Did you know?

Do you know that mentally ill children are tethered to the wall in Holland? About 40 children with learning/intellectual disabilities are tethered and allowed to be tethered by law. These children don't get any of the experiences another child might. They can't be hugged. They can run in the sunshine or ride a bike. They can't even walk across to the other side of a room.

Did you know that a mentally ill person can be incarcerated (hospitalised) having committed no serious crime without treatment for life in conditions which are worse than prisons in the UK? Loss of liberty is the worst punishment and there's a huge, expensive judicial system to make sure the innocent aren't punished yet a psychiatric patient a psych considers at risk of harming someone else (but hasn't harmed anyone) can be incarcerated for life without treatment thanks to the revision to the law in 2007. The law was changed to allow psychopathy to be defined as a mental disorder even though psychiatry historically didn't consider it a mental illness. The law also dropped the treatability test so no treatment was required. A person could be punished the same way as a murder could but they'd never committed any other crime than being mentally ill.

Did you know they may not really be illness and it's really a form of socio-political control and judgements based on cultural/social norms dressed as something which doctors treat? Black men are significantly overdiagnosed with schizophrenia in the US and the UK but this doesn't happen in the West Indies. Homosexuality was obviously a mental illness, or at least that's what people thought in the 20th century. Drapteomania was obviously a mental illness (though, admittedly never codified in the reference diagnostic criteria like homosexuality was) going further back in time because to those people a black slave who kept on running away was clearly insane... In Sweden the language is precise and they don't use the term mental illness. They use the term mental disorder. The reason is because there's not sufficient evidence to prove the behaviours, emotions and experiences of consciousness are genuine medical illness. Like homosexuality, the paradigm of illness can be applied and evidence interpreted to say that behaviour is an illness however pretty much anything could be like that. I've offered two examples of illnesses which changed because psychiatrists stopped judging that group as deviant from normal. Gender Identity Disorder is another interesting example. Though there's evidence of brain differences the treatment is not to alter the corpus callosum (the bit which connects the two hemispheres of the brain). It is not to 'treat' the person to tell them that they are their biological gender. It's to offer them counselling for the distress or change their body (if they can afford it or the healthcare system will pay for it. Some companies like KPMG have paid for people to have gender reassignment treatment). Grief can present with the same symptoms as depression but is excluded from depression - are doctors allowing people to be ill ontop of all the suffering which comes with bereavement or is psychiatry doing the job of religion and placing rules on things like death and grief by saying that 6 months of being miserable is ok because it's death whereas 2 weeks  of being miserable is culturally unacceptable and this state should be removed?

Do you know that ECT, according to the latest high quality review, doesn't work on followup? It was introduced with no evidence and the British Journal of Psychiatry considered this a good thing. People have died because of this treatment. Many others have had other mental and physical problem because of this treatment. It can still be used without a person's consent but consent is irrelevant - the treatment works as well as ECT without the patient being electrocuted on long term follow up and has minimal benefits during treatment (sham-ECT is the placebo control where the patient thinks they're being electrocuted to induce a seizure but no electricity is used). Ernest Hemingway was treated with ECT. After treatment he lost his ability to write. So he shot himself. He left this message to the world.
"Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient...."

A nurse is quoted on Wikipedia saying the following about ECT
"Shock 'therapy' totally and permanently disabled me. EEGs [electroencephalograms] verify the extensive damage shock did to my brain. Fifteen to 20 years of my life were simply erased; only small bits and pieces have returned. I was also left with short-term memory impairment and serious cognitive deficits. ... Shock 'therapy' took my past, my college education, my musical abilities, even the knowledge that my children were, in fact, my children. I call ECT a rape of the soul."

Did you know 1,800 old people a year died in the UK every year when doctors used antipsychotics to 'treat' dementia? They don't treat dementia. They were used as a chemical straitjacket. The medical profession got away with it by basically going doh!

Did you know that the Royal College of Psychiatry's motto translates as "Let wisdom guide" but after the points above can they really be allowed to use that motto?