Yet was falsely diagnosed with a "mental illness," given electric shock brain "treatment" which damaged my brain and spoiled my future. This example of careless classification of the populace by psychiatry is quite common, yet the law provides scant possibility of people so abused to ever prove it and receive just compensation.

Politicians do not consider this a human rights issue. Anybody who admits to having been labeled by a psychiatrist is not listened to and the idea that a psychiatric 'diagnosis' could be in gross error* seems simply like a foreign thought that their minds can't conceptualize. The Constitution, it would seem, has a clause specifying that full rights and freedom are not to be enjoyed by "mental patients," just as slavery was once also permitted by that same Constitution.

This proves, as actual fact, a close marriage between psychiatry, supposedly a branch of medicine, and government, concerned mainly with the health of the multi-billion dollar drug industry, the electroshock industry, and the utility of psychiatry as an extra-legal means of social control to keep people in line with its mandate to segregate, modify and/or punish all deviance in behavior and thought that a quasi-medical authority might find perturbing.

Most behavior subject to psychiatric intervention is not lawbreaking. Only someone who has broken a law warrants punishment. As being punishment or correction disguised in medical trappings, institutional psychiatry in effect compliments the penal system. The difference from strict law enforcement is in that they punish society's unwritten laws or simply anything that a 'clinician' does not like in a person. Anyone socially non-conforming is in danger of psychiatric interventions. Yearly, the number of "psychiatric disorders" increases. More and more of the travails of ordinary daily life are being cast as symptoms of mental disorders requiring drugs and other forms of biologic psychiatric interventions for management.

Psychiatry exists, and has always existed, to control those called mad by inflicting confinement, punishment, and neurological damage to pacify such people. Most, if not all of the psychoactive drugs presently used by psychiatry are known to cause damage to the nervous system. Electroshock damages the brain with 'doses' of high voltage.

The mentally troubled or troubling are not being cured, but confirmed in a stigmatized role and their possibly temporary unhappiness or altered states of mind (which could be a spiritual crisis or due to overlooked biological disease) made permanent. By being carelessly labeled as 'schizophrenic', bipolar, or a host of other pseudo-scientific "diagnoses" of shaky etiology they are confirmed as real patients with the superposition of legalized drug addiction and iatrogenic nerve damage, in the guise of medical treatment. When help could have been possible with a more careful medical approach to diagnosis and treatment, or true sanctuary at the crucial time instead of harsh measures, instead many people are removed from full participation in society to a lifetime of psychiatric disability.

The public must recognize that psychiatry is not health care. Coercive biologic psychiatry is a violation of fundamental basic human rights and must be disempowered. Only then can a truly democratic and free society exist. Coercive, biologic, reductionist psychiatry must be abolished as a medical specialty, and if it absolutely must continue to exist in its biological 'treatment,' behavior modification role, then it must do so confined to prisons as part of the penal system. One must however question whether a truly democratic and free society should need such an adjunct to its penal system.

I do not think we should continue to call such a pseudo-medical venture of behavior modification a form of health care, as it is now considered. There should be another category and name altogether for a "profession" that uses quasi-medical procedures in a way that impairs the function of biological systems to alter behavior, and does not heal, i.e. aim to improve the functioning of an organ or body system. They should not be called physicians, as this blurs the ethical distinction of the physician as someone who has pledged to "First, do no harm," and to serve as the patient's agent, not the agent of society, family, or government.

In closing, I assert: psychiatry has become so blind to the harm it produces to be at all deserving of the prestige it has held by pretending to be an altruistic, helping profession. It is time for critical thinkers at large in society to take the blinders off and turn their attention to an examination of the examiners and definers of our "mental health." We have given them cushy jobs that allow them to make stinging judgements against the personal worth of others while they remain unaccountable for them should they turn out to be unjustified. Anybody they don't like or doesn't like them is "decisionally impaired." Anybody critical of this corrupt, fraudulent and erroneous system known as the mental health movement is "mentally ill." They call us crazy, never do they pronounce us sane. They don't even know what that is, having yet to encounter it in themselves.

* According to psychiatrist Sydney Walker, in his book A Dose of Sanity, 40% of those diagnosed with strictly mental disease are really suffering from an overlooked, curable real disease that has brain symptoms. No psychiatrist will ever admit to mistakenly diagnosing someone with a mental disease; hence those so wrongly treated will find it nearly impossible to throw off the stigma of a psychiatric 'diagnosis'.