I am against compulsion at any level in mental health care. And in principle I uphold service users’ right to free decision making when it comes to issues of treatment (drug and other treatment) and care. But I have questions too and I would like to interrogate further the notion of ‘the right to free decision making’ within mental health care: Read more
In my previous post I talked about the Occupy the APA (American Psychiatric Association) 2013 protest that took place yesterday (Sunday 19th May) in San Francisco,California. Read more
MindFreedom International, the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights) and the California Client Action Workgroup are organising a protest of the American Psychiatric Association’s 2013 annual conference in San Francisco, California –an Occupy Psychiatry Event– today (19th May). Read more
I came across this cartoon this morning. The cartoon accompanies critical reflections on the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in an article that appeared on the Economist (published on 18th May). I thought the cartoon very pertinently portrays the main function performed by psychiatry nowadays, ie labeling (tagging) patients with a diagnosis and overdrugging them with ‘magic bullets’ of varying colour on the basis of the supposed scientific wisdom that the DSM, psychiatry’s Holly Bible, encapsulates. Read more
So far this year, each issue of the magazine took a particular theme. We hope you found them interesting. We apologise to anyone who has sent in a contribution not on one of those themes, and not had much of an acknowledgement. This issue catches up on some of the backlog of material we have on a variety of topics, and we hope soon to publish more. Read more
Self-Harm: Minimising Harm, Maximising Hope… This special issue on self-harm came out of a conference in September 2012 that Asylum co-hosted with the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, alongside harm-ed and Manchester Metropolitan University. The conference highlighted some of the tensions between the perspectives of people who self-harm and those who care for them. Read more
