Tuesday, September 02, 2003

Raising Doubts About Drugs  
"After two weeks, four mental health advocates are still on a hunger strike, protesting the widespread use of prescription drugs to treat mental illnesses and challenging psychiatrists to document their rationale for prescribing them..." - and the national press is starting to take notice, as evidenced by this August 29 story in the Washington Post, which is also reprinted at Common Dreams. A few days earlier Activist strikes over psychiatrists' faith in drug therapy appeared in the Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard, profiling activist David Oaks, but news coverage in the mainstream press has generally been scarce, with the only coverage of the strike's early days appearing in local (California) sources. I learned of (and have kept up on) the hunger strike through the e-mail alert service available through Mind Freedom, the activist organization Oaks is closely affiliated with. At their web site, there's a long page indexing a wide variety of materials related to the action, such as the strikers' official statement of demands, the text of a cover letter sent from hunger strikers to APA, NAMI & Office of Surgeon General, biographies and photos of the participants, an index of news stories and daily updates. There's also a web site by the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights and an index of links on "the debate" underlying the strike and reactions to it, including a number of documents not available through the Mind Freedom site.