Media Release  - July 23, 2008 - Toronto

VIGIL IN TORONTO TO MOURN THE LOSS OF ESMIN ELIZABETH GREEN AND CONDEMN PSYCHIATRY’S HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

Date:  Friday, July 25
Time: 1pm
Place: Centre of Addiction and Mental Health, 1001 Queen St.W., Toronto

This vigil is being held to mourn and memorialize the tragic death of Esmin Elizabeth Green.  Similar vigils are being held on this date in other cities including New York and Cork, Ireland.

On June 19, 2008, Ms. Green, died a tragic, horrific and totally preventable death. She died of medical neglect and lack of care, compassion and respect in the Kings County Hospital Center’s Psychiatric Emergency Room in Brooklyn, New York.  Ms. Green was 49, poor and black, and about to lose her home – extremely vulnerable. For 24 hours while waiting for a bed, no doctor, no nurse, no security guard, nobody offered to see or help her- she was totally ignored and alone. While waiting quietly in the emergency room, she collapsed to the floor and lay there for almost 1 hour before hospital staff approached her lying motionless, face down on the floor – she was already dead. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, hospital staff falsified documents stating that Ms. Green was “up and went to the bathroom” and was “sitting quietly in the waiting room” – more than 10 minutes after she last moved. A surveillance tape played on CNN Video clearly shows Ms. Green dropping to the floor, her body convulsing as she lay dying and as several people walked past and ignored her.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/01/waiting.room.death/index.html

Because of considerable publicity and public outrage, investigations into her death and Kings County Hospital have been launched.

The death of Esmin Elizabeth Green highlights a few disturbing facts of ‘modern’ psychiatry and hospital care:  Like many other people labeled “mentally ill” and a “visible minority”, she was abused and discriminated against, ignored, neglected in the psychiatric system. Like many other vulnerable psychiatric survivors, Ms. Green was also re-victimized and re-traumatized in the emergency room. Like many other psychiatric survivors and other vulnerable, marginalized people, Ms. Green came to a public hospital looking for medical care but was ignored and neglected. She was understandably “agitated”, depressed and desperate, given the fact that she was faced with multiple crises: losing her home, becoming homeless, being unemployed.

Deaths from medical neglect, indifference and psychiatric abuse - including forced drugging, electroshock (“ECT”), physical restraints, and daily humiliation or ‘degradation ceremonies’ – are all too common, not only in New York but in virtually all major cities in North America including Toronto. Several staff at Kings County Hospital cruelly and willfully violated Ms. Green’s human rights, including her right to timely and essential medical care, her right to dignity, her right to respect. Some of us psychiatric survivors and social justice activists will be speaking out against these human rights violations that some of us have experienced in the Canadian psychiatric system.

This vigil is co-sponsored by Resistance Against Psychiatry, the International Campaign to Ban Electroshock icbe.wordpress.com, We the People  www.theopalproject.org/vigil.html, and The Opal Project www.theopalproject.org

Contact:  Don Weitz, ph: 416-545-0796, and Lauren  J. Tenney, Lauren@theopalproject.org