The Right to Health

P0ci wrote:Very well said Cledwyn

Thanks, POci. Sorry if I lost my cool on the issue of Robert Whitaker and MIA and misinterpreted you in any way. I should have more calmly stated my position. On top of that, I am perhaps a little extreme in my denunciation of MIA, after all, there are good people on there and it is a repository of important information. Nevertheless, I'm really not a fan of Whitaker (after all he did ban me and other patients from his site).

1013 victim wrote:These people don't have a sensible argument. Everyone of there arguments will come off as some "father knows best" type of self righteous foolishness. The truth is any government doing this or making up rules that allow people to do this is too far reaching.

Like it has been said above they are not forcing people to take there heart disease medicine. They can't force HIV or Aids patients to not have sex as a protection against causing harm to other people.

The mental health field is simply a field that is getting away with too much.

Very well said. This double standard needs to be pointed out whenever there is a discussion about "the right to health" or the "right to treatment" (what constitutes treatment ultimately hinges upon whether or not there is consent. If not, it's assault and battery).

Where are all the "hospitals" for people who stay out in the sun too much and through overexposure to radiation incur the the risk of getting skin cancer? Where are all the "hospitals" for people who smoke too much, eat too much, have unprotected sex, who exert themselves too strenuously in exercise and risk dying of a heart attack; where are the "hospitals" for people who partake in extreme sports, for people with empirically verified diseases who refuse treatments of proven efficacy (which is of course in contradistinction to psychiatry and its "diseases" and "treatments")?

Are we honestly supposed to believe that society is more compassionate about us social lepers than the foregoing? It's preposterous.

-- Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:08 pm --

When a patient refuses mental health treatment, this should prima facie evidence that the patient is sane.

Cheze is right on the point of stigma and fear. The thing is that the fear of the madman simply doesn't pass statistical muster, is totally out of proportion to the empirical data itself, yet it is a myth that continues to endure, undergirded as it is by institutional support from the media, organized psychiatry itself (opportunistically tapping into the lunacy of the herd for its own advancement and aggrandization), "advocacy groups", family groups, and its continual reinforcement through communal and cultural discourse by people to whom culture has bequeathed the odious stereotype of the poo-slinging madman given to unfettered instinctual indulgence (although when I was kept in "hospital" I once slung a turd into a meeting because I hated them and because I found the image of a turd suddenly intruding into the stuffy, ritualized atmosphere of a meeting quite amusing).

As long as this stereotype continues to hold dominion over the minds of the masses, psychiatry will have no problem justifying the unjustifiable, because people assume as axiomatic that the madman (who is no madder than anyone else) is dangerous and therefore the detention and drugging (or electro-shocking) of the patient is ordained by necessity, yet you can be sure that one of the marks by which a tyranny or many a popular lunacy betrays itself is the regular invocation of necessity. What men label as necessity is almost always, as Nietzsche once pointed, nothing more than an interpretation, especially when it promotes the self-interest of the person who invokes it, like all these psychiatrists who talk about their having no alternative but to force their vile toxins into the bodies of people who on this issue are far saner than they. In all the time I was in "hospital" (six months), whose catchment area was at the lower end of the socio-economic scale where severe mental distress and problems of psycho-social development tend to abound, never once did I see any necessity in forced-drugging a patient, yet what I did learn was that oppression and abuse of others tends to engrain the conviction in those who perpetrate it that they are acting at the behest and under the aegis of necessity, and that there is something native to the victim's disposition or something about their behaviour that predisposes them to such treatment, releasing the perpetrators of the burden of conscience.

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:

P0ci wrote:Very well said Cledwyn

Thanks, POci. Sorry if I lost my cool on the issue of Robert Whitaker and MIA and misinterpreted you in any way. I should have more calmly stated my position. On top of that, I am perhaps a little extreme in my denunciation of MIA, after all, there are good people on there and it is a repository of important information. Nevertheless, I'm really not a fan of Whitaker (after all he did ban me and other patients from his site).

But why did Whitaker ban you?