Excellent article by a social worker about the problems that exist in the field of mental health care.
"I now realize that I overlooked many important questions when making the decision to accept this role. At the time, I minimized the importance of questioning whether working as part of a program that incarcerates persons against their will on psychiatric grounds was something that could reconcile with my own values and beliefs. I had never worked in a program that was “secure” or that had psychiatrists on site pushing drugs. I had never worked for a program that was so deeply embedded in the state system of mental health with its own expectations and agenda. In other words, I had never really come face to face with the medical and authoritarian model of treatment from the inside....
"Yelling at people, “agitation,” or verbal hostility should not be enough to justify involuntary commitment and the forced drugging that inevitably comes with it. Yet people frequently experience psychiatric incarceration because they are inconvenient to a system that does not and will not provide empowering, listening, understanding relational care....
"Success is measured by whether or not someone becomes more compliant with an “authority’s” expectations, not whether or not someone experiences emotional and personal healing. For most people I work with who are incarcerated for psychiatric reasons, their happiness or own assessment of their quality of life is not an issue that informs treatment planning; whether or not they are behaving most certainly is...."
http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/01/corrections-officers-not-clinicians-2/
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