Wolfdeck's journal

A Chronology of the Growing Violence Against the Homeless
http://www.tdrc.net/Crowe-Newsletter_jun_06.htm

1999 - the province of Ontario introduces the Safe Streets Act, essentially criminalizing homeless and poor people who might be sleeping outside or panhandling for additional survival income. The law is currently being appealed by lawyer Peter Rosenthal on behalf of complainants, via the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Mary Birdsell a lawyer with Justice for Children.

PSYCHIATRY\'S HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

1. NO INFORMED CONSENT

The right to voluntary informed consent is enshrined in virtually all mental health laws, it\'s a key principle of medical ethics. This right means that when prescribing any treatment or procedure, the physician must, a., not use any pressure, threat or coercion to obtain consent; b., tell you the nature of your condition or illness; c., inform you of the immediate risks and other common risks of the treatment (\"side effects\"); d., inform you of alternatives to the treatment; and e., inform you of your right to refuse. Psychiatrists frequently violate this right - especially when prescribing psychiatric drugs (\"medication\") and electroshock (\"ECT\").

2. FORCED DRUGGING

Psychiatrists frequently administer brain-disabling antidepressants and neuroleptics and addictive tranquilizers (\"medication\") without informed consent of their patients. This is unlawful. Under the Criminal Code of Canada, \"unwanted touching\" is an assault. Forced drugging is assault. Many psychiatric survivors have been traumatized and disabled (sometimes permanently) by forced drugging (e.g.
injections). Many more women than men are drugged; women diagnosed as depressed, \"bipolar\" or suffering \"postpartum depression\" are the main targets of this psychiatric assault.

3. ELECTROSHOCK ( \"electroconvulsive therapy\"/ECT\")

As one of the most disabling and inhumane procedures in psychiatry, electroshock is increasingly used in several countries including Canada, United States, and the UK. ECT\'s immediate effects include seizure, convulsion, coma, severe headache, disorientation, nausea, and physical weakness. Its long-term effects include permanent memory loss, learning and reading disabilities, impaired concentration, and brain damage. \"ECT\" consent forms are a sham, since patients are misinformed or not informed of most of these serious health risks. Women and the elderly, especially elderly women, are the main targets. Anti-shock campaigns advocating abolition are growing in the United States (Texas, California), the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. \"ECT\" should be banned

4. INVOLUNTARY COMMITTAL IS PREVENTIVE DETENTION

Involuntary committal is the psychiatric imprisonment of people labeled and believed to be \"mentally ill\", dangerous to themselves or others, and/or \"incapable\". Locking up citizens on the belief or opinion they might commit a violent act or criminal offence - without being charged and denied a trial - is preventive detention, which is prohibited in international law. Many involuntary patients are poor or homeless, with little or no community support. Although involuntary committal violates several rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (sections 7, 9,15), it is legal in all provinces, all states in the United States and many European countries.

5. COMMUNITY TREATMENT ORDERS/OUTPATIENT FORCED DRUGGING

Under these \"leash laws\", psychiatrists have the power to force psychiatric patients to be treated in the community - the treatment is usually powerful, brain-damaging antidepressants and/or neuroleptics. If patients refuse to obey community treatment orders (CTOs) or \"take their meds\" (sometimes ordered by judges in the United States), they can be locked up again for longer periods or indefinitely. These psychiatric orders are enforced by community treatment teams of mental health professionals. In Ontario, patient appeals are rarely successful; CTOs may soon be challenged as Charter violations.

6. CHILD ABUSE

Child psychiatrists frequently prescribe health-threatening antidepressants and neuroleptics to young children (some as young as 2 or 3 years old) as a treatment for \"behavior disorder\" or \"mental illness\". Some researchers have used children as guinea pigs in hi-risk drug experiments. In Canada and the United States, hundreds of thousands of children have been fraudulently diagnosed with the label attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and prescribed highly addictive stimulants like Ritalin. The United States government\'s national \"teen screening\" program targets and tests youth suspected of being \"mentally ill\". A similar program is recommended in the current mental health report of the Canadian Senate (\"Out of the Shadows - Highlights and Recommendations\", 2006, p.19)

7. TORTURE: PHYSICAL RESTRAINTS/\"SECLUSION\"

Adults and children labeled \"non-compliant\" or \"unmanageable\" are frequently subjected to 2-point, 4-point and sometimes 5-point restraints ordered by psychiatrists. Hundreds of patients have been seriously traumatized or died while restrained (see \"Deadly Restraint\" series in The Hartford Courant). Many have also languished in \"seclusion\", a form of solitary confinement. \"Seclusion rooms\" exist on virtually all psychiatric wards and hospitals. Patients experience restraints and seclusion as cruel and degrading punishment or torture. Physically and chemically restraining children is child abuse - a serious violation of the UN Convention Against Torture and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In April 2005, the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA), sponsored four days of public hearings on the effects of psychiatric drugs and electroshock. Approximately 40 psychiatric survivors courageously testified about many of these rights abuses and violations they personally experienced. (see \"Inquiry Into Psychiatry\": - http://capa.oise.utoronto.ca).
We demand that governments immediately call public hearings into these psychiatric abuses - human rights violations the American Psychiatric Association and Canadian Psychiatric Association minimize or deny - in the name of \"mental health\".

Prepared by the OCAP Accessibility Committee Toronto, May 20, 2006
Endorsed by the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA), MindFreedom International, Psychiatric Survivors and Allies

The following is a chronology of warnings that have occurred since 2004.

2004
February 2: FDA official Dr. Andrew D. Mosholder was prevented from testifying before the FDA’s Psychopharmacological Advisory Committee on the Office of Drug Safety Data Resources for the Study of Suicidal Events. The Mosholder report was not released until April 16, 2004. It warned that children being prescribed the newer antidepressants were at risk of suicide. Vera Sharav (www.ahrp.org/) was involved in creating an environment enabling the Mosholder report to be released to the public.

March 22: The FDA warned that Prozac-like antidepressants (called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRIs) could cause \"anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia [severe restlessness], hypomania [abnormal excitement] and mania [psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur].\"

June: The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration published an Adverse Drug Reactions Bulletin reporting that the latest antipsychotics could increase the risk of diabetes.

June: The FDA ordered that the packaging for the stimulant Adderall include a warning about sudden cardiovascular deaths, especially in children with underlying heart disease.

August 20: A Columbia University review of the pediatric (child) clinical trials of Zoloft, Celexa, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Paxil and Prozac, found that young people who took them could experience suicidal thoughts or actions.

September 21: Following a BBC news report on antidepressants causing aggression and homicidal behavior, the British Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority advised that it had issued guidelines that children should not be given most SSRIs because clinical trial data showed an increased rate of harmful outcomes, including hostility.

October 15: The FDA ordered a \"black box\" warning for antidepressants that they could cause suicidal thoughts and actions in under 18 year olds taking them.

October 21: The New Zealand Medicines Adverse Reactions Committee recommended that old and new antidepressants not be administered to patients less than 18 years of age because of the potential risk of suicide.

December: The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration children and adolescents prescribed SSRI antidepressants should be carefully monitored for the emergence of suicidal ideation. In a recent study involving Prozac, it said, there was an increase in adverse psychiatric events (acts and ideation [thoughts] of suicide, self-harm, aggression, violence.)

December 9: The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use confirmed that product information should be changed for antidepressants to warn of the risk of suicide-related behavior in children and adolescents and of withdrawal reactions on stopping treatment.

December 17: The FDA required that packaging for the \"ADHD\" drug Straterra carry a new warning advising, \"Severe liver damage may progress to liver failure resulting in death or the need for a liver transplant in a small percentage of patients.\"

2005
February 9: Health Canada, the Canadian counterpart of the FDA, suspended marketing of Adderall XR (Extended Release, given once a day) due to reports of 20 sudden unexplained deaths (14 in children) and 12 strokes (2 in children) in patients taking Adderall or Adderall XR.

February 18: A study published in the British Medical Journal determined that adults taking SSRI antidepressants were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as patients given placebo.

April: The British House of Commons (Parliament) Health Committee issued a damning report that SSRI antidepressants had been \"indiscriminately prescribed on a grand scale\" and that drug companies have marketed the drugs without punishment to treat \"unhappiness [that] is part of the spectrum of human experience, not a medical condition.\"

April 11: The FDA warned that antipsychotic drugs in elderly patients could increase the risk of death.

April 21: A national non-government organization, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, released its findings of a study that determined that 10% of teens (2.3 million) had abused the stimulants Ritalin and Adderall.

April 25: The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use reaffirmed that all the latest antidepressants could cause increased suicide-related behavior and hostility in young people.

June 28: The FDA announced its intention to make labeling changes to Concerta and other Ritalin products to include the side effects: \"visual hallucinations, suicidal ideation [ideas], psychotic behavior, as well as aggression or violent behavior.\"

June 30: The FDA warned that the latest antidepressant Cymbalta could increase suicidal thinking or behavior in pediatric patients taking it.

June 30: The FDA also warned about a potential increased risk of suicidal behavior in adults taking antidepressants, broadening its earlier warning that related only to children and adolescents taking the drugs.

July 1: An FDA \"Talk Paper\" said that it had requested antidepressant manufacturers to provide all information from their clinical trials on possible increased suicidal behavior in adults taking the drugs.

July 7: The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University issued a report called \"Under the Counter: The Diversion and Abuse of Controlled Prescription Drugs in the U.S.\" that determined 15 million Americans were getting high on painkillers and psychiatric drugs such as the tranquilizer Xanax and the stimulants Ritalin and Adderall. Between 1992 and 2003, the number of 12 to 17 year olds abusing these drugs had risen 212%. Teens who abused prescription drugs were 12 times likelier to use heroin, 15 times likelier to use Ecstasy and 21 times likelier to use cocaine, compared to teens that did not abuse such drugs.

July 16: The British Medical Journal published a study, \"Efficacy of antidepressants in adults,\" by Joanna Moncrieff, senior lecturer in psychiatry at University College London who found that antidepressants were no more effective than a placebo (fake pill) and do not reduce depression. In a media interview on the study, Dr. Moncrieff stated, \"The bottom line is that we really don’t have any good evidence that these drugs work.\"

August: The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration found a relationship between antidepressants and suicidality, akathisia (severe restlessness), agitation, nervousness and anxiety in adults. Similar symptoms could occur during withdrawal from the drugs, it determined.

August 19: The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use issued its strongest warning against child antidepressant use, stating that the drugs caused suicide attempts and thoughts, aggression, hostility, aggression, oppositional behavior and anger.

August 22: Norwegian researchers found that patients taking antidepressants were seven times more likely to experience suicide than those taking placebo.
September 7: The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration warned that antidepressant use during pregnancy could cause \"withdrawal effects that can be severe or life-threatening.\"

September 13: The Oregon Health & Science University, Evidence-Based Practice Center published the findings of its review of 2,287 studies—virtually every study ever conducted on \"ADHD\" drugs—and found that there were no trials showing the effectiveness of these drugs and that there was a lack of evidence that they could affect \"academic performance, risky behaviors, social achievements, etc.\" Further, \"We found no evidence on long-term safety of drugs used to treat ADHD in young children\" or \"adolescents.\"

September 22: Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman of Columbia University and other researchers published a federally funded study in the New England Journal of Medicine about the effectiveness of certain antipsychotic drugs, comparing an older generation of antipsychotics with several newer ones. Far from proving effectiveness, of the 1,493 patients who had participated, 74% discontinued their antipsychotic drugs before the end of their treatment due to inefficacy, intolerable side effects or other reasons. After 18 months of taking Zyprexa, 64% of the patients taking this stopped, most commonly because it caused sleepiness, weight gain or neurological symptoms like stiffness and tremors.
September 26: The Italian Gazette (official news agency of the Italian government) published a resolution of the Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (Italian Drug Agency, equivalent to the FDA) ordering a warning label for older (tricyclic) antidepressants that the drugs should not be prescribed for under 18 year olds. They also determined that they were associated with heart attacks in people of any age.

September 27: The FDA warned that Paxil and other antidepressants taken during the first trimester of pregnancy could cause increased risk of major birth defects, including heart malformations in newborn infants.

September 28: The British National Health Service’s Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence released a Clinical Guideline for treatment of \"Depression in Children and Young People.\" It advised \"all antidepressant drugs have significant risks when given to children and young people\" and instead, they should be \"offered advice on the benefits of regular exercise,\" \"sleep hygiene,\" \"nutrition and the benefits of a balanced diet.\"

September 29: The FDA directed Eli Lilly & Co. to revise Strattera labeling to include a boxed warning about the increased risk of suicidal thinking in children and adolescents taking it.

September 29: The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency issued a press release that it had begun a review of the risks of Straterra in light of the FDA’s direction.

October: The sales and marketing of the stimulant Cylert were stopped in the U.S. because of the risk of liver damage that could lead to death.
October 17: The FDA ordered Eli Lilly & Co. to add a warning to the packaging of its antidepressant Cymbalta, that it could cause liver damage.

October 19: A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that atypical (newer) antipsychotic drugs could increase the risk of death in elderly people.

October 24: The FDA withdrew Cylert from the market because of its \"overall risk of liver toxicity\" and liver failure.

December 1: Researchers found that 18% of nearly 23,000 elderly patients taking the older antipsychotics died within the first six months of taking them.
December 8: The FDA warned that Paxil taken by pregnant women in their first trimester may cause birth defects, including heart malformations.

2006
January 5: The FDA said it had received reports of sudden deaths, strokes, heart attacks and hypertension (high blood pressure) in both children and adults taking \"ADHD\" drugs and asked its Drug Safety and Risk Management advisory committee to examine the potential of cardiovascular (heart) risks of the drugs.

February 4: A University of Texas study published in Pediatric Neurology reported cardiovascular problems in people taking stimulants.

February 5: An analysis of World Health Organization medical records found that infants whose mothers took antidepressants while pregnant could suffer withdrawal effects.

February 6: A study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine determined that nearly one-third of newborn infants whose mothers took SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy experienced withdrawal symptoms that included high-pitched crying, tremors and disturbed sleep.

February 9: The FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee urged that the strongest \"black box\" warning be issued for stimulants, including Ritalin, Adderall and Concerta and that they may cause heart attacks, strokes and sudden death.

February 11: The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration announced it would review the FDA advisory committee recommendation for stronger warnings against stimulants.

February 20: British authorities warned that the \"ADHD\" drug Straterra was associated with seizures and potentially lengthening period of the time between heartbeats.

February 25: A study in the journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and reported in The Washington Post revealed that seven million Americans were estimated to have abused stimulant drugs and a substantial amount of teenagers and young adults now appeared to show signs of addiction.

March 10: Health Canada issued a warning that pregnant women taking SSRIs and other newer antidepressants placed newborns at risk of developing a rare lung and heart condition.

March 22-23: Two FDA advisory panels held hearings into the risk of stimulants and another new \"ADHD\" drug called Sparlon. Between January 2000 and June 30, 2005, the FDA had received almost 1,000 reports of kids experiencing psychosis or mania while taking the drugs. The first panel recommended stronger warnings against stimulants, emphasizing these on special handouts called \"Med Guides\" that doctors must give to patients with each prescription. The second committee recommended not to approve Sparlon, which the manufacturer, Cephalon, estimated would lose them $100 million in drug sales.

March 28: The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration announced its review of reports of 400 adverse reactions to stimulants in children taking them. CCHR had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the TGA to obtain the reports and released this to the media that ran the story internationally.

May 1: An American Journal of Psychiatry study revealed that elderly people prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft are almost five times more likely to commit suicide during the first month on the drugs than those given other classes of antidepressants.

May 3: FDA adverse drug reaction reports linked 45 child deaths to new antipsychotic drugs. There were also more than 1,300 reports of other potentially life-threatening adverse reactions such as convulsions and low white blood cell count.

May 12: GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Paxil, sent a letter to doctors warning that its antidepressant increases the risk of suicide in adults. It was the first warning of its kind by a manufacturer.

Will Ferrell - Bush on Global Warming on Transbuddha
http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=1147&pID=725752

\"Changing how the public labels categories changes the associations those labels invoke in people\'s minds, which in turn changes their affective attitudes toward what is being described.\" David Green, Hofstra University

Oppression breeds the Native mind, psychiatrically labeled as the Criminal mind, but where there is no crime. Wherever/whenever, its seed threatens to take sprout; it must be redefined and recharacterised as malign. The Native mind must be quelled, discounted, demeaned, debased, denigrated, negated, and nullified out of existence. It is a threat to all that is patriarchally sacred (individualism, consumerism and conflict) in – our – dominant culture.

Containment and restraint are general terms employed as descriptive for the force used by the mental health industry in its coercive management of our socially unacceptable feeling/thoughts via their agents of social-control-over. Psychiatric agents follow a dogmatic belief system based in bio psychiatric eugenics or rule-over-other by divine right of genetic superiority.

There are times when peoples’ subjugation to a diversity of oppression so alienates us from the exercise of our personal-power, that the survivalist’s capacity to cope within environment, either the public domain or the private domain or both, has become criminally enfeebled. We may seek out a witness to our pain, an expression of our fearful sense for its potential volatile effects. I.e. As we near the point at which revelation of our private pain is a possibility, we fear the oppression that has been absorbed into the essence of our being, thereby warping its otherwise shining expression, will spill out onto other in our environment. The seeker’s (mis)behaviour becomes a communication to others that there is something amiss, something that has become unmanageable and must end or in some manner be resolved or in some way a sense of closure must be achieved.

The help being searched for is that of an empathetic person to be available to bear witness to the harms done to us and so the harms corrupting from within us alienating us from our humanity. Often, however, the response from the people around us is to treat the victim’s righteous mental (intellectual/emotional) upheaval as though oppression’s victim were abnormal or dangerous. Oppressions’ phantasm is the belief that the intensity of crisis, a product of extreme conflicts in living, can only be dealt with by avoidant submission.

Deaf’s denial is a form of community retraumatisation exorcising societal irrational fear and hate by the agents of PhRMA in the highly profitable form of powerful sedative drugs and ECT, for example, which are forced onto oppression’s victims, thereby quelling their pleas even from themselves. Another form of community retraumatisation is to ensure that there is no place in our dominant culture, which will offer asylum, haven, refuge, or sanctuary from acculturated issues, to those who need a safe place in which to begin mindful-healing into a spirit-recovery.

What is needed is a form of empathetic holding, a soothing of internalized hurts. It is when oppression’s unreasoning depths can be heard within a relationship of empathetic sharing that the underlying oppression’s phantasm can begin to affect change. Our victims, the community retraumatisation personified, will continue to be revictimised and therefore will continue to grapple, both successfully and unsuccessfully, with a powerfull empathetic understanding and appreciation of the truth that we are all creatures of value - equal value.

Kathleen Hill June 2006.
Based on: ‘On Learning from the Patient’ By Patrick Casement

About Involuntary Commitment: “…all history teaches us to beware of benefactors who deprive their beneficiaries of liberty….There is neither justification nor need for involuntary psychiatric interventions….” Szasz

Community self-governance, self-control, self-rule, self-determination, self-empowerment is a reflection of the personal-power exercised by its individual membership. The integrity of our humanity is inherent to us as a human-being. Personal-power is our humanity’s, unique amongst mammalians, capacity to apply mindfulness or feeling-thought to any given situation, to exercise ingenuity as a product of free-will, to not be enslaved. Because personal-power is the essence of being human – we can’t lose it or have it taken from us.

Identity is not one’s personal power! Identity is a social construct! We can become alienated from our sense of self or our loss of a socially constructed self-identity that stems from our exercise of personal-power, or the lack of same. It means the public-power innate to and wielded in interpersonal social interactions that is based on culturally accepted, honoured, respected, dishonoured, disrespected, and validated or invalidated value systems – like getting or giving a star in kindergarten, or not. Identity is hierarchical within the social sphere. Therefore, when we lose our identity we lose our place in the social strata that has become familiar to us and dictated our behavior. We are cast adrift as if someone lost in the jungle without a guide. The more oppressive (violent) our new environment, the more troubling will be our adaptation to it, thereby reducing our survival rate.

Adaptation is a survivalist strategy of ingenuity and an exercise of inherent personal-power. So what do we lose when we become alienated from our personal-power, our humanity? We lose the force of our humanity to alter our environment to increase our survival rate, while remaining safely cocooned by it. A person who only sought validation for their existence from outside of their personhood would therefore be a person alienated from their personal-power, with their capacity for survival utterly dependent upon the good graces of others, due to their incapacitation in the exercise of free-will or their personal-power. Adaptation to culture (acculturation or socialization) is wholesome, but only when it is mutually and equitably agreed upon. A survivalist social strategy is an ecological contract of personal responsibility.
Social-control is the exercise of ownership, regardless of harm, for the purpose of self-aggrandisement.

Oppression exists when we are coerced into accepting a constriction over our exercise of personal-power (self-identity), such that we become enslaved by it (in varying degrees and in some one or all aspects of our existence). Generally-speaking oppression is a progressive loss in which we begin to lose our connection with our personal-power, hence our capacity to exercise free-will to do right by our selves (as individual members of community). We begin to lose our capacity for adaptation requiring ingenuity and creativity, i.e. our capacity to think with the holism of reason in promotion of our humane right to life. A force outside of ourselves overwhelms us, such that we perpetrate self-harm for the purpose of promoting superficial gain for someone/something outside of our individual existence within community. The oppressor is successful as designating our humanity as gift of serviceable value (or not). Where there is no mutuality communal survival rate is reduced when not extinguished outright.

Social-control is societal oppression as artificially-created conflicts within and between individuals. Oppression divides us from our intra-personal selves and inter-personal community of selves in a divide and conquers way. Oppression’s purpose is to steal our humane right to exercise individual personal-power in promotion of one’s private right to an independent life. In the dominant culture this is perpetrated largely through our indoctrinated, programmed (acculturated) lack of knowledge as to the very existence of our personal-power (humanity) as intrinsic to each of us. We find ourselves trapped by a force greater than our social selves creating barriers to the exercise of our self-determination or personal-power. Aberrant parenting, educational system, employers, governmental legislation, etcetera with ulterior motivation or self-gain train us out of the exercise of a format for social-control, in which each person’s personal-power becomes synonymous with their self-identity as it gets expressed through consensual, social interactions within community.

“Always remember, a cat looks down on man (us), a dog looks up to man (us), but a pig will look man (us) right in the eye and see his (its) equal”. Winston Churchill (parentheses mine) In other words, our dominant culture is hog-rule!

Where there is no mutuality in gifting or giving and receiving, we assimilate under the aberrant rule-over knowledge by professionals not to use our personal power on behalf of ourselves, but to submit dictation of our intellect to the control-over by other, for example, Psychiatry. We don’t think to self-protect our precious humanity. We allow our personal-power to be degraded by social forces from outside our selves each time we allow other to define us and by our acceptance of their definition for us. Where there is no mutuality, the exercise of our personal-power becomes our self-identity that is the right of social participation recognized in the community, but - without influence. Authority-over other, and conversely our subjection to it, is delegated to us in the exercise of another’s agenda impacting against community. As with all oppressions there is a reward for submission and a punishment for no submission or the giving things of desire and the taking of that which is needful and wanted. This speaks to the First Nations ethic of Assimilation and Traditionalism. (See: http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/HistoryCulture/Cree/Feit1/index.html Hunting and the Quest for Power: The James Bay Cree and Whitemen in the 20th Century By Harvey A. Feit )

To the degree that we assimilate through submission to the dominant culture of power-over, we invariably do harm, self and other, thereby degrading community. The oppression exercised by power-over leading to assimilation or denial of one’s humanity, creates a human-being whose self-identity becomes the exercise of their humanity (personal-power) as the physical extension of another, in the promotion of other’s private self-gain. The assimilate provides their personal selves, regardless of community harm, with the reward of “creature comforts” or luxury items or items without intrinsic value, while escaping the punishment for non-compliance to one’s individual person. Assimilation is not adaptation! Assimilates’ personal-power has not changed, but we are changed in relation to it. Assimilation is the acceptance of coercion as a way of life. It is the exercise of fear seeking short-term protection from personal harm (from the punishment) and the reward (private gain) that is a pleasure without intrinsic value and therefore cannot satisfy our need for self-fulfilment. We become the never-satisfied!

Adaptation is the exercise of ingenuity and creativity as a product of and self-defining example of - one’s life force expressed in community. Assimilation is the process of losing one’s ability to exercise ingenuity and creativity or to process feeling-thought (empathetic learning seeking wisdom). Adaptation is acceptance of authority that is respected as possessing something of intrinsic value that one does not have and therefore one is willingly influenced by it. Assimilation is the submission of one’s personal, social and private, authority/identity in all things - to become enslaved to the criminally enfeebled. Adaptation leads to a mutually equitable benefit by both parties in the action of giving and receiving something of intrinsic value. We become the easily satisfied!

Humanity that is our moral and spiritual self-worth is our personal-power establishing a sympathetic mutuality, wherein respect equates to influence, such that the successful seeker of experiential wisdom is being influenced by principled judgement. The seeker both respects and is respected by the one whose moral values model the reasoning of choice. The power in choice is “the gift of delight” (John Breeding, which he likens to heaven) in appreciation for individual progress of self-realization within community, a process of self-direction seeking wisdom’s self-reliance. Choice directly equates to self-governance, self-control, self-rule, and self-determination i.e. the desirability for power-over one’s private self, of individual responsibility and accountability for oneself. We deceive our selves into thinking that the terms mean hedonism or mayhem or inherently amoral, of being without conscience, mindfulness, or empathy. We have been/are being instrumentally coerced into a code of conduct by dependant authoritarianism masking love, where suffering in fear and enforced, functional self-interest, guilt and anxiety is misconstrued as respect.

June 06 – Kate Hill

\"Remember their times of resistance, make note of the time and their actions of defiance. Give voice to their histories of resistance: Note their continuation of their history of defiance. Know that a scream, be it silent or loud, is an act of refusal to collude with house arrest.\" Interface of gender and culture, NZ; Kiwi Tamasese http://psychology.waikato.ac.nz

We, as (ex)users and survivors of Psychiatry, stand in solidarity to protect the human rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities, with the International Disability Caucus working at the U.N. It is our goal to end the discrimination that we experience on a daily basis and to promote and protect our human rights by creating a world culture through a universal prohibition of involuntary hospitalization and involuntary treatment.

We:
(1) oppose any language and/or action that would allow for mental health and/or psychiatric treatment to be forced upon any individual.
(2) oppose any exceptions to be made to this prohibition for “exceptional circumstances” and with “appropriate legal safeguards” when it is “in the best interest of the person.”
In our experienced knowledge we consider such “treatment” to be a total violation of our human rights and dignity and our experience is that such treatment is torture.
(3) oppose the substituted decision-making model because the legal capacity of the person is given away to another person.
(4) advocate a model of supported decision-making as key stone to a voluntary system of services that is non-coercive support for someone undergoing a mental health crisis.

In sum: We (ex) users and survivors of Psychiatry are not anti-psychiatry but anti-psychiatric oppression as witnessed/experienced by ourselves who have been subjected to existing mental health laws and practices.

Because everything in the universe is part of a single whole, everything is connected in some way to everything else. So the hurt of one is the hurt of all. The honour of one is the honour of all.

Because it is only possible to understand something if we understand how it is connected to everything else, we need holistic thinking or feeling-thought.

Because the physical and spiritual domains are two aspects of one reality, showing respect is a basic law of life. Breaking of a spiritual principle will affect the physical world and vice versa. A balanced life is one that honours both.

Because, self-actualisation is the self-generated, participatory, creative process of developing new personal qualities or \"true learning\", a person learns in a whole and balanced manner when the four dimensions of personhood are involved in the process - intellectual, spiritual, physical and emotional.

Because, the spiritual dimension of human development has four related capacities:
- to have and respond to dreams, visions, ideals, spiritual teaching, goals, and theories;
- to accept these as a reflection of our unknown or unrealized potential;
- to express these using symbols in speech, art, or mathematics
we naturally seek the courage and strength to be a better person by using symbolic expression towards action directed at making the possible a reality – to affect change.

Tribunal raps coroner\'s office
Psychiatric patients denied equal treatment
Inquests ordered by retired judge hearing rights case
Jun. 1, 2006. 06:05 AM, HEBA ALY, STAFF REPORTER (URL @ bottom)

SOYLENT By Flows Off Like Water

Clearly some people are deserving of better, unlike the welfare recipient who is the socially unacceptable deserving of punishment for their existence. It is also worth noting that those of us with a psychosocial disability (dysfunctional in the public domain of employment) must enter in to a medical fraud to get short-term disability benefits (when only life-long benefits exist), in that we must accept the “belief on faith alone” paradigm.
• We must accept (or else!) that we have a biological brain sick and a medical disease that has not yet been established to exist?

Accepting medical falsehood is a major stumbling block for those of us whose disability discounts employment, but does not sever us from our capacity to process thought. Our Psychosocial Disability can only be metaphorically characterized as a disease akin to heart disease or diabetes. But the societal price of survival directly equates to acceptance of a psychiatric labeling of our behavioral difference as an organic brain sick.
• This is no different than calling fever a disease!

We are then traditionally married to psychiatric control-over us with the civil rights of personhood that is no different than that of a slave. In essence, psychiatric modeling of itself after medical science directly equates to organic treatments for “problems in living” (Szasz). It is also worth noting that the only bio-psychiatric treatments are toxic chemicals and electrocuting one’s brain cells, thereby disabling and frequently damaging the very organ that one needs the full use of in order to progress through mindful-healing and spirit-recovery.

On the one hand: Biopsychiaty’s cryptic mandate is to disqualify our humanity, thereby burying the fact that:
• People subjected to oppression go dysfunctional becoming unemployable!
While on the other hand: Human service’s societally approved mandate is to subject us to severe punishment for breaking the mandatory employment rule:
• thereby making of us criminals.

In sum: the primary purpose of Health and Human Services’ re-traumatisation is to ensure that the populations of peoples subjected to community traumatisation stay dysfunctional, thereby remaining unemployable.
• Because nowadays that’s a $500 billions a year PhRMA factory, corporate industry.

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