"How dare you?"

An important column by activist Nancy Rubenstein del Giudice on the Mad in America Website

Here is a large snippet from the article

I am grateful to Phil Hickey and Robert Whitaker for challenging Jeffrey Lieberman in the manner they did, because, at this point my response to him is more of an emotional one and it can best be summed up this way; "How dare you?"

Dr. Lieberman, how dare you suggest that you should not have to endure critical examination? In case you missed the college experience, anthropology is all about looking at cultures and their institutions, and since your profession has sought to redefine what it means to be human, anthropologists have an absolute duty to examine that endeavor.

I am not sure what country you think you live in, but this is the one that celebrates freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the New York Times is not here to protect your profession or any other.

How dare you ignore the thousands of people who have been harmed by psychiatric drugs and diagnostic lies over the last several decades. If you and your colleagues were the least bit concerned about people and society you would by now have mounted a full-scale investigation into hospital and physician records to find all the people who were told they had a "chemical imbalance" and needed to take psychiatric drugs for the rest of their lives, like a diabetic takes insulin. Dr. Pies' well known assertion that this is only propagated by "uninformed" psychiatrists is belied by the fact that these "uninformed" psychiatrists run hospital psych wards all over the country.

You would find all the people who had an adverse reaction to an SSRI and were told this had "unmasked an underlying illness," and were then put on polypharmacy cocktails leading to disability. That would be the responsible thing to do. But car manufacturers make changes for public safety, and they are not "well-educated professionals" who have sworn to "Do no harm."

How dare you call Robert Whitaker a menace to society? The real menace to society is a profession that has knowingly lied for decades to vulnerable people for profit, and refuses to take responsibility for the harm done.

For the past five years that I have worked for The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, I have known over a thousand individuals who have literally lost everything because they are disabled after withdrawal from SSRIs, benzodiazapines, "mood stabilizers," and neuroleptics prescribed for sleep. They are a burden to their families, unable to qualify for disability because the medical profession refuses to learn and continues to deny the reality of their iatrogenic suffering.

How dare you ignore these young people whose twenties have been ripped away from them? As they suffer for years, unable even to leave the house, they watch their peers build families and careers and enjoy their youth. Any responsible group of people, instead of digging their heels in and denying this is happening would be diving in first to learn, and then to help. Because people matter. Because doctors are suppose to care about patients. Instead, we have a public health epidemic of iatrogenesis.