Psychiatric Tyranny

Here is an article posted by someone on the forum I am on.
We were addressing the subject:
Psychiatry provides both excuses and tools for destroying freedom.

Psychiatric Tyranny

Most of the time most societies seem to be trying to use some excuse to control someone in their society. It seems to be true of the USA for the past 100 plus years.

The Marxists talk about the "tasks of the proletariat", most of which seem to be creating an ever more controlled society. Lenin said that in any state worthy of the name there would be no such thing as liberty. That kind of stuff gives me the willies.

The two ruling parties in the USA are the Dems and the Repubs. Neither of them seems to be interesting in personal liberty. The Libertarians are a tiny group.


Psychiatry provides both excuses and tools for destroying freedom.

Excuses:

The original excuse was that "mentally ill" people are dangerous to themselves or others and need to be restrained in order to avoid imminent harm to people. But this has experienced massive mission creep to the point that in California a person can be involuntarily committed if they "need treatment". I thought it was just a "red state / blue state" thing, until I found out the criteria for involuntary commitment in Arizona are similarly lax. Kate Millett said that in one of those "blue" New England states (I forget which one, possibly New York) you can be as crazy as you want to be, as long as you are your own property. Kate Millett escaped from an involuntary commitment in Ireland and has been doing OK ever since.

The medicalization of deviance, in which any "deviant" behavior is described as a mental illness. Society's fears change so psychiatric diagnoses change. A long time ago there was a psychiatric diagnosis of "anarchia", which was distrust of and dislike for authority. Sounds like me. One day homosexuality was an illness, the next day it wasn't. Very scientific.

Some people use as an excuse "society's right to perfect itself", which turns into perfecting itself by getting unsightly and inconvenient people out of sight and out of mind (i.e. locked away in institutions). Chilling.

Tools:

They are many and varied. The threat to kick people out of affordable housing if they do not take "their" medication. Apparently everyone associated with the psychiatric establishment is assigned medication (a nice touchy-feely term for dangerous, destructive drugs). The threat of having a child committed if they refuse to do what the parent wants. The threat of having a prisoner put in solitary if he does not take "his" drugs. Prisoners and guards talk about the "Haldol strut", a loss of muscle control due to Haldol.

After the shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley did not wait for a federal mandate - he voluntarily turned over the names of anyone who had ever been committed to a psychiatric institution in Maryland, the names to be put into a federal database. Allegedly this database will only be accessed if someone wants to buy a gun, but there is little political firewall to keep it from being used for other purposes in the future, including getting rid of the mentally ill in a holocaust. The first people murdered in the Holocaust were the ones labeled as "defective", including the mentally ill.

The Maryland state legislature enacted legislation making it easy to force someone in an institution to take drugs. The same piece of legislation made it almost impossible to sue a psychiatrist in Maryland.

The drugs: Drugs such as Thorazine, Mellaril, and Haldol are destructive to the nervous system. They can cause some of the symptoms of mental illness. Before the fall of the USSR, soviet dissidents would complain about the barbaric treatment they received from the Soviet authorities. Chief among their complaints was that they were forced to take drugs like Thorazine and Mellaril. This is standard treatment in the USA for those who have been labeled "mentally ill".

The drugs have been called a "chemical lobotomy". Speaking of which, I have heard that surgical lobotomy is coming back. I don't know if it is true. I do know that electroshock is used, because I know someone on whom it was used. She was a highly educated, highly intelligent productive person. The last time I saw her she was a homeless person.

Someone who is accused of a crime has many rights under the US Constitution. A person who is involuntarily committed has almost none of those rights. A psychiatric diagnosis is a negation of almost all of a person's constitutional rights, which is any dictator's dream.

I have barely touched on this topic. There are websites dedicated to combating psychiatric tyranny.

Note from, TM: This all sounds like, “We don’t know what to do with these people. We don’t want to take-care of them, like they need to be taken-care of. This and that person is deranged for thinking like that..let’s LOCK them-up and feed drugs to them to control them. Better yet, let’s KILL them”.

A few people on the forum said they got some or a lot of relief by taking marijuana. They had bipolar and/or schizophrenia.
If this is true, that changes my view about marijuana being taken because they want to "forget" their problems and it really doesn't help their illness, but, makes things worse.


TM