Documentary Evidence

The Insane Liberation Front dates back to the dawn of the ex-patients movement around 1969 and 1970. Notice the demand for freak out centers, yep, drop-centers date back to about 1971 or so, too.

Insane Liberation Front

We, of the Insane Liberation Front, are former mental patients and people whom society labels as
insane. We are beginning to get together—beginning to see that our problems are not individual, not
due to personal inadequacies but are a result of living in an oppressive society. And we’re beginning
to see that our so-called “sickness” is a personal rebellion or an internal revolt against this
inhumane system. Insane Liberation will actively fight mental institutions and the brutalization
they represent (e.g., involuntary confinement, electric shock, use of drugs, forced labor, beatings,
and the constant affronts to our self-identity). Even in so-called “progressive hospitals” where many
of the physical abuses do not occur, we’re still made to feel so low that our concept of whom we
are, and our beliefs, are pushed down so far that we often end up accepting our jailer’s society. We
will fight to free all people imprisoned in mental institutions.

Demands from Insane Manifesto

1. We demand an end to the existence of mental institutions and all the oppression they represent (e.g., involuntary servitude, electroshock, use of drugs, and restrictions to communicate with the outside).

2. We demand that all people imprisoned in mental hospitals be immediately freed.

3. We demand the establishment of neighborhood freak-out centers, entirely controlled by the people who use them. A freak-out center is a place where people, if they feel they need help, can get it in a totally open atmosphere from people who are undergoing or have undergone similar experiences.

   ”I see the freak-out center as a place where there will be people who know where people freaking out are at because they have been there and they won’t cut them off because they know how devastating that can be. The people that live and work there see themselves as no more sane than anybody that will come there. Everyone is insane and everyone freaks out.” (Insane Liberation, Portland, Oregon)

   Insane liberation plans to form freak-out centers immediately.

4. We demand an end to mental commitments.

5. We want an end to the practice of psychiatry. The whole “science” of psychiatry is based on the assumption that there is something wrong with the individual rather than with society. We see psychiatry as a tool to maintain the present system. Rebelling often means immediately being sent to a shrink because of “emotional disturbance.” We see that the majority of shrinks a) make money off our problems; b) see us as categories and objects. To them we are “anxiety neurosis” or a “paranoid reaction” instead of a human being; c) foster dependency rather than independency by making us distrust ourselves and consequently look for answers in the all-knowing God, the psychiatrist.

   Many psychiatrists have already used their influences to discredit the revolutionary movement by calling it sick. We see that this will continue and get worse.

6. We demand an end to economic discrimination against people who have undergone psychiatric treatment and we demand that all their records be destroyed.

7. We want an end to sane chauvinism (intolerance toward people who appear strange and act differently) and that people be educated to fight against it.

8. We demand with other liberation groups an end to the capitalistic system and its racist, sexist oppression and with its competitive, antihuman standards. We believe in a socialist society based on cooperation.

9. “We demand the right to the integrity of our bodies in all their functions, including the extremist of situations, suicide. We demand that all antisuicide laws be wiped from the books.” (Insane Liberation, Portland, Oregan)

   The Radical Therapist, Ballantine Books, Inc., 1971, Jerome Agel, p. 107-109

   When it comes to the article below, don't try calling the Dolphin Center either, this article dates back to the early seventies. The Mental Patients' Liberation Project no longer exists. I imagine it was just one step along the way to the formation of what we now know as the Mental Patients' Liberation Alliance of New York.

   Statement

   MENTAL PATIENTS’ LIBERATION PROJECT

   We. of the Mental Patient’s Liberation Project, are former mental patients. We’ve all been labeled schizophrenic, manic-depressive, psychotic, and neurotic—labels that have degraded us, made us feel inferior. Now we’re beginning to get together—beginning to see that these labels are not true but have been thrown at us because we have refused to conform—refused to adjust to a society where to be normal is to be an unquestioning robot, without emotion and creativity. As ex-mental patients we know what its like to be locked up in mental institutions for this refusal; we know what its like to be treated as an object—to be made to feel less of a person than “normal” people on the outside. We’ve all felt the boredom, the regimentation, the inhumane physical and psychological abuses of institutional life—life on the inside. We are now beginning to realize that we are no longer alone in these feelings—that we are all brothers and sisters. Now for the first time we’re beginning to fight for ourselves—fight for our personal liberty. We, of the Mental Patients’ Liberation Project, want to work to change the conditions we have experienced. We have drawn up a Bill of Rights for Mental Patients—rights that we unquestioningly should have but rights that have been refused to us. Because these rights are not now legally ours we are now going to fight to make them a reality.

   Mental Patients Bill Of Rights

   We are ex-patients. We have been subjected to brutalization in mental hospitals and by the psychiatric profession. In almost every state of the union, a mental patient has fewer de facto rights than a murderer condemned to die or to life imprisonment. As human beings, you are entitled to basic human rights that are taken for granted by the general population. You are entitled to protection by and recourse to the law. The purpose of the Mental Patients’ Liberation Project is to help those who are still institutionalized. This bill of rights was prepared by those at the first meeting of MPLP held on June 13, 1971 at the Washington Square Methodist Church. If you know someone in a mental hospital, give him/her a copy of these rights. If you are in a hospital and need legal help, try to find someone to call the Dolphin Center.

   1. You are a human being and are entitled to be treated as such with as much decency and respect as is accorded any other human being.
   2. You are an American citizen and are entitled to every right established by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.
   3. You have the right to the integrity of your own mind and the integrity of your own body.
   4. Treatment and medication can be administered only with your consent, you have the right to demand to know all relevant information regarding said treatment and/or medication.
   5. You have the right to have access to your own legal and medical counsel.
   6. You have the right to refuse to work in a mental hospital and/or to choose what work you shall do and you have the right to receive the minimum wage for such work as is set by the state labor laws.
   7. You have the right to decent medical attention when you feel you need it just as any other human being has that right.
   8. You have the right to uncensored communication by phone, letter, and in person with whomever you wish and at any time you wish.
   9. You have the right not to be treated like a criminal; not to be locked up against your will; not to be committed involuntarily; not to be fingerprinted or “mugged” (photographed).
   10. You have the right to decent living conditions. You’re paying for it and the taxpayers are paying for it.
   11. You have the right to retain your own personal property. No one has the right to confiscate what is legally yours, no matter what reason is given. That is commonly known as theft.
   12. You have the right to bring grievance against those who have mistreated you and the right to counsel and a court hearing. You are entitled to protection by the law against retaliation.
   13. You have the right to refuse to be a guinea pig for experimental drugs and treatments and to refuse to be used as learning material for students. You have the right to demand reimbursement if you are so used.
   14. You have the right not to have your character questioned or defamed.
   15. You have the right to request an alternative to legal commitment or incarceration in a mental hospital.

   The Mental Patients’ Liberation Project plans to set up neighborhood crisis centers as alternatives to incarceration and voluntary and involuntary commitment to hospitals. We plan to set up a legal aid society for those whose rights are taken away and/or abused. Although our immediate aim is to help those currently in hospitals, we are also interested in helping those who are suffering from job discrimination, discriminatory school admissions policies and discrimination and abuse at the hands of the psychiatric profession. Call the number below if you are interested in our group or if you need legal assistance.

   Please contact us if there is any specific condition you would like us to work against.

   Mental Patients’ Liberation Project
   c/o Dolphin Center
   56 East 4th Street
   New York, NY 10003
   254-4270

   Radical Psychology, 1973, Phillip M. Brown, Harper & Row, Publishers, pp. 521-525

   A second look at the Principles below might be worth taking just in case anyone wants to take a good hard look at whether or not fundamental progress is being made.

   Statement of Principles
   from the 10th Annual International Conference
   on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression

   http://members.bellatlantic.net/~adhdah/psych_inmates_libfront/vol_4/the_movement.html

   The Tenth Annual International Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, held in Toronto, Canada on May l4-l8 1982 adopted the following principles:

   1. We oppose involuntary psychiatric intervention including civil commitment and the administration of psychiatric procedures ("treatments") by force or coercion or without informed consent.

   2. We oppose involuntary psychiatric intervention because it is an unethical and unconstitutional denial of freedom, due process and the right to he left alone.

   3. We oppose involuntary psychiatric intervention because it is a violation of the individual's right to control his or her own soul, mind and body.

   4. We oppose forced psychiatric procedures such as drugging electroshock, psychosurgery, restraints, solitary confinement, and "aversive behaviour modification".

   5. We oppose forced psychiatric procedures because they humiliate, debilitate, injure. incapacitate and kill people.

   6. We oppose forced psychiatric procedures because they are at best quackery and at worst tortures, which can and do cause severe and permanent harm to the total being of people subjected to them.

   7. We oppose the psychiatric system because it is inherently tyrannical.

   8. We oppose the psychiatric system because it is an extra legal parallel police force which suppresses cultural and political dissent.

   9. We oppose the psychiatric system because it punishes individuals who have had or claim to have had spiritual experiences and invalidates those experiences by defining them as "symptoms" of "mental illness."

   10. We oppose the psychiatric system because it uses the trappings of medicine and science to mask the social-control function it serves.

   11. We oppose the psychiatric system because it invalidates the real needs of poor people by offering social welfare under the guise of psychiatric "care and treatment."

   12. We oppose the psychiatric system because it feeds on the poor and powerless, the elderly, women, children, sexual minorities, people of colour and ethnic groups.

   13. We oppose the psychiatric system because it creates a stigmatized class of society which is easily oppressed and controlled.

   14. We oppose the psychiatric system because its growing influence in education, the prisons, the military, government, industry and medicine threatens to turn society into a psychiatric state made up of two classes: those who impose "treatment" and those who have or are likely to have it imposed on them.

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

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

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

   18. We oppose the use of psychiatric terms because they substitute jargon for plain English and are fundamentally stigmatizing, demeaning, unscientific, mystifying and superstitious. Examples:

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

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

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

   21. We believe that alleged dangerousness, whether to oneself or others, should not be considered grounds for denying personal liberty, and that only proven criminal acts should be the basis for such denial.

   22. We believe that persons charged with crimes should be tried for their alleged criminal acts with due process of law, and that psychiatric professionals should not be given expert-witness status in criminal proceedings or courts of law.

   23. We believe that there should be no involuntary psychiatric interventions in prisons and that the prison system should be reformed and humanized.

   24. We believe that so long as one individual's freedom is unjustly restricted no one is truly free.

   25. We believe that the psychiatric system is, in fact, a pacification programme controlled by psychiatrists and supported by other mental health professionals, whose chief function is to persuade, threaten or force people into conforming to established norms and values.

   26. We believe that the psychiatric system cannot be reformed but must be abolished.

   27. We believe that voluntary networks of community alternatives to the psychiatric system should be widely encouraged and supported. Alternatives such as self-help or mutual support groups, advocacy/rights groups, co-op houses, crisis centers and drop-ins should be controlled by the users themselves to serve their needs, while ensuring their freedom, dignity and self-respect.

   28. We demand an end to involuntary psychiatric intervention.

   29. We demand individual liberty and social justice for everyone.

   30. We intend to make these words real and will not rest until we do.

   And On Going...

   If "First Do No Harm" is not in the Hippocratic Oath, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the Hippocratic Oath. Don's reasons capture the spirit of the movement, and those reasons remain very much on target to this day.

   25 GOOD REASONS WHY PSYCHIATRY MUST BE ABOLISHED

   by Don Weitz

   http://www.antipsychiatry.org/25reason.htm

   1. Because psychiatrists frequently cause harm, permanent disabilities, death - death of the body-mind-spirit.

   2. Because psychiatrists frequently violate the Hippocratic Oath which orders all physicians "First Do No Harm."

   3. Because psychiatrists patronize and disempower people, especially their patients.

   4. Because psychiatry is not a medical science.

   5. Because psychiatry is quackery, a pseudo-science which lacks independent diagnostic tests, testable hypotheses, and cures for "schizophrenia" and all other types of alleged "mental illness" or "mental disorder".

   6. Because psychiatrists can not accurately and reliably predict dangerousness, violence, or any other type of human behaviour, yet make such claims as "expert witnesses", and with the media promote the "dangerous mental patient" myth/stereotype.

   7. Because psychiatrists have caused a worldwide epidemic of brain damage by promoting and prescribing brain-disabling treatments such as the neuroleptics, antidepressants, electroconvulsive brainwashing (electroshock), and psychosurgery (lobotomy).

   8. Because psychiatrists manufacture hundreds of "mental disorders" classified in its bible called "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (a modern witch-hunting manual); such "mental disorders" and "symptoms" are in fact negative, class-and-culturally-biased moral judgments for dissident ways of coping with personal problems and alternative ways of perceiving, interpreting or being in the world.

   9. Because psychiatrists, blinded by their medical model bias, fraudulently pathologize and label people's serious life or existential crises as "symptoms" of "mental illness" or "mental disorder" such as "schizophrenia","bipolar affective disorder", and "personality disorder".

   10. Because psychiatrists compound this fraud by falsely claiming, without scientific proof, that these "mental disorders" are caused by a "biochemical imbalance" in the brain, genetic factors or "genetic predispositions", despite the fact that there are no genetic factors in "mental illness".

   11. Because psychiatrists frequently misinform their patients, families and the public by claiming that brain-disabling procedures such as the neurotoxins (e.g.,"antipsychotic medication" and "antidepressasnts"), electroconvulsive brainwashing (electroconvulsive therapy/"ECT"), psychosurgery (lobotomy) and other behaviour modification-mind control procedures are "safe, effective and lifesaving". The exact opposite is tragically true.

   12. Because psychiatrists routinely deceive or lie to patients, prisoners, their families, and the public.

   13. Because psychiatrists routinely and willfully violate the medical-ethical principle of "informed consent" by misinforming or not informing their patients about the numerous toxic, disabling and frequently permanent effects of the neuroleptics such as memory loss, tardive dyskinesia, tardive psychosis, parkinsonism, dementia (all signs of brain damage), and death.

   14. Because psychiatrists routinely threaten, intimidate or coerce many patients - particularly women, children, the elderly, and prisoners - into consenting to health-threatening/brain-damaging "treatment" such as the antidepressants, neuroleptics, electroconvulsive brainwashing, and hi-risk experiments.

   15. Because psychiatrists frequently fail to fully inform psychiatric inmates and prisoners about existing safe and humane, non-medical alternatives in the community such as survivor-controlled crisis centres, drop-ins, self-help or advocacy groups, diet, massage, wholistic medicine, affordable supportive housing, and jobs.

   16. Because psychiatrists are sexist in frequently stereotyping women in crisis as "hysterical" or "over-emotional", blaming women whenever they voice real complaints and assertively express their feelings and emotions, prescribing massive doses of tranquilizers and antidrepressants to disproportionately large numbers of women, and in sexually assaulting women in their offices and institutions.

   17. Because psychiatrists, particularly white male psychiatrists, are homophobic - the American Psychiatric Association (APA) once labelled homosexuality as a "mental illness" or "mental disorder" - and have used forced electroshock on lesbians, trying to coerce them into adopting a heterosexual life style.

   18. Because psychiatrists are ageist in prescribing tranquilizers, antidepressants ("medication") and electroconvulsive brainwashing for disproportionately large numbers of elderly people - a form of elder abuse.

   19. Because psychiatrists are racist in disproportionately incarcerating and drugging people of African descent, aboringal people, other people of colour and labelling them "psychotic" or "schizophrenic".

   20. Because psychiatrists routinely violate people's civil rights, human rights and constitutional rights such as imprisoning innocent people without court trial or public hearing ("involuntary commitment"), and subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishments or tortures such as forced drugging, electroconvulsive brainwashing, psychosurgery, solitary confinement, "chemical restraints", and 4-point or 5-point restraints.

   21. Because psychiatrists masterminded the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people including disabled children, the elderly and psychiatric patients during The Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and "selected" hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners for death ("T-4 euthanasia" program) - historical facts still missing in psychiatric textbooks and histories.

   22. Because psychiatrists have willingly participated in and administered mind-control experiments in the United States and Canada since the early 1950s - its chief targets have been poor patients, women, dissidents and prisoners.

   23. Because psychiatry, particularly institutional-biological psychiatry, is based on the 3 Fs: Fear, Fraud,and Force.

   24. Because psychiatry is a form of social control or punishment - not treatment.

   25. Because psychiatry, particularly institutional-biological psychiatry, is fascist - a direct threat to democracy, human rights and life.

   A note from the author: This statement is a slightly revised version of the original written in Spring 1998. Feel free to add and publish your own reasons. I am a psychiatric survivor and antipsychiatry activist who has been involved in the psychiatric survivor liberation movment for 24 years. I am also co-editor of "Shrink Resistant: The Struggle Against Psychiatry in Canada" (1988), host-producer of the antipsychiatry program "Shrinkrap" on CKLN radio (88.1 FM) in Toronto, member of People Against Coercive Treatment (P.A.C.T.), and member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).]

   PLEASE SNOWBALL, COPY AND PUBLISH THIS STATEMENT INCLUDING THE NOTE. NO COPYRIGHT OR PERMISSION REQUIRED.

   The author, Don Weitz can be reached at his e-mail address: dweitz@interlog.com

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