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Stigmatization and Persecution
(Dansk version her - other related articles here and here)
See also here an example of how danish lawyers attempt to use a request of psychiatric evaluation as a means to do away with a case
that might not have given the preferred outcome if it was to be tried in court. - And of their reluctancy to answer the question of wether there exist
as much as one single example of such a psychiatric evaluation having ever returned a conclusion of the "evaluated" person not being mentally ill.
This article started as a summa on loose remarks and comments on (primarily danish) psychiatric - and juridic - practices that I have recently added to different places on this website, to collect those remarks in one place in a coherent form, and to get the opportunity to add additional reflections and elaborating comments.
But there is not as much as one single example in history of a psychiatric label having ever been revoked, once it has been applied.
Are we really to assume that psychiatrists are THAT infallible: EVEN MORE INFALLIBLE THAN GOD?!
The juridic system has a built-in appeal option to dispute a juridical verdict if one believe that the judge's ruling was wrong. Thus it is acknowledged that juridic judges are human and can make mistakes. And naturally, therefor, juridical verdicts are also occasionally overturned. Anything else would be strange: At least some mistakes must have been made, given the sheer number of juridical verdicts. It is a simple, statistically expectable fact. - But when it comes to the practices of psychiatric doctors the only two times in history in which a juridical court has ever ruled against a psychiatric doctor on charges of malpractice, both of those cases were cases of one doctor suing another doctor. Thus there exist absolutely no examples in which a "patient" have sued a psychiatric doctor to dispute the diagnosis, in which the juridical court has ever ruled in favour of the plaintiff. Not even one single example of such a ruling has ever occurred. And similarly; of all the cases of complaints against psychiatric doctors which the danish Patients' Board of Complaints ("Patientklagenævnet") has ever been presented with, the Patients' Board of Complaints has never; not as much as in one single case ever ruled in favour of the complainant.*
*The danish Patients' Board of Complaints must thus, certainly with regard to psychiatric "patients" access to complaining, be considered to be nothing but a potemkin village, the actual purpose of which is not to give patients an actual possibility of appeal against the medical authority, but on contrary merely to give the impression that such an appeal option exist, all the while the board is actually categorically and consequently rejecting the complaints as on a conveyer belt.
Are we to interpret that 'statistic' such that no psychiatric diagnosis has ever have been mistakenly applied? Or is it more likely that, with regard to psychiatric authority, the juridic courts are biassed; and their minds are made up in advance? - Are we to believe that of all the billions of diagnoses which have ever been plastered on people throughout history NOT EVEN ONE could possibly have been wrongly applied?! - I find that very hard to believe (but of course I'm supposedly insane so that might possibly be why I would hesitate to accept that statistic). None the less any existing precedence suggest that juridical courts have hitherto consequently treated psychiatric diagnoses as if they consider psychiatrists to be somehow beyond human fallibility: The moment a psychiatric diagnosis has been brought into the case it seems that there is suddenly no need of any further argumentation, as the lawyers and judges at that point blindly accept the psychiatric authority, and any attempt to question the validity of the diagnosis is dismissed beforehand as merely an expression of mental illness which need not be taken seriously. It is as if a psychiatric diagnosis thus function as a kind of "joker" card by which any court case can be easily done away with: As if psychiatric diagnoses somehow 'magically' makes the need of any further juridic discussion of any given case disappear - along with the "patient"'s constitutional right to have his or her account of events heard by the court (whome does not consider the accounts of a "mentally ill" person to be of any significance).
Thus there exist absolutely no presedence of a psychiatric diagnosis, and the social stigma that goes with it, having ever been overruled by any juridical court of law. Propably not because the evidence has not been good enough or sufficiently abundent, but more likely because the prosecution and defence alike, the judge, and even the jury, were biassed in such a way that their minds were made up of the outcome before those cases had even begun. So a person having been burnmarked with a psychiatric diagnosis is facing the fact that his or her "odds" of being washed clean of the stigma of the diagnosis by the legitimate procedure of taking his or her case to a court of law, given the statistic based on the presedence of such cases, are exactly zero. Except, perhaps, in case of such an event as war breaking out. - So, cynically speaking; what's the more likely achievement; winning a biassed court case against all odds, or succeeding at starting a war? -Suffice to say that I wouldn't place my bet on the court case.
The reluctancy of the courts to even consider the possibility of questioning the validity of a psychiatric diagnosis may be assumed to be due to the fact that doing so would not just be an inconvenient example of psychiatric authority being demonstrated to have in some particular cases failed to live up to the trust that official society has bestowed on them - but it would, in a much more fundamental and catastrophic way, demonstrate the principial fallability of the psychiatric authority on which any given juridical judge would have blindly based who-knows-how-many verdicts, the justifications of which would then be at doubt. Which fact might nescessitate the juridical judges to face the fact that a lot of their verdicts were likely to have been wrong and injust, to the effect of possibly having destroyed the lives of many many people. And THAT realization may be one that juridical judges, for very humane and psychologically understandable reasons might be very reluctant to risk having to face.
From recent experience (see my comment to the course of the courtcase) it furthermore seem to be at least suggested that lawyers may practice using the request of "psychiatric evaluation" - presumably knowing very well that there to all likelihood does not exist any precedence at all of such a psychiatric evaluation having ever returned a statement which did not conclude that the defendent was mentally ill - as a kind of "joker card" that they can throw into a court case as a convenient way of sircumvening the court procedure in order to avoid having a case tried at court, for which there would fx. otherwise be too much of a chance that they would loose, or whatever the motivation in other cases might be.
then are we to asume that the diagnosis had somehow "foreseen" the symptoms
(even if they are completely different from the symptoms described by the diagnosis)?
- Or would we rather suspect that the diagnosis has in fact CAUSED the problems?
The truly scairy thing about danish psychiatric diagnostic practies is that in actual reality it takes nothing more than a psychiatrist don't approve of the clothes you wear or the sociolect you speak or some belief or opinion you have, in order for that psychiatrist to decide that there is "something wrong" with you and start interpreting every aspect of what you say and do within the conceptual framework of a diagnosis. - If a person trespass againt the officially established laws of society then it is punishable by for example having to pay a certain amount of money or being locked up for a certain amount of time. Those are rational sanctions. But it would seem as if such unwritten an not official "offences" as wearing the wrong clothes or talking in a way that a psychiatrist don't like are potentially punishable by disgrace and public humimiliation and being, in effect, ousted from society for life. That is not rational. Whereof comes this insane disproportionality?! - Personally I wasn't experiencing anything paranormal* until the ENW incident mentioned on the index page, which was after I had the diagnosis labelled on me. Which fact of course urge the question of wether the psychiatric label was somehow "foreseeing" the trouble (although of a completely different symptomatology than what it described), or wether it did in fact cause the trouble.
*Yes by the mere mentioning of the word "paranormal" this would be where I expect you to categorically dismiss my entire argumentation. Well sorry I had to mention it. But paranormal stuff happens to be going on, and only by being willing to admit and address this fact as it is without the need to euphemize about it in metaphoric terms can we hope to develop conceptual models; scientific or otherwise, adequate to handle this phenomenology. Simply to dismiss anybody who dare mention the occurrance of anything which established sciences does not as yet have adequate conceptual or theoretic models to handle, as "mentally ill", does not explain the phenomenon - it merely explains it away. And there is absolutely nothing scientific about that. Having mentioned this I know from experience it might be adviceable of me to point out that this is just a footnote and that this is NOT otherwise the main topic of this document: Please consider the argumentation on this page by its own right and make up your mind about it based on the arguments.
That diagnosis was, btw, based on some very questionable methodic practices - to say the least:
A memory test was interrupted, though in the report the psychologist, Lise Møller, who had performed the test, didn't mention the interruption with as much as one word; she only reported the foreseeable 'below average' outcome that was expectable in light of the disturbance, which she, however, neglected to mention.
Secondly: The psychiatrist, Munthe Suenson, who interviewed me waited a whole week before making a report on the interview (relying solely on his recollection, according to himself); in which everything I had said in the interview was systematically misconstrued - such as for example replies presented in context of completely different questions than those they were originally replies to, or replies to questions presented as if they were things I had just suddenly said without any reason or context. -The misrepresentations in Munthe Suenson's report of my conversation with him were furthermore of such a nature and frequency that I can simply not explain them by him "mis-remembering" what I had said in the interview; which is to say that I can see no way around concluding from the nature and frequency of the misrepresentations that Munthe Suenson appeared to be knowingly and deliberately misrepresenting what I had said in the interview, in order to artificially arrive at a result that matched the diagnosis that he had decided on, seemingly in advance.
If mental symptoms occurred AFTER a person has been burnmarked with a psychiatric diagnosis, then are we to asume that the diagnosis had somehow "foreseen" the symptoms (even if they are completely different from the symptoms described by the diagnosis)? - Or would we rather suspect that the diagnosis has in fact CAUSED the problems? - Could this really be possible? Let's see: Have traumatic and personally catastrophic events ever been known to have the potential to trigger mental disturbances? And do you think that being burnmarked with the stigma of a psychiatric diagnosis could perhaps be considered to be a "traumatic and personally catastrophic event"?.. - And furthermore; has prolonged and constant stress similarly been known to have the potential to result in mental disturbances? -And would you think it might be a situation of "prolonged and constant stress" to either constantly have to dodge topics to avoid people finding out about the diagnosis, or else have to live in an environment in which (in any such situation* in which they would, about any other person of whome they had not been primed with an "illness" interpretation model, simply shrug and conclude that they just happened to not see the point of whatever it is the other person is saying or doing - whereas when it came to you) consequently tend to interpret whatever you say or do as an expression of what's "wrong with you"? Would you think that such conditions are stressful on a "prolonged and constant" basis? - The diagnostic or "illness-" frame of reference is not helping the least bit: If anything surrounding the person with such linguo-social conditions is making matters worse!** - But then again who cares... Other than those whome such labels have been applied to - but of course they're not to be taken seriously: 'says so on the label!
*Which, as demonstrated not least by Franz From's study of the perception of other people's behaviour, is actually bound to be very often - in which the perceiver does not immediately come up with an adequate model of interpretation of the perceived behaviour.
**Especially if some moron is pestering you on the internet and in your local neighbourhood, deliberately poking at your traumatology.
'Wonder how many other people those two; Munthe Suenson and Lise Møller, knowingly and deliberately, have seen to it are never going to produce offspring... In case you have been branded with some psychiatric label too then perhaps you can think of some diagnosis-monger in particular who robbed YOU of your prospects, and YOUR children and grand children of their lives?
A psychologist at KAS Ballerup; Poul Schønbeck, once asked me the question what I would like to do with my life. I replied that I would like to settle down; get a steady job, a wife and children, etc. His reaction to that reply was that "uh-oh" expression on his face, and the reply that "maybe I should consider that perhaps not everybody was meant to have children, and maybe I ought to consider getting a cat or a dog in stead".* That reaction demonstrate at least one thing; namely that he was perfectly and very clearly aware of the fact that the social stigma of a mental diagnosis actively prevent the person who has been labelled with it from producing offspring. And if that psychologist know of that fact then I'm pretty sure that so does the psychiatrists who apply the diagnoses on people. - Other observations from my time at KAS Ballerup would suggest that not only is the fact that the stigmatization of a mental diagnosis prevent reproduction well known, but that in fact psychiatric personnel were actively seeking to further that particular effect: Thus I have observed that techniques of paranoid- or phobic induction (see the index) have been used deliberately by psychiatric personnel, to prevent male/female interaction; in one instance, f.ex. a staff member reacted to a male and a female patient standing too close to each other, by a strong warning outburst and a remark of "risk of spontaneous self combustion". And that's far from the only incident I have seen, of psychiatric personnel acting to prevent interaction between male and female patients, or to utilize psychologic manipulation aimed at manipulating the patients' reproductive reflex at the emotional and motivational level: Another example is the time when the staff (while, as mentioned, otherwise enforcing a 'no-romance' policy) exceptionally allowed one particular, newly arrived, male patient of that tall, muscular, "fit" body-type that's promoted in television commercials, to openly romantizise with a particular female patient (attractive, though I suspect the reason was that they considered her to be trouble because she was intelligent and had her own opinion, so they wanted to make her unpopular) in midst everybody else on the ward, whome, as described, they were actively preventing from interacting romantically with each other.
*Personally I think it would be intensely interesting to hear Poul Schønbeck's explanation to exactly what people it is then, that in Poul Schønbeck's opinion "perhaps should not have children". Would Poul Schønbeck for example include anybody in particular of his own family in that category of people whose offspring Poul Schønbeck apparently think the world would be a better place without?.. Here's a thought experiment: Suppose I slit the throats of Poul Schønbeck's children, BUT GAVE HIM A POODLE IN STEAD, then wouldn't that be suitable compensation? Think about it: A poodle! That's several hundred dollars! And he'd get to care for it; feed it and walk it every day, etc. So isn't that more or less the same?! ... Also I would like to know if Poul Schønbeck, while making that statement, was expressing any formal or informal policy of KAS-Ballerup or of the psychiatric system in Denmark in general? (That might explain some of the reactions of some staff members, to male/female approaches among patients out there). And if so wether any particular steps-, and in that case which steps-, are being taken to actively enforce such a policy? - Other, of course, than labelling people with diagnoses that guarantee to make it particularly difficult for them to be socially accepted and get into the job market and other little things like that which on the bottom line of course implicitly makes finding a romantic partner difficult.
Regardless of what you call your political system.
These incidents seemingly suggest that psychiatric institutions are in fact actively conducting what can hardly be described by any other term than eugenetic "cleansing", by not only actively preventing patients from romantic interaction while they are at the institution facilities; but by furthermore attempting to cause specific long term psychological trauma to the patients to the effect of damaging the patients' reproductive reflex in such ways that reproductive behaviours become difficult or impossible. Furthermore these attempts appear to be followed up by the occasional media campaigns of the medical and diagnostic industry, which, apart from what appear to be their main purpose of advertizing medical products and the diagnoses that they're sold with, typically also make some effort to promote a naive and oversimplified view on the "syndrom" they're selling, as solely and unequivocally attributable to genetic "defects". Which promotions often occur more or less simultaneously with media promotions of an equally naive and oversimplified view on natural selection ("naive darwinism") as simply a process of weeding out the "wrongs", to discourage romantic involvement with "flawed" people. Having a psychiatric diagnosis attached to oneself is about as devastating as if the responsible psychiatrist had maimed ones face; or, with regard to the "anti-reproductive" aspect, one's child's face, with hydrochloric acid. Have you ever seen what hydrochloric acid can do to a child's face? What that means psychologically and socially to that child for the rest of its life? It's not a pretty sight.
Different theories and methods throughout time, regarding the psyche and its treatment; from the ethics of the medieval church to the present day diagnostic mania, have hitherto had a remarkable tendency to imply an option of (and a willingness to) let themselves be used as an ill concealed method of humiliating the person or persons it concern, and attempt to force some sort of submission out of them in the form of some sort of ritual act of atonement. Thus the language of the medieval church constructed the "sinful" in terms of something to look down at as something "lower", and to sin as a kind of "defeat" by which one had "fallen" in the "battle" against the sin. - And wether it was Sigmund Freud's intention or not his theory followingly came to function mainly as a basis for the trend by which psychoanalysts and other "experts" could for decades make insinuations of incestuous tendencies left and right about those thus "analyzed" and their parents as well; which their victims absolutely had to "admit" or else it was "repression" and they were "blocking". And throughout the latest decades it has been the diagnostic industry in unholy alliance with the eager promotions by the commercial media of a pop-scientifically oversimplified "vulgar darwinism" according to which übermensch-theory the seemingly only principle of biology is to sort away "loosers".* - As a thread going right through the ethics of the medieval church, the Freudian psycho- and literature-analysis of the 70s and 80s, and later the vulgar darwinist myth which the diagnosis industry and the commercial market has been promoting throughout the latest decades, is the common feature of them that the "sinner", the "analyzed", the "deviant", the "patient", is implicitly attempted to be induced a feeling of SHAME (of being outside, wrong, abnormal, subordinate, weak, a looser, inadequate) and is attempted to be forced to somehow submit by making some sort of ritual act of atonement: In the medieval church confession; at the psychoanalyst "admitting" of "childhood trauma" which usually had propably never occured in reality - and in the psychiatric system "admitting illness" as it is called (ie. that it is demanded of the "patient" that he or she submit to the frame of reference by which his or her perception of reality is constructed linguistically as an "illness") and commit him- or her-self to consume this or that pharmacologic product (the fact that the "medication" is usually relatively useless against whatever is the problem actually doesn't matter because its actual function is to be a ritual or symbolic sign of the patient's "submission"). Though psychiatry and clinical psychology lack scientificly methodic and founding justification the reason is that the function of this field is actually not of a scientific kind at all, but it is actually in stead primarily to function as a social means to cover an apparent need to get release for an urge to humiliate and deminish some collective scape goat.
*Which, with regard to the consumers, is evidently equivalent with the kind who can't (see the absolutely iparative nescessity in) keeping up with the the commercial market's constant "development" of new standards which constantly require investments in "updating" to new types of bottles for the same old wines, or in spending vast amounts of resources on fitness and skin- and hair-care products (female behaviour per se) to be able to prove oneself to be a "real man" and acquire (!) a completely and utterly unnatural bodily build which according to the myth witness of "good genes" (which, according to the same vulgar darwinist myth is thus apparently something of which nature has some kind of pre-established facit list, and which just so fortunately happens to point unequivocally towards the easily controllable citizen and the "good consumer").
One might perhaps similarly suspect that the kind of mentality that make some people choose that line of work, (aiming, apart from selling drugs, of course, at making sure the clientel does not have a chance of social advancement or romance or reproduction) might be due to some hormonal disturbance and hence genetically conditioned.. That shouldn't be difficult to "prove": One could just use that "twin studies" method that's so popular whenever the medical industry invented some new "condition". I believe the method is to discard of "false negatives" until the statistic show the desired distribution. And then it just need to be given some catchy name like "Compulsive Labelling Disorder": CLD. And there you go; one piece of medical condition (in dire need of medical treatment, obviously) ready to be marketed.
I don't think I have to point out to anyone exactly what kind of society and historic events these trends; of persecution of non conformists, of authoritative eugenetics and institutionalized cleansings, associate to. And if you need to have the nature of the kind of self fulfilling stigmatization and nazi style persecution clarified then consider these examples of a similar kind of persecution campaign, just the other way round; and just imagine what it would be like if for example "information" flyers like THESE were distributed, f.ex. on walls everywhere, and on the doors of kindergardens and schools and workplaces, and in trains and busses. (Not that I'm encouriging anyone to make printouts of these fictive flyers and distribute them - they're just a scary example):
Or, as a parallel to the implicitly discouraging effect of the stigmatization, on work places and institutions:
Just imagine what that would be like if flyers like these were distributed all around.* Scary though, huh? But actually the kind of self fulfilling stigmatization is principially the same as what is implicit in the regularly reoccurring media promotions of whatever new- or existing "syndrom" the diagnostic- and medical industry are trying to get "customers" for. Reminescent, perhaps, to something from sometime in the thirties. Just to make the parallel absolutely clear.
*With regard to the concern that there might have been a person who though it irresponsible of me to make these completely fictive examples absolutely publically availeable so that anybody could in principle just right click and choose "save image.." and then make hundreds of printouts of them and distribute them everywhere, without anybody being able to know who it was: I already stated that they are just a scary example, which I don't think anybody could have overlooked. But if somebody feels like starting to pick out names at random listed at Psychiatric Society's webpage, and find out what schools or kindergardens or work places their children are at, and conduct acid attacks on those places or blowing them up with something like hydrogen peroxide and baking soda (if you are to believe CNN, BBC, and other commercial news media - the label on the 10% bottle I have warns against nitric acid or sulphuric acid though, but I wouldn't know; I'm not a chemist), or something like that, then there's not much I can do about it. I can just say that I can't endorse that kind of actions.
It is one of the main functions and purposes of the juridical courts to uphold the peace and stability of society. Not merely by ensuring that the laws of society are respected, but in a much more fundamental way; by ensuring the trust of the population by upholding JUSTICE: In return for having taken away the individual citizen's right to avenge wrongdoing against him or her, society must on its part provide a guarantee that if such wrongdoings are committed against him or her then it will prosecute and punish the guilty on his or her behalf. If society on a regular basis fail to live up to that guarantee then the population loose its trust and respect in the laws and their administration, and will no longer be motivated to abide by them, and people will have no choise but to seek justice by their own measure, as they can no longer trust that the proper social institutions will do so for them. In so many words; when the social institutions which are meant to enforce and administer the laws become corrupt and on a regular basis fail to deliver justice, society thereby start descending into anarchy as the population looses its faith in the laws.
And failing to deliver justice is exactly what the juridical system is doing when it consequently treat one particular group of authoritative officials as if they were infallible in the eyes of the juridical courts, and categorically dismiss the mere possibility of questioning decisions made by them, and equally consequently treat another group of the population (namely that group of people whome the decisions of the just mentioned authoritative officials concern) as if that constitutional right somehow does not apply to them; that they can present a perceived wrongdoing against them to a court of law, and have their case heard and considered, ratioanlly and unbiassed, by the court.
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