"... how #Occupy Wall St has affected #psychiatry & #mentalhealth"

Via @Dr_Tad




Op-Ed: Reflections on the 2012 Radical Caucus Meeting


 Excerpt:

"Part of the reason that the AACP members of the Radical Caucus were defensive is that they think they have been trying to live up to recovery concerns. There are two main problems with being too self-congratulatory here. The first is the way that recovery has been taken up is largely controlled by psychiatrists rather than consumers themselves. It is the psychiatrists, powerful budget administrators, and increasingly big pharma marketers who are having disproportionate influence on how consumers can participate and picking which consumers are appropriate. That means many activists are increasingly wary about the way that “recovery” is being adopted. Second, and more to the point of this meeting, the psychiatric activists at this meeting were not talking about recovery. They were talking about coercion and forced treatment.
For whatever reason, and I’m not sure I completely understand it (although of course I can weave a story around it if I have to), psychiatrists, even radicals and AACP members, were unable to hear these concerns. It wasn’t like the activists were hard to understand. They were being very clear, even willing to go to dramatics, to help people know that to their minds the most important issue for the meeting was forced treatment. And, in view of the 100 year monologue of experts, why shouldn’t the activists get to decide what is most important?"