Here Are Some of My Flashbacks: For Doctors and Delegates and Professors to Dream About Like I Do

I just thought about the resident who not only pulled out my PIC line so hard it left a fistula that caused severe pain that was ignored by UVA dialysis for months years later because he didn’t want to be the doctor to a “mental case” who also told my mother I must be sneaking lithium on the side because of course everyone wants to throw up all day every day and be tied to a PIC line for hydration on their 40th birthday….. Same resident, taught by UVA medical faculty, theorized I had late developed bulimia despite 7+ weeks in the hospital and acute kidney failure I now know.  Or it was lithium toxicity, who knows, UVA doesn’t keep medical records very well.  And they certainly don’t dialysize wastes of space like me who have diagnoses no matter how sick we are….

I remember the attending who complained over my bedside about the cost of the Zofranthat was helping my intense nausea a little to the fellow. As if I wasn’t worth anything. Mysteriously my Zofran was stopped one night and I was wretchedly ill all night until another doctor intervened and gave me back the Zofran.

I remember the nurse who wouldn’t talk to me but would gossip about me to my room mate and other nurses and who contradicted the doctors and also told me I must want to vomit. 

I remember being treated like a piece of meat and dragged from one room to another to be catheterized (now that I have heard the real story from UVAnurses I remember it correctly) because my room bed wasn’t set up for such procedures and I know I ended up with symptoms from this rough treatment for a month.  I remember nobody comforting me or warning me it might hurt as is usual medical procedure but instead scaring me by saying my bladder was 80% full and could burst and it must have been the resident since UVAswears both nurses present say they didn’t say it but mysteriously no one can identify or will identify the resident present.  Her name was on the wall, not so hard to find..

I remember being told my kidneys would be fine or they didn’t know what would happen and not being referred to a nephrologist as I should have been.  I remember leaving UVA in early ‘97 thinking I was the lowest of the low having never been a medical patient before and being in so long treated as the lowest patient of the low, all due to prejudice.  The few polite doctors and nurses stand out they were so rare.

I remember being afraid of doctors for years after this, finally overcoming it and now regaining my fear after 2 unnecessary weeks in UVA 5 East for a steroid reaction an arrogant attending was determined to diagnose as bipolar disorder and even more determined to be absolutely adored and obeyed. 

Most of all I will never forget losing my half-sister because I was drugged up on drugs I should never have been on, withdrawing, forgetting, not myself and having her one visit spend with her refusing to even speak to me.  I will never forget the pain of that nor what UVA doctors did lying to my mother and terrifying her and lying to my brother and scaring him and sending false information about me to all of my doctors without my permission and the threat of being sent to Western if I let my lawyer ask for my medical records or if I exercised my legal right to do so.  Now that I have read them, I know why.  So tomorrow I am not waiting for the “internal and probably endless possible investigation” into falsifying medical records, I’m calling the Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Office and reporting a crime.  Because who knows how many others have had their records completely falsified to suit some psychiatrist’s power agenda or just need to lie and who knows what damage could be done to another fine UVA program if this complete fabrication got out in court or elsewhere and I care about that unlike UVA 5 East psychiatry. 

Oh, and thanks for the fear of sleeping in my own bed and the need to sleep on my couch with a light on.  PTSD from UVA, the gift that keeps on giving and giving.  A special thanks to my delegate who knew that lowering the standard for commitment was not necessary and pushed it anyway for political reasons.  This is the woman who sat in your office and told you what the commitment rate was and you said it was like hitting a flea with a hammer.  Well I’m one of the fleas who got hit, living in your district, afraid to sleep in my own bed. Thank you Delegate David Toscano, former friend to people with disabilities. You might think about starting an investigation or study into the number of folks involuntarily hospitalized unnecessarily under the laws you passed and the rates of PTSD, unemployment, eviction, divorce, family alienation, even suicide since the rate goes up on release. Don’t worry about me, I’m too busy taking my transplant drugs on time, something 5 East couldn’t manage and too busy fighting back for all the other folks affected to give up, much to some’s chagrin..

Treatment Advocacy Center, So Many False Assumptions, So Little Time to Correct Them :)

I know the Treatment Advocacy Center folks are trying very hard to improve their image, I see their efforts to be more compassionate and less fear-mongering about people with psychiatric disabilities/diagnoses/histories, but it seems they just can’t stop themselves from making huge assumptions about the relationship between mental illness and homelessness. 

I wonder if the good folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center are aware of how many people diagnosed with mental illness are put out on the street by their families of origin?  Or how many are not allowed to come home if they leave home and then realize they need support and help only a family could give?  Or how many parents have bought into or been fooled into believing “tough love” is appropriate for their children in emotional distress?  I am aware of it.  I know too many people who as young adults, in some cases very young adults, were disowned by their families because they were given a serious mental illness diagnosis.  It is not the majority of folks of course, but it is a real and not uncommon phenomenon. How exactly will more forced outpatient treatment laws, which is what the good folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center want, help any of these people who have been disowned by their families and forced onto the streets or left on the streets?  If a person, any person, is homeless, what they need first is a home.

And how does the Treatment Advocacy Center make the leap from homelessness to jail? Sure some people end up in jail for status crimes who also happen to be homeless but to write that the choice is homelessness or jails is a big reach.  The choice is giving people who are homeless a place to live and lay their head or not making that commitment as a society and as individuals.  Unfortunately in most places in this country we have not made the commitment to provide a safe place to lay their head for every citizen who through hard times or hard situations or disownment due to emotional crisis has become homeless.  I would opine we have made a bad choice in that regard and that no amount of expensive outpatient commitment programs will help if we do not make the decision as a society to support people through hard times with at least a  bed and food. 

Yes, homelessness will get worse with these bad economic times and yes living on the streets will cause some folks to go into an emotional crisis and all to be unhappy and distressed, how could it not?  But no drug will fix their distress when it is caused by no place to call their own or even a pillow inside to lay their head on.  If a person, any person, is homeless, what they need first is a home.

Okay, that’s all I have time for tonight, tune in for more updates on the good but assumption-prone folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center as I have time.

From the Treatment Advocacy Center’s new and improved blog that still allows no comments and has no RSS feed (silly rabbits, no RSS feed is for kids ).

“Too many people with mental illness end up homeless. People with untreated psychiatric illnesses constitute one-third, or between 150,000 and 200,000 people, of the estimated 744,000 homeless population. The quality of life for these individuals is abysmal. Many are regularly victimized.

For some of those homeless, it is often part of a cycle between life on the streets and jail.  A choice no one, especially someone with a serious illness, should face.
When someone with a mental illness lives on the streets, they face a number of threats from the environment and weather, the lack of sanitation, theft, and violence.  At any given time, there are approximately twice as many people with untreated severe psychiatric illnesses living on America’s streets than are receiving care in hospital.

Given the current state of the economy, many fear the problem will grow worse. 
“With the nation and state in recession, the problem is likely to grow before it improves, but how a society treats those citizens who most need the help of other people or institutions says a great deal about it,” wrote a recent editorial in the Tennessee Knox News Sentinel.  Like in other states, the jail there has become the state’s largest mental hospital. 

Living on the streets-and all that it entails-is a difficult circumstance for someone without a severe mental illness to adapt.  For someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder it can be a living hell. 
There need to be better alternatives.  The choice between life on the streets and jail is not choice at all.  As the Tennessee paper wrote, “Jail is not the proper place for any society to house homeless people with mental health issues.”"

FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (C ) material the use of which
has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such
material is made available for educational purposes, to advance
understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and
social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a ‘fair
use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C.
section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without
profit.

Large Study Shows Mental Illness Without Drug Abuse Is Not Correlated With Violence

Mental illness alone is no trigger for violence

The Associated Press

Monday, February 2, 2009

CHICAGO: A new large U.S. study challenges the idea that mental illness alone is a leading cause of violence.

Researchers instead blame a combination of factors, specifically substance abuse and a history of violent acts, that drives up the danger when combined with mental illness in what they call an “intricate link.”

People with serious mental illness, without other big risk factors, are no more violent than most people, according to the study of more than 34,000 U.S. adults. The research was released Monday in Archives of General Psychiatry.

“Mental illness can provide the knee-jerk explanation for the Virginia Tech shootings,” but it’s not a strong predictor of violence by itself, said lead author Eric Elbogen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

Elbogen compiled a “top 10″ list of things that predict violent behavior, based on the analysis.

Younger age topped the list. History of violence came next, followed by male gender, history of juvenile detention, divorce or separation in the past year, history of physical abuse, parental criminal history and unemployment in the past year. Rounding out the list were severe mental illness with substance abuse and being a crime victim in the past year.

After the 2007 Virginia Tech killings by a student ordered to get psychiatric treatment, some states considered laws adding mental health questions to background checks for gun buyers or denying weapons to people who’ve been involuntarily committed for mental health treatment.

The new research, which bolsters other similar findings, raises questions about such laws, experts said. Such legislation may be both ineffective and discourage people who need help from getting treatment.

“We are being misled by our own fears,” said Columbia University psychiatry professor Dr. Paul Appelbaum, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “We ought to be concerned about providing good treatment and helping people lead fulfilling lives, not obsessed with protecting ourselves from phantom threats that appear to be unrelated to mental illness.”

U.S. systems to treat mental illness and substance abuse are separate, uncoordinated and could do a better job treating people with both problems, Appelbaum said.

For the new study, the researchers analyzed data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. The original survey in 2001-2002 involved more than 43,000 face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of American adults. Three years later, many of the same people, more than 34,000, were interviewed again.

Questions about violence in both interviews included:

_”Ever use a weapon like a stick, knife or gun in a fight?”

_”Ever hit someone so hard that you injured them or they had to see a doctor?”

_”Ever start a fire on purpose to destroy someone’s property or just to see it burn?”

_”Ever force someone to have sex with you against their will?”

From the responses, the researchers determined what elements raised the risk of violent behavior.

There were 3,089 people deemed to have severe mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression — but no history of either violence or substance abuse. They reported very few violent acts, about 50, between interviews.

But when mental illness was combined with a history of violence and a history of substance abuse, as in about 1,600 people, the risk of future violence increased by a factor of 10.

The relationship between mental illness and violence is there, “but it’s not as strong as people think,” Elbogen said.

Predicting who will act violently is complex, said John Monahan, a psychologist at University of Virginia’s law school, who has done similar research but was not involved in the new study.

“It is true that our crystal balls are very murky,” Monahan said. “The vast majority of violence that occurs in American society has absolutely nothing to do with mental illness.”

The large national survey, conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, included people living in shelters, hotels and group homes, as well as houses and apartments, but it didn’t include people living in hospitals, jails or prisons.

Rosanna Esposito of the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Virginia, applauded the study but pointed out the researchers weren’t able to analyze whether the subjects were in psychiatric treatment or not. Medication for serious mental illness can reduce the risk of violence, she said.

___

On the Net:

Archives of General Psychiatry: http://www.archgenpsychiatry.com

Diving Too Deep into the Ocean of Corruption and Cynicism

Icarus flew too close to the sun.  I have dived too deep into the ocean of corruption and cynicism that is Virginia’s mental/behavioral/authoritarian/coercive/punitive/retaliatory/gas-lighting/insincere/self-serving/two-faced “system” and political system  and I must now swim up to the waves so I can breathe again.

My plan is to leave Virginia and return to my home of 32 years.  I never planned to move to Virginia.   It was sheer fate that I fell so ill and spent more than 7 weeks including a week in the ICU while I was on vacation in Virginia.  The doctors thought I was too ill to live alone.  I proved them wrong but I had already moved.  I have been here 12 years now but it is really the last 3 or so that have taught me I will never be comfortable in this state.  I dove too deep, got too close to how sausages/laws are made, into the real way our lives are ruled, into the reality that in Virginia  it is still well off white men and a few women who have never known prejudice or been treated badly simply because of who they are perceived to be by others who call the shots. I have seen through the fiction of Councils with no power, Commissions and task forces that are designed to come to the conclusion wanted by the powers that be before they even begin.   I have been lied to to my face and to my ear and then had to stand and listen to fake expressions of apology/concern/respect/you-name-it.  I have seen people sell out others of their group for mere approval by their own oppressors.  I have seen so-called professionals lie about others to preserve their own unrealistic self admiration and egos.  I have seen too much.  It is time to make plans to go home.

Regressive Mental Health Laws Inhibit Free Speech

Someone once told me that I don’t share enough about myself on this blog.  I didn’t agree but it is true that there are many important things I never write about on this blog.  Why? Because Virginia, and to be fair, most other states in this country, have now passed such regressive commitment laws that they inhibit my free speech.  Anything I put on this blog could and would be used against me in the kangaroo court they call a civil commitment proceeding under the regressive laws passed as “reform” last year due to the high emotions after Virginia Tech. in which no leader in this state was willing to step up and ask citizens not to take their feelings out on everyone with a psychiatric label or history or mislabel or even the perception of such.  Even George W. Bush eventually spoke publically of the need not to scapegoat American citizens who happened to be Muslim or from the Middle East after 9/11.  But no one in this state had the courage (sic) of George W. Bush when it came to people with psychiatric labels. 

So I don’t write as much these days.  I value honesty and full disclosure, but I value my health and well being and freedom more.   But hey,  free speech isn’t for people like me anyway, who do I think I am?  A law abiding citizen who has never even gotten a parking ticket and has voted  in every election since I was 18 except one where I was too ill? A volunteer for many groups in my community who has probably spent more money volunteering than I ever earned working?  People like me absolutely should not have free speech, that just makes good……..prejudice and bigotry and intimidation.

Who Would Lock Up Jesus Christ? The State of Virginia, That’s Who

Questioning the authority of the government, getting angry and knocking over furniture (tables in front of the temple), announcing he was the Son of G-d, attracting crowds, walking on water, preaching outside, not in a church or synagogue, no visible means of support, no home of his own, walking everywhere, upsetting people of means and status, of course Jesus Christ would be commitable under the current and soon to come lowered standards for involuntary commitment to a mental hospital in Virginia. 

But, you say, there was that one, that one who shot people up, he was one of “them”, even if he wasn’t really, even if he had a very rare disorder and even if most of “them” are less likely to be violent than the general population, still we must make an example of all of “them” because of that one.  We need someone to blame, of course we do, in fact, as we did 2,000 years ago, we need a scapegoat, someone or some group to take the blame for our own sins and our own faults and omissions.  Human beings have had scapegoats for thousands of years, why should the present be any different?  But it’s medicine or science you say.  No, it’s not.  It’s social control and it’s intolerance of difference and it’s archaic and brutal and largely avoidable if voluntary CARE is available to all, which it is not.  But never mind, we need scapegoats.  And we forget, those of us who are Christian, that G-d already gave us His only Son so that we would not need to scapegoat each other anymore. 

Merry Christmas.

In France, Psychiatrists Join With Psychiatric Patients in Opposing MOT, Seclusion and National Database of Commitments!

In response to this question, the majority of health care professionals would say that more and more frequently mental health patients are badly cared for both in hospital and when back at home. That is why health professionals and patient support organisations are widely opposed to Sarkozy’s plan.

I wish I was better at learning languages.  Despite several years of studying French, my speaking fluency never reached a high level.  It is so amazing to me, so heartening, so hopeful and yet so discouraging, to see a country where psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are protesting proposed further oppression of psychiatric patients.  They are opposing more seclusion, opposing a national database of involuntary commitments–USA has one and now the FBI has it too–actually telling the truth that psychiatric patients are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, opposing making psychiatric hospitals more prison like and opposing restrictions on outings for patients. 

If psychiatrists in France can be on the same side as their patients, why do we continue to have such refusal to even talk to survivors of psychiatry in the U.S.?  The APA doesn’t want to talk to patients unless they are telling a story of how psychiatry saved their life.  They want to talk to the parents of patients AKA NAMI and ally themselves with them, despite the fact that NAMI supports allowing psychologists to prescribe and most patients and most psychiatrists do not.  What is the APA afraid of?  Or is it just that they feel they are too good to associate with ex-patients in anything but a paternalistic manner? What is DMHMRSAS of Virginia afraid of when they  act two-faced and passive aggressively towards any ex-patient who is critical of them? What would it be like to have a Department of Mental Health that was not fear and retaliation based, where money was not given out based on toeing the party line and not speaking up too loudly or too critically?  Where promises were kept, legitimate business phone calls were returned, opinions did not sway with the wind of politics, accountability was not a dirty word and DMHRMSAS knew what most mature adults in organizations know, that their critics are their best friends in improving their organizations? I must be high on Christmas candy to even dream of such a state of affairs…….

Maryland Created Database That Will Actually Save Lives, Unlike Virginia Which Created One That Only Creates Fear and Prejudice

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121001813.html

Virginia created a database of folks who have been committed to a psychiatric unit for any reason including a psychiatric reaction to a prescribed medical medication or temporary inability to care for self years ago and last year made it even more extensive by adding in folks who volunteer for hospitalization after being detained initially.  There is no evidence this database, created years before the massacre at Virginia Tech. ever saved any lives or ever will.   There is every reason to believe that it will  create prejudice and stigma  againtt Virginia citizens who have committed no crime and are no danger to anyone at all and that it will deter people from both seeking treatment for themselves and loved ones and from volunteering for hospitalization. 

Maryland on the other hand created a database that makes sense and will save lives–a database of all court orders around domestic violence that sheriffs can access at any time of day or night without going to a courthouse, impossible in the middle of the night, and which also allows them to print out orders in their patrol cars in case a perpetrator has torn up a protective or restraining order or an order was issued very recently.  In Maryland, men (and a few women) known to be violent and likely to be violent again are in a database that law enforcement can use in the moment to keep victims, including their children, safe and protected.  In Virginia, we have only succeeded in regressing the status of people who have psychiatric issues at any time in their lives and in increasing popular misconceptions that people with psychiatric histories are dangerous which has no scientific basis at all.  But hey, Virginia’s politicians had to show they were tough on….people with disabilities?  G-d forbid Virginia’s politicians showed any sign that they were tough on people who beat their wives and/or children, after all, the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse does not even bother to check if someone who is detained is in an abusive living situation, and they know best, right?  Oh, except for that unfortunate and preventable killing in Fairfax in which a woman in an abusive relationship was taken to her Community Services Board’s crisis center and no one there seemed to realize the danger of her situation so when she left and was attacked by her abusive boyfriend she killed him in self-defense and was found not guilty months later after being restored to competency because she was defending herself, not because she was mentally ill.  Do you know how innocent she must have been with a psychiatric label in a criminal court to actually be found not guilty?   Ordinary citizens figured it out, but not the trained clinicians at her community services board.  Virginia’s Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse created a new pre-screening form this year.  A perfect opportunity to add screening for abuse to the process, instead they added a nonsensical and non-existent “level of insight” called “blaming” on their pre-screening form.  Sort of telling about their real attitude towards people with psychiatric disabilities, don’t you think?

“All Our Lives We Must Struggle to Rid the Earth of All Such Crimes”

Two Good Arms by Charlie Parker sung by Holly Near

We All Matter

Applebaum and Monahan-Compare and Contrast Biases Stated or Otherwise

John Monahan ends his editorial on leverage in mental health (in which he makes the mistake of conflating SSI payments with SSDI disability payments and the mistake of assuming the ADA allows landlords to legally discriminate against people with psychiatric disabilities) with the statement that “Contrary to the confident claims of advocates on either side of the debate, the legal status of many forms of mandated treatment is currently uncertain. Given the recent origins of many kinds of leverage, it will be some time before we know which will survive constitutional or statutory challenge.” As if John Monahan were not himself an advocate for outpatient commitment!?  What exactly was he voting for on the Commitment Task-force of the Virginia Supreme Court’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform? For expanding the use of outpatient commitment in the state of Virginia, that’s what.  Monahan has made previous statements in articles implying that there are overly dramatic activists on both sides of the outpatient commitment debate while he himself is a disinterested, unopinionated academic observer.   No one who has seen him in discussions of the issue can make sense of these claims in my humble opinion.

Paul Applebaum on the other hand has just come out with a reviewof E. Fuller Torrey’s new book promoting stigma and forced treatment that takes on Torrey’s misleading use of anecdotes and limited and dated statistics to make his case.  Applebaum is not a civil rights activist by any stretch of the imagination, he actually believes it is still too hard to commit folks to psychiatric hospitals in some parts of this country (some people will not be happy until we have a 100% commitment rate in every state), but he points out the huge gaps in funding for services in the community and does not claim that these need to be coercive or leveraged to be effective, a claim with no proof nor merit in my opinion that Monahan seems to be making.  The existence of leverage does not prove that it works, it only proves that it exists and no more.  Applebaum is honest enough to point out that even the best funded mental health system (or any system) can prevent rare acts of random violence by anyone, “mentally ill” or sane and that preventing all acts of violence by people labelled with mental illness would do little to promote the safety of the American public given how low a percentage they comprise of the total.  Applebaum also points out that using fear of violence as a strategy to get what one wants makes the lives of people with psychiatric diagnoses harder not better. 

Of course there are no bias free human beings, academics or otherwise, but it does get old when some folks claim they are the unbiased one in the room or world while others are wild-eyed activists.  No matter who it is claiming to be the unbiased voice, Monahan or anyone in a position of prominence in mental health policy in Virginia.   Personally, I actually prefer the wild eyed activists on the other side because I always know what I am dealing with as do they .  Congratulations on your new up to date blog TAC <evil grin>.

Outpatient Commitment Is About Money, Not Public Safety or “Caring Coercion”

Proponents of outpatient commitment (forced drugging and so called “treatment” in their own homes of folks labelled with psychiatric diagnoses) usually use one of two arguments or both to persuade others that it is a good idea.  The argument most often used by E. Fuller Torrey and his Treatment Advocacy Center is that people with mental illness are dangerous ticking time bombs if not force medicated in their own homes who will kill you or your child or your sister on the street if you don’t pass laws to force drugs down their throats NOW!  The argument others use and that the Treatment Advocacy Center also uses sometimes is that not forcing psychiatric drugging and “treatment” on people in their own homes is tantamount to neglect and shows a lack of caring or concern for people with mental illness.  And if the drugs didn’t shorten lives by 25 years and actually worked as they claim rather than by causing brain damage and if we as a society had decided that we were going to force drug everyone with an illness in their own home if they didn’t take medicine voluntarily, well I”d move to another country but they might have more of an argument than they do now. 

But the fact is the push for outpatient commitment in Virginia and elsewhere is not about public safety nor about “caring coercion”.  It is all about money.  Money that taxpayers and legislators and Governors do not want to spend on mental health services in the community but will have to spend if legislation is passed that makes it even easier to force a citizen of Virginia into forced outpatient “treatment”.  Once there is a court order mandating treatment, there is no way out for the legislators and the Governor.  The money will have to be found to “treat” (force drug and monitor) each and every person ordered into outpatient commitment in Virginia.  If the psychiatrists to prescribe aren’t there they will have to be hired and if there is no money in the state pharmacy to pay for the drugs it will have to be found because otherwise state employees and their bosses will find themselves in contempt of court.  Of course the money for outpatient forced treatment will only be forced out of the legislature and the Governor after every last bit of money for voluntary mental health services in the community has been squeezed out of Community Service Board budgets and there is no more voluntary care left in the state for those dependent on the public system of mental health if we can even call it a system.  But no matter right?  It’s not as if self-determination, empowerment, choice, recovery or resilience are part of the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse’s Mission statement and Vision and Comprehensive Plan and Transformation plan and Olmstead Plan or anything….oh wait, they are.

Talk the talk.  Walk the walk.  You can do it.  We can do it.  Yes we can.

Lack of Screening for Domestic Violence May Have Led to Death of Man

The Treatment Advocacy Center is unlikely to publish the end of the story of the woman who was taken to a Fairfax crisis stabilization center by a police officer, left to wait for 45 minutes and then left and ended up killing her live in boyfriend when she got home because it does not fit with their agenda of psychiatric patients as irrational perpetrators of violence.  I do hope that the Office of the Inspector General however will re-open its investigation into this critical incident now that new information and a verdict of not guilty have occurred.  The woman in question was, according to news reports of trial testimony, in an abusive relationship and that is what got her so upset and taken to the crisis stabilization center.  However she was not seen quickly and if she had been there is no space on Virginia’s pre-screening nor any requirement in performance contracts that women or men who seek crisis psychiatric services be screened for domestic violence, unlike most medical contacts for women even with their obstetrician or in a medical hospital.  This despite the known fact that women with mental illness are far more likely to enter into abusive relationships than women without mental illness diagnoses.

If this woman had been screened for domestic violence it is unlikely she would have been sent home.  Instead she would we hope have been referred to a domestic violence shelter for women.  If that had happened, she would not have faced a murder trial even though she was found not guilty in the end, and her abusive boyfriend would probably still be alive. 

It is past time to take the issue of domestic violence perpetrated ON people with mental illness labels seriously and to screen for it at every juncture that a person with a psychiatric label interfaces with the mental health system.  It could save lives.

No!!!! The Only Thing That Would Make Me Not Vote For President is Kaine as VP. NO!!

Sources: Obama Campaign Seriously Vetting Kaine

This has to be joke right?  We need a vice presidential candidate who is against the death penalty but signs death warrants anyway?  A vice-president who used people with psychiatric disabilities as a scapegoat to boost his own political ratings while doing nothing to address the responsibility of people in charge?  A VP who has done nothing for folks on fixed incomes in his own state but raise fees and keep Medicaid just as hard to obtain as ever and kept the cap on Medicaid lifetime expenditures that other states don’t have?  A VP who is pro-business but not pro-union nor pro-poor people.  A VP who retreats immediately in the face of opposition from lobbyists when he does have a good idea such as putting expensive, no more effective and dangerous neuroleptics into the state formulary?  A VP with no foreign policy experience?  No Senate nor House experience?  A VP who will add absolutely nothing to the ticket but baggage?  A VP who will not clean up his own state hospitals so is unlikely to help clean up those across the country?

WHY????????????????????????????

Politically Correct Prejudice and Bigotry

It’s very amusing to me that Sally Satel entitled her book before last P.C. MD: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine because Satel is in so many ways the epitome of psychiatric political correctness. She makes fun of the idea that psychiatric survivors have anything to say or offer to the psychiatric system–this is very politically correct in the U.S. culture, particularly on the left/liberal side of the culture. Using psychiatric labels and diagnoses as put downs and jokes is commonplace and accepted without question as to its effect on people who have been so labelled in real life in left/liberal circles. Of course there are many who do the same on the right/neocon side and Bush himself called Sadaam a “madman” at one point and his DOJ isn’t exactly overly interested in civil rights violations against people in psychiatric institutions.

But I really get tired of hearing and reading people who consider themselves enlightened repeat the propaganda pushed by lobbyists who want to erode the minimal civil rights in existence for people with psychiatric labels in this country. These lobbyists deliberately and openly choose to push the idea that people with psychiatric labels are a threat to public safety, knowing the reality is that very few are and that you are much more likely to be killed by a non-diagnosed person than you ever are by someone with a psychiatric label and that folks with psychiatric labels are significantly over represented in the population of victims of violent crime. They also know that people with psychiatric labels are subject to discriminatory policing and prosecution, but ignore those facts to get well meaning folks upset about the fact that there are people with mental illness in our prisons and jails.

They also pretend that acts of violence can be both predicted and prevented by the psychiatric system knowing this is hogwash. The only way the psychiatric system can reliably predict future violence is from a history of past violence, age (young) and gender (male), and substance abuse, just like everybody else in our society and in fact, very few folks don’t have the common sense to predict that someone who has been violent in the past, is young, is male and abuses drugs is more likely to be violent in the future than someone who doesn’t fit any of those categories.

If it were any other marginalized group in our society being targeted as threats to public safety through propaganda (illegal immigrants have been targeted this way as well, but there has been pushback), liberals and the left would see through it and push back. But the prejudice and bigotry against people with psychiatric labels is so strong that even folks with psychiatric labels themselves will sometimes buy into the propaganda and lies being pushed by lobbyists who want to take away what little civil rights we have left.

It’s not politically incorrect to call someone crazy, a wingnut, or disturbed instead of bad, ignorant or obnoxious, it’s absolutely politically correct in our culture. And that’s a shame.

Governor Kaine Chooses To Appear With President Bush at Monticello

GOVERNOR’S PUBLIC SCHEDULE FOR

FRIDAY, JULY 4 – FRIDAY JULY 11

 

Friday, July 4

 

Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony. Governor Timothy M. Kaine will attend the annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony at Monticello. The ceremony will feature remarks by President George W. Bush.

 

When:         10:00 a.m.  

 

Where:       Monticello

Charlottesville, Virginia

The New Easier Civil Commitment Laws: At Least They Fixed The Problems in Cho’s Case, Right? Wrong.

1. The Virginia Tech. shooter was allowed to live on campus again after being kicked off for misbehavior and nothing has been done to change Virginia Techs’ policies in situations such as his.

2.  The Virginia Tech. shooter’s commitment hearing was held in less than 24 hours after he was picked up by police for evaluation and the hospital had no time to properly observe him because he was there on a Sunday night and only for 14 hours.  The reason his hearing was held so quickly and without time for proper evaluation? Because the New River Valley holds commitment hearings Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the convenience of the 2 lawyers who switch roles each month as special justice and attorney for the person being committed and nothing was enacted in law nor policy to change this situation.  So if someone is picked up this Sunday afternoon in the New River Valley, the CSB and the hospital will still only have less than 24 hours to evaluate the person.  Great job of addressing the problems General Assembly, Governor and Commission on Mental Health Law Reform.  I would have supported waiting 24 hours before holding a hearing to give a fairer chance in both directions but we had a special special justice from Richmond on the Commission who said it would prevent him from ordering forced drugging immediately if he had to wait 24 hours and we all know it’s all about the forced injections……not.

3. The Virginia Tech. shooter was selectively mute but was ordered into talk therapy, clearly there was no thought of what actually would work to help him.  Was money given to CSB’s and others to provide alternative therapies to folks who cannot benefit from traditional treatment by the General Assembly et. al.? No.  In fact, the new legislation provides no new money even for traditional talk therapy which most CSB’s in Virginia cannot afford to provide given the extremely low reimbursement rate by Virginia’s Medicaid program.  The new money is all about crisis services after the fact and inpatient beds.  Or is it?  Because apparently the funds for LOS purchase of community inpatient funds have been cut to CSB’s as of July 1, the same day the new laws go into effect.  So we will have more folks committed and less money to pay for community beds for them.  Catch and release with a permanent and stigmatizing record.

4. The Virginia Tech shooter’s evaluation and hearing were both extremely short, less than 15 minutes.  So presumably this was fixed in the new laws to make sure enough time is taken in evaluation and hearings to make sure everyone knows what is really going on with someone, right?  Wrong.  There is no requirement in the new laws that evaluators nor special justices spend more time with the people being sent for commitment and no incentive for them to given that the scandalously low fees paid to both have not been raised one bit.  But, independent evaluators will now be allowed to evaluate someone by video conference which is sure to help with picking up on nuances of behavior and issues, not. 

5. Well at least we must have made commitment hearings and hospitalization more trauma-informed and less likely to cause narcissistic injury which could lead to rage and acting out in someone such as Cho right?  Okay, don’t make me laugh.  Not even close, nothing, nada, trauma is the order of the day as it always was. 

So in some, we have taken away the civil liberties of an entire group of Virginia citizens and called it the “Virginia Tech.” legislation which is offensive and stigmatizing in itself and on top of that, not even true.  The legislation that was passed would not have prevented the Virginia Tech. tragedy.  Not that anyone with any common sense and without a political agenda ever really thought we could prevent tragedies by changing laws.  Let’s outlaw tornadoes! That will work. 

T-4 Revisited: A reminder of what can happen when fascism is cloaked in compassionate care of the handicapped

Do we think this cannot happen again? Maybe not in the exact same way, but it is happening…NOW…all across our country, fueled by greed, hatred, fear and spread as progressive transformation for the good of our society. Through intentional misinformation about mental illness and those affected by it, certain interest groups with deep pockets and strong political ties have been waging an insidious war on the consciousness of our nation, urging on fear and prejudice, yet concealed quietly within the gift of a Trojan Horse…”compassion and treatment for the sickest of the sick”.

We hear about “the right to treatment” from lobby groups like NAMI and the Treatment Advocacy Center, much the same as you will hear about “the right to death” in the excerpt below. We hear about “incurable illness” as well, but framed in a slightly different package, because the goal here for our government and it’s utilization of psychiatry and their interdependent relationships all funded by Pharma and tax dollars is not the same as it was for the Nazis. The goal here is not necessarily to kill, but to create the necessary lower strata of society that is required for the bureaucracies involved to serve themselves and each other by organizing their power to promote their own wealth, a wealth that depends on a class of people that must be managed and held in place. The underlying principles of fascism are the same however for both the Nazis and our “compassionate advocates” fighting for forced drugging and looser commitment standards.

We are told that there is no point in providing housing or food or other programs of support for those mentally ill who refuse the drugs…”life unworthy” of basic necessities…unless “medicated”.

We are to be convinced that forcing sedating, mind-numbing drugs into the bodies of innocent people will prevent crime…a better, safer society for all by way of chemical straightjacket.

Families and patients are being told that these psych laws will provide “access” to “the best and most modern treatments available”.

We are being sold the idea that forcible drugging with dangerous psychotropics and looser commitment criteria is for the good of “the severely and persistently mentally ill”, and that this “is a therapeutic treatment and a compassionate act completely consistent with medical ethics.”

Our doctors did not become psychiatric police overnight. The transformation has taken time and required a veneer of scientific justification along with the politically opportunistic use of tragedy to wear down public resistance, the shock doctrine in play.

We are being offered pseudo-scientific rationalizations for the forced drugging and involuntary commitment of the “sickest of the sick” which are being bolstered by misguided economic considerations. According to bureaucratic calculations, state funds that go to the care of criminals and the mentally ill could be put to better use, for example, by building new large state hospitals or outpatient commitment laws…

The scapegoating of the mentally ill as a danger and threat to society for the purpose of degrading civil rights and increasing legal authority over certain groups is a pre-figuration of what is to come for all. No one will be immune. The dragnet has been cast.

The parallels are uncanny…

Murder of the handicapped

Berenbaum, Michael (1993). The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust memorial Museum. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. (pp.63-65).

Mass murder began with the death of a few individuals. In September 1939, Hitler signed an order empowering his personal physician and the chief of Fuhrer Chancellory to put to death, those unsuited to live. He backdated it to September 1^st 1939, the day World War II began, to give it the appearance of a wartime measure. In the directive:

Reich leader Philip Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing.

What followed was the so-called euthanasia program, in which men, women, and children who were physically disabled, mentally retarded, or emotionally disturbed were systematically killed.

Within a few months, the T-4 program involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to “take executive measures against those defined as ‘life unworthy of living’”.

A statistical survey of all psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and homes for the chronically ill patients was ordered. At Tiergarten 4, three medical experts reviewed the forms reviewed by institutions throughout Germany, but did not examine any patients or read their medical records. Nevertheless, they had the power to decide life or death.

Patients whom it was decided to kill were transported to six killing centers: Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernberg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. The members of the SS in charge of the transports donned white coats to keep up the charade of a medical procedure.

The first killings were by starvation: starvation is passive, simple and natural. Then injections of lethal doses of sedatives were used. Children were easily “put to sleep”. But gassing soon became the preferred method of killing. Fifteen to twenty people were killed in a chamber disguised as a shower. The lethal gas was provided by chemists, and the process was supervised by physicians. Afterward, black smoke billowed from the chimneys as the bodies were burned in adjacent crematoria.

Families of those killed were informed of the transfer. They were assured that their loved ones were being moved in order to receive the best and most modern treatments available. Visits, however, were not possible. The relatives then received condolence letters, falsified death certificates signed by physicians, and urns containing ashes. There were occasional lapses in bureaucratic efficiency, and some families received more than one urn. They soon realized something was amiss.

A few doctors protested. Heinrich Bonhoeffer, a leading psychiatrist, worked with his son Dietrich, a pastor who actively opposed the regime, to contact church groups, urging them not to turn patients in church-run institutions over to the SS. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the SS just before the end of the war.) A few physicians refused to fill out the requisite forms. Only one psychiatrist, Professor Gottfried Ewald of the University of Gottingen, openly opposed the killing.

Doctors did not become killers overnight. The transformation took time and required a veneer of scientific justification. As early as 1895, a widely used German medical textbook made a claim for “the right to death”. In 1920, a physician and a prominent jurist argued that destroying “life unworthy of life” is a therapeutic treatment and a compassionate act completely consistent with medical ethics.

Soon after the Nazis came to power, the Bavarian Minister of Health proposed the mentally ill, the mentally retarded and other “inferior” people be isolated and killed. “This policy has already been initiated in our concentration camps,” he noted. A year later, mental institutions throughout the Reich were instructed to “neglect” their patients by withholding food and medical treatment.

Pseudo-scientific rationalizations for the killing of the “unworthy” were bolstered by economic considerations. According to bureaucratic calculations, state funds that went to the care of criminals and the insane could be put to better use, for example, by loans to newly married couples. Incurably sick children were seen as a burden for the healthy body of the Volk, the German people. In a time of war, it was not difficult to lose sight of the absolute value of human life. Hitler understood this. Wartime, he said, “was the best time for elimination of the incurably ill”.

The murder of the handicapped was a pre-figuration of the Holocaust. The killing centers to which the handicapped were transported were the antecedents of death camps. The organized transportation of the handicapped foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians who became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps. All their moral, professional and ethical inhibitions had been lost.

During the German euthanasia program, psychiatrists were able to save some patients, at least temporarily, but only if the psychiatrists cooperated in sending others to their death. In the Jewish communities of the territories later conquered by the Nazi’s, Judenrat leaders, Jews appointed by the Germans to take charge of the ghettos, had to make similar choices.

Gas chambers were first developed at the handicapped killing centers. So was the use of burning to dispose of dead bodies. In the death camps, the technology was taken to a new level: thousands could be killed at one time and their bodies burned within hours.

The Roman Catholic church, which had not taken a stand on the Jewish question, protested the “mercy killing”. Count von Galen, the Bishop of Munster, openly challenged the regime, arguing that it was the duty of Christians to oppose the taking of human life even if this were to cost them their own lives. It seemed to have an effect.

On August 24, 1941, almost two years after the euthanasia program was initiated, it appeared to cease. In fact, it had gone underground. The killing did not end; mass murder was just beginning. Physicians trained in the medical killing centers went on to grander tasks. Irmfired Eberl, a doctor whose career began in the T-4 program, became the commandant of Treblinka, where killing of a magnitude as yet unimagined would take place…

New Uniform Preadmission Screening Report: Includes “Blaming” as a “Level of Insight”!!!!

uniformpreadmscreen

The New Mental Health Laws Are Worse Than You Thought: A Radical Intepretation of the Laws by Bonnie, Cohen and Monahan is Being Taught to All Special Justices and CSB staff

Reprised because the post after this has drawn attention away from the most important issue facing us in my opinion.

It is also not clear why the print media is not covering this radical interpretation of the new laws which makes them even looser than the language of the law as passed.  Perhaps interpretation is not dramatic enough to make a good story, unfortunately, drama does not teach the public what they need to know:  that interpretation of their laws has been handed over to 3 men who are not legislators, not judges and not in the executive branch of government, 3 men who have not been elected nor appointed to any public office in fact, two law professors and a psychiatrist. 

For citizens affected by these laws, which is everyone, this interpretation and its implications are critical. 

You can now be committed if someone says there is a substantial likelihood that you will lose your job due to symptoms of mental illness.

You can now be committed if someone says there is a substantial likelihood that you could be evicted due to your mental illness or perceived mental illness.

You can now be committed if you are diabetic from taking the new psychiatric drugs and choose to stop taking your insulin at any time even though folks who did not become diabetic from the new drugs can not be committed for failing to take their insulin.  Apparently, the decision to risk amputation and kidney failure is always rational when made by the not yet diagnosed and always irrational when made by the psychiatrically labelled since Dr. Cohen argued with me more than once in taskforce meetings that non-compliant diabetics were making a rational decision.  Dr. Cohen has also written that he supports “rational suicide”, whatever that might be, but clearly it only applies to “people like us” or I should say “people like him”.  Personally, I do not believe in rational suicide and am a supporter of Not Dead Yet and would encourage anyone to try and live with their illness as long as they can, but hey, what do I know?  I’m not a psychiatrist, just a person who believes in life. 

Any hearsay or rumor of past actions or any slander or inaccuracy on an old mental health record can now be used to help lock you up against your will and force drugs on you.

According to the interpretation of Bonnie, Cohen and Monahan, if there is a 1 in 4 chance of serious harm/danger, you should be committed.  25% chance despite the Supreme Court of the United States decision that a standard of clear and convincing-more like 72% must be used in involuntary commitment.

Is it a coincidence that 3 white upper middle class men were allowed to interpret the laws of Virginia for every citizen?  I do not believe it is.  The mental health system in Virginia has been run by upper middle class white men since it began and continues to this day.  We have never had a woman Commissioner nor an African American Commissioner of our Department of Mental Health in Virginia, unlike other states.  We continue to act as if the white man knows best for women and for minorities in this state and we will all suffer for it. 

Moving out of this state where homophobia and ablism are now enshrined into law but basic health services are not funded  and the homeless are told to get a job without any help to do so is looking better and better and as soon as the real estate market comes back, if it does, I will. 

The New Mental Health Laws Are Worse Than You Thought: A Radical Intepretation of the Laws by Bonnie, Cohen and Monahan is Being Taught to All Special Justices and CSB staff

All Virginia Special Justices have now been trained in the new laws under an interpretation developed by Richard Bonnie, John Monahan and Bruce Cohen of the University of Virginia’s Institute on Law and Psychiatry.  Their interpretation is the loosest interpretation anyone could have imagined and more.  It is not clear who decided to use this radical interpretation to train not only special justices who hold hearings but also Community Service Board employees who make pre-screening decisions at an earlier training and as available on the Department of Mental Health and Retardation etc. website under Mental Health Law “Reform”.  

It is also not clear why the print media is not covering this radical interpretation of the new laws which makes them even looser than the language of the law as passed.  Perhaps interpretation is not dramatic enough to make a good story, unfortunately, drama does not teach the public what they need to know:  that interpretation of their laws has been handed over to 3 men who are not legislators, not judges and not in the executive branch of government, 3 men who have not been elected nor appointed to any public office in fact, two law professors and a psychiatrist. 

For citizens affected by these laws, which is everyone, this interpretation and its implications are critical. 

You can now be committed if someone says there is a substantial likelihood that you will lose your job due to symptoms of mental illness.

You can now be committed if someone says there is a substantial likelihood that you could be evicted due to your mental illness or perceived mental illness.

You can now be committed if you are diabetic from taking the new psychiatric drugs and choose to stop taking your insulin at any time even folks who did not become diabetic from the new drugs can now be committed for failing to take their insulin.

Any hearsay or rumor of past actions or any slander or inaccuracy on an old mental health record can now be used to help lock you up against your will and force drugs on you.

According to the interpretation of Bonnie, Cohen and Monahan, if there is a 1 in 4 chance of serious harm/danger, you should be committed.  25% chance despite the Supreme Court of the United States decision that a standard of clear and convincing-more like 72% must be used in involuntary commitment.

Is it a coincidence that 3 white upper middle class men were allowed to interpret the laws of Virginia for every citizen?  I do not believe it is.  The mental health system in Virginia has been run by upper middle class white men since it began and continues to this day.  We have never had a woman Commissioner nor an African American Commissioner of our Department of Mental Health in Virginia, unlike other states.  We continue to act as if the white man knows best for women and for minorities in this state and we will all suffer for it. 

Moving out of this state where homophobia and ablism are now enshrined into law but basic health services are not funded  and the homeless are told to get a job without any help to do so is looking better and better and as soon as the real estate market comes back, if it does, I will. 

You Have the Right to Request a Copy of the Tape of Your Involuntary Commitment Hearing in Virginia After July 1

Under the new mental health regression laws, commitment hearings will no longer be open to monitoring by advocates, lawyers and the fourth estate unless you specifically request your hearing be open.  Secret hearings have a long history of being abuses of process and this is a huge concern.  But, you now have the right to request a copy of the tape recording of your hearing after the fact at your local courthouse.  If you do not want to listen to it yourself, you may still want to request a copy for any future commitment hearing watch program that may develop in Virginia.  Don’t keep the copy where someone in your family or someone who might use it against you can find it.  As before the law changed, hearings can be closed at the “discretion” of the special justice, a discretion which was used to close all hearings to a Washington Post reporter in Prince William County.  Whether that was an abuse of discretion or not is not my call. 

It’s Opposites Day and Nobody Told Me? Why Didn’t I Get the Memo the Treatment Advocacy Center Did? Huh? :)

The (forced and coercive and drugs only) Treatment Advocacy Center was told it was Opposites Day today and I was not.  I call no fair!  .  Why did no one tell me?  I could have done a great post on how empowering and safe and patient centered Virginia’s mental health system is if I had gotten the memo!

So they got to have all the fun because now it’s the end of Opposites Day and I’m too tired from kidney failure caused by fear of forced treatment to do a good humor post now.  Whine. 

So have fun, read their very humorous post, and please, someone make sure I get the memo on the NEXT Opposites Day?  I like to have fun too.

 

If You Think I’m Over-Reacting Or That This Has No Relevance You Have Not Been Paying Attention

Thank You, I’ll Continue to Honor the Prophets of the Torah and the Bible if You Don’t Mind :)

Can you say pretentious? I know you can.    This is so funny because if someone with a psychiatric label instead of a long retired psychiatrist such as Dr. McHugh (who is against sexual reassignment surgery and supports the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and is an admirer of Sally Satel by the way) wrote this, they would be asked if they were symptomatic.  Now I just find it hilarious personally, over hype, but it does bring home what the non-labelled can get away with saying and writing with no fear of being locked up or medicated.  E. Fuller Torrey may be a prophet of doom, that does not make him a Prophet. 

 

“In just a few short days of publication, those words ring so true that the book is receiving attention of biblical proportions.

“There are times and situations that call for prophets,” writes Johns Hopkins University Professor Dr. Paul McHugh in The Wall Street Journal. “Not fortunetellers or soothsayers, but biblical prophets like Amos or Jeremiah who furiously proclaim the old truths, puncture our pretensions and predict from current tribulations worse to come if what lies deeper than sin — idolatrous worship of false gods — continues. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist who cares for patients with schizophrenia and manic-depression, is to my mind the doctor nearest in character to an ancient Hebrew prophet.””

Schizophrenogenic Agencies and Courts in Virginia

“Understandably, parents of schizophrenics find the classification of schizophrenogenic parent offensive. No one wants to believe that they could have caused, even inadvertently, such terrible suffering in someone they love. But therapists who treat schizophrenics generally report a parenting interaction different from that usual to neurotic patients (although there are cases where relevant noxious life events have nothing to do with parents; in other cases, both parents and child are tragic victims of bad or absent professional advice). Communication deviance, measured from parental interaction, the Rorschach Inkblot Test (Rorschach, 1932), and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1943) has been found to characterize parents and adoptive parents of schizophrenics. Expressed emotion (intrusive hostility) of parents increases rehospitalization. Genetic factors, at most, represent increased vulnerability.

Pathogenesis, based on clinical observations, is measured from the TAT and is defined as the degree to which the parent, when there is a potential conflict between the needs of the child and the needs of the parent, unconsciously acts in terms of the parent’s needs without regard to the potentially conflicting needs of the child. Pathogenic parents, as well as their children, are victims in the same way that any patient who suffers psychological symptoms based on unconscious factors is a victim and not a culprit. In a series of studies, mothers of normals averaged 35% pathogenic. Mothers of schizophrenics averaged 65% pathogenic. Fathers of schizophrenics are nearly as high. Most convincing are clinical observations. Clinical examples of the meaning of pathogenesis are provided.”

I’ve been struggling all week to come up with words to describe what I feel about the ambushing of all of us who have fought for fair commitment laws by the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse and by the staff of the Supreme Court of Virginia in their last minute springing on us of a radically regressive interpretation of the new laws the General Assembly passed and the Governor signed.  I will leave the legalities of it to lawyers although I do wonder how the Supreme Court can interpret before enactment laws that will come to them on appeal for interpretation in time and I do wonder why DMHMRSAS could not and did not go through the customary regulatory process for a state agency.  But I am not a lawyer and I will leave that to the lawyers to figure out.

My feelings are personal and political.  I feel betrayed, I feel sideswiped, the victim of a sneak attack by people I thought would not do that even though I knew we disagreed on many matters of substance.  I feel like a child growing up in a family where parents put their own needs ahead of the interests of their children over and over while telling the outside world what a sacrifice they have made in raising their difficult children.  I feel like a child living in a family where black is white and blue is red and if you say no, blue is not red, you have violated a norm and are in big trouble with a capital T and are branded disloyal and a trouble maker.  I feel as if I am being asked to accept falsehood as truth and unreality as reality and I can not and will not do that.  Because that way lies madness.

The Treatment Advocacy Center Signed A Post With a NAME! Is It Getting Cold in the Seventh Circle or What? :)

Course there is no content to the post, just the offensive title of E. Fuller Torrey’s new book which he was shilling on c-span this morning, but at least there is a name on the blog and contact information. What’s next?  Enabling comments? Putting in links that aren’t repeats?  Using unspun statistics?  Stopping creating more prejudice and legal discrimination against people with mental illness????  Nah.  I’m just joking.  That could never happen. 

Non-hypothetical Example of What Will Happen Under the Radical Interpretation of Virginia’s New MH Laws Promulgated by DMHMRSAS and the Virginia Supreme Court

Agencies fined for placing man in mental facility

 By Gary Grado, Tribune January 2, 2007

 Charles Haroutunian rested on a squeaky gurney as an ambulance driver wheeled him into the mental unit that would be his home for the next six months. The stench of urine and feces quickly engulfed the 80-year-old Sun Lakes man as he made his way through the Santa Rosa Care Center in Tucson.

He heard wailing from some unseen place and then turned his head and saw someone slumped in a wheelchair.

The World War II veteran did not belong in the locked ward for severely mentally ill and brain-damaged patients. But a falling out with his family, a suicide attempt and a court order led him there.

A system breakdown left him there.

“You see it in the movies and you don’t believe it,” Haroutunian said. “I believe it. I lived through it.”

For his troubles, a Pima County jury awarded the man $310,250 in October, assigning most of the blame to Value Options, Maricopa County’s behavioral health provider for the indigent. The jury laid a relatively smaller portion of the blame on the Maricopa County Public Fiduciary, the agency charged with protecting vulnerable adults.

Haroutunian’s descent into “hell” began Sept. 2, 2002, when he took 520 Valium tablets while feeling depressed and abandoned.

“I woke up in the hospital, that’s all I know,” Haroutunian said.

He soon found himself at Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix answering questions from a psychiatrist who told him his family was trying to have him committed to a mental hospital.

Two psychiatrists examined him — one saying he met the requirements for forced treatment and the other say- ing he did not. The latter didn’t show up for a court hearing, and Judge Barbara Rodriguez Mundell of Maricopa County Superior Court ordered his commitment, Haroutunian said.

Cheryl Blum, Haroutunian’s attorney, said in opening statements of the trial that the court order required Value Options to provide treatment for Haroutunian, but the company stepped aside and let the county hospital decide where he would go.

The hospital set up his stay at Santa Rosa Care Center, the only place where the Veterans Administration would cover the bill.

Value Options does not comment on litigation, said company spokesman Joseph Ortiz. But defense attorney Lisa Mills said at trial that Value Options was responsible only for Haroutunian’s outpatient treatment and he was suing the wrong party.

Haroutunian said he didn’t question his move to the Tucson nursing home because he didn’t know his rights.

“I just thought I had my 180 days of punishment for breaking man’s law and God’s law by trying to take my life,” Haroutunian said.

He was placed in a locked unit that housed about 30 men and women who were either mentally ill or brain-damaged. Many were elderly.

Haroutunian’s two roommates wore diapers, and one banged his bed and yelled most of the day. Haroutunian also shared a bathroom with two men with hepatitis C and one with stomach cancer who would vomit after most meals — a smell Haroutunian said was worse than decomposing bodies.

“I can still smell it,” said Haroutunian, who trembles when he talks about his experiences there.

He often went without eating because patients would spit in his food or try to snatch it.

There was no one to speak with because most of the patients were incoherent. He said it wasn’t until his final month that a patient came with whom he could have a sensible conversation.

About two months into his stay, Haroutunian said a psychotherapist named Wendy White started working there. She made the rounds and introduced herself to everyone.

“This man comes up to me and says, ‘I really shouldn’t be here,’” said White, now in private practice.

White said she mentioned the patient’s comment to other staff members. Much to her surprise, they agreed.

White began looking at Haroutunian’s chart and couldn’t tell whose authority he was under. Weeks of making phone calls to the various agencies were fruitless.

“I just couldn’t get him the help he needed,” White said. “No one seemed alarmed.”

She suspected Haroutunian might be a victim of age discrimination. “My argument was, if he was 26, this wouldn’t be happening,” White said.

Blum told the jury that Value Options didn’t look into the type of facility that Haroutunian was in or whether he was getting treatment, medication or access to the courts.

Value Options never finished paperwork to transfer his case to its counterpart in Pima County, no one requested a termination of the court order and someone at Value Options mistakenly closed the file when it shouldn’t have been.

“Once they closed his file, he literally ceases to exist in the mental health system,” Blum said.

White said she helped Haroutunian find a lawyer, who eventually pieced together Haroutunian’s situation. “A man shouldn’t have to spend his own money to get out of a nursing home,” White said.

The attorney, Paul Bartlett, managed to get an emergency hearing before Mundell, who fined Value Options and the Public Fiduciary $10,000 each. The judge ordered that Haroutunian be examined to see if he belonged in Santa Rosa.

After an extensive examination by two doctors he hired, Value Options conceded Haroutunian should be freed, Blum said.

“Conceivably he could have been there the rest of his life,” White said. Contact Gary Grado by email, or phone (480) 898-6573

 

Washington Journal on c-span 1 to Give E. Fuller Torrey a Platform Monday, June 23rd at 8:30 a.m. EDT

E. Fuller Torrey, who has said he would have testified for the family who killed their son and brother with schizophrenia (as a defense witness), who continually smears people with mental illness as violent with made up and twisted statistics, who is in favor of lying to get people to take psychiatric medication and has admitted doing so himself to a patient, who thinks state hospitals are wonderful places and there should be tons more beds in them, who does not believe anyone diagnosed with a serious mental illness should have the right to decide on their own course of treatment, who has pushed and pushed to erroneously connect people with mental illness with danger in the mind of the American public in order to further his forced and purely medication based treatment agenda which ignores all humanistic and alternative approaches, even tradtional psychotherapy is a joke to Dr. Torrey who has not been able to help his own sister recover with his forced treatment of her with drugs and more drugs for about 30 years now, who has accepted and not returned brains for research that turned out to be stolen, who has absolutely no respect at all for the patient population he signed up to serve as a psychiatrist, will be on the Washington Journal, one of my favorite shows, tomorrow at 8:30 a.m.  This is a call in show but hard to get on and you have to call a non toll free number in D.C. and call early to have a chance of getting on and I would not be surprised if Dr. Torrey requests that no psychiatric survivors be allowed to get through to call in while he is on the air.  But if you are up to it, try calling in.  And shame on c-span for NEVER having had a psychiatric survivor or any disability rights activist on their show while giving this man a platform. 

The Joys of Lithium Induced Kidney Defects

Lithium damages the kidneys and causes polyuria and polydypsia also known as nephrogenic diabetes inspidus when it lasts long after lithium has been discontinued, as in 11 years after due to toxicity caused by lack of appropriate testing being ordered by a psychiatrist.  This is what has woken me up in the middle of the night, not just to use the bathroom but because my leg is cramping due to dehydration from being asleep and not drinking water for several hours. 

This is just one of the joys that citizens who have broken no laws and are no danger to others or even themselves will get to enjoy because our legislature, our Governor, the Supreme Court of Virginia and all of our CSB’s chose to scapegoat people with psychiatric diagnoses for the tragedy at Virginia Tech. by passing laws enabling forced drugging in people’s own homes and easier forced drugging in hospitals.  How many citizens of this Commonwealth will join me in having ruined kidney function and permenent chronic dehydration because of this scapegoating?  Nobody knows and nobody much cares is the answer nor will there be any collection of research data on the medical harm done by the passage of this legislation because those in power just don’t want that kind of information out there to keep them up at night.  As if it would…..

 

E. Fuller Torrey, President of Treatment Advocacy Center, Admits He Offered To Testify in Defense of Mother and Sister Who Murdered Their Psychiatrically Disabled Son and Brother

E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center and brother of a woman living with schizophrenia, has yet another hate and fear mongering screed out in the Wall Street Journal.  What makes this one a little different is that he writes that he offered to testify in DEFENSE of a mother and sister who murdered their son and brother who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and romanticizes their killing of their disabled, obviously not “loved” one as a noble act akin to a Greek tragedy.  Besides the fact that E. Fuller Torrey clearly suffers from delusions of grandeur, diagnosed or not, the fact that he can get such hate speech, almost inciting to violence in a mainstream paper shows just how far we have to go in overcoming prejudice, ignorance and discrimination against people with psychiatric diagnoses, prejudice made worse every year by E. Fuller Torrey and his Treatment (Hatred) Advocacy Center.  How extreme and out of the mainstream does this man and this advocacy group have to go before decent people disavow and disassociate themselves from it loudly and publicly? 

Long Haul

 Long Haul
Words and Music by Margie Adam

Many times I’ve seen their faces on the TV screen
Some of them are still among us
Some of them are history
But what always stops me
Is the message in their eyes
The truth they fight for freedom
In their daily lives
With a steady voice they call us,
Those of us who choose to see
With a steady voice they speak to us
With simple dignity.
And they say:
     CHORUS
     I am in it for the long haul
     I will be there for the last call
     You can count on me if you stumble and fall
     I am in it for the long haul
     I will be there for the last call
     You can count on me if you stumble and fall
     On the long haul.

All the ones who came before are calling out to me
Drawing my attention to the things that should not be
Though I’ve tried to look away
My heart would not be still
The cost of my distraction
is just not worth the bill.

With a steady heart I reach out
Taking hold of others’ hands
With the teachers and the lovers here
I join to take a stand.
   

  CHORUS

It’s no secret – all around us suffering goes on
Every day we make a choice to witness and respond
I don’t know the answer – why we are here awake
While the others sleep beside us
Content to only take.
With a steady voice we call out
Those of us who choose to see
With a steady voice we speak to all
With simple dignity
     Are you in it for the long haul?
     Will you be there for the last call?
     Can we count on you if we stumble and fall?
     We are in it for the long haul
     We will be there for the last call
     You can count on us if you stumble and fall
     ‘Cause we’re here
     For the long haul.
© Labyris Music Co. 1990

For more information: info@margieadam.com
Pleiades Records – 510.528.8193

It All Comes Down To Fear and Intimidation and Keeping Us Scared and Fighting With Our Friends

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. 

 

 

Experiment, Please Ignore: Treatment Advocacy Center, Western State Hospital: Coercion and Trauma and Disregard for Patients’ Rights

Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center, Treatment Advocacy Center

Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital

Please Join Me In Nominating Eli Lilly For NAMI-Virginia’s 2008 Award Of Excellence

Eli Lilly is my first choice, but if you feel funny nominating a corporation, I have some second choices for you to choose from.  They are:  Richard Bonnie, Chair of the Commission on Mental Health Law Regression, the entire county of Prince William for showing the rest of Virginia how to implement prejudice based law enforcement, very helpful for the coming mental health law regression and last but not least, our own Rob Bell of the House of Delegates who voted to change mental health laws but killed the financing for training those who will implement them, thus ensuring that citizens of Virginia will continue to be locked up willy nilly on the whim of folks with no real training.  Bravo to Eli Lilly for knowing just the right time to give a gift of cash to an organization, to Mr. Bonnie for being willing to politicize the entire Commission’s work, to Prince William County for being such a good example to the rest of Virginia and to Delegate Bell just for being so penny wise and pound foolish.  You all make me…darn, I was brought up too well to say.

Hey All You Forced Treatment and Restraint Chair Advocates! Your Favorite Movie Is On Retro! :)

_Judgment at Nuremberg_. 8:00 p.m. Retro.  If you miss this movie on your future, they replay it a lot, I’m sure you can catch it later. 

Have a nice night, sleep well. 

Bad Laws Are Nothing New and We Do Not Have to Reinvent the Wheel in Our Response to Them

Virginia’s “Thought Leaders” Missed the Memo–Liberation is On the March in the Civilized World

When it came to eugenics, memorialized in many countries today, University of Virginia “thought leaders” of the day were way ahead of the curve, but in regards to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities, it seems that University of Virginia “thought leaders” would not even be able to wrap their authoritarian heads around the concept and have never heard of it.  Today it was ratified after being signed by 20 countries.  Here is the press release from the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry:

 

PRESS RELEASE: EMBARGO: May 3, 2008, 8:00AM EST	For Further Information: Daniel Iga WNUSP Board Member +256-772-939404 igadaniel2003@yahoo.com

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Enters into Force Today as Twenty Countries have Ratified the Convention

 

 

New York City, May 3, 2008— The World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry joins with the international disability rights movement in celebrating the entry into force of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

 

 

The Convention ensures that persons with disabilities are guaranteed our human rights on an equal basis with all other people.  “This means a 180 degree shift in the way the world thinks of users and survivors of psychiatry.  It means we no longer have to sacrifice our freedom when we need support.  We will have the legal right to get out of institutions or stop treatment that doesn’t meet our needs, to end abusive guardianship arrangements and live as free members of society,” said Tina Minkowitz, co-chair of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (WNUSP).

 

 

The UN Convention obligates participating governments to change laws and ban discriminatory customs and practices. One highlight of the Convention is the right to enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others.  For persons with disabilities, this means the right to make our own decisions and to be able to obtain support that we may need to make those decisions.  Nothing in the Convention allows governments ever again to make decisions for us because they think they know “what is best”.  The Convention also protects us from discrimination and protects our right to liberty on an equal basis with others; the right to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; the right to live in the community; the right to health care on the basis of free and informed consent; an end to discrimination in the job market; and the participation by persons with disabilities to participate in the implementation and monitoring of the Convention.

 

 

WNUSP was a founding member of the International Disability Caucus – a coalition of over 70 disability rights groups and human rights advocates who drafted text, built momentum and created the political will in support of the Convention. WNUSP is following the progress on the Convention very closely as we continue our work with other disability rights groups, human rights organizations and other allies, and with governments around the world to assure widespread ratification of the Convention without any reservations, and to ensure well-planned and fully compliant implementation.

 

WNUSP looks forward to the day that the Convention achieves its purpose – to protect and promote the human rights and dignity of the estimated 650 million persons with disabilities around the world, a significant proportion of whom are users and survivors of psychiatry.

 

 

 

End

 

 

 

The World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (WNUSP)

 

·         is an international organization of users and survivors of psychiatry

·         advocates for human rights of users and survivors

·         speaks internationally for users and survivors

·         promotes the user/survivor movement in every nation around the globe

·         links user/survivor organizations and individuals throughout the world

 

For more information, please visit our website at www.wnusp.net

 

110 Million for a New Warehouse for People With Mental Illness, 41 Million for Coercive Community Services: Virginia May Soon Be Worst In Nation

On top of failing to fund community mental health services this year, instead spending 41 million on implementing outpatient commitment and crisis centered care, the General Assembly and Governor Kaine are going to spend 110 million in Bond funds to rebuild Western State Hospital, a snake pit that uses the restraint chairs in the post before this one, provides almost no psychotherapy even to long term residents, fails to execute proper discharge plans, has not reduced seclusion and restraint despite federal mandates to do so, has no record of leading to recovery outcomes for its residents, has been investigated by the Department of Justice, has fired a medical doctor who complained of poor care and disobeyed a Supreme Court decision to rehire him without any apparent consequences, uses involuntary ECT on residents, does not protect its residents from assault and rape and tells families that it is their loved ones’ fault if they don’t recover in this snake pit. 

Great job Virginia!  We are regressing in new and creative ways.  All the other states must be jealous of our success at implementing ignorant, backwards, ineffective and coercive, prejudiced systems of care.  Or not.

Dr. Jeff Swanson of Duke Goes Over to the Dark Side

Duke medical sociologist Dr. Jeffrey Swanson says that people with mental disorders are three times more likely to commit violent acts than are others.

Either Dr. Swanson was misquoted or he is lying to the press to push an agenda for more forced outpatient commitment/forced drugging in people’s own homes.  There is NO reputable data to support such a slander against people with mental illness who don’t abuse substances or alcohol.  What’s almost funny is Dr. Swanson goes on to say that “the rest of the violence” (clearly the reporter didn’t get that even 3 times more likely doesn’t create much of a percentage of our nationwide violence but lots of folks mistake probabilities for percentages) is caused by child abuse and substance abuse.  Huh, child abuse causes an awful lot of mental illness, so does Dr. Swanson want our society to address trauma issues among people with mental illness?  Of course not, don’t be silly!  We can’t spend precious resources offering psychotherapy to people with mental illness!  Sheesh, psychotherapy is for well people.  No, Dr. Swanson wants society to force more drugs that cause serious medical side effects down the throats of people with mental illness.   Leave addressing child abuse consequences for actual people, not “the mentally ill” who are clearly sub-human in Dr. Swanson’s view. 

He knows better.  This is really sad.

Imagine If:

The Pope prayed with victims of sexual abuse by priests yesterday.  Even though I know the long history of denial and obfuscation by the Catholic Church, reading this brought tears to my eyes.  I tried to imagine mental health officials meeting with victims of abuse in state and other psychiatric hospitals, maybe not praying, but acknowledging their very real pain and apologizing on behalf of the mental health system.  This Pope did not abuse anyone, but he took responsibility for His Church’s failure to protect members of His church from abuse.  In New Zealand, the government held tribunals that gave survivors of institutional abuse the opportunity to tell their stories and be heard.  In Canada survivors of state boarding schools were given a similar opportunity and even compensated.   In the United States?  Well we have had a series of states express regret in a general way for eugenics in the past, but no compensation and no hearings where survivors could tell their stories and be heard.  We have never had hearings on psychiatric abuse for survivors to tell their stories and be heard.  We have lawsuits on occasion which states fight until they know they will lose and then settle.  We have confidentiality agreements and payments to prevent public lawsuits. We have no accountability, no reconciliation, no sitting down with and seeing as suffering human beings the many survivors of abuse in psychiatric hospitals.  And because of the prejudice in our society against people with psychiatric diagnoses, we do not even have a movement for such accountability in our country nor our state.  Who would want or dare to speak out about their abuse in a psychiatric hospital at a time when the civil rights of all folks with psychiatric histories are disappearing and hatred and bigotry and scapegoating are not only more acceptable but encouraged by our own Governor as he continues to make a false connnection between the tragedy at Virgniia Tech. and all people in the state with psychiatric histories.  One can feel like an American Arab right after 9/11 still in the state of Virginia as the Governor and others continue the scapegoating and raise their own political stature on the backs of our quality of life and liberty and as dilettante rich folks start “lie-in” movements thinking they are doing good by continually insisting that anyone who has been in a psychiatric hospital is a likely mass murderer. 

Imagine if we were thought of as people.  Imagine if we were thought of as citizens.  Imagine if someone in power sat down with us, not with advocates for us, but us, and said: “I am sorry for what has happened to so many of you in institutions run by the state of Virginia.”  Imagine. 

The Silence of Our Friends, Good People Supporting Bad Laws, Loss of Civil Rights

Our local Community Services Board Director, who I quite like, is quoted as saying the new laws which will increase forced drugging and decrease availability of voluntary community services are well intended and a step in the right direction.   Commissioner Reinhard also gives them praise.  I do not believe either of these men believe what they were quoted as saying, I hope they were misquoted in fact.  But if they were not misquoted, I am so sad to read good people, allies, go along to get along, stay silent about what they know to be true, that these new laws were not well-intentioned, they were legal scapegoating of an entire group, they are not a step in the right direction, they are a step backwards, in fact, Virgninia’s laws were never this regressive since forced drugging in someone’s home was never an option on the table even in the days of vast institutionalzation. Outpatient commitment is not a better alternative to hospitalization, it is even more intrusive in many ways and lasts far longer.  It is bringing the hospital into the homes, that was the idea behind it, that is its intent.  Now all the media talk of “monitoring” “the mentally ill” as if that were a treatment modality or the responsiblity of mental health professionals, which it never was before, as is clinicians were probation officers, as if we were criminals.  This language shift is dangerous and hurtful.

The silence of our friends (with one exception in this article) is painful.  And the silence of good people everywhere as we lose so much, as we face chaos in the system and many people truamatized and injured by forced drugging, some of whom will die from it, is deafening. 

Speak up as if our lives and not your jobs or society’s approval depended on it, because they do.

What Part of This Treatment Advocacy Center Post Is Not Like the Others, What Part of This Post Just Doesn’t Belong?

Character Flaw?!

Character is a combination of both virtues and flaws that make up an individual’s moral fiber. Everyone has some sort of character flaw. Whether it is arrogance, stubbornness, selfishness… no character is without defect. The idea that an individual is suffering from a severe mental illness because of a “character flaw” is absurd and simply untrue.

As Marya Hornbacher states in a recent interview with the Washington Post, one of the biggest misconceptions about people with a mental illness is, “[t]he idea that [mental illness] is about character, that it’s not really an illness and it’s a character flaw. I’d invite all those people who believe that to an anatomy-of-the-brain class, and they can learn that it is a brain disease! It’s not about being a bad person or committing sin.”

In fact, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are neurobiological brain disorders that affect over 4 million individuals in the United States alone.

Unfortunately, many state laws do not reflect the current scientific understanding surrounding mental illnesses. The standards in many state statutes do not seek to prevent the deterioration of a severe mental illness. Instead, those laws make families and treatment providers wait for moments of extreme crisis to occur before authorizing the use of involuntary treatment, by which time it may be too late to help the individual. From both a commonsense and medical perspective, these statutes discriminate against those individuals with a severe mental illness whose symptoms are discernible in less violent ways.

Can you say nonsequitor?  I knew you could .

A Bill That No Virginia Legislator Nor Academic Thought Leader Would Think Of, Let Alone Support:

We spent a year and several months on the Commitment Taskforce talking about our mental health system, I and many others spent about a year on the Human Rights Regulation review for Virginia mental health providers a few years back, did emergency room trauma of people with psychiatric diagnoses seeking medical (or psychiatric) help ever come up even once in conversation?  The answer is no, it did not.  However, if you talk to advocates for people with psychiatric disabilities, we all have horror stories of people we know who sought medical care in an emergency and were either turned away in medically dangerous circumstances or treated with brutality and contempt by nurses and/or doctors in the Emergency Room.  The first testimony of ER doctors representing state ER doctors in the Virginia legislature gave a clear indication of the contempt felt for people with psychiatric diagnoses who come to the ER by many ER doctors, by the second testimony they realized they were making themselves look bad and toned it down a bit, but the fact is although there are many caring and compassionate ER staff in Virginia and especially in Charlottesville, even here we all know horror stories about people with psychiatric labels being turned away for important medical care or folks being treated with contempt in front of other staff and patients.

 

I only mention the Massachusetts focus on this issue to point out how far Virginia has to go in getting to a place some other states and nations got to years ago, a place where people with mental illness can speak up when they are mistreated and actually get legislative attention rather than the place we are now, when people with mental illness are only of concern to legislators when they can be scapegoated for the actions of one person and provide an easy way out of focusing on real problems and politically unpopular reality based solutions.

 

http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/house/185/ht02pdf/ht02042.pdf
Chapter 111 of the General Laws, as appearing in the 2004 Official

HOUSE . . . . . . . No. 2042
By Ms. Balser of Newton, petition of Ruth B. Balser and others that
the Department of Public Health and the Department of Mental Health
be required to adopt regulations for the protection of mentally ill patients
in emergency rooms of hospitals. Public Health.
In the Year Two Thousand and Seven.
AN ACT TO PROTECT THE MENTALLY ILL IN EMERGENCY ROOMS.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General
Court assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Ruth B. Balser
Patricia D. Jehlen
Susan C. Fargo
Jennifer L. Flanagan
Ellen Story
Kay Khan
William N. Brownsberger
Steven J. D’Amico
Mary E. Grant
Susan C. Tucker
PETITION OF:
John P. Fresolo
Barbara A. L’Italien
John W. Scibak
Robert A. Antonioni
Alice K. Wolf
Steven A. Tolman
Frank I. Smizik
Gloria L. Fox
Timothy J. Toomey, Jr.
Chapter 111 of the General Laws, as appearing in the 2004 Official
Edition, is hereby amended by inserting after section 51G the
following section:—
Section 51H. The Department of Public Health and the Department
of Mental Health shall jointly promulgate and enforce regulations
to ensure the provision of safe and effective care to, and to
protect the dignity of, individuals with psychiatric disorders and/or
behavioral issues in hospital emergency departments; such regulations
shall be consistent with evidence based practices and best practices
in the fields of mental health, trauma, informed care and
emergency medical services, and shall be revised from time to time
so as to remain current with such fields.

 

 In the promulgations of said regulations the Department of Public Health and the Department of Mental Health shall seek input from consumer advocate groups including but not limited to M-Power, Inc., Disability Law
Center, the Center for Public Representation, the National Alliance
for the Mentally Ill of Massachusetts, and the Mental Health Legal
Advisors, as well as from the Massachusetts Hospital Association,
the Massachusetts College of Emergency Physicians and the Massachusetts Emergency Nurses Association.

 

 

Virginia’s General Assembly Made It Far Easier To Take Citizens’ Liberty, Certainly They Must Have Added Protections At the Same Time, Yes? No.

The Taskforce on Commitment of the Supreme Court Commission on Mental Health Law Reform agreed on several added protections that exist in other states for folks who are involuntarily committed to mitigate damage to their living situation and their financial status caused by sudden involuntary detention away from home.  We agreed that people under involuntary inpatient commitment should be protected from eviction during their 30 day initial stay in a hospital solely due to inability to pay rent due to being away from home and also protection from eviction from nursing homes and adult care facilities since some of these facilities use commitment as a way to get rid of expensive or bothersome residents who then end up in the hospital for long periods without needing to be there because they have no place to which to return on discharge.

We agreed that folks involuntarily detained under mental health laws should be exempt from financial judgments against them in their absence.  We agreed that people should not be forced into bankruptcy to pay for involuntary treatment they did not want in the first place.

Were any of these protections even asked to be sponsored by a legislator by the Chair of the Commission? I do not know but certainly none were sponsored let alone enacted.

We all agreed that a huge problem in this state was lack of training of special justices who run commitment hearings and are not real judges, just lawyers, some right out of law school, who watch a 10-year-old video to qualify as a special justice.  However, the Virginia General Assembly refused to spend the money to train special justices even though it was a small amount compared to the rest of the mental health budget.  Rumor has it that Rob Bell killed the special justice training, but I do not know this for a fact.

Are magistrates who issue temporary detention orders going to be better trained or qualified under the new legislation? No.

Are we going to have better qualified and better paid lawyers defending people held for commitment? No. They will still be paid only $75 per case. 

Are we going to have better paid and better qualified independent evaluators in the commitment process? No, quite the opposite, the General Assembly decided to let nurse clinicians and nurse practitioners perform evaluations despite the lack of training in that area in their discipline.  Moreover, the pathetic fee paid for independent evaluations was not raised one bit.

Are we going to have better paid special justices to attract better-qualified lawyers? No.  No raise in the ridiculously low fee they are paid per hearing that encourages practices in Northern Virginia such as holding all hearings at 7 a.m. in the morning even when that means getting a patient up at 4 a.m. to get to another hospital or court for their hearing so the lawyers can earn money in their regular day jobs. 

Did we get better side effect monitoring?   No, we did not, despite the fact that many states, but not Virginia, are currently suing drug companies over the fact that they were not warned of the dangerous and deadly side effects of several of the psychotropics that will be forced on more people under the new laws.  Of course, it is fair to be forced to take drugs that cause diabetes in order to make the state happy, right?  No need to make sure actual physicians are monitoring the bloodwork of those under forced drugging orders to prevent diabetes, tardive dyskinesia, heart problems, liver problems, polycystic ovary syndrome in young women, kidney disease, or neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which actually kills those who get it.

Gee, I feel so much safer as a citizen of Virginia, don’t you?

 

 

Hide Your Feelings In Public, Don’t Laugh Too Loud and Watch What You Say and Write: Easy Peasy Involuntary Commitment Will Be Signed Into Law By Virginia’s Governor This Wednesday

This Wednesday Governor Kaine will sign laws that will make it even easier to involuntarily hospitalize and commit to forced drugging in their own homes Virginia citizens than it is already.  (See previous posts on the 91% rate of hospitalization after commitment hearings in May of 2007, 84% in 1994 study). 

These laws also force private mental health practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed professional counselors and clinical social workers to turn over your health records even if they as your primary mental health provider do not think you are in need of forced treatment.  Police will get to see some of your records, how much is unclear, supposedly it is limited to “what is necessary” to their role in commitment hearings and transporting folks but there will be no way to ensure they don’t retain nor disclose your private health information since they are not health providers and are not subject to HIPPA.  They could tell everyone in your town and you would have no real recourse. 

Private psychiatrists finally woke up to the fact that their patients’ rights and their rights were being usurped according to an article in an American Psychiatric Association publication, but a little too late since the law is being signed in 2 days.  Maybe next time they will not rely on the rest of medicine, especially emergency room doctors, to make their patients’ and their case in the General Assembly.  I saw the emergency room doctors in action; they were not about protecting the interests of neither psychiatrists nor their patients, quite the opposite.

Governor Kaine insists on calling these new laws a “response to the Virginia Tech. tragedy” when they are no such thing unless you call scapegoating thousands of innocent Virginians with a disability rather than face the reality of that tragedy a “response”.  The fact is many folks were itching to get these laws passed for years and when that tragedy happened they were practically gleeful that they could use it to push their agenda despite the Governor’s statement that he would not let the tragedy be exploited for political purposes. 

Although the laws eroding the civil rights of all Virginians will be signed this Wednesday, they will not go into effect until July 1 of this year, so you have some time to practice never looking crazy in the street, never getting too loud, never making your landlord or wife or husband or roommate angry enough that they would use the new laws against you, never expressing too much feeling around others–too much will be defined in a completely unstandardized fashion by the thousands of folks now authorized to be “independent examiners” for involuntary commitment including nurse practitioners and nurse clinicians. 

The truly depressing part of all this?  No one outside of the mental health community seems to know or care about the loss of civil liberties that is about to happen, they do not even want to hear about it.  History repeats itself in Virginia. 

 

 

Media Sanity

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/410378

Long time activist Graeme Bacque refutes the common myth that psychiatric hospitals are so much better than prisons.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/bullet_found_at_ancora_psychia.html

New Jersey’s largest state hospital in the news again for its safety and sanctuary from crime and the dangerous streets, not. 

http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/156953

Virginia woman bravely recounts how ridiculously easy it is for someone to lose their liberty and their reputation in this state now, before the new laws that make it even easier are signed by Governor Kaine. 

 

If the Only Tool You Have Is a Hammer, Every Problem Comes Up Needing a Nail, Or the Treatment Advocacy Center Misses the Real Problem, Again

From the Treatment (Coercion) Advocacy Center’s blog today:

“… Busby suffered from bipolar disorder, had stopped taking her medications, and was engaging in odd behavior. However, the hospital refused to admit her because she did not have proper insurance coverage.

This is one more reason why states like Texas must take steps to address their severe shortage of public psychiatric hospital beds….”

 OR:  States like Texas and the Federal Government must work to provide what the vast majority of Americans and even American doctors’ want: Universal Health Insurance.  Did someone try to tell me the Treatment Advocacy Center was “progressive” or “mainstream”?  Nah, couldn’t be……..

Treatment Advocacy Center Releases “Report”, Only Stupid People Believe It Though

The Treatment Advocacy Center has released a “report” with input from experts who were promised they would not be identified (makes you really trust they actually exist, doesn’t it?), making the ridiculous claim that the United States is short 100,000 state hospital spaces/beds.  They base their claim on figures from the ’50’s when folks could get locked up for life just for a grief reaction because we all want to go back to those good old days, right?  They also strangely fail to note the complete and utter decimination of mental health services in the community over the last 20 years, both the cuts in public community mental health and the 300+ decrease in coverage for mental illness by non-governmental health insurance companies and the capping of federal expenditures on mental health with the block grants 20 or so years ago.   If you don’t make insurance companies cover mental health and you cut services in the public community sector, yeah, a lot of folks who used to get psychotherapy and stay out of the hospital are going to end up worse off, but the solution is to restore funding and change the paradigm, not open up back wards of state facilities and shove folks into them.

The Treatment Advocacy Center also claims in this report that the homeless in your library and on your street corner are all folks with untreated mental illness, a claim disputed by every reputable researcher and which ignores the fact that the rise in homelessness in our country coincided exactly with the Reagan initiated cut backs in public housing support which have continued to this day, made even worse by Bill Clinton with his so-called “welfare reform” which has put familes out on the street. 

But let’s ignore the decimination of the social contract and the safety net over the last 20 years and scapegoat folks with mental illness instead!  Much more palatable to people who feel guilty about paying less taxes on their billions of income than they used to pay while children go without food and mothers go without pre-natal care.  Let’s see if we can get everyone in the country to hate, despise and fear people with mental illness and blame them for every social ill and than lock them up in back wards/camps in huge numbers!  It worked so well in Germany…

No Money For Non-Crisis, Voluntary Community Mental Health Services Out of 41 Million

At the last minute, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a budget amendment for the 41 million promised for community mental health in Virginia that ensures we will have an even more crisis driven and coercion based community mental health system, exactly the opposite of what various legislators said they were aiming to produce with reforms and what the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform chaired by Richard Bonnie says it is trying to achieve with reforms in its mission statement and all of its reports to date.

There will be no money at all out of the 41 million for adults who need public mental health care unless they have reached the point of crisis or meet the criteria for forced outpatient treatment.  Department of Mental Health money may actually be diverted for the first time towards expenditures that have always been the responsibility of the Supreme Court of Virginia in regards to the expected increase in outpatient commitment and inpatient commitment.  (This is not absolutely clear to me and one hopes there will be clarification before the Governor either signs or even better veto’s or amends the legislation as passed by the General Assembly.)

So we went from an ideal of reducing criminalization of mental illness and reducing the number of commitment hearings and forced treatment to the exact opposite by the end of this long politicized process unless the Governor acts to salvage a voluntary, consumer and family driven community mental health system for Virginia.

We have 5,000 folks waiting for voluntary community services who will continue to wait until or unless they reach the point of crisis or of meeting the criteria for outpatient or inpatient commitment.  Even if or when they reach the point of crisis, once their crisis has passed, if they are not committed, there will be no new funds to continue serving them to prevent another crisis from occurring.  There will be great incentives to commit folks to involuntary outpatient treatment just to access services, exactly what mental health advocates and activists in Virginia have fought against occurring for years and years. 

People who can not afford private mental health care, including veterans who aren’t near or served by the Veteran’s Administration, will be sent to the back of the line if they aren’t in bad enough shape to qualify for crisis care.  We are saying to folks:   wait until you are doing really badly, than we will offer you services, before that we couldn’t care less about your needs and the needs of your family. 

Can you imagine saying this to any other group of citizens with a treatable illness? Too bad your arteries are clogged and getting worse, but we won’t pay for your medical care until you have a heart attack.  And if and when you do have a heart attack, we are going to force treatment on you after you leave the hospital even though you wanted treatment before your heart attack but we wouldn’t give it to you.  

Oh yes, we have done a wonderful job of creating a crisis and coercion driven mental health system in this state and people are cheering about it?!  What part of this is regression, not progress,  don’t they understand?

If You Miss Me At The CSB, You Can Find Me Nowhere

IF YOU MISS ME

1. If you miss me at the CSB, you can find me nowhere, oh,

    Come on over to the peer support, I’ll be healing over there,

    I’ll be healing over there, I’ll be healing over there, oh

    Come on over to the peer support, I’ll be healing over there.

2.  If you miss me in the ALF, you can find me nowhere, oh

     Come on over to the independent living, I’ll be rooming over there,

      I’ll be rooming over there, I’ll be rooming over there, oh

      Come on over to the independent living, I’ll be rooming over there.

3.   If you miss me at the state hospital, you can find me nowhere, oh

       Come on over to the General Assembly, I’ll be lobbying right there, oh,

        I’ll be lobbying right there, I’ll be lobbying right there, oh,

         Come on over to the General Assembly, I’ll be lobbying right there.

4.      If you miss me on the taskforces, you can find me nowhere, oh,

          Come on over to the polling place, I’ll be voting right there,

           I’ll be voting right there, I’ll be voting right there, oh,

           Come on over to the polling place, I’ll be voting right there.

Violence By People With NO Psychiatric Histories Nor Labels, A Reality Check for All 3 Branches of Virginia Government And For The Treatment (Hatred) Advocacy Center

Convicted murderer William Morva, right,…  March 13, 2008. The jury in Virginia has begun deliberating whether an escaped inmate convicted of capital murder should…

Suspects in UNC Death Had Criminal Past

Doctor Convicted of First-Degree Murder in Love 

SoCal man gets death for masterminding couple’s murder

Alleged gang member charged with murder of prep football star

Charges Upgraded To Capital Murder In Death Of UA Student

Man pleads guilty to murder in slaying of wife

Suspects In Sean Taylor’s Murder Case Confess To A Cover-up Attempt

Man jailed for life for ‘execution’ murder of pregnant neighbour

Nurse in police remand for murder

Taylor Had Met One Suspect in Killing

Crime Report

Kevorkian Plans Congressional Run

With “Defenders” Like This, Who Needs Hate Groups? Wait, I Forgot, He Co-Founded A Hate Group :)

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=670927&category=OPINION&newsdate=3/11/2008&TextPage=1

It’s a rough time to be a defender of the mentally ill.”

Mr. Jaffe, whose sister-in-law stayed with him and his wife for a whole 3 weeks according to an earlier article and has a mental illness according to him and therefore considers himself the family member of a person with mental illness, than goes on to list every act of violence he can find in the ever cooperative prejudiced media committed by someone who may or may not have had a mental illness and whose mental illness most likely had nothing to do with the act of violence they committed.  He also, in a really nice touch, compares acts of violence by people accused of having mental illness to 9/11, a tactic used by Mary Zdanowizc in a masterpiece of fear-mongering and prejudice breeding while she was director of the Treatment Advocacy Center.  Mr. Jaffe is co-founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center which broke away from the National Alliance On Mental Illness because they were not willing to work to increase hatred of their family members by combing the news for ammunition and declaring a state of terror every time someone who has ever had a psychiatric label is accused of a crime.

Than the Treatment Advocacy Center has the admirable gall to claim tbat it isn’t they who increase prejudice but crime that increases prejudice.  I would love to see them try their slanderous tactics on any other segment of the U.S. citizenry and get away with saying they are “defenders” of that group.  Yup, you and David Duke Mr. Jaffe.

We Will Not Give Up: Virginians With Psychiatric Labels Lose Civil Rights

The General Assembly, the Attorney General, the Governor and even, sadly, the Virginia Association of Community Service Boards, have all agreed that people with psychiatric labels don’t deserve equal protection from incarceration under the law and don’t deserve the same confidentiality of health records as other citizens.  They have all acted to or supported erode what civil rights we had.  Virginia already does not provide adequate representation to people subject to commitment hearings, this was not addressed in any of the legislation in a real manner, i.e. raising the fees paid to attorneys or special justices nor paying to actually train special justices nor adding any real monitoring of the quality of special justice and state paid attorneys’ performance in commitment hearings.  Without these, any added requirements for what must be considered in a commmitment hearing mean nothing as no one will know if they are being followed or not and no one will be paid enough to put in the work to appeal or raise issues about the quality and due process or lack thereof of commitment hearings.

New River Valley where the shooter at Virginia Tech. was taken to a commitment hearing in less than 24 hours continues to hold commitment hearings only 3 days a week for the convenience of the 2 lawyers who trade off playing special justice and attorney for the subject of commitment.  No law to fix this was passed.  Other parts of the state wake people up at 4 a.m. in the morning to drive them in shackles to commitment hearings at 7 a.m. for the convenience of underpaid lawyers and special justices who can’t afford to do these hearings if they interfere with their day jobs.  This will not change.

We all know now that there is wide variety of interpretation of commitment laws across the state.  Now we have a new law and no money to train lawyers and special justices in how to interpret it more evenly. 

We have 5,000+ people on waiting lists for services at Community Service Boards across the state.  Even in a year when all eyes were on mental health, eliminating this tragic waiting list for voluntary care was not on the agenda.  So people will continue to be served mostly in crisis and more people will suffer the trauma and stigma and real life consequences of being involuntarily committed due to looser criteria. 

The legislature, the Governor, the Attorney General and other mental health advocacy groups have all gone along with this “catch and release”, traumatizing and useless approach to mental health in our state.  We will have more folks locked up briefly and released to no follow up or long term care in the community only to be locked up again.  We will have many people avoiding treatment altogether once they learn about the new laws. 

We could have taken the opportunity to fully fund outpatient treatment and raise the reimbursement for outpatient therapy, the service wanted most by public mental health consumers in this state and the one that is least available, but we didn’t.  We will continue to have three regions/CSB’s with no adult outpatient services at all, not even case management.  We will continue to have a serious gap in community services to children and adolescents.  We will lock up more citizens, alienate more people from their families who commit them, kill some more folks in staff caused deaths in state hospitals and medication caused deaths in the community and we will still have one of the very worst funded community mental health systems in the country.

This is what the General Assembly cheered itself for?  This is what all that work on the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform led to? 

We had an opportunity to respond as mature citizens of a mature society and look beyond fear-mongering and prejudice at the real needs of citizens in the public mental health system.  We blew it.

But those of us who do not buy the line that the job is done and everything is fine now will keep fighting and keep telling the truth and keep pushing this state to do what is right by its citizens with mental illness.  We will not pretend that we are fine with what was done this year nor that those who did not stand with us are our friends. 

We will not stay stuck in mourning what happened, we will organize,  we will speak out and we will fight back as we see the chaos these new laws will create.  We will educate each other and we will support each other.  We will not lie down and take it or pretend it is okay. 

Never give up.

If You Don’t Want To Create Stigma and Prejudice, Then You Don’t Make Stuff Up Treatment Advocacy Center

   message about violence and severe mental illnesses from the Treatment Advocacy Center’s executive director –

As someone who has been treated for bipolar disorder for 12 years and who has no history of violence, I understand it would be highly unfair and completely inaccurate for any organization to argue or imply that all people with severe mental illnesses are dangerous. That has never been our position.

The Treatment Advocacy Center has repeatedly pointed out that people with severe mental illnesses who receive proper treatment are no more likely to commit violent acts than people without severe mental illnesses. However, we simply cannot ignore the evidence that shows that people with severe mental illnesses who go untreated are more likely to commit violent acts.

We are very sensitive to the need not to stigmatize people with mental illnesses. Again, as a person who has struggled with bipolar disorder, my attitude toward others who struggle with mental illnesses is one of compassion and empathy. Our overriding desire is to help people who may not be able to help themselves – not to cast a negative light on them.

The Treatment Advocacy Center publicizes stories about people with mental illnesses who commit harm to themselves or others to highlight the need for better treatment laws and practices. We are not the source of stigma. Rather, the stigma arises because of the tragic number of incidents in which people neglected by a broken system end up committing harm to themselves or others. Our mission is to bring about more effective and timely treatment for people with severe mental illnesses. When we succeed in fulfilling this mission, violent acts and resulting stigma are reduced.

Labels: stigma, violence

  Is preceded by this entry on the Treatment Advocacy Center blog:

Cry for help ignored

Cindy Powell entered the emergency room with large knife cuts on her arms. She was sent home with stitches, ibuprofen and brochures on bipolar disorder.

“She said, ‘I wasn’t trying to kill myself’ — she actually said that,” [Dr. Robin]Henderson said. “At that point, we’re not seeing intent, and this particular injury was not holdable. If we do, then we’ve got a civil rights violation on our hands.”

In Oregon, two physicians must find people are a danger to themselves or others before they can be put on a five-day psychiatric hold against their will.

Because Powell said she didn’t want to kill herself and told a nurse that she never had a desire to hurt anyone else, St. Charles’ staff couldn’t keep her, Henderson said. Three days later, Powell committed suicide.

Yes, Ms. Powell killed herself, but not because she wasn’t committed or because there was something wrong with Oregon’s laws.  If you read the actual article TAC links to, you find quite a different tragic story.  She was not diagnosed bipolar for one, she had been labelled borderline personality disorder, a controversial diagnosis that is often used to deny (mostly women) treatment as untreatable.  So when Ms. Powell went voluntarily for help over and over in the days before her death, she was told to go home and told the mental health center was closed for the weekend etc.  But on the day she died, she had been in the hospital, in treatment, in fact, she was never out of treatment nor off of her prescribed medications, she used them in an attempt to die prior to her final successful suicide in fact.  She died while being transferred to another psychiatric facility that she didn’t want to go to.  She died because staff did not follow protocol for transferring patients and took her through a route that gave her a chance to jump to her death.  She died because of a really stupid policy of not chasing any patient who runs even if they are on the way to their death, that policy staff followed while ignoring the safety protocol for means and route of transport. 

Why was she suicidal?  She was poor, she had a disability, she was an abuse survivor, she was afraid of losing her home, she didn’t have enough to eat, her mother had died and her sisters would have none of her in life, thought she should be “institutionalized”, her mental health provider had committed suicide.  She asked for help over and over and what she mostly got was disdain from the comments by the doctor and nurses after her suicide. 

So we have a possible case of investigation of this hospitals protection of patients and adherence to protocols and we have a woman who died BECAUSE she was committed to a hospital.  Maybe she would have succeeded in dying anyway, but to take this woman’s tragic story and use it as a justification for easing commitment laws is to lie and distort and dishonor her memory.  This was a compliant patient, look where it got her. 

It is also absurd to say that if laws were changed no one with a mental illness would ever commit a violent act.  What? Are people with mental illness better people than everyone else in the country?  Because people in general are violent on occasion, in every group in our society, and if you choose to single out every instance of violence by a member of a certain group and not compare it to rates of violence in general in the population, you are deliberately creating more prejudice and you are fear-mongering.  If you did it with any other group that group would be up in arms calling you a hate group.  Well, Treatment Advocacy Center, I’m calling you a hate group and lots of folks I know agree with me.   

Forcing Heart Medications On Heart Attack Patients Could Prevent Deaths, So Why Don’t We Have Laws To Do That?

http://americanheart.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=342

25% of heart attack patients in this study in Canada (where cost of prescriptions should not be a factor) were either completely or partially non-compliant with the medications prescribed to them to prevent another heart attack.  Those who were completely non-compliant had an 80% increased risk of dying within a year and those who were partially compliant had a 40% increased risk of dying within a year as compared to patients who were fully compliant with their medication regime. Interestingly enough, the authors note that there have not been previous studies on compliance with medication in heart attack patients.  Could it be that studying how non-compliant all kinds of patients are with their medications would cut into the myths and propaganda and lies that people with psychiatric labels are particularly non-compliant?  A study of folks with HIV showed that people with HIV who also had psychiatric labels were in fact the MOST complaint with their HIV drug regimen, but that didn’t get a lot of press for some reason…

So isn’t it time if we are willing to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of public safety and preventing disease and morbidity in psychiatric patients to enact the same compassionate, caring coercive legislation for heart attack patients? The death rate for non-compliance is clear cut, (unlike the studies on psychiatric drug non-compliance which are muddied by the little problem of folks dying from psychotropics), the path to prevent unnecessary deaths is clear, all we have to give up is our right to privacy and our right to make our own medical decisions.  What could be wrong with that?

Rob Bell Flip Flops On Confidentiality

Delegate Rob Bell told me himself that he was proud of helping to pass  20-124.3:1 of the Code of Virginia in his first term in office.  This session, he voted to repeal it on 2/29/08.  While I appreciate the bills Delegate Bell passed to help prosecute abuse of people in our state institutions, this year he has seemed to turn his back on the rights of people with disabilities in every way possible.  And now, to vote to repeal a bill that kept divorced spouses from using the fact that one went for counseling and the other did not in custody and visitation cases when he was for that very bill before the hysterical scapegoating of all people with mental health issues over the actions of one hit Virginia, well I expected better from Rob Bell.  Shows how much I know.

Virginia Senate Criminalizes Mental Illness

2. Upon finding that the person continues to meet the criteria for mandatory outpatient treatment specified in subsection C of § 37.2-817, and that a continued period of mandatory outpatient treatment is warranted, the court shall renew the order for mandatory outpatient treatment. The court may modify the mandatory outpatient treatment order for good cause shown. However, if the person was not materially compliant with the mandatory outpatient treatment order and no good cause was shown for such material noncompliance, the court shall order the person’s involuntary admission pursuant to subsection B of § 37.2-817. Good cause shall include a finding that the person no longer meets the commitment criteria pursuant to either subsection B of § 37.2-817 or subsection C of § 27.2-817.

So what they are really saying is that not agreeing with a treatment plan and not following it for whatever reason a lawyer who thinks he or she is a judge, i.e. a “special” justice,  does not consider “good cause” should be punished by being locked up for up to 180 days in a psychiatric hospital or unit.  That’s 6 months by the way, 6 months of lost freedom for not following a treatment plan.  Abusers of kids and adults with dementia in psychiatric facilities regularly get far less than that as a sentence.  (See previous posts on dementia patient in Western State and every post on Whisper Ridge in C’ville.).  But it’s not jail you say?  Wrong.  No smoking, no caffeine, no choice over what a patient eats and drinks, locked up, housed with strangers (but coed to make it especially safe in Virginia because the state is too cheap to pay for the cost of building single sex units), following orders from staff, what part of this is not jail except the name of the facility?

We can not pretend that those who endorsed this bill who know better are our friends or allies.  And we can not let them pretend that they did not know better or that they always thought this was a good idea when we know they did not.  We have been betrayed for political expediency and/or job security and we must never forget that we must always be ready to speak for ourselves and not depend on anyone else to speak for us. 

Okay, Antabuse For Everyone It Is

http://psychlaws.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-many-people-have-to-lose-their.html

The Treatment Advocacy Center asks how many people have to lose their lives because someone was killed 9 years ago by someone who may or may not have been mentally ill and may or may not have been on psychotropics at the time of the killing.  Well following their “logic”, I think it’s about time we mandated Antabuse for everyone who has ever been an alcoholic and has a driver’s license.  We all know many, many more people die each year at the hands of drunk drivers than have ever been killed by people with psychiatric illness and it’s time we take away the rights of all current and “recovered” (TAC and the Virginia House Of Delegates and the Virginia Senate don’t believe in recovery so why should I?http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?081+sum+HB499 ) alcoholics and force them to take Antabuse every day under supervision of substance abuse case managers.  So what if Antabuse has side effects?  So what if there are much better ways to overcome alcoholism than taking a prescription drug that will make you vomit if you go anywhere near alcohol?  So what if it’s an intrusion on people’s bodies and autonomy and health and personal choice?  We don’t care about that anymore do we? 

If some alcoholics have killed people through alcohol abuse, and we know many have, than all must pay/oops/I mean be “treated” with compassion and their lack of insight overridden by your government and the fine folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center who know what’s best for you and yours.