Coercion

The Grand Jury indictment on January 21st of a Georgia policeman for the felony murder of Anthony Hill brought national attention to the intersection of Black Pride and Mad Pride. Hill, who was black and a veteran, was murdered in March 2015 while in an extreme state or “mental health crisis.” He was naked and clearly unarmed when shot by a white policeman. The indictment brings attention to the failure of mental health care system in America.

The House Subcommittee on Health will hold a hearing tomorrow (Thursday, April 3, 2014) on the “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act," also...

From The Boston Globe: Massachusetts has seen a significant increase in its number of psychiatric institutions since 2015. However, many psychiatric patients are still waiting for...

From The New York Times: Michelle Carter, a 20-year-old woman, is currently being tried for urging her boyfriend to kill himself via text message. According to...

From Vox Gibraltar: Many people confuse psychology with psychiatry. Too often, general practitioners recommend psychiatric treatment when psychological treatment or therapy could be just as effective without resulting...

From PinkNews: A new bill has been introduced in California would would see practitioners of gay conversion therapy prosecuted for fraud. "The bill would build on the...

In the New York Times Sunday Review, Irene Hurford, a psychiatrist, reflects on the ethics of forced treatment for psychosis. “As doctors,” she writes,...

In 2014, psychiatrist Peter Breggin was the medical expert in a case involving a Paxil-induced suicide and helped the surviving family win the malpractice suit....

In this piece for The BMJ, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche points out several of the major problems with the drug-based paradigm of psychiatric care as well as...

Today, July 1, 2016, the Alaska Supreme Court issued its Opinion in In the Matter of the Hospitalization of Mark V.    What strikes me the most about the case is that Mark's expressing the view that a psychiatric drug he was being required to take is poison, that it had side effects related to his sexual performance, and that it was killing him were all cited as proving Mark was delusional. As readers of this site know, these drugs can quite reasonably be characterized as poison, they do cause sexual dysfunction, and they are quite lethal to many many people, shortening lives on average by 25 years for those in the public mental health system, such as Mark.

From American Civil Liberties Union: Last week, the defense attorneys of the psychologists behind the CIA's torture program, James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, compared their...

In an Op-ed for the Times Union, Madeleine Ringwald explains how the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act “would severely disable protection and advocacy organizations from protecting the civil, legal and human rights of people in mental health services.” “Whether you examine it through a scientific, civil rights or bottom-line lens, Murphy's bill should appall you,” she writes. “Any legislation that bolsters institutionalization at the cost of community-based services seeks not to help those with mental health needs, but help society find ways to hide, suppress and silence them.”

From The Neuroethics Blog: When populations are divided into two genders, women show roughly double the incidence of depression, anxiety, and stress-related mental health concerns....

Again and again I am told the ‘severely mentally ill’ are impaired and incapable, not quite human. I am told the “high utilizers” and “frequent flyers” burden services because they are different than the rest of us. And when I finally do meet the people carrying that terrible, stigmatizing label of schizophrenia, what do I find? I find – a human being. A human who responds to the same listening and curiosity that I, or anyone, responds to. I find a human who is above all terrified, absolutely terrified, by some horrible trauma we may not see or understand.

From Medium: "13 Reasons Why," the most-watched series in Netflix history, raises many important real-life concerns that need to be addressed, such as the impact...

In this piece for Tales from the Madhouse, Gary Sidley critiques the Mental Health Act as a form of legal discrimination against people deemed "mentally...

In this interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, cultural theorist and philosopher Erin Manning discusses neurodiversity, a movement that seeks to depathologize traits, experiences, and...

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...

I am quarantined in Stabilization. In front of me an old woman with cherry lipstick and a clipboard asks questions about sexual abuse, but my mind is through the square window on the door behind her. In that room I see a steel bed surrounded by emptiness. On top of it lay leather straps that are uneven in width where they’re wearing thin. Each strap has a set of holes to fasten the buckles tight, and I can see quite clearly that the ones nearest the end are circles while the ones furthest away have stretched into ovals. Tonight will be a Haldol night.

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

In this video, Dr. Elio Frattaroli describes how biological explanations for "treatment-resistant depression" often ignore the meaning and context of a patient's suffering. He...

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...

Update: Elsie Tindle has sadly passed away after a forced electroshock treatment triggered an epileptic fit and permanent brain damage. The psychiatrist, Eugene van...

In a new study, Baylor College of Medicine researchers have raised ethical questions about clinical trials of deep brain stimulation (DBS) and other brain implants. "'Generally,...

On Wednesday, July 18, the Heritage Foundation sponsored a forum entitled “How to Bring Sanity to our Mental Health System.” It featured Dr. E....