Posts Tagged ‘Living Will’

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New York City Goes Big-Time For Involuntary Commitment

Monday, December 12th, 2022

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a major effort on November 29, 2022 to involuntarily commit the homeless and anyone found suffering from mental trauma.

Involuntary Commitment, sometimes euphemistically called “Civil Commitment”, is a profound violation of Human Rights, and a major tool of coercive psychiatry to funnel government funds into the mental health system.

As the late Professor Thomas Szasz said, “coercive psychiatrists function as judges and jailers not physicians and healers” with the power of life and death over the most vulnerable people.

“Disguising social control as medical treatment is a deceit which conceals an abuse.” This is a de facto abuse of power, as it seeks to limit and control the individual instead of helping the individual to get better and improve their conditions in life.

Coercive psychiatry is not intended to cure anything. On the contrary, psychiatry is the science of control and entrapment, and having power over distressed and vulnerable individuals. Wherever men have advocated and advanced totalitarianism, they have used psychiatric principles to control society, to put limits on individual freedom, to suppress and punish dissent, and to trap people into worsening conditions. It is actually a mis-use of power, since its intentions are to make less of a person’s self-determinism and give more power to others and the State.

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that forced treatment is not proven to prevent violent practices yet are relied upon “despite the lack of evidence that they offer any benefits, and the significant evidence that they lead to physical and psychological harm and even death.”

There is a heavy ongoing push country-wide, called Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), to train police officers to “handle” difficult situations involving “suspected mental illness.” In the name of “help”, it removes unwanted citizens from the street and forces them, using government funds, into mental health facilities.

Your mental health, and the mental health of your family, friends and associates, can be questioned by CIT-trained police. If this makes you uncomfortable, execute a Living Will (Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment) and then express your opinion to your local, state and federal officials, especially if you live in New York City.

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Nursing Home Psychiatric Abuse of the Elderly

Monday, December 13th, 2021

Almost 300,000 nursing home residents are given harmful antipsychotic drugs each week, even though most have no psychosis to justify it. In 2019 only about 2% had qualifying conditions for such drugs.

The FDA only approves antipsychotics for people who have serious mental diagnoses, such as so-called schizophrenia. The danger of these drugs to older adults can be profound. They come with black box warnings from the FDA, saying they can increase the risk of death in older people, especially those with dementia.

“The high rate of antipsychotics use across our nation’s nursing homes shows that many facilities continue to resort to the use of these potentially dangerous drugs as a chemical restraint — in lieu of proper staffing — which has the potential to harm hundreds of thousands of patients.”

The extensive off-label use of antipsychotics in nursing homes was found in one study to be associated with a 50% increased risk of experiencing a serious fall-related bone fracture.

Some evidence suggests that some nursing homes may be falsifying psychosis diagnoses to avoid citations for inappropriate antipsychotic prescriptions. In 2018 in Missouri, data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services show there were 108 citations for unnecessary use of antipsychotics in skilled nursing facilities (SNF). This involved 20% of all SNFs in Missouri which received at least one citation; and this had been increasing for at least four years.

“It is reasonable to conclude that the overuse and misuse of antipsychotics is pervasive and continues to occur at unacceptably high rates.”

Such extensive abuse of the elderly is not the result of medical incompetence. The abuse is the result of psychiatry maneuvering itself into an authoritative position over aged care. From there, psychiatry has broadly perpetrated the tragic but lucrative hoax that aging is a mental disorder requiring extensive and expensive psychiatric services.

Recommendation

Insist that any nursing home where an elderly person is to be admitted has a policy of respecting the resident’s wishes not to undergo any form of psychiatric treatment, including psychoactive drugs. Sign a “Psychiatric Living Will” to prepare for this and give a copy to the nursing home staff.

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Britney Spears’ Conservatorship Challenge

Monday, August 9th, 2021

[Condensed from Jan Eastgate, President, CCHR International]

The pop icon’s traumatic story of being held captive by a punitive guardianship law, with abusive psychiatric evaluations and forced mood-altering drugs, has prompted legislators to act. But proposed laws, while applaudable, fall short on needed protections.

Conservatorships, which place guardians over the control of a person’s life when deemed incompetent, are often based on a subjective psychiatric evaluation. As such, while it is very easy for someone to be placed under a conservatorship order because of a psychiatric diagnosis, it’s very hard to get out of one. The diagnosis is stigmatizing and is hard to disprove because of its subjectivity. It can also expand over the years, especially where there may be deterioration in the individual from powerful psychotropic drugs prescribed to them.

The late professor of psychiatry and co-founder of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) Dr. Thomas Szasz, warned against state intervention that allows psychiatry to circumvent individual and constitutional rights. He called it “The Therapeutic State,” where the state gives psychiatry the power to be an institution of social control. “When I use the term therapeutic state, I use it ironically, it’s therapeutic for the people who are doing the locking up, who are doing the therapy, it’s not therapeutic for the victims, for the patients,” Szasz said. “The therapeutic state seeks to remedy personal and social problems defined as diseases; its beneficiaries are often ‘helped’ against their will; it is a totalitarian state, governed by the rule of therapeutic discretion.”

CCHR asks legislators to review the World Health Organization’s recent guideline for protections of people with mental health disabilities. WHO recommends countries “repeal guardianship and other substitute decision-making legislation and replace it with laws that recognize legal capacity and promote supported decision-making, including the use of advance plans [living wills] and best interpretation of will and preference.”

In Britney’s case, the conservatorship was put into place in 2008, while she struggled with her mental health, and gave her father broad control over her life and finances. Britney obtained a court order recently to reinforce her inherent right to obtain the legal counsel of her choice. Her new attorney must petition the court to have the current conservatorship removed.

Britney pleaded that the conservatorship over her affairs has made her feel “demoralized and enslaved.” She has been subjected to numerous psychiatric evaluations and medications, stating: “I want to end the conservatorship without being evaluated,” she said. The system in place is “abusive,” Britney said in court, accusing her conservators of forcing her to take mood-stabilizing drugs and perform against her will.

Britney also told the court that her previous psychiatrist (who died in 2019) was abusive in his treatment of her. She alleged that she was subjected to lengthy psychological evaluations, forced into a $60,000-a-month inpatient facility and told that she wouldn’t be able to see her children if she failed to comply. “To be totally honest with you, when [the doctor] passed away, I got on my knees and thanked God,” she said. She was then forced to see a therapist three days a week. Paparazzi humiliated her by taking photos of her crying after the emotional sessions. She asked the judge last month to be allowed to be part of her own care plan.

NBC News reported that allegations of abusive psychiatrists in conservatorships are not uncommon. Doctors are asked to file capacity declarations with the court which form about 75 percent of how judges base their decisions to keep someone under court-ordered guardianship.

The WHO’s “Guidance on community mental health services: Promoting person-centered and rights-based approaches” released in June 2021, is very clear about abuse in the mental health system: “Many people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities are denied the right to exercise their legal capacity; that is, the right to make decisions for oneself and to have those decisions respected by others. Based on stigmatizing assumptions about their status – that their decisions are unreasonable or bring negative consequences, or that their decision-making skills are deficient, or that they cannot understand and make decisions for themselves or communicate their will and preferences – it has become acceptable in services in countries throughout the world, for others to step in and make decisions for people with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities. In many countries, this is implemented through schemes like guardianship, supervision and surrogacy, and is legitimized by laws and practices.”

As an organization that has exposed abuses in the mental health industry for more than fifty years, CCHR has definitely come across unscrupulous guardians that have been able to secure the help of psychiatrists to maintain control over an individual, especially their finances. The diagnostic aspect of conservatorship needs closer scrutiny.

State laws need to ensure that someone who is subject to a psychiatric evaluation also has freedom of choice and the right to obtain a second medical—as opposed to a psychiatric—opinion. Contact your state legislators and express your viewpoint about this.

The WHO guidelines are clear about protecting individual rights to choose. It also recommends people sign a Living Will to express their treatment and guardianship preferences should their liberty be threatened by competency issues.

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Going On Hoping

Monday, April 5th, 2021

Hope is the desire that sometime in the future, one will cease to have something which is no longer wanted but one can’t seem to get rid of (like a chronic pain), or that one will acquire something wanted.

“Going On Hoping” is the condition where one continues to hope in spite of no possibility of realizing one’s goal, particularly when one is not actively involved in realizing the goal.

Giving something a lick and a promise and hoping it will somehow be all right stems from laziness and stupidity. I hope that doesn’t offend anyone.

The better alternative is to control one’s environment by doing things well and thoroughly, leading to one’s goals.

The Psychiatric Way

Psychiatrists speak about “adaptation to one’s environment” as the way to handle Life. One of the primary ways psychiatric treatment attempts to adapt one to one’s environment is with drugs, which reduce or block restimulative stimuli by deadening the perceptive abilities of the central nervous system.

Many psychiatric studies on the topic emphasize how one’s environment, over which one apparently has little control, influences or controls one’s troubles. Toxins and contaminants in the environment; stress in the environment; one’s genes; one’s community and its social factors; the climate; PTSD; crime and other violent or dangerous situations in the environment; endemic systemic pandemic polemics.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, promotes these environmental factors against which one supposedly cannot fight back as the diagnostic criteria showing the presence of a “mental disorder”. One such is the diagnosis of “Victim of crime.”

Of course, one can certainly find situations where it is helpful to adapt to an environment. Think of wearing a protective suit in a hostile environment such as outer space or under water.

We don’t minimize these environmental factors, which have been found to be major contributors to mental stress and trauma. Rather, we point out that the common psychiatric point of view is to only find ways a person can adapt to such stress, when there might also be ways to exert more control over the environmental factors and adapt the environment to oneself. There are even terms to describe this psychiatric viewpoint, such as “stress-adapted children”; meaning that they have learned how to adapt to stress in their environments.

In fact, the data indicate that drug treatment is not usually necessary if a proper interpersonal environment and social context is provided as alternatives to psychiatry.

The Better Alternative

It has also been found that if one knows the technology of how to do something and can do it, and uses it, he cannot be the adverse effect of it. So for example in the matters under discussion here, the more one knows about something in the environment, and the more one can handle and control that, the less bad effects it can cause one. This leads to the insight that the more one can adapt the environment to oneself, instead of only adapting oneself to the environment, then the less the environment can harm one.

One may exclaim all kinds of ifs, ands and buts in the matter. But the fact remains that it behooves one to find out more about whatever the trouble is, and search diligently for ways to influence or control that.

Recommendations

CCHR recommends various strategies to proactively cope with psychiatric fraud or abuse, an environmental stress to which one may be subjected. For example:

The Motto here is “FIND OUT! FIGHT BACK!“

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Psychiatric Intention — Failure is Not an Accident

Monday, November 16th, 2020

Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

It’s called INTENT.

One definition of intention is positive postulation. It’s a self-determined causation, action, resolve, outcome or consideration. Whatever it is, it is done on purpose.

[Ultimately from Latin intendere “intend, extend, direct”, from in- “towards” + tendere “stretch, tend” — for example “to stretch out for, or aim at”].

Failure can be defined as a reversal of an intention. For example, one intends to hit the wall and does not hit the wall, or one intends not to hit the wall and does hit the wall. These are failures. The intention was reversed in action.

Psychiatric Intention — Failure is Not an Accident

Let’s examine the Intent of the psychiatric industry. It’s something you need to know.

It is not well-known that psychiatry, as taught in schools and funded by governments, is not intended to cure anything. Historically the idea that a science could be developed to control populations sprang up after the French Revolution of the late 1700’s, to counter the popular demand of liberty. At Leipzig University in the late 1800’s Wundt advanced the idea that nerve conditioning could be done to control people. In Russia between 1890 and 1930 Pavlov conceived the idea that men’s social responses could be altered with conditioning. Using the same principles in the 1930’s and 40’s German psychiatrists extended “conditioning” to mean outright murder of dissenters.

The pattern has been invariable. Totalitarian principles are now called “psychology,” “sociology” and “psychiatry.” This half-witted dream to control society has slaughtered more than a hundred million people.

The purported “intention” of psychiatry to treat mental illness is a failure. As psychiatrist Rex Cowdry, the acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said of “mental illness” in 1995, “We do not know the causes. We don’t have methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.”

The goal of psychiatry was reached at least in 1955. With the advent of LSD as a “treatment” it could now make anyone insane. And now we see the actual goal of psychiatry, which has not been a failure, is to control populations for their own ends.

Psychiatrists and their front groups operate straight out of the terrorist text books. The 1920’s Russian Revolutionary Communistic plan for world domination as originally conceived used psychiatry as a weapon designed to undermine the social fabric of the target country. One can see it in constant use in present time.

Psychiatry’s brutal and barbaric treatments succeed not only in controlling their patients, but actually result in harming their patients — Involuntary Commitment, Electro-Convulsive Therapy, Psychosurgery, Deadly Restraints, psychiatric Rape, harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs, etc.

Protect yourself and your families by executing a Living Will. A Living Will lets you specify decisions about your health care treatment in advance. Should you be in a position where you are to be subject to unwanted psychiatric hospitalization and/or mental or medical treatment, this Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment directs that such incarceration, hospitalization, treatment or procedures not be imposed, committed or used on you.

Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Alexa Is Listening For Your Own Good

Sunday, April 5th, 2020
Recently I was at my sister’s house and I told a joke that had the word “suicide” in it. Unbidden, Alexa started to tell us how to call a suicide hotline. For a moment I half expected the police to barge in and take me away.

You see, in Missouri and all other states, involuntary commitment “for your own good” is the law.

According to the Revised Statutes of Missouri (RSMo) state law 192.2465, when a peace officer has probable cause to believe that an adult will suffer an imminent likelihood of serious physical harm if not immediately placed in a medical facility the officer may summarily take the person against their will to a psychiatric hospital.

Missouri law euphemistically calls this “civil detention”; also known as civil commitment or involuntary commitment.

There is a religious exemption, so CCHR recommends that you execute a Living Will (Letter of protection from psychiatric incarceration and/or treatment) that expresses this.

Involuntary Commitment

Can this really happen in America today? Can this happen in a country where even criminals are set free if they are not given their rights, where the strongest Constitution in man’s history guarantees the individual his liberties? It not only can, but it does. The fact is, more than 1.5 million U.S. citizens per year become the next victim of involuntary incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, forced to undergo dangerous and harmful treatments against their will. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

This less-than-charitable “concern for the troubled individual” yields the psychiatric industry upwards of $25 billion per year. And it is ultimately financed by the unwitting taxpayer who, more likely than not, has never even heard of involuntary commitment procedures.

While involuntary commitment laws enrich the psychiatric industry, they not only deprive individuals of their freedom of choice, but milk millions of health insurance dollars annually from private, state, national and military health plans. And while psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals are today being investigated nationally and in state hearings for insurance fraud, mistreatment of patients, sexual violations and other crimes, the crux of their power — involuntary commitment laws — receives no focused attention.

Contact your state legislators and tell them what you think about this.

For more information download and read the full CCHR report “Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment — A Crack In The Door Of Constitutional Freedoms“.
Involuntary Commitment

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The Gray Shades Of Gaslighting

Monday, March 23rd, 2020
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation or brainwashing intended to gain control of another person or group and make them question themselves, their memory, their perception, or their sanity.

The term originated from the 1938 play (and subsequent film adaptations) Gas Light, where the protagonist’s husband slowly manipulated her into believing she’s going mad by dimming the gaslights and telling her she was imagining it.

This is apparently a common Hollywood theme; I recall seeing the same premise in a 1960’s Perry Mason episode.

If it’s common in Hollywood, chances are it’s common in real life.

In the current political and social climate, fake news is the new standard for gaslighting. Frankly, this is nothing really new; the Russians have been at it since communism began around 1844, in one form or another.

The psychiatric Connection
The 1920’s Russian Revolutionary Communistic plan for world domination as originally conceived used psychiatry as a weapon designed to undermine the social fabric of the target country. The practice continues today using mind-altering psychiatric drugs to overwhelm a person and create terrorists who have been drug-deluded into committing heinous crimes against humanity.
Not only do psychiatrists commit gaslighting in the form of manipulating terrorists to do their dirty work, but also they cover their tracks by diagnosing and treating the results of such manipulation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) labels as a mental disorder being a “Victim of terrorism or torture”; or more generally, being a victim of psychological abuse.

And on the other side a person can be diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a perpetrator of psychological abuse.

They’ve got you both coming and going; gaslighting and being gaslighted. And then they can prescribe an addictive, mind-altering psychiatric drug to keep you there, since they don’t keep collecting your insurance unless they can keep diagnosing you and “treating” you with psychiatric drugs.

Don’t think we’re making this up; it’s right there in the DSM.

Coercive psychiatrists are themselves often thought by their patients to be perpetrators of gaslighting. This can create a conflict where the patient is unable to trust their own sense of their feelings and surroundings in favor of evaluations by the therapist. Gaslighting has also been observed between patients and staff in inpatient psychiatric facilities.

All in all such manipulations are unhealthy. Since the psychiatric industry itself admits it has no capacity to cure, we observe psychology and psychiatry taking advantage of vulnerable patients for their own purposes instead of the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance.

Don’t be caught gaslighted — execute a Living Will “Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment.”

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Who is the Predator Here?

Friday, October 9th, 2015

Who is the Predator Here?

We approach this topic with some trepidation, as there can be considerable fixed opinions regarding the topic of sex.

We feel, however, that the news is relevant — and we’d like your permission to continue reading. We aren’t concerned so much with offending anyone; we’re sure we do that anyway by exposing the fraud and abuse inherent in the mental health care system. So if you have an emotional reaction to this information, we dare you to read on.

If you may be feeling upset, angry, or otherwise overwhelmed by any of the material we present in our newsletters, know this: The intention in presenting these materials is not at all to make anyone feel overwhelmed or upset. Our intention is to expose what has been hidden from the general public by various forces, to shine the light of truth on the psychiatric industry, and to restore human rights and dignity to the field of mental health.

Our intention is for you to be enraged by the pervasive abuse of human rights by the psychiatric mental health care industry and incite you to action. If you know of people who have been harmed by a psychiatrist or by a psychiatric facility, encourage them to file a complaint.

Sex offenders who have completed their prison sentences are often detained (usually for life) in prison-like psychiatric facilities based on the completely mistaken assumption that their having committed sexual crimes somehow means they are also mentally ill. These however, are criminal actions and are covered by criminal justice, not psychiatric diagnoses.

A recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discusses this topic. [“Judge calls sex predator law misapplied“, 9/12/2015]

A U.S. District Judge ruled that Missouri’s sexually violent predator law, although constitutional, is seriously misapplied.

“The judge wrote that there is a ‘pervasive sense of hopelessness’ at the Department of Mental Health’s Sex Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment Services, or SORTS program, because patients aren’t being properly released.”

“SORTS is indefinitely committing about 200 people to treatment in the belief that they might re-offend.”

“The overwhelming evidence at trial — much of which came from Defendants’ own experts — did establish that the SORTS civil commitment program suffers from systemic failures regarding risk assessment and release that have resulted in the continued confinement of individuals who no longer meet the criteria for commitment, in violation of the Due Process Clause. … The Constitution does not allow (Missouri officials) to impose lifetime detention on individuals who have completed their prison sentences and who no longer pose a danger to the public, no matter how heinous their past conduct.”

They call this process “civil commitment” – an attempt to make it sound less harsh than “involuntary commitment.”

Displaying a surprising ignorance of (and careless indifference to) proper diagnostic practice, psychologists and psychiatrists routinely and rotely misdiagnose mental disorder in sexual offenders who are in fact clearly no more than simple criminals.

Statutory checks on the abuse of civil commitment laws are scarce, readily sidestepped and widely ignored. Yet the minds and memories of those subjected to this capriciousness have frequently been destroyed after involuntary imprisonment in psychiatric facilities across the nation.

When any psychiatrist has full legal power to cause your involuntary physical detention by force (kidnapping), subject you to physical pain and mental stress (torture), leave you permanently mentally damaged (cruel and unusual punishment), with or without proving to your peers that you are a danger to yourself or others, then, by definition, a totalitarian state exists.

Because of their ubiquity and far–reaching powers, involuntary commitment laws lay a truly concrete foundation for totalitarianism. And they are not, it must be stressed, a threat of what might be, but a present danger — representing America’s gaping breach in the otherwise admirable wall of individual Constitutional rights.

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first spending cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who prefer not to be mentally treated. Involuntary commitment laws hike federal, state, county, city and private health care costs under the strange circumstance of a patient–recipient who cannot say no, and in this case of a person who has already paid their time in prison.

CCHR recommends that citizens execute a Living Will, or Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment, which directs that psychiatric incarceration, hospitalization, treatment or procedures not be imposed on you.

Click here for more information about involuntary commitment.

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Involuntary Commitment Records in Missouri are No Longer Confidential

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2015

Involuntary Commitment  Records in Missouri are No Longer Confidential

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed into law Senate Bill 426 on July 13 which expands the conditions under which confidential mental health care records can be released.

Mental health care facilities that hold patients who have been civilly committed, either voluntarily or involuntarily, can now disclose information about patient medications and other medical records “to individuals designated by the department of mental health as community mental health liaisons for the purpose of coordination of care and services.”

We expect that this means the government wants to follow these patients back into the community when they are released so that they can be monitored as continuing to take their prescribed psychiatric drugs.

As if commitment is not an abusive human rights violation in itself! Now the government wants to make sure the abuse continues for the rest of the person’s life.

“The fact that psychiatric imprisonment is called ‘civil commitment’ is, of course, simply part of the linguistic deception characteristic of the mental–health system. Since civil commitment results in the loss of liberty, and subjects the victim to health hazards at the hands of medical criminals whose ostensible healing function is legitimized by the state, it entails far greater deprivation of rights than does incarceration in prison, a penalty carefully circumscribed by constitutional guarantees and judicial safeguards.”
(Dr. Thomas Szasz, M.D., late Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus)

With health care eating up vast amounts of our national budget, the first spending cut to make is the cost of “treating” people who prefer not to be mentally treated. Involuntary commitment laws hike federal, state, county, city and private health care costs under the strange circumstance of a patient–recipient who cannot say no.

CCHR recommends that citizens execute a Living Will, or Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment, which directs that psychiatric incarceration, hospitalization, treatment or procedures not be imposed on you.

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Crisis Intervention Teams and your mental health

Sunday, October 19th, 2014

Crisis Intervention Teams and your mental health

You may or may not be aware of a police function called a “Crisis Intervention Team” (CIT). There is a heavy ongoing push country-wide to train police officers to “handle” difficult situations involving “suspected mental illness.”

For example, someone calls 911 to report a domestic squabble. The police arrive. Tempers flair. Someone is going to be taken to a mental health facility for a “96-hour evaluation,” also called Involuntary Commitment or Civil Commitment.

Let us use the Saint Louis County Police CIT as an example, whose mission is “to deliver positive law enforcement crisis intervention service to people with mental illness in the St. Louis area.”

The CIT-trained officers are used primarily as a referral mechanism to local mental health hospitals and agencies. If they cannot defuse a potentially dangerous situation, they will forcibly transport the offending person to a local hospital emergency room and transfer the person into the mental health system, authorized by Missouri Statute 632.305 (“Detention for evaluation and treatment”.)

The CIT engages local hospitals, agencies and organizations in a cooperative effort (“community partnership”) to streamline this process. One of the primary goals of a CIT is to divert offenders from jail to the mental health system, reducing the burden on the criminal justice system.

In the St. Louis area, there are 20 cooperating mental health agencies, 9 cooperating hospital systems, and 58 local law enforcement agencies with CIT-trained personnel. There are 10 counties throughout Missouri with CIT programs.

In 1988, the Memphis Police Department joined in partnership with the Memphis Chapter of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, mental health providers, and two local universities (the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee) in organizing, training, and implementing a specialized unit for handling mental crisis events. This became the model Crisis Intervention Team subsequently exported to police departments across the country.

To be sure, no one disputes the need for police training, the safe and effective handling of potentially dangerous situations, and the temporary care for persons in crisis mode. One does, however, question the efficacy of mental health “treatment” in the current model of the psychiatric mental health system, where “treatment” generally means one or more abusive practices such as involuntary commitment, harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs, patient restraints, electroshock, and psycho-surgery.

Your mental health, and the mental health of your family, friends and associates, can be questioned by CIT-trained police. If this makes you uncomfortable, execute a Living Will (Letter of Protection from Psychiatric Incarceration and/or Treatment) and then express your opinion to your local, state and federal officials, and email the St. Louis Area Crisis Intervention Team Coordinating Council.

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