STOP THE PSYCHIATRIC VIOLENCE
DECLARATION OF THE PAN-HELLENIC COALITION FOR THE PSYCHIATRIC REFORM
Thousand inmates in Psychiatric Hospitals in all Balkan countries bear
at this very moment the psychiatric brutality and experience under the
most awful conditions their social and biological death.
Thousand inmates are mechanically or chemically restrained, are
subjected to ECT, are put in isolation and are deprived under the
pretext of “treatment modality of fundamental human rights; that is the right to be human.
This situation is not their choice.
It is the choice of a specific social-political-cultural regime which
necessitates the control of the society and the social extinction of
all those who threaten the balance of its development and reproduction
model in order to maintain its stability. This choice is manifested in
the interaction of manifold factors. Which are these?
Those sciences which intend to shape and define - arbitrarily but still
“in scientific terminology”- the boundaries between
“normal” and “abnormal”,
“mental health” and “mental
illness” with the conception of various psychiatric,
psychological and sociological theories.
The Psychiatry which - through observation, description and
classification in the framework of the scientific arbitrariness of the
psychiatric nosology in its different variants (traditional,
bio-psychosocial and community) - in synergy with Justice and drug
industry constructs the notions of dangerousness and dangerous mental
patients.
The dominant mental health policies driven exclusively by fiscal
criteria which address the need to reduce the “fiscal
burden”, urge privatization or reduction of the number of
inmates in hospitals by transferring the latter from the state-nurtured
“not-for-profit sector” to the new type of
institutional structures in the community.
The mental health professionals, trapped as we are in processes and
mechanisms of alienation, which deny even our human essence and are
transformed, through the educational system, into trained instruments
for the exercise of violence on fellow human beings.
All of us, citizens, which through our tolerance towards the
confinement and extinction of our fellow citizens maintain and
reproduce this situation.
Therefore, the demand for the prohibition and penalization of the
exercise of any form of violence in Psychiatry and the abolition of
confinement places is not merely a humanitarian request but a claim for
our own liberation from the alienation we experience ourselves.
Click on this link to watch the video "STOP THE PSYCHIATRIC VIOLENCE"
at their protest on 21st September at the 1st Eastern European
Psychiatric
Congress in Thessaloniki, Greece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf77Lpsytsk