Pharmaceutical Industry Corruption Is Structural, Systemic, and Profitable, New Review Finds
A new empirical review published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics reports that pharmaceutical industry corruption is a structural, industry-wide problem. Author...
Open Dialogue Approach Cuts Psychiatric Hospital Use in Major Trial
The ODDESSI trial found that people’s reported recovery, quality of life and satisfaction with services improved with Open Dialogue.
Antidepressants Are Major Drivers of Suicides
For almost 40 years, psychiatric leaders have denied that antidepressants increase suicides despite overwhelming evidence.
A Call for a Paradigm Shift in Schizophrenia Treatment: Reassessing Long-Term Antipsychotic Use and the Evidence for Psychosocial Interventions
The cumulative evidence challenges the assumption that lifelong antipsychotic treatment is necessary or beneficial for most individuals with schizophrenia.
“Sticky Labels” and Overlooking Physical Illness—Researchers Highlight Risks of Psychiatric Diagnosis
This week, Mad in America explores four articles around problems with psychiatric diagnoses. The first study finds that childhood diagnoses of autism and ADHD...
What I Learned After Losing My Partner to Polypharmacy
I am left with questions that cannot be resolved retrospectively. Why were medications added without clear longitudinal review of cumulative exposure?
What I Learned After Losing My Partner to Polypharmacy
I am left with questions that cannot be resolved retrospectively. Why were medications added without clear longitudinal review of cumulative exposure?
On Dialectics and Disappearance
DBT is made of a soft enough fabric, but you can trace the threads of applied behavioral analysis in its lineage if you know where the seams are, or if you are me and your fingers crash into them without meaning to.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Psychiatry’s Suppression of the Highly...
How many highly capable people are lost to a system that champions mediocrity as a necessary implication of mental illness?
Remembering Dory Previn: An Interview by Peter Sterling in 1974
Dory Previn was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, and poet whose deeply personal work explored her struggles with mental health, including experiences of psychosis. In October 1974, she met with neuroscientist Peter Sterling for a candid conversation about her psychiatric treatment.
First-Person Knowledge and the Meanings of Madness: An Interview with Gail Hornstein
Psychologist Gail Hornstein discusses her search for the meanings of madness, from asylum artifacts and memoirs to the contemporary peer-support groups reshaping how people understand voices and visions.
When Medical Science Refuses to Correct Itself
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But what happens when the journals entrusted to uphold this principle become its gatekeepers?
Mad Studies Is More Than Lived Experience: An Interview with Merrick Daniel Pilling
Pilling explains how Mad Studies moves from first-person knowledge to questions of sanism, psychiatric authority, mutual aid, and collective resistance.
The West Doesn’t Have All the Answers: An Interview with Dinesh Bhugra
In this wide-ranging conversation on public mental health, psychiatrization, and community care, Dinesh Bhugra explains why meaningful lives, not symptom reduction alone, should guide mental healthcare today.
Around the Web
Mad in Norway International Film Festival
Mad in Norway International Film Festival Film Review: 10 Days In...
In 1887, 23-year-old reporter Nellie Bly, working for Joseph Pulitzer, feigns mental illness to go undercover in notorious Blackwell’s Island, a mental institution for women, to expose corruption, abuse, and murder.
View the artwork, poetry, and humor galleries and submit your work. Or visit the Arts Corner.
Heal by Eddie Kaitz
Research Studies
Research Participants Needed: Are You Reducing or Stopping a Psychiatric Medication? We are a research team at the University of Washington studying how people taper or stop psychiatric medications such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, and stimulants. If you are over 18 years old and currently reducing or stopping (tapering) a psychiatric medication, we would love to hear about your experiences. Click here to take the eligibility survey.
MAD IN NORWAY FILM FESTIVAL: September 24-26, 2026, Lillehammer, Norway
NEW POSSIBILITIES: CLINICIANS AND VOICE HEARERS REIMAGINE SUPPORT TOGETHER: October 13, 2026, 12PM EDT, online
New in Poetry
A Hand on the Shoulder (a poem for Lindsay Clancy) by...
It didn’t have to be this way—
She begged for help,
took the drugs,
admitted herself to a psych hospital,
worked with a psychiatrist.
Her doctor treated her over...
