Latest / psychophobia* podcast / Episode 11, Part I: Abolish Forced Treatment Now with Rob Wipond

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Episode 11, Part I: Abolish Forced Treatment Now with Rob Wipond · psychophobia* podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: The average member of the public has no idea the depth of what we're talking
0:04
SPEAKER_00: about here in terms of being an American citizen and being able to be taken away
0:12
SPEAKER_00: from your home to a hospital against your will and treated forcibly
0:18
SPEAKER_00: without your consent.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Behind these statistics are broken lives.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Psychophobia Podcast.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: What I would like to ask you,
0:34
SPEAKER_00: you seem to have dedicated a huge part of your life to bringing the attention to
0:39
SPEAKER_00: the injustice in the mental health system.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to imagine you're at a congressional hearing,
0:46
SPEAKER_00: and we're going to give you 60 seconds to tell us,
0:50
SPEAKER_00: through all your research and all your knowledge,
0:54
SPEAKER_00: what would you want to say to this hearing about what we need to do differently
0:58
SPEAKER_00: in terms of the mental health system in America?
1:02
SPEAKER_01: That stuff to get it down to a minute.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you can have
1:09
SPEAKER_01: to.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: I use my time.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: You can have to.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: And honestly,
1:13
SPEAKER_01: it's funny,
1:14
SPEAKER_01: but I think that one of the things we need to highlight
1:18
SPEAKER_01: when you ask your question like that is that that is a very specific context.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't necessarily tell them exactly what I think and feel about
1:28
SPEAKER_01: The mental health system or about involuntary commitment,
1:31
SPEAKER_01: because I don't think that's going to get anywhere.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: I think a group of people in Congress are going to have a very specific kind of agenda in mind.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: There's a way they work, there's types of things they're looking for.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: So I try to speak to what I think something they might take action on,
1:50
SPEAKER_01: that they might have power over.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:53
SPEAKER_01: I'd read the room a bit and try to say,
1:56
SPEAKER_01: okay, here's where I think you could be working on this.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: And an important thing to highlight right away is that,
2:03
SPEAKER_01: federally, that's not actually how involuntary commitment is Implemented in America.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: It's essentially a state power.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: So one of the most important things that they do federally,
2:17
SPEAKER_01: which I support,
2:17
SPEAKER_01: is I would say strengthen The original Department of Justice,
2:23
SPEAKER_01: as you know in America right now,
2:25
SPEAKER_01: lots is going on with the Department of Justice,
2:27
SPEAKER_01: it's becoming increasingly questionable.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: But essentially the Department of Justice does have and can have
2:33
SPEAKER_01: a very important role in oversight in investigating fraudulent
2:38
SPEAKER_01: and abusive behaviors.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: With respect to involuntary commitments.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: So I would really probably start there,
2:46
SPEAKER_01: emphasizing here's something that Congress has authority over,
2:51
SPEAKER_01: has done very important,
2:55
SPEAKER_01: taken very important action in So, you're an incredible investigative journalist.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: You clearly could have been a diplomat.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: You obviously have experience in dealing with legislators,
3:27
SPEAKER_00: if you're going to speak that diplomatically.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: I'll make it easier for you.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: If you had 60 seconds to live, what would be your parting shot in this area?
3:35
SPEAKER_00: If it was your swan song, what would you say?
3:37
SPEAKER_01: Stop it.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: Abolish involuntary commitment.
3:40
SPEAKER_01: Particularly, I mean,
3:42
SPEAKER_01: forced treatment,
3:43
SPEAKER_01: so-called forced treatment,
3:46
SPEAKER_01: which is,
3:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
3:47
SPEAKER_01: invading people's brains with our little experimental approaches,
3:51
SPEAKER_01: the psychiatric drugs.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: There's electroconvulsive shock therapy,
3:56
SPEAKER_01: all these other techniques that we're using on people against their will,
4:00
SPEAKER_01: just abolish it altogether.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: There is an argument to be made in some cases perhaps for a forced intervention.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: We'll imagine a situation where someone is acting violent and we may
4:11
SPEAKER_01: under some circumstances want someone else in the room,
4:14
SPEAKER_01: whether it be a friend,
4:15
SPEAKER_01: a police officer,
4:17
SPEAKER_01: someone to intervene and stop someone from doing physical harm to someone else.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: So insofar as some people imagine that's a role for the mental health system,
4:27
SPEAKER_01: then I'd say, okay,
4:29
SPEAKER_01: maybe there's a justification for physically stopping somebody,
4:32
SPEAKER_01: that we could talk about what sorts of circumstances that might be justifiable
4:37
SPEAKER_01: within.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: But I don't see any rationale that it has any compelling evidence behind it
4:43
SPEAKER_01: to support involuntary forced psychiatric treatment.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: So that's what I'd say, get rid of that, abolish it.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay, now we're getting into it.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: So I think,
4:57
SPEAKER_00: in fact,
4:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure the average member of the public has no idea the depth
5:04
SPEAKER_00: of what we're talking about here in terms of Being an American citizen
5:10
SPEAKER_00: and being able to be taken away from your home to a hospital against your will
5:17
SPEAKER_00: and treated forcibly without your consent,
5:20
SPEAKER_00: which is the title of your incredible book, Your Consent Is Not Required.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: A book, I have to tell you, I had difficulty reading because it's so harrowing.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Behind these statistics are broken lives.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people have said that to me.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: So people kind of go one way or the other with the book.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: They're either like,
5:43
SPEAKER_01: oh my God, like,
5:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
5:45
SPEAKER_01: I stopped reading it after I finished and I started again because,
5:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
5:48
SPEAKER_01: finally somebody is talking about what I've experienced or what I've suffered.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: It's powerful and it's incredible.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: It's a piece of journalism and research, an essential addition to the canon, if you like.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: So I'd like to express gratitude for the toil that you've gone through to put that together.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: How do you stay so positive?
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Because your presentation, you seem upbeat.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: And also, how did you get into this?
6:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, why did you choose to focus on this area?
6:42
SPEAKER_01: Well, one of the ways I stay positive is connecting with people.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's one of the joys of working on the book and continues to be.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: People like yourself,
6:52
SPEAKER_01: anyone else who's sharing a concern about this in any way,
6:56
SPEAKER_01: wherever they come from,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: I find it uplifting to just know there's other people who are trying to become
7:05
SPEAKER_01: To learn more about this,
7:07
SPEAKER_01: or they already are and are wanting to speak out,
7:11
SPEAKER_01: all of that, that's what I find uplifting.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: I've always enjoyed connecting with people in honest, open ways, you know?
7:20
SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of why I went into journalism.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: Actually, it's not the reverse.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: I don't do that because I'm a journalist.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: I've always been someone who's interested in learning about people's inner lives,
7:29
SPEAKER_01: hearing that shared,
7:31
SPEAKER_01: and then I started to have a passion for uplifting the voices of people
7:34
SPEAKER_01: who are less often heard in the public sphere.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: So that uplifts me too,
7:39
SPEAKER_01: to be able to say to somebody,
7:41
SPEAKER_01: I hear your story and I want to share it with the public and can we work on
7:45
SPEAKER_01: that together and get your story out there?
7:48
SPEAKER_01: So being able to use my skill in that way I find exciting.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: But it is a brutal area to be working in overall.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: I've worked in other types of areas in journalism and this is definitely one of
8:01
SPEAKER_01: the ones that's harder to take because it can be a very brutal
8:06
SPEAKER_01: and traumatizing experience for people.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: So how I got into it,
8:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:10
SPEAKER_01: is the first chapter of the book really is
8:13
SPEAKER_01: that my father got involuntarily committed.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: He was going through a difficult period.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: He had no history of quote unquote mental illness or anything like that.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: He was going through a difficult time.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: And I happened to be there living with them at the time around this period.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: So I observed it and saw that, yeah, he's really struggling here.
8:31
SPEAKER_01: He had gone through a sort of catastrophic prostate cancer surgery
8:35
SPEAKER_01: that had left him completely impotent and incontinent.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: So pretty big devastation for somebody just who'd only recently retired from
8:45
SPEAKER_01: a career as a college professor of computer engineering.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
8:50
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't sleeping,
8:51
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:51
SPEAKER_01: he was not wanting to get out of bed,
8:54
SPEAKER_01: kind of a mix of kind of depression and strange things he was saying and that.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: At some point I wasn't there anymore and my brother and mother felt in collaboration
9:05
SPEAKER_01: with him that they should go to the psychiatric hospital
9:08
SPEAKER_01: because that's what you're told to do when you're struggling like this.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: So they went there and in very short order, he was held against his will.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I laugh because you don't know what else to do about some of this stuff, right?
9:22
SPEAKER_01: It was devastating for him and scary and traumatizing and immediately
9:27
SPEAKER_01: a big security guard comes out and ushers him into this sterile, Dr.
9:31
SPEAKER_01: Montgomery,
9:32
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:33
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:33
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:34
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:35
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:35
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:35
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:36
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
9:36
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: And we were all aghast.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: And this story just kind of goes on,
9:51
SPEAKER_01: where I witnessed how quickly this otherwise ordinary person, my dad,
9:57
SPEAKER_01: who I knew quite well,
9:58
SPEAKER_01: went from who he was to somebody with absolutely no No rights at all,
10:03
SPEAKER_01: and being able to be subjected to this kind of treatment.
10:09
SPEAKER_01: And through that process,
10:11
SPEAKER_01: which I could go on and on,
10:12
SPEAKER_01: it's the entire first chapter of the book,
10:13
SPEAKER_01: but essentially it was really devastating for all of us.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: And in the end, I was also wondering, who else is this happening to?
10:20
SPEAKER_01: Because,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: my dad had all the benefits you would want in such a situation,
10:25
SPEAKER_01: all the supports you would want, and it played out terribly even for him.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: And I wondered about what it What about people who don't have families?
10:33
SPEAKER_01: What about people who have families that aren't nice?
10:36
SPEAKER_01: We all cared for him and really supported him.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: What about abusive families?
10:40
SPEAKER_01: What's happening in that kind of context?
10:42
SPEAKER_01: What about people who are poor, don't have any money?
10:44
SPEAKER_01: Because at any point when he got let out,
10:47
SPEAKER_01: they knew, well, he's going to go to a nice little home out on Okanagan Lake.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: They had no anxiety about letting him go.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: They weren't letting him out into the street or into a place that was
10:57
SPEAKER_01: a terrible kind of A place to live or something.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
11:02
SPEAKER_01: he had all these benefits,
11:03
SPEAKER_01: and I really wondered about people who didn't, and so I started to investigate.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: It's a great question, and you know, it's probably my motivation for doing this.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: In many ways,
11:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't particularly want to do it,
11:16
SPEAKER_00: but I feel that I'm obliged to do it because there are so many people
11:19
SPEAKER_00: who do not have a voice,
11:20
SPEAKER_00: who won't be listened to, who won't be believed, whose society doesn't really care.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: And the thing I've witnessed is When your rights are removed in the system,
11:32
SPEAKER_00: your right to complain also goes.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: Because an abusive member of staff can just say,
11:38
SPEAKER_00: oh, they're paranoid, they're being disruptive.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: It negates all aspects of voice.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's incumbent upon others who have a bit of a platform and a voice
11:51
SPEAKER_00: and experience to try and raise these voices up.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: What was your memory of how they justified detaining him?
12:01
SPEAKER_01: Just typical stuff, right?
12:02
SPEAKER_01: Oh, he's a danger to himself.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: Because they would say, well, how are you feeling?
12:07
SPEAKER_01: He'd say, well, I feel like dying.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: I feel like killing myself.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: Which he'd been saying since the day of the surgery pretty much.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: Well,
12:15
SPEAKER_01: since the day he learned that he might not be recovering his physical capacities
12:21
SPEAKER_01: after the surgery.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: He'd been talking about suicide and all of that.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: As you would expect, right?
12:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, to me, it was just kind of normal stuff, right?
12:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm like,
12:33
SPEAKER_01: but they were, oh,
12:34
SPEAKER_01: aghast and afraid and all these things,
12:37
SPEAKER_01: these practitioners,
12:38
SPEAKER_01: as if I thought, well, this is your business, like, this is your profession.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Have you seen anyone seriously depressed before?
12:45
SPEAKER_01: It's one of the first things out of their mouth usually is like, I feel like killing myself.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: So how can that be the criteria upon which you're saying,
12:53
SPEAKER_01: we're going to take away all your rights?
12:55
SPEAKER_01: To me, it was kind of nonsensical.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
12:58
SPEAKER_01: I've spent years studying it ever since to kind of understand better how and
13:03
SPEAKER_01: while this is playing out.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: But that was essentially it,
13:06
SPEAKER_01: because he was in no way, other than he'd also say, oh, I want to kill you, right?
13:10
SPEAKER_01: And I'd go, oh, dad, you do not.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: And he'd go, oh, you're right, son, I'd love you so much.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: Honestly, that was what these discussions were like.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: He was just flying through his emotions and really having difficulty,
13:20
SPEAKER_01: but for them, again, that's a trigger.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, he said he wanted to kill somebody.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well,
13:25
SPEAKER_01: how do you get this upset without feeling like you I want to kill someone, you know?
13:29
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of almost natural, I feel like, you know?
13:32
SPEAKER_01: So this is like a tension in the whole system, right?
13:36
SPEAKER_01: The whole mental health system has this problem
13:38
SPEAKER_01: where they've defined these two phrases,
13:43
SPEAKER_01: I want to kill myself as fundamental, right?
13:46
SPEAKER_01: These are on the basis you can lose your rights very easily.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: And yet there's things that are commonly,
13:52
SPEAKER_01: commonly felt and not uncommonly said by people when they're
13:57
SPEAKER_01: in what I would consider to be a fairly common type of distress.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: You see, I think the reveal for me, as you said, their business.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: So I had spent 20 years sort of Believing that so much of the McDonaldization of
14:13
SPEAKER_00: the health system was based on fear of liability.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'm coming around to the belief,
14:21
SPEAKER_00: which is going to be controversial when I say it, that suicidal ideation is product.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: The minute I say I'm going to harm myself, I become product.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: If I don't say I'm not product, there's nothing you can do.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: The minute they have that as a justification, Boy, they will do everything to keep you alive.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: And that is depressing to see that in action.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know whether it's conscious,
14:52
SPEAKER_00: but it's true because nobody has the conversation around where in society can you go
14:57
SPEAKER_00: to scream?
14:59
SPEAKER_00: If I can't scream to a mental health professional and say,
15:02
SPEAKER_00: you know what,
15:03
SPEAKER_00: I've just had prostate cancer,
15:04
SPEAKER_00: I feel like dying,
15:05
SPEAKER_00: I feel like killing my son,
15:07
SPEAKER_00: probably because I'm so dependent on him and I was once an independent man,
15:10
SPEAKER_00: I just resent it.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: If someone can't hold that, we have a problem.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: The truth is,
15:17
SPEAKER_00: we are manufacturing clinicians and technicians who cannot hold it
15:22
SPEAKER_00: because they're not trained how to hold it because they're trained in
15:24
SPEAKER_00: the McDonaldization, which is basically, whoa, flag, he said what?
15:30
SPEAKER_00: He said he was going to, okay, now we're going to initiate X, Y, and Z.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: It's that easy.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: It can be.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I also often hear from people like,
15:43
SPEAKER_01: oh, you know, they see my data, even, and they say, oh, that must be wrong.
15:49
SPEAKER_01: The numbers must be wrong because,
15:51
SPEAKER_01: and they'll tell some story about how they tried to Dr.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: Montgomery, psychophobia, psychophobia
16:09
SPEAKER_01: And I'll say, you know what?
16:10
SPEAKER_01: These are not incompatible stories,
16:12
SPEAKER_01: because what I've found through this story is that it's not incompatible.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: It's not incompatible.
16:23
SPEAKER_01: And what I've learned through my research is often these facilities
16:26
SPEAKER_01: and these practitioners are not interested in working with the people
16:31
SPEAKER_01: who are really, really struggling because they don't have good solutions.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: In mainstream mental health are often very ineffective.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: These drugs don't truly help people.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: They often just slow them down, tranquilize them a bit, but don't actually address the problems.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people then immediately start hating the brutal side effects
16:54
SPEAKER_01: of drugs like antipsychotics,
16:56
SPEAKER_01: which can be absolutely debilitating and destroy people's lives when they're
17:00
SPEAKER_01: on even medium doses of those drugs for long periods.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah,
17:06
SPEAKER_01: there's a sense that
17:09
SPEAKER_01: There's a brutality to all this that people find it really hard
17:14
SPEAKER_01: to extricate themselves from.
17:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm sort of losing the thread of what I was saying here.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: What was I talking about?
17:20
SPEAKER_00: No, it's good.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: I think it's, well, how easily you get into this situation.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, right.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: That's what I was just highlighting
17:28
SPEAKER_01: is that, yeah,
17:30
SPEAKER_01: and so what we found,
17:31
SPEAKER_01: and there's actually studies showing this,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: I've seen major reports looking at it,
17:35
SPEAKER_01: that people who are really struggling the most,
17:37
SPEAKER_01: Practitioners don't really want to work with them and often will not hold them
17:41
SPEAKER_01: against their will.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: And it is more likely if they think,
17:44
SPEAKER_01: oh, I think this is somebody I can quote unquote cure or help in some way.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: Those are the people that they'll more often hold against their will.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: People like my father, because they believed.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm quite sure they did believe.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: I don't think there was anything nefarious going on beyond the fact
17:59
SPEAKER_01: that they They honestly thought, we're going to do something good here.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: We're going to forcibly treat this person,
18:06
SPEAKER_01: and they're going to be better, and they're going to be thankful in the end.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: That never occurred after a year of them intervening repeatedly.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: It just got worse.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: But I'm quite sure that they continued to sort of believe, oh, he'd be worse off without us.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of thing they were saying, and I think they honestly believed that.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: So that's sort of,
18:27
SPEAKER_01: I want to highlight that for people out there who,
18:30
SPEAKER_01: when we talk Dr. Montgomery, psychophobia, psychophobia.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: And put all that together to really understand what's going on.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: And what we do learn is that it's very subjective, the entire system.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: There's really not a lot of hard science operating here
18:56
SPEAKER_01: and how people diagnose other people and how these kinds
19:00
SPEAKER_01: of interventions are implemented.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: You make a great point.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: And I've written about it before in terms of the analysis of McDonaldization.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: If you're under pressure to achieve certain targets,
19:11
SPEAKER_00: you're going to select the people who are going to help you make the target.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: So you're going to deselect the really complex,
19:18
SPEAKER_00: difficult, challenging, labour intensive because it's like a factory.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: The other point that you made that I think is really,
19:25
SPEAKER_00: really important is,
19:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:28
SPEAKER_00: I talk a lot about the negativity in the system,
19:32
SPEAKER_00: taking the positivity as red, right?
19:34
SPEAKER_00: John Reid once said, you know, there's enough people talking about the positive narrative.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: There should be no excuse made for talking about the negative,
19:42
SPEAKER_00: but it has to be said A lot of the workers or the people in the system,
19:48
SPEAKER_00: they do believe categorically that they're doing the right thing and they're trying
19:52
SPEAKER_00: to help people.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: I witnessed recently an old woman in an ER who wouldn't comply,
20:00
SPEAKER_00: who was frightened to death from three burly security,
20:05
SPEAKER_00: and the nurse and doctor restrained her forcibly.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: This is an ER.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: And then they proceeded to inject her against their will.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: And I said, why are you doing this?
20:17
SPEAKER_00: And this lovely nurse said, would you like to be kicked in the face?
20:22
SPEAKER_00: And to say I nearly lost my shit is an understatement because it was like, I'm from Belfast.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: You're strapping down this woman and injecting her because you don't want to get
20:33
SPEAKER_00: a kick in the face.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: But you'll find if you scratch the surface, that'll be the procedure.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: That's how they're trained.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: That's what they're trained to do.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: There's no exception.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: But somebody has to realize that the system is made up of the people in it.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: So they can't turn around and say, this is procedure.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: This is what we're meant to do.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: Especially if they've had any sort of professional training.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: And this is what's really concerning me.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: The lack of critical thinking.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: The lack of thinking, actually, we're meant to be a hospital.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: We're strapping this old woman down and injecting her against her will because
21:12
SPEAKER_00: of our own fear of a kick in the face.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: That's torture.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: I do think we're dealing with a big problem
21:21
SPEAKER_01: across system-wide involuntary commitment and forced treatment have existed for
21:26
SPEAKER_01: a very long time, you know, hundreds of years, right?
21:29
SPEAKER_01: Very embedded in the system.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: And I do think a lot of people who are the practitioners become affected by it over time.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: As one nurse I interviewed said to me,
21:42
SPEAKER_01: you know, Rob,
21:42
SPEAKER_01: you need to understand that All the practitioners you're interviewing for your book,
21:48
SPEAKER_01: we've done this.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: We have forcibly treated people.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: You can't graduate as a psychiatric nurse, as a psychiatrist.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: You know, you can't graduate without implementing it.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
22:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:04
SPEAKER_01: being in military training and you have to learn to be trained to shoot on command,
22:09
SPEAKER_01: you know, to potentially kill somebody.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: And in this case,
22:13
SPEAKER_01: they have actually And he says, and it does, it changes you in fundamental ways.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: And in this case, he said he ultimately had to quit.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: He couldn't do it anymore.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: And he went into teaching.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: But a lot of people stay in it.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: And they have to learn how to justify it.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: And they're caught in that.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: And I do think that really affects the public dialogue and discussion about this,
22:38
SPEAKER_01: that so many of the people who run this system are people
22:42
SPEAKER_01: who have already done this.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: And do it regularly on a routine basis.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: And it's difficult for them to kind of turn around suddenly and go, maybe this is all wrong.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: And maybe it's not, maybe the justifications I'm using to do it are really not valid.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Because right now the biggest one is simply they'll say,
22:59
SPEAKER_01: well, you'd be worse off without us, you know?
23:02
SPEAKER_01: And there's no evidence of that.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: There's not any kind of scientific studies to prove that.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the anecdotal evidence points in the other direction,
23:09
SPEAKER_01: but it's a powerful justification still.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to push back on that,
23:15
SPEAKER_00: what you just said,
23:16
SPEAKER_00: because I came to this world as a second career and I went to college in London
23:23
SPEAKER_00: at 34 and I did an undergrad in social work,
23:25
SPEAKER_00: that was my first,
23:27
SPEAKER_00: and I refused to go to an involuntary commitment and I won the prize
23:34
SPEAKER_00: for social work.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: When I got a first, but I never attended a forced commitment.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: As I protest,
23:43
SPEAKER_00: not that I don't empathise when sometimes services have to get involved,
23:48
SPEAKER_00: it's not that,
23:49
SPEAKER_00: but I wanted to communicate that if a social worker doesn't challenge the system,
23:55
SPEAKER_00: don't call yourself a social worker, call yourself a nurse.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: I had to go back and actually look at this recently,
24:01
SPEAKER_00: and the National Association of Social Workers,
24:03
SPEAKER_00: which many,
24:04
SPEAKER_00: many practitioners,
24:04
SPEAKER_00: especially in Massachusetts are clinical social workers,
24:08
SPEAKER_00: pushing against social injustice is one of the top values,
24:14
SPEAKER_00: but they seem to have assimilated themselves so far into the medical model
24:21
SPEAKER_00: that they are not speaking up in the voice that we need them to use.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: So in the UK it's changed now,
24:27
SPEAKER_00: It used to be you couldn't section someone under the Mental Health Act unless
24:30
SPEAKER_00: the social worker signed the paper with the psychiatrist,
24:33
SPEAKER_00: which meant you always had the pushback against the bio, you had the psychosocial.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: And my experience of working with the psychiatrists,
24:41
SPEAKER_00: they were delighted because they were all out of answers.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: If they've spent any time at the front end,
24:49
SPEAKER_00: this is in London, it's pretty hardcore, they're going to see what doesn't work.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: So they're begging for some alternative than just medication.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: So they tended to work very well with the social workers and work quite creatively.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: But it's a problem.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: The problem for me is,
25:10
SPEAKER_00: especially when I read your book,
25:13
SPEAKER_00: I had this naivety that 20 years ago things were worse,
25:17
SPEAKER_00: but I think they're objectively getting worse now.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Primarily because of McDonaldization and also because of profit.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, those are factors.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: I think the system has become more aggressive in a lot of ways, particularly in communities.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: We see now this expansion of, oh,
25:39
SPEAKER_01: we don't even need a hospital in some cases,
25:41
SPEAKER_01: we'll just send Dr. Montgomery, psychophobia
25:57
SPEAKER_01: Just housing in general.
25:58
SPEAKER_01: So there are lots of sort of publicly subsidized housing where the managers of
26:03
SPEAKER_01: the housing are essentially becoming monitors for ensuring that people continue
26:08
SPEAKER_01: to take psychiatric medications and so on.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: These subtler ways of coercing people that are basically threatening to call at any time.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: You know,
26:19
SPEAKER_01: if you go off your medication,
26:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to call 911 or I'm going to call this contact they gave me for
26:24
SPEAKER_01: the hospital and you're going to get dragged up and forcibly
26:29
SPEAKER_01: So this kind of attitude out there in the public has become really widespread
26:34
SPEAKER_01: and becoming more widespread all the time.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: So I agree.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of ways in which it's gotten worse.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: Clearly, if we compare it to Dr. Montgomery, psychophobia, psychophobia.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: And actually there's a,
26:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
26:58
SPEAKER_01: I think within my lifetime I've seen a more,
27:03
SPEAKER_01: like the public overall is more aggressive around this.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: They want,
27:09
SPEAKER_01: in response largely to what they believe to be A mental illness related issue
27:14
SPEAKER_01: of homelessness,
27:15
SPEAKER_01: people are becoming very aggressive about thinking
27:18
SPEAKER_01: that somehow involuntary commitment is a solution to that,
27:21
SPEAKER_01: which is very misguided in so many ways.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: It's not a mental illness problem,
27:26
SPEAKER_01: it's a house Housing,
27:27
SPEAKER_01: housing,
27:27
SPEAKER_01: affordability problem by and large,
27:29
SPEAKER_01: and just people who are really struggling emotionally,
27:32
SPEAKER_01: mentally are often some of the victims of that as well.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
27:36
SPEAKER_01: there's a drug use issue too that can come into play,
27:40
SPEAKER_01: but involuntary It's one of the most outrageously abusive and certainly
27:44
SPEAKER_01: the most expensive ways to try to address that problem.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: It's enormously expensive to involuntarily commit people.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm amazed that it kind of gets,
27:53
SPEAKER_01: the sort of public support it gets, that people don't seem to kind of grasp that.
27:57
SPEAKER_01: Even they protest against something like Housing First, you know.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: But would there not be a heavy lobbying for Forced treatment
28:05
SPEAKER_00: because there will be providers who will make huge amount of money from those.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: That's a factor too, as you highlighted, we're seeing it.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: I think it's happened in both levels.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: In some cases it can just be, I legitimately think I can help you and I'm making money off you.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: And other times it can be, I don't even care because I'm going to make money off you either way.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: And I think we're seeing both of those play out at a systemic level and we have lots
28:30
SPEAKER_01: of evidence to suggest that we are.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's a sort of sidebar,
28:36
SPEAKER_00: I've been doing some outreach work with homeless people in New York
28:40
SPEAKER_00: and what I was struck by was what they wanted more than time,
28:49
SPEAKER_00: money or food was a hug.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: And that really,
28:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
28:54
SPEAKER_00: I've had moments where I'm just like holding someone who's homeless in the street
28:58
SPEAKER_00: of New York and I was like,
28:59
SPEAKER_00: I might have been with them for 30 minutes talking about food,
29:02
SPEAKER_00: housing, but they always asked for a hug and they held on, right?
29:08
SPEAKER_00: That human contact.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the things I would love to get across today is,
29:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
29:14
SPEAKER_00: we're both in this field,
29:17
SPEAKER_00: we're studied,
29:17
SPEAKER_00: we're researched, published, but it's trying to get the humanity across.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, you talk about that community treatment order.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: So basically you've been told to take a medication that's going to affect your mind
29:30
SPEAKER_00: and wellbeing that you don't want to take.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't take it, you're going to be dragged back to hospital.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: I came across that 20 years ago.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: And what I was struck by in London was the majority of people who were
29:42
SPEAKER_00: under those orders were people of colour or people
29:45
SPEAKER_00: who have disadvantaged backgrounds, people who had nobody to speak up for them.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: The statistics are,
29:53
SPEAKER_00: in New York,
29:53
SPEAKER_00: I'll have to fact check the exact numbers on this,
29:55
SPEAKER_00: but I think it's 24% black population and 54% forced incarceration in New York.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: That's self-evident, right?
30:09
SPEAKER_00: But let's talk a little bit about what did you come across when you were coming from
30:16
SPEAKER_00: the outside in and hearing these stories?
30:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you had your father as an example,
30:21
SPEAKER_00: and thank you for sharing that,
30:22
SPEAKER_00: but what were you struck by when you heard the stories of other people
30:26
SPEAKER_00: and forced treatment and before and after?
30:32
SPEAKER_01: Really, first of all, I guess, how reasonable.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: I thought lots of people who had been
30:39
SPEAKER_00: involuntarily committed, how reasonable they
30:42
SPEAKER_01: were.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: There's this caricature out there of the insane madman,
30:50
SPEAKER_01: and people imagine that that's the only type of person that's getting locked up.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: It's this extreme caricature, and it's very, very, Very rare in my experience.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: Far more often is people who are just going through a difficult period of their lives.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: They have long histories of relationships,
31:06
SPEAKER_01: friendships,
31:07
SPEAKER_01: capacity to work,
31:09
SPEAKER_01: all these other things,
31:11
SPEAKER_01: and something That may have happened that did,
31:15
SPEAKER_01: like with my father,
31:16
SPEAKER_01: going through a difficult period of time that they would subsequently come out of,
31:20
SPEAKER_01: but the system decided to intervene very aggressively and in this way
31:25
SPEAKER_01: that I was also struck by just the brutality of it.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: And even in some ways more is the chilling side of it for me,
31:34
SPEAKER_01: even when it's not brutal,
31:36
SPEAKER_01: even when people weren't being actively restrained
31:41
SPEAKER_01: because they weren't acting out any particular So they'd behave reasonably,
31:45
SPEAKER_01: and it was a situation where the practitioners themselves sort
31:48
SPEAKER_01: of behaved somewhat reasonably.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: Even in that context, it was often very humiliating, chilling, like stupid, a waste of time.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: People would just say to me,
31:58
SPEAKER_01: Wandering around in these empty rooms,
32:02
SPEAKER_01: listening to a TV drone all day in this white-walled ward,
32:07
SPEAKER_01: talking with other people who are also just frustrated about being there,
32:10
SPEAKER_01: who have nothing to do and there's nothing to do there.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: And how is this in any way healing?
32:15
SPEAKER_01: And then they're giving me a drug,
32:17
SPEAKER_01: they're just giving me all these bad side effects and kind of making it difficult
32:21
SPEAKER_01: to think.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't like it, it's not making me feel better.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: They're kind of telling stories like that over and over and over again.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: It was so rare that I heard a story where someone went,
32:32
SPEAKER_01: oh yeah,
32:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm really glad it happened and it was really great what happened
32:35
SPEAKER_01: and here's what happened.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: And they would lay it out.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: And usually if I did hear a story like that,
32:39
SPEAKER_01: it was simply Everybody was super respectful and I was out of there within two days,
32:43
SPEAKER_01: you know, and I like this particular drug.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: I was feeling in distress and, you know, and I'm like, okay, so, you know, all right.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: But in a way,
32:52
SPEAKER_01: you're not even representative of what we're talking about then because you never,
32:56
SPEAKER_01: even though you were nominally,
32:58
SPEAKER_01: you know, detained on paper, you weren't really forcibly treated.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: You weren't really involuntarily detained because the moment you got there,
33:05
SPEAKER_01: you met somebody that made you feel good and comfortable,
33:08
SPEAKER_01: like gave you the hug, as it were, right?
33:10
SPEAKER_01: In some way, even though they wouldn't physically hug them, that sort of thing.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: And often I hear what you heard, too,
33:15
SPEAKER_01: is that people would say, God,
33:16
SPEAKER_01: if somebody had just given me a hug or just treated me respectfully or just made
33:21
SPEAKER_01: the hospital seem like it was a welcoming environment,
33:23
SPEAKER_01: I would have felt so much better.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: So it is these little things that start to add up to a brutal experience for people.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: It's not complicated,
33:33
SPEAKER_00: and it doesn't cost any money,
33:35
SPEAKER_00: but it's nearly like,
33:36
SPEAKER_00: it goes back to the old days where it was seen,
33:39
SPEAKER_00: nearly if you engage with somebody in a state of psychosis, you can make it worse.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: Because Jasper's,
33:47
SPEAKER_00: when his original phenomenology was categorizing the symptoms, but not the content.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: So from a McDonaldization point of view,
33:55
SPEAKER_00: it's like you hear voices tick,
33:58
SPEAKER_00: Not, well, when did they start and is it a male voice?
34:01
SPEAKER_00: Is it a word you hear?
34:02
SPEAKER_00: What's happened?
34:02
SPEAKER_00: But going back, Artie Lang used to talk about, at the heart of psychosis is a brokenheartedness.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: And that is an incredible thing to witness.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: And his argument was, you meet brokenheartedness with openheartedness.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's kind of not what we're saying,
34:21
SPEAKER_00: but going back...
34:24
SPEAKER_01: Let me say something about that.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Because that's another thing I've noticed,
34:28
SPEAKER_01: and it continues to this day, is people thank me so much for interviewing them.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: And often,
34:37
SPEAKER_01: worse than that,
34:39
SPEAKER_01: and I mean that's a nice thing,
34:41
SPEAKER_01: But worse than that,
34:42
SPEAKER_01: they say, you're the first person that's ever actually listened to my story.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: You know, that asks these kind of questions.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: Where did this really start?
34:52
SPEAKER_01: What happened to you?
34:53
SPEAKER_01: You know,
34:54
SPEAKER_01: and I'll just react like a normal,
34:55
SPEAKER_01: but oh my God, Dr.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: Montgomery,
34:56
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:57
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:57
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:58
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:58
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:58
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:59
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
34:59
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
35:00
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
35:01
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
35:01
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad I can do that.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: That can happen between us.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: It's very natural.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm not doing it.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a therapist.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: This happens naturally for me,
35:21
SPEAKER_01: my curiosity and their story and who they are and what they're all about and all of
35:25
SPEAKER_01: that.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: Just friend to friend, really.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
35:29
SPEAKER_01: they highlight for me often that the therapists don't do that,
35:34
SPEAKER_01: that their experience of hospitalization, it never happened that way.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: They were just labeled.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: They were forcibly drugged.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: They were just warehoused there for however long,
35:45
SPEAKER_01: that no one ever really delved into them and their story with them.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: And if they wanted that,
35:50
SPEAKER_01: they needed to have enough money to hire a private therapist on the side to do that
35:55
SPEAKER_01: on their own side.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: In a hospital, people rarely get that.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
36:00
SPEAKER_01: I really want to double-click on what you're talking about,
36:03
SPEAKER_01: that sense of human connection,
36:05
SPEAKER_01: so important,
36:06
SPEAKER_01: so healing for people and so rare,
36:10
SPEAKER_01: shockingly rare,
36:11
SPEAKER_01: disturbingly rare and horrifyingly rare in the mental health system in terms
36:17
SPEAKER_01: of involuntary commitment processes.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: So basically what you're saying is people were thanking you as an investigative journalist.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: For witnessing and listening.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: Potentially sometimes their broken heartedness.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: The very thing that you would think that they are going to receive when they go
36:33
SPEAKER_00: to hospital is the very thing they're not receiving.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: What you just said makes me want to weep.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you why.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: I got into this, my interest in this was sparked in the early 90s.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: I was on the rave scene and I was at a party and I met a gentleman.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: I said, you know, after party situation and he told me his story.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: It was incredible.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: And then he told me he had been incarcerated for three months.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: I was like, I had no experience of any of this.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: I just thought this was wild.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: And then he told me in the three months he'd been there, no one had asked him his story.
37:07
SPEAKER_00: And I just couldn't understand.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: And that research really pulled up,
37:11
SPEAKER_00: you know,
37:13
SPEAKER_00: there is a history to why they don't do that,
37:15
SPEAKER_00: but I cannot think of anything more iotrogenic than kind of being ignored
37:20
SPEAKER_00: when you're on a ward.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: But I do know something more iotrogenic that doesn't get spoken about a lot.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: When you're involuntary taken to hospital, more often than not they take away your phone.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: So what I experienced talking to people was three days,
37:39
SPEAKER_00: even three days for an assessment or a week or whatever,
37:43
SPEAKER_00: they don't get to pay their bills or their rent or talk to their friends or
37:50
SPEAKER_00: So they come out and the problem that they may have went in
37:55
SPEAKER_00: with has been exasperated to the point where their life is falling down around them.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: I can't help think that there's something about manufacturing madness in that.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: You need stability.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: You're brought into a situation where all stability is stripped away and
38:19
SPEAKER_00: then you're expected to go out and rebuild.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: The anxiety levels that people experience just being helpless on a ward
38:29
SPEAKER_00: without being able to contact the outside world.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: And then the response of family and loved ones who feel they've been ghosted.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: People don't like being ghosted.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: Banks, bills, friends, lovers, enemies.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: It's like you're off your phone for three days.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: They think you've vanished.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: And in many ways you have,
38:52
SPEAKER_00: because if you don't have an ability to send a message out, where have you gone?
38:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, no, it's brutal.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can be so, I say, it becomes terrifying.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Just that piece alone,
39:05
SPEAKER_01: the isolation,
39:06
SPEAKER_01: the fact that that can be taken away from you in a way
39:08
SPEAKER_01: that even criminals sometimes often are not They are required to be so isolated.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: They have the right to call a lawyer and so on.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they can hold this against you for a really long time,
39:21
SPEAKER_01: use it against you over, yeah, this period.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: I talked with an indigenous woman who,
39:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
39:27
SPEAKER_01: described that in particular,
39:29
SPEAKER_01: When she talked with members of her community about,
39:32
SPEAKER_01: how did we handle this in the past?
39:34
SPEAKER_01: They talked about how, oh,
39:36
SPEAKER_01: if somebody was really struggling in these kinds of ways emotionally,
39:39
SPEAKER_01: we'd all rally around them, we'd bring them into the big house, the long house.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: And celebrate,
39:45
SPEAKER_01: and do things with them,
39:46
SPEAKER_01: and provide for them, help them out and stuff, and they would move through it.
39:51
SPEAKER_01: But whereas her experience,
39:52
SPEAKER_01: having been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital,
39:55
SPEAKER_01: was being pulled right out of that.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: No ability to connect with her community at all,
40:00
SPEAKER_01: and that isolation just compounded her psychological stress and fear and trauma.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: It's not complicated, is it, when you think about it?
40:08
SPEAKER_00: But you make a great point.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: You know,
40:10
SPEAKER_00: somebody said to me recently,
40:12
SPEAKER_00: they were taken away for an assessment from their family home on the basis
40:18
SPEAKER_00: of collateral information.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: And they said, if I had stabbed my partner, I would have had more rights.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: So they were taken away on the basis of primarily of collateral information.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, and it's absolutely true.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, it's not inflammatory, rhetorical.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: There's no question about it that if you are an average criminally charged person
40:43
SPEAKER_01: or even convicted criminal,
40:45
SPEAKER_01: In the United States or Canada or most European countries,
40:48
SPEAKER_01: you would typically have more rights of due process than you do as
40:53
SPEAKER_01: a psychiatric patient being detained against your will.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: The evidence base,
40:58
SPEAKER_01: even right up to the Supreme Court,
41:00
SPEAKER_01: They dropped the requirement for evidence when you do get in front of a judge,
41:07
SPEAKER_01: which can be quite a long time before you even get to see a judge
41:11
SPEAKER_01: when you're detained in the mental health system.
41:13
SPEAKER_01: Even then, the requirement for evidence presentation is lower.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: The Supreme Court said, yeah,
41:18
SPEAKER_01: we don't need to hit the same level of standard as we do with criminal cases
41:23
SPEAKER_01: because we're supposedly, quote unquote, trying to help.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
41:27
SPEAKER_01: it's right across the board that you don't have as many rights,
41:30
SPEAKER_01: it's harder to build your own case,
41:32
SPEAKER_01: it's harder to defend yourself,
41:33
SPEAKER_01: the other side doesn't have to meet the same standard of evidence,
41:38
SPEAKER_01: all of these things.
41:39
SPEAKER_00: And there's this,
41:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to claim ownership of it, the concept, epistemic destabilization.
41:46
SPEAKER_00: If we phoned the police to do a wellness check on you now and they came around,
41:54
SPEAKER_00: You would meet them with incredulity, and it's like, what?
41:57
SPEAKER_00: And you probably get a little bit elevated at the front of these people.
42:03
SPEAKER_00: But if that happens in reality,
42:04
SPEAKER_00: you know,
42:05
SPEAKER_00: it's that saying,
42:07
SPEAKER_00: they called me mad, I said I wasn't mad, damn they outvoted me, right?
42:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't think most people realise that it's that simple,
42:16
SPEAKER_00: that if somebody was to phone the police or ambulance and say that you're in a state
42:22
SPEAKER_00: of mental health crisis,
42:25
SPEAKER_00: they can literally come into your home,
42:27
SPEAKER_00: take you away without charge,
42:30
SPEAKER_00: They've assessed on the collateral information that they're provided,
42:33
SPEAKER_00: whether it's accurate or not.
42:35
SPEAKER_00: And maybe they don't like what you're saying, which turns out to be a crime in America.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
42:42
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I think people don't realize it.
42:44
SPEAKER_01: And it is really that simple.
42:46
SPEAKER_01: In fact, police have a duty to respond.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: So they have to show up and do something.
42:53
SPEAKER_01: And they do have leeway There's no way to not take you into a psychiatric hospital
42:59
SPEAKER_01: against your will.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: They can make that call themselves.
43:02
SPEAKER_01: Often they don't, though, because they consider themselves to be erring on the side of caution.
43:08
SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, you know, well, we got some concerns.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: We'll have good care up there at the hospital and they'll figure out
43:13
SPEAKER_01: if there really is a problem or not.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: And so we'll let them do it.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: And so this is the kind of system that,
43:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
43:20
SPEAKER_01: ends up and people already,
43:22
SPEAKER_01: that experience alone of being handcuffed by the police and pulled up to
43:25
SPEAKER_01: the psychiatric hospital and left there and go through the process of admission
43:29
SPEAKER_01: and interviewing and all that stuff there,
43:31
SPEAKER_01: that already is terrifying for many people.
43:33
SPEAKER_01: If they were having difficulty,
43:35
SPEAKER_01: it will spike, you know, obviously their level of anxiety and all of that.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: And then if that often, oh, there might not be a doctor there right now.
43:45
SPEAKER_01: So the intern just admits you and you'll get a real interview and a You know,
43:49
SPEAKER_01: so now they've held you for that long.
43:51
SPEAKER_01: All of this stuff can happen, and there's really no very little recourse for you in many cases.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it varies a lot from state to state,
43:58
SPEAKER_01: I have to say that,
43:59
SPEAKER_01: how long this takes and all of that,
44:02
SPEAKER_01: but essentially The bare bones of what we're describing here is very,
44:06
SPEAKER_01: very common and can be terrifying in and of itself.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: And it really is that simple.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: And the other thing, it's different than swatting, criminal swatting.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: So if I call and say, Hey,
44:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:19
SPEAKER_01: you have,
44:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
44:20
SPEAKER_01: you've got a loaded gun,
44:21
SPEAKER_01: you're going to kill people,
44:23
SPEAKER_01: and the police show up and you don't actually have a gun,
44:25
SPEAKER_01: I can be criminally charged for that lying.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: Totally not the case if I say,
44:30
SPEAKER_01: I call 911 and say, hey,
44:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm worried about his mental health,
44:33
SPEAKER_01: because they can never prove,
44:35
SPEAKER_01: right, that I didn't have some reason to be anxious about your well-being.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: You know,
44:41
SPEAKER_01: so they can't,
44:42
SPEAKER_01: it's virtually impossible to ever charge someone for a false representation for
44:47
SPEAKER_01: a 911 swatting event of some kind that's related to emotional distress.
44:55
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