SURVIVOR!!!

“Facing psychiatry you have to fight even to simply survive. Those who have experienced the ritual tortures of today’s psychiatry know how hard it is to survive — not only physically, but also mentally — psychiatry’s torments and its masked cruelty. Ritual menticide is no longer an Orwellian circumstance of the famous novel 1984, it’s the institutional routine of today’s mental health system. The famous words «anything you say can be used against you» are today more relevant to the psychiatric psychopolice — which has the right to revoke citizens’ freedom in an arbitrary and systematic way — than it is to ordinary police forces.”

— Tristano Ajmone, preface to La Verità Sull’Olocausto, 2004.

A Story That Belongs To All

“I want to write out a confession both intimate and general,
because the things that happen to any one man happen to them all.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

I have spent several consecutive years in Italian psychiatric institutes, from OPGs (Ospedali Psichiatrici Giudiziari — Judiciary Psychiatric Hospitals: Psychiatric Prisons) to private clinics and «therapeutic» communities (Italian euphemisms for psychiatric facilities differ from the English ones). Even though my psychiatric journey is tied to a judiciary measure, it’s a misfortune that could happen to anyone... it could even happen to you!

I have met men who were locked up in OPGs only because deemed «socially dangerous». The «crimes» that brought them in those facilities are often hasty acts resulting from inner-despair situations. Having been deprived of the right to defend themselves in court, because discredited by psychiatrist who branded them «incapable of intending and willing» (Italian insanity defense cornerstone formula), these people soon found themselves locked up in a ghastly, atrocious reality — places and situations that cannot but exacerbate the original sufferance that brought them there.

The smallest crime contemplated by the Italian legal codex can easily be converted in a verdict of «acquittal for incapacity of intending and willing at the time of the occurrence» — a verdict which decrees, in alternative to prison, the «cure» and custody in an Ospedale Psichiatrico Giudiziario for a minimum period of two, five or ten years. At the expiry of the established period of cure begins the theatre of «social dangerousness revision», so that the «cure» gets protracted «deferral» after «deferral» for years, thus coercively providing the psychiatric industry a vast number of consumers of extremely expensive psychiatric drugs.

I have met people who had been in the OPG for five years for having stolen a purse, or having smashed a window out of rage. Others no longer remembered how they ended up there, decades ago. Many died without ever seeing freedom again.

The opposite side of the psychiatric/judiciary coin is represented by those people who committed major crimes and get away with them with a few years time-serving in OPG. People charged with several murders, which «reconquer» freedom in a few years (sometimes just three years).

My experience allowed me to grasp that in psychiatry the patient’s destiny is largely influenced by his social ranking of origin, his financial resources, and his acquaintances outside the institute (especially if they include influential, rich, or dangerous people).

Psychiatrists are crafty enough to put in the frontline, during public events, patients which come from mild psychiatric experiences (territorial facilities, private institutes, or voluntary treatment experience), so you often ear testimonials of patients who declare to be satisfied of the mental health services, but you never ear the desperate screams of the thousands of people who have been segregated and tortured in OPGs. These screams would create a long chain reaction of embarrassments that would end up shaking the top management in Rome. The nature of the abuses is such that it leaves no space to any plausible explanation other that the indolent aloofness typical of the bureaucrats devoted to their career and a spotless public image.

During their residency in OPG, the «guest» (so is euphemistically defined the prisoner) is in a condition of perpetual involuntary hospitalization («TSO» in Italian), so he cannot oppose any decision of the medical staff. The punitive measures employed for marginalizing dissent are those typical of the totalitarian regimes: physical restraint, increase of psychiatric drugs dosages, and further restrictions of freedom. To handle extremely complex situation there is the body of penitentiary-police wardens (we are speaking of hospitals with cells, bars, an police officers in uniform — places which of the hospital bear just the name, ipso facto being prisons).

Bodily punishment, by means of drug injections and/or beating and restraint, is still a current reality in Italian psychiatry, and its applied to youngsters as well as to elders.

The fact that I have met a number of psychiatrists which turned out to be understanding and supportive people, not abusive, does not exclude the fact that psychiatry has a discretionary power which is terrifying — a power which at any moment can be grabbed to suppress dissent. In good as well as in evil, no psychiatrist ever impersonates psychiatry, yet every psychiatrist enjoys the full executive powers of psychiatry.

My experience has been that in the majority of cases this power is employed in bad faith in order to harm, and that the psychiatric profession rests its foundations on a number of unspoken rules, the first of which is the prohibition to denounce a colleague. So it happens that, from time to time, you ear some psychiatrists complaining about the general conditions in psychiatry, or in such and such a facility, but you never ear a psychiatrist denouncing or suing a colleague for crimes or abuses that he saw him commit. Even though some victims of psychiatry manage to win some law suits against psychiatrists, no one ever rises the question of how the colleagues of these convicted psychiatrists have permitted — by rule of omertà — that those crimes took place in the first place.

In Italian prisons, when inmates not belonging to the European Union try to hunger strike in protest for some violation of their rights, they are often moved to an OPG for «psychiatric monitoring». This is a crystal clear example (as well as a frequently occurring one) of how psychiatry is still employed today as an instrument of social control for the suppression of dissent and protest.

Victims of psychiatry find themselves in a situation which is similar to that of the victims of the Mafia: they fear that by denouncing the abuses which they suffered they will be subjected to revenge. The Mafia has the power (illegally acquired) of burning your house or shooting you. Psychiatry has the power (legally acquired) to drag you out of your home and imprison you in a totalitarian institute, and if you try to rebel they will call the police, which has a public mandate authorizing them to shoot you if you oppose «excessive» resistance. The adjective «excessive» in this context holds a different weight for the one who doesn’t want to be imprisoned without having committed any crime, on one side, and the one who has been commanded to conduce him to the institute of destination, on the other.

The are no negotiation fringes, psychiatry does not presuppose any dialogue. Dialogue is the cream used by some false democrats to garnish a cake which, from the very beginning, is all shit. A street-wise Italian proverb, form Naples, teaches us: «You can add all the icing you want... who’s born a turd will never die a cake!».

It should not therefore be surprising that so few victims of psychiatry have the courage to speak out what they saw and suffered. Those few who have the courage of doing it are not taken seriously because they tell of atrocities which involve thousands of people and which are heard spoken only from a too exiguous number of mouths.

The psychiatric mandate of involuntary hospitalization must be abolished at all costs. The alliance between the legal system and psychiatry must be broken.

Nothing to Be Ashamed Of!

There is nothing to be ashamed of in having been in psychiatry, NOTHING!

No, I’m not ashamed of it, nor will I ever feel ashamed of it... I would be ashamed of myself if I will ever keep silent and omit to openly denounce that which I saw and experienced. This would be shameful.

I consider shameful that in Italy, today, people who suffer in the soul are still being restrained to bed with straps, and that this is done as a punishment disguised as medical intervention. I have seen people over seventy being five-point restrained to filthy beds — immobilized, naked, lying in their own excrements, their limbs tied and the “fifth band” to block their trunk. I have seen my Muslim brothers tied to restraint beds, deprived of their right to perform the five obligatory daily prayers.

It’s shameful that such medieval torture systems are considered therapeutic interventions, where they are clearly the continuation of the old inquisition.

It’s shameful that in many Italian penitentiaries in order to receive medical attention people have to cut their veins, and to this established practice inevitably follows a punitive psychiatric monitoring-period in prison psychiatric wards, so wretched that they go beyond any nightmare of popular fantasy.

What is shameful is that psychiatry has managed to institutionalize human suffering, transforming it in a highly profitable business, to which are migrating always more professions — psychologists, social workers, etc.

The myth of «mental illness» encumbers today over Humanity, entrusting every form of human solidarity to the responsibility of the «clinical experts». The New Man — at the same time end product and gear of the user consumer process — has dislearned every concept of individual and civil responsibility. The deformed mirror of Science has defaced consensual reality up to the point of mediating family relations.

It’s shameful that there are parents which decline responsibility over their children, delegating to the «experts» the management of their adolescence troubles — or that they just comply, with resentment, to the psychiatric invasion of their children’s life. This attitude is the draw back of the parents who are sucked up in a working reality that doesn’t allow them to share time with their children, thus substituting their parental presence with high-speed action videogames — which are by many considered to be one of the main causes of youth problems.

The tragic side of all this is that these parent are oppressed by inhumane working schedules which are designed to satisfy a taxation system over which heavily burden the expenses of the mental health system’s psychiatric drugs which are meant to «cure» the disorders of those children who sicken as a result of this working situation which enslaves their parents. There is a vicious circle which at the same time feeds both the social distress and the pharmaceutical business, but the media — subjected as they are to multinational corporations — will not bring up the argument.

The average man sacrifices his exsistence to an inhuman lifestyle in the hope of obtaining enough money to buy childish entertainments apt to exorcise the evils which result from such a lifestyle. When one hasn’t got the courage to look inside, he ends up seeking all solutions outside himself; that is to say: when one cannot find solutions within himself he will seek them without himself — which explains today’s attitude of aloofing and delegating to others.

The false psychiatric dialectics have undermined interpersonal relationships, inoculating the germs of «feelings-phobia». We have reached a point at which many people nurture doubts and fears about their own — sporadic — feelings, going to the extreme of seeking «experts’ counselling» in order to know whether these feelings/emotion are «right or wrong». Such an attitude toward one’s inner life is the empiric demonstration that mental/emotional alienation has now become a lifestyle.

As Noam Chomsky said:

“As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody’s supposed to think that. ... Since there’s no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don’t pay any attention to what’s going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl.”

That whoever went mad ended up in the psychiatric system is not as shameful as it is that those who did not enter it are not questioning what is wrong in a world where its populace is approaching a percentage of «mentally ill» diagnosed citizens which calls for the questioning of democratic governability. What meaning will the term «democracy» hold in countries where over one-third of the population are considered by the State as mentally compromised?

That society shows indifference toward the barbarities perpetrated by psychiatry is as shameful as those barbarities themselves, if not more! Which person lives in such an ignorance as to not knowing what electroshock, lobotomy, or straightjackets are? Torture instruments survive in the popular culture heritage with more vividness than scientific discoveries do; then, why is it that despite all this background awareness people still refuse to believe the stories of psychiatric victims? why are they not granted as much credibility as it’s granted to the psychiatric confraternity, whose crimes against humanity are well fixed in everyone’s mind?

I invite all psychiatric survivors to reflect... Why are you ashamed of speaking up what you saw? What’s stopping you, the fear of compromising your public image? of no longer finding a job after? of being avoided? Then, tell me, what distinguishes you from your jailers? How can you claim of not having passed onto the other side? Do you ever think of the people you have left behind, which continue to suffer in those places of compassionate extermination? Or are you trying to remove, delete, forget it all together?

I say that having been a witness to psychiatric atrocities, yet refusing to denounce them, only for fear of compromising one’s social position — or losing the comfortable invalidity check —, is doubly shameful, for eye-witnessing implies more responsibility than having just heard about it!

Tristano Ajmone.