Tag: involuntary treatment

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we need to move studies and research forward, move mental health treatment forward into an era where forced treatment is obsolete.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.

The psychiatric concept of insight rests on the assumption that the psychiatrist, designated sane, knows what’s best. But if we question that assumption and consider that the medical model of mental illness may be incorrect, then the question of which party actually possesses insight becomes less clear.

Both these cases are examples of people whose only symptoms were stating they were not mentally ill and did not need psychiatric medication. They both certainly had problems at some time in their lives, but the one size fits all system of commitment and mandatory medication did not fit their needs at all. Does having mental symptoms in the past mean that one should have a lifetime of mental health commitment and forced medications?

Such interventions, the report says, "generally involve highly discriminatory and coercive attempts at controlling or 'correcting' the victim’s personality, behaviour or choices and almost always inflict severe pain or suffering."

Doctors refuse to believe psychiatric medications have caused my sibling, Pat, any harm.  Over a three-year period, however, Pat's insurance companies have paid out more than one million dollars to warehouse Pat and to provide "treatment" that has caused complete disability.

Ten years after being fired for taking a mental health leave after the Virginia Tech massacre, I was diagnosed as "schizophrenic" and involuntarily committed to a hospital. Now I have a job and a life, but I'm still forced to take drugs and report to a social worker.

Candidate Bernie Sanders' 'disability rights as civil rights' plan is distinctive in its explicit inclusion of people with psychiatric disabilities and diagnoses, an orientation that runs counter to prevailing policy discourse in the U.S. 

In this second part of MIA’s report on compulsory outpatient treatment orders, Michael Simonson tells of how he came to report on this topic, the results from MIA’s survey of people who have experienced such forced treatment, his interviews with several of the survey respondents, and more on Andrew Rich’s life.

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

“For your own good” is oppressive. Embedded in that four-word phrase is the idea that each of us doesn’t understand who we are or what we need. Someone else is the expert. Someone else has the privilege to hold all the answers, and if those answers don't work for us then somehow it's our fault.