Tag: cognitive liberty

“You are sick. You are unwell,” said the man in the white coat. “No rational person believes 9/11 was an inside job. Alas, You are a very sick man, and we are going to make you well. We can cure you. We used to burn witches, yet we’ve grown more Sophisticated in our methods. Now we leave the body intact - but not The mind. Look at what we did to Julian. No one can escape us.”

The concept of cognitive liberty is valuable—one might even say necessary—precisely because it goes to the core of what we are as human beings. Correspondingly, it unmasks psychiatry for the profound human rights violator that it is. It reveals such transgression as the essence of what psychiatry is actually all about.

An interview with Jeffrey Michael Friedman, clinical social worker and activist in the psychiatric survivors movement who provides trauma-informed therapy to victims of abuse and violence, including those who have survived abuses within the mental health system.

What would it take to go about abolishing psychiatry? If we truly eliminated all the horrid practices that are currently committed by the mental health system, what would the world look like? What follows are 15 ways our society would need to change before we could be confident that we are free from the tyranny of the mental health system.

This week on the Mad in America Podcast we launch our series on forced treatment, interviewing antipsychiatry scholar Bonnie Burstow and neurodiversity scholar Nick Walker. Central to both Nick and Bonnie’s work is the concept of cognitive liberty, or freedom and integrity of the mind.