A writers collective
Samizdat has just launched The Decapitation of Care on Amazon — in English (print and kindle) and La santé décapitée in French (kindle) with French print in a few days time and El Fin Del Cuidado; Una breve historia del auge y caída de la atención médica in Spanish both print and kindle very soon after. […]
Canada put Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation in place in June 2016. This allowed for medical assistance in dying in cases where death was reasonably foreseeable. In 2019, in Truchon v Attorney General of Canada, the Superior Court of Québec declared the “reasonable foreseeability” criterion unconstitutional. This decision forced a review of the original legislation.
The provision of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is under review in Canada with debate about access for patients with mental illness.
An amendment to the draft legislation eliminating the exclusion of people with mental illness was proposed by Senator Stan Kutcher, arguing mental illness is as real as physical illness, that it can lead to great distress and people taking their own life in any event.
CounterPunch.org has just published a great review of The Zyprexa Papers, Jim Gottstein’s book about his battle over Zyprexa (Olanzapine) with drug marketing giant Eli Lilly. Written by Bruce E. Levine, a psychologist and social critic, the review addresses the broad social issues raised by Jim Gottstein’s story. “The Zyprexa Papers is not simply about the harm done by blockbuster psychiatric drugs and drug company illegal marketing. It is also about the perversion of the U.S. legal system, as Gottstein illuminates the courts’ use of secrecy orders in settlement agreements to the detriment of the public.”
The resonance between what is happening this year with COVID-19 and what happened and the events described in Decapitation of Care is too great to ignore. A plague helped do in Charles I of England. Then it was The Plague. It struck in 1641, primarily affecting London. As the monarch, Charles was the person who […]
RxISK has just launched a writer’s co-operative – Samizdat-Health and Samizdat House – for non-fiction and fiction publications falling outside the boundaries of the sanctioned conversation on issues thrown up by health. Launching a new set of imprints like this has become necessary, because publishing about treatment-related difficulties has become increasingly problematic in a risk-averse […]
by John Dan Stone, Age of Autism, UK Editor A welcome for David Healy’s new, short polemical volume The Decapitation of Care. Healy as ever likes to express himself in terms of historical theatre — the comparison with oppressive political situations of past as well as the roots of this present oppressive situation in the […]
Last week’s post introduced “neo-culturalism“. This post might add to the sense of what’s at stake and why there is a need for Samizdat – and your input to help us all work out how to grapple with what is going wrong. Two decades ago, the editors of journals were people with what was once […]
Samizdat Health – a writer’s co-operative that has taken shape in responses to changes in health and in publishing – will be borne this month. The original Samizdat was an underground messaging system in the Soviet Union where dissidents passed on writings – often on toilet paper. A collection of Samizdat writings is now stored […]
