Torture is Never a Duck…
I recall a young woman who had an intellectual disability at a group home I used to visit. She was effectively but slowly being killed by the mega-doses of psychotropic medication forced upon her by her treating psychiatrist. This was not therapeutic practice but rather, chemical restraint. This resident had been ‘troublesome’ and upsetting to the peace and quiet at the home. Soon enough, she could neither yell nor scream, hit anyone or get out of bed. From people who are intellectually disabled to people who are dementing, psychotropics provide a quick-fix behaviour management strait-jacket with manifestly harmful side-effects. When I dared to question the clinical expertise of the young woman’s psychiatrist, he roared like a bull on crack, damning me as the only person who was not (in his words) ‘on-side’. I was not surprised. His aggressive demeanour was contemptuous, disturbing, and frightening. It was only when the young woman contracted pneumonia that another doctor stepped in to remedy the harm caused by over-medication.
I remembered that story, amongst many others, as I read the details of the barbaric misdeeds perpetrated by doctors and psychologists at Guantanamo Bay and other such places (see link, below). As Rubenstein and Xenakis point out in the linked article, the golden rule of any health professional is to ‘do no harm’. That is not a duck that if turned upside down looks like a swan. It is duck, always. What strikes me about the human rights abuses perpetrated by health professionals is 1) how easily they can step over that uncrossable ethical line, and 2) how complicit, directly and indirectly, other health professionals can be in supporting that abuse. When we look back at the great ethical disasters in medicine outside of the context of war (for example, Tuskegee, Vipeholm and here in Australia, Chelmsford), the human rights abuses are so starkly audacious and so shrilly calling out for reasonable people to shout ‘stop!’ from the top of the lungs. And yet for months, years, even decades, silence pervaded these debauched sites of inhumanity.
Singing like a canary, I always say, beats hanging around like a stunned mullet…
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