'years Locked In Mental Institution'

[reactive*emotions]

'Years locked in mental institution'

Country Germany Germany

Date 26 September 2005

Vera Stein, a German woman, describes a harrowing ordeal of being falsely imprisoned in a mental institution, tied to beds and given injections. She emerged from hospital a physical wreck, and will never recover fully from the effects of the drugs she was forced to take.

Forty-seven-year-old Vera Stein clambers into her electric wheelchair and drives into her spartanly decorated lounge.

Her disability is just one of the effects of mental health drugs that were pumped into her against her will.

This year Vera won compensation from the European Court of Human Rights, after it ruled that she had been illegally detained for years in clinics, despite being mentally healthy.

"I was nearly 19 years old, so I was an adult, when my father had me committed to a clinic in Bremen," she told me.

"I was put straight in a locked ward. The necessary court order was not obtained for this. I was given double measures of drugs to pacify me. They used physical force to inject me with 17 different types of drugs."

Under German law, to commit someone to a clinic they must either sign their consent, or a court order must be obtained. But in this case her father simply won the agreement of the health authorities to lock up his daughter.

In total, she spent nearly 20 years in institutions as a result of this. Worse still, her case is not unique.

"The mere possibility of withdrawing a person from legal life in co-operation with a psycho-medical system will always lead to abuse - and there we do have some problems," says psychiatrist Helmut Pollaehne.

He says the control mechanisms to prevent cases like Vera Stein's are not sufficient.

For example, he argues that so-called "visiting commissions" always announce their visits beforehand, weakening their control function - and warns that privatisation in the health sector makes it all the more important for the state to defend the rights of people who are in mental health institutions.

"Within the German legal system, this is a rare case because the victims of psychiatric power are not very successful in taking their case to the court," Dr Pollaehne said.

"But in terms of being a victim - I mean being a victim of the abuse of psychiatry - it was not a rare case in the 1970s and it's not a rare case nowadays."

Ms Stein is now a crusader against the use of psychiatry to lock people up.

"The association of German judges has also complained that forced incarceration, forced treatments, and violations of personal freedoms take place in a legal grey zone," she says.

She adds that a recent study at Goettingen University showed the number of people held in psychiatric clinics against their will has trebled in the last decade.

Source: BBC News Online, 23/09/2005

Personally i think psychiatrists who do this kind of thing are out and sociopaths.The disturbing thing is that they are not short on the ground.

A woman who lives in my area complained about the way a carer was looking after

her disabled son.The carer then went and told her bosses she reckoned the woman

was suffering from 'Munchausens by proxy'. Next thing the social workers(lot of them are sociopaths)etc are telling the woman that unless she goes into hospital for treatment they will take her unborn child away as soon as it was born.

The mental health authority that colluded in this piece of abuse was my local one.

The woman's husband had to pay out for an independent pdoc who debunked the whole pile of 'abusive and evil crap'(my words)before justice prevailed.

There is a need for psychiatry but the disturbing thing is that there are a good number of people working in mental health who should be residing in prison or places like Broadmoor(ie they are evil sadistic lying bastards)

[denise]

This used to be quite common in this country too. Young girls would be committed for disobeying their fathers, associating with men and other such horrifying things. Ols women in their 70's could be released after being left fogotten and to rot in some asylum. It was only recently when all these victorain buildings were closed that much of this came to light. And we think we have it bad..