May 23, 2013

If you haven’t been labeled mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association, you have to ask yourself what’s wrong. Perhaps you were ahead of the game: you knew not to reveal yourself to them, you knew how to avoid them, you found other social support, and if so, a big congratulations. If not, what’s wrong? Why have you conformed?
Full Article →

Categorized in: Anxiety, Bipolar, Blogs, Coercion, Community, Depression, Featured Blogs, Medication Tapering/Withdrawal, Mind/Body, Psychiatric Drugs, Recovery/Empowerment, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

May 23, 2013

The last four years I’ve been running Poetry for Personal Power, a stigma reduction campaign funded by SAMHSA. Poetry for Personal Power has been going to Missouri Universities and asking students what they do to get through hard times and we now have about 400 incredible videos on You-Tube, with youth wellness tools.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Uncategorized | Tagged as: mental health stigma, overcoming adversity, poetry for healing, social inclusion campaign, stigma reduction, wellness tools

May 23, 2013

The Critical Psychiatry Network is concerned with the way the controversy over the publication of DSM-5 is being portrayed in the media and by some academic psychiatrists. The issues raised by the DSM are complex and require careful and studied consideration. There are two aspects in particular that concern us. These relate to the portrayal of the controversy as a guild dispute, and the polarisation of the debate as one of nurture versus nature.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: critical psychiatry

May 15, 2013

Imagine being able to live harmoniously amongst others without fear. I cannot. Cannot imagine it even a little bit. What can be created for people in my camp? People who are sensitive and had so much trauma in childhood that life among others is highly stressful, scary and worrisome? I’m allowing myself sanctuary-time alone, quiet time, time to write… yet… will things ever be different? Will I ever find my niche in this world, where I feel safe and able, valued and worthwhile, loved, adored and comfortable? I have no idea.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Featured Blogs, Non-Drug Approaches, Recovery/Empowerment, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Trauma/Distress

May 15, 2013

Leonard Roy Frank, an early pioneer of the Psychiatric Survivor movement, discusses his lived experience including forced insulin treatments, ECT, and the relationship between non-conformity and psychiatric diagnosis.
Full Article →

Categorized in: DSM, ECT, Interviews, MIA Reports, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

May 15, 2013

As co-chair of the Diagnostic Summit Committee of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, I am pleased to announce that today we officially launch the Global Summit on Diagnostic Alternatives (DxSummit.org), an online platform for rethinking mental health. Our goal is to provide a place for a collegial and rigorous discussion of alternative ways to conceptualize and practice diagnosis. Today’s launch is marked by the appearance of our first eight posts. These posts come from a variety of prominent people in the field, each offering a unique perspective on the current state of diagnosis and where we might take things as we move forward.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Disorders, DSM, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: diagnosis, diagnostic alternatives, Diagnostic Summit Committee, Division 32, DSM-5, DxSummit, DxSummit.org, Global Summit on Diagnostic Alternatives, GSDA, ICD, psychiatric diagnosis, Society for Humanistic Psychology

May 13, 2013

What makes the DSM so pernicious is that it is a cultural document whose influence transcends not only psychiatric practice but also the Western civilization from which it originates. Each revision of the DSM rescripts and reimagines how we make sense of our experiences, reinterprets what thoughts, feelings and behaviors are socially sanctioned, and ultimately what it means to be human.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Bipolar, Blogs, Depression, DSM, Featured Blogs, Psychiatric Drugs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

May 13, 2013

When Thomas Szasz’s name comes up in debates over defining mental illness, it is fairly common to hear people say something along the lines of, “Well, he made some good points, but he was just too extreme.” Yet I am struck by how conversations about DSM-5, being released this month, make the crisp arguments Szasz consistently offered for 50 years just as timely as ever. I’d even go so far as to suggest that a large number of counselors, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists pretty much agree with the main tenets of Szasz’s argument, despite their ongoing disclaimers.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Disorders, DSM, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

May 11, 2013

Psych meds can not only put weight on regardless of how you otherwise care for yourself, they also tend to make people feel gravely lethargic and vaguely sick all the time. I could not exercise as I had before. Could not. It doesn’t matter how much mental health professionals try to tell us that if we just exercised we’d be okay in the face of neurotoxic drugs that cause weight gain, because the fact is the drugs impede that capacity. This is not widely appreciated or understood and people on psych meds are again traumatized and made to feel guilty for something that is truly outside of their control as long as they are taking these medications.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Medication Tapering/Withdrawal, Mind/Body, Obesity/Metabolic Syndrome, Psychiatric Drugs, Recovery/Empowerment, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Trauma/Distress

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

For everyone who goes on psychiatric drugs, the reason comes back to power imbalances in their personal life. Women who’s husbands “make all of the money” and have an unequal share of the power, kids who’s parents have power over them—frequently people who have less money and security, therefore less platform for authority than those around them. Mental illness is not in fact an illness but an unequal division of power and sense of security in a social group.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Depression, Depression, Featured Blogs, Psychiatric Drugs, Recovery/Empowerment, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Trauma/Distress

May 4, 2013

While some people find their lives ruined by belief in imagined conspiracies that affect them personally – they may isolate from, or even attack, friends and family, and get diagnosed with psychosis – many other people believe in conspiracies on the basis of little evidence, yet have prominent places in society or even bodies like the US Senate. Yet it seems clear to me that the same dynamics are often involved in both.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Anxiety, Blogs, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders | Tagged as: conspiracy theories, normalizing, paranoia, Psychosis

April 21, 2013

Earth Day 2013 is a good time to reflect on how problems in our mental health system reflect deep flaws in “normal” conceptions of what it means to be a human being. These flawed conceptions then contribute in a critical way to the climate crisis that threatens us all.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders | Tagged as: climate crisis, creative maladjustment, madness, MindFreedom, Psychosis

April 7, 2013

Since I left the psychiatric prescribing trenches and came south for the winter, I’ve been staying in a beach town within driving distance of a technology metropolis. I take breaks from my writing and walk to the beach. There, I meet and talk with the winners of the American dream. They are intelligent, highly educated and financially successful. They take their beach vacations here.
Full Article →

Categorized in: ADHD, Anxiety, Blogs, Children and Adolescents, Depression, Featured Blogs, Psychiatric Drugs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: ADHD, Alice Keys MD, mental health, psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatric medication

March 10, 2013

A reader asked why more psychiatrists don’t speak up louder against psychiatric drugs. I’d like to think there’s someone in charge who could sound the alarm. It’s nice to imagine that working doctors have the power and freedom to speak up in a forceful and visible manner. If such a doctor exists, it’s not a psychiatrist who works in the trenches. A working doctor today is not in a position to be Paul Revere.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: Alice Keys MD, coming off psychiatric drugs, Empowerment, Human Rights, mental health recovery, speaking up

March 1, 2013

Not long ago I had a conversation with a psychiatrist. He told me about a diagnostic dilemma he’d run up against at work; When a judge makes an unfunded treatment mandate as part of her judgment, she pressures the doctor to make a “payable” psychiatric diagnosis. If the doctor stretches the truth out of sympathy and provides an inaccurate but payable diagnosis so that his patient can have access to medical care and money to live on, he is committing fraud that can mean heavy fines and incarceration for himself.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, DSM, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: Alice Keys MD, diagnostic labels, DSM, gate keepers, insurance, psychiatric labels, resources

February 27, 2013

In August 2010, my friend and fellow ‘suicide mum’ Deb Williams and I established CASPER – Community Action on Suicide Prevention Education & Research. CASPER’s goals are to provide peer support to families bereaved by suicide, to educate politicians and opinion leaders on suicide and its prevention and to support families and communities to reclaim suicide prevention from medical professionals and governments.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Antidepressants, Community, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Non-Drug Approaches, Psychiatric Drugs, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Suicide | Tagged as: CASPER, suicide, suicide prevention

February 23, 2013

This is a transcript of my keynote speech at Alternatives 2012, which a Madness Radio listener recently transcribed.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Non-Drug Approaches, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Violence

February 13, 2013

My public writing has brought my mother and I closer together than we’ve been in decades. There have been disagreements. But now, my almost ninety-year-old mother tells me she reads everything I write. She recently told me that she’s glad I see things so clearly.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Community, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Genetics, Recovery/Empowerment, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: Alice Keys MD, blame, community, education, Empowerment, hope, industrialization, Poverty, social models

February 8, 2013

You may think I’m slow on the uptake when I say this. And maybe I am. But I recently came to the realization that products or lifestyles that are vigorously marketed and promoted are bad for you.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Non-Drug Approaches, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: Alice Keys MD, cultural matrix, hope, Human Rights, the bigger picture

February 7, 2013

“Asheville psychiatrist Daniel Johnson didn’t set out to transform his profession,” says an article in North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress, “But he’s now part of a growing movement, both locally and nationally, that’s challenging the most fundamental assumptions about mental illness.” Since starting his practice in 2010, Johnson has come to believe that “unfortunately, and sadly, more often than not, medications do more harm than good … I had a lot of soul searching and reckoning to do on a personal level.”

Article → Discuss →

Categorized in: Featured News, In the News, Industry, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

February 6, 2013

I am writing this post primarily to share a trailer for a new film. ‘Beyond the Medical Model’ is a product of our community in many ways. It grows collaboratively out of our hurts, our anger, our passion, our discoveries and our insistence that we be heard. Our collective wisdom and exploration drives its very purpose. It would be hollow without our stories.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

January 17, 2013

“The voices, they tell me they gonna kill me, and it’s my fault.”

“Sometimes, when we hear voices, they just reflect our own anxieties, sometimes they can echo things we’ve been told in the past. When the voices tell you that they’re going to kill you, does that echo anything you may have been told in the past?” I ask.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Childhood Adversity/Trauma, DSM, Featured Blogs, Hearing Voices, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders, Trauma/Distress

January 17, 2013

This is the second in my new series, “Haiku for social change”, the first having appeared on my own blog page. Since this piece is about pharmacology and psychopharmacology, I think MIA is a good home for it.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Blogs, Disorders, Featured Blogs, Industry, Psychiatric Drugs, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model | Tagged as: Alice Keys MD, anitdepessants, Antipsychotics, children, coming off psychiatric drugs, haiku for social change, methamphetamines, psychiatric medication, psychiatric medication withdrawal

January 15, 2013

In my last post, I argued that the single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis is loss of meaning. By ruthlessly divesting experiences of their personal, social and cultural significance, diagnosis turns ‘people with problems’ into ‘patients with illnesses.’ Horrifying stories of trauma, abuse, discrimination and deprivation are sealed off behind a pseudo-medical label as the individual is launched on what is often a lifelong journey of disability, exclusion and despair.
Full Article →

Categorized in: Adult, Blogs, Disorders, DSM, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Hearing Voices, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model