I partly agree, but I also think it is a fine piece of working class writing showing what life at the bottom is like and how the state oppresses the poor – and you don’t get much of that in mainstream media. As such it is one of the best pieces on the site imho.
Thanks for raising this important issue. In the early 90’s I met a man who had suffered, “electric shock “therapy.” He said don’t ever do it. I had no intention of doing any such thing.
Your school and psychiatrist were evil. People deserve compensation for these sorts of harms. Sadly that is unlikely to happen.
Nice analysis of an excellent article. I also think James Davies thinks that capitalism can be reformed, or maybe a revolution instigated, by professionals taking action where as I think it probably has to be from the working class, and that includes service user/survivors of psychiatry leading.
This is a tragic, gruelling story. That it is happening to thousands more, many living in poverty is a scandal. It deserves a mass direct action campaign
When the occupations of psychiatrists offices start wake me up.
I find it weird to see the UN saying something I have been banging on about for nearly 30 years. I shall take this article to my local Crisis House, where all psychiatrists and social workers are banned without prior consent of the people who run it.
it is weird to hear what I have been banging on about and putting into practice, in small ways, for decades, spoken about by someone from WHO
Wow – corruption always seems to go with bullying. I admire your persistence. Keep it up.
The corruption seems endemic.
Your experiences are horrible, you have my sympathy. However I think the original comment was aimed at psychiatrists and researchers who make very good livings poisoning people or doing useless research while people like you are ignored, shunned or locked up and drugged.
I personally would like all the money these people get taken back and given to you and people who support people like you.
Time to read Brave New World again I fear.
These are brilliant articles showing how drug policy is used by politicians to garner votes while the real causes and solutions to problenatic drug use are ignored.
Great interview. It covers a lot of stuff.
Your view is the one I like the most:
Follow the money, as ever, is the motto here.
Peterson has made a small fortune peddling his strict Daddy self help rubbish and he and his publisher needed another book to consolidate his fortune. The benzo story added to the drama and as in all his mutterings there is no coherence, just what passes for intelligent thought.
“Stopping medications is an important part of the job of a psychiatrist, yet it has received relatively little attention,” or just not prescribe them in the first place.
Or better still resign and retrain as a gardener or a flower arranger or something that doesn’t actually harm people.
Excellent article.
I am very glad the support groups exist and congratulate them for developing there skilled work and for John Reeds excellent assessment of the situation.
The situation is however likely to continue until direct action campaigns from survivors emerge.
Out of the support groups, onto the streets.
I think this article ultimately points to either anarchism or communism as self reliance is an ideal that is promoted by and benefits rampant capitalism.
A better question would be:
Why is there not a direct action campaign against Electro Covulsive Torture?
Geart but horrific article though.
Blunt, condemning and a breath of fresh air from what is often a mealy mouthed medical establishment, even when they know how bad things are.
The outcomes of those in care are not good in the UK. I imagine they are worse in the USA.
This is disgusting: it is like charging prisoners for upkeep, education and any help they get while they are in prison and expecting them to pay it back when they leave out of any earnings they get.
Why not have kidnappers who forcibly drug the people they kidnap demand money from there victims for upkeep too?
Perverse or what?
When does the rebellion begin?
I liked the whole article till it got to this point:
“They propose that this kind of research could inform public policy efforts to combat social and economic inequality and the deleterious mental health effects that can result from such “toxic” environments.”
It is fine to propose this sort of research. It would be good sociology, anthropology and have an impact on lessening the present drug based model. But it is naive to think that public policy will change from academic research alone. Those street children in Brazil will only go when the poor organize and rise up to get rid of the rich in those gated communities. They need to be aiming this research at those who fight poverty, not those that enable it such as governments. The researchers are revealing there own class background by making this statement. They are middle class academics hoping to influence and then implement policy for the ruling class. They are not the oppressed.
True and that is to some degree covered in the report
I cannot see in the article if it refers to type 1, type 2 or both. That is important as type 1 is thought to be an autoimmune disease and type 2 the result of excess fat which cpuld be caused by comfort eating due to ACE’s.
That is a really interesting article. Thanks for publishing it. It makes the link between prison abolition and psychiatry abolition very nicely.
What it points to is how psychiatry mainly oppresses the poor. It is a tool of capital to keep a lid on dissent.
Speak for yourself luv. I’m as mad as a hatter.
I quite like calling myself the names my oppressors call me. It takes the sting out and shows society that their standards are just ideas that can and are constantly remade.
There is a strong disability rights movement that says peoole are disabled because of society excluding people with impairments. The antipsychiatry movement could be seen as part of that just as it could be seen as part of the prison abolition movement.
Thanks for the fascinating critique of PTSD
Excellent chapter.
I am heartened by the description of what happens in Italy where hospitalization is very limited and where community support with big service user input is common.
I agree. I also think that there are therputic communities within the prison system that are humane and effective and also that psychiatric drugs are dolled out on prison wards.
I think we need to hear from inmates from both institutions as well as looking at outcomes from both. They all sound pretty dismal to me.
Medication only – no improvement (except for drug company profits and health provider wages) but lots of risks to the client.
Nuff said
Psychiatric patients’ physical health problems are are routinely ignored. I know three people whose physical health was ignored in psychiatric hospitals.
Diagnostic overshadowing is a known phenonema.
That isn’t self centered. That is an appalling story of child abuse by drug obsessed psychiatry.
I am glad you have survived the poisoning and lies.
Great study and a total indictment of psychiatrists and GP’s who prescribe these drugs so readily and then are useless at helping people stop them.
A brilliant piece and a vital piece of survivor history. Thank you so much for writing it.
In the UK a few years ago the government kept banging on about how employment was good for people’s mental health. They used this to push conditionality, where by people had to go to ridiculous lengths to look for jobs, applying for 30 jobs a week for example and going on mickey mouse training courses, to get benefits. If they don’t comply they are sanctioned. So thanks for unearthing this research to show that this is all built on a lie.
This reminds me of:
“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
As Prof John Reed once said, can we have the money back?
I love this as it uses one of my core principles, which is to turn complex sounding ideas into plain English (or as some physicist once said, if you can’t explain it to an eight year old you probably don’t know what you are on about). Most therapy is based on a few simple ideas really so I am glad you are making that explicit.
I also like the idea that, “A market economy requires ongoing selling to sustain itself. It needs consumers to feel a bit better, but not in any sustained way, so they keep coming back for more.” As that is my experience of therapy.
Conversely if I on a retreat, an intense group experience, my whole outlook changes and after I leave I cope with the world much better for a while. So I can see how the Open Dialogue and other community based approaches could work, they reflect my experience of groups being encouraged to get to know and struggle with each other to the benefit of all of them.
Indeed
I think your comments on IAPT are intetesting in the context of previous chapters on neoliberalism. The same target cuture, excessive managerialism and dire results are found in teaching. Good teachers leave or are pressired out, teachers do not set the class, they ate expected to teach lesson plans set by year heads. Teachers and pupils are micromanaged and fed up, just like IAPT clients and therapists.
At the most TMS is a sophisticated placebo procedure. Expensive treatment requiring assessment by a well paid expert, big impressive machine that makes muscles move by magic that you are told calibrates the machine to your particular brain, then treatments that are expensive with the machine and technicians every day for a few weeks and which cause people to feel disorientated, maybe have headaches and such like discombobulation. Who wouldn’t feel better for a while with all that attention? Just as long as you don’t get the brain damage…..
” There are over 500 different forms of therapy documented and every year new ones come on stream.” A bit like religions then. As a young man my friends and I joked about inventing a new religion. Now a days we would joke about inventing a new therapy.
I met a therapist a few years ago who worked on IAPT. They were doing a bit of admin for the team and did there own analysis of the data. They found out that they got lots of returners. If it worked so well that wouldn’t happen of course. The manager was not pleased….
I am utturly shocked by the TMS advocates in these coments. Their comments are junk science at there worst. It reminds me of the kind of “science” proposed by homeopathy or dowsing. You cannot map the mind with any kind of electric stimulation to show which bits cause u happiness and then use any kind of electromagnectic stimulation to clear brain pathways so that new and nicer ones form. This is dangerous junk science.
If you really could clear brain pathways then you could by accident clear the ones that say what someones name is or where they live. Then they may decide they are called simething else or live next door.
If you really believe TMS clears brain pathways you are saying it causes brain damage and that brain damage stops people feling miserable. Lets hope real doctors see that for the dangerous sham it is.
This reads like junk science to me. States of mind do not correlate to brain areas. You cannot map out which ares need attention and which are ok.
You can’t clear pathways in the brain, only damage them.
Brains change all the time. Any teacher will tell you that. New pathways ate created as a person learns something new. Teachers do not use electricity to help people have space in there brain to learn more maths.
If you have been told tms clears pathways in the brain you have been lied to. It probably works on a placebo effect at the most.
It disturbs me that TMS is even allowed. States of mind, no matter how painful, are not medical problems. Therefore medical treatments are not justified.
This is just awful. Thanks for writing this up. I am so sorry you went through this. I hope you find a good lawyer and are able to sue the psychiatrist who did this to you.
It is so important this story gets out.
It is a superb essay. It is very generous of the authhor to publish it here for free.
I was wondering about the low number of commments compared to some other blogs. My guess is that the subject of this chapter, which is about how the politics of the last forty years have influenced both the psyche, culture and the development of mental health and other services, is not of direct relevence to the lives of those harmed by psychiatry. For myself I think that the broad background of the ploitics of the last forty years is important in understanding how the harms of psychiatry have expanded so that we now talk routinely of, “Mental health, ” and so many are on damaging and addictive drugs.
What I would like to see more if is how the neoliberal model has influenced and degraded the commisioning and implimentation of services and also what part the left plays in all this.
Neoliberalism trimphed because the left failed and continue to fail. Inequality is still growing. Inequality is also related to trade union membership. More equal countries have more trade unionists per head of population. Yet trade unions are weak as we can see from both there reactions to both austerity and the covid 19 crisis.
The bigger question for me is how much can we really change psychiatry without changing society?
Hm, I am a gardener by trade. I have a client who is a doctor, a consultant in ICU as it happens, which means he is of importance in treating server coronavirus cases at the moment. I call him Andy as that is what he seems to want to be called. Although it must be said I call him Dr Andy to my friends as he is rather cute and I harbour a Chic Lit fantasy of him rescuing me as I mow over my toes one day and we miraculously end up married – sigh, one can dream. Meanwhile I need to order some aconites for his garden (not to mention getting a life…)
Cipriani and co are evil. They are taking drug company money for pushing drugs that cause young people to kill themselves.
Funnily enough there people in the UK who say the police show more compassion than MH services.
“. Some children will deny feeling sad but will admit to feeling ‘down’, others will admit to feeling ‘grumpy’ or ‘irritable’.” Sounds like most of us.
“I know, lets make everyday life a disease. Then we can sell drugs as fake cures to everyone and become stinking rich!” As the Big Pharma man said.
Oh Brave New World…….
If you are saying autism is an identity, a social group that people identify with and find use from then diagnosis is irrelevent.
The problem with diagnosis is that people diagnosed seldom have choice over the treatment offered and those treatments can often be irrelevent, timewasting or harmful.
” Studies today show that we can tell which babies will eventually fit the criteria for autism at the early age of 18 months. Some early studies even show this is true at 2 months. ”
Please provide the links to these studies.
I think your economic analysis is true. There maybe a class issue too. The diagnosers are middle class professionals but maybe the diagnosed are more likely to be working class?
It would of course be possible to reward the clinics that refuse to diagnose and drug by giving them goid reviews and punish those that drug and diagnose children with banner drops and office invasions. It just takes enough of us to do it.
” hidden message that the ASD was the reason they were bullied (i.e. their “disorder” caused others to treat them badly)” a nice bit of victim blaming going on there. Reminds me of my step mother saying she was horrible to me because I never fought back when she was horrible to me.
I had a theatre company, called Rose and Thorn, which used theatre and Frierian type discussion to help service users get more of what they want. It was thrilling and the service users benefitted.
We didn’t use forum theatre but I am familiar with the form.
One day I will write it up.
Your story is an excellent and tragic example of how psychiatries main function is to stop people from thinking about why people are distressed.
I hope one day you will come off the lithium and ditch the diagnosis.
Good luck with the novel.
“Because psychosocial risk factors are more amenable than their genetic counterparts to remediation by social policy, this should be good news.” Not to governments intent on making the rich richer. This is ample argument to see why the bio model is predominant. Or do you want psychiatrists to become militant socialists?
You can see similar forces at play when Freud disavowed his seduction theory, ie that unhappiness is largely caused by child sexual assault, because male doctors gave him the cold shoulder cwhen he went on about it in public. Instead he said survivors, mainly women, imagined it because secretly they fancied there parents. It eas a sick theory designed to keep his standing with his professional peers and psychiatries insistence on bio explanations of distress despite the contrary evidence is a similar ploy to keep in with the powerful and keep getting the dosh.
“Loneliness is intimately intertwined with our social, cultural, and relational life and upbringing.” A bit obvious really.
In the UK a few years ago, “Lonliness,” became a government agenda. The government ignored how there policies contributed to it.
I think that is well worth examining. I have met those angry psychiatrists.
As with many psychoanalytical texts this was unesercerily verbose but also fascinating and useful
A frightening summary of how the mass drugging of children developed. Thanks for the scholarship.
I thought that it was interesting that James problems came to a head when the government instituted an austerity programme which presumably put him under pressure at work. That psychiatry is a way of diverting from political and economic problems is evudenced by this story.
‘Before we go any further, I’ll give you some background. We know that antidepressants can help relieve the symptoms of more severe forms of depression and are helpful for many people..” pull the other one Ms Burn, it’s got bells on.
Tragic – and at the same time the best blog on MIA in a long time.
I quite like the idea of lively and difficult childhood behaviour being chatacterised as a phase. If only all behaviour that gets people sectioned or involved with psychiatric services was considered like that life would be much better for many people reeading this blog.
The usa attitude to guns is beyond comprehension in the uk ans many parts of the world. The only protection from a despotic government is an organised populace. Thinking handguns offer protection when the state has access to tanks is naive and romantic.
All fine points apart from: “reducing the stigma around mental health services.” These services increase the risk of suicide.
“One day I’m out and about, the next I’m holed up in my apartment wishing the world would just understand: understand me, understand that the society we live in is fucked up, and that it’s all just an illusion. ” Sounds like me – on a good day.
Lack of privacy and confidentiality, and discrimination are stsndard in psychiatry and Big Tech is where the money and power to influence givernment these days
The Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists are therefore lying toerags. The Queen would not be pleased to know about this (unless she has shares in GSK that is).
“A Cohen’s kappa of 0.28 means that the individuals using the term don’t actually know what they are talking about – literally.”
That is the funniest thing I have read all morning. To put it another way, the Emperor has no clothes.
“…we cannot match the power and influence that comes from resource-rich bodies like the pharmaceutical industry; hence we are only able to make marginal differences.”
There’s the rub. Websites like thus are important, as is Timimi’s work as an example of what can be done (though survivor led services do just as well when they emerge) with a bit of common sense but to achieve big change needs smart strategy, a huge movement and perhaps the death of capitalism?
Brilliant as usual.
“What this evidence seems to be telling us is that what we wrap up in special expert-sounding language has more to do with everyday human experiences than any special knowledge,” is my conclusion about therapy. Or as the old song goes:
“Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face
You just bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
You know your mother would talk about you
Your own sisters and your brothers too
They just don’t care how you’re tryin’ to live
They’ll talk about you still
Yes, but bear, ooh, this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Oh, just bear, ooh this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
You know they’ll jump you up and down
They’ll carry you all ’round and ’round
Just as soon as your back is turned
They’ll be tryin’ to crush you down
Yes, but bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face, oh, Lord
And just bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face”
Or, ” Resilience,” as they like to say these days.
I think that is the minor outcome.the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
The major outcome is that the people who did and wrote up the study are not real scientists and is not a proper science journal.
The real study is the study of the ethics of science and how money corrupts it.
I don’t think anyone makes any money from publishing on MIA. Neither do I think Timimi saw the error of his ways late in his career. He has been publishing and practicing without drugs or diagnosis for a decade or two.
MIA is MIA. It does it’s job. The revolution is elsewhere, which at the moment is precisely no where.
“Medical Model of Mental Health”….
I get your point. No one referred to mental health till Dr’s came along and offered to take in the Mad – for a nice wallop of money. Now nearly everyone talks of mental health when they mean state of mind.
The colonisation continues.
I think Open Dialogue is a way of running a meeting. It was developed by mental health practitioners but the principles are found elsewhere. Let’s free it from it’s psychiatric bounds. If school counsellors can do it so can others. If someone is distressed don’t call services, call a meeting and find some facilitators.
I love Timimi’s work. This is the clearest expression I have read by anyone working in the psychiatric industry that it is all dangerous bunkum. It is refreshing to see it clearly laid out.
A survivor of psychiatry might write something similar but with justified anger and venom.
I have been reading interviews with Raul Vaneigem, an anarchist who was central to the Situationists (an anarchist movement whose hay day was the 1960’s) and whose book The Revolution of Everyday Life was essential reading for those involved in the uprising in Paris in 1968. Timimi’s text reminds me of many of the concepts central to situationist ideas that Vaneigem talks and writes about, for example he said this on an interview; “I just do what I can to see that resistance to market exploitation is transformed into an offensive of life, and that an art of living sweeps away the ruins of oppression.”
That modern society is so sick that it takes our desires for happiness and our refusal to face the misery of everyday life that late capitalism provides and then sells that desire back to us as fake and poisonous medicine, then locks some of up and forces these poisons us is a sick culmination of what Vaneigem and the situationists called “The Specticle”, ie the all enveloping miasma that is late capitalism.
Perhaps to end psychiatry capitalism needs also to end?
I agree that we cannot always leave this to family and friends. People are often overwhelmed by working long hours in insecure work places these days to provide care for anyone, never mind people who are going off the deep end.
However DP Hunter in there book Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors https://www.theclassworkproject.com/product-page/tracksuits-traumas-and-class-traitors-by-d-hunter puts forward the idea that all state, “Support,” services (psychiatry, benefits, social services, children’s services etc) are about control of the working class and are evermore likely to be so. In the book he describes how as an adult, when he had a breakdown, his friends supported him by sitting with him on a round the clock rota for several weeks. He was insistent on them not calling services and he had been through them, which large sections of the book are about.
We know it is possible to support people through crisis, but we also know that people are often overwhelmed by the demands of our increasingly unequal society, ill equipped with the patience or knowledge of how to deal with someone in crisis, or might have contributed to it.
I suspect DP Hunter, as an anarchist, would call the support they received as Mutual Aid. While I cannot see many people setting up mutual aid collectives to support those in crisis I can see that it would be possible to do. The principles of Soteria House and even Open Dialogue are reproducible by unpaid volunteers with a little training.
If services were to be run by the state, before or after any revolution (I for one see the world moving away from communism and whatever people may consider the left to be that it is getting progressively weaker) they would have to have a high degree of user/survivor/community input and control for any coercive, medical based model to not be instigated.
Thanks, this was really illuminating on Jaffe and the TAC.
I am from the UK and although we have similar organisations and individuals here they are not so rabid or bombastic.
I have recently been reading and thinking about how psychiatry is mainly about controlling the distressed working class. This article illuminates that thought very clearly.
For me, as a Greenpeace activist, it was a bit of a laugh. For me, who at the time was also running The Rose and Thorn Theatre company, a “mental health” consultancy, it was quite revealing in a not very nice way.
We put on a play about section 136 based on service user/survivor experiences.
We didn’t concentrate on what the police did but I got one story of someone who was detained under section 136 by the police, taken to the hospital 136 suite and then no once actually came to “asses” her. I presume she was taken off the street, or from her home, by a police person, maybe asked if she was suicidal, taken to hospital, locked up for half a day or so and ignored and then sent home.
This woman’s story illustrates what this is all about. It is about taking people who are distressed away so that they do not disturb the public, asking them if they want to kill themselves so the people taking them away can show they did the job get paid and justify the agencies exorbitant fees and then ignoring the person in distress and letting those that caused the distress get away with it.
“This person is ill, we have taken her to a place of safety, we are dealing with it, go home now, move along please.”
Good article. My guess is suicide assessments are to help organisations not be criticized if a, “Client,” kills themselves.
I was once arrested for sitting on the top of Houses of Parliament, ie the Palace of Westminster (Greenpeace protest – natch). When the police processed us before locking us in the cells, it was 2am by then, they asked all sorts of pertinent (name, address, any known illnesses or disabilities) and impertinent questions such as are you thinking of killing yourself. I laughed, as I was interested in what in the UK is called Section 136, where the police detain you for reasons of mental health and thought this is probably what they ask a distressed person when they take them off the street before taking them to the hospital or putting them in the cells. The policeman checking me in asked why I laughed, so I replied I wondered how they did that assessment. He replied, “Well how else am I supposed to know?” I could have given him an answer but really they just wanted to tick the tick sheet and lock me up. As long as that was done it didn’t matter if me or anyone else tried to kill themselves as they were covered – job done. Time for a tea break and wait till the end of the shift.
There are high rates of psychiatric diagnosis and incarceration and forced treatment among BAME (Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority communities) either because racism drives people mad, or because BAME people are more likely to live in poverty and poverty drives people mad, or because psychiatry is racist – or a combination of all three. Yet the survivor, critical psychiatry, anti-psychiatry movements seem pretty white.
I have thought about this for a long time and my conclusion is that this will continue until organisations have sufficient numbers of BAME people at involved in strategic positions and that white organisations go out of there way to make sure BAME stories, issues and people are represented in the organisation.
Well done for writing the article. I wish you luck in your awareness raising work.
I think one of psychiatries main functions is to collude with abuse.
By saying people are ill and drugging them psychiatry distracts from the societal causes of distress.
I read as far as, ” suicide risk assessments are well known not to work,” and laughed. It reminded me of the time when I was arrested on a Greenpeace action, when I still did Greenpeace actions. We were taken to the police station and as we were booked in the desk sergeant asked us one by one if we were suicidal? I laughed at the time and said, “So that’s how you monitor people who might be a risk to themselves?” The desk sergeant replied, “Well how else am I meant to do it?”
I guess they do this to everyone who is arrested?
It is a tick box exercise designed to cover the person and institution asking and nothing to do with care for the person they are monitoring.
I should have said, “No Comment,” as I did to most of the other questions they asked.
Jordan Peterson is prone to depression….. While that on it’s own tells us little combine that with his harsh parental manner towards many things and his promoting physical punishment of children and I, in my putting two and two together to make five, see him as having a harsh conscience that he wants to project on the world while fighting the bogeymen of censorship driven by rebellion against his own harsh parenting.
Unfortunately as yet I have no proof of my theory.
As some of you may have realised he has riled me. I have a friend who acts like he is her cult leader where as I see a charlatan.
Jordan Peterson: a man good with words and bereft if ideas (or any that have any internal consistency at any rate). The charlatans charlatan: he charms those easily taken in with fake intellectualism and comes across as a stern Daddy, telling us all off for not reaching his rather high and impossible standards while looking credible by taking pot shots at the bogey men of political correctness (don’t hit children for example) while ignoring the real issues of inequality and injustice (the evidence that hitting children harms and is not an effective way to discipline children).
I am looking at the excess death stats in different countries. It shows about three times the expected deaths in the UK while covid 19 is raging. That is all I need to know.
SAR, MERS and Ebola are proof that viruses can be beaten by good public health without vaccines.
The UK housed all it’s homeless people at the start of the Covid 19 epidemic in the UK. S Korea dealt with it so well that it did not spread to homeless people too much with only 254 deaths so far out of a population of 51 million compared to the UK of a declared death number of 29, 000 deaths and rising in a population of 67 million.
As I am 61 with high blood pressure and asthma I have a vested interest in public health measures controlling this virus. In 18 months, the minimum time to develop, test and distribute a vaccine, I could be dead from Covid 19. However if contact tracing is bought into the UK along with other public health measures my chance of not being infected goes up considerably.
I am not sure what the article was about. It was a bit opaque for me. What I do know is the the UK government is using this crisis to privitise the health service, starve local councils of cash and give contracts to big business friends of theirs as well cut away at democratic accountability. That cannot be good for those suffering the brunt end of psychiatry and that is the broader point I also want to push. This is a crisis the rich will use to rip us all off and erode our rights even more and vaccine conspiracy theories are a distraction from that vital point.
We don’t know if vaccines will be developed and if they are that will be 18 months away.
Right now I stand in solidarity with nurses, doctors, care staff, the elderly, people who work in factories preparing and packing food for us to eat, people who are incarcerated in prisons and psychiatric facilities and those who have lost there jobs and have little to live on.
These are real struggles and people are unnecessarily loosing there lives.
Vietnam – no deaths, South Korea 252 deaths, UK – 28,446 deaths, USA 68,602 deaths. The figures speak for themselves. Those that prepare and use WHO guidelines beat this virus just as they beat SARS. Those that ignore the guidelines have there citizens unnecessarily die, and that is the poor who disproportionately die and those in institutions where it can be transmitted very quickly.
Coronavirus is a horrendous situation: a pandemic that many countries have managed well but which many others have botched. The USA and the UK are two of the worst examples of how to handle a public health crisis where money and business comes before people’s well-being. Some countries did well by having few lockdowns but acting early, stopping people coming into the country or testing or quarantining them when they arrived. They also made sure those that needed to be financially supported were well looked after so that they could isolate without loosing income. When countries didn’t take measures to limit transmission fast the number of cases, quickly followed by the number of deaths increased exponentially.
When people are given good information by people they trust and well supported they will accept temporary restrictions on there freedoms. That was illustrated in New Zealand which has had an exemplary response to this crisis. Without those conditions in place people question whether quarantine is justified and many on low incomes have to break it to survive and this leads to increasing cases and death rates and those deaths are disproportionately among the poor and the incarcerated.
People are fighting back: for example Amazon workers are demanding proper personal protective equipment (PPE) and safe working conditions in the USA and other places and care workers and medical staff are demanding proper PPE too. Deaths due to coronavirus are especially high among nurses and care staff, this is a scandal as it is unnecessary as witnessed by those countries that have had few deaths by early and aggressive action.
When people are locked up in psychiatric facilities, prisons or live in care homes infections diseases can spread through them very quickly unless appropriate infection control measures are put in place. Countries that fail to take those measures are demonstrating how little they value the lives of both those who are locked up and the staff who work in those institutions.
Organisations that are making money out of this are big business that is close to government. For example in the UK testing for coronavirus is run by big private companies like Deloitte, a major accountancy firm, and Boots, a big pharmacy company while local councils and the NHS are kept out of contact tracing which is an essential part of dealing with coronavirus.
This pandemic is not only a major public health crisis of our time it also shows who governments value and in the USA and UK’s it is the lives of the well off and profit for business that seems to come before all else.
I like the website as it has a summary of measures that are needed to contain and hopefully eliminate Covid 19. What it lacks is any kind of social justice element and it is the people at the bottom, including survivors and users of psychiatry that need to be part of this struggle and in my opinion at the core.
We are all nuerodiverse: we all have different brains. Our genetics gives us different brains and our brains change with experience.
I wonder why the label nuerodiverse was thought useful?
My step mother worked with children like your son in the early 1970’s.
Now Autism seems to mean anyone who is a bit odd.
Yous son needs care, but different care from people with no intellectual impairments but who struggle with the social world.
Like you, I have no idea what the term means.
I know what problems people have when they tell me and I know what is a problem for me trying to relate to someone, but this diagnosis is just bio-babble to me.
I partly agree, but I also think it is a fine piece of working class writing showing what life at the bottom is like and how the state oppresses the poor – and you don’t get much of that in mainstream media. As such it is one of the best pieces on the site imho.
It is a piece that would not be out of place in the UK Lumpen journal. https://www.theclassworkproject.com/lumpen
Thanks for raising this important issue. In the early 90’s I met a man who had suffered, “electric shock “therapy.” He said don’t ever do it. I had no intention of doing any such thing.
Your school and psychiatrist were evil. People deserve compensation for these sorts of harms. Sadly that is unlikely to happen.
Nice analysis of an excellent article. I also think James Davies thinks that capitalism can be reformed, or maybe a revolution instigated, by professionals taking action where as I think it probably has to be from the working class, and that includes service user/survivors of psychiatry leading.
This is a tragic, gruelling story. That it is happening to thousands more, many living in poverty is a scandal. It deserves a mass direct action campaign
When the occupations of psychiatrists offices start wake me up.
I find it weird to see the UN saying something I have been banging on about for nearly 30 years. I shall take this article to my local Crisis House, where all psychiatrists and social workers are banned without prior consent of the people who run it.
it is weird to hear what I have been banging on about and putting into practice, in small ways, for decades, spoken about by someone from WHO
Wow – corruption always seems to go with bullying. I admire your persistence. Keep it up.
The corruption seems endemic.
Your experiences are horrible, you have my sympathy. However I think the original comment was aimed at psychiatrists and researchers who make very good livings poisoning people or doing useless research while people like you are ignored, shunned or locked up and drugged.
I personally would like all the money these people get taken back and given to you and people who support people like you.
Time to read Brave New World again I fear.
These are brilliant articles showing how drug policy is used by politicians to garner votes while the real causes and solutions to problenatic drug use are ignored.
Great interview. It covers a lot of stuff.
Your view is the one I like the most:
Follow the money, as ever, is the motto here.
Peterson has made a small fortune peddling his strict Daddy self help rubbish and he and his publisher needed another book to consolidate his fortune. The benzo story added to the drama and as in all his mutterings there is no coherence, just what passes for intelligent thought.
“Stopping medications is an important part of the job of a psychiatrist, yet it has received relatively little attention,” or just not prescribe them in the first place.
Or better still resign and retrain as a gardener or a flower arranger or something that doesn’t actually harm people.
Excellent article.
I am very glad the support groups exist and congratulate them for developing there skilled work and for John Reeds excellent assessment of the situation.
The situation is however likely to continue until direct action campaigns from survivors emerge.
Out of the support groups, onto the streets.
I think this article ultimately points to either anarchism or communism as self reliance is an ideal that is promoted by and benefits rampant capitalism.
A better question would be:
Why is there not a direct action campaign against Electro Covulsive Torture?
Geart but horrific article though.
Blunt, condemning and a breath of fresh air from what is often a mealy mouthed medical establishment, even when they know how bad things are.
The outcomes of those in care are not good in the UK. I imagine they are worse in the USA.
This is disgusting: it is like charging prisoners for upkeep, education and any help they get while they are in prison and expecting them to pay it back when they leave out of any earnings they get.
Why not have kidnappers who forcibly drug the people they kidnap demand money from there victims for upkeep too?
Perverse or what?
When does the rebellion begin?
I liked the whole article till it got to this point:
“They propose that this kind of research could inform public policy efforts to combat social and economic inequality and the deleterious mental health effects that can result from such “toxic” environments.”
It is fine to propose this sort of research. It would be good sociology, anthropology and have an impact on lessening the present drug based model. But it is naive to think that public policy will change from academic research alone. Those street children in Brazil will only go when the poor organize and rise up to get rid of the rich in those gated communities. They need to be aiming this research at those who fight poverty, not those that enable it such as governments. The researchers are revealing there own class background by making this statement. They are middle class academics hoping to influence and then implement policy for the ruling class. They are not the oppressed.
True and that is to some degree covered in the report
I cannot see in the article if it refers to type 1, type 2 or both. That is important as type 1 is thought to be an autoimmune disease and type 2 the result of excess fat which cpuld be caused by comfort eating due to ACE’s.
That is a really interesting article. Thanks for publishing it. It makes the link between prison abolition and psychiatry abolition very nicely.
What it points to is how psychiatry mainly oppresses the poor. It is a tool of capital to keep a lid on dissent.
Speak for yourself luv. I’m as mad as a hatter.
I quite like calling myself the names my oppressors call me. It takes the sting out and shows society that their standards are just ideas that can and are constantly remade.
There is a strong disability rights movement that says peoole are disabled because of society excluding people with impairments. The antipsychiatry movement could be seen as part of that just as it could be seen as part of the prison abolition movement.
Thanks for the fascinating critique of PTSD
Excellent chapter.
I am heartened by the description of what happens in Italy where hospitalization is very limited and where community support with big service user input is common.
In this blog I write about a project I was involved in which enabled service users to imagine what a service created by them would be like. It sounds remarkably like what happens in Italy.
https://www.madintheuk.com/2021/02/the-rose-and-thorn-a-participatory-theatre-project/
Good to see academic journals taking this on
I agree. I also think that there are therputic communities within the prison system that are humane and effective and also that psychiatric drugs are dolled out on prison wards.
I think we need to hear from inmates from both institutions as well as looking at outcomes from both. They all sound pretty dismal to me.
I looked at the video of Ben on https://www.kidsskills.org/ .
He looks fun.
As if we didn’t know.
From
Angry of Reading.
Medication only – no improvement (except for drug company profits and health provider wages) but lots of risks to the client.
Nuff said
Psychiatric patients’ physical health problems are are routinely ignored. I know three people whose physical health was ignored in psychiatric hospitals.
Diagnostic overshadowing is a known phenonema.
That isn’t self centered. That is an appalling story of child abuse by drug obsessed psychiatry.
I am glad you have survived the poisoning and lies.
Great study and a total indictment of psychiatrists and GP’s who prescribe these drugs so readily and then are useless at helping people stop them.
A brilliant piece and a vital piece of survivor history. Thank you so much for writing it.
In the UK a few years ago the government kept banging on about how employment was good for people’s mental health. They used this to push conditionality, where by people had to go to ridiculous lengths to look for jobs, applying for 30 jobs a week for example and going on mickey mouse training courses, to get benefits. If they don’t comply they are sanctioned. So thanks for unearthing this research to show that this is all built on a lie.
This reminds me of:
“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
As Prof John Reed once said, can we have the money back?
I love this as it uses one of my core principles, which is to turn complex sounding ideas into plain English (or as some physicist once said, if you can’t explain it to an eight year old you probably don’t know what you are on about). Most therapy is based on a few simple ideas really so I am glad you are making that explicit.
I also like the idea that, “A market economy requires ongoing selling to sustain itself. It needs consumers to feel a bit better, but not in any sustained way, so they keep coming back for more.” As that is my experience of therapy.
Conversely if I on a retreat, an intense group experience, my whole outlook changes and after I leave I cope with the world much better for a while. So I can see how the Open Dialogue and other community based approaches could work, they reflect my experience of groups being encouraged to get to know and struggle with each other to the benefit of all of them.
Indeed
I think your comments on IAPT are intetesting in the context of previous chapters on neoliberalism. The same target cuture, excessive managerialism and dire results are found in teaching. Good teachers leave or are pressired out, teachers do not set the class, they ate expected to teach lesson plans set by year heads. Teachers and pupils are micromanaged and fed up, just like IAPT clients and therapists.
At the most TMS is a sophisticated placebo procedure. Expensive treatment requiring assessment by a well paid expert, big impressive machine that makes muscles move by magic that you are told calibrates the machine to your particular brain, then treatments that are expensive with the machine and technicians every day for a few weeks and which cause people to feel disorientated, maybe have headaches and such like discombobulation. Who wouldn’t feel better for a while with all that attention? Just as long as you don’t get the brain damage…..
” There are over 500 different forms of therapy documented and every year new ones come on stream.” A bit like religions then. As a young man my friends and I joked about inventing a new religion. Now a days we would joke about inventing a new therapy.
I met a therapist a few years ago who worked on IAPT. They were doing a bit of admin for the team and did there own analysis of the data. They found out that they got lots of returners. If it worked so well that wouldn’t happen of course. The manager was not pleased….
I am utturly shocked by the TMS advocates in these coments. Their comments are junk science at there worst. It reminds me of the kind of “science” proposed by homeopathy or dowsing. You cannot map the mind with any kind of electric stimulation to show which bits cause u happiness and then use any kind of electromagnectic stimulation to clear brain pathways so that new and nicer ones form. This is dangerous junk science.
If you really could clear brain pathways then you could by accident clear the ones that say what someones name is or where they live. Then they may decide they are called simething else or live next door.
If you really believe TMS clears brain pathways you are saying it causes brain damage and that brain damage stops people feling miserable. Lets hope real doctors see that for the dangerous sham it is.
This reads like junk science to me. States of mind do not correlate to brain areas. You cannot map out which ares need attention and which are ok.
You can’t clear pathways in the brain, only damage them.
Brains change all the time. Any teacher will tell you that. New pathways ate created as a person learns something new. Teachers do not use electricity to help people have space in there brain to learn more maths.
If you have been told tms clears pathways in the brain you have been lied to. It probably works on a placebo effect at the most.
It disturbs me that TMS is even allowed. States of mind, no matter how painful, are not medical problems. Therefore medical treatments are not justified.
This is just awful. Thanks for writing this up. I am so sorry you went through this. I hope you find a good lawyer and are able to sue the psychiatrist who did this to you.
It is so important this story gets out.
It is a superb essay. It is very generous of the authhor to publish it here for free.
I was wondering about the low number of commments compared to some other blogs. My guess is that the subject of this chapter, which is about how the politics of the last forty years have influenced both the psyche, culture and the development of mental health and other services, is not of direct relevence to the lives of those harmed by psychiatry. For myself I think that the broad background of the ploitics of the last forty years is important in understanding how the harms of psychiatry have expanded so that we now talk routinely of, “Mental health, ” and so many are on damaging and addictive drugs.
What I would like to see more if is how the neoliberal model has influenced and degraded the commisioning and implimentation of services and also what part the left plays in all this.
Neoliberalism trimphed because the left failed and continue to fail. Inequality is still growing. Inequality is also related to trade union membership. More equal countries have more trade unionists per head of population. Yet trade unions are weak as we can see from both there reactions to both austerity and the covid 19 crisis.
The bigger question for me is how much can we really change psychiatry without changing society?
Hm, I am a gardener by trade. I have a client who is a doctor, a consultant in ICU as it happens, which means he is of importance in treating server coronavirus cases at the moment. I call him Andy as that is what he seems to want to be called. Although it must be said I call him Dr Andy to my friends as he is rather cute and I harbour a Chic Lit fantasy of him rescuing me as I mow over my toes one day and we miraculously end up married – sigh, one can dream. Meanwhile I need to order some aconites for his garden (not to mention getting a life…)
Cipriani and co are evil. They are taking drug company money for pushing drugs that cause young people to kill themselves.
Funnily enough there people in the UK who say the police show more compassion than MH services.
“. Some children will deny feeling sad but will admit to feeling ‘down’, others will admit to feeling ‘grumpy’ or ‘irritable’.” Sounds like most of us.
“I know, lets make everyday life a disease. Then we can sell drugs as fake cures to everyone and become stinking rich!” As the Big Pharma man said.
Oh Brave New World…….
If you are saying autism is an identity, a social group that people identify with and find use from then diagnosis is irrelevent.
The problem with diagnosis is that people diagnosed seldom have choice over the treatment offered and those treatments can often be irrelevent, timewasting or harmful.
” Studies today show that we can tell which babies will eventually fit the criteria for autism at the early age of 18 months. Some early studies even show this is true at 2 months. ”
Please provide the links to these studies.
I think your economic analysis is true. There maybe a class issue too. The diagnosers are middle class professionals but maybe the diagnosed are more likely to be working class?
It would of course be possible to reward the clinics that refuse to diagnose and drug by giving them goid reviews and punish those that drug and diagnose children with banner drops and office invasions. It just takes enough of us to do it.
” hidden message that the ASD was the reason they were bullied (i.e. their “disorder” caused others to treat them badly)” a nice bit of victim blaming going on there. Reminds me of my step mother saying she was horrible to me because I never fought back when she was horrible to me.
As the for ADOS assessment I think this one is better and maybe more valid https://www.women.com/vanessa/quiz-this-persoanlity-quiz-is-so-accurate-itll-give-you-goosebumps
Or indeed any personality quizz in any women’s magazine over the last fifty years.
The Vancouver based Theatre for Living did a forum theatre piece on mental health called Maladjusted. Here is the weblink with final reports https://theatreforliving.com/past_work/maladjustedTour/index.htm
I had a theatre company, called Rose and Thorn, which used theatre and Frierian type discussion to help service users get more of what they want. It was thrilling and the service users benefitted.
We didn’t use forum theatre but I am familiar with the form.
One day I will write it up.
Your story is an excellent and tragic example of how psychiatries main function is to stop people from thinking about why people are distressed.
I hope one day you will come off the lithium and ditch the diagnosis.
Good luck with the novel.
“Because psychosocial risk factors are more amenable than their genetic counterparts to remediation by social policy, this should be good news.” Not to governments intent on making the rich richer. This is ample argument to see why the bio model is predominant. Or do you want psychiatrists to become militant socialists?
You can see similar forces at play when Freud disavowed his seduction theory, ie that unhappiness is largely caused by child sexual assault, because male doctors gave him the cold shoulder cwhen he went on about it in public. Instead he said survivors, mainly women, imagined it because secretly they fancied there parents. It eas a sick theory designed to keep his standing with his professional peers and psychiatries insistence on bio explanations of distress despite the contrary evidence is a similar ploy to keep in with the powerful and keep getting the dosh.
“Loneliness is intimately intertwined with our social, cultural, and relational life and upbringing.” A bit obvious really.
In the UK a few years ago, “Lonliness,” became a government agenda. The government ignored how there policies contributed to it.
I think that is well worth examining. I have met those angry psychiatrists.
As with many psychoanalytical texts this was unesercerily verbose but also fascinating and useful
A frightening summary of how the mass drugging of children developed. Thanks for the scholarship.
I thought that it was interesting that James problems came to a head when the government instituted an austerity programme which presumably put him under pressure at work. That psychiatry is a way of diverting from political and economic problems is evudenced by this story.
‘Before we go any further, I’ll give you some background. We know that antidepressants can help relieve the symptoms of more severe forms of depression and are helpful for many people..” pull the other one Ms Burn, it’s got bells on.
Tragic – and at the same time the best blog on MIA in a long time.
I quite like the idea of lively and difficult childhood behaviour being chatacterised as a phase. If only all behaviour that gets people sectioned or involved with psychiatric services was considered like that life would be much better for many people reeading this blog.
The usa attitude to guns is beyond comprehension in the uk ans many parts of the world. The only protection from a despotic government is an organised populace. Thinking handguns offer protection when the state has access to tanks is naive and romantic.
All fine points apart from: “reducing the stigma around mental health services.” These services increase the risk of suicide.
“One day I’m out and about, the next I’m holed up in my apartment wishing the world would just understand: understand me, understand that the society we live in is fucked up, and that it’s all just an illusion. ” Sounds like me – on a good day.
Lack of privacy and confidentiality, and discrimination are stsndard in psychiatry and Big Tech is where the money and power to influence givernment these days
The Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists are therefore lying toerags. The Queen would not be pleased to know about this (unless she has shares in GSK that is).
“A Cohen’s kappa of 0.28 means that the individuals using the term don’t actually know what they are talking about – literally.”
That is the funniest thing I have read all morning. To put it another way, the Emperor has no clothes.
“…we cannot match the power and influence that comes from resource-rich bodies like the pharmaceutical industry; hence we are only able to make marginal differences.”
There’s the rub. Websites like thus are important, as is Timimi’s work as an example of what can be done (though survivor led services do just as well when they emerge) with a bit of common sense but to achieve big change needs smart strategy, a huge movement and perhaps the death of capitalism?
Brilliant as usual.
“What this evidence seems to be telling us is that what we wrap up in special expert-sounding language has more to do with everyday human experiences than any special knowledge,” is my conclusion about therapy. Or as the old song goes:
“Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face
You just bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
You know your mother would talk about you
Your own sisters and your brothers too
They just don’t care how you’re tryin’ to live
They’ll talk about you still
Yes, but bear, ooh, this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Oh, just bear, ooh this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
You know they’ll jump you up and down
They’ll carry you all ’round and ’round
Just as soon as your back is turned
They’ll be tryin’ to crush you down
Yes, but bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face
Don’t mind people grinnin’ in your face, oh, Lord
And just bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find
Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face”
Or, ” Resilience,” as they like to say these days.
I think that is the minor outcome.the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
The major outcome is that the people who did and wrote up the study are not real scientists and is not a proper science journal.
The real study is the study of the ethics of science and how money corrupts it.
I don’t think anyone makes any money from publishing on MIA. Neither do I think Timimi saw the error of his ways late in his career. He has been publishing and practicing without drugs or diagnosis for a decade or two.
MIA is MIA. It does it’s job. The revolution is elsewhere, which at the moment is precisely no where.
“Medical Model of Mental Health”….
I get your point. No one referred to mental health till Dr’s came along and offered to take in the Mad – for a nice wallop of money. Now nearly everyone talks of mental health when they mean state of mind.
The colonisation continues.
I think Open Dialogue is a way of running a meeting. It was developed by mental health practitioners but the principles are found elsewhere. Let’s free it from it’s psychiatric bounds. If school counsellors can do it so can others. If someone is distressed don’t call services, call a meeting and find some facilitators.
I love Timimi’s work. This is the clearest expression I have read by anyone working in the psychiatric industry that it is all dangerous bunkum. It is refreshing to see it clearly laid out.
A survivor of psychiatry might write something similar but with justified anger and venom.
I have been reading interviews with Raul Vaneigem, an anarchist who was central to the Situationists (an anarchist movement whose hay day was the 1960’s) and whose book The Revolution of Everyday Life was essential reading for those involved in the uprising in Paris in 1968. Timimi’s text reminds me of many of the concepts central to situationist ideas that Vaneigem talks and writes about, for example he said this on an interview; “I just do what I can to see that resistance to market exploitation is transformed into an offensive of life, and that an art of living sweeps away the ruins of oppression.”
That modern society is so sick that it takes our desires for happiness and our refusal to face the misery of everyday life that late capitalism provides and then sells that desire back to us as fake and poisonous medicine, then locks some of up and forces these poisons us is a sick culmination of what Vaneigem and the situationists called “The Specticle”, ie the all enveloping miasma that is late capitalism.
Perhaps to end psychiatry capitalism needs also to end?
I agree that we cannot always leave this to family and friends. People are often overwhelmed by working long hours in insecure work places these days to provide care for anyone, never mind people who are going off the deep end.
However DP Hunter in there book Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors https://www.theclassworkproject.com/product-page/tracksuits-traumas-and-class-traitors-by-d-hunter puts forward the idea that all state, “Support,” services (psychiatry, benefits, social services, children’s services etc) are about control of the working class and are evermore likely to be so. In the book he describes how as an adult, when he had a breakdown, his friends supported him by sitting with him on a round the clock rota for several weeks. He was insistent on them not calling services and he had been through them, which large sections of the book are about.
We know it is possible to support people through crisis, but we also know that people are often overwhelmed by the demands of our increasingly unequal society, ill equipped with the patience or knowledge of how to deal with someone in crisis, or might have contributed to it.
I suspect DP Hunter, as an anarchist, would call the support they received as Mutual Aid. While I cannot see many people setting up mutual aid collectives to support those in crisis I can see that it would be possible to do. The principles of Soteria House and even Open Dialogue are reproducible by unpaid volunteers with a little training.
If services were to be run by the state, before or after any revolution (I for one see the world moving away from communism and whatever people may consider the left to be that it is getting progressively weaker) they would have to have a high degree of user/survivor/community input and control for any coercive, medical based model to not be instigated.
Thanks, this was really illuminating on Jaffe and the TAC.
I am from the UK and although we have similar organisations and individuals here they are not so rabid or bombastic.
I have recently been reading and thinking about how psychiatry is mainly about controlling the distressed working class. This article illuminates that thought very clearly.
For me, as a Greenpeace activist, it was a bit of a laugh. For me, who at the time was also running The Rose and Thorn Theatre company, a “mental health” consultancy, it was quite revealing in a not very nice way.
We put on a play about section 136 based on service user/survivor experiences.
We didn’t concentrate on what the police did but I got one story of someone who was detained under section 136 by the police, taken to the hospital 136 suite and then no once actually came to “asses” her. I presume she was taken off the street, or from her home, by a police person, maybe asked if she was suicidal, taken to hospital, locked up for half a day or so and ignored and then sent home.
This woman’s story illustrates what this is all about. It is about taking people who are distressed away so that they do not disturb the public, asking them if they want to kill themselves so the people taking them away can show they did the job get paid and justify the agencies exorbitant fees and then ignoring the person in distress and letting those that caused the distress get away with it.
“This person is ill, we have taken her to a place of safety, we are dealing with it, go home now, move along please.”
Good article. My guess is suicide assessments are to help organisations not be criticized if a, “Client,” kills themselves.
I was once arrested for sitting on the top of Houses of Parliament, ie the Palace of Westminster (Greenpeace protest – natch). When the police processed us before locking us in the cells, it was 2am by then, they asked all sorts of pertinent (name, address, any known illnesses or disabilities) and impertinent questions such as are you thinking of killing yourself. I laughed, as I was interested in what in the UK is called Section 136, where the police detain you for reasons of mental health and thought this is probably what they ask a distressed person when they take them off the street before taking them to the hospital or putting them in the cells. The policeman checking me in asked why I laughed, so I replied I wondered how they did that assessment. He replied, “Well how else am I supposed to know?” I could have given him an answer but really they just wanted to tick the tick sheet and lock me up. As long as that was done it didn’t matter if me or anyone else tried to kill themselves as they were covered – job done. Time for a tea break and wait till the end of the shift.
There are high rates of psychiatric diagnosis and incarceration and forced treatment among BAME (Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority communities) either because racism drives people mad, or because BAME people are more likely to live in poverty and poverty drives people mad, or because psychiatry is racist – or a combination of all three. Yet the survivor, critical psychiatry, anti-psychiatry movements seem pretty white.
I have thought about this for a long time and my conclusion is that this will continue until organisations have sufficient numbers of BAME people at involved in strategic positions and that white organisations go out of there way to make sure BAME stories, issues and people are represented in the organisation.
Well done for writing the article. I wish you luck in your awareness raising work.
I think one of psychiatries main functions is to collude with abuse.
By saying people are ill and drugging them psychiatry distracts from the societal causes of distress.
I read as far as, ” suicide risk assessments are well known not to work,” and laughed. It reminded me of the time when I was arrested on a Greenpeace action, when I still did Greenpeace actions. We were taken to the police station and as we were booked in the desk sergeant asked us one by one if we were suicidal? I laughed at the time and said, “So that’s how you monitor people who might be a risk to themselves?” The desk sergeant replied, “Well how else am I meant to do it?”
I guess they do this to everyone who is arrested?
It is a tick box exercise designed to cover the person and institution asking and nothing to do with care for the person they are monitoring.
I should have said, “No Comment,” as I did to most of the other questions they asked.
Jordan Peterson is prone to depression….. While that on it’s own tells us little combine that with his harsh parental manner towards many things and his promoting physical punishment of children and I, in my putting two and two together to make five, see him as having a harsh conscience that he wants to project on the world while fighting the bogeymen of censorship driven by rebellion against his own harsh parenting.
Unfortunately as yet I have no proof of my theory.
As some of you may have realised he has riled me. I have a friend who acts like he is her cult leader where as I see a charlatan.
Jordan Peterson: a man good with words and bereft if ideas (or any that have any internal consistency at any rate). The charlatans charlatan: he charms those easily taken in with fake intellectualism and comes across as a stern Daddy, telling us all off for not reaching his rather high and impossible standards while looking credible by taking pot shots at the bogey men of political correctness (don’t hit children for example) while ignoring the real issues of inequality and injustice (the evidence that hitting children harms and is not an effective way to discipline children).
I am looking at the excess death stats in different countries. It shows about three times the expected deaths in the UK while covid 19 is raging. That is all I need to know.
SAR, MERS and Ebola are proof that viruses can be beaten by good public health without vaccines.
The UK housed all it’s homeless people at the start of the Covid 19 epidemic in the UK. S Korea dealt with it so well that it did not spread to homeless people too much with only 254 deaths so far out of a population of 51 million compared to the UK of a declared death number of 29, 000 deaths and rising in a population of 67 million.
As I am 61 with high blood pressure and asthma I have a vested interest in public health measures controlling this virus. In 18 months, the minimum time to develop, test and distribute a vaccine, I could be dead from Covid 19. However if contact tracing is bought into the UK along with other public health measures my chance of not being infected goes up considerably.
I am not sure what the article was about. It was a bit opaque for me. What I do know is the the UK government is using this crisis to privitise the health service, starve local councils of cash and give contracts to big business friends of theirs as well cut away at democratic accountability. That cannot be good for those suffering the brunt end of psychiatry and that is the broader point I also want to push. This is a crisis the rich will use to rip us all off and erode our rights even more and vaccine conspiracy theories are a distraction from that vital point.
We don’t know if vaccines will be developed and if they are that will be 18 months away.
Right now I stand in solidarity with nurses, doctors, care staff, the elderly, people who work in factories preparing and packing food for us to eat, people who are incarcerated in prisons and psychiatric facilities and those who have lost there jobs and have little to live on.
These are real struggles and people are unnecessarily loosing there lives.
Vietnam – no deaths, South Korea 252 deaths, UK – 28,446 deaths, USA 68,602 deaths. The figures speak for themselves. Those that prepare and use WHO guidelines beat this virus just as they beat SARS. Those that ignore the guidelines have there citizens unnecessarily die, and that is the poor who disproportionately die and those in institutions where it can be transmitted very quickly.
Coronavirus is a horrendous situation: a pandemic that many countries have managed well but which many others have botched. The USA and the UK are two of the worst examples of how to handle a public health crisis where money and business comes before people’s well-being. Some countries did well by having few lockdowns but acting early, stopping people coming into the country or testing or quarantining them when they arrived. They also made sure those that needed to be financially supported were well looked after so that they could isolate without loosing income. When countries didn’t take measures to limit transmission fast the number of cases, quickly followed by the number of deaths increased exponentially.
When people are given good information by people they trust and well supported they will accept temporary restrictions on there freedoms. That was illustrated in New Zealand which has had an exemplary response to this crisis. Without those conditions in place people question whether quarantine is justified and many on low incomes have to break it to survive and this leads to increasing cases and death rates and those deaths are disproportionately among the poor and the incarcerated.
People are fighting back: for example Amazon workers are demanding proper personal protective equipment (PPE) and safe working conditions in the USA and other places and care workers and medical staff are demanding proper PPE too. Deaths due to coronavirus are especially high among nurses and care staff, this is a scandal as it is unnecessary as witnessed by those countries that have had few deaths by early and aggressive action.
When people are locked up in psychiatric facilities, prisons or live in care homes infections diseases can spread through them very quickly unless appropriate infection control measures are put in place. Countries that fail to take those measures are demonstrating how little they value the lives of both those who are locked up and the staff who work in those institutions.
Organisations that are making money out of this are big business that is close to government. For example in the UK testing for coronavirus is run by big private companies like Deloitte, a major accountancy firm, and Boots, a big pharmacy company while local councils and the NHS are kept out of contact tracing which is an essential part of dealing with coronavirus.
This pandemic is not only a major public health crisis of our time it also shows who governments value and in the USA and UK’s it is the lives of the well off and profit for business that seems to come before all else.
This webpage has details of countries doing well https://www.endcoronavirus.org/daily-update-winning
I like the website as it has a summary of measures that are needed to contain and hopefully eliminate Covid 19. What it lacks is any kind of social justice element and it is the people at the bottom, including survivors and users of psychiatry that need to be part of this struggle and in my opinion at the core.
We are all nuerodiverse: we all have different brains. Our genetics gives us different brains and our brains change with experience.
I wonder why the label nuerodiverse was thought useful?
I recommend The Myth of Autism by Sami Timimi, Brian McCabe and Neil Gardner (one psychiatrist and two people who renounced there diagnosis). https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Sami-Timimi/The-Myth-of-Autism–Medicalising-Mens-and-Boys-Social-and/595191
My step mother worked with children like your son in the early 1970’s.
Now Autism seems to mean anyone who is a bit odd.
Yous son needs care, but different care from people with no intellectual impairments but who struggle with the social world.
Like you, I have no idea what the term means.
I know what problems people have when they tell me and I know what is a problem for me trying to relate to someone, but this diagnosis is just bio-babble to me.