Involuntary Treatment

From The Telegraph: Mental health patients across the UK are waiting for years to be discharged from psychiatric units. At least 91 patients have waited...

Three leading legal scholars speak to Pacific Standard about the nature and history of the insanity defense, as well as its impact on our criminal...

From the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco city officials are hoping to change the law that allows homeless individuals with mental health diagnoses to stay on...

Most Americans would agree that we have problem with mental health in this country, but what many do not know when they consider that people who are in distress are not getting the help they need is that hospitals in this country are not giving people a choice when they are in the most need. This is based on laws that currently exist in 45 US States, which allow individuals to be petitioned into an inpatient psychiatric unit against their will if they are deemed to be a “danger to themselves or others.” I have worked for 3.5 years as a Peer Support Specialist within my local public mental health system, where I see this happen to the individuals I serve, on a regular basis. I myself have been forced.

Today on Radio Times, U.S. Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), Mark Salzer, professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at Temple University, and Leah...

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...

New study links involuntary hospitalization with psychotic diagnosis, previous involuntary hospitalization, and economic deprivation.

In the Room for Debate section of this weekend's New York Times, specialists in ethics, psychiatry, social work, addiction, and human rights hash out their...

This week a commentary, written by members of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and titled “Improving Long-term Psychiatric Care: Bring Back the Asylum” was published in JAMA Online. The authors recommend a return to asylum care, albeit not as a replacement for but as an addition to improved community services and only for those who have “severe and treatment-resistant psychotic disorders, who are too unstable or unsafe for community based treatment.” The authors seem to accept the notion of transinstitutionalization (TI) which suggests that people who in another generation would have lived in state hospitals are now incarcerated in jails and prisons. While I do not agree, I do find there is a need for a safe place for people to stay while they work through their crisis.

Until recently the history of psychiatry was a neglected backwater whose murky depths were explored largely by psychiatrist. The impression conveyed by books such as Tuke’s Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles, Macalpine and Hunter's Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1535 - 1860, Berrios and Freemen's 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841 - 1991, or Fuller Torrey and Miller's The Invisible Plague, is one that sees psychiatry and modern systems of mental health care as the inevitable outcome of progress through scientific thought, a (white European male-led) narrative from darkness and ignorance to enlightenment and knowledge.

Lise Zumwalt’s new documentary “CRAZY” follows Eric, a young adult diagnosed with serious mental illness, and his father, who together want to change Eric’s treatment. However, the county does not want to give them a say.

From Acting NT: Many mental health advocates have objected to the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which centers around the suicide of a teenage girl. Here...

From The Age: According to a new report, sexual assault claims by mental health patients are not being reported to the police or even the...

On her blog, A Disordered World, psychiatric survivor Jeanene Harlick writes that “prejudicial rhetoric about the mentally ill, following mass shootings, is exacerbating the already-overwhelming stigma, discrimination and oppression we experience as an unrecognized and disadvantaged minority group.”

In this piece for the Hartford Courant, Kathleen Flaherty describes why President Trump's assertion that more psychiatric hospitals would prevent mass shootings is inaccurate and...

An internal government investigation found that authorities did not investigate 50% of deaths that occurred inside mental health services in Ireland, reports the Irish...

The International Association Against Psychiatric Assault (IAAPA) plans to protest against the World Congress of Psychiatry this October. The IAAPA considers it a "provocation"...

From Psychology Today: It has become increasingly trendy for therapists to talk about sharing their power or even giving away their power to clients. However,...

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.

From STAT: Although many people believe that we need to train more psychiatrists in order to increase access to mental health care, there is no...

New analysis of post-discharge suicide rates finds estimates 6 times higher than recent studies.

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 TIME: In 1972, 51 of the most troubled mental health patients at Oregon State Hospital were sent into the woods for a camping trip....

Study finds more patients are visiting physicians who have ties to industry than previously thought.

Next week the United Nations Human Rights Committee is scheduled to begin evaluating Ireland's progress towards implementing the International Covenant on Civil and Political...