My Doctor, My Jailor?

"...clinicians' increasing liability for the violent actions of their patients has forced evaluators to err on the side of commitment..."

– Robert D. Miller, M.D., Ph.D.

on unjustified psychiatric commitment

A number of years ago a business partner of mine was having trouble sleeping. He informed his doctor of this, telling him that because of this insomnia he was always tired. His doctor asked him what he would do if he got too tired while driving, and my business partner told him that if he ever felt he was too tired to drive he would pull over and have a nap. They talked a little more about solutions, and he went home.

---

We live in the “preemptive age”. Think another nation might attack you in the future? Make up a flimsy case and attack them first, before facing the risk of their attack on you. Think someone might be a danger to themselves? Lock them up, before they can hurt themselves — do yourself a favor, if you don’t, and they do hurt themselves, you could be sued!

---

Three days later there was a registered letter from the Ontario government. When he opened it, he was informed that his driver’s license had been revoked and that he would need to undergo observation at a sleep clinic. When he called to make an appointment he found out that not only would he have to wait nine months, but that there was no appeals process. So, nine months later, at which point his insomnia had already passed, they hooked him up to the machines, had him take a nap, and “promptly” returned his license to him.

Maybe you’re saying that it’s better that the doctors “played it safe” and suspended his basic rights and privileges — after all, he might have posed a risk to other drivers if it turned out he had a severe sleeping disorder.

The fact is, we can play the “better safe than sorry” game endlessly. What are you willing to sacrifice for safety? It’s very easy when we’re talking about someone else’s freedoms being taken away. The safest society is the one that is the least free, and with free society comes both responsibility and danger.

Many readers of this site have faced medical and legal harassment because of their body modification decisions. Some have been jailed, others incarcerated in psychiatric institutes, and others have been sued by ex-wives claiming their body modification was a form of abuse. In a small percentage of those cases, the aggressors have turned out to be correct, but in the vast majority it was baseless accusation built on inaccurate stereotypes. A witch hunt.

Treating people with body modifications as a danger to themselves or others for that reason alone is no better than calling for the incarceration of all members of a specific race because statistically they may be slightly more prone to be found guilty of criminal behaviour.

The letter on the right recounts some recent experiences had by a friend of mine, pictured below.

There’s got to be a million young people who’d love to “have her look”. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s a healthy expression of who she is.

To make a long story short, she went to the doctor because of some minor depression and insomnia — how many of us haven’t suffered from this from time to time? It’s so common it’s practically considered normal. The doctor treated her well, until he asked her to roll up her sleeve for a blood pressure check, revealing her tattoos.

Upon seeing her professionally done and long-since healed tattoos, coupled with a missing finger joint (which was lost in an accident long before, which was in her chart, along with the fact that she was seeking a prosthesis for it — most young people enamoured with amputation do not seek prosthetic correction), he classed her a “significant risk to herself” and imprisoned her involuntarily for an indefinite period of time.

Luckily her ordeal was over six hours later as other doctors did not share the bigoted views of the first.

The fact is, once you fall into the “psychiatric care” system, it can be very difficult to get out, and all it takes to get there in the first place is the subjective opinion of a doctor that’s known you for all of fifteen minutes.

Not only that, but this doctor’s views were based on not just his own personal hatred of tattooed people and women with short hair, but by a television show — I can only assume that he was referring to TLC’s Skin Skulptors, which told the story of several older voluntary amputees. In each of their cases, the end result was the same: “I was depressed my whole life, but now I’m happy. I can’t tell you why I am this way, but I can tell you this is the best decision I ever made.”

Since when is choosing an unusual path to happiness, one that doesn’t hurt anyone else, a crime punishable by psychiatric imprisonment?

To tell a similar story from my own life, long before starting BME I’d had an encounter with doctors who’d never come in contact with stretched piercings. For that and other reasons they told my parents that they wanted to hold me for three days to make sure I wasn’t a danger to myself (I absolutely fail to see how well healed and cared for piercings are indicative of anything but someone who takes care of their body). At the end of it they decided that they were expressions of schizophrenia, and prescribed me massive doses of a dopamine-level altering anti-psychotic drug.

WRONG.

I’m not schizophrenic — a fact that would be later confirmed by more experienced doctors. It wasn’t the first time I’d been misdiagnosed. When I first revealed my body modifications to my parents, they took me to a psychiatrist who told them I had “delusions of grandeur” because I’d told the doctor that I was a computer programmer — and even though he could have easily confirmed that fact with my employer, he instead wrote it off with his own pre-conceived notion: “you’re far too young to understand how to program, let alone do it successfully”.

Then, in the drugged haze that I was in, I was thrown into a larger institution. The first doctor to see me stripped me down to “examine me”, and at the time I had a nipple piercing. The doctor told me that my nipple piercing was indicative of “gender disorders and transsexualism” and ordered a series of humiliating genetic tests and examinations to find out if I was actually male or not.

When their tests came back showing me to be totally normal, they instead put me on more anti-psychotics (even though they’d already discarded the “schizophrenic” claim), and as I was beginning to become agitated at being held prisoner, they added a pile of tranquillisers to my daily dose. I had no choice but to take these drugs — across the floor of the Clarke Institute that I was in was the “long term” ward, where they still used shock therapy. I was told that if I didn’t take the drugs that they’d force me to undergo shock treatment instead.

Now, I’d signed up for this “voluntarily”, so I thought, “Why don’t I just check myself out. I don’t need this.”

Unfortunately, when I went to do so, they confirmed that I was in on a voluntary form, but that if I sought to leave, they would immediately be switched over to an involuntary form. It took me a full month of jumping through their hoops before I was able to leave, and by the time I did, my head was so messed up from the drugs they were over-prescribing me that it wasn’t long before I took too many of them (the drugs they’d given me) and returned, post-overdose.

My luck turned though as I was transferred to a new doctor who realized there was nothing wrong with me at all. At this point my only problem was that I was on a pile of drugs I never should have been on. I spent thirty days in a locked ward under armed guard as they weaned me off the drugs.

As those drugs began to wear off, I desperately needed to express “me”. I coloured my hair green in the psyche ward bathroom with some dye that a friend smuggled in for me, and I began to re-stretch my piercings. Eventually I was free again, happy to be me, but having learned an ominous lesson about what happens to people who don’t conform.

I don’t know what advice I can give you on this subject. Normally I might say “escalate it”, but there’s no guarantee that won’t make the problem dramatically worse. I don’t want to say “isolate yourself” and try not to have contact with doctors either since we know that won’t make anything better. I’ll certainly warn you to avoid falling into their traps. It’s not easy to free yourself once you’re caught.

It’s a long battle still. We’ve made incredible strides in assuring the mainstream acceptability of body modification, but we’ve made them very quickly, and there are still an enormous amount of people who doubt the validity of our actions. All I can suggest is try and conduct yourself politely and think of yourself as an ambassador.

After all, if this really is bigotry drawn on stereotypes — “modified people are bad/crazy/dangerous” — then it’s in all our best interest to change those stereotypes through our actions, so maybe one day the stereotype will flip to “modified people are so nice!”

Maybe we’ll eventually grow out of judging books by their covers.

For now, let’s just try not to burn books based on their covers.

Thank you,

Shannon Larratt

BMEzine.com

High-tech implants: The future of body modification?

"If God made anything better, he kept it for himself."

– William Gibson, Neuromancer

Cyberpunk sci-fi fetishists and scientists of questionable skill have long held that “the future of body modification” is implantable technology. Some of you may have recently seen Professor Kevin Warwick appearing alongside myself on TLC’s Skin Sculptors documentary. On that show, Professor Warwick, often falsely held up as the “first human to host a microchip” (after having a PetNet-type passive chip implanted), showcased a series of barely functioning technological parlour tricks such as clapping his hands to try and make lights turn on and off. While many scientists hold that Warwick’s experiments are meritless, amateur, and misleading, Warwick predicts that they will have enormous medical and social applications and will revolutionise the way we interface with technology.

Ultimately we are discussing the addition of gadgets such as implantable watches, identification systems, and input/output devices. I will ignore the more common “correction” of handicaps using similar technologies (cochlear implants, prosthetic devices, and so on), since I don’t believe they could reasonably be classed as voluntary body modification and seek to bring normal rather than augmented functioning.

I think most of us have entertained notions of implanting a timepiece or PDA device under our skin — just think how convenient it would be, not to mention cool! Or what if we had an ID chip so our computer would only respond to our touch, or our house would automatically turn the lights on for us as we entered. Those are just the tip of the iceberg — we can come up with “neat” gadgets indefinitely … but that’s the core problem — do we want something that’s going to be “neat” for fifteen minutes, or do we want something that will permanently enrich our lives?

We are tool using creatures; we are not walking tools. As we grow as a species, we enhance our tool set, but our core being remains relatively unchanged. As we create new tools, we discard our old ones as they no longer meet our expanding needs. We do not have that luxury with our bodies, which we discard only once, as we leave this world.

How many of you reading this are still using the computer they were using twenty years ago? The fact is, bleeding edge technology (which is what implantable technology would be) becomes obsolete very quickly and ceases to be desirable — short of removing and replacing it every three years, a human being who has chosen to augment themselves with implantable technology will quickly become an obsolete human — yesterday’s model — a fate no self-respecting futurist ever wants to face.

Let’s assume briefly that we have reached a point where technology is relatively static in terms of the device that we seek to implant. Now we have to ask the larger question: why bother? After all, these gadgets could just as easily be wearable, with projects such as Isa Gordon and Jesse Jarrell’s Psymbiote being excellent examples. What is the advantage to the device being implanted? Once implanted, we can’t upgrade it, we can’t swap it out, and we’ve done physical damage to the area, weakening our core physical form. In addition, implantation requires a power source that is containably non-toxic and can be recharged without direct contact. It would be utterly unreasonable and ill-informed to presume that an implantable power source can compete with one that is external (as has been consistently illustrated in the world of artificial organs).

As far as simpler passive identification devices, again we must ask ourselves what the advantage is. After all, it is just as easy to place the RFID chips into clothing or jewelry … But that ignores the larger issue that identification devices serve not to augment us, but to augment the technology surrounding us (that is, having an implanted ID chip makes it easier for computers to detect us, but offers no enhanced sense to us in return). In addition, as computer technology becomes more powerful, their ability to recognise us will grow. Building fingerprint identification systems into keyboards is already being done, and speech and visual identification systems become more accurate every day. The only advantage to implantable identification technology is that it is difficult to remove. So I propose that any future person with an implanted ID is either walking around with yesterday’s tech, or is a criminal that has had this unpleasant fate forced upon them.

These things are very fun to think about, and make glorious storytelling elements a la Neuromancer, but the fact is that the future of human/technology interconnection is wearable. Yes, one day in the distant future we may (and probably will) reach a point where we have a “port” — perhaps a plug on our spine that acts as a communications hub between the technological word and our wetware innards. However, that’s a long way away, and ultimately we’re just talking about a communications medium rather than a body modification. Taking it to greater extremes, these transhumanist ideals eventually lead us to the end of the human being as we replace ourselves with machines that may or may not carry on with human souls … and that’s an entirely different debate.

We will definitely have some tough questions to face regarding technology over the next fifty years as the “intelligence” of machines first meets, and then surpasses our own. It is my belief that in order to survive that difficult time in our evolution, we need to really cherish being human.

Part of what makes body modification attractive to people is first that it recognises and glorifies the human biology, and then allows us to seize control over our physical form and mold it to our desires where we can revel in a personal utopia of our own creation. A fancy piece of technology, above or below the skin, does not glorify the body. A subincision does. A stretched piercing does. A fit body from years of exercise does. Let’s face it: as megalomanically superior as it may make you feel, driving a Ferrari does not make you feel like you can run fast.

Now, genetic engineering on the other hand…

Carpe corpus!

Shannon Larratt
BMEzine.com