If you are thinking that 72 hours is a big ask, thatās the point. You have things to do, people to see, calls to make. You lose your job. Your pets or plants die. Your kids get taken by social services. You lose sleep. You miss opportunities. Bills donāt get paid on time. You might or might not get back the life you left.
This happens to thousands of people every week who get labeled āmentally ill.ā A call is made to 911 by someone wanting help. The next thing you know, we are yanked out of our lives. The damage for manyĀ ā materially, socially, emotionally and spirituallyĀ ā is irreparable.
So hereās the deal. Before you decide itās okay for someone else to give up 72 hours of their life so you can feel safer, at least take the time to educate yourself on the facts.
Some Things are Self-Evident
This United States of America was founded on the ‘self-evident truths’ that its citizens have ‘inalienable rights’ and equality under law:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These truths and rights were self-evident to our founders. Their meaning was readily appreciable by the common person based on lived experience:
- All of us are born equal in certain important ways
- All of us are born with some inalienable rights
- Life is an inalienable right
- Liberty is an inalienable right
- Pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right
- Equality before the law is an inalienable right
We fought a Revolutionary War over these rights. We fought a Civil War to correct our wrongs. We fought two World Wars to defend this vision.
Diagnostic Detention is Un-American
More and more these days, self-evident truths are being replaced by medical and scientific ones. What that means in practice is this:
The average person no longer has a chance compared to expert voice. Only brain scientists, doctors and mental health professionals can understand what is crazy and what isn’t. Average people can’t.
Ergo:Ā Only brain scientists, doctors and mental health professionals are qualified to decide who has inalienable rights and who doesn’t. If they decide you’re diagnosable, then your rights go out the window.
Poof! Medical science and brain specialists have just alienated your rights. You now have the level of rights that healthcare providers decide you are qualified to handle. It’s all a matter of professional judgment. No ordinary person is qualified to refute them. Courts are expected to respect their expertiseĀ ā and for the most part do.
That’s how it is if you have been labeled ‘mentally ill’ in the United States of America in 2017.
The Damage to Individuals is Self-Evident
Imagine this. It is the worst day of your life. You or someone else calls 911 looking for help. The police show up, tackle you to the floor, handcuff you and yank you out of your life. Maybe you return in a few days, maybe you never do.
- There is no warrant
- There is no probable cause
- There is no police investigation into the actual facts of who did what to whom.
- There are no Miranda warnings. If you say anything it can be held against you.
- There is no right against self-incrimination. If you say nothing it is held against you…
- There is no opportunity for bail
- No formal statement of changes is required
- You have no right to cross-examine the real life people who reported you as dangerous
- You lose your freedom of speech. If you protest, you are likely to be tied down and injected with antipsychotics against your will.
- You lose your freedom of belief. If you insist that you are sane, safe or in the right, it proves that you lack insight to your āillness.ā
- There is no right to a speedy trial. You may be held for weeks (sometimes months) on a doctorās say-so.
- If the government is wrong, you are not entitled to compensation.
- The hospital bills you for services you were forced to receive. You go bankrupt if you pay it. Your credit rating tanks if you donāt.
- You come home to a life that is far worse than the one you left…
- No one understands because you got all this expensive ‘help’. You lose your trust in other people.
- You try to talk about it with family and friends, and everyone says, “Have you talked with your doctor. Did you take your meds?”
- You get tired of everyone thinking you are the problem. You lose patience. You lose your cool. You lose friends…
- You stop trying. You lose your job.
- Your spouse divorces you. You lose your kids.
If you didnāt want to kill yourself or someone else before, you probably do now.
I’ll say it again. These are the painful facts of life if you are believed to be āmentally illā in the United States of America in 2017.
The Danger to Society is Self-Evident
Far be it from me to question expert judgment. But have any of these people ever considered how dangerous it is to abrogate someone’s personhood…?
1. Nothing to live for
The medical model message is that large numbers of people basically have little to live or hope for. Our brains or biologyĀ are defective and there is no cure. The only choice is life-limiting medications that we can never safely stop taking.
To the average person, the damage of such statements, coming from experts, is self-evident. It’s hard to conceive that healthcare providers could fail to appreciate the harm.
Whether or not the ‘disease’ is deadly, the message certainly is. It literally kills.Ā Only last week we lost another dear one. Matt Stevenson of BPD TransformationĀ took his life at age 32. A brilliant writer, blogger and critical psychiatry thinker, Matt’s final writings about the impact of psychiatry on his psyche evoke images of voodoo death and broken heart syndrome.
āRecently, I continued to be extremely terrified of certain psychiatric studies, ideas and diagnostic labels, and could not contain the fear around them. I knew this intellectually but could not change it enough emotionally no matter how hard I tried. I was robbed of my life by these identifications.ā
Suffice it to say, the medical monopoly on defining ‘normal’ is robbing us of some of the most creative, sensitive, gifted modern seers. There are many valid ways of thinking and being. As a human race, our diversity has much to teach us. But so many of our emergent ones are locked up and drugged up before they ever have a chance to find their stride. The loss for our collective human future is unbearable.
2. Nothing left to lose
Whatever the reason, if I’m calling 911 my life is pretty much in the toilet. About all I can hear is that giant flushing sound.
The major bargaining chip you have with me at this point is how you treat me. I’m already feeling like the dearth of the earth, and a lot of people in my world are treating me that way. You can either be different and win my undying loyalty. Or you can be the same as everyone else, and become a target for my wrath. It’s about that simple.
If you think I’m an aberration, think again. Some 90% of the people who get caught in the public mental health system are trauma survivors. Overwhelmingly, the trauma starts in childhood and has to do with violence, force, coercion and indifference to basic human needs. We have been invaded, violated and treated like objects or problems to be managed on physical, sexual, emotional, social and spiritual levels.
We are mostly people with nothing to lose. We have every reason to grind the ax.Ā We are calling you on the worst day of our lives. We ask you for help and human aid at our time of greatest need. Then you reinforce the message:Ā You have no personhood. You don’t matter.
The outcomes are erhmm… self-evident.
3. A Literally Vicious Cycle
It gets even worse than that when you look at the big picture.Ā The simple fact is:
The more outsiders we create, the more unsafe we are.
Let me say that again:
The more outsiders we create, the more unsafe we are.
This is not about broken biology or aberrant genes. It is the Catch 22 of the human condition.
Here is the how and why of it:
- None of us likes to feel scared or threatened.
- Feeling at odds with others is scary and threatening.
- Feeling unable to meet basic needs is scary and threateningĀ ā and it often goes hand in hand with being a social outsider.
- Human beings who feel threatened tend to resort to one of three responses: fight, flight or freeze.
- When someone calls 911, flighters and freezers usually are not a problem. They run or hide, which doesn’t scare others too much.
- Fighters are a totally different matter. We don’t run, we don’t hide. We go toward the stuff that scares us. And then we take it on and try to bring it down. The more afraid we are, the harder we attack. We don’t stop until the threat is dead or we are.
- It’s also no sense trying to talk reason either. As long as the stakes stay high and we stay scared, the sympathetic nervous system will continue to do its job. It will createĀ tunnel vision and tunnel hearing to keep distractions out. It will make sure our attention stays riveted until the threat is gone or we are.
- This isn’t going to changeĀ ā not for a long time, probably not ever. The fight response has helped our species survive for thousands of years. There’s every reason to believe that it is genetically encoded. There’s every reason to believe that, for some of us, the fight response isĀ a biological default. A species made up only of flighters and freezers wouldn’t last long. They would cede the turf with every new challenge. Humanity needs its fighters to ‘stick to their guns’ when the stakes are high.
Therein lies our problem as human beings. Think about it:
- A certain percentage of the human species defaults to fight when threatened.
- Being treated as ‘other’ scares people.
- The more we ‘other’ each other the more scared more people are.
- The more scared people we have and the more scared they feel, the more violence we are going to see.
This is not because marginalized people are violent. We’re not any more violent as a group than anyone else.
But we are a whole lot more threatened. And the more of us who are threatened, and the worse we feel inside, the more fighters you will activate and the more violence you will see.
It’s a simple matter of statistics, percentages and computing the odds.
As a case in point, look at the public health data on four groups that society loves to hate: mental illness, addictions, corrections and homelessness. There’s a common denominator staring us in the face. It’s not only ‘the mentally ill’ who have trauma. No, no, no. Widely-accepted government research suggests that roughly 90% of those who get caught in any of these systems are trauma survivors.
In other words, there are a lot of marginalized and very scared people out there.
Like was said before. The outcomes are erhmm… self-evident.
‘Mental Illness’ is Not What We Need to Be Aware of
Every October in the United States, the ‘mental illness’ treatment industry and its allies argue that our government should fund conventional medical model services better. According to them, we need to offer people more and more opportunities for medical model screening, diagnosis and treatment. To contain costs and manage risks, they also say we need more resources to educate (and sometimes force) people to accept what experts ‘know’ are good for them.
I absolutely agree that the good people of America need something. Far too many of us in too many places are in over our heads. We need and deserve more support. This includes families and neighbors too, not just designated ‘people of concern.’ The stress of living is palpable these days. And, frankly, that’s bad for all of us.
Where I disagree is what to do about it. I don’t believe we should silo citizens into categories like ‘mentally well’ and ‘mentally ill.’ I think that’s a false dichotomy. It creates a perpetually threatened class and a perpetually threatening one.Ā That’s a recipe for bringing out the worst in human nature, not the best.
Here is what Matt thought we should do:
“The message should be that serious mental distress, including psychotic and borderline states, is primarily caused by adverse psychosocial events, not primarily by faulty biogenetic factors, and that people can mostly or fully become free from these states with support and sufficientĀ hope,Ā that key thing I couldnāt feel at the end.ā
Matt’s last words to us highlight for me the importance of a human rights framework to creating individual and social well being (mental/behavioral health). Instead of killing hope for social outsiders, human rights create it:
- Human rights focus on human values and commonalities that all of us share.
- Human rights reinforce (and insist on resourcing) our commitment to each other.
- Human rights expect us to hold faith in each other’s dignity and worth as human beings.Ā Ā
- Human rights insist that weĀ stop ignoring and marginalizing each other’s voices (madness).
- Human rights pay attention to real life needsĀ ā material, emotional, social, developmentalĀ ā that all of us have and that many of us can’t find a way to address.
- Human rights require us to learn to navigate human differences gracefully and with everyone’s rights intact.
- Human rights invite us all to the table to talk about this stuff as people of conscience.
72 Hour Hold for Personhood Awareness
Starting today, Friday, September 29th at 5 PM, Eastern Standard Time, a peaceful, voluntary 72 Hour Hold will commence with regard to these issues. Every hour on the hour for 72 hours, I will post a shareable image or writing to highlight the importance (seemingly self-evident) of personhood to mental health.Ā You will be able to find it here:
- On Facebook: Wellness & Recovery Human Rights Campaign,Ā https://www.facebook.com/groups/WellnessRecoveryRights/
- On Twitter: RecoverHumanRights, @right2bu, https://twitter.com/right2bu
- On Blogger: Peerly Human, peerlyhuman.blogspot.com
I will also be publicizing these messages to friends, family, organizations and public officials throughout the 72 hour period. The hope is to hold public attention on the difference that the human right of full personhood can make for all of us. It is also to honor people like Matt, who we have lost to medical inhumanity. It is a way to carry on their work, keep alive their spirits, and to try to create the kind of hope for others that might have made a difference for them.
If any of this speaks to you, I hope you will join me in your own way. You can share stuff I post or something else that fits for you. You can tell whoever you want to tell how you feel about these issues or how they have impacted you.
The take-home message:
It’s time to recognize inalienable personhood. Social ‘othering’ is deadly for all of us. As a species, we can’t afford it. Once you know the facts, the need to respect each other’s human rights is a self-evident truth.
Thank you, Sarah. Your experience and knowledge really show here. I hate to complain about it, but one sees and hears so many screeds ā well-intentioned, and informed by some pretty harsh experiences, but still screeds ā that seeing someone lay out a well-reasoned and well-informed and articulate expression of their concerns about the need to uphold human rights against the usual practices of the “mental health system” in a way that makes clear how important those concerns are for all of us is quite unusual and quite welcome. Thank you. I’ll share this.
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Thank you so much Eric. Your encouragement and dedication to these issues is one of the things that keeps me going.
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Thank you Sarah. We all should be very worried about the direction of our world, including in ‘mental health services’ – specifically the fact that Big Pharma, psychiatry and other trade and big business interests benefit by funding biased “scientific research,” defining “Evidenced Based Practices” and then using that “expert” authority to label and force “treatment” on us for their own benefits and profits. Thank you for repeating and amplifying the words and concerns of Matt about what needs to change. This will take all of us.
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So well spoken! Thank you for getting this!
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A brilliant analysis of the devastating arrogance and brutality which underlies the inhumanity of detention and forced drugging by “experts”.
A brutal, abusive process which destroys every aspect of human raison d’ĆŖtre.
The 72 hours that leads to multiple forced prescription drug toxicities, often with irreversible iatrogenic injuries to brain, endocrine, integumentary, and metabolic systems.
Toxicities that lead to multiple “diagnostic” labels for life.
Labels which expand incrementally as every drug toxicity, withdrawal toxicity, poly-pharmacy toxicity is eagerly misinterpreted as another “Serious Mental Illness”.
Devastating injuries which are physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, socially, economically and occupationally crippling, as well as causing destruction of the soul and ablation of self-worth.
The “medical professionals” responsible for such crimes against humanity often lack the diagnostic competence to differentiate SSRI/SNRI/ psychotropic drug induced akathisia and toxic delusion from what they perceive to be a “functional psychosis”.
Having failed in their basic duty of accurate differential diagnosis, they immediately enforce further, potentially fatal adverse drug reactions such as generalised neuroleptic/psychotropic malignant syndrome.
Hence they detain, compulsorily “treat” and destroy those who have only had a life threatening psychotropic adverse drug reaction, caused by drugs documented as trialled by academic fraud and malfeasance, licensed and marketed by the same deception.
An individual’s tragedy initiated in naive trust afforded to a coercive prescribing P.C.P. or G.P.
Prescribers who have been denied knowledge and awareness of akathisia induced by SSRIs by the manufacturers and drug regulators.
A lifetime catastrophe emerging from a momentary act of faith
Sarah, your words “”LOST TO MEDICAL INHUMANITY” powerfully convey the the reason why mainstream psychiatry has left me ashamed of the medical profession to which I tried to afford absolute commitment for forty six years.
“All psychiatric diagnoses should be written in pencil”. – “We should be able to erase them over time”.
Allen Frances. (BBC 2 Television. 8pm. U.K – 27/09/2017).
Yes indeed; but it is impossible to erase the injury of detention and forced “treatment”.
Thank you for such an appropriate tribute.
TRM 123. Retired Consultant Physician.
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Thanks Sarah, this is brilliant! Yes. When a person calls 911 they are never judged in any way shape or form. They could be in crisis themselves yet their word is taken at complete face value.
I have been a victim of this twice. One was a neighbor who smiled gleefully as she said ” I know what I will do I will call the police.” she overheard a comment I made while she was standing – actually trespassing on my property have having an adolescent blow at me and stated some pretty devastating things. The adolescent took off and the pole came to my house. It was awful, humiliating, and shaming. Luckily, the police where rational but it was close to losing my freedom. The woman was in crisis and she got away Scott free. She had a son in Iraq, had lost a nephew, was raising a niece, and don’t doing to well financially in a well income development. She was a tenant among no tenants.
She never spoke to me after I brought cookies to welcome here. She had no idea of my life, my education, she knew nothing about me. She had no idea of the medical crisis of my husband, my parents, my children. She had no idea I was a LISW. But she was listened to and obeyed- not me.
The phone calls to police really bear scrutiny. I don’t think the police like it very much either. It puts them between a rock and a hard place and they are sworn to uphold the law whether the law is incorrect and biased or not.
There has to be a better way to deal with all of this. I credit the cell phones as part and parcel of an ongoing problem that just keeps on getting worse not better. It’s the propaganda, its Big Pharma, its life after9/11. It’s folks not being able to use common sense. It’s lack of the ability to handle etiquette questions in the neighborhood. Lack of good healthy manners and healthy boundaries.It’s the elevation of psychiatry to religion and holy status.
Think back thirty years ago. Except for the prevalent racism and in a smaller way -that so many of us missed and were not aware of – this did not happen.
My mother roomed with a woman who had a daughter with issues of non reality – let’s say. The daughter was in and out of the hospital system – poor one – but my mom was not afraid and she never ever told stories about the police coming and dragging her away. If it had happened she would have told me. Really.
The militarization/criminalization of mental health and the uptake of “-othering”
So how and why did this start? And how can we stop it? I wonder about Reagan assassination attempt and others, the Vietnam War protests, and if someone decided to use mental health folks as ducks.
Thanks again. Keep up the work.
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This is a great article, Sarah. Thank you for sharing your stories, CatNight.
It reminds me of times in the 80’s. Neighborhood domestic violence. Do you call the cops or not? Does she want him there or not? Is this violence? Or just another knock down drunk shouting match?
There was hardship in making this decision. It would affect lives, someone would get hauled off to jail (still, better than the 72-hour forced “hold for observation” option, and more deserved).
Now – in our impersonal text message era, one can call the cops on a whim, and one’s un-comfort is eased but someone else’s life is ruined. The impersonality of this era enables people to anonymously soothe their own discomfort by ruining someone else.
And the cops are more likely to come in full riot gear. I remember when I finally called the cops in the above domestic disturbance. I said that I thought he had a gun (he had bragged as such). They surrounded the house (not in riot gear, they didn’t have riot gear in the 80’s) and approached very carefully. It was SCARY! Now – I hate to think what it would look like, with door smashers, helmets, and riot gear.
A request – maybe this only works in Australia, but if you know someone in distress – if you can choose to call an ambulance instead of a cop – that’s always a better alternative. Medics are (somewhat) more compassionate.
Better still – can you talk face to face? “I’m sorry you’re upset, but are you okay? Would you like a cuppa tea?” Or is that solution too 1950’s?
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Hope that b_tch calls the police for a real emergency sometime and gets laughed at! Maybe she can get a nice SMI diagnosis herself! If she lives in the PJ’s she’s not beyond that kind of thing by any means.
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The lesson boys and girls? Never call 911.
If your neighbor pulls that stunt see if you can set them up for a psych evaluation. Seriously. It’s easier than you think.
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Sarah, That’s one of the bestest written pieces I’ve seen here! Not the usual clinical/official style, but from the gut and from the heart, and all the more truthful because of it…. I’ve lived it myself, and seen it myself….
But there’s ONE LITTLE thing that I want to add, and I think you’ll agree: Above, you list *3* possible crisis responses: fight/flight/freeze. I think that’s basically correct, but I would add “run and hide”. That makes an even 4, and there’s good reasons for that. The human body has 4 fluid systems: lymph/blood/bile/digestive.
4 nervous sytems: sympathetic/parasympathetic/voluntary/(I forget the name of the 4th one, -you get what I mean….)
We often hear about the “fight or flight response”, and that’s valid as far as it goes. But adding “freeze”, and “run and hide”, seems to me to offer the most accurate and complete picture. To many, “freeze” can LOOK LIKE “fight”, and “run and hide” can LOOK LIKE “flee”.
I hope you think about what I’m trying to show here, and I hope you agree with me. There’s a lot more explanation I can give, but I want to leave it at that for now.
4 Responses, physical/mental/emotional/spiritual/psychological:
1.Fight
2.Flight
3.Freeze
4.Run and hide
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Great article. Well written. Just one quibble. We don’t need to use the deceptive terminology of psychiatry at all… “mental health,” etc. Other than that, this is great. Well done.
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This is a really brilliant article, Sarah! I just read all the way through after only skimming it before. I don’t have time to comment in depth now but I will later. It takes my posts a while to go through, but hopefully this discussion will continue for another day or two at least.
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[I just wrote a long response and had only started getting into it when this motherfucking windows 10 upgrade erased the whole thing. That does it, I’m switching to Linux. However I’m not letting technology gain the upper hand here so I’ll try to start over.]
Sarah makes clear here that she recognizes the psychiatric system is not a rogue branch of medicine, but essentially the psy-ops branch of the penal system. Its function is to neutralize those who are inclined to fight the system just as the gulag state imprisons Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners. She also notes with great insight that the system is far more concerned with the “fighters” than those who freeze or run (although I would add there is at least some degree of concern as well for lost productive capacity among the working class; this is capitalism after all).
Those who run this system, largely through knowing how to keep the people fighting each other instead of them, understand that the system is inimical to a healthy and fulfilled life, and can thus knowingly predict that a certain portion of the population will be inclined to resist. The official repressive apparatus, i.e. the penal system, will be used to contain the most outspokenly articulate, bold and overtly political spokespeople and fighters for the resistance. However, it will try to keep confused those who sense a problem but don’t know how to put their finger on it, and try to convince them that what they experience as a fault with society or government is actually a personal inadequacy. This is the function and strategy of psychiatric oppression, to nip resistance in the bud.
So once we realize that psychiatry is the enforcement arm of the system that made us crazy to begin with we understand that its true purpose and function is not to help people understand their confusion, but to perpetuate and exacerbate it, and that this is not the result of a misunderstanding or flaw but the way the system is intentionally designed. Understanding what and whom we’re fighting and why is key to developing a successful anti-psychiatry strategy.
Turning to more concrete suggestions, I have been arguing for some time now that we should start a legal campaign to demand that Miranda laws apply to psychiatric interviews, so I’m glad to see Sarah mention it. This is not only needed, as anything we say in such can and will be used against us, but it would be educational and the debate would help focus people on the contradictions involved.
So I hope to return but in any case, great article and please don’t disappear or anything.
The difference between psychiatric prisoners — those who, for the most part, express their resistance in less articulate or organized ways — and officially recognized political prisoners
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Oops — that last line was supposed to have been discarded, however what I was getting at is that “traditional” resisters are generally fairly well-spoken and can express themselves in identifiable political ways. Those who fall into the psychiatric lair tend to be instinctively disinclined to “get with the program” but express their rebellion in more idiosyncratic ways.
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Sarah you speak my language but I am unable to express myself with such clarity.
I just finished blasting off another email to my kids who are 30 and 27. They have heard my rants and chants, but I won’t stop. I also gave them your name, since they have an article once a month that I send them from MIA and other sources.
I completely understand why Matt did end up where he did. And no one in psychiatry will feel shame, after all, they justify these matters in their cold selves.
I am thankful you are rising and shining the light. I feel if I can convert even one, possibly two, I have accomplished something.
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