Artists, activists, and narrative theorists have long asserted that those who control the narrative hold the power in society. In a viral 2009 TED Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power… Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”

These ideas seem especially relevant in the contested domain of mental health care, where marginalized communities often fight to be heard above the pronouncements of psychiatric, medical, and legal authorities. Recently, the battle for narrative justice in mental health has centered around Bedlam, a widely-acclaimed documentary distributed by PBS’ Independent Lens that opened last month to packed film festival screenings, fanfare, and awards. The film is named after Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, England, the first asylum ever built.

Bedlam’s director, writer, and co-producer Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, who wrote a companion book of the same name, told Democracy Now! last year that he decided to become a psychiatrist at age 14 after watching his parents take his sister out of a mental hospital against medical advice. “All I knew was that to my parents, the psychiatrist was the enemy, and I was ready and willing to enlist in his army,” Rosenberg wrote in Bedlam, the book.

Rosenberg’s camera lens follows the life trajectories of several people and families who have experienced crisis, incarceration, institutionalization, and homelessness in Los Angeles, as well as the beleaguered psychiatrists treating them. While the crises depicted in the film are not in dispute, its underlying message has been heavily influenced by the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), an organization representing a movement of family advocates, psychiatrists, and criminal justice professionals that has long pushed for the expansion of involuntary treatment of people diagnosed with “serious mental illnesses.”

The film has also stirred protests from a broad coalition of survivor-led, civil rights, and disability rights groups over sins of omission: Their voices are missing from this narrative. Last week, more than seventy organizations signed an Open Letter to PBS, demanding that the publicly-funded entity affirm the right of people who have experienced oppression to control and share their own narratives and thus reclaim their power.

The Power to Frame the Narrative

The film follows a conventional deinstitutionalization narrative that lays the blame for the current mental health care crisis on the emptying of state hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s. Early on, audiences are shown a montage meant to provide context: a series of images of tent cities and humans in distress that emphasize the horrors of incarceration, a barely-functioning healthcare system, and the housing crisis. Set to mournful music, the film also presents images of asylums past, demolished by deinstitutionalization’s tragic wrecking ball. If the visual storytelling does not provide sufficient definition of the problem, then the official press kit does: “In the wake of decades of deinstitutionalization in which half a million psychiatric hospital beds have been lost, our jails and prisons have become America’s largest mental institutions.”

Kathy Flaherty, director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project (CLRP), told Mad in America, “The film lays out a completely valid argument—that our systems are broken and most communities have abandoned people experiencing crisis. But then it presents us with a false dilemma, positing that there are only two options: the way it is now, and institutionalization. Exposing the audience to the horrors of the former pushes them to believe the latter is better.”

If the vanished asylum is framed as the historic root of the problem, then its reconstruction is implied as the modern-day solution. Yet state hospitals have been and continue to be congregate sites of abuse, neglect, and violence. It is said that the violent lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy’s sister, may have partially influenced his decision to champion the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. And a growing number of organizations are currently fighting the mismanagement of COVID-19 that has led to the deaths of people incarcerated in public and private psychiatric facilities.

Last week, Flaherty’s organization launched a Federal class-action lawsuit to compel the state of Connecticut to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and prevent deaths in public psychiatric hospitals. And one journalist’s preliminary research found that “roughly double” the number of people were dying from the virus in state hospitals than in federal prisons.

Bedlam is only one recent example of a master narrative that is deployed often by Treatment Advocacy Center spokespersons to potent political effect. It is a narrative that moves and mobilizes both the public and policymakers alike. It crosses political divides, appealing to both Democrats and Republicans, and has been featured on media outlets ranging from the far left-leaning program Democracy Now! to conservative publications such as the National Review online. Critics of this narrative remain largely unheard in the press.

The film itself does not spell out solutions to the crisis that it depicts with painful and unrelenting accuracy. But the filmmaker and his advisors at the Treatment Advocacy Center have a clear set of policy proposals in mind. Bedlam was made in close collaboration with the Treatment Advocacy Center; in its 2018 anniversary report, “Twenty Years of Eliminating Barriers to Treatment,” the organization boasted that it had been working with the Bedlam team for “quite a while,” adding that the film “draws heavily from the work of Dr. E. Fuller Torrey.”

Since its founding in 1998 by Torrey, a psychiatrist and author, the Treatment Advocacy Center has worked on the local, state, and national levels to promote legislation authorizing forced inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment and to erode the privacy rights of people designated as having serious mental illnesses. Torrey and affiliated spokespersons, promoting such laws on major media across the political spectrum, have perpetuated the notion that the unmedicated “seriously mentally ill” are inherently dangerous and violent, a claim refuted by the research. These intertwined media and legislative advocacy efforts have driven the public’s and policymakers’ support for coercive laws and social-control type interventions.

A Transparent Policy Agenda

While filmmaker Rosenberg repeatedly promises audiences that he has no interest in returning to the asylum era, he has also publicly stated his support for repeal of what is called the Institutions of Mental Disease (IMD) exclusion, a law enacted in 1965 at the start of the Medicaid program to discourage states from their historic over-reliance on institutional care. Speaking last year to Democracy Now!, Rosenberg said: “This was developed in the Johnson era, and probably, again, for good reasons. They wanted to disincentivize big institutions. They wanted to incentivize community mental health. And they didn’t want to warehouse people in big hospitals. But it doesn’t make sense in 2019, does it?”

Rosenberg is also a vocal proponent of “therapeutic jurisprudence” or the Black Robe Effect, describing a range of policies that utilize the legal system to compel people to comply with treatment, framed as the humane alternative to incarceration and homelessness. In an op-ed, Rosenberg wrote: “Mental health courts can help divert people with psychiatric disorders who have committed a crime from jail to treatment.”

The psychiatrist filmmaker is also a fan of a controversial program called assisted outpatient treatment, (AOT) a euphemism for involuntary outpatient commitment, usually involving a forced medication component. As he told Truthdig:

“Many people I know have family members who live on the streets who are seriously mentally ill. And it’s very, very hard to challenge that, very, very hard to get them help. And it’s a complicated question, but there now are some procedures to get people help. There’s something called assisted outpatient treatment–very controversial, but it uses what we call therapeutic jurisprudence. Having a judge who knows about these things say to the person, look, either you go to a hospital, or you get treatment.”

On Democracy Now!, Rosenberg was asked about Todd, an unhoused HIV-positive man who was repeatedly criminalized for nonviolent drug offenses during the course of the film. “His story is painfully typical of people who end up cycled in and out of jail. They don’t get any kind of jail-assisted or judge-assisted treatment, which is extremely powerful, something called assisted outpatient treatment, which means that you don’t even have to end up in jail. And there is a process in place, on the books, in which people could get treatment, or family members could help their loved ones get treatment.”

While Todd just so happens to be white, AOT’s critics point to data showing that the “process” tends to land disproportionately on people of color. According to a report by the Maryland Disability Law Center and On Our Own of Maryland, which reviewed the existing literature on AOT: “In North Carolina, two-thirds of persons subjected to a mandated treatment order in the study were African American, despite only representing approximately 22% of the total state population. The evaluation of the New York [Outpatient Civil Commitment] OCC program revealed that disparate rates based on race/ethnicity have plagued the program since its implementation in 1999.”

Bedlam on the Hill: Members of Congress Cosponsor the Narrative

The deinstitutionalization narrative has been deployed with great success on Capitol Hill over the past decade. On March 3, just prior to the pandemic upending life as Americans knew it, the news service ITVS, with support from the federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting, presented a “sneak peek” screening of the documentary to a packed house on Capitol Hill. The film thus provides a look into how Congress, as it mulls over mental health legislation, is presented with a narrative that promotes “coercion” as a “caring” response to our current failure, while the voices of critics of that narrative go unheard.

The documentary was co-sponsored by several Democratic and Republican members of Congress, including Senator Chris Murphy (CT) and Senator Debbie Stabenow (MI), as well as Congressman Earl Blumenauer (OR), Congressman Buddy Carter (GA), and Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX).

John Snook, executive director of Treatment Advocacy Center and a panelist at the Capitol Hill screening, hinted at the organization’s long-standing efforts to lower existing standards for involuntary treatment from “danger to self or others” to the “need for treatment” standard of the past, which presumably could be pronounced by any medical doctor over an individual’s objection. Snook spoke enthusiastically on the inroads made thus far by his group.

“That’s where I think the conversation is really moving, that we’re de-stigmatizing mental illness and saying, ‘It doesn’t matter whether or not someone is dangerous to themselves or somebody else. Who cares about that as a requirement. Do they need medical care? Do we do that for strokes? Do we do that for heart attacks? Do we say, ‘Not really dangerous yet. So come back in a week.’ That’s ridiculous, and that’s where things are changing. I think that’s the opportunity that we’re seeing in this film and around the country.”

John Snook (right), Treatment Advocacy Center, at “Bedlam on the Hill” event. Photo credit: Leah Harris.

Rosenberg seemed to concur with Snook, saying at the Hill event, “I could see as a society moving away from protecting people’s civil liberties to protecting their mental health.”

Writing for Sundance, Rosenberg seemed to call for centering the voices of people with lived experience in reform efforts. “Include people with serious mental illness in our dialogue about treatment and social reform rather than shutting them out with an attitude of ‘They don’t know what’s good for them.’” But instead of inviting people in the film with firsthand experience of the mental health and criminal justice systems to join the panel, the panel’s organizers flew in two of the psychiatrists depicted in the film.

USC+LAC Medical Center chief of psychiatry Dr. Colin Dias, one of the doctors on the panel, opened his remarks by saying of Bedlam: “It gives us an opportunity and a platform to speak for the voiceless.” But while Todd, the unhoused man whose story was featured in Bedlam, is missing—a fact Rosenberg revealed at a recent online screening discussion—presumably other individuals featured in the film could have represented their own points of view on the panel, in person or via videoconferencing. The intentional erasure of the voices of those incarcerated in psychiatric and prison facilities and substitution with those of family members and medical authorities is a familiar pattern among purveyors of the deinstitutionalization narrative.

“Bedlam on the Hill” event. L to R: Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Colin Dias. Photo credit: Leah Harris
Scholars and Scientists Debunk the Narrative

Critics in the academy, civil and human rights advocates, and people with direct experiences of psychiatric care have long asserted that deinstitutionalization is the wrong scapegoat, that the causes of this crisis are complex and multifactorial, and that they cannot be separated from questions of race, class, and gender.

Many scholars, including epidemiologist Seth Prins, historian Anne Parsons, psychiatrist John Michael “Mickey” Nardo, as well as feminist and antiracist scholar Mab Segrest, have provided compelling takedowns of the deinstitutionalization narrative based on the data and the historical record. As Prins writes in the Journal of Community Mental Health: “Although there is broad consensus that people with serious mental illnesses [SMI] are overrepresented in correctional settings, there is less agreement about the policy trends that may have created this situation.”

Parsons, author of From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945, locates the incarceration of people with psychosocial disabilities within the “rapid growth of the criminal legal system itself…[due to a] broader shift in government,” which she identifies as “a war on crime and drugs and the increased policing and surveillance of African-American communities.” Parsons asserts that those incarcerated in state hospitals during the mid-twentieth century were mostly middle-aged white people, while “the newly incarcerated were disproportionately African-American men under the age of 40.”

To blame the current state of affairs on a single failed policy of President Kennedy’s is to gloss over the actions taken by all presidents since, especially President Ronald Reagan and his “trickle-down” economic policies. President Reagan’s policies are widely considered to be the primary drivers of political and cultural wars on drugs and crime, which led to the mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, described as the “New Jim Crow” by legal scholar and author Michelle Alexander.

Mickey Nardo, the late data-oriented psychiatrist who blogged on health policy matters, argued that what occurred was not deinstitutionalization but “transinstitutionalization,”  a term invoked to describe forms of carcerality and criminalization impacting people across streets, prisons, and psychiatric facilities. For Nardo, the analysis lacks a broader social justice context. He wrote that this deinstitutionalization narrative implies “an inevitability, an excuse for our indifference to the lot of the chronically mentally ill. It’s way too simplistic and leaves out huge swathes of related history.”

Source: 1 Boring Old Man.

In her new book Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at Milledgeville Asylum, Mab Segrest notes that the history of deinstitutionalization has largely been told by white authors such as DJ Jaffe or Ron Powers, presenting a medicalized caregiver perspective. Segrest writes: “It is past time to join or challenge those accounts with the brilliant historians of slavery, racism, and gendered white supremacy.”

The Submersion of Race and Class Within a Medicalized Narrative

Survivors and advocates shared similar responses to the deinstitutionalization narrative represented by Bedlam with Mad in America. For Los Angeles-based mental health advocate Keris Jän Myrick, the narrative fails to make key connections. “There is no room for any exploration of the impacts of systematic institutional racism and inequities for communities of color, especially for Black men and interactions with police and/or force—other than a few statements from the narrator and family members,” Myrick said.

Myrick resists the “hospitals not jails” message implied in the deinstitutionalization narrative. “More locked facilities? That’s not about care, that’s about safety, control, and relief.” While acknowledging the fear that families feel if their loved ones are missing or potentially in danger, she said, “As a Black person, the word freedom and anything that impacts freedom has to be contextualized, understood, and supported. Locking someone up for ‘care’ is an oxymoron. Rather, I want to know: What more should we do to negate any ‘care’ that reduces someone’s freedom?”

Filmmaker Rosenberg talks publicly about how he accidentally connected with Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors after filming her brother Monte in the ER. Cullors is the co-author of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, which heartrendingly portrays her family’s struggle to protect Monte from criminalization and police violence. Her community’s successful organizing to shut down a planned “mental health jail” are portrayed in the film. Cullors does speak directly to the intergenerational impacts of racism and criminalization on Black families, telling Democracy Now!: “Monte should have never been incarcerated.”

Patrisse Cullors. Source: Bedlam Press Kit.

If the presence of racial bias in criminal justice is emphasized within the deinstitutionalization narrative, then its existence in psychiatric practice and medical settings such as ERs is largely ignored. Myrick, who once held a high-level position at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), said: “Sadly, the movie presents us with an African-American man who already has had horrible and traumatic incidents with police and incarceration. But the ER itself is like a jail with guards, police and iatrogenic approaches to controlling people.”

Rosenberg does acknowledge racial bias in psychiatry to a degree in his book, citing the research of William B. Lawson, chair of Psychiatry at Howard University. In the Clinical Handbook of Schizophrenia, Lawson writes: “Overdiagnosis of schizophrenia is common among African Americans, with affective disorders often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, mainly due to a failure to get adequate information, clinician bias, and cultural factors.” Lawson goes on to say that “African Americans often receive excessive doses of medication” and “are more likely to receive first-generation rather than second-generation or atypical medications, higher doses of medication, and more depot medication.”

The chemical straitjacketing of minority communities occurs with alarming frequency, despite evidence that it can cause them excessive harm. According to Lawson, “Biological evidence, if anything, supports lower dosing for ethnic minorities” because of particular ways that they metabolize psychotropic agents. He writes that African Americans who receive “standard medication doses are more likely to have extrapyramidal side effects on antipsychotics and to discontinue treatment.”

At one point in the film, Monte is asked about and rattles off a list of the heavy-duty medications he is taking: “Seroquel, Klonopin, Lithium, and Zyprexa.” He is said to have “gone off his meds” at least once during the course of filming the documentary. But no one ever asks him why. The unspoken implication is that such med-resistant behavior is a feature of Monte’s psychotic illness, and therefore not worth exploring.

While the films spends significant time focused on Los Angeles’ housing crisis, its deinstitutionalization narrative remains largely silent when it comes to its racialized dimensions. These include the historic and ongoing role of housing discrimination, including the practice of redlining, which created segregated cities and prevented Black people from accessing mortgages in Los Angeles and other parts of the country and thus precluded them from building intergenerational wealth via the commodification of housing markets.

Rosenberg does give a cursory nod to the role of economic inequality in producing distress, telling Democracy Now!: “At times, of course, poverty becomes a part of this cycle. Poverty makes mental illness worse and may even cause mental illness, in some way.” But Peter Lynn, the longtime head of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), told The New York Times: “There is a staggering overrepresentation of black people in homelessness, and that is not based on poverty,” but on “structural and institutional racism.”

And a 2018 report from LAHSA, the first of its kind to focus on Black people, stated: “Black people are more likely than white people to experience homelessness in the United States, including in Los Angeles County… The impact of institutional and structural racism in education, criminal justice, housing, employment, health care and access to opportunities cannot be denied: Homelessness is a by-product of racism in America.”

Beyond the deinstitutionalization narrative’s superficial treatment of race, scholars and advocates take issue with its reductionistic lens. “This business of mental health is so complex. Rarely do complex issues have simple solutions,” Myrick said. “The complexity is rooted in policies, government funding bureaucracies, and system and service fragmentation.”

Epidemiologist Seth Prins wrote similarly about the dangers of the reductionistic approach to policy and practice inherent in the deinstitutionalization narrative. “The failure to approach this issue with the nuance it requires may unwittingly imply expensive interventions that will benefit only a fraction of the population at issue.” Prins added, “For the majority of this group, the key to staying out of hospitals, jails, and prisons may be a place to live, a job or some income support, a meaningful relationship or social network, quality healthcare, or linkage to treatment instead of frequent arrest for substance use disorders—fundamental needs that can best be redressed in the community, not psychiatric or correctional institutions.”

And New York-based psychiatrist and professor Bradley Lewis shared with Mad in America that he was struck by the film’s omission of any reference to the recovery model, developed in the 1990s as a more holistic and collaborative approach than the Western biomedical model depicted onscreen. For Lewis, the recovery model, a coalition between providers and service users, has become “the heart of the American Association for Community Psychiatry, people who have dedicated their careers to helping people in the community, unhoused people, those who are least served.” He acknowledged that if community mental health systems have “failed,” as the deinstitutionalization narrative posits, it is because they have been underfunded and overwhelmed. “They didn’t fail because they didn’t use the medical model well enough.”

Ultimately, survivors and advocates wholly reject the romanticized “bring back the asylum” narrative. “There is no reason to repeat the past and think somehow we are going to get something different,” Myrick said. “We were promised during the closing of institutions that community mental health was the replacement. We have yet to achieve that promise. We are waiting. Many of us are working towards collecting on that promise.”

Keris Myrick. Source: Keris Myrick.
The Fight for Narrative Justice

Narrative justice, a framework that has emerged from narrative therapy and trauma work, refers to the “storytelling rights” of people who have survived injustice and oppression. Narrative justice approaches defend people’s rights to “name their own experiences, to define their own problems, and to honor how their skills, abilities, relationships, history and culture can contribute to reclaiming their lives from the effects of trauma.” And the framework centers around an ethical question: “When meeting with people whose problems are the result of human rights abuses and injustices, how can we ensure we do not separate healing from justice?”

The Dulwich Centre, an Australian-based narrative therapy organization, has even created a Charter of Story-Telling Rights, which include the right of survivors “to define their experiences and problems in their own words and terms” and “to be free from having problems caused by trauma and injustice located inside them, internally, as if there is some deficit in them. The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.”

Sascha Altman DuBrul, organizer with the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA) represents a growing number of organizations based in the U.S. fighting for narrative justice, fixing their crosshairs on the narrative represented by Bedlam.

IDHA visioning meeting. L to R: Sascha Altman DuBrul, Issa Ibrahim. Source: IDHA

He told Mad in America: “It’s as if ‘mental illness’ lives in some kind of social and political vacuum, and just develops in the brain as some kind of chemical defect. This is a discredited story that unfortunately has a lot of money behind it,” referring to the economic and political influence of the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric profession’s guild interests.

DuBrul was first alerted to the documentary in January when his mother, Anita Altman, invited him to moderate a post-screening discussion last month as part of the Reelabilities Film Festival, which Altman founded. Prior to the official event, DuBrul held a private screening of Bedlam for members of the IDHA community, and reported that they were “horrified to see the way our people were portrayed.”

“As someone who spent a month being shot up with Haldol in a cell in the LA County Jail, this film feels personal,” DuBrul said. “I’m diagnosed with a serious mental illness but I don’t fit into their narrative.” Dubrul, who co-founded The Icarus Project in the early aughts, added: “I went on to find thousands of others like me and be a part of building a resistance movement. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same kind of resources to develop a PBS documentary.”

Following Bedlam’s premiere last month, IDHA members moved from outrage into action. Their Open Letter to PBS, which has since been signed by more than seventy civil rights, survivor-led, and disability organizations, shares a vision for a future “in which ex-patients, survivors, and currently and previously incarcerated individuals are not merely depicted in mental health narratives, but given the agency to tell their own stories.”

“As a trusted, publicly-funded institution, we call on PBS to reflect upon its responsibility to deliver quality content to the public representing a range of perspectives and uplifting diverse voices,” the signatories said.

IDHA, which runs a school for “Transformative Mental Health,” also has organized a two-hour online community discussion in response to Bedlam on May 11. DuBrul will moderate the event.

Speakers will include Akeem Browder, former New York City mayoral candidate and brother to Kalief Browder, who died by suicide after he was unjustly imprisoned and tortured on Rikers’ Island as a juvenile; Patricia Berne, co-founder, executive and artistic director of Sins Invalid, a people of color-led “disability justice-based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized;” Azza Altiraifi, an award-winning disabled Afro-Arab organizer working for radical inclusion and access, racial and disability justice, and collective liberation; and Felix Guzman, a poet who has experienced incarceration in both prison and in psych facilities and is a member of Voices of Community Activists and Leaders, New York. This writer will also be a panelist.

Akeem Browder. Screenshot via Democracy Now!

In February, DuBrul provided comments to Mad in America about Bedlam that foreshadowed the ways in which the coronavirus pandemic would serve to magnify preexisting vulnerabilities and inequalities in all of our institutions and within society, truths conveniently left on the cutting-room floor. “Often the best way to deceive is to tell part of the truth, and then to leave out the really critical details,” he said. “We are so vulnerable as a society right now, and this [documentary] just fits into a playbook of manipulation.”

“If we really wanted to address all the factors that cause ‘serious mental illness,’ we would have to seriously restructure the society we live in,” DuBrul added.

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MIA Reports are supported, in part, by a grant from the Open Society Foundations

21 COMMENTS

  1. “Kalief Browder, who died by suicide after he was unjustly imprisoned and tortured on Rikers’ Island as a juvenile”

    Tortured? I can’t see any mention of that in the article. Not saying it didn’t happen but I think that a lot of what is covered by “inherent in or incidental to lawful sanction” gets called torture and it’s not.
    Which brings me to the recent wedding between our police and the mental health nurses who have been placed in our police stations to enable what would be considered torture, except that it is “inherent in or incidental to lawful sanction”. Any complaints and your off to the hospital for some further ‘treatment’ for your delusional belief that what you have just been subjected to was torture. The good guys don’t torture, they exploit loopholes as our public is going to become increasingly aware of when they realise that this ‘effective program’ introduced to assist police with the ‘mentally ill’ is really all about.

    Consider the use of ‘chemical restraints’ enhancing the effects of interrogations? Can’t be done? I can show you how 🙂 These were the “added protections” spoken about by our politicians when the new Act was released. They just failed to mention who was being protected. The misconduct (perverting the course of justice) to conceal torture was becoming a problem, and they needed protection from prosecution. Not that anyone is prepared to stand up now, though i’m sure they will all have been active in protest when history is written. Ask the Clinical Director about the “editing” of legal narrative to create whatever truth we want. It’s no longer torture if we change the status of “citizen” to “patient” post hoc I am told, it now becomes ‘medicine’.

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      • Thanks for the clarification vicj. I assume that recognition doesn’t extend to the people subjecting the person to it?.

        I know in my State torture is something that others do, what we do fits into the category of “coercive measures”, and if it doesn’t then with a little fraud it soon will. A quick change of status post hoc from citizen to “mental patient” by appointing a doctor to the victim and one can claim exemption under the “inherent in or incidental to lawful sanction” using the mental health Act as a shield against prosecution. Mock executions, threats of pack rape etc standards that do not meet the threshold of Article 1 of the Convention. Any complaints and your mental illness will require treatment by a mental health professional. And what disgusted me was the role of human rights advocates (Mental Health Law Centre) in the concealment of these acts of torture for the State government.

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      • a definition of torture:

        https://apt.ch/en/what-is-torture/

        as the article says, this differs from a layperson’s definition of what “torture” means.

        to illustrate: when I first ended up at McLean, they put me in “the quiet room” and put in four point restraints after the first morning because they thought I might go wild and get violent. (I wouldn’t’ve done that.) although that had psychological effects which scarred me to this day, decades later, I personally don’t think it counts as torture.

        whereas later, I did get put in the quiet room (not in restraints this time) as punishment to break my disobedience. this does, by my definition count as torture.

        anyway: if you want to call an action an act of torture, you had damn well better justify that, otherwise you degrade the word further and blur the definition and make it a meaningless word.

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        • Couldn’t agree more Ria.

          “For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

          The “offical” definition.

          I note the recent discussions at the UN regarding the use of ‘soft’ tortures (the ‘psychological’ tortures that are much more difficult to prove, as opposed to hard tortures).

          In my instance I was assaulted via the ‘spiking’ with benzodiazepines (one element of the use of hard torture a physical assault like punching to the head), and then an “acute stress reaction” induced by jumping me in my bed by police (enlisted via a ‘lie’ by a Community Nurse to assist with his “patient”) The two DO NOTS of an acute stress reaction are (1) DO NOT prescribe benzos and (2) DO NOT force the person to talk (especially when thye have been ‘spiked’ and then had weapons used to force them to talk).

          So how is this not considered torture given that it was done by two people who did it knowing I would not talk to a Community Nurse (or any other mental health professional) willingly? And then the acquiescence of public officers to conceal the ‘spiking’ by kidnapping and having me delivered to a dcotor prepared to sign a prescription for drugs used to spike someone and enable torture? An Ordained Minister none the less.

          Because knowing they did not meet the criteria of the Mental Health Act for detention, they planted items to enable police to detain under s. 68 (e) of the Criminal Code. Once police had handed me over to these consprators then they had lawful sanction and could torture with impunity.

          Of course if police werre to do their duty they would have arrested these people for conspiring to torture, stupefy without knowledge to commit an indictable offence namely kidnapping but ……. I guess being able to set people up to exploit the loophole of the definition of torture (ie obtain lawful sanction to enable police to open up the right to torture for mental health professionals, who can then hand you back to police and it isn’t torture anymore) means that the Convention is useless. Totally useless when the people with a duty to ensure the rights given by it are ignored or covered up with convenience killings (refoulment).

          Of course me having the proof of this has been a slight inconvenience to my government. They have had to ensure the silence of a number of people who have become aware of their vile conduct, and how they have been concealing acts of torture (and a few knocks).

          This has been faily easy as I have a trusting nature and when people tell me they don’t agree with torture and will help, only to take documents from me and then breach agreements regarding that evidence/proof I am further refouled and find myself wanting to die. I just assumed that people had a revulsion for torture, not that they were considering it medical treatment. Even Machiavelli didn’t go that far. But I guess it’s important that the public don’t become aware that our police and mental health services have found a means to torture citizens and then conceal any proof of those offences via the distribution of fraudulent documents to lawyers (advocates who assist in concealing human rights abuses? Speak to the Mental Halth Law Centre about their role as a Venus Fly Trap for the State sanctioned torture program) and the unintended negative outcomes that are faily easily achived in an Emergency Dept which police tell me it’s best they don’t know about. Who is it they actually Protect and Serve? Organised criminals? Human rights abusers?

          The Convention suggests the appointmemnt of a Committee to investigate claims made up of ‘people of good standing’. Let me say that thse would be difficult to find in the State I live in, where access to legal representation is denied and your own representative prefers outcomes that suit the State and make what is torture a ‘medical procedure’.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdwyAcJ8j2U

          3 minutes. Is this torture? Or merely the use of a coercive method? Has Raymonds life been affirmed by this ‘treatment’? Because it’s a method being used and is not considered torture. And much more effective if you can ‘spike’ Ramond prior to the interrgation, as can be done in my State according to the Minister for Health and our Chief Psychiatrist. All you need is a doctor prepared to sign off on it post hoc. And I can make a referral to one.

          I’ve much more to say but find myself severly traumatised. Though I’m much better these days after ten years of living on the street without my family. And I must say I really should have appreciated the concern of these people over me losing some sleep and not eating properly for a couple of days. Mind you the cost to me of not sleeping properly as a result of being jumped in my bed and tortured, kidnapped and then nearly killed for complaining has probably escaped their notice. They had other victims to deal with.

          I would have assumed they would allow me to obtain my belongings and leave. Not so, my wife obviously aware of the States need to ‘fuking destroy’ me (she was after all conspiring with them to do precisely that) and ensure I can not get access to the courts means she gets to keep everything I ever worked for (including my family photos, passport, birth certificate, degrees, employment references …… and my daughter and grandchildren who have no blood tie to her. The Police knee jerk reaction is to destroy a persons family to ensure they become vulnerable. It makes retrieving documented proof of criminal conduct by public officers so much easier to deal with via a bullet and a label). And we’re paying taxes for this?

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          • Just digging around the site of the Association for the Prevention of Torture and I note that the list of “Partners in Prevention” is a list of all the people who have assisted in the concealment of the torture and kidnapping I was subjected to.

            It reminded me of the “exclusions” in the Mental Health Act being a list of things to not write down on the Forms when your drugging someone into oblivion. Don’t like gays? No probls, just don’t put that down as the reason your locking them up okay Community Nurse. Verbal it up a bit, did he admit to smoking a bit of pot 30 years ago? “History of heavy illicit drug use”, Does he believe in God? “Hearing voices and delusional beliefs expressed”. He refused to answer questions about his sex life? “Possible breaches of the Perversions Act of 1916” (No such Act exists but our Chief Psychiatrist doesn’t even know the provisions of the Mental Health Act so no chance of him knowing. According to him “reasonable grounds” are whatever the Community Nurse writes on the Form, despite them not actually relating to anything he was told. Refusing to answer a question is grounds for detention? Wow, if police knew that……..) “refused to answer re substance abuse” This from a man who knew I had been ‘spiked’ with benzos? he knew more about my substance abuse than I did, why didn’t he write that down on the Form? Maybe because he was engaging in conspiring to pervert the course of justice? Oh yeah, bit much expecting him to document his crimes, or the two police who stood and watched him commit these offences. Like they care, they were turning away children who had been repeatedly raped for 40 years.

            People being locked up and force drugged in my State for literally nothing more than a Community Nurse want to do it. And Police will provide him with a referral to overcome the protections afforded the community and enable arbitrary detention and torture.

            I’ll keep digging in the hope of finding someone who actually believes that torturing citizens is wrong. Though ten years of trying, and not a soul prepared to say why it wasn’t torture (because the fact they distributed fraudulent documents demonstrates they knew it was. Imgine human rights lawyers ensuring they don’t obtain the proof of torture so they don’t have to assist the victim of torture. Well done Mental Health Law Centre, your a disgrace to lawyers everywhere.) Just ignore him and hopefully we have gaslighted him enough so that he takes his own life, because the slaughter program for whistleblowers/torture victims in the Emergency Dept has been temporarily closed due to COVID 19 (and some people having to leave town rather quickly when they were tipped off (by whom? Police? Sorry we did our best but we can’t have victims of torture turning up in police stations with the proof. Making referrals and them turning up dead might raise some eyebrows at the Coroners office if there are too many)) Rotten to the core.

            It really is about making people think they are in on the secret. Just between you and me …….. and this type of conspiring is rampant in these ‘institutions’ of torture.

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    • He was accused of a non-violent crime (taking a backpack) and he always said he was innocent. He was detained in jail before trial because he couldn’t make bail. Like many others at Rikers. Held three years before trial including two in solitary confinement. Case was dismissed when finally came up.

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      • Wow, that’s a long time in solitary while on remand. And whats with the three years wait for a trial?

        I know that mandatory sentencing laws here have resulted in people being sentenced to prison for such crimes as shoplifting a $5 packet of pencils etc. I always kind of laugh about my situation given that it seems obvious that drugging someone without knowledge with benzos is a crime (and once that crime is proven other crimes fall like dominoes) and yet I get told I will be arrested for being able to prove it. Meanwhile police have 16 detectives working on a ‘shoplifting team’ of (two) kids sitting in the park conspiring to steal some food from the local supermarket because they’re hungry as mum and dad have spent all their money on drugs from a police enabled drug house. They have phone taps, and a drone operating to listen in to their conspiring to ensure that the packet of biscuits they intend stealng is kept safe in the hands of shareholders, and they will do some hard prison time for their crimes.

        Meanwhile I’m being told by a Senior Constable who has in his hands proof of me being tortured and kidnapped, and what was attempted to resolve these matters by the doctor (ie an attempt to unintentionally negatively outcome me) that it ‘might be best he doesn’t know about that’. I have a letter from a Police Superintendent stating that police do not wish to be informed about how these killings in our Emergency Depts are being done. The harvesting of morphine from patients is actually quite easy in an emergency dept despite the claims that their is a system in place to ensure the drugs are all accounted for. Still, don’t look, they won’t see.

        Two possibilities, they either already know and are doing nothing about it, or their refusal to accept the documents I have and accept the fraudulent narrative preferred by the State has ensured they have been lead astray. Call me mental patient if you will, despite that being easily demonstrated as false, but that does not mean what i’m saying isnt true. Given that I have the documents proving that I was ‘spiked’ and kidnapped, you think the people who arranged that might wish to ensure police don’t find out?

        My guess is they know that these folk were killing, and they feel bad about the amount of deaths that could have been avoided if they had listened to the mental patient in the first instance, not two years down the track when their was a pile of bodies for the Coroner to bury with a cover up. And then they have to continue fuking destroying me to ensure they conceal their negligence. Meh, a good person will stand up……. eventually.

        And of course the timing of these folk leaving town in a hurry right after I dropped the documents on the table at the police station? And then I identify that the documents sent to the Law Centre didn’t match the ones I had (that police tried to retrieve) and were considered “edited” documents that removed the ‘spiking’ and labelled me a mental patient of more than ten years at a hospital that snatched me out of my bed and didn’t know me? Call me suspicious lol Call it fraud, not editing. Call it convenience killing not unintended negative outcoming. Call it criminal not medical. Though for now, police prefer to leave these sort of matters for doctor to sort out in the Emergency Dept, somewhere they too can send personal problems for ‘resolution’. Knowing of course what can be done under the ’emergency provisons’ (which funnily enough does not include torture Article 2 (2). But does include snuffing if you can slip it past the Coroner as being a death from morphine from an unknown source. Simples)

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    • Consider that when US military have been captured and confess to war crimes and the like it is often maintained in the media (possibly correctly) that they were “drugged.” Just about everything in an in-house psychiatric interview/interrogation is done under the effects of psych drugs.

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  2. anomie — As I read this, I was thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If the most basic needs and a sense of safety and security are not present, the bottom two elements, it certainly seems that whatever issues with a person’s mental health would be significantly exacerbated. It isn’t rocket science. I tend to believe that much of what is labeled as “mental illness” is more likely related to severe stress breakdowns. And, gee, having so much stress added by being homeless and having no sense of security in the future would certainly worsen any issues a person has.

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  3. Thank you, Leah, for the article. In the opening paragraph, you use the phrase “control the narrative”. I often use the phrase “control the dialogue”. The role of linguistics in this psychiatric mess is horrific in that it results in so much extra and unnecessary suffering by those already struggling.

    I saw Bedlam a couple weeks ago and pulled up the web page on PBS. I noticed a comment from Ron Thompson who mentioned that he had a “severe nervous breakdown” back in the 1960s. And he provided his email address. I emailed him and told him that I endured what I call a “severe stress breakdown” back in the late 90s. I of course ended up labeled “bipolar” which I rejected because I was aware of mislabeling already and knew the multiple sources of stress that I was crutching — hence why i label it a “stress breakdown”.

    We both questioned the filmmaker’s sister’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. As I recall from the film, she was 20 years old and going through a divorce in 1970, which of course would have been a VERY stigmatizing experience to go through. Depending on the relationships and pressures of being a young wife, certainly going through a divorce at such a young age would likely cause significant stress in a person.

    It was a disturbing film, that’s for sure.

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    • Rosenberg’s “relationship” to his sister was downright horrifying. He characterized her as “hopeless”, and a “burden”, and, despite her permanently marginalized status in her family, he held *her* accountable for everyone’s problems. Then he entered a profession where he could easily prey on vulnerable, hated, and death-bound strangers. There’s a reason why he created this documentary AFTER his sister died – at age 55! – from 30 years of “treatment”. Destroyed as she was by her family, he was, nonetheless, threatened by her ability to rebel against the power he exerted over her life.

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  4. Thanks for the article, Leah. I couldn’t agree more, there is a need to allow psych survivors to be the narrators of their own stories. And most of them will be quite similar, since the primary actual function of the scientific fraud based “mental health” workers is systemically covering up child abuse and rape, on a massive societal scale.

    https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
    https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/

    How appalling that today, “the prevalence of childhood trauma exposure within borderline personality disorder patients has been evidenced to be as high as 92% (Yen et al., 2002). Within individuals diagnosed with psychotic or affective disorders, it reaches 82% (Larsson et al., 2012).”

    And all of this systemic child abuse covering up – by the “all distress is caused by chemical imbalances in peoples’ brains” believing, can’t bill to help any child abuse survivor ever – “mental health” workers, is by DSM design.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1

    For God’s sake, I had to leave my psychiatrist once I’d read some of his medical records and my family’s medical records. I first confronted him with all the misinformation and lies about me, gotten from pedophiles, written within those medical records. And the fact that I’d found the medical evidence of the abuse of my child in my child’s medical records.

    My psychiatrist responded by wanting to have my healing child neurotoxic poisoned, to which I said no. Then my psychiatrist declared my entire life to be a “credible fictional story,” and tried to convince my husband I needed to be re-neurotoxic poisoned. I again said no, and left that satanic, child rape covering up – pedophile aiding, abetting, and empowering – psychiatrist forever.

    But I will say, I’m watching a Netflix documentary right now, it’s called ‘Cracked Up: The Darell Hammond Story.’ Believe it or not, it is a psych and child abuse survivors’ story that is actually being told. And these stories do need to come out. The “mental health” industries’ systemic child abuse and rape covering up crimes do need to come to light. Especially now that we all live in a “pedophile empire.”

    https://www.amazon.com/Pedophilia-Empire-Chapter-Introduction-Disorder-ebook/dp/B0773QHGPT
    https://community.healthimpactnews.com/topic/4576/america-1-in-child-sex-trafficking-and-pedophilia-cps-and-foster-care-are-the-pipelines

    This is another good documentary that recently came out.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wTiCxXgrJw&feature=emb_err_watch_on_yt

    Yes, racism is a big problem with our “mental health” workers, but covering up child abuse is their primary actual societal function. And these systemic psychological and psychiatric crimes, too, must come to light. Those of us who were attacked, misdiagnosed, defamed, and neurotoxic poisoned – all to cover up child abuse – do deserve narrative justice, at a very minimum.

    But we actually deserve real justice. America needs to start arresting the pedophiles. And we need an end to the “mental health” workers’ multibillion dollar, scientific fraud based, by DSM design, primarily child abuse and rape covering up, systemic iatrogenic illness creating, “mental health” system. We need a return to the rule of law.

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  5. Leah – GREAT job!!! Very thorough. Hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced trauma, humiliation, abuse, torture – the small people- are working to educate others about the REAL changes, the genuine changes, needed to build a system of mental health care – as opposed to building the well-funded “mental illness” industrial complex. Let’s not forget the many people murdered in the name of “mental health care”. The system is so broken and causes so much damage how do we shift the perspectives of those who only see a need to control, limit human rights and not listen to those of us with wisdom from our lived experienced of being locked up, drugged up, etc.

    The damage that has been done to us, I believe, is in large part what makes it extremely difficult to come together and form a big coalition that IS HEARD and taken seriously – with the funding, policies, trainings, research that are all part the change we need.
    thanks again Leah Harris.
    Please keep writing

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  6. This is a long article – which means I didn’t read all of it carefully.
    I was alerted to this problem when I ran across an LA Times article about a man who was “saved” by being forced into an institution. (It has religious connotations, now that I think about it.)
    It might be noted that Bedlam was not necessarily the “first” lunatic asylum. It had been a regular hospital for several centuries before it started admitting “the insane.” But such places were also known in the Islamic world from very early times.
    Community Mental Health, though it led to “deinstitutionalization,” was very much pushed by the psychiatric institutions of that time, such as the NIHM. As I understand it, their goal was to make “mental health” more of a popular subject, and thus greatly increase their access to “patients.” Now that mental health care is generally seen as a type of medical care, and so covered by most insurance policies, their patient access problem may be largely solved.
    The real problem has always been psychiatry. And it has been a considerable problem, given their ability to win over governments and publics with grand talk about “solutions” that have never been proven to be workable.
    Social class considerations have always been a huge problem in this field, as well as many others. We are quick to label a beggar, or even someone just having a hard time holding a job, as “mentally ill.” We are slow to realize how mental, emotional and moral instabilities reach all the way up to the highest ranks of government and the professions. Which “mental health issue” is really the most important to solve? The poor ex-athlete that got addicted to pain killers and is now homeless? Or the maniacal (if theoretical) big pharma board member (or consulting psychiatrist – less theoretical) who thinks it’s more important to make money on drugs that don’t work than to find real, lasting answers to the problems we all face in life?
    So the emphasis in this field is upside-down from my point of view, and the “lower classes” (whatever that means) on this planet tend to feel it the worst.

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  7. I followed some of the links in this article and came out to some disturbing findings.

    One of them led to a group in Palestine that purports to help torture survivors. One of the services they provide? Psychiatric services.

    Bit of a contradiction?

    “So you didn’t like the waterboarding you got…Might I recommend you try akathisia instead?”

    Then I looked up IDHA. Anyone else follow that link? Here’s a quote about whom comprises their group:

    “WE ARE…

    mental health workers, clinicians, psychiatrists, current and prior users of mental health services, advocates, artists, and survivors of trauma and adversity, who are interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.”

    They talk about narrative justice. And there are professionals in the group? Seriously?

    And “users of mental health services”. NO. The proper term here would be victims of crime. You can’t be a “user” of fraud. Well unless you have an agenda you wish to further via fraud…

    The site is also littered with references to “mental health”. Do we have to go over again what’s wrong with this concept???

    And seriously IDHA writes an open letter to PBS claiming to support “narrative justice” for those in the system…then individual survivors have to ask permission to sign the letter.

    Great sense of irony there IDHA!

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