Tag: mental health legislation
New Bill Targets Asian-American, Pacific Islander Community
From NBC News: Representative Judy Chu recently introduced the Stop Mental Health Stigma in Our Communities Act, a bill to reduce mental health stigma in...
âHouse Passes Controversial Medical Funding ‘Cures’ Billâ
âDemocrats and consumer groups were upset with the bill's streamlining of some Food and Drug Administration processes, including making it easier for companies to...
“21st Century Cures Act will get Vote this Week”
Several members of Congress spoke this weekend signaling that they were ready to vote on legislation designed to speed federal approval of new drugs...
The Helping Room
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.
The Mental Health Reform Act of 2016 (SB 2680) Would Be...
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.
Evolution or Revolution? Why Western Psychiatry Wonât Change by Incremental Steps
...but how realistic is it to expect that the biological skew of Western psychiatry can be sustainably changed one small step at a time?
Dear Boston Globe, Part IV: A Taste of Your Own Medicine
The Boston Globe paints a picture (in the vivid way that they so love to do) that pins the systemâs decline primarily on budgetary issues, but there is more than one way for a system to be âbroken.â In fact, where the Globe goes most wrong in their latest piece, âCommunity Care,â is in their failure to adequately recognize that the system has always been broken in one way or another in this country.
A Diluted Murphy Bill Clears the House and Goes to the...
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."
NPR: âGun Violence And Mental Health Lawsâ
On NPRâs Morning Edition, Lauren Silverman debunks the assumption that mass shooters are usually âmentally ill,â and that mental health policy can substitute for...
The Murphy Bill, HR 2646 â a Heinous Piece of Legislation...
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.
A CALL TO ACTION:Â The Murphy Bill Passed the E&C Committee but...
As you read this, people with lived experience all around the country are mobilizing to educate our federal legislators about why the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646) should be defeated. Education is the key. As executive director of the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery, I am issuing a call to action. We need to ramp up our efforts before this backward piece of legislation becomes law. We need to get in touch with our legislators and their staffs, contact the media, make some noise! We need to exercise the proverbial strength in numbers. And we need all of this now!
âA Psychiatrist Opposes H.R. 2646: Hereâs Whyâ
Writing for the Campaign for Real Change in Mental Health Policy, psychiatrist Coni Kalinowski implores others not to support the Murphy Bill âor any other legislation that encourages the use of involuntary outpatient commitment for psychiatric treatment.â âFor 9 years, I trained and worked in Wisconsin where involuntary outpatient commitment has been used to force people into treatment for over 30 years, and I can tell you first hand, it does far more harm than good to individuals, it is very expensive, and it does not address the public health and safety issues that people hope it will.â
Experts Call on Presidential Candidates to Improve Study Transparency
In an open letter to all US presidential candidates published Thursday in the BMJ, a group of global health care experts assert that current research regulations allow drug companies to publish incomplete and misleading results. They ask the candidates to declare whether they support improved transparency measures that would make data on drug studies publically available and open to scrutiny.
âSaving Congressman Murphy from Fraudulent Informationâ
Dennis Embry, a clinical psychologist and government consultant on mental health, shares a letter he sent to congressman Murphy warning him about how he may have been misled concerning his mental health bill. âI am specifically writing you about erroneous, false information youâve been given about the National Registry of Evidence Base Programs and Practices. That erroneous information is likely to cause serious problems, which have been withheld from you.â
âWould Washingtonâs FDA Fix Cure the Patients or the Drug Industry?â
Legislation is being advanced that would speed up the FDAâs approval process for new drugs and medical devices, according to a report by the Pacific Standard. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies have been lobbying heavily to reduce regulations and are winning over bipartisan support by attaching these measures to increased mental health funding.
What Would CRPD-Compliant Mental Health Legislation Look Like?
Letâs be clear â I prefer to have no mental health legislation at all. The history and legacy of mental health legislation is anti-human rights, discriminatory, segregative, othering of people whose experiences of distress and states of consciousness are disapproved of by those who are able to fit more easily into social norms. Often too, âmental health legislationâ is synonymous with âmental health actsâ that are concerned with regulating involuntary commitment and compulsory treatment. It is with this in mind that I promoted the goal of ârepealing mental health lawsâ and started the Campaign to Repeal Mental Health Laws.