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Dear ISPS-US Community,

We are pleased to announce our April webinar, Involuntary Commitment and Its Potential Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Dialogue with Pim Welle, PhD, Awais Aftab, MD and Morgan Shields, PhD, taking place on 4/10/25 at 1pm Eastern.

1.5 CE credits for APA, ASWB, and NY Boards are available for this offering, with a sliding scale rate of $0-$40.

This presentation was a standout session at our 2024 conference, and we are thrilled to be able to offer it to our wider audience. 

Webinar Description:

The involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing mental health crises is a widespread practice across the US, as common as imprisonment in state and federal prisons. In spite of persistent concerns from service users and advocates, the impacts of involuntary treatment have been difficult to characterize, and causal inference limited by structural and ethical barriers. This panel will lead with important new research led by Dr. Welle utilizing administrative data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and leveraging the quasi-random assignment of evaluating physicians in order to estimate causal effects of involuntary hospitalization on post-discharge death by suicide or overdose, violent crime and employment. For individuals whom some physicians would hospitalize but others would not, the team has found that hospitalization nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime or dying by suicide or overdose in the three months after evaluation.

Remaining panelists – Drs. Morgan Shields and Awais Aftab – will reflect on these provocative findings and share their own adjacent work. Specifically, Dr. Shields will focus on inpatient psychiatry, including common experiences in inpatient settings, and the potential role of inpatient iatrogenic harm with respect to post-discharge outcomes. Dr. Awais, a community psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry, will discuss ethical and political implications, as well as potential ways forward.

Can't attend live? Don't worry! The webinar will be recorded and sent to all registrants. However, please note that live attendance is required for CE credits.

Unable to contribute? We encourage everyone to contribute towards our webinars where possible to ensure we can compensate our speakers and continue our vital mission. However, if you are unable, please reach the full event description on the event page for access.

Please do share this event with your colleagues and networks to highlight this important research which has wide implications in our environment of increasingly coercive mental health policy.

Sincerely,

ISPS-US

Presenter Bios

Awais Aftab, MD, is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. His academic, educational, and public-facing work focuses on conceptual and critical issues in psychiatry. He is a senior editor for the journal “Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology.” His first book, “Conversations in Critical Psychiatry,” is an edited volume of interviews published by Oxford University Press (2024). He writes online on his Substack newsletter Psychiatry at the Margins (www.psychiatrymargins.com).

Morgan Shields, PhD, researches the quality and accountability of behavioral healthcare. Her work seeks to identify implementation strategies to improve the use of evidence-based practices, with a focus on patient-centered care and equity. She is particularly focused on identifying policies (e.g., payment, regulations) to motivate and support quality improvement. Shields is one of few people studying the quality of inpatient psychiatry. Her research identifying disparities in quality performance at the Veterans Health Administration led to internal investigations by the Deputy Under Secretary for Health and Organizational Excellence.

In 2019, the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health revamped its critical incident monitoring system in response to Shields’ research. Her analyses highlighting the systematic exclusion of psychiatric patients from national measurement of patient experience has prompted action from national entities to address this discrimination. Shields serves as an expert in related legal cases.

Shields received training in implementation science and community-academic research through an NIMH T32 postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. from Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, where she was an NIAAA T32 fellow and a Harvard Kennedy School Rappaport Public Policy fellow, and an M.Sc. from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Shields publishes in outlets such as Health Affairs, Medical Care, and the JAMA Network. Shields directs the IDEAL (Inclusive, Dignified, Equitable and Effective, Accountable, and Loving) Lab, which identifies strategies for providing patient-centered care.

Dr. Pim Welle is a health economist whose research focuses on how public policies can reduce harms from addictive substance use at the population level. Dr. Welle's work on this topic features applied economic theory, state-of-the-art econometric methods, and large and novel datasets.