(translation: “1/3 of all children inserted in Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark are exposed to FORCE: · Belt fixation · Enforced medication · Fixation · Gloves · Imprisonment. That’s how they play in psychiatry”)

It’s sickening to be sick - But it pays really well

In Denmark we currently have the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights) exhibition about psychiatry. It’s a critical expo displaying the 200 year history of psychiatric abuse of fellow men. In some countries for the sake of money, in others as a mean to suppression of critical voices for the government, in others again it seem to be for personal pleasure of a few psychiatrists.

It’s the third time we have this expo here, and every time the Danes are astonished that these things are going on - they hope - in other countries. Quite many think that for example electro chock therapy isn’t happening anymore - that it went out of fashion after the 1975-movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with Jack Nicholson. But in fact Denmark is not just one of the countries where electro chock therapy is mostly used, Denmark is also one of the few countries in the world where electro chock therapy is given under force to patients who doesn’t want it. 

In any case, the whole aim of the expo is to inform people that what is going on in the psychiatric hospitals, which in Denmark are state-funded via the tax that every citizen pays, is not something one can just ignore and trust is in the best hands.

Many statistics show that it doesn’t work - at all. If the methods was working it wouldn’t be necessary to have 87% of the patients recycling in the system. In face, the typical psychiatric patient in Denmark is one who had a traumatic experience like a divorce, a traffic accident, at death in the family, loss of a good job or other condition which you would normally say one would get over after some hours, days or weeks. But when such a situation turns into a matter of a psychiatrist, it becomes a diagnosis for which the cure is drugs, isolation and physical damage to the brain. Log story short; what is the fact of the matter is that normal people in a crisis are this way turned into patients, given a diagnosis and made unable to perform and work (which in Denmark leads to public paid retirement of the person so the person can spend the rest of his or her life as a psychiatric patient - hence the 87%).

Few actually get out. Because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t cure anybody, it turns them into patients for life.

One interesting little fact I found for the promotion of this expo was a report from The Danish National Board of Health about force in the psychiatric hospitals of Denmark.

1/3 of all children inserted in Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark are exposed to FORCE

· Belt fixation
. Enforced medication
· Fixation
· Gloves
· Imprisonment

So we did the above video on that fact, and it now ranks in the top when you search for the psychiatric hospital “Århus Universitetshospital” … which I’m sure they will be unhappy about. But then they should deal with the situation.

Generally “only” 1/5 of all patients in all of Denmark are subject to force, and the number just went up 0,5% from 2007-2008 (it’s now 21.9% of all patients). An alarming fact, what would you think if you went to your doctor with a flu, and he insisted so bad on a treatment that you were imprisoned and forced to take the medicine. What if you felt it was going away, that it wasn’t really a problem, or if you had some other “alternative” method of dealing with it other than medication?

If it’s in the mind, you have no choice. And one can only wonder why that is.

The expo gives the answer as one can see how psychiatric institutions came about 200 years ago, and how this sick business developed over the centuries.

If you are in Copenhagen have a look at Nytorv at the walking street (“Strøget”) till June 6, 2010. It’s open every day from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM and admission is free.

– Thorsten Overgaard