Contemporary practices of sterilization in Australia

As a follow up to the post in the first link below, here is a list of further related links on those wanting to know more.  Thanks to a helpful anonymous reader of the What Sorts blog who provided most of the links below but who doesn’t wish to be identified.  Folks in Oz: let us know if you have more information, are undertaking action, whatever.

• https://whatsortsofpeople.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/forced-sterilization-and-disability-in-australia/  Recent What sorts blog post on forced sterilization in Australia TODAY:

• 1997 & 2001: reports from the Human Rights Commission in Australia that discuss the practice.
• 1998– official document assessing situation, number of sterilizations per year, convenience of sterilizing disabled woman http://www.familycourt.gov.au/wps/wcm/resources/file/ebb8810487b4021/MURRAY.pdf
• 2001- Study and report from Women With Disabilities Australia.  Thorough, including much relevant history, sterilization survivor testimony and narratives, as well as a talk given by Adrienne Asch, and references to the significance of the Canadian eugenic history here, and reports “The Sterilization of Leilani Muir” as one of two video source. http://www.ag.gov.au/Documents/HRPB%20-%20NHRAP%20-%20Baseline%20Study%20-%20Submission%20-%20Women%20with%20Disabilities%20Australia%20-%20Attachment%205.PDF
• Leilani Muir on The Current, with Anna Maria Tremonti

“Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion”

An article from the New York Times tells the story of Milt Greek, who experiences psychotic delusions to save the world.

So after cleaning the yard around his house — a big job, a gift to his wife — in the coming days he sat down and wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, supporting a noise-pollution ordinance.

Small things, maybe, but Mr. Greek has learned to live with his diagnosis in part by understanding and acting on its underlying messages, and along the way has built something exceptional: a full life, complete with a family and a career.

Greek, and a growing number of others, have looked to their delusions as being rooted in fears, and other psychological wounds, with the goal of recovery through understanding. It’s a process that

Lennard Davis on SSRIs

Over at his blog column at Psychology Today, distinguished disability theorist Lennard Davis has just posted “Five Reasons Not to Take SSRIs”. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, the best-known of which is Prozac, have been massively prescribed for the past 15-20 years by doctors and psychiatrists, especially for depression. Davis begins:

For the past five years, and in my recent book OBSESSION: A HISTORY, I have been questioning the effectiveness of Prozac-like drugs known as SSRIs. I’ve pointed out that when the drugs first came out in the early 1990’s there was a wildly enthusiastic uptake in the prescribing of such drugs. Doctors were jubilantly claiming that the drugs were 80-90 per cent effective in treating depression and related conditions like OCD. In the last few years those success rates have been going down, with the NY Times pointing out that the initial numbers had been inflated by drug companies supressing the studies that were less encouraging. But few if any doctors or patients were willing to hear anything disparaging said about these “wonder” drugs.

Now the tune has changed. …

To read the full post, click here.

Does anyone remember “lobotomy”?

Picture of brain surgery

The New York Times recent Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk raises, for me, one big question: why the enthusiasm for bringing experimental brain-fu*king to the public’s attention right now? As the article reports but does not underscore in the name of balance, the history of psychosurgery is one of moral and medical failure, though failures recognized only in retrospect. What could be so different now? That we’re not considering lobotomies (which sever the frontal lobes) but cingulotomies (which sever into the anterior cingulate) and capsulotomies (which sever the connections between the cortex and the medulla that make up the internal capsule)?

h/t to ARPH’s Psychosurgery promoted by the NYT: Here we go, again; for a more optimistic take on this, see also Mind Hack’s Psychosurgery : new cutting edge or short, sharp shock (the only comment up there gives some pause, however).

Mad Pride on National (US) News

FYI:

**********************************************************
MindFreedom Update — Tuesday, 25 August 2009

Unite for A Mad Pride Revolution in Mental Health

Tonight on ABC-TV USA News Show Primetime:

MAD PRIDE DEBATED!

As Predicted: Last Half of ABC-TV Show Plays Up Violence

ABC-TV just posted the text for the second half of their story tonight on MAD PRIDE, and it looks like the show will end as many experienced activists predicted:

Over-emphasizing a gory violent incident by a person with a psychiatric diagnosis.

Tonight, Tuesday night, 25 August 2009, the Mad Pride piece is slated to air on ABC-TV’s national Primetime show “Outsiders” at 10 pm ET and PT in the USA, but check your local listings for the exact time.

Said David Oaks, Director of MindFreedom, who is interviewed in the show, “After 33 years of activism, I am not surprised about media exploitation of violence. But let us remember the many people killed by the violence of forced psychiatric drugging. ABC-TV ignores this institutional violence. Most of us in MindFreedom are psychiatric survivors. We remember. Nothing will stop us from speaking out, not even predictable bias by huge corporations like Disney.” Disney is the owner of ABC-TV.

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* ACTION * ACTION * ACTION *

Join the debate!

Read both Part One and Part Two of the text of ABC’s Mad Pride story on their web site, and add your comment now to the debate in BOTH parts:

Part 1:

“‘Mad Pride’ Activists Say They Are Unique, Not Sick”:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=8382903

Part 2:

“For One Family Decision to Reject Treatment Ends in Tragic Death”:

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=8399298

Listening to Madness

Newsweek has run an article (May 2, 2009) on patients classified as “mentally ill” refusing to take their meds and making a case for “mad pride.”  You can read it at http://www.newsweek.com/id/195694.

Rethinking “Conceptions of the Good” in Light of Intellectual Disability: What’s dependence got to do with it?

[This post is the ninth in our new series of Thinking in Action posts, the series being devoted initially at least to discussion of talks at the Cognitive Disability conference in NYC in September. The first post in the series is here and the posts run Tuesdays and Fridays.]

In their talks at the disability conference, Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis look at questions about the role of the individual in the process of coming up with the things the person perceives as what is good for them, which includes reasons and motivations for accepting these goods as the person’s own. This is what is typically referred to as “a conception of the good” in the academic literature on social justice. Silvers and Francis argue that the accounts offered by Rawls and Nussbaum characterize this process in a way that is problematic for those with significant cognitive disabilities because they play up importance of the independence of the individual in coming up with their own good. If we adopt a picture of the individual as independent in this way, then it looks like those with cognitive disabilities will be excluded and left without any way to guard against being exploited by others in society. Is there a way to include individuals with severe cognitive disabilities in the process of conceiving their own good and in exercising their conception of the good to the degree required for social cooperation?

The answer, according to, Silvers and Francis in their talks, is ‘yes’. However, an account that includes those with significant cognitive abilities requires a shift in focus from independence to collaboration. The way in which Silvers and Francis suggest we make this shift is what I want to focus on. Part of their task involves expanding the picture by reframing the notion of conceiving of the good as a collaborative process, which involves “a reasonable dependence” on others in coming to one’s conception of the good. One way to illustrate the direction of the revision, which includes moving away from independence and toward reasonable dependence, is the use of trusteeship as a prosthetic process for those with cognitive disabilities. This way of thinking about collaboration and prosthetic processes in this way assists cognitively disabled individuals in coming up with their own good as well as with their interaction with others in coming up with a conception of the good for society (and thereby justifying justice). Before I get to questions about how we are meant to understand prosthetic processes, I’ll talk a bit about the role of independence and why Silvers and Francis find it problematic.

This is contrasted with Rawls’ and Nussbaum’s accounts of political liberalism, each of which relies on its own picture of persons as independent in the process of coming to their conception of the good. The emphasis on the role of independence within the individual’s process of arriving at and revising their conception of the good on their own has been the basis for the claim that his account of justifying justice excluded people with significant cognitive disabilities. And it is the independence of the individual in this way that invokes a “metaphysics of independence.”

What exactly does a metaphysics of independence refer to?