Local campaign on compulsory treatment

Aspies may have past experiences and/or future worries with the mental health system. We have contact with it for getting diagnoses, and some folks have ongoing contact with it over coping issues or anxiety or depression. We may have had aspie life problems grouped under the mental health label in the past, or be dealing with services where there is still an overlap.

So we are concerned with the safety of our civil liberties, and the fact that aspieness is not a mental illness and aspies are still ordinary citizens. We must be on guard against any reading of mental health issues into what are actually aspie items, and any impulse to turn them into grounds for authoritarian interventions by the mental health system.

Edinburgh Users' Forum, which is part of the local collective advocacy for mental health, is doing a local campaign on the problems arising in compulsory treatment or the threat of it. Whether interventions were unjust, the effect of being threatened with them or actually suffering them, the practicalities observed by the system when making an intervention, and whether it was avoidably frightening. They are looking for personal stories to draw info from.

So if the mental health system features as an issue in either your present or your past, please respond at the following link...

www.surveymonkey.com/s/7CTRGL2

... to speak out about it.

Even if you have not experienced anything to do with compulsory treatment, but just you have made or wanted to make an "Advance Statement", like a living will that will apply if it ever happens, you can still valuably respond. They want to know about this too. Advance Statements were introduced in 2005 but folks are still finding it difficult or confusing to get information about them.