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.
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.
18 March 2014

Psychiatry, medication and human rights

The Global Movement for Mental Health could make a bridge between the public health and disability rights worlds. Aligning themselves with disability rights means rethinking views such as “I can cure mental illness therefore it is not a disability.” In the second of a three-part series I discuss how community living with supports has become a human right that should reshape the public mental health landscape. 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’.
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.
12 November 2013

Abandoned with bedbugs in West Bengal

“My father brought me here 16 years ago”, said Sanjaya, a 29-year old woman, in Bengali. Her family appear to have freaked out when, at the age of 13, she started having mental health problems. Instead of getting some support, they dumped her into the Lumbini Park institution, where she was robbed of her youth, her education, and her safety. Detained there for the past 16 years without committing any crime, she was allowed out for a day two years ago. She returned to her family who had abandoned her. “I went and cried. I wanted to stay, but my family didn’t want me”, she told me.
30 October 2013

Girls and women with disabilities have rights too

2,200 people in Moldova are forced to live in 13 psychiatric and social care institutions: from Badiceni to Brinzeni, Balti to Bender, and Tiraspol in the Transnistria region. A third of these people are stripped of their autonomy. They are under guardianship where others control their lives. They are rendered invisible and invalid.
5 September 2013

The Romanian government killed a young man with disabilities. Will it get away with it on a technicality?

OliverTalks - Our Executive Director explains how the Romanian government is attempting to avoid accountability for the death of Valentin Câmpeanu in a psychiatric institution.
8 July 2013

Rosenhan revisited

A couple of weeks ago a tribunal in the UK decided that Ian Brady – probably the country’s most famous living killer – should remain in a high-security psychiatric hospital, rather than being sent to a prison as he wanted. Brady’s lawyers argued that he did not have paranoid schizophrenia, and had never been mentally ill since he was jailed for life in 1966. The outcome of the case was that he has to stay in hospital – no surprise there. What I want to concentrate on in this blog post is a miniscule detail of the case.
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.
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.

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