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"Deprivation of civil liberties under the health food model
In what other “medical” discipline besides psychiatry are patients are afraid to be completely honest, for fear of being “diagnosed” as less deserving of human rights than those around them, who are often just as screwed up?
How do such “mental health professionals” figure that’s going to work? Aside from milking insurance and tax money? Is knowing that someone can yank you back into the local loony bin, at any time for nearly any reason, supposed to be liberating and healing? Or just as depressing, punitive and repressive as it feels?
A tormented state of mind may bring on occasional lapses in judgment, but it is not the same as stupid. It is merely one part of the human condition. Forcing someone from a bad situation into a worse one doesn’t improve it. It’s like kicking a dog for having diarrhea. It may get the dog out of your house or off your lawn, but from the dog’s point of view, it only adds to its misery and makes it afraid of you.
And if some “mental health professional” claims that it the State mental health system does help people, where is the scientific and medical evidence? Where are the links to such evidence and statistics on its web sites? Where has it done and published any study with the same scope as the MacArthur Study on violence risk assessment, freely available on the net? How and where has it demonstrated that its rules and methods for committing “dangerous” people are just, helpful and effective?
Blustering doesn’t count. You actually have to run long-term experiments using real data on evaluations, treatments and outcomes, which any outside expert can freely examine and interpret. Which means that you actually have to collect and keep aggregate and de-personalized data, and make publicly available that data and the rules under which it was collected. The same as any real doctor and scientist does when publishing in a journal. To truly demonstrate its fairness and usefulness, the State mental health system must to be open to investigation and professional criticism.
The empty-suited shamans in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services are rightly afraid of doing this. It would expose them as having very little if any evidence-based treatment. Their “standard of care” is a bunch of people concurring that what they are doing is right, with no more evidence of medical efficacy than many health foods sold on the Internet. It they were medical pills instead of the kind they are, they couldn’t get past the stringent FDA requirements. They might as well be scientologists, because any cult or fringe group can make the same claims of saving and improving lives with secret methods that the uninitiated cannot fathom.
If we have freedom of religion in this country, why does State law favor them? The continuous silly season in the Legislature, perhaps? And if I’m wrong, let’s see the State mental health system demonstrate it with something besides forcibly detaining and medicating me like a Soviet “mental patient” in Lubyanka. "
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