THE SCANDAL involving the deaths of nearly 100 so-called ‘mental patients’ deserves more consideration. Missing from the press narrative regarding the tragedy, involving an investigation by Health Ombudsperson Malegapuru Makgoba and the many understatements and obfuscations by Health Minister Elias Motsoaledi, is any criticism of the designated methodology used to commit patients, namely psychiatry.
Until 2002 when the Mental Health Care Act was implemented and then amended in 2004, it was considered acceptable to incarcerate persons for political and socio-economic reasons. Involuntary psychiatric commitment was a hallmark of the apartheid regime. Yet the practice of ‘torture as treatment’ deployed by persons such as Dr Aubrey Levin, aka ‘Dr Shock’, continued long past the transition.
It should be remembered that thousands of SADF conscripts ended up in South African asylums, and many were only dehospitalised in 1994. Despite these amendments outlawing involuntary commitment on specific grounds, psychiatry remains the designated methodology deployed by our health department.
All it takes today is two doctors to commit a patient. There is no obligation for these doctors to even see the patient, and thus involuntary commitment of political dissidents may occur even via remote control. Once inside the system, it is extremely difficult for patients to gain access to what little remains of human agency, both in terms of human rights and decision making.
Despite provisions within the Act, it must be noted the so-called Mental Health ‘review boards’, do not function as personal ombuds as such, and even if they did, the problem arises, that of legal representation.
Bar the existence of the general health ombud, there is still no dedicated and practical ombud system focused on South Africa’s so-called mental institutions, nor an independent watchdog for that matter, and we still lack genuine means by which such persons may safely contest a commitment decision and especially when their rights are infringed.
A psychiatric patient for instance, might appear before a judge or lawfully convened health panel, but in a highly medicalised state, and without a dedicated representative, present, to argue his or her case. The situation is akin to being charged with a crime, in this case in the form of a medical diagnosis, and yet to be cast within a situation where there is no defense against what is essentially the medical dismissal of one’s ideas and behaviour.
A dire state which makes the possession of other rights in the constitution, meaningless.
It is not surprising, and given the many articles on this issue in the foreign press, that South Africa has consistantly failed to provide UN country reports on the status of its psychiatric patients, and by most accounts, has failed to honour its obligations in terms of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
The release of the damning health ombud report is however to be welcomed as one small step towards rectifying this horrendous situation.
Both article 12 of the CRPD convention and article 12 of our own Constitution, guarantee that psychiatric patients have human rights and are also to be considered in possession of ‘psychological integrity’, — an all-important concept when one remembers — whether unconscious or asleep, citizens do not automatically lose the presumption of consciousness, as they did under the past regime.
While the UCT sponsored psychiatric consortium has received massive funding from central government and is currently expanding the Valkenberg facility to twice its size, these funds could be better spent on providing therapies within complementary modalities. Instead Big Pharma is the big winner in a model which provides persons with a diagnosis and then treats the diagnosis instead of the individual.
Mental diseases unlike physical diseases are invented. It takes two persons to have a mental illness. Every year the psychiatric profession vote on what to include in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM). The same cannot be said of cardiologists and neurologists. Mental illness labels are thus a social construction.
Medical professionals such Dr Aubrey Levin and others, who administered Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy (ECT) to persons suffering from what was then considered a mental illness, namely homosexuality, were never prosecuted by the TRC. The commission failed to investigate the use of ‘torture as treatment’ under apartheid.
Psychosurgery as well as ECT are still considered ‘therapies’ under the current act, which fails to provide for comparative therapies and other treatments. It is time for a commission of inquiry into abuses and gross violations committed by psychiatry under apartheid and for new thinking on this important subject.