Tag: involuntary hospitalization

Compounding the lack of participation of former and current patients, a major theme of the summit was that Americans diagnosed with “serious mental illness” should not be able to make their own treatment decisions.

Rethinking Psychiatry put out a survey on people’s experiences of psychiatric hospitalization in the Pacific Northwest. The results showed tremendous dissatisfaction, with the overwhelming majority of respondents reporting that they did not feel safe, secure or respected in the hospital.

Anthropologist Zhiying Ma explores mental health care in China, including tensions between Western psychiatry and socially-oriented local frameworks.

Overall I learned a great deal during my hospital adventure. The whole experience seemed like a comedy of errors. For me the only people there who were truly out of touch with reality were staff members. All of the patients were very present, albeit in some distress. The reasons for their distress were not unreasonable.

New study finds that people who felt they were coerced into being hospitalized were more likely to attempt suicide later.

In a MIA survey of people who had been patients in mental hospitals, nearly 500 respondents told of an experience that was often traumatic, and frequently characterized by a violation of their legal rights, forced treatment with drugs, and physical or sexual abuse. Only 17% said they were “satisfied” with the “quality of the psychiatric treatment” they received.

From ShortList: "'I asked to go out for a cigarette but was told that if I tried to leave I would be sectioned against...

Spotlight on Institutional Psychiatry is a response by psychiatric survivors and allies to Operating in Darkness, a scathing 2017 report on British Columbia’s Mental Health Act Detention System. We hope that professionals will take note of the devastating effects of forced psychiatric treatment and be moved to speak out, and, above all, that survivors will feel encouraged and inspired by our efforts.

In this piece for Medium, activist and survivor Louisa J. Harvey describes the experience of being locked in a psychiatric institution on an involuntary hold. "This is not...

Every time that I have been confined in a psych hospital, I have collected as many trophies as possible. Sometimes I go out of my way to steal the silverware, or the sheets, or the blankets from the beds, or even the signs off the walls. But it’s the really forbidden stuff that attracts me.

How people are treated after being hospitalized can either help them to overcome the traumatic effects of coercion or make them worse.

If I had any legal rights, I knew nothing about them. And the hospital cared even less about them. As a law student, I would like to share the legal rights I did have in the state of California and how they were violated from the very start.

Poof! Medical science and brain specialists have just alienated your rights. Far be it from me to question expert judgment, but have any of these people ever considered how dangerous it is to abrogate someone's personhood? It's time to recognize inalienable personhood. Social 'othering' is deadly.

A recent editorial, published in BMJ, argues there is an increase in coercive measures in psychiatry that are damaging to individuals diagnosed with mental illness.