ENUSP publishes the open letter in reaction to the latest issue of World Psychiatry (Volume 18, Issue 1, February 2019), an official journal of the WPA. We would like to express our concerns in regard to both its content, as well as the perspectives excluded when putting this issue together.
We would particularly like to draw attention to the Editorial: while discussing the challenges of implementation of the CRPD, the author presents ‘ignoring, reinterpreting or amending the CRPD’ as ways forward, and concludes that governments should “ignore the Convention when it would interfere with a commonsense approach” (Appelbaum, 2019:2). This is nothing less than an official call by the WPA to ignore international law and the hard-won rights of persons with disabilities, including those with psychosocial disabilities as enshrined in the CRPD.
We write this open letter from the perspectives of those who have been denied legal capacity, whose will and preferences have been ignored and their “best interests” defined by experts; we write from the perspectives of those who have been abused by forced psychiatric treatment and are traditionally and purposefully being excluded from spaces such as this journal, where our lives are being debated. Indeed, the CRPD is precisely there to ensure that what we have to say is not silenced and marginalised any longer. Apart from ENUSP, the letter is signed by the Absolute Prohibition Campaign, the Red Esfera Latinoamericana de la Diversidad Psicosocial, the TCI Asia Pacific and the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (WNUSP).
See the text of the Open letter to WPA (pdf)
The Open letter was also published by Mad in America: see the article here