Toronto, November 3 - Survivors say 'NO' to CTO's!*
Graeme Bacque (gbacque@idirect.com)
Thu, 04 Nov 1999 23:38:02 -0500
Over a hundred Psychiatric Survivors and other human rights advocates
yesterday braved an icy west wind outside Ontario's legislature to protest
the Harris government's stated intention to vastly increase the power and
scope of the Mental Health Act.
*CTOs (Community Treatment Orders, also known as outpatient committal or
'leash laws') are a legal mechanism that can compel discharged psychiatric
inmates to comply with prescribed treatments and medical appointments while
living in the community, with the constant threat of re-incarceration in a
psychiatric facility being wielded as a means of enforcement. Forty U.S.
states currently have such laws on the books, as do the Canadian provinces
of Saskatchewan and British Colombia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and parts
of Australia. The United Kingdom is currently considering such legislation.
Speaker after speaker (Including supporters from the Toronto Disaster
Relief Committee, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, New Democrat MPPs
Marilyn Churley and Peter Kormos, and many members of the Survivor
community) made the links between the proposed CTO bill and the systematic
process of social cleansing the Province and municipalities are currently
engaging in.
Legislation which would essentially outlaw panhandling or squeegeeing was
introduced on Tuesday this week, and bills are in the works that will
compel welfare recipients suspected of substance use to submit to testing
and compulsory 'treatment' (seems this government has a real set of double
standards when it comes to drugs!) and see every person resident in Ontario
being issued with electronic 'smart' ID cards that would allow authorities
access to most of the intimate details of our lives with a single swipe
through a reader (this info could well include medical/psychiatric records).
The planned changes to the Mental Health Act represent just one more aspect
of this effort to drive unwanted (Read: poor) people from the public view,
and will likely also serve as the legal glue that will bind many of these
other proposals together into a terrifyingly cohesive whole. It is a
product of systematic demonizing of targeted groups (in this instance
psychiatrically labeled persons) in the mainstream media, along with
lobbying efforts from powerful interests like the Schizophrenia Society of
Ontario, the Coalition of Ontario Psychiatrists and pharmaceutical
corporate giants Eli Lilly.
Similar protests have occurred recently outside the State Legislature in
Albany, New York (the most recent jurisdiction to pass a CTO bill) and at
the Treatment Advocacy Center headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. (TAC is
an offshoot of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, established for
the specific purpose of lobbying for changes to mental health laws in order
to facilitate forced 'treatment'), mainly under the umbrella of Support
Coalition International (based in Eugene, Oregon). SCI's website is
<http://www.MindFreedom.org>.
The Toronto protest was organized by the No Force! Coalition - a grassroots
body of nearly two dozen survivor organizations and local agencies working
with survivors and the homeless that came together in January this year to
fight against proposed changes to Ontario's Mental Health Act.
Pics of Wednesday's protest are available online at
<http://www.tao.ca/~pact/NoToCTOs.html>.
--
Graeme
<http://webhome.idirect.com/~gbacque/gbacque.html>
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"Your anger is a gift." -- Rage Against The Machine