Dear Boston Globe Spotlight Team: Access to Care is About So Much More than Public Safety

The Boston Globe Spotlight Team -- the investigative reporting team featured in the Oscar-winning, best pictureSpotlight -- is doing a six-part series on the shambles the mental health system has become in Massachusetts.  And make no mistake, their system is a shambles.  The series is called The Desperate and the Dead, and while I understand that journalism involves sensationalism to get people to read, the emphasis on violence in these articles is striking, and unnecessarily provocative.  It's stigmatizing and distracts from the real issues.  This from an author who has abook coming out shortly about psychiatry's role in preventing violence.So the first article came out in late June, about people who can't, don't, or won't get care and kill their parents. It was written about desperate and dead family members.  The second came out 10 days later and focused on police interventions, and the third was published today.  In the meantime, the Spotlight team has set up aFacebook pagefor commenters and there are over 1,100 members and even with a 6 week hiatus between articles, the commenting and bickering is incessant, it has become pro-versus-anti psychiatry, do meds work anyway? And the tension over forced care is enormous.  150 People demonstrated outside the Globe one day to protest the series.Today's article starts out well -- a man is talking to his therapist about his grief after his son has died by an overdose, and during this heartfelt se...
Source: Shrink Rap - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Source Type: blogs