Something I just wrote to Avaaz.org to promote psychiatric rights

Some background. Avaaz are an amazing internal ecampaigns organisation. They can get a million signatures on some of their petitions.

They put one out recently which I signed and reposted. He is facing degrading treatment because he was a whistleblower.
http://www.avaaz.org/en/bradley_manning_1/?cl=1007676179&v=8809

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First of all thank you for all the great work you do. You help many causes and make the world a better place.

I'd like to highlight a campaign area you may not know about. It's a hard campaign area. It's the rights of the mentally ill. You've recently put out a petition against humiliating treatment which I signed and shared on my Facebook profile.

I usually share things about mental health. These are very small petitions. Hundreds and at best thousands of people sign these. They're petitions against forced treatment and degradation. One of these treatments is the forced electrocution of an individual to change their behaviour. The aim is to induce a seizure. Electro-convulsive therapy is used across the world. Many have died in the past. Many have it forced upon them. A recent review of evidence showed that after treatment sham ECT (where no electricity is used but the patient thinks they've been electrocuted) works as well as ECT and benefits are small during treatment.

Perhaps if I highlight a story the problem might be a little clearer? This is about children who are tethered to a wall. This is done legally.
http://www.helium.com/items/2074233-tethered-teenage-psychiatric-patient-shocks-netherlands

Perhaps if I told you that two or three hundred years ago waterboarding was used not on prisoners of war but on psychiatric patients you might get a sense of where I'm coming from. Doctors and nurses did it rather than prison wardens. There was no oversight because the assumption is doctors only do good things. Remember that up until 1992 the World Health Organisation considered homosexuality a mental illness and there have been some inhumane, unethical things done to people who were simply different because the WHO chose to consider their sexuality an illness.

There are cases of black activists incarcerated in psychiatric wards in the US in the 1970s and pathologised with schizophrenia because of their activism published in a recent book. The UK and the US overdiagnose black men with schizophrenia about 3 times more than white men; this doesn't happen in the West Indies. They use strong chemicals called major tranquilises to sedate them. When these were used on the elderly in the UK with dementia a Royal College of Psychiatry report stated that 1,800 old people were killed unnecessarily every year (this was in the last year and the government has revised their dementia strategy however the use of the antipsychotic drug on the elderly to sedate them still continues at lower levels).

Today in the UK a person can be punished with incaceration without justice. The changes to the UK's medico-legal framework (the Mental Health Act 1983 amended in 2007) allow a mentally ill person to be hospitalised without treatment (which is little different from imprisonment but the individual has fewer rights) based on the risk of homicide but having committed no serious crime. They can be incarcerated indefinitely without any judicial procedure. It is incarceration in a psychiatric ward rather than a prison however some prisons in the UK are better than some psychiatric wards. People who've been charged with no crime other than mental illness can be incarcerated in facilities worse than those where people who've been charged with a serious crime are punished. They have fewer protections too, for example there are far fewer human rights inspections. I am unaware if this loop hole in justice has been exploited yet.

You may be unaware of these injustices. Many people aren't. There are many other examples.

I've copied Mind Freedom International into this email. They're one of the few international organisations who stand against this oppression. They fight against the humiliating, degrading and often forced treatment which happens to people all around the world. They fight for psychiatric rights.

I just wanted to highlight these details to you in the hope that one day I see an Avaaz petition against the brutal treatment of the mentally ill.
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