Career
Since 1977,Kupers has been actively involved in community mental health and forensic psychiatry. He began his forensic pscyhiatry career by providing expert testimony in the case of Rutherford vs. Pitchess,where prisoners sued Los Angeles County because their jail violated their human rights. [10] He also provided testimony in the case of Ashker v. Brown,which ended the use of long-term solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison in California. [11] [7]
In 1981,Kupers joined the faculty of the Wright Institute's Clinical Psychology program,where he is now a professor emeritus. Over the years,Kupers has taught a variety of courses,both at the Wright Institute and at other graduate schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Classes he has taught include Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts,Social Psychopathology,Brief Psychotherapy,and Forensic and Correctional Mental Health. [5] [10]
Kupers has served as a consultant for various human and civil rights campaigns,including those of Human Rights Watch and Disability Rights California. [12] [13]
Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an incarcerated person lives in a single cell with little or no contact with other people. It is a punitive tool used within the prison system to discipline or separate incarcerated individuals who are considered to be security risks to other incarcerated individuals or prison staff, as well as those who violate facility rules or are deemed disruptive. However, it can also be used as protective custody for incarcerated individuals whose safety is threatened by other prisoners. This is employed to separate them from the general prison population and prevent injury or death.
Edwin Fuller Torrey, is an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher. He is associate director of research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI) and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a nonprofit organization whose principal activity is promoting the passage and implementation of outpatient commitment laws and civil commitment laws and standards in individual states that allow people diagnosed with severe mental illness to be involuntarily hospitalized and treated throughout the United States.
There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent.
Forensic psychiatry is a subspeciality of psychiatry and is related to criminology. It encompasses the interface between law and psychiatry. According to the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, it is defined as "a subspecialty of psychiatry in which scientific and clinical expertise is applied in legal contexts involving civil, criminal, correctional, regulatory, or legislative matters, and in specialized clinical consultations in areas such as risk assessment or employment." A forensic psychiatrist provides services – such as determination of competency to stand trial – to a court of law to facilitate the adjudicative process and provide treatment, such as medications and psychotherapy, to criminals.
George Jack Makari is a psychiatrist and historian. He serves as director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, which encompasses the Oskar Diethelm Library at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also a Professor of Psychiatry. Makari's work has been widely reviewed, and he is well known among historians of the mind sciences, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis for Revolution in Mind, The Creation of Psychoanalysis and Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. His recent work, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, won the 87th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in the nonfiction category. He was the Director and Attending Psychiatrist of a sliding scale Psychotherapy Clinic at Payne Whitney Clinic from 1991-2016.
The Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry is a psychiatric hospital and Russia's main center of forensic psychiatry. In the past, the institution was called the Serbsky Institute.
The Austen Riggs Center is a psychiatric treatment facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was founded by Austen Fox Riggs in 1913 as the Stockbridge Institute for the Study and Treatment of Psychoneuroses before being renamed in honor of Austen Riggs on July 21, 1919.
Atascadero State Hospital, formally known as California Department of State Hospitals - Atascadero (DSHA), is located on the Central Coast of California, in San Luis Obispo County, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. DSHA is an all-male, maximum-security facility, forensic institution that houses mentally ill convicts who have been committed to psychiatric facilities by California's courts. Located on a 700+ acre grounds in the city of Atascadero, California, it is the largest employer in that town. DSHA is not a general purpose public hospital, and the only patients admitted are those that are referred to the hospital by the Superior Court, Board of Prison Terms, or the Department of Corrections.
Alan Abraham Stone was an American psychiatrist who was the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry Emeritus at Harvard Law School. His writing and teaching has focused on professional medical ethics, issues at the intersection of law and psychiatry, and the topic of violence in both law and in psychiatry. Stone served as president of the American Psychiatric Association. He also served for a number of years as the film critic for the Boston Review.
Carl Compton Bell was an American professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bell was a National Institute of Mental Health international researcher, an author of more than 575 books, chapters, and articles addressing issues of violence prevention, HIV prevention, isolated sleep paralysis, misdiagnosis of Manic depressive illness, and children exposed to violence.
James Gilligan is an American psychiatrist and author, husband of Carol Gilligan and best known for his series of books entitled Violence, where he draws on 25 years of work in the American prison system to describe the motivation and causes behind violent behavior.
Judd Marmor was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist known for his role in removing homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to psychiatry:
The 2013 California prisoner hunger strike started on July 8, 2013, involving over 29,000 inmates in protest of the state's use of solitary confinement practices and ended on September 5, 2013. The hunger strike was organized by inmates in long term solitary in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in protest of inmates housed there that were in solitary confinement indefinitely for having ties to gangs. Another hunger strike that added to the movement started the week before in High Desert State Prison. The focus of the High Desert State Prison hunger strike was to demand cleaner facilities, better food and better access to the library.
People with mental illnesses are over-represented in jail and prison populations in the United States relative to the general population.
Eric M. Plakun is an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, researcher and forensic psychiatrist. He is the current medical director/CEO at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Plakun's primary interests include the mental health advocacy, full implementation of the mental health parity law, access-to-care issues, and reducing health disparities; the value of and evidence base for psychosocial treatments and the diagnosis, treatment, longitudinal course and outcome of patients with borderline personality disorder and treatment resistant disorders.
The Prisoner Human Rights Movement was launched in 2011 by Pelican Bay State Prison inmates in response to large numbers of inmates being moved from general prison populations to solitary-confinement units after allegations of gang affiliation or political organizing. Its goal is to improve living conditions for inmates in California.
The New Center for Psychoanalysis is a psychoanalytic research, training, and educational organization that is affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. It was formed in 2005 from the merger of two older psychoanalytic organizations, the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI) and the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and Society (SCPIS), which had been founded as a single organization in the 1940s and then split around 1950.
Correctional nursing or forensic nursing is nursing as it relates to prisoners. Nurses are required in prisons, jails, and detention centers; their job is to provide physical and mental healthcare for detainees and inmates. In these correctional settings, nurses are the primary healthcare providers. These nurses also work with crime victims and assist in expert witness testimonies, and are involved in a variety of legal cases, including paternity disputes and workplace injuries.
Lawrence Hartmann is a child and adult psychiatrist, social-psychiatric activist, clinician, professor, and former President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Hartmann played a central role in the APA's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality as a diagnosis of mental illness from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This change decisively changed the modern era of LGBTQ rights by providing support for the overturning of laws and prejudices against homosexuals and by advancing gay civil rights, including the right to immigrate, to adopt, to buy a home, to teach, to marry, and to be left alone.
