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Psychiatry: Loss of Rights by Diagnosis
Psychiatry is destroying lives. The previous two articles tell of how one person lost her freedom and the horrific treatment she received. Here is her situation today. This can happen to anyone.
Part 1: Psychiatric Incarceration: It Can Happen to Anyone.
Part 2: How Psychiatry Holds onto Its Victims: Creation of a No-Win Situation
Jody’s Diminished Life
All the treatment did was force Jody to take drugs, and humiliate and abuse her. Through three rounds of psychiatric hospitalization in less than a year, they destroyed her life:
- Her career is gone.
- Her health has been devastated. Before, she was slim and in superb health. None of the following problems existed before she was forcibly drugged:
- The drugs have caused her to put on weight, and so far, try as she might, she’s only been able to lose a small fraction of it.
- She has tremors in her left foot and it feels like it’s asleep. She has tardive dyskinesia, uncontrollable movements, in her lower jaw.
- Her friends have told her that her smile, previously described as “radiant”, has changed. She is, in fact, barely able to make her face move into a smile, even though she feels like she’s smiling. (Try to imagine what that must be like.)
- Her blood pressure, which her lifelong exercise habit had always kept low, is now high.
- Her hair has thinned and gone gray and brittle.
- Her skin is dry with hot crawling sensations all the time.
- She now has osteoporosis and possibly osteoarthritis.
- Her life partner is gone. And in the process of leaving, he sold their home. Because she’d been diagnosed as mentally ill, she had no say in the process.
- She is now homeless, left with no option but to stay with family that sees her as a problem.
- She carries the label of schizophrenic.
- To add insult to incredible injury, they are now dunning her for tens of thousands of dollars to pay for the incarceration and torture that she tried to refuse!
On release, the drugs initally made it impossible for Jody to think clearly. Apparently, taking away everything a person requires to survive is the goal of treatment. Once that’s accomplished, the incarcerated “patients” are deemed well enough to release. Reduction to speaking little beyond gibberish and, best of all, to inability to construct a coherent sentence stating what has just happened, makes a patient safe to release—safe for the reputation of the maniacs who staff these institutions.
The Tools of Psychiatric Incarceration
The primary “charitable” organization, NAMI, provides support to relatives and friends, and gives them tools to keep people labeled mentally ill in their new place: permanently debilitated pharmaceutical drug takers. No effort is spared to keep them in their role as fodder for the mental health industry.
Diagnosis of psychiatric disorders is, itself, a farce. Patients report on a bewildering variety of diagnoses. The absurdity has reached Kafkaesque proportions. Read Anne C. Woodlen’s account of being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia while rendered unconscious in intensive care to see how truly insane such diagnosis is.
The claims of a physical or chemical basis for schizophrenia, bipolar, or almost all other psychiatric diagnoses have long been discounted, as clearly reported by people like Dr. Peter Breggin and Robert Whitaker’s book, Mad in America. There are no tests for psychiatric diagnoses.
The psychiatrist’s “bible”, the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual, is a farce. Aside from the fact that the title itself is a lie, as there are no statistics involved in it and it isn’t based on stats, the fact is that there’s little science behind it. The majority of people who determine what goes into the manual have close financial ties to Big Pharma. Diagnoses get into the manual by a vote of those people, the majority of whom can be presumed to be biased by their financial and career interests.
As Gertrude Stein once stated in a different context, with regard to psychiatry, “There is no there there.”
Loss of Rights by Diagnosis
Jody’s in a Catch-22 situation: Her physical and mental health are both at risk from taking the drugs on which psychiatry insists. Society itself—the police, government agencies, and even family—are all organized to be enforcers. If Jody steps outside what any of them want—whether it be a certain behavior or demeanor or drugged into submission or working or not working—she can find herself dragged back for more abuse and soul-destroying drugging.
Jody has lost her civil rights. She has been turned into a debtor in the process. A person with problems was grabbed, drugged, and diagnosed so that even her right to decide what can be put into her body has been taken from her. She was diagnosed with a condition she’d shown no signs of having. Her symptoms were of the distress from unresolved grief, overwork, and stresses impressed on her by the fear of being locked up with no explanation and the fear induced by drugging with toxic chemicals that threw her body into overdrive, and later, after increasing the drugs to keep her from complaining, turned her into little more than a zombie, a person with flat affect. She had been drugged into unresponsiveness, and this, too, was used to diagnose her.
Now that the drugs have damaged her, Jody has no rights. If she wants to wean herself off the drugs, she’s at risk of being arrested by police and hauled back off to a hellhole for further drugging into submission. And then charged for it! How can she explain the past year away to potential future employers? How is she ever going to clear the debt that now that she carries a millstone of debt around her neck?
Overwork. Lack of time to grieve. These are not unusual today. Given the right stresses, what has happened to Jody can happen to anyone.
What doubt can possibly exist that the psychiatric system has run amok, that it has designed a web that drags innocents into it and entangles them with more and more strangling psychiatric silk to hold them there?
Info on Psychiatric Resistance and Support for Survivors
Obviously, Gaia Health does not support NAMI or the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), both of which seem to exist solely to press psychiatry’s diagnoses and Big Pharma’s drugs.
- Blue Panthers, an unabashedly anti-psychiatry organization
- Law Project for Psych Rights, founded by a psych survivor who’s an attorney, very active and knowledgeable
- MindFreedom, very active and well-regarded by psychiatry survivors
Philip Shane did the photo above. Please take look at his PhotoStream.
*Relatives and anyone else referenced are changed to disguise her. However, all the particulars are accurate. Do not believe that it can’t happen to you because you aren’t in America. I recall my shock in the UK at being told by a woman I knew and had worked beside. She’d been forced onto medication. Her home had been taken from her to pay for the treatment—all against her wishes. She sobbed in front of me. Any hope she’d had was gone. Without her home, she had no place to go. Could anything more effectively destroy hope?
Tagged big pharma, diagnosis and statistical manual farce, dsm farce, dsm psychiatry, no there there, pharmaceutical drugs, pharmaceuticals, pseudo-science, psychiatry, psychiatry diagnosis, psychiatry loss of rights, schizophrenia
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