Legislation & Regulation

A new generation of multilateral and bilateral trade agreements is likely to significantly threaten access and cost of healthcare, and limit signatory Governments sovereignty to prioritise health care policy to protect and improve the health of citizens. The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a Pacific Rim regional trade agreement involving 12 countries — including New Zealand, Australia and the US — is one such agreement, and it has the potential to significantly alter the domestic environment for health policy-making.

If their clients admit to having suicidal feelings or show evidence of serious psychological problems, how do lawyers' legal responsibilities to their clients change...

Start shopping for the best hospitals, doctors and therapies while you're feeling good, suggests Lisa Keith on her PsychCentral blog Bipolar Lifehacks, because when...

An article in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law reviews the development of China's new mental health legislation. The process took a significant turn,...

Coercive situations like the one depicted in this blog subtly replicate older times when colonizers dominated Indian people using guns and ammo. In the contemporary times, oppressive mental health systems of colonizers use pills and labels to force-feed ‘civilizing’ principles. This intergenerational comparison might seem more intriguing if you consider that the psychiatric nurse in question was a Commissioned Corps officer in full uniform blues while meeting with this girl in the bunker-like Indian Health Service (IHS) clinic located along “Fort Road.” If you drive straight out along that road for 23 miles, you’ll end up on the park grounds of the actual historic fort where this girl’s ancestors were once bull-whipped for non-compliance.

Both Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz dated the beginnings of a distinct Western institutional response to madness to the late 1500s-early 1600s. But while for Foucault it started in France with the creation of the public “hôpital général” for the poor insane, for Szasz it began in England with the appearance of for-profit madhouses where upper class families shut away inconvenient relatives. Regardless of their different ideas on the beginnings of anything resembling a mental health system, both authors agree that it was characterized by the coercive incarceration of a specially labeled group.

A growing body of evidence indicates that forced “treatment” in today’s mental health system, including all forms of forced hospitalization and forced drugging, may actually cause FAR more harm than good. Recent published studies and articles point towards evidence of physical and psychological harm that, in some cases, may contribute to more suicidality and patient deaths, as well as overall worse outcomes in a person’s state of recovery.

Psychiatrists' use of community treatment orders (or outpatient committal) in the UK is already ten times more frequent than was originally envisioned, writes Manchester...

An internal government investigation found that authorities did not investigate 50% of deaths that occurred inside mental health services in Ireland, reports the Irish...

The European Medicines Agency has announced in a press release its final policies on the open publication of data from clinical trials. Ed Silverman...

"It is unacceptable for this municipality to create a housing crisis and then reframe it as a mental health crisis," writes the Vancouver Area...

In what ways can psychiatric treatments, and the relationships between psychiatrists and patients, be appropriately characterized as "abusive"? On his blog, MIA Foreign Correspondent...

John Albers was completely surprised when police came to his home at midnight and insisted on taking him to a psychiatric hospital, where he...

"A nationalist lawmaker suggests making politicians disclose their psychiatric problems to the public and punish those who try to hide them by removing them...

Since many more Americans now have mental health coverage as a result of the US Affordable Care Act, mental health services will soon begin...

Republican Tim Murphy should be lauded for bringing attention to important issues through his proposed legislation, but he "has it wrong when it comes...

The new President-elect of the European Union Jean-Claude Juncker has removed key responsibilities relating to health and medicines from the government Commissioner in charge...

On June 13, 2014, United States District Court Judge Carol E. Jackson issued a Memorandum and Order decision holding that a former psychiatric inmate was allowed to bring federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. §1983 against hospital personnel when the hospital continued to hold her against her will after authorization had expired. In her Memorandum and Order decision, Judge Jackson took Ms. Pierce's rights seriously and, reading through it, one gets a sense that the court was offended by the cavalier attitude of hospital personnel towards their patients' rights. It is clear that if the Court's ruling is upheld, it can result in dramatic improvement in the way people are treated in Missouri psychiatric hospitals.

The Boston Globe interviews people who became ever more severely dependent on sedating benzodiazepines without realizing it, because as they tried to stop taking...

The Atlantic investigates the brutal "training" and "therapy" regimes and chronic abuses still going on at psychological and physical boot camps for "troubled teens"...

Our children are not safe. Not because of terrorists, but because it is becoming dangerous to advocate for their medical care without fear of losing them. A new charge, "Medical Child Abuse,” is now used by hospitals to remove inconvenient parents from the role of advocating for their children.

Tom Burns, M.D., Psychiatrist and Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford, recently said of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) that “compulsion added to otherwise decent care makes no difference.” This was no easy conclusion for Burns, who for twenty years “argued ardently” for Community Treatment Orders (CTO’s), which are described as the British version of California’s newly passed AOT laws. "I worked for more than 20 years to get the CTO law passed," he said. "I thought such laws were going to make a difference, but they don't."

Disability Rights California will challenge Los Angeles’ Assisted Outpatient Treatment program in court this fall, DRC attorney Pamela Cohen announced Friday. According to Cohen, California’s AB-1241 or “Laura’s Law” diverts funding from community mental health services and towards police, administrators and courts, doesn’t reach the people it purports to be trying to help, and violates people’s civil rights. “This is an illegal program,” said Cohen.

Most Americans would agree that we have problem with mental health in this country, but what many do not know when they consider that people who are in distress are not getting the help they need is that hospitals in this country are not giving people a choice when they are in the most need. This is based on laws that currently exist in 45 US States, which allow individuals to be petitioned into an inpatient psychiatric unit against their will if they are deemed to be a “danger to themselves or others.” I have worked for 3.5 years as a Peer Support Specialist within my local public mental health system, where I see this happen to the individuals I serve, on a regular basis. I myself have been forced.

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is eager to provide advice or assistance to US citizens who may wish to sue their physicians for prescribing off-label psychiatric drugs to children, said lawyer James Gottstein in an interview with Mad In America.