988: Is it harming more than helping? Wildflower Alliance hosted a discussion with me, psychiatric survivor and 988 victim Emily Wu Truong, and 988 consultant Jess Stohlman-Rainey about the latest known and still-not-known about 988 in the U.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84ysd8kB5Y
This article was previously published in the Globe and Mail. Crisis hotlines, like Canada’s new 988, promise confidentiality. So why do so many trace calls and texts? * Rob Wipond is an investigative journalist and author of Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships. * A teen
As contacts to the new 988 hotline number have risen, so have call tracing and police interventions, and 81,000 Americans in the past ten months have been subjected to coercive pressure or covert call tracing followed by unrequested visits from police and ambulance and psychiatric detentions. Read the story at Mad in America.
Many callers who call 988 or other mental health help hotlines believe they're anonymous, but get subjected to call traces, unwanted interventions, and police coming to forcibly take them to psychiatric hospitals. The numbers are much higher than is ordinarily publicly admitted by the managers of 988 and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
As uses of psychiatric force expand, can social media be better used to focus critical attention? The most reliable data available suggests that millions of Americans from many walks of life have been subjected to psychiatric detentions and treatment against their will, and millions more have experienced unwanted psychiatric coercion under threat of commitment.
