To be clear

To be clear - I have nothing against people helping people.

Which is presumably what people wish to do.

However, for centuries "Psychiatry" has clearly done very much the opposite - and has hence nearly irreperably damaged a fundamental human endeavour - Medicine.

The first principle - traditionally, correctly and obviously of Medicine - is "FIRST DO NO HARM".


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A decent "psychiatrist" should not only avoid "hospitalising"/imprisoning his clients/patients/victims AT ALL COSTS etc.

This has been very much the case now for some time and is starting to be even more so.

They should also - I believe - start to have exactly the same attitude to the highly questionable so-called "Medication" involved as well.

Why should ANY doctor define himself by medication given???
Why should an eye doctor define himself by giving out ocular glasses???....

Exercise, peace and quiet, exposure to the countryside, periods of quiet escape/retreat are - I would say - far more important for people who are experiencing PROBLEMS IN LIVING.

I have nothing personally against any Psychiatrist. They are often as trapped in an ideology and an institution as anyone else. If I had studied Medicine I could easily have ended up choosing Psychiatry as an option in the belief that I would be helping people by doing so. All Psychiatrists have to have medical degrees.

We owe a great deal to Szasz for having the clarity of mind to point out at an early point of his own career that the Emperor has no clothes on at all and yet keeps "trying to put more on" so to speak.

Let's not be victims of sheer stupidity - often with entirely innocent beginnings - and let's try and make things better.


I sincerely hope so. And that we can go forward peacefully and in a spirit of deep forgiveness.

Love and best wishes,

The Sofa.

(By the way, I do not genuinely believe myself to be a Sofa. It is just a metaphor. Or something like that. OK? Great!)

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Incidentally, an interesting exercise would be to replace the piece of language "mental illness" with the piece of language "problems in living" or something like it whenever one can.

It could be quite revealing.

[Similar to "replacing" or "translating" "Economics" with/as "Household Management" which is both revealing and quite hilarious.
E.G. Stephanie Flanders, Household Management Correspondent of the BBC. etc. etc.]

A fundamental issue of human rights.

"THE MAGNA CARTA, THE PETITION OF RIGHTS, AND
THE BILL OF RIGHTS ARE DOCUMENTS WHICH ARE
HELD IN VENERATION BY DEMOCRATS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD."

NELSON MANDELA.

In the UK people of African origin have been massive victims of the crime against humanity
that is psychiatry.

The ideology of "mental illness" includes A CLEAR, FLAGRANT
AND TOTAL BREACH of an old English legal principle of
HABEAS CORPUS which has been a strong principle since
at least 1215 and Magna Carta.

Truly, truly wicked in our time.

This means "the body will be present" at a legal trial before detention by the state.

This was to prevent arbitrary detention by the state - and is a basis of human rights today.

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In the UK specifically "The Mental Health Act" of 1983/2008 is a serious crime against humanity in itself.

All personnel involved in enforcing it are obviously and objectively criminals.

They should be liable to arrest by UN forces - just as Nazis were after 1945 and the liberation of the Death Camps.

This act is an embarrassment to the UK and would not be acceptable elsewhere in Europe.

It is one of the things that makes me sympathise with the German Bishop who recently called our so-called "country" a "Third World" country.

The situation is worse in other countries - particularly in Africa.

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[Incidentally Magna Carta - did she die in vain :) etc.? - also guaranteed 
"freedom for the English [Catholic] Church" (from state and other interference). 
The Barons efforts were in vain here too - since about 300 years later the Church became the State and vice versa....... and so it remains today......]

"The Sanity Plea"?

Declaration of "Insanity", "Diagnosis", Incarceration, Poisoning - these seem to be our contemporary Ultimate Punishment.

A "fate worse than death" indeed - as millions of innocents know.

"Insanity" DOES NOT EXIST.

A mass murderer now uses the new-fangled "Sanity Plea" :) as a DEFENCE :) ????

Even if Breivik thought genuinely that all he slew were alien beings from outer space he would still be guilty of a crime.

Mistaken beliefs are not an illness nor an exoneration.

Extremely obvious, extremely simple, extremely correct.

I am ashamed that I have to emphasise something so obvious and so simple.

Yet I repeat - to be clear - it could not be clearer - 
Mistaken beliefs are not an illness nor an exoneration.

This is ridiculous farce.

-------------------------------

Is it now required of Breivik to convince the world that he is a "normal", "run-of-the-mill", "good old fashioned", sensible, healthy, right-wing extremist? :) ? Is that it?.....

-------------------------------

Incidentally - a comparison between Anders Breivik and Tony Blair may be enlightening and perhaps helpful.

-------------------------------

Breivik perhaps fits more into the pattern of Michael Ryan/Hungerford, Dunblane, Columbine etc. etc. = the pattern of a "beserker"/mass killing.

This too is NOT an illness or "insanity". No behavior or misbehavior is or can be an illness.

The struggles against Psychiatry is the struggle against Nazism

The struggle against Psychiatry is the struggle against Nazism.

Want to help secure the 1945 victory - still not fully won?...

And secure HUMAN RIGHTS as established in 1948. Churchill was one of the architects of them.

Stage one - to achieve them here in Churchill's home - is without doubt :-

 destroy the crime against humanity that is Psychiatry....

NEVER AGAIN!

This organisation had a Pastor Niemoller poem in its literature:


"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me."

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In terms of the mass murder - the first to be killed en masse were - I repeat - the disabled and "mentally ill".

And like Niemoller, they were Germans.

And what I am saying VERY CLEARLY - is that this persecution and harm and, yes, this murder is not something I am warning you all about happening again.

I am saying to you all that IT CONTINUES in England and elsewhere right this very second and it is called Psychiatry itself.

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In the UK at least Africans in particular have been victims of the crime that is Psychiatry on a particluarly large scale.

I mean this entirely seriously.

These are serious crimes. Harming people is harming people. Crimes are crimes.

Crimes MUST be recognised as such for civilisation to continue and flourish.

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The solution is REMOVE ALL COERCION from Psychiatry.
This needs to be done as soon as can be managed - across the whole world.

Coercion is harm and is violence.

Even if this is a big change - it is a change that must occur.

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I disagree totally about "manic depression".

R.I.P. ZOE SCHWARZ - 1972-2000. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/dec/11/medicineandhealth.lifeandhealth

With full and due respect to the writers, I have read this and I disagree with some of what is written in it.
I believe that there is no such thing as "manic depression"; and further that there is no such thing as mental illness.

From the actual words of the woman who eventually took her own life, you can I think see that it may be the case that at least an aspect of what upset the woman was her treatment by the mental health system, the role in life she was being forced to take on by the mental health system and her incarceration by the mental health system.

Pyschiatry is fundamentally a fraud and a crime.

The parents think that it was unawareness of the "illness" and its characteristics that prevented proper so-called "treatment" and help.
Could it not possibly be the belief that there was an illness at all, and what that belief entailed that was part of the problem?

----

"Bipolar affective disorder, as the ancient illness is now called, has been associated down the ages with originality and charisma, often with genius: Byron, Coleridge, Melville, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Strindberg, Spike Milligan, Louis Althusser, Otto Klemperer, Stephen Fry, Vivien Leigh, Kurt Cobain, Francis Ford Coppola...
The illness is now regarded as a genetic neurobiological brain disease that affects one in 100 people to some degree."

An "ancient illness"? Would malaria be called an "ancient illness"? What an odd phrase!
I don't know of any Ancient Greek or Latin texts that refer to "manic depression"....
How do we know that all these people had this so-called "disease"?
Have we examined all of their brains?
Case not proven.

[Even if it were possible to examine all the brains of all the above-mentioned people and they were all found to have the same "brain lesion "X"" how could that prove that everyone who had severe highs and lows had the "disease"?
.....

Behaviour can be surely entirely determined by the (normal) functioning of the cortex or upper brain and surely any behaviour can be "generated" by this part of the brain without disease being present. ]

The illness is now "regarded" as "a brain disease"?
Would lung cancer come to be "regarded" as a lung disease?
Lung cancer woud surely be proven to be a lung disease.
Again this is an odd word - "regarded" - to use. Either it's a brain disease or it isn't.
Surely you can't "regard" it as one until you know it is one.
"Regard" implies an opinion.
It affects 1 in 100 "to some degree" - either it affects them or it doesn't. Strange.
Also, in this extract it is called a "disorder", an "illness" and a "disease" - which is it?
All three?
Also Byron may have had "manic depression" but he didn't spend his life being forced to take bullshit drugs, in and out of pysch wards against his will, on benefits etc...
He probably would do if he was around today!

These points reveal that what is being discussed is a social construct not a proven disease.

.....

"So, brainwashed, we didn't think of manic depression when she punched her elder sister in a quarrel (Zoë was very strong) and, in another quarrel, bit through her younger brother's sweater and into his chest."

What does the above extract imply? That violence is a symptom of so-called "manic depression".
How can that possibly be the case when it has been said that manic depression means "highs and lows in mood"?
???
If she had been violent and not had severe ups and downs in mood what would have been blamed then?
Violence is not itself a mental illness. It's a behaviour.
Who is really being "brain-washed" here?
Where is the evidence for what is being said?

" ...a terrifying place... very difficult to describe, which makes it harder for others to understand. The stigma is hard, too. It's hard to imagine being out of it... you feel you've gone mad even when you're lucid. Don't know what to do with myself. What to think? Where to start? Cannot envisage improvement in the future. Everything is quite frightening."

Does this refer to imprisonment on a psychiatric ward?
Is the stigma referred to the stigma of being labelled mentally ill?

"I love you all but I can't live like this."

Like what exactly?
Does she mean she can't live the life of a psychiatric patient?
She may have been very depressed but is psychiatry giving her the right help for this?

"her treatable but incurable illness."
Is there really an illness?
Where is the evidence that she was suffering from an illness of any kind?

"I'm living behind a glass wall." She contemplated a future on medication. In her last diary entry, she wrote: " ...if I don't get better, I will most probably have to accept a more humble job and more humble living arrangements than I would like. But make the most of things: I can work my way up... have to accept that at 27 I am not 'set up' job/house/relationship-wise.

The lifestyle she is being forced into and that she finds hard to accept is one that is perhaps determined by the fact that she is in the "mental health system."

One of her friends said that it was her "pride" that killed her.
Is pride a "mental illness'?

In the suicide note that she wrote, amongst the first words are: "No one is to blame for my death."
May I boldly suggest that if anything was to blame for her death it was Psychiatry!------

All these things are just observations on the article and the story of Zoe.
They are just a view. I don't pretend that they are anything more than observations.
I am sorry if they offend. They are not meant to.
They are meant to question things that I think need questioning.

------

OK. It is one thing to say there are loads of creative people who suffer very severe mood swings and patterns of behaviour and mood that are very similar.
It is another thing to say "therefore they must all have a brain disease xyz and need drugs xyz"
when there is no evidence whatsoever for this.
It does not follow. Non sequitur.

------

"Bipolar disorder is not a single disorder, but a category of mood disorders...." Wikipedia, May 2008...

....

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As it says on a website in Zoe's honour:

"Zoë was a star. She refused to live out her days as a mental invalid.
On 22 August 2000 she took her own life."

This is surely implying that she took her own life to avoid so-called "psychiatric treatment" rather than due to or as a "symptom" of an "illness". Sorry if that seems like an inappropriate comment but I feel it is fully warranted.

I was also born in 1972.
I have also been what I can only call a victim of psychiatry for at least two decades.
I can only say that it sometimes feels like a miracle that I am alive.

-----------------------------------

The mental health system is a trap!

And there is no escape without assistance.

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I am sincerely sorry if anyone is offended by anything in this post. 
I do feel it is fully warranted on freedom of speech grounds.

"Anorexia Nervosa" DOES NOT AND CANNOT EXIST.

"Anorexia Nervosa" DOES NOT AND CANNOT EXIST.


IF all that is being observed is SELF-STARVATION then that is all that is occuring. There is NO illness.


Was Bobby Sands "DIAGNONSENSED" with "Anorexia Politica"?


------


This logic applies to all so-called "mental illnesses".


-------------------------------------


Szasz's insights apply to ALL so-called "mental illnesses". Even if you feel empowered by saying that you "have" "ADHD" - IF it simply does not exist in any way whatsoever then this reality cannot be changed.

NOTA BENE - "Sectioning"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/dec/09/day-mental-health-professionals

"Sectioning" under the UK "Mental Health" Act is:-

- the effective temporary destruction of a human being;
- a crime and;
- a crime against humanity.

The people involved in it are criminals.

It must be abolished as soon as possible.

There is simply no such thing as mental illness.

http://www.szasz.com/manifesto.html

Don't think it couldn't happen to you.
It could happen to ANYONE including YOU and it is a CRIME.
----------------------------------------------------

IT IS A CLEAR, FLAGRANT AND TOTAL BREACH of an old English legal principle of HABEAS CORPUS which has been a strong principle since at least 1215 and Magna Carta.

Truly truly wicked in our time.

This means "the body will be present" at a legal trial before detention by the state.

This was to prevent arbitrary detention by the state - and is a basis of human rights today.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"THE MAGNA CARTA, THE PETITION OF RIGHTS, AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS ARE DOCUMENTS WHICH ARE HELD IN VENERATION BY DEMOCRATS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD."

NELSON MANDELA.


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