It's unlikely that many people know Chris Hedges by his articles,
since they never make the Corporate Media. His impact is probably
felt more, by those he is teaching in prison.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/26/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So what do you imagine is in Chris Hedges' mind when he writes about huge
multitudes of people, going out into the streets and peacefully overthrowing
our current corrupt order? I know what he is doing. He's teaching writing
and literature to prisoners in New Jersey, and he's writing distressing
articles.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2018 11:28 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Legacy of the Anti-Psychiatry Movement
Miriam wrote, "...where People like Phillip Berrigan's daughter, live in
those houses and try to help in whatever way they can, one person at a time
while we fantasize about changing whole political and economic systems."
But you have hit the nail on the head, Miriam. That is exactly how a System
is changed. Not by violence, not by huge donations of money, but by caring
about one person...and then another...
Carl Jarvis
On 5/26/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There's a story in the May 28th New Yorker called Framed. It's the
story of a family, of a man in particular, who was incarcerated after
being one of hundreds that a particular Chicago cop has framed and
then arrested for possession and selling of drugs, over decades. It's
a true story, but horrifying because it helps you know the
individuals, and understand what the system does to millions of people
in individual terms. I mention it because the mentally ill poor and
working people in this country are helpless victims, just like this
young black man, raised in poverty, whose parents were damaged by
poverty, and who was almost sacrificed like so many others. Perhaps
our true heroes are people like the Catholic workers and the other
folks who open homes in poor areas that are like the settlement houses
once were, where People like Phillip Berrigan's daughter, live in
those houses and try to help in whatever way they can, one person at a
time while we fantasize about changing whole political and economic
systems.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2018 9:43 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Legacy of the Anti-Psychiatry
Movement
Very interesting.
What I remember about the early 70's was the dumping of a large number
of people who had been living in institutions, onto the streets.
If sticking people away in isolated mental hospitals was cruel, so was
turning them out to fend for themselves.
I was operating the snack bar in Spokane's city hall at the time. My
facility was in the lobby by the front door. For the first time the
city had a homeless problem. The folks who wandered into my location
looking for free food, were mostly people with very low IQ's. One
fellow said he had been "hired" by a nursing home, and his job was
that of Janitor. He had a room that had been partitioned off from the
furnace, just big enough for a single cot and a four drawer dresser.
But that didn't matter since he worked six full days each week, on
call all day, and unless he left the building on Sunday, he was on call
then, too.
His "pay"? Room and board and $5 per week for spending money.
The other folks who stand out in my memory was a couple. They had met
at a shelter following their discharge from Eastern Washington
Hospital. By the time they began hanging around my snack bar, they
had figured out how to produce a baby. They walked up to my counter
and sat their 6 month old baby smack in the middle of the counter.
"Squish!" went the baby's diaper. And poop squeezed out. The poor
little fellow stunk to high Heaven, and so did the parents. The
father stepped up to the counter to ask me for "a loan", and I literally
gagged.
I had one employee at the time, a fellow who had been sentenced to
Lake Land Village some 30 years earlier. He was both blind and had
seizures. His stepfather was afraid of him and had him committed.
Harold had the IQ of a genius. He worked as a Braille transcriber,
and became a skilled organist, and was "allowed" to leave to attend a
local church, where he played. After 30 years, our organization of
the blind learned of his incarceration, and we petitioned for his
release. He had a fairly decent monthly income from a family
endowment, and he was hired by the Lincoln Bank to play the chimes
each day at noon. He found a decent apartment and with the help of our
Spokane chapter, furnished it tastefully.
He was a fixture in Spokane for many years. I hired him because he
was efficient, punctual, personable, honest to a fault, and very much
loved by the people who stopped by the snack bar. Having lived so
many years at Eastern Washington/Lake Land Village, Harold knew most
of the people being turned out. He spent his afternoons assisting
them in locating decent lodging and meals.
There were far better ways of relocating those people who had been
held captive for such a long time. But the governor seemed to be more
focused on how much we could save, than whether the people, now turned
victims, could survive.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/25/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Legacy of the Anti-Psychiatry Movement
A scene from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." (YouTube)
Last week marked 40 years since Franco Basaglia's revolutionary work
in Trieste, Italy, led to the groundbreaking Legge 180 (Law 180, also
known as "Basaglia Law"), which ended the practice of involuntary
confinement in asylums throughout Italy. The anti-psychiatry movement
was part of a larger intellectual and professional movement promoted
through the efforts of Basaglia, Michel Foucault in France, R. D.
Laing in Great Britain, Thomas Szasz in the United States and Erving
Goffman in Canada. These thinkers critiqued the legal powers
conferred on psychiatrists to detain and treat individuals with
mental health disorders, which contributed to the medicalization of
madness.
They also championed the notion that personal subjectivity is
independent from any hegemonic mandate of normalcy imposed by
organized psychiatric medicine. This movement even suggested that
mental illness might not exist at all outside of the language to
frame the other. Basaglia's work in the asylum in Trieste became a
model for radical psychiatrists internationally who had been laboring
in their own countries to end the forced institutionalization of
patients and attempting to forge a new model of mental health care.
Part of the post-war anti-psychiatry movement, Basaglia's political
ethos was born from his six-month internment in Venice's Santa Maria
Maggiore prison for his participation in the Italian resistance.
Basaglia and other prisoners escaped in April 1945, months before the
end of the Second World War.
After receiving his medical degree in 1949 from the University of
Padua, where he trained in the school of psychiatry, his experience
as director of a provincial asylum in Gorizia (now located in
Slovenia) would affect his political and philosophical ideas. In was
at this point, early in his career, that Basaglia was pushed from
Padua to Italy's border regions for having been critical of the
medical profession's confinement model. In Gorizia, shocked by use of
chains, straitjackets, bars and other modes of confinement, Basaglia
sought to understand why an institution that was ostensibly about
helping people seemed very much to punish them.
Inspired by Goffman's "Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of
Mental Patients and Other Inmates" (1961) and Foucault's "Madness and
Civilization:
A History of Madness in the Classical Age" (1961), Basaglia became a
fierce critic of what he referred to as the "total institution,"
which turned people into "non-persons" and produced a discourse of
deviance in which individuals were excluded from and broken down by
society.
Basaglia viewed "mental illness" not as a disease, but as an
expression of human needs. From Gorizia, he took a director role of
the asylum in Trieste, where he would stay until 1979. In Trieste, 90
percent of the 1,182 patients in the psychiatric hospital were
nonvoluntary, living in conditions similar to those in Gorizia. It
was here that Basaglia's work would become a beacon of change-one
that would finally end psychiatric institutionalization in many parts
of the world.
Basaglia instituted open staff meetings and involved the local
community in cultural events outside the institution's walls. The
hospital staff, together with the patient-turned-subject, staged
cultural performances, joining forces with actors, musicians,
repertory companies and artists from around the world.
Basaglia transformed the "total institution," from one built on
hard-and-fast rules in which medical violence was kept from public
view into an open, creative space in which freedom and participation
by those inside and outside its walls served as a model for the new
"anti-asylum." By creating cultural events inside and outside the
hospital that included performances by the likes of Ornette Coleman,
as well as airplane excursions and art exhibits, the contained space
of "mental illness" was demystified and opened to an inclusive model
of society.
As a result of Law 180, Basaglia's work became the basis for radical
psychiatric reform around Europe and beyond-even extending to New
Zealand and Australia-with hundreds of institutions closing over the
next decade.
With each closing, the abuses of power within these hospitals became
better known-as did the reasons for confining individuals to them.
Anna Marchitelli and Annacarla Valeriano have documented how the
mental hospital was used to contain women who had merely broken out
of roles imposed by the patriarchy and were deemed "mentally ill" for
their refusal to get married, stay home or have children, as were
women who were labeled "nymphomaniacs" or deemed loquacious,
incoherent and exhibitionistic. They also note that asylums have been
used to lock up artists, people suffering from social exclusion and
medical debt, those whose political ideas were viewed as dangerous,
and even to contain and "cure" homosexuals. Yet the long-term effect
of the movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill has had harsh
consequences in countries where the absence of solid social
structures and services have ushered in the liberalization of the
mental-health market.
The theoretical roots of the anti-psychiatry movement in the United
States date to the late 1950s. Szasz, a psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst, first criticized the legitimacy of "mental illness" as
a legal term in an article he wrote in 1958 for the Columbia Law
Review. At the time "Psychiatry, Ethics, and the Criminal Law" was
published, only five states in the U.S.
barred involuntary commitment of people with "mental illness."
Drawing parallels between the practice of committing patients to
mental hospitals and the prison system, Szasz maintained that
psychiatrists were given the power to command a sentence of "insanity"
and to indefinitely intern patients who are suffering, all the while
treating them like criminals. Szasz kicked off the anti-psychiatry
movement in North America while foreshadowing the privatization of
mental health care in the future:
"All 'hospitals' should function essentially as private medical
institutions do at present." In response to what he saw as a
dangerous collaboration between the state and psychiatry, Szasz was
instrumental in forming the Libertarian Party in 1971, whose primary
platform called for the end of government collaborations with
psychiatry.
Unlike in Italy, in the U.S., the deinstitutionalization of mental
health care took place in phases. The first occurred just after 1963,
when President John Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act,
which encouraged the shift of mental health care from large
institutions back to the community. Later, President Lyndon Johnson
signed into law the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965, which
created Medicaid, which would pay for the health care of low-income
families. But this had a detrimental effect on people in mental
health care institutions who were transferred into nursing homes.
The 1966 U.S. Court of Appeals case Lake v. Cameron established that
psychiatric care should take place in the least restrictive setting
possible, and the following year, California's Gov. Ronald Reagan
signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act. While this law ended the
practice of institutionalization, it resulted, in the following year,
in the twofold increase of the mentally ill in California's criminal
justice system.
Later administrations were more conscious of the need for
community-based centers, with President Jimmy Carter signing the
Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 to fund more community health
centers. This still did not address chronic mental illness treatments.
But this act was quickly repealed by President Reagan's devastating
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, which moved funding to the
state level through block grants. This forced mental health centers
to compete with other public programs, including public housing, food
banks and drug programs. As a result, mental health rarely received
funds, and the 1980s was marked by an increase in homeless people who
were mentally ill. This was particularly notable in metropolitan
centers.
There were also some unlikely figures in the anti-psychiatry movement
in the U.S. For instance, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology,
joined forces with Szasz in 1969 to create the Citizens Commission on
Human Rights, a watchdog for psychiatric human rights. And between
the publication of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in
1962 and the release of its film adaptation in 1975, public opinion
the U.S. shifted radically against the asylum model.
The U.S. anti-psychiatry framework differed slightly from Italy's in
how the long-term changes eventually took effect. After the asylum
model was abandoned in most states by the late 1970s, with a shift to
community-based care, it was not until the Reagan administration that
the larger deinstitutionalization movement came into force in 1981.
This move accounted for the scenario in which approximately one-third
of all homeless people in the U.S. had severe mental health issues,
which had repercussions for how mental health care would be accessed
in the future.
First, for those who can afford it, mental health care is accessible
in the private market. Of the 300,000 inmates in the U.S. prison
system diagnosed with mental health problems, 30,000 receive
treatment in psychiatric facilities. The remaining prisoners, like
many homeless people with mental health problems, are left without any
support.
Starting in 2009, as a result of the Great Recession, states cut
$4.35 billion in public mental-health spending over the next three
years.
This was the largest reduction in funding since
deinstitutionalization began. Today, there are approximately 37,679
psychiatric beds in the United States, which is about 12 beds for
every 100,000 people, a lower ratio than in 1850. With increasing
numbers of mental-health patients in American jails, there is a
serious problem in how deinstitutionalization has been abandoned and
replaced by the private model-or left unexamined.
We must revisit the ideals of the anti-psychiatry movement in the
U.S., because it is clear that deinstitutionalization simply moved
the furniture around. This left other institutions to take over the
role of mental health care, leaving the most vulnerable with no
treatment and no community.
