Press release for Nonviolent Psychiatry!

Joint press release from the BPE bpe-online.de and die-BPE:

Under this title the only two nation-wide organizations of users and survivors of psychiatry united in a coalition against forced psychiatry and campaign for a Nonviolent Psychiatry now. Because the attempt for a dialogue with the German Psychiatric Association DGPPN* about how finally the provisions of the UN-CRPD for a non-violent psychiatry are to be fulfilled, failed. German psychiatry doggedly clings to coercion and violence in order to deny the human rights that have to be realized in Germany since 2009 due to the ratified UN CRPD in a Non-violent Psychiatry !

In doing so, the DGPPN no longer proves itself to be acting independently, but acts as if it had been brought into line by the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in order to bend the human rights spelled out in the UN CRPD. The WPA has pretended in the editorial of its WPA Journal 2/2019 that: “…ignore the CRPD, reinterpret it or amend it” and that mental health professional societies should persuade governments to “ignore the Convention”.

On 23.7.2021 we asked the DGPPN for the first time to organize and host a conference with the title Nonviolent Psychiatry! together with us, but on an equal footing, because after the publication of the concept by Martin Zinkler and Sebastian von Peter (see: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/8/3/19)
the question of how non-violent psychiatry is to be implemented politically with the abolition of the special psychiatric laws is no longer a question of whether but rather how it is to be implemented. To their evasive answer of 18.8.2021 we asked for a precise answer on 3.9. On 8.9. our proposal was again rejected and they tried to set their own hegemonic ideas against it. On 20.11. we asked the DGPPN to decide in its committees how the implementation will be carried out in daily practice, so that psychiatry for the future makes itself morally innocent and becomes compliant with human rights as they are spelled out in the UN CRPD.

Our patience is now at an end, so we are now prepared for no participation in any event of the DGPPN in an alleged “Trialogical format”, since the DGPPN answer on 24.2.2022 was only meaningless and arrogant.

Those responsible and who rule in German psychiatry want to exercise violence, even if it has become incompatible with human rights. There is no longer any excuse that they “have to” exercise violence, no they want to be violent. This may come as a surprise to some, but it was already indicated in 2018 in our joint survey of almost all German psychiatric hospitals with closed wards. The title of its evaluation: Psychiatry – clueless and incapable of learning.** Michel Foucault called this willingness for violence of forced psychiatry a “dungeon system with a torture regime”.

We therefore kindly request you to sign and support our online campaign collecting signatures by redistributing them: www.tinyurl.com/no-coercion
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* German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology (DGPPN).
** see here: https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/2018/03/umfrage-psychiatrie-ist-merkbefreit-lernresistent (Please click on the flag in the drop-down translation box on the top right corner and choose your language for translation)

Best regards
rene talbot
(Secretary of IAAPA and member of the board of a national German survivor organization)