Wednesday 31 August 2011

Rise and shine, people - the coffee's on!

 WARNING: Seriously pissed-off rant lies directly ahead!!!

It seems my point of view about psychiatry has been misunderstood once again. When will people understand that dissent is not a crime - even when it challenges one of the supposed 'healing professions'?

Yet it seems I'm made to feel like some kind of monster every time this subject comes up and I put forth my own direct opinions.

Am I supposed to be less than honest in order to placate these tin gods that ruin so many lives with their pseudo-medical bullshit or to spare the feelings of those who have been duped into believing this 'profession' actually helps anyone?

I have to wonder if there is a soul left on earth who truly understands just how oppressive this system is, or if psychiatry's con-job has reached that critical mass where it is now impossible to refute it without digging one's own grave.

What really makes me want to throw up is the number of otherwise 'progressive' individuals who can't recognize the inherently destructive nature of this particular 'medical specialty' and the infrastructure-from-hell it has amassed around itself.

It appears that a white smock or the letters 'MD' on a sheepskin will always succeed in obfuscating the obvious or blinkering even the most perceptive of individuals to what these shysters and violent social manipulators are really about.

Jesus please us, people, these guys are only human, which means that not only do they make mistakes, but they are as (if not more) prone to a false or distorted sense of self as anyone else. The difference is in the power they wield, and the personal rewards - both fiscal and in terms of ego gratification - they reap through using it against vulnerable individuals.

The medical profession as a whole wields a tremendous amount of power in our society. Whether it be due to the profession's associated mystique, or a misdirected worship focused on persons who can appear to bring someone else back from the brink of death (although far less attention is paid to their sometimes lethal bloopers that seem to happen almost as frequently) is open to debate, but one thing that is clear is this kind of dynamic cannot possibly be healthy for anyone involved.

And in the case of psychiatry, this power is on steroids. No other branch of the medical profession has psychiatry's legal sanction to deprive innocent people of their liberty on a regular basis, or to impose unwanted, unpleasant and frequently harmful procedures on individuals without their consent.

Psychiatry and its false doctrines has succeeded in infiltrating every aspect of our society, from our homes and workplaces to schools,  the judicial system, the provision of other social services and every aspect of child-rearing.

It's time to pull the plug on these pseudo-medical shysters and the brainless lawmakers that enable them, along with the ruthless corporate pill-pushers who make massive profits from this pathologizing of literally every aspect of our humanity.

We need to build the kind of inclusive, truly caring society that doesn't regularly traumatize its members, and which respects the whole spectrum of human feelings, perceptions and beliefs, provided these in themselves do not result in harm to others. 

Psychiatry be damned! Get thee hence!

Saturday 20 August 2011

Some thoughts on 'addiction'...

Why do people insist on medicalizing what is essentially a natural human response to unbearable social pressures, most of which are systemic in nature and thus beyond the immediate control of the sufferer?

We all know the world we have created is not gentle on the human soul and it is only natural the hardest hit will seek some kind of relief - to be honest it can boil down to either doing that or going mad right on the spot in many cases.

Medicalizing the causes of  addiction still serves as a backhanded way of putting forth a 'personal defect' model in which the world is portrayed as an essentially benign environment where difficulties in adjusting or coping are seen as being due to an individual flaw, rather than illustrating addiction as a completely understandable and inevitable consequence of someone trying to soften the blows meted out by a society that has become steadily less responsive to human needs and feelings.

The notion of a malfunctioning 'reward center' in the brain as a cause arises from just the kind of carrot-and-stick mentality an authoritarian  society wields in order to maintain compliance from the masses. If any such mechanism even exists in the human mind, its presence is completely artificial and results from deliberate enculturation as opposed to any kind of inborn 'flaw in the circuitry'.

The primary health issues related to addiction arise from the wear and tear that substances themselves have on the body and mind, or sometimes other factors such as infectious diseases like HIV or Hepatitis C  acquired through the actual mechanism of drug use. It is not inherently a 'disease' and upon  successful  termination of substance use most of the related medical issues likewise vanish, unless some kind of permanent physical damage has occurred.

The term 'addiction' itself has been expanded over the years to include (and thus medicalize) a broad range of human behaviors including the performance of vital functions such as procreation or taking nourishment, when in truth it was only ever intended to describe the compulsive ingestion of certain foreign substances that create a literal, physical dependency, meaning that unpleasant - or even life-threatening - symptoms will result if the substance is withdrawn.

So the solutions to addiction are obvious - fundamental changes to society are needed in order to put a stop to the kinds of systemic abuses that cause people to seek succor in mind-numbing chemicals in the first place. Alongside this we need to stop criminalizing substance use itself, and the acts related to the procurement and possession of such substances for personal use, provided these acts do not in themselves result in harm to others.

There is also the question of the role played by medical practitioners themselves (and their Pharma handlers) in creating widespread dependency on legally-sanctioned substances in order to enrich their own bottom line and frequently as a means of social control in itself. Psychiatrists are among the worst offenders with their wholesale use of mind-numbing chemicals to pacify painful emotions or unwanted behaviors in their 'patients'.

This is the truly criminal behavior; the deliberate, systemic use of powerful chemicals not only to modify the behavior and emotions of unwilling individuals, but to reap huge profits by doing so. And it is all legally-sanctioned despite the fact that many prescription drugs (especially psychotropics) can be every bit as physically addictive as heroin or other 'illicit' narcotics, and their use is even more likely to result in violent behavior from persons under their influence.

The same applies to alcohol and tobacco, which are completely legal for personal use despite the fact they are among the most addictive (and physically harmful) substances on the planet. Yet society's insidious double standards outlaw the use of cannabis, which by comparison is a relatively benign substance that does not result in catastrophic physical dependency, or any kind of withdrawal syndrome upon cessation of use.

The whole 'industry' of addiction can be seen as a complex nexus of social control for profit involving the criminalization of substance use (and directly related, the intentional state-sanctioned introduction of 'illicit' substances into certain communities in order to destabilize them and serve as 'pretext' for legal intervention), the deliberate, doctor-created dependency on still other 'medicines' in order to control people while reaping enormous financial gains in the process, and the wholesale availability and use of 'legal' recreational drugs that carry their own host of social and medical issues, thus keeping the whole destructive loop endlessly turning.

Systemic abuse, injustice and general lack of caring form the engine that drives this vicious cycle in the first place, with profit motive and an aggressive social control agenda providing the fuel. Challenging and putting a stop to these deliberate systemic aberrations is the only real solution to addiction.

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Prisoners' Justice Day


August 10, 1974 - prisoner Eddie Nalon bled to death in a segregation cell at Millhaven Penitentiary near Kingston, Ontario after slashing himself in protest of how he was being treated by guards. Millhaven's segregation cells were equipped with emergency call buttons but the one in Eddie's cell had been intentionally disabled by prison staff.

One year later to the day, other inmates commemorated Eddie's passing by engaging on a peaceful one-day fast and refusing to work.

This tradition has continued to this day in Canadian jails, with outside supporters also joining in  by holding vigils, rallies, educational events - or  themselves fasting in solidarity with prisoners that are doing so.

This is Prisoners' Justice Day. August 10.

This year's vigil in Toronto was once again held outside the notorious Don Jail.


Speakers and performers shared of the horrors the system holds. People buried alive for decades. A beloved friend gunned down by guards. Willful denial of essential health services. The list goes on and on.

Comparisons were drawn by still others between prisons, the 'mental health' system, institutions used to warehouse the mentally disabled and even 'long-term care' facilities - all places  where people are not free to come and go as they wish and abuse is rife.

But along with all this pain and horror comes hope for healing and redemption as we come together in community to confront these abuses.

We will keep coming  together and speaking out until no one remains behind bars. There are other ways. That is the power of community.


Monday 8 August 2011

Vigil for Charles 'Charlie' McGillivary


Over 200 members of the community turned out this evening for a somber vigil at Bloor and Christie St. to remember 46-year old Charles 'Charlie' McGillivary, who had died shortly after being tackled and arrested by Toronto police one week earlier at that very spot. The vigil was organized by other tenants in the building where Charles and his mother Ann (center, seated)  lived.



Sunday 7 August 2011

The medical model is the true failure of compassion!


Another thing that really pisses me off is when 'friends' want to shut out any alternative explanation of certain human phenomena that doesn't seek to medicalize them.

I've actually had people blow up at me and walk away in a complete snit when I try to explain why I reject psychiatry's pejorative 'diagnoses' and the false science it uses to justify them.  They seem to view it as a failure of compassion on my part.
 
Well sorry, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This isn't a denial of the reality that many people suffer from painful and frightening emotional or mental experiences - I just reject the narrow lens through which psychiatry and society in general view these things. 

 As far as I'm concerned, the true 'failure of compassion' lies in the hearts and minds of those who seek not only to suppress these vital components of our humanity and collective body politic, but to reap enormous profits from doing so.
 
Our society is not kind to the hearts and souls of its members. It is little wonder there is so much pain in the world when  abuse, systemic injustice and general human fuckery are so rife.
 
Even the small percentage of painful emotional or mental reactions not easily traceable to something more specific would be remedied by a collective shift in thinking that would have people respecting others simply for who and what they are; rather than heaping scorn and abuse upon them for not fitting into some arbitrary, narrow framework of 'normalcy'.

Seeing the world through different eyes is neither a crime or a 'disease' - and it is long past time for us all to get that truth through our heads.

Most people simply do not realize just how oppressive the 'mental health' system really is - they only see it as a 'quick fix' being available for those who voice an unconventional worldview or who out of some deep inner pain or personal conflict are presenting themselves in a manner that causes discomfort to others.

The medical model is only the means through which this particular oppressive response to the human condition is rationalized in a manner that makes it palatable to 'normals'.

What is even more disgusting is how it has been turned into a multi-billion dollar industry. Seems that drug company stock never suffers even when the rest of the economy is tanking - and psychiatry's mind-fuck pills are among their biggest sellers. Ain't capitalism wonderful? (NOT!!!)

Saturday 6 August 2011

Law Enforcement's War on the Vulnerable Continues...

The undeclared war by the police against vulnerable individuals continues.

This time it was a quiet evening stroll and a simple quest for a slice of pizza that to their eyes merited a death sentence.

46-year old Charles McGillivary collapsed and died on Monday, August 1 shortly after being tackled and arrested by Toronto Police for no apparent reason near Christie Pits park as his horrified mother Ann looked on. Her frantic attempts to explain her son’s circumstances to the arresting officers were met with overt rudeness and a barked command to ‘back away’.

Charles McGillivary was severely disabled by a childhood accident that left him developmentally challenged and largely unable to communicate. Naturally the cops only saw this very large man who was not responding to their commands... and they responded as cops so often do.

As is increasingly becoming the norm, the police and the SIU alike are saying little about what took place, no longer even resorting to what was their standard litany of excuses. Clearly their mutual hope is if they stay off the radar this will quietly fade from the public consciousness and the media before any civil outrage has the opportunity to take root.

This strategy appears to be working. The kind of police violence and assumed impunity that in the past has resulted in large public protests (and even riots) seems to be creating hardly a stir among the populace these days.

Some heartless types are even lauding this kind of conduct by law enforcement. And Stephen Harper’s ‘law and order’ agenda will only amount to further escalation as police forces across the country pounce on what amounts to an opportunity to write their own ticket without the encumbrance of any kind of civilian oversight. Equally likely is that the draconian municipal cutbacks planned by the Ford administration in Toronto will leave the police budget untouched.

Last year there were at least half a dozen fatal shootings by Toronto police. Most of these resulted from Mental Health Act-related calls.  The only instance in which charges were actually laid was the result of a botched ‘gang-related’ raid in which the man who was shot and killed wasn’t even the suspect the cops were looking for.

Most dramatic of these was the death of 25-year old Reyal Jensen Jardine-Douglas as he attempted to evade his parents’ efforts to have him involuntarily committed to a psych. ward. When the police (summoned by the parents themselves) boxed in the TTC bus he was riding in, Jardine-Douglas attempted once more to flee and was subsequently shot in the back. The cops are claiming he had a knife but this was never publicly confirmed.

There seems to be an increasing inevitability about the outcome of situations where the the police and vulnerable people/persons with any kind of disability encounter one another. In the case of Charles McGillivary simply taking the time to listen to what his mom was saying would have probably saved his life. But obviously this was impossible for individuals drunk on their own power and blinkered by prejudice to comprehend as a logical course to follow.

Racialized and poor communities have long been the targets of prejudicial and often exceeding violent interactions with the cops. So have more diffuse groups of individuals such as psychiatric survivors and (increasingly) other people with disabilities both real and perceived.

This reality was glaringly brought to the fore by a number of incidents of gross able-ism during last year’s G-20 summit, during which a deaf and mute arrestee was denied independent ASL interpretation by the cops, another man had his prosthetic lag confiscated after his arrest at Queen’s Park (a ‘weapon of opportunity’ was how the cops referred to it, if you can believe it!) and still another man (who actually had no involvement in the protests) was left to lie in his own excrement on a holding cage floor for hours after the police took his wheelchair and refused him assistance to use the toilet.

Subsequent to that, 9 people were arrested at an anti-poverty demonstration and two others were issued trespassing tickets. One of those ticketed was a woman with cerebral palsy who in fact had been in the middle of delivering a statement through a window at Liberal Party of Ontario HQ with the aid of her communication assistant when the cops barged in.

 In a particularly asinine display of ignorance, the cops suggested this smart, highly capable woman be ‘taken to a hospital’ rather than arrested simply on the basis of her physical disability.

Many people (including some members of the psychiatric survivor community) have lauded the introduction of ‘community crisis teams’ that pair a uniformed cop with a ‘mental health professional’ (most often a psychiatric nurse) on patrols. First launched as a pilot project in the late 1990’s in Toronto’s east downtown area, the scheme was quietly granted permanent funding in short order and now there are a dozen of these teams operating in the Toronto area. (Advocates of the scheme are now lamenting that these teams aren’t operating in all 17 Toronto Police divisions on every shift, as if what we already have weren’t bad enough).

The drawback to this kind of project that at the end of the day it still amounts to vulnerable, scared, hurting human beings being forced into encounters with armed, uniformed cops, plus it grants extra powers to psychiatric personnel, who previously had no more legal right of entry to someone else’s personal living space than any other private citizen. Accompaniment by a police officer (with their power to enter private accommodations under ‘emergency circumstances’) means all the ‘mental health’ person needs to do is claim there is a ‘medical crisis’ within the premises in question to legally justify forced entry.

It is long past time to altogether stop involving the police in situations where innocent people are in emotional or mental crisis. We need to have trained volunteers from the psychiatric survivor community who can respond non-violently by offering reassurance to frightened or distressed individuals as opposed to the standard cop response of physical and verbal aggression, shackles, incarceration and (increasingly often) deadly force.

Where persons who may have other kinds of disabilities are involved, volunteers from the specific affected community also could become a part of similar initiatives, but this would also rely on the police developing a knowledge of when it is best to back off and call on others to respond, which given the size of the egos involved is no sure thing.

So-called ‘sensitivity training’ has proved largely useless when it comes to police officers so it is clear that other resources are indicated under these circumstances, especially in instances where criminal proceedings are unlikely to result from someone coming into contact with the police.

And in the case of others like  Charles McGillivary, police (or others who may be intervening) desperately need to stop and listen to what informed bystanders might have to say before embarking on a potentially lethal course of action.  Unless this happens there will inevitably be more tragedies.

Friday 5 August 2011

Psychiatric 'Diagnoses'

These are all subjective, pejorative labels that attempt to describe in medical terms various states of acting or being, visible emotional turmoil or ways of perceiving the world that do not fit into the arbitrary mold of 'normalcy'.

Most often what people are seeing here is extreme pain in response to being damaged by abuse, injustice, or perhaps from simply being devalued constantly for seeing the world through different eyes. This is not the result of a 'disease'. It is a perfectly natural response to some intolerable, very real situation.

We're not talking about diseases like diabetes or HIV here. Both these disorders can be detected concretely through examination of the blood. Both have been changed from invariably fatal maladies to manageable chronic disorders through advances in medical science.

OTOH, a psychiatric 'examination' consists entirely of a series of convoluted questions to which all possible answers are inherently self-incriminating (and you won't be spared by remaining silent, believe me!) with no physical examination or lab study involved. It begins and ends with the subjective interview.

And let's also be clear about another thing - pacifying unwanted behaviors or painful emotional/mental phenomena by administering drugs isn't an 'advance in medical science' - it is pacifying unwanted behaviors or painful emotional/mental phenomena by administering drugs. Period. This practice also creates a whole host of damaging physical and mental complications in its own right.

The social construct we have collectively made is not gentle to the human soul. Medicalizing these inevitable consequences is only one more way of ensuring that our society once more wriggles off the hook for the harm it causes to so many. Attributing someone's distress to some nebulous and medically unprovable 'mental illness' only serves to obfuscate the reality of injustice and abuse.

Words have power. In the case of the (unsubstantiated) term 'mental illness', it gives shrinks the real power to deprive the innocent of their liberty and administer 'treatments' even over their clear objections that in themselves far more often than not prove to be more destructive than helpful.

They also can (and often do) use this as a pretext to call on the police and the courts to assist them in this agenda - which also has sometimes tragic consequences.

What other area of healthcare does anyone know of that calls on the judiciary or law enforcement in this manner? What other area of healthcare can anyone cite that consistently violates peoples’ civil liberties in the name of a set of alleged medical conditions that haven't even been proved to exist?

All this results from the false medicalizing of peoples' experiences and the pejorative, unsubstantiated, bigoted 'diagnoses' that have been concocted to describe these experiences. People fall for this con-job simply because the people speaking these words wear a white smock and have the letters 'MD' after their names.
 
Well, let's be perfectly clear about one thing - no amount of book learning will overcome ignorance about the human condition. 'Only words'? Yeah, right. 

Most people have never experienced firsthand the sheer hatred and fear these words engender in others. In the old days pejoratives such as 'mad', lunatic' 'deranged' served the same purpose. The words have changed but the negative impact they have on far too many innocent, vulnerable lives is no less.

There are many words whose use were once commonplace that are now considered unacceptable in our society because they are blatantly racist, homophobic or misogynist. I long for the day when all words or phrases that describe certain states of mind in similar prejudicial terms have likewise disappeared from our language - this including the entire contents of the DSM.