Sorry the deepl translation programm made a stupid mistake:
wrong is:
…the nationwide organizations of the Federal Association of Experienced Psychiatrists and the Federal Working Group of Experienced Psychiatrists…
correct is:
…the nationwide organizations of the Federal Association of people who have experienced Psychiatry and the Federal Working Group of people who have experienced Psychiatry…
I did not carefully enough proofread the translation, so I remarked the mistake just now
rene
Dear Readers,
Typically, actions count more than words.
This event “Madness: Fighting for Justice in Mental Health” conference practiced only in beautiful words. But when we, activists of the Lunatic Offensive and the nationwide organizations of the Federal Association of Experienced Psychiatrists and the Federal Working Group of Experienced Psychiatrists wanted to distribute our flyer, we could only do so in front of the door, in the event we were expelled. Very sad, if one had hoped that in this meeting something could be said against the violence of the psychiatry.
Below the translation of the press release that we also want to distribute in the event. Two days earlier we had sent more than 1500 signatures to the Federal Government Commissioner for the Affairs of Persons with Disabilities and to the CRPD monitoring body in Germany clearly stating what the demands of those affected are.
With best regards
rene talbot
Berlin
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Press release on the handover of the first 1500 signatures Nonviolent psychiatry! [see: https://chng.it/D2fhvzcmk9 ]
Finally fulfill the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN-CRPD) instead perversion of justice!
Berlin, 23.11.2022: The Federal Association of People Experiencing Psychiatry (BPE) and the Federal Association of People Experiencing Psychiatry (die-BPE) today handed over the first 1500 signatures for their demand for a non-violent psychiatry to the Federal Government Commissioner for the Affairs of Persons with Disabilities, as well as to the Monitoring Body UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN-CRPD) at the German Institute for Human Rights. Both know that the ratified UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities made violence-free psychiatry a human right in 2009. The federal German legislators must finally fulfill this human right and abolish the special laws for the apparent legal justification of violence in psychiatry. The demands are:
The first and most important goal of any reform effort in psychiatry must be the unconditional* abolition of the special psychiatric laws. Through them is legalized and thus only made possible:
psychiatric forced incarceration
psychiatric forced treatment
incapacitation, which is misleadingly called “care” because it can be imposed by the courts against the declared will
a special criminal law with an unlimited sentence and compulsory psychiatric treatment in the so-called “forensic” hospital
Imprisonment in a closed ward of a psychiatric hospital and psychiatric forced treatment may exist if, and only if, this is to be tolerated was previously stipulated in a living will signed with free will, i.e. a corresponding treatment fulfills and does not break the will of the affected person.
We call on the governments and parliaments of the states and the federation in Germany to implement the appropriate legislative procedures now, in order to guarantee finally the human rights in such a way, as they are valid since 1948 and are spelled out by the ratified UN Disability Rights Convention since 2009.
We call on both institutions to present our demand now to the federal German legislators in such a way that the UN CRPD is not further a perversion of justice, but is finally fulfilled in a timely manner.
Immediately it must be ensured by a new legal regulation or a new law that all reject the psychiatric examination, diagnosis and treatment, documented in a before put down patient order (e.g. of the type PatVerfĂŒ Âź ), in all psychiatric hospitals in the FRG unconditionally the right have to leave these at any time and/or if necessary, if no assistance at all is inquired, not at all to be taken up **.
We would like to point out that since March 2022 also a substantial part of the psychiatry, the German society for social psychiatry (DGSP) demands to abolish our fourth point above, the psychiatric special criminal law by the §§ 20, 21, 63 and 64 (forensic psychiatry).
——-
* Unconditionally, because human rights are indivisible. It would be absurd to make e.g. freedom from torture dependent on any conditions.
** This has even the DGPPN President (2019-2020) Prof. Andreas Heinz publicly in the Legal Committee of the Bundestag demanded (see: Protokolll: https://tinyurl.com/mtp4abfs), and the DGPPN President (2021-2022) Prof. Thomas PollmÀcher, quote: To the author, such a hospital accommodation also appears incompatible with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which in Art. 14 prohibits a deprivation of liberty due to a disability (and thus also due to a mental illness) (see https://tinyurl.com/yy7ad4zd ). To our knowledge they did however nothing appropriate, therefore must become now finally the legislator immediately active
This press release is a resolution of the general meeting of the BPE on 8.10.2022 and the general meeting of die-BPE on 18.10.2022
I very much appreciate how Tom Szasz is praised in the article.
We as an organization, the “lunatic offensive”, cooperated with him since 1987 when we printed his booklet, the “Psychiatric Will”. The modernized form of it is our advanced psychiatric directive, the PatVerfue: https://www.patverfue.de/en
The next collaboration was in 1997 in a Symposium: https://www.irrenoffensive.de/szaszsymposium/index.htm followed by his indictment: https://www.foucault.de/indictment.htm for the Foucault Tribunal: http://www.foucault.de and his participation in the Russell Tribunal: https://www.freedom-of-thought.de/index.html
We awarded him our Freedom Award, for the first time we gave our prize, the Golden Flashlight: https://www.irrenoffensive.de/szasz/start.htm
In my speech at the Szasz symposium for his 80th birthday at the Syracuse university I spoke also about the social and political dimension, which can be found in Toms libertarian work:
“c) In his work “Cruel Compassion” Thomas Szasz employed the term “parasite”. In a private conversation with him three years ago, I asked how his use of the word “parasite” should be understood. His spontaneous answer: “You have to love your parasites”. He had hit the nail on the head.
I invert the parasitic into a positive meaning and claim that due to an ever-increasing productivity only the parasitic offers the possibility for the free market economy to continue to develop.
Otherwise the economy will increasingly go mad and will need more and more occupational therapy. In Germany, we are currently about to start a campaign promoting the idea that the willingness to work should cease to be a criterion to receive state benefits indefinitely. The requirement to work should be revoked.
Or, in short: Thou shalt eat, even if you refuse to work.” https://irrenoffensive.de/symposium.htm
Tom was the inspiration of my life.
rene talbot
Berlin, Germany
The Kurt Gödel Circle of Friends published two examples of brilliant science by asking the right questions and getting the answers judged by a jury of excellent scientist having not a clue who the authors of the answers were. Please see here:
Kurt Gödel Award 2019: https://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-prize-2019/
for the best question reductionists would have to answer, but cannot and why.
(THE question to proof that psychiatry did never and will never base on any knowledge at all)
The Brain Fetish is a typical reductionist ideology.
Read here about the Kurt Gödel Prize 2019 to promote anti-reductionist knowledge in the natural sciences and humanities: https://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-prize-2019/
There are also the essays of the 3 winners of the award.
Our main blog https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de has an automatic translation function into Englsh by clicking on the US flag on the right column in the third line and the 5th flag from the top
I accept that Jim writes: “Roxanne accepted she is mentally ill with bipolar disorder, needs psychiatric drugs, and admitted herself to the hospital on multiple occasions when she recognized she was becoming psychotic. In other words, she did not challenge psychiatric dogma per se, instead asserting the threat of involuntary hospitalization in brutal conditions and extreme over drugging constituted persecution.”
Of course any assertion can be made if it is successful to go free.
But in the long run the key point for the success at the supreme court in Germany was that in “our” psychiatric advance directive any belief in the existence of a “mental illness” is denied. ThatÂŽs why I can only recommend following Thomas Szasz insisting on the fact that mental illness does not exist. Please read below the comment on the successful complaint at the supreme court in Germany.
rene talbot
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Commentary on the successful complaint at the supreme court in Germany
The latest decision by the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) on the restriction of coercive psychiatry No. 2 BvR 1866/17 and No. 2 BvR 1314/181 was even reported on in the Tagesschau (the main German national public TV news) : https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verfassungsgericht-patientenrechte-101.html.
What is special and important about this decision for us (Werner-Fuss-Zentrum and friends)?
First of all, we would like to emphasise that the FCC made the decision on 8.6.2021 that our special psychiatric advance directive PatVerfueÂź applies and must be respected even in the case of a non compos mentis per se dangerous person, the long-term prisoners in a forensic facility. With this, the FCC has either bid farewell to forensics (which would be super, but is extremely unlikely), or as lawyer Dr. David Schneider-Addae-Mensah has put it, granted the PatVerfue the status of âjus cogensâ (peremptory norm).
Explanation:
§ 63 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) sentences an offender despite being incapable of committing a crime, nevertheless confines him or her in a forensic facility for an indefinite period of time. This draconian punishment is supposed to be justified against all the usual norms of the penal system (prospect of early release, rehabilitation, etc.), by the fact that psychiatrists have judged a person to be âdangerousâ per se. Their inclination to commit crimes is uncontrolled, actually always uncontrollable. They should therefore be promoted to the status of dangerous âinsaneâ per se and locked up until the contrary is proven (the logically unprovable harmlessness). Subjected to the infinite wisdom of psychiatric science, there could only be hope for âhealingâ if this subjugation was total and the insight into the illness of the âmentally illâ appeared credible to those in power in forensics. If it is not, the guild can always nullify any prospect of release with the diagnosis of âfeigned insight into illnessâ or âgood facadeâ (a simulation of normality that can be declared insane). It is therefore a typical Catch-22 situation and incarceration is regularly beyond any proportionality to the offence and is also against the UN-CRPD ratified in Germany, which has actually become law. The permanent dangerousness of a mentally âillâ person, as diagnosed by a doctor and certified by a state judge, is the legal or sufficient justification for this special sacrifice (that is what lawyers actually call it) of prisoners in forensics.
Any psychiatric diagnosis and any attempt for psychiatric treatment without the explicit consent of the person concerned is forbidden by the PatVerfue, the advance directive that was at issue in this case. The possibility of prohibiting diagnosis and treatment is in law § 1901a of the German civil code (a federal law on medical advance directives). In our view, any law on coercive psychiatric treatment is illegal because it violates the prohibition of torture which is recognised as jus cogens. The complaint against the coercive treatment of a prisoner in forensic psychiatry was disapproved by the lower courts but had been accepted and not yet decided in 2016 by the FCC. We had then sent the FCC the proof that a law forcing the toleration of forced treatment is illegal in itself, and published it here: https://www.irrenoffensive.de/proof.htm. The proof is also the logically compelling derivation of why the FCCâs 2011 decision was wrong, in which the FCC claimed that coercive treatment could be ruled by law if the capacity to consent was lacking âdue to illnessâ: such a law violates jus cogens, in this case the prohibition of torture. The FCC had to take this evidence into account recognising that it was correct. However, in the evidence a distinction is made between
A) people who think mental illness is at least likely, believe in it or are convinced of its existence.
B) people, who neither consider mental illness as likely, nor believe in it and are not convinced of its existence.
Only people from Group A) can therefore be capable or incapable of consent â for whatever reason.
People from Group B) can â in a conscious state â under no circumstances agree to treatment of an illness of which they are convinced is non-existent. Consent would be a conscious lie for them. Thus, based on this logic, they are in principle, i.e. always, incapable of consent.
For people in group B), the PatVerfueÂź is the tailor-made instrument to put a stop to coercive psychiatry for themselves: Insane? Your own choice!
The FCC was thus faced with the dilemma of either ignoring this evidence against logic (at the cost of being accused of disregarding compelling logic) or revising the 2011 decision. For Germanyâs highest court, this is apparently too much to ask, and so instead of abandoning coercive psychiatric treatment altogether and becoming human rights compliant, it attempted a last-ditch rescue. It declared the law § 1901a German civil code on medical advance directives to be legally binding and effective only for people in group B) who have a PatVerfue. The legal principle that no-one may dispose over the rights of others serves as a pretext for legitimisation. However, this has a two-sided effect â on the one hand, the rights of a person protected by a living will under the Patient Advance Directive Act § 1901a may not be violated. On the other hand, no-one may endanger another person, e.g. by a threat or an attempt to coerce. However, this principle applies equally to all people and is comprehensively taken into account in the constitutional state, especially also without psychiatric diagnoses. Nina Hagen, PatVerfueâs patroness, summed it up like this: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/nina-hagen-explains-the-clever-psychiatric-advance-directive/
âAnyone who denies that there are mental illnesses does not deny that there are conspicuous behaviors and disturbing thoughts and feelings of others. The only dispute is that this is a disease and that medical healing is to be consulted. Since the lawful state can sanction any version of conduct that violates or endangers the rights, property or body of others, also without the construction of special deprivation of rights on âmental illnessâ, there are no loopholes in the law that can justify this far-reaching and arbitrary detention and degradation in psychiatry.
By means of coercive psychiatry, medicine offers the state power only an additional punishment apparatus for breaking the will, monitoring, coercion, intimidation, threat and fear of adult citizens â a kind of thought police.â 2
There is no justification for a coercive diagnosis prohibited by a PatVerfue, because without a diagnosis no rights of another person are violated, instead only the rights of the person concerned having a PatVerfue would be violated by the compulsion.
Danger to another person can only occur as a result of concrete action. But these concrete dangers can be countered without coercive psychiatry anyway, as Nina Hagen correctly described above.
So there is no justification at all for coercive treatment which is prohibited by a PatVerfue because
a) no coercive diagnosis may be made (and should not be able to be made anyway if the person consistently remains silent) and
b) endangerment and criminal acts are covered by the narrow criminal and public order law anyway, so there is no lawful justification for psychiatric coercive measures. They are disproportionate, as inadmissibly less mild measures are a disregard of Article 2 of the Constitution Law, because physical integrity is violated by coercive treatment. This is also the case with a coercive diagnosis, as already in 1995 the Regional Court of Cologne found in its judgement No. 25 O 308/92 (the doctor had to pay damages for pain and suffering in a case of a person agreeing to having a blood sample taken, despite testing for HIV not previously being agreed to).
This only reinforces the contrast between people who, with foresight, have protected themselves with a PatVerfue and those who have carelessly not done so. Unprotected, they are still at the mercy of coercive psychiatry. In the absence of a ban on psychiatric diagnoses by means of a PatVerfue, they are also unable to defend themselves against an actual or assumed âdanger to othersâ, which can lead e.g. to legalised forced treatment. However, the FCC has also strengthened their rights in such a way that only when the rights of others are violated may coercive treatment legalised by state force come into play, and always only in a proportionate manner!
This constitutional view must also be recognised by the lower courts, or they must be educated by consistent complaints to the higher courts about their unjust decisions against the Constitutional Law.
On 31.1.2017 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights publicized a report on “Mental health and human rights”, Document A/HRC/34/32.
Thus, the most important institution for human rights has clearly taken position on the issue and elegantly circumvented the difficulties that a false “right to health” logically brings with it. We have copied the most important passages, commenting on them as follows.
The OHCHR begins with the “right to health”. It would constitute the framework for their further statements. We would immediately like to point out that it is nonsense or a scam with words, because the statements cannot be taken literally. Health is described in accordance with the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Explaining this condition as a right to entitlement means:
Every disease, and as a consequence thereof, even death – even if it is caused by an accident – is not only pain and suffering, it is conceived as a violation of a right. Thus a claim is formulated which can never be fulfilled, a fundamentally unfulfillable right. In the promise of eternal life in the Kingdom of God, it shall be fulfilled, but neither the Messiah has come yet, nor is there a living being who is actually immortal. To proclaim a right to health is the conscious narrative of a fairy tale, a fiction. To take this seriously and to stand by it against better knowledge is therefore an ideologically justified scam.
A dangerous scam because the consequences of this false promise are then:
a) becoming ill is a breach of law, so health tends to become a duty.
b) the state, as guarantor of rights, is granted a position of power with comprehensive enforcement possibilities against the disturbers of the health claim – in the Nazi public health dictatorship this was taken to the extreme. The incurably or chronically ill immediately risk being deprived of their dignity as humans since they contradict the fantasy of a right to health.
c) this fraudulent demand is exacerbated by the fact that health is even defined as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being. Thus, every ailment, every slight upset is understood to be non-health, so a disease with a right to elimination. Thus, the basis for the doctors as masters of society, if not the world, is laid – and is executed in the exercise of power in psychiatry. Allen Frances and the other critics of DSM 5 are wrong; of course in such a definition of the WHO, for example, every mourning is a violation of the right to a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, as was the case with the mourned dead person anyway.
So we can sum up: The right to health is the last of the great utopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have turned out to be a dystopia, a phantasm, better a fiction, a secular realization of God’s realm on earth, in the here and now, or at least in the near future. It is a false promise, an ideology to establish domination and oppression, in particular a standardisation by the medical professionals who serve the promise of salvation in a secular religion.
Instead, we call for a right to illness (it will be demagogic to misinterpret it as a duty to illness).
How did the OHCHR avoid the danger of this ideologically based scam?:
By trying to read into the right to health what it actually means, thus simply reinterpreting what it says:
“It is an inclusive right encompassing both timely and appropriate health care and the underlying determinants of health…
..The core obligations applicable to the right to health include ensuring the right of access to health facilities, goods and services on a non-discriminatory basis, especially for vulnerable or marginalized groups; ensuring access to adequate food and nutrition; ensuring access to basic shelter, housing and sanitation; providing access to essential drugs; ensuring an equitable distribution of all health facilities, goods and services; and adopting and implementing a national public health strategy and plan of action which address the health concerns of the whole population..”
The right to health is therefore a right to a state of the art medical assistance. That is something completely different.
But only with the following statement is the right to health not only deprived of its poisonous content, but also it points to the black spot which is like a complete taboo, quote:
The right to health contains freedoms (such as the freedom to control oneâs health and body and the right to be free from interference, torture and non-consensual medical treatment) and entitlements (such as the right to a health system that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable level of health).7 While, in recognition of resource constraints, the right to health is subject to progressive realization, the freedom element in the right to health is subject to neither progressive realization nor resource availability.8
Freedom is almost non-existent when you land up in a hospital. With the help of psychiatric consultation one can practically always be judged by psychiatric diagnonsense. On the demand of a doctor the court may then implement a guardian.
With these two interpretive tricks by the OHCHR, neither the dogma of a right to health must be abandoned, nor a disastrous hierarchisation of human rights has to be accepted. Instead, the medical-psychiatric hegemony must be broken to be able to judge the state of mind of other people in order to justify coercion and violence. Eventually it means: Insane? Your own choice!
This is reflected in the report of the OHCHR, part of which please see below.
Meanwhile, also the three UN Special Rapporteurs
on torture etc., Mr. Juan Mendez,
on the right to health, Mr. Dainius PĆ«ras,
and the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Ms. Catalina Devandas Aguilar,
have basically repeated what the OHCHR said. States must now be forced to finally respect human rights in this particularly sensitive area and not just give them lip-service
——
A citation from the IAAPA statement: https://www.iaapa.de/reply_to_OHCHR_report.htm
“The history of psychiatry is riddled with stories of abuse, torture, drugging, involuntary incarceration, shock, insulin coma âtherapy,â lobotomy, and other coercive measures.”
You only forgot to mention the systematic mass murder in Germany from 1939-1949:
The Racism of Psychiatry and the Deadly Connection between German and International Psychiatry
The murder of human beings in German institutions and the role psychiatry played in these murders can only be understood in the context of the âscientific administrationâ of populations. This conception of âscientific managementâ developed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and was differently realized depending on national and political contexts. In all Western states, governments focused more and more on two questions..
Continue to read here: https://www.iaapa.de/fake_science/thomas_foth.htm
“The claim that Szasz would support âmodern anti-psychiatryâ is not supported by any evidence and is debunked..”
Nothing more wrong than that, if “anti-psychiatry” is translated into “anti-coercive-psychiatry”, which it should name itself at the best:
– E.g. he was a member of http://www.iaapa.ch
– He was engaged as the accuser in the “Foucualt Tribunal”: http://www.foucault.de
– and in the “Russell Tribunal”: http://www.freedom-of-thought.de/index.html
– I was invited to speak at the Symposium in Honor of Thomas S. Szasz on his 80th Birthday, read my speech here: http://irrenoffensive.de/symposium.htm
– He accepted the Lunatic-OffensiveÂŽs Freedom award: http://www.irrenoffensive.de/szasz/start.htm
– And Thomas Szasz got the 3rd prize in the contest for the best title of this collaboration photo, see: https://www.iaapa.de/contest.html
“Psychiatric training is the ritualized indoctrination of the young physician into the theory and practice of psychiatric violence.”
Thanks for this great reply!
Just one little remark on your question: What did Szasz really have to say about so-called âschizophreniaâ?
I appreciate the following as the best citation:
âSchizophreniaâ is a strategic label as âJewâ was in Nazi Germany. If one wants to exclude people from the social order, one must justify this to others, but especially to oneself. So one invents a justificatory rhetoric. This is what all these horrible psychiatric words are about: they are justifying figures of speech, a label wrapped around âgarbageâ â they mean âTake him awayâ, âGet him out of my sightâ etc. This is what the word âJewâ meant in Nazi Germany; it did not mean a person with a specific religious belief. It meant âVerminâ, âGas itâ. I am afraid that âschizophrenicâ and âsociopathic personalityâ and many other psychiatric diagnostic terms mean exactly the same thing; they mean âhuman garbageâ, âtake him awayâ, âget him out of my sight.â
Source: âInterview with Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.â, The New Physician, 18 June 1969, p. 460.
That is not what I said. My criticism is that a right to health is a false promise (as I explained above).
Instead, what only could be said is that there is (or should be) a right to obtain medical/professional help. Such a claim is compatible with our demand for the right to illness.
By the way, the right to illness has a good parallel in the demand for the right to lazyness.
The right to lazyness would be fulfilled with the basic income, e.g. see here: http://basicincome.org
âA basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.â
rene
That is not what I said. My criticism is that a right to health is a false promise (as I explained above).
Instead, what only could be said is that there is (or should be) a right to obtain medical/professional help. Such a claim is compatible with our demand for the right to illness.
By the way, the right to illness has a good parallel in the demand for the right to lazyness.
The right to lazyness would be fulfilled with the basic income, e.g. see here: http://basicincome.org
“A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
rene
“…in the US where people die in a system that can deny them easy treatment for lack of money, the right to health care is real, and it is absurd to talk about a right to illness. ”
Dear Tina,
Please do not try to misinterpret my demand for the right to illness as a duty to illness.
rene
This invitation of the UN council for human rights is based on an illusion. They invited in good faith antagonistic functionaries, obviously by
these UN special rapporteurs:
– Ms. Catalina Devandas Aguilar, Special Rapporteur on the rights of Persons with disabilities
– Dr. Dainius PĆ«ras, Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health
– Mr. Nils Melzer, special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment
In strong contradiction is this invited representative of the WHO:
– Dr. Michelle Funk, Coordinator, mental health Policy and service development, World Health Organization (WHO)
This invitation displays the paradox of the event because the WHO runs torture, it operates or supports and covers coercive treatment and coercion. Logically the WHO belongs to the criminals, the perpetrators of torture!
Since when have torturers been invited to human rights advocates?
Since when are rapists invited to meetings about women’s rights?
Absurd!
This shows the dilemma the UN is now in.
The UN tries to escape the dilemma by using an interesting rationalisation. In the preparatory document it is mentioned that the Human Rights council decided in the Resolution 36/13 (therefore click here on “E” for English: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/RES/36/13) see quote from article 7 second sentence:
While, in recognition of resource constraints, the right to health is subject to progressive realization, the freedom element in the right to health is subject to neither progressive realization nor resource availability.
We do not have this dilemma, because we demand the right to illness.
Contrary to us, the UN sticks to the old human rights demand of a right to health. This is dogmatically defended as it is an article of the human rights since the beginning in 1948.
In our view, it is conceptual nonsense, because it is like including the right to an eternal life as any illness is defeated, even no fatal accident can occur – a very, very religious promise. (But this should not play any further right role in this explanation.)
The UN tries to escape the abovementioned dilemma by a definition that the right to health includes freedom, see article 7 the first sentence, quote:
The right to health contains freedoms (such as the freedom to control oneâs health and body and the right to be free from interference, torture and non-consensual medical treatment) and entitlements (such as the right to a health system that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable level of health).
By that the UN is trying to escape a fatal hierarchization of human rights: health is a prevailing right to freedom, which logically would be a health dictatorship, so that would be of course inacceptable for the UN human rights. (Basically that was a Nazi society.)
If now the UN is seeking and demanding freedom in health, well, we can accept that đ
For our project, it is not necessary to surrender the right to health to the right to illness.
So we can use the conclusion of the UN: no health without freedom in our rhetoric.
Kates important input on our movement cannot be overestimated.
Our group visited her in 1992 on her farm and she incentivized us to proceed politically, see the video here: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=10m32s
6 years later in 1998 she was the speaker of the jury of our Foucault Tribunal, see the video here: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=18m41s
and in 2001 she was the speaker of the jury of the Russell Tribunal:
see pictures here: http://www.freedom-of-thought.de/photos.htm
rene talbot
Reductionism itself is dead completly, proof see here:
On December 9, 2015 Toby S. Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, and Michael M. Wolf reported in the journal âNatureâ[ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v528/n7581/full/nature16059.html ], that a mathematical problem, which is basic to many fundamental questions of particle and quantum physics, is definitely unsolvable: even with the theoretically complete knowledge of all microstates it is impossible to determine the macrostate of a material! See: Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable, here: https://www.tum.de/en/studies/studinews/issue-012014/show/article/32791/ .
Complete original text in English: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04573v2.pdf
Supplementary Discussion: http://eprints.ucm.es/38062/1/spectral-gap_supplementary.pdf
Here a quote by Michael Wolf, professor of mathematical physics at the Technical University of Munich: âBut up until now, such [in principle undecidable problems] were found only in very abstract corners of theoretical informatics and mathematical logic. No-one had expected something like this right in the heart of theoretical physics. However, our results change this picture, âŠbecause the insuperable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of the macroscopic properties of a microscopic description.â
With that, the hopes in physics are ruined, just as Kurt Goedel dissapointed the hopes of the Hilbert program in mathematics.
See also: http://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-a-world-without-a-past/
If what you write is true, Jim, then even more I can only recommend to concentrate on the struggle from now on by juridical means: Here in Germany 2 years after the law was in force allowing our bulletproof PAD, our supreme court “suddenly” discovered that in the history of Germany since 1949 there was never a forced treatment law reconcilable with the German constitution. You can read about it here: http://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/historic-breakthrough-in-german-psychiatry
and what then happened you can read here: http://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/now-obvious-psychiatry-is-brute-force
The power of the shrinks is deteriorating, even if we only have a loophole exit. So I can heartily recommend concentrating on the judicial battle for a “bulletproof” PAD or a “bulletproof” representation agreement. If it should be challenged, it has to be fought through as a precedent case, if necessary even up to the supreme court. In case you win, this PAD is the template which everybody can use to stay free from coercive psychiatry: “Insane? Your choice!”
In case you should lose, it is obvious which political struggle has to be undertaken in order to change the law which prevented the juridical success.
> The enforceability of advance directives depends on state law, but in > the main, they are legally binding if the person was competent at the > time it was signed.
If that is true, then it is only a matter of making it waterproof and promote this gate out of coercive psychiatry.
> The whole idea of competence is pretty bogus in this context, but I
> suggest that people include right on their advance directive someone > signing that they were competent when they signed because it is hard
> for the psychiatrist to come back later and say that the person wasnât.
Yes, that is what we also recommend all people who have signed our PAD and have previously been libeled as being “insane”. If the first doctor shouldn’t write such a certificate, the second, third or fourth will do it. It is finally no problem to get such a document. Add it to the PAD! Additionally we include in our PAD a representation agreement so that in case a psychiatrist should nevertheless challenge the PAD, this authorized person can continue to demand an instant release. Additional security would be provided by a power of attorney signed in advance to act on behalf of the person so that instant legal action could be undertaken. In Germany we would win the case and the state would lose it and here the loser pays for everything. So the doctors and judges are very cautious.
> The better the credentials of the person certifying the person is
> competent the better. MD, outranks PhD, etc., but even a lay person
> is better than nothing.
>
> In the end, though, even though the advance directive is legally
> binding, they are often ignored in practice.
Such practice has to be ended! To concentrate on this is a key issue – all hands on deck to help đ
> Of course, the docs donât know what to do if they canât drug people
> into submission, but it is the lawyers assigned to represent people
> who are not zealously advocating for their clients.
Since 17 years we have published a list of lawyers who work single sided in our interests: http://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/rechtliches/anwaelte/
I can only recommend to build such a list (probably through NARPA?) and publish it too. The shrinks will then get more cautious đ
> This is the key place the legal part of the system is broken. The legal
> system in the United States is based on zealous advocacy on both
> sides and people facing the horror of forced drugging (and
> commitment) are assigned lawyers whose main purpose is so the
> system can say people have a lawyer.
Of course such betraying lawyers should never be allowed to represent us. Instead one should take care of and update such a list of lawyers mentioned above.
The conclusion of my concerns is: please concentrate on abolishing mental health acts and legal discrimination based on alleged or true “mental illness”. If there is any progress, like a binding PAD, use it extensively till all judges are forced to obey the law or one has to recognize which loop hole for coercion has to closed by a new law. Then of course such a new law has to be fought for.
E.g. in British Columbia there is a nice representation agreement act. But of course they made an exception that a compentent! representative is not allowed for declining court decisions according to the mental health act. See here: http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96405_01#section11
Such discrimination has to be abolished, it is probably unconstitutional and for sure irreconcilable with the CRPD.
In my opinion waiting on a ârevolutionâ is a waste of time.
ThatÂŽs why i suggest the reformist step to struggle for a new law, which permits a “bulletproof” PAD.
Lying is luckily not for bitten – but selling services with lies wonÂŽt result in satisfied customers – I am sure it will soon proof to be a bad business
rene
Thats why a first step in the mentioned POLITICAL struggle would be a law which allows for a “bulletproof” PAD.
We got such a law in 2009 – and requested lobbying for almost 6 years.
rene
In my opinion we should stop all attempts to be “better psychiatrists” or “better social workers” or stop any drugs producing industry, instead we should concentrate ONLY on the core task: stop any psychiatric coercion, forced treatment and incarceration, as long as a psychiatric advance directive (PAD) has not been signed beforehand, legalizing any psychiatric violence.
If we concentrate on this, one can instantly see that it is a political question, as the mental health laws have to be abolished.
As a step in between we need to achieve a waterproof PAD prohibiting any psychiatric diagnosis, any psychiatric coercion, any forced treatment and any incarceration, also on grounds of the insanity defense.
The reason for this suggestion: as soon as coercion is banned, all “mental health” workers would no longer have the possibility for taking hostages, so they would have to offer their services and convince the customer that they be paid only for their efforts.
We did have success here in Germany with this focus on the political question. One can read about our waterproof PAD here: http://www.patverfue.de/en
Best greetings from accross the Atlantic
Rene Talbot
Berlin
Germany
Sorry the deepl translation programm made a stupid mistake:
wrong is:
…the nationwide organizations of the Federal Association of Experienced Psychiatrists and the Federal Working Group of Experienced Psychiatrists…
correct is:
…the nationwide organizations of the Federal Association of people who have experienced Psychiatry and the Federal Working Group of people who have experienced Psychiatry…
I did not carefully enough proofread the translation, so I remarked the mistake just now
rene
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Dear Readers,
Typically, actions count more than words.
This event “Madness: Fighting for Justice in Mental Health” conference practiced only in beautiful words. But when we, activists of the Lunatic Offensive and the nationwide organizations of the Federal Association of Experienced Psychiatrists and the Federal Working Group of Experienced Psychiatrists wanted to distribute our flyer, we could only do so in front of the door, in the event we were expelled. Very sad, if one had hoped that in this meeting something could be said against the violence of the psychiatry.
Below the translation of the press release that we also want to distribute in the event. Two days earlier we had sent more than 1500 signatures to the Federal Government Commissioner for the Affairs of Persons with Disabilities and to the CRPD monitoring body in Germany clearly stating what the demands of those affected are.
With best regards
rene talbot
Berlin
———————————————–
Press release on the handover of the first 1500 signatures Nonviolent psychiatry! [see: https://chng.it/D2fhvzcmk9 ]
Finally fulfill the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN-CRPD) instead perversion of justice!
Berlin, 23.11.2022: The Federal Association of People Experiencing Psychiatry (BPE) and the Federal Association of People Experiencing Psychiatry (die-BPE) today handed over the first 1500 signatures for their demand for a non-violent psychiatry to the Federal Government Commissioner for the Affairs of Persons with Disabilities, as well as to the Monitoring Body UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN-CRPD) at the German Institute for Human Rights. Both know that the ratified UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities made violence-free psychiatry a human right in 2009. The federal German legislators must finally fulfill this human right and abolish the special laws for the apparent legal justification of violence in psychiatry. The demands are:
The first and most important goal of any reform effort in psychiatry must be the unconditional* abolition of the special psychiatric laws. Through them is legalized and thus only made possible:
psychiatric forced incarceration
psychiatric forced treatment
incapacitation, which is misleadingly called “care” because it can be imposed by the courts against the declared will
a special criminal law with an unlimited sentence and compulsory psychiatric treatment in the so-called “forensic” hospital
Imprisonment in a closed ward of a psychiatric hospital and psychiatric forced treatment may exist if, and only if, this is to be tolerated was previously stipulated in a living will signed with free will, i.e. a corresponding treatment fulfills and does not break the will of the affected person.
We call on the governments and parliaments of the states and the federation in Germany to implement the appropriate legislative procedures now, in order to guarantee finally the human rights in such a way, as they are valid since 1948 and are spelled out by the ratified UN Disability Rights Convention since 2009.
We call on both institutions to present our demand now to the federal German legislators in such a way that the UN CRPD is not further a perversion of justice, but is finally fulfilled in a timely manner.
Immediately it must be ensured by a new legal regulation or a new law that all reject the psychiatric examination, diagnosis and treatment, documented in a before put down patient order (e.g. of the type PatVerfĂŒ Âź ), in all psychiatric hospitals in the FRG unconditionally the right have to leave these at any time and/or if necessary, if no assistance at all is inquired, not at all to be taken up **.
We would like to point out that since March 2022 also a substantial part of the psychiatry, the German society for social psychiatry (DGSP) demands to abolish our fourth point above, the psychiatric special criminal law by the §§ 20, 21, 63 and 64 (forensic psychiatry).
——-
* Unconditionally, because human rights are indivisible. It would be absurd to make e.g. freedom from torture dependent on any conditions.
** This has even the DGPPN President (2019-2020) Prof. Andreas Heinz publicly in the Legal Committee of the Bundestag demanded (see: Protokolll: https://tinyurl.com/mtp4abfs), and the DGPPN President (2021-2022) Prof. Thomas PollmÀcher, quote: To the author, such a hospital accommodation also appears incompatible with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which in Art. 14 prohibits a deprivation of liberty due to a disability (and thus also due to a mental illness) (see https://tinyurl.com/yy7ad4zd ). To our knowledge they did however nothing appropriate, therefore must become now finally the legislator immediately active
This press release is a resolution of the general meeting of the BPE on 8.10.2022 and the general meeting of die-BPE on 18.10.2022
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I very much appreciate how Tom Szasz is praised in the article.
We as an organization, the “lunatic offensive”, cooperated with him since 1987 when we printed his booklet, the “Psychiatric Will”. The modernized form of it is our advanced psychiatric directive, the PatVerfue: https://www.patverfue.de/en
The next collaboration was in 1997 in a Symposium: https://www.irrenoffensive.de/szaszsymposium/index.htm followed by his indictment: https://www.foucault.de/indictment.htm for the Foucault Tribunal: http://www.foucault.de and his participation in the Russell Tribunal: https://www.freedom-of-thought.de/index.html
We awarded him our Freedom Award, for the first time we gave our prize, the Golden Flashlight: https://www.irrenoffensive.de/szasz/start.htm
In my speech at the Szasz symposium for his 80th birthday at the Syracuse university I spoke also about the social and political dimension, which can be found in Toms libertarian work:
“c) In his work “Cruel Compassion” Thomas Szasz employed the term “parasite”. In a private conversation with him three years ago, I asked how his use of the word “parasite” should be understood. His spontaneous answer: “You have to love your parasites”. He had hit the nail on the head.
I invert the parasitic into a positive meaning and claim that due to an ever-increasing productivity only the parasitic offers the possibility for the free market economy to continue to develop.
Otherwise the economy will increasingly go mad and will need more and more occupational therapy. In Germany, we are currently about to start a campaign promoting the idea that the willingness to work should cease to be a criterion to receive state benefits indefinitely. The requirement to work should be revoked.
Or, in short: Thou shalt eat, even if you refuse to work.”
https://irrenoffensive.de/symposium.htm
Tom was the inspiration of my life.
rene talbot
Berlin, Germany
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Please read here the good news from our struggle in Germany: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/breaking-news-forced-psychiatry-begins-to-implode/
Breaking News: Forced psychiatry begins to implode
The bombshell has dropped: Forensics to be abolished
rene
—
Please snowball:
Sign with the Coalition Against Coercive Psychiatry – Nonviolent Psychiatry now, see: http://www.tinyurl.com/no-coercion
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The Kurt Gödel Circle of Friends published two examples of brilliant science by asking the right questions and getting the answers judged by a jury of excellent scientist having not a clue who the authors of the answers were. Please see here:
Kurt Gödel Award 2019: https://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-prize-2019/
for the best question reductionists would have to answer, but cannot and why.
(THE question to proof that psychiatry did never and will never base on any knowledge at all)
Kurt Gödel Award 2021: https://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-award-2021/
for the best answer to the question: What does it mean for our world view if, according to Gödel, we also assume the non-existence of time?
Press release: https://kurtgoedel.de/press-release-2021/
rene talbot
Berlin, Germany
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Tina, that is a very true statement
rene talbot, Berlin, Germany
https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/non-german/english/
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The Brain Fetish is a typical reductionist ideology.
Read here about the Kurt Gödel Prize 2019 to promote anti-reductionist knowledge in the natural sciences and humanities: https://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-prize-2019/
There are also the essays of the 3 winners of the award.
The book of 11 selected articles from this Award 2019 appeared on 17th July 2021 and can be ordered here from the Springer book publisher: https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783662631867
Preface, Content in German and about the authors here: https://kurtgoedel.de/cms-83FO/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Vorwort.pdf
rene
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Dear Julie,
Thanks for your nice reply.
You can read about our progress here:
Foucault Tribunal 1999 with Don Weitz und Kate Millett in the Jury: https://www.foucault.de/
Russell Tribunal 2001: https://www.freedom-of-thought.de/index.html
Lots of information in our English blog: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/non-german/english/
Our main blog https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de has an automatic translation function into Englsh by clicking on the US flag on the right column in the third line and the 5th flag from the top
rene
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I accept that Jim writes: “Roxanne accepted she is mentally ill with bipolar disorder, needs psychiatric drugs, and admitted herself to the hospital on multiple occasions when she recognized she was becoming psychotic. In other words, she did not challenge psychiatric dogma per se, instead asserting the threat of involuntary hospitalization in brutal conditions and extreme over drugging constituted persecution.”
Of course any assertion can be made if it is successful to go free.
But in the long run the key point for the success at the supreme court in Germany was that in “our” psychiatric advance directive any belief in the existence of a “mental illness” is denied. ThatÂŽs why I can only recommend following Thomas Szasz insisting on the fact that mental illness does not exist. Please read below the comment on the successful complaint at the supreme court in Germany.
rene talbot
————————————————-
Commentary on the successful complaint at the supreme court in Germany
The latest decision by the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) on the restriction of coercive psychiatry No. 2 BvR 1866/17 and No. 2 BvR 1314/181 was even reported on in the Tagesschau (the main German national public TV news) : https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verfassungsgericht-patientenrechte-101.html.
What is special and important about this decision for us (Werner-Fuss-Zentrum and friends)?
First of all, we would like to emphasise that the FCC made the decision on 8.6.2021 that our special psychiatric advance directive PatVerfueÂź applies and must be respected even in the case of a non compos mentis per se dangerous person, the long-term prisoners in a forensic facility. With this, the FCC has either bid farewell to forensics (which would be super, but is extremely unlikely), or as lawyer Dr. David Schneider-Addae-Mensah has put it, granted the PatVerfue the status of âjus cogensâ (peremptory norm).
Explanation:
§ 63 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) sentences an offender despite being incapable of committing a crime, nevertheless confines him or her in a forensic facility for an indefinite period of time. This draconian punishment is supposed to be justified against all the usual norms of the penal system (prospect of early release, rehabilitation, etc.), by the fact that psychiatrists have judged a person to be âdangerousâ per se. Their inclination to commit crimes is uncontrolled, actually always uncontrollable. They should therefore be promoted to the status of dangerous âinsaneâ per se and locked up until the contrary is proven (the logically unprovable harmlessness). Subjected to the infinite wisdom of psychiatric science, there could only be hope for âhealingâ if this subjugation was total and the insight into the illness of the âmentally illâ appeared credible to those in power in forensics. If it is not, the guild can always nullify any prospect of release with the diagnosis of âfeigned insight into illnessâ or âgood facadeâ (a simulation of normality that can be declared insane). It is therefore a typical Catch-22 situation and incarceration is regularly beyond any proportionality to the offence and is also against the UN-CRPD ratified in Germany, which has actually become law. The permanent dangerousness of a mentally âillâ person, as diagnosed by a doctor and certified by a state judge, is the legal or sufficient justification for this special sacrifice (that is what lawyers actually call it) of prisoners in forensics.
Any psychiatric diagnosis and any attempt for psychiatric treatment without the explicit consent of the person concerned is forbidden by the PatVerfue, the advance directive that was at issue in this case. The possibility of prohibiting diagnosis and treatment is in law § 1901a of the German civil code (a federal law on medical advance directives). In our view, any law on coercive psychiatric treatment is illegal because it violates the prohibition of torture which is recognised as jus cogens. The complaint against the coercive treatment of a prisoner in forensic psychiatry was disapproved by the lower courts but had been accepted and not yet decided in 2016 by the FCC. We had then sent the FCC the proof that a law forcing the toleration of forced treatment is illegal in itself, and published it here: https://www.irrenoffensive.de/proof.htm. The proof is also the logically compelling derivation of why the FCCâs 2011 decision was wrong, in which the FCC claimed that coercive treatment could be ruled by law if the capacity to consent was lacking âdue to illnessâ: such a law violates jus cogens, in this case the prohibition of torture. The FCC had to take this evidence into account recognising that it was correct. However, in the evidence a distinction is made between
A) people who think mental illness is at least likely, believe in it or are convinced of its existence.
B) people, who neither consider mental illness as likely, nor believe in it and are not convinced of its existence.
Only people from Group A) can therefore be capable or incapable of consent â for whatever reason.
People from Group B) can â in a conscious state â under no circumstances agree to treatment of an illness of which they are convinced is non-existent. Consent would be a conscious lie for them. Thus, based on this logic, they are in principle, i.e. always, incapable of consent.
For people in group B), the PatVerfueÂź is the tailor-made instrument to put a stop to coercive psychiatry for themselves: Insane? Your own choice!
The FCC was thus faced with the dilemma of either ignoring this evidence against logic (at the cost of being accused of disregarding compelling logic) or revising the 2011 decision. For Germanyâs highest court, this is apparently too much to ask, and so instead of abandoning coercive psychiatric treatment altogether and becoming human rights compliant, it attempted a last-ditch rescue. It declared the law § 1901a German civil code on medical advance directives to be legally binding and effective only for people in group B) who have a PatVerfue. The legal principle that no-one may dispose over the rights of others serves as a pretext for legitimisation. However, this has a two-sided effect â on the one hand, the rights of a person protected by a living will under the Patient Advance Directive Act § 1901a may not be violated. On the other hand, no-one may endanger another person, e.g. by a threat or an attempt to coerce. However, this principle applies equally to all people and is comprehensively taken into account in the constitutional state, especially also without psychiatric diagnoses. Nina Hagen, PatVerfueâs patroness, summed it up like this:
https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/nina-hagen-explains-the-clever-psychiatric-advance-directive/
âAnyone who denies that there are mental illnesses does not deny that there are conspicuous behaviors and disturbing thoughts and feelings of others. The only dispute is that this is a disease and that medical healing is to be consulted. Since the lawful state can sanction any version of conduct that violates or endangers the rights, property or body of others, also without the construction of special deprivation of rights on âmental illnessâ, there are no loopholes in the law that can justify this far-reaching and arbitrary detention and degradation in psychiatry.
By means of coercive psychiatry, medicine offers the state power only an additional punishment apparatus for breaking the will, monitoring, coercion, intimidation, threat and fear of adult citizens â a kind of thought police.â 2
There is no justification for a coercive diagnosis prohibited by a PatVerfue, because without a diagnosis no rights of another person are violated, instead only the rights of the person concerned having a PatVerfue would be violated by the compulsion.
Danger to another person can only occur as a result of concrete action. But these concrete dangers can be countered without coercive psychiatry anyway, as Nina Hagen correctly described above.
So there is no justification at all for coercive treatment which is prohibited by a PatVerfue because
a) no coercive diagnosis may be made (and should not be able to be made anyway if the person consistently remains silent) and
b) endangerment and criminal acts are covered by the narrow criminal and public order law anyway, so there is no lawful justification for psychiatric coercive measures. They are disproportionate, as inadmissibly less mild measures are a disregard of Article 2 of the Constitution Law, because physical integrity is violated by coercive treatment. This is also the case with a coercive diagnosis, as already in 1995 the Regional Court of Cologne found in its judgement No. 25 O 308/92 (the doctor had to pay damages for pain and suffering in a case of a person agreeing to having a blood sample taken, despite testing for HIV not previously being agreed to).
Conclusion:
Psychiatric coercive treatment can only be justified by a living will that explicitly authorises the mentioned coercive treatment and previously written with his/her free will. The attempt to interpret Article 2 of the Constitutional Law in such a way that an incapacity to consent under certain conditions could justify bodily harm to be endured by people who neither consider mental illness to be probable, nor believe in it, nor are convinced of its existence, was rejected by the FCC in its decision because it violates the absolute prohibition of torture. The PatVerfue has thus been granted the status of jus cogens, as lawyer Dr. David Schneider-Addae-Mensah stated in his press release. The Special Rapporteur on Torture of the UN Human Rights Council, Juan E. MĂ©ndez, has also stated that âAll States should impose an absolute ban on all forced and non-consensual medical interventions against persons with disabilities, including the non-consensual administration of psychosurgery, electroshock and mind-altering drugs, for both long- and short- term application. The obligation to end forced psychiatric interventions based on grounds of disability is of immediate application and scarce financial resources cannot justify postponement of its implementation.â 3 The FCCâs trick of making this jus cogens apply only to people protected by a PatVerfue has only a delayed effect4.
This only reinforces the contrast between people who, with foresight, have protected themselves with a PatVerfue and those who have carelessly not done so. Unprotected, they are still at the mercy of coercive psychiatry. In the absence of a ban on psychiatric diagnoses by means of a PatVerfue, they are also unable to defend themselves against an actual or assumed âdanger to othersâ, which can lead e.g. to legalised forced treatment. However, the FCC has also strengthened their rights in such a way that only when the rights of others are violated may coercive treatment legalised by state force come into play, and always only in a proportionate manner!
This constitutional view must also be recognised by the lower courts, or they must be educated by consistent complaints to the higher courts about their unjust decisions against the Constitutional Law.
Noteworthy: With this decision, the FCC has also revised the reasoning of its previous rejection of an interim injunction of 7 September 2017, see: http://www.FCC.de/e/rk20170907_2bvr186617.html !
âââââââââ-
1 The press release with link to the full text of the decision here: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2021/bvg21-066.html
2 The quote from Nina Hagen is from her article âMentally ill? Your own decision!â in the book âStadtwirte /Von Sozialraumfarmern und Inklusionswirtenâ (published by G.I.B. â Gesellschaft fĂŒr integrative BeschĂ€ftigung mbH). The text can also be read on the PatVerfue website: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/nina-hagen-explains-the-clever-psychiatric-advance-directive
3 The quote translated into German is from page 5 in: Statement by Mr. Juan E MĂ©ndez SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON TORTURE AND OTHER CRUEL, INHUMAN OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR
PUNISHMENT. 22nd session of the Human Rights Council Agenda Item 3. 4 March 2013 Geneva
Internet see: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/cms-67UN/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Juan_Mendez.pdf
4 See the UN CRPD, i.e. human rights compliant, non-violent psychiatry as conceptualised in this article in Recht&Psychiarie (Law & Psychiatry): https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/8/3/19
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By the way: The CRPD, which is ratified in Germany, was disregarded and not mentioned at all in this decision. (The comment is also published with links here: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/commentary-on-the-successful-complaint-at-the-supreme-court-in-germany )
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On 31.1.2017 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights publicized a report on “Mental health and human rights”, Document A/HRC/34/32.
Thus, the most important institution for human rights has clearly taken position on the issue and elegantly circumvented the difficulties that a false “right to health” logically brings with it. We have copied the most important passages, commenting on them as follows.
The OHCHR begins with the “right to health”. It would constitute the framework for their further statements. We would immediately like to point out that it is nonsense or a scam with words, because the statements cannot be taken literally. Health is described in accordance with the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Explaining this condition as a right to entitlement means:
Every disease, and as a consequence thereof, even death – even if it is caused by an accident – is not only pain and suffering, it is conceived as a violation of a right. Thus a claim is formulated which can never be fulfilled, a fundamentally unfulfillable right. In the promise of eternal life in the Kingdom of God, it shall be fulfilled, but neither the Messiah has come yet, nor is there a living being who is actually immortal. To proclaim a right to health is the conscious narrative of a fairy tale, a fiction. To take this seriously and to stand by it against better knowledge is therefore an ideologically justified scam.
A dangerous scam because the consequences of this false promise are then:
a) becoming ill is a breach of law, so health tends to become a duty.
b) the state, as guarantor of rights, is granted a position of power with comprehensive enforcement possibilities against the disturbers of the health claim – in the Nazi public health dictatorship this was taken to the extreme. The incurably or chronically ill immediately risk being deprived of their dignity as humans since they contradict the fantasy of a right to health.
c) this fraudulent demand is exacerbated by the fact that health is even defined as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being. Thus, every ailment, every slight upset is understood to be non-health, so a disease with a right to elimination. Thus, the basis for the doctors as masters of society, if not the world, is laid – and is executed in the exercise of power in psychiatry. Allen Frances and the other critics of DSM 5 are wrong; of course in such a definition of the WHO, for example, every mourning is a violation of the right to a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, as was the case with the mourned dead person anyway.
So we can sum up: The right to health is the last of the great utopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have turned out to be a dystopia, a phantasm, better a fiction, a secular realization of God’s realm on earth, in the here and now, or at least in the near future. It is a false promise, an ideology to establish domination and oppression, in particular a standardisation by the medical professionals who serve the promise of salvation in a secular religion.
Instead, we call for a right to illness (it will be demagogic to misinterpret it as a duty to illness).
How did the OHCHR avoid the danger of this ideologically based scam?:
By trying to read into the right to health what it actually means, thus simply reinterpreting what it says:
“It is an inclusive right encompassing both timely and appropriate health care and the underlying determinants of health…
..The core obligations applicable to the right to health include ensuring the right of access to health facilities, goods and services on a non-discriminatory basis, especially for vulnerable or marginalized groups; ensuring access to adequate food and nutrition; ensuring access to basic shelter, housing and sanitation; providing access to essential drugs; ensuring an equitable distribution of all health facilities, goods and services; and adopting and implementing a national public health strategy and plan of action which address the health concerns of the whole population..”
The right to health is therefore a right to a state of the art medical assistance. That is something completely different.
But only with the following statement is the right to health not only deprived of its poisonous content, but also it points to the black spot which is like a complete taboo, quote:
The right to health contains freedoms (such as the freedom to control oneâs health and body and the right to be free from interference, torture and non-consensual medical treatment) and entitlements (such as the right to a health system that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable level of health).7 While, in recognition of resource constraints, the right to health is subject to progressive realization, the freedom element in the right to health is subject to neither progressive realization nor resource availability.8
Freedom is almost non-existent when you land up in a hospital. With the help of psychiatric consultation one can practically always be judged by psychiatric diagnonsense. On the demand of a doctor the court may then implement a guardian.
With these two interpretive tricks by the OHCHR, neither the dogma of a right to health must be abandoned, nor a disastrous hierarchisation of human rights has to be accepted. Instead, the medical-psychiatric hegemony must be broken to be able to judge the state of mind of other people in order to justify coercion and violence. Eventually it means: Insane? Your own choice!
This is reflected in the report of the OHCHR, part of which please see below.
Meanwhile, also the three UN Special Rapporteurs
on torture etc., Mr. Juan Mendez,
on the right to health, Mr. Dainius PĆ«ras,
and the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Ms. Catalina Devandas Aguilar,
have basically repeated what the OHCHR said. States must now be forced to finally respect human rights in this particularly sensitive area and not just give them lip-service
——
A citation from the IAAPA statement: https://www.iaapa.de/reply_to_OHCHR_report.htm
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“The history of psychiatry is riddled with stories of abuse, torture, drugging, involuntary incarceration, shock, insulin coma âtherapy,â lobotomy, and other coercive measures.”
You only forgot to mention the systematic mass murder in Germany from 1939-1949:
The Racism of Psychiatry and the Deadly Connection between German and International Psychiatry
The murder of human beings in German institutions and the role psychiatry played in these murders can only be understood in the context of the âscientific administrationâ of populations. This conception of âscientific managementâ developed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and was differently realized depending on national and political contexts. In all Western states, governments focused more and more on two questions..
Continue to read here: https://www.iaapa.de/fake_science/thomas_foth.htm
rene talbot
Chair FOR madness
Berlin, Gremany (Webpages in English: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/non-german/english )
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“The claim that Szasz would support âmodern anti-psychiatryâ is not supported by any evidence and is debunked..”
Nothing more wrong than that, if “anti-psychiatry” is translated into “anti-coercive-psychiatry”, which it should name itself at the best:
– E.g. he was a member of http://www.iaapa.ch
– He was engaged as the accuser in the “Foucualt Tribunal”: http://www.foucault.de
– and in the “Russell Tribunal”: http://www.freedom-of-thought.de/index.html
– I was invited to speak at the Symposium in Honor of Thomas S. Szasz on his 80th Birthday, read my speech here: http://irrenoffensive.de/symposium.htm
– He accepted the Lunatic-OffensiveÂŽs Freedom award: http://www.irrenoffensive.de/szasz/start.htm
– And Thomas Szasz got the 3rd prize in the contest for the best title of this collaboration photo, see: https://www.iaapa.de/contest.html
“Psychiatric training is the ritualized indoctrination of the young physician into the theory and practice of psychiatric violence.”
rene talbot
Chair FOR madness
Berlin, Gremany (Webpages in English: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/non-german/english )
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Thanks for this great reply!
Just one little remark on your question: What did Szasz really have to say about so-called âschizophreniaâ?
I appreciate the following as the best citation:
âSchizophreniaâ is a strategic label as âJewâ was in Nazi Germany. If one wants to exclude people from the social order, one must justify this to others, but especially to oneself. So one invents a justificatory rhetoric. This is what all these horrible psychiatric words are about: they are justifying figures of speech, a label wrapped around âgarbageâ â they mean âTake him awayâ, âGet him out of my sightâ etc. This is what the word âJewâ meant in Nazi Germany; it did not mean a person with a specific religious belief. It meant âVerminâ, âGas itâ. I am afraid that âschizophrenicâ and âsociopathic personalityâ and many other psychiatric diagnostic terms mean exactly the same thing; they mean âhuman garbageâ, âtake him awayâ, âget him out of my sight.â
Source: âInterview with Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.â, The New Physician, 18 June 1969, p. 460.
rene talbot
Chair FOR madness
Berlin, Gremany (Webpages in English: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/non-german/english )
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Rereading my comment I have to say sorry for a wrong link to the document of the citation:
The citation is NOT from the document you can read if you click on âEâ for English: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/RES/36/13)
It is in deed the document you can read if you click on âEâ for English here: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/34/32
Sorry for the mistake
rene
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Sorry, this was meant as a reply to Tina. By mistake I placed it in the wrong place.
rene
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That is not what I said. My criticism is that a right to health is a false promise (as I explained above).
Instead, what only could be said is that there is (or should be) a right to obtain medical/professional help. Such a claim is compatible with our demand for the right to illness.
By the way, the right to illness has a good parallel in the demand for the right to lazyness.
The right to lazyness would be fulfilled with the basic income, e.g. see here: http://basicincome.org
âA basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.â
rene
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That is not what I said. My criticism is that a right to health is a false promise (as I explained above).
Instead, what only could be said is that there is (or should be) a right to obtain medical/professional help. Such a claim is compatible with our demand for the right to illness.
By the way, the right to illness has a good parallel in the demand for the right to lazyness.
The right to lazyness would be fulfilled with the basic income, e.g. see here: http://basicincome.org
“A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
rene
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“…in the US where people die in a system that can deny them easy treatment for lack of money, the right to health care is real, and it is absurd to talk about a right to illness. ”
Dear Tina,
Please do not try to misinterpret my demand for the right to illness as a duty to illness.
rene
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This invitation of the UN council for human rights is based on an illusion. They invited in good faith antagonistic functionaries, obviously by
these UN special rapporteurs:
– Ms. Catalina Devandas Aguilar, Special Rapporteur on the rights of Persons with disabilities
– Dr. Dainius PĆ«ras, Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health
– Mr. Nils Melzer, special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment
In strong contradiction is this invited representative of the WHO:
– Dr. Michelle Funk, Coordinator, mental health Policy and service development, World Health Organization (WHO)
This invitation displays the paradox of the event because the WHO runs torture, it operates or supports and covers coercive treatment and coercion. Logically the WHO belongs to the criminals, the perpetrators of torture!
Since when have torturers been invited to human rights advocates?
Since when are rapists invited to meetings about women’s rights?
Absurd!
This shows the dilemma the UN is now in.
The UN tries to escape the dilemma by using an interesting rationalisation. In the preparatory document it is mentioned that the Human Rights council decided in the Resolution 36/13 (therefore click here on “E” for English: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/RES/36/13) see quote from article 7 second sentence:
While, in recognition of resource constraints, the right to health is subject to progressive realization, the freedom element in the right to health is subject to neither progressive realization nor resource availability.
We do not have this dilemma, because we demand the right to illness.
Contrary to us, the UN sticks to the old human rights demand of a right to health. This is dogmatically defended as it is an article of the human rights since the beginning in 1948.
In our view, it is conceptual nonsense, because it is like including the right to an eternal life as any illness is defeated, even no fatal accident can occur – a very, very religious promise. (But this should not play any further right role in this explanation.)
The UN tries to escape the abovementioned dilemma by a definition that the right to health includes freedom, see article 7 the first sentence, quote:
The right to health contains freedoms (such as the freedom to control oneâs health and body and the right to be free from interference, torture and non-consensual medical treatment) and entitlements (such as the right to a health system that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable level of health).
By that the UN is trying to escape a fatal hierarchization of human rights: health is a prevailing right to freedom, which logically would be a health dictatorship, so that would be of course inacceptable for the UN human rights. (Basically that was a Nazi society.)
If now the UN is seeking and demanding freedom in health, well, we can accept that đ
For our project, it is not necessary to surrender the right to health to the right to illness.
So we can use the conclusion of the UN: no health without freedom in our rhetoric.
rene talbot
Berlin
Germany
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More videos of Kate in the Foucault Tribunal 1998:
https://youtu.be/jHvruV_Jdx4?t=28m7s
https://youtu.be/jHvruV_Jdx4?t=1h51s
https://youtu.be/jHvruV_Jdx4?t=1h17m30s
rene
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Kates important input on our movement cannot be overestimated.
Our group visited her in 1992 on her farm and she incentivized us to proceed politically, see the video here:
https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=10m32s
6 years later in 1998 she was the speaker of the jury of our Foucault Tribunal, see the video here:
https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=18m41s
and in 2001 she was the speaker of the jury of the Russell Tribunal:
see pictures here: http://www.freedom-of-thought.de/photos.htm
rene talbot
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Reductionism itself is dead completly, proof see here:
On December 9, 2015 Toby S. Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, and Michael M. Wolf reported in the journal âNatureâ[ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v528/n7581/full/nature16059.html ], that a mathematical problem, which is basic to many fundamental questions of particle and quantum physics, is definitely unsolvable: even with the theoretically complete knowledge of all microstates it is impossible to determine the macrostate of a material! See: Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable, here: https://www.tum.de/en/studies/studinews/issue-012014/show/article/32791/ .
Complete original text in English: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04573v2.pdf
Supplementary Discussion: http://eprints.ucm.es/38062/1/spectral-gap_supplementary.pdf
Here a quote by Michael Wolf, professor of mathematical physics at the Technical University of Munich: âBut up until now, such [in principle undecidable problems] were found only in very abstract corners of theoretical informatics and mathematical logic. No-one had expected something like this right in the heart of theoretical physics. However, our results change this picture, âŠbecause the insuperable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of the macroscopic properties of a microscopic description.â
With that, the hopes in physics are ruined, just as Kurt Goedel dissapointed the hopes of the Hilbert program in mathematics.
See also: http://kurtgoedel.de/kurt-goedel-a-world-without-a-past/
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Shortly:
Psychiatry: Fake science. Real harm.
See also: http://www.die-bpe.de
rene
Berlin
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Very good to link race hygene to the psychiatric mass murder and the renaming as “psychiatric genetics”.
Please also read this article ” Neo-Nazi Eugenics: Are many Anti-Fascists Turning a Blind Eye?”
http://www.iaapa.de/antifa_blind.htm
Published in THE HOLOCAUST IN HISTORY AND MEMORY, Vol. 5 (2012):
http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/journal_thhm/volume_5.html
rene talbot
Berlin
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If what you write is true, Jim, then even more I can only recommend to concentrate on the struggle from now on by juridical means: Here in Germany 2 years after the law was in force allowing our bulletproof PAD, our supreme court “suddenly” discovered that in the history of Germany since 1949 there was never a forced treatment law reconcilable with the German constitution. You can read about it here:
http://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/historic-breakthrough-in-german-psychiatry
and what then happened you can read here:
http://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/now-obvious-psychiatry-is-brute-force
The power of the shrinks is deteriorating, even if we only have a loophole exit. So I can heartily recommend concentrating on the judicial battle for a “bulletproof” PAD or a “bulletproof” representation agreement. If it should be challenged, it has to be fought through as a precedent case, if necessary even up to the supreme court. In case you win, this PAD is the template which everybody can use to stay free from coercive psychiatry: “Insane? Your choice!”
In case you should lose, it is obvious which political struggle has to be undertaken in order to change the law which prevented the juridical success.
rene
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Dear Jim and the other readers,
> The enforceability of advance directives depends on state law, but in > the main, they are legally binding if the person was competent at the > time it was signed.
If that is true, then it is only a matter of making it waterproof and promote this gate out of coercive psychiatry.
> The whole idea of competence is pretty bogus in this context, but I
> suggest that people include right on their advance directive someone > signing that they were competent when they signed because it is hard
> for the psychiatrist to come back later and say that the person wasnât.
Yes, that is what we also recommend all people who have signed our PAD and have previously been libeled as being “insane”. If the first doctor shouldn’t write such a certificate, the second, third or fourth will do it. It is finally no problem to get such a document. Add it to the PAD! Additionally we include in our PAD a representation agreement so that in case a psychiatrist should nevertheless challenge the PAD, this authorized person can continue to demand an instant release. Additional security would be provided by a power of attorney signed in advance to act on behalf of the person so that instant legal action could be undertaken. In Germany we would win the case and the state would lose it and here the loser pays for everything. So the doctors and judges are very cautious.
> The better the credentials of the person certifying the person is
> competent the better. MD, outranks PhD, etc., but even a lay person
> is better than nothing.
>
> In the end, though, even though the advance directive is legally
> binding, they are often ignored in practice.
Such practice has to be ended! To concentrate on this is a key issue – all hands on deck to help đ
> Of course, the docs donât know what to do if they canât drug people
> into submission, but it is the lawyers assigned to represent people
> who are not zealously advocating for their clients.
Since 17 years we have published a list of lawyers who work single sided in our interests:
http://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/rechtliches/anwaelte/
I can only recommend to build such a list (probably through NARPA?) and publish it too. The shrinks will then get more cautious đ
> This is the key place the legal part of the system is broken. The legal
> system in the United States is based on zealous advocacy on both
> sides and people facing the horror of forced drugging (and
> commitment) are assigned lawyers whose main purpose is so the
> system can say people have a lawyer.
Of course such betraying lawyers should never be allowed to represent us. Instead one should take care of and update such a list of lawyers mentioned above.
> I wrote a law review article about how peopleâs rights are ignored in
> Involuntary Commitment and Forced Drugging in the Trial Courts:
> Rights Violations as a matter of course. http://psychrights.org/Research/Legal/25AkLRev51Gottstein2008.pdf
The conclusion of my concerns is: please concentrate on abolishing mental health acts and legal discrimination based on alleged or true “mental illness”. If there is any progress, like a binding PAD, use it extensively till all judges are forced to obey the law or one has to recognize which loop hole for coercion has to closed by a new law. Then of course such a new law has to be fought for.
E.g. in British Columbia there is a nice representation agreement act. But of course they made an exception that a compentent! representative is not allowed for declining court decisions according to the mental health act. See here:
http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/96405_01#section11
Such discrimination has to be abolished, it is probably unconstitutional and for sure irreconcilable with the CRPD.
rene
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In my opinion waiting on a ârevolutionâ is a waste of time.
ThatÂŽs why i suggest the reformist step to struggle for a new law, which permits a “bulletproof” PAD.
Lying is luckily not for bitten – but selling services with lies wonÂŽt result in satisfied customers – I am sure it will soon proof to be a bad business
rene
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Thats why a first step in the mentioned POLITICAL struggle would be a law which allows for a “bulletproof” PAD.
We got such a law in 2009 – and requested lobbying for almost 6 years.
rene
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Dear Jim and other readers of the blog,
In my opinion we should stop all attempts to be “better psychiatrists” or “better social workers” or stop any drugs producing industry, instead we should concentrate ONLY on the core task: stop any psychiatric coercion, forced treatment and incarceration, as long as a psychiatric advance directive (PAD) has not been signed beforehand, legalizing any psychiatric violence.
If we concentrate on this, one can instantly see that it is a political question, as the mental health laws have to be abolished.
As a step in between we need to achieve a waterproof PAD prohibiting any psychiatric diagnosis, any psychiatric coercion, any forced treatment and any incarceration, also on grounds of the insanity defense.
The reason for this suggestion: as soon as coercion is banned, all “mental health” workers would no longer have the possibility for taking hostages, so they would have to offer their services and convince the customer that they be paid only for their efforts.
We did have success here in Germany with this focus on the political question. One can read about our waterproof PAD here: http://www.patverfue.de/en
Best greetings from accross the Atlantic
Rene Talbot
Berlin
Germany
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