Tag: Human Rights

On May 14 and 15, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights held a meeting on human rights in mental health. The event represented tensions in the United Nations between the promotion of mental health and the promotion of the human rights of people with psychosocial disabilities under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

From The New York Times: Many medical centers, professional associations, and states have developed patients' bills of rights. It is time to develop a Financial Bill of...

A quiet revolution has just happened—a formidable piece of counter-hegemony. We now have antipsychiatry scholarships ensconced at all three universities in a major international city. And with this, antipsychiatry has made sizeable inroads into academia, laying down infrastructure and altering the discourse.

A new anthology is seeking essays, short stories, poetry, and visual art on the topic of paternalism, i.e. abuses or human rights violations that are...

From Tales from the Madhouse: In fall 2017, the UK government an Independent Review of the Mental Health Act, inciting hope for radical revision of...

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 episode of ABC Radio National's All In The Mind, Lynne Malcolm interviews three experts about the impact of trauma on our memory and mental health. One guest,...

From The Sydney Morning Herald: A new review found that mental health patients' decision-making capacity is very rarely considered in court rulings on involuntary treatment. "The...

For 7 hours, Andre McCollins was strapped to a 4-point restraint board and shocked 31 times while he screamed and begged and apologized. What happened to him is still legal. It wouldn’t be legal for anyone else — not convicted terrorists, not captured enemy combatants, not anybody. And it shouldn’t be: torture should not be legal. But it happens every day to disabled people.

From The Boston Globe: According to a new report from the Disability Law Center in Boston, two patients who died at Arbour Health System psychiatric...

From the National Post: An independent report found that disabled people were being unjustly confined in a Nova Scotia psychiatric hospital. Law professor Archie Kaiser...

In this piece for Tales from the Madhouse, Gary Sidley critiques the Mental Health Act as a form of legal discrimination against people deemed "mentally...

Regardless of what one's moral stance is on the value of life, or the meaning of death, it is time to recognize that there are people whose views differ from ours, and that we do not have the right to force them to live (and die) the way we want to. We all die; it's the journey that matters, not the destination.

This is not how the mental health system should treat "psychotic" people. Mental health providers should treat them with compassion, empathy, respect, love and understanding. With a circle of loving and understanding people surrounding a person in crisis, I have no doubt that most "psychosis" would normalize in time.

From The Guardian: According to a new Human Rights Watch report, U.S. nursing homes are inappropriately prescribing antipsychotics to an estimated 179,000 residents with dementia each...

From Atlas Obscura: In the 1930s, hundreds of people with mental disabilities committed to the now abandoned DeJarnette Sanitarium were forcibly sterilized and experimented on by the hospital's eugenicist namesake.

From Fear and Loathing in Bioethics: A new fifteen-minute television documentary investigates New Zealand's "unfortunate experiment," a horrific case of nonconsensual experimentation at the National...

From Stuff: In 2015, the United Nations Committee Against Torture expressed concern at New Zealand's use of seclusion against mental health patients. According to a...

At Mental Health Europe, we see 2017 as having been a crossroads for mental health and human rights. Let’s ensure that this yields concrete change in 2018 with the support of like-minded communities ready to take the discussion to the next level and truly enact this as a civil rights movement.

In this piece for the National Survivor User Network, Liz Sayce argues that people with mental health conditions will continue to stay silent about their...

From Stuff: More than 800 New Zealand mental health patients were held in seclusion at some point last year, representing a six percent increase in...

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...

Electroshock survivor Nancy Rubstein and professor, author, and antipsychiatry theorist Dr. Bonnie Burstow were recently interviewed for CTV News Channel about Dr. Burstow's new book, The...

In this piece for the National Survivor User Network, Martin Coyle highlights some of the shortcomings of the UK's Mental Health Act in light of its...

In light of the recent events and media discussions pertaining to the issue of sexual violence, we feel that it is of the utmost importance to speak out about this issue in the context of psychiatry and the treatment of those perceived as mentally ill.