Tag: torture

From Buzzfeed News: "This month in San Francisco, the American Psychological Association will vote on a proposal that would return psychologists working for 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 Dissent Magazine: In her recently published book 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement, scholar and advocate Keramet Reiter discusses the...

From The Times of India: A psychiatrist from the Uma Nalini Mary Clinic and Research Institute was recently arrested on charges of homicide of a middle-aged patient....

From The Guardian: Kelly Savage, a 27-year-old New Zealand man working abroad as an English teacher in Japan, was admitted to a Japanese psychiatric hospital...

With reports of the horrid abuse at Oak Ridge surfacing frequently over the years, how could this travesty have continued unabated for so long? What is wrong with the “therapeutic” community that what happened here was hailed as a major advance?

From The Associated Press: The United Arab Emirates and Yemeni forces run a secret network of prisons where terrorism suspects are brutally tortured. Several U.S....

From The Globe and Mail: A judge has recently ruled that patients at a mental health facility in Ontario were tortured by doctors over a...

Psychologist Stephen Soldz writes for STAT: "It was profoundly distressing to hear Donald Trump on the campaign trail vowing a return to abusing prisoners...

“I am going to make an official complaint,” says the mother. “You are welcome to do that,” says the psychiatrist, and you can almost hear the laughter—for they know, as others do, that the psychiatric laws trump both the country's own laws and that of human rights.

Former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), Roy Eidelson discusses efforts to undermine the Hoffman report which revealed the American Psychologica Association’s collusion in torture. "First, from a familiar playbook, we have the obligatory attack on the patriotism of Hoffman and those who have criticized psychologists’ participation in abusive detention and interrogation operations,” he writes. “The most outrageous example comes from two retired military officers, David Bolgiano and John Taylor. In a recent piece they described the Hoffman Report as a ‘classic attack of cowards’ and also stated, ‘By the publication and release of this report, the APA becomes a willing co-conspirator to the likes of al Qaeda and ISIS.’”

On Tuesday morning, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of three former detainees against the psychologists who collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to oversee the torture program. According to the Intercept, psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen and their employees collected over $85 million dollars for designing and implementing techniques, based off of the work of Martin Seligman, that combatted torture-resistance techniques by creating a state of “learned helplessness.” There is, however, no evidence that these techniques gleaned any useful intelligence.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), one of the groups that led the push for changes to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) collusion in the CIA torture program (as detailed in the Hoffman report), is again calling on the APA for a change in policies.

If your government espouses freedom for all but abuses citizens of its own as well other countries, its pronouncements are pure propaganda. This article seeks to help readers make the connection between the public and secret behaviors of the U.S. government as it continues to oppress those individuals within its reach that occupy a politically marginalized status; including, of course, persons who are survivors and/or users of psychiatric services.