Reclassifying "BPD."

"BPD" (Borderline Personality Disorder) should be reclassified as

BULLSHIT PROFESSION DISORDER and applied to anyone calling themselves a "Psychiatrist".

That would truly be a taste of their own medicine!

Comments on the name "Hearing Voices Network"

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!

Insanity

I regard the idea that you should lock someone up in case they commit a crime as insane.

In other words I regard it as irrational and I disagree with it.

Yet it is ardently believed in by psychiatrists who delude themselves that it is reasonable.


Coercion in psychiatry is never a "necessary evil". It is always a crime.

The only circumstances in which people can be arrested and detained by the state is if they
have committed a crime.

If you can't see this basic point you have missed the point.

Also, if there is no illness there can be no treatment, coerced or otherwise.

Reform of the U.K. Mental Health Act

To be honest, I think the U.K. Mental Health Act should reform itself out of existence.
The M.H.A. should be repealed in its entirety.
The Act has no intellectual or moral justfication, and no practical use.
"Mental Health" and "Mental Illness" are bankrupt concepts.
The M.H.A. has done far more harm than good in its long history.

Worth remembering - drugs never cause behaviours, nor does lack of drugs

               "The view that mental illness causes murder and suicide, and the view that drugs used to treat mental illness cause such behaviours, are both false. One excuses the actor from responsibility by blaming his behaviour on psychiatric diseases, the other excuses him from responsibility by blaming his behaviour on psychiatric treatments. Both contentions are claims serving the claimants' medical, legal and economic interests. And both claims bolster psychiatric slavery, based equally on the insanity defense and on civil commitment. Promoting psychiatric excuses, like promoting psychiatric coercions, does not weaken psychiatric slavery, it strengthens it.
              I maintain that mental illness is part of a person's identity or self, not a disease apart from him. If a mental patient is dangerous - if he assaults and kills another person, or mutilates or kills himself - it is not because of a mental disease he allegedly has, nor because of a drug he takes or does not take, but because of who he is and what he decides."

Thomas Szasz, 2002.

It is worth remembering this truth as we wade through torrents of web reports that x,y,z drug "caused" x,y,z behaviour, from organisations and individuals that are supposedly sceptical of psychiatry and that oppose psychiatric coercion and psychiatric slavery.

Neither drugs nor the lack of drugs cause behaviours. Saying that they do can effectively serve to endorse psychiatry.

Two plus two equals four.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows."

George Orwell.

"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it."

George Orwell.

Widely held opinions

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."

Bertrand Russell.