cjh@csin.UUCP (Chip Hitchcock) (09/15/83)
In response to your message of Mon Sep 12 14:37:23 1983: I believe that in our enlightened age with concern for human dignity, people are ADMITTED to hospitals for psyciatric care, not COMMITTED. This belief is of the same order of naivete as belief in Santa Claus, but much more dangerous. In the US people are still committed to asylums against their will, particularly if they are female (read this week's SCIENCE NEWS for details on how psychiatric "care" is stacked against women). (Aside: not to run down your friend specifically, but what sort of courage does it take to go to someone that society declares a specialist and say "I'm broken. Fix me."?) I am particularly familiar with a case in which the shrink a woman had been seeing went on vacation; the substitute he'd told her to call decided he couldn't cope and had her carted off to a "hospital for psychiatric care", where she was treated absolutely abominably and distinctly careLESSly. Among other things, on committance they took all of her personal possessions, including her thyroid pills; she had just had part of her thyroid removed (fortunately this had no effect on her singing voice, but the worry was considerable) and had to take some number of these pills to prevent a recurrence of the tumor that had been removed. They then proceded to apply a variety of dangerous stupefying drugs, alleging that these were necessary to effect a "cure" (in practice, this usually means that the patients are close enough to asleep to be easy to handle). The evidence is that this is far from an isolated case. We sneer at the Russians and claim they are abusing psychiatry by committing people for political reasons, but the rest of the world is similarly to be despised for the number of people, mostly female, who are committed because just aren't close enough to frequently arbitrary norms. Considering the indeterminate sentences they can give and the lack of knowledge about residual effects of the various 'zines, I consider a psychiatrist with a committal form and a prescription pad more dangerous than a maniac with a gun.