Tag Archives: accountability of boards

A Discussion About Stigma Part I

31 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Anti Stigma Movement, End Mental Health Stigma, humane treatment, mental health advocacy, mental heath, mental institutions, patient abuse, stigma, Survivor Of Mental Health System

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I recently sat down with Dr. Patrick Corrigan, Psy.D, a distinguished professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, to talk about the stigma of mental illness. Pat is a world expert on the subject and has spent decades researching the topic. The interview is in three parts and will be posted over the next three weeks. In this first episode, Pat explains stigma, what it means, how it harms people, why people stigmatize.

Stigma is still a very real problem as Pat so eloquently explains in our casual conversation. It is the first hurdle to tackle when addressing abuse and misdiagnosis. If we can erase stigma it would benefit patients and ex-patients by allowing them to have a voice, to feel less discrimination and less isolated in our world. I hope you will, as I did, learn something from these interviews with Pat.

https://youtu.be/A6CcdbspaOI

Forced Incarceration Is A Myth. Says Who?

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in humane treatment, mental health advocacy, mental heath, mental institutions, patient abuse, psychiatric abuse, Uncategorized

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**I yanked the first version of this post because I tried to cover a lot of ground, and it just felt overweighted. So, here is the  edited version which I hope will be more easily digestible. More to come in the next post.**

For my birthday, the friends who suggested the photo for the cover of my blog gave me a book called, Forced Into Treatment.  The title made think the book was an argument against forced incarceration,  or people held against their wills in psychiatric hospitals. Great, I thought. Someone has documented this. There’s another voice out in the wilderness!  I didn’t focus on the sub-title, “The Role of Coercion in Clinical Practice”, hopeful, perhaps, I would find some research, no matter how dated, that would back up the devastating impact resulting from forced treatment in general, and the trauma I experienced first-hand in 1989 when I was held against my will at Timberlawn Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

I was wrong. The book, the brain child of the Committee on Government Policy for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, or GAP, published in 1994 by the American Psychiatric Press, is essentially, a tool to impact public policy, speaking to the psychiatric community, legislators and lobbyists. There is no bibliography or any detailed footnotes in the book except for broad citations. So, how representative of reality can it be? The back of the book lists only the other GAP publications and Symposia Reports, along with a section called GAP Committees (25) and Membership.  But it was the Committee on Government Policy that produced this book.  Its stated mission is The Advancement of Psychiatry. Not the Advancement of Mental Health, not the Advancement of Humane Psychiatric Care, and so on. The book covers a number of topics including, “Coercion in Child Psychiatric Treatment,” and “Mandated Therapy in Military Settings.”  But the one that caught my attention was “Coercive Treatment is Reportedly Not Abused.” The paragraph reads in full:

“One factor that is not much addressed in the debate over the need for judicial safeguards is the empirical data on the prevalence of abuse within the system. It is noteworthy that a congressional hearing by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, produced no cases of successful railroading (e.g.: forcing an individual into a psychiatric hospital not for his or her best interests but the for the gain of the petitioner).  A field investigation of mental hospitals in six states conducted by the American Bar Association concluded that railroading is a myth (Slovenka 1977). Although clinical and legal safeguards do prevent railroading, as defined above, the involved parties may become so frustrated with the restrictiveness of the system that they ‘finesse the law’ to obtain care that is in the best interest of the patient.”

From my own experience of being held against my will at Timberlawn 25 years ago, the notion that forced incarceration is “a myth” is a lie.  I was a casualty of finessing the law. I wonder how many other people were victims of “the myth?”

 

Poof!

15 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by in humane treatment, mental health advocacy, mental heath, psychiatric misdiagnosis

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After my last post, I received a comment from a health care professional who (full disclosure) has also acted as a life coach of sorts for me for some years now. “I was left thinking and feeling,” he wrote, ” ‘what would humane inpatient psychiatric care look like particularly with the projected increase [in care with the Affordable Care Act]?”

It occurred to me that the idea of ‘ Camera As Advocate’  isn’t just a one-off post, but  a jumping off point for a series. What would have to happen for there to be no need for cameras as surveillance? There are a number of things to consider, which I’ll talk about in coming posts. The issues of quality of and compensation for staff;  accountability and transparency; inpatient medical vs. inpatient psychiatric; environment/appearance of facilities; continuity of care; the problem of objectification; insurance; who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

This might seem obvious but the most basic factor in humane care is to see the human being often buried under a diagnosis or worse, a merry-go-round of diagnoses and misdiagnoses. It’s depressingly common. I know from my own experience that once I was diagnosed (and misdiagnosed repeatedly) I vanished as a person. Poof!  Through the Looking Glass I went. The excavation of my personal history took a back seat at the rear of the bus  to my being a set of symptoms to be treated. When I finally got a copy of my medical records, there were at least 6 diagnoses from different staff members and doctors who were involved in some way in my treatment. They didn’t consult each other, clearly. They couldn’t make up their minds. They had no idea what they were doing. I was stunned, still am, by the almost casualness, the willingness to just essentially trash my life.

Patients need a voice. They need to be heard. They should be allowed, to the greatest extent possible, to be involved in their treatment plans, to be included in meetings with the staff, have ongoing access to their records, a more open treatment plan that has flexibility if staff has the guts to admit they were wrong or simply don’t know what’s going on. I was appalled at what doctors wrote in my records. But there was no way to change them, no recourse. What they wrote was considered reliable and the truth. I was rendered mute. Patients cannot just be allowed to disappear. That’s a start.