It angers me beyond all imagination that psychiatric incarceration, police brutality, forced drugging and complete negation of our humanity or worth is the best our supposedly 'enlightened' society can offer to distressed people.

Why is it that this kind of almost inconceivable violence is considered acceptable in dealing with someone who's been labeled 'mentally ill' when it would inevitably result in a person going to jail if they did these same things to someone who bore no such label?

And there's the privacy issue - someone with any real medical condition has the right to have their personal information and their relationship with their physician be considered essentially a sacred trust, with no threat of disclosure, while someone with a psych. label can quite literally expect the possibility of their 'health information', in all its gory details, being translated into public headlines.

What's especially infuriating for me is how many supposedly progressive people have been seduced by psychiatry's and pharma's PR campaign into believing this particular social construct is acceptable.

Supposedly activists are people who have assumed the responsibility of creating a vision for a better world and who are willing to challenge their own misconceptions about how things are in order to do so. This is a situation that should be an obvious, urgent target for a complete revisioning and makeover. As a broader social change community we've really dropped the ball here.

Perhaps it's that a lot of supposedly 'progressive' folk are reluctant to admit they harbor the same biases as the rest of society when it comes to these issues? There's times that I've been literally screamed at by other 'activists' for daring to suggest that in psychiatry's case, the emperor's bare butt is clearly visible.

The same irrational fear that lies at the root of other social prejudices is at work here. If the same obvious prejudice were being shown nowadays on the basis of someone's race, gender. religion, what have you the public outcry would be enormous. What's wrong with this picture?

What makes it especially frustrating in this case is how often the bias comes cloaked in a false mantle of compassion. The social blind spot thus created is enormous.

My challenge to the activist community as a whole is to face and conquer this particular irrationality so we can proceed ASAP to doing what needs to be done. I don't have any answers to offer immediately, but that doesn't stop me from knowing, to the very core of my being, that the existing situation is wrong.