* Long *:Fwd: Sociopolitical Realities
Morgan Brown (morganbrown@hotmail.com)
Fri, 09 Jan 1998 08:27:36 PST
Hello,
Below is a forward of a forwarded message that I thought may be
of interest to you or others you may know.
F.Y.I.: Personally and as a matter of record, I agree totally with
Sue. Excellent Sue!!!!!
Morgan W. Brown <morganbrown@hotmail.com>
Montpelier Vermont USA
Norsehorse's Home Turf: http://members.tripod.com/~Norsehorse/
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On: Fri, 9 Jan 1998
Tim Konza <chesm_usa@yahoo.com> forwarded
Subject: Fwd: Sociopolitical Realities
Via: World Mental Health Networker List
<world-mentalhealth-networker-list@peak.org>
Subscribe page for WMHNL:
http://www.designrus.com/aform2.htm
--------------Forwarded message-----------------
---Sue Poole <dpoole@awod.com> wrote:
Sociopolitical realities. They are there. They are not going away
unless numbers of people united in a cause build up community and
clout to end social injustice and institutional brutalities.
If you have a psychiatric label in this culture, you are considered
many things, none of them positive. You are inferior. You are
deficient in essential human qualities. You are dangerous. You are
unpredictable. You are ureliable. You are unable to perceive reality
accurately. You are stupid. You are incapable of achieving goals you
have set for yourself and must be
managed and observed. You are inarticulate. You are unable to express
your viewpoints or negotiate in the public political arena. You are
considered alien, strange, outcast, undesirable. You are a non-person.
You are fit only to collect disability and pay the government
insurance back into the system that ensures you remain that way.
Those are sociopolitical realities. Here are more. The mental health
system makes lots of money and enhances its own professional status by
exploiting your distress and differences. Its proponents enhance their
social status by destroying yours. The system uses force to project a
false image of dangerousness and criminality of the psychiatrically
labeled. This enables them to justify incarcerating you until your
insurance is gone. This enables them to surround your house with 30
police officers and throw tear gas at you and shoot at you with rubber
bullets, cut off your electricty and water,
throw hamburger wrappers and styrofoam cups in your driveway and then
handcuff you and drag you off for an expensive observation period, for
which dubious service the state considers you the payee.
The mental health system deliberately disempowers and impoverishes you
because that enables social workers to get you qualified for
disability so you can receive Medicare and Medicaid so the system can
get paid for
defining your reality and determining your future. By creating a
permanent underclass of undesirables, the system justifies its
expansion of both influence and turf. By keeping you emotionally
traumatized, physically stunned with damaging drugs and convinced
through propaganda that you are mentally ill, without sufficient
insight to identify your own needs and
manage your own affairs, the mental health system disables you for
its own ends. The system uses you. So-called advocacy agencies use
you. The madness
establishment manipulates and distorts information about you to ensure
that you can continue to be used for purposes of profit and elevated
social status for its professionals, who regard you with disdain and
contempt as genetically defective accidents of birth that must be
controlled, managed, confined, intimidated into acquiescence.
The mental health system disseminates propaganda claiming all
psychiatrically labeled persons have diseased brains. The mental
health system claims people with diseased brains should not be
stigmatized or shut
out of society. Then the mental health system proceeds to sequester
you, isolate you socially and abrogate your rights by denying you due
process in court proceedings through which probate attorneys profit
handsomely by not defending you or attempting to obtain your release.
The mental health system says stigma and discrimination are wrong. The
mental health system then
proceeds to confine you, projecting an image of criminality and
dangerousness, and justifies this injustice by declaring that you
might harm someone, although you have never in your life committed an
act of violence or threatened to do so.
Lawmakers are lobbied by drug companies, mental health departments and
family-oriented advocacy groups to make laws more and more repressive,
so that being confined and force-treated in your home is a real
possibility.
Drug companies and mental health departments profit by the passage of
more and more repressive laws. "Family oriented advocacy" agencies get
money from the mental health system to hire "normals" who help the
mental health system devise more and more humiliating and debilitating
policies so this mess can be perpetuated and "normal" advocates can be
paid for negotiating political deals that benefit the system, the
advocacy agencies, the drug companies...almost everyone but the
consumers who are merely objects for exploitation in this giant game
of fraud and deceit. You keep a lot of
judges in business, too. Of course, laws mandating that you can be
confined, observed, drugged and spied upon in your own domicile are
based on the assumption that you have a home after several years of
neuroleptics, a lot of debilitating polypharmacy, several career
losses because of unnecessary confinements and years of clinicians'
assaults on your identity as a full
human being with needs, hopes, dreams, goals and talents to offer
society.
Lawmakers believe what the drug companies, mental health professionals
and advocacy groups tell them because once you have been locked away,
your word
is no longer valid in the dominant culture. Nothing you say, think or
report has credibility from that point on. You are a nonperson in the
eyes of the law and society after being involuntarily incarcerated.
The mental health system calls this help. The government calls this
"protecting the public."
>From YOU.
Lawmakers do not solicit your viewpoint for all the preceding reasons.
And also because, even though you still retain the right to vote, you
do not belong to a national organization like NAMI or the Mental Health
Association, an organization with clout and numbers and money to
contribute to campaign funds and drug research and human
experimentation and medical
school propaganda about how your brain is diseased and must be "fixed"
with disabling drugs and police force.
You have not banded together with other oppressed persons in
sufficient numbers to make an impact on election outcomes. You can't
stuff anyone's
campaign coffers. You can't fund any research. You can't volunteer
your children for a twin study organized by E. Fuller Torrey. Why
should anyone
care what you think or need as long as the system profits, the drug
companies thrive, the propaganda machine keeps pumping out deliberate
lies, the insurance companies keep paying for unwarranted confinements
and abusive "treatments" and biopsychiatry perpetuates the notion that
your brain is defective and diseased? Meaning that YOU, by extension,
are defective and diseased and, therefore, worthless to fulfill any
function but that of cash cow for the exploiters.
You may be happy with these sociopolitical realities. You may not be
happy with them. It really doesn't matter, because you are mentally
ill. All you are is a cash cow for a system that would collapse if it
actually made strides toward helping you achieve self-determination
and social
acceptability.
Just thought I'd throw in a reality check, for what it may be worth.
Sue
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have had to learn the simplest things last, which made for
difficulties. -
Charles Olson from "The Maximus Poems"
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>
>
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