Date Published:
Author:
Source: MindFreedom Ireland
Where ‘mental health’ problems abound worldwide, the emphasis has shifted from religious beliefs to pseudo science, particularly in the form of medicine. Many of us live in a world where health is one of our main obsessions. We have only to look at our television advertisements to repeatedly remind us of this sad fact. It is a very clever way to deny social injustice, to overlook the real causes, to make huge profits for a rich minority, while the majority live in misery and coercion. It is no wonder then that women are part of this group of people.
Historically,women have been part of the underclasses. They are viewed as the weaker sex who is easy to control, easy to suppress, easy to abuse. When religion was the super power, women were defined as witches and heretics. Eve was only an after thought who came from Adam’s side! Then suppression and elimination was carried out by indoctrination and physical force. The here and now was not important. Heaven was the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. But today the emphasis has changed and the present is all that matters. Power has moved from religion to science and medicine and women are very easily defined as ‘mentally ill’. The modern method of control is more biological and less physical. Today’s weapons are drugs and chemicals in the form of ‘medicine’ and ‘food’. In America the FDA instead of acting as a regulatory system is destroying people mainly because of its corrupt relationship with the pharmaceutical companies. Women are very cleverly indoctrinated to believe in medicine as they were to believe in religion in the past. If you examine the television adds, many of them are directed at women. Many women who ‘suffer’ from ‘mental illnesses’ and ‘mental health’ problems, in reality are often poor, abused, terrified, homeless sexual objects with little leisure time for themselves and their children.
When women are true to themselves they have a softer side, they like to communicate, to listen, to nurture, to understand and reach out. They cannot be understood by bio-psychiatrists who see them as a bunch of chemicals to be controlled and regulated. The attitude of bio-psychiatry is so skewed that a face to face meeting is unnecessary. It could be done by email or by phone but then the small matter of a fee would not arise. Some friends of mine went on a 400 mile return journey to visit their psychiatrists for a maximum of 10 minutes while mostly only their drug consumption was discussed. I attended a psychiatrist for 15 years for less than 10 minute sessions while he kept me on the same drugs for most of that time. He never asked me any questions to get to know me. He saw me as someone with a chemical brain imbalance who needed drug treatment full stop. I got my medical record for the 15 years I attended him. There was very little written in that report. The writing was illegible and the rest was a litany of drugs and their quantities.
There are times when women are very vulnerable to indoctrination and incarceration by psychiatrists. One of these is at the birth of a child. It was at this time that I was unfortunate enough to encounter the psychiatric world. Prior to this, I had lived a sheltered life as a cloistered nun. I was deemed psychologically suitable by my community to be a professed sister. Admittedly, on leaving the convent, I was not street wise. I met and married my husband Jim within 2 short years. Our daughter Claire was born within another 2 years. It was a whirlwind. We were on top of the world but it was very short lived.
Two days after Claire’s birth I was whisked away to a psychiatric hospital. I had lived for four years in an enclosed order but nothing prepared me for the life I endured for the next four months. As a nun I could not go outside the gate of the convent. That was very difficult for a young rebellious woman but the four months, in two different psychiatric hospitals, were a thousand times more terrible than those four years locked away in a convent at the tender age of eighteen.
It is very difficult to describe to others what it is like to be a ‘non person,’ to have no control over your life while you are experiencing excruciating real effects of psychiatric drugs and electroshock for the first time. At the same time, you are ignorant and don’t know that these drugs can do terrible harm to your body, mind and spirit. You are like a guinea pig. You are separated from your loving family. You think everyday is a living nightmare. You find it difficult to see there will ever be an end to this continuous hell. This was my lot. I needed treatment. I had to accept I had a ‘mental illness’. I would be lucky to eventually join my broken family. After all, it was an illness just like any other illness!
But now I have a label. I can be incarcerated again if I step out of line. A psychiatrist can decide if I refuse to take his ‘medicine’ that I have a phobia about it without any medical test. Now I can to be hospitalized against my will. If I commit a crime I am innocent until I am found guilty by a court of law but if I do not want to take harmful, brain damaging psychotropic drugs, I can be incarcerated in a mental hospital without any trial and violently raped with these same lobotomizing drugs. This is not a crime!
While the mental health laws protect this corrupt system, we are all in danger of incarceration and forced drugging. But those who already have a psychiatric label are in much more danger. They are the invisible victims of this world. In Ireland at the moment, the Catholic Church’s reports of abuse are receiving much media attention. Canon law protected the violators of the Church’s sex abuse just as our mental health laws are protecting medical abuse today. It is easy to condemn past crimes. Unfortunately, governments, lawyers and the media rarely question this ‘lawful’ medical abuse.