A Week’s Worth of Rabble-Rousing
Lately I have been spending more time on facebook than on my blog. The exchange is faster and the community of people from all over the world are available 24/7 to comment and get a discussion rolling.
A week ago I posted Loren Mosher’s Letter of Resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. On December 4, 1998, Dr. Mosher, a pioneer in establishing programs of psychosocial community care in the field of psychiatry – the Soteria House, wrote a letter that slammed the APA. He refers to the APA as the American Psychopharmacological Association.
“Unfortunately, APA reflects, and reinforces, in word and deed, our drug dependent society…. This is not a group for me. At this point in history, in my view, psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. The APA could not continue without the pharmaceutical company support of meetings, symposia, workshops, journal advertising, grand rounds luncheons, unrestricted educational grants, etc. etc. Psychiatrist have become the minions of the drug company promotions.”
“In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI.. such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the champion of their clients the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring.”
“DSM IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document.. DSM IV has become a bible and a money making best seller… There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder… APA as an organization has implicitly (sometimes explicitly as well) bought into a theoretical hoax.”
The response from the facebook community after I published this letter was great. Many were not familiar with Dr. Mosher and delighted by the wisdom they read and others were happy to be reminded of Dr. Mosher and shared their experiences of working with him. Together we lamented the loss of such a great man who died in 2004. We were all in awe of his courage to come out so publicly against the revered APA and pharmaceutical industry.
Later in the week I posted The HIghlander Statement and Call to Action.
(I am not sure that this will come up so I have reposted the main part of the statement here. Though I am risking making this blog too long, I want people to have access to it.)
“In the tradition of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt and thousands of men and women concerned about social justice and progressive change, thirty people with long histories of fighting for human rights in mental health gathered for three days at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. We argued, came to consensus, and then quietly shared our pain, our concerns, our fears, and our hopes for the future.”
The Highlander Call for Action:
We call upon all people committed to human rights to organize and fight against the passage and implementation of legislation making it easier to lock up and forcibly drug people labeled with psychiatric disorders, legislation that is creating the back-wards of the twenty-first century not just in hospitals, but also in our own homes.
We call upon all people committed to human rights to work together to build a mental health system that is based upon the principles of self-determination, on a belief in our ability to recover, and on our right to define what recovery is and how best to achieve it.
We call upon people who have used mental health services to heal each other by telling our stories. We call for the creation of literature and other arts that use our truths to educate, to inform, and to validate our culture and our experience.
We call upon elected officials, political candidates, and those with power over our lives to recognize and honor the legitimacy of our concerns through their policy statements, legislative proposals, and their actions; and we herby give notice that we will do whatever it takes to insure that we are heard, that our rights are protected, and that we can live freely and peacefully in our communities.”
At the end of the week I published the Principles adopted by the 1982 gathering of psychiatric survivors. Each year in the 1970’s and 1980’s there was an annual gathering of psychiatric survivors. It became known as the “International Conference on Human Rights and Against Psychiatric Association”.
Statement of Principles from the 10th Annual International Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression was drafted at this meeting. 30 Principles to pay attention to!
I highlighted a couple which generated lots of comments.
#5- We oppose forced psychiatric procedures because they humiliate, debilitate, injure, incapacitate and kill people.
I wrote in the comments -Ativan injections throw a wet blanket over the population of the psych wards in this country. Repeated throughout the day, everyone is a sad shadow of themselves – bored and dejected. They are subjected to bad food, usually an overworked and undereducated staff, and little control over how to proceed with their lives.
A woman wrote in a following comment that she was “Currently sitting in the communal tv room of a psych hospital and there is little conversation and a group of people who are over medicated while the nurses have yet another tea break.”
#17 – We oppose the medical model of “mental illness” because it dupes the public into seeking or accepting “voluntary” treatment by fostering the notion that fundamental human problems, whether personal or social, can be solved by psychiatric/medical means.
The thread following this post swayed a reader who started firmly entrench in the psychiatric medical model. At first he just listened and wrote a couple of comments seeking information. In his most recent comment he said that he would be very busy this week revamping his facebook page.
I am paraphrasing here – “Must admit I never stop reading since I put myself in the middle and my eyes are opened a little wider. I checked out a great deal of material.”
He was dismayed to not able to find answers to his questions on the web, most notably not from the American Medical Association. “Everything I tried to get answers for weren’t there.” Then he realized that there is no internship to become a psychiatrist as in other areas of medicine. “Really one just has to be a doctor first, then they begin to learn using us. I think you all opened my mind… did this with very little insulting, I will thank you all for this and continue on my search.”
A collective cheer rose from the participants on this thread. The most startling thing about these posts is that they all originated from documents first written 20, 30, even 40 years ago and they are just as relevant today. Maybe even more so as we search for real changes that have been made and realize that there are very few.
Read these documents!
Join the facebook discussions if you haven’t already (befriend me – Kristin Ulland) and team up with the community trying to make some changes.
More voices, more energy, quicker action!
Keep raising rabble, you inspire me.