Art, Poetry, and Humor Galleries
View the artwork, poetry, and humor galleries and submit your work. Or visit the Arts Corner.
Split by Ashley Nightingale
Life in the Hospital Before Deinstitutionalization
Accounts of deinstitutionalization fail to describe recovery, peer support, or what it was actually like to be in the state hospitals.
How the Troubled Teen Industry Turns Pain Into Profit
These programs, though marketed as "therapeutic," are nothing more than profit-driven enterprises that exploit families at their most desperate.
Fighting Forced Treatment in Court: A Victory is to Be Celebrated
It is very difficult to get off a mental health commitment. The counties fight tooth and nail to keep people in the system.
Family Traditions and the Inheritance of “Madness”
Families are not merely a source of comfort and support but also a breeding ground for dysfunction, unhealed trauma, and emotional neglect.
What Does Consent Mean in Practice? A Lived Experience Perspective
Every time I agreed to 'treatment’, I was told that it was necessary to save my life. I was sold a bunch of lies.
Mad in Portugal
Mad in Portugal's readers can find blogs, book reviews, and first-person testimonials from voices less present in mainstream narratives.
Rebecca Williams from University of Manchester is seeking participants for research on what potential participants want to know about psychedelic-assisted therapies. If you are interested in taking part, please contact [email protected].
Dr. Morgan Shields of Washington University in St. Louis is conducting research on the experience of people utilizing behavioral health crisis services. They are recruiting people who have direct lived experience as patients/
Please join us on Thursday, June 26, at 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 5pm BST, 7pm CEST for a special webinar on Recovery Oriented Cognitive Therapy for Psychosis: Living Well w/ Psychosis with Dr. Aaron P. Brinen, hosted by Ron Unger.
- May 21, 2025, 12:00 pm: When Conversation Turns to Suicide, May, 2025
- June 24, 2025, 12:00 pm: Harm Reduction Approach to Self-Injury (June '25)
The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer
Ayurdhi Dhar interviews influential cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer on how metaphors, histories, and social structures contour our experiences of suffering and healing.
Heritability Explains Less About Mental Disorders Than You Think
The focus on diseased brains and genes obscures the significance of social and environmental influences.
Two Decades of PSSD: A Life Stolen by Antidepressants
Our two-year-long collaborative research project suggests that neuroimmune processes and related downstream mechanisms may play a role in PSSD.
Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar…
On the podcast this week we are joined by Kermit Cole who shares his thoughts on how humor can help in creating a shared experience that is helpful to the healing process. Kermit, in his experiences of being with people in psychotic states, has seen humor as a moment when a connection can be made. In many ways, this project is bringing Kermit back full circle to his work as a film director, early in his professional career.
Criticisms That Establishment Psychiatry Can and Cannot Tolerate
Criticism that uniquely applies to establishment psychiatry but not to medicine in general threatens its existential legitimacy, and is not tolerated.
Chemically Imbalanced: Joanna Moncrieff on the Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth
Joanna Moncrieff joins Robert Whitaker to talk about her latest book, titled Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth. They discuss the serotonin story and the fact that there is no good evidence that a serotonergic deficiency is a primary cause of depression.
Psychological care without coercion – how care was provided at Nacka...
The motto "no matter how confused someone is, they haven't lost their whole self" was a guiding principle at Sweden's first and so far only Soteria house, which operated during the 1990s. Here, psychiatric care was provided without coercion - a whole decade without either suicide or coercive measures. Majka Stenberg and Petra Horn explain how care worked at Nacka Soteria.
Another perspective on the Randers case: psychiatry is in deep crisis
In 2006, the Danish Health Authority warned against combining antipsychotics with benzodiazepines because it increases mortality by 50-65% . But what do we see in the medical records? Virtually all patients with psychosis receive one or more antipsychotics and also benzodiazepines.
Beyond 180…some reflection
If it is true that mental health is not psychiatry and that mental disorder is part of a distress that has its origin in a complex of factors, which in a somewhat too simplistic way are defined as bio-psycho-social, then I believe that psychiatry cannot omnipotently take charge of it but that it must find a less reductive interpretation than the currently dominant one.
