Tag: coercion

A new scale has been developed and validated to examine beliefs held by mental health professionals towards service users’ rights.

Refugees and first-generation immigrants of African descent are at greater risk of experiencing medical coercion when compared to immigrants of other visible minority communities in Canada.

A review of the literature demonstrates that coercive practices lack empirical support and violate human rights.

In an effort to reduce coercion, researchers isolate associated factors including age, relationship status, location, and diagnosis.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco city officials are hoping to change the law that allows homeless individuals with mental health diagnoses to stay on...

From WFAA: Many patients who check themselves into psychiatric hospitals voluntarily may have difficulty when attempting to check out. In one recent incident in Denton,...

This week on the Mad in America podcast we interview Olga Runciman. Olga is an international trainer and speaker, writer, campaigner, and artist. In this interview, we discuss Olga’s professional and personal experiences of the psychiatric system and how she now helps and supports healing and recovery in others.

Participatory action approaches in bioethics research used to decrease coercion and seclusion in psychiatric treatment.

From STAT: Proove Biosciences, which sold dubious DNA tests to predict opioid addiction risk, has been placed into court-ordered receivership for restructuring and asset sale. Experts...

A recent editorial, published in BMJ, argues there is an increase in coercive measures in psychiatry that are damaging to individuals diagnosed with mental illness.

I made journaling non-negotiable. I started sitting in nature and running trails. I practiced being present and prioritized sleep. These things are often seen as what you do if your problems aren’t really that bad. But to me, these are the things I do to save myself every day.

Maureen Hannah, a Professor of Psychology at Siena College, New York, tells of experiences with the psychiatric system, both personally and professionally, and how poor care in the mental health system led to an unexpected and devastating family loss.

Jim Gottstein, president and founder of the organisation Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, talks about his own experiences with the psychiatric system, patient rights in mental healthcare and the recent trial between Wendy Dolin and the UK Pharmaceutical manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.

In this piece for The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv investigates how a psychologist and deputy sheriff convinced several suspects that they committed a murder, for which...

Something is lost, a great deal is lost, when we give up an independent advocacy platform about our own bodies and subsume our needs and rights into what medical professionals are motivated to fight for on our behalf.

Dainius Pūras, UN Special Rapporteur on Health, has issued a groundbreaking new report critiquing biopsychiatry and its reliance on coercion, yet he pulls his punches, most unforgivably by treating the obligation to end coercive practices as a matter for gradual rather than immediate implementation.

From Live Science: Stanley Milgram's infamous experiments on the science of obedience to authority figures were recently repeated with very similar results. Participants showed a high...

From TruthHawk: Facebook's technology has an unprecedented ability to surveil and manipulate people. Article →­  

In this personal essay for MarieClaire, one woman shares her story of being locked up in a mental hospital for refusing to have an abortion.

Every culture has its share of individuals who break down in bewilderment. People who hallucinate, behave beyond norms, seek to die, think in strange ways.

There is indeed a crisis in the mental health business. The crisis derives from psychiatry's spurious and self-serving premise that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses that are correctable by psychiatric drugs.

The Boston Globe paints a picture (in the vivid way that they so love to do) that pins the system’s decline primarily on budgetary issues, but there is more than one way for a system to be ‘broken.’ In fact, where the Globe goes most wrong in their latest piece, ‘Community Care,’ is in their failure to adequately recognize that the system has always been broken in one way or another in this country.

Organized psychiatry, committed irrevocably and wholeheartedly to drug pushing and to their corrupt and corrupting relationship with pharma, simply will not countenance the fact that their primary product is fundamentally flawed and destructive. So they hire a PR company; they fund and lobby politicians; they parrot slogans; and they encourage one another to ever-increasing heights of self-congratulation. But they will not commission a definitive study to clarify and assess the scale of this problem once and for all. And the reason for this inaction is because they know that it would be bad for business. It would "cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications."

There is an ever-narrowing bandwidth of behavior that supports the dominant narrative in our culture today. We all need to act a certain way to protect the foundational beliefs of our time – that “science” has it all figured out, that rules keep us safe, and that it’s us vs. them (insert germs, terrorists, pests, and other “enemies”). But what are the consequences of this? What is this sadness and where does it go if we bandage our consciousness with business, medication, substances, or general avoidance of our real human experience?

The media is now reporting details about the 18-year-old who shot and killed nine and wounded many others before killing himself on July 22 in Munich. My clinical and forensic experience leads to a distinction among people who murder under the influence of psychiatric drugs. Those who kill only one or two people, or close family members, often have little or no history of mental disturbance and violent tendencies. The drug itself seems like the sole cause of the violent outburst. On the other hand, most of those who commit mass violence while taking psychiatric drugs often have a long history of mental disturbance and sometimes violence. For these people, the mental health system seems to have provoked increasing violence without recognizing the danger.