A new qualitative study from British Columbia in Canada examines how service users and clinicians are impacted when mental health systems shift toward coercive involuntary treatments.
The authors interviewed individuals who had been detained and treated under the province’s Mental Health Act, as well as the professionals responsible for its application. Their accounts describe a system that funnels crises toward involuntary care when community support is scarce and hospitals are under pressure.
Across five focus groups with people who had experienced involuntary treatment and interviews with clinicians, lawyers, and peer workers, the authors identified seven themes. Participants cited a shortage of voluntary, community-based care; fear, trauma, and lingering distrust tied to coercive practices; the promise of peer support; an “all or nothing” approach to consent; a narrow menu of hospital interventions; stigma and discrimination; and providers’ doubts about the evidence behind mandated care.
“I feel like that we get a little bit more backed into a corner to do involuntary treatment,” one clinician said, describing how gaps in housing, income, and follow-up services shape decisions.
Another participant, reflecting on seclusion and injections, called it “a pretty brutal assault to one’s human dignity.
The preprint, posted on medRxiv, comes from Mary Elizabeth Snow and Amy Salmon at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine and the Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes in Vancouver; Jenyo Banjo is the corresponding author. Co-authors include Colleen Varcoe of UBC’s School of Nursing and Marina Morrow, a professor at York University and Director of the Mad Studies Hub. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.
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When is ANYTHING on this website going to be about science or social justice? IT’S ALL JUST PSYCHIATRY NOW. THIS DOESN’T HELP ANYONE. THIS WEBSITE IS HURTING THE PEOPLE IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE FOR. WHY WON’T YOU DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?
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Seriously, this website is horrible. What good does this article do? Who here was in doubt that involuntary psychiatry is harmful? Take the “social justice” off the tagline, it’s a joke.
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I disagree with at least part of the comment seeming to imply that the article isn’t useful or helpful. The article seems to be so very useful and helpful, in my opinion. While many people don’t have any doubt that involuntary hospitalization tends to be harmful, there are so many people who tend to justify involuntary hospitalization, for some of the reasons, stated in the article, such as due to a perception of lack of alternatives. Also, the legal “standard of care” for some verbalizations and/or behaviors has seemed to often be involuntary hospitalization.
In addition, professional disciplines tend to promote evidence-based assessments, interventions, and decisions, so the more “evidence” there is, often the better. So, I think we need more articles like the said article utilizing different populations, samples, research designs, methods, questions, etc and need qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies. And, the more triangulation of data and research methods, the better too. Also, people often tend to question whether past research may pertain to more recent times, so newer studies are often very helpful too.
Also, i think the article comprises an aspect very relevant to “social justice”, so i think that any tagline of “social justice” is very appropriate.
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The problem I have with MIA right now is that ZERO people on this website need to be told that involuntary psychiatry is bad. Even all the psychiatrists and psych shills they have come here and spout their pro-drug pro-DSM bullshit agree institutionalization and forced treatment are bad. I don’t think a single person was affected in any meaningful way by this article.
Second, I don’t think a “medical” practice being torture is something that we should have to have scientific evidence for. I think that’s inherently part of our society’s giant problems, that we can’t just stop doing evil torturous things without “evidence” that it’s evil and torturous.
Like all those people screaming and crying and telling you it was torture? That’s not enough? We really need to experiment on MORE people to “objectively” verify how torturous it is? Psych survivor voices DO NOT MATTER, not here, not anywhere. Otherwise psychiatry wouldn’t be worse off twenty years later. If our voices mattered, someone would have fucking listened by now.
All this leads to the larger problem, where all we have on MIA right now are attempts to give psychiatry a facelift, not actually improve things in the direction of social justice, because THAT would mean abolishing psychiatry.
If this website were really at all about social justice, there would be no psychiatrists here. There would be research, but we shouldn’t need research to tell us that psychiatry is trying to fix something that doesn’t even exist. There would be survivors (and not ONLY the ones who love their meds and will still be returning to their psychiatrists) talking about their experiences, and critically, WHAT TO LEARN FROM IT. And psychiatrists, if they have any conscience not drowned by their ego, would read all this, they’d shut up and listen, and then they’d stop being psychiatrists and would realize the only true improvement is liberation.
The article itself is whatever, but it’s just the same crap this website always posts that does nothing but tell us what we already know and absolutely did not need “science” to “prove”.
Meanwhile people keep being poisoned and dying every day because people still buy into the lies.
And we’re here, ten years later, having learned nothing but the specifics of how this torture breaks people.
Curiously, suddenly we’ve spent so much time trying to prove to everyone else (people who think we’re insane trash) that we’re actually suffering and dying that we have absolutely nothing to offer when someone asks, “well, what would you do differently?”
This website is not about social justice, it’s just window dressing for good old traditional psychiatry but the improved modern version where we don’t do lobotomies anymore. Except for all the chemical lobotomies we still do every day. Oh, but until they scientifically prove it’s torture, I guess we should just keep doing it because what else are we going to do, give people AUTONOMY and RIGHTS? Nonsense.
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“Torture” is an ethical decision, not a scientific one. So you are right, it’s ridiculous to try and “prove” torture! If the recipients say they feel tortured, that’s a good enough reason to stop! Please, no further research to see if we should believe them!
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I love the way you tell it like it is, Dead soul. Your comments are fresh air on a site that too often seems more concerned with catering to the status quo than honoring those who’ve been harmed by it.
Reminding myself that MIA also features survivors’ personal stories that highlight the reality of the “mental health” system eases my occasional dissatisfaction with MIA.
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“In addition, professional disciplines tend to promote evidence-based assessments, interventions, and decisions, so the more “evidence” there is, often the better.”
Do they really promote “evidence-based” assessments?
I have not seen any “evidence”
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“They call for an ‘urgent movement away from coercive care practices’ and for investments that make voluntary, low-barrier, community supports a reality and accessible.”
I agree, giving any faction of society the right to play judge, jury, and executioner to others within society – which the “invalid” psych professions were unwisely given – needs to end.
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put them all in an asylum. half the people will be in the other half will guard them………and from time to time give them drugs….
sure that sound good to me…well not to me but to some corporations.
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“They call for an ‘urgent movement away from coercive care practices’ and for investments that make voluntary, low-barrier, community supports a reality and accessible.”
This fellow’s dead daughter and the subsequent three stabbing victims in the community would VERY MUCH DISAGREE with these researchers’ findings: https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/man-who-stabbed-3-at-vancouver-chinatown-festival-found-not-criminally-responsible/
Community and low-barrier care is not the right place for violent psychopaths.
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Violent people do need to be locked away. But let’s not pretend it’s “treatment.” It’s called incarceration, and it’s not therapeutic. Even if you pretend to “diagnose” them and throw drugs at them. Coercion is not “care.” Sometimes it’s needed, but it’s not a way to heal anyone.
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“Violent psychopaths” are a boogeyman made up to defend psychiatric torture. Violence is triggered, not innate or part of a “disorder”. I can pretty well guarantee you moving away from carceral “care” would REDUCE the overall amounts of violence.
Would that stop some random person from attacking people on the street, no. But clearly our CURRENT system doesn’t do that either, nor does the existence of the police. All that would change is more people undergo more torture. People only seem to “feel safe in their community” when they know someone else is being imprisoned, beaten and tortured.
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How many witches were burnet at the stake or drowned. I wonder how many were falsely diagnosed. Worth thinking about.
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