Coercion

The United States desperately needs good programs to help people withdraw from neuroleptic drugs. From all I have seen and heard, there aren’t any - none at least that can reputably claim to get good results on a fairly consistent basis. Again and again I find myself challenged to envision such a program, and in reply to the challenge I have broken down this hypothetical program into various components.

I am flattered and pleased to have been asked by MadInAmerica to post here the letter PsychRights wrote Monday to Vice President Biden regarding the misguided, counterproductive and very dangerous focus on identifying and forcing "treatment" on people diagnosed with mental illness as any part of the solution to gun violence in the United States.

I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.

Yes, a psychiatric diagnosis can be a dangerous thing to have. But, these days, so is having any medical diagnosis. The names and words of the diagnoses themselves are not so much to blame for the harm. Rather, the harm comes through the ways the diagnoses are created and how they are used.

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

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

(Speech delivered by Daniel Fisher at the rally in front of the Boston State House, June 2,2012) How can residents of Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC)...

First Aired 5-1-2012 What is it like for a prisoner diagnosed with mental illness? Should we have more mental health treatment in prison -- or...

I am a psychiatrist who believes that involuntary treatment is rarely effective in the long run but I am also a psychiatrist who sometimes forces people into hospitals against their will.

Mary O'Hagan, an international mental health leader with lived experience, writes on the paradox of increasing legal coercion of psychiatric patients, even as the...

Recently, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, identified the “NIMH’s Top 10 Research Advances of 2011.” He wrote: “This has been a year of exciting discoveries and scientific progress . . . Here are 10 breakthroughs and events of 2011 that are changing the landscape of mental health research.”

I was sixteen and going on seventeen and I had never gone crazy before.  I think the most startling aspect of it is how...

I thought I would begin my blogging career with a description of how I see three elements that reinforce each other in ways that...