As I reported in early April, Douglas Brown of Burlington, Ontario who suffers from schizophrenia was found not guilty of assaulting two Joseph Brant Hospital staff and of attempting to grab a police officer's revolver. The judge, in his findings stated "this case is an indictment of the...

Physicians, health thyself.

May 24th is Schizophrenia Awareness Day in Canada -- and the month of May is Mental Health month -- but a disturbing study just presented at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting in San Francisco demonstrates just how prejudiced many health providers are towards those...

The month of May in Canada has in it one week devoted to mental illness awareness and one day devoted to schizophrenia awareness. But, nothing for the parents of the mentally ill who suffer almost as much as their children. We parents carry much of the...

Almost two and half years of hell ended for Douglas Brown, a 40-year-old man with schizophrenia from Burlington, Ontario, when Justice Stephen D. Brown of the Ontario Court of Justice on April 8, 2013 found him not guilty of assault against hospital staff and for attempting to steal...

What is it about psychiatry that generates so much animosity from the lay public? Psychiatric treatment strategies and the science upon which they are based do not differ from that of gastroenterology or cardiology. We do not see the antipathy towards medications for atrial fibrilation or gastroesophegeal reflux disease (GERD)...

Prime Minister Harper wants to enhance the safety of victims harmed by the violence of the untreated mentally ill with proposed changes to the Criminal Code in his Not Criminally Responsible Reform (NCR) Act (Bill C-54). Debates on the changes have just begun but his proposed changes ignored...

Legislation introduced by Stephen Harper to amend the Criminal Code to protect the public from those found not criminally responsible for their acts (Bill C-54) is overly simplistic. It is an effort to bring about changes in how we deal with violent behaviour on the part of a...

Reaction to a tragedy in Victoria, B.C. exemplifies the disconnect that exists in our views of adequate care for those with serious mental illness. Alex Conte, a 21-year-old Sooke, B.C. man was found not criminally responsible for killing his mother due to his mental illness.

According to...

As absurd as it may seem, there is a myth that continues to grow after mass shootings and that is that the cause of these shootings are psychiatric medications themselves. A January 8 letter to the Toronto Star headlined "Preventing Another Newtown" pointed out that "The perpetrators of...

Hopefully, the horrors of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting will lead to a more sensible attitude to violence and mental illness and to improved treatment for the hardest to treat. Whenever a tragedy like this occurs, mental health bureaucrats repeat their mantra that violence is not typical for the mentally ill...

The best comment I've seen so far on the Connecticut tragedy is that events like this would never happen if accessing mental health services was as easy as getting guns. It first appeared on the Facebook page of mental health advocate, Andy Electroboy Behrman, but is the head...

Selective quotes taken out of context do not benefit our understanding of serious and persistent mental illness. So, imagine my surprise when I discover that the Mad in America people are using an academic paper by Dr. Robert Zipursky of McMaster University as proof of the...

Mental health advocate Lembi Buchanan of Victoria, B.C. released a new report called Emergence of the Recovery Movement: Are medications taking a back seat to recovery? She points out that the popular recovery model threatens to take centre stage at the expense of the urgent needs...

A residence for eight teenage girls with mental illnesses is caught in the middle of an upcoming fight at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) between the City of Hamilton Ontario and the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). And the OHRC deserves credit for stepping into the fray to protect the...

The first week of October is Mental Illness Awareness week in Canada and the organizers, the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health, are to be congratulated for talking about mental illness rather than mental health problems and mental health issues. These are illnesses and we should...

A recently released report on human rights, mental health and addictions from the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) ventures into areas that they have no expertise with: actual treatment for serious mental illness. By doing so without proper understanding, they confound the topic.

On p.93, the Commission talks...

When I first heard that the U.S. cable channel, TNT, was producing a series about a neuroscientist with paranoid schizophrenia called Perception, I was ecstatic. Finally, we're going to see someone with schizophrenia who is not a crazed killer but is, like many with schizophrenia, doing well. Then...

In July, I reported on the possibility that alternative medicine may have led to death in the case of Jordan Ramsey in Vancouver. Ramsay murdered his father and severely injured his mother while in a schizophrenic psychotic state. He had stopped his prescription medication at that time in...

It is regrettable that almost all the information that people get about schizophrenia occurs when someone with this disease commits a violent act. And most perpetrators, if not all, are untreated. It is now coming out that James Holmes, the alleged Colorado shooter, had been seeing a psychiatrist...

It was a tragedy that some of us feared would happen and it did. And LeeAnn Ramsay wants an investigation. On Friday, the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that 27-year-old Jordan Ramsay, who suffers from schizophrenia and who killed his father and severely injured his mother, is not criminally responsible to...