Involuntary Treatment

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.’"

This is the final of four installments about the bizarre, ongoing conduct of psychiatrists at Upton House, an Eastern Health psychiatric facility in Melbourne, and the collusion with their conduct by all relevant agencies. This last installment will document the failure, so far, of the State and Federal Governments to intervene in even this most extreme and blatant example of abuse of power by psychiatry. If I, as a Professor of Clinical Psychology with 40 years clinical and research experience in this field, can be so easily dismissed/ignored by the relevant systems in Victoria, what chance do the average users of mental health services and their families have of being heard in this State?

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...

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...

From BuzzFeed News: America's largest chain of psychiatric hospitals, United Health Services, is currently under investigation by at least three federal agencies including the FBI...

From Tales from the Madhouse: On May 1st, the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act published a 60-page interim report. The report makes it clear that no...

On May 14 and 15, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights held a meeting on human rights in mental health. The event represented tensions in the United Nations between the promotion of mental health and the promotion of the human rights of people with psychosocial disabilities under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

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

Matthew Cooper, writing for Newsweek, reports that despite the preponderance of political rhetoric about “mental illness” after mass shootings, a review of the research suggests that the connection between mental health and gun violence is dubious.

I lived through forced ECT from 2005-2006 at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. My experience with ECT was the impetus for me to become involved in the antipsychiatry and Mad Pride movements, although I am not entirely opposed to voluntary mental health treatment. The following is the comment I submitted to the FDA on its proposal to down-classify the ECT shock device.

The FDA approved the prescribing and sale of a new hi-tech compliance-monitoring “antipsychotic” drug this week. A new chapter in human darkness has descended — one that is applauded by the alliance of control addicts that made it happen.

On NPR’s Morning Edition, Lauren Silverman debunks the assumption that mass shooters are usually ‘mentally ill,’ and that mental health policy can substitute for...

From National Post: Antipsychotic drugs are increasingly being prescribed to children as young as two for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, aggression and behavior problems. A...

The Irish Times reports that a judge has ordered ECT for a 16-year-old with depression and an eating disorder. The doctor asked the court...

The Atlantic investigates the brutal "training" and "therapy" regimes and chronic abuses still going on at psychological and physical boot camps for "troubled teens"...

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...

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.

From the Tampa Bay Times: The Tampa City Council recently moved to ban mental health professionals from providing gay conversion therapy to minors, proposing penalties of...

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...

Reporting from Elizabeth Rosenthal at the New York Times reveals that more and more hospital guards are now carrying weapons. For patients in mental...

In this piece for Tales from the Madhouse, Gary Sidley critiques the Mental Health Act as a form of legal discrimination against people deemed "mentally...

At CounterPunch, Joseph Natoli connects Big Pharma, mass shootings, and rampant inequality. He writes: “The Brave New World soma strategy to deal with a population that, were they not doped up, might violently disrupt that brave new world, is useful if a society is ‘creatively destroying’ a growing number of its population each day. While the poor have daily evidence of their poverty, a collapsing middle class live in the illusion that they are middle class and just a short distance, not from ruin, but from fame and fortune. They are, in short, heading for a catastrophic break-down. Big Pharma is already set to give us all a ‘soft landing.’”

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...

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

From The New Yorker: In a new book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a group of mental health experts warn the public of Donald Trump's...