Tag: Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has announced a series of regional consultations on deinstitutionalization.

Public mental health authorities continue to oppress persons with psychosocial conditions through a combination of punitive and discriminatory laws that are constructed with a "best interests" paradigm in mind and a medical model that pathologises difference and dissent. 

The experience with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's visit to the US is a watershed for our work against forced psychiatry. Step by step, global and national advocacy support each other as part of a worldwide movement to abolish forced psychiatry using the UN human rights framework.

Despite everyone's best intentions, the river of psychopharmacy was making its path through the global south, with no stops anywhere within policy or practice. INTAR India 2016 became very important for the global south against this rising tide and the overmedicalization of people's psychosocial distress and disabilities.

In psychiatric hospitals we have set up the same environment as the Stanford Prison Experiment, but without a professor watching who has the authority to shut it down when things go horribly wrong. As a patient, there wasn’t any protection from the inescapable abuse of limitless power.

It is possible to heal, and at the same time healing also means restoring the part of oneself that can face violence and disobey to protect what is most sacred. I am that sacred, and so are you.

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.