Dear Editor
Everyone deserves to have people in medicine and the government who honestly represent them. This is an attempt to intelligently plead for a specific kind of human rights in mental health care, rights that oppose a sophisticated, though essentially brutal, repression - the professional need to control exceptional others. While forced electroshock and forced drugging are often, except for the people these devastate, symbolic issues, the real story is that the situation for mental health patients is really bad. Needless to say, in terms of the aesthetic environment, mental health treatment is a disaster. It seems too, that all of these concerns are never adequately dealt with.
As with attempts at governmental health care reform, the context of reality, thought, and social control is a subject that is never articulated or exposed (at least in a way that allows for public action or understanding). In the world of events, this has usually shown that what was good and truthful could not prevail. Instead, deception, power, and coercion toxically attempt to decide everyone's lives. In microcosm and at crises base, these issues are also found in mental health treatments. The exposition is one that I regret wasting on psychiatric terms.
My personal situation partly results from the exclusionary stigma of a forced treatment and attention. I am seriously and adversely affected by a manipulation of health, survival, crisis, and the accompanying possibility of horrible and desperate situations. How could I, though, demonstrate to anyone that dissenting minds suffer unexplained harm, mental stress, and sleep problems that are caused by hostile third causes? There is no 'evidence' of this, just many who suffer, fail, and fear . . . or worse. Ironically, trying to speak, reason, or articulate events this way is what psychiatrists would refer to as 'losing contact with reality' or 'delusional or paranoid thinking.' I believe there is a better explanation than the clinical analysis. Consider that another explanation may actually remove the harm.
Whether a person has the ability to 'challenge the therapeutic state' - is probably an invitation to an undue scrutiny and other social problems. To interfere with psychiatry's deterministic function is a very serious risk. For reasons like this, there is presently no public examination of psychiatry's methods and goals. From tragic personal experience, I can only say that no one who loves freedom would agree with the horrendous practices that I have seen. This is why I do not trust their justifications or methods for controlling and manipulating how people think, live, and act. Alas though, due to the enormous power of manipulative professionals, due to an overly simplistic and diverting rhetoric, and also due to an often misrepresented (though seemingly 'therapeutic') public image, they are allowed to make or influence most important decisions.
Forced electroshock and drugging are just that . . . forced. The vital consent issue is mired and obscured in the issue of 'incompetence' and an unwillingness of the courts to protect patient's constitutional rights. Seen in the extreme by those affected, it seems like a system of uninformed violation and slavery. Seen in terms of mental health's popular image, what happens to patients is justified and even desirable. Even with the system's intentional obscuration of the health and rights issues, forced electroshock is an extreme measure. It exposes the real inhumanity of forced psychiatry. It is a provable harm and is accomplished by violating rights. In this issue, for once, the repressive parts of the psychiatric community have actually been caught (provably) harming people. Though this is done to fairly few people, even symbolic opposition to this creates an awareness of real freedom from it and other less obvious repression.
The issue of forced drugging, because of its extensive biophysical chemical intrusion, is just as, if not more, important. For ostensibly 'therapeutic' reasons . . . involuntary, intimidated, or otherwise desperate psychiatric patients are given anti-psychotic drugs. While the drugs seem to suppress clinical symptoms, they also intrusively affect a patient's mental and physical integrity. When these drugs (neuroleptics) are over prescribed or are given to those not acutely in need, the side effects are horrible. These effects are what authoritarian psychiatric practitioners depend on to make difficult and rebellious patients docile (with many becoming servile). Possibility of release makes many subjects cooperate. Many though, never again become independent.
Most of the public, seeing physicians as sympathetic figures, would say that most psychiatrists are likely not authoritarian, not likely to misprescribe. Doctors' own well-meaning ethical standards actually expose the fundamental problem with the mental health system. The professional community, as an institution, is not as interested in the comfort, happiness, or cure of individual psychiatric patients as they are in trying to control and eliminate a classification of activity and thought they call 'psychosis.' 'Psychosis,' to psychiatric enforcement, is what should not be thought, known, or acted out. In accomplishing this, the professional community allows themselves an access to a much greater information than those they limit. They attempt to become the ultimate judges of what is thought, realized, and lived. (This is not an exaggeration.) I would like to except myself from this.
To be certain that there are no challenges or exceptions, the mental health system has developed many very efficient means of controlling and maintaining 'catchment areas,' as well as the ability to punish, divert criticism and maintain a secrecy. This enforcement can get pretty frightening. I don't think the rest of the medical community can afford to care what is done. Even if they do care, there is a very real possibility that they can no longer legislate control of these powerful institutions and people.
It is reasonable to believe that there was opposition because psychiatry has been slow to humanize or quit these activities. After so many protests, why has psychiatry consistently resisted the humanization of its practices? What could possibly be worth betraying the trust and freedom of so many people? I believe this is partly because psychiatrists really believe they are (inarguably) right to suppress all 'psychotic' thoughts and actions - and - are willing to do almost anything to accomplish this 'greater goal.' Many psychiatrists really believe that 'deviant' events are a threat to everyone's security. They are preoccupied with survivability, life, and civilization - in monolithic proportions. Because of the dramatic importance of these considerations, psychiatrists see no one as qualified to criticize their actions.
Mistrust of psychiatric doctors is sad, because there are possibly good situations to consider healthful medical practices When having overwhelming memories, having no alternative, I voluntarily used anti-psychotic medications. Even though the emotional crises and fear may have been caused by the system, I appreciated anything that would help remove the pain of it. Unfortunately, though, two years later, I was forcibly medicated because I refused to reenter the mental health system in a different area. The pressure there was so onfrontational and great that professionals felt obliged to make personally destructive and inaccurate interpretations to commit me. Even at my worst, I have never been a danger to others. Trails of Betrayals - Over the course of these forced treatments, what was happening became starkly evident. The whole process was permeated with betrayal. It occurred to me that the cause of the betrayal was set into the system itself, into the enforcement and policing of human consciousness. The professional community's manufactured crisis wouldn't let me exist in peace, wouldn't respect my silence about what I had done previous to their interference. Talking, especially talking to professionals, became an act of informing upon those I shared an exceptional existence with.
Regrettably, I became a person dominated by an intrusive 'policing' that most would rather not admit possible. I realized then that I had not been free ever since my first restrictive contact with the professional community. The efficiency with which they did this was astonishing, the mental abilities, means, and scenarios were completely beyond any 'normal' explanatory discussion. They had caused a betrayal of freedom, honesty, and goodness. Ironically, though, by the time my friends and relatives were scared off and I was forcibly hospitalized, I no longer had anyplace to go except into the very mental health system that had done this to me. I became an outcast. The forced drugging was dismal, the discomfort was extreme.
Aversion is a kind of therapy, though it seems reasonable to ask if the aversion to these drugs is really 'helping' most people or if it is just 'punishing' them. Is this kind of medicine really the best they can do? To psychiatrists, the discomfort is a required means to the benefits of conformity. In a wider sense, it is a reasonable conclusion that the medication is useful because 'socially acceptable thoughts and behaviors' eliminate dissent, and dissent interferes with professional attempts to enforce their version of appropriate 'knowledge.'
Unaware people should know that the lengths that the professional community has gone to are quite beyond belief. Unaware people should have been told by now that they are not giving us the whole story. It is a more sophisticated, diverse, and advanced world than others are allowed to realize. The professional community's real methods are almost never discussed in the terms that they occur. All that any concerned person is left with is symbols, hopefully to coincide with an action that has a real effect for freedom.
To others I would like to say that I regret that the whole issue of forced electroshock and forced drugging is so seemingly insignificant that it does not effect most people's concern about freedom. It is helpless people against overwhelming odds. This professional domination is a degradation of civilization, of thought, of the aesthetics of existence. We should instead help protect the weak and set their minds free. Please consider the importance of the humanist staffing of law enforcement, hospitals, and medical care. Please even consider intervening in the way professionals are trained and established. Please consider a symbolic act to remove the injustice.
Respectfully,
Robert D Ewbank
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