Op-Eds
The Journey of Transformation
May 7, 2013
From reflecting on my own experience and that of many other psychiatric survivors I’ve known and read about, I have concluded that mainstream psychiatry plays the role of Joseph Campbell’s Holdfast, the keeper and enforcer of the status quo. As such, one of its functions is to discourage, through intimidation and terror, those inclined to embark on the journey of transformation from actually doing so.
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Occupy the American Psychiatric Association
May 6, 2013
A small but feisty group of “psychiatric survivors” are demonstrating just how disenchanted they truly are with what they consider to be the cult of psychiatry. Their movement is known as Occupy the American Psychiatric Association, or Occupy APA. They recently protested at American Psychiatric Association (APA) meetings in Philadelphia and in New York, and they are already organizing a similar protest in San Francisco for May 19 of this year.
If onlookers think this group of under 100 protestors are misguided in believing they can take away the power of the psychiatric profession, they should realize that these zealous activists are just getting started.
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Homework for E. Fuller Torrey and Xavier Amador
May 3, 2013
In an Op-ed in the Hartford Courant Larry Davidson argued that denial of “mental illness” is not neurological. E. Fuller Torrey and Xavier Amador promptly wrote letters to the Courant claiming that data exist which prove that there is a neurological basis for denying “mental illness.” Torrey and Amador throw around the term anosognosia – the original usage of which described ignorance of disease due to lobe lesions. Amador wrote, “Anosognosia exists and AOT provides a workaround that can save lives”
Disseminating subjective observation disguised as scientific fact is harmful. The original usage of the word anosognosia described something that is much more of a disease and far more tangible than what the new usage psychiatry has introduced into the lexicon describes. Psychiatry is posing a danger to society via an incorrect and largely unchecked usage of this term. It is important to discredit this usage of the aforementioned word because it is invoked in order to justify forcing people into “treatment” which is incredibly harmful.
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More Than Surviving: Speaking up About ‘Life’ in the American ‘Mental Health’ Gulags
April 4, 2013
February 26, I left behind locked, steel doors, inmates, languishing, wandering through cinder block rooms and long hallways. The core of their humanity being drug drenched, blunted into the vapor of ghosts. This last visit I was not heavily drugged. They were no longer ghosts. I saw their humanity. Some became my friends.
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Response to “Power Needed To Make Potentially Dangerous People Take Their Meds” in the Hartford Courant
March 28, 2013
The title of the article, “Power Needed To Make Potentially Dangerous People Take Their Meds,” concedes that Intensive Outpatient Commitment Laws preemptively abridge the liberty of individuals who haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t even been accused of doing anything wrong. Forcibly invading individuals with harmful psych-drugs against their will and restricting their liberty in other ways because they are potentially dangerous – is a good practice? This is a power needed by Connecticut judges?
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A Mother’s Response to the NY Times’ “Sunday Dialogue: Defining Mental Illness”
March 28, 2013
As a mother of a 25 year old son who took his life fourteen months ago, I completely disagree that the forthcoming DSM-5, with its expanding diagnoses, will lessen the stigma. Surely, when my husband and I found our sons’s body, “grief” – the human emotion for something so profoundly horrifying, the most catastrophic devastation that life can possible bring a parent – should not be pathologized as a “mental illness” after two weeks, per the “psychiatric bible”‘s newest revision.
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Help End the War Against Psychotherapy
March 15, 2013
Decades of disinformation and funding restrictions have devastated mental health services and wrecked lives. For more than thirty years, organized medicine has engaged in a concerted effort to severely restrict the practice of psychotherapy. In the early ‘80s, faced with competition for patients from psychologists and social workers, the American Psychiatric Association began colluding with pharmaceutical companies to eliminate the competition for their mutual economic benefit. Specifically, they began promoting a theory that had, and still has, no basis in science, that mental illness is the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be corrected by the administration of drugs.
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A Phenomenological View of Madness and Medicine
January 20, 2013
I got to thinking. In my essay “The Reality Is In Our Heads,” I espoused a phenomenological view of the world in which human meanings cannot be located in the physical world. Yet, human experience requires the notion of a …
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Call for an Investigation Into Psych Meds and Violence
January 13, 2013
The killing of 20 children and six adults in Newtown has triggered a search for some way of preventing these kinds of tragedies. The focus has been on gun control, video game violence and a registry of persons diagnosed with …
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Mood Stabilizers, Op-Eds, Psychiatric Drugs, Violence
How the Same Study with Different Conclusions Could Spell Disaster for Unborn and New-Born Babies
January 13, 2013
Last year (2012) the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a study from 5 Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) based on more than 1.6 million infants born after gestational week 33 between 1996-2007. This year (2013) JAMA published …
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Op-Eds, Pregnancy & Birth Defects, Psychiatric Drugs
From Psychiatry and Psychotherapy’s Grand Delusion Toward Constructions of a Post-Therapeutic State
January 8, 2013
by Eugene Epstein, Manfred Wiesner, and Lothar Duda Over the past 50 years, the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourses of the western first world have infiltrated practically every aspect of our culture and society. The introduction of the new DSM-5 will …
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Categorized in: DSM, Op-Eds, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model
Re-examining the Biochemical Model after Newtown: The Effects of Stigma and the Need for Better Family Coaching
January 7, 2013
The media discussions around the horrific event that unfolded in Newtown, Connecticut just before Christmas once again focus the world’s attention on the nation’s gun control laws. Let’s hope that this time, the right actions for the right reasons will …
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What is “Mental Illness”? Not What Caused Newtown
January 3, 2013
I am deeply saddened by the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut. It is difficult to make sense of the despair that motivated the violence. As one who works in the mental health field, I hear too many of my colleagues …
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Categorized in: Op-Eds, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Violence
Why Paul Steinberg Has It All Wrong (and Should Stop Seeing Patients)
January 1, 2013
(This commentary originally ran on Beyond Meds) In his New York Times op-ed entitled “Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia“ Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist in private practice, proposes we all go back to the “golden age” of psychiatry, when patients spent years in institutions …
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Categorized in: Adult, Antipsychotics, Children and Adolescents, Disorders, DSM, Op-Eds, Psychiatric Drugs, Schizophrenia and Psychosis, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders, Violence
A Call for a National Research and Training Institute for Safe Psych Drug Withdrawal
December 22, 2012
The mass media is awash with debate about the current horrific mass slaughter in Connecticut, and people are calling for more gun control and greater monitoring of those labeled “mentally ill.” Many in the psychiatric recovery movement suspect that the young assassin was either on psych drugs or had recently withdrawn from them. As people frantically try to understand, absorb and process yet another high profile national trauma, the debate circles around ideas of further regulation of guns, the prohibition of mental patients use, a ban on all public gun use, and the heightened legal and medical control of psychiatric patients.
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A Psychiatric Assault on Liberty: The Case of Carolyn Barnes
December 18, 2012
The main purpose of this article is to draw the reader’s attention to the horribly egregious violation of attorney Carolyn Barnes of Leander by the Williamson County legal authorities and the psychiatric institutions of Texas. In order to properly frame …
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Szasz and Beyond: The Spiritual Promise of the Mad Pride Movement
November 21, 2012
Dedicated to the memory of Thomas Szasz In 1961 The Myth of Mental Illness by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz was published. No one knew it then but it would turn out to be one of the most important books of the …
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The APA Refuses to Listen to Voices of People Harmed by Diagnosis … and Refuses and Refuses and Refuses
November 19, 2012
When you try to speak truth to power, what happens if the powerful turn off their hearing aids? These days, when I think of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), I remember Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine, an obstreperous telephone operator who …
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Lost and Found in Santa Barbara
November 7, 2012
A few springs ago, I flew out to Santa Barbara from Columbus, Ohio for what would have been my son Jake’s 29th birthday. I needed to see for myself where he had lived and died as a homeless person the …
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10 Years of the Icarus Project: Reflections & The Second Generation of Icaristas
October 9, 2012
With the Icarus Project celebrating their 10 year anniversary comes nostalgia and reflection. I can vividly remember the year the Icarus Project first came to fruition, and the joy I felt knowing that there were people like me in the …
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Our Time
October 7, 2012
Before the new millennium, psychiatry as practised in Ireland was like psychiatry practised everywhere else. It was controlling, dominating, conservative and forceful. It was backed up by the law. Once you fell into its clutches, you became a second class citizen. Scattered throughout the country were huge, forbidding, grey Victorian asylums which were little more than prisons. Large doses of chlorpromazine and electro shock were standard treatment. Mental health was a taboo subject rarely mentioned by politicians or for that matter, the general public. Such patient/carer groups as did exist, while they may have been critical of the physical conditions of the asylums, still bought into the medical model of treatment practiced behind the high walls.
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Will the APA Listen to the Voices of Those Harmed by Psychiatric Diagnosis?
October 1, 2012
Since 1988, when I began a two-year stint as consultant to two Work Groups that were preparing the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), hundreds of people have told me how receiving a psychiatric …
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Neurotoxic vs. Brain-Boosting: Psychiatric Drugs
August 22, 2012
Neurotoxic vs. Brain-Boosting: Psychiatric Drugs by Monica Cassani August 22, 2012 The other day someone on twitter said that my use of the term “toxic” when I referred to psych meds was hyperbolic. They also referred to Ritalin as “brain-boosting,” as …
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Brain Disease or Existential Crisis?
by Paris Williams, Ph.D
August 2, 2012
As the schizophrenia/psychosis recovery research continues to emerge, we discover increasing evidence that psychosis is not caused by a disease of the brain, but perhaps may best be described as a last ditch strategy of a desperate psyche to transcend …
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Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Disorders, Genetics, Mind/Body, Non-Drug Approaches, Nuclear Genetics, Op-Eds, Recovery/Empowerment, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders, Uncategorized
Reviving the Myth of Mental Illness
July 26, 2012
What do we mean when we say someone has a mental illness? If we are to take the phrase literally, we mean that someone’s mind is ill. But can a mind be ill with disease? To believe so, one must …
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