Bruce Ennis, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, led the Mental Health Bar in litigation to close all mental hospitals. These efforts, unlike Mrs. Packard's, did not seek hospital safeguards and regulations, but outright closings.
In 1972, Ennis and three other young attorneys formed the Mental Health Law Project (MHLP), which rapidly became the ideological and logistical center of the mental patient liberation bar. They were abolitionists, not reformers, who challenged every assumption of the mental health care system (Isaac and Armat, 1990).
Ennis' book Prisoners of Psychiatry was also published in 1972. In the preface, Thomas Szasz, M.D. (a fellow anti-psychiatry advocate), praised Ennis for recognizing that "individuals incriminated as mentally ill do not need guarantees of 'treatment' but protection against their enemies-the legislators, judges, and psychiatrists who persecute them in the name of mental health" (cited in Isaac and Armat, 1990).
Ennis portrayed psychiatry as a means to control or dispose of people who annoy others. He wrote, "How would we tame our rebellious youth, or rid ourselves of doddering parents, or clear the streets of the offensive poor, without it?" For Ennis, hospitals were places "where sick people get sicker and sane people go mad" (cited in Isaac and Armat, 1990).
In a 1974 interview published in Madness Network News, Ennis stated, "My personal goal is either to abolish involuntary commitment or to set up so many procedural roadblocks and hurdles that it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the state to commit people against their will" (cited in Isaac and Armat, 1990). |
