It amazes me how blind so many Americans are to the harm that their government has caused in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I enjoyed it Woulda thought someone such as yourself doesn't need reminding that Communism/Socialism never killed anyone. People kill people, not ideologies, and even if you want to blame ideologies Communism and Socialism are nowhere near as guilty as nationalism, militarism and authoritarianism... without these, I'd wager practically none of those killings would have resulted. And bear in mind that these doctrines are certainly NOT exclusively pertaining to any ideology, much less exclusively Communist/Socialist ideologies... I should only need to say the name Pinochet (a man Milton Friedman saw as heralding a new 'golden age' for Chile, seemingly regardless of the terror and thousands of political murders commited by his government) for you to see my point here. Finally... this is so fucked up. I mean, it's happened before, but I don't think they've ever exploited people in mental hospitals like this. And that almost literally makes my blood boil. The mentally ill are one of the most stigmatised, victimised, oppressed people of our society. In mental hospitals, you have fairly well no rights and no voice. They tell you to do something and if you don't do it they consider you "uncooperative", which is a sign that you're still very ill and need to be treated... by goons knocking you out with a fucking needle and them forcefully administering their medication. I never normally talk about this, but it's the internet and I'm anonymous so normality can take a hike... my Mum has spent a lot of time in mental hospitals, almost more than half her life, and the damage that they've done to her is utterly criminal. The shock therapy they gave her destroyed most of her memory and has damaged her speech - her mind is so fried that she has no recollection of me or my sisters as kids, no recollection of her marriage or her own childhood, or even of her own father, who died while she was in 'hospital'. She was 'too ill', apparently, to go to his funeral. Anyhow, they gave her a drug called Olanzapine (Zyprexa is the other name), which at the time was hailed as nothing short of being a miracle drug set to forever change the face of treating acutely pyschotic patients. After 2 years it'd been completely withdrawn (very quietly, mind you) from Australian mental hospitals because it was known to cause irreversable, permanent side effects like teeth-grinding, not being able to keep your tongue still, uncontrolled repetitve body movement and others. My Mum suffers all of these, she now has false teeth (paid for by the government because we couldn't afford them, thankyou government!) due to them being ground away and otherwise rotted by the medication she was forced to take (at the ripe old age of 53), can't stop wiggling her toes, fingers and mouth at night, and has recieved no compensation or apology. Bear in mind that all of this was against her will, she never chose to take the drug - they FORCED her to, and if she hadn't they similarly would have forced her to. To repeat, they forced her to take something that didn't cure her at all, but instead permanently and forever fucked up her body with irreversible side effects. In fact, one of these side effects apparently is hallucination - Olanzapine is a fucking anti-pyschotic drug, how is it combatting pyschosis if it's known to CAUSE pyschotic symptoms?! Many of these medications are actually guilty of this, and the likelihood of an 'adverse reaction' occuring steadily increases as the dosage increases. Mum was on a cocktail of drugs so potent that whenever she was home when I was a kid (not as often as I would of liked, she was gone for a whole year once) she fairly well lay in bed all day and couldn't speak properly because she was so whacked out on the drugs. The nurses and doctors frequently told us that she was on enough drugs to floor a 6 foot builder, but they never tried to take her off some of these drugs, just said that they'd 'get it right' eventually. About a year or two ago, her old nurse left and the new one fairly well immediately recognised that she was being overmedicated. They took her off the drugs... and she's fairly well fine now, INFINITELY better than she was before. She's now on one needle a fortnight and some sleeping pills, and she's almost a functioning member of society again, she's even thinking about getting a job. The treatment has been to get rid of the treatment, and it's worked. The point I raise is that our Western mental health system is a sham, institutionalising people in asylums where their dignity, individuality and often will to live is mercilessly stripped from them, where you don't get a say in what goes on and you obey them or they make you obey them. The drugs they 'treat' patients with often don't work, resulting in a constant shuffling of drugs until they find 'the right one' (meanwhile, the patient is going through a chemically induced hell), while often the drugs do more than just not work, they fucking exasperate and amplify the symptoms they're supposed to treat! Mental health patients are under the authority of ignorant, psuedo-scientific tyrants, and are - in my opinion - the most vulnerable group of people to be exploited on the planet, with prisoners coming second. Thus, for the government to prey on these mental health patients who don't have a choice in what's given to them at the best of times makes me beyond angry, beyond disgusted - it's hard to even describe how sicknening it is, to me, to think of how anyone could USE these vulnerable, suffering people like this. Not even just 'people', PATIENTS! They're supposed to be getting TREATED, not infected with fucking syphillis and experimented upon like rats in a fucking CAGE. /rant
Anyone who forces drugs to be used on a patient is either severely handicapped mentally or they're severely handicapped morally. Frankly I really don't give a shit which it is. That sort of nonsense should be stamped out as a child.
It's hard to lay down absolutes, that it is ALWAYS wrong to do so. Take the example of a fictitious child with some preventable but eventually lethal disease whos' parents absolutely refuse for him to have treatment, due to their religion. Let's say it's scientology. Let's say the kid is so brainwashed into this cult that he too doesn't want treatment, only because it's never been explained to him that they can actually save his life if they do. Is it wrong to take the kid away from his nutjob parents and treat him for his terminal but treatable disease, from which he would suffer a slow, painful death? But generally, I absolutely agree, as you can probably gather.