Involuntary Treatment

...but how realistic is it to expect that the biological skew of Western psychiatry can be sustainably changed one small step at a time?

How we think about health, happiness, and self-fulfillment, how they are linked with flawed systems of government has been assigned to the domain of social scientists. The most influential of those are the psychiatrists who have been given the government-mandated power to diagnose, incarcerate and forcibly drug those who are perceived to have a form of mental illness. I believe that such power is arbitrary, unjust and frequently harmful.

-AlterNet reports on a lawsuit that accuses a police officer of abusing his mental health law powers.

Emotional support, religion, and searching for meaning are positively correlated with posttraumatic growth among prisoners.

-"I'm sorry this blog post turned out to be so polarizing," writes Shrink Rap psychiatrist Dinah Miller. "No one has ever called me 'evil' before."

In this piece for The Sunday Times, Oliver Thring tells the story of Katinka Blackford Newman, a woman who became psychotic after taking antidepressants and...

From EDS and Chronic Pain News & Info: Recent legislation has proposed measures that permit people to be involuntarily committed on the basis of perceived...

From Atlas Obscura: In the 1930s, hundreds of people with mental disabilities committed to the now abandoned DeJarnette Sanitarium were forcibly sterilized and experimented on by the hospital's eugenicist namesake.

John Albers was completely surprised when police came to his home at midnight and insisted on taking him to a psychiatric hospital, where he...

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...

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 The Boston Globe: An increasing number of families are filing lawsuits against insurance companies that refuse to cover wilderness therapy for their children's mental...

At a recent conference on legal capacity, I was struck by the failure of another invited expert to adhere to the paradigm of supported decision-making as articulated by the CRPD Committee. We still need to work to ensure that this paradigm is well understood and appreciated, despite the progress made in national reforms.

In this piece, Keris Myrick critiques the usage of the word "anosognosia" and reflects on its power to harm the people it is directed...

From TechCrunch: Facebook's new artificial intelligence technology will now scan all posts for suicidal thoughts and send mental health resources or contact local first-responders for users...

Various instruments of the United Nations have commented on forced treatment, or involuntary confinement, or both (for details, see Burstow, 2015a), and a number of truly critical additions to international law have materialized. Arguably, the most significant of these is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. What makes it so significant? For one thing, it is because this landmark convention puts forward nothing less than a total ban on both involuntary treatment and the involuntary confinement of people who have broken no laws.

Dainius Pūras, UN Special Rapporteur on Health, has issued a groundbreaking new report critiquing biopsychiatry and its reliance on coercion, yet he pulls his punches, most unforgivably by treating the obligation to end coercive practices as a matter for gradual rather than immediate implementation.

In this piece for CounterPunch, Bruce Levine critiques the pervasive hypocrisy among U.S. mental health professionals, who on one hand claim they hope to abolish the...

From ABC Australia: Australia's high rate of antipsychotic prescriptions, as well as the frequent usage of restraints and seclusion, has raised concerns among Australian mental health advocates, researchers,...

In a MIA survey of people who had been patients in mental hospitals, nearly 500 respondents told of an experience that was often traumatic, and frequently characterized by a violation of their legal rights, forced treatment with drugs, and physical or sexual abuse. Only 17% said they were “satisfied” with the “quality of the psychiatric treatment” they received.

Only months after the American Psychological Association voted to ban psychologists from “advanced interrogation” facilities like Guantánamo Bay prison the Pentagon is asking them to...

While plans to involuntary commit drug users have “received virtual across-the-board support,” Susan Sered from TruthOut reports that “there is little to no evidence showing that coerced drug treatment is effective,” and that “having abstained from opiates for several days may set them up to overdose when they return to their former level of drug use, with a reduced tolerance for the drugs.”

The Lancet Psychiatry published a study last week finding no benefit to locking up patients in mental health hospitals. Data on 145,000 patients found...

Last week, well-known Stanford scientist John Ioannidis and his colleague Denes Szucs released a new analysis online. They examined research published in eighteen prominent...

On May 2nd, 2017, the International Association Against Psychiatric Assault (IAAPA) staged a demonstration in Berlin to commemorate the psychiatric mass murders in Nazi...