Tag: romesh senewiratne-alagaratnam

Eugenics and Modern Psychiatry

opening chapter

Dr. Romesh SENEWIRATNE-ALAGARATNAM

©1998

                                      Chapter 1

                LEGACIES OF A PRISON COLONY

When the first large asylum was built in Australia, at Tarban Creek in New South Wales, the Superintendent made a requisition that hints at the treatment the inmates were to receive when the “lunatic asylum” opened:

“63 iron bedsteads, six chairs for violent cases, 16 cribs of wood for dirty cases, 12 pairs of leather hobbles of various sizes for males and females, 12 hard belts of strong leather and iron cuffs attached to them with straps, 12 cuffs and belts for the hands in less violent [cases]” (Dax, 1975)

The Tarban Creek Asylum was opened in 1838, and it accepted patients from Victoria who were transported there by ship from Melbourne. The state of Victoria had not yet been founded, and the area was still administered by the British colonists from New South Wales. Prior to this a smaller asylum had been opened in 1811 in New South Wales, before which the insane were kept in jails. The close connection between the prisons system and the psychiatric system has persisted to the present.

The next asylum was built in Tasmania (Van Dieman’s Land) which was then a prison colony along with Norfolk Island, to the east of Tasmania. This occurred in 1829 and was followed by an additional larger asylum at Port Arthur in 1842. The Australian psychiatrist Professor Eric Cunningham Dax wrote of Port Arthur in A World History of Psychiatry (1975):

“In 1842 an asylum was opened at Port Arthur. There were four dormitories, a central hall, 24 cells, and a padded room. One patient spent long hours in a cage. Port Arthur then had an evil reputation, and Britain, in a wave of belated guilt, ordered the penal settlement to be abandoned, so that by 1879 only 64 prisoners, 126 paupers (presumably housed in the invalid block), and 69 lunatics remained. They were called “imperial lunatics”!

“Another matter of psychiatric interest at Port Arthur was an adjacent establishment at Point Puer which contained up to 730 delinquent boys, mostly aged 9 to 18. Some were transported for trivial offences. It appears that Governor Arthur made a real attempt to educate and train them as stonemasons, sawyers, and in other trades.” (p.707)

The training and retraining of young people was one of the many agendas of psychiatrists and mental hygienists, but they had to compete for the minds of the young with the Churches, which had a longer history of both teaching children and looking after the poor and disadvantaged. It was the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church in Australia that controlled most of the primary and high school education in these areas in Australian schools, but this was to change, according to the plans of the mental hygiene movement and medical profession.

One way in which the psychiatric profession formed an unholy alliance with the Anglican and Catholic Churches, was by providing the initial incarceration, enforcement of ‘compliance’ (obedience) and drug treatment of young people and collaborating with Church organizations in their subsequent training in menial occupations, whilst providing on-going supervision and enforcement of drug treatment. Cunningham Dax refers to such programs  in From Asylum to Community, and continued developments of this alliance are evident in an examination of today’s youth-training programs and psychiatric treatment and followup programs. Dax wrote, of the then new system in the late 1950s:

“Prior to 1954 there were no full-time chaplains within the mental hospitals. Since that time the Anglican Church have appointed five and the Presbyterians one, and it is hoped that three other full-time chaplains from the Catholic and the Methodist churches and another Anglican will be engaged before long. They are jointly appointed by the Church and the Mental Hygiene Department. There is a chaplains’ advisory committee which discusses the terms and the conditions of appointment, and the training. Opportunities are available for the chaplains of the various denominations to discuss their work together and a series of successful seminars have been held which have extended from a single day up to a full residential week. Three Anglican chaplains have been abroad for training.” (p.34)

Dax does not say which countries the chaplains were trained in but it was undoubtedly Britain or America. Dax, who was born in Britain and graduated in medicine at the University of London in 1935, is Anglocentric in his perspective, and, along with common medical views of British and British trained psychiatrists had fundamental belief in “physical treatments” and drug treatment over “talk therapies” and psychotherapy of a more gentle nature. This has been a feature of Australian psychiatry since the time of Cunningham Dax, especially in the public hospital system, where the only treatment is drugs and electric shocks. Psychotherapy is generally held “to not work for serious mental illness”, and “psychoanalysis”, by which is usually meant Freudian analysis, is suspected (with good reason) to confuse the psychotic further. Dax does not mention psychoanalysis, or Freud, and makes only passing references to psychotherapy, which he says the psychologists employed by the Mental Hygiene Authority and public hospitals were actively discouraged from doing. He writes:

“Neither the psychologists nor the social workers are encouraged to do psychotherapy as it is felt that they are more usefully used in their own special fields. On the other hand, it is hoped to extend the group activities for both these associates within their own specialties” (p.34)

In territorial fashion he defines what he sees the role of psychologists to be in this new empire controlled and dominated by psychiatrists:

“Nine years ago there was an establishment of seven psychologists; now there are nineteen. They have not as yet been widely used in the mental hospitals, but more within the clinics and particularly in those for children. The ways in which they have been occupied within the Department are therefore as follows:

Intellectual Deficiency Here the psychologists are particularly concerned with assessing the intellectual abilities of the patient and his capacity for development. They give remedial teaching, so the child may develop to the maximum of his ability. They supervise the patients’ activities so as to direct them towards gaining a therapeutic benefit. They are able to guide the patients into appropriate occupations or activities towards training them to live in the community.

Children  In child guidance clinics some of the psychologists are used for play therapy or counselling, but the practice varies. Intellectual and vocational testing, educational assessment and advice on overcoming difficulties, and remedial educational therapy are regarded as some of the psychologist’s functions in this field. They do valuable work in the instruction of the staffs of institutions for adolescents and children, especially through group activities. Also they usefully undertake the management of parents; group discussions for remedial training.

Adults  In this field the psychologists undertake the intelligence, educational, vocational and projective testing, and they direct the junction with the occupational therapists. They can set out patients’ records in such a way that they will supply the needed data for statistical records. Similarly they can prepare and plan controlled psychiatric experiments in a way capable of statistical analysis.

Research They carry out research into the various aspects of human behaviour and the best means by which patients, in all the psychiatric fields can be taught fully to use their abilities and skills.” (p.34)

As far as spiritual needs of his patients, and of the Australian population generally, Dax assumes that the Church can provide this:

“Chaplain’s functions within the hospitals relate to the patients’ spiritual needs and welfare and to their way of life, and therefore the duties of the chaplain may be defined as follows:   

To see whether each patient admitted wants, or is likely to want, his spiritual help, and always to be available at a definite time for patients to visit him.

To arrange for prayers, services and religious observance for the patients of his own denomination.

To supervise the care of the hospital chapel.

To co-operate with the chaplains of the other denominations for the welfare of the patients.

To act as educational officer in the hospital and so to interest himself in such items as the library, debates, drama, English lessons, recreations, current affair discussions, choral societies, music, and the patients’ magazine.

To be available to see patients’ relatives and to communicate, as needs be, with their clergy.

To participate with the other medical associates in the treatment, resocialization and rehabilitation of the patients.

To further the understanding between the mental hospitals and the general public by interpreting the hospitals’ functions to the community” (p.35)

In other words, the mental hygiene movement seconded the Christian Churches, starting with the Anglican Church, as public relations agents for the treatments, diagnoses and propaganda provided by the psychiatric profession, which controlled the “mental hospitals”, despite the fact that what they were doing and teaching were the very antithesis of what Jesus of Nazareth did and taught. They also seconded the psychology profession, which competes with the psychiatry profession, to implement psychiatrist-designed treatment programs, administer psychiatrist-approved “intelligence tests” and “personality tests” for psychiatric diagnoses made by the psychiatrists (not the psychologists), and process statistics which could be used by the medical and psychiatric profession, and, it turns out, the pharmaceutical industry.

The care of intellectually deficient children was already a self-appointed responsibility of the Christian Churches in Australia, and the conditions in which these children were kept from the earliest days of British colonization is a national disgrace. Although Dax does not write about mistreatment of psychiatric patients during his own years of office, his description of the conditions at the Kew Cottages in the 1950s gives some indication of how unwanted children were treated in Melbourne:

“There were open drains, children caught worms by drinking the water, there was little storage accomodation, the paint was drab and peeling. The children’s clothing was awful; the small boys had unlaced boots, long moleskin trousers turned up at the bottom, adult football jerseys which had been given to the cottages by a football club with old army jackets on top and whatever hats they could collect. They were dirty and had very little washing accomodation indeed. Many played in a shed during the day in a half-nude state, there was a battery of lavatories with eight or ten adjoining seats but there was no way of swilling the excreta out of the trough except by walking thirty yards for water. They passed urine into the open drains. The patients ate from tins with their fingers, slept on straw mattresses and the place smelt of stale food and excreta and unsatisfactory drainage.” (p.125)

Although there were improvements in the cosmetic appearance of many of the metropolitan institutions in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, the abusive treatment of young people in Australia, including forced labour, separation from families, and arbitrary punishment were to continue under the joint supervision of the Mental Hygiene/Health Authority (and its successors) and Church Organizations, later accompanied by bigger and bigger doses and combinations of crippling drugs. Dax explains:

“The intellectual deficiency colonies are partly under the care of the Mental Hygiene Authority and partly of several voluntary organizations. One of the latter is really a day-centre, organized on a residential basis because it is in the middle of a sparsely populated district, where the pupils cannot come by transport each day, in other ways it is similar to the retarded children’s day-centres. There are eighteen boarders there who go home for holidays and frequently for weekends. A few day-children are taken. The other two voluntary residential colonies are run by the Catholic Church. Marillac House for retarded children from 6 to 16 was opened in 1943 by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. In 1961, there were ninety-six girls, of a higher intellectual level than the children in the retarded children’s centres and mostly of about special school standard.

“The Brothers of St John of God opened an institution in New South Wales in 1947 for the training of intellectually handicapped boys, and another in 1953 in Victoria. The children in the main training centre are at the special school level, but a lodge adjoining was later opened for those who were no more than the day-centre level. In 1957 they opened a farm colony and there are now 95 boys in the residential unit, and 40 in the farm colony.” (p.124)

The Church directly sold out to the corporate interests of the chemical industry and psychiatric profession by selling Churches for conversion into psychiatric treatment centres, where the treatments were inevitably chemicals, combined, at times, with surgical mutilation and electric shocks, physical restraint and solitary confinement, forced labour and brainwashing. Dax writes:

“The Clarendon Clinic [in East Melbourne] was formed by redesigning a church, its vestry, a church hall and an adjacent house. The body of the church has been converted into a therapeutic workshop and the vestry into four consulting rooms. The church hall has been made into a cloak-room, sitting- and dining-room, and a hall for the rooms, offices and staff rooms and a female toilet block.

“The clinic was designed to supply the needs of those patients who had been many years in hospital, had been rehabilitated there by the new methods used, and were now fit for community care. However many of them were unable to earn a living at first or to find accomodation except by the use, at least on a temporary basis, of one of the departmental hostels. Moreover, many of them still needed some medical care, and were therefore followed up by their own medical staff who could visit the Clarendon Clinic to see them.”

The “new methods used” are inadequately described by Dax, but included insulin comas, chemical shock using cardiazol, injected and ingested tranquillisers, electric shocks (an older treatment) and brain mutilation by “psychosurgery”. He explains of the upgrading of “Larundel receiving house” into a major treatment centre, which it remains today:

“Larundel has a residential early-treatment unit and a short-term rehabilitation hospital attached. At Mont Park [the adjoining hospital] there is a longer term treatment hospital with a long-term rehabilitation hospital attached; this has a subdivision consisting of the general, medical and the surgical services and the neurosurgical unit, together with a geriatric hospital. Opposite to Larundel is a repatriation hospital for psychiatric cases attributable to war service. Within two miles is the old private hospital which is being used for geriatric patients but which may be converted later into a short-term alcoholism treatment centre” (p.177)

As they plotted to convert a general hospital for the elderly to an “alcoholism treatment centre”, the Mental Hygiene Authority and associated hospitals explored new treatments for their captives and converts with the aid of the then new “Mental Health Research Institute” in Parkville, Melbourne. Dax writes:

“In 1954 the Chief Clinical Officer, Dr Alan Stoller, was appointed, but much of his time in that year was spent in an Australia-wide survey of mental health needs and facilities, so he did not take up his position until 1955. Shortly after this the Mental Health Research Institute was built and officially opened by the late Sir Ian Clunies-Ross.       

“In 1955 a Mental Health Research Fund was founded consisting of an annual grant by the Victorian government to the University of Melbourne…Within the first year the University Department of Anatomy was able to demonstrate its work on the neuro-anatomical basis of emotion and growth on mongoloid children. The Departments of Physiology and Pharmacology were working on cerebral sedatives and analeptics while the Department of Pathology was doing research on cerebral arteriosclerosis.

“By the beginning of 1956 the Mental Health Research Institute was able to give demonstrations of the work proceeding in the Department on the incidence of schizophrenia, Huntington’s Chorea, juvenile delinquency, the clinical effects of tranquilizing drugs, electro-encephalographic studies of brain-damaged children and the results of infero-medial leucotomy [psychosurgery]. Studies had also been made on the treatment of excitement with lithium and its effects were being tried out at several hospitals.” (p.139)

The passage above reveals the connection between the mental hygiene movement, the University of Melbourne, the Mental Health Research Institute in Parkville and the public hospitals, including Royal Park Hospital, also in Parkville. In all these institutions the main focus was on drug treatments, although Dax was also enthusiastic about brain surgery for the treatment of psychological problems. At Royal Park Hospital, Larundel and other psychiatric hospitals electric shocks to the brain were also used for various conditions, the names of which have been changed over the past forty years. Electric shocks to the brain, usually called ECT in Australia, are used against people’s wishes in dozens of hospitals in Australia, today. The use of electrical shocks in Australia dates back to the 19th century, and it has been an unchanging feature of Australian psychiatry over the past century, although the “discovery” of ECT is usually attributed to Cerletti in Italy in the 1940s. Such is the nature of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment terminology as well as history: it is subject to frequent changes. Thus electric shocks to the brain have been called “electroconvulsive therapy” or ECT, “shock treatment”, “electroshock”, “electroplexy” and “electro-therapy”. The same class of drugs have been called “analeptics”, “neuroleptics”, “anti-psychotics”, “major tranquillisers” and “psychotropics”. The use of lithium was experimented with, in Dax’s terminology, for “excitement” (a suspect indication, indeed), but now it is used for “mania” and “bipolar affective disorder”. Previously “bipolar affective disorder” (BAD) was called “manic depression”.

Lithium was first used on psychiatric patients by the then 39 year old superintendent of Bundoora repatriation hospital in Victoria, Dr John Cade. This occurred in the 1940s, and since then the Victorian and Australian psychiatric hospitals have been avid dispensers of lithium, often referred to as a “mood stabiliser”. Although it may indeed prevent fluctuations in mood, the ingestion of lithium is accompanied by a range of unpleasant and dangerous side-effects and is extremely toxic in overdose. Lithium is toxic to the kidneys and thyroid in particular, and, since the toxicity margin is recognised to be low, regular blood tests to check lithium levels (also used to check compliance with drug-taking) are necessary if this drug is prescribed, as it often is done in Australia. It also dulls emotional reactions generally and produces a range of unpleasant mental side-effects in many who are forced to take the drug under threat of incarceration if they “fail to comply” with treatment.

The medical education system in Australia has, since its inception, like the military, been rigidly hierarchical, with professors at the top and medical students at the bottom, and the ladder is climbed by the acquisition of degrees and publications, together with less easily identified factors, which come into operation in the mysterious “upper echelons” of the academic world, an area where global politics plays a greater role than most people realise.

The Mental Health Research Institute in Parkville, Melbourne is Victoria’s biggest psychiatry research institution and is affiliated with the University of Melbourne, the city’s oldest university. The Institute was initially set up at Royal Park psychiatric hospital in the 1950s, shortly after, as was revealed in the press recently, several Nazi ‘scientists’ were smuggled into Melbourne.

The previous director of Royal Park Hospital, the psychiatrist Norman James, was, after the closure of the notorious hospital, appointed Chief Psychiatrist of Victoria during the autocratic reign of Premier Jeff Kennett (who, after being voted out of office assumed the lucrative job of CEO of ‘Beyond Blue’, part of the Federal Government’s ‘depression initiative’, which will be examined later). James wrote the opening chapter in the undergraduate textbook Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry (1994) titled “A Historical Context”.

In it he wrote:

“It was in the asylums that the first widely available and effective biological treatments were developed. Freud himself trained in neurology and recognised that the severely mentally ill required organic forms of treatment. The discovery of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) by Cerletti and Bini who worked in a mental hospital in Rome in 1938 led to a simple and readily applied treatment for those who suffered from severe depressive illness and related disorders. Despite the advent of World War II, ECT was rapidly adopted as a treatment internationally.

“The discovery of lithium in 1949 as a treatment for mania and as a prophylaxis for bipolar disorder (manic depression) was made by Dr John Cade, a distinguished Australian Psychiatrist. This was soon followed by the development of major tranquillisers, the neuroleptics, by Delay and Deniker in Paris in 1952, although the initial idea of their application in psychiatry occurred in a general hospital when it was noted that they were effective tranquillisers for patients undergoing surgery. Shortly after this Nathan Kline made the discovery that a drug being tested for its effect in tuberculous patients had an antidepressant action and thus the first specific antidepressants were discovered, again in a large mental hospital and this time in Orangeburg, New York”.

Professor Edward Shorter, in A History of Psychiatry (1997) gives more details of John Cade’s less than exacting methodology in his rapturous description of the “medical discovery” of lithium:

“The story began in 1949 with John Cade, the 37-year-old superintendent of the Repatriation Mental Hospital in Bundoora, Australia [Victoria]. Cade, like Neil Macleod in late-nineteenth-century Shanghai, had not lost his scientific curiosity despite his provincial isolation. He was determined to see if the cause of mania was some toxic product manufactured by the body itself, analogous to thyrotoxicosis from the thyroid. Not having any idea what, exactly, he might be searching for, he began taking urine from his manic patients and, in a disused hospital kitchen, injecting it into the bellies of guinea pigs. Sure enough, the guinea pigs died, as they did when injected with the urine of controls. Cade began investigating the various components of urine – urea, uric acid and so forth – and realized that to make urine soluble for purposes of injection he would have to mix it with lithium, an element that had been used medically since the nineteenth century (in the mistaken belief that it could serve as a solvent of uric acid in the treatment of gout).

“Then Cade, on a whim, tried injecting the guinea pigs with lithium alone, just to see what would happen. The guinea pigs became very lethargic. “Those who have experimented with guinea pigs”, he wrote, “know to what degree a ready startle reaction is part of their makeup. It was thus even more startling to the experimenter that after the injection of a solution of lithium carbonate they could be turned on their backs and that, instead of their usual frantic righting reflex behavior, they merely lay there and gazed placidly back at him.”

“Cade had stumbled into a discovery of staggering importance, yet he was able to develop it only because of his resoluteness in taking the next step. He decided to inject manic patients with lithium… he injected 10 of his manic patients, 6 schizophrenics, and 3 chronic psychotic depressives. The lithium produced no impact on the depressed patients; it calmed somewhat the restlessness of the schizophrenics. But its effect on the manic patients was flamboyant: All ten of them improved, though several discontinued the medication and were still in hospital at the time Cade wrote his article late in 1949. Five were discharged well, though on maintenance doses of lithium.” (p.256)

No mention is made in this book, or in Professor James’ account, of the toxicity and risks associated with swallowing (or injecting lithium), which are, in particular damage to the kidneys and thyroid. So dangerous is this drug, that regular blood tests must be done to guard against acute and chronic toxicity. According to the MIMS Annual (1993), its “adverse reactions”, better described as “dangers and toxicity”, are briefly described as follows:

“Administration of lithium carbonate may precipitate goitre requiring treatment with thyroxine, but this regresses when treatment is discontinued. The ECG [electrocardiograph] may show flattening of the T wave. Hypercalcaemia, hypermagnesaemia, weight gain and oedema may occur, and skin conditions may be aggravated. The toxic symptoms are referable to the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system. These must be known by the patient and his or her nurses and relatives. Those referable to the gastrointestinal tract are anorexia, nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal discomfort and diarrhoea. Those referable to the central nervous system are lassitude, ataxia, slurred speech, tremor (marked) and agitation. If none of these are present, the patient is not intoxicated. Patients suffering from lithium toxicity look sick, pale, grey, drawn and asthenic. It is vital to bear in mind that lithium can be fatal, if prescribed or ingested in excess…At serum lithium levels above 2 to 3 mmol/L, increasing disorientation and loss of consciousness may be followed by seizures, coma and death.”

Heralding the “discovery” of lithium by Cade by a Victorian psychiatrist as a great moment in medical science, the Victorian medical establishment, including Professor Norman James, has long been insistent on the treatment of “manic” and even “hypomanic” people with lithium. This is despite the known risks and toxicity of the drug.

Lithium is said, by Australian psychiatrists, to “stabilise the mood”, and it is assumed that people who have had even brief episodes of “elevation” or “abnormal excitement” need long term mood stabilization with the drug. This includes single episodes of “hypomania”, which is described in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM IV as follows:

“A Hypomanic Episode is defined as a distinct period during which there is an abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood that lasts for at least 4 days (Criterion A). This period of abnormal mood must be accompanied by at least three additional symptoms from a list that includes inflated self-esteem or grandiosity (nondelusional), decreased need for sleep, pressure of speech, flight of ideas, distractibility, increased involvement in goal-directed activities or psychomotor retardation, and excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (Criterion B)”. (p.335)

As if it makes the diagnostic criteria “precise” and “specific”, the DSM adds that:

“If the mood is irritable rather than elevated or expansive [which are not further defined in the DSM IV], at least four of the above symptoms must be present.”

It is incredible that “increased goal directed activities” and “non-delusional increase in self-esteem” could be cited as evidence of mental illhealth rather than an indication of improved health. Furthermore DSM IV  adds that:

“The change in functioning for some individuals may take the form of a marked increase in efficiency, accomplishments or creativity.” (p.335)

It is strange that this mental state should be viewed as an “abnormal” one, but at least the American Psychiatric Association (unlike the Australian psychiatric establishment) does not advocate incarceration or forced drugging for “hypomania”. The reference manual says:

“In contrast to a Manic Episode, a Hypomanic Episode is not severe enough to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning or to require hospitalization, and there are no psychotic features.”

The University of Melbourne’s Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry is not as clear in their distinction between “hypomania” and “mania” and “hypomania” has only two references to it, one relating to diagnosis and one relating to treatment. Under “Abnormal states of mood elevation” is written:

“Far less commonly [than depression], a persistent elevated mood occurs. Similarly, a continuum of severity if found with the mild states difficult to distinguish from normality. Moderate severity Hypomania, or severe state Mania, are obvious, the patient’s behaviour having serious consequences if treatment is not swiftly initiated. Most manic patients also experience depressive swings, and this condition is therefore referred to as Bipolar Mood Disorder.” (p129)

The recommended treatment is described under “management of elevated mood states”:

“The assessment and treatment of the patient suffering from acute hypomania or mania is essentially the management of the acutely psychotic patient. Organic conditions, including drug-induced states, need to be excluded. For reasons of safety, most patients need hospitalisation which, because of the lack of insight, may need to be recommended. The mainstay of pharmacotherapy are the neuroleptics, such as Haloperidol or Chlorpromazine. Although lithium carbonate is an effective antimanic agent at relatively high concentrations risks of toxicity discourage its use. Occasionally, for particularly severe cases, ECT is needed.” (p.144)

The drugs recommended for the treatment of “hypomania” and “mania” turn out to be the same ones recommended for “schizophrenia” and “ECT” is electroconvulsive treatment (shock treatment), which is used for “depression” as well as its “opposite”, “mania” and also for severe or “intractable” psychosis (including that supposedly due to “schizophrenia” or “schizoaffective disorder”). Unlike many other parts of the world, where ECT has been banned or seriously restricted, in Australia the use of electrical shocks has increased in recent years and is used more widely (in more centres and for more reasons). Most of the psychiatric hospitals in Australian cities give patients ECT, often against their will.

Involuntary ECT in the State of Victoria is said to be restricted to “emergency cases”, but it is left to the individual psychiatrist to define what constitutes an “emergency”. The systems of appeal open to the protesting patient are very limited. They can appeal to the Chief Psychiatrist, Norman James, who has the authority to stop the abusive use of drugs or ECT. It is most unlikely that he would, however. James, who was previously head of psychiatry at the Royal Park Hospital is a keen advocate of both ECT and the use of “neuroleptic drugs”. It is he who wrote the opening chapter of Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry. In it, he wrote an intriguing passage:

“The asylums inaugurated as a result of humanistic urges soon became grossly overcrowded, despite the fact that some were among the largest and most expensive buildings erected by the governments of the day. Numerous difficulties beset them. As a result of their isolation they became large, impersonal, human warehouses. Patients had few if any rights and were completely at the mercy of their carer – a largely untrained workforce from which has arisen the modern profession of psychiatric nursing. There was a total lack of any specific physical treatment for mental illness until the advent of ECT [so much for walking in gardens, music and warm baths]. Those who did improve did so largely by the passage of time and the happy advent of a spontaneous remission [not ‘recovery’]. These conditions led to a cycle of scandals, public inquiries, usually some temporary improvement and then a relapse into previous conditions or worse.” (p.9)

 It could be time for another public inquiry.

In psychiatric wards and Mental Health Review Board hearings the psychiatric patient is judged guilty unless proven innocent. Unfortunately innocence (of ‘mental illness’ or ‘personality disorder’) cannot actually be proved according to prevailing psychiatric theory which does not view humans in terms of “guilty” or “innocent”. All psychiatric patients are “officially innocent”, just “unfortunately inflicted with an (invisible) illness”. One which “unfortunately tends to run in families”. Thus entire families are stigmatised without laying blame on any individual. It is not the fault of the family or the individual to be afflicted with illness: it is “just one of those things”. Maybe genetics plays a role. That way individuals in the family can scan their relatives (and in-laws) for evidence of insanity.

As for the diagnosed patient, regardless of whether he or she is called a “mental patient”, “schizophrenic”, “nutcase”, “client” or “consumer” there is no escape from the judgement of “defective” and the accompanying stigma. Even if no evidence can be found at a particular time of mental illness, the patient can be accused of “masking” (hiding) their madness or be in remission.

More of My Story

Dr. Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam Arya Chakravarti

aryachakravarti@icloud.com

romeshsenewiratne@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/DrAryaChakravarti

Yesterday I went to the Upper Mt Gravatt Police Station, opposite the euphemistically-named ‘Garden City’, to collect $1,200 of new $50 notes that had been ‘seized’ by the Queensland Police on 29 May this year, after they abducted me from outside my house at Fegen Drive and took me to the Princess Alexandra Hospital where I was locked up for a week and poisoned with antipsychotic drugs – though I was obviously not psychotic.

The grim woman at the counter asked me if I had an appointment for the return of the money. I told her that I had been given a report number to quote and that I would be given the money. I had been told it was taken to the Upper Mt Gravatt Station because the Moorooka Station did not have a safe. I also explained that the notes were new $50 notes in close-to mint condition that are worth much more than their face value. I had previously explained this to officers from the Moorooka Station.

The lady asked me for identification and I gave her my driver’s license. I was asked to wait while she spoke on the phone and then went to another room. When she returned, she told me that the money had been banked with the rest of Queensland Government revenue and that I will need to wait for two months for the station to give me a cheque for the money. She said that the matter of return of the actual notes required me to “take up the matter” with Sergeant Lee Slatter, whom I had heard her mentioning on the phone. She offered to send Slatter an email to contact me. I said it was not Slatter who took the money but a Sergeant Bernie Quinlan. She said she’s send Quinlan an email to contact me, too.

I had noticed that some of my money was missing when I was allowed home by Nakul Parashar, the Indian psychiatrist who had been put in charge of me. Parashar, who I had never met before, said he had discussed me with Anup Joseph, who is also Indian, as is Manaan Kar Ray who took over as Director of Psychiatry in 2016 from Balaji Motamarri (who is also Indian). I discussed my father with Motamarri over the phone (you can see it on YouTube) and also with Anup Joseph, the previous psychiatrist Tarun Sehgal (also Indian) and Nakul Parashar (who would not tell me his first name or where he qualified).

Joseph said my claim that my father supported the Tamil Tigers was “far-fetched” and that he was increasing the dose of the abusive injection I was being subjected to. This injection made the sialorrhoea (hypersalivation) and slurred speech that I had developed from the years of dopamine-blocker injections much worse. Saliva was falling from my mouth constantly, staining all my clothes. People couldn’t understand what I was saying over the phone. The injections also sterilised me and I started developing a peripheral neuropathy with numbness in my toes.

I had already told this to Joseph, who graduated in Manipal in 2003 and came to Australia through the “regional doctors program” by taking a job at the infamous Bundaberg Hospital (that previously employed the notorious Dr Patel dubbed “Dr Death” by the Australian media). Terun Sehgal graduated from the MGR University, established by the film director and Tamil Nadu politician MG Ramachandran. According the Tamil Tiger arms procurer Kumaran Pathmanathan (KP) “MGR” as he was called was a key financier of the Tamil Tigers.

The day after I was locked up Nakul Parashar told me he had discussed me with Anup Joseph and they wanted to “restart the injections”. The injections had been stopped several months before this after the case manager Raghavan Raman refused to give me any more injections after observing the deterioration in my health.While I was locked up in hospital I was given tablets of an “antipsychotic” drug by the name of aripiprazole. The nurses had orders to inject me if i refused, so I swallowed the tablets. The drooling became worse. I complained about it to the nurses. One of them offered me a bib. The charge nurse accused me of faking it and drooling on purpose. I was furious, but knew not to show it.

I was told that I would not be discharged until I had an injection of depot aripiprazole. I agreed to accept the injection, though I told them it would make the drooling worse and asked them to give me a small dose. This request was ignored and I was injected with 400 mg of the drug and then told I could leave.

A couple of days after I was allowed home I was visited by two police officers, an obese middle-aged man with a young woman. I recognised his accent as English, which he confirmed. He told me his name was Sergeant Slatter from the South Brisbane station and that he had come to question me about some “cannabis” that had been found by the police in my house. I asked him about the missing money and he confirmed that about $!,000 had been taken for “safekeeping” by Constable Anthony Gallagher, who was the “arresting officer” on 29 May. He asked if I had not been given a receipt for it (as is required by law). I said I had not. I also told him I was happy to talk to them and asked them to verify that what had been seized by the police were molasses of hemp drained of THC and poisoned with arsenic. The policewoman asked “you mean it was tampered with?” I said they have been poisoning Black people in Australia with arsenic for a long time.

I also tried to tell them about corruption at the PA Hospital. I began by saying how the registrar Sagir Parkar had told me that “we all know that pharmaceutical corruption is rampant” back in 2013. Parkar, who is also Indian was brought to my house several times by the case manager Nigel Lewin.

Sgt Slatter stopped me. “This is way above my pay grade” he said.

He then told me he could not take a statement from me because I was “affected” by the injection but was issuing me with an order to go to the Upper Mount Gravatt station to be fingerprinted and an order to appear in the Roma Street Magistrate’s Court in the Brisbane City to answer a charge of “possession of dangerous drugs”. He said I could ask about the seized money when I went to the station to be fingerprinted. I said the police already have my fingerprints (and handprints) but he said it had to be done again. I then asked why it could not be done at the local Moorooka Station and he said they did not have the necessary equipment.

I did not attend court or go to the Mt Gravatt station to be fingerprinted. Shortly after I was supposed to be in court I was visited and arrested by Sergeant Michael Walters and a junior officer from Moorooka station for failure to appear in court and taken to the City Watchhouse. My clothes were dirty and stained. Dirty because I was gardening when the police arrived and stained because of the saliva that was falling from my mouth. I asked who had ordered the arrest and they said the Officer in Charge was Senior Sergeant Tony Collins.

I was told by the rude police woman it the watch house that I was being given “another chance” to appear in court and got me to sign documents agreeing to it. She said she didn’t want to hear any of my “excuses” for not attending court. She said, though that if I pleaded not guilty I would need to “come back to court”. I had to pay $30.00 to get home in a taxi.

Before I hailed the taxi I went to the Magistrate’s Court to ask how I could present my defence online using Skype. The officer I asked conferred with a colleague and told me I had to request it in an email to the “JAG”. He told me this is the “Justice and Attorney-General’s Department”.When I got home I investigated the JAG and Sergeants Collins and Quinlan online. I had been told by Constable Anthony Gallagher who had come to my house some days earlier that the officer who took the money for “safekeeping” was a Sergeant Bernie Quinlan, the boss of the “Vulnerable Persons and Domestic Violence Unit” who had been called to assist Mel Rodgers and Gallagher when I refused to go with them to the PA Hospital on the 29th of May. I said I did not give them permission to enter my house and that they were obliged to tell me about taking the money and give me a receipt for it.

I found a photo online of the boss of the Moorooka station, Senior Sergeant Anthony Collins posing while cutting a cake to celebrate 100 years of the Moorooka Police Station of which he has been the Officer in Charge since 2013. There were also photos of him posing, at the same event, with the politicians Graham Perrett and Steve Griffiths. Griffiths, my local councillor is the son of Colin Griffiths who works in his son’s office and advised my neighbour Miller to keep a “diary” of my actions in 2015 and contacted the police for Miller at this time (Miller has written in his handwritten “diary” on 28.8.2015 – “Col called Police on my behalf, $12-30 approx.). This was prior to my being locked up, chemically tortured and robbed on 22 September 2015 (my 55th birthday) after another series of false and malicious reports by both Miller and my father, Brian Senewiratne.

I had been told, back in 2014, that his boss was Tony Collins by an officer by the name of Darren Boersma, when he abducted me from my lounge room at 9.00 pm at night, breaking my front door when I would not let him, handcuffing me and taking me to the PA Hospital. He did not secure the glass door panel he had broken and some of my valuables were stolen while I was locked up.

I then checked out Bernie Quinlan who had arrived in a second police car with an obese middle-aged Englishman who said he was “mental health worker” on 29 May (I don’t remember his name, but I didn’t like him or his actions which were to approve that I be taken forcibly to the ‘hospital’). There was a photo of Quinlan posing with the ex-police prosecutor Atul Bhagwan, whose online biography indicates was a Major in the Indian Army before he came to Australia, became a lawyer and promoted to the position of Chief Police Prosecutor. He held this position for about 10 years and is now offering his private legal services. The photo with Quinlan was taken at a fund-raising event for a “safe house” for South Asian women, misleadingly called “Sahara”.

I also contacted the Justice and Attorney-General’s department by phone and sent the Director of JAG, David Mackie, a connection request on LinkedIn. I was pleasantly surprised when he accepted the request. When I rang the JAG I was told I was put through, after a delay, to a man with an Indian accent who told me that I needed to contact the court but that they would only allow the case to be transferred to the (closer and more accessible) Holland Park Magistrate’s Court if I pleaded guilty. I asked Constable Gallagher about this. “I don’t think that’s right”, he said.

I then sent a submission to the Roma Street Magistrates Court asking that the charges be dropped or transferred to the Holland Park Magistrates Court. I also asked to present my case by videoconferencing. The latter request was ignored and I received a letter the next week saying the case had been adjourned till 9 December at the Holland Park Magistrate’s Court.I have been robbed several times after being taken to the PA Hospital by the Moorooka Police, including in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The thefts have included my valuable coin collection, stamp collection, musical equipment, recording equipment, cameras, computers and memory sticks. I reported these robberies to the police several times.

I gathered from what I was told by the PA Hospital, that my next-door neighbour Jeff Miller had claimed that I was “pacing up and down the street”. I wasn’t. I was checking the flow of water from my property into the storm water drain in Whittle Street, behind my house. You can see this from my YouTube channel.Two officers arrived in a car that pulled up in front of Miller’s house. Both were wearing sunglasses and armed with guns and tasers. I knew the first police officer who approached me by name. Her name is Melissa Rodgers, but calls herself ‘Mel’. She calls me “Dr Romesh’ and she has abducted me from my home several times since 2013, when she did it the first time. This was following false reports about me from the same source – my next door neighbour Jeffrey Mitchell Miller, who lives at 74 Fegen Drive.

Miller has been my neighbour since Sara and I moved into number 76 on 16 October 2008. I remember the date because it was Sara’s birthday. I extended my hand in friendship towards him and his family when we first moved in, inviting them for dinner and to our daughter Zoe’s first birthday party. When we first moved here there was only a wire mesh half-height fence between our properties enabling Miller and I to observe each other and talk to each other when we were in our “back yards” as they call what the British call “back gardens”. My back garden has many trees and I tried growing vegetables in a small “veggie patch” I made under the shade of a Flamboyant (Royal Poinciana) Tree. I watered the plants laboriously with a watering can. Miller used to laugh at me, but I took it with good humour.

I was locked up at the PA ‘Hospital’ for 5 days soon after Zoe was born on 30 August 2009. It broke my heart.This cruel imprisonment did not involve Miller, as far as I know. It was because of a false report by a man by the name of Pawel (“Paul”) Obrocki, whom I had met in 2006 when I was camping alone in the Border Ranges National Park. I had been introduced to this national park in northern New South Wales as a place to catch butterflies by a fellow medical student back in 1978 when it was still a logging forest called “Wiangaree State Forest”. At the time it was difficult to access the forest from Queensland and one had to circuit Wullubin and travel up Lion’s Road to get there. Wullubin or Wooloobin is the rocky core of a giant shield volcano (the Tweed Volcano). The so-called “Scenic Rim’ in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, with their lush forests and waterfalls are the rim of this huge volcano that Captain Cook named “Mount Warning”.

I heard Obrocki before I met him. He has a loud voice and was saying to someone with a quiet voice that he would “kill for a coffee”. I didn’t take it literally and offered them some of mine. I found that his accent, which I had thought might be Swiss, was actually Polish and his companion, a young woman called Astrid was a tourist from France. I was surprised by her ambition, which was to become a butcher.

When we shared coffee and a few joints Obrocki told me he was a “green architect”. He also told me he and his partner, who was in Brisbane, did not watch TV. He asked me to write a limerick for him (after explaining what it was) and to give him my phone number. I obliged. He also asked me if I thought it was possible to remove a full-grown tree from a forest. He said the reason he was asking was that he had found a hole in the ground that looked like a giant tree had been removed and that he and Astrid had slept in this hole.

I later found that it was not true that he was an architect, let alone a “green architect”. He repeatedly told me, “never let truth get in the way of a good story”. This is the motto of a liar. The truth, which I gathered when I was living for a year in his garage, was that he had been unable to complete his written thesis for his architecture degree which was supposed to be on “healthy houses”. This was despite the help of his partner Gosia Osielska, who was and is far more literate. Gosia is an overweight physiotherapist, and Pawel’s qualification is as an “occupational therapist”. He was not qualified as a builder or an architect, but had been doing house “modifications” when he was working for what was then called the “Spastic Society”.

When I lived with them I discovered that Obrocki abused alcohol and was an aggressive drunk who picked arguments with people after he’d been drinking. He was also violent towards his young sons. From under their bedrooms I would hear him shouting, a thump or two, followed by the sound of them crying. I was very upset by this and tried discussing it with Gosia. Her response shocked me, “I don’t have to use the belt anymore, all I have to do is threaten to get it”. Shortly after I met him in the forest Obrocki invited me to their home at 33 Arras Street, Yeronga for dinner. I met Gosia and his two sons and enjoyed the evening. Obrocki uses flattery to achieve his ends and told me he wanted me to be his “mentor” and offered me a job to do a “mosaic” in tiles at a house he was renovating in Inala. He said that he needed my “artistic skills” and was insistent that it did not matter that I had never done it before. I was desperately in need of money after escaping from torture in Melbourne penniless so I accepted.

Over the years I worked out Obrocki’s modus operandi. This was to seduce older women and convince them to register as “owner builders” while he did the building on the cheap using his dodgy Polish mates. This is said in the Australian vernacular.The first of these women that I met was the owner of the house that I was commissioned to do a “mosaic” for while Obrocki did the design and all the building single-handedly except for the electrical connections, which were done by a Polish man who was morbidly fearful of magnetic fields by the name of Marek. (I met him later when he asked me to look at his psychiatric records and documents while I was living in Obrocki’s garage in 2008). I noticed, with disapproval, that Obrocki was giving this lady “relationship advice” regarding her husband with whom she was having marital difficulties and also was flirting with her, saying how much he liked older women. I tried discussing it with him, but he defended his actions. Later I met another middle-aged woman whom Obrocki had built a plywood attachment for. In my presence he told her how attractive she was and how he was attracted to older women. She, too, had been convinced to register as an “owner-builder” for Obrocki to do the building.

Immediately after we moved into this house (from Obrocki’s garage, where Sara had joined me from Melbourne) Pawel tried to convince Sara and I to employ him to build an attachment to the house. Sara was in agreement and offered him $60,000 to built it. The condition was that she become part owner of the house with her name on the title deeds.

Sara’s brother Guido (“Andrew”) was getting married for the second time, this time to a girl called May from Cambodia. I was told that her family owned a bicycle shop but that’s all. Sara and her mother Rosario (“Charo”) attended the wedding. Before she left for Cambodia Sara rang me from Melbourne and told me she was pregnant. I was overjoyed. That night I recorded “Groove for Our New Baby”. It shows how happy I was.

I was very attentive to Sara’s needs while she was pregnant with awareness of the auditory environment of the baby inside her. We did not argue even once and I complied with her wishes most of the time. She was interested in “hypnobirthing” and I helped her make a personal hypnosis CD. I also recorded a couple of CDs of “birthing music” consisting of her favourite music and tried to learn basic shiatsu pressure points. She used to watch a DVD on “yoga for pregnancy” that Obrocki gave her. However, I refused her request for me to do a home delivery. Consequently, Zoe was born in the Mater Hospital.

I brought Sara home from the hospital the day after Zoe was born. Sara has described it subsequently as an ecstatic experience, but I found it stressful because of how the doctors and nurses at the hospital reacted to the fact that Zoe was born with “intact membranes” (the amniotic sac had not ruptured). The nurses panicked as said Sara might need a Caesarean Section. They called the obstetric registrar who was fortunately sensible and just ruptured the membranes and reassured us, though she said the baby needed to be monitored with a CTG.

As it turned out Sara wanted to give birth standing up. She refused all pain killers and held onto me while she gave birth. It was she who wanted to call our daughter Zoe Raven Jade Senewiratne-Di Genova. I had some reservations about the name but I agreed to it. She said she wanted to call her “Raven” because of the black birds in our skies. I later found out that they are crows, not ravens. I also found out that Jade is the middle name of my sister Shireen’s daughter Talita. My main objection to the name Zoe is that there is no Z in Singhala or Tamil, so my Singhalese and Tamil brethren would have difficulty saying it.

Anyway, after I had brought Sara and Zoe from the hospital. my mother Kamalini rang me up to tell me that she and my father were planning on coming around to see our new baby. That evening they came around, and stayed a short while. The next day my mother rang and asked me to speak to my father and she handed him the phone. I decided to try and have a frank and honest conversation with him. I was very angry after the way he had treated both Sara and me as well as his propaganda activities in support of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers). I told him for the first time that it was I who had reported him to the Federal Police for his support of the Tamil Tigers and not a cousin of his in Sri Lanka, as he had supposed. Needless to say, he was furious.

The next day my mother came around and told me that my father had “abused” her badly and was crying about his plight, fearing that he may go to jail. He had told her that his friends in Melbourne and Sydney were being “rounded up”. She said “he thinks you’re ill and wanted to know if you would go in voluntarily for an injection.”

I rang Gosia the following morning. I had not told Sara or anyone else about reporting my father on the National Security Hotline in May 2009 or the information and interview I had given the Federal Police (while Sara was out of this house). This was in the final stages of the war against the Tamil Tigers, after I had seen footage on TV of the LTTE shooting people who were trying to leave them and cross to the government side. I tried telling my mother this but she wouldn’t believe it and accused me of being “brainwashed by Rajapaksa”.

I had also carefully watched the “13 DVDs” that my father had been boasting about to the expatriate Tamil community as a “major contribution” that had been “hailed as God’s gift to mankind”. I provided the 13 DVDs to the counter-terrorism investigator who came to my house and asked me to give her and her (middle aged male) colleague a recorded interview. She said her name was “Nicole East” but I noted that the card she gave me had an email address of “n.scott”. Some weeks after the end of the war the DVDs were returned to me. A couple of years ago I was informed that the Federal Police had completed an investigation into claims that my father had supported the LTTE in July 2009 and found that they were false.

Returning to my story, when I rang Gosia I asked her to come around so that I could talk to her without Pawel. I trusted her judgement and advice while I did not trust Obrockis. I told her I wanted to discuss my father with her. I had discussed him with her many times before, though they had never met. I then walked down to the shops on Beaudesert Road to buy some milk and a newspaper.

When I returned I was surprised to find both Pawel’s and Gosia’s cars parked outside. Pawel was in the street talking on a mobile phone and Gosia was standing in the front garden with her mother Anya. I told Gosia I wanted to speak to her alone and walked past her, opening the front door. To my surprise there was a man hiding behind the door. He was Pawel’s Colombian mate Carlos Martinez, who I had met many times at Arras Street. Obrocki had told me how he, Carlos and Ziggy (who was Yugoslavian) were the “bad boys of architecture”. The three of them had used and, by the sound of it, abused a young New Guinean architecture student by the name of Carl when they were required to do a group architecture project at the University of Queensland. Carl’s had designed what was called a “Wind House”. It is a traditional New Guinean design. Obrocki used this design as well as Carl’s labour to build what he called “The Shack” on a 50-acre block of land that his mother Dana owned in Mount Tambourine.

He then fleeced his wealthy mother out of $200,000 for “designing” a house that he promised to build on the land. Obrocki did not have the first idea how to build a whole house, and despite many years and excuses the house never got built. He got his mother, who is morbidly obese, to plant an avenue of trees leading up to the site of the promised house but they and the road were washed away by the next heavy rain. As well as this, he had done renovations and built a new bathroom in the house at 33 Arras Street, but they could not use the shower for more than a year because water was dripping into the room below, which he had rented out to his friend Marchek (who was living next to me while I was in the garage).

Carlos was a captain in the Colombian army before he escaped justice, fled to Australia and studied architecture. He told me his version of the story at some length when I was living in Obrocki’s garage. I had met him and his partner many times by then. Carlos told me he escaped Colombia to avoid being arrested for supplying weapons to ‘right wing militias’ who were fighting against the “FARC rebels”. I asked him if the accusation was true. “Everyone was doing it”, was his self-serving response.

I was furious when I found Carlos hiding behind the door and ordered him out of the house. Then I went into the bedroom to see that Zoe and Sara were OK. I picked up Zoe gently, carried her to the garden and sat down with her in my arms. I told Obrocki and Osielska to leave. I did not raise my voice. Then the police arrived. Zoe was still asleep in my arms.

I later found out, by reading the PA Hospital reports, that Obrocki had told the police that I had “barricaded’ myself in my house with my newborn baby and that I had “a history” of “barricading” myself “in houses with children”. When I questioned him over the phone about this some years ago he admitted he had said I had such a history, but he wouldn’t divulge the source of the lie. He maintained that I was “running around shouting” with my baby in my arms and he had decided to “put the child’s health ahead of our friendship”. I also asked him why he had brought Carlos and he said that he needed “moral support” because he had “limited experience in dealing with people who are crazy”. When I rang Carlos Martinez about it he denied ever coming to my house.

As I have said, when the police arrived I had not barricaded myself anywhere. I was seated in the garden with our baby in my arms. They asked me to give Zoe to Sara, who had hobbled out of the house. I did so. Then they grabbed me, handcuffed me, and took me to the PA Hospital. While in the police car I told them about Pawel Obrocki and Gosia Osielska. The hospital has recorded that I had persecutory delusions about Ozzie Osborne!

I was then deprived of experiencing Zoe’s first days, and forced to take antipsychotic drugs by the psychiatrist Daniel Varghese. Varghese is the son of the psychiatrist Frank Varghese whose real name is Thomas. I was told this by Daniel’s uncle (and Frank’s younger brother) Paul, who was in my batch and a good friend of mine when we studied medicine. Paul has been the Director of Geriatrics at the PA Hospital for many years. Frank used to be the Director of Psychiatry when my father was working on the medical wards and my sister training as a surgeon. He replaced Brett Emmerson who first got me locked up back in 1995, again on the instigation of my father. Brett’s father Bryan Emmerson was the professor who offered my father a job at the hospital back in 1975 and it was Brett who met us at the airport when we first arrived from Sri Lanka in January 1975. In 1995, when my father brought Brett to his house to certify me (after I had escaped from the Royal Park Hospital in Victoria) Brett was the director of Logan Hospital after a brief tenure as Chief Psychiatrist of Queensland. He is now the Director of Psychiatry at Metro North (which includes the Royal Brisbane Hospital and Prince Charles Hospital).

While I was locked up under Daniel Varghese my father flew to Melbourne to seek legal advice. I don’t know what this advice was or from whom. Varghese himself claimed that he was not an “investigator” and could not confirm or refute what I said about my father, but nevertheless denied me my freedom and claimed that I was “psychotic”. He also prescribed oral antipsychotic drugs which I agreed to take, since the alternative he presented me with was a depot injection. I was allowed to leave the hospital after five days, but he illegally put me on an “Involuntary Treatment Order” and got his registrar to contest my appeal for release at the Mental Health Review Board. Over the next few years he did this several times.

I have copies of about 10 MHRT reports dating back to 2009. I also have the Statement of Reasons provided by the tribunal justifying their decision on 15 December 2009 to confirm the ITO Varghese had illegally put me on. He did not attend the hearing himself but sent his registrar, an English doctor by the name of Steven Bower (who was older than Varghese himself) and a fat occupational therapist by the name of Jenny Pike who had been appointed my “case manager”. I did not like Pike but I quite liked Steven Bower. Bower told me that he would have been angry too if he had been subjected to what had been written about me, and defended the theory that AIDS was man-made as legitimate (Varghese had initially classed it as a delusion as had the psychiatrists in Melbourne).

I did not take the tablets, but I attended the appointments I was given to see Steven Bower. However I refused to see Jenny Pike the appointed ‘case manager’. Despite this, Steven Bower took me off the ITO after a few visits. He told the tribunal that this was because I was “cooperating with the treatment team and accepting treatment” and that he thought I could be “managed in a less restrictive environment”.

“However”, the report continues, “it didn’t take him long to stop his cooperation. He did continue to see Dr Bower but refused to see his case manager and was selective about who else he would see, such as which consulting psychiatrist”. I had objected to being diagnosed and treated by Varghese who was many years my junior and whose family I had known for many years. The report of Dr Bower’s testimony continues, “He only saw Dr Bower two or three times after the Involuntary Treatment Order was revoked and then stopped. He also ceased his prescribed medication. His mother contacted the mental health services with concerns about Dr Senewiratne’s behaviour and as a result a new Involuntary Treatment Order dated 25 October 2009 was instituted and he was admitted to the acute observation area (AOA) of the Princess Alexandra Hospital mental health ward”

To be continued….

Case against the Alfred Hospital

©2018 Dr Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam

  1. Between 1999 and 2002 I was locked up and assaulted with injections of antipsychotic drugs several times at the Alfred Hospital (Prahran, Melbourne).
  2. I was not suffering from a diagnosable mental illness at the time but I was punitively diagnosed with several serious mental disorders including “schizo-affective disorder” by two psychiatrists (Kym Jenkins and Robert Shields), and “psychotic disorder (Schizomanic type) superimposed on narcissistic and paranoid personality disorder” by another (Mark Taylor).
  3. These disease labels seriously damaged my personal and professional reputation.
  4. Psychiatrists at the Alfred Hospital also contacted the Medical Board of Victoria claiming that I had “schizoaffective disorder”, in an effort to stop me from working as a doctor.
  5. The Director of Psychiatry at the Alfred (Dr Peter Doherty) also provided selected documents to the Medical Board of Queensland in 2002 in a further effort to stop me from working as a doctor.
  6. When I was locked up between 1999 and 2002 I provided ample evidence of my sanity in the form of my writings and publications but these were pathologised and misrepresented as “hypergraphia” and evidence of mental illness.
  7. My claim to be doing research on the brain was also described as a grandiose delusion.
  8. My concern about the Stolen Children, human rights abuses against Aboriginal people and the role of eugenics in causing genocide were misrepresented and presented as evidence of mental illness.
  9. My support of the allegation (first made by others) that HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) was developed as a biological weapon was pathologised and referred to as further evidence of mental illness and “paranoid delusions”.
  • My concern that the medical system and government were dominated by Freemasons was pathologised by the psychiatrist Mark Taylor as evidence of mental illness.
  • My concern about the possible role of the Mossad and a cabal of Jewish psychiatrists in persecuting me and calling me mad/mentally ill was pathologised as evidence of paranoid delusions by psychiatrists at the Alfred (including Peter Braun and David Lowenstern who are Jewish).
  • My concern about the possible role of MI5 in my incarceration was likewise pathologised as evidence of mental illness and paranoid delusions by Mark Taylor and Kym Jenkins, who are both British; Kym Jenkins went on to become the President of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP); Mark Taylor moved to Scotland in 2002 but is now working in Brisbane and has been made my “treating psychiatrist” by Metro South and the Princess Alexandra (PA) Hospital.
  • My claim that my father was a supporter of terrorism for his support, propaganda and lobbying efforts for the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) was likewise pathologised as evidence of mental illness.
  1. The repeated false claims of my hostile father that I was “paranoid” and “psychotic” were uncritically acted upon by the hospital CATT team (Crisis and Assessment Team) without checking the veracity of his and my claims.
  2. During each admission my behaviour and observations of it were not consistent with the claims of the admitting doctors, but I was still held for several days in the LSA (Low Stimulus Area) and unnecessarily (and abusively) injected with short-acting Zuclopentixol Accuphase injections, which caused involuntary spasms in my back and legs as well as difficulty speaking (a single injection only on three of the admissions).
  3. Despite the fact that I have never suffered from hallucinations, I was recorded to have ‘thought disorder’ by some, but not other, psychiatrists.
  • My justified anger at being abducted from my home and locked up for no good reason was pathologised as an “irritable mood” and “hostility”.
  • My statement that I was talking legal action against the hospital for deprivation of my rights was pathologised as well, with records that I was “litigious”.
  • My 40-point Peace Plan for Timor was pathologised as an “extremely thought-disordered letter sent to Kofi Annan of the UN”; it was a list of proposals not a letter and was not sent anywhere (I gave a copy to the Jewish GP who had employed me to do sessions for him at what he called “Melbourne Wholistic Medicine”, Abraham “Abe” Mass – it was Mass who referred me to the Alfred Hospital on 16 September 1999 with the claim that I had “schizoaffective disorder”).
  1. The hospital recorded that Abraham Mass was my GP and not my colleague, though the psychiatrists referred to the fact that I had been referred in by a “GP colleague”.
  2. I stopped working for Mass at this stage and the hospital recorded that I was an “unemployed medical practitioner” qualifying that it was “as of last week”.
  • Mass attempted to change from being my employer to being my doctor after the first admission (which he arranged) though I had not and would not seek his medical advice.
  • On discharge from the Alfred Hospital I was ordered to attend Dr Peter Braun of the Waiora Clinic (an outpatient clinic of the Alfred); I confronted Braun with my suspicion that he was working for the Mossad, which he did not deny but wrote to the Mental Health Review Board that my concern that “doctors” work for the Mossad were evidence of mental illness and paranoia. Braun also confirmed during our discussions that the Israeli military had trained both sides in the war in Sri Lanka, but defended this action on their part.
  • In 2001, following another report about me my father (and a resultant admission), the decision was made to start me on injections of a depot antipsychotic – Zuclopenthixol (Clopixol) to be given every 2 weeks under as Community Treatment Order (CTO); this decision made me leave the State of Victoria and seek safety back in Queensland, where I went to school and graduated as a doctor, despite the fact that my father lives here; I hoped, at this stage, to convince him of my sanity.

    Particulars:

Admission from 16 September 1999 to 27 September 1999.

16.9.1999 – Referral by Abraham Mass of 257 Tucker Road, Ormond

Abducted by Ian Katz and Victoria Police from 149 Bambra Road, Caulfield and taken in handcuffs to the Alfred Hospital

House was rented from Avi Jawarowski via real estate agent Hiam Sharp of Caulfield. Avi Jawarowski’s brother Sol is a psychiatrist, who worked previously for the Alfred Hospital but has now returned to Israel. Avi Jawarowski who is a chemist is listed in the Burnet Institute Annual Report as a Senior Lecturer at the institute. The Burnet Institute is located at the Alfred Hospital and part of the Alfred Medical Research and Education Precinct (AMREP).

Katz wrote (in all capitals):

39 YO SINGLE UNEMPLOYED MEDICAL PRACTITIONER, ADM INVOL VIA ISCATT

BACKGROUND/

PSYCHOTIC DISORDER, VARIABLE DIAGNOSES (BIPOLAR, DELUSIONAL DISORDER ETC)

ADM (Admissions) X 5       1995 X 2

1998 X 3

HOPC (History of Presenting Complaint)

2-3/7 OF PARANOID IDEAS, IRRITABLE, LITIGIOUS, HYPER-GRAPHIA, GRANDIOSE

NON-COMPLIANT RECENTLY

ΨTRIST – DR PROCTOR

REFERRED VIA COLLEGUE GP

DR (Omits the name – Abraham Mass)

MSE/ HYPERAROUSED, IRRITABLE STOCKY MAN OF DARK COMPLEXION IRRITABLE, THOUGHT DISORDERED, GRANDIOSE, BIZARRE PERSECUTORY DELUSIONS OF POLITICAL/SCIENTIFIC THEMES, NO INSIGHT, PRESSURE OF SPEECH

ASST (Assessment)/

EXAC (Exacerbation) OF PSYCHOSIS

?SCHIZOAFFECTIVE

ADM INVOL (Admit Involuntarily)

MEDICAL BOARD INFORMED AS PER STAT LEGAL REQUIREMENT

I KATZ

Seen by Kym Jenkins (psychiatrist) who wrote:

STAT REVIEW

39 yo unemployed (as of this week) medical practitioner. Referred to CAT team by a medical colleague [again omits name]

Recommended under MH Act [by Ian Katz] because of grandiose and persecutory delusions

PΨHx (past psychiatric history) – delusional disorder/hypomania

MSE/

Well groomed

suspicious

hostile

verbally aggressive

speech pressured

some flight of ideas

Content of thought:

Delusional belief that he is persecuted by a Jewish mafia, British colonial regime

Belief that he is involved in research into the brain – grandiose delusions re this

Delusional belief that Alfred Hospital staff responsible for disseminating HIV to 3rd World, East Timor and sending letter to Kofi Annan at UN [This is a misrepresentation of my views and behaviour – I did not send a letter to Kofi Annan or anyone else – I was working on my 40-point Peace Plan for Timor but had not sent it to anyone; the reference to Alfred Hospital staff “disseminating” HIV to Third World countries this was a reference to my writings on the Burnet Institute which had recently relocated to the premises of the Alfred Hospital – details can be found in my book ‘Eugenics and Genocide in the Modern World’]

?disorders of perception

Insight: nil. Thinks he is in hospital as part of plot/persecution

Imp (Impression): psychotic episode hypomanic presentation

ΔΔ (differential diagnosis)

Schizoaffective disorder/Bipolar Affective Disorder

Plan/

Certification upheld

Patient informed of this & has “rights” leaflets

Very close observation LSA

At risk to others if absconds

Collateral Hx – Private Ψ

Length of psychosis

Past treatments and response

Medical Board to be informed

Commence antipsychotic Rx – rispiradone 2mg nocte

Needs full organic work up – admits to cannabis usage

Needs mood stabilizer ?not been on lithium

Kym Jenkins

 

17.9.1999

Seen again by Kym Jenkins while being kept in the “LSA”

She wrote:

Remains hostile, guarded ++, thought disordered, speech less pressured, totally insightless.

Believes there is a political plot against him and continues to have grandiose and persecutory delusions.

Stat dose 100 mg Zuclopenthixol (Acuphase)

Romesh would like a 2nd opinion.

 

 

 

 

 

20.9.1999

Seen again by Kym Jenkins with registrar Tejpal Singh

After the interview Jenkins wrote:

Romesh presents :- much less elevated

More pleasant

Not openly hostile

Speech not pressured

Thought stream slowed – no flight of ideas

Apologising for previous insulting behaviour on admission

Decrease in grandiose and persecutory ideation

Impression/    Hypomanic episode resolving

Plan/

Can be nursed in open ward

Needs close obs (absconding risk)

Continue rispiradone

Reassess MSE tomorrow – may be masking psychotic Sx [symptoms]

Discharge planning – will need assertive follow up to ensure compliance

Address issues re medical registration.

 

To be continued…..

On Balaji Motamarri’s Directions

©2018 Romesh Senewiratne-Alagartatnam (MD)

I am writing this to express my strongest condemnation of the thinking and actions of Dr Balaji Motamarri towards me at the Princess Alexandra (PA) Hospital and Metro South Addiction and Mental Health Services (MSAMHS) of which he is the director.

I have never met Dr Motamarri, and he has refused to speak to me, even on the phone, but I have been subjected to abusive diagnosis and treatment by a series of psychiatrists at the PA Hospital and its outpatient clinics since 2002, when I was locked up 5 times under the authority of Dr Paul Schneider, who continues to work as a senior psychiatrist at the hospital to this day. Schneider was acting on the wishes of my father, Dr Brian Senewiratne, who was a long-time consultant at the same hospital and a colleague of his. My father was also a long-time propagandist and lobbyist for the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) travelling the world campaigning for the Tamil Tigers to be de-banned. He claimed that the Tigers were “freedom fighters” rather than terrorists and argued, citing the example of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), that a “guerrilla army using guerrilla tactics on guerrilla soil” could never be defeated, though the fight may go on for hundreds of years.

My father began getting me locked up in 1995, when I first publicly criticised him. A man who holds grudges, he has had me locked up numerous times since then, prevented me from earning my living as doctor, and tried to discredit me by claiming that I was “in and out of mental hospitals” (which was true, but mainly because of his insistence that I had a “serious psychotic disorder” that required “assertive treatment”). To run salt into my wounds, my father presents himself as a champion of human rights and the rights of the oppressed.

Balaji Motamarri, my father and I all have Linkedin and Facebook accounts. What I know about Dr Motamarri comes from what he has made publicly available about himself and his qualifications, rather than personal discussions with him. I have seen him once, when he was pointed out by nursing staff one weekend, when I had been locked up again in 2016. It was a weekend and he was the on-call psychiatrist for the PA. I had been locked up for more than a week and wanted to go home. I wanted to see him so that he could see for himself that I was of sound mind. He didn’t even acknowledge my presence and ignored me completely. I have not seen him since, though the Nigerian psychiatrist who had got me locked up (again on the wishes of my father) kept me locked up for a few more days, and tried to convince me that I had “paranoid schizophrenia”. I pointed out that my long-standing claims that my father was a supporter and lobbyist for the LTTE was not paranoid, it was factual. She ordered that I be injected with the antipsychotic drug paliperidone and placed on an Involuntary Treatment Order (ITO) to enable easier return to the hospital if I become “unwell” again or refuse (the abusive) “treatment”.

Balaji Motamarri’s Linkedin page indicates that he speaks Hindi and Telugu and graduated in medicine at the Andhra Medical College in 1987. His Linkedin page says he has been a psychiatrist in Australia and “Clinical Director, Psychosis Academic Clinical Unit” for 19 years and 8 months (since Oct 1998). Below this it states that he has been ‘Clincal [sic] Director” of MSAMHS since 2012. Since he has been the clinical director of the “Psychosis Academic Clinical Unit” I have been locked up and injected on more than 20 occasions, always at the PA Hospital (one of several hospitals on Brisbane’s south-side that comes under the authority of the MSAMHS).

Despite graduating (in India) some years after I graduated at the University of Queensland, Balaji Motamarri’s Linkedin and Facebook pages do not suggest that he is computer literate. He also has an almost complete absence of academic publications to his name, yet he is supposedly the clinical director of the “Psychosis Academic Clinical Unit”.  As testament to his carelessness, even when confronted with the relatively simple task of listing his experience for Linkedin he made several typographical errors (in addition to ‘clincal’ instead of clinical): He says he is now (since October 2016) the Executive Director of “Clincial Services” of “Metrosouth Mental Health Services”. He hasn’t even got his own title right. This is the “Executive Director of the Metro South Addiction and Mental Health Services (MSAMHS)”.

Balaji Motamarri has 161 Linkedin contacts, including 14 mutual contacts with me. I have about 3500 contacts, including psychologists and psychiatrists from many countries, including India. I also have contacts relevant to my other areas of interest – neuroscience, medicine, meditation, music, human rights, law, Buddhism, journalism and politics. I have posted links to my music and publications on my Linkedin page, which are available to be read by my peers, including Balaji Motamarri. I have sent him a contact request but he hasn’t accepted it yet.

The University of Queensland lists one and only one publication co-authored by Balaji Motamarri. From 2012, and published in “Current Medical Research and Opinion” it is titled “Practical guidelines on the use of paliperidone palmitate on the treatment of schizophrenia”. PubMed lists 3 other papers for which he was a co-author, all published in Australian psychiatry newsletters and all promoting long-acting injectables, like paliperidone. Since I was locked up at the PA in 2012 I have been injected monthly with paliperidone on the orders of a series of psychiatrists answering to Balaji Motamarri. They started off by saying I had schizophrenia, then revised it to “psychotic disorder – not otherwise specified” before changing back to schizophrenia. My protestations that I have never had hallucinations, am motivated and sociable with a stable mood, am well-organized, rational and logical and am obviously of sound mind has fallen on deaf ears. The psychiatrists have consistently taken the side of my father against me and declared me to be “psychotic” and “delusional” to believe that he was maliciously motivated towards me, and that he was a propagandist and lobbyist for the LTTE.

Balaji Motamarri’s Facebook page provides a window into his social life in 2010. There are only 2 postings, from 26 December 2009 “Merry Christmas to all” and from 25 January 2010, when he has posted on his wall what he intended as a personal message to his friend Manju:

“Hi Manju. My apologies for not replying earlier. As you can understand we are ‘recovering’ from our trip – the trip of ‘Telengana Bandhs’. Hyderabad has become a city of uncertain nightmares. And to add to the issue, our daughter’s school is starting in 2 days time and you know the dramas associated with this – just imagine ‘school after 10 weeks on holidays’ – what a nightmare to the parents.”

Balaji Motamarri seems to be feeling sorry for himself because his daughter has to go back to school after 10 weeks of holiday (which he claims he needs to recover from) and this is a “nightmare to the parents”. I have never had nightmares about my daughters going to school, but I have had many nightmares about being locked up by Balaji Motamarri’s unit. In these nightmares I am trying to prove my sanity but am interminably kept waiting. Sometimes I am assaulted by men with needles. Sometimes I am looking for my bed but am faced with endless corridors. My most consistent nightmare is being kept waiting in the confines of the PA Hospital. I am also uncertain about what he meant my Hyderabad becoming a “city of uncertain nightmares”. I am certain about my nightmares. They are very vivid.

Balaji Motamarri has only 182 Facebook friends, and hasn’t made any new ones in recent years. However, when he first filled in the questionnaire for Facebook he enthusiastically listed the Indian educational establishments he studied at. His Intro lists:

Works at MSAMHS

Worked at CNAHS

Studied psychiatry at PGIMER Chandigarh

Studied MBBS at Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatman, India

He also includes three high schools, including one in Chennai, where he matriculated in 1979 (before starting medicine in 1981).

 

Everybody should be treated with respect, but seniority is an important concept in society and in the medical and academic hierarchies. One is expected to respect ones seniors, as one is expected to respect ones elders. This has a long tradition in the West as well as the East (including India). The MSAHMS boasts that it provides “respect” as ones of its core values. I matriculated in 1978, winning the Tyrwitt Cup for best academic student at the Church of England Grammar School in Brisbane. I was working as a young doctor looking after desperately sick children and at the Royal Children’s Hospital and Prince Charles Hospital when Balaji Motamarri was still a medical student in India. While Motamarri was studying to become a psychiatrist I was looking after a community of 1000 mainly elderly patients, including many with complex illnesses (including mental health problems) as a family doctor in Melbourne. I have researched and lectured on mind-body medicine at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and my lectures can be viewed on YouTube, if Balaji Motomarri and his staff are interested to see what my state of mind was like in 2001 (when I was first misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia). They can even see the interview I gave in 1998 when I discussed my research into the pineal gland with Micheal Adami and the documentaries I have made about eugenics, psychiatry and AIDS (the theories that were diagnosed as ‘delusional’ by the psychiatrists in Melbourne).

I think I am owed the respect of a phone call with him to explain how and why his hospital is misguided to force a disease label and anti-psychotic drugs on me. I am also owed an apology for being locked up for raising uncomfortable truths and being denied my freedom of speech and my physical freedom. I am owed an apology, too, for being poisoned with drugs that have harmed my health and brought me no benefit, as well as putting me at risk of a range of iatrogenic adverse effects. At least I don’t have the added trauma of believing that I have an incurable brain disease.

Old Wine in New Bottles – Remarketing ‘Depression’

Last year, I watched an interview on ABC News 24 informing us about a “new theory on the cause of depression”. This is that it is caused, not by a “chemical imbalance” but by inflammation in the nervous system (notably the brain). This is being presented as an alternative to the “serotonin theory of depression” that was used to justify the presciption of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) drugs, beginning with Prozac in 1987.

I have been watching and analysing the changing hype for many years. When I worked as a family doctor, the drug companies were claiming that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the neurotransmitter noradrenaline, not the indole amine serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine). This was because the market leaders in the “depression market” were the toxic and ineffective “tricyclic antidepressants” which were developed in the 1950s and were the mainstay of depression treatment till they were replaced by the SSRIs in the 1990s. Tricyclics were known to affect noradrenaline (norepinephrine) levels in the brain.

The psychiatrist interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) defended the “chemical imbalance theory” that has been such a successful marketing catchphrase for the drug companies but admitted that the SSRI’s don’t work for everyone and that “we don’t know” why some people with depression have disordered serotonin metabolism and others don’t. As usual, she explained that they needed more money for research to get the answers.

Dr Liz Scott, for that was her name, also agreed that the new theory was plausible, pointing to the fact that stress affects the immune system. She didn’t explain how stress, which usually depresses the immune system, is responsible for this inflammation, or why there is no evidence of such inflammation in the brains of depressed people who commit suicide. At the same time it is known that chronic illness of many types causes unhappiness and “depression”, including viral, bacterial and fungal infections, kidney and heart disease, cancer and chronic arthritis. Forced psychiatric treatment (especially incarceration) is an important cause of stress that Dr Liz Scott did not mention, predictably. Many other things cause unhappiness, and unhappiness has long been termed “depression” by the medical treatment industry, rejecting the older term of melancholia (thought to be due to a preponderance of black bile, one of the four humours of Galenic medicine).

In the 1960s American “experimental psychologists” of the “Behaviorist School” did a series of cruel experiments on baby chimpanzees, which demonstrated, as if there was need for it, that primates (as well as cats, dogs and even rats) pine away and become morose and depressed when they are deliberately made lonely and deprived of social activity and the comfort of others. This was heralded as a “discovery”.

Prozac was released with much hype, including a flurry of books in the “popular science” press, especially by Rupert Murdoch’s Harper-Collins publishers. These promoted Prozac for a range of medical and psychiatric conditions beyond depression, and resulted in profits of 3 billion for Eli Lilly. The other major drug companies followed suit, releasing and marketing (including bribing doctors to prescribe) a growing range of alternative SSRIs.

Eli Lilly have a long history of research into psychedelic drugs and psychoactive drugs that affect the serotonin receptors and pathways in the brain. In the 1960s they bought the rights to LSD (or ‘acid’) from the Swiss company (Sandoz) that had developed it. It was known that LSD could cause “schizophrenia-like” psychotic episodes, according to the psychiatric terminology of the time. This terminology dates back to 1909, when the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term “schizophrenia” and promoted its use for what his colleague Emil Kraepelin of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, known as the “Father of Psychiatric Classification”, had termed “dementia praecox” (adolescent dementia).

Bleuler argued that Kraepelin, in Germany was too pessimistic and that a third of his patients in the Swiss Burgholzli asylum recovered and were discharged from hospital. Kraepelin had taught, for many years, that any young person who “heard voices” was eventually destined to die of dementia (terminal mental degeneration) in a lunatic asylum.

German psychiatry became more brutal under the Nazis when patients with “schizophrenia”, “cyclical madness” (manic depression or bipolar disorder) and “personality disorder”, who had been populating the long-term mental asylum wards, were prescribed “euthanasia” – meaning “good” or “mercy killing”. Needless to say this included political enemies of the regime, since it has long been the case that enemies of the state or ruling regime get branded as mad. The same label of schizophrenia was also used in the Soviet Union to justify locking up and drugging, with chemical restraints, social and political dissidents.

In fact, chemicals do have a lot of effect on human thinking and behaviour, as the well-known effects of alcohol and drunkenness demonstates. To understand the hidden crime of “antipsychotic drugs”, and “antidepressants” one needs to know a few basics about catecholamine and indole amine neiurotransmitters and neurohormones.

Neurotransmitters are small molecules that bind to cell membranes of the nerve cells (neurones) in the brain and nervous system, stimulating or inhibiting “action potentials” or electrical impulses that pulse or vibrate in a constant, complex network through the nervous system. There are many different receptors for the same neurotransmitter – for example there are D1, D2, D3, D4 and D5 receptors in different parts of the brain. This results in the same chemical neurotransmitter having different effects depending on the type of receptor on the effector cell.

This science lies behind the efforts, over many decades, to find antipsychotic drugs that did not cause stiffness, dribbling and uncontrollable writhing movements of the face and limbs (Tardive Dyskinesia) which crippled so many of the long-term inmates of mental hospitals in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when the main drugs that were used were Largactil (Thorazine), Haldol (haloperidol), Stelazine and Modecate. Thousands were crippled and still are, by these horrible drugs – both in the communist and the capitalist nations. The main “indications” were “schizophrenia”, “mania” and “schizoaffective disorder”, though they were also used as chemical restraints in elderly people diagnosed with dementia, a particularly cruel form of elder abuse that was prevalent in the more abusive nursing homes in Australia.

It is important to realise that the neurotransmitters in the brain are in constant dynamic flux. Every emotion or action results in chemical changes. When one listens to music the chemicals in the brain change. When one does for a walk, the chemicals change. When one gets excited, or relaxes, the chemical balance changes. Some neurotransmitters increase and some decrease in activity, made more complex by the fact that different cells have different neurotransmitter receptors, affecting how they respond to them. It been demonstrated that the successful completion of tasks results in measurable increase in serotonin levels.

Chemical imbalance theories make a lot of money for companies selling chemicals (drugs/medications). Millions of dollars are spent on promoting various chemical imbalance theories and the drugs that affect these chemicals. The dopamine theory of schizophrenia and the serotonin theory of depression were used to market dopamine-blocking “antipsychotic drugs” and SSRI “antidepressants” respectively. Despite numerous people demonstrating the fallacy of the different chemical imbalance theories, opponents are up against a multi-billion-dollar industry that is profit-driven and stands to profit from repeating the theories without mentioning the opposition to them.

Don’t believe the hype.

Reality TV (protest song)

 

The ‘Green Guide’ told us to watch the TV

It claimed that we would finally see reality.

Under the impression that truth is not a digression

I had to ask the question

As to why the strange things I saw that night

Were advertised as real and right

So I waited for the commercial break

To lose my concentration

As my attention wandered away

From the packet filled with cornflakes on the screen

To reality as it has been

From the cornflakes on the screen

To reality as it has been

 

So I looked out of my window

And saw that things were good –

The tree that I had planted

Was still standing where it should;

I thought it seemed real enough

I didn’t need to check

I saw a purple flower

But in the shade it looked black.

 

Then I looked up at the sky

Where the moon had been last night

The moon had gone and in its place

Was a glowing ball of light

A glowing ball of light

 

“Could this be real?” I wondered

As I looked on with delight

As the cotton clouds changed shape

To form a white dove bird in flight

But I knew that it was only a cloud I knew it was the sky

I didn’t wave my arms about

Thinking that I could fly!

 

I didn’t watch the box that night

To tell me what is wrong and what is right

But ‘reality’ blazed its bizarre beams

Into other minds and other brains

And I wonder how many were sane

With ‘reality TV’ in their brains

I wonder how many were sane

With ‘reality TV’ in their brains.

 

(words and music by Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam, copyright 2004)

With One Voice “Peace” (protest song)

words and music by Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam Arya Chakravarti, 2004

recorded in 2006

 

WITH ONE VOICE ‘PEACE’

 

Looking at the sunshine

But kept in the dark

The weatherman said it would be fine

Another glossy, casual remark

‘Cause a new war looms and we’ve seen it all before

A new war looms and we’ve seen it all before

 

The TV talks up the conflict again

It showed the friendly soldiers and some were weeping

It slowed the lonely viewers already sleeping

Said the special correspondent ‘the soldiers are despondent’

This time the administration has acted without consent

And its time to voice some real dissent

 

‘Cause a new war looms and we’ve seen it all before

A new war looms and we’ve seen it all before

 

No longer hypnotised by lies

The masses mobilized

To stop the growth of arms in the skies

The masses have been mobilized

 

They dance and march and wave placards

The poets and the singing bards

They say with one voice “No War!”

They say with one voice “Peace!”

They say with one voice “Peace!”

 

Retrospective Diagnosis (protest song)

I ask as I read

Your diagnoses of the dead

Of the madness of artists

And the ravings of poets –

Do you consider what’s said?

Do you think ANY poet sane?

How can you understand such a brain

When you treat metaphor with disdain?

 

I ask as I read

When you speak of Van Gogh

Diagnoses are made

And his brilliance fades –

Viewed as a freak

Diseased imagination

That glorified sunflowers

And saw beauty in the mundane

 

I ask as I read

The criteria you make

To call artists mad

Synonymous with bad

Prejudiced rules

Constructed by fools

With stupid textbooks

Created by crooks

With hidden agendas

Arrogant and friendless

 

Do you consider any poet “chemically balanced”?

Do you consider any artist “appropriately behaved”?

Or are poetry and art the very diseases

That you would rid the human race of?

The human race, tired of running

Round in circles

Driven ever faster, the human race

Sick of competing and climbing the ladder

Deeper into the sewer Of greedy profiteering

Relentless careering

Artists exploited, poets tortured

The victims cry out, but fear to be clear

They speak in metaphor

To hide their horror

They have seen the world as poets

As sensitive people

Not “schizophrenics”.

 

(words and music by Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam Arya Chakravarti, 1999)

Guitars, bass and vocals by Romesh)