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Do existing conditions warrant a hunger strike?

For the past 30 years, historians have documented abuses of mental patients carried out by psychiatrists and other mental health workers during the 18th, 19th, and first half of the 20th century. Support Coalition International (SCI), a group of psychiatric survivors, contends that abuses continue, abuses so severe SCI calls them "human rights violations and crimes."

SCI's members feel so strongly about these alleged injustices, that they are willing to fast until the psychiatric powers-that-be prove the effectiveness of what SCI calls "BioPsychiatry." Anytime our peers make a statement this forceful, we are compelled out of respect to take notice. After all, many of us have suffered the loss of our freedom, felt pressured to take medication against our better judgement, and endured ineffective doctors, among other unfortunate practices.

But allegations are not the same as proof. SCI must not only document such abuses through an outside agency, such as Amnesty International, but also determine whether treatment of the mentally ill is better or worse than it has been in the past.

No doubt biopsychiatry is the dominant system of mental health care in the U.S., if not in the world. But it is a testament to the consumer movement that many more treatment alternatives are available today than in the past. These alternatives include non-pharmaceutical remedies, peer advocacy, self-help, talk therapy, respite care, and supported housing/employment.

What makes the SCI hunger strike unique is that the group is not requesting the elimination of particular abuses, whether suffered by the hunger strikers or others. Rather SCI demands that the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities prove that the theory behind mental health and illness is correct; in other words, that mental illness is biological in origin rather than environmental.

SCI believes that psychiatrists and drug companies cannot make that connection; in which case, their house of cards will come tumbling down and the strikers will have acted as Samson did burying the Philistines.

The debate about whether mental illness is biological or environmental has been going on for at least a century, and SCI's challenge to psychiatrists probably won't change that. Although many scientists are heading in the direction of biological and genetic determinism, a fair amount of what passes for mental illness is environmentally-based. Nevertheless people are discovering that all trauma leaves an impact on the brain. Meanwhile there is no simple physical test for mental illness and DSM IV leaves many diagnoses open to discussion. So the debate will continue.

Unfortunately, the fact that SCI has chosen its own experts to decide whether psychiatrists are right or wrong does not seem like an open process.

So, we propose our own panel of experts, with representatives pro and con. Call, write, or email us with your opinions. Let us know if you would like to join the panel discussion we are planning on the subject during the second half of May: "Is the mental health system getting better or worse and what should we do about it?"