News stories from Counterpoint
Improving Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment, and Healing
MONTPELIER – With new attention to the increases in emergency room use for mental health crises, a national expert was brought in for a conference this summer to advise local hospitals about improving the quality of care. He proposed a model called EmPath – emergency...
Join Us for Our 2021 Annual Meeting
Dear VPS Members: We want to let you know that the date of the annual meeting is changed to December 4th from 1 pm - 3pm. We look forward to seeing you there! Join the meeting with the following link: Saturday, December 4, 2021 from 1 pm EST to 4 pm EST.We...
Creative Maladjustment Week, Day 7: The Legacy of Lunacy | Jul 13, 2019
Today we’re taking part in Mad history, and celebrating the legacy of lunacy Today is the 4th annual Vermont Mad Pride celebration, this year taking place in Brattleboro, Vermont. Mad Pride events started in Toronto in the early 1990’s as a protest of local...
Report Says Up to 35 Hospital Beds Needed to Prevent ED Waits
During the public comments that followed the presentation before the Green Mountain Care Board, several people questioned whether the analysis had adequately considered community supports that could prevent hospitalization or enable discharges sooner.
Commentary
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.