Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 19:57:14 -0700
From: Duffy Dumb <urk_vagh@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Re: No Safe Place
To: POWR-L@LISTSERV.URI.EDU
Hi
This happened in Santa Rosa, CA.
In 1987 a 'client' reported to a friend of hers — a nurse practioner with a specialty of reproductive health care — that the staff at the County Hospital psychiatric unit was systematically gang-raping the female clients.
My friend the nurse spent 2 years making a public stink about this. She was systematically ignored and abused. Finally she made a breakthru and the story was published in the local paper. The M.H. Director resigned and so did the Chair of the M.H. Advisory Board.
My friend lost her career and eventually a decade later committed suicide, with a broken heart. The M.H. Director got his knuckles rapped by the CA Board of Governors and went to a different County where he was cautious and earned his retirement.
You don't want to hear this, because it is opposite to the contention of Women & Madness, but there are two classes of feminists, sisters and "diagnosed sisters." The latter indeed have "no safe place."
More recently the 'client' my friend's friend became a leader in the mental patients movement in the County. The County agreed to name the new Wellness Center after my friend. Then they got 'nervous' and reneged. She resigned her position as the E.D. of the Interlink Self-Help Center.
Phyllis Chesler wrote:
In the late 1990s, I was asked to interview a group of female mental patients who had been raped on their state psychiatric ward by other patients. I traveled out to Nebraska to interview these women and to prepare my testimony. My planning sessions with their lawyers were fascinating-but not as moving as my meetings with the brave women themselves. The institutional abuse of our most vulnerable citizens in state care remains a crucial and unresolved problem.
I would welcome other such similar stories and even more: The remedies and just conclusions.
Paula Caplan has got it right. There is really only one class of "sisters" and psychiatric diagnosis is an ideology which promotes bias.
Andrew Phelps