{I RE-POST} “WHY PSYCHIATRY IS EVIL” by Wayne Ramsay {PART 1}

To most human beings, killing another human being is the epitome of evil. Torturing a living human being may be even more cruel and even more evil.
By either definition, psychiatry qualifies as evil.

Most psychiatry deaths are caused by psychiatry’s so-called medications. Psychiatry’s most lethal drugs are the so-called anti­psychotic, anti-schizo­phrenic, major tranquilizer or neuro­leptic (nerve-seizing) drugs. All these terms are different names for the same group of drugs. Other types of psychiatric drugs also kill people, however.

          Dr. Peter C. Gotzsche, a physician specializing in internal medicine at Denmark’s Nordic Cochrane Centre, alleged in the May 12, 2015 British Medical Journal:

Psychiatric drugs are responsible for the deaths of more than half a million people aged 65 and older each year in the Western world… Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal. … Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm … This would lead to healthier and longer-lived populations.

If people under age 65 and those outside the Western world are included, perhaps psychiatric drugs kill more than one million people each year worldwide.

          A study by Matti Joukamaa, M.D., Ph.D., et al., published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2006, “Schizophrenia, neuroleptic medication, and mortality” (bjp.rcpsych.org) found that “The number of neuroleptics used at the time of the baseline survey showed a graded relation to mortality. Adjusted for age, gender, somatic diseases and other potential risk factors for premature death, the relative risk was 2.50 (95% Cl1 46-4.30) per increment of one neuroleptic.” The study found taking a neuroleptic “medication” more than doubles a person’s risk of death.

          American researchers using U.S.A. nationwide data reported in a February 2011 article in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety there were 14.3 million “Annual antipsychotic treat­ment visits” in 2008 in the U.S.A. alone (Caleb Alexander, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, and Randall Stafford, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford Prevention Research Center, et al., “Increasing off-label use of antipsychotic medications in the United States, 1995-2008”, Vol. 20, Issue 2, pp. 177-184, also available at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). How many patients those 14.3 million antipsychotic treatment visits represent isn’t clear. If we assume each patient sees his psychiatrist once a month, that’s 1,191,666 patients taking so-called antipsychotic or neuroleptic (nerve-seizing) drugs in the U.S.A. in 2008 (14.3 million divided by 12 = 1,191,666). Many of these deaths are caused by neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which is when the body succumbs to the toxicity of the so-called medication. In 2012, Eelco F.M. Wijdicks, M.D., Professor of Neurology at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota reported—

Incidence rates for neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) range from 0.02 to 3 percent among patients taking neuroleptic agents… Mortality [death rate among those contracting NMS] has declined from the earliest reports in the 1960s of 76 percent and is more recently estimated between 10 and 20 percent. … NMS is most often seen with the “typical” high potency neuroleptic agents (eg, haloperidol, fluphenazine). However, every class of neuroleptic drug has been implicated, including the low potency (eg, chlor­promazine) and the newer “atypical” antipsychotic drugs (eg, clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine). [“Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome”, updated April 10, 2012, Wolters Kluwer Health | uptodate.com]

          Not all psychiatrists are convinced the so-called “atypical” neuroleptic drugs produce a lower death rate than the “typical” neuroleptics. Some
evidence suggests the death rate with “atypical” neuroleptic/“antipsychotic” drugs is higher. In his book Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition, 2008, p. 25) psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin, M.D. says this:

…the newer antipsychotic drugs pose even greater risks of causing potentially life-threatening disorders, including marked obesity, elevated cholesterol, and potentially lethal diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and pancreatitis. Overall, the concept of atypical is a marketing ploy with little clinical reality. These drugs combine the risks associated with the older neuroleptics with the very serious new risks. Nevertheless, health care providers, including sophisticated physicians, seem taken in by the claims.

Similarly, in his book Saving Normal—An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life, psychiatrist Allen Frances says experience has shown “the newer antipsychotics were no more effective than their predecessors and carried much worse long-term risks” (HarperCollins 2013, p. 92). Dr. Breggin’s and Dr. Frances’ opinion that the newer or “atypical” (so-called) antipsychotics have worse long-term effects than the older or “typical” (so-called) antipsychotics receives support from a report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, “Morbidity and Mortality in People with Serious Mental Illness”, in October 2006, by which time atypicals had become the majority of neuroleptic prescriptions. The report states in bold italics, “People with serious mental illness (SMI) die, on average, 25 years earlier than the general population. State studies document recent increases in death rates over those previously reported.” Premature death among those considered seriously mentally ill began at the same time as the the advent of psychiatric drugs, suggesting psychiatric drugs are the reason, and an increase in deaths among supposedly seriously mentally ill persons corresponding with the shift from “typical” to “atypical” neuro­leptic/​“antipsychotic” drugs suggests there is a higher death rate with the newer, supposedly better “atypical” neuro­lep­tics than with the older or “typical” neuroleptics.

          Using Dr. Wijdick’s smallest figures, 0.02 percent (0.0002) and my assumption the 14.3 million “Annual antipsychotic treatment visits” represent
about 1,191,666 (1.19 million) Americans taking neuroleptic drugs, the resulting estimate of Americans contracting neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) each year is 238, about 24 of whom die if the death or mortality rate is 10%, or 48 if it is 20%. Using his upper incidence rate for NMS of 3% and his upper mortality or death rate of 20% yields an estimate of approximately 35,745 NMS victims, about 7,150 of whom die. The worldwide figure would be a multiple of those numbers.

          According to psychiatrist Peter Breggin and clinical social work professor David Cohen in their book Your Drug May Be Your Problem—How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications (De Capo/Perseus Books 2007, pp. 102-103), about 2.4 percent of persons treated (if that’s the correct term) with neuroleptic drugs will contract NMS. They also cite the following estimate:

Using a low-end rate of 1 percent, Maxmen and Ward [in Psychotropic Drugs Fast Facts, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton 1995, p. 33] estimate that 1,000 to 4,000 deaths occur in
America each year as a result of neuroleptic malignant syndrome [NMS]. The actual number is probably much greater. [Id]

Again, the worldwide “antipsychotic”/neuroleptic death toll is neces­sarily many times greater than in America alone.

          The target of psychiatric drugs is the brain, but psychiatric drugs including neuroleptics reduce the function of nerves all over the body and
hence may disable many other parts of the nervous system, resulting in many deleterious effects, some of which are life-threatening. A study of “individuals who had died because of choking” after taking neuroleptic/antipsychotic drugs in the November 2003 British Journal of Psychiatry titled “Choking deaths: the role of antipsychotic medication” found choking deaths in persons taking so-called antipsychotic drugs may result from “compromised neurological competence” and that those taking thioridazine (a particular so-called antipsychotic) were 92 times more likely to die. It was also found that persons taking lithium were 30 times more likely to die (David Ruschena, et al., Vol. 183, pp. 446-50, ncbi.nlm.hih.gov).

          One of the ways neuroleptic or nerve-seizing drugs kill people is slowing or deactivating nerve impulses to the heart, causing the heart to lose coordination, which is called arrhyth­mia, or causing the heart to stop beating, causing sudden death, which is when death is unexpected and without warning. An article titled “Sudden cardiac death and antipsychotics” in the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment in 2006 (Vol. 12, pp. 35-44, by Nasser Abdelmawla, Ph.D. in psychopharmacology & Alex Mitchell) says “Sudden death refers to the unexpected death of a person who has no known acutely life-​threatening condition and yet dies of a fatal medical cause.” In this article the authors say sudden death is “thought to result from fatal arrhythmias” of the heart and that “Prospective studies show that people with prolongation of the QT interval beyond 500 ms [milliseconds] are at increased risk of serious [heart] arrhythmias such as ventricular tachycardia [dangerously fast heartbeat] and torsade de pointes” (see below) and that “Most antipsychotics prolong the QTc interval in overdose but some prolong it even at therapeutic doses.”

          In an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2001, Alexander H. Glassman, M.D. and J. Thomas Bigger, M.D., titled “Anti­psychotic Drugs: Prolonged QTc Inter­val, Torsade de Pointes, and Sudden Death” (Nov. 1, 2001, Vol. 158, No. 11, pp. 1774-1782) say this:

The first report of sudden arrhythmic death with an antipsychotic drug appeared in 1963 …sudden unexpected death occurs almost twice as often in populations treated with anti­psychotics as in normal populations. … Torsade de pointes is a malignant ventricular arrhythmia that is associated with syncope [loss of consciousness] and sudden death. … Drugs blocking the I_Kr channel can induce torsade de pointes and
sudden death in apparently healthy adults. … At this point in time, an atypical antipsychotic without concern does not exist.

Note they say an “atypical” (not typical) antipsychotic without concern does not exist, casting doubt on the claims the newer atypical antipsychotics are safer.

          Bruce G. Charlton, M.D. of the School of Biology and Psychology, University of Newcastle upon Tyre, in an article titled “Why are doctors still prescribing neuroleptics?” (QJM 2006; 99, 417-20) says “the so-called ‘atypical neuroleptics’ which now take up 90 percent of the US market, and are increasingly being prescribed to children, seem to offer few advantages over traditional agents while being highly toxic and associated with significantly increased mortality from metabolic and a variety of other causes.” He suggests the harm done by neuroleptic drugs including the newer so-called atypicals “represents an unprece­dented disaster for the self-image and public representation—not just of psychiatry—but the whole medical profession.”

          Health science writer Ethan A. Huff cites a study published in the British Medical Journal by researchers from Harvard Medical School of more than 75,000 dementia patients given so-called antipsychotic drugs such as haloperidol (Haldol, a “typical” neuroleptic) and quetiapine (Seroquel, an “atypical” neuroleptic) showing “at least 1,800 additional deaths a year as a result of dementia patients taking antipsychotic drugs.” He suggests “These 1,800 deaths, of course, are just the additional deaths caused by antipsychotic drugs when they are used for off-label purposes in those with dementia, which means there are tens of thousands—and perhaps even hundreds of thousands—of deaths every year in other patients taking antipsychotics for other purposes” (“BMJ [British Medical Journal] admits antipsychotic drugs kill far more people than terrorism”, March 02, 2012, naturalnews.com, italics in original).

There is evidence SSRI “antidepressants” cause suicide, homicide, and other violence, perhaps by making people feel worse, contrary to their
expectation, perhaps by reducing sleep quality, and perhaps by disabling parts of the brain responsible for people’s normal inhibitions. (See Psychiatric Drugs: Cure or Quackery?) How this was discovered is described in Alison Bass’ book Side Effects—A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Anti­depressant on Trial (Algonquin Books 2008). Because of these harmful effects, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now requires a “black box” warning on the package inserts for all supposedly anti­de­pressant drugs about increased risk of suicide in adolescents and young adults (but not older adults) taking them (as if the drugs have different effects in a person of age 20 than they do in a person of age 30 or 40).

          In his book Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (HarperCollins 2013, p. xv), psychiatry professor Allen Frances, M.D., chairperson of the task force that created DSM-IV, says this:

Since 2005 there has been a remarkable eightfold increase in psychiatric prescriptions among our active duty troops. An incredible 110,000 soldiers are now taking at least one psychotropic drug, many are on more than one, and hundreds die every year from accidental overdoses.

Others die from intentional overdoses or other suicide methods. Increased suicidality is one of the effects psychiatric drugs for reasons discussed in my essay Psychiatric Drugs: Cure or Quackery? According to an article in the May 28, 2012 Newsweek magazine, “About 18 veterans kill themselves each day. Thousands from the current wars have already done so. In fact, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died by their own hand is now estimated to be greater than the number (6,460) who have died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq (Anthony Swofford, "We Pretend the Vets Don’t Even Exist”, p. 26 at 29). If the psychiatric drugs U.S. soldiers take make them suicidal when they would not be otherwise, psychiatry may be indirectly but truly causing the deaths of more American soldiers than the Nation’s enemies on the battlefield.

          Others die neither from accidental overdose nor suicide but because of other effects of psychiatric “medication”. According to a report by
neurologist Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. published electronically December 29, 2011 in the European Heart Journal, many U.S. military veterans have died in their sleep with “no signs of suicide” or overdose while taking Seroquel (an antipsychotic), Paxil (an antidepressant), and Klonopin (a benzodiazepine).  Dr. Baughman concluded “psychotropic drug polypharmacy is never safe, scientific, or medically justifiable.” It is nevertheless commonplace if not routine in psychiatry.

          Whatever the exact numbers are, there is plenty of evidence psychiatry’s “medications” cost rather than save lives.

          Further­more, psychiatrists (and other physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and psychologists with prescribing authority) do
this for the ostensible purpose of treating nonexistent illnesses and arbitrarily defined “disorders”. In the words of Edward Shorter, professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto, psychiatry today uses “drugs that don’t work for diseases that don’t exist” (“Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy”, Wall Street Journal (Eastern Edition), Feb. 27, 2010, p. W3, proquest.umi.com).

          Despite the harm psychiatric and particularly neuroleptic drugs do, psychiatrists continue to prescribe them, and American courts, acting on
psychiatrists’ recommendations, continue to order people to take them. In 2012 a 44 year old woman in Pennsylvania sought my advice about a judicial outpatient commitment order compelling her to appear for injections of Invega Sustenna (an “atypical” neuroleptic), sometimes by a treatment team who came to her home, with a threat of incarceration if she did not comply. Also in 2012 a New Hampshire man sought my advice about his elderly father, who was under the control of a court-appointed professional guardian and was being held in a geriatric psychiatric ward of a private hospital where he was being given food and beverage to which a psychiatric drug cocktail including a neuroleptic was added. In 2013 a 32 year old man in New Hampshire sought my advice about his being required to appear at a Community Mental Health Center every ten (10) days for injections of Prolixin (a “typical” neuroleptic) pursuant to a conditional discharge from New Hampshire Hospital, where he was also required to be supervised simultaneously taking lithium orally to be certain he actually swallowed the “medication”. Due to the widespread ignorance or lack of concern about the harm done by psychiatric drugs and the lack of right to jury trial in civil commitment in these states, resulting in court hearings before a single judge who routinely grants (or “rubber stamps”) psychiatrists’ requests for involuntary inpatient or outpatient co­mmit­ment orders, there is little legal protection for such persons.

Most estimates of the number of people who are given electro­convulsive “therapy” (ECT) are 100,000 per year in the U.S.A. and one million to two million per year worldwide. In its model consent form for ECT, the American Psychiatric Association claims the death rate for ECT is approximately one death per 10,000 patients treated (Practice of Electroconvulsive Therapy: Recommendations for Treatment, Training, and Privileging, American Psychiatric Association 1990, Appendix B p. 157; see also p. 59). Other investigations show the ECT death rate is much higher.

          The authors of an article in Psychiatric Services (Vol. 52, No. 8, August 1, 2001), titled “An Analysis of Reported Deaths Following Electroconvulsive Therapy in Texas” by Raj S. Shiwach, M.D., et al. (available at ps.psychiatryonline.org) attempted to minimize the ECT death rate but nevertheless reported “Over the study period, 8,148 patients received a total of 49,048 ECT treatments” and that “Among more than 8,000 patients who received 49,048 ECT treatments between 1993 and 1998, a total of 30 deaths were reported to the mental health department…” 8,148 patients receiving ECT divided by 30 deaths is a death rate of 1 in 271.6 (8,148 divided by 30 = 271.6). If 100,000 Americans receive ECT each year as estimated by ECT advocates, and the death rate is 1 in 271.6 patients, the approximate number of Americans dying each year from electroconvulsive “therapy” or ECT is 368, slightly more than, on average, one American dying from ECT each day. Applying the 1 in 271.6 death rate to the worldwide estimates of one or two million persons per year given ECT is an ECT death toll of 3,681 or 7,363 persons per year. Dividing those figures by 365 days in a year yields an estimated worldwide death rate from ECT of, on average, 10 or 20 persons each day.

          In The Myth of Biological Depression I show there is no evidence depression, for which ECT is most often used, is ever caused by biological abnormality (in the brain or elsewhere). In Psychiatry’s Electroconvulsive Shock Treatment: A Crime Against Humanity, I show there is no credible theory to explain why inducing seizures by running electricity through a person’s head would cure or treat anything and ample evidence it damages the brain.

October 11-15, 1998 the Hartford Courant, a newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut, published a series of articles titled “Deadly Restraint: A Hartford Courant Investigative Report” about the killing of hundreds of people in America’s facilities for the mentally ill and retarded because of the way they were physically restrained:

A 50-state survey by The Courant, the first of its kind ever conducted, has confirmed 142 deaths during or shortly after restraint or seclusion in
the past decade. The survey focused on mental health and mental retardation facilities and group homes nationwide. But because many of these cases go unreported, the actual number of deaths during or after restraint is many times higher. Between 50 and 150 such deaths occur every year across the country, according to a statistical estimate commissioned by The Courant and conducted by a research specialist at the Harvard for Risk Analysis. That’s one to three deaths every week, 500 to 1,500 in the past decade, the study shows. “It’s going on all around the country,” said Dr. Jack Zusman, a psychiatrist and author of a book on restraint policy. The nationwide trail of death leads from a 6-year-old boy in California to a 45-year-old mother of four in Utah, from a private treatment center in the deserts of Arizona to a public psychiatric hospital in the pastures of Wisconsin. In some cases, patients died in ways and for reasons that defy common sense: a towel wrapped around the mouth of a 16-year-old boy; a 15-year-old girl wrestled to the ground after she wouldn’t give up a family photograph. Many of the actions would land a parent in jail, yet staffers and facilities were rarely punished. [charlydmiller.com, accessed June 24, 2013]

I recall seeing a videotaped interview with the mother of the 16 year old boy, or perhaps who I saw was the mother of another teenage young man who died in a similar way: She said a towel was wrapped around his nose and mouth while he was in 4-point restraints, supposedly to prevent him from biting people (as if he could while restrained in that way even without the towel).

          Probably the reason people are rarely punished for torturing or killing supposedly mentally ill or mentally retarded people is the perception of
the victims as less than fully human. The human mind is the defining characteristic of a human being, and it is that part of the person that is considered defective or absent in these victims.

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“The very term psychiatry (Psychiatrie)­ was a German invention, coined in 1808 by Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813). … In addition to coining the term ‘psychiatry,’ he also coined the term ‘noninjurious torture,’ to describe the methods of frightening mental patients that he considered effective and legitimate ‘treatments’” (Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., “Mental Illness as Brain Disease: A Brief History Lesson”, The Freeman, May 1, 2006, szasz.com). Dr. Benjamin Rush, often called the father of American psychiatry, whose face, in 2015, still appears on the official seal of the American Psychiatric Association, implying approval of Dr. Rush’s methods, wrote in his book Medical Inquires and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind in 1812 that “TERROR acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness” (Kimber & Richardson, Philadelphia: 1812, reprinted by Hafner Publishing Co., New York: 1962, p. 211, emphasis (capitals) in original). Today, torture and terror remain among the primary modes of action of psychiatry’s supposed therapies.

          Much if not most psychiatry today consists of psychiatrists and their co-workers trying to persuade their patients to take, or forcing their (so-called) patients to take, “medication” and the so-called patients doing everything in their power to avoid being “medicated”. The usual explanation is the supposed mental illness prevents those so afflicted from realizing they are sick and need “medication”, but the real reason is the torturous effects of the drugs.

          In her book, The Myth of the Chemical Cure—A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment, Revised Edition (Palgrave Macmillan 2009, p. 14), British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff says “the effects produced by most psychiatric drugs are experienced as unpleasant.”

          Alan A. Stone, M.D., Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at Harvard Law School, has said high rates of suicide among hospital­ized
psychiatric patients “may be a conse­quence of tranquilizing drugs keeping patients in a state of agony for a long period of time” (quoted in David F. Greenberg, Ph.D., “Involun­tary Psychiatric Commitments to Prevent Suicide”, New York University Law Review, Vol. 49 (May-June 1974), p. 227 at 259, note 106). Yes, you read that correctly: He said agony.

          Alexander D. Brooks, Justice Joseph Weintraub Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law—Newark, in “The Right to Refuse Antipsychotic Medications: Law and Policy”, 39 Rutgers Law Review 339 at 350 (1987) says this:

In sum, it must be acknowledged that side effects caused by antipsychotic medications are serious, although more so for some patients than for
others. They generate a high order of physical, emotional, and cognitive distress. The fact that most side effects (though not tardive dyskinesia) recede when medication is discontinued provides little comfort for the chronically and severely mentally ill who are currently required to use medication at all times.

Calling the effects of antipsychotic medications “a high order of physical, emotional, and cogni­tive distress” is another way of saying torture. Permanent neurological diseases such as tardive dyskinesia, akathisia, dystonia, and dementia caused by psychiatric drugs are another kind of torture.

          In her book Own Our Own, Judi Chamberlin, says in psychiatric hospitals there is “heavy use of psychiatric drugs, which is often perceived by the patients as torture. But patients cannot object to treatment without bringing on more treatment. Only agreeing that one is indeed ill and in need of help brings the possibility of ending the treatment” (Hawthorn Books, Inc. 1978, p. 111).

          Psychiatry professor and psychiatrist Allen Frances, M.D., quotes one of his patients describing the effects of Thorazine, one of the so-called typical tranquilizer/neuroleptic/antipsychotic drugs she was forced to take:

Mindy was put through the horror show that passed for treatment in those days, and I was part of the team directing it. “Three times a day, we lined up for meds and I was given Thorazine, the standard drug for psychosis. If I tried hiding the pills in my cheek, the nurse would search my mouth and I’d be given a bitter-tasting liquid [version of Thorazine to compel swallowing]. Either way, the effect was the same: the drugs would nail you to the furniture, suck your life force, dry your mouth an fill your head with despair. Each time I swallowed the pills I wished the doctors could feel for themselves the deadening effects.” [Saving Normal, Harper Collins 2013, p. 46]

Dr. Frances says “in those days” as if people are not forced to swallow or be injected with psychiatry’s torture drugs now in the 21st Century.

          According to a Radio Free Asia report on October 31, 2012 (http://www.unhcr.org)—

China’s new mental health law does little to protect patients or end a long‑running practice that enables the government to silence dissidents by deeming them mentally ill, rights groups and former mental health detainees said. … Wang Yonglan, a petitioner who tried to file a complaint against officials in her hometown of Chongshan in the eastern province of Jiangxi, had been locked up in the Hougang Psychiatric Hospital near Leshan city “numerous times” during the course of this year, according to her close friend Yu Ganlin. “While she was in the mental hospital, they force‑fed her with drugs,” Yu, a fellow petitioner from Hubei province, said in an interview on Wednesday. “If she refused to take the drugs, they would force her mouth open and pour them down her throat,” Yu said. “This made her very sick, and she told me that it would be better to die than to live like that.” [italics added]

          In Washington v. Harper, a U.S. Supreme Court decision about involuntary admin­istration of neuro­leptic/antipsychotic drugs to prison inmates, Justice Stevens’ says in his dissent­ing opinion that “Inmate Harper stated he would rather die th[a]n take medication” 494 U.S. 210 at 239 (1990, footnote 2/5).

          Better dead than drugged was also the conclusion of a patient of a Canadian psychiatrist quoted by Eric Fabris in his book Tranquil Prisons: Chemical Incarceration under Community Treatment Orders (University of Toronto Press 2011, p. 161). Community Treatment Orders, or CTOs, in Canada are similar to Outpatient Commitment and Conditional Discharge in the U.S.A. according to which people are court-ordered to take psychiatric drugs while living in their own homes. The psychiatrist said her patient “would rather die than be on a CTO.”

          Tranquil Prisons is both an autobiographical account and a study of forced outpatient psychiatric drugging in which Eric Fabris says “My personal experience of psychiatric drugging (not so much the assault [by hospital employees in the administration of the drug] but the effects of the drug) was the most frightening aspect of my psychiatrization. … drugging can be understood as torture, according to psychiatric survivor and lawyer Tina Minkowitz and the U.N.” (Id., p. 193).

          Juan E. Méndez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, in his statement to the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland on March 4, 2013 said this:

…abusive practices in health-care settings meet the definition of torture … Free and informed consent should be safeguarded on an equal basis for all individuals without any exception … Any legal provisions to the contrary, such as provisions allowing confinement or compulsory treatment in mental health settings, including through guardianship or other substituted decision-making, must be repealed. … Despite the significant strides made in the development of norms for the abolition of forced psychiatric interventions on the basis of disability alone as a form of torture and ill-treatment and the authoritative guidance provided by the CRPD [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities], severe abuses continue to be committed in health-care settings where choices by people with disabilities are often overridden based on their supposed “best interests” … medical treatments of an intrusive and irreversible nature, when lacking a therapeutic purpose or when aimed at correcting or alleviating a disability, may constitute torture or ill-treatment when enforced or administered without the free and formed consent of the person
concerned. … States should repeal any law allowing intrusive and irreversible treatments when enforced or administered without the free and informed consent of the person concerned. … Such interventions always amount at least to inhuman and degrading treatment, often they arguably meet the criteria for torture, and they are always prohibited by international law.

          In her autobiography, Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears—A Personal Triumph Over Psychiatry (Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. 1975, pp. 388-399), Janet Gotkin says this of her psychiatric hospitalizations and treatment with psychiatric drugs and ECT following suicide attempts:

If all the years of being a psychiatric patient brought me nothing but pain and increasing torment, who, then benefited from my status? And the final question: Are these men evil? Did they lie when they said “We only want to help you?”
          “We only want to help you” is a statement woven integrally into the pattern of lies, semantic farces, and mystification that is the fabric of
American psychiatry. … It is what every psychiatrist says to his patient when he plans to perpetrate another psychiatric torment and he doesn’t want any resistance: “I only want to help you.” For many years I believed the lie. Now I say, if that is help, we are not speaking the same language.

          Someone is continuing to insist that these human garbage dumps called mental hospitals are, in reality, hospitals. Someone is saying that they are
places where troubled people can get help. They are calling the guards doctors, the tortures treatments, and the humiliating experience of being a mental patient therapeutic. They are saying that the psychiatric labels that degrade and imprison people are diagnoses. They are the Mental Health Professionals. … But their help was imprisonment and torture and we allowed the semantic niceties of treatment and hospital to continue to fool us.

Four and five point physical restraints (wrists, ankles, and sometimes chest or head), are used frequently in psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric wards in the U.S.A. and are an obvious example of torture. Imagine being tied down and unable to use a toilet, being unable scratch an itch on your face or back because of restraints holding your hands to your sides, having asthma and being unable to reach for the rescue inhaler in your pocket or purse or attached to your key chain, and preventing raising your inhaler to your mouth, or having chronic, severe nasal congestion and being unable to raise a hand to spray decongestant into your nose, and unable to position your head to use the decongestant as nose drops, choking on mucus from your chronic post nasal drip but being unable to get off your back and into a position gravity would help you dislodge the mucus caught in your throat and help you stop choking, being desperately thirsty but being unable to reach for a glass of water, feeling your lips getting dry and beginning to crack or tear but being unable to use your Chap-Stick or other lip moistur­izer because your hands are bound, being cold but being unable to reach for a blanket, or being hot and sweating under a blanket but because your hands are bound you are unable to remove the blanket. Add to this a face mask such as is seen in the below photograph, forcing you to re-breath air you have exhaled, causing partial suffocation, especially if you already have difficulty breathing. When I offered a dust mask similar to this to a healthy 22 year old man spackling and sanding walls in a bedroom in my house, he refused and continued breathing paint-dust tainted air because, he said, the mask made him feel like he was suffocating. Imagine feeling like that but being unable to remove the mask because your hands are bound. Add to this the torturous and life-threatening effects of psychiatric drugs given over your objection while you are physically restrained. All this is a reality for people subjected to physical restraints and forced drugging, supposedly as psychiatric “therapy”, in the supposedly human-rights-respecting U.S.A.

In 2013 a man in Keene, New Hamp­shire left me an answering machine message saying “I’m currently incarcerated in an emergency room facility. I’ve been here a week now against my will. Been in four-point restraints several times. Was brought in for no good reason whatsoever. I just want to get the hell out of here. … Thank you very much, Mr. Ramsay.” When we had a two-way telephone conversation he told me while at New Hampshire (State) Hospital he was held “spread eagle” in four-point restraints (wrists and ankles) for 24 hours, which he described as “hell”.

          The use of physical restraints against David Deaton, “a normal 17-year-old when he walked into a National Medical Enterprises (NME) psychiatric hospital in Dallas…for help with depression after his girlfriend jilted him” is described in a July 15, 1996 National Review article:

After four days, when Deaton sought to leave, he was tied down with leather restraints. … he was held for more than a year, including 333 days tied to a wheelchair or spreadeagled on a bed with leather restraints. He was required to use a bedpan and never allowed more than one arm free to take his meals. … His muscles…atrophied so badly he could not walk. … Deaton told a congressional committee hearing in 1994 [about the experience]. [Eugene H. Methvin, “Cuckoo’s Nest”, p. 38]

According to Juan E. Méndez, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in his Statement to the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland on March 4, 2013, “there can be no therapeutic justification for the use of solitary confinement and prolonged restraint of persons with disabilities in psychiatric institutions; both prolonged seclusion and
restraint constitute torture and ill-treatment.”

          Involuntary electroconvulsive “therapy” is no longer a type of physical torture because of the use of anesthesia, but because of its harmful
effects, forcing it on people is psychological torture. The lowered IQ and inability to remember or learn resulting from electroshock-induced brain damage may also be considered a type of torture. Listen to the words of the two below quoted women who were subjected to involuntary electroshock, and then imagine yourself in the situation in which they found themselves, and ask yourself if involuntary electroshock is a form of torture. The
first is Janet Gotkin (maiden name Moss) in her autobiography Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears: A Personal Triumph Over Psychiatry (Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., New York: 1975, p. 148):

          “No breakfast for you, Moss,” she said into the smoky light of my room.  No breakfast.  I repeated the words to myself; they were nonsense syllables; I wouldn’t hear what they said. No breakfast. That meant shock. I was on the shock list.

          “No!” I screamed, hurling the thin beige hospital blanket off my rubber-sheeted bed. In an instant I was by the door. “There must be some mistake. I’m not supposed to get treatments.” How many times had I seen other people perform this same panicky charade? How many times had I heard the frantic terrorized cry? Not me, not me. There must be some mistake. Now it was me, in a frenzy of survival fear, crying the futile cry, clawing on the twelve-foot wall.

            “No mistake,” the little woman said calmly. “Here’s your name, right near the top of the list.”

          “But my doctor said—” I started to explain. She interrupted.

            “No breakfast,” she said again. “I’ll be back to get you in a few minutes.” She turned, as smartly as a new private, and I heard her raspy voice with its message for the doomed, as she moved from room to room.

According to the New Zealand Book Counsel, Janet Frame (1924-2004) is “New Zealand’s most distinguished writer”. She wrote this about her experience as a mental hospital patient:

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime. Waiting in the early morning, in the
black-capped frosted hours, was like waiting for the pronouncement of a death sentence. … If our name appeared on the fateful list we had to try with all our might, at times unsuccessfully, to subdue the rising panic. For there was no escape. … the fear leads in some patients to more madness. [Janet Frame, “Faces in the Water”, appearing in Thomas Szasz (editor), The Age of Madness: The History of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization Presented in Selected Texts, Anchor Books 1973), pp. 203, 204-205, 210]

Imagine yourself incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, or psychiatric ward of a general hospital, talking with people, other patients, who seem normal when they first arrive at the hospital, but after a few electric shock treatments are so demented they can no longer talk with you. They are still breathing, but their minds are gone. Since the mind is the most essential part of a human being, it can seem, or even be, equivalent to murder. Imag­ine watching a fellow patient being hauled away by force for electric shock treatment while she resists physically as well as she can while she pleads with the psychiatrist and hospital attendants to stop. Imagine the terror of knowing you might be next, and your mind, your memories, your intelligence, might be the next to be erased, and there is nothing you can do stop it.

          Joanna Moncrieff, M.B.B.S., M.Sc., FRCPsych., M.D., and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mental Health Sciences at University College London,
in her book The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (Palgrave MacMillan 2009, p. 2) says—

We have only to look to the relatively recent past to see the proclivity of psychiatrists to subject their patients to invasive, degrading, harmful and not unusually fatal pro­ce­dures in the name of therapy, and to blind themselves to the real nature of their activities.

A central theme of this series of essays is psychiatry’s harmful, cruel, evil, and sometimes fatal “treatments” exist not only in psychiatry’s relatively recent past but now in the early 21st century.

          Sadly, the torture goes on, and for the most part, lawmakers do nothing.