Your Own Ghost
Human
- Mar 12, 2019
- 96
Dear Mental Health Professionals: Please Stop Defending Yourselves and Listen
I thought I'd post this column from the website MadInAmerica.com. It echoes many of the sentiments about the mental health field shared here and is a good read overall.
An excerpt:
"...in an article that an Irish news source was brave enough to publish, a woman describes her experience of fighting back against the mental health system, the trauma she experienced through so-called 'treatment', the harm from diagnoses, and her own recovery journey supported by Intervoice and the Hearing Voices Movement.
Rather than listen, engage, and try to learn more, professionals flooded the comment section with threats to the editorial board. In addition to reactive defensiveness, most of the comments claimed that this article was a public health danger, and was irresponsible and "unbalanced" (apparently balanced means that every statement made by a person with a viewpoint other than the status quo must be followed or preceded by an 'expert' statement refuting the perspective).
This is standard practice — assuming that the "experts" must be right and any opposing perspective is 'dangerous' or 'uninformed'. This would be an understandable concern if it were true. But do you ever consider the possibility that it just might not be?
Most people who enter the mental health field do so with good intentions. Plus, aspects of mental health treatment can be very helpful for many. This can be true at the same time as the fact that much about the system and standard operating procedures are extremely harmful and based on elitism, oppression, and lies.
Perhaps you might take a few moments to consider: What if everything you think you know isn't quite so?"
...
I thought I'd post this column from the website MadInAmerica.com. It echoes many of the sentiments about the mental health field shared here and is a good read overall.
An excerpt:
"...in an article that an Irish news source was brave enough to publish, a woman describes her experience of fighting back against the mental health system, the trauma she experienced through so-called 'treatment', the harm from diagnoses, and her own recovery journey supported by Intervoice and the Hearing Voices Movement.
Rather than listen, engage, and try to learn more, professionals flooded the comment section with threats to the editorial board. In addition to reactive defensiveness, most of the comments claimed that this article was a public health danger, and was irresponsible and "unbalanced" (apparently balanced means that every statement made by a person with a viewpoint other than the status quo must be followed or preceded by an 'expert' statement refuting the perspective).
This is standard practice — assuming that the "experts" must be right and any opposing perspective is 'dangerous' or 'uninformed'. This would be an understandable concern if it were true. But do you ever consider the possibility that it just might not be?
Most people who enter the mental health field do so with good intentions. Plus, aspects of mental health treatment can be very helpful for many. This can be true at the same time as the fact that much about the system and standard operating procedures are extremely harmful and based on elitism, oppression, and lies.
Perhaps you might take a few moments to consider: What if everything you think you know isn't quite so?"
...