NEWS: Your Mind & Human Rights
5 August 2003
http://www.MindFreedom.org
Editor of _National Review_ Calls Forced Psychiatric Drugging "True Freedom"!
Editor Complains about Psychiatric Survivors as a "Powerful Force"
Holding Back Rise of Forced Drugging.
How *You* Can Email to _National Review_ and Editor to Oppose
Forced Psychiatric Drugging!
A national magazine has jumped on the bandwagon for more forced psychiatric
drugging... and you can easily e-mail the editor and publication to object.
The _National Review_ magazine ran a joint opinion piece by two of the main
proponents of more forced psychiatric drugging, psychiatrist Sally Satel and
attorney Mary Zdanowicz. Satel of American Enterprise Institute is an advisor
to the Bush Administration on mental health. Zdanowicz directs Treatment
Advocacy Center, whose main goal is increasing the use of forced psychiatry.
The editor of _National Review_, Rich Lowry, then added his own virulent
editorial. All three writers were upset that the President's New Freedom
Commission report did not call for a massive increase in forced psychiatric
drugging.
Rich Lowry went so far as to call forced psychiatric drugging "true freedom"!
He calls "psychiatric survivors" one of the "powerful forces" preventing a
more rapid expansion of forced psychiatric drugging. He blames activists for
keeping a call for more forced psychiatry out of the president's report.
Apparently our People's True Freedom Commission has had an effect, and Rich
Lowry is upset about that.
It's time for Mr. Lowry and _National Review_ to hear from people who have
been on receiving end of forced drugging, and others who support liberty!
You can easily e-mail to Mr. Lowry and to both the print and on-line versions
of _National Review_ by using the below e-mail addresses that I used in my two
letters in response to these pieces. AT BOTTOM you will find copies of both
Mr. Lowry's editorial, and the opinion piece by Satel and Zdanowicz.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com,
letters@nationalreview.com,
nronline@nationalreview.com
Dear Mr. Lowry,
I am an American citizen. A dozen psychiatrist diagnosed me "schizophrenic,"
and told me I had to take psychiatric drugs the rest of my life.
That was 26 years ago. Thankfully, my family was skeptical, and I got in touch
with a human rights advocacy organization. I was able to obtain help other
than just drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs and more drugs -- which is what
the mental health system is basically about at this point.
For a quarter century I've been a human rights activist. I'm married, I'm a
home owner, I'm law abiding.
But I am exactly the kind of person that would be targeted by your editorial
to strip away our human rights.
Dr. Satel and Ms. Zdanowicz have made a career of simplistically attacking our
rights.
But do you for a moment even know what these drugs do? What they feel like?
What the latest medical studies show about the way they apparently cause brain
damage so severe, the brain shrinkage is visible under CT scans?
Do you know about how alternatives work? About how unscientific the diagnoses
are? Did you know there are organizations representing the voices of people
who use the mental health system, who very much care about homeless people
experiencing mental and emotional crises -- and that these groups are united
against the kind of simplistic fascistic hate stirred up by Satel & Zdanowicz?
The only reason you can get away with pushing for forced drugging, is that you
believe -- probably correctly -- that you have the kind of power, wealth and
privilege that makes you immune to the utter powerlessness and oppression
connected with forced psychiatric drugging.
In the 1950's they used to hold people down and give them forced lobotomies,
sometimes with an ice pick type surgical device. Now that lobotomy is done
chemically, but it is still a lobotomy. And you are pushing for this
simplistic, brain damaging and potentially deadly "final solution" to the
extreme poverty and hopelessness pervading the USA.
BELOW is a letter to the editor I submitted to your publication.
Sincerely,
David Oaks, Director, MindFreedom [my contact info is in signature line at
bottom]
~~~~~~~
To editor of _National Review_
You ran an opinion piece calling for a massive increase in government
administration of involuntary psychiatric drugging. (July 29, 2003; The
president's mental-health commission in denial; by Sally Satel & Mary
Zdanowicz).
This call for thousands of chemical lynchings might make you feel better if
you think you will never be on the sharp end of the needle. But our non-profit
organization has a lot of members who were forcibly drugged. They can tell you
that the drugs used are overpowering and profoundly intrusive. While some
individuals choose to take these psychiatric drugs as prescribed, many others
have plenty of rational reasons to just say no. Mainstream medicine is now
discovering that the most common drugs used during involuntary procedures can
apparently lead to brain damage, including shrinkage of the frontal lobes so
severe it is visible on CT scans.
Your publication supposedly stands for liberty, but allows its pages to be
used to endorse the government entering citizens' homes and administering
brain damaging chemicals against our will. Your publication supposedly
utilizes skepticism, but has fallen for the delusions that psychiatrists can
accurately predict violence and that there is a wonder drug available that
will make people well and peaceful with few side effects.
We feel so strongly about this, we are engaging in a hunger strike for human
rights in the mental health system. See our web site for information about the
Fast for Freedom in Mental Health:
http://www.MindFreedom.org.
This is all about power. You apparently feel that you have enough power that
you are not in danger of government forced drugging, otherwise you would
adamantly oppose this human rights violation.
Sincerely,
--
David Oaks, Executive Director
MindFreedom
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/richlowry/printrl20030731.shtml
Thursday, July 31, 2003
Mistreating the mentally ill
by Rich Lowry, Editor, National Review
I encounter the mentally ill every day. I step over them on the sidewalks, I
ignore their rantings, I look the other way when they rummage through the
trash. I do this not because I'm hardhearted, but because I live in New York
City, and there's really no other choice. Anyone living in any major urban
area in America probably does the same.
During recent decades, we have literally dumped severely mentally ill people
onto our streets, abandoning them to their disease and delusions. This is a
great national shame, hidden in plain view. On July 22, President Bush's New
Freedom Commission on Mental Health released a report that was an opportunity
to address this neglect, but it, disgracefully, took a pass.
Most of the mentally ill roaming the streets are too sick to know they are
sick. Roughly 50 percent of schizophrenics and those with bipolar disorder do
not know they are mentally ill. Therefore, if seeking treatment is left as an
entirely voluntary choice - as it has been in recent decades - these people
will choose continued illness and misery.
Powerful forces oppose caring for the unwilling mentally ill: the American
Civil Liberties Union, which maintains essentially that there is a right to be
an untreated schizophrenic; the Scientologists, who hate psychiatry as a
matter of faith; and "psychiatric survivors,' the formerly mentally ill who
were treated involuntarily and are ideologically committed to keeping it from
happening to anyone else ever again.
The president's commission aped the language and concerns of this
anti-involuntary treatment bloc, calling the mentally ill "consumers' and
emphasizing the need for their participation in their "plans for recovery.'
That's fine, so long as the mentally ill people in question know they are ill.
The focus on "choice' fits with a long-running trend toward
deinstitutionalization. In 1955, there were 559,000 people in state
psychiatric hospitals. Today there are fewer than 50,000. If the situation in
1955 had held, adjusting for population growth, there would be more than
900,000 people in state hospitals today. Many of these people are out in their
communities and doing fine, but others are living a nightmare on the streets
or in jail.
There are some 450,000 homeless people in the United States, and about a third
are mentally ill. Roughly 16 percent of prisoners in state and local jails
have psychiatric illnesses. According to Dr. Fuller Torrey, president of the
Treatment Advocacy Center: "The Los Angeles County jail, with 3,400 mentally
ill prisoners, is de facto the largest psychiatric inpatient facility in the
United States. New York's Rikers Island jail, with 2,800 mentally ill
prisoners, is the second-largest.'
Opponents of involuntary treatment maintain that the severely mentally ill
would choose to get care if only mental health services were better. Nonsense.
Says Torrey, "You could set up a suite in the local Hyatt with free coffee and
cigarettes and these people would show up, but they still wouldn't take their
treatment.'
Opponents also argue that the "stigma' of mental illness keeps sick people
from admitting that they need help. This is self-defeating nonsense. It is
allowing mentally ill people to go untreated and roam the streets, free to do
harm to themselves and others, that adds to the stigma of psychiatric
disorders.
The severely mentally ill refuse treatment simply as part of their illness.
The only answer is to treat them involuntarily, and there is a budding trend
toward this solution in state laws.
According to Sally Satel and Mary Zdanowicz, critics of the Bush commission's
work, "Studies consistently show that the majority of patients initially
treated without their consent agree with the decision when asked about it in
retrospect.'
There is no liberty in psychosis, and it is medication that offers mentally
ill people true freedom. Unfortunately, the president's commission lacked the
moral courage to make a stark statement to this effect and recommend policies
in keeping with it. Meanwhile, on street corners all over America, very sick
people are left to rot.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
E-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
National Review On-Line
July 29, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
Commission's Omission
The president's mental-health commission in denial.
By Sally Satel & Mary Zdanowicz
Last week, the president's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health released
its much-awaited report, "Achieving The Promise: Transforming Mental Health
Care in America." President Bush had charged the 22-member group with making a
"comprehensive study" that would "advise [him] on methods of improving the
system."
Unfortunately, the report is woefully incomplete. The commission did not take
on the most difficult cases.
Andrew Goldstein was a hard case. In 1999 the 29-year-old New Yorker killed
Kendra Webdale by pushing her in front of a subway train. Goldstein suffered
from schizophrenia and according to his court-appointed attorney had stopped
taking his antipsychotic medication. Every year thousands of people with
psychotic illnesses stop taking their medications; often because they do not
even think they are ill.
They do not all murder, of course, but the consequences are dire nonetheless.
Severe and persistent mental illness is a factor in 10-15 percent of violent
crimes, according to a 2000 Lewin Group report. This rate is much higher than
the two percent of people with a psychotic condition (schizophrenia or
manic-depressive illness) in the population and the incidents occur most often
because they are untreated. They swell the ranks of the homeless and
incarcerated as well. Taxpayer costs aside, the human toll is staggering.
The commission, however, ignored this hard-to-treat group. Instead it focused
on "consumers" - the politically correct word for psychiatric patients - who
are willing and able to make use of treatments, programs, and opportunities.
The commission even prided itself on soliciting testimony revealing that
"nearly every consumer…expressed the need to fully participate in his or her
plan for recovery." But they did not hear from the sickest silent minority
that is languishing in back bedrooms, jail cells, and homeless shelters. They
are too paranoid, oblivious, or lost in madness to attend hearings, never mind
testify.
Dubbing its vision the "recovery model," the commission believes that
sufficient therapy, housing options, and employment programs will enable
people with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness to take charge of their
lives. Many will, it's true. But thousands won't. Over half of all untreated
people with a psychotic illness do not acknowledge there is anything wrong
with them. These people aren't avoiding treatment because services are
unattractive (though many are indeed dismal) or because of "stigma," as the
report repeatedly claims, but because they don't even know they need care in
the first place.
The problem with the recovery vision is that it is a dangerously partial
vision. It sets up unrealistic expectations for those who will never fully
"recover," no matter how hard they try, because their illness is so severe.
What's more, exclusive emphasis on recovery as a goal steers policymakers away
from making changes vital to the needs of the most severely disabled.
One long-overdue change is helping those who need intensive long-term
institutional care. Not only does the report fail to recognize the paucity of
psychiatric hospital beds, it ignores a blatantly discriminatory aspect of
federal law. The Medicaid Institutions for Mental Disease (IMD) exclusion law
prevents states from receiving federal reimbursement for facilities with more
than 16 beds, simply because its residents are treated for psychiatric
disorders.
It is a policy with devastating consequences, especially considering the
condition of state budgets. Just last month, the IMD exclusion forced the
closure of several beds for mentally ill felons in Miami who may now be forced
to live under far less-supervised conditions.
The commission also neglected to advise the president on how to manage
severely mentally ill people who stop taking their medications. There was no
mention, for example, of proven strategies, such as assisted outpatient
treatment (civil court-ordered community treatment), which is often necessary
for those who have a reliable pattern of spirally into self-destruction or
dangerousness when off medication. The commission's hesitancy to address this
treatment mechanism is especially odd given the results from instituting such
measures. For instance, in New York, of those placed in six months of assisted
outpatient treatment, 77 percent fewer were hospitalized, 85 percent fewer
experienced homelessness, 83 percent fewer were arrested, and 85 percent fewer
were incarcerated.
Doubtless the timid commission was afraid of censure from mental-health groups
who reflexively charge civil-liberties violations at the slightest hint of
coercion. But in fact, anti-psychotic medication, even when taken by a
resistant patient, restores personal liberty, freeing him to make his own
decisions again. Studies consistently show that the majority of patients
initially treated without their consent agree with the decision when asked
about it in retrospect. Newer mental-health courts, another coercive option,
use judicial persuasion and the threat of jail to keep minor offenders with
psychosis in treatment and on medications at least long enough for them to
make informed decisions about treatment.
Last, we come to the matter of stigma. The commission thinks that irrational
fear and disapproval of the mentally ill explain public indifference to their
welfare. While many are indeed fearful their attitudes are not inexplicable -
they come from reading lurid headlines or dodging menacing or hallucinating
individuals on the street. "The perception of people with psychosis as being
dangerous is stronger today than in the past," according to the 1999 U. S.
Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health. Unfortunately, the logical
conclusion eluded the commission - stigma will continue unabated until we stem
threatening and erratic behavior.
Despite our dismay, the commission got many things right. Among them it urged
integration of funding agencies, medical, and social services. It promoted
evidence-based treatments and programs and condemned the awful double bind in
which many are forced to remain on meager disability income because taking on
paid work would mean losing Medicaid coverage.
These recommendations, while solid, are not enough to help a deeply troubled
system recover. Ever since deinstitionalization began closing doors to state
hospitals in the late 1950s, we have abandoned the sickest of the mentally ill
to the streets and jails. Four decades later, the commission opted for the
safe route and abandoned them as well.
~~~~~~~~
- Sally Satel, M.D. is at the American Enterprise Institute. Mary Zdanowicz is
a lawyer and executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington,
Va.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-satel-zdanowicz072903.asp
David Oaks, Executive Director
MindFreedom
Support Coalition International
454 Willamette, Suite 216 - POB 11284
Eugene, OR 97440-3484 USA
http://www.mindfreedom.org
email: oaks@mindfreedom.org fax:
(541) 345-3737
phone: (541) 345-9106 toll free in USA: 1-877-MAD-PRIDE
A beautiful mind is a terrible thing to label, forcibly drug & electroshock.
Last Updated on
04/08/04
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