(spoken by Phil Kumin)
Phoenix, I owe you an apology and I’ll give it to you. At first, I didn’t understand what you were getting at with your question above.
The news media makes things absolutely horrible for us. Every time there’s another shooting somewhere, the first thing which gets disclosed is that the perpetrator had a past history of psychiatric treatment. Similarly with Hollywood, there’s never any end to the stream of movies which come out which center around some, “crazy psycho killer,” in one form or another.
Do you realize how impossible this makes the lives of all other mental patients, including this one? Are you aware of how hated you are, since you’re a mental patient?
The people who benefit from this horrible situation are the drug companies, because this is how they make a lot of money. I’ve often wondered if proof couldn’t be found that media corporations and film studios actually agreed to help the drug companies get rich? There might have been another reason also why the drug companies asked them to do that, in addition to profit: I hope you’ll be able to understand what I’m going to explain.
The drug companies made every effort they could to convince people that mental patients had to be medicated, whether they wanted to be or not. The treatment regimen the drug companies favored also included things like forced electroshock treatments, the occasional forced lobotomy, and involuntary commitment laws, in addition to forced medication.
The drug companies know that the average person is morally offended by the obvious predicament of mental patients, particularly when they see them living on the streets. People don’t understand why the mental health system isn’t doing a better job of taking care of those patients.
The drug companies’ rationale for asking for help from the news media and Hollywood was, they figured, if the lives of patients could be publically devalued, (the only circumstance under which drug companies can make a profit,) nobody would care how patients were being treated afterwards, though the drug companies have turned out to be wrong about that. The obvious problem with this, however, is that this also creates the stigma and the hatred of us we have to live with. The boilerplate objective of the drug companies is to maximize profits to the ultimate degree.
There’s another twist to this whole story. There are a lot of people who work to protect the lives of patients. They’re called, “advocates.”
A guy named Robert Whitaker, an investigative journalist, recently arrived. He’s been able to show everybody that the drug companies have been lying to us for a long, long time regarding mental illness. That’s something none of the advocates had ever known before, since the drug companies have worked so hard to cover it up, and since the drug companies have always been thought of as allies. It was obvious that stigma was a severe problem for patients but in the absence of any more in-depth explanation for it, it was regarded as an element of serendipity. I think this is a big turn of events because it means people now know for the first time, the drug companies cannot be trusted.
