This profound book, Power to Silence, is founded on Dr. Nerad’s poetic and highly reflective doctoral dissertation, Separation from the Real: The Power of Story at the Heart of the Civil Commitment Process.  As her friend, colleague and chair of her doctoral dissertation committee I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you.  The story embedded within its pages begs reflection on the nature of consciousness inherent in our systems and why such an egregious act can still be perpetrated in this day and age radically changing a person’s life story.

Blessed with a healer's heart, her resiliency, faith, courage and determination for justice, as well as her background in organizational development shine brightly, giving us an inside look behind locked doors as well as the workings of the legal system. Read this book as a guide and a warning as it will enhance your consciousness of something you might be taking for granted. Your mental health and your freedom.

Allan Leslie Combs, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies and University of North Carolina, Asheville; President Emeritus, The Society for Consciousness Studies; Research Scholar & Faculty, California Institute for Human Sciences, and President of Four Rivers Institute, Cuenca, Ecuador.

I encourage you to read this book, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. I had the honor of working with Dr. Nerad as her attorney in the final leg of her journey to clear her name of the unwarranted and illegal civil commitment, which was vacated and dismissed in its entirety. No one ought to endure what Dr. Nerad endured over the past 16 years. Her fortitude, courage and determination for truth to prevail led me to take her case and work with her to bring it to a successful close after her previous lawyers caused almost irreparable harm. A must read book.

Attorney Daniel Repka (www.repkalaw.com)

Dr. Nerad's in-depth research and lived experience culminated in the book Power to Silence: Psychiatry, DSM, Drugs, Institutional Corruption, Immunity & the Insanity of the Mental Health System, exposes the systematic and complex mechanisms of injustice structured into the mental health system and the interconnected pharmaceutical, legal and governmental systems. Her systemic scholarship reveals the recursive nature of injustice at every level, highlighting the ways in which each system reinforces oppression within each other in a way that removes all rights, freedoms and power that we as citizens are to be afforded in the constitution. Empowering agents of social control, these systems collude to disempower those deemed to be mentally ill. If this book doesn't scare you about a reality that any one of us could find ourselves in, I challenge you to think about what protects you from finding yourself institutionalized. This research should prompt social change to depathologize mental health, alter laws and revolutionize how our societal systems of control operate.

Bethany Simmons, Ph.D., LMFT-S, LPC, AAMFT Approved Supervisor, Professor and Program Director of M.S. Counseling Psychology-MFT Program, California Lutheran University, Adjunct Senior Lecturer Transformative Inquiry Department, California Institute of Integral Studies and Founder of the Big Systems Collective.