Around The Web

From The Conversation: Only one in 20 medical treatments have high-quality evidence to support their benefits, and treatment harms are measured only a third as often as benefits.

FromPsychology Today: Scanlon's Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen—A Memoir concerns the treatment of prolonged grief in a major psychiatric hospital.

From The Guardian: When I sought help for crippling invasive thoughts, I was told I had a disease like any other. But I wasn’t able to recover until I understood the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare.

From Where Is My Mind?: Niall Breslin and Robert Whitaker discuss the paradigm shift needed in mental health to ensure people have informed consent and a true understanding of their distress.

From EmpowerUAmerica: Psychologist and author Bruce E. Levine is interviewed about the problem of depression in America and how it's being treated.

From MedPage Today: Taylor Ware's August 2019 death was among more than 1,000 over a decade after police used common use-of-force tactics that are meant to stop people without killing them.

From Investigative Journalism Foundation: Under Canada's Mental Health Act, doctors don’t have to get a patient’s consent for treatment — or the consent of a substitute decision maker. They have what’s known as the patient’s “deemed consent” to administer any treatment that’s been approved by the director of the mental health facility.

In the past 30 years, repeated regulatory failures and a shift in the FDA’s mission from protecting public health to speeding drugs and devices to market has tarnished the agency’s reputation and, more importantly, harmed patients.

From Psychiatric Times: “Our patients, our field, and our integrity demand a better explanation of what happened in STAR*D than what has thus been provided," argue two San Diego psychiatrists.

From FTC: The FTC has moved to ban BetterHelp from revealing people's data, including sensitive mental health information, to Facebook and others for targeted advertising.

From Psychiatric Times: Two psychiatrists write in the Psychiatric Times that the response of the STAR*D investigators to a reanalysis of STAR*D data by Ed...

From Shared Wisdom: From the shaman’s perspective, illness can be caused by either disharmony, fear, or soul loss: negative internal states that appear within us in response to negative or traumatic life experiences.

From Gary Sharpe Substack: This mechanism applies to all "dopamine deficiency" issues including Parkinson’s, dystonia, restless leg syndrome, ADHD, chronic conditions more generally, trauma, and addictions of all sorts.

This is a talk at UPenn by neuroscientist Peter Sterling, who, in his writings for Mad in America, has critically assessed the “biological model of depression."

From Benzodiazepine Information Coalition: Dr. Huff was a cardiologist who experienced a benzodiazepine injury firsthand, leading her to become a fierce advocate for better education and safe tapering of these drugs.

From Irish Examiner: "Parents must surrender their point of view that there’s something wrong with the child and see that it’s the relationship that’s in trouble and the child’s behaviour is just a function of that," says physician Gabor Maté, who works with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness.

From Terapeutiska Tankar: Reification happens when constructs that describe but do not explain behaviors, such as ADHD, are mistaken for causes of behavior. 

From Rebecca Mandeville, LMFT - Scapegoat Recovery: Traumatic invalidation is usually found in systems where people are marginalized; so this would be, for example, the family scapegoat, who is the marginalized person in the family system.

From Shaun Attwood: "What's happened with the child trauma, the child abuse, the childhood neglect...is lack of agency in the adult. And unless they've got agency, they can't stop doing bad things," says UK psychiatrist Bob Johnson.

From ABC7/WXYZ Detroit: Patients, parents, and employees are coming forward to talk about their experiences at some Michigan hospitals with psychiatrist Dr. Nagy Kheir. 

From BristolLive: Dr. Ben Sessa has said he knew the woman had a history of self-harm and overdoses but was not aware that she had tried to take her own life during the course of their relationship.

From Sociology Lens Insights: In recent decades, we have too often passed the buck of social problems to children who lack the power to say no to stigmatizing psychiatric labels.

From NJ Spotlight News: “Imagine living in an environment where even the most basic choices are taken away from you...and, in place of psychiatric treatment, you face both boredom and violence on a daily basis,” said Bren Pramanik, a Disability Rights New Jersey attorney.

From The Times: Although Dr. Mark Horowitz wondered whether the pills were to blame for a growing raft of health complaints “I thought it was the right thing to do,” he says, “like taking your vitamins.”

From The Marshall Project: State officials often fail to identify prisoners with developmental disorders, a group that faces overwhelming challenges behind bars, from bright lights to noises to social dynamics.