Tag: forced treatment

In a new report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, calls for a move away from the biomedical model and “excessive use of psychotropic medicines.”

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...

On May 2nd, 2017, the International Association Against Psychiatric Assault (IAAPA) staged a demonstration in Berlin to commemorate the psychiatric mass murders in Nazi...

From Talk Poverty: Last week, the House passed the American Health Care Act, which would cut funding from in-home care programs and community support for seniors...

From Courier Mail: Divorced parents are increasingly ordering involuntary psychiatric examinations against one another to be used as a weapon in custody fights. "Family lawyer Deborah...

From CBS News: The Massachusetts Appeals Court recently ruled that a woman who was raped at a state psychiatric hospital cannot sue the state for...

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 The Province: In April 2015, a man was detained and held involuntarily at a psychiatric hospital after posting a series of angry tweets about...

Daryl, who was only 9 years old when he was taken into mental health services and medicated, talks about being made to take both antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs and he describes the lies told to him to justify treatment.

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...

From BuzzFeed News: A six-year-old boy in Jacksonville, Florida was recently committed to a psychiatric institution for throwing a temper tantrum in school. There, he...

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...

In this personal essay for MarieClaire, one woman shares her story of being locked up in a mental hospital for refusing to have an abortion.

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...

“I am going to make an official complaint,” says the mother. “You are welcome to do that,” says the psychiatrist, and you can almost hear the laughter—for they know, as others do, that the psychiatric laws trump both the country's own laws and that of human rights.

Rob Wipond reports on a constitutional challenge in British Columbia against a key component of the province’s Mental Health Act. “This case isn’t arguing...

Every culture has its share of individuals who break down in bewilderment. People who hallucinate, behave beyond norms, seek to die, think in strange ways.

For Activist Post, Janet Phelan reports on the new psychiatric hospitals being built in droves across the US.  She connects the increase in psychiatric...

In the New York Times Sunday Review, Irene Hurford, a psychiatrist, reflects on the ethics of forced treatment for psychosis. “As doctors,” she writes,...

There is indeed a crisis in the mental health business. The crisis derives from psychiatry's spurious and self-serving premise that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses that are correctable by psychiatric drugs.

The Boston Globe paints a picture (in the vivid way that they so love to do) that pins the system’s decline primarily on budgetary issues, but there is more than one way for a system to be ‘broken.’ In fact, where the Globe goes most wrong in their latest piece, ‘Community Care,’ is in their failure to adequately recognize that the system has always been broken in one way or another in this country.

Organized psychiatry, committed irrevocably and wholeheartedly to drug pushing and to their corrupt and corrupting relationship with pharma, simply will not countenance the fact that their primary product is fundamentally flawed and destructive. So they hire a PR company; they fund and lobby politicians; they parrot slogans; and they encourage one another to ever-increasing heights of self-congratulation. But they will not commission a definitive study to clarify and assess the scale of this problem once and for all. And the reason for this inaction is because they know that it would be bad for business. It would "cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications."

The Lancet Psychiatry published a study last week finding no benefit to locking up patients in mental health hospitals. Data on 145,000 patients found...

The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery is calling upon all people of like minds, who care about individuals who need mental health services, to ACT. It is urgent. Please call your representative in the House of Representatives to vigorously oppose HR 2646 on Tuesday, July 5, 2016. And, call your Senator to insist that the Senate reject any amendments or changes to mental health legislation from the House by Friday, July 8, 2016. For more information about this Call to Action, please click here.

Today, July 1, 2016, the Alaska Supreme Court issued its Opinion in In the Matter of the Hospitalization of Mark V.    What strikes me the most about the case is that Mark's expressing the view that a psychiatric drug he was being required to take is poison, that it had side effects related to his sexual performance, and that it was killing him were all cited as proving Mark was delusional. As readers of this site know, these drugs can quite reasonably be characterized as poison, they do cause sexual dysfunction, and they are quite lethal to many many people, shortening lives on average by 25 years for those in the public mental health system, such as Mark.