ON THE first anniversary of the launch of the government’s blueprint for mental health, A Vision for Change, comes a book highly critical of the psychiatric establishment. Soul Survivor:  A Personal Encounter with Psychiatry was officially published at the European Union building in Dublin on Wednesday, 24 January 2007.
    The ceremony was presented by European Parliament member Kathy Sinnott, who told the gathering of her long association with Mary Maddock in the campaigns for sympathetic, compassionate treatment for users of the mental health services and for proper respect for their rights. Mary, a founder of MindFreedom Ireland, spent 20 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, undergoing forced treatment in the shape of electric shocks to the brain, forced administration of 'medication', and blatant disregard for her rights as a person. She recovered from this abuse, though, and overcame both the side effects of the drugs prescribed for her and their addictive character with the assistance of psychiatrist Dr Peter Breggin and psychotherapist Dr Terry Lynch, who introduced her to their emotion- and experience-centred methods of healing psychological distress.
    Mary wrote the book along with her husband Jim. It tells the harrowing but ultimately inspiring story of her involvement with psychiatry over two decades. In the foreword, Terry Lynch, author of Beyond Prozac, says this book “should be required reading in training courses for psychiatrists, GPs and all involved in the provision of mental health services.”
    Mental Health Minister Tim O'Malley attended and spoke. He told the gathering that the recent debate over mental health treatments stirred up by his interview with the Irish Medical News in November last year was not over. It would continue, he said, and left his audience in no doubt that he would not be swayed by pressure from the biological psychiatry establishment to close it off and accept their view as the only valid one. Minister O'Malley congratulated Mary Maddock for her courage and perseverance in surviving her ordeal, and for going public so dramatically in her book.
   Activist John McCarthy told the audience that action was needed as well as debate. He stressed that forced treatment in psychiatric hospitals and units is still legal in Ireland under the Mental Health Act of 2001, including the forced administration of ECT (electric shock 'therapy'), and that as long as this is so what happened to Mary Maddock can happen to anyone who enters the mental health services as a patient. Such a position was incompatible with Ireland's obligations under the Human Rights Act, he said, and urged the government to ratify the UN Convention on Disability, which would mean amending the Mental Health Act to enforce respect for the human rights of patients.

    In 1972 Mary, a former nun, left her convent after seven years and had met and married her husband Jim by 1974. Within two years she found herself in Sarsfield Court Psychiatric Hospital two days after the birth of her daughter.  Mary was heavily medicated and subjected to many sessions of electro-convulsive 'therapy' (ECT) for post-natal depression, the beginning of a nightmare that saw her admitted to a further three psychiatric hospitals — the GF wing of Cork University Hospital, St Anne’s (now Carrigmor) in Cork and St Patrick’s in Dublin. Mary was branded a ‘manic depressive’ and put on a cocktail of drugs, including lithium, which destroys thyroid function, for the next 18 years. Supposedly ‘well’ and out of hospital, in reality she was reduced to a piece of psychiatric flotsam — an overweight, stiff-limbed, kidney-damaged, drooling, tremor-ridden, mind-numbed, middle-aged woman.
    Then in 1993, with the help of people like Dr Peter Breggin and Dr Terry Lynch, and of organisations like the Cork Advocacy Network and MindFreedom, she began to challenge the orthodox thinking of the psychiatric establishment and began what her publisher calls her "brave, slow, scary but ultimately empowering journey of liberation from its clutches". She and her husband also began to attend conferences, speak out on television and in the press and established MindFreedom Ireland. Both are also members of Sli Eile, the Cork housing association for former psychiatric patients, and continue their campaign for human rights in the mental health area, specifically in relation to the over-prescription of drugs, forced injections, involuntary detention and the use of electro-convulsive therapy.
    Soul Survivor costs €12.95 and is on sale in all good bookshops and can also be purchased online from asylumonline.net

Soul Survivor:  A Personal Encounter with Psychiatry by Mary and Jim Maddock