Monthly Archives: May 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.

A previously "solicitous and loving" young undergoes "a classic onset of schizophrenia", followed by "a changing regimen of antidepressants." He is now in jail...

MindFreedom believes in the dignity and VOICE of every human being, no matter how mentally or emotionally distressed. We all have the right to CHOICE and true, informed consent in mental health care. We alert the mental health activism community to the proposed Texas House Bill 2212, which will dramatically expand the population eligible for assisted outpatient commitment. In a blatant assault on the right to bodily integrity, the bill would allow psychiatric interventions including what the state says is “clinically necessary medication” to be administered by force to law-abiding citizens living in the their own homes based on a few, elastic criteria.

The case of a Harvard student who was diagnosed as ADHD and prescribed Adderall based on cursory information collected by a nurse, then committed...

In November 2012, Cardiff, Wales, more than two hundred and fifty people who hear voices, see visions and have other unusual and extreme experiences (referred to as “hearing voices” in the rest of this post), family members, friends, activists and allied experts by profession came together from around the world. The purpose of the three-day meeting was to celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of the formation of hearing voices movement, to consider the lessons learnt so far and to envisage what we should be doing over the next 25 years. The excellent film, "Voices Matter", that you can now view on this site is a record of the event and I strongly recommend that you take a look.

In the New York Times’ recent autobiographical account of a “bipolar” woman’s struggle the main message is that the current mental health care system has some real problems but that the general paradigm from which this treatment model has emerged is not to be questioned. Anyone who knows my work knows that I have a real problem with this paradigm, believing that it generally causes much more harm than benefit. So, what is it then about this story that grabbed me? I recognized that if we read Linda’s story while holding a different paradigm, then this story reveals what I believe are some of the most fundamental issues at the heart of this epidemic of “mental illness” that so pervades our society.

A study of 530,000 patients who underwent surgery at 375 U.S. hospitals found a 10% increased risk of post-operative complications including bleeding, transfusion, hospital...

                              Jacks McNamara is a genderqueer artist, writer, organizer, and healer. Jacks co-founded The Icarus Project and is the subject of the poetic documentary Crooked Beauty. They...