‘Not guilty your Honour,’ pleaded the psychiatrist, ‘I mistook my patient for a giraffe.’

 

You want a lawsuit? You must be kidding. You want to go up against the good doctors? Right. You must be whacko. Well if you’re not now you soon will be. Fighting them can be like banging your head against a brick wall of some elephant enclosure. Get real and slip on a banana peel near a supermarket, then you’ll get compensation, but never from good doctors who have performed ‘duty of care’.  Psychiatrists are akin to police, thought police, consensual reality police... It is very difficult to obtain compensation from forensic police, so you know what are you thinking? You’re not recognising that the public fears those who have ‘gone mad’ and likes them to be put in chemical strait-jackets. So, stop making them feel uncomfortable about what they are doing!

There are cases though. People do try. And they there are very strong cases that lose. However on the winning side, there was an Australian case involving shattered teeth from ECT a friend told me about that I can’t find on the net… And then in the USA, the lawsuit country: A settlement in a case in New York over prescription and negligent monitoring of Haldol resulting in harm to the patient… Improper monitoring of Prolixin by a psychiatrist resulting in harm to a patient in California… Negligent mixing of medications in a state facility in Florida resulting in harm to the patient…

I’m very interested in the cases coming up involving the use of LSD, a ‘grey area’ of psychiatry. I know it was forced on people in Australia. One person who was in hospital during the 1960s – 70s, said he was administered over a hundred tabs of LSD and it wrecked him, frightened him, made him feel worse.

I am also interested in the cases involving newer ‘popular’ drugs Seroquel, Zyprexa and Respiradol, that have a commonality of causing type II diabetes.

I am personally concerned with the use of veterinary drugs, for instance zuclopenthixol acetate. It is given either by deep intramuscular injection or subcutaneously. A total dose of 50 – 100 mg has been used on a number of different free-ranging and captive wild animals, such as me. This acuphase injection resulted in micro-seizures and involuntary movements of the tongue and other parts of my body.

            A lawyer in 2001 said I should never be given it again, told me to write the effects in a letter to him and photocopy one for the hospital. The lawyer said this should stop them from giving it to me again. It didn’t. The next time I was taken to hospital 2008 I was given this cattle tranquiliser, despite informing them against doing so. I was also given it in 2009 and 2010.

            Same effects, of micro-seizures, but different muscles moved involuntarily, luckily not the tongue every time, that was frightening!

            What is also disturbing is that I feel like every time I’ve been injected with this drug I’ve suffered severe memory loss. By that I mean, the ability to remember things, like monologues. See, I was a person who could remember a 90 minute monologue for stage and perform it, no problems. A psychiatrist (Dr L) even came to a performance and witnessed this in 1998 and said I must be better if I could perform like I did. Back then I could remember three hours’ worth of songs and sing them non-stop on top of remembering a 90 minute monologue. I can’t do even a tenth of the kind of memorising now.

            So, do I have a case? No… But, just think about this:

·         Used on cattle via dart to tranquilise: acuphase 50mg

·         Immobilisation of a sub-adult female giraffe for relocation: Clopixol Acuphase

·         Long-acting tranquilisers like Cloxipol Acuphase tranquilise the rhino for three days and assist with long distance transport.

I am an average sized woman of small build. I wasn’t violent in any way. Talk about overkill! I didn’t need to be put to sleep. I didn’t need have my memory harmed, be given Tourette’s Syndrome and Tardive Dyskinesia. Yet psychiatrists have done this to me again and again, despite a lawyer’s letter. It has damaged me over time. And I feel somewhat angry that psychiatrists have the law covering them, as they have done their, ‘duty of care’ by harming me with this ‘standard procedure’.

There are other options that could be used to help people instead of psychiatry’s drugs and ECT. I would like other therapies to be considered next time laws are amended. I want positive solutions. I don’t want to be thinking about how many people are harmed by psychiatrists and never have hope of recovery, who have been crippled because of these treatment regimes.

            What I’d like to happen is for psychiatrists to be liable, for the damage they cause, when they administer a drug. I’d like them to have to check an epage specific to that patient, for known allergies and ill effects to the drugs they intend to administer. I want psychiatrists to take care. And, I think society has to think about these ongoing crimes that don’t receive compensation. Really think about what kind of era we’re living in, that allows this to happen.

            However, if you think that I’m going to bother to lawsuit, I’ll just let you know that I’d rather write another book. I have a possibility of being published and no possibility of winning a case against a pharmacology sponsored psychiatrist, who is following their training and the Mental Health Act as it currently stands. I have no window. But I do think the public has a lot of blind-spots they may wish to address in regards to ‘community treatment orders’ and the power psychiatrists have in forcing things like giraffe tranquilisers on people.

Please sign our petition to stop psychiatric abuse

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Diagnosed schizophrenic… so let’s kill the cat

The diagnosis of schizophrenia is the most common diagnosis of all categories in the DSM4. This means that the cause of schizophrenia cannot be put down to just one thing, like a chemical imbalance in the brain caused by toxoplasmosis parasites. But perhaps for some people, cats are the cause. In any case television reports that it is a possibility. But, no way is that how it is for everyone diagnosed with schizophrenia. No way!

                I had a diagnosis of schizophrenia given to me fifteen years ago. I’d experienced three deaths in a short period of time and I was isolated and in an abusive relationship. But that alone wasn’t the cause, it was the trigger. However, I was told it was a chemical imbalance and I must be treated with anti-psychotic medication.

There were scary things that happened in my childhood again and again. There was no real physical violence though. And, the person who was violating my childhood was also very loving and nurturing. However she exploded into suicidal threats due to her childhood trauma for the duration of my childhood and teenage years. This conditioning in childhood has meant that, as an adult, I’ve been triggered into an altered state of consciousness when someone close to me has died.

                So why did I get the label schizophrenic? Because most psychiatrists are really lazy, uncaring and stupidly trained to follow out-dated dogma. A thinking professional would’ve realised what has caused me problems is transgenerational trauma. That is trauma that is passed onto the next generation because there isn’t effective social structure to allow the parent to overcome the abuse suffered , so they can tell their story to their children in a helpful non-threatening manner.

                I blame transgenerational trauma on psychiatrists and their insistence on forcing harmful chemicals on people who don’t want it or need it. Neuroleptics don’t work for people who have experienced trauma, because people who have experienced trauma do not have a chemical imbalance, they are traumatised. So what could my mother do but pour out her sufferings to her children? She would’ve been locked away. She would’ve been drugged. I would’ve had to put up with foster parents who didn’t love me as much as she did, who may’ve put me on drugs if they thought I was behaving too artistically for their straight-laced sensibilities.

                45 per cent of Australian Aboriginal children in foster care are put on psychiatric drugs. That’s horrific racism! There is no way that Australian Aboriginal children have a genetic ‘mental illness’ gene.  More like there is some kind of imbalance in the Mental Health Act that allows this wholesale drugging of children and adults who are most likely suffering from trauma as well as transgenerational trauma, from the genocide that happened in this country!

                I am enjoying learning about the growth of the peer support movement and how there is hope for people like me and parents who have a reasonable fear of medical professionals. I am also learning art therapy techniques that I believe do shift behavioural patterns, well, these things work for me.

                It takes a long time to recover, if you can. For me, I’ve spent over a decade in art based rehabilitation, that was gentle and didn’t push me to quickly move on. This has meant I have been able to learn what I needed to and have developed a consensual reality that also makes sense to me. It’s taken a long time though. I’ve had steps backs where I was taken to hospital and tortured with cattle tranquilisers and heavy doses of neuroleptics. I’ve had times where I’ve lost the plot and said things that I didn’t want to say and only made sense if people understood the symbolic nightmare realm I’d entered into.

                I have been repeatedly given the label schizophrenic by psychiatrists who give that label to anyone who shows symptoms that include unusual sensory experiences such as hearing voices. A better society would not give psychiatrists such a high platform in mental health treatment, when their belief of chemical imbalances are based on bollocks. I’m tired of a society that sits by and lets generations be tortured because of their faith in the cult of psychiatry. Many art therapists train for over ten years in various techniques. So, it’s not about the years studied, it’s about the sponsorship.

                I say let those who want to be drugged by psychiatry, have their drugs, because perhaps they do actually have some parasite causing a cyst in their brain, that’s stressing them enough to cause trauma to the body that induces ‘symptoms of schizophrenia’. However, please, if the drugs don’t work, don’t force them on people and then say it’s their fault for being, ‘treatment resistant’. Besides, when drugs like Abilify have a known side-effect of causing hallucinations, how on earth can they be acceptable? Psychiatry and government law, is not currently making sense. It’s time for them to grow up and become better. As for blaming cats… well pussy down the well.

Not a chemical imbalance protest T-shirts