The narrow focus of the mental health industry and its inappropriate medical approach promotes and maintains more disability than any other single cause.
A bastion of mainstream mental health and its single-minded focus on pharmaceuticals or electroshock, Kansas offers little or nothing in the way of alternatives. Few recover by passage through the present system.. if they get through it at all. Before mental institutions became home to highly experimental, and I daresay detrimental procedures such as lobotomy, electroshock, and neuroleptic (chemical lobotomy producing) drugs many more people recovered and left, or found community there superior to that which was available on the outside. No more... Still there must be alternatives lurking here somewhere, and it is the effort of the founder of this website and all those who volunteer in this quest to find them.
Alternatives to recovery for spiritual, mental, and emotional difficulties which may or may not have a behavioral aspect are extant elsewhere in the country and on the web. Prominent celebrities such as can be found promoting them.
Assist us in getting the word out about the harm that the present coercive, paternalistic, authoritarian mental health system wreaks, and let us bring to those in need knowledge and access to humane alternatives to dismal confinement, lifelong drug dependence on and addiction to legal psychotropic and neurotoxic drugs, and electroshock. Grievous Faults We See in the Practice of Medicine Today
The foundation of public 'mental health' is for all citizens to have full and equal rights. The alleged 'mentally ill' have fewer rights than convicted felons. Some organizations working toward restoring full human and civil rights to the psychiatrically labeled are:
(PAB)
. Lists alternative practitioners around the country. One practitioner is located in .
Association for Mental Health Alternatives
As well as the above, other alternative links can be found in the at the Antipsychiatry Reading Room. They exemplify a growing revolt against the hegemony of biopsychiatry, which is subservient to the pharmaceutical industry.
If you have knowledge of other alternatives not listed here, especially if they are in Kansas, we'd appreciate it if you'd drop the webmaster a line and let him know. Especially needed are psychologists, lay councillors, etc. who emphasize a non-drug approach, and doctors competent to supervise the safe, slow withdrawal of psychotropic drugs.
[The following is a book review from a publisher's site, .]
In recent years the mental health industry has been attacked for the invalidity of its illnesses, the unreliability of its diagnoses, the dangers of its treatments, and its corruption by drug companies. [The book] integrates those critiques and goes further.
Nearly 1 in 4 American adults are on psychiatric drugs, and Ritalin production has increased 800 percent since 1990, yet the mental health industry laments the fact that two-thirds of us with diagnosable mental disorders do not seek treatment. This book argues that "institutional mental health's" ever-increasing diseases, disorders, and drugs have diverted us from examining an important rebellion.
This rebellion--mainly passive and too often self-destructive--is against an increasingly impersonal and coercive "institutional society." Institutional society's worship of speed, power, and technology has created fantastic wealth--at least for some of us--but its disregard for human autonomy, community, and diversity has come with a cost. Depression has reportedly increased tenfold since 1900, and suicide levels for teenage boys have tripled since 1960. Have human genetics and serotonin levels changed that much, or has society?
Praise for Commonsense Rebellion
"Here is one psychologist who knows the reason America is sick: the institutions
and technologies we have created that make modern life meaningless, disjointed,
dispiriting, depressing, and joyless. His most unlikely prescription is to recognize
the widespread disaffection from them as a rebellion, not a disease, and to
encourage a more sensible one. What the hell, it just might work."
- Kirkpatrick Sale
© 2000 The Continuum International Publishing Group
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