Sep112023
Front PageImage is a color rendition of Judi Chamberlin by Board Member Vesper Moore. They depicted Judi wearing a seventies era striped turtleneck, with large flowing brown wavy hair, white skin, and large black rimmed glasses

— Join us for Judi’s Room —

Featuring

Special Guest Jim Gottstein*

“Reinventing the Mental Health System from a

Pipeline Drugging Millions Indefinitely

to Giving People Hope Through People, Place, and Purpose”

Wednesday, October 4, 2023

3:00 PM Pacific

4:00 PM Mountain

5:00 PM Central

6:00 PM Eastern

6 AM Eastern Australia, 12 PM Hawaii, 7 PM Brazil Standard, 11 PM in Ireland & UK

Pre-registration is required.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

The mental health system’s standard treatments are colossally counter-productive and harmful, often forced on unwilling patients.  The overreliance on psychiatric drugs is reducing the recovery rate of people diagnosed with serious mental illness from a possible 80% to 5% and reducing their life spans by 20 years or so.  Psychiatric incarceration, euphemistically called “involuntary commitment,” is similarly counterproductive and harmful, adding to patients’ trauma and massively associated with suicides.  Harmful psychiatric interventions are being imposed on people without consideration of the facts about treatments, and their harms and are a violation of International Law.

 

The most important elements for improving patients’ lives are People, Place and Purpose.  People—even psychiatric patients—need to have relation-ships (People), a safe place to live (Place), and activity that is meaningful to them, usually school or work (Purpose).  People need to be given hope these are possible.  Voluntary approaches that improve people’s lives should be made broadly available instead of the currently prevailing counterproductive and harmful psychiatric drugs for everyone, forever, regime often forced on people.  These approaches include Peer Respites, Soteria Houses, Open Dialogue, Drug-Free Hospitals, Housing First, Employment, Warm Lines, Hearing Voices Network, Non-Police Community Response Teams, and emotional CPR (eCPR).

 

By implementing these approaches, mental health systems can move towards, and even achieve, the 80% possible recovery rate.

As bad as it is for adults, the psychiatric incarceration and psychiatric drugging of children and youth is even more tragic and should cease.  Instead, children and youth should be helped to manage their emotions and become successful, and their parents should be given support and assistance to achieve this.

 

*Jim Gottstein was an Alaska-based lawyer, now living on Maui, who founded the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights) whose mission is to mount a strategic litigation campaign against forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock.  He won five Alaska Supreme Court appeals, three on constitutional grounds invalidating various aspects of Alaska’s mental illness system. Jim is most known for subpoenaing and releasing secret documents showing Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Zyprexa hid that it causes diabetes and other metabolic problems, resulting in a series of front page stories in The New York Times.  He has written an acclaimed book, The Zyprexa Papers about this and his representation of Bill Bigley for whom he subpoenaed the secret documents.  Jim is currently devoting his time to making more humane, voluntary and effective approaches available, such as Peer Respites and Soteria Houses.

 

   This event is presented jointly by I Love You, Lead On and MindFreedom International (MFI), Judi’s Room is named after celebrated human rights activist Judi Chamberlin. It’s free and open to the public on the first Wednesday of every month as an opportunity to meet and engage in a cross-disabilities dialogue with a focus on human rights. Each event usually starts with a guest presenter or a panel of experts followed by questions from the audience.

    If you would like to support Judi’s Room, please consider donating to I Love You, Lead On and/or MindFreedom International.

If you need any accommodations (e.g. ASL interpretation), please contact Sarah at sarah@mindfreedom.org.

If you are not already on our mailing list for Judi’s Room notifications and would like to be added, please send an email to the MFI office at office@mindfreedom.org with “Add me to Judi’s Room” as the subject heading.

Can’t make it? No problem! Judi’s Room events are recorded. You can view past recordings on MFI’s official YouTube channel.