In 1998, I started working as a freelance investigative journalist based in the metropolitan regions of Victoria and Vancouver. I covered many community and social issues but kept returning to people’s experiences of psychiatric detention and forced treatment. Eventually, I began writing for news outlets with American audiences as well, and my investigations of civil commitment became continent wide.
One of the first people I ever interviewed who’d been involuntarily treated was Gerald McVeigh, a burly, bearded, fifty-eight-year-old. He’d been working as a logger in centuries-old Pacific Northwest rainforests when a dispute developed over a possible clear-cut. Environmentalists and police clashed. Tangled between his own environmental sensitivity and need for more money to meet alimony payments, McVeigh was stressed and barely eating or sleeping when he argued with his boss and got fired.
