Psychiatry can be brutal and coercive. It’s important to understand. Some of it is so extreme it’s hard for those uninitiated to conceive of and yet it’s very common. Psychiatry, in general, at best, is subtly coercive. At worst it’s straight up violent.
Drugs are generally presented as necessary rather than one, often far less than ideal, possibility for treatment. This means one is made to believe through somewhat more subtle coercion that they have no choice but to take drugs with very dangerous adverse effects that include disabling physical illness and very early death. Then there is outright forced treatment in which peole can be restrained (tied up), stuck and drugged with needles, or even electrocuted to name a few. All forced treatment is violent as anything done to the body against one’s will is a sort of rape. If our bodies are not our own we are nothing.
Faith Rhyne writes:
“As a person who has experienced involuntary commitments, seclusion, restraints, forced medication, and intentional humiliation as part of my “mental health” treatment, I am still working through the severe and persistent effects of force and coercion. Being in relational dynamics in which I had no voice and in which I was not treated as a human being with viable thoughts and legitimate feelings impacted my sense of self in ways that were incredibly destructive.
I didn’t have a word for it when it was happening. Torture was something that happened to prisoners of war in faraway places and in terrible movies.
It was not something that happened to young Americans in modern hospitals. “
Tina Minkowitz writes: To respond to controversy and resistance developing in response to the recommendation of Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez for an absolute ban on nonconsensual psychiatric interventions, I suggested to use June 26, the International Day in Solidarity with Victims of Torture, to raise awareness and support for the recommendations. (see more)
Below is a collection of links on forced treatment and what amounts to torture:
A book by Richard Bentall – Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good?
● UN report states that involuntary treatment of those with psychiatric labels is torture
● In honor of the woman I witnessed being tortured in a psych ward
● That’s crazy: powerful documentary on the coercive nature of psychiatry – If you’re not aware of just how brutal and coercive psychiatry can be, you should really watch this. This may seem extreme to those who’ve not seen it happening but it’s very common and the bottom line is psychiatry, in general, at best, is subtly coercive. Drugs are generally presented as necessary rather than one, often far less than ideal, possibility for treatment. This means one is made to believe through what amounts to subtle coercion that they have no choice but to take drugs with very dangerous side effects.
● Forced treatment isn’t the answer
● Forced Psychotropic Drugs, Assertive Community Treatment, (in-home forced treatment)
● WNUSP statement on the Implications of the CRPD on Forced Treatment
● The chill of forced incarceration and psychiatric “care” (otherwise known as gun control??)
● Demands that it be easier to involuntarily commit the mentally ill are knee-jerk and irrational
● Robert Whitaker’s response to E. Fuller Torrey. About the rationale for forced psychiatric treatment
● My Forced Psychiatric “Treatment”
For a multitude of ideas about how to create a life filled with safe alternatives to psychiatric drugs visit the drop-down menus at the top of this page or scroll down the homepage for more recent postings.
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