Are People Being Thrown Into Psychiatric Wards For Their Political Views?
By Washington's Blog
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Global Research, August 22, 2012
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URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.
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Mental Health Diagnoses Are Sometimes Politically-Motivated
Many psychologists and psychiatrists are good people, who are only trying to help their patients.
But the Nazi government substantially supported psychologists ... many of whom, in turn, espoused extermination of the people they considered to be “racially and cognitively compromised”.
Soviet psychiatrists famously aided Stalin in applying fake insanity diagnoses to political dissenters. The official explanation was that no sane person would declaim the Soviet government and Communism.
American psychologists created the American program of torture which was specially-crafted to produce false confessions to justify U.S. military policy. And see this.
And authoritarian American psychologists are eager to label anyone “taking a cynical stance toward politics, mistrusting authority, endorsing democratic practices, ... and displaying an inquisitive, imaginative outlook” as worthy of a trip to the insane asylum. (Those traits may also get one labeled as a potential terrorist.)
As prominent forensic psychiatrist James Knoll – psychiatry professor at SUNY-Syracuse and director of a forensic fellowship program – writes in the Psychiatric Times:
Even psychologists with good intentions can erroneously label people delusional simply because they themselves make bad assumptions.
There is even a label for this – the “Martha Mitchell Effect” – defined as:
The authors of a paper on this phenomenon (Bell, V., Halligan, P.W., Ellis, H.D. (2003) Beliefs About Delusions. The Psychologist, 6 (8), 418-422) conclude:
In other words, psychologists who haven’t taken the time to examine for themselves the claims of their patients will tend to label as delusional anything which they “intuitively” feel is improbable. As such, psychologists and psychiatrists are just as prone to acting out their irrational prejudices as anyone else ... unless they take the time to investigate and educate themselves.
Governments Indefinitely Detaining Citizens In Psychiatric Wards Without Due Process of Law
As such, detention in psych wards on mere “suspicion” of posing a danger – without due process of law – is troubling.
For example, former marine Brandon Raub was just carted off and locked in a psychiatric ward for his allegedly “anti-government” Facebook posts.
AP reports today:
New York Police officer Adrian Schoolcraft was involuntarily hospitalizated in a psychiatric ward after he recorded videotapes of his fellow police officers engaging in corruption.
Claire Swinney of New Zealand was also held in a psychiatric ward and called “delusional” for criticizing the government. Susan Lindauer was held under the Patriot Act for a year at Carswell Air Force Base – where psychiatric drugs were pushed on her – after she alleged government corruption.
The Daily Mail notes:
Who gets to decide what “inappropriate” or “threatening” means? What if a whistleblower has information that a member of parliament has engaged in bribes? Would trying to reveal such information constitute “inappropriate or threatening communications or behaviours” in the context of “abnormally intense preoccupations” with that MP’s illegal actions?
Indeed, a study published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry found a high rate of false positives in the British identification of dangerous persons.
The Mail continues:
Indeed, the whole “indefinite detention” process (which Americans living on American soil are subject to) can be based on circular reasoning:
This is an analogy. We are not accusing psych wards of using torture. However, they do often use powerful psychiatric drugs on patients ... which can elicit false confessions.
Are we going to slide into Soviet levels of psychiatric detention of political dissidents? Unless the spread of psychiatric detention without due process of law is checked, the mere belief that the government is interfering with your liberty may become grounds for locking you away.
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