In July 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14321, encouraging states to expand the use of involuntary psychiatric treatment and civil commitment. While many headlines describe this as “bringing back asylums,” the proposal is less about reopening the massive institutions of the past and more about increasing the use of psychiatric hospitals, long-term treatment facilities, and other locked institutional settings. For many psychiatric survivors, disabled people, and abolitionists, this raises profound concerns. History has repeatedly shown that when societies respond to distress through coercion, confinement, and forced treatment, the people most impacted are often those already marginalized—people experiencing poverty, homelessness, trauma, disability, racism, transphobia, and social exclusion. Institutionalization has long been justified as “care,” yet too often it has resulted in the loss of autonomy, family separation, trauma, abuse, neglect, and indefinite confinement. This executive order shifts the conversation away from addressing the root causes of suffering—such as housing insecurity, poverty, trauma, isolation, lack of voluntary support, and systemic injustice—and toward expanding the state’s power to confine people deemed mentally ill or unable to care for themselves. An abolitionist perspective asks a different question: What if people don’t need more coercion—they need more choice, more community, more housing, more peer support, more economic security, and more opportunities to heal outside of institutions? Rather than investing billions into expanding psychiatric confinement, what could become possible if those resources were directed toward voluntary, peer-led, trauma-informed, community-based supports that honor dignity, autonomy, and self-determination? Discussion Questions - What feelings come up for you when you hear about expanded involuntary treatment? - How has institutionalization or coercive treatment impacted you or your community? - What would meaningful alternatives to psychiatric incarceration look like? - If we truly wanted people to thrive, what would we invest in instead?

Hi everyone! 💙 Our Unlock Psych Reading Circle meets this Thursday at 5:30 PM Pacific, and I’d love your input before we gather. We’ve been reading Mad in America by Robert Whitaker, but since we haven’t gotten very far into it, I wanted to check in with everyone. Would you like to continue with Mad in America, or would you rather start fresh with a new book? When we first started the Reading Circle, this was our original list of books we were considering: 📖 Unlock Psych Reading Circle Books - Mad in America — Robert Whitaker - Committed — Dinah Miller & Annette Hanson - Desperate Remedies — Andrew Scull - Experiences of Mental Health In-Patient Care — Mark Hardcastle, David Kennard, Sheila Gradison, & Leonard Fagin - Healthy Minds in the Twentieth Century: In and Beyond the Asylum — Steven J. Taylor & Alice Brumby - Narratives of Recovery from Serious Mental Illness — William Tucker - Speaking Our Minds: An Anthology — Jim Read & Jill Reynolds - The First Resort — Mathew Smith - The Source & Development of Social & Community Psychiatry — David G. Satin You’re also welcome to suggest any other book you’d love for us to read together! I’m very resourceful when it comes to finding free, legal digital copies or library access, so don’t hesitate to recommend something that’s meaningful to you. There will be no need to purchase the book unless you want a physical copy for yourself as I will likely be able to get a digital copy of the book for us. I also have a quite a large personal collection of digital mental health books such as books on philosophy, recovery, therapy workbooks, psychology, somatic healing, therapeutic modalities, self-help, fiction, autobiographies etc. if you would like any ebooks. Please message me if you would like any access to it. Please leave your thoughts in the comments preferable before the Reading Circle on Thursday. Since we likely won't have a definite book from many answers by Thursday since today is Wednesday, I'll plan on just continuing to read Mad in America or perhaps some poetry tomorrow until we gather more responses for the final decision later on. Or perhaps we can sample some of the books tomorrow and explore what we might want to decide on. That might be a good way to decide what to choose! 🤗

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9716886587868/WN_jvrjVmQRRH-HTQsMqQRpFQ#/registration

Hey everyone! Just wanted to check-in and remind you that there's a meeting today on our new Skool platform. I'm so excited to be able to explore meetings in this space. I hope it's a good fit and that it works for everyone! I look forward to seeing you at our meeting in a bit. ☺️

I know it can be hard getting to know a new platform, but I want to warmly welcome you all to Skool and offer you a space to introduce yourselves here and get to share anything you'd like about yourself. Thank you for navigating alongside me as we walk through the transition from Discord to Skool. I wanted to share that we have our first Skool meeting coming up this coming Monday at 3pm Pacific time. I look forward to seeing you there if you can make it! 🙂