POLITICAL PSYCHIATRY : Are People Being Thrown Into Psychiatric Wards For Their Political Views?

 

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ALL PERFECTLY LEGAL

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Mental Health Diagnoses Are 
Sometimes Politically-Motivated
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Many psychologists and psychiatrists are good people, who are only trying to help their patients.

But the Nazi government substantially supported psychologists … many of whom, in turn, espoused extermination of the people they considered to be “racially and cognitively compromised”.

Soviet psychiatrists famously aided Stalin in applying fake insanity diagnoses to political dissenters.  The official explanation was that no sane person would declaim the Soviet government and Communism.

American psychologists created the American program of torture which was specially-crafted to produce false confessions to justify U.S. military policy. And see this.

And authoritarian American psychologists are eager to label anyone “taking a cynical stance toward politics, mistrusting authority, endorsing democratic practices, … and displaying an inquisitive, imaginative outlook” as worthy of a trip to the insane asylum. (Those traits may also get one labeled as a potential terrorist.)

As prominent forensic psychiatrist James Knoll – psychiatry professor at SUNY-Syracuse and director of a forensic fellowship program – writes in the Psychiatric Times:

When psychiatric science becomes co-opted by a political agenda, an unhealthy alliance may be created. It is science that will always be the host organism, to be taken over by political viruses…. [P]sychiatry may come to resemble a new organism entirely — one that serves the ends of the criminal justice system.

Even psychologists with good intentions can erroneously label people delusional simply because they themselves make bad assumptions.
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Chinese Government Institutionalizes 

People Against Their Will: 

Chinese Human-Rights Defenders

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Every year, thousands of healthy Chinese are forcibly locked up and ‘treated’ in mental institutions, according to a new report by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Prominent human-rights lawyer Jin Guanghong was walking down a street in Beijing one day in April 2011 when he was grabbed by several unidentified men, who threw a black hood over his head and stuffed him into the back of a car. The men, believed to be national security officers, later placed him in a psychiatric hospital where doctors tied him up, force-fed him medicine and gave him unknown injections, all against his will. When he was released about 10 days later, he had no idea about what exactly had happened to him during the frightening ordeal.

READ MORE HERE
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/22/chinese-government-institutionalizes-people-against-their-will-chinese-human-rights-defenders.html
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Governments Indefinitely Detaining Citizens 

In Psychiatric Wards Without Due Process of Law
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As such, detention in psych wards on mere “suspicion” of posing a danger – without due process of law – is troubling.

For example, former marine Brandon Raub was just carted off and locked in a psychiatric ward for his allegedly “anti-government” Facebook posts.

The Daily Mail notes:

The [British] Government has established a shadowy new national anti-terrorist unit to protect VIPs, with the power to detain suspects indefinitely using mental health laws.

READ MORE HERE
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/08/governments-indefinitely-detaining-citizens-in-psychiatric-wards-without-due-process-of-law.html