Richard Bentall writes in The Guardian on the “routine” coercion in the U.K. mental health services, and on patients who are “voluntary in name only”.
Of Further Notice:
Coercion, subtle or otherwise, is the rule in psychiatric care… (Beyond Meds)
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Ah, the comments on a Guardian article critical of psychiatry! I may as well be reading my own obituary, it’s that depressing.
One family member (in this case, code word for stakeholder in the system of psychiatric slavery), tries to justify the continued existence of this institution.
The reaction to her comments is typical. Whenever we are confronted with a family member talking of their “mentally-ill loved ones”, this is accompanied both by an aberration of our reasoning and critical faculties, as well as a prejudgement of the “mentally-healthy” family member as the omniscient narrator of their “loved-one’s” existence, as if being the occupant of that particular status (that of “family-member”) somehow purges them of those influences that lead human beings to lie, manipulate, cheat, self-deceive and embellish, that releases them from the shackles of human nature and vaccinates them against the forces that might prejudice their judgement of reality.
Yet anyone who questions much of the conventional wisdom about many family members regarding their “mentally-ill loved-ones” is suddenly exposed to the fulminations of self-righteous “mentally-healthy” family members. It is as if there was no historical basis for this concern many of us have about psychiatry’s role as an instrument in family-sacpegoating and tyranny.
Has it ever occurred to people that, although often operating in the family-member beneath the threshold of consciousness due to the intervention of the mechanism of self-deception, maybe one of the reasons why there is so much confusion and fantasy on the issue of the behaviour of “mentally-ill” people, is because we have allowed parents, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, as well Mental Health Professionals, to monopolize the interpretation and narration of the lives of “mentally-ill” people, even though, considering the history of families abandoning their “loved-ones” to the medically-disguised predations of psychiatrists, we have sufficient grounds to be paranoid of the scheming parent or offspring, especially when one is cognisant of how invested the foregoing often are in the continued existence of the relevent institution, as well as in the manipulation, distortion, mystification and embellishment of reality?
Maybe it is about time that we refocus our attention on the patient, even though it is true that many patients, in their confusion, lack of self-respect and self-belief; their eagerness to tranquilize the interpersonal disharmony in their lives and to gain admission into the group and the respect of others; to get benefits and support, often embrace the degrading identities attributed to them and internalize the desires and beliefs of their oppressors.
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One commenter talks about how, in the vulgar, self-righteous phraseology of the Mental Healther, we need to coerce more quickly because this allows the “mentally-ill” person to deny his illness (and of course, we can’t have that, can we?) and carry on ruining the lives of those around them. Such is the intolerable self-centeredness of these people; it is all right for them to ruin the lives of “mentally-ill” unpeople, but woe betide that it should be the other way round. This gives off an almost palpable odour of a sense of entitlement, that they should be allowed to do unto others what certain others shouldn’t be allowed to do to they!
Such people talk of ruined lives, whilst articulating the ruins of their victims lives in pseudo-medical and therapeutic terminology. Yet if we were to weigh the aggregate of the evil committed against mental patients (by psychiatrists, their lackeys and those whose interests they advance), against the aggregate of the evil committed against psychiatrists and family members (by the “mentally-ill” person), we would soon realize the sheer poverty of their presumptuous claims to moral authority and righteousness on this issue.
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That should be “wouldn’t allow”.
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One person said, “The reality (his reality I think he means) is that many people suffering with psychotic symtoms have an aversion to medication, often rooted in delusional beliefs…”
Oh but of course, he doesn’t have any delusions, as proven by the fact that he isn’t on the mental health register! He talks as if his powers of comprehension on this matter range over the entire landscape of the human psyche, as if he was some sort of objective, inerrant investigator of every aspect of human nature, mentation and experience. If he isn’t a psychiatrist, then he surely has the requisite lack of intellectual humility!
It is, of course, my contention, that such utterances bear the stamp of his own delusions, but unlike all these arrogant Mental Health control-freaks, I don’t expect my utterances and beliefs to entitle me to privileges, or expect them to be heeded in the halls of legislation and administration.
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Unholy crap. WHAT?
“lostgirl
02 February 2013 12:09pmLink to this comment
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4There is a paradox at the heart of psychiatry which relates to the CQC’s report of increasing use of detention and of coercive practice and it is this.
Child care social workers talk of increasingly unbearable caseloads and of the impossibility of protecting so many at risk children. There are many children who are being battered, raped or neglected by their families and those whose job it is to protect them find it hard to cope. The murder rate is about one per week in Britain of children killed by their guardians, mainly their parents. Most survive and become adults.
Mental health social workers and other AMHPs and psychiatrists have the power to detain and many detentions are triggered by calls from family members and stories of how badly or dangerously their loved one is behaving, often a young person in their teens or twenties or even under 18. Here lies the thought provoking paradox – suddenly all the abusive relatives have disappeared and all relatives are honest, totally without malice and only have the welfare of their loved one at heart. Mental health professionals appear to be incapable of believing that anyone who demands a detention for someone under the Mental Health law or who reports that their relative is violent or threatening, can have an ulterior motive or is lying.”
There’s a snapshot of evil if I ever saw one. Is angel / devil a popular game over there? It is here in America. Sick, twisted evil is what that is.
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Yeah, things are pretty bad over here. That lostgirl’s comment pretty much echoes my own, in that she seems to share the same incredulity as I on the issue of the stubborn unwillingnness of many in regards this issue to avail themselves of their mental endowments in discussion of the issue of the possibility that family-members aren’t always impelled to abandon their loved-ones to the predations by misguided good-intentions.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not stating that they are simply evil, but am referring more to the often contradictory currents of a person’s nature, and the role of familial conflict in corrupting intent. Nevertheless, some family-members, in their treatment of “loved-ones” are just plain wicked.
Whenever there is discussion of the possibility that many family-members are both abusing the system as well as the blind trust invested in them by the generality of people (and such trust inevitably leads to abuse), your comments are dismissed as if they were lese majeste, whcih onlys the injustice.
The statistics she sights pertaining to the prevalence of child abuse, rape and murder should serve as a chilling warning to those who hallucinate pure intentions wherever they see man and whose critical faculties seem to be in an advanced stage of metaphorical putrefaction, that bad intentions do exist, and are far more commonplace than most people’s world view and conception of human nature allows for!
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That Malasangra’s comments afford us much insight into the mentality of the apologist for psychiatric coercion, torture and slavery.
First off, we have the untenable analogy. He/she compares the rituals of the coercive psychiatrist to taking car keys off a drunken man, which bears neither distant nor close scrutiny.
How many moral philosophers, humanitarians and activists have written on the mistreatment of inebriated citizens by other citizens in taking away their car keys? Such an analogy seems to have been formulated a moral, historical and empirical vacuum. The writer, like the rest of his ilk, seems to be living in a moral abyss.
How many potential drunken drivers have ended up with a diseased brain after having their car keys removed; or with their brains mutilated; or morbidly obese in an insanely health conscious society prejudiced against fat people; or with the configuration of their physiognomies grotesquely altered by the neurological disorder occasioned by the removal their car keys? Of course I could on and on, but I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
Such people, when they make these risible analogies (which implicitly mocks the suffering consequent to the myopic conferment of power upon rogue medical professionals), strategically disjoin the rituals of the coercive psychiatrists from their consequences and from the disastrous history, from a human rights perspective and the perspective of the patient, of psychiatric coercion,in order not to undercut their prescriptions, because any indivdual non-selectively au fait with the history of this profession understands that psychiatrists simply can’t be trusted to use that power responsibly.
The prescription to invest in these intolerable, power-hungry quacks parens patriae power vis-a-vis thier victims occupies about the same moral status as prescribing that children should, if the maggot was still alive, be left in the hands of odious creeps like Jimmy Savile; that we should trust the care of rape victims to their rapists!
