Coercion

From Stuff: In 2015, the United Nations Committee Against Torture expressed concern at New Zealand's use of seclusion against mental health patients. According to a...

From Pacific Standard: The new Abilify MyCite pill, which contains a digital sensor that tracks whether a patient has ingested the drug, has the potential...

Rates of suicide in prison are significantly higher than in the general population.

In this piece for the National Survivor User Network, Martin Coyle highlights some of the shortcomings of the UK's Mental Health Act in light of its...

From Quartz: Seeking healthcare in the medical system can be a dehumanizing experience for women: doctors often dismiss women's pain as psychological rather than physiological, and...

The recent publicity surrounding the Justina Pelletier case has focused attention, not only on the spurious and arbitrary nature of psychiatric diagnoses, but also on the legitimacy and appropriateness of mental health commitments. It is being widely asserted that these archaic statutes are fundamentally incompatible with current civil rights standards, and the question "should mental health commitments be abolished?" is being raised in a variety of contexts.

From Pacific Standard: In an effort to protect homeless individuals from the effects of Hurricane Irma, officials from the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust used the...

Psychiatry would long since have gone the way of phrenology and mesmerism but for the financial support it receives from the pharmaceutical industry. But the truth has a way of trickling out. Here are five recent stories that buck the psychiatry-friendly stance that has characterized the mainstream media for at least the past 50 years.

After the 2009 suicide of a seven-year-old foster kid who had been on two “black box” medications intended for adults, Florida updated its policies to protect vulnerable children from over-prescription. Unfortunately, according to a report by Orlando Weekly, “foster children are still being put on psychotropic medications without caregivers following proper procedures.”

On May 2nd, 2017, the International Association Against Psychiatric Assault (IAAPA) staged a demonstration in Berlin to commemorate the psychiatric mass murders in Nazi...

From The Boston Globe: An increasing number of families are filing lawsuits against insurance companies that refuse to cover wilderness therapy for their children's mental...

The movement to radically reform the modern mental health system is rooted in a desire to offer people going through emotional distress a wider variety of options for care. As a society we have largely shifted to a model of care that is limited to a select few options that primarily advocates the use of strong psychotropic drugs and simplistic diagnostic labels for complex and widely varying narratives. The stigma of going on an antidepressant has been lessened to such a degree that one out of nine people in the US now takes this class of drug. In the context of this astronomical growth in drug-based therapy, reformers are rightly calling for a dramatic reappraisal of how we are treating emotional distress.

From Fox43: Last week, two Pennsylvania state representatives, Tom Murt and Stephen Kinsey, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of electroconvulsive therapy on children...

What would it take to go about abolishing psychiatry? If we truly eliminated all the horrid practices that are currently committed by the mental health system, what would the world look like? What follows are 15 ways our society would need to change before we could be confident that we are free from the tyranny of the mental health system.

From The Boston Herald: Michelle Carter has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for repeatedly encouraging her high school boyfriend to kill himself via text...

From The Washington Post: In addition to the opioid crisis, America has one other prescription drug epidemic — older Americans are taking far too many unnecessary...

In this interview for The New Inquiry, two co-editors and three writers of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements discuss prison abolition and...

From Tablet Magazine: Angela Sells' new book Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth describes the work and life of a pioneering psychoanalyst who challenged her contemporaries'...

In this three-part series for Psychology Today, Dr. Eric Maisel describes 30 personality traits that are common among authoritarians, and how these traits can lead to abuse...

David Shern, from Johns Hopkins University, writes that the latest mental health “Murphy bill” in Congress is “an expansion of the approaches that got us into our current difficulties.” “Early intervention and prevention, assessable and patient-focused services with a rehabilitation orientation and increased funding for the community supports needed for successful recovery are the tickets to system improvement.”

From Rabble: The regulatory body for social workers and social service workers in Ontario — the Ontario College for Social Workers and Social Service Workers — is...

Psychiatrist Keith Ablow of Fox News writes "That’s why Boston’s Children’s Hospital, in making a play to take over the life of Justina Pelletier,...

From the Drug Policy Alliance: Last week, Drug Policy Alliance Board Member Dr. Carl Hart visited the Philippines to speak at a drug policy forum....

From Psychology Today: The American Psychological Association has previously taken a number of steps to take responsibility for its involvement in torture and make amends to...

From EDS and Chronic Pain News & Info: Recent legislation has proposed measures that permit people to be involuntarily committed on the basis of perceived...