As long as so-called "mental health professionals" have the legal right to satisfy their own whims, neuroses, and paternalistic perspectives at the cost of our liberty and our lives, we must recognize our true position. A "patient" is free to seek a second opinion; a "consumer" may, at will, walk away from a service or product he finds unsatisfactory; a "client" can always say "no"-- and make it stick. We have none of these options, for underlying each act of voluntary participation is the threat of force. It may not be expressed, it may not be acknowledged, but it is ever-present-- and we ignore it at our own peril. Voluntary treatment remains so only as long as the word "no" remains unspoken; with its utterance, how easily can that treatment be made involuntary!
With little concern and less regard, our rights are trampled, our feelings dismissed, our decisions invalidated, our intellect insulted, and we are delivered into the hands of those who strip us of our dignity, our selves, and our personhood.
And what of the reasoning of these upright Keepers of Sanity? When a person is forcibly kidnaped, shorn of all rights, and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward, is it irrational for him to express his outrage in no uncertain terms? Clearly, yes, in the through-the-looking-glass world in which he now finds himself, for such a response will invariably be met with restraints and drugs. Should the same person, in the same set of circumstances, appear to embrace with calm acceptance the prospect of his forced incarceration and personal denigration, he would be favorably viewed as at least partially rational and, for the most part, be left alone. Yet, if his serenity were genuine, he would be truly demented. This is what the Keepers fail to see and, like Lear, their blindness is of their own making.
When every vestige of individuality can be labled as a symptom of mental imbalance, when every word, every action, can be identified as evidence of the need for forced treatment, when the offer of "help" is also the threat of persecution, when our freedom can be lost to the biased, narrow-minded, and too-often self-serving opinions of a single individual with the power to turn the Constitution into a fraud, we cannot delude ourselves with the pleasantries of sanitized words. We are not patients. We are not consumers. We are not clients.
We are hostages.
Shoshanna Moser
equinox@harborside.com
