I’m reading the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform’s research on commitment hearings in May of 2007. It’s a long read but last night I skipped to the part about the commitment rate per jurisdiction and figured out 16 was Charlottesville and that the numbers weren’t lying and that in May of 2007 only one person out of 106 people who were subject to commitment hearings in our area were released at the hearing. The rest were either involuntarily hospitalized, “volunteered” after being detained, which after July 1 of this year will give them an FBI record or outpatient committed to forced “treatment” in their own homes. One person. One. One.
Why hold hearings at all? What is the point? One. In an entire month. One.
So many of us who fight for our rights have been traumatized by the mental health system that it is no wonder we fight amongst ourselves in these conditions. We are hostages to fear and intimidation by the system and the laws which are about to get worse and we fight each other because we are afraid to fight the ones with the power to lock us up without trial, kill and injure our bodies and kill our spirits and risk our homes if we have them and our jobs if we have them and our friends and our reputations and if we are on the transplant list? Our very lives depend on not getting caught up in this system. So we fight amongst ourselves and take it out on each other when we need to unite in fear and loathing of the people who would and have done this to us and our people and think they have the right to do it even more as if they were G-ds or even decent human beings.
Decent human beings don’t tie people up in the name of “treatment”. Decent human beings don’t inject people against their will. Decent human beings don’t lock other human beings into small rooms with a lock on the door. Decent human beings don’t participate in a system that does this to people, they find another line of work or they find a way to work that doesn’t involve bullying and oppression and traumatizing innocent people.
Enough with the politeness. I’m done. I will fight those who want to bully and intimidate us as long as I have breath in my body. Please join me in wearing a black ribbon to mourn the loss of our civil rights at every occasion at which those who instigated and supported this oppression are present, starting with the training on the new commitment laws on Tuesday at the DoubleTree. I won’t be there, I won’t go near that training, but if you are going, wear a black ribbon in solidarity if you are ready to fight back.
June 1, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I watch that video and I think, “And it’s so much worse than that. It’s so much worse inside those locked doors.”
I like the effort, though. The refusal to be invisible, be quiet, be ashamed.
My personal, anecdotal, unscientific experience with commitment hearings is that people don’t walk away from them free very often. One man walked out of the state hospital when his six months was over. The other several hundred people we shared time with there did not. At hearings for people who aren’t already committed, I’ve never personally seen it. Not one time.
What I have seen is people committed in abstentia who were perfectly capable of defending themselves had they been allowed to go to or even known about their own hearings. I’ve seen a LOT of people sign themselves over for another six months without a peep — maybe because the commitment hearing experience is such a nightmare.
Damn it.