In laying out the perquisites and privileges of licensed caregivers, California’s Business Practices Law yet recognizes that the consumer retains final authority in their pursuit of physical and mental ease. While this leaves license for unscrupulous self-promoters, it is also the avenue for alternative wellness practitioners to challenge specialists who ignore disabling interactions between mind, body, and spirit.

Specialists, of course, have the obligation to seek professional licensing. Licensing comes with a powerful inducement to the consumer: under the Affordable Care Act, every person must carry insurance that covers medical and psychiatric care, and insurers will only reimburse care provided by a licensed practitioner. This upended the business model for unlicensed practitioners. Most clients, by the time they contact me, cannot pay my fees – even at half the going rate for clinical care.

In “Your Consent is Not Required,” Rob Wipond surveys the market created by clinical privilege. In brief, it is terrifying. Where I frame mental discomfort as a learning opportunity, the clinician sees a medical disorder. Brains break and need chemical and surgical intervention to restore proper function. A clinical diagnosis is made against the criteria of the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (DSM), leading then to “evidence-based” treatments.

Wipond’s survey of clinical overreach begins with the DSM itself. Assessments are made using questionnaires developed by researchers affiliated with the pharmaceutical industry. The criteria for diagnosis are hair-trigger (my term), covering only the last two weeks and reflecting mood changes that arise whenever stress is experienced. In this way, the DSM no longer serves as a sieve that identifies serious disorders but a a funnel that justifies clinical intervention.

Most of Wipond’s reporting concerns the diffusion of clinical responsibility to members of the public. Almost anyone can call the police to report a “concern” for your mental well-being. While this can be a family member or friend, it is also common for various types of volunteer-led “help hotlines.” What follows is often a confrontational intervention that leads to a clinical assessment. The detainee, naturally stressed by the experience, is likely to appear agitated in the presence of the clinician, leading to a recommendation for medication. When this is resisted, too frequently the detainee is labelled as “lacking insight,” and forcibly injected.

If this sounds traumatic, it is. The factors are diverse and terrifying.

First, as psychotropic medications are sometimes prescribed to prevent harm to persons and property, the FDA screens for side-effects using the same criteria as are used for cancer therapies. All psychotropic substances have pronounced side effects. The side-effects are themselves diagnosed as psychological conditions that come with further medication. It is not uncommon for detainees to find themselves taking four or more medications, with a complex set of interacting side-effects.

Worse, the FDA has determined that these “medications” have no proven healing effects and prohibits drug companies from claiming to “cure” mental illness. The benefit of medication appears rather to be in preventing the patient from thinking clearly enough to commit harm. Unfortunately, these substances – while not formally “addictive” – come with intense withdrawal symptoms. Once the mind becomes habituated to the artificial substance, it may be impossible to get off the drug. Forced medication is therefore tantamount to enslavement to the drug.

On top of this chemical restraint, physical isolation prevents the detainee from defending their autonomy and initiating action to address the problems that generated their distress. Worse, appeals from family can lead to forced alienation so that clinicians can guarantee “proper treatment.”

What drives this counter-productive program? Well, the amplification of mental distress by ready availability of military weaponry must play a part. But there is also profit – and plenty of it. An occupied bed in a mental ward nets thousands of dollars a day. On top of this are medication payments and fees for follow-up assessments – assessments often given by interns carrying large medical school loans.

Should there be legal protection against this abuse? Nominally, but in fact mental commitment courts devote twenty or so minutes to a hearing and grant enormous privilege to clinical opinions. Once you have fallen into the system, disputing the operation of its mechanisms can come with the dreaded “lacking insight” label. Ultimately, Wipond counsels staying calm, assenting to the noble intentions of the clinicians, and riding out the ten to fourteen days required for an opinion to be reached that the “crisis has passed.”

The insurance and drug industry have worked strenuously to prevent reform of these practices. Hope is focused, at this time, with the World Health Organization and United Nations, both of whom have issued declarations that mental wellness commitment procedures are tantamount to torture when the consent of the detainee is not obtained.

If you are angered by this review, well, you should be. At first, I could only read a chapter or two at a time. As someone who helps people take charge of their capacity for personal growth, I am infuriated by the industrial scale of the damage done to the delicate brains of my fellow citizens – tens of millions of them.

My advice, then, is to never buy into the belief that your mind is broken. This is the twisted lie that the pharmaceutical industry has used to enslave us to products that have no proven effect on the conditions that they claim to treat.

And, for God’s sake, if you love someone in crisis, don’t send a stranger to intervene. Either go sit with them in person or find a friend that can. If the crisis is real and overwhelming, don’t let them go alone into their clinical assessment. As alluded to by Wipond, when the mind is embroiled in crisis, information from deep perceptual layers can be revealed, driving bizarre and confusing conclusions. A calm, trusted voice of reason may be essential to keeping your loved-one out of the wood-chipper of psychiatric commitment.

If commitment is necessary, Wipond describes the characteristics of a healing experience. They are, sadly, only human essentials: physical security, basic comfort, good nutrition, and the opportunity to reintegrate mind, body, and community with stimulating activities. In other words, the summation of the only proven effective mental wellness intervention: “Home, Sweet Home.”