Involuntary Treatment

Dennis Embry, a clinical psychologist and government consultant on mental health, shares a letter he sent to congressman Murphy warning him about how he may have been misled concerning his mental health bill. “I am specifically writing you about erroneous, false information you’ve been given about the National Registry of Evidence Base Programs and Practices. That erroneous information is likely to cause serious problems, which have been withheld from you.”

In this piece for the National Survivor User Network, Martin Coyle highlights some of the shortcomings of the UK's Mental Health Act in light of its...

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

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,...

In this piece for Jacobin, John Foot describes the Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia's efforts to revolutionize the mental health system in Italy. Basaglia sparked a...

A new anthology is seeking essays, short stories, poetry, and visual art on the topic of paternalism, i.e. abuses or human rights violations that are...

The University of Minnesota announced a change to its research ethics policies this month after coming under criticism “following the recruitment of a schizophrenia...

From The Onion: “Thank God that in America our mental health facilities are too poorly funded for something like this to happen.” Article →­

From The Washington Post: Representative Tim Murphy, who has worked to decrease the civil rights of those labeled mentally ill, has announced that he will...

Despite the promises of two successive governments to end forced shock treatment in Ireland, unwilling patients are still being forced to undergo the therapy, according to the Sunday Independent. “Writer Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide shortly after ECT, is reported to have said before his death: ‘It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.’"

From the Boston Review: In his new book Doctors in Denial: The Forgotten Women in the "Unfortunate Experiment," Ronald W. Jones chronicles the history of New...

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.”

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...

In December, the FDA proposed down-classifying the device used in electroshock treatment (ECT), which would loosen regulations and potentially make ECT more widely available...

The Boston Herald reports on mental health care reform bills moving through both houses of Congress. Lawmakers warn, however, “that some aspects of the legislation could create greater barriers to access mental health care for some.”

From The Guardian: Daniel Swift's book The Bughouse renders a poignant account of poet Ezra Pound's years spent in a psychiatric institution. Article →­

An article in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law reviews the development of China's new mental health legislation. The process took a significant turn,...

On Tuesday morning, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of three former detainees against the psychologists who collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to oversee the torture program. According to the Intercept, psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen and their employees collected over $85 million dollars for designing and implementing techniques, based off of the work of Martin Seligman, that combatted torture-resistance techniques by creating a state of “learned helplessness.” There is, however, no evidence that these techniques gleaned any useful intelligence.

Martin Gottesfeld was charged in October in relation to the hacking of Boston Children’s Hospital in 2014 following the alleged mistreatment of one of...

Legislation is being advanced that would speed up the FDA’s approval process for new drugs and medical devices, according to a report by the Pacific Standard. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies have been lobbying heavily to reduce regulations and are winning over bipartisan support by attaching these measures to increased mental health funding.

In this piece for The BMJ, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche points out several of the major problems with the drug-based paradigm of psychiatric care as well as...

From CBS News: The Massachusetts Appeals Court recently ruled that a woman who was raped at a state psychiatric hospital cannot sue the state for...

From The Guardian: Kelly Savage, a 27-year-old New Zealand man working abroad as an English teacher in Japan, was admitted to a Japanese psychiatric hospital...

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

In this piece for The New York Times, psychiatrist Amy Barnhorst explains why it is not feasible for mental health professionals to identify or treat people...