Your Consent is Not Required

Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships (BenBella, 2023) is now available in hardcover, ePub, Kindle and audiobook by order through your local bookstore, or at Amazon, Amazon Canada, Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo, Audiobooks.com and elsewhere. Scroll down for a detailed description and to see what others have said about the book!

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About Your Consent Is Not Required

Asylums are supposed to be in the past. However, though the buildings were closed, many of the practices lived on. In fact, more law-abiding Americans today are being involuntarily committed and forcibly treated “for their own good” than at any time in history.

In the first work of investigative journalism in decades to give a comprehensive view into contemporary civil psychiatric incarceration and forced interventions, Your Consent Is Not Required exposes how rising numbers of people from many walks of life are being subjected against their will to surveillance, indefinite detention, and powerful tranquilizing drugs, restraints, seclusion, and electroshock.

There’s a common misconception that, due to asylum closures, only “dangerous” people get committed now. But forced psychiatric interventions today occur in thousands of public and private hospitals, and also in group and long-term care facilities, troubled-teen and residential treatment centers, and even in people’s own homes under outpatient commitment orders. Intended to “help,” for many people the experiences are terrifying, traumatizing, and permanently damaging.

Driven partly by individuals’ genuine concerns for the “mental health” of others, and partly by institutions entangled with goals of power, profit, and social control, psychiatric coercion is increasingly used to:

manage school children and the elderly
quell family conflicts
police the streets
control people in shelters, community living, and prisons
fraudulently increase hospital profits
“resolve” workplace disagreements
detain protesters and discredit whistleblowers

Thoroughly researched, with alarming true stories and hard data from the US and Canada, Rob Wipond’s Your Consent Is Not Required builds an unassailable case for greater transparency, vigilance, and change.

*****

Rob Wipond is a freelance investigative journalist who writes frequently about the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change. His articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards for reporting on science, medicine, law, business, and community issues.

What People Are Saying about Your Consent Is Not Required

“…timely… eye-opening… exhaustive… powerful… Wipond’s powers as an investigative journalist frequently collide with, but sometimes also overcome, the determined stonewalling of health authorities… Wipond’s comprehensive study unearths health and social services replete with poor-to-dreadful outcomes, lax oversight, and protocols seemingly rigged against those most in need.”

–Christopher Lane, Psychology Today

“Deeply researched, lucidly written… an important contribution to public policy debate and a profoundly moving, must-read call for human dignity and humane treatment for all. Highly recommended.”

–Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, Calgary Herald

“…informative… eye-opening… Having worked as a defence lawyer representing ten thousand individuals embroiled in the justice system consequent to being diagnosed with a mental disorder over 30 years at the bar, I know that Wipond’s thoughtful analysis is right on all fronts… There has not been much, if anything of this nature available in print, until now… should be required reading for anyone involved in supporting, treating, caring for or representing persons living with serious mental health issues.”

–Anita Szigeti, Law360 Canada

“…a comprehensive and authoritative report on unwanted psychiatric interventions in North America… a fabulous, albeit frightening, analysis of the myriad ways people are forced to endure unwanted psychiatric interventions, from civil commitment and forced drugging to the way employers and schools also force people, to guardianships and the surveillance of social media.”

–Jim Gottstein, author of The Zyprexa Papers and
founder of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights

“A hugely important investigation of psychiatry’s ‘extra-legal’ policing of people who have done nothing illegal but who create tension for their families or society… A vivid picture of an injustice ignored by the mainstream media.”

–Bruce E. Levine, psychologist and author of A Profession Without Reason
and Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic

“A timely, well-researched and comprehensive exposé of one of the least visible epidemics in the US: legalized force, segregation and – all too often — incapacitation in the name of psychiatric help.”

–Peter Stastny MD, psychiatrist, co-author The Lives They Left Behind
and co-editor Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry

“Your Consent Is Not Required examines a problem that gets far too little attention: the detention and forced treatment of people under civil mental health laws. Rob Wipond’s exposé is passionate, thoroughly reported and rigorously reasoned. This book grabbed my attention from the start and never let go.”

–John Horgan, Scientific American columnist, author of Mind-Body Problems,
and director of the Stevens Institute of Technology Center for Science Writings

“In the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement, for years we’ve fought against involuntary psychiatric treatments and strived for self-determination and autonomy. Featuring the stories of a wide range of psychiatric survivors, from children and seniors to Black veterans and white medical professionals, Your Consent Is Not Required is a vital contribution to discussions of the economics, politics, structural racism, and weak science behind this country’s expanding systems of forced psychiatry. And everyone should hear well its warning: This could happen to you.”

—Celia Brown, board president of MindFreedom International and founder of
Surviving Race: The Intersection of Injustice, Disability and Human Rights

“We exposed many serious, ongoing problems at a major mental health facility in Colorado that ultimately led to the facility being shut down. This ground-breaking book shows that these problems are frighteningly common and nationwide, indeed continent-wide, in scope. Wipond also provides vital information and insights about the risks of involuntary psychiatric detention that everyone should know before voluntarily entering the mental health system.”

–Tony Kovaleski, Emmy and duPont Columbia Award-winning
Chief Investigative Reporter, ABC News Denver7

“A much-needed investigation that reveals the shocking extent of psychiatric coercion in our society: How well-intentioned 911 callers, suicide hotline volunteers, police and private security guards, school teachers, housing managers, social workers, and others funnel people toward unwanted ‘treatment’ that more often oppresses than helps them.”

—Dr. Bren LeFrançois, professor at Memorial University
School of Social Work and coeditor of Mad Matters

“As someone who identifies as a former patient and survivor of involuntary psychiatry, and now works as a lawyer representing people in inpatient psychiatric facilities, many of the experiences shared in this book were, disturbingly, all too familiar. Still, I could not put this book down. From revelations about the true numbers of inpatient beds to stories of psychiatric retaliation against whistleblowers, it’s full of important and sometimes frightening insights, and should be required reading for everyone working in human rights and mental health.”

–Kathy Flaherty, Executive Director, Connecticut Legal Rights Project