04/01/2019
Floyd Prozanski is coming for your children.
And liberal democracy, cognitive liberty, and civil rights are yours unless you are so unfortunate to be a member of an unpopular marginalized group whose oppression has no political downside. Who is that you ask? Why, it is persons who are un-housed, unattached, and unable to behave up to the conventions of our culture, even those we only think might be confrontational or unpleasant, based on the social stigma of various individuals acting in ways that likely make store owners nervous about their shopping carts.
A "South of Eugene" area politician and part time municipal prosecutor, Floyd Prozanski, State Senator D - Lane/Douglas County, has dropped in a couple of bills (SB 762, SB 763) without warning to the public -- bills that purport to fix the woes of the mentally distressed on our streets by forcing them into psychiatric incarceration without due process -- bills which also manage to give carte blanche to the authorities, mental health professionals, and hospitals to then drug the unfortunate subjects into what very well might eventually be an early funeral. Problem gone. No more shopping carts in Floyd's neighborhood, ...without even having to provide as much as one room at the Inn as much as a toxic injection.
Stories like this, well, DeFazio's office will not answer calls for comment because it is knee deep in sponsoring the outpatient commitment issue itself (euphemistically called Assisted (read Involuntary) Outpatient Treatment or AOT/IOT - see his office's sponosrship of the Murphy bill -- with its grants incentivizing states to pass legislation to increase coercive interventions and civil commitment). DeFazio won't answer calls because the constituent mental health population is so unpopular, even the most liberal politicians behave as if the elements who are supporting things like Floyd's commitment bills are just the very well organized and very vocal affected families with siblings or relatives suffering or on the street.
In allying themselves however, somehow they have conveniently missed the bill being supported by a cadre of drug company lobbyists in an unholy alliance with fringe psychiatrists so far out on the edges of hysterical science that they think (not an exaggeration) that cats and viruses cause mental illness and that the patients should be fitted with under skin implants of mind rending psychiatric drugs to insure they remain on their medication regimes. And heck, no matter that research shows that the drugs over time, will shorten life and or disfigure the mind, biology, or personality of the unwilling recipient.
Read here below the position of the Oregon Consumer Survivor Coalition on Prozanski's little legislative surprise, which details the interesting relationship between Floyd's Senate "Mental Health Workgroup", Pat Wolke, a Josephine County "mental health court" judge, and E Fuller Torrey's (an extremist psychiatrist) "Treatment Advocacy Center" which is the primary high paid lobbying organization that promotes stigma and fear when advocating for stigmatizing and forcibly drugging (again without prior probable cause and due process) those who are or can be labeled with a mental health diagnosis.
Unlike any other minority or marginalized population, the individuals who would be affected or who could speak to the use of force or forced drugging,... were completely left out of the conversation and work group. A known liberal blind spot because the disabled do not matter. IE, a poorly researched, expert based, invocation of a clueless and somewhat oppressive nanny state... at least short of tackling the underlying problems.
Floyd! Either as a placeholder for families that want to force their kids into psychiatric hospitals or outpatient forced drugging, why on earth do your efforts include trying to sneak this bill past advocates and being in bed with worst parts of NAMI, the drug monied Stanley Foundation that finances discredited and anti-humanist Torrey and the Treatment Advocacy Center, and the drug companies whose corporate agenda blind to the (other) social catastrophe that is drugging every person or child that so much as utters a contrary or insensible sound that could be blown up into a lucrative and authoritarian based pathology.
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March 29, 2019
To the Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee:
Dear Chair Prozanski, and Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:
OCSC opposes SB762 & SB763.
It is unfortunate that Senator Prozanski and the off session “work group” on Mental Health appear to have been unduly influenced by social and political pressures into trying to solve a larger cultural, societal, and systemic problem by the relatively easy to sell policy of stigmatizing, capturing, and drugging of highly vulnerable individuals in varying forms of distress.
First of all, force, especially where it means involuntarily imposing an invasive bio-pharmacology on non consenting adults and children should be considered a “failure of the system” and beyond a last resort. This is due to stigma, trauma, irreversible psychological impact, and the actual preponderance for creating a negative life trajectory for individuals as contrasted with the popular assumptions of useful and lifesaving assistance.
This ‘failure’ is also the description given to it in the “Force and Coercion” policy plank of the National Mental Health Summit in Portland Oregon in 2001 sponsored by the National Mental Health Association (now Mental Health America).
The socially unpopular targets of these bills are those who in practice generally present poorly, are non-compliant, or have crises that make them unlikely and unwilling to participate in a system that on the front end underserves them, labels them, keeps them homeless, leaves them without meaningful assistance, … and then finds vastly more expensive resources and funding to force them into aversive forms of “treatment” which have known health risks and clinically proven neuro-toxic impacts when the prior mentioned circumstances finally overwhelm them and/or they have contact with police or emergency rooms.
The net result of the present legislation, rather than rehabilitation in the lives of the vulnerable is yet more undue stigma and the promotion of legislation that uses the stories of parents and plays on socially accepted stereotypes of dangerousness and incapacity to deprive individuals of freedom, civil rights, and dignity. It does a disservice to the disability and mental health community by trading fear based incarceration for real community based support and help.
Surprise Introduction of Bills No One Had Seen
The legislation does this in part with inadequate due process protections and is now being rushed to a vote *without* any consensus or even full participation of any of the constituency affected. The action has mostly created an expansion of the ability to use force – and it is reasonably assumed this will result in the rush to detain and forcibly drug the target population as a first resort. These bills make it possible to use a lower bar for detaining people based on behavior or history, and a longer hold time allows for drugging first and due process second for persons in the commitment process. The manner of its construction and introduction suggests those who don’t hold extremist views are being bypassed.
Extremist and Stigmatizing Lobbying for Forced Treatment
There are other aspects of the work group that are deeply troubling to mental health and civil rights advocates, in addition to the constituent affected populations. SB 762 and 763 are bills assisted and promoted by forced treatment advocates whose involvement is a stain on the reputation of the legislature here and Oregon’s reputation for refusing to stigmatize marginalized population and its reputation for preserving and protecting civil liberties.
In an effort to create a sort of “Kendra’s Law” like environment, ill-informed individuals have brought in the extremist views and technical support of the “Treatment Advocacy Center” (TAC) headed by the infamous “drug ‘implants’ for compliance” psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey.
Torrey, whose prior scandals before being rehabilitated as a congressional witness for the “Murphy Bill” legislation of now disgraced Republican Congressman Chris Murphy (R-Pennsylvania), include, amazingly, things like the ‘theft’ of brains for ostensible research, Torrey arguing that cats and transmitted viruses were responsible for mental illnesses (no this is not a misprint), and some of the most virulent and stigmatizing assumptions about labeled individuals that exist that are aligned with the extreme fringes of psychiatry. Torrey was pushed out of the already conservative national NAMI organization for his extremist views, which is when the Stanley Foundation (receiving as much as 20 million a year from drug companies) stepped in with money to form the TAC and its well-funded lobby.
The TAC and Torrey are known for stigmatizing those seeking help or even those promoting recovery by characterizing “the mentally ill” as violent and dangerous. This stereotype still survives even though comprehensive studies have shown that the mental health population is no more violent than the “normal” population except where substance abuse is present (which is a greater problem in the mental health population).
The one incredibly under-reported fact in this aforementioned research is that the patient population was taken from minute percentage of diagnosed individuals that are then committed to psychiatric hospitals and then discharged into the community after being hospitalized for a length of time. THAT population is no more violent than the normal population without controlling for substance abuse. (!)
Torrey, among other questionable advocacy, is an advocate of installing implants to keep people in medication compliance. These are medications that have known toxicities that dramatically shorten the lives of almost 40% of the treated public mental health population. This aggregate number of deaths dwarfs any number of people ostensibly being harmed by “untreated mental illness”. The fear of untreated mentally ill individuals occupies the talking points and stigmatizing stereotypy that forced treatment advocates use to frighten the public into restricting the civil liberties of those who might make the public nervous.
If a law is going to take away someone’s physical liberty without a conviction or violating a law, the availability of due process challenges should be clearly defined and immediately available. Indifferent attention to civil liberties, and the idea that one can predict and prevent adverse events by forcing those with mental health labels into yet more traumatic forced psychiatric drugging and incarceration – are discriminatory and without scientific basis. These treatments frequently exacerbate mental health problems and have high incidents of adversity and health issues related to the treatments themselves* – as well as causing the person to avoid help.
(*Consider a 2006 study by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD): Persons in the public mental health system die on average 25 years earlier than those that are not in the system. )
Alternatives That Work
Instead, OCSC would like to suggest that you have significant alternatives to choosing to “widen the gates” of expensive and questionably therapeutic incarceration in a mental health lock down facility:
* Develop and sustain alternatives to involuntary treatment. Expand peer respite, peer and environmental supports, and early diversion. (See SB 2831)
* Fund programs that work as measured by those in the programs rather than overly optimistic professionals who have significantly worse recovery outcomes than countries that have no mental health systems at all.
* Address Social Determinates Of Health (SDOH) that impair the individual’s ability to live in a sustainable, safe, and healthy culture or social setting.
* Promote alternatives to psychiatric drugs and anti-depressants that have better compliance prospects, and do not have violent reactions nor have rebound violence from discontinuing overly heavy dosages that quickly diminish someone’s emotional regulation and capacity and massively increase their confusion.
Prevention
The Oregon contingent at the Alternatives 2018 Conference report out to Oregon’s congressional members states:
“The general mental health of our society is less expensive and better served by diversifying community based resources, especially peer supports, and leveraging those supports at all levels of need. This means providing these supports before expensive treatments, before life changing bio-chemical interventions, and before resort to pathologies, courses of care, and labels that will stigmatize an individual for life.”
A sustainable, non coercive system is voluntary - where a large percentage of the persons affected by mental health issues trust, seek out, and use available resources and help. IE this means creating relevant and effective user driven supports and systems of support, as well as for example, diverting folks who are in crisis into trusted safe environments operated by highly skilled, experienced, and personally dedicated individuals. Integrating policy and the service system with empathetic persons who are adept and who have lived experience of mental health crises is far more effective than imposing various forms of isolation and force.
COSTS: Little Known/Discussed Facts
* A standard OHP hour of mental health services presently uses 50% of the time and resource just to pay for paperwork and administration, thus only 50% of the time goes to the services rendered, with less than 25% of the billed amount going to the individual provider.
* One hour of clinical counseling or case management costs in Medicaid/OHP are enough to fully fund almost 7 hours of peer services, with better outcomes for the peer intervention.
* Contrast cost of a standard public mental health service hour ($120+ hr), cost of a standard mental health hour in a Federally Qualified Health Center “FQHC” ($249+ hr), or the cost for every day in the state hospital, IE ($700+ a day), with a census in just the state hospitals in Salem and Junction City of 600 or so. About 150 million dollars for a literal fraction of the population. Involuntary commitments of populations to the 2 Oregon state-run psychiatric hospitals are more than half of all the general fund mental health budget for the state of Oregon. Psychiatric care in a private or local hospital easily exceeds $1000 a day.
Participation and the Voice of Those Most Affected
Please consider reconvening with persons present at the table that are knowledgeable about what works, without a political agenda or a rationale to stigmatize those they want to force into care, and who can speak to the full impact of mass expansion of the criteria to suspend an individual’s civil liberties based on subjective criteria.
‘Statistically’ Saving Lives
If you want to save lives, save people from tragedy, the answer is not herding together undesirable segments of society wholesale and putting them under court ordered psychiatric drugging and invasive supervision. The answer, like anything else, is in addressing the underlying causes, and coming to the understanding that there is no system “magic bullet” that is going to instantly solve the present (and often frightening) existential tendencies of our culture and current social reality. The answer is to empower the resources and people to save one individual life at a time… and meeting those individuals at risk with support and resources at the earliest point of need – not the latest and most expensive point of crisis.
This legal call to action that mandates more force and pharmacological intervention in the form of super powerful mind altering drugs -- and ultimately, will support outpatient forced drugging and compliance monitoring in people’s homes -- is unfortunately, in a somewhat Orwellian sense, promoting the continuing construction of a “prison without walls”.
This is misguided, especially in Oregon, and is mostly the product of a polarizing and stigmatizing narrative that you have gotten from experts who cannot justify current funding and interventions in the context of any actual clinical results… there is a continuing professional inability to adequately address the increasing deterioration of our society’s mental wellbeing. In contrast to this, we would like you to consider looking at this situation without the rose colored clinical gaze and the “danger to self or others” stereotype, and insist on answers and input based on facts and sound research, and based on experiences and practices that actually work (AND are cost effective).
Please contact us if you have any questions about this input, we are happy to be of service to the Committee and the legislature in implementing resources and crafting laws that can measurably improve the lives and mental wellbeing of Oregonians.
Most appreciatively yours,
Rebecca Edens, B.A.
President
Oregon Consumer Survivor Coalition
