Mental Health Recovery
LA Times Editorial Endorses Forced Outpatient Psychiatric Treatment
ACTION: WRITE A LETTER TO EDITOR NOW
The Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writers for the _Los Angeles Times_, just last Sunday, April 14, 2002, published another in a year-long series of editorials suggesting that forced outpatient psychiatric procedures are a necessary supplement to any other effort to get homeless and emotionally distressed men and women off the streets of Los Angeles and into better life situations.
This is the same _LA Times_ which has ignored medical stories about the harm done by the same psychiatric drugs they are recommending for forced procedures. The _LA Times_ has refused to cover mainstream medical stories showing these
"neuroleptic" drugs can cause structural changes to the brain.
Just as the media promoted DDT and plutonium in the 1950's without any serious concerns about unintended consequences, so the corporate media are promoting forced psychiatric drugs today.
While the writers really are personally nice guys, up until now they appear to have made few efforts to dig beyond the Helen Thomson, Carla Jacobs, NAMI party line. As you can judge from their most recent piece, they generally employ the violent and dangerous stereotype of "the mentally ill" alongside the vulnerable and helpless stereotype in order to make their case. They claim to be open now to new information and new perspectives. They admit to not having all the answers. So, now is the time to deluge them with our truths. The Times needs to hear from us.
ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE
E-mail your letter to editor to <letters@latimes.com>.
Keep your letter to editor brief, reference their editorial 4/14/02, and include all your contact information if you want it considered for publication.
Also, at the bottom of the editorial, the _LA Times_ calls for lobbying California legislators for forced psychiatry; you can use the same information to lobby to do the opposite.
Below is a sample letter to the editor followed by the editorial itself.
SAMPLE LETTER TO EDITOR SUBMITTED BY SCI BOARD MEMBER
MICKEY WEINBERG (please use your own words)
From: Mickey Weinberg <JonesBev@aol.com>
Dear Editor,
It is a strange logic which suggests that the consequences of lack of treatment for the "small percentage of people," who are both violent and labeled "mentally ill," are somehow "just as bad" as the historic and continuing mistreatment of those who have found themselves in the care of the mental health system. To my knowledge, no study has been done comparing violence perpetrated by the "mentally ill" to the violence imposed upon them by those into whose care they have, voluntarily or forcibly, been entrusted.
It is not our expectation of caregivers that they will insult, humiliate, rape, assault, and, without informed consent, conduct dangerous experiments upon those in their care. Yet only the poorly informed, or the mendaciously self-interested, would deny that this has been the lot of many thousands of the psychiatrically diagnosed. And this is in addition to the not so infrequent damage done by mental health treatments themselves.
The scandal now surrounding revelations of mistreatment of vulnerable individuals by persons acting under cover of piety within the Catholic Church, suggests that none of our institutions should be immune from public scrutiny. Neither should the experiences of those who fear, mistrust, or challenge venerated institutions be easily dismissed for no better reason than the public's need for self-deception.
The record of our mainstream mental health system is hardly so free of taint, that any of us should offer it our unexamined trust, much less those who have experienced its ministrations, or those upon whom we would force its services by government edict. Both public and private safety are better served by an imperfect, but largely transparent justice system, than by a mental health system which protects an unknown, but too high, percentage of wolves in sheep's clothing.
_LA Times_ editorial April 14, 2002
HELPING PEOPLE OFF THE STREETS
An Rx Against Violence
Imagine a train wreck that scatters passengers across the landscape. Paramedics arrive and begin loading the injured onto stretchers. But when anyone screams out in pain, "No! Don't touch me!" the medics nod compassionately and leave that person sprawled amid the rocks and cactuses.
A similar scene has been unfolding on the urban landscape for the last 40 years. People with severe mental illness, tossed from state hospitals, have landed on public sidewalks and in wretched urban encampments. And no one helps them because they say they don't want help.
It's time for society to reevaluate this perverse arrangement. Senate Health and Human Services Committee Chairwoman Deborah Ortiz, a Sacramento Democrat, is presently deciding when, or whether, to schedule a vote on a bill by Assemblywoman Helen Thomson (D-Davis) that would give authorities more power to impose treatment.
AB 1421, or "Laura's law," would let judges compel some severely mentally ill people to accept supervised outpatient care. A person whose voices were telling him to hurt himself or someone else, for example, could be forced to attend counseling sessions with a psychologist or psychiatrist and to take prescribed stabilizing medications.
The bill is named after Laura Wilcox, a 19-year-old high school valedictorian killed along with two other people in Northern California last year by a man whose mental illness went untreated. Existing laws had left his family, the police and mental health professionals impotent to intervene.
Civil libertarians have defeated the bill twice now, by persuading legislators--notably Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) -- that no one should be forced to take medications against his or her will. Thomson's bill, however, has been amended numerous times to provide comprehensive civil rights protections. It would let judges order treatment only after mental health professionals, social workers and family members had carefully deliberated and decided that without intervention a severely mentally ill person would be at ''high risk'' of injury to himself or others.
Of course, society must guarantee that no patient is ever again subjected to the sort of abuse that was rampant in the psychiatric "snake pits" of the late 1950s and early '60s. But those who focus solely on worries about mistreatment need to understand something other activists pushing for Laura's law know all too well: that lack of treatment can be just as bad.
Couple this shared compassion for a vulnerable population with the fear among people whose children or spouses have been attacked by individuals who needed medical care and it becomes very clear why California needs to restore a balance between rights and responsibilities. This was lost when civil libertarians passed laws that not only liberated mistreated patients but granted some the new freedom to harm themselves and others in a never-ending cycle.
Only a small percentage of people with serious mental illness are the least bit violent. But since Laura Wilcox's death in January 2001 the state's failure to give assertive treatment to those who need it has led to many other tragedies.
Just days after a man suffering from severe paranoia shot Wilcox, a trucker known to become erratic when he wasn't on medications rammed his 18-wheeler into the state Capitol and died in the crash. In San Bernardino, a man with paranoid schizophrenia killed his mother on Mother's Day. And last month San Diego police killed a man who had been released that morning by a psychiatric hospital without mandatory follow-up treatment.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and the California Peace Officers Assn. recently threw their important support behind Laura's law. Ortiz, her colleagues in the Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis should do the same.
Term limits will push Assemblywoman Thomson out of state office this fall. It may be a while before another politician has the courage to pick up this cause -- one that is all too easy for so-called leaders to ignore. The time to pass this important, long-delayed bill is now.
To Take Action: Call or write state Sen. Deborah Ortiz, (916) 445-7807, the chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, where the bill will face its biggest challenge. Or write to your own senator, whose address you can find on the Web at
www.sen.ca.gov.
For more information on resisting forced psychiatry in our communities contact:
Support Coalition International
454 Willamette, Suite 216
PO Box 11284
Eugene, OR 97440-3484 USA
email: office@mindfreedom.org
web: http://mindfreedom.org
phone: (541) 345-9106
toll free in USA: 1-877-MAD-PRIDE
fax: (541) 345-3737
Win human rights in the mental health system!
