Comments by Anthony Murray

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  • IM BACK IN HOSPITAL…!
    They won, and it’s because they found out I’m off their drugs, no other reason.
    So from studying full time, working part time and living independently off drugs for 18 months, I’ll shortly be back in Hades, once these drugs kick in, relying on shadows for sustenance…
    In the famous words of Kevin bloody Wilson
    “Someone f…in’ shoot me please”

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  • To provide ‘Psych education’ was one of my CTOs objectives. During the past two years they kept repeating a new one ‘there’s no stigma in having a mental illness’. Good luck getting that one through to the keeper. No stigma? There certainly is in the world I’ve been living in.
    I think the point you made about the student understanding the basic principles of law and costing less sums up the entire ‘system’. It’s become more and more clever at treating its own creation; mental health, that it now misses the point entirely. The more sophisticated it becomes the less it can accommodate for common sense, and the more common sense begins to complicate it.
    And as for tattooing people, I think they might have already tried that one sometime in the forties.

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  • You’re absolutely right Sam,

    At the moment mental health has become a major issue in the media. In this country at least, it’s gotten to the point that there is constant exposure. Every other day the government is announcing another pile of money to tackle the ‘mental health epidemic in the country’ and commentators are always acknowledging the ‘crisis in mental health at the moment’. People are putting their faith in this fairytale and no-one seems to define or know anything about what the mental health system really is. The ultimate heresy would seem to be to ask ‘do we even need a mental health system?’. Seems to me we would be better off without one but I usually see people wonder if I’m on my way back to the funny farm myself if I try to explain how I’ve come to that position.
    For anyone who’s read Anatomy of an Epidemic it’s obvious that to continue down the road were on things are only going get a lot worse. It would be so refreshing if a tv personality would read that book and maybe for once we could hear someone who has an idea of what they’re talking about.
    I don’t think the narrative in the media is accidental by the way. There’s a constant background noise of misinformation that breaks down anybody’s disinterest or resistance and their views about ‘mental health’ arrive fully formed and generally intractable. Psychiatrist’s couldn’t be happier at this development if it is coincidental and not an orchestrated gambit to expand their reach and influence, and to keep expanding their market until their final solution of complete relevance to every person in society is realised and unassailable.
    Of course this will never happen and will ultimately be their undoing. As more and more people turn to them and become disillusioned by the confusing load of garbage they have to offer the tide will turn against them and they will end up again being the running joke of the medical profession.

    Fingers crossed eh

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  • That’s terrible! I’m really sorry that happened to you.
    It’s too easy for predators to operate within such an environment because it’s an echo chamber. Sometimes the women go crazy saying a nurse has been innappropriate towards them. Even though the female nurses ignore them I think that’s their best defence to bring it to everyone’s attention at the slightest hint of ill intent. It’s terrible that if something does occur or if an allegation is made it is not automatically taken very seriously.
    The last time I was in there was a male nurse who kept waiting till I was showering and would then come in to have a conversation with me. When I pointed out how inappropriate his timing was he acted very innocently as if he hadn’t noticed I was showering. In that case it was enough for him to stop doing it.

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  • G’day Bill,
    Thanks for the encouragement.
    There is a printout sheet in every room when we check into hospital but it’s very vague, nothing in it that’s useful.
    After reading up on the Act when I left hospital I saw that several provisions in the law are routinely circumvented by staff and It’s done with impunity. Even now being aware of some rights I don’t think it would change how I’d be treated in there.
    Even the tribunal acted outside the time frame of two weeks once an order lapses to make another order. If I had of refused drugging then, on the grounds of legality, I’m certain I’d have been recommitted straight away, regardless of any ‘rights’.
    As for the commitment hearing itself it truly was a farce. At one point I rolled my eyes at an argument the doctor was making to which the head of proceedings remarked “oh your looking around, I can see his engaging with voices”. I was sober as a judge at the time but I think she needed a convenient way to end the hearing.

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  • Boans, this last run in with the ‘services’ has left me in no doubt. Nobody has any rights within psychiatry whatsoever. Even checks and balances mandated under the Act are summarily ignored if requested.
    They do as they please, even using ‘treatment’ as punishment. There is also literally nowhere to turn once under the Act, their authority is paramount, and any interference is justified.
    I no longer have any illusions about the ‘system’; it messes people up. I count myself as very fortunate to be one of the few who ever escapes.

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  • Thats my current plan Steve,
    For six months I’ve done just that and have just copped another six months with even stricter conditions. I recently learned of one fellow here in Australia who has had his renewed every six months for the past fourteen years. Though it is so difficult to keep a straight face and these clinicians make suspicion an art form I think it’s the only way out.

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  • This article had me thinking that these serious diagnoses, for what they are worth, are a three step problem: Environmental/ interpersonal problems and experiences which lead to abnormal reactions in the body/mind that over time lead behavioural/cognitive problems at which stage outward “pathologies” can then be noticed within an individual. Treating psychiatrists are only concerned with this third stage and research psychiatrists are only concerned with the second.
    Psychiatry, which by and large in 2020 is biological psychiatry, is theologically opposed to this first step that bad things happen and can mess us up. They have been actively advocating against it’s importance since the fifties when the internal faction war began within the APA, who have since ideologically denied the possible idea that confusing things happen and make people crazy. Without any convincing evidence the bio faction completed its reformation entirely due to monetary, political and personal professional interests, all but obliterating the psychotherapy faction from relevance and history. This ideology hasn’t changed in seventy years despite the billions spent in research to show they are not even near being close to on the right track.
    This is a scary situation, as a person undergoing forced treatment I’m am forced to accept this cults position that my environment does not affect me in any way and the last two steps, physiological/psychological responses occur, randomly and without stimulus which leads to misunderstood behaviour which is out of context to my life’s circumstances. Against what I see as common sense, my own sense of responsibility and any chance of receiving treatment that will actually help me, it’s an absurdly ignorant position but I have no choice to accept it, to voice disagreement or anything relevant to mental health in the company of a mental health clinician is dangerous. It risks being deemed as lacking insight and to have their position explained to me, for the hundredth time as though I lack intelligence. They think I’m a simpleton because I can’t understand that I have a medical illness that they cannot demonstrate. I tell them when they repeat this “no you don’t have to shout I can hear what your saying I just don’t believe it” or what landed me in this mess “that doesn’t make any sense”. If I say anything by this time after they have lost patience I’m labelled a trouble maker and forced treated, which is in its second year.
    It is so disorientating, knowing that I need to get the psychiatrist opposite me to try and understand these three steps, as my life depends on it, and they are incapable, absolutely incapable of reasoning what I see as common sense, to understand these three things in that order, and they are supposed to be intelligent people, University trained, though not one yet, in twenty years can entertain such a simple sequence. I could easily explain this, I’m confident, even to my hyperactive five year old nephew without much difficulty. It’s beyond belief, it’s like living in a twilight zone with Cassandras’ curse, it was enough to send her mad too!
    I truly believe these studies are junk science and are intended to lead nowhere while reinforcing the idea of the mystery of mental illness and its causes and the absurd notion of a biological cause to psychological distress and bizarre behaviours. Does anyone think they could be that corrupt or am I being paranoid?

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  • Haven’t they done enough already? Now it’s suggested they can claim, colonise and compromise the survivor or mad movement, exactly what they have done to the hearing voices movement here in my own home state of Australia. I’ve heard enough…

    “But to rethink the clinical encounter is not to rethink the entirety of mental health practice”

    It is and it must be, that is to say if we need clinical encounters at all… The whole premise of this paper is a joke, the two sides can’t ever be reconciled and why would we want to anyway?
    Psychiatry would corrupt the Mad movement and we would end up with just another soft arm of psychiatry. I can’t believe the arrogance of this quack to even suggest this, it’s unbelievable!

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