TRANSCRIPT
PROTEST PSYCHIATRY
New York City, May 2014
Interviewer: So what brought you here today?
Speaker: I’m a psychiatric survivor and I’m just grateful for my life. I’m grateful to be free from the influence of psychiatry and psych drugs. It’s doing great harm. And I want people to become aware of that. I’m also inspired by the work of others who support people who go through that process of trying to extricate themselves from psychiatry. And personal experience, obviously! It makes people incredibly less resilient to life’s challenges. It cripples them. It makes them childlike and defenseless against handling life.
Interviewer: Is that your experience, what happened to you?
Speaker: Yes, it is. Personal experience learned a very long and hard way.
Interviewer: Are you excited to be here?
Speaker: I am very excited to be here.
Interviewer: Have you done these protests before?
Speaker: No, no.
Interviewer: How you go feel it’s going to go today?
Speaker: It’s gotta go really well. I think when any group of people gather quietly and peacefully, they feed off that energy. And that energy feeds the atmosphere in a way that’s different. That’s how you make change. It’s one person affecting another person, slowly, one at a time. You never know who you’re gonna reach, who’s walking by on the sidewalk, who needs to hear exactly what you have to say at that very moment in their life, who’s on their way to an appointment with the shrink for the first appointment — and they hear something that one of us has to say and they decide, “You know, maybe before I go that way I’ll try another way…” You just never know who you’re gonna reach.
Interviewer: I’ve been off psych drugs for 2 years and 10 months. How’s that been?
Speaker: Incredible. Wild. Just fantastic.
Interviewer: No hospitalizations or anything?
Speaker: No. That’s ridiculous. No.
Random Street Encounter with New York Yankees Fans:
Fan: What are you doing?
Speaker: I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing. We’re going to protest the American Psychiatric Association.
Fan: Why??
Speaker: Because they do some horrible things…
Fan: Like??
Speaker: I don’t know… let me ask you this…
Fan: You don’t know!!! My god! You have to know if you’re protesting them!! You can’t not know!!
Speaker: Actually, I’m documenting the protest… I’m trying to be neutral.
Fan: That’s fair enough, fair enough. Ok, I’ll record you.
Speaker: You want to record me?
Fan: Yes, I do!
Speaker: Okay, I’ll tell you my opinion. You can ask me any questions you want, in fact.
Fan: What’s your opinion on psychiatry?
Speaker: Psychiatry — I think it’s based on a lot of fraudulent science. I think they overprescribe drugs. I think they often don’t know what they’re doing. They give out these silly diagnoses which often don’t mean anything. All anyone needs is someone to talk to. Like what are we doing right now?
Fan: Exactly! We’re just having a conversation and it’s great! In the middle of New York City. Talking with people is good. But giving drugs out is not good. Drugs are not candy.
Speaker: Well… actually drugs are candy, but they need to be administered…
Fan: And regulated.
Speaker: Yes, regulated… But that’s what the psychiatrists do, they regulate them…
Fan: Do they though? They just hand out refills like it’s nobody’s business!
Speaker: I honestly think that psychiatrists shouldn’t give out the amount of pills that they’re handing out, because there’s not an illness. There’s not a sickness. There’s not a medical reason why. They can argue it all they want, but the fact is you’re talking with a healthy person who thinks that they’re sick. By giving them money or giving them prescription drugs you’re just hurting the person that you’re helping.
Fan: No, not even that though! It’s that the pharmaceutical industry is just forcing drugs down everyone’s throat and the problem has become that everyone’s accustomed to that. Like, “Oh, I have depression, let me go get some xanax because I’m so uptight!”
Speaker: No! You don’t need xanax, you need to fucking face your problems head-on like a man and deal with it! That’s where psychiatrists come in. Psychiatrists should open you up to that. But they shouldn’t have to do it with a medical book. Or through a prescription pad. You need to get the person talking to get their problems out so they can face them instead of just forcing it, pushing it down with drugs…
Fan: If you’re depressed you shouldn’t need a medical prescription pad to tell you to come out of your shell more. That’s a self-problem, that’s not a problem that can be handled with a prescription pad.
Speaker: Okay, I have to find my friends!
Fan: Okay, good luck!
Speaker: Thank you!
Fan: Good luck!
Speaker: Daniel, have a good one!
Fan: Daniel, take care!
Speaker: Activism energizes me, for one. Two, psychiatry is killing too many of our people. Although there may be well-meaning psychiatrists, it’s more like an industry. And it’s hurting children and youth. There’s no more talking about your issues, or emotional support. What happened to therapy? You know? So I’m here to be with my peers.
Speaker: Oh no!! I’m here today for people who don’t have a voice. I want to be their voice. As a teenager I was in the system and I didn’t really have a voice. I wasn’t treated fairly and I feel we need to give people a voice.
Speaker: 25 years ago today I organized a similar protest at the APA meeting in New York City. We were only 12 mothers. It was Mother’s Day that time. We were 12 mothers and one male. That particular meeting was the launching pad for clozapine, the first of the so-called atypical neuroleptics, which they call antipsychotics. The APA promoted the drug as a scientific breakthrough in the treatment of schizophrenia. Those drugs, though, as we all know now, and there are so many of them — zyprexa and risperdal and seroquel and they keep on coming. Those drugs are both unsafe and untherapeutic. They have produced terrible, irreparable damage to the body and the brain of those who have ingested them for any length of time. Even some psychiatrists have begun to turn back.
Interviewer: So what brings you here, Peter?
Peter: I’m happy to support my friends who are trying to point out what’s going on with psychiatry, and have continued to do that over many years.
Interviewer: Is it strange being a psychiatrist and being here?
Peter: No, it feels reasonable, totally. It’s not about which side are you on. You’re working to help people. You’re not trying to help psychiatry.
Interviewer: I’m not a psychiatrist to help psychiatry.
Peter: What are you a psychiatrist for?
Peter: To work with people who want to change things, including themselves.
Interviewer: Thanks for coming, how are you doing?
Crowd: Tell the American Psychiatric Association “NO MORE!”
Crowd: NO MORE!! HEY HEY! HO HO! FORCED PSYCHIATRY HAS GOT TO GO! HEY HEY! HO HO! FORCED PSYCHIATRY HAS GOT TO GO!
Speaker: I think this is fabulous. It’s more than we expected. We usually have demonstrations and we don’t have a lot of us out here. But because all of these different issues — stop the Murphy Bill, forced electroshock, forced drugging — the things that are continuing to happen and we’re in 2014. People come out.
Speaker: Who are some of the people who have been murdered? Little children. Rebecca Riley. Two years old when she was started on neuroleptics. I don’t call them anti-psychotics. They don’t have anti-psychotic properties for many. Rebecca Riley was started on these drugs when she was 2 and was dead by 4.
Speaker: I was hospitalized years ago in the 80s. Involuntary commitment. We were just someone who, you know, didn’t matter, who wasn’t a human being. That’s how I felt and I really needed to get away from it. But I had some really good helpers who helped me get where I needed. But it wasn’t until I found the consumer-survivor movement that I really changed my life.
Speaker: Esmin Green. The only reason we know about Esmin Green is that her death by psychiatry was caught on film. She was in the emergency room for 24 hours without being seen, collapsed, and people, the staff, just walked by. One person even kicked her.
Speaker: I grew up believing, my entire life, that there was something wrong with me, that I was damaged, that I was sick. And through becoming involved in this movement I’ve created a new identity for myself, beyond the labels given to me by psychiatry.
Interviewer: What would you say your new identity is?
Speaker: Well, one of them is Rollergirl Mazel Tov Cocktail Number 18.
Interviewer: What does that mean?
Speaker: That’s my roller derby name. Yes, that was one of the things that saved my life. I’m a jammer so I’m fast. And it was never put in a treatment plan for me, incidentally, during all my hospitalizations.
Speaker: It is time for us as a collective human family to shed the chains of psychiatric oppression and reclaim ourselves. For you, psychiatry, only have power because…
We have given it to you. Just make sure we don’t get arrested. Everybody in the street! It’s a threat to them because it goes against everything they’ve learned in school. And it’s a threat to their livelihood. And that’s a huge thing to overcome for some of them.
When I was a teenager, I was locked up for three long years. Forced to undergo combined insulin and ECT. Drugging, seclusion, and restraint. My 17-year-old roommate, Susan Kelly, was killed by the ECT and the insulin. It was unspeakably horrible. It was torture.
I have been speaking out for over 35 years, and I’m here again to tell you THIS MUST STOP!
HEY HEY! HO HO! FORCED PSYCHIATRY HAS GOT TO GO! HEY HEY! HO HO! FORCED PSYCHIATRY HAS GOT TO GO!
[THE MENTAL ILLNESS INDUSTRY IS A DANGER TO SOCIETY.] We are more and more motivated to be a part of getting the word out that psychiatry has some things pretty messed up, needs to change, needs to get its act together, and first “Do No Harm.”
What brought you here today? I’m a… I’m a… I consider myself an electroshock survivor… A… Also… a prisoner of psychiatry probably for 22 years. I was diagnosed at 18. Um… Told that I was sick… I took lots and lots of drugs for a long time. And then electroshocked. I had my memory destroyed basically. It’s done something to my emotions. I’m not sure, I think it’s disconnected my… my… my frontal cortex from my emotional system, or something, because I feel strange and out of it and not myself at all.
Guys, clear the sidewalk please!
How did you experience the protest? I loved it! I am so glad to be here today. It was fabulous! And next year… maybe you?
This movie was not funded by Big Pharma. THE END