For abolition

To the degree that you are able to communicate with another person, you will be less afraid of them. No matter what that person ever did (and no matter what you ever did) in the past, to the degree that you are in communication now, any apparent need for force or trickery will be reduced.

Psychiatric drugs are force, not communication. The project is to change a person’s mind. Persuasion is or seems to have become impossible when a person is psychotic, so the drug controls the brain, which is part of the body. Handcuffs control the hands which are a part of the body. A blow from a police baton controls the head, which is a part of the body. A bullet controls the heart, which is part of the body. Clearly, handcuffs, billy clubs and bullets are not social or helpful communication from the view of the person on the receiving end. Obviously, neither are coerced psychiatric drugs.

State psychiatrists like Richard Malis and James Corcoran at Elgin Mental Health Center automatically speak of believing that “medication” would be “helpful” for “patients” diagnosed with so-called “serious mental illnesses”. Corcoran actually made a claim under oath just a couple days ago, that an individual who has shown no signs of active psychosis for many years should start taking antipsychotics to help cope with stress when he is no longer in a controlled environment. The idea was, I believe, that the drug will prevent a recurrence of symptoms.

But it’s a lie. The truth is, there’s absolutely no reliable medical or scientific evidence for any such theory of prophylactic drugging. Corcoran was in actual fact attempting to enlist the Cook County Circuit Court to punish or subdue an individual whom he believes to be a dissident. This particular patient doesn’t take drugs, and yet he appears to be fully recovered. His treatment team, along with independent evaluators, believe there is nothing to “treat” with medication. They have observed him on a daily basis, interviewed him, dealt with him consistently on the clinical unit. They all think he should progress through the gradient of increased privileges toward a conditional release, without drugs.

Corcoran and Malis cannot allow that to happen. They must enforce their own severe orthodoxy: Everybody at Elgin Mental Health Center takes psychiatric drugs whether they like it or not! These two are cracking down, and any patients who think they can avoid taking drugs will be crushed, slowly but surely. Any staff who may countenance people avoiding drugs will not be promoted, or even allowed to act or make decisions freely in their normal clinical capacity. It’s relentless and fascistic. Eventually there will be hell to pay, because it’s also against the law.

Fascists are terrified of people. They have to control others by deception or violence because they can’t change anyone’s mind with reason. They can’t communicate in present time.

It amazes me that Corcoran and Malis can so delude themselves as to believe they are in any way engaged in helping anyone. They remind me of antebellum Southern slaveholders who were so deluded as to truly believe they were doing what was best for their Africans by keeping them in chains. Those plantation owners and Southern politicians owned and controlled the government of the United States, and they had their own unconstrained way with it until 1860.

Perhaps there is a war that must continue until all the bureaucracy and political power piled by a century of false promises for coerced “hospitalization” and “treatment” shall be sunk, until every drop of blood drawn with the psychiatric lash shall be paid by another drawn with an antipsychiatric sword.

God help me, I must be Sherman. Uncle Billy, the torch.