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Medicated madness (posted 24 June 2008)
From nikki @ Give Me Space (To Rock) 2008-06-09: The Medicated Child:
After finding a fast enough Internet connection to pirate, my housemate and I sat in my bedroom and watched The Medicated Child — a documentary about children who are placed on SSRIs, benzodiazapines and mood stabilizers to control various mental diagnoses. As a person who has been permanently altered by medications such as the ones above, it hit me a little bit too close to home to watch this documentary.
You can watch it online on the PBS website: The Medicated Child
My experience in the psychiatric drug system began at age 16. My mother was dying, I was trying to work full time and go to school, and I was sinking in teenage depression. We were on welfare, so my mother decided to find me some sort of mental health care at no cost - this is surprisingly easy in New Jersey.
I was placed on Zoloft, an SSRI, after a brief conversation with a doctor on my first visit to the free clinic. After a few weeks of therapy and more consultations, my doctor raised my Zoloft dose after coming to the conclusion that my depression wasn’t getting better. I was no longer able to fall asleep naturally due to the jitters that Zoloft gave to me, which affected my schoolwork greatly. My doctor then put me on Trazodone to help me sleep at night - this made it very difficult to wake up for school in the morning.
—nikki @ Give Me Space (To Rock) 2008-06-09: The Medicated Child
It goes on from there; every new drug brings a new side effect, and every new side effect brings another new drug to control
it. The unending swallow-the-spider-to-catch-the-fly process would be funny, in a macabre sort of way, were it not for the fact that this is a real young woman whose life and brain were being systematically stewed, with permanent effects on her body and her behavior. Not because she wanted it that way, but because the State and its legally privileged medical experts told her do it, bribed her into doing it, and finally used an involuntary commitment procedure to force her to keep doing it, no matter how bad it got.
At age 20, I was on Effexor, Klonopin, Seroquel, Wellbutrin and Neurontin. My social life plummeted, and I was incredibly on edge and anxious. I was suicidal. My skin was a mess. I didn’t feel real — I felt completely detached from my body and was convinced that I was going to die. I became preoccupied with my early death, and started to live as though death was near. I was so tired and had racing thoughts. Seroquel would make me rock back and forth. My doctor said that the Neurontin didn’t seem to be working, so she prescribed me Gabatril in order to strengthen Neurontin’s effects.
I was on 6 different medications for a condition that I didn’t remember anymore. My doctor continued to prescribe me drug after drug to counteract effects of the previous drugs. I didn’t have anywhere else to turn — I trusted and believed her and credited her for keeping me sane. In reality, I was completely insane — and this was from the medication, not from my mental illness.
—nikki @ Give Me Space (To Rock) 2008-06-09: The Medicated Child
This young woman did not have a broken brain.
She was not suffering from some congenital mental illness.
She was pushed to the brink by emotional crises that were a rational reaction to a terrible situation — her mother’s suffering and death — and then, in the effort to help
her by medically suppressing this painful but rational reaction, she was made sick, and made mad, institutionally mad, by the spiraling effects of years of psychiatric cures.
My long-term effects from psychiatric medication: I have painful stomach ulcers that occasionally perforate, my liver has deteorated to the point where I can barely drink liquor, psoriasis on my elbows and knees, some forms of compulsive behavior that started when I began SSRIs, and occasional paranoia that is completely unfounded.
[…]
Before you sign your life away to the psychiatric industry, please pay attention to what goes on. Were you given medication after only speaking to someone for an hour? Were you placed on psychiatric drugs at a young age for ADHD and then put on more drugs for illnesses that seemed to develop after you started those medications? Does your doctor give you a new medication every time you complain about a side effect? Does your doctor ever recommend things like excersize, a change in career, more social time, healthier foods, or naturopathic methods? Does your doctor raise your dose when you have a bad day?
When I think about what was pushed on me in my younger years I feel enraged… and after watching The Medicated Child, I’m outright terrified. There are children as young as 4 years old being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and placed on mood stabilizers. There are children who are put on dehabilitating anti-psychotic drugs at age 6 who develop uncontrollable ticks in their necks in their teenage years. These drugs were never tested on children — if you choose to put your children on these drugs, your child is a guinea pig.
—nikki @ Give Me Space (To Rock) 2008-06-09: The Medicated Child
You really must read the whole thing. What was done to her is, quite simply, unforgivable.
Of all the horrible things that institutional psychiatry routinely does, one of the most infuriating for me is its stupidly aggressive lack of anything approaching self-consciousness or critical reflection. In a field where, not half a century ago, patients
were routinely locked away in filthy hellholes that would be hard to distinguish from a medieval dungeon, and, once confined, subjected, against their will, to restraints, tortures and mutilations that would have made Torquemada blush — camphor shock torture, repeated massive electric shocks to the brain, and, at the end of the road, an icepick jabbed through the eye socket and rotated so as to mutilate the brain and deliberately destroy centers of personality and higher cognition — in a field, I say, where all this was dignified as brain damaging therapeutics
and regarded as best practices for a scientifically-informed helping profession — in a field where current practitioners now more or less universally agree that torture like this was based on little more than pseudoscience and quackery, and where almost no-one in their right mind would propose ever using practices like these on any patient today — in a field, that is to say, where within living memory thousands of people were subjected to the worst kinds of sadism and torture that the human mind can devise, and all of it based on what are now almost universally acknowledged follies, illusions and lies indulged in by the recognized experts of the field — in such a field, you might expect at least a little bit of humility, historical awareness, and decent caution, rather than sanctimonious self-righteousness and aggressive obliviousness to the idea that psychiatric practice itself might perhaps be part of the problem.
In point of fact, there are countless cases like this one, cases where a life crisis becomes the occasion of massive psychiatric intervention, and where the intervention itself spirals into years of institutionally- and chemically-manufactured madness; in which the stereotypical behavior of the psychiatric patient, invariably passed off as part of her disease,
can in fact be traced quite directly to the physiological, behavioral and social effects of the forced drugging, the forced confinement in hospital
psychoprisons, and other aspects of psychiatric therapy.
Psychiatrists then have the gall to use those same symptoms, created by their own therapy,
as proof
of the need for even more of the same.
Under the present circumstances, there is no reason to believe that individual psychiatrists or psychiatric institutions will ever trouble themselves to acknowledge this possibility or to incorporate it into their practice in any way that matters. It’s not just the financial incentives — although those are certainly there, and those are certainly important. The problem that underlies the financial problem is that psychiatrists have no real reason to care whether they get things right or not. Why should they? They are backed by cultural prejudices in favor of doctors; they can dismiss any complaints by their patients
as literally the ravings of lunatics, and almost no-one will bat an eye; they are backed up by the force of the law, which gives them the power to force their latest and greatest therapies
on a literally captive market of unwilling patients.
Unless and until psychiatrists no longer have the privilege of inflicting nonconsensual treatment,
which is to say, unless and until they become directly accountable to the will and desires of the people for whose benefit they claim to be acting, cases just like Nikki’s are going to happen again, and again, and again.
Free Nikki!
Free all psychiatric prisoners!
See also:
We need government cops and government courts because private protection forces and private arbitrators would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people. (#2) (posted 23 June 2008)
Trigger warning. The following video of a local news story may be triggering for experiences of sexual assault.
Tom Meyer, WKYC (2008-06-18): Grand Jury clears Sheriff Deputies of criminal misconduct in explosive strip search case:
STARK COUNTY — A Stark county grand jury has found no probable cause that county deputies committed any criminal wrongdoing while arresting Hope Steffey.
As many as 7 male and female deputies forcibly removed Steffey’s clothes inside a Stark County jail cell and left her completely naked for 6 hours. Steffey had someone call for help when a cousin injured her during a fight.
The video of Steffey being stripped searched triggered reaction nationwide, forcing Sheriff Tim Swanson to ask the Ohio Attorney General to step in and investigate the arrest and incarceration of Steffey. Link to The Investigator, Tom Meyer’s previous strip search stories
The results of the investigation were turned over to the Stark County prosecutor who appointed the Attorney General’s Special Prosecutions Section to present the case to the grand jury.
The grand jury decided to not indict any of the deputies. On the day of the grand jury’s findings, Steffey was undergoing questioning in a deposition for her lawsuit against the Sheriff. Steffey is seeking justice in a civil case filed in federal court and which is set to go to trial this December. Steffey is accusing deputies of using excessive and outrageous force.
It’s unclear if the jailhouse video was shown to the grand jury. Those proceedings are secret. But the video is certain to be shown in federal court during her civil trial. The Sheriff has maintained that his office has done nothing wrong and was always in compliance with Ohio jail standards. Steffey’s attorneys are now under federal court order to not discuss the case. But they have argued that that the force used by deputies was brutal and unnecessary.
Phone calls to Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson seeking comment were not returned.
Attorney General Marc Dann launched the state investigation into the Steffey case in February. Dann resigned May 14 after only 17 months in office. Dann was forced to step down following a highly-publicized sex scandal in his office which included his affair with a female staff member.
Susan Vinella, WKYC (2008-06-19): Investigator Exclusive: Special prosecutors deny Steffey case was a strip search:
The special prosecutors in the Hope Steffey case said Thursday that there was no strip search and no criminal wrongdoing by the Stark County sheriff’s deputies.
Paul Scarsella and Bridget Carty said the incident, in which male and female deputies forcibly removed Steffey’s clothes at the Stark County jail, was a suicide precaution.
They said the deputies were only following a medical order given by a doctor on duty to remove her clothes.
The special prosecutors presented the results of their investigation to a grand jury on Wednesday. The grand jury declined to indict the deputies involved.
Though the jail has suicide suits for inmates to wear, Scarscella said Steffey was not immediately given one because even the suit was deemed too dangerous for her to have.
Steffey and her lawyers have denied that she was suicidal or was given the opportunity to remove her clothes herself, as the prosecutors say she was.
There is no policy that prevents men from removing a female inmate’s clothes during a suicide precaution situation. During a strip search, jail policy prevents men from being involved.
In a phone interview, Scarsella and Carty said they attempted to interview Steffey before the grand jury hearing Wednesday. They never did speak to her because they would not allow her attorneys by her side, as she requested.
Steffey did appear before the grand jury.
Scarsella said he could not say whether attorneys were allowed to sit in on the questioning of the sheriff’s deputies because ethical guidelines prevent him from discussing an investigation of uncharged defendants.
See also:
- GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
- GT 2008-03-07: Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward
- GT 2008-03-08: In Their Own Words:
Just following orders
edition - GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in uniform #3: a sixth woman comes forward
- GT 2008-04-25: We need government cops because private protection forces would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people.
Cops are here to protect you. (#6) (posted 3 June 2008)
Cops are here to protect you by stopping an upset man from cutting himself with a knife by shouting at him in a language he doesn’t speak, then, after he fails to obey commands he couldn’t understand, by tasering him, firing pepperballs at him, and then shooting him dead — with several shots fired after he had dropped the knife.
All for his own good, of course. It became necessary to kill Odiceo Valencia in order to save him.
Cops are here to protect you by pulling you over if your car seems suspicious
to them and then, if you want to know what you were pulled over for, pulling you out of the car, getting up in your face, and shouting, Ever get smart-mouthed with a cop again, I show you what a cop does,
threatening to arrest you for some fucking reason I come up with,
bragging that they can come up with nine other things
to arrest you for, insisting, when you tell them that their conduct is being recorded, shouting I don’t really care about your cameras, ‘cause I’m about ready to tow your car, then we can tear ‘em all apart,
and then proceeding to give you a ten-minute lecture on how you should properly address your public servants.
Please note that Officer James Kuhnlein’s dash cam tape from that night was inexplicably
missing when Brett Darrow filed a complaint with the St. George police department. Actually, I don’t think it’s particularly difficult at all to explain what happened to the tape.
Cops are here to protect you by pulling you over for possibly speeding and then arresting you on a 10-year-old dog violation
. Then, since they just can’t be bothered to wait half an hour until your sister arrives, leaving a 15 year old girl and a 7 month old infant stuck alone in a car on the side of the road at 11 o’clock at night.
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.—A Grand Junction woman says a state trooper left her baby and her teenage niece unattended in her car for 25 minutes one night when he took her to jail after a traffic stop.
Keio Saupaia said Trooper Jeffrey Vrbas pulled her over at about 11 p.m. on April 28 when she had her 7-month-old daughter and 15-year-old niece with her.
She said Vrbas contacted her sister to come get the children, but that he didn’t wait for the sister to arrive before taking Saupaia to jail.
If that was me, I could have been charged with child abuse,she told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.Colorado State Patrol Capt. Ed Clark confirmed to The Associated Press Monday that Vrbas had arrested Saupaia. Clark said he doesn’t dispute Saupaia’s account but declined to discuss specifics of the incident.
Clark said the matter had been
handled internally,but he declined to say whether Clark had been disciplined or to give any other details, citing confidentiality rules covering personnel matters.
I just ask the public to trust that we would handle this appropriately,he told the AP in a telephone interview.—Denver Post (2008-05-19): Woman says trooper left her baby, teen alone in car at night
But why the fuck would anyone trust them to handle it appropriately?
Trust is earned, not bestowed, and in the case of out-of-control cops like Trooper Jeffrey Vrbas, there is no empirical evidence at all to justify putting trust in the police department administration to do a damned thing about it, beyond possibly ripping him for causing a P.R. problem. When every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police department almost invariably doing everything in its power to conceal, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously irresponsible or dangerously out-of-control the cop may be, it beggars belief to keep on claiming that there is no systemic problem here, that cops ought to be given every benefit of the doubt, that the same police department that hires and trains these goons ought to be trusted
to handle it internally
(which means secretly
), and that any blanket condemnation of American policing is a sign of hastiness and unfair prejudice. The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things: either a professionalized system of control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, and unrepentant abuse against powerless people—or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
See also:
Texas psychoprisons (posted 5 May 2008)
Trigger warning. The news report I discuss includes verbal descriptions of sexual exploitation and extreme violence by caretakers
against male and female patients under their control. It may be triggering for past experiences of violence.
In the past, when I’ve written about violence committed by government police officers or prison guards, I’ve often written something like this:
Please note that if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, the people around us would more or less universally conclude that we’re belligerent and dangerous lunatics. In fact, if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, and it was caught on camera, we would soon be in jail for on a charge of assault and battery. When someone with a badge and a gun acts like this, and it’s caught on camera, with a very few exceptions, the worst that ever happens is that they might get fired. The most common response from the powers that be is either to do nothing at all, or else to give the pig a paid vacation and a verbal reprimand.
That’s a point that I stand by, and that I think is vitally important. But one thing you’ve got to remember when thinking about that point is that the class of government-privileged cops and prison guards is larger than the obvious cases you might first think of when asked. Badges and guns
come in a lot of shapes and sizes and prisons can be found in a lot of places. Sometimes the badge is a gold shield and the prison is a penitentiary surrounded by razor-wire and high fences. Sometimes the badge
is a white coat, the gun
is a syringe, and the prison is the locked mental ward
of a hospital. What matters is not the external form, but the underlying relationship of power, and when so-called caretakers
have the legal power to restrain, confine, hold down, drug, shock, spy on, and otherwise coerce or violate a so-called patient,
to treat
her against her will, to force her to remain in a locked room even if she wants to leave, and to chase her down and force her back into that locked room if she tries to slip out without permission, then those so-called caretakers
function as a jailers, and their hospital
as a prison, no less than the corrections officers
and correctional facilities
of the official State prison system.
This is, by the way, a basic point that needs to be made, and needs to be accepted, whether or not one accepts presuppositions of institutional psychiatry, and whether or not one accepts the common practices of involuntary civil commitment, the imprisonment of criminals deemed legally insane in State-run psychoprisons, drugging patients
through the use of force or deception, etc. etc. etc. If you accept those presuppositions and you support imprisoning and forcibly drugging people who, for example, try to hurt (only) themselves, or who have hallucinations, or who steadfastly cling to beliefs that the majority of people consider irrational, then you should go ahead and defend that. But that is what you need to defend—imprisonment and coercive force—not some sentimentalized helping professions
myth in which caretakers are helping willing patients through a disease just like cancer or diabetes.
If you have cancer and diabetes, and you decide (for whatever reason) that you’d rather suffer or even die from it than undergo the conventional treatments, nobody has the legal power to force those treatments on you against your will. And therein lies one of the fundamental political differences between real doctor-patient relationships and psychiatry as it is practiced today. If you want to try to defend psychiatry as it’s practiced today, that difference—the fact of psychiatric imprisonment—is something you’ll have to admit, and where you’ll have to start.
And for those of us who have spent some time watching how the official State prisons and their prison guards work, and who know that the pervasive violence and domination that runs through the system, even when it is judged excessive
or abusive by the powers that be, should be dismissed as Yet Another Isolated Incident carried out by A Few More Bad Apples, but rather recognized as the natural and inevitable result of the kind of environment fostered by the unaccountable power of government enforcers—well, for those of us, things like the Dallas Morning News’s recent report on intense, pervasive abuse of patients
in Texas’s state psychoprisons should be an outrage, but (heart-breakingly) not at all a surprise:
Last year, one [Texas] state mental hospital employee tackled an adolescent patient who was sobbing for his mother, dragging him across the floor by his wrists and hair.
The year before, another brought a female patient into a hospital bathroom and sexually abused her.
And dozens more have participated in brutal beatings at the psychiatric hospitals since 2005, employee disciplinary reports show – using chokeholds, headlocks and threats of violence to restrain the patients under their watch.
In all, 72 employees across Texas’ 10 state mental hospitals have been fired in the last three years for allegations of physical abuse, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of state personnel records. Hundreds more have been terminated for other violations, the records show, from sleeping on the job to over-medicating mentally ill patients.
[…] Among the allegations of abuse and neglect state hospital workers have been fired for since 2005:
A worker at the North Texas State Hospital slammed a clipboard on a patient’s head, dragged her by her feet and kicked her in the legs and buttocks.
An employee at the Big Spring State Hospital failed to notice a patient who knotted her sheet and strung it around her neck. The patient was blue by the time staff found her.
At the Austin State Hospital, a male employee brought a female patient into a private room for her to carry out a sexual act on him.
An employee at the Austin hospital tackled a juvenile patient and pinned the patient’s neck and head to the floor, bloodying his lips and face and breaking his glasses.
Other employees were punished for offensive treatment, from using racial slurs on patients to making verbal threats and sexual advances. Some ignored patients’ cries for help while they watched TV, played video games and wrote text messages. Others stole state property and sold tobacco products to patients.
[…]
Jason Evans called 911 in November during a bipolar meltdown and was admitted to the Terrell State Hospital. Days later, the 34-year-old was dead – and his parents still don’t know why.
State officials told the Kaufman couple that their son, who was severely mentally ill but in good physical condition, had been disruptive that evening, and records obtained by the family indicate hospital workers medicated him before sending him to sleep. Mr. Evans was apparently found hours later in his bed, and was no longer breathing.
Lynn Evans, his mother, said psychiatric hospital workers attributed the death to natural causes, and doctors said her son had lost oxygen to the brain. But she and Mr. Evans’ father, a pharmacist, have been unable to get specific details about their son’s death. They believe Jason was effectively overdosed by hospital workers trying to restrain him.
It was a disease. Jason couldn’t help it,said Mrs. Evans, choking back sobs.In my heart, I will go to my grave knowing that hospital killed him.Mr. McBride said that the agency is prohibited from confirming the identities of anyone in their care – but that any unexpected deaths are investigated by the Department of Family and Protective Services or by local law enforcement.
There were no deaths among Terrell State Hospital patients last fall from anything other than natural causes,he said.
And anyone who has followed the official response to past prison abuse scandals (cf. GT 2008-02-21: Mississippi Corrections, GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, GT 2007-10-28: Corrections officers, etc.) should be outraged, but not at all surprised, by the fact that state Mental Health
officials have responded to the threatening, neglecting, assaulting, raping, and torturing of imprisoned patients
in the usual way that prison bosses respond. That, when the administrators are forced to admit that abuses have happened, the individual psychoprison guards are usually administratively disciplined,
or at worst fired, rather than arrested or sued like the violent criminals that they are. That, when asked, the official mouthpieces of the mental health
prison system reply by lying, covering up, whitewashing, isolating, or minimizing the extent of the violence against patients, by making excuses for the perpetrators, and by telling a bunch of sob-stories about the hard luck of supposed trained professionals who are expected to actually do their tough job without hurting people.
State officials say there will always be some reports of abuse and neglect in an institutional setting. And they say they take any allegations of mistreatment seriously. But the records show that as in other state-run facilities, abuse and neglect are systemic.
[…]
The state’s juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled, and state schools for people with mental disabilities all came under fire last year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse.
[…]
Officials with the Department of State Health Services, the agency that runs the psychiatric hospitals, say abuse and neglect are
absolutely notpervasive – and verified cases are actually dropping.In the last two years, they confirmed 15
Class Icases – the most serious abuse. On average, investigators substantiate 5 percent of the more than 2,000 allegations they examine annually. And 90 percent of patient deaths since 2005 were attributed to natural causes, agency spokesman Doug McBride said. Five were suicides, and none were the result of abuse.
Keep in mind there are about 7,400 employees, 18,000 patient admissions and probably hundreds of thousands of staff-patient interactions in a year,Mr. McBride said.State officials acknowledge that the psychiatric hospitals are stressful environments; there are times, Mr. McBride said, when employees
do not handle a situation appropriately.But they say the rules for reporting abuse and neglect are stringent – and confirmed cases of physical and sexual abuse are reported to police.And they balk at the suggestion that conditions bear a resemblance to the state schools for people with mental disabilities, where the U.S. Justice Department has intervened twice in recent years.
The state psychiatric hospitals, which have about 2,500 patients daily, had 137 confirmed abuse cases in 2007. The state schools for people with disabilities, which have twice as many residents, have an average of 300 confirmed abuse cases per year.
But some advocates fear the mentally ill patients may face greater risks. Patients of the psychiatric hospitals are largely indigent, transient and not connected to their families, so they have few allies as they bounce through the mental health system.
It’s a population that’s easy to abuse because they’re not on the radar in any way,said Richard Hansen, a Texas mental health advocate who was chemically restrained, shackled and beaten to the point of broken ribs years ago while suffering from bipolar disorder in a New York mental hospital.[…] Mr. Hansen said many employees are conscientious, but conditions vary from hospital to hospital and ward to ward. Some are simply warehouses, where patients are often overmedicated and ignored. In others, patients frequently turn up with unexplained injuries, he said.
Besides the fact that it is just a lie to claim that a problem that has involved hundreds of employees in the last three years alone is somehow absolutely not pervasive,
one of the most important factors simply goes unmentioned here — that it is really, really easy to get away with far more violence and abuse than crops up in verified
official reports, simply because guards tend to stick together against any allegations made by inmates, and because they can act with an incredible amount of impunity when officials will never trust a victim’s testimony, and will happily wave it off, whenever it’s convenient to do so, as the product—literally—of feeble-mindedness or insanity. No wonder that 5% (and dropping) of the 2,000 abuse allegations filed every year end up getting verified
by the officials.
And, to cap it all, no matter how bad and how widespread the abuse may get, the administrators can always count on the pro-establishment wing of their supposed critics to go to the public and to the legislature to beg for even more tax money and even more prison guards to be sent into the psychiatric prison system, so that the very people who created these maddening prison-ward hellholes can be rewarded for their institutionalized violence by being allowed to take even more money from taxpayers to go on doing the same old thing:
The state psychiatric hospitals, like other systems for vulnerable Texans, are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can’t keep up.
[…]
You get what you pay for,said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder.When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something’s got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan.[…]
Aaryce Hayes, a mental health policy specialist with Advocacy Inc., said the Department of State Health Services is working to improve the state hospital system, from incorporating trauma-informed treatment into care regimens to increasing employee empathy training. It is also trying to reduce reliance on restraint and seclusion to keep control of patients.
They get it,she said.They want to see a culture change.But it’s hard to improve when the state hospital system is so overburdened, Ms. Hayes said. Right now, the state funds just 27 percent of mental health needs in the community – meaning everyone else rotates in and out of crisis care. There are more than 450,000 adult Texans with serious and persistent mental illness, everything from schizophrenia to major depression, Ms. Hayes said.
If we said we were serving just 27 percent of people who had cancer, or diabetes, nobody would be comfortable with that,Ms. Hayes said.Money is a persistent problem. In 2003, lawmakers stripped $100 million from the state’s mental health budget, Mr. Coleman said – funding that has only partially been replaced.
The Legislature approved $82 million last year to improve community mental health crisis services, said Robin Peyson, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ Texas chapter. But Texas ranks 48th in the country in per capita funding for people with mental illness, so that money only begins to address the shortfall.
There are not services at the community level and there are not enough beds in the system,she said.If you have inadequate funding, you’re just supporting this cycle, this revolving wheel.
The reality is that what is needed is not more money, or more guards, or better training, or even a culture change.
A culture change would be a step forward, but the real solution that is needed is something that goes far deeper: a solution that strikes at the root from which that culture and these conditions grow. What is really needed is a power change, so that psychiatric wards are no longer artificially packed by court order, so that patients can leave and seek help through other means if conditions become unbearable, and so that supposed patients are no longer treated
against their will and held down at the mercy of their helper-captors. If you make a hospital into a prison camp, then it should be no surprise when the hospital caregivers
start acting like prison camp guards. The only thing to do — the only thing you can do that will not just recreate the same problem in a superficially different form — is to respect the will of patients, to treat violence against them as a real crime worthy of punishment, to repeal the laws that privilege and protect their captors, and to break open the doors and tear off the straitjackets that hold them back from living their lives as human beings, rather than as objects of pity and coercion.
Free the Texas 2,500!
Free all psychiatric prisoners!
Further reading:
- GT 2008-01-06: Shiva on
abuse
andmisdiagnosis
- GT 2007-10-29: For her own good
- GT 2008-02-21: Mississippi Corrections
- GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.
- GT 2006-04-14: Over My Shoulder #19: Robert Whitaker (2002), Mad in America on metrazol
therapy
- GT 2006-03-18: Over My Shoulder #15: Robert Whitaker (2002), Mad in America
Rapists in uniform #2: four more women come forward (posted 7 March 2008)
(Via Google News.)
Four more women in northern Ohio have come forward about unnecessary and sexually humiliating strip searches by the Stark County sheriff’s office.
As I mentioned about a month ago, Hope Steffey is suing the sheriff and a gang of male and female cops and prison guards, because a year and a half ago, after she was assaulted and knocked unconscious by her cousin in a domestic dispute, her family called 911 for help, and the cop who arrived decided that the assault victim was giving him too much lip while he tried to Investigate, so he beat her up, arrested her on a bogus disorderly conduct
charge, and sent her down to jail where, once handcuffed and locked in a cage, she was held down by a gang of seven cops, including at least two men, and strip searched, over her screams of protest, while the male guards wrenched her (still handcuffed) arms behind her back. After that she was left naked in her jail cell for six hours. Sheriff Tim Swanson maintains that his hired thugs are allowed to use reasonable force to make an arrest and protect prisoners in their custody,
where reasonable force
is cop speak for grabbing an assault victim who you were supposedly dispatched to help (the cop was there because Steffey had been knocked unconscious by her cousin during a domestic dispute) and then slamming her face-down on the hood of your car, then cuffing her, sending her to jail, gang-rape-searching her with two male officers in the cell, and then leaving her naked in her cell for six hours. The excuse for that last part is that they had to protect
her by raping her because she was crazy, by which they mean that she was visibly upset, and if you can be labeled crazy then that means that cops and prison guards can do any damn thing at all to you, no matter how violent, no matter how painful, and no matter how sexually humiliating, in order to protect
the hell out of you, whether you want that protection or not.
The strip search was caught on tape and it hit the news. Because of the local and national attention to the case in the news media, four more women in northern Ohio have decided to come forward about similar experiences at the hands of Sheriff Tim Swanson’s rape gang / prison suicide watch.
One of them is Valentina Dyshko, who was handcuffed and locked in a cage after she voluntarily turned herself in on a misdemeanor warrant for a miscommunication with the state over which home-schooling text-books the government deems good enough for her own children. When they handcuffed her and threw her in jail, she got upset, and she couldn’t speak English, and by God, she’s obviously a dangerous home-schooling criminal, so she was declared crazy and forced to undergo a strip-search and to wear nothing but a flimsy prison-issued gown that kept falling off her chest. For three days.
Dyshko says video of Steffey’s treatment reminded her of what she experienced 2 years ago inside the same jail.
Dyshko came to North Canton nine years ago, she says, to escape the fear of KGB persecution in Ukraine. Her ordeal inside the Stark County Jail stemmed from a home schooling issue. She says there was some confusion over the use of certain textbooks.
It was all a big mix-up, said her attorney Dennis Niermann.Dyskho was educating 2 of her 8 children at home. She received a notice from the Stark County Sheriff about a warrant for her arrest from the Stark County Family Court. When Dyshko arrived at the Sheriff’s office, she says she was quickly handcuffed and thrown in jail on a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
After this mother of 8 spent 3 days behind bars, a judge reviewed her case and quickly dismissed the case.
Lawyers for Dyhsko say she had to remove all her clothes because someone inside the jail determined she was suicidal. Dyshko says she’s never been suicidal. She complained to Channel 3 News that the gown she was given in the jail kept falling down, and at times, exposed her naked chest to male guards.
She was asked to remove her clothes and her undergarments. What’s the purpose of that? It’s demeaning,said Niermann.Since the Hope Steffey case made headlines, 4 more women, including Dyshko have come forward to report similar stories. Lawyer David Malik says
we’re seeing a pattern where apparently every woman who cries or gets emotional is deemed suicidal.
And remember, if you are deemed suicidal, government cops and government jailers will take it for granted that the best way for armed Trained Professionals to handle the situation is to hurt you, hold you down, strip you against your will, subject you to an invasive search, and lock you in a cage and leave you there, naked, for six hours at a stretch.
There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent,
nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad, not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it. They are a pack of dangerous predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.
