Monthly Archives: May 2013

Americans have increasingly lost community and autonomy, and have acquired instead the tyranny of institutionalization: domination by gigantic, impersonal, bureaucratic, standardized entities — visible in large corporations, the workplace, health care, schools, and much of our lives. This institutionalization has made many Americans feel small, isolated, helpless, scared, inattentive, bored, angry, alienated, and depressed.

Jeffrey Lieberman, incoming president of the APA, responds to criticism of the DSM and psychiatry, saying "it’s important to understand the difference between thoughtful,...

For several decades, since the days when I was a patient, I have seen and heard how an obsession with questions damages psychiatry. Many of us have been asked the same questions day after day, year after year: ‘Do your thoughts seem faster than normal?’, ‘Do you ever have thoughts in your mind which are not your own?’, ‘Do you feel anxious?’, and so on. Hearing only what a patient says under questioning when frozen by paralysis, or subject to the hyper-arousal of anxiety, the professional misses the opportunity to hear the threads of something new, the possibility of weaving with the patient a narrative of hope and recovery.

People in roles of power in the mental health system often don’t realize how much complicity they have in actually creating the symptoms they claim are biologically-based in individuals with psychiatric labels.

A 33-year controlled, prospective study conducted as a collaboration by researchers in New York, Mexico, and Verona, Italy found that men diagnosed with ADHD...

Britain's Guardian discovers, in light of the DSM controversy, that a "growing number of psychiatrists suspect mental conditions are 'culture-bound syndromes' rather than exclusively...

The recent furore surrounding publication of the new DSM has provided a much-needed opportunity to discuss and debate crucial issues about how we make sense of, and respond to, experiences of madness and distress. Many psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals have expressed their dismay about the dominance and inadequacy of a biomedical model of mental illness. Whilst we share these concerns, welcome these debates and support colleagues that are willing to take a stand, The Hearing Voices Network believes that people with lived experience of diagnosis must be at the heart of any discussions about alternatives to the current system.

Reclaiming the Unconscious: Jay writes about how conventional psychiatry treatment can work against and damage the psyche’s attempts to recover from trauma. She focuses on...

RECLAIMING THE UNCONSCIOUS Jay Watts is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and mental health activist living in London. Dr Watts had held many senior clinical and...

Schizophrenia Bulletin publishes a review of published articles that finds the use of schizophrenia subtypes (Catatonic, Disorganized, Paranoid, Residual & Undifferentiated), "while widely used...

Science News offers an excellent review of the the perils and pitfalls of the scientific method as it is practiced in psychology today, concluding...

Jamin Peck is a multifaceted individual who’s creative expressions range from art, music, communication, spirituality and more. Like so many others, he has been told...

For me there are at least four separate questions to be addressed. The first is whether neuroscience is capable of understanding human emotion and higher level cognitive experiences. The second is the extent to which that understanding - even if it is achievable - is critical to our being able to help people in distress. The third is whether is it is correct to assume, as many people seem to do, that if we come to some basic understanding of brain function as it pertains to core human emotion and suffering that this will automatically translate into treatments that are commonly thought of as "biological," such as drug treatment. The fourth relates to the limitations and relevance of studying the brain in isolation when we are constantly in interaction with our environment.

Salon publishes and excerpt from Temple Grandin's "The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum", saying it "anticipated much of the thinking in the new...

Monica Cassani promises to add to Beyond Meds' chronicle, today and for the next week or so, of emerging coverage on the DSM rollout....

Claudia Gold writes in the Boston Globe, "The time has come to recognize the overwhelming evidence regarding the importance of early relationships in healthy...

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has reversed its 2005 recommendations, finding methodological flaws, possible bias, and uncertain generalizability in a review...

Tomorrow, May 18, the American Psychiatric Association kicks off its 166th annual conference. That same day, its new DSM-5 will be officially published. Given the occurrences of the past couple of weeks, which I’ll review briefly below, some members of the APA might wish tomorrow’s events would go unnoticed. But they won’t.

MIA reader/commenter Brett Deacon's article in the prominent Clinical Psychology Review says that despite "widespread faith in the potential of neuroscience", the biomedical era has...

The Economist, in its upcoming edition, says of the DSM "No other major branch of medicine has such a single text, with so much...

The New York Times reports that the "baffling" rise in suicide rates in the U.S. military is not correlated to deployment, as is often...

I think it’s helpful to see the psychiatric/pharmaceutical complex as being somewhat analogous to one of those large inflatable giants that you sometimes see hovering over car lot sales. Sure, it looks big and powerful, and it really is so long as “we the people” buy its propaganda and its drugs and continue feeding it billions of dollars and continue “bowing down” to its “almighty wisdom.” But its entire foundation consists of a model that simply doesn’t fit the research evidence at all, and quite frankly is propped up by many outright lies.

There has been a lot of talk lately about neuroscience and the future of the medical model of "mental illness." It was made clear, in NIMH director Thomas Insel’s statement, that the DSM is a system of identification and classification of what are deemed disorders within our human experience. This isn’t exactly news to the vast majority of people who have spent even a little bit of time thinking about whether or not psychiatric diagnosis makes sense.

A meta-analysis of studies of mental health websites by John Read found that 42% are either drug company owned or receive funding from drug...

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.