A Look at Madness Through the Lens of Culture

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Twenty years ago, I was invited to watch a young monk named Thupten Ngodrup go into a trance and ‘channel’ the State Oracle of Tibet (The Nechung Oracle). It took place in a small monastery next to the Dalai Lama’s residence in the little Himalayan town of Dharamsala, India. As the monks began to chant and beat their drums, Thupten’s eyes rolled back, his face flushed and he began to speak in a high-pitched voice. A few monks gathered around him and began writing down everything he said. After a few minutes, he collapsed and had to be carried from the room. At the time, I didn’t know what to think of what I had seen. Was this a dramatization?

What Is Biological Psychiatry and Why Is It So Important To Know?

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In a recent discussion on Mad in America  I made the following statement: “I am NOT anti-psychiatry, but I AM proudly anti-Biological Psychiatry. And I believe anyone who critically reads the science reported at MIA, combined with the narratives of survivors and other dissidents, should be too.” This comment was part of a spirited, and at times, contentious discussion about Daniel Mackler’s recent blog titled “An Ode to Biological Psychiatry.” This blog was a scathing critique of the pervasive historical trend in psychiatry that essentially dominates the entire mental health field in this country and throughout most parts of the world.

From Self Care to Collective Caring

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As a trauma survivor growing up in various adolescent mental health systems, I never learned any useful self-care tools or practices. I was taught that my current coping skills (self-injury, suicidal behavior, illicit drug use) were unacceptable, but not given any ideas as to what to replace them with. No one seemed to want to know much about the early childhood traumas that were driving these behaviors. Instead, I collected an assortment of diagnoses. I was told that I would be forever dependent on mediated relationships with professionals, and an ever-changing combination of pills. The message was that my troubles were chemical in nature and largely beyond my control.

Blame the Clients?

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I'm old enough to remember a time when outpatient psychiatry was almost entirely a talking and listening profession. Depression was considered a fairly ordinary and understandable phenomenon – part of the human lot, so to speak - and remediation was conceptualized as being largely a matter of seeking support and solace from friends and loved ones, and of making positive changes in one's circumstances and lifestyle. In extreme cases, people did consult psychiatrists, but the purpose of these visits was to discuss issues and problems – not to obtain drugs.

The Story of “Teenagers Against Psychiatric Drugs”

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My name is Jaquelin Kalach. I am 19 years old and live in Mexico City. A friend, a teacher, and me created our association; Teenagers Against Psychiatric Drugs.

Why I Work in the System

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I find it to be a really difficult decision—some days more so than others—to do peer support in the traditional mental health system. I need to remind myself pretty often why I am doing this because it’s really, really hard! Here are the reasons I go to most often . . .

Why Do We Say That Mental Health Detention is Discrimination?

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The disability community, including users and survivors of psychiatry, has sent a letter (drafted and circulated by WNUSP) to the UN Human Rights Committee urging that treaty monitoring body to follow the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in prohibiting all mental health detention. The signatories came from all regions of the world and include user/survivor organizations, disability organizations, other human rights organizations and individual experts. Since our letter is quite technical in pointing out the divergence of the Human Rights Committee's position from that of the CRPD, which is a higher standard of human rights protection, I would like to bring out some additional points that may be helpful in our advocacy.

The Proliferation and Elimination of Mental Illness: Clinging to the Slopes of Everest

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A month ago, I published a critique of specific terminology of DSM-5.  Like countless others, I have serious concerns about the overpathologizing of normal behaviors that appears to be occurring over the past few decades.  The potential consequences of this trend have been widely articulated in many circles, and have raised a serious question, “What is normal?” But while this has been occurring in both psychiatric and lay arenas, another movement has been gaining significant support.  It is the idea that mental illness (or disease) is a fabrication, and as Sera Davidow quoted E. Fuller Torrey in her recent moving article, “Mental illness does not exist, and neither does mental health.”

More Delays on Sandy Hook Reports

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The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission (SHAC) and the State Child Advocate's office still have produced no reports, and the deadlines continually come and go, with virtually no interest on the part of Governor Malloy or Connecticut state lawmakers. What is of interest, though, is the complete run-around and disconnect by those involved in producing the reports.

Should Our Tax Dollars Be Spent on Promoting Drugs?

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As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has made a commitment to integrate behavioral health with physical medicine. Physicians have saddled America with addiction to antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazpines. If the federal government decides that opiate addiction is ok, as they seem to have conceded, shouldn’t the question be “what is the cheapest and the safest opiate?” In Europe, heroin is an option right along with buprenorphine and methadone. It seems to me that the “back-door” legalization of opiates under the guise of “treatment” ought to at least be debated out in the open.

Pro-Force Attitudes a Symptom of Post Traumatic Stress?

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The year before I was born, E. Fuller Torrey published ‘The Death of Psychiatry.’ Therein, he repeatedly made statements that are disdainful of the psychiatric profession and its core concepts. He also asserted that known brain diseases were responsible for "no more than 5 percent of the people we refer to as mentally 'ill’.” As recently as 1991, he has been quoted as calling for the end of psychiatry. In October of that year he said, “Now, if you give the people with brain diseases to neurology and the rest to education, there's really no need for psychiatry." I want to ask: “Edwin Fuller Torrey, what happened to you?”

A Daughter’s Call for Safety and Sanity in Mental Health

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My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

News Flash: 4.5 Million Children Forced Daily by “Caretakers” to Do Cocaine-like Drugs 

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Before we get to the meat and potatoes documenting how this headline is not only shocking but also accurate, you must know that a secondary goal of this blog is to test a few theories. I have been pondering these theories because it seems to be a mystery as to why (after more than two decades of whistleblowers warning the public) so many adults have not heard or heeded the news that ADHD stimulant drugs, which are not that different from cocaine, are extremely dangerous for kids.

Psychiatry DID Promote the Chemical Imbalance Theory

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At the present time psychiatry, because of intense pressure from its critics, is retreating somewhat from the chemical imbalance theory. But instead of acknowledging that this notion was flawed, that they knew it was flawed, and that they promoted it for self-gain, they are claiming that they never really said it in the first place.

Who’s Delusional? And How Do We Support Them?

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In mainstream society, when attempting to assess whether or not someone is “mad” or “mentally ill,” a lot of effort is put into trying to determine whether or not someone is “delusional” (i.e, is harboring beliefs that do not conform to those generally held within mainstream society), and if deemed so, trying to coerce that person to conform. I believe this approach, however, is not only seriously misguided but potentially extremely harmful—not just to the individual but also to our society, our species and our planet.

Did Psychiatric Drugs Play a Role in the Prom Day Killer’s Violent Behavior?

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The alleged “Prom day” killer, Christopher Plaskon, is a snap shot of the future result of Connecticut’s increased mental health services. The 17 year-old's defense apparently will be that his “mental health” caused his murderous actions – not the dangerous psychiatric drugs he obviously has been taking for some time.

Tickets, Updates, and More on MIA’s International Film Festival

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Our Film Festival’s mission is to foster the pursuit of social justice and human rights by bringing together an international collective of voices, perspectives, and artistic presentations that challenge the current mental health system and explore alternative understandings of "mental illness." We have confirmed speakers coming from across the United States, England, Iceland, Sweden, and Canada, all of whom share a commitment to rethinking psychiatry and the current mental health system, and to cultivating effective alternatives.

The Politics of Healing

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Some things are floating around in my mind to try and make sense of. A big part of it is the connection of coercive/biopsychiatry to both race and gender politics. This is connected in my mind to the politics of healing in a larger sense than the singular healing any person might seek through therapy or personal search for wellness. It is a healing that is throughout the individual and society.

Ode to Biological Psychiatry

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Sometimes I get so sick of the lies of biological psychiatry that I must speak out. At these moments I find silence to be a kind of emotional death: a death of my spirit, a death of my critical faculties, a death of my courage. I speak out because I am alive and I wish to align with life.

The Relationship Between Systems Change and Being Present with Others

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Despite the hiring of peers, the mental health system still has not implemented the recovery and trauma-informed values advocated by both SAMHSA and by people with the lived experience of mental health recovery. Person-centered planning requires a system-wide shift in communication, as well as adaptation of recovery-oriented, trauma-informed values. Tomorrow, Dan Fisher, W. Reid Smithdeal and I are offering a webinar that will provide administrators, managers, providers of mental health services and others with some essential communication tools needed to transform their systems to being recovery-based, trauma-informed and empowerment focused.

Do We Underestimate the Benefits of Antidepressants?

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On April 19, 2014, The Lancet published an article titled Do we underestimate the benefits of antiddepressants?, by German psychiatrists Mazda Adli and Ulrich Hegerl. The authors argue that randomized controlled trials (RCT's), as currently conducted, systematically underestimate the benefits of antidepressants and overestimate the benefits of psychotherapy. But what's interesting is that in all the years that pharma-psychiatry was churning out its fraudulent, spurious and self-serving "findings," I never heard of a single complaint from psychiatry about these kinds of methodological issues.

Hearing Voices, Emancipation, Shamanism and CBT: Thoughts After Douglas Turkington’s Training

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When Doug Turkington, a UK psychiatrist, first announced to his colleagues that he wanted to help people with psychotic experiences by talking to them, he was told by some that this would just make them worse, and by others that this would be a risk to his own mental health, and would probably cause him to become psychotic! Fortunately, he didn’t believe either group, and in the following decades he went on to be a leading researcher and educator about talking to people within the method called CBT for psychosis.

What Should be The #1 Priority of Our Schools?

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With the semester over and summer quickly approaching, I sit here reflecting on the past school year. Thankfully, there were some shining moments for my two kids, my hundreds of students and the many schools I work with nationwide. But as a parent, professor and psychologist, I still have one main educational concern that still rises above all the rest. Can you guess what it is?

Final Lecture

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On May 16, 2014, I retired from a 35-year career as a professor of clinical psychology at Miami University. As a part of my retirement celebration, I gave a Final Lecture to my Department. These Final Lectures give retiring faculty members the opportunity to talk about anything they think is important for their colleagues and the attending students to hear. I focused on the changes I have witnessed in the profession of clinical psychology over my career; changes that were not for the better.

Creating More Equal Societies Decreases Mental Illness: What Should We Do?

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Consider what would happen if people in the United States were able to bring about greater income equality, akin to Japan’s.  The rate of mental disorders would drop by half.  Life expectancy, even of the upper middle class, would increase.  There would be more trust, fewer homicides and fewer prisoners.  These are some of the well documented effects of increasing income equality, as the social scientists Roger Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explain in their book The Spirit Level, and on their website, equalitytrust.org.