Canadian Mindscape Monitor

CMM editor Rob Wipond has just published an article in Focus magazine about the overlapping mental capacity and mental health laws which allow elderly people in British Columbia to easily and quickly be stripped of all their legal rights. Check out “Who Has the Right to Control Your Life?“

San Jose Mercury News reports that Santa Clara University has recently replicated Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1974 study in which people were told to administer painful electrical shocks on others.  Due to appear in the journal American Psychologist, the new study found once again that the vast majority of people will continue to intensify torturous electrical [...]

The Globe and Mail cites perennial involuntary committal promoter and Schizophrenia Society rep John Gray as saying that 60,000 people are involuntarily treated in Canada each year. It’s a stunning statistic. And you can bet it’s actually much higher if we add in all the “treatment by forcible coercion” numbers, because it’s common practice for [...]

The recommendations from the inquest into the death of Jeffrey James at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health are being applauded by its own “voice for clients”, the Empowerment Council, in this Globe and Mail article. Certainly, CMM is always encouraged when somebody with the Coroner’s kind of public credibility states the obvious: that [...]

CBC reports that a medical ethicist at the Canadian Psychiatric Association conference is arguing BC’s Mental Health Act is the way to go for the future of psychiatric treatment in Canada. Not surprising, since BC has long been applauded by mainstream psychiatrists around North America for its “pioneering” Mental Health Act, which gives doctors essentially [...]