Yearly Archives: 2012

BEYOND PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS Lucy Johnstone is a UK clinical psychologist, trainer, speaker and writer, and a long-standing critic of biomedical model psychiatry. She has worked...

Questions have been circulating about whether Adam Lanza had been taking psychotropic medications. We hope that the inquiry into the mass murder will determine what psychotropic medications he may have been on. Meanwhile, Catherine Clarke and Jan Evans research paper "Neuroleptic Drugs and Violence" is archived on Madinamerica, and may shed further light on why this question arises in the context of these terrible events.

This is the third time in less than two years that I’m writing an article about young men walking into public venues and shooting a dozen or more people at a time --- first Tucson, then Aurora, now Newtown. The Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, didn’t just walk into the Sandy Hook elementary school where he shot and killed 26 persons, he broke in, determined to carry out the plan he had. “Why?” and “Where Next?” seem to be the questions we are always left with, along with “How can we prevent this from happening again?” Many Americans are also asking, finally, “What is happening to this country?”

I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.

I woke up this morning and there it was again, "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother." This essay is all over the internet, written by a woman who is using her personal story about experiences with her “mentally ill” son, whom she is “terrified of,” to appeal for more dialogue on the issue of mental health. As I write this, her son's picture has been viewed by over a million people. They have read her accounts of what may be some of these young man’s most painful childhood memories.

Drawing New Lines: Faith Rhyne is a recovery educator, an advocate, and a storyteller. She enjoys exploring the role that narrative and culture play in...

DRAWING NEW LINES Faith Rhyne is a parent, educator, and a radical mental health activist. She became interested in psychology and psychiatry at age 13,...

Finding Our Way Home: As managing director for the Mother Bear Family Mental Health Network, Jennifer helps guide the development of family-led mental health education...

FINDING OUR WAY HOME Jennifer Maurer is the managing director for Mother Bear Family Mental Health Network, a nonprofit organization and fund of the Foundation for Excellence...

We have long been told that “low levels” of serotonin in the brain equal bad and sad, and we have been educated by the Pharmaceutical industry about the opportunity we have, through the use of antidepressants, to retrain our wayward neurons: by making the proverbial holes in the strainer that much smaller. But even if you accept the conventional wisdom regarding the role of serotonin in the narrative of mind, merriness, and misery, from where do we think that this magical neurochemical arises?

We poison ever growing numbers of children with chemicals known to cause aggression and suicidality. We routinely drug children with these so they’ll sit still and be quiet in classrooms. Now, we drug babies for crying and 3 year olds for acting frightened while locked away from their families in day care centers. Those unsuccessful in school environments are incarcerated. It 's a well-worn path.

As I write these words on a Monday evening, my spirit aches.  It aches with grief for the lives lost in Connecticut last week; it aches with dread for our collective American future in Sandy Hook’s aftermath; and it aches with love and empathy for Michael, a thirteen-year old boy whose once private life has, for the last day and a half, been on display for millions to see, exploited by a mother whose opinions are representative of America’s most pervasive mass delusion: that “mental illness” is a biologically-based condition requiring psychopharmaceutical “treatment” and “mental health care”, and that “the mentally ill” are a class of Other that threatens the safety, security, and health of America.

I had the best of intentions of sitting down Friday morning (12/14) to write about how faith — belief in myself, intrinsic healing, and the basic goodness of the universe — helped me through withdrawal from psychoactive medications. Then, the woman who was going to watch our son couldn’t make it due to car trouble, so I decided to take the little man out in his stroller. Before I left, I checked email and saw a brief flicker on Yahoo about a “school shooting in Connecticut.”

As many of the readers of this website know, David Oaks, the long-time leader of MindFreedom, was badly injured when he fell from a ladder on December 1. He broke a bone in his neck, his injury so severe he had to be on a ventilator. The latest news is encouraging: he had a tracheotomy and is off the ventilator, able now to speak in a whisper. Personally, I owe David a great deal, as it was an interview I did with him in 1998 that propelled me to write more in-depth about psychiatry.

A couple of days ago, after two years of fighting, I received Mylan Pharmaceuticals assessment of the causal link between their drug Fluox and my son's suicide. Their conclusion is identical to that of the New Zealand drug regulator Medsafe, that the SSRI antidepressant Fluoxetine is the probable cause of Toran's death. The rating of 'probable' includes an assessment that Toran's suicide was 'unlikely to be attributed to disease or other drugs.'

The Gene Illusion: Jay Joseph brings a critical perspective to claims in the media and the academic literature that disordered genes underlie psychiatric disorders. His...

THE GENE ILLUSION IN PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY Jay Joseph, Psy.D., is a licensed psychologist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1998, he has...

Is poetry the way to truly understand madness? Do rituals and music -- such as Ireland's tradition of keening -- have the power to heal emotional suffering? Susan McKeown, Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter and folklorist, supported her partner through an extreme state. She began a journey to uncover intergenerational trauma in her family and in the history of her native Ireland, and was inspired to set poems about madness to music.

A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study comparing outcomes from risperidone, cognitive therapy, and supportive therapy in a cohort of 115 at-risk young adults over a...

This shorter-than-usual contribution signifies a departure from my earlier blogs. It is the first in an occasional series that uses semi-fictional clinical narratives to examine some of the difficulties that face people who use psychiatric services in England, and the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who work in them.

Today I paid a visit to the Managing Director of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Lloyd Price. Mylan is the company that manufactured the antidepressant Fluox1 which, according to the NZ government, is the most likely cause of my son's suicide. My dealings with Mylan in the time since Toran died have not been entirely fruitful.

A recent article, "Screw Positive Thinking! Why Our Quest for Happiness Is Making Us Miserable" provides humorous perspective on the ways seeking too hard after happiness can make us unhappy - and, it seems, stupid as well! I'm going to argue that the same paradox also applies to other aspects of mental health, and that some of the major problems in current mental health treatment result from failing to take this into account.

I was a chemical and diagnostic sewer. Never, ever have I been sicker, more depressed, more anxious, or more confused than while medicated or struggling to quit a psychiatric medication. For me, the bugaboo was benzodiazepines, and after seven years of continuous use that climbed to four mg of clonazepam a day, I went through a living nightmare to quit, made all the worse by further drugging and red-herring misdiagnoses of mania, mood cycling, and major depression.

It is not the responsibility of those exposed to demonstrate danger, it is the responsibility of pharmaceutical, commercial, and industrial companies to properly evaluate the long-term safety of such exposures, including an evaluation of the severe risks to a potentially genetically vulnerable minority. Only then can a governing body be in a position to sanction, condone, or even promote such chemicals.

When plans for the DSM-5 were first announced about ten years ago, most folks’ reaction was “Why?”. Many of us asked that same question several times as the publication date for the new tome kept on getting pushed back. Finally, the curtain enshrouding the DSM-5 Task Force and its several committees began to part and proposed revisions/additions began to appear on its website. To our dismay, we found our question answered.