Anti-Psychiatry and the UN Assault on the Mentally Ill

By Marvin Ross

This present book exposes the danger of antipsychiatry beliefs and their infiltration into the UN and that body's Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons. Anti-psychiatry is another manifestation of the growing anti-science views found in the anti-vax movement and in the rise of alternative medicine.

This book explores the common myths often propagated against psychiatry and psychiatric treatment and refutes them.

Ross' previous book on schizophrenia was "a powerful resource for anyone looking for answers and insight into the world of mental illness." Schizophrenia Digest Magazine, Fall 2008.

"very comprehensive", Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, psychiatrist and author of Surviving Schizophrenia

"A goldmine of history and information", Dr. Carol Parlow, psychiatrist, Oakville, Ontario

Recommended by the World Fellowship for Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bridgeross Communications
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781927637395

Book preview

Anti-Psychiatry

And

The United Nations Assault on the Mentally Ill

Marvin Ross

Copyright 2021 © Marvin Ross

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication

reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, digital, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Anti-psychiatry and the United Nations assault on the mentally ill / Marvin Ross.

Names: Ross, Marvin, 1943- author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20210122951 | ISBN 9781927637395 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Optional Protocol (2007

March 30) | LCSH: Antipsychiatry. | LCSH: Mental illness. | LCSH: Mentally ill—Commitment and

detention.

Classification: LCC RC437.5 .R67 2021 | DDC 616.89001—dc23

Bridgeross Communications

Dundas, Ontario, Canada

ISBN 978-1-927637-39-5

Cover Image by Jens Junge from Pixabay

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Chapter One – Also Good for Gout, Hair Loss, Female Troubles and Lack of Energy… 9

Chapter Two – Data on Complementary and Alternative Medicine 20

Chapter Three - Depression 33

Chapter Four – Serious Mental Illness Exists Despite the Naysayers 40

Chapter Five – Diseases of the Brain 52

Chapter Six – The Journalist Critic 66

Chapter Seven – the Academic and the Anti-Psychiatry Scholarship 84

Chapter Eight – Some of the Other Key Criticisms of Psychiatric Treatment 93

Chapter Nine – The British Psychological Society and Criticisms 120

Chapter Ten – When the Concept of Recovery is Bad 129

Chapter Eleven They Mean Well but Civil Libertarians and Do Gooders Are Causing Harm 139

Chapter Twelve The Final Word 166

About the Author 171

Introduction

The title may seem extreme but it is reality based on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.¹ Countries that ratify the Convention are expected to abolish all involuntary hospitalization and treatment for their most seriously ill. As a result, serious mental illness will not be treated and this is likely to cause serious harm to those who suffer and to others. As the British medical journal Lancet Psychiatry suggested², Article 12 of the CRPD threatens to undermine critical rights for persons with mental disabilities, including the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, access to justice, the right to liberty, and the right to life. Stigma and discrimination might also increase.

Furthermore the UN requires countries to be cruel to people with a mental illness that caused them to commit a crime. Instead of being sent to a hospital for treatment and protection, the UN requires that they be sent to prison untreated. Back to the Dark Ages. This will become clear as you read through the hallmarks of anti-psychiatry which underline the UN requirements that follow and my refutation of their unscientific beliefs. I knew the UN was misguided when I started this book but until I began researching it, I had no idea that the UN disability committee was filled with anti-psychiatry zealots who know as much of science as your grandmother who thinks eating garlic will rid you of your cold.

As Lancet Psychiatry points out, these dictates are not consistent with best medical practices for these ailments and came about because of the total lack of clinical experience among those who framed these rules and their limited consultation with users.

I came to realize in the aftermath of the US Presidential election that the US election, Covid 19 and anti-psychiatry were all related. I wrote a column for my blog entitled just that. My point was that the election had delivered the final blow to science. As the medical paper, Stat News³ reported, the 70 million Americans who voted for Trump agree with a president who has called the nation’s top scientists idiots, openly mocked mask-wearing, and has insisted states must be liberated from lock downs. While I don’t disagree with their declaration, this anti-science movement has been coming for a long time. The opposition by many to simple public health strategies like wearing masks, social distancing plus embracing unproven drugs for Covid like hydroxychloroquine are just the latest manifestation of anti-science acceptance.

It’s difficult to know when this modern anti-science trend began, but probably with the search for alternative cancer treatments and the conspiracy theory that cancer is curable but big pharma refuses to release these cures because they make so much money selling drugs. That one did not gain much acceptance but other anti-science beliefs dealing with psychiatry and mental illness, anti-vax views, alternative medicine and the use of vitamins, homeopathic potions, reiki, etc, opposition to genetic modification, avoidance of gluten by people who did not suffer celiac disease and the list goes on are common. Some of these have had serious health consequences much like the opposition to standard public health strategies is having in Covid. One commentator in the US election circus pointed out that by the time Trump leaves office, another 100,000 Americans will have died. And the proponents of this anti-science are not all uneducated, ignorant people. There are doctors who push hydroxy and are willing to sell vitamins to increase immunity although I am not sure of their motivation. Probably money and fame although some may just be misguided. A lot of middle class, educated people are opposed to vaccinations based solely on anecdotes and a study found to be badly flawed done by Andrew Wakefield and that was retracted by the medical journal (The Lancet) where it was originally published. How many seemingly educated people tell you they cannot consume gluten even though they do not have celiac disease or rail against GMO? Genetic modification has been going on for years in one form or another to develop crops that are more resistant to drought or frost or whatever. Our dogs are genetically modified to produce animals where the desired characteristic becomes dominant.

The one anti-science position that is the most firmly established and damaging is anti-psychiatry. After the development of antipsychotic medications in the 1950’s, hospitals began discharging patients. It was believed they would stay on medication and get support in the community but the funds for that support were never made available. Since then, we have seen an increase in homeless mentally ill and of the mentally ill in jails. Aside from the lack of community treatment, many with mental illness refuse to take their medications because of a condition known as anosognosia (inability to understand you are sick because of the illness). I will cover this concept later in the book.

Despite the advances in less dirty and more targeted medications, hospital and community resources, including supportive laws, have not been adequate to provide effective treatment. Added to this, is a move away from science to a belief that mental illness is a life choice (a response to adversity and tragedy.) In British Columbia, there is a movement to change the Mental Health Act to do away with involuntary treatment and committal. It is believed that involuntary treatment violates the human rights of the ill person when in fact involuntary commitment and treatment allows the person the human right of not being driven by his/her psychiatric demons. The UN also wishes to abolish these conditions.

This anti-psychiatry movement has even resulted in a scholarship at the University of Toronto for anti-psychiatry studies. The person responsible for that has spent considerable time going after the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto because they provide ECT. Of course, studies of ECT for depression and other serious mental illnesses like refractory schizophrenia have demonstrated considerable efficacy but these do-gooders consider it to be torture.

I concluded the blog by saying that there is a great deal that can be written about anti-science movements that continue to prevent the seriously mentally ill from getting the treatment they need and have such disastrous impacts on fighting other diseases but that will have to wait for another day. It would actually make a good book.

I then began to think more about this idea and realized just how important it is to call out our growing anti-science stance as it is killing people with its lack of logical thinking. My short life (when looking at time from the beginning) began towards the end of World War II but has witnessed mind boggling advances in science. Leaving aside TV, the internet, space travel, GPS systems, computers, medicine has given us longer lives and much better health. My generation saw the end of polio, smallpox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles (coming back again due to stupidity) and improved treatments for heart conditions, infectious diseases, asthma, migraine and the list goes on.

People like my father died in the 1950s from heart conditions who would not die today. Now, we have medications for hypertension, atrial fibrillation, blood thinning, catheter labs where clogged blood vessels can be reamed out and stents put in, bypass surgery, and cardiac care units.

As covid-19 is highly contagious with no effective treatment, the only logical means to try to control it is isolation through social distancing and the wearing of masks. This is perfectly sensible but is opposed by so many not just in the US although they seem to make up the bulk of the dissenters. Why they do this makes absolutely no sense and it is worth pointing out that this strategy of social distancing was employed by our ancestors. Leprosy is a contagious condition and during Biblical times, lepers were separated from the rest of society in colonies to prevent its spread. As it turned out, it is not very infectious but our Biblical ancestors did not know that so isolation made sense.

The Bubonic Plague or Black Death of the middle ages was man's worst pandemic killing 75-200 million people but it ended when people quarantined themselves. Similarly, the Spanish flu of 100 years ago was contained by quarantines, social distancing and masks. The techniques that many rail against today have been used fairly successfully since Biblical times. Why the backlash today? That is the $64,000 question which, frankly, I cannot answer, nor do I think that anyone else can. Infringement on personal liberty is a big reason.

What I can say is that our increasing resistance to advances in science is deadly. What I propose is a brief description of the major anti-science movements that abound before moving into a more detailed look at anti-psychiatry and the absurdity and danger it poses. When I think about it, I've been writing about the anti-science idiocy for well over 20 years so first, a little tour of an alternative health fair I visited and wrote about in 2004.

Chapter One – Also Good for Gout, Hair Loss, Female Troubles and Lack of Energy…

This first appeared in a magazine called MD Magazine in 2004 and was then reprinted in a blog I've been doing since 2014 with my psychiatrist colleague, Dr David Laing Dawson. The issue of so-called alternative medicine and its danger was the subject of an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 by Drs Kassirer and Angell.

Talking about the risks of untested and unregulated treatments, they pointed out that:

"There cannot be two kinds of medicine -- conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted. But assertions, speculation, and testimonials do not substitute for evidence. Alternative treatments should be subjected to scientific testing no less rigorous than that required for conventional treatments"

Sadly, very little attention has been paid to this and Canada has established an office for Natural so called health treatments which fall into the category of not proven. The US has its national Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. They research these off the wall treatments and many US hospitals are adopting alternative medical practices into their programs. Many hospitals now have spiritual health practitioners. Imagine putting that to a double blind test? Money talks I guess but this is a description of what I encountered at an alternative health fair I attended with two medical doctors.

When Dr. Terry Polevoy, a Kitchener, Ontario, anti-quack advocate, invited me to join him and Dr. Eva Briggs, a physician from Marcellus, New York, to investigate the latest products available at the Total Health Fair in Toronto, I jumped at the chance. In the past, this show delighted me with the fallacies perpetuated by its speakers and the banalities of their products.

Billed as North America’s premier natural health show, the event has been held every