May 21, 2013

For several decades, since the days when I was a patient, I have seen and heard how an obsession with questions damages psychiatry. Many of us have been asked the same questions day after day, year after year: ‘Do your thoughts seem faster than normal?’, ‘Do you ever have thoughts in your mind which are not your own?’, ‘Do you feel anxious?’, and so on. Hearing only what a patient says under questioning when frozen by paralysis, or subject to the hyper-arousal of anxiety, the professional misses the opportunity to hear the threads of something new, the possibility of weaving with the patient a narrative of hope and recovery.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

May 20, 2013

The recent furore surrounding publication of the new DSM has provided a much-needed opportunity to discuss and debate crucial issues about how we make sense of, and respond to, experiences of madness and distress. Many psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals have expressed their dismay about the dominance and inadequacy of a biomedical model of mental illness. Whilst we share these concerns, welcome these debates and support colleagues that are willing to take a stand, The Hearing Voices Network believes that people with lived experience of diagnosis must be at the heart of any discussions about alternatives to the current system.

Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

May 13, 2013

In a bold and unprecedented move for any professional body, the UK Division of Clinical Psychology, a sub-division of the British Psychological Society, issued a Position Statement today calling for the end of the unevidenced biomedical model implied by psychiatric diagnosis. In brief, the argument is that the so-called ‘functional’ diagnoses – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, ADHD and so on – are not scientifically valid categories and are often damaging in practice.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

May 9, 2013

Nowadays, with our increasingly aged population, it is probable that the main cause of psychotic symptoms in the West is dementia. But what is less obvious is that most of the symptoms of demented patients may actually be due to delirium (that is, to acute confusional states).
Full Article →

Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Dementia, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

May 9, 2013

I believe the video ‘Voices Matter’ has, quite apart from capturing the spirit of the Hearing Voices movement, filmed the first signs, the first moments of professional interest, hinting at the dangers that inevitably are present when a movement threatens the established order of things.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Hearing Voices, Industry

May 7, 2013

The decision by the National Institute of Mental Health to part company with the APA’s forthcoming DSM-5 should not be taken as evidence that biological psychiatry is entering a terminal decline. Far from it, as the Director of NIMH Thomas Insel’s blog of 29th April 2013 makes clear, the reason NIMH has opted for its own Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDoC) is because they believe psychiatric patients deserve something better.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: critical psychiatry, neuro-imaging, philosophy

May 7, 2013

Faced with questions about the $3 Billion fine imposed on GSK – is it just the cost of doing business? – Andrew Witty snapped back: “Although corporate malfeasance cases end up looking very big, they often have their origin in just… one or two people who didn’t quite do the right thing. It’s not about the big piece. The 100,000 people who work for GSK are just like you, right? I’m sure everybody who reads the BMJ has friends who work for drug companies. They’re normal people… Many of them are doctors.”
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

May 7, 2013

Those of you following our posts on Nutrition and Mental Health know that we ended the last one, on ‘history’, by saying that the two of us are essentially devoting our research lives to re-inventing the wheel. It is old knowledge that good nutrition is essential for mental health, and it is really old knowledge that improving nutrition can improve mental health. We are going to spend the next few blogs outlining the science and rationale that supports the role played by nutrition in wellness as well as the expression of mental illness. This information will provide modern scientific validation for the conclusions drawn by some of our ancestors, described in the previous blogs.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Mind/Body

May 7, 2013

The Hearing Voices movement is a beautiful thing, and last year it was 25 years old. What has happened in 25 years? A confidence has grown in a different approach to hearing voices, listening and embracing rather than trying to control and silence voices. Key to this has been Hearing Voices groups and conferences, where people who hear voices are listened to with openness and curiosity. It’s not about telling people who hear voices to throw away their pills if they are taking them, its about creating spaces to listen deeply to what is happening.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Hearing Voices

May 4, 2013

Treating one disease by causing another is actually a pretty mainstream therapeutic strategy in medicine – and especially psychiatry. The idea is to use a milder or temporary disease to treat a more severe or permanent one. In a recent development neuroleptic/antipsychotic drugs are being given to tens/hundreds of thousands of over-active children (aka ‘bipolar’). Parkinson’s disease certainly puts a stop to hyperactivity!

Full Article →

Categorized in: ADHD, Antipsychotics, Blogs, Children and Adolescents, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs, Stimulants

May 2, 2013

In the New York Times’ recent autobiographical account of a “bipolar” woman’s struggle the main message is that the current mental health care system has some real problems but that the general paradigm from which this treatment model has emerged is not to be questioned. Anyone who knows my work knows that I have a real problem with this paradigm, believing that it generally causes much more harm than benefit. So, what is it then about this story that grabbed me? I recognized that if we read Linda’s story while holding a different paradigm, then this story reveals what I believe are some of the most fundamental issues at the heart of this epidemic of “mental illness” that so pervades our society.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

April 30, 2013

The norm in science is that there is free access to the data underpinning experiments. If free access is denied; it’s not science. In the case of branded pharmaceuticals, we do not even know what trials have been done. What is put in the public domain is not data. The selected highlights of a football game and the comments of the pundits afterwards don’t change the score. The selected highlights of pharma studies and the comments of pundits routinely change the score.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Antidepressants, Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Industry, Psychiatric Drugs, Research

April 24, 2013

At the 50th American Psychosomatic Society meeting in New York, Michael Shepherd was speaking. His topic – The Placebo. When the lecture finished, Lou Lasagna said “this paper is now open for questions.” Nothing happened. Nobody said anything at all. Lasagna couldn’t refrain from commenting: “There are 3 possible explanations. First, you were all asleep and therefore you heard nothing. Secondly, it was so bad that since this speaker has come 3,000 miles you didn’t want to embarrass him. Third, it is genuinely so original and new that you don’t quite know what to make of it. I’ll leave you to decide which it was”.

What had Shepherd said?
Full Article →

Categorized in: Antidepressants, Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs, Research

April 19, 2013

What if we lived in a world where people who heard voices were respected? What if we lived in a world where if you said you heard voices people would be intrigued and asked if you did not mind sharing what the voice had to say? What if when you said you were troubled by voices, people offered to mediate between you and the voices? This peace-making approach is what we have learned in the Hearing Voices movement.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Hearing Voices

April 17, 2013

Tension mounts across the ideological divide as D-Day (DSM-5 Day) approaches. The APA has powerful allies on its side. President Obama has just launched Decade of the Brain 2 with the announcement two weeks ago that heralds the arrival of BRAIN ( Brain Research through Advances in Innovative Neurotechnologies). If that’s not enough, those who believe that science will ultimately explain madness can always rely on the media to fawn at their feet.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Genetics, Research | Tagged as: neuroscience

April 9, 2013

In 1956, Lou Lasagna was on his way to being the most famous doctor in the United States; an advocate for controlled clinical trials of both the safety and effectiveness of medication, as well as for a revision to the Hippocratic Oath to include a holistic and compassionate approach to medicine. Then, caught in the nexus of reason, regulation, and the pharmaceutical machine, his star fell.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Industry

April 9, 2013

I hope this will be of help to people who hear voices and their friends and supporters. I also hope it will be helpful to the voices which are parts of many people’s lives. Many voices I have come across and the people that hear them are convinced that their voices are spiritual in nature. I take an agnostic position on this, and therefore endeavour to respect different spiritual understandings. My intention is not to explain all voices psychologically but to help people make peace with their voices so they can get on with their lives.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Mind/Body, Non-Drug Approaches, Recovery/Empowerment, Trauma/Distress

April 2, 2013

In the upper north of Berlin one finds the so-called garden city Frohnau. Here the rich and prosperous of Germany’s capital can be found; it is a community that would personify perfection if it were solely up to its residents. Enter 1996: One ugly duckling sees the light of day right in between the villas; the Weglaufhaus is erected to fight against psychiatric conventions in mental health and help those that are labelled ‘mentally ill’.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

March 28, 2013

The invitation from the London Review of Books to review Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma™ reads: “We were unsure, at first, what a review could add that isn’t already in the book – scrappy summaries and bits of praise are not for us. The book is of sufficient importance that the main thing is to get someone who knows what they’re talking about to present the material confidently… frame the discussion”. My head said it was inconceivable that the LRB wouldn’t take a review, even if it was at odds with the invitation to praise Bad Pharma. But my gut told me the inconceivable was about to take flesh.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Industry, Research

March 24, 2013

Speaking as someone whose whole family has been affected by psychoses and the subsequent psychiatric treatment I am fed up with the separation and segregation that continually is and has been our lot … The stigma and discrimination foisted upon us by a psychiatric opinion, non-medical, subjective, yet taken as gospel and written in the notes.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: bipolar, Bipolar Disorder, brain surgery for mental illness, complete recovery, ECT, family history of, lifelong mental illness, mental health strategy Scotland, psychiatric system, psychiatry a religion, psychological therapies, Psychosis, Recovery, remission, resistance, Schizophrenia, severe and enduring mental illness, shock treatment, Social Control

March 21, 2013

This post was written by Alan Cassels and first appeared in Focus magazine online in early March. The full version is here. Alan was one of the creators of the Selling Sickness, or disease mongering idea. His recent book is …
Full Article →

Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

March 20, 2013

The International DSM-5 Response Committee, sponsored by Division 32 of the American Psychological Association — the Society for Humanistic Psychology — now has an online petition against the DSM-5.  This is a truly international effort. Please support the petition by signing it at http://dsm5response.com

Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

March 16, 2013

The problem with anti-stigma campaigns, to my mind, is that they are focusing on the wrong target, society, when the real issue is to do with psychiatric diagnoses, biomedical models of mental illness and lifelong psychiatric drug prescribing that can restrict and cause disability. Therefore there will never be an end to stigma until there is a turnaround in psychiatry so that patients become people and mental illness becomes life’s problems that can happen to any of us.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents | Tagged as: anti-stigma campaigns, brain surgery for mental illness, ECT, forced treatment, governements, human rights abuses, long term chronicity, mental distress, mental illness, problems of living, psychiatric drug prescribing, psychiatric labels, Recovery, reinforcing stigma, religion of psychiatry, Social Control, stigma, survivor activists

March 12, 2013

In recent years however in both the US and UK there has been a rise in the number of hangings so that this mode of death now accounts for 50% of cases. A website, AntiDepAware, was recently set up to track deaths by suicide or misadventure that are related to antidepressants. It has logged over 1600 UK suicides involving antidepressants.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

March 9, 2013

A Colorado based company, Sundance Diagnostics, contacted me a few months ago to tell me about work they are doing to develop a genetic test to predict suicide risk when patients are prescribed antidepressant drugs. Their plan is to sequence the entire human genome of about 360 patients and controls to see if antidepressant drug risk can definitively be predicted.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Antidepressants, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs, Suicide