Embarrassment with the police while being sectioned

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While there may be some justifications for what was done it does not mean it is best practice and we need to encourage police and mental health services to do just that. My understanding is that in most places in the developed world when a person suspected of a crime is to be strip searched it must be done by someone of the same gender as them. That is certainly the case in Australia. Even in our prisons, convicted offenders can only be strip searched by people of the same gender as them. Sure people may have committed an offence but they are still human and should have some human rigths upheld. What suprises me is that even in Australia when people in mental health units are being placed in seclusion, striped, under one to one supervision, and hence not even allowed to toilet unsupervised they do not have the same right to be in the care of people of the same gender as them. I respect that it is not always possible, but from the location you have said London, surely it is a big enough city, it would have been a big enough hospital for them to have found another female to be present with the police officer if needed. They may have been justified in hand cuffing you, but once the cuffs are one, surely it is common sense it ensure the person is not restrained too tightly.

I do not believe that anyone can recover from a mental illness with medicaiton alone, and you should be being offered a wide range of treatments, and at the absolute minimum that would invovle access to some form of talk therapy not just CBT. CBT while effective is only focussed on short term work of changing negative beliefs. It is cognitive in nature and while that does work, common sense says that there is more to people than just their cognitions, which are there thoughts. One has to look at why people have those thoughts to begin with. Research consistently shows that disturbed thoughts in those with scrizophrenia usually stem from somewhere and they are often to some degree understood when you can work out where they came from. Given that medication is not working 100% for you then to me I would be looking to try something alternative.

The standard in mental illness is to work on a biopsychosocial model, that means the biological (ie, medication), psychological and social. By the way you are writing you are being offered biological support and that would be standard in such cases as you describe and should be, but it does not sound as though much of the other two are being provided to you, and I guess I would be trying to get those things into place. You cannot recover by just being given a prescriptions. Medication is important, but I have never discovered a person in which that alone would be enough to help them to fully recover. There are people who do fully recover from paranoid schizophrenia, they may be rare, but they do exist.

Being on the other side of the world it is hard to tell you where to go for further advice and support, but a simple google search on mental health in the UK, lead me to the MIND website, and that appears to be biggest mental health organisation in the UK. They do from the look of their website also offer legal advice. But to me any of the large mental health organisations should be able to lead you to other possible places of support, and they would all be working to try to ensure that people do not experience the type of care you did. They would be trying to educate the police to write best practice guidelines and to try to make that as common as possible, and for them to know your experience would be important.

I have seen some wonderful police and some absolutely horrible ones, and I would suspect it would be common everywhere. No profession is ever going to be perfect and I guess we do need to consider that most of their training is dealing with offenders, not the mentally ill. They are trained to use force and while that is needed, most of them do use it way too much, which is why police forces everywhere are now providing there officers with more than guns, and I would suspect yours would have some form of capsicum spray, possibly tazers, etc, etc. While none of those are ideal, they are all better than guns. Anything can be used wrongly and tazers certianly can kill someone, but given the choice between a gun or a tazer, I think everyone would agreee a tazer is better, but capscium spray is better than that, and simply talking to people is better than that. To me one of the biggest issues with police is that they expect an immediate response and they do not really have the time to stand there and try to talk to you for however long is needed to help you to help yourself. Regardless of the voices, you still have some level of awareness of what is going on, the fact that you said you wanted female officers is one of them, regardless of how small that awareness is, it still exists and needs to be acknowledged and supported in such situations.

There are many people in mental health and disability who simply should not be working in the system and the vast majority of cases voilence and aggression from people can be avoided if handled correctly and people simply use a bit of common sense and basic human respect. But many of these people are seen as less than human that need to have people do things to them, rather than do things with them.

You may find this hearing voices group useful to you. They are firmly of the belief that people need more than simply a medical response to their problems, as it involves such a complex issue:
http://www.hearing-voices.org/

This is the link to the MIND website I found:
http://www.mind.org.uk/

From what I can see of these groups they are about encouraging and supporting people to use the full biopsychosocial model when dealing with their issues and understanding that no one can heal alone. Medication is important for you, but you do need and have a right to more than that if that makes sense, in my opinion.

Good Luck, I really admire the inner strength that has shined through in your writing.

One of my closest friends has paranoid schizophrenia, but he is one of the lucky ones who made a full recovery when he found a medication that works for him. He is on respirodone, and it was only the second one he tried. I know full well that most people do not have the luck that he has had.