Exposing Violations in the Mental Health System
by Eve Hillary
www.evehillary.org

PHILLIP DAY'S COMMENT: Eve Hillary is one of Australia's staunchest and most articulate advocates of citizens' freedoms in a country where freedom of choice in health is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. In this article, she comments on the frightening turn the Australia's Mental Health State is taking, and what every Australian should do to stop it.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.
- Martin Luther King, Jr

The repressive mental health laws being put in place around the world reduce accountability and transparency, seemingly empowering the corporate state to incarcerate individuals indefinitely in order to force drugs and treatments upon them that can cause permanent brain damage.10

Mandatory mental health screening has recently been introduced in some US states, and activists fear it will also lead to more involuntary drug treatments.11.12.

Increasingly, where statute laws abound, more health conditions are being included under the "mental health" umbrella. The result has been a shocking betrayal of trust. Increasingly, children and teenagers who once needed treatment merely for a drug or alcohol problem are being funnelled into the mental health system and often end up on psychiatric drugs for the long term. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights13 and other watchdogs investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. All report a significant increase in complaints of psychiatric abuse.

A seventeen-year-old Australian boy14 had been smoking marijuana on a regular basis during his final year of school. He was a well-liked, straight-A student. The boy and his mother sought help from staff at a nearby drug and alcohol treatment centre, but they said that pot "won't hurt him". Still concerned, the mother took her son to the local doctor. The GP referred him to a visiting psychiatrist, who then began to prescribe psychiatric drugs to the boy. Within weeks, the psychiatrist placed the boy into the mental health system. Once there, he was heavily drugged. Within two years, the boy was permanently institutionalised and given dozens of shock treatments without his mother's consent. Later he was found to have paddle-shaped electrical burns on his upper abdomen from the shock treatment.

For the past seven years he has been institutionalised and drugged into a stupor with strong psychiatric drugs. Now a man of twenty-four, he remains imprisoned in the mental health system and his general health has deteriorated appallingly. Mostly heavily drugged and in effect unable to communicate, he shakes and trembles between rigid spasms and shuffles unsteadily when on his feet. The remaining time he sleeps stuporously for hours on end. The psychiatric facility has refused to allow outside medical treatment for him. In his GP's opinion, the young man may now be irreparably brain damaged. His mother has now taken common law steps to address her son's psychiatric abuse and to provide the necessary medical measures required to treat the damage done to her son.

Reclaiming Parental Rights
Stories abound of children dying in the care of abusive parents after child welfare authorities had been notified and failed to take action. However, the darker side of government child welfare authorities is rarely publicised. Authorities made an eleven-year-old-girl15 a ward of the court after an oncologist called in the authorities when the family was still deciding whether to consent to chemotherapy.

The child had chemo forcibly administered while being confined and guarded in a hospital for two months. A Supreme Court judge ordered this forced treatment on the strength of the oncologist's opinion. However, the doctor could not show any evidence supporting the validity of his treatment. The family made several efforts to stop the forced treatment, which they considered to be medical abuse, but they were unsuccessful in this despite having spent their savings on legal fees. The child's father joined a common law movement and represented the child's interests in court himself, where he reinstated his and his wife's parental rights.

Standing Up for Our Health Freedom
The Big Pharma lobby has increasingly infiltrated government policy.16 Consequently, there have been unprecedented attacks on the use of natural, non-drug-based therapies as well as on their providers. New health-care laws give powers of search and seizure to medical boards and health care watchdogs. This might be understandable if the police-state powers were being used to ferret out sleazy or quack doctors and incompetent practitioners. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the power of these laws is now arbitrarily used to harass and abuse qualified doctors and other health professionals who practise natural, alternative or integrative health care.17

Last year an Australian naturopath was allegedly raided by a government team who searched the practitioner's private belongings. The quiet, elderly, health professional was overwhelmed and devastated by the raid, allegedly conducted by 18 uniformed goons.18

More recently, another notable Australian physician who has achieved excellent clinical results treating patients with nutrient supplements and dietary measures was targeted by the medical regulators in his state. He had been officially harassed for several years. But when confronted by the Board's police-type powers, he "voluntarily" consented to his retirement instead of mounting what he anticipated would be a costly and stressful legal action.19

The Internet abounds with health freedom activists who are now tracking this official abuse of practitioners. However, Tim Bolen, one such advocate, publicises the increasing numbers of practitioners who successfully stand up to authorities.20 Though abuses still abound, some success stories are emerging.

One Australian doctor, who successfully incorporates natural medicine into his busy practice, was targeted by his state's medical board on the basis of issues such as a complaint made by an habitual complainant who has been mentioned in Parliament as a person who systematically makes complaints specifically against alternative practitioners. The medical board took up this bogus complaint in an attempt to use its police-type powers to gain entry to the doctor's premises. The board's representatives were stopped on the day because the doctor insisted the board demonstrate a reasonable cause and a proper reason as to its authority to enter his premises. The board was unable to do this. The doctor remains an ardent constitutional law and social justice advocate.21

Further Resources
The Mind Game by Phillip Day
Contact www.evehillary.org for further information on activism strategies and Australia link groups.

10 Confidential interviews with two parents of children who have suffered permanent damage from psychiatric treatments forced on them by the mental health system.
11. See http://www.newswithviews.com/NWVexclusive/exclusive32.htm.
12. "New UK Mental Health Act - direct from hell"' http://www.ctono.freeserve.co.uk/id28.htm
13 See http://www.cchr.org.
14 Source wishes not to be identified
15 Hillery, Eve, "DOCS - Stealing our Children for Medicine", Living Now newspaper, December 2003.
16 "The Other Drug War: Big Pharma's 625 Washington Lobyists", at http://www.ciizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID=7077&secID=1078&cat=126.
17 Conclusions from analysis of NSW medico-legal data, court transcripts and record.
18 Source wishes not to be identified
19 Source wishes not to be identified
20 See http://www.bolenreport.com
21 Legal documents from medical practitioner who wishes to remain unidentified