September 25, 2012

I co-led a day long Continuing Education Training with that title last month in Oakland. Almost 100 people attended this first ever in the United States, taxpayer funded CEU training that explored the spiritual dimensions of psychosis. But it wasn’t preaching to the choir of those who are true believers in that possibility, because the majority in attendance were front line professional county mental health staff!
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 24, 2012

Yana Jacobs and I both served at medication free madness sanctuaries. She at Soteria House and I at I-Ward. In this television interview, Yana shares about the wonderful SAMSHA pilot project, peer respite center she got started in Santa Cruz, …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 13, 2012

Do we bring gifts to our family and community that are born of suffering but infused with spirit? Has our madness been in vain, or has it brought us through fiery trials that have meaning we otherwise would have missed for …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

June 16, 2012

“You are not alone.” If you are mad, that is the Icarus Project’s bold promise to you. Every time I read it, it moves me because when I was mad, being alone was the worst aspect of it. Being all …
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June 12, 2012

The experience of hearing voices during madness, or during our “normal” and constant inner conversation that never stops, shows that we use words to attempt to express our underlying emotional state to ourselves and others. We first and foremost are …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 28, 2012

Move over outdated chemical imbalance theory, now it is claimed that genetic misregulation underlies psychiatric disease, and that psychiatric drugs themselves can fix the genetic misregulation problem. ”Anti-psychotics and mood stabilizing agents are capable of promoting epigenetic modifications associated with an active transcriptional …
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May 16, 2012

The Canadian judge in the first North American criminal trial to find Prozac the sole cause of a murder ruled – “There is clear medical evidence that the Prozac affected his (defendant’s) behavior and judgment, thereby reducing his moral culpability.” Will …
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May 2, 2012

One of the subtle but underlying factors that keep the great divide active between psychiatry’s medical model of human emotional suffering, and the alternative paradigm that challenges it, is the existence of a class system based on meritocracy, that accounts …
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Categorized in: Blogs

April 26, 2012

With a loud piercing cry, the bare chested Native American warrior hurled his tomahawk at John Weir Perry with full force. John told me that at the last second in the dream, he caught it between both his palms just …
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April 11, 2012

“Madness!” was the vehement one word response from my friend when I told her that the Mental Health Minister of Western Australia has proposed legislation to allow children as young as twelve years old to have consent rights to receive psychosurgery, electroconvulsive therapy and/or permanent sterilization if they are …
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March 19, 2012

In November 2000, I anxiously stood before the gathered four hundred and fifty mental health professionals, administrators, peers and academicians and said, “Hi, I’m Michael Cornwall and I don’t believe in mental illness!”
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Categorized in: Blogs, Popular

March 4, 2012

This blog entry is another chapter in the story of my personal odyssey as a radical therapist and human rights activist with lived experience of madness that I have been sharing on the Mad in America site. I hope it provides a meaningful look at a piece of our reform movement’s history from a ground-level perspective.
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February 14, 2012

In my last three blogs I posed the question- “If madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then what is it?” Now I’m asking- “If madness isn’t what psychiatry says it is, then how should we respond to madness?’ Here …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Mind/Body, Non-Drug Approaches, Recovery/Empowerment, Research, Trauma/Distress

February 3, 2012

In my last blog entry, I described how the I-Ward first episode madness sanctuary came into being and how I ended up working there as a therapist for over three years. As you read now about my time there, I would again like to ask you to keep in mind the question I posed in my first two blog entries- “If Madness isn’t what Psychiatry says it is, then what is it?”
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January 17, 2012

I’ll begin this chapter of my personal odyssey through madness and the vocation it created of my life as a therapist specializing in madness, with the same question I posed at the beginning of my first blog post that is entitled- ‘Initiatory …
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January 5, 2012

If madness isn’t what Psychiatry says it is, then what is it? I have been asking myself that question almost every day since I became mad as a young man over 45 years ago. Over the course of this and future …
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Categorized in: Blogs