Featured

On Tuesday 25th September, The Times published a front-page article entitled: “Drugs adviser David Baldwin quits after being branded ‘worse than Hitler’ in online abuse row.”

Let’s try to get some other messages out there that challenge the old, tired, damaging narrative of diagnosis and disorder. Messages that offer hope and solidarity to people and messages that put the responsibility for the primary causal factors of emotional distress firmly back where it belongs.

When I was invited to review “Call me Crazy”, written and directed by Paula J Caplan, a clinical and research psychologist, playwright, author, advocate, filmmaker and activist from the US, I was aware that this was the first play she had ever written and that it had won second place in a national playwriting competition.

Doctors must understand and explain that drugs change the brain, and other parts of the body, in ways that we do not fully understand, that are almost always harmful to some degree, and that may be irreversible.

Every year, around 46,000 people in England are subject to compulsory treatment under the Mental Health Act. Black people are around four times more likely to be ‘Sectioned’ than White people. Let’s take steps to change the law here in the UK, protecting the rights of people within the mental health care system to exercise informed consent and preserve their autonomy.