The single way to prove all mental illness

Does the single way to prove all mental illness exist?

Yes, I am starting this thread in response to the one someone started about the single way to cure all mental illness because I believe that you first need to prove mental illness exist before curing it.


Moving on, some of you know my story. I was committed to a mental health facility approximately 18 months ago against my will. The process is called an emergency hold. It led to me spending 5 days in a facility. 18 months later I am still fine just as I was fine during the emergency hold and the 5 day stay. All those people did was uproot my life. I am still looking for legal recourse but no-one wants to take my case. This site, the CCHR, NAMI, and no other organization is any good to people looking for legal recourse.

18 months, I believe you have 6 months left before the Statutes of limitations kicks in.

Statutes of limitation limit the time after an event that legal proceedings may be initiated. Once the period of time specified in a statute of limitation passes, a claim can no longer be validly filed.

You don't need a lawyer, If you wish to file a lawsuit in federal Court, but are unsure exactly how, you are in the right place. Anyone can file a federal lawsuit by following these easy instructions.

How to File a Federal Lawsuit http://www.wikihow.com/File-a-Federal-Lawsuit

What to sue for ?

I saw this when reading the psychiatric living will,

Involuntary hospitalization or commitment is a violation of my civil rights under U.S. Code, Title 42, Chapter 21 § 1983, Civil action for deprivation of rights. Lawsuits for involuntary commitment have resulted in verdicts of $1 million or more against hospitals, doctors and other agencies and personnel:

Lund vs. Northwest Medical Center, (Case No. Civ. 1805-95, Court of Common Pleas, Venango County, PA, June 16, 2003), jury awarded $1,100,000 million in damages.

Marion vs. LaFargue Case No. 00 Civ. 0840, 2004 WL 330239, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, February 23, 2004), jury verdict of $1,000,001 in damages.

Dick vs. Watonwan County (Case No. Civ. 4-82-1.16, U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota, April 11, 1983), more than $1 million in damages awarded to plaintiff.

lets look up "Title 42, Chapter 21 § 1983, Civil action for deprivation of rights."

http://www.google.com/search?q=Title+42%2C+Chapter+21+§+1983%2C+Civil+action+for+deprivation+of+rights

Here is the story of Marion vs. LaFargue,

Homeless man wins $1 million after Bellevue ordeal

In his testimony, Marion described being strapped down to a gurney, a nurse hovering over him with a needle, then injecting him, “like in ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest,’ ” referring to Ken Kesey’s novel about a psychiatric hospital from hell. Comparing himself to “Louima,” as in police brutality victim Abner Louima, Marion said, “They used a toilet plunger for him and a needle for me.”

http://thevillager.com/villager_35/homelessmanwins.html

1013 victim wrote:recourse

I know the crappy feeling of being victimized by inpatient psychiatry , knowing they wronged me severely , knowing they know they wronged me and having no legal recourse. It still stings just thinking about it.

These 'hospitals' think they can do what ever they want to anyone because it seems they can.

Several years ago when I endured inpatient I heard people stating over and over again "I am going to sue this place" in response to the dehumanizing treatment that blatantly violated there civil and human rights but the staff must have heard "I am going to sue this place" a thousand times and knew it rarely or never happens and continued treating everyone like criminals and subhumans.

1013 victim wrote:NAMI

NAMI is a front to push drugs on kids and is funded by the pharmaceutical companies . http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Alliance_on_Mental_Illness

Of course they won't help.

Copy_Cat wrote:I know the crappy feeling of being victimized by inpatient psychiatry , knowing they wronged me severely , knowing they know they wronged me and having no legal recourse. It still stings just thinking about it.

These 'hospitals' think they can do what ever they want to anyone because it seems they can.

Several years ago when I endured inpatient I heard people stating over and over again "I am going to sue this place" in response to the dehumanizing treatment that blatantly violated there civil and human rights but the staff must have heard "I am going to sue this place" a thousand times and knew it rarely or never happens and continued treating everyone like criminals and subhumans.

I know many people who have been in that situation. I seen it first hand Ive been through it first hand. Its incredibly painful being a victim with no accountability. These institutions do damage for years to come that spreads beyond the patient yet nothing is done to stop it.

I have seen exactly what you describe with people threatening to sue, threatening justice, revenge... you name it. But it never bothered the staff because instigating patients into depression, outbursts, you name it lead to longer stays with more "services" needing to be offered. The abuse that takes place behind closed doors is disgusting. It is wrong, sick, twisted... yet it goes unchecked because the patient that are served have no voice. The treatment of the ''mentally ill'' is disgusting. Pretty much what ever happens brings to attention from anyone who can stop it. Its no wonder they never seem to get better. The system is engineered to fail them. I have seen it first hand, Ive been through it.

Further in my case I have been the victim of psychiatric malpractice by psychiatrists, (misdiagnosed over and over, brainwashed, bullied, coerced, harassed, degraded and constantly made to feel crazy ect) getting justice is impossible. Few people ever get justice. As soon as the label is given, the person is gas-lit.

I think this is more than enough reason to change the system. No one deserves to be treated as a subhuman.

Thanks for the federal law suggestion. If I have to go that route I will and I may need some help. I might share the full story with one of two of you guys that I have come to trust over the months I have been around this site.

1013 victim wrote:Thanks for the federal law suggestion. If I have to go that route I will and I may need some help. I might share the full story with one of two of you guys that I have come to trust over the months I have been around this site.

Definitely try, I would go that route if I had no other way. Even if it doesn't go as planned, the more people speak out against such abuses the more changes will start to take place. Evil only incubates in darkness. When darkness is lifted, evil can not grow or hide. It disappears.

I hope you win in the end though. Every victory is a step forward.

I definitely don't have any ideas for any tests that prove all mental illness, or anything along those lines.

But in my opinion, forced treatment should really only be on the table when there is a threat to society. I think recognizing mental illness stems at its core from recognizing when individuals are posing harm or threat to society but lack any sinister motives in doing so. So it creates the dilemma of trying to protect society while also trying not to punish someone who isn't being sinister.

The topic of suicide gets really tricky because the person who is suicidal is also a part of society. That they threaten their own life, means they threaten society, because they are a member of society. But it's also just as valid of an argument that people should have the ultimate right on their own bodies, which is something that most governments disrespect on many different levels and in many different ways far beyond mental illness topics.

Even with such a seemingly simplistic foundation for forced treatment, though, it's still not really simple at all. It would be easy to get carried away with it. For example in our capitalist consumerism society here in the U.S., one could make an argument that it is "harmful to society" if a person wants to live off the grid and not participate, not oil the gears and help keep the machine going. But in my opinion it's obvious that it would be incredibly insane and morally wrong to medically arrest a person just because they want to live off the grid out in nature.

So it's still a complicated, slippery-slope risk, anyway.

Yet I do think mental illness is worth treating forcibly when it poses certain dangers. Someone with Schizophrenia who believes that their neighbors are plotting to kill them and has attempted to act out first in self-defense - okay obviously something needs to be done. Yet it needs to be done humanely because the person is not sinister, they are ill. They don't need to be punished, they need to be helped.

It's just easy for such rare circumstances to be used as a slippery slope to forcibly capture and drug people when it's not necessary at all.

Maybe a good place to start would be for everyone to debate what constitutes a need for intervention and what doesn't, or what method would be best to make that call in any situation. That might be the big crux of the matter.

It will always be very complicated, though, I think. I mean heck, psychopaths tend to wreak all kinds of havoc in a society but are rarely considered "crazy" in the typical sense, so they roam free sending waves of emotional and psychological damage through communities, unless they get caught breaking a serious law. So it's not like forced hospitalization is ever going to fix everything, either.

Excellent post CopperMoon I feel much the same way, your points are on target.

The issue at hand is a power issue.

IMO, when a person poses an immediate danger to himself or others beyond a reasonable doubt forced treatment should be option*. However that has always been subject to abuse by profit hungry intuitions. Any intuition with less than perfect intention can declare everyone that drops by as an imminent threat even if they are not. But by doing so that opens the door for professional services, services which require someone to pay. Insurance, state, ect... money comes in and the more people are committed the more profit. This has been the modus operandi for most Psych hospitals in the past, even many to this day no matter how much people deny it. It is exactly this mentality that has destroyed mental health care in the United States if not around the world. Today this mentality has moved from hospitals to big pharma, where the system is rigged to guarantee a diagnosis that can only be treated with psychotropic drugs.


Having such power to force treatment on anyone no questions asked creates another, perhaps even bigger problem. The treatment itself. Patients no longer have any power, which strips them of all rights. Because such power held by institutions will always assure a fresh supply of patients, it does not matter any more if treatment even works. One could even say "well, there all so dangerous, better here then on the streets". Psych hospitals then them turn into prisons where mistakes are not held accountable to anyone or anything. Its even better for institutions not to invest less in treatment because that in tern maximizes profit. And poor treatment will not interfere with offering forcing more services on people. Good well meaning staff start to leave and those who take over can be anyone with any intentions. No accountability, unlimited power with little to invest in patients leads to appalling, abusive, inhuman environments. Patients are terrorized at no fault of there own. The people who treat them like animals do so because the objective is profit, not a warm feel good mission statement. Further, a risk opens up for the control of people who do not meet societal norms, since they to can be declared dangerous with a doctor's pen. You now have a beast running unchecked.

When institutions get to this level they no longer do good, they don't even help, rather they begin to do damage. People who go through the system become sicker, they become bitter, they learn hate. Their lives become destroyed, shattered, in grief. This sets off a chain reaction of events that ripple through society. The mentally ill then start to become a burden on society; they begin to resent authority (because the only authority that promised to help betrayed them with abuse) taking that anger out on society. Property, people, you name it. Their decline means even more need for help, forcing society to take the cost to a much deeper level.


Eventually patients begin revolting against the system. Institutions are no longer respected or taken seriously. Insurance companies no longer want to pay. The system is viewed in disgust, and I don't blame anyone who does. Even when a person is in danger no one can do anything because the pendulum has swung in the other direction. The system falls apart, yet remains grossly incompetent.

In a nut shell this sums up what has happened overtime to mental health care system.

Where are the mentally ill toady? No place better. Homeless or in prison. Prison certainly isn't a human place for them, neither is being homeless. They still are not getting the help they need.

Id even go on a leap saying some of those psychopaths in society were created by those very same institutions. The amount of foster kids that under go mental treatment is just frightening. I have seen kids in this type of care, and I don't want to get into it.

* Where a person is forcibly committed, they should loose little if any rights. They must have the right to be treated like a human being. They have the right to exceptional treatment, dignity, liberty, respect, comfort, you name it in their benefit and no less. Just the way a criminal has Maranda rights, proof of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, right to an attorney, evidence, a warrant signed by a judge, ect ect so should a person in forced treatment and then some.


Without a doubt if everyone had been treated like a human during a forced hospitalization we wouldn't be seeing half the posters that we do in anti-psych. Certainly not that hurt, bitter or angry. Every hurt person is a cost on society. Every hurt person is a victim. IMO everyone on here, anyone harmed or failed by psychiatry has the right to feel the way they do and for exceptionally good reasons. Its a normal reaction. That's sanity, not insanity. Everyone deserve the right to be treated like a human being, no less.

Yeah I think power abuse is very obvious for the simple reason alone that so many people are forcibly hospitalized, when scenarios like a paranoid schizophrenic becoming violent or a depressed person trying to jump off a bridge - are relatively very, very rare scenarios. So why are soooo many people being forcibly hospitalized if that is the case?

I also think it boils down to money-hunger much of the time because many mentally ill people are in prison, not in hospitalizes. That prisons can basically be privately run businesses is just horrifying all by itself. And then on top of that, there are many mentally ill roaming the streets as homeless, such as the schizophrenic woman I encountered while homeless in California. I guess it's interesting that nobody thinks they need to be hospitalized, since there would be nobody to ever pay money on that woman's behalf. So she just gets left out in the streets suffering and starving.

I don't understand why here in the U.S. we spend billions on efforts in other countries (which doesn't bother me all by itself) but then "can't afford" to have well-supervised / regulated facilities for the mentally ill here in our country?

I actually used to by into the notion that there are all these people feeding on the "welfare gravy train" across the U.S. until I was homeless, myself. I think it's important for me to admit my previous ignorance so that others might have an easier time letting themselves question their perceptions, too. For California being considered such a liberal state with high taxes, ironically the only help I could ever find while homeless was all private charity stuff, nothing from the government. The only thing the government did was scream us at and threaten to ticket us at 6AM every day if they caught us sleeping outside.

Yet those very high taxes do exist. So where is the money going? Certainly not to that schizophrenic woman. Really chaps my ass. Especially because I was fooled, which just makes it even more agitating, when I wonder just how many people have been fooled like I was.

Everything you say is happening

The outcome today for a person with such is still much the same. Way to many people with mental disability are either in prison or homeless. And I agree, prisons are now another intuition that is capitalizing off of illness. Heck, they don't even need to fulfil a mission statement. Its a horrible fate. This needs to change.

I feel the same way. For the amount of money we spend on taxes, donating and helping other nations... well none of it seems to go toward the people who need it most. In fact, the sad irony is that its cheaper to pay for some ones health care than to have them end up in prison where it costs way more to take care of them. It really makes me angry

It is not so easy to file a case in federal government. First the case must belong there.

Does anyone have a full list of things you can sue for? Such as defamation, harrasment, etc.