Medication Nation

Medication Nation is a multi-purpose site that was recently started in August of 2008. We are a small network of individuals who share a common purpose regarding current treatment practices and patient rights in the areas of Psychiatry, Treatment Facilities and Institutions, as well as corporate government involvement and responsibility in these areas. We started as a result of a series of recent articles in the Sacramento Bee newpaper in response to 111 violations of code and multiple wrongful deaths at Sierra Vista Hospital.

We are committed to advocacy for the patient as well as the family, but seek to create reform and to educate the public regarding the violations of human rights, personal safety, mental health and individual will including personal freedom. We are strongly opposed to many of the modern psychiatric practices that take place today in the doctor's office, public and private schools, institutions and treatment centers as well as organizations that provide support to individuals who suffer from mental illness.

Our goals are varied and include the following Visions...

1. Provide a network that focuses on the experience and freedom of the individual.
2. Educate and inform the public about current events and legal or illegal practices being performed in today's psychiatric facilities and out-patient programs.
3. Demand recourse for violations, abuses, oppression and atrocities committed by facilities, doctors, corporations and private practices or organizations who violate patient rights, manipulate families and patients inclduing the law, and provide substandard or negligent care.
4. Extend outreach not only to individuals or families who faithfully follow through with the standard recommended treatment, but to support individuals who seek to live outside of the confines of psychiatric facilities or barbaric treatment methods that are often forced upon them against their will. We encourage individuals to exercise their right of freedom in all decisions and pursuits in life. A diagnosis is not always the law, and treatments fail as often as no treatment at all.
5. Provide a voice and an outlet of expression for individuals, victims, families, friends and survivors to express their sadness, protest, and outrage as well as their hope. We encourage anonymity and personal privacy, but also feel that speaking out is crucial to the cause of reform and identification of current practices and violations records.
6. Organize and empower individuals who otherwise are not heard, and give them the opportunity to communicate and participate in direct action in their quest to seek justice.

As an organization we are opposed to the following activities and practices...

1. Involuntary Institutionalization - Generally and specifically in facilities which are known for gross violations of patient rights and safety. We recognize that psychiatric emergencies can often be serious, but the repeated abuse of such practice as 5150 begins to take on a heavy socially oppressive habit, and we strongly discourage it's use in all but the most serious situations.
2. Mandatory Drugging / Chemical Restraints - Including the involuntary injection of sedatives, tranquilizers and powerful anti-psychotic medications intended to incapacitate the victim and induce catatonia or amnesia. Injectable medications are easy to administer, but hard to reverse if accidentally giving the wrong dosage, commonly this mistake leads to serious trauma or death. These methods are also often used on individuals prior to declaring them mentally incompetent, effectively stripping them of all rights to legal recourse through the laws of the State.
3. Controversial Treatments - Including the persuasive promotion of such treatments as Electro-Convulsive Therapy, including abuse of the practice by intentionally inducing permanent brain damage and amnesia or catatonia as a form of "cure".
4. Forcible Restraint - Either the physical attack and restraint of a patient by individuals or the tying down of the patient with hand cuffs or other devices intended to restrict physical movement. Often such practices lead to injury of the patient and physical restrictions cause various harms including medical emergency, suffocation and death.
5. Physical, Verbal or Sexual Violence - Often hospital staff, doctors, orderlies and other patients willingly and negligently foster events and incidents where a patient without control of their situation are subjected to violence, verbal attacks, and sexual violence including sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. A patient who is drugged to the point of having no conscious decision making ability, or who has been chemically restrained and has lost physical agility have no ability to protect themselves or ensure their own personal safety in such situations.
6. Mental or Emotional Abuse - Staff, doctors, orderlies and patients are often responsible for a traumatic barrage of mental and emotional abuse. Doctors will intentionally manipulate a patients mental or emotional status to justify unnecessary treatments or extended periods of hospitalization or restraints. Patients are also vulnerable to other patients who will harbor all kinds of malicious, competitive or violent intentions.
7. Co-ed Housing of Patients - Today's modern facilities often house both genders together in the same wards making privacy, personal safety and freedom from harassment or violence impossible to prevent. Not only are women at serious risk in these situations, but children are also housed similarly with adults, and patients are often found to fraternize inappropriately despite significant impairment of judgment and physical agility.
8. Inadequate Patient Monitoring - Patients who are reasonably considered to be a threat to themselves, who have psychotic ideations of suicide, or who wish to inflict violence upon others are improperly monitored due to under staffing and a lack of protocols. Many patients are found self-asphyxiated or are capable of harming themselves. Documented cases of criminals, sexual predators and violent offenders being allowed to interact with other patients unmonitored have also resulted in violence, molestation, rape and homicide. Proper measures are not taken to protect patients from other patients or staff.
9. Mis-Diagnosis - Staff and doctors are often responsible for the blatantly intentional or negligent mis-diagnosis of patients. Either for the purpose of excessive treatments and lengths of institutionalization and restraints, or for a common lack of understanding of the complicated nature of mental illness.
10. Neglect of Patient's Livelihood - Patients who are involuntarily hospitalized are often given no rights, abilities or resources to protect their own livelihood within society. Often patients due to being held are fired from their jobs, placed on extended leave or disability, are incapacitated with medication and rendered incapable of performing their duties properly, and often times risk great financial ruin and family segregation.
11. Negligent or False Documentation and Authorizations - Staff, doctors and nurses are often responsible for terrific negligence in the conduct of documentation and gaining appropriate authorization for treatments, transfers, lengths of stay, medications prescribed and medical health care provided. Cases of false documentation occur frequently both to confine and restrain a patient illegally, or to cover up negligent care and treatments by facilities or doctors.
12. False Witness - Staff, doctors, orderlies or patients are often guilty of providing extreme and unjust false witness against a patient for the purposes of extending stay, increasing treatments or enforcing physical restraints. Other such cases include neglect to properly report incidents of violence or injury, as well as direct falsification of statements or documents to the direct harm of the patient.
13. Transfer or Re-location of Patients - Families and spouses or friends are given little to absolutely no control or deciding power as to whether or where or when a patient will be transferred or re-located to another facility. Often severe patients are transferred outside of their area of residence ensuring that none of their family or loved ones have access to visit them, or to monitor their condition for the sake of their safety. Patients are also given no choice in this matter, and are often put at significant disadvantage financially when they are released from a facility that is very far from their residence.
14. Violation of Laws and Patient Rights - Patients Rights Laws are clearly in place to help assist the patient make their will known in the event of their hospitalization. Often doctors, nurses or facilities will neglect or deny these fundamental rights illegally for malicious or oppressive intent. Patients are systematically denied needed treatments, forcibly given others, denied access to their families or legal counsel, denied access to contact employers or financial institutions to ensure that their lives are properly handled. Families are consequently denied access to their loved one, and are systematically harassed and intimidated so that they do not interfere with the practices and intentions of the facility.
15. Inadequate Health Provisions - Patients are often denied adequate furnishings, supplies, medical devices, medications and needed equipment by staff, doctors and facilities. The provision of sanitary supplies for women, adequate clothing, comfortable bedding, clean water, fresh food, toiletries, first aid, medical assisting devices, and other medical needs are often never met. The cost of treatment including the enormous profits made by such places cannot rationally account for such neglect of provisions to the patient.
16. Discrimination, Stigmatization, Neglect, Oppression and Manipulation - Staff, doctors, orderlies, nurses and patients are often subjected to extremes of attitude and communication or treatment in a facility, including but not limited to racism, sexism, homophobia, religious persecution, ethnic discrimination, taunting, teasing, sexual harassment, stigmatization and marginalization due to diagnosis, also including blatant interference or neglect of patient care due to these prejudices.
17. Homeless Abuse and Social Oppression - Almost daily homeless persons and individuals who are perceived as "different" are systematically rounded up, taken in and involuntarily committed. These are not just drug abusers, mentally insane or threatening persons. These are the weakest or most vulnerable members of our society, and Psychiatry is used as a vehicle to alienate, oppress, abuse and exterminate them. Often persons going into treatment come out worse off and are left with no resources, they then become homeless and hopelessly trapped in a cycle of ongoing imprisonment and daily despair. Their lives become about basic survival, and the only tools provided to them come in a bottle prescribed by a far away doctor. Contrary to public opinion, psychiatry does not ever promise to free a person from suffering, it often creates the multitudinous problems that we see today:
1. Homelessness and enforced poverty, unemployment, increased rates of permanently disabled persons.
2. Destruction of families, separation of parents from children, spouses from their other half, children from their homes and schools, caretakers from their wards, and friends from their companions.
3. Physical, mental and spiritual sickness, often resulting in suffering that promotes drug and alcohol abuse as a method to cope.
4. Violence, school shootings, and "terrorist acts" committed by children.
5. Random acts of violence, perversion, psychotic behavior and "terrorism" by adults who are or were once treated for mental illness but "fell through the cracks".