Survivor mental health

Dear Elsie, Caroline and the rest

I experience severe psychosocial disability. The system does not work. It is abuse and a failure.

I'm a psychiatric survivor. I perceive forced psychiatric treatment is torture and this is a position the United Nations acknowledge. The Convention for the rights of people with disabilities grants equal rights and therefore eschews all forced treatment.

I reject the biomedical fallacy. Mind Freedom International, the European Network for Users and Survivors of Psychiatry and the World Network for Users and Survivors of Psychiatry acknowledge this and are made up of members and organisations who consider their forced treatment is torture and abuse. At least one study shows the PTSD effect of forced hospitalisation - for obvious reasons this sort of research is poorly funded.

Forced treatment is what creators we survivors of psychiatric abuse - this is the defining attribute of those of the us who define ourselves as survivors. It is a tyrannical system with prejudice at the core, not true medical illness.

There are those who aren't in touch with the survivor movement but reject the nefarious coercion of the mental health system. These unacknowledged survivors and those like myself have had bad experiences, experiences which force us to avoid mental healthcare - sort of like what homosexuals faced in the mid-20th century in the UK (in fact it was the early nineties that the UK demedicalised homosexuality because that's when ICD was updated to remove it. Interestingly perhaps, the diagnosis of ego dystonic homosexuality now medicalises people who should be gay.)

Avoiding mental healthcare protects us from further abuse and the suffering it causes. The cutting edge of the international disability rights movement is fighting against the trauma of forced treatment. It is as unjust now as it was a hundred years ago when single mothers were treated as mentally I'll and forcibly incarcerated.

But what can help us reduce our disability? Who can we turn to for our needs and remain safe from harm? The system is designed around those who accept contact with mental health services but if they represent abuse then there can be no contact.

Survivors are unique to psychosocial disability. We're the victims of injustice and harm. We should not have to face those who harmed and tortured us through forced treatment and other coercive methods, eg restraint. The UN Rapporteur on Torture has declared forced treatment of psychosocial disability is torture - something we survivors have know for a long time.

I don't expect you to agree with us and our experience of mental healthcare. I feel you need to acknowledge it exists. We have suffered because of the forced treatment which the biomedical model justifies but modern disability concepts do not. Foucault addresses the fallacy in his seminal work Madness and civilisation and other authors have made the same point.

What is real is not a disease. What's real is the prognosis - of which there's substantial evidence - which partially describes psychosocial disability. Survivors still need help. Just not more abuse.

Unfortunately, no one in public mental health policy is aware we survivors exist. They might recognise the evidence that there are people with psychosocial disabilities who don't stay in contact with mental health services and this set has even worse outcomes. They don't really understand it though because they don't understand what a survivor is. They don't appreciate the negative consequences - the abuse and torture - of forced treatment.

It is a wholly normal reaction to reject further harm from a system which has already harmed...but rejecting contact with NHS mental health teams leaves the individual totally unsupported.

This problem needs to be acknowledged before it can be resolved at local and national level. How can those who are forced to stay away from the mental health system to protect their liberty be served by the independent sector?

Regards

Arj Subanandan

- sent from a tablet