Guthrum, at the LPUK unofficial blog, comments on cases of people being put into Soviet-style psychoprisons for wholly unsatisfactory reasons.
Once I worked in a town where I knew a couple of people who ran the only Army-surplus shop in the whole place. An occasional visitor to the shop was a friend of theirs, who lived on a narrowboat moored on the canal. He was a bit eccentric, but by no means so mad that his sudden disappearance caused no surprise. He was not at the time receiving any medical treatment.
It eventually turned out, after some investigation, that the police had for some reason raided his narrowboat. He had not apparently been arrested for anything, but had been taken away and sectioned under the Mental Health Act, on the word of two doctors down from London, neither of whom was his GP, and who seem to have directed the police operation. Immediately after the police had left the narrowboat it sank, rendering him legally homeless. He was never seen again.
His crime (which dates the case) was to have written a polite letter to HM the Queen, suggesting that Lady Diana Spencer was an unsuitable bride for the heir to the throne, who, in his opinion (shared at the time by a number of prominent people in the UK), should, by amendment to the Act of Succession, have been allowed to marry Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg, for whom at the time Prince Charles was thought to have more than a modest affection.
For doing this he was deprived permanently of his liberty, of his rights as a citizen, and of all the property he had in the world, without recourse to any process of appeal or review, whether medical, legal or otherwise.
He will never be let out of whatever hell-hole they put him in. Such people are always incarcerated until they die, for fear that they might, if released alive, tell stories about what had happened to them.
It is to provide for such unconstitutional and arbitrary life-imprisonment that places have to be made in ’secure mental hospitals’ by evicting from them people with serious mental illnesses, many of whom, suddenly alone and without help, have then committed serious crimes.
The state of psychiatry in the 21st century is roughly equivalent to that of surgery in the 17th; crude, desperate, ill-informed, necessarily brutal, and far too often either ineffective or counterproductive. Its use as a means of ‘disappearing’ those whose views are inconvenient, but who cannot realistically be convicted of a crime serious enough to ensure their long-term incarceration, is nothing short of the atrocity which it was in the hands of the Soviet regime (and still is in those of the equally totalitarian Chinese).
The Libertarian Party is the only political organisation in the UK with the courage and common decency to demand that all state psychoprisons be searched for ‘victims of the State’. Were this ever to be done, I would not be surprised if those imprisoned for reasons other than their clearly dangerous mental illness were found to be in the majority.
