PAIMI Advisory Council Empowerment Project

PsychRights' mission is to mount a strategic litigation campaign against forced psychiatric drugging and electroshock, which also involves fighting against psychiatric incarceration, euphemistically called "involuntary commitment. The current mental health system, largely driven by psychiatric incarceration and forced drugging, is reducing the recovery rate for people diagnosed with serious mental illness from a possible 80% to 5%, and reducing life spans by 20-25 years. See, Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes (Report).

No more than 10% of those psychiatrically incarcerated in the United States actually meet the statutory and constitutional requirements for depriving people of their right to be free from confinement. While adults are certainly entitled to decide to take psychiatric drugs, no one can be constitutionally drugged against their will because that requires the forced drugging be in the person's best interest and there are no less intrusive alternatives, neither of which can be legitimately proven.  As the Report documents, there are many safe, proven, and humane, approaches that could and should be employed.  It is a denial of people's rights to lock them up and/or drug them against there will when such less restrictive or intrusive approaches could be provided instead.

The federal Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) Act funds an army of lawyers to "ensure that the rights of individuals with mental illness are protected" through the Protection and Advocacy (P&A) agencies in each state and other jurisdictions. To do this the P&As are required to have Advisory Councils, called "PAIMI Advisory Councils," or "PACs" for short, to jointly determine the PAIMI Act priorities with their P&As.

PsychRights believes the P&A System's army of lawyers should be deployed against the massive and pervasive violation of people's rights and infliction of great harm through psychiatric incarceration and forced drugging, and the PsychRights PAIMI Advisory Council Empowment Project is about empowering the PACs to make this happen under their statutory authority to jointly determine their P&A's priorities.

Recommended language for this priority is:

	Ensure that the rights of people to not be
	(1)  psychiatrically confined, and/or (2)  drugged or electroshocked against their will,
	unless the constitutional, statutory, and judicial requirements for such massive deprivations of liberty exist, be protected, including the right to the least restrictive and least intrusive alternative respectively.

There will be a meeting for people aligned with this purpose on November 20, 2024 at 6:30 PM Eastern Time, for which registration is required.

There are also a couple of presentations for which video and materials are available.

• June 5, 2024, Judi's Room, PAIMI Advisory Councils: 800 Pound Gorillas?

  • Slides from presentation

  • SAMHSA's Lisa Stallworth's stunning appearance at  56:35, 1:21:04, 1:29:22, and 2:00:43 

• September 21, 2024, ISPS-US Community Chat.

  • Slides from presentation

James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq., the president of PsychRights, is willing to attend PAC meetings and PAC meetings with their P&A to support PAC members who wish to establish the priority of ensuring peoples rights not to be psychiatric imprisoned or drugged or electroshocked against their will are protected.  Mr. Gottstein is also willing to meet with PACs, groups of PAC members, and individual PAC members or people who are interested in becoming PAC members, to discuss how the PAIMI Advisory Councils can exercise their authority to jointly determine their P&A's priorities to make people's rights not to be psychiatrically imprisoned, drugged or electroshocked against their will a priority.  This includes talking about the factual and legal bases for achieving this goal.

To contact the PsychRights PAIMI Advisory Council Empowerment Project, e-mail PAIMI@psychrights.org.

Resources

• Find Your P&A at the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN)
• Full P&A List