I was talking recently about the current climate of
denial still occurring in mental health and how, in the past, when I have suffered detrimental
effects of psychiatric drugs, I have been still forced to take them.
A psychiatric
nurse at the talk wanted to dismiss the brain damage, caused by neuroleptics, and
concurrent memory loss as ‘aging.’ I’m
only forty! Besides, I felt the harm being caused to me. I felt the ongoing
pain while taking the drugs. And I felt the very gradual recovery from those horrific
damaging effects the neuroleptics caused, as well as what hasn’t recovered.
Besides, it is well-known the drugs do this. It is even on the drug’s website.
Then
a psychiatrist issued a poor excuse rather than a question. Instead of apologising
for the harm caused by his colleagues, he leapt to their defence and accused, ‘Patients
don’t really know what’s going on, so it’s hard to tell if their complaints are
valid.’
In
front of me he wanted to excuse the way he, most obviously, systematically invalidated
his patient’s complaints about medications, made invalid the truth and left
them wondering what truth is exactly. So many psychiatrists I’ve been forced to
be patient to, agree with, submit to… it’s horrible this is crazy-making
denial.
I
offered a concrete example of when I saw a GP for a broken finger, which I knew
was broken, because I’d heard it snap, plus I’d had broken bones before, so I
recognised the kind of pain associated with a break, just as I recognise the
effects of neuroleptics after being force intermittently over a 14 year period
to take them.
The
GP told me, ‘It’s only a sprain.’
I
was eighteen and I believed him. It took me another month before a work colleague
insisted I go to hospital to get it x-rayed. And that proved it was broken, but
it had started to mend so there was no way to set the bones in their right
place. As a result I have a permanently gammy finger.
It’s
one thing to come to a doctor with something wrong and be denied the appropriate
treatment you wish to have, it’s quite another thing to be dragged to a doctor
and be physically harmed by forced treatment that causes your bones to become
brittle. (Yes, osteoporosis is an effect of neuroleptics listed on drug
websites. They stop a women’s menstrual cycle.)
Refusal
to take, ‘required medication’ should be understood better.
First of all, why is
medication, ‘required’ when counselling, psychology or art therapy has not been
tried? Why is it required when the patient is in no way violent? Why is it
required when the patient knows from previous doses that they have suffered
horribly on it?
When smoking was allowed in
pubs around Australia, I developed an immune related allergy to second-hand
tobacco smoke. People would deny and deny the validity of this. They would try
to say I was imagining that my face swelled up and my eyes itched so like I
wanted to remove them. I was lucky that a doctor, a GP, affirmed that this was
a common reaction to tobacco smoke.
People don’t want to see
themselves as a perpetrator of harmful actions, even if they are, because they
then see themselves as a victim of accusation and so they quickly attempt to
rescue themselves and end up accusing the victim of being the perpetrator.
It is extremely hard to get a
doctor to affirm the harm caused by neuroleptics because they don’t want to end
up transferred and thus be victimised. Humane psychiatrist Peter Breggin
explains it does not make him popular amongst his colleagues, when he tells the
truth about the harm psychiatrists cause on a regular basis to their patients. He
is then accused of causing harm to his profession.
This denial of what is clearly happening could be
easily confirmed by looking at the offending drug’s website and finding that
yes, what the patient is describing is a known effect of the medication that’s
been prescribed for ‘treatment.’
Psychiatrists have not been
sued in Australia for LSD tests in the 70s (patients were often given over a
hundred tabs.) Psychiatrists have not been sued in Australia, for forcing drugs
that cause diabetes, for causing Tardive Dyskinesia in so many of their
patients. They have not been sued for causing osteoporosis, or epilepsy,
memory-loss, for traumatising, for prescribing drugs that cause a person to
feel so unwell they suicide, for causing chronic fatigue and nausea so a person
is unable to work. For giving drugs that cause a person’s sight to blur so they
can no longer study, then dismissing this effect of the drug as ‘psychosomatic,’
when it is listed on the drug’s website. Psychiatrists and other mental health
professionals have not been sued for giving advice that is harmful, the number
one offender being, ‘take your medication.’ Psychiatric drugs are harmful, so
that is really dangerous advice to give anyone, particularly if you are a
mental health professional.
Causing harm to others, is not
okay. When a doctor causes harm, that doctor is not practising medicine, they
are conducting experiments. When a patient says they don’t want to take harmful
drugs because of the side-effects are too horrible and the doctor forces those
drugs on the patient, this is torture. Psychiatric drugs are extremely painful
physically and mentally, causing anguish over a long period, for 24 hours of
the day, every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the
year, for how many years a psychiatrist keeps a patient on a treatment order.
Psychiatric drugs also cause
permanent damage, which is often visible to others, particularly when the
nervous system gets damaged, or memory becomes impaired.
Psychiatric drugs are
extremely unsafe, harmful measures and to force such things on 20 per cent of
our population is one of the ugliest regimes that has continued into the millennium.
It is the total opposite of the terms it uses to advertise and advise.
Psychiatry is not about ‘care’ and ‘health’ it is about abuse and control.
When I worked as a shop
assistant from a young age, I was told a golden rule: ‘The customer is always
right.’
Patients are customers. People
become unwilling customers of psychiatry once they’ve experienced it,
however, they still are, in a perverted way, customers. The psychiatrist is receiving
money for the patients seen.
I think all doctors need to be
retrained to realise, ‘The patient is always right.’
That’s probably a hard one to
swallow for a psychiatrist who is used to dictating. It’s like saying, ‘Take a
dose of your own medicine.’ Which psychiatrists won’t do.
If a Court Judge were to
dismiss every case as invalid because the thinking was, ‘The witnesses don’t
really understand legal matters, so it’s hard to tell if their complaints are
valid,’ that would be really wrong. However, since there are lawyers
representing each side of the cases in court the judges have interpreters.
Do patients, who have committed no crime, need to bring
along medical interpreters to see their psychiatrists, so they are not
condemned? Would that enable a person some respect?
Well, maybe, but those
interpreters must not be desensitised by their training. They must be people
schooled in medicine who still hold close the ethics to not cause harm. They
must also be people who do not dehumanise and are not easily bribed.
If I was to propose changes,
it would be that all doctors have to undergo new ethics training, to understand
where their previous training and intern mentoring was horrifically wrong.
If they won’t, or are
training-resistant and keep committing harm, then they have to retire from
their profession.
Something like that would make
sense and hopefully address and resolve the notion, that, ‘The patient is
always wrong,’ which doctors seem to hold as an axiom.
Don’t pooh-pooh psychiatric
abuse and condemn like Freud eventually did with his patients who talked about
how his colleagues and esteemed friends had raped them when they were children.
Don’t do that same thing the church and schools have done to cover up child abuse,
which the population condemns. Protecting, ‘your own’ when they’ve caused harm,
is denial of justice. That is not okay. It is not right. It is really, really,
wrong to cover up and deny abuse.
The dehumanisation
of those with a psychiatric diagnose and the following societal ignorance,
blame and acceptance of the torture caused by psychiatric practises, is truly
one of the most stupid and horrific government approved regimes. It is stupid
because the internet enables the information about the effects of these drugs
to be freely available. The internet also allows brave individuals with a
conscience, knowledge or experience to speak up. For those with experience,
like me, to speak I need support and at the moment I have that. Having someone
who loves me enough to fight tooth and nail to make certain psychiatry will never
harm me again, is a wonderful relief to my psyche. I can remain calm and say
what needs to be said without freaking out that if I say something too edgy the
bastards will come and get me and I’ll be the living-dead again, unable to
think, work or play.
Forced-drugging and ECT needs
to be stopped immediately (though for safety from withdrawal effects, all
medications needs to be tapered slowly.) Peer-support groups can be set up to
combat those suffering from the abuses of psychiatry. People may also wish to
have trauma therapy related to their psychiatric abuse. At the moment, with such
a widespread denial of psychiatric abuse, I would only go to a therapist who
understood, or had lived-experience of psychiatric abuse. I wouldn’t want to be
in therapy all vulnerable and opening up and have some shmuck who denied the
validity of my experience and blamed me, like so many ignorant prejudiced
people do.
