End North Carolina's Eugenics Counterpart

We, the undersigned, believe it is important to acknowledge and compensate for wrongs of the past, and the Eugenics Program in North Carolina definitely fits the definition of  "Wrong."

But it is also very important to learn from mistakes of the past and not repeat or continue them.

However, what North Carolina's state agencies are doing and have done, since the rise of drug-based psychiatric treatment, is accept pharmaceutical propaganda which singles out the drug-based approach and other cruel methods as the current standard treatment for so-called mental disorders.

To continue this and other brain-damaging and largely ineffective, as well as cruel and life-threatening approaches to mental health care is scientifically unsupported. To force this cruel, dangerous and ineffective treatment on patients, especially without proper informed consent, as well as proper screening for physical causes of symptoms is a violation of human rights.

By allowing the state to decide who is "incompetent" and subject to its coercive incarceration and forced treatment, North Carolina continues to practice a form of Eugenics.

We ask that, in addition to acknowledging your Eugenics program of surgical sterilization and chemical lobotomization,  that you now denounce the more subtle, modern forms of these damaging treatments, ie, the brain-damaging and reproductive affects of antipsychotic drugs.

For more on antipsychotics' negative effects on fertility, please see:
 http://www.womensmentalhealth.org/posts/fertility-and-antipsychotic-medications/

Current research supporting the unnecessarily dangerous risks and long-term ineffectiveness of the, not infrequently, forced standard of treatment for conditions often mislabeled mental illness, has been discussed prominently in the media and more recently in-depth at the center of North Carolina's hub of education. Last October the second symposium on of the Foundation For Excellence in Mental Health Care met in Chapel Hill. (Not to be confused  this UNC's Center for Excellence in Mental Health Care).  Discussed at this symposium were a number of more compassionate and effective ways to deal with emotional and behavioral trauma. One growing movement is the "Open Dialogue" approach, which is having overwhelming success in Finland.

Last June and July, the New York Review of Books featured recent research on the serious health risks and ineffectiveness of psychotropic drugs by authors like Robert B. Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic), which blames the current epidemic of  "mental illness" largely on the methods now used to treat it, and further emphasizes the need to find a better approach to healing.

North Carolina has no excuse for ignorance on this subject and should end its current practices of forced-incarceration and forced-drugging of those suffering with emotional or behavioral trauma or any other labeled diagnosis.

These methods hark back to the Eugenics Program and should be replaced. It is far more enlightened, human, and sensible to recognize a program's injustice, cruelty, and failure before it becomes necessary to compensate its victims.

We appreciate your serious consideration of this request.