May 17, 2013

Tomorrow, May 18, the American Psychiatric Association kicks off its 166th annual conference. That same day, its new DSM-5 will be officially published. Given the occurrences of the past couple of weeks, which I’ll review briefly below, some members of the APA might wish tomorrow’s events would go unnoticed. But they won’t.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: American Psychiatric Assocation, British Psychological Association, DSM-5, New Treatment Paradigm, NIMH, occupy APA, RDoC, Research Domain Criteria, Thomas Insell

April 29, 2013

Fear. Omnipresent. Difficult to ward off or ignore. Just to advise readers, this long, somewhat involved article has been written for purely didactic purposes. Frankly, I’d like more folks to learn how to challenge their fears, how to organize and do systems change work. I trust readers will find it useful and that I managed to at least approximate what I intended.

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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Committee for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, Culture of Fear, national security state, template for organizing, U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

March 26, 2013

The American Journal of Psychiatry (January, 2103) recently published a series of articles that analyzed the outcomes of the field trials that were conducted by the DSM-5 Task Force, to determine the inter-rater reliability of the multiple diagnostic categories that will comprise the DSM-5. A table below tracks the downward progression of inter-rater reliability from DSM-III through DSM-5.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: boycott, DSM-5, Grouch Marx, Inter-Rater Reliability, Kappa scores

February 26, 2013

Machiavelli had it right. “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order to things.” Ever since we launched our DSM-5 Boycott three weeks ago, we’ve received support from organizations and individuals but have become entangled in more wrangling than I ever would have anticipated.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: boycott, Dialectics, DSM-5, Social Change, Systems Change

February 5, 2013

Our objectives are to convince professionals neither to buy nor use the new DSM, encourage patients to urge their psychotherapists and psychiatrists to neither buy nor use the DSM-5, and to ask the survivors to reach out to those they know still caught in the system and support their efforts to press those who treat them to neither buy nor use the DSM-5.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

January 25, 2013

Scapegoating is an ancient human practice that probably dates from the time the first human beings decided to circle their huts — what we fondly term the dawn of civilization. When things got tense in the compound, penalties got handed out to one or more individuals or families, those usually at the low end of the pole, the politically powerless or vulnerable.
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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Violence | Tagged as: APA, Gun Control, Kendra's Law, NICS, NRA, SAFE, Scapegoating, U.S. Exceptionalism

December 20, 2012

This is the third time in less than two years that I’m writing an article about young men walking into public venues and shooting a dozen or more people at a time — first Tucson, then Aurora, now Newtown. The Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, didn’t just walk into the Sandy Hook elementary school where he shot and killed 26 persons, he broke in, determined to carry out the plan he had. “Why?” and “Where Next?” seem to be the questions we are always left with, along with “How can we prevent this from happening again?” Many Americans are also asking, finally, “What is happening to this country?”
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Categorized in: Antipsychotics, Blogs, Featured Blogs, Psychiatric Drugs, Violence | Tagged as: 2nd Amendment, Adam Lanza, collective action, Gun Control, Mass Murder, neuroleptics, Newton, NRA, Violence

December 10, 2012

When plans for the DSM-5 were first announced about ten years ago, most folks’ reaction was “Why?”. Many of us asked that same question several times as the publication date for the new tome kept on getting pushed back. Finally, the curtain enshrouding the DSM-5 Task Force and its several committees began to part and proposed revisions/additions began to appear on its website. To our dismay, we found our question answered.

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Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: boycott, DSM-5, Personality Disorders, Post-techonology Paradigm, Somatic Symptom Disorder

December 4, 2012

As embodied in the U.S. Constitution, all levels of government have two types of power which enables them to make and enforce laws : police power, which empowers them to protect the individuals who live within their jurisdictions, and what is deemed parental power, formally parens patriae, which allows government to protect those individuals who can’t protect themselves.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: involuntary outpatient commitment, Kendra's Law, Life-Threatening, Psychoactive Medications

December 3, 2012

If involuntary outpatient commitment, popularly known as Kendra’s Law, is to be ended in New York when it sunsets or expires in 2015, the reductive stereotypes used to characterize the individuals most likely to be affected, viz., those persons labeled with serious mental illnesses and caught up in the public mental health system, must be discredited and discarded.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Early Prevention and Intervention, Nursing Homes, Over-Medication, Public Schools, Social Control, Surveillance

October 31, 2012

Little more than a week ago, I participated in a panel discussion that focused on the implications of the DSM-5 for social work practice. It was part of a larger conference co-sponsored by the NYU School of Social Work and the New York City chapter of NASW. So far as I know, it was the first such social work conference that’s taken place in New York specifically assembled to review the new DSM.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: duality/unity integrative model, Recovery, scientism, social work, transitional mental health social worker

October 8, 2012

This article is about coercion in its various forms – that which is direct, unequivocal, almost thuggish, and that which is more subtle, usually masked as well-meaning, referred to by David Oaks as “velvet gloved.” The Tolstoy quote above, which was sent to me by a friend and colleague, Diana Gonzalez, aptly sums this up. This article is also about the upcoming struggle over New York’s involuntary outpatient commitment law, Kendra’s Law, and which of the principal stakeholders of New York’s public mental health system — professionals, providers, family members, bureaucrats and politicians, peer/survivors and their advocates – will line up for, and which against.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: anosognosia, Assisted Outpatient Treatment, coerced medication, DJ Jaffe, E Fuller Torrey, involuntary outpatient commitment, Kendra's Law, velvet glove approach

September 20, 2012

On August 16, 2003, six individuals who had travelled from all over the country – Brooklyn; Wilmington, Delaware; Chicago; Portland – to Pasadena, California, began a Fast for Freedom, “a hunger strike to challenge international domination by biopsychiatry.” They were …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Fast for Freedom, hunger strike, MindFreedom International

August 1, 2012

So who is James Holmes and why did he do what he did? Is he a lone wolf psycho or a lone psychopath who calculatingly planned a surprise attack on unsuspecting moviegoers; who wired his apartment with high explosives yet …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: 2nd Amendment, Aurora, Culture of Fear, Gun Control, Holmes, Mass Murderer, NRA, Profiles

July 19, 2012

“The word is out!” That was Dr. Keris Myrick’s reaction when she was elected earlier this month as the new president of NAMI’s Board of Directors (personal communication). “Wow!” The reaction of many of us when we heard the news. …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: Big Pharma, Keris Myrick, NAMI

June 29, 2012

New York State’s out-patient commitment program, termed Assisted Out-Patient Treatment (AOT), was instituted in 1999 to protect the general public from treatment non-compliant and presumably violent mental patients. Despite the relatively small number of treatment orders issued by the courts …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: AOT, Civil rights, Kendra's Law, racism, Violence

June 23, 2012

In answer to the question posed in the title to this article, probably not for a long, long time. Or perhaps more accurately, when the entire country does. We often seem to forget that the public mental health system reflects …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: African-Americans, Criminalization, racism, Schizophrenia, War on Drugs

May 24, 2012

Shortly after I posted a two-part blog on this site back in February about New York’s just-approved Medicaid Health Homes, I got this crazy, ultimately grandiose idea to talk to the case managers and clients I had worked with for …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: Advocacy, Affordable Care Act, Cost-effective, Health Homes, Health Information Technology, Medicaid

May 22, 2012

Just had to share this with you. Was copied on an e-mail from Allen Frances yesterday, wherein he informed colleagues that two blogs had been posted yesterday whose principal themes were boycotting the new DSM. One was mine, posted on …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: boycott, DSM5, Howard Brody, primary care physicians

May 21, 2012

Captain Boycott was the British land agent for Lord Erne of County Mayo who, in 1880, was ostracized from the local community as part of the Irish Land League’s campaign for agrarian tenants’ rights. Rather than harvest Lord Erne’s crops, …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: boycott, DSM5, icd-10, icd-9