Posted on 12/18/2005 3:05:55 PM PST by sionnsar
We need a writ of Habeas Corpus in Medicine. Somebody Sue us PLEASE!
“Now I am going to do my level best to get these diagnoses expunged from your record, but I cannot do this without your assistance. That means that you have to stop saying stupid things for the fun of yanking everybody’s chain. You can’t afford it! Is that clear?”
By the time I had finished, my face was flushed, my 14 year old patient was in tears, and my office manager had stuck her head into the examination room to find out why I had raised my voice.
We Americans enjoy more rights than any other nation on earth. Not only do we have our “Bill of Rights”, which are the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, but some rights are so fundamental that they are enshrined in the Constitution herself. The right of Habeas Corpus (Latin for “produce the body”) is so basic a freedom that it is guaranteed specifically in the Constitution (Article One, Section Nine, Paragraph Two). This gem of Anglo-Saxon common law, preceded the Norman invasion, and was written into the Magna Carta in 1215. Since then the right of Habeas Corpus has found her way into the English Bill of Rights, and from there to our own Constitution. Nothing could be more basic than the right of Habeas Corpus which states that no individual may be taken up on charges and imprisoned indefinitely. Such individuals, must, MUST under law, be brought to court, judged by a jury of his peers, be given the opportunity to defend himself, and be found guilty before he can be (in the language of the Magna Carta) “imprisoned or sisseised or exiled or in any way destroyed” .
Indeed, the whole point of the carefully crafted balancing of powers, by our nation’s founders, was to arrange it such that no branch of the federal government could ever become so powerful, that it could abridge these our basic freedoms. The power of the Presidency is checked by Congress and the Judiciary. The power of Congress is checked by the President and the Judiciary. Judges are appointed by the president and confirmed (and impeached) by Congress. No branch of the federal or state government could ever grow so strong as to overthrow so basic a freedom as the one that states that no man may be imprisoned without charge.
Only doctors are allowed to do that.
Which is what my patient had run into. She was a fairly unexceptional teenager until her biological mother moved to a different state with her new boyfriend and she failed to fit comfortably into the new family unit. She continued to get reasonably good grades in regular classes, was not sexually active, and never had any trouble with the law. However, she failed to get along with her mother’s boyfriend and openly campaigned to be allowed to live with her dad (who was also in a new “relationship”). When the usual teenage sulking and defiance failed to be helpful, she took a page from one of the teen magazines she was reading. This told the touching tale of a teenager who was “misunderstood” and began “cutting herself”. This self mutilation made the storybook parents realize how truly unhappy the storybook teenager was, and what fools they, the storybook parents, were. This in turn gave birth to a new and wonderful relationship between the fictional teenager and her parents, in which they all learned to understand and appreciate one another. Now my patient was not quite brave or stupid enough to actually cut herself, however with some difficulty she did manage to make a couple of painful, if not precisely blood-drawing, scratches on her skin with a safety pin. Then she called 911, sobbed to the police radio operator that she was miserable, that nobody understood her, and that she was going to “slash her wrists” and waited, her wounded wrists quite unnecessarily bound with toilet paper (there being no blood), for everybody to start being nice to her.
Unfortunately she was well insured.
This is why three months later, after she had been released from an inpatient psychiatry unit with diagnoses of Major Depression and Oppositional Defiant Disorder with possible Bipolar illness, she was seeing me. I am not a psychiatrist, nor do I wish to be. However since there are no child psychiatrists in my part of the country, and since I happen to be the only neurologist who sees poor kids in a three hundred mile radius, I tend to get folks with psychiatric diagnoses sent to me from their family physician with a referal diagnosis of “behavioral disturbance, rule out seizure”. By the time my patient saw me, she had run out of insurance, and her grandmother was now her guardian. (The mother’s boy friend had refused to keep her, and the father’s girl friend also did not want a teenager who was “mentally handicapped”). By this time also, her “psychiatric diagnoses” had resulted in her missing most of a semester in school, which meant that she was in danger of being dropped from the college bound track into the track reserved for children with learning disabilities and mental illnesses, that lacked the core courses needed for college work. The patient’s grandmother was unable to make her take her medications and the teen pointed out that she felt much better off of medications than on them and that she didn’t need them anyway. Review of her extensive hospital chart corroborated the teenager’s clinical judgment. Every time she insisted that she felt fine and wanted to leave, her anti-psychotic medications would be increased in order to treat her “denial” and “delusions” of being in control. These made her sleepy but more docile and easier to manage. It doesn’t surprise me that she felt much better off of them, and I’m quite sure she didn’t need them. I’m also quite sure that she had never needed them.
My patient’s case is not an isolated one. One individual, a close friend of mine from my residency days, whom I know well, had something similar happen to her. She was a physician, had had no previous history of mental or physical illness, had excellent family supports, and in the setting of an acute family crisis went to a psychiatrist saying that she was depressed and felt that life was over for her. She was walked to the evaluation room of a nearby psychiatric hospital, and there she was urged to consent to be admitted “voluntarily” for her safety. She refused. She was then told that if she did not admit herself voluntarily, she would be admitted involuntarily and that she would probably “be in the hospital at least six weeks” if she was committed. By contrast, she was told, if she admitted herself voluntarily she could leave voluntarily as soon as staff could ensure that she was safe. My friend therefore admitted herself voluntarily, and tried to leave the next day in the company of her family who testified that they would ensure her safety. She was then told that her “treating psychiatrist” didn’t think she would be “safe” to leave for two weeks (oddly enough the maximum period for a voluntary admission that her insurance paid for). Nor was she allowed to leave “against medical advice” since this was a matter of “patient safety”. Eventually she was there five days refusing all medications thrust on her, and threats of false imprisonment had to be made by her family before the psychiatrists in charge agreed to let her have a second opinion. The consultant rendering the second opinion agreed that she was in no danger of suicide, that she had excellent family support, and the patient in question has never required psychiatric attention in the twenty years that have passed since that day.
Physicians answer to nobody when they declare that their patients have “delusions” or “hallucinations” or are “mentally ill”. Such mentally ill patients can be confined against their will indefinitely, until such time as a physician pronounces them to no longer be a danger to “themselves or others”. Indeed, the very refusal of medical care is a billable psychiatric illness according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel (DSM-IV) being known “noncompliance with treatment disorder” (DSM: V15.81). There is no “writ” of habeas corpus in medicine. There is no “balance of power” in medicine. Patients just trust us to do the right thing.
Which is why I was alarmed, but not really surprised to learn that the American Psychiatric Association is considering making “homophobia” or “extreme bias” a psychiatric illness treatable by “counseling” and “medications”.
“We treat racism and homophobia as delusional disorders,” said Shama Chaiken, who later became a divisional chief psychologist for the California Department of Corrections, at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. “Treatment with antipsychotics does work to reduce these prejudices.”
Dr. Chaiken did not mention that the usual mechanism by which treatment with antipsychotic drugs reduces such “prejudices” in otherwise healthy individuals, is by causing mild sedation. This is why antipsychotic drugs were freely used in the Soviet Union in order to discredit advocates of human rights and religious believers by pronouncing them “mentally ill,” as well as to intimidate and confuse them into altering their political postions by both pharmacological agents and the fear of indefinate incarceration. Labelling dissidents as being “mentally ill” and treating them with antipsychotic drugs is also a favorite technique of the Cuban regime. It requires no scientific justification.
We like to believe that such things can’t happen in the United States. However, even in the United States, pathologizing behavior does not require any scientific justification. Indeed, as one prominant US psychiatrist (who is in favor of making homophobia a mental illness) points out: “”Psychiatrists who are uneasy with including something like this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual need to get used to the fact that the whole manual reflects social context. That is true of depression on down. Pathological bias is no more or less scientific than major depression.”
Exactly. Inclusion as a disease entity in the DSM-IV has never required a scientific justification. Psychiatric diseases are voted in and out of the DSM manuel by a committee of academic psychiatrists based on their “best clinical judgment”. This is how homosexuality stopped being a disease. It was “voted out” of the DSM manual in 1974 by a thin margin of politically active advocates. Feminist groups helped vote out “self-defeating personality disorder” when it was proposed due to the political implications. There is no reason why, if homosexuality can be voted out of the DSM manuel, homophobia cannot be voted in. And once it is “recognized” that homophobia, or Biblical literalism, or for that matter Christianity itself is a “pathological condition”, then psychiatrists will have a “right and duty” to incarcerate such individuals to prevent “harm to themselves or others.” There is no “due process” under the Constitution for the “mentally ill”. The Constitution, and the United States leaves such people to the mercy and justice of physicians.
Once a patient or a physician is labelled as being “mentally ill” there are all sorts of consequences. It is unlikely that my 14 year old patient will ever be able to join the military, even if she remains off medications henceforth. (The military will not accept youngsters who have had psychiatric diagnoses - including the ubiquitous if often mythical “attention deficit disorder” - that required medication after the age of 12). If I am unsuccessful in having my patient’s diagnoses expunged, her ability to qualify for either health or disability insurance for many years will also be poor. For that matter, the physician I referred to also failed to qualify for disability insurance for almost 10 years. Her “diagnosis”, however bogus, also meant that she had her medical licence suspended for six months, as she was considered “impaired” for health reasons. Had she been an airline pilot instead of a physician, her license would likely have been tabled much longer. Once “homophobia” is a mental illness, advocates with traditional Christian views will automatically be suspect, and will have their licenses stripped from them, as they will be considered “impaired” by their medical “disability”. Nor can such cases be easily reported to the press. Unlike ordinary employment or political speech, a host of “privacy” laws limits access to information when “health care” is involved. Thus, the suspicion of “mental illness” will cling to such individuals, however unfair such a designation might be, and those who label such individuals as being mentally ill, will refuse to provide documentation on the grounds of “health care privacy” laws. In addition, once “homophobia” or “extreme bias” enters the DSM-IV, even fewer physicians will raise their voices in protest, as doing so may result in them also being investigated for “mental illness”. As it is, there are few enough physicians who are willing to speak in favor of traditional values, even though it is my belief that the overwhelming majority of physicians support traditional values. Most of us learned to keep our mouths shut, and to focus on our immediate duties, sometime during medical school. Even physicians or patients who have been victimized by this sort of process are reluctant to speak up. The very fact that someone has been considered “mentally ill” is, of itself, damaging. Nobody so victimized wishes to be dragged through the media to prove the justice of their cases, even were it easier to obtain access to the health information that would justify their claims.
Our nation has built her foundation on a Constitution that protects the rights of the weak against the strong, the ignorant against the knowledgeable, and prevents powerful interest groups from muzzling free speech or imprisoning those who disagree with them. However we have left a loophole which powerful entities already use to abuse and imprison those who disagree with them.
It is time to have a writ of Habeas Corpus in Medicine. Somebody sue us PLEASE!
I have an old friend who was married to a Freudian psychoanalyst. Many years ago, she had mysterious back problems that the physicians couldn't figure out. So her husband had her committed to a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston, under the theory that her back pains were psychosomatic.
I paid her a visit there, and it was really scary. You go in, the door closes and locks behind you, you go down all these corridors with the proverbial men in white coats. I thought I was going to go crazy just being there, and I was probably only inside for about an hour.
Later, it was found that she did have back problems, and eventually she was divorced.
It's a whole lot more than that. It's a grab for power, and an awful lot of it.
Bingo! Spot on!!
Quoted for truth.
Me: "Somebody here may know definitively but I believe the origin of the word comes from the assumption that those who speak most loudly against homosexuality are afraid they may be homosexual."
Dirty Harry: "Uh Oh! By that logic we're all closet libs/leftists.."
Funny you should mention that. I've only been here a short time but i have become convinced that there are more trolls here trying to goad us into taking extreme positions that will hurt the conservative movement than there are trolls who say liberal things.
"Foreboding, yes, but accurate, yes. Which is worse than foreboding because the reality of what occured in the Sovieet Union by way of "psychiatry" is among the most amoral, inhumane and vile misdeeds ever in the history of human civilization."
Yes.
"And, that's exactly where -- as this neurologist so accurately writes -- what exists today as "liberalism" is headed in the U.S.: a recreation of the worst from the old Soviet Union and more...communist/Marxism at it's most ardent extreme."
No.
There are real problems in the mental health community but it not like you describe. Some of the new tools are being overused or used by people who are not qualified (even worse) who have a financial motive rather than trying to help.
But many mental issues are being shown to have chemical components. There is resistance to this much as there was resistance to the idea that ulcers are usually caused by a bacterial infection and not by stress.
It doesn't do an y good to label this as liberal or communist or anything else - it is apparently the way God made us and studying and trying to help with issues is good, not bad. M.D.'s with training in psychiatry are the best choice.
Have you noticed how much bigger their hands have grown in the last two decades?
Perrhaps you should reread it.
The first several paragraphs were the foundation upon which the author built his fortress to take his stand.
I found this piece to be the most readable article that I have ever read that was written by a medical doctor.
I found no errors in spelling, grammar or syntax.
Antipsychotics were developed so they didn't have to do permanent lobotomies.
I disagree with your "no" about the perilous conclusion that our form of Liberalism today is headed and it's found in the history of the Soveit Union...
I've even heard physicians say as much, and one, particularly, formerly involved in the APA on a professional level. It's a real and emergent fear -- that the Soviet use of "medicine" to classify persons who hold political and social views different from 'the proletariat', the ruling communist/marxist standard, could be replicated today not only in the U.S. but elsewhere.
What's occured is today we have an entire generation (or more) of people who have no familiarity or even knowledge of past history (the Depression in the U.S., the Soviet rule, fascism in Europe, especially) and in their zeal to insist on extremely 'liberal' (and forced, politically implemented) 'tolerance', they thereby implement the very forms of governments in the past that have been responsible for the most damaging political forms of government: socialism (which gives rise to fascism and communist/marxist governments...take a look at Cuba for starters).
The article here points that out from a physician's experience and perspective. I agree with it. Because, the very danger signals that this article points out as happening now in the U.S. field of "mental health" is exactly what began with similar subtelty in the old Soviet Union. People who originated the rights of the individual and particularly who were dedicated to religious freedom, were deemed a threat to the politic of the government and thereby deemed "mentally ill" and incarcerated and most of them utterly forgotten (and who died accordingly in prisons) agains their will, without any social, legal or governmental recourse to avoid their doom -- it was the social, governmental process that was their accuser, so, thus, they were without recourse to counter the forced judgements.
It's verging on the similar today in the U.S. "mental health" community -- you have an emerging opinion of "dissidents become authority" who are using the mental health process -- or at least organizing toward that effort (see the article again) -- to punish, and thereby silence any version of reality other than theirs, based upon mostly the concepts of extreme permissivenes as standard and suppression of religious ideology (which requires personal response that often deviates with socialism on an individual level).
It's the use of institutional norms to try to suppress the opinions of others but with an intellectually destructive method. An excellent case, as was in the Soviet Union of old, of "science" as corrupt method to insist upon communist/marxist authority. Judeo-Christianity is the most threatening to that, given that it's usually the Judeo-Christian values that are first attacked and maligned as also occured in the old Soviet empire -- the U.S. Left is providing a similar bed for the same to reoccur today.
I didn't mean to sound dismissive of the concerns and/or fears. I have actually worked to try to have the local county mental health department decertified as a medical facility and thus cut off their federal funding(unsuccessfully though I did get some concessions.)
My "no" was directed as a summary of the current state of affairs. It's not unlike our government - lots of problems but so much better than other governments.
Yes, of course "chemical" basis for some deviations from norms as to how behaviors are manifested, but, isn't everything? Isn't everything, physically, "chemical" in nature? "Chemically" influenced and manipulated?
The best medicine does not begin and end there. Unfortunately, today, most of it does for convenience sake and in a sense of time efficiency ("it's a chemical imbalance; take these [chemicals] and call me in the morning").
Psychiatry (people with medical degrees who were specialized in a clinical practice of that type) was the method by which the old Soviet government (as also the German Socialist Party approached) implemented the concept of "deviation" and "abnormality" to and about people who maintained, particularly, relgious values despite the communist/marxist requiring silence from society in that regard.
Yes, it's a case of liberal versus conservative. Psychiatry is nothing more, ultimately (read the article) than a committee of individuals deciding based upon social understandings what is a deviation from their understanding of normal/acceptable, to boil this down to the essence of the process of how disorders are deemed to be. It's quite possible for a committee under the influence of politico-social ideology to perceive others outside that influence to be abnormal. As happened in the Soviet Union.
And seems to be occuring with some today in our western "mental health" area, given what this article says. And, as I wrote earlier, I've heard discussed before by many among physicians and attorneys specializing in healthcare.
It's a case of who determines and how they determine what to be abnormal. In the case of today's American Psychiatric Assn., for instance, their philosophy is to TRY to implement an intolerance -- manifested as a professional opinion -- for and about Judeo-Christian values that hold that homosexuality is abnormal, "disordered thinking" as Pope Benedict describes it.
What's occuring is the Liberal Left (Ginsberg on the S.C., as a great example of this level of Liberal intellectualism, such as that is, who has said that the legag age for consentual sex should be reduced to twelve or something similar -- something that NAMBLA wants lowered but also entirely removed from legality, with the ACLU supporting most of their abuses of social restrictions on sexuality) is using the concept of "freedom" to try to secure a legality to suppress religious freedom (which poses restrictions to otherwise permissiveness in many areas of human behaviors).
I do find it very similar to the historical and historically bad deeds that were implemented in the Soviet Union inorder to suppress and penalize religious ideology that limited their sense of "freedom" for their form of suppressive government.
It's a convoluted understanding but even more predatory and impending for that reason. The article was written by a guy with the credentials and clinical examples to evidence the process.
"And, as I wrote earlier, I've heard discussed before by many among physicians and attorneys specializing in healthcare."
You are saying the medical professionals you know believe that their profession, through psychiatry, is pushing the United States into a Stalinist type environment and therefore conservatives should oppose psychiatry?
It's funny, but in Texas it's almost impossible to involuntarily commit someone. Except for that pesky "danger to themselves or others", but even still I think they can only keep you for three days. It's a conundrum. Can't commit the people that need to be committed (street bums, hobos) but people with money get snatched off the street.
My psychiatrist told me I'd better not go on disability for alcohol/drug abuse because I'd never get it off my record, and word gets around. All HIPAA does is keep relatives from seeing the patient.
Isn't a spirochete the little bug with syphillis that infects the brain? Perhaps he's trying to tell us something.
This is always an attempt to apply a Hegelian Dialectic, also known as thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This is played out as Thesis: You are a homophobe. Anti-thesis: No, I'm not. Synthesis: You must do X, Y, and Z to prove you're not. You break the dialectic before it gets started by agreeing with the thesis. As you said, if you do that, no argument is possible, only stunned silence, or screaming and cursing.
No, I am writing that it is my opinion and the opinin of others that it's quite possible that could happen here in the U.S.
And for the reasons I wrote. And as did this neurologist write in his article.
There's nothing in anything I've written that suggests that "conservatives should oppose psychiatry."
What the neurologist/physician points out in his article here is that anyone CAN be committed based upon a physician's decision. And can be held there based upon that and only that.
And that the results possible are/can be profound.
And, thus, that it's worth looking over as to who decides what and how.
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