Latest news on the movement against psychiatric oppression

We mourn Kate Millett

For pictures of Kate, please see here a large selection of her at different ages:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=kate%20millett&FORM=BILH1

She passed away on the 6th of September 2017 in Paris at the age of 82.
In the obituaries it is almost only mentioned what an important contribution she has made to feminism, especially through her work Sexual Politics (1970).
It can hardly be overestimated how important she was for us, the movement against forced psychiatry. Inspired by her book: „The loony bin trip„, the German Lunatic Offensive (Irren-Offensive) made a trip to New York in 1994 and visited Kate at her farm in Poughkeepsie, during which this video shows Kate encouraging us to see the problem politically, e.g. to go demonstrating: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=10m32s

Four years later, the Lunatic Offensive had shifted its focus to a political approach. With a public tribunal at the Volksbuehne theater in Berlin, the Lunatic Offensive together with the Free University of Berlin had created their own court, the Foucault Tribunal. Kate came to Berlin and became the spokeswoman for the jury. Together with Hagai Aviel from Israel, she insisted that a tribunal must have a law as a benchmark for it’s sentence. That had not even been thought about before, but everybody in the jury immediately agreed to Hagai´s suggestion that this law must be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kate announced this along with the charges at the beginning of the tribunal. Later she critically questioned the defense, the President of the Medical Chamber of Berlin etc., the most important parts of which can be seen in these videos:

Three years later, in 2001, Kate was back in Berlin and was the spokeswoman for the 5th International Russell Tribunal on Human Rights in Psychiatry. On a suggestion by Kate, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, was involved in a welcoming speech at the opening event, see photos here.
This was one of the initial impulses for the 2007 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
In 2002, with her help, the laudatory speech for the Freedom Prize to Thomas Szasz was written at Kates Farm.

—————————————————-

Impostor among impostors

Now for the second time this year in Germany a „doctor“ in a psychiatry was disclosed as an alleged „impostor“: once again only by accident, and, as always, never as a result of any professional failure, because a failure cannot exist when no psychiatric knowledge exists!

In 1999 Gert Postel, a trained postman, was sentenced to four years imprisonment for having worked for 18 months as a senior physician in a psychiatry (read his story here). After that he became the patron of the federal psychiatric survivor group, the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Psychiatrie-Erfahrener.

This year, first Alexandra Beek was sentenced for the same alleged „crime“ (even having worked in a forensic unit!) and portrayed on a national TV channel.
Now for the second time within a year, Henry T. in the electro-shocking East Frisian Ubbo-Emmius Clinic, proved once again that the  psychiatric „knowledge“ is a fake and only verbiage. For 15 months he earned a monthly gross salary of 4,300 Euros! The case was reported in the Bild-Zeitung (similar to The Daily Mirror) and Focus online. (similar to Newsweek online).

Special about this case was that Henry T. had been diagnosed as „paranoid schizophrenic“ 🙂
So obviously it is no problem to become a psychiatrist; maybe Henry T. could teach more unemployed people how to perfectly produce the necessary documents for being recognized as a psychiatrist?
—————————–

Instruction by the new President of the WPA, Helen Herrman

What a joke:
The new President of the World Psychiatric Association, Helen Herrman, instructed psychiatrists that mental health legislation should eliminate involuntary psychiatric treatment.
See as documentation the abstract of her speech in the presidential symposium at the recent WPA Congress.
Anybody who wants to believe her should ask her for proof, especially in her home domain, Australia.
Believers in her might be able to put her to the test and we would be happy if she passes it 🙂