Je Suis Garth
18/4/25
Letter to Dr Katz,
Assoc. Professor,
Upton House, Box Hill Hospital,
Mental Health,
Dear Dr Katz,
Now I have
some sage advice for you Doctor Katz, since you didn’t change your ways last time. I
think I should give you a little bit of a motherly pep talk, or maybe some
‘Hard Chat.’ I know I make you uncomfortable; but the truth hurts, so don’t
turn away again. Take your medicine: it’s good for you. Are you sitting down, are you paying
attention? Right I’m ready to go….
So we are
now on Chapter two of the Garth Daniels expose. The first chapter took twenty
years of unremitting, shall we say, mismanagement at one end and what looks to
me like torture and mistreatment of a defenseless patient at the other. Being a mentally ill patient makes
him no less a human patient than the mainstream. He hasn’t ceased to exist as an individual like many
in the mental health system.
So, just to
recap for the readers……The story began when a normal boy did what a lot of
normal boys do, that most unwisely, he smoked a bit of ‘Pot.’ Sadly the
friends he hung out with at the time, more than likely spiked him with
something heavier. As the fog receded, he developed a crippling headache. So with
the best of intentions, Garth,
still a normal boy went to the Emergency Department of, I hear, a major
Melbourne hospital to get help with the headache.
Normal boys,
girls, mothers, fathers, uncle aunts, grandparents and little children go there
to Emergency Departments all the
time.The paradox is, when those people
sit down on the padded vinyl chairs in E.D. they don't suspect what could lie ahead
for one in five.
They
are normal people doing what normal people do, but naïve and sometimes being misled by career doctors. They
think they are in the safest place in the world to be sickest, and that would be a
hospital. But that’s far from the truth.
I don’t want to overstate the next part
of the story. It could take away from the punch line of the last tragic endings. The story unfolds....
You know about
this story Dr Katz, don’t you? It probably flags you every day.That one in five of each family universally is deemed
by the Psychiatric Associations to have a mental illness that's in need treatment.
Little
do these people know what's in store for one of their family members, while
quietly sitting behind the glass of the waiting room of a major hospital. It’s tragically like Garth Daniel's experience some twenty
years earlier.
Its import for psychiatry to
keep these things low profile, so the universal strategy is that you don’t want to
scare the horses before rounding them up. For it only takes one experimental
pill slipped into the mouths of innocents, and they are trapped like rabbits in
a cage, a feral cat or a runaway snake in a bag with nowhere to go. One wrong pill, and their loved one
could be torn from the family and spirited away for a lifetime of cruelty in a
psychiatric unit. You know Dr Katz, that antipsychotic medications given to a person with a normal brain causes psychosis and confusion. Is not in dispute.
I feel
qualified to speak, because it happened to one of my family members too. Like Garth Daniels, after
previously presenting with only a headache twenty years ago, the family find their
loved one writhing, maybe sometimes hallucinating and strapped to a bed or from a bad
reaction coming from the wrong antipsychotic pill. It can go on for days, months, even years of higher and higher doses, while not everyone has the enzymes
to metabolize them. I have a family member who has been in those shoes, also for twenty odd years. A lot of psychological and physical damage was done on forced treatments.
Then to
compensate, poorly trained psychiatrists increase the dose to fix it these people with
catastrophic outcomes: with more doses that’s when the
psychosis explodes in intensity. Both the family and patient are terrified by
this and will have no say once an involuntary treatment order is written. They are written out with reckless abandon.
A nurse, a social worker can write these legal things. There is then plenty of unending severe trauma to go round. With the growing hurt the
patient must be then sedated senseless till they adjust. If they resist, what else is there for management to do but
run an electric current through the patients brain to subdue them. This is happening
in real time in a real way in hospitals around the world. It's highly subdued. Retribution for speaking out is swift and savage. just look what's happening to Garth Daniels family for speaking out. From an active brain and a sharp hand on a camera Garth had a reasonable life with things to enjoy. Now with E.C.T treatment he has nothing, including his health. He is terrified his heart will fail or brain function collapse. It is a real possibility,because Dr Katz won't order it stopped.
There aren’t
enough staff at Upton House or anywhere else in Victorian Mental Health I can see. . You and I know along with the patients and families don’t we
Dr Katz. Garth's family is kept away, as psychiatrists up the dose again trying to
quell the psychosis, or sedate him, either or, but like putting salt on a wound, it continues to worsen.
Then not uncommonly their loved one deteriorates suddenly to an early death, sometimes screaming ‘no
more antipsychotics.’ or trying unsuccessfully to avoid the next electric shock
treatment. I say the way things are now,
‘Belsen,’ is looking attractive.
You know about the case of Garth Daniel’s and
the family quest to free him from your grasp, but you hang on relentlessly, Dr
Katz, determined to teach this fine united family that they should not cross
you without there being retribution, or a rain of fire and brimstone upon them...... Do I have it right? The family wants to go to Queensland with his psychiatrist and Garth. You say no Dr Katz, when there are better alternatives, and not Clozapine because it will compromise his heart and other organs.
As I said
earlier; you are the Grande Puppeteer:
You still pull
the strings of this sad case, remotely, out of the way of prying eyes. You hope you will again be hidden from view, but you are in full view. But you
can’t escape the glare of publicity and notoriety, because:
You Dr Katz must realize the family is entitled to oxygen too!
When the
press got too hot, you slid Garth Daniels sideways into a locked facility at
Dandenong Hospital, far away from prying eyes that are trained on you at Upton
House, Box Hill. Have you noticed this keeps following you, because how ever it ends, this is ….your
legacy.
It’s the kind of press that dogs a person for a
lifetime. Yes, its Garth Daniels case that won't go away. Why
did you suddenly move him we ask?..... but you never said. Garth is now under the
umbrella of Monash Health. I assume it is your hope the public spotlight would
fall away from you then, but it hasn’t Dr Katz, and it won’t.
So, after this unending and devastating storm, the family now
finds Garth twenty years later, residing in a locked psychiatric Unit, in a
major hospital, anywhere and everywhere according to your whim Dr Katz, still
tortured with electric shocks to the body, sometimes on alternate days…
It's Joseph
Mengles -style with unsolicited electric shocks any time. You say Garth has no capacity
to refuse, but when a nurse manhandled him and he pushed her away you charged
him with assault. ….Any reasonable human being would take that as a …..No!.....
No electric shock treatment!
One of Adolph
Hitler’s legal psychiatrist Joseph Mengles, acted lawfully too when he sewed
the twins together without anesthetic drugs. I understand anesthetic treatment
is compromised with Garth too along with the brain shocks. This has some irony
in itself considering your family roots. Back then, Jewish children were also
considered inferior beings like the mentally ill today, who are not deserving of respect and love, empathy and
compassion, or the right to draw breath and justice.
Is this latest confinement also where
you are heading with this Dr Katz? Is it your zenith, your one greatest achievement. We'll see!
The hearing
for assault against Garth is today at the Magistrates Court. You Dr Katz, have striped the
family of their life savings over time in defense of their son, so they can’t afford
a defense lawyer. Dad Bernard Daniels,
sixty nine years old and frail from the fight, has to represent his son yet
again, on limited and confusing information provided to him by your cohorts.
You want to revoke guardianship away from Bernard, so Garth can be spirited away
from public scrutiny as you continue to constantly squeeze him, compromise his life, both general and mental
health.
Now it’s about….ninety electric shocks and growing you’ve ordered for
him, when the normal upper limit is usually ......twenty compromising still his memory, spirit
and good health. You set this off Dr Katz and now you will have to wear it.
Both
you and Joseph Mengles (World War 2) have traits in common. Both were operating within the
law at the times of cruel treatments inflicted on the defenseless and lost. I
see the obvious flaws in both of you. Neither of you can feel empathy with their
fellow man.
Since Garth
has been restrained by both wrist and ankle in a bed for sixty days until now…..wouldn’t
a reasonable man or woman snap under that duress and want to push back from
those conditions, knowing the electric shocks are frying his brain and he clearly says No! which is his right and he is ignored. Knowing this, Dr Katz is pushing you hard, till you nearly break.
Even our
genetic cousins, the apes, would go mad and try to defend themselves if they
were in Garth’s shoes. A person who in the face of unremitting danger and who
feels powerless for long enough, will react. Everyone has their breaking point.
Who could reasonably stay quiet under those conditions…..so why not Garth? It shows he is one of us.
Your thinking that Garth’s
not of sound mind, as you claim, and not competent you should have been aware
there could be an unrestrained reaction from Garth and worked around it. But assault? Dr Katz you need to plan ahead.
What’s the
difference between Garth’s case and the restraint of an ape in a six foot by
three foot cage where it can’t move about and it’s drugged and poked with a
stick, tranquilized; and assaulted by enforcement that causes pain? ….The
answer is ….very little.
That cage would be about the size of Garth's bed where he is strapped down unable to move for sixty days on end, with both hands and feet tied. If Garth were a primate in these conditions there would
be international condemnation and charges laid against the handlers. In this
case it’s the nurses who have to do the dirty work.at your bidding.
Garth is in
a worse situation than the ape mentioned above, and the caged honey caged bear kept
in Russia. There is not much daylight between those two examples. Even the most
mildly mannered primates or humans in time will try to defend themselves under
constant unremitting threat.
So when an intelligent human being like Garth
predictably reacts under deplorable and degrading conditions, he is charged with
assault by your team? How about the right number of staff for the right job?.
Garth has a basic right to the same as everyone else, but I don’t see evidence
he can get that under your hawkish glare.
Garth
Daniels should have the same basic human rights as anyone else, and that is the
right to defend his self from assault or harm. But he doesn’t.
So, who is
really the aggressor here? The
legislation is clearly swayed in the wrong direction, against the patient.
It’s evidenced
that nurses at Eastern Health are not adequately trained to deal with or
predict the actions of overly sedated patients when they flail around. Sometimes
a limb will collide with a human being, often the abuser. This time it was a
nurse, it seems, but stories have a way of changing when the service is
applying to overwhelm Garth’s father in the rush to seize guardianship of Garth.
Constant dripping water wears away a stone, they say. There are no independent
witnesses to protect Garth against defamation. Anything else could have occurred in
the alleged assault.
The basic rule
for any carer or nurse is to stand back and not manhandle the patient. Let the
person have some space. What can a nurse do when asked to go over and bodily
force the patient to submit to tyranny? ……If
she wants to hold her job she must be complicit and toe the line.
For this
alas, is a sorry story, To nearly approximately quote poor Yorick. (William Shakespeare) ‘I see something stinks in the state of Denmark or say Victoria.’
Don’t you
understand Dr Katz, ……..No means No! ....No more electric shocks for Garth. If it happened this time how many others have you hold up and scattered somewhere else? I shudder to think. ....When will the dark ages end?
The bright light of justice is shining brightly on Garth from all angles, and can''t be extinguished. The bed Garth is in; is still funded by your Eastern Health. It’s just in a different location, so your reign and responsibility Dr Katz as we know it is still on Garth and still Eastern Health, along with several other tentacles that penetrate the Monash domain and other areas. Oh, you are the agile one Dr Katz, aren’t you? Why don't you tell Bernard the truth so he can have a fair hearing for his son at the magistrates court. .
Marine
biology experimentation in an earlier career Dr Katz was your forte. I think
you should stick to what you do best, beside the sea.