Left: Alison Hymes attends a friend's wedding in Washington in 1984. (Courtesy of Alison Hymes) Right: Hymes is seen at the entrance of Riverdale Assisted Living on Dec. 17, 2014. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)
Contrary to its image of love and compassion, psychiatry is a means of social control with no due process protections. Among the misguided standards is if a person denies the entire concept of mental illness that too is a mental illness. Human emotions, ordinary protected speech and behavior are classified as illnesses. Using arbitrary standards psychiatrists take a person's freedom for speech and behavior which they do not like or do not understand.
[From article]
Hymes was no ordinary patient. Before landing at Western, she spent years urging others with mental illness and their families not to let doctors, judges and social workers make decisions for them. She was part of a state task force charged with reforming civil commitment laws at the time of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, serving alongside doctors, academics, and law enforcement officials.
The daughter of a prominent University of Virginia linguist, Hymes argued vehemently — and unsuccessfully — against loosening the state’s commitment criteria.
[. . .]
Anyone who knew Hymes from her days on the state’s commitment task force would not have recognized the timid woman in the hospital waiting room.
She had been a fixture at public meetings on mental health issues for years, with a reputation for challenging anyone, no matter how important.
[. . .]
Author Pete Earley, who served with Hymes on the state panel, described her as the loudest, fiercest voice against involuntary hospitalization and forced medication. “She wouldn’t give an inch and celebrated being an outsider,” he said. “She was relentless if you disagreed with her.”
[. . .]
Years of taking lithium had ruined Hymes’s kidneys. She was on a transplant waiting list as she served on the task force, spending much of her free time going to dialysis.
[. . .]
More significant for Hymes, the state adopted the approach to involuntary hospitalization recommended by the task force. It no longer required that people pose an “imminent danger” to themselves or others before they could be committed, but it also allowed involuntary hospitalization of those who showed a “substantial likelihood” of harm because of an inability to protect themselves from harm or to provide for their basic human needs.
[. . .]
When asked whether she was mentally ill, she replied, “I don’t really believe in mental disability.”
To clinicians, her answer was a sign of her illness, and they sent her to Western for what became a one-year stay. To her friends in what’s called “the psychiatric survivors movement,” her statement was a sign of sanity. She shared their view of involuntary hospitalization, forced medication and the use of restraints as traumatizing and a violation of civil rights. To them, she was not a patient but a political prisoner.
[. . .]
When outside pressure against her hospital commitment did not work, Hymes grew dejected. A doctor described her as “feeling hopeless and helpless” and saying, “ ‘I give up.’ ”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/she-fought-for-patients-rights-then-she-was-put-in-a-hospital-against-her-will/2015/01/31/c306f01c-a1b0-11e4-903f-9f2faf7cd9fe_story.html
She fought for patients’ rights, then she was put in a hospital against her will
By Annys Shin
January 31, 2015 at 8:15 PM
Washington Post
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