Human Rights Activists Challenge Heritage Foundation and E. Fuller Torrey

Online, July 24, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Today, human rights activists gathered to protest the Heritage Foundation's sponsorship of a public policy talk by E. Fuller Torrey at their Lehrman Auditorium in Washington DC. Mr. Torrey is the author of a book,The Insanity Offense: How America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens. This book actively advocates the forced drugging and confinement of persons who have been labeled "mentally ill." The Heritage Foundation is also on record as opposing ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which is currently being debated by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The issues of human rights and the advancement of mental health for all citizens are inextricably intertwined. Government-funded research documents that some 80-90 percent of those experiencing mental health crisis or extreme states are trauma survivors. These people have endured serious violations to mental and physical integrity that have compromised their trust in and connection to the human community. Accordingly, far from being curative or a viable solution, the forced 'interventions' that Mr. Torrey advocates serve only to intensify and exacerbate this urgent public health problem. Forcive responses serve to further traumatize persons who are already experiencing the effects of trauma - thereby leading to a vicious cycle in which increasingly extreme states result.

What actually is needed - and what people who have actually survived and successfully recovered from such traumas describe as helpful - is a very different response on the part of mental health system and society at large. To be truly effective in any long-term sense, interventions must support people in distress to make sense of their experience, recover from its effects and reconnect with their lives and the community fabric in which they live.

Such responses exist and include things like Intentional Peer Support by Shery Mead and Chris Hansen, Emotional CPR (from the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery and the National Empowerment Center), The Hearing Voices Network, and David Webb's work in "Thinking About Suicide." These responses are highly effective and can be offered by ordinary people in the person's natural community. They give everyone involved the opportunity to make meaning of crisis and learn from it in ways that make for richer, deeper and more intentional participation in the social web that binds us all.

An important step that the United States can take in this regard is to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CPRD). The CPRD affirms the human rights of all persons with disabilities - including those of traumatized persons who have been labeled with psychiatric disabilities. In contemporary society, the needs and concerns of such persons have been greatly misunderstand. As a result, members of this group have been unfairly marginalized and largely excluded from meaningful participation in society at large. The CPRD lays the socio-political groundwork for reconnecting such persons to the human rights and human community

Participating and concerned organizations include:

Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry
www.chrusp.org
Tina Minkowitz, Esq
tminkowitz@earthlink.net

Voices of the Heart, Inc.
http://www.voicesoftheheart.net
Daniel Hazen 518-798-1100
voicesdirector@gmail.com

The Opal Project
Lauren J. Tenney, ABD
lauren@theopalproject.org