mental illness in prisons

Here's an interesting article on the BBC about the prevalence of mental illness in the British corrections system:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7867398.stm

Paul

Tags: britain, illness, mental

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Permalink Reply by Carter (PDN Admin) on February 6, 2009 at 4:22pm
This was interesting...thank you Paul for posting
Permalink Reply by Carol Shinouskis on February 10, 2009 at 10:24am
Wow. That's very similar to what happened to me here in the US. I was in jail for two years and I have borderline personality disorder. I am a cutter ( tho I'm working on it). I was told, instead of helping me, that I was only trying to get attention and was put back into general population. Without my correct meds. The second time I tried to cut my wrists along with the rest of my arm and they said guess what? That I just wanted attention and put me back in gen pop with NO meds! People refuse to acknowledge that mental illness has a lot to do with a) crime in general and b) how people are treated or not treated when it surfaces.
Carol
Permalink Reply by Janna on November 13, 2009 at 6:21pm
The Buddha taught that everyone is borderline, i.e., that we all have a tendency to see others as "all good" or "all bad," and that tendency, called "splitting" in psychological parlance (or jargon) is what the Buddha called "attachment/craving/greed/passion" and "aversion/hate/anger," or our rose-colored and dark-colored lenses. These are two of the three root causes of suffering to be abandoned. The more we become empathic, compassionate, concerned for others, altruistic, the less we will tend to split, and the more healed and whole we become. The more we see others as complex, constantly changing with different situations, like ourselves, the less we will see self and others as black and white. The Buddha taught that we are all "mentally ill," and that the medicine for the mind is Dharma, mind training. There is no other medicine that cures the source of mental suffering.

I was surprised to read of a "clinically assessed mental age." The Buddha taught that we all have immature minds of children and that mind training leads to the gradually ripening, maturation of the mind. Bedwetting and defecation are not signs of an assessable "mental age" but rather of possible sexual abuse or rape.

Beware of the "mental health" trap, which is high on the priorities of pharmaceutical companies and colluding partners (hospitals, doctors, families, insurance companies). Be grateful that in prison they don't load you up with tons of toxic chemicals with severe psychological and physical side effects. Focus on your practice with your whole heart and mind. Mind training is very, very slow and painstaking. Bear the searing mental anguish, ride it like a long long wave. It is impermanent, like all compounded phenomena. Develop patience. You have a precious human life and a precious opportunity to practice and grow.

I recommend the article by Ron Leifer http://www.iaapa.de/zwang/leifer.htm on moral responsibility and "mental illness." As you read, you may want to keep in mind that moral responsibility (ethics, the warm recommendation to abandon the ten non-virtues) is also the basis of Dharma practice. I hope this is helpful and if I irk you, I apologize. I find it helpful to imagine that I am a yogi in a cave and often draw comfort from that thought.
Permalink Reply by Ed Knight on December 27, 2009 at 7:48pm
Please tell this to a cancer patient or an aids victim. "Mental Illness" a term i am not at all fond of is more "moralized" than any other illness or what ever it is. Everything is enlightened just as it is including medications and people who take them for what ever reason they take them. Other than that i generally agree with what you say.
Permalink Reply by Janna on December 28, 2009 at 2:31am
Thank you for your reply.
I would say precisely the same to cancer and AIDS patients. Look at this, on AIDS in Africa: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/277.html

I certainly didn't mean to "moralize" mental illness (or cancer or AIDS), or to blame any victim. Not everything is enlightened, although our greater acceptance of all that is, is part of the path towards inner healing. Discernment, of what to adopt and what to discard, is also part of the path. Just as meditation on suffering is part of the path, but at the point where we start losing hope and feeling overwhelmed by all the suffering, our own and that of others, we switch to meditating on our precious human life and our rare opportunity to practice. Ultimately the mind heals the mind. Medications, including mind altering substances (entheogens) can help or hinder that process. Diagnostic labels can also help or hinder that process. Freeing ourselves from our feelings of victimization, and becoming empowered and increasingly self-confident (vs. self-centered "esteem") are important for our healing. Ethics can be a powerful tool for self-improvement, but are certainly useless as a stick to beat over someone else's head. Not what I meant at all. This is a resource on ethics: www.dalailamafoundation.org/studyguides

This is a wonderful humorous/serious film about mental health and illness:
Evolving Minds- Psychosis and Spirituality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h12_kRYITTA

What is reality? Who defines it?
Evolving Minds offers a fresh and radical perspective on alternatives to the mental health system. Presenting clear information in a humorous style it covers diverse topics such as shamanism, nutrition, psychotherapy, meditation and protest against draconian mental health legislation.

Produced by Undercurrents & Melissa Gunasena, Evolving Minds explores the connection between psychosis and spiritual experience and provides techniques for people to explore and take control of their own minds. An invaluable resource that will educate, empower and inform.
Includes exclusive footage of British army experiments with LSD.
Running Time 45minutes

And an interview with the filmmaker, Melissa Gunasena: http://www.undercurrents.org/minds/index.htm

There are lots of alternative mental health resources. Here are three:
successfulschizophrenia.org (can be of interest to people with other diagnoses as well)
mindfreedom.org
intervoiceonline.org
Permalink Reply by Ed Knight on December 29, 2009 at 9:54pm
Dualism. I struggle with that too. Non-dualism is not an easy practice
As a resource i'd add psychrights.org. and www.professored.com
Permalink Reply by Janna on December 30, 2009 at 5:18pm
Thank you. Middle Way (3rd option).

I read the Short Spiritual Biography.

Stigma is in the eye of the beholder, and imho the solution is massive education of the masses, to remove the sty in the eye. No one "has" a stigma. Individuals in society project "badness" onto others, according to an endless procession of labels.

I am so glad for this mental health discussion - forced hospitalization is another prison, often worse, with no due process.
Permalink Reply by Ed Knight on December 30, 2009 at 11:38pm
To me the word "masses" is very "stigmatizing". People are hurting terribly everywhere. They are doing the best they can in almost impossible circumstances. Labelling and force seems to be immediate solutions. To paraphrase Jesus, "let him who is without attachment preach about it." I have been forcedably treated in jails and prison. I took the oppportunity this offered to enter an endless transformation. When people are frightened by their own ghostly projections they acgt in cruel ways.
Many people who don't want or think they need medications are forced to take them. Many people who want and think they need meds are denied them. It is crazy.
Permalink Reply by Janna on December 31, 2009 at 12:12am
Yes, what you say is very compassionate, and true.

Of course, you must also get my meaning. It is not the "mentally ill" who wear the stigma on their persons, but the "others," who suffer no less, even more perhaps, who do the stigmatizing of the "mentally ill," and project "badness," disgust, rejection, onto them/us. We all suffer from these "good/bad" projections and the healing from them, as you have already said, is through non-dual acceptance.

Are you familiar with the tong len meditation, Tibetan "giving and taking" meditation? It is very beautiful and very powerful, and similar to what you write: http://www.kaykeys.net/spirit/buddhism/tonglen.html

What I am saying is that it is not the "mentally ill" who are in need of mental health. True mental health, which is obtained by dharma practice (or spiritual practice and mind transformation by any other name according to culture) is needed by all. Violence is the disease of the mind in need of the cure.

It is okay to use the labels, of self and other, of "mentally ill" and the rest of society who have not been so labeled, as long as one recognizes that we are using conventional labels, nothing more. The label itself does not necessarily carry any stigma (of course some derogatory labels do - I've lived in China, where "masses" is an acceptable common term; in English it may not sound okay). We do call things tables, chairs, and so on, and these terms are useful. Of course they are also whirring electrons, existing on the basis of parts, and so on. :-)

Yes it is crazy. Yes, people can be very cruel. Together we can change ourselves and the world.

May all beings be happy, free of suffering and its causes.
Permalink Reply by Michelle Espinosa on February 20, 2011 at 10:59am
Jenna, I really appreciate your thoughtful posts.
Permalink Reply by Chris de Ocejo on February 20, 2011 at 5:50pm

Jenna,

 

But they do load people in prison up with drugs, usually the cheapest ones available, like thorazine or haloperidol, which do horrific things to a person's mind and leave behind tardive dyskinesia, an incurable side-effect of the medications that remains after the medication is withdrawn.

 

As for clinically-determined mental age, it is used to assess an individual's competency in a number of legal situations. For example, a clinical assessment is done of mothers and fathers where there is some sort of child abuse in order to determine whether it is in the best interest of the child to restore the child's custody to the parents. You have it backwards: sexual abuse and/or rape triggers an investigation to determine who should have custody of the child, or whether the child should remain in the custody of the state.

 

As for the "mental health trap," I have a severe mental illness myself, Major Depressive Disorder. One of the symptoms of my illness was an inability to find joy or pleasure or happiness in anything. Because of this, I had absolutely no motivation to pursue meditation practice. In fact, it could and sometimes did make the situation worse.

 

Please forgive me if this sounds harsh, but you haven't mentioned any personal experience of yours that led you to conclude that there is a "mental health trap." Were you yourself on medications for mental illness? If so, which ones, and how much? What was the outcome of your use of them?

 

I ask because because I think it's a bit unfair to say "we're all mentally ill" and that medications for mental illness comprise some sort of "trap." In the same way that (I assume) you wouldn't say "we all have a skin color" and go around trying to tell Black folk what they should do to better their lives.

 

For me, medications are absolutely essential because I harm myself and others if I don't take them. The "first" step of the Eightfold Path is sila, promoting skillful behaviors rather than unskillful ones. Not treating my mental illness with whatever I can manage violates ahimsa. Violating ahimsa is unskillful because it promotes uddhacca-kukkucca, restlessness and worry. As long as that hindrance is around, I can practice neither samatha nor vipassana. I've wanted to be off-meds for a long time now - the side-effects are terrible - but I will not do it because I would harm others in the process.

 

But the idea that I can be "off meds" is unskillful for a second reason: it is based upon the idea that I am an independent entity. Which I'm not. I'm an interdependent entity. My actions affect others. It's only my delusional belief in an independent self that sees things differently.

 

This my experience, though, and everybody needs to make up their own minds. I offer it so that others might see what I did and the results I got. 

 

With metta,

Chris

 

Permalink Reply by Janna on February 21, 2011 at 2:38am

Dear Chris,

I respect very much your thoughtful personal process that you so willingly share with us.  Milarepa, the great Tibetan yogi saint (this is in response to your post in the discussion about Zimbardo's book), started off as a murderer, and killed many, before he entered the Dharma and met Marpa, his teacher. I have always respected and tolerated my emotions, even the very unpleasant ones, such as grief and rage, and have experienced what someone might term "depression." I just lived with the feelings, sometimes doing nothing or not much of anything for days, weeks, months, until the feeling/s passed, until there was a natural turning point. From feelings of intense loneliness, I have gone out and done things I later regretted, and each one of these experiences taught me that such actions do not bring happiness. 

 

Many psychiatric medications are known to cause aggression, so the fear of harming others might actually have a physical/chemical basis, and may result from the medications or an unsupported effort to stop them. I have worked in hospital psychiatry with natural medicine, acupuncture and herbs, and have consistently been able to help people reduce their medication dosages and to diminish side effects (including "chronic, major, resistant depression").  I do not believe that long term use of psychiatric medication, CNS poison, is beneficial or necessary for anyone.  Psychosis, various trance states, can usually be stopped in 1-4  days of psychiatric medication. "Mental illness" is rare in Tibet and Tibetan society does not and did not have mental institutions and only small prisons. Tibetan medical practitioners use herbs, taken internally, applied externally in massage or as incense, and nutrition, to heal mental/emotional imbalances. 

 

In the ideal world we do not live in, your reasoning regarding rape - custody would apply.  I have seen children abducted from parents without any basis, placed in institutions and raped, and then diagnosed as "having a problem" (non-specific) which is then used as further grounds for keeping the unjustly abducted child institutionalized. What do you say about that, Subhuti?

 

Your description of use of psychiatric drugs in prisons is horrifying; drugs are used as a convenient form of social control, for profit. Institutionalized people, whether in prisons, mental hospitals or other forms of warehousing, are a modern (probably since the steam engine, though I am weak in history) form of lucrative slavery that should be abolished.

 

I would like to suggest, if I may, that with appropriate support (meditation, nutrition, exercise, acupuncture/herbs, drumming, etc.), you may be able to reduce and eventually discard your reliance on psychiatric medication.  You have a dharma practice, that does not give instant results, but is the most precious and most important medicine for the mind there is.

 

I recommend this excellent film, for natural methods of attaining and maintaining mental health:

"Evolving Minds: Psychosis and Spirituality" by Melissa Gunasena (45 min)
2 min trailer
8.30 min interview with the director

Neuroscience and meditation research of and for healthy minds:

www.investigatinghealthyminds.org

www.mindandlife.org (8 min introductory video to Mind and Life Institute)

ccare.stanford.org

http://www.psychiatry.emory.edu/PROGRAMS/mindbody/ (links to articles on depression)

http://www.psychiatry.emory.edu/PROGRAMS/mindbody/people/craison.html

 

May all beings be happy,

Janna

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