Note: This article by Anne Krauss appeared in the Winter/Spring issue of The Rights Tenet, a publication of the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy. It appears here at the request of the author, who would like to make the links which appear in the article more easily accessible to readers.

Two of the pieces in this issue of the Rights Tenet are reproduced from sites on the World Wide Web. These two pieces,"Psychopharmacology and the Government of the Self" and "The Right Side of History," have something else in common, despite their obvious differences. They each have fascinating companion stories, also told on the Internet, which illuminate the risks and publicity which on occasion can attend the exercise of exercise free speech. In this age of Google, it is hard to keep a secret from anyone who has an Internet connection. In fact, in this age of e-mail and mailing lists, one of the surest ways of spreading information is to be caught trying to censor it, or punishing people for talking about it.

Dave Hosseini accompanied his "The Right Side of History" speech with a prop: a bottle of Elmer's glue. He used this prop as he spoke about the involuntary outpatient commitment legislation which was then before the California State Assembly, saying that "the supporters of this bill, a small faction who have managed to temporarily take over a California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, when confronted by the truth of this issue in their own magazine, fired the editor, discontinued the magazine and tried to glue the offending pages shut. Well, I have news for you, you can't glue the truth shut." Those gathered on the California State Capitol steps in Sacramento doubtlessly were familiar with the story to which this alludes, as were the hundreds of people who received the "dendrites" (e-mails from a Support Coalition International mailing list) which David Oaks wrote about this issue. The glue refers to the clumsily executed censorship of two pieces which were published in the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill (CAMI) periodical, The Journal. After the publication but before the distribution of the Journal issue which included this piece, CAMI ordered "mental health clients" at a vocational rehabilitation program to apply glue to seal this and another story closed.

Some subscribers were able to peel the glued together pages open, and now the stories are posted on the Internet at http://www.mindfreedom.org/mindfreedom/news/010201_b.shtml. The piece to which Mr. Hosseini referred in "The Right Side of History" debunked the often quoted statistic that in the United States 1,000 murders per year are committed by untreated mentally ill persons. This piece provided convincing evidence that E. Fuller Torrey invented this statistic to help promote the campaign to enact involuntary outpatient commitment statutes throughout the United States. E. Fuller Torrey and the Treatment Advocacy Center have pursued a strategy of using soundbites, such as the 1,000 murders statistic, to link dangerousness with untreated mental illness, and involuntary outpatient commitment with public safety (http://www.fair.org/extra/0105/mental-illness.html).

Although the gluing of the pages was perhaps a laughably ineffective attempt at censorship, the firing of Dan Weisburd, who had edited the Journal for over a decade, was no joke. The sad and deceit filled details of this story are also available on the Internet at http://www.namiscc.org/newsletters/March01/Sacramento-web.htm, or via Google using the search term "Dan Weisburd".

Dr. Healy's lecture, "Psychopharmacology and the Government of the Self," gained considerable attention when, shortly after delivering this lecture, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto withdrew an employment offer which Dr. Healy had already accepted. Very shortly after delivering the lecture, David Goldbloom, Physician-in-Chief at CAMH, told Dr. Healy that people only remember three things from a talk and that what they would remember from Dr. Healy's lecture were the claims that Prozac could cause suicide, that Lilly knew about this (which Dr. Healy did not say in his lecture), and that high dose antipsychotics cause brain damage. In early December of 2000, Dr. Healy received an e-mail from David Goldbloom stating "we believe that it is not a good fit between you and the role as leader of an academic program...This view was solidified by your recent appearance at the Centre in the context of an academic lecture..." CAMH was rescinding the position.

This incident has raised serious concerns about academic freedom at CAMH and the University of Toronto. Since Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac, is a major contributor to CAMH, there has been speculation about a possible connection between the rescinding of the offer and the substantial funding which Lilly has provided to CAMH (http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/17/elliott-c.html). It has been documented that Lilly withdrew funding from New York's Hastings Center in response to a Hastings publication which was critical of Prozac, adding credibility to this speculation.

Although several newspapers and the prestigious journal, Nature Medicine, provided coverage of the CAMH affair, many people first heard of this apparent breach of academic freedom via e-mail. I learned of it via an "infomail" (an e-mail from a mailing list maintained by Vera Sherav, founder of The Alliance for Human Research Protection) and also via a Support Coalition International mailing list. Details of this story are widely available via Internet. A search at Google on the terms, "David Healy" CAMH Toronto, currently yields 167 results. Visit http://www.counterpunch.com/prozacsuicide.html to read a recent interview of Dr. Healy and for links to some original source material concerning the CAMH affair.

Historically, principled people have often sustained personal losses for speaking the truth to power. However, the stories of these losses have never been as widely available or available in as much detail as they are now, in this Internet age. Information from news sources throughout the world is instantaneously available to anyone with an Internet connection and can instantly be shared via e-mail or web site with others who share similar interests. Greater depth of coverage is available through the use of links and search engines, such as Google. Those who wish to silence critics must now face the risk that their dirty deeds will become widely known in great detail, drawing additional attention to exactly the information which they wished to conceal. If information is power, the Internet has certainly made power more easily accessible. The question remains, however: will our curiosity spur us to seek out this information in our own areas of interest, and will our sense of justice cause us to act on it, so that we can claim this power as our own?

Author's note: Dr. Healy is scheduled to deliver this lecture in Toronto again on May 24, 2002. To request infomails from Vera Sherav, send her an e-mail at veracare@rcn.com, with the message "Tenet reader would like to receive infomails." To request dendrites, send an e-mail to listproc@efn.org with the body text reading "subscribe DENDRITE".