By Graeme Merry
Psychiatric patients are among the poorest, most marginalised, stigmatised and oppressed groups in Australian society. I know this because I have spent the last five years getting enmeshed in, and struggling to escape from, the psychiatric system. My story is fairly typical.
In 1987, I made the mistake of showing a psychiatrist I was seeing at the time a long poem I had written. In this poem I tried to describe a religious experience I had recently had. There were lines like "I see angels on trams", in which I simply meant that ordinary human beings have an angelic side to them.
On reading my poem, this psychiatrist immediately diagnosed me "schizophrenic". I was to find out later that the working definition of "schizophrenic" is (1) hearing voices (which presumably aren't there) and (2) having visions (which also aren't there).
I consequently spent three months as an in-patient in a psychiatric ward of St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. — I needed a break anyway and the fellow patients and food made my stay pleasant enough. However, I was immediately placed on some very strange drugs — in particular, Stelazine, Modecate, Cogentin and Largactil. The first three drugs were so powerful that I developed acute "Parkinsonism" — a well-known side effect that includes involuntary shaking of the limbs and debilitating stiffness.
This stiffness became so severe that, on release from hospital, I had to ask someone to feed me — I couldn't lift the fork to my mouth, or comb my hair. I endured months while the psychiatrists changed my drugs around. I also had to dodge a particularly nasty psychiatrist in St Vincent's, who insisted on giving me electric shock therapy ("ECT")
I had spent a couple of years as an out-patient when, in 1989, I was visited by a couple of psychiatrists, who had heard I had taken myself off medication (it had no effect), and insisted I go to hospital.
I refused, and was a day later raided by six policemen, pointing pistols, who wrestled me to the floor, handcuffed me, put me in their paddy wagon, and took me to the maximum security ward of Royal Park Hospital, where I spent an unpleasant night before being taken to Mont Park Hospital.
I spent one month there, threatening to appeal (to the Mental Health Review Board) against my involuntary incarceration and negotiating with my psychiatrist for a quick release. I was released, but I have since had little to do with psychiatrists, or indeed the whole mental health system. It's a sick joke.
Until very recently, our mental health system was as bad as anything in Stalinist Russia. Dissidents of many kinds were labelled "schizophrenic", and involuntarily imprisoned in mental hospitals, where they were forced to undergo ECT or take stupefying drugs. There is an excellent anthology called Radical Psychology n) in which Thomas Scheff talks of "labeling theory" — a sociological approach which claims that '"schizophrenia' is an appellation, or label, which may be easily applied to those residual rule breakers whose deviant behaviour is difficult to classify".
"Schizophrenia" is defined more by what it is not, than by what it is. Psychiatrists haven't a clue what it is; but it is a very useful "too hard basket" in which to put people whose behaviour they do not understand. I cannot count the number of Christians, Ananda Margi, socialists, prostitutes, hippies and punks I have encountered in my brief sojourn into the "funny farm" — the places are full of them. (I remember one prostitute going through a religious crisis — she was victimised on two counts.)
One has to distinguish the situation before the Mental Health Act of 1987 from the situation now. Under this new act, you cannot be regarded as mentally ill because of religious views, political beliefs or sexual persuasion.
While the act is progressive, it has loopholes. For instance, if you are a Christian, do not — repeat, do not — confess any religious visions or "words of God" to your psychiatrist. Visions and voices are still enough to get you labelled "schizophrenic". From my own experience, I have yet to discover whether the new act has any teeth (I have been legally advised that the only way to overturn a diagnosis is to get a second psychiatric opinion, which I am obviously not happy with.)
Secondly, there are some very basic human rights that psychiatric patients are denied. The only other group denied these rights is the prison population. However, psychiatric patients are not criminals — they have done nothing "wrong". They are said to suffer from a "sickness", and yet, unlike the physically sick, they can be:
- involuntarily incarcerated (this still applies if your psychiatrist thinks it is "good for you");
- locked in solitary confinement (I have seen this happen);
- forced to take mind-numbing medication, including ECT;
- have their pensions administered by the nursing staff (I have also witnessed this);
- be encouraged to work in sheltered workshops at Third World rates ($6 per day at Mont Park).
The situation is so bad I am thinking of setting up a "Mental patients' Liberation project", as has existed in the USA, which would advise mental patients of their human rights. These can be extrapolated from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Thirdly, the working definition of "schizophrenia" is based on some very muddy thinking. Instead of seeing "visions and voices" as a neurological disease to be treated by physiological drugs, we should , and perhaps advantageous, psychological experiences (similar to perception, cognition, memory). Some of the greatest religious figures (Jesus Christ, Moses), prophets (St John of the Cross) and artists (William Blake) had "visions and voices".
I would refer interested people to the writings of R.D. Laing, David Cooper and the above-mentioned anthology Radical Psychology. Read them and I'm sure you will find in the Dickensian nature of Australia's psychiatric institutions a lot that socialists can get their teeth into.