{I RE-POST} “WHY PSYCHIATRY IS EVIL” by Wayne Ramsay {PART 2}

Psychiatry is evil because in addition to imprisoning (forcibly “hospitalizing”), torturing and killing law-abiding people, damaging brains and causing neurological disease with psychiatric drugs, and ruining people’s lives with psychiatric stigma, and deceiving to the public and law makers about what psychiatry is and can do, psychi­atrists retaliate against those who attempt to reveal psychiatry as the quackery and violation of human rights it is. In his book Anatomy of an Epidemic (Crown Publishers 2010, pp. 304-312), Robert Whitaker puts it this way:

American psychiatry has told the public a false story over the past thirty years. The field promoted the idea that its drugs fix chemical imbalances in the brain when they do no such thing … In order to keep that tale of scientific progress afloat (and to protect its own belief in that tale), it has needed to squelch talk about the harm that the drugs can cause.

Whitaker gives examples of actions taken against those on what he calls “psychiatry’s hit list”. One of them is psychiatrist Peter Breggin, M.D., who for the last few decades has led the fight against biological psychiatry:

Psychiatry’s policing of its own ranks began in earnest in the late 1970s… [Dr. Peter] Breggin appeared in 1987 on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, where he spoke about tardive dyskinesia and how that dysfunction was evidence that neuroleptics damaged the brain. His comments so infuriated the APA [American Psychiatric Association] that it sent a transcript of the show to NAMI [a drug-company financed pro-psychiatry advocacy group], which in turn filed a complaint with the Maryland State Commission on Medical Discipline, asking that it take away Breggin’s medical license on the grounds that his statements had caused schizophrenia patients to stop taking their medications (and thus caused harm). Although the commission decided not to take any action, it did conduct an inquiry (rather than summarily dismissing NAMI’s complaint), and the message to everyone in the field was, once again, quite clear. [Quoting Dr. Breggin:] “…what this showed is that…they were willing to destroy your career” [to discourage criticism of psychiatry]. [pp. 304-305]

          In a lecture at Tufts University, psychiatrist Daniel Carlat says after publication in 2010 of his book Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, he “got a taste of just how angry it is possible to make some people that are in your field when your are critical. … When you are a psychiatrist and you become critical of your field, you’re in for a special retribution” (“Daniel Carlat—Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry”, YouTube.com at 1:25).

          An example of psychiatric retaliation against a physician because he tried to expose psychiatry’s mythology about itself is what happened to neurologist John Friedberg (1942-2012). Dr. Friedberg describes what happened to him in his book Shock Treatment Is Not Good For Your Brain—A Neurologist Challenges the Psychiatric Myth (Glide Publications 1976, pp. 10-21), which is both an autobiography and a scientific book about the harm done by electric shock treatment. In 1974, after graduating from Yale University and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and beginning a residency in neurology at Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Dr. Friedberg became interested in the harm done by electro­convulsive “therapy”. He placed an invitation for people who’d been subjected to electro­shock to contact him in the April 7 Sunday San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle: “Electric shock therapy is not good for the brain. I would like to hear from anyone who has received these treatments here in San Francisco. Call 668-2085 evenings or 563-4321 noontime. John Friedberg, M.D.” Three days later the chairman of the Pacific Medical Center Department of Psychiatry sent a memo to Dr. Friedberg’s superior in the neurology department and to the dean of Pacific Medical Center with a photo­static copy of Dr. Friedberg’s newspaper notice saying “We believe that this study is inappropriate for a resident at Pacific Medical Center.” Dr. Friedberg received word his superior was thinking of firing him. His superior gave him a choice: Either “go into psychotherapy with the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry as a patient, or be fired” (italics are Dr. Fried­berg’s). Dr. Friedberg refused and was fired. “Residents are rarely dismissed from their training programs,” wrote Dr. Friedberg, “Dismissal from residency connotes gross negligence or incompetence. My career in neurology was at stake, my reputation as a doctor was at stake, and my freedom of speech was at stake.” He reached the conclusion that “active opposition to ECT is simply not tolerated, even from within” the medical profession because “entire careers in psychiatry were built upon searing the brains of the gullible and the powerless and the unhappy.” He appealed his dismissal without success and took a job as an emergency room physician but was later offered and accepted a position in the neurology program at the University of Oregon in Portland and became a board-certified neurologist who spent the remainder of his life writing and speaking against psychiatry’s harmful “therapies”.

          According to psychiatrist Ron Leifer, M.D., in “A Critique of Psychiatry and an Invi­tation to Dialogue” in the December 27, 2000 Ethical Human Science and Services, after the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness by Dr. Thomas Szasz in 1961, “Serious attempts were made to remove him [Dr. Szasz] from his tenured appointment as professor of psychiatry. His two main defenders at that time, Ernest Becker and myself, both of us untenured, were fired” (iaapa.de/zwang/leifer.htm & critpsynet.freeuk.com).

         Psychiatry has also been used to retaliate against physicians who criticize their fellow physicians for medical practices unrelated to psychiatry.

          Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) was committed to an insane asylum where he was beaten and died of his injuries after accurately accusing his fellow physicians of causing the deaths of many maternity patients by giving patients infections with the doctors’ own dirty hands. Dr. Semmelweis recommended washing hands in chlorinated water before contact with patients. According to psychology professor Robyn M. Dawes in his book House of Cards—Psy­chology and Psycho­therapy Built on Myth (Free Press 1994, pp. 77-78), “Semmelweis … lost his sanity, begun accosting people on the streets to warn them to stay away from doctors who didn’t clean their hands, and died in a mental institution in 1865.” Probably what actually happened is not that Dr. Semmelweis lost his sanity but that his warnings seemed crazy at a time people knew nothing about germs, and because his warnings were an affront to his fellow physi­cians. Only after Dr. Semmelweis’ death did the germ theory of disease gain acceptance and vindicate his beliefs. Now, Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, which has schools of medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy, is named after him.

         Elaine Kennedy, M.D., is a 1974 honors graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1993 she was named Outstanding Physician of the Year by the Tennessee Medical Association. According to an Associated Press report, later that year, on December 17, 1993, she went to the office of Dr. Ferroll Sams III, an internal medicine specialist of Fayetteville, Georgia to review the medical records of her elderly aunt. Dr. Kennedy was reportedly “hostile, demanding, and interfering” regarding her aunt’s medical care.  Dr. Sams was apparently displeased by another physician questioning the treatment provided and had Dr. Kennedy committed to a psychiatric facility after writing on the commitment form she was delusional, hyperactive and manic-depressive. Dr. Kennedy remained psychiatrically hospital­ized for five (5) days and temporarily suffered loss of her medical licensure, confirmation of which appears on the the Tennessee Department of Health web site, which says Dr. Kennedy must undergo “evaluation by a psychiatrist of the board’s choosing” for “an independent psychiatric evaluation of licensee”, after which her license to practice medicine was reinstated. In a lawsuit that followed, Dr. Kennedy won a $3.4 million jury verdict against Dr. Sams for wrongful commitment. The jury said the commitment was “unlawful” and that Dr. Sams “did not act in good faith” when he had Dr. Kennedy involuntarily committed.

         Both Dr. Semmelweis and Dr. Kennedy were involuntarily committed to an insane asylum or psychiatric facility because of their exercise of the right of free speech.

        So was psychologist Al Siebert, Ph.D., during a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical psychology at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, because he questioned the concept of mental illness and the validity of psychiatry. He describes the experience in a chapter in Dr. William Glasser’s book Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health (HarperCollins 2003, pp. 178-203) and in his book A Schizophrenia Breakthrough (Practical Psychology Press 2003), an autographed copy of which he gave me when we met at a con­ference in 2003. Dr. Siebert was accused of mental illness because he began to speculate “about why a suppressed need for esteem compels people to force unwanted help onto others … I explained how the perception of mental illness in others is mostly a stress reaction in the mind of the beholder.” Psychiatrists in his training program found these ideas unaccept­able, ignored (or more likely never even thought about) Dr. Siebert’s right of free speech, called him mentally ill, and demanded he go to a mental hospital as a patient. When threatened with involuntary commitment, Dr. Siebert entered a mental hospital “voluntarily” because he believed “a person who goes into a mental hospital voluntarily can get out much more easily than a person who is committed.” His like many others was a case of coerced consent and so was essentially involuntary. Like virtually all psychiatric hospital patients, Dr. Siebert was forced to take at least one psychiatric drug, in his case Thorazine: “I saw that they would use force if necessary. Make me take shots maybe put me in an isolation room. I saw that my chances of successful resis­tance were zero. I reached out for the cup the nurse held out to me. The aides relaxed and stepped back.” After his experience as a mental hospital patient Dr. Siebert concluded psychi­atry is “a deluded profession” and that psychi­atrists are “like members of a cult, their minds controlled by a delusional belief system.”

        American commentators point an accusing finger at dictatorial regimes in other nations, such as the former Soviet Union, where critics including authors of books who try to correct what’s wrong with a society are imprisoned or involuntarily committed to mental institutions. What happened to Drs. Kennedy and Siebert is reason to wonder if some of us in America are equally bad.

        When I told Dr. Thomas Szasz about my efforts, as a lawyer, to stop kangaroo court commitment proceedings in the U.S.A., Dr. Szasz replied to me in an e-mail dated 3/19/2012 saying “Writing a book is a good idea. Otherwise, desist. Asking for justice for people against psychi­atry is asking for trouble, as you are finding out.”

        We Americans should ask ourselves what kind of country we’ve become if critics who call attention to uncomfortable truths in an effort to correct what’s wrong in our society are punished. Was Dr. Szasz correct about America having become a nation where asking for justice is asking for trouble?

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Psychiatry is evil because dishonesty is a routine part of what psychiatrists and those who work with them do.

          For example, in my essay Suicide: A Civil Right, I quote Paul G. Quinnett, Ph.D., a psychol­ogist, in his book about suicide saying “doctors like myself will stand up in court and say something to the effect that, by reason of a mental illness, you are a danger to yourself and need treatment” even when they do not believe the person so accused actually has a mental illness.

        E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., a psychiatrist, is one of today’s leading advocates of involuntary psychiatric treatment, contrary to the views he previously expressed in his book The Death of Psychiatry in 1974. In later books and through his Treatment Advocacy Center, Dr. Torrey urges legis­lators to make it easier to subject people to involuntary “hospitalization” for mental illness and outpatient psychi­atric drugging court orders authorizing what is in reality a type of assault. In his book Out of the Shadows: Confronting America’s Mental Illness Crisis, Dr. Torrey says “It would probably be difficult to find any American psychia­trist working with the mentally ill who has not, at a minimum, exaggerated the dangerousness of a mentally ill person to obtain a judicial order of commitment” (John Wiley & Sons 1997, p. 152, italics added). He quotes Paul Applebaum, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, saying mental health professionals regularly use “discretion to expand the scope of commitment statutes by admitting who might not qualify under strict [legal] criteria but are thought to be in need of [involuntary] care.”  Dr. Torrey continues:

Families also exaggerate their family member’s symptoms to get the person committed to a hospital. In a 1989 study of 83 families in Philadelphia, 18 percent said they had lied or exaggerated to officials in order to get a relative committed. … In fact a number of local officials with the Alliance for the Mentally Ill (AMI), a nationwide support group for families, say they privately counsel families to lie, if necessary, to get acutely ill relatives hospitalized… . They say they were attacked when they weren’t, they say their children tried to kill themselves when they didn’t… Thus, ignoring the law, exaggerating symptoms, and outright lying to get care for those who need it are important reasons the mental illness system is not even worse than it is.

What Dr. Torrey means is laws should permit involuntary hospital­ization and involuntary treat­ment without evidence the supposedly mentally ill person has ever done anything violent, making it unnecessary for others to make false accusations of violence to get somebody involuntarily “hospitalized” or involuntarily drugged.

          Dr. Torrey’s current position on forced psychiatric “hospital­ization” and forced psychi­atric “treatment” is 180° oppo­site of his opinion in The Death of Psychiatry in 1974 wherein he said “It should not be possible to confine people against their wills in mental ‘hospitals.’ … This implies that people have a right to kill themselves if they wish. I believe this is so” (Penguin Books, p. 180). In The Death of Psychiatry Dr. Torrey repeatedly puts the word disease, when referring to mental disease, in mocking quotation marks (as I often do). On pages 150 and 151 of The Death of Psychiatry he puts quotation marks around the word disease six times to indicate he did not believe mental disease is real disease. In The Death of Psy­chi­atry Dr. Torrey leaves no doubt he fully understands the erroneousness of the concept of mental illness, includ­ing schizophrenia. (See, for example, quotations from The Death of Psy­chiatry appearing on the first page of my essays
Does Mental Illness Exist? and Schizophrenia: A Nonexistent Disease)

In The Death of Psychiatry Dr. Torrey puts the word treatment in quota­tion marks (e.g., p. 149). He puts quotation marks around the words hospital and hospitals when referring to psychiatric or mental hospitals as a way of indicating they are really prisons (e.g., pp. 154-155).

        It is impossible for me to believe someone who so eloquently and convincingly debunked the concept of mental illness, including schizo­phrenia, as Dr. Torrey did in The Death of Psy­chi­atry, could be sincere now when he promotes these very ideas. In 1990 at the Thomas S. Szasz Tribute Dinner in New York City in a face-to-face conversation with Dr. Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness, I asked Dr. Szasz, “Whatever happened to Fuller Torrey?!” Dr. Szasz answered with a single word, “Funding”, and suggested I ask another psychiatrist who was with us that night, Dr. Ron Leifer, who gave me the same answer. Dr. Szasz wrote an article about Dr. Torrey’s turnabout titled “Psychiatric Fraud and Force: A Critique of E. Fuller Torrey” in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Vol. 44, No. 4, Fall 2004, p. 416).

        Although Dr. Torrey intended his above quoted words to be a critique of laws he says wrongfully protect the liberty of supposedly mentally ill people, the important lesson of what Dr. Torrey says in Out of the Shadows: Confronting America’s Mental Illness Crisis is dis­honesty is an integral and endemic part of involuntary psychiatric commitment of law-abiding but supposedly mentally ill people in the U.S.A.  Human nature being the same everywhere, this habitual dishonesty is probably a reality all around the world. This dishonesty undermines rule of law and makes America’s or any democracy’s promise of liberty a broken promise.

          Additional evidence of routine dishonesty in civil commitment of supposedly mentally ill and dangerous persons is found in The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior (Jason Aronson, Inc. 1995), by John Mon­ahan, Ph.D., professor of law and psychology at the University of Virginia. The 1981 edition of this book was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 at 899 (1983), where the Court says “one of the State’s experts relied [on Dr. Monahan] as ‘the leading thinker on’” the question of whether psychiatrists have the ability to predict future human behavior. In the 1995 edition of this book, Dr. Monahan points out that in Baxstrom v. Herold, 383 U.S. 107 (1966) and Dixon v. Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 325 F.Supp 966 (1971) court decisions caused the release of prisoners detained because of predictions by psychiatrists or psychologists they would be violent if released from custody. If predictions of future human behavior by psychiatrists and psychol­ogists were (1) honest and (2) anywhere close to accurate, a high percentage of these former prisoners would have committed violent crimes after they were released from prisons and mental hospitals. However, of the Baxstrom patients, all of whom were what are now usually called sexually violent predators, when followed by researchers for 2½ years after their release, only 8 percent were convicted of a crime, and “only one of those convictions was for a violent act” (p. 46). Additionally, “Only 14 percent of the [Dixon] patients were discovered to have engaged in behaviors injurious to other persons within 4 years after their release” (p. 47).  Dr. Monahan continues:

It is sometimes claimed regarding the Baxstrom and Dixon patients that no one really believed that they would be violent if released—that the predictions were merely a bureau­cratic ploy to keep “chronic” patients in the hospital​—and so the finding that they were not violent upon release should not be surprising. … It is difficult to respond to the criticism that mental health professionals were not telling the truth when they pre­dicted violence so that they could facilitate their bureaucratic hold on patients. It may, unfor­tunately, be true that if the ticket to involuntary treatment is a prediction of vio­lence, many psychiatrists and psycholo­gists are willing to punch it, regardless of whether they actually believe the patient to be violence-prone. [pp. 50-51]

          I once told the Assistant Superintendent of a large state mental hospital in Texas it seemed to me doctors were routinely certifying “that the proposed patient is mentally ill and because of his mental illness is likely to cause injury to himself or others if not immediately restrained” when this was not true, and known by the doctor to be untrue, because the Texas Mental Health Code (Article 5547-66, later repealed) required the doctor to say this to get the “patient” forcibly “hospitalized” immediately. If the doctor said only that the pro­posed patient was mentally ill and needed hospitalization in a mental hospital but did not say the proposed patient was likely, because of mental illness, to cause injury to himself or others if not immed­iately restrained, the proposed patient remained at liberty until his commitment hearing (pursuant to Article 5547-35, titled Liberty Pending Hearing). In practice, patients were never permitted to remain at liberty until their commitment hearing. They were always certified as likely, because of mental illness, to cause injury to self or others if not immediately restrained and forcibly “hospitalized” (imprisoned) on the basis of an ex parte proceeding, meaning one about which they knew nothing prior to being taken into custody and incarcerated at the Hospital. I thought it noteworthy that the second physician, who was required to concur with the first prior to the commitment hearing regarding mental illness and need for treatment in a mental hospital, usually did not make the statement about imminent dangerousness on the fill-in-the-blank form where he made the required statements that the proposed patient was mentally ill and needed hospitalization. The space in the fill-in-the-blank statement about the proposed patient being likely because of mental illness to cause injury to self or others if not immediately restrained was usually left blank. (Why tell a lie when you don’t have to?) Additionally, seeing and hearing the proposed patients at their hearings, and talking with them in the hallway outside the conference room where the commitment hearings were held, they never seemed dangerous. Many seemed old and senile and in need of nursing home care. Many seemed completely normal. I thought the Assistant Super­intendent, a physician and probably a psychiatrist, would disagree with my observation that doctors were routinely lying on their Certifi­cates of Medical Examination for Mental Illness regarding proposed patients’ likelihood of causing injury to self or others due to mental illness if not immediately restrained. I thought he would insist that under no circumstances would a physician fill out a Certificate of Medical Examination for Mental Illness stating the proposed patient was likely because of mental illness to cause injury to himself or others if not immediately restrained when the doctor did not think so. However, to my surprise, the Assistant Super­intendent agreed with me. He admitted psychia­trists and other physicians routinely certified people as likely, because of mental illness, to cause injury to self or others if not immediately restrained, even when the doctor knew this was not true, because this statement was required to prevent the proposed patient from remaining at liberty until his commitment hearing. I said to the Assistant Superintendent it was the intent of the Texas Legislature when drafting the Texas Mental Health Code to allow persons with mental illness who need treatment in a mental hospital but are not imminently dangerous to remain at liberty until their commitment hearings. I asked him why doctors would tell lies to deliberately defeat the Legislature’s intent. His answer was bold, candid, blunt and without the slightest trace of apol­ogy or embarrassment. He said, “Because that’s the way you dumb lawyers wrote the law!” It was a candid admission psychiatrists and other committing physicians are willing to say what­ever the law says they must to obtain an involun­tary commitment even when they know what they are saying is false.

          In his 1,104 page textbook, Mental Disability Law—Cases and Materials, Second Edition (Carolina Academic Press 2005, pp. 26-27), Michael L. Perlin, Professor of Law at New York Law School and for decades a leading scholar in mental health law, makes a similar observation:

…the legal system regularly accepts (either implicitly or explicitly) dishonest testimony in mental disability cases … This pretextuality—along with sanism [analogous to racism]—drives the mental disability law system. … the entire relationship between the legal process and mentally disabled litigants is often pretextual. This pretextuality is poisonous. It infects all players, breeds cynicism and disrespect for the law, demeans participants, reinforces shoddy lawyering, invites blase judging, and at times, promotes perjurious and corrupt testifying. The reality is well known to frequent consumers of judicial services in this area: to mental health advocates and other public defender/legal aid/legal service lawyers assigned to repre­sent patients … In short, the mental disability law system often deprives individuals of liberty dis­in­genuously and for reasons that have no relationship to case law or statutes.

          In his book Psychiatry—The Science of Lies (Syracuse University Press 2008, p. 96), psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz says “Whether they talk about platelets or patients, diagnosis or treatment, law or liberty, psychiatrists remain stubbornly estranged from truth-telling.”

          Some years ago court decisions and statutes (in theory) limited civil commitment to occasions when incarceration is the “least restrictive alternative”.  In practice, this made and makes absolutely no difference other than requiring the committing physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist to take a few seconds to tell one more lie in his testimony: “Doctor, do you believe involuntary hospitalization is the least restrictive alternative?” “Yes.”

          The same is true of legislators’ attempts to restrict involuntary commitment without prior notice to the affected party and prior to his having any kind of day in court or opportunity to argue for his liberty to “emergencies”. As I said in my conversation with the Assistant Superin­tendent, my observation has been that such “emergency” commit­ment provisions are used rou­tine­ly in every commit­ment, includ­ing when there is no emergency. Such statutory limi­ta­tions are not true limitations: They merely require mental health professionals (or family members) to tell one more lie.

          Sadly, legislators refuse to repeal, and continue to write, laws that assume honesty on the part of psychiatrists, psychologists, family members, and other supporters and perpetrators of psychiatric oppression such as involuntary “hospitalization” and outpatient commit­ment and psychiatric assault such as involuntary psychiatric “medication” and involuntary electro­convulsive “therapy”. They do not understand that any law that depends for its proper function­ing on the honesty of mental health professionals and others involved in civil commit­ment will not function in actual practice as legislators intended when enacting the law.

In my essay Why the Myth of Mental Illness Lives On, I point out that we, as a society, employ psychiatry to impose what in reality are punishments for breaking society’s unwritten rules of behavior. Psychiatry is evil because its “treatments” are often more cruel than the punishments we inflict on those who violate our written laws, such as against bank robbery. It is as if we had laws (actually, implicitly we do have laws) saying any person whose feelings of sadness are upsetting to other people may be involuntarily “hospitalized” and electro­shocked against his will until his brain has been damaged sufficiently to lower his IQ by 30 points, or anyone who expresses ideas that seem irrational to other people may be given “antipsychotic” drugs against his will in sufficient dose and duration to cause permanent neurological injury and brain damage evidenced by abnormal body movements and dementia, or any teenager who annoys her parents may be forcibly administered “medications” that will shorten her life by twenty-five years. We do actually inflict these punishments (called “treatment” or “therapy”) on people whose sadness or “depression” or other behavior bothers us or whose ideas seem strange or irrational, with court-ordered imprisonment (“hospi­talization”) and/​or “involuntary medication” erroneously referred to as “anti­psychotic” or invol­un­tary electroshock. In The Antidepressant Fact Book, psychiatrist Peter Breggin, M.D., says “Damaging the brain to impair brain function lies at the heart of all the physical treatments in psychiatry” (Perseus 2001, p. 155; italics are Dr. Breggin’s).

          If administered as punishment, psychiatry’s physical or biological therapies would be soon declared a violation of the U.S.A.‘s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel or unusual punish­ment: Can you imagine a criminal law requiring or authorizing administration of brain-damaging drugs or electroshock as punishment for a crime? Yet as “therapy” for supposed “mental illness”, such “treatments” are inflicted on unwilling so-called patients. The legislators, judges, jurors, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who impose these punishments on people, or permit them to continue, either fail to see the truth about invol­un­tary psychiatric treatment being punishment, and inflicting injury, and constituting torture, or know it but are not honest enough to acknowledge it.

Psychiatry is evil because it makes alienable, or voidable, human rights that the U.S.A.’s Declaration of Independence says are the God-given and unalienable rights of every human being: “WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Dictionary definitions of “unalienable” are cannot be taken away, surrendered, or given away; not transferable. When doing research for his biography of actress Frances Farmer, who was probably America’s most famous involuntary mental patient before her death in 1970, William Arnold learned something most Americans never think about (Frances Farmer—Shadowland, Berkley Books 1978, p. 125):

Psychiatry gained the extraordinary power to arrest, detain, and sentence any citizen to an indefinite confinement without due process. The mere accusation of insanity was all it took for the suspension of every single human right guaranteed under the Constitution.

In the words a San Francisco, California emergency room (ER) psychiatrist—

As time goes on, I become more and more aware of how awesome that power is. We’re able to just grab people and say, “You have to be here for seventy-two hours,” with no evidence other than our belief that it’s the right thing to do; and we’re empowered to do it. We don’t have to prove it to anyone. That’s a tremendously abusable power… [Paul R. Linde, M.D., Danger to Self: On the Front Line With an ER Psychiatrist, University of California Press 2010, p. 96]

It is also a power nobody should have in a country such as the United States of America that says in its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, one of which is liberty, and whose people and political leaders continue to claim is a nation of free people.

          In states with no right to trial by jury in civil commitment, psychiatrists actually have the power to hold people prisoner indefinitely, not only for 72 hours, because what happens after 72 hours is the formerly free citizen, now reduced to being a mental patient in hospital clothes and “medicated” against his will into a state of reduced mental functioning if not outright stupor, gets a hearing before a judge who routinely grants all requests by psychiatrists for continued confinement, with rare if any excep­tions. I’m reminded of a justice of the peace in Kerrville, Texas in 2011 who in the conference room where hearings were held at the Crisis Stabilization Unit, a few minutes before hearing the first of four (4) cases, casually mentioned she was going to do whatever the doctor recommended, which is exactly what she did, committing all of the patients whose cases she heard. Hearings before judges who have this attitude, which is most of them, provide only a pretense of due process and do not protect against wrongful commit­ment. (For reasons pre­viously stated, all civil commitment of law-abiding and objecting persons is wrongful.) Even where the right to trial by jury exists, it is seldom exercised because lawyers supposedly representing patients don’t tell them they must demand a jury to avoid a kangaroo court hearing in which commitment is a virtual certainty (see “'Assistance’ of Counsel?” in Unjustified Psychiatric Commitment in the U.S.A.).

          Few Americans know how tenuous and uncertain is their freedom in America. Few Americans know they can be arbitrarily imprisoned at any time in a place called a hospital merely because someone (often a family member) is willing to pay a mental health professional to question their “mental health”. America advertises itself to itself and to the world as a free country. In American public schools children are taught how lucky we are to be Americans because of the freedom we have in America. Almost all of us Americans believe the misleading platitudes about our freedom we hear in speeches by our political leaders, espe­cially presidents, particularly on occasions such as the 4th of July and Memorial Day holidays. We sincerely believe the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who died for our freedom died for something real, but in fact the freedom for which Americans have died has been a myth through­out the Nation’s history for many Americans, starting at the Nation’s inception with Negro slavery and still today with what has been called psychiatric slavery. Because of psy­chi­atric stigma, the victims dare not speak out, and the myths of mental illness and of psychiatric diagnosis go unchallenged, and America’s promise of liberty ­continues to be false. Psychiatry is evil because it under­mines America’s most fundamental promise, which is freedom.

Louise Arm­strong, And They Call It Help—The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children (Addison-Wes­ley Pub. Co. 1993). This book is out of print: Try bn.com; look for “marketplace sellers”.

Janet & Paul Gotkin, Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears—A Personal Triumph Over Psychiatry (Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. 1975)

Peter C. Gøtzsche, Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial (People’s&#x200BPress 2015)

Thomas Szasz, M.D., Psychiatric Slavery (Syracuse University Press 1998)

Thomas Szasz, M.D., Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry (Transaction Publishers 2003)

Thomas Szasz, M.D., Psychiatry—The Science of Lies (Syracuse Univer­sity Press 2008).

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., The Death of Psychiatry (hardcover: Chilton Book Co./paperback: Penguin Books, Inc. 1974), especially Chapter 12, “People as Human Beings: Legal Implications”

Radio Free Asia, “China Holds Blogger, Rights Activist in Psychiatric Hospitals”, www.rfa.org, 2014-09-18 (accessed Nov. 8, 2016)

Radio Free Asia, “Petitioner Held In Mental Hospital”: case highlights China’s use of psychiatric wards to silence dissent, www.rfa.org, 2011-12-28 (accessed Nov. 8, 2016)

“Without Consent” (a.k.a. Trapped and Deceived)(1994), available on YouTube.com. Seeing this movie shortly after reading Louise Armstrong’s book And They Call It Help—The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children, the movie seemed to me a fictionalized version of Ms. Armstrong’s nonfiction book. A movie reviewer at imdb.com calls it a movie about “the awful, evil people at the psych facility … It’s a sad yet realistic look at what truly goes on behind the closed, locked doors of these ‘treatment centers, and psychiatric hospitals. … It is just SICKENING how innocent people…are treated WORSE than convicted CRIMINALS’ … This movie is a chilling look at the pure injustice that occurs in today’s psychiatric facilities.” [capital­ization in original]

The author is a volunteer (pro bono) attorney for the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (psychrights.org) and may be reached at wayneramsay (at) mail (dot) com

DEE ESSEM WRITES: We thank attorney Ramsay and any others
involved in the legal arena who helped in the fights of those damaged
by psychiatry. It has to be known always that such tragedies occur
and how that profession is tarnished.