AN OPEN LETTER TO MPPs Wednesday, March 22, 2000 On March 22, 2000 Health & Long-Term Care Minister Elizabeth Witmer made her long-anticipated announcement on mental health reform. As things now stand, I am truly ashamed to be a resident of a jurisdiction that apparently has such low regard for even the basic human rights of its more vulnerable and marginalized citizens. Witmer’s announcement represents the pinnacle of an intensive campaign of demonizing persons with a psychiatric diagnosis, as carried out by powerful lobbyists from the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, the Coalition of Ontario Psychiatrists, Eli Lilly and others through the mechanism of the corporate media. It can only be viewed as being the latest stage in this government’s agenda of systematic social cleansing. Not only has this media campaign taken substantial liberties with the truth, but the voices of the one true stakeholder group in this whole situation – Psychiatric Survivors – have been systematically excluded and silenced. In the course of her rhetoric, Ms. Witmer talked of ‘balancing the rights of individuals with the need for community safety’. To that I must state that it is impossible to achieve the kind of balance she refers to in a situation where no balance of any kind has ever existed. What we have here is a case where a sizable sector of society has throughout history been deliberately robbed of all power, rights or social standing on the basis of a set of medical diagnoses – diagnoses I might add that to this day remain scientifically unsubstantiated. If balance is indeed involved in this instance, it is manifesting as a substantial tilt towards the forces of bigotry, misinformation, social stratification and big money that are the primary governing principles of modern society. As for community safety, I have to state categorically that in this context it is a non-issue – or at least no more of an issue than with any other comparable sector of society. Numerous studies have clearly displayed that there is no direct co-relation between a diagnosis of ‘mental illness’ and violent behavior – yet a few headline-grabbing incidents by individuals who just happened to carry one of these arbitrary diagnoses are being used as pretext to limit or remove altogether the fundamental rights of a large section of the community. Conversely, no such special attention is paid to the equivalent and far more frequent criminal actions committed (sic) by individuals who carry no such diagnosis. This can hardly be viewed as representing a ‘balanced’ perspective. As illustrated by the beating death in Oshawa of Joey Pace last November and the heinous incendiary attack on Michael Wilson in my own part of Toronto just prior to Christmas 1999, even situations where Survivors are the victims of violence (which is the case far more frequently than them being the perpetrators) are being distorted into support for coercive legislation. What most people (including Government Ministers) apparently fail to realize is that forced psychiatric intervention is in itself a violent act which traumatizes the person subjected to it and which accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of addressing the root causes of emotional and mental distress. A case in point: it has been demonstrated that most (as many as four out of five) psychiatrically labeled persons have sustained some form of abuse in their lives. Of what benefit is it to such an individual to be bodily dragged to a facility (frequently in shackles), have the clothes ripped from their body, force-injected with powerful drugs then tied naked to a bed in a tiny locked room, possibly for hours or even days at a stretch? How can such a deliberate act of alienation and violence possibly be of value to anyone’s state of mind? Yet this represents the most likely scenario involved in involuntary psychiatric admissions in Ontario, and the world over. Likewise, how is it of benefit to anyone to be placed literally under partial house arrest, and forced daily to accept interventions from ‘Assertive Community Treatment’ teams, who are legally empowered to arbitrarily deprive individuals of what remains of their liberty whenever they see fit to do so? This latter scenario is being played out daily in the more than forty U.S. states that have ‘outpatient committal’ laws in place, along with the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan, and several other countries. My understanding is that Ms. Witmer has something similar in store for this province. The Government, media and related interest groups would have us all believing that we are in the midst of an ‘epidemic of mental illness’. However, what they fail to illustrate is how the timing of the onset of this ‘epidemic’ coincides so precisely with that of the 21.6 per cent cut to social assistance, the decimation of social housing, the criminalization of all survival-related activities such as panhandling or squeegeeing and legislation that essentially strips tenants of all legal protection. In this context such ‘mental health reform’ is revealed to be the cutting edge of this Government’s apparent wish to purge our communities of ‘undesirables’ (namely, the visible victims of social policy) – and it is all the more dangerous, sheathed as it is in the velvet glove of false medical compassion. If this Government were truly concerned about ‘mental health’ issues it would immediately seek to reverse the oppressive measures it has implemented over the previous five years; immediately cease its persecution of the victims of these measures, and promote the kind of initiatives in the area of housing, employment and personal resources that involve true community engagement and support as opposed to the current norms of alienation and intolerance. While such would involve taking a radical leap in faith, such concepts nonetheless make far more sense than the present agenda of law-and-order which in this case is wearing the insidious disguise of medical compassion and authority. Sincerely yours, Graeme Bacque |