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

July 19, 2012

Recently, a Facebook discussion asked if peer support specialists in community mental health centers really do genuine, helpful peer support.  Most people said no. Peer support pioneer Shery Mead, my long-time friend and colleague, thinks peer support in a CMHC …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: cedritied peer specialist, Chris Hansen, community mental health center, National association of peer specialists (NAOPS), peer support, peer support agency, Shery Mead

July 18, 2012

Imagine for a moment that you are seriously injured in a medical research study and require expensive medical care.   Imagine further that the study in which you are injured is scientifically worthless, deceptive and exploitative – sort of like the …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Uncategorized

July 17, 2012

“I was six years old, and so, finally, all the symptoms of my supposed mental illness … especially, being born to a crazy mother, came to a head. And now I was officially a schizophrenic, proving that the disease was inherited.”
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 16, 2012

A Mental Health Recovery Movement is a good start, but frankly I am more interested in a movement that uses the language of “transformation,” a movement that recognizes the powerful of our collective potential to transform the world, that isn’t willing to compromise our visions of a better world, has the ability to capture many people’s imaginations, and is capable of building coalitions across many boundaries.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 16, 2012

We’re apt to rant against DSM and the pathologizing of everything that hurts. Rightly so—or not, depending on what we want to accomplish.Patients who want insurance to pay for their care, and clinicians who want more money than their patients are willing or able to give, have little grounds to gripe about the general drift of DSM. The sad fact is that we can expect DSM to skew the thinking of clinicians, and the knowledge base of mental health care, more, not less, in coming years.
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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

July 11, 2012

If we want to understand how our society may end up deluded about the merits of psychiatric medications, we can look at the research published by Robert Gibbons, Director of the Center for Health Statistics at the University of Chicago, …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 11, 2012

Shortly after Mad In America launched at the beginning of the year I was invited to take over the site’s web development and to assist in building a healthy community here. Since that time we have made minor changes to …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Community Updates, Featured Blogs

July 7, 2012

A New Hampshire judge overruled a jury verdict that awarded $1.5 million to State Trooper James Conrad, who claimed he was wrongfully detained by his superiors in state police headquarters. While detained, Conrad suffered a nervous breakdown, threatened suicide, was …
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Categorized in: Blogs

July 7, 2012

Robert Whitaker has raised questions about the problems with long term exposure to antipsychotic drugs but recent research raises questions about their efficacy in the short run.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 7, 2012

Last week, the Wall Street Journal has an article titled The Medication Generation by Katherine Sharpe which questioned the fact that a large number of teenagers are currently taking antidepressants. In several respects the article was a bit of a refreshing change from …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Uncategorized | Tagged as: chemical imbalance, psychiatyr, Serotonin

July 5, 2012

Dear Bob: Saw a young man recently, early 30s, who wanted help withdrawing from benzodiazepines. He had been on escalating doses of Xanax for two years.  The Xanax had been prescribed for panic attacks that began after he was placed on …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Uncategorized

July 5, 2012

Hearing distressing voices is highly correlated with traumatic experiences, and many people report that their first experience with distressing voices occurs after a trauma. Making the connection can be a vital step in the recovery process. In this interview with …
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Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Disorders, Hearing Voices, Psychiatric Drugs, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

July 3, 2012

I was glad to see that the New York Times‘ reporters covering GlaxoSmithKline’s $3 billion settlement tipped their hat to former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. After all, it was his crew and specifically a pioneering attorney by the …
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Categorized in: Blogs

July 1, 2012

Money corrupts, and not just money from pharmaceutical companies. Money’s money, and it spends just as nicely no matter who offers it. It doesn’t just corrupt psychiatry. Talk therapy has been badly corrupted in recent years, too. The money corrupting talk therapy comes from insurance companies.

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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

June 30, 2012

I was invited to give a Keynote Address at the 2012 Alternatives Conference in Portland Oregon, and I’m collecting your input on what I should say — I’m crowd sourcing my Keynote! Alternatives is a federally funded annual SAMHSA conference that brings …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Featured Blogs, Non-Drug Approaches, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

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 28, 2012

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller. This is why entrepreneurship is our way out of the mental health mess. It …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs | Tagged as: coming off psych meds, consumer movement, forced medication, mental health advocacy, mental health social entrepreneur, psychiatric medication withdrawal, recovery movement, social entrepreneurship, Wellness Wordworks

June 27, 2012

In caring for patients with mental illness or distress as a naturopathic physician, I am either indirectly or directly working with the conventional (allopathic) mental health care system. I say this, as my patients do not exist in isolation; often …
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Categorized in: Blogs

June 27, 2012

There is a fascinating process playing out in academic medicine right now. The general public is understandably concerned that much of the medical literature has not been written by the named authors – what most people would call ghostwriting.  In …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: ICMJE, Jay Amsterdam, university of Pennsylvania

June 26, 2012

It looks like a great event:  The Hearing Voices Network 25 Years On: Learning from the PAST, Practicing in the PRESENT, Visioning the FUTURE.  Cardiff, Wales 19-21 September 2012.  Click here to look at the complete brochure . From the brochure: …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: Alternatives, hearing voices, Psychosis

June 25, 2012

Now in the current issue of Skeptic, I have an article called “Depression Treatment: What Works and How We Know” (article rights owned by Skeptic but which I am allowed to republish on my web site). I thought that some …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Uncategorized

June 25, 2012

“What do you think caused your problems?,” I asked.

“I have a chemical imbalance, a chemical imbalance, an imbalance in the brain that makes me ill.”
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Categorized in: Bipolar, Blogs, Depression, Genetics, Psychotherapy, Recovery/Empowerment, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Trauma/Distress

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