Tag: involuntary treatment

Pilling explains how Mad Studies moves from first-person knowledge to questions of sanism, psychiatric authority, mutual aid, and collective resistance.

I had been the one whose fear was called dangerous, distorted into a label. Now I was on the other side, being asked to do it to someone else.

Cultural psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis discusses religion and mental health, the social determinants of psychosis, and how coercive treatment can deepen mistrust in psychiatric care.

Instead of creating a sustainable environment for recovery, traditional practices often create more distress and reluctance. 

Kamaldeep Bhui joins us to challenge the myth of clinical neutrality, arguing that culture informs not only patients’ experiences of distress but also clinicians’ judgments about what counts as pathology. From voice-hearing to addiction, meaning depends on context, class, belief systems, and power relations.

One does not simply forget the dehumanization of coercion in psychiatric practices. It is traumatic. How is adding another distressing experience to an individual’s life therapeutic?

A roundup of Mad in America's most read blogs and personal stories of 2025 as chosen by our readers.

In a public statement, the Green Party of California endorsed the Abolish Forced Psychiatry statement.

From STAT (paid subscription required): "In the last decade, the federal government has provided $146 million to organizations that provide outpatient care to people...

After decades of study, billions of dollars spent, and thousands of studies conducted, the failure to identify any genes for schizophrenia should definitively put to rest the notion that schizophrenia is a genetic disorder, according to E. Fuller Torrey.

Anyone detained and then formally committed under Wisconsin’s civil mental health laws can initially be held and forcibly drugged for six long months. Yet, for years, not a single person has been able to appeal the six-month commitments in court.

A year ago today, our youngest child died, thanks to the adversarial actions and toxic treatments foisted on her by medical-model psychiatry. By telling her story, we hope to promote systemic change.

Despite the UN’s strong stance against involuntary treatment, many countries continue to uphold legislation that encourages it.

Roxanne fled to Canada, and received formal refugee status, as a psychiatric refugee after being threatened with psychiatric imprisonment and forced drugging in Jamaica.

Spriestersbach was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for almost three years. The more he told the doctors that he was not Thomas Castleberry, the more they believed that he was psychotic.

So many of us young women believed the people who told us we needed them to make us healthy, who told us that without them, we’d be at the mercy of untameable "disease."

Comparing her circumstances to sex trafficking, Britney Spears told the judge she wished to sue her conservators and be allowed to tell reporters “what they did to me.”

Peter Gøtzsche gives advice on what withdrawal symptoms may look like and explains the dangers of—and alternatives to—forced treatment.

I believe that, as things are right now, forced treatment can be justifiable. But we need to move studies and research forward, move mental health treatment forward into an era where forced treatment is obsolete.

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. 

When I heard this morning that DJ Jaffe was dead my face went through its own mutation; a moment of surprise and wonderment followed by swift elation, and then, very quickly and now for so many hours afterward, an enraged, frustrated, quick-breathed grimace.

In its coverage of the impact of COVID on psychiatric hospitals, the media missed opportunities to challenge stereotypes and interrogate problems with current carceral approaches to mental health treatment.

Neglect for personal autonomy is a pervasive attitude in the mental health system. No human being should be stripped of their dignity and autonomy, much less a vulnerable 74-year-old woman.

Psychiatric survivors in Canada tell the UN that Canada is not complying with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

I am very concerned that Evan is about to be devoured by psychiatry's maw. Things could be different if Evan were able to hire an attorney or attorneys to deal with all of these different legal actions coming at him and otherwise protect his interests such as sue the trustees for their unconscionable actions, but as I have indicated, his trustees have cut off his money so he can't hire such an attorney or attorneys.