AM I STILL LAUGHING EXTRACT
Please, please explain something to me – where is the CARE in mental health care? Every person who has been through the system will tell their horror stories of how badly they were treated, of stripped searches, ECT, forced injections, indifferent nursing, etc, so a review of the mental health bill could have been an opportunity to improve this, but what do they use it for – more compulsory treatment, more horror for vulnerable people, more reason to distrust the system. This new legislature conflicts with Human Rights. How could that possibly be justified? If you were newly experiencing mental distress or having strange mental experiences, would you want to enter a system that could force treatment in your own home? No room for love, respect or trust? You’re going stay the fuck away, and become more unwell, more isolated, more alienated. You’re going realise you’re living in the 21st century and that psychiatry is still medieval, and that the majority of its practitioners are just drug pushers for the pharmaceutical companies. What you need is hope, but that can’t be offered without side effects, it can’t be offered with mental health professionals exchanging their role of carer for jailer.
Also explain this to me: that the majority of mental health professionals realise this mental health bill is unworkable and backward-sliding, that most mental health charities are against it, as are lawyers, carers and service users. So why is it still going through?
There was a Scrutiny Committee set up to look at this Bill, and they made over 100 recommendations to emphasise the rights, care and treatment of vulnerable people without the need for compulsion, but most of it was ignored.
The government seems to be taking its consultation for this Bill from inaccurate, nasty Tabloid reportage. This Bill feeds people’s misconceptions on mental health issues. Doesn’t matter that murder committed by a mentally ill person is minute, and that you are more likely to be killed a drunk 9-5er. To me, this bill is based on prejudice – nothing more. Care for vulnerable people seems very secondary.
When Creative Routes, the mad performance company I belong to, performed on the Liberty stage at Trafalgar Square, the Bill was represented as Fear Embodied. This Bill is a monster.
Any warmth the mental health system had is draining away to be as cold as a corpse, as welcoming as a handshake full of razor blades. This Bill won’t decrease murders but increase them. I see the extra suicides by mad people, a hidden holocaust. But dead mad people are good for society, we’re the empty-eaters, burden to the tax payers (!) I am fucking angry about this. But give me your worst and I will give you my best. No, I won’t have an axe in my hand. Instead ”I will not cease from mental fight nor shall my art sleep in my hand.”
The only compulsory treatment orders there should be is this: That all service users have respect from all the professionals they deal with; that every service user has, if it is needed, good housing support and provision; psychological therapies to all who want it; social support and leisure activities and employment opportunities. That is the kind of treatment that should be compulsory. A treatment order that is solely based on coercion and forced drugging makes it look like they are punishment squads for people who dare to be different from the norm. I know there are some ‘mad’ people who are violent. But there are sane people who are violent, but not every violent person has medication forced on them.
"An epistle to equality, tolerance and the true beauty of madness. Dolly Sen's powerful personal pilgrimage to love, life and humanity again is a very intimate tale about the power of dreaming, taking control and fighting for the right to be oneself and to be equal and to be accepted" - David Morris, Senior Policy Adviser to the Mayor (Disability), Greater London Authority
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ISBN: 978-1-905610-94-5