The Virginia Tech Shootings
April 19th, 2007Universities should act quickly and institute compulsory courses in ethics and human kindness. We can show a substantial number of people that goodwill provides positive benefits.
I hate to say this, but when you provoke people, it is then pretty easy to run around saying that they might be a danger to you or someone else.
In Vancouver during 1982, Professor Wolf Wolfensburger, Syracuse University, New York, argued that thousands of mentally handicapped people die in North American prisons and psychiatric institutions from massive doses of mind-altering drugs, or when emergency or intensive-care treatments are withheld, or due to society’s mistreatment of them: Hard proof is often unavailable: “If Germany had won the war,” he said, comparing the present to the past, “we’d never have seen the evidence.”
Yes, and with Wolfensburger’s statement in mind, many of us would like to see the health-science industry allocate a tiny bit of its wealth to the creation and maintenance of a not-for-profit depository for patients’ narratives, perhaps something similar to the Kenneth Donaldson Archives for the Autobiographies of Psychiatric Survivors (see http://www.successfulschizophrenia.org/kdarch.html).
I have not investigated the Donaldson depository. Al Siebert, a co-founder of the archive, writes, “One day there will be archives of psychiatric abuses similar to the archives that now document Holocaust atrocities. This Archives exists to provide psychiatric survivors with a place to preserve for future generations the unpublished autobiographies of their experiences. The Archives was founded in 1980 when Ken Donaldson, author of Insanity Inside Out and Al Siebert, author of Peaking Out: How My Mind Broke Free from the Delusions in Psychiatry, discovered that many psychiatric survivors have written manuscripts about their experiences but are rarely successful in getting their books published.”
