On May 14 and 15, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) held a meeting on human rights in mental health, responding to Resolution 36/13 of the Human Rights Council. The meeting was webcast and archived videos are available in three parts: day 1 morning, day 1 afternoon, and day 2, following this agenda; the main page also has links to written presentations and speaker bios.
The event represented tensions in the United Nations between the promotion of mental health and the promotion and realization of the human rights of people with psychosocial disabilities under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Development-focused agencies and member states have emphasized mental health promotion, which has of course always included force and coercion and legislation to restrict our rights and regulate the restrictions. Before the CRPD, human rights in mental health meant the regulation of rights restrictions, and providing access to tribunals to challenge the restrictions. CRPD brought in an entirely different regime that calls for an absolute prohibition of deprivation of liberty in mental health services and absolute prohibition of forced treatment; this is underpinned by recognition of legal capacity as a universal right to make decisions that, at least with respect to adults, cannot be restricted.
Speakers at the recent meeting were mixed as to where they fell. Those who are people with psychosocial disabilities or users and/or survivors of psychiatry uniformly came with the message that our human rights do not belong inside the context of mental health — we have a right to autonomy and full inclusion in our societies, and the laws allowing for restriction of our rights need to be repealed; coercion cannot be reformed, it must be abolished. YeniRosa Damayanti spoke from civil society in the opening panel, Bhargavi Davar in a panel on ‘mental health as a human rights issue’, Olga Runciman (speaking as a psychologist and acknowledging her lived experience) and Michael Njenga spoke in a panel on human rights based services and supports. Jolijn Santegoeds, Mette Elingsdalen and Kristijan Grdan spoke from the floor, also Erich Kopfmel from the autistic community. Their messages were strong and clear, but were at odds with the general framing of the day, which felt to me, listening to the webcast, like a debate that was primarily about us without truly listening to us or allowing our leadership to set the agenda.
Some, like Nils Melzer who is currently the Special Rapporteur on Torture, proclaimed outdated pre-CRPD standards such as the legitimacy of deprivation of liberty in mental health contexts to protect public safety or the person’s own safety. This approach is directly in opposition to CRPD Article 14, which prohibits all deprivation of liberty based on disability and not only that based ‘solely’ on disability as Melzer said. Similarly, Roberto Mezzina from Trieste, Italy, put forward Italy as an example of good practice, since they abolished large psychiatric institutions and have involuntary treatment as a last resort based on health and not danger. It is interesting to note that those two speakers had diametrically opposite justifications for the continuation of acts of medical violence on the bodies of people with psychosocial disabilities — and it does not matter to us which justification is used because the violence is the same. (Mezzina might have tried to suggest moving towards full abolition of coercion at one point, but it was not very clear.) A UK government delegate spoke from the floor and promoted their mental health act review, suggesting a narrow focus on challenging detention, and detailed Scotland’s mental health act which he thinks is fantastic for its great procedural safeguards.
Many in the mental health sphere focused on what they could do that they believe to be pragmatically useful. Michelle Funk from WHO spoke about training materials and processes that she says are having a real impact in changing practices. Vincent Girard, a French psychiatrist, spoke well about a Housing First program that doesn’t require medication compliance, respects autonomy and provides support services (I hope the person can choose to refuse any services they don’t want). Dganit Tal-Slor from New York’s Community Access spoke well criticizing the dominant medicalization and force in our law and practice in NY, including forced outpatient treatment, and also supported Housing First. Sashi Sashidharan from Scotland, while he wanted to focus on ‘easy’ changes, made one really excellent point from work he did with Human Rights Watch in Indonesia. There is a practice of restraint in community called pusung; one mother was persuaded to take her son to a new psychiatric hospital and she was horrified, because they were doing pusung in the hospital too and he was also starved, beaten and abused. Sashidharan explicitly called out psychiatry for doing the same practices and said it is equally bad. (However, I realize he didn’t say anything about forced drugging, which might be considered a harder issue.)
There was a lot of talk about stigma, about the burden of mental health, about people suffering from mental health conditions. Some speakers addressed social determinants of mental health, especially in context of gender, and the UNICEF representative highlighted a study that showed that 14-15 year old girls were depressed much more than boys, while there was no sex difference at age 11-12, likely due to pressure to conform to gender roles as they enter adolescence. A Bolivian delegate spoke about indigenous values that need to be incorporated into our thinking, and said that market values go against human dignity.
Dainius Puras, the Special Rapporteur on Health, took an intermediate position and has positioned himself deliberately to promote a way forward based on developing alternative practices “with a view to eliminating coercion.” This is itself contrary to the message expressed by survivors in the meeting — as Mette Elingsdalen said, the harm from coercion does not go away when you encounter a good practice.
Two of the panels had no survivor participants: those on system-wide changes in mental health and, astonishingly, on improving practices to combat discrimination, stigma, violence, coercion and abuse. The latter appeared to be a place to invite speakers from various UN mandates that may or may not link with mental health, in addition to Kriti Sharma from Human Rights Watch. That panel was disheartening and odd to listen to. I can’t help but infer that the organizers would have imagined it too threatening to the delicate structure they had attempted to build, to invite survivors to address this area in which our movement has indisputable expertise.
The concluding panel was composed of the three special rapporteurs: Melzer (torture), Puras (health), and Catalina Devandas, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, who also spoke earlier and supports the abolition of involuntary treatment and commitment. It was chaired by Kate Gilmore, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights. Most interesting to me was Gilmore’s sense of being impressed that the current situation is unacceptable, and saying that activists whose rights have been deprived are leaders and her office will proceed that way going forward. Dainius Puras got the last word, criticizing the ‘hierarchy of rights’ idea by which psychiatrists want to ‘fix the disorder’ of the person before respecting their human rights: “To have a monopoly of power is not healthy; it’s in the interest of psychiatry to share power and responsibility with others.”
And that, I think, will remain the bottom line for how the UN will continue to lurch towards what it thinks to be the paradigm shift — but it is not the way forward pointed by survivors. And then the cycle will continue whereby we are silenced and then others in the disability and human rights sector imagine that we are not politically powerful because we lack support; then we will say no, it’s because the state and psychiatry are not willing to give up their power and we need allies to make them give it up. And this will be too hard for most of them who also want to keep their jobs and speaking gigs and relationships, and the cycle continues.
So as not to end on a negative note, the state of development of the survivor/user/people with psychosocial disabilities movement as human rights advocates and practitioners is wonderful, something to celebrate and nurture. We have allies in growing numbers all the time. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, a UN human rights mechanism not represented at the meeting, has started to do significant work in cases of psychiatric detention and forced treatment, upholding an abolitionist standard that views these practices as discrimination. The High Commissioner for Human Rights himself, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, spoke in the opening panel and clearly enunciated the CRPD standard of abolition, while also speaking to promotion of mental health. We are always reaching out to people in the human rights system who are open to learning. Portugal, one of the country sponsors of the meeting and the Human Rights Council resolution, has come out publicly in opposition to the Oviedo Protocol, a draft treaty in the Council of Europe that is entirely about authorization of forced interventions in a mental health context. The Council of Europe representative herself spoke against the Protocol in this meeting, but said they were unable to convince the Council of Ministers to abandon it. People like Olga Runciman, Bhargavi Davar, and Michael Njenga will continue to develop good practices and promote them; Peter Stastny from INTAR spoke from the floor and announced a forthcoming meeting or conference in Kenya co-organized with the user/survivor group there. Litigation and law reform, opposition to new legislation that continues authorizing coercive practices and deprivation of legal capacity, calls for reparations, drafting of a model law of inclusion, research and promotion of our paradigm by survivors in scholarly conferences and academia, all will continue and our initiatives will keep on challenging the UN as a whole to keep up with us.
Thank you Tina for this report. I was interested to see what the person from the UK had to say. But it looked like he had wandered into the wrong meeting. As you say, he was just promoting the current legislation/review. He even talked about having been given a statement (who by? I don’t know much about how these things work). And said twice that his father is a forensic psychiatrist. And what is so marvellous about the Scottish Mental Health Act? A few facts he didn’t mention: increasing numbers of people in Scotland (population 5.3 million) detained (5422 in 2016/17); increasing numbers of people given drugs without their consent for more than two months (1559); increasing numbers of people given ECT without their consent (176 of whom 71 per cent were “resisting or objecting”, in theory all are supposed to lack capacity). And the safeguards? That just means they have to get another psychiatrist to approve it and they don’t often say no and, if it is similar to the system in England, it is a lucrative business.
Yes, it did have that effect, as if he had wandered into the wrong meeting. He seemed to be trying to challenge the professor from Scotland who was critical, but that individual pushed back with further criticism.
Thanks for the update. Question:
…the cycle will continue whereby we are silenced and then others in the disability and human rights sector imagine that we are not politically powerful because we lack support; then we will say no, it’s because the state and psychiatry are not willing to give up their power and we need allies to make them give it up. And this will be too hard for most of them who also want to keep their jobs and speaking gigs and relationships…
This highlights the difference between “failing” and being defeated, i.e. your efforts are under attack not for lack of success in your organizing and educational pursuits, but because of oppressive and heavy-handed opposition from the psych establishment and its many tentacles. Rooting out and exposing examples of this dynamic might be helpful, especially if you can demonstrate collusion with or deference to corporate psychiatry.
I know nothing of how U.N. decisions are made. How many higher levels of power are there beyond the “rapporteurs” which can reverse resolutions made at a grassroots level, and who/what do they answer to?
I am not sure it is a deference to corporate psychiatry, rather I’d say to institutional psychiatry. In the case of UN human rights mechanisms that monitor compliance with the prohibition of torture, they have been accustomed to working closely with psychiatrists. Psychiatrists and other doctors accompany them on visits to places of detention, usually prisons, to verify if a person has been tortured, and they act as witnesses to torture and support victims. This institutional collaboration makes it even more difficult for many human rights experts that deal with torture to open their minds to accept that psychiatry in its ordinary and routine work is simply torture. One thing that helps us make the argument however is the fact that human rights experts have long acknowledged that forced psychiatric drugging and psychiatric incarceration of people who are viewed by some psychiatrists as sane would quality as torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading or degrading treatment. To say that the same abominable acts when done to someone psychiatrists have labeled as mad is actually beneficial to the person, manifests discrimination in treating people with psychosocial disabilities as subhuman. Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak in 2008 managed to acknowledge this discrimination and other factors that justify addressing forced psychiatry in the framework of prohibition of torture, but the institutional bias still exists in these mechanisms generally.
Also, though I sounded an alarm in this post, I don’t think we have failed; it is one side of the struggle that we have always to keep our eyes open to see the obstacles. So long as we are fighting, we become free in the struggle and keep creating more space and more allies.
Regarding how UN decisions are made: it has been said that there many UNs, each part of the UN can operate independently. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities still emphatically supports the abolition of forced psychiatry, and can be expected to do so into the future. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which hosted this meeting, has a complicated role; it is the secretariat for the CRPD Committee and for other human rights treaty bodies, some of which continue to oppose the CRPD standard; it is also the secretariat for the Special Rapporteurs, and has its own staff who advise on particular topics, including a disability adviser and a health adviser. The OHCHR disability adviser is Facundo Chavez, who moderated the first panel in the continuation of Day 1; he knows his material and supports the CRPD standard, and the High Commissioner himself articulated the CRPD standard of abolition when he spoke in the opening panel.
The different parts of the UN speak to each other and try to harmonize their standards. This meeting was also responding to a resolution of the Human Rights Council, which is a UN body made up of member states, i.e. governments. Brazil and Portugal have been sponsoring resolutions on human rights and mental health, and the last resolution called for OHCHR to arrange this consultation. To the extent that the UN member states retain a degree of power over the secretariat, including funding, they make their influence felt. It can be difficult for human rights experts whether in OHCHR or treaty bodies like the CRPD Committee to oppose states parties, but it is their role as independent experts to pronounce the standards they believe to be correct.
Meanwhile none of these actors can ignore civil society, both those whose rights are at stake – in this case users and survivors of psychiatry – and those who have structural power and interests in either opposing or regulating the exercise of those rights. (I’m thinking of psychiatrists but also of lawyers and academics who may support state interests or view themselves as intermediaries between state and people who are seeking to change long-standing discrimination embedded in law.)
International law itself is complicated, especially human rights law at the global level. We do not have a global court that can make binding rulings on human rights violations complaints by individuals. (Human rights courts do exist in some regions; at least one such regional court, the European Court of Human Rights, has refused to accept the full CRPD standard of abolition of forced psychiatry and substituted decision-making.) At the global level, human rights law depends for its impact on the willingness of states to adopt and/or enforce the standard in its domestic law.
International law is a good area to see the dynamic between law and politics, they overlap and merge into each other in a different way than in domestic law. And ultimately it is a tool we use. Sometimes there are openings that allow international law itself to change; we had that in the CRPD and it continues to open doors.
“Institutional psychiatry” is a perfectly legitimate term as well (tho I don’t think “institutional” and “corporate” are mutually exclusive).
The next evolutionary step in bringing “human rights” advocates into our sphere, instead of their autocratically deciding what they sincerely believe is “best” for us, would be to educate them about the fundamental contradictions underlying psychiatric theory and practice, encouraging them to comprehend the Carrollian irrationality of treating metaphor (“mental illness”) as material reality. Once they grasp this it should become apparent that specific torturous “treatments” are almost secondary compared to the criminal absurdity of treating metaphorical “illnesses” with very real drugs and other quasi-medical procedures.
My comment about “failure” was not a commentary on your own efforts, but on the system tactic of smothering revolutionary ventures via overt repression then accusing them of “failing” due to the supposedly inherent invalidity of their ideology or analysis. It is often said that socialism has never failed, it has only been defeated; that’s what I was alluding to after reading your mention of how your relative lack of power was not due to lack of legitimacy or support per se. Though it seems that you are also saying that some of those who “support” CRPD draw some lines vis. a vis. how fervently they are willing to do so.
I guess my interest in UN decision-making procedure boils down to wanting to know whether I can accurately say that the U.N. has resolved this or that pertaining to forced treatment and/or torture.
i agree that one of the needed avenues for work is to continue to challenge the psychiatric belief system and its practices. That is part of the story, to remove the ‘bio’ entirely from the belief system – as a friend pointed out to me, the New York Times has recently published an article stating flatly that there is no such thing as chemical imbalance related to madness or psychiatric labels. This should be promoted widely.
it is difficult to say ‘the UN’ has resolved an issue in a particular way when there are different bodies in the UN that continue to contradict each other. In ordinary discussions, we might say ‘the UN’ to refer to what any Special Rapporteur says, etc., but it becomes confusing when they disagree. it is probably best to talk about the specific body or mechanism or agency of the UN has done a particular thing, e.g. the UN Human Rights Council has said… or the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has said…
I would like to believe that the CRPD standards are gradually winning in the UN, but there are still some holdouts. One of the avenues I think is necessary is to remind them of where the CRPD came from, and take seriously the leadership of survivors as was done in the drafting process. We are not alone; we have allies in the UN and elsewhere and they are needed and make important contributions, but too often they have been listening to each other and ignoring those of us with the real expertise.
Sounds like maybe at least in this case the “attrition” strategy may eventually bear fruit.
Do you have the link to that NYT article?
Wow….Maybe we should see this as a step back, or perhaps a challenge we have to face…but of course it’s not failure. After all, the dialogue is ongoing, not over.
Tina, something was forwarded to me regarding making an appeal to the UN. I was literally tortured in a medical facility, Massachusetts General Hospital, via water deprivation in mid-2011. This was their “protocol,” so this is scary because it’s still ongoing, that is, they still have this universal strict “protocol” and they watch you so you cannot cheat. I believe it was pure stupidity that caused them to do this to me, but this was MGH! The greatest hospital in the USA! Stupidity and discrediting of the patient that would have killed me! I now suffer trauma due to my life having been threatened.
In the mailing you had mentioned two choices and now, in light of this new development, what would you recommend I do? Two ways to bring this torture to the attention of the UN. I would love an investigation into this “program” that MGH does not even advertise. I would love for MGH to end their water restriction policy as they told me there was no medical reason for it whatsoever. Just a universal policy. I feel the policy poses a threat to patients because they do not make exception for those that may have diabetes insipidus, and the possibility is very real, even undiagnosed, as mine was undiagnosed 27 years (I was told I was “faking it”).
I’ve been called psychotic over and over. And this really did happen. But you cannot argue when they call you crazy. It is senseless.
I had anonymous hired online bullies for two years bullying me over this, too. And they even abused me in another hospital (2013) to try to silence me and get me locked up permanently.
Julie – If MGH wasn’t testing for diabetes, why in the world did they restrict your water?? Mary Newton
Mary, this is their little-known “eating disorders protocol.” Any ED patient in their inpatient “program” is automatically restricted to 32 oz per day. They monitor this very carefully. They won’t allow soup nor tea. They also watched me in the bathroom even while I was toileting, totally illegal in MA, and insisted they’d have to watch me shower. They claimed I would drink the shower water. I refused to shower with someone watching. I was very very thin then. I became desperate for water within a very short time. I begged and begged. Pleaded with them. I realized I would likely become dangerously dehydrated as I’d been upon admission if this continued. My normal intake for over 30 years now has been at least six liters per day in 68 degree weather. In summer or if I am exercising, that could double. I do not get an electrolyte imbalance from drinking my usual amount of water.
While I was there I noticed my face was beginning to have that “sunken in” appearance of dehydration. My eyes became scratchy, my lips cracked, my skin became dry. I had headaches which they claimed were from fluorescent lights. I told them that had never happened before. Then, they said it was “caffeine withdrawal” and allowed me a cup of coffee in addition to the four 8-oz bottles of water they allowed me. They denied I was suffering from what was essentially life-threatening to me, and very very scary and upsetting. They were also verbally and physically abusive to me, and they intentionally listened on to all my phone conversations, illegal in MA.
I continued to ask, “Why? Why? Why are you limiting my water?” They repeated, “Protocol.” I have hated the word protocol ever since.
Julie, I’d rather not discuss recommendation for you in your individual case in this forum on Mad in America. Please send me an email about this.
Thanks, Tina. I assume I have your email address somewhere.
Come to the conclusion that – in the context of neoliberal globalism – all this is a waste of time. It’s up to us to educate within our own communities: online, email, skype, in-person, whatever. Personally I do it by helping people off the drugs, and not just psych drugs. It’s a hell of a battle, wish I could find a way of shortening it and removing the terrible fear. You have to repeat the same things for many months. And to think that a GP (SSRI, benzo’s) /psychiatrist (antipsychotics/lithium) has spent 10mins prescribing and has set many thousands – throughout their career – on a course of – financially incentivised – destruction. What a disgrace.
Streetphoto: The mental health system isn’t just a pill mill. It’s a system of incarceration. It removes people from society or ghettoizes them, essentially de-voicing them or refusing to allow them to participate in society and denies them rights to make their own decisions. It removes them from the workforce, creating a tiered society, a society based on elitism, the haves who are supposedly capable who have rights, and those who are considered incapacitated, whose rights are taken away, sanctioned by laws in many countries. Drugs compound the matter, they are part of it, but they they aren’t the big picture.
My view on the big picture is that MH is a business, big business, that seeks to rule beyond authority/law and it does. But if a business doesn’t have any business, it goes under.
That’s where forced “treatment” comes in to save their day. It’s symbiotic.
They can forcefully incarcerate and diagnose, and indoctrinate anyone who has less power and less money.
When two people are in a room and one calls the other psychotic, it won’t carry a bit of weight unless the accuser has more power than the accused.
That’s going up on Twitter.
We need to help people get off drugs and help people stay away from psychiatry in our communities; I agree with you about neoliberalism but also agree with the commenters about forced psychiatry needing to be addressed as well as the business/ ‘pill mill’ aspect. We can also do a lot on community level to persuade people to not call the mental health system on each other as an enforcer, and not call police on each other unless there is a situation that truly calls for police involvement. To remind each other that calling 911 is calling in armed state power, and it’s not friendly or helpful; to help or support someone we have to let them be who they are and work with them not against them.
This kind of community work can make a difference potentially to both building support to abolish the mental health laws and incapacity laws, and to letting them fall into disuse.
This invitation of the UN council for human rights is based on an illusion. They invited in good faith antagonistic functionaries, obviously by
these UN special rapporteurs:
– Ms. Catalina Devandas Aguilar, Special Rapporteur on the rights of Persons with disabilities
– Dr. Dainius Pūras, Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health
– Mr. Nils Melzer, special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment
In strong contradiction is this invited representative of the WHO:
– Dr. Michelle Funk, Coordinator, mental health Policy and service development, World Health Organization (WHO)
This invitation displays the paradox of the event because the WHO runs torture, it operates or supports and covers coercive treatment and coercion. Logically the WHO belongs to the criminals, the perpetrators of torture!
Since when have torturers been invited to human rights advocates?
Since when are rapists invited to meetings about women’s rights?
Absurd!
This shows the dilemma the UN is now in.
The UN tries to escape the dilemma by using an interesting rationalisation. In the preparatory document it is mentioned that the Human Rights council decided in the Resolution 36/13 (therefore click here on “E” for English: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/RES/36/13) see quote from article 7 second sentence:
While, in recognition of resource constraints, the right to health is subject to progressive realization, the freedom element in the right to health is subject to neither progressive realization nor resource availability.
We do not have this dilemma, because we demand the right to illness.
Contrary to us, the UN sticks to the old human rights demand of a right to health. This is dogmatically defended as it is an article of the human rights since the beginning in 1948.
In our view, it is conceptual nonsense, because it is like including the right to an eternal life as any illness is defeated, even no fatal accident can occur – a very, very religious promise. (But this should not play any further right role in this explanation.)
The UN tries to escape the abovementioned dilemma by a definition that the right to health includes freedom, see article 7 the first sentence, quote:
The right to health contains freedoms (such as the freedom to control one’s health and body and the right to be free from interference, torture and non-consensual medical treatment) and entitlements (such as the right to a health system that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable level of health).
By that the UN is trying to escape a fatal hierarchization of human rights: health is a prevailing right to freedom, which logically would be a health dictatorship, so that would be of course inacceptable for the UN human rights. (Basically that was a Nazi society.)
If now the UN is seeking and demanding freedom in health, well, we can accept that 🙂
For our project, it is not necessary to surrender the right to health to the right to illness.
So we can use the conclusion of the UN: no health without freedom in our rhetoric.
rene talbot
Berlin
Germany
Thanks for finding the silver lining at least in the resolution; I read it a little differently than you do but agree that the ‘freedom in health’ as proclaimed in the resolution is something to hold the UN and governments accountable to.
Freedom is freedom; health is health. Individuals have a right to get health care they need; in the US where people die in a system that can deny them easy treatment for lack of money, the right to health care is real, and it is absurd to talk about a right to illness. A right to illness could be invoked to deny desired treatment and allow the person to die, just as a right to health is invoked by some psychiatrists to justify forced interventions. A right to illness on the other hand can be invoked to support your freedom to refuse treatment irrespective of whether or not you are actually ill – it is a way to avoid the dispute about whether the illness is real, whether the doctor is right or wrong. And a right to health can be invoked to demand that societal resources be equitably distributed so no one has to do without health care.
All human rights are rights held by the individual, and cannot be legitimately invoked to justify the deprivation of some other human right to the same individual. That is a managerial approach to human rights that subverts the true purpose. If freedom from forced interventions is part of the right to health, this is both a cobbling together of a right to integrity of the person with the right to health so that we acknowledge a right to integrity, to be free from unwanted intrusions, in the context of health care; and it is also possibly an argument that such freedom is also part of what the right to health itself means, that there can be no health without integrity and freedom from forced interventions. I do not think either of these is bad; but I do think that forced psychiatry has to be taken beyond and outside the context of health care because it is a regime that has nothing to do with health and instead is for social control – management of people who are viewed as unruly or disruptive for one reason or another, active or passive. For that reason I support, as WNUSP proposed in its statement in the meeting, a framework of reparations for forced psychiatry as a widespread and systematic human rights violation, as the way forward to have the conversation that all the survivors in the meeting wanted to have: implementation of our full human rights throughout society, and end to legalized discrimination/ subordination/ torture.
Regarding WHO, this organization has called for the abolition of forced treatment and no longer recommends that countries adopt mental health legislation. This has been a huge shift for WHO. I cannot fully endorse their training materials but there are parts of those materials that clearly uphold the CRPD standard of no force/coercion. In fact, Michelle Funk from WHO is a better supporter of the CRPD and abolition of force at this point than Nils Melzer, for the reasons I described.
“…in the US where people die in a system that can deny them easy treatment for lack of money, the right to health care is real, and it is absurd to talk about a right to illness. ”
Dear Tina,
Please do not try to misinterpret my demand for the right to illness as a duty to illness.
rene
In exactly the same way, the right to health is not a duty to health.
That is not what I said. My criticism is that a right to health is a false promise (as I explained above).
Instead, what only could be said is that there is (or should be) a right to obtain medical/professional help. Such a claim is compatible with our demand for the right to illness.
By the way, the right to illness has a good parallel in the demand for the right to lazyness.
The right to lazyness would be fulfilled with the basic income, e.g. see here: http://basicincome.org
“A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
rene
I don’t understand. Right to refuse treatment whether one is ill/injured or not is a right. Right to illness? I don’t agree with the parallel to right to laziness. One does not choose to become ill, I hope! However, Right to Illness implies that a person deliberately contracts an illness, or has the right to do so. I feel that people who are ill with any malady, real or perceived, should be treated well! Health is not black or white, it is on a continuum.
You have the choice to exercise or not. You can not exercise, that, certainly, is a right. I am not one to judge whether another person’s choices about their personal health matters are good choices or not. And why should medical people claim authority over another person’s personal health choices? However, they do, increasingly so.
the UN sticks to the old human rights demand of a right to health… In our view, it is conceptual nonsense, because it is like including the right to an eternal life
Most astute. 🙂
It seems like the bigger problem is the erroneous belief that “mental health” refers to “health” instead of natural emotional suffering or coping styles deemed “antisocial” (non-conforming, non-productive, disruptive). Human rights violations against people experiencing mental distress are predicated on the assumption that “mental illness” has robbed people of their natural, normal judgment processes; hence, they need saving from themselves.
Steve S, I concur. Also, many people who are in state of emotional distress might need or want “help” but the help they get, if it’s from the System, invariably is rarely what they are asking for.
I remember each time I left a facility, or ended with a therapist, I asked myself, “Why do I feel such a terrible sense of disappointment?” But then, I learned I was not alone.
I have known people who ended up in “therapy” for physical pain, due to joblessness, due to overall impoverished conditions, or because they’d been crime victims or subject to bad circumstances such as being hit by a drunk driver. Therapy leads to a psych diagnosis, and that is the gateway to drugging, marginalization, and worse.
“But that is not what I asked for.” Sadly, I hear this too much.
Rereading my comment I have to say sorry for a wrong link to the document of the citation:
The citation is NOT from the document you can read if you click on “E” for English: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/RES/36/13)
It is in deed the document you can read if you click on “E” for English here: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/34/32
Sorry for the mistake
rene
That is not what I said. My criticism is that a right to health is a false promise (as I explained above).
Instead, what only could be said is that there is (or should be) a right to obtain medical/professional help. Such a claim is compatible with our demand for the right to illness.
By the way, the right to illness has a good parallel in the demand for the right to lazyness.
The right to lazyness would be fulfilled with the basic income, e.g. see here: http://basicincome.org
“A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
rene
Sorry, this was meant as a reply to Tina. By mistake I placed it in the wrong place.
rene
Your reply went to both places but it is easier to reply here. I stand by my comment, as the right to health understood without a duty to health amounts to a right to obtain good quality health care acceptable to the person, as well as to have the preconditions for health such as clean water and food. There is nothing wrong with economic and social rights per se; the right to housing does not mean that the government should forcibly house someone who wants to live outside.
I agree, Tina. The right to choose to use available health-related resources regardless of citizenship, locale, race, or economic status. The right to be free of being forced or coerced to partake in such.
I even wonder about the flu shot. Many tell me it’s being pushed on them, and they barely have a chance to say no. I was alarmed when I had to fill out a form at the ophthalmologist’s office asking me if I’d had a flu shot and mammo. What does this have to do with cataract surgery? After my surgery is over, I’m sure I’ll have a chance to give feedback or ask questions (if not, I will anyway) and I hope to point out the imposition these questions pose to the patient. I suspect they’re trying to get these things onto your record and plan to “share” these things with any doctor that signs onto the online system.
Last time I was at the eye doc the doctor insisted I get a primary care doctor. This, too, is an imposition, since I am not sick nor injured right now, but thankfully the folks in the office seem to have forgotten to continue to push that one on me.
Health care should be a choice, not pushed on a person. And I do not like it when a doctor tells me how to manage my adult body. I am in charge of my body, not the medical industrial complex. I have the right to ask for a badly needed cataract surgery and have the right to be spared from all this rude pushiness.
Also, in my opinion, the fact that I notice these things now, while in the past was blase about the obvious infractions on my rights, I credit to being off the drugs! I am no longer oblivious to human rights abuses. And darned proud of that, because I think this is the way I am meant to be.
So Julie, why did you answer the questions that did not pertain to your eyes? Personally, I refuse to answer screening-type questions. Or I at least challenge their reason for asking: “and that’s pertinent to my presenting issue how?” before I decide whether they get info or an education.
I agree wholeheartedly that health care should be a choice, not pushed on a person. Have you tried responding to their pushy “requests” with the simple statement “I choose not to,” or does that get a bad response? I feel very free to tell them “that’s none of your business,” or in the case of preventive crap (flu shots, mammograms) “No means No.”
Also, unless a change in weight is one of my presenting symptoms, or they need to carefully titrate the dose of a drug I’ve agreed to, I do not step on the scale for them. I realize that if I had an ED label, I’d get hassled about this refusal, but fortunately that label was never attempted on me.
It has been suggested that people fill in the blanks pertaining what used to be considered inappropriately personal questions with “MYOB.”
Forced psychiatry is an absolute crime Because she replaces by yourself enforcement. Disease is not a crime. Therefore in disease can not incriminate. And the disease can not be imposed. But psychiatry does just that – incriminate disease. According to the psychiatric concept, the patient does not realize, does not understand the quality of his intentions and actions. And so his rights should not be respected. It can be coerced and it is possible to do with it what they, psychiatrists, experts in the psyche will find necessary. Psychiatry appropriates imagine right, fight sick, as with criminals. And she admits one more sacrilegious cunning. – Suppression, destruction of those “sick” she interprets as treatment and giving help them. That is, literally – psychiatry helps those whom it destroys. Such blasphemous hypocrisy can not be found in other examples!
In reality, it is necessary to adopt the unshakable postulate – No such patients who do not consider themselves sick. And there are no such diseases from which the “sick” themselves do not want to be cured.
Some particular reason you refer to psychiatry as a “she”?
Meanwhile, this is happening in NH:
‘Pilgrimage’ for Andrew Butler From Prison to Federal Court Set For Thursday in Concord
Andrew Butler, a 21-year-old resident of Hollis, was committed to the New Hampshire Hospital, the state’s psychiatric hospital, in the fall of 2017. From there, he was sent to the Secure Psychiatric Unit at the prison.
“He is held as a mental health patient without being in an accredited hospital, denied contact visits with his father, denied contact visits with his attorney, forced to wear prison clothing,” his attorney Sandra Bloomenthal wrote in the habeas corpus petition filed in federal court. “He is locked down 23 hours a day. He has been tasered. The treatment he has received is cruel and unusual punishment without having been convicted of a crime and with no pending criminal process.”
http://indepthnh.org/2018/05/23/pilgrimage-for-andrew-butler-from-prison-to-federal-court-set-for-thursday-in-concord/
” The walk is scheduled to coincide with a hearing inside the courthouse on Andrew Butler’s habeas corpus petition demanding to be transferred to a psychiatric hospital because he isn’t charged with or been convicted of a crime.”
Glad to see he has support but the demands are less than inspiring. From the frying pan…or vice versa.
It is possible to overcome criminal psychiatry only by exerting joint pressure on the authorities. It is necessary to act cohesively and as much as possible. It is necessary to demand legislatively prohibit psychiatry.
cris jones May 28, 2018 at 8:37 am
Breaking News, latest treatment . No more electrocution ,chemical lobotomy etc.
Decapitation its cheep,quick, painless relieves suffering instantly .
But Seriously ,IF psychiatry ever went so far ,and one protested against this ,would one be called anti psychiatry?
Please excuse the word treatment,ooopss.
CJ
“Death therapy, Bob. It’s a sure cure!”
From the movie ‘What About Bob?’ If you’ve never seen it, you really should. It’s a comedy that acts as a very effective antipsychiatry message.
Thank you Tina for your fantastic work.
Waiting for you in Spain next weekend!