PSYCHIATRY FOR QUEERS

         

      This is an excerpt from the introduction to my proposed  book

      Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the Queer Struggle

                                                     

 

21. Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the branch of medicine that is supposed to be concerned with the study, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness. Kinderman (2019) feels that we need a revolution to change it. Per Laterna (2023) report articles in the Guardian concerning over 26000 rape and sexual assault incidents over 5 years in UK mental health institutions. I regard bad psychiatry as still serving to violently suppress people with mental health issues and to violate large numbers of queer people.

Drescher (2010) argues with numerous activists that, as in the case of gayness in the 1970s, it is wrong to label expressions of gender variance as symptoms of a mental disorder and that perpetuating DSM-IV’s TR GID diagnoses in the DSM-V would further stigmatize and cause harm to transgender individuals. Other advocates in the trans community expressed concern that deleting GID would lead to denying medical and surgical care for transgender adults. More queer psychiatrists need to assert themselves in their profession and seek to clarify such issues. See University of Toronto (2023)

There is ever-increasing concern in the psychiatric survivor movement as to how many so-called mental illnesses can be beneficially treated using a medical model, whether they can be responsibly diagnosed, and as to how many mental health issues are created by socio-economic, working environments, homophobia and transphobia, rather than underlying ‘chemical imbalances’ or medical deficiencies. Furthermore, any enzyme-poisoning psychiatric medication can cause debilitating physical side effects.

Nevertheless, many suicidal people are kept alive by taking psychiatric medications, even though the medications dampen their psychiatric symptoms rather than curing the disorder. Some paranoid schizophrenics find them necessary, in the absence of well-researched holistic treatments, in order to achieve a harmless and at all rational existence.

A Facebook group of self-promoting ‘reforming’ psychiatrists known as Drop the Disorder sometimes behave like bullies e.g. by encouraging a shrink to bully their members by uninvited private messaging, trying to dissuade people experiencing manic mood swings from taking their medications (Howard, 2023), and by claiming that ‘ADHD is BS’.

Followers of Thomas Szasz and Bonnie Burstow, the conspiracy-theoretical anti-vaxxers who are also anti-psychiatry, and the Scientology movement can be even more harmful. They detract from the credibility of the psychiatric survivor movement. Even the much-respected Facebook group Mad in America gets split along these lines,

My selective history of psychiatry will focus, in part, on its history in London and Edinburgh, but also on international material collated during my twelve or so years campaigning (beginning around the end of 2011).against problematic twenty-first century psychiatry.

The seminal work on the underlying causes of depressive disorders by Professor Joanne Moncrieff at UCL has relatively recently epitomised the urgent need for, albeit belated, change to, or replacement of, the entire discipline of psychiatry. Professor Moncrieff has changed her attitude towards the treatment of clinical depression; she no longer believes that it is caused by a chemical imbalance. See Moncrieff (2022). For various ineptitudes from a former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, see Burn (2020). For an enlightened approach to addressing childhood trauma, see Mackler (2023).

Knapton (2023) reports that anti-depressants raise the risk of suicide while also giving people the means to kill themselves. Psychologists at the University of East London, lead by the pioneering reformist Professor John Read, analysed media reports of nearly 8000 coroners’ inquests in England and Wales between 2003 and 2020 in which antidepressants were mentioned. They found that the drugs [presumably including the infamous imaprimine, Prozac, and Seroxat] were linked to 2718 cases of hanging and 2329 overdoses, of which 933 people had overdosed on the antidepressants themselves. A further 2083 had been struck by a train, tube, lorry or other vehicle, had jumped or fallen to their death, drowned, shot themselves , or been involved in a fire or electrocution. Experts said that the figures were likely to be just the tip of the iceberg, because many suicides and inquests are not fully reported in the media,

Psychiatry has frequently been used to damage native populations. For example, Dr. Selwyn Leeks used electric shocks without anaesthetic from an ECT machine to torture over 300 children between 1972 and 1977 in the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital in New Zealand (Smale, 2022, Ellingham, 2022). Most of the tortured children had been sent to Lake Alice from state-run welfare homes and around half were Maori boys.

The children received electric shocks or were demeaningly injected with paralysing drugs such as paraldehyde as punishments. Many were sexually or psychologically abused. The Crown and the psychiatric profession reportedly protected Leeks, and he was never held to account for his heinous sadism. He lived for another 45 years while his surviving victims still suffered from their horrific childhood experiences.

Depixol/flupentixol can paralyse patients from the waist down and put them on crutches. This happened to a young and handsome, learning-disabled bisexual man ‘Timothy’ in Edinburgh in around the year 2000 when he was sectioned into the ‘Royal Ed’ for impersonating a Holy entity. Timothy, who was vulnerable to exploitation by butch guys but preferred the company of his girlfriend, was repeatedly ‘jagged’ with depixol in his left buttock at the behest of highly eminent and notoriously sarcastic, Quaker psychiatrist. Timothy’s legs turned rubbery and he was put on crutches.

The sarcastic ‘headshrinker’ later put Timothy into 14 days of solitary in a cell with an iron-barred window for grinning too much on the ward. Timothy said that the course of depixol continued for three years and had life-changing, unexpected effects on his feelings of sexual attraction. The multiple injections left a sizeable deep red blotch on his left buttock. Timothy hadn’t recovered from the experience when I last met him in 2019 even though he’d been incessantly ‘jagged’ (chemically raped) with narcoleptic medications, ever since.

According to Dr. Graham Vahey (various conversations with Tom Leonard on the Mental Health Discussions Edinburgh Facebook page) who worked with the great reforming psychiatrist R.D. Laing in Glasgow, electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) has very harmful effects while seldom curing any psychiatric disorder. It destroys brain cells, and causes cognitive problems and short-term, persistent, or permanent memory loss. While it can lead to temporary feelings of euphoria, ECT can cause deep, long-term depression and the need to be ‘meek’, to acquiesce and comply. Shorter and Healy (2007) would very much disagree with this as they reek havoc around the world. But Admin (2022), on behalf of the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry, refers to the lack of placebo-based studies, all of which have been seriously flawed, and states to the effect that the psychiatric profession is unfairly and obstructively defending itself. Meanwhile, the Scottish Health Inspectorate approve of ECT and assert that it is beneficial (John Williamson, the ‘Scottish Gatekeeper’, personal communication).

Psychiatry has been used to damage or destroy many queer people’s lives e.g. by damaging their brains with ECT or by imposing courses of aversion therapy for ‘sexual perversions’ (Davison, 2020) or by the NHS or private clinics giving (e.g. gay or trans) children or adults hefty doses of unnecessary, harmful medications after diagnosing or misdiagnosing them with ADHD (e.g. Panorama Team, 2023).

Even when a psychiatric maltreatment damages people regardless of their gender or orientation, it injures a disproportionately large number of queer folk, simply because queers are much more likely to have mental health issues.

Here is a totally anonymous quote (15 May 2023), from an erstwhile inpatient, who is too frightened to give their name, but has given me permission to publish:

Horrible horrible place poor old ladies being electro shocked , injecting people in there sleep, violent prisoner tactics being rushed pinned down and injected for just being upset and crying it's so inhumane these horrible "private" yes out the way where nobody can see what they do it's absolutely gross poor poor hurting people it breaks my heart

According to Dr. Jessica Taylor, women have long been pathologized, locked up and medicated for not conforming to whichever norms or stereotypes are expected of them in that time and space. In her book Sexy But Psycho Dr. Taylor explores the way professionals and society at large pathologize and sexualise women and girls. See Taylor (2022). I am not convinced that gay men are pathologized and sexualised any less than women.

For Martin Harrow’s seminal empirical investigations that invalidated the cruel treatment of schizophrenia by anti-psychotics, and the dismissive attitude of the psychiatric profession towards Harrow’s firmly based conclusions, see Whitaker (2023).

The ‘optimal’ dynamic treatment regimes proposed by Shortreed and Moodie (2012), where patients are switched from one harmful anti-psychotic to another, give rise to a large collection of excruciatingly debilitating side effects that the patients could and often do suffer. Patients can switch between olanzapine, perphenazine, quetiapine, risperidone, ziprasidone, and clozapine, though it’s not at all obvious whether any of these choices would actually improve the patient’s underlying psychiatric condition rather than suppressing some of the symptoms e.g. shutting the patient up.

Professor Shortreed carries out her very frightening, futuristic, research at the Kaiser Permanente Health Washington Research Institute in Seattle, and refers to Lieberman’s nefarious, very high attrition-rate CATIE study (see Self-Study Exercise 2.14) when determining her ‘optimal’ dynamic treatment regimes. I don’t see how Shortreed can say ‘optimal’ when there isn’t even a control group. Since the 1493 patients in the supposedly randomized study were not chosen at random from a reference population, it’s not at all obvious what on earth Shortreed is playing at. But she’s the way to go if you want Artificial Intelligence to take over, and if you want highly theoretical, assumption-dependent, weird and strangely behaving [‘Bayesian random effects’] statistical models to help determine your next choice of enzyme-poisoning, narcoleptic medication.

Not only psychiatric, but other medical patients get abused. According to Chiu (2021) about 40% of people with MS are abused e.g. by their carers or nurses. When the abuse is physical, it includes getting beaten, hit, or slapped, But physical abuse can be more subtle. For example, a caregiver who is handling a person roughly or aggressively while tending to their needs may be causing physical abuse.

Peter Kinderman (2019) A Manifesto for Mental Health: Why we need a revolution in mental care London: Palgrave MacMillan

Per Laterna (2023) Rape and Sexual Assault in UK Mental Health (Real Story of Psychiatry) https://perlanterna.com/articles/rape-and-sexual-assault-in-uk-mental-health/? Accessed 12 June 2023

Jack Drescher (2009) Queer Diagnoses: Parallels and Contrasts in the History of Homosexuality, Gender Variance, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

Archive of Sexual Behavior 39, pp 427–460 DOI 10.1007/s10508-009-9531-5

University of Toronto (2023) Queer in Practice (Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto) https://psychiatry.utoronto.ca/quip? Accessed 17 June 2023

Robert Howard (2023) Tweet message

https://twitter.com/ProfRobHoward/status/1668678158919389184

Accessed 17 June 2023

Joanne Moncrieff (2022) How to take the news that depression has not been shown to be caused by a chemical imbalance (Critical Psychiatry Network)

https://joannamoncrieff.com/2022/07/24/how-to-take-the-news-that-depression-has-not-been-shown-to-be-caused-by-a-chemical-imbalance/ Accessed 22 March 2023

Wendy Burn (2020) Medical Community must ensure that those needing support to come off anti-depressants can get it (the bmj opinion)

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/09/25/wendy-burn-medical-community-must-ensure-that-those-needing-support-to-come-off-anti-depressants-can-get-it/? Accessed 22 May 2023

Daniel Mackler (2023) Healing Childhood Trauma (Wild Truth Blog) https://wildtruth.net/ Accessed 24 May 2023

Sarah Knapton (2023) Anti-depressants increase the risk of suicide for some patients, scientists warn (Telegraph) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/17/antidepressants-suicide-drugs-prozac-research/ Accessed 18 April 2023

Aaron Smale (2022) Notorious Lake Alice Psychiatrist Dr. Selwyn Leeks Dies (Stuff) https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/300503822/notorious-lake-alice-psychiatrist-dr-selwyn-leeks-dies

Jimmy Ellingham (2022) Lake Alice: Why psychiatrist Dr. Selwyn Leeks was never charged (RNZ) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/462498/lake-alice-why-psychiatrist-dr-selwyn-leeks-was-never-charged

Edward Shorter and David Healy (2007) Shock Therapy: The History of Electro-convulsive Treatment in Mental Illness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Admin (2022) Professor John Read: Fear and Loathing in the ECT Debate (Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry)

http://cepuk.org/2022/02/15/blog-by-prof-john-read-fear-and-loathing-in-the-ect-debate/ Accessed 17 June 2023

Kate Davison (2021) Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s History of the Human Sciences 34 (1) pp81-119

Panorama Team (2023) ADHD: Private clinics exposed by BBC undercover investigation (BBC News) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65534448

Jessica Taylor (2022) Sexy but Psycho London and Edinburgh: Hachette

Robert Whitaker (2023). Martin Harrow: The Galileo of Modern Psychiatry (1933-2023) Mad in America https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/03/martin-harrow-the-galileo-of-modern-psychiatry-1933-2023/ Accessed 1 April 2023

Susan Shortreed and Nicola Moodie (2012) Estimating the optimal dynamic antipsychotic treatment regime: Evidence from the sequential multiple assignment randomized CATIE Schizophrenia Study. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C (Applied Statistics) 61 (4) pp 577-599 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3475611/ Accessed 15 April 2023

Ryan Chiu (2021). Preventing abuse and multiple sclerosis. (My MS Team)

https://www.mymsteam.com/resources/preventing-abuse-and-multiple-sclerosis#