Legislation & Regulation

Again and again I am told the ‘severely mentally ill’ are impaired and incapable, not quite human. I am told the “high utilizers” and “frequent flyers” burden services because they are different than the rest of us. And when I finally do meet the people carrying that terrible, stigmatizing label of schizophrenia, what do I find? I find – a human being. A human who responds to the same listening and curiosity that I, or anyone, responds to. I find a human who is above all terrified, absolutely terrified, by some horrible trauma we may not see or understand.

-A prominent advocate against forced psychiatric treatment was recently involuntarily committed.

Kathleen Flaherty argues that it is understandable why some people think involuntary outpatient commitment will improve Connecticut's mental health system, but the belief is misguided.

-A survivor of abuse tells of how she was victimized again by her own therapist, and is now trying to rally support to change the laws that govern therapists.

One of the most amazing activist campaigns I have been involved in during my 40 years of protest for human rights in the mental health system, was the effort to stop the involuntary electroshock of Ray Sandford of Minnesota. Ray reached MindFreedom in the Fall of 2008, and an international human rights campaign began for him.

An investigation found that many US hospital websites were more like advertising outlets than educational portals.

-Longreads has posted links to online stories about being committed to psychiatric hospitals.

Food and Drug Administration-approved information and public advertisements are misleading the public about the actual neurodegenerative risks from second-generation antipsychotics.

-AlterNet reports on a lawsuit that accuses a police officer of abusing his mental health law powers.

This week a commentary, written by members of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and titled “Improving Long-term Psychiatric Care: Bring Back the Asylum” was published in JAMA Online. The authors recommend a return to asylum care, albeit not as a replacement for but as an addition to improved community services and only for those who have “severe and treatment-resistant psychotic disorders, who are too unstable or unsafe for community based treatment.” The authors seem to accept the notion of transinstitutionalization (TI) which suggests that people who in another generation would have lived in state hospitals are now incarcerated in jails and prisons. While I do not agree, I do find there is a need for a safe place for people to stay while they work through their crisis.

In Counterpunch, Geoff Gray analyzes how increasing use of psychiatric drugs and declining financial support for psychology may have contributed to the American Psychological Association's reluctance to condemn involvement in US government torture programs, even in spite of protests from its own membership.

"I spent almost 20 years inside the inner sanctum of the American Psychological Association," writes Bryant Welch in The Huffington Post. "A psychologist and attorney, I was the first Executive Director of Professional Practice for the APA and in 1986 built much of the advocacy structure still in place to advocate for clinical psychologists." Welch offers his perspectives on how and why the APA started to support the US torture program after his departure.

The International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry published an article titled Safety and utility of acute electroconvulsive therapy for agitation and aggression in dementia,  which concludes "Electroconvulsive therapy may be a safe treatment option to reduce symptoms of agitation and aggression in patients with dementia whose behaviors are refractory to medication management." But the participants were not a random selection of people taking the drugs in question. Rather, they were individuals selected because of aggressive behavior, most of whom had been taking some or all of these drugs on admission. So it is a distinct possibility that the aggression was a drug effect for many, or even most, of the study participants.

The Fix reviews the past and present of the estimated $2 billion/year industry of trying to "improve" the behaviors and attitudes of "troubled teens." Adolescence...

A news story and opinion article in Psychiatric News discuss a current US Supreme Court case that is considering whether non-dentists should be permitted...

It is "unethical" for the British government to establish expected rates of depression and to pay doctors per diagnosis to increase the diagnosing of...

1 Boring Old Man has written a series of posts examining some of the older and newer scientific literature about the number of people...

Pointing to recent high-profile incidents of police violence, MIA Blogger Leah Harris discusses in Truthout the intersections and parallels between police or public discrimination...

ProPublica is well known for creating interesting data bases that allow anyone hooked up to a computer to see by name whether a physician is accepting Big Pharma payments — from dinners to speaking engagements to consulting services. What may be lesser known is that occasionally ProPublica will publish other data that when carefully mined can reveal even more about the use of psychiatric drugs especially when there is a public funding source available.

To this day I do not know how I found my way back. I think it might’ve had something to do with willpower, as I was NOT going to lose myself. I was NOT going to end up like those people who were living indefinitely in the hospital—those “chronic schizophrenics”, as they say. I was going to find my way back, back to myself.

Professional psychologists designed most of the main techniques and strategies and played ongoing, active, central roles in the CIA's torture of people it was...

We are an unlikely duo, sharing secrets only known to insiders, the inmates and staff of Bader 5, Boston Children's Hospital's adolescent psychiatric unit. I am the nurse who blew the whistle that no one heard in 2010, she is the teenager who was imprisoned on Bader 5 for nine months in 2013. We met for the first time on this past Thanksgiving Day at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, where she has been a *medical* patient for the past nine weeks.

I’ve been arguing against calling this movement that I’m a part of a ‘peer’ movement for a long time. What has happened with Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has helped me to crystallize that point. If we do not see what happens to some of us in the psychiatric system as connected to what happens to others because they are black or because they are transgender or because they love someone else of the same expressed gender (or because they live in poverty, etc. etc.), then I’m not sure any of us really, fully understands what it is we are trying to accomplish at all.

"The American Psychological Association (APA) last week named a former federal prosecutor to lead an investigation into its role in supporting the U.S. government’s...

Evidence based care is supposed to drive up standards, ensure uniformity, establish best practice, guide clinicians and protect patients. This should be celebrated. Instead, evidence-based mental health is openly disparaged, and when psychiatrists don’t get the results they want, they ignore them, suppress them, or denounce them. These attitudes have repercussions on the training of psychiatrists.