Issues In Psychiatric Mistreatment

Toy Town – Clubhouses or outpatient treatment facilities
following the lead from New York’s Fountain House model of operations
have sprung up everywhere it seems. These facilities are essentially
nursery schools for adults, and not very good nursery schools at that
judging from the results of the treatments received within them. They
are nursery schools in which adults make a pretense at doing
vocational rehabilitation the way children play house or doctor and
nurse. These adults though probably wouldn’t survive real nursery
school as they never got the lesson right embodied in the children’s
book The Little Engine That Could. The mantra in some of these
facilities seems to run along the lines of I think I can’t, I think
I can’t, I think I can’t and so on. The not ready for the real world
players who receive services from these places have and take every
opportunity to avoid the responsibilities that come of facing the
realities that everyday life entails indefinitely. These facilities,
fostering dependency and debility the way they do, end up being
society’s warehouses of human refuse.

Abduction, Assault, Torture & Imprisonment – If a private citizen were to
abduct, assault, torture and imprison another human being then that
citizen would likely find him or herself in a whole lot of hot water with the
law. We tend to think of these matters as criminal activities, and yet
communities across the country engage in these same activities every
day of the year. The communities that engage in these activities don’t
call them abduction, assault, torture and imprisonment though, they refer to
them instead as civil commitment proceedings. A person facing such
proceedings ends up being forcibly removed from the circumstances that
person is familiar with, often in handcuffs and shackles, and by a law
enforcement officer, and placed in a very strange environment
surrounded by very strangely behaving people. He or she is daily
forcibly given, in this environment, small doses of brain altering
poisons that have severe and sometimes permanent side effects and that
will make him or her feel absolutely miserable. The aim of this torture
is to attain an admission of having an illness from the person who is
being held captive. Without such an admission, he or she will not be
released from the prison, called a hospital, he or she is being held
in. People placed in such circumstances make such an admission, even if
it is a total lie, or those people won’t be released from the
institutions in which they are being held prisoner. Although the
criminal justice system can own up to some of its mistakes – yes,
Virginia, innocent people have been executed – the mental health
system is fain to acknowledge the possibility that any of the people
shuffling the halls of its units could be sane.

Biological Psychiatry – or Bio-psychiatry is the theory that
holds that psychiatric disturbances have a biological or a genetic
basis. This theory would downplay the importance of the environment and
social factors on the development of a mental illness in any of those
individuals diagnosed as having such a condition. The problem with
biological psychiatry is that it would damn a person from before birth
in much the same way that the perspective that holds one race to be
superior to another race would damn those races which such a view held
to be inferior races. This theory flies in the face of the fact that
some people actually do completely recover from a serious mental
illness after having received a diagnosis of having such a debilitating
condition. This theory is part of the rationale behind the over
reliance on neuroleptic drugs that many doctors have demonstrated these
days, drugs that may have more to do with a persons perceived low
functioning level than any mental illness such a person is thought to
have contracted. There is little or no real evidence to support the
belief in this theory despite its wide spread and general acceptance
among members of the professional community. Theory begging – the
reporting of a theory so often that it is accepted as fact – is rampant
regarding this theory within the profession. A chemical imbalance has
been postulated to explain mental illness without ever supposing the
chemical balance that might explain a lack of mental illness, and such
a chemical imbalance has never been found, chiefly because it doesn’t
exist.

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