TWO HEALTH SYSTEMS
America had two separate but equal education systems. There were few people whose voice could be heard above that custom. People who tried to address the inequality of the segregated systems could find no voice, so deeply inculcated was the prejudice, that few could view it as anything but a normality, a part of everyday life.
No one in the media cared to address it, the media mirrored the custom, ignoring the blatant inequality of the division. No one in the U.S.
Attorney General’s office cared to address it; although it violated federal law, custom had trumped law for so many generations that no one could imagine the Basic Rights Amendment of the Constitution actually applied, least of all the highest legal office in the country.
The pattern did not dissolve with Brown V Board of Education, it simply continued unabated directed at a different set of victims: America’s health care is divided into two distinctly “separate but equal” systems, one based upon the Hippocratic Oath and community-based services, the other based upon a system of segregation, isolation, institutionalization and intense authority, removed from public purview, and dedicated to the proposition that some people are so inherently unequal, they should not only be hidden, but labeled as less than human and sequestered not only physically but in language as well.
Why demonstrate against the directors of such a system is a cruel question to pose, but it was posed during America’s other long term segregation, so the person segregated would expect to be asked: What right do people with psychiatric disorders have to be seen as people first? What right do we have to protest that the health system the general public enjoys is locked from us, and not just metaphorically, the prisons are real, the locks are real, the bars are real, the isolation is real.
The vilification is real.
As other segregated people tried to reach the legal authority constituted to protect their rights, so have we — individuals who have sought medical attention from this separate but equal system. As attorneys general throughout the nation ignored those requests for equality, trusted and believe in the custom of segregating we people of lesser worth, so now we are protesting against not only the laws that relegate us to 4/5 human, if that, but against the professions that maintain that definition through their onerous silence, and worse, through the very language they present publicly.
Psychiatry is the understanding of the human mind. Its purpose is to help people understand, and instead, its public actions and its public rhetoric have been to assure the segregation, to prolong the prejudice, to prolong the discrimination and to assure it continue for so long as possible, while posturing it does indeed care.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded a study of public attitudes toward people with mental disorders. The study was done by an unbiased research agency, the Daniel Yankelovich Group in New York City, but once the research had filtered through the organization receiving the funding, had filtered through psychiatry, the heart of the message was lost.
We all know a child brought up with abusive language experiences that abuse as deeply, if not more deeply than physical abuse. We know that. No one would dispute that simple statement, and yet, psychiatry and the industry it has fostered, can not learn the simple lesson of one independent study: People are more accepting when the language is more respectful. A lesson most of us learn in kindergarten.
In Memphis striking garbage workers carried signs declaring “I AM A MAN.” They had to instruct the world of their humanity, so deeply had it been abused. And now we act to stand outside the American Psychiatric Association conference carrying the same signs — “WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS” — and hope the world will take note, while knowing it will not.
Hoping their authority will be shaken.
Knowing it will not. Hoping for change, knowing it will not come.
But we will be carrying the signs. What other resource do we have but our own minds and bodies?
Harold