National Public Radio’s show “Justice Talking” featured discussions with representatives of ‘both sides of the story’ about the issue of involuntary psychiatric drugging of people out in their own neighborhoods and homes using court orders.

Debate on forced outpatient psychiatric drugging

Michael Allen defends freedom of choice in mental health care on National Public Radio.

MICHAEL ALLEN, a MindFreedom member in Washington, D.C. area who is an attorney, debated the issue of forced outpatient psychiatric drugging on the National Public Radio show “Justice Talking.”

Representing the other side, promoting more forced outpatient psychiatric drugging, was a representative from the Treatment Advocacy Center. Significantly, this is one of the first times the main representative was not attorney Mary Zdanowicz who served as founding executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), or psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, who has made promoting forced drugging a focus of his career.

Ms. Zdanowicz left the employment of TAC suddenly to return to the “environmental” field.

On the NPR show, the representative defending forced outpatient psychiatric drugging was a member of the Stanley family that actually funds TAC, attorney Jonathan Stanley.

Jonathan Stanley, who is now acting director of TAC, has experienced the psychiatric system personally. He uses his experience as a “mental health consumer” to promote more forced psychiatric drugging for others. All known organizations actually run by mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors oppose the expansion of involuntary psychiatric drugs.

The show aired the week of 20 August 2007.

An archive of the show may be heard at:

http://www.justicetalking.org/programarchive.asp