Psychiatry in Fermanagh

PSYCHIATRY IN FERMANAGH

In our first article "Psychiatry and Socialism" we established that psychiatry has no basis in the natural sciences. Now we will look at psychiatrists in action in one rural area in Ireland, Fermanagh. 

The psychiatrists in charge of the case-lists in Fermanagh are Dr Diana Day-Cody and Dr Patrick Manley who are both consultants at the Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital in Omagh.

Since her arrival on the scene in July 1992, Dr Day-Cody has left a trail of death and destruction through Fermanagh. Sixteen of her patients have died through suicide, heart attacks and avoidable incidents. Her policy of stigmatisation of the anxious and depressed has carved a bloody path. Manley is her understudy and works in a lock-up ward at the T&F.

Day-Cody, in this writer's experience, suffers from the same delusions that she is paid to discover in her clientele. She detains clients against their will in her hospital and insists that they are "voluntary"patients. Her lackeys in the hospital threaten her patients that they will be forcibly restrained if they attempt to leave admission wards. To avoid a detention in a lock-up ward they must comply. Cody has accused the author of intending to shoot her with an AK47 and intending to "impregnate" a member of the nursing staff. Cody's crude delusions are sufficient to please other state functionaries, such as Neville Morrow of the Mental Health Review Tribunal. Her "professional colleagues" i.e. the other doctors, follow Cody's deluded appraisals of her clients faithfully.

What unites all is a common class background and shared outlook - the outlook of the upper-middle class. Psychiatry is a lucrative profession with salaries of about £2000 per week. Not only does Cody draw a huge salary, she also takes frequent sickness leave to cope with stress.

The General Practitioners know how to play their part in this bourgeois system too. Dr Vincent Davidson is a police doctor. Where police surveillance has played its part in stressing out the police "target" he steps in with his effective powers of arrest. After a two-minute interview he dispatched the author to the T&F Hospital for seven and a half months.

There are no legal restraints on the mad doctors. The 1985 Mental Health Order requires that a social worker sign the admission for "referral" to a psychiatric hospital. In practice the doctor sends his victim to the hospital without any such signature.

In the T&F Cody and the staff as we have seen, maintain the pretence of voluntary status. When this is no longer avails, the victim of police harassment is introduced to a compliant associate of Cody, Dr Deeney in this case, and to a social worker. Without being interviewed by a social worker the forms are signed and the psychotropic line of death, confinement and stigmatisation and degradation rolls on.

In the secure wards where those who oppose Cody's whims inevitably end up, the nurses play an eager part in the degradation of Cody's and Manley's victims. Clothes are stripped off and victims pinned to a bed in solitary cells while psychotropic medication is injected. All property is taken away regardless of protests. These nurses are recruited from the most backward and reactionary section of the population, namely the farming class. Mail is intercepted and read by the staff. Doctors eavesdrop on conversations with solicitors.

Cody's approach to her victims is not unique. When challenged, she increases doses of tranquillisers and “anti-psychotics” to the maximum level to punish those who try to assert legal rights. Her familiar refrain when challenged is, "We will have to look at your medication again". Medication is increased to dangerous levels until sudden death becomes a real possibility. The epigones of state coercion chime together that the victim is "ill" and needs their “help”. “Help” consists of psychotropic medication which deadens the senses and wipes out the sense of self-identity and consciousness. The frigid world of the nurses does not correlate to the reality of class society. The victims of these doctors are invariably Catholic and working class.

The brainwashing of the victims is the most insidious part of medical fascism. After some time, victims will be heard to say that they are unwell and are being cured. They will boast of the effects of medication. The roller coaster of death by suicide grabs many of the more sentient resisters. The stigma of chemical dependence is broadcast by the doctors and nurses throughout the wider community. The self-seeking proponents of a National health Service, the new god of opportunism, preach of the need to increase spending on "Health".

When one considers the swathe that has been cut through the ranks of working people in their millions by the proponents of "mental health" one must ask the question: how much longer?