My father, a college professor, sought mental health help during a difficult period—and got forcibly electroshocked. I later started doing journalism, investigating community issues such as poverty, government and business, racial conflicts, policing, and protests—wherever I looked, I’d find sources who’d been subjected to psychiatric detentions. I started to see that a far greater diversity of people were being affected than we normally realize or talk about. Over the ensuing years, I interviewed hundreds of people about their experiences of forced psychiatric interventions, and became determined to shine a brighter public light on mental health law powers. My articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards.
I wrote...
Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships
Asylums closed, but smaller institutions multiplied. Rates of civil commitment and involuntary treatment have been rising, quietly but dramatically, for decades. In Your Consent Is Not Required, the voices and stories of people who’ve experienced forced psychiatric interventions are interwoven with examinations of the current laws, science, economics, and cultural politics of involuntary care in the U.S. and Canada. Dispelling common myths with hard data, I expose how mental health law powers are used to manage schools and nursing homes, “resolve” family conflicts, police streets, and shelters, fraudulently increase hospital profits, discredit workplace whistleblowers, and more. People from many walks of life are being subjected against their will to detentions, powerful tranquilizing drugs, restraints, seclusion, and electroshock, and are all-too-often left harmed, terrified, and traumatized.
Lawyer Michael Perlin was, for decades, lead author of the seminal, annually updated reference volumes on developments in U.S. mental health laws and precedent commitment cases.
The Hidden Prejudice is written for general readers; many pages are still two-thirds reference footnotes, but Perlin allows himself a more personal tone that makes the core text riveting and disturbing.
Dispelling out-of-date notions that people can only be locked up if they’re physically threatening and dangerous, Perlin demonstrates with stark warning how criteria for detaining people have become shockingly broad, most judges have abandoned any requirement that psychiatrists meet even basic standards of science, average commitment hearings function virtually outside the law, and courts grant psychiatric institutions horrifying degrees of immunity for abuses.
You’ll never again hear calls to expand forced psychiatric treatment in the same way.
In ""The Hidden Prejudice"", Michael L. Perlin reveals a pattern of prejudice against mentally disabled individuals that keeps them from receiving equal treatment under the law. ""Sanism"", like racism, is a prejudice against a minority population. This mostly hidden prejudice against mentally ill people has pervaded Western culture throughout history and continues to affect our culture and legal system. Under the pretext of ""improving"" society, a judge, lawyer or fact-finder may rationalize turning a blind eye to faulty evidence and render a sanist decision. The pretext for this testimonial dishonesty is that the end result justifies the means. In cases…
“That book changed my life”--when interviewing current and former psychiatric patients (and some critical psychiatrists), no book has so often been described to me in this way.
Anatomy of an Epidemic isn’t about forced treatment per se—it’s about the medications used to forcibly treat people today. An award-winning science journalist (and founder of the web magazine Mad in America for which I sometimes write), Whitaker critically examined every existing study of the long-term impacts of common psychiatric medications from antidepressants and ADHD stimulants to lithium and antipsychotics.
He found that, over time, nearly all psychotropics are associated with serious harms to physical health, quality of life, and cognitive capacity. In the precedent Third Circuit case that first established limited rights for people to decline psychotropics, the court found that “even acutely disturbed patients might have good reason to refuse these drugs.”
Whitaker’s research shows, with alternately disturbing, gruesome, and tragic details, why that’s still true today.
Updated with bonus material, including a new foreword and afterword with new research, this New York Times bestseller is essential reading for a time when mental health is constantly in the news.
In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades?
Interwoven with Whitaker’s groundbreaking analysis of the merits of psychiatric medications are the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. As Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, other societies have…
Possibly the 20th century’s most famous book about involuntary commitment, it’s remarkable—and profoundly disturbing—how well Ken Kesey’s masterpiece has stood the test of time.
Kesey was working in a psychiatric hospital as he wrote it, and portrays all-too-vividly the twisted relationships of power, climate of fear, daily routines of institutionalization, insipid group “therapy,” often debilitating medical treatments, and sudden bouts of violence from both sides. Most institutions are simply smaller now.
Readers today might question a white man writing through the eyes of a mute “half-Indian”—but it situates front and center stingingly timely examinations of racism, ableism, and sanism in mental health systems.
And the novel’s central, driving drama also remains consummately contemporary: The more the irascible Randle P. McMurphy rebels against institutional abuses, the more the medical staff diagnose him as "lacking insight" into his mental illness—and prescribe ever-more-aggressive “treatment.”
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them…
Forced electroshock or “electroconvulsive therapy” (ECT) is still commonplace, and it caused Linda Andre massive memory loss—but she recovered enough to write one of my favorite of many important books by people who’ve personally experienced forced treatment.
Her commentaries on the science are good, but Andre, once a leading activist, was frequently interviewed by news media and attacked by pro-ECT psychiatrists, and she exposes the behind-the-scenes politics and public relations of psychiatric science, forced treatment, and ECT in fascinating ways.
Her observations on how journalists tend to work, and of the many ways even “responsible” news outlets can misrepresent, manipulate, and get manipulated, are unnerving.
With revealing irony,Doctors of Deceptioncriticized pro-ECT psychiatrists for rarely disclosing their conflicts of interest—and the book was viciously attacked in a prominent review by two pro-ECT psychiatrists who didn’t disclose to readers that they themselves were criticized in the book.
Doctors of Deception is a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.
Hatch did stellar research to expose how coercive psychiatric treatment—especially tranquilization with heavy antipsychotics—is spreading into nursing homes, child foster care and juvenile facilities, immigration centers, and prisons.
Antipsychotics are becoming a ‘go-to’ approach for institutional management of large populations, especially targeting people of color.
Hatch’s work also draws attention to a vital, related issue: Abundant research shows that involuntary treatment is driven by our culture’s dominant prejudices: classism, racism, sexism, sanism, etc. Predictably then, public discussions of involuntary treatment routinely lack, and desperately need, a greater diversity of voices.
So, while highlighting the work of the Black scholar Hatch, I want to also mention several recent anthologies that bring forth a fantastic diversity of voices and perspectives on contempory psychiatric care, forced treatment, and alternatives: Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies; Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, and We've Been Too Patient: An Anthology of Voices from Radical Mental Health.
A critical investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to pacify and control inmates and other captives in the vast U.S. prison, military, and welfare systems
For at least four decades, U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic drugs-antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and tranquilizers-to silence inmates, whether or not they have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells, Anthony Ryan Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes, military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes.…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is it too late?
In the tradition of Graham Greene, this is a book about love, betrayal, and life’s heavenly music
“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…
