The reasons why… Pt 2

Ok, here is the clue. (WHO and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2023).  

The link sends you to this 2023 document.

World Health Organization & Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights . 2023. Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation: Guidance and Practice. World Health Organization. 

Don’t click on that link unless you can read Chinese. Click on mine.

This massive publication is the source of what I’ve been banging on about, the untruthful, immoral, virtue signalling, health service destroying, staff injuring, criminal absolving, lying insistence that violent patients are wonderful, never need locking up and its all the horrid staff’s fault. I’m no longer wondering why seclusion reduction initiatives in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Sweden and so on all have the same phrasing and language. And timing. I could go off on a tangent about how much our ministers are paid (Base £99K + additional £67K) when to my eyes, they are nothing but obedient delegates, following orders from a supra-national body instead of doing the hard yards of working out policy to meet our national needs – but for another day.

The document has a section titled ‘Evidence against coercion’ which doesn’t provide any. It just makes shock, horror claims, with no examples. They don’t waste any paper showing the opposite, the benefits of coercing violent patients. There’s no corresponding section titled ‘Evidence for coercion.’ I could write one. They’re not even pretending to be fair and even handed.

I may have already posted elsewhere that when woke academics don’t have any evidence for their desired outcomes, they make it up. Read on.

Here’s one. ‘Coercive practices in mental health violate the right to be protected from torture, and cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.’

Notice there’s no caveat or moderator like ‘may violate’, or ‘sometimes violates’. Oh no, these heroes know beyond doubt that they’re right.

The citation supporting this statement? https://docs.un.org/en/CAT/C/GC/2 It’s called ‘Convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. General comment No. 2. Implementation of article 2 by States parties.’

Astonishingly it doesn’t send you to a rigorously researched study. Do you consider that a bunch of suits talking among themselves at a conference somehow constitutes evidence that secluding violent patients constitutes torture? I don’t. It doesn’t. The document doesn’t even mention it. It’s a false citation. I’d call it marking your own homework. Other ‘evidence’ or citations for this airy-fairy nonsense – if you scroll down to the references are no more than other UN reports.

Here’s another.

‘Coercion can inflict severe pain and suffering on a person and have long-lasting physical and mental health consequences which can impede recovery and lead to substantial trauma and even death.’

Care to put any figures on that dramatic claim, anonymous UN author? Like, out of all the restraints last year, how many resulted in severe pain and suffering or death? Set against how many resulted in no pain, suffering, injuries or death? What’s that? You couldn’t be bothered to check? You just knew you were right?

I’ve never seen those consequences from a restraint or seclusion, not in 35+ years. I have seen ‘severe pain and suffering and long-lasting physical and mental health consequences’ on staff from patient assaults, including never being able to come back to work. But human rights legislation is not written (I suspect deliberately) to protect civilians from criminals. It’s a one-way street.

The citation ‘evidencing’ this drama queen claim is the only one that, at first glance, looks like a published paper. ‘An end to coercion: rights and decision-making in mental health care’ Kanna Sugiura et al.’ It isn’t though.  It’s a ‘Bulletin of the WHO.’ I call it an opportunity to spout someone’s show-off virtue signalling daydream without going through peer review. Don’t bother reading it unless suffering insomnia.

As I say, it’s not a study. But it does contain a quote from a professional politician, the ‘Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights,’ buckets of UN and WHO references and this bedpan of tosh from the writers.

‘The underlying belief (*) is that people with psychosocial disabilities lack the intellectual capacity to make decisions for themselves, which can engender a destructive cycle of marginalization and abuse.’ (3)

*) That’s her summary of a belief (she doesn’t identify anyone who actually holds it) about everyone belonging to a fake, a UN created category of people, (people with psychosocial disabilities *), which she then dismantles and criticises in the text. A ‘belief’ which she wrote herself. That’s a straw man any day of the week, however high-faluting the publisher is.

*) who just so happen to have their own UN Convention of Rights despite not being in a category anyone living in the real world has ever heard of.

NB a lot of patients with (I may as well play along), ‘psychosocial disabilities’ do lack intellectual capacity and can’t make decisions without help from us. That, Kanna, is what a disability means. You can’t magic it away with a straw man.

And the citation supporting it (3) (which doesn’t) is just a literature review which says it ‘reviews (testicles, it cherry-picks) the evidence for the types of human rights violations experienced by people with mental and psychosocial disabilities in low-income and middle-income countries.’ Includes Egypt, Lithuania, Kenya. How does this nonsense affect what Britain should be doing? Anyway, this is an interminable rabbit hole. If by now I haven’t proved to your satisfaction they make it all up, then I recommend you reading Janet and John instead.

Continued in ‘The reasons why… Pt 3’