Canadian Mindscape Monitor

Sorry, dear readers, that we’ve been delinquent in our posts. Too much work, too little pay for this blogging (i.e. none!) etc etc… But we do feel it’s important to follow up on an earlier story.  When asked by CMM if he could provide even one scientific reference for his grandiose claims to the media [...]

“Treat mental health problems early, avoid trouble later” is the headline for an article today in the Halifax, Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald on mental illness in children and youth.  The main source cited is Dr. Stan Kutcher:
“Caught early, the mental disorders that might otherwise derail young lives can be treated very effectively, said Dr. [...]

Various and sundry Canadian media covered with relatively little fanfare or controversy the recent decision of sitting “independent” Senator Lillian Dyck to become a Liberal.  Along the way, they casually described her background, which includes a PhD in Biological Psychiatry and studies into antidepressants and antipsychotics. She’s also patented some mental health drugs herself.  So [...]

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 [...]

This is rich. British Columbia’s Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman told the Victoria Times-Colonist that the government was engaged in a review of the BC Mental Health Act, partly with an eye to begin forcing homeless people into emergency shelters on cold nights. This comment came in the wake of a Vancouver [...]

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 [...]

In response to the enormous public embarrassment they’ve suffered in the past when it was revealed how much more political and economic the whole process is than scientific, all the psychiatrists working on the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have had to sign non-disclosure agreements about the process, according [...]

A Masters student from Toronto’s York University has started a petition to save the old Weyburn Asylum in Saskatchewan. Her plea included on this blog post reminds us of some of the history of international significance which took place within its walls. For a long time a veritable hell-hole warehouse for patients, Weyburn eventually became [...]

The Canadian Press is reporting that the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada is “endorsing the principles” of a April 2008 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges which recommended cutting off the stream of kickbacks and perks like free pizza parties, refrigerators and sunbelt trips being given to med students by pharmaceutical [...]

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 [...]

We here at CMM have been worrying that we might one day see striking workers and protesters rounded up, declared mentally ill and forcibly sedated en masse, but it seems that day has already arrived and psychiatrist Dr. Lyle Rossiter has gone much further than our worst nightmares. We thought it was actually a viral [...]

U.S. National Public Radio has finally fired its psychiatrist talkshow host, Dr.  Frederick Goodwin of “The Infinite Mind”. The New York Times reports he potted $1.3 million in kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies — much more than NPR ever paid him to host the show no doubt — during his 7-year tenure. “The fact that he [...]

A rare opportunity to hear a good interview with Dr. Thomas Szasz, one of the few high profile psychiatrists who regularly attacks the foundations of psychiatry and the concepts surrounding “mental health” and “mental illness” at his Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility…

“Powerful antipsychotic medicines are being used far too cavalierly in children, and federal drug regulators must do more to warn doctors of their substantial risks, a panel of federal drug experts said Tuesday,” begins an article in the New York Times today. CMM would like to hope this marks the turning of the tide of [...]

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 [...]