Friday, April 26, 2019

Comments by -Anonymous

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  • I must say the sheer number of 2013 publication dates I’m seeing all over this page is impressive. It’s only April yet Thomas’ piece and his comments are littered with 2013 journal articles. I love this.

  • “So they opened mental health courts, which is exactly the right thing to do…””

    Apartheid justice. The beliefs of biopsychiatry BUILT IN to the very system of government. The biopsychaitric theocratic state. Do you swear on the psychiatric bible to fit the label, the whole label and nothing but the label? So help me Allen Frances.

    “The idea here is if you are mentally ill we’re not going to treat you just like everyone else”

    The idea here is that if a quack, acting in his capacity as government agent labels you mentally ill, you are now a brain, a created less equal brain, needing to be changed. Brains don’t have rights, only people do, and when you’re no longer a person, just a brain, anything the mouth attached to the former person says, is just a noise. Trying to convince the government agents you’re not a diseased brain, that’s the word salad of a diseased brain.

    Eagleman and his ilk won’t be stopped by their peers or by government. It is going to take the people to stop this march toward psychiatric apartheid. Tragically, the last time the people stopped anything happening was when? Decades ago?

    “Really, I wonder: can ‘civilization’ and our planet sustain the impact of yet another “Decade of the Brain”?”

    Absolutely. And absolutely terrifying. What a brilliant comment Jonah. And thank you for telling us Clinton will launch DSM 5 I didn’t know that. Psychiatry truly is a state religion.

  • “A minority of patients is angry about the initial commitment and stays angry even after they have gotten better — sometimes feeling abused and humiliated for life.”

    – Allen Frances, 2012, in his apologia for forced psychiatry. In it, we are to assume Frances has done a survey, or that such a survey could be done, and we are to assume he’s in a position to be using quantitative words like “a minority”. We are to assume “gotten better”, implies they were “sick” in the first place, and we are to assume that objective fact that people are stripped naked, held down and forcibly drugged gives rise to merely a “feeling” of abuse and humiliation. Then there’s the fact that the chilling effect coercion has on the public speech of forced psychiatry survivors precludes ANYONE knowing the true quantity of lives destroyed or “benefited” from forced psychiatry. It’s like a Stasi officer claiming “a minority of people are angry they were ratted out by informants, but most come to be thankful for being led back onto the path of righteousness”. Trusting a coercive psychiatrist to lay out the “results” of coercive psychiatry is just ridiculous.

    Allen Frances, found the courage, from the safety of a well-funded retirement, almost 20 years after he helped unleash DSM 4 on the world, to become a supposed “critic” of DSM 5.

    Allen Frances remains an apologist for his profession having the power to force itself on people without consent. Apparently abused and humiliated people are just the necessary collateral damage for crafting what he sees as “success stories”. Some lives need to be destroyed by forced psychiatry to “save” other lives. This is how most apologists of forced psychiatry think.

    Anybody can be “protected from themselves” without some quack profession of brain meddlers remodeling their brain function by force. And society can be protected from violent criminals without recourse to the quack brain re-modelers too. Allen Frances is a person who is willing to gamble with people’s lives against their wishes, if you wind up abused and humiliated for life, or thankful, well that’s a chance he’s willing to take, after all, he doesn’t pay the price… he just wanted to “help” when he took your human rights away using commitment laws. He’s on record as having personally signed off hundreds of people losing the right to own their own bodies even though he never proved anything was diseased in their bodies.

    He’s no “ally”. In fact, there is reason to believe had psychiatry chosen to extend the shelf life of DSM 4 for another 20 years instead of creating the new King James version of the psychiatric bible, the former King would have stayed in retirement.

    I agree with CannotSay2013 about so called forensic psychiatry, the merger of quackery and the criminal justice system, and more terrifying than any prison cell on earth.

  • “In private, many psychiatric researchers are starting to acknowledge that madness has been a barren field for scientific inquiry, but they are reluctant to admit this in public because their livelihoods are at stake, or (in the case of pharma) profit and dividends.”

    This is made all the more morally reprehensible by the fact that the same researcher class arms government with the justifications for the brutal, draconian forced drugging of both the psychiatric gulags and the home forced drugging (AOT, CTO) atrocities. Anyone who puts their livelihood above the human rights of others is morally bankrupt.

  • “When I think of the work that has gone into rooting these things out of mental health services and to find that they are seriously being considered on this site of all places…

    I don’t know what to say…. ”

    For people that need a refresher on the human rights at play in forced psychiatry.

    1. The human right to bodily integrity.

    2. The human right to freedom of movement.

    Handcuffs – Freedom of movement.

    Shackles – Freedom of movement.

    Solitary Confinement – Freedom of movement.

    Physical restraint (held by people) – Freedom of movement.

    Mechanical restraint (restraint chairs, straight jackets) – Freedom of movement.


    The death penalty – Bodily Integrity

    Female Genital Mutilation – Bodily Integrity

    Male Genital Mutilation – Bodily Integrity

    A bullet in the head – bodily integrity

    A taser to the chest – bodily integrity

    A beating – bodily integrity

    Waterboarding – bodily integrity

    Sexual rape – bodily integrity

    Forced sterilization – bodily integrity

    Forced abortion – bodily integrity

    Forced electroshock – bodily integrity

    Forced lobotomy – bodily integrity

    Forced drugging – bodily integrity.


    Forced removal of the human right to freedom of movement, is an infinitely lighter touch on a person’s life than shattering their right to bodily integrity.

    The UN Special Rapporteur calls forced drugging torture. The psychiatric survivor movement (who have survived having their human right to bodily integrity ripped away), call it torture.


    When I think of that “work”, that so-called improvement, shifting from taking away freedom of movement, NOT entering bodies, to whitewashing the wholesale removal of bodily integrity with widespread forced drugging, even in people’s own homes, I am disgusted.

    Oh I’m aware people who work in the “services” consider the move to biological violence, hidden violence, horrendous levels of molecular, constant, 24/7 intracranial violence, to be an improvement on mere freedom of movement curtailment.

    They are wrong if think shifting to chemical violence against the detainees is more “humane”.

    We in a fight for our right to bodily integrity, against people who think the image of a man tied to a chair is MORE distasteful than the wholesale rape of biology. Up is down and down is up in the Alice in Wonderland that is the world of forced psychiatric quackery.


    These freedom of movement curtailments were simply REPLACED with things that are 100,000 times more invasive. That is NOTHING to be proud of.

  • Torrey is the world’s leading apologist for forced psychiatry. If societies worldwide hadn’t been treating those labeled “mental patients” like second class citizens for hundreds of years, and if there wasn’t an ever-present supply of people willing to carry out forced psychiatry, Torrey would have less success in his desire to make it illegal for people with psychiatric labels to own their own bodies.

    The banality of the evil of forced psychiatry, the desensitization of the public to psychiatry’s creation of a class seen as a biological underclass unworthy of human rights has much more to do with Torrey’s success in his quest to expand forced psychiatry than the donors.

    In Nazi Germany we were life unworthy of life, and there was no short supply of well-intentioned Third Reich psychiatric nurses who were nice to their kids and their pets, willing to step up to the plate and lead people labeled “schizophrenic” out to the mobile gas vans that would come to state hospitals, “for their own good”.

    Today, we are considered life unworthy of rights, and Torrey and his ilk, along with hundreds of thousands of functionaries in forced psychiatry systems worldwide, ensure those rights can be removed from us “for our own good”.

  • “The child cannot give informed genuine consent to giving up a kidney to the brother because they lack capacity to make that decision”

    A child is a child. Children don’t have the legal rights adults have. The constant analogies of those labeled “mentally ill” to demented old people, locked in paralyzed people, and children, is getting old.

    “The parallels with date rapists imo don’t really add anything to clarify the issues at hand. The motivation of the date rapist is their own gratification. I’m taking it as a given that even actions we disagree with are not motivated by that sort of evil intent.”

    The parallels with date rapists exist. Both drug people whose brains haven’t proven diseased just to control them. Evil and gratification don’t always go hand in hand. Evil and intent don’t always go hand in hand. All fanatics who believe they are justified in targeting groups, rounding them up, and “fixing them”, believe they are justified. I don’t doubt the “pure intentions” of the fundamentalist anti-gay “pray the gay away” fanatics, likewise I don’t doubt the “pure intentions” of a psychiatry true believer “here to medicate” people they consider to be literally “ill”.

    You think holding someone or restraining someone for a while is the lesser evil than stripping from them the right to bodily integrity, to own their own brain, I’m afraid we are always going to disagree on that.

    “But if you are saying that you prefer restraint then I accept that is your preferred option”

    It’s not merely a “preferred option” sir, it’s a LIMIT on government power, and I want my preferred limit to be the law of the land. And I’m assuming you want your preferred option, drugging, to be the law. Your call involves infinitely more invasive government action.

    What is a “mental health service”? You mean where the government, kind of like a state religion says unwanted behavior, thoughts and feelings are a “health” issue, and passes laws that discriminate against people with psychiatric labels, laws that terrorize them and deny them choice?

    If you don’t believe in my right choose, in terms of what I put in body, you’re my political enemy, for life.

    Anyone who would ever enter the body of a stranger against their will without a bona fide iron clad medical reason is not welcome in my life, in my home, in my family, and especially not welcome in my brain. Like I say, we try and make this clear to those work in “services” when we say no.

    I could never live with myself if I worked in a forced psychiatry job. Never. Total moral compromise.

    “There are for sure people who work in mental health services who probably shouldn’t , whose motivations might be more suspect than others. Certainly some of them we might both call “sick”. Weeding these people out of the system and how to go about it is another matter. ”

    A byzantine bureaucratic government “system” founded on force, compulsion and coercion and the unearned monopoly of psychiatric ideology is a dangerous and destructive thing. The component cogs in the machine, the staff, are really just the oil that greases a machine designed for one thing only, to deliver psychiatric labels and psychiatric drugs into the lives and bodies of those targeted. The system is neither designed to, nor is it equipped to deliver anything but labels and drugs. The occasional true “human service” might be provided within that framework.

    Just as any soldier in a war didn’t create the war machine, I don’t blame any one forced psychiatry worker for the system, in fact I pity any forced psychiatry worker misled enough to think they could make the world a better place by working in a system of violence. I pity anyone gullible enough to embark on a career that began with psychiatric textbooks and the lies therein.

    I don’t know what desensitization it takes to witness and carry out forced drugging and not vomit and be haunted by the same nightmares the victims of it are. But I do know those who carry out this violence against us will justify it to the hilt, firing a Gatling gun of justifications and thought experiments to try and dodge the fundamental inhumanity of forced drugging. Denial. After all, if forced psychiatry workers admitted they’d carried out gross human rights abuses with their own hands, earned blood money, where would that leave them? Maybe as distressed as some of those they label “patients”.

    We are fighting for our human rights. If human rights abusers didn’t abuse our human rights we wouldn’t have to. If every syringe wielding forced psychiatry worker decided not to come to work, a lot of us would feel a lot safer. It’s not “bad apples” working in forced psychiatry, it’s a demonstration of how a system can get humans to carry out violence against their fellow man and feel justified in doing so. Something to be seen throughout human history.

    It’s sad that we have to fight for our right to own our own bodies in the face of violent ideologues who insist on using force to smash our will and imposing their beliefs on us using legal force. But we will continue to fight so that one day nobody’s brain gets assaulted in the name of this quackery.

    I know many former forced psychiatry workers who have found a clearer conscience upon leaving coercion behind and moving into working in purely voluntary settings. When one is old and on their death bed they want to be sure they’ve done more good than harm in their lives. Forced psychiatry workers have VICTIMS. Literal victims, hidden out there in the community, assaulted, battered, tortured, traumatized for life. I’m sure glad I don’t have victims. I sleep sounder at night knowing I never forced drugs on a stranger.

  • I agree with every single word of Jonah’s above comment.

    Particularly this…

    “I believe that, *almost* inevitably, he would *not* find such care in any prison “hospital” workers.”

    Someone wants to, feels they have the right to, change the behavior of the face punching woman. The problem is not a medical problem. Any old date rapist can drug a targeted person’s consciousness into submission, it is not rocket science. It doesn’t take years of medical school to stick a needle full of tranquilizer drugs in a person whose behavior is frowned upon. Just as any marksman can shoot a tranquilizer dart into a Rhino on safari.

    The use of chemicals to restrain human beings or animals whose behavior doesn’t suit, does not represent the treatment of a medical condition. In humans it represents an expedient trashing of the individual’s human rights.

    I’m with you Jonah, although they have restraint chairs these days instead of straight jackets. I think people are visual and they seem to be offended by the sight of someone getting tied to a chair. I agree, it’s nasty stuff. But simply deploying invisible (to the observer) tranquilizer drug molecules to their dirty work of SEIZING the BRAIN (neuro-leptic), seems to give the controllers of strangers a feeling that they aren’t doing violence to a person. Violence against the consciousness of others seems easier to swallow, because after the initial syringe stabbing it ceases to be a “vulgar display of power”. As the inescapable forced drugging nightmare bubbles away beneath the skull, the attackers can look at their quarry and not see a degrading sight of a man strapped to a chair. This makes them feel better perhaps, but I believe it is a false consciousness to deny the rape of another human being’s consciousness.

    Having government agents force the medico-legal status of an unconscious person on a conscious person, to legally enable government brain meddling, IS the Orwellian nightmare that it sounds like it is.

    There exists in this world a small number of fundamentalist christian anti gay psychologists who carry out so called “reparative therapy”. Gays rail against these quacks and rightly so. I know what it is like to have well-intentioned yet fundamentally misguided quacks think they posses the “help that I need”.

    Almost every single tenet and foundation upon which my psychiatric “helpers” based their alleged insights into my situation, is something I would like the freedom to run as far away from as gays have the right to be protected from unwanted interaction with the antigay “reparative therapy” quacks.

    Sometimes I really do feel like I’m being stalked by cult members, with massive legal power to coerce me, and I imagine how gays feel when they are stalked by those fundamentalist self appointed saviors.

    It is truly nothing to envy. It’s a wonder any of us get out alive. Instead of being chased by quacks with bibles in their hands telling us we can pray the gay away, we are chased by quacks with psychiatric bibles in their hands telling us it’s just fine that there are laws that see our biology forcibly split open to be desecrated by their guesswork pseudomedical meddling. How anyone can still justify nonconsensual drug-based psychiatry after reading the wealth of debunking on this site, is just staggering. But, such is messianic blind faith. Religious extremists of all stripes, including those in the Church of Psychiatry, have always felt the right to have a claim on the bodies and lives of perfect strangers. The desire to meddle, to “help”, even those who don’t see their “help” as help or want their help, dies hard. Tragically most of them see absolutely nothing wrong with forcing their belief system and drugs on strangers using force. Neuronal terrorists, literally. Total indoctrinated fanatics. How else could they dehumanize us so?

  • ” a person can have capacity to make a decision about one thing but not another at the same time. ”

    How is that? They can’t find the words to talk about the topic of what to have for breakfast or the topic of taking major tranquilizer drugs? Or is just that those more powerful than them legally refuse to listen to the words they speak on one topic or another?

    Comparing paralyzed locked in people to the millions of people subjected to tranquilizer drug social control under the guise of psychiatry? No.

  • Can I just paste what I already said, when I sided with restraint? Do you not even read what I said?

    ““So far you have chosen the do nothing option and the person is still hitting themselves. Doing nothing isn’t ethical it is just abrogating responsibility.”

    Forced drugging isn’t ethical. Nobody has a “responsibility” to invasively blockade someone’s neurotransmission. Especially no quack who doesn’t even demonstrate disease of neurotranmission. I already chose an option, if you believe in the government having a self-harm prevention squad of some description, I said don’t enter their body, touch the outside of it if you feel you must.”

    And then you said:

    ” I’m reluctantly recommending medication.”

    These ah, dopaminergic system blockade drugs you refer to as “medication”, what medical disease do they correct? On the basis of what series of leaps of faith in psychiatry’s THEORIES would they come to be seen as a gold standard “treatment”?, and given the “medication” corrects no known disease process and carries risks in the extreme, how do you justify putting those drugs in someone else’s body when they have not been afforded the opportunity for informed consent?

    These leaps of faith to the “medication” of problem behaviors that aren’t even proven to be medical in nature, how do they stand in comparison to an unconscious person later thanking a doctor for you giving them a blood transfusion when they were DEMONSTRABLY having a medical emergency like bleeding to death?

    If you’re pro non-consensual drugging, fine, be pro non-consensual drugging.

    “If you can’t address the distinction between medicating/drugging with out consent and medicating and drugging by force a person with capacity”

    If you seriously, seriously believe that “capacity”, IE deciding who’s screams for mercy get listened to before the needle goes in and whose get pushed to the side, can be trusted to be determined by government agents behind closed doors in a hospital in situ, without enormous collateral damage, and you seriously believe tranquilizer drugging someone constitutes a “medical” act of “medication”, then I can’t help you sir. If it starts with restraint and ends with a drug in someone’s body, it constitutes forced drugging. If the person has their right to say no and be listened to, there right to pull away, to run away from people who want to put drugs in her body, that constitutes forced drugging.

    Drunk, incapacitated people in the realm of sexual violence law can take action for date rape if someone enters their body against their will. There is a presumption of no consent when it comes to people’s bodies being entered for no medical reason.

    It should be not be assumed that any government representative has the moral right to enter the body of someone to “protect them from themselves”, when not entering their body, when restraining them, will bring about behavioral control without the massive invasiveness of the government entering their brain function and treating their consciousness like something that doesn’t deserve to exist in this world.

    It should be illegal for the government, or anyone acting under government law to perform brain altering interventions on people for the sole purpose of behavioral control.

    You may call behavioral control “medication”, or a “medical” act, but given you’re unable to demonstrate a biomedical disease in the biology you’re commandeering, it is a “medical” act in name only.

    Because if plying the face puncher with drugs is a medical act, then a date rapist slipping a roofie into a woman’s drink is practicing medicine. Both druggers of people without consent wish to bend a human being to their ends. Both druggers of people without consent, see problem behavior, wish to change it, and see the other human being’s blood/brain barrier as nothing sacred. Both don’t feel they are crossing a moral, ethical and human rights line.

    If you feel any stranger dragged before you has forfeited the right to their brain being inviolable, then I can’t help you.

    I will say again, and repeat like a fourth time just so it sinks in, I did say restraint would be better than meddling with the person’s brain, if anything.

    I’ll take Patch Adams or anyone else restraining me, I’ll take being tied to a chair, locked in a room, over some biological rapist entering my brain any day of my life. And that includes biologically raping me when I am asleep, half conscious, labeled as having “capacity” by a biased quack, labeled as not having “capacity” by a biased quack, my body is inviolable in the absence of a bona fide medical emergency.

    Such an emergency would no doubt involve being treated by real doctors who actually examine bodies and biomarkers, etc. ie: not psychiatry.

    Until the day psychiatry’s BS chicanery of claiming rapid human wrangling, behavioral control, tranquilization, social control, magically becomes a bona fide medical activity, that is, when the word “medication” that you use represents the genuine practice of evidence based medical treatment of a biomedical disease, people who wrap themselves in the flag of the psychiatric lexicon to justify entering bodies without consent will not have a leg to stand on.

    If drugging the face puncher woman is a medical activity, then the police tasering her is a medical activity. Both achieve the desired end of of cessation of the problem behavior, by means of invasive entering and altering of the physiology that isn’t diseased. Neither are medical activities. Both are invasive, disgusting, unnecessary acts of disrespecting the fundamental human rights of the target.

  • Jonah,

    “You see Patch as a medical dictator???

    In my view, that is exactly what medical-coercive Psychiatry offers us (thousands of dictators, called psychiatrists).”

    Don’t forget psychiatry’s version of “nurses”, and social workers, too. It is bizarre, I dare say to call a doctor who who only engages in consensual relations, like Patch, a “dictator”.

  • Jonah,

    “No is ever completely “lacking capacity” — unless or until s/he is rendered fully unconscious.”

    Isn’t it ironic that that penalty for being caught in contempt of psychiatrist in a psychiatrist facility is being forcibly rendered unconscious by forced drugging?

    There is no legally binding advance directive that can protect anybody from any forced psychiatry laws that exist anywhere in the entire English speaking world. Even so, presumed consent for biopsychiatry when biopsychiatry is harmful quackery, is an absolutely ridiculous situation. We need to move away from this idea that psychiatry has somehow earned the reserve power to enter the bodies of citizens.

    What is bogus in this whole bogus capacity debate is the people who work in forced psychiatry regularly demonstrate they are willing to completely ignore the targeted person’s express wishes, clearly articulated, in situ.

    In every non-legally-binding JOKE of an advance directive scheme I’ve ever seen introduced, psychiatry is there whispering in legislators’ ears to make sure the advance directives are easily overturnable by psychiatry, what else can we expect from a profession that was founded on coercion?

  • “You can inject all the invective you like but I would suggest that perhaps what you really don’t like is that the situation doesn’t fit into the simple narrative that drugs are always evil.”

    You can use the word “invective” twice, I don’t see where it was. Please cite the invective. What I really don’t like, is living in fear of forced drugging laws.

    “Secondly it’s nothing like a ticking time bomb because you have the person in front of you hitting themselves.”

    Oh so the person isn’t in danger of injuring themselves too badly then?

    Involuntary labor relations, involuntary sexual relations, involuntary psychiatry relations, are always evil. You can call basic human rights for all humans a “simple narrative” all you like. Some things in morality are that simple. Either you are a slave, or you are free.

    “Given the number of deaths that occur during and following restraint trying to pretend that restraint is risk free isn’t imo taking the problem seriously. That’s even before getting into the even trickier area of solutions that take into account gender and cultural appropriateness, both of which you studiously ignore.”

    Like I said, most restraints happen because a psychiatric staffer has decided someone will be subjected to forced drugging. I acknowledge these deaths, mourn them, and how you got to “pretending restrain is risk free” is anybody’s guess. I have talked about the risk of restraint, in several other comments. I know that many deaths from restraint would be prevented had thugs in mental hospitals not got it in their heads that after someone saying no to pills, they had the right to restrain and inject. You want invective? You’ve accused Patch Adams of being a dictator in this thread, you’ve accused me of “studiously ignoring” something I merely ignored.

    You bring up the “cultural appropriateness” (whatever that means) of restraint. You bring up gender relations in relation to your ethics of protecting people from themselves. You bring this up seemingly in contrast to forced drugging, a procedure that requires forced nakedness! Every day, women are stripped butt naked by male psychiatric nurse thugs and injected, yet you want Jonah and I to formulate some cultural sensitivity panel and if we ignore you its a “studious” ignoring? I don’t think so. You were the one who posed Patch Adams holding a woman. Is that worse than male psych “nurses” stripping a woman of her pants and injecting her in the buttocks with brain disabling drugs?



    Or there’s the culturally sensitive gender sensitive swarming by syringe wielding attackers, and the forced disrobing, of forced drugging.

    “Taking options off the table is ceding the moral high ground if anything imo. And taking options off the table for other people certainly does.”

    I had no idea, opponents of forced drugging LAWS are just taking an “option” off the table for “other people” according to you. Reminds me of those pesky opponents of China’s One Child Policy who are taking the “option off the table” for those Chinese who might like to be coerced into only having child. There is no scenario under which forced drugging is not a human rights violation.

    I think our conversation is permanently done.

  • So called “capacity” is a medico-legal judgment. We live in a world where it assumed people labeled “competent” would have no problem accepting psychiatry’s drugs.

    Capacity is not even an objective fact, yet you act like it is. It is a subjective judgment imposed on a conscious person, and in practice amounts to millions of people having their clearly articulated “NO” steamrolled by people who think they know better than them.

    Nobody chooses to be in a situation where violent thugs are overriding their express wishes in relation to the content of their own biology.

    Deciding what the best course of action is, is simple. You listen to their wishes. If you feel you must intervene, you don’t enter their body.

  • Do they stop beating themselves in the face when they are eating? Drinking? And if they do find the bathroom and some food and drink, how are they “oblivious to their surroundings”?

    And if they have been without nutrition for days how do they have the energy to continue punching themselves in the face?

    How do they remember where their face is but forget they need to eat?

    How do they remember how to make a fist?

    If getting close and gentle touching is making “no difference” how would restraint be resisted?

  • Aswat has had a hell of a lot coincidences occur around him if he was never a radical islamist. Just happening to have his passport found on the battlefield? Just happening to slip into Britain in June 2005?

    It is quite possible that the threat of winding up in ADX Florence for life has driven him into a mentally distressed state.

    But then half the internet says he is an MI6 agent too.

    It’s anybody’s guess what this case truly contains.

  • “Getting free of all that meant having a series of insights, not so much about psychiatry (which I’d always thought was garbage, before they broke me), but about myself, my feelings, my behaviour.”

    I sense you have a real sense of personal responsibility about helping yourself. I love seeing stuff like this. Congratulations on getting free and crafting for yourself, a solid foundation on which to live your life.

    You gave yourself the dignity of risk and it sounds like your partner did too. That’s a beautiful story.

  • Your Jack Bauer ticking time-bomb esque extreme thought experiments are the sorts of “ammunition” thrown at opponents of forced drugging all the time.

    “Others point out that the ticking-bomb torture proponents adopt an extremely short-term view, which impoverishes their consequentialism. Using torture—or even declaring that one is prepared to accept its use—makes other groups of people much more likely to use torture themselves in the long run. The consequence is likely to be a long-term increase in violence. This long-term effect is so serious that the person making the torture decision cannot possibly (according to this argument) make a reasonable estimate of its results. Thus the decision-maker has no grounds for certainty that the value of the lives saved from the ticking bomb will outweigh the value of the lives lost because of the subsequent disorder. She or he cannot arrive at a successful accounting of consequences.”

    Just like ticking time bomb justifications of torture, justifying forced drugging any circumstance sends the message to others that forced drugging is acceptable and increases use of forced drugging.

    You assume a psychiatric facility is the best place for a family to take the young woman. This assumes a society in which families are taught to seek out psychiatry in times of crisis.

    You assume that a conscious person is “unable to give consent” when we know that is just mainstream psychiatry speak for a conscious person being treated as though they are unconscious.

    You assume that people would be in their own home “beating themselves in the face”. Did they stop beating themselves in the face to put on clothes and shower that day? Do they cease beating themselves in the face to go to the bathroom? That they would come with their family in a vehicle to a facility, no doubt “beating themselves in the face” the whole ride… walk lockstep with their family into the facility “beating themselves in the face”.

    This utterly ridiculous story is the basis upon which you justify forced drugging laws that apply to everybody?

  • You’ve offered no justification for invasive molecular violence against a person’s brain function here. What can be achieved with as little invasiveness as possible, should be achieved with as little invasiveness as possible.

    Touching the outside of someone’s body, while potentiality dangerous and potentially unpleasant, is in no way directly comparable to an invasive intervention upon brain function such as forced drugging. It’s like the difference between handcuffs and a taser straight to the heart. Night and day. And policing was carried out without “electroshock compliance devices” for a long time without recourse to such invasiveness in unarmed confrontations.

    Putting a convicted spree killer in a cell until he dies, is less invasive and against human dignity than injecting his biology with chemicals designed to stop his heart and kill him.

    If something can be done with as light a touch on the fundamentals of human dignity as possible, it should be.

    Jonah would never ignore the many unsung killings of “patients” due to restraint in psychiatric facilities. In fact, by calling for the abolition of forced drugging, if he got his wish, the vast majority of restraint situations would disappear overnight. Because restraining people in preparation for forced injections is the primary use of restraint.

    How this Mr. Pies thread turned into a restraint debate is beyond me.

    I’ll give you one thing, I did smile at the imagery of a guy in a clown wig and red nose restraining someone. Let’s hope he wasn’t in full get-up. And I do agree “cuddling” is a BS term for restraint. The human right to freedom of movement is an important human right, but lower on the ladder than the human right to bodily integrity. Losing the right to bodily integrity is the wholesale smashing of human dignity.

    I don’t think there is any evidence to be impugning Patch Adams as a dictator who fires staff.

    You began your post with “However in making your choice for someone else”. Opponents of a system that denies choice are not making a choice for someone else.

    Opponents of forced drugging would like to take away the government’s power to deny people a choice. In such a world, if you’d like to choose to take psychiatric drugs, none of the opponents of forced drugging would be standing in your way. Asking us to have our freedom and our right to own our bodies pooled with a group of people who don’t seem to mind having their to own their bodies stripped from them at a moment’s notice, is a bridge too far. Anybody who expects psychiatric survivors to accept lesser protection on their own bodies from government invasion just so those who find government invasion “good” can rapidly get their body invaded, are asking for all of our bodies to become a commons.

    I will never accept being put at risk of sudden death by forced drugging, long term disablement by forced drugging, further traumatization by forced drugging, living in fear of forced drugging, just because some stranger prefers the thought of psychiatrists making a decision for them during a crisis.

    If you’re into “acuphase” buy some and take it. If you want to go about your life with a safety net of coercive legal structures that make it possible for government to force acuphase into everyone else’s body, as reassuring as that might seem to fan of acuphase, feeling “safe” about the knowledge that come what may, acuphase is going to get dumped into YOUR brain, as much as I’d love to help you out, as much as I believe in your right to get whatever “treatment” you want, reserving the right to get treatment you DON’T ask for, unfortunately comes at too great a cost to me. You see, my body has to be as easily enterable as you’d like yours to be, for such a situation to exist.

    People with psychiatric labels who are for forced psychiatry, can’t avoid forcibly pooling their bodily freedom with the millions of other people whose bodies have been entered by force. A military draft is some pretty serious stuff because your body and life are being put in harm’s way against your will. I consider it to be the case that my body was drafted into the pool of bodies forcibly meddled with by psychiatry. I believe this is an atrocious situation.

    While fighting for your nation in a war might be an act of extreme sacrifice, I am simply unwilling to pay the price in risk that forced drugging advocates are demanding I pay by keeping my body in constant legal jeopardy. This price, is higher than any monetary amount I could ever dream of, this price, and I simply cannot say to myself “oh, it’s a small price to pay, living in constant terror of forced psychiatry, facing the potentiality of death, maiming, brain damage, so long as some stranger elsewhere in society can get his acuphase even if he hasn’t asked for it”.

    Some people with psychiatric labels don’t mind being on a short leash. It’s simply indecent to externalize the costs of the provision of that short leash to others. People actually had to be killed by forced psychiatry for it to be the case that someone can pick up the phone, call 9/11, and have someone carted off to be tranquilized like a zoo animal. Very few apologists of forced drugging think about the collateral damage that ensues when they see their own legal rights as pesky “barriers to treatment”.

    Pro-choice activists in the abortion debate have a slogan “If you are against abortion don’t have one”. There is another slogan “If you are against gay marriage then don’t marry a gay person”.

    Nobody can say to an opponent of forced drugging “If you are against forced drugging don’t get forcibly drugged”.

  • I won’t be signing your petition. The way this has been reported has never sat well with me.

    From the Mother Jones article:


    Uncited, in the pdf linked to, this claim that people with the schizophrenia label are at higher risk of murdering other people, and what appears to be a claim the whole “group” of so called “first episode” people should never be in any studies?

    Another problem I’ve had with the Dan Markingson reporting… from various MIA blogs…

    “In Minnesota, however, patients who have been involuntarily committed are given an option called a “stay of commitment,” which means they can avoid being locked up as long as they agree to comply with the treatment recommendations of their psychiatrist. On November 20, Olson recommended that Dan be given a stay, and the court agreed. But the next day, instead of simply treating Dan, Olson enrolled him in a pharmaceutical company-sponsored research study.”

    “Instead of simply treating Dan”, treating is code for drugging, no doubt forcibly considering all the legal coercion swirling around Dan. All the reporting I’ve read alludes that Dan should simply have been drugged outside of a study instead of drugged within a study.

    “Dan believed that other people could read minds, that he was being visited by aliens, and that a Satanic cult that was calling on him to kill people, including his mother.”

    And some people in Papua New Guinea believe in witches and kill people on that basis too

    Their thoughts don’t get labeled a brain disease or a “thought disorder”.

    “Second, the document discusses a “newly-added 16 bed psychosis specialty unit” where all nurses and staff are “supportive of research” and “all patients are reviewed for possible research candidacy.” Every patient? Remember, patients with psychotic illnesses are among the most vulnerable patients in the hospital. Because of their thought disorders, they are often unable to understand and appreciate the risks of research.”

    There you have it. “Patients” with “illnesses”. BECAUSE of their “thought disorders”, they can’t appreciate the risks of research, but what of the standard forced drugging? Where risks are taken with people’s bodies without any consideration for what they might want? I agree the study was dirty, that Pharma is beyond reprehensible. People also die in the standard forced drugging (non-research study) environment. They don’t become cause célèbres. I’ve seen no evidence proving that the drug caused Dan write the suicide note, perform the act, or that being forcibly drugged in a non-study environment with the same or similar drugs would have led to a different outcome. I’ve seen no analysis of the myriad other factors that can clearly go into wearing someone declared “thought disordered” down to the point of ending their lives. A blood test that Seroquel was in his body? What does that prove?

    “Apparently one way is to have research staff “attend morning report before inpatient rounds take place,” in order to “identify any possible subjects who might be eligible for studies.” Yet again, this statement should raise alarm bells. Morning report is a time for discussing the care of patients, where private medical information is revealed. Why should research staff working for pharmaceutical companies and Contract Research Organizations be given privileged access to the private health information of hospitalized patients? Of course, privacy violations were at the heart of Mike Howard’s complaint about Stephen Olson to the Board of Regents, which was dismissed by the General Counsel.”

    Privacy. Now, I’ve been in research studies. I’ve been in research studies in coercive mental health systems. If I’d have decided to end my life, and there was a medical ethicist who plastered my childhood photographs, and private written journal entries all over Mother Jones, I’d be none too happy myself. I think the inclusion of a dead man’s private journals in the Mother Jones article was gratuitous and certainly speaks to the issue of privacy.

    I think it is useful to spotlight the gross abuses of Pharma in their research practices. I also know the rapacious for profit predatory human research on drugging people labeled “thought disordered” would never have even dawned on mankind had the fraudulent concept of unusual thoughts being declared “medically” out of order ever risen up.

    I feel people should be protected from unethical research. I also feel the need to be protected from people who see “thought disorder” and “illness” in an American guy who believes in mind-reading, alien abduction and satanic cults, but see Papua New Guinean witch burners as just plain old Papua New Guinean witch burners.

    All the talk about Dan being coerced, Dan not being able to consent, (language which simply means those with the power ignore or override what the target says regarding consent, Dan wasn’t unconscious)… yet the alternative that people are saying would be ethical would to be just force on him the standard forced neuroleptic intervention outside of the auspices of a study.

    If Dan was one of the countless people who merely had their unusual beliefs pathologized by psychiatry, had the SZ label slapped on them, were ordered into forced drugging, would this have been “ethical”?. This whole story is supposed to be about “coerced participation in psychiatric research”, but the champions of Dan’s cause seem to be saying instead of “coerced participation in psychiatric research”, Dan should have been in “coerced participation in psychiatric treatment”.

    That’s not a petition I can sign.

  • “Perhaps you would agree that LSD had a particular effect on the Beatles that contributed to a very different album than, say, if their LSD had been swapped out with methamphetamine or neuroleptics – or sand.”

    Of course, that’s why I used words like “totality” and “100%”. Drugs are a factor. A factor.

    It’s also why I don’t like to see juries led to believe a drug caused 100% of a suicide or a crime.

    Hi Rutherford, I’ve never seen anything from you before. I wish you the best with helping your family member.

    “The precise mechanisms underlying opioid-induced hyperalgesia are poorly understood.” From that wiki page. There are all sorts of confounds. When access to a drug is behind a government licensed gatekeeper and the only way to get more of a drug is to verbally report more pain, there are confounds. I am sure messing around with opioid receptors can mess things up for a while in the long run. Pain or not painful is a world away from make thousands of decisions and plan a shooting spree.

    Pain is a hornet’s nest of hard to study stuff, and I probably shouldn’t have extended the NIMH guy’s quote using pain, but the mechanisms not being well understood still applies to any of the paradoxical effects floated across the board.

    Say no to drugs kids.

  • “some people” hit themselves in the face? I’ve never heard such a situation unless the person was already provoked into such things by being locked in solitary confinement by the staff. Desperate people to desperate things. If the face-puncher is on the outside why is he choosing to punch only his own face? Did you ask him? When you saw such a person, did you ask them anything?

    “The situation i’m describing is one that by any stretch of the imagination or definition the person is not able to give consent…”

    What’s the protocol with people who are too drunk to consent to sex?

    You don’t enter their body. What if they accidentally walk in front of a car? You might touch the outside of their body.

    Blockade of brain function using forced drugging as a way of defending oneself or “protecting someone from themselves”, takes you far beyond helper and into date rapist territory.

    By the way let’s not pretend the government cares in all cases if someone harms themselves or takes risks. Society has very LIMITED set of harms they will intervene upon. The face-puncher (if he exists anywhere but in solitary confinement and provocation) is allowed to commit a slow suicide with overeating, oversmoking, overdrinking, solo hiking, extreme sports, etc. etc. etc. and none of the “front line heroes” of mental health will feel entitled to chemically lobotomize him.

    The human right to be free of someone forcibly messing around with your brain should apply to all humans.

    If you can’t see why a world free of forced drugging would be ethically superior to a world where forced drugging is still in the “toolbox” for controlling people, then well.

    I think you just defended forced drugging, using a hypothetical story about extreme human behavior.

    For thousands of years human being have lived in close quarters to one another without raping brains as a method of deleting problem behavior from the scene.

    Chemical restraint vs. physical restraint is about the profound violation and difference between having the outside of your body touched by others who have a reasonable right to self defense, and the profaning nature of wholesale biological violence against a person’s consciousness.

    Extreme behavior is going to be responded to. It is not so much about what you would want, or your preference. If you commit a crime you could to prison OR get the death penalty needle stuck in you. That won’t be your choice. It is up to society to decide how inhumane they want to be toward people who become a problem. I would like to see a world where there is respect for the human right of people to not have their biology entered as a response, whether it be death penalty or forced drugging. There are non-invasive ways to deal with these problems.

    If you’re for invasive ways of dealing with these problems… invasive forced drugging, then fine. I’m against forced drugging.

    The argument from “it would cost too much” to have a less invasive system is the argument from expediency. It is an argument that says if we can just pickle a human being’s brain so they shut up and stop doing anything, and drugs are cheap, quick, and easy, we should just tranquilize people like they are zoo animals. I don’t like being treated like a zoo animal.

    You may “chose acuphase or similar…until someone can come up with something better.” I want a world with choice.

  • “quite capable (over time and under the right circumstances) of distinguishing the difference between thoughts and behaviors that are useful to themselves and to our species and those that are harmful and self- defeating”

    I think this is a great article. Me, I subscribe to a non-medicalized view of “bad habits” and I think peoples’ personal power to break habits in their lives is undermined by the disease model. One only needs to look at Hollywood stars who have millions of dollars and a blank check to purchase the “best” “addiction medicine” “care” and how it rarely works out.

    I like psychologists Stanton Peele, John Booth Davis, and Jeff Schaler on this issue.

    The books “Addiction is a Choice” and “The Myth of Addiction” are starting points.

    I have ended some “bad habits” in life and am yet to end others I’m still habituated to, sadly, but I know that it is up to me and there isn’t a technical expert in the world who can end them for me. I think people need to keep open the idea of moderation, and that this total abstinence first approach we often see can be too much pressure for many people.

    I also wonder why neuroscience researchers blame “reward pathways” for bad habits, but not good habits. And I think saying a brain is “rewarded” is like saying a liver feels “rewarded”. It’s a line of thought that disembodies the human from their entire world by blaming the brain. If something feels good, whether it be blasting yourself with heroin, or even thinking you’re superior to others, people are gonna do it. How long they do it depends on what comes first, death or a reassessment of their values. I most appreciate the reminder in this piece, that MILLIONS of people have quit “bad habits” without recourse to so called “addiction medicine” technical “expertise”. So true.

    I really recommend youtube searching for Stanton Peele. And Googling John Booth Davies “Myth of Addiction” and Schaler’s “Addiction is a Choice”.

    I think there is some good economics papers too on time horizon values. People thinking of and planning for a long life, or just indulging today and throwing caution to the wind. I do think the prohibition on substances puts them behind a glass case that mystifies them to young people. I think if all drugs were legal people would use them more responsibly and the war on drugs is just a war on humanity responsible for criminal violence on a huge scale. The “addiction medicine” industry is just a piggyback on biopsychiatric thinking extended to bad habits, and every criticism of biopsychiatry can be applied to it too.

    I don’t think calling “addiction” bad habits is a “blaming someone” type thing, I mean, if you lived on a deserted island like Tom Hanks in that movie “Cast Away” there would be no-one there to judge the “goodness or badness” of someone doing a certain drug all day every day. It’s up to the person to decide what is having a net positive effect in their lives. If you’re neglecting your kids and your responsibilites because of a bad habit, people are going to judge you, but blame from outside is not important. It’s how the person thinks about their own decisions. If you have terminal cancer already, smoking isn’t going to rob you of a future you won’t get anyway, is it? We do live in a society with other people, and it would be “ideal” for everyone to live a moderated, temperate life, but this is a problem in human life that has been struggled with since the Ancient Greeks and beyond… and it is a problem that will outlive all of us. On how to live… you either find a path, or you put yourself at the mercy of others like “addiction medicine specialists”. There is a reason that doesn’t work out for even the richest Hollywood stars. That reason is, it’s quackery to think there is a technical fix to the “over”indulged life.

    Good piece. Thanks for writing it.

  • “I just think that sometimes we overlook that conversation and the chasm that sometimes exists between our ‘no force’ decree (with which I very much agree) and the fact that many of our alternatives (peer respites, supportive environments outside of the system, etc.) aren’t equipped to move through a violent place with someone.”

    Naive self-defense is what sparks most violent incidents in a forced psychiatry setting (state hospital etc.). People in extreme states who are swarmed by those wishing to carry out forced drugging often try in vain to ward off their attackers. This gets called “agitation”. It’s a completely understandable reaction to being assaulted by the staff and treated like a subhuman.

    I am not against an alternative place having physical immobilization as a last resort. People in any environment have the right to defend themselves against someone INITIATING violence. The medicalization, the biologization, however, of control, is completely unacceptable. We should monitor, avoid, and only in very rare circumstances deploy physical force to defend against physical violence. Biological violence, touching the INSIDE of someone’s body, should be illegal.

    Holding someone still, immobilizing the outside of their body, by touching the outside of their body, is not a human rights abuse in the context of physical violence self defense.

    Raping the person’s biology with the forced administration of drugs to control them, is 10,000 times more violent than immobilizing a violent person in a non biological way, and well and truly a human rights abuse and one of the most disgusting things a human being can do to another.

    I think rage-rooms, rubber bats, punching bags, and calling the cops when someone’s actively planning a crime, are fine, not ideal, but they aren’t forced drugging.

    Deterrent factors, believe it or not, do work, even the most “disturbed” people soon learn in a forced psychiatry environment that resistance to their forced drugging attackers is futile. Rules and consequences for rule breaking do deter most people. Credible threats of repercussions for behavior do get through more often than not to most people.

    Ideally people should have understanding, able-bodied family members willing to be them through a crisis, to take time off work, and keep the government out of it. Keep strangers out of it. People need people they know and trust around them when they are in an extreme state.

    Practically anything would be better than the current situation where families just defer to “bio”psychiatry quacks and have their “loved one” shipped off to a facility for forced drugging and labeling. It’s psychiatry’s violence against millions of people it has coerced in its past and present that doesn’t get 0.000001% as much play as the violence a minority of mentally distressed people commit.

    Forced psychiatry IS institutionalized violence against the people who are targeted.

  • “he mentioned there were studies suggesting that untreated mania results in brain damage.”

    Could it be that most psychiatrists are nothing but regurgitators of psychiatry’s endless array of invalid research? That there is a difference between people who think for themselves and people who just line up, rote memorize textbooks and pass exams? That the social status afforded psychiatrists for simply jumping through a series of hoops and possessing “training” is dying on the vine now that every single thing a doctor knows can be found with a 3 second Google search?

    And when coupled with the legal power to forcibly enter the bodies of citizens against their will, could it be that such “trained” labelers and druggers represent a clear and present danger to the public?

    On the topic of so called supersensitivity psychosis, as the former head of the NIMH has recently stated… “Another important lesson is that even effective drugs may not prove to be useful keys to understanding disease mechanisms. Even if drugs that block dopamine receptors treat psychotic symptoms, it does not follow that the fundamental problem is excess dopamine any more than pain relief in response to morphine suggests that the original problem is a deficiency of endogenous opiates. ”

    I don’t buy the claims that the molecules in drugs “cause” people to have a particular series of problematic thoughts that get labeled “psychosis”. I buy that mood can be altered, sure, but directly blaming drugs for someone believing they are Jesus, for instance, just isn’t something I buy. Anymore than I would buy someone claiming that painkillers cause pain, to extend the former NIMH guy’s quote.

    Blaming major tranquilizer drugs, the pulling, adding, stacking, initiating, ending of tranquilizer drugging for the totality of the extreme states of mind that get labeled “psychosis”, is like ascribing 100% of the credit for the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

    Nowhere to be found in a drug based explanation for that Beatles album is the billions of decisions that the Fab Four made in their lives up to that point, their choice to master their musical instruments, nurture their talent, the myriad factors around the financial freedom millionaire artists have to focus their creative energies and produce great art…etc.

    Speaking only for myself, as one only can, I’d never reduce any of the complexity of my extreme states of mind to whether I was drugged one day, a little less drugged another month, not drugged at all at some other point, sure, meddling with my thinking organ was a factor in how I experienced the world, but I was always still a infinitely complex human being, as we all are. Whatever trains of thought and narratives I wound up in, are not just some chemical soup, they were part of my life, labeled a “pathological” part of life by psychiatric quacks, sure, but all of our lives are emergent interactions with the human world, and contain everything we’ve ever learned, pondered or felt about anything humankind has ever been, known or believed. The “storm” of racing assocations and the unique to each person content of people’s thoughts when they are mentally overwhelmed with life, attest to this complexity.

    The process of achieving a solid state of mind that is acceptable to society with a minimum of unusual thoughts, feelings and behaviors, is something the individual must be ready to achieve. If a person’s original stressors and life situation and worldview have not evolved to a more bearable situation, it should not surprise that tinkering with their brain, by pushing or pulling various levers, has mixed results. It shouldn’t surprise that fluctuations in the level of tranquilization drugging allow people more or less scope to *THINK*, depending on more or less tranquilization impairing their brain.

    If someone has been busy working all their lives and after retirement finds that having the time to read and expand their mind enables them to form thought on various things they’d never considered, to have new experiences that they didn’t have while they were in the rat race, then a young person who had a mental crisis and had a tranquilizing “cork” of drugs stuck in their thinking organ by psychiatry, is sometimes gonna return to the type of thinking that got the cork jammed in them in the first place. If the cork is pulled, out of nowhere, with no preparation and readiness, maturity, insight into their previous experiences etc, expect the revolving door.

    What thoughts a person labeled mentally ill has, at various times in their life, are colored by much more than what’s going on with that day’s dose of brain disabling psych drugs. I’m sure part of what allows the Rolling Stones in their 70s to go out on stage with complete ease and comfort and no stage fright is the fact they’ve performed live thousands of times, before millions of people, and know they are acknowledged and loved worldwide for their artistry and talent. They have no reason to doubt themselves.

    When a person with a psychiatric label, destroyed social identity from psychiatry imposed stigma, a person with a tranquilized, drugged brain, indoctrinated into fear and learned helplessness, a person led to believe their future is one of hopelessness, can’t even look someone in the eyes, doesn’t want to leave their apartment, psychiatrists as we see above, label such things “negative symptoms”. As though a “disease” caused them.

    The medicalization is relentless, and the reason is, society has completely misplaced where the expertise in these matters is. Society believes there is more insight to be found on the topic of extreme mental states in “trained professionals” than in the very people who have first hand experience of such states. Society literally believes the rote memorization of textbooks, the passing of medical exams, the slicing up of cadavers, the sorts of things that med school training provides, is the key to producing professionals who understand the extremes of life. I don’t know what happens on day one of a psychiatrist’s education, but they seem to get told certain thoughts are a brain disease, and then they proceed to base their entire careers on that false foundation.

    The fact that psychiatrists say things like “there were studies suggesting that untreated mania results in brain damage.” tells you psychiatry as a whole stopped listening to human beings long ago, and a piece of paper called a “study” has much more success in getting a psychiatrist’s attention and listening ear than the human beings they claim to “treat”. If only we were all pieces of paper, maybe we’d get listened to.

    The internet is not even two decades old. For over 90% of psychiatry’s history, when the false “knowledge” contained in psychiatry’s papers and texts was only available to the rarefied strata of society with a medical education, those labeled as “patients”, and parents, government officials, investors, concerned citizens of all stripes, could only blindly trust the holders of the “knowledge”.

    In just 17 short years of the internet breaking this monopoly stranglehold on information, we’ve seen psychiatry’s credibility take a nosedive. With the internet, anyone can peek behind the curtain and see psychiatrists are not the wizards of science they’ve been made out to be. Hopefully psychiatry’s edifice continues to crumble at a precipitous rate, and without a doubt, information exchanges such as websites like this one, and many more, will continue to shovel soil onto its zyprexa logo covered casket.

  • “character attacks against psychiatrists or psychiatry.”

    What does it say about the character of anybody who would enter someone’s body against their express wishes? To strip people naked, hold them down, ignore them pleading with their attackers to stop, stabbing them with hard steel, flooding their bodies with brain disabling drugs? Traumatizing people for life?

    What is the character of someone who justifies this biological violence? What is the character of someone whose BMW repayments are paid for with the screams of helpless forced drugging victims?

    What came first? A centuries long record of human rights abuses against people labeled mental patients, or the people labeled mental patients responding?

  • (Australia’s most famous psychiatrist) “Patrick McGorry is probably the psychiatrist who has the most experience with early intervention including early use of neuroleptics.”

    Well of course he is the psychiatrist with the most experience with intervention in young people. He operates in the jurisdiction with the highest use of forced drugging per capita in the world. He has the power, and uses it, to forcibly drug young people in crisis, putting them on home-based forced drugging community commitment, something that is done in Australia without even a court hearing. It must be remembered that McGorry’s insights, if any, came at a cost of enormous human misery inflicted by the most coercive mental health system in the Western world. I liken this to the “research insights” gained by Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, which provided medical data that is still in use today, for instance data on how long the human body can last before it freezes to death. Any nod to McGorry’s oeuvre should come with an acknowledgment of the massive world record setting coercion that the system he works in carries out, and the massive amount of ethically questionable research consent that colors his research given young people in McGorry’s system know their human rights can stripped from them with the stroke of a pen should they do anything to displease their psychiatric masters.

    Below, mainstream media acknowledges the jurisdiction in which McGorry’s research is conducted is the most coercive environment in the entire world.

    So I think any mention of McGorry, especially on MIA, should be sensitive to this fact that psychiatrists carrying out research in this Australian jurisdiction, hold within their hands the power to do research on people in the most coercive system in the Western world. You’ve heard of blood money, I consider these blood data. Any data coming out of Victoria Australia should be seen as data that piggybacks on world record setting force, compulsion, misery and coercion. McGorry is the Australian version of Torrey.

    It’s also disappointing to hear anybody lend credence to this notion that McGorry can predict who is “at risk” of having a crisis that will be labeled “psychosis”. Even DSM4 kingpin Allen Frances, finds McGorry to be a pusher of indefensible junk prediction.

    You’ve gotta love the quote from the 1991 study…

    “While psychosis is undoubtedly demoralizing and stigmatizing, it may also be biologically toxic.”

    Replace the fraudulent, reifying, pseudomedical, pseudobiological, label “psychosis”, with the word “psychiatry” and the quote would work just as well.

    I applaud any attempt to re-imagine the use of major tranquilizer drugging as a “tonic” and to end the diseasing of people’s experiences, but forced drugging in any form, low-dose, whatever, will always be opposed.

  • Implicit in referring to survivors of forced psychiatry as having had a “bad experience” is the suggestion that it is possible for the government detaining law-abiding citizens, forcibly altering their brains with tranquilizer drugs, and slapping a stigmatizing label on them to be a “good experience”, as though, through tweaking and reform, the government entering your brain against your will could be perfected so that nobody found such biological violence against them a “bad experience”.

    “and that is the decision of a judge–not a psychiatrist or other physician.”

    Empty. We know around the world success rates of convincing a judge you are not brain diseased, in the face of a psychiatrist petitioning a judge to have the citizen’s right to own their body stripped from them, is like 3%. Numerous well done jurisprudence studies from top scholars have shown the “rubber stamp” judicial decision in commitment hearings to be perfunctory at best. The power imbalance, is plain for all to see. The judge is adjudicating a fight for liberty between a targeted person on what may be the worst week of their lives, they are extremely traumatized and distressed, even drugged and tranquilized, and they must somehow, make their case to a judge, in the face of a so called “biological” psychiatrist, who is seen by society as a wizard who can diagnose brain disease without even examining brains. To claim the psychiatrist isn’t the one initiating the legal jeopardy, and that the psychiatrist doesn’t hold 97% as much sway as the judge does, is just a blatant obfuscation. His appeal to “blind justice” is a completely offensive claim.

    “I do not defend this system as ideal or always in the best interests of the patient – nor was it a system created by psychiatrists”

    Governments worldwide didn’t just institute laws that allow the forced flooding of law-abiding citizens brains with toxic drugs out of thin air. They were convinced by so called “biological” psychiatrists that mentally and emotionally distressed citizens were a biological underclass unworthy of basic human rights. Biological psychiatry did this. Psychiatry whispered in government’s ear, and behind every single push for more involuntary psychiatry laws, you can find top psychiatrists and their professional associations advising government, lobbying government, how the dishonesty of Mr. Pies “don’t blame us” shtick, this “who me?”, kind of stuff, can be swallowed by anyone, is just amazing to me. I suspect it won’t be swallowed by everyone.

    “Indeed, over more than 25 years of practice, I witnessed many more patients benefit from psychiatric treatment than were harmed by it–”

    As though a “doctor” who forcibly initiates the doctor/patient relationships he pretends to unbiasedly critique can report on outcomes as though coercion doesn’t color them.

    It is a well-known fact among people who live outside the bubble of so called “biological” psychiatry’s fanaticism, that over a psychiatrist’s career, he witnesses coerced, compelled, and forced people, who he forced a “doctor/patient” relationship on against their will, appear thankful, just so they can win their freedom and get the hell out of there. It is also a fact, that many of a coercive psychiatrist’s former detainees, will avoid them like the plague for the rest of their lives, because they live in fear of their former government imposed psychiatrist. Like neocons who were the architects of the invasion of Iraq, they only have ears to hear, and eyes to see, the people who are happy that Saddam is gone. The collateral damage is always ignored. And of course, they’ll say “it was the President’s decision”, just like the psychiatrists hide behind the rubber stamp of the judge who comes to the hospital for a perfunctory “hearing” initiated by a psychiatrist who seeks to drug the targeted individual based on the psychiatrist’s religious beliefs about “brain diseases” they can’t even prove exist in the targeted citizen’s body.

    “Alas, I do not have confidence that further exchanges on the MIA website are likely to be fruitful or respectful. My experience with the MIA website – and based on the experience of one of my colleagues, who used to post on MIA – has not been positive. I believe that the profusion of anonymous and insulting comments – poorly-moderated by the website administrators – makes for a very unhelpful and demeaning forum.”

    Oh, a dig at both the administrators AND the audience. I do not have confidence that any interaction between psychiatry and I will be fruitful or respectful. My experience with psychiatry, and based on the experience of millions of people forcibly detained and meddled with by psychiatry over the last couple of hundred years, has not been positive. I believe that anonymity is not a crime. In fact in the words of late Aaron Schwartz “In 1787, when America’s framers wanted to argue for its Constitution, they published their arguments (the Federalist Papers) anonymously. Whistleblowers have released everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Downing Street Memos. Anonymous speech is a First Amendment right.”

    “I do understand that many on the MIA website have had very bad experiences with psychiatry, but that is no excuse for the abusive (and usually anonymous) comments that are often posted in the MIA forums.”

    Mr. Pies exercises the freedom of association his profession denies to others, he has the right to walk away, he has the right to not have our words go into his ears, enter his brain. The people who have had much more forced into their brain than mere words, well, he’s “sorry you had such a bad experience”. The people asphyxiated to death by psychiatric nurses during forced drugging take downs, who now lie in morgues with toe-tags on, they had a “bad experience”… Going to a concert, or a museum, is an “experience”. Having your brain assaulted, violated, damaged, by an out of control profession of fanatical drug company money soaked wannabe neurologists, posing as real doctors, who possess nothing but labels and drugs, and how see people as nothing but brains, having your very humanity denied, by goons armed with syringes who swarm you, hold you down, ignore your please for mercy, and brutally steamroll your consciousness because they view as a defective being, having your good name wrecked and stigma heaped upon you for life, having your entire family and everyone you know indoctrinated to view every word that comes out of your mouth as the meaningless chemical soup of a “brain disease”, is not a “bad experience”, Mr. Pies, it is the wholesale devastation of an innocent human being’s life.

    In my opinion it takes massive hubris, and deep, 25 year long indoctrination to talk like Mr. Pies does. So called “biological” psychiatrists, simply need to be stripped of the right to enter people’s biology by force. We won’t have to worry about stopping them testing or examining anybody’s biology by force, because these people simply don’t examine biology in clinical practice at all, they only flood never-proven-diseased biology with drugs. They don’t know what they are doing, and they are very dangerous to others. Will they go to their graves never admitting they were wrong?, never admitting they used the violent force of the state to impose their ridiculous and false “brain disease” quackery claims on others against their will? Never considering for one moment, that freely made decision they made in medical school to specialize in psychiatry (something fewer and fewer medical students find a compelling route), the freely made decision they made when young, to accept psychiatry’s belief system, is not a fait accompli among the public? Will “drug and label” psychiatrists admit that to force their beliefs on the public, physically force, their beliefs, into the bodies of the non-consenting, is a deeply unethical thing, a human rights abuse among the worst in history? People should have the right, to say no, to having their brain altered, by so-called biological psychiatrists, who don’t even examine biology! How did we get this deep into Alice in Wonderland?

    I live in fear of men like Pies. This constant fear isn’t an “experience”, it’s NOT some “thing that happened”, it is life under the forced psychiatry regime, life in a society that forces this quackery on people by force. It is daily life. Daily, I am forced to live in fear because my right to own my own body, can be ripped away from by a “brain disease” doctor who doesn’t even examine brains. So enjoy that freedom of association, that freedom to walk away from a dialogue Mr. Pies, that freedom to set the terms of the debate. I only wish I had the freedom to ignore your profession. Sadly, denying choice to the people psychiatry labels “patients”, is one of the first rites of initiation into the profession of psychiatry. The few med students who actually do find psychiatry a compelling specialty to enter, quickly learn that what those labeled “mentally ill” say or want, is irrelevant, the most important thing is that drugs get put in their “diseased” brains, regardless of what the targeted person has to say on the matter. 25 years living in the bubble where its completely normal for drugs and ideology to be forced on any stranger dragged into a psychiatric facility, it’s easy to see why Mr. Pies doesn’t appear to understand where the survivors of his profession’s actions are coming from.

  • To “Theinarticulatepoet”.

    Congratulations on leaving comments so offensive as to bring me out of retirement.

    While you may have been conditioned to accept discrimination on the basis of an ascribed group identity / membership rather than on the basis of your proven actions as an individual, you can expect resistance to such injustice from people who actually care about liberty.

    “The conversation needs to be much more grown up. Madness and flying jumbo jets don’t mix. Epilepsy and driving don’t mix.”

    First, marshaling epilepsy as an analogy for ‘mental illness’ and as a rationale for the removal of our rights is bunk. Epilepsy causes lapses of consciousness. The laws in place worldwide to take the right to drive vehicles from people who have suffered seizures often include ‘seizure free periods’, after which, the individual’s right to use a car are restored. Furthermore, epilepsy is a bona fide medical condition, and it is therefore appropriate that these laws involve recourse to physicians certifying that people are OK to drive.

    Medical control over who is worthy of the right to a career in aviation, or the right to defend oneself with a firearm, in terms of the subject matter of the article is a completely different kettle of fish to epilepsy, given the alleged ‘medical conditions’ psychiatrists label and drug are not even established bona fide brain diseases, and don’t involve drivers having seizures.

    I have never misused the tools called “cars”, “firearms”, “knives” or “aircraft”. If you believe in stripping rights from people not on the basis of them having committed crimes/misuses involving such tools in the past, but rather on the basis of a psychiatric label being applied to somebody, their ascribed membership in the minority group you like to call “mad people”, then I’m afraid you, as you readily admit, “probably won’t win many friends for saying this”.

    The laws that take away 2nd amendment rights on the basis of psychiatric profiling often do so indefinitely and with no regard for demonstrating the individual has misused the tool in question in the past. Further, they often are used to take away, for life, the 2nd amendment rights of veterans who have taken up arms in defense of the United States and her allies. Laws based on psychiatric profiling rather than individual criminal actions are completely contrary to the spirit of everything liberty stands for.

    The laws based on psychiatric profiling banning people with psychiatric labels from various careers, pilot, high level diplomat, politician, etc. are absolutely indefensible and discriminatory. Every comment you’ve left indicates a collectivist mindset, rather than a respect for INDIVIDUAL rights. Individuals who have never demonstrated through their actions as individuals, that they are dangerous people, should never be caught in some dragnet of discrimination. That is what this article was about, that is what respect for individual liberty is about.

    “If we want society to take the cause of mad people seriously we have to stop conducting the conversation like spoilt brats with no regard for anyone but ourselves… ”

    The “spoilt brats” and “mad people” you think should be just fine with being discriminated against by society when they have committed no crime against said society, may have a problem with your choice of epithets. You’ve shown how you would like to “conduct the conversation”.

    “In the UK if you are in hospital you are more likely to be legally detained, which is as it should be.”

    Detention under the UK’s involuntary psychiatry laws is carried out without judicial oversight. Tens of thousands of UK citizens are detained and forcibly drugged each year solely on the basis of a psychiatrist signing papers. And here you are criticizing a country, America, which still has vestiges of due process and judicial oversight. Glass house / stones. A discriminatory non-judicial “review board” stacked with shrinks is not judicial oversight.

    ” In the UK seclusion and restrain[sic] are much less common than in the US where that problem is much much worse (generally).”

    In the UK and throughout the Commonwealth countries forced drugging is carried out without court order, at a vastly higher per capita rate than in the United States, I’d advise everyone against this false consciousness that says if your brain is being forcibly drugged by the government but you’re not in shackles or locked in a small room, that your government is somehow treating you better. Just because the UK has managed to make biological restraint and biological seclusion “seem” more humane, doesn’t make it more humane. There are many survivors who would love the government have the decency to only touch the OUTSIDE of their bodies.

    The list of people who know what they are talking about, who say their lives would never have been destroyed had they been born in the United States where psychiatry is harder to force on people, is a very long list, make absolutely no mistake about that.

    I have never committed a violent crime, never shown anyone in society that I have misused firearms, and if I want to fulfill the dream of holding any career, any career at all, from flying a plane, to be being trusted with children, to jumping out of a plane, to defending myself at home, or my community as a police officer, my country in the military, my country with diplomatic secrets, to working in building demolition, to any “risky” thing in society, you have ZERO right to discriminate against me on the basis of a psychiatric label. Zero.

    This is what collectivist thinking does. If you want to be judged by the content of your psychiatric file, and not the content of your character and your demonstrated actions in this life, go right ahead. I won’t be standing for it, and I know plenty of the readers here won’t stand for psychiatric profiling either.

    CannotSay2013 is not a eugenicist, you should apologize to him, of other minority groups and CannotSay2013, you said of him “Essentially you have just written them off as inferior as well.” He did no such thing.

    I dare say I note the tone of virulent antiamericanism in your tone as well. While you may think it is on topic to this article to be telling Americans “their government is bought and paid for”, “their democracy is dead”, America’s poor are “non unionized Wal Mart wage slaves”, calling the gun rights groups “detached from reality” (nice choice of undermining phrase), you are seriously offending a lot of people, including me. The fact that several times in the comment thread you call for the conversation to be elevated or conducted in a mature way, after what you’ve had to offer, is simply laughable.

    Again, congratulations on leaving the most offensive set of comments I’ve seen on this site in months. In the face of such low blows, I cannot remain silent.

    I will now return to retirement. This will be my only comment.

    Citizens don’t forfeit individual rights by anything other than their actions. Ascribed membership to a group identity alone, an accusation of brain disease, a nationality, a race, whatever, should never be enough for them to be put in internment camps, detained in “hospitals”, or lose the right to own their bodies. This notion that we ought to accept being treated like children or second class citizens, that cops should beat down our doors and our property should be confiscated from us, our rights taken away, certain careers denied to us, on the basis of psychiatry’s claims, rather than our actions as individuals, is something that needs to be countered wherever it rears its ugly head. This article did that and I thought it was a good article. Congratulations on the author completing law school. I’d have said the same if he’d just completed pilot training.

  • I say let everyone prescribe who wants to prescribe. Do away with prescriptions all together.

    Get the government out of our bodies, and then maybe people will do their research before putting a substance in their body. And legalize all drugs.

    And of course, no force.

  • “I realized that most of the suicides I had witnessed had been after abrupt medication changes, that most of the bipolar patients had turned manic on antidepressants, and that many of the anxiety patients that were difficult to cure with cognitive therapy were actually suffering from akathesia.”

    This is the pat creation story of suicides, anxiety and “mania”, that some people believe.

    The meaning of someones thoughts during these times? The outside influences that helped them to think these thoughts, the inconvenient problem of responsibility, pushed to the side in favor of pharmacological explanations.

    It’s as if people believe the human condition was just peachy before these drugs came along.

  • Are you saying that the “wet brain”, decided to write the “intelligent” books?

    He decided to write them.

    Christopher Hitchens was a neocon warmonger with a flair for prose, nothing more.

    He could have planned much more than a massacre, he helped to cheer-lead a nation into an unjustified war.

    And I don’t blame the distilleries, vineyards, or breweries for his behavior.

    What is so compelling to you about letting the Colorado killer off the hook?

    Great, whatever, “personality” change. SO WHAT?

    People’s personalities change in relation to life events too.

    It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat people as responsible actors.

    “personality” is just a vague catch-all word for somebody subjective opinion generally of what someone thinks and does.

    Why do you even bother arguing? Everything’s just brains, and science is amoral.

    Where do you think ethics came from?

    Just “developed”? you don’t the culture we live in and the thousands of years of traditions are just as, if not more important than wild speculations about your alleged “brain state”?

  • “I think that some people here believe that working on the locked units is a walk in the park and that we go home in the evenings counting all of the big bucks we’ve made that day and feeling very proud of ourselves. ”

    I never said this with relation to “peers” who do this.

    There are psychiatric nurses etc who are very proud of themselves. Whether they find it a walk in the park, I could not care less.

    The folding of psychiatric survivors into paid employees in mental hospitals is a co opting coup for psychiatry.

    There are all sorts of rationalizations.

    We are going to have to agree to disagree.

  • “I wouldn’t worry about it, anonymous. They have free will. If they choose not to be affected by the shrinkage than they wont be. It will not change their personality in any way what so ever. ”

    Nice try. I never said neuroleptics don’t harm the brain. Sure, with a long time on these you will be as very impaired human being.

    Too impaired to teach yourself how to make bombs and train with guns and ammo in the desert for four months.

    The neuroleptics are multitudes of times more toxic than the SSRIs.

    And you know all those brain damaged long term alcoholics and meth heads? They account for the vast majority of heavily premeditated shooting sprees, not.

    Hey these drugs sound pretty toxic. Glad I got them out of my system ASAP.


  • It’s official then.

    The government penalty for the crime of thinking the thoughts prohibited in the DSM, is to be chemically lobotomized, to the point of forced alteration of your grey matter volumes.

    Everybody please abide by the law, and don’t dare think the prohibited thoughts. Because the brain rapists are authorized to alter your brain by force.

    Think you’re talking to God? That’s an immediate forced grey matter reduction.

    Dare to feel suicidal? Again, serious crime with a serious brain volume reduction penalty.

    Thinking the CIA is spying on you? Whoa! Don’t even go there. The government will put your brain in a sling!

    More evidence, that if you’ve raped an innocent human being’s brain with neuroleptic drugs, you’re evil.

  • “Would I be working with any of these people if they weren’t detained? No.”

    That’s the key phrase.

    Language such as “working with” when used in relation to a party who had choice in the matter, irks me.

    I’m sure a lot of anti death penalty advocates would love to counsel and outreach and smooth the way for death row inmates, cook them a nice last meal, look into their eyes while the life drains out of them in the death chamber, but the way I look at it, most of them don’t take a job on payroll in the execution system.

    Like I said you’re better than most, you’re hardly evil, but meh, I like it when people value voluntarism and voluntary interaction.

  • You couldn’t disagree more. Fine. If you want your freedom taken away, go lobby for “Malene’s Law”, and make sure it only applies to YOU personally. Not anyone else.

    If it stands a chance of ensnaring me, I’m against such a law.

    I own my body, and unless I’ve committed a crime, I deserve freedom. As does everybody.

    Real supporters of human rights don’t make exceptions. All humans deserve human rights at all times.

    What you seem to be saying is, distressed humans don’t deserve their freedom, and by extension, that all people should be forced to live in fear of the “people from the government who are here to help us”.

    “Stopping the self destruction is a valid concern. ”

    It may be a valid concern but it is not a valid reason for a set of laws to take away their freedom.

    And I note, there are many self-destructive behaviors, such as eating too much, that you’re prepared to allow adults the freedom to indulge in, with forcing you definition of so called “help” on them.

    Using government force to “help” people is a recipe for destroyed lives.

  • “Yes, it is the law, and in the absolute most extreme cases it makes sense. Violence to self or others, or the inability to care for the most basic of ones own needs can necessitate involuntary commitment. ”

    This is the ‘other people’ deserve forced psychiatry but not me argument.

    Violence to others is a police matter, violence to self is something violent hypocrites use to selectively justify ripping freedom away from certain self-harmers and not others.

    You’re allowed to stuff your face with fast food and give yourself a heart attack, but if you ever dare take to your wrist with a knife, you’re going to lose your freedom.

    Society only pretends to care about freedom, and society only pretends to care about protecting some people from themselves in some instances and not others.

    It would be better if the busy bodies would just let people alone.

  • “4) Scientific evidence supports: A) the brain responds to dopamine blocking drugs by making more dopamine receptors. B) When the dopamine blocker is suddenly removed, there will be a sudden increase in dopamine C) Insomnia is a sure bet…. D) Consistent with *patient* reports: “Haven’t slept in … several days!””

    Not sleeping, is not the reason stated for committing somebody. There has to be someone who doesn’t like the content of the person’s thoughts.

    Nobody can prove any “dopamine flooding” is the cause of the prohibited thoughts.

    I see how you view your job, you’re better than most, but the way I play it, is I boycott earning any money from people’s detention, don’t set foot in an evil place, and I’m happy that way.

  • “I supply the physiological explanation for the *symptoms* that led to the admission. I say in a very matter of fact tone- ” Jim Bob is experiencing an episode of dopamine flooding due to the increased number of D2 receptors created by his long term ingestion (by prescription) of Haldol . Sans Haldol (his choice) he is suffering severe withdrawal.””

    This is a very disappointing load of quackery to be reading from you.

    If I was ever your captive detainee, and you ever DARED reduce my experience to some pathetic guesswork “episode of dopamine flooding”, I’d probably wish I could sue you, but like most captives, I’d probably be powerless to sue you, because you’re free to theorize about quack pat biological explanations for people’s distress.

    Oh, did you get that everyone? Whatever thoughts are going through your mind, and then you’re hospitalized? Sinead’s answer? “Dopamine flooding”.

    How do you justify feeding your mouth by taking away the freedom of innocent people?

  • “Once you get withdrawal symptoms, your nervous system is damaged. ”

    I see. And the name of the doctor who proved your nervous system is damaged? and the tests he carried out to prove it?

    Are people who go trough smoking withdrawal or alchohol or coffee withdrawal, are their nervous systems “damaged” as well?

    And that the damage occurred at the time you say it did?

    “How would you, for instance, like to lose the ability to sleep? That’s for years, not days. (That happened to me.”

    People die after a few months without sleep even if they have fatal insomnia disease. And unless you have a real disease, the longest anyone has been able to stay awake is like 18 days.

    “Any withdrawal symptoms at all represent neurological damage.”

    I’ll remember that next time around someone who is moody from quitting smoking. I’ll be sure to tell them it is just the “neurological damage” talking.

    Sure, bodies adjust when a drug is pulled, but to go around with the certainty that you do, about what is allegedly damaged/happening inside your nervous system, isn’t scientific.

    “Even people who get over the symptoms in a couple of weeks”

    Are those people (millions of them exist, and millions more had no great problems stopping at all), are they “neurologically damaged”?

    There is always much more to the story than mere “luck”, and SPECULATIONS about “neurological damage”.

    Many people have a hard time adjusting to life without all sorts of substances they have habitually used. It is a more complex story than what is often told on various “SSRI withdrawal syndrome” websites.

  • Nonsconstructive posters, trolls.

    Coming from someone whose hit parade of personal attacks against others in recent days include the words

    ““Wankers”, “Idiots”, “God-damned”, “Garbage”, “Bozos”, “self-indulgent crap”, “Idiot savants”.

    That’s rich altostrata. Real rich.

  • “What seems clear is that this is fundamentally a humane approach to talking to people in distress.”

    Talking to people can only ever be “framed” as a “therapy”. The people that talk, can only ever be “framed” as “clinicians” and “patients”.

    But what two humans talking to each other and helping to work through problems will never be, is something “medical” in nature.

    Therefore the ubiquitous medicalizing language that plagues even this, is nothing but an affectation, and bound to get in the way of progress.

  • I know. He spammed us with 3 successive posts on the same point. And called me a spammer. I suppose JeffreyC believes if he ever gets a DWI, he should not be prosecuted, and instead, a beer brewery should be sued for making a magic drug that somehow makes brain chemistry decide to grab his car keys.

  • “continues spamming his/her opinion that the brain has nothing to do with human thought or behavior”

    I’ve never said that. Find a quote of mine and show me where I said that.

    “Faulty brain chemistry makes a man smack himself repeatedly in the chest while grunting – plausible. Faulty brain chemistry makes a man think he’s a villain in a movie on a mission to carry out a violent plot – impossible.”

    Are you aware that you just said “faulty brain chemistry” was responsible for the Aurora Theater massacre?

    Good for you. Enjoy your belief. It is not a belief based on any evidence or scientific understanding. If you think it is, I’ll be patiently waiting for the court case of James Holmes, where the defense lays out its detailed evidence of brain chemistry, and wins a Nobel Prize and takes the world by storm causing every critic of psychiatry’s quackery to forever hold their peace.

    You sound like you may be someone who’d like to blame their brain for something?

    Or maybe you’re just in the business of letting calculating mass murderers off the hook?

    Either way, your comparison of a four month long planned massacre, perfectly timed and armed by a self-trained bomb maker and self-training desert target practicing gunman, to verbal tics, is not persuasive to me.

    I’ll stick to believing Holmes was an angry young man, you can keep your head in the neurological clouds of not being to prove anything is diseased about his brain.

    You call ME a spammmer, yet go and post 3 posts saying the exact same thing.

  • Matthew,

    Here my comment, the newest, is buried on page 2 of the comments.

    This site, please, needs to be like the rest of the internet, where people can see the most recent comments first if they want to. As in the almost universal feature of being able to order comments in terms of “newest first”, found on almost every site out there.

  • How did I miss this particular bar fight that has been going on for days? I honestly didn’t even notice it. Wow. Some serious discord here.

    I don’t have that much of a problem with Steve Moffic. From the first couple of blogs he wrote, I knew where he stood. I knew he was an editor at Psychiatric Times, and I knew what this told me. I knew he’d only recently been exposed to Whitaker’s work, etc.

    I’ve read all these comments, and if he did say he “couldn’t remember the last time he was involved in forced treatment”, and then you found the 2010 Psychiatric Times article where he admits to being involved in a community commitment forced drugging case, well then, that could be seen as incongruous with what he said here.

    Moffic seems to rile some people here, he doesn’t bother me, he doesn’t even approach the level of hypocrisy of others, I’m thinking about the stealth electroshock psychiatrist in the reform movement here.

  • “even though many people give convincing stories of how these drugs can be more difficult to stop than heroin, speed or other illegal drugs.”

    Many people give convincing stories of their memory loss and injury after electroshock, too, but Dr. Healy dismisses these people in his book on electroshock.

    And wouldn’t one need to be an ex-junkie and an ex-antidepressant taker too, to be able to compare the two?

    And what’s with this?

    “In the case of drugs like these, your doctor may object that this use is off-label. He may ask where’s the evidence? If this happens, you may need to find a doctor who is prepared to explore some of these issues with you.”

    So here, he advocates finding doctors to prescribe off-label, but every other example of off-label prescribing is evil and constantly pummeled by Dr. Healy.

    Which one is it?

    Horror stories of drug withdrawal are true and compelling and worthy of compassion and consideration, electroshock survivors meanwhile are dismissed when they talk about their own “adverse events”.

    And which one is it also?

    Off-label is evil, or find a doctor to do off-label?

    This guy makes me stare, and stare at the following warning:

    “Please keep comments civil and refrain from personal attacks. Comments that fail to meet this guideline will be removed.”

    It is very hard to control oneself in the presence of such a hypocrite.

  • It’s a good guide. And there is a conversation happening on this very topic in the forums.

    I’m glad I’m no longer on psychiatric drugs. I used to be, that was a choice my government and the people who choose to work in forced psychiatry stole from me, and it is very important for those of you have had that choice ripped away from you, to consider carefully whether you ever would have taken these drugs had you been given informed consent.

    If your government coercion has died down, who knows, maybe you’re lucky enough to own your body this year and not currently be a government slave, maybe it is time to reassess for yourself anew, the pros and cons, of these drugs.

    One thing can be said for certain, while there may be a harm reduction approach to coming off psychiatric drugs, there will never be a way to reduce the harm done to so many people by the brutality and cruelty of forced drugging.

  • Why then wasn’t she “taken over” by the urge to drive to the store to buy more knives?

    And why did this intelligent choice making wonder drug, Clozapine, decide to target some other person in her life? Why the mother?

    And then why did the drug as the mother to hide the knives? or did the niece ask the mother to hide the knives. It’s hard to keep up with which decisions the drug is making and which decisions the niece is making.

    Why did she have to wait for the doctor to ‘take her off’, if she felt murderous, why would you wait for the doctor to make a decision?

    Could anything else have been going on in your neice’s life, like, for instance, being told she generally doesnt have any free will, because she is allegedly brain diseased?

    People can look at a knife, and have their doubts as to whether they can control themselves, but what is the largest seed planter of doubts about self control and free will in the mental patient’s life? psychiatry itself, not the drugs.

    Given the average mental patient cycles through many many drugs during their psychiatric drug taking career, and given no thought, can occur, until it occurs, there is a first for everything, from getting a certain job, never happened before, getting a certain haircut, never happened before, and staring at a knife, pondering what would happen if you picked it up and killed your mother, all these things are just human thoughts and actions, and life is short, given a new occurence is bound to coincide with the latest in the hit parade of whatever psychiatric drug the person is on, people tend to blame Clozapine, its a nice neat story, but fails to take into account the myriad inputs into your niece’s mind coming from a world telling her this is what mental patients do, they look at knives, and begin to doubt their agency, after all, that is what hollywood, and psychiatry itself, drums into their heads.

    Drugs can help, tip people to that state where they doubt themself three times more than if they are clean and sober, but drugs don’t in and of themselves cause good or bad human actions to be made.

    Just as we don’t put distillers and brewers in the dock for bar fight / DUI murders, people need to take responsibility for themselves. Or, if they are a parent of somebody, a so called “carer”, they ought to pay close attention to the process of psychiatric brainwashing that they all too often actively encourage in their own adult children.

    To let a four year old watch a violent movie is negligent parenting. To let a 19 year old slowly come to internalize the mental patient narrative of how they USED TO BE a fully equal human being with free will, BUT NOW THEY are a brain diseased automaton, is to basically hang your kid out to dry.

    And then we blame whatever drug, happened to be in the system of the person, on the week, month, year, that their self-doubt over their own free will peaked. Sure, maybe the drug played a role of some sort, but never enough to let the humans off the hook. There are many humans lying to, and filling young people’s head with self fulfilling prophecies of violence, psychiatrists are great at getting young people to doubt themselves. Psychiatrists are fanatastic at smashing self esteem and reducing a person to an anxious wreck who develops TOTAL perceieved dependency on the alleged expertise of psychiatry to solve their life problems. Every single nuance of life from then on, becomes to the person a script learned subtly, on how a mental patient is supposed to act, and think, and most importantly, doubt.

    People doubt themselves more than ever after being psychiatrized.You stare at that college application, you doubt. You’re a brain diseased former normal now, you’re not as capable as you once thought you were. You stare at that attractive potential partner across the bar, and you doubt yourself. You’re a labeled social pariah now, a brain diseased former normal, so doubt yourself, don’t try.

    Then comes a night, where you open the kitchen drawer, and see some shiny knives. You focus in on them in your drugged haze, and you start to doubt.

    I have no doubt, that the toxic self doubt, that psychiatry unleashed in the lives of the people it declares “brain diseased”, is EQUALLY, if not more toxic than psychiatric drugs themselves.

    Psychiatry’s unique ability to take formerly independent, self-assured, and capable, confident young people, and liquidate them into a steaming pile of toxic self-doubt, is staggering to behold, and to live through. It has no doubt played a HUGE role in hundreds of thousands of violenct crimes, suicides, whatnot.

    The drugs help the process along, but they are far, far, far from the whole story. Like a date rapist with their roofies, the real evil of the situation lies not in the chemical structure or effects of the roofies, or the liver of the victim.

  • I strongly disapprove of this article.
    I expect this comment to stay when the webmaster has figured out the massive problem with how this op ed was posted. Readers must click on the first link in the related posts, to read what was intended to be on this page….

    These two authors simply don’t get it:

    “Fundamentally, human behaviour is determined by neurotransmitter functioning”, they say.

    I know plenty of argumentative people who have aggressive responses to psychiatry, for very understandable reasons that don’t involve making wild speculations about their aggressive response being “caused by neurotransmitters”

    The article then goes on to blame the anger of young black disenfranchised afro caribbean britons who are being forcibly drugged, on liver enzymes.

    Where is the human understanding of why people forced into the mental patient role, the most degrading role in society, where is the human understanding OF WHY WE ARE ANGRY?

    Or is this site turning into biopsychiatry explanations-r-us?

    Did the authors of this article even bother to ask any people labeled mental patients why they are angry?


    And at the end they call for what will be presumably FORCED genotype testing…. disgusting.

    More pat conclusions from the land of Healy, the UK. Where drugs directly cause violence, and all bar fights in the history of man are caused by neurotransmitter effects of ethanol, no doubt.


    What neurotransmitter reductionist explanation will we pin a psychiatrist’s violence on? or the nurses’ violence against people labeled patients?

    Or will we blame a drug? maybe coffee.

    There is a human side to every human action. ASK A HUMAN TODAY.

    Or gaze into stats about livers, and black people, and one study about asians.

    Major tranquilizers are toxic, toxic, toxic… but one thing they are not, is the greatest cause of violence in psychiatric facilities. These drugs came about to tranquilize, to subdue, to shut people up, and they do this, very well.

    If there is any increase in violence as more minorities get put on community commitment in the UK, it might serve to ask them if they enjoyed being assaulted every two weeks with a depot injection, and from going from what they thought was the bottom of society, to a whole new bottom they never knew existed, the mental patient role. When the system itself is violent, and the job the staff in the system choose is violent, why is that massive amount of violence NOT EVEN COUNTED OR GIVEN MORAL EQUIVALENCY in this paper.

    Or…. you could wax lyrical about liver enzymes.

    Maybe someone could take the logic from this paper, and go and do a paper about bar fights and alcohol and race, too?

    This paper is a real come down in quality from the last two brilliant Op-Eds. A real come down in quality. In spades.

    How dare anyone dehumanize the violence in our community, to nothing but biology, when there is so much else to the story, and completely ignore psychiatry’s violence against us, and society’s violence against us.

    This is an outrageous paper now that I think about it more. This paper, is the exact logical equivalent of blaming ANY MINORITY GROUP’s rate of violence, on the chemical action of alchohol, and thier alleged inferior livers. Such a thing, would be scientific racism, pat biological determinism, complete ignorance of the cultural history of the minority group over the past hundreds of years of culture, and a completely offensive whitewash of the truth of the matter.

    In comparison,

    This paper blaming chemicals and livers for violence in my community of people with psychiatric labels IS DEVOID OF CONTEXT, HUMANITY, HUMAN EXPLANATIONS, AND UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE LIVE IN THE HORRIFIC DEGRADED POSITION OF THE MENTAL PATIENT ROLE.

    Poor areas of urban slums wracked by poverty and despair? whole communities of unemployed welfare dependency? fathers beating children, husbands beating wives? domestic violence, binge drinking, alcohol abuse daily, guys beating wives, punching people in the face, neglecting kids, WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED.


    Or all “caused by” psychiatric drugs. No context exists in the world of the drug blamers.



  • Great can we finally put to rest the ridiculous mindless citing (never properly cited) figure of “1% of the population” that we hear all the time. It’s up to the capricious psychiatry profession to name-call whoever it likes, at various rates, fluctuating through time, and I’ve NEVER seen the origin of the BS 1% figure. It’s a lie that psychiatry’s name-calling was ever static, any time.

    The fake medical apparatus of “journal articles” and “author researchers” in relation to psychiatric name-calling, is just what we are up against. These people think they are serious medical researchers.

  • Anything would be better than the hideous apartheid dating site ‘nolongerlonely’.

    A dating ‘for the mentally ill’ website where they:

    “encourage anyone considering membership to first consult with their psychiatrist and/or social worker.”

    And anyone who dares question psychiatry gets their profile deleted.

    Success stories include:

    A Mother’s Thanks

    I just wanted to tell you what a GREAT idea this website is. My schizophrenic daughter who was diagnosed about 4 years ago has had a hard time meeting people who understand her illness, and who aren’t fearful of her because of it.”

    Thankful Mother

    I read about this site on I think what you have here is wonderful. My son carries a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and dating is painful for him. I just wanted to thank you for this outlet!”

    A dating site where people’s mothers speak for the people who use the site.

    Upon signing up you’re asked ‘diagnosis-check all that apply’, whereupon you’re offered a DSM menu.

  • 50,000. Hmm.

    49,000 odd war criminals and one platoon of heroes.

    At least we have established a beachhead.

    We could go deeper on this…

    50,000 psychiatrists = 40,000 spouses? who decided to marry a psychiatrist? That makes 40,000 spouses who voluntarily lie down in a bed with a psychiatrist, and many more than 40,000 who get mechanically restrained to a bed by a psychiatrist.

    50,000 psychiatrists = 80,000 children of psychiatrists? 80,000 kids who get read bedtime stories by a psychiatrist who loves them, and millions of kids who get their growing brains assaulted by a psychiatrist who views them as a malfunctioning piece of meat.

    50,000 psychiatrists = 100,000 parents who are just proud as punch that little Jimmy grew up to ‘help those brain diseased mentally ill people for a living ain’t he a good boy, rich and successful too’. (But of course many of his ex-patients hate his guts for the human rights abuses he carried out on them)

    I wonder how much money it costs the taxpayer when a psychiatrist is added to the world. Most psychiatrists are going to leave a litany of iatrogenic disease in their wake, millions of dollars in disability payments, millions in lost productivity from the people whose lives they kneecap and destroy…

    There was a fork in the road, at medical school, every one of them could have become a primary carer, or a cardiologist, and actually been of service to society. Instead, 50,000 menaces to society sitting in a football stadium cheering on their pseudoscience, signing innocent people’s lives away with their Abilify logo emblazoned pens.

    What time is it? Check the Abilify plastic wall clock. It’s time for this pseudoscience to GO.

    To prison.

  • Feedback. The forums, and the new blogosphere thing, and the recovery stories, and the op-eds, have always been too far down the main page. It’s like a scrolling down odyssey where your mouse wheel finger becomes arthritic. It’s a long way down.

    The New York Times website is seven columns across, five for content, two for ads.

    Instead of three across, this site could at least be four, to bring some of the content up to the eye level of the main page upon first sight.

  • “He was the son of an academic psychiatrist.”

    What a dangerous position to be in.

    ” The young man’s father commented that he also agreed, but could never voice this opinion in public because his peers would be highly disapproving.”

    Such is the group-think associated with psychiatrists. Imagine trying to find one brave enough to disagree with his colleagues if your very liberty depends on it. Good luck.

    Smelling patients? I didn’t know they did that. Sounds like an unpleasant part of the job.

    There is much more to the story of how psychiatry is in no way scientific than drug company studies. The entire concept of labeling unwanted behaviors and thoughts ‘medical problems’ is utterly flawed.

    The only benign form of psychiatry is not psychiatry really as it is known today at all, some form of counseling on life’s problems, is what I am talking about.

  • “There is one other new interactive feature we will be launching in the near future that I am excited to see in action. More on that soon!”

    A cryptic surprise? Hmm.

    I wonder what it is? Crosswords? Games? Psychiatry scrabble?

    A paypal donate button where we can fund lawsuits to destroy psychiatry?

    A call in internet radio talk show?

    Prizes? like a trip to a country with the least psychiatrists?

    I am curious now. I want to know what it is. Interactive, and coming soon, hmm.

  • People should be able to buy whatever drugs they want. It is their body. I like the idea of pharmacies 100 years ago. You could buy whatever you needed, including pain killers without being treated like a criminal.

  • This piece is utterly incoherent. I’ll never understand what is so special about this guy that he gets to be the sole syndicated columnist whose every blog post gets reposted from his personal blog, to here, a community where he’s never even graced us with his presence to interact with the audience in the comments, nor tailored a piece of writing specifically for this audience. I just don’t get it.

  • “I’ve long been frustrated with transpersonal psychology for not having the courage or moral integrity of Szasz or Laing.”

    Laing forcibly drugged people at Kingsley Hall. Szasz wouldn’t dream of it. In terms of moral integrity, the two names don’t belong together. Szasz has it in spades. Laing was a different story. Nice cute theorist, but not much else. In my opinion.

    I like the secular psychiatric survivor movement. I hope it stays secular and gets even more secular.

    Romanticizing what gets labeled “madness”, ain’t the way to go.

    I’m pleased to see you have gravitated here though Seth Farber. You wrote a couple of books that are very interesting and an important stepping stone in the tapestry for people who are just starting to question psychiatry’s ideology.

  • Do they have community commitment forced drugging laws in Vermont?

    What will the psychiatrist who is being paid over 300 grand of the 1 million dollar budget be doing at this soteria house?

    When someone becomes violent, will they be treated like an ordinary criminal and the cops called, or a brain diseased criminal and sent to the locked ward?

    I say this, not to diminish this great success of funding and the promise it holds. I think it is great, but I have questions.

    I would also point out, that there is no way I could work with legislators and lobby for this like Steven has, he’s a calmer person than I am. If faced with a legislator, I want to know why they support violent and cruel forced biopsychiatry laws, and I find it hard to play nice.

  • There are some biographical details for Steven at the bottom of his recent Op Ed.

    Regular bloggers, like you, and not Op-Ed and Recovery Story writers get pride of place on the ‘about’ page with a photo and bio details, I guess it is just to save space, and it wouldn’t make sense for the site to fill up the about page dozens and dozens of head shots. People who have said they’ll make a regular commitment to blogging, get their bio details up on the about page. I hope Steven does become a regular blogger. His Op-Ed and recovery story, are both strong pieces of writing.

  • One of the best. A personal interpretation of your own life, snatched from the jaws of the ideology that would presume to impose its interpretation on you.

    But isn’t it tragic and sad, that if this entire essay were to be recited by the author at a commitment hearing, it would be used as further evidence of his brain disease and used to justify caging the author and assaulting his brain with forced drugging.

    While individuals can, with great painstaking work, carve out some solidity and freedom for themselves, society stands ever ready to snatch it away.

    Naming and shaming Dr. Grof, was necessary and brave.

  • Great article. Sad reality of the current situation. Ted your work now and in the past had meaning and your name and efforts will always be remembered with deep respect.

    The main problem is, 9 out of 10 people believe in the Church of Psychiatry’s fake brain diseases. When millions voluntarily line up to swallow the lies and the drugs, the minority complaining about having these beliefs forced on us the government, appear completely alien to the true believers.

    Not believing in psychiatry’s lies, in 2012, is like being a member of a small community in the middle ages who dared doubt the Pope and the Church. People learn to keep their head down, try and educate and protect themselves from the brain rapists as best they can, and try and get through this life intact.

    We are living in a world where most people are a member of the psychiatric cult. The cult members are overwhelmingly legally, politically and economically powerful, and think nothing of breaking any individual on the wheel of submission to their ideology.

    It is very dangerous, deadly, to be right when most of society is wrong.