Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dowm. My guest is Rob Wipond,

and I'm going to tell you about him in a second, but first, just really quickly, the next

unspeak easy retreat that I'm going to announce anyway is coming up in May, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 8th through 11th,

we're going to do a retreat. There's a lot of interest already. So if you are interested,

go to the unspeak Easy.com and read about what we're doing and get in touch with me and I will send

you the information. As always, these retreats have limited

space. I really try to cap the participant number at 15, but they're great. So if you want to do it,

let me know. The events in Los Angeles and Seattle sold out really quickly. So if Minneapolis

has your name on it, let me know,

the unspeakeezy.com. Anyway, my guest, Rob Weipond, is a Canadian-based investigative journalist

who writes about issues related to psychiatry, civil rights, policing, social change,

that kind of thing. His new book, Your Consent Is Not Required,

is about involuntary interventions in psychiatric care, especially those involving inpatient

treatment. We associate forcible detentions in psych wards with barbaric practices of the past,

but as Rob found out, they're all too common today. And his book shows

just how little agency patients often have in their own care. And moreover, how the medical

establishment and pharmaceutical industry benefits from as many people as possible being

classified as mental patients. In this conversation, we talk about all of that, including

a question that was on the top of my mind, which is why, despite this apparent overreach,

it's still so hard to get mental health care for people living on the streets. Rob also stayed

overtime for a more personal conversation about how he feels about his life and career these days

and how he went from acting in local theater, performing music, and doing various kinds of community work to being an investigative reporter.

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