Monthly Archives: November 2013

It was an awesome experience to give a TEDx Talk at my old school, because, frankly, it was an acknowledgement by an elite institution that I've done something in my life worth listening to. I hope you appreciate my talk and share it with others. So many people who are affected by the mental health system in North America today have no idea how much the rise of the DSM and biopsychiatry has to do with the Reagan era and neoliberal economic policies that reshaped the whole language and culture of mental health. It's like a bulldozed neighborhood with shiny new buildings, after a while people forget how they got there and they just seem "normal."

The American Journal of Psychiatry explores the implications for science and ethics of the rising placebo response rate in trials of antipsychotic drugs, in an...

Many months ago I wrote a guest piece on Mad In America entitled, “Corrections Officers, Not Clinicians.” And since that time I have walked away from that job because of the irreconcilable conflicts between its mission and my own heart. I have become convinced that, as an institution, the public mental health system of the United States is a disaster. There are always individuals within any system who are doing noble, beautiful things - For me, one part of my path toward healing included the connection I made with a therapist - But that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to confront institutional norms that are oppressive and dehumanizing.

Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries will pay more than $2.2 billion - one of the largest health-care fraud settlements in history - to...

GSK's continued failure to provide true transparency flies in the face of what the overwhelming majority of people signing consent forms probably intend - which is to make their data available for scrutiny by independent experts. If those who participate in trials thought some remote risk of a breach of privacy were being used to prevent disclosure of details that would save someone else's life - but threaten GSK's profits - most of us would likely be horrified.

Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial: Professor Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD, co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration. He has published more than 70 papers in the top 5...

Whenever I write or speak publicly, I feel compelled to frame cutting, burning and hitting myself as something I used to do. I don’t actually outright say I’ve stopped, but I use the past tense and thus I suspect most hear it as implied. Somehow, the pressure to appear outwardly ‘all better’ in that way still seems big. Self-injury (of that type) ranks pretty high up there on an awful lot of people’s scary meters. Just saying you are someone who has ever done that sort of thing seems disconcerting enough for most.

This blog was prompted by an invitation to do a guest post on the site of one of my favorite bloggers, 1 Boring Old Man. This is my response to the notion that there are certain conditions - Schizophrenia among them - that correspond more directly to biomedical conditions

Anoiksis (the Dutch association of and for people with a psychotic vulnerability) has introduced a new name for the disease schizophrenia: Psychosis Susceptibility Syndrome (PSS). Together with the old name, its attached prejudices, misleading significance and stigma can be thrown overboard.

The Journal of Psychosocial Nursing reviews the evidence for peer support, finding "outcomes across a range of measures no different than when services had...

David Healy posits the Secret Health Ingredient in Treatment (SHIT)  . . .  "In the early twentieth century SHIT was some supposedly secret magic...

Dr. Philip Hickey does the play-by-play on Allen Frances' interchange with Lucy Johnstone about prospective "overreaching" paradigm shifts in mental health. Johnstone, Frances fears,...

1 Boring Old Man points out the link between (possibly spurious) research findings and a subsequent wave of media articles and ad campaigns based...

Research from the universities of Cardiff, Cambridge and Bristol finds no evidence of a link between genetic associations with schizophrenia and adolescent psychotic experiences....

Research drawing on the British national survey finds that, despite the fact that psychotic conditions and mood disorders have historically been approached as separate...

Researchers from Taiwan and the United States find, in a study of 1,752 inner-city infants born between 1960 and 1965 (the Johns Hopkins Pathways...

Bill George was born in England and emigrated to the Netherlands in 1975. He worked for a Dutch academic publishing house despite his diagnosis...

When I pick up a pen, I put down my fear. Sorry, they don't both fit into my hand at once. Meditation teachers often say the hardest part is getting to the cushion. The hardest part of writing is probably picking up the pen. So, pick up a pen, I dare you. Write even if you think no one will read it, even if you don't want anyone to read it.

After an hour of deliberation, jurors decided that the anticonvulsant Topamax (topiramate) had, in fact, caused April Czimmer's son to be born with a...