Posted by pseudoname on March 1, 2006, at 13:03:22
In reply to Re: America Helpless » ClearSkies, posted by fires on December 31, 2005, at 11:33:53
This is what Steve Salerno has to say about mental health patients in “SHAM” (pg 226-227).
<quote>
A textbook example of SHAM's [the self-help & actualization movement's] ability to turn things topsy-turvy can be found in the field of mental health, where a legitimate interest in supporting the independence of the mentally ill has also given birth to a radical form of patient advocacy. At a presentation to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1996, Dale Walsh, the vice president of Riverbend Community Mental Health, came front and center with such revisionism. He spoke of how some among the mentally ill have taken to using the term “psychiatric inmates” to “make clear their dissatisfaction” with the “power inequities” of their treatment, and how, in California and elsewhere, backlash against that “patriarchal system” had caused the mentally ill to refer to themselves as “consumers” or even “clients” of the system. The use of such terminology, said Walsh, captured their newfound “sense of empowerment and the place they feel they can occupy within the hierarchy” of mental-health treatment. Of his own mental-illness history, Walsh said he used to think “there was something wrong with me,” while lamenting the fact that traditionally “people who have been labeled as mentally ill have been considered to have poor judgment.” Walsh wrapped up by asserting that modern-day consumers “who use the mental-health system” must “play a significant role in the shaping of the services, policies, and research” that affect them as part of “taking back power from the system.” Another mental-health activist, Selina Glater of Sanctuary Psychiatric Centers, has written that “empowerment,” in a mental-health setting, is about “clearly stating what it is you need in order to feel whole again.” Inmates running the asylum indeed.
Such bold rhetoric invites skepticism on many grounds, the most obvious, perhaps, being the implication that just because people *want* power, they're entitled to it, regardless of circumstances. But the most compelling flaw in arguments like those made by Walsh and Glater might be their assumption that people who know there's something wrong with them are ipso facto the best ones to decide how they can be cured.
<unquote>
• "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless" by Steve Salerno (2004; 273 pages) ISBN 1400054095
poster:pseudoname
thread:593512
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20051228/msgs/614659.html