Sept 4, 2019

Dear Senator Warren,

I just watched your town hall appearance focussed on climate change, and even though I have been rooting for you and contributing to your campaign ever since you entered the race, I was thrilled to hear you mention both science, your faith in it, and the morass of corruption that characterizes everything in Washington DC. 

I know you don’t have a lot of time to read emails, if indeed you read this one, so I will get right to the point.

There is only one group of law-abiding American citizens who can be and regularly are deprived of their civil rights in this country, with utter impunity, and that is the group of us who have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia and bipolar conditions. On the word of a psychiatrist or even in some cases just a masters-degree-carrying “counselor” we can be deprived of our freedom, institutionalized and forcibly drugged for months, even years at a time. Why? Because someone else believes we might be dangerous, even though in fact future violence is notoriously hard to predict, even some will admit impossible to predict.

 No one who has committed a crime is kept in prison because of possible future violence, no, what prisons are for, whether you agree with this or not, and I think it is shameful, is to punish, by applying violence to those who HAVE committed a crime.  But many, even most of us who have been forcibly hospitalized and drugged have never been violent towards any other person, period. Look at the statistics if you have not already. As those predict, i have been the victim of a violent crime, but never have I been charged with a single incidence of lawbreaking…

Senator, the thing is, if you believe in science, and in rooting out corruption, look at what is going on in psychiatry, and don’t just get the word of psychiatrists, or people who run the so-called mental health system. They either do no know or do not care about the extreme damage the drugs they force on us have done and are doing. They are either completely in cahoots with big Pharma, or they too believe the lies they taught us, that schizophrenia and bipolar conditions are real disease entities, chemical imbalances that such drugs ameliorate if they do not actually amend them. As you may learn, psychiatrists now claim they never said this, that we patients “made them say it.” But this is a lie, and the chemical imbalance lie is still being used on us and the general public.

Psychiatrists as a group do know the truth of what Thomas Insel, former head of NIMH, wrote just a few years ago, that they spent over 20 BILLION dollars in their effort to prove that these things are real neurochemical imbalances, with neuro-anatomic foundations, and in Insel’s words, they “have not moved the needle” on discovering either the cause or any effective treatment. 

And yet medication, drugs, are the ONLY treatment that hospitals offer Involuntary patients. In fact, if you are a willingly hospitalized patient, even then such drugs — which shorten the average lifespan by as much as 25 years — are de facto the only treatment. Sure there are “groups” but those who run them will tell you they are just to keep people busy, and are not intended to do anything else.

I am not one of the lucky wealthy people who have been treated voluntarily in posh private  hospitals. No, i have been beaten up and tied to a bed too many times to count, which is also involuntary treatment, in public and municipal hospitals, the only ones who took my Medicare and Medicaid, so I know where of I speak…

I could say so much more about this. I am a former medical student, and now an author and artist who was diagnosed and treated, in hospitals and out, for schizophrenia for decades.

The drug companies and psychiatrists lie when they say the drugs work. They do NOT lie when they say that is all they have…indeed it is! But is this right, to lock us up in hospitals because we are different and people claim we might be dangerous for being different? To drug us for life on compounds that drastically curtail our lifespans, and rarely increase our happiness, or our productivity as citizens? No, please see that a resounding NO is the only answer. 

And keep us in mind when you become our next president.

Sincerely,

Phoebe Sparrow Wagner