Book release:
Tues Nov. 1, 2011, 7 pm, The Gladstone Hotel Gallery,
1214 Queen Street West @ Dufferin,
Toronto, Canada.
Featuring: Drs. Rachel Gorman and Geoffrey Reaume (Associate Proffessors in Critical Disability Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada), and, appearing on skype, Tina Minkowitz, Esq. (founder of the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry).
Free and wheelchair accessible.
About the book:
“A brave and innovative book, Tranquil Prisons is a rare academic study of psychiatric treatment written by a former mental patient. Erick Fabris' original, multidisciplinary research demonstrates how clients are pre-emptively put on chemical agents despite the possibility of alternatives. Putting forth calls for professional accountability and more therapy choices for patients, Fabris' narrative is both accessible and eye-opening.” – Erica Burman, Research Institute of Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University
Tranquil Prisons is a unique and accessible study of psychiatric treatments used as restraints. Medications assumed to be safe and effective are imposed on many patients who are neither violent nor resistant. Psychiatric drug intervention can be indefinitely prescribed through legal constraints like Ontario’s Community Treatment Orders. As choice is healthy in any medical arrangement, the author calls for an abandonment of pre-emptive toxic bio-psychological interventions, which he argues to be cruel forms of restraint and detention. Fabris is himself a former psychiatric patient and his ethnographic narrative also describes patient resistance to contemporary psychiatric practices and theories.