About fourteen and a half years ago, I wrote an article which has been the third-most popular out of 465 on this blog. This was my reaction to E. Fuller Torrey's claim in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that to reduce mass shooting incidents in America all we need to do is validate psychiatry, and then consistently lock up and drug the people whom psychiatrists "diagnose" as mentally ill and dangerous.
I argued as rationally as I could that Torrey was a fanatic, proposing the use of supposed "medicine" to punish and restrain people; and by such proposal, he proved that psychiatry is not, or at least not entirely, a medical specialty, and it is definitely not help. I said and am still convinced almost a decade and a half later, that Fuller Torrey will ultimately be held responsible for far more harm to society than any mass shooter. What is called "forensic psychiatry" (involuntary "hospitalization" and court-ordered/forced "treatment") is a giant dodge for modern people who are afraid to protect themselves and their families and unable to witness anything un-pretty in their wimpy, over-protected lives.
People are desperately afraid of insanity. They are willing and even anxious to turn over the whole subject and all its myriad implications and phenomena to "experts". If a child from a suburban family "speaks in tongues" without religious upbringing on that phenomenon, it's probably "schizophrenia" which a "doctor" should "treat". Everyone bemoans, but also ignores the facts, that there is no cure for "schizophrenia" and any two properly (i.e., strictly in accordance with DSM criteria) "diagnosed" schizophrenics may have no symptoms in common at all. The "expertise" we are so happy to turn these problems over to is bullshit, as openly admitted by some of the field's most prominent practitioners.
I reviewed the old blog article today, immediately after reading Betsy Levy Paluck's long Atlantic piece, "The Most Overlooked Value of Political Protest," which centers around predictable left-liberal issues like climate policy and reproductive choice, but also offers very valuable insight that applies anywhere on any political spectrum. What the author calls "a spiral of silence" is the snowballing tendency for silence to beget silence in conversations that approach controversial issues. People get more and more careful to never hurt anyone's feelings or let any voices ever be raised, until everyone just stops talking about anything but the weather for fear of stating a minority opinion. This undermines the kind of informal "common knowledge" about what other people think, which is essential for a democratic society.
Paluck suggests that we should speak up and become politically involved: i.e., we should protest. I think that is even more true for involuntary "patients" in state nuthouses than it is for regular people who are not accused of any "mental illness" alleged to make them dangerous to themselves or others. Many of my clients are protesters, against the meds they hate taking, against the condescending, dehumanizing attitudes of so-called "mental health professionals," and against the ugly corruption, outright perjurous lies, and wasteful bureaucracy in the psychiatric plantation system of the Illinois Department of Human Services.
I can describe grim details of endemic sexual abuse in state-operated institutions: female social workers have oral sex sessions with their male "patients" three times a week for years, only steps away from doctors and administrators specially trained to detect, prevent and report those crimes; male STA's and librarians seduce female "patients" and pass them around to each other like real chattel slaves; female "patients" get pregnant in the institutions and nobody knows whose fault that is, so there are well-worn routines for coercing them to have cheap abortions or hysterectomies; and everyone, EVERYONE, sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil, as their Illinois Attorney General's office, taxpayer-funded legal counsel argues that they are all immune from any prosecution or civil claim, as experts who must be accorded discretion and who can never be contradicted by lawyers or mental patients (God forbid!!) about their almighty professional judgment or their "medical" diagnoses and treatments.
The bottom line is, most people think that everyone else rationally believes involuntary mental patients to always be the problem, and their overseers, the mental health professionals, to be the only (albeit occasionally, rarely, slightly imperfect) solution. So nobody ever discusses the things I see every day in my practice of law. Good, normal people don't know anything about state psychiatric "hospitals," and they don't want to know. This is why protests by psychiatric "patients" are probably increasing and need to increase a lot more.
The question is whether such protests will be noticed. "Not taking your meds" was long agreed to be an unsocial behavior. Laura Delano and Cooper Davis were, first of all, protesters just because they stopped taking meds. They are getting noticed, big-time now. I sent Laura's book to a patient who is protesting from inside Packard Mental Health Center yesterday. (I had to cut the hardcover off and turn it into a paperback so security won't have an easy excuse to withhold it from my client.)
If Unshrunk is released in a paperback format, I'll buy a dozen for clients, who'll be "...Takin' it to the streets!" What a party, man....
Then God help the IDHS nuthouse administrators.
