Category Archives: Mental Health

8 Years of Punishment in Cygnet Hospital

DIABOLICAL: This could happen to YOU:

CASE STUDY: E.T.
FACTS:

Mummy’s Helper: Is like a mum to two younger Brothers.

DAILY CHORES: Tidy / Clean, ironing Etc.
FREE TIME: 0-5%

AGE 14:
2004: RAN AWAY from AGGRESSIVE Dad.
HAPPY: Lived with Nan for 6 months.
No problems: Punctual √ Honest √ Helpful √ Aggressive X Wants to be a nurse.
(Photo, on left, in white top – taken then)
FORCED to return to Mum.

2005: RAN AWAY at 10am in PJ’s whilst Mum at work.
(REASON: Not known by Nan until 2017):
(Fled STEP-DAD’s unwanted sexual advances).
NO (statutory) INVESTIGATION DONE WHY she was HOMELESS.

She was BLAMED & FALSELY ACCUSED by Mum: “… she is an attention seeking drama queen…” & not questioned by Children’s Services’s Trainee Social Worker (sw).

NAN BLAMED by Mum (scape goated): “it’s all her fault.” Nan not questioned by sw.

NOT ALLOWED to live with NAN.

REFUSED TO GO “HOME”:
(Drunk) Mum & sw in Charge of “Plan”:
Ensured NO help available
to “Force her back home” – police used.

ON STREETS approx 3 MONTHS:
In TERRIBLE State.
Terrified / Forced back to Dad, locked in.
Ran away. Terrified / Forced back to Dad again. Ran away.

Nan complained (in writing) sw has got it VERY WRONG. Stage 2 Complaint IGNORED by Children’s Services.

Nan told “you have no rights – you are only a grandmother.”

INCARCERATED for approx 2 MONTHS:
DUMPED & Locked IN a disused empty former children’s home, kept in ISOLATION. Only equipment / activity: A snooker table. Promised access to Education by sw but that never happened. CONTACT with Nan restricted.

ACCUSED of thumping sw.
FOUND GUILTY (at Magistrate’s court).
Terrified. Sent to SECURE UNITS in UK,
many miles away from family & friends.
ISOLATED: Contact with Nan not allowed.

Inmate advised: Self Harm to PROTEST UNJUST INCARCERATION.

AGE 17: PUT in St ANDREW’s, Northampton, DIAGNOSIS: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) (has one symptom – self harming; need minimum of 5 symptoms to meet criteria).
(Done as label, to invalidate).

DETAINED under Mental Health Act, on SECTION 3: “for own safety”
(by Children’s Services, before handed over to Adult Services):

Placed in care of (Mental Health) CARE MANAGER: NO INVESTIGATION DONE.

PUT in Cygnet hospital, Beckton.

Transferred to Cygnet hospital, Stevenage:
INADEQUATE SAFEGUARDING:
7 YEARS: “ALLOWED to self-harm” by staff, paid for one-one Care.

Every protest IGNORED.

ALLOWED Weekend Leave to stay with ALCOHOLIC MUM (still desperately needs to be reunited & loved by MUM).

Still FEARS for brothers welfare.
Still too scared & distrusting to confide in staff.

REPORTS: BAD FLASHBACKS
DIAGNOSIS: PTSD

PROMISED Supported Housing, in Community, “if your mum gives permission… No later than November 2016.”

HAPPILY LOOKING FORWARD to having a Home – a long awaited Fresh Start.
STOPS SELF HARMING for 7 MONTHS.

Still NO ASSESSMENT DONE for Community Treatment Order (CTO).

RAN AWAY from MUM. Fled to hospital.
Promised Transfer to Cygnet’s Keystoke hospital in Weston Super Mare, to be nearer Nan, in South Devon.

October 2016: FORCIBLY TRANSFERRED to Cygnet hospital, in Derby. “Arrived with NO CASE HISTORY only medical notes.”

OVERLY STRICT SAFEGUARDING IMPOSED:
ALL LEAVE CANCELLED (inexplicably).
FORCED to stay on locked BPD ward
24/7 x 365 days a year:

NO Fresh Air, No Exercise, No Outings, No Nature, No Nurture, No interesting Activities, No Access to Education, No Structure.

EXTREME BOREDOM.
Nothing to do except Fester.

WANTS TRANSFER: “I HATE it here…”

“Nan identified as very important person.”
Nan gives hospital sw a truthful (written) family history.

Nan Visits: 1st Time Allowed to See each other in 11 YEARS.
Nan ACCEPTED as ACTING NR.

Nan SHOCKED & APPALLED: She is unrecognisable due to excessive weight gain, caused by dangerous levels of medications, & HORRIFIED she is covered in visible (weeping) scars, her physical condition / general health is so poor.

Nan sends a tube of Savlon. Staff confiscate it. “Only E45 cream is allowed.”

Nan Complains re: PUNITIVE REGIME etc:
Formally requests REVIEW OF CARE & TREATMENT PLAN & a 2nd opinion by INDEPENDENT expert re: Misdiagnosis (as label & punishment regime is sharply resented).

Nan submits a written Care Plan she believes will work. IGNORED by staff.

Nan promised a reward system will be tried. NOT IMPLEMENTED.

One-to-One Care REQUESTED.
TOLD: “Derby only do 15 minute observations.”

SELF HARMING ESCALATES – there are several SERIOUS SUICIDE ATTEMPTS:
“… staff only just manage to bring her back using CPR…” PUNISHED CRUELLY for “upsetting staff.”

CQC COMPLAINT: MEDS have caused OBESITY & DIABETES Type 11,
NOT ALLOWED TO DIET, irresponsible strain on heart by Clinician.
IGNORED by staff.

Staff continue to ALLOW online shopping for consumption of unlimited supply of sugary products.

CQC COMPLAINT by SOLICITOR:
URGENT TRANSFER NEEDED.
IGNORED.

Told Nan’s SOLICITOR is denied access to CPA meeting to discuss (false) “progress” with NHS FUNDER.

UPSET: RESTRAINED, ACUPHASED 3 TIMES by Forcible Injection – each time rendered UNCONSCIOUS.

INACCURATE REPORTS SUBMITTED by staff.
(same old lies copy & pasted).
NHS Funder appeased by promises of “progress in 6 months” & introduction of SKYPE to reduce isolation.

TRIBUNAL CANCELLED.
TRANSFER REFUSED.

SKYPE NOT ORGANISED (only happened after 6 month Delay: 3 or 4 times).

Nan requests (same) CARE MANAGER investigates UNJUST punishment since Age 15.
RESPONSE: Care Manager casts doubt on Nan. Refuses to communicate with Nan.

Nan aware ADVOCATE on ward is not independent. Nan asks advocate outside of Cygnet to visit. Ignored. Nan asks solicitor to arrange advocate. Action gets blocked.

Nan told not to complain as staff take it out on patients. “Do as I do, bite your tounge.”

MECHANICAL RESTRAINTS:
BOTH ARMS put in uncomfortable RIGID CASTS (at same time) for total of 6 MONTHS = (AVERSION) PUNISHMENT / Humiliation, to discourage / make self harming / doing anything for self: Impossible.

OPEN WOUND: Stabbed in stomach in past, keeps opening wound. Inserted objects left inside wound, contracts MRSA, nursed in isolation on the ward.

Nan works with staff / receives many distressing phone calls – each time helps STABILISE situation.
She is TOLD OFF by staff for confiding in Nan.

Nan notes “new” Care Plan makes NO mention of anything requested.

Still Wants NO CONTACT with DAD. Told by staff he is still legally her NEAREST RELATIVE (NR).

SOLICITOR arranges Court Hearing to Displace existing NR so Nan can be made NR.
(Still not clear who her NR is legally – staff argue it is a man at Children’s Services).

COURT HEARING STOPPED: Hospital’s sw UNJUSTLY casts doubt on Nan’s suitability (but allows Nan to continue as Acting NR). Legal Aid funding for Hearing withdrawn.

Death on same ward (her best friend with a Eating Disorder is found dead).

Nan aware “staff don’t care.”
“ONLY WAY OUT OF HERE IS IN A BODY BAG.” “I’d be better off dead…”

Nan puts hospital On Notice, in writing. Cygnet object to “tone” – Nan threatened (in writing) with police. Staff told Nan has abused staff. Staff refuse to communicate with Nan.

NOSEDIVES:
2nd time, tries to block airway TO ESCAPE PLACE BY DYING. Foreign object gets stuck in right side of her chest – too painful to move, hurts to breathe. 6 HOURS later Nan by chance phones her, then Nan calls ward to report Emergency to staff. Nan told to write a letter. Nan calls 999, staff cancel ambulance. Police refuse to do a welfare check. Safeguarding Adults ignore call. Denied access to proper medical attention for 3 days.

Complaints to CQC requesting URGENT INTERVENTION: Receipt acknowledged, no action reported to complainants.

Staff try to further ALIENATE Nan.
ISOLATION INCREASED: Mobile phone taken, staff open & keep mail, (rare) visits from friend cancelled, “not allowed a visit at Xmas, until after New Year.”

QUALITY OF LIFE: 0-5%

NO Human Rights Respected
(has same rights as a vegetable).

Is this a case of Habeous Corpus?

DURING 8 YEARS in Cygnet: GETS THE WRONG CARE & TREATMENT:

Still No HELP / Psychotherapy for PTSD / being Traumatised.

Still in THE WRONG ENVIRONMENT:
In a Hospital setting: Alarming!
Continually RE-TRAUMATISED.

“Out of Area,” very lonely, frightened, brow beaten. (Some) Sadistic staff
ENJOY ABUSE OF POWER:
ridicule / jeer belittle / bully =

ALL TRIGGERS self harming.

OBVIOUS PATTERN: A VICIOUS CIRCLE: Cygnet use to advantage:
“She Can’t be Discharged, she is not safe.”

Staff Provoke, Antagonise – try to cause / evoke Aggression (from docile vulnerable patient) to overcome / hide NEGLECT by getting exoneration via her being Reclassified as “dangerous.”

INCIDENT: Staff member claims “for no reason” was pushed & wrist hurt. Nan told staff member was being horrible & laughing at her for self harming. This “dangerous” patient has now been charged. Due to appear in court, December 2017.

Nan posted on Facebook Desperately Seeking Advice.

PETITION: GET HER OUT OF CYGNET “hospital” TO SAVE HER LIFE.
15,000 Signatures in 2 weeks.

Nan gets withheld contact details for NHS Special Commissioning Group Funder & Review doctor. Both are happy to speak to Nan.

BPD “Diagnosis Annual Review” done for 1st? time.

Review Doctor tell Nan he has too many patients to visit in UK. He IS KEEN “out of area” patients RETURN to area, in a COMMUNITY setting.

He Cites LACK of SUPPORTED HOUSING & SECURE beds in COMMUNITY
as REASON why patients are PUT
“OUT OF AREA.”

REVIEW DOCTOR wants time to do PLAN (to achieve a move back to Devon):
Conditions:
Must stop self harming for 6 months.
All parties must work together.
SOLUTION PROPOSED: NO details given.

Nan does NOT want any more Empty promises.

TOLD by lead Psychologist on ward,
“you are the most difficult patient…”
A TRANSFER to a MEDIUM or HIGHER SECURITY psychiatric hospital is IMMINENT – you will have to wear a rip proof suit & if you refuse to eat, you will be force fed. The funder & review doctor agree to this plan.

TERRIFIED / TRAUMATISED.

Funder & Review Doctor deny knowledge of this plan (to Nan) but say the Psychologist is not lying or saying that to terrify her.

ONLY place can be transferred to:
St ANDREWS? (Has a dreadful reputation).

WHAT IS HER FUTURE?
DO these “care providers” CARE?

CQC RATING of Cygnet Hospital in Derby: Good.

OMG.

HOW MANY OTHER PEOPLE ARE TRAPPED in this way? IMPRISONED unfairly within confines of psychiatric institutions with pleasant FACADES, controlled by powerful operators, ABUSING & Exploiting the difficulties of legally implementing the protections & guidance of the Mental Health Act, aware there is Ineffective monitoring as BAD standards are accepted as normal in this rapidly growing SINISTER Industry?

BIG PROBLEM:
The NHS is Promoting Privatisation of patient services by pouring huge amounts of money into private “hospitals” that are allowed to put shareholders profits before patient’s Real Needs, contrary to the Patients Best Interests – causing little or no actual Rehabilitations due to lengths of stays being (covertly & deliberately) MAXIMISED.

PETITION

Gwent Police and Senior Mental Health Managers Meeting

2 Replies

On 26/07/17 I wrote to Gwent Police and senior Aneurin Bevan University Health Board Trust Mental Health Nursing Manager, Perry Attwell.

Hi Perry and Gwent Police,

I have been wanting to write to you, with regard to the current status of my detainment under section of the mental health act at my home address.

I have been subjected to the mental health act since 2nd April 1997. I have never been violent towards the police nor mental health workers during the 20 years in which I have been treated. At present, I feel that there is an over-reaction to me when I am processed for sectioning under the mental health act. There are up to 50 police officers in my street during a sectioning and the whole process is very daunting both for myself and also the officers. I am transferred in the back of the police van like a common prisoner and feel that this aggravated my early stay in hospital. As I am never aggressive, I am asking you that, for any potential future assessments, we have a low key approach whereby, if necessary the police can attend in a single car and transfer me in the back of a car, humanely, and so that my mental health in the community is preserved for any potential hospital assessment. I feel that as things stand, with such a hullabaloo raised, it doesn’t assist me nor my local community in the whole process. These most recent hospitalizations have cost me my career at university and I am really struggling to rebuild my life. I am never going to be violent or troublesome and do not wish to be portrayed in a bad light in my neighborhood with a vast police presence and a seemingly violent capture ahead of any mental hospital admittances. Also, Perry Attwell has mentioned to me himself that he would be arranging for me to be transferred directly to Talygarn and not being sent to the processing unit at St Cadoc’s. I ask for a response to this letter as I wish to improve the oft fractured relations I have with this whole service as part of my processing under the Mental Health Act. Theresa May says that she wishes to improve Human Rights for mental patients and here I believe that, at grass roots, I am helping to do just that.

Regards

Wesley Gerrard

After a very long delay and much avoidance by the requested parties to attend this meeting, I finally managed to sit down and meet with mental health managers and police in an attempt to diffuse the whole of my mental health situation / saga. Here is a report I have prepared about this meeting:

After waiting impatiently for this meeting since I first tried to arrange it last July, I finally managed to get the chance to sit down with some of the local police and senior mental health management on Thursday, 26^th October 2017 at Caldicot Library. I had wanted to begin a dialogue so as to analyze exactly what was happening in both the police and mental health services during the far too often sectioning process that they have been using on me for a number of years. It seems that not twelve months can go by without me being aggressively taken out of my home or off the street and removed to Talygarn and St Cadoc’s for lengthy stays. Every time I come before an appeals court these days I win my case so it is becoming ever more annoying that the police and mental health community teams plus psychiatrists in the hospital are persisting in performing these sections. It is so disruptive to me and has continued for over 20 years and I do not intend for it to go on any longer. I am trying to nip the whole saga in the bud and this meeting, whilst I am free and comfortable at home, I felt would be a good way of starting a constructive dialogue to help end the process. Senior manager Perry Atwell, has been taking an active role during my care in recent years and he, for one, is hoping to end the repeat process of me being taken into hospital as he on the whole feels it unnecessary. Unfortunately Perry has now retired from his senior management role and Anne James has taken his place. I have known Anne for most of the 20 years for which I have been a patient.

Anne James was present at the meeting. Also, my social worker / care co-ordinator, Elen Mcelroy. Plus psychologist John Baird (about to retire). Representing Gwent police there were two WPCs. I didn’t manage to record their names although I was aware of one as she has previously processed me during a detainment. The one WPC was senior mental health representative for the whole of Gwent. The other WPC was specifically the mental health liaison officer for my local area.

The whole atmosphere was pretty hostile from the start. I explained some of my grievances. The police denied tasering me etc. They denied assaulting me in the cells. Everyone was pretty much of the steadfast opinion that there has been no wrongdoing on behalf of the powers that be and that all that had been done was necessary. Anne James admitted that in the twenty years I have NEVER once been a danger to myself or others. I have though been sectioned and get regularly aggressively sectioned on no fewer than fifty occasions. The whole criteria of being sectioned means that you have to present as a danger to yourself or others. Yet, here on record, they have admitted that this has never been the case. The police corroborated that I have never been violent to them in any way nor have I any form of criminal record.

The police stated that they have no interest in fighting crime in the local area any more. They said that nowadays their policing was to be targeted towards the policing of vulnerable people.

They said that the main reason of me being violently sectioned by them was that in their view, when they turn up to my property they feel that I am intimidating in character towards them. I explained that I was not trying to intimidate them but that based on the history of what they have been doing to me for years that I am genuinely in fear for my life when they turn up. I cannot go past a police officer or car in the street without experiencing a panic attack through fear of them. It is more them who are intimidating me and the facts and evidence will verify this.

They said that when a magistrate passes an order they are just doing their jobs. I asked as to why they were using this system which is open to corruption. I do not get processed fairly under the mental health act as it is supposed to be.

They said that the social workers involved – mainly Linda Price – have a way of perceiving that I might be perceiving something that might make me mentally ill and they apply to judges for these orders.

In other words I am being detained and sectioned and locked away based on pure speculation of Orwellian ‘thought crime’.

It is illegal, unjust and wrong and must be stopped somehow. It is no way for me to live in constant fear from these hideous people.

I have never experienced the symptoms of any of the diagnosed mental illnesses they accuse me of. I have never sought treatment from them. I never take their medications willingly. It is all done against my will and consent and by using violent force. It has simply gone on for too long.

They have said that the whole process will not be stopped, will not go away and will simply intensify in the years ahead. They want to have more access to me in the community and to lock me away more regularly.

To be honest, the whole meeting was a shambles, very much what I expect from a broken dilapidated system that has perpetually abused me for years on end.

There must be some form of political / legal solution to this.

I am hoping that someone will be able to assist me in getting a better result from this attempt to diffuse the situation and also to look at the wider picture of how this system and its actors might be detrimentally affecting the lives of other victims.

At the very least I demand a full investigation into local mental health services and practices. If they have no evidence for their persecution of me then it should surely be stopped once and for all. They will end up killing me one way or another if they are allowed to proceed and we are not some third world country with no legal process or 21^st century morals. We are supposed to be a democracy where freedom is almost guaranteed.

‘I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in its hand.’

Emotional Support Animal Registry UK

2 Replies

My friend has just started an organisation that might be useful for mental health sufferers in the UK. His service will register your small pet as an ‘Emotional Support Animal’ enabling you to take your pet with you into places that they would not normally be allowed – eg. supermarket, planes, buses. Feel free to check it out http://esaorguk.com

Caroline’s Complaint about H Ward, Somerset Partnership Trust Mental Health Services

1 Reply

My letter of complaint about my experiences of mental health care in UK..
An experience no one should ever be put through but they are every day.. This is the reality of care in the UK mental health services for many ppl.

CONFIDENTIAL

My name is Caroline Breslin. I am writing to you because I would like to make a formal complaint about my treatment by mental health services. When you reply to me please would you also send a copy of your reply to my advocate:

My complaint is about the ongoing effects of my treatment in H Ward in 2015 and the follow up care given to me in 2016. Before I set out details of my complaint I would first like to give some background about my experience at an earlier time because I see it as all connected. At my first contact with psychiatric services in 2008 Dr gave me a contraindicated drug Amyl Sulphide that was not meant to be taken with citalopram antidepressant. This resulted in me being very heavily sedated to the extent that I was unable to organise leaving house for counselling therapy offered by the service so I was cut off from their services and basically existed in a heavily sedated state until I ended up in a manic state in 2012 or 2013, which I blame on the contraindicated drug given alongside the anti depressant citalopram.and the services allowed me to re-engage with them. I never had mania before or since, apart from once mild flight or fight in 2004 when my dad died and I was mugged and assaulted twice in Dublin; it was a reaction to these traumas. I have problems with dates as I have complex PTSD which was a result of my treatment by police and mental health services. I am currently receiving help privately as I will never trust the statutory psychiatric services ever again.

I was sectioned to H Ward on 15 Oct 2015, and discharged from the section around 15 November 2015. I was offered a very high dose of quietiapine which was much higher than I had been taking previously. I refused this so then was given forced injections – to this day I do not know what drug it was. I was given up to five maybe six intra-muscular injections. I was left with a lump on my right buttock that to this day causes me physical pain and discomfort.

I would like to point out that I was sectioned following police intervention in a domestic dispute. This was as a result of crossed wires. My past experience of police when I lived in Dublin had been very traumatic. My treatment at the hands of the police on this occasion totally terrified me and severely traumatised me and the traumas continued until I disengaged with the psychiatric services in after the summer of 2016. I would like to stress that I did not attack anyone nor behave in an uncontrollable manner in H ward.

While I was detained in H ward I injured my leg which needed treatment, but it was nearly two weeks before I was taken to hospital for an x-ray, despite repeated requests by my flatmate. My leg was severely swollen from the injury which turned out to be a severed achilles tendon, which to this day causes me discomfort and significant pain and difficulty walking any distance. Because of the swelling my footwear did not fit and the ward insisted I wear slippers which they gave me; these were unsuitable as the inside heel was not covered and this caused me pain.

Upon leaving the unit in Nov 2015 I disengaged from mental health services services but then reengaged Feb / March 2016. After a few weeks the injected drugs (I don’t know what they were as I was never told when I asked) started to cause major physical and mental withdrawal symptoms. It was then I agreed to have the mental health services help me. A decision I have come to deeply regret. I was then placed under Dr S. I began treatment with Dr S at the end of January, or February 206. I explained I felt it may be the injections making me feel so mentally and physically ill. I was not listened to. I was ignored and felt bullied and pressurised by Dr S and by my care coordinator and support worker into continuing their line of medication treatment. My flat mate witnessed this bullying and pressurising by those who were meant to be helping me, as I asked her to come with me to some meetings.

Dr S and the team proceeded to pressurise me into taking very high doses of medications namely seroquel, zopiclone, benzodiazapines, and various other medications. When I had side effects from the drugs Dr S diagnosed these as more mental illnesses, and refused to acknowledge how obviously physically sick I was becoming to the point of not being able to eat at all or sleep or to go to the toilet normally as I was severely constipated and was urinating for over 25 mins every time I needed to use toilet. Also I lost the ability to communicate properly with others, my very essence of who I am was destroyed. I was severely dehydrated and my skin turned black and nails started to turn black and have holes in them I was also suffering very bad nerve pain at night that travelled up my legs to the rest of my body, extremely uncomfortable nerve and body pain that I am very convinced was caused by these psychiatric drugs.

by seroquel or the combination of these toxic drugs I was prescribed and found almost impossible to come off or reduce dosage. Also I am very concerned about the unknown not studied long term effects of these drugs on an individual given to them by mental health professionals. One instance relating to these side effects was my skin starting to turn very dark which prompted support worker to say how great it was my tan from summer 2015 had lasted into March or April 2016. My very obvious physical and mental distress was put down to my being extremely mentally ill. No effort was made to even listen to my concerns and my understanding that the many injections I was given during a short time 3 1/2 weeks in H in Oct 2015, was what caused the severe physical and mental effects upon me when those drugs wore off and left my body.

In late December 2015 to early January 2016 I started to experience severe withdrawal effects from the injections they had given me in H ward. However when I complained of adverse effects from the medication it was implied that I was like this because I was very mentally unwell, and that I did not know what was good for me as I was in no fit state to know my own mind. I was not listened to and the team refused to acknowledge or hear my obvious distress and suffering. I believe if I had been listened to and the injections and the withdrawal effects from them researched further into I would not have suffered so much and so cruelly and unnecessarily under Somerset Partnership Trust’s mental health services. Instead I was judged unable to know my own mind and my valid fears and concerns were ignored.

Since my extremely traumatic experiences in H I have refused to engage with the mental health services in……….
.

I will not let this matter lie as I have suffered very significant harm mentally and physically through no fault of my own. I believe that those who were meant to be helping have in fact damaged me very significantly mentally and physically. I have PTSD which is mainly as a result of my treatment at the hands of so called professionals who behaved, in my opinion, in a very barbaric manner.

The main points of my complaint are that:

· medication I was given has been damaging to my health and well-being.
· I was not given timely care or treatment of a leg injury while on H Ward.
· I was not listened to regarding my views about medication, and I was bullied and pressurised by the treatment team
· I was not given proper information about the medication I was given or its side effects.
When I experienced unpleasant side effects these were not recognised.

I would like there to be a thorough investigation of my complaint and an independent clinical review of the treatment decisions. The indiscriminate use of powerful medication has caused me great damage and I would like this to be acknowledged and for changes to be made so that others do not suffer as I have done.

Yours sincerely

Caroline Breslin

Undergoing A Section Assessment of The Mental Health Act

5 Replies

Andrew Bowen Section Assessment

Andrew is a friend I have made over the internet and he managed to capture this amazing video of a section assessment at his home in Devon in 2015. It’s a great idea to use technology to protect yourself as a vulnerable mental patient. It is most intimidating facing a section assessment and in my case I have always been dragged off to a mental hospital after one. This video shows just how unreasonable all parties – the doctors, social workers, nurses and police can be. Andrew demonstrates a clear resolve with calm composure. I would recommend watching this and taking tips on how to handle an assessment if you are forced to ever undergo one. At the end of the assessment, Andrew wasn’t sectioned and managed to retain his freedom. I will leave you with the Youtube video plus some words to follow from Andrew himself. [wezg – End Of Terror]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJuxZGgwG-0&w=560&h=315]

Where do I start? Well it would be impossible for me to put my life story on here so I’m thinking there will be some who will say they were only thinking about my best interests, “NO THEY WERE NOT” if you knew the history you would understand, no matter what you say will not change how it really is. this is an edited video what you will see I had to endure for over an hour as my goal for the day was to get out to seek help with exactly what they were doing to me, not to enter into a game of words to avoid them from sectioning me, to make aware this experience was something new to me.

So earlier in the week having got to a point once again of being overwhelmed in challenging failures, ridiculing and a smear campaign from a supposed support system that is in place for us all in times of need, that has in fact left me more damaged in the community than the damage caused to me as a child from sexual and physical abuse, everyone of these people you will see in this video represents organisations that have lied, deflected and denied to cover up their institutional abuse and failings of the past that have become core issues in the same relative way as the issues as being abused as a child, can you imagine yet they close me off force me into isolation to stop me talking, ironic really when they say to encourage abuse victims to talk to help them to move on, fundamentally they have been victim blaming and ridiculing in the community simply for trying to talk about historical abuse issues from the past, that as I hope you can imagine has not been easy to open up with being a slow gradual process over years.

During my visit to my Doctor one of many for the same issues, I knew there would be nothing she could do for me, only I’m not going to sit in silence to be mentally abused at times this has also been physical violence from within the support networks, that on raising the issue with the appropriate organisation the police has been covered up to my detriment, so you could say everything they have expected in their criteria of an abuse victim in talking they have destroyed any recovery simply to protect themselves.

Anyway back to my Doctor visit, during my appointment my Doctor asked as she has asked me on previous occasions if I had thoughts of suicide, given what I have explained it’s not an unreasonable thought process to be in, which is always what I have tried to explain, although I have been put into a position to think that way I told her in my own words, I would not have the balls to harm myself to which she replied “GOOD” I further went on to say as I have previously “FULLY COMPOS MENTIS” under no circumstances DO NOT raise a concern, as in doing so would bring me into contact with the people and organisations that have cause myself harm, the very reason I was sat talking with her for in that moment, I also reassured that I understood her duty of care, but under under any circumstances DO NOT PUT THEM ONTO ME, I could not of been any more reassuring, one thing the system has taught me is to say it how it is, what I was simply putting across given the history it was not a good place to be.

The next day there was a buzz on my intercom, I answered and was shocked outraged to have explained the person I was talking with was from NHS mental health another service that has wilfully gone out of their way to damage me in the past to stop me from talking of failures within the system, in no uncertain terms and with a few choice words that you will hear stated in the video where to go!

Outraged by this clear breach of trust in Doctor, patient confidence, the following day I went to see the practise manager to make an in person complaint explaining the circumstances, even I know that unless it is a written formal complaint it will not go anywhere, so anyway it was the usual instead of looking at the facts, Doctors shit don’t stink, we agreed the practise manager would have a talking to with the Doctor, it was left at that, with myself saying I hope NHS mental health are not going to go away and write more damaging remarks in a report, especially as I had not invited them to do so, to which the practise manager tried to reassure all was ok they would not.

The rest is academic the male Asian Doctor in the video has worked in a previous life for the police and may well still do, he explains he has been sent by the courts, this Doctor has in my view attempted to ridicule in the past in my recovery with police contact, absolute nightmare of mind games they play, so from the onset this encounter was extremely intimidating for myself.

The video does not show the lack of dignity from them once they entered what is supposed to be our safe space, making comments about correspondence, letters that were in open view, making comments on my furnishings, I felt invaded by the people and organisations that have caused myself so much damage, leaving me damaged in the community.

POSTSCRIPT:

Subsequently from the video at around 16 mins you hear the police say we’re not here to write anything down it has nothing to do with us… at a later date the police tried to use this to smear me in a complaint I had against them, saying that I had been sectioned which is not true, the information commissioners office found that they were holding inaccurate data and told them to amend it, the breach and sharing of the data is still an ongoing matter with the ICO.

End Of Terror Meeting with Politician, Jessica Morden MP

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This morning I met with my local MP Jessica Morden. Jessica represents Labour and is the parliamentary representative for the Newport East constituency. Over the past few years that I have known Jessica we have had two face-to-face meetings scheduled that have unfortunately not materialised due to me being sectioned on both occasions by mental health authorities. It was to be third time lucky and it was with great pleasure that, without any unwanted intrusions, I attended Jessica’s surgery at Caldicot library today.

In Wales, health is a devolved matter and most of the issues I have with Mental Health Authorities fall into the remit of Jessica’s Welsh Assembly cohort, John Griffiths AM. I had a productive meeting with John Griffiths AM a couple of months ago and we are still following up with work based on what was discussed at that meeting, with Welsh Minister for Health Vaughan Gething currently attending to my plight. Parliament, however, does house the Mental Health Act, the legislation that governs Mental Health care in this country and I felt that a meeting with Jessica Morden MP would be of paramount importance in order for me to successfully challenge the provisions of this Act. After being contained within the mental health system for approximately 20 years I am especially keen to find a permanent solution to escape this legislation as a persecuted individual and also to build a better future system for the healthcare users of tomorrow.

Jessica welcomed my partner, Nicola and I, with warm smiles and an invite to take a seat in her office. Jessica was accompanied by an assistant who was very helpful throughout the meet. Jessica was pleased that I had previously met with John Griffiths and from the outset of our meeting Jessica was graced with an air of positivity and a desire to help me change the system for the better. I explained the circumstances of my most recent hospitalisation, when pure ‘thought crime’ was invented and acted upon and how I was shepherded off to detention and tortured for several months before the Mental Health Review Tribunal Courts overturned the psychiatrists and, finding in my favour, secured my release. Only 5% of patient appeals ever result in success and despite the long wait for justice,I felt that it had been served and that I was a lucky man. I made it clear that after that judgement I had sought to avoid psychiatric services completely, failing to engage with social services or medics. For the past six months I have been successfully living outside of the mental health system and have been re-attending university, getting on with life. I explained to Jessica that I aimed to continue this progress outside the auspices of Mental Health.

Jessica wanted to know about the progress of my complaints. I explained that Perry Attwell of Aneurin Bevan university Health Board Trust, acting on behalf of Chief executive, Judith Paget, was still dealing with two ongoing complaints and also that I was awaiting a response from the Public Service Ombudsman for Wales. I explained the detail of my latest complaint within the system relating to my drinks ban at the Castle Inn, Caldicot – the psychiatrist and police had informed the landlord of the Castle Inn, Steve Gribble, that he wasn’t to serve me alcohol as it interfered with the prescribed mental health medications. Jessica felt that this was rather bizarre and that the mental health authorities were over-extending their powers unnecessarily in the community. It is an ongoing matter where I aim to use the Equality Act in court against the pub landlord and once the complaints have been resolved I aim to bring the matter before the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) who could fine the health authority £500 000 for illegally disclosing confidential private medical details.

I have a lifetime award of DLA (Disability Living Allowance) for my mental health conditions. Due to government changes to the benefits system I am currently in the process of having to reapply and migrate over to PIP (Personal Independence Payment). This whole shift has been a controversial government policy and many difficulties have been created for the often marginalised disabled community across the country. Jessica was glad that I have been getting support from Monmouthshire Mind and she offered to appoint some government PIP advisors to assist my case, something that I was especially grateful for.

Jessica pointed out that only last week, Prime Minister Theresa May had made some further, controversial alterations to how difficult mental health sufferers would find the application for PIP. I explained that I was aware of this and dismayed that the news had so successfully been oppressed by the mainstream media. I did, however, explain how I had been impressed by some of the changes that Mrs May had made to the mental health system. At End Of Terror, we started tweeting Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary and it was during this period that she started to divorce the cosy relationship the police had been having with mental health services. Theresa May has now dramatically reduced police involvement in mental health care and police cells are no longer to be used as ‘Places of Safety’ under the Mental Health Act. I welcomed this change and feel it improves the system no end. I had been a victim of some of the most horrific human rights abuses by Gwent Police over the course of my extended life as a mental patient.

We were discussing charities in mental health and I said that I was often frustrated by the activities of MIND, who I felt actually were quite powerless in the quest to genuinely support mental patients. I want there to be wholesale changes to the Mental Health Act, in particular for Treatment Against Consent to be abolished. Jessica wondered if there were any charities that were set up that could support my anti-psychiatry stance. I said that the closest i had found so far was the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights). I praised their stance on anti-psychiatry and also the volumes of material that this charity releases online to combat Big Pharma and the slavery-like Mental Health industry.

In university I have been studying the Francophone Caribbean. We have covered slavery and colonialism, from the French perspective, of the controversial slave trade that persisted in the French Atlantic Triangle. Slaves were moved wholesale across the ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to the French Antilles where they were bound to masters and forced to work plantations, providing the capitalist goods and profits for their European overlords. Coffee, Sugar, Indigo and Cotton flooded the economy back home in France and vast profits were made by this now recognised as criminal enterprise. It was the epitome of the Capitalist system. I explained how the whole French slave system was legalised and regulated by the introduction of the French King of the ‘Code Noir’. These laws were controversial and in today’s light can be seen as very brutal as they set out the policies for punishing the property that were slaves, by cutting hamstrings and whipping for misdemeanours. I equated the UK Mental Health Act of today with the ‘Code Noir’. It is a modern day Code Noir, legislating a modern form of slavery, again driven by capitalism and producing vast profits. The Mental Health Act is inhumane and in today’s age of modern enlightenment, should be abolished.

I explained how I wanted Jessica to somehow put me in touch with government think tanks and health policymakers so that I could continue to lobby for real change in Mental Health. I feel that the voice of individuals, who suffer the system, is suppressed. The decision makers who determine law are simply unaware of the real experiences of those on the front line, fighting the battle. Jessica was intrigued to learn of exactly what happened tome during my most recent stay in hospital. I went into detail to explain just exactly how degrading depot injections against consent can be and the indeterminable suffering that they produce, turning the patient into a zombie who is unable to read anything, to concentrate, to move about or to focus on basic life. These depot injections are about the most powerful weapon in the psychiatrists’ arsenal and they overuse them, disabling and rendering useless a vast swathe of the mental health population.

Jessica concluded the meeting by saying how she would be following up on what we discussed and, with her aide, she arranged to visit the House of Commons library to conduct some follow-up research. I have produced a document for Jessica Morden and John Griffiths, outlining the key areas where I wish to see change.

Jessica said that she could see that I was in very good health and kindly wished me all the best with my continued studies at Cardiff University.

My whole case is an ongoing matter. After 20 years in the system, I struggle to make sense of the war but feel that today’s meeting with Jessica can certainly be marked as being positive, encouraging and hopefully will produce long term results that satisfy the End Of Terror campaign against mental health abuses. The people of Newport East are lucky to have such fine political representatives as Jessica and John. They both earn their votes and devote considerable time to improving all of our lives locally. If ever you have an issue, please do not hesitate in contacting them and you will be surprised just exactly how helpful they can both be. I look forward to continuing to lobby for improvements in Mental Health and look forward to fighting the whole overall war with renewed vigour.

Interview with Justin Bond, Mental Health Sufferer from Birmingham

End Of Terror Meeting with Politician, Welsh Assembly Member, John Griffiths AM

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Today, after four years of campaigning, I finally met with Welsh Assembly Member, John Griffiths AM. John is my local political representative in the Welsh Assembly. In Wales, health is a devolved matter and is dealt with in the Cardiff National Assembly, rather than in parliament. Since the launch of End Of Terror five years ago, both John Griffiths and his parliamentary cohort, Jessica Morden MP, have attentively supported our needs. There has been an extensive correspondence via email and I am regularly in touch via telephone with both their offices. On no fewer than two previous occasions our scheduled public meetings have been cancelled due to me being sectioned. It is thus much overdue that I finally met in public with John, in order to thrash out the End Of Terror campaign and to seek a much-needed political solution to the issues that the #EoT movement raises. We met at 2pm on Friday, 6th January 2017, at Aroma Coffee Shop in Caldicot Town Centre.

John is well up to speed on all End Of Terror developments and in addition to our current filings with the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, John has kindly petitioned the Welsh Minister for Health, on our behalf. In a previous post you can see some of EoT’s political agenda and the issues that we campaign for politically. – See –

REPORT ON MENTAL HEALTH IN SOUTHEAST WALES FOR JOHN GRIFFITHS AM AND JESSICA MORDEN MP

http://endofterror.org/?p=850

John listened attentively to my campaigning for well over an hour and explained to me in detail on how best to pursue my cause. He identified that in order to successfully petition the government that End Of Terror need to network more and grow its supporter base in order to achieve more political clout. He mentioned that organisations such as MIND are successful in getting the government’s attention as they speak on behalf of a multitude of campaigners. I think that at End Of Terror we shall certainly use John’s advice and try to expand our reach and involve more people. to date it has sort of been an individual’s campaign by me and I am but a lone wolf, crying in the darkness.

We spoke about the concerns I have about the local system being far too decadent and out of control. There is a definite need for psychiatrists and their employees to be reigned in. I really want there to be a system of balances and checks in place so that omnipotent psychiatrist power can be curtailed. We spoke about the need to divorce police power from mental health services and also for a fairer court system to be put in place. I want a twenty-first century mental health service and an abolishment of Victorian Bedlamist attitudes towards mental health sufferers.

There was a recognition that Big Pharma is out of control and that there is an overdependence on clinical solutions when perhaps more should be done with improving talking therapies. John mentioned the statistics that one in three people now suffer from a mental health issue. I am especially keen to erode the power of Big Pharma, the multibillion dollar fraud that drives this hideous inhumane industry.

Ideally, there will be more power for mental health advocates who at present are in a position of limbo, despite the Labour government’s introduction of them as an entity some decade or so ago.

I suggested that the Welsh government consult mental health solicitors more as these are a body of people who are intelligent and have their finger on the pulse in being able to truly assess the reality of mental health services in a holistic manner.

John said that he would try and open the doors for me with regard to consulting the mental health committees in government and we talked of the need to also meet Jessica Morden MP in future in order to make changes in Parliament itself.

I was keen to encourage John and other local politicians to visit their local hospitals, just to see for themselves how threadbare services here actually are. We must end the inhumane conditions for mental patients, wherever they are. I stressed how there must be an end to treating mental patients like animals and to rid the subhuman attitudes that divide the gulf between staff and patients.

John is keen to erode the public stigma attached to mental health sufferers and he feels that there is movement towards mental health achieving parity with physical health services across Wales. John recognises that often in the past mental health has been a ‘Cinderella service’ that has been overlooked.

John was pleased that I am currently outside of the mental health system and that I am getting on with my degree. We agreed to stay in close contact and I am certain that as my political representative, despite mental health being such a difficult area politically, that John will assist our EoT endeavours long into the future.

It was a true pleasure to have the time of such an important person in the local community and I felt pleased that my voice had been heard and I truly believe that real change can now be achieved in the field of mental health in southeast Wales and the wider world. Thank you for your time, Mr Griffiths. All the best for the future from the End Of Terror movement. Let’s all fight together for change and improvement in mental health services…

Psychiatry in the Former Soviet Union

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[Here is a post by our first international guest poster. Leoned is from the former Soviet Union and has sent us this about his mental health experiences. End Of Terror is a worldwide struggle and campaign for better rights for mental patients, wherever you may be in the world. ENJOY! Wez G, End Of Terror]

I really experienced the disaster. And it happened not in Auschwitz and not in Dachau, but in the ordinary mental hospital. It happened yet in childhood. Adults branch staff mercilessly tortured, oppressed us, disadvantaged and without this children
… One night I was awakened by the noise. Opening my eyes, I saw how two nurses are beating the boy, who lies at the window. The boy was trembling. « “Again Vovka has epileptic seizure», – someone said . “How epileptic seizure?!” – I blurted out: “But why to beat ?!” Then the nurse left Vovka for a second and turned to me: Shut up, otherwise, and you will be bad”. That nightly incident was bothering me for long time. I hoped, that gits will be punished. But all gone, as if nothing had happened.

… Once, one nurse pegged me in punishment for disobedience. And did it in a special way: the hands were were fixed to the metal corners of the bed. She had said, that she’ll unbind me, when I’ll ask forgiveness and went away. The circulation was disrupted , the hands swollen. Endure was becoming increasingly difficult. Nurse had entered in the ward and asked, I am going to ask forgivness or not. I hadn’t answer and she left.
The matter was already nearing to an evening. Soon the night shift had to come . I was very hoping, what this damned wretch will go, and the other nurse will unbind me.
However, it soon became clear, that the damned wretch stays on the night shift. She had come into the room and announced by triumphant tone: «Well, do you intend to ask forgiveness?» I wasn’t able to endure anymore and asked forgiveness from this crud as she had wanted. After that I was feeling myself horribly
humiliated.
They constantly indoctrinated us, that at any rate everything will be as they want. Any meanness, any overwhelming nightmare – everything will be as they want.

There was a teenage boy. He was suffering a severe form of epilepsy with mental retardation and was very irritable. The bastards were using this. They were provoking him intentionally and when he had come into anger – they attacked him from all sides and commited reprisal. In the time of the reprisal, when he was already tied, one nurse had gripped his genitals and furiously jerked. That nightmare still causes me stupor.
In general, intimate dignity was the subject of their special, sophisticated hostility. We were all Bug and cows, devil knows that have grown in us. It is terrible how our balls hindered them . The desire to tear off this” surplus ” again and again flied from their trashy sip. And some ones organized games such violence – chased the children and pulled their genitals and this wild nightmare took place quite openly, in front of everyone.
But the most terrible thing was chlorpromazine. The terrible effect can not be described. In what satanic laboratories was prepared this drug!? It was destroying the thinnest, most intimate strings of essence. Its action caused a complete rejection reaction. Every cell, every nerve were screaming with outrage. As long as overwhelming effect of chlorpromazine was manifesting, this reaction was completely suppressed. But as soon as this action is being weakened, the whole being is being filled with rage. But they were continuing to do chlorpromazine else and else.
There was one nurse, very greedy and cynical. She was often substituting others and was on duty multiple shifts in a row. And in order that the duty roster would pass quietly she was doing chlorpromazine to all. She was getting this with different ways. At the beginning with help on duty doctors. There were a lot of young doctors. Basically women. With them she was in familiarly relationships. She was calling a doctor by phone, a doctor was coming and appointing chlorpromazine, even not seeing for whom she appoints. Then they ceased trouble oneself to arrive. They were assigning by a phone. Then and this turned out to be unnecessary. The nurse herself was doing chlorpromazine, and the appoint was being done after, backdating. Then others followed her example .
And no salvation from this destruction remained. I was then completely destroyed! Physically and spiritually. The mind found itself in a state of complete prostration. I lost the ability to feel, resent and somehow to react. In this condition I was discharged home.
After some time, snippets of feelings began to erupt. Firstly the earlier depressed rage as a reaction on the influence of chlorpromazine. Gradually the awareness of what happened filled me. Experiences, that i endured, atrocity, vile, impunity were overflowing me. Precious moments of life, youth sped by. I was biting my lips from despair and was able to change nothing. I was dreaming about a retribution for the bastards. But they were far and i was not be able to do anything against them. And then all of uncontrollable pain fall at the man who was next. – On my poor mother. The dearest person in the world. Who gave me whole life without residue.
When I hit her all yelled in me: «What am I doing?!» And I felt, what i do not govern yourself. And i again was there.
… Again violence, merciless cynicism. Again boorish edification, that everything will be as they want. All they want, they will do – no one is decree for them . Yes, there was no hands on them. Abomination predetermine everything! Unlimited possibilities of absolute nothingness.
I could neither tolerate them, nor resist them! And again they were grinding me and scraping me with chlorpromazine. Until they destroyed all flesh and bone, every nerve, every cell. Human nature did not presuppose such exposure and did not envisage any protection against it. A human must not survive such ruinous exposure. So ruinous effects ssence not should survive.
He must die before going to happen like that. But the sadistic action of chlorpromazine overcame this last protective edge. And destroys not only the essence of life, but also the ability to die.
And I did not die then only by this terrible reason.

Leoned also has an antipsychiatry petition for you to sign:

Here’s what else I want to offer … Petition: https://goo.gl/sMnJ6y signed by much more people! Moderators facebook blocked most of the signatures! The number 1473 – is absolutely false! About it i reported not only once to recipients in UN Human Rights Committee. But they ignored all my appeals. Not on single of letter was not answered. So I suggest to you, what would you also ask them the same. Confirm that the petition actually signed a lot more people. Maybe the appeal of many people, they will not ignore.

Report on Mental Health in Southeast Wales for John Griffiths AM and Jessica Morden MP

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I have been a non-consenting patient of southeast Wales’ mental health services since 2^nd April 1997. I have almost amassed twenty years of living within this closed mental health system. I write this report with a view to enacting real change for the better for myself and other end users of the mental health services in our area.

Ideally I would like to see the Mental Health Act scrapped in parliament. I feel that it is antiquated and rooted in Victorian Bedlamism.

Psychiatry is not a science. At best it is a pseudoscience. There is little actual medical evidence for most, nearly all mental illnesses. Mental illness, unlike normal illness, cannot be scientifically assessed. If an illness cannot be scientifically diagnosed, how can it be an illness? The blood, body, mind of a schizophrenic is exactly the same as a healthy person. There are no biometric markers that indicate a sickness in someone’s mind. The point is that mental illness is not pathological. Cancer has its markers, as does AIDS. As these illnesses can be scientifically studied and examined, they can also be scientifically treated and hopefully cured. What hope is there for a cure for mental illness if the illness itself cannot be determined scientifically? This point exposes the myth that mental illness is untreatable and cannot be cured. It cannot be cured as it does not exist in the first place. I was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1997. Schizophrenia is apparently an incurable disease. This is not true as it does not exist and I have never suffered the symptoms psychiatrists identify in schizophrenia. For 19 years I have been confident that I have been misdiagnosed and yet I still experience treatment and simply cannot evade the system.

Big Pharma is the driving force behind the mental health industry. For every identified illness there is often expensive treatment available from big global pharmaceutical firms. Drugs companies rarely see their share prices topple and mental health is a very profitable sector. With all this big business and money flying around I often worry about exactly how precise and effective these treatments are. There must be a more ethical means of turning a profit for Big Pharma than mental health drugs, drugs that are often used against the consent of patients.

Treatment against consent is my biggest bugbear in psychiatry. In every branch of medicine the patient has a choice bar psychiatry. If someone falls ill they may choose to consult a healthcare professional or doctor. The doctor can then diagnose illness and offer treatment with a view to curing the illness. At any stage the patient is within his or her rights to refuse the doctor’s advice and to consult elsewhere or simply ignore the treatment. Often illness is an individual matter and if the treatment doesn’t feel right to a patient then why should that patient continue the course of treatment. How many of our medicine cabinets are full of half-used prescriptions of painkillers and antibiotics or the like? In mental health as treatment against consent is condoned and used, patients’ rights are eroded. We move out of a realm of doctors and patients and into a realm of torture and torturer. Treatment against consent is torture plain and simple. It was used in the days of Bedlam, in the Victorian Institutions and has been a cornerstone of the short history of psychiatry and mental hospitals. Yes, some more barbaric, outlandish practices (with no scientific basis) such as lobotomy have been ceased, but treatment against consent continues to this day and with our modern technology and advancements in science chemical lobotomies occur on a daily basis through the use of some of psychiatry’s arsenal. We are talking drugs such as Clozaril, depot injections, Risperidone, Olanzapine.

It is often argued that psychiatrists are dealing with the most disturbed of patients. People always use Peter Sutcliffe in Broadmoor as an extreme example and say how this abhorrent man who has committed abhorrent crimes needs to be treated against his consent. Unfortunately, the vast majority of service users aren’t Peter Sutcliffe, yet they get tarred with the same brush and treatment against consent affects this majority of patients far worse than they do Sutcliffe and other extreme cases. Even in the case of abhorrent psychiatric criminals, these people are human beings with human rights. The choice of treatment and the right to consent to treatment is an absolutely fundamental human right and is part of what separates us as an intelligent species from the animal world. Treatment against consent fosters a concentration camp mentality. It is Nazism, plain and simple, extreme far right use of force to disrupt nature. It is man against the environment in its most absolute ultimate form. Man mistreating other man using torture and chemicals. So much of psychiatry is rooted in eugenics and this is a distant historical archaic fixation that needs to be properly eradicated in order for human society to function properly,

To set this treatment against consent in its context I give you my 19 year case as an extreme example. I have never accepted my diagnosis, nor felt mentally ill. I therefore reject treatment. When under section of the Mental Health Act you lose your right to consent. From Day 1 on my healthcare plan I have been forcibly injected against my consent, with drugs unknown to me and only through experience and research have I discovered what these drugs do. When you refuse tablets in a mental health environment they will turn to injections to guarantee that you take the treatment. They are allowed to use force and in my case have done that or always used the veiled threat of force to get me to take down my trousers so they can inject my thigh or backside. By law, mental health professionals can freely assault, restrain and drug with hardcore, mind and body –altering chemicals with no repercussions. If this happened in a war environment – let’s say Aleppo, there would be international outcry and it would be seen as a war crime, yet it occurs on a daily basis inside British mental hospitals, and worse, with new CTO legislation, also in our communities. Depot injections that I am allergic to have caused me to have a severe hiatus hernia. This makes me projectile vomit all my meals and every morning I start the day puking. It was brought on by depot injections against my consent and the NHS is powerless to stop psychiatrists doing this to me and so my hiatus hernia cannot be treated and cured so I have to live with a permanent disability caused by treatment against consent.

What if treatment against consent was outlawed? It would force the mental health services to adapt greatly. For a start, less emphasis would be on Big Pharma and the medications it produces. We would move away from clinical psychiatry and into the realm of more natural, talking therapies. I’m not saying people should all be freed from mental hospitals, just that the emphasis on drugs would be less. People could choose to be unmedicated and if deemed ill, remain inpatients, but unmedicated ones by choice. When a lay person thinks of a psychiatrist they think that these people sit down and chat with you for hours about your problems and your childhood etc. This is a common misperception. Psychiatrists tend to be just clinical and rely on prescribing drugs. It is psychologists, who aren’t necessarily medically trained, who perform the talking therapies one associates with US Sitcoms and films etc. Psychologists won’t offer you medications. They aren’t doctors so lack prescribing power. They will recommend ways and means of dealing with your problems and often over a period of time will assist you in coping with your problems by identifying root causes and disruptive patterns of behavior. Psychology is a buzz subject academically these days with university departments full, yet try seeing a psychologist on the NHS. You will always find a psychiatrist. They are funded by Big Pharma. I have been on the waiting list to see a psychologist for over ten years. I am deeply embedded in the mental health system with regular hospitalizations yet cannot get to see a psychologist. Aneurin Bevan UHB simply employ too few psychologists and those they do are fully overworked and do not have time for their clientele. The local NHS invest in psychiatry and virtually ignore talking therapies yet it is in these areas where psychiatry and its relevant research are most accurately close to being a proper genuine science. We are supposed to be moving away from clinical mental health environments and towards ‘care in the community’. It is imperative that talking therapies get adequate financial coverage and are accorded a valued place within the therapeutic setup, especially in our local area.

Another great area for improvement locally is another variety of talking therapy in use in mental hospitals, that of occupational therapy. The occupational therapy has as its aim the goal of readying an inpatient for reintegration into the community and outside world. They will work on basic skills, life skills, things one would normally do on the outside and from within a hospital environment an occupational therapist shall aim to get you back to full healthy working order, enough so you can function independently in the real world. Two years ago I met with Judith Paget, Chief Executive, Aneurin Bevan UHB, and in this meeting I emphasized how I disliked the cutbacks that were being made within her system on occupational therapy. To me, as a longstanding mental inpatient, I found the most value in the hospital to be in occupational therapy. Occupational therapy made me feel normal. Whether it be a day trip to the beach, cooking a lunchtime meal for fellow patients, doing a morning crossword or just simple arts and crafts, occupational therapy is vital in an inpatient environment and indeed in out patient aftercare. Yet, consistently over the past twenty years the OT budget has been cut, staff have been laid off and services and end users suffer as a result. On at least three occasions over the past 3 years there has been absolutely zero occupational therapy at all in Talygarn. When you combine the fact that you can’t see a psychologist or engage in other meaningful talking therapies, it seems that the local system is over-reliant on psychiatry and Big Pharma meds. It’s how to pass your time in the hospital system. One aims to be as active as possible and all It seems you can physically do as a patient is sit and smoke cigarettes. It’s no wonder that drug use is becoming ever more prevalent inside mental hospitals as people are genuinely bored and need to occupy their time in some way. Judith Paget incidentally promised to get me in a consultation meeting with the heads of OT for the Trust and to suitably increase funding in their direction. Instead she brushed me aside, ignored her promise and cut back more funds and saved more money by binning OT which she obviously deemed a non-essential luxury.

In general, human rights for mental patients need to be improved. I worry about the scrapping of the human rights Act and how it will affect mental patients. There are a few safeguards I’ve noticed in use in the tribunal courts which do protect certain interests of patients. In general, there is a massive stigma attached to mental illness and perhaps the worst part of being diagnosed and treated is how the community and society change to treating you as an individual. It is a difficult period for patients and their families and friends. This is made worse by the massive stigma and misunderstandings associated with mental health. I think that it all begins with the vast divide between staff and patients within hospital systems. Too many fundamental freedoms and rights are taken away from inpatients. If one is being treated like a subhuman one will feel like a subhuman. Mental hospitals become, not healthcare environments,but punishment centres. They are prisons for the disaffected. Most patients I have spoken to who have experience of both the prison service and mental hospitals actually prefer prisons as they have more freedom there and it is more like normal life inside. They can have jobs and tvs and do what they wish during association hours. Mental hospitals, and you must try visiting Talygarn and St Cadoc’s to see this, are dark and dismal places often threadbare with so little to do for patients. Facilities are dilapidated, often broken and rarely repaired. If mental health is to be treated on a parity with physical health then surely the environment of the hospital can be improved. Rights are taken away. Mobile phones are confiscated, or mobile phone chargers. Cigarette lighters are confiscated. You can’t drink caffeinated coffee. Takeaways are banned. Are these rules fit for patients or fit for prisoners?

As the last twenty years have gone by I have noticed how freedom within the community, within the hospital itself, has slowly been tightened up. Twenty years ago, patients would wake in St Cadoc’s, have a cooked breakfast, do the crossword together in OT, and disappear to Caerleon town to trawl around the pubs all day. You could freely walk around the beautiful countryside grounds and vistors could come and go as pleased. Nowadays, you are more likely to walk onto the ward after some leave, forced to submit to a full body search and have a breathalyzer to test you for any signs of alcohol. Your visitors have to stay outside the entire ward and can only come at certain times. You cannot simply walk out into the grounds for a bit of fresh air. These hospitals are now heavily policed by the staff that have become warders as opposed to nurses. As smoking bans enter the fray, staff can no longer socially smoke with patients and talk about their problems. It adds to further separation between staff and patient and ultimately when the smoking ban is enforced life for an involuntary smoking patient will be a nightmare as they will be forced to quit on the spot and that is unhealthy. If the aim is to get patients into the community they need to be able to have trust built in that community from as early a stage as possible. Mental Health systems should be about lifting barriers, not erecting them. There is enough stigma in the real world without stigma inside the hospital system.

There is a major problem in justice for mental patients. The current tribunal system is very unfair and far too heavily weighted in favor of psychiatrists. For a start one of the three board members of a Tribunal is a psychiatrist. There is an unhealthy backlog of delay in the Tribunal system meaning that you often have to wait several months under treatment (against consent) in hospital following your appeal being lodged prior to the Tribunal sitting. Solicitors are hard pressed and often very impotent in terms of what actual assistance they can give you. The hospitals are full of people living in hope about their appeals yet on average only about 5% of appeals are ever successful for patients. I feel that similar to the criminal justice system, prior to being locked away you should get your chance in front of a court for them to decide if the psychiatrist is right in saying you need to be detained under section. It is only reasonable for this to happen.
Police have become a lot more involved in mental health – Cells are being used to hold patients prior to them being transported to hospital. Often patients’ first contact with services is via the police, police transportation being used instead of ambulances and handcuffs and, worse still, tasers are routinely used on mental patients. The last thing you expect as you enter a healthcare environment is to be shot in the chest by a police marksman. I have been the victim of a taser attack in my own home and it severely traumatised me. Again, are we treating health or is this just a form of social control for disciplining the marginalized and disaffected.

Police have no role in healthcare. When you need to use the police as a patient they will ignore you and they routinely ignore some of the worst crimes perpetuated by staff in mental hospitals. The training of the police re mental health needs to be completely overhauled and they need to distance themselves as a system as a whole from the mental health sector if we are ever to achieve parity between mental and physical healthcare.

Training needs to be revamped and brought into the twenty-first century. Antiquated ideologies need to be erased. I find that most mental health workers appear to have a glazed sense of brainwash about them. They are conditioned into distancing themselves from the mentally ill, into building barriers. They are oversold the pharmaceutical benefits of the drugs and are misled, like doctors, by drug company marketing material, false claims and the vast profits that multi-billion dollar industry generates.

Lastly, does it really need to be said that the system should not be employing criminals. Often psychiatry and the industry attracts some dark people in its workforce. There are far to many with brutal prison-warder type mentalities who get their kicks out of oppressing others. And psychiatrists are not always the sanest and most reasonable people. I was appalled to learn that my psychiatrist of two years had a history of child sex offences. Dr Darryl Watts was employed by Aneurin Bean UHB after spending 30 hours a week surfing child pornography on the internet whilst working as a psychiatrist in Bristol. He was convicted, struck off and the later employed to work in a position of responsibility. He is unfit to judge the sanity of others in my opinion and this is a clear scandal.

For more see http://endofterror.org

Brexit and Mental Health

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Brexit, like it or not is a reality. 54% of the public voted in a referendum for us to leave the EU. I watched with despair as events unfolded and was almost praying for us to stay in as I feared that a Brexit decision could really send my End Of Terror situation spiralling out of control. Post-Brexit, if I believed in restricting people’s liberties for thought crime and nowt else and I had the power as a psychiatrist, then maybe I’d be sentencing 54% of the population for section detainment in mental hospitals for making a completely irrational decision in voting, a decision I believe that long term will make the entire UK suffer, economically, politically and more importantly, to End Of Terror, within the mental health system.

Why the big fear, you may ask? Firstly, one of the core components of EU membership is that EU citizens have access to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This court, although I’ve never used it personally, acts as a safeguard for human rights. I’ve always dreamed of getting over to Strasbourg and felt that it would be one of the only places in which to get justice for End Of Terror. I will never realise that goal. But,many good things have come from Strasbourg over the years and indirectly it has safeguarded all those unnecessarily under the cosh, detained in UK mental health institutions. One piece of legislation that has been delivered through the presence of the EU Human Rights Court, is our own country’s Human Rights Act (1998). This Act came into being under the supervision of the Tony Blair government and basically enshrined EU Human Rights legislation into British Law.

I have always felt that the Human Rights Act is incompatible with the Mental Health Act. The fundamental freedoms it enshrines are usurped once the Mental Health Act is invoked. I have constantly tried to argue a Human Rights case for myself, even in the Mental Health Tribunal Courts, quoting the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights and referring to Strasbourg and indeed the Human Rights Act. Most debate, however, falls on deaf ears, and the tribunal courts tend to favour the misplaced incorrect mindset of Mental Health Workers who generally claim that the Mental Health Act is more important than any human rights legislation and overrides it. Treatment against consent is my main bugbear with the Mental Health Act and any fool can see that this is incompatible with virtually all that Human Rights laws suggest.

Brexit has created not just deep divisions in society, but also a pre-Revolution like political fallout. Both major parties – Labour and Conservative, are quarrelling within their ranks and their infighting is spilling over into a tense political anarchy, spreading like wildfire across the Nation. Brexiteers are abandoning their pre-referendum promises and also withdrawing on the whole from their ideology, as they resign from political decisions, themselves surprised that they duped the British voting public so wonderfully. I need not mention the falls of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, all leading campaigners for Brexit, who have all not quite stood up to their vision. The reality is that there is a great political awkwardness lying in the immediate future for those decision-makers that have to actually go ahead and invoke Article 5o of the European Constitution and officially make the UK no longer an EU member. These shirkers will rear their ugly heads at some distant point in the future to carry on their warped visions and lies.

It was already a major part of David Cameron and the Conservative Party’s plans to terminate the Human Rights Act and to replace it with a UK Bill of Rights. The Human Rights Act was a Labour policy and is loathsome to rightist politicians. It is a safeguard that protects and restricts Conservative policies. Perhaps a tonic to Cameron as he resigned in the wake of Brexit, was that Britian leaving the EU would enhance the powers of those opposed to Human Rights legislation as the people of this country would no longer be able to challenge the UK government in Strasbourg, thus consolidating more power in Westminster. However, the Brexit fallout is not all rosy for the mental health system and those who rely on the comfort of human rights. Theresa May is our new unelected Prime Minister, avoiding even the vote selection for leader of the Conservatives from within the party ranks. At End Of Terror we have already pleaded with Theresa May to sort out the situation with Mental Health and Policing in South East Wales. She was home secretary for the vast duration of the period when the police and mental healthers stepped up their violent pursuit, culminating in them opening fire on me with a taser through the letterbox at home (see articles on Police Brutality and Mental Health). I tweeted Theresa May but like David Cameron, she just completely ignored End Of Terror, a response that we are well used to seeing from policymakers and the powers that be, in general. Theresa May is dangerous to Mental Health as she has some radically twisted views on human rights and wherever possible has exercised her parliamentary powers to vote against any form of human rights that would protect people within the Mental Health system. I just hope that now she has reached her zenith of power, in being Prime Minister, that perhaps she has the responsibility to change her views. She promises a better Britain for all and I pray she delivers this FOR ALL, and not just the privileged few.

It’s not all bad, perhaps, for mental health detainees. I’ve pondered Brexit substantially and one of the possible benefits could be that due to the falling pound, the departure from the Common Market and tighter budget restrictions there could be a corresponding fall in budget expenditure for mental health and policing. Mental Health spending was supposed to reach parity with Physical Health spending and this goal is far from being realised and is very distant on the horizon. I think that in a shrinking economy with less access to European markets, psychiatry, whose total reliance on Big Pharma with its almost pure dedication to pharmaceuticals, may be forced to tighten its purse strings. A lot of psychiatric medicines are produced abroad and imported into the UK. With the pound demolished and the exchange rate to Euro and indeed dollar damaged, the cost of bulk buying mental health medicines from abroad could almost double in real terms. Tariffs on European imports will further exacerbate these costs. Will we see a move towards non-pharmaceutical interventions in mental health? Will the oft-neglected talking therapies enter fashion? Will the taxpaying public support rising pharmaceutical expenditure, on drugs that are very iffy at best and have no scientific or medical foundation?

Looking towards the Mental Health Review Tribunal Courts, any change in Human Rights legislation could alter the way that they work. Most people are not aware that the current status quo has been changed slightly in favour of patients at Tribunals due to the Human Rights Act. At present the onus of responsibility in the courts for burden of proof falls upon the detaining authority to prove that ongoing detention of an appealing patient is warranted. Any loss of human rights laws could lead to a reversal of this situation thus making the patient’s job of appealing against section detainment even more difficult. Already the courts decisions are heavily weighted to rule against patients, with only approximately 5% of appeals resulting in success for patients.

An interesting point to note and one that I have already touched upon in a previous article – Immigrant Doctors on the NHS – Will there be fewer foreign doctors and therefore psychiatrists as a result of Brexit? I do not believe that positions of such power and responsibility should be allocated to immigrants in psychiatry. I do not feel that foreigners truly understand the nature of our society as they have not been nurtured in it. I would welcome fewer immigrant psychiatrists. However, on the flipside, I think that fewer foreign mental patients, nurses and cleaners could be detrimental to mental hospitals as it would essentially reduce the complexity of the usual rich biodiversity of nationalities they contain. I’m sure foreign patients such as the Italian Allesandra Pacchieri might be glad not to be in the UK mental health system, most certainly after her terrifying ordeal here.

Research is one area of society dependant on Europe and its links with universities across Europe, sharing their studies and cross-funding. Already the science of mental health is most imprecise – it is a pseudoscience at best. The lack of research as a consequence of Brexit will leave us ever deeper in the dark ages of this medieval-like system of torture.

On the whole I think that Brexit produces a new, more isolated society with fewer safeguards in place that will lead to more suffering for mental patients and an increased government reliance on the oppressive system that mental health provides. Isolation and a warped power sense triggered the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. Remember that post WW2, one of the mechanisms set up to prevent the incidence of Nazism from ever reappearing, was the creation of closer international co-operation via the European Union. It mustn’t be forgotten that one of the first groups of people Hitler tested the concentration camp system upon were Germany’s mental patients. Often it is in times of crisis that mental patients’ suffering is at its most acute.

Brexit Britain, cast adrift from continental Europe, will be a lonesome island, its asylums even lonelier, darker, more eery than ever. Big Pharma is too far embedded to disappear and I fear that the new government, most certainly outside of the European safeguard mechanisms, will further erode human rights making an easier triumph for the fascist powers that control mental health and perpetuate modern day psychiatric slavery.

Interesting internet articles:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/eu-referendum-mental-health-vote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Act_1998

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Human_Rights

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

End Of Terror Under Attack – Repression Inside Talygarn

The authorities – local mental health workers and Gwent Police – are not happy with End Of Terror exposing their misdeeds. When I first started the website there was an immediate clampdown and I was ushered off into the Mental Health system. I later understood why my then Doctor, Dr Darryl Watts, was unhappy about being published on the internet as he had been convicted of child sex offences. It is convenient for the authorities to mask their repression and cover up End Of Terror. I think it important though, to expose this hidden system to the world and I certainly, over the years, have taken much refuge in the fact that End of Terror exists. It is a crutch of support to me.

2015 was a horrific year for me. I was taken into the hospital on no fewer than four occasions. It took me out of my undergraduate university studies at Cardiff University and set my life back again. After nineteen years in the mental health system it came as no real shock and i am used to dealing with the State disrupting my life. It is an asset to be resilient and to forge on with life plans in spite of the constant mental health harassment and its infringement upon my liberty.

During the last hospitalisation I was detained from July 2015 through to November. I was sat at home, minding my own business, doing work on the internet for my music business and out of the blue Dr Basu turned up with the police and a magistrate-signed warrant to remove me for assessment. I had done nothing whatsoever and was just carted off and incarcerated. Basu proceeded to give me the maximum dose of CloPixol Depot injection, something to which it has been proved I am allergic to. I had two stints on the secure PICU (Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit) Beechwood, St. Cadoc’s, Caerleon, for dissent on Talygarn Ward, Griffithstown County Hospital, Pontypool, where I was detained for the bulk of my stay.

My notoriety as a patient precedes me on Talygarn and on the ward I have some formidable enemies, usually within the nurse management structure. People who are constantly vying for their own selfish climb up the ladder whose disdain for patients is most cruel. I name Keith Sullivan, deputy ward manager, Jayne Hughes, former ward manager and Paul Hanna, Deputy Nurse Manager, to be among the most appalling of these ladder-climbing despots. They spend their days in a twisted Machiavellian power struggle, never hesitating to have a pop at patients using any means at their disposal to make their victims’ stays in hospital less comfortable. They are the antithesis of good nursing and miss the fundamental point that they are there to serve the patients’ needs. These are the prison warders whose radical oppression of patients and their rights truly epitomise the struggle within mental hospitals – the very examples of why there is such a divide between staff and patients.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Yayz5o-l0

One of the scariest movements within mental health hospitals is the inevitable ban they seek to impose on smoking. Anti-smoking lobbies have successfully campaigned across the board of the NHS for smoking to be restricted. Due to the enforced nature of sectioning, where patients are detained against their consent, smoking is still, on the whole, allowed inside mental hospitals. Smoking is one of the few things you can actually do to while away your time and most mental patients are heavy smokers. It upset me to see during my stay on Talygarn, that the inside smoking room had been closed and patients had been relegated to the garden area. It is one step closer to the achieved goal of a complete ban. Lighters were confiscated and the nurses had to be called to light your cigarette. This is one undignified way of removing patient’s human rights, but not the major subject of this article. I dread to think what it will be like in the future to be detained and forced to quit smoking instantly. There will be uproar within the services and most patients will struggle to come to terms with the ban.

Since the advent of mobile phones, patients have found new ways of staying in touch with the outside world during their incarceration. Although some parts of the system do deny access to mobiles eg.PICU, most acute wards allow patients to use their phones, although they often confiscate them at night and refuse patients the use of their chargers. This leads to a clandestine smuggling operation for patients whereby contraband chargers exchange hands on the ward so that everyone can top up their battery. Nurses spend their days lighting cigarettes and searching bedrooms for hidden mobile phone chargers – hardly constructive medical care?

Smart phones with internet are especially useful and to maintain social media accounts and have internet access is a godsend, especially to me. I have been able to update my EndOfTerror from within the confines of the establishment and being able to reach out to followers gives a certain empowerment. Being locked away from society is lonely and frustrating and although not freedom, internet access allows a certain maintenance of your outside life. Messages of encouragement from friends and family are invaluable to your disrupted mindset and as a patient the therapeutic value of support on the outside is immeasurable.

Resisting as ever, during my stay, I was actively tweeting on the @endofterror timeline. It’s rather difficult to do full blog posts from a mobile phone and tweeting is a handy alternative, even if the tweets just serve as a personal reminder of incidents once one gets back to the outside world. I regularly study social media activity of mental patients during detainment through online mental patient friends and although often disturbing in content I know that I am not alone in seeking solace through social media use during a section. Each individual has their own methods of reaching out.

The Indian Dr Basu and his underling, the Iranian Dr Al-Hasani, were being particularly virulent in their disdainful treatment of me. They simply failed to recognise me as a human being with human rights and used the treatment against consent to the maximum. They frustrated me by denying me any leave at all and I was forced to resort to criticising their actions on twitter. They were both monitoring my twitter use and the End Of Terror website and threatened me saying that I was not allowed to post anything about them or their names. This infringes upon my freedom of speech and expression and I simply refuse to bow down to fascism and change my policies of exposing the fault-lines of the mental health system. Prior to hospitalisation Dr Basu had been stalking me online and although he denies this, I caught him, through analytic software, studying my Linkedin and invading my personal space on the web. This adds to my conspiracy theory of how the actions of psychiatrists are preordained and not rooted in healthcare. My enemies will pursue me despite me having good health. The voice of dissent will be punished by the system and EndOFTerror is a nightmare scenario for my pursuers.

I started using the smartphone camera to take some visual images of the hospital surroundings. Most people fortunately never get to view the bare oppressive inside walls of a psychiatric hospital so it helps in exposing the realities inside. One night in the smoking area, where we were jovially listening to some music, I took a photo of some fellow patients, with, of course, their permission. I posted this photo on my personal networks (not end of terror). The psychiatric nurses and doctors who were glued to my social networks, looking for an excuse to pounce, did just this. They cited privacy rules and said that I had broken confidentiality rules and mobile phone policies and they confiscated my Iphone. I was up in arms. I said I would delete the offending photo but could not see what harm I had done. In the real world I am always updating my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with all my escapades. Why should this be any different during a stay in hospital?

After many complaints the nurses came to a compromise and returned the mobile phone but they decided to do this with a twist and use an experimental policy. This experiment was horrendous to me and signified the extreme measures of state repression that little Hitlers within mental health services are prepared to use. I was allowed ten minutes of access to my mobile phone per shift and this access was to be supervised by a nurse. They wanted the inner workings of End Of Terror and were prepared to intimidate me into revealing my personal use of the internet. Nurses were quite uncomfortable with doing this and many expressed this to me. However, there are nurses who just relish the sort of power this experiment brings and jump at the chance of subverting patients’ rights. I found that my internet use was to be closely scrutinised and used in ways to justify my mental illness. Everything I did online found its way into my notes and was judged as mental illness. It’s just a total invasion of privacy and when you hear about internet repression in far off places such as China, to see this obsessive monitoring occurring in the UK just proved to me the State’s obsessiveness with surveillance.

Pretty soon, the ban on my phone use became compounded. I am a translation student at Cardiff University and use social media and the internet to maintain contact with a host of international friends and business associates across the world. The nurses started to complain as they could not understand my social media messages when I spoke in a foreign language. Therefore I was banned from speaking foreign languages and banned from internet contact with anyone outside of the UK. It is bad enough being prevented from studying your Translation degree, being forced to mss key lectures and examinations while you are subjected to the human experimentation of mental health. These authorities were now dictating to me that use of foreign language was a mental illness. I was being treated for my education skills and prevented in every way possible of exercising my study mindset. I found this to be ignorant, racist and typical of a stupid mentality. Why should my ways be changed to suit my captors?

Is it mentally ill and evil to contact people in the outside world and to use foreign languages? I was disappointed with the recent Brexit vote that demonstrated a democratic dislike for the EU and its foreign characteristics yet inside the mental hospital I witnessed some of the sickness of the system and how ignorant people could be. Right wing tendencies and oppression are key to the success of the mental health movement and where people have the right to exercise their power, I feel they often abuse this power, typical of the little Hitlers that so plague our fragmented society. Be it a police officer with a trigger-happy taser or a racist nurse, these people love mental health systems and what their roles in society entail. I feel sick that people can actively monitor my personal correspondence – most of the time it being innocuous contact with friends and family. I was forced to submit and to be honest dreaded my ten minute sessions on the phone. In a locked ward surrounded by cameras monitoring your every move, with your body given up to non-consensual mind-altering drugs, not being able to set foot on the grass or go to the pub for a pint, or even walk to the local shop, I felt that the monitoring of me could not possibly extend any further. Why does psychiatry have to be so intrusive? Do they really need to know every last detail of a patient? If they ever did anything useful with the information then I might be able to understand the medical necessity of information-gathering. However, the information is always misused and leads ultimately to further oppression.

Eventually, the whole charade cracked. While the nurses were running around lighting cigarettes, hunting down mobile phone chargers and peering over my shoulder at my Facebook messages, they obviously neglected their key role and jobs – that of nursing. An unmonitored patient slipped away to his room and hung himself with his dressing gown belt. Priorities should be given to prevent suicides and it is a nurse’s role to stop this happening. Suicides are sad affairs for all witnesses. I’d been close to the dead patient, sorting him out some tobacco and keeping his spirits high as he came to terms with his own incarceration yet he had gone ahead and done what he intended. All I did during my ten minutes of mobile phone usage that day, was to post an RIP message on my Facebook to my personal friends. It asks you how you feel on Facebook when you post a status. I was feeling sad about the suicide and posted so. Whenever somebody dies who I know, I tend to do a simple RIP message on Facebook. In the modern world of social media, many do this and I believe it is a key way of us dealing with grief as a society. The nurse who was monitoring me freaked out, tried seizing my phone and although I did post my status, I was reported to senior staff and my phone was permanently confiscated. Senior management were called to endorse this ultimate ban and despite my protests, Nursing manager Perry Attwell confirmed that my social media usage was not to be tolerated and the phone would remain in the possession of the Trust.

I do not know where monitoring and surveillance in society will ultimately lead but remember that the insides of mental hospitals where there is a captive population are very often where the most disturbing ideas in society are first trialled. Oppression begins in mental hospitals and they serve as a mirror to the realities and horrors of the real world.

Cardiff student tells of sectioning nightmare – from Gair Rhydd – Cardiff University student newspaper

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Cardiff student tells of sectioning nightmare
Posted in News by Alexander Norton on March 3, 2015

http://cardiffstudentmedia.co.uk/gairrhydd/news/cardiff-student-tells-sectioning-nightmare/

A mature student has revealed to Gair Rhydd details of eighteen turbulent years as a mental health patient.

Wesley Gerrard, 37, is currently studying Translation at Cardiff University’s School of Modern Languages – but for nearly two decades his academic career has been disrupted by a series of detainments.

Gerrard claimed that his extensive experiences with the system have been far from positive and provoked him to set up the campaign site ‘endofterror.org’. The site aims to raise awareness of his experiences – but this in itself has brought him problems.

“As soon as I started publishing stories on ‘endofterror’, I’ve had major police involvement. I came to realise it was dangerous to publish this sort of thing,” he said.

In all, the part-time DJ claimed to have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act on “fifteen to twenty” occasions.

He claimed that his encounters with mental health services started when he was studying for an undergraduate degree in Geography at University College London in 1997.

“I ran into some trouble in London and when I came home, my parents forced me to go to an outpatient appointment.

“Since then I haven’t really progressed or gotten out of the system.”

He said that he was discouraged from undertaking further education by the fact that they “wouldn’t let me out of hospital to complete my exams [and] sectioned me whilst I was preparing my dissertation”.

Despite this, he re-entered higher education with the Cardiff Centre for Lifelong Learning in around 2008, and subsequently progressed to undertake a full degree.

However, he still had encounters with mental health authorities – until an academic “would not accept me pulling out of classes and put me in touch with disability advisor.”

“They said: ‘enough is enough, we’re not going to have this student’s life ruined anymore’. It made me very happy knowing I was going to get some protection from Cardiff University.”

The University’s intervention reportedly caused the mental health authorities to “lay off me”, and despite averaging a sectioning a year he came to an agreement with mental health authorities “not to disrupt his studies for three years”.

However, over the festive period he once again found himself incarcerated at St. Caldcot’s Hospital – and was accused by the authorities of having delusions over his status as a Cardiff University student.

“I tried getting hold of student support but they were away on Christmas break, something my tutor was not happy about,” Gerrard said.

“In the end I managed to get a phone call through, and said ‘I’m in an emergency situation, can you implement the emergency plan to help me out?’”

“They didn’t do anything they’d agreed to. I felt really betrayed by Student Support and Cardiff University,” he claimed.

He alleged that despite showing official ID, it fell to a number of Cardiff University students on placement to confirm his identity.

He subsequently won a tribunal against the National Health Service relating to his treatment over the Christmas period.

He claimed that although his personal tutor continues to be “really supportive”, he was disappointed that “there was nothing directly from the University.”

Gerrard made a number of claims regarding his treatment that we are unable to publish here, but continues to detail his experiences on endofterror.org.

A Cardiff University Student Support spokesperson said that “quite obviously we can’t comment on individual cases, even if the student has opted to speak to you”.

“In such situations it is our aim to ensure that Cardiff University students continue to have access to the facilities here which are designed to aide them with whichever problems they might be experiencing,” they added.

Hamster Disorder

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Let me introduce a new character on the doctor front. Dr. Agniezsca Tyson, or Agi, is a Polish female acute psychiatrist employed by Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. She works out of the Hywel Dda Centre in Chepstow and is head of psychiatry for Lower Monmouthshire. She is also a lecturer in Psychiatry at Cardiff University thus bringing the new generation of mental health employees up to scratch. Agi has a command role within the local police and they have to attend regular briefing and meetings at Hywel Dda. I think she relies far too heavily on the fear factor her surname induces with it also being that of the fearsome world champion boxer, Mike Tyson. A world champion, Agi isn’t.

I was transferred to Tyson against my consent after the previous Sri Lankan psychiatrist managing me, Dr. Nirmalie Mirando, retired. Never keen, as the Chepstow shrinks are usually a lot worse than the Newport ones and the general staff they employ are totally militant and more obnoxious than the average mental health worker. Almost automatically I ended up feeling the full force of Tyson. I filed multiple reports of attempted murder against her with the police and over the several years she acted upon me it was a truly frightening experience. Eventually, Tyson transferred me into the care of convicted child sex offender Gwent Police-employed forensic psychiatrist, Dr Darryl Watts (see category http://endofterror.org/?cat=191 ). I was ‘under’ her from around 2006-2010 and fought every second of the way to be transferred away from her grasp.

When my partner, Nicola, lost our unborn child in the womb (due to her enforced mental health drug treatment regime), we decided we would bring some life into our home by getting some family pets. A kind neighbour gave us our first hamster, ‘Rafa’ or ‘littly’. I bought a nice cage complex for our living room and our friends and us had hours of fun with a whole mass of roaming Roborovsky dwarf hamsters. Yes, our front room became the Gobi desert away from home, but these creatures are magnificent and they were well looked after and bred really well.
Obviously the psychiatric establishment (who you are forced by law to enter your home regularly) disapproved. When a whole industry is based so heavily on the inhumane torture of rodents it is no wonder that well-looked after hamster pets are an anathema. I disagree with scientific testing on animals wholeheartedly.

Pretty soon, I got a new diagnosis added to me medical sheets. Tyson brandished me with ‘hamster disorder’. Obviously I felt she was deranged and couldn’t understand how this new illness to me fitted into the DSM. I made some enquiries next time I was among sane people. I casually mentioned to a female music industry friend and associate next time I was at one of my artist’s studios in Cardiff. I often tell people about some of the nonsense I put up with in this mental health system. It helps to have normal people’s advice. Kath explained to me that ‘hamster disorder’ was in actual fact a real medical condition ans warned me that I shouldn’t perhaps be quite too blasé about this new condition and that I certainly shouldn’t be so casual in revealing it to people, especially strangers.

I was a little concerned at Kath’s tone of voice as I realised that she was being serious. She got out the laptop and quickly googled a page for me too show exactly why she was concerned. Most of my friends knew how much our hamsters meant to me and I really wish I hadn’t investigated my new diagnosis. It turns out that hamster disorder actually refers to a sexual fetish whereby ‘people’ get pleasure by inserting live hamsters up their rectal passages. Obviously, I hit the roof just to know the cheek of this woman doctor, Agi Tyson, to have actually accused me of bestiality with my family pets. Things went even further downhill from then on. I was soon kidnapped and taken away to the mental hospital. Tyson tended to use Talygarn Ward at Griffithstown County Hospital in Pontypool. While she injected me with medicines to which I have an allergy over a period of months, the council-employed rat-catchers were sent out to my home to lay down traps everywhere and exterminate my family pets.

Just to set the record straight, I do not suffer from hamster disorder and I do not indulge in bestiality of any kind. I do resent the diagnosis from Tyson and I do resent the false accusations. I resent the police involvement in enforcing the mental health act and I resent to be treated for this ‘illness’. I do agree it is a sick condition and I don’t care if Hollywood stars have been afflicted with it. My hamsters were well-looked after and Nicola and I loved having them be part of our lives for several enjoyable years. Psychiatry is sick and it is that which needs to be eradicated, not animals.

Police Brutality and Mental Health – PART 3

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I’ve written two articles already on policing and mental health. The impact of this particular episode still hasn’t quite sunk in. Bang out of order is obviously one of my judgements. Equally, writing this blog, just knowing firsthand exactly what the British police are capable of, means that my life is in potential danger as something equally as bad or worse could quite easily happen at any time.

I was just reading a fellow DJ’s Facebook about returning home to a key UK airport to see heavily armed police officers ‘greeting’ people as they got off the plane. OK. We may be on whatever alert, but I do passionately disagree with the arming of the police. Unless laws are passed for the general public to have the right to bear arms, it is unfair to arm a civilian force. Army and other military services, by all means, weapons are a necessity. But not the police. They do not have responsible enough a mentality to be given the easy power over life and death that a trigger brings. I speak from experience.

If you actually ever look at the mental health act, when you are admitted to a hospital or sectioned, you are supposed to go through a process of assessment. There are balances and checks in place. I do believe that the process is unfair as it stands. However, over the years the mental health system has been opening up to allow the police more and more involvement and they more or less have a free reign today. The ‘Place Of Safety’ in the legislation allows them to use their premises as mental hospital holding cells. As soon as I heard of the police being armed with tasers I was against the idea. I don’t believe that any form of weapon can be safely deemed as providing non-lethal force, in particular a ballistic weapon. it is no surprise to me that there are so many deaths caused by tasers.

I was spending the evening in my home studio, making music. I use Ableton and have various MIDI instruments that plug into it. I was having a quiet jam on my keyboard and laying down the foundations of a new tune. It’s quite a creative process, making music and is very tranquil and relaxing as a producer, although repetitively listening to the same beat patterns as you build up a track from scratch can be frustrating for other people to listen to. My missus has to put up with a lot of this. On that particular evening, she decided to pop out to see her friend down the road. Nicola went and I carried on making music. I powered down the studio for a while and went out to the kitchen to grab a bite to eat. I was in my dressing gown, as I often am at home. As I returned from the kitchen into my living room, all of a sudden I felt a jolt and these wires seemed to be coming out of nowhere at me. I looked down and I had some sharp metallic objects in my heart, with cables attached that were whirling around and heading for me. I immediately, AND I MEAN IMMEDIATELY, ripped at my chest to remove these objects. The wires came flying out and scattered away, off to my left. I had thought I was alone in the flat. I couldn’t get these metal rods out of my chest. Suddenly there was a clatter at the front door as it was being forced open. I ran over to the door, opened it quickly as the intruders were trying to break in and strongly slammed it shut on the intruders and double locked it. They couldn’t get in.

I still had the metal in my chest and wanted it out. It was in my heart, two tiny rods of aluminium-looking, man-made material, with bits of plastic and other junk attached. I knew who the intruders were now, as obviously, I had seen them when I shut the door. It was the police. They now had a battering ram to the door and were attempting to force it; yet couldn’t. They couldn’t muster the strength. There was a hell of a noise coming from them. Lots of shouting and panic. I was alone in my home and I have to say, was truly scared. This was a life or death situation. I took and air rifle pellet in my backside as a kid but this was the first time I had been shot with a gun. I finally just ripped at the metal and they were barbed, fish-hook like prongs that were retaining the rods in my chest. They were almost impossible to remove. I realised that it was a taser that had been fired at me and was thanking my lucky stars that I had managed to rip the wires out prior to the post-impact electric shock being discharged. The idiots had not only randomly shot an unarmed man, minding his own business, in his own home, but they had also misfired their own weapon. I didn’t have any weapons in my home to defend myself and was left to the mercy of what happened when they eventually got in. Alone, with no witnesses, the panic set in. I had removed the metal as best I could and realised that I wasn’t going to die from the first shot. Blood was gushing out of the open wound and it bloody well stung, like never before. It’s a truly horrible feeling, reminded me of how you feel inside your body, under the cosh of the biological weapons they use in mental health treatment. It’s just that this was exterior, on the body, and not inside.

I decided that I needed to inform the public in order to protect myself. I was still trying to figure out how they had shot the weapon. They weren’t inside the house. Either they had fired through the open front window or had fired through the letter box. Either way, there was no warning, either in human voice or any noise at all. I knew they had tried to assassinate me and I just didn’t want to be a random statistic of police murder. I looked out the front room window and, there was, I’d estimate, about 50 or so police officers. All in uniform, milling around. I screamed at the top of my lungs: “HELP!!!” “I’ve Been Shot!” – I felt that I had to let people know. In a life or death situation you have tremendous power in your voice. Despite having a serious traumatic injury to my chest, I shouted louder than I’d ever shouted before. I decided that I would scream the neighbourhood, the whole town, down. I thought of every person I knew nearby, and others in the locality further afield. I was even screaming to friends far away in London, lest my voice should carry as far as it seemed to be able to. Members of the public started to gather and the police were sort of shepherding them around and trying to clear the vicinity. I knew they were up for another pop at me that night. Someone suggested that I jump out of the window but I didn’t really fancy flying out of the flats into a bunch of armed police for obvious safety reasons. There were witnesses now to me being alive. I decided to go off to my bedroom and try to relax in bed. They were still bashing hell out of the door and it would give at any moment. I felt that even the most heartless copper ain’t just going to shoot an unarmed man, naked in his own bed, in cold blood. I lay in bed, pretty sure that my time on this planet was coming to a close. I heard the front door give and was just hoping that the duvet would protect against any further taser shots. I’ve taken a full mains electric shock before, whilst setting up DJ equipment, and electric shocks are not pleasant. Your heart has a weakness after one full shock and is never quite the same.

It took ages for them to open the bedroom door after entering the building. I could hear loads of noise. Movement of people. Suddenly a plastic shield came through the door and hordes of riot police stormed into my bedroom, their shiny metal helmets peaking above the heavy-duty reinforced, hardened plastic riot shields. I’d never been in a riot or demonstration so had only ever seen riot police on TV or in photographs or internet videos. They surrounded the bed with their shields protecting them completely. I was just glad that they hadn’t shot me and I couldn’t see any weapons. I just stayed calm and quiet and then about 8 of them just dived on me, riots shields down, and were trying to squash / suffocate me. They just bounced off me really and it was a non-effective whatever-it-was-supposed-to-be. They all seemed pretty much in a right panic. Eventually, one broke the silence and I realised he was Scottish.

I said ‘Hi, Are you Scottish?’

He said ‘Yes’

I said ‘Where are you from’.

He said ‘Glasgow’

I said ‘Ah, you’ve come a long way.’ Do you support Rangers or Celtic?’

He said, rather proudly, ‘Rangers’

Being a Liverpool fan, there are a lot of links between Rangers and Celtic and our club. I just started having a conversation with this guy from out of town as his mates continued to act silly with their weapons etc. I have to be fair to this guy. He did look a bit shocked and disillusioned with the whole situation.

Someone else took command as they did some sort of hold on me and started lifting me out of bed. They have manoevres, these riot police and I was surrounded by large plastic shields at all times. As I was naked they decided it was appropriate to get me dressed. It’s a surreal experience, I can tell you. Watching a bunch of armed, grown men with plastic shields and helmets and sparkly badges with ‘police’ on, fish around your bedroom, while you’re naked, boxed in by plastic, with blood pissing out of your chest from a misfired taser. I explained to the guy, that the Bermuda Shorts he dug out of my drawer. just didn’t fit me. I hadn’t worn them since I was about 12. I was trying to help the situation. stay calm, release the pressure. Talk to a copper on duty though and they think you’re trying to be smart. They got heavy handed and were forcing me into the shorts. In the end, as we had now shuffled into my living room, a couple of them realised that the shorts just weren’t going on and it wasn’t the best thing to do to a man in his own home, forcibly dress him into child’s clothes. I just kept saying softly, ‘just let me put the shorts on’ They were petrified and trying to cover up what was obviously quite an extreme incident. Someone managed to fetch another pair of shorts from back in the bedroom. I was getting frustrated because they were in my living room causing havoc. They broke my computer system, my studio monitor speakers and ripped all my wiring out. Just out-and-out criminal vandals. I cannot believe how inhumane these people are. Eventually I had a pair of surf shorts on. It was a freezing cold night. I was bleeding, been shot in the chest, attacked by riot police and now I was to be dragged into the middle of my neighbourhood in the dead of night in a pair of surf shorts. Not very practical, Mr Policeman, really? Simple health training. Normally when someone is shot, first aid is applied, especially if the weapon has, perhaps, misfired? They seemed more keen on removing the remnants of the taser in my front room than anything else. Bloody wires everywhere.

If their idea of helping a shot human is to help him get dressed in his old shorts, then they really need to go back to the drawing board. Emergency services? it’s no wonder we have so many bloody disasters in this country. They are incompetent. It’s just inappropriate. How are this lot supposed to deal with an actual riot where the people are actually committed to achieving their aims? They don’t even understand how to get dressed? I can just picture police across the country waking up every morning for mummy to slip on their pants for them and help them get to the potty toilet. They couldn’t blow out a candle with a fire extinguisher: the idiots!

Outside the property, and there were lots of people. The fear for my life hadn’t quite dissipated. Obviously, when you are being kidnapped after being shot, the fear doesn’t erode at all really. Until I get home to my bedroom after the whole charade, however much time it takes, everything is by force, and everyone can be regarded as an unnatural encounter.

Back of the van. I just zoned out in the van. The pain in my heart was great and I know that I was at risk of heart failure. I was not aware of any rulebook to guide you from, when you are shot. It doesn’t help that you aren’t getting immediate medical assistance and I will be eternally grateful to the police for that. Handcuffed (incidentally they went on back in the bedroom – yet still they had to crush me with the riot shields), I was banged into the back of a van. A long time to get going as they were doing their ‘hush, hush, nice police in front of the public operation’ to ease the crowded streets into believing that they were somehow doing some form of fitful employment and public service.

By the time we reached our destination, I just felt like it would be safer to feign unconsciousness and just to fall out of the back of the van when the doors opened, just in case there were any surprises awaiting. It’s a complete bastard, having an open chest wound with shrapnel remnants in it and being handcuffed behind your back, unable to tend to your own wounds. We were at the Royal Gwent hospital in Newport and I was wheel-chaired in to a new little corner of it, shall we say ‘the police’s special room’. The Royal Gwent is a good hospital and I’ve had top notch treatment there over the years. All the time. Except on this occasion. In ‘police corner’ you get junior nurses who do not understand how to use expensive heart monitoring equipment. You get crazed coppers running the whole show. I do not believe that I met a trained doctor throughout the whole incident. It was like some sort of twisted perverted medical saga. They seemed to be getting some sort of thrill by pretending that they were actual nurses. There were two male police officers, quite young, probably the same age as myself, maybe a little younger. One of them was quiet and didn’t speak. the other just kept repeatedly, in a sort of spaced out drone-like mantra, saying. ‘Hi Wesley, I’m your friend!’ He repeated it about 300 times that night. I might have possibly seen the guy once before on a police mental hospital kidnap operation, But i have never spoken to him at all in my life. Never once met him. I don’t know who the hell he is. He’s not my friend. Talk about stalkers! I’m repeatedly asking him to un-cuff me so that I can get medical attention and at the very least tend to myself. I just thought this guys is just so unbelievably sick that I don’t know how I am going to every have faith in the human species again. They were just sort of mincing around, waiting for me to die, in some way of ‘natural causes’. I was detained at this hospital for seemingly forever. then i got bundled back in the van. no medical care at all. Nor medical staff to explain anything and i was just being rotated around by two clueless policemen in full uniform with handcuffs on and some gaping wounds which by now and ceased oozing of their own accord.

It was the short journey to their gaff now. At this stage I was just hoping they’d take me to St. Cadocs’. Whereas, at St. Cad’s there are plenty of ex-police officers on the nursing staff, at least they don’t parade around in uniform and I actually know some of the nursing staff quite well, enough to have a sensible occasional human-to-human conversation.

Back in ‘police world’ I was escorted into Newport Central and, finally, the cuffs were removed. I just couldn’t believe I was alive. My body was numb with shock and I had shooting pains in every direction. I felt never more in need of a medic in my entire life. I was put in a cell with no camera and weirdly they left the door open. The same two police stayed outside the cell all night and I was just walking back and for, in and out of the cell, trying to speak to them, as when they are on their own turf they settle right down and are far less weird than in public. I just tried persuading them to just call it a day and take me home to my missus who used to be a nurse and we could all forget about the little incident earlier. Obviously police don’t quite grasp the reality or the impact they have on people and it was a no-go zone.

I knew I wasn’t getting medical attention and it is imperative that you somehow calm down. I eventually got an hour of snooze on the cell bench. I wasn’t keen on having an open door as I slept,. Especially with two police outside. After all that had occurred. But, survival is survival, I guess.

Next day, transfer to Beechwood secure ward, St. Cadoc’s Hospital, Caerleon. And this is the point where I object, based on what has come to light to me in the past month. I am handed over by the police to a police-employed forensic psychiatrist who will treat me for mental illness against my consent for an indeterminable period. Dr Darryl Watts (see full details here… ) sectioned me under the mental health act immediately. I had zero physical medical attention for my injuries., this man is a convicted felon. Now it’s all very well me banging on about his child sex convictions. I am not a child and we live in a world where there are paedophiles. Deal with it. What alarms me is, that, when you read the articles about his sick habits in the papers, it isn’t just child porn he fetishes about. He is into extreme violence and some weird conspiracy sort of nonsense. He is a dangerous man, who is unreformed as he has never served any time and been punished for his convictions. He does not understand remorse and is a danger to society.. A long time after this whole escapade, I was told off the record by an off-duty policeman, in the knowing loop, that Dr Darryl Watts had ordered the whole taser operation on me.

To see these police charge into my home, rip my life apart another time, attempt to murder me and realise they are all doing it on the orders and advice of a 30 hour a week child porn addict….. Where indeed does this place the British legal system? Yes, Watts won several hearings again this time in Mental Health Review Tribunal Courts. What sort of world is it that I can be judged ill in the head when these people are just not natural at all, nor human?

A long time has passed since then and I’m recovering from the scars. I still wonder the trajectory of the weapon. I’d love to come face to face with whoever pulled the trigger. See what sort of person that they actually are. Not that I’ll ever know.

On a quiet note, just to bring some rationale back, to myself as much as anything…. I can remember when I was taught how to use firearms. On a farm in New Zealand, my mother’s family farm, out in the country, outside Wanganui: My Uncle Johnny took me out hunting. He taught me how to use a shotgun and I took a rabbit – they are pests on the farmland in NZ. It’s a dark feeling post-trigger, and seeing an animal die in front of your eyes is a sight to behold. Shortly after taking kill I was back, aiming. I had a lovely pretty bird, way up in the tops of the trees in the telescopic sight. My Uncle just checked to see what I was aiming at. He asked me softly and i described the bird – its bright plumage, green and beautiful;. He said, ‘Stop Wez’ – ‘don’t fire!’. I had half slipped the trigger and it was on the point of a shot. i relaxed my finger and asked him “why?”‘ “oh, that’s a native pigeon and they are protected birds under Maori law and it is illegal to kill them. You’ll get into trouble if you shoot that one.” I learnt the difference between a fluffy rabbit and a native pigeon and it was a wonderful day. The farm cats feasted on the rabbit and i got to keep its tail.

Guns are dangerous, people, and the police should not be carrying them, certainly not for medical purposes.

Coffee Cup Syndrome

1 Reply

Here is another letter of complaint about a Dr Darryl Watts incident. this complaint resides with a senior nursing manager (Perry Attwell) at Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. It shows how trivial medical staff can be in the mental health system.

Hi Perry,

Further to our telephone conversation, I am writing you an email, as requested, with Karen Newman cc’ed.

I would like to request that you reinvestigate the incident which I already reported to you regarding the acuphase I endured at the hands of Dr Darryl Watts. I found this particular incident to be one of the worst incidences of malicious medical malpractice I have ever witnessed and believe that it clearly indicates Watts’ un-reformed criminal character.

Whereas I have found it unsettling to discover Watts’ past demons, I do smell blood here and will not let my enemies have a wink of sleep. I will not let this matter rest, purely from a vengeful perspective. Watts went out of his way to take 4 whole days out of my time and life (plus recovery) by delivering an unnecessary acuphase.

He thought it was particularly funny and Gareth Lane and himself had a good giggle at the time. I hope that giggling now haunts him because it has fired me into action. He wants to go out of his way to ruin my life, then I will let as much of the public know about his own failures in life and his own sick ideas on reality.

I was an inpatient under Watts’ treatment at Talygarn. I like drinking green tea and always have my own green teabags. It is an antioxidant and helps combat the torture chemicals you use by force upon me during incarceration. The teacups at Talygarn were small and it was difficult to get a good brew from them. I asked the staff and got the staff’s permission to bring in my own mug so that I could enjoy my green tea more whilst an inpatient.

Nicola, my partner, brought me a mug from home and on entering Talygarn at visiting time she was subjected to a search by nurse in charge, Jayne Hughes (one of Agi Tyson’s good friends and working colleagues). By the time I managed to locate Nicola she was crying her eyes out and Jayne was screaming at her. Jane banned her from visiting me any more and entering Talygarn as Nicola had brought contraband into the ward. The coffee mug was deemed an offensive weapon. I tried explaining that I had staff permission for the coffee mug. Jane threw Nicola out. She then called in Dr Watts and Gareth Lane who decided that it would be a good idea to implement their obvious punishment strategy a further notch (due to Agi Tyson affair).

Watts and Lane, while giggling uncontrollably took me into a room where Lane was physically threatening and Watts thought he’d get in on the act too, while being protected by his insane nurse. They ordered me off to Beechwood for four days for Acuphase as a result of Nicola bringing me a coffee mug.

Acuphase, as I need not explain is a pretty serious affair. This was completely unnecessary. I travelled down to the secure Beechwood Ward and accepted my fate. I didn’t resist as I didn’t blame the Beechwood staff for just following the orders of their employment. The nurse, Paul (with moustache) who administered the injections did tell me (and he wanted it off the record) that he really disagreed with his instructions in this incident as he knew that Watts was out of order and that I didn’t require acuphase.

I tried writing a letter of complaint at the time but it was torn up by Beechwood staff when I gave it to them to deliver to the Hospital managers. I think I may have written another note to the managers but of course the matter went unresolved. I also did inform you verbally in person about the incident at the time but no action was ever taken to investigate or discipline Watts, Lane and Jane.

I would like this matter looked at again as there must be medical notes in existence to verify that I am not a liar.

After the acuphase I returned to Talygarn and eventually returned home, although I think I lost several managers hearings / section appeals (as I usually do).

I actively tried to remove Watts as my psychiatrist from that point as I obviously regarded him as very dangerous. I also tried to avoid Lane. Eventually – a long time afterwards I was transferred out of forensic psychiatry and away from Watts although Lane persisted in harrassing me and treating me for a considerable amount of time afterwards. The fact that you are getting Lane to harrassingly call me and ruin my Christmas and enact police / section kidnaps – on my birthday no less, shows me that the immaturity and criminality of the local mental health system knows no bounds.

I would like this particular incident to be addressed, especially now in the knowledge that Watts was in fact a convicted criminal. I find the matter so deeply disturbing my feelings cannot be expressed in words.

Regards

Wesley Gerrard

As you might be able to tell, I am a little angry about the ridiculousness of this situation. It may be minor to the casual reader, but let me assure you that Acuphase is about the most serious form of mental health drug on the market and it makes you feel so bad that words cannot describe. It’s a serious misuse of medicine and clear negligence. All over the sake of a coffee cup… These doctors are out of their minds and out of control.

Here is the official response, from Aneurin Bevan University Health Board Chief Executive, Judith Paget…

As can be seen by the response to this complaint, the bosses of Darryl Watts have defended his abominal actions to the letter claiming he made good medical decisions. We are talking about a convicted paedophile who has no right to practise medicine, who is treating me, a non-criminal, against his consent, while detaining him, using the mental health act. I find the inability of Watts’ bosses to recognise malpractice as particularly irresponsible and most disturbing. It seems as though I will not be getting justice on this particular occasion and to be honest I feel that any for,m of justice in my plight against mental health is seemingly futile based on the clear cut defensive stance taken by senior NHS policy-makers towards their psychiatrists. Where can one obtain justice as a mental patient?

Aneurin Bevan University Health Board: Complaint about Criminal Psychiatrist, DR DARRYL WATTS

14 Replies

When I found out just prior to Christmas 2014, about my former psychiatrist Dr Darryl Watts’ criminal convictions (see category http://endofterror.org/?cat=191 for more details) , I was upset, to say the least. I decided to follow the appropriate channels and sent a complaint to the Chief Executive of the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board Trust, the local NHS for this area of SE Wales. They are ultimately the employer of Dr Watts and were responsible for him being assigned to my care in the first place. Judith Paget is the current Chief Executive and having attended a private meeting with her in the past to address mental health issues, I do know her personally. I addressed the complaint to Judith, as I discovered (here: http://www.wales.nhs.uk/sitesplus/866/opendoc/169907 ) that she was part of the small committee that actually gave Watts the job in the first place. From the newspaper articles surrounding his conviction I know that he is forced to disclose the full details of his criminal history to any future employer. Therefore the Aneurin Bevan UHB had full knowledge of the character of the man that they were employing.

Here is the relevant text from the above cited NHS WALES document (pp13-14) surrounding the appointment of Dr Watts.

“3.3 Appointment of Consultant Adult Psychiatrist with a

special interest in Forensic Rehabilitation
The Health Board held interviews for the post of Consultant
Adult Psychiatrist with a special interest in Forensic
Rehabilitation on Friday 25th February 2011.
13Aneurin Bevan Health Board
Wednesday 23 March 2011
Agenda Item: 7.2
The appointments panel comprised the following members:
REPRESENTING THE CHAIRMAN:
Miss Sue Kent, Vice Chair, Aneurin Bevan Health Board

REPRESENTING THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE:
Mrs Judith Paget, Director of Planning and Operations, Aneurin
Bevan Health Board
REPRESENTING THE MEDICAL DIRECTOR:
Dr Stephen Hunter, Associate Medical Director, Aneurin Bevan
Health Board
REPRESENTING THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF
PSYCHIATRISTS:
Professor Gary Sullivan, Regional Advisor, Bwrdd lechyd Cwm
Taf Health Board
REPRESENTING THE ANEURIN BEVAN HEALTH BOARD:
Dr Steve Attwood, Consultant Psychiatrist, Aneurin Bevan
Health Board
1 applicant was interviewed for the post.
The recruitment and interview process was conducted in
accordance with Health Board policies and procedures.
The appointments panel recommended Dr Darryl BallantyneWatts
for appointment to this post.”

I heard nothing for quite some time from the Trust and then received the below letter that I was told was a final resolution to my complaint about all the misdemeanours I suffered under the ‘care’ of Dr Watts over a two year period.

[Here is the body text of the letter, reproduced…]

“I am writing further to your email to the Putting Things Right Team on 22 December 2014 regarding issues you have raised in relation to the background of a clinician providing care for you within the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. Firstly, can I please sincerely apologise for any distress you may have experienced in relation to this matter.

On receiving your e-mail, I asked colleagues in the Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Division to contact you before Christmas to discuss this matter with you and I am aware that you have been receiving ongoing support from our team over the last couple of weeks. I hope this support has been helpful.

Specifically in relation to the concerns that you raised, I should like to inform you that when the Doctor in question was appointed to the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, the appointment panel was aware of the individual’s past history and due process was followed including confirmation that the Legal and GMC restrictions had been served and that there had been no fresh issues since the original offence that would cause concern to prevent the clinician’s right to practice

In conclusion, I would like to thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. I understand that you have already received a copy of our information leaflet which explains how you may take matters further, through the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, should you remain dissatisfied with this response.”

My first impression of the letter was disgust. I was annoyed that Paget herself could not regard the matter sufficiently horrific to attend to the complaint. I felt the sarcasm of the fact that they admitted sending out mental health services and subsequently police to harass and detain me, over the festive period where I wanted to enjoy myself at home, while on a study break from my university courses. The last place I wished to be was under treatment from the very organisation about which I was complaining. I do not have faith in the mental health services of Aneurin Bevan UHB and do not feel safe in their environment. AT ALL.

They seemed completely nonchalant about Watts’ appointment and seemed to defend him to the hilt. He had a right to practise his medicine and who are they to deny that? I just wonder how many others have been affected by an irresponsible appointment? Now that the man is allowed back working with children in the area, as a psychiatrist, I find this sickening. When you hear about the convicted Welsh footballer, Ched Evans, facing such public outcry over his return to football it does make you question some of Aneurin Bevan UHB’s decisions here. A convicted doctor has a right to work and ‘sod the public’ – they have no need to know. It’s just ridiculous and smacks of institutionalised paedophilia that you here so much about in the media. I am unsatisfied with the response and have informed the trust of this and have taken the matter to the Public Ombudsman for Wales where I hope they will see some sense in my grievances.
I am annoyed that it seems that my whole meeting with Mrs Paget and some colleagues about a year ago, is now a complete waste of time. In our hour session we discussed from a patient’s perspective how the mental health services could be improved. In particular I talked of how Occupational Therapy could receive more funding and one of Judith’s colleagues suggested how they wanted to employ me in a education role, to help train their staff about how a mental patient actually perceives the services. After the meeting I left feeling like my voice had been heard but there was zero follow up and nothing ever transpired.

Quite frankly, having worked in an educational role: teaching music (DJing) for the government, Arts Council Wales, Newport Arts Council, Monmouthshire Youth Services, DOE Award Scheme, Newport Arts Disability, Nash Pilot Project, NASH homeless hostels, Young Offenders Orgs and various others – I cannot possibly accept a position as a teacher for an establishment that actually employs convicted child sex offenders. It is just ridiculous attempting to educate in a system where the very head is knowingly appointing such vile members of society to work at taxpayer wages of some ridiculous 6 figure per annum sum… How I am expected to maintain any sort of faith in this Health Trust from now on, God only knows, but I do know that they won’t be going away.

Yes, it may be victory for you, Dr Darryl Watts et al, but I’ll be the one sleeping tonight, with a clear conscience. Have a look in the mirror at your own mental health issues, all involved.

All I can say is that Aneurin Bevan, for all the good he brought to Britain, in founding the NHS, must be turning in his grave to see his name attached to such a vile organisation as the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board Trust.

You may have won this round, mental-healthers, but the End Of Terror will fight on…

Police Brutality and Mental Health – PART 2

2 Replies

In this second post about my experiences of police brutality and mental health, I wish to discuss the nature of problems affecting diagnosed mental health victims when it comes to attempting to conventionally use police services.

If you’ve ever been a mental inpatient you are probably aware that the police’s jurisdiction does not extend to mental hospitals. There is no protection for incarcerated patients no matter how many times you contact police. Therefore you are forced to deal with crime inside a hospital environment on your own. This in itself is dangerous, especially when often it is the polices themselves who have removed you to the locked environment. I suppose, it could be argued that it makes sense not to want to seek help from an organisation that works on behalf of the secret prison system that is mental health lockup.

The problem I have found, is that once back in the community, attempting to build up your life, should you ever require the assistance of the police in a conventional way. To report a crime or anything else, you do not get standard service that a public user of their service might expect.

This dilemma is created by, despite diagnosed mental illness not (yet) being a criminal offence, it is recorded by the police and you do show on their system as being diagnosed mentally ill. When you call 999 or 101, caller display and police monitoring systems indicate immediately and you are flagged as a ‘mentally ill’ customer.

I first encountered the reality of this situation over a decade ago when, during a business dispute whereby some of my business’ equipment was illegally seized and I was attempting to recover it I was held hostage on someone else’s business premises with active threats of violence which I feared could result in murder. I felt I had no real alternative but to report the matter to the police, from a question of personal safety as much as anything else. Luckily, I had a mobile phone so I dialled 999 and reported the matter from within my locked environment.

After about 15 minutes the police turned up at the location. they entered the premises where the owner was actually in the room with me. The police entered, and despite me having given a lucid sane account of the crime I alleged, the police did nothing to the person I was reporting, but on entering the building put me up against the wall, inside the place where I’d been captive for about 90 minutes and started conducting a body search. I asked them exactly what they were doing as it was I who had contacted them and was the victim of a crime. The Asian officer, who I knew from the local Caldicot police (part of Gwent police), informed me that because I was mentally ill, this was standard procedure and he had to check me for concealed weapons which I obviously did not have. After conducting a thorough body search I asked him if he would now attend to the criminal matter at hand and that a) I wanted out of my hostage situation and if possible I wanted the recovery of my stolen computers and other business equipment that were being locked in a different part of the building. The police officer told me that I was trespassing and had to leave the premises without my equipment. I was quite shocked, but equally quite glad to be alive and no longer being held in a hostage situation. The police never followed up the matter at all, but I was very ill at ease and realised that I wouldn’t get conventional treatment from the police due to my mental health status. As a business you have to right off the occasional asset and possessions aren’t everything in this world. Health is a priority and preserving life is a necessary factor in living.

I tried my best not to ever contact them again but unfortunately many years later I had the misfortune of having to report a crime and felt that to make a 999 call was the only viable option.

My fiancée, Nicola, had a friend around our house for the evening. They had been enjoying themselves and having a few drinks whilst I was just minding my own business, ploughing away with my computer work…. running so many internet sites and social media takes a lot of dedicated effort! lol…

It came time for Nicola’s friend to go home. It was about midnight and she had booked a taxi. Nicola told me her friend was leaving and asked if I’d do the gentlemanly thing and escort her friend outside and to see her safely into the taxi. Of course, as chivalry demands I obliged and walked the lady outside. As she got into the taxi, a little drunk as she was, I Couldn’t believe my eyes when the taxi driver leant over her, strapped her seatbelt in and not realising that I was present, openly groped the passenger’s breast. I immediately protested and demanded to see the driver’s identity card. He showed me a ‘hackney carriage id’ with his photo on. I felt it strange that a local taxi in South Wales should have a London cabbie’s ID. The taxi sped off down the road before I could discuss matters further and sort the situation myself.

I rushed back inside and quickly explained to the missus what had happened. She was shocked and we both realised that the only people we could realistically call in this potential kidnap situation was the police on 999.

I reluctantly dialled ‘999’ and the operator speedily put me through to the police. As I was reporting the incident, I realised that I was speaking to a local police operator from her accent. the questioning seemed to be directed away from the incident and she seemed to be just gathering information on me. there was an obsession to get my details and not the details of the crime. It was like going through a standard call centre security check, like when you ring the bank. I suddenly realised that I had obviously flagged on their system as mentally ill and they were messing around. This, when Nicola’s friend’s life was in potential danger, made me angry. I hung up on the 999 call and immediately rang 999 again to try and get a better response from a different operator. I got put through to a police operator somewhere in the East Midlands if I remember correctly. I rushed through my incident report which was accepted well and she informed me that the matter was being dealt with and that the incident could expect a response.

After this 999 call ended, I quickly rang Nicola’s friends partner, who was waiting for her at home. I explained to him the situation and he was very worried, but luckily as we were talking, his drunken partner stumbled through the house door. Nicola and I breathed a sigh of relief and were just glad that the worst had not transpired in the incident. As we experienced relief we could hear a massive noise outside as vehicles started storming the neighbourhood. I realise it was the police arriving. Nicola went running outside to explain what had happened and that her friend was home safe.

I had my dressing gown on and was pondering about getting changed before I saw the police but I thought I’d better get outside and check that Nicola was OK.

This is where matters broke down and still to this day I cannot get my head around the actual lunacy that resulted. I have put in IPCC complaints etc about this and tried to pursue the matter but obviously it’s a waste of time dealing with that particular organisation.

I went through the front door and Nicola was about 25 metres away, surrounded by a group of yellow-vested police. She looked frightened and I was worried about what was happening. Stood on my front lawn I politely inquired of Nicola if she was Ok and all was OK. On hearing my voice, a second group of approximately 10-12 officers, saw me and in a military formation started rushing at me, as a group…. I raised my hands just to try and settle them. Perhaps they thought I was the reported criminal, and Nicola was the victim? This was not actually the case as the IPCC would have reported this to me when I entered my official complaint.

The police grabbed me. I offered no resistance at all, as obviously I had just dialled 999. I was thrown face down on the floor and handcuffed. The young PC, about 20 years old, who led the charge and had handcuffed me then proceeded to boot me in the back of the head and left his foot embedded in my neck, applying pressure. I couldn’t breathe at all and felt close to death. I was suffocating as I was face down in the mud with a boot in the back of my head / neck, obstructing my airways. I was in a stress position with my hands secured behind my back in cuffs. I started having an asthma attack after several minutes and somehow the officer’s heavy jackboot was removed from my neck. I was hyperventilating and just pleaded to see a doctor. He shouted at me that he was a doctor. As i re-caught my breath I was removed from the ground and escorted towards one of the waiting police vans. I asked them politely if they could get my inhaler from inside my home as I was having an asthma attack and needed it, especially anticipating I would be locked in the airtight, sealed back of a police van for a journey to wherever.

They refused to get an inhaler and were still surrounding Nicola in a military-style ring formation. I was concerned for my partner’s safety as I didn’t really want to leave her in the company of this particular section of police officers. You have no choice, however, and there was nothing I could do but quietly pray as the vehicle moved off. Cuffed, back of the wagon, not for the first time, hardly able to breathe. It is disturbing travelling in the back of a ‘meat wagon’ yet when you’ve been cuffed in the back of an ambulance the first time they introduced handcuffs to your life, travelling police-style isn’t as scary as people might imagine.

The van stopped and the doors were opened and I was grabbed out, yet the cuffs were not removed. I was at the back of Newport Central police station. I was escorted into the processing area. I thought I’d go straight to the custody desk and be able to get some sense out of the custody sergeant and at least be able to phone and check that Nicola was safe and well as that was my main concern. With a sexual predator being around my home, the last thing I need is to be wondering if the missus is home safe with doors securely locked. At Newport Central, however, nothing is very easy. There were two police in the van. One, the 20 year old male ‘doctor’ who had assaulted me. The other, one from Nicola’s surrounding ring, a woman officer, who I later established was the officer in charge of the whole ‘operation’ and was a beat officer from Chepstow. Never seen either before in my life. They stopped behind the closed door of the custody suite, just inside the entrance, one either side of me restraining my arms, even though I was cuffed behind my back. We stopped and I was held there for I’d estimate about 60-90 minutes. The bloke on my left was obviously bored and decided to relieve his boredom by twisting my thumbs on my left hand around, trying to dislocate them or break them, no doubt. After being the victim of his assault outside my home I was in no mood to verbalise anything with him, for obvious reasons. In a police situation the best thing to do is to remain calm. A police officer full of adrenaline is a dangerous thing. Any form of ‘dissent’ will be punished. His officer to my right was not torturing my thumbs nor was she aware of his little idea of ‘fascist police brutality’.

I got to the custody desk, asked to call my partner at home, was denied and moved straight to the holding cells. No charge, no comment, no offer of communication about what is going on, no offer of legal representation. No communication whatsoever. Luckily, another officer managed to release me from the rather restrictive cuffs at this stage and I was so glad to get into the back of the cell where I could start reworking my circulation. At the end of the day, as a professional DJ who requires his hands for work, there is nothing worse than handcuff wounds and finger / thumb injuries… My thumb has never become right since that day. It’s a real challenge, spinning vinyl, when you’ve been tortured by police officers on so many occasions, directly on the parts of the body you need most to earn a living.

Unfortunately they wouldn’t shut the cell door and give me any peace and kept it open as, after waiting so long to get into the place there was a crazy rush to get me out. I was moved on by a fresh police officer straight out of the nick and into a more comfortable cage in the back of another van. No communications again as to where we were heading, why we were heading there, what was going on, but you expect it off the police. I recognised this copper from a previous detention and he seems a little more settled than the rampaging lot who had kidnapped me earlier in the evening.

Eventually we turned up at the secure mental hospital ward, Beechwood, St. Cadoc’s Hospital. Luckily an Ok nurse, my mate Mick was the nurse in charge for the evening. He could see that the coppers had had a right go at me and luckily as they released me into his custody he let me just have a wander off in ‘freedom, around the St. Cadoc’s grounds and garden outside the ward as he knew full well I wouldn’t be seeing any outside or nature for quite some time.

I was of course to be ‘treated’ by the criminal mental patient forensic police-employed Newport Central psychiatrist Dr Darryl Watts (see – #EoT category http://endofterror.org/?cat=191 ) for the duration of my detainment. Mick gave me one last privilege before I was sectioned as he humanely allowed me to phone Nicola, who thankfully was at home, alone, with doors locked, and safe. I had a cigarette to calm and then faced a junior shrink to get sectioned. god knows what for… to this day and post court hearings (Mental Health Review Tribunal) I do not know how the hell calling 999 to report a directly witnessed sex crime can be mental illness, yet if the police psychiatrist who is treating you is a convicted sex offender then I suppose it makes some sort of sense (as twisted as mental health logic goes).

I think that as much as I hate the police state that I believe one has to accept that it is a reality. With the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) being so useless, it is important for people to document crimes by the police publicly. At the end of the day, if the outright murders of Brazilian tourist, Jean Charles de Menezes, and newsagent, Ian Tomlinson, go completely unpunished then what hope is there for other police victims in the UK? History teaches us about the rise of Nazi Germany post-1933 and what resulted in that. The scariest thing for me was that one of the first groups of people Hitler exterminated as war broke out, were the mental patients. i think that they paved the way for the gypsies and jews and slavs etc that followed. Obviously modern psychiatry was born directly out of concentration camp science. We live in a repetition of history and early 21st century Britain is in danger of being remembered in the same way as 1930s Germany.

I’ve got plenty more episodes of this blog to release, equally traumatic, if not more so, and while ‘freedom’ allows I shall continue to fight for the truth and justice and the end of tyranny and evil in mental health and psychiatry.
to be continued…

Ps. they didn’t have an asthma pump in the police station or hospital so I had to wait for my partner to arrange visiting times and bring one in for me at which point it was confiscated as it hadn’t been prescribed by the psychiatrist in charge.

[This is part 2: READ PART 1 of this story thread here… http://endofterror.org/?p=512 ]

Immigrant Doctors on the NHS: A Good Thing or Bad Thing?

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Not wanting to sound the horn or anything, but: PEOPLE, THERE IS A GENERAL ELECTION COMING UP! Come May unless you adhere to Russell Brand’s non-voting strategy, then you could well be heading to the polling booth. We heard of ‘weaponising the NHS in the buildup and it looks like a weird old forthcoming election with the rise of UKIP and some pretty unsettling times here in the UK and indeed in the wider world.

I put a picture of Farage on this post as I have heard time and time again people citing immigration as a key issue. I am very pro-European in essence. As a Translation student and a man with a passion for foreign languages, I embrace the ‘otherness’ of cultures from abroad. I think that in expelling immigrants and abandoning the European we would instantly be cats back into the stone age. Immigration brings us a net benefit in terms of capital, cultural diversity and skills in the workplace, plus it would be rather difficult to study foreign languages in the education sector if all foreigners are thrown out à la Farage.

But, politics aside, immigration is a real issue. We hear of how our NHS is full of nurses and doctors from abroad. In fact, I believe that I am correct in saying that proportionally, the NHS employs more foreign workers than the average organisation.
I think that in healthcare, some of my pro-immigration views do distort. I can especially remember when my dying grandmother was in hospital. She came from a pre 1960s immigration boom generation. She was supporting an RAF pilot during WW2 and part of the incredible effort made by home soil women during that conflict. Her values and ideas were very old-fashioned and quite a bit different from my own. I felt a bit ashamed when she was openly cursing foreign NHS workers during her treatment. I found it a little rude, but, who am I to judge? I come from a more tolerant generation whose values have been shaped by a different set of problems and I live in a more or less totally globalised world. I wonder though, how the older, often politically silent generation feel about their healthcare needs being attended to by foreigners.

We are constantly told how our education and especially higher education system is among the best in the world. If that is the case, why can not one of our biggest national establishments, the NHS, fill its parole with home-born, home-educated, British doctors and nurses? Are we lacking in the educational field for medicine? Are salaries in the NHS really that dire? We recruit from abroad in our healthcare sectors. Doctors and Nurses who have trained up and learnt their craft in a different educational environment, in nations where we do not control the political systems and where life values are very much different.

I would argue that surgery is surgery and a surgeon, who is treating the body, usually of an unconscious patient, is either skilled and capable or not, wherever he has been taught medicine. He is not necessarily having to speak to a patient. He has no real need to understand them, and he has no real political power in terms of affecting that patient’s life, bar saving it from a scientific bodily perspective.

At the other end of the top pay-scale NHS bracket, however, is consultant psychiatrists. They have no surgical function. They allegedly ‘treat’ mental issues, which are societal in nature and where the medical science is extremely lacking. My argument against psychiatrists, is that they have much more scope for errors in judgement. A psychiatrist who makes poor decisions can cover up their mistakes with political obfuscation. Their failures are buried in the system. They take people’s liberty, have the facility to treat against consent and their process takes on average a much longer period. They have more long term impact on a patient’s life and can be severely disruptive even if they happen to be benefitting the patient. A surgeon who makes an error on the operating table has little recourse for excuse-making as the patient will usually directly have a major emergency issue or the health problem (where science is a lot more accurate) will not dissipate.

When you take into account the societal factors affecting mental illness and introduce immigrant psychiatrists to the equation we have a whole host of medical ethics issues. I can understand the internationalisation of academia, especially in today’s world. A medical degree in Prague, could carry equal weight as one from Delhi or London. Faculties exchange ideas, information and share resources. However, how can the value system of a a foreigner, born and brought up in a different land, be shaped as to fit the needs of patients in the host country?

Over the 18 years I’ve been in the UK mental health system, I can actually count the number of UK born, UK raised, UK qualified psychiatrists who have treated me on one hand. There has been a rainbow of different nationalities involved in the senior position of psychiatrist in my healthcare, which on the whole has been very suppressive and done entirely against my consent, involving large quantities of restricted liberty. I’ve had consultant psychiatrists from Sri Lanka (Dr Nirmalie Mirando), Poland (Dr Agnieszca Tyson) and my current one is from Iraq (Dr Nahla Jamil). Other psychiatrists who have treated me hail from Sudan (Dr. Ali, Dr. Ahmed), India / Pakistan (unknown – several), Egypt (Dr Nimkar) other African doctors. There is a multitude of senior professionals who have had a lot of power invested in them by the British system. I question the ability of these doctors to be subjective and to truly understand British values and the psychiatry of people who are nurtured in this country. Most of them only arrived on these shores post- qualification, as young adults. They know little about core UK cultural values and textbooks I’m afraid are no substitute for living the real British life. I find these foreigners to be often lacking in critical understanding of what it is to be British. Often their medical knowledge of their subject field is vastly superior to the British psychiatrists that I have encountered. However, these doctors can be quite irrational and lack understanding. If you had been educated and brought up in a civil war environment, or behind the depths of the Iron Curtain, or in a land where Jihadism is rife and governments are notable for their lack of organisation, how can you hope to understand the complex nature of the United Kingdom and its remnants of Empire? Perhaps it is these very remnants which leads these doctors here to practise in the first place?

I object to almost omnipotent unchecked power being awarded to foreign nationals, whatever their qualifications, as it leads to controversial issues which the almost childlike, trusting, naive nature of UK authorities cannot bring to heel. If these foreigners ever had malicious intent it would be far too easy for them to disrupt future generations of Britain through the suppressive nature of irresponsible legislation such as the Mental Health Act.

In the USA, they have a sensible law that states that the US President has to be a US born US citizen. Does this make the USA a racist, undemocratic country?

For or against foreigners in the NHS? I see the mental health branch of the NHS being an overall disgrace and believe that foreigners elevated to positions of power within it is a dangerous policy for senior NHS recruitment managers.

I don’t believe in force and enjoy the ideology of democracy so I won’t force my ideas down your throat. It’s just an experience-based opinion and despite being on the whole pro-immigration, I feel that there should be rational balances and checks in place to protect the native-born nationals of these Isles.

Happy Pills

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-6iM7HHRk8]

Well, some might argue that mental health meds are happy pills, certainly those dull enough to accept the marketing nonsense dished out by anti-depressant manufacturers… I’d say it’s more like suicide-in-a-box… Whatever floats your boat, Younger Brother certainly enjoy their ‘Happy Pills’. They’re a great band incidentally: An offshoot from Shpongle – and all their music will make your spine tingle with or without pills.

More Younger Brother: http://www.last.fm/music/Younger+Brother

Living With Schizophrenia – PART 1

1 Reply

Living with Schizophrenia Part 1 from End Of Terror on Vimeo.

This is the first part of my mental health story, explaining how I first came into contact with psychiatry in 1997 and the horrors I experienced during my first mental hospital incarceration. I plan to do a series of videos about mental health.

More http://endofterror.org

This was a video I did a couple of years ago. It was originally posted on my youtube but I had to take it down as it cost me a job. I had gone through the interview process and been appointed by Pharmya ( http://www.pharmya.com/ ), a pharmacovigilance company in the South of France. It would have been an interesting position, combining translation, interpreting, my language skills and also knowledge of medical industry, but the woman boss found this whilst googling and decided that she couldn’t employ me as a result.

Anyway, I like the fact that the video is the truth… You can run and hide from your past or you can live with it. My biggest goal in life is not to make money, or to travel, raise a family, fall in love etc… My primary goal is to sleep at night with a clean conscience. I feel that on the whole I manage to do that.

Since the making of this video my incurable ‘schizophrenia’ has actually been ‘cured’ and I have a new diagnosis that I haven’t even bothered to research bar a brief scan of wikipedia. I’m now apparently suffering from Schizo-Affective disorder which sort of buggers up the future episodes I plan to do for this series…

Enjoy the vid, any comments most welcomed… Hope I don’t lose any more work for putting it out into the ether…

‘Child porn’ doc: Limits imposed: Dr Darryl Watts

1 Reply

By This is Bristol | Posted: October 28, 2008

A psychiatrist who surfed the web for child pornography has been told he can only treat adults for the next 18 months. Dr Darryl Watts, 45, was suspended from practice for a year in April 2004 after he used the internet for up to 30 hours a week to look at obscene pictures of youngsters.

The General Medical Council (GMC) heard how the doctor from Hereford started his surfing habit after he was signed off work with depression while working at a large practice in Bristol.

Before his conviction, Watts had been based at Blackberry Hill Hospital, Fishponds, looking after adult NHS patients.

Watts, who qualified in Bristol in 1984, moved with his long-term partner to Hereford and joined Hereford primary care trust in January 2003, three months before his arrest.

Police raided his home as part of Operation Ricochet and seized his computer, which contained an image of a naked girl aged between five and seven in a sexual pose.

Watts was fined £1,500 by Hereford magistrates in August 2003 after admitting possession of an indecent photograph of a child under the age of 16. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender for five years and his computer was destroyed.

In October 2006, he was allowed to carry on working, provided he only treated adults.

He was removed from the sex offenders’ register in August this year and has not re-offended for three years.

But GMC panel chairman Ralph Bergmann this week said restrictions were still necessary because Watts still needed to demonstrate a further period of non-offending without the controls of the sex offenders’ register.

He said: “In your evidence you explained you viewed child pornography at a time when you were feeling depressed and were under considerable distress.

“While you stated in evidence that you regret what you have done, this panel is not convinced that you have the necessary level of insight into your offending behaviour and its consequences,” said Mr Bergmann.

“In addition, the panel has borne in mind that you were convicted of a very serious offence.

“This panel takes a serious view of the nature of this conviction and its implications for the maintenance of public trust and confidence in the medical profession.

“The panel notes that your name was only removed from the Sex Offenders’ Register as recently as August 2008.”

Placing restrictions on his registration for a further 18 months, Mr Bergmann told Watts he must follow his psychiatrist’s advice against over-working as he started a part-time consultancy job with Gwent Healthcare NHS trust in Newport in December.

As part of his new restrictions, Watts is only allowed to work with adults. The doctor is also only allowed to carry out four NHS sessions a week.

He must also notify his employers, or any future employers, of the restrictions on his practice.

Watts will have to return to the GMC in 18 months, when a conduct committee will decide whether further restrictions should be imposed.

Police Brutality and Mental Health – PART 1

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I have no criminal record. But, I have been in the mental health system of the UK since 1997 – 18 years to date. Unfortunately the name ‘health’ in ‘mental health’ is a misnomer. The mental health system is nothing but a secret prison system where people can be easily silenced and removed from society without appropriate balances and checks such as those that exist in the criminal justice system. The police have a very active role in mental health and very often the first people you see when you are sectioned under the mental health act are the police. They do not have to place you under arrest verbally. If you are diagnosed or under suspicion of having a mental health condition you can just be attacked by them, handcuffed and dragged off in the back of a van to either a police station – deemed as a ‘place of safety’ under the mental health act, or directly to a mental hospital, usually in the custody of police, direct to a secure mental hospital locked ward. There is an illusion in the public that you have to be seen by a judge or get legal assistance but the reality is that once TAKEN you usually have to wait 5 months in custody before going before a court of law. Those five months of non-consensual treatment and torture with no freedom at all are obviously hell.

Over the years the police have become more and more involved in my mental health treatment. I want to use End Of Terror to publicly address some of the worst brutality I have experienced from them. I feel I have a duty to the public to warn them as the police are very dangerous and can cause members of the public serious harm. They have been stepping up their militarisation here in the UK for a number of years now and I believe them to be a hardened criminal incorporation who believe they are exempt from the law.

In this post I will illustrate one example of brutality where I have photographic evidence. I have presented this case to the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) on a number of occasions. This body, however, is a sham and is not fit for purpose. The police escape punishment and never learn from their crimes.

The above scar comes from a stay in Newport Central Custody Suite – a ‘place of safety’ in the summer of 2011. I had been seized by police from my front garden after a transvestite neighbour who I didn’t get along with falsely reported me as streaking in the neighbourhood. I hadn’t been streaking at all. I was in my dressing gown and was minding my own business. The police turned up, stripped me naked and handcuffed me. I had recently been appointed a police forensic psychiatrist on my previous visit to Newport Central. This psychiatrist, Dr Darryl Watts, is a convicted criminal, convicted in 2003 of serious child sex offences. In 2011 (and still to this day to my knowledge) Watts was working for the police out of Newport Central. It sort of defies logic that the police should employ a convicted sex offender to work out of their station, but that is my opinion. It just proves the criminal mentality of Gwent police and how low they are prepared to stoop.

I was thrown naked into a cell, having been bundled out of the van. At last, I was free from the handcuffs. I didn’t have time to inspect my handcuff wounds, however. As per usual the custody sergeant gave me no access to a phone call either to family or to a solicitor. I was then kicked in the side by a forensic community nurse, Gareth Lane, who was Dr Darryl Watts’ partner in crime or second in command. The police refused to clothe me. I was then left alone in the cell with the convicted paedophile sex offender, Dr Darryl Watts. [See Daily Mail and Bristol Post]He was mouthing off repetitious nonsense, about me being the sickest person he has ever seen, some sort of mantra which I later discovered was part of his own plea to the judge during his trial and conviction years ago. Watts is obviously a mental patient himself and although under the treatment of a psychiatrist for diagnosed mental illness, he is allowed by the police to practise psychiatry.

Watts eventually left thank god, and although naked, I was allowed time to recuperate although without a toilet or any water, despite asking for hours for either a glass of water or to be able to go to the toilet, I was just left alone , naked. I wonder about deaths in custody and just exactly how many police prisoners in custody actually starve to death, die of thirst or suffocate in cells.

Police started gathering outside the cell as I could see them through the little glass window. I counted about 8 or 9 of them in all and could hear them egging each other on to psych themselves up for something.

The cell door open and the light switch was turned off. Officers started piling into the cell and that was the last thing I could remember. I awoke some time later in a secure ward – Beechwood Ward, at St Cadoc’s Hospital. As I awoke, I felt great pain in my side and I looked down on the bed and I had a deep cut running from my belly around my hip to my back.

I struggled up and asked a nurse on Beechwood how on earth I had gotten there and who had assaulted me. He said that the open wound was an old rugby injury but I had retired from rugby 20 years previously and hadn’t touched a ball since.

I had been placed under section and when I finally got a transfer for good behaviour off the secure ward to Talygarn Ward, County hospital, Griffithstown, Pontypool, I managed to smuggle in a mobile phone with a camera to take the photos of the injury that you can see in this post.

A friend who visited me and who was no stranger to police brutality himself, informed me that in his opinion the weapon used was an ‘extendy’ truncheon, a thin metal rodlike truncheon. To this day, however, I do not know what actually happened although I do know that a criminal police doctor was present at Newport Central that day. I do regard the matter as not only a serious physical assault but a sexual one also as I was naked the whole time and when you are naked in the company of sex offenders and rendered unconscious, God forbid what might have happened.

There was a camera in the cell that I was in and I later got a solicitor from the criminal justice system to obtain the footage for me so I could see how the assault was committed. However, the tape conveniently went missing and Gwent Police refused to hand it over.

After a while and having lost all my court hearings due to my psychiatrist – Dr Darryl Watts’ lies and nonsense, I eventually returned home and went back to my civilian life. However, it wasn’t long before the police stepped up their act and went a few stages further in their brutality….

I was lucky on this occasion to have escaped with my life. I am scarred for life physically yet the worst scars are the mental ones. When you are treated by police officers in this way it puts you in a difficult situation mentally whenever you are unfortunate enough to encounter them. When I see them in public, at train stations or driving past in the street, I experience levels of fear and stress and anger that are indescribable. I do not believe that the police are human and think that they are a sub-species.

(to be continued)

[This is part 1: READ PART 2 of this story thread here… http://endofterror.org/?p=650 ]

Psychiatrist who surfed web looking for child porn and violence free to work with children again: Dr Darryl Watts

1 Reply

By Daily Mail Reporter
UPDATED: 12:34, 4 May 2010

A psychiatrist who surfed the web to look at depraved pictures of youngsters is free to work with children again.

Dr Darryl Watts blamed stress and depression after he spent up to 30 hours a week on the internet looking at images of violence and indecent pictures of young girls.

In April 2003 police raided his home and seized Watts’ computer which contained an image of a naked girl aged between five and seven years old in sexual poses.

Watts was fined £1,500 by Hereford Magistrates after admitting possession of an indecent photograph of a child under the age of 16.

He was also ordered to register as a sex offender for five years and his computer was destroyed.

Watts was suspended for a year by the GMC and later banned from working with children.

But the Hereford-based doctor has successfully appealed for the restrictions to be lifted.

He blamed the stress of a 70,000-patient workload at the Blackberry Hill Hospital, Bristol, for his behaviour.

Watts told the hearing: ‘I began to get into a frame of mind where I began to hate my failings and my shortcomings.

‘I began to get very negative thoughts about myself and dislike myself significantly.

‘When I had time off work because I was not coping I became more introverted.

‘At that time I started to use the internet and I used it to look at things that were horrible images.

‘That seemed to validate what I was feeling in here, in myself. I looked at things to do with suicide and I looked at horrible images of people being hurt or maimed, car crashes, bombings. I did see something to do with Lady Diana.

‘These images were in some way an external representation of what I was feeling inside. Along with the looking at some images of child pornography as well.’

When asked if the child images were sexual he said ‘certainly not.’

In January 2003 Watts moved from the Bristol hospital to a Hereford clinic with his partner Jackie Valentine.

He was caught in Operation Ricochet run by Avon and Somerset Constabulary to combat child porn on the internet and one stored image was found on his computer.

Watts added: ‘I’m so, so sorry I have done it. It won’t happen again. What I did supports the procurement of these sorts of pictures.’

The doctor now works part time at a clinic in Newport as well as running a bed and breakfast in Harewood End, Herefordshire, with his partner.

He spends his spare time cleaning toilets and making beds, he said.

The GMC panel agreed Watts, of Handley Cross House, Harewood End, Herefordshire, could now practice again without restriction.

His governing body found the doctor’s fitness to practise was no longer impaired.

GMC chairman Dr Timothy Ross said: ‘The panel accepts that you now have clear insight into the effects of your behaviour on yourself, your patients, the profession and on victims of abuse.

‘The testimonial evidence is that you have retained the confidence of your professional colleagues and that your clinical competence is not in doubt.

‘The panel is confident that a fair-minded member of the public, if in full possession of the facts would not conclude that it is necessary in the public interest to continue to restrict your registration.

‘The medical evidence indicates that there are no concerns regarding your health and also the reports from your workplace supervisors confirm that you continue to work as a competent and caring doctor, working solely in adult psychiatry, who commands the confidence of his professional colleagues.

‘Talking all factors into account, the panel has determined that your fitness to practise is not now impaired.

‘Having reached that conclusion, the panel hereby revokes the current order of conditions with immediate effect.’

End Of Terror – Under Attack: Why the early #EoT movement collapsed

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Back in 2011, when the End Of Terror movement was launched, I felt that the project was great. It was just what I personally needed to do in order to address my mental health treatment issues. I felt that #EoT was fulfilling my vision of antipsychiatry on several levels. Building and running the site was therapeutic for me and I also felt that by getting my own voice heard and giving my patient’s perspective of treatment here in South Wales, I would also be helping other mental health victims across the world, in seeking ways to address their own issues with mental health.

Unfortunately, when you take an anti-establishment stance, it is never easy. I am a lone voice, fighting an established massively rich and powerful, money-making system that spans the globe. Drugs companies force through their agenda and governments fully support mental health agendas. That it is individual patients that are suppressed is no surprise. I realise that any voice of dissent has to be crushed by the Mental Health authorities as there is too much for them to potentially lose.

End Of Terror was quickly discovered by my psychiatric team. They decided that by building and running End Of Terror, it was a symptom of my mental illness and I was locked away in the local mental hospitals. Inside these hospitals it is particularly difficult to build and maintain a website when you are banned from using a computer and have no internet access. All the momentum of End Of Terror was lost and I was kept away from the project long enough for my enthusiasm to dissipate. I appreciated that it was a dangerous thing to do: to confront the very system that was oppressing me, and to confront it directly and publicly using the net.

I felt that #EoT had a fun element to it. It incorporated music and entertainment alongside more serious articles on Mental Health and Human Rights. It also covered some of the wackier details of my own treatment and experiences. I believe that psychiatry needs to be opened up and put under the microscope so that it can be exposed for the dark pseudoscience that it is. End Of Terror’s goal: To Fight for Truth and Justice and the end of Evil and Tyranny in Mental Health and Psychiatry – had this aim and I believe, had launched well and was succeeding.

I’ve kind of let the project gather cobwebs and run into the ground since. I’ve maintained a slight twitter presence http://twitter.com/endofterror

And I’ve also fought the hackers etc who have attempted to destroy the movement’s website – it attracts far more attention than any other website I build and maintain.

In December 2014, I discovered, in my counter-intelligence operations, that the forensic psychiatrist responsible for destroying the End Of Terror movement, was in fact a convicted paedophile. Dr Darryl Watts had been exposed in newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Bristol Post . I felt felt truly sickened that I had been forcibly treated by this psychiatrist and also that #EoT had been destroyed by such a heinous criminal.

I recently decided that it was time to resurrect the movement fully. I never got to the point of expressing all that I had intended at the time of the #EoT creation. I feel that now, in 2015, it is time to carefully resurrect End Of Terror.

I’m just rebuilding and redesigning the whole layout so you’ll have to bear with me as the site redefines its content, old and new. I will post on a less regular basis as previously, so that the whole movement is more sustainable. There’s been plenty more suppression from the mental health system since that point – indeed it has intensified fully, so there will be lots of exciting, new, relevant content.

Welcome back! Here’s to the future.

Mental Health Act (UK)

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End Of Terror

Well, like it or lump it, as we stand the Mental Health Act is an Act of Parliament. The United Kingdom is a democracy so I understand and we, the British people have voted for this act. Personally I feel that this act has ruined my life. It is an interesting read, whatever your views, and if we wish to bring our campaign to a wider audience, to broaden the understanding of Mental Health, then, equally, it is a very important thing to study. I know that before I was first sectionned I hadn’t even heard of it. There are various aspects to the Act and discussing them will be an ongoing concern of End Of Terror. Have a read of it and see for yourselves exactly what it entails. As with any law or act, the interpretation and application of the law is relevant. Is the Mental Health Act just, or not? As someone deemed to be of unsound mind who has been denied a vote in this democracy (1997). I am not really capable of passing serious judgement. If democracy is real and hasn’t been hijacked by the doublethink word renovation brigade, then maybe End Of Terror can persuade people for this Act to be abolished, or at least seriously renovated, to take into consideration Human Rights and other important fundamental aspects of life on this planet. I am constantly told by workers within the system that all they do is legal because of this Act: that it supercedes any previous legislation and is entirely compatible with the Human Rights Act, which is another Parliamentary Act, that, perhaps, we can discuss in the future.

Here is the link to the Act at the UK Government department of Health website http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Legislation/Actsandbills/DH_4002034

Chemical Warfare On Humans

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Natural News Article Link

I’m a 14 year veteran of Psychiatric services in the UK having had 10 forced admissions and have had most of the drugs mentionned here (in article below) and indeed more. It’s an accurate article based on my own research and experiences. The trouble is, as a patient, there is no get-out clause at all. The worst form of human rights violations in history, all for the sake of profit and power. When you factor in that, the practicionners of the pseudoscience of psychiatry, the doctors, the nurses, the police, are all fully prepared to lie to whatever extent to maintain patients fully in the system, patients with no rights to consenting to the drugs, you have a serious danger. People are having lifelong illnesses created for them by the drugs companies, they become unemployable in every aspect of society and the media do nothing but stir up mass hysteria about mental illness to ensure that profits increase. Most of the original research came straight out of Nazi Germany and the implementation of the system on a global scale is pretty much akin to most of the horrific ideologies of such barbaric regimes. I’d like to sound optimistic about these problems having a nice happy solution but I am realistic and until the Genetic agenda is satisfied and the goals of the people working in the entire system are met, those unfortunate enough to end up with an incurable diagnosis have no choice in their suffering. We live in dark times. I guess I just wait now for the prototype brain implant to come to me, if it hasn’t already been put in yet. To what end? That is what I’d really love to know.

http://www.naturalnews.com/011353_bad_medicine_psychiatric_drug.html?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150217128877837_21055098_10150429138757837#f3b5193c88

Mind Freedom International

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Mind Freedom International

Mind Freedom International is a non-profit human rights organization working to change the mental health system. MFI is a non-violent activist group that advocates for truth, freedom, equality, and human rights in the mental health system!

http://www.mindfreedom.org/

I thought it would be a good idea to mention this organisation. In scouting about the web for organisations that could support psychiatry victims I landed upon this US-Based organisation and signed up to their newsletters and updates. I get a nice little letter through the post every so often. They take a proactive approach to patient support and although I haven’t directly used their services, it has been an intention to get involved somehow. I especially like the way they support campaigns for inpatients who are right in the mire of detention and enforced treatment. They operate worldwide and have branches throughout, even in Africa. I won’t witter on and on as it is their job to discuss their mission and goals. Surf over to their site and see for yourself. It is a valuable resource and will assist in achieving the End Of Terror.

Fighting for Truth and Justice and the End of Tyranny and Evil in Mental Health and Psychiatry