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.
It is horrible when there is no where to go home.
“The management of the rehabilitation institution was made aware of this hierarchical break-down and deemed it in conflict with the collective institutional stance. They asked me to revert to using the formal pronoun or else discontinue the group. Under this condition I could not continue with the reading group, for it opposed much of what I had been trying to do.”
Dear me, such stuffy managers. Reminds me of school.
I blame all those Anti-Stigma campaigns. Pure Big Pharma marketing if you ask me – that and a brill way of distracting from the causes of distress.
Blame the child – as old as humanity – only now we give it a nice new spin by calling it a disease.
I have found anarchists often sympathetic to the survivor movement. Socialists not so much….
“Among the anarchist attendees at my last talk, some have been beaten by cops, interrogated by the FBI, and jailed. Among psychiatric survivors I’ve known, it is common to have had coerced “treatments” that include drugs, electroshock, and lengthy psychiatric hospitalizations forced on them against their wishes.”
I know patients who have been beaten in by staff too. The comparisons are very close.
“Psychiatrists noted their expected identity as involving curing mental illness through medication.” LOL – they must constantly disappoint there clients then as the cure rate hasn’t changed since Victorian times.
But a controversial one….
“Cochrane’s Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, who is a psychiatrist”
Corporate capture of Cochrane init?
I am experimenting with meditation for ten minutes twice or three times a day at the moment. I find myself expressing a lot of fear and anger while doing it. I think this is helping with my sleep as I was suppressing a lot of seething rage about something I will not go into here. This fits in with the idea of avoidance.
I shall investigate your website. I wish you luck with the project, from a fellow poet.
Urgh, just urgh.
See, this just reminds me of why I really want a direct action anti-psychiatry movement and very occasionally invade wards and in December gave a psychiatrist a very hard time in a meeting.
Ugh, just ugh.
More strength to your work Sera.
Early days, small study, the culture change from standard to psychiatry to this open discussion will take a while to bed in. Perhaps what the study reveals is how patients and family are bedded to the medical, authoritarian model?
Wow – sounds like my kind of therapy!
Great piece.
The UK psychiatric complaints system is set up so that they hardly ever have to say sorry. Even if they beat up and then “accidentally”kill your nearest and dearest (a case I know of). Or falsely accuse you of being a potential criminal and pervert and force you to leave your job and get sick things on your medical record that takes months of stressful time to get corrected (which happened to me several years ago). Never mind if eventually they agree that the drugs cause more harm than good or that ECT is dangerous nonsense – I’m not expecting any apologies there if those things ever happen.
I was reminded of running a theatre based consultation on Section 136 of the Mental Health Act (UK law which state the police can detain you and take you to a psyche hospital for assessment if they think you are acting nutty). We did it in the day centre and did a line out asking people how bad/good is psychiatry and the line went from mediocre to appalling. We did it again with social workers who did out of hours 136 assessments and the line went from mediocre to brill. Fortunately we had three service users there to take them to task.
We did another piece, a consultation for the Day Centre on proposed changes. We interviewed service users, put a play on that represented there concerns, booked an afternoon to put it on a run a discussion. The staff gave us a day and time that was the lunch outing for members. So we waited for them to come back from there outing. None of the staff were planning on coming and certainly not the area manager who asked and paid us to do the work. So we pulled the staff in from the offices. The normally reserved service users were quite outspoken about the proposed changes, we did our job well, the staff were a bit mortified. We wrote a report for the area manager on what service users wanted and were concerned about. They ignored every word.
The suicide prevention people remind me that nearly all social movements get co-opted by the powers that be. They choose compliant service users to go on committees and professionals who see there job as protecting those in power take over the top positions.
Never saying sorry means you are a heartless, well paid, middle class manager IMHO.
Weirdos and freaks unit – we have nothing to loose but our diagnosis and crushing families.
So he wants to create business opportunities for the rich by them locking up and drugging the poor.
Nothing new there, just expanding the empire.
Interesting article. I would need to know the funding models and details of the contracts and service to comment in any detail though.
A classic tail of how psychiatric diagnosus and treatment distracts from the causes of distress and adds onsult to injury.
But also a far too rare tail of how care and compassion restored someone to sanity.
“WINDSURFING FOR DISTRESSED PSYCHIATRIC DOCTORS AND NURSES,” sweetheart, I hope the course sells well and earns you a fortune!
ah yes, psychiatry, the state’s way of hiding the causes of mental distress.
Kaiser Permanente, a private insurance company with zero interest in preventative medicine. They are trying to take over the UK NHS which is crumbling as a result.
I listened to the song, looked up the lyrics. Reed is very bitter. I bet no one apologized to him for the cruel injuries he was subject to.
They never apologies.
We must fight back.
………..
KILL YOUR SONS
All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electro shock
They say, they let you live at home, with mom and dad
Instead of mental hospital
But every time you tried to read a book
You couldn’t get to page 17
‘Cause you forgot, where you were
So you couldn’t even read
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
They’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Until they run run run run run run run run away
Mom informed me on the phone
She didn’t know what to do about dad
Took an axe and broke the table
Aren’t you glad you’re married
And sister, she got married on the island
And her husband takes the train
He’s big and he’s fat and he doesn’t even have a brain
They’re gonna kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Until they run away
Creedmore treated me very good
But Paine Whitney was even better
And when I flipped on PHC
I was so sad I didn’t even get a letter
All of the drugs, that we took, it really was lots of fun
But when they shoot you up with thorizene on crystal smoke
You choke like a son of a gun
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
They’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Until they run run run run run run run run away
Great blog Bob.
Time for a bit of direct action me thinks. There are so many possible targets….
I had one really good experience of group therapy and one mediocre one which I walked away from. I think it depends on the group and the skill of the person hosting it, same as one to one therapy.
Often it is seen as cheap but that doens’t work well if it is not run well.
I once went to a hearing voices group with a friend. He went a few times after that and said it was the best thing he had ever got from services.
So I think we can’t generalise, but I do think bad group therapy is just the pits, boring and stressful.
The Dr’s said “I think in that case our hands are quite tied if someone is to dictate that we are not allowed to give the treatment which I think is best for that patient’s illness.”
Good, as it should be.
I think this shows there is a fightback happening by Dr’s and drug companies, that these meagre reforms are at risk and it will be a long struggle to ensure psychiatric patients have their full human rights.
No, I’m resting and wibbling away on facebbok and websites.
I’ve done my bit, I set up speak out againsy psychiatry, I’m now bitter and as the modern boys say, burnt out.
Get back to me when you, or anyone else has a decent strategy and maybe I’ll be, ‘in.’
In the meantime I’m thinkonh of setting up a prize for the best escape from my local looney bin. I’m looking for prizes. Let me know if you want to offer anything
The people I know in that situation freak out and despair even more because they know if they stop the drugs and have a bad patch they will get sectioned, drugged up even more and put on a CTO
Obvoiusly, once the tesy had been done to confirm the condition, send them to a nuorlogist for the expert care they would need. Psychiatry has no place in addressing such a condition.
I think we are back to yhe history of psychiatry here. Dr’s making profit ftom lunatics that were an inconvenience in poor houses
I agree that re educating clients, or just people, that distress does not need to be seen as illness or disorder is entitely sensible. It is an approach that Sammi Timmimi takes in his oo clinics. I am glad you have been succesful in helping people with this approach. However yor style seemrd to have little sympathy for people falling for the trap of diagnosis in your original article, something I fall into too and which I am trying to ameliorate.
True, esp with benefit cuts these days
but also because they are miserable and the cake is comforting
I certainly think the arguments outlined work like this for autism and adult ADHD.
However I think the blaming of patients for not taking responsibility for themselves is not pleasant to read and counter productive. Most of society refuses to take responsibility for themselves and those whose lives have been especially hard do so more than most. It also is an individual response and not a systemic analysis.
An analysis which looks at poverty, racism and other systemic injustices in the manufacture of distress and how psychiatry is a distraction from those and how these play out in individual choices would be more interesting to me.
I agree, it also gives people something to research and read about. Whether this is useful is debatable, but it certainly fills many people’s hours.
You obviously don’t know the people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Junk food is what they eat when they are miserable, which is often and they enjoy alcohol just as much as anyone else.
But hey, the diagnosis is meaningless.
I would like to know what people who have this label find useful about it. They obviously do though the science is non existent behind the diagnosis.
Interesting article: who has the power in psychiatry? Dr’s, Big Pharma, the state or “patients”?
It looks to me that Dr’s do what the state want in the interest of big business.
Here in the UK anti-capitalists have worked with anti-psychiatry, survivors. It has not happened a lot but it does happen occasionally.
At the moment I am working on an anti austerity project that did for a while work with survivors. So although it is not a common alliance it is possible.
One of the problems is that politics is now dominated by the middle class, who find challanging professinals very difficult. For example I spammed the wellbeing e-mail list for Occupy in London with an anti psychiatry protest flyer and all the professional on it, who were helping support the homeless people that Occupy attracted, were appaled. I was most gratified to see the uproar I provoked on their e-mail list!
I am interested in your point. I’ve been thinking and learning about co-option a lot in recent years. A friend who is in the disability arts movement said that it used to be about attacking the system and pointing out how disabled people are excluded from society. Now it is brave artistic cripples showing how great they are funded by big lottery money.
Disability Arts on the whole lost it’s bite and got co-opted. Some think the LGBT+ movement did too. All same sex marriage and queers in the military while young queers are at risk of homelessness as benefits are cut to young people in the UK making those in homo and transphobic homes at risk of homelessness.
Government funding always comes with strings – and that means criticizing the government is weakened as organisations get paid off. The rebel is never paid for by the master.
From what I have read asylums were developed for pauper lunatics in early industrial capitalism. The families of paupers could not afford to look after their mad relatives so putting them in asylums was probably essential to the family and lunatics survival. The asylums for the well off didn’t grow so quickly as those for paupers.
Dr’s convinced people they were the experts in dealing with lunatics so people dumped there lunatics, ie those who they considered difficult, in asylums and definitions of madness grew as more and more people were considered mad and outside the normal bounds of society. Psychiatry became a social control agent in early industrial capitalism.
I therefore suspect the early asylums with the legalisation of the locking up of pauper lunatics, ie the odd and unproductive, is one of the sources of stigma, ie shame of being distressed.
Tranquilizers and ECT became the new and additional social control mechanisms of psychiatry as well as profit driven industries.
Now we have state funded anti-stigma campaigns that normalise being tranquilized or given ECT and which arguably makes the acceptable range of behavior narrower, disguises the causes of distress and increases profit for drug companies. Meanwhile any good help, and long term counselling can often be effective, is cut and short CBT aimed at symptoms, and thus is a psychosocial tranquiliser is increased.
I love complaints procedures, especially when making the fact I put a complaint in public on social media and such like.
Better still, make the complaint at their next training event, with a banner drop n all.
“creative” and “gifted.”
Best labels I’ve read and that’s for sure.
Ginsberg was a psychiatric survivor. His mother was not, she was killed by psychiatry after having ECT and lobotomy.
I don’t think we can rely on professionals alone to bring much change to psychiatric systems.
Psychiatry always was a way of controlling the mad so the money men could continue exploiting the populace. Only by the mad organizing and fighting back can we hope to influence psychiatry.
Joanna Maccy has worked on grief and empowerment around environmental issues for most of her life. https://www.joannamacy.net/main
climate scientists tend to be pretty middle of the road in terms of politics.
Are you saying that climate denial is a right wing thing?
I skimmed this article.
I think it should have stayed as a heart felt conversation over coffee between the author and a mate, not a confessional morality tale where serious abuse by a therapist is mixed with Mr Hall’s, “When I was younger I made a massive mistake, I was a plonker and….”
I am left wondering if the women concerned read a draft before it was published?
I want MIA and other media to cover sexual abuse by therapists, and when therapists blame the client that very much deserves investigating and bringing to the attention of the public. I want to read articles about abuse by therapists that cover how serious it is, whether it is endemic and who, these days it tackling it. I especially want to hear the survivors side of the story.
I do not want such articles dressed up with personal moral quandaries where someone who is saying they made a mistake and may have hurt a women and which the women concerned may read. I am wondering if the women in the story Will Hall has told may not have seen a draft of this article and whether she consented to this article being published? I hope she did. If not this is a serious error of judgement by Will Hall and the MIA editorial team.
If no consent was given by the women in Will Hall’s story then I think MIA need to review their editorial policies.
I think Will Hall needs to get some advice on how to publicly address the serious issues around of sexual assault in therapy. If no consent was given by the women in Will Hall’s story he needs to review whatever he learnt about confidentiality and respecting people who he comes into contact with in self help groups and therapy situations and get some advice on how to write about those situations in a way that respects people’s confidentiality, especially if he thinks he may have abused his power in such situation.
Perhaps I skimmed the article too quickly. If so please correct me.
not the type I have matey
I seldom come here, probably because I’m looking for community action and not theoretical stuff that I’ve read before.
I have been reading some books, Training for Transformation manuals, that are based on the ideas of Paolo Friere. They seem to combine therapy and politicising the poor and marginalised communities. I may use this work with down and outs.
Consciousness raising could be seen as a form of psychotherapy and was used by a variety of groups, notably the Gay Liberation Front, in preparation for action.
I have just been reading about selfish extroverts and introverts..
I wonder if you are describing selfish extroverts?
Interesting point. There is evidence that I find compelling (though I have not looked into it sufficiently to have have a well grounded understanding of the work or how significant it is) on how the lack of micro-nutrients are linked to unquiet minds. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12091259
Whether this is mental illness, or symptoms of vitamin and mineral deficiency is an interesting debate.
I can see where your stand on that issue and I tentatively join you in that position.
I look forward to seeing how this progresses
I found out tonight that my step-mother died about a week ago.
I hadn’t seen her for over 25 years.
In your terms I guess she used protective identifications a lot. Or as a friend of hers said, ” Suzannah put the knife in when you were feeling vulnerable.” That’s why I hadn’t seen her for 25 years.
She had a hard life and I know her life story well enough to know some of why she felt so bad that she was horrid to people around her and why she drank herself to a relatively early grave.
Once I was sleeping in a squatted building on my own when some people broke in and wanted to smash it up. For a while I talked them down.
Sometimes I can let the threats come and go, reflect on them, reflect them back with empathy for myself and the other person. Sometimes I can’t. For some people, such as my step-mother, I was and maybe will never be able to.
I agree, write to all professional bodies, employers, licensing bodies this counsellor is involved in.
Even better, get an advocate to do it for you.
I think the extreme measure called for in extreme situations is knocking on someone’s door, offering to be with them, telling them how you feel, and listening to them. I’d never call services, or go to them for help unless I knew what they were offering something useful. Usually they aren’t.
But when someone does’t answer the door, the phone or online contact and is at risk for physical medical reasons or is so distressed that they could have committed suicide already (or be in the process of committing suicide) is a real possibility I will call the police. They could be dead, in which case it needs dealing with, or they might not be in which case it might lead to them being sectioned, which while worse in most cases could lead to a constructive convesation about how to proceed when the person gets out if something similar occurs in the future.
They were difficult choices.
Beautiful piece.
Tonight I am visiting someone in hospital who will die soon. It is cancer and she has chosen no more treatment other than palliative.
I have called the police on someone twice. They have type 1 diabetes and are also long term MH service survivors. They stopped answering the door for a few days. His blood sugar was often out of control and I knew he could go into a coma and die. Both times when the police arrived he answered the door to their knocks so they didn’t have to break the door down.
Each time it was a struggle.
I nearly did it another time when someone was not answering the phone or door but in the end she had been sectioned so that was why she was not answering the door.
Most cases though I’d do what you did, maintain contact as best I could, allow them freedom, but insist they not to kill themselves where and in ways it interfered with me or people I know.
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.
It is horrible when there is no where to go home.
“The management of the rehabilitation institution was made aware of this hierarchical break-down and deemed it in conflict with the collective institutional stance. They asked me to revert to using the formal pronoun or else discontinue the group. Under this condition I could not continue with the reading group, for it opposed much of what I had been trying to do.”
Dear me, such stuffy managers. Reminds me of school.
I blame all those Anti-Stigma campaigns. Pure Big Pharma marketing if you ask me – that and a brill way of distracting from the causes of distress.
Blame the child – as old as humanity – only now we give it a nice new spin by calling it a disease.
I have found anarchists often sympathetic to the survivor movement. Socialists not so much….
“Among the anarchist attendees at my last talk, some have been beaten by cops, interrogated by the FBI, and jailed. Among psychiatric survivors I’ve known, it is common to have had coerced “treatments” that include drugs, electroshock, and lengthy psychiatric hospitalizations forced on them against their wishes.”
I know patients who have been beaten in by staff too. The comparisons are very close.
“Psychiatrists noted their expected identity as involving curing mental illness through medication.” LOL – they must constantly disappoint there clients then as the cure rate hasn’t changed since Victorian times.
But a controversial one….
“Cochrane’s Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, who is a psychiatrist”
Corporate capture of Cochrane init?
I am experimenting with meditation for ten minutes twice or three times a day at the moment. I find myself expressing a lot of fear and anger while doing it. I think this is helping with my sleep as I was suppressing a lot of seething rage about something I will not go into here. This fits in with the idea of avoidance.
Here is a book I wrote
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=983
I am in Reading, England. A long way from LA.
I wish you luck with your work.
Brill essay. You are a successor to the Beats. https://www.beatdom.com/women-of-the-beat-generation/
I shall investigate your website. I wish you luck with the project, from a fellow poet.
Urgh, just urgh.
See, this just reminds me of why I really want a direct action anti-psychiatry movement and very occasionally invade wards and in December gave a psychiatrist a very hard time in a meeting.
Ugh, just ugh.
More strength to your work Sera.
Early days, small study, the culture change from standard to psychiatry to this open discussion will take a while to bed in. Perhaps what the study reveals is how patients and family are bedded to the medical, authoritarian model?
Wow – sounds like my kind of therapy!
Great piece.
The UK psychiatric complaints system is set up so that they hardly ever have to say sorry. Even if they beat up and then “accidentally”kill your nearest and dearest (a case I know of). Or falsely accuse you of being a potential criminal and pervert and force you to leave your job and get sick things on your medical record that takes months of stressful time to get corrected (which happened to me several years ago). Never mind if eventually they agree that the drugs cause more harm than good or that ECT is dangerous nonsense – I’m not expecting any apologies there if those things ever happen.
I was reminded of running a theatre based consultation on Section 136 of the Mental Health Act (UK law which state the police can detain you and take you to a psyche hospital for assessment if they think you are acting nutty). We did it in the day centre and did a line out asking people how bad/good is psychiatry and the line went from mediocre to appalling. We did it again with social workers who did out of hours 136 assessments and the line went from mediocre to brill. Fortunately we had three service users there to take them to task.
We did another piece, a consultation for the Day Centre on proposed changes. We interviewed service users, put a play on that represented there concerns, booked an afternoon to put it on a run a discussion. The staff gave us a day and time that was the lunch outing for members. So we waited for them to come back from there outing. None of the staff were planning on coming and certainly not the area manager who asked and paid us to do the work. So we pulled the staff in from the offices. The normally reserved service users were quite outspoken about the proposed changes, we did our job well, the staff were a bit mortified. We wrote a report for the area manager on what service users wanted and were concerned about. They ignored every word.
The suicide prevention people remind me that nearly all social movements get co-opted by the powers that be. They choose compliant service users to go on committees and professionals who see there job as protecting those in power take over the top positions.
Never saying sorry means you are a heartless, well paid, middle class manager IMHO.
Weirdos and freaks unit – we have nothing to loose but our diagnosis and crushing families.
So he wants to create business opportunities for the rich by them locking up and drugging the poor.
Nothing new there, just expanding the empire.
Interesting article. I would need to know the funding models and details of the contracts and service to comment in any detail though.
A classic tail of how psychiatric diagnosus and treatment distracts from the causes of distress and adds onsult to injury.
But also a far too rare tail of how care and compassion restored someone to sanity.
“WINDSURFING FOR DISTRESSED PSYCHIATRIC DOCTORS AND NURSES,” sweetheart, I hope the course sells well and earns you a fortune!
ah yes, psychiatry, the state’s way of hiding the causes of mental distress.
Kaiser Permanente, a private insurance company with zero interest in preventative medicine. They are trying to take over the UK NHS which is crumbling as a result.
I listened to the song, looked up the lyrics. Reed is very bitter. I bet no one apologized to him for the cruel injuries he was subject to.
They never apologies.
We must fight back.
………..
KILL YOUR SONS
All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electro shock
They say, they let you live at home, with mom and dad
Instead of mental hospital
But every time you tried to read a book
You couldn’t get to page 17
‘Cause you forgot, where you were
So you couldn’t even read
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
They’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Until they run run run run run run run run away
Mom informed me on the phone
She didn’t know what to do about dad
Took an axe and broke the table
Aren’t you glad you’re married
And sister, she got married on the island
And her husband takes the train
He’s big and he’s fat and he doesn’t even have a brain
They’re gonna kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Until they run away
Creedmore treated me very good
But Paine Whitney was even better
And when I flipped on PHC
I was so sad I didn’t even get a letter
All of the drugs, that we took, it really was lots of fun
But when they shoot you up with thorizene on crystal smoke
You choke like a son of a gun
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill your sons
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill, kill your sons
They’re gonna kill, kill your sons
Until they run run run run run run run run away
Great blog Bob.
Time for a bit of direct action me thinks. There are so many possible targets….
I had one really good experience of group therapy and one mediocre one which I walked away from. I think it depends on the group and the skill of the person hosting it, same as one to one therapy.
Often it is seen as cheap but that doens’t work well if it is not run well.
I once went to a hearing voices group with a friend. He went a few times after that and said it was the best thing he had ever got from services.
So I think we can’t generalise, but I do think bad group therapy is just the pits, boring and stressful.
The Dr’s said “I think in that case our hands are quite tied if someone is to dictate that we are not allowed to give the treatment which I think is best for that patient’s illness.”
Good, as it should be.
I think this shows there is a fightback happening by Dr’s and drug companies, that these meagre reforms are at risk and it will be a long struggle to ensure psychiatric patients have their full human rights.
No, I’m resting and wibbling away on facebbok and websites.
I’ve done my bit, I set up speak out againsy psychiatry, I’m now bitter and as the modern boys say, burnt out.
Get back to me when you, or anyone else has a decent strategy and maybe I’ll be, ‘in.’
In the meantime I’m thinkonh of setting up a prize for the best escape from my local looney bin. I’m looking for prizes. Let me know if you want to offer anything
The people I know in that situation freak out and despair even more because they know if they stop the drugs and have a bad patch they will get sectioned, drugged up even more and put on a CTO
Obvoiusly, once the tesy had been done to confirm the condition, send them to a nuorlogist for the expert care they would need. Psychiatry has no place in addressing such a condition.
I think we are back to yhe history of psychiatry here. Dr’s making profit ftom lunatics that were an inconvenience in poor houses
I agree that re educating clients, or just people, that distress does not need to be seen as illness or disorder is entitely sensible. It is an approach that Sammi Timmimi takes in his oo clinics. I am glad you have been succesful in helping people with this approach. However yor style seemrd to have little sympathy for people falling for the trap of diagnosis in your original article, something I fall into too and which I am trying to ameliorate.
True, esp with benefit cuts these days
but also because they are miserable and the cake is comforting
I certainly think the arguments outlined work like this for autism and adult ADHD.
However I think the blaming of patients for not taking responsibility for themselves is not pleasant to read and counter productive. Most of society refuses to take responsibility for themselves and those whose lives have been especially hard do so more than most. It also is an individual response and not a systemic analysis.
An analysis which looks at poverty, racism and other systemic injustices in the manufacture of distress and how psychiatry is a distraction from those and how these play out in individual choices would be more interesting to me.
I agree, it also gives people something to research and read about. Whether this is useful is debatable, but it certainly fills many people’s hours.
You obviously don’t know the people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Junk food is what they eat when they are miserable, which is often and they enjoy alcohol just as much as anyone else.
But hey, the diagnosis is meaningless.
I would like to know what people who have this label find useful about it. They obviously do though the science is non existent behind the diagnosis.
Interesting article: who has the power in psychiatry? Dr’s, Big Pharma, the state or “patients”?
It looks to me that Dr’s do what the state want in the interest of big business.
Here in the UK anti-capitalists have worked with anti-psychiatry, survivors. It has not happened a lot but it does happen occasionally.
At the moment I am working on an anti austerity project that did for a while work with survivors. So although it is not a common alliance it is possible.
One of the problems is that politics is now dominated by the middle class, who find challanging professinals very difficult. For example I spammed the wellbeing e-mail list for Occupy in London with an anti psychiatry protest flyer and all the professional on it, who were helping support the homeless people that Occupy attracted, were appaled. I was most gratified to see the uproar I provoked on their e-mail list!
I am interested in your point. I’ve been thinking and learning about co-option a lot in recent years. A friend who is in the disability arts movement said that it used to be about attacking the system and pointing out how disabled people are excluded from society. Now it is brave artistic cripples showing how great they are funded by big lottery money.
Disability Arts on the whole lost it’s bite and got co-opted. Some think the LGBT+ movement did too. All same sex marriage and queers in the military while young queers are at risk of homelessness as benefits are cut to young people in the UK making those in homo and transphobic homes at risk of homelessness.
Government funding always comes with strings – and that means criticizing the government is weakened as organisations get paid off. The rebel is never paid for by the master.
From what I have read asylums were developed for pauper lunatics in early industrial capitalism. The families of paupers could not afford to look after their mad relatives so putting them in asylums was probably essential to the family and lunatics survival. The asylums for the well off didn’t grow so quickly as those for paupers.
Dr’s convinced people they were the experts in dealing with lunatics so people dumped there lunatics, ie those who they considered difficult, in asylums and definitions of madness grew as more and more people were considered mad and outside the normal bounds of society. Psychiatry became a social control agent in early industrial capitalism.
I therefore suspect the early asylums with the legalisation of the locking up of pauper lunatics, ie the odd and unproductive, is one of the sources of stigma, ie shame of being distressed.
Tranquilizers and ECT became the new and additional social control mechanisms of psychiatry as well as profit driven industries.
Now we have state funded anti-stigma campaigns that normalise being tranquilized or given ECT and which arguably makes the acceptable range of behavior narrower, disguises the causes of distress and increases profit for drug companies. Meanwhile any good help, and long term counselling can often be effective, is cut and short CBT aimed at symptoms, and thus is a psychosocial tranquiliser is increased.
I love complaints procedures, especially when making the fact I put a complaint in public on social media and such like.
Better still, make the complaint at their next training event, with a banner drop n all.
“creative” and “gifted.”
Best labels I’ve read and that’s for sure.
Ginsberg was a psychiatric survivor. His mother was not, she was killed by psychiatry after having ECT and lobotomy.
in order for nonviolence to work you need to engage a lot of people, but engaging them in non violence is easier than when using violence. https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/facts-are-nonviolent-resistance-works
I don’t think we can rely on professionals alone to bring much change to psychiatric systems.
Psychiatry always was a way of controlling the mad so the money men could continue exploiting the populace. Only by the mad organizing and fighting back can we hope to influence psychiatry.
Joanna Maccy has worked on grief and empowerment around environmental issues for most of her life. https://www.joannamacy.net/main
climate scientists tend to be pretty middle of the road in terms of politics.
Are you saying that climate denial is a right wing thing?
I skimmed this article.
I think it should have stayed as a heart felt conversation over coffee between the author and a mate, not a confessional morality tale where serious abuse by a therapist is mixed with Mr Hall’s, “When I was younger I made a massive mistake, I was a plonker and….”
I am left wondering if the women concerned read a draft before it was published?
I want MIA and other media to cover sexual abuse by therapists, and when therapists blame the client that very much deserves investigating and bringing to the attention of the public. I want to read articles about abuse by therapists that cover how serious it is, whether it is endemic and who, these days it tackling it. I especially want to hear the survivors side of the story.
I do not want such articles dressed up with personal moral quandaries where someone who is saying they made a mistake and may have hurt a women and which the women concerned may read. I am wondering if the women in the story Will Hall has told may not have seen a draft of this article and whether she consented to this article being published? I hope she did. If not this is a serious error of judgement by Will Hall and the MIA editorial team.
If no consent was given by the women in Will Hall’s story then I think MIA need to review their editorial policies.
I think Will Hall needs to get some advice on how to publicly address the serious issues around of sexual assault in therapy. If no consent was given by the women in Will Hall’s story he needs to review whatever he learnt about confidentiality and respecting people who he comes into contact with in self help groups and therapy situations and get some advice on how to write about those situations in a way that respects people’s confidentiality, especially if he thinks he may have abused his power in such situation.
Perhaps I skimmed the article too quickly. If so please correct me.
not the type I have matey
I seldom come here, probably because I’m looking for community action and not theoretical stuff that I’ve read before.
I have been reading some books, Training for Transformation manuals, that are based on the ideas of Paolo Friere. They seem to combine therapy and politicising the poor and marginalised communities. I may use this work with down and outs.
http://www.populareducation.co.za/content/training-transformation-tft
Consciousness raising could be seen as a form of psychotherapy and was used by a variety of groups, notably the Gay Liberation Front, in preparation for action.
I have just been reading about selfish extroverts and introverts..
I wonder if you are describing selfish extroverts?
Interesting point. There is evidence that I find compelling (though I have not looked into it sufficiently to have have a well grounded understanding of the work or how significant it is) on how the lack of micro-nutrients are linked to unquiet minds. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12091259
Whether this is mental illness, or symptoms of vitamin and mineral deficiency is an interesting debate.
I can see where your stand on that issue and I tentatively join you in that position.
I look forward to seeing how this progresses
I found out tonight that my step-mother died about a week ago.
I hadn’t seen her for over 25 years.
In your terms I guess she used protective identifications a lot. Or as a friend of hers said, ” Suzannah put the knife in when you were feeling vulnerable.” That’s why I hadn’t seen her for 25 years.
She had a hard life and I know her life story well enough to know some of why she felt so bad that she was horrid to people around her and why she drank herself to a relatively early grave.
Once I was sleeping in a squatted building on my own when some people broke in and wanted to smash it up. For a while I talked them down.
Sometimes I can let the threats come and go, reflect on them, reflect them back with empathy for myself and the other person. Sometimes I can’t. For some people, such as my step-mother, I was and maybe will never be able to.
I agree, write to all professional bodies, employers, licensing bodies this counsellor is involved in.
Even better, get an advocate to do it for you.
I think the extreme measure called for in extreme situations is knocking on someone’s door, offering to be with them, telling them how you feel, and listening to them. I’d never call services, or go to them for help unless I knew what they were offering something useful. Usually they aren’t.
But when someone does’t answer the door, the phone or online contact and is at risk for physical medical reasons or is so distressed that they could have committed suicide already (or be in the process of committing suicide) is a real possibility I will call the police. They could be dead, in which case it needs dealing with, or they might not be in which case it might lead to them being sectioned, which while worse in most cases could lead to a constructive convesation about how to proceed when the person gets out if something similar occurs in the future.
They were difficult choices.
Beautiful piece.
Tonight I am visiting someone in hospital who will die soon. It is cancer and she has chosen no more treatment other than palliative.
I have called the police on someone twice. They have type 1 diabetes and are also long term MH service survivors. They stopped answering the door for a few days. His blood sugar was often out of control and I knew he could go into a coma and die. Both times when the police arrived he answered the door to their knocks so they didn’t have to break the door down.
Each time it was a struggle.
I nearly did it another time when someone was not answering the phone or door but in the end she had been sectioned so that was why she was not answering the door.
Most cases though I’d do what you did, maintain contact as best I could, allow them freedom, but insist they not to kill themselves where and in ways it interfered with me or people I know.