Jo Watson Chats With Rob Wipond About His Work and His Book

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on our affiliate site, Mad in the UK. It is written by Jo Watson, psychotherapist and founder of Drop the Disorder! and A Disorder 4 Everyone (AD4E), who interviewed journalist Rob Wipond about his work.

Rob Wipond is known for his critical work on mental health, psychiatry, and civil rights. He focuses on exposing abuses in mental health systems, particularly around issues like forced treatment, psychiatric detentions and surveillance and highlights the often overlooked harms caused by psychiatry and the broader implications for individual rights and freedoms.

At the end of last year I read Your Consent Is Not Required by Canadian investigative journalist, author, and advocate Rob Wipond. It is a powerful and important book that should be read by as many people as possible.

Soon after finishing the book I asked Rob if he’d be up for joining a AD4E zoom room for ‘An Audience with an Ally’ to talk about his work and his book and he said yes.

This event is scheduled for March 25th but ahead of this I took the opportunity to ask Rob a few questions.

Jo Watson: Hi Rob, as you know I loved the book. Can you tell our readers a bit about it and about what you’ll be talking about in March?

Rob Wipond: Your Consent Is Not Required addresses several overarching topics in ways that disrupt common beliefs about involuntary psychiatric commitment. The legal criteria to detain and forcibly drug people under mental health laws have broadened a lot, and the best data we have shows that rates of psychiatric incarcerations have been rising for decades. The rates in the US and Canada lead the world, and most of my book focuses on those countries, but we find similar trends, for example, in the UK and Australia as well. This is possible in part because there are far more psychiatric beds than is typically publicly discussed—we hear a lot about the closure of large asylums in Western countries, which did happen, but we don’t hear as much about the massive funding increases over decades that have gone into creating smaller facilities. And thirdly, I also explore how these extraordinary powers of detention and control are increasingly used across a wide range of settings and circumstances—not only for policing homeless people, as is prominently reported in recent years from cities with large unhoused populations, but against school children, people with disabilities in group homes, seniors in long-term care, veterans, callers to emotional help lines, disruptive workers, government complainants, political protesters, whistleblowers, and more. We occasionally hear about one or another such case in the news—I show how all of these have become systemically common practices.

Jo: What inspired you to write the book?

Rob: I was an avid reader in my youth, and I certainly didn’t gather a good impression from my readings about people’s experiences of forced psychiatric treatment—it seemed to deliberately cut short what could otherwise have been supported opportunities for important social changes, inner exploration, and deep learning. Decades later, my own father, shortly after retirement and having cancer surgery with serious adverse effects, was going through a difficult period with anxiety and depression. He reached out for mental health help, as we’re all told so often to do. And I was aghast at how quickly—essentially immediately—he was turned from respected, retired college professor of computer engineering to certified mental patient being treated against his will. And even though it was a perfectly fine hospital where I’d gladly go myself for any other kind of medical need, the “state of the art” psychiatric “treatment” there was appalling. Streams of toxic drugs that just seemed to make him worse, and then electroconvulsive shock therapy that had major, lasting impacts on his memory functions. And barely a pretense to providing any other kinds of psychotherapeutic options. Whenever my father was let out, he would simply so much as mention honestly how he was still feeling to a visiting social worker, and they’d lock him straight back up again. I immediately had enormous sympathy and concern for anyone else being subjected in a vulnerable emotional state to this kind of “treatment”, which seemed especially abusive when it’s done against one’s express will. Then I started researching it and soon realised that this is happening today to far more people—millions of people—than I ever imagined or ever seems to be truly forthrightly publicly discussed.

Jo: What has the reception been to your book?

Rob: People who read it tell me they’ve been affected and moved. People who’ve personally experienced forced treatment often tell me that they feel validated from seeing stories and perspectives like my father’s and like their own reflected in the book and in the research I summarise. Some of those same people also tell me they find it hard to continue reading the book, because every page is so familiar to them it brings up immense trauma. Practically everyone is surprised by the actual numbers—the numbers of beds, and the rates of force—because the whole other narrative is so common out there, that asylums were closed and never replaced. I go into detail in the book to show asylums were definitely replaced, and it’s the ongoing failures of our mental health system that get excused and ignored when we present this false narrative about underfunding and lack of beds. There are lots of beds, and never before has such a vast swathe of the population been getting mental health treatments, but the beds are being overloaded and coercion and force are increasingly relied on. Why? Because, it appears, practically no one is getting better, and many are becoming worse.

And it frustrates me that the mainstream media has largely continued to ignore these facts and the book. In the past few years, involuntary commitment is increasingly in the news. And incidentally, I will say, in the UK compared to the US and Canada, there’s been moderately more national-level media coverage of how horrible these places often are—the systemically abusive “standards of care” in many psychiatric hospitals, the staggering numbers of deaths in group homes and other residential care facilities, and so on. ‘Your Consent Is Not Required’ is the first book since the era of asylums to provide a broad, journalistic picture and research review of all of this, and of the growing uses of involuntary commitment under civil mental health laws and of forcible psychiatric detentions and interventions against relatively ordinary, non-criminal citizens. But the book, these facts, and this ‘big picture’ view of these abysmal overall trends across the entire psychiatric care system  have been largely ignored by news media—not even criticised. It’s clear that the dominant narrative, about how rare involuntary commitment allegedly is and that there’s a need to expand its uses for controlling people, serves certain political purposes for the mental health industry and liberal and conservative legislators, reporters, and commentators alike, and they are reluctant to let it go.

Jo: What are the changes you most want to see?

Rob: I would like to see more thoughtful, informed public discussions about involuntary commitment. Currently, most of the public discussions, really across the English-speaking world, are occurring on the basis of these false facts I keep mentioning: The laws are so strict, hardly anyone gets forced, there are no beds and no funding etc. With that as the starting point, public discussions are not occurring in any reasonable relationship to reality, and therefore cannot lead anywhere truly helpful no matter the intent behind them.

I’d also like to see the voices of people who’ve experienced force uplifted more. Too many journalists and legislators are primarily listening to mental health practitioners, drug companies, facility operator lobby groups, and family members who want their adult children permanently under their control. They end up with a completely distorted view. This whole system is ultimately supposed to HELP patients—and if you actually talk to the patients, the overwhelming message is clear that coercion is something most people understandably hate and feel humiliated and traumatised by, and it tends to backfire.

Jo: What can people do to help inform change?

Rob: For one there needs to be more political organising and action by people who’ve experienced psychiatric force and their allies among practitioners, attorneys, academic researchers, family members and others who respect civil rights. It’s very disparate right now. I get it—it’s hard to organise people to act together, hard to find funding, hard to battle against multi-billion-pound industries with full-time propaganda specialists, and so on. But it simply needs to happen a lot more than it currently does. And the activism needs to focus on reducing or abolishing psychiatric coercion. Right now, a lot of action by consumers and survivors and their allies is focused on asking for more voluntary mental health services—while intuitively that would seem to be a sensible solution, in reality more mental health services always seem to bring more coercion and force alongside. Using force is simply an established, core part of the daily operations of the current mental health system. So I think there needs to be stronger recognition that most of the problems that involuntary commitment and mental health services are grappling with aren’t actually even mental health problems per se—they are problems of loneliness and social isolation, of poverty, of the psychological legacies of abuse, of poor physical health, of a lack of opportunities for meaningful, creative engagement in society, of anxieties about our collective human future, and so on. Most of these don’t need more mental health services; they require addressing through social, political, spiritual, economic, artistic and other kinds of supports and collective action.

Jo: Thanks so much Rob, we are looking forward to seeing you on 25th March to chat some more.

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