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
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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