Rob Wipond

There is a parallel incarceration system thriving in North America. As much as the US leads the world in attaching residents to its criminal justice system, the mental health incarceration system is even larger. According to Rob Wipond in his painful and terrifying book, Your Consent is not Required, Americans and Canadians are always just one step away from being forcefully confined and drugged in psychiatric institutions. It is the most personally frightening book I have ever reviewed, and that is saying a lot.

The mental health complex continues to expand exponentially. There are actually far more beds now than when Ronald Reagan supposedly emptied the psychiatric hospitals, considered common knowledge, even though it is false. Today, literally everyone is empowered to have authorities forcibly commit another person without recourse (civil confinement) if they seem a danger to themselves (depressed, suicidal) or to others (psychotic). A simple call to 911 suffices to have the police surround the house and subdue its occupant. No warrant necessary. New York City fields 170,000 such calls a year. One Canadian victim’s human resources manager did that to him after she fired him. In his frustration, he threatened to kill himself. Police blocked off his street, positioned themselves around his house and prepared for an armed standoff, when he wandered out and asked what was going on. They immediately seized him and institutionalized him.

The book is filled with vivid color and action, a fast yet difficult read because readers will want to stop after every paragraph and think about what they just read. There are innumerable horrifying stories of people minding their own business, suddenly being hauled off to hospital, forced to remove all their clothes (or orderlies would cut them off and destroy them) and while being pinned down naked, receive multiple injections of antipsychotics, sedatives and other psychotropic drugs to dull them into submissive vegetation. These meds are also known as chemical straitjackets.

Your Consent is not Required covers a huge number of topics, from schools, guardianships, and side effects of drugs, to the military, foster children and secret court proceedings. And every one is made visceral and far too real for comfort by personal stories from those who lived through them. Their stories are relentlessly engrossing. This unending parade of traps, torture, and medical fraud is all around us, and unbeknownst to us, is affecting millions.

Fighting it leads to being physically restrained. Protesting leads to reports you “lack insight” and are not credible or competent to understand your own condition. Co-operating means the treatment is working and should therefore be continued indefinitely. They will twist anything at all to their advantage. And no one represents the other side.

At the hospital level, it is all about control. Staff sees this all day long among their far-too-many charges and responsibilities. All they want is an easy shift: quiet obedience. Anyone who sticks out physically or verbally is playing Whac-A-Mole with their own heads. Just sit and watch the TV in the common area, because that is all the staff wants to see. That is, if you are even allowed out of your cubicle of a room. If you’re not on 24 hour suicide watch.

One of the many strange things about this psychiatric world is its secrecy. Few if any stats are kept. Public Relations refuses to divulge any data. Governments do not require reports. Police need no warrants. Court cases are secret, and over in minutes as judges quickly defer to psychiatrists almost every time. No one has an accurate handle on how big the problem is, and it shows in Wipond’s descriptions and (lack of comparable) stats. But Wipond clearly demonstrates the gigantic nature of it, and how widespread it has become in both the USA and Canada.

He found that 80-90% of psychiatric patients are not there voluntarily. This includes about 20% whom the criminal justice system has declared not guilty by reason of insanity. Altogether, North Americans end up in psychiatric hospitals at over 300 per hundred thousand, the kind of figure we got used to in regards to the pandemic. It is double and triple the rate in western Europe and the Baltics where Wipond says the systems are comparable.

He makes every chapter a grimacing shiver with personal stories. People following normal lives are suddenly and totally unexpectedly seized and incarcerated. They are treated like dirt, alternately abused and bored out of their minds, drugged into vegetative states and isolated. When they no longer appear normal, it is further proof they need institutionalization. And of course, Blacks are targeted for repeated hospitalizations at five times the rate for whites (for which the American Psychiatric Association only very recently made a blanket formal apology).

Victims (it’s hard to call them patients) lose all their rights: “Once you’re labeled mentally ill or even alleged, you’re no longer protected by the constitution. I now know that to be true,” says one who lived to tell the story. Even the Supreme Court has acknowledged that psychiatric detention is a “massive curtailment of liberty.” (Yet the Supreme Court has also affirmed immunity for mental health professionals so they can’t be sued for kidnapping, sequestration, torture, overdrugging, misdiagnosis and so on.) Victims are denied even simple access to their own medical records. Once they get off the meds, they feel infinitely better. The vast majority of those who make it out of there and stop taking their meds, detest and despise mental health professionals.

Ironically, psychiatric professionals think and proudly claim that those who return to society are grateful for and appreciative of the wonderful job they did on them. Even worse, victims who go through the hospitalization ordeal are “dozens to hundreds of times more likely” to commit suicide after treatment. Victims compare it to being sexually assaulted. The British Journal of Psychiatry says forced treatment “is not associated with improved outcome.” If anyone is delusional here it is the mental health industry.

One victim memorably told Wipond the caregivers were “as dogmatic and patronizing, as condescending and defensive as Mormon Church officials.” He added: “It’s the universal paranoia of psychiatry that everybody who disagrees with them is pathological. You can’t argue with a psychiatrist without getting a diagnosis (yourself).” When people are disappeared, family typically has no idea where they went or why.

Consider the homeless. It has been widely reported they are largely mentally ill. Yet institutionalizing them is no one’s priority because it does not help (and is not very profitable). What the homeless need is a home, not meds. What studies there are show that simply having a home with privacy and security makes most homeless well adapted citizens again. No therapists required. It is the time-tested Amish method. There are projects today that succeed with just that model. But for the most part, the homeless are labeled as mentally ill and treated as such: in and out of psychiatric facilities against their will.

It just gets worse and worse as you read on. After learning that forced antipsychotics, psychotropics, antidepressants and anti-anxiety injections begin with infants, the next chapter follows police as they trace and track down callers to the anonymous suicide prevention lifeline, incarcerating them and putting them on suicide watch. The suicide prevention line has become one the largest funnels into psychiatric detention, Wipond says. Then the next chapter deals with guardianships, a wealth-stealing scam beyond belief. One 67 year old woman was sitting at home when the doorbell rang. She answered and her visitor simply commanded “Give me your house keys and your car keys. You’re coming with me.” She had no idea who the woman was, but it transpired she collected guardianships, hundreds of them, putting ordinary people into forced confinement, until she had drained all their savings and insurance money and sold their possessions. There is no recourse. All you need is a sleaze psychiatrist to sign off for a fat fee. This victim managed to break free eventually, but lost her house, family trust fund and life savings, and now rents a small apartment and lives on social security. The guardianship was perfectly legal, properly filed and processed, even though it was totally outside her knowledge.

Because forced detention and incarceration are quickly labeled incompetence, the victims have no recourse. Readers might recall the Britney Spears case, that Wipond cites. She hired her own lawyer against the guardianship by her father, but the judge dismissed him, claiming Spears was not competent even just to appoint a lawyer to represent her. The Department of Justice says there are 1.3 million seniors under guardianships, controlling at least $50 billion in personal assets. Wipond cites one person who tries to aid them: “The mantra is litigate, overmedicate, take the estate, cremate the remains. It’s nearly impossible to escape guardianship except in a coffin.”

Wipond says the majority of US adults have sought professional mental health help. As the population grows, individuality is ever less tolerated. Anyone who sticks out is no longer just odd, but a threat. Advertising has made it seem that Big Pharma has totally safe pills for everything. So many people have therapists, it now seems normal, even desirable. Media continually run stories about the lack of power to commit the mentally ill. And to the lack of mental health facilities and beds for them. It is all totally upside down.

Worst of all are Wipond’s stats on children. Starting at birth, but with significant numbers by the age of two, parents medicate their children with mental health pills and injections. By the time they reach adulthood, 20% are taking at least daily multiple psychotropics. In Tampa over a seven year period, there were 7,500 instances of children taken from school directly to psychiatric facilities. By the age of 18, 50% of American students have had a mental illness diagnosis.

They are broken in as children, with made-up diseases like ADHD, and wide choices of non-real diseases listed in the DSM-5, the bible of brain diseases. This manual shows “there are no consensus-based, scientifically testable, known biological aspects to most mental disorders,” Wipond says. And he is far from alone in that. Meanwhile psychotropics retard intellectual growth, dull creativity and add physical weight, among other things that will show up later in life, from fidgeting and rocking to diabetes. There is an ugly section on side effects, currently treated as additional diseases requiring additional pills, but traceable directly to mental health meds. Twenty pills a day is not atypical.

Elsewhere in the system, foster children are put on psychotropics all but automatically. It helps keep them from running away, and keeps foster parents coming back for more. The state reaps a fortune from them, seizing their personal property and enrolling them in bulk on Social Security. Foster parents get a tiny cut of that. One state gets more than a third of its budget from this scam. I reviewed this in the similarly shattering The Poverty Industry, which is well worth taking a look at: https://medium.com/@davidwineberg/state-sponsored-racketeering-of-the-poor-8eab4... . Come back for it when you’re done here.

Most military enlisted men get assigned psychotropics. If they don’t accept them they get reported. When they leave, the Veterans Administration will insist they continue them, or deny their PTSD status. And that can be a loss of 2/3 of their military pension. So all kinds of veterans are locked into mental illness regimens for life.

That the drugs don’t work is a scandal admitted by psychiatrists. Their association (APA) says “lack of treatment specificity is the rule rather than the exception.” The FDA refuses to talk about those drugs, but can show no proof they work any better than placebos. Nor do they have anything to say about electroconvulsive (shock) therapy, which also has no scientific basis and is very far from safe. Nothing has come to market that cures mental illness or eliminates symptoms. Ever.

The current biggest scam is that mental illness is directly traceable to a chemical imbalance in the brain. Even up the levels and the mental illness goes away. Nothing could be farther from the truth, yet this is daily repeated as gospel. A new study proves it to be definitively bogus and worthless, but it remains the guiding light of the system. Mere mortals can’t contradict the pros whose careers depend on it.

Similarly, the tests and quizzes mental health workers employ have definitively been proven worthless, assigning mental illness seven times more often than in-depth assessments. But they are more widely available than ever, used by county health officials, senior citizen programs, schools – you name it, they’ve got five question tests to prove mental illness in pretty much anyone.

States can go to ridiculous lengths. In Wisconsin, Wipond notes, a woman’s fetus is entitled to a lawyer, but she is not. A pregnant person declining to take psychotropics is considered endangering the life of the fetus. That’s endangerment for NOT taking dangerous drugs while pregnant. The industry claims psychotropics do not pass to the fetus, like cocaine does. And we are instructed to believe that. If charged, a woman can’t give her own medical records to her lawyer, because that would be a breach of the fetus’ privacy rights.

All this has led to the creation of a new tribe of Americans: psychiatric refugees. They flee the state to avoid forced treatment. But then the mental health establishments classify them as missing persons nationwide, and they can be forcibly extradicted from wherever they settled. They would have to leave the country – and Canada is just as bad.

So where is all this coming from? If we peel back the curtain, we plainly see – Big Pharma. Multiple expensive pills several times daily for life is as close to heaven as there is for pill makers. They wine and dine psychiatrists, hire them on consulting contracts, put them on committees that meet in exotic resorts, and mold them into spokepeople. It is so overwhelming that any psychiatrist who speaks in favor of therapy over meds is immediately slapped down. The APA demands they shut up or give up their license to practice – or it will arrange to have it removed by the state. Kangaroo courts accuse them of everything in the world. Psychiatrists are the exceptionally vicious front line defense for Big Pharma.

Outside the mental health monolith, research tells a bitter truth: “Psychiatric diagnoses are non-scientific, that psychotropics have no known or proven effect on any underlying disease, and that most psychiatric medications are like 50 variations of aspirin and do not show long-term benefits.” That from a 2022 Tufts and Harvard meta-study of decades of published mental health studies. The whole edifice is a fraud that as psychiatrist Bruce Levine points out, has made no progress since Spinoza, 350 years ago.

If there is just one takeaway here, if readers understand nothing else, they should not ever speak of depression or suicide as long as they are in North America. Never enquire about them, and NEVER admit to even thinking about them, even to a best friend or spouse. You never know who they might talk to, even just casually, as some of Wipond’s cases demonstrate. The risks of an unexpected knock at the door are simply too high. Never admit to researching death or depression. Delete search history immediately. Any of this can lead to an endless hell where you will wish you had committed suicide when you had the chance.

That’s sick. And it is a sadly accurate reflection of the powers described in this important book.

David Wineberg… (mehr)