Restraints

The University of Minnesota recently announced that it is ending the controversial practice of recruiting study participants from patients involuntarily being held in their psychiatric unit. In a commentary for Minnesota’s Star Tribune, bioethicist and MIA contributor Carl Elliot reports that the university has still not apologized to the patient who spoke out against this practice. Instead, “the university has done its best to discredit him.”

Dear Reader, I am reaching out to you in the hope that you will get this message in time to act! Even if you only have time to read the first two sentences of this blog, please click here for instructions on how you can win the hearts and minds of our federal legislators and help them understand why HR 2646 – proposed by Rep. Tim Murphy and called the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act – is a bad bill

Psychologist Roy Eidelson comments on the Society for Military Psychology’s criticism of the Hoffman report, which exposed the collusion between the APA and the CIA’s torture program. He writes, “the leaders of APA’s military psychology division have offered a very dark vision for the profession of psychology – a vision that we must reject, both individually and institutionally.”

Writing for the Campaign for Real Change in Mental Health Policy, psychiatrist Coni Kalinowski implores others not to support the Murphy Bill “or any other legislation that encourages the use of involuntary outpatient commitment for psychiatric treatment.” “For 9 years, I trained and worked in Wisconsin where involuntary outpatient commitment has been used to force people into treatment for over 30 years, and I can tell you first hand, it does far more harm than good to individuals, it is very expensive, and it does not address the public health and safety issues that people hope it will.”

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.

From The Independent: Recently, psychiatric patients used the hashtag #AbusedByServices to tweet about their experiences being re-traumatized by mental health services. The hashtag reflects the...

The science magazine RUBIN provides an update on patients’ rights to refuse treatment in Germany's psychiatric wards. “In psychiatric wards in Germany, patients used to be medicated indiscriminately against their will if doctors considered it necessary. It was only after a Federal Constitution Court ruling a few years ago that patient autonomy has been strengthened.”

From Engadget: An early trial has found that staff-worn body cameras can reduce confrontation and aggressive behavior, including incidents of physical restraint, in psychiatric hospitals. "If...

A bottom-up approach to understanding the history of asylums allows us to learn from past successes and failures in the mental health system.

A new study published in Lancet Psychiatry challenges the common practice of locking psychiatric wards to prevent patients from attempting suicide or leaving against...

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...

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

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...

In this interview for Pacific Standard, David Dobbs, who profiled Nev Jones this month, discusses the ways that the mental health community is beginning to...

From The Guardian: Recent research shows that one in five women and girls are physically restrained in mental health settings in England. There were nearly...

From U.S. News & World Report: New Hampshire legislators are debating a bill that would make opioid use criteria for involuntary commitment to a psychiatric...

In this piece for Elephant Journal, one man tells his story of being locked up and forcibly drugged in the psych ward, and how he...

“An ordinary person becomes a torturer with surprising ease. The hard part comes when it’s time to be human again,” neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes...

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.

Steven Reisner and Stephen Soldz, writing for Counter Punch, take on those who have criticized the Hoffman Report, which found that the APA had actively colluded in the US Torture program. “They have not credibly refuted these core findings of Hoffman’s seven-month investigation, nor have they even attempted to do so.”

"There's a growing awareness that alternatives to law enforcement are needed, that alternatives to emergency medical services are needed. There's a lot of people...

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 New York Times reports on the findings of a South African government investigation that determined that "94 psychiatric patients died of negligence last year after being...

In “When Phrenology Was Used in Court,” Geoffrey S. Holtzman writes for Slate about the spurious use of brain science in legal cases. In the 1800’s the “science of phrenology” promised to reveal criminal psychological traits by measuring the skull and today defense teams still employ neurogenetic explanations for their client’s violent behavior.

As the UK debates whether to ban smoking inside and outside of mental health hospitals, the BMJ has solicited opinion pieces on the debate for an upcoming issue. However, psychiatric survivors have come forward alleging that the BMJ refused to print their pieces unless they removed descriptions of forced treatment and coercive care.