers, including people recovering from mental health problems.

Anybody up for doing a little digging after days of yore.

Some Heritage Lottery funded the Past in Mind dig after hearing how rural history had inspired volunteers from a mental health charity.

The project is run by the mental health charity, Herefordshire Mind.

Really? You mean hopefully ex-loony bird ne’er do wells are good for something besides holding a mop? Jumping Jehosaphat, Batman! What a revelation!

Honesty As A Revolutionary Act

Weaning oneself off psychiatric drugs, leaving the mental health system behind, and saying, ” I haven’t got a “mental illness” are revolutionary acts of resistance for people who have been labeled and violated by psychiatry. No question about it! There is an ethos and perspective that challenges this departure. It claims, “You can’t do that”, despite the fact that you can, and you do.

Scan the newspaper stories about mental health in the dailies throughout the United States and beyond. You will see what I mean. So and so is in his or her fifties, on psych drugs, and has been in treatment, sometimes called recovery, for the last thirty years. So and so has got a disease he or she is going to die having. Baloney! This baloney is like all the other baloney that people believe in. Beliefs and facts are at a remove from each other.

This is a token consumer ventriloquist dummy spewing out the standard line perpetuated by bio-medical model psychiatry. “I will be a good mental patient and feed the psycho-pharmaceutical industrial complex. I will be a relative loss to society, a burden on the economy, and a slap in the face of existence. I…can’t help myself. I have this disease that prevents me from performing at the level of the average citizen.”

Have you ever heard the saying, “You can do anything you really want to do if you set your mind to it”? Revised theory has it that you can do anything you really set your heart on doing if you haven’t been labeled and gobbled up by the mental health system. If you’ve been swallowed by the mental health system, that’s it, life is different. There should be a sign above the door of every mental health facility, “Abandon hope all ye who enter herein.”

I was taken with William Burrough’s novel Naked Lunch when I first read it because he was hip to behavioral addictions long before the American Psychiatric Association ever invented them. Commercialism, consumerism, war, treatment, culture, etc., every trend, and especially every fad, you can imagine is an addiction. I must keep up with the Jones because I’m an addict. You think the Jones have a healthy lifestyle? Think again.

Biological psychiatry has this conventional folly line toward the limited capacity it sees the madman or mad woman as having with self-fulfilling prophesies galore. “You can’t achieve, and you must conform to the low bar we have set for you as far as your expectations are concerned. According to theory, you are incapable of doing anything more.”

The “mental health” of this nation is not getting better, it is getting worse. More and more people are being persuaded that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. More and more people are getting on disability rolls. More and more people are waking up from the American dream in the middle of the American nightmare. Bio-medical psychiatry, and its salespeople, are the primary reason why this is so.

We are experiencing a media cover up right now. What is being covered up is the truth about the harm psychiatric drugs do to people. They are actually killing people. This cover up, and the totally biased nature of bio-medical model psychiatric inquiry, allows this to happen. Biological psychiatry has been claiming that this injury is due to lifestyle, or disease, and not treatment. Misleading is misleading, but if you look, the evidence will set you straight.

People can and do leave the monster that the mental health system has become. They have been doing so more or less silently for years. This silence is part of the problem. Rather than contributing to the problem, they are contributing to the solution. Unfortunately, the problem is growing too fast to be contained. For this reason, a more revolutionary act is breaking the silence about psychiatry and psychiatric oppression.

When people speak up, the facade of legimacy biological psychiatry has been trying to maintain begins to crack. When people speak up, other people can begin to see they aren’t fated to a life of diminishment. When people tell the truth, the lies that paternalism fosters begin to dissolve. When people speak the truth, the antidote is beginning to be applied to the body politic. The epidemic of distress that our world is undergoing can begin to recede. When the cat is out of the bag, at long last, we can begin to realise that there is a world out there for everybody, and not just the robber baron elite, be they corporate ceos or mental health providers.

Interview with Brian Henley

This interview took place on Wednesday, July 25, in Ocala, Marion County, Florida.

It’s been said of any one speaking event that it is difficult for the mind to digest more than three new ideas at any one time. I think there are three conclusions about mental health care in the state of Florida that we can draw from this video. Let me mention them in consequential order of occurrence but ascending order of importance. That is to say, I will list the things that need to be done, first, before we achieve the matters of maximum importance, second.

3. Brian Henley mentions this action in his interview. Mental health consumers, psychiatric treatment survivors, and former mental patients need to band together to struggle for, and to achieve, human rights and social justice within the mental health system in the state of Florida.

2. We desperately need some kind of transitional housing programs in the state of Florida, from state hospital to community, perhaps attached to drop-in or respite care centers, that don’t involve forced drugging and Florida Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) team blackmail and bullying.

1. The aim for former patients, treatment survivors, and mental health consumers should be the repeal of mental health law, and with it the abolition of all forced mental health treatment. Only when all patients are voluntary patients, residing on unlocked wards in which they can freely come and go, should they be able rest content. Before all treatment is voluntary, full citizenship rights have not been restored to people currently oppressed by the mental health system.

Free ADHD testing goes the way of free lunches at UF

If you thought “stigma” was the only obstacle to seeking mental health treatment, think again, there is also the little matter of costs. The University of Florida, which previously had given free ADHD tests, will soon start charging. Diagnosis is going to cost students money starting this fall.

The story is in the latest edition of the Independent Florida Alligator, under the heading, UF will charge students in Fall for currently free ADHD testing.

The new four-step process will take seven hours and will cost $175 per student.

That’s right! It may now cost you $175 to acquire an ADHD. Consider, too, that this is only the price for purchasing the disorder. Feeding, maintenance, and vet costs follow close behind. An ADHD, with the advent of ADHDs for adults, can last well beyond the lifetime of a single individual.

These tests, despite being more elaborate than previous tests, are designed to determine the aptitude and dedication an individual might display in caring for an ADHD.

First students must be screened because you wouldn’t want a student with an ADHD that couldn’t properly care for that ADHD.

Students will go through two 90-minute screening sessions, one of which costs $25.

As you can see ADHD is a very peculiar animal.

The third step is a three-hour, $150 evaluation including an IQ test, a personality test, an achievement test and a specific test for ADHD.

Reportedly this deal at UF is a very good one as an alive and kicking ADHD can run you as much as 2Gs from a private collector.

ADHDs have gained increasing popularity over the years, especially among school age boys. It is estimated that almost 10 % of the male children in this country are the proud owners of ADHDs.

Those students without the necessary funding to purchase an ADHD may be able to get around this shortcoming by applying for financial aid.

Mad People Are Everywhere

An associated press headline today read, Colorado shooting suspect was brilliant science student. Don’t you know the authorities are going to start looking for signs of “mental illness” in this (sic) brilliant science student. They can’t attribute his acts of violence to “mental illness”, or blame “the mentally ill”, if they don’t do so. Any defense team in the country is going to be scrambling for the most handy excuse available for what is absolutely inexcusable.

Another irony is that the major this (sic) brilliant science student was reportedly dropping out of in college was neuroscience. Apparently, at some point or other, the mad student had his sights set on becoming a mad doctor.

As the organization MindFreedom International posted on its front page recently in a story about Mad Pride Celebrations throughout the world, Mad Pride 2012 in 5 + Nations “We Are the 100 %”. 99 % of the world’s population may make under a certain economic figure every year, but 100 % of the population are nuts.

The legal definition of insanity has typically been given as ‘a danger to oneself or others’. Ironically there are few people more dangerous to themselves or others on earth than politicians, and allegations of mental infirmity can destroy a political career. These ladies and gentlemen, in other words, fill the bill, but they’re not crazy as long they haven’t come under “the care”–another one of those funny words with the exact opposite of its dictionary meaning–of a psychiatrist.

Every soldier in a wartime situation is insane under the legal definition of insanity. The thing is, the legal definition of insanity is a ruse, they don’t lock mad folk up because they’re dangerous, they lock them up because they’re different. We don’t, as a rule, have another path for the person who doesn’t fit the mold to take. Some of the unwanted ones are thought of as “defective”, and given to the loony bin.

Few shining examples of upstanding humanity ever graduated cum laude summa from the loony bin. Perhaps you’ve heard the mantra, “I think I can’t, I think I can’t, I think I can’t”. The loony bin is not the railroad track to success, it’s the other railroad track, and so a lot of its boarders resign themselves to the trappings of defeat. When you’re mode of operation is the logic of the casino, that happens. The world is divided into two irreconcilable camps, the lucky and the screwed.

The lord of random chance is not the lord of an inhabitable environment. You need a lot of people who are a danger to themselves or others if the lord of random chance is to have his way. Actually random chance is never so random as it may seem because the house has to win. This is a win scored for the politicians who run the national casino. Expanding on a theme, the owners of the house include politicians, their bankers, and the corporations that have bought them.

If you’re going to support a small number of big rollers, you need a large number of losers. These losers are the poor suckers who vote for, and who work for, the big rollers. They are, in a word, insignificant in the big rollers view, and very dispensable. In the world of big rollers, big rollers are the only things that count. I think there needs to be some kind of reappraisal so that monetary gain, and corruption, are not the highest value around. The community of people at large should not be dissolving, the way it is today, into shantytown wastrels and the service industry for a tiny colony of rich people.

Why, you ask, should we turn things around in such a dramatic fashion? Alright. Let me start with the example of a movie theatre in Colorado where 12 people died and 58 people were wounded. I kind think of this kind of thing is the result of bad city planning. Massacres of this sort are becoming more and more common. I think these massacres are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to humanity’s mistreatment of humanity. When you build places that are good for people, people are good to people. When they are good to people, they don’t shoot them. All the people, not just the upper crust.

The ‘Mental Illness’ Confidence Game

“Mental illness” per se is only gullibility. “Chronic mental illness” is chronic gullibility. “Serious mental illness” is serious gullibility. All sorts of people can be gulled, and some of them get gulled into believing that there is something seriously wrong with themselves.

Mental health treatment serves the status quo. Mental health is seen as a 9 -5 job performed by some sort of unthinking automaton. Mental health is also seen as the status of politicians and bankers who get us into all kinds of trouble. We say, in their case, that this trouble is not trouble because these fuck ups make megabucks fucking up.

Mental health treatment, given the ascendancy of biological medical model psychiatry, is a drug. Does it make the person dubbed “mentally ill” mentally healthy? No. It doesn’t, in other words, correct the mistake of “mental illness”. It does produce a subservient and obedient toady who has been sedated sans objection though.

The human being dubbed “mentally ill” who resists this social programming regime through chemistry is referred to as noncompliant. The aim of treatment is compliance. Compliance is a synonym for subservient and obedient. Non-compliance leads to mental health, or independence from insurance payments, and the mental health system, and as such it just doesn’t pay.

You have three, maybe four, different industries that need gullible people. These industries are the mental health industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, and the government, federal and state.

If we want to add a fifth, there is also the health care industry. The drugs that sedate mental patients subservient and obedient also ruin their physical health, and keep doctors and nurses in business. As long as they aren’t automatons, they are expendable. Money, in fact, is made on expending them.

The mental health system is where people are sent who don’t fit into the 9-5 automaton money grubbing scheme mold. Somebody has to make money off them, too, and therefore we’ve got mental health workers, insurance salespeople, drug company exes, and politicians.

The “sicker” people are, and the more “sick” people there are among them, the more money these people make off of this “sickness” industry. As this “sickness” is nothing more than a matter of susceptibility, that is, gullibility, the “sickness” is a matter for industry pitchmen to foster.

There are ways around the 9-5 world. It’s just that they aren’t found in the mental health system because the mental health system is built around that world. People spend their entire lives doing stupid little idiotic things because other people are doing the same. We call some of this idiocy mental health treatment.

Eradicating ‘Stigma’, The New Sales Pitch For ‘Mental Illness’

It takes some stretching to put it in something resembling transactional analysis terms, but I think will give it a whirl. “I’m not Okay, but now that we have anti-stigma campaigns, it’s Okay not to be Okay.”

I guess I’m old fashioned. I still prefer Okay over not Okay.

Now we’ve got this problem of dissent and the mental health orthodoxy that didn’t exist 2 or 3 decades ago. You get the kind of thinking that runs if you don’t believe what we are saying to be true, you “stigmatize” the “mentally ill”, or more properly put, people with “mental illnesses”.

There is no “stigma” attached to mental health. There is a “stigma” attached to “mental illness”. Is there any “stigma” attached to recovering from a “mental illness”?

“Stigma”, once a brand or a tattoo, now refers to a more metaphoric or symbolic mark of disgrace. We have a problem in that, given this definition; use of the word itself is “stigmatizing”, or prejudicial. You can’t wash off disgrace any more than you can wash off the mark of Cain. When it is a matter of perception, maybe another word would be preferable.

Both words, “stigma” and recovery, are words that some people in the mad peoples movement claim have been co-opted by people who are in opposition to their wishes, aims, and rights. In the case of both words there is much legitimate truth to this accusation.

Recovery is now being used by pharmaceutical companies to sell pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals are one of the reasons why some people in treatment don’t recover. Recovery is now used by mental health professionals who feel most people who have been labeled with “serious mental illness” labels are incapable of recovering. Some of this recovery rhetoric has even degenerated into being applied to custodial care by another name. Custodial care, in some of these cases, has merely been transferred from a hospital setting to a community setting.

The idea is that there are all these “mentally ill” people out there who are not getting treatment they need because of “stigma”. The question here becomes who determines need, and where do we draw the line. The thing that is seldom being pointed out is that there are a lot of people who are being treated by force and against their wishes. Do we need more people in mental health treatment who don’t want to be treated? If so, you or your neighbor could be next. Is it not “stigmatizing” to force treatment on people who don’t want, for whatever reason, to be treated?

I see a big danger in using “stigma” to sell “mental illness”. I think this is precisely what is going on today. The numbers of people being fed, clothed, and sheltered by the taxpayers due to a “mental illness” label is increasing by leaps and bounds. Sooner or later, given the kind of growth that is taking place in the field, this burden is going to become too great for the state to carry. Once that point is reached, it will have become too late not to do something about the problem.

Recovery takes place where people leave the mental health system. They leave the mental health system precisely because they have recovered their mental health. Where people don’t leave the mental health system, the mental health system could be said to be ‘broken’. The idea is to get more people leaving the mental health system, and fewer people entering it. When you get fewer people entering the mental health system, you are being preventative. When you get more people entering the mental health system, you are being causative. I’d say it’s time to take a good long hard and honest look at what we’re doing.

Gambling With People’s Lives

The world of psycho-social rehabilitation isn’t the real world. The person in psycho-social rehabilitation has returned to the make believe, and less significant, world of adolescence and childhood. I have a problem, to cut to the real, with this kind of languishing in the waiting room. I don’t think it makes much sense to spend one’s precious time and entire life in a waiting room. Now I could be wrong, but it seems to my way of thinking that this waiting for nothing in particular to happen represents an incredible waste.

It’s possible that what we’re seeing is the apotheosis of bureaucracy. Bureaucrats like to make everyone wait. There are rules, procedures, and red tape, and when you’re finished with them, you’re a cadaver. The waiting room is where people congregate, and learn the rules, procedures, and red tape. Anywhere else is what the waiting room is designed to postpone. You frequent the waiting room until you’re spirit enough to make an excursion into the real world posthumously.

People wouldn’t frequent the waiting room if they were in their right minds, and therefore, there is propaganda and a professional elite trained to convince people that they are not in their right minds. As long as you are in your wrong mind you must be in the right place. Self-assured people with a lot of confidence wouldn’t fritter away their lives in a waiting room waiting on some kind of appointment they aren’t going to make. Cowed and beaten down defeated people, on the other hand, know that wherever they’re going it isn’t a good place.

When you’ve got people convinced that they will never be in their right minds, you’ve won the ball game. They are the losing team enduring the penalty of defeat. You are the conquering army. You’ve got a salary, a life, and a fief; they haven’t got squat. They put money in your pocket, they put bacon on your table, and they get the kids through college. Somebody has to pay for them, and that somebody is Joe Taxpayer, but the money goes into your pocket. If they ever wake up, hell’s bells, your out on your arse and pounding the pavement.

We have a relationship here similar to that between the beggar for alms and the benefactor of beggars for alms. This is a reminder that ex-bedlam inmates in England used to be provided with licenses to beg. After all, who’s going to provide a job to a loony bird? We have what we call the human condition, and the human condition wouldn’t be the human condition if loony birds could be anything other than loony birds. The ugly duckling tale, well, that’s a fairytale, isn’t it? So long as people are fated, some people are going to come out on the winning end of any proposition, and some on the losing end.

If fate, in this case, sounds like a gamble, you’ve got it! It is not reason that guides the affairs of humanity, given the world that we’ve created for ourselves, it is greed and advantage. We haven’t yet designed a world for all of its inhabitants. We’ve designed a world for its luckiest inhabitants. That, after all, is what you get from any gamble. So long as life is a gamble, in which luck and treachery mean everything, you are going to get a whole population holding the short end of the stick. When we stop gambling, maybe we can find a better purpose for this waiting room than waiting for a perpetual game to end.