The Fight Against Involuntary Commitment
Protection & Advocacy organizations have a chance to lead the way -- or be wiped out by the new U.S. federal administration.
I started actively working on my new article, published on Saturday in Mad in America, about eight months ago. The story is titled, “The Fight Against Involuntary Commitment: Are Protection & Advocacy Organizations Fulfilling Their Mission?” You can read the story in its entirety by following the link above to the Mad in America website.
The United States has politically shifted a lot over those eight months—and kept shifting underneath the story as I worked on it, right up to deadline.
Basically, in the article, I examine the past and present of federally funded, state-level Protection & Advocacy organizations, and in particular their “PAIMI Advisory Councils” that are statutorily required to be 60% comprised of people with lived experience of mental health care facilities and services. This was a system deliberately set up to empower people with lived experience, and to give these peers, survivors, and consumers significant authority and funding to guide attorneys in defending the fundamental legal rights of people labeled with mental illnesses.
I respect, value, and even admire the work that some of these organizations have done. In Your Consent Is Not Required, I cite data and insights from a lot of their research, reports, and class-action lawsuits in states around the country. And a few of them have in turn invited me to speak to their staff about my work and findings.
However, as I found through extensive research and interviewing, in many states there are serious questions about how effectively these organizations are doing their mandated job—and if they’re truly listening to their Advisory Councils. I also came across some inspiring examples, and good ideas being proposed for how these organizations could take leading roles in the fight against rising rates of involuntary commitment.
Unfortunately, the Trump Administration and its new Health and Human Services (HHS) director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have been rapidly implementing dramatic cuts across HHS—so rapidly, it seems impossible for anyone but a Trump-Musk ideologue to believe there’s any true thoughtfulness going on regarding priorities. And if that weren’t enough to raise concern, in a 2026 HHS budget proposal leaked last week, these very Protection & Advocacy organization Advisory Councils and their linked funding are explicitly targeted for massive, devastating, and in some states potentially fatal cuts.
I feel a bit like a person who was walking down the street having a political debate with a friend, only for the friend to suddenly get hit by a truck.
I still believe that the article can contribute constructively to greater public awareness of the good that Protection & Advocacy organizations and their PAIMI Advisory Councils do, and could potentially do more of. And I also hope that it might help spark some much-needed debates within and outside these organizations about their priorities and ways of working. Ideally, the proposals for change that people with lived experience shared with me will help reinvigorate and strengthen these organizations for the important battles ahead. Because, I need to be clear, I sure as hell don’t want to see these organizations thoughtlessly hacked down—they are one of relatively few government-funded entities that can and sometimes do investigate, publicly report, and fight back against the abuses of involuntary commitment.
Read the article here. Since in principle Congress has the power to decide whether or not to accept the HHS budget proposals, you may want to contact your members of the House and Senate and encourage them to do their jobs by defending bipartisan initiatives of Congress like PAIMI Advisory Councils and Protection & Advocacy organizations.
And please contact me at any time at news@robwipond.com to let me know of stories and issues surrounding involuntary commitment that you think I should be aware of or looking into, as I continue to explore what PsychForce Report can be.
YES defend advocacy organizations from federal budget cuts -- AND maybe we should be asking why for decades they failed to achieve their goals ***when they were funded***?
It's a bit like being innocent and locked up in prison and your lawyer keeps getting paid to get you released... and three decades later you are still locked up and suddenly your lawyer starts yelling that their funding just got cut.
Defending federal funding without talking about movement failures and cooptation is just a recipe for repeating the past.
What happens if the funding gets restored? It's just going to be under threat again of new budget cuts.
Is our movement about defending the budgets of paid advocates while we fail to win our goals?
(Ah yes, there are those who will say "But we HAVE been meeting our goals." That's not how movements win - reduce the bar of success to small changes that can be taken away at any moment. Define "success" as getting funded for a tiny number of innovative programs while the overall situation of oppression just keeps worsening. -- and yes psychiatric oppression today is worse than in 1970. If Dr. King had that strategy there would be five integrated lunch counters and the rest of Jim Crow would be in place and worse, just with a budget for professional civil rights reform advocate grants added in.)
Mentally ill Americans are at more risk today than we have been for many decades now, as per the hate-centric attitudes at the top of our nation's filth ridden food chain at this time. And I agree that at least some advocacy resources fail to the heed the voices of mentally ill Americans, and may function so haphazardly as to be all but useless in terms of better defending the rights of mentally ill American. I am but one voice that has all but singlehandedly brought about long past due federal oversight and intervention to two (2) different state managed mental hospitals in two (2) different states since my first diagnosis of mental illness in 2010, and have accrued over 3.25 years of in-patient time in these settings. As with other oppressor-to-oppressed relationships over the far greater course of human history, as a male American citizen who just happens to be mentally ill I am comfortable in saying that I have come to understand the basic choices and behaviors of many of these male American psychiatrists than they can understand in their own right. It is, thus, the behaviors of the contemporary American psychiatrist that most needs direct attention today, while the APA simply must be subject to deep and lasting reform, and be required to provide reasonably independent oversight of the behaviors of its collective membership- the doctors. The attendant need remains clear for the American people to again raise our voices and again tell the APA and these doctors how to and how not to behave. Responsible adult American citizens have had to do this more than once in contemporary US history. Thank you for your own good work, Mr. Wipond (Rob), and for sharing your own work with the American people and myself personally. Author-editor "PJ Reed. The Arizona State Hospital and Patient Abuse 2011-2015; "PJ Reed. Montana State Hospital. Montana's Forgotten Suicides" 2016-19: "To All Serious Problems There are Always Solutions" current-ongoing.