Psychiatric Coercion Kills

CN: This involves the death of a child, and institutionalization and forced drugging.

A baby in Florida has died before birth as a result of an altercation between their mother, a nurse tending coercively imprisoned people, and a prisoner of the institution. The prisoner, Joseph Wuerz, is being charged with homicide in the baby’s death.

This case is horrifically tragic. A child is dead, apparently as a result of violence. Nothing can change that.

This individual case of tragic violence is part of a larger system of violence that is intrinsic to institutionalization, restraint, and forced drugging. Psychiatric coercion IS violence. “Behavioral health” IS violence. These things are inherently abusive and always unjustified.

Furthermore, when people are locked up, restrained, forcibly drugged, and denied their human rights, it is inevitable that some of them will fight back. People will get hurt. In this case, a baby died.

Psychiatric coercion is violence. It is violence against the psychiatrically coerced inmates, and it leads to violence against the people guarding, restraining, and drugging them.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to cast personal blame on the mother of the child who died. She should never have been put in that position. The job of tending involuntarily committed psychiatric prisoners shouldn’t exist, because involuntary commitment shouldn’t exist.

But media outlets are using this child’s death as a hook to write about “violence against nurses” by psychiatric prisoners. The narrative is that psychiatric prisoners are inherently violent because of their “mental illness”, or because of some intrinsic bad character, rather than a result of the conditions of their imprisonment. This is being used to argue for even more psychiatric coercion.

Psychiatric coercion kills people. Psychiatric prisoners die from restraint, from forced drugging, from medical conditions that go untreated because psychiatrically disabled people are disbelieved about their symptoms, from contagious diseases like COVID-19 that inherently spread in institutions, and from the poverty that psychiatric coercion imposes on people (everything from loss of jobs and income to literally being billed for their own incarceration). The child of the hospital nurse is one more death in an impossibly long list of innocent lives lost due to psychiatric coercion.

I have no idea whether Joseph Wuertz is or should be criminally liable for the death of the baby. I’m not defending him. That’s not my point. The situation that ended this way should never have happened to begin with. There should never have been an altercation between a nurse and a psychiatric prisoner, because there should never be psychiatric prisoners. Psychiatric coercion is violence. In this case, that violence led to the death of a child. We can’t undo that, but we can end the system of violence that led to it.