Canadian Mindscape Monitor

The inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski in the Vancouver Airport after being Tasered 5 times by RCMP officers has exploded across the national and international media again following the testimony of Richmond Fire Capt. Kirby Graeme. Graeme called the RCMP officers “unprofessional” and said the RCMP officers even “obstructed” paramedics who wanted to [...]

Sorry, dearest readers, that we’ve been delinquent here at CMM lately getting posts up… We’re trying to get back on the job after binge-working on the aforementioned feature article about the rights of seniors in BC care homes. But we couldn’t let you miss today’s New York Times coverage of the latest on the lawsuit [...]

Les Leyne has written a good column for the Victoria Times-Colonist about the decision not to press charges against the RCMP officers who infamously on video killed Robert Dziekanski while he was pleading for help in Polish in a Vancouver airport: “It’s easier to blame Robert Dziekanski”. Yes, that about sums it up, right down [...]

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 [...]

Canada’s Mental Health Commission has spun off a fundraising arm, “Mental Health Partnerships of Canada”. The MHC announced recently that it had developed a “strategic alliance” between Mental Health Partnerships of Canada and the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation to raise money “to support the goals of the Mental Health Commission of Canada”. However, Mental Health [...]

Why is the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation hiding its biggest corporate funder? If you look at the “Partners and Corporate Contributors” section of their website, you see a fairly innocuous-looking list of corporate contributors:
The Frank Cowan Foundation
CIBC
CIBC World Markets Children’s Foundation
RBC Financial Group
Scotiabank
TD Bank Financial Group
That’s the whole list. But delve [...]

The Toronto Star ran two strong opinion articles in the past two days, one by Joe Fiorito, and another by Anita Szigeti, attacking the Ontario Public Service Employees Union for its recently half-aborted ad campaign.  (The Toronto Sun also ran a news article.) Szigeti points out that of the 23 recent incidents of “violence” against [...]

The controversy over the sensationalist ads by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union continues. In a Nov. 10 press release, OPSEU acknowledged the ads “may be moving”, but vowed to keep them up. However, the billboards outside Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which depicted a battered woman and implied she was beaten by [...]

It seems the Ontario Public Service Employees Union local that represents staff at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has a history of being more concerned about staff safety than patient safety. In the wake of the scandal already resulting from OPSEU’s placement of a sensationalist billboard ad yesterday, the Ontario Psychiatric Survivor Archives [...]

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union today placed this billboard of a battered woman outside Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. In a press release, OPSEU states that “OPSEU is sending the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health a message they can’t ignore — starting this week outdoor advertising will be placed directly across from the [...]

Many people arriving at CMM via search engines in recent weeks have been searching for information about the inquest into the death of Jeffrey James at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Toronto civil rights activist Don Weitz has contributed some invaluable, detailed, first-hand-account analysis on the topic to CMM. Click on the “Comments” [...]

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 [...]

CMM has to give the conventional folks driving Canada’s Mental Illness Awareness Week credit where credit is due. Despite the fact their whole website is a non-stop ad for their prominently displayed pharmaceutical company sponsors (and their media sponsors like The Globe and Mail–so will the Globe ever be able to run an objective, independent [...]

CBC news reports that Canadian psychologists want more mental health services for kids and want to know what the federal political parties plan to do about it. The article cites a Canadian Psychological Association press release that says 15% of Canadian kids, or 1.2 million of them, have mental illnesses, and that most of these [...]

Just when you’d hoped we were done with the Mental Health Commission, MHC’s fall newsletter says they’ve got $130 million to keep them covered for the next ten years of their gloriously well-conceived “anti-stigma” campaign. They also got another $110 million to conduct “research demonstration” projects on homelessness and mental illness. Though that unfortunately wasn’t [...]

From the beginning, these ridiculously insulting “anti-stigma” stamps for mental health awareness coming from Canada Post seemed strangely similar to the kind of misguided ideas we’re already accustomed to from Canada’s new Mental Health Commission… Right down to the descriptive phrase “out of the shadows” used as both the title of the MHC/Senate report and [...]

The chair of Canada’s Mental Health Commission keeps preaching his “anti-stigma” campaign to the public, and most journalists keep gobbling it up uncritically. Michael Kirby, who previously chaired the Senate Committee that issued the federal report on Canada’s mental health system, “Out of the Shadows at Last”, constantly complains about the “negative opinions” many people [...]

A Globe and Mail article includes some damning testimony from the public inquest into the death of Jeffrey James at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. After angering and embarrassing staff by performing a sexual act in front of them, James was left in restraints for FIVE DAYS in Canada’s “premier” psychiatric hospital, and [...]

Using an access to information request, the Toronto Star reports it has obtained a copy of a recent independent internal review of the RCMP’s use of tasers. According to the Star (and much to their credit, the Star has so far done much of Canada’s most incisive and critical writing on Tasers and manufacturer Taser [...]

More from the CPA conference… The Canadian Psychiatric Association’s “Stigma Working Group” is handing out t-shirts emblazoned “Proud to be a Psychiatrist — Part of the Solution”. It’s part of the increasingly bizarre, nation-wide campaign amongst mainstream mental health professionals to help “reduce the stigma” that people with “mental illnesses” face in society. At times [...]