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.
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’.
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.
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.
16 October 2013

When will the UN Human Rights Committee focus on disability rights?

The UN represents universality and indivisibility of human rights norms. So why is the UN Human Rights Committee ignoring the human rights of people with disabilities?
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.
11 March 2013

Consent to ill-treatment

Psychiatry, religion and culture all assert considerable power over individuals. A human rights approach can rebalance this power. I want to address the question: should the law allow someone to consent to what she believes to be a cure, but what others consider to be “inhuman or degrading treatment” which is banned under international law?
6 March 2013

Nigeria’s lunatic laws and evil spirits: what place for human rights?

Traditional and spiritual healers deliver the bulk of mental health ‘services’ in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. They profit from the populist belief that madness is caused by demonic possession. As a result people labelled as mad are hyper-stigmatised and families urgently want to rid the devil from their afflicted relative. Within this delusional belief system, beatings, lashings, burnings and rapes drive out the evil spirits. The colonial lunacy law provides precisely zero protections against arbitrary internment, chemical and physical restraints, and non-consensual electroshock in psychiatric hospitals. The tiny amount of psychiatrists are hospital-based and overstretched. Mental health services are largely absent from primary healthcare, save in some EU-funded pilot projects. Both the psychiatric and the traditional healing industries are unregulated, unmonitored and susceptible to corruption. Ill-treatment is carried out with impunity because perpetrators are never punished.

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