There’s no doubt that personal strengths and inner resolve have been severely tested over recent months due to covid-19. Stresses and anxieties regarding the present and the future have understandably risen following the imposed restrictions on personal freedoms.

While media focus has been on the difficulties experienced by those who ordinarily enjoy an untroubled existence, there has been an even greater reduction of civil liberties for those detained under a section of the Mental Health Act.

Under the erroneous description of mental health, psychiatrists forcibly reduce personal freedoms to an even lower and degrading level. It’s a frightening experience for someone who was in need of a little care and attention but who instead got a locked door and a syringe. It would be more accurate to say the psychiatric industry is the provider of mental illness, not mental health.

By chemically restraining a person with powerful mind-altering drugs, psychiatrists are creating a situation where a person is vulnerable to even more mental and physical difficulties due to the effects that go hand-in-hand with prescribed psychiatric drugs.

It’s therefore important that anyone caught in the mental health matrix gets a listening ear and a helping hand and the opportunity to exercise his or her rights. This may not align with the psychiatric ideology, but it’s a humane approach that has the potential to give a vulnerable person confidence.

Brian Daniels

Citizens Commission on Human Rights