What is a very serious problem of stigma for mental patients is something which has always benefited the mental health/mental illness Establishment. Were it not for their ability to discredit patients in the eyes of the public, with the tremendous help of the media and the Hollywood movie industry, so-called “advocacy” groups like N.A.M.I., Mental Health America, and the Treatment Advocacy Center would never be able to advance their agendas against patients.
Witness 2016’s heartless transgressions by Congressman Timothy Murphy as he worked to promote his heinous Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act through Congress. Congressman Murphy didn’t miss a beat each time there was another tragedy involving guns somewhere. He was right on time with his instant and insistent indictments of patients each time there was another headline-grabbing incident. For this, Congressman Murphy is now being heralded as a darling of the Establishment after the passing of his filthy bill. Stigma is NOT the mysterious monstrosity ascending from Hell which advocates always publicly insist it is.
I find the trailer of the above movie and the accompanying interview with the director to be naive and very sad. Lise Zumwalt’s heart was unquestionably in the right place when she made this movie. But her revelations about the evil nature of the mental health system therein represent only the tip of an iceberg.
It is obvious from Lise Zumwalt’s tone of voice as she describes her movie that she’s oblivious to the true depth and dimensionality of the suffering of patients. She knows nothing about the scandalous, conspiratorial, and intended effect of stigma against patients, and the monolithic effect this has on their lives. And yet it is this same depth and dimensionality which is subliminally driving today’s manifest destiny of mental health care. Stigma is inherent to the medical model of mental illness.
I’ve always been delighted by the exceedingly high rate of non-compliance with treatment by patients. 90% is it? And like all other antipsychiatry activists, I know for a fact this has not one thing to do with a lack of insight into their “sicknesses.” Rather, it is due to a universally shared experience of patienthood, which says that being a mental patient means you will have no substantive life whatsoever beyond the point you foolishly enter the mental health system. It is a very sad state of affairs that patients have no other recourse to exact justice on their own behalf other than to eschew the drugs, sleep in the streets, and populate the jails. This is the bottom line which is driving behavioral system evolution.
Yes, there are “advocates” and family members who will tell you that court-ordered outpatient treatment will solve the problem of willful non-compliance with treatment amongst patients. It won’t. The criterion for eligibility for outpatient forced treatment is so restrictive that only a minuscule segment of the overall patient population is subject to it. This then leaves the vast majority of patients with the continued prerogative of homelessness, jail, and obstruction.
“Why not then broaden the criterion for eligibility for forced treatment,” some bright advocates say? Purportedly then all patients could be compelled to undergo treatment against their will.
I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution will ever permit this.
