Nazi Psychiatric fascism? Diagnostic Statistical Manual, DSM

[festival of snickers]

[xmasdale]

Facecrime - By Doug Hornig
November 13, 2010 "Lew Rockwell" --
In late September, there was a modest gathering of law enforcement officers, military personnel, and mental health professionals in the small western New York town of Hamburg. It was totally ignored by the mainstream media, with just a reporter from the Buffalo News on hand to record the proceedings. Lucky for us.
The 120 men and women were attending the International First Responder-Military Symposium, held at Hilbert College, a small “Franciscan tradition” place of learning. Not that St. Francis would have been interested in a military symposium, but if he’d been able to attend, he’d have heard all about a new technology that will help identify and track “terrorists.”
A lot of very disparate people have been tagged with that term of late. But this new tech may well be the final icing on the cake. It’s a computer program that trawls phone conversations, emails, and social networking sites looking for any signs of resentment of the government.
That’s right. If you’re angry at Washington, they want to know who you are and what you’re saying.
The program has just been rolled out, and there’s no certainty that the cops or the Pentagon will jump at the chance to own it. But in the current climate, what’s the likelihood that they’ll turn up their noses at the opportunity to add this valuable weapon to their anti-terrorist arsenal?
Mathieu Guidere of the University of Geneva is co-developer of the software, along with Dr. Newton Howard, director of MIT’s Mind Machine Project. Guidere said it works by pinpointing “resentment in conversations through measurements in decibels and other voice biometrics,” and that it “detects obsessiveness with the individual going back to the same topic over and over, measuring crescendos.” With written material, it hunts for a similar fixation on the subject.
Chillingly, Guidere added that once this dangerous individual has been identified, the information can be passed along to authorities so surveillance can begin........
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26810.htm

[Thermate911]

Point taken - but it's just another ramping up of the fear level as is this:-

[TonyGosling]

PSYCHIATRIC FASCISM
by Don Weitz
Toronto, Ontario
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/weitz2.htm

For almost 150 years, psychiatry has been masquerading as a medical science and as a branch of medicine. It is not and never was a science or a type of health care. Modern psychiatry is driven by unproved empirical assumptions, medical biases, and pseudo-scientific opinions. There are no scientifically established, independently proven facts in psychiatry. Psychiatry, in fact, has no laws or testable hypotheses and no coherent and comprehensive theory. Psychiatry conspicuously lacks scientific proof or evidence to support its news-media-parroted claims of "mental illness" or "disorders".

After about seventy years of psychiatric practices and research, there is still no diagnostic test for schizophrenia or any of the other three hundred so-called mental disorders listed in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is essentially a list of class-driven moral judgements of allegedly abnormal behaviour, published and propagandized by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM is the official bible of organized psychiatry. The DSM is the equivalent of the Malleus Maleficarum in the middle ages, which Spanish inquisitors used to identify, target, stigmatize and burn witches and heretics. Today's witches, heretics, and scapegoats are labeled mentally ill or schizophrenic.

Hospital psychiatry with its emphasis on the control of inmate behaviour through high risk behaviour modification programs, biological "treatments", physical and mechanical restraints, locked doors and wards, and seclusion/isolation rooms, have always exhibited several fascist elements. I want to focus on three: fear, force and fraud. These are the guiding principles and policies used to control citizens and groups in the population whom government leaders and other authorities, including the police and so-called mental health experts, have judged to be dissident, problematic or difficult to control. Hospital psychiatry is very similar to the prison system. In the prison or correctional system psychiatrists have been used as consultants to design dangerous, unethical behaviour modification programs and to conduct high risk drug experiments on prisoners. Both the psychiatric system and the prison system systematically use fear, force and fraud for the purpose of social control and punishment - not for purposes of treatment or rehabilitation, both of which are euphemisms. It is or should be obvious that forced treatment is in fact punishment. It is frequently cruel and usual and should therefore be banned in the United States under that nation's Eighth constitutional amendment. Virtually all treatments in psychiatric facilities are forced or administered without informed consent. They are administered against the "patient's" (the prisoner's) will or with consent obtained by threatening the "patient" with worse consequences, or with consent obtained by keeping the "patient" unaware of important information about serious risks and alternatives. Informed consent in psychiatry is a cruel sham. It doesn't exist.

Fear/Terror - "Terror acts powerfully upon the body through the medium of the mind and should be employed in the cure of madness. Fear accompanied with pain and the sense of shame has sometimes cured the disease". That was written almost two centuries ago in 1818 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, father of American psychiatry, and the first president of the APA, whose face still appears on the official seal of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Rush advocated and practiced terror by designing and using the straitjacket, the tranquilizer chair and "fear of death" on numerous inmates in 19th century lunatic asylums. Rush once had his son locked up in an insane asylum - some father!

Fear is a powerful motivator in enforcing conformity, obedience and making people submit to authority. Historically, inducing and manipulating fear or masked terror has always been a key policy and practice in all fascist regimes, such as Italy under Mussolini, Nazi Germany under Hitler, and the Soviet Union under Stalin - in fact, under any dictatorship. The threat of punishment, torture and the threat of being killed is enough to cause fear, panic, and terror if most of us. We do as we're told or else.

As used in psychiatry, fear or terror is more selective but is widespread and powerful. In the institution, psychiatry frequently resorts to blackmail to control the more "uncontrollable" and difficult or non-compliant patient. Psychiatrists and other therapists threaten their patients with longer incarceration, higher doses of forced neuroleptics or "antidepressants", and/or threatened transfers to more severe maximum security institutions if they misbehave, fail to follow doctors' orders, refuse to take their "medication", refuse to follow institutional rules, or annoy their captors in other ways. Generally aimed at captive populations of involuntary patients, these threats typically strike fear in many of them, and psychiatrists know it. For example, some years ago, several patients and former patients of Queen Street Mental Health Centre, Toronto's notorious mental hospital or psycho-prison, told me and other activist-critics that psychiatrists have threatened, if they didn't calm down or control themselves, to transfer them to Penetang, the Oakridge division of Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre, a maximum security behaviour modification facility in Ontario, known for its harsh and brutal environment. Penetang was and still is recognized as punishment, one of the most barbaric psycho-prisons in Canada. It should have been shut down years ago, especially after a scathing report about many of its abuses by psychiatrist Steven Harper.

Threatening patients with physical restraints or solitary confinement is also extremely effective in arousing fear or panic in patients. On virtually every psychiatric ward or unit, there is a place, euphemistically called "The Quiet Room", a barren and forbidden cell-like room, with a mattress or sink, usually no toilet or blankets. While languishing the quiet room, patients are sometimes further restrained by leather cuffs, two-point and four-point restraints, tightly wrapped around their wrists and/or ankles so they can barely move, for hours at a time. The mere threat of loss of freedom, involuntary committal, or being locked up in a psychiatric ward or institution against your will, and without any trial or public hearing, is enough to frighten most of us. In virtually every province and territory in Canada, these are the main criteria or reasons for being locked up or committed to a psychiatric institution: judgement of mental illness or disorder; judgement of threatening to physically hurt yourself or another person; judgement of being unable to look after yourself. Note that these criteria are subjective moral judgements of dissident behaviour based on observation and opinion, not medical or scientific facts. Despite the fact that mental illness or mental disorder, which in my opinion is a metaphor for dissidence, has never been officially classified as a medical disease or illness, only physicians are legally authorized to make these non-medical and fateful judgements.

In Ontario, any doctor can sign a committal form which forces an individual to be locked up in any psychiatric facility for the first 72 hours for observation and assessment. Two other doctors can sign a form authorizing an individual's imprisonment for another 2-4 weeks. During the last few years, approximately 50% of thousands of people treated in Ontario's nine psychiatric hospitals were involuntarily committed.

The threat or fact of losing your freedom being locked up in a psychiatric facility for days or months at a time is terrifying. The minimal or non-existent advocacy currently provided in Ontario makes the right to appeal or protest a sham, and this serves to heighten people's fear and despair. The mere threat of forced psychiatric treatment as well as the treatment itself can be terrorizing - e.g., electroshock, also called electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), but more accurately called electro-convulsive brainwashing by shock survivor critics such as Leonard Frank. My close friend Mel told me of being dragged by several aids along the hallway to a hospital shockroom. I can imagine his terror and the terror of others who suffered the same fate. I suffered a similar terror when I was forcibly subjected to over 50 subcoma insulin shocks in the 1950s. To the surprise of many people, this barbaric brain-damaging and memory destroying treatment not only exists, but is expanding in Canada and the United States. Its main targets are women and the elderly, particularly elderly women.

There is also the threat of psychiatric drugs, euphemistically called "medication". These chemicals such as minor tranquilizers, antidepressants and the anti-psychotics such as Haldol, Modicate, Thorazine, and the so-called mood modifier Lithium, are not natural substances but are manufactured poisons, aptly called neurotoxins by psychiatrist and psychiatry critic Peter Breggin in several of his books and Joseph Glenmullen, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in his book Prozac Backlash. These chemicals have no scientifically proven medical value or benefit. What they do is control or subdue any problematic or disturbing behaviour, mood and emotion. These toxins, particularly neuroleptics like Haldol, Modicate, Chlorpromazine, are so disabling, powerful and fearsome that many psychiatric survivors and other critics call them chemical lobotomies or chemical straitjackets. These drugs have many serious and disabling effects, called "side effects" to minimize how they are perceived, such as trembling, uncontrollable shaking or movement of the hands or other parts of the body (which occur in the neurological disorder such as Parkinsonism or tardive dyskenisia), powerful muscular cramps, blurred vision, restless pacing, nightmares, sudden outbursts of anger, agitation, memory loss, fainting, blood disorders, seizures, and sudden death. These so-called side effects are the drugs' intended effects. This fear of psychiatric drugs is compounded by ignorance and uncertainty, because psychiatrists and other doctors fail to inform patients of the drugs' horrific effects.

Without the use or threat of force, fascism could not exist. Machiavelli, Mussolini, Hitler knew this. All dictators, would-be dictators, and bullies know this basic fact. And this is the case with psychiatry. Without the use and threat of force, institutional psychiatry would die. Lots of psychiatrists would be out of a job. I wish that would happen! Psychiatry gets its authority and power to force, imprison, involuntarily commit, and treat individuals against their will from the state.

Mental health legislation gives psychiatrists and other physicians the power to involuntarily commit any person they "believe", after only minutes of examination, to be dangerous to themselves or others. This is problematic. The Mental Health Act wrongly assumes that doctors can predict dangerous and violent behaviour, which they cannot do. It is worth emphasizing that Ontario's Mental Health Act, as with other mental health acts across Canada and the United States, legally sanction the state to use force to detain or imprison people for days, weeks or months at a time. Unfortunately, there has never been a public outcry or protest over the fact that people judged or assumed to be crazy or dangerous, but not charged with any crime, can nevertheless be locked up without a trial or the legal rights accorded to people charged with crimes such as murder or rape. This is prevention detention, which is illegal in Canada and other so-called democratic countries, but it is legal and a common practice in all police states and totalitarian countries. I know of no lawsuit challenge to involuntary committal as preventive detention and therefore as unconstitutional.

In institutional psychiatry in fascist states, forced treatment is the rule, not the exception. Forced treatment and tortuous terminal medical experiments inflicted on thousands of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners, women and children, were carried out in death camps during World War II throughout Nazi Germany. There is now irrefutable, documentary evidence that it was the German psychiatrists, particularly prominent professors of psychiatry, and psychiatry department heads, who were chiefly responsible for initiating and administering the infamous T4 program, which involved the mass murder of over 200,000 mental patients and thousands of sick and disabled children and adults during the holocaust. The term euthanasia and mercy death to describe this murderous program is a cruel euphemism.

Much of biological psychiatry, which is largely based on unproved assumptions about the biological and genetic causes of schizophrenia and other mental disorders, can be traced back to the racist, eugenics-driven psychiatrist in Nazi Germany, Ernst Rudin, who propagated the myth that schizophrenia is a genetic disease. He, along with hundreds of other psychiatrists in the T4 program of mass murder of psychiatric patients, is still cited in some psychiatric journal articles, as documented by researcher-activist Lenny Lapon in his brilliant book, Mass Murderers in White Coats: Psychiatric Genocide in Nazi Germany. He states that several German psychiatrists from the Nazi era emigrated to the United States and Canada and succeeded in indoctrinating many of his colleagues in his biological, genetic and racist theories of mental illness. Heinz Layman who emigrated to Canada in 1937, is chiefly responsible for introducing Thorazine or Chlorpromazine, and propagated the use of psychiatric drugs in Canada.

We now have an epidemic of brain damage caused by psychiatric drugs, partly due to Layman and all the other doctors he taught. In one 1954 journal article, Layman admitted that Thorazine was a "pharmacological substitute for lobotomy". Despite publicly acknowledging this alarming fact, it never stopped Layman from using it on many "schizophrenic" patients in Montreal's Douglas Hospital. Layman also persuaded Ewen Cameron to administer chlorpromazine and many other drugs and massive amounts of electroshock. Chlorpromazine, considered an experimental drug at the time, was widely used on many patients during Cameron's infamous brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute in the 1950s and 1960s.

There was no informed consent then, and there is none now. During the Nazi years, the doctors didn't seek permission. According to Nazi ideology, these were "useless eaters", "subhumans". This is a mindset that still rules in biological psychiatry throughout North America. Another legacy of psychiatry in Nazi Germany is the widespread acceptance and justification of abuse to break the will of non-compliant or rebellious patients. Physical or mechanical restraints such as straps, ropes, belts, handcuffs and solitary confinement are used in psychiatric institutions not to treat or protect but to punish people for dissident or rebellious behaviour. It is this naked display of force and threats against patients by hospital staff which resembles the awesome brutality of German psychiatric staff during the holocaust.

Fraud: A very apt quote by Leonard Roy Frank, author of Influencing Minds is "Mystification is psychiatry's defense against the danger of being found out". Many of the labels or diagnoses used by psychiatrists do not refer to real psychiatric problems or to actual illnesses. Psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz has exposed the fraud and the myth of the concept of mental illness in many books, starting with his classic The Myth of Mental Illness. This misrepresentation one of the greatest scientific scandals in our scientific age. The code words that are now used in biological psychiatry such as anti-depressants do not assist people with overcoming depression or get at the causes of depression. The term "Quiet Room" is a fraudulent code for solitary confinement. The word "medication" is also a misleading euphemism and misrepresentation for toxic substances to which many of us have been subjected.

I've tried to show that institutional, coercive psychiatry has a fascist history and that biological psychiatry as practiced today in psychiatric facilities in Canada and the United States is still based on fear, force and fraud. Psychiatry does not deserve public or government support. We must work to abolish psychiatry. We must also continue working to create self-help advocacy groups, more drop-in centers, and more affordable, supportive housing in our communities. We need to create our own alternatives to the monstrous and evil mental health system. By doing this, we empower ourselves. This is our work, our challenge, and our hope.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Psychiatric fascism: notes from the underground
Thursday, November 12, 2015 7:08
http://and-picture.beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/11/psychiatric-f ascism-notes-from-the-underground-3242016.html

Psychiatric fascism: notes from the underground

by Jon Rappoport November 12, 2015

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

These are wide-ranging quotes from my work-in-progress, The Underground. They take up the subject of psychiatry, the absurd pseudoscience licensed by the State.

“Since there are no definitive physical tests for any of the 300 officially certified mental disorders—no blood tests, no urine tests, no brain scans, no genetic assays—what we’re left with is a phantasm-map of Nowhere Land, a philosophy of limitation. A translation of human problems and suffering into a professional liar’s language, a made-up nonsensical technical gibberish. And the federal government licenses this as a monopoly.”

“Whenever you come across a pseudoscience, you’re looking at a mask that covers an ideology. And that ideology intends to limit freedom, the free person, the free soul, the free mind, the free psyche, the free creative impulse.”

“Modern psychiatry is an updated version of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program, adjusted for the masses.”

“Psychiatry is basically a mechanism to control people who are dissatisfied, disaffected, rebellious, independent, thoughtful; and then, secondarily, a mechanism to control those who just want to surrender their lives to an external authority and can’t believe in religion anymore. Instead of a priest and a church, they have drugs.”

“If Huxley’s Brave New World is the mountaintop of controlled society, with its genetic manipulations and laboratory births, psychiatry is its ancestor, rambling around in the foothills, pretending to define so-called mental disorders, handing out toxic drugs, giving people electric shocks, performing lobotomies. Psychiatry is the crazy grandfather.”

“Psychiatry is a system of arbitrary definitions. When you get past all the pseudo-technical nonsense, you’re looking at mind control—the attempt to make people believe consciousness is composed of 300 disorders.”

“Psychiatry is a state-of-mind prison for society. You can have this state of mind or that one, and after we treat you, you can have a normal state of mind.”

“But, actually, consciousness is up for grabs. You can have any state of mind you want to. No labels. Does that sound frightening? You’re supposed to feel frightened and crawl back into a little hole. That’s the game.”

“Psychiatry is just another organized religion. Instead of a wafer and a sip of wine, they have drugs. Lots of drugs. Their cosmology is a picture they paint, the subject of which is a paradise called Normal. Sane. Average. By their average definitions.”

“Psychiatry would like to be known as some kind of ultimate information theory. But information theory is what the loser in a poker game is left with. It’s all he’s got, so he has to go out on the street and try to sell it, hypnotize people with it. Pure scrubbed data, as empty and dead as the face of an old politician.”

“Today’s psychiatrists are playing around with brain signals. They have no idea what the mind is. No idea what consciousness is. No idea what freedom is. They have no idea how different individuals would be from one another if they broke out of the collective prison of The Normal.”

“The Wizard of Psychiatry is a hustler from way back. His job is to make Normal plausible.”

“Everything a human being is starts to come into view when he gets rid of Normal.”

“Psychiatry and its government, media, and intelligence-agency allies are saying, ‘See that crazy killer over there? Anybody could turn into that. Even you. So we have to treat the whole population before somebody starts spraying bullets in your neighborhood. We have to sculpt everybody into a good citizen, an average person.’”

“Psychiatry is the Surveillance Society of the brain. The NSA with toxic drugs.”

“Psychiatry is State control of emotion and thought. And its poor cousin, psychology, has become sentimental hokum for the rubes. Slop.”

“At the bottom of his titanic pile of nonsense, the Wizard of Psychiatry is saying, ‘You’re not free.’ But you are.”

“Sixty years ago, a hundred years ago, there was an idea in America. The Open Road. Travel the open road. Adventure. Psychiatry is one of the disciplines that’s tried to shut it down.”

“There never was, and never will be, a science of consciousness, because by its very nature, consciousness is free and unpredictable. Many people find this hard to swallow, because they fear freedom and hate it. They know they’ve lost it somewhere, and they don’t want anyone else to have it.”

exit from the matrix

“We live in a wilderness of bad poetry and overblown sentimental attachments. Or to put it another way, more and more people are attaching themselves to heraldic promises of salvation and rescue from their problems and the problems of the world. The theme is constant: some thing, some force, some being, some power is going to appear and change the world. This is entitlement on a grand scale. At the core it’s surrender of self and surrender of creative power. ‘I want to read the book of my life, I don’t want to write it.’”

“Psychiatry is the action of painting false pictures inside the mind, and obtaining obedience to those images. It’s imposed reality-invention. Meanwhile, under the tons of false information and propaganda that pervade life, the individual is, in fact, intensely creative; he is perfectly capable of inventing and fleshing out his own reality.”

“The real future, the future people run away and hide from, isn’t one state or condition or cosmology. It’s open. It’s the paralleling and intersecting of millions and millions of realities consciously invented by free individuals. No one can predict what this looks like. It isn’t a system. It isn’t an overall design. It isn’t a planned society. It has zero value for the meddlers who fervently believe in one unified shape.”

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Filed under: Medical Fraud, Psychiatry Fraud, Underground Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/



Source: https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/psychiatric-fascism-note s-from-the-underground/

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

There's no proper scientific definition for mental illness

PSYCHIATRY IN SOCIETY
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (Zeynep Tufekci | TEDGlobal>NYC) https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_jus t_to_make_people_click_on_ad

[TonyGosling]

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (German: Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus) is a 1933 book by Wilhelm Reich, in which the author explores how fascists come into power, and explains their rise as a symptom of sexual repression.
The authoritarian family as the first cell of the fascist society[edit]
Chapter V contains the famous statement that the family is the first cell of the fascist society:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism




From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation. In this connection, the findings of Morgan and of Engels are still entirely correct.


The question at the heart of Reich's book was this: why did the masses turn to authoritarianism even though it is clearly against their interests?[5] Reich set out to analyze "the economic and ideological structure of German society between 1928 and 1933" in this book.[6] In it, he calls Bolshevism "red fascism", and groups it in the same category as Nazism.

Reich argued that the reason Nazism was chosen over communism was sexual repression. As children, members of the proletariat had learned from their parents to suppress sexual desire. Hence, in adults, rebellious and sexual impulses caused anxiety. Fear of revolt, as well as fear of sexuality, were thus "anchored" in the character of the masses. This influenced the irrationality of the people, Reich would argue:[5]

Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.[5]

Reich noted that the symbolism of the swastika, evoking the fantasy of the primal scene, showed in spectacular fashion how Nazism systematically manipulated the unconscious. A repressive family, a baneful religion, a sadistic educational system, the terrorism of the party, and economic violence all operated in and through individuals' unconscious psychology of emotions, traumatic experiences, fantasies, libidinal economies, and so on, and Nazi political ideology and practice exacerbated and exploited these tendencies.[6]

For Reich, fighting fascism meant first of all studying it scientifically, which was to say, using the methods of psychoanalysis. He believed that reason—alone able to check the forces of irrationality and loosen the grip of mysticism—is also capable of playing its own part in developing original modes of political action, building on a deep respect for life, and promoting a harmonious channeling of libido and orgastic potency. Reich proposed "work democracy", a self-managing form of social organization that would preserve the individual's freedom, independence, and responsibility and base itself on them.[6]

[TonyGosling]

'I went from being a teacher with a first class degree to losing my power of speech': New mother reveals how she was drugged and locked up in solitary confinement until she became suicidal after she was diagnosed with autism
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6349939/Mother-reveals-drugge d-suicidal-diagnosed-autism.html

Alexis Quinn, 34, was diagnosed with autism four years ago and went to an ATU
At the Autism Treatment Unit in the south of England she was restrained 97 times
After trying to escape Alexis was put in solitary confinement and tried to kill self
She ran away from rehab centre with help of GP and is now teaching in Nigeria
By ALEXIS QUINN FOR MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:08, 3 November 2018 | UPDATED: 22:08, 3 November 2018

All my life, I’ve known I was different. As a child, I would develop all-consuming interests, poring obsessively over a subject such as the kings and queens of England until my fixation waned and then I would move on to the next thing.

When I grew older, these obsessive tendencies helped me excel at my favourite sport, swimming.

I became so good that I swam for my country on numerous occasions before retiring due to injury. I loved swimming’s precision, from the carefully calculated biomechanics of each stroke to the timing, measured in hundredths of a second, as well as the way the water felt as I moved through it.

There are other differences between me and most people, too. I experience sights, sounds and touch with incredible intensity.

I can often hear what people are saying in another room when a regular person would just hear a murmur.

My skin is very sensitive, so I feel every fibre of the clothing I’m wearing. And I find it difficult to interpret people’s body language, which can sometimes make social interaction difficult.

This all began to make sense, when four years ago, aged 30, I was diagnosed with autism. It finally helped me to understand who I am: my obsessions, the excruciating sensory overloads I can suffer when everything feels too much, and the meltdowns they lead to.

My parents – a prison officer and a police officer who are both retired now – have always been wonderfully supportive of me and my ‘quirks’. I’d achieved a first class degree in education and had been working as a teacher in Tokyo, but when my brother died suddenly I found myself struggling to cope.

At about the same time, I moved back to Britain, changed jobs and became a mother to my beautiful daughter.

I was living with my family, but I felt overwhelmed. I sought help from my GP and after a year and a half of misdiagnosis and mistreatment I was lucky that an autism specialist witnessed one of my meltdowns and recognised my condition immediately. A specialist autism psychiatrist diagnosed me officially after a lengthy assessment while I was an in-patient.

She explained that there was nothing wrong with me, but that my brain functioned differently and that I would need to learn to work with it.

I needed support, so I was told about an autism assessment and treatment unit – an ATU – in the south of England and decided to go there for a three-month assessment as a voluntary patient.

The mother-of-one was told she wasn't allowed to go outside when she arrived at the centre, even though running was a major part of her daily routine and helps to calm her down (stock) +4
The mother-of-one was told she wasn't allowed to go outside when she arrived at the centre, even though running was a major part of her daily routine and helps to calm her down (stock)

I arrived in December 2014 and my nightmare began that very first day. When I admitted myself, everything was taken from me, including the phone I used to communicate with my daughter and parents who lived more than 200 miles away. I was searched, then left with only the clothes I was wearing, one extra T-shirt and some underwear.

An hour after arriving, I asked if I could go for a walk. I like to think that autistic people are the most sensitive in the world. Small changes can upset us. We thrive on routine, predictability, control and sameness. It’s how we cope with the blinding intensity of the world around us.

I’ve run several marathons and find that walking and running at the same times every day helps calm me down and relieves the stress that builds up inside me.

But the ATU staff refused to let me go, even though I explained that I was a voluntary patient who had got myself to the hospital, meaning I could legally come and go whenever I wanted.

I just wanted half an hour of fresh air, but they refused.

I asked to see the nurse in charge, who was located in an office downstairs, with the door always shut. Eventually, she came and spoke to me. I told her that I simply wanted some fresh air and that I would return, but she said that I couldn’t leave.

I demanded to be allowed to call a solicitor. This nurse laughed at me, then shut the door. I was petrified and began to panic. I had a meltdown, which the National Autistic Society describes as an ‘intense response to overwhelming situations’. They can look similar to a temper tantrum, with shouting, crying and physical lashing out, but are totally involuntary.

I grabbed a staff member’s key fob and, after pushing them out of the way, kicked the door to the unit and left. After running for a few minutes, I felt calmer, but then I realised a car with five men inside it was following me.

I became scared and crossed the motorway to evade them. Suddenly, a police van pulled up. The officers piled out and jumped on me, pinning me to the ground.

I wanted to scream but I could barely breathe as they handcuffed me, tied my legs together and threw me roughly into a cage in the back of the van. The car that had been chasing me was from the ATU and the men stared at me as I was driven off.

Back at the ATU, I was restrained while my trousers and underwear were pulled down and a needle pierced my skin. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ward manager stride towards me. He knelt down and whispered in my ear: ‘If you try that again, Alexis, I’ll see to it that you don’t leave this room for a month.’ I told them what they had done to me was illegal, since I hadn’t been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Their response was to section me and put me in segregation for eight days.

I was locked in a room with only a bed, a mattress, a single duvet sheet and a pillow. There was no table or chair. No stimulation, no human contact, no clocks. There was only me, growing more distressed and anxious but trying to appear calm and controlled.

From that point, I was stuck in an endless cycle. If my behaviour was ‘difficult’ – as any autistic person’s would be in that environment – it was used as a justification for preventing me from leaving. And I desperately wanted to leave.

In all the time I was in there I was restrained 97 times and put in and out of seclusion frequently – 17 times in total.

In seclusion, I couldn’t go running outside, so I would pace and jog in my room, in bare feet. The room was tiny – just nine steps wide – so I had to do a lot of laps. After dark, the night light – as bright as daylight – was kept on.

A member of staff would sit either side of my bed, watching me. Sometimes they’d talk to one another or snore if they fell asleep. It made sleeping very difficult. One of the most degrading aspects of being an inpatient on observations was showering and going to the toilet. It is humiliating to take your clothes off and shower in front of two watching people – even more so to use the toilet. Some kinder staff tried to avert their gaze. Others stared straight at me.

I didn’t shower or use the toilet very often, which caused hygiene and stomach problems.

The irony of being in a unit dedicated to helping those with autism was that nothing about the way it operated was conducive to autistic people. The chaotic, noisy and often distressing environment made my meltdowns far more regular.

It is impossible to find the words to describe how agonising sensory overload feels. I found it so overwhelming that I went from being a woman who had achieved a first class degree and taught in schools to losing most of my power of speech. Routines were constantly disrupted, making us all stressed and increasingly depressed.

Staff seemed to relish their power over us, telling us we could go in the garden and then that actually, no, we couldn’t.

When I feel stressed I like to wrap myself very tightly in a blanket, which makes me feel calmer and safer. Sometimes they would take my blanket away.

For me, the texture of food is incredibly important. For example, I like soggy Shreddies, but I wasn’t permitted to eat them more than once a day, even though I couldn’t stomach the cold, stodgy chips, overcooked vegetables and processed meat they served at other times.

Patients had a daily milk ration and I wasn’t allowed more, despite offering to buy it myself.

One girl’s routine involved counting exactly 200 Cheerios into a bowl, three times a day. She was only allowed milk on them at breakfast, though.

The drugs we were given were so powerful that my brain felt as though it was filled with thick clouds. Trying to think felt like clawing my way through a dense fog. On the antipsychotic medicine Haloperidol, I was constantly restless and had to move my legs all the time, day or night. I was always hungry – many patients became obese due to the drugs.

The only real help I was given was one hour of speech and language therapy, one hour of psychotherapy and one hour of occupational therapy per week. The rest of the time there was nothing to do except nursery-style activities such as colouring in, as though we were toddlers.

Most patients spent their days slumped in front of daytime television. The NHS was providing more than £1,000 a night for each of us to be there – but it was very difficult to tell where that was going.

From Monday to Friday I stayed in the unit, where I was on 2:1 observation, which meant two members of staff followed me around, watching my every move.

And yet, although the unit was run like a prison, every Friday evenings, they would drop me at the station so that I could get two trains – a journey of hundreds of miles, alone – to spend the weekends with my parents and daughter. It made no sense.

Every Sunday I would dread going back, but I knew I that, having been sectioned, I had to. There was no escape from this routine, which continued for months.

My parents knew how desperately I wanted to leave, but there was nothing they could do. When my father tried to get me discharged, he was told he would be taken to court to be removed as my next of kin. They felt helpless and so worried about me.

After six months, I felt my life wasn’t worth living. I was traumatised by what I had experienced – the helplessness and constant fear of being punished for being myself. I begged to be released but I wasn’t being listened to. I had reached the limits of my endurance, so I tried to kill myself. Afterwards, I was transferred to an intensive care unit, then to an acute unit, then a rehabilitation centre.

Months passed and in April 2016 I was still living in a rehab centre, but by this time, I’d realised how inhumane my treatment had been. I knew there was nothing really wrong with me, so I contacted a retired GP who was a family friend and asked him to help me escape.

We planned for my father to bring me my passport, and then later that day our GP friend and his wife drove to the centre.

They pulled up outside, I ran out and got in their car, aware that staff had seen and were about to follow us. But we got away in time.

We caught the ferry to Calais and drove to Paris, where they left me. I’ll always be grateful to them for helping me.

From Paris, I travelled to Lagos in Nigeria, where I was met by another friend. At her home, I went through horrific withdrawal from the 14 tablets a day I’d been taking. My skin felt as though it was fizzing, I couldn’t sleep and had restless legs. Gradually, though, the symptoms began to fade.

My parents brought my daughter out and my father stayed with me until I was stable enough to look after us both. I got a good job teaching at an international school and have been here with my daughter since. My life is calm and I’m managing my autism far better alone than I could at the ATU.

But the trauma remains. I have flashbacks to being restrained by gangs of men and I remember the long, frightening hours in seclusion as if they happened yesterday.

At the end of 2016, 115 days after I escaped, I attended a tribunal about my sectioning via Skype, in which my solicitor explained that I was functioning well and supporting myself. A psychiatrist demanded that I come home immediately and hand myself over to a secure unit again.

When I refused, the panel supported me and my solicitor, going against the medical advice. They could see I was fine and well. Also, my absence from the country meant it no longer served the purpose it was intended for.

I may be one of the lucky ones who escaped an ATU, but I’m aware that what happened to me could easily happen again. I could visit my parents in Britain, have a meltdown in public and find myself back in one of those prisons. And even if I never return, I need to make the public aware of what happens to vulnerable people in them, some of whom are not able to articulate what they are going through.

I understand that it’s difficult to believe what I’ve described is happening to people in this country, today. That’s why I requested all my clinical notes, so I have a record.

The way this awful system treats autistic people is shameful. It’s happening to thousands of children and adults. And it has to stop.

l Unbroken, by Alexis Quinn, is published by Trigger Press and available on Amazon for £11.99.



Unbroken – Living Life Beyond Diagnosis
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Alexis QuinnAlexis Quinn has always known she was different. Academically and athletically gifted, she soared through her years in education but failed to socialise adequately with her peers. Somehow, social norms just passed her by. But her difference had always been her strength, until the birth of her child and the death of her brother, Josh; then her difference became her downfall.Unable to deal with the reality of what happened with Josh, Alexis was detained under the mental health act against her will. She found herself struggling for years, with diagnosis after diagnosis landing on her shoulders. Told repeatedly by doctors that she was dangerous, Alexis tried to become the person the system wanted her to be: someone normal. But it seemed that normal was always just out of reach.As time went by, she realised that the care she thought was going to help her might just be the very thing that would destroy her.Raw and honest, Unbroken tells the story of a strong woman learning how to live beyond diagnosis.