The modern confinement of 'difficult' men
Foucault's histories of confinement are a heuristic for a new activism
I made a formal complaint about my treatment at a mental health practice in the UK over 2 years ago. I had been forewarned about this in Berlin. Feminists boasted that the British men leave Berlin on account of the abuse, only for another group in the UK to pick up where they let off. The abuse in Berlin leads the victim to seek help for strees and anxeity. Knowing the target will be searching for a flat share on his return to the UK, the group set up a flat for him. The purpose is twofold: the flatmates will harass him, but more importantly, he is now in the catchment area of a mental health facility primed for his arrival. This is easily done. False ads are posted only for flat viewings to be cancelled at the last minute, when he switched to Gumtree he finds a place almost too good to be true.
The young female psychiatric nurse will antagonise him and post clips of the recording on the group chat. These will be used to humiliate the target at work and in bars. The Asian student doctor will talk down every form of abuse that he describes, and then write them all off to delusion. When he goes to A&E after being spiked at his work, no tests are taken. If he were to call the police after being spiked in a bar, he would not be taken serious. Every point of contact with the practice is scripted to antagonise or abuse the target. I will post the detailed complaint soon for you to make your own assessment of my treatment.
It took around three months of pestering the practice just to get the complaint acknowledged. When I finally met the clinical director, I received an apology for my treatment. However, there was no investigation as was promised me. So, I wrote an MP and started my Subtstack. 10 days ago, I finally got to see a different psychiatrist. After one meeting I was taken to a mental hospital against my will.
Long story short, on the second day a doctor bump into me and ask if he can help. I told him I wanted to know when I would see a consultant. I told him I had a full-time job and a flat that I have not been in for a week already. I told him I was due to start a full-time postgraduate programme next month and I have things to get in order. He asked me why I was here, i.e., why would the Dr think I pose a risk to myself or others. I told him that I had asked the doctor that exact question myself, and that she could not provide an answer. We spoke for 10 minutes, and he said I should not be here and said he could see about getting me out. We sat down with a nurse and my father and hade another 20-minute discussion. He would let me out, but the last thing he said to me was:
“I hope you do not need to see a psychiatrist again. You just need to remember that you think a bit differently than other people, a little bit more to the extreme and just remember, if you attack the system, the system will attack you.”
He stood up and shook my hand.
What happens next?
I was not sure what would happen if I reported this to anyone. I posted something on Substack on Sunday the 10th. On Thursday the 14th at 11am, I went to pick up a sick note from my GP. A social worker was there with my GP, and they said they had another emergency detention order. Just to be clear, I only signed on at that practice a few months ago so that I would have access to NHS care in a different catchment area. I have never spoken to my GP, who is in fact my mother’s GP. I have also never seen a social worker before. I asked them what had changed about my condition. My GP said, she thought I needed help, but I have never spoken to her. Then they claimed the previous doctor insisted I needed help. I put it to them that the senior consultant and clinical director of the mental hospital is has seniority and he sent me home. They could not answer. I was taken and detained in a mental hospital from my GP’s surgery. My situation and condition have not changed since I was last in this hospital, 10 days ago. I have been at my parent’s place, and I have only published a post on my Substack detailing what had happened up to, and including, the threat I received form the consultant on leaving the hospital. So, why have I been put through this anxiety inducing process within 10 days of being threatened and then released?
The detainment
Staff make the victim uncomfortable by stealing form his room and tampering with his food and water and deprive him of sleep i.e. banging doors and turning his lights on and leaving them on. They know that the patient wants to record any discussion and they have designed scenarios to prevent that. The woman who came to take my heart scan, interrupts me to say she is not a consultant, just a student. She did not inform me that she would be taken notes on the discussion we had while he took the scan of my heart. She quipped, as she left my room, that it sounded like a conspiracy theory because I thought a whole organisation like my GP was against me. I had never mentioned my GP. It was only when I received my discharge sheets, that I realise she was working in some the capacity as trainee doctor. She can write what she likes on my record- something scripted- if I have not recorded the conversation. The two invitations to see my consultant came when I was on the phone to my parents who had just arrived in the hospital.
More sinister, is the spiking that goes on in the canteen and through my water. I know this sounds like I might need to be in a mental hospital, but equally it is so easy to do while they have you detained and only allow you access to a couple of taps. In the dinner hall, they must pour your coffee and tea for you, and you are served your food. They can invite the others in earlier, so that you arrive to get the spiked pot. Equally, when they see you are there waiting early, they can switch the order around. There are even a couple of patients who seem to go in front of me to encourage me to take what they are having (see my comments on nudge theory: ). When they have succeeded in spiking me they make a point of coming to take my ‘obs’, but with a dodgy machine. I can see my pulse has ‘spiked’ from between 75-85 up to over 120. However, they say it is the machine playing up. The take apart a cable connection and put it back together as if to demonstrate the machine is dodgy. They then write what they want on the chart say, 90.
The second consultation, during second detainment.
Talked down and diminished my descriptions of the abuse. It was almost word for word with the student form the very first consultation in Glasgow had said. They, like the women in Berlin, read from a script. He kept responding ‘ yes, but then what?’, ‘Yes, but you said you were harassed?’ ‘Ok, but what did they do to harass you apart from…’ and he would list everything I had said. The same rigmarole followed my description of sexual harassment. I put it to him, that being repeatedly asked for sex and repeatedly rejecting sex is sexual harassment. That, using guilt and criticizing my sexuality and the reputation of British men in bed; and suggesting my girlfriend is having an affair because of my lack of experience; and that I need more experience was also sexual harassment. Describing in detail that they offered deep throat phallacio and anal sex in front of colleagues and regulars in the bar was sexual harassment.
Furthermore, he claimed I was not sexually assaulted. So, I asked him how he would see it, if I was having sex with a women who had had a bit to drink, who I knew I had caught at a vulnerable. I just travelled back to Berlin from the funeral of the women who did the most part of raising me, my grandmother. If in this scenario a woman was shouting at me to stop, while she tried to push me off her, if I were to ignore her pleas and continued fucked her, only more aggressively and pinning her between me and the furniture. This would be considered sexual assault. He chose to use the word rape which bothered me, because as a psychiatrist he would know that it would bother me as victim who preferred ‘sexual assault’. I raised this with the mental health officer who seemed a little perturbed by the consultant’s denial. However, I sensed she was there to agree with the consultant and get me detained and on medication. I am guessing that she was in on my abuse as well, but I am not so sure. The consultant seemed very uneasy when I retold some of his gas-lighting, and him scoffing at criminal offenses, only to cause more offense.
I have learned a lot about men during this campaign. For one thing, there’s a propensity of men who have always believed that they are special to get into a position where they can behave in the most obnoxious and petty ways. This is to demonstrate to the target of his barbs that he can do what he wants. When the need for recognition is sought only in the capacity of a profession, which the man thereby calls into question, it makes my skin crawl. He could sit there and talk about rape being not so bad and I might call him out, but no matter what the nurse thought, she would sit quietly, and his argument would win as ‘an argument by authority’ as he put it. I know most women will be flabbergasted that I feel I need to say this. Women have been reporting it for centuries, and for the last century it has become a stereotype in popular culture. Women are powerless when their ideas are belittled by the manager one week, and in a fortnight floated as the managers own. Some might, at most, cast eyes round the room, but he has already won the argument by authority. It is not only women of course, and it is not only just talk. BlackLivesMatter might well argue that George Floyd was lost to an argument by authority. Now I am being detained and drugged to incapacitate me ‘by argument of authority’.