Blogs

There is hope that the truth about sleeping pills will become more commonplace. As it does, however, we are faced with an even greater challenge: to move beyond the medicalization of insomnia in order to help people sleep better naturally. The alternative paradigm I suggest is that nutrition is a primary cure for insomnia.

If a person binges habitually, upon sensing certain stimuli the pancreas prepares the body with insulin, and simultaneously, the stomach prepares by getting more acidic. This means that for many of us, the drive to binge is a physical need. Therapy blames the patient for “bad coping” when all she is doing is responding to her body's signals.

I want to learn how to control my anger. But to get rid of it would be to get rid of a part of myself. It would also feel like swallowing down injustice. Such a drug probably doesn't exist, but what if there were an antidepressant that could make me stop disliking mental health professionals? The idea feels scary to me, like some kind of mind control pill.

If depression leads to suicide and antidepressants like SSRIs resolve depression, we could decrease suicide rates by increasing the number of antidepressant prescriptions, right? Yet researchers found the opposite in a new study from Sweden that examined antidepressants in the context of suicide.

If mental disorders are not bodily diseases, what are they and how should we understand them? If madness involves a loss or failure of shared reasoning that places the individual outside of the community of immediate and implicit human understanding, does this mean it is without interest or meaning?

I am going to pose the question: What would it take to go about abolishing psychiatry and the mental health system? My goal is to try to shed light on whether psychiatric nihilism can actually lead anywhere. Or is it mostly something that makes people who have been so terribly harmed feel better?

Parents must inform themselves about the flaws in the current paradigm if they are to have any chance of thinking sensibly about what might be distressing their child. Toward that end of providing information about those flaws, I interviewed Richard Hallam, author of the new book Abolishing the Concept of Mental Illness: Rethinking the Nature of our Woes.

I am an activist, and I am tired. I seem to be living what life would look like if ‘painted into a corner,’ met ‘put in a box’ in a car wreck, leaving the two a tangled idiomatic mess. Here are eleven examples of how activists and advocates are asked to cough up boundless energy while simultaneously being demoralized, devalued, diminished, and used.

Szasz clarified what mental illness isn't, but not what it is, and it is something. I will show that it's just a concept that evolved in order to dehumanize those who cope in ways that don't further society's survival, and thus to justify their exclusion so as to maximize society's efficiency.

It turns out that our stress response and inflammatory modeling are set early in our childhood. While our infant microbiome certainly lays a foundation, our beliefs and the thoughts that run like a ticker tape under our life experience cannot be underemphasized. How can we heal our pasts?

In Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress, Iain Ferguson aims to use the marxist approach “not only to make sense of mental distress but also help us address and change the material conditions that give rise to it.” He begins by describing the ‘crisis in mental health’ that disproportionately affects the unemployed, poor, and oppressed.

There is no rational way to argue against putting psychiatric chemicals into the category of neurotoxins. All psychiatric substances alter “the structure or functions of the nervous system,” disrupt “the normal function of nerve cells” and act “specifically on nervous tissue.” It is time to clean up the misleading mess of words in psychiatry.

We have been interested in the broad public health implications of nutrition, such as the findings from national health population surveys. What conclusion can be drawn from these studies? Improving people’s diets may protect them from experiencing poor mental health. 

Essentially what Choy et al are seeking in their editorial is the total suppression of information concerning the harmful and often permanent effects of high voltage electric shocks to the brain, thus implying that the very large number of individuals who report more extensive and persistent damage are not worth listening to.

The problem with the DSM is that it not only pathologizes asexuality, but also pathologizes the distress asexual people feel due to marginalization and prejudice. In attributing people’s distress to their lack of sexual attraction or interest, rather than their environment, psychiatry fails to recognize oppression.

The Framework is an ambitious attempt to outline a conceptual alternative to the diagnostic model of mental distress. It builds on the Division of Clinical Psychology’s 2013 Position Statement recommending work in conjunction with service users to develop a multi-factorial and contextual approach.

Language, and how we use it, are important to counselling’s conversational work. As a counsellor, my language for understanding and addressing client concerns often fits poorly with the diagnostic and treatment language used to manage services within that system.

Psychiatry likes to portray itself as a scientific discipline, and indeed there is a lot of useful science to draw on when evaluating the evidence base connected to mental health problems. Sadly, most of the mainstream psychiatric literature of recent decades has shown a marked preference for rhetoric over scientific accuracy.

I submitted a letter to the editor of JAMA pointing out the likely explanation for the lack of effect of sertraline. JAMA rejected my letter, as it has done many times. Explaining why psychiatric drugs don’t work is not a priority for medical journals, it seems.

Every time that I have been confined in a psych hospital, I have collected as many trophies as possible. Sometimes I go out of my way to steal the silverware, or the sheets, or the blankets from the beds, or even the signs off the walls. But it’s the really forbidden stuff that attracts me.

When parents accept the bipolar label, something seems to click in their minds, and it’s in this instant that their kid’s life is forever ruined. Now they retrospectively view all the turmoil that began in puberty as due to permanent brain illness rather than normal, outgrowable adolescent issues.

At Mental Health Europe, we see 2017 as having been a crossroads for mental health and human rights. Let’s ensure that this yields concrete change in 2018 with the support of like-minded communities ready to take the discussion to the next level and truly enact this as a civil rights movement.

Florida’s Wrongful Death Act essentially denies residents and visitors alike the right to live once they enter a hospital. The law has been dubbed “Free Kill” because while it can cost money to correct mistakes, keep hospitals safely staffed and update equipment, it is free to kill.

Over and over again, we have shown that additional nutrients positively affect behaviour and mental states. This research offers further evidence that children with ADHD, mood dysregulation and symptoms of aggression should be given the opportunity to try micronutrient treatment FIRST.

Our son, Mark, is an example of the deadly effects of polypharmacy. He died at the young age of 46 and his death was caused by toxicity/cardiac failure from two of the five medications he was taking, at higher than recommended doses, as prescribed by his psychiatrist.