Involuntary Treatment

On November 4, the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee marked up an amended version of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015 (H.R. 2646), introduced by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). However, the bill still does not reflect the voices or meet the needs of millions of Americans with lived experience of mental health conditions because the E&C Health Subcommittee failed to incorporate our recommendations.

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...

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 New York Times: President Trump's nominee to direct SAMHSA, Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, who is a strong proponent of the medical model of psychiatry,...

-A prominent advocate against forced psychiatric treatment was recently involuntarily committed.

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...

In this piece for Truthout, Noel Hunter lists seven facts it is important to be cognizant of during Mental Health Awareness Month, from the influence...

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...

To this day I do not know how I found my way back. I think it might’ve had something to do with willpower, as I was NOT going to lose myself. I was NOT going to end up like those people who were living indefinitely in the hospital—those “chronic schizophrenics”, as they say. I was going to find my way back, back to myself.

Dinah Miller and Annette Hanson are psychiatrists who blog at Shrink Rap. On one topic we agree — the subject of involuntary care is the most contentious and troubling topic for psychiatry. To their credit, they have directed an enormous amount of attention to this subject in their latest book.

Rates of suicide in prison are significantly higher than in the general population.

From The Independent: According to one researcher, some patients on mental health units should be allowed to self-harm. Forcibly stopping patients from engaging in self-harm can...

"A STAT investigation finds that “Most research institutions — including leading universities and hospitals in addition to drug companies — routinely break a law that requires...

Ten years after being fired for taking a mental health leave after the Virginia Tech massacre, I was diagnosed as "schizophrenic" and involuntarily committed to a hospital. Now I have a job and a life, but I'm still forced to take drugs and report to a social worker.

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.

The National Survivor User Network (NSUN) has expressed concerns about the UK government's plans to reform the Mental Health Act, as the government's current approach...

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.

From The Sun: Reports of abuse against NHS mental health patients hit a record high last year. In 2016, almost 200 cases related to the...

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...

ProPublica is well known for creating interesting data bases that allow anyone hooked up to a computer to see by name whether a physician is accepting Big Pharma payments — from dinners to speaking engagements to consulting services. What may be lesser known is that occasionally ProPublica will publish other data that when carefully mined can reveal even more about the use of psychiatric drugs especially when there is a public funding source available.

From Vice: Donald Trump's expected nominee for director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Congressman Tom Marino, is a proponent of mandatory inpatient...

From Health Affairs: Although the problem of antipsychotic misuse in nursing homes has been raised to policymakers numerous times over the past six decades, the...

On his Critical Psychiatry blog, Duncan Double offers his response to Peter Gøtzsche’s and Peter Breggin’s latest blogs on forced treatment. “They want to...

From The New York Times: While the public perception of the insanity defense is that it is a "get out of jail free" card, the...