Survivors of Forced Psychiatry Are Suing the State of Norway

10
1822

From Mad in Norway: “Inger-Mari Eidsvik and Merete Nesset have experience being force-treated from 1988 to 2016, and are now suing the state of Norway at the Ministry of Health and Care Services with allegations of human rights violations in the implementation of forced ‘mental health care’ (forced medication, isolation and restraint). This is the first time the state has been charged with human rights violations in connection with compulsory psychiatric treatment in Norway.

The Psychiatry and Judicial Protection Committee in ICJ-Norway has established a pro bono group for human rights cases related to the use of coercion in mental health care. The lawyers assisting Eidsvik and Nesset in their cases are affiliated with this pro bono group. ICJ-Norway is the Norwegian branch of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), an NGO with a secretariat in Geneva.

The court proceedings are scheduled for week 25 in Oslo District Court. It shall in the first instance be decided whether the cases are of legal interest, whether they are obsolete, and whether the cases are to be tried together or separately. Three days have been set aside from 20 June, with one day in reserve. The case is brought before an open court.

The issues are of great importance. Several thousand people are forcibly treated in ‘mental health care’ every year, and unfortunately very few have the opportunity to have their case assessed by the court. Through these cases, the focus will be on the state’s responsibility for the concrete observance of human rights in psychiatry. It is about the right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment, and that fundamental human rights must protect us, also in mental health care.

Both Eidsvik and Nesset, and the team helping them, are willing to lead the cases all the way through the court system, and further internationally if necessary.”

Article is in Norwegian, but readers can use the Google Translate extension to translate the page into English. Read an English translation of the summons here.

***

Back to Around the Web

10 COMMENTS

    • I firmly believe that psychiatry as we know it today will be gone before the end of this century. And in its place I see limited drugging, markedly different psychotherapy dynamics and protocols, a COMPLETE repudiation and TOTAL dissolution of the DSM, AND AN END TO ALL FORMS OF FORCED TREATMENT –

      Report comment

  3. Someday, psychiatry as it is known today will be no more. At such time, many books may be written about its slow but steady decline.
    Here’s a few titles that might be used:

    1. “PSYCHIATRY: The Rise and Fall of Institutionalized Insanity”

    2. “Psychiatry: How Freud’s Dreams Theory Turned Corporate”

    3. “Human Wrongs to Human Rights: Psychiatry’s End in the Twenty-First Century”

    4. “From Trauma to Truth: Losing the Lies of Psychiatry”

    Report comment

  5. I hope they win this lawsuit. I am one of the thousands who have been forced against their will and their better judgement, to take the medicines, and I can’t be the only one who wants it to stop. For my mental health problem of schizophrenia, there are many other forms of treatment that work, of which the most scientifically proven might be Jaakko Seikkula’s “Open Dialoque model”, where patients are talked with extensively and often, especially in their earlier and more acute days of the problem.

    My main problem with the medicines we’re being forced to take is, is their harmful effects that many still call “side-effects” as if they were some neutral effects. Is heart attack or suicide or loss of motivation or mental sluggishness or fogginess, a netural effect? Not to me, it isn’t. The ones who force us to take them, don’t take those meds themselves, because they are well-aware of their harmful effects. Yet despite there being other methods of treatment, the chemical medicines are treated like gifts from God and the only viable solutions. That is very wrong and untruthful stance on them.

    Report comment

LEAVE A REPLY