Justina Pelletier

[Sho Nuff 719]

GP still trying the internet diagnosis line after getting whipped...and shown that he didn't actually diagnose the parents anyway.

 

Psycho provides very good information and a counter side. The problem is he is also biased as an anti-psych advocate because of what happened to him.

Can't blame someone for doing so after going through what he says he did.

The problem for all is we don't have all the information...we have to go on what we do have. Which, so far is a team of doctors and a judge reviewing it that sides with what Pen so far has said.

 

Neither psych nor GP can refute that, so they have to fall back on arguments of other things and for one of them...well, poor attempts at the same ol bash that has been wrong every time he tried it.

[penultimatestraw 473]

is that a yes ? My job and life demand more than sitting in front of a computer all day and night. A simple yes or no regarding the criminal proceedings against the parents would suffice.

 

TIA

I see. Where'd you find the time for the other 41K+ posts?

 

Also, clearly I have nothing better to do than improving your reading comprehension.

[IGotWorms 3,315]

But this statement of yours doesn't make any sense my friend. If the parents cannot be criminally charged for "medical child abuse" (which is what happens when there is genuine Munchhausen by proxy), then case closed. Stop the nonsense.

 

Let me give you the actual reason why the parents were not charged. As criminal defendants they would have had discovery powers well beyond what a civil trial in family court allows, not to mention that a DA would have to convince a jury that listening to a mito expert at Tufts vs listening to a BCH psych is a criminal offense. Good luck with that.

 

There is absolutely nothing to this case except evil Harvard affiliated psychiatrists who work at BCH and corrupt government officials who rubber stamp their wishes. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yeah that's just not true. A civil rights lawsuit gives you much greater discovery powers such as taking depositions and gaining access to "nom exculpatory" evidence. Hell FOIA requests often unearth more info than criminal discovery

[Googballz 39]

Child abuse is a crime right ? Have the parents been arrested and charged yet ?

Typically in child abuse cases the other children are removed from the home for their safety.

 

How long will the authorities leave these other children in harms way?

[IGotWorms 3,315]

Child abuse is a crime right ? Have the parents been arrested and charged yet ?

You're like a child, who wanders into the theatre...

[IGotWorms 3,315]

Innerweb diagnosis is in Penultimate's wheelhouse. Please stay out of it.

 

I surprised he hasn't diagnosed Psycho yet......he has probably provided too much information.

Sounds like delusional disorder to me

 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder

[penultimatestraw 473]

Yeah that's just not true. A civil rights lawsuit gives you much greater discovery powers such as taking depositions and gaining access to "nom exculpatory" evidence. Hell FOIA requests often unearth more info than criminal discovery

He has some valid points, but there are several other statements that I would bet aren't accurate. Not in the mood to challenge them, as clearly his agenda is set.

 

But the videos he links are super entertaining!

[drobeski 3,061]

You're like a child, who wanders into the theatre...

is that anything like being a legal secretary who sucks from the government teet ?

[FeelingMN 273]

There could be a variety of reasons for this. Differing burdens of proof could be one, probably clear and convincing versus beyond a reasonable doubt but that's just my guess. Another reason could be that you have different agencies involved in making the decisions, so perhaps one considers it a priority or has the resources to pursue action while the other does not. But most likely is that the decision makers don't see this as a criminal matter so much as a child welfare and psychiatric matter. Would punishing the parents really achieve positive results in any way?

The kid has been removed from the home for a considerable amount of time. I assume they did so because they suspected medical child abuse. Since when do we let child abusers slide?

 

If the state doesn't see it as a criminal matter so much as a child welfare and psych matter, then they are saying they are more capable of meeting the needs of the child than the parents. Have fun on that slippery slope.

 

In this case, the parents aren't meeting the child's needs because of presumed abuse and not some other form of incapacity, like poor health or whatever. We punish them not to achieve positive results but because when someone does something wrong, there are consequences. Isn't that the basis of justice?

[psychsurvivor 2]

I'm not fearmongering, nor advocating everyone be "locked up". Just recognizing psychiatrists provide useful care for many people. OCD is an interesting example. My roommate in med school has it, so I saw first hand how much better he functioned on his medications. Sure they have side effects, as does just about anything one ingests. But he almost had to drop out several times while off them because of his untreated mental illness. And he is a child psychiatrist today, plus one of the most intelligent and thoughtful individuals I know.

 

Of course there are bad psychiatrists, as there are practitioners in all fields of medicine. And all occupations. Sure the DSM is far from perfect. This doesn't mean the profession and treatment modalities are always out of line - I'll argue they promote far more good than the few cases of mistreatment you highlight.

 

Lost in your vitriol is the motivation of the non-psychiatric docs who suspected MCA in the first place. Why would they promote evaluation which removed parental custody? Why aren't physicians clamoring for confirmation of Justina's mitochondrial disorder?

And lost in this in this pro psychiatry propaganda is the whole issue of civil rights that psychiatry thinks has a right to violate (a prerogative that no other branch of medicine asserts). If people who, demographically speaking, are disproportionally more likely to be HIV positive were to be forced on Truvada http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm312210.htm , HIV infection rates would go to the floor. Just reducing the infection rate by half, would save 7500 lives annually in the United States. If people who are obese were to be put on forced "fat camps", a big chunk of the 600000 annual deaths due to heart disease could similarly be prevented or delayed. I could continue with other examples but you get the idea. Yet, because we respect civil rights, we do not condone said coercive "health policies" (even though we have empirical evidence that they would accomplish the goal of reducing death http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2688320/ ).

 

However, people like you want to give psychiatry, despite it not being a scientific discipline, increased powers for them to screw as many lives as possible.

 

To understand psychiatry, one needs to understand what it really is: a system of "social control" by experts who hold MD degrees. It's today's equivalent to the religious tribunals that existed in the US a few hundred years ago. Then, people were required to be theology experts because people respected "men of God". The social controllers of today are required to have an MD degree only because many would trust anything that a guy on a white coat says. There is an academic article that calls the DSM a "sacred text for a secular community" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13674676.2012.762574 . I think that that description is spot on. Once you see psychiatry and the DSM for what they are, this Justina situation makes perfect sense. The "secular priests" of 2014 are using their "secular sacred text" to exercise social control an an unwilling victim, a situation no different from the Salem trials. Only now instead of "executing" those accused o heresy, the new social controllers, lock up the heretics in psych wards.

 

You are a bigot from the moment you believe that psychiatry has a prerogative to define behavioral orthodoxy for the rest of society just because psychiatry says so.

 

Your friend is happy with his drugs, good for him. All I ask is that nobody is forced onto said poisonous substances just because your friend says so. Very typical of the new secular zealots: the socialization of their own experience. As an OCD labeled individual (which is not to say that I recognize OCD as a genuine disease because it hasn't been shown to be one), all I am asking is for my constitutional right to be left alone as long as I do not commit any crimes. I do not think it is a very hard thing to ask.

[Googballz 39]

The kid has been removed from the home for a considerable amount of time. I assume they did so because they suspected medical child abuse. Since when do we let child abusers slide?

 

If the state doesn't see it as a criminal matter so much as a child welfare and psych matter, then they are saying they are more capable of meeting the needs of the child than the parents. Have fun on that slippery slope.

 

In this case, the parents aren't meeting the child's needs because of presumed abuse and not some other form of incapacity, like poor health or whatever. We punish them not to achieve positive results but because when someone does something wrong, there are consequences. Isn't that the basis of justice?

Once again, if the authorities suspect child abuse why have they not taken the other children out of an abusive home?

[psychsurvivor 2]

Neither psych nor GP can refute that, so they have to fall back on arguments of other things and for one of them...well, poor attempts at the same ol bash that has been wrong every time he tried it.

Even giving psychiatry a value that ontologically doesn't deserve, when such a situation happens, per Massachusetts own laws according to Alan Dershowitz stated, it is the parents' prerogative not the judge's to make the final call.

 

This is the big obstacle that nobody willing to give BCH the benefit of the doubt has yet surmounted: judges DO NOT HAVE a legal right to override the parents' decisions in medical disputes unless there is a crime being committed (and we would all agree that no criminal charges have been filed against the Pelletiers).

 

BTW, I would appreciate you use the work "psych survivor" or "psych" alone to refer to me. "Psycho" has very negative connotations, like calling "negro" a black person or "" a gay man. You get the idea.

[penultimatestraw 473]

The kid has been removed from the home for a considerable amount of time. I assume they did so because they suspected medical child abuse. Since when do we let child abusers slide?

 

If the state doesn't see it as a criminal matter so much as a child welfare and psych matter, then they are saying they are more capable of meeting the needs of the child than the parents. Have fun on that slippery slope.

 

In this case, the parents aren't meeting the child's needs because of presumed abuse and not some other form of incapacity, like poor health or whatever. We punish them not to achieve positive results but because when someone does something wrong, there are consequences. Isn't that the basis of justice?

I don't know about the legal ramifications of criminal child abuse but I think there are several goals in charging them: to punish the abusers, hopefully rehabilitate them and deter others from committing similar crimes. Above all, the child must be kept safe.

[psychsurvivor 2]

He has some valid points, but there are several other statements that I would bet aren't accurate. Not in the mood to challenge them, as clearly his agenda is set.

 

But the videos he links are super entertaining!

 

I have had several debates with so called "respected psychiatrists", one of them http://psychiatry.duke.edu/faculty/details/0117067 which I can point you to if you are interested. Inevitable all my debates end up the same way. When my pro psychiatry opponent is presented with the evidence that psychiatry is not scientific, that its diagnoses are even non reliable (there are modern enactments of Rosenhan type of experiments), of the widespread conflicts of interests that affect the discipline (recently the chairman of the current edition of the DSM, DSM-5, David Kupfer was shown to have had a huge one while he served as the chairman of the task force of DSM-5 http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/01/conflict-interest-dsm-5-apa/), that psychiatrists have no power to predict violence (since we humans have free will), that adopting their paternalist views (even giving psychiatry some value) would result in a "Brave New World" type of situation, my opponent, instead of refuting my arguments, always bails out with a nonsensical accusation that I am biased. As if defending psychiatry was not a form of bias!!!

 

This is how it goes with the religious zealots of today, they have the same zeal defending the sacred "DSM truth" as their predecessors had defending the literal interpretation of the Bible. Same kind of people, different book but same tactics!

[FeelingMN 273]

Having spent several weeks locked up with people so labelled (they are as human as you and I). In one of the two wards, I shared my room with a guy who was labelled "schizophrenic". I count several people labelled as "bipolar" among my friends and I have met countless of survivors with those labels who live their lives peacefully without offending anyone. You can meet a few here http://openparadigmproject.com/ . Tell those people that they need (we need!) to be on drugs or else .

What you are doing here is called "scaremongering" not very different from this (minute 1:20 and after) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AXAOT_swIE

People fear what they don't understand. I get that. But the people who behave in ways non approved by DSM committees are still human beings, they (we!) have their (our) free will and they (we) deserve respect. As long as (we) they commit no crimes, we deserve the same civil rights as anybody else.

For all your lecturing about your "professional experience" you are coming out as something much more nefarious: a bigot who agrees with the pathologization categories of the DSM.

There's the rub. If you keep your cool and play nice citizen there's no reason to "lock you up". If you live your life antagonistically, offending folks.....well, you're going to come under scrutiny from the medical community.....because that behavior isn't condoned by society.

 

Fact is, millions of Americans take their meds and live peaceful, fulfilling lives......without ever being "locked up". There's a way to do it.

[psychsurvivor 2]

There's the rub. If you keep your cool and play nice citizen there's no reason to "lock you up". If you live your life antagonistically, offending folks.....well, you're going to come under scrutiny from the medical community.....because that behavior isn't condoned by society.

Fact is, millions of Americans take their meds and live peaceful, fulfilling lives......without ever being "locked up". There's a way to do it.

Sure, just as million of black Americans who accepted the Jim Crow laws lived "peaceful, fulfilling lives" as long as they didn't dare challenge them. Thankfully many like Rosa Parks did and our society is better off declaring that discrimination based on race alone is illegal.

 

Not agreeing with a "DSM truth" makes still people subjects of legal abuse by the medical establishment. This has to be abolished. In fact, I contend that the abolition of coercive psychiatry is the last remaining battle of the civil rights movement.

[NewbieJr 540]

Serious question, pyschosurvivor....what brought you here for this discussion? Were you searching this subject and this message board popped up? Or are you a regular member and thought you'd become a little more anonymous for this discussion?

[penultimatestraw 473]

And lost in this in this pro psychiatry propaganda is the whole issue of civil rights that psychiatry thinks has a right to violate (a prerogative that no other branch of medicine asserts). If people who, demographically speaking, are disproportionally more likely to be HIV positive were to be forced on Truvada http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm312210.htm , HIV infection rates would go to the floor. Just reducing the infection rate by half, would save 7500 lives annually in the United States. If people who are obese were to be put on forced "fat camps", a big chunk of the 600000 annual deaths due to heart disease could similarly be prevented or delayed. I could continue with other examples but you get the idea. Yet, because we respect civil rights, we do not condone said coercive "health policies" (even though we have empirical evidence that they would accomplish the goal of reducing death http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2688320/ ).

 

However, people like you want to give psychiatry, despite it not being a scientific discipline, increased powers for them to screw as many lives as possible.

 

To understand psychiatry, one needs to understand what it really is: a system of "social control" by experts who hold MD degrees. It's today's equivalent to the religious tribunals that existed in the US a few hundred years ago. Then, people were required to be theology experts because people respected "men of God". The social controllers of today are required to have an MD degree only because many would trust anything that a guy on a white coat says. There is an academic article that calls the DSM a "sacred text for a secular community" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13674676.2012.762574 . I think that that description is spot on. Once you see psychiatry and the DSM for what they are, this Justina situation makes perfect sense. The "secular priests" of 2014 are using their "secular sacred text" to exercise social control an an unwilling victim, a situation no different from the Salem trials. Only now instead of "executing" those accused o heresy, the new social controllers, lock up the heretics in psych wards.

 

You are a bigot from the moment you believe that psychiatry has a prerogative to define behavioral orthodoxy for the rest of society just because psychiatry says so.

 

Your friend is happy with his drugs, good for him. All I ask is that nobody is forced onto said poisonous substances just because your friend says so. Very typical of the new secular zealots: the socialization of their own experience. As an OCD labeled individual (which is not to say that I recognize OCD as a genuine disease because it hasn't been shown to be one), all I am asking is for my constitutional right to be left alone as long as I do not commit any crimes. I do not think it is a very hard thing to ask.

Name calling isn't going to dissuade me that psychiatry is a useful discipline. While you are correct that one's definition of normalcy is subjective, most psychiatric diagnoses require an aberrant pattern of behavior impeding one's functionality to qualify for therapy.

 

OCD is an excellent example. My friend doesn't like taking his meds, and when he is off them his ability to work and interact with others is extremely impaired. I've seen it first hand; he is a completely different person on meds (for the better IMO). You may be different, but that doesn't invalidate the utility of pharmacotherapy. But unless patients pose a danger to themselves or others and lack decisional capacity, use of the meds should be voluntary.

[psychsurvivor 2]

Serious question, pyschosurvivor....what brought you here for this discussion? Were you searching this subject and this message board popped up? Or are you a regular member and thought you'd become a little more anonymous for this discussion?

Correct, I did a Google search for info during the last 24 hours and this discussion popped up in the first or second page. I didn't even know what fantasy football was before coming here .

 

I saw this as an opportunity to bring the Justina case to a wider audience and to inform the same audience about the evilness of psychiatry.

 

I ask you to seriously consider taking the Rosenhan challenge. If you tell me which city/state you live in, I can recommend you a few psych hospitals that you can use for your experiment. I bet 1000 dollars that you will be admitted .

[penultimatestraw 473]

BTW, I would appreciate you use the work "psych survivor" or "psych" alone to refer to me. "Psycho" has very negative connotations, like calling "negro" a black person or "######" a gay man. You get the idea.

And I would appreciate it if you wouldn't repeatedly call me a bigot. Or zealot. Or pro psychiatry propagandist...

[penultimatestraw 473]

Correct, I did a Google search for info during the last 24 hours and this discussion popped up in the first or second page. I didn't even know what fantasy football was before coming here .

 

I saw this as an opportunity to bring the Justina case to a wider audience and to inform the same audience about the evilness of psychiatry.

 

I ask you to seriously consider taking the Rosenhan challenge. If you tell me which city/state you live in, I can recommend you a few psych hospitals that you can use for your experiment. I bet 1000 dollars that you will be admitted .

You will get your message across more effectively if you are less grandiose in your prose. And less absolute. The world is painted in shades of gray, not black and white.

[penultimatestraw 473]

I have had several debates with so called "respected psychiatrists", one of them http://psychiatry.duke.edu/faculty/details/0117067 which I can point you to if you are interested. Inevitable all my debates end up the same way. When my pro psychiatry opponent is presented with the evidence that psychiatry is not scientific, that its diagnoses are even non reliable (there are modern enactments of Rosenhan type of experiments), of the widespread conflicts of interests that affect the discipline (recently the chairman of the current edition of the DSM, DSM-5, David Kupfer was shown to have had a huge one while he served as the chairman of the task force of DSM-5 http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/01/conflict-interest-dsm-5-apa/), that psychiatrists have no power to predict violence (since we humans have free will), that adopting their paternalist views (even giving psychiatry some value) would result in a "Brave New World" type of situation, my opponent, instead of refuting my arguments, always bails out with a nonsensical accusation that I am biased. As if defending psychiatry was not a form of bias!!!

 

This is how it goes with the religious zealots of today, they have the same zeal defending the sacred "DSM truth" as their predecessors had defending the literal interpretation of the Bible. Same kind of people, different book but same tactics!

Or perhaps they realize you aren't open to civil discussion, or incapable of doing so without resorting to histrionics.

[FeelingMN 273]

all I am asking is for my constitutional right to be left alone as long as I do not commit any crimes. I do not think it is a very hard thing to ask.

I do not have the right to go around saying I'm going to pound someone's face into gravel because they disagree with me. If you do that around enough people, you're going to attract attention.....irrespective if a crime has been committed.....yet.

 

You believe in free will, yet you have blamed a lot of people for your circumstances. Maybe you're a victim....or maybe you lack circumspection necessary to take responsibility for your actions.

[NewbieJr 540]

Correct, I did a Google search for info during the last 24 hours and this discussion popped up in the first or second page. I didn't even know what fantasy football was before coming here .

 

I saw this as an opportunity to bring the Justina case to a wider audience and to inform the same audience about the evilness of psychiatry.

 

I ask you to seriously consider taking the Rosenhan challenge. If you tell me which city/state you live in, I can recommend you a few psych hospitals that you can use for your experiment. I bet 1000 dollars that you will be admitted .

I was just curious. When you first entered the thread and I saw it was post #1, I figured you were another lame alias. This place is crawling with them. But as I continued reading, I could tell you knew your sh!t. This thread has become very entertaining and I am enjoying the interplay between someone in the medical field and someone who's been through it from the patient side.

 

As for your challenge, I'll take that list at the first sign of unstableness.

[penultimatestraw 473]

I was just curious. When you first entered the thread and I saw it was post #1, I figured you were another lame alias. This place is crawling with them. But as I continued reading, I could tell you knew your sh!t. This thread has become very entertaining and I am enjoying the interplay between someone in the medical field and someone who's been through it from the patient side.

 

As for your challenge, I'll take that list at the first sign of unstableness.

Funny FeelingMN mentions pounding one's face into gravel, as I think this guy argues a lot like Mensa.

[psychsurvivor 2]

Name calling isn't going to dissuade me that psychiatry is a useful discipline. While you are correct that one's definition of normalcy is subjective, most psychiatric diagnoses require an aberrant pattern of behavior impeding one's functionality to qualify for therapy.

 

Aberrant in the eyes of whom? The MD degree holding DSM committee members, that's it!

Which is why up to 1974 homosexuality was considered "aberrant" deserving the label "mental illness" but when a majority of members in the APA became gay friendly this was not anymore the case (and still 40% of the APA voting members still thought that homosexuality deserved being called a "mental illness").

 

You are just confirming what I said above, you see the DSM as a secular sacred text for an increasingly secular society. Some people are unable to live without controlling other people's lives. That was true of the religious zealots of the Salem trials and it is true of the pro psychiatry zealots of today. I am glad there seems to be agreement on what the DSM/psychiatry are. The disagreement, of course, lies in that I do not consider any form of social control outside the criminal justice system to be valid, neither scientifically speaking, nor morally speaking.

 

 

OCD is an excellent example. My friend doesn't like taking his meds, and when he is off them his ability to work and interact with others is extremely impaired. I've seen it first hand; he is a completely different person on meds (for the better IMO). You may be different, but that doesn't invalidate the utility of pharmacotherapy. But unless patients pose a danger to themselves or others and lack decisional capacity, use of the meds should be voluntary.

Here I can speak not of "a friend" but of my own experience. What the psychiatric nut jobs call "OCD" is part of who I am. I am many other things, but I am also that. It has served me very well to stay out of trouble and to achieve goals (like legally immigrating to the US and becoming a citizen) that looked like a long shot. By calling it a "disease" (even though there is absolutely no proof that it is an actual disease; an "OCD brain" looks in an autopsy exactly the same as a "non OCD" brain unlike what happens with genuine brain diseases) they demean me and some of the ways I experience life.

 

I also want to say something about "unless patients pose a danger to themselves or others and lack decisional capacity, use of the meds should be voluntary". I would respect that if you had the same opinion about coercive HAART on HIV patients or coercive chemotherapy. I remind you that there is a very famous case of some CEO who was "deluded" that meditation and eating fruits could make cancer go away and nobody thought about putting that guy on chemotherapy by force. Similarly, the HIV denialist community is alive and well. Nobody is going around asking that people like these http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/dead_denialists be put on HAART by force.

 

Even if you give psychiatry some power to predict who is likely to become dangerous (I do not concede the point, but I give you that for the sake of the argument), if a dead body is a dead body, why should psychiatry have a prerogative that neither AIDS medicine, nor cancer medicine has?

[psychsurvivor 2]

Or perhaps they realize you aren't open to civil discussion, or incapable of doing so without resorting to histrionics.

You can judge for yourself http://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2013/12/23/dsm-5-dimensional-diagnoses-more-conflicts-of-interest/ . I am "cannotsay" or "Guest" since I regularly remove my disqus account to increase my anonymity.

 

That discussion led Phil Hickey to publish this other entry on the lack of science of psychiatry, where Bernard Carroll came back but he was unable to make a cogent and articulate defense of his quackery either ,

 

http://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2014/01/09/psychiatry-is-not-based-on-valid-science/

[penultimatestraw 473]

I was just curious. When you first entered the thread and I saw it was post #1, I figured you were another lame alias. This place is crawling with them. But as I continued reading, I could tell you knew your sh!t. This thread has become very entertaining and I am enjoying the interplay between someone in the medical field and someone who's been through it from the patient side.

 

As for your challenge, I'll take that list at the first sign of unstableness.

As an aside I once dated a woman who was involuntarily committed. She had genuine mental illness, but I felt like they kept her hospitalized for too long once her condition had stabilized. And I am well aware that psychiatry creates a ripe environment for abuse, more so than other medical disciplines. But psychsurvivor is way too extreme in his opinions, so much so he is hurting his cause IMO.

[psychsurvivor 2]

I do not have the right to go around saying I'm going to pound someone's face into gravel because they disagree with me. If you do that around enough people, you're going to attract attention.....irrespective if a crime has been committed.....yet.

You believe in free will, yet you have blamed a lot of people for your circumstances. Maybe you're a victim....or maybe you lack circumspection necessary to take responsibility for your actions.

I was not charged of any crime when I was civilly committed. In fact, the whole idea of "civil commitment" is a non criminal issue, that's why it is "civil" not "criminal". It is social control for non criminals, which, of course, should be unacceptable on civil rights grounds.

[psychsurvivor 2]

As an aside I once dated a woman who was involuntarily committed. She had genuine mental illness, but I felt like they kept her hospitalized for too long once her condition had stabilized. And I am well aware that psychiatry creates a ripe environment for abuse, more so than other medical disciplines. But psychsurvivor is way too extreme in his opinions, so much so he is hurting his cause IMO.

You know, when gay activists were asking for gay marriage 15 years ago, they were told the same thing, "too extreme". Look now. If you had told me two years ago that Tom Insel would be writing this http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml or this http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics-taking-the-long-view.shtml I would have said "you must be kidding me". Yet, those two posts echo many points that just two years ago were dismissed as "anti psychiatry". Boy, the first one is Thomas Szasz on steroids!

[Googballz 39]

Hey Phsych, since you seem to have knowledge on the subjectI will ask you the question Penultimate, Worms, and FeelingMN are avoiding.

 

Why would the authorities leave the other children in a household where they suspect child abuse is going on?

[IGotWorms 3,315]

As an aside I once dated a woman who was involuntarily committed. She had genuine mental illness, but I felt like they kept her hospitalized for too long once her condition had stabilized. And I am well aware that psychiatry creates a ripe environment for abuse, more so than other medical disciplines. But psychsurvivor is way too extreme in his opinions, so much so he is hurting his cause IMO.

Listening to him, you would get the impression that there is NEVER any legitimate use for psychiatry. Guy doesn't even limit his discussion to involuntary commitment even though that's really the only part of psychiatric treatment relevant to his argument.

[psychsurvivor 2]

Why would the authorities leave the other children in a household where they suspect child abuse is going on?

 

Some defenders of BCH claim that since all their other children are adults, there is no custody to be taken away. But of course, that avoids the fact that my understanding is that at least at the beginning of the ordeal, one of their other daughters was still I minor (now she is in college and there was never any word that she should be taken from their parents' custody). Also, Connecticut DCF had been in the Pelletiers' home checking the parents (it begs repeating that this visits were always AFTER JUSTINA'S CUSTODY WAS STOLEN, NOT EARLIER) and saw no reasons to open a case against the Pelletiers under Connecticut law.

 

So Massachusetts' DCF, without having visited the Pelletiers' home or their neighbors, think they have a case of "medical child abuse". Connecticut's DCF after having visited the Pelletiers on the request of Massachusetts' DCF thinks that there is no case.

 

You add the evil nature of psychiatrists, and you have all you need to understand this case!

[penultimatestraw 473]

Aberrant in the eyes of whom? The MD degree holding DSM committee members, that's it!

Which is why up to 1974 homosexuality was considered "aberrant" deserving the label "mental illness" but when a majority of members in the APA became gay friendly this was not anymore the case (and still 40% of the APA voting members still thought that homosexuality deserved being called a "mental illness").

 

You are just confirming what I said above, you see the DSM as a secular sacred text for an increasingly secular society. Some people are unable to live without controlling other people's lives. That was true of the religious zealots of the Salem trials and it is true of the pro psychiatry zealots of today. I am glad there seems to be agreement on what the DSM/psychiatry are. The disagreement, of course, lies in that I do not consider any form of social control outside the criminal justice system to be valid, neither scientifically speaking, nor morally speaking.

 

 

Here I can speak not of "a friend" but of my own experience. What the psychiatric nut jobs call "OCD" is part of who I am. I am many other things, but I am also that. It has served me very well to stay out of trouble and to achieve goals (like legally immigrating to the US and becoming a citizen) that looked like a long shot. By calling it a "disease" (even though there is absolutely no proof that it is an actual disease; an "OCD brain" looks in an autopsy exactly the same as a "non OCD" brain unlike what happens with genuine brain diseases) they demean me and some of the ways I experience life.

 

I also want to say something about "unless patients pose a danger to themselves or others and lack decisional capacity, use of the meds should be voluntary". I would respect that if you had the same opinion about coercive HAART on HIV patients or coercive chemotherapy. I remind you that there is a very famous case of some CEO who was "deluded" that meditation and eating fruits could make cancer go away and nobody thought about putting that guy on chemotherapy by force. Similarly, the HIV denialist community is alive and well. Nobody is going around asking that people like these http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/dead_denialists be put on HAART by force.

 

Even if you give psychiatry some power to predict who is likely to become dangerous (I do not concede the point, but I give you that for the sake of the argument), if a dead body is a dead body, why should psychiatry have a prerogative that neither AIDS medicine, nor cancer medicine has?

So mischaracterization of now acceptable behaviors in the past invalidates the entire discipline of psychiatry for all eternity?

 

Whether you admit it or not, or whether applicable to you individually, many people function better and live more productive lives as a result of psychiatrists. Some of them benefit immensely from psychiatric medications. It isn't a big conspiracy perpetuated by egomaniacal, Svengalian physicians and the pharmaceutical industry, or government for that matter. And most of them aren't forced to take their meds.

[psychsurvivor 2]

Listening to him, you would get the impression that there is NEVER any legitimate use for psychiatry. Guy doesn't even limit his discussion to involuntary commitment even though that's really the only part of psychiatric treatment relevant to his argument.

Actually, my struggle is against coercive psychiatry. I will stop all my anti psychiatry activism the day the APA adopts a resolution asking the legislators that the ban all forms of coercive psychiatry, not only involuntary commitment/drugging, but things such as forensic psychiatric evaluations and insanity defenses.

 

My attacks to psychiatry, which BTW are based on psychiatry's own pseudo science, are only destined to make the above happen. I have no problem with people engaging voluntarily in the pseudo science of their choice, be it psychiatry, homeopathy or astrology.

[IGotWorms 3,315]

I was not charged of any crime when I was civilly committed. In fact, the whole idea of "civil commitment" is a non criminal issue, that's why it is "civil" not "criminal". It is social control for non criminals, which, of course, should be unacceptable on civil rights grounds.

OK, I'm gonna go nuclear here: what if someone had sought civil commitment of Adam Lanza before he murdered all those little kids? Of Jared Lee Loughner? James Holmes? Ted Kaczinsky? Etc, etc.

 

Would committing those individuals be "unacceptable on civil rights grounds"?

 

Obviously I'm going with some extreme examples here, but you are making a very extreme argument

[psychsurvivor 2]

So mischaracterization of now acceptable behaviors in the past invalidates the entire discipline of psychiatry for all eternity?

 

Whether you admit it or not, or whether applicable to you individually, many people function better and live more productive lives as a result of psychiatrists. Some of them benefit immensely from psychiatric medications. It isn't a big conspiracy perpetuated by egomaniacal, Svengalian physicians and the pharmaceutical industry, or government for that matter. And most of them aren't forced to take their meds.

 

It looks like a defense of astrology to me. I have met many people for whom knowing their "natal chart" served them very well. I could say the same thing about homeopathy. I don't think that I should work very hard to convince you that government should have no business enforcing pseudo science.

[IGotWorms 3,315]

Hey Phsych, since you seem to have knowledge on the subjectI will ask you the question Penultimate, Worms, and FeelingMN are avoiding.

 

Why would the authorities leave the other children in a household where they suspect child abuse is going on?

Nobody is avoiding it, you're asking for a degree of speculation we just can't engage in. Maybe they think this child is the only one being abused for whatever reason. Maybe they just don't know enough about how the other children are treated. Maybe they figure taking away all the kids is too extreme so they're only focusing on the worst case. Who the hell knows without more facts, just like who knows whether the father's story is the be all and end all without hearing any other perspective.

 

Or if psychsurvivor is right and none of them are minors anymore, then that pretty much ends the inquiry right there

[Phurfur 70]

Massachusetts state legislators have filed a bill that would force state officials to return custody of Justina Pelletier to her parents.

 

Justina Pelletier’s medical condition has dramatically worsened since her wrongful imprisonment and mismanaged medical care by the Massachusetts’ Department of Children and Families. So supporters of her family are urging the legislature to act fast on the bill.

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/04/08/legislators-introduce-bill-to-return-custody-of-justina-pelletier-to-her-parents/

[psychsurvivor 2]

OK, I'm gonna go nuclear here: what if someone had sought civil commitment of Adam Lanza before he murdered all those little kids? Of Jared Lee Loughner? James Holmes? Ted Kaczinsky? Etc, etc.

Would committing those individuals be "unacceptable on civil rights grounds"?

Obviously I'm going with some extreme examples here, but you are making a very extreme argument

You know that Stephen King is known to have had similar thoughts but he decided NOT TO do anything rather to write about them and make a lot of money in the process?

 

It might be uncomfortable to you but according with that hate group called the "Treatment Advocacy Center" there are 2 million so called "seriously mentally ill" in circulation http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/09/25/guns-mental-health-gun-control-mass-shooting-editorials-debates/2873387/ . If these people were as dangerous as you make them look like, we would be having a Sandy Hook style massacre every minute. We do not see that happen because there is a great deal of baloney behind your propaganda.

 

Once you think scientifically about this, you see your argument for what it is: propaganda inspired by bigotry towards what you don't understand.