Thursday, October 15, 2009

Is The Government Spying on Those with Schizophrenia Enough?



This from the Onion: The government needs to do more to help individuals with paranoid schizophrenia, such as implant devices in their heads so voices can tell them which bus drivers hate them and which manholes are covering up underground government prisons.

On a serious note, too many of us have bitter experiences of well-intentioned people charged with helping us doing the very opposite: Threatening restraints, not listening, telling us we will never work again, making us feel like outsiders ...

Have a good laugh, then when you're through laughing ...

1 comment:

John McManamy said...

This is The Onion at its finest and scariest. The disturbing and great thing about Our Finest News Source is that they can put their finger on the absurdity of how people really think, and then nudge it half a smidgen into absurdity. In this case a quite dark absurdity.
Hey, Elizabeth. I accidentally hit "Reject" instead of "Publish" from my iPhone in a moving vehicle. I just got back home and have to load your comment into this one. Here goes, and My reply follow:

What this brings to mind is what you were saying in an earlier blog about the "us and them" relationship between professionals and patients. Letting a professional with a merely intellectual understanding of a crisis situation decide what would be best for the patient is less than ideal situation, one that The Onion plays on brilliantly. - Elizabeth

Hi, Elizabeth. It's interesting. Some of the worst psychiatric abuses such as lobotomies were done in the name of some higher principle and for our own good. This is a much more enlightened era, but the "us"-"them" dichotomy, with our population perceived by clinicians as somehow deficient or defective still exists. Well intentioned individuals who profess to do good hopefully will, but we need a much greater say in calling the shots.