Did I just do the most amazing job application?

Something just hit me. I don't remember filling in my education
details for a job application I just did. That's fucking brilliant! In
education the symptoms of mental ill health can mean for lower grades or
a lack of education. It doesn't mean the person is not capable. I went
to one of the top 5 schools in the UK and when I started there was a guy
there who didn't fit in. He was from a very poor background and had an
assisted place. He must have been exceptionally intelligent to get
through the 11-plus entrance exams with his poor background and low
socio-economic status.

He didn't last long. He just stopped coming to school. It's not
surprising. He didn't fit in. I was one of the few people who was
friendly with him. Through a scary coincidence I met him again several
years later when I ended up in a children's home in Harlesden.

His lack of education meant his raw talent was never used. He'd always
have the barrier of having no GCSEs let alone any other qualifications.
It would be a barrier to basic jobs yet he had the intelligence and
capability to get into one of the hardest secondary schools to get into
in the country. I applied to many private schools and even got a
scholarship interview at another prestigious school but the one I ended
up in had the hardest exams by far. Some people who went to that school
would have left university and got jobs paying £40,000 a year and by now
are on six and even seven figure salaries (I know at least 1). My cousin
went to the same school and was headhunted by Arthur Anderson while
studying medicine at Oxford university. They offered her £70,000 a year
but she continued to a medical career.

An education is important of course but it's not the only thing and for
many people who have suffered from mental health problems it means they
can't flourish (to borrow Dr. Jo Nurse's term for the
reconceptualisation of mental health as getting the maximum potential of
the individual and for society) as they should once they've recovered.

Education is such a barrier in employment. Many places need jobs need
specific degrees and it won't be long before a Masters will become a
minimum requirement. This will extend the level of social disability.
Removing the barrier of education as a pre-requisite may advantage many
people who have potential but because of problems with their behaviour
or mental health problems they never got the grades they could have.

Should an employer make an employee take antidepressants?

I worked in a call centre while I was pretty depressed. Some days I'd
be crying for no reason on the way to work but I went in and did my job.
On those days I may not have been the best employee. British Telecom may
not have wanted their customers to deal with a person who was flat
toned, hesitant and sparse with their words.

The customer service training told us statistics like 50% of people can
tell when you're smiling on the phone. They wanted us to be happy,
bouncy and cheery to their customers and when I was not depressed I was
one of their best employees and got promoted quickly. I could turn
around the worst complaints and the most difficult customers while still
remaining polite and cordial. My calls would be tapped and one of them
was used for nationwide training because it was an example of good
customer service.

In fact I tried St Johns Wort at the time and it was good. But I wonder
if an employer would have wanted me to take SJW. I can imagine in other
call centre environments the need for a positive tone and a cheery
attitude could be fulfilled by putting SJW in the tea. It's just a herb
after all.

There are other medications that can be useful in employment. Monafodil
is a treatment for sleep problems (narcolepsy?) that when given to
normal people can make them more intelligent - or so the rumours go; I'm
unaware of the evidence. If this were true organisations like Goldmans
Sachs who spend literally thousands and tens of thousands per person on
recruiting the smartest people in the world would want it in the water
supply (or champagne supply). Gingko may be a herbal alternative though
the evidence base for it's effect on cognition shows it is ineffective
(my personal experience tells me otherwise).

The practical reality is that a depressed employee is more likely to get
disciplinaries or fired. If they don't have periods out of depression or
hypomanic stages they'll be less likely to be considered for promotion.
They may not fit into the various cliques and political office games.
They may be outshined by people with less ability but who are happier.

Leaving the decision up to them means they are more disabled and
disadvantaged. This is the fundamental problem with the anti-medication
and anti-psychiatry movement (though psychiatry and medication may have
limited positive effect on these outcomes anyway). The problematicness
that leads to worse occupational and social outcomes can, apparently, be
treated in some people using biological means in the same way people
self-medicate.

There are other options though. Working the call centre helped me
develop my mask. I can switch into a mode where I sound happy. Over the
years it's developed so I can look happy too, and when I'm drunk it's so
easy. It's hard to tell when I'm masking and when I'm genuinely ok. I
hope so anyway. The same goes for the Goldman Sachs employees. A friend
of mine who worked there learned memory techniques and tried the
Emotional Freedom Technique to lift his spirits.

These options take a longer term view though. Many employers are driven
by automoton-management principles (I want a robot, not a human being).
They want quick solutions to meet their targets. They want constant
performance. They want something easy to manage but they often forget
that it's not a thing. It's a someone they're dealing with.

This is where society change is vital. There are many options to rectify
the problematicness that creates the prognosis. Changing people to
accept people as different and unique is the next step in mental
healthcare and organisational theory, in my opinion.

Animal rights vs psychiatric rights

I just skimmed the headings of the Welfare Act. It gives rights to
animals whereas the Mental Health Act takes away rights from people who
have a mental disorder and gives them no rights or protections
(admittedly the 2007 amendments made small changes to rights but in
practice the rights can be overridden and in my personal experience the
NHS doesn't care about the law).

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/45/contents

The problem is the public assume psychiatric patients are animals.
They've never met one though. They don't know just how normal we are.
They may be different. They may be weird. They may even be ugly. But
they're as normal as us. And the same fucking species.

Human rights and incarceration of psychiatric patients

Psychiatric patients aren't hospitalised for committing a crime.
They're there if they are a risk to themselves or others.

Prisoners have committed a crime. They are detained as punishment.

These are two totally different reasons for the removal of liberty. But
what of the experience?

I've only been in a jail cell less than a handful of times and never
more than an overnight stay but I've been sectioned twice in two
different hospitals (one in Nottingham and one in London).

Detention of liberty is punishment. Lack of freedom to live life is the
greatest punishment before physical torture. The conditions are poor.
There is no option for consumption nor much social contact with
established social networks which is how most people get their
happiness. There may be limited opportunities to have fun. Some people
may spend long periods incarcerated or even their whole lives.

I wrote that last paragraph to be a description of what I imagine prison
life to be like. As I re-read it it sounds like psychiatric ward life.
Prison of course must be unimagineably worse but it is meant to be
punishment (which I disagree with but that's a whole other thing). A
psychiatric ward is healthcare.

The basic right of consumption - to chose what you eat and buy - is
often not afforded to patients under section. The lucky ones can
negotiate section 17 leave so they can walk down to the local shops.
Many others can't and in practice getting section 17 leave can be hard.
Consumption is a basic right taken away from prisoners but also from
psychiatric patients as is access to the funds to buy things. They don't
have the right to sunlight or fresh air or to walk in green space. Their
rights of privacy are minimal. They don't have the right to chose
medication. The experience of hospitalisation is often traumatic and
torturous. In practice treatment by nursing staff can be inhumane and
what I'd expected of prison guards, especially since they can use
'treatments' like acute tranquilisation that wouldn't be considered
humane for use on prisoners.

It fascinates me that there's a debate about animal rights (and a
salient one) but there still isn't the debate about the human rights of
those considered of unsound mind and put under section. The power of the
animal rights lobby may be such that in ten years we'll see chimpanzees
with more rights than patients in NHS wards.

There are many obvious problems with psychiatric wards as healthcare
facilities and many organisations and individuals have pointed this out
more clearly than I but there is this fundamental issue of rights. The
human rights of patients and prisoners are the same but there should be
legislation to ensure that hospitalisation doesn't violate human rights
in the same way a prison sentence does. Without this law patients are
treated as badly as prisoners, confined like prisoners and have the same
exclusions on their normal lives as prisoners but have committed no crime.

Is psychiatry fundamentally against diversity?

The human race is very diverse at a genetic level. It is even more
diverse in the different types of people that live on this Earth,
created by environmental factors such as upbringing. This is, in my
opinion, the richness of the human race: its diversity.

There is a theory of genotypes and phenotypes which I'm getting my head
around. People are born of a certain genetic type (which is akin to a
predisposition but is best considered as a type because the schizotaxia
type can predispose to many things) and they become what they are
through their life experiences.

Some people of the schizotaxia type may end up as artists or scientists,
others may end up with schizophrenia or bipolar. Psychiatrists mark the
dividing line and they fear the creation of severely mentally ill
people. At the moment there is little they can do but there are moves to
change this such as the introduction of pre-pathological syndrome
diagnoses in the new US diagnostic criteria (and the World Health
Organisation will eventually follow).

These are all measures which reduced the diversity of the human race. A
large element of what mental illnesses are is a form of control of
"social ugliness"
(http://imaginendless.blogspot.com/2010/04/social-ugliness-or-mental-illness.html).
There are certain phenotypes that are undesireable. They become more
excluded and impoverished as civilisation 'advanced' which is how
psychiatry came about. They are still part of the human race however
they are not afforded the same rights as acceptable phenotypes,
phenotypes which may share the same genotypes as the unacceptable
phenotypes. Psychiatry takes away the expression of the phenotype. It
removes the behaviours and emotions from these poor souls.

Another way to explain this is to consider a depressed person. A
depressed person is part of the human race and their phenotype has been
around since civilisation began. A depressed person should be allowed to
be unhappy if they want to be (I know, this is where i get
dis-compassionate and am also avoiding considerations of mental
capacity) because they are part of the human race. They have as much of
a right to exist as they are as Eeyore the gloomy donkey in the Winnie
the Pooh stories. A psychiatrist would drug that donkey. In so doing
they would remove that type of donkey from the Winnie the Pooh stories.

Psychiatry is also fundamentally pathological: it looks for what is
wrong with a person rather than what is right or what the interplay is
between 'wrongness' and 'rightness'. This reduces the diversity of the
human race. I could ramble on longer on this but this quote from Ernest
Hemingway says what I'm trying to say better.

"
"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."
Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning author who killed himself after
complaining that psychiatric electric shocks had ruined his career by
destroying his memory.
"
http://www.sntp.net/ect/ect3.htm

Human rights? Not in mental health.

There are significant differences in treatment choices for people with
physical and mental illnesses. A person with a physical health problem
can refuse certain treatments whereas the Mental Health Act (even the
amended one) gives little option for some people. In fact it has a new
control outside the psychiatric hospital: Supervised Community
Treatment. This is essentially a form of psychiatric parole to ensure
people keep taking their medication. The threat is return to the
confines of the psychiatric ward.

The justifications for the SCT (or Community Treatment Order - the
language changes) is the risk of murder by someone off medication. Te
risk of suicide is irrelevant to the public compared to the risk of
homicide. It removes the right of choice from people in the community.
It has been significantly overused - by 1000% - and is disproportionally
used on Black people (and no one gives a fucking shit).

I believe people have the right to chose their treatment. I believe that
there is sufficient challenging evidence to support that idea that the
science of psychiatry is not medicine nor science. It is enough to make
the biomedical model a hypothesis rather than a fact. People should have
the right to chose their psychiatric journey - treatment as usual;
treatment with minimal medication; self-medication; no medication. They
should have access to talking rather than drugging. They should never
have treatments like ECT forced upon them.

The problem is the idea of an unsound mind. This is an exclusion from
the right of liberty in the Human Rights Act. It is clearly an exclusion
from choice in healthcare but I'd challenge that because many people can
make better choices about their treatment, and there is evidence to
suggest that the psychiatric paradigm may be producing worse results
however it is only through awareness of history that this can be seen
with clarity.

It will be in 50 or 100 years when organisations like Mind Freedom, the
survivor movement and mad pride will be recognised for being the only
groups that got it right when it came to ethics and mental healthcare,
however in the intervening years many people will suffer through
psychiatric abuse, many years will be lost in life expectancy and the
will be a huge loss to the richness of the human race because of the
lack of diversity.

Scientology

I've started a facebook conversation with a long standing
Scientologist. I may be on their radar now. I posted a link in the
Citizens Commission for Human Rights Facebook page which had the
information about the CCHR's connection to the Scientologists. I think
the CCHR is a great cause but people should know their associations. I
then commented in the fake Thomas Szasz page on Facebook and that's how
the communique began.

I've read up a bit about Scientology but know little of the core of the
quasi-religion. I agree with some of their principles though not with
the same vehemence. I disagree with their tactics, for example trying to
take over the membership of the National Association for Mental Health
(now Mind).

We're actually getting along quite well. He's trying to get me to read
Dianetics. I'm passing on information about Richard Bentall and Joanna
Moncrieff's work. I also sent a link to the Thud experiment, one of the
most accessible pieces of research showing mispathology in action.

What little I knew of Dianetics he's confirmed to me. It's a rebranded
form of an established psychotherapy but it has no evidence base. L Ron
Hubbard's papers were rejected by the American Psychiatric Association.
If there was an ecidence base it would show that it had limited effect
compared to the control treatments because most psychotherapies in high
quality reviews fail to be effective and the only one that seems to be
effective, cognitive behavioural therapy (the new religion....), is an
engineer's solution to psychotherapy: it's designed around the measures
so it measures well.

Still, I want to find out more. This is me exploring out of curiosity
but it may be playing with fire. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.