Coercion

From City Pages: In a 2014 University of Minnesota research scandal, a young man was coerced into an experimental drug study conducted by his psychiatrist that...

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.

For those of us who have been labeled by medical model psychiatry, it is frightening to watch the wolf of social prejudice being cloaked in the guise of mental health reform. The reality for many of us is that our lives and well-being have been profoundly affected – not only by the bad science and good marketing of pharmaceutical companies - but also by a wholesale refusal to listen. The result is a mental health system that many of us do not trust to operate in good faith. The Murphy bills add fuel to this fire.

From STAT: Federal investigators recently searched Proove Biosciences, a genetic testing company that purports to determine an individual's likelihood of becoming addicted to opioids. Proove's genetic...

A team of reporters and data specialists from the Tampa Bay Times and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune spent more than a year investigating Florida’s largest...

This piece from Newsner chronicles the life and work of Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, a journalist who went undercover to expose the conditions at an infamous mental...

From the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care: Yana Jacobs, LMFT reflects on her experiences providing art therapy at a Soteria House and "being...

From the Hartford Courant: In 2011, Melinda Jakobowski, a psychiatric patient at the Florida Institute of Neurologic Rehabilitation, died from a sudden heart failure after...

From The New York Times: Many medical centers, professional associations, and states have developed patients' bills of rights. It is time to develop a Financial Bill of...

As I walked alone up the stairs to the Rayburn House Office Building this morning to attend the hearing of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on H.R. 3717 - the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act - I thought about how I wasn’t truly alone. In spirit with me were all the people who had experienced scary, coercive, and dehumanizing interventions in the name of help. In spirit with me was every mental health provider who went into the field hoping to really make a difference in their communities, but became cynical and discouraged in the face of so many broken systems and broken spirits.

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.

In an article published by the Treatment Advocacy Center, The Shortage of Public Hospital Beds for Mentally Ill Persons, the authors (D. J. Jaffe and E. Fuller Torrey) present the idea that we have far too few hospital beds in this country, and because of that there has been a dramatic shift towards the diversion of people labeled with mental illness into prisons and homelessness. Their answer to this issue is that we should radically increase the amount of hospital beds and we should also dramatically increase our reliance on outpatient treatment in the form of mandated involuntary medication programs. As many people know here, the TAC has been highly influential politically and the authors of this paper have been instrumental in getting laws passed that mandate the outpatient use of psychiatric drugs for people who have been civilly committed.

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

From Stuff: More than 800 New Zealand mental health patients were held in seclusion at some point last year, representing a six percent increase in...

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...

Psychiatrists at the University of Minnesota forced a young man into a profitable study of antipsychotic drugs over the objections of his mother, who desperately warned that his condition was deteriorating and that he was in danger of killing himself. On May 8, 2004, Mary Weiss' only son, Dan Markingson, committed suicide. A petition to the governor of Minnesota now asks for an investigation.

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...

From Courier Mail: Divorced parents are increasingly ordering involuntary psychiatric examinations against one another to be used as a weapon in custody fights. "Family lawyer Deborah...

From The New York Times: According to international standards for the treatment of prisoners, keeping someone in solitary confinement for longer than 15 days is...

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...

(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)...

For a scathing, 11-minute overview of the death of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota, and new allegations of coercion into psychiatric clinical trials, you can't do much better than this excellent investigative report by Jeff Baillon.

After 25 years of chronic emergency, 22 mental hospitalizations, a stint at a “community mental health center,” 13 years in a "board & care," repeated withdrawals from addictions to legal drugs, and a 12-year marriage, I plan to live every last breath out as a survivor, an advocate, and an artist.

Psychiatrist Dan Fisher's "opposing view" in USA Today makes the case — from a mental health perspective — against repealing the Affordable Care Act, which has...

Ed Silverman reports for STAT that a provision tucked into the 21st Century Cares legislation exempts companies from reporting payments made to doctors, journals,...