The Treatment Advocacy Center’s blog today cites the new study that shows that bipolar disorder is being diagnosed in folks who do not have it in large numbers in the United States. Their conclusion, more of a non-sequitor actually, is that we need a mental health system that focuses on the “sickest of the sick”, one of their favorite prejudice-mongering phrases. Um, logic anyone? They admit the mental health system is doing a lousy job of figuring out who is “very sick” and who is not, and yet they support giving this same system more power to lock people up and force drugs on them? They write as if all these wrongly diagnosed folks who do not have bipolar disorder but were diagnosed with it by mental health professionals never end up in the mental health system as a result of their wrong diagnosis and wrong treatment and never become the psychiatrically disabled folks they were not to begin with due to the effects of the drugs and the stigma of diagnosis and the blow to their morale of how they are treated post-diagnosis by society. And of course they use borderline personality disorder as the missed diagnosis, since 1) that is the most stigmatized and misogynist diagnosis in psychiatry and 2) they are idiots who think their is no treatment needed for borderline personality disorder just because it doesn’t respond to drugs and forced treatment. Maybe the Treatment Advocacy Center would like to talk to the grieving relatives of the many people with BPD who have successfully killed themselves about how not serious their family member’s illness was?
And let’s just call what happens to people wrongly diagnosed and given drugs “side effects”, sounds so benign compared to the reality of kidney failure, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, tardive dyskinesia and early death. Yes, just say “Oops” when people are injured and killed and their lives ruined by psychiatric misdiagnosis as if you just dropped your keys. That’s the appropriate affect. Empathy challenged anyone?
Sometimes I wonder if the Treatment Advocacy Center lives on the Northern Star rather than in Northern Virginia.
May 12, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Oops, wrong patients?
Screw them. Oops, we just happened to have incorrectly diagnosed you with bipolar disorder at age 17 and drugged you with our state-of-the-art psychiatric drugs, making you on of the “sickest of the sick” and causing serious physical health problems and making it impossible to function and involuntarily committing you 26 times for your iatrogenic symptoms…OOPS!
Bastards! They are fucking bastards, I would have been one of those that could have qualified for their damn AOT programs. Instead, I am getting my life back without their poisonous drugs. Yeah, I’m so worried about relapsing into my “bipolar disorder” since going cold turkey of a shitload of meds two and a half years ago and never having been shoved into a hospital for three and half years now. NOT!
Just how the hell does TAC and the other compassionate fascists propose to “correctly” diagnose people with these “serious mental illnesses”. Huh? There are no objective biological tests for the diagnosis of mental illnesses. NONE. Just the good ‘ol mental disorder cookbook, the DSM and person prejudice. But yeah, keep talking out your asses TAC! If they’re going to insist on calling them brain disorders, they damn well better be able to prove that they are. But they can’t.
May 12, 2008 at 4:51 pm
[...] over at Charlottesville Prejudice and Civil Rights Watch called my attention to the (Forced Drug) Treatment “Advocacy” Center’s latest [...]
May 13, 2008 at 2:37 pm
“By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY
Adults with serious mental illness treated in public systems die about 25 years earlier”
but it is not directly linked to psychiatric drugs as the main cause for an earlier death.
“about 3 out of 5 die from mostly preventable diseases”
and the 2 out of 5 is from what?
In my experience,
if I or any mental patient has a health complaint, it is assumed to be false, a manifestation of our mental illness.
Read (on blogs) of how emergency departments treat the mentally ill.
This is spun to this …
“Because of their mental disorder, patients often aren’t good health advocates for themselves, says Andrew Leuchter of the UCLA School of Medicine.”