Yearly Archives: 2013

Jim Gottstein's September 27, 2013 talk on PsychRights' Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth, at the National Association of Rights...

Sera Davidow, MIA Blogger and Director of The Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community (RLC), discusses her lived experience within the psychiatric system.

The New York Times returns to the question of whether the explosion of ADHD diagnosis reflects a previously undetected population that was pathologically hyperactive,...

Oddly enough, it had occurred to me over this past year as I’ve been writing these essays for Mad in America that maybe I was “too healthy” to speak to the withdrawal experience with authenticity, to have street cred. It’s now a moot point. I write this not to scare people, but to present a reality. This reality has been difficult to accept, but the fact remains that my nervous system is more sensitive than before and might always be so, at least to some degree.

This summer, Sera Davidow, Laura Delano, Sean Donovan and Caroline White began a collaborative process with many others from the Western Mass RLC and beyond to develop two new films (not yet titled) focusing particularly on the topic of psychiatric drugs. And that’s where YOU come in.

Researchers from the University of Toronto departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, publishing in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, propose that various forms of stress,...

Antidepressants are still the most consumed class of medication in the U.S., with 270 million prescriptions per year. But sales revenue has gone down,...

On September 21, I posted here that the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities took a definitive stand against psychiatric commitment in its Concluding Observations on El Salvador and Austria.  The Committee held that the "danger to self or others" standard cannot legitimize psychiatric detention, and that all legislation authorizing such detention must be repealed. This is of huge significance, which I did not expand on in my earlier post.  Another set of Concluding Observations has now been released, this time on Australia, which gives me another opportunity to discuss what has happened.  I hope that both lawyers and non-lawyers will follow the discussion, since it has both legal and political implications.

A few years ago I had the intuition that meditation was the most important survival skill for these shifting times. It came after reading...

I’d like to share a bit about what happened to me after being placed on these medications, and how I successfully got off. Until recently, I was embarrassed to talk about my personal experiences publicly, as I’m a professional who specializes in anxiety and depression. Today, medication free, I feel better than ever before, and I am now on a mission to help my current clients get off medications, and to inform others through my writing about the dangers and pitfalls of starting antidepressants.

Subtitled "Pain is an emotion," Scientific American's portrait of Dennis Rogers, whose uncanny feats of strength seem predicated on his anomalous relationship to pain...

Scientific American says of Gary Greenburg's The Book of Woe "This is a landmark book about a landmark book . . . a picture so...

If you are reading this, you are probably involved in the mental health system. You might consider yourself a patient. You might consider yourself a professional or perhaps a caregiver. Maybe you consider yourself a survivor of the system. If you are reading this, you are probably interested in change. The interest of change, and the exploration of its possibilities, unites the readers of this site.

Calling it "easily the most important meeting I ever attended," psychiatrist Allen Francis writes in Psychiatric Times about the “Preventing Overdiagnosis” conference at Dartmouth. Article →

Antipsychotics Raise Diabetes Risk →

We would be much better served if we were told by mental health professionals from the very beginning to trust ourselves. Instead, the entire system is fraught with the infantilization of the client. This is (in general) true of both psychology and psychiatry as currently practiced.

Living in this very complex, demanding, stratified modern society has produced an epidemic of personal alienation. There is often a tragic gulf between our emotional experience and our awareness of it. 1 in 5 Americans are now taking a psychiatric medication. 1 in 4 women are now taking a psychiatric medication. All of those medications suppress, modify, or block emotion.

As Frederick Douglass said 150 years ago, “Power concedes nothing without a struggle. It never did and it never will.” As we look at our situation now and try to figure out how to respond to it, we should keep those words in mind. People with psychiatric labels, like me, are now being systematically attacked as less than human, as “walking time bombs” who might kill someone at any moment, as not-quite-human creatures who should not be allowed the rights of all other citizens.

Psychology Today writes "The fears of many European psychiatrists may soon be realized. Earlier this week, Psychiatric News reported that the American Psychiatric Association has begun petitioning the...

The Onion satirizes the state of the state and/or the state of psychiatry, saying "the estimated 15.5 million Americans who approve of Congress are...

“This case does not make sense in the normal sense,” Assistant Prosecutor Doug Newton told jurors in the trial of Michael Hamilton for murder....

Researchers at Tufts University exposed rats and their children to early life stress, resulting in depressed maternal care, aggression, increased restlessness and anxiety-related...

Researchers from McMaster University's Department of Medicine, presenting at this year's American Society for Bone and Mineral Research's annual meeting, found that the magnitude...

The September/October issue of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry reviews the biological and therapeutic research findings for the role of oxytocin in attachment, and...