On October 23, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) announced the introduction of the Restoring, Enhancing, Strengthening and Promoting Our Nation’s Safety Efforts (RESPONSE) Act, in the wake of two mass shootings in August in El Paso and Midland-Odessa, TX. The RESPONSE Act asserts that there is a link between mass violence and psychiatric disability; calls for the expansion of involuntary mental health treatment, including long-acting injectable antipsychotic drugs; promotes greater collaboration between law enforcement and mental health authorities; and would increase the digital surveillance and criminalization of American schoolchildren.
The RESPONSE Act is similar to the 2013 Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, also known as the Murphy Bill, spearheaded by former Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012. The bill is endorsed by many of the same organizations that supported former Rep. Murphy’s legislative efforts, some provisions of which were eventually folded into the 21st Century Cures Act. These include the National Council for Behavioral Health, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National District Attorneys Association, Treatment Advocacy Center, Fraternal Order of Police, National Association of Police Organizations, National Sheriffs Association, and Major Cities Chiefs.
Advocates Respond: Gun Violence is Not a Mental Health Issue
The proposed legislation has prompted a sharp response from leading disability rights, civil rights, education, and privacy organizations, including the National Disability Rights Network, The American Association of People with Disabilities, The National Council on Independent Living, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, among many others. The groups have mobilized as the Coalition for Smart Safety, using the tagline “gun violence is not a mental health issue.”
In a recent statement issued in response to the bill, the Coalition outlined some of its fundamental flaws: “There is a need to expand and improve community mental health services, but legislation to address those issues should be separated from legislation to address gun violence; the two are not connected. The evidence has clearly and consistently shown that mental health disabilities are not predictors of gun violence.”
The letter goes on to say:
“We are concerned that, by focusing on mental health reforms, the RESPONSE Act will do little to limit future instances of mass violence, and will instead fuel prejudice, fear, and marginalization of individuals with mental health disabilities. It may also lead many people to avoid seeking needed services.”
Like the 2013 Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, the RESPONSE Act assumes a “mass-shooting prevention” orientation through the promotion of “enhanced” mental health services. On the floor of Congress on October 23, Sen. Cornyn related a conversation where he asked the Odessa police chief following the Midland-Odessa shooting: “What is it that you think we might have been able to do?” To which the police chief reportedly responded, “We need better access to mental health diagnosis and treatment.”
Sen. Cornyn acknowledged in his recent op-ed that “mental illness is not the prevailing cause of mass violence,” a statement that aligns with the scientific literature on the subject. Even so, he still asserts that “enhanced mental health resources are critical to saving lives.”
A study published in October in Health Affairs found that political agendas, rather than scientific findings, are shaping public opinion on this subject. The study found that public perceptions regarding potential violence and support for coercion have been rising, especially as regards the diagnosis of schizophrenia. By 2018, over 60% of survey respondents equated schizophrenia with dangerousness, and 44% to 59% said they were in favor of coercive treatment. The study’s authors concluded:
“Despite solid evidence that people with mental illness are unlikely to be dangerous, such prejudice can lead to support for inappropriately using legal means to force people into treatment.”
Similar to its 2013 predecessor, the RESPONSE Act contains a controversial involuntary treatment component, calling for the expansion of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT), a euphemistic term for court-ordered involuntary outpatient commitment that usually includes a forced-medication component. The bill adopts the extreme AOT provisions in earlier versions of the Murphy Bill, calling on states to spend 10% of their Federal mental health block grant funding each year (or 20% every two years) to support the development and implementation of forced outpatient treatment programs.
Sen. Cornyn has long been a proponent of the “black robe effect.” In a recent Tweet, he said: “AOT has been proven to help at-risk people with severe mental illness get the treatment they deserve while reducing crime and violence.”
AOT has been proven to help at-risk people with severe mental illness get the treatment they deserve while reducing crime and violence. Happy to support this successful program through The 21st Century Cures Act. pic.twitter.com/ycTrkV4D2e
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) September 30, 2019
As an MIA Report recently detailed, the evidence does not support Cornyn’s claims. A small number of existing studies on AOT have not found that mandating outpatient treatment through a court order is any more effective than providing voluntary, community-based supports. As the Coalition letter notes, any improved outcomes reported in the research “appear to result from the intensive services that have been made available to participants rather than from the existence of a court order mandating treatment.”
Rarely does research on AOT programs include the perspectives of persons who have been mandated to participate in them. In a 2018 Mad in America survey, the vast majority of respondents under past and ongoing AOT orders reported significant trauma and harm from the experience, including a worsening of their mental state.
Bringing in the Police to Ensure Compliance
The bill includes provisions that would strengthen collaboration between law enforcement and mental health provider agencies, with the stated goals of increasing “engagement in recovery supports and services; access to medication while in an incarcerated setting” and “continuity of care during re-entry in the community.” According to Sen. Cornyn’s press release, the bill would commit $10 million in Department of Justice (DOJ) “state and local law enforcement funding for law enforcement to partner with mental health providers to provide mental health treatment and compliance through the use of long-acting medically assisted treatment.” It would direct HHS to report to Congress within one year regarding State Medicaid strategies “to address the mental health needs and criminogenic risk among individuals with mental illnesses involved in the criminal justice system.”
The text of the RESPONSE Act repeatedly refers to “long-acting injectables” (LAIs): injected doses of powerful antipsychotic (neuroleptic) drugs that remain in the body anywhere from a few weeks up to 90 days.
The National Council for Behavioral Health, one of the aforementioned RESPONSE Act endorsers, received recent grant funding from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) to create a guide and technical assistance materials supporting the vast expansion of the use of injectables, including how to get payers to finance them.
The National Council recommends prescribing of LAIs not only as a solution to medication non-adherence, but as “a first-line treatment option for patients.” The organization is encouraging its members to promote increased LAI use in numerous marginalized populations, including “patients involved in transitions of care,” such as discharge from psychiatric hospitals or leaving jail or prison, and even for first-episode psychosis. Such recommendations align closely with a sustained push by psychiatry and Pharma over the last several years to expand the use of injections.
Kathy Flaherty, director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, a member organization of the Coalition for Smart Safety, commented on the bill’s forced treatment provisions:
“Treatment by force in the community does not create long term lasting recovery and violates the sanctuary of someone’s home. Kind of ironic that one can stand one’s ground and defend one’s home with a gun, while they want to arm ‘health’ providers with needles and syringes loaded with long-acting medication to violate someone’s body and mind.”
The Coalition’s response letter states: “We are concerned about the primary focus on long-acting injectable medication—which may not be appropriate for or desired by many individuals—as a strategy to promote crisis stabilization and community re-entry, and the lack of focus on meaningful engagement strategies or services such as supported housing, which is key to successful re-entry.”
The bill makes only one passing reference to housing. It calls for a State Medicaid Director Letter to provide guidance to states on how to increase housing access for incarcerated persons with psychiatric disabilities who are re-entering the community. There is no increase in available funding for housing in the bill, and no recommendations to address discriminatory housing policies that negatively impact individuals with a criminal record.
The Reentry and Housing Coalition notes that discriminatory practices and policies in housing contribute to cycles of homelessness and recidivism, and “disproportionately impact people of color and people with disabilities, as these persons are over-represented in the U.S. criminal justice system.”
Putting American Students Under Constant Surveillance
The RESPONSE Act goes beyond the Murphy bill in its call to subject American schoolchildren to extraordinary levels of surveillance. “The RESPONSE Act will make schools less vulnerable through promoting best practices and internet safety policies to help schools better identify and assess students whose behavior indicates a threat of violence,” Cornyn wrote in his op-ed unveiling the bill.
As Lois Beckett wrote in The Guardian, “That would mean redirecting public schools’ time and money away from strategies that are backed by evidence, such as supporting mental health and counseling services, and towards dealing with surveillance technologies, which often produce many false alarms, like alerts about essays on To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Beckett goes on to note that: “There is still no research evidence that demonstrates whether or not online monitoring of schoolchildren actually works to prevent violence.”
Amelia Vance, a student privacy advocate with the Future of Privacy Forum, told NPR that schools may feel increasingly compelled to contract with unproven technology monitoring companies for fear of liability.
“It’s similar to post-9/11,” Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a lawyer with the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school told Education Week. “There is an understandable instinct to do whatever you can to stop the next horrible thing from happening. But the solution doesn’t solve the problem, and it creates new issues of its own.”
One education advocate told The Hill: “We need to think of ways to find these kids that have problems and address those problems rather than escalating the situation by putting them under a microscope in the way that some of this language might do.”
Trauma survivor Christa Marie wrote in The Mighty sharing concerns about the chilling effect surveillance could have on young people, especially those at risk for self-harm, who are unlikely to be violent towards others:
“This lack of privacy may decrease students’ levels of trust as well as the likelihood of self-disclosure. Students’ awareness of being monitored may lead to social isolation, which is associated with increased mental health concerns and defeats the initial purpose of monitoring their activity.”
The bill also pushes the expansion of “behavioral intervention teams” in schools. It instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to create best practices that schools could use to “operate behavioral intervention teams to identify students whose behavior indicates a threat of violence and ensure they receive the assistance and services they need.” However, there is reason to believe that such ‘help’ might arrive in the form of increased criminalization of student distress.
The Coalition for Smart Safety response letter notes that such provisions “appear to suggest that behavioral intervention teams should report any student behavior that could have ‘potential criminal implications’ first to criminal authorities rather than initiating an in-school process to identify and address the root cause of this behavior. Training behavioral assessment teams to default to the criminal process rather than school-based behavioral assessment and intervention would do little to address violence in schools and would likely foster rather than prevent a violent school environment.”
The Coalition’s letter cites a United States Commission on Civil Rights report from July of this year, which details how disciplinary measures in schools disproportionately affect students of color and students with disabilities:
“By making the criminal process the frontline for student discipline, this bill will only serve to increase the number of students of color and students with disabilities in the juvenile justice system.”
Ultimately, the provisions in this bill are based on the premise that mass shootings can be accurately predicted in the first place. But despite the impression gained by wall-to-wall media coverage of school shootings and other events of mass violence, they remain rare occurrences, so rare as to defy efforts at prediction.
Even so, an enormous amount of time and investment is devoted towards trying to predict violence through digital surveillance and other programs. Yet a literature review published this year, examining a range of school violence prevention programs operating between 2000-2018, found no compelling evidence of their effectiveness in predicting or preventing violence.
The Coalition for Smart Safety, in its letter opposing this act, observed that there are alternative ways to deter violence and suicide that focus on relationships and restorative practices rather than the punitive approaches to discipline outlined in this bill. The Coalition wrote: “Schools, educators, caregivers, and communities are in the best position to notice and address concerning student behavior. Experts agree behavioral interventions are most effective at reducing behavioral problems when they incorporate educators’ knowledge of their students, are non-punitive, and avoid removal from school.”
A GOP Pivot on Gun Control?
The RESPONSE Act is conspicuously silent on guns. The only reference to firearms in the RESPONSE Act is around the creation of federal, state and local law enforcement task forces that would make it easier to prosecute illegal, unlicensed firearms dealers, such as the individual who sold the gun to the Odessa shooter in a private sale after he initially failed a background check.
Sen. Cornyn has received top ratings and around $200,000 in donations from the National Rifle Association (NRA) for his continued opposition to gun control measures favored by the majority of American voters, such as expanding background checks for gun purchasers. Sen. Cornyn is up for reelection next year.
Unlike the Tim Murphy 2013 legislation, which was introduced into the House in a bipartisan fashion, the RESPONSE Act has no initial backers among Senate Democrats. Senators Martha McSally (R-AZ), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), and Tim Scott (R-SC) are the current co-sponsors. “I hope we can work together to build a big bipartisan list of co-sponsors as other Senators have the opportunity to review this legislation,” Sen. Cornyn said on October 23 while introducing the bill on the Senate floor.
The bill will be referred next to the Senate Judiciary Committee for review.
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MIA Reports are supported, in part, by a grant from the Open Society Foundations
Indeed, COTS or ACTS don’t work because they are designed not to help but to monitor patients like objects and curiosities. Also, its all about the meds. In fact, my experience on an ACT order was dehumanizing and all smoke and mirrors. Imagine having dozens of people on a team coming to your home (you never know who) to see you take meds, watch your physical movements, and then make comments in your file? I read my MH records and it appears an ACT team workers (peer support specialists and social workers) are just judging your physical appearance, eye contact, and making wry comments about your life. Yup! Interestingly, you will never talk one on one with a qualified therapist on an Act team. In fact, you are lucky to get a person with a college degree. They hire people right off the streets. The whole thing made me paranoid and then they blamed me for being critical. I believe the whole thing is just a way to make jobs and force medications. It appears to be the illusion of help.
Lastly, I was happy to read that its the Big Pharma funded research psychiatrists who have created this model of treatment where you never get to see a bona fide therapists or psychologist. Everything is quick but not painless.
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This is DISGUSTING!! Society marching backwards under Trump. Ever hear of DR.THOMAS SZASZ,people?? THE MYTH OF MENTAL ILLNESS! The DSM (psychiatric “bible”) is done by VOTING…Psychiatry therefore is NOT MEDICINE OR SCIENCE!! And psychiatric drugs DO cause shootings! When will this nonsense stop?? Concerned people ought to contact the ACLU…
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Meds you write. The drugs are not medications. There is no measurable illness the drugs are affecting. Should the dose be 4mg or 100 mg? The decision is totally arbitrary. There is no science to back up the claim the drugs are medicine as there are no brain chemical (imbalance) tests. A comparison is the thickness of the rope binding the person like a 4 piece stranded rope or a 100 stranded rope or the different types of metal that can be used in handcuffs. And people willingly go along with this idea of drugs as medicine.
When is the stop date to the medicine? When is the stop day of the drug? Human behavior, a human’s choice to do/perform evil or good is not a medical problem.
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The drugs are meant to pacify and cripple would-be criminals. (SSRI drugs do a mighty bad job of that.) They are NOT meant to help anyone think clearly, live independently, nor add longevity. Shackles and muzzles–not health is what psychiatry offers.
Crippling and segregation is the work of Psychiatry! Punishing “defectives” for the crime of existence.
These drugs and labels force potential workers out of the work place, forcing us to live off the pittance doled out in smaller and smaller amounts to greater and greater numbers. There is a real lack of HUD. Regular housing is hopelessly expensive on less than $800 a month.
Institutions cost more. Yet Big Brother is intent on increasing the latter.
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Someone’s trying to eat their cake and have it, too. Our Distinguished Politician from Texas wants a safe state while ignoring its armed, but voting, morons walking around on city streets with their AK’s and AR15’s, just looking for a chance to open fire in a crowded street. He also is unaware of the nature of the paranoids’ mentality, which will easily outwit these screening plans, being easily able to see through the reasoning behind the questions in the universal tests given them while they’re still in school.
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So much of this type of news goes unreported. This is so much of a vortex seemingly with no end. There are the grassroots organizations around this issue Moms Demand Action, Everytown, the Sandy Hook Promise, And others. It is hard to know where they actually stand and so so much is a reactionary backlash so deep research and the capacity to have deep understanding is missing. The NRA folks know this and use it as a populist tool as does our current leader.
Truth be told we are a globe of trauma and unless we start with the basis of we are alll trauma survivors not much will ever get accomplished.
One of the news magazine outlets ran a piece on the after-affects of being a gun massacre survivor and they not only deal with the act itself but medical lead poisoning due to the shrapnel that remains in their bodies due to the high assault weapons.
And we psych survivors know about double whammy’s! The metaphor of this strikes as beyond precious.
There are so many players here both hidden and above ground.
The weapons industry George Bernard Shaw had his finger on them in “Major Barbara.”
Ibsen had the NRA members mindset with his play , “Enemy of The People.”
And one could look through out time in the art and commentary where rational and then convoluted thought rises and falls.
I will share this for what it is worth. Not many folks ever respond back. One or two at most. I continue to be traumatized every day. One hopes someday there will be an end to the worst aspects of this world and my life.
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You are quite right about this hysterical backlash. Somehow I want to leave America!
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Paranoia of the masses.
Psychic psychiatrists claim they can foretell the future and read minds to weed out criminals BEFORE they break the law and punish them accordingly. The gullible herd is scared of the dangerous “crazies” and Dr. Shrinkenstein offers to save them from the monsters he creates.
“But it’s treatment–not punishment,” Norman Normal argues.
Ask Norm to take a cocktail and he’ll argue “I don’t need it. I’m not sick.’
Diagnose Norm with Agosognosia AND Schizophrenia. 🙂
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I agree, CatNight, there’s way too much violence and criminality in this world. And those of us who knew 9/11/2001 would lead us to the brink of WWIII in 2001, which seems to be where we’re headed or are. In other words, the anti-war, non-violent people, are the ones the psychiatrists attack.
What kind of sick world do we live in, when the anti-war, non-violent people, are the enemies of our state? I agree, we’re living in a society that wants to traumatize us every day, it’s disgusting. As God supposedly said to me, during my early 2002 Risperdal induced first psychotic break, “We have a local planet manager problem.” Call me crazy, but God was right.
Thank you, Leah, for reporting on this. And thanks to those who are fighting against this bill’s passage. Someone who tweets needs to educate Senator Cornyn regarding the fact that the “schizophrenia” drugs, the antipsychotics/neuroleptics, can create both the negative and positive symptoms of “schizophrenia,” please. The positive symptoms of “schizophrenia” can be created via antipsychotic induced anticholinergic toxidrome, and the negative symptoms can be created via neuroleptic induced deficit syndrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroleptic-induced_deficit_syndrome
And apparently our senators need to be educated in the regards to the reality that the head of the NIMH confessed that all the DSM “mental illnesses” are scientifically “invalid” in 2013. And the main editor of the DSM-IV confessed that the entire DSM “bible” is “bullshit” as well.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
https://www.wired.com/2010/12/ff_dsmv/
I hope people will help properly educate the psychiatrically deluded people who currently run our government.
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The DSM is in fact a CATALOG of BILLING CODES. Everything in the DSM was either INVENTED, or CREATED. Nothing in the DSM was *discovered*…. Think about that….
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“…Go with the wrong, deeper”
“Search out the meaning of the symptom…Find a new method rather than opposition.”
James Hillman – Accentuate the Positive: Reclaiming the Country from the Nation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SovVxyNHJ9A
The roots of imagination –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuYg3QKj2K4&t=11s
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Thank You Leah for standing up effectively against Injustice.
“Mental Health” Misrepresentation
My Response to GP Delisting Letter:-
https://drive.google.com/file/d/114Qjp47-TmI0LJWlyKRmrC7R4QLtHITq/view?usp=drivesdk
GP Delisting Letter (October 2018):-
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VB1L7C7G87DNmS-uS3blngY3CMtOH5gl/view?usp=drivesdk
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The same old responses at MIA will do nothing to stop this joint Democrat/Republican onslaught. People who are serious about their outrage should start considering what ACTION they are prepared to take. It might be time to take a cue from ACT UP. But “expressing concern” and trusting the ACLU to protect you are SO over in terms of dealing with overt fascism, which is not embodied in any one party or person. Are we gonna roll over and stick our throats out?
Of course this could just be some yahoo clown with no real support so we could use some good intelligence as to how likely this bill is to go anywhere. (And btw calling for “gun control” is NOT the answer either.)
This is also a good time to reinvigorate the campaign to educate people about psychiatric drug violence, in fact it might be our only hope. Whatever excuses people are making to justify not taking this to talk radio are just that. (Forget letters to the editor, most newspapers are irrelevant by now.)
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Also, unless our strategy is based on an analysis of psychiatry as a police agency and not a failed branch of medicine or “social services” we will surely fail.
PS Reviewing the article again, one thing we have going for us is the total Dem/Repug split on almost everything, so we should play on that whenever possible. Normally some reptilian Democrats would be crawling out from under their rocks to support this by now. But the night is young.
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Scapegoating “the mentally ill” (sic) may placate the NRA, but I fail to see how the mass manufacture and sale of weapons of mass destruction makes anybody safe. Right now, what do they do? Blame “mental patients”, and downplay gun control because of the lobbying efforts of the NRA. This doesn’t have so much to do with second amendment rights as it does with a person’s right to gun down a large number of other people, and it’s either blame ‘nuts’ or blame guns. I say spare the ‘nuts’ and trash the guns would be a much better direction for us to go in than the one we’re currently going in.
Everybody is ‘nuts’ to one degree or another, but every bodies favorite toy is not always a machine gun. When that toy though is a machine gun, watch out, somebody is going to get hurt.
I’m much less concerned about people losing their guns than I am about people being put on this list of people who are not to own guns. Many, if not most, of the people on that list never owned any guns anyway. I don’t see this matter as very fair in the least. Being put on that list is a matter of profiling, but the profiling itself is fiction because you’re talking about a population that doesn’t tend to be violent in the first place, in fact, a population that tends to be less violent than the rest of the general public.
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Getting deprived of liberty–or sometimes life itself–is far worse than having your toys taken away.
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Hopefully they won’t get away with passing this bill into law. It doesn’t have bi-partisan support, but such was also the case with the Murphy bill, and what happened? The outgoing Dems used it in a deal-making maneuver with the incoming Repubs. Both parties are just made up of the same old snakes, although their appearance, the colors and patterns on their scales, differ.
We need to fight this type of oppressive legislation tooth and nail. Thanks for being there, on the alert, and informing people about the continuing danger.
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Yep, historically neither party has supported our human and civil rights very well. The polarized Congress five years ago slowed the roll of the Murphy Bill considerably, although did not stop the continuing impact of it in policy and practice. The now more than ever polarized Congress is definitely in our favor, and Dems have been sufficiently educated by disability and civil rights activists over the years to sniff out a cowardly GOP pivot like this and not sign on.
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Both parties are shameless, and the Democrats have the added element of pompous and cowardly hypocrisy, and in the end are an even more insidious enemy. However maybe we can play the cards right and use the Dems “gun control” rhetoric as a way to play the two factions off against one another and neutralize both. Exactly how remains to be seen, but it should not be done at the expense of either the 1st or 2nd Amendments.
Have you done any research as to the bill’s likelihood of being taken seriously? There are a lot of frivolous bills.
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SCAPEGOATING
If “most people” carrying out “Mass Shootings” come from the “Normal” division of the population, NOT the “Severe Mentally Ill” division; then I don’t see how “Getting Tough” with the “Severely Mentally Ill” will reduce the “Mass Shootings”.
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Oh, were you under the impression that the goal was to reduce mass shootings? I think that’s where the confusion enters in.
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You mean it’s about promoting the (very expensive) “electronic drugs”?
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Seems to be the logical conclusion based on their actions, doesn’t it?
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I thought it was about packing the asylums so “defectives” won’t breed. What the APA’s true agenda remains.
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i have no idea about the causes of this suffering…
but i do not want lawful forced medication…
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I agree with you on that point!
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Everytime there is a mass shooting, I ask myself: “I wonder what kind of medication the murderer was taking?” That information usually does not make the news. Strange how we don’t all think alike.
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We think alike, and that’s the first question everyone should be asking. Spread this on talk radio, right or left wing doesn’t matter.
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After the shooting in Florida, (which one, right?….), the FIRST thing the court-appointed lawyer did, was get a judge to SEAL the shooter’s medical records. But the TRUTH came out other ways…. The guy had been on PSYCH DRUGS…. And, BTW, I do NOT use the false and misleading euphemisms “meds” and “medications”. They are DRUGS are drugs are drugs are drugs are drugs….NOT “meds”….
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Every time I get an intolerable headache I reach for paracetamol. That’s a psychoactive drug. And in most contexts it’s a medicine.
Any psychoactive drug which is taken for medicinal purposes is a medicine.
I think it must be the intent that matters. So any drug taken with the aim to be medicinal, is a medicine.
There are of course official and nonofficial medicines. But that is another matter.
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I struggled to understand why under our law Ketamine, Rohypnol, GHB and Benzodiazepines are considered to be stupefying/intoxicating drugs if administered without knowledge or consent. And yet if you can convince someone to take them willingly its seen as being medicine.
Not that you can have anything done about a medical person like a nurse authorising the spiking of peoples food and drink with these drugs, the Australian Health Practitoners Regulation Agency is authorising anyone who they provide regulation for with the power to do this. Despite knowing that they don’t have any prescribing rights. They just refuse to look and let you complain about the way your complaint was handled. And the negligence results in a hospital system that is literally killing people. If only i’d known you could get paid for that. Human rights abuses? No problem, AHPRA will cover that one up for us with their negligent investigations and predetermined outcomes.
Just make sure the complaint is directed away from police with the slanderous “patient” label and redirected to their kangaroo court medical complaint system that ensures these organised criminals are enabled eh Minister?
In fact, how negligent must our Minister for Health be to think that spiking people with benzodaizepines is a ‘medical issue’? Because there is a whole bunch of nite club rapists who should be seeking his support to be freed from incarceration. I mean their stupefying with intent was to sexually assault, this Community Nurse is doing it to kidnap. And yet they are somehow different? Lucky the Minister is such an effective slanderer and can obstruct if not pervert the course of justice.
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I can’t help but smile reading the article and comments here after what I’ve been put through.
Civil and human rights? In my State all that is required for police to snatch you from your bed and hand you over to mental health services is a suspicion. In my instance that “suspicion” consisted of a lie from a mental health ‘professional’, a drink spiked with benzos, and a knife planted in my pocket when I collapsed. Off we go to a hospital of choice despite there being a protection in the Act against ‘remotes’.
If police had documented their suspicion (on reasonable grounds is the bit they don’t like) it would consist of “man collapsed in bed”. Which part of that suggests a person suffering from a mental illness I ask? Or was the suspicion based on the lie from the mental health professional perhaps? That of course would constitute a crime under s. 336 of the Criminal Code Procurring. Still police aren’t given much training with regards dealing with the ‘mentally ill’ beyond where to point the gun these days. And the idea of expecting them to notice they were actually assisting a criminal operating right under their noses? Community Nurse and citizens getting together and conspiring to ‘spike’ people with benzos before interrogations? So what is it I was expecting? On one hand we have our politicians stating that drink spiking is “abhorrent and extrememly dangerous” and on the other we have a nurse authorising spikings to make his job easy and concealing this information from police and doctors.
And combine the spiking with benzos with the ‘acute stress reaction’? That’ll get em talking eh? Ignore the Convention against the use of Torture too. Nut with knife sounds so much easier to deal with than all that law stuff.
And the Civil libertarians are where? Nowhere when police are intimidating and threatening witnesses because they’re embarrassed that they’re being used by ‘medical people’ to do their kidnapping and assist in the torture of citizens who do not wish to speak with these mental health professionals who have a reputation as ‘verballers’.
You people are lucky to be talking about loosing your rights. I mean, we have some coded into our laws, but the authorities simply ignore them and do what they want anyway, and not a soul prepared to hold them to account. Coz they’re the ones with the guns.
8 years on and i’m still being slandered as “patient” by the Minister for Health who, despite his duty, ignores the facts and pretends that the burden of proving I wasn’t a “patient” is mine. Bit busy with his Euthanasia Bill he promised doctors before the public gets a chance to vote on it in an election. They want it done by Christmas. Won’t he be Santa at the AMA Christmas party.
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Euthanasia Bill, mass killings?
I like how this Minister for Health/Mental Health manages to ignore his duty and pretend that the protections afforded the public in the Mental Health Act don’t exist, and then tells us that the protections afforded the public in his Euthanasia Bill will protect the public. Why on earth would the protections be any good when we know that the person who has a duty to enforce them does not do his duty when it matters?
There is of course that little problem of abuse with old people and the mentally ill. And restraining them with anti psychotics isn’t going to last forever. Where were you when they started loading people into the camps in 1940s?
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It kicked off in 1920 with Alfred Hoche (psychriatrist) and Karl Binding (lawyer) writing: “Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensnsunwerten Lebens”
“Allowing the destruction of life unworthy of living”
This led to Aktion T4 mass murder by German psychiatrists. According to Dr Michael Von Cranach (German psychiatrist) Almost all the psychiatrists killed their patients, he mentions one who would not kill was not himself destroyed in Nazi Germany. The inference being that they willing murdered their patients and brutally so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YU6CHaTWb0
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Yes streetphotobeing, An interesting progression during boom times for Germany.
We have been through a bit of a boom time ourselves lately, lots of money from the mining industry and major deals being done with our neighbours in China.
I did notice when they started discussing our new Mental Health Act that approximately 40% of the psychiatrists during a crisis meeting left the public system to practice privately.
The system is still in crisis though they did fill some of the spots with overseas doctors who are being paid for doing what the locals wouldn’t. And I mean they did take the forced sterilization of children without parental consent clause out so I don’t really know why they all ran away (though I have my suspicions despite this being a symptom of illness).
And now we are getting to see the footage of old people and the mentally ill being abused in institutions via our media.
Life unworthy of living? Sure but I didn’t realise that the underfunding was going to create the situation.
I was aware of the desensitization of emergency workers and first responders to the value of life, but I had no idea it had got to the situation where organised criminals operating in our hospitals were seen as being like shoplifters. An inconveniece not worth pursuing for a few convenience killings. That just seemed a bit cold to me looking from the outside, but I’m not a doctor and don’t understand the difficulties of juggling healthcaare with selecting my preferred model of Audi.
Anyway, thanks for the info and given the “climate emergency” which has been declared they may have left it too late to cull a few million and enjoy the fruits of others labour. I’ve always got a smile from the saying Man plans, God laughs.
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It was 10 years earlier. The FIRST people the Nazis put in the camps were the disabled, and so-called “mentally ill”. That started in 1933…
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“So called mentally ill”
Always important to keep an eye on the shifts with regards legislation. The “drug addiction” exclusion was removed from the new Act. Perhaps they can remove the religious beliefs exclusion next time. Our government has a bit of a problem with the use of methylamhetamines at present. Police have been ineffective in dealing with the problem mainly due to the levels of organised criminals who have protection from police. Big money involved and we can’t have certain people be held to account.
So blame is being put on the folk who are taking the drugs and they have become the responsibility of mental health services, who claim to have ‘treatments’ for them. I’m sure that ‘treatments’ will be developed to deal with these folk and ensure that the large amounts of money from the meth dealing is not interferred with. In the meantime the regular users of services are afraid to even go near the hospitals because their modus operandii has changed. I’m sure that some valuable information can be obtained from many of these criminals given what can be done to them under the “lawful sanction” loophole in the Convention. Mind you, one would have to be motivated by stopping the illegal drug trade, not ensuring its continuance via witness/evidence tampering. Oh well, another missed opportunity.
RIP Andrew Petrelis.
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Bradford wrote: “It was 10 years earlier. The FIRST people the Nazis put in the camps were the disabled, and so-called “mentally ill”. That started in 1933…”
I question the veracity of this comment.
It is true that the killing of mental patients in mostly mental institutions pre-dated the killing of others by Nazis, but it’s important to remember that this killing had gotten underway before even the formulation of the Nazi Party.
The concentration camps began popping up in 1933. The first 3 were Dachau, Oranienburg and Lichtenberg. All three were populated first with political prisoners.
source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/concentration-camps-1933-39
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Nazi Party never formed. National Socialists. Many of the first prisoners were Jehovah Witnesses. Why one might ask when Hitler is quoted as saying “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attack the ideas of Chritianity. Our movement is Christian” 1928. Of course the Jehovah Witnesses refused to give the ‘salute’ and so, off you go to prison if you don’t support the Fuhrer. I guess the similarity to not doing as one is told by your local Community Nurse who demands you speak to him when spoken to lest you be hospitalised may be a bit much for the modern day fascists to tolerate. I mean I have seen a young woman locked up for not doing her dishes when it came time for home inspection by the Community Nurse ffs. At what point do these people get off the controlling band wagon?
The particular Community Nurse who had me jumped by police obviously hates Muslims because it was basically what his “reasons” for believing that I needed to be an involuntary patient were, islamophobia. And he has obviouly read the Qur’an, because he also knows as a result of 4:34 we are all wife beaters, and it’s a given on his Forms. Which went down really well with the Catholic Priest and Senior Medical Officer who he handed me off to without telling him I had been spiked with bezodiazepines.
Should see the list of ‘chemical restraints’ he had me down for. He obviously hadn’t read the Qur’an because he didnt know about 5:90 which makes these stupefying/intoxicating drugs prohibited. Not that he would consider the cultural/religious aspects of my belief system of any significance. Perhaps he can loan me his copy of The Arab Mind? Because his attitude seemed to consist of the only thing these people understand is humiliation.
He even had me believing he was a psychiatrist until one of the other detainees pointed out he was “only a doctor”. Still, it did get him the opportunity to have my clothes removed and stick objects into my mouth or anus when I had expressly denied him consent. Not that anyone is going to say anything, as police and everyone else who works in these environments knows “i refuse to testify on the grounds I may incriminate myself”. As was done when 12 police officers watched a young man beaten to death in the cells all did. 12 witnesses and nothing can be done, what a shame.
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Murder is murder. Whether it occurs in camps or “hospitals.”
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Anyone consider a big thing behind all these mass killings, besides drugs, is a vicious contempt for human life?
Human lives do not matter in Western Culture.
“Mentally ill” loners gun down or knife the innocent who have done them no harm out of this contempt for their fellow humans. It helps make them feel big and important.
Psychiatrists and demagogues (IS there a difference?) have learned how to express their contempt for humanity in socially acceptable ways.
Like the lone shooters but smarter and successful.
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Been thinking. We’re little fish being torn up by two sea monsters.
Turn these parties on each other. Here’s how.
See if the Democrats could “compromise” by not demanding gun restrictions on the condition that ALL gun owners be forced to take a battery of a dozen tests for mental illness by a psychiatrist or forfeit the right to bear arms.
Once 50% of the NRA has been labeled this will bite Sen. Cornyn and other politicians promoting RESPONSE in the butt.
I was hoping liberal Torrey or someone similar would try to use his pseudo medical authority to remove Trump. Turning half of America against the APA. But he knew it would tip his hand to how his faux science is just a political weapon.
Persuade Democrat lawmakers who aren’t “in the know” to force these tests. The NRA members–and many others–will soon discover how dangerous psychiatry is to the liberties of ALL Americans.
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