1..2..3..4.. The APA is a Corporate Whore!!!

by TJ Johnston/PoorNewsNetwork

Mind Freedom-Support Coalition International's weekend of resistance to the mental health orthodoxy in San Francisco culminated in a protest at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.

Where 19,000 shrinks gathered inside the Moscone Center, some 40 psychiatric survivors (some of whom endured forced "treatment" and labels affixed to them) picketed the APA in a peaceful display of dissidence (as well as dissonance).

The day after co-sponsors Mind Freedom and California Network of Mental Health clients countered with their own conference, organizers David Oaks and Sally Zinman presented an APA rep a list of at least 20 questions. Among them were:

*Why do you insist that the primary treatment is medication, despite research showing that when people do fully recover, drugs are unrelated?

*Why do psychiatrists provide no practical information about how to develop excellent mental health during "mental health month" every May?

*How can you keep your objectivity on treatments when you take money from the pharmaceutical companies?

*Are you aware that some individuals in the USA are receiving involuntary electroshock over their expressed wishes?

Freedom of choice, self-determination and the end of the drug industry's tyranny were the major themes that afternoon. Zinman finds the biologically reductive approach of treating clients as a series of symptoms objectionable. "Good services deal with the whole person," she emphasizes. In stressing the theme of choice, Zinman called out the APA's history of supporting forced treatment at the professional and legislative levels.

In the presence of an SFPD officer, Oaks made sure their rented sound system went to its optimal legal level in order to break the silence on coercive drugging and electroconvulsive therapy. The band of protesters chanted"1,2,3,4, APA is a corporate whore" and "We're crazy, proud and free." It seemed to be characteristic fashion that their chants were off key.

Speakers such as Jessie Lorenz of San Francisco's Independent Living Resource Center exhorted a 1999 Supreme Court Decision "which affirm our right to live in our communities."

As do recovering alcoholics who celebrate each year of sobriety, advocates like Carol Ford commemorate each year where they don't rely on hospitalization. Massachusetts poet Vicki Goldberg also marked the occasion by reading selections from her volume, "I Always Wanted a Pony But Had To Settle For Insanity."

Street Spirit editor Terry Messman condemned the institutionalization of mental health care. Two years ago, his paper printed an expose of the East Bay Hospital's wretched excesses, a dumping ground of nine counties' often poor detainees. When charges of maltreatment and corruption came to light, the hospital was closed.

The phrase "the personal is political" appears to have been updated: the psychological has also become political. It hadn't escaped the organizers' notice that the APA is paid for by drug companies. When the pill makers sponsor studies, observed LA County's director of consume affairs, "ideology is masqueraded as medicine." As a survivor, he has nothing against "normal" people, just because they engage in activities as dropping bombs and genocide. Oaks pushed the metaphor of madness further quoting Dr. Martin Luther King:"Salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted." Forced medication, to him, is another form of warfare where psych-drugs are WMDs.

In a comic moment, a protester donned a cardboard likeness of psych status quo defender and Bush appointee Sally Satel. To drive home her agenda, a label of "right wing lunatic" was affixed to her and she passed out faux medication. Having achieved putting most of the US on Ritalin, Satel wants to take her medication globally.

I couldn't help but think of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at the rally. If APA took on the role of Nurse Ratched, Mind Freedom was cast as R.P. McMurphy (with a bit of Gandhi and MLK thrown in).