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9 April 2014

Degradation of women in Uganda’s main psychiatric hospital

This is 2 out of a 3 part series about Butabika hospital, Uganda’s premier psychiatric facility, which I visited on 3 April 2014. The first post laid out how people are admitted and forcibly treated outside the ambit of a law, and how therefore people are unlawfully detained. The most memorable thing about the visit was the litany of gender-based discrimination which I saw, and that’s what I want to talk about in this blog post. On Friday I’ll upload a blog post about clinical care.
4 April 2014

Democracy? Not for people with mental disabilities

This Sunday, over 55,000 Hungarian citizens living in Hungary will not be allowed to choose their leaders at the national elections. They’re not criminals, they’re not migrants and they’re not children. It is like not counting the votes of the entire population of Szombathely.
25 March 2014

World psychiatry and accountability for human rights violations

This is the third part of my series on torture in healthcare where I argue that the psychiatric community must be prepared to recognise human rights abuses among its professionals and propose the use of restorative justice principles to deal with the problem. In the first of this trilogy of blog posts I criticised leading psychiatrists’ calls for a hierarchy of human rights for people with ‘mental disorders’. I discussed how psychiatry needs to accept the right to community living with supports as part of reshaping the public mental health landscape in the second post, The series is based on a chapter I wrote in ‘Torture in Healthcare Settings: Reflections on the Special Rapporteur on Torture’s 2013 Thematic Report’. You can read my chapter here, from page 247.
6 March 2014

A hierarchy of ‘mental health’ rights?

Leading psychiatrists are calling for a hierarchy of rights for people with 'mental disorders'. In this blog post, MDAC's Executive Director argues that their views offend well-established notions of human rights. The is the first in a three-part series, based on a chapter in a new book which discusses torture in healthcare settings.
3 February 2014

Rancid community reactions should spur action on community living

With the European Commission’s blessing and funding, the Hungarian Government is steaming ahead with plans to segregate people with disabilities from large institutions into smaller ones. These are what they call “group homes” (institutions with 8 to 12 beds) and “living centres” (institutions of up to 25 beds). The new institutions, by their very definition, will continue to segregate people from the community. Segregation is a violation of international law. It breeds societal anger, frustration and resentment. It entrenches the very prejudices from which disability rights emerged to eradicate. Enough is enough.
3 December 2013

Becoming a human rights activist

On the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, here are my top ten advocacy tips. I shared these with graduating students of an international diploma on mental health and human rights a few weeks ago in India.
7 June 2013

A social paradigm of mental health

7 June 2013. New post on OliverTalks: Psychiatry should step out of the bubble of mental health and join the disability rights world where the right to live in the community means more than access to psychiatric treatments.
29 May 2013

Serbian judges sentence 3,500 people to civil death each year

Last Tuesday I participated in the first day of a two-day conference in Belgrade, about legal capacity and community living, organised by various NGO partners in the “Person” project, which is funded by the European Commission (aka European taxpayers).
10 May 2013

Global psychiatry: stop deploying human rights rhetoric to justify forced psychiatric treatment

On Wednesday I gave a lecture at the University of Leeds. It was about human rights and the Movement for Global Mental Health. Let me outline one of the main points which I made. OliverTalks posts next week will cover the other points.
25 March 2013

“Let me breathe, let me leave”: a song for Alex in Chisinau

In the Moldovan mental health system, voluntary means involuntary, consent means coercion, yes means no, and a safeguard means a rubber stamp. Reducing law into formalistic fiction creates an environment where healthcare staff mistreat patients to such an extent that some instances amount to torture. The new Moldovan government needs to abandon the focus on hospitals and instead ensure that law underpins autonomy, that budgets are oriented towards community-based supports, and that people with disabilities participate in monitoring human rights.

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