Coercion

Over at CounterPunch, Carl Boggs takes on the knee-jerk mental illness response that pervades the airwaves after every mass shooting. He writes: “What the mental-health fixation lacks is any semblance of historical or social context. Given the persistence of U.S. imperialism and militarism — and mounting fascination with combat and guns in a society transfigured by its warfare state — Washington remains a thriving center of global violence: repeated armed interventions abroad have found their domestic parallel in the world’s largest prison system, a deepening gun culture, home-bred terrorism, police atrocities, and a media culture filled with spectacles of warfare and bloodshed.”

From Retraction Watch: The psychology journal Teaching of Psychology plans to issue an editor's note about a controversial paper exploring the APA's involvement in the torture...

From STAT: Despite evidence that drug company sales reps skew prescribing habits, relatively few hospitals have taken the step of barring them. This is a...

The National Survivor User Network (NSUN) has expressed concerns about the UK government's plans to reform the Mental Health Act, as the government's current approach...

From STAT: Last week, the House approved a bill that will grant employers access to employees' genetic test results and other health information. Article →­

A conversation with Thomas Szasz, published on March 28, 2014.  He discusses the question of whether mental illness exists and whether it is possible...

Robert Neugeboren, who “spent most of his adult life in institutions, often subject to isolation, physical punishment and numbing medication,” was “a celebrity of sorts in the world of the mentally ill: a survivor of the horrors of mistreatment, a case history for those who point to the positive effects of kindness and talk therapy, and, perhaps most of all, the embodiment of the bottomless mystery of the human mind.”

Writing for the Huffington Post, Caroline Beaton looks into how drugs continue to make billions in sales even after they lose lawsuits for fraud and misconduct. “The persistence of Big Pharma's fraud despite ubiquitous legal action suggests that our present efforts to hold the industry accountable are ineffective,” Beaton writes. “New polices in motion will make potentially unsafe drugs even easier to bring to market and promote.”

In my recent Alternatives keynote I talked about mental health issues and our unjust prisons, including the shameful racism of the criminal justice system...

From Healthline: A new app, Concrn, allows users to request assistance from mental health volunteers for homeless people in need. The creators of the app...

From STAT: People with dementia are coming together to fight for the right to make their own decisions, to have a voice in public policy, and to...

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...

The Bay Area survivor and peer movement came out strong recently, pushing the Alameda Board of Supervisors to table a proposed expansion of forced outpatient commitment. AB 1421, more commonly known as Laura's Law, says that if a court or judge decides that a person with mental health issues requires treatment, they must abide by a plan determined by a team of professionals on an outpatient basis. The law was passed in California in 2002 but is conditional on California county approval for implementation. Fueled by sensational accounts of the death of Laura Wilcox, who was killed by a man with a psychiatric diagnosis, AB 1421 holds the false promise that force and coercion are the solution to help people in emotional distress.

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 NBC News: Representative Judy Chu recently introduced the Stop Mental Health Stigma in Our Communities Act, a bill to reduce mental health stigma in...

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D, shares his experiences and views on AOT with Behavioral Healthcare. “The whole issue of involuntary treatment is one that’s difficult...

Government whistleblower and journalist Linda Leisure was diagnosed with a mood disorder and forcibly treated after an altercation with local police, according to Katherine...

In The Opinion Pages of the New York Times, Matthew Epperson discusses the devastating results of police acting as the primary responders to mental health crises. “If we are to prevent future tragedies, then we should be ready to invest in a more responsive mental-health system and relieve the police of the burden of being the primary, and often sole, responders.”

Tom Burns, M.D., Psychiatrist and Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford, recently said of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) that “compulsion added to otherwise decent care makes no difference.” This was no easy conclusion for Burns, who for twenty years “argued ardently” for Community Treatment Orders (CTO’s), which are described as the British version of California’s newly passed AOT laws. "I worked for more than 20 years to get the CTO law passed," he said. "I thought such laws were going to make a difference, but they don't."

As the UK debates whether to ban smoking inside and outside of mental health hospitals, the BMJ has solicited opinion pieces on the debate for an upcoming issue. However, psychiatric survivors have come forward alleging that the BMJ refused to print their pieces unless they removed descriptions of forced treatment and coercive care.

When police came to enforce a 2011 court order to remove her 13-year-old daughter Arianna, and medicate her, Maryann Golboldo stood her ground -...

On Friday, Psych Rights won a legal fight in Alaska Supreme Court reversing an order for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation. Opinion →

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.”

"A STAT investigation finds that “Most research institutions — including leading universities and hospitals in addition to drug companies — routinely break a law that requires...

An editorial in the Guardian discusses the fact that the number of people with intellectual or learning disabilities “who are being treated with psychotropic drugs far exceeds those with mental illness.” The authors of a new study examining the overuse of psychotropic drugs on people with learning disabilities, published this month in BMJ, argue: “If people without mental illness are given psychotropic drugs… it is probably to control their behavior.”