Belgrade, Serbia
September 27, 2000


Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 07:20:16 -0700
To: "MHOCCA List" <mhocca@egroups.com>
From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>
Subject: Re: [MHOCCA] Criminalization of the Mentally Ill

Pat Risser wrote:
On Mon, 11 Sep 2000 06:01:31 GMT Katherine Minsk wrote: Unfortunately the number of mentally ill people in jails and prisons are disportionately high.
I’ve heard this but I’ve yet to see a single study where the diagnosis of prisoners was done by someone legally recognized to label folks as “mentally ill.” Instead, I’ve seen some researchers with dubious credentials and not recognized as “experts”who have talked anecdotally about such matters. This is analogous to when E. Fuller Torrey was in California a couple of years ago and admittedly pulled numbers from thin air to back what he was saying.
Another way to put this is that Fuller Torrey’s #s “pulled from thin air” are vaguely on point. It’s just that he’s notorious for narrow interpretations as well as sloppy factual work. I’d say that the ‘liberation movement’ of the 60s (as, the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets) has been converted into a forced rage suppression system known as housing 100s of 1000s of individuals who ‘fit the pattern’ in the state prisons. Does this make it wrong for minorities to fight for their rights? NOT.

However, it does mean that society has a severe way of dealing with a movement that confronts it. Similarly, I’d say, the situation Katherine reports from L.A. County jails is real but it also reflects the way the society has dealt with confrontation by mad people.

And similarly the ‘answer’ has to be, you can respect the Black Panthers but you know, they knew too, that they had to pull back and ‘take over Oakland by electoral means’. Our movement too has to take charge of the question of respect for mad people. Torrey and (I’m afraid) Katherine too believe that respect=forced treatment. But I don’t think so. That is a move based on limited options and Vision breakdown. Really, respect depends on developing a tradition of ‘accountability’ among clients and leading society to recognize that there is value in some kind of accommodation with the client culture.

This won’t be easy, and for a long time we will have ‘lockup’ and abuse problems such as the L.A. jail situation represents. But we must be steadfast and — I’m sorry, Katherine, but this is where the hope is — we must cling to the notion that respect and not force is the basis of the social relations that must obtain.

Respectfully

Andrew Phelps

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