Have you ever been lied to by a mental health professional?

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Ridiculous paranoid bullsh*t

I saw a neurologyst once. He tried to convice myself I was hearing voices in my head. I told him I had trouble filtering noises but ke kept on charging with paranoid issues.
I think he is paranoid!

But what about the voices in your head?

No, well-documented destructive institutional cultures, and much of the documentation has come from people who've worked in them and then done actual research to try to figure out what on earth was going wrong. And some pretty well-respected sociologists and psychologists. Erving Goffman, Dick Sobsey, etc. But I guess they're all paranoid too, rather than trying to improve deplorable conditions in the fields they've worked in, or trying to document destructiveness so it can be stopped, etc...

And are you claiming my friend was lying when she said she was fired for charting that a woman previously from Willowbrook (which meant she was being watched closely) was being fed a high-sodium diet despite kidney trouble and doctor's orders otherwise? And lying when she said that, after she was fired, the woman died? And that when she'd previously charted things in that manner, she'd had them handed back to her, and been explicitly instructed to blame the clients instead of staff?

And I suppose, all the people who've talked about all the dishonesty the system promotes (through its sociological structure), whether they've seen it as "clients" of the system, or worked in the system themselves, are all lying or paranoid too.

Not that I'm aware of.

I've had someone withhold AS from me for a year and a bit, which meant I pushed myself with CBT that wasn't helpful at all, in fact, all it did was hurt. This is probably worst than lying in its effect.

Lied to? Other than "These pills will make you feel better'?

This reminds me of how Scientologists talk about psychiatry and medicine in general. The contempt is the same, ditto for the wild accusations. If it all weren't so one-sided, I might consider it as possibly true.

Why is it that video-game designers or Anime illustrators don't ever get accused of fraud on WP? No one else seems to excite the enmity of the AS crowd other than psychiatrists. This looks pretty suspicious to me. If you had your way, there would be no mental health industry to speak of and mental illness, consequently, would cease to exist.

I don't think anyone is implying that ALL psychiatrists/therapists/councilors are liars. The question is has any of those type of people lied to you, and people are just reporting their experiences. If anyone is being one sided it's you.

BTW I don't play video games, and I can't stand anime, and yes I've been lied to by mental health professionals.

Oh good grief, Scientologists see psychiatry as business competition, that's the only reason they criticize it.

What I don't get, here, is... okay, all the examples of people I talked about who noticed these things, are psychologists, sociologists, mental health workers, and other people who actually work in the system or have good reason to study the system.

If this was so one-sided, wouldn't I be saying that nobody who works in the system could possibly notice what's wrong with it, because they're all the Bad Guys or something? Rather than relaying their direct observations of the jobs they had to work in, and the cultures that cropped up around them?

Have you ever even read Dick Sobsey's book Violence and Abuse in the Lives of People with Disabilities? Or just about any book or article by Dave Hingsburger? Have you read The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, which discusses not only his famous prison experiments, but a number of lesser-known experiments, some of them taking place in mental institutions, which corroborated his findings in stunning and awful ways (and his findings have meaning in all environments where the power structure is shaped a certain way, which it happens to be shaped in most disability-related institutions of all kinds, which is why you see the same atrocities happening in all of them)? All of these people are insiders to these systems in one way or another, and they're reporting what they see, as well as what experiments have been carried out that frequently validate their observations. It's not about people being some kind of deliberately evil mind-control freaks or something, it's about how certain power structures and belief systems corrupt people in specific and predictable ways, over and over again.

These are also people who work in the system, psychiatric, developmental, whatever, often both or several more. If they just wanted to see the system vanish, they'd all be out of jobs. At least one of them actually goes around internationally giving trainings to people who work in the system to try to help them understand the rights of their clients better. Both have published numerous books on that sort of subject too. One of them ran a mailing list for a long time dedicated to dealing with abuse of disabled people (he was both a psychologist and a father with a disabled son).

And as for 'wild accusations', I again ask, what on earth do you think of that woman who died because of policies like this? Do you think her death was imaginary? Do you think there wasn't a reason the government kept trying to check in on people like her to make sure they were okay? (Or is the government paranoid about the system too?) Do you think my friend made up the death of a fellow human being that she knew and cared about in order to make 'wild accusations'?

These are real people, and real people's lives, and real people's deaths, and you are trying to hand-wave them away as imaginary, paranoid, and wild accusations, and saying that their stories aren't two-sided enough. I suppose to you, the 'other side' would be talking about how it's totally reasonable to give someone a diet that's going to kill them and then lie about it in records that you know the government who checks on her is going to try to read. But it's not reasonable, and you're not going to hear that from me.

Today was Blogging Against Disablism Day, and one thing that one person posted for it was called Don't Enable An Ableist. So I'm not going to enable your dismissive handwaving, as if calling real events (and the deaths of real live people that mattered, that woman wasn't the first or the last) 'wild accusations' and comparing legitimate critics of the system (often from within, mind you) to brainwashed cultists offering one-sided views, or using disability-related epithets (of which 'paranoid' is one) to dismiss the observations of people who've lived in the system, will make all the little ugly realities of life in these systems (psychiatric and otherwise, anything structured similar) vanish.

Last edited by anbuend on 02 May 2008, 12:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'll admit that I defend your enemies here, but not to being one-sided. If I were aware of the sinister motives behind psychiatry, I may not be so easy on them. But I really have no motive to villify the mental health profession with such heavy-handedness.

Why do people need sinister motives in order to do things wrong? Very few people have truly sinister motives about most things, but most people do things wrong, sometimes very wrong, or abuse power when they get into it, etc.

What happens, with the lying, is usually one of a small number of things.

One of the most common, is that the person thinks that it's for the person's own good. They've been trained to believe that if the person knew certain things, it would be destructive to them. So they lie. Milton Erickson, who one of my scariest psychologists trained under, believed that lying to patients was a good thing -- that you could tell them false stories as if they really happened, as long as it made them do what you thought was best for them, or led them to realizations. And even many people who have not trained under him, have been influenced by those ideas, or by the "Knowing the nature of their condition would lead to a total breakdown" thing.

And then another, is a combination of the pressures of the job situation (which often requires that you do things to people who don't want them done to them), with cultures that develop in these situations (which are often dysfunctional and destructive), with the pressures of being at the bottom of a big hierarchy of staff, with nobody to take it out on but clients/inmates/whatever. The Stanford prison experiment showed some of these things.

And then more of it can just be explained as selfishness. And most people struggle with selfishness, it's a normal human trait. In a position of power, it can lead to horrible things, even if the person doesn't really think they're that horrible, because they're insulating themselves from the amount of damage they're doing. Selfishness isn't exactly sinister, but it can be one of the most destructive forces in the human psyche. Selfishness can be the selfishness of the do-gooder, but it can also be an almost willful ignorance, a "I don't want to look at this because I couldn't deal with it, so I'll keep on doing what I'm doing and try not to think too hard of the consequences, it's just a job," sort of thing.

But it happens, it's a combination of the training, the environment, and the human mind. It doesn't have to have sinister motives to be a frequently-sinister system. It just has to have a certain power structure that has bad effects on most people who would get stuck into it, including "good people", and then it "helps" to make it really bad, if it has teachings that validate some of the bad things, like the "for your own good" stuff.

People do bad things with good or just neutral motives all the time, and they do good things with bad or neutral motives, it's just life. I don't see a lot of attacks on people's motives here, just noting a bad system when they see one.

Although, one thing about bad systems like this, is that they do attract people with more sinister motives, so you do get your share of sadistic people working in them because in that environment they can get away with it. But that's an effect, not a cause, or at least an effect that turns into a cause, rather than the other way around.

I do not like my own psychiatrist. I do not like the way he does things, or the way he talks to me. Or the way he'll be so dismissive of what I have to say. He seems to trivialize my suffering and hardship. But I can't change the way he does his job, nor do I think it's my place to tell him how to do his job. Psychiatrists in my home province are as rare as three-legged ballerinas, I'm told. So I am stuck with this guy.

Complaining has never improved things much with this guy. I don't think he's as receptive to input and criticism as other doctors might be. He's got a huge practise and is pretty wealthy. His scheduling policies imply that his time is far more precious than any patient's could ever be. No regard for other people's schedules, it seems. Does this pi$$ me off? You betcha. Can I do anything about it? No. There's nothing I can do about it. At least Dr. V doesn't talk dirty or touch me inappropriately when my aide isn't in the room.

Sometimes, you just gotta make do with what you have.

While this is true, it is perfectly fine for people to vent here about their experiences. IMO, I'm finding these stories educational.

Last edited by hartzofspace on 02 May 2008, 7:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It was nice in there for the most part but I have some complaints.


My third roommate, who was committed involuntarily was told to take a seat about 3 times when she was pacing in the dayroom. She wasn't bothering anyone. They also made her change her shirt because it was too tight. When she asked another staff member if the shirt was okay to wear the staff member said as long as it covered her stomach. She was involuntary. Why did they put restrictions on what she wore or whether she stood up or sat down? She was crying in our room and said that was because she missed being able to come and go as she pleased, and I went out to talk to the nurses about it. When I asked them about it they said to me, "Have we been mean to you?" "No," I said. "There's nothing wrong with taking a seat," they said. But I have that problem myself. Where it's uncomfortable to sit down. As for all you can eat, some of us were still hungry after meals and one person asked for a sandwich (there were sandwiches in the fridge on the unit). The tech said he had to ask the doctor to prescribe him a sandwich!


They never bothered me. I was never bossed around or told what to do and the shrink and the nurse asked me if I had enough to eat. I was lucky, I guess.


My second roommate was allegedly told to go back into our room after she went out to go to the bathroom. I told her to just go when she wanted to go out in the middle of the night and she did and they didn't bother her this time, and they were nice enough to give her the results of a pregnancy test at that time of night.


Some of the staff were asses, and I was lucky enough to avoid those ones, I guess.


They called the "special teams" onto our unit when a guy made a fuss because it was pork for dinner and he was Muslim and wouldn't eat it but he was hungry, and didn't want to just hardly eat anything or not eat anything. The next day it still wasn't resolved; it was pork again and he was Muslim and hungry, and apparently they weren't doing anything for him. It was good of them not to call in the special teams the next time, but they made us all go to our rooms and they always made us do that when someone pitched a fit.


One guy was given Haldol and told it was Celexa.


One woman tried to call the cops and they cut the phone! When my friend and roommate, Laurel, protested they sent her to the seclusion room to "calm herself down".


This girl Diana was spying on people in the shower and on the toilet and Laurel was arguing about it with her, both were yelling at each other, and all the staff did was send Laurel to the seclusion room to calm down when really they should have done nothing; they weren't hurting each other and the staff had no idea what went on in the bathroom.


In group therapy we were told to write a problem we had on a piece of paper and then pick someone else's problem and try to tell them how to solve it. I opened mine up and read, "I did not see God. Please get me out of here!" So how did they get in there? They were falsely accused of seeing God? What is this?


Laurel was allegedly given a prenatal vitamin and told it was Depakote. I don't know if this is true, but she claimed she was pregnant and they didn't want to tell her, but once when she was running to the bathroom one of the staff told her not to run like that or it would fall out. She had several miscarriages before caused by psych drugs given to her in the hospitals. She had one miscarriage in a psychiatric hospital. By the time they got to a real hospital the baby was pronounced dead. She also claimed the staff didn't care if they poisoned her babies with antipsychotics because if she didn't take them she would be like Andrea Yates and drown her children or something.


The papers that listed our rights said that we had the right to fresh air, but one woman said she had been there several days and they had never taken her outside. They did it pretty much when they felt like it.


the bill of rights thingy also said that we had the right to have no restrictions on visits, but the truth was, we had two hours a day when we were allowed to have visitors, and we were only allowed to have two visitors at a time on the unit and they had to be 15or older, or else we needed to ask for a lobby pass from the doctor and go down and visit them in the lobby. I don't think private visits were allowed either even though it said we had the right to private visits.


According to Laurel, she was talking to a nurse and they thought she was talking to herself and gave her some more Haldol and some Benadryl.


A patient said he was committed involuntarily under the false accusation that he waved a shotgun at his neighbor in the neighbor's backyard. He was putting the shotgun in his car to go hunting.


One patient's parents committed him involuntarily after his brother hanged himself, they buried him, then they committed him and themselves in separate institutions. The staff thanked him for explaining that to them, or else they wouldn't have known.


Visitors aren't allowed to use the same bathroom the patients used. When Jack came to visit me they had to let him off the unit, through two sets of locked doors, and he had to go way down a hall to another bathroom.


I know nobody and no institution is perfect like that. I'm just nitpicking. I don't know why. I'm bored I guess. Now I feel bad for posting this. But I'll still post it.

You must set the bar pretty low for what constitutes "nice", much like I used to. Some of that stuff is criminal, and other parts are the sort of totally random and senseless authoritarianism that always crop up with that sort of power structure. And you describe certain things as "good", that are really just the absence of a certain level of awfulness (while other levels of awfulness remain intact), rather than actually good. Which is a way of looking at things that is common in situations where you haven't ever even seen a truly good situation. I can remember being delighted at one point, at face-up rather than face-down restraints, and food that was actually fit for human consumption. And at that point, the delight was real, but the "goodness" of the new situation was unreal.

even im in grouphome its nothing to compared that thats clear abusing and i would report it immediately..can u give name of that place..there has lot of places in net where u can complain..really wish i could go there to release all whith my friends in here:( everyone hate when someting like this happens