EXTRA!

August 21, 2003

SECOND OPINION

A FAST FOR FREEDOM IN MENTAL HEALTH

A hunger strike challenges international domination by biopsychiatry and the forced drugging of patients

By RFD Editor, Nicholas Regush

Day Five. He’s still fasting. But David Oaks sounds anything but weak on the telephone. His spirits are high and he is determined to carry through on his call for freedom in mental health. He’s one of six former psychiatric patients who are on a hunger strike at a church in Pasadena, California. They are challenging the basis of biological psychiatry — that "emotional and mental problems are primarily a biologically-based brain disease." And they are demanding that groups such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States provide scientific evidence for their acceptance of a biopsychiatric approach that primarily involves drugging patients and neglecting viable non-drug options.

Oaks is the director of MindFreedom, a group which has been highly vocal in its opposition to forced drugging of many thousands of psychiatric patients in the U.S. The group, which is organizing the "Fast For Freedom In Mental Health," says that psychiatrtists, among other things:

*Incarcerate citizens who have committed crimes against neither persons nor property
*Impose diagnostic labels on people that stigmatize and defame them
* Induce neurological damage by force and coercion with powerful psychotropic drugs
*Stimulate violence and suicide with drugs promoted as able to control these activities

Quite a list. So the hunger strikers are hoping to draw attention to these professional behavioral patterns and to emphasize the need to move away from an increasingly coercive infrastructure of drug treatment to one that offers patients a clear therapeutic choice.

Of course, psychiatry is tied by an umbilical cord made of greenbacks to the drug industry. Its journals and many of its practitioners have long sold out to fame and fortune promised by the drug merchants. Sure, some people benefit from drug therapy, but in recent years, there has been such an enormous upturn of drugging that this has disqualified psychiatry as a medical endeavor. It’s become, by and large, a mobster on a rampage. It’s easier to watch the violence on the Sopranos.

What can Oaks and his colleagues achieve by this hunger strike? A lot, if they get wide media attention. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that modern psychiatry runs on the fuel of superstition and ignorance. MindFreedom is asking for scientific evidence that, for example:

*Clearly establishes the validity of schizophrenia, depression or "other major illnesses" as biologically-based brain diseases.
*Clearly establishes that a scan or test of the brain, blood, urine, genes, etc can reliably distinguish individuals with the above diagnoses — prior to treatment with psychiatric drugs — from individuals without the diagnoses.
*Clearly establishes a base-line standard of a neurochemically-balanced "normal" personality, against which a neurochemical "imbalance"can be measured and corrected by pharmaceutical means.

And so on. You get the picture. MindFreedom has put together a panel of its own experts to review any of the answers provided by anyone from the APA, NAMI and the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States.

Rather than provide MindFreedom with an intelligent response to their questions, here, for example, is, in part, how Dr. James H. Scully, Jr., the APA Medical Director, responded a few days ago:

"The answers to your questions are widely available in the scientific literature, and have been for years. I suggest you begin your review with Surgeon General David Satcher’s report, "Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General." In addition, I recommend the Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry (3^rd edition), edited by Andreasen and Black. This is a ‘user-friendly’ textbook for persons just being introduced to the field of psychiatry."

Arrogance replaces intellect. Not a very smart move by Dr. Scully.

TO BE CONTINUED

For more information about the hunger strike, go to MIND FREEDOM