Invitation to a Talk with Dr. Cathy Wield next Thursday, April 17th

Emergency physician, survivor, and author reflects on consent, recovery, and hope after years of iatrogenic harm and psychiatric incarceration

Reading time: 2 min
Topic: Consent in psychiatry, survivor testimony, trauma-informed care

It is an honor to invite you to a talk with Dr. Cathy Wield, who will share insights from her newly released memoir Unshackled Mind: A Doctor’s Story of Trauma, Liberation and Healing, reflect on her personal and professional experience within the mental health system, and speak about one of the most urgent and often overlooked issues in psychiatry today: informed consent.

Date: Thursday, April 17th, 2025
Time: 09:00 BST (British Summer Time) | 10:00 CEST (Central European Summer Time)
Location: Online – Microsoft Teams

Join the meeting:
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/383327601863?p=lffmT4yo0fQK6dVnfp

Dr. Cathy Wield is an Emergency Physician with clinical experience in both emergency medicine and psychiatry. The daughter of a British diplomat, she spent much of her childhood overseas before completing her education in the UK. After raising four children, she resumed her medical career, which was twice interrupted by episodes of severe mental illness. Her first encounter with psychiatric care culminated in brain surgery, followed by a sudden and unexpected recovery that defied clinical expectations. Despite enduring repeated hospitalisations and psychiatric interventions that often intensified her suffering, she returned to clinical practice and became a visible advocate against mental health stigma. She is the author of Life After Darkness: A Doctor’s Journey Through Severe Depression (Radcliffe, 2006) and A Thorn in My Mind: Mental Illness, Stigma and the Church (Instant Apostle, 2011). While living in Denver, Colorado, she rediscovered her passion for creative writing and now leads free writing workshops as a tool for healing and self-expression. Her story is one of profound pain, but also of resilience, clarity, and enduring hope.

As someone who has endured years of family abuse, institutional violence, and psychiatric mistreatment myself – and who now works as a researcher and university professor in training, despite having been silenced, dehumanised, violated, and cast aside by a system designed to chronify distress rather than address its roots – I know how essential it is to make space for voices like hers.

Distressingly, current clinical practice continues to reduce complex human suffering to narrow biomedical categories, promoting a superimposed narrative of biological causality under the pretense of scientific neutrality. This framework overrides the lived realities of abuse, violence, inequality, and social marginalisation – all well-documented as central to the emergence and persistence of psychological distress. Instead of recognising this complexity, the system routinely pathologises survivors, imposing reductive diagnostic labels while disregarding social, relational, and structural dimensions of suffering.

Worse still, the treatments offered within this model – often coercive and frequently iatrogenic – cause significant harm. Informed consent is routinely compromised, and alternative approaches to healing are marginalised or excluded altogether. Trauma-informed, rights-based, and community-rooted forms of support that honour experience and autonomy are rarely accessible. The system that claims to provide care often obstructs recovery through its own prejudices, power imbalances, and structural rigidity. Rather than offering protection, it deepens suffering and perpetuates cycles of harm under the guise of help.

Meaningful reform demands more than incremental change. It requires a fundamental shift – one that centres dignity, justice, and full recognition of the social and political contexts of mental distress. The knowledge and frameworks for change already exist. What remains lacking is the institutional will to make them the norm rather than the exception.

This event is not merely a book presentation – it is a space for collective reflection on lived experience, on systemic violence, and on the urgent need to place consent, care, and justice at the heart of mental health practice. Dr. Cathy Wield’s testimony reveals how these systems silence, discredit, and retraumatise those they claim to serve, when what is truly needed is a model that centres empathy, affirms dignity, and integrates care with justice.

The prevailing psychiatric paradigm remains, in far too many settings, shaped by coercion, forced treatment, and the denial of the most basic ethical principle: informed consent. Instead of addressing the roots of suffering and recognising the person behind the symptoms, it imposes control, compounds trauma, and obstructs the possibility of recovery. We must reimagine mental health care – not as a system of surveillance and compliance, but as a space of trust, autonomy, and relational support.

I heartfeltly welcome clinicians, researchers, students, and all those with lived experience to join us in this free, open, and respectful dialogue. Dr. Cathy Wield offers a profound testimony of survival, resistance, and healing. Her voice challenges dominant narratives of so-called treatment-resistant illness and opens vital space for person-centred, trauma-informed, rights-based, and recovery-oriented approaches to psychological distress.

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If you are interested in this conversation, you may also support related research by completing a short survey on shared decision-making and psychiatric medication. The survey is open to mental health professionals and aims to contribute to reforms grounded in autonomy, ethics, and human rights.

Survey link: https://better.health.int.eu.org/survey/