Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 21:08:28 -0500 From: Quinn D Rossander Subject: NARPA-CSP & Political Vertigo by Ron Thompson To: Multiple recipients of list MADNESS NARPA to CSP And Autumn Week of Political Vertigo by Ron Thompson The leadership of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy journeys to San Diego to preside over its 13th annual convention, and to engage in an annual ritual of self-congratulation on its ... "radicalism". But when faced with a Board Member's request to boldly call for the repeal and abolition of the laws which empower Forced Treatment Psychiatry, the same leadership turns pale and confused, and fends off the request amidst indignant recrimination at this disturbance of its political sleep. It proves impossible to frame a coherent motion and get a vote. One day after this convention ends, the Community Support Program of the Center for Mental Health Services holds an annual conference for its somewhat volatile constituencies. That is, constituencies. That is, constituencies of hyperintense family members, the tamest of mental health "consumers", and state government bureaucrats - now including a sprinkling of ex-patient bureaucrats most of whom are eagerly turning their backs on their own experiences as well as their peers in order to embrace and 'inside the beltway' psychology. Arcanely, indeed boringly entitled the CSP Service System Improvement Grantees Meeting, this conference is opened by the shortish and diffident-seeming figure who heads CMHS, Dr. Bernie Arons. Nevertheless, within this comprehensively modest fellow lurks a would-be Napoleon of psychiatric imperialism. Hence the vertigo of this writer. For in vivid contrast to the West Coast claims of boldness but actual timidity, I found myself listening a day later to an ambitions new claim of jurisdiction for psychiatry in incongruously mild, even hesitant terms. That initiative to be shortly described. But first, to the languid shores of southern California. Attendance at the NARPA conference was down to less than 200 persons for the first time in the seven conferences I've attended. Nevertheless, the group stayed true to its proudest tradition, of having at least one speaker each year who engages in an excoriation of assaultive biological psychiatry that is at once articulate, passionate, humorous, and populist. This year, that mantle fell to the diminutive but resonantly named Joe Sharkey, author of one of the historically best-grounded and most readable indictments of psychiatry ever published, _BEDLAM - Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy. (1994). The aggressive timidity mentioned above in the Board meeting no doubt explains the traditional NARPA pattern of inviting extremely vigorous speakers, and yet never achieving any political results, or even political notice, in the wider world. Perhaps also related to this distressing result are the number of workshops devoted to what might be called Fair Forced Treatment. Such as earnest discussions of how to lessen seclusion and restraint practices, thereby implicitly and fully accepting that such practices can be 'medical' activities consistent with the Hippocratic Oath. But at least one workshop may have broken new ground. Conceived by Dian Cox of Texas and Peter Stastny, MD, a cautiously radical psychiatrist from New York City, and including this writer, it was entitled Coercion, Malpractice, and Hippocratic Psychiatry. An overflow group listened to Stastny build on a theme he first publicly discussed in Houston last May. That it is outrageous for a psychiatrist forcing himself on a patient who doesn't want anything to do with him (or her), and who is really acting as an agent of social control, to pretend his behavior has anything to do with the practice of medicine according to the Hippocratic Oath. Another participant in this workshop tackled the issue of why psychiatry has always gotten away with this total inconsistency so easily. He charged that lawyers are even more derelict in their overall duty to society than psychiatrists, for the reason that, contrary to the example of Stastny and a handful of other psychiatrists around the country who are disputing the chief behaviors and attitudes of their own profession, there are NO practicing lawyers denouncing the laws which allow those activities to take place - not one. No lawyer is calling for the abolition of the laws allowing emergency violent "treatment" and establishing 'clinical review' panels as a disguise for premeditated forced treatment. No lawyer is attacking the elastic laws about 'dangerous to self or others' and 'gravely disabled' as justifications for psychiatric incarcerations. And no lawyer is opposing the laws about inpatient and (increasingly popular) outpatient 'medical' commitment - all the laws without which forced drugging and other assaults in the name of medical treatment can not take place. As an exercise to prove this, he challenged anyone of the thirty or more individuals at this workshop to fine ONE lawyer at this convention of alleged radicals who would publicly say, or who has ever written, or argued before a court, that forced treatment should be considered a violation of Substantive Due Process of Law. That it is a legal practice which should be abolished as beneath the minimum standard of decent society. A couple of lawyers were brought to the issuer of this challenge in the course of the convention, but in each case, it became quickly clear that while they opposed some form of Forced Treatment, they were unwilling to question or oppose the legal principle itself. For they were unwilling to say that if society wants to lock up certain people, it should - consistent with the barest minimum attention to fairness - find an HONEST reason for such deprivations of freedom, and for repeated violations of the physical and psychological integrity of such persons. Besides the always valuable and enjoyable networking, and the renewal of old friendships, other noteworthy events took place. A workshop entitled Youth Movement against Psychiatric Control was particularly anticipated by many. With the news that the young presenter was physically ill and hadn't arrived, at first it looked to be a major disappointment. But then, with quick and quite remarkable resourcefulness, the twenty-five or so attendees gave themselves a fine workshop on youth issues according to their own knowledge and experiences. this went so well an ongoing initiative was organized. A frequent plus at ex-patient gatherings is learning particularly useful and dramatic 'sound-bites'. My favorite at this convention came from Xenia Williams of Vermont, who is President of the Board of Directors of her state Protection and Advocacy agency - to my knowledge the only ex-patient in such a strategic position. In response to the kind of question in her workshop which ALWAYS comes up about individual 'hard cases' and frequently sabotages and derails public discussion of general policy issues, she used the dramatic phrase of "worst case scenario fear- mongering". Used carefully, to respond to the kind of accusatory and fear-ridden emotions often behind such questions, which are asked for the purpose of justifying every kind of psychiatric involuntarism and lock-up, I immediately felt I had a powerfully descriptive phrase to counter such questions when demagogically or hysterically motivated. Lastly, in spite of reduced attendance, tepid (except for Sharkey) plenary speeches, and a decided percentage of dishwatery workshops, the elections - of a third of the slots - to the NARPA board produced an unusual level of competition, and more strong candidates that positions to be filled. And so it seems that the NARPA group will endure another year (to meet in Madison, Wisconsin in '95), with yet another chance to actually become what it has so long pretended to be, a genuinely radical opponent of involuntary psychiatry. Returning to the east coast and Washington, I was as mentioned, immediately confronted with an initiative as bold as it was outrageous. The almost offhand comments by Dr. Arons about this initiative had little to do with the CSP subject matter, which is mainly about bureaucratic pork to ideologically docile ex-patients and to traditional bureaucrats in search of reasons for pushing paper around. Fairly serious port is involved, as the CSP budget is over $24 million. A major sub-plot to this port dispersal was the attitude of the parents, who appeared without exception to be members of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the state cells of that organization. This vast and almost dementedly dedicated group is seriously misnamed, for it is really a support group for the families of individuals successfully labelled mentally ill. They used to be totally opposed to CSP for taking any money away from their Holy Grail of "research" for the Final, Ultimate, Genetic Cause of mental illness. Which quest would be sad and even ludicrous, if it didn't provide most of the rationale for their fervent support of the psychiatric concentration camp system. A system they always want to extend in either tits hard or 'soft' version (the version individual members support depends on whether their family member is "compliant" or not with their "treatment"). Since CSP has shrewdly shoveled some of the pork in their direction, their attitude has declined to a simmering resentment rather than their former calls for shutting the program down. They still resent that CSP even pretends to listen to "consumers" as much as it really listens to them (for they know how to harass Congress and get supposed horror stories of non "care" of their relatives into the Media). It never occurs to NAMI that if CSP weren't buying off many of those "consumers" able to function as bureaucrats, some of them would be bold enough and talented enough to actually take on their crazy brain ideology. And therefore that it is in their interest to support CSP's increasingly successful campaign of cooptation. As it is, any such impulses by the consumer/bureaucrats are fiercely repressed in order to keep the pork oozing in their direction. A bizarre sideshow in CSP nowhere land is the emergence of native- american AMI's is apparently every western state. Startlingly, it appears that this form of deculturalizing psychiatric colonialism, spearheaded by the zeal of local white AMI's to pathologize as much of human behavior and emotion as possible, is being swallowed whole by native-americans throughout the West. Although I only glanced, I saw not a hint of skepticism among people whom recent news stories have said are supposedly undergoing a renewal of cultural self-respect. Other sideshows call out for brief comment. Such as two african- americans windily droning on about the need for respecting "diversity". But when asked about how to be respectful of diversity in the "administration" of forced treatment, one (the psychiatrist) defiantly and unresponsively said he is not afraid to use it when necessary, while the other, a former patient, called it a trick question and went off into even windier and more opaque rhetoric than he had lost himself in earlier. But after all such oddities and creative rationalizations, what I heard first made the most impact. This initiative, referred to earlier, was Dr. Arons' announcement that CMHS is gearing up a major campaign to target grandparents as a big new class who are 'in need of' psychiatric services. Specifically, he announced that a National Conference is being planned to identify the 'mental health needs' of those grandparents who, instead of being able to enjoy idyllic retirement years, are often finding in necessary to care for their grandchildren due to the need for two incomes in the families of their adult children. Supposedly, if CMHS is being consistent with its brain ideology, these economic stresses - if that is how they are experienced - are leading to brain diseases and chemical imbalances in a large new class of Americans. While one may be appalled at this huge new source of confusion to be generated in society by biological psychiatric thinking, one nevertheless has to admire the boldness and brazenness of the initiative. And thus did one observer witness a week's events first on one side of the country and then the other, which, when taken together and with regard to both the style and substance of each, produced marked feeling of political vertigo. by RON THOMPSON This file came from anonymous ftp sjuvm.stjohns.edu cd MADNESS The MADNESS ftp site is a service of MADNESS, an online discussion on LISTSERV@sjuvm.stjohns.edu Please credit the list if you copy this file.