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Thoroughly researched, with alarming true stories and hard data from the US and Canada, Rob Wipond’s Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships builds an unassailable case for greater transparency, vigilance, and change.
Asylums are supposed to be a thing of the past. But they didn’t really go away—they became smaller, and multiplied.
In fact,more law-abiding Americans today are getting involuntarily committed and forcibly treated “for their own good” than at any time in history.
In the first work of investigative journalism in decades to give a comprehensive view into contemporary psychiatric incarceration and forced interventions, Your Consent Is Not Required exposes how rising numbers of diverse individuals from many walks of life are being subjected against their will to surveillance, indefinite detention, and powerful tranquilizing drugs, restraints, seclusion, and electroshock.
The common argument that asylum-closures and “deinstitutionalization” led to only extremely “dangerous” people ever getting committed is wrong. Forced psychiatric interventions today occur in thousands of public and private hospitals, and also in group and long-term care facilities, troubled-teen and residential treatment centers, and even in people’s own homes under outpatient commitment orders. Intended to “help,” for many people the experiences are all-too-often terrifying, traumatizing, and permanently damaging.
Driven partly by individuals’ genuine concerns for the “mental health” of others, and partly by institutions entangled with goals of power, profit, and social control, psychiatric coercion is increasingly used to:
manage school children and the elderly
quell family conflicts
“clean” the streets
control people in shelters, community living, and prisons
fraudulently increase hospital profits
“resolve” workplace disagreements
detain protesters and discredit whistleblowers
Thoroughly researched, with alarming true stories and hard data from the US and Canada, Rob Wipond’s Your Consent Is Not Required builds an unassailable case for greater transparency, vigilance, and change.
Rob Wipond is a freelance journalist who writes frequently on the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change. His articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards.
