In the latest twist to the saga of Alternatives 2010, the National Empowerment Center, which organized the conference, has apparently reversed course and restored the original language to Will Hall’s workshop — see my earlier blog about the brouhaha over this.
According to a hot-off-the-presses statement from Dr. Daniel Fisher, the director of the NEC:
“Hall’s original workshop title, Coming off Medications: A Harm Reduction Approach. will be restored and we are delighted Will has agreed to come to Alternatives and present on this subject as originally planned.”
In his statement, Dr. Fisher, a psychiatrist, also said,
“On behalf of the National Empowerment Center, I wish to apologize to Will Hall and to the consumer/survivor community for the last-minute decision to alter the title of his workshop to remove the reference to coming off medication.”
Sanity, it seems, has prevailed.
Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and MIT's Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University.
One Response to Alternatives 2010 organizers reverse course on censorship