You’re invited to join us for the third Judi’s Room of 2024!
Event Details
• Topic: A conversation about involuntary commitment with Rob Wipond
• Date: Wednesday, April 3rd 2024
• Time: 3 PM Pacific | 4 PM Mountain | 5 PM Central | 6 PM Eastern & Atlantic Standard | 6 AM Eastern Australia | 7 PM Brazil Standard | 11 PM UK
• Platform: Zoom
• Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82375518189
About the Conversation
Journalist and author Rob Wipond will be hosting a conversation about involuntary commitment based on input from Judi’s Room participants like you.
Those who may be interested can fill out this brief questionnaire anytime before Monday, April 1st in order to ask Rob questions about his research and request specific topics for him to discuss. Rob will look through these questionnaire submissions in advance and use them to guide the contents of his presentation. After the presentation, there will be a live question-and-answer and discussion period as well.
Each person who completes the questionnaire will also have the option to enter a random drawing for a chance to win either a free hardcover copy or a free audiobook of Rob’s recent book, Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships. The drawing will be held live during this Judi’s Room talk. In order to claim a book, you must be in attendance at the time of the drawing.
About Your Presenter
Rob Wipond (Alberta, Canada)
Rob Wipond is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change.
He was for ten years a regular columnist and feature writer for Focus, and now often contributes investigative journalism to the science, psychiatry, and community web magazine and blogging community Mad In America.
His writing has appeared in more than a hundred varied outlets, including Adbusters, Chatelaine, the European Journal of Law and Technology, and Queens Quarterly, and it has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards, nine Western Magazine Awards, and five British Columbia Jack Webster Awards for journalism. He’s also won WMAs for business, science, and public issues writing, and won two Websters for community reporting.
In 2016-17, he co-founded and was a senior researcher and editor for Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project, websites which provide information about psychiatric drugs and how to withdraw from them more safely.
In 2023, BenBella released his book Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships, which recounts people’s experiences of psychiatric detentions and involuntary commitment, and critically examines the science, economics, politics, and expanding uses of psychiatric legal powers across North America.
About Rob’s Book
From Rob’s website:
Asylums are supposed to be in the past. However, though the buildings were closed, many of the practices lived on. In fact, more law-abiding Americans today are being 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 civil psychiatric incarceration and forced interventions, Your Consent Is Not Required exposes how rising numbers of people from many walks of life are being subjected against their will to surveillance, indefinite detention, and powerful tranquilizing drugs, restraints, seclusion, and electroshock.
There’s a common misconception that, due to asylum closures, only “dangerous” people get committed now. But 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 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
- police 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.
Your Consent Is Not Required is now available in hardcover, ePub, Kindle and audiobook by order through your local bookstore, or at Amazon, Amazon Canada, Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo, Audiobooks.com and elsewhere.
About Judi’s Room
Named after celebrated human rights activist Judi Chamberlin, Judi’s Room is a free event presented jointly by MindFreedom International (MFI) and I Love You, Lead On to facilitate opportunities for ongoing cross-disability dialogue. It typically begins with a presentation by one or more expert panelists followed by an open public discussion.
If you require accommodation for this event such as sign language interpretation, please email office@mindfreedom.org at least three business days in advance.
If you would like to support Judi’s Room, please consider donating to MFI and I Love You, Lead On.
If you are not yet subscribed to our mailing list for Judi’s Room and would like to sign up to receive invitations to these events in the future, please send an email to office@mindfreedom.org with “Add me to Judi’s Room” in the subject heading.
A recording of this event will later be posted on MFI’s official YouTube channel.