News stories from Counterpoint
Legislature Considers Peer Mental Health Bills
The first week of Vermont’s legislative session saw the introduction of two bills that would dramatically advance the development of peer-based mental health services in the state. Five peer-led mental health organizations – Alyssum, Another Way, MadFreedom, Pathways...
New Use-of-Force Policy for Police Takes Effect
Vermont’s first statewide use-of-force policy for police went into effect on Oct. 1, 2021. In preparation, law enforcement officers received in-person training by the Vermont Police Academy in August and September, with a self-identified psychiatric survivor providing...
Act 114 Petitions Decline Slightly in FY21
On Jan. 15, the Vermont General Assembly learned that the Department of Mental Health (DMH) recorded 50 incidences of court-approved involuntary non-emergency psychiatric medication in Vermont hospitals in fiscal year 2021 (FY21), which began on July 1, 2020, and...
DMH Seeks New Pediatric Psych Ward
Amid emergency department logjams across Vermont, the Department of Mental Health (DMH) issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a new inpatient psychiatric unit for children and adolescents on Jan. 28. The Brattleboro Retreat is the only hospital in the state that...
First Forensic Mental Health Report Arrives
The Vermont Department of Mental Health (DMH) delivered the first of two mandated reports by its Forensic Care Working Group to the legislature on Jan. 15, in accordance with Act 57. Passed in 2021, the law initiated a process to contemplate new restrictions, as well...
Executive Budget Calls for Additional Mobile Response
On Jan. 18, Gov. Scott released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2023. It calls for $7.7 billion in spending by the state, which would represent an increase of $350 million over the previous year. The executive budget recommends an appropriation of $287,273,887 for...
Counterpoint Articles Archives
Arts and commentary from Counterpoint
Longtime Windsor County Poet Becomes First-Time Author
In November, the Cape Cod-based publisher Wrinkled Sea Press released Sidelong Glances, the debut poetry collection by prolific Counterpoint contributor Dennis Rivard. The volume’s unusual journey to publication began with a poem printed in a high school yearbook half...
Mental Health Consumers Raise Voices on Advocacy Day
Vermonters delivered the following testimonies, among others, before legislators, nonprofit leaders, clinicians, and peers at Mental Health Advocacy Day, whose four-hour schedule concluded with a story-sharing session on Jan. 31. The annual event, normally held at the...
Four Poems
Poetry by Wim Alden (Woodstock, VT) A more developed thoughtI cannot bearFather leads the wayWith hardly a sideways glanceBrother trudges onKeeping up, forging a duplicate trailI sink, I swimIt depends upon the day. *** My therapeutic home is adequateI have a bedThere...
Walking Through Depression
Prose by Amanda Perry (North Hartland, VT) I walk through a darkened path only large enough for me to fit through. I move side to side, I feel the rough bark of the trees next to me. Turning my head toward the sky I see nothing but darkness. The trees are so dense and...
Editorial: All Politics Are the Politics of Mental Health
January marked the five-year anniversary of the suicide of the British critic and theorist Mark Fisher, whose short book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? has, since its publication in 2009, become a classic of contemporary left-wing political philosophy....
Homelessness and Resulting Trauma
Commentary by Morgan W. Brown Although I have been housed for nearly twelve and a half years now, all these years later I have still felt the effects of severe trauma from having previously lived unhoused (aka homeless). Some people don't seem to realize or understand...
‘Medicating Normal’ Sounds Another Warning on Psychiatric Drugs
More than a decade has passed since the journalist Robert Whitaker authored the controversial exposé Anatomy of an Epidemic, which gathered reams of evidence in support of a central claim that psychiatric medication has hurt far more people than it has helped....
Coercion in Survival Benefits
At this year’s Alternatives conference in Washington, Calvin Moen, Kaz DeWolfe and I gave a presentation on the elements of psychiatric coercion that members of our community face in accessing survival benefits.
This was an effort on our part to broaden the scope of discussions that occur in the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement to consider coercion more broadly.
All the people who attended our workshop were recipients of survival benefits and had a great deal to contribute to the discussion. They spoke to the precarious nature of life on benefits, as well as to the degree to which participation in the benefits system limits their ability to determine the conditions of their care.
“Alternatives” — Plural
This was my second consecutive year attending the Alternatives conference. Like last year, I distinctly felt that there were (at least) two separate conferences happening concurrently.
One of these conferences centers the experience and perspective of a user of mental health services who is in recovery from a mental illness and has joined the peer workforce to serve others who are experiencing what they have gone through.
The other conference centers the experience and perspective of a survivor of psychiatric harm who works to resist and dismantle the coercive and forceful psychiatric system and to reinstate the human and civil rights of those who have been deemed mad.