by Jack Carney | Oct 8, 2012 | Mad In America
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means — except by getting off his back.” Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)...
by Jack Carney | Sep 20, 2012 | Mad In America
On August 16, 2003, six individuals who had travelled from all over the country – Brooklyn; Wilmington, Delaware; Chicago; Portland – to Pasadena, California, began a Fast for Freedom, “a hunger strike to challenge international domination by biopsychiatry.” They were...
by Jack Carney | Aug 1, 2012 | Mad In America
So who is James Holmes and why did he do what he did? Is he a lone wolf psycho or a lone psychopath who calculatingly planned a surprise attack on unsuspecting moviegoers; who wired his apartment with high explosives yet alerted police to their presence; who...
by Jack Carney | Jul 19, 2012 | Mad In America
“The word is out!” That was Dr. Keris Myrick’s reaction when she was elected earlier this month as the new president of NAMI’s Board of Directors (personal communication). “Wow!” The reaction of many of us when we heard the news. For those of us who know Dr. Myrick,...
by Jack Carney | Jun 29, 2012 | Mad In America
New York State’s out-patient commitment program, termed Assisted Out-Patient Treatment (AOT), was instituted in 1999 to protect the general public from treatment non-compliant and presumably violent mental patients. Despite the relatively small number of treatment...
by Jack Carney | Jun 23, 2012 | Mad In America
In answer to the question posed in the title to this article, probably not for a long, long time. Or perhaps more accurately, when the entire country does. We often seem to forget that the public mental health system reflects the larger social system of which it forms...
by Jack Carney | May 24, 2012 | Mad In America
Shortly after I posted a two-part blog on this site back in February about New York’s just-approved Medicaid Health Homes, I got this crazy, ultimately grandiose idea to talk to the case managers and clients I had worked with for years as director of a New York City...
by Jack Carney | May 22, 2012 | Mad In America
Just had to share this with you. Was copied on an e-mail from Allen Frances yesterday, wherein he informed colleagues that two blogs had been posted yesterday whose principal themes were boycotting the new DSM. One was mine, posted on this site yesterday. The other...
by Jack Carney | May 21, 2012 | Mad In America
Captain Boycott was the British land agent for Lord Erne of County Mayo who, in 1880, was ostracized from the local community as part of the Irish Land League’s campaign for agrarian tenants’ rights. Rather than harvest Lord Erne’s crops, his tenants let them rot in...
by Jack Carney | May 17, 2012 | Mad In America
Sixteen million dollars are sitting in Albany, waiting to be converted into fifteen hundred apartments for adult home residents presumed to have serious mental illnesses. The task for CIAD – the Coalition of the Aged and Institutionalized Disabled – and its allies is...
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