An Ideal Scene expresses the way an area ought to be. In other words, if you had your “druthers” (“I’d rather…”) what would things look like and how would they operate in the best of all possible worlds? We can state unequivocally that the scene in most state mental health departments and facilities is abominable. If they were really doing their jobs right, their patients would be recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals. It doesn’t take much research to find out that isn’t the case, just Google “psychiatric abuse.”
In Missouri, for example, the annual budget for the state department of mental health is well over $1 billion. It has been generally increasing for the last thirty-seven years while state psychiatric facilities continue to abuse their patients. In fact, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch exposed the outrageous level of abuse in Missouri psychiatric facilities in a series of articles called “Broken Promises, Broken Lives” published June 11-14, 2006. They said, “Mentally retarded and mentally ill people in Missouri have been sexually assaulted, beaten, injured and left to die by abusive and neglectful caregivers in a system that for years has failed at every level to safeguard them.”
[See the resource for a graph of the Missouri Department of Mental Health annual budgets.]
Similar situations can be found in other states. For example, on December 30, 2007 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published “A Hidden Shame: Danger And Death In Georgia’s Mental Hospitals” saying that “despite intense scrutiny, conditions are still substandard for many patients in seven state facilities.”
The following would be necessary characteristics of an ideal state mental health department. If your state’s department of mental health doesn’t fit these criteria, where are your letters to your own state representatives and senators telling them to get busy and fix it? It’s all laid out for you here, now go write those letters.
No person should ever be forced to undergo electric shock treatment, psychosurgery, coercive psychiatric treatment, or the enforced administration of mind-altering drugs. Governments should outlaw such abuses. Prosecute as a criminal offense any and all cases of physical damage caused through psychiatry’s use of electroshock, brain surgery or abusive drug “treatment.”
People in desperate circumstances must be provided proper and effective medical care. Medical, not psychiatric, attention, good nutrition, a healthy, safe environment and activity that promotes confidence will do far more than the brutality of psychiatry’s drug treatments. Housing and work will do more for the homeless than the life-debilitating effects of psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric treatments that destroy responsibility.
The use of physical and mechanical restraints should be outlawed. Until this occurs, any psychiatric staff member-and the psychiatrist who authorized the procedure-should be criminally culpable should the restraint result in physical damage or death.
Insist the community treatment laws that rely upon mandatory and thereby coercive measures be abolished, and dismantle or prevent “mental health courts” which are another conduit for drugging our communities.
Humane mental health hospitals and homes must be established to replace coercive psychiatric institutions. These must have a full complement of competent physical (non-psychiatric) doctors and medical diagnostic equipment, which non-psychiatric medical doctors can use to thoroughly examine and test for all underlying physical problems that may be manifesting as disturbed behavior. Government and private funds should be channeled into this rather than abusive psychiatric institutions and programs that have proven not to work.
Legal protections should be put in place to ensure that psychiatrists and psychologists are prohibited from violating the right of every person to exercise all civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights as recognized in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in other relevant instruments.
Appropriate state regulatory agencies should investigate every complaint of psychiatric assault, fraud or illicit drug selling. Such agencies should revoke or suspend a psychiatrist’s or psychologist’s license for such criminal practices. All patient complaints of sexual abuse should be referred to the police, attorney general or prosecutor who must be obligated to investigate and prosecute.
The responsible officials of regulatory agencies or their advisors must be held accountable and criminally charged for harm caused by psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric “treatment” if it is established that they knew, or should have known, of such harm either through clinical trial results, adverse reaction reports or broadly available public information.
Establish rights for patients and their insurance companies to receive refunds for mental health treatment which did not achieve the promised result or improvement, or which resulted in proven harm to the individual, thereby ensuring that responsibility lies with the individual practitioner and psychiatric facility rather than the government or its agencies.
Clinical and financial audits must be done of all government-run and private psychiatric facilities that receive government subsidies or insurance payments to ensure accountability, and the compilation of statistics on admissions, treatment and deaths, without breaching patient confidentiality.
Establish or increase the number of psychiatric fraud investigation units to recover funds that are embezzled in the mental health system.
Taxpayers’ money must not be used to fund psychiatry’s unworkable methods and “treatment” for “diseases” that cannot be scientifically verified.
It must be recognized that every person is responsible for his or her own actions and must be held accountable for their actions. State legislators should repeal any laws permitting the insanity defense and diminished capacity pleas.
Remove psychiatrists and psychologists as advisors or as counselors from courts, police forces, prisons, criminal rehabilitation and parole services, and educational institutions. Because psychiatrists have no scientific foundation for their claims, do not permit them to render opinions about or to treat drug addiction, criminal behavior and delinquency, or to probe for alleged dangerous behavior.
None of the 374 mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (or those in the International Classifications of Diseases mental disorders section) should be eligible for insurance coverage because they have no scientific, physical validation.
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