Of concern to all,
and in particular to sufferers of
ME/ICD-CFS, MCS, GWS and FM:
WHAT IS IT ABOUT
PSYCHIATRY?
Gurli Bagnall
[Psychiatry] is a field where fads and fancies flourish. Hardly a
year passes without some new claim [But] The early promises of each
of these discoveries are uniformly unfulfilled.”
(US) Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Mental Health, 1961
___________________________
New Zealand is a small country with a small population; too small,
one might imagine, for authorities to get away with questionable or
criminal activities for very long. But even here, now and then, the
stench of corruption seeps out from the dankness in which it hid.
The Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital scandal which took place in the
1970s , is but one example.
“Tales of terror and torture of children at Lake Alice mental
hospital emerged from a Dominion newspaper inquiry and in a TV3
20/20 documentary more than 6 months ago…” (The
National Business Review, 18 December, 1998.)
“Dr. Leeks in 1977 told a newspaper: ‘Some of these children do
not need to be in a hospital, but apart from the child unit, there
has been nowhere for them’.” (The
Age. March 13, 1999) “[Psychiatrist, Dr. Leeks] established the 46 bed child and
adolescent unit at Lake Alice Hospital in 1972, but left in the late
1970s after two inquiries into his use of ECT.” (Sunday
Star-Times 27 August, 2000) “[New Zealand High Court judge Sir Rodney Gallen] said:
“Statement after statement indicates that the children concerned
lived in a state of terror during the period they spent at Lake
Alice. All were in need of understanding, love and compassionate
care. That is not what they received at Lake Alice…’ Last week, the
20/20 television program in New Zealand showed Dr. Leeks tell a
former Lake Alice resident with a hidden camera that the electric
shocks were a ‘form of aversion therapy’. When the children
administered shocks to another child it was a ‘behavioral therapy
thing.’…Sir Rodney described paraldehyde as a particularly
unpleasant and extremely painful injection that was used to punish
children…it seems to have been administered on quite a capricious
basis….Sir Rodney said that perhaps the most appalling story
involved a 15-year-old boy who claimed he was locked in a wooden
cage with a seriously deranged adult…for a considerable period, he
crouches in the corner being pawed by the particular inmate,
screaming to be released and unable to get out or to get
away…Claimant after claimant indicated that on one day in the week
children were gathered together in the day room where they sat
waiting for those to be selected to who ECT would be applied. Both
boys and girls spoke of young children lying in a foetal position on
the floor in attempt to avoid being taken …and of children who, in
tears and through sheer fear, had lost control of their bodily
functions before any application had taken place…Complaints were
made to police, welfare officers and probation officers, but they
were not believed. ‘There was literally no way out for them,’ Sir
Rodney said.” (The
Age, 14 October, 2001)
“Normally the smoke doors were kept closed…but when Dr. Leeks
performed the ECT sessions the doors were left open. This was so
the boys downstairs could hear the screaming and muffled cries of
pain from the boy being tortured upstairs. ‘We were all terrified…’
The staff used that fear. ‘The words they used for it were to ride
the thunderbolt, the national grid, and the zappidy
zap.’…Paraldehyde is a psychiatric drug used to subdue
out-of-control patients. It hurts as it is administered, leaving a
feeling like hot, burning acid. It has a foul smell and leaves a
sickening taste in the mouth for days. Sometimes staff would
‘harpoon’ the boys, throwing the syringes at their naked buttocks
from across the room. Sexual abuse was also common….Some staff
threatened the raped residents would get the thunderbolt if they
complained.” (The Manawatu Standard, 6 March, 2004)
“The Government recently paid $6.5 million to the lawyer
representing 95 former patients of the Child and Adolescent Unit of
Lake Alice Hospital between 1972 and 1977….The settlement group
filed legal action against the Crown because of their treatment at
the Unit during that time. The unit closed in 1978.” (Ministry
of Health - media release, Hon Annette King, 9 May 2002.)
That these events occurred is no longer denied, yet Dr. Leeks
continues to practice in Australia. He has the protection of the
authorities and his profession. There is no protection for his
past, present and future victims. In his book “Mad in America” Robert Whitaker highlights that abuse
of this nature is far from rare: “…electroshock was also used to
frighten, control, and punish patients….One physician told of using
it to give women a ‘mental spanking’…. Superintendent T.G. Peacock
informed his attendants: ‘I want to make it clear that it is
hospital policy to use shock treatment to insure good citizenship’” Not
only did Peacock show his contempt for women but, typical of many in
his profession, he considered his self-appointed roles as judge,
jury and executioner, of greater importance than the Hippocratic
Oath.
What is it about medicine that affords most perpetrators of heinous
acts official protection from criminal prosecution? Why is it that
when cases are reported in the media, society in general is only
momentarily appalled?
What is it about psychiatry that attracts people like Dr. Abraham
Myerson, of Boston who, in the 1940s expressed the opinion that: “…it
may be true that these people have for the time being at any rate
more intelligence than they can handle and that the reduction of
intelligence is an important factor in the curative process.…The
fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those
individuals whom one reduces to about amentia [simple mindedness].” One
might believe that sixty years later no one could get away with
destroying the brain of another human being; sadly, that is not
true. And even today, the patient is still expected to doff his
cap, adopt a “simple-minded” demeanour to avoid ruffling the ego of
the “expert”, and to accept without complaint, the misdiagnoses and
inappropriate treatments that will destroy his life. The expert
patient is no more welcome now than he was in Myerson’s day.
“Whatever was done to make this person more manageable would be
simply called treatment. And then it would all get defined within
the medical framework. And the sad reality is that many of these
so-called treatments were in essence torture…” (“Reign
of Terror”, Les Coleman, psychiatrist and author.) As we have seen,
at Lake Alice, the “treatments” ECT and paraldehyde, were used as
instruments of torture.
Highlighted by the New York Times of 24 June, 2005, medical
involvement in torture is not applied exclusively to innocent
citizens. “Military
doctors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in
conducting and refining coercive interrogation of detainees,
including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and
exploit fears, according to new detailed accounts given by former
interrogators...[It was] suggested that the doctors advising
interrogators were not covered by ethics strictures because they
were not treating patients but rather were acting as behavioural
scientists… ‘Their purpose was to help us break them,’ one former
interrogator told The Times earlier this year….”
As an excuse for the sadistic behaviour of medical personnel, it
is not convincing. In the same article, Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a
psychiatrist and former Army brigadier general in the medical corps, agreed. “[He] said in an interview that ‘this behavior is not consistent
with our medical responsibility or any of the codes that guide our
conduct as doctors.’”
In the United States, the emerging stories of distressed families
trying to deal with the abuse of their children by the authorities
in collusion with the drug industry and the mental health system,
are gathering momentum. Hardly a day goes by without one or more
media reports of once normal children who have died, gone on
destructive rampages or become mentally and physically ill due to
the adverse effects of toxic psychotropic drugs.
The Food and Drug Administrations has finally conceded that drugs
prescribed for ADHD, a dubious condition with no scientific proof
of its existence, have serious side effects. “A briefing
document…says that the review was prompted by reports of
hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, psychotic behavior and aggression
among methylphenidate users. …The FDA also has received reports of
cardiovascular problems among Concerta users, such as high blood
pressure, arrhythmia and racing hearbeats.” (USA
Today 29/06/05) Anyone would think these were new discoveries!
Members of the public have been giving the authorities the same
information for years.
In the interests of profits, being human, and especially a young
human, has become a mental disorder. Vera Hassner Sharav of the
Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP) quoted Dr. Paul
McHugh, former chairman of psychiatry at John Hopkins University: “‘Fifty
percent of Americans mentally impaired - are you kidding me?...The
problem is that the diagnostic manual we are using in psychiatry is
like a field guide and it just keeps expanding and expanding…Pretty
soon,’ he said, ‘we’ll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys
with a Boston accent, and I’ll be mentally ill.’” http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/05/06/07.php
Dr.
Milton, who assisted in the revision of the Diagnostic Statistical
Manual on Mental Disorders tells the story of how the term
‘borderline’ personality disorder arose. It was a term devised in
the 1970s to describe a person who fell somewhere between neurotic
and psychotic…Some doctors in the room hated the term; others liked
it; several said it was meaningless. But after hours of debate,
reversals of opinion and bruised egos, the diagnosis was born…” (“Who’s
mentally ill? Deciding is often all in the mind” Benedict Carey,
New York Times June 12, 2005)
Science in psychiatry does not involve test tubes and Bunsen
burners. There are no microscopes or pipettes “When
people come to me and they say, ‘I have a biochemical imbalance,’ I
say, ‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So what’s
the biochemical imbalance?” (“In
the Name of Mental Health” Ron Leifer, M.D. and author.)
“Science” in psychiatry revolves around opinions, arguments and an
unlimited supply of egos.
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Question: What has any of this to do with ME, MCS, GWS and FM?
Answer: Everything.
On the 6th July, 2005, I learnt of yet another death of an ME
sufferer - a young man of twenty-four who was taken in his sleep
before he even had a chance to experience life. My feeling of
sadness was followed by a sense of despair at the thought that his
death may very likely have been the result of the typical
misdiagnosis and medical neglect to which ME sufferers are coldly
and deliberately subjected. It brought to mind Christine Hunter’s
recent piece outlining medical abuse of children suffering ME.
What is it was about the medical profession and psychiatry in
particular, that attracts the sort of person who will put a
seriously ill child into a swimming pool and stand watching as he
drowns. The ‘expert’ who ‘knew best’, who would brook no argument,
and who insisted the child’s weakness would disappear once he ran
out of breath, was wrong. Had the boy’s fully clothed mother not
jumped in to save him, he would have drowned.
What attributes make up the personality of a person who forces a
child suffering ME to perform activities beyond her physical
capacity? Does he feel a sense of achievement when the child
collapses on the floor? Does he experience a surge of power as he
leaves her to lie there, to be walked over and around and even
dragged out of the way by her hair? Did he tear the wings off
butterflies and the legs from frogs when he was a child? Does
torture of the weak and vulnerable provide the job satisfaction such
a person craves?
The above events are barely the tip of the iceberg; they represent what psychiatry has in store for those who suffer ME, MCS, GWS and FM.
Not only must we bear and deal with a devastating disease, we must also somehow find the strength to resist those who would inflict, at best, unnecessary suffering, and at worst, a nightmare of medically induced madness.
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I wish to express my thanks to those in the profession who have not
lost their humanity; who treat their patients with dignity and
kindness, and who are cautious about endangering them further by
inappropriate treatments and indiscriminate prescribing habits.
Gurli Bagnall
12 July, 2005
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