Misdiagnosis Australia Style

If you don’t think mistakes happen in the mental health field the following story from Top News, Man Drugged After Being Mistaken For Escaped Psychiatric Patient, should prove enlightening.

A patient escaped from Perth’s Graylands Mental Hospital at some point in the middle of December.

Police, on December 16, discovered another person who matched the description given by the hospital and he was taken to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and was kept there over the night. He was given the anti-psychotic drugs which made him ill.

A man misidentified as an escaped mental patient was hospitalized and drugged. Two days later the real escapee returned to the hospital and, oh oh, then the cat was out of the bag.

The real patient who had escaped returned to the hospital on December 18 and it was then the hospital realized that they have committed [a] mistake in identifying the man. The Minister for Mental Health, Helen Morton has now apologized to him for the huge mistake.

Helen Morton says the people responsible for this misadventure should be held accountable. I suppose that also means the possibility of a sizable financial settlement from the threat of civil litigation for some lucky cuss.

Now whatever “disorder” the man nabbed on the 16th actually had, that information isn’t being released to the public.

Lengthy stays in Australia’s mental hospitals

If a recent report from New South Wales is to be believed, Australia needs to step into the twenty-first century. The Ombudsman for mental health facilities there has uncovered a few real horror stories. ABC News reported on the matter in a story bearing the headline, Psychiatric patients spending too long in hospital.

Bruce Barbour reviewed the files of 95 people in 11 mental health facilities across the State and found a lack of appropriate accommodation and support was leading to people being denied their right to live in the community.

His findings, in his own words, are startling.

“What was staggering was 13 people had been in hospital for over 20 years and indeed there were three people in hospital for over 40 years,” the Ombudsman said.

This is 13 people out of 95 people, well over 10 %. If the this selection accurately reflects the population in Australian mental institutions then there are way too many people abandoned, wasting away, and forgotten in them over long periods of their lifetimes.

“Two people had been in hospital from the time they were teenagers and that’s almost Dickensian, it’s just not something we should be seeing in the 21st century in this state.”

I think to call the situation ‘almost Dickensian’ is to understate it. Charles Dickens wouldn’t be so hard on the characters in his novels as the Australian authorities have been on some of their citizens.

Just think, some of these inmates have been incarcerated since a time when they were practically children. If children are innocent, such a claim can’t be made for their elders, particularly when their elders would condemn them to such a fate.

Saying Yes To Health By Saying No To Labels And Drugs

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I see it as a revolutionary act to proclaim myself free of “mental illness”. It is a revolutionary act because psychiatrists had diagnosed me with a number of different “disorders of the mind” in the past. These same psychiatrists readily give negative prognoses’ for certain diagnoses’, among them some of the diagnoses’ they’d given me. I call it a revolutionary act because I have found that it is an act many people find themselves too cowardly to make. I don’t need a doctor to circumscribe terms for living my life, and I don’t need to pretend I need a doctor to do such.

In a mental hospital setting, where one has been involuntarily committed, by a hearing and not by a trial, one is expected to admit to having an “illness”. If one doesn’t admit to being “ill”, a prequisite for discharge, while one at one time would have been said to be using a defense mechanism, and being ‘in denial’ about the severity of his or her “disease”, now one is more likely to hear that one has ‘anosogosia’, a brain defect, that causes one to ‘lack insight’ into the nature of his or her “disease”. Non-admission of “illness” is seen as a further “symptom of illness”, or a further indication of the more serious nature of the impugned “illness”. This is the game, you go along, or you rot in a psychiatric facility.

It must first be remembered that one has been convicted of acting insane not by a jury, but by a judge, a few psychiatrists, and probably a public defender who was only pretending to defend his client. The suspect, in other words, is presumed to be “sick”, and no proof need be offered, for as long and until a mental health professional declares him or her otherwise. The thing is mental health professionals don’t hand out certificates of mental health or sanity. If they are going to verify anything, on paper, it’s usually to the instability that they would find in their captives. Of course, the appearance of “improvement” can open doors.

I am not a high functioning schizophrenic. I am not a high functioning person with bipolar disorder. I am not a high functioning depressive person. High functioning, in combination with “mental illness”, is an oxymoron. People are gauged by the DSM, the shrink’s label bible, according to levels of functionality, and people so labeled are not expected to be able to function at the level of people who bear no labels. I am, therefore, high functioning precisely because I am not schizophrenic, nor bipolar, nor depressed. The high functioning exception to the rule of low functioning is a ruse.

Much research has stirred up much confusion about so called “mental illnesses” and the direct effects of the drugs used to “manage” so called “symptoms“. When it comes to schizophrenia and neuroleptic drugs, a worsening condition is more often the result of the drugs than it is of the disease itself. Neuroleptic drugs reduce brain mass, induce apathy, and ultimately produce cognitive decline in the individuals who take them. Each of these conditions has been attributed to the progress of the disease. You would have to factor psychiatric drugs into the equation before you begin to figure out whether this is so or not, and this is not done in much research today precisely because it is driven by drug company marketing efforts.

I don’t take psychiatric drugs. I don’t need a psychiatrist to prescribe psychiatric drugs to me. I have recovered from any “mental disability” that I may have been said to have suffered from, and I did so without recourse to excessive psychiatric counseling. Usually this counseling involves little more than a script for a chemical agent to be ingested periodically. I don’t take psychiatric drugs because of the ill effects they have on my person, and because I have some knowledge as to how these drugs actually affect the brain and the body. I, in fact, attribute my continuing physical and mental well being to my aversion to taking psychiatric drugs. I think when you connect the “illness” with the drug you can begin to see the virtue in coming off.

We live in a prescription drug culture that has left many casualties in its wake, and you can read the names of some of the more notable cadavers in the dailies. I am proud, for the moment, to count myself among the survivors of psychiatric labeling, psychiatric drugging, and standard psychiatric malpractice. This survival would not have been the case had I passively concurred with some psychiatrist’s low opinion of myself and my chances. We need to change the predominate paradigm in mental health treatment today from one that relies so heavily on chemical sedation to one that deals with the problems of real people before we can advance. One sure sign that a person is mentally healthy is that they don’t rely upon drugs. I encourage others to do as I have done, in the name of saving lives, and to say no to psychiatry and psychiatric drugs.

Living My Life Without ‘Mental Illness’

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I don’t have multiple “mental illnesses”. I don’t see a doctor who says I have any “mental illness”. If I did see such a doctor, it would still be my big secret. I think there are some things you should never discuss with a member of the psychiatric profession, and that is just one of those things. If I felt I had a “mental illness”, or if I wanted a “mental illness”, as some people seem to do, the situation would be different. Psychiatrists dispense “mental illness” labels, and the pills used to treat such labels, as if they were candy. Doing so, I would imagine, fits the psychiatrist job description as it is defined today pretty much to a tee.

The literature these days seems to suggest that there is a “stigma” against seeking treatment for a “mental” condition. What this literature seldom goes into is that much of the treatment going on today, as it was yesterday, is unsought and unwanted. It is coercive treatment given by way of court order to a person who somebody found annoying, and who doesn’t want that mental health treatment imposed on him or her. Unfortunately there aren’t so many people saying that we should end forced treatment so that the only people in treatment are those who want to have such treatment. This leaves the person who disagrees with forced treatment with a limited number of choices. Released from confinement he or she can either join the chorus of people crying for more and more treatment reputedly to end “stigma”, he or she can vanish into a quiet but unmolested and ignoble obscurity, or he or she can speak out on behalf of all those who are treated against their will and wishes.

The first path was always out of the question for me on account of the fact that I could never be so dishonest. I know there is much incentive, after forced and life disrupting psychiatric interventions, for choosing the second path, but I have chosen the third, and I would imagine more arduous path. Why? I think the value of one brave soul surpasses that of a thousand cowardly souls when it comes right down to it. A number of us feel that that violence that the state uses on people deemed to be of unsound mind is quite literally torture. This torture amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in a circumstance where no crime has been committed. Persuading the victim of this torture that torture is treatment, and that treatment is a necessary “good”, gives the torturer quite an edge over his detractors I would say. It cannot, for instance, as in this case, be said that oppression takes place without the acquiescence of the oppressed. I, for my part, aim to acquiesce as little as possible.

When I was first introduced to psychiatric treatment I was wary of psychiatric drugs not because they were dangerous but because they made me feel miserable. Learning, as I have learned, that these drugs do damage to people, and that the misery I felt was indicative of their destructive nature, I have not become any less wary of their usage. I have in fact become an advocate for non-compliance to treatment plans because of the damage wreaked by these drugs. This is only the beginning though when it comes to my complaints about conventional psychiatry. Some of us, and I include myself in that category, have better things to do with our lives than waste our days in mental health limbo. Some of us had rather be leading a purposeful existence. When it comes to this purposeful existence, we don’t need a psychiatrist telling us just what that purpose should be. We can figure these things out for ourselves.

Imagine a psychiatric label. Imagine a pair of scissors. With a couple of snips from the scissors imagine the psychiatric label divorced from the human whose neck it hung around. Imagine this psychiatric label lying by its lonesome. Imagine freedom. I don’t have to imagine that freedom any more because that freedom is mine. The label had no magic hold over me, and it wasn’t attached by super(crazy)glue. It was only a matter of words in a text on some mental health professional’s bookshelf. I have my own words. I can put the dictionary to work for my own ends, too. I don’t need to be debilitated by language. I don’t need to be removed from any meaningful dialogue and social context. I don’t need to be exiled from the community at large. I am not logically challenged, nor am I communication dysfunctional. I don’t have a “major” or a “minor mental illness”. I don’t know about you, but me, hey, I’m Okay.

Epiphany On The Threshold Of A Better World

We need to say, and in no uncertain terms, “NO to forced mental health treatment!” Forced treatment is always mistreatment. This totalitarian loophole in our democratic system of government should be closed, and closed for good. The problem is not, and never was, forced this therapy or that therapy. The problem is force in and of itself because force involves denying one of the values we hold most basic to the democratic process, namely individual liberty.

There are just so many ways in which people are made un-free through mental health maltreatment. They can be restrained by restraining devices, they can be subjected to solitary confinement, they can be electro-shocked against their wishes, and they can be drugged regardless of their own feelings on the subject, even when out of the so called mental hospital, more literally a psychiatric prison, and in the larger community.

A new law is not going to fix this old problem at all. A new law will merely add to the confusion. There are so many laws, and in few places is this more true than in the mental health system, that are not being enforced now. We certainly don’t need another silly law on the books. What we need is for the old law that allows this over extended exercise in tyranny to be repealed. When force is not the law, as far as mental health treatment is concerned, then force is a violation of the law the way it is everywhere else.

The mental health system in fact serves as the way in which mental health authorities get around the law. People are neglected, abused, violated, and die in these facilities, and the offenders are let off with little more than a knuckle rapping if that. The people confined to these facilities are not schizophrenics or manic depressives, and they didn’t come from another planet. They are human beings the same as you and me. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are lying words in a lying book used to make human beings out to be something other than what they are.

Violence is growing more and more common in contemporary society. Violence is growing more and more common because of the lack of a sense of community, and because of a breakdown in communications. Violence is not growing more common because of an epidemic of “mental illness”. That is the myth. “Mental illnesses” don’t kill people any more than guns kill people. When all is said and done, it is people who kill people, and it is people who should be held accountable.

Tolerance is the answer. Tolerance and an end to these arbitrary and discriminatory laws. Intolerance breeds intolerance. We see the results of this intolerance in the multiple murders that take place on an almost daily basis here and there. These acts of violence weren’t perpetuated by people with “mental illnesses”. They are intolerant acts perpetuated by frustrated individuals reacting to other acts of intolerance. Build a more livable world, for everybody not just for some monied elite, and such acts of violence should subside to the degree that such a world is actually achieved. There is often a reason, you see, to unreason, and it’s not the sort of reason that should be ignored.

Ex-marine Locked Up Over Facebook Posts Freed

Ex-marine Brandon Raub of Chesterfield Virginia was detained in a psychiatric hospital for evaluation for, of all things, his Facebook posts. The case, handled by lawyers from the Rutherford Institute as it was felt that his free speech rights were being violated, was later dismissed.

Business Insider recently published an UPDATE: Judge Orders Release Of Detained Marine From Psychiatric Hospital

A circuit court judge has dismissed the government’s case against Brandon Raub and ordered that the Marine veteran, detained over anti-government Facebook posts, be released from a state psychiatric hospital because authorities had no grounds to detain him, Catie Beck of CBS 6 News reports.

Raub’s lawyer, John Whitehead, issued a stern warning on the state of affairs with Virginia mental health law.

Whitehead said that every year in Virginia more than 20,000 people are committed under similar circumstances and “that means
a lot of people are disappearing” under the pretext of mental illness.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings a few years ago, Virginia lowered its standard for forced treatment. This situation makes it way too easy for people to get committed to psychiatric institutions in the state of Virginia, sometimes for the most frivolous of reasons.

“I’m friends with the local police; I could call them right now and probably get you committed if you were in Virginia,” Whitehead said. “They can arrive at your door based on somebody’s testimony or your Facebook page and take you away to a mental hospital… There’s a system here that is corrupt. And this guy is caught in it.”

Brandon Raub has been released from that system. Many more people are hopelessly caught in it now. I would suspect that Brandon Raub is not the only person so confined in an effort to suppress freedom of speech.

Rumored Resistance to the Church of Mental Health

Contemporary theory has it that what has been termed “mental illness” is the result of biology. Semantically this sleight of logical reasoning just doesn’t work very well. At issue, metaphysics, the domain of philosophy, is being confused with physics, the domain of biology. You can have a wounded finger, but should you claim to have the wounded thought of a finger, then you’re in for some heavy duty therapeutic trouble.

This theory has created a new religion, mental health. Converts to this religion believe in “mental illness” the way fundamentalist Christians believe in Jesus Christ. People are said to “have a mental illness”. This “mental illness” is not thought to be something they can “lose”. This “mental illness” can be “treated” but it can’t be “cured”. This “mental illness” is “treated” by a lifetime drug taking regimen that is thought to manage “symptoms”. In other words, being biological, this thing they call “disease” is a fact of nature, or eternal, according to theory anyway.

People who don’t share this view are said to express a “stigma” towards people who do hold this view. “Stigma”, as you might have guessed, is the new heresy. You put on your mental patient gloves when dealing with the chosen afflicted, or you are a heretic. The holy trinity of Serious Mental Illness goes like this, “We believe in mental illness, we believe in its unchangeable nature, and we believe in special treatment for people who have been damned or blessed by it.”

Many people have been utterly devastated and destroyed by a fervent belief in “mental illness”. This belief would affect all aspects of their lives. In particular, this belief encourages them to take toxic substances in the mistaken belief that some kind of trade-off was taking place, and that they would be worse off if they didn’t destroy their physical health in this fashion. In reality they are dying off at a much high rate, and at a much earlier age, than the rest of the population. The good news is that there are so many more new converts to this religion every day of the week that its priests and priestesses are in absolutely no danger of losing their congregations.

The big secret is that there are a few people who have managed to escape from the monasteries and convents run by the church of mental health. These are people who have exorcised the demon “mental disorder” that was tormenting them. Usually this dispossession was achieved by reversing the treatment process. The debilitating drugs used to make loyal converts were curtailed, and the biology of real nature, not textbook nature, took over. This process helped them to rejoin the world of men and women outside of the church of mental health where they have gone on to form pockets of resistance to the rapidly expanding church and the church states it oversees.

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.

The Church of Biological Psychiatry and its Discontents

The collusion of business interests, academic stuffed shirts, and a media elite has ensured that the public gets the views of compliant converts to the Church of Biological Psychiatry much more frequently than it hears from non-compliant, and completely recovered, survivors of psychiatric human rights violations and oppression.

The goody two shoes of psychiatry are multiple, and the deception is deep. Your step and fetch it wierd Aunt or Uncle Tom of the treatment world is not the only animal around. She or he is just the media‘s, and the media that is courting psychiatric industry interests and corporate drug company money, darling. Drool on yourself for the camera, dear.

The Church of Biological Psychiatry includes a loose confederation of interested parties seeking to ward off funding cuts, independent examination, criticism and free thought. These parties include mainstream psychiatry organizations, torture advocacy organizations, institutions of high education, law enforcement officials, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, plus a bunch of dumb hacks that don‘t know shit.

The God of the Church of Biological Psychiatry goes by the name of chronic and irreparable “mental illness”. The Church of Biological Psychiatry asserts that a certain percentage of the population have been chosen to express the genes fashioned expressly by this God of Madness. Here, “mental illness” is a noun and never a verb. Furthermore, “mental illness” is possessive. If it’s not what you are, it’s what you have, and it’s not what you do.

The belief in “mental illness” genes has not put us one iota closer to developing a “mental illness” litmus test. After all this time, this “mental illness” bug or defect, just like the Gods of the Greeks, the Romans, and the God of the Christians, has eluded capture. Converts and evangelicals alike, despite being certain that “mental illnesses” are caused by defective, inferiority, or submission genes, readily admit that they don’t know the source of “mental disturbances”.

The great God “mental disorder” demands further research and development into the potent capacity chemicals have to maintain, contain, and otherwise control the more unruly select among his flock. Without these pills and potions they would be lost forever. Sorry fuckers who can’t cope with the world outside of an institution. These chemical compounds were created expressly in order to correct the mistakes of nature. The church has an expression for its solution to these mistakes, “In pharmaceuticals, and the profits they pull in, we trust.”

For decades a small but growing band of heretics have defied the dictates and decrees of the Church of Biological Psychiatry despite, if not total silence, irritation on the part of the illuminati. You must know your place, the clergy preach, and that place is either in receiving treatment, or in providing treatment, or in agreeing with everything we say. Stay tuned, although evangelicals and corruption have guaranteed that the Church of Biological Psychiatry is growing at a much faster rate than heresy, there is no room for improvement in the perfect doctrine.