Well I have major problems with the name of H.V.N. - "Hearing Voices Network".
This may sound ridiculous, offensive or judgemental but I don't really believe that anyone hears
voices or has hallucinations strictly speaking. I believe that this type of narrative is mainly
following a psychiatric agenda, or originates in psychiatry.
Opposition to psychiatry has to be based on human rights, and not defining or categorizing people.
I have never ever "heard voices" - am I therefore excluded from HVN?
What I see myself as is a human victim of psychiatry - not someone who "hears voices" etc.
Hopefully it is obvious that I don't deny for a second that everyone has an imagination.
It is a basic human faculty and a part
of why we are as advanced as we are as a species.
We talk of it in our everyday language - for example, "picture this if you will""in your mind's eye",
"something about the product said to me "buy me"", etc. - you can think of other good examples.
Is an artist who pictures his picture before he puts it onto canvas having a "visual hallucination"?
Of course not! Or is a composer having "auditory hallucinations"? Of course not!
Sometimes this faculty can possibly go a bit haywire in the case of what could be called "malignant imagination".
But I fundamentally disbelieve in the reality of literal hallucinations - whether aural or visual - and I believe the belief in in these to be principally an interpolation by psychiatry.
It is very wrong of HVN to pander to this nonsense in the title of their organization.
And this is one reason that I am sceptical of the organisation. It also slightly smacks
of the elevation of the so-called "mad" to a superior status that Szasz has observed as happening in some anti-psychiatry tendencies.
I am glad loads of people want the Mental Health Act to be abolished. Of course it should be.
And yes the Mental Health Act is effectively racist - as therefore is psychiatry. Pyschiatry is ethnocentric too.
Human rights are absolutely breached by psychiatry and this SHOULD be a matter for Amnesty
International and human rights groups in general. Human rights are indivisible and applicable
in all circumstances with no exceptions, or they are nothing. Amnesty International are to be criticized for their lack of attention to this question. An aim of the anti-psychiatry movement should be getting human rights groups to see things in this way.
Amnesty International seem at the moment to be concentrating on the human rights of LGBT people all the time.
Whilst this is important, it should not be forgotten that there is no specific human right to behave
homosexually (nor should there be in my opinion - though it should be tolerated where consensual),
but there IS a human right to be protected from arbitrary detention.
I have heard that the UN has made resolutions against forced treatment. That is very positive.
I think that the World Health Organisation still believes in "mental illness" and psychiatry.
So we need to change that perspective as well.
John Read I think is a critical psychiatrist/psychologist - like Joana Moncrieff and Richard Bentall.
So whilst I am glad critical psychiatry is there, I just don't think that they always go far enough in
opposing psychiatry. A bit like Peter Breggin in the US. They aren't anti-psychiatry enough.
They are still sometimes working with basic conceptual errors in my opinion.
But I am very glad they are there!
