I saw that story the other day, I thought you knew of it already. Who is going to stop authorities from drugging people? The victims aren't legally people (with rights) if they are not US citizens.

Same thing happens in the emergency department of Hospitals, if you read the emergency blogs.

Truly barbaric, and you're right Mark, the victims aren't legally people, but then neither are those of us with psych diagnoses.

Philip left the link to his post of October 26, 2007.
I just want to remember that this is the use of psychiatry as social control which is very different from the "medicinal" use.
I'm making this remark because some people like to mix everything in order to promote more misunderstanding linking the two. It has already happened here in another topic.
The use of psychiatry to punish dissidents in Russia; in Brazil during the dictatorship supicious people were put in mental institutions for political reasons* and alike are deferents phenomenons.
Gee! It's necessary to say the obvious.
Once again: Mengele was not a psychiatrist.

*Paulo Coelho, the "guru writer" was one of these.

This is hideous but it doesn't surprise me.
Today I heard on the TV, it will be on the press tomorrow, that 6 children from a shelter were hospitalized drugged with an anticonvulsive (they didn't said which one).

(My sister and a friend of hers used to give diazepam to their children so that they "slipped well" while they were not home at night. I got pretty mad at her.)

"and it's pretty damn barbaric even with the proper indication."

Yes, it is. This is beyond comprehension and for any reader casually stopping by this site as a result of this article: one must be aware that this drug is forced upon patients in psychiatric wards and used to sedate, and quiet(shut up)patients who I have witnessed fully aware of their surroundings, and begging to be released. Most were women, and when they get too vocal(loud)they get this injection in their ass with a 5 point restraint. It is one thing I witnessed first hand as a visitor, at my feet. Barbaric? this is how psych patients are silenced every single day in America. Not to wonder that these drugs are used for this purpose in this article, because it is MAINSTREAM AMERICA AT IT'S BEST IN LOCKED DOWN PSYCH WARDS.

I've never been so traumatized as the day I had a woman sobbing at my feet she was injected against her will, while she was on the phone to her attorney, and saw the drool happen, and the broken spirit sobbing.

Prior to that, it was my daughter.

I have nothing more to say.

Ana"...which is very different from the "medicinal" use"
Stephany gives a great example of its medicinal use in the Hospital-that-is-not-a-jail.

Physicians for Social Responsibility writes,

Ensure Humane Health Conditions for Asylum Seekers and Other Immigrants Detained in US Facilities

We urge you to write your Senators and Representative today to support the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008.

Shocking exposés this week by the New York Times, Washington Post, and 60 Minutes have confirmed the alarming breakdown in health care for detained asylum seekers and other immigrants in custody of the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in needless suffering and, in the most tragic cases, avoidable death.

The Detainee Basic Medical Care Act would help to prevent these tragedies by requiring the government to protect the rights and well-being of asylum seekers and others held in immigration prisons throughout the United States.

Please take action now in support of humane treatment and the right to health care of asylum seekers and other immigration detainees.

Sincerely,
Jennie Baldé and Paul Rocklin
Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Program

P.S. If you know of currently or previously detained asylum seekers who received inadequate health care in detention, please let us know as soon as you can by emailing Jennie Baldé at jbalde@phrusa.org.

Mark,
I have stories much worse than Stephanie's. Some of them leads to death. Torture in mental hospitals are practiced every day.
I mean something totally different here.
But I'll not start this kind of argument for it causes more and more confusion if not well guided and I'm sure that with you it will be the continuation of another post.
No! I we don't need that.

I have many stories of torture on mental institutions.
But I'll not have this argument here now because I don't want this important discussion turning into something else.

Mark,

The victims aren't legally people (with rights) if they are not US citizens.

Show me where in the Bill of Rights there is a distinction suggesting those rights only apply to US Citizens?

They may not have certain privileges of citizenship, but they legally have rights.

Mark was being facetious, Brad W.

Sadly, anon mom, not necessarily. As you correctly state, the Bill of Rights doesn't make such a distinction, but law as it's interpreted pretty much does. These days if you can't afford a lawyer, you don't have any rights in the US, unless of course you're accused of a crime, then all you get is an overworked, underpaid, terrified and exhausted public defender. Don't look for US human rights violations to decrease any time soon. There's nothing wrong with working to try and decrease such, but these days we're pretty far away from the minimal human rights of the vast majority of other nations.

Like I posted above; the woman I saw get injected against her will (with Haldol)was in a locked down psych ward, on the phone to her attorney. It doesn't get much worse than that.

Makes me sick.

Not only that, these patients/people are by law supposed to have an advocate and (at least in my state) the funding isn't there for that, (and the hospitals do "free will policing with B-52s in the ass).

This woman was loud. That's all.

She was wildly manic, told me this herself--and there was NO reason--none--as far as I am concerned to shoot her up with anything.

For God's sake, she was talking! and talking smart. She was giving a list of all of the meds she couldn't tolerate and I was hanging on listening to her give the most profound speech to save herself--and they shot her up.

She crumbled into a sobbing heap onto the floor.(after being held down in disposable restraints, yes they exist).After-- Someone wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.

SO, imagine people being detained (the deportees) who for all intent and purpose are not in a psych ward--they are just being prepped like animals sedated for transport.

It's outrageous.

It was haldol that stopped my life, completely and totally derailed it. I assume other folks reading this have been haldoled, not all of you but at least a few. It's not an okay and never an appropriate thing to happen. 21 years before I was haldoled I was raped, three nights in a row actually because I was scared and poor and if I had moved, my dogs and cats would have been abandoned. The fourth night I was just so scared and so tired I was actually able to convince my abuser I was human, that he was hurting me, and he left me alone after that.

Compared to being haldoled, my personal experience of being raped wasn't as bad, but I speak only for myself.

Many of you have heard the story, I came home from work one day, from clerking in my father's law office between my second and third years of law school, and his lawyer served me with papers saying that a hearing had taken place that morning in which I was present and represented by an attorney. The authentic court document signed by the probate judge listed the name of the attorney that represented me, a colleague of my father who I had never had a substantive conversation with, still haven't for that matter, who I had never seen at that point, but according to the signed piece of paper, I had been in court and I had been represented by an attorney and I had been found to be mentally incompetent, a danger to myself and others and I was committed to a mental institute for 6 months. Oh, the lawyer that represented me was appointed my guardian so that any complaints I might have about my "treatment," any needs I might as a 40 year old woman have, bills to pay, pets to care for, friends to contact, all of these requests went through this friend of the judge's, colleague of my father who five years later I've still never seen, a man who makes his living helping families like this by not humiliating the person whose family is "trying to get them help" by providing them with due process of the law.

But my story was a little different. I was able to call a friend on a cell phone before being taken away, I was able to prove I wasn't in any hearing that morning, I had receipts from paying bills online at those times...working, paying bills and I was still labeled incompetent because the hearing was a sham. No one involved felt even the slightest need to see me or interview me. My father and his lawyer just went up to the court house, got the standard papers saying there had been a hearing printed out by a court clerk who spelled my name wrong in the fill in the blank form and the judge signed the paper and I lost my legal status as an adult. And that's how they do it in Macon County, Alabama for every competency hearing.

So nonetheless my friend I called couldn't get to me before I was taken to the psych ward, and even if she had, what the hell could she have done as I was taken by an armed sheriff's deputy, had a shoot out. So I get to the nuthouse and I'm diagnosed as calm and cooperative but suffering from the delusion that I was committed with out a hearing, claiming I wasn't even in court...all of which true, but the mental health workers that Friday night didn't have any legal duty to check and didn't give much of a damn, sadistic, underpaid poor bitter overworked folks that they were. My father later told me and snickered that Friday night is the worst night to get admitted to a psych hospital because all sorts of people get brought in and psychiatrists don't work on Friday nights. He set the hearing for a Friday knowing this.

Still I was allowing to call a friend from the hospital collect, as I was miles from where I knew anyone, after a three hour drive in a sheriff's car. She was getting me a lawyer, which would prove difficult since none of us had much money.

And at some point I was haldoled. I don't even remember it. I know I was scared but I was calm on the phone with my friend because we both realized that if I showed my fear it would be interpreted as mental illness.

Two days later I was laying in a hospital bed. I don't think I was strapped down but I couldn't move. A particularly brutish orderly staring down at me. If anyone reading this has ever been imprisoned in the lockdown psych ward at Carraway Methodist Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, he's the brute with the black goatee with a patch of grey in it. Probably didn't work there for long, a sadistic, evil man who brutalized that class of prisoners knows as "geriatric psychiatric patients" much worse than he did me, my own private Alfred Hoche. I remember the beeping of the electronic blood pressure machine, how low my blood pressure was. I remember mostly not being able to move, haldol is evil. There is no good in psychiatry. At least folks being deported have allegedly done something wrong, as opposed to those brutalized by haldol in psych hospitals where this weapon is considered medical treatment.