Can MFI provide me with legal advice?
No, we are not a legal advocacy organization and cannot provide legal services. The best we can do is potentially refer you to a legal agency or legal professional such as an attorney depending on whether we have any active affiliates in your area.
Can MFI provide me with medical advice?
No. Our website contains information about various medical topics, but these materials should not be construed as an attempt to offer or render a medical opinion or otherwise engage in the practice of medicine.
Anyone seeking to stop taking psychiatric drugs should do so carefully and with proper medical advice because suddenly quitting can be dangerous.
I believe I am being targeted by a governmental organization and/or tortured by electromagnetic waves/implants/”V2K”/mind control. Can MFI help me with this?
No, we can only offer assistance pertaining directly to mental health care.
Where do MFI’s funds come from?
We are powered solely by contributions from thousands of individuals like you, and occasional grants from independent foundations. We receive no funding from pharmaceutical companies, governments, political parties, or religious organizations.
Feel free to contact our office at office@mindfreedom.org to request copies of our 990 Forms that we have filed with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). You will see that we do a lot with limited resources!
Aren’t all critics of psychiatry involved with “Scientology”? Does MFI have any connections to that?
No, there are plenty of individuals and organizations with reasonable criticisms of psychiatry who are not connected to “Scientology”—like us.
MFI is not affiliated with nor sponsored by “The Church of Scientology” or its organization known as “The Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights” (CCHR), and we do not intend to associate with either in the future. This applies to all of our volunteers, staff, and leaders.
There is always a possibility that some of our non-representative members (i.e. those who are not volunteers, staff, or leaders) may privately subscribe to “Scientology” without our knowledge since we naturally do not investigate the individual ideologies of the people who sign up for memberships with us. However, should we have any “Scientologists” among our non-representative members, we will never use our organization as a platform for them to voice their beliefs.
David Atkin, our attorney, has provided a signed letter to clarify and emphasize MFI’s independence.
Is MFI anti-psychiatry?
No, we are “pro-choice”: we believe that each individual should have the right to make their own informed choices about accessing mental health care, including psychiatric services.
Many of our members are “dissident” psychiatrists or people who choose to consume prescribed psychiatric drugs which they find beneficial. Often, it’s those who are willingly taking prescriptions who are also the most passionate and active about challenging abuse in the psychiatric drug industry, as they have the most at stake—their lives are on the line.
It is also true that many human rights violations arise from the current dominance of psychiatric drugs in mental health care, squeezing out alternatives and facilitating the spread of disinformation, and we are among the few advocacy groups to openly speak out about the unethical way in which these drugs are promoted or even pushed on people. This does not make us anti-psychiatry, however.
In fact, MFI’s concerns are now mainstream ones. The general public is increasingly expressing worry and even outrage about corruption in the psychiatric drug industry and mental health care services themselves.
Does MFI keep my personal information private?
Yes. We keep your personal information in a secure database, where it is accessible only by our office administrators. We will not share or publicize any information about you without your explicit permission, and we never sell personal information.
In the event that you are no longer interested in maintaining ties with MFI, you can contact our office at office@mindfreedom.org to request that we delete your profile in our database.
May I copy and use printed materials and/or graphics from MFI?
Except for written material, photographs, etc. where the copyright is retained by the individual creator, you are encouraged to use any and all of the materials on the MFI web site and other MFI sources with some rights reserved under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5.
What is Creative Commons, and what does that mean?
In other words, “You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and to make derivative works, under the following conditions: Attribution. You must give the original author credit [including the www.MindFreedom.org web site]. Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.”
Click the CC button on the very bottom of any MFI web page for more information about the Creative Commons. For other uses of MFI web site or other material or to answer questions, contact the MFI office.
FAIR USE NOTICE: Public portions of this web site may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.